about in pink fleeces; the sky turned pale green, like the sky before
dawn. Latitude plays strange pranks with sunsets and sunrises. Norway,
I think, must be the only place in the world where you could mistake
one for the other; but it is literally true that in Norway it would be
very easy to do so if you happened not to know which end of the day it
was.
When we went down into our staterooms sorrow awaited us. To the eye
the staterooms had been most alluring. One and all, we had exclaimed
that never had we seen so fine staterooms in a Norwegian steamboat.
All the time we were undressing we eyed with complacency the two fine
red sofas, on one of which we were to sleep. Strangely enough, no one
of us observed the shape of the sofa, or thought to try the
consistency of it. Our experiences, therefore, were nearly
simultaneous, and unanimous to a degree, as we discovered afterwards
on comparing notes. The first thing we did on lying down on our bed
was to roll off it. Then we got up and on again, and tried to get
farther back on it. As it was only about the width of a good-sized
pocket-handkerchief, and rounded up in the middle, this proved to be
impossible. Then we got up and tried to pull it out from the wall.
Vain! It was upholstered to the board as immovable as the stack-pipe
of the boat. Then we tried once more to adjust ourselves to it.
Presently we discovered that it was not only narrow and rounding, but
harder than it would have seemed possible that anything in shape of
tufted upholstered velvet could be. We began to ache in spots; the
ache spread: we ached all over; we could neither toss, twist, nor turn
on the summit of this narrow tumulus. Misery set in; indignation and
restlessness followed; seasickness, in addition, seemed for once a
trifle. The most indefatigable member of the party, being also the
most fatigued, succeeded at last in procuring a half-dozen small
square pillows,--one shade less hard than the sofa, she thought when
she first lay down on them, but long before morning she began to
wonder whether they were not even harder. Such a night lingers long in
one's memory; it was a closing chapter to our experience of Norwegian
beds,--a fitting climax, if anything so small could be properly called
a climax. How it has ever come about that the Norwegian notion of a
bed should be so restricted, I am at a loss to imagine. They are
simply child's cribs,--no more; as short as narrow, and in many
instances so narrow that it is impossible to turn over quickly in them
without danger. I have again and again been suddenly waked, finding
myself just going over the edge. The making of them is as queer as the
size. A sort of _bulkhead_ small mattress is slipped in under the
head, lifting it up at an angle admirably suited to an asthmatic
patient who can't breathe lying down, or to a small boy who likes to
coast down-hill in his bed of a morning. The single pillow is placed
on this; the short, narrow sheet flung loosely over it; blanket,
ditto; coverlet, ditto--it may or may not be straight or smooth. The
whole expression of the bed is as if it had been just hastily smoothed
up temporarily till there should be time enough to make it. In perfect
good faith I sent for a chambermaid one night, in the early days of my
Norway journey, and made signs to her that I would like to have my bed
made, when the poor thing had already made it to the very best of her
ability, and entirely in keeping with the customs of her country.
It is very needless to say that we all were up early the next morning;
and there was something ludicrous enough in the tone in which each
inquired eagerly of each, "Did you ever know such beds?" At ten we
were anchored off the little town of Frederikssund; and here the boat
lay five mortal hours, doing nothing but unloading and taking on bags
of bran.
Another big steamer was lying alongside, doing the same thing. This
was our first glimpse of Denmark. Very flat it looked,--just out of
water, and no more,--like Holland. The sailors who were carrying the
bags of bran wore queer pointed hoods on their heads, with long,
tail-like pieces coming down behind, which made them look like
elves,--at least it did for the first hour; after that they no longer
looked queer. If we had gone on shore, we could have seen the Royal
Estate of Iaegerspriis, which has belonged to kings of Denmark ever
since the year 1300, and has a fine park, and a house decorated by
sculptures by Wiedewelt,--a Danish sculptor of the last century,--and
an old sepulchre which dates back to the stone age, and, best of all,
a great old oak, called the King's Oak, which is the largest in
Denmark, and dates back farther than anybody will know till it dies.
A tree is the only living thing which can keep the secret of its own
age, is it not? Nobody can tell within a hundred or two of years
anything about it so long as the tree can hold its head up. The
circumference of this tree is said to be forty-two feet four feet from
the ground,--a pretty respectable tree, considering the size of
Denmark itself. Now we begin to see where the old Vikings got the oak
to build their ships. They carried it up from Denmark, which must have
been in those days a great forest of beech and oak to have kept so
many till now. It is only a few miles from Frederikssund, also, to
Havelse, which is celebrated for its "kitchen middings,"--the
archæological name for kitchen refuse which got buried up hundreds of
years ago. Even potato parings become highly important if you keep
them long enough! They will at least establish the fact that somebody
ate potatoes at that date; and all things hang together so in this
queer world that there is no telling how much any one fact may prove
or disprove. For myself, I don't care so much for what they ate in
those days as for what they wore,--next to what they did in the way of
fighting and making love. I saw the other day, in Christiania, a whole
trayful of things which were taken from a burial mound opened in
Norway last spring. A Viking had been buried there in his ship. The
hull was entire, and I have stood in it; but not even the old
blackened hull, nor the oars, stirred me so much as the ornaments he
and his horses had worn,--the bosses of the shields, and queer little
carved bits of iron and silver which had held the harnesses together;
one exquisitely wrought horse's head, only about two inches long,
which must have been a beautiful ornament wherever it was placed. If
there had been a fish-bone found left from his last dinner or from the
funeral feast which the relations had at his wake, I should not have
cared half so much for it. But tastes differ.
An afternoon more of sailing and another awful night on the red velvet
ridges, and we came to Copenhagen itself, at five of the morning. At
four we had thought it must be near,--long strips of green shore, with
trees and houses,--so flat that it looked narrow, and seemed to unroll
like a ribbon as we sailed by; but when we slipped into the harbor we
saw the difference,--wharves and crowds of masts and warehouses, just
like any other city, and the same tiresome farce of making believe
examine your luggage. I should respect customs and custom-houses more
if they did as they say they will do. As it is, to smuggle seems to me
the easiest thing in the world as well as the most alluring. I have
never smuggled because I have never had the means necessary to do it;
but I _could_ have smuggled thousands of dollars worth of goods, if I
had had them, through every custom-house I have ever seen. A
commissionnaire with a shining beaver hat stood on the shore to meet
us, we having been passed on with "recommendations" from the kindly
people of the Scandinavie in Christiania to the King of Denmark Hotel
people in Copenhagen. Nothing is so comfortable in travelling as to be
waited for by your landlord. The difference between arriving unlooked
for and arriving as an expected customer is about like the difference
between arriving at the house of a friend and arriving at that of an
enemy. The commissionaire had that pathetic air of having seen better
days which is so universal in his class. One would think that the last
vocation in the world which a "decayed" gentleman would choose would
be that of showing other gentlemen their way about cities; it is only
to be explained by the same morbid liking to be tantalized which makes
hungry beggars stand by the hour with their noses against the outside
of the panes of a pastry-cook's window,--which they all do, if they
can! Spite of our flaming "recommendations," which had preceded us
from our last employer, the landlord of the Scandinavie, satisfactory
rooms were not awaiting us. Sara Bernhardt was in town, and every
hotel was crowded with people who had come for a night or two to see
and hear her. It is wonderful how much room a person of her sort can
take up in a city; and if they add, as she does, the aroma of a
distinct and avowed disreputability, they take up twice as much room!
Since her visit to England I wonder she does not add to her open
avowal of disregard of all the laws and moralities which decent people
hold in esteem, "By permission of the Queen," or "To the Royal
Family."
But this is not telling you about Copenhagen. It was five o'clock when
we landed, and before seven I had driven with the commissionnaire to
each one of the four first-class hotels in Copenhagen in search of
_sunny_ rooms. None to be had! All four of the hotels were fully
occupied, as I said, by Sara Bernhardt in some shape or other. So we
made the best of the best we could do,--breakfasted, slept, lunched,
and at two o'clock were ready to begin to see Copenhagen. At first we
were disappointed, as in Christiania, by its modern look. It is a
dreadful pity that old cities will burn down and be rebuilt, and that
all cities must have such a monotony of repetitions of blocks of
houses. By the end of another century there won't be an old city left
anywhere in the world. There are acres of blocks of houses in
Copenhagen to-day that might have been built anywhere else, and fit in
anywhere else just as well as here. When you look at them a little
more closely, you see that there are bits of terra-cotta work in
friezes and pilasters and brackets here and there, which would not
have been done anywhere except in the home of Thorwaldsen. If he had
done nothing else for art than to stamp a refined and graceful
expression on all the minor architectural decorations of his native
city, that would have been worth while. There is not an architectural
monstrosity in the city,--not one; and many of the buildings have an
excellent tone of quiet, conventional decoration which is pleasing to
the eye. The brick-work particularly is well done; and simple
variations of design are effectively used. You see often recurring
over doorways and windows terra-cotta reproductions of some of
Thorwaldsen's popular figures; and they are never marred by anything
fantastic or bizarre in cornice or moulding above or around them.
Among the most noticeable of the modern blocks are some built for the
dwellings of poor people. They are in short streets leading to the
Reservoir, and having therefore a good sweep of air through them. They
are but two stories and a half high, pale yellow brick, neatly
finished; and each house has a tiny dooryard filled with flowers.
There are three tenements to a house, each having three rooms. The
expression of these rows of gay little yellow houses with red roofs
and flower-filled dooryards and windows, and each doorway bearing its
two or three signs of trade or artisanry, was enough to do one's heart
good. The rents are low, bringing the tenements within easy reach of
poor people's purses. Yet there is evidently an obligation--a certain
sort of social standard--involved in the neighborhood which will keep
it always from squalor or untidiness. I doubt if anybody would dare to
live in those rows and not have flowers in his front yard and windows.
For myself, I would far rather live in one of these little houses than
in either of the four great palaces which make the Royal Square,
Amalienborg, and look as much like great penitentiaries as like
anything else,--high, bulky, unadorned gray piles, flat and straight
walls, and tiresome, dingy windows, and the pavements up to their
door-sills. They may be splendid the other side the walls,--probably
are; but they are dreary objects to look at as you come home of an
evening. The horse-cars are the most unique thing in the modern parts
of Copenhagen. How two horses can draw them I don't see: but they do;
and if two horses can draw two-story horse-cars, why don't we have
them in America, and save such overcrowding? The horse-cars here not
only have a double row of seats on top as they have in London, but
they have a roof over those seats, which nearly doubles the apparent
height. As they come towards you they look like a great
square-cornered boat, with a long pilot-house on top. Of course they
carry just double the number. Women never ride on the top; but men do
not mind going upstairs outside a horse-car and sitting in mid-air
above the heads of the crowd; and if two horses really are able to
draw so many, it is a gain.
The one splendid sight in Copenhagen is its great dragon spire. This,
one could stand and gaze at by the day. It is made of four dragons
twisted together, heads down, tails up; heads pointing to the four
corners of the earth; tails tapering and twisting, and twisting and
tapering, till they taper out into an iron rod, which mounts still
higher, with three gilded balls, and three wrought gilded circles on
it, and finally ends in a huge gilded open-work weather-cock. This is
on an old brick building now used as the Exchange. It was built early
in 1600 by Christian IV., who seems to me to have done everything best
worth doing that was ever done in Denmark. His monogram (C) is forever
cropping out on all the splendid old things. They are enlarging this
Exchange now; and the new red brick and glaring white marble make a
very unpleasing contrast to the old part of the building, although
every effort has been made to copy the style of it exactly. It is
long, and not high, the wall divided into spaces by carved pilasters
between every two windows. Each pilaster begins as a man or a
woman,--arms cut off at the shoulders, breasts and shoulders looking
from a distance grotesquely like four humps. Where the legs should
begin, the trunk ends in a great gargoyle,--a lion's head, or a man's,
or a bull's,--some grotesque, some beautiful; below this, a
conventional tapering support. In the pointed arch of each of the
lower windows, also a carved head, no two of them alike, many of them
beautiful. It is a grand old building, and one might study it and draw
from it by the week. Passing this and crossing an arm of the
sea,--which, by the way, you are perpetually doing in Copenhagen to go
anywhere, the sea never having fully made up its mind to abandon the
situation,--you come to another quaint old building in the suburbs,
called Christianshaven. This is Vor Frelser's Church (Our Saviour's
Church), built only fifty years later than the Exchange. It is a dark
red brick church, with tiny flat dormer windows let in and painted
green on a shining tile roof; a square belfry; clock face painted red,
black, and blue; above this, a spire, first six-sided and then round,
288 feet high, covered with copper, which is bright green in places,
and wound round and round by a glittering gilded staircase, which goes
to the very top and ends under a huge gilt ball, under which twelve
people can stand. This also is a fine kind of spire to have at hand at
sunset; it flames out like a ladder into the sky.
One more old church has a way up, which is worth telling, though you
can't see it from the outside. This is another of that same Christian
IV.'s buildings,--it was built for an observatory, and used for that
for two hundred years, but then joined to a church. The tower is
round, 115 feet high, 48 feet in diameter, and made of two hollow
cylinders. Between these is the way up, a winding stone road, smooth
and broad; and if you'll believe it, in 1716 that rascal Catherine of
Russia actually drove up to the top of it in a coach and four, Peter
going ahead on horseback. I walked up two of the turns of this stone
roadway, and it made me dizzy to think what a clatter the five
horses' hoofs must have made, with stone above, below, and around
them; and what a place it would have been to have knocked brains out
if the horses had been frightened! In this inside cylinder all the
University treasures were hidden when the English bombarded the city
in 1807, and a very safe place it must have been.
Opposite this church is still another of Christian IV.'s good
works,--a large brick building put up for the accommodation of poor
students at the University. One hundred poor students still have free
lodgings in this building, but part of it looks as if its roof would
fall in before long.
Along the arms of the sea which stretch into or across the city--for
some of them go way through, come out, and join the outer waters
again--are rows of high warehouses for grain, some seven and eight
stories high. These have two-storied dormer windows, and terraced
roofs, and a great beak like a ship's prow projecting from the
ridge-pole of the dormer window. From this the grain is lowered and
hoisted to and from the ships below. The ships lie crowded in these
narrow arms, as in a harbor, and make picturesque lanes of mast-tops
through the city. On many of them are hung great strings of flounders
drying, festooned on cords, from rope to rope, scores of them on a
single sloop. They look better than they smell; you could not spare
them out of the picture.
The last thing we saw this afternoon was the statue of Hans Christian
Andersen, which has just been put up in the great garden of Rosenborg
Castle. This garden is generally called Kongen's Have ("The King's
Garden"). It was planned by the good Christian, but contains now very
little of his original design. Two splendid avenues of horse-chestnut
trees and a couple of old bronze lions are all that is left as he saw
it. It is a great place of resort for the middle classes with their
children. A yearly tax of two kroners (about fifty cents) permits a
family to take its children there every day; and I am sure there must
have been two hundred children in sight as I walked up the dark dense
shaded avenue of linden trees at the upper end of which sits the
beloved Hans Christian, with the sunlight falling on his head. "The
children come here every day," said the commissionnaire; "and that is
the reason they put him here, so they can see him." He looked as if he
also saw them. A more benignant, lifelike, tender look was never
wrought in bronze. He sits, half wrapped in a cloak, his left hand
holding a book carelessly on his knee, the right hand lifted as if in
benediction of the children. The statue is raised a few feet on a
plain pedestal, in a large oval bed of flowers: on one side the
pedestal is carved the "Child and the Stork;" on the other, the group
of ducks, with the "ugly" one in the middle,--pictures that every
little child will understand and love to see; on the front is his name
and a wreath of the bay he so well earned. Written above is,--
"PUT UP BY THE DANISH PEOPLE;"
and I thought as I stood there that he was more to be envied than
Christian IV. with his splendors of art and architecture, or than the
whole Danish dynasty, with their priceless treasures and their
jewelled orders. And so ended our first day in Copenhagen.
The next morning, Sunday, I drove out to church in the island of
Amager, of which that paradoxical compound of truth and falsehood,
Murray, says: "It offers absolutely nothing of interest." I always
find it very safe to go to places of which that is said. Amager is
Copenhagen's vegetable garden. It is an island four miles square, and
absolutely flat,--as flat as a piece of pasteboard; in fact, while I
was driving on it, it seemed to me to bear the same relation to
flatness that the Irishman's gun did to recoiling,--"If it recoiled at
all, it recoiled forrards,"--so it was a very safe gun. If Amager is
anything more or less than flat, it is bent inwards; for actually when
I looked off to the water it seemed to be higher than the land, and
the ships looked as if they might any minute come sailing down among
the cabbages. Early in the sixteenth century it was filled up by Dutch
people; and there they are to this day, wearing the same clothes and
raising cabbages just as they did three hundred years ago. To reach
Amager from Copenhagen, you cross several arms of the sea and go
through one or two suburbs called by different names; but you would
never know that you were not driving in Copenhagen all the time until
you come out into the greenery of Amager itself. It was good luck to
go of a Sunday. All the Dutch dames were out and about in their best,
driving in carts and walking, or sitting in their doorways. The women
were "sights to behold." The poorer ones wore shirred sunbonnets on
their heads, made of calico, coming out like an old poke-bonnet in
front, and with full capes which set out at a fly-away angle behind.
They seemed to have got the conception of the cape from the arms of
their own windmills (of which, by the way, there are several on the
island; and their revolving arms add to the island's expression of
being insecurely at sea!). Next below the sunbonnet came a gay
handkerchief crossed on the breast, over a black gown with tight
sleeves; a full bright blue apron, reaching half-way round the waist
and coming down to within two inches of the bottom of the overskirt,
completed their rig. It was droller than it sounds. Some of them wore
three-cornered handkerchiefs pinned outside their poke-bonnets, pinned
under their chins, and the point falling over the neck behind. These
were sometimes plain colors, sometimes white, embroidered or trimmed
with lace. The men looked exactly like any countrymen in England or
Scotland or America. If we haven't an international anything else, we
have very nearly an international costume for the masculine human
creature; and it is as ugly and unpicturesque a thing as malignity
itself could devise. The better class of women wore a plain black
bonnet, made in the same poke shape as the sunbonnets, but without any
cape at all on the back, only a little full crown tucked in, and the
fronts coming round very narrow in the back of the neck, and tied
there with narrow black ribbons. Don't fancy these were the only
strings that held the roof in its place,--not at all. Two very broad
strings, of bright blue, or red, or purple, as it might be, came from
somewhere high up inside the front, and tied under the chin in a huge
bow, so that their faces looked as if they had first been tied up in
broad ribbon for the toothache, and then the huge bonnet put on
outside of all. Strangely enough, the effect on the faces was not
ugly. Old faces were sheltered and softened, double chins and scraggy
necks were hid, and younger faces peered out prettily from under the
scoop and among the folds of ribbon; and the absolute plainness of the
bonnet itself, having no trimming save a straight band across the
middle, gave the charm of simplicity to the outline, and vindicated
the worth of that most emphatically when set side by side in the
church pews with the modern bonnets,--all bunches and bows, and angles
and tilts of feathers and flowers and rubbish generally.