Bull's funeral, full accounts of which reached the H----'s just
before we left Munich on the 9th. It was a splendid tribute to
the dear old man; I shall always regret that I did not see it.
His home is on a beautiful island about sixteen miles from
Bergen. If it were only possible to make you understand how
much more the word _island_ means in Norway than anywhere else!
But it is not. To those of you who know the sort of mountain
pasture in which great hillocks of moss and stone are thrown
up, piled up, crowded in, in such labyrinths that you go
leaping from one to the other, winding in and out in
crevice-like paths, never knowing where moss leaves off and
stone begins,--where you will strike firm footing, and where
you will plunge your foot down suddenly into moss above your
ankles; and to those of you who love the country and the spring
in the country so well that you know just the look of a
feathery young birch-tree on the first day of June, and of
slender young spruce-trees all the year round, it is enough to
say that if you take a dozen miles or so of such a pasture, and
make the hillocks many feet high, and then set in here and
there little hollows full of the birches, and a ravine or two
full of the young spruces, and then launch your hillocks and
birches and spruces straight out into deep blue sea, you'll
have something such an island as there are thousands of on the
Norway coast. Ole Bull's home was on such an island as this,
and he had made it an ideally beautiful place. Eighteen miles
of pathway he had made in the labyrinths of the island; had
brought soil from the shore, and set gardens in hollows here
and there. The house is a picturesque and delightful one; and
in the great music-room, nearly a hundred feet long, there he
lay dead, two days, in state like a king, with steamers full of
sorrowing friends and mourning strangers coming to take their
last look at his face. The king sent a letter of condolence to
Mrs. Bull, and the peasants came weeping to the side of his
bed; from highest to lowest, Norway mourned. On the day of the
funeral, after some short services at the house, the body was
carried on board a steamer, to be taken to Bergen. The steamer
was draped with black and strewn with green. I believe I have
told you of the beautiful custom the Norwegians have of
strewing green juniper twigs in the street in front of their
houses whenever they have lost a friend. No matter how far away
the friend may have lived, when they hear of his death they
strew the juniper around their house to show that a death has
given them sorrow. It was a commentary on human life (and
death!) that I never went out in Bergen without seeing in some
street, and often in many, the juniper-strewn sidewalks. As the
steamer with Ole Bull's body approached the entrance of Bergen
harbor, sixteen steamers, all draped in black, with flags at
half-mast, sailed out to meet it, turned, and fell into line on
either side to convoy it to shore. Bands were playing his music
all the way. At the wharf they were met by nearly all Bergen;
and the body was borne in grand procession through the streets,
which were strewn thick with juniper from the wharf to the
cemetery, at least two or three miles. The houses were all
draped with black, and many of the people had put on black. The
golden wreath which was given him in San Francisco was borne in
the procession by one of his friends, and a procession of
little girls bore wreaths and bouquets of flowers. The grave
was hidden and half filled with flowers; and last of all, after
the body had been laid there,--last and most touching of all,
came the peasants, crowds of them, gathering close, and each
one flinging in a fern leaf or a juniper bough or a bunch of
flowers. Every one had brought something, and the grave was
nearly filled up with their offerings. It is worth while to be
loved like that by a people. Whatever scientific critics may
say of Ole Bull's playing, he played so that he swayed the
hearts of the common people; and his own nation loved him and
were proud of him, just as the Danes loved Hans Christian
Andersen, with a love that asked no indorsement and admitted no
question from the outside world. The school of music to which
Ole Bull belonged has passed away; but what scientific art has
gained the people have lost. It will never be seen that one of
these modern violinists can make uneducated people smile and
weep as he did. The flowers that are dying on his coffin are
all immortelles. Such blossoms as these will never again be
strewn by peasant hands in a player's grave.
It took two days to come from Munich to Paris,--two hard days,
from seven in the morning till six at night. We broke the
journey by sleeping at Strasburg, where we had just one hour to
see the wonderful cathedral and its clock. The clock I didn't
care so much about, though the trick of it is a marvel; but the
twilight of the cathedral, lit up by its great roses of topaz
and amethyst, I shall never forget as long as I live. In my
next letter I will tell you about it. But now I have only time
to copy Harriet's verses, and send off this letter. Here they
are:--
DENMARK.
When again in your own bright land you are,
And with all that dearly you love,
And at times you look up at the Northern Star
That stands on the sky above,
Remember, then, that near forgot,
Here, near the Gothic strand,
There is on the globe a little spot,--
'T is Denmark, a beautiful land.
Now at harvest time from there you flew,
Like the birds from its tranquil shore;
They return at springtime, kind and true:
May, like them, you return once more!
Dear Mrs. Jakson, I remain your humble and thankful servant,
HARRIET.
Poor thing! when she bade me good-by she began to shed tears, and I
had to be almost stern with her to stop their flow. "Tell your
husband," she said, "that there's a little creature in Denmark that
you've made very happy, that'll never forget you," and she was gone.
In about ten minutes a tap at the door; there was Harriet again, with
a big paper of grapes and a deprecating face. "Excuse me, ma'am, but
they were only one mark and a half a pound, and they 're much better
than you'd get them in the hotel. Oh, I'll not lose my train, ma'am;
I've plenty of time." And with another kiss on my hand she ran out of
the room. Faithful creature! I shall never see her again in this
world, but I shall remember her with gratitude as long as I live.
Surely nowhere except in Norway and Denmark could it have happened to
a person to find in the sudden exigency of the moment two such devoted
servants as Katrina and Harriet; and that they should have both been
rhymers was a doubling up of coincidences truly droll.
Paris is as detestable as ever,--literally a howling and waste place!
Of all the yells and shrieks that ever made air discordant, surely the
cries of Paris are the loudest and worst. My room looks on the street;
and I should say that at least three different Indian tribes in
distress and one in drunken hilarity were wailing and shouting under
my windows all the time! As for the fiacre-men,--how like _fiasco_,
_fiacre_ looks written!--they drive as if their souls' salvation
depended on just grazing the wheel of every vehicle they pass. When
two of them yell out at once, as they go by each other, it is enough
to deafen one.
III.
Dear People,--I couldn't give you a better illustration of what
happens to you in foreign countries when you pin your faith on people
who are said to "speak English here," than by giving you the tale of
how I went from Copenhagen to Lubeck. To begin with, I explained to
the porter of the König von Denmark Hotel, who is one of the
English-speaking _attachés_ of that very good hotel, that I wished,
in going to Lubeck, to avoid water as much as possible. I endeavored
to convey to him that my horror of it was in fact hydrophobic, and
that I could go miles out of my way to escape it. He understood me
perfectly, he said; and he explained to me a fine route by which I was
to cross island after island by rail, have only short intervals of
water between, and come comfortably to Lubeck by eight in the evening,
provided I would leave Copenhagen at 6.45 in the morning, which I was
only too happy to do for the sake of escaping a long steamboat
journey. So I arranged everything to that end; explained to the one
waiter who spoke English that I must have breakfast on the table at
5.40, as I was to leave the house at 6.15. He understood perfectly, he
said. (I also commissioned him to buy a pound of grapes for my
lunch-basket; the relevancy of this will appear later.) I then
carefully explained to the worthy old lady who had promised for a
small consideration to take me to Munich, that she must be on the spot
at six, with her luggage; and that she was on no account to bring
anything to lift in her hands, because my own hand-luggage would be
all she could well handle. Then I asked for my bill, that it might be
settled the night beforehand, to have nothing on hand in the morning
but to get off. This was doubly important, as the landlord had
promised to change my Danish money into German money for me,--the
Danish bankers having no German money. They so hate Germany that they
consider it a disgrace, I believe, even to handle marks and pfennigs.
The clerk, who also "speaks English," said he understood me perfectly;
so I went upstairs cheerful and at ease in my mind. In half an hour my
bill arrived; and I sent down by the waiter, who spoke "a leetle"
English, five hundred Danish crowns to pay my bill, and have four
hundred crowns returned to me in marks. Waited one hour, no money;
rang, same waiter appeared.
"Where is my money?"
"Yees, it have gone out; it will soon return. He is not here."
Waited half an hour longer; rang again.
"Where is my money?"
"Yees, strachs. He shall all right, strachs."
"But I am very tired; I wish to go to bed."
"Yees, it shall be kommen."
Waited another half-hour,--it was now quarter of eleven; wrote on a
bit of paper, "I have gone to bed; cannot take the money to-night.
Have it ready for me at six in the morning." Rang, and gave it to the
waiter, ejaculating, "Bureau;" and pointing downstairs, shut the door
on him and went to bed. The last thing I heard from him, as I shut the
door, was, "Strachs, strachs!" That means "Immediately;" and there is
a Norwegian proverb that "when the Norwegian says 'Strachs,' he will
be with you in half an hour."
At twenty-five minutes before six I was in the dining-room, bonneted,
all ready; no sign or symptom of breakfast. I went to the little room
beyond, where the waiters are to be found. There was the one who
speaks least English. "Oh, goodness!" said I, "where _is_ Wilhelm?"
Wilhelm being the one mainstay of the establishment in the matter of
English, and the one who had waited upon me during all my stay.
"Ya, ya. Wilhelm here; soon will be kommen."
"But I must have my breakfast; I leave the house in half an hour."
"Ya, ya. Wilhelm is not yet. He sleeps." And the good-natured little
fellow darted off to call him. Poor Wilhelm had indeed overslept; but
he appeared in a miraculously short time, got my breakfast together by
bits, got the money from the clerk, and did his best to explain to me
how it was that a given sum of money was at once more and less in
marks than it was in kroner. I crammed it all into my pocket, and ran
downstairs to find--no old lady; her "knapsack" on the driver's seat,
but she herself not there. Four different people said something to me
about it, and I could not understand one word they said; so I stepped
into the carriage, sat down, and resigned myself to whatever was
coming next. After about ten minutes she appeared, breathless, coming
down the stairs of the hotel. She had mounted to my room, and,
unmindful of the significant fact that the door was wide open and all
my luggage gone, had been waiting there for me. This augured well for
the journey! However, there was no time for misgivings; and we drove
off at a tearing rate, late for the train. Suddenly I spied a most
disreputable-looking parcel on the seat,--large, clumsy, done up in an
old dirty calico curtain, from which a few brass rings were still
hanging.
"What is that?" I exclaimed.
"Only my best gown, ma'am, and my velvet cloak. I couldn't disgrace
you, ma'am."
"Disgrace me!" thought I. "I was never before disgraced by such a
bundle."
"But I told you to bring nothing whatever to carry in your hands," I
said; "you must put that into your knapsack. My roll and basket are
all you can possibly lift."
"Oh, ma'am, it would ruin it to put it in the knapsack. I'm not a rich
lady, like you, ma'am; it's all I've got: but I'd not like to disgrace
you. I was out last night trying to hire a small trunk to bring; but
you wouldn't believe it, ma'am, they wanted eight kroner down for the
deposit for the value of it. But I'll not disgrace you, ma'am, and
I'll forget nothing. I've a good head at counting. You'll see I'll not
overlook anything."
"Never mind," I said; "you must wear your cloak [she had on only a
little thin, clinging, black crape shawl,--the most pitiful of
garments, and no more protection than a pocket-handkerchief against
cold], and the dress must go into the knapsack at Lubeck. I will put
it into my own roll as soon as we are in the cars."
At the station--luckily, as I thought--the ticket-seller spoke
English, and replied readily to my inquiry for a ticket to Lubeck, _by
rail_, "Yes, by Kiel." Then there came a man who wanted three kroner
more because my trunk was heavy, and another who wanted a few pfennigs
for having helped the first one lift it. I tried for a minute to count
out the sum he had mentioned, and then I said, "Oh, good gracious,
take it all!" emptying the few little coppers and tiny silver
bits--which I knew must be, all told, not a quarter of a dollar--into
his hand. He said something which, in my innocence, I supposed was
thanks, but Brita told me afterwards that he was a "fearfully rough
man, and what he said was to call me a 'damned German devil!' You see,
ma'am, they all hate the Germans so, and hearing me speak English, he
thought it was German. The French, too, ma'am,--they hate the Germans
too. They say that Sara Bernhardt,--I dare say you've seen her,
ma'am,--they say she nearly starved herself all in her travelling
through Germany, because she wouldn't eat the German food."
At the train to see me off were two dear warm-hearted Danish
women,--mother and daughter,--to whom I had brought a letter from
friends in America. With barely time to thank them and say good-by, I
and my old lady and her bundle and my own three parcels were all
hustled into a carriage, the door slammed and locked, and we were off.
Then I sank back and considered the situation. I had fancied that all
that was necessary was to have a person who could speak,--that if I
had but a tongue at my command, it would answer my purposes almost as
well in another person's head as in my own. But I was fast learning my
mistake. This good old woman, who had never been out of Denmark in her
life, had no more idea which way to turn or what to do in a railway
station than a baby. The first five minutes of our journey had shown
that. She stood, bundles in hand, her bonnet falling off the back of
her head, her crape shawl clinging limp to her figure; her face full
of nervous uncertainty,--the very ideal of a bewildered old woman,
such as one always sees at railway stations. The thought of being
taken charge of, all the way from Copenhagen to Munich, by this type
of elderly female, was, at the outset, awful; but very soon the
comical side of it came over me so thoroughly that I began to think it
would, on the whole, be more entertaining.
When she had told me the day before, as we were driving about in
Copenhagen, that she had never in her life been out of Denmark, though
she was sixty-four years old, I said, "Really that is a strange
thing,--for you to be taking your first journey at that age."
"Oh, well, ma'am," she said, "I'm such a child of Nature that I shall
enjoy it as much as if I were younger, and I've all the Danish
history, ma'am, at my tongue's end, ma'am. There's nothing I can't
tell you, ma'am. Though we've been very hard-working, I've always been
one that was for making all I could: and I've been with my children at
their lessons always,--we gave them all good schooling; and I've a
volume of Danish poetry I've written, ma'am,--a volume _that_ thick,"
marking off at least two inches on her finger.
"Danish?" said I. "Why did you not write it in English?"
"Well, ma'am, being raised here, the Danish tongue is more my own,
much as I spoke English always till my parents died; but I'll write
some in English for you, ma'am, before we part."
So I had for the third time alighted on a poet. "Birds of a feather,"
thought I to myself; but it really is extraordinary. Norwegian,
Dane--I wonder, if I take a German maid to carry me to Oberammergau,
if she also will turn out "a child of Nature" and a scribbler of
verses.
The way from Copenhagen southward and westward by land is delightful.
It plunges immediately into a rich farming-country, level as an
Illinois prairie, and with comfortable farm-houses set in enclosures
of trees, as they are there; and I presume for the same reason,--to
break the force of the winds which might sweep from one end of Denmark
to the other, without so much as a hillock to stay them: no fences,
only hedges, and great tracts without even a hedge, marked off and
divided by differing colors from the different crops. The second crop
of clover was in full flower; acres of wheat or barley, just being
sheaved; wagons piled full, rolling down shaded roads with long lines
of trees on each side. Roeskilde, Ringsted, Soro,--three towns, but
seemingly only one great farm, for seventeen miles out of Copenhagen.
Then we began to smell the salt water, and to get a fresh breeze in at
the windows; and presently we came to Kosör, where we were to take
boat. A big man in uniform stood at the door of the station, looked at
our tickets, said "Kiel," and waved his hand toward a little steamer
lying at the dock.
"They say they fear it will be rough, ma'am, as the wind is from the
southeast," said the old lady.
"Oh, well," said I, "it is only an hour and a half across. We cross
the Big Belt to Nyborg."
She accepted my statement as confidingly as a child, and we made
ourselves comfortable on the upper deck. It was half-past nine
o'clock. I took out my guide-book and studied up the descriptions of
the different towns we were to pass through after our next landing. A
green dome-like island came into sight, with a lighthouse on top,
looking like the stick at the top of a haystack. "That's in the
middle of the Belt, ma'am," said Brita. "In the winter many's the time
the passengers across here have to land there and stay a day, or maybe
two; and sometimes they come on the ice-boats. Very dangerous they
are; they pull them on the ice, and if the ice breaks, jump in and row
them."
It seemed to me that we were bearing strangely to the south: land was
disappearing from view; the waves grew bigger and higher; spray dashed
on the deck; white-caps tossed in all directions.
"I believe we are going out to sea," said I.
"It does look like it, ma'am," replied the "child of Nature." "Shall I
go and ask?"
"Yes," I replied, "go and ask." She returned with consternation in
every line of her aged face.
"Oh, ma'am, it's strange they should have told you so wrong. We're on
this boat till four in the afternoon."
And so we were, and a half-hour to boot, owing to the southeast wind
which was dead ahead all the way. Everybody was ill,--my poor old
protectress most of all, and for the first time in her life.
"Oh, ma'am, I did not think it could be like this," she gasped. "I
never did feel so awful." I sat grimly still in one spot on the deck
all that day. What a day it was! About noon it occurred to me that
some grapes would be a relief to my misery. Opening the basket and
taking out the bag in which the English-speaking waiter had told me
were my grapes, I put in my hand and drew out--a hard, corky,
tasteless pear! Thanks to the southeast wind, we came a half-hour late
to Kiel, and thereby missed the train to Lubeck which we should have
taken, waited two hours and a half in the station, and then had to
take three different trains one after the other, and pay an extra fare
on each one; how we ever stumbled through I don't know, but we did,
and at half-past eleven we were in Lubeck, safe and sound, and not
more than three quarters dead! and I shall laugh whenever I think of
it as long as I live.
Lubeck is an old town, well worth several days' study; and the Stadt
Hamburg is a comfortable house to sleep and be fed in. You can have a
mutton-chop there, and that is a thing hard to find in Germany; and
you can have your mutton-chop brought to you by an "English-speaking"
waiter who speaks English; and you may have it delicately served in
your own room, or in a pretty dining-room, or on a front porch, walled
in thick by oleander-trees, ten and fifteen feet high,--a lustrous
wall of green, through which you have glimpses of such old gables and
high peaked roofs, red-tiled, and scooped into queer curves, as I do
not know elsewhere except in Nuremberg. It all dates back to 1100 and
1200, and thereabouts,--which does not sound so very old to you when
you have just come from Norway, where a thing is not ancient unless it
dates back to somewhere near Christ's time; but for a mediæval town,
Lubeck has a fine flavor of antiquity about it. It has some splendid
old gateways, and plenty of old houses, two-thirds roof, one-third
gable, and four-fifths dormer-window, with door-posts and corners
carved in the leisurely way peculiar to that time. Really, one would
think a man must have his house ordered before he was born, to have
got it done in time to die in, in those days. I have speculated very
much about this problem, and it puzzles me yet. So many of these old
houses look as if it must have taken at least the years of one
generation to have made the carvings on them; perhaps the building and
ornamentation of the house was a thing handed down from father to son
and to son's son, like famous games of chess. Nothing less than this
seems to me to explain the elaboration of fine hand-wrought
decorations in the way of carving and tapestries, which were the chief
splendors of splendid living in those old times. There is a room in
the Merchants' Exchange in Lubeck, which is entirely walled and ceiled
with carved wood-work taken out of an ancient house belonging to one
of Lubeck's early burgomasters. These carvings were done in 1585 by
"an unknown master," and were recently transferred to this room to
preserve them. The panels of wood alternate with panels of exquisitely
wrought alabaster; two rows of these around the room. There were old
cupboard doors, now firmly fastened on the wall, never to swing again;
and one panel, with a group of wood-carvers at work, said--or
guessed--to be the portraits of the carver and his assistants. The old
shutters are there,--each decorated with a group, or single
figure,--every face as expressive as if it were painted in oil by a
master's hand. Every inch of the wall is wrought into some form of
decorations; the ceiling is carved into great squares, with alabaster
knobs at the intersections; a superb chandelier of ancient Venetian
glass hangs in the middle; and the new room stands to-day exactly as
the old one stood in the grand old burgomaster's day. It is kept
insured by the Merchants' Guild for $30,000, but twice that sum could
not replace it. The Merchants' Guild of Lubeck must contain true
art-lovers; a large room opening from this one has also finely carved
walls, and a frieze of the old burgomasters' portraits, and another
fine Venetian glass chandelier, two centuries old. Through the window
I caught a glimpse of a spiral stair outside the building; it wound in
short turns, and the iron balustrade was a wall of green vines; it
looked like the stair to the chamber of a princess, but it was only
the outside way to another room where the Merchants held their
sittings.
The largest of the Lubeck churches is the Church of Saint Mary. This
was built so big, it is said, simply to outdo the cathedral in size,
the Lubeck citizens being determined to have their church bigger than
the bishop's. The result is three hundred and thirty-five feet of a
succession of frightful rococo things, enough to drive the thought of
worship out of any head that has eyes in it. The exterior is fine,
being of the best style of twelfth-century brick-work, and there are
some fine and interesting things to be seen inside; but the general
effect of the interior is indescribably hideous, with huge grotesque
carvings in black and white marble and painted wood, at every pillar
of the arches. In one of the chapels is a series of paintings,
ascribed to Holbein,--"The Dance of Death." It is a ghastly picture,
with a certain morbid fascination about it,--a series of fantastic
figures, alternating with grim skeleton figures of Death. The emperor,
the pope, the king and queen, the law-giver, the merchant, the
peasant, the miser,--all are there, hand in hand with the grim,
grappling, leaping skeleton, who will draw them away. Under each
figure is a stanza of verse representing his excuse for delay, his
reply to Death,--all in vain. This chapel had the most uncanny
fascination to my companion.
"Oh, ma'am! oh, indeed, ma'am, it is too true!" she exclaimed, walking
about, and peering through her spectacles at each motto. "It is all
the same for the pope and the emperor. Death calls us all; and we all
would like to stay a little longer."