It was great fun showing Norway to Zephine. They went very well
together. Norway is the least conventional of countries, where you
have the most room in which to swing cats. There is nothing to look
at but Norway itself, and you aren’t overrun by fellow bearers of the
red book. It doesn’t distress me a bit that the mountains are only half
as high as the Swiss ones. They are twice as effective when they climb
sheer out of still green fiords. That is the great point about Norway,
of course--the water, and those fingers of the sea feeling for leagues
among the mountains. And the peasants are quite the most perfect among
peasants, if a shade too honest.
Zephine was entranced by everything, from our first view of the
Christiania Fiord. That’s too much like Island Pond to suit me.
However, disdaining trains, boats, and the outcries of the Grand
Hotel, we embarked in three of those funny little carts, drawn by
three of those fat friendly little ponies, and travelled post--when we
could--across to the Hardanger Fiord. When we could not, we walked. We
nearly froze to death, too, in the high fjelds, just as the Grand Hotel
had promised with tears in its eyes. But Zephine and I made no end of
sketches, and Nick got no end of ideas for cottages--with arches of
rough stone, and outside stairs, and loggias of carved wood, and roofs
overgrown by turf and pansies and bluebells. We also picked up, out of
such cottages, some old silver that made our eyes pop out of our heads.
Altogether we had the time of our lives.
We hardly saw a tourist the whole way. Consequently we were surprised
enough to drive into Odde one evening, at the head of the fiord, and
be told there was not a room in the hotel. We might have expected it,
for the time was just when people flock to the North Cape. And there
was no other hotel in the place--which then consisted of two or three
cottages and a pier. Nick, however, took his usual course with the
landlady. He blandly persisted in demanding three rooms, until the
landlady produced them. Very good rooms they were, too--or at least
mine was. It looked out through festoons of blossoming honeysuckle
into a little garden, and beside it a river ran gaily into the long
avenue of the fiord, whose rocky walls were still gilded by the late
summer light. As I stood there, looking and listening and sniffing,
an old lady stepped from a wing of the house to make a last touch of
local colour with her wonderful white cap, which stood out frilled and
starched around her head like an aureole.
Still more wonderful, in his way, was a man whose acquaintance we
struck up at dinner. He was an Angle, though he might have been a
Saxon. He was all pockets, and he travelled with everything he had
in the world in them. You never saw such bunches in such unexpected
places. Some of the pockets were too inaccessible for him to get
at without taking off his clothes; so he had bags inside of them,
detachable by means of tagged strings which hung within reach. He
showed us some of the things in the bags--rocks and weeds and beasts
of the field. For the man was by way of being a naturalist. And his
back was so stiff and so flat that you couldn’t conceive what was
the matter with him, until you learned that somewhere in it he kept a
life-sized atlas!
“Nick,” I observed after a hilarious evening, as we stood in my window
looking at the twilight of the gods that hung in the fiord, “a crown of
righteousness shall be laid up for you on high. You have made Zephine’s
fortune.”
“O?” he grunted noncommittally.
“That Englishman! I see it all. They were formed by heaven for one
another. It’s a case of _coup de foudre_, as the alienists say. We
shall have to go home without Zephine.”
“Herb,” remarked Nick, turning his back on the twilight of the gods and
on me, “your inside is as baroque as that bird’s outside. Stop being a
pickled peacock, if you can, and go to sleep.”
It was not written, however, that slumber should instantly visit
our eyelids. We presently became aware of a tremendous commotion
downstairs. We then became aware of the cause of the commotion. The
commotion was caused, as no one in the house could help learning in
the broken and squeaky English of its fount and origin, by no less
a personage than His Serene Highness the Prince Ernst Paul XXIII of
Waldeck-Hohenkugel, who had reserved, as it appeared, the very rooms
which Nick had pulled out of the landlady’s sleeve, and who clamoured
that those rooms be delivered up to him at once. The landlady, good
woman, had made her bed and she lay in it. She refused at all events to
turn us out of ours, arguing that no reservation held after dinner.
And she liberally offered his far from serene Highness his choice of
bath rooms, billiard rooms, reading rooms, drawing rooms, or dining
rooms. His Highness rejected them all, very profanely, and vowed he
would go on to the next post-station. But as there happened to be no
road to it except by water, and as no steamer would leave till morning,
he was forced to accept what hospitality the landlady proffered him. So
silence descended at last upon the solitudes of Odde.
V
When I unwillingly came back to consciousness I thought His Serene
Highness must be getting under way again. Then I didn’t know what to
think. For who should be at my chaste bachelor bedside, shaking me
vigorously and shouting something about Nick, but Zephine. It didn’t
take me long, however, to make out a strong smell of smoke, a most
unpleasant glare, and horrid sounds of crackling. What happened next
I don’t quite remember. We only just had time to run for it. You have
no idea how quickly a small wooden hotel can burn up at two or three
o’clock of a cool June morning. There turned out, thank heaven, to be
no casualties. But there were some pretty tight squeezes. And nobody
saved much of anything.
As the flames died down and the survivors began to regard each other
in the cold light of day, we presented one of the most inspiriting
spectacles I ever hope to admire. It made me think of what I have heard
described in rural regions as a white shower. The only completely
dressed persons in the party were a few sympathetic citizens of Odde,
plus my old lady in the white cap and the Englishman of the pockets.
A fairly complete exhibition of the night-wear of civilisation was
there, hovering for warmth in the neighbourhood of the smoking ruins or
lurking for privacy in an orchard I had not noticed the evening before.
There were a few blankets and counter-panes in the assembly. Some had
clutched odd garments as they fled, and now retired behind apple trees
to put them on. One lady had had time to rescue her hat--“only this and
nothing more.” A squire of two dames had clothed one of them in his
dinner-jacket and the other in the waistcoat appertaining thereto. He
himself boasted a pair of pumps and a Baedeker. As for me, I discovered
myself to be the happy possessor of a pair of trousers and a travelling
rug. The latter in particular was highly comforting, in the air that
drew down the valley from the white fjelds.
I likewise discovered, however, that with the rest of my belongings I
seemed to have lost my companions. I had been so diverted, for a time,
that it did not occur to me to be uneasy about them. And I was unable
to imagine that two such competent persons would ever allow themselves
to be roasted alive. I began, though, to wonder what had become of
them--when in the wearer of a splendid Persian dressing gown I suddenly
recognised Nick. We fell, so to speak, upon each other’s necks.
“But where is Zephine?” we simultaneously demanded.
She could scarcely have come to any harm, for she it was who rescued us
both. And we both vaguely remembered having, in our excitement, seen
her afterward. But where on earth was she? And, poor wretch, in what
condition?
Just as we were setting forth to find out, we were arrested by a loud
and lamentable “_Ach Gott!_” This outcry enabled us, indirectly, to
identify the Prince of Waldeck-Hohenkugel. I had first picked out
for that nobleman the most distinguished looking person present,
a blond and curly-haired Apollo who stalked about with an air of
proprietorship, classically draped in a sheet. But a squeaky voice,
issuing in response to the “_Ach Gott!_” from an unnaturally distended
suit of purple pyjamas, rebuked my ingenuousness. His Highness, less
serene than ever and now past all power of English, nevertheless took
us at once into his confidence, pouring out the history of his woes
from the moment of his arrival in Odde, and intimating that the fire
was a just judgment from on high upon an unrighteous _Wirthin_. As for
the princely consort, she shivered in the lee of an apple tree and
refused to be comforted. She had reason!
I looked at Nick and Nick looked at me. We had not much more cause
for happiness than those disillusioned pleasure seekers. Nor had we
burned the roof over their heads. Yet we had, as it were, snatched the
pillows from under them. Moreover we could not help being conscious
that our own case was less dire than theirs, and that one of them was
a lady. So Nick, like a hero, took off his Persian dressing gown. I,
not to be outdone, divested myself of my English travelling rug. As one
man we advanced toward the princely apple tree, whose branching trunk
intervened between us and the shrinking Serenity of Waldeck-Hohenkugel.
And each of us, holding out at arm’s length his offering, invited Her
Highness, in a strange mixture of tongues, to accept the same.
Her Serene Highness--such is the inconsistency of womankind--eyed us
through the fork of her apple tree with no little confusion. In the
candle-light of her ancestral halls, or even in the sunlight of the
beach at Swinemünde, she would have been unconscious of exposures
more expansive than she now presented. But to parley, under a
Norwegian apple tree, in a single voluminous garment of white, with
two honourably intentioned gentlemen in pyjamas, seemed to shake the
serenity even of a mediatised house. Yet that Her Highness’s emotions
were of a complex nature was patent from the hungry glances which
she cast, now upon the English travelling rug, now upon the Persian
dressing gown.
I know not how long this painful scene might have been drawn out, had
it not been for Zephine, our lost Zephine, who suddenly reappeared
before us, trim and miraculous in her famous écru silk and her famous
brown skirt, with the Englishman of the pockets. Behind them marched
the curly-haired Apollo in the sheet, respectfully bearing Zephine’s
straw suit-case. It was really too much.
“Well Zephine,” I was just able to remark, well-nigh overcome by my
superhuman attempts to ward off another attack of hysteria, “this is a
scene to your taste. Here is an orchard and here are models--more or
less as you like them. I think we would make you a stupendous success
in the next Academy!”
Zephine, taking in the situation at a glance, wasted no time in
unprofitable speech. She made a sign to the Englishman of the pockets,
who for a wonder understood it. At least he forthwith presented to our
little company his atlas façade. She made another sign to the gentleman
in the sheet, who put down her suit-case, pulled his uncombed yellow
fore-lock, and stalked away. She then, under the admiring eyes of her
travelling companions and of Their Serene Highnesses of Hohenkugel,
proceeded to open the suit-case, revealing her palette, her little
folding easel, and the rest of her painting paraphernalia.
“Gracious!” I burst out. “Are you going to do it? Or are you going to
paint clothes on us?” And at the same instant Nick demanded: “Who’s
your friend?”
Zephine evidently considered the latter question more worthy of a
reply.
“He’s the stable boy of the hotel,” she said, “and he’s been helping me
telephone. I’ve engaged rooms for us all in Bergen. And the captain of
the steamer says we can go on board any time we like. They’re making
coffee for us there. Keep your clothes, for I’ve saved mine and can
lend some to this lady.” As a matter of fact, there they were, under
her painting kit! “But first turn your backs and hold this behind you,
so that we can have a dressing room.” And she handed us a green silk
petticoat.
It is not for me to record what took place behind that petticoat. I
can only testify that it was upon a much more serene Highness we were
at last permitted to turn--attired in Zephine’s shiny grey skirt of
super-state, with other necessary adjuncts, and abounding in the most
complicated expressions of gratitude.
“_Kolossal!_” let out the Prince. “But I--!” he added mournfully,
beating his brilliant breast.
“You can wrap this around your shoulders,” said Zephine comfortingly,
presenting him with the green silk petticoat. “And you might give him
something, Herb,” she added. “You seem to have more than you need.”
“Ah!” archly exclaimed Her Serene Highness. “Then he is the one! I
asked myself which of these gentlemen was the gracious lady’s husband.”
The violence of my efforts to maintain a decorum suitable to the
occasion must have made me turn a colour not far from that of the
princely pyjamas. I hardly dared meet the eyes of my accomplices.
Yet when I did so it was to discover in Zephine not quite the amused
self-possession I expected.
As for Nick, he stared a little, he drew himself up in his Persian
dressing gown, he did his best to click a pair of bare heels, he made
Their Serene Highnesses of Waldeck-Hohenkugel such a bow as they knew
how to appreciate, and he said:
“Pardon, Highness, but you are mistaken.” Then he turned, somewhat less
ceremoniously, to me. “Look here,” he threw out, in a way that made
me stare in turn. “I don’t know how much the mantua-makers of Bergen
are up to, but Zephine’ll have to get some new clothes, like the rest
of us. She’s given away most of her own. And I think it’s about time
she tried a new system. Anyhow, the first thing she’s going to have is
one non-reversible garment of white bombazine, garnished with mosquito
netting and whatever in the flora of the country may answer to orange
blossoms. Do you get me?”