Kristiania to Stockholm--A Wedding Party--Differing Norsk and Swede.
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN, _September 12, 1902_.
We came over here night before last from Kristiania, by the night
train; by _sovevogn_ (sleep-wagon), the first I have tried in Europe.
We traveled first-class and had a compartment to ourselves. About
9 P. M. a porter came in at a way-station, put all our bags out in the
corridor, pulled out the round cushions at the back of the seats and
put them into the overhead racks; he then pulled out a linen cover
with which he overlaid the long seat, and unholed small, wee pillows
from a cavity at the end of each seat; the beds were made! Later,
another man informed me that we could have sheets at one _kroner_
(twenty-seven cents) each; but these we declined. Fortunately, we had
with us our heavy sea rugs. I put H into my long gray overcoat, did
her up in the blanket and rug, and tucked her big golf cape over her.
Then I put on my blanket smoking jacket, my slippers and cap, rolled
up in a blanket and rug, and so we slept comfortably on our narrow
seat-beds. There was no heat in the car, and only one toilet room for
both sexes! The night was cold and it was with difficulty we
managed to keep warm. Such is the modern European method of running a
sleeping car.
[Illustration: STOCKHOLM.]
The train we traveled in was crowded. In our car every compartment was
filled. There were two groups of travelers who interested us. The
first was a party of Americans, a petite elderly woman, keen, lively,
very much mistress of herself, evidently accustomed to command, and
with her two pretty black-eyed American girls, "pert," "sassy," and
used to receiving the homage of man! In their company were half a
dozen tall, blond-bearded, blue-eyed Viking youths, entirely willing
to be commanded and to render homage. They were all in uniform, a dark
blue cloth with red facings and a very little gold braid. The blue
eyes shot tender glances, we thought, the black ones defending against
Cupid's darts with great vivacity. Each young man presented an
enormous bouquet to the elderly woman, and one gave her a basket of
fruit--the girls got nothing, only the blue-eye-flashes. And how
eagerly the young men promised to call on the elderly woman, if ever
they should be so fortunate as to visit New York! And all the while
the two American belles laughed and smiled and smote yet deeper
through the dark blue uniforms. The departing train almost carried
away with us one fair-haired giant. All the military caps came off
with sweeping bows, while two handkerchiefs fluttered from the
windows.
The other group took us by storm and also captured the train. Before
we knew it, there was a surging crowd outside the car and the roar of
many Viking throats. And then into the compartment next to ours rushed
a pack of ladies, one of them all in white, with a sweet face half hid
in a pink satin bonnet. A little man with waxed moustache, curly black
hair, wearing a stovepipe hat, and clad in evening dress, followed
close behind. The women admitted him, as though by right, but no other
man was let inside. It was a wedding party. A wedding in high life. He
was a Professor at Upsala. She was one of Kristiania's fairest
daughters. They had been married in the Fru Kirke in the afternoon.
She had had a big reception at her home. The friends and guests were
now come down to the train to see them off. She was large and fair and
rosy, yet in her early twenties. He was small and weazen, shriveled
and swarthy. They called him "Herr Doctor," evidently recognizing his
eminent standing. Flowers and rice and a white satin slipper were
thrown into the window. There was tremendous hugging and kissing of
the bride by all the women,--I could not see that here the men had any
show,--and pandemonium still prevailed upon the station platform when
the train pulled out. Later in the night I was awakened by shouts and
then most glorious singing. I sat up with a start, the melody pulsing
through my brain. The Student Corps from the University of Upsala had
come down to the junction where the newly-wedded pair would change
cars, to welcome their Professor and his bride. They were singing a
mighty welcome. And it was such full-toned, full-voiced, perfect and
practiced singing by the hundreds of young men who seemed to be on
hand! I fell asleep as our train went on, the splendid harmony of the
well-trained voices filling me with dreams of realms not far away from
Paradise.
Next morning I was about dressed, and H was adjusting her skirt, when
the doors, which I thought securely locked, flew open and a burly
red-faced uniformed official thrust himself in. He came to take away
the pillow cases! He did not seem to think he in any way intruded;
privacy is not much respected this side the sea.
Our toilets were scarcely made when the train came to a stop in the
station at Stockholm. Indeed H was not yet quite ready, when another
official in uniform again burst open the door and began grabbing our
effects. To his astonishment he was forthwith ejected and the door
shut in his face. When we were finally dressed I went out and found
him waiting for us on the station platform. He was a licensed porter.
We were first obliged to fetch all our belongings to the Custom House,
where important-looking officials, in gray uniforms trimmed with red,
asked perfunctory questions and hurriedly passed us through--an
exercise of Swedish authority which seemed quite unnecessary since we
came direct from Norway under the same King. This done, our porter
then gathered up our bags and rugs, put them into a little
two-wheeled push cart and started out across the square. Here again I
came near meeting the fate of the tenderfoot. We did not know the
location of the Hotel Continental; I stepped up to a cabby and told
him we wanted to be taken to that hotel. A man in uniform gave me a
brass check with "No. 5" marked on it, pointing to a cab standing in a
long row which also bore a No. 5. I handed the brass check to No. 5
cabby, and was putting in my bag when our porter pointed to the
farther side of the square. There was our hostelry, not three hundred
feet away! I took out my bag from the carriage, in spite of protest,
and walked to the hotel. The driver claimed a fare of half a _kroner_
and raised a mighty clamor, but I vowed I would not give him an
_oere_. Thus you must have your eyes about you when you come to a city
you do not know.
The Continental is a fine hotel. The rooms are supplied with electric
lights and with telephones (good ones, not the imperfect London
system). We have a large front room, facing the Vasa Gatan, with
dressing room and ante-room, handsomely furnished, and as clean as
anything can be. We are fain to be content with the fourth story,
although we asked for the tenth, and a new modern elevator takes us up
and also down; all this costs only six _kroner_ a day ($1.62) for the
two of us. Our breakfasts are served in our room, two eggs each, a pot
of coffee, boiled milk and cream, a basket of rolls, fresh radishes,
cold tongue, cold veal, smoked goose breast, anchovies, cold smoked
salmon, cheese, each in a neat little dish by itself, and a big
round flat slab of slightly salted butter; all for one and a half
_kroner_ each, three _kroner_ for us two (eighty-one cents). You
receive much for your money here in Scandinavia.
[Illustration: KING'S PALACE, STOCKHOLM.]
The spirit of Stockholm, although intensely Scandinavian, is yet
widely different from that of either Copenhagen or Kristiania. It is a
difference, not so much to the eye, as to the feeling.
The city presents the same substantial and solid types of buildings,
there are the same high walls of stone and dark red brick, and
sharp-gabled roofs covered with heavy tiles, the same square towers,
the same spindly leanness to the steepled churches, and in the older
sections the narrow streets are paved from wall to wall with the same
big squares of granite. The people are mostly blue-eyed and
fair-haired like their kindred Danes and Norsks. But here the likeness
ends and you feel it the instant you pass out upon the street. I
missed at once that certain self-containment, based upon
unostentatious self-respect, which marks the Norsk, where no man knows
a lord but God, and manhood suffrage everywhere prevails. I missed
that composure of manner and self-assurance to the step, which lets
men look you calmly in the eye without offense, that spirit, which
takes for granted the perfect equality of man and man. I instantly
felt myself among men of another temper. The alert, frank,
self-respecting manner of the Norsk is lacking in the Swede. I found
myself again among a "lower class," who have no votes, and treat you
with sullen servility, and also among men with the swashbuckling
manners of military caste. Stockholm is full of young officers in
natty uniforms, who strut along the streets aping the braggart
insolence one meets among the soldier-bestridden Germans. The peasant
and townsman must also here step aside to let these Yunker soldiery
pass on. Militarism hangs heavy over Stockholm, where the scions of an
impecunious aristocracy think to find in dashing uniform and truculent
German manner a restoration of the noble military traditions of the
past.
The Norwegian looks out upon the Twentieth Century and finds his
inspiration in the example of free America and the universal equality
of man. The Swede looks ever backward to the glorious days of Gustavus
Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII, and sighs for a return of the
good old times when the half of Europe trembled before Sweden's
military might. The lofty mountains and profound valleys, the savage
mystery of fathomless _fjords_, the wondrous immensity of the unknown
and illimitable sea, which fired the brain and pricked the energy of
the Norseman, and made him poet, pirate, explorer and conqueror
through a dozen successive centuries, were all unknown to the
practical-minded Swede. His monotonous forests, his sandy levels and
shallow gulfs, his pond-like and insignificant Baltic Sea, stirred no
fibre of his imagination; nor when he crossed those narrow waters
and set foot upon the flat and barren shores of Germanic and Slavic
Europe, was there anything in their sombre forests and limitless
plains and desolate marshes to arouse within him the fire of his soul.
War with the flaxen-haired savages, who swarmed upon these lands like
myriad wolves, was his only exercise. He sailed up the Gulf of Bothnia
till he entered the Arctic wastes where dwelt the Laps; he followed
the shores of the Gulf of Finland, and explored the river Neva and
Lake Ladoga and connecting streams, and even crossed to the waters of
the mighty Volga, and entered Asia by the Caspian Sea; he ascended the
lesser Russian rivers, and pitched fortified camps along their banks,
founding Revel and Riga and Novogorod, whence the Swedish Ruriks gave
to the Muskovites their earliest Czars. He ruled Finland and Esthonia
and Livonia and Courland, and even begat Sigismund, the Polish King.
For centuries he warred with and ruled these Slavic tribes until at
last, driven back to his narrow peninsula, the mainland knew him only
as defeated and expelled. A practical, unimaginative fighting man was
the Swede. He loved war for war's own sake, and when he had no longer
reason to war for conquest or defense, he clung to pike and sword as
permanent substitute for plow and seine, and hired himself to
bickering Slav and German and grew famous as a "Mercenary," who
spilled his blood for pay and the plunder of his master's foes. Thus
have the cousin peoples swung wide apart. The one, free and
open-minded; the other, still dazed by the faded glories of a long
dead past, turns ever a wistful eye toward the military tyrannies of
Czar and Kaiser, and finds in the inequalities of landed noble and
landless yokel, in official and military caste and enthralled
peasantry, the realization of his Fifteenth Century ideal.
[Illustration: A SWEDISH CHURCH.]
[Illustration: ANCIENT SWEDISH FORTRESS.]
Thus, as I have wended my way along the Vasa and Freds Gatans and
neighboring streets, toward the fine Gustaf Adolf Torg, the chief
public square, mixing among the jostling crowds, have I felt keenly
the variant atmospheres of these Norse and Swedish lands, differences
which finding their roots in the historical development of the kindred
peoples make their present union beneath a single flag and King both
artificial and constrained.
While on the surface and to the feeling there is apparently wide
divergence in political sentiment between the Norwegian and Swedish
peoples, yet there is in reality a closer and closer approachment
between them. The democratic notions prevailing in Norway already stir
the pulse of the Swedish peasantry and working classes--the classes
which in Sweden have no votes. Already has the demand for universal
suffrage been raised in Sweden, and sentiment inimical to aristocracy,
yunkerdom and privilege, grows continually more aggressive. An
intelligent and aristocratic Swede with whom I have discussed this
question to-day, admits this rising tide of democracy, and admits,
also, though ruefully, that not until universal suffrage shall become
established in Sweden will it be possible to come to that
understanding with the Norwegian people on which may be founded a
lasting and united Scandinavian State. Thus in Sweden itself, I hear
uttered sentiments very nearly akin to those which caught my ear when
in Copenhagen: the possibility, nay, probability, of a common
Scandinavian Union, when the peoples of Denmark and Norway and Sweden
shall federate, and the obsolete system of kingship and privilege
shall be set aside.
[Illustration: A BAND OF SWEDISH HORSES.]