One of the buildings on this farm was known, the young man said, to be at least two hundred years old. The logs are moss-grown and black, but it is good for hundreds of years yet. The first story is used now for a storeroom. From this a ladder led up to a half-chamber overhead, the front railed by a low railing; here, in this strange sort of balcony bedroom, had slept the children of the family, all the time under observation of their elders below.
Thrust in among the rafters, dark, rusty, bent, was an ancient sword. Our guide took it out and handed it to us, with a look of awe on his face. No one knew, he said, how long that sword had been on the farm. In the earliest writings by which the estate had been transferred, that sword had been mentioned, and it was a clause in every lease since that it should never be taken away from the place. However many times the farm might change hands, thesword must go with it, for all time. Was there no legend, no tradition, with it? None that his father or his father's father had ever heard; only the mysterious entailed charge, from generation to generation, that the sword must never be removed. The blade was thin and the edge jagged, the handle plain and without ornament; evidently the sword had been for work, and not for show. There was something infinitely solemn in its inalienable estate of safe and reverent keeping at the hands of men all ignorant of its history. It is by no means impossible that it had journeyed in the company of that Sigurd who sailed with his splendid fleet of sixty ships for Palestine, early in the twelfth century. Sigurd Jorsalafarer, or Traveller to Jerusalem, he was called; and no less an authority than Thomas Carlyle vouches for him as having been "a wise, able, and prudent man," reigning in a "solid and successful way." Through the Straits of Gibraltar to Jerusalem, home by way of Constantinople and Russia, "shining with renown," he sailed, and took a hand in any fighting he found going on by the way. Many of his men came from the region of the Sogne Fjord; and the more I thought of it the surer I felt that this old sword had many a time flashed on the deck of his ships.
Our second day opened rainy. The lake was blotted out by mist; on the fence under the willows sat half a dozen men, roosting as unconcernedly as if it were warm sunshine.
"It does wonder me," said Sanna, "that I find here so many men standing idle. When the railroad come, it shall be that the life must be different."
A heroic English party, undeterred by weather, were setting off in carioles and on horseback. Delays after delays occurred to hinder them. At the last moment their angry courier was obliged to go and fetch the washing, which had not arrived. There is a proverb in Norway, "When the Norwegian says 'immediately,' look for him in half an hour."
Finally, at noon, in despair of sunshine, we also set off: rugs, water-proofs; the india-rubber boot of the carriage drawn tight up to the level of our eyes; we set off in pouring sheets of rain for Gudvangen. For the first two hours the sole variation of the monotony of our journey was inemptying the boot of water once every five minutes, just in time to save a freshet in our laps. High mountain peaks, black with forests or icy white with snow, gleamed in and out of the clouds on either hand, as we toiled and splashed along. Occasional lightings up revealed stretches of barren country, here and there a cluster of farm-houses or a lowly church. On the shores of a small lake we passed one of these lonely churches. Only two other buildings were in sight in the vast expanse: one, the wretched little inn where we were to rest our horses for half an hour; the other, the parsonage. This last was a pretty little cottage, picturesquely built of yellow pine, half bowered in vines, looking in that lonely waste as if it had lost itself and strayed away from some civilized spot. The pastor and his sister, who kept house for him, were away; but his servant was so sure that they would like to have us see their home that we allowed her to show it to us. It was a tasteful and cosey little home: parlor, study, and dining-room, all prettily carpeted and furnished; books, flowers, a sewing-machine, and a piano. It did one's heart good to see such an oasis of a home in the wilderness. Drawn up on rests in a shed near the house, was an open boat, much like a wherry. The pastor spent hours every day, the maid said, in rowing on the lake. It was his great pleasure.
Up, up we climbed: past fir forests, swamps, foaming streams,—the wildest, weirdest road storm-driven people ever crossed. Spite of the rain, half-naked children came flying out of hovels and cabins to open gates: sometimes there would be six in a row, their thin brown hands all stretched for alms, and their hollow eyes begging piteously; then they would race on ahead to open the next gate. The moors seemed but a succession of enclosed pasture-lands. Now and then we passed a little knot of cabins close to the road, and men who looked kindly, but as wild as wild beasts, would come out and speak to the driver; their poverty was direful to see. At last, at the top of a high hill, we halted; the storm stayed; the clouds lifted and blew off. At our feet lay a black chasm; it was like looking down into the bowels of the earth. This was the Nerodal Valley; into it we were to descend. Its walls were three and four thousand feet high. It looked little more than a cleft. The road down this precipitous wallis a marvel of engineering. It is called the Stalheimscleft, and was built by a Norwegian officer, Captain Finne. It is made in a series of zigzagging loops, which are so long and so narrow that the descent at no point appears steep; yet as one looks up from any loop to the loop next above, it seems directly over his head. Down this precipice into the Nerodal Valley leap two grand fosses, the Stalheimfos and the Salvklevfos; roaring in ceaseless thunder, filling the air, and drenching the valley with spray. Tiny grass-grown spaces between the bowlders and the loops of the road had all been close mowed; spaces which looked too small for the smallest reaping-hook to swing in were yet close shorn, and the little handfuls of hay hung up drying on hand's-breadths of fence set up for the purpose. Even single blades of grass are too precious in Norway to be wasted.
As we walked slowly down this incredible road, we paused step by step to look first up, then down. The carriage waiting for us below on the bridge looked like a baby wagon. The river made by the meeting of these two great cataracts at the base of the precipice was only a little silver thread flowing down the valley. The cataracts seemed leaping from the sky, and the sky seemed resting on the hill-tops; masses of whirling and floating clouds added to the awesome grandeur of the scene. The Stalheimfos fell into a deep, basin-shaped ravine, piled with great bowlders, and full of birch and ash shrubs; in the centre of this, by some strange play of the water, rose a distinct and beautifully shaped cone, thrown up closely in front of the fall, almost blending with it, and thick veiled in the tumultuous spray,—a fountain in a waterfall. It seemed the accident of a moment, but its shape did not alter so long as we watched it; it is a part of the fall.
Five miles down this cleft, called valley, to Gudvangen run the road and the little river and the narrow strips of meadow, dark, thin, and ghastly; long months in utter darkness this Nerodal lies, and never, even at summer's best and longest, has it more than a half-day of sun. The mountains rise in sheer black walls on either hand,—bare rock in colossal shafts and peaks, three, four, and even five thousand feet high; snow in the rifts at top; patches of gaunt firs here and there; great spaces of tumbled rocks,where avalanches have slid; pebbly and sandy channels worn from side to side of the valley, where torrents have rushed down and torn a way across; white streams from top to bottom of the precipices, all foam and quiver, like threads spun out on the sward, more than can be counted; they seem to swing down out of the sky as spider threads swing swift and countless in a dewy morning.
Sanna shuddered. "Now you see, one could not spend a whole day in Nerodal Valley," she said. "It does wonder me that any people will live here. Every spring the mountains do fall and people are killed."
On a narrow rim of land at base of these walls, just where the fjord meets the river, is the village of Gudvangen, a desolate huddle of half a dozen poor houses. A chill as of death filled the air; foul odors arose at every turn. The two little inns were overcrowded with people, who roamed restlessly up and down, waiting for they knew not what. An indescribable gloom settles on Gudvangen with nightfall. The black waters of the fjord chafing monotonously at the base of the black mountains; the sky black also, and looking farther off than sky ever looked before, walled into a strip, like the valley beneath it; hemmed in, forsaken, doomed, and left seems Gudvangen. What hold life can have on a human being kept in such a spot it is hard to imagine. Yet we found three very old women hobnobbing contentedly there in a cave of a hut. Ragged, dirty, hideous, hopeless one would have thought them; but they were all agog and cheery, and full of plans for repairing their house. They were in a little log stable, perhaps ten feet square, and hardly high enough to stand upright in: they were cowering round a bit of fire in the centre; their piles of straw and blankets laid in corners; not a chair, not a table. Macbeth's witches had seemed full-dressed society women by the side of these. We peered timidly in at the group, and they all came running towards us, chattering, glad to see strangers, and apologizing for their condition, because, as they said, they had just turned in there together for a few days, while their house across the way was being mended. Not a light of any description had they, except the fire. The oldest one hobbled away, and returned with a small tallow candle, which she lit and held in her hand, to show us howcomfortable they were, after all; plenty of room for three piles of straw on the rough log floor. Their "house across the way" was a little better than this; not much. One of the poor old crones had "five children in America." "They wanted her to come out to America and live with them, but she was too old to go away from home," she said. "Home was the best place for old people," to which the other two assented eagerly. "Oh, yes, home was the best place. America was too far."
It seemed a miracle to have comfort in an inn in so poverty-stricken a spot as this, but we did. We slept in straw-filled bunks, set tight into closets under the eaves; only a narrow doorway by which to get in and out of bed; but there were two windows in the room, and no need to stifle. And for supper there was set before us a stew of lamb, delicately flavored with curry, and served with rice, of which no house need be ashamed. That so palatable a dish could have issued from the place which answered for kitchen in that poor little inn was a marvel; it was little more than a small dark tomb. The dishes were all washed out-of-doors in tubs set on planks laid across two broken chairs at the kitchen door; and the food and milk were kept in an above-ground cellar not three steps from the same door. This had been made by an immense slab of rock which had crashed down from the mountain top, one day, and instead of tearing through the house and killing everybody had considerately lodged on top of two other bowlders, roofing the space in, and forming a huge stone refrigerator ready to hand for the innkeeper. The enclosed space was cold as ice, and high enough and large enough for one to walk about in it comfortably. I had the curiosity to ask this innkeeper how much he could make in a year off his inn. When he found that I had no sinister motive in the inquiry, he was freely communicative. At first he feared, Sanna said, that it might become known in the town how much money he was making, and that demands might be made on him in consequence. If the season of summer travel were very good, he said he would clear two hundred dollars; but he did not always make so much as that. He earned a little also by keeping a small shop, and in the winter that was his only resource. He had a wife and two children, and hiswife was not strong, which made it harder for them, as they were obliged always to keep a servant.
Even in full sunlight, at nine of the morning, Gudvangen looked grim and dangerous, and the Nerö Fjord water black. As we sailed out, the walls of the valley closed up suddenly behind us, as with a snap which might have craunched poor little Gudvangen to death. The fjord is as wild as the pass; in fact, the same thing, only that it has water at bottom instead of land, and you can sail closer than you can drive at base of the rocky walls. Soon we came to the mouth of another great fjord, opening up another watery road into the mountains; this was the Aurland, and on its farther shore opened again the Sognedal Fjord, up which we went a little way to leave somebody at a landing. Here were green hills and slopes and trees, and a bright yellow church, shaped like a blancmange mould in three pyramid-shaped cones, each smaller than the one below.
"Here is the finest fruit orchard in all Scandinavia," said Sanna, pointing to a pretty place just out of the town, where fields rose one above the other in terraces on south-facing slopes, covered thick with orchards. "It belongs to an acquainted with me: but she must sell it. She is a widow, and she cannot take the care to herself."
Back again across the mouth of the Aurland Fjord, and then out into the great Sogne Fjord, zigzagging from side to side of it, and up into numerous little fjords where the boat looked to be steering straight into hills,—we seemed to be adrift, without purpose, rather than on a definite voyage with a fixed aim of getting home. The magnificent labyrinths of walled waters were calm as the heavens they reflected; the clouds above and clouds below kept silent pace with each other, and we seemed gliding between two skies. Great snow fjelds came in sight, wheeled, rose, sank, and disappeared, as we passed; sometimes green meadows stretched on either side of us, then terrible gorges and pinnacles of towering rock. Picture after picture we saw, of gay-colored little villages, with rims of fields and rocky promontories; snow fjelds above, and fir forests between; glittering waterfalls shooting from the sky line to the water, like white lightning down a black stone front, or leaping out in spaces of feathery snow, like one preternaturalblooming of the forests all the way down the black walls rising perpendicularly thousands of feet; tiers of blue mountains in the distance, dark blue on the nearest, and shading off to palest blue at the sky line; the fjord dark purple in the narrows, shading to gray in the opens; illuminated spaces of green, now at the shore, now half-way up, now two-thirds-way up to the sky; tops of hills in sunlight; bars of sunlight streaming through dark clefts. Then a storm-sweep across the fjord, far in our wake,—swooping and sweeping, and gone in a half-hour; blotting out the mountains; then turning them into a dark-slate wall, on which white sails and cross-sunbeams made a superb shining. And so, between the sun and the storm, we came to Valestrand, and sent off and took on boat-loads of pleasuring people,—the boats with bright flags at prow and stern, and gay-dressed women with fantastic parasols like butterflies poised on their edges,—Valestrand, where, as some say, Frithiof was born; and as all say, he burnt one of Balder's great temples. Then Ladvik, on a green slope turning to gold in the sun; its white church with a gray stone spire relieved against a bank of purple gloom; the lights sinking lower and the shadows stretching farther every minute; shadows of hills behind which the sun had already gone, thrown sharp and black on hills still glowing in full light; hills before us, shimmering in soft silver gray and pale purple against a clear golden west; hills behind us, folding and folded in masses of rosy vapor; shining fosses leaping down among them; the colors changing like the colors of a prism minute by minute along the tops of the ranges,—this was the way our day on the Sogne Fjord drew near its ending. Industriously knitting, with eyes firm fastened on her needles, sat an English matron near us on the deck. Not one glance of her eye did she give to the splendors of sky and water and land about her.
"I do think that lady must be in want of stockings very much," remarked Sanna quietly; "but she need not to come to Norway to knit."
Far worse, however, than the woman who knitted were the women and the men who talked, loudly, stupidly, vulgarly, around us. It was mortifying that their talk was English, but they were not Americans. At last they droveus to another part of the deck, but not before a few phrases of their conversation had been indelibly stamped on my memory.
"Well, we were in Dresden two days: there's only the gallery there; that's time enough for that."
"Raphaels,—lots of Raphaels."
"I don't care for Raphaels, anyhow. I'll tell you who I like; I like Veronese."
"Well, I'm very fond of Tintoretto."
"I like Titians; they're so delicate, don't you know?"
"Well, who's that man that's painted such dreadful things,—all mixed up, don't you know? In some places you see a good many of them."
"You don't mean Rembrandt, do you? There are a lot of Rembrandts in Munich."
"There was one picture I liked. I think it was a Christ; but I ain't sure. There were four children on the ground, I remember."
When the real sunset came we were threading the rocky labyrinths of the Bergen Fjord. It is a field of bowlders, with an ocean let in; nothing more. Why the bowlders are not submerged, since the water is deep enough for big ships to sail on, is the perpetual marvel; but they are not. They are as firm in their places as continents, myriads of them only a few feet out of water; and when the sun as it sinks sends a flood of gold and red light athwart them, they turn all colors, and glow on the water like great smoke crystals with fire shining through. To sail up this fjord in the sunset is to wind through devious lanes walled with these jewels, and to look off, over and above them, to fields of purple and gray and green, islands on islands on islands, to the right and to the left, with the same jewel-walled lanes running east and west and north and south among them; the sky will stream with glowing colors from horizon to horizon, and the glorious silence will be broken by no harsher sound than the low lapsing of waters and the soft whirr of gray gulls' wings.
And so we came to Bergen in the bright midnight of the last of our four days.
Months afterwards Sanna sent me a few extracts from descriptions given by a Norwegian writer of some of the spots we had seen in the dim upper distances along thefjords,—some of those illuminated spaces of green high up among the crags, which looked such sunny and peaceful homes.
Her English is so much more graphic than mine that I have begged her permission to give the extracts as she wrote them:—
"Grand, glorious, and serious is the Sogne Fjord. Serious in itself, and still more serious we find it when we know where and how people do live there between mountains. And we must wonder or ask, Is there really none places left, or no kind of work for those people to get for the maintenance of the life, but to go to such desolate and rather impassable a place?..."More than half of the year are the two families who live on the farm of Vetti separated from all other human beings. During the winter can the usual path in the grass not be passed in case of snow, ice, and perpetual slips, which leave behind trace long out in the summer, because the sun only for a short time came over this long enormous abyss, and does not linger there long, so that the snow which has been to ice do melt very slow, and seldom disappear earlier than in July. The short time in the winter when the river Utla is frozen may the bottom of the pass well be passed, though not without danger, on account of the mentioned slips, which, with the power of the hurricane, are whizzing down in the deep, and which merely pressure of the air is so strong that it throw all down."Late in the autumn and in the spring is all approach to and from Vetti quite stopped; and late in the autumn chiefly with ground and snow slips, which then get loosened by the frequent rain. The farm-houses is situate on a steep slope, so that the one end of the lowest beam is put on the mere ground, and the other end must be put on a wall almost three yards high. The fields are so steep, and so quite near the dreadful precipice, that none unaccustomed to it do venture one's self thither; and when one from here look over the pass, and look the meadows which is more hanging than laying over the deep, and which have its grass mowed down with a short scythe, then one cannot comprehend the desperate courage which risk to set about and occupy one's self here, while the abyss has opened its swallow for receiving the foolhardy."A little above the dwelling-houses is a quite tolerable plain; and when one ask the man why he has not built his houses there, he answers that owing to the snow-slips it is impossible to build there."Through the valley-streams the Afdals River comes from the mountains, run in a distance of only twenty yards from the farm-houses, and about one hundred yards from the same pourout itself with crash of thunder in a mighty foss. The rumble of the same, and that with its hurling out caused pressure of the air, is in the summer so strong that the dwelling-houses seems to shiver, and all what fluids there in open vessels get placed on the table is on an incessant trembling, moving almost as on board a ship in a rough sea. The wall and windows which turns to the river are then always moistened of the whipped foam, which in small particles continually is thrown back from the foss."By the side of this foss, in the hard granite wall which it moisten, is a mined gut (the author says he can't call it a road, though it is reckoned for that), broad enough that one man, and in the highest one small well-trained horse, however not by each other's side, can walk therein. This gut, which vault is not so high that an full-grown man can walk upright, is the farm's only road which rise to a considerable height."But as this gut could not get lightened in a suitable height, one has filled up or finished the remaining gap with four timber beams, four or five yards long, which is close to the gut, and with its upper end leans on a higher small mountain peak, which beside this is the fastening for the bridge over the waterfall. In these beams is cut in flukes, just as the steps of a staircase, and when one walks up these flukes one looks between the beams the frothing foss beneath one's self, while one get wrapped up of its exhalation clouds."The man told me that the pass also is to be passed with horse, the time of the summer, and that all then is to be carried in a pack-saddle to the farm, of his own horse, which is accustomed to this trip. And when one know the small Lærdalske horses' easiness, and the extraordinary security wherewith they can go upon the most narrow path on the edge of the most dreadful precipices, in that they place or cast the feet so in front of each other that no path is too narrow for them, then it seems a little less surprising."From the Vetti farm continues the pass in a distance of about twenty-one English miles, so that the whole pass, then, is a little more than twenty-four miles, and shall on the other side of the farm be still more narrow, more difficult, and more dreadful. The farmer himself and his people must often go there to the woods, and for other things for his farm. There belongs to this farm most excellent sæter and mountain fields, wherefore the cattle begetting is here of great importance; and also the most excellent tract of firs belong to this farm."I was curious to know how one had to behave from here to get the dead buried, when it was impossible that two men could walk by the side of each other through the pass, and I did even not see how one could carry any coffin on horseback. I got the following information: The corpse is to be laid on a thin board,in which there is bored holes in both ends in which there is to be put handles of rope; to this board is the corpse to be tied, wrapped up in its linen cloth. And now one man in the front and one behind carry it through the pass to the farm Gjelde, and here it is to be laid into the coffin, and in the common manner brought to the churchyard. If any one die in the winter, and the bottom of the pass must be impassable then as well as in the spring and in the autumn, one must try to keep the corpse in an hard frozen state, which is not difficult, till it can be brought down in the above-mentioned manner."A still more strange and sad manner was used once at a cottager place called Vermelien. This place is lying in the little valley which border to the Vetti's field. Its situation by the river deep down in the pass is exceedingly horrid, and it has none other road or path than a very steep and narrow foot-path along the mountain wall side with the most dreadful precipice as by the Vetti."Since the cottager people here generally had changed, no one had dead there. It happened, then, the first time a boy, on seventeen years old, died. One did not do one's self any hesitation about the manner to bring him to his grave, and they made a coffin in the house. The corpse was put in the coffin, and then the coffin brought outside; and first now one did see with consternation that it was not possible to carry the corpse with them in this manner. What was to do then?"At last they resolved to let the coffin be left as amemento mori, and to place the dead upon a horse, his feet tied up under the belly of the horse; against the mane on the horse was fastened a well-stuffed fodder bag, that the corpse may lean to the same, to which again the corpse was tied. And so the dead must ride over the mountain to his resting-place by Fortun's church in Lyster."
"Grand, glorious, and serious is the Sogne Fjord. Serious in itself, and still more serious we find it when we know where and how people do live there between mountains. And we must wonder or ask, Is there really none places left, or no kind of work for those people to get for the maintenance of the life, but to go to such desolate and rather impassable a place?...
"More than half of the year are the two families who live on the farm of Vetti separated from all other human beings. During the winter can the usual path in the grass not be passed in case of snow, ice, and perpetual slips, which leave behind trace long out in the summer, because the sun only for a short time came over this long enormous abyss, and does not linger there long, so that the snow which has been to ice do melt very slow, and seldom disappear earlier than in July. The short time in the winter when the river Utla is frozen may the bottom of the pass well be passed, though not without danger, on account of the mentioned slips, which, with the power of the hurricane, are whizzing down in the deep, and which merely pressure of the air is so strong that it throw all down.
"Late in the autumn and in the spring is all approach to and from Vetti quite stopped; and late in the autumn chiefly with ground and snow slips, which then get loosened by the frequent rain. The farm-houses is situate on a steep slope, so that the one end of the lowest beam is put on the mere ground, and the other end must be put on a wall almost three yards high. The fields are so steep, and so quite near the dreadful precipice, that none unaccustomed to it do venture one's self thither; and when one from here look over the pass, and look the meadows which is more hanging than laying over the deep, and which have its grass mowed down with a short scythe, then one cannot comprehend the desperate courage which risk to set about and occupy one's self here, while the abyss has opened its swallow for receiving the foolhardy.
"A little above the dwelling-houses is a quite tolerable plain; and when one ask the man why he has not built his houses there, he answers that owing to the snow-slips it is impossible to build there.
"Through the valley-streams the Afdals River comes from the mountains, run in a distance of only twenty yards from the farm-houses, and about one hundred yards from the same pourout itself with crash of thunder in a mighty foss. The rumble of the same, and that with its hurling out caused pressure of the air, is in the summer so strong that the dwelling-houses seems to shiver, and all what fluids there in open vessels get placed on the table is on an incessant trembling, moving almost as on board a ship in a rough sea. The wall and windows which turns to the river are then always moistened of the whipped foam, which in small particles continually is thrown back from the foss.
"By the side of this foss, in the hard granite wall which it moisten, is a mined gut (the author says he can't call it a road, though it is reckoned for that), broad enough that one man, and in the highest one small well-trained horse, however not by each other's side, can walk therein. This gut, which vault is not so high that an full-grown man can walk upright, is the farm's only road which rise to a considerable height.
"But as this gut could not get lightened in a suitable height, one has filled up or finished the remaining gap with four timber beams, four or five yards long, which is close to the gut, and with its upper end leans on a higher small mountain peak, which beside this is the fastening for the bridge over the waterfall. In these beams is cut in flukes, just as the steps of a staircase, and when one walks up these flukes one looks between the beams the frothing foss beneath one's self, while one get wrapped up of its exhalation clouds.
"The man told me that the pass also is to be passed with horse, the time of the summer, and that all then is to be carried in a pack-saddle to the farm, of his own horse, which is accustomed to this trip. And when one know the small Lærdalske horses' easiness, and the extraordinary security wherewith they can go upon the most narrow path on the edge of the most dreadful precipices, in that they place or cast the feet so in front of each other that no path is too narrow for them, then it seems a little less surprising.
"From the Vetti farm continues the pass in a distance of about twenty-one English miles, so that the whole pass, then, is a little more than twenty-four miles, and shall on the other side of the farm be still more narrow, more difficult, and more dreadful. The farmer himself and his people must often go there to the woods, and for other things for his farm. There belongs to this farm most excellent sæter and mountain fields, wherefore the cattle begetting is here of great importance; and also the most excellent tract of firs belong to this farm.
"I was curious to know how one had to behave from here to get the dead buried, when it was impossible that two men could walk by the side of each other through the pass, and I did even not see how one could carry any coffin on horseback. I got the following information: The corpse is to be laid on a thin board,in which there is bored holes in both ends in which there is to be put handles of rope; to this board is the corpse to be tied, wrapped up in its linen cloth. And now one man in the front and one behind carry it through the pass to the farm Gjelde, and here it is to be laid into the coffin, and in the common manner brought to the churchyard. If any one die in the winter, and the bottom of the pass must be impassable then as well as in the spring and in the autumn, one must try to keep the corpse in an hard frozen state, which is not difficult, till it can be brought down in the above-mentioned manner.
"A still more strange and sad manner was used once at a cottager place called Vermelien. This place is lying in the little valley which border to the Vetti's field. Its situation by the river deep down in the pass is exceedingly horrid, and it has none other road or path than a very steep and narrow foot-path along the mountain wall side with the most dreadful precipice as by the Vetti.
"Since the cottager people here generally had changed, no one had dead there. It happened, then, the first time a boy, on seventeen years old, died. One did not do one's self any hesitation about the manner to bring him to his grave, and they made a coffin in the house. The corpse was put in the coffin, and then the coffin brought outside; and first now one did see with consternation that it was not possible to carry the corpse with them in this manner. What was to do then?
"At last they resolved to let the coffin be left as amemento mori, and to place the dead upon a horse, his feet tied up under the belly of the horse; against the mane on the horse was fastened a well-stuffed fodder bag, that the corpse may lean to the same, to which again the corpse was tied. And so the dead must ride over the mountain to his resting-place by Fortun's church in Lyster."
I.
"Forr English Ladies." This was the address on the back of a much-thumbed envelope, resting on top of the key-rack in the dining-room of our Bergen hotel. If "For" had been spelled correctly, the letter would not have been half so likely to be read; but that extra outsider of anrwas irresistibly attractive. The words of the letter itself were, if not equally original in spelling, at least as unique in arrangement, and altogether the advertisement answered its purposes far better than if it had been written in good English. Thenaïvetéwith which the writer went on to say, "I do recommend me," was delicious; and when she herself appeared there was something in her whole personal bearing entirely in keeping with the childlike and unconscious complacency of her phraseology. "I do recommend me" was written all over her face; and, as things turned out, if it had been "I do guarantee me," it had not been too strong an indorsement. A more tireless, willing, thoughtful, helpful, eager, shrewd little creature than Katrina never chattered. Looking back from the last day to the first of my acquaintance with her, I feel a remorseful twinge as I think how near I came to taking instead of her, as my maid for a month's journeying, a stately young woman, who, appearing in answer to my advertisement, handed me her card with dignity, and begged my pardon for inquiring precisely what it would be that she would have to do for me, besides the turning of English into Norwegian andvice versa. The contrast between this specific gravity and Katrina's hearty and unreflecting "I will do my best to satisfy you in all occasions," did not sufficiently impress me in the outset. But many a time afterward did I recallit, and believe more than ever in the doctrine of lucky stars and good angels.
When Katrina appeared, punctually to the appointed minute, half an hour before the time for setting off, I saw with pleasure that she was wrapped in a warm cloak of dark cloth. I had seen her before, flitting about in shawls of various sorts, loosely pinned at the throat in a disjointed kind of way, which gave to her appearance an expression that I did not like,—an expression of desultory if not intermittent respectability. But wrapped in this heavy cloak, she was decorum personified.
"Ah, Katrina," I said, "I am very glad to see you are warmly dressed. This summer you keep in Norway is so cold, one needs winter clothes all the time."
"Yes, I must," she replied. "I get fever and ague in New York, and since then it always reminds me. That was six years ago; but it reminds me,—the freezing at my neck," putting her hand to the back of her neck.
It was in New York, then, that she had learned so much English. This explained everything,—the curious mixture of volubility and inaccuracy and slang in her speech. She had been for several months a house-servant in New York, "with an Irish lady; such a nice lady. Her husband, he took care of a bank: kept it clean, don't you see, and all such tings. And we lived in the top in the eight story: we was always going up and down in the elewator."
After this she had been a button-hole maker in a great clothing-house, and next, had married one of her own countrymen; a nephew, by the way, of the famous Norwegian giant at Barnum's Museum,—a fact which Katrina stated simply, without any apparent boast, adding, "My husband's father were guyant, too. There be many guyants in that part of the country."
Perhaps it was wicked, seeing that Katrina had had such hopes of learning much English in her month with me, not to have told her then and there thatgin the English wordgiantwas always soft. But I could not. Neither did I once, from first to last, correct her inimitable and delicious pronunciations. I confined my instructions to the endeavor to make her understand clearly the meanings of words, and to teach her true synonymes; but as for meddlingwith her pronunciations, I would as soon have been caught trying to teach a baby to speak plain. I fear, towards the last, she began to suspect this, and to be half aware of the not wholly disinterested pleasure which I took in listening to her eager prattle; but she did not accuse me, and I let her set off for home not one whit wiser in the matter of the sounds of the English language than she had been when she came away, except so far as she might have unconsciously caught them from hearing me speak. It is just as well: her English is quite good enough as it is, for all practical purposes in Norway, and would lose half its charm and value to English-speaking people if she were to learn to say the words as we say them.
To set off by boat from Bergen means to set off by boats; it would not be an idle addition to the phrase, either, to say, not only by boats, but among boats, in, out, over, and across boats; and one may consider himself lucky if he is not called upon to add,—the whole truth being told,—under boats. Arriving at the wharf, he is shown where his steamer lies, midway in the harbor; whether it be at anchor, or hoisted on a raft of small boats, he is at first at a loss to see. However, rowing alongside, he discovers that the raft of small boats is only a crowd, like any other crowd, of movable things or creatures, and can be shoved, jostled, pushed out of the way, and compelled to give room. A Norwegian can elbow his boat through a tight-packed mass of boats with as dexterous and irresistible force as another man can elbow his way on foot, on dry land, in a crowd of men. So long as you are sitting quiet in the middle of the boat, merely swayed from side to side by his gyrations, with no sort of responsibility as to their successive direction, and with implicit faith in their being right, it is all very well. But when your Norwegian springs up, confident, poises one foot on the edge of his own boat, the other foot on the edge of another boat, plants one of his oars against the gunwale of a third boat, and rests the other oar hard up against the high side of a steamboat, and then authoritatively requests you to rise and make pathway for yourself across and between all these oars and boats, and leap varying chasms of water between them and the ladder up the steamer's side, dismay seizes you, if you are not to thewater born. I did not hear of anybody's being drowned in attempting to get on board a Bergen steamer. But why somebody is not, every day in the week, I do not know, if it often happens to people to thread and surmount such a labyrinth of small rocking boats as lay around the dampskib "Jupiter," in which Katrina and I sailed for Christiania.
The Northern nations of Europe seem to have hit upon signally appropriate names for that place of torment which in English is called steamboat. There are times when simply to pronounce the wordsdampskibordampbaadis soothing to the nerves; and nowhere oftener than in Norway can one be called upon to seek such relief. It is an accepted thing in Norway that no steamboat can be counted on either to arrive or depart within one, two, or three hours of its advertised time. The guide-books all state this fact; so nobody who, thus forewarned, has chosen to trust himself to the dampskib has any right to complain if the whole plan of his journey is disarranged and frustrated by the thing's not arriving within four hours of the time it had promised. But it is not set down in the guide-books, as it ought to be, that there is something else on which the traveller in Norwegian dampskibs can place no dependence whatever; and that is the engaging beforehand of his stateroom. To have engaged a stateroom one week beforehand, positively, explicitly, and then, upon arriving on board, to be confronted by a smiling captain, who states in an off-hand manner, as if it were an every-day occurrence, that "he is very sorry, but it is impossible to let you have it;" and who, when he is pressed for an explanation of the impossibility, has no better reason to give than that two gentlemen wanted the stateroom, and as the two gentlemen could not go in the ladies' cabin, and you, owing to the misfortune of your sex, could, therefore the two gentlemen have the stateroom, and you will take the one remaining untenanted berth in the cabin,—this is what may happen in a Norwegian dampskib. If one is resolute enough to halt in the gangway, and, ordering the porters bearing the luggage to halt also, say calmly, "Very well; then I must return to my hotel, and wait for another boat, in which I can have a stateroom; it would be quite out of the question, my making the journey in thecabin," the captain will discover some way of disposing of the two gentlemen, and without putting them into the ladies' cabin; but this late concession, not to the justice of your claim, only to your determination in enforcing it, does not in any wise conciliate your respect or your amiability. The fact of the imposition and unfairness is the same. I ought to say, however, that this is the only matter in which I found unfairness in Norway. In regard to everything else the Norwegian has to provide or to sell, he is just and honest; but when it comes to the question of dampskib accommodations, he seems to take leave of all his sense of obligation to be either.
As I crept into the narrow trough called a berth, in my hardly won stateroom, a vision flitted past the door: a tall and graceful figure, in a tight, shabby black gown; a classic head, set with the grace of a lily on a slender neck; pale brown hair, put back, braided, and wound in a knot behind, all save a few short curls, which fell lightly floating and waving over a low forehead; a pair of honest, merry gray eyes, with a swift twinkle at the corners, and a sudden serious tenderness in their depths; a straight nose, with a nostril spirited and fine as an Arabian's; a mouth of flawless beauty, unless it might be that the upper lip was a trifle too short, but this fault only added to the piquancy of the face. I lifted myself on my elbow to look at her. She was gone; and I sank back, thinking of the pictures that the world raved over, so few short years ago, of the lovely Eugénie. Here was a face strangely like hers, but with far more fire and character,—a Norwegian girl, evidently poor. I was wondering if I should see her again, and how I could manage to set Katrina on her track, and if I could find out who she was, when, lo, there she stood by my side, bending above me, and saying something Norwegian over and over in a gentle voice; and Katrina behind her, saying, "This is the lady what has care of all. She do say, 'Poor lady, poor lady, to be so sick!' She is sorry that you are sick." I gazed at her in stupefied wonder. This radiant creature the stewardess of a steamboat! She was more beautiful near than at a distance. I am sure I have never seen so beautiful a woman. And coming nearer, one could see clearly, almost as radiant as her physical beauty, the beauty of a fine and sweet natureshining through. Her smile was transcendent. I am not over-easy to be stirred by women's fair looks. Seldom I see a woman's face that gives me unalloyed pleasure. Faces are half-terrifying things to one who studies them, such paradoxical masks are they; only one half mask, and the other half bared secrets of a lifetime. Their mere physical beauty, however great it may be, is so underlaid and overlaid by tokens and traces and scars of things in which the flesh and blood of it have played part that a fair face can rarely be more than half fair. But here was a face with beauty such as the old Greeks put into marble; and shining through it the honesty and innocence of an untaught child, the good-will and content of a faithful working-girl, and the native archness of a healthful maiden. I am not unaware that all this must have the sound of an invention, and there being no man to bear witness to my tale, except such as have sailed in the Norwegian dampskib "Jupiter," it will not be much believed; nevertheless, I shall tell it. Not being the sort of artist to bring the girl's face away in a portfolio, the only thing left for me is to try to set it in the poor portraiture of words. Poor enough portraiture it is that words can fashion, even for things less subtle than faces,—a day or a sky, a swift passion or a thought. Words seem always to those who work with them more or less failures; but most of all are they impotent and disappointing when a face is to be told. Yet I shall not cast away my sketch of the beautiful Anna. It is the only one which will ever be made of her. Now that I think of it, however, there is one testimony to be added to mine,—a testimony of much weight, too, taken in the connection, for it was of such involuntariness.
On the second day of my voyage in the "Jupiter," in the course of a conversation with the captain, I took occasion to speak of the good-will and efficiency of his stewardess. He assented warmly to my praise of her; adding that she was born of very poor parents, and had little education herself beyond knowing how to read and write, but was a person of rare goodness.
I then said, "And of very rare beauty, also. I have never seen a more beautiful face."
"Yes," he replied; "there is something very not common about her. Her face is quite antic." "Antique," hemeant, but for the first few seconds I could not imagine what it was he had intended. He also, then, had recognized, as this phrase shows, the truly classic quality of the girl's beauty; and he is the only witness I am able to bring to prove that my description of her face and figure and look and bearing are not an ingenious fable wrought out of nothing.
From Katrina, also, there came testimonies to Anna's rare quality.
"I have been in long speech with Anna," she said before we had been at sea a day. "I tink she will come to Bergen, by my husband and me. She can be trusted; I can tell in one firstest minute vat peoples is to be trusted. She is so polite always, but she passes ghentlemens without speaking, except she has business. I can tell."
Shrewd Katrina! Her husband has a sort of restaurant and billiard-room in Bergen,—a place not over-creditable, I fear, although keeping within the pale of respectability. It is a sore trial to Katrina, his doing this, especially the selling of liquor. She had several times refused her consent to his going into the business, "but dis time," she said, "he had it before I knowed anyting, don't you see? He didn't tell me. I always tink dere is de wifes and children, and maybe de mens don't take home no bread; and den to sit dere and drink, it is shame, don't you see? But if he don't do, some other mans would; so tere it is, don't you see? And tere is money in it, you see." Poor Katrina had tried in vain to shelter herself and appease her conscience by this old sophistry. Her pride and self-respect still so revolted at the trade that she would not go to the place to stay. "He not get me to go tere. He not want me, either. I would not work in such a place."
But she had no scruples about endeavoring to engage Anna as a waiter-girl for the place.
"She will be by my husband and me," she said, "and it is always shut every night at ten o'clock; and my husband is very strict man. He will have all right. She can have all her times after dat; and here she have only four dollars a mont, and my husband gives more tan dat. And I shall teach to her English; I gives her one hour every day. Dat is great for her, for she vill go to America next year. If she can English speak, she get twice the moneyin America. Oh, ven I go to America, I did not know de name of one ting; and every night I cry and cry; I tink I never learn; but dat Irish lady I live by, she vas so kind to me as my own mother. Oh, I like Irish peoples; the Irish and the Americans, dey are what I like best. I don't like de English; and Chermans, I don't like dem; dey vill take all out of your pocket. She is intended;[9]and dat is good. When one are intended one must be careful; and if he is one you love, ten you don't vant to do anyting else; and her sweetheart is a nice young fellow. He is in the engyne in a Hamburg boat. She has been speaking by me about him."
The dampskib "Jupiter" is a roller. It is a marvel how anything not a log can roll at such a rate. The stateroom berths being built across instead of lengthwise, the result is a perpetual tossing of headsversusfeet. As Katrina expressively put it, "It is first te head, and den te feets up. Dat is te worstest. Dat makes te difference."
Ill, helpless, almost as tight-wedged in as a knife-blade shut in its handle, I lay in my trough a day and a night. The swinging port-hole, through which I feebly looked, made a series of ever-changing vignettes of the bits of water, sky, land it showed: moss-crowned hillocks of stone; now and then a red roof, or a sloop scudding by. The shore of Norway is a kaleidoscope of land, rock, and water broken up. To call it shore at all seems half a misnomer. I have never heard of a census of the islands on the Norway coast, but it would be a matter of great interest to know if it needs the decimals of millions to reckon them. This would not be hard to be believed by one who has sailed two days and two nights in their labyrinths. They are a more distinctive feature in the beauty of Norway's seaward face than even her majestic mountain ranges. They have as much and as changing beauty of color as those, and, added to the subtle and exhaustless beauty of changing color, they have the still subtler charm of that mysterious combination of rest and restlessness, stillness and motion, solidity and evanescence, which is the dower of all islands, and most of all of the islands of outer seas. Even more than from the stern solemnity of their mountain-walled fjords must the Norwegians havedrawn their ancient inspirations, I imagine, from the wooing, baffling, luring, forbidding, locking and unlocking, and never-revealing vistas, channels, gates, and barriers of their islands. They are round and soft and mossy as hillocks of sphagnum in a green marsh. You may sink above your ankles in the moist, delicious verdure, which looks from the sea like a mere mantle lightly flung over the rock. Or they are bare and gray and unbroken, as if coated in mail of stone; and you might clutch in vain for so much as the help of a crevice or a shrub, if you were cast on their sides. Some lie level and low, with oases of vividest green in their hollows; these lift and loom in the noon or the twilight, with a mirage which the desert cannot outdo. Some rise up in precipices of sudden wall, countless Gibraltars, which no mortal power can scale, and only wild creatures with tireless wings can approach. They are lashed by foaming waves, and the echoes peal like laughter among them; the tide brings them all it has; the morning sun lights them up, top after top, like beacons of its way out to sea, and leaves them again at night, lingeringly, one by one; changing them often into the semblance of jewels by the last red rays of its sinking light. They seem, as you sail swiftly among them, to be sailing too, a flotilla of glittering kingdoms; your escort, your convoy; shifting to right, to left, in gorgeous parade of skilful display, as for a pageant. When you anchor, they too are of a sudden at rest; solid, substantial land again, wooing you to take possession. There are myriads of them still unknown, untrodden, and sure to remain so forever, no matter how long the world may last; as sure as if the old spells were true, and the gods had made them invincible by a charm, or lonely under an eternal curse. At the mouths of the great fjords they seem sometimes to have fallen back and into line, as if to do honor to whomever might come sailing in. They must have greatly helped the splendor of the processions of viking ships, a thousand years ago, in the days when a viking thought nothing of setting sail for the south or the east with six or seven hundred ships in his fleet. If their birch-trees were as plumy then as now, there was nothing finer than they in all that a viking adorned his ships with, not even the gilt dragons at the prow.
Before the close of the second day of our voyage, the six passengers in the ladies' cabin had reached the end of their journey and left the boat. By way of atonement for his first scheming to rob me of my stateroom, the captain now magnanimously offered to me the whole of the ladies' cabin, for which he had no further use. How gladly I accepted it! How gleefully I watched my broad bed being made on a sofa, lengthwise the rolling "Jupiter"! How pleased was Katrina, how cheery the beautiful stewardess!
"Good-night! Good-night! Sleep well! Sleep well!" they both said as they left me.
"Now it will be different; not te head and feets any more. De oder way is bestest," added Katrina, as she lurched out of the room.
How triumphantly I locked the door! How well I slept! All of which would be of no consequence here, except that it makes such a background for what followed. Out of a sleep sound as only the sleep of one worn out by seasickness can be, I was roused by a dash of water in my face. Too bewildered at first to understand what had happened, I sat up in bed quickly, and thereby brought my face considerably nearer the port-hole, directly above my pillow, just in time to receive another full dash of water in my very teeth; and water by no means clean, either, as I instantly perceived. The situation explained itself. The port-hole had not been shut tight; the decks were being washed. Swash, swash, it came, with frightful dexterity, aimed, it would seem, at that very port-hole, and nowhere else. I sprang up, seized the handle of the port-hole window, and tried to tighten it. In my ignorance and fright I turned it the wrong way; in poured the dirty water. There stood I, clapping the window to with all my might, but utterly unable either to fasten it or to hold it tight enough to keep out the water. Calling for help was useless, even if my voice could have been heard above the noise of the boat; the door of my cabin was locked. Swash, swash, in it came, more and more, and dirtier and dirtier; trickling down the back of the red velvet sofa, drenching my pillows and sheets, and spattering me. One of the few things one never ceases being astonished at in this world is the length a minute can seem when one isuncomfortable. It couldn't have been many minutes, but it seemed an hour, before I had succeeded in partially fastening that port-hole, unlocking that cabin door, and bringing Anna to the rescue. Before she arrived the dirty swashes had left the first port-hole and gone to the second, which, luckily, had been fastened tight, and all danger was over. But if I had been afloat and in danger of drowning, her sympathy could not have been greater. She came running, her feet bare,—very white they were, too, and rosy pink on the outside edges, like a baby's, I noticed,—and her gown but partly on. It was only half-past four, and she had been, no doubt, as sound asleep as I. With comic pantomime of distress, and repeated exclamations of "Poor lady, poor lady!" which phrase I already knew by heart, she gathered up the wet bed, made me another in a dry corner, and then vanished; and I heard her telling the tale of my disaster, in excited tones, to Katrina, who soon appeared with a look half sympathy, half amusement, on her face.
"Now, dat is great tings," she said, giving the innocent port-hole another hard twist at the handle. "I tink you vill be glad ven you comes to Christiania. Dey say it vill be tere at ten, but I tink it is only shtories."
It was not. Already we were well up in the smoothness and shelter of the beautiful Christiania Fjord,—a great bay, which is in the beginning like a sea looking southward into an ocean; then reaches up northward, counting its miles by scores, shooting its shining inlets to right and left, narrowing and yielding itself more and more to the embrace of the land, till, suddenly, headed off by a knot of hills, it turns around, and as if seeking the outer sea it has left behind runs due south for miles, making the peninsula of Nesodden. On this peninsula is the little town of Drobak, where thirty thousand pounds' worth of ice is stored every winter, to be sold in London as "Wenham Lake ice." This ice was in summer the water of countless little lakes. The region round about the Christiania Fjord is set full of them, lily-grown and fir-shaded. Once they freeze over, they are marked for their destiny; the snow is kept from them; if the surface be too much roughened it is planed; then it is lined off into great squares, cut out by an ice plough, pried up bywedges, loaded on carts, and carried to the ice-houses. There it is packed into solid bulk, with layers of sawdust between to prevent the blocks from freezing together again.
The fjord was so glassy smooth, as we sailed up, that even the "Jupiter" could not roll, but glided; and seemed to try to hush its jarring sounds, as if holding its breath, with sense of the shame it was to disturb such sunny silence. The shores on either hand were darkly wooded; here and there a country-seat on higher ground, with a gay flag floating out. No Norwegian house is complete without its flagstaff. On Sundays, on all holidays, on the birthdays of members of the family, and on all days when guests are expected at the house, the flag is run up. This pretty custom gives a festal air to all places, since one can never walk far without coming on a house that keeps either a birthday or a guest-day.
There seemed almost a mirage on the western shore of the bay. The captain, noticing this, called my attention to it, and said it was often to be seen on the Norway fjords, "but it was always on the head." In reply to my puzzled look, he went on to say, by way of making it perfectly clear, that "the mountains stood always on their heads;" that is, "their heads down to the heads of the other mountains." He then spoke of the strange looming of the water-line often seen in Holland, where he had travelled; but where, he said he never wished to go again, they were "such dirty people." This accusation brought against the Dutch was indeed startling. I exclaimed in surprise, saying that the world gave the Dutch credit for being the cleanliest of people. Yes, he said, they did scrub; it was to be admitted that they kept their houses clean; "but they do put the spitkin on the table when they eat."
"Spitkin," cried I. "What is that? You do not mean spittoon, surely?"
"Yes, yes, that is it; the spitkin in which to spit. It is high, like what we keep to put flowers in,—so high," holding his hand about twelve inches from the table; "made just like what we put for flowers; and they put it always on the table when they are eating. I have myself seen it. And they do eat and spit, and eat and spit,ugh!" And the captain shook himself with a great shudder, as well he might, at the recollection. "I do never wish to see Holland again."
I took the opportunity then to praise the Norwegian spitkin, which is a most ingenious device; and not only ingenious, but wholesome and cleanly. It is an open brass pan, some four inches in depth, filled with broken twigs of green juniper. These are put in fresh and clean every day,—an invention, no doubt, of poverty in the first place; for the Norwegian has been hard pressed for centuries, and has learned to set his fragrant juniper and fir boughs to all manner of uses unknown in other countries; for instance, spreading them down for outside door-mats, in country-houses,—another pretty and cleanly custom. But the juniper-filled spitkin is the triumph of them all, and he would be a benefactor who would introduce its civilization into all countries. The captain seemed pleased with my commendation, and said hesitatingly,—
"There is a tale, that. They do say,—excuse me," bowing apologetically,—"they do say that it is in America spitted everywhere; and that an American who was in Norway did see the spitkin on the stove, but did not know it was spitkin."
This part of the story I could most easily credit, having myself looked wonderingly for several days at the pretty little oval brass pan, filled with juniper twigs, standing on the hearth of the turret-like stove in my Bergen bedroom, and having finally come to the conclusion that the juniper twigs must be kept there for kindlings.
"So he did spit everywhere on the stove; it was all around spitted. And when the servant came in he said, 'Take away that thing with green stuff; I want to spit in that place.'"
The captain told this story with much hesitancy of manner and repeated "excuse me's;" but he was reassured by my hearty laughter, and my confession that my own ignorance of the proper use of the juniper spitkin had been quite equal to my countryman's.
Christiania looks well, as one approaches it by water; it is snugged in on the lower half of an amphitheatre of high wooded hills, which open as they recede, showingravines, and suggesting countless delightful ways up and out into the country. Many ships lie in the harbor; on either hand are wooded peninsulas and islands; and everywhere are to be seen light or bright-colored country-houses. The first expression of the city itself, as one enters it, is disappointingly modern, if one has his head full of Haralds and Olafs, and expects to see some traces of the old Osloe. The Christiania of to-day is new, as newness is reckoned in Norway, for it dates back only to the middle of the sixteenth century; but it is as characteristically Norwegian as if it were older,—a pleasanter place to stay in than Bergen, and a much better starting-point for Norway travel.