IV
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.