CHAPTER VIII—BALTIC COMMUNITIES
AT Vordingborg, a small town at the extreme south of Sjaelland, the largest and easternmost of the Danish islands, we felt ourselves to be really for the first time in pure and simple Denmark (Esbjerg had a certain international quality). We had sailed through the Langelands Belt, skirting the monotonous agricultural coasts of all sorts of islands, great and small, until one evening we reached this city, which looked imposing on the map. When we had followed the skipper ashore on his marketing expedition, and trodden all the stony streets of little Vordingborg, we seemed to know what essential Denmark, dozing in the midst of the Baltic, truly was.
Except a huge and antique fort, there was no visible historical basis to this town. The main thoroughfare showed none of the dignity of tradition. It was a bourgeois thoroughfare, and comfortable bourgeoises were placidly shopping therein—the same little bourgeoises that one sees all over the world. A fairly large hotel; sundry tobacconists; a bookseller who also sold wall-papers; a sausage-shop, with a girl actuating an efficient sausage-slicing machine, and in the window an electric fan whirring close to a gigantic sausage. In the market, on a vague open space, a few carts, with their shafts on the ground; a few stalls; a few women; a butcher whipping off a hungry dog; three cheeses on a stand; baskets of fruit and vegetables on the Danish ground; our skipper chattering by signs and monosyllables in the middle. That was Vordingborg.
In the churchyard there were only two graves. The church had no more architectural interest than a modern church in a London suburb, though it was older. We went within. The numbers of the hymns at the last service were still forlornly stuck up on the indicator. The altar and screen were ingenuously decorated in the style of a high-class booth at a fair. Three women in huge disfiguring aprons were cleaning the interior. Their cloaks and a white umbrella lay on the stone floor. They never even glanced at us. We left the church, and then skirting market-gardens and climbing over the ramparts of the fort, we descended to the mournful little railway station, and as we watched a little train amble plaintively in and out of that terminus, we thought of the numbers of the hymns sung at the last service in the church, and the immense devastating ennui of provincial existence in remote places enveloped us like a dank fog. We set sail, and quitted Vordingborg forever, lest we might harden our hearts and be unjust to Vordingborg, which, after all, at bottom, must be very like a million other townlets on earth.
Compared with some of the ports we made, Vordingborg was a metropolis and a center of art. When we had threaded through the Ulfsund and the Stege Strand and the intricacies of the Rogestrommen, we found shelter in a village harbor of the name of Faxo. Faxo had nothing—nothing but a thousand trucks of marl, a girl looking out of a window, and a locked railway station. We walked inland into a forest, and encountered the railway track in the middle of the forest, and we walked back to Faxo, and it was the same Faxo, except that a splendid brig previously at anchor in the outer roads was slipping away in the twilight, and leaving us alone in Faxo.
At Spotsbjerg, on the north of the island of Sjælland, a small, untidy fishing village with a harbor as big as a swimming-bath, there was not even a visible church; we looked vainly for any church. But there was a telephone, and on the quay there was a young and pretty girl leaning motionless on her father’s, or her grandfather’s, tarpaulin shoulder. Full of the thought that she would one day be old and plain, we fled from Spotsbjerg, and traveled an incredible distance during the whole of a bright Sunday, in order to refresh our mundane instincts at the capital of the Jutland peninsula, Aarhus.