And on approaching Aarhus, we ran into a regatta, and the Velsa had less of the air of an aristocrat among the industrial classes than in such ports as Spotsbjerg and Faxo. Further, a reporter came to obtain a “story” about the strange Dutch yacht with the English ensign. It was almost equal to being anchored off the Battery, New York.
At Aarhus the pulse of the world was beating rather loud. In the windows of the booksellers’ shops were photographs of the director of the municipal theater surrounded by his troupe of stars. And he exactly resembled his important brethren in the West End of London. I myself was among the authors performed in the municipal theater, and I had a strange, comic sensation of being world-renowned. Crowds surged in the streets of Aarhus and in its cafés and tram-cars, and at least one of its taxicabs was driven by a woman. It had a really admirable hotel, the Royal, with first-class cooking, and a concert every night in its winter garden, where the ruling classes met for inexpensive amusement, and succeeded in amusing themselves with a dignity, a simplicity, and a politeness that could not possibly be achieved in any provincial town in England, were it five times the size of Aarhus. And why?
Withal, Aarhus, I have to confess, was not much of a place for elegance. Its women failed, and the appearance of the women is the true test of a civilization. So far in our Danish experience the women of Esbjerg stood unrivaled. The ladies of Aarhus, even the leading ladies gathered together in the Royal Hotel, lacked style and beauty. Many of them had had the sense to retain the national short sleeve against the ruling of fashion, but they did not arrive at any effect of individuality. They were neither one thing nor the other. Their faces showed kindness, efficiency, constancy, perhaps all the virtues; but they could not capture the stranger’s interest.
There was more style at Helsingôr (Elsinore), a town much smaller than Aarhus, but probably enlivened by naval and military influences, by its close proximity to Sweden, with train-ferry communication therewith, and by its connection with Hamlet and Shakspere. The night ferries keep the town unduly awake, but they energize it. Till a late hour the station and the quay are busy with dim figures of chattering youth in pale costumes, and the departure of the glittering train-laden ferry to a foreign country two miles off is a romantic spectacle. The churches of Helsingôr have an architectural interest, and its fruit shops display exotic fruits at high prices. Officers flit to and fro on bicycles. Generals get out of a closed cab at the railway station, and they bear a furled standard, and vanish importantly with it into the arcana of the station. The newspapers of many countries are for sale at the kiosk. The harbor-master is a great man, and a suave.
The pride of Helsingor is the Kronborg Castle, within sight of the town and most grandiosely overlooking sea and land. Feudal castles are often well placed, but one seldom sees a renaissance building of such heroic proportions in such a dramatically conceived situation. The castle is of course used chiefly as a barracks. On entering the enormous precincts, we saw through a window a private sitting on a chair on a table, in fatigue uniform, playing mildly a flageolet, and by his side on the table another private in fatigue uniform, with a boot in one hand, doing nothing whatever. And from these two figures, from the whitewashed bareness of the chamber, and from the flageolet, was exhaled all the monstrous melancholy of barrack-life, the same throughout the world. Part of the castle is set aside as a museum, wherein, under the direction of a guide, one is permitted to see a collection of pictures the surpassing ugliness of which nearly renders them interesting. The guide points through a window in the wall ten feet thick to a little plot of turf. “Where Hamlet walked.” No historical authority is offered to the visitor for this statement. The guide then leads one through a series of large rooms, empty save for an occasional arm-chair, to the true heart of the Kronborg, where he displayed to us a seated statue of Mr. Hall Caine, tinted an extreme unpleasant bluish-white. An inscription told that it had been presented to Kronborg by a committee of Englishmen a few years earlier to mark some anniversary. The guide said it was a statue of Shakspere. I could not believe him.
