I estimate that I have seen twenty thousand people at once in the Tivoli, not a bad total for one resort in a town of only half a million inhabitants. And the twenty thousand were a pleasant sight to the foreign observer, not merely for the pervading beauty and grace cf the women, which was remarkable, but also for the evident fact that as a race the Danish know how to enjoy themselves with gaiety, dignity, and simplicity. Their demeanor was a lesson to Anglo-Saxons, who have yet to discover how to enjoy themselves freely without being either ridiculous or vulgar or brutish. The twenty thousand represented in chief the unassuming middle-class of Copenhagen.
There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats, “nuts,” rascals, obelisks, and mere artisans among the lot, but the solid bulk was the middle-class, getting value for its money in an agreeable and unexceptionable manner. The memory of those thousands wandering lightly clad in the cold Northern night, under domes and festoons and pillars of electric light, amid the altercations of conflicting orchestras, or dancing in vast, stuffy inclosures, or drinking and laughing and eating hors-d’ouvre under rustling trees, or submitting gracefully to Wagnerian overtures in a theater whose glazed aisles were two restaurants, or floating on icy lakes, or just beatifically sitting on al-fresco seats in couples—this memory remains important in the yachtsman’s experiences of the Baltic.
CHAPTER XII—ARISTOCRACY AND ART
THE harbor-master would not allow us to remain for more than three days in our original berth, which served us very well as a sort of grand stand for viewing the life of Copenhagen. His theory was that we were in the way of honest laboring folk, and that we ought to be up in the “sound,” on the northeastern edge of the city, where the yachts lie. We contested his theory, but we went, because it is unwise to quarrel with a bureaucracy of whose language you are ignorant.
The sound did not suit us. The anchorage was opposite a coaling station, and also opposite a shipbuilding yard, and from the west came a strong odor out of a manufactory of something unpleasant. We could have tolerated the dust, the noise, and the smell, but what we could not tolerate was the heavy rolling, for the north wind was blowing and the anchorage exposed to it. Indeed, the Royal Danish Yacht Club might have chosen more comfortable quarters for itself. We therefore unostentatiously weighed anchor again, and reëntered the town, and hid ourselves among many businesslike tugs in a little creek called the New Haven, whose extremity was conveniently close to the Café d’Angleterre. We hoped that the prowling harbor-master would not catch sight of us, and he did not.