A very happy likeness it was, and the old woman was amazed to see herself for the first time in all a long life on paper. But she was not altogether pleased. On some occasion during her days she had broken a leg, which (according to the primitive method of the country) had been set with a reef in it. When she walked this gave her a prodigious limp. When she stood at rest upon both feet, it naturally skewed her shoulders well out of the horizontal. The sketch faithfully reproduced this trait, and the old lady objected in her top key. She wanted to be drawn straight as she would like to be, and not with rugged face and halting body, as the accident of years and weather had happened to make her. She was very like her sisters in more favoured climes, this middle-aged dame of Lapland.
But she did not stay arguing long. Work could not stop. She left us in the dairy and went away to the kitchen, and the whirr of a spinning-wheel told us what was her employment.
Hayter’s pencil, however, was not permitted to rest. Johann had evidently exploited its powers, and presently he came in half-dragging, half-leading, a younger, more comely girl, and whom he explained he was sweet on himself. He backed her up against the wall, arranged her hands and her head-kerchief, and explained that he would like a portrait of her executed in the best style for his own personal use and convenience. Her name he said was Margrete, and he mentioned that she was famed for her skill in milking cows in the summer and making clothes during the long nights of winter. The gay matsoreo which he was at that moment wearing himself was the outcome of her clever knife and needle.
In view of the forty-nine mile tramp ahead, Johann had annexed a bundle of the fine, dried grass they use here in the shoes, and whilst the sketch of his sweetheart was progressing—by the way she was only one of his many loves—he dumped himself down acrobat-fashion on the floor and took off his foot-gear, and arranged the packing of grass therein with vast deliberateness and care. A small, solemn child, all bumpy about the head from bites, came in, stark-naked, from the other room, and stayed to stare. A couple of dogs—stout, gray, wire-coated fellows, like the dogs of the Eskimo—added themselves unobtrusively to the audience.
A lover of trimness in the female ankle should not go to Lapland to find his models, as the trouser, strapped on to the boot-top, is fatal to any idea of symmetry. And in fact female personal beauty of any sort is not there brought to any high stage of cultivation. The faces of the women always verge towards plain, and their figures can only be described as dumpy. But if the features of these Lappish women are homely and perhaps rugged, at any rate they are invariably pleasant in expression, and such a thing as a peevish face cannot be found from one side of the country to the other. They wriggle along through life on the lean edge of starvation. They have everlastingly to confront the struggle for the next meal, and the meal after that, and this constant strain marks the forehead and wrinkles the cheek; but at least they are free from those more branding worries of larger communities, which whiten the cheek and draw lines from the mouths of the women we know so well at home.
A cuckoo clock in the great, busy kitchen hooted half hourly. In this land of the midnight sun and of midday night one cannot tell the time by the heavens as the countryman does in England and lower Europe. A timepiece of sorts is a primitive necessity, and many are the varieties which find a use. In the larger coast towns, like Vardö, the watchmakers drive a roaring trade, and dozens of watches with curious tooled brass cases dangle from the rods in the windows. Up-country almost every hut sports its clock—some investment from a winter’s marketing trip in the tiny, boat-like, reindeer sledges at Abö or Sodankyla, or even far Helsingfors.
An ordinary solid clock does not take the Laplander’s eye. He likes something flimsy, and if possible novel. At one place, hung on a peg driven into the logs of the wall, we were condemned to gaze hourly upon the exasperating device of a dentifrice advertisement, wherein a smiling young female drew a tooth-brush briskly across a beautiful set of cardboard teeth between every tick. I was half frantic with bites at that halt I remember, and deadly tired, and much wishful for sleep and forgetfulness. But neither would come. Hour after hour I was condemned to remain awake, and stare at the tooth-brush clock, and read the legend (printed in my native tongue) that it was made in Germany, and that the dentifrice was put up into neat packets, priced sixpence, or one shilling, which could be obtained from any chemist with the least presumption to call himself respectable. I argued at the time that the clock had evidently drifted far from the land where the ingenious advertiser destined it, seeing that the letterpress was English, and the Laplanders do not use tooth-powder even if they could have read about its existence. And I savagely hoped that the man who sent it out had gone bankrupt as a penalty for annoying me. But at this peaceful distance of time and space I am inclined to call back that wish. And besides, I could not injure him (by conspicuously refusing to buy his wares) even if I wished, as the name of the ingenious dentrifice has completely passed away from me.
Fortune took it into her fickle head to smile on us at this halt. We got no less than two new carriers, and rare fellows they proved to be. They agreed after about an hour’s palaver to take our packs upon their shoulders, and once more we started down the lake. The whole population were either on the beach, or came there to see us off. The eight ladies who were employed in the dissection of more fish, left off that employment for the moment, and stood up, and took of their head-kerchiefs and waved them diligently. And Margrete came down, and stood where the shingle was wet, and kissed her hand. Johann saw, and so moved was he that he must needs stand up on the top of the pile of packs to wave back, thereby very nearly upsetting the canoe and all of us. We got hold of his bandy legs and pulled him down, and he lay on the wet floor-boards with his head undermost, bawling with laughter, and thinking it the best joke in all the world.