Farther on we came upon another pillar bearing the Swedish arms, but this also was solitary and unguarded. We drove on and came to Haparanda. Of our own free-will we pulled up at the house of a custom’s officer to report. He was away. His wife heard the tale and shrugged her shoulder. “Oh, Englanders,” said she. “Go on.” It was the only piece of official formality we met with during all our journeying.
There was a hotel in Haparanda, and we went to it and dined à la Suède—that is, mostly off hors d’œuvres, and washed down the meal with some alleged Roederer, which was more than half liqueur. We felt that we were indeed getting into civilisation again, and as we were lucky enough to hear of a steamer leaving for Stockholm in a couple of days, we were prepared to slack about and enjoy ourselves in the interval.
As a first luxury we went and bathed. Moored off the shore were half a dozen little schooners with two large gaff-sails, and the foremast stepped right up in the bows, and no bowsprit. Their crews live aft in a little house, and employ themselves with bringing in cargoes of split birch-logs for fuel from the nearest forests. We swam off to these, and disported ourselves in the water after the manner of porpoises. And then we got into our clothes again, lit up mild, bad cigars, and strolled around without any cares about meal-getting, carrier-engaging, route-finding, or mosquito-slaying.
The town of Haparanda is rectangular in plan, and pretty when viewed from a distance. It is well be-telephoned, and possesses two banks and an ugly church. The town of Torneo, the only piece of Russian territory west of the Torneo River, is reached by foot-passengers over an unpainted wooden bridge, which straddles across the mouth of the lagoon like some monstrous gray-legged centipede. The lagoon divides them, as the Danube does Buda and Pesth.
Torneo, as a town, is less neat. It is liberally planted with gardens containing little creeper-covered arbours, in which it is the height of the Finn’s ambition to sit and smoke, and gloat over the fact that other people are fools enough to work. There is a pretty Lutheran church in black and white outside Torneo, with a tall, slender spire, and away from the church is a quaint bell-tower, also in magpie colours. An enclosure of stone hedges them both in, and inside the enclosure is a coppice of mountain ashes shadowing the graves. The Russian church in Torneo is set at a street corner in the middle of the town. It is an ornate little building in white and two tints of brown, with an elaborate cupola and coloured windows. It was suggestive of a kiosk in an exhibition where one might reasonably expect to buy somebody or other’s cocoa from comely young damsels in uniform.
There is a hospital in Torneo, which held two curious patients. One was a Lapp, the only one in the district. He had come down to Matarangi, which is fifty miles farther up the Torneo River, to sell his deer at the annual fair. He was outside Russian territory there and drink was plentiful, and in that commodity he made heavy investments. During his subsequent adventures he broke both thighs, nobody seemed to know how, and his friends brought him down to hospital, and left him there to return to their eternal deer-herding.
The other patient was a Tartar, and he also was in the accident ward. He was by no means an uncommon person to find so far out of his native latitude. Swarthy Tartar tramps, in face almost as dark as a mulatto, permeate the country as beggars and horsedealers. They wear European clothes, and are generally accompanied by their women and children. Very often they have been born in Finland. They are thieves and vagabonds, the horses they sell are poor, and they occupy much the same position as the gipsy did a hundred years ago at home. They are hedge-bottom nomads, and the Wanderlust is too strong in them ever to let them settle for long. It is on record that at times they have taken farms and tried to sit down and breed horses; but it is not on record that they have ever succeeded in staying three years in one place. They are quite without shame, morals, or common honesty; their most valued roof is a farmer’s outhouse; their one ambition in life is to keep just beyond starvation. Even the Finns despise them, just as the Swedes despise the Finns.
The Northern Swede is a cheerful, bourgeois creature, all belly and laugh, who browses on odds and ends of victual, and nips caloric punch all the day long; and for the short time we were with him in Haparanda, he amused us. But then we were not with him for long. The educated Swede of Stockholm is a very different person: he is a gentleman, and one of the most delightful gentlemen in Europe.
I think we left Haparanda without any keen regret. We drove a couple of miles past reedy lagoons to Salmis, the port, and there got on board a coaster, which was waiting. She was going to take us down the waters of the Bothnia to Stockholm, the capital of Gustavus Adolphus, of Bernadotte, of Oscar II., the Venice of the North; and afterwards we would get back to England, which of all countries on this terrestrial globe is the most desirable.
