But C. G. has a surprise for me—for me who have never been in this part of the world before—have never even seen Imatra. We shall be at a station called St. Andrea soon, he tells me, and then I shall see something which will interest me. What? I am to wait; it shall burst upon my sight.
It does. It bursts upon my sight in all the calm beauty of its wide, white, gleaming, rippling majesty—the Voksa. At this distant spot, dedicated to the first Englishman probably who ever set foot in Finland, St. Henry,[1] my delighted English eyes catch their first glimpse of the ideal river—a river any Englishman would love at first sight. And what a spot for the fisherman! As I live, there is one at it down there. I can see him from the train whipping merrily at the rapids beneath the railway bridge! Instantly all the apathy of the long, slow journey is swallowed up in the enthusiasm of the angler; I feel inclined to wave my cap from the window and cry, like Xenophon's men, "Thalatta, thalatta!" Happy Bishop Henry, friend of Eric IX. of Sweden, who, about 1120, an Englishman, though Bishop of Upsala, brought Bible and sword and conquered and converted this pleasant land for his master, and became patron saint thereof. St. Andrea is delightfully situated indeed. I wonder whether our canonised countryman who gave his name to it was ever here? St. Andrea sounds and reads more like St. Andrew than St. Henry, but I may explain that Henrys are always Andrews in Russia, just as William is changed to Basil, Edward to Dmitry, Bernard to Boris, and so on, because where names do not exist in the Saints' calendar, substitutes have had to be found. In the case of Henry, the Finns appear to have followed the example of their neighbours, and to have changed Henry into Andrea. St. Andrew himself is connected with Russia, but in no way, I believe, with Finland. This saint is said to have travelled, preaching the Gospel, from the Holy Land to Byzantium, and thence along the Black Sea to the Danube, crossing that river and reaching eventually the Dnieper. Here he went up country as far as the spot where Kief was afterwards built, and in this place, before turning to retrace his steps to Byzantium, he uttered a long prophecy as to the size and importance of the city which should one day stand in that site, and which should be dedicated to the faith which he had then come to preach. So much for the Saints Andrew and Henry, either of whom may claim, as far as names go, the honour of affording one to the remote Finnish village close to which the beautiful Voksa is first seen by the tourist.
Thence to Imatra is not far, and from Imatra to Varpa-Saari is a short drive of three miles or so, past the renowned "falls," about which I shall have more to say later. My friend and I accomplish this distance luxuriously in a spring cart, the commissariat following in a second vehicle. The roads in Finland are not like the roads in Russia. The Finnish roads are civilised, and may be driven upon without fatal results.
It was past eleven now, of a glorious July night, and in the white northern twilight, which is nearly daylight, we cantered up to the riverside and drew up at the spot where a landing stage has been made, communicating by means of an overhead wire over the Voksa with the island in mid-stream. The house is upon the island, and from the wire, at the island end, depends a bell. A tug at our end sets this bell clanging and a dog barking, destroying the calm majesty of the night in an instant, and causing dogs in all directions, far and near, to respond to the canine voice from mid-river in sleepy, querulous accents, as though barking were a terrible bore, but must be done out of conscientious motives. While we wait for the boat which is to take us across we hear ourselves hailed in English from some point hidden in the midnight mystery of the river, and when our eyes have located the sound we discover two boats swimming silently side by side, looking all one piece with the water, mystic, wonderful! It is J. H. and E. H., who have driven over from their lovely summer home a few miles below Imatra for a night's fishing in the Varpa waters. Slowly the two boats approach—it seems a sin to murder the marvel of the stillness by speaking—like two swans they swim towards us in the white twilight. Are we awake, and is all this really happening, or are these the creatures of a sleep-picture, and the witchery of the midnight Voksa a mere dream of unreal delight? The winding of two reels and C. G.'s hearty enquiry as to "what sport" has been enjoyed by these two midnight fishers put to flight all ideas of the unreality of things, and in a very few minutes we are each seated in a boat and crossing the gleaming, rippling, hurrying Voksa towards the little island which is to be our home for the next three days. As we reach the landing-stage at the island we find a sleepy Finn fisherman just preparing a boat, in response to our bell-summons, to take us across; but our friends have saved him this trouble. They land us, and away they float again, the two light craft moving noiselessly over the broad river propelled by the fisherman-Finn in the bows, and in the dim and mysterious distance we can hear the soft crake, crake of their reels as the lines are let out once more after having been wound in in compliment to ourselves. Before we are out of hearing there is a whirr, and we know that the phantom of one of them has found a billet.
Then up through leafy paths to the house, with only the murmur of water audible, but that from every side; with here a gleam and there a gleam between the trees, and everything else silence and shady darkness and mystery, and one's very soul feeling half numbed with the wonder of being in such a place and at such a time.
As for the house, it is the ideal of what a fishing lodge should be, with its racks for rods outside and in; its glorious roomy balcony dining-room, its large central sitting-room and its half-dozen or more of most excellent bedrooms, each commanding a more fascinating view over trees and river than its next neighbour, and each with the perpetual sing-song of the gentle mother Voksa to sing the tired angler to sleep with her eternal lullaby.
And now, as C. G. most appropriately observes, a little supper. The night and the place and the circumstances are about as full of poetry as such things can be; my very soul seems steeped in mysticism, and the witchery of the surroundings has made a poet of me to my very backbone; but—well, they did not give us time to eat at Wiborg, nor at St. Andrea, nor anywhere else, and the very word "supper" is sufficient to send poetry to the winds and to convert the poet into the ravening wolf until the leeway of the appetite has been made up. Luckily there is plenty to eat and it is ready to hand. Julia, the Finn cook, a neat, clean-looking person who cannot speak or understand a single word of Russian or anything else but Finnish—Julia has baked some quite delicious bread; and there is Finnish butter—none of your "Dosset" this!—and C. G.'s baskets contain town-bought dainties of the very best: it is pleasant to sit and enjoy such a supper with the white gleam of the midnight Voksa visible to us wherever we choose to peep for it between the ghostly trees that would screen it from us; and with the soft babble of her waters for ever in our ears, as though they were constantly telling of the wonders in trout and silver grayling that lurk and hide from us in the secret depths beneath; as though each wavelet had such a secret to tell us and were murmuring to us as it passed, "Down below—just here—oh, such a trout! oh, such a trout! Quick, or he will be off and away!"
There can be no question of sleeping this night. We must fix up our rods and choose our phantom minnows, and go out in boats that are phantoms also, like those ghostly fellows, J. and E. H., there, who can be seen occasionally passing slowly across the white water in the distance, silent, mysterious, intent upon their spinning, two phantoms, in phantom boats and with phantom boatmen, fishing with phantom minnows, rightly so-called—all phantoms together! What matter if we catch anything or nothing? We must go, if it be only to steep our souls in the wonderful silence and beauty of this July night on the water, and to drink in the intoxicating delight and novelty of the whole thing.
And in an hour we are there, floating on Voksa's white bosom, propelled softly hither and thither as our boatmen think best; for these men know where the huge silver Voksa and Saima trout most do congregate, and the charm and wonder of the river and of the night are nothing to them so long as some big ten or fifteen pounder can be induced to accept the invitation our cruel blue minnows hold out to them. These superb fish are, so far as I can make out, of three kinds. First, great silvery fellows with bright red spots, for all the world like overgrown brothers of the little river trout. Then there are darker coloured fish, of a golden brown hue, with spots less brightly accentuated, and, I think, larger heads. Of these two kinds the former is the handsomer fish, but both are splendid specimens, and are caught up to twenty-four pounds in weight, C. G. having taken the record in this respect. The third specimen I saw was a fish which I should have called a salmon, but, I believe, erroneously. The Finns have a simple rule. To them all fish over five pounds in weight are "Lochi," salmon (German, Lachs; Russian, Lososino). Now there are plenty of salmon in the Neva, and therefore in Lake Ladoga also; and the reader might suppose that, since the Voksa flows into the Ladoga, there may be salmon in the Voksa just as well as in Ladoga itself. So there may, in the lower parts of the river, but between Ladoga and Saima Lakes there is a barrier, known as the Imatra Falls, which must surely be an insurmountable obstacle to the most enterprising of salmon. The Voksa is a broad, generous, full-flowing river, of three hundred yards in width, which is suddenly compelled at Imatra to compress itself into a narrow gorge of scarcely twenty yards across, and to pass through this as best it can for a distance of a couple of hundred yards or so, after which it is free once more to open itself out to its former wealth of elbow-room. The reader may imagine with how much protest and clamour the surprised and tortured waters of the proud river perform this sudden act of self-compression. Roaring and hissing with rage, they pile themselves mountain high in an instant, and sweep down the moderate incline in a furious phalanx of angry wave-warriors, dashing from one rocky side of the gorge to the other, diving, rearing, whirling, plunging, hurling angry hisses of spray to this side and that, and at the foot of the narrow torture-chamber standing up in mighty water-columns and twisting round to face the rock-walls that have confined them, as though they half thought of turning again and rending them ere they depart once more upon their course in unimpeded freedom and gradually regained calm and majesty. The very idea of any salmon mounting in safety such a whirling, battling, irresistible fury of waters as Imatra is surely outrageous. There cannot be salmon above Imatra. The salmon-like lochi must be a salmon trout, or a lake trout, or some one of the non-seagoing families of Salmonidæ.
Full as the Voksa is of fish, and hard as my friend C. G. and I worked, both from the platforms with fly and from boat with phantoms of every shape and size likely to attract the monsters down in the depths beneath us, it was all in vain—or nearly in vain. We did, indeed, catch a few fish, but nothing very large, and hardly more than enough to keep us well supplied with toothsome, dainty fare for our own table. We offered those fish the choicest delicacies that London makers could produce; we tempted them with phantoms so fascinating that one would suppose any fish of decently discriminative powers would rise from its moist bed and come out, at night, to feed upon them as they lay on the table within the very house. We dangled these tempting morsels over the very spots where they were known to lie; but for two days did these Voksa monsters sulk and turn their faces steadfastly from us. There was thunder in the air; that, we concluded, was the mischief; perhaps during Sunday the storm would break. We would try them again on Monday, and meanwhile we would accept J. H.'s hospitable invitation and drive over to spend Sunday with him at his lovely home at Lappin-Haru (the Ridge, or the District, of the Lapps). Those Lapps who chose this spot for their habitation showed a wise discrimination and a taste for natural beauty of scene and site which one would scarcely look for in that unromantic tribe. Lappin-Haru overlooks the Voksa at one of its loveliest bends; a truly noble river, flowing through dense forests and by the side of tidy, cultivated fields; deep and majestic and silent at this corner, and bursting into rippling laughter at that; a river that bears up the swimmer as buoyantly and as securely as the sea, so strong and so full and ample is the beautiful, bright, clear flood of it. My friend J. H.—the representative in St. Petersburg of a family as well known and as widely respected in Russia as it is in England—has built him a house in this corner of the Voksa Paradise, and a splendid house it is. And though in the very wilds of Finland, yet he is in communication with all centres of civilisation by means of the telephone; indeed, you can even speak to him from the island club at Varpa-Saari, a dozen miles away; while the Imatra trains stop for passengers within a mile of his front door. So quickly do the enlightened Finns avail themselves of the discoveries of science that the southern portion of their province is covered with a network of telephones, and no one in town or country dreams of being without this useful adjunct to civilised comfort.