Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

I then said, "And of very rare beauty, also. I have never seen a more beautiful face."

"Yes," he replied; "there is something very not common about her. Her face is quite antic." "Antique," he meant, but for the first few seconds I could not imagine what it was he had intended. He also, then, had recognized, as this phrase shows, the truly classic quality of the girl's beauty; and he is the only witness I am able to bring to prove that my description of her face and figure and look and bearing are not an ingenious fable wrought out of nothing.

From Katrina, also, there came testimonies to Anna's rare quality.

"I have been in long speech with Anna," she said before we had been at sea a day. "I tink she will come to Bergen, by my husband and me. She can be trusted; I can tell in one firstest minute vat peoples is to be trusted. She is so polite always, but she passes ghentlemens without speaking, except she has business. I can tell."

Shrewd Katrina! Her husband has a sort of restaurant and billiard-room in Bergen,—a place not over-creditable, I fear, although keeping within the pale of respectability. It is a sore trial to Katrina, his doing this, especially the selling of liquor. She had several times refused her consent to his going into the business, "but dis time," she said, "he had it before I knowed anyting, don't you see? He didn't tell me. I always tink dere is de wifes and children, and maybe de mens don't take home no bread; and den to sit dere and drink, it is shame, don't you see? But if he don't do, some other mans would; so tere it is, don't you see? And tere is money in it, you see." Poor Katrina had tried in vain to shelter herself and appease her conscience by this old sophistry. Her pride and self-respect still so revolted at the trade that she would not go to the place to stay. "He not get me to go tere. He not want me, either. I would not work in such a place."

But she had no scruples about endeavoring to engage Anna as a waiter-girl for the place.

"She will be by my husband and me," she said, "and it is always shut every night at ten o'clock; and my husband is very strict man. He will have all right. She can have all her times after dat; and here she have only four dollars a mont, and my husband gives more tan dat. And I shall teach to her English; I gives her one hour every day. Dat is great for her, for she vill go to America next year. If she can English speak, she get twice the money in America. Oh, ven I go to America, I did not know de name of one ting; and every night I cry and cry; I tink I never learn; but dat Irish lady I live by, she vas so kind to me as my own mother. Oh, I like Irish peoples; the Irish and the Americans, dey are what I like best. I don't like de English; and Chermans, I don't like dem; dey vill take all out of your pocket. She is intended;[9] and dat is good. When one are intended one must be careful; and if he is one you love, ten you don't vant to do anyting else; and her sweetheart is a nice young fellow. He is in the engyne in a Hamburg boat. She has been speaking by me about him."

The dampskib "Jupiter" is a roller. It is a marvel how anything not a log can roll at such a rate. The stateroom berths being built across instead of lengthwise, the result is a perpetual tossing of heads versus feet. As Katrina expressively put it, "It is first te head, and den te feets up. Dat is te worstest. Dat makes te difference."

Ill, helpless, almost as tight-wedged in as a knife-blade shut in its handle, I lay in my trough a day and a night. The swinging port-hole, through which I feebly looked, made a series of ever-changing vignettes of the bits of water, sky, land it showed: moss-crowned hillocks of stone; now and then a red roof, or a sloop scudding by. The shore of Norway is a kaleidoscope of land, rock, and water broken up. To call it shore at all seems half a misnomer. I have never heard of a census of the islands on the Norway coast, but it would be a matter of great interest to know if it needs the decimals of millions to reckon them. This would not be hard to be believed by one who has sailed two days and two nights in their labyrinths. They are a more distinctive feature in the beauty of Norway's seaward face than even her majestic mountain ranges. They have as much and as changing beauty of color as those, and, added to the subtle and exhaustless beauty of changing color, they have the still subtler charm of that mysterious combination of rest and restlessness, stillness and motion, solidity and evanescence, which is the dower of all islands, and most of all of the islands of outer seas. Even more than from the stern solemnity of their mountain-walled fjords must the Norwegians have drawn their ancient inspirations, I imagine, from the wooing, baffling, luring, forbidding, locking and unlocking, and never-revealing vistas, channels, gates, and barriers of their islands. They are round and soft and mossy as hillocks of sphagnum in a green marsh. You may sink above your ankles in the moist, delicious verdure, which looks from the sea like a mere mantle lightly flung over the rock. Or they are bare and gray and unbroken, as if coated in mail of stone; and you might clutch in vain for so much as the help of a crevice or a shrub, if you were cast on their sides. Some lie level and low, with oases of vividest green in their hollows; these lift and loom in the noon or the twilight, with a mirage which the desert cannot outdo. Some rise up in precipices of sudden wall, countless Gibraltars, which no mortal power can scale, and only wild creatures with tireless wings can approach. They are lashed by foaming waves, and the echoes peal like laughter among them; the tide brings them all it has; the morning sun lights them up, top after top, like beacons of its way out to sea, and leaves them again at night, lingeringly, one by one; changing them often into the semblance of jewels by the last red rays of its sinking light. They seem, as you sail swiftly among them, to be sailing too, a flotilla of glittering kingdoms; your escort, your convoy; shifting to right, to left, in gorgeous parade of skilful display, as for a pageant. When you anchor, they too are of a sudden at rest; solid, substantial land again, wooing you to take possession. There are myriads of them still unknown, untrodden, and sure to remain so forever, no matter how long the world may last; as sure as if the old spells were true, and the gods had made them invincible by a charm, or lonely under an eternal curse. At the mouths of the great fjords they seem sometimes to have fallen back and into line, as if to do honor to whomever might come sailing in. They must have greatly helped the splendor of the processions of viking ships, a thousand years ago, in the days when a viking thought nothing of setting sail for the south or the east with six or seven hundred ships in his fleet. If their birch-trees were as plumy then as now, there was nothing finer than they in all that a viking adorned his ships with, not even the gilt dragons at the prow.

Before the close of the second day of our voyage, the six passengers in the ladies' cabin had reached the end of their journey and left the boat. By way of atonement for his first scheming to rob me of my stateroom, the captain now magnanimously offered to me the whole of the ladies' cabin, for which he had no further use. How gladly I accepted it! How gleefully I watched my broad bed being made on a sofa, lengthwise the rolling "Jupiter"! How pleased was Katrina, how cheery the beautiful stewardess!