Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

We left Moss by a short cut, not overland exactly, but next door to it,—through land. The first thing we knew we were sailing through a bridge right into the town, in a narrow canal,—we could have thrown an apple into the windows of some of the houses as we glided by; then in a few moments out we were again into the broad open fjord.

At six o'clock we went down to our first Danish supper. The "Balder" is a Danish boat, and sailed by a Danish captain, and conducted on Danish methods; and they pleased us greatly. The ordinary Norwegian supper is a mongrel meal of nobody knows how many kinds of sausage, raw ham, raw smoked salmon, sardines, and all varieties of cheese. The Danish we found much better, having the addition of hot fish, and cutlets, and the delicious Danish butter. One good result of Denmark's lying low, she gets splendid pasturage for her cows, and makes a delicious butter, which brings the highest prices in the English and other markets.

When we came up from supper we found ourselves in a vast open sea; dim shores to be seen in the east and west,—in the east pink and gray, in the west dark with woods. The setting sun was sinking behind them, and its yellow light etched every tree-top on the clear sky. Here and there a sail gleamed in the sun, or stood out white in the farther horizon. A pink halo slowly spread around the whole outer circumference of the water; and while we were looking at this, all of a sudden we were not in an open sea at all, but in among islands again, and slowly coming to a stop between two stretches of lovely shore,—big solid green fields like America's on one side, and a low promontory of mossy rocks on the other. A handful of houses, with one large and conspicuous one in the centre, stood between the green fields and the shore. A sign was printed on this house in big letters; and as I was trying to spell it out, a polite Norwegian at my elbow said, "Shoddy factory! We make shoddy there; we call it so after the English," bowing flatteringly as if it were a compliment to the English. Kradsuld is Norwegian for shoddy, and sounds worlds more respectable, I am sure.

The roof of this shoddy factory had four dormer windows in it, with their tiled roofs running up full width to the ridge-pole, which gave the roof the drollest expression of being laid in box-plaits. I wish somebody would make a series of photographs of roofs in Norway and Denmark. They are the most picturesque part of the scenery; and as for their "sky-line," it is the very poetry of etching. I thought I had seen the perfection of the beauty of irregularity in the sky-line in Edinburgh; but Edinburgh roofs are monotonous and straight in comparison with the huddling of corners and angles in Scandinavian gables and ridges and chimneys and attics. Add to this freaky and fantastic and shifting shape the beauty of color and of fine regularity of small curves in the red tile, and you have got as it were a mid-air world of beauty by itself. As I was studying out the points where these box-plaited dormer windows set into their roof, the same polite Norwegian voice said to a friend by his side, "I have read it over twenty-five ones." He pronounced the word read as for the present indicative, which made his adverbs of time at the end still droller. Really one of the great pleasures of foreign travel is the English one hears spoken; and it is a pleasure for which we no doubt render a full equivalent in turn when we try speaking in any tongue except our own. But it is hard to conceive of any intelligible English French or German being so droll as German or French English can be and yet be perfectly intelligible. Polite creatures that they all are, never to smile when we speak their language!

As the sun sank, the rosy horizon-halo gathered itself up and floated about in pink fleeces; the sky turned pale green, like the sky before dawn. Latitude plays strange pranks with sunsets and sunrises. Norway, I think, must be the only place in the world where you could mistake one for the other; but it is literally true that in Norway it would be very easy to do so if you happened not to know which end of the day it was.

When we went down into our staterooms sorrow awaited us. To the eye the staterooms had been most alluring. One and all, we had exclaimed that never had we seen so fine staterooms in a Norwegian steamboat. All the time we were undressing we eyed with complacency the two fine red sofas, on one of which we were to sleep. Strangely enough, no one of us observed the shape of the sofa, or thought to try the consistency of it. Our experiences, therefore, were nearly simultaneous, and unanimous to a degree, as we discovered afterwards on comparing notes. The first thing we did on lying down on our bed was to roll off it. Then we got up and on again, and tried to get farther back on it. As it was only about the width of a good-sized pocket-handkerchief, and rounded up in the middle, this proved to be impossible. Then we got up and tried to pull it out from the wall. Vain! It was upholstered to the board as immovable as the stack-pipe of the boat. Then we tried once more to adjust ourselves to it. Presently we discovered that it was not only narrow and rounding, but harder than it would have seemed possible that anything in shape of tufted upholstered velvet could be. We began to ache in spots; the ache spread: we ached all over; we could neither toss, twist, nor turn on the summit of this narrow tumulus. Misery set in; indignation and restlessness followed; seasickness, in addition, seemed for once a trifle. The most indefatigable member of the party, being also the most fatigued, succeeded at last in procuring a half-dozen small square pillows,—one shade less hard than the sofa, she thought when she first lay down on them, but long before morning she began to wonder whether they were not even harder. Such a night lingers long in one's memory; it was a closing chapter to our experience of Norwegian beds,—a fitting climax, if anything so small could be properly called a climax. How it has ever come about that the Norwegian notion of a bed should be so restricted, I am at a loss to imagine. They are simply child's cribs,—no more; as short as narrow, and in many instances so narrow that it is impossible to turn over quickly in them without danger. I have again and again been suddenly waked, finding myself just going over the edge. The making of them is as queer as the size. A sort of bulkhead small mattress is slipped in under the head, lifting it up at an angle admirably suited to an asthmatic patient who can't breathe lying down, or to a small boy who likes to coast down-hill in his bed of a morning. The single pillow is placed on this; the short, narrow sheet flung loosely over it; blanket, ditto; coverlet, ditto—it may or may not be straight or smooth. The whole expression of the bed is as if it had been just hastily smoothed up temporarily till there should be time enough to make it. In perfect good faith I sent for a chambermaid one night, in the early days of my Norway journey, and made signs to her that I would like to have my bed made, when the poor thing had already made it to the very best of her ability, and entirely in keeping with the customs of her country.

It is very needless to say that we all were up early the next morning; and there was something ludicrous enough in the tone in which each inquired eagerly of each, "Did you ever know such beds?" At ten we were anchored off the little town of Frederikssund; and here the boat lay five mortal hours, doing nothing but unloading and taking on bags of bran.

Another big steamer was lying alongside, doing the same thing. This was our first glimpse of Denmark. Very flat it looked,—just out of water, and no more,—like Holland. The sailors who were carrying the bags of bran wore queer pointed hoods on their heads, with long, tail-like pieces coming down behind, which made them look like elves,—at least it did for the first hour; after that they no longer looked queer. If we had gone on shore, we could have seen the Royal Estate of Iaegerspriis, which has belonged to kings of Denmark ever since the year 1300, and has a fine park, and a house decorated by sculptures by Wiedewelt,—a Danish sculptor of the last century,—and an old sepulchre which dates back to the stone age, and, best of all, a great old oak, called the King's Oak, which is the largest in Denmark, and dates back farther than anybody will know till it dies. A tree is the only living thing which can keep the secret of its own age, is it not? Nobody can tell within a hundred or two of years anything about it so long as the tree can hold its head up. The circumference of this tree is said to be forty-two feet four feet from the ground,—a pretty respectable tree, considering the size of Denmark itself. Now we begin to see where the old Vikings got the oak to build their ships. They carried it up from Denmark, which must have been in those days a great forest of beech and oak to have kept so many till now. It is only a few miles from Frederikssund, also, to Havelse, which is celebrated for its "kitchen middings,"—the archæological name for kitchen refuse which got buried up hundreds of years ago. Even potato parings become highly important if you keep them long enough! They will at least establish the fact that somebody ate potatoes at that date; and all things hang together so in this queer world that there is no telling how much any one fact may prove or disprove. For myself, I don't care so much for what they ate in those days as for what they wore,—next to what they did in the way of fighting and making love. I saw the other day, in Christiania, a whole trayful of things which were taken from a burial mound opened in Norway last spring. A Viking had been buried there in his ship. The hull was entire, and I have stood in it; but not even the old blackened hull, nor the oars, stirred me so much as the ornaments he and his horses had worn,—the bosses of the shields, and queer little carved bits of iron and silver which had held the harnesses together; one exquisitely wrought horse's head, only about two inches long, which must have been a beautiful ornament wherever it was placed. If there had been a fish-bone found left from his last dinner or from the funeral feast which the relations had at his wake, I should not have cared half so much for it. But tastes differ.

An afternoon more of sailing and another awful night on the red velvet ridges, and we came to Copenhagen itself, at five of the morning. At four we had thought it must be near,—long strips of green shore, with trees and houses,—so flat that it looked narrow, and seemed to unroll like a ribbon as we sailed by; but when we slipped into the harbor we saw the difference,—wharves and crowds of masts and warehouses, just like any other city, and the same tiresome farce of making believe examine your luggage. I should respect customs and custom-houses more if they did as they say they will do. As it is, to smuggle seems to me the easiest thing in the world as well as the most alluring. I have never smuggled because I have never had the means necessary to do it; but I could have smuggled thousands of dollars worth of goods, if I had had them, through every custom-house I have ever seen. A commissionnaire with a shining beaver hat stood on the shore to meet us, we having been passed on with "recommendations" from the kindly people of the Scandinavie in Christiania to the King of Denmark Hotel people in Copenhagen. Nothing is so comfortable in travelling as to be waited for by your landlord. The difference between arriving unlooked for and arriving as an expected customer is about like the difference between arriving at the house of a friend and arriving at that of an enemy. The commissionaire had that pathetic air of having seen better days which is so universal in his class. One would think that the last vocation in the world which a "decayed" gentleman would choose would be that of showing other gentlemen their way about cities; it is only to be explained by the same morbid liking to be tantalized which makes hungry beggars stand by the hour with their noses against the outside of the panes of a pastry-cook's window,—which they all do, if they can! Spite of our flaming "recommendations," which had preceded us from our last employer, the landlord of the Scandinavie, satisfactory rooms were not awaiting us. Sara Bernhardt was in town, and every hotel was crowded with people who had come for a night or two to see and hear her. It is wonderful how much room a person of her sort can take up in a city; and if they add, as she does, the aroma of a distinct and avowed disreputability, they take up twice as much room! Since her visit to England I wonder she does not add to her open avowal of disregard of all the laws and moralities which decent people hold in esteem, "By permission of the Queen," or "To the Royal Family."

But this is not telling you about Copenhagen. It was five o'clock when we landed, and before seven I had driven with the commissionnaire to each one of the four first-class hotels in Copenhagen in search of sunny rooms. None to be had! All four of the hotels were fully occupied, as I said, by Sara Bernhardt in some shape or other. So we made the best of the best we could do,—breakfasted, slept, lunched, and at two o'clock were ready to begin to see Copenhagen. At first we were disappointed, as in Christiania, by its modern look. It is a dreadful pity that old cities will burn down and be rebuilt, and that all cities must have such a monotony of repetitions of blocks of houses. By the end of another century there won't be an old city left anywhere in the world. There are acres of blocks of houses in Copenhagen to-day that might have been built anywhere else, and fit in anywhere else just as well as here. When you look at them a little more closely, you see that there are bits of terra-cotta work in friezes and pilasters and brackets here and there, which would not have been done anywhere except in the home of Thorwaldsen. If he had done nothing else for art than to stamp a refined and graceful expression on all the minor architectural decorations of his native city, that would have been worth while. There is not an architectural monstrosity in the city,—not one; and many of the buildings have an excellent tone of quiet, conventional decoration which is pleasing to the eye. The brick-work particularly is well done; and simple variations of design are effectively used. You see often recurring over doorways and windows terra-cotta reproductions of some of Thorwaldsen's popular figures; and they are never marred by anything fantastic or bizarre in cornice or moulding above or around them. Among the most noticeable of the modern blocks are some built for the dwellings of poor people. They are in short streets leading to the Reservoir, and having therefore a good sweep of air through them. They are but two stories and a half high, pale yellow brick, neatly finished; and each house has a tiny dooryard filled with flowers. There are three tenements to a house, each having three rooms. The expression of these rows of gay little yellow houses with red roofs and flower-filled dooryards and windows, and each doorway bearing its two or three signs of trade or artisanry, was enough to do one's heart good. The rents are low, bringing the tenements within easy reach of poor people's purses. Yet there is evidently an obligation—a certain sort of social standard—involved in the neighborhood which will keep it always from squalor or untidiness. I doubt if anybody would dare to live in those rows and not have flowers in his front yard and windows. For myself, I would far rather live in one of these little houses than in either of the four great palaces which make the Royal Square, Amalienborg, and look as much like great penitentiaries as like anything else,—high, bulky, unadorned gray piles, flat and straight walls, and tiresome, dingy windows, and the pavements up to their door-sills. They may be splendid the other side the walls,—probably are; but they are dreary objects to look at as you come home of an evening. The horse-cars are the most unique thing in the modern parts of Copenhagen. How two horses can draw them I don't see: but they do; and if two horses can draw two-story horse-cars, why don't we have them in America, and save such overcrowding? The horse-cars here not only have a double row of seats on top as they have in London, but they have a roof over those seats, which nearly doubles the apparent height. As they come towards you they look like a great square-cornered boat, with a long pilot-house on top. Of course they carry just double the number. Women never ride on the top; but men do not mind going upstairs outside a horse-car and sitting in mid-air above the heads of the crowd; and if two horses really are able to draw so many, it is a gain.