Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm is not yet. He sleeps." And the good-natured little fellow darted off to call him. Poor Wilhelm had indeed overslept; but he appeared in a miraculously short time, got my breakfast together by bits, got the money from the clerk, and did his best to explain to me how it was that a given sum of money was at once more and less in marks than it was in kroner. I crammed it all into my pocket, and ran downstairs to find—no old lady; her "knapsack" on the driver's seat, but she herself not there. Four different people said something to me about it, and I could not understand one word they said; so I stepped into the carriage, sat down, and resigned myself to whatever was coming next. After about ten minutes she appeared, breathless, coming down the stairs of the hotel. She had mounted to my room, and, unmindful of the significant fact that the door was wide open and all my luggage gone, had been waiting there for me. This augured well for the journey! However, there was no time for misgivings; and we drove off at a tearing rate, late for the train. Suddenly I spied a most disreputable-looking parcel on the seat,—large, clumsy, done up in an old dirty calico curtain, from which a few brass rings were still hanging.

"What is that?" I exclaimed.

"Only my best gown, ma'am, and my velvet cloak. I couldn't disgrace you, ma'am."

"Disgrace me!" thought I. "I was never before disgraced by such a bundle."

"But I told you to bring nothing whatever to carry in your hands," I said; "you must put that into your knapsack. My roll and basket are all you can possibly lift."

"Oh, ma'am, it would ruin it to put it in the knapsack. I'm not a rich lady, like you, ma'am; it's all I've got: but I'd not like to disgrace you. I was out last night trying to hire a small trunk to bring; but you wouldn't believe it, ma'am, they wanted eight kroner down for the deposit for the value of it. But I'll not disgrace you, ma'am, and I'll forget nothing. I've a good head at counting. You'll see I'll not overlook anything."

"Never mind," I said; "you must wear your cloak [she had on only a little thin, clinging, black crape shawl,—the most pitiful of garments, and no more protection than a pocket-handkerchief against cold], and the dress must go into the knapsack at Lubeck. I will put it into my own roll as soon as we are in the cars."

At the station—luckily, as I thought—the ticket-seller spoke English, and replied readily to my inquiry for a ticket to Lubeck, by rail, "Yes, by Kiel." Then there came a man who wanted three kroner more because my trunk was heavy, and another who wanted a few pfennigs for having helped the first one lift it. I tried for a minute to count out the sum he had mentioned, and then I said, "Oh, good gracious, take it all!" emptying the few little coppers and tiny silver bits—which I knew must be, all told, not a quarter of a dollar—into his hand. He said something which, in my innocence, I supposed was thanks, but Brita told me afterwards that he was a "fearfully rough man, and what he said was to call me a 'damned German devil!' You see, ma'am, they all hate the Germans so, and hearing me speak English, he thought it was German. The French, too, ma'am,—they hate the Germans too. They say that Sara Bernhardt,—I dare say you've seen her, ma'am,—they say she nearly starved herself all in her travelling through Germany, because she wouldn't eat the German food."

At the train to see me off were two dear warm-hearted Danish women,—mother and daughter,—to whom I had brought a letter from friends in America. With barely time to thank them and say good-by, I and my old lady and her bundle and my own three parcels were all hustled into a carriage, the door slammed and locked, and we were off. Then I sank back and considered the situation. I had fancied that all that was necessary was to have a person who could speak,—that if I had but a tongue at my command, it would answer my purposes almost as well in another person's head as in my own. But I was fast learning my mistake. This good old woman, who had never been out of Denmark in her life, had no more idea which way to turn or what to do in a railway station than a baby. The first five minutes of our journey had shown that. She stood, bundles in hand, her bonnet falling off the back of her head, her crape shawl clinging limp to her figure; her face full of nervous uncertainty,—the very ideal of a bewildered old woman, such as one always sees at railway stations. The thought of being taken charge of, all the way from Copenhagen to Munich, by this type of elderly female, was, at the outset, awful; but very soon the comical side of it came over me so thoroughly that I began to think it would, on the whole, be more entertaining.

When she had told me the day before, as we were driving about in Copenhagen, that she had never in her life been out of Denmark, though she was sixty-four years old, I said, "Really that is a strange thing,—for you to be taking your first journey at that age."