“The dickens they do,” I blurted out, fortunately in English, with a vision of silk hats and regalia of which I had none. But my wife pulled my sleeve and saved the day. “Would he thank their royal highnesses very much; we should be glad to come,” was the way it went into Danish. Whereupon he bowed and went, leaving us staring helplessly at one another. I think we were both disposed to back out; but the children decided it otherwise. Of course we must go. Such an honor!
So we went. After all, it was simple enough. I just borrowed a top hat (that did not fit; I was glad to carry it in my hand in the presence of royalty, for it simply would not come down over my head; it was three sizes too small). The rest was easy. We drove out with the American Minister and his wife, who were invited too. It was for a long time after a disputed question in our family whether it was the cross of Dannebrog I wore on my breast, and therefore me, the sentinels saluted; or the American Minister. But he wore no cross. My wife insisted mischievously that it must be his carriage. Could she have seen herself, charming princes and princesses alike with her sweet and gracious ways, there would have been no mystery. Where she passed, everybody was made glad. They saluted from sheer desire to do it. And then, we were guests of royalty.
Charlottenlund lies in the forest just outside Copenhagen, on the beautiful Shore Road. It blew in from the water, and the ladies, on account of their hats, preferred to ride backwards. And so, chatting and laughing, we wheeled into the palace grounds before we knew we were halfway, and found ourselves heading a procession of royal carriages bent for the palace. They were easily known by their scarlet-coated drivers. We had barely time to change around, to get our wives properly seated, when the door of the carriage was yanked open and lackeys swarmed to help the ladies. In we went. Almost before we could draw breath a door was thrown wide, our names were announced, and the Crown Princess came forward with outstretched hand.
“It was very good of you to come out to us,” she said.
Our entrance had been so sudden, due to the hustle to make way for the princes following close upon us, and in thought and speech we had been so far away during the trip, that the Danish greeting left me for the moment dumb, groping my way four thousand miles across the sea. Slowly and laboriously, as it seemed to me, I found the tongue of my childhood again, but awkward beyond belief. This is what it said:
“How very respectable of you to ask us.”
The Crown Princess looked at me a moment, uncertain what to think, then caught the look in my wife’s face, and laughed outright. At which the Prince came up and heard the explanation, and we all laughed together. The next moment the room was filled with their children, and we were introduced right and left. It was all quite as neighborly and as informal as if we had been at home. Fine young people, all of them; finest of them all Prince Karl, who is now King Haakon of Norway. Handsome, frank, and full of fun and friendliness, he was both good to look at and to speak with; and in that he resembled his father. They all have the slender, youthful shape of the old King. But for his furrowed face and the tired look that often came into it in the last few years, no one would have thought him over fifty, though he was nearly ninety. The Crown Prince at sixty-one seemed barely forty.
My wife was taken in to dinner by a prince, a shy, boyish young fellow, whose great ambition, he confided to her, was to live in a New York sky-scraper and shoot up and down in the elevator, which was entirely contrary to her inclinations, and she told him so. I was not so lucky, but I shall always remember that evening with unalloyed pleasure for the hearty and unaffected hospitality of our hosts and of everybody. The Crown Prince talked of America and its people with warm appreciation, and of President Roosevelt as a chief prop of the world’s peace, at the very time when some people at home were yet shouting that he was a firebrand. He thought him a wonderful man, and we did not disagree. The thing that especially challenged his admiration was his capacity for work—for getting things done. That any one could get access to him in a nation of eighty millions, and get a hearing if he was entitled to one, seemed to him marvellous. He was interested in everything done for the toiler in our great cities, and heard with visible interest of the progress we were making in the search for the lost neighbor. The talk strayed to the unhappy conditions in Russia, the Jewish massacres, and the threatening unrest. My wife was expressing her horror at the things we read, and I began to feel that we were skating on very thin ice, seeing that the Czar was the Crown Prince’s nephew, when I heard him say to her, with great earnestness, “You may believe that if my sister had the influence many think, many a burden would be eased for that unhappy people.” And my heart swelled with gratitude; for Crown Prince Frederik’s sister, the Czar’s mother, was the sweet Princess Dagmar whom every Danish boy loved when I was one of them, unless he were the sworn knight of Alexandra, her beautiful sister.
After dinner we strayed through the garden that lies in the shelter of the deep beech forest, and when it was bedtime the boys, including my wife’s cavalier, came to kiss their father good-night. It was all as sweet a picture of family happiness as if it were our own White House at home, and it did us good to witness. I think our host saw it, for when we shook hands at the leave-taking he said: “You have seen now how happily and simply we live here, and I am glad you came. Now, take back with you my warm greeting to your great President, and tell him that we all of us admire him and trust him, and are glad of the prosperity of his people—your people.”
He had expressed a wish to my wife to read our story, and I sent to London for a copy of “The Making of an American,” which he fell to reading at once, according to his habit. They say in Denmark that he reads everything and never forgets anything, and has it all at his fingers’ end always. I had proof of that when we next met. It was in the Old Town at the reopening of the Domkirke. I was coming out of our hotel at seven in the morning, and in the Square ran plumb into a gentleman in a military cloak, who had a young man for company and a girl of fifteen or sixteen.