Some of the apartments of the stately royal palace are open to visitors. I viewed them yesterday. The rooms occupied by the late king were of special interest. The billiard hall is hung with beautiful tapestries—not orthodoxly made in Paris, but in Saint Petersburg at the manufactory established by Peter the Great in 1716. Some of the other rooms, however, contain tapestries of French workmanship. In Oscar’s study is his desk, as he left it, with his writing materials and the portraits of his family still upon it. The State apartments are tremendously elegant, with carvings and frescoes, brocades and paintings, tapestries and sculptures, gold and silver; but I have lived in many a California bungalow that I am sure was more pleasingly furnished and more artistic, as well as decidedly more comfortable. I tried to see the apartments of the dowager Queen Sophie, which I understood to be open to the public, but the guard at the door in the blue and gray uniform and the cocked hat of the period of Charles XII stood firmly at his post and emphatically repeated a word foreign to my Swedish vocabulary: “Stängt! Stängt!” The soldier’s determination not to let me pass was obvious, so I soon abandoned all plans to pry into Queen Sophie’s privacy, and went to the Museum of the North instead. “Stängt,” as I learned from my dictionary later, in Swedish means “closed.”
On the way to the Museum I stopped for a few minutes at an institute for the development of the Swedish manual arts. The object is to preserve the peasant knowledge of old-time weaving, needlework, and the like, and to create a demand for such work—an excellent purpose. I wish that you might have seen some of the woven pieces, Cynthia. They were beautiful, both in color and in composition. Some of the heavier ones reminded me of the finest work of the Navajo Indians. I am almost as charmed with the Scandinavian art weavings as I am with the Royal Copenhagen porcelain.
In contrast to the industrial institute, the Museum of the North deals with things distinctly past and gone. It is filled with Northern antiquities of all sorts, including a tremendous amount of royal “old clothes”—military uniforms, coronation robes, and the like. Among these relics are a pair of silk stockings embroidered in silver, which belonged to Gustav Adolf, and the embroidered collar and cuffs and the shirt—still blood-stained—worn by him on the battlefield of Lützen, where he met his death. The bay horse (I had always supposed that it was white) which the king rode at Lützen is also there, carefully stuffed and mounted, with the old saddle—the gift of Gustav’s queen—on his back. This horse, my museum guide-book informs me, was led in the king’s funeral procession, and died in 1639, seven years after his master. The remains of the faithful old steed were kept in the palace and were somewhat damaged by the great fire which destroyed the royal residence in 1697. That accounts for their present rather tattered and moth-eaten appearance. The collection of ancient armor and weapons is very complete, and includes a sword, shield, and helmet which belonged to Gustav Vasa, five centuries ago. In the armory are also long rows of coaches and sleighs richly decorated, which have borne Swedish royalty on journeys, ill-fated and otherwise.
And now I, too, must journey on. Mine will be a mere tourist pilgrimage, and will be in the present-day, happy Sweden, so I have pleasant anticipations. Again “Adjö! Adjö!”
CHAPTER VI
THE TWO UPPSALAS; GEFLE AND SÖDERHAMN
Söderhamn, Sweden,
August 25, 191—
Dear Cynthia:
From Stockholm I went to Uppsala, which is a short distance to the north—only an hour and a half by train; and Swedish trains are slow affairs. At Uppsala is a fine Gothic cathedral of red brick. It is the largest church in Sweden, and its high buttressed walls as well as its twin spires tower grandly above all of the other buildings of the town. Red brick, I know, does not sound beautiful, but it is—at Uppsala—especially when it comes after a whole gallery of mental pictures of gray stone churches. Like many other things in Sweden, the church was founded in the thirteenth century. But the present building is quite new; it was completed only about twenty years ago. Uppsala Cathedral, like Riddarholmen Church, contains the ashes of many of the greatest Swedes; but those buried at Uppsala were more truly great, in the best sense of the word, than most of the noted ones buried at Stockholm. Practically all made worthy contributions to the world.