But the quiet! and the candlelight and the soft northern midnight twilight in the fiord, and the ripple of the boat coming back with the milk are great things! to be remembered by themselves for ever and aye.
If our night at anchor at the entrance of the fiord was quiet and peaceful, Trömso on a Sunday felt even more so. We came in with a brisk breeze blowing sharp ripples on the sheltered strait or loch, and were thankful to be under shelter, for the same breeze off the hill-side, clothed with alder and heather, would be a different thing a hundred miles north by west.
Even our bears seem to be at rest. By the afternoon we have all got shaven and shorn, and into more townified clothes, in some cases to advantage, in others not so. The blue jacket with brass buttons of the styrmand gives him far more of an air than he had with his old weather-worn pea jacket. But De Gisbert is ruined. The old Gisbert, the bear-killer, and the new F. J. de Gisbert would hardly recognise each other. Polar Gisbert in a great thick, deep blue Iceland jersey, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with black beard with a wave in it, and black hair unbrushed and curling, a vermilion-and-white spotted handkerchief round his throat, loose corduroy knickers and wooden clogs like a Dutchman, was a picture of the jolly deep-sea piratical-looking Columbus we know. But this Gisbert! of Hamburg and Madrid, in a quiet blue serge suit, with trousers, and brown boots low at the heel, and a white collar sticking into a closely cropped black beard, and straight combed-out hair, and a straw hat! might be anyone!
C. A. H. does not change his get-up much, but when he goes home to hang his bearskins in the ancestral hall, he will have to do so. Sisters hate beards.
They, the Dons and Gisbert and Hamilton, have all gone up the hill to be entertained by a local magnate to-day. I was asked, and was there before, on our first visit, and it was quite charming—gramophone music, cigars with red and gold bands, delightful whiskies-and-sodas, and nice cosy rooms, with the windows all shut. But the cut on my left foot felt painful on putting on shore boots, and the house being uphill I felt obliged to deny myself the pleasure, and passed a very quiet afternoon on board. The engineer’s children came off to see me (and incidentally their father). The eldest was about twelve, I think, and they talked Norwegian to me, and opened their blue eyes wide and puckered their fair faces with wonder, when they found I could not understand their little words, however distinctly and slowly they said them. They insisted then on my playing the pipes to them again, and apparently were hugely pleased.
I was sometimes sorry for the engineer’s lot when we were at sea, in bad weather, for he is pale, rather like a gentle Louis Stevenson, and seemed to have little to interest him at sea beyond the engine, but now I do not pity him for his welcome home from such a beauty of a daughter, with such jolly blue eyes, so full of wonder and fun. The whole family looked over my pictures and were interested in ice-bears (Is bjorn) and ice-floes, but I think they were more fetched by a picture of the Fonix, done this morning, of the effect yesterday morning at three o’clock in the gale. I daresay they realised from it what sort of a life their poor dad leads sometimes—at sea.
By the way, it was not a dangerous gale, though tiresome and uncomfortable. But to show how differently things strike people, I heard that our two youngest Spaniards, who spent all night on the bridge, apparently as jolly as could be, chatting and laughing, believed all the time the ship would very likely go down—plucky of them, I think. And yet again, when we were in danger of being pinched between two ice-floes a few days previously, they were joyously potting skuas and gulls on the floe, without an idea of the danger, whilst the writer was hopping about like a hen on a hot girdle, with apprehension.
Hamilton will not look at this picture, it makes him simply squirm, which is rather flattering to the artist. Just now he says: “It is too beastly like.” I must show him it again, perhaps after many days—say in a London or Clydebank fog in November. Perhaps pleasure will then be what past pain was.