CHAPTER XXXVII
We find little difference here in Trömso since we left for the cold North. Then it was sunny but very cold, now all the snow has melted away from the hills and they are green with belts of dark alders that run up the corries from their reflections in the calm fiord. The rough main street of wooden houses presents the same series of little wooden doll houses, some made of upright planks, some of horizontal, in subdued harmonies of weathered pale green, blue, and worn slate, which would be a little sad but for the summer dresses of women and children, bright splashes of colour—scarlets and pale blues, vivid but harmonious, only a little noticeable on account of the uniformity of the black and dark blue clothes of all the men.
Is it coming back from the Arctic, where there are no people, or is it the atmosphere of Trömso that makes the character of each individual seem so distinct? You could sketch any of the figures, men or women, in the brightly painted street of doll houses, and the drawing would be recognised by anyone in Trömso.
Everyone seems to be at least on a bowing acquaintance with every second person he meets. Opposite this Grand (wooden) Hotel I see two of our men in dark suits and bowlers, each has a little tobacco in his cheek. I know this because I saw them put it in almost on the sly; each doffs his bowler as some acquaintance comes up. Larsen has barely time for one whiff of his cigarette between the sedate bows which they make to passers-by. Who could believe that a few days ago he was in old blue dungarees and sea-boots, hauling with us hand over hand on a narwhal line—and Larsen—it is difficult to realise that a week or two ago we saw him skeltering over a floe, a long, dark figure against the ice, blazing black powder cartridges and splashing bullets at three yards’ range into the ice in front of a three-year-old polar bear’s nose, to turn it. It strikes me that the way these fair-haired men stand, and move their heads, and their type of face, is rather like the men of Berwickshire or Selkirkshire. You could hardly tell a Selkirk man here from a native, but the average man of Trömso is perhaps smaller and thinner.
The women here are not so well grown and good-looking as those in Trondhjem. Half the men are teetotallers, at least in public. I saw rather a remarkable sight here at the table d’hôte, six men at table in a row, “travellers,” I think, each with a large burgundy or claret glass full of new milk beside his plate—very different in habits and the appearance we associate with their deep-drinking Viking forefathers. It really does look as if with milk drinking we may yet have peace to be amongst all men.
We go down the coast between the islands in sunshine—little cloudlets round the greystone peaks in the blue sky. This day is the Glorious 12th, and we are far from home—and we are more than content, to be comfortably on shipboard, glad to leave the northern ice regions, and yet we know that in six months’ time we will long to return. We watch the hills go past in luxurious repose from the luggage-covered decks—lovely hill-faces, wooded elk ground below, and higher up, slopes, with scrub and heather, just the place for dal ryper, the counterpart of our grouse, bar the white flight feathers, and above, the heather-grey rocks and stones, where you find the Norwegian ptarmigan; a glorious country, and so like our own.
No wonder in the ancient days our forefathers exchanged visits from these fiords to our Highland lochs and islands, and from old Alba to Lochlin, as described in the tales of the Ossianic times—friendly visits for feastings and marriages, and more often on bloody forays.