Part 23 (2/2)

Then I told her about Balder and his death, and asked her if she had never seen the country people put a boat on the top of their bonfire on St. John's Eve.

”Yes, I did see dat, once, in Stavanger,” she replied, ”but it was old boat; no use any more. I tink dat be to save wood. It are cheapest wood dey have, old boat. Dat were not to give to any G.o.d.”

”No, you are mistaken, Katrina,” I said. ”They have done that for hundreds of years in Norway. It is to remind them of Balder's great s.h.i.+p, the Hringhorn, and to commemorate his death.”

”May be,” she said curtly, ”but I don't tink. I only see dat once; and all my life I see de fires, all round Bergen, and everywhere, and dere was no boat on dem. I don't tink.”

We drove into the city through one of the smaller fruit markets, where, late as it was, the old women still lingered with their baskets of cherries, pears, and currants. They were not losing time, for they were all knitting, fast as their fingers could fly; such a thing as a Norwegian wasting time is not to be seen, I verily believe, from the North Cape to the Skager Rack, and one would think that they knit stockings enough for the whole continent of Europe; old men, old women, little girls, and even little boys, all knitting, knitting, morning, noon, and night, by roadsides, on door-sills, in market-places; wherever they sit down, or stand, to rest, they knit.

As our carriage stopped, down went the stockings, b.a.l.l.s rolling, yarn tangling, on the sidewalk, and up jumped the old women, all crowding round me, smiling, each holding out a specimen of her fruit for me to taste. ”Eat, lady, eat. It is good.” ”Eat and you will buy.” ”No such cherries as these in Christiania.” ”Taste of my plums.” A chorus of imploring voices and rattling hail of _sks_. Hurried and confused talk in the Norwegian tongue as spoken by uneducated people is a bewildering racket; it hardly sounds like human voices. If the smiles did not redeem it, it would be something insupportable; but the smiles do redeem it, transfigure it, lift it up to the level of superior harmonies. Such graciousness of eye and of smiling lips triumphs over all possible discord of sound, even over the Norwegian battery of consonants.

Katrina fired back to them all. I fear she reproved them; for they subsided suddenly into silence, and left the outstretched withered palms holding the fruit to speak for themselves.

”I only tell dem you cannot buy all de market out. You can say vat you like,” she said.

Pears and cherries, and plums too, because the old plum-woman looked poorer than the rest, I bought; and as we drove away the chorus followed us again with good wishes. ”Dey are like crazy old vomans,”

remarked Katrina; ”I never heard such noise of old vomans to once time before.” A few minutes after we reached the house she disappeared suddenly, and presently returned with a little cantaloupe melon in her hands. Standing before me, with a curious and hesitating look on her face, she said, ”Is dis vat you like?”

”Oh, yes,” I exclaimed, grateful for the sight. ”I was longing for one yesterday. Where did you get it?”

”I not get it. I borrow it for you to see. I tell the man I bring it back,” she replied, still with the same curious expressions of doubt flitting over her queer little face.

”Why, whose melon is it?” I exclaimed. ”What did you bring it for if it were not for sale?”

”Oh, it is for selled, if you like to buy,” she said, still with the hesitant expression.

”Of course I like to buy it,” I said impatiently. ”How much does it cost?”

”Dat is it,” replied Katrina, sententiously. ”It is too dear to buy, I tell the man; but he said I should bring it to you, to see. I tink you vill not buy it;” still with the quizzical look on her face.

Quite out of patience, I cried, ”But why don't you tell me the price of it? I should like it very much. It can't be so very dear.”

”Dat it can,” answered Katrina, chuckling, at last letting out her suppressed laugh. ”He ask six kroner for dat ting; and I tink you not buy it at such price, so I bring to make you laugh.”

One dollar and sixty-two cents for a tiny cantaloupe! Katrina had her reward. ”Oh, but I am dat glad ven I make you laugh,” she said roguishly, picking up her melon, as I cried out with surprise and amus.e.m.e.nt,--

”I should think not. I never heard of such a price for a melon.”

”So I tink,” said Katrina. ”I ask de man who buy dem melons, and he say plenty peoples; but I tink it is all shtories.” And she ran downstairs laughing so that I heard her, all the way, two flights down to the door.

High up on the dark wooded mountain wall which lies to the north and northwest of Christiania is a spot of light color. In the early morning it is vivid green; sometimes at sunset it catches a tint of gold; but neither at morn nor at night can it ever be overlooked. It is a perpetual lure to the eye, and stimulus to the imagination. What eyry is it that has cleared for itself this loop-hole in the solid mountain-forest? Is it a clearing, or only a bit of varied wooding of a contrasting color to the rest? For several days I looked at it before I asked; and I had grown so impressed by its mystery and charm, that when I found it was a house, the summer home of a rich Christiania family, and one of the places always shown to travellers, I felt more than half-way minded not to go near it,--to keep it still nothing more than a far-away, changing, luring oasis of sunny gold or wistful green on the mountain-side. Had it been called by any other name, my instinct to leave it unknown might have triumphed; but the words ”Frogner Saeter” were almost as great a lure to the imagination as the green oasis itself. The saeter, high up on some mountain-side, is the fulfilling of the Norwegian out-door life, the key-note of the Norwegian summer. The gentle kine know it as well as their mistresses who go thither with them. Three months in the upper air, in the spicy and fragrant woods,--no matter if it be solitary and if the work be hard, the saeter life must be the best the Norwegians know,--must elevate and develop them, and strengthen them for their long, sunless winters. I had looked up from the Vossevangen Valley, from Ringeriket, and from the Hardanger country to many such gleaming points of lighter green, tossed up as it were on the billowy forests. They were beyond the reach of any methods of ascent at my command; unwillingly I had accepted again and again the wisdom of the farm people, who said ”the road up to the saeter was too hard for those who were not used to it.”

Reluctantly I had put the saeter out of my hopes, as a thing to be known only by imagination and other people's descriptions. Therefore the name of the Frogner Saeter was a lure not to be resisted; a saeter to which one might drive in a comfortable carriage over a good road could not be the ideal saeter of the wild country life, but still it was called ”saeter;” we would go, and we would take a day for the going and coming.

”Dat will be bestest,” said Katrina. ”I tink you like dat high place better as Christiania.”

On the way we called at the office of a h.o.m.oeopathic physician, whose name had been given to me by a Bergen friend. He spoke no English, and for the first time Katrina's failed. I saw at once that she did not convey my meanings to him, nor his to me, with accuracy.

She was out of her depth. Her mortification was droll; it reached the climax when it came to the word ”dynamic.” Poor little child! How should she have known that!

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