Part 28 (2/2)
You can imagine what a thrilling pleasure all this was to me. But it was marred by the keenest sense of shame of my country, that it should have been left for Denmark alone to keep a place in historical archives for a fair showing and true appreciation of the ”wards of the United States Government.”
I might fill another letter with accounts of the ”Collection of Northern Antiquities;” but don't be frightened: I won't, only to tell you that it is far the largest and most complete in Europe. And you may see there a specimen of everything that has been made, wrought, and worn in the way of stone, bronze, iron, or gold and silver, in the north countries, from the rude stone chisel with which the prehistoric man pried open his oyster and clam sh.e.l.ls at picnics on the sh.o.r.e, and went away and left his sh.e.l.ls and ”openers” in a careless pile behind him, so that we could dig them all up together some thousands of years later, down to the superb gold bracelets worn by the strong-armed women who queened it in Norway ten centuries ago. It is a great thing for us that those old fellows had such a way of flinging their ornaments into lakes as offerings to G.o.ds, and burying them by the wheelbarrow-full in graves. It wasn't a safe thing to do, even as long ago as that, however; for there are traces in many of these burial-mounds of their having been opened and robbed at some period far back. In one of the rooms of this museum are several huge oak coffins, with the mummied or half-petrified bodies lying in them, just as they were buried sixteen hundred years ago. The coffins were made of whole trunks of trees, hollowed out so as to make a sort of trough with a lid; and in this the body was laid, with all its usual garments on. There is an indescribable and uncanny fascination in the sight of one of these old mummies,--the eyeless sockets, the painful cheekbone, the tight-drawn forehead; they look so human and unhuman at once, so awfully dead and yet somehow so suggestive of having been alive, that it stimulates a far greater curiosity to know what they did and thought and felt, than it is possible to feel about neighbors to-day.
I never see half a dozen of these mummies together without wis.h.i.+ng they would sit up and take up the thread of their gossip where they left it off,--so different from the feeling one has about live gossips, and so utterly unreasonable too; for gossip is gossip all the same, and nothing but an abomination in any age, whether that of Pharaoh or Ulysses Grant. If I did not feel a dreadful misgiving that you had had enough museum already, and would be bored by more, I really would like to tell you about a few more of these things: a necklace, found in a peat bog by a poor devil who had begged leave to cut a bit of turf there to burn, and to be sure he found eleven beautiful gold things of one sort and another. The necklace is very heavy to lift. I asked permission to take it in my hands. I laid it around my neck, and it would have hurt to wear it ten minutes. It was a great snake coil of solid gold, the body half as big as my wrist! If Queen Thyra wore it, she must have been a giantess, or else have had a wadded ”chest protector” underneath her necklaces. She and her husband, King Gorm, were buried in two enormous mounds in Jutland, some fourteen hundred years ago. The mounds were so high that they nearly overtopped the little village church; and yet, at some time or other, robbers had burrowed into them, and carried off a lot of things, so that when the mounds were scientifically excavated, few relics were found. Stealing from that sort of grave seems to make the modern methods of body-s.n.a.t.c.hing quite insignificant. Even A. T.
Stewart's body would have been safe if it had been in a mound as high as the church steeple.
Now I must tell you a little more about Harriet. She leaves me to-morrow, and I shall grieve at parting with the garrulous old soul.
Niobe, I call her in my own mind; for she melts into tears at the least emotion. I am afraid n.o.body has ever been very good to her; for the smallest kindness touches her to the quick, and she cannot refrain from perpetually breaking out into expressions of fondness for me, and grat.i.tude, which are sometimes tiresome. The explanation of her good English is that her parents were English, though she was born in Copenhagen, has lived there all her life, and married a Dane when she was quite young. He was a tradesman, and they lived in comparative comfort, though, as she said, ”we never could lay up a penny, because we always sent the children to the best schools; and for ten children, ma'am, it does take a heap of schooling!”
Of the ten children, six are still living; and Harriet, at sixty-four, has thirty-six grandchildren. When she first came to me she looked ten years older than she does now. Good food, freedom from care, and her enjoyment of her journey have almost worked miracles on her face.
Every morning she has come out looking better than she did the night before. I see that she must have been a very handsome woman in her day,--delicate features, and a soft dark brown eye, with very great native refinement and gentleness of manner. Poor soul! her hardest days are before her, I fear; for the daughter with whom she lives, and for whom she works night and day, is the wife of that worthless fellow, our commissionnaire. He is a drunkard, and not much more than four fifths ”witted.” Harriet is pew-opener at the English church, and gets a little money from that; the clergyman is very kind to her, and she has the promise of a place at last in a sort of ”Old Lady's Home”
in Copenhagen. This is her outlook! I must send you the verses she presented to me yesterday. I had left her alone for the greater part of the forenoon, and she took to her pen for company. That was the way Katrina used to amuse herself when I left her alone. I always found her sitting with her elbows on the table, a pile of scribbled sheets in front of her, her hair pushed off her forehead, and a general expression of fine frenzy about her. Katrina's English did not compare with Harriet's at all; that is, it was not so good. I liked it far better. It was one perpetual fund of amus.e.m.e.nt to me; but I think Katrina had more nearly a vein of genius about her, and she was not sentimental; whereas Harriet is a sentimentalist of the first water,--no, of the ”seventy thousandth”!
PARIS, September 19.
I kept my letter and brought it here to tell you about Ole Bull's funeral, full accounts of which reached the H----'s just before we left Munich on the 9th. It was a splendid tribute to the dear old man; I shall always regret that I did not see it.
His home is on a beautiful island about sixteen miles from Bergen. If it were only possible to make you understand how much more the word _island_ means in Norway than anywhere else!
But it is not. To those of you who know the sort of mountain pasture in which great hillocks of moss and stone are thrown up, piled up, crowded in, in such labyrinths that you go leaping from one to the other, winding in and out in crevice-like paths, never knowing where moss leaves off and stone begins,--where you will strike firm footing, and where you will plunge your foot down suddenly into moss above your ankles; and to those of you who love the country and the spring in the country so well that you know just the look of a feathery young birch-tree on the first day of June, and of slender young spruce-trees all the year round, it is enough to say that if you take a dozen miles or so of such a pasture, and make the hillocks many feet high, and then set in here and there little hollows full of the birches, and a ravine or two full of the young spruces, and then launch your hillocks and birches and spruces straight out into deep blue sea, you'll have something such an island as there are thousands of on the Norway coast. Ole Bull's home was on such an island as this, and he had made it an ideally beautiful place. Eighteen miles of pathway he had made in the labyrinths of the island; had brought soil from the sh.o.r.e, and set gardens in hollows here and there. The house is a picturesque and delightful one; and in the great music-room, nearly a hundred feet long, there he lay dead, two days, in state like a king, with steamers full of sorrowing friends and mourning strangers coming to take their last look at his face. The king sent a letter of condolence to Mrs. Bull, and the peasants came weeping to the side of his bed; from highest to lowest, Norway mourned. On the day of the funeral, after some short services at the house, the body was carried on board a steamer, to be taken to Bergen. The steamer was draped with black and strewn with green. I believe I have told you of the beautiful custom the Norwegians have of strewing green juniper twigs in the street in front of their houses whenever they have lost a friend. No matter how far away the friend may have lived, when they hear of his death they strew the juniper around their house to show that a death has given them sorrow. It was a commentary on human life (and death!) that I never went out in Bergen without seeing in some street, and often in many, the juniper-strewn sidewalks. As the steamer with Ole Bull's body approached the entrance of Bergen harbor, sixteen steamers, all draped in black, with flags at half-mast, sailed out to meet it, turned, and fell into line on either side to convoy it to sh.o.r.e. Bands were playing his music all the way. At the wharf they were met by nearly all Bergen; and the body was borne in grand procession through the streets, which were strewn thick with juniper from the wharf to the cemetery, at least two or three miles. The houses were all draped with black, and many of the people had put on black. The golden wreath which was given him in San Francisco was borne in the procession by one of his friends, and a procession of little girls bore wreaths and bouquets of flowers. The grave was hidden and half filled with flowers; and last of all, after the body had been laid there,--last and most touching of all, came the peasants, crowds of them, gathering close, and each one flinging in a fern leaf or a juniper bough or a bunch of flowers. Every one had brought something, and the grave was nearly filled up with their offerings. It is worth while to be loved like that by a people. Whatever scientific critics may say of Ole Bull's playing, he played so that he swayed the hearts of the common people; and his own nation loved him and were proud of him, just as the Danes loved Hans Christian Andersen, with a love that asked no indors.e.m.e.nt and admitted no question from the outside world. The school of music to which Ole Bull belonged has pa.s.sed away; but what scientific art has gained the people have lost. It will never be seen that one of these modern violinists can make uneducated people smile and weep as he did. The flowers that are dying on his coffin are all immortelles. Such blossoms as these will never again be strewn by peasant hands in a player's grave.
It took two days to come from Munich to Paris,--two hard days, from seven in the morning till six at night. We broke the journey by sleeping at Strasburg, where we had just one hour to see the wonderful cathedral and its clock. The clock I didn't care so much about, though the trick of it is a marvel; but the twilight of the cathedral, lit up by its great roses of topaz and amethyst, I shall never forget as long as I live. In my next letter I will tell you about it. But now I have only time to copy Harriet's verses, and send off this letter. Here they are:--
DENMARK.
When again in your own bright land you are, And with all that dearly you love, And at times you look up at the Northern Star That stands on the sky above, Remember, then, that near forgot, Here, near the Gothic strand, There is on the globe a little spot,-- 'T is Denmark, a beautiful land.
Now at harvest time from there you flew, Like the birds from its tranquil sh.o.r.e; They return at springtime, kind and true: May, like them, you return once more!
Dear Mrs. Jakson, I remain your humble and thankful servant, HARRIET.
Poor thing! when she bade me good-by she began to shed tears, and I had to be almost stern with her to stop their flow. ”Tell your husband,” she said, ”that there's a little creature in Denmark that you've made very happy, that'll never forget you,” and she was gone.
In about ten minutes a tap at the door; there was Harriet again, with a big paper of grapes and a deprecating face. ”Excuse me, ma'am, but they were only one mark and a half a pound, and they 're much better than you'd get them in the hotel. Oh, I'll not lose my train, ma'am; I've plenty of time.” And with another kiss on my hand she ran out of the room. Faithful creature! I shall never see her again in this world, but I shall remember her with grat.i.tude as long as I live.
Surely nowhere except in Norway and Denmark could it have happened to a person to find in the sudden exigency of the moment two such devoted servants as Katrina and Harriet; and that they should have both been rhymers was a doubling up of coincidences truly droll.
Paris is as detestable as ever,--literally a howling and waste place!
Of all the yells and shrieks that ever made air discordant, surely the cries of Paris are the loudest and worst. My room looks on the street; and I should say that at least three different Indian tribes in distress and one in drunken hilarity were wailing and shouting under my windows all the time! As for the fiacre-men,--how like _fiasco_, _fiacre_ looks written!--they drive as if their souls' salvation depended on just grazing the wheel of every vehicle they pa.s.s. When two of them yell out at once, as they go by each other, it is enough to deafen one.
III.
Dear People,--I couldn't give you a better ill.u.s.tration of what happens to you in foreign countries when you pin your faith on people who are said to ”speak English here,” than by giving you the tale of how I went from Copenhagen to Lubeck. To begin with, I explained to the porter of the Konig von Denmark Hotel, who is one of the English-speaking _attaches_ of that very good hotel, that I wished, in going to Lubeck, to avoid water as much as possible. I endeavored to convey to him that my horror of it was in fact hydrophobic, and that I could go miles out of my way to escape it. He understood me perfectly, he said; and he explained to me a fine route by which I was to cross island after island by rail, have only short intervals of water between, and come comfortably to Lubeck by eight in the evening, provided I would leave Copenhagen at 6.45 in the morning, which I was only too happy to do for the sake of escaping a long steamboat journey. So I arranged everything to that end; explained to the one waiter who spoke English that I must have breakfast on the table at 5.40, as I was to leave the house at 6.15. He understood perfectly, he said. (I also commissioned him to buy a pound of grapes for my lunch-basket; the relevancy of this will appear later.) I then carefully explained to the worthy old lady who had promised for a small consideration to take me to Munich, that she must be on the spot at six, with her luggage; and that she was on no account to bring anything to lift in her hands, because my own hand-luggage would be all she could well handle. Then I asked for my bill, that it might be settled the night beforehand, to have nothing on hand in the morning but to get off. This was doubly important, as the landlord had promised to change my Danish money into German money for me,--the Danish bankers having no German money. They so hate Germany that they consider it a disgrace, I believe, even to handle marks and pfennigs.
The clerk, who also ”speaks English,” said he understood me perfectly; so I went upstairs cheerful and at ease in my mind. In half an hour my bill arrived; and I sent down by the waiter, who spoke ”a leetle”
English, five hundred Danish crowns to pay my bill, and have four hundred crowns returned to me in marks. Waited one hour, no money; rang, same waiter appeared.
”Where is my money?”
”Yees, it have gone out; it will soon return. He is not here.”
Waited half an hour longer; rang again.
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