Читать книгу The Charm of Scandinavia - Sydney Clark - Страница 4

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In which Phillips descants on his route to Scandinavia from Berlin; on the gastronomic delights of a Swedish railway restaurant; on the lavish comfort and economy as well as the safety of travel in Sweden; on the quiet charms of the scenery in southern Sweden, as well as on the well-earned social position and independence of the Swedish farmer.

Stockholm, January 1.

My dear Judicia,

You have brought this upon yourself, you know, for it was your proposition that Aylmer and I should try to make you feel the charm of Scandinavia as we have felt it. But do not suppose that we are going to enter upon a contest of wits in order to make our respective countries shine upon the written page, or that we are going to indulge in high-flown descriptions. We shall try to tell you of things as we see them; of the peasant in his low-thatched roof, who is as interesting as the king in his palace. We may not even think it beneath our dignity to tell you of the Smörgåsbörd, and of the different kinds of cheese of many colors which grace the breakfast table, for all these different, homely, commonplace things enter into the spell of Scandinavia.

As you know, we started on this long northern journey at Berlin. This trip has been robbed of all its terrors, since keen competition has compelled the railway and steamboat companies to exchange the little Dampfschiff, little bigger than tugboats, which used to connect Germany with Scandinavia, for great ferry steamers, which take within their capacious maws whole railway trains, so that now we can go to sleep in Berlin, in a very comfortable sofwagn, and wake up the next morning on Swedish soil, with no consciousness of the fact that in the middle of the night we had a four hours’ voyage across a bit of blue sea which is often as stormy as the broad Atlantic itself.

You remember that I wrote you about a former journey across this same bit of water during an equinoctial gale, how our boat was tossed about like a cork, how the port was stove in, and I was washed out of my bunk. Well, last night I was reminded of that former journey by contrast, for I never knew when we were trundled aboard ship at Sassnitz, or when we were trundled on to dry land again at Trelleborg. I was sorry to cross the island of Rügen in the night, for this bit of wind-swept, sea-washed land will always be associated for us with “Elizabeth” and her adventures, though to be sure her German garden was not on Rügen, but on the mainland near by.

However, if I did not know when we passed from Germany to Sweden, it was very evident that we were in a different country when the window curtain was raised in the morning, and the porter informed me deferentially, in his musical Swedish voice, that “caffe and Smörbröd” would be served in the compartment if I wished. Everything is different here. This little four hours’ voyage in the middle of the night seems to have put a wide ocean between the experiences of to-day and yesterday. The brick houses are exchanged for wooden ones. The pine trees which abound in the sandy wastes north of Berlin have been exchanged for graceful white birches, sprinkled with spruce and fir. Instead of the gutturals of the south we hear the open, flowing vowels of the north. Even the signs with which the railway stations are so abundantly plastered that one has difficulty in finding their names, are different from those in Germany, and our attention is called to wholly different brands of beer, whisky, and margarine.

One thing you will rejoice in, I am sure, Judicia, and that is, that I am assured by every responsible authority that railway accidents are almost unknown in Sweden, or at least that the risk is quite infinitesimal. It is said that even in America, which has such an evil reputation for railway smashups, you can travel by rail on the average a distance one hundred and fifty-six times around the world without getting a scratch. I wonder how many thousands of times one would have to travel twenty-five thousand miles in Sweden before the train would run off the track or bump into another train. One would think that the railway accident insurance companies in Sweden would get very little business.

I concluded not to accept the porter’s kind invitation to “caffe and Smörbröd,” for I wanted to indulge at the first opportunity in a genuine Swedish railway restaurant. Think of anticipating with pleasure a railway restaurant breakfast in America or England!

I waited for breakfast until we reached Alfvesta, well on toward noon, and then made the most of the twenty-five minutes generously allowed for refreshments. “Can this be a railway restaurant?” a stranger would say to himself. Here is a bountifully filled table covered with all sorts of viands, fish, flesh, and fowl, and good red herring besides. And around this tempting table a number of gentlemen, hats and overcoats laid aside, are wandering nonchalantly, as though they had the whole day at their disposal; picking up here a ball of golden butter and there a delicate morsel of cheese; from another dish a sardine, or a slice of tongue or cold roast beef, or possibly some appetizing salad. If you would do in Sweden as the Swedes do and not declare your foreign extraction, you, too, will wander around this table in a most careless and casual way, and, when you have heaped your plate with the fat of the land, and spread a piece of crisp rye flatbread thick with fresh and fragrant butter, when you have poured out a cup of delicious coffee reduced to exactly the right shade of amber by abundant cream, then you take your spoil to a side table near by and try to feel as much at leisure in eating it as your Swedish fellow passengers appear to be.

But this is only the beginning. This is just to whet the appetite for what is to come. I counted twenty-seven different dishes on the Smörgåsbörd table from which one might choose; or one might take something from each of the twenty-seven if he so desired. Then comes the real meal: fish and potatoes, meat and vegetables of several different kinds, salad, puddings, and cheese—and to all of these viands you help yourself. No officious waiter hovers over you, impatient for your order and eager to snatch away your plate before the last mouthful is finished, an eagerness only equaled by his rapacious desire for the expected tip. No, the only official in the room is the modest young lady who sits at a table in the far corner, and who seems to take no notice of your coming and going. If you get up a dozen times to help yourself from either end of the table; if you pour out half a dozen cups of coffee, or indulge in a quart of milk from the capacious pitchers, it seems to be no concern of hers. Her only duty is to sit behind the table and take your money when you get through, and a very small amount she takes at that.

If you have “put a knife to your throat,” and have contented yourself with coffee and cakes, the charge will be fifty öre, or thirteen and a half cents. If you have helped yourself, however liberally, only from the cold dishes, the Smörgåsbörd, the charge will be seventy-five öre, or twenty cents, while even the most extravagant meal, where everything hot and cold is sampled, would be but two kronor, or a trifle over fifty cents.

I shall not tell you, Judicia, how much I paid for that particular breakfast, for I know that your first remark would be: “All that in twenty-five minutes, and you a Fletcherite!”

What strikes the uninitiated traveler with wonder and amaze on reaching Sweden is the lavishness of everything and its cheapness. On this table in Alfvesta, for instance, there were great mounds of butter nearly a foot high, instead of the little minute dabs that we see on most continental tables, with which you are supposed to merely smear your bread. The big joints of beef, the great legs of mutton, the bright silver pudding dishes of capacious size, all seem to say to the tourist: “Help yourself, and don’t be stingy.” But elegance is not sacrificed to abundance. Everything is neat and clean. The silver is polished to the last degree. The glasses are crystal clear. You do not have to scrub your plate with your napkin, as is the custom at some continental hotels, and the cooking is as delicious as the food is abundant.

Am I dwelling too long upon these merely temporal and gastronomic features of Sweden? Do you remind me that the charm of a country does not depend upon what we shall eat or what we shall drink? I reply that the first thing for a traveler, like an army, to consider, is the base of supplies. What famous general was that who made the immortal remark that every army marched upon its stomach? Why is not that equally true of a traveler?

But though the dinner table is one of the initial experiences in Sweden, it does not often need to be described. Ex uno disce omnes, and from this one meal you may learn what to expect from Trelleborg on the south to Riksgränsen, some twelve hundred miles farther north, the Dan and Beersheba of Sweden. At every stopping-place, large or small, which the railway time-table kindly marks with a diminutive knife and fork, to show that the needs of the inner man are here met, you will find just such lavish, well-cooked, moderate-priced refreshments. Indeed the favorite English phrase, “cheap and nahsty”, has no equivalent in Swedish, for there is no such thing known. Cheapness does not imply poor quality or slatternly service.

You are reminded of this fact even before you leave Berlin, for a sleeping-car berth which costs more than twelve marks, something over three dollars on the south side of Berlin, costs for a longer distance on the north side, since most of the journey is to be in Sweden, less than six marks, or not quite one half as much, while the compartments are even more comfortable and better fitted. Yes, dear Judicia, Scandinavia is the country for you and me to travel in as well as for the very few other Americans, who, according to European notions, are not millionaires.

When I took my seat again after breakfast at Alfvesta, in the comfortable second-class compartment, we were soon flying, as rapidly as Swedish trains ever fly, which is rarely more than thirty miles an hour, through the heart of southern Sweden, and I had time to refresh my memory concerning this great Scandinavian peninsula, which, as some people think, hangs like a huge icicle from the roof of the world. The icicle idea, however, is entirely erroneous, so far at least as the southern part of Sweden and Norway go. The average temperature is about that of Washington, though it is cooler in summer; and very often in the neighborhood of the west coast, where the Gulf Stream, that mighty wizard of the Atlantic, does its work, there is little snow or ice from one year’s end to another.

This southern section of Sweden is called Gothland, or, literally, the Land of the Gota or Goths, a name which we always couple with the Vandals. Indeed, one of the titles by which the King of Sweden is still addressed at his coronation is “Lord of the Goths and Vandals.” Truly these old Goths and Vandals were the “scourge of God”, as Attila their leader was called, when they sailed away in their great viking ships, carrying their conquests as far as the Pillars of Hercules, and founding colonies and kingdoms along all the shores of Europe, and even across the Mediterranean, in Africa.

Scandinavia, when judged by its square miles, is certainly no mean country. Sweden alone, which claims a little more than half of the great peninsula, is as large as France or Germany, and half as large again as all Great Britain. If we should compare Sweden with some of our own more familiar boundaries, we should see that it is a little larger than California, and not unlike that Golden State in its geographical outlines. We should see also that it is about three times as large as all New England, and more than three times as large as Illinois.

Skikjoring, a Highly Enjoyable Sport.

Skate Sailing, a Favorite Sport in Sweden.

Before I finish this journey I shall have a realizing sense of Sweden’s long-drawn-out provinces, for it takes nearly sixty hours of continuous railway travel to go even as far north as the railway will carry us.

Gothland in the south, Svealand in the center, and Norrland in the north are the three great divisions of Sweden, the latter larger than the other two put together.

From the car window I see many charming sights, even in this wintry season. Indeed I am not sure that Sweden is not quite as lovely in winter as in summer. The red farmhouses, half buried in snow (for the winter is more severe now that we are getting away from the coast); the great stacks of hay that enable the patient cows to chew the cud contentedly through the long winter days; the splendid forests of white birch, the most graceful tree that grows; the ice-locked lakes, and the rushing streamlets that are making their way to the Baltic—all these combine to give us a landscape which is charming in the extreme.

I suppose that Aylmer will surfeit you with eloquent descriptions of far-reaching fjords, mighty mountains, and abysmal cañons when he comes to write about his beloved Norway, but I am sure he will find nothing more peacefully lovely and harmonious than the farmlands of southern and central Sweden. These are the lands, too, which raise not only grass and turnips and sugar beets, but a grand crop of men and women, who are the very backbone of the Swedish commonwealth. More than eighty-five per cent of the land is owned and farmed by its proprietors, and mostly small proprietors at that. Absentee landlordism is little known. A country whose people thus have their roots in the soil has little fear from anarchists and revolutionists.

These peasant proprietors, as they are called, are by no means the dense yokels with which we associate the word “peasant” in many parts of Europe. The peasants of Sweden are simply farmers, and not always small farmers at that, for they sometimes own hundreds of acres. They are farmers who enjoy the daily newspapers and the monthly magazines, whose children all go to school, and who can aspire to the university for their sons and daughters, if they so elect. They are farmers who hold the balance of power among the law-makers of Sweden, and who always have a hundred or more of their own number in the Riksdag, some of whom are among the best orators and debaters in the Assembly. They know that no important piece of legislation to which they are opposed can ever be enacted in Sweden, and they are as proud as the nobility itself of their ancient history, and more tenacious of their ancient privileges.

Honorable W. W. Thomas, for many years the American Minister to Sweden and Norway, and who has written entertainingly concerning the people of the country, which he came to consider his adopted land, tells a good story that illustrates the independence of the Swedish peasant. It is worth quoting to you, as the train rushes by hundreds of just such peasant homes.

“Clad in homespun, and driving a rough farm wagon, this peasant pulled up at a post station in the west of Sweden. There were but two horses left in the stable, and these he immediately ordered to be harnessed into his wagon. Just as they were being hitched up, there rattled into the courtyard in great style the grand equipage of the Governor of the Province, with coachman and footman in livery. Learning the state of affairs, and wishing to avoid a long and weary delay, the coachman ordered these two horses to be taken from the peasant’s cart and harnessed into the Governor’s carriage, but the peasant stoutly refused to allow this to be done.

“ ‘What,’ said the Governor, ‘do you refuse to permit those horses to be harnessed into my carriage?’

“ ‘Yes, I do,’ said the peasant.

“ ‘And do you know who I am,’ quoth the Governor, somewhat in a rage; ‘I am the Governor of this Province; a Knight of the Royal Order of the North Star, and one of the chamberlains of his Majesty the King.’

“ ‘Oh ho,’ said the peasant, ‘and do you, sir, know who I am?’

“He said this in such a bold and defiant manner that the Governor was somewhat taken aback. He began to think that the fellow might be some great personage after all, some prince perhaps, traveling in disguise.

“ ‘No,’ said he in an irresolute voice, ‘I do not know who you are. Who are you?’

“ ‘Well,’ replied the peasant, walking up to him and looking him firmly in the eye, ‘I’ll tell you who I am—I am the man that ordered those horses!’

“After this there was nothing more to be said. The peasant quietly drove away on his journey, and the Governor waited until such time as he could legally procure fresh means of locomotion.”

As I said, I thought of this characteristic story of peasant independence as my train sped by many a comfortable farmhouse, whose occupants, I have no doubt, would defy the authority of the governor, or of the king himself, if he should attempt to trample upon their rights.

But we are now drawing near to Sweden’s capital, and perhaps you will think that this letter is quite long enough for my first promised installment concerning the charms of Sweden.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.