The Police Chief continued to smile—if a bit wryly—and enthusiastically clapped his begloved hands. And since Anders bobbed up just then beside the car, Mother remarked rather angrily that she thought the Chief of Police had taken it all very nicely—“impertinent and disagreeable as you have been toward him. He certainly had a right to forbid shooting firecrackers last night. It is not done anywhere else.”
Anders lost his monocle in sheer astonishment at Mother’s criticism. He looked reproachfully at her and disappeared.
“And now we’d better see about getting home,” decided Thea. For Tulla did not care about the senior parade—there was no band, only shouting and yelling, and the banners held no interest for her—and Thea was very much interested in being at home when Anders and Hans stopped in to get the cups and spoons they needed, for after the parade all the pupils in the entire school would march up to a meadow beside the falls and have an eggnog party. But it rarely happened that the boys brought home from this picnic the eating utensils they had been allowed to “borrow,” and Thea muttered that the trick Anders had played on his mother two years ago, when he took one of the old silver spoons that no one had ever seen since, should not be repeated. Hans agreed and looked indescribably sanctimonious. This was the first year he was old enough to be allowed to go to the falls.
Leddy, poor thing, was still howling on her chain. But now Njord and Neri were so exhausted from all the excitement that they made no objection whatever when Mother chained them too. For from now on the boys would be flying in and out all day long and forgetting to close the gate behind them. And it would not be wise to let the dogs run downtown alone on a day like today.
Tulla’s chocolate was brought to her and she was placed out in the garden in her beach chair near the flagpole. But in an instant her eyes closed and she slept
Thea brought the Christmas ham down from the attic and cut some slices from it for the first time and for dessert they had the first rhubarb from the garden. It was the same every Seventeenth of May, for on that day it was impossible to eat at the regular hours. Youngsters, Ingeborg, the boys, people who happened to be in town for the day—they all came and went today whenever they happened to think about food. It was but the matter of a moment to sauté some potatoes and scramble some eggs. The children were satiated with cookies and lemonade and ginger ale and eggnog and maintained they could not bear the thought of food—until they had taken the first bite of the salty and succulent red ham, and then they ate like wolves.
Mother sat with Tulla in the garden in the afternoon. From downtown came the sound of music—it was the citizens’ parade starting at five o’clock. But Tulla looked so tired that Mother did not dare take her down again.
The Entertainment Committee—Hans and Magne and Ole Henrik—suddenly appeared coming full speed up the hill. It seemed they had concentrated their activity on the purchase of fireworks—a pinwheel, three rockets, and several boxes of Bengalese matches. Now they were busy getting ready for the big celebration tonight, setting up the four giant rockets that were to be the principal attraction. They tried them first outside the windows of the large parlor, then pulled them up and tried them farther down the hill—only to move them several times again. They got an incredible amount of fun out of this, playing so nicely and quietly that Mother thought that if only Tulla would let go her hand she would go get some milk and cookies for the boys, they were so good. . . .
Just then Anders and a friend hopped over the hedge down by the road and came storming up the hill. They too began setting up rockets and other giant firecrackers. Committee Hans & Co. burst out in terrific howling....
“Hush up, little ones. We’re not going to hurt your things. All you have to do is move them down a little farther.”
“Why, you! We were here first. . . . Mother, shall Anders be allowed to move our rockets? We were the ones who thought of having fireworks here tonight—and now Anders is going to have fireworks too, just because I told him we had bought—oh, you! You’re just aping us, an ape, an ape, that’s what you are!”
“Boys, boys! There is room for all of you on the hill! Hans, it is fun that Anders and Johan have rockets too. Now you will have a great display tonight.”
“Yes, but Anders and Johan have many more rockets than we have—and so it will be mostly their fireworks.”
“But it was your idea. If you had not thought of it first, Anders would certainly never have thought of it.”
“Oh, yes, mother, Johan and I decided a long time ago—”
Mother interrupted him. “Now you are to keep still and not tease your brother. If you like, Anders may go in and ask Thea to find some ginger ale and cookies for you.”
But for once the boys declared they could not drink any more ginger ale.
“My stomach clunks like a barrel of water now when I run,” explained Magne.
It does not become properly dark this time of the year until about midnight, and by then the children had to be in bed. But finally the dusk became deep enough so that the flagpole looked dark against the blue-green air.
The boys were as close as pearls on a string now. Not only had Anders and Johan given their word of honor not to light any of the rockets belonging to the little boys, but they had promised Hans and Magne and Ole each one of theirs. The five of them stood gathered around their rockets, awaiting their public. Ole Henrik’s father and mother and Magne’s sister and Johan’s cousin had been invited to come and see.
Thea had bathed Tulla and made her ready for the night, but she was allowed to come down with her fur coat over her pajamas.
“Look, Tulla—look!”
The first streak of fire shot to heaven, where with a faint explosion it burst into a shower of blue and yellow light drops that drifted slowly to earth. . . .
Tulla was so impressed she neither laughed nor shouted but only pressed close to Mother, almost as if she were afraid. She had never seen fireworks before. And Njord crept under Mother’s skirts and lay trembling, but Neri flew around in circles between the boys’ legs and scolded with all his might.
It was a splendid display—the entire audience was unanimous about that. And finally, when Hans’s pinwheel began to rotate, a spluttering wheel of golden rain over the darkening hillside, Tulla had become so courageous she shrieked with delight. But Njord fled into Mother’s lap, big and heavy as he was, and rolled up and tried to convince her he was only a poor little lap dog that should be allowed to hide its head in her hands.
From downtown came the sound of music in the night. There were parties everywhere, and organizations were still parading and playing the national songs. But now at last it was possible to get the boys to go up to bed.
As Mother came into the boys’ room to say good night to them the fireworks on Maihaugen, or May Hill, began. Far away over the dark treetops there was a drizzle of red and yellow rain and stardust. . . .
“So now it is midnight, boys.”
The boys had to come to the window to look. But soon that too was over. The children’s longest and happiest day in all the year was ended. And suddenly big tall Anders put his arms around his mother’s neck and kissed her. Then Hans came and wanted to kiss his mother, too.
“Thank you for today. Oh, we have had so much fun! Haven’t you had fun, mother?”
PART III
SUMMER VACATION
1
“MOTHER, WHEN SHALL WE MOVE TO THE SAETER?”
“Right after St. John’s, Hans.”
“Mother,” then asked Anders, “Godfather wrote he and Uncle George are coming to meet me at Ringbu as soon as the Boy Scout jamboree is over. We’re planning a three weeks’ camping trip. Could I join you at the saeter afterwards?”
“Of course. How nice of Godfather and the professor to want you along on their camping trip again this year, Anders.”
“Yes, very nice. But then, of course, you know I make myself useful too. I am a kind of orderly for them, you see.”
Norway is a lar
ge, far-reaching country, but people can live and build homes on but a small part of it. Along the coast, with its thousand isles and projecting rocks, lies a garland of little towns, fishing hamlets, outports, and little farms where women and children cultivate what poor arable land there is, while the men and boys are at sea or out fishing. But Norway’s interior is one single, enormous mass of mountains. From the backbone ridge, the divide between Norway and Sweden from north to south, run mighty ribs of mountain range with many peaks and pinnacles of which the highest are everlastingly capped with ice and snow. But between lie wide upland moors, gray with lichen—the “Iceland moss”—and green with dwarf birch, and dotted everywhere with the bright glance of water—little lakes, pools and tarns, and little brooks that unite to form rivers that seek their way to the valleys.
As early as September come rain and storms that tear the red and yellow leaves from the dwarf birch and snow falls—to lie until midsummer. Snowstorm follows snowstorm the whole winter through, and when day is but a quick blink and the greater part of the twenty-four hours pitch-dark, then the mountains are such that few persons can bear to live there. Still every settlement in Norway has stories to tell from olden days about someone who had been outlawed by the community and fled into the wilderness and built himself a stone hut deep within a crevasse between mountain walls. There he lived for years by hunting and fishing. . . . Then there are stories about strange and erratic characters—recluses who, in the olden days, lived on the saeters the year round. The mountains teemed with reindeer and ptarmigan and blue fox and bear and wolverine and provided the fearless hunter with all the food he needed, and all he desired of excitement and adventure.
Not much wild life remains in our mountains and where the outlawed ones once had their secluded refuges now lies one large tourist hotel after another and buses transport the guests up and down the mountain. But still anyone who wants to get away from other people can find room and view enough in the great wilds and moors that still exist.
And nearly every farm in Norway has its saeter in the mountains—a cottage where one or two or three milkmaids live in the summer, a stable for cows and goats, a hayloft where the farmer can store the good, fragrant hay from the meadow until such time as he can haul it down to the valley when there is sledding. In Norway we have never managed to grow enough grain for our daily bread and people have to rely on dairying for the other necessities. And as far back as we know anything about dairying in our country, the farmers and peasants have utilized the mountain pastures by moving their stock to the saeter and feeding them there from the time the grass in the mountain first begins to grow—it grows so fast during the long, light days that you can see the difference in it between morning and night—and until the autumn storms and snows come when summer ends. In olden days the saeter girls had to make cheese and churn butter. Now they have only to milk and care for the cows, for the milk is usually sent down to the creamery in the valley by a milk truck that also calls for and delivers mail every day. In many ways it is easier now to be a saeter girl than in the old days when there was not “a living thing but the animals to see” from one Saturday to the next. On Saturdays there were usually visitors from down in the valley—and the girls were very eager. “Wonder who’s coming tonight?” For, true enough, they usually had a friend they hoped would come. . . .
But, though in the last score years or so the saeter ways have become ever so modern, the cows are unchanged. A cow thinks and acts about as her mother and her grandmother acted, generation after generation, for a thousand years. From the first spring day that she is let out of the barn and allowed to graze in the field at home she longs for the mountain. There, she recalls, she is free to graze the livelong day in mile-wide pastures of short, sweet, and juicy grass, drink from cold, clear streams, rest during the hot midday hours someplace where a breeze cools and helps to keep away the tormenting mosquito swarm. Deep somewhere behind her square brow lurks perhaps a shadow of that fear her mother before her knew—the fear of bear in the mountain. But the cow does not know what it is she fears, for there are not many cows nowadays who have ever as much as smelled the scent of a bear. There is only this unease left—a nervousness that makes a Norwegian cow intelligent and capricious—so that the peasant women say a cow is almost like a person, she is so canny.
Then comes huferdsdagen, that day the stock is started up the road to the saeter. They travel day and night. It is impossible to get them to stop along the way. The saeters of many farms lie so deep and high in the mountains that it takes a day and a half or two days to get there. The start usually is made late in the afternoon in order to travel as much as possible by night when it is cool and dew has settled the dust on the road.
After St. John’s, and for the fortnight following, herds of stock from farms south of town passed by Mother’s garden fences every blessed night. And when Mother heard the faint clang of cowbells in the summer night and the cartwheels creaking in the gravel of the road, she could not restrain herself—she had to throw a dressing gown over her nightdress and run down. Often Hans woke up, but Anders was so busy, now that school was over and the Boy Scout jamboree in Ringbu and the hiking trip with Godfather were coming up, that he slept like a rock. But for Hans vacation was vacation and he slept more lightly, so when he heard Mother get up he tumbled out of bed and trotted along behind.
“Oh, you should at least have put something on,” Mother said. “What if you catch cold?”
Hans pretended not to hear—and it was true Mother said such things only because mothers are supposed to talk like that.
Housetops and treetops outlined themselves darkly against the white lake, and the heavens were bluish-white above the dark ridges. It was as light as day out, as if the colors had only fallen asleep; tall irises that were reddish purple when the sun shone on them looked wholly blue in this strange northern light. Hans’s sandals turned dark and his pajamas got wet far up his legs as he and Mother walked across the lawn.
“Oh, child, you’ll freeze.”
Hans climbed up on the panel gate and hung over.
“It’s Mrs. Rindal, mother. It’s the cows from the parsonage. Mrs. Rindal, Mrs. Rindal,” he shouted.
Mrs. Rindal waved and called good morning, but to stop was something saeter people had no time to do.
“Come on, come o-on, come o-o-o-on . . .” came the milkmaid’s call. She walked at the head of the procession.
First came the bell cow, followed by a row of reddish-brown brindled and white-spotted cows. The bull and the calves came last. The herd of blue and brown and gray-black goats tripped and pranced, some in front and some behind and some alongside the file of cows, their little bells pinging fine and clear. Finally came two carts loaded with the cream separator and dishes and vats and bedding—and a washtubful of potted plants and a loom too, Mrs. Rindal had on her saeter load. Atop it all sat a big chestnut tomcat beside the driver, looking as if he was the master there. He was a son of Sissi. Mrs. Rindal had got him two years ago.
“Mother,” Hans shouted in jubilation, “did you see Mr. Rosenquist. Hasn’t he grown big?”
Mother had put her arm around Hans to keep him from tumbling on his head in sheer delight.
“When are we starting for the saeter, mother?” he asked, his voice plaintive with longing.
“As soon as the St. Swithin’s celebration is over,” Mother replied and sighed.
For everyone in Norway longs for the mountains in summer, exactly like the cows. True, some long more for the sea. But nearly everyone is so recently sprung from the peasant, or the fisherman, or the seaman that when summer comes, with its long days and short, never-dark nights, they feel in themselves a great longing to search out the place whence their ancestors came so short a while ago.
“You’d better change into a pair of dry pajama pants,” said Mother, when they got back in the bedroom. “I’ll go find some for you.”
But when Mother came back with the pants, Hans was already sound aslee
p. So she only spread an extra woolen blanket over his legs. Naturally, Mother did not really believe either that anyone could catch cold from standing outside watching the stock pass by, saeter bound.
2
THE BOYS’ REPORT CARDS COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE. They could have been much better too, of course. But both of them passed, and that was almost more than Mother had dared hope for.
The little town where Hans and Anders had their home lies directly on one of the main routes of summer vacation travel. And all who passed through the little town had to stop off and see Maihaugen, the big outdoor museum for which it is renowned.
The story of Maihaugen is a story in itself. Anders Sandvig was the name of a young Norwegian dentist who had won a reputation as a scientist in his field. He had just accepted a creditable appointment abroad in Europe when it was discovered he had tuberculosis, and the doctors said that if he wanted to live he had to go back home to Norway and settle down up there someplace where the altitude was high and the air dry and clean. Sandvig felt this was like being sentenced to a living death. Should he give up his work in a university abroad for a dental practice in a little country town—where he had to keep office hours one day a week or so in hotels and at farmhouses along the valley, for farmers certainly could not make a trip to town every time they had toothache. . . . Little did Sandvig suspect at the time that Fate had assigned him a life’s task that would make him one of Norway’s most deserving sons.
At that time—fifty years ago—a new era was reaching into the quiet Norwegian valleys, where the life of the people for a thousand years had progressed so smoothly and so slowly that the peasants themselves fully believed they lived as their forefathers before them had always lived. For even though each new generation added its experiences and discoveries and improvements to the value of their heritage, the peasants always claimed that the poor little improvements they had contributed, or had seen come, were nothing in comparison with what their forefathers, in their wisdom, had contributed. Then came the railroad, the telephone, better roadways, the water power in the cataracts was harnessed, new ideas and new people streamed in on the old social order. The peasants became bewildered, uncertain of the worth of the values they held and had depended upon before. Soon they began to imitate the new. That was good in many ways. They learned much that was sound and true. But they lost their confidence in their own inheritance. Blindly, and with uncritical eyes, they abolished the “old-fashioned.” Much was not worth preserving, of course, but much, much more was good and tried—the fruits of a people’s experiences through a thousand years in how to best manage life in a harsh and difficult land.
Happy Times in Norway Page 8
