Through Finland in Carts
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We had black bread – nothing else can be got in peasant homes – and any one who cannot accept its sourness, and one might add hardness, must provide himself with white bread from the towns. We got excellent butter of course – the smallest home has good butter and milk in Finland, where the little native cows can be bought for sixty or a hundred marks. They live on what they can find in the summer, and dried birch leaves, moss, or an occasional "delikatess" of hay in the winter. We had also deliciously cold fresh milk, that and coffee being the only drinks procurable, as a rule, and a small fish with a pink skin like a mullet, fresh out of the water, was served nicely fried in butter, the farmer having sent a man to catch it on our arrival.
There was cold bacon, too poisonous in appearance to touch, and hot eggs, but no egg-cups, of course. We bumped the round heavy end of the eggs, and stood them up on our plates, native fashion, and felt we had learnt a trick that might be useful when egg-cups fell short in England. In fact, before we left our peasant homes, we had begun to look upon an egg-cup as a totally unnecessary luxury, and to find ourselves so capable of managing without one, that the egg no longer ran out at the wrong end, as it did at first in our inexperienced hands, but behaved as every well-behaved egg ought to do – that is to say, sit up on its end and appear as if it liked it.
One terrible-looking dish adorned our table on this and many occasions. It was pike – caught, cleaned, opened, salted, and kept till wanted; a piece, being laid flat on a plate to be served, is cut in thin slices and spread on bread and butter by those who care to eat the luxury. At the bone it was red, and gradually tapered away to a white gelatinous-looking stuff. We never dared venture upon this choice raw dish. It had a particularly distasteful appearance. As there was no filbunke, made of sour unskimmed milk, which we had learnt to enjoy, we had to content ourselves with piimää, the skimmed milk curdled; but as we were visitors, and not peasants, tumblers of fresh cream had been poured over it, and with sugar it tasted really excellent. It was a primitive dinner, but with fresh fish and eggs, milk and cream, no one need starve, and we only paid fivepence each for our mid-day meal, such a sum being fixed on the tariff. Our dear comfortable old hostess was fascinated by our presence, and sat smiling and blinking beside us all the time, her hands, folded over her portly form below the short straight cotton jacket she wore, were raised occasionally to retie her black silk head-covering. Again and again she murmured – "Englantilaiset" (Englishwoman), and nodded approval.
Poor Baron George, our kindly cicerone, had to answer all her questions about England, our age, size, weight, height, the price of our clothing, why our hair was so dark – an endless subject of inquiry among the peasantry – and to ply her with questions from us in return.
It was with real regret we left these folk, they were so honest and simple, so far removed from civilisation and its corrupting influences on their thoughts, that they and their life seemed to take us back a couple of centuries at least.
The family came out and shook hands with us on leaving; but not before they had one and all sat down in our grand carriage, just to see what it was like. Individually, we thought it a ramshackle old chaise, but further acquaintance with the springless native carts made us look back at that victoria as if it were the Lord Mayor's Coach!
It is no uncommon thing for the roofs of the houses in Savolax to be thatched with thin strips of wood an inch or so wide, similar to our old shingle roofs in the west of England. At Wiborg we were shown, among the curiosities of the town, a red-tiled roof, which Finlanders thought as wonderful as we thought their wooden thatch. These were quite common formerly, but are now condemned by the Insurance Companies.
Such is life. What we eat, others despise; what we think beautiful, others find hideous; what we call virtue, other lands consider vice; what to us is novel and interesting is to others mere commonplace; the more we travel, and the more we read, the less we find we know; except that there may be good and use in all things, and that other men and women, with whom we have not one idea in common, are quite as clever or good as ourselves – more so, perhaps.
"Why, what is that? Three stone chimneys without any house," we exclaimed, seeing three brick erections standing bleak and alone in the midst of a dreary waste.
"Ah," replied Baron George, "that is one of the sad sides of Finnish life. Those three stone chimneys are the only remains of what was once a three-roomed house. All the dwellings, as you know, are entirely built of wood, except for the brick chimneys. These three great gaunt towers mean fire, and perhaps starvation. One of those little houses will burn to the ground in an hour, on a dry windy night, and all the toil of years, all the wealth of its proprietor, the home of his family, be reduced to the few ashes you see on the ground, while the clock marks one short hour."
It seemed horrible. Those three chimneys looked so gaunt and sad. Where were the folk who had lived beside them, cooked beneath them, and spent their lives of grief or joy?
Outside every house in Finland stands a large wooden ladder, tall enough to reach to the top of the roof, for fire is very common, and generally ends in everything being demolished by the flames. Buckets of water, passed on by hand, can do little to avert disaster, when the old wooden home is dry as tinder and often rotten to the core.
Again our attention was arrested as we jogged along by the earth mounds; those queer green mounds that look like graves in a country church-yard, which are so common in Iceland, where they grow so close together, there is often hardly room for a pony's feet to pass between, but on the origin of which scientists disagree. The grass-grown sand – sand as beautiful and silvery as the sand of Iona, but here was no sea, although it had left its deposits in ages long gone by – was beautifully fresh and green.
Iceland moss, too, grows in profusion – a very useful commodity for the peasants, who plug out the draughts between the wooden walls of their houses with it, or make it into a kind of medicinal drink, as the Buckinghamshire peasant makes her nettle tea from the wondrous stinging nettles that grow five feet high in some of the lovely lanes of wooded Bucks.
Iceland moss, indeed, has taken the place of bread in times of famine, for that or the bark of the pine tree has been ground down many times into flour and mixed with a little rye for the half-starved peasants' only sustenance.
With all their sufferings and their hardships, can one be surprised that they take life seriously?
That evening at ten o'clock – but it might have been seven judging by the brilliancy of the sunset – we rowed on the lake, accompanied by a grandson of Finland's greatest poet, Runeberg.
It really was a wonderful night; we English have no idea of the gorgeousness of long July sunsets in Finland, just as we little dream of the heat of the day, or the length and beauty of the evenings. It is in these wondrous sunny glows, which spread themselves like a mantle, that the hundreds of miles of lakes and thousands and thousands of islands look their best. And there are many such evenings. Evenings when one feels at peace with all the world, and one's thoughts soar higher than the busy turmoil of the crowded city.
It is these wonderful nights that impress the stranger most of all in Finland. There is something to make even the most prosaic feel poetical. There is a dull dreariness, a sombre sadness in the scene, and at the same time a rich warmth of colouring, a strength of Nature that makes even the least artistic feel the wonders of the picture spread out before them, and, withal, a peacefulness, for these vast tracts of uninhabited land mean repose. Those numerous pine forests, denoting quiet, and the wide, wide canopy of Heaven, unbroken by mountain or hill, give one an idea of vast extent and wild expanse.
Finland is reposeful; and has a charm about it which is particularly its own.
It was on such an evening as this that we rowed over the wide deep waters of Maaninka, as still as a mirror, to the little white church, with its tower soaring out of the pines, on the other side. We had been joined by several new friends, all anxious to show us their church; but, individually, our happiness was a little spoilt by the fact that the boat was leaking badly, and we could positively see the water rising in her bottom. Up – up – up – the water crept.
We had been in many curious boats before, and had become quite accustomed to folding our petticoats neatly up on our laps, but this boat filled more rapidly than usual, and we did not run for the bank till six or eight inches of water actually covered her bottom. It rose apace, and before we reached the shore our feet and our skirts were well up on our seats for safety, and, verily, we were well-nigh swamped.
Out we scrambled; the men immediately beached the frail bark, and as they did so the water all ran away. "What an extraordinary thing," we thought, and when they pulled her right on to shore we saw the last drops disappearing from the boat.
"Why, the plug is out," one of them exclaimed, and, sure enough, the plug was out! In the bottom of every Finnish boat they have a round hole, and this round hole contains a large cork or plug, so that when the craft fills with water, as she invariably does from a leak, or spray, or other causes, they merely pull her up on to the shore, take out the plug, and let the water run away. But in this particular case the plug had never been put in, or had somehow got lost, and we actually rowed across a lake with the water rising at the rate of about half an inch a minute.
We scrambled up over the slippery pine needles to the crest of the little eminence on which the church stood, and found ourselves in the most primitive of churchyards. There was no attempt at law or order, for the graves had just been put down between the trees wherever there was room for them. We noticed a painted clock on several of the wooden tombstones, evidently intended to indicate the exact hour at which the person lying under the sod had died. For instance, it would stand at twenty-two minutes to four o'clock, which was the precise moment the dead man expired, carefully noted by the exactitude of the Finns, who are very particular about such matters. In the newspapers, for example, it is stated, "Johanson died, aged 46 years 11 months and 4 days," and this record of the number of days is by no means uncommon. They are a most exact nation.
The Maaninka church, like so many others in Finland, has its important-looking bell-tower standing quite a distance away from the main building. We climbed to the top after some persuasion, and certainly our trouble was repaid by a glorious view.
But, alas! every Finlander has a hobby, and that hobby is that at every point where there is a view of any sort or description, in fact, one might say where there is no view at all, he erects an Aussichtsturm. These outlook towers are a bane of existence to a stranger. One goes out to dinner and is taken for a walk round the island. At every conceivable point is an outlook tower, generally only a summer-house, but, alas, there are usually some steps leading to the top which one toils up, and has the fatigue of doing so without any reward, as they are not high enough to afford any better view at the summit than one has at the base.
To go to the top of St. Peter's in Rome, St. Paul's in London, the Isaak Church in Petersburg, the Citadel at Quebec, or the Castle of Chapultepec in Mexico, is worth the fatigue, but to toil up twenty steps on a hot summer's day and clamber down again, to repeat the operation a quarter of a mile farther on, and so ad lib., becomes somewhat monotonous, and one begins to wish that every outlook tower in Finland might be banished from the country. Stop, once we ascended an outlook tower that more than rewarded our labour. It was at Kuopio, which town we had just left – perhaps the most beautifully situated in all Finland – and as the night when we arrived chanced to be particularly brilliant, the view from the top of that outlook tower will be long treasured in remembrance.
To many of us the recollection of the past is a storehouse of precious gems; the realisation of the present is often without sparkle; yet the anticipation of the future is fraught with glitter, and the crown of happiness is ever before our eyes.
CHAPTER XV
ON WE JOG
It is difficult for strangers to travel through the heart of Finland, for every person may not be so lucky as to be passed on from one charming friend to another equally delightful, as we were; and, therefore, we would like to suggest the formation of a guides' bureau at Helsingfors, where men and women teachers from the schools – who are thoroughly well educated and always hold excellent social positions in Finland – could be engaged as couriers. These teachers speak English, French, and German, and would probably be glad to improve that knowledge for a few weeks by acting as friendly guides for a trifling sum in return for their expenses.
It is only a suggestion, but the schools being closed in June, July, and August, the teachers are then free, and voyageurs are willing to explore, though their imperfect knowledge of Finnish prevents their penetrating far from steamers and trains.
As we drove towards Lapinlahti we were surprised by many things: the smallness of the sheep, generally black, and very like those of Astrakhan; the hairiness of the pigs, often piebald; the politeness of the natives, all of whom curtsied or took off their hats; the delicious smell the sun was drawing out of the pine trees, and, perhaps more wonderful still, the luxuriance of gorgeously coloured wild-flowers, which are often as beautiful as in spring-time in Switzerland or Morocco; the numbers of singing birds, and, above all, the many delicious wild berries. The wild strawberries of Finland in July are surprising, great dishes of them appear at every meal. Paris has learnt to appreciate them, and at all the grand restaurants of Paris cultivated "wild strawberries" appear. In Finland, the peasant children slice a foot square of bark from a birch tree, bend it into the shape of a box without a lid, then sew the sides together with a twig by the aid of their long native knives, and, having filled the basket, eagerly accept a penny for its contents. Every one eats strawberries. The peasants themselves half live on them, and, certainly, the wild berries of Switzerland are far less numerous, and not more sweet than those of Finland.
As evening drew on smoke rose from the proximity of the homesteads, and we wondered what it could be, for there are never any trees near the houses.
These are the cow-fires, lighted when the animals come to be milked. The poor creatures are so pestered and tormented by gnats and flies – of which Finland has more than her share – that fires are kindled towards evening, a dozen in one field sometimes, where they are to be milked, to keep the torments away. The cows are wonderfully clever, they know the value of the fires, and all huddle close up to them, glad of the restful reprieve, after the worry they have endured all day. Poor patient beasts, there they stand, chewing the cud, first with one side of their body turned towards the flames and then the other, the filmy smoke, the glow of the fire and the rays of the sunlight, hiding and showing distinctly by turns the girls and their kine. The dairymaids come with their stools to milk their soft-eyed friends, and on blazing hot summer evenings they all sit closely huddled round the fires together.
These milkmaids have some strange superstitions still lurking in their breasts, and the juice of the big birch tree is sometimes given to cows to make them yield better butter.
Lapinlahti is a typical Finnish village, and had at least one newspaper of its own, so advanced were the folk, even at the time of my first visit.
Outside the little post-station we were much amused to read on a board "528 kilos. to St. Petersburg, 470 kilos. to Uleåborg." But we were more amazed on our return from a ramble, prepared to grumble that the meal ordered an hour before was not ready, when the host walked into the room, and, making a most polite bow, said in excellent English —
"Good day, ladies."
"Do you speak English?" we asked.
"Certainly. I think I ought to after doing so for sixteen years."
We were immensely surprised. Who could have expected to find in the interior of Finland a peasant landlord who was also an English linguist? He seemed even more delighted to see us, than we were to have an opportunity of learning something concerning the country from one speaking our own tongue so perfectly, for it is a little difficult to unravel intricate matters when the intermediary is a Swedish-speaking Finlander, who has to translate what the peasant says into French or German for your information, you again retranslating it into English for your own purposes.
Our host spoke English fluently, and it turned out that, having been a sailor like so many of the Finns, he had spent sixteen years of his life on board English vessels. He preferred them, he said, as the pay was twice as good as on the Finnish boats.
He told us that many of his countrymen went away to sea for a few years and saved money, the wise ones bringing it home and investing it in a plot of land; "but," he added, "they do not all succeed, for many of them have become so accustomed to a roving life, and know so little of farming, that they cannot manage to make it pay. I have worked very hard myself, and am getting along all right;" and, looking at his surroundings, we certainly thought he must be doing very well indeed.
The most remarkable rocking-chair we had ever seen in our lives stood in his sitting-room. The Finlanders love rocking-chairs as dearly as the Americans do, but it is not often that they are double; our host's, however, was more than double – it was big enough for two fat Finlanders, or three ordinary persons to sit in a row at the same time, and it afforded us some amusement.
As there is hardly a house in Finland without its rocking-chair, so there is seldom a house which is not decorated somewhere or other with elk horns. The elk, like deer, shed their horns every year, and as Finland is crowded with these Arctic beasts, the horns are picked up in large quantities. They are handsome, but heavy, for the ordinary elk horn is far more ponderous in shape and weight and equal in width to a Scotch Royal. The ingenuity of the Finlander is great in making these handsome horns into hat-stands, umbrella-holders, stools, newspaper-racks, and portfolio-stands, or interlacing them in such a manner as to form a frieze round the top of the entrance hall in their homes. A really good pair will cost as much as twenty-five shillings, but when less well-grown, or in any way chipped or damaged, they can be bought for a couple of shillings.
A Finnish hall, besides its elk-horn decorations, is somewhat of a curiosity. For instance, at one of the Governor's houses where we chanced to dine, we saw for the first time with surprise what we repeatedly saw again in Finland. Along either wall was a wooden stand with rows and rows of pegs upon it for holding hats and coats. There were two pegs, one below the other, so that the coat might go beneath, while the hat resting over it did not get hurt. But below each of these pegs, a few inches from the floor, was a little wooden box with an open side. They really looked like forty or fifty small nests for hens to lay their eggs in, and we were very much interested to know what they could be for. What was our surprise to learn they were for goloshes.
In winter the younger guests arrive on snow-shoes (skidor), but during wet weather or when the road is muddy, during the thaws of spring, they always wear goloshes, and as it is considered the worst of taste to enter a room with dirty boots, the goloshes are left behind with the coat in the hall. This reminded us of Henrik Ibsen's home in Christiania, where the hall was strewn with goloshes. So much is this the fashion that we actually saw people walking about in indiarubber "gummies," as our American friends call them, during almost tropical weather. Habit becomes second nature.
Whether that meal at Lapinlahti, with its English-speaking landlord, was specially prepared for our honour or whether it was always excellent at that majatalo we cannot say, but it lingers in remembrance as one of the most luxurious feasts we had in the wilds of Suomi.
The heat was so great that afternoon as we drove towards Iisalmi– two or three inches of dust covering the roadways – that we determined to drive no more in the daytime, and that our future expeditions should be at night; a plan which we carried out most successfully. On future occasions we started at six in the afternoon, drove till midnight, and perhaps did a couple or three hours more at four or five in the morning; think of it!
After peeping into some well-arranged Free Schools, looking at a college for technical education, being invited with true Finnish hospitality to stay and sleep at every house we entered, we drew up at the next majatalo to Lapinlahti. It was the post-house, and at the same time a farm; but the first thing that arrested our attention was the smoke – it really seemed as if we were never to get away from smoke for forest-burning or cow-milking. This time volumes were ascending from the sauna or bath-house, for it was Saturday night, and it appeared as if the population were about to have their weekly cleansing. The sauna door was very small, and the person about to enter had to step up over a foot of boarding to effect his object, just as we were compelled to do on Fridtjof Nansen's ship the Fram,5 when she lay in Christiania dock a week or two before leaving for her ice-drift. In the case of the Fram the doors were high up and small, to keep out the snow, as they are likewise in the Finnish peasants' homes, excepting when they arrange a snow-guard or sort of fore-chamber of loose pine trees, laid wigwam fashion on the top of one another, to keep back the drifts. We had hardly settled down to our evening meal – in the bedroom of course, everything is done in bedrooms in Finland, visitors received, etc. – before we saw a number of men and women hurrying to the sauna, where, in true native fashion, after undressing outside, all disappeared en masse into that tremendous hot vapour room, where they beat one another with birch branches dipped in hot water, as described in the chapter on Finnish baths. In Kalevala we read of these mixed baths thus —
So he hastened to the bath-house,Found therein a group of maidensWorking each upon a birch broom.When this performance was over they redressed outside, which is a custom even when the ground is deeply covered with snow.
Our host, a finely-made young fellow, fondly nursing a baby of about two years old, seeing our interest in everything, was very anxious we should join the bath party, and begged Baron George to tell us of its charms, an invitation we politely but firmly refused. He showed his home. When we reached a room upstairs – for the house actually possessed two storeys – we stood back amazed. Long poles suspended from ropes hung from the ceiling, and there in rows, and rows, and rows, we beheld clothing, mostly under-linen. Some were as coarse as sacking; others were finer; but there seemed enough for a regiment – something like the linen we once saw in a harem in Tangier, but Tangier is a hot country where change of raiment is often necessary, and the owner was a rich man, while Finland is for most part of the year cold, and our landlord only a farmer. The mystery was soon explained; the farmer had to provide clothing for all his labourers – a strange custom of the country – and these garments were intended for eight or nine servants, as well as a large family. Moreover, as washing in the winter with ice-covered lakes is a serious matter, two or three big washes a year are all Finns can manage, the spring wash being one of the great events in their lives. The finer linen belonged to the master's family, the coarser to the labourers, and there must have been hundreds of articles in that loft.