Through Finland in Carts

"Will you come with me, Annuka, fair maid of Åbo?"

"I do not want to, and I will not come," she answers.

And then came a poor man, whose only wealth was bread. It is not gold, nor silver, nor copper, nor iron, but bread that is the staff of life. This is emblematical, to show that money does not make happiness, and so Annuka, the maid of Åbo, takes him, and sings —

"Now I am coming to you, my husband. Annuka, the maid of Åbo, will be happy now, and happy evermore."

Many old Finnish songs repeat themselves like this, and most of them are very sad.

Our dear old woman was moved to tears as she sang in her squeaky voice, and rocked herself to and fro.

As she sang a butterfly flew past us, and was quickly joined by a second, when a small fight ensued, the pretty creatures coming together as though kissing one another in their frolicsome short-lived glee, and then separating again, perhaps for ever.

"Ukonkoira" (butterflies), remarked the old woman, beaming with pleasure. Then our student explained that the butterfly was looked upon as sacred, and its flight considered a good omen.

We had been much impressed by our old dame; her innocence and childish joy, her love of music, and her God-fearing goodness were most touching.

We cannot repeat too often that the Finn is musical and poetical to the core, indeed, he has a strong and romantic love for tales and stories, songs and melody, while riddles are to be met with at every turn, and the funny thing is that these riddles or mental puzzles often most mercilessly ridicule the Finns themselves.

No language, perhaps, is richer in sayings than the Finnish. When a Finn sees any one trying to perform some feat beyond his power, and failing, he immediately laughs and cries, "Eihän lehmä puuhun pääse" (the cow cannot climb a tree). Or, when speaking of his own country as superior to every other land, he invariably adds, "Oma maa mansikka muu maa mustikka" (my own land is a strawberry, all other lands are bilberries).

These proverbs and riddles, of which there are some thousands, are the solace of the winter evenings, when the old folk sit opposite one another in the dark – more often than not hand in hand – each trying who will give in first and find his store of riddles soonest exhausted. In fact, from childhood the Finn is taught to think and invent by means of riddles; in his solitude he ponders over them, and any man who evolves a good one is a hero in his village. They meet together for "riddle evenings," and most amusing are the punishments given to those who cannot answer three in succession. He is sent to Hymylä, which is something like being sent to Coventry.

He is given three chances, and if he can answer none every one sings —

Hyys hyys Hymylään!Kun et sitäkään tiedä.

Meaning, "Well, well, off you go to Coventry as punishment for ignorance."

Then the poor delinquent is made to play the fool. He is set on a chair in the middle of the room, dressed up as fancy pleases the audience. His face is often absurdly painted, and after enduring every indignity, to the amusement of his friends, he is escorted from the room to ponder over the answers to the riddles. How they chaff him. Does he enjoy Hymylä? Are the dogs howling and the children running away? If he wants to come back he had better harness a mouse to his carriage, find a cat to act as coachman, and a saucepan for a sledge. He must wash himself with tar and paint himself with feathers.

And so they chaff and laugh on during those long winter evenings, in their badly-lighted homes, where books are still rare.

Every one in Finland can read to-day, but the first Finnish book was published in 1542, by Mikael Agricola, the Bishop who made the first translation of the New Testament; but they cannot read much in their dimly-lighted houses during the long winters, and therefore it is that they sing so constantly, and repeat mythical rhymes, or riddles and proverbs, which our host and hostess declared they loved.

Their Savupirtti and land did not belong to them, the latter told us. The actual owner was a farmer who let it out in various torps. Our particular friend, the torppari, paid him one-third of all he made off his holding, and gave him besides eight days' work during the year – being called upon for this manual contribution whenever the farmer was himself most pressed.

This particular little chimneyless house lay eighteen kilometres from Iisalmi, where the nearest shops were to be found. The poor old woman told us that she had had nine children, out of which number she had lost seven. When we considered the smallness of her home, the terrible want of ventilation and sanitation, the poverty of the people, and the hardness of their lives, we were not in the least surprised at her statement, but we marvelled much at the mother having survived all she must have gone through.

She made a wonderful picture as she sat on the wooden bedstead, her bare feet playing a tattoo on the wooden floor, while her clean clothes seemed absolutely to shine against the darkness of the wall behind her.

Although so far removed from civilisation, and from luxuries of any kind, the old couple knew how to read, and they had one or two treasured books. Poor as they were, they, like every other native peasant, possessed a Piplia (Bible), a Katkismus (catechism), a Virsikirja (hymn-book), and an Almanakka (almanac).

We ventured to ask the good soul if she ever read them. "Of course," she replied, "or what should we do at the lukukinkerit?"

"And what may that be?" we asked, surprised; only to learn that in the winter months the priests travel about by means of sledges from one big peasant's house to another, where the smaller torpparis all assemble, and there hold an examination of the people in order to ascertain their holy knowledge.

The peasants rather dread these lukukinkerit, as the priest asks them difficult questions, which it is considered an absolute disgrace not to be able to answer satisfactorily. As we know, this was formerly the custom in Scotland, and severe punishments were given to those who could not answer rightly, and prove themselves thoroughly versed in Bible history. This custom is now practically done away with in Scotland, although the examination for the communion, which takes place twice a year in the Highlands, partakes somewhat of the same nature. In Finland the winter examinations are very serious matters, and therefore it is that the Bible, prayer-book, and hymn-book are to be found in every peasant's home, while a profound knowledge of their contents is general.

Besides examining the folk on religious subjects, the priest also severely tests their reading capabilities, for no one can be married in Finland unless he be able to read to the satisfaction of his spiritual adviser. This means that all Finland can read. Yet in Russia, near by, only a quarter of the population know how to read, and far fewer can write, and they still count by beads.

As we turned to leave the little homestead, we noticed some apparently dead birch-trees planted on both sides of the front door, and knowing the birch and ash were still considered more or less sacred by the peasant, we wondered what such a shrubbery could signify – why, when the trees were dead, they had not been thrown away. Everything else looked fresh and green, so we were more than surprised to notice their crumpled brown leaves, and eventually asked how it came about that these two young trees were dead.

"It was my husband's Nimipäivä (name-day) lately," said the old body, "and of course we went to the forest and cut down two birch-trees, and stuck them into the ground by the front door to bring him luck."

The name-day, be it understood, is an important event in Finnish family history, a festival equivalent to our birthday rejoicings; and in the case of the father or mother, the children generally all assemble on their parent's name-day. The richer folk have a dinner or a dance, or something of that kind – the poor a feast; but all decorate their front door with birch-trees, in honour of the occasion, while those who have the means to do so exchange presents.

Our dear old lady was almost tearful when we left, and, asking our names most affectionately, tried again and again to pronounce the queer-sounding Tweedie and Harley. A bright idea struck us; we would show her the words written, and thereupon we gave her our cards. This was too much joy. Fancy any one actually having her name on a card. Then she turned the extraordinary bits of pasteboard over and over, and seizing our hands, kissed them to show her gratitude. Afterwards she went to her cupboard, and producing a white handkerchief, one of those she kept for conveying her Bible to and from church, carefully wrapped the cards round and round, and promised to keep them always in remembrance of her strange visitors.

It was really wonderful, driving along the roads, how near our three kärra kept to one another; sometimes, indeed, they were so close that we could all converse conveniently. This answered very well, but when, by chance or design, they got about twenty or thirty yards apart, the dust kicked up by the horse in front was so fearful that we suffered much, and it was really amusing at the end of each day to see how completely our hair was powdered, and note the wonderful gray hue our faces had assumed, eyelashes, eyebrows and all. I was wearing a black dress, on the lapels of which it afforded amusement to my companions to play a game of noughts and crosses with their fingers amid the accumulated dust. It was extraordinary, considering the thickness of the sand, for it was more sand than dust that lay upon the roads, that our ponies could go so well; and when the sun was at its height the heat was so fearful, and the number of mosquitoes and horseflies so appalling, that this inconvenience, coupled with the dust, still made it absolutely impossible at times for us to pursue our journey during the mid-day hours; but those glorious northern evenings made up for all the discomfort.

The roads themselves were wonderfully straight, and as there is a red post every kilometre (or half mile), we could tell how far we went without even turning our heads, because we could count five or six posts at the same time, so straight was the way.

As we proceeded farther North the country became more hilly, and our little animals would stop and walk up steep inclines; having reached the summit, however, they were wont to gallop full speed to the bottom.

We reached a most charming majatalo. It was near midnight, and, as it is one of the best in Finland, it was decided that we should there spend a night. It was only the pretence of a night, however, for the coachman declared it would be quite impossible to drive during the heat of the following day, and, consequently, We must start again on our way at four in the morning at the very latest.

Here at last, thank heaven, we found a majatalo which was properly inspected. There were iron bedsteads and clean mattresses, and, having suffered so terribly as we had done, it seemed very bad luck that we could not enjoy more than three hours' rest in such delightful quarters. While our supper, which consisted of milk, coffee, eggs, and delicious butter, supplemented with the white bread we brought with us, was being prepared, we had a look into the large farmhouse where our host himself lived.

Instead of the family being in bed, as in an ordinary English farm they would be at midnight, a girl was sitting in the corner making butter with an old-fashioned churn of the wooden-handled type, which you pull up and down to use. There had evidently been a great baking that day or the day before, for the farm kitchen seemed to contain hundreds of loaves, which were stacked on the floor, piled on the table, and strewn on benches, not yet having been suspended by means of strings from the ceilings and rafters.

We thoroughly enjoyed that evening meal, sitting on the balcony, or rather large porch of the little annexe kept for strangers; one and all agreed no nicer butter, sweeter milk, or more perfect cream – of which they brought us a quart jug – could be found anywhere, and that travellers must indeed be hard to please who could not live for a few days on such excellent farm produce, even though they might have to dispense with the luxuries of fish, flesh, and fowl.

Three A.M. is a little early to turn out of bed, but when one is travelling through the wilds one must do many trying things, so we all got up at that hour, which, judging by our feelings, seemed to us still midnight. The sun, however, was of a different opinion, he was up and shining brilliantly long before any of us.

We had previously told our Finnish student the joke of having tried to order hot water over night, and, after much explanation and many struggles to make her understand, how the girl had returned with a teacup full of the boiling liquid, and declared that the greatest trouble we were forced to encounter in Finland was to get any water to wash with, more especially warm.

He smiled, but was not daunted. We heard him up early, and imagined he was arranging things with the coachman and ordering breakfast – for we cannot ever be sufficiently grateful to our Finnish friends for their kindness and thoughtfulness in managing everything for our comfort from the first day of our stay in Finland till the last; but he had done more than this, and apparently made up his mind that we should never, while he travelled with us, have cause to accuse Finland again of being unable to produce Hett vatten!

At three A.M. a knock came at the door – a most unusual form of proceeding in a country where every one walks in without this preliminary – and, having opened it in reply, we found a buxom maid standing with an enormous jug of boiling water, and a yet more enormous wooden pail, such as one might require for a family wash, full of the same boiling liquid, and a tub outside the door from which volumes of steam were rising. It was for the English ladies, she said.

Our student had paid us out, and we felt ashamed and sorry.

As we sat at breakfast we watched a girl drawing water from the well. Every house in Finland, be it understood, has its well, over which is a raised wooden platform something like a table with a hole in the middle for the bucket to pass through. A few feet back a solid pillar stands on the ground, through the fork-like top of which a pine-tree trunk is fixed, generally about thirty feet long. It is balanced in such a way that at the one end of it a large stone is tied to make it heavy, while suspended from a fine point, standing in mid-air, appear a series of wooden posts joined together by iron hasps so as to form a long chain or cord, to the bottom end of which the bucket is attached. Thus the bucket with its wooden string is, when filled with water, equivalent in weight to the stone at the other end of the pump. In fact, the whole thing is made on the principle of a pair of scales.

The girl seized the empty bucket, pulled it over the hole, and, hanging on to the jointed poles with all her weight, sent the bucket down some thirty feet into the well below. By this time the stone at the far end of the pole was up in mid-air. When she thought the bucket was full she let go, and immediately it began to rise at the same time as the stone at the other end began to descend, and in a moment the beautiful well-water reached the surface. Such pumps as these are to be found all over Finland, and their manufacture seems a speciality of the country.

We had considerable fun over the coffee cups at breakfast, for every one of them had written round its border love passages and mottoes in Finnish – another instance of how the love of proverbs and mottoes is noticeable everywhere throughout the country. Our gentleman friends had great jokes over these inscriptions, but they unkindly refused to tell us what they really meant.

We had learnt a good deal of Finnish from sheer necessity, and could manage to order coffee or milk, or to pay what was necessary, but our knowledge of the language did not go far enough for us to understand the wonderful little tales printed round the coffee cups from which we drank. Again we were given silver spoons.

For once we really started at the hour named, and at four o'clock, with a crack of the whip, our ponies galloped out of the yard of the most delightful majatalo we had ever slept in. On we drove through the early hours of the morning, everything looking fresh and bright, the birds singing, the rabbits running across the road. As we passed fields where the peasants were gathering in their hay, or ploughing with an old-fashioned hand-plough, such as was used in Bible days and is still common in Morocco, we wondered what Finnish peasants would think of all our modern inventions for saving labour, especially that wonderful machine where the wheat goes in at the top and comes out corn at one end, chaff in the middle, and straw, bound ready for sale, at the other. We drove on till nine o'clock, by which time we were all ready for another meal. Jogging along country roads aids digestion, and by nine we had forgotten we had ever eaten any breakfast at all. We had really arranged to spend some hours at our next halting-place, in fact not to leave until the cool of the evening, so as to rest both our horses and ourselves, and be saved the glare and the heat. But tired as our animals seemed, and weary though we were, that station proved impossible. We had to stay for a couple of hours, for it would have been cruel to ask the ponies to leave sooner, but we were indeed thankful that we had not arranged to spend the night in such an awful hole. To relate the horror of that majatalo would be too fearful a task. Suffice it to say everything was filthy, and we felt sick at heart when drinking milk and coffee at the place. Worse still, our white bread had come to an end, and we had to eat some of the native rye bread. The housewife and all the women in the house being terrible even to look upon, it seemed perfectly awful to eat bread that they had made, but yet we were so hungry. Reader, pity our plight.

Though the sun was blazing, we dare not sit inside, for the little tufts of hair tied round the legs of the tables a foot and a half from the floor found here practical use. These fur protectors are often used in Suomi to keep insects from crawling up the legs of the table, but, in this case, when we bent down to look at the bit of ba-lamb's fur so tied, we saw to our horror that it was full of animal life. Calling the attention of one of our Finnish friends to this fact, he told us that there was a saying that none of these creepy things would come across filbunke, and that a friend of his, travelling in these Northern parts, had on one occasion been so pestered that he fetched a wooden mug of filbunke, and with a wooden spoon made a ring on the floor with the soured milk, inside which he sat in peace, the crawling things remaining on the outside of his charmed circle.

"And," he added, laughing, "we will go and fetch filbunke, if you like, and then you can all sit inside rings of your own."

"No," we replied, "instead of doing that, let us get away from here as quickly as possible."

Out we sallied, therefore, to ask the coachman how soon he could be ready to drive on to Kajana.

How typical. There was one of the lads, aged thirteen, lying on his back, flat out on the wooden steps of the house, smoking hard at a native pipe; his felt hat was pulled down over his eyes, his top boots were standing beside him, and over them hung the rags he used for stockings.

"Go on," he said. "Oh! we cannot go on till this afternoon, it's too hot."

"But," remonstrated Grandpapa, "it is not so very far to Kajana, and the ladies are anxious to get to the end of their journey."

"Quite impossible," he replied, "the horses must rest."

Wherein he certainly was right; the poor brutes had come well, and, after all, whatever the horrors and inconveniences may be to oneself, one cannot drive dumb animals to death, so, therefore, at that majatalo we stayed, weary and hungry prisoners for hours. Only think of it!

Oh, how glad we were to shake the dust of that station from our feet, and how ridiculous it seemed to us that such dirty untidy folk could exist in the present day, to whom "Cleanliness is next to godliness" was an unknown fact.

We found some amusement, however, for the family had just received in a box-case a sewing-machine – a real English sewing-machine. A "traveller" had been round even to this sequestered spot, possessed of sufficient eloquence to persuade the farmer to buy his goods, and it certainly did seem remarkable that in such a primitive homestead, with its spinning-wheel and hand-loom in one corner, a sewing machine and a new American clock should stand in the other.

On we jogged; but, be it owned, so many consecutive days' driving and so few hours' rest, in carts without springs or seats and without backs, were beginning to tell, and we were one and all finding our backbones getting very limp. The poor little ponies too began to show signs of fatigue, but luckily we at last reached a hilltop which showed we were drawing close to the end of our kärra journey. We pulled up for a while to give the poor creatures time to breathe, and for us to see the wide-spreading forests around. The view extended for miles and miles, and undulating away to the horizon, nothing appeared but pine-trees.

No one can imagine the vastness, the black darkness, the sombre grandness of those pine forests of Finland.

Then the descent began; there were terribly steep little bits, where the one idea of the ponies seemed to be to fly away from the wheels that were tearing along behind them. We held on tightly to the blue knitted reins, for the descents in some places were so severe that even those sure-footed little ponies were inclined to stumble – fatigue was the cause, no doubt; – but if our own descent were exciting, it was yet more alarming to look back at the kärra following, too close for comfort, behind us, literally waggling from side to side in their fast and precipitous descent, encircled by clouds of dust.

Kajana at last. What a promised haven of rest after travelling for days in springless carts, happily through some of the most beautiful and interesting parts of Finland.

CHAPTER XVII

TAR-BOATS

Tar hardly sounds exciting; but the transport of tar can be thrilling.

We were worn out and weary when we reached Kajana, where we were the only visitors in the hotel, and, as the beds very rapidly proved impossible, we women-folk confiscated the large – and I suppose only – sitting-room as our bed-chamber. A horsehair sofa, of a hard old-fashioned type, formed a downy couch for one; the dining-table, covered by one of the travelling-rugs, answered as a bed – rather of the prison plank-bed order – for number two; and the old-fashioned spinet, standing against the wall, furnished sleeping accommodation for number three. We had some compunctions on retiring to rest, because, after our luxurious beds had been fixed up, as the Americans would say, we discovered there was no means whatever for fastening the door, – it was, as usual, minus bolts and locks; but as Kajana was a quiet sleepy little town, and no one else was staying in the hotel but our own men-folk on the other side of the courtyard, weary and worn out with our jolty drive, and our waterfall bath, we lay down to rest. We were all half asleep when the door suddenly opened and in marched two men. They stood transfixed, for of course it was quite light enough for them to see the strange positions of the three occupants of the sitting-room; and the sight scared them even more than their appearance surprised us, for they turned and fled. We could not help laughing, and wondering what strange tales of our eccentricities would enliven the town that night.

Descending the rapids of the Uleåborg river in a tar-boat is one of the most exciting experiences imaginable. Ice-boat sailing in Holland, skilöbnung (snow-shoeing) in Norway, tobogganing in Switzerland, horse-riding in Morocco – all have their charms and their dangers – but, even to an old traveller, a tar-boat and a cataract proved new-found joys. There is a vast district in Finland, about 65° North latitude, extending from the frontier of Russia right across to Uleåborg on the Gulf of Bothnia where tar plays a very important rôle; so important, in fact, that this large stretch of land, as big or bigger than Wales, is practically given over to its manufacture and transport.