Through Finland in Carts

On this island the wild arum lilies we had before noticed grew profusely, while the vegetation everywhere was beautiful, and yet eight or ten feet of snow covered the ground all through the long winter. As we left Holy Island, it was past ten o'clock at night, and yet what could that be? We were far away from land, and still there seemed to be land quite close to us. What could it mean? It was a mirage. Such a mirage is sometimes seen on the vast Ladoga lake as in the plains of Egypt, and vastly beautiful it was. A fitting ending to a strangely beautiful day we thought, as we softly glided over the water.

It was the longest day of the year, and when at eleven P.M. we neared Sordavala the sun had not set. Its glorious reflections and warm colourings stirred our hearts' inmost depths, and bathed us in a sweet content as we sat silent and awed, dreaming of the strangely pathetic story of that beautiful boy.

CHAPTER V

SORDAVALA, OR A MUSICAL FESTIVAL

Terror had entered our souls when we read in the Nya Pressen, the day before leaving for the musical festival at Sordavala, the following: "Sordavala has only thirteen hundred inhabitants, and some ten thousand people have arrived for the Juhla. They are sleeping on floors and tables, and any one who can get even a share in a bed must be more than satisfied. Food cannot be procured, and general discomfort reigns." This was not cheerful; indeed the prospect seemed terrible, more especially when, after getting up at five o'clock, and driving some miles to Wiborg, we arrived at the station only to find the train crammed from end to end, and not a chance of a seat anywhere. Confusion reigned, every one was struggling with every one else for places, and the scrimmage was as great as though it were "a cheap trip to Margate and back" in the height of the season. There were only second and third-class carriages, with a sort of fourth, which was said to hold "forty men or eight horses," and had no windows, but was provided with rough benches and odd boxes for the passengers to sit on. In such a terrible railway carriage all the members of the brass band travelled with their music stands and instruments.

We ran from end to end of the platform in despair. It was the only train of the day, and full. Even Frau von Lilly, with all her Swedish and all her Finnish, could not succeed in finding places. At last an official stepped forward, and, touching his hat, remarked —

"There are no seats to be had in any compartment, but, as so many persons desire to go on, we shall probably send a relief train in an hour."

"Are we to wait on the chance of 'probably'?"

"Yes, I think you must. In fact, I am almost sure you must; but in any case you cannot go in that; it is just off."

And sure enough away steamed number one before the stolid Finns could make up their minds to despatch number two; nevertheless, an hour afterwards the relief train was ready and comparatively empty, so we travelled in peace.

All these slow arrangements and avoidances of committal to any announcement of fact, constantly reminded us of Scotland – indeed, it is quite remarkable how closely a Finn and a Highlander resemble each other in appearance, in stolid worth, and dogged deliberation; how they eat porridge or gröt, oatcake or knäckebröd, and have many other strange little peculiarities of manner and diet in common.

We got under weigh at last, and settled down for a few restful hours in a comfortable Finnish railway carriage. The train, ever dignified and deliberate of pace, had just passed Jaakkima in the South-East of Finland, almost due North from Petersburg. The heat was great that June day, and here and there, as the engine puffed through the pine forests, dense columns of smoke rising from the woods near the railway lines alarmed all who beheld, and warned the neighbouring peasants to dig trenches, which alone could stay the fierce flames, rapidly gathering force, that meant destruction.

At many stations we paused, not necessarily for passengers to alight or ascend, but to stock our engine with fuel. There, stacked high and wide and broad, was the wood cut into pieces about two feet long, intended to feed our locomotive, and a couple of men were always in readiness to throw it into the tender as quickly as possible, compatible with the slowness of the Finn.

The heat in the train was so intense that it made us feel drowsy, but, as we fortunately had the end compartment in the corridor-carriage, we were able to open the door and get a breath of air. A bridge somewhat insecure-looking joined us to the next waggon, and a very amusing scene presented itself. The guard was flirting with a Finnish maid, a typical peasant, with a comely figure, set off by a well-fitting bodice. She had high cheek-bones and a wondrous round moon face; a large, good-tempered mouth filled with beautiful teeth, a good complexion, and weak, thin, straight flaxen hair, combed back from a very high forehead. She wore the usual handkerchief over her head. Had she been dark instead of fair, judging by the width of her face and the lines of her eyes, she might have been a Chinese; but to an English mind she appeared anything but beautiful, although clean and healthy looking. She, like many others of her class, had the neatest hands and feet imaginable, although the latter were encased in black mohair boots with elastic sides, a very favourite foot-covering in Finland.

All along the line there ran a sort of tumbledown wooden fencing, loosely made, and about four or five feet high, meant to keep back the snow in winter. The very thought of snow was refreshing on that broiling day.

As we gasped with the heat, and pondered over the scrambled meal at Jaakkima, we listened to the strangely sad but entrancing singing of a number of peasants in the next waggon, all bound like ourselves for Sordavala, although they were really rehearsing for the Festival, while we were drowsily proceeding thither merely as spectators.

How they flirted those two on the bridge outside our carriage. Spite of the hard outlines of her face, and her peculiarly small Finnish eyes, the maiden managed to ogle and smile upon the guard standing with his hands upon the rail; so slender was the support, that it seemed as if he might readily fall off the train and be killed by the wheels below. The flirtation was not only on her side, for presently he took her hand, a fat little round hand, with a golden circle upon one of the fingers, which denoted betrothal or marriage, and pressed it fondly. We could not understand their Finnish speech; but there is a language comprehensible to all, in every clime. That the pair were in love no one could for a moment doubt, and that they heeded nothing of those quaint old Finnish chants, distinctly audible from the opposite carriage, was evident, for they talked on and on.

We passed Niva; here and there the waters of a lake glinted in the sunshine, or a river wound away to the sea, strewn with floating wood, as though its waters were one huge raft.

The singing ceased; save the merry laugh of the Finnish girl, nothing but the click-cluck-click of the wheels was audible. The guard leaned over her, whispered in her ear, then, as if yielding to some sudden impulse, pressed her to his heart; and, still to the accompaniment of that endless click-cluck-click, implanted a kiss on her full round lips. For a moment they stood thus, held in warm embrace, muttering those sweet nothings which to lovers mean all the world.

Suddenly the door behind them opened, and one of the singers, nervous and excited from the long practice of his national airs, came upon the bridge to let the gentle zephyrs cool his heated brow.

All smiles, this sunburnt blonde, whose hair fell in long locks, cut off straight, like the ancient saints in pictures, stood before us – his pink flannel shirt almost matching the colour of his complexion.

In a moment all was changed; his happy smile vanished into a glance of deadly hate, the colour fled from his face, leaving him ashy-pale, fire literally shot from his eyes as he gazed upon his affianced bride; but he did not speak.

His hand violently sought his belt, and in a moment the long blade of one of those Scandinavian puukko– knives all peasants use – gleamed in the sunshine. For an instant he balanced it on high, and then, with a shriek more wild than human, he plunged the blade deep down into his betrothed's white breast.

Like a tiger the guilty guard sprang upon him; madly they fought while the girl lay still and senseless at their feet, a tiny stream of blood trickling from her breast.

Northern rage once roused is uncontrollable; and there, on the bridge of the moving train, those two men struggled for mastery, till – yes, yes – the light railing gave way, and together the hater and the hated fell over the side, and were cut to pieces by the wheels.

What a moment! a groan, a piercing shriek, rent the air!

Then, with a gasp, hot and cold, and wet by turns, I woke to find it was all a dream!

The run to Sordavala proved a hot and tedious journey of seven hours, but even dusty railway journeys must come to an end, and we arrived at our destination in Eastern Finland about three o'clock.

The crowd at the country station was horrible, and the clamour for cabs, carts, and the general odds and ends of vehicles in waiting to transfer us to our destination, reminded us much of Ober Ammergau on a smaller scale.

This Sordavala festival is really the outcome of an old religious ceremony, just as the Welsh Eisteddfod is a child of Druidical meetings for prayer and song. In ancient days bards sang and prayed, and now both in Finland and in England the survival is a sort of musical competition.

Our Eisteddfod, encouraged by the landed proprietors of Wales, forms a useful bond between landlord and tenant, employer and employed. It is held yearly, in different towns, and prizes are given for choir singing, for which fifty to a hundred voices will assemble from one village, all the choirs joining together in some of the great choruses. Rewards are also given for knitting, for the best national costumes, for solo singing, violin and harp playing, for original poems in Welsh, and for recitations.

In Finland the competition, strangely enough, also takes place once a year, and dates back to the old Runo Singers, who orally handed down the national music from generation to generation. Each time the Festival is, as in Wales, held in a different town, the idea being to raise the tastes of the populace, and to encourage the practice of music among a thoroughly musical people. Clubs or choirs are sent from all corners of Finland to compete; the old national airs – of which there are hundreds, ay thousands – are sung, and that unique native instrument the Kantele is played. For hundreds of years these Runo Singers have handed on the songs of their forefathers by word of mouth, and have kept their history alive.

It was Elias Lönnrot who collected these Kantele songs. For years and years he travelled about the country gathering them together by ear and word of mouth, and, having weeded out the repetitions, he edited the famous epical Kalevala, and later collected quantities of other lyric ballads from the heathen times, and published them as Kanteletar. Thus much ancient music and verse was revived that had almost been forgotten. But of this we must speak in the next chapter.

That Finland is thoroughly musical may be inferred from the dozens of choirs sent to the Sordavala Festival from all parts of the country. The peasant voices, in spite of being but slightly trained, or at all events trained very little, sing together wonderfully. Indeed, it was surprising to find how they could all take their proper parts, and keep to them; but the supreme delight, perhaps, of the Festival was the student corps, composed of fifty men from the University of Helsingfors, who sang together most beautifully, the choir being conducted by one of themselves. They had some glorious voices among them, and as they sang the national airs of Finland, marching backwards and forwards to the park, their feet keeping time with their music, the effect of their distant singing in the pine-woods was most enthralling.

Strangely enough, when they went to sing on the public platform raised in the park for the occasion, they wore evening dress and white gloves. Dress-clothes are somewhat of a rarity in Finland, as they are in many other continental countries; but there they stood in a semicircle on the dais, each man with his white velvet student cap in his hand, and, to the spectators, standing a little in the distance, the effect of snowy-white shirt, white gloves, and white cap shown up in the glancing sunbeams by black clothes, was somewhat funny.

The performers met with tremendous applause, and certainly deserved it. Although German students often sing beautifully, and are indeed famous for their rendering of the Volkslieder, those from Helsingfors sang as well if not better.

We often dined at the same hotel where they lodged, during the week, and when they marched in they sang a grace. After they had finished their dinner, they generally, before leaving, sang two or three songs by special request of visitors dining at the various tables.

Morning, noon, and night those students sang! Small bands of them went to meet the trains coming in, if they expected friends, and stood upon the platform lustily singing their welcome. They went to see other friends off, and, amidst much doffing of caps, they sang farewell songs. They marched in torchlight processions – although the torches were not very successful when all was daylight – and everywhere they went they met with the greatest enthusiasm.

Modern singing at the Festival, in parts and glees, was very good, showing the great musical talent of the people, while especially delightful were the out-of-door concerts. Another charm of the Festival consisted in the exhibition of peasants' work.

As we entered the museum where we were to hear the Kantele Concert, we stood transfixed. At a bare wooden table a quite, quite old man with long-flowing locks was sitting with his elbows on the boards, his hands stretched over his Kantele, which he was playing delightfully.

The small flat musical instrument reminded one of the zither of Tyrol, while the strange airs bore some similarity to the bagpipe music of Scotland, at least in time, which, like the piper, the old man beat with his foot. His blue eyes were fixed on the wall opposite, with a strange, weird, far-off look, and never for one moment did he relax his gaze. He seemed absolutely absorbed by his music, and as the queer old figure – a sort of Moses with his long beard – played his native instrument, amid the quaint trappings of the museum for background, we felt enthralled by the sombre surroundings and curious apparition, who might have been Wäinämöinen himself, the mythological god of music in Finland.

Others followed; they all played charmingly, and their usually sombre faces seemed quite changed by the sounds of music. Music has always played an important part in the history of Finland – for good be it owned, and not, as Tolstoi suggested, to arouse the vilest passions.

Look at the faces of the people dowered with such legends. The Runo Singers live in another world from ours. Theirs is the land of poetry and romance; theirs the careless, happy dream of life. The things of this world, the sordid littleness, the petty struggles, the very fight for bread, they wot not of, for they are content with little. Socialism and Syndicalism have not robbed them of life's joys.

They sit and sing, and dream. See the far-away look on yon man's features; see how intensely he gazes on some vision painted visibly for him on the blank wall. His very face and mind seem transported to other realms. As the song rises and falls his expression alters, and when he strikes those stirring chords on the Kantele and speaks of bloodshed and war his whole being seems changed.

We noticed one peculiarity with the Runo Singers, viz., that each vocalist repeated the whole line twice. For instance —

"The old man fished." All the others took up the word "fished," and then every one present sang the whole of the line a second time in company with the original singer, again repeating the word fished at the end alone. After that the original singer took up the next line by himself, his friends repeating the last word, ere joining him in the repetition of the line itself.

This seemed to be a speciality, for we noticed it again and again, and, as the performers all chanted well together, the effect was delightful; at the same time the practice unduly lengthens the progress of the songs, some of which go on for hours in a dull, monotonous recitative.

We always had to cross the river at Sordavala whenever we went out to dinner, or attended any of the concerts, as our home was on one bank and the representations and restaurant on the other, and one old Russian boatman was particularly attentive in waiting about for us at the hours when he thought it likely we should require to be ferried over. His bark was decorated, like all the other craft at Sordavala, with silver birch, which, as we knew, is sacred in Finland, and great branches of its silver boughs were cut to ornament the kuiru (native boats). It was wonderful what a pretty effect this gave, for they were not little boughs, but great branches stuck on the rowlocks in such a manner as to make the boat appear a veritable bower. When several craft were on the water together, they had the effect of a beautiful picture, with the red and pink shirts of the boatmen, and the white or black handkerchiefs over the women's heads.

Our old Russian was a wonderful-looking individual, with shaggy grisly locks which fell in regular ringlets upon his shoulders – the sort of man one would love to paint. Every wrinkle upon his face was italicised by dirt, and his faded red shirt appeared a dream of colour for an artist's eye. He was much interested in us all, and at last he ventured to ask Frau von Lilly where the ladies came from.

"England," she replied in Russian.

"Ah! I know about England," he returned; "it has many big towns, and they are strong towns. England is much afraid that our Tzar might take those big towns."

"Do you think so?"

"Yes, I know; but the ladies do not look English, they are so dark. Is it the fierce sun of their country that has burned them so black?"

We laughed; we had heard of many things, but not often of "the fierce sun of England."

"You are not English?" he went on, addressing our friend.

"No," replied Frau von Lilly, "I am a Finlander."

"You? Why, you speak Russian, and you are dark, too; your face is not like a Finn's, it is not wide enough, and your hair is too black. He," pointing to Grandpapa, "is a Finlander, and looks like one."

Fancy such observations from an old Russian boatman. The same wonderful interest in our concerns and welfare was, however, evinced on all sides. The whole town of Sordavala had positively thrilled with excitement when the Committee of the Fête learned that some English people were coming to their Festival. Instantly that Committee wrote to say they would do everything they could for the visitors' "komfort," which they certainly did. They gave us the best rooms in the place, they opened their museums for us that we might view them, privately, they gave us Runo singing entertainments with ourselves for sole audience, they found seats for us in the theatre when every seat was sold, and they treated us in all ways as though we had been princesses. But everything we said was noted, and everything we did cautiously watched; therefore for a short time we tasted something of the horrors of that publicity which must be the bane of existence to royalty.

Long after we had left Sordavala we happened to refer to that town when conversing with some friends.

"Isn't it amusing?" one of them observed. "I saw in the paper the other day that some English people who went to Sordavala for the Festival, had written beforehand a letter to the Manager of the Committee to say "they required a suite of apartments, not higher than the third floor, with a bathroom."

We could not help smiling. It was the old story of "The Three Black Crows" over again! We had been the only English people at the Festival, we had never written a line ourselves to any member of the Committee; a native friend had done so for us, however, saying "that rooms would be required for three ladies, two English, and one Finnish."

One of the features of the Festival which interested us the most was a representation, at a little improvised theatre, of a typical modern Finnish play, by Finnish actors.

Anna Liisa was the piece chosen, because it was a peasant drama. It is written by one of Finland's greatest dramatists – perhaps the greatest in the Finnish language – and a woman!

It was only a small impromptu theatre, packed to suffocation by a most wonderfully sympathetic audience, but as the play was very representative, we give a slight sketch of the subject.

The curtain rose on a little peasant log-hut with its huge chimney, where over a small native stove heated by wood, pots were boiling.

Fixed to a chair was a spinning machine, made of wood and shaped like an umbrella, which twisted round and round, while the bride-elect, with her fair hair hanging down in a plait, sat upon the stage.

Her fiancé says how happy they will be in three weeks when they are married; but Anna Liisa, although desperately in love with her betrothed, hangs back, and refuses to sit upon his knee. At last Johannes coaxes her to his side, and expresses huge delight at the prospect of their future. He tells her how he loves her with a never-fading love, is certain of her goodness, and that she has never loved any one else; he warmly praises her virtue; but, nevertheless, as he speaks, she shudders. Immediately an old woman comes in (Husso), the mother of Mikko, a man with whom Anna Liisa had formerly had some relations; her words are of evil import, for she tells the girl if she marries Johannes, who has just left the room, she will do her harm.

Anna pretending not to care, the old woman becomes furious and threatens her.

"I shall tell of your intrigue with my son. I have but to whisper of a – "

"Mother, no, no."

"But I can, and I will, and more than that, may speak of – "

The girl implores, tells of her real, honest love for Johannes, beseeches Mikko's mother to hold her peace, but the woman is obdurate.

Anna suffers tortures when left alone with her little sister, because the girl will talk of the delights of the coming wedding, and how nice it would be if Anna Liisa had a child for her to dress like a doll. The bride's father and mother, who know nothing of their daughter's intrigue, come and drink coffee, and like true peasants they pour the coffee into a saucer, and putting a bit of sugar into their mouths imbibe the beverage through it, supporting the saucer on five fingers. Thus happily they all sit together – a real representation of life in a peasant home. In the midst of it all the former lover, Mikko, who was once a servant on the farm, comes in and is very insulting to the bridegroom-elect, and very insinuating to Anna Liisa. At last Johannes gets angry; threats ensue. Mikko says "that he was once engaged to a girl and intends to have her" (looking pointedly at Anna Liisa). It seems as if the whole story would be revealed, but at that moment the little sister rushes in to say Mikko's horse has run away, and he goes off, leaving the bride and bridegroom alone, when the former implores Johannes to trust her always and in everything, which he promises to do, greatly wondering the while at her request.

When the second act opens the father and mother are discussing before Anna Liisa her own virtues. They say what a good wife their child will make, they lay stress upon her honesty, integrity, and truthfulness, and while the words sink into the guilty girl's heart like gall and wormwood, she sits and knits with apparent calmness. At last, however, the parents leave the room, and while she is thinking of following them, in comes Mikko. Finding herself alone with Mikko the poor girl entreats him to leave her, to leave her in peace and happiness to marry the man she loves, and if possible to forget her guilty past.