The Spirit of Stockholm
SOMEWHERE in Stockholm there is a little park, rather deserted, with some white statues, a fountain and a kiosk. I discovered it first, I remember, two years ago on a hot August day, and I sank then into its green, comforting, silence with a happy sigh of gratitude.
With that same sigh I sink into it again now, here in this city of blue rippling water and green forest. There is a peace here that cannot, I verily believe, be found just now in any other town in Europe. To-morrow I must go on again, but for twenty-four hours at least there will be at my side the spirit of this place, assuring me that the world is just as it used to be—how many ages ago?
On the afternoon that I left Hull the rain came down, a hissing torrent. On the boat we were a cosmopolitan company, two Russians, three Swedes, five Englishmen and a German. We all of us tried to forget that a week earlier the "Runo" had been sunk by a mine, and the captain told us that it would be four days at least before we reached Christiana. We did our best, I am sure, to be pleasant to one another, but we were suspicious and detestably conscious of our German companion. Mines, Louvain, Belgian refugees, Dinant—and here he was, stout, with large spectacles, mild blue eyes, the mouth of a sentimental child, eyeing us now apologetically, now almost fiercely, responding suddenly to some little courtesy on our part, remembering that we were his enemies, and might, had things been otherwise ordered, be at this moment engaged in splitting open his head with a shell. No, it was not pleasant.
On the third day our ship was whirled into a storm, and we were all of us, I think, very ill. I know that Herr S. was horribly indisposed, because I could hear him, from my cabin, calling loudly upon his Fatherland. Rolling upon my own berth, sympathizing daily with him, I knew that in seasickness, at any rate, there are no nationalities.
Then, approaching Christiana, we slipped suddenly into a gray mirror of a sea, above it a sky of smoking, flaming scarlet. Herr S. appreciated deeply its splendour, sighing, wiping his spectacles, seeing in it who knows what "daemmerung" of hopes and placidities and pleasures, all the tranquility of a contended life, flung at one man's call into limbo. I now that he would have turned and demanded my admiration had we not, of course, been enemies.
In Christiana one was still pursued. The hotel was littered with German newspapers. On every side there are huge headlines, "90,000 Russian Prisoners," "Rising of Natives in India," "Socialist Disaffection in England." The world is thundering at one, "Defeat, defeat, defeat." Seasickness and mines are a poor prelude just now to German newspapers. During my night journey into Stockholm my carriage was invaded by two German gentlemen, who, seeing that I was English, turned on the electric light and discussed German victories with pointed and over-eager volubility. Sleep was nothing to them. They sang their war song until seven of the morning. As the train slipped into the Stockholm station they turned to me, and with an exaggerated bow wished me good-morning.
And here, suddenly, the plague is stayed. I know, sitting in my little green park, that Stockholm has preserved its soul in peace, and is telling me that so I must preserve mine. That is not to say that Stockholm is not interested in the war. Its papers have huge headlines, in many windows there are maps with coloured flags, there are military photographs in the bookshops, and little eager groups of argument at the street corners. Moreover, Sweden is pro-German. Russia, with Finland in its grasp, is too near at home; the Baltic is too narrow. Stockholm is conscious of the war, but the war has not touched its spirit, that remote, beautiful, plangent tranquility born of the thick forests and the myriad islands and the lakes that are about it.
Between the dark, cool trees of my little park there is a break, and against the blue evening sky a white curving bridge runs. Up and down this bridge little toy figures, moving swiftly, but to me, so far from them, with a remote silence, like coloured marionettes, pass and repass. Those moving figures are all of the living world that I can see, and the evening peace finds its voice in the measured note of a church bell.
To-morrow I cross the Baltic. Already two Swedish steamers have been stopped in their crossing and searched for Englishmen; from one of them thirty Englishmen were politely handed over to the courtesy of German detention. By this time to-morrow I may be a German prisoner, and in any case, if I escape that fate, I shall, in Petrograd, be once more plunged into the whirlpool of the war. Here, for a day, I have been encouraged to believe that the time will surely come when once again the old values, the old friendships, the old sympathies and understandings will assert themselves, that flaming, angry sky above Christiana giving no more the true colours of the picture than the sacking of Louvain represents the normal character of mankind.
Beyond my park there is one of Stockholm's many quays. I cannot see it from where I am sitting, but I can fancy its colours, the piled wooden green trees reflected in the waters of the opposite shore, the blue ferry-boats, the red and black funnels of the steamers. To-morrow once again I shall search the papers for news of the war, shall be alarmed at this rumour and rejoice at that, shall see in the streets of petrograd the mourning that the women of Russia are wearing for their sons. To-night the little coloured figures dance across the fairy-bridge, the gold of a splendid sunset steals into the dark chequer-board of the trees …
They are playing, I see, "Rigoletto" at the Opera House.
