The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

into.
    Â 
    April 4, Hotel d’Angleterre:
    Quiet run this morning down the Øresund in the rain, with Sweden dim on the left and Denmark dim on the right. Hamlet’s castle at Helsingør loomed up awhile, guarding the narrows, and then a stretch of shore with villages and houses like Monopoly pieces among the leafless trees, and then Copenhagen, the harbor full of traffic, the Little Mermaid wet and cold on her rock, and finally we nudged and snuggled against a pier overhung with a railed platform on which hundreds of people smiled and waved and held up signs: Velkommen til Danmark. Velkommen Doktor Holger Hansen. Velkommen Onkel Oskar. Jeg Elsker Dig, Kristin Møllerup.
    The rain came down on them, half of them without umbrellas, and their wet faces shone, and they cheered and waved and held up their banners till the rain melted the paper and ran the paint. Altogether the healthiest, happiest people we have ever seen. We feel like something brought up by grappling hooks, but we are happy to accept their wavings and welcomings as if they were meant for us personally. Escaped from the deep. Praise the Lord.
    As I write this, Ruth has gone hunting an apothek or some place where she can buy toothpaste and postcards. She is all recovered, I am still woozy. I sit here by the window overlooking the big square called Kongens Nytorv, nibbling Rullemops and drinking akvavit, and take a look at Copenhagen. The center of the square is all one leafless park. Across it I can see some copper spires, and some castle towers, and narrow streets winding away from the square. All around Kongens Nytorv crimson banners hang out the windows into the rain—some holiday, I assume—and a postman in a crimson coat is moving from door to door along the south side. Like the British, the Danes seem to have discovered the functions of crimson in a gray climate.
    Bells are bonging the hour of four from a dozen steeples. Below me, people buy sausages from a street wagon. I pour another two fingers of cold akvavit and pick up another piece of slimy herring. I never much liked herring, but this is suddenly delicious. It goes with the akvavit in one of those subtle food-and-drink marriages like octopus, feta cheese, and ouzo in Greece. It is a form of instant naturalization. I am very glad to be here.
    Just now the door opened and a maid, evidently expecting an empty room, started in. I said something in English. A wave of red washed upward from her neck, a blush so dark it looked painful, and she scrambled out, falling over her own feet. New, probably, a country girl just learning to make beds and scrub bathtubs and bring in morning coffee. I can’t avoid the feeling that she is just such a girl as my mother was when she first got up the courage—and what an act of courage it had to be—to spend her savings on a third-class ticket to America, all by herself. I have been half joking about going back to the village she came from—Bregninge, I don’t even know what island it’s on—but I’m sure now I will. Tomorrow we will start negotiations for a car, and call on the rental agent whose name we got from the cherry grower on the Stockholm. We will get maps, guidebooks, phrase books. Ruth swears she will not try to learn Danish, but that doesn’t have to hinder me. Already I can say Ja tak and vaer saa god and en smuk pige, and I am getting pretty good at the glottal stop.
    On the corner, carpenters are working on the second floor of a building. I watch a boy, an apprentice he has to be, come from the street with bottles of beer spread fanwise between the fingers of both hands. Eight bottles, he carries. He disappears under the scaffolding, reappears after a while on the second floor. The carpenters lay down their tools and each takes a beer. They pass the opener around, they hoist their bottles toward one another and tilt them to their mouths. They look like a bugle corps playing “To the Colors,”