The Roogö Islands

We did not call at Roogö in Racundra, for we were hurrying to get southwards to the places we had not yet visited. But the year before, in Kittiwake, we had sailed round between the two islands, and had landed at the jetty that you can see from the quay at Baltic Port and walked all over Little Roogö. The inhabitants of these islands, men, women and even pigs, are patriotic Swedes. When I first rounded up there, three aged men and a pig strolled out on the jetty to inspect us, and began at once by asking me if I spoke Swedish. I told them in Swedish that I did not, or only very little, but they were persuaded that I was only teasing them, and when at last they were convinced they lost all interest and strolled disappointed away. The pig remained on guard, and when I landed, resented my presence, worrying round me like a good housedog. I am sure if I had been a Swede he would have wagged his tail and licked my hand.

A day or two later, however, Leslie joined us from Reval, and we crossed to the island again. He had lived in Christiania and Copenhagen and was sure of being able to make himself understood. A man on the jetty who had watched us sailing over had disappeared by the time we arrived. I suppose he was one of those whom I had disappointed by not being a Swede. But Leslie went boldly up past the little windmill to the first of the wooden cottages to buy eggs. He returned discomfited with the news that this cottage was inhabited exclusively by widows who did not keep hens. I had gone farther and found another cottage, outside which some sort of Sunday parliament was in progress, half a dozen men and two or three women sitting on logs and stools, the men smoking long pipes. Spurred by competition as a linguist with Leslie, I shouted out boldly, “Har ni naugra egg?” with electrical effect. A woman with a white shawl over her head leapt up and disappeared on the run towards some outhouses. The gathering broke up. Everyone slipped away and ostentatiously busied himself or herself with something or other, and when Leslie and the Cook came up they refused to believe that I had done anything but terrify the population. Gradually the men and women, having as it were put themselves in the right by being found busy, deserted their imaginary occupations and came half-heartedly towards us. In the background I could see the fleet runner in the white shawl and green petticoat darting from outhouse to outhouse with a basket. An old humpbacked witch, certainly not over four and a half feet high, with a bright maroon shirt hanging loose outside her petticoat, hobbled from a cottage to stare at us from afar, and presently the egg-gatherer, shielded by a group of friends, drifted towards the gate where we stood.

The same questions were asked that had been put to me on my first coming by the old men on the jetty. Were we Swedish? Where had we come from? How long had we been in Baltic Port? My Swedish, having obtained eggs, faded away behind Leslie’s Scandinavian fluency. We bought butter, but had no paper to put it in. The old man who sold it us said at once that we could take their saucer and bring it back in the evening when we had done with it, a remarkable proof of the honesty of the islanders and their consequent belief in the honesty of others. In Russia such a loan would have been unthinkable. On the mainland here, the canny lender would have asked for a deposit of at least twice the value of the saucer. We settled the matter by putting the butter in the biggest of our tin mugs.

We walked out of this village of Storaby together with three mottled cows, driven by a woman with a handkerchief on her head of red, orange and white, a deep rich green skirt and a bodice of bright purple, flaming like a tulip. As we walked we were joined by other women and other cows, until at last there was a considerable herd, driven by four women with long sticks over an open space of moorland, green grass and swamp, with grey rocks showing through the turf. Fields on either hand were enclosed with stone walls built without mortar, like our walls in Lancashire and Westmoreland, but lower, because the stones are round, sea-worn boulders and harder to fit together than the flat slates at home. Presently we broke away from our companions and made for the woods to get out of the wind and find a place for dinner. The woods were even wetter than the open country, carpeted with moss that squelched under the feet. They were not the pinewoods of the mainland, but birchwoods, and under their silver stems, wherever the ground was not a morass, were lilies of the valley. Near the far edge of the woods we stopped and cooked our dinner under the shadow of a great rock on a good fire of birch, which is the best of all trees for the heat that is in it. Climbing to the top of the rock and standing upon it, I could just see the glint of water, and beyond it the dark woods of the other or Greater Roogö.

After dinner, a pipe and some flower-gathering, we went slowly out of the woods and across one stone wall after another until we came down on the western shore of the island and found a scene of astonishing strange beauty. The shore, flat, with scattered boulders, seemed to slip unwillingly into the sea. The water, dotted with rocks, so that it looked as if one could walk ankle-deep from one island to the other, was quite smooth. And in the middle of this shining water, a quarter of a mile away, was a green islet, with a little wood at its southern end, and behind this wood, her bows and tilted bowsprit showing and her tall masts heeling over above the trees, was a black, two-masted sailing-ship, aground. Beyond were the bluer waters of the bay, ruffled with wind; beyond them again the wooded shore of the mainland. It might have been the opening scene of a boy’s story of a pirate island. Nor did the scene lose any of its romantic character as we came nearer and saw the black tarred ship reflected in shallow water, through which the grass rose, disturbing her image, while at her stern a ladder was set with its foot resting on the green meadow. How she got there I could not say, nor how she proposed to depart thence. The waters of the Baltic deepen along these shores, when the wind is from the N. and W., but I did not think that they could rise so high as to float this vessel, which, undamaged, her anchor out as if in deep water, her masts and rigging intact and fretting the sky, seemed by the ladder, with a gesture of renunciation, to have given up the sea for good and made the land her resting-place forever.

We walked on southwards along the shore, looking at the windmills, which are many and small, like large dovecots, to the village of Lillaby, which, though called the lesser, is really the larger of the two on the island. It is a fishing village, and on the shore close by are many little artificial harbours, each big enough for one or at most two small open boats. At the head of each of these little shallow landing-places is a shed, hung with the nets and other instruments. There were long nets on hoops, with wide wings opening from their mouths, for the catching of pike, and the usual very fine nets, like gossamer, some of them stained a faint blue, for catching the little silver killos which, salted or preserved in oil, are a staple of Estonian diet. Then there were the buoys for the nets⁠—wooden buoys, each one carved so that its owner would know it; buoys shaped like dumbbells, balls, crosses, with flags and without flags, lettered and unlettered.

The village itself is a group of little wooden cottages, painted for the most part yellow, with a few blue ones among them, each one set higgledy-piggledy in a little bit of ground with apple-trees, which just then were in full bloom. It seemed at first deserted, but as we turned up towards it from the edge of the sea we saw two old men leaning on a gate in conversation. Both of these men, and a younger man who joined them later, were dressed like sailors, in blue striped jerseys under their coats. Leslie, as Scandinavian scholar, was thrust forward as spokesman, and had a great success, fully making up for my first failure on the quay at Storaby. It seemed that news of our arrival had already crossed the island. They knew that we were English, and the elder of the two, evidently the philosopher of the place, told us that it was no wonder we could make ourselves understood, since Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, German and English were all from the same stem and were the five great languages of the world. Politely trying to make us feel at home and among friends, he asked how we were getting on with our coal strike and wanted us to tell him about Ireland, which he confounded with Courland, though when Leslie said that the Courlanders were now independent and called their country Latvia, he at once explained that he meant a country somewhere that belonged to England.

The inhabitants of Lillaby are very timorous of strangers. Besides the three fishermen, we could not get speech of a soul, though we saw several peeping at us through cottage windows as we passed on through a seemingly deserted village. We wanted water, and saw a girl in an orchard by a pump, so the Cook went in there to ask leave to draw some for herself, but the girl rose and fled silent into the cottage, and the Cook filled her can at the pump and came away. Afterwards we saw the girl’s head, looking after us round the corner of the wall.

We did, however, have one other interview, but that was with a pig. We had come on the nearest thing to a street to be found on the island⁠—low stone walls, with a mud lane between them, and barns and painted cottages on either side. I wanted to photograph it, but wanted something in the foreground, and since there were no inhabitants, and I remembered that rather hostile pig I had met on my first landing, said aloud, “If only there were a pig.” At that moment we turned the corner of a barn, and there in the very middle of the lane lay a pig indeed. It was such a pig as that described in a novel of the Goncourts’, which slept a sleep that could only be due to a heart of gold and a stomach of iron. It lay on the edge of a shadow, in the muddiest bit of road, its forepaws idly crossed, like the hands of a gentlewoman resting from her knitting. She (for it was a feminine pig) raised her head and grunted at us. The ice was broken. I approached her with affectionate words, camera in hand, begging her to move a yard, no more, into the sunshine. She understood me perfectly, moved into the sunshine, and took up one pose after another which she judged characteristic of her temperament. I asked her to snuffle in the mud and she snuffled in the mud. I took off my hat to the pig and thanked her, and she, after showing that she was not to be outdone by her owners in kindness to those who could talk Swedish to the inhabitants of Roogö (for I feel sure that if it had not been for Leslie’s conversational successes she would have treated me in the manner of her brother of Storaby), returned sedately to her place, judged the lengthening shadows, chose the dampest spot that had recently been warmed by the sun, and resumed her calm and contemplative attitude of benevolent repose. Unfortunately every one of the photographs was a failure.

We met no one else on the island and came out from the village on wide open grassland, and over that to the woods, where we gathered lilies of the valley, made fire on a stone, and tea, which we drank squatting on our heels, which squelched beneath us in the marsh, while a woodpecker shrieked and jeered in the birch-trees overhead. Then, as evening fell, we hurried back to Kittiwake, made sail again, and returned to our anchorage in Baltic Port.