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Title: The Old Town
Author: Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
THE OLD TOWN
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: “POST OFFICE.”]
THE OLD TOWN
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF “THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN,” “HOW
THE OTHER HALF LIVES,” “THE BATTLE WITH
THE SLUM,” ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY W. T. BENDA
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1909
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1909,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1909.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO ALL WHO LOVE
THE OLD HOME AND THE
OLD FRIENDS
THE OLD AND THE NEW
How small this world of ours is, and how close we are, all unknowing,
to one another! I had set out to write the story of the Old Town with
no thought that it touched the land across the seas and its people
in any closer way than through these pages, and through the abiding
affection of a few of its children who, like myself, have wandered far
from home. And while I wrote there fell into my hands the account of
a sale of some building lots half a dozen years ago, in Jersey City,
part of a property which for three hundred years had belonged to the
Van Riepen family. And the Van Riepen name was shown to mean “from
Ribe”--the Old Town itself. This is the historical record:
From the port of Ribe there sailed in April, 1663, a ship bearing
the name _Te Bonte Koe_, meaning “The Brindle Cow,” bound for New
Amsterdam with eighty-nine passengers aboard. Among them was one
Juriaen Tomasson, a citizen of Ribe, who, four years after reaching
these shores, married Pryntje Hermans--to be exact, on May 25, 1667;
and died on September 12, 1695. From their union sprang two well-known
families, one that twisted the Danish name of Jörgen (Juriaen in the
record) into Jurianse, which later became Yearance; and the other the
Van Riepen, or Van Ripen, family, which thus preserved the name of the
Old Town in its purity of pronunciation. For Ribe is pronounced Reebė.
The Germans to this day call it Ripen on their maps.
It did more than preserve the mere name--it kept its spirit alive.
In the chronicles of the Revolution preserved in his home state we
read of a Lieutenant Daniel Van Riepen,[1] one of the descendants of
the Juriaen who came over in _Te Bonte Koe_, being captured by the
Royalists and imprisoned in the old Sugar House with other patriots.
He must have borne the marks of the hardships they suffered there, for
when he was brought before a court-martial in Hoboken to be tried and
shot as a rebel, he was ragged and without uniform or distinctions of
rank. Asked by the presiding judge why he came thus, being an officer,
he made reply: “It is not clothes or arms that make the man.”
“What then?” sneered his accuser, one Van Horst.
“This, sir!” said Van Riepen, and smote his breast proudly. Whereat the
British officer who attended ordered that he be released.
“He is a man,” he said. “Were I ten times a prisoner, I could give no
better answer.” And the patriot went free.
So the old world and the new have met, and the Old Town won the day
once more, this time far from home, with the best of all weapons,--the
manhood that is its hall-mark wherever its children are found.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE OLD AND THE NEW vii
CHAPTER I 1
CHAPTER II 26
CHAPTER III 49
CHAPTER IV 78
CHAPTER V 104
CHAPTER VI 143
CHAPTER VII 169
CHAPTER VIII 186
CHAPTER IX. OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER 229
KING FREDERIK AT HOME 257
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“Post Office” _Frontispiece_
PAGE
“Where blossoming lilacs dip over garden walls” 9
“The old Domkirke reared its gray head” _facing_ 12
The Causeway in a Storm 15
Fanö Women 21
Seal of the Old Town in the Thirteenth Century 26
An Old House 31
The Iron Hand 32
A Watchman 38
“He found his prisoner faithfully guarding
the gun when he came back” _facing_ 48
“Eyes that spoke of things unseen by the crowd” 49
Peer Down’s Slip _facing_ 50
Neighbor Quedens 52
The Good Dean of the Domkirke 58
The Wife of the Middle-miller 60
Venus 61
“Did the honors on ceremonial occasions” _facing_ 62
Liar Hans 65
The Old Family Doctor _facing_ 74
“They crept about, the old men with their staffs” 77
The Christmas Sheaf 78
The Nisse _facing_ 80
“Blowing in Yule from the grim old tower” ” 84
“The whole family turned to and helped” ” 92
“We joined hands and danced around the tree” ” 95
“We ‘smashed’ the New Year in” ” 100
“We caught them napping there one dark night” ” 102
Getting Ready for the Review 104
The Stork came in April _facing_ 104
A Girl from the North Sea Islands ” 112
“There were booths with toys
and booths with trumpets” ” 115
The Girl Market ” 119
Where the Cows go in through the Street Door 121
“Trenchers of steaming sausage” 130
“I threw the last pebble” 141
King Harald’s Stone 143
“In my dreams I sit by the creek” 146
Where I shot my First Duck _facing_ 147
Picking Rävlinger in the Moor 153
Dagmar’s Despoiled Tomb 159
In Holme Week--The Old Ferry Raft _facing_ 162
Cruising up to the Seem Church 167
Riberhus 169
The King’s Ride over the Moor 176
“For God and the King” _facing_ 179
“The King and his men knelt
upon the battlefield” ” 180
Danish Women ransomed their King ” 181
“Comforted the King in sorrow and defeat” 181
Jackdaws in Council 186
“Ha! you were just going to fire it” 195
The Latin School Teachers 198
The Chimney-sweep 207
“We saw it on moonlight nights” 209
The North Gate 212
The Emperor’s Birthday _facing_ 215
“It’s come” 227
The Accursed Candlestick 229
A Strange Figure in Kilts 234
The Restored Domkirke _facing_ 235
The Cat-head Door ” 237
The Old Cloister-church 239
King Christian comes from Church 249
King Frederik 259
THE OLD TOWN
CHAPTER I
[Illustration]
The other day, when I was busy in my garden, I heard the whir of swift
wings and saw a flight of birds coming from the hills in the east.
Something in the way in which they flew stirred me with a sudden
thrill, and I stood up, feeling forty years younger all at once.
“Blackbirds,” said Mike, looking aloft, but I knew better. I watched
them wistfully, with eager hope, and when they were over me and I saw
their orange bills, I knew that I had not been mistaken. They were
starlings, beloved friends of my boyhood, come across the seas at last
after all these years, looking for me, perhaps. It seemed as if it
must be so, and I dropped spade and trowel, and took up hammer and saw
to make boxes for them as I used to, so that they might know I was
waiting to welcome them. I am waiting now. Every day I look to see if
my feathered chum is there, perched at my window. And he will come, I
know. For he cannot have forgotten the good times we had in the long
ago.
You see, we grew up together. Almost the earliest thing I remember is
the box at my bedroom window which the first rays of the rising sun
struck in spring. Then, as soon as ever the winter snows were gone and
the daffodils peeped through the half-frozen crust, some morning there
would be a mighty commotion in that box. Black shadows darted in and
out, and a great scratching and thumping went on. And while I lay and
watched with heart beating fast,--for was not here my songster playmate
back with the summer and the sunlight on his burnished wing?--out he
came on the peg for a sidelong peep at my window, and sat and whistled
the old tune, nodding to the bare trees he knew with his brave promise
that presently Jack Frost would be banished for good, and all would be
right. Was he not there to prove it? And it was even so. The summer was
right on his trail always.
The weeks passed, and the Old Town lay buried in a dreamy sea of
blossoming elders. In field and meadow the starling was busy from early
dawn till the sun was far in the west; for his young, of whom there
was always a vigorous family,--and oh! the glorious blue eggs we loved
to peep at before Mrs. Starling had taken them under her wing,--had a
healthy appetite and required no end of grubs and worms. But whether
they went to sleep early or he thought they had had enough, always when
the setting sun gilded the top of the old poplar, he would come with
all his friends and sing his evening song. In the very top branches,
swaying with the summer wind, they would sit and whistle the clear
notes in the minor key I hear yet when I am worn and tired, and that
tell me that some day it will all come back, the joy and the sunshine
of the young days. It was for him I turned my boyish hands to their
first labor of love. I made him a house of an empty starch box, and
later on, when I had learned carpentering, I built for his family a
tenement of three flats that hung by my window many years after I knew
it no more. I had long been absorbed in the fight with tenements made
for human kind by builders with no such friendly feelings, when my
father wrote that the winter storms had blown down the box and broken
it, and that written inside in my boyish hand, they found these words:
“This box is for starlings, but, by the great horn spoon, not for
sparrows.
“JACOB RIIS.”
We did not like sparrows. They were cheeky tramps, good only to eat
when there were enough of them. The starling was a friend.
I suppose it was the near approach of the time of his going away,
with the stork and the swallow, to leave us in the grip of the long
winter, that made me in desperation try to cage him once. How I could,
I don’t know. Boys are boys everywhere, I suppose. I made the cage with
infinite toil, caught my starling, and put him in it. But when I saw
him darting from side to side struggling to get out to the trees and
the grass and the clouds, my heart smote me, and I tore the cage apart
and threw open the window. It was many days before I could look my
friend in the eye, and I was secretly afraid all winter that he would
not come back. But he was a generous bird and bore no grudge. Next
spring he was there earlier than ever, as if he knew.
Never have I forgotten it; it is to me as vivid as if it were
yesterday, that black day when, with the instinct to “kill something”
strong in me, I had gone out with my father’s gun, and coming through
the willows, met a starling on joyous wing crossing the meadow on the
way to his nest. Up went the gun, and before I knew, I had shot him. I
can see him folding his wings as he fell at my feet. I did not pick him
up. I went home with all the sunlight gone out of the day. I have shot
many living things since, more shame to me, but never one that hurt
like that. I had slain my friend.
But neither have I forgotten the long peaceful twilights of summer when
we drifted down the river in our boat, listening to the small talk of
the mother duck with her young, and to the chattering of uncounted
thousands of starlings in the reeds where they had settled for the
night, settling too, as was proper, the disputes of the day before they
went to sleep. If only men were always so wise. In the midst of it we
would suddenly get on our feet and shout and clap our hands, and the
flock would rise and rise and keep rising, farther and farther down
the river, until the sky was darkened and the twilight became night,
while the rush of the million wings swelled into rolling thunder. We
stood open-mouthed and watched the marvellous sight, while the youngest
crowded up close, half afraid.
Ah, well! they were the old days of sweet memories, and here they have
come back to me on the wings of the black starling. Who brought him, or
how he came, I do not know, but glad am I. And while I am waiting for
him to sound his message of cheer and good-will at my window, let me
try and hold fast awhile the Old Town we both loved, and from which it
must be that he has come straight. Else, why should he seek me out?
Where the northernmost boundary post of the German empire, shaken by
the rude blasts of the North Sea, points its black menacing finger
toward the little remnant of stricken Denmark, it stood a thousand
years, a lonely sentinel with its face toward the southern foe. Kings
were born and buried within its portals, proud bishops ruled it, armies
fought for it, and over it, but all these things had passed away.
Centuries before it had bidden good-by to the pageantry of royalty and
courts, and had gone to sleep with its mouldering past. And it had
slept ever since save when the tramp of armies stirred uneasy dreams;
but they halted no longer at its gates. The snort of the iron horse,
hitched to the nineteenth century, had not yet aroused it in my day. No
shriek of steam whistle, scarce a ripple from the great world without,
disturbed its rest. There was, indeed, a factory in town, always spoken
of as _the_ factory, a cotton mill of impossible pretensions, grotesque
in its mediæval setting, and discredited by public opinion as a kind
of flying in the face of tradition and Providence at once that invited
sure disaster. When disaster did come, though it took the power of
two empires to bring it about,--it was an immediate result of the war
of conquest waged by Germany and Austria against Denmark that drew
the boundary line and built custom-houses within sight of the factory
windows,--it was accepted as a judgment any one could have foretold.
But even that bold intruder had never been guilty of the impropriety of
whistling. The drowsy clatter of mill-wheels where blossoming lilacs
dipped over garden walls into the loitering stream was the only sound
of industry that broke the profound peace. The flour-mills were among
the privileged traditions of the town. They had been handed down from
father to son in unbroken succession since the exclusive right to
grind the flour of the community had been granted to them by the early
kings. No one had ever disputed that right. Perhaps it was not worth
contending for; anyhow, it would have been useless. Could a clearer
title to possession be imagined than that the thing had been there
before any one could remember?
[Illustration: “WHERE BLOSSOMING LILACS DIP OVER GARDEN WALLS.”]
Red-legged storks built their nests on the tiled roofs of the quaint
old houses, and swallows reared their young under the broad eaves,
protected like their loftier neighbors by the general good-will of the
people, and by the superstition that assigned sure misfortune, even if
nothing worse than a plague of boils, to whomsoever should lay profane
hand upon them. In the silent halls of the old cloister, where the
echo of sandalled feet on stone floors seemed always to linger,--steps
of good friars long since dust in forgotten graves,--they flew in and
out, and though they built two nests for one, since they were given to
raising two broods in the brief summer, they did not wear their welcome
out. The turnkey patiently put up an extra shelf, for, old as was he,
were not the swallows tenants before him?
Ponderous whale-oil lamps swung across the streets in rusty chains
that squeaked in every vagrant breeze a dismal accompaniment to the
cry of the night watch. In such a setting tinderboxes and quill pens
seemed quite the thing. I well remember the distrustful resentment in
which old teachers held the “English” (steel) pens. They still clung
to the goose-quill, which no one to-day would know how to cut. But
the word “penknife” had meaning in those days. Envelopes were a still
later discovery. Letters were folded and sealed with wax, and we boys
collected seals as the boys of to-day collect stamps; and a good deal
more of variety and human interest there was in the collection. I mind
the excitement when the first bottle of “Pennsylvania oil” came into
our house. I fetched it myself from the grocer’s, bottled like beer
at eight skilling a bottle. Very likely they were Lübeck skilling,
reminiscent of the middle ages when the Hanse Towns so thoroughly
monopolized all trade in the North that their very coinage endured
centuries after their League had ceased to be. Other things lasted.
Their factors in foreign lands were bachelors, whether from choice or
compulsion I do not know, and to this day the Danish word for bachelor
is “Pebersvend,” _i.e._ pepper clerk, spices being a chief ware in
their shops. As for the telegraph, people shook their heads at it as a
more than dubious American notion, though the undoubted success of the
first sewing-machine that had come to town had disposed them to lend a
lenient ear to its claims.
Above this little world of men the old Domkirke reared its gray head, a
splendid vision of the great things that were. Travellers approaching
the town saw it from afar, a majestic pile against whose strong walls
the town leaned with its time-worn old houses and crooked streets as
if seeking strength and comfort against the assault of the gathering
years. Its square red tower was a landmark for skippers far out at sea.
The Dom itself was, and always had been, the heart and soul of the
Old Town. It was so when the early Christian bishops built it in the
twelfth century, for though kings abode in its shadow, they were their
advisers and the real masters of the city. It was even more so after
the Reformation had clipped the wings of the clergy. With their power
went the commerce and the prestige of the Old Town; there remained
little but the Domkirke and the Latin School that had been part of it
from the beginning, and about these centred its life and all its normal
interest. There were those, it is true, who dreamed of a return of
the great days by wedding Ribe once more to the sea through a ship
canal to deep water, but it was a dream that ended when they built a
harbor at Esbjerg, a scant dozen miles away. After that the Old Town
slept on, undisturbed by the world without.
[Illustration: “THE OLD DOMKIRKE REARED ITS GRAY HEAD.”]
They were mighty men who built the Domkirke, and went far afield for
the stone of which they reared it. There is none in Denmark, so they
sent their ships over the North Sea and up the river Rhine for the gray
stone of which they built the walls, and in quarries on the Weser they
found granite for the great pillars and sandstone for the lighter ones.
They wrought in the fashion of their day, but those that came after
them and raised the great tower of burned brick had learned another
that suited their purpose better; and so while the gentler Roman
curve was that of the church, the tower stood forth in the massive
strength of the Goth, as it had need, for it was the strong place of
the burghers as the castle was the King’s stronghold. Watchmen kept a
constant lookout from it in times of war for an approaching enemy, and
the great bell hung there, the “storm bell,” that called the people
to arms. It had long been dumb in my day, for it was feared that to
ring it would imperil the tower. But when the autumn storms bellowed
about the gables of the Dom, sometimes we heard at dead of night a deep
singing note above the crash of falling tiles, and then we hugged our
pillows close and held our breath to listen; for when the bell sang, it
was warning that the sea was coming in.
The Old Town stood on a wide plain, the fertile marsh between it and
the shore, behind it the barren heath, with no tree or shrub to break
the sweep of the pitiless west wind. The very broom on the barrows,
beneath which slept the old vikings, it cropped short on the side
that looked toward the sea they loved so well. Summer and winter it
piped its melancholy lay above their heads. At sundown the sea-fogs,
rolling in over the land in a dense gray cloud, wrapped them in their
damp embrace. There was no dike to protect the coast, but beyond the
shallows lay a string of islands that within historic times had been
torn from the mainland, and these stood the brunt of the onset when the
North Sea was angry. But when the wind had blown hard from the west for
days, as was its wont, and then veered to the north, so that the waters
from the great deep were massed in the inlet, then it was we heard the
big bell sing in the tower.
[Illustration: THE CAUSEWAY IN A STORM.]
Morning broke after such a night, upon a raging ocean where at sunset
there had been meadows and dry fields. Far as the eye reached only
storm-tossed waves were in sight. The shores were strewn with perch
and other fresh-water fish that were driven up on the pavement in
shoals by the rushing tides. On the great causeway that stretched north
and south, high above the flood level, cattle, hares, grouse, and
field-mice huddled together in wretched, shivering groups. With break
of day the butchers of the town went out, if going was at all possible,
to bleed the drowning cattle that could yet be saved for food.
Sometimes the trip had to be made in boats, and even in the streets of
the town these were in demand when the “storm-flood” was at its height.
I recollect very well seeing the water washing through the ground-story
windows of the houses down by the harbor. By ordinary tides we were
there five miles from the sea. At such times, when the flood had
surprised the cattle yet in the far-outlying pastures, we heard news of
disaster. The herders had been slow in gaining the refuges provided for
them, and had perished with their herds.
If the flood came before the mail had got in, an anxious outlook was
kept at the town gate, where the sea could be seen rising higher and
higher, threatening with each swell to wash quite over the roadway.
White-painted posts were set on both sides of it to mark out the way
for the driver even if water covered it knee-deep, but in spite of this
precaution, the trip was full of peril. If the coach were blown over,
or the team succumbed, the passengers had but a slim chance of escaping
with their lives. On such nights a band of resolute men gathered in
the shelter of the farthest houses ready to go to the rescue on the
first warning of danger. I was very proud to be one of these when I was
a big boy of sixteen. But big as I was when the summons came and we
sallied forth to bring the exhausted team in, it took all my strength
to stand against the furious blast. The waves beat upon the causeway
and were carried across it in a pelting rain of brine that stung like
whip-lashes. In water halfway to our waists, in utter darkness and
numbed with cold, we groped our way toward the lights of the town
scarce a hundred yards away. How that driver had lived through it, I
shall never understand. The relief when we reached shelter was great,
but greater my pride when the stern old Amtmand, the chief government
officer of the county, caught me by the shoulder and whirled me around
to have a look at the fellow who had lent him a hand in need.
“Strong boy,” he said, and rapped me smartly with his cane; “be a man
yet,” which was praise indeed from him. And I forgot that I was cold
and wet through, in my pride.
They used to tell a story of another Amtmand who, fresh from his snug
berth at the capital, had come out to take the post in the Old Town, as
ill luck would have it a passenger in the mail on just such a night. It
was too much for him. He waited only till the tide fell enough to clear
the way, then fled the town, with the parting shot that “Ribe might be
good enough for ducks and geese, but not for men.” He never came back,
but set up his office in another town where he was out of reach of the
North Sea. Well for him he was not there on that awful Christmas Eve
when the water reached the very Domkirke itself, and rose five feet or
more over its floor. Many years before, another flood had torn thirty
parishes from the coast. The sea swallowed them up. It stands in the
old records as “de grote Mandranck” (1362) because of the loss of life
it caused. Shortly before the Reformation the water rose so high in the
streets that the cloister of the Black Friars stood in a lake, and the
monks caught fish for their supper in the portico that enclosed their
garden. One may be permitted the hope that this flood came on a Friday
to fitly replenish their larder.
Indeed, the history of the Old Town was one long succession of such
disasters that had craved lives and wasted treasure without end, yet
had never taught the people the lesson their southern neighbors had
learned early. “Preserve, O Lord, the dikes and dams in the King’s
marshlands; watch over the widows and the fatherless,” read a petition
in our old prayer-book. The King’s marshlands went their way when the
Germans stole them, but the Old Town stood, and stands still in its
undiked plain, heedless alike of warning and experience. One may see
all I have written here, by evil chance this very winter, if he cares
to go and risk it.
When after a storm-flood the waters ebbed out, field and beach were
covered with the drift of the Gulf Stream, driven in by the long gale,
and amid the snows of the northern winter we boys roasted our potatoes,
and an occasional dead bird, over bonfires built of the bleached husks
of the cocoa-palm, banana stalks, waterlogged Brazil-nuts, and other
wreck of the tropics.
[Illustration: FANÖ WOMEN.]
It could not well be otherwise than that the sea, which knocked upon
our doors so often and so rudely, played a great part in the lives
and in the imagination of the people. From the islands I spoke of the
whole male population was absent in summer, and often enough the year
round. They were sailors, all of them, and a Fanö[2] skipper to-day
walks the bridge of many a ship that ties up at its pier in New York
or Philadelphia. The women, left in charge of the little farms, did
all the chores, including the getting in of such crops as they raised
in their sand-dunes and tending to the stock. The Old Town, too, left
stranded by the sanding in of the mouth of the river, nevertheless
furnished its full quota to the merchant marine of more lands than
Denmark. The sea gave it lime to build its houses with, and the lime
that was burned of sea-shells held what it was laid to bind. It gave
the fisherman a living, and the housewife cleaner and cheaper carpets
than our day knows of. Clear pine floors, scrubbed spotlessly clean and
with the white sea-sand swept in “tongues” over them, had a homelike
something about them which no forty-dollar rug harbors.
The thunder-storms, which in the dog-days were often very severe, came
and went with the tides. The same storm, having gone out to sea with
the ebb, would come back on the flood tide and keep the farmers awake
who lived under a roof of thatch. Good cause; I have seen as many as
half a score of farm-houses burning after a long night’s storm. Thus,
too, people died when the tide ebbed. One who was on his death-bed
could not find rest while the tide was in, but when it went out he
went out with it. There was something in all this of the old days when
Odin and Thor were worshipped where the Domkirke now stood, something
of the nature worship and of the fatalism of pagan times. Was it
Oliver Wendell Holmes who said that we are omnibuses in which all our
ancestors ride? Sometimes I find myself struggling with a “fate” which
I cannot bend to my will or purpose, and then comes to me out of the
past the Jute farmer’s calm “When a man’s time is up, he must die;”
along with the recollection of a friend’s experience, a clergyman in
that country. A woman with a child born out of wedlock sought poor
relief because of her handicap. When he remonstrated gently that she
had saddled herself with a needless burden, her curt reply was: “No use
talking that way; the children one has to have, one will get.”
The philosophy of one of my teachers in the Latin School was of a
different kind. It was custom in the Old Town for the members of
the Fire Company to get up and get ready at the third heavy clap of
thunder, and though my father was not of the corps he followed the
custom. Dressed for the street, with his insurance and other valuable
papers ready to hand, he sat the storm out in his easy-chair, the
better to marshal his household in time of need. His friend could not
understand that any one should break his sleep for a thunder-storm and
go to all that trouble. “What for?” he asked.
“Suppose the lightning were to strike the house,” said my father.
The other looked stunned. “Why,” he said, “what beastly bad luck.”
With all this record of fight and fire and flood, the Old Town was the
reverse of strenuous. Its prevailing note was of sweetness and rest.
The west wind that cut like a knife in November was soft in June as the
touch of a woman’s hand. The grass was never as green in meadow; the
wild blossoms that nodded on the river bank were never so sweet; nor
ever did bird sing in forest or field as sang the skylark to its mate
in my childhood’s home, as it soared toward the sky. The streets in the
Old Town were narrow and crooked, and in their cobble-stone pavements
the rain stood in pools that tempted unwary feet. But there were lights
in the windows for glad home-comers. Neighbor knew neighbor and shared
his grief and his joys. No one was rich, as wealth is counted nowadays;
but then no one was allowed to want for the daily bread. “Good day and
God help” was the everyday salutation to a man at work; “God bless,”
if he were eating. They were ways of speech, it is true, but they were
typical of the good feeling that was over and above all the sign of the
Old Town and its people.
CHAPTER II
[Illustration: SEAL OF THE OLD TOWN IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.]
If war and war’s alarms creep into the story of the Old Town on every
page, despite the fact that its name to me is peace, the reason is not
far to seek. I was not yet a month old when my mother had to fly from
home with me in her arms, on the outbreak of war. A report ran through
the land that the “slaves,” that is, the prisoners in the Holstein
state prison, had been freed by the Germans and were swarming north,
the vanguard of an army that looted and laid waste where it went. The
women with little children were hurriedly sent away, and the Old Town
prepared to give battle to the invaders. Barricades were built and
manned; the council requisitioned two hundred pounds of powder from
the next town, to be carried in as he could by the village express, who
made his trips on foot, and they dug up an old cannon that had done
duty as a hitching post a hundred years or more, to impress it into the
municipal defence. The unencumbered women moulded bullets and boiled
water and pitch in the houses overlooking the route of the enemy’s
supposed advance. The parishes roundabout sent squads of peasants to
the defence armed with battle-axes and spears. They will show you those
weapons yet in the Town Hall. They keep the record there, too, of the
council at which peace prevailed, on the showing of military experts
that it would cost two hundred daler[3] to dam the river and flood
the fields to stop an army. That was voted to be too steep a price to
pay for being sacked, perhaps, in the end, as a captured town. But it
is not the whole story, I am sure. Better sense must have dawned, I
imagine, at the sight of those armaments. That they would have died on
the barricades to the last man in defence of their homes I know, for
I knew them. How carefully and deliberately they planned is shown by
the erection of one of the barricades in front of the drug store, where
Hoffmann’s Drops would be handy “in case any were taken ill.” It was
not faint-heartedness, but cool foresight.
When the summons came for the last time, I was a half-grown boy. I
remember it, that gray October morning, when a gendarme, all dusty and
famished from his long, hard ride, reined in his panting horse at the
tavern in the market-place, where the children were just then swarming
with their school books. I hear the clatter of the iron-shod hoofs in
the quiet streets, the clanging of his sabre as he leaped from the
saddle and spoke gravely to the inn-keeper. Far and fast as he had
come, riding farther and riding farther; ghostly legions were even then
hurrying from the south on his trail to grieve the echoes of the Old
Town. I see the sudden awe in the faces as the whispered message went
from mouth to mouth, “The King is dead,”--the King whom the people
loved as their friend, last of his house, to whose life was linked
inseparably the destiny of Denmark. I see the solemn face of our old
Rector and hear the quiver in his voice as he bade us go home, there
would be no school that day; a great sorrow had come upon the land.
I see our little band trooping homeward, all desire to skip or play
swallowed up in a vague dread of nameless disaster. I live over again
the dark days when, in the hush of all other sounds and cares, we
listened by night and by day to the boom of cannon coming nearer and
nearer from the Eider, where the little Danish flock was matched in
unequal combat against the armies of two mighty empires. Then the
flight of broken and scattered regiments, hunted, travel-worn, and
desperate, through the town. The bivouac in the Square, with shotted
guns pointing southward over the causeway. The smile that will come is
followed by a tear as I recall the trembling eagerness, the feverish
haste of faithful hands that packed our school arsenal--twenty-five
historic muskets of the Napoleonic era--in boxes to be taken out to
sea and sunk, lest they become the prey of the enemy. They are rusting
there yet. After we had seen the Prussian needle-guns, they were left
to their fate. And when the last friend was gone on his way, the long
days of suspense, the nightly vigils at the South-gate, where at last
we heard the tread of approaching armies which none of us should live
to see return; for within our sight Denmark was cut in twain by German
bayonets.
So, a child of the Old Town may be forgiven for calling up the Red
Gods on occasion. Indeed, they had left their tracks where he who ran
might read. The other day I heard how, in restoring the Bishop’s Manse,
they had come upon traces of the old spiral stairway, which even in
that house of peace wound to the right, as the custom was, so that the
man defending it might have his right hand free, while the attacking
enemy had to strike from the left. Perhaps, though, it was not always
a house of peace, nor the enemy all of the world and the flesh, for I
read in the archives of the Domkirke of a least one pitched battle
between the Brethren of the Chapter, that is, the clerics attached to
the cathedral, and the Bishop, in which the latter had his robe torn
from his back. Three hundred years later I find the Chapter uniting in
a round-robin to the Bishop, in which perjury, simony, and lewdness are
among the open offences laid at his door. Unless he mend his ways, they
give notice, they will have him before the Pope.
[Illustration: AN OLD HOUSE.]
Doughty scrappers were they ever, those old Jutes. Doubtless there was
reason for the Ribe justice that was proverbial throughout the days
when each town was a law unto itself. “‘You thank God, sonny,’ is an
old saw that has come down to this day, ‘that you weren’t punished
by Ribe law,’ said the old woman, when she saw her son hung on the
Varde gallows.” Varde was the next town, a little way up the coast.
The symbol of that justice was an iron hand over the town gate which,
tradition said, warned any who might be disposed to buy up grain and
food-stuffs to their own gain, that for “cornering” the means of
living, in Ribe a man had his right hand cut off. Good that the hand
was never nailed on Trinity Church or on the Chicago Board of Trade,
else what a one-handed lot of men we should have there and in Wall
Street! Whether that was the real purpose of it or not, the Old Town
was ruled with an iron hand indeed in those days. Witness the report,
preserved in its archives, of the conviction of a woman for _stealing_
the hand-iron which her thieving husband carried off with him when
he broke jail. She filed it off and threw it into a neighbor’s yard,
and not only she, but the neighbor, too, was convicted of theft. And
stealing was a hanging matter. Stealing less than two dollars’ worth
of property took a man to the gallows straight; but a woman, “for
decency’s sake,” was buried alive in the gallows hill. For murder,
counterfeiting and adulteration of honey,--why specially honey, I
do not know,--and for eloping with another’s wife, a man’s head was
chopped off with the big sword that still hung in the Town Hall. There
were holes in the end of it, so that it might be weighted and made
to “bite.” The bigamist was merely turned out of town and mulcted in
half his belongings. But even the iron hand did not stop brawling,
and other measures had to be adopted. A man was accused of knocking
another on the head with a spear,--prodding was the fashion of murder
only,--but legal evidence was lacking. Nevertheless, the “jury of the
North-gate” found him guilty on the principle that for an eye an eye
was due, and he was sentenced to pay damages to the injured man, to the
King, and to the town, and to stand committed “until such time as he
catches another in his place.” And he in jail!
[Illustration: THE IRON HAND.]
It seems almost jolly by comparison, certainly it has a more modern,
not to say familiar sound, to find another jury acquitting a malefactor
in the face of convincing evidence of his guilt upon grounds that
seem delicately suggested in the question from the bench why they,
the jurymen, “had demanded a keg of beer of the prisoner.” The record
mentions one obstinate juryman, perhaps the original prohibitionist,
who entered an ineffectual protest against the verdict.
With all their staid solemnity there is a comic vein in some of these
old records. As, for instance, when Jep Bennedsen, appearing to
prosecute a horse thief, swears that “the dappled mare which is here
present, he bought of Anders Munk and it is God’s and his own horse.”
Or, when a man charged with the theft of a neighbor’s axe proceeds to
swear “on his soul and salvation and his uplifted hand, and asks God
to curse him and push him in under the foot of Lucifer if he ever had
the axe”; then, suddenly reflecting, adds, “Wait; if I did, I will give
it back to him.” But the musty pages in which these facts are set down
with minutest care betray no appreciation of their humor.
The stern old Ribe justice had but a leg and a half left to stand
on, as it were, in my day. The effective police force of the town
consisted of two able-bodied night-watchmen and a beadle with a game
leg, but with a temper and an oaken staff that more than made up for
his other defects. In ordinary times, always excepting New Year’s Eve,
when it was the privilege of the Old Town to cut up as it saw fit,
this was quite sufficient to preserve the public peace, for brawling
as an occupation had long ceased, and crime was almost unknown. The
commotion that was caused by a real burglary when I was a little lad
can therefore be understood. As a matter of fact there was nothing
very alarming about the crime. The thief had merely forced a door,
that was fastened after the simple fashion of the day and place with
a wooden whorl, and taken some money from an open drawer; but he had
cut his hand in doing it, and there were smears of blood on the wall
that made the mystery ever so much more dreadful to us all. To cap the
climax, it was public property he had taken, the King’s money, for it
was the custom-house he had robbed. The whole community was aroused,
and the town council met promptly to consider the emergency. It is fair
to state that it distinctly rose to it. The records of that meeting
are still in existence. The business in hand, so they state, being to
catch the thief, it was suggested by a member that this could not be
done while the watchmen clattered about at night in wooden clogs and
cried the hours; for so they gave warning to any evil-doer who might
be lurking around. To this the meeting agreed, and it was resolved
that they must henceforth cease bawling and put on boots--and rubbers.
The sum of four daler was voted to equip the force with these police
accoutrements, and was duly entered in the budget of the town to be
raised by taxation.
[Illustration: A WATCHMAN.]
The thief, if I remember rightly, was never caught, but the event
proved that the departure from the ancient landmarks was too radical.
Thief or no thief, the town could by no possibility sleep without
being awakened hourly by the cry of the watchmen; or if it did go
to sleep it didn’t know it, which was almost, if not quite, as bad.
Universal insomnia threatened to wreck its peace. Within a month the
entire community, headed by the councilmen themselves, petitioned the
municipality to unloose again the watchmen’s tongues. A compromise was
made upon the basis of the boots, and was religiously kept till within
a year, when, I am told, the crying of the hour finally ceased.
I am sorry it did, for it was a picturesque relic of its mediæval
past, which after all is the real setting of the Old Town. It was not a
mere cry, or senseless shout. In its mournful melody, that took kindly
to the cracked and weather-beaten voices of the singers, I live over
again those long and lonesome nights when I lay awake, listening to the
buffeting of the winds, and followed the ships on their course over the
sea where it swept unchecked, wondering what the great world in which
they moved might be like. People went to bed early in those days, and
the watchman raised his voice at eight o’clock. From that hour until
four in the morning he sang his song, every hour a new verse, supposed
to have special reference to the time of night. The curious commingling
of pious exhortation with homely advice on the everyday affairs of
domestic life was characteristic of the time and of the people. At ten
o’clock he put in a pointed reminder to the laggard that it was time to
turn in, thus:
[Music:
Ho, watchman! heard ye the clock strike ten?
This hour is worth the knowing
Ye house-holds high and low,
The time is here and going
When ye to bed should go;
Ask God to guard, and say Amen!
Be quick and bright,
Watch fire and light,
Our clock just now struck ten.]
At one o’clock he sang:
Ho, watchman! Our clock is striking one.
Oh, Jesus, wise and holy,
Help us our cross to bear.
There is no one too lowly
To be beneath thy care.
Our clock strikes one; in darkest night
Oh, helpful friend,
Thy comfort send,
Then grows the burden light.
The Old Town was the county-seat, and the county was large, but I do
not remember that there were at any time more than two lawyers. One
was good, the other bad. By bad I mean not that he was a bad lawyer,
but reputed to be tricky, whereas the other was known to be honor
itself. It is therefore perhaps the best character I can give my people
when I record the fact--it was so stated, and I have not the least
doubt that it was true--that when two farmers quarrelled, each sure
that he was right, they made haste to hitch up to get first to the
honest lawyer, and usually that was the end of the quarrel; for the
last in the race was willing to make peace. They used to tell of two
well-to-do neighbors who had fallen out over a line fence and started
simultaneously for town. Both had good teams, and they were well
matched in the race. For half an hour they drove silently alongside of
one another, each on his own side of the road, grimly urging on their
horses, but neither gaining a length. At last, as the lights of the
town came into sight, for it was evening, a trace broke on one of the
rigs and the horses stopped. The other team was whirled away in a cloud
of dust.
“Hans!” the beaten one called after him, and he halted and looked back.
“Are you going after Lawyer ----?” naming the square one.
“I am that,” came back.
“Then let’s go back. I am beat;” and back home they went and made it up.
In contrast to this comedy of the highway stands in my memory a human
tragedy that made a deep impression upon our childish minds, though we
little understood at the time. There was in our street a public house
keeper with whose pretty daughter we played at our daily games until
she grew out of short skirts into a very handsome but flashy young
woman. After a while she disappeared, and rumors reached the town that
she was living in Hamburg upon the wages of sin, whereat the little
circle in which she had spun her top buzzed mightily, and scandalized
mammas turned up their noses with an “I told you so.” Her mother went
about red-eyed as if from much crying, but was rarely seen outside her
house. As for the father, publican that he was, he said nothing, but
grimly held his peace.
Then one day a stylish carriage, the most elegant the town owned, drove
up to the door of the public house, and a lady in silks and furbelows,
and with a mammoth ostrich-feather sweeping her shoulder, descended
and went in. Like a storm wind the report spread through the street
that Helene had come home a fine lady, and we boys gathered to see
the carriage and the show. We were standing there when the door of
the house was opened, and the publican and his daughter came out. She
was weeping pitifully, and the feather drooped sadly as he gave her
his arm and, with face sternly set but with the dignity of righteous
fatherhood, led her to the carriage, helped her in, and, closing the
door, bade the coachman drive on. At the window we caught a moment’s
glimpse of the mother’s tearful face as the coach turned the corner;
then the door closed, and we saw and heard no more. We knew, somehow,
that a drama of human sin and sorrow had been enacted in our sight, but
little else. Years after, I heard what had happened within. She had
come in her paint and her fripperies, unrepenting, to her old home;
but barely within its shelter had been met by her father with the hard
demand whether she was living honestly.
“First answer me,” he said, barring the way to her mother; “are you
honest?”
And when she was silent and hung her head, he led her forth, an outcast
without her mother’s kiss. The Old Town never saw her again.
Happily the ordinary tenor of life there ran on a different plane.
Neighborly kindness ruled; on the basis of the square deal, however:
to every one his own. Stick up for your rights; these secure, go
any length to oblige a neighbor. It is a characteristic of the
Danish people, who are essentially honest, intolerant of pretence,
stubbornly democratic, and withal good-natured to a degree. Hence their
apparent passion for argument, which is all-pervading, but utterly
harmless, excepting as it delays action. Business is held up; trains
appear sometimes to stop for argument between the station-master and
conductor. When the whistle blows, they part with a nod and a cordial
“Paa Gjensyn”--_au revoir_. When I was last there, I was a listener
to a conversation between two men, strangers to one another, who were
waiting for a train. The one had overheard the other tell his name and
that of the town he hailed from. He turned upon him straightway:
“Are you Christian Sörensen?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“So you are that? And you are from Hvillingebäk.”
“Yes, I am that,” patiently.
“So--I thought there was only one Christian Sörensen in Hvillingebäk,
and him _I_ know,” with strong emphasis on the “I.”
“Yes! Well, my name is Jens Christian Sörensen.”
Two minutes after I saw them taking a stein of beer together at the
depot bar, on the friendliest of terms.
Of such kind was the long-standing feud between the factory owner in
the Old Town and Knud Clausen, his next-door neighbor, who kept cows.
Knud’s manure heap, which was his wealth, for he had also a farm, was
right under the other’s dining-room window and was not nice, to put
it mildly. The man of industry and wealth tried to buy it many a time
and oft, but Knud would not sell; not he, for in an unguarded moment
the other had disputed his right to keep it there at all, and he was
merely standing upon his undoubted rights. Had not his father kept it
there before him? So it was a drawn battle, and the subject of many
heart-burnings, until the Palm Sunday when the manufacturer’s daughter
went to confirmation. Knud loved the ground she trod on, as did every
one else in the Old Town, and sought a way of showing his good-will. He
found it in the bone of contention in his back yard. When the family,
returning from church, sat down to dinner, they beheld the offensive
pile hidden entirely under a layer of grass and green leaves with
daisies stuck in, like silver stars on a green carpet, and Knud himself
beaming all over, presenting congratulations in mimic show.
When the government undertook to replace the deadly slow old hymns that
were sung in church on Sunday with some of more modern cast, and to
that end introduced a new hymnbook, it came to a characteristic fight
between the conservative countryfolk, who wanted no change, and their
clergy carrying out the orders from headquarters. The peasants flatly
refused to sing the new tunes. When the preceptor struck up one, they
calmly sang the old and drowned him and the parson out. The battle
raged for years before the new prevailed, just how I do not know. The
government tried to seize the old books and burn them, but it only
made matters worse. Some compromise was made, without doubt, or they
would be singing the old tunes to this day.
The “stalwart Jutes” they called the countryfolk round about the Old
Town, and stalwart they are, as Germany is finding out trying to bend
those south of the Konge-aa to her will. She may do it in Alsace and
Lorraine perhaps,--I don’t know,--but not with them. They will be Danes
four hundred years hence, as they have been these forty under daily
persecution. They will do nothing rash, but give in they never will. It
is their way. Let me end this battlesome chapter, when I yearned only
for peace, with the characteristic tale of my old friend Rosenvinge,
who was set to guard a prisoner in the war of ’49. The man was a
disloyal burgomaster or sheriff or something from one of the Schleswig
towns, brought in by order of the government, to be kept and guarded
in Ribe. Rosenvinge--may his shadow never grow less! he lives yet,
near the nineties if not in them, and goes his daily rounds in the
old cloister of which he is the keeper--Rosenvinge was the sentinel.
The call for breakfast came after a night on the road, for suspects
had to be taken by stealth and under cover of darkness. The sentinel
was hungry. Never was man a hero without his porridge. No guard relief
was in sight. There was but one way, and he took it. He put his gun
in the corner with the prisoner, and went calmly across the street to
the tavern, whence came the compelling savors of fried herring and hot
Tvebak. Nor did he hurry himself over his coffee, but took his time.
A soldier must have a good digestion, or he will have no stomach for
the stern duties of war. Let it be recorded that he found his prisoner
faithfully guarding the gun when he came back and awaiting his turn
at the herring. To disturb a man’s breakfast by running away--if,
indeed, it would have disturbed it--would have been dishonorable; not
to mention that thereby he would have lost his own. A square deal and
nothing in haste was the good working plan of the Old Town.
[Illustration: “HE FOUND HIS PRISONER FAITHFULLY GUARDING THE GUN WHEN
HE CAME BACK.”]
CHAPTER III
[Illustration: “EYES THAT SPOKE OF THINGS UNSEEN BY THE CROWD.”]
Our house was in Black Friars’ Street, right around the corner from
Peer Down’s Slip in the picture. The Slip was a short cut to school
for us boys, and we skipped through it lightly enough, morning, noon,
and evening. Mother never passed it, but always went the other way. It
stood for the great sorrow of her life, for at the foot of it, where
the river ran swiftly, my younger brother was drowned while at play.
Theodore was ten. Though my mother had a house full, I do not believe
she ever got over the shock of this first great trouble. To me it calls
up two things which at the time caused me much wonderment. One was
the strange consideration, even deference, with which I was treated
by the boys who used to fight me and call me names, in the long week
while they dragged the river for the body. Even my arch-enemy, Liar
Hans, who skinned cats and hated me, let me alone. It gave me a queer
feeling of being deserted and cast out which I made haste to get over
when opportunity came. The other had somehow to do with this same
experience, though I could not make out the connection.
[Illustration: PEER DOWN’S SLIP.]
There was in the Old Town among the clergy attached to the Domkirke
one with whom my father was on a war footing, so to speak. They were
not enemies, for they were Christians. But Pastor Jacobi was a very
bright and clever man with a caustic wit of which he was in no wise
sparing. Father’s mental equipment was not unlike his in those younger
days, and they clashed often, taking instinctively opposite sides
in public discussion, until it had come to be understood, among us
boys, at least, that they were not friends. Out of such a case we
had an easy way; they, being men, could not fight and were forced to
carry around their grievance unslaked. Hence my astonishment may be
understood when, upon my father answering a knock at the door while
we were together in the first burst of grief, I beheld Pastor Jacobi
standing on the threshold. Without a word he opened his arms, and my
father walked straight into them. So they stood and wept. As I looked
at them standing there, I felt that somehow, wholly irregular and
incomprehensible as it was, something good had entered that house of
mourning, a sweetness that took the sting out of our grief. They were
ever after friends.
[Illustration: NEIGHBOR QUEDENS.]
The trees that hang over the wall of the Slip grew in the garden of our
neighbor, Quedens, and our house abutted on it. We were his tenants.
Herr Quedens was one of the solid merchants of the town. He was an
old man as far back as I can remember, little, dried-up; but in the
kind face with its mock seriousness that was in a perpetual struggle
with the shrewd twinkle in eyes which saw ever the good in man and
sought the way of helping it, the soul of the Old Town seems mirrored
to me. If any one was in trouble or need, his path led straight to the
Quedens’ back door. Mr. Quedens himself would have barred the front
door, that was in full sight of the town, with a severity which somehow
without words managed to convey the message that at the other, in the
narrow street around the corner where no one was looking, there was a
pitying soul that had balm for all wounds. And so there was; for there
Mrs. Quedens was in charge. Dear old friends! Sweet dreams be yours in
your long sleep. The world seems poorer, the Old Town empty, without
your gentle presence. It must be that even the Sunday service in the
Domkirke is unreal without those good gray heads. His voice rose long
and quavering from his seat on the men’s side, always a bar behind the
congregation; but he sang on undisturbed, finishing the hymn in his own
good time and in his own way, which was not the way of earthly harmony;
but in the angels’ choir it rises clear and sweet, I know. It was
ever heavy upon my conscience that once, and only once, Mrs. Quedens
expressed a desire to box my ears soundly. That was when my love-making
had disconcerted the Old Town and fatally broken its peace. But even
then she refrained; and in his office Herr Quedens looked up a little
later and pinched my arm with his quizzical look. “We must be patient,
patient,” he said, and somehow I felt that there was one who understood.
It happened that Father and he had birthday together, and the
eighteenth of March was the great feast-day of both our houses. I
think that the fact that Grover Cleveland was also born on that day
helped on the great liking I had for the ex-President in his later
years. On that day we gathered, old and young, around the board in the
Quedens home and had a great time. Father invariably had a song which
he had written for the occasion with special reference to the events
of the year; as invariably to the great surprise of Mr. Quedens, who
knew all about it, but never ceased to wonder loudly at these poetic
achievements. No one was forgotten; there was a verse for every member
of the family--theirs; not ours, it was too large, we should never have
gotten through the dinner. As it was, the night-watchman’s midnight
verse usually came in and finished it, and we heard the tramp of his
heavy boots at the gate as Mrs. Quedens disappeared from the table to
see that he was not forgotten.
Sunday evenings always saw a friendly gathering at their home, there
being no vesper service in the Domkirke, since it could not be
lighted. We youngsters danced and played games. Our elders had a
quiet rubber of whist, or gossiped over their knitting and the fine
embroidery they did in those days. There was one article that went
with the knitting pins which very recently I have seen come back, as
a curiosity I suppose. It was an implement of polite use then--the
scratching stick I mean. A slender rod with an ivory hand on its end,
the fingers set “a-scratch.” I can think of no better way of describing
it. It was handy if a lady’s back needed scratching, to reach down
with, and no doubt it was the source of much solid comfort. When the
watchman cried ten, Mr. Quedens would look up from his whist and remark
innocently:
“Well, Anna, what do you say? I say when our company go home, we’ll go
to bed.” The company took the hint.
On the Monday morning preceding Lent we children had a game that
reversed the usual order of things and was fine fun. We went around
then and “whipped up” our friends with festive rods trimmed with
colored paper rosettes. For being caught in bed they were mulcted in
many “boller,” a kind of sweetened bun, or else pennies. They made a
point, of course, of staying in bed late, and cried piteously as we
beat the feather beds with all our might. Mr. Quedens always cried
loudest of all and begged for mercy in his droll half-German speech,
while we gleefully laid it on all the harder.
Across the main street from the Quedens home one of the two Jewish
families in Ribe kept shop. They were quiet good people, popular with
their neighbors, who took little account of the fact that they were
Jews. The Old Town was not given to religious discussions, for good
cause: with this exception it was all one way. There was not a Roman
Catholic in the country, I think. Baptists we had heard of as sad
heretics quite beyond the pale; Methodism was but a name. We were all
Lutherans, and that as such we had a monopoly of the way of salvation
followed, of course.
So perhaps it was not so strange after all that Mrs. Tacchau should
fall out with her life-long friend, Mrs. Kerst, who was as stubbornly
zealous in her churchmanship as she was good and generous in her life.
The Jewess had always known how to steer clear of the dangerous reef,
but at last they struck it fair.
“Well, well, dear friend,” said she, trying desperately to back away,
“don’t let us talk about it. Some day when we meet in heaven we shall
know better.”
It was too much. Her friend absolutely bristled.
“What! _Our_ heaven? Indeed, no! Here we can be friends, Mrs. Tacchau.
But there--really, excuse _me_!”
It has helped me over many a stile since to remember that she really
was a good woman. She was that. I have seldom known a better.
[Illustration: THE GOOD DEAN OF THE DOMKIRKE.]
Which brings me naturally to the good Dean of the Domkirke. Pastor Koch
was my teacher in the Latin School when the blow fell that separated
Denmark from her children south of the Konge-aa. His father had been
the parish priest in Döstrup, one of the villages across the line, and
his father before him, and so on through an unbroken chain back almost
to the Reformation. When the separation came, old Gabriel Koch moved
to Ribe, rather than swear allegiance to the conquerors, and died of a
broken heart. There messengers from the old parish found his son, then
in orders, and bade him come to them. His church, his people needed
him, they said. The parish was Danish despite the German occupation and
would always remain so. The change of allegiance would be a mere matter
of form. Would he come? They were waiting and yearning for the son of
the old house.
They pleaded long and earnestly, but he stood firm. He could not take
oath to serve the enemies of his country. When the men from Döstrup
went back over the line, Pastor Koch stood at the South-gate, shading
his eyes with his hands, and followed their retreating forms until they
vanished in the sunset. He had brought the last sacrifice, forever
closing the door upon his life-dream, that of filling the pulpit of
his fathers. To the day of his death, I think, he never ceased to look
southward with a yearning that had no words. And from below the line
longing eyes were directed, are yet, toward the square tower of the
Domkirke with the white cross on red waving from its top. Like him,
they are men who never forget.
[Illustration: THE WIFE OF THE MIDDLE-MILLER.]
It is the way, I guess, of the Old Town. Last year, when I was within
a day’s journey of it, travelling toward Denmark, news reached me that
an old friend had gone to her long home. Mrs. Hansen was the wife of
the “middle-miller,” for there were three on the three branches of the
river. It was at her door I bade good-by to my mother when I went into
the great world, and it was she who comforted her, Mother told me in
after years, with the assurance that “Jacob will come back President
of the new country, see if he doesn’t.” Nor did she ever forget the
wanderer, but always hailed his return with gladness. Her boy rode with
me in that post-chaise. He was going in to serve the King as a soldier.
We had sat on the school bench together and fought together, to the
loss of much learning, I fear, and to the loss of caste, too, with our
teacher. But it befell that, when we met again under his mother’s roof,
when our hair that was brown had grown grizzled and gray, she saw us
both distinguished by old King Christian as the two of our class who
had made it proud. And she smiled a calm “I told you so.” But that is
another story, and we shall come to it.
[Illustration: VENUS.]
The people of the Old Town were like itself, simple and honest and
good. None of them ever plumed themselves with stolen feathers. There
was a bell-ringer at the Domkirke whom we boys dubbed Venus because of
her exceeding ugliness. She was certainly the most hideous and withal
the most good-natured girl I ever met. She accepted the name meekly as
a part of her office, something pertaining to the job, and her smile
reached from ear to ear when we hailed her by it in the street. Then
there was a change. Her employer died, and she lost her place. When
next we met her and called her Venus, she protested soberly:
“I ain’t Venus no more now, for I ain’t by the kirk.”
She ought logically to have descended from her ecclesiastical position
to civil employment as the town bell-woman, but I am not sure she did.
All public advertising was done in the Old Town through the medium of
either the bell-woman or the drummer-man, the two official town-criers.
There was a newspaper, to be sure,--indeed, it had been there for a
hundred years and more, “privileged by the King,”--but I think it came
out only every other day. At all events, all matters of real human
interest were promulgated through these two functionaries. They divided
their duties fairly. She did the crying of fish and meat in the market,
and such like, or if any one had lost anything. He, having been once a
soldier, did the honors on ceremonial occasions, as when a fat steer,
or a horse, was to be killed at the butcher’s, good horse-meat being
neither unwelcome on the poor man’s table, nor unpalatable either.
Then he led the procession through the town, proclaiming between rolls
of his drum the virtues of the victim that stalked after, adorned
with ribbons and flowers. The steer never took any interest in the
proceedings. Perhaps a bovine tradition told it what was coming. But
the horse took it all as a compliment, and walked in the procession
with pride, as if he were a person of consequence.
[Illustration: “DID THE HONORS ON CEREMONIAL OCCASIONS.”]
Of characters the Old Town had had a full supply ever since the days
when Anders Sörensen Vedel, who was a cleric attached to the Domkirke,
translated Saxo Grammaticus with the Hamlet Saga into Danish from
the original Latin. Being in straits for paper on which to print it,
he called upon the Danish women through his friend, Tycho Brahe, the
astronomer, to send their linen to the paper-mill lest the great work
be lost to posterity. Vedel was a pious as well as a famous man, and it
was his custom, in order to impress his children with the bitterness of
the Passion, to call them into his study on Good Friday and scourge
them soundly. The scourge had no longer any pertinent relation to
Good Friday in our day, though it was busy enough the year round. It
helped us on our way to knowledge, or was supposed to, in the school,
where “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was still an article of
unquestioned faith. There was an evil tradition that a king in the
early part of the century had once, on a visit, expressed wonder at
the number of great and learned men that had come from it, and that
the Rector had told him: “We have a little birch forest near, your
Majesty. It helps, it helps!” It certainly labored faithfully. As to
the results--but probably it is a subject without interest to my young
readers, and since their elders have lost faith in it I shall let it
alone, and be glad to.
[Illustration: LIAR HANS.]
Liar Hans, whom I spoke of, was one of the institutions of the town,
along with Maren Dragoon, the apple woman, the memory of whose early
flirtation with a dragoon--she was sixty and had a beard when I knew
her--was thus perpetuated, and Hop-Carolina, so called because one of
her legs was shorter than the other. How and why Hans got his nickname,
I don’t know. I know that he hated us, probably for yelling it at him,
and that he compelled me for a long time to go armed with a horsewhip
for fear of him. The Liar was a professional skinner of cats. Women
wore tanned catskins in those days as we wear chamois chest protectors,
with the hairy side in, and this demand Liar Hans supplied. So he went
about with a sack with dead cats in it, and from this brought up his
ammunition when a fight befell, as it did whenever one of the Latin
School boys hove in sight. Then the air was filled with cats that went
back and forth till we ran; for Hans did not know the word surrender.
He cornered me once in our own street, and there ensued a mighty combat
between the Liar and his cats on one side, and myself and Othello, my
dog, on the other, in which my horsewhip did great execution until we
fled in disorderly retreat and got wedged in the doorway, the dog and
I, where Hans laid it on both of us with a cat he had by the tail. My
mother’s exclamation of horror, as she came out to see what was the
matter, set us free at last.
I have forgotten the name of the man who lived just out of town and
kept bees. I cannot even remember whether he occupied the old manse
at Lustrup or the Dam-house. It was one of them, I know. The thing I
do remember is the shift he made to tend his bees without getting up
with the sun as did they. The honey they gather on the heath when the
broom is purple has a wild flavor which nothing can match, but it is
essential that they shall be about it early, while the morning sun is
on the heather. For some reason they closed the hives at night, and
some one had to open them at sunrise. The keeper was fond of lying late
in bed, and it was laziness in this instance that was the mother of
invention. He kept hens also, and their coop adjoined the hives. They
were early risers too; he heard them jump down from their roosts when
he ought to be out tending his bees. So he hit upon a contrivance, a
sort of lever under the roost, which, when the hens jumped upon it,
opened the hives and let the bees out. After that he could lie in bed
and laugh while his husbandry went on. He was the only inventor I ever
knew the Old Town to turn out, unless you count in the telegrapher who
came when the wires had been strung to our coast. He was a lonesome,
morose man, fond of taking long walks by himself. On one of his tramps
a vagrant dog attached itself to him, and the two became friends. The
telegrapher had the notion, however, that a well-behaved dog must trot
obediently at its master’s heels, and that he could not make his dog
do. So he kept him half-starved, and when he went out, tied a piece of
meat to the end of his stick. After that they were always seen together
in the orthodox way, the dog sniffing industriously in his tracks as
he strode along, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He was
a very thin and ungainly man, who could look over a six-foot fence
without standing on his toes, and the procession through the town was
most singular. Of course we dubbed him “the Bone.”
The old bookseller was there, whose birthday was a movable feast. The
date had been lost, and as it was somewhere in the spring and he liked
Whitsuntide, anyhow, he kept it on that Sunday, whenever it came. It
was something to have even the sun get up and dance on your birthday.
Perhaps that persuaded him. It was the tradition that you could see the
sun skip for joy on the holy morning very early, in that latitude. Most
people took the dance on trust and stayed in bed. And we had the funny
German shoemaker whose bills were the gems of the town. The one he
sent to the factory owner’s wife, who was a very fine and aristocratic
lady, became its great classic. It ran thus:
“En Paar Stiefel
“Die Madame--Verschnudelt und hintergeflickt.”[4]
There used to be a Postmaster in the Old Town who had a very quick
and violent temper. The post-chaise was upset once when he was the
only passenger, and in such a way that he was imprisoned within it and
unable to open the door. He called in vain for help; the driver did not
come. At that his gorge rose, and he shrieked angrily: “Niels! Niels!
Where are you? Come at once.”
“I cannot, Mr. Postmaster,” Niels’ voice spoke patiently from the
ditch. “I am lying here with a broken leg.”
“Hang your leg,” yelled the angry man, from the chaise; “come at once,
I tell you. I am lying here with a broken neck.”
I was thinking less of the unreasonable Postmaster than of the just
anger of the district physician, who one day was called to deal with
an emergency in a near-by farm-house, where all depended on letting in
fresh air quickly. The patient lay in one of the horrible closet beds
that always gave me a shiver, though they were often not so bad, if
only there were not mice in the straw. Air there never was, could not
be. The doctor ran to the window and tried to open it. It was nailed
down; probably had not been opened since the house was built. Dr. P.
was a hasty man, too, and here he had reason, for no time was to be
lost. Looking around for something to smash the window with, his eye
fell upon the farmer’s silver-mounted meerschaum pipe, with a bowl
as big as a man’s fist and long elastic stem. The doctor seized it
and, wielding it as a war club, smashed pane after pane and saved his
patient. But the farmer sued him. The pipe was an heirloom and beyond
price to him. It was the one thing that by the country folk was valued
higher than lands and cattle. The doctor lost his case, but he took the
occasion to inveigh effectually against the evil abuse of the cupboard
beds that were closed tight with doors as often as with a curtain. When
this last was so, it was rather to save the wood than the sleeper. And
he lived to see them put under the ban, and to see windows made to open.
The pipe was, indeed, an indispensable part of the peasant’s equipment.
The boy of twelve had his sticking out of his side pocket, just like
his father. They never stopped smoking except when they were haying,
and I have seen a man mowing grass with his long pipe hanging from his
mouth. They even counted distances by pipes instead of miles. A peasant
would tell you, if you asked how far it was to the next town, that
it was two pipes, or three pipes, as the case might be. How far that
was, I have forgotten, but it was a safe enough way of reckoning. For
they went always at the same jog-trot, and the pipe bowls were always
of the same size. They were of porcelain and gayly decorated. Among
the young men there was a kind of rivalry as to who should have the
handsomest pipe bowl; the meerschaum was the holiday pipe, for home
and festive occasions. And it was not only the country folk who smoked
thus. Everybody did--the men, that is to say. It is only lately the
women have taken to smoking cigars, and in public. When last I crossed
the “Great Belt” on the steam-ferry, I was greatly annoyed at the sight
of two handsome and otherwise nice young girls smoking cigarettes
on the deck, and I took occasion to say so to a motherly woman who
occupied the chair next to mine. She listened with polite interest to
my diatribe about how things were when I was a boy, and when I had
finished took out a cigar, a regular man’s cigar.
“Yes!” she said, “things do change. Now, I like a smoke myself. These
girls take after me, I suppose. They are my daughters.” And she struck
a match and lit her weed.
We boys in the Old Town were strictly prohibited from smoking under
the school rules, which prescribed the rod for every such offence. In
consequence, we did it on the sly, thinking it manly and fine. At his
desk, at home, Father smoked all the time, and so did everybody else.
Many a pound of Kanaster have I carried home from the tobacconist’s
shop, the one in Grönnegade with the naked brown Indian smoking a
very long pipe. From the moment the “Last of the Mohicans” fell into
my hands I looked upon him as friend and brother. There was something
between us which the grown-ups knew nothing about. He must be
acquainted with Uncas and Chingachgook and Deerslayer, of course, for
clearly he was of the good Delawares and not of the wicked Hurons. He
swings from his hook yet, and I confess to a nodding acquaintance when
I pass him in the street. His pipe is still the biggest part of him.
It was a part of everything. I mind many a time seeing our family
doctor on the way to a country case, wrapped in his great fur coat and
with the pipe between his teeth as he sat in his wagon chair. That was
a still bigger part of the doctor’s outfit: the great easy-chair that
stood in the hall and was lifted into the farmer’s wagon where it hung
suspended from the sideboards. Farm wagons in those days were not made
with springs. With his collar up about his ears, his cap pulled down
and “fire up,” the doctor could sleep comfortably on the longest and
coldest ride, and he had need. For there were few nights when he was
not called out for one. It was hard work for very poor pay. Father,
with a family of fifteen and errand for the doctor every day, and
sometimes all day, paid our family physician, I think, not over fifty
daler a year, which is half that in American dollars. But it was not
a matter of dollars. Money could not pay what our doctor gave us. He
was the family friend before he was the physician. He smoothed the
pillow of suffering, and the last agony was made easier because he sat
by. Grown old and slow of gait, he goes his rounds yet in the Old Town
that will be my Old Town no longer when I look for him in vain on his
morning route. And where he goes, to the rich man’s house or the poor
man’s hut, sunshine and hope come with him.
[Illustration: THE OLD FAMILY DOCTOR.]
I have said that in Ribe one seemed to be always bordering upon the way
past because of the track it had made everywhere, the many landmarks
it had set. There was another reason; namely, that so many old people
lived there who in themselves made a link connecting the town with days
long gone. Their lives seemed to reach straight back and lay hold of it
visibly. People grew older in the Old Town than anywhere I know of, as
if they were loath to let go of it. There seemed to be no good reason
why they should die, and so they lived and lived, and some of them
are living yet. The old Bishop, whom we all loved and revered, was 92
when I saw him vault with the agility of a young man over a beam some
carpenters had left in his way. He was the father-in-law of Dr. Niels
Finsen, whom all the world knows. Dr. Finsen’s father was Amtmand in
Ribe in his day, and his picture in uniform hangs in the Town Hall.
Bishop Balslev and King Christian had grown old together, and were
friends. When the Bishop thought his charge required a younger man, he
asked the King to appoint his successor. “Not while I live,” said the
King, and he kept his word. He outlived his friend, who was in sight
of the century post when his relief came.
There was scarce a street in the Old Town where some kindly old face
did not look out upon you with patient eyes that spoke of things unseen
by the crowd, of friends long waiting in the beyond. In the Cloister[5]
there were always one or two old women that were nearing the hundred.
The keeper himself was in the nineties. They crept about, the old men
with their staffs in the sunshiny garden patches; the women sat at
their curtained windows, busy with sewing or knitting. For there were
ever small trousers to be patched and small feet to be shod with warm
socks for the winter, if not in their own home then in many a one about
them. And the Old Town loved them. Some day we heard that they slept,
and we bound wreaths for our friends and strewed the street with
wintergreen and spruce, and walked, singing, their last journey with
them, while all the church bells rang and friends carried the tired
body.
[Illustration: “THEY CREPT ABOUT, THE OLD MEN WITH THEIR STAFFS.”]
“Ashes to ashes--dust to dust.”
But there was no pain in the parting, for in the living there had been
no discord. The welcome of the grave was peace.
CHAPTER IV
[Illustration: THE CHRISTMAS SHEAF.]
I do not know how the forty years I have been away have dealt with
“Jule-nissen,” the Christmas elf of my childhood. He was pretty old
then, gray and bent, and there were signs that his time was nearly
over. So it may be that they have laid him away. I shall find out when
I go over there next time. When I was a boy we never sat down to our
Christmas Eve dinner until a bowl of rice and milk had been taken up
to the attic, where he lived with the marten and its young, and kept an
eye upon the house--saw that everything ran smoothly. I never met him
myself, but I know the house-cat must have done so. No doubt they were
well acquainted; for when in the morning I went in for the bowl, there
it was, quite dry and licked clean, and the cat purring in the corner.
So, being there all night, he must have seen and likely talked with him.
I suspect, as I said, that they have not treated my Nisse fairly in
these matter-of-fact days that have come upon us, not altogether for
our own good, I fear. I am not even certain that they were quite
serious about him then, though to my mind that was very unreasonable.
But then there is nothing so unreasonable to a child as the cold reason
of the grown-ups. However, if they have gone back on him, I know where
to find him yet. Only last Christmas when I talked of him to the
tenement-house mothers in my Henry Street Neighborhood House,[6]--all
of them from the ever faithful isle,--I saw their eyes light up with
the glad smile of recognition, and half a dozen called out excitedly,
“The Little People! the Leprecawn ye mean, we know him well,” and they
were not more pleased than I to find that we had an old friend in
common. For the Nisse, or the Leprecawn, call him whichever you like,
was a friend indeed to those who loved kindness and peace. If there
was a house in which contention ruled, either he would have nothing
to do with it, like the stork that built its nest on the roof, or
else he paid the tenants back in their own coin, playing all kinds of
tricks upon them and making it very uncomfortable. I suppose it was
this trait that gave people, when they began to reason so much about
things, the notion that he was really the wraith, as it were, of their
own disposition, which was not so at all. I remember the story told of
one man who quarrelled with everybody, and in consequence had a very
troublesome Nisse in the house that provoked him to the point of moving
away; which he did. But as the load of furniture was going down the
street, with its owner hugging himself in glee at the thought that
he had stolen a march on the Nisse, the little fellow poked his head
out of the load and nodded to him, “We are moving to-day.” At which
naturally he flew into a great rage. But then, that was just a story.
[Illustration: THE NISSE.]
The Nisse was of the family, as you see, very much of it, and certainly
not to be classed with the cattle. Yet they were his special concern;
he kept them quiet, and saw to it, when the stableman forgot, that
they were properly bedded and cleaned and fed. He was very well known
to the hands about the farm, and they said that he looked just like a
little old man, all in gray and with a pointed red nightcap and long
gray beard. He was always civilly treated, as he surely deserved to
be, but Christmas was his great holiday, when he became part of it,
indeed, and was made much of. So, for that matter, was everything that
lived under the husbandman’s roof, or within reach of it. The farmer
always set a lighted candle in his window on Christmas Eve, to guide
the lonesome wanderer to a hospitable hearth. The very sparrows that
burrowed in the straw thatch, and did it no good, were not forgotten. A
sheaf of rye was set out in the snow for them, so that on that night at
least they should have shelter and warmth unchallenged, and plenty to
eat. At all other times we were permitted to raid their nests and help
ourselves to a sparrow roast, which was by long odds the greatest treat
we had. Thirty or forty of them, dug out of any old thatch roof by
the light of the stable lantern and stuffed into Ane’s long stocking,
which we had borrowed for a game-bag, made a meal for the whole family,
each sparrow a fat mouthful. Ane was the cook, and I am very certain
that her pot-roast of sparrow would pass muster at any Fifth Avenue
restaurant as the finest dish of reed-birds that ever was. However,
at Christmas their sheaf was their sanctuary, and no one as much as
squinted at them. Only last winter when Christmas found me stranded in
a little Michigan town, wandering disconsolate about the streets, I
came across such a sheaf raised on a pole in a dooryard, and I knew at
once that one of my people lived in that house and kept Yule in the
old way. So I felt as if I were not quite a stranger.
All the animals knew perfectly well that the holiday had come, and kept
it in their way. The watch-dog was unchained. In the midnight hour
on the Holy Eve the cattle stood up in their stalls and bowed out of
respect and reverence for Him who was laid in a manger when there was
no room in the inn, and in that hour speech was given them, and they
talked together. Claus, our neighbor’s man, had seen and heard it, and
every Christmas Eve I meant fully to go and be there when it happened;
but always long before that I had been led away to bed, a very sleepy
boy, with all my toys hugged tight, and when I woke up the daylight
shone through the frosted window-panes, and they were blowing good
morning from the church tower; it would be a whole year before another
Christmas. So I vowed, with a sigh at having neglected a really sacred
observance, that I would be there sure on the next Christmas Eve. But
it was always so, every year, and perhaps it was just as well, for
Claus said that it might go ill with the one who listened, if the cows
found him out.
Blowing in the Yule from the grim old tower that had stood eight
hundred years against the blasts of the North Sea was one of the
customs of the Old Town that abide, however it fares with the Nisse;
that I know. At sun-up, while yet the people were at breakfast, the
town band climbed the many steep ladders to the top of the tower, and
up there, in fair weather or foul,--and sometimes it blew great guns
from the wintry sea,--they played four old hymns, one to each corner
of the compass, so that no one was forgotten. They always began with
Luther’s sturdy challenge, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” while
down below we listened devoutly. There was something both weird and
beautiful about those far-away strains in the early morning light of
the northern winter, something that was not of earth and that suggested
to my child’s imagination the angels’ song on far Judean hills. Even
now, after all these years, the memory of it does that. It could not
have been because the music was so rare, for the band was made up
of small storekeepers and artisans who thus turned an honest penny
on festive occasions. Incongruously enough, I think, the official
town mourner who bade people to funerals was one of them. It was like
the burghers’ guard, the colonel of which--we thought him at least a
general, because of the huge brass sword he trailed when he marched at
the head of his men--was the town tailor, a very small but very martial
man. But whether or no, it was beautiful. I have never heard music
since that so moved me. When the last strain died away came the big
bells with their deep voices that sang far out over field and heath,
and our Yule was fairly under way.
[Illustration: “BLOWING IN YULE FROM THE GRIM OLD TOWER.”]
A whole fortnight we kept it. Real Christmas was from Little Christmas
Eve, which was the night before the Holy Eve proper, till New Year.
Then there was a week of supplementary festivities before things
slipped back into their wonted groove. That was the time of parties
and balls. The great ball of the year was on the day after Christmas.
Second Christmas Day we called it, when all the quality attended at
the club-house, where the Amtmand and the Burgomaster, the Bishop and
the Rector of the Latin School, did the honors and received the people.
That was the grandest of the town functions. The school ball, late
in autumn, was the jolliest, for then the boys invited each the girl
he liked best, and the older people were guests and outsiders, so to
speak. The Latin School, still the “Cathedral School,” was as old as
the Domkirke itself, and when it took the stage it was easily first
while it lasted. The Yule ball, though it was a rather more formal
affair, for all that was neither stiff nor tiresome; nothing was in the
Old Town; there was too much genuine kindness for that. And then it was
the recognized occasion when matches were made by enterprising mammas,
or by the young themselves, and when engagements were declared and
discussed as the great news of the day. We heard of all those things
afterward and thought a great fuss was being made over nothing much.
For when a young couple were declared engaged, that meant that there
was no more fun to be got out of them. They were given, after that, to
go mooning about by themselves and to chasing us children away when
we ran across them; until they happily returned to their senses, got
married, and became reasonable human beings once more.
When we had been sent to bed on the great night, Father and Mother went
away in their Sunday very best, and we knew they would not return until
two o’clock in the morning, a fact which alone invested the occasion
with unwonted gravity, for the Old Town kept early hours. At ten
o’clock, when the watchman droned his sleepy lay, absurdly warning the
people to
Be quick and bright,
Watch fire and light,
Our clock it has struck ten,
it was ordinarily tucked in and asleep. But that night we lay awake
a long time listening to the muffled sound of heavy wheels in the
snow rolling unceasingly past, and trying to picture to ourselves the
grandeur they conveyed. Every carriage in the town was then in use and
doing overtime. I think there were as many as four.
When we were not dancing or playing games, we literally ate our way
through the two holiday weeks. Pastry by the mile did we eat, and
general indigestion brooded over the town when it emerged into the
white light of the new year. At any rate it ought to have done so. It
is a prime article of faith with the Danes to this day that for any one
to go out of a friend’s house, or of anybody’s house, in the Christmas
season without partaking of its cheer, is to “bear away their Yule,”
which no one must do on any account. Every house was a bakery from
the middle of December until Christmas Eve, and oh! the quantities of
cakes we ate, and such cakes! We were sixteen normally, in our home,
and Mother mixed the dough for her cakes in a veritable horse-trough
kept for that exclusive purpose. As much as a sack of flour went in, I
guess, and gallons of molasses and whatever else went to the mixing.
For weeks there had been long and anxious speculations as to “what
Father would do,” and gloomy conferences between him and Mother over
the state of the family pocketbook, which was never plethoric; but at
last the joyful message ran through the house from attic to kitchen
that the appropriation had been made, “even for citron,” which meant
throwing all care to the winds. The thrill of it, when we children
stood by and saw the generous avalanche going into the trough! What
would not come out of it! The whole family turned to and helped make
the cakes and cut the “pepper-nuts,” which were little squares of
spiced cake-dough we played cards for and stuffed our pockets with,
gnawing them incessantly. Talk about eating between meals: ours was a
continuous performance for two solid weeks. The pepper-nuts were the
real staple of Christmas to us children. We paid forfeits with them in
the game of scratch-nose (jackstraws), when the fellow fishing for his
straw stirred the others and had his nose scratched with the little
file in the bunch as extra penalty; in “Under which tree lies my pig?”
in which the pig was a pepper-nut, the fingers of the closed hands
the trees; and in Black Peter. In this last the loser had his nose
blackened with the snuff from the candle until advancing civilization
substituted a burnt cork. Christmas without pepper-nuts would have
been a hollow mockery indeed. We rolled the dough in long strings like
slender eels and then cut it, a little on the bias. They were good,
those nuts, when baked brown. I wish I had some now.
It all stood for the universal desire that in the joyous season
everybody be made glad. I know that in the Old Town no one went hungry
or cold during the holidays, if indeed any one ever did. Every one gave
of what he had, and no one was afraid of pauperizing anybody by his
gifts, for they were given gladly and in love, and that makes all the
difference--did then and does now. At Christmas it is perfectly safe to
let our scientific principles go and just remember the Lord’s command
that we love one another. I subscribe to them all with perfect loyalty,
and try to practise them till Christmas week comes in with its holly
and the smell of balsam and fir, and the memories of childhood in the
Old Town; then--well, anyway, it is only a little while. New Year and
the long cold winter come soon enough.
Christmas Eve was, of course, the great and blessed time. That was
the one night in the year when in the gray old Domkirke services were
held by candle-light. A myriad wax candles twinkled in the gloom, but
did not dispel it. It lingered under the great arches where the voice
of the venerable minister, the responses of the congregation, and
above it all the boyish treble of the choir billowed and strove, now
dreamily with the memories of ages past, now sharply, tossed from angle
to corner in the stone walls, and again in long thunderous echoes,
sweeping all before it on the triumphant strains of the organ, like a
victorious army with banners crowding through the halls of time. So it
sounded to me, as sleep gently tugged at my eyelids. The air grew heavy
with the smell of evergreens and of burning wax, and as the thunder of
war drew farther and farther away, in the shadow of the great pillars
stirred the phantoms of mailed knights whose names were hewn in the
grave-stones there. We youngsters clung to the skirts of Mother as we
went out and the great doors fell to behind us. And yet those Christmas
Eves, with Mother’s gentle eyes forever inseparable from them, and with
the glad cries of Merry Christmas ringing all about, have left a touch
of sweet peace in my heart which all the years have not effaced, nor
ever will.
[Illustration: “THE WHOLE FAMILY TURNED TO AND HELPED.”]
At home the great dinner of the year was waiting for us: roast goose
stuffed with apples and prunes, rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar
on it, and a great staring butter eye in the middle. The pudding was
to lay the ground-work with, and it was served in deep soup-plates. It
was the dish the Nisse came in on, and the cat. On New Year’s Eve both
these were left out; but to make up for it an almond was slipped into
the “gröd,” and whoever found it in his plate got a present. It was no
device to make people “fletch,” but it served the purpose admirably.
At Christmas we had doughnuts after the goose, big and stout and
good. However I managed it, I don’t know, but it is a tradition in the
family, and I remember it well, that I once ate thirteen on top of the
big dinner. Evidently I was having a good time. Dinner was, if not the
chief end of man, at least an item in his make-up, and a big one.[7]
When it had had time to settle and all the kitchen work was done,
Father took his seat at the end of the long table, with all the
household gathered about, the servants included and the baby without
fail, and read the story of The Child: “And it came to pass in those
days,” while Mother hushed the baby. Then we sang together “A Child is
Born in Bethlehem,” which was the simplest of our hymns, and also the
one we children loved best, for it told of how in heaven we were to
walk to church
On sky-blue carpets, star-bedeckt,
which was a great comfort. Children love beautiful things, and we had
few of them. The great and precious treasure in our house was the rag
carpet in the spare room which we were allowed to enter only on festive
occasions such as Christmas. It had an orange streak in it which I can
see to this day. Whenever I come across one that even remotely suggests
it, it gives me yet a kind of solemn feeling. We had no piano,--that
was a luxury in those days,--and Father was not a singer, but he led
on bravely with his tremulous bass and we all joined in, Ane the cook
and Maria the housemaid furtively wiping their eyes with their aprons,
for they were good and pious folk and this was their Christmas service.
So we sang the ten verses to end, with their refrain “Hallelujah!
hallelujah,” that always seemed to me to open the very gates of Yule.
And it did, literally; for when the last hallelujah died away the
door of the spare room was flung wide and there stood the Christmas
tree, all shining lights, and the baby was borne in, wide-eyed, to
be the first, as was proper; for was not this The Child’s holiday?
Unconsciously we all gave way to those who were nearest Him, who had
most recently come from His presence and were therefore in closest
touch with the spirit of the holiday. So, when we joined hands and
danced around the tree, Father held the baby, and we laughed and were
happy as the little one crowed his joy and stretched the tiny arms
toward the light.
[Illustration: “WE JOINED HANDS AND DANCED AROUND THE TREE.”]
Light and shadow, joy and sorrow, go hand in hand in the world. While
we danced and made merry, there was one near for whom Christmas was but
grief and loss. Out in the white fields he went from farm to farm, a
solitary wanderer, the folklore had it, looking for plough or harrow
on which to rest his weary limbs. It was the Wandering Jew, to whom
this hope was given, that, if on that night of all in the year he could
find some tool used in honest toil over which the sign of the cross had
not been made, his wanderings would be at an end and the curse depart
from him, to cleave thenceforward to the luckless farmer.[8] He never
found what he sought in my time. The thrifty husbandman had been over
his field on the eve of the holiday with a watchful eye to his coming.
When the bell in the distant church tower struck the midnight hour,
belated travellers heard his sorrowful wail as he fled over the heath
and vanished.
When Ansgarius preached the White Christ to the vikings of the North,
so runs the legend of the Christmas tree, the Lord sent His three
messengers, Faith, Hope, and Love, to help light the first tree.
Seeking one that should be high as hope, wide as love, and that bore
the sign of the cross on every bough, they chose the balsam fir, which
best of all the trees in the forest met the requirements. Perhaps that
is a good reason why there clings about the Christmas tree in my old
home that which has preserved it from being swept along in the flood
of senseless luxury that has swamped so many things in our money-mad
day. At least so it was then. Every time I see a tree studded with
electric lights, garlands of tinsel-gold festooning every branch, and
hung with the hundred costly knicknacks the storekeepers invent year
by year “to make trade,” until the tree itself disappears entirely
under its burden, I have a feeling what a fraud has been practised on
the kindly spirit of Yule. Wax candles are the only real thing for
a Christmas tree, candles of _wax_ that mingle their perfume with
that of the burning fir, not the by-product of some coal-oil or other
abomination. What if the boughs do catch fire; they can be watched, and
too many candles are tawdry, anyhow. Also, red apples, oranges, and
old-fashioned cornucopias made of colored paper, and made at home, look
a hundred times better and fitter in the green; and so do drums and toy
trumpets and wald-horns, and a rocking-horse reined up in front that
need not have cost forty dollars, or anything like it.
I am thinking of one, or rather two, a little piebald team with a
wooden seat between, for which Mother certainly did not give over
seventy-five cents at the store, that as “Belcher and Mamie”--the names
were bestowed on the beasts at sight by Kate, aged three, who bossed
the play-room--gave a generation of romping children more happiness
than all the expensive railroads and trolley-cars and steam-engines
that are considered indispensable to keeping Christmas nowadays. And
the Noah’s Ark with Noah and his wife and all the animals that went two
by two--ah, well! I haven’t set out to preach a sermon on extravagance
that makes no one happier, but I wish--The legend makes me think of
the holly that grew in our Danish woods. We called it Christ-thorn,
for to us it was of that the crown of thorns was made with which the
cruel soldiers mocked our Saviour, and the red berries were the drops
of blood that fell from His anguished brow. Therefore the holly was a
sacred tree, and to this day the woods in which I find it seem to me
like the forest where the Christmas roses bloomed in the night when the
Lord was born, different from all other woods, and better.
Mistletoe was rare in Denmark. There was known to be but one oak in
all the land on which it grew. But that did not discourage the young.
We had our kissing games which gave the boys and girls their chance to
choose sides, and in the Christmas season they went on right merrily.
There was rarely a night that did not bring the children together under
some roof or other. They say that kissing goes by favor, but we had not
arrived at that point yet, though we had our preferences. In the game
of Post Office, for instance, he was a bold boy who would dare call out
the girl he really liked, to get the letter that was supposed to be
awaiting her. You could tell for a dead certainty who was his choice
by watching whom he studiously avoided asking for. I have a very vivid
recollection of having once really dared with sudden desperation, and
of the defiant flushed face, framed in angry curls, that confronted me
in the hall, the painful silence while we each stood looking the other
way and heard our playmates tittering behind the closed door,--for well
they knew,--and her indignant stride as she went back to her seat
unkissed, with me trailing behind, feeling like a very sheepish boy,
and no doubt looking the part.
[Illustration: “WE ‘SMASHED’ THE NEW YEAR IN.”]
The Old Year went out with much such a racket as we make nowadays,
but of quite a different kind. We did not blow the New Year in, we
“smashed” it in. When it was dark on New Year’s Eve, we stole out with
all the cracked and damaged crockery of the year that had been hoarded
for the purpose and, hieing ourselves to some favorite neighbor’s door,
broke our pots against it. Then we ran, but not very far or very fast,
for it was part of the game that if one was caught at it, he was to
be taken in and treated to hot doughnuts. The smashing was a mark of
favor, and the citizen who had most pots broken against his door was
the most popular man in town. When I was in the Latin School, a cranky
burgomaster, whose door had been freshly painted, gave orders to the
watchmen to stop it and gave them an unhappy night, for they were hard
put to it to find a way it was safe to look, with the streets full of
the best citizens in town, and their wives and daughters, sneaking
singly by with bulging coats on their way to salute a friend. That was
when our mothers--those who were not out smashing in New Year--came
out strong, after the fashion of mothers. They baked more doughnuts
than ever that night, and beckoned the watchman in to the treat; and
there he sat, blissfully deaf while the street rang with the thunderous
salvos of our raids; until it was discovered that the burgomaster
himself was on patrol, when there was a sudden rush from kitchen doors
and a great scurrying through streets that grew strangely silent.
The town had its revenge, however. The burgomaster, returning home in
the midnight hour, stumbled in his gate over a discarded Christmas
tree hung full of old boots and many black and sooty pots that went
down around him with great smash in the upset, so that his family came
running out in alarm to find him sprawling in the midst of the biggest
celebration of all. His dignity suffered a shock which he never got
over quite. But it killed the New Year’s fun, too. For he was really
a good fellow, and then he was the burgomaster, and chief of police to
boot. I suspect the fact was that the pot smashing had run its course.
Perhaps the supply of pots was giving out; we began to use tinware more
about that time. That was the end of it, anyhow.
[Illustration: “WE CAUGHT THEM NAPPING THERE ONE DARK NIGHT.”]
We boys got square, too, with the watchmen. We knew their habit
of stowing themselves away in the stage-coach that stood in the
market-place when they had cried the hour at ten o’clock, and we caught
them napping there one dark night when we were coming home from a
party. The stage had doors that locked on the outside. We slammed them
shut and ran the conveyance, with them in it wildly gesticulating from
the windows, through the main street of the town, amid the cheers of
the citizens whom the racket aroused from their slumbers. We were safe
enough. The watchmen were not anxious to catch us, maddened as they
were by our prank, and they were careful not to report us either. I
chuckled at that exploit more than once when, in years long after, I
went the rounds of the midnight streets with Haroun-al-Roosevelt,
as they called New York’s Police Commissioner, to find his patrolmen
sleeping soundly on their posts when they should have been catching
thieves. Human nature, police human nature, anyhow, is not so
different, after all, in the old world and in the new.
With Twelfth Night our Yule came to an end. In that night, if a girl
would know her fate, she must go to bed walking backward and throw a
shoe over her left shoulder, or hide it under her pillow, I forget
which, perhaps both, and say aloud a verse that prayed the Three Holy
Kings to show her the man
Whose table I must set,
Whose bed I must spread,
Whose name I must bear,
Whose bride I must be.
The man who appeared to her in her sleep was to be her husband. There
was no escape from it, and consequently she did not try. He was her
Christmas gift, and she took him for better or for worse. Let us hope
that the Nisse played her no scurvy trick, and that it was for better
always.
CHAPTER V
[Illustration: GETTING READY FOR THE REVIEW.]
The stork came in April, with delivery from the vile tyranny of March.
Talk of March violets! to us the month meant cod-liver oil. It was our
steady dessert all through it. Good for the system, they said. Perhaps
it was. I think it encouraged duplicity. The rule was that when we had
grown to like it so that we licked the spoon after it, we might quit.
You wouldn’t believe how quickly we came to adore it. However, when our
need was greatest, the stork came, and with it balmy spring and our
freedom. Not necessarily all at once: three times the stork had to have
snow in its nest to make things right; but we knew the sunshine was not
far away.
[Illustration: THE STORK CAME IN APRIL.]
One day we heard it on its nest, jabbering out a noisy “How d’do”
through its long red bill, and then we children gathered below and sang
our song of welcome:
[Music:
Stork, Storkie long leg
Where were you this long while?
Saw you King Pharaoh’s lofty stone?
Stalk’d you in Nile River meadows?]
The swallow and the starling were not far behind it. They were all our
tenants and lived under our roof, or on it, but the stork was the only
one who paid rent formally. Payment was made in kind. Every other year
he threw an egg out of the nest, and the next year a fledgling stork.
For the rest he held aloof, disdaining haughtily to hold communication
of any kind with us. Even when a disabled stork became, by force of
circumstances, a member of the household, residing in the hen-house
through the winter, he never grew familiar, but accepted what was
given to him with quiet reserve as from a subject people; which, of
course, was his right, seeing that he was a public functionary of the
first importance. We had no stork on our house, but both our neighbors
did, and as if to make up for the apparent slight, he was a regular
visitor in our family. They seemed to always know when he was coming,
and when I was told of it, I never failed to leave a Tvebak for him in
the window which the nurse had left open so that he should not wake up
the whole house by rapping on the pane with his bill. And when it was
gone in the morning, I knew that a little brother had come to join our
company; and sure enough it was so.
The swallow sang for us, and we saw to it that his way out and in of
the hallway where he built his nest was free, by leaving a pane out of
the transom. If by any chance that was obstructed, we knew it by his
flying up and down before the doorway, waiting anxiously for some one
to open it, that he might slip in where a string of little round heads,
always set in a straight row, were clamoring with wide-open bills for
flies and gnats. When the starling sang his evening song in the big
poplar, the Old Town was white with the bloom of the elder. He left it
dyed a deep purple, for he was as fond of elderberries as we were of
the soup our mothers made of them, and the stain of them abides. In
between the blossoming and the berrying when his youngsters were grown,
he took himself off with his wife for several weeks, leaving only the
children behind. To France, it was said, he went, and to Mediterranean
olive groves, where they hunted him as a nuisance. We loved him and
gave him sanctuary. And he helped the farmer in turn by ridding his
field of pests. Where a flock of starlings settled down for luncheon,
no wriggling thing remained to tell the tale.
By the time the stork was settled on the Rector’s house and busy
repairing his nest, our boyish eyes turned speculatively toward the
swelling buds of the pear tree that hung temptingly over the narrow
way to the Latin School, and we tried to estimate how many of them had
pears in them, and what were the chances of their happening to hit
us as they fell, later on. Our daily walk took the direction of the
Castle Hill, and turned off at the big buckthorn hedge to the river
where we swam in summer. The cowslips were in the meadows then, and
forget-me-nots grew on the bank where the rushes nodded to the waters
going out to the sea, as if they would like to go too, but, being
unable, gave them a message of cheer and good luck on the way. And
the spring birds called to each other in the meadows. Then the bright
nights were at hand. They came, as night does in the hot countries,
suddenly. You saw in the almanac--the 6th of May, I think it was--that
they were due, and that night, or the next if it was clear, you noticed
a something in the atmosphere that was different. You walked with a
lighter step, and your glance strayed constantly to the west, where
the light never quite went out, but kept moving round north, to hail
the coming day in the east. And every morning it came earlier and left
later, till St. John’s Day was passed, when the days again began to
grow shorter. Then one night in early August, when we walked abroad on
the causeway, we knew that the summer was soon over. The light had gone
out of the sky, as suddenly as it came, and the world was changed.
There lives in my memory such an evening in after years. I had been
home--for ever the Old Town remained home to one whose cradle was
rocked there--and was going my farewell rounds among the old people and
the old places before packing off with the stork and his family. My
way took me past the Castle Hill in the early twilight. A man stood
up there, a lonely figure sharply outlined against the light that was
fading out of the western sky. He stood watching it as if he would hold
it fast if he could, never stirring once while the warm pink changed
to a steely gray, cold as the moonlight on Arctic ice. Behind him the
town lay buried in its shadows. I almost fancied I saw him shiver as
they crept up the hill to close him in their long night. I knew him, a
schoolmate of mine, a man in good position who had remained unmarried
and was now past middle age, always a lonesome sort of fellow. He stood
there yet when the houses shut him out of my sight, and I did not see
him again. Three days later, on the day we sailed from Copenhagen, I
heard that he was dead. He had killed himself, no one knew why. He was
comfortable as the world goes, and there was no explanation of his act,
they said. To me none was needed. The picture of him, standing there
alone, the twilight of summer and of life closing in upon him, rose up
before me, and I thought I understood.
With the coming of the bright nights the Old Town grew young again.
Its staid habits were laid aside; the watchmen cried the bedtime hour
in vain. At all hours of the night, till the midnight bell sounded and
sometimes later, young and old were abroad, on the causeway, in the
Plantage, or driving to the shore and taking their supper there. The
young rowed and sang on the river in the long glowing twilight and had
a good time. School and university were closed, and the students came
back to visit old friends and to make love. With midsummer came “Holme
week,” of which more hereafter, when they all went out and sported in
the hay together. An endless procession of young couples have driven
home on the hay wagons, watching the midnight glow in the northern
heavens from the top of the load, hand in hand, and thinking earth a
new-found paradise for Two, while Cupid laughed at the ferry-landing
to see them go. In Holme week he was always a regular boarder with
the ferry-master. But the young never suspected it, or if they did,
showed no fear; and their elders, who knew, having met him there in
their time, held their peace. I am not sure that they did not even
surreptitiously pay his board. For they were sly, the good people of
the Old Town.
Early in August the young storks began to gather on the high roof of
the Cloister-church, and every day we saw them manœuvring there in
agitated rows, between practice flights into the fields that grew
longer and longer toward the time for their departure. At the final
review, we knew, any of them that could not fly well enough and far
enough would be killed by the rest, for no laggards were wanted on
their long trip to King Pharaoh’s land. We watched them soaring high,
high up, and hoped fervently that our own stork, or the neighbor’s we
knew so well, might pass muster and not be stabbed to death with those
long bills which we had seen carrying home snakes and frogs and lizards
to the nest so often, and always raised in loud thanksgiving as the
feast was spread before the brood. Then they seemed the gentlest of
birds; but all at once the red beaks became swords to our imagination,
to pierce the helpless youngster who got a bad report at his “exam.”
Every day we looked to see if they were all there and were glad when
none was missing. Then one morning we looked out, and the Cloister roof
was bare. The storks were gone. Every nest in the town was empty. We
searched awhile, incredulous; then, with a little shiver, went to look
up our skates and our mittens.
[Illustration: A GIRL FROM THE NORTH SEA ISLANDS.]
Before we had use for them, however, came the annual fair in September.
The Ribe Fair was famous throughout the middle ages, when the town
was the chief seaport of the country. Then merchants came from far
and near, and the court bought its purple and fine linen of them. In
our day it had dwindled, as had the Old Town itself, until barely a
baker’s dozen of traders from abroad brought their wares. But the Ribe
merchants built their booths in the Square, and there came embroideries
from Schleswig, pottery from the country to the north--the black “Jute
pots,” that alone were deemed fit to cook in by a careful housewife.
The woman who served fried eels, and coffee out of a copper kettle
with rock sugar in lumps,--lovely lumps, strung on a thread, can I ever
forget!--sat at the Cat-head Door of the Domkirke. To us she was as
much of an institution as the Domkirke itself and twice as important,
for she came only once a year, while the church was there all the
time. In the narrow lane between the booths multitudes of farm-folk
swarmed, togged out in their best, admiring it all and meeting friends
at every step. The blue of the border gendarmes and the red and green
of the Fanö girls made a pretty picture. The Fair was in fact the great
opportunity of the country folk for social intercourse in the days
when newspapers were rare, railroad and telegraph as yet to come, and
a letter an event news of which spread through a country neighborhood
and was discussed at its firesides in all its probable bearings. The
peasants came to the Fair, the men to dicker and trade, if nothing
else their pipes, it being understood that a treat went with the
trade, so that they became speedily mellow and sometimes loud over the
tavern board. The women laid in their supply of ribbons, calico,
and such like for the year, heard and discussed the news of weddings,
christenings, and funerals; and the foundation of many a match was laid
with a parting invitation to the prospective suitor to “come and see
the farm” as the next step in the negotiations.
[Illustration: “THERE WERE BOOTHS WITH TOYS AND BOOTHS WITH TRUMPETS.”]
To us children it was all an enchanted land. There were booths with
toys and booths with trumpets and booths with great “honey-cakes” with
an almond heart right in the middle. No such cakes are made nowadays,
and the trumpets in the toy-shops send forth no such blasts of rapture
as did those we bought at the Fair in the Old Town and blew till our
cheeks bulged and our eyes stared with the strain. Up and down we
trooped, through lane after lane, dragging weary but happy mothers in
our wake, trumpeting--I can hear those peals across all the toilsome
years. Tin horns--bah! Those were _trumpets_, I tell you, red and green
and silver-shine. And at last we brought up in front of the Great
Panorama and stopped, breathless, to look and listen.
The panorama man kept no booth. He was above it. His entire outfit
consisted of a sheet of canvas hung upon a pole and painted all
over with the scenes he sang about. For he was a singer, the
nineteenth-century descendant of the Skjald of our forefathers; far
descended, alas! his song was ever about murder and horror on sea and
land. He was the real precursor of the yellow press--pictures, songs,
and all. Whether he made the latter up himself, or merely sang the
ballad of the day, I do not know. If it was not about a man who took
his girl to a dance and, getting her aside,
[Music:
He took his knife from his pocket
And opened it up,]
preparatory to stabbing her with great detail and deliberation, then
it dealt with the latest world horror, the full circumstances of
which were set forth in lurid words, and even more lurid paint, on
the canvas. Thus, for instance, the burning of the emigrant steamer
_Austria_ in mid-ocean. I can see him now, slapping the canvas with
his rattan, and hear every inflection of his strident voice as he drew
attention to the picture of it steaming peacefully along, and sang:
[Music:
Proudly o’er the ocean waves
Sped the steamer Austria.
Passengers it had in numbers
Going to America.
To the captain who commanded
Never dream came of the blow
Which fate for him upon this voyage
Unluckily prepared has.]
Then the fire and the horror, the women throwing the children overboard
and being swallowed up by yellow and crimson flames that sent grewsome
thrills up and down our backbones--and then the hat passed around for
the troubadour. His was the _pièce de résistance_ of the Fair, and we
went home, when we had heard him through, impressed that we had heard
the heart of the great world throb.
[Illustration: THE GIRL MARKET.]
Besides the Fair which in olden times was known as Our Lady’s Fair,
perhaps because of the Domkirke,[9] in the shadow of which it was held,
more likely because it came on the Virgin’s feast-day, there were two
other kinds, the cattle fairs and the “girl market.” The last was
in the spring and fall, when farmers hired their help. Those who were
for hire then came to the Old Town on a set date, and stood in two
long rows in front of the old tavern in the Square, which remained
unchanged, as did the custom no doubt, from the Sixteenth Century. The
women bared their arms to the shoulder, and the farmers felt them,
approvingly or not as they thought them strong to do their work.
There are tricks in all trades. An old country parson from one of the
neighboring villages tells that a mistress at whose house hard scrabble
ruled would sometimes be found to smear her mouth with bacon to give
the impression that there was fat living where she was at home. When
a pair were suited, the dickering began, and the bargain made had the
sanction of law. Indeed, the applicant’s “book” was the first thing
asked for if the physical inspection had been satisfactory. In it his
or her character was recorded by successive employers, and attested by
the police, to whom it had to be presented each time the owner of it
made a change of base.
All through the spring great droves of steers came through the town on
their way to the Holstein marshlands, where they were to be fattened
for the Hamburg and London trade. Ribe was on one of the ancient cattle
tracks from the north to the great southern pastures. Then we heard
the tread of many hurrying hoofs at early dawn and the loud hop-how!
of the herders trying to keep their droves together. While they passed
through the town, the people kept discreetly indoors. Indeed, there was
no room for them outside; but they bore it patiently, being used to
it. Often enough the cows that lived in the town went in by the same
door their owners used, and naturally there came to be a neighborly
feeling between them, which was extended to these wayfarers. Sometimes,
instead of cattle, flocks of Jutland horses came through with braided
manes and tails, headed south for the armies of Prussia or France or
Austria. Twice a year, I think, they halted at the Old Town, and the
market square became the scene of a great cattle fair. It was on one
of these occasions that I made my first bid for a horse. I must have
been seven or eight years old, and had with much argument brought my
mother over to my notion that a little horse was a good thing to have
about the house. It could be stabled in the peat shed, where we kept
our winter fuel, and in summer grass enough to more than keep it grew
between the cobble-stones in our street, and on the narrow sidewalk.
So it was decided that I might buy a horse at the next fair, if I
could get it for eight skilling,--about five cents, I should say. That
was the appropriation, and with it I sped, my heart beating fast, to
the Square and interviewed a dealer, telling him that I only wanted a
little horse, being but a little boy; and besides, the peat shed was
small. I had seen some that were just the kind I wanted, running along
with a farmer’s team sometimes.
[Illustration: WHERE THE COWS GO IN THROUGH THE STREET DOOR.]
The dealer heard me through very gravely, and as gravely inspected
the eight skilling which I unwrapped and showed him as a guarantee of
good faith. He ran his eye over his sleek mares and regretted that
those little horses were scarce that year, and just then he had none
in stock. But he was going south, where they were plentiful, he said,
and if I would save my money till he came back, he would be sure to
bring me one. And I went home joyfully to report my success and get
the shed ready, and also to drive off the weeding women, who came most
inappropriately that very spring to dig out the dandelions in our
gutter. They were to be kept as a choice morsel for my horse. I waited
anxiously all through that summer and kept a lookout for every drove of
horses that came through, but my trader I never saw again, and in none
of the herds was my little horse. After a while I forgot about it in
the great overwhelming sensation of the time. The King came to the town.
In its old age that was an honor it had rarely enjoyed. No one there
had, I think, seen the King, unless in the field as a soldier seven
years before, in ’49-’50. King Frederik, furthermore, was a great
favorite of the people. He had given them constitutional government,
and he was the popular hero whose army had driven the invaders back
after two years of hard fighting. So we turned out to receive him, to
the last inhabitant. He came, impressive, kingly, yet with a bonhomie
about him that made the common people accept him as their own wherever
he went. They told of how he had fared with a steady Jutland farmer
who entertained him and his suite on the journey across country. Those
yeomen still said “thou” to the King, as their forefathers did in the
long ago, and knew little of the ways of courts--cared less, I fancy.
Also, they are as close-fisted as they are square in a trade with
“known man.” A neighbor is safe in their hands; others may look out
for themselves. So when the King went to his host and thanked him for
his trouble, calling him by his first name as was his wont, for he
understood his men, Hans scratched his head.
“It’s all right with the trouble, King,” he answered; “but about the
expense. That’s worse.”
The King laughed long and loud and squared up, and they parted friends.
This was the man we turned out in a body to honor. The men who had
horses and could ride received him as an escort, miles up the road.
All the countryside was there to see and to cheer; most of the men had
carried muskets in the war, and to the tune of “Den tappre Landsoldat”
they brought him in. The streets were hung with garlands of green, and
little girls in white strewed flowers before the royal procession. I
remember it all as if it were yesterday. In the evening there was a
great time in the Domkirke. The King sat inside the altar-rail in his
blue soldier’s uniform and with a big silver helmet on. Years and
years after, going through the National Museum at Copenhagen, I saw
it hanging there in a glass case, and clear across the room I knew it
at sight. That was the way a king ought to look, and it was the way
King Christian, his successor, did look when I saw him in the same
seat nearly fifty years later. Only he was slender and youthful of
figure despite his eighty odd years. King Frederik was stout. Stout or
slender, he was our boyish ideal of a king.
There was the gala dinner to which our father and mother went and came
home in the small hours of the morning with their pockets full of
bonbons, and with wondrous tales of the show that made our ears tingle
all that winter. And then there was the discovery on the Castle Hill,
made for the occasion expressly. That was the very peak and pinnacle of
it all.
Ever since anybody could remember there had been stories about a secret
passage leading from the Castle Hill under the moat into town--now, it
was said, to the Bishop’s Manse, and then again to the Cloister, or to
the Domkirke itself. It was supposed to be a way they had in the old
fighting days of getting out and taking the enemy in the rear, when
the castle was besieged and they were hard put to it. No one ever knew
the truth of it, and so we all believed it; but now by some fortunate
chance the secret passage was actually found. The mouth of it had
been uncovered, and the King was to see it. It was a tunnel built of
the big brick the monks made, and which we still knew as monk-brick.
Half the Old Town is built of it, that is to say, castle, cloisters,
and churches long since gone live again in the walls of the houses
built since the Reformation. What is quite evidently a part of the
mantelpiece from the castle adorns the entrance to the silversmith’s on
the corner of the street through which King Valdemar rode to his dying
queen, and the searcher of to-day, seeking vainly a trace of his famous
castle where it stood, walks over it, unthinking, when he goes in to
buy a souvenir of his visit. This secret way stirred the town mightily.
It was confirmation of the old rumors, and it was in itself a mystery.
Where was the other end of the hole?
The King saw, but declined the honor of being the explorer. He
suggested first one then another of his suite with less avoirdupois.
But they all had excuses. In fact, a small boy might barely have done
it; further, the hole led downward and was black and ill-smelling.
So it remained unexplored. It stood open for some time, an object of
awe and many speculative creeps to us boys; then it was covered up. I
regret to have to add, as destroying a long-cherished illusion that had
a glamour about it which it is hateful to dispel, that when diggings
were made in the Castle Hill last summer, under competent leadership,
our secret passage was discovered to be an old sewer that led no
farther than the dry moat. It was just as well none of the King’s
courtiers went down.
Those close-fisted farmer neighbors of ours were sometimes very
well-to-do; but a hard fight with a lean soil had taught them the
value of money earned, perhaps overmuch. In the Old Town, as I have
said, there were no very rich people, but the poor were not poor
either in the sense in which one thinks of poverty in a great city.
They had always enough to eat and were comfortably housed. There were
no beggars, unless you would count as such the travelling “Burschen,”
mechanics making the rounds of Denmark and Germany under their guild
plan, working where they could and asking alms when they had nothing,
the which we freely gave. It was an understood thing that that was not
charity in any sense, but a kind of lift to a traveller on his way. So
he was getting experience in his work, whatever it might be, by seeing
the ways of other communities, and by and by would return to his own,
better regarded as man and mechanic for having “travelled” in his
years. It was, of course, the old mediæval system of which we saw the
last. There is very little left of it to-day, I imagine.
I said that there were no beggars in the Old Town. There are indeed
few in Denmark, where prosperity is very evenly distributed. It was,
nevertheless, there I encountered the slyest little beggar it was
ever my fortune to come across. It was in one of the cemeteries of
Copenhagen, where we had been to look up a friend’s grave, that we came
upon a little girl, a child of ten, who was fashioning a little mound
in the dust and putting a monument over it, a piece of a broken slate.
She looked up as we stopped beside her, noticing our serious faces and
no doubt checking us off at once as being there on business, not mere
chance visitors.
“Here lies my cat,” she said. “It was red.”
“Oh!” We were interested at once. “And what did it die of?”
“The weasel killed it--sucked its blood.”
We walked right into the trap--“And is there to be a writing?”
“Yes,” sadly; “‘Good-by, little Svip;’ but I have no money to buy a
slate pencil with.”
She accepted our penny with the gravity of an undertaker as she cast
a swift glance down the walk where two women in deep mourning were
coming. Then she went on making her grave.
[Illustration: “TRENCHERS OF STEAMING SAUSAGE.”]
There came a season in the autumn when the Old Town resounded with the
squealing of countless pigs. It was killing-time when the fat friend so
fondly cherished throughout the year was to make return by furnishing
forth the tables of his hosts. We boys heard it with joy, for we knew
what was to come after all the woe. Toward evening of the great day
trenchers of steaming sausage were carried around among the neighbors
who had no pigs, that they also might taste of the good things of
the earth. Blood sausage was there, big and round and red, and good
to eat, fried with syrup; and liver sausage, pale but appealing; and
sausage with rice in and sausage with spices in; and roll sausage,
which sometimes I buy in delicatessen shops nowadays; but they must
have lost the art of making them, for they don’t taste as they did
then. The trencher must have been welcome in Mother’s larder, for with
so many mouths to fill we were taught to look upon meat as a relish
rather than the mainstay of the meal. Not that we did not have enough.
We always had that, but dishes made of flour, of potatoes, of peas
and other vegetables, played a greater rôle in the economic cookery
of the day and country than nowadays. And we liked it. I defy any one
to find a summer dish that compares with “Rödgröd med Flöde,” which
was just currant juice and corn-starch with cream. Even the Saturday
menu in our house was a favorite: fried herring and Öllebröd. For
special occasions the herring were fried “in dressing-gowns,” each in
a cornucopia of white paper that gave the dish quite a festive touch.
Öllebröd is a dish I despair of making the American mind grasp. It was
made of black bread boiled in beer till it made a thick broth, to which
each one added cream and sugar to suit his taste. Boiled beer sounds
funny, but it was the household beer, non-alcoholic, which was both
cheap and good. The other kind we knew as Bavarian beer. Its use was
not so common as it has become since.
Still, the Old Town had ever been partial to its beer. When it was in
its prime, eight “beer-tasters” were among the town functionaries. They
were to see that the supply was up to the standard, with the proper
allowance of good hops. In the account of the hanging of the big bell
in the church tower--the “storm bell” I spoke of--in 1599, two barrels
of beer to the men who hoisted it up and hung it are set down among
the expenses. One wonders whether all who took a hand were included.
According to one report of that day’s proceedings, there was some
doubt about their ability to transport the bell from the foundry to
the Domkirke, until the Rector of the Latin School put it up to his
boys, who at once took hold and dragged it all the way alone. Whether
they came in under the subsequent largesse of beer is not stated,
but probably not. Two barrels would not have gone very far then. All
this seems queer to us nowadays. It is strange to find that in that
century the privileged Town Hall dramshop--the Rathhaus-keller, in
fact--achieved a competitor in the Domkirke itself. The chapter of
clerics opened one of their own in their cellar under the north end
of the chancel, on the plea that they must have wine for churchly
functions, of a proper quality, and kept it going for I don’t know
how long. Much later than that, in 1683, clergymen were forbidden by
law to distil whiskey, but in 1768 “priest and deacon” were expressly
confirmed in their right to distil it for their own use. So there was
ecclesiastical sanction, and to spare, for all the beer and spirits
that were consumed. Clear down to my time, when the Jutland peasant
brewed,[10] it was the custom to throw the first three handfuls of malt
into the mash “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
And the same man who did that, as the next step shut all the doors of
the brewing room, placed a glowing coal on each doorstep, put three
coals in the vat with a wisp of straw bound in form of a cross, and
finally stirred it all with the iron tongs from the fireplace, to keep
evil eyes from spoiling the brew![11] No wonder there were spooks in
the Old Town, the werwolf that haunted the graveyard by night, and the
hell-horse on its three legs.
Whenever I think of that last and the horror we held it in, it comes
to me that our dread of crawling things must be largely a matter of
legs, due to our prejudice in favor of the standard two or four. The
hell-horse was ever so much more horrible because of its limping about
by night on three. We hate a spider, which has six or eight, and loathe
the thousand-leg worm with cause. And at the other end, when it comes
to the snake, that has no legs at all, we are prompted by an instant
impulse to kill it. It is not a religious prejudice at all, no Garden
of Eden notion, but an instinctive recoil from the thing that does not
conform to the established standard in legs. But whether that be so or
not, the hell-horse that so terrorized us, was a decadent beast. He was
literally on his last legs in my childhood, and even the Old Town knows
him no more, I guess.
The man with his head under his arm was, if anything, worse than the
hell-horse, and had an unpleasant habit of making himself at home under
your roof. The three-legged beast at least stayed outside. There was a
headless man in the old mansion at Sönderskov, where I sometimes spent
my summer vacation. You could hear him walk in the midnight hour up and
down, up and down the hall, and we boys lay and shivered in bed for
fear he would come to our door and knock. I have heard him more than
once since I grew up and identified his tread on the oaken stairs with
the regular beat of the tower-clock above my head, but still I confess
to a creepy feeling when I hear it.
But I have gone far afield from the household economics of the Old
Town. They were intended to make both ends meet on a scale of small
incomes with need, often enough, of the closest figuring. Large
families were the rule rather than the exception. Not till my father
was long in his grave and I was looking over his old papers and
accounts, did I suspect how bitter was the fight he waged those forty
years and to what straits he was put. To turn a coat when the right
side was worn threadbare was a common expedient in those days of honest
cloth, but Father had his overcoat turned twice to tide him over an
evil time. As for us boys, we didn’t have any half the time. I remember
the winter when, being in such case and making a virtue of bald
necessity, I tried to organize a Spartan Society among my schoolmates,
the corner-stone of which was contempt of overcoats as plain
mollycoddling. As a means of attracting the boys there were secret
passwords and an initiation that had to be worked at dusk in the moat
by the Castle Hill and was supposed to be very grewsome. It took for a
while, until the mothers put a stop to it. I believe one of them who
had read Æsop’s fable about the fox that had lost its tail and tried to
persuade the other foxes that it was the latest fashion, saw through
my dodge. At any rate the long woollen muffler which the society
allowed, I being possessed of one, went out of vogue and the overcoats
came back. It must have been at that time that my father bought at a
salvage sale of the cargo of a wrecked ship a roll of really fine cloth
of a peculiar sea-green color. It was a good investment, for it made
not only a suit for Father that had lots of wear in it, but all the
family were clad in green while it lasted, which was a long while. I
hate to think what the boys of to-day would have nicknamed us. They
were not so bright then, and I doubt if we would have cared. We boys
were quite able to defend the family honor, and quite ready too.
Father had a fancy for numbering his children in Latin. The sixth was
called Sextus, the ninth Nonus. In grim jest, he proposed to name
the twelfth Duodecimus, but agreed with his fellow-teachers that the
luckless child would be forever miscalled “dozen.” They had a good
laugh over it. Father was very far from being a book-worm. Though he
was very learned, he had a keen sense of humor, and, for all the heavy
burdens he carried, he was the life of the company always.
The dead languages were his task in the Latin School, the living his
pleasure and recreation. I doubt if there was any modern tongue in
which he was not more or less proficient. And so it was natural that
when a wrecked ship’s crew came to the Old Town he should be the
interpreter; or when, as happened every now and then, a bottle was cast
ashore on one of the islands with a message from some ship in peril on
the deep, that it should be brought to him to be deciphered. There was
a fixed fee for this,--a “specie,” which was two daler in the case of
a bottle,--and it was most welcome. Yet there was always an element of
the deeply tragic in it. We children stood with bated breath and looked
on while Father unfolded the piece of crumpled paper, polished his
spectacles, and read with husky voice some such message as this:
“We are sinking. Jesus, Maria, save us!”
Then the name of the vessel, its home port, and the latitude, if
they knew it. I think I am quoting literally one which I have never
forgotten. It was a Portuguese vessel and it got somehow mixed up in
my childish imagination with the Lisbon earthquake. That had happened
a long while before, but news lasted longer than nowadays. There was
not a fresh horror every day, and the illustrated papers kept the
earthquake in stock until the siege of Sebastopol came and gave us all
a change. That in its turn lasted, I think, quite a dozen years, down
to our own war of ’64.
[Illustration: “I THREW THE LAST PEBBLE.”]
I cannot stop without recording here the great and awful tragedy of
my childhood. It was when I had become possessed, by some unheard-of
streak of luck, of a silver four-skilling that was all my own, to spend
as I pleased, with no string to it. It was a grave responsibility,
for I perceived that with this immeasurable wealth I might buy
practically anything, and what it was to be, with the shops of the Old
Town simply crammed with things that were all desirable, was not to
be decided lightly. So I betook myself to the Long Bridge, where I
could be alone, to think it over, my pockets, in the depths of which
reposed the miraculous coin, filled with pebbles to punctuate my ideas
withal. I stood on one of the arches and threw them in, watching the
rings they made in the water, and as they widened till they reached
from shore to shore and I dug deeper and deeper into my pocket, my
ambition and my hopes rose with them. Until, all unknowing, I threw
the last pebble and, as it sped forth in the sunshine, saw that it was
my four-skilling. The waters closed over it with a little splash I can
hear yet, and I saw its silver sheen as it turned and sank. I did not
weep. The disaster was too great. I stood awhile dumb, then went home
and told no one. Darkness had settled upon my life with a sorrow so
great that I felt it invested even with a kind of dignity as a vast
and irreparable misfortune. I cannot even now laugh at it. It was too
terrible to ever quite forget.
CHAPTER VI
[Illustration: KING HARALD’S STONE.]
The Old Town was set in a meadow, grass to the right of it, grass to
the left of it, stretching away toward the horizon until in the south
and east it came up against the black moor, and toward the sunset a
little way met the sands of the western sea. What sport was there
for boys in such a country? My own boys asked me that question with
something of impatience on a walk through the fields, for they had been
sizing up the lads of their own age on baseball and found them no good.
They threw the ball “just like girls.” Not many days after one of them
came home with a bruised nose and an increased respect for Danish
muscle. It was good for fighting, anyhow. But, in truth, we did not run
to baseball when I was a boy; and as for fighting, we had no more than
was good for us; when any Uitlander bragged, for instance. As I look
back now it seems to me we didn’t have time for either, so busy were we
with our sports.
There was the brook that led to the old manse, hidden quite behind a
wind-tossed thicket of scrub-oak that had run over the sunken walls
since the days when bishops were fighting men who went clad in iron
to the wars. Then the manse was one of the strongholds of the Ribe
prelates who led the armies of the King against the German counts,
notably the “Strong Master Jacob,” whose fists and sword saved many
a soul where preaching failed. The brook was now barely a step wide,
and we boys could easily jump over it in places; but the wild birds
built their nests in its banks in spring, and up where we had our early
bonfires it widened into a dark still pool, hedged in with mint and
forget-me-nots, where wary trout were always darting from the deep
shadows. I go to seek that pool first thing when I return to the Old
Town now, and it is not changed. But the boys of to-day seem to have
forgotten it.
[Illustration: “IN MY DREAMS I SIT BY THE CREEK.”]
And then the creek that meandered through the meadows miles and
miles from the great peat bog where our winter fuel came from,
making one turn more tortuous than another, with hole after hole in
the deep pockets that were fairly alive with yellow perch and their
silver-scaled neighbors, whatever you would call them. We called them
“skaller.” I could go to a dozen of them blindfolded, I think, even
now, and bait my hook and throw it in the exact spot where a perch is
waiting to pull the cork under with one quick, determined jerk. No
nibbling about him; his mind is always made up and ready. Sometimes
in my dreams I sit by the creek in one particular spot I have never
forgotten, with feet hanging over the edge, the slanting sunlight on
the dark waters, red-finned perch and silver fish darting hither and
thither, and the soft west wind in the grass; and then I am perfectly
happy. Our ambition did not rise to five-pound pickerel in those days.
Maybe there weren’t any. My little boy and I found plenty in after
years, and little else. My pretty fish seemed to be gone. Perhaps the
pickerel had eaten them up, like some mean trust on dry land. If he
had, we got square with him. We ate him in turn. They had reduced the
catching of him to an exact science. Drop your bait there, right in the
edge of the rushes, so--a swirl and a sudden tightening of the line!
Let him run, and take out your watch. Eight minutes to a dot, and he
is off again. That is when he turns the bait around in his mouth and
swallows it, having lain by waiting for signs of treachery. Now, pull
him in. Here he is! Hi, what a big fellow!
[Illustration: WHERE I SHOT MY FIRST DUCK.]
It was up here by this turn that I shot my first duck. It was in the
winter vacation, and I had found out that here, where there was a
stretch of open water, a flock of black-headed ducks were at home. I
burrowed through six feet of snow to the water’s edge and shot one of
them as they flew. It fell and dived, and I threw my clothes in the
snow and jumped after. Ugh! it was cold. I dodged the floating ice
as well as I could and kept turning the cakes over and over, looking
for my duck, but it was not there. It was not till I climbed ashore
again and dressed myself with chattering teeth that, happening to
look under the bank where the current had cut the earth away, I saw
it sitting composedly on the little shelving beach below. I can feel
now the throbbing of my heart as I leaned over, and reaching down with
infinite stealth, caught it by the neck and yanked it up. The pride of
that homeward procession with the head of the duck flapping from my
game-bag! And then, after all, the cook had to wring its neck. In my
joy I had forgotten to kill it. The shot had only stunned it.
If fish ran low in our own river because of the swans taking more
than their share, we could go to Konge-aaen (the King’s River), four
or five miles away, where there were jumping fish which an Englishman
came across the North Sea every year to catch with flies. This to us
was a very amazing thing, and quite like an Englishman: to angle with
a bit of hen feather, or even a grasshopper, when there were fine fat
worms to be had for the digging. Really, if the truth be told, it was
a rank imposition on the fish. I confess that it seems to me so even
yet--not exactly a square deal. The Englishman did not discourage this
attitude on our part. He went right on, and for years had a monopoly
of the salmon in the stream. For we did them little damage. Once in a
while very large salmon were speared by those living along the stream.
More frequently a farmer haying in his field spitted a sturgeon on
his pitchfork. Then there was a fight, the accounts of which we boys
listened to with breathless interest when the fish was brought to town.
Always it seemed to me to hark back to the days we so loved to dream
of; for the sturgeon was all clad in mail, as it were, just like the
knights of old, and it was often a question whether the fish would come
ashore or the man go into the brook. At least that was the way he told
it. If the fish said nothing, it looked grim enough to make you believe
almost anything.
But if one did not run to fishing,--though what healthy boy does
not?--there was the heath, and then the forest. Forest sounds big. All
there was of it was a patch of woodland some twenty or twenty-five
acres in extent, but to us in the mellow autumn days it was an
enchanted forest indeed. For under the gnarled oaks, only survivors
of the sturdy giants that had once covered the land, as the names of
half the villages bore witness, and had filled the seas with the bold
vikings’ ships, was a wilderness of hazel bushes that was the special
preserve of the Latin School boys on Saturday afternoons, or when we
had “month’s leave.” Month’s leave was an afternoon off, which the
school might choose itself once a month, if it had been good. Then a
committee of the oldest boys went to the Rector with the observation
that it was a fine day for play, while the rest of us stood with
beating hearts, and if the gout did not pinch him just then, he would
say, “Yes! be off,” and with a mighty shout we would run for our botany
boxes and crooked sticks, and for the woods, if it was in autumn.
The boxes were to hold the nuts; the crooked sticks served a double
purpose. They were for walking-staffs on the homeward way, for the
forest was three miles away; once there, they were indispensable to
hook down the branches with. The hazel bushes grew in the twilight of
the woods, much as dogwood grows with us, and were mostly big enough
to climb, but the nuts were on the farthest twigs, that could only be
reached and stripped by pulling them down. That was fine fun, with
enough tumbles to make it exciting, and a very substantial reward
if judgment were used in the picking. The supply so laid in often
lasted past Christmas, and we had little else. Walnuts were too dear.
Chestnuts we did not know at all, not the eatable kind. The other, the
horse-chestnut, made fine ammunition when, in autumn, we played “robber
and soldier.” The winter storms that drove in wreckage from the Gulf
Stream strewed our coast, indeed, with Brazil-nuts, sometimes whole
ship loads of them, but they were good only for making bonfires. The
sea or something else had cracked them. There was not a kernel in one
of them.
It does not seem to me that life could be worth much in the Latin
School without those nutting expeditions. And so, when I went there
with my own boys, and after wading through the old bog where the stork
stalked up and down fishing for frogs, we came to the cool shade of
the forest and found it hedged in with cheeky American barbed wire and
signs up warning intruders off, my spirit rose in instant rebellion.
This was a double disgrace not to be borne. And once back again in the
land of freedom I planned to defeat that wretched barbed-wire fence.
Not only must it go, but the forest itself must belong to the Latin
School, or else the undisputed right to go nutting there forever; and
while I had it in mind I thought I saw a way to drive in the edge of
democracy by vesting the control of it in the boys, with the proviso
that at least once a year they should invite the public school boys to
be their guests there. In my day they fought at the drop of a hat; the
recollection of the bitter feud between them stirs my blood even now
when I think of it. But alas for the best-laid plans of mice and men!
I was told, when I moved to the attack, that times had changed; that
school was dismissed at two o’clock, not at five, nowadays, and that
therefore month’s leave as we knew it had gone out of existence; that
Latin School and “plebs” were part of the same system, hence the strife
of the old times had ceased; and that anyhow boys rode cycles and made
century runs and such things, where we went nutting. Truly, the times
do change. I am glad I was a boy then, if I am a back number now.
[Illustration: PICKING RÄVLINGER IN THE MOOR.]
Maybe they ride right through the heath on their senseless runs, and
don’t stop to pick Rävlinger. If they do, I am done; I have nothing
more to say. Rävlinger are the little black berries that grow on the
creeping heather in the sterile moor, quite like our blueberries, only
there are many more of them. Very likely you would think them sour; we
thought them heavenly, and there is enough of the boy left in me to
back up that opinion to-day against the riper judgment of the years.
We gathered them by the bucketful, paying little heed to the heath
farmer’s warning not to touch them after midsummer night, for then
the devil had greased his boots with them, and came home with black
faces and hands and terrible tales of the “worms”--_i.e._ snakes--we
had encountered in the heath. And, indeed, there are enough of these
poisonous reptiles there yet. But, now as then, a fellow can keep out
of their way. Some of the dearest recollections of my boyhood are
of the long tours I made through this lonesome moor, where a rare
shepherd knitting his woollen stocking and a gypsy’s cart are often the
only “humans” one meets in a day’s journey. Met, I should have said,
perhaps, for in another generation even the moor will be a thing of
the past. Already half of the six hundred thousand acres of heath land
in the Danish peninsula has been planted with seedling pine, American
pine, that has grown up finely, and a great and salutary change has
been wrought, no doubt. But if there is to be a day without moor,
without heather, without the sweet honey the bees gathered there when
the broom was purple, and without Rävlinger, I--well, I am glad I was a
boy when I was.
Which brings to my mind an adventure of one of my lonely trips in the
heath. This one went far, extending over a whole vacation week. I
had come at the end of a long summer day to an inn, where they gave
me a big box-bed to sleep in; and I had barely got into it when a lot
of scratching under me made me aware that a family of rats shared my
couch. But I was too sleepy to care; we snuggled up together and did
one another no harm in the night. I remember it because of the terror
it caused my mother when she heard of it. She had a great dread of
rats. It was on that same trip that, coming to the shore, I supped at a
fisherman’s hut on smoked dogfish and thought it the finest I had ever
tasted. I was a boy and hungry. But I do not know why it should not be
good. The dogfish I am thinking of are the small sharks that infest the
North Sea coast in great numbers. They ate the flesh and sold the skin
for sandpaper in those days. It was scratchy and did very well for that
purpose.
The Seem woods, where we went nutting, covered, as I said, but a little
patch, but a dozen miles to the eastward there were real forests, in
which a boy might get lost; and there were deer in them, which made
a picnic there ever so exciting. That had to be engineered by the
grown-ups, for it meant impressing practically the entire rolling stock
of the town for the day. Then its half-dozen ancient Holsteiners,
yellow-wheeled open wagons with seats for eight or a dozen, pulled
up early in the Square, where all upper-tendom was waiting with much
provender to board them for Gram. Many were the dubious headshakes
of those who were left behind as to the promises of the weather. The
wind was in the east, and the clouds prophesied rain. They did that
regularly, and they kept their promise at least half the time. It was
sometimes a bedraggled crowd that made cover at sunset. But if even
half the day was fair, it paid well for the trip. The change from the
barren, rather stern outlook from the Old Town, where the sea-wind
stunted tree and thicket so that it always sloped down to nothing in
the west as if some giant scythe had trimmed it so, to the beech woods
with their shelter and quiet and their luxury of color and vegetation,
was very alluring. While our elders took tea at the forester’s, where
the tea-urn was always simmering, expecting company, and duly admired
the furniture in the Countess’s drawing-room at the Château, we boys
organized a mighty hunt for boar and bear, and sometimes were lucky
enough to start a roebuck. Then, indeed, was the hunt a success, and
our minds were stocked for many a day to come with stuff for day-dreams.
There was enough of that lying all about, for field and heath were
dotted with the cairns that covered the ashes of the bold vikings. Off
to the northeast from Gram, buried in a thicket of scrub-oak where
once had been deep forest, lay a large boulder, twice as high as a
big man, that always seemed to me to span the thousand years between
the old days and ours as no dry books could. Stones are not common
in that country; this one had come down from Norwegian mountains on
an ice-floe in ages long past. But no geological speculation chained
our imagination to it. It had a story of its own. Harald Blaatand,
grandfather of Knud (Canute) the Great, had chosen it to put over the
grave of his mother, Queen Thyra, and was hauling it across the country
with an army of oxen and thralls, when word came that his son had risen
against him to take the kingdom. He dropped it there to take up arms,
and there it had been since. The top of it was split open. The priest
in a neighboring parish had tried, a hundred years before, to quarry
it for his parsonage, but like King Harald was halted before he had
gone far. What was the matter with the parsons in those days, I cannot
imagine. When they opened the graves of King Valdemar and Queen Dagmar,
of whom I have told elsewhere, they found her tomb a jumble of broken
brick and rubbish. A priest attached to the church, to make a nice
roomy burial-place for himself, had calmly cut into the resting-place
of Denmark’s best-beloved queen, throwing the bones he found there
to the scrap-heap. A hundred years and over, the skull of the gentle
Dagmar, which some one had picked up, lay about the church and was then
carried off by a thief. A gold cross the queen had worn was saved,
having “value” in the eyes of the vandals, and in the course of time
found its way into the possession of the government and into the museum
of antiquities, where it now is, its most precious relic.
[Illustration: DAGMAR’S DESPOILED TOMB.]
“Holme week” was the great time of the year for us all. It came late
in July, when the hay was all in and we got our fishing-tackle out;
for the hay was the great crop thereabouts, and until it had been cut
it was not a good thing to be caught by the farmer wading through
his meadows. Out toward the sea the river made a great bend, and in
it, near its mouth, lay a stretch of marshland where the grass grew
exceeding rich and sweet. This was the “Holme,”[12] which in the
thirteenth century had been given to the town by the King in return for
its building a wall around Ribe the better to defend it. The wall was
never built, though they got so far as digging a ditch, but they kept
the land, and after the Reformation divided it up among themselves,
to their great gain. When now the last of the hay had been cut and
stacked, the Old Town went a-picnicking, bag and baggage. Those who
could afford it drove out; those who couldn’t walked, or sailed, or
rowed out, depending on a lift from the tide to help them back. And
all of them had hampers or baskets, filled to the brim. There is no
occasion that I know of in Denmark when these are left behind. There,
on the meadow that was like a smooth, green-carpeted floor, they
sported and ran and tumbled, pelting one another with hay, children and
grown-ups together, all day. I never knew who paid for the hay, or if
it was just a contribution to the general good-will of the time, but
no one ever put a damper on our fun. The climax of it for us boys was
always the attack on the Fold, a kind of fort on the meadow into which
the cattle were driven in case of flood. The Fold had earth walls and a
living hedge, and to roll off that wall with a bloody nose, or better
still, to climb over it and give the other fellow one, was enough to
make any boy feel like a real hero, especially with the girls looking
on and showing great concern.
When the sun set over the meadows and we came back from our campaign,
tired and sore, supper was spread on the grass beside a comfortable
hay-stack, and it was good. There is nothing anywhere half so good to
eat when you are hungry as the Danish Smörrebröd, particularly the kind
they make in Ribe. Only, I guess, you’ve got to have a boy’s stomach,
for you will want to eat it all, and the last time I did--well, never
mind! I will lay that up against my American training. It never
happened when I was a boy but once; that was when a ship had been
wrecked with a cargo of Messina raisins, and the man who had bought it
saw us snooping around where he had laid those raisins out to dry on
great tarpaulins and told us we might eat as many as we liked. We did,
and ouch! let me forget it. I sure thought I was going to die.
In the gloaming they lit tallow candles set in beer bottles in the
dancing tent, and to the tune of an old cracked fiddle everybody had
a turn on the sod with everybody else. If there were classes and
distinctions in the Old Town, there were none out there. The Bishop’s
wife or the Rector’s daughter danced with the shoemaker’s lad and had a
good time. The old ferry raft that was pulled from shore to shore with
a rope, plied back and forth over the river, carrying great loads of
hay one way, and bigger and bigger loads of merry-makers from the town,
for those were the midsummer nights when nobody kept account of time.
That was the Old Town’s real holiday. It came to an end with the third
Sunday, I think it was, in July, after which the cattle were turned in
to graze on the Holme and the herdsman was left in sole possession;
by no means a sinecure, for soon the North Sea gave warning that at any
moment his life and the safety of his charges might be at stake, if
they were outstripped in the race with the angry floods.
[Illustration: IN HOLME WEEK--THE OLD FERRY RAFT.]
But while the sea yet slumbered in summer sunshine we boys had our
shore days, and they were fine. Then we arose with the sun and walked
the four miles to the beach, which thereabouts is very flat and wide.
When the tide is out, there is a stretch of quite half a mile of white
sand to deep water. Over this the flood tide comes stealing in so
stealthily, yet so swiftly, that it takes a pretty good runner to get
to the land without very wet feet or worse, if he is caught far out by
the turn of the tide. We would sometimes bring home quite a store of
amber from these trips, and then little files would be busy for days
making hearts, sabots, and other trinkets for the girl each boy liked
best. Hearts were the most popular and also the easiest to fashion. We
made those things ourselves, and it was a sort of manual training not
to be despised.
“Treading” flounders was a unique kind of fishing that took a whole
day from earliest dawn, but sometimes turned up a bigger yield of fish
than one could carry home. A perfectly calm day was needed for that,
when there was no “wash.” The boys followed the outgoing tide, tramping
hard with bare feet in the soft sand and steering by the church on the
island out in the sea. When they had gone as far as they wanted, they
tramped back by another route, and then put in the long wait till the
tide had come in and was ebbing again, building fires, catching crabs,
or whatever they felt like. With the next ebb-tide came their harvest.
Following their tracks of the morning, they would find, wherever they
had made them deep enough, a little pool left by the receding waters,
and in each pool one or two, and sometimes three, flounders about the
size of my hand, very much like the Catalina sand dabs of the Pacific.
These they would unceremoniously heave into a sack they carried between
them, and before long it grew heavy with their catch. It seems that the
bottom of the North Sea is fairly covered with multitudes of these
fish, which served the islanders of that coast as both meat and bread.
They dried and toasted them, and served them with their afternoon
coffee, and you might look long for a better dish. I think of it often
as being quite like Tvebak[13] slightly salted, only better to my
youthful taste.
Out along the river mouth was famous hunting for water-fowl. In the
migrating season great flocks of duck alighted there, and geese and
every other kind of game that flies. I can hear yet the cry of the
sickle-billed curlew in those meadows. It prophesied rain, we said, and
the promise was usually kept. When I was a big boy, the first telegraph
line was built to the Old Town, and that autumn an odd thing happened.
Morning after morning dozens of shore-birds were found dead under the
wires. We thought first that the electric current had slain them as
they roosted on the wires; but as it was apparent that some of them
couldn’t roost that way, a better explanation was sought and found.
They had been killed flying against the wires. It seems that they were
strung just at the height at which they flew. It is clear to me that
birds have some power of reasoning, for after a while we found no more
dead. Evidently they had learned to fly higher, or lower perhaps.
Once or twice in autumn, on their way south, great flights of
kramsfowl, a bird highly esteemed by the cook, roosted in the Plantage,
a little grove just outside of town. Just when that would be, no one
could tell, but for weeks after the leaves began to turn some of us set
our snares,--a willow bough bent in a triangle, with horse-hair loops
in each of the uprights, and baited with rowan-berries below. The bird
would sit and swing in the triangle, and, bending to get at the berries
under its feet, would put its head through one or both of the loops and
be strangled. Morning after morning we would sneak out before breakfast
to look to our snares and come home empty-handed. Then some brisk
morning, when the first touch of frost was in the air, we would drag
such loads of the big black birds into town that there would be talk
of it for days. Every sick person we knew had a feast, and we felt that
we were mighty hunters indeed.
[Illustration: CRUISING UP TO THE SEEM CHURCH.]
So there was no lack of sport in the Old Town, and I haven’t begun to
tell you of it all. In the winter there was the river that was then
dammed back and became a great frozen lake five or six miles long.
Then we would strap on our skates good and tight for a long trip,
and go cruising up from the Kannegrove,[14] the big ditch down by the
Cloister, to the Seem church, clear at the further end, and, spreading
our jackets out, let the wind use them as sails on the run back. I tell
you we came down in a hurry. No time for fancy skating then. But a
mighty sharp lookout had to be kept on that trip, for if a skate slid
into a crack there was a wrench and a fall, and it was apt to be a bad
one. When the snow lay deep, there was such coasting as you do not
often find. For though the country was flat as a pancake, the Castle
Hill was there with its deep moat. Almost clear up on the other side
the rush would fetch you. I haven’t seen a better coasting hill in New
England. But, on the other hand, I must own that American boys are “up”
on steering to an extent we didn’t dream of. The “leg out” is a Yankee
invention, and it is great. We just slid.
CHAPTER VII
[Illustration: RIBERHUS.]
To the West of the Old Town, with only the dry moat and a fringe of
gardens between, stood the green Castle Hill. Green it was and had
been in the memory of the oldest. The road-makers of three generations
before had taken what the house-builder had left of the ruins that
alone remained of Denmark’s once great historic stronghold. There its
fighting kings guarded the land against the enemy to the south; thence
its armies had marched to victory or defeat in many a fight with the
turbulent German barons. Thither came the merchant ships of Europe
bringing stone from the Rhine for the Domkirke, sweet wines and silken
raiment for the ladies of the court, and cloth from Flanders; for to be
well dressed in those days a man’s coat must have been cut in Ribe. The
river was long since sanded in, in my day, and ships came that way no
more. A few lonesome sheep were picketed on the green hill, and when at
night the white mist crept in from the sea, blurring and blotting the
landscape out, their melancholy bleating alone betrayed the site where
once the clash of arms waked ready echoes.
Here dwelt King Valdemar and his gentle queen who live in the Danish
folk-song. Of her after seven centuries the ploughman sang yet:
She came without burden, she came with peace,
She came the good peasant to cheer.
The ballad tells of the brief year of bliss the royal lovers lived
here, of his wild ride across the heath to her death-bed, and of the
daring May party that won back the castle from a traitorous garrison
for “King Erik the young.” Last summer they dug in the Castle Hill and
found little enough there. But here on my table stands a brick from
the stout wall, that long since crossed the ocean with me. It may
be that there is magic in the stone to tell of the past, for it was
fashioned by monks who knew more than the pater-nosters they told on
their beads; or is it that I am of Queen Dagmar’s kin, her god-son,
christened as I was in the font she gave to the Domkirke: last night
as I sat alone pondering the old songs, the flickering shadows from my
study fire touched it, and I dreamed again the story of King Valdemar
and Riberhus.[15]
I dreamed that I saw a great throng on land and shore, men and women
in holiday garments, straining their eyes seaward, where a ship with
golden dragon’s head was making its way slowly between low islands. As
it came into full view, the people broke into jubilant cheers: “Welcome
Dagmar, Denmark’s Queen!” It was the King’s ship bringing his bride
from her far Bohemian home. Answering cries came back from the crew,
and with music and the waving of many banners the splendid vessel
sailed up the channel. At the rail stood a golden-haired princess with
the King’s messenger and friend. Her eyes were wet, but there was a
happy smile upon her lips. Her glance sought the lonely figure of a
horseman on the beach whose prancing steed champed its bit impatiently.
Where he rode the crowd fell back and made room.
“What knight rides yonder on the white charger?” she asked; “never saw
I kinglier man.”
“Hail thee, fair Queen! that first of Denmark’s sons thou sawest is
thy royal bridegroom,” was the answer. “It is King Valdemar, whom his
people call ‘Victor,’ with cause.”
Then I heard a louder, more joyous cry than before, and I saw the
people thronging about, striving to kiss the hem of her robe as she
stood upon the quay that was laid with crimson cloth for her feet. I
saw the King bend his knee and kiss her hand and her brow; and the
people went wild at the sight. They took her horses out of their
harness, and themselves drew the chaise toward the city with the many
spires, singing and shouting their joy; and I saw that she was glad
and that the young King who rode by her side was proud and happy. I
saw them walk up the broad aisle of the Domkirke together, followed by
many brave knights and fair ladies, and before the altar they knelt and
were blest by the venerable priest who had held the King in his arms at
his christening. The bells of the thirteen churches and chapels in the
town were rung, and masses were said for the twain at their altars. And
I heard many a wassail drunk at the wedding-feast in the great halls
of the castle and in the thronged streets of the town, where torches
burned from sundown to sunrise and the people made merry through the
long summer nights. Strong ale and mead from the royal cellars ran like
a river, for such was the custom of the times and of the people.
But before the sun had set twice I heard a new song in the Ribe
streets which the very children learned with joy. It told of the
Queen’s “morning-gift” from her lord. “Ask,” he said; “whatever thy
wish, of land or gold, it shall be thine.” But she prayed for neither
greatness nor riches, but that the plough-tax that bore heavily on
the husbandman be forgiven him, and that the peasants who, for rising
against it, were laid in irons be set free. And the King granted her
prayer. Ever since, the Danish people have given Dagmar’s name to
their best-beloved queens. “Daybreak” was the meaning of it in the old
tongue, and she was their hope and heart’s desire.
Then darkness fell; and I saw the King resting after the chase in a
far-distant place. In the west there arose a cloud of dust, and at the
sight of it his heart misgave him, for his happiness had been too great
for man. Out of it came one riding fast with evil tidings: “The Queen
is sick unto death. She bids the King make haste.” And there came to me
the voices of women singing at their spinning-wheels as I heard them
when I was a child; and this was the burden of their song:
[Music:
When the King he rode out of Skanderborg
Him follow’d one hundred men.
But when he rode over Ribe Bridge
Then rode the King alone.
In Ringsted sleepeth Queen Dagmar!]
Over the wildsome moor he had come, neither resting nor sleeping, his
face set ever toward the sea, the one wild prayer in his heart that he
might not be too late. But ride man ever so fast, death travels faster.
As his horse’s hoofs struck fire from the stones in Grönnegade,[16]
with the castle beyond the pillared gate at its end, the Ribe church
bells rang out the tidings of Dagmar’s death.
Now help, O Lord, my Dagmar dear,
Me thinketh my heart must break.
[Illustration: THE KING’S RIDE OVER THE MOOR.]
On his knees at her bed the King begs her weeping women to pray that
she may speak to him once more, and the Queen opens her eyes and
smiles upon her lover. “Fear not for me,” she says, “I did no worse sin
than to lace my silken sleeves on Sunday.” And her last thought as her
first is for her people. She prays him to pardon every outlaw, and with
her dying breath pleads with him not to take Bengerd to his heart. “The
evil Bengerd,” the ballad calls her, and evil did she bring to Denmark.
For, when in after years the King did marry the Portuguese princess,
whose beauty was so great that even her dust after ages bore witness to
it, she brought King and land but sorrow and misery, aye! and of both a
full measure.[17]
But these things were not yet. Still I dreamed by my study lamp. I saw
a mighty host of men and ships; fifteen hundred sail did I count in
line. But the men wore no fine raiment; they were clad in steel and
carried battle-axes and swords. Every knight wore on his left shoulder
a crusader’s cross. And I saw the King, grown stern and gray, lead them
toward a foreign shore, where there dwelt men who worshipped idols.
And there by night the pagan hosts fell upon them in such multitudes
that the King’s men were swallowed up as sands by the sea. I saw them
struggling in darkness and dread in which no man knew friend from foe,
and the Christians were driven back in despair, their standards taken;
and a great cry arose that all was lost.
Then I beheld a wondrous thing. I saw a strange banner descending as if
from the clouds, over against the hills upon which the priests were
calling upon God for victory. It was crimson red, and in it was a
great white cross, even the one upon which our Lord was crucified for
the sins of the whole world. And a loud voice cried, “Bear this high,
and victory shall be yours.” And the heathen saw and heard and were
stricken with fear; for now they knew, indeed, that they were fighting
the Lord God of Hosts, and that their strength was as a broken reed.
And as the ensign fell among the battling hordes I saw a tall knight
who rode before the King seize it and, holding it high, spur his horse
into the bravest of the fight, with the cry “For God and the King.”
[Illustration: “FOR GOD AND THE KING.”]
And I saw the King’s men take heart and the heathen turn and flee from
the shore that was strewn with their slain, while the sea ran red with
blood. And the King and his men rested their swords and knelt upon
the battlefield as the moon rose over it, and sang a Te Deum to their
God for having delivered them and crushed the power of the Evil One;
for of the Fiend and of his idols there was an end in the land, then
and forevermore. And I knew that I had seen in my dream the battle
of Lyndanissa that won all Esthland for the Christians’ God by King
Valdemar’s sword, and gave to Denmark its Dannebrog, oldest of flags
among nations.
[Illustration: “THE KING AND HIS MEN KNELT UPON THE BATTLEFIELD.”]
Once more did darkness fall, and I saw the old King betrayed by night
in his tent, in the midst of peace, by his guest, the Black Count
Henrik of Schwerin, who hated him, and, with Dagmar’s son, brought,
bound and gagged, “in great haste and fear,” to the traitor’s strong
tower on the Elbe. I saw them lying in chains, thirty moons and more
in the dark dungeons, while Denmark’s foes rose on every side and
overwhelmed its armies that had lost hope with their leader. I saw the
old marshal, the King’s kinsman and friend, brought wounded and chained
to his cell after the battle; and the aged King bowed his head while
his enemies mocked him. And I saw the prince with Dagmar’s blue eyes
and fair locks comfort him in his sorrow and defeat. And then I saw the
Danish women, matron and maid, in the proud castle and in the peasant’s
hut, bring their gold and their gems, their rings and their jewels
and their silver, for their King’s ransom; and once more the Old Town
echoed with cries of gladness and joy as when Dagmar came; but this
time he rode alone, and stricken and sore.
[Illustration: DANISH WOMEN RANSOMED THEIR KING.]
[Illustration: “COMFORTED THE KING IN SORROW AND DEFEAT.”]
Once again in my dreams I saw the gates of the tower swing wide and
a mighty army march forth to meet the German traitors in battle, to
avenge their King. And I saw the great barren where the bones of the
fairest knights in all the North lay bleaching in many a summer’s sun
from that day, while all the Danish land mourned. I saw the day all but
won when the base Holsteiners turned their arms against their Danish
allies, and I beheld the sun set in defeat and disaster and the King
borne, wounded and beaten, from the field, his army destroyed, his wars
ended.
But still were his people faithful, in evil days as in good. I saw
King Valdemar, now blinded and white and bent, put away the sword and
write laws for his land that in the evening of his life earned him the
name of the Wise Law-giver; for the landmarks he set, the justice he
did between man and man, endure unto this day. I saw the last crushing
sorrow fall upon him when Dagmar’s son was killed on the chase by a
friend’s arrow. And I saw the mightiest of Danish rulers breathe out
his great soul in the fulness of his days. And as I awoke I heard the
voice of the old chronicler, when Valdemar was gathered to his fathers:
“Truly then fell the crown from the heads of Danish men.” For never
since has Denmark seen his like.
The embers in my fireplace glowed and the stone from the old tower
showed red. Once more I saw, as in a dream, the castle on the hill. It
was night, and there were lights in the windows and sounds of noisy
revelry within. On the green by the river men and women were dancing.
The girls had daisies and the young leaf of the beech braided in their
hair, for it was May-day. The men wore long muffling cloaks that hid
their armor and their swords. They were dancing “May into town” in the
glad fashion of the day, and into the castle too, where the captain
was making merry with his men. He had betrayed the King’s cause into
the hands of his enemies and sold his soul, with his faith, for their
gold. Little did he dream who was dancing over the drawbridge which the
sentinels let down at his bidding:
They danced them over the Ribe Bro, (bridge)
There danceth the knight with pointed shoe
For Erik, for young King Erik.
Over the bridge and into the castle they danced, and into the great
hall where the faithless Tage Muus and his men sat drinking deep to
the success of their deviltry, hammering a mirthful welcome on the
table with their tankards as the doors swung open for the May party.
They trod the dance lightly before them, the men waving torches and the
women weaving flowery garlands about them, and the knaves hailed them
uproariously; but the shout died in their throats as, at a signal from
their leader, the women seized the torches and the men dropped their
cloaks and fell upon the revellers with drawn swords. For they were the
King’s men, and Ribe was loyal if the captain of the castle was false.
So it was won by a May dance
For Erik, for young King Erik,
Valdemar’s son, and his banner flew once more from its walls, while the
dungeon claimed the traitors.
Thus I dreamed. And I thought that I slept seven centuries and saw the
green Castle Hill once more with its lonesome sheep looking into the
sunset; with its billowing reeds in the deep moats that whisper to the
west wind of the great days that were; with the sleepy little town
by the shallow river, its glory gone, its ships gone, the world gone
from it, forgotten even as--no, not that. For the great name, the great
past, live for all time, and that which I have written is not a dream.
It is the story of the castle that stood upon the green hill, and of
its king. It is the story of Riberhus.
CHAPTER VIII
[Illustration: JACKDAWS IN COUNCIL.]
The big pear tree that hung over our way to school is gone, but the
hawthorn hedge remains. When our young feet trod those toppy pavements,
the tree smoothed the thorny path to learning in a way all its own. The
late summer season when the sun shone so temptingly on the round red
pears, and the old woman over whose garden wall they grew counted her
profits at a skilling for two, fell in with our time for practising
marksmanship, just as the spring brought its marbles and September
its nutting tramps. Then if it befell that a good shot and the law
of gravitation operated simultaneously to dislodge the biggest and
juiciest pear, and it dropped in our path--surely destiny was to blame,
not we. Findings is keepings, and there is no law against picking up a
pear in the street. The stork on the Rector’s house looked on unmoved.
Being in a way responsible for us, perhaps he was resigned to the ways
of boys. Not so the old woman who counted upon our skillings. She
stormed in the doorway, much exercised in spirit, and threatened to
report us. I think she did once or twice, for we were warned not to go
under the tree when pears were falling. But there was no other way out.
And we detected, or thought we did, a twinkle in the old Rector’s eye
while he took us to task. He had been a boy himself; was yet, despite
the infirmities of years, beneath his mask of official sternness. And
we evened it up with the pear woman by loyally investing our pennies
with her when we had them.
The Latin School had always been just across from the Domkirke with
which it had come into existence, and in the old house I was born, the
teachers having lodgings under its roof at that time. But it was moved
as the tie between church and school was loosened, and it was thus
that the feud was bred with the pear woman, who had until then dwelt
in seclusion and peace. That we came honestly by our proficiency in
marksmanship I gather from the fact that, when the ecclesiastical bond
was stronger a good deal than in our day, it made its mark in the pages
of the Old Town’s history by picking the very Domkirke itself for a
target. It is on record that the churchwarden complained of the boys
snow-balling its windows. Of several hundred window-panes in the west
front only seven were then whole; but, he added, “it is no use sending
for the glazier to put them in while the snow is on the ground, for
they will as surely be smashed again.” Evidently union of pedagogue and
priest had not bred reverence in their pupils. They were the vandals
who, when the Reformation had consigned to the lumber room the fine old
crucifix that hangs once more in its rightful place since the late
restoration, amused themselves by trimming the nails of the image. But
that time they got their deserving, if the rod had been spared by man
too long. According to tradition they lost their own finger nails,
and it served them right, too. They were sad old days, when to put
reverence and common sense, with common decency, in the rag-bag was
held to be a mark of piety. Clear down into our day we heard the echo
of it. When, in the ’40’s, the Domkirke was undergoing repairs, the
stone coffin of one of the old kings was carried off, and after a long
search was discovered serving as a horse-trough in front of a public
house. “To what base uses--!” It would not have been recovered at that,
but for peremptory notice from the government that it had better turn
up without delay. There is nothing in their past record to forbid the
suspicion that the Latin schoolboys had had a hand in raping the royal
tomb.
So, if it does not fall to the lot of every man to have an alma mater
dating back to the time of the crusades (the school was founded in
1137, or very soon after), the fact of having it is not necessarily a
warrant of saintliness. It was not with us. I have recounted some of
our pranks. For them, if they went beyond the limit, there was still
the rod. That and the big book with red letters and the iron chain
riveted to it that lay in the school library were the visible survivals
of a past day. Concerning the latter there was a belief current among
the untaught that it was in fact Cyprianus, the book with which the
priest could cast a spell and bid the devil come and go as he saw fit,
but which the hand of no unlearned man might touch without instant
peril to life and soul. It was, as a matter of fact, the Bible that was
held in such regard. The chain that gave it its grewsome aspect was
testimony merely to its rarity and the cost of paper and printer’s ink
in the day that made so sure it would not get lost. All of which made
little or no impact upon the belief that the devil was firmly chained
between its pages, and that it was a good plan to give it a wide berth.
No mediæval superstition was needed to convince us of the wisdom of
that plan when it came to the rod. Its ceremonial use, so to speak,
had fallen into disuse. I mean by that the great capital occasions
when, for hopeless breach of discipline or for disgracing the school
before the world, a pupil was flogged by the janitor in the presence
of the assembled school, after a lecture by the Rector, and publicly
expelled. No such emergency arose in my day. But in a more private
and sufficiently intimate way it was still part of the curriculum.
The daily cudgelling of dull heads was supposed to have a stimulating
effect upon the intellect. It was the custom of the day, but its sun
was setting even then. Is it merely harking back to personal experience
that I sometimes think a boy is just pining for a whipping and won’t
be happy till he gets it; and that, having got it, he feels justified,
squared as it were, and ready for a new and better start? Or, is it
faith in the boy’s fundamental love of fair play that sizes up the
offence and its deserving? I will let the teacher decide. Somewhere
I have told of my first introduction to the “kids’ school,” kept by
an old “she-wolf,” and its educational equipment. I was dragged all
the way to it by an exasperated housemaid, hammering the pavement
with my heels and yelling at the top of my voice. Forbearance at home
had, it seems, ceased to be a virtue. There was none in the ogre who
received me at the door and forthwith thrust me into a barrel down in
the cellar, where it was dark, and putting on the lid, snarled through
the bung-hole that that was the way bad boys were dealt with in school.
Good boys were given kringler to eat. When from sheer fright I ceased
howling, I was set free and conducted to the yard, where there was
a sow with a litter of pigs. The sow had a slit in the ear to which
my attention was invited. It was for being lazy, and when boys were
lazy--the ogre brandished the long shears that hung at her belt--zip! I
earned a kringle that very afternoon.
The ways of the Latin School were still stamped with the old severity,
but there was some approach to present-day methods of constitutional
government. The faculty took hardened cases under advisement. Execution
of judgment was vested in the Rector, as gentle an old man as ever
unwillingly caned a boy, whose guileless soul was no match for our
practised wiles. A remorseful howl put him instantly out of action,
and he was always ready to be led sympathetically along the slippery
paths of boyish excuses; for, however much the boy’s soul may pine
for just punishment, his body will always struggle to escape it. We
had a singing-teacher, the organist of the Domkirke, whom, seeing
that he was a helpless old bachelor without proper home or boys of
his own, we accounted our lawful prey. Accordingly the candle snuffer
sputtered with powder to his mild amazement, mice haunted the piano
and struck unexpected chords at singing-school, and the blackboard
sponge performed unheard-of antics as an impromptu foot-ball while the
organist was writing our lesson on the board. It was when he happened
to turn suddenly once and caught me in the very act of aiming it at his
wig, that the worm turned. I was conducted straight upstairs to the
Rector, with _corpus delicti_ in my grasp, and left to his mercy.
Rector rose mechanically from his papers when the door closed and
opened a cupboard to afford me a private view of the stick standing
there. Then he came over to me and said sternly, pointing to the
sponge, “What is this?”
“The sponge, Herr Rektor,” I said. “It was on the floor and I kicked
it, like this--” it bounded across to the table--“and Niels, he--”
“Ah,” Rector was all interest; “Niels, he--?”
“He kicked it--so, and it landed where Hans stood.”
“Eh!” he was rubbing his hands; “and Hans?”
“Hans, he sent it--this way--to Peter; and Peter trod on it, and it
shied to Anders. And he--”
We were skipping across the room together, mapping out the journeys of
the vagrant sponge as fast as Rector’s gout allowed, when we arrived at
the turn.
“It came back to me,” I explained, “and I was just going to fire it--”
“Ha! you were just going to fire it--”
[Illustration: “HA! YOU WERE JUST GOING TO FIRE IT--”]
“When the organist turned and caught me.”
The Rector stopped rubbing his hands abruptly. We gazed at one another
soberly for a full minute. I don’t know, I think I saw the suspicion of
a wink; then:
“I think you said this was a sponge. Go then and tell the organist that
you have discovered it is not a ball. Now go.”
I went quickly. Unless my ears deceived me, I heard a chuckle behind
the door as it fell to.
Little as he relished the job of thrashing a boy, the Rector hated
meanness in him worse. It was the discovery of such a streak in me
that brought me the most thorough caning of my school life at his
hands. Hans and I, who perennially disputed the seat next to the head
of the class--when it stood in a circle--had been engaged in a combat
that was undecided when the bell summoned us to our lessons. Flushed
with the hope of victory, Hans hit upon the idea of setting the clock
ahead, that we might the sooner have it out. The clock was in our
class room, and it was easily enough done, but in his eagerness Hans
forgot prudence and set it three-quarters of an hour ahead, so that
recitations were no sooner begun than they were at an end. Whereupon
there was an investigation, and the culprit was found. This was a
matter that called for the big stick, as being at once dishonest and
foolish, and Hans was commanded to wait after school had gone home.
Now it befell that I was getting a book out of the library in the next
room when Hans’ shrieks rose high between the dull thuds of “Master
Erik.” I will not attempt to excuse my conduct; I despise it. Probably
the defeat I had so narrowly escaped rankled. I crept up to the door
and listened. Meanly rejoicing at his plight, I pressed my ear to
the key-hole to hear more, and leaned with my whole weight. I hadn’t
noticed that the door was not shut tight, and suddenly it swung open,
and I fell into the other room with my arm full of books,--fell right
at Rector’s feet and lay sprawling there.
He gave me an amazed glance, paused an instant with uplifted stick,
and comprehended. A look of stern disgust swept over his face; he
let go of Hans and, seizing me, administered to me the worse half of
the interrupted thrashing. Hans got square. I can see him yet as he
stood in his corner wiping his eyes to keep from grinning. The utterly
exasperating thing about it was the look of shocked innocence at the
disclosure of such baseness that sat upon his face. As if he--ugh!
[Illustration: THE LATIN SCHOOL TEACHERS.]
The good old Rector stands flanked by his staff in the picture, in
full dress, as beseems his dignity. My father is on his right, the only
one who wears a cap. Herr Kinch, behind the Rector, was an antiquarian
of no mean repute, and wrote the history of the Old Town,[18] making
a notable contribution to Danish annals thereby. The venerable face
that peers out beside him is that of Dr. Helms, whose interest in and
writings about the Domkirke, through a long lifetime, finally bore
fruit in the thorough restoration that has been just completed. We
boys held the candle for him sometimes when he was poking in the dark
corners for signs of the long past. Once he found what he was not
looking for. It was while he was delving in the foundations of the
Maria tower, which had been torn down a century or two before, being
unsafe. They had covered up the foundations and shut them out of sight.
But there must have been a crack somewhere, for when the good doctor
broke into the dark space, thousands of bats broke out. The air was
literally filled with the creepy things. The Old Town was at all times
full of bats, and this was evidently one of their secret hiding-places.
There were dead bats, too, by the cart load.
The other face in the doorway, that of Adjunct Koch, the same who
in after years became Dean of the Domkirke, I can never see without
thinking of the hour of my great triumph. He and Herr Trugaard were my
history teachers. History as taught in the schools of those days was
largely made up of interminable files of kings, with the years of their
reign, nothing else, to be memorized that way. This I could not do,
or would not; the result was the same,--a bad examination. But these
two had discovered something. When the Great Examen came round again,
instead of bringing up the tedious kings, they asked me to tell about
the Hundred Days of Napoleon after Elba. Napoleon had not been dead
forty years then, and there were people everywhere who had fought in
his wars. We had one in our school, an old sergeant who drilled us in
gymnastics. He had been through the campaign that ended at Waterloo,
and was never tired of telling how it froze so hard in the winter of
1814 that they cut the wine for the army rations with axes, and of the
fighting he had seen, of course. Poor fellow! He looked too long upon
the wine when it was red, and marched to his death in the river one
winter’s night singing a war-song, thinking perhaps he was at Borodino.
They found him standing dead in the mud, upright, as a man and a
soldier should, with his face to the foe who he imagined held the other
shore.
I had sat at his feet when they strayed unsteadily toward the great
past, many a time. And I needed no second invitation to enter upon the
campaign of the Hundred Days. A sudden transformation came over that
dusty class-room; for veterans sat in the Board of Censors. In five
minutes I had them sitting up, eagerly scanning the camps of the French
and the Allied Armies as I drew them. In ten they were on their feet,
striding from Ligny to Quatre Bras, to the Wavre turnpike, objecting,
applauding, disputing with me and with one another as I led them from
field to field of slaughter and finally rounded them up at Waterloo,
brought Blucher to the relief of Wellington in the nick of time, and
charged the Old Guard with a yell of “Surrender!” only to be met with
the immortal reply: “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders.”
We sat down, a hot, excited band. There was a quiet gleam in Herr
Trugaard’s eye as he pronounced the unanimous judgment of the Board:
“ug+,” that is, A1 and to spare. It was the only “ug” I earned in my
school days. It ought to have given the pedagogues food for thought,
and perhaps it did.
The bell that once called the monks to prayers summoned us to school
at a quarter to eight, and in the long winter we sang our morning
hymn with the dawn struggling through the windows. When we trooped
home again with knapsacks strapped on our backs, it was night once
more. From eight to five was our day, with two hours for noon, the
rule in all the Old Town’s affairs. The bell regulated our lives as
it had done since hour-glasses marked the time. It rings yet at the
old hours, though the school-day is entirely changed, and Venus who
rang it has long been gathered to her fathers. But when the Great
Examen drew near, it was too slow for our guilty consciences, and the
night-watchman was bribed to wake us up. So that he should not rouse
the whole house, a string was hung out of the window, the other end of
which was tied securely to the sleeper’s toe or ankle. The watchman’s
order was to pull it till the boy responded, and he did. Perhaps he
took the chance to pay off old scores. He pulled and pulled with might
and main, until a red and swollen foot shot up to the window and behind
it an angry face yelling to let go. The boy was awake and up, and the
watchman clattered on his way, chanting his morning verse:
Ho! Watchman, our clock it has struck four!
Eternal God, all honor
In Heaven’s choir to Thee,
Thou who art watchman ever
For us on earth that be.
Now ended is our watch,
For a good night
Give God the thanks
And mind ye well the time.
Before his song died away among the old houses, we were hard at work
cramming for examination.
This service was set down to his credit when in Christmas week the
watchman came to the door to “bid New Years.” It was one of the customs
of the Old Town that came down from the earliest days, happily shorn of
some of its mediæval aspects. For then he came not alone, but the whole
body of watchmen together, a kind of reconnoissance in force, to which
the fact that the public executioner came with them lent a suggestion
which no one could afford to let go unheeded. That it really was a kind
of official blackmail is made apparent by certain ordinances passed in
the Sixteenth Century which forbade the practice and fixed a regular
schedule of charges for these public servants. The executioner was to
have one dollar for chopping off a head or hanging a man, half a dollar
for an ear, a dollar and a half for burning a witch at the stake, and
so forth. It was not much. When one reads of his using twenty-two
loads of wood for burning a single witch, it seems but poor pickings
for a hard-worked man; but then he made up for it by having his hands
full. He burned thirteen witches between the years 1572 and 1652,
and beheaded one. Of ears and such small fry no account seems to have
been kept. Besides all this he was street-cleaning commissioner[19]
and offal contractor, with the express proviso, however, that he must
not himself engage in the latter business as beneath his dignity, but
must farm it out to the town chimney-sweep. It will be seen that the
executioner was by no means a disreputable man, but a functionary of
importance who could not be allowed to go begging from door to door.
As for the watchmen, they were ordered to desist not merely from that
practice, but from monopolizing the moving business and from bossing
weddings held in the Town Hall; likewise they must do no harm to
drunken men in the street, but must help them home. One look at the
mug they drank from at council meetings and still keep at the Town Hall
gives a clew to the wherefore of this last ordinance: the councilmen
themselves might have some trouble navigating after a protracted
session.
[Illustration: THE CHIMNEY-SWEEP.]
The demand of these New Year pirates seems in the olden time to have
been for “candles,” perhaps a convenient medium of exchange. In our day
it was frankly for cash. Not only the watchman, but every one who had
during the year rendered the house any service, or might be expected
to in the year to come, knocked, said “Happy New Year,” and received a
silver mark or an “eight-skilling,” which was half a mark, as the case
might be, with the thanks of the householder. The chimney-sweep was
there, washed and cleaned for once,--on other days he made it a point
to look “like his trade,”--and the official mourner, who alternately
bade the town to weddings and funerals, or gave notice that the stork
had been around with a baby. A regular “cinch” had he, since sooner or
later every well-regulated family must employ his service. His was a
real profession, and he kept a special face for each of his functions.
When he was bidding to a funeral his gait was slow and measured, his
face grave, and his voice had a mournful droop that matched his rusty
black coat and ancient silk hat. If it was a wedding, he was cordial,
his step was light and his tile was set at a rakish angle. The man was
an artist. And so in their limited sphere were the funeral bearers,
who were among our New Year’s callers, too. They were a remnant from
the days of the executioner, farther back even, to the time of the
Black Death that killed half the people in the town. Their guild was
organized then, a sort of mutual insurance concern that made a man sure
of getting underground at all events; and, having been established,
stayed, as did everything else till it fell to pieces of itself. The
aforesaid ordinances bear witness that it took much Dutch courage to
carry the dead in the days of pestilence. There is one which forbids
giving the “bearers” a barrel of beer at each funeral as wasteful
and unseemly. The Old Town did some things after all that are worth
considering. We do with less than a barrel in our day, but even when
we do without it altogether, there is still waste enough about our
funerals that is both unseemly and unfit in a Christian land.
[Illustration: “WE SAW IT ON MOONLIGHT NIGHTS.”]
The head of the house sat in state with a plate full of silver coins
beside him on the day these callers made their rounds, and responded to
each salutation in kind; said “Thank you, same to you,” and handed the
caller his coin. He twirled his cap, spat on the silver for good luck,
put it in his pocket, scraped out, and made room for the next comer. If
it was the night-watchman, he had perhaps a word about the wind being
in the northwest, “blowing up to a storm,” or about the marten that ate
the last batch of squabs. The marten lived in the attic under the roof
beams, where it had its young in peace. It was not disturbed, though
it made an occasional raid on the hen roost or the pigeon coop; but
that was to be guarded against. To make up for it, it ate the rats that
infested the old houses, and for this service it was let alone. We saw
it sometimes on moonlight nights, a black shadow up among the pointed
gables, big as a cat, it seemed to me, and with a cat’s long tail. The
watchman knew all its haunts, being a night prowler himself, and could
tell when it was “getting too many” for the peace of the hen roost.
Then shot-guns came out, and after some still-hunting by moonlight
things were evened up again and put upon a peace basis.
As pater familias sat awaiting his New Year’s callers, he had the
advantage always of knowing who was in the offing making for his door,
and could arrange his contribution accordingly. That was because of
the universal use of window reflectors, two mirrors set at an angle
and fixed on the outside of the window. Sitting in your chair by it,
you could tell who was coming from either side, half a block away. I
often wonder why they are not more used on this side of the ocean. I
should think they would be a great convenience if one did not wish to
be “at home” for undesirable callers. Perhaps that was how the Bishop’s
wife escaped meeting the Burgomaster’s lady they used to tell of in
Copenhagen. They were not exactly friends, but their position required
them to be agreeable before the world. So they exchanged visits, and
upon one of these occasions the Burgomasterinde found the Bishop’s
Manse deserted, with evidences of hasty flight. Now the good Bishop’s
wife was not noted nearly as much for tidiness as for her sharp wit,
and the Burgomasterinde took a long chance when, seeing the mahogany
table covered with a thick layer of dust, she wrote on it “P-i-g.” But
she felt better, no doubt, and went on her way rejoicing.
Some days later the two ladies met on the street. “Oh!” said the
Burgomaster’s wife, “I called at your house last week, but you were not
in.”
“Yes, I am so sorry,” from the other, sweetly, “I found your card on
the table.”
They played the Old Town a trick once, those reflectors, that is hard
to forgive. It was when the burghers who dwelt in the Main Street
insisted upon the town removing the North Gate that obstructed their
view. They “could not see past it.” No more they could, for it fairly
blocked the way. But it was the last remnant of the old walls, which,
imperfect as they were, for they never reached around, had borne the
brunt of many an assault, and it was over this the iron hand was fixed
in the days of rigorous Ribe justice. It was a wretched fate that
sacrificed it to the whim of a lot of curious women who wanted to spy
on their neighbors. However, they got their deserts. They had forgotten
that the street turned just beyond the gate, and when it was down and
out of the way, behold! they could see no farther than before. I do not
know what they did. I know what sensible people said about it twenty
years after. But I suppose the gate would have gone anyway, so it’s no
use grieving.
[Illustration: THE NORTH GATE.]
Speaking of women’s ways, a fashion grew up three hundred years ago
of wearing their cloaks or petticoats over their heads instead of on
their shoulders, in the street and to church, where, so shrouded, they
slumbered peacefully through the sermon and, say the contemporary
accounts, even slept at the altar-rail through the communion service.
Talk about women wearing hats in church! Those cloaks became such a
nuisance to the clergy that the practice was sternly forbidden in town
council under penalty of a fine. Widows and mourners were excepted,
but the latter only for six months. There is no mention of a petticoat
revenue, so probably the practice ceased of itself.
A custom that made a deep impression on us children was the semi-annual
“offering” in the Domkirke. Part of the revenues of priest and
deacon was derived from free gifts of the people at Easter and
Christmas--free, that is, to all appearances; but custom prescribed
the exact amount of what was really a tax upon every householder. On
these Sundays, when the last hymn had been sung and the sexton’s purse
on its long pole had been poked into the farthest pew, the Dean put
on his crimson robe with the big white cross down the back that made
him look as if he were clad in the national flag, and took his place at
the altar. The organist pulled a stop that set a little bell tinkling
and started a silver star spinning in the organ loft. That was the
signal for all the men to rise, and with the Amtmand, the Rector, and
the Burgomaster leading on, they marched up to the altar and laid
their gifts there in two piles, one for the priest, the other for the
clerk, always silver, which made quite a heap before the last coin had
clinked upon it. The organist always played the hymn with the longest
and slowest metre while the procession was passing, to give it time,
I suppose, and the order of procedure was rigidly maintained. For a
boss carpenter, for instance, to have gone before a teacher in the
Latin School, even though his offerings had been twice the size of
the other’s, would not have done at all. They kept step very well to
the music, going and coming back, though I fancied their march was a
little brisker on the return, as if they were glad it was over. Odd
what impressions children get and keep. To me, looking back, it seems
the one really great religious ceremony in the Domkirke I remember,
always excepting the time the King came and one other. That was when
the Austrian soldiers, during the occupation in ’63-’64, celebrated
the birthday of their Emperor with a high mass. There had not been a
Catholic service in the cathedral since the Reformation, and there
has not been one since. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was the whole
setting of august ceremonial and warmth and color that were foreign
there; the uniforms, the bugles, the incense, with the strange tongue
and the evident devotion of the soldiers who knelt on the marble
floor--it all left an impression on my mind and heart that has never
faded. It is rank heresy, of course, and I would never subscribe to it
in cold blood, but it did seem somehow as if the old House of God came
to its rights once more. Saints of old whose knees, bent in worship,
had hallowed those ancient stones, walked again in the vaulted aisles,
and the image of the martyred Bishop Leofdag in the wall outside seemed
to nod as with understanding as we went by. I saw the lights go out
with regret. Perhaps, unknown to myself, it had something to do with my
desire in years long after to put a couple of stained-glass windows in
the chancel that looks so white and cold. But they did not want them.
They were not in the style, they said. Perhaps they were right. But oh!
for a little warmth in our worship now and then, even at the sacrifice
of being right in the matter of style.
[Illustration: THE EMPEROR’S BIRTHDAY.]
It may be that the fact that the Emperor’s birthday came in summer,
if my memory serves me right, had something to do with it. The most
loyal friend of the Domkirke could not have sat out the services there
in winter without discomfort. There was no way of heating it, had not
been since the beginning of our century, when the “fire-pan” given to
it by a pious burgher in 1473 was taken out and sold for old iron. A
legacy went with it that was forever to keep it in coal, so that “the
poor and the church-goers” should not suffer from the cold. What
became of that, I don’t know. They did many queer things in the days
before reverence for the great past, and its memories and landmarks,
awoke with the struggle for nationality and for freedom in our own
time. Among other things they stripped some of the ancient grave-stones
of their beautiful engraved brass plates for the melting pot, when
a new bell had to be cast. And down in Holstein, where the sacred
banner that fell from heaven to the Danish knights in the Esthland
crusade and saved the battle that was all but lost, had been left by
the indifference of a later day in hostile hands, they took it at
housecleaning time and, esteeming it just a moth-eaten and tattered
rag, burned it with other rubbish in the public road.
In Ribe, for a hundred years the people put on their overcoats and
mufflers and their rubbers when they went to church and sat it out as
they could; or else they stayed at home. Even so clothed we sat and
shivered, our toes growing numb on the stone floor. When it was over,
we limped out and took a quick walk around the Castle Hill to “get up
circulation.” The walls of the Domkirke were thick, and it was past
Christmas before the winter had quite moved in; but then it stayed well
into the summer, refusing to be dislodged by spring until the roses
were in bloom. In the great restoration, of which more hereafter, it
was at last the upstart factory across the Linden Square, that had once
so piqued the conservatism of the Old Town, which, having been by that
time abandoned, gave its boiler house to be a heating plant for the
church. And so the old and the new met once again, and atonement was
made for past misconduct.
I have spoken of the square red tower which, though part of the
Domkirke, and its great and distinguishing feature seen from afar, did
yet belong under the civil government as the stronghold of the burghers
in time of trouble, typifying curiously the union of church and state,
and crumbling slowly like that in my day. It had given fair warning to
more than one generation. There was a house in Priest Street, straight
up from the tower, with the old arms of the town picked out in colors
above its door, which I never could pass without a shudder. As far as
that, tradition had it, the tower fell on Christmas morning in the year
1283, when it collapsed during early mass while the church was full of
people. Very many were killed. It was in the time after the death of
the great Valdemar when the country was torn by dissension within and
onslaught from without. An earthquake had shaken the land eleven years
before, probably contributing its share to the insecurity of the tower,
and one can imagine the “great fear that prevailed” among the people.
Again in 1594 the upper part of the tower fell, and in the rebuilding
it received the shape and height which it has kept.
The tower falcon, a fierce-eyed, solitary bird of prey, was its
rightful tenant in my day; had been, I fancy, from the beginning. He
seemed to fit in with its warlike traditions. The boys caught him in
traps, sometimes, and kept him chained about the house, but never for
long, for he was utterly untamable and his shriek was not melodious.
Furthermore, his diet of meat, preferably live mice, kept us scurrying
in a way we quickly tired of. The falcon has moved. A score of years
ago they overhauled the village church at Seem, three miles up the
river, and dislodged a family of rooks that lived there. In search
of new quarters they struck the Domkirke, liked it, and stayed. The
newcomers were great chatterers, while the falcon is a silent bird,
and moreover they brought all their relations. In disgust, I suppose,
at the racket they made, the falcon betook himself to the Plantage and
became a dweller in trees. My boy reports that he is there yet. He has
been up to see. The rooks stayed and multiplied exceedingly. At least I
supposed them to be rooks, till, last summer, I stood on the top of the
tower in Windsor Castle and was told by the caretaker that the black
birds hopping about were jackdaws. They were the very same.
Jackdaws or rooks, they took possession of the big tower and of the
little one, and they have kept it since. By day they go afield for
their food; but sundown always finds them in loud and general debate
on the stone railing of the red tower. They sit in military files
discussing the subject in hand in very human fashion: now one at a
time, and again all together, squawking at the top of their voices.
Year by year their number grows, since no marten can reach them on
their roost. There came a time when it seemed as if something ought to
be done, if they were not to practically own the town. The matter came
up in council, and the debate that ensued was worthy of the best days
of the Old Town. The consensus of opinion was that they were getting to
be a nuisance; but how to stop it was another matter.
“They are here,” said one of the city fathers, “and what are you going
to do about it?” There was no answer. Upon the question what was their
diet no one could shed any definite light; but it suggested a ray of
hope to one.
“They might,” he ventured, “be good to eat.” The city fathers
considered one another thoughtfully. They were certainly fat. If they
were to turn out a new kind of game, now! It ended, after long debate,
in a committee being appointed to take the matter under practical
advisement, with directions to report at a future meeting whether
the rooks were good eating, or, if not, how they disagreed with a
councilman’s stomach. Six months had passed when last I fished with a
member of the committee. He screwed up his mouth and shook his head
dubiously as he made a cast for a pickerel hiding in the rushes.
“They are fat, yes,” he said ruefully. “They might be good, and then
again--they might make you sick.”
Caution, says an ancient Danish proverb, is the virtue of a
burgomaster. It ought at least to be the privilege of a councilman.
A friend who, like myself, had long been in foreign parts where they
have other ways, once told me that he believed the Danes had no
business capacity, at least the Danes who stayed at home, because he
found them charging the big summer hotel a cent more for milk than
they exacted from the poor fishermen who lived on the shore; and when
he asked them why, he was told that “the hotel took so much more and
it was more trouble.” But in the first place that was true; and,
further, I think it was their inborn sense of fairness plus their
stubborn democracy that was breaking out there. The small folk were to
be protected against the wealthier neighbor. A people without business
capacity would never have thought of the expedient the Old Town hit
upon in a dispute with the local gas company, long after I had gone
away. The sidewalks are narrow, with never room for more than one, and
the nights are sometimes very dark. So, as the gas company refused to
give in and the town refused to burn gas till it did, and consequently,
all parties to the quarrel being Jutlanders, there was no telling when
the dispute would be settled, if ever, the council ordered that the
lampposts be painted white to avoid collision and suits for damages. If
that is not business sense, what is it?
No. The Old Town moves with deliberation, it is true. But then, the
rest of us are in too much of a hurry. No one ever is, there. What is
there to run after? The clock that has counted the hours since before
Napoleon stirred up the dry bones of Europe still stands in its corner
and ticks the seconds, the hours, the years, twice a day pointing its
slow finger to the date graven on its face: 1600-1700-1800--why should
one hurry? If we but wait, the years will come to us and carry us with
them to our long rest. And there will be others where we are now. The
world will move; men will live and labor and love; and the old clock
will tick in the hall, counting the hours, the days, the years. It is
the Old Town’s philosophy. If it has not made it rich, or powerful, or
great, it has made it content. Who shall say then that it is not as
good as the best?
There is one that ticks in a house I know of where eyes I loved smiled
to it and nodded to it every day in passing. In 1792 it was made in
Ribe, where famous clock-makers lived then. I tried to buy it; I
offered two hundred kroner for it, which was a small fortune to the Old
Town. But its owner shook his head. It had been in the family since
his great-great-great-grandfather, and it would stay there as long as
there were any of them left. I shook his hand. I should have been sorry
had he been willing to sell. It would have been like betraying an old
friend. They were poor, but they were loyal. It was the Old Town all
over. Years ago the last of the clock-makers lived in Black Friars
Street, in our block. One morning there was a great crash. It was their
house that had fallen down. The neighbors hastened up to help, and when
a way had been made through the wreck, found the old man and his wife
lying calmly in bed. The beams had formed a shelter over them, and they
were safe till the next cave-in. They urged them to hurry out, but the
old couple refused. It was their home. They had always lived in it and,
now they were old, would die in it if need be rather than seek another.
They were like Heine’s lovers:
Wir Beide bekümmern uns um nichts
Und bleiben ruhig liegen.
They had to take them out by force.
No need of haste. The mail-coach waited for you in the old days, once
you were registered as a passenger, till you came. It would have been
base to desert you. The train waits now till you climb aboard and
station-master and conductor have exchanged the last item of news. The
red-coated mail-carrier taps on your window with the expected letter
and a sympathetic “It’s come.” The telegraph messenger who meets you in
the street with his message goes home with you to hear the good news;
he knows it is good. The mill-wheels drone in the stream their old
drowsy lay that was old when you were born. Down by the castle garden
a worn wheel whirs and hums in the rope walk where father and son go
spinning their endless cord, side by side, as did their people before
them as far back as any one can remember. Why should one hurry? The
sun sinks low in the west. Far upon the horizon there is a gleam of
silver: it is the sea, sleeping in a calm. The bells of the Old Town
peal forth their even song. The cows come home from the meadows. In the
Cloister shadows trembling hands are trimming the evening lamp, tired
old feet tottering to their rest. A day is ended. Above blossoming
gardens the stork looks down from its nest, wiser than the world of
men: another will dawn. So that its evening be peace, what matters the
rest? It is the message of the Old Town.
[Illustration: “IT’S COME.”]
CHAPTER IX
OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER
[Illustration: THE ACCURSED CANDLESTICK.]
To us it will always be “our beautiful summer,” I expect, and, indeed,
I fancy it will be so remembered throughout the Danish land.[20] For
the seasons there had suffered a sad decline since my boyhood days.
Then the sun shone always in summer, the autumn days were ever mellow
as the ripened nuts we shook from the hazel bushes, and in winter we
skated from Christmas until the March winds woke the slumbering spring.
At least so it seems to me now. They tell me that this generation of
boys has almost forgotten the art of skating; that they do not know how
to cut the figure 8, or the name of the girl they like best, in the
ice, because there is no ice more than half the time; that in summer
they have to hurry so between showers that all the fun is gone out of
the haying. And as for the autumn, I am not likely to forget one that
found me stranded there, sick and desolate just as the century was
closing; the long, wakeful nights I lay listening to the storm shaking
my window and whistling through the cracks as if it were mocking my
helplessness, with four thousand miles of tempestuous sea between me
and home. I sailed them all in those night-watches, with never a rift
in the pitiless gray skies, till I saw at last a coast lying golden
in the sunset, and knew it from the way my heart leaped within me for
the Blessed Isles where home was. It was then I learned that I, too,
belonged here where my children were born.
But this summer was one long holiday without a cloud. The sun set in
yellow glory on that June day when we landed, hours after children
should be in bed and asleep; but how could one ask it in reason,
with the day, as it seemed, only half over? And it rose in undimmed
splendor on the September morn that saw us wave tearful good-bys and
sail away, past Hamlet’s Castle and Elsinore, and leave our fairyland
behind. We rode in on the hay wagons, we saw the sheaves of golden
grain stacked and housed. We watched day by day the stalks of Indian
corn by the fountain in the King’s Square grow ears as big as any in
Kansas fields. They were flaunting great shocks of shining silk when
we went away, to the admiration of the good people of Copenhagen, who
were never tired of looking at the strange plant; and I, with the
memories of Long Island strong upon me, was deep in a plot to teach
that gardener how to make “hot corn,” since ripen they would not, those
ears, when my wife came along and wrecked that dinner and my reputation
with one swoop by declaring that “they were not that kind, but common
chicken corn.” I never knew until then that there was any difference.
But, sweet corn or chicken-feed, dinner or no dinner, it was truly a
beautiful summer. All Denmark will bear me out in that.
We had gone, we old folk, to see once more the fields where we played
when we were children, and to us there was in it the sadness of the
long ago. To the young it was a joyous picnic; and many a time their
laughter in the quiet streets, where ghosts walked in broad daylight
to our sight at every turn, made us stop and listen wistfully. For in
the Old Town nothing was changed. The stork stood one-legged upon the
peak of the red-tiled roof, holding majestically aloof from the ways of
men; and in the doorway the swallow hatched her young as of old. There
was the broken pane in the transom I knew so well, to let her in, the
right of way for which she paid in coin of sweetest song. I know they
laughed at me for calling it song; but then they had not been away a
lifetime. No mocking-bird or nightingale sings to my heart as does the
house-swallow’s cheery note. In it are summer and sunshine, and the
blossoming lilacs, and the whisper of the breeze in the trees, the
children calling to each other at their play. It is as the time I had
sat through an hour of Christina Nilsson, missing something--I knew
not what--in all the wealth of music, when all at once came “’Way down
upon the Suwanee River,” and melted the icicles away. It is many years
since, but the mist comes into my eyes at the thought of it. That is
how the swallow sings to me in the streets of old Ribe.
[Illustration: A STRANGE FIGURE IN KILTS.]
Down in the river the white swans arched their necks as in the days
that were, and the clatter of the mill-wheels by the dam came up with
drowsy hum, heavy with the burden of the centuries. For Ribe was an
old city when Christian bishops first preached peace to the savage
North. In the wall of its great cathedral there is a stone that once
bore the image of the earliest among them who fell before pagan arrows
in the very meadow where we had our boyish games. The storms of many
winters have nearly worn it away; but what reverent loyalty vainly
sought to preserve, the bigotry of a day that thought itself wise as
well as pious ignorantly achieved in commemoration of human hate. When
they came to knock away the whitewash of the Reformation, put on to
hide what sand and soap and acids could not efface (there are clear
marks of their having been used to destroy the pictures of apostles
and saints painted in Catholic days on the great granite pillars),
there came to light, in one of the arches pointing toward the place
of Bishop Leofdag’s martyrdom, a strange figure in kilts with fists
upraised in threat and curse, which presently was seen to be a heathen
raging against the new day that dared rear a temple to the Christians’
God upon the very site of the ancient sacrifices. The whitewash had
kept it from decay. The recollection of it came over me with a rush
of gratitude that the world is growing better and broader and all
the time farther into the light, when, the other day, I sat in the
beautiful chapel of the Leland Stanford University that was built “to
the glory of God” and to no sect or set of mortals. Some one had told
the organist that I was there, and upon the waves of soft music that
floated out into the twilight hour there came snatches of a Danish hymn
I had not heard since childhood until twenty-five hundred men and women
sang it in the old church the day we rededicated it, and this time
“to the glory of God,” with no wish to make reservation. Ay! let the
heathen rage, within the sanctuary and without. It stands there despite
them, witness that the light drives out darkness, love conquers hate.
[Illustration: THE RESTORED DOMKIRKE.]
Eight hundred years the old Dom of Ribe had borne its testimony, when
its crumbling walls gave warning that nothing that is of earth is
imperishable, and now, after many years of labor, it stood restored.
It was to its birthday we had come home. Morning, noon, and evening
our steps turned toward it; and when at night the old town had settled
down to its fireside chat, and only the organist was musing over the
old hymns in his loft, my feet found the familiar paths. They needed no
guide here, even where the shadows lay deepest. There was the pillar
with the mark of the great flood that two hundred years ago[21] at the
Christmastide made ten thousand homes desolate upon the Danish coast.
Though the Dom stands upon the highest spot in town, anciently called
the mountain because it was at least ten feet above the level of the
river, the water rose man-high within it. We boys used to measure up
against the mark, and wonder if we would ever grow to be so tall. There
was the oaken door with great bronze rings worn thin and light that
bore their own testimony to those days and their ways. The powerful
bishops who built the Dom and gave it renown were fighting men. It
was the custom of their day. The one who laid its foundation fell
in battle before the walls were fairly above ground. But at home they
wore the mitre, and knew how to make even the King hold his hand at the
door of the sanctuary. To all men it was that literally; hence the worn
rings. How many appealing hands had grasped them with despairing grip,
no one may ever tell; but this much is certain, that the appeal was not
in vain. The iron hand was over the town gate, indeed, symbol of the
rigor of human justice that demanded an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth, but at the church door a mightier was raised to stay it, at
least until the case had been heard by the tribunal that claimed power
to loose and to bind in the world to come as in the one that is.
[Illustration: THE CAT-HEAD DOOR.]
The Cat-head Door, as we called it, because of the lions’ heads wrought
upon it, long since ceased to play other part than to frighten us
children. It was nearest the altar, and, with that curious incongruity
that in the popular superstition assigned to Satan an abode in the
church when it was forsaken at night, we boys had been told how we
could bring him out by walking thrice around the building and calling
each time through the key-hole of that door, “Come out!” The third time
he would appear. I do not think any of us believed it; but many a dark
night--it was only at such times that speech was to be had with his
Satanic Majesty--I have made one of a party to test the power of the
spell. We made the circuit of the Domkirke bravely enough twice, albeit
we lagged a little on the second lap; but invariably when we approached
the Cat-head Door on the third, a wild panic would seize us, and we ran
as if the devil were after us in very truth.
Silly? Of course it was. But in Ribe it was bred in the bone. Barely
within the door that held us in such terror, haven of refuge though
it had once been, was the accursed candlestick, with its blasphemous
ban upon whoever should presume to move what some purse-proud burgher
had hung there to celebrate his own littleness, persuading himself
and his time, perhaps, that it was also to the glory of God. In such
fashion had he succeeded that stories of how disaster had befallen when
impious hands were stretched forth to touch it were whispered yet in my
school days. The sexton had fallen from the ladder, the architect had
died suddenly, etc. Silly, certainly. But with every spade-thrust in
the earth disclosing forgotten cemeteries, buried cloister walls, and
secret burrows; with the watchmen at night droning forth their chants
of five hundred years ago in the dark shadows of the Domkirke; with
the deep voice of its bell counting the hours, the bell that hung in
the great tower when men went to war clad in iron--and little else
they did in that country in those days; with the very street names
proclaiming the past on every hand: Black Friar Street, Gray Friar
Street, Priest Street, Bishop Street, Monk Street, Cloister Street,
Castle Street, Grave Street--mere names now, it is true, but eloquent
of things long dead--why, the wonder was, not that we were still so
little, but rather that we had grown so big in our world ghosts.
[Illustration: THE OLD CLOISTER-CHURCH.]
To one they had put up a marble tablet since I was a boy. There it was,
set in the wall of the old house:
Here lived the tailor Laurids Splid, whose poor wife, Maren, on
November the 9th, 1641, was burned for witchcraft on the gallows hill.
A hundred years after the Reformation! Was there a maniac epidemic that
swept the world and swept men’s reason away, as the Black Death did
their lives in that fatal century? Fifty years later still, they hanged
the witches at Salem, Massachusetts. They did not burn them, so I was
informed once, when I fell into the error, by a scandalized citizen
of that righteous commonwealth. They were not savages, he would have
me know. The Ribe Christians had some bowels too. They tied a pound of
powder on the woman’s back before they flung her into the fire, and so
cut her sufferings short. Surely the devil came out of his hiding-place
that day and helped feed the fire. The house in which Maren lived
stands unchanged, except for a coat of paint, across the way from
the jail. She confessed, is the record. Oh, yes! the Seventeenth
Century had not forgotten the ways of the Inquisition, any more than
the Twentieth has the fire when its passions are aroused, though the
merciful pound of powder is left out. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but
there was no swallow’s nest in that hall, with hungry mouths of little
ones gaping to be fed, and no peaceful stork upon the roof. Even the
rats shunned it: a weasel lived in the attic.
Poor Maren’s travail was brief, let us hope. Down the street there
lived a man with whom it went through a life rich in benediction to
his kind. A bishop was he, and a singer whose songs will live as long
as the Danish tongue. He sang of human sorrow and travail and of the
land yonder where the tears are wiped away, until one who did not know
went to him once with a sneer. Easy for him to speak of trouble who had
none--rich, well housed, all his lines cast in pleasant places! Bishop
Brorson heard him out with a sad little smile.
“Come with me,” he beckoned, when he had done, and led the way to the
top story of the house. There, in a room made strong with iron bars,
sat his son, caged like a wild beast, a raving maniac.
“There,” he said, with a sigh that must have seared the man’s soul
to his dying day--“there is my trouble.” The mark of the bars is
there yet,--there were no insane asylums in those days,--but the good
bishop’s troubles are long over.
So I wandered, and whithersoever I strayed, back to the Dom I came
and lingered there. There was the seat in which She sat, in her fair
girlhood, during the long Sunday sermons, while I was banished to the
“men’s side” across the aisle. Yonder the door through which we had
come in together on the day of our betrothal, when the doing gave
notice to all the world forever after to hold its peace; and down this
aisle we had walked, hand in hand, with the old parson’s blessing in
our ears and our hearts, out into the world that had suddenly become
glorified. And now, across the Square, there hung from a window She and
I both well knew, the flag of freedom and of hope under which we were
growing old together. I wanted it so that when we came back we should
be within sight of the Domkirke and as near to it as might be. For the
church is as much part of my life as is the memory of my father and
mother. Indeed, it is a big part of the life of the Old Town, all of
its past and more than half of the present.
With might and main did we wave our flag when the King came. For days
the silent street had echoed with the tramp of troops come from far-off
garrison towns to receive him. The children stared; they had never
seen soldiers. In us of the past generation it touched a wound that
ached still. Forty years had not made us forget those winter nights of
weary waiting for our beaten army on its way to the north, its face
still to the foe that followed fast. That spring we saw our country
cut in twain and a wall of bayonets drawn between us and our brothers
to the south. King Christian had not forgotten, either, the great
tragedy of his and the nation’s life. I saw it in his furrowed face as
he looked up at old Dannebrog flying from the church tower. Perhaps
he thought of the thousands of hungry eyes riveted upon it across the
frontier. Up there at least the enemy could not reach it, though he
tore it from their homes.
But if the ghost sat at the banquet, no one gave any sign. In fact, no
one did anything but run and shout for three whole days. It was Ribe’s
one chance to cheer its King, and it dropped all else and went at it
with a rush. Fifty times a day the alarm was given: “Here they come!”
and men, women, and children ran and swung their hats and cheered
until they were red in the face. We too. My little boy had announced
with republican dignity that “he guessed the President was more than
any King,” but when he saw the kind old face of King Christian he swung
his flag and yelled louder than any of us.
“Gee! Mamma,” he said, when it was over for the moment, “I didn’t know
it was like that. I just had to.”
The very guard at the fire-house that was there to rush out and toot
and present arms whenever one of the red-coated royal drivers came
into view on the box of a coach, lost its bearings and turned out to
salute a scarlet-clad letter-carrier in the twilight. That the bugler
discovered his mistake, choked off his tune in the middle, and so took
the whole town into the joke, was as it should be. We were in it, all
of us, and, as young America remarked, “up to the neck!” All except the
cows. They had been warned off the streets during the King’s stay by
police ordinance. Ordinarily they have the right of way, being taken
back and forth twice a day, to and from the pasture. But now they must
keep away three whole days. The police force of Ribe put the case to me
convincingly:
“’Tain’t only for the sake of the streets,” he said; “we don’t mind
they’re dirty; but s’pposin’ they came up against the Bishop and the
parsons paradin’--them cows is lawless beasts--they wouldn’t let them
pass, no more they wouldn’t.”
Hence their banishment and the singular pageant of numberless led cows,
in charge of little boys, that paraded through the streets on the last
day of their freedom. They wanted to see as much of the show as they
could while they had the chance. And see it they did--greens, flags,
flowers, and all. Into the very yard of our hotel I found one youngster
leading his cow to see the tent they were putting up there for the
overflow, and also the flag that Hans Petersen, or Peter Hansen, or
somebody, had hoisted in his back yard, where no one could see it but
he himself. But then, was he nobody? It was his chance to show his
loyal good-will, and he took it, as did all the rest of us.
The rising sun found an orchestra of bareheaded men on top of the
church tower “blowing in” the festival with old hymn tunes, that all
might hear and rejoice. That is one use the big tower is put to. Of
another the fat stone balusters that hedge in its top give a hint under
close scrutiny. Three or four of them have been replaced by wooden ones
with copper skins. The old were shot away in a duel with the Swedes
who had taken the castle in the seventeenth century and were pelted
with cannon-balls from the tower. Truly, the Church militant! but the
tower was built in the beginning for warfare. The centuries and the
Church--perhaps also the modern artillery--tamed it slowly. As the day
wore on, one excitement followed another. A big blow brewed in the
west, and by the middle of the afternoon the North Sea itself came in
to have a look at the King. Where the cows had been pastured, suddenly
there was water, and the royalties turned out, eager to see the famed
“storm-flood.” But the wind died down, and the cows went back to their
own. Night found the Old Town in a blaze of light. In every window
of every house stood lighted candles; the river was alive with boats
carrying colored lanterns and joyous singers. Above it all a black
cloud of bewildered rooks flew with loud squawks from the old Cloister
to the Dom and back again, frightened out of their night’s rest, and
thinking, no doubt, that the end of the world had come.
[Illustration: KING CHRISTIAN COMES FROM CHURCH.]
Old King Christian had tears in his eyes when he arose at the banquet
to thank his people, and so had we all of us when he broke down utterly
and pleaded for patience “with an old man eighty-six years and over.”
And then he gave me the surprise of my life; for in the midst of it all
he sent one of the gold-gallooned lackeys to tell me that he desired to
drink to my health, and did. Now you may call me a snob, or anything
else you like; I own that I was never so proud in all my days. For
there sat my old townsmen, with whom I had been, shall we say, just a
bit off-color in spite of all, because I did not do according to the
rules, but broke over the traces every way, and went off to America to
do mercy knows what outlandish stunts in the way of earning a living.
There they sat now, in their own town, and saw the King himself toast
me before their very faces! I did think my measure was full when I
beheld the President of the United States take my wife in to dinner
in the White House--I know I nearly burst with pride in her and in
him--but now, indeed, it was running over. In self-defence, lest I grow
vain and foolish, I had to pinch myself, and remember the Iowa farmer
who sized me up last winter. I met him going to one of my lectures, and
when he found out that I was the man who was to speak, he looked me up
and down, and passed verdict thus:
“Well, now, you never kin tell from lookin’ at a toad how far he’ll
jump!”
Back to the soil, is the proper cure for the big head any day.
Now that I am back home I can speak of another surprise that befell, if
the little people can be left out the while. They might not understand.
It was when I looked my classmates from the Latin School over. There
were fifteen of us, and the thirteen took the strait and narrow road.
They were good and they prospered. Hans and I were the black sheep who
perennially disputed the dunce’s seat on the last bench, and disputed
pretty much everything else. It seems that we never found time to learn
for fighting, and no doubt the class felt it as a relief when we quit,
out of season, Hans to go into business where he belonged, I to learn a
trade. And now, after a lifetime, what was my surprise to find that of
the whole fifteen the two whom the King had singled out for decoration
with his much-coveted cross were--Hans and myself. The thing came to me
with a stunning sensation when I saw the ribbon pinned on Hans’s coat
that day; and when we were together in his home at tea, it worked out
into my consciousness.
“Hans,” I said, “did it occur to you--”
A motion of his hand stayed me. “Fritz!” he called, sharply, “time
you were at your lessons,” and not until the door had closed upon the
reluctant retreat of the son of the house did he turn to me with a
twinkle in the eye.
“Yes,” he said, “it did. We got through somehow, but on your life don’t
you let the boy hear. He is in it now.”
All things come to an end, and this did too. When the King was gone and
Ribe had settled down to talk it over, I had my chance of getting even
for sundry little digs at my home across the seas that I had scored
up. They will do it; it is in the blood. To the old country, when it
is as old as Ribe, we shall remain, I suppose, to the end of time a
lot of ex-savages, barely reclaimed from the woods and scalp-locks and
such, and in the nature of things not made to last. It was at a social
gathering where the one all-absorbing topic was the Domkirke, that the
worm turned. The walls would stand now a hundred years, some one said,
and shot a pitying glance at me, that said as plainly as speech: “Your
whole republic isn’t much older than that, and where will it be in
another hundred?” But I had been up in the roof of the church the day
before with the boss carpenter to look at the big beams, and something
there seemed familiar. To my question he nodded: Yes! he had bought the
lot on the sea, a ship load of American timber, pitch-pine, and there
it was. So I was not slow to rise to my friend’s bait.
“And,” I added, when I had told them, “your walls of old-world stone
may stand a hundred years on your own showing; or give them two. But
the carpenter told me that, barring accidents, there is no reason why
the roof of American timber should not last a thousand and be as good
as new.” I think I scored.
But we bore no grudges. I owe them too much for that. The sun shone so
brightly upon my mother’s new-made grave, which hands of loving friends
had garlanded with flowers against her boy’s home-coming; the grass was
so green and the thrush sang so sweetly in the hedge, that the sting
went out also of that sorrow and only the promise remained. It is good
to have lived, and though its days be mostly gray under northern skies,
glad am I that mine were framed in the memories of the Old Town. We
sought and found it together, She and I, the house in which I dreamed
as a boy, in the street of the Black Friars. The window-pane was still
there upon which I wrote “From here I can see Elisabeth’s garden”
beyond the river, heaven knows with what stylus to cut so deep. With a
dozen little mouths to feed in our home, diamonds were not lying loose
there. The trees have grown and shut garden and stream out of sight.
But the river divides us no longer, and though the shadows lengthen and
the frost is upon our heads, into our hearts it cannot come. Hand in
hand, we look trustfully across to that farther shore, to the land of
the rising sun where we shall find what we vainly seek here: our youth
in the long ago.
So we came home. I shall not soon forget the morning when, to the
wondering sight of our thousand immigrants, the panorama of the great
world city rose out of the deep. They crowded the rail of the steamer
as it came slowly up through the Narrows. Clad in their holiday
clothes, they stood in quiet groups, gazing silently toward the land,
all the fun and the horseplay of the voyage gone out of them. To the
jester of the steerage it was but a dull mood, and, thinking to cheer
them, he leaped upon a chest and harangued the crowd, telling them in
their own language that they were coming to a land where the golden
rule read, “Do others or they will do you.”
“Cheer up!” he shouted, “and let’s have a song. Who can give us a jolly
one?”
There was no answer. Till somewhere in the crowd a lone, far-away
voice began a verse of an old Norwegian hymn and sang it to the end
in a clear alto. There was a little uneasy laugh in the corner by the
wheel-house, but as the singer went on, never faltering, here and there
a voice fell in, and before he had come to the end of the second verse
it swelled in one common strain: “On this our festal day.” Everybody
was singing. The jester had disappeared. He was forgotten, as they
looked out, men and women, with folded hands toward their Promised
Land. I thought of my friend who fears for our democracy, and wished he
were there to hear his answer. For it _was_ the answer. Such as these
have its hope in keeping.
KING FREDERIK AT HOME
[Illustration]
I had never met King Frederik--the Crown Prince he was then--until the
summer of 1904, which we spent at Copenhagen. As a boy I had seen him
often and pulled off my cap to him, and always in return had received a
bow and a friendly smile. But at home, and to speak to, I had not met
him till that summer. We were at luncheon at our hotel one day, nothing
further from our thoughts than princes and courts, when the _portier_
came in hot haste to announce a royal lackey who wished speech with me.
Right behind him up loomed the messenger, in his gold lace and with
his silver-headed cane ever so much more imposing a figure than the
King himself. “Their Royal Highnesses, the Crown Prince and the Crown
Princess,” so ran his message, “desired our attendance at dinner at
Charlottenlund the next day but one.”
“The dickens they do,” I blurted out, fortunately in English, with a
vision of silk hats and regalia of which I had none. But my wife pulled
my sleeve and saved the day. “Would he thank their royal highnesses
very much; we should be glad to come,” was the way it went into Danish.
Whereupon he bowed and went, leaving us staring helplessly at one
another. I think we were both disposed to back out; but the children
decided it otherwise. Of course we must go. Such an honor!
So we went. After all, it was simple enough. I just borrowed a top hat
(that did not fit; I was glad to carry it in my hand in the presence
of royalty, for it simply would not come down over my head; it was
three sizes too small). The rest was easy. We drove out with the
American Minister and his wife, who were invited too. It was for a
long time after a disputed question in our family whether it was the
cross of Dannebrog I wore on my breast, and therefore me, the sentinels
saluted; or the American Minister. But he wore no cross. My wife
insisted mischievously that it must be his carriage. Could she have
seen herself, charming princes and princesses alike with her sweet and
gracious ways, there would have been no mystery. Where she passed,
everybody was made glad. They saluted from sheer desire to do it. And
then, we were guests of royalty.
Charlottenlund lies in the forest just outside Copenhagen, on the
beautiful Shore Road. It blew in from the water, and the ladies, on
account of their hats, preferred to ride backwards. And so, chatting
and laughing, we wheeled into the palace grounds before we knew we were
halfway, and found ourselves heading a procession of royal carriages
bent for the palace. They were easily known by their scarlet-coated
drivers. We had barely time to change around, to get our wives properly
seated, when the door of the carriage was yanked open and lackeys
swarmed to help the ladies. In we went. Almost before we could draw
breath a door was thrown wide, our names were announced, and the Crown
Princess came forward with outstretched hand.
“It was very good of you to come out to us,” she said.
Our entrance had been so sudden, due to the hustle to make way for the
princes following close upon us, and in thought and speech we had been
so far away during the trip, that the Danish greeting left me for the
moment dumb, groping my way four thousand miles across the sea. Slowly
and laboriously, as it seemed to me, I found the tongue of my childhood
again, but awkward beyond belief. This is what it said:
“How very respectable of you to ask us.”
The Crown Princess looked at me a moment, uncertain what to think,
then caught the look in my wife’s face, and laughed outright. At which
the Prince came up and heard the explanation, and we all laughed
together. The next moment the room was filled with their children,
and we were introduced right and left. It was all quite as neighborly
and as informal as if we had been at home. Fine young people, all of
them; finest of them all Prince Karl, who is now King Haakon of Norway.
Handsome, frank, and full of fun and friendliness, he was both good
to look at and to speak with; and in that he resembled his father.
They all have the slender, youthful shape of the old King. But for his
furrowed face and the tired look that often came into it in the last
few years, no one would have thought him over fifty, though he was
nearly ninety. The Crown Prince at sixty-one seemed barely forty.
My wife was taken in to dinner by a prince, a shy, boyish young
fellow, whose great ambition, he confided to her, was to live in a
New York sky-scraper and shoot up and down in the elevator, which was
entirely contrary to her inclinations, and she told him so. I was not
so lucky, but I shall always remember that evening with unalloyed
pleasure for the hearty and unaffected hospitality of our hosts and of
everybody. The Crown Prince talked of America and its people with warm
appreciation, and of President Roosevelt as a chief prop of the world’s
peace, at the very time when some people at home were yet shouting
that he was a firebrand. He thought him a wonderful man, and we did
not disagree. The thing that especially challenged his admiration was
his capacity for work--for getting things done. That any one could get
access to him in a nation of eighty millions, and get a hearing if
he was entitled to one, seemed to him marvellous. He was interested
in everything done for the toiler in our great cities, and heard
with visible interest of the progress we were making in the search
for the lost neighbor. The talk strayed to the unhappy conditions in
Russia, the Jewish massacres, and the threatening unrest. My wife was
expressing her horror at the things we read, and I began to feel that
we were skating on very thin ice, seeing that the Czar was the Crown
Prince’s nephew, when I heard him say to her, with great earnestness,
“You may believe that if my sister had the influence many think,
many a burden would be eased for that unhappy people.” And my heart
swelled with gratitude; for Crown Prince Frederik’s sister, the Czar’s
mother, was the sweet Princess Dagmar whom every Danish boy loved when
I was one of them, unless he were the sworn knight of Alexandra, her
beautiful sister.
After dinner we strayed through the garden that lies in the shelter of
the deep beech forest, and when it was bedtime the boys, including my
wife’s cavalier, came to kiss their father good-night. It was all as
sweet a picture of family happiness as if it were our own White House
at home, and it did us good to witness. I think our host saw it, for
when we shook hands at the leave-taking he said: “You have seen now how
happily and simply we live here, and I am glad you came. Now, take back
with you my warm greeting to your great President, and tell him that we
all of us admire him and trust him, and are glad of the prosperity of
his people--your people.”
He had expressed a wish to my wife to read our story, and I sent to
London for a copy of “The Making of an American,” which he fell to
reading at once, according to his habit. They say in Denmark that he
reads everything and never forgets anything, and has it all at his
fingers’ end always. I had proof of that when we next met. It was in
the Old Town at the reopening of the Domkirke. I was coming out of
our hotel at seven in the morning, and in the Square ran plumb into a
gentleman in a military cloak, who had a young man for company and a
girl of fifteen or sixteen.
“Good morning, Mr. Riis,” said he. “I hope you are well, and your wife,
since last we met.”
It must surely be that I am getting old and foolish. The voice I knew;
there are few as pleasing. But the man--I stood and looked at him,
while a smile crept over his features and broadened there. All at once
I knew.
“But, good gracious, your Royal Highness,” I said, “who would expect
to find you here before any one is up and stirring? You are really
yourself to blame.”
He laughed. “We are early risers, my children and I. We have been up
and out since six o’clock.” And so they had, I learned afterwards, to
the despair of the cook at the Bishop’s house where they were staying.
He introduced his son and daughter. “And now,” said the Prince with a
smile that had a challenge in it, “where do you suppose we have been?
Down at the river to look at the bridge where you first met your wife.
You see, I have read your book. But we did not find it.”
I explained that the Long Bridge had been but a memory these twenty
years, but to me a very dear one, and he nodded brightly, “Give her my
warm regards.” She was glad when I told her, for her loyal heart had
made room for him beside his sweet sisters from our childhood. When the
lilacs bloomed again, I was alone, and he sent me a message of sorrow
and sympathy. And because of that, for his liking of her, he shall
always have a place in my heart.
They told no end of stories of the delight he had given by this gift,
so invaluable in a public man, of remembering and recognizing men after
the lapse of years. One peasant, come to town to see the show, was
halted by Prince Frederik in the market square, as was I, and greeted
as an old comrade. They had been recruits together in one regiment;
for the royal princes in Denmark have to serve in the ranks with their
fellow-citizens. They are not made generals at birth. In Copenhagen I
was told that the Prince kept tab on all that went on in the Rigsdag,
and the man without convictions dreaded nothing so much as his long
memory. With reason it would seem; for not long before, when a certain
member of the Opposition made a troublesome speech, the Crown Prince
calmly brought out his scrap-book and showed the embarrassed minister
where the same man had taken the exactly opposite stand half a score
of years before. It is not hard to understand how a memory like that
might become potent in the deliberations of a parliamentary body,
particularly among a people with a keen sense of the ridiculous, like
the Danes. However, they have something better than that. They are
above all a loyal people. I have never seen anything more touching or
more creditable to a nation than the way the Danes put aside their
claims when the dispute between them and King Christian’s ministers
over constitutional rights became bitter, and the King, loyal himself
to the backbone, would not let the ministers go.
“He is of the past that does not comprehend,” they said, “but he is our
good old King and we love him.”
* * * * *
And the clouds blew over, and the people and their ruler were united in
an affection that wiped out every trace of resentment. King Frederik is
of the present. He knows his people, and they trust him with the love
they gave his father. Stronger buttress was never built for a happy
union of Prince and People.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The full story may be read in the “History of Hudson County,” where
my friend, Rev. R. Andersen, of the Danish church in Brooklyn, an
indefatigable delver, unearthed this chip of the old block.
[2] Fanö and Manö are the two islands just outside the Old Town.
[3] About one hundred dollars.
[4] The Madam--Patched before and behind.
[5] The old building was a hospital for centuries after the Reformation
drove out the monks, and for a season served as an insane asylum. We
children used to steal up to the tarred board fence that enclosed its
grounds and, gluing our eyes to a knot hole, shudder deliciously at the
sight of the poor wretches. It was eventually turned into an Old Ladies
Home, and the name of the “Cloister” was restored to it.
[6] The Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, New York.
[7] The reader who is not afraid of dyspepsia by suggestion may
consider the following Christmas bill of fare which obtained among the
peasants east of the Old Town: On a large trencher a layer of pork and
ribs, on top of that a nest of fat sausages, in which sat a roast duck.
[8] An unromantic variation of this was the belief that the farmer who
left his plough out on Christmas would get a drubbing from his wife
within a twelvemonth. I hope whoever held to that got what he richly
deserved.
[9] The Church of Our Lady was its official title.
[10] My father’s friend, Pastor Fejlberg, who, as a village parson just
outside the Old Town, lived the life of the country folk and recorded
it with sympathetic understanding, is my authority. I remember him
telling a story which only last winter one of his old “boys” recalled
to me in California. It was of the village tailor, who, coming home in
the small hours of the morning, the worse for many deep potations of
the strong mead at the inn, was beset by a ghost that would not let him
go. In vain did he try to shake it off at cross-road after cross-road.
They all ran like this ✗, and had no power over the children of
darkness. The spectre still pursued him, shrieking in ghoulish glee
over his failure. Not until he came to two roads that crossed at right
angles, forming a true ✚, did he beat it off. There it could not pass,
and he got home safe; let us hope, sobered also.
[11] Which reminds me of a lesson in manners I once received from the
gudewife of a neighboring farm. It was in the days when the farmer and
his hands all ate out of the same dish, each with his own horn spoon,
which he afterward licked clean and stuck up under the beam until the
next meal. I had never been away from home and had “notions” that made
me decline a mellemmad (sandwich) when she brought it to me in her
honest hand. She took in the situation, and after serving the other
children, handed me my mellemmad with the fire-tongs, all sooty from
the chimney.
[12] Meaning islands.
[13] Tvebak is Danish for Zwieback.
[14] The “cleric’s” or “clerk’s ditch” that skirted the monks’ garden
in the old days. The garden is still there, and traces of the ditch.
[15] The Ribe House, or Ribe Castle.
[16] Green Street, the street leading to the Green where the castle
stood.
[17] Of her three sons, Abel slew his brother Erik for the crown, and
was himself slain by a peasant in the highway. His body was buried in a
swamp, with a stake driven through the heart to lay his grievous ghost.
Christopher, who took the sceptre last, was poisoned by a monk in the
sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the Domkirke; and in the
division of the kingdom between the brothers that gave cause for their
quarrels, began Denmark’s woes, which in our own day culminated in her
dismemberment, when Germany took Slesvig, Abel’s dukedom. Queen Bengerd
herself was the worst-hated woman in Danish history, as Dagmar is yet
the best-beloved. In death the people’s hatred would not let her rest.
When her grave was opened in my boyhood, it was found that the stone
slab which covered it had been pried off and a round boulder dropped in
the place made for her head. Yet her beautiful black braid was there,
and the skull, so delicate in its perfect oval, that those who saw it
marvelled greatly.
[18] It is upon his “History of Ribe Town,” in two stout volumes, that
I have drawn in these sketches for the ancient records that enliven its
pages.
[19] The river was included, I suppose; at all events, it contributed
to his revenues. An old law provided that whoever polluted the
stream by throwing any uncleanness into it should lose his life. The
Thirteenth Century had a curious way of anticipating the things upon
which the Twentieth prides itself with much vaunting. We cry out
against water pollution; they prohibited it. It is easy to understand
that there were no sewers in Ribe.
[20] The summer of 1904, the year of our home-coming.
[21] October 11-12, 1634. The worst flood in Danish history. Over
twenty-two thousand persons perished in it, all along the coast. In one
village hard by Ribe--Melby--only one young man was left alive.
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