[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.”]