[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.