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.
BY JACOB A. RIIS
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN
_An Autobiography_
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