XV: LUCKHe climbed over some barbed-wire fences, and in doing so made a large number of ventilation holes in his nether garments.The primitive fishing-tackle that dangled behind his back consisted of a piece of rope with a couple of beer-barrel bungs for a float, and a length of strong, home-twisted iron wire for a trace. The great hook, which must have been intended to catch whales with, was a clumsy steel one that the village smith’s apprentice, who was just finishing his time, had made for him; the rod was a short, thick beanpole.Little Rasmus was an angler with no shrewdness or intelligence worth mentioning. In his hand he carried an old, battered water-can, in which were his bait--a few bastard carp, caught by trawling with an osier-basket in the village pond. They had not been treatedsecundum artem; they had not spent the night in a tub under a running tap, and had not felt any salutary coolness of the gills from having small pieces of ice dropped into their tepid water from time to time. No, a little grass and mud at the bottom of the can was all they had had in which to keep themselves alive.Rasmus tried several, and at last found one that could just flap its tail. From habit, and for luck, he spat upon it.The pools were smooth and clear in the cool September air. To look down into them was like looking through a magnifying-glass at the bottom, where brown-shelled, fresh-water mussels and white-shelled planorbes were discernible among the water-grass and mosses. The reed-tassels, that had formerly been so blue, were now brown and downy at the tip; and all the flags among the rushes trembled under the weight of their heavy seed-pods.Rasmus quickly made ready his line and went out.“Aatch!” cried a snipe, as soon as he set foot in the bog, and a little later he put up seven or eight more, which fluttered along in uneven zigzags over the muddy herbage, and then suddenly rose in steep, winding curves. With interest the boy watched them in their rapid flight, saw how they hastened the strokes of their wings and circled round the bog, until one by one they broke from the rank and disappeared in a downward dive.At the end of a ridge, which ran out in a blunt promontory in one of the pits, he tried a throw, and stood for a little while waiting; but as the bait had found a hole in which to hide, and the big bung-float lay still, he pulled it up, and went, with his rope-line gathered over his outstretched arm, to a new place.He came into a thicket of meadow-sweet and wild raspberries. Late-flowering blue forget-me-nots covered the ground. He plucked one, smelt it, but threw it away as the sound of a great splash reached his ear.By balancing along a plank he got on to a little solitary island surrounded by duck-weed. The plank swayed very much under him, and the island sank alarmingly beneath his weight; but he could see that it had borne people before, and he was on it now! A bushy grey willow grew in the middle of the island, and a spike of purple loose-strife raised its head above it.Grim was lying in a flat, muddy bay, hidden in a large clump of mares’-tails. A fat, lazy carp was half swimming, half floating in the open water in front of her. Had she not been in the bog with its scarcity of food, the very sight of such carrion would have made her sick; as it was, she took it with thankfulness, and ran at it with such greed that she gulped it straight down, and got a large steel hook far down in her stomach.For a moment she felt it was an uncomfortable mouthful; the flabby morsel must have gone down the wrong way. Well, she would disgorge it!But she could not, and there was a thick stalk like a water-lily stem that kept tickling her throat. She was going to spit the stalk out, when she noticed that it was rooted in a tuft of reeds.“Rubbish!” thought Grim, as she flourished her fins and twisted her tail; for she meant to get out of this warm corner. She set her teeth and started off. The mares’ tails broke and the rushes curtsied as she crashed along; everything rocked--the bank and the bay, the reeds and the island; it seemed to the boy as if a pig were running round and rooting about under the water.The enthusiastic fisherman in grey-weather cloth, with sky-blue rod, silk line, and running tackle, had never had the luck to catch this monster; and here was little Rasmus with his bean-pole, his steel hook and his tethering-rope, and his tackle held!Grim pulled at the line till the rod was half under water. The boy had all but let go, when a sudden violent jerk upset him. He had no time to save himself, and with the rod in his arms he fell into the willow-bush. The rope tightened so that the strands creaked and groaned; but the rod was fast in the bush.Rasmus thinks of making for the shore by the plank, but sees, to his terror, that the island is afloat. The fish on his hook has pulled it away from its anchorage, and is now dragging him out into the deep water. The water bubbles about the rope and foams out from the island, as if it were the bow of a racing-yacht. Sometimes the little raft heels over horribly, so that Rasmus’s wooden shoes are filled with water. He has quite given himself up for lost, and is repeating the Lord’s Prayer.In the meantime, Grim is dragging him, like a second Tom Thumb, from one end of the pool to the other. She twists and turns, dives down head first to the bottom, only to shoot straight up a few seconds later to the surface to lash it into foam and waves. Great bubbles and myriads of atoms of horrid, black peat-sediment float like swelling clouds in all directions.Now and then the boy catches sight of a wrinkled, moss-grown back about as long as a bull’s. It looks to him like one of the ancient oaks of the bog coming up to lie and float on the surface.Gradually, as the large, pointed steel hook enters farther and farther into Grim’s intestines, and makes her cold, red blood flow the wrong way, her movements become less and less rapid.The water makes things dim; she no longer sees clearly, and runs full tilt into banks and clumps of reeds. She feels delightfully surfeited, and darts about the pool with the sensation of dragging with her the greatest booty she had ever taken in her life. How it seems to fill her stomach! At last,at lastshe is satiated, so that her throat seems ready to burst and her jaws to part asunder; and all at once she notices the same strange over-burdened feeling that she had had that day many years ago, when in greed she had swallowed the big perch.Wildly and recklessly she drags on the rope, careering around with her little captor; but every time she jerks him off an island, or through thickly-matted vegetation, she drives the point of the iron nearer to her heart. At last, in the fever of death, she rushes right in to the bank, and runs the boy aground on an island of reeds.She lies floating just below the surface, and Rasmus, who now and then between the water-plants catches sight of her greenish-yellow belly and black-spotted tail-fin, cries out in terror.The old pike of many adventures is wandering in her mind. Is it the big, black perch that she has at last succeeded in consuming? Is it the bull with horns? Or is it one of the big swimming-bird’s young?Yes,thatis it! This time she has succeeded in getting hold of its long leg, and has at last swallowed it and has it safely in her stomach.But it weighs her down, so that she can no longer keep in a horizontal position. Yes, she feels that distinctly; it is so tremendously satisfying that her tail is sinking and her head rising, and now all at once she rises slowly and stiffly from the water.The boy almost goes crazy at the sight, and involuntarily covers his eyes with his hands, so fantastically horrible does it appear. Out of the black, muddy water and the purple, poisonous-green plants from which the gases of decomposition release great, bladdery bubbles, stands out Grim’s huge, crocodile head, cold and staring.The flabby, wrinkled skin of the throat vibrates with her violent, convulsive gulps, and the lower jaw of more than arm’s length is pushed out beyond the upper, exposing to view the extreme points of a row of long, dagger-like teeth at the shrunken corners of the mouth.The monster now turns slowly on her axis, her big, expressionless, watery eye, looking, with its dirty grey colour, like an unwashed window in an empty, deserted house, projects, fixed and blind, from her huge head.The iron has reached her swimming-bladder, and robbed her of the power of navigation. She grows dizzy, and like a great float at the bite of a big fish, she goes down silently and straight.A man busy ploughing heard the boy’s cry, and running up, learned what was the matter: a monster of an animal, that Rasmus could not pull up, had sailed over half the bog with him!The man fished up the plank, and helped the boy ashore. Then he fetched his horses, harnessed them to the line, and drew Grim slowly, but surely, up on to the bank.She lay that night moored to a birch-tree. Life was long since extinct.A message was telephoned to the innkeeper, who collected items of news for the editor’s paper, “that Peter Jenn’s son had caught, under the strangest circumstances, a specimen of the great sea-serpent. It resembled a prehistoric toad rather than a fish of the present day.”The following day the whole district gathered at the spot, and the schoolmaster appeared with a man of science who had been summoned.“Why, it’s a pike,” said the professor, as soon as he saw it, “an unusually large and old specimen, it is true, but still only a pike.” And it must be confessed that he felt a little hurt at having been called out on so long a journey for nothing.For many years afterwards Rasmus was the hero of the village, and from that day he never went by the name of Rasmus Jenn, but was called Rasmus Pike.THE ENDTHE BORZOI-GYLDENDAL BOOKSThe firm of Gyldendal [Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag] is the oldest and greatest publishing house in Scandinavia, and has been responsible, since its inception in 1770, for giving to the world some of the greatest Danish and Norwegian writers of three centuries. Among them are such names as Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Pontoppidan, Brandes, Gjellerup, Hans Christian Andersen, and Knut Hamsun, the Nobel Prize winner for 1920, whose works I am publishing in America.It is therefore with particular satisfaction that I announce the completion of arrangements whereby I shall bring out in this country certain of the publications of this famous house. The books listed below are the first of theBorzoi-Gyldendalbooks.JennyA novel translated from the Norwegian of Sigrid Undset by W. Emmé.The Sworn BrothersA Tale of the Early Days of Iceland. Translated from the Danish of Gunnar Gunnarsson [Icelandic] by C. Field and W. Emmé.Grim: the Story of a PikeALFRED A. KNOPF,Publisher, NEW YORK
He climbed over some barbed-wire fences, and in doing so made a large number of ventilation holes in his nether garments.
The primitive fishing-tackle that dangled behind his back consisted of a piece of rope with a couple of beer-barrel bungs for a float, and a length of strong, home-twisted iron wire for a trace. The great hook, which must have been intended to catch whales with, was a clumsy steel one that the village smith’s apprentice, who was just finishing his time, had made for him; the rod was a short, thick beanpole.
Little Rasmus was an angler with no shrewdness or intelligence worth mentioning. In his hand he carried an old, battered water-can, in which were his bait--a few bastard carp, caught by trawling with an osier-basket in the village pond. They had not been treatedsecundum artem; they had not spent the night in a tub under a running tap, and had not felt any salutary coolness of the gills from having small pieces of ice dropped into their tepid water from time to time. No, a little grass and mud at the bottom of the can was all they had had in which to keep themselves alive.
Rasmus tried several, and at last found one that could just flap its tail. From habit, and for luck, he spat upon it.
The pools were smooth and clear in the cool September air. To look down into them was like looking through a magnifying-glass at the bottom, where brown-shelled, fresh-water mussels and white-shelled planorbes were discernible among the water-grass and mosses. The reed-tassels, that had formerly been so blue, were now brown and downy at the tip; and all the flags among the rushes trembled under the weight of their heavy seed-pods.
Rasmus quickly made ready his line and went out.
“Aatch!” cried a snipe, as soon as he set foot in the bog, and a little later he put up seven or eight more, which fluttered along in uneven zigzags over the muddy herbage, and then suddenly rose in steep, winding curves. With interest the boy watched them in their rapid flight, saw how they hastened the strokes of their wings and circled round the bog, until one by one they broke from the rank and disappeared in a downward dive.
At the end of a ridge, which ran out in a blunt promontory in one of the pits, he tried a throw, and stood for a little while waiting; but as the bait had found a hole in which to hide, and the big bung-float lay still, he pulled it up, and went, with his rope-line gathered over his outstretched arm, to a new place.
He came into a thicket of meadow-sweet and wild raspberries. Late-flowering blue forget-me-nots covered the ground. He plucked one, smelt it, but threw it away as the sound of a great splash reached his ear.
By balancing along a plank he got on to a little solitary island surrounded by duck-weed. The plank swayed very much under him, and the island sank alarmingly beneath his weight; but he could see that it had borne people before, and he was on it now! A bushy grey willow grew in the middle of the island, and a spike of purple loose-strife raised its head above it.
Grim was lying in a flat, muddy bay, hidden in a large clump of mares’-tails. A fat, lazy carp was half swimming, half floating in the open water in front of her. Had she not been in the bog with its scarcity of food, the very sight of such carrion would have made her sick; as it was, she took it with thankfulness, and ran at it with such greed that she gulped it straight down, and got a large steel hook far down in her stomach.
For a moment she felt it was an uncomfortable mouthful; the flabby morsel must have gone down the wrong way. Well, she would disgorge it!
But she could not, and there was a thick stalk like a water-lily stem that kept tickling her throat. She was going to spit the stalk out, when she noticed that it was rooted in a tuft of reeds.
“Rubbish!” thought Grim, as she flourished her fins and twisted her tail; for she meant to get out of this warm corner. She set her teeth and started off. The mares’ tails broke and the rushes curtsied as she crashed along; everything rocked--the bank and the bay, the reeds and the island; it seemed to the boy as if a pig were running round and rooting about under the water.
The enthusiastic fisherman in grey-weather cloth, with sky-blue rod, silk line, and running tackle, had never had the luck to catch this monster; and here was little Rasmus with his bean-pole, his steel hook and his tethering-rope, and his tackle held!
Grim pulled at the line till the rod was half under water. The boy had all but let go, when a sudden violent jerk upset him. He had no time to save himself, and with the rod in his arms he fell into the willow-bush. The rope tightened so that the strands creaked and groaned; but the rod was fast in the bush.
Rasmus thinks of making for the shore by the plank, but sees, to his terror, that the island is afloat. The fish on his hook has pulled it away from its anchorage, and is now dragging him out into the deep water. The water bubbles about the rope and foams out from the island, as if it were the bow of a racing-yacht. Sometimes the little raft heels over horribly, so that Rasmus’s wooden shoes are filled with water. He has quite given himself up for lost, and is repeating the Lord’s Prayer.
In the meantime, Grim is dragging him, like a second Tom Thumb, from one end of the pool to the other. She twists and turns, dives down head first to the bottom, only to shoot straight up a few seconds later to the surface to lash it into foam and waves. Great bubbles and myriads of atoms of horrid, black peat-sediment float like swelling clouds in all directions.
Now and then the boy catches sight of a wrinkled, moss-grown back about as long as a bull’s. It looks to him like one of the ancient oaks of the bog coming up to lie and float on the surface.
Gradually, as the large, pointed steel hook enters farther and farther into Grim’s intestines, and makes her cold, red blood flow the wrong way, her movements become less and less rapid.
The water makes things dim; she no longer sees clearly, and runs full tilt into banks and clumps of reeds. She feels delightfully surfeited, and darts about the pool with the sensation of dragging with her the greatest booty she had ever taken in her life. How it seems to fill her stomach! At last,at lastshe is satiated, so that her throat seems ready to burst and her jaws to part asunder; and all at once she notices the same strange over-burdened feeling that she had had that day many years ago, when in greed she had swallowed the big perch.
Wildly and recklessly she drags on the rope, careering around with her little captor; but every time she jerks him off an island, or through thickly-matted vegetation, she drives the point of the iron nearer to her heart. At last, in the fever of death, she rushes right in to the bank, and runs the boy aground on an island of reeds.
She lies floating just below the surface, and Rasmus, who now and then between the water-plants catches sight of her greenish-yellow belly and black-spotted tail-fin, cries out in terror.
The old pike of many adventures is wandering in her mind. Is it the big, black perch that she has at last succeeded in consuming? Is it the bull with horns? Or is it one of the big swimming-bird’s young?
Yes,thatis it! This time she has succeeded in getting hold of its long leg, and has at last swallowed it and has it safely in her stomach.
But it weighs her down, so that she can no longer keep in a horizontal position. Yes, she feels that distinctly; it is so tremendously satisfying that her tail is sinking and her head rising, and now all at once she rises slowly and stiffly from the water.
The boy almost goes crazy at the sight, and involuntarily covers his eyes with his hands, so fantastically horrible does it appear. Out of the black, muddy water and the purple, poisonous-green plants from which the gases of decomposition release great, bladdery bubbles, stands out Grim’s huge, crocodile head, cold and staring.
The flabby, wrinkled skin of the throat vibrates with her violent, convulsive gulps, and the lower jaw of more than arm’s length is pushed out beyond the upper, exposing to view the extreme points of a row of long, dagger-like teeth at the shrunken corners of the mouth.
The monster now turns slowly on her axis, her big, expressionless, watery eye, looking, with its dirty grey colour, like an unwashed window in an empty, deserted house, projects, fixed and blind, from her huge head.
The iron has reached her swimming-bladder, and robbed her of the power of navigation. She grows dizzy, and like a great float at the bite of a big fish, she goes down silently and straight.
A man busy ploughing heard the boy’s cry, and running up, learned what was the matter: a monster of an animal, that Rasmus could not pull up, had sailed over half the bog with him!
The man fished up the plank, and helped the boy ashore. Then he fetched his horses, harnessed them to the line, and drew Grim slowly, but surely, up on to the bank.
She lay that night moored to a birch-tree. Life was long since extinct.
A message was telephoned to the innkeeper, who collected items of news for the editor’s paper, “that Peter Jenn’s son had caught, under the strangest circumstances, a specimen of the great sea-serpent. It resembled a prehistoric toad rather than a fish of the present day.”
The following day the whole district gathered at the spot, and the schoolmaster appeared with a man of science who had been summoned.
“Why, it’s a pike,” said the professor, as soon as he saw it, “an unusually large and old specimen, it is true, but still only a pike.” And it must be confessed that he felt a little hurt at having been called out on so long a journey for nothing.
For many years afterwards Rasmus was the hero of the village, and from that day he never went by the name of Rasmus Jenn, but was called Rasmus Pike.
THE END
THE BORZOI-GYLDENDAL BOOKS
The firm of Gyldendal [Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag] is the oldest and greatest publishing house in Scandinavia, and has been responsible, since its inception in 1770, for giving to the world some of the greatest Danish and Norwegian writers of three centuries. Among them are such names as Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Pontoppidan, Brandes, Gjellerup, Hans Christian Andersen, and Knut Hamsun, the Nobel Prize winner for 1920, whose works I am publishing in America.
It is therefore with particular satisfaction that I announce the completion of arrangements whereby I shall bring out in this country certain of the publications of this famous house. The books listed below are the first of theBorzoi-Gyldendalbooks.
Jenny
A novel translated from the Norwegian of Sigrid Undset by W. Emmé.
The Sworn Brothers
A Tale of the Early Days of Iceland. Translated from the Danish of Gunnar Gunnarsson [Icelandic] by C. Field and W. Emmé.
Grim: the Story of a Pike
ALFRED A. KNOPF,Publisher, NEW YORK