CHAPTER III

“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.

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 theyclashed 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.

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 farback 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. Dearold 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 thegreat 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 beingcaught 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-longfriend, 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!Ourheaven? Indeed, no! Here we can be friends, Mrs. Tacchau. But there—really, excuseme!”

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.

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 theline, 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 enemiesof 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.

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 toldme 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 acalm “I told you so.” But that is another story, and we shall come to it.

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. Heremployer 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 killedat 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.

“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 studyon 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.

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 becauseone 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 whena 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, butit 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 itsmaster’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 thetown. 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

“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 Postmasterthan 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 occasionto 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; themeerschaum 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, Fathersmoked 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.

The Old Family Doctor.

I have said that in Ribe one seemed to be always bordering upon the way past because ofthe 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. Heoutlived 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 Cloister5there 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 thestreet with wintergreen and spruce, and walked, singing, their last journey with them, while all the church bells rang and friends carried the tired body.

“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.

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