CHAPTER IX

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.20For 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, becausethere 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 splendoron 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 anhour 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.

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 awaythe 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 mewith 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.

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 eveningour 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 ago21at 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. Theone 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.

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 boyshad 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. Insuch 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 menwent 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.

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 intothe 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 hiskind. 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 fairgirlhood, 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. Thechildren 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 ranand 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 havethe 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 hehimself. 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, suddenlythere 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.

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 theresat 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—Iknow 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 forfighting, 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 settleddown 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 knowswith 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 themin 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 itwasthe answer. Such as these have its hope in keeping.

Back to Index Next