KING FREDERIK AT HOME
King Frederik
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 theportiercame 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 afigure 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 invitedtoo. 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 doorof 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. Thenext 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 heartyand 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 beforeany 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.
1The 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.
2Fanö and Manö are the two islands just outside the Old Town.
3About one hundred dollars.
4The Madam—Patched before and behind.
5The 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.
6The Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, New York.
7The 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.
8An 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.
9The Church of Our Lady was its official title.
10My 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.
11Which 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.
12Meaning islands.
13Tvebak is Danish for Zwieback.
14The “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.
15The Ribe House, or Ribe Castle.
16Green Street, the street leading to the Green where the castle stood.
17Of 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.
18It 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.
19The 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.
20The summer of 1904, the year of our home-coming.
21October 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.