THE OLD TOWN

CHAPTER I

The other day, when I was busy in my garden, I heard the whir of swift wings and saw a flight of birds coming from the hills in the east. Something in the way in which they flew stirred me with a sudden thrill, and I stood up, feeling forty years younger all at once.

“Blackbirds,” said Mike, looking aloft, but I knew better. I watched them wistfully, with eager hope, and when they were over me and I saw their orange bills, I knew that I had not been mistaken. They were starlings, beloved friends of my boyhood, come across the seas at last after all these years, looking for me, perhaps. Itseemed as if it must be so, and I dropped spade and trowel, and took up hammer and saw to make boxes for them as I used to, so that they might know I was waiting to welcome them. I am waiting now. Every day I look to see if my feathered chum is there, perched at my window. And he will come, I know. For he cannot have forgotten the good times we had in the long ago.

You see, we grew up together. Almost the earliest thing I remember is the box at my bedroom window which the first rays of the rising sun struck in spring. Then, as soon as ever the winter snows were gone and the daffodils peeped through the half-frozen crust, some morning there would be a mighty commotion in that box. Black shadows darted in and out, and a great scratching and thumping went on. And while I lay and watched with heart beating fast,—for was not here my songster playmate back with the summer and the sunlight on his burnished wing?—out he came on the peg for a sidelong peep at my window, and sat and whistled the old tune, nodding to the bare trees he knew with his brave promise thatpresently Jack Frost would be banished for good, and all would be right. Was he not there to prove it? And it was even so. The summer was right on his trail always.

The weeks passed, and the Old Town lay buried in a dreamy sea of blossoming elders. In field and meadow the starling was busy from early dawn till the sun was far in the west; for his young, of whom there was always a vigorous family,—and oh! the glorious blue eggs we loved to peep at before Mrs. Starling had taken them under her wing,—had a healthy appetite and required no end of grubs and worms. But whether they went to sleep early or he thought they had had enough, always when the setting sun gilded the top of the old poplar, he would come with all his friends and sing his evening song. In the very top branches, swaying with the summer wind, they would sit and whistle the clear notes in the minor key I hear yet when I am worn and tired, and that tell me that some day it will all come back, the joy and the sunshine of the young days. It was for him I turned my boyish hands to their first labor oflove. I made him a house of an empty starch box, and later on, when I had learned carpentering, I built for his family a tenement of three flats that hung by my window many years after I knew it no more. I had long been absorbed in the fight with tenements made for human kind by builders with no such friendly feelings, when my father wrote that the winter storms had blown down the box and broken it, and that written inside in my boyish hand, they found these words:

“This box is for starlings, but, by the great horn spoon, not for sparrows.“JACOB RIIS.”

“This box is for starlings, but, by the great horn spoon, not for sparrows.

“JACOB RIIS.”

We did not like sparrows. They were cheeky tramps, good only to eat when there were enough of them. The starling was a friend.

I suppose it was the near approach of the time of his going away, with the stork and the swallow, to leave us in the grip of the long winter, that made me in desperation try to cage him once. How I could, I don’t know. Boys are boys everywhere, I suppose. I made the cage with infinitetoil, caught my starling, and put him in it. But when I saw him darting from side to side struggling to get out to the trees and the grass and the clouds, my heart smote me, and I tore the cage apart and threw open the window. It was many days before I could look my friend in the eye, and I was secretly afraid all winter that he would not come back. But he was a generous bird and bore no grudge. Next spring he was there earlier than ever, as if he knew.

Never have I forgotten it; it is to me as vivid as if it were yesterday, that black day when, with the instinct to “kill something” strong in me, I had gone out with my father’s gun, and coming through the willows, met a starling on joyous wing crossing the meadow on the way to his nest. Up went the gun, and before I knew, I had shot him. I can see him folding his wings as he fell at my feet. I did not pick him up. I went home with all the sunlight gone out of the day. I have shot many living things since, more shame to me, but never one that hurt like that. I had slain my friend.

But neither have I forgotten the long peaceful twilights of summer when we drifted down the river in our boat, listening to the small talk of the mother duck with her young, and to the chattering of uncounted thousands of starlings in the reeds where they had settled for the night, settling too, as was proper, the disputes of the day before they went to sleep. If only men were always so wise. In the midst of it we would suddenly get on our feet and shout and clap our hands, and the flock would rise and rise and keep rising, farther and farther down the river, until the sky was darkened and the twilight became night, while the rush of the million wings swelled into rolling thunder. We stood open-mouthed and watched the marvellous sight, while the youngest crowded up close, half afraid.

Ah, well! they were the old days of sweet memories, and here they have come back to me on the wings of the black starling. Who brought him, or how he came, I do not know, but glad am I. And while I am waiting for him to sound his message of cheer and good-will at my window, let metry and hold fast awhile the Old Town we both loved, and from which it must be that he has come straight. Else, why should he seek me out?

Where the northernmost boundary post of the German empire, shaken by the rude blasts of the North Sea, points its black menacing finger toward the little remnant of stricken Denmark, it stood a thousand years, a lonely sentinel with its face toward the southern foe. Kings were born and buried within its portals, proud bishops ruled it, armies fought for it, and over it, but all these things had passed away. Centuries before it had bidden good-by to the pageantry of royalty and courts, and had gone to sleep with its mouldering past. And it had slept ever since save when the tramp of armies stirred uneasy dreams; but they halted no longer at its gates. The snort of the iron horse, hitched to the nineteenth century, had not yet aroused it in my day. No shriek of steam whistle, scarce a ripple from the great world without, disturbed its rest. There was, indeed, a factory in town, always spoken of asthefactory, a cotton mill of impossible pretensions, grotesque inits mediæval setting, and discredited by public opinion as a kind of flying in the face of tradition and Providence at once that invited sure disaster. When disaster did come, though it took the power of two empires to bring it about,—it was an immediate result of the war of conquest waged by Germany and Austria against Denmark that drew the boundary line and built custom-houses within sight of the factory windows,—it was accepted as a judgment any one could have foretold. But even that bold intruder had never been guilty of the impropriety of whistling. The drowsy clatter of mill-wheels where blossoming lilacs dipped over garden walls into the loitering stream was the only sound of industry that broke the profound peace. The flour-mills were among the privileged traditions of the town. They had been handed down from father to son in unbroken succession since the exclusive right to grind the flour of the community had been granted to them by the early kings. No one had ever disputed that right. Perhaps it was not worth contending for; anyhow, it would have been useless. Could aclearer title to possession be imagined than that the thing had been there before any one could remember?

“Where blossoming lilacs dip over garden walls.”

Red-legged storks built their nests on the tiled roofs of the quaint old houses, and swallows rearedtheir young under the broad eaves, protected like their loftier neighbors by the general good-will of the people, and by the superstition that assigned sure misfortune, even if nothing worse than a plague of boils, to whomsoever should lay profane hand upon them. In the silent halls of the old cloister, where the echo of sandalled feet on stone floors seemed always to linger,—steps of good friars long since dust in forgotten graves,—they flew in and out, and though they built two nests for one, since they were given to raising two broods in the brief summer, they did not wear their welcome out. The turnkey patiently put up an extra shelf, for, old as was he, were not the swallows tenants before him?

Ponderous whale-oil lamps swung across the streets in rusty chains that squeaked in every vagrant breeze a dismal accompaniment to the cry of the night watch. In such a setting tinderboxes and quill pens seemed quite the thing. I well remember the distrustful resentment in which old teachers held the “English” (steel) pens. They still clung to the goose-quill, which no oneto-day would know how to cut. But the word “penknife” had meaning in those days. Envelopes were a still later discovery. Letters were folded and sealed with wax, and we boys collected seals as the boys of to-day collect stamps; and a good deal more of variety and human interest there was in the collection. I mind the excitement when the first bottle of “Pennsylvania oil” came into our house. I fetched it myself from the grocer’s, bottled like beer at eight skilling a bottle. Very likely they were Lübeck skilling, reminiscent of the middle ages when the Hanse Towns so thoroughly monopolized all trade in the North that their very coinage endured centuries after their League had ceased to be. Other things lasted. Their factors in foreign lands were bachelors, whether from choice or compulsion I do not know, and to this day the Danish word for bachelor is “Pebersvend,”i.e.pepper clerk, spices being a chief ware in their shops. As for the telegraph, people shook their heads at it as a more than dubious American notion, though the undoubted success of the first sewing-machine thathad come to town had disposed them to lend a lenient ear to its claims.

Above this little world of men the old Domkirke reared its gray head, a splendid vision of the great things that were. Travellers approaching the town saw it from afar, a majestic pile against whose strong walls the town leaned with its time-worn old houses and crooked streets as if seeking strength and comfort against the assault of the gathering years. Its square red tower was a landmark for skippers far out at sea. The Dom itself was, and always had been, the heart and soul of the Old Town. It was so when the early Christian bishops built it in the twelfth century, for though kings abode in its shadow, they were their advisers and the real masters of the city. It was even more so after the Reformation had clipped the wings of the clergy. With their power went the commerce and the prestige of the Old Town; there remained little but the Domkirke and the Latin School that had been part of it from the beginning, and about these centred its life and all its normal interest. Therewere those, it is true, who dreamed of a return of the great days by wedding Ribe once more to the sea through a ship canal to deep water, but it was a dream that ended when they built a harbor at Esbjerg, a scant dozen miles away. After that the Old Town slept on, undisturbed by the world without.

“The old Domkirke reared its gray head.”

They were mighty men who built the Domkirke, and went far afield for the stone of which they reared it. There is none in Denmark, so they sent their ships over the North Sea and up the river Rhine for the gray stone of which they built the walls, and in quarries on the Weser they found granite for the great pillars and sandstone for the lighter ones. They wrought in the fashion of their day, but those that came after them and raised the great tower of burned brick had learned another that suited their purpose better; and so while the gentler Roman curve was that of the church, the tower stood forth in the massive strength of the Goth, as it had need, for it was the strong place of the burghers as the castle was the King’s stronghold. Watchmen kept a constantlookout from it in times of war for an approaching enemy, and the great bell hung there, the “storm bell,” that called the people to arms. It had long been dumb in my day, for it was feared that to ring it would imperil the tower. But when the autumn storms bellowed about the gables of the Dom, sometimes we heard at dead of night a deep singing note above the crash of falling tiles, and then we hugged our pillows close and held our breath to listen; for when the bell sang, it was warning that the sea was coming in.

The Old Town stood on a wide plain, the fertile marsh between it and the shore, behind it the barren heath, with no tree or shrub to break the sweep of the pitiless west wind. The very broom on the barrows, beneath which slept the old vikings, it cropped short on the side that looked toward the sea they loved so well. Summer and winter it piped its melancholy lay above their heads. At sundown the sea-fogs, rolling in over the land in a dense gray cloud, wrapped them in their damp embrace. There was no dike to protect the coast, but beyond the shallows lay astring of islands that within historic times had been torn from the mainland, and these stood the brunt of the onset when the North Sea was angry. But when the wind had blown hard from the west for days, as was its wont, and then veered to the north, so that the waters from the great deep were massed in the inlet, then it was we heard the big bell sing in the tower.

The Causeway in a Storm.

Morning broke after such a night, upon a raging ocean where at sunset there had been meadows and dry fields. Far as the eye reached only storm-tossed waves were in sight. The shores werestrewn with perch and other fresh-water fish that were driven up on the pavement in shoals by the rushing tides. On the great causeway that stretched north and south, high above the flood level, cattle, hares, grouse, and field-mice huddled together in wretched, shivering groups. With break of day the butchers of the town went out, if going was at all possible, to bleed the drowning cattle that could yet be saved for food. Sometimes the trip had to be made in boats, and even in the streets of the town these were in demand when the “storm-flood” was at its height. I recollect very well seeing the water washing through the ground-story windows of the houses down by the harbor. By ordinary tides we were there five miles from the sea. At such times, when the flood had surprised the cattle yet in the far-outlying pastures, we heard news of disaster. The herders had been slow in gaining the refuges provided for them, and had perished with their herds.

If the flood came before the mail had got in, an anxious outlook was kept at the town gate,where the sea could be seen rising higher and higher, threatening with each swell to wash quite over the roadway. White-painted posts were set on both sides of it to mark out the way for the driver even if water covered it knee-deep, but in spite of this precaution, the trip was full of peril. If the coach were blown over, or the team succumbed, the passengers had but a slim chance of escaping with their lives. On such nights a band of resolute men gathered in the shelter of the farthest houses ready to go to the rescue on the first warning of danger. I was very proud to be one of these when I was a big boy of sixteen. But big as I was when the summons came and we sallied forth to bring the exhausted team in, it took all my strength to stand against the furious blast. The waves beat upon the causeway and were carried across it in a pelting rain of brine that stung like whip-lashes. In water halfway to our waists, in utter darkness and numbed with cold, we groped our way toward the lights of the town scarce a hundred yards away. How that driver had lived throughit, I shall never understand. The relief when we reached shelter was great, but greater my pride when the stern old Amtmand, the chief government officer of the county, caught me by the shoulder and whirled me around to have a look at the fellow who had lent him a hand in need.

“Strong boy,” he said, and rapped me smartly with his cane; “be a man yet,” which was praise indeed from him. And I forgot that I was cold and wet through, in my pride.

They used to tell a story of another Amtmand who, fresh from his snug berth at the capital, had come out to take the post in the Old Town, as ill luck would have it a passenger in the mail on just such a night. It was too much for him. He waited only till the tide fell enough to clear the way, then fled the town, with the parting shot that “Ribe might be good enough for ducks and geese, but not for men.” He never came back, but set up his office in another town where he was out of reach of the North Sea. Well for him he was not there on that awful Christmas Eve when the water reached the very Domkirkeitself, and rose five feet or more over its floor. Many years before, another flood had torn thirty parishes from the coast. The sea swallowed them up. It stands in the old records as “de grote Mandranck” (1362) because of the loss of life it caused. Shortly before the Reformation the water rose so high in the streets that the cloister of the Black Friars stood in a lake, and the monks caught fish for their supper in the portico that enclosed their garden. One may be permitted the hope that this flood came on a Friday to fitly replenish their larder.

Indeed, the history of the Old Town was one long succession of such disasters that had craved lives and wasted treasure without end, yet had never taught the people the lesson their southern neighbors had learned early. “Preserve, O Lord, the dikes and dams in the King’s marshlands; watch over the widows and the fatherless,” read a petition in our old prayer-book. The King’s marshlands went their way when the Germans stole them, but the Old Town stood, and stands still in its undiked plain, heedless alike of warningand experience. One may see all I have written here, by evil chance this very winter, if he cares to go and risk it.

When after a storm-flood the waters ebbed out, field and beach were covered with the drift of the Gulf Stream, driven in by the long gale, and amid the snows of the northern winter we boys roasted our potatoes, and an occasional dead bird, over bonfires built of the bleached husks of the cocoa-palm, banana stalks, waterlogged Brazil-nuts, and other wreck of the tropics.

Fanö Women.

It could not well be otherwise than that the sea, which knocked upon our doors so often and so rudely, played a great part in the lives and in the imagination of the people. From the islands I spoke of the whole male population was absent in summer, and often enough the year round. They were sailors, all of them, and a Fanö2skipper to-day walks the bridge of many a ship that ties up at its pier in New York or Philadelphia.The women, left in charge of the little farms, did all the chores, including the getting in of such crops as they raised in their sand-dunes and tending to the stock. The Old Town, too, left stranded by the sanding in of the mouth of the river, nevertheless furnished its full quota to the merchant marine of more lands than Denmark. The sea gave it lime to build its houses with, and the lime that was burned of sea-shells held what it was laid to bind. It gave the fisherman a living,and the housewife cleaner and cheaper carpets than our day knows of. Clear pine floors, scrubbed spotlessly clean and with the white sea-sand swept in “tongues” over them, had a homelike something about them which no forty-dollar rug harbors.

The thunder-storms, which in the dog-days were often very severe, came and went with the tides. The same storm, having gone out to sea with the ebb, would come back on the flood tide and keep the farmers awake who lived under a roof of thatch. Good cause; I have seen as many as half a score of farm-houses burning after a long night’s storm. Thus, too, people died when the tide ebbed. One who was on his death-bed could not find rest while the tide was in, but when it went out he went out with it. There was something in all this of the old days when Odin and Thor were worshipped where the Domkirke now stood, something of the nature worship and of the fatalism of pagan times. Was it Oliver Wendell Holmes who said that we are omnibuses in which all our ancestors ride? SometimesI find myself struggling with a “fate” which I cannot bend to my will or purpose, and then comes to me out of the past the Jute farmer’s calm “When a man’s time is up, he must die;” along with the recollection of a friend’s experience, a clergyman in that country. A woman with a child born out of wedlock sought poor relief because of her handicap. When he remonstrated gently that she had saddled herself with a needless burden, her curt reply was: “No use talking that way; the children one has to have, one will get.”

The philosophy of one of my teachers in the Latin School was of a different kind. It was custom in the Old Town for the members of the Fire Company to get up and get ready at the third heavy clap of thunder, and though my father was not of the corps he followed the custom. Dressed for the street, with his insurance and other valuable papers ready to hand, he sat the storm out in his easy-chair, the better to marshal his household in time of need. His friend could not understand that any one shouldbreak his sleep for a thunder-storm and go to all that trouble. “What for?” he asked.

“Suppose the lightning were to strike the house,” said my father.

The other looked stunned. “Why,” he said, “what beastly bad luck.”

With all this record of fight and fire and flood, the Old Town was the reverse of strenuous. Its prevailing note was of sweetness and rest. The west wind that cut like a knife in November was soft in June as the touch of a woman’s hand. The grass was never as green in meadow; the wild blossoms that nodded on the river bank were never so sweet; nor ever did bird sing in forest or field as sang the skylark to its mate in my childhood’s home, as it soared toward the sky. The streets in the Old Town were narrow and crooked, and in their cobble-stone pavements the rain stood in pools that tempted unwary feet. But there were lights in the windows for glad home-comers. Neighbor knew neighbor and shared his grief and his joys. No one was rich, as wealth is counted nowadays; but thenno one was allowed to want for the daily bread. “Good day and God help” was the everyday salutation to a man at work; “God bless,” if he were eating. They were ways of speech, it is true, but they were typical of the good feeling that was over and above all the sign of the Old Town and its people.

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