FOOTNOTES:
[1] Permission L. Staackmann, Leipzig.
[THE LIFE OF THEODOR STORM]
By Ewald Eiserhardt, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of German, University of Rochester, N.Y.
Hans Theodor Woldsen Storm was born on the fourteenth of September, 1817, in the little town of Husum on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein. His paternal forefathers were Low Germans; his mother's family, named Woldsen, was of Friesian origin. For many generations the Storms had been hereditary tenants of the mill in Westermühlen near Husum; for centuries the Woldsens had belonged to the aristocracy of Husum, composed of prominent merchants from whose ranks the burgomasters and senators rose. Theodor Storm's father was an attorney in Husum and commanded universal respect on account of his unselfishness, punctilious sense of honor, and clear-sightedness in juristic matters. The poet's mother is described as a woman of graceful and attractive appearance, distinguished by an unaffected emotional nature and keen mental penetration. Eduard Mörike spoke of her personality as being "so clear, so luminous, so provocative of love."
The Storms were not rich, but their home was permeated with that sense of solid comfort, based on the consciousness of efficiency and pride of ancestry, so often found in the burgher circles of Germany. Of particular importance to the children was the presence in the family of their maternal grandmother. She was full of overflowing kindness toward her grandchildren, and hence to them the home possessed the magic of a spot where, as in fairy tales, all wishes might be fulfilled, a veritable refuge in all times of need. She succeeded, moreover, in awakening in them strong family feeling; for she loved to tell about her own youth, her parents and brothers and sisters whose portraits and silhouettes, in old-fashioned costumes and with quaint cues, hung on the walls. It was owing mainly to his mother's family that the poet, even in his early youth, was brought into somewhat close touch in his native place with all the different classes of people and many kinds of characters; for on the vessels, in the factories, and in the houses of the Woldsens and Feddersens—Storm's maternal grandmother was a Feddersen—numbers of the inhabitants of the little town had employment, and their relations with these families were not entirely of a business nature but were rooted in mutual confidence.
Of equal importance for his development were the scenes with which the boy became familiar through his father's family. His paternal relatives were settled on considerable estates in the neighborhood, the family mill in Westermühlen being managed by his father's eldest brother. There the boy found an Eldorado in the holidays. There, while wandering through the woods and over the heath, he first held converse with nature; there, where another spirit rested on house and garden than in the town, he first vaguely felt the atmosphere peculiar to certain places; there, where he saw men now favored, now threatened, by external powers and always dependent upon them, his eyes were first opened to the relations between man and nature in all their many-sidedness.
Compared with what his home and family offered him, all that school could give the future poet was of no significance. Until the autumn of 1835 he attended the preparatory school of the town and was then sent to the Gymnasium in Lübeck for a year and a half. After leaving there he devoted himself to the study of law, first in Kiel, which he left only to return after three terms spent in Berlin; and it was in the former place that he concluded his studies and passed his final juristic examination in the autumn of 1842.
At that time Storm had already made several efforts to express himself in lyric poetry. At the age of nine he had written his first poem, and it is characteristic that the occasion of it was the death of a dearly loved sister. Later, during his school-days in Husum and Lübeck, he filled two small books with poems, and even made a vain attempt to reach the public with his The Building of St. Mary's at Lübeck. His poetical talent was most deeply stirred, however, while he was in Kiel for the second time, when he became intimate with the historian Theodor Mommsen and his brother Tycho. As a result of this inspiring friendship the three young men published, in 1843, the Songs by Three Friends. Our poet's contributions to it were chiefly in the sphere in which throughout his whole life he was to show himself a master—namely, in love lyrics; and even these early poems sound, in common with many of his later writings, the note of resignation. Doubtless this quality was largely innate in his nature, but it was also nursed and fed by an experience through which he passed in his youth. As a young student Storm loved a child, Berta von Buchau, and, while she was still a young girl, asked her hand in marriage, only, however, to meet with a refusal. The poems dedicated to this love are rich and varied in tone; they range from the ironic and humorous to the exuberant and graceful, make the lover find gratification in the service of his love, are prompted by doubt, raise lamentations and accusations, pray for the lost love's happiness and ask her to bear him in remembrance, and finally they die away in grief and sadness. The most artistically finished poem of this group and the one that gives deepest utterance to Storm's peculiar poetical talent is Twilight. It avoids all extremes in feeling, seeks to produce the single, deeply felt mood that created it, and gives in a few apparently chance touches a clear and definite situation.
In February, 1843, Storm established himself as an attorney in Husum, and with this step his happiest years began. He was once more in his home, away from which there had never been any real happiness for him; his parents were both still vigorous and he was surrounded by loving brothers and sisters. In the social life of the place, which seems to have centred in his father's house, he was a favorite, and his influence on the spirit of the little town was felt when he founded and conducted a musical society, which soon was able to appear successfully in public. His happiness reached its climax when, in the autumn of 1846, he married his cousin Konstanze Esmarch.
Konstanze was a really beautiful woman of fine and generous proportions, with large yet delicately modeled features and fresh youthful vigor. Storm himself is described as a man of scarcely medium height, slender and of a somewhat stooping carriage. His appearance can have been impressive only by reason of his bright blue eyes and the high forehead beneath his abundant blond hair. Less irritable than her husband, less passionate and eager in her desires, Konstanze met life more evenly, firmly, and clearly, and thus, though lacking talent of any kind, she exerted a far-reaching and beneficial influence on the poet's nature. "When she came into the room it always seemed to me as if it grew lighter," he once said of her.
For some years, during which three sons were born to them, they lived most happily in Husum until the shadow of political events fell across their house. After a vain struggle for freedom, the dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein were subdued by Denmark; and as Storm, even after their subjection, continued openly to proclaim his German sentiments he finally found himself obliged, in 1853, to leave his home.
During the ten years spent in Husum Storm's lyric talent came to full and characteristic development. The influence of Heine's Book of Songs, so apparent in the poems of his school and student days, is hardly seen any more. Eichendorff's poems and his novel, Poets and Their Disciples, do indeed still echo strongly, and we feel the influence of Mörike's lyrics in this period more clearly than before. But all this is insignificant in comparison with Storm's own creative power and the wealth that flowed to him out of his own life. As he was particularly happy at that time, it is natural that qualities should appear in his work which are too often overlooked in forming an estimate of his character and which were more strongly developed in this period than in any other. It is true that we still hear sad tones, even complaints of lost love and of love's suffering and loneliness, but the majority and the best poems are written in a contented, confident, energetic, even jubilant key. It is his love for his wife, of whom he sang so much, that transfigures life to the poet. Beneath her hand pain is stilled, in her arms life and death are overcome, and her presence turns the alien place into home. Separated from the world and from the day nothing can surpass the moments when he receives from her love's last and highest gifts. To the sound of clear bells on moonlight nights peace on earth and good-will to men seem to descend upon the little family circle over which God himself keeps watch. It was in those days, too, that the poet succeeded in writing his song of "the gray town by the sea" which nature has treated so slightingly and yet so singularly, and to which his whole heart goes out; for it is, after all, his mother town. Indeed, he hails with rejoicing the world, the beautiful, imperishable world, and every true heart that does not allow itself to be subdued but enjoys the golden days and has learned to gild the gray ones. He is even full of hope as regards the fate of his home country. In spite of all defeats, in spite of all disgrace and distress, he prophesies a new spring for her and calls the poet blessed who may then win for her "the jewel of poetry." It is only when he actually has to leave his home and move away with his wife and children that he begins to doubt as to his own return; then his hope changes into the prayer that at least his sons may once be able to go back, for "no man thrives without a fatherland."
In 1853 Storm had entered the Prussian service, and for three years held the position of assistant judge in the circuit court in Potsdam. There he was not content, in spite of the cordiality with which he was received, especially by Berlin poets, artists, and lovers of art. If we understand him aright, he was oppressed by the feeling that in the society of Potsdam the worth of the individual was determined by the office he held and by his descent, and that the human being in that State was sacrificed to the citizen and the official, the man to the soldier. During those years Storm's poetical production faltered, and it was fortunate for him that in the autumn of 1856 he was transferred as a circuit judge to Heiligenstadt in Central Germany. This cozy little town in the mountains appealed exceedingly to his nature, and on the whole he was able to live there much as he had been accustomed to in Husum. In addition, the improvement in his financial condition and the lesser burden of his professional work undoubtedly contributed to the re-awakening in him of the poet.
He was not so productive in lyric poetry as during the years in Husum, but, as regards artistic value, the poems of this period certainly do not stand below those of the earlier one. He tries his hand at folk-poetry and succeeds in striking its key of heartiness, simplicity, and spontaneity. He clothes the popular theme of the enamoured miller's daughter in a garment of artistic form, and yet, by means of roguish humor and naïve frankness, manages to sound the note of the folk-song. He employs one of the most telling means for lyric effect by drawing parallels between the conditions in nature and those in men, and in doing this he awakens the most delicate harmonies by portraying both conditions without pointing out the relation between them, or by placing an individual in the midst of a somewhat minutely described landscape and leading us to imagine him in a state that corresponds with that of nature.
But in contrast to those just mentioned the greater number of his poems are of a subjective kind. Again the poet writes of his wife, from whom after all comes every joy that he experiences away from home, and he only draws her all the closer to his heart since the passing years have imprinted the first signs of age on her gentle features. His love is mixed with yearning for the time when they were both young and—for his home. The yearning for home is at one time expressed in almost classically pure words, "nach drüben ist sein Auge stets gewandt" (his eye is ever roaming toward the other land); at another it merely underlies and glimmers through the devotion with which he paints a scene from home; at still another the poet's blood surges high and "fury and longing for home wrestle for his heart." At last he can no longer stifle his indignation; he calls upon the very dead to arise and to battle again, and in ringing words shouts to the world "die deutschen Gräber sind ein Spott der Feinde" (the German graves are mocked by enemies).
Even more strongly than in his political poems the specifically manly quality in Storm's poetry appears in what we may call his confessional lyrics. There he gives us his thoughts about immortality: that, in common with all creation, man too rebels against dissolution, and that the belief in immortality is only the final, refined, and spiritualized form of this rebellion. But the true man stands above his own fate and will not sacrifice reason even to the most seductive promises. The church stands opposed to such high development of the individual; Storm thinks poorly of it, and forbids the priest to attend at his grave.
THEODOR STORM
Permission Berlin Photo. Co., New York
As in the realm of the mind the poet opposes the church, so in the social sphere he attacks feudalism and the bureaucracy. Those whose national feeling is not deep and comprehensive enough to allow them to feel at one with the people he stigmatizes as the drop of poison in German blood. He holds up to ridicule those who need the pretentiousness of power in order to be happy and would like to gain it at the cost of the people's liberty. But in pithy words Storm advises his sons to keep to the truth uncompromisingly, to despise outward success, but to spare no pains in striving for true worth, not to sacrifice self-respect to consideration for others but always to remember that in this life, after all, every one can stand only on his own feet.
The years in Heiligenstadt are of special importance in Storm's whole artistic activity, inasmuch as poetry is gradually pushed into the second place by his prose works. At that time Storm was known to the greater public hardly at all by his lyrics but only by Immensee (1849) and similar tales. Hence he was recognized as the author of lyric stories expressive chiefly of "transfigured resignation." This characterization, however, is only partially justified, for resignation finally disappears from Storm's stories and the share that the lyric element has in his tales changes entirely in the course of time. Of a number of his earlier narratives and sketches it can actually be said that they were written less for the sake of the tale than on account of the mood they express. And, in Heiligenstadt, Storm, who in all spheres sought untiringly for pure form, finally reached that kind of prose in which feeling and imagination have the widest scope, the "Märchen." He writes The Rain-Witch, perhaps the most perfect artistic fairy tale of German literature, in which he not only surpasses Goethe and the Romanticists but also himself. For, in Storm's own words, his Hinzelmeier is only a "fantastic-allegorical creation," Bulemann's House, written in the style of E. T. A. Hoffmann, "an odd story," while The Mirror of Cyprianus appears rather "in the elegant robe of the saga."
The last of these works was not finished in Heiligenstadt, but when Storm was back in his old home again. For in March, 1864, he had returned to Husum, where he was given the office of "Landvogt" (district magistrate), to which were attached authority in police matters and the administration of justice.
In taking this step he had followed the call of his fellow-citizens, for the death of Frederick VII. of Denmark had once more awakened in the Duchies the hope of freedom. The longed-for happiness of his return, however, was marred; for, instead of becoming independent, Schleswig-Holstein was finally made a Prussian province, and he was still more deeply stricken by a loss in his family. In May, 1865, his wife Konstanze died after the birth of her seventh child. Storm did indeed marry again—his second wife Dorothea Jensen was a friend and relative of his and Konstanze's, and this marriage too was happy—but his further poems bear witness to what he lost in Konstanze. One of his stories, also, Viola Tricolor (1873), deals with the problem how a man can cultivate the memory of his dead wife without doing injury to his love for the living one; he called it a "Selbstbefreiung" (self-justification).
The evening of Storm's life was not spent in Husum, where memories threatened to engulf him, but in the village of Hademarschen nearby, whither he moved in 1880, when he retired from office. Here he was destined still to develop abundant artistic activity as a novelist until his death on the fourth of July, 1888.
After the completion of his imaginative writings a decided change in Storm's prose style began to take place. Formerly the lyrical element lay like a haze over and about objects and persons, and even now it does not disappear. Yet it no longer blurs and obliterates the outlines and connections, but rather streams out of the objects represented, as a fragrance rises from a flower. The first beginnings of this style are already noticeable in At the Castle (1861), in which the problems of class differences and of enlightenment form to a certain extent the backbone of the narrative, and in At the University (1862), which for a story of Storm's at that period contains a great wealth of incidents. But it was in such works as In the Village on the Heath and At Cousin Christian's that the poet first attained a purely objective narrative style. That he himself realized this is clear from his correspondence. On the twenty-fourth of January, 1873, he writes to Hebbel's biographer Kuh with reference to In the Village on the Heath: "I think I have shown by this that I can also write a story without the atmosphere of a distinct mood (Dunstkreis einer bestimmten Stimmung). I do not mean a mood which is spontaneously developed during the reading from the facts given, but a mood furnished a priori by the author."
Hand in hand with the development of this "epic" style goes the transition to realism which we find also in Storm's poems. In prose it is best represented by works like Eekenhof and Der Herr Etatsrat, or Hans and Heinz Kirch and Two-Souled. Here the poet shrinks from no harshness. We find striking portraits the lines of which are drawn with a sharp, unflattering touch. Psychic conditions of the most brutal kind are portrayed and are made the more telling because it is almost only their effects that are given. In the same way the external world stands chiefly before us in its appearances while the conditions that have led to these appearances are neglected. Finally, Storm endeavors to step beyond the bounds of pure narrative. He seizes upon material of a dramatic nature and seeks to retain—nay more, to bring out—its dramatic character, even in the epic form. In one of his letters he calls the "Novelle" the epic sister of the drama, and goes on to say that it treats of the deepest problems of human life and requires for its perfection to be centred about some conflict. Such are works like The Sons of the Senator, where individual will is pitted against individual will; Renate or At the Brewer's, where individuals struggle against a multitude who are sunk in error and superstition; and, above all, The Rider of the White Horse, where the individual wrestles with the mass, the man with the most elementary forces of nature.
The Rider of the White Horse is Storm's last complete work and also, as we believe, the one that best reflects the whole man, as far as that is possible with a poet of such varied development. The scene is laid in his home, which is characterized with vividness and grandeur in its setting of marsh and sea. Like the stories of his youth it glorifies love, the love of two beings who are faithful to each other unto death, and at the same time it touches themes which deeply occupied Storm in his age, such as the problem of heredity in Karsten Kurator, or the relation between father and son in Hans and Heinz Kirch or in Basch the Cooper. The charm of youth, to which our poet was always most susceptible, invests the chief characters, and they have that chaste reserve that holds all internal life sacred. Happiness is won, but it ends in tragedy, the tragedy which has taken the place of the resignation of his youthful works and which, after all, was more deeply rooted in Storm than the joyfulness that is sounded in Psyche. It is a man of sober intellect who tells the whole story and yet, like human life itself, it stands out against a mystic background. Remembrance of long ago has clarified everything, loving comprehension fills everything with deepest sympathy. It was granted to Storm to stand on a pinnacle of art at the end of his life, a pinnacle which he had to leave, but from which he did not need to descend.
[THEODOR STORM]
[THE RIDER OF THE WHITE HORSE (1888)]
TRANSLATED BY MURIEL ALMON
The story that I have to tell came to my knowledge more than half a century ago in the house of my great-grandmother, the wife of Senator Feddersen, when, sitting close up to her armchair one day, I was busy reading a number of some magazine bound in blue cardboard, either the Leipziger or Pappes Hamburger Lesefrüchte, I have forgotten which. I still recall with a tremor how the old lady of more than eighty years would now and then pass her soft hand caressingly over her great-grandchild's hair. She herself, and that day, have long been buried and I have sought in vain for those old pages, so I can just as little vouch for the truth of the facts as defend them if anyone should question them. Only one thing I can affirm, that although no outward circumstance has since revived them in my mind they have never vanished from my memory.
On an October afternoon, in the third decade of our century—thus the narrator began his tale—I was riding in very bad weather along a dike in northern Friesland. For more than an hour I had been passing, on the left, a bleak marsh from which all the cattle had already gone, and, on the right, uncomfortably near, the marsh of the North Sea. A traveler along the dike was supposed to be able to see islets and islands; I saw nothing however but the yellow-gray waves that dashed unceasingly against the dike with what seemed like roars of fury, sometimes splashing me and the horse with dirty foam; in the background eerie twilight in which earth could not be distinguished from sky, for the moon, which had risen and was now in its second quarter, was covered most of the time by driving clouds. It was icy cold. My benumbed hands could scarcely hold the reins and I did not blame the crows and gulls that, cawing and shrieking, allowed themselves to be borne inland by the storm. Night had begun to fall and I could no longer distinguish my horse's hoofs with certainty; not a soul had met me; I heard nothing but the screaming of the birds, as their long wings almost brushed against me or my faithful mare, and the raging of wind and water. I do not deny that at times I wished myself in some secure shelter.
It was the third day of the storm and I had allowed myself to be detained longer than I should have by a particularly dear relative at his farm in one of the northern parishes. But at last I had to leave. Business was calling me in the town which probably still lay a few hours' ride ahead of me, to the south, and in the afternoon I had ridden away in spite of all my cousin and his kind wife could do to persuade me, and in spite of the splendid home-grown Perinette and Grand Richard apples which were yet to be tried. "Just wait till you get out by the sea," he had called after me from the door, "you will turn back then; we will keep your room ready for you!"
And really, for a moment, as a dark layer of clouds made it grow black as pitch around me and at the same time a roaring gust threatened to sweep both me and my horse away, the thought did flash through my head: "Don't be a fool! Turn back and sit down in comfort with your friends." But then it occurred to me that the way back was longer than the one to my journey's end, and so, drawing the collar of my cloak closer about my ears, I trotted on.
But now something was coming along the dike towards me. I heard nothing, but I thought I could distinguish more and more clearly, as a glimmer fell from the young moon, a dark figure, and soon, when it came nearer, I saw that it was riding a long-legged, lean white horse. A dark cloak fluttered about the figure's shoulders and as it flew past two burning eyes looked at me from a pale countenance.
Who was it? Why was it here? And now I remembered that I had heard no sound of hoofs nor of the animal's breathing, and yet horse and rider had passed close beside me.
Wondering about this I rode on. But I had not much time to wonder; it was already passing me again from behind. It seemed to me as if the flying cloak brushed against me and the apparition shot by as noiselessly as before. Then I saw it farther and farther ahead of me and suddenly it seemed to me as if its shadow was suddenly descending the land-side of the dike.
With some hesitation I followed. When I reached the spot where the figure had disappeared I could see close to the dike, below it and on the land-side, the glistening of water in one of those water-holes which the high tides bore in the earth during a storm and which then usually remain as small but deep-bottomed pools.
The water was remarkably still, even stiller than the protection of the dike would account for. The rider could not have disturbed it; I saw nothing more of him. But I did see something else that I greeted with joy; below me, on the reclaimed land, a number of scattered lights shone. They seemed to come from the long, narrow Friesian houses that stood singly on mounds of different heights; while close before me, halfway up the inside of the dike, stood a large house of the same sort. All its windows on the south side, to the right of the door, were illuminated; behind them I could see people and even thought I could hear them, in spite of the storm. My horse had already turned of its own accord onto the path down the side of the dike that would lead me to the house. It was evidently a public house, for in front of the windows I could see the beams, resting on two posts and provided with iron rings, to which the cattle and horses that stopped there were tied.
I fastened mine to one of the rings and then commended it to the care of the hostler who came to meet me as I stepped into the hall. "Is there a meeting here?" I asked him, hearing distinctly the sound of voices and the clatter of glasses through the open door of the room.
"Something of the kind," he replied in Low German, and I learnt later that this dialect in the place had been current, together with the Friesian, for over a hundred years. "The dikegrave and commissioners and some of the others interested! It's on account of the high water!"
Entering I saw about a dozen men sitting at a table which ran along under the windows; on it stood a bowl of punch over which a particularly stately man seemed to preside.
I bowed and asked to be allowed to sit down with them, which request was readily granted. "You are keeping watch here, I suppose," I said, turning to the stately man; "it is dirty weather outside; the dikes will have all they can do!"
"Yes, indeed," he replied; "but we here, on the east side, think we are out of danger now; it is only over on the other side that they are not safe. The dikes there are built, for the most part, after the old pattern; our main dike was moved and rebuilt as long ago as in the last century. We got chilled out there a little while ago, and you are certainly cold too," he added, "but we must stand it here for a few hours longer; we have our trustworthy men out there who come and report to us." And before I could give the publican my order a steaming glass was pushed towards me.
I soon learnt that my friendly neighbor was the dikegrave. We got into conversation and I began to tell him my singular experience on the dike. He grew attentive and I suddenly noticed that the conversation all around us had ceased. "The rider of the white horse!" exclaimed one of the company and all the rest started.
The dikegrave rose. "You need not be afraid," he said across the table; "that does not concern us alone. In the year '17 too it was meant for those on the other side; we'll hope that they are prepared for anything!"
Now the shudder ran through me that should properly have assailed me out on the dike. "Pardon me," I said, "who and what is this rider of the white horse?"
Apart from the rest, behind the stove, sat a little lean man in a scant and shabby black coat. He was somewhat bent and one of his shoulders seemed to be a little crooked. He had taken no part whatever in the conversation of the others, but his eyes, which in spite of his sparse gray hair were still shaded by dark lashes, showed clearly that he was not sitting there merely to nod off to sleep.
The dikegrave stretched out his hand towards him. "Our schoolmaster," he said, raising his voice, "will be able to tell you that better than any of the rest of us here—only in his own way, to be sure, and not as correctly as Antje Vollmers, my old housekeeper at home, would do it."
"You're joking, Dikegrave," came the somewhat thin voice of the schoolmaster from behind the stove, "to put your stupid dragon on an equality with me!"
"Yes, yes, Schoolmaster!" returned the other; "but tales of that kind you know are said to be best preserved among the dragons!"
"To be sure," said the little man. "We are not quite of the same opinion in this matter," and a smile of superiority passed over his delicately formed face.
"You see," the dikegrave whispered in my ear, "he is still a little haughty. He studied theology once, in his youth, and stuck here in his home as schoolmaster only on account of an unfortunate betrothal."
In the meantime the schoolmaster had come forward out of his corner and seated himself beside me at the long table. "Go on Schoolmaster, let us have the story," called a few of the younger ones in the party.
"To be sure," said the old man turning to me, "I am glad to oblige you; but there is much superstition interwoven with it and it requires art to tell the tale without including that."
"Please don't leave that out," I replied, "trust me to separate the chaff from the wheat myself."
The old man looked at me with a smile of understanding. "Well, then," he said, "in the middle of the last century, or rather, to be more exact, before and after the middle, there was a dikegrave here who understood more about dikes, drains and sluices than peasants and farmers usually do; yet even so it seems hardly to have been enough, for he had read but little of what learned experts have written about such things, and had only thought out his own knowledge for himself from the time he was a little child. You have probably heard, sir, that the Friesians are good at figures and undoubtedly you have heard some talk too about our Hans Mommsen of Fahretoft, who was a peasant and yet could make compasses and chronometers, telescopes and organs. Well, the father of this dikegrave was a bit like that too; only a bit, to be sure. He had a few fields in the fens where he planted rape and beans, and where a cow grazed. Sometimes in autumn and spring he went out surveying, and in winter when the northwester came and shook his shutters, he sat at home sketching and engraving. His boy generally sat there with him and looked up from his reader or his Bible at his father measuring and calculating, and buried his hand in his blond hair. And one evening he asked his father why that which he had just written had to be just like that and not otherwise, and gave his own opinion about it." But his father, who did not know what answer to give, shook his head and said: "I can't tell you why, it is enough that it is so; and you yourself are mistaken. If you want to know more go up to the attic tomorrow and hunt for a book in the box up there. The man who wrote it was called Euclid; you can find out from that book."
The next day the boy did go up to the attic and soon found the book, for there were not many in the whole house; but his father laughed when the boy laid it down before him on the table. It was a Dutch Euclid, and Dutch, although after all it is half German, was beyond them both.
"Yes, yes," he said, "the book was my father's, he understood it. Isn't there a German one there?"
The boy, who was a child of few words, looked quietly at his father and only said: "May I keep it? There is no German one there."
And when the old man nodded he showed him a second little volume, half torn. "This one too?" he asked again.
"Take them both," said Tede Haien; "they won't do you much good."
But the second book was a little Dutch grammar, and as most of the winter was still to come it did help the lad enough so that finally when the time came for the gooseberries to bloom in the garden he was able to understand nearly all of the Euclid, then very much in vogue.
"I am not unaware, Sir," the narrator interrupted himself, "that this same incident is told of Hans Mommsen; but, here with us, people used to tell it of Hauke Haien—that was the boy's name—before Mommsen was born. You know how it is, when a greater man arises, he is credited with everything that his predecessors may have done, in earnest or in fun."
When the old man saw that the lad cared nothing about cows or sheep and scarcely even noticed when the beans were in blossom—which after all is the joy of every man from the marshlands—and that his little place might indeed get on with a peasant and a boy, but not with a semi-scholar and a servant, and also because he himself had failed of prosperity, he sent his big boy to the dike, where from Easter till Martinmas he was to wheel his barrow of earth with the other laborers. "That will cure him of Euclid!" he said to himself.
And the lad pushed his wheelbarrow, but he kept the Euclid in his pocket all the time, and when the workmen ate their lunch or stopped for a bite in the late afternoon he sat on the bottom of a wheelbarrow with the book in his hand. And in autumn when the tides began to be higher, and the work had sometimes to be stopped he did not go home with the others, but stayed, and sat on the slope of the dike, his hands clasped round his knee, and watched for hours how the gray waves of the North Sea dashed up higher and higher towards the grass-line of the dike. Not until the water came in over his feet and the foam spattered in his face did he move up a few feet higher and then sit on there. He heard neither the splashing of the water nor the screaming of the gulls and shore-birds that flew above and around him, almost touching him with their wings, and flashing their black eyes into his; nor did he see how night came and enveloped the broad, wild desert of water in front of him. All that he saw was the hem of the water outlined by the surf which, when the tide was in, struck again and again with its heavy beat on the same spot in the dike and washed away the grass-line on its steep side before his very eyes.
After staring at it long he sometimes nodded his head slowly, or, without looking up, drew a soft line in the air with his hand as if he would thus give the dike a gentler slope. When it grew so dark that all earthly things vanished from his sight and only the tide continued to thunder in his ears, he got up and trotted home half wet through.
One evening when he came home in this state, his father, who was cleaning his measuring instruments, looked up and turned on him. "What have you been doing out there so long? You might have been drowned; the water is eating right into the dike today."
Hauke looked at him stubbornly.
"Don't you hear what I say? You might have been drowned."
"Yes," said Hauke; "but I didn't get drowned."
"No," replied the old man after a time and looked at him absent-mindedly—"not this time."
"But," went on Hauke, "our dikes are no good!"
"What's that, boy?"
"The dikes, I say!"
"What about the dikes?"
"They're no good, Father."
The old man laughed in his face. "Is that so, boy? I suppose you are the child prodigy of Lübeck!"
But the lad would not allow himself to be confused. "The water-side is too steep," he said; "if it should happen again as it has already happened more than once we may all drown in here, behind the dike too."
The old man pulled his tobacco out of his pocket, twisted off a piece and pushed it in behind his teeth. "And how many barrows did you wheel today?" he asked crossly, for he saw that working at the dike could not cure the boy of working with his mind.
"I don't know, Father; about the same as the others; perhaps half a dozen more. But—the dikes must be built different."
"Good," said his father with a laugh; "you may get to be dikegrave; then, build them different."
"Yes, Father," returned the boy.
The old man looked at him and swallowed once or twice; then he went out. He did not know what answer to give the lad.
When, at the end of October, work on the dike came to an end Hauke Haien still continued to find more pleasure in a walk out towards the north, to the sea, than in anything else. Just as the children of today look forward to Christmas, he looked forward to All Saints' Day, when the equinoctial gales burst over the land, an occasion for lamentation in Friesland. In spite of wind and weather he was certain to be found at the time of the high spring tides lying out on the dike all by himself; and when the gulls shrieked, when the waves dashed high against the dike, and in rolling back washed out whole pieces of sod into the sea, Hauke's angry laughter was something worth hearing.
"You can't do anything right," he shouted out into the noise, "just as people don't know how to do anything!" And at last, often when it was quite dark, he would turn away from the broad, bleak expanse and trot home along the dike till he reached the low door under his father's thatch, and his tall, overgrown figure slipped through and into the little room beyond.
Sometimes he brought a handful of clay with him. Then he sat down beside his father who had begun to let him go his own way, and, by the light of the thin tallow candle, kneaded all kinds of dike-models, laid them in a shallow dish of water and tried to imitate the way in which the waves washed out the bank. Or he took his slate and drew on it profiles of dikes on the water-side as he thought they ought to be.
It never entered his head to associate with the boys who had been his companions in school, and apparently they cared nothing about such a dreamer. When it came winter again and the frost had taken hold he wandered out along the dike farther than he had ever been before to where the ice-covered surface of the shoals stretched before him as far as the eye could reach.
In February, during continuous frost, dead bodies were found washed up on the shore; they had lain out by the open sea on the frozen shoals. A young woman who had seen them being carried into the village stood and chattered to old Haien: "Don't think that they looked like people," she exclaimed, "no, they looked like sea-devils! Big heads like this," and she held up her hands with the fingers stretched out, far apart from each other, "black and wrinkled and shiny like freshly baked bread! And the crabs had nibbled them; the children screamed when they saw them."
Such a description was not exactly new to old Haien. "They have probably been washing about in the sea since November," he said indifferently.
Hauke stood beside them in silence. But as soon as he could he crept away out to the dike; no one could say whether he wanted to hunt for more corpses or whether the horror that still hung about the now deserted spots where the others had been found attracted him. He ran on farther and farther till he stood all alone in the bleakness where only the winds swept across the dike and where there was nothing but the plaintive voices of the great birds as they wheeled quickly by. On his left lay the wide empty marsh, on the other side the never-ending shore with the great expanse of shoals now glistening with ice; it seemed as if the whole world lay in white death.
Hauke remained standing on the dike and his keen eyes glanced far in all directions; but there were no more dead to be seen; only where the invisible currents moved under it the ice field rose and sank like a stream.
He ran home; but on one of the following evenings he was out there again. The ice was now broken in places: clouds of smoke seemed to rise out of the cracks and above the whole surface of the shallows was spread a net of steam and fog that combined strangely with the dusk of the evening. Hauke gazed at it with fixed eyes, for dark figures moved up and down in the fog, and as he watched them they seemed to be as large as men. There, far away on the edge of the smoking fissures, they walked back and forth, full of dignity but with long noses and necks and odd, terrifying gestures; suddenly they began to jump up and down in an uncanny way, like imps, the big ones over the little ones and the little ones towards the others; then they spread out and lost all form.
"What of them? Are they the spirits of those who were drowned?" thought Hauke. "Ahoy!" he shouted loudly into the night; but the forms heeded him not, merely continued their strange doings.
Then he suddenly thought of the fearful Norwegian sea-ghosts about whom an old captain had once told him, who instead of a head and face had only a tuft of sea-grass on their necks; he did not run away however, but dug the heels of his boots deep into the clay of the dike and gazed at the weird antics that went on before his eyes in the growing dusk. "Are you here with us too?" he asked in a hard voice. "You shall not drive me away."
Not till the darkness had covered everything did he start for home, walking with a stiff, slow step. But from behind him there seemed to come the whirring of wings and resounding laughter. He did not look round, neither did he quicken his step, and it was late when he reached home, but he is said never to have spoken to his father or anyone else of this experience. Only many years later, after God Almighty had laid the burden of an half-witted child upon him, he took the girl out on the dike with him at the same time of day and of the year and the same thing is said to have happened again out on the shallows. But he told her not to be afraid, those creatures were only herons and crows that looked so big and dreadful in the fog as they caught fish in the open cracks.
"God knows, Sir!" the schoolmaster interrupted himself; "there are all kinds of things in the world that may confuse an honest Christian's heart; but Hauke was neither a fool nor a dunce."
As I did not reply he was about to go on, but suddenly there was a stir among the other guests who hitherto had listened in silence, only filling the low room with dense tobacco smoke. First one or two, then nearly all of them turned towards the window. Outside—we could see through the uncurtained windows—the wind was driving the clouds, and light and darkness were madly intermingled; but it seemed to me, too, as if I had seen the haggard rider shoot by on his white horse.
"Wait a bit, Schoolmaster," said the dikegrave softly.
"You need not be afraid, Dikegrave," replied the little story-teller. "I have not slandered him and have no reason to do so," and he looked up at him with his wise little eyes.
DUNES ON THE NORTH SEA
Jacob Alberts
"Well, well," said the other, "just let me fill your glass again." And after that had been done and the listeners, most of them with disconcerted faces, had turned to him again the schoolmaster continued:
"Thus keeping to himself and loving best to live only with the wind and water and the images that solitude brings, Hauke grew up to be a tall, lean fellow. He had been confirmed for more than a year when things began to change with him, and that was owing to the old white Angora tom-cat which had been brought home from a Spanish sea voyage to old Trien' Jans by her son, who later perished on the flats. Trien' lived a good distance out on the dike in a little cottage and when she was working about in her house this monster of a cat used to sit in front of the door and blink out at the summer day, and the lapwings that flew by. When Hauke passed the cat mewed at him and Hauke nodded; they both knew what was going on between them."
Once, it was spring, and Hauke often lay out on the dike as was his habit, farther down nearer the water, among the shore-pinks and the sweet-smelling sea-wormwood, and let the sun, which was already strong, shine down on him. The day before, when he was on the uplands, he had filled his pockets with pebbles and when the low tide had laid bare the flats and the little gray sand-pipers hopped over them, piping as they went, he suddenly took a stone out of his pocket and threw it at the birds. He had practised this from childhood and generally managed to bring one down; but just as often it was impossible to go out on the mud after it; Hauke had often thought of bringing the cat with him and teaching it to retrieve. Here and there, however, there were firm spots in the mud or sandbanks and then he could run out and fetch his plunder himself. If the cat was still sitting in front of the door as he passed on his way home it mewed wild with rapacity until Hauke threw it one of the birds he had killed.
On this particular day as he went home, his jacket on his shoulder, he only had one bird, of a kind unknown to him but which was covered with beautiful plumage that looked like variegated silk and burnished metal. The cat looked at him and begged loudly as usual. But this time Hauke did not want to give up his prey—it may have been a kingfisher—and paid no attention to the animal's desire. "Turn and turn about," he called to him, "my turn today, yours tomorrow; this is no food for a tom-cat!" But the cat crept up cautiously towards him; Hauke stood and looked at him, the bird hanging from his hand and the cat stopped with its paw raised. But Hauke seems not to have understood his friend thoroughly, for, as he turned his back on him and prepared to go on his way he felt his plunder torn from his grasp with a jerk, and at the same time a sharp claw dug into his flesh. A sudden fury like that of a beast of prey surged in the young fellow's blood; he grabbed madly about him and had the robber by the neck in a moment. Holding up the powerful creature in his fist he strangled it till its eyes obtruded from the rough hair, not heeding the strong hind claws that were tearing the flesh from his arm. "Ho, ho!" he shouted and gripped it still tighter; "we'll see which of us can stand it longest!"
Suddenly the hind legs of the great cat dropped lifelessly from his arm and Hauke went back a few steps and threw it towards the cottage of the old woman. As the cat did not move he turned and continued his way home.
But the Angora cat had been its mistress's treasure; it was her companion and the only thing that her son, the sailor, had left her when he came to his sudden end on the coast hard by, while trying to help his mother catch prawns in a storm. Hauke had scarcely taken a hundred steps, sopping up the blood from his wounds with a cloth as he went, when a loud outcry and lamentation from the direction of the cottage struck on his ear. He turned and saw the old woman lying on the ground in front of it while the wind blew her gray hair about the red handkerchief that covered her head. "Dead!" she shrieked, "dead!" and stretched out her thin arm threateningly towards him: "you shall be cursed! You killed him, you useless vagabond; you weren't worthy to stroke his tail." She threw herself on the animal and gently wiped away with her apron the blood that flowed from its nose and mouth. Then she again began her loud lamentation.
"Will you soon be through?" called Hauke to her, "then let me tell you this: I will get you a tom-cat that is satisfied with the blood of rats and mice!"
With this he went on his way, not apparently paying heed to anything. But the dead cat must have confused his head all the same, for when he came to the village he went on past his father's house and all the others too, out a long way on the dike towards the south, where the town lies.
In the meantime Trien' Jans too wandered out in the same direction; she carried a burden in her arms wrapped in an old blue-checked pillow slip, holding it carefully as if it had been a child; and her gray hair blew about in the gentle spring breeze. "What are you carrying there, Trina?" asked a peasant who met her. "More than your house and home," she replied and went on eagerly. When she came near to old Haien's house, which stood down below, she turned down the "Akt" as we call the cattle-paths and footways that run up or down the side of the dike.
Old Tede Haien was just standing out in front of the door looking at the weather. "Well, Trien'!" he said as she stood before him, panting and digging the point of her stick into the ground. "What have you got new in your bag?"
"First let me come in, Tede Haien! Then I'll show you," she said with an odd gleam in her eyes.
"Come in then," said the old man. Why should he bother about the foolish woman's eyes?
And when they were both inside she went on: "Take the old tobacco box and writing things away from the table—what do you want to be always writing for? There! And now wipe it off nice and clean!" And the old man, who was beginning to be curious, did everything that she told him. Then she took the blue pillow slip by the corners and shook the body of the great cat out on the table. "There you have him," she cried, "your Hauke has killed him." Whereupon she began to cry bitterly. She stroked the thick fur of the dead animal, laid its paws together, bowed her long nose over its head and whispered indistinct words of endearment into its ear.
Tede Haien watched the scene. "So," he said, "Hauke killed him?" He did not know what to do with the blubbering woman.
She nodded grimly: "Yes, by God, he did it!" and she wiped away the tears from her eyes with her gnarled gouty hand. "No child, nothing alive any more!" she sobbed. "And you know yourself how it is with us old ones, after All Saints' Day's over our legs freeze at night in bed and instead of sleeping we listen to the northwester rattling at the shutters. I don't like to hear it, Tede Haien, it comes from where my lad went down in the mud."
Tede Haien nodded and the old woman stroked her dead cat's coat. "And this one here," she began again, "in the winter when I sat at my work and the spinning wheel and hummed he sat beside me and hummed too and looked at me with his green eyes! And when I was cold and crept into bed—it was not long before he sprang up too and laid himself on my shivering legs and then we slept warm together!" And the old woman looked at the old man standing beside her at the table with smouldering eyes as if she wanted his assent to this memory.
But Tede Haien said slowly: "I know a way to help you, Trien' Jans." He went to his strong box and took a silver coin out of the drawer. "You say that Hauke has robbed you of your pet and I know that you don't lie; but here is a crownpiece of Christian IV.; go and buy yourself a dressed lambskin to keep your legs warm. Besides, our cat will soon have kittens and you may pick out the largest of them. The two together ought to make up for an Angora tom-cat that is weak with old age. And now take the creature and carry it into town to the knacker, for aught I care, and hold your tongue about its having lain here on my respectable table!"
While he was speaking the woman had taken the crown and hidden it in a little bag that she wore under her skirts; then she stuffed the cat back into the pillow-case, wiped the spots of blood from the table with her apron and stumped out of the door. "Don't forget about the young kitten," she called back as she went.
Some time later, as old Haien was walking up and down in the little room, Hauke came in and threw his bright bird onto the table; but when he saw the blood-stains which were still recognizable on its white, scoured top he asked with apparent carelessness, "What's that?"
His father stood still. "That is the blood that you shed!"
The boy flushed hotly. "Oh, has Trien' Jans been here with her cat?"
The old man nodded. "Why did you kill it?"
Hauke bared his torn arm. "That's why," he said; "he snatched my bird away from me."
The old man said nothing. He began to walk up and down again for some time; then he stopped in front of his son and looked at him absently. "I have settled the matter of the cat," he said after a moment, "but you see Hauke, this cottage is too small; two masters can't hold it—it is time now, you must get yourself something to do."
"Yes, Father," replied Hauke; "I have thought the same myself."
"Why?" asked the old man.
"Well, a fellow boils within, if he has not enough to do to work it off."
"So," said the old man, "and that's why you killed the Angora? That might easily lead to something worse!"
"You may be right, Father; but the dikegrave has sent his servant-boy off; I could do that work."
The old man began to walk up and down again and squirted a stream of black tobacco-juice from his mouth. "The dikegrave is a dunce, as stupid as an owl! He is only dikegrave because his father and grandfather were dikegraves before him and because of his twenty-nine fens. When Martinmas comes round and the dike and sluice accounts have to be made up he feeds the schoolmaster on roast goose and mead and wheat-cracknels, and just sits there and nods when the other man runs over the columns of figures and says: "Yes, indeed, Schoolmaster, may God reward you! What a man you are at figures!" But if at any time the schoolmaster can't or won't, then he has to do it himself and he sits and writes and crosses out again, and his big stupid head grows red and hot and his eyes stand out like glass balls as if what little brain he has was trying to get out there."
The boy stood up straight before his father and was amazed that he could make such a speech; he had never heard him talk like that before. "Yes, he is stupid enough, God knows," he said; "but his daughter Elke, she can figure!"
The old man looked at him sharply. "Oh ho, Hauke!" he exclaimed, "what do you know of Elke Volkerts?"
"Nothing, Father; only the schoolmaster told me so."
The old man made no answer to this; he merely shifted his tobacco quid slowly from one cheek to the other. "And you think," he said then, "that when you're there you will be able to help figure too."
"Oh, yes, Father, I could do that all right," answered the son and his mouth quivered with earnestness.
The old man shook his head: "Well, as far as I am concerned, you may try your luck!"
"Thank you, Father!" said Hauke, and went up to the attic where he slept. There he seated himself on the side of the bed and thought and wondered why his father had questioned him about Elke Volkerts. He knew her of course, the slender eighteen-year-old girl with the narrow, brown-skinned face and the dark brows that met above the defiant eyes and narrow nose; but he had scarcely spoken a word to her till now. Well, if he should go to work for old Tede Volkerts he would look at her more closely to see what kind of a girl she was. And he would go right away so that no one else should get the place ahead of him, for it was still quite early in the evening. And so he put on his Sunday suit and best boots and started on his way in good spirits.
The long low house of the dikegrave could be seen from far away, for it stood on a high mound, and the highest tree in the village, a mighty ash, stood near it. In his youth the grandfather of the present dikegrave, the first one in the family, had planted such a tree to the east of the front door; but the first two saplings died and so, on his wedding morning, he had planted this tree which with its ever wider-spreading top still murmured in the unceasing wind, as it seemed, of by-gone days.
When, some time later, Hauke's tall, overgrown form ascended the high mound, the sides of which were planted with turnips and cabbages, he saw above him, standing beside the low door, the daughter of the master of the house. One of her somewhat thin arms hung loosely at her side, her other hand seemed to be feeling behind her for an iron ring, two of which were fastened to the wall, one on either side of the door, so that a rider coming to the house could tie up his horse. She seemed to be looking out over the dike to the sea where, in the still of evening, the sun was just sinking into the water and sending its last ray to gild the brown-skinned girl who stood there watching.
Hauke slackened his steps and thought to himself: "She does not look half bad that way!" And then he had already reached the top. "Good evening," he said going up to her, "what are your big eyes looking at now, Jungfer Elke?"
"At something that happens here every evening," she replied, "but which cannot always be seen every evening." She let the ring drop from her hand so that it fell back clanging against the wall. "What do you want, Hauke Haien?" she asked.
"Something that I hope won't displease you," he said. "Your father has turned out his servant-boy so I thought I might get the place."
She looked him over from head to foot. "You still look rather too slight to be strong, Hauke," she said, "but two good eyes would serve us better than two good arms." She looked at him with an almost lowering glance as she spoke, but Hauke did not falter. "Come along then," she went on, "the master is in the house, let us go in."
The next day Tede Haien and his son entered the large room of the dikegrave. The walls were covered with glazed tiles on which to please the eye, there was here a ship under full sail or an anchor on the shore, there a recumbent ox before a peasant's house. This durable wall-covering was broken by an immense wall-bed, the doors of which were now closed, and a cupboard through the glass doors of which all sorts of china and silverware might be seen. Beside the door leading into the adjoining parlor a Dutch clock was let into the wall behind glass.
The stout, somewhat apoplectic, master of the house sat in an armchair on a bright-colored woolen cushion at the end of a table that had been scoured until it shone. His hands were folded over his stomach and his round eyes were contentedly fixed on the skeleton of a fat duck; knife and fork lay on a plate in front of him.
"Good day, Dikegrave," said Haien and the dikegrave slowly turned his head and eyes towards him. "Is it you, Tede?" he replied, and the fat duck he had just eaten had had its effect on his voice. "Sit down, it's a long way over here from your house to mine!"
"I've come," said Tede Haien, sitting down at right angles to the dikegrave on a bench that ran along the wall. "You've had trouble with your servant-boy and have agreed to take my boy in his place!"
The dikegrave nodded: "Yes, yes, Tede; but—what do you mean by trouble? We people from the marsh have something to take for that, thank God!" And he picked up the knife that lay before him and tapped the skeleton of the poor duck caressingly. "That was my favorite bird," he added with a comfortable laugh; "it would eat out of my hand!"
"I thought," said old Haien not hearing the last words, "that the fellow did a lot of mischief in the stable."
"Mischief? Yes, Tede; mischief enough, to be sure! The lazy mutton-head had not watered the calves, but he lay dead drunk in the hayloft and the creatures mooed with thirst the whole night, so that I had to lie in bed till noon to make up my sleep. No farm can go on that way!"
"No, Dikegrave, but there is no danger of that where my son is concerned."
Hauke stood against the door-post with his hands in his side pockets; he had thrown his head back and was studying the window casing opposite him.
The dikegrave raised his eyes and nodded to him: "No, no, Tede," and now he nodded to the old man too, "your Hauke will not disturb my night's rest; the schoolmaster has already told me that he would rather sit before a slate and reckon than over a glass of spirits."
Hauke did not listen to this speech of encouragement for Elke had come into the room and was clearing away the remains of the food from the table with her light, quick hands, glancing at him furtively with her dark eyes, as she did so. Now his glance too fell upon her. "By God," he said to himself, "she does not look half bad that way either."
The girl had left the room. "You know, Tede," the dikegrave began again, "God has denied me a son."
"Yes, Dikegrave, but do not let that trouble you," answered the other. "For the brains of a family are said to come to an end in the third generation; your grandfather, as we all still know today, was the man who protected the land!"
After thinking for some moments the dikegrave looked almost puzzled. "How do you mean that, Tede Haien?" he asked, and sat upright in his armchair; "I am in the third generation myself."
"Oh, that's so! No offence, Dikegrave; that's just what people say." And Tede Haien with his lean form looked at the old dignitary with somewhat mischievous eyes.
The latter went on unconcernedly: "You must not let old women's talk put such foolishness as that into your head, Tede Haien; you don't know my daughter, she can figure two or three times as well as I myself! I only wanted to say that besides his work in the field your Hauke can gain considerable here in my room with pen or pencil and that won't do him any harm!"
"Yes, indeed, Dikegrave, that he will; there you're quite right!" said old Haien and began to arrange for several benefits to be included in his son's contract which had not occurred to the boy the evening before. Thus besides the linen shirts that Hauke was to receive in the autumn in addition to his wages, he was also to have eight pairs of woolen stockings; then he was to help his father with the work at home for a week in the spring and so on. The dikegrave agreed to everything; Hauke Haien seemed to be just the right man for him.
"Well, God have mercy on you, my boy," said the old man as soon as they left the house, "if you are to learn from him how the world goes!"
But Hauke answered quietly: "Let it be, Father; everything will turn out all right."
And Hauke was not wrong; the world, or what the world meant to him, did grow clearer to him the longer he stayed in that house. This was more the case perhaps, the less a superior judgment came to his aid, and the more he was obliged to depend on his own strength, on which he had been accustomed to rely from the beginning. There was one person in the house to be sure whom he did not suit at all and that was Ole Peters, the head man, a capable workman but a fellow with a very ready tongue. The former lazy and stupid but stocky second man on whose back he had been able to load a whole barrel of oats and whom he could knock about as he chose had been more to his liking. He could not get at Hauke, who was much quieter and mentally far superior to him, in this way; for Hauke had such a very peculiar way of looking at him. Nevertheless he managed to find work for him which might have been dangerous to his body as it was not yet firmly knit, and when he said: "You should have seen fat Niss; it was all play to him!" Hauke took hold with all his strength and managed to do the job even though he had to overexert himself. It was fortunate for him that Elke was generally able to countermand such orders either herself or through her father. We may well ask ourselves what it is that sometimes binds perfect strangers to each other; perhaps—they were both born mathematicians and the girl could not bear to see her comrade ruined by doing rough work.
The breach between the head man and his subordinate did not grow better in winter when, after Martinmas, the different dike accounts came in to be examined.
It was on a May evening, but the weather was like November; inside the house the surf could be heard thundering out beyond the dike. "Here, Hauke," said the master of the house, "come in here; now you can show whether you can figure!"
"I have got to feed the yearlings first, Master," replied Hauke.
"Elke," called the dikegrave, "where are you, Elke? Go to Ole and tell him to feed the yearlings; Hauke must come and figure!"
And Elke hurried to the stable and gave the order to the head man, who was just occupied in putting away the harness that had been used that day.
Ole Peters took a snaffle and struck a post near which he was standing as if he would smash it to bits: "The devil take the damned scribbling farm-hand!" She overheard the words as she closed the stable-door behind her.
"Well?" asked her father as she came back into the room.
"Ole is going to do it," she answered biting her lips a little, and sat down opposite Hauke on a coarsely carved wooden chair such as at that time the people here used to make in their own homes during the winter evenings. She took out of a drawer a white stocking with a red-bird pattern on it and went on knitting; the long-legged creatures in the pattern might have been herons or storks. Hauke sat opposite her deep in his calculations, the dikegrave himself rested in his armchair, blinking now and then sleepily at Hauke's pen. As always in the dikegrave's house, two tallow-candles burned on the table and in front of the windows with their leaded glass the shutters were closed outside and screwed tight from within; the wind might bluster as it would. At times Hauke raised his head from his work and glanced for a moment at the stockings with the birds on them or at the narrow, quiet face of the girl.
All at once a loud snore came from the armchair and a glance and a smile flew back and forth between the two young people; then followed gradually quieter breathing; one might have begun a little conversation, only Hauke did not know how. But as she stretched out her knitting and the birds became visible in their entirety he whispered across the table:
"Where did you learn that, Elke?"
"Learn what?" the girl asked back.
"To knit birds?" asked Hauke.
"Oh, that? From Trien' Jans, out at the dike, she can do all sorts of things; she served here once in my grandfather's time."
"But you weren't born then, were you?" asked Hauke.
"No, I hardly think I was; but she often came to the house afterwards."
"Is she so fond of birds? I thought she only liked cats."
Elke shook her head. "She raises ducks, you know, and sells them; but last spring after you killed her Angora, the rats got at the ducks in the back of the duckhouse. Now she wants to build another one at the front of the house."
"Oh!" said Hauke and gave a low whistle, drawing his breath in through his teeth, "That is why she has dragged all that clay and stone down from the upland. But if she does that she will build on the road on the inside of the dike; has she got a permit?"
"I don't know," said Elke; but Hauke had spoken the last word so loud that the dikegrave started up out of his slumber. "What permit?" he asked and looked almost wildly from one to the other. "What is the permit for?"
But when Hauke had explained the matter to him he tapped him on the shoulder laughing. "Well, well, the inside road is wide enough; God have mercy on the dikegrave if he has got to bother about every duckhouse as well!"
It made Hauke's heart heavy to think that he had been the means of delivering the old woman's ducklings up to the rats and he allowed himself to let the dikegrave's excuse stand. "But Master," he began again, "there are some that would be better off for just a little nip and if you don't want to do it yourself just give the commissioner a nudge who is supposed to see that the dike regulations are carried out."
"How, what's the lad saying?" and the dikegrave sat perfectly upright while Elke let her elaborate stocking fall and listened.
"Yes, Master," Hauke went on, "you have already had the spring inspection; but all the same Peter Jansen has not harrowed out the weeds on his piece till today. In summer the goldfinches will play merrily about the red thistle-blossoms there! And close beside it there's another piece—I don't know whom it belongs to—but there's a regular hollow in the dike on the outside. When the weather's fine its always full of little children who roll about in it, but—God preserve us from high water!"
The old dikegrave's eyes had grown steadily bigger.
"And then," began Hauke again.
"Well, and what else, young man?" asked the dikegrave; "haven't you done yet?" and his voice sounded as if his second man had already said too much to please him.
"Yes, and then, Master," went on Hauke, "you know that fat girl Vollina, the daughter of Harders, the commissioner, who always fetches her father's horses home from the fens,—once she's up on the old yellow mare with her fat legs then it's: 'Cluck, cluck! Get up!' And that's the way she always rides, right up the slope of the dike!"
Not till this moment did Hauke notice that Elke's wise eyes were fixed on him and that she was shaking her head gently.
He stopped, but the blow that the old man gave the table with his fist thundered in his ears. "The devil take it!" he roared, and Hauke was almost frightened at the bellow that filled the room. "She shall be fined! Make a note of it, Hauke, that the fat wench is to be fined! Last summer the hussy caught three of my young ducks! Go on, make a note of it," he repeated when Hauke hesitated; "I think she really got four!"
"Oh, come, Father," said Elke, "don't you think it was the otter that took the young ducks?"
"A giant otter!" the old man shouted snorting. "I think I know that fat Vollina from an otter! No, no, it was four ducks, Hauke. But as for the other things you've chattered about, last spring the chief dikegrave and I lunched together here in my house and then we went out and drove past your weeds and your hollow and we didn't see anything of the sort. But you two," and he nodded significantly towards his daughter and Hauke, "may well thank God that you are not a dikegrave! A man's only got two eyes and he's supposed to use a hundred. Just run through the accounts of the straw work on the dike, Hauke; those fellows' figures are often altogether too careless."
Then he lay back again in his chair, settled his heavy body once or twice and soon fell into a contented sleep.
Similar scenes took place on many an evening. Hauke had keen eyes and when he and the dikegrave were sitting together he did not fail to report this or that transgression or omission in matters relating to the dike, and as his master was not always able to shut his eyes, the management gradually became more active before anyone was aware of it, and those persons who formerly had kept on in their accustomed sinful rut, and now unexpectedly received a stroke across their mischievous or lazy fingers, turned round annoyed and surprised to see where it came from. And Ole, the head man, did not fail to spread the information far and near and thus to turn those circles against Hauke and his father, who, of course, was also responsible; but the others, on whom no hand descended or who were actually anxious to see the thing done, laughed and rejoiced that the young man had succeeded in poking the old one up a bit. "It is only a pity," they said, "that the fellow hasn't the necessary clay under his feet; then later on he'd make a dikegrave like those that we used to have; but the couple of acres that his father has would never be enough!"
When in the following autumn the chief dikegrave, who was also the magistrate for the district, came to inspect, he looked old Tede Volkerts over from top to toe while the latter begged him to sit down to lunch. "Upon my word, Dikegrave," he said, "it's just as I expected, you've grown ten years younger; you've kept me busy this time with all your proposals; if only we can get done with them all today!"
"We'll manage, we'll manage, your Worship," returned the old man with a smirk; "this roast goose here will give us strength; yes, thank God, I am always brisk and lively still!" He looked round the room to see if Hauke might not perhaps be somewhere about; then he added with dignity; "and I hope to God to be spared to exercise my office a few years longer."
"And to that, my dear Dikegrave," replied his superior rising, "let us drink this glass together!"
Elke, who had arranged the lunch, was just going out of the room door with a soft laugh as the two men clinked their glasses together. Then she fetched a dish of scraps from the kitchen and went through the stable to throw them to the fowls in front of the outside door. In the stable she found Hauke Haien just pitching hay into the cows' cribs, for the cattle had already been brought in for the winter owing to the bad weather. When he saw the girl coming he let his pitchfork rest on the ground. "Well, Elke!" he said.
She stopped and nodded to him. "Oh, Hauke, you ought to have been in there just now!"
"Should I? Why Elke?"
"The chief dikegrave was praising the master!"
"The master? What has that got to do with me?"
"Well, of course, he praised the dikegrave!"
A deep red spread over the young man's face. "I know what you are driving at," he said.
"You needn't blush, Hauke; after all it was you whom the chief dikegrave praised!"
Hauke looked at her half smiling. "But it was you too, Elke," he said.
But she shook her head. "No, Hauke; when I was the only one that helped he didn't praise us. And all I can do is to figure; but you see everything outside that the dikegrave ought to see himself; you have cut me out!"
"I didn't mean to, you least of all," said Hauke shyly, pushing aside one of the cows' heads. "Come, Spotty, don't eat up my fork; I'll give you all you want!"
"Don't think that I am sorry," said the girl after thinking a minute; "after all it's a man's business!"
CHURCHYARD ON A NORTH SEA ISLAND
Jacob Alberts
Hauke stretched out his arm towards her. "Give me your hand on it, Elke."
A deep scarlet shot up under the girl's dark brows. "Why? I don't lie," she cried.
Hauke was about to answer, but she was already out of the stable, and standing with the pitchfork in his hand he could only hear the ducks and hens outside quacking and cackling around her.
It was in January of the third year of Hauke's service that a winter festival was to be held. "Eisboseln" (winter golf) they call it here. There had been no wind along the coast and a steady frost had covered all the ditches between the fens with a firm, smooth crystal surface so that the divided pieces of land now formed an extensive course over which the little wooden balls filled with lead, with which the goal was to be reached, could be thrown. A light northeast breeze blew day after day. Everything was ready. The uplanders from the village lying to the east across the marsh and in which stood the church of the district, who had won the previous year, had been challenged and had accepted. Nine players had been picked out on each side. The umpire and the spokesmen had also been chosen. The latter, who had to discuss disputed points when a doubtful throw was in question, were generally men who knew how to present their case in the best light, usually fellows who had a ready tongue as well as common sense. First among these was Ole Peters, the dikegrave's head man. "See that you throw like devils," he said, "I'll do the talking for nothing."
It was towards evening of the day before the festival. A number of the players had gathered in the inside room of the parish tavern on the uplands, to decide whether or not a few applicants who had come at the last minute should be accepted. Hauke Haien was among the latter. At first he had decided not to try, although he knew that his arms were well trained in throwing. He feared that Ole Peters, who held a post of honor in the game, would succeed in having him rejected and he hoped to spare himself such a defeat. But Elke had changed his mind at the eleventh hour. "He wouldn't dare to, Hauke," she said; "he is the son of a day laborer; your father has a horse and cow of his own and is the wisest man in the village as well."
"Yes, but what if he should do it in spite of that?"
She looked at him half smiling with her dark eyes. "Then," she said, "he'll get turned down when he wants to dance with his master's daughter in the evening." Thereupon Hauke had nodded to her with spirit.
Outside the tavern the young people, who still wanted to enter the game, were standing in the cold, stamping their feet and looking up at the top of the church-tower, which was built of stone and stood beside the public-house. The pastor's pigeons, which fed in summer on the fields of the village, were just coming back from the peasants' yards and barns where they had sought their grain and were now disappearing into their nests under the eaves of the tower. In the west, above the sea, hung a glowing evening crimson.
"It'll be good weather tomorrow!" said one of the young fellows walking up and down stamping, "but cold, cold!" Another, after he had seen the last pigeon disappear, went into the house and stood listening at the door of the room through which there now came the sound of lively conversation; the dikegrave's second man came and stood beside him. "Listen, Hauke, now they're shouting about you," and within they could distinctly hear Ole Peters' grating voice saying, "Second men and boys don't belong in it."
"Come," said the other boy and taking Hauke by the sleeve he tried to pull him up to the door. "Now you can hear what they think of you."
But Hauke pulled himself away and went outside the house again. "They didn't lock us out so that we should hear what they said," he called back.
The third applicant was standing in front of the house. "I'm afraid I shan't be taken without a hitch," he called to Hauke, "I am hardly eighteen years old; if only they don't ask for my baptismal certificate! Your head man will talk you up all right, Hauke!"
"Yes, up and out!" growled Hauke and kicked a stone across the way, "but not in."
The noise inside increased; then gradually it grew still; those outside could hear again the gentle northeast wind as it swept by the top of the church tower. The boy who had been listening came back to the others. "Who were they talking about in there?" asked the eighteen-year-old boy.
"Him," the other answered and pointed to Hauke; "Ole Peters tried to make out he was still a boy, but they were all against that. And Jess Hansen said, 'and his father has land and cattle.' 'Yes, land,' said Ole Peters, 'land that could be carted away on thirteen barrows!' Finally Ole Hensen began to speak: 'Keep still there,' he called, 'I'll put you straight; tell me, who is the first man in the village?' They were all quiet a minute and seemed to be thinking, then someone said 'I suppose it's the dikegrave!' And all the others shouted, 'Well, yes; it must be the dikegrave!' 'And who is the dikegrave?' asked Ole Hensen again; 'and now think carefully!' Then one of them began to laugh softly and then another until at last the whole room was just full of laughter. 'Well, go call him then,' said Ole Hensen; 'you surely don't want to turn away the dikegrave from your door!' I think they're still laughing; but you can't hear Ole Peters' voice any more!" the boy finished his report.
Almost at that moment the door of the room inside was flung open and loud, merry cries of "Hauke! Hauke Haien!" rang out into the cold night.
So Hauke went into the house and did not stop to hear who the dikegrave was; what had been going on in his head during these moments nobody ever knew.
When, some time later, he approached his master's house he saw Elke standing down at the gate of the carriage-drive. The moonlight glistened over the immeasurable white-frosted pasture-land. "Are you standing here, Elke?" he asked.
She only nodded: "What happened?" she said. "Did he dare?"
"What would he not do?"
"Well, and?"
"It's all right, Elke. I can try tomorrow."
"Good-night, Hauke!" and she ran lightly up the mound and disappeared into the house.
Hauke followed her slowly.
On the following afternoon a dark mass of people was seen on the broad pasture-land that ran along towards the east on the land side of the dike. Sometimes the mass stood still, then, after a wooden ball had twice flown from it over the ground which the sun had now freed from frost, it moved gradually forward away from the long, low houses that lay behind it. The two parties of winter golfers were in the middle, surrounded by all the young and old who were living or staying either in these houses or on the uplands. The older men were in long coats, smoking their short pipes with deliberation, the women in shawls and jackets, some of them leading children by the hand or carrying them in their arms. Out of the frozen ditches which were crossed one after another the pale shine of the noonday sun sparkled through the sharp points of the reeds; it was freezing hard. But the game went on uninterruptedly, and all eyes followed again and again the flying wooden ball, for the whole village felt that on it hung the honor of the day. The spokesman of the home side carried a white staff with an iron point, that of the upland party a black one. Wherever the ball ceased rolling this staff was driven into the frozen ground amid the quiet admiration or the mocking laughter of the opposing party and whoever first reached the goal with his ball won the game for his side.
There was very little conversation in the crowd; only when a capital cast was made the young men or women sometimes broke into a cheer, or one of the old men took his pipe out of his mouth and tapped the thrower with it on the shoulder, saying, "That was a throw, said Zacharias, and threw his wife out of the attic window," or "That's how your father used to throw, may God have mercy on his soul!" or some other pleasant words.
The first time he cast luck had not been with Hauke; just as he threw his arm out behind him to hurl the ball a cloud which had covered the sun till then passed away from it and the dazzling rays struck him full in the eyes; his cast was too short, the ball fell on a ditch and stuck in the uneven ice.
"That doesn't count! That doesn't count! Throw again, Hauke!" shouted his partners.
But the uplanders' spokesman objected: "It must count. What's cast is cast."
"Ole! Ole Peters!" shouted the men from the marsh. "Where is Ole? Where the devil can he be?"
But he was there already. "Don't shout so! Is there something wrong with Hauke? That's just how I thought it would be."
"Oh, nonsense! Hauke must throw again; now show that you've got your mouth in the right place."
"I certainly have that!" shouted Ole, and he went up to the other spokesman and made a long harangue. But the sharp cuts and witty points that usually filled his speech were lacking this time. At his side stood the girl with the enigmatical brows and watched him sharply with angry eyes; but she might not speak for the women had no voice in the game.
"You're talking nonsense," shouted the other spokesman, "because reason is not on your side. Sun, moon and stars treat us all alike and are in the sky all the time; it was a clumsy cast and all clumsy casts count!"
Thus they talked at each other for a while, but the end of it was that, according to the umpire's decision, Hauke was not allowed to repeat his cast.
"Forward!" cried the uplanders and their spokesman pulled the black staff out of the ground and the next player took his stand there when his number was called and hurled the ball forward. In order to see the throw the dikegrave's head man was obliged to pass Elke Volkerts. "For whose sake did you leave your brains at home today?" she whispered to him.
He looked at her almost fiercely and all trace of fun disappeared from his broad face. "For your sake," he said, "for you have forgotten yours too."
"Oh, come! I know you, Ole Peters!" answered the girl drawing herself up, but he turned his head away and pretended not to hear.
And the game and the black staff and the white one went on. When Hauke's turn to throw came again his ball flew so far that the goal, a large whitewashed hogshead, came plainly into sight. He was now a solidly built young fellow and mathematics and throwing had occupied him daily since he was a boy. "Oh ho! Hauke!" the crowd shouted; "the archangel Michael could not have done better himself!" An old woman with cakes and brandy made her way through the crowd to him; she poured out a glass and offered it to him: "Come," she said, "let us be friends; you are doing better today than when you killed my cat!" As he looked at her he saw that it was Trien' Jans. "Thank you, Mother," he said; "but I don't drink that stuff." He felt in his pockets and pressed a newly coined mark-piece into her hand. "Take that and drink this glass yourself, Trien'; then we shall be friends again!"
"You're right, Hauke!" returned the old woman obeying him. "You're right; it is better for an old woman like me than for you!"
"How are you getting on with your ducks?" he called after her as she was going away with her basket; but she only shook her head without turning round and clapped her old hands in the air. "It's no good, Hauke; there are too many rats in your ditches; God have mercy on me! I must find some other way of earning my bread." And with this she pushed her way into the crowd again, offering her spirits and honey-cakes as she went.
At last the sun had sunk behind the dike and in its place had left a reddish violet glow that flamed up into the sky; now and then black crows flew by and seemed for the moment to be of gold; it was evening. On the fields however the dark crowd of people kept on moving farther and farther away from the black houses in the distance behind them towards the hogshead; an exceptionally good cast might reach it now. It was the marsh party's turn and Hauke was to throw.
The chalky hogshead stood out white in the broad shadows that now fell from the dyke across the course. "You'll have to leave it to us, this time!" cried one of the uplanders, for the contest was hot and they were at least ten feet in advance.
Hauke's tall, lean figure stepped out of the crowd; the gray eyes in his long Friesian face were fixed on the hogshead; his hand, which hung at his side, held the ball.
"The bird's too big for you, eh?" came the grating voice of Ole Peters close to his ear, "shall we exchange it for a gray pot?"
Hauke turned and looked at him steadily. "I'm throwing for the marsh," he said. "Where do you belong?"
"To the marsh too, I imagine; but you are throwing for Elke Volkerts, eh?"
"Stand aside!" shouted Hauke and took his position again. But Ole pressed forward with his head still nearer to him. Then suddenly, before Hauke himself could do anything, a hand gripped the intruder and pulled him backwards so that he stumbled against his laughing comrades. It was not a large hand that did so, for as Hauke hastily turned his head he saw Elke Volkerts beside him pulling her sleeve to rights, and her dark brows were drawn angrily across her hot face.
The power of steel shot into Hauke's arm; he bent forward a little, weighed the ball in his hand once or twice, then he drew his arm back and a dead silence fell on both sides; all eyes followed the flying ball, it could be heard whistling through the air; suddenly, far away from the spot where it was thrown, the silver wings of a gull hid it as, shrieking, the bird flew across from the dike. But at the same moment it was heard in the distance striking against the hogshead. "Hurrah for Hauke!" shouted the marshlanders and the news ran loudly through the crowd: "Hauke! Hauke Haien has won the game!"
But Hauke himself as they all crowded about him had only felt for a hand at his side and even when they called again: "What are you waiting for, Hauke? Your ball is lying in the hogshead!" he only nodded and did not move from the spot; not until he felt the little hand clasp his firmly did he say: "I believe you're right; I think I've won!"
Then the whole crowd streamed back and Elke and Hauke were separated and swept along by the crowd towards the tavern on the road that turned up by the dikegrave's mound towards the uplands. But here they both escaped and while Elke went up to her room Hauke stood at the back, in front of the stable door and watched the dark mass of people wandering up to the tavern, where a room was ready for the dancers. Night gradually fell over the open country; it grew stiller and stiller about him, only behind him he could hear the cattle moving in the stable; he fancied he could already catch the sound of the clarinets in the tavern on the uplands. All at once he heard the rustle of a gown round the corner of the house and firm little steps went down the footway that led through the fens up onto the uplands. Now, in the dusk, he could see the figure swinging along and he knew that it was Elke; she too was going to the dance in the tavern. The blood rushed up into his throat; should he not run after her and go with her? But Hauke was no hero where women were concerned; weighing this question he remained standing till she had disappeared from his sight in the dark.
Then, when the danger of overtaking her had passed, he too went the same way till he reached the tavern up by the church, and the talking and shouting of the crowd before the house and in the passage, and the shrill tones of the violins and clarinets within, surrounded him with a deafening noise. Unnoticed he made his way into the "guildhall." It was not large and was so full that he could scarcely see a step in front of him. In silence he stood leaning against the door-jamb and watched the moving throng; the people seemed to him like fools; he did not need to fear either that anyone would think of the struggle in the afternoon or of who had won the game an hour ago. Each man had eyes only for his girl and turned round and round with her in a circle. He was seeking for one only and at last—there she was! She was dancing with her cousin, the young dike commissioner—but she had already disappeared again and he could see only other girls from the marsh and the uplands for whom he cared nothing. Then suddenly the violins and the clarinets ceased and the dance was at an end; but already another was beginning. The thought passed through Hauke's mind whether Elke would really keep her word, if she might not dance past him with Ole Peters. He almost screamed at the idea; then—well, what would he do then? But she did not seem to be dancing this dance at all and at last it came to an end and another, a two-step, which was just beginning to be popular then, followed. The music started with a mad flourish, the young fellows rushed up to the girls, the lights on the walls flared. Hauke nearly dislocated his neck trying to distinguish the dancers; and there, the third couple, was Ole Peters and—but who was the girl? A broad fellow from the marsh stood in front of her and hid her face. But the dance went on madly and Ole and his partner circled out where he could see them. "Vollina! Vollina Harders!" Hauke almost shouted aloud and gave a sigh of relief. But where was Elke? Had she no partner or had she refused them all because she did not want to dance with Ole? The music stopped again and then a new dance began but still he did not see her. There was Ole, still with his fat Vollina in his arms! "Well," said Hauke to himself, "it looks as if Jess Harders with his twenty-five acres would soon have to retire! But where is Elke?"
He left the door and pushed his way further into the room; suddenly he found himself standing before her as she sat with an older friend in a corner. "Hauke!" she exclaimed, raising her narrow face to look at him; "are you here? I didn't see you dancing!"
"I haven't danced," he replied.
"Why not, Hauke?" and half rising she added: "Will you dance with me? I wouldn't with Ole Peters; he won't come again!"
But Hauke made no move to begin. "Thank you, Elke," he said, "but I don't know how well enough; they might laugh at you; and then * * *" he broke off suddenly and looked at her with feeling in his gray eyes as if he must leave it to them to finish what he would say.
"What do you mean, Hauke?" she asked softly.
"I mean, Elke, that the day can have no happier ending for me than it has had already."
"Yes," she said, "you won the game."
"Elke!" he said with scarcely audible reproach.
A hot red flamed up into her face. "There!" she said, "what do you want?" and dropped her eyes.
A partner now came and claimed her friend and after she had gone Hauke spoke louder. "I thought I had won something better, Elke!"
Her eyes searched the floor a few seconds longer; then she raised them slowly and a glance, filled with the quiet strength of her being, met his and ran through him like summer warmth. "Do as your feeling tells you, Hauke," she said; "we ought to know each other!"
Elke did not dance again that evening and when they went home they went hand in hand; from the sky above the stars sparkled over the silent marsh; a light east wind blew and made the cold severe, but the two walked on without many wraps as if spring had suddenly come.
Hauke had thought of something, to be used perhaps only in the uncertain future, but with which he hoped to celebrate a secret festival. Accordingly he went to town the next Sunday to the old goldsmith Andersen and ordered a thick gold ring. "Stretch out your finger till I measure it," said the old man and took hold of Hauke's third finger. "It's not as big as most of you people have," he went on. But Hauke said: "I'd rather you measured my little finger," and he held it out to him.
The goldsmith looked at him somewhat puzzled; but what did he care what the whim of a young peasant might be. "We'll probably find one among the ladies' rings," he said, and the blood mounted into Hauke's cheeks. But the ring fitted his little finger and he took it hastily and paid for it with bright silver. Then, with his heart beating loudly and as if it were a solemn act, he put it into his waistcoat pocket. And from then on he carried it there day by day with a restless yet proud feeling, as if his waistcoat pocket were made only to carry a ring in.
So he carried it for years, in fact, the ring had to leave that pocket for a new one; no opportunity to escape presented itself. It had indeed passed through Hauke's head to go straight to his master; after all, his father belonged in the village and held land there. But in his calmer moments he knew well that the old dikegrave would have laughed at his second man. And so he and the dikegrave's daughter lived on side by side, she in girlish silence, and yet both as if they walked hand in hand.
A year after the winter festival Ole Peters had left the dikegrave's service and married Vollina Harders; Hauke had been right; the old man had retired and instead of his fat daughter his brisk son-in-law now rode the yellow mare to the fens and on his way back, it was said, always up the side of the dike. Hauke was now head man and a younger fellow had taken his former place. At first the dikegrave had not wanted to advance him. "He's better as second man," he had growled, "I need him here with my books!" But Elke had said, "Then Hauke would leave, Father!" That frightened the old man and Hauke had been made head man but he still kept on as before helping in the administration of the dike.
After another year had passed he began to talk to Elke about his father's growing feeble, and explained that the few days that the master allowed him in summer in which to help at home were no longer enough; the old man was overworking himself and he, Hauke, could not stand by and see it go on. It was a summer evening; the two were standing in the twilight under the great ash in front of the door of the house. For a time the girl looked up in silence at the bough of the tree; then she answered, "I did not want to say it, Hauke; I thought you would find the right thing to do yourself."
"Then I must go away out of your house," he said, "and cannot come again."
They were silent for a time and watched the sunset glow that was just sinking into the sea over behind the dike. "You must know best," she said; "I was at your father's this morning and found him asleep in his armchair; he had a drawing-pen in his hand and the drawing-board with a half finished drawing lay before him on the table. Afterwards he woke and talked to me for a quarter of an hour but only with difficulty, and then, when I was going, he clung to my hand as if he were afraid that it was for the last time; but * * *."
"But what, Elke?" asked Hauke, as she hesitated to go on.
A few tears ran down over the girl's cheeks. "I was only thinking of my father," she said; "believe me, it will be hard for him to lose you." And with an effort she added: "It often seems to me as if he too were preparing for his end."
Hauke did not answer; it seemed to him as if the ring in his pocket suddenly moved but before he could suppress his indignation at this involuntary stir Elke went on: "No, don't be angry, Hauke! I trust and believe that even so you will not forsake us!"
At that he seized her hand eagerly and she did not draw it away. For some time longer the two stood there together in the growing dusk till their hands slipped apart and they went their different ways. A gust of wind struck the ash-tree and rustled through its leaves, rattling the shutters on the front of the house; but gradually the night fell and silence lay over the vast plain.
The old dikegrave yielded to Elke's persuasion and allowed Hauke to leave his service although the latter had not given notice at the proper time. Two new men had since been engaged. A few months later Tede Haien died, but before he died he called his son to his bed: "Sit down here beside me, child," he said in a feeble voice, "close beside me! You need not be afraid; the one who is with me is only the dark angel of the Lord who has come to call me."
And the grief-stricken son sat down close to the dark wall-bed: "Speak, Father, tell me all that you still have to say!"
"Yes, my son, there is still something," said the old man and stretched out his hands on the counterpane. "When you, only a half-grown boy, went into the dikegrave's service you had it in your mind to be a dikegrave yourself some day. You infected me with the idea and gradually I too came to think that you were the right man for that. But your inheritance was too small for you to hold such an office. I have lived frugally during the time you were in service. I thought to increase it."
Hauke pressed his father's hands warmly and the old man tried to sit up so that he could see him. "Yes, my son," he said, "the paper is there in the top drawer of the strong chest. You know, old Antje Wohlers had a field of five and a half acres; but in her crippled old age she could not get on with the rent from it alone; so every Martinmas I gave the poor creature a certain sum and more too, when I had it; and for that she made over the field to me; it is all legally arranged. Now she too is lying at the point of death; the disease of our marshes, cancer, has overtaken her; you will not have anything more to pay!"
He closed his eyes for a time; then he added: "It isn't much; but still you will have more than you were accustomed to with me. May it serve you for your life in this world!"
Listening to his son's thanks the old man fell asleep. He had nothing more to attend to, and a few days later the angel of the Lord had closed his eyes forever, and Hauke came into his paternal inheritance.
On the day after the funeral Elke came to his house. "Thank you for looking in, Elke!" was Hauke's greeting.
But she answered: "I am not just looking in; I want to tidy the house a little so that you can live in comfort. With all his figures and drawings your father had not time to look about him much and death too brings confusion; I'll make it a little homelike for you again!"
He looked at her with his gray eyes full of trust: "Tidy up, then," he said; "I like it better too."
And so she began to clear up the room. The drawing-board which still lay there was dusted and put away in the attic. Drawing-pens, pencils and chalk were carefully locked away in a drawer of the strong chest. Then the young servant was called in and helped to move the furniture of the whole room into a different and better position so that there seemed to be more light and space. "Only we women can do that," said Elke, smiling, and Hauke, in spite of his grief for his father, looked on with happy eyes and helped too when it was necessary.
And when, towards twilight—it was at the beginning of September—everything was as she wanted it for him, she took his hand and nodded to him with her dark eyes. "Now come and have supper with us; I had to promise my father to bring you back with me; then when you come home later everything will be ready for you."
When they entered the spacious living-room of the dikegrave, where the shutters were already closed and the two lights burning on the table, the old man started to get up out of his armchair but his heavy body sank back again and he contented himself with calling out to his former servant: "That's right, Hauke, I'm glad you've come to look up your old friends again! Just come nearer, nearer!" And when Hauke came up to his chair he took his hand in both his podgy ones and said: "Well, well, my boy, don't grieve too much, for we must all die and your father was not one of the worst! But, come, Elke, bring the roast in; we need to strengthen ourselves! There is a lot of work ahead of us, Hauke! The autumn inspection is coming on; the dike and sluice accounts are piled as high as the house; then there's the recent damage to the dike on the western koog—I don't know which way to turn my head; but yours, thank God, is a good bit younger; you are a good lad, Hauke!"
And after this long speech in which the old man had laid bare his whole heart, he fell back in his chair and blinked longingly at the door through which Elke was just entering with the roast. Hauke stood beside him smiling. "Now sit down," said the dikegrave; "we mustn't waste time; this dish doesn't taste good cold."
And Hauke sat down; it seemed to him a matter of course that he should share in Elke's father's work. And when later the autumn inspection came and a few months more had been added to the year, he had really done the greater part of it.
The narrator stopped and looked about him. The shriek of a gull had struck the window and outside in the entrance the stamping of feet was heard as if someone were shaking off the clay from his heavy boots.
The dikegrave and the commissioners turned their heads towards the door. "What is it?" exclaimed the former.
A stout man with a sou'wester on his head entered. "Sir," he announced, "we both saw it, Hans Nickels and I: the rider of the white horse has thrown himself into the water-hole!"
"Where did you see that?" asked the dikegrave.
"There is only the one hole; in Jansen's fen where the Hauke Haien Koog begins."
"Did you only see it once?"
"Only once; and it only looked like a shadow; but that doesn't mean that it was the first time."
The dikegrave had risen. "You will excuse me," he said, turning to me, "we must go out and see where the mischief is brewing." He went out with the messenger and the rest of the company rose too and followed him.
I was left alone with the schoolmaster in the large bare room; we now had a clear view through the uncurtained windows which were no longer hidden by people sitting in front of them, and could see how the wind was driving the dark clouds across the sky. The old man still sat in his place, a superior, almost compassionate smile on his lips. "It has grown too empty here," he said, "will you come upstairs with me to my room? I live here in the house, and, believe me, I know the weather here near the dike; we have nothing to fear for ourselves."
COMMUNION SERVICE ON A NORTH SEA ISLAND
From the Painting by Jacob Alberts
PERMISSION PHOTOGRAPHISCHE GESEILSCHAFT BERLIN
I accepted gratefully; for I too was beginning to feel chilly there, and after taking a light we climbed the stairs to an attic-room which did indeed look towards the west like the other, but whose windows were now covered with dark woolen hangings. In a bookcase I saw a small collection of books and beside it the portraits of two old professors; in front of a table stood a large easy-chair. "Make yourself at home," said my friendly host and threw a few pieces of peat into the still faintly burning stove, on the top of which stood a tin kettle. "Just a few minutes! It will soon begin to sing and then I will brew a glass of grog for us; that will keep you awake."
"I don't need that," I answered; "I don't grow sleepy following your Hauke on his way through life."
"Really?" and he nodded to me with his wise eyes after I had been comfortably settled in his easy chair. "Let me see, where were we?——Oh yes, I know. Well then!"
Hauke had come into his paternal inheritance, and as old Antje Wohlers had also succumbed to her illness, her field had increased it. But since the death, or, rather, since the last words of his father, something had grown up in him, the seed of which he had carried in his heart since his boyhood; more than often enough he repeated to himself that he was the right man when there should have to be a new dikegrave. That was it. His father who surely understood it, who, in fact, had been the wisest man in the village, had, as it were, added these words to his inheritance as a final gift; Antje Wohlers' field, which he also owed to him, should form the first stepping-stone to this height. For, to be sure, a dikegrave must be able to point to far more extensive property than this alone. But his father had lived frugally for lonely years and had bought this new possession with the money thus saved; he could do that too, he could do more than that; for his father's strength had been gone, while he could still do the hardest work for years to come. Of course, even if he did succeed in that way, yet the keen edge that he had put on his old master's administration had not made friends for him in the village, and Ole Peters, his old antagonist, had lately come into an inheritance and was beginning to be a well-to-do man. A number of faces passed before his inward vision and they all looked at him with unfriendly eyes; then wrath against these people took hold of him and he stretched out his arms as if he would seize them; for they wanted to keep him from the office to which he alone was suited. And these thoughts did not leave him; they were always there and so side by side with honor and love there grew up ambition and hatred in his young heart. But he hid them deep within him; even Elke did not suspect their existence.
With the coming of the New Year there was a wedding. The bride was a relative of the Haiens, and Hauke and Elke were both there as invited guests; in fact they sat side by side at the wedding breakfast owing to the failure of a nearer relative to come. Only the smile that passed over both their faces betrayed their joy at this. But Elke sat listless in the noise of the conversation and the clatter of glasses that went on about them.
"Is there something the matter?" asked Hauke.
"Oh, no, not really; there are only too many people here for me."
"But you look so sad!"
She shook her head; then they were both silent again.
Gradually a feeling as if he were jealous because of her silence grew in him and he took her hand secretly under cover of the tablecloth; it did not start but closed confidingly round his. Had a feeling of loneliness taken hold of her as she watched her father growing older and weaker day by day? Hauke did not think of putting this question to himself but he ceased to breathe now as he drew the gold ring from his pocket. "Will you leave it there?" he asked, trembling as he slipped it onto the third finger of her slender hand.
The pastor's wife was sitting opposite them at the table; suddenly she laid down her fork and turned to her neighbor: "Good gracious, look at that girl!" she exclaimed, "she's pale as death!"
But the blood was already coming back into Elke's face. "Can you wait, Hauke?" she asked softly.
The prudent Friesian stopped to think for a moment. "For what?" he said then.
"You know well; I don't need to tell you."
"You are right," he said; "yes, Elke, I can wait—if only the time's within reason!"
"Oh God, I'm afraid it's near! Don't speak like that, Hauke, you are talking of my father's death!" She laid the other hand on her breast: "Till then," she said, "I will wear the ring here; never fear, you will never get it back as long as I live."
Then they both smiled and his hand pressed hers so that at any other time the girl would have screamed aloud.
During this time the pastor's wife had been looking steadily at Elke's eyes which now burned as with dark fire beneath the lace edging of her little gold-brocaded cap. But the increasing noise at the table had prevented the older woman from understanding anything that was said; she did not turn to her neighbor again either, for budding marriages—and that is what this looked like to her—even if it were only because of the fee that budded for her husband at the same time, she was not in the habit of disturbing.
Elke's premonition had come true. One morning after Easter the dikegrave Tede Volkerts had been found dead in his bed; his countenance bore witness to a peaceful end. He had often spoken in the previous months of being tired of life and had had no appetite for his favorite dish, a roast joint, or even for a young duck.
And now there was a great funeral in the village. In the burying ground about the church on the upland, lying towards the west, was a lot surrounded by an iron fence. In it the broad, blue grave-stone had been lifted up and was now leaning against a weeping ash. A figure of Death with a very full and prominent set of teeth had been chiseled on the stone and below stood in large letters:
Dat is de Dot, de allens fritt,
Nimmt Kunst un Wetenschop di mit;
De kloke Mann is nu vergån
Gott gäw em selik Uperstån.
This is Death who eats up all,
Art and science go at his call;
The clever man has left us forlorn
God raise him on resurrection morn!
This was the resting place of the former dikegrave, Volkert Tedsen. Now a new grave had been dug in which his son, the dikegrave Tede Volkerts, was to be laid. The funeral procession was already coming up from the marsh below, a throng of carriages from all the villages in the parish; the one at the head bore the heavy coffin, the two glossy black horses from the dikegrave's stables were already drawing it up the sandy slope to the uplands; the horses' manes and tails waved in the brisk spring breeze. The churchyard was filled to the walls with people, even on top of the brick gate boys squatted with little children in their arms; all were anxious to see the burying.
In the house down on the marsh Elke had prepared the funeral repast in the living-room and the adjoining parlor; old wine stood at every place; there was a bottle of Langkork for the chief dikegrave—for he too had not failed to come to the ceremony—and another for the pastor. When everything was ready she went through the stable out to the back door; she met no one on her way; the men had gone with the carriages to the funeral. There she stood, her mourning clothes fluttering in the spring breeze, and looked across to the village where the last carriages were just driving up to the church. After a while there was a commotion there and then followed a dead silence. Elke folded her hands; now they were probably lowering the coffin into the grave: "And to dust thou shalt return!" Involuntarily, softly, as if she could hear them from the churchyard she repeated the words; then her eyes filled with tears, her hands which were folded across her breast sank into her lap; "Our Father, who art in heaven!" she prayed with fervor. And when she had finished the Lord's prayer she stood there long, immovable, she, from now on the owner of this large lowland farm; and thoughts of death and of life began to strive within her.
A distant rumble roused her. When she opened her eyes she saw again one carriage following the other in rapid succession, driving down from the marsh and coming towards her farm. She stood upright, looked out once more with a keen glance and then went back, as she had come, through the stable and into the solemnly prepared living rooms. There was no one here either, only through the wall she could hear the bustle of the maids in the kitchen. The banquet table looked so still and lonely; the mirror between the windows was covered with white cloth, so were the brass knobs of the warming-oven; there was nothing to shine in the room any more. Elke noticed that the doors of the wall-bed in which her father had slept for the last time were open and she went over and closed them tight; absently she read the words painted on them in gold letters among the roses and pinks:
"Hest du din Dågwerk richtig dan
Da kommt de Slåp von sülvst heran."
If you have done your day's work right
Sleep will come of itself at night.
That was from her grandfather's time! She glanced at the cupboard; it was almost empty but through the glass-doors she could see the cut-glass goblet which, as he had been fond of telling, her father had won once in his youth tilting in the ring. She took it out and stood it at the chief dikegrave's place. Then she went to the window, for already she could hear the carriages coming up the drive. One after another stopped in front of the house, and, more cheerful than when they first came, the guests now sprang down from their seats to the ground. Rubbing their hands and talking, they all crowded into the room; it was not long before they had all taken their places at the festive table on which the well-cooked dishes were steaming, the chief dikegrave and the pastor in the parlor; noise and loud conversation ran along the table as if the dreadful silence of death had never hovered here. Silently, her eyes on her guests, Elke went round with the maids among the tables to see that nothing was missing. Hauke Haien too sat in the living-room besides Ole Peters and other small landowners.
After the meal was over the white clay pipes were fetched out of the corner and lighted and Elke was busy again passing the coffee cups to her guests, for she did not spare with that either today. In the living-room, at her father's desk, the chief dikegrave was standing in conversation with the pastor and the white-haired dike commissioner Jewe Manners. "It is all very well, Gentlemen," said the former, "we have laid the old dikegrave to rest with honors; but where shall we find a new one? I think, Manners, you will have to take the dignity upon you!"
Smiling, the old man raised the black velvet cap from his white hair: "The game would be too short, Sir," he said; "when the deceased Tede Volkerts was made dikegrave, I was made commissioner and I have been it now for forty years!"
"That is no fault, Manners; you know the dike affairs so much the better and will have no trouble with them!"
But the old man shook his head: "No, no, your Grace, leave me where I am and I can keep on in the game for another few years yet!"
The pastor came to his aid. "Why," he said, "do we not put into office the man who has really exercised it in the last years?"
The chief dikegrave looked at him. "I don't understand you, pastor."
The pastor pointed into the parlor where Hauke seemed to be explaining something to two older men in a slow earnest way. "There he stands," he said, "the tall Friesian figure with the clever gray eyes beside his lean nose and the two bumps in his forehead above them! He was the old man's servant and now has a little piece of his own; of course, he is still rather young!"
"He seems to be in the thirties," said the chief dikegrave, measuring Hauke with his eyes.
"He is scarcely twenty-four," returned Commissioner Manners; "but the pastor is right; all the good proposals for the dike and drain work and so on that have come from the dikegrave's office during the last years have come from him; after all, the old man didn't amount to much towards the end."
"Indeed?" said the chief dikegrave; "and you think that he would be the man now to move up into his old master's place?"
"He would be the man," answered Jewe Manners; "but he lacks what we call here 'clay under his feet'; his father had about fifteen, he may have a good twenty acres; but no one here has ever been made dikegrave on that."
The pastor opened his mouth as if he were about to speak, when Elke Volkerts, who had been in the room for some little time, suddenly came up to them. "Will your Grace allow me a word?" she said to the chief officer, "it is only so that an error may not lead to a wrong!"
"Speak out, Miss Elke!" he answered; "wisdom always sounds well from a pretty girl's mouth."
"—It is not wisdom, your Grace; I only want to tell the truth."
"We ought to be able to listen to that too, Jungfer Elke."
The girl's dark eyes glanced aside again as if she wanted to reassure herself that no superfluous ears were near. "Your Grace," she began then, and her breast rose with strong emotion, "my godfather, Jewe Manners, told you that Hauke Haien only possesses about twenty acres, and that is true for the moment; but as soon as is necessary Hauke will have as many more acres as there are in my father's farm which is now mine; this with what he now has ought to be * * *."
Old Manners stretched his white head towards her as if he were looking to see who it was that spoke. "What's that?" he said, "what are you saying, child?"
Elke drew a little black ribbon out of her bodice with a shining gold ring on the end of it. "I am engaged, Godfather," she said; "here is the ring, and Hauke Haien is my betrothed."
"And when—I suppose I may ask since I held you at the font, Elke Volkerts—when did this happen?"
"It was some time ago, but I was of age, Godfather Manners," she said; "my father was already growing feeble and, as I knew him, I did not want to trouble him with it; now that he is with God he will see that his child is well cared for with this man. I should have said nothing about it till my year of mourning was over, but now, for Hauke's sake and on account of the koog, I have had to speak." And turning to the chief dikegrave she added: "Your Grace will pardon me, I hope!"
The three men looked at one another. The pastor laughed, the old commissioner contented himself with murmuring "Hum, hum!" while the chief dikegrave rubbed his forehead as if he were concerned with an important decision. "Yes, my dear girl," he said at last, "but how is it with the matrimonial property rights here? I must confess I am not thoroughly at home in these complicated matters."
"That is not necessary, your Grace," answered the dikegrave's daughter, "I will transfer the property to Hauke before the marriage. I have my own little pride," she added, smiling; "I want to marry the richest man in the village!"
"Well, Manners," said the pastor, "I suppose that you, as godfather, will have no objection when I unite the young dikegrave and the daughter of the old one in marriage!"
The old man shook his head gently. "May God give them his blessing!" he said, devoutly.
But the chief dikegrave held out his hand to the girl. "You have spoken truly and wisely, Elke Volkerts; I thank you for your forceful explanations and I hope also in the future and on more joyous occasions than this to be the guest of your house; but—the most wonderful thing about it all is that a dikegrave should be made by such a young woman."
"Your Grace," replied Elke, who looked at his kindly face again with her serious eyes, "the right man may well be helped by his wife!" Then she went into the adjoining parlor and silently laid her hand in Hauke Haien's.
It was several years later. Tede Haien's little house was now occupied by an active workman with his wife and children. The young dikegrave Hauke Haien lived with his wife in what had been her father's house. In summer the mighty ash rustled in front of the house as before; but on the bench which now stood beneath it generally only the young wife was to be seen in the evening sitting alone with her sewing or some other piece of work. There was still no child in this home and Hauke had something else to do than to spend a leisure evening in front of the house, for in spite of the help he had given the old dikegrave the latter had bequeathed to him a number of unsettled matters pertaining to the dike, matters with which Hauke had not liked to meddle before; but now they must all gradually be cleared up and he swept with a strong broom. Then came the management and work of the farm itself, increased as it was by the addition of his own property, and moreover he was trying to do without a servant boy. And so it happened that, except on Sunday when they went to church, he and Elke saw each other only at dinner, when Hauke was generally hurried, and at the beginning and end of the day; it was a life of continuous work and yet a contented one.
And then the tongues of the busy-bodies disturbed the peace. One Sunday after church a somewhat noisy gang of the younger landowners in the marsh and upland districts were sitting drinking in the tavern on the uplands. Over the fourth or fifth glass they began to talk, not indeed about the king and the government—no one went so high in those days—but about the municipal officials and their superiors and above all about the municipal taxes and assessments, and the longer they talked the less they were satisfied with them, least of all with the new dike assessments; all the drains and sluices which had hitherto been all right now needed repairs; new places were always being found in the dike that needed hundreds of barrows of earth; the devil take it all!
"That's your clever dikegrave's doing," shouted one of the uplanders, "who always goes about thinking and then puts a finger into every pie."
"Yes, Marten," said Ole Peters, who sat opposite the speaker; "you're right, he's tricky and is always trying to get into the chief dikegrave's good books; but we've got him now."
"Why did you let them load him onto you?" said the other; "now you've got to pay for it."
Ole Peters laughed. "Yes, Marten Fedders, that's the way it goes with us here and there's nothing to be done. The old dikegrave got the office on his father's account; the new one on his wife's." The laughter that greeted this sally showed how it pleased the company.
But it was said at a public house table and it did not stop there; soon it went the rounds on the uplands as well as down on the marshes; thus it came to Hauke's ears too. And again all the malicious faces passed before his inward eye and when he thought of the laughter at the tavern table it sounded more mocking than it had been in reality. "The dogs!" he shouted and looked wrathfully to one side as if he would have had them thrashed.
At that Elke laid her hand on his arm: "Never mind them! They would all like to be what you are!"
"That's just it," he answered rancorously.
"And," she went on, "did not Ole Peters himself marry money?"
"That he did, Elke; but what he got when he married Vollina was not enough to make him dikegrave!"
"Say rather; he was not enough himself to become dikegrave!" And Elke turned her husband round so that he looked at himself in the mirror, for they were standing between the windows in their room. "There stands the dikegrave," she said; "now look at him; only he who can exercise an office holds one!"
"You are not wrong there," he answered, thinking, "and yet * * * Well, Elke, I must go on to the eastern sluice; the gates don't lock again."
She pressed his hand. "Come, look at me a minute first! What is the matter with you, your eyes look so far away?"
"Nothing, Elke; you're right."
He went; but he had not been gone long when he had forgotten all about the repairs to the sluice. Another idea which he had half thought out and had carried about with him for years, but which had been pushed into the background by urgent official duties, now took possession of him anew and more powerfully than before as if suddenly it had grown wings.
Hardly realizing where he was going he found himself up on the seaward dike, a good distance to the south, towards the town; the village that lay out in this direction had long disappeared on his left; still he went on, his gaze turned towards the water-side and fixed steadily on the broad stretch of land in front of the dikes; anyone with him could not have helped seeing what absorbing mental work was going on behind those eyes. At last he stopped; there the foreland narrowed down to a little strip along the dike. "It must be possible," he said to himself. "Seven years in office! they shan't say again that I am dikegrave only on my wife's account!"
Still he stood and his keen glance swept carefully over the green foreland in all directions; then he went back to where another small strip of green pasture-land took the place of the broad expanse lying before him. Close to the dike however a strong sea current ran through this expanse separating nearly the whole outland from the mainland and making it into an island; a rough wooden bridge led across to it so that cattle or hay and grain carts could pass over. The tide was low and the golden September sun glistened on the bare strip of mud, perhaps a hundred feet wide, and on the deep water-course in the middle of it through which the sea was even now running. "That could be dammed," said Hauke to himself after watching it for some time. Then he looked up and, in imagination, drew a line from the dike on which he stood, across the water-course, along the edge of the island, round towards the south and back again in an easterly direction across the water-course and up to the dike. And this invisible line which he now drew was a new dike, new too in the construction of its profile which till now had existed only in his head.
"That would give us about a thousand acres more of reclaimed land," he said, smiling to himself; "not exactly a great stretch, but still——"
Another calculation absorbed him. The outland here belonged to the community, its members each holding a number of shares according to the size of their property in the parish or by having legally acquired them in some other way. He began to count up how many shares he had received from his own, how many from Elke's father and how many he had bought himself since his marriage, partly with an indistinct idea of benefit to be derived in the future, partly when he increased his flocks of sheep. Altogether he held a considerable number of shares; for he had bought from Ole Peters all that he had as well, when the latter became so disgusted at losing his best ram in a partial inundation that he decided to sell. But that was a rare accident, for as far back as Hauke could remember only the edges were flooded even when the tides were unusually high. What splendid pasture and grain land it would make and how valuable it would be when it was all surrounded by his new dike! A kind of intoxication came over him as he thought of it, but he dug his nails into the palms of his hands and forced his eyes to look clearly and soberly at what lay before him. There was this great dike-less area on the extreme edge of which a flock of dirty sheep now wandered grazing slowly; who knew what storms and tides might do to it even within the next few years; and for him it would mean a lot of work, struggle, and annoyance. Nevertheless, as he went down from the dike and along the foot-path across the fens towards his mound, he felt as if he were bringing a great treasure home with him.
Elke met him in the hall; "How did you find the sluice?" she asked.
He looked down at her with a mysterious smile: "We shall soon need another sluice," he said, "and drains and a new dike!"
"I don't understand," replied Elke as they went into the room. "What is it that you want, Hauke?"
"I want," he said slowly and stopped a moment. "I want to have the big stretch of outland that begins opposite our place and then runs towards the west, all diked in and a well-drained koog made out of it. The high tides have left us in peace for nearly a generation, but if one of the really bad ones should come again and destroy the new growth, everything might be ruined at one blow; only the old slip-shod way of doing things could have let it go on like that so long."
She looked at him in amazement. "Then you blame yourself!" she said.
"Yes, I do, Elke; but there has always been so much else to do."
"I know, Hauke; you have done enough!"
He had seated himself in the old dikegrave's easy-chair and his hands gripped both arms of it firmly.
"Have you the courage to do it?" asked his wife.
"Indeed I have, Elke," he said hastily.
"Don't go too fast, Hauke; that is an undertaking of life and death and they will nearly all be against you; you will get no thanks for all your trouble and care!"
He nodded: "I know!" he said.
"And suppose it doesn't succeed!" she exclaimed again; "ever since I was a child I have heard that that water-course could not be stopped and therefore it must never be touched."
"That is simply a lazy man's excuse," said Hauke; "why should it be impossible to stop it?"
"I never heard why; perhaps because it flows through so straight; the washout is too strong." Suddenly a memory came back to her and an almost roguish smile dawned in her serious eyes. "When I was a child," she said, "I heard the hired men talking about it once; they said that the only way to build a dam there that would hold was to bury something alive in it while it was being made; when they were building a dike on the other side—it must have been a hundred years ago—a gypsy child that they bought from its mother at a high price had been thrown into it and buried alive; but now probably no one would sell her child."
Hauke shook his head. "Then it is just as well that we have none, or they would probably require it of us!"
"They wouldn't get it!" said Elke, and threw her arms across her own body as if in fear.
And Hauke smiled; but she went on to another question: "And the tremendous expense! Have you thought of that?"
"Indeed I have, Elke; we shall gain in land much more than the expense of building the dike, and then too the cost of maintaining the old dike will be much less; we shall work ourselves and we have more than eighty teams in the parish and no lack of young hands. At least you will not have made me dikegrave for nothing, Elke; I will show them that I am one."
She had crouched down in front of him and was looking at him anxiously; now she rose with a sigh. "I must go on with my day's work," she said slowly stroking his cheek; "you do yours, Hauke."
"Amen, Elke," he said with an earnest smile; "there is work here for both of us!"
And there was work enough for both, though now the husband's burden became even heavier. On Sunday afternoons and often late in the evening Hauke and a capable surveyor sat together, deep in calculations, drawings and plans; it was the same when Hauke was alone and he often did not finish till long after midnight. Then he crept into his and Elke's bedroom, for they no longer used the stuffy wall-beds in the living-room, and so that he might at last get some rest, his wife lay with closed eyes as if asleep although she had been waiting for him with a beating heart. Then he sometimes kissed her brow, whispering a word of endearment, and laid himself down to wait for the sleep which often did not come to him till cock-crow. During the winter tempests he would go out on the dike with paper and pencil in his hand and stand there drawing and making notes while a gust of wind tore his cap from his head and his long tawny hair blew across his hot face. As long as the ice did not prevent it he would take one of the men-servants and go out in the boat to the shallows and measure the depth of the currents there with a rod and plumb-line, whenever he was in doubt. Elke often trembled for him, but the only sign she showed of it when he came home again was the firmness of her hand-clasp or the gleaming light in her usually quiet eyes. "Have patience, Elke," he said once when it seemed to him that his wife did not want to let him go; "I must be perfectly clear about it myself before I make my proposal." At that she nodded and let him go. His rides into town to the chief dikegrave were no trifle either, and they and all the work of managing the house and farm were always followed by work on his papers late into the night. He almost ceased to associate with other people except in his work and business; he even saw less of his wife from day to day. "It is a hard time and it will last a long while yet," said Elke to herself and went about her work.
At last, when the sun and spring winds had broken up the ice everywhere the preparatory work came to an end. The petition to the chief dikegrave to be recommended to a higher department was ready. It contained the proposal for a dike to surround the foreland mentioned, for the benefit of the public welfare, especially of the koog and not less of the Sovereign's exchequer as, in a few years, the latter would profit by taxes from about one thousand acres. The whole was neatly copied, packed in a strong tubular case, together with plans and drawings of all the localities as they were at present and as planned, of sluices and drains and everything else in question, and was provided with the dikegrave's official seal.
"Here it is, Elke," said the young dikegrave, "now give it your blessing."
Elke laid her hand in his: "We will hold fast to each other," she said.
"That we will."
Then the petition was sent into town by a messenger on horseback.
"You will notice, my dear sir," the schoolmaster interrupted his tale as he looked at me with kindness in his expressive eyes, "that what I have told you up to now I have gathered during nearly forty years of activity in this district from reliable accounts from what has been told me by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of enlightened families. Now in order that you may bring this into harmony with the final course of events I have to tell you that the rest of my story was at the time and still is the gossip of the whole marsh village when, about All Saints' Day, the spinning wheels begin to whirr."
A NORTH SEA ISLANDER'S CONGREGATION
Jacob Alberts
About five or six hundred feet north of the dikegrave's farm, as one stood on the dike, one could see a few thousand feet out in the shallows and, somewhat farther from the opposite bank, a little islet called "Jeverssand" or "Jevershallig." It had been used by the grandfathers of that day as a sheep pasture, for at that time it had been covered with grass; but even that had ceased because several times the low islet had been flooded by the sea, especially in midsummer, and the grass had been damaged and made unfit for the sheep. So it happened that, except for the gulls and other birds that fly along the shore, and perhaps an occasional fishhawk, nothing visited it any more; and on moonlight evenings, looking out from the dike, only the foggy mists could be seen as they hung lightly or heavily above it. When the moon shone from the east on the islet people also thought they could distinguish a few bleached skeletons of drowned sheep and the skeleton of a horse, though how the latter had come there no one could explain.
Once, towards the end of March, late in the evening, the day-laborer who lived in Tede Haien's house and the young dikegrave's man Iven Johns stood together at that spot and gazed out fixedly at the islet, which could scarcely be distinguished in the misty moonlight; apparently something unusual had caught their attention and kept them standing there. The day laborer stuck his hands in his pockets and shook himself. "Come on, Iven," he said, "that's nothing good; let us go home!"
The other one laughed, but a shudder could be heard through his laughter. "Oh, nonsense! It's a living creature, a big one! Who in the devil's name could have driven it out there onto that piece of mud! Look! Now it's stretching its head over towards us! No, it's lowering its head, it's eating! I thought there was no grass there! Whatever can it be?"
"What business is that of ours?" answered the other. "Good night, Iven, if you won't go along; I'm going home."
"Good-night then," the day laborer called back as he trotted home along the dike. The servant looked round after him a few times, but the desire to see something uncanny kept him where he was. Then a dark, stocky figure came along the dike from the village towards him; it was the dikegrave's stable boy. "What do you want, Karsten?" the man called out to him.
"I?—nothing," answered the boy; "but the master wants to speak to you, Iven Johns."
The man had his eyes fixed on the islet again. "All right; I'm coming in a minute," he said.
"What are you looking at?" asked the boy.
The man raised his arm and pointed to the islet in silence. "Oh ho!" whispered the boy; "there's a horse—a white horse—it must be the devil who rides it—how does a horse get out there on Jevershallig?"
"Don't know, Karsten; if only it's a real horse!"
"Oh, yes, Iven; look, it's grazing just like a horse! But who took it out there; there isn't a boat big enough in the whole village! Perhaps after all it's only a sheep; Peter Ohm says, in the moonlight ten stocks of peat look like a whole village. No, look! Now it's jumping—it must be a horse!"
The two stood for a time in silence, their eyes fixed on what they could see but indistinctly over there. The moon was high in the sky and shone down on the broad shallow sea whose rising tide was just beginning to wash over the glistening stretches of mud; no sound of any animal was to be heard all around, nothing but the gentle noise of the water; the marsh too, behind the dike, was empty; cows and oxen were all still in their stalls. Nothing was moving; the only thing that seemed to be alive was what they took to be a horse, a white horse, out on Jevershallig. "It's growing lighter," said the man breaking the silence; "I can see the white sheep bones shining clearly."
"So can I," said the boy, stretching his neck; then, as if an idea had suddenly struck him, he pulled at the man's sleeve. "Iven," he whispered, "the horse's skeleton that always used to lie there, where is it? I can't see it!"
"I don't see it either, that's queer!" said the man.
"Not so very queer, Iven! Sometimes, I don't know in what nights, the bones are said to rise up and act as if they were alive."
"So?" said the man; "that's old wives' superstition!"
"May be, Iven," said the boy.
"Well, I thought you came to fetch me; come on, we must go home. There's nothing new to see here."
The boy would not move till the man had turned him round by force and pulled him onto the path. "Listen, Karsten," he said when the ghostly island was already a good bit behind them, "they say you're a fellow that's ready for anything; I believe you'd like best to investigate that yourself."
"Yes," replied Karsten, shuddering a little at the recollection, "yes, I'd like to, Iven."
"Are you in earnest?" asked the man after Karsten had given him his hand on it. "Well then, tomorrow evening we'll take our boat; you can go over to Jeverssand and I'll wait for you on the dike."
"Yes," replied the boy, "we can do that. I'll take my whip with me."
"Yes, do!"
In silence they went up the high mound to their master's house.
The same time the following evening the man was sitting on the big stone in front of the stable door as the boy came up to him cracking his whip. "That makes an odd whistle!" said Iven.
"To be sure, look out for yourself," answered the boy; "I have plaited nails into the lash."
"Come along then," said the other.
As on the day before the moon was in the eastern sky and shone down clearly from its height. Soon they were both out on the dike and looking over at Jevershallig that stood like a spot of fog in the water. "There it is again," said the man; "I was here after dinner and it wasn't there, but I could distinctly see the white skeleton of the horse lying there."
The boy stretched his neck. "It isn't there now, Iven," he whispered.
"Well, Karsten, how is it?" asked the man. "Are you still itching to row over there?"
Karsten thought for a moment; then he cracked his whip in the air. "Undo the boat, Iven!"
Over on the island it looked as if whatever was walking there raised its head and stretched it out towards the mainland. They did not see it any longer; they were already walking down the dike and to the place where the boat lay. "Now, get in," said the man after he had untied it. "I'll wait till you come back. You must head for the east shore, there was always a good landing there." The lad nodded silently and then rowed out, with his whip, into the moon-lit night. The man wandered along the dike back to the place where they had stood before. Soon he saw the boat ground near a steep dark spot on the other side to which a broad water-course flowed, and a short, thickset figure sprang ashore. Wasn't that the boy cracking his whip? Or it might be the sound of the rising tide. Several hundred feet to the north he saw what they had taken to be a white horse, and now—yes, the figure of the boy was going straight towards it. Now it raised its head as if startled and the boy—he could hear it plainly—snapped his whip. But—what could he be thinking of? He had turned round and was walking back along the way he had gone. The creature on the other side seemed to go on grazing steadily, he had not heard it neigh; at times white stripes of water seemed to pass across the apparition. The man watched it as if spellbound.
Then he heard the grounding of the boat on the side on which he stood and soon he saw the boy coming out of the dusk and towards him up the side of the dike. "Well, Karsten," he said, "what was it?"
The boy shook his head. "It wasn't anything," he said. "Just before I landed I saw it from the boat and then, when I was once on the island—the devil knows where the beast went, the moon was shining brightly enough; but when I came to the place there was nothing there but the bleached bones of half a dozen sheep and a little farther on lay the horse's skeleton with its long, white skull and the moon was shining into its empty eye-sockets!"
"Hmm!" said the man; "did you look carefully?"
"Yes, Iven, I stood close up to it; a God-forsaken lapwing that had gone to sleep behind the bones flew up shrieking and startled me so that I cracked my whip after it a few times."
"And that was all?"
"Yes, Iven, I didn't see anything else."
"And it's enough," said the man, pulling the boy towards him by the arm and pointing across to the islet. "Do you see anything over there, Karsten?"
"As I live, there it is again!"
"Again?" said the man; "I was looking over there the whole time and it never went away; you went right towards the uncanny thing."
The boy stared at him; a look of horror that did not escape the man appeared on his usually saucy face. "Come," said the latter, "let us go home; seen from here it is alive and over there it is only bones—that is more than you and I can understand. Keep your mouth shut about it; things like that must not be questioned."
So they turned and the boy trotted along beside him; they did not speak and the marsh lay in unbroken silence at their side.
But after the moon had declined and the nights had grown dark something else happened.
Hauke Haien had ridden into town at the time the horse-fair was going on, without however having anything to do with that. Nevertheless towards evening when he came home he brought a second horse with him; but its coat was rough and it was so thin that its ribs could be counted and its eyes lay dull and sunken in their sockets. Elke had gone out in front of the door to meet her husband. "For heaven's sake!" she exclaimed, "what's the old white horse for?" For as Hauke came riding up in front of the house and drew rein under the ash she saw that the poor creature was lame too.
But the young dikegrave sprang laughing from his brown gelding. "Never mind, Elke, it didn't cost much."
"You know that the cheapest thing is usually the dearest," his wise wife answered.
"Not always, Elke; this animal is four years old at the most; look at him more carefully! He has been starved and abused; our oats will do him good and I will take care of him myself so that he shan't be overfed."
During this conversation the animal stood with his head lowered; his mane hung down long over his neck. While her husband was calling the men Elke walked round the horse looking him over, but she shook her head: "We never had such a nag as this in our stable!"
When the stable boy came round the corner of the house he suddenly stopped with terror-stricken eyes. "Well, Karsten," said the dikegrave, "what's the matter with you? Don't you like my white horse?"
"Yes—Oh, yes, master, why not?"
"Well, then, take both the horses into the stable but don't feed them; I am coming over there in a minute myself."
Cautiously the boy took hold of the white horse's halter and then hastily, as if to protect himself, he seized the rein of the gelding which had also been trusted to his care. Hauke went into the house with his wife; she had warm beer ready for him and bread and butter were also at hand.
He was soon satisfied and, rising began to walk up and down the room with his wife. "Now let me tell you, Elke," he said, while the evening glow shone on the tiles in the walls, "how I happened to get the animal. I stayed at the chief dikegrave's about an hour; he had good news for me—some changes will undoubtedly have to be made in my plans; but the main thing, my profile, has been accepted and the order to begin work on the new dike may get here any day now."
Elke sighed involuntarily: "Then it is to be done after all!" she said apprehensively.
"Yes, wife," replied Hauke; "it's going to be uphill work but that is why God brought us together, I think. Our farm is in such good order now that you can take a good part of it on your shoulders; think ten years ahead—then our property will have greatly increased!"
At his first words she had pressed her husband's hand assuringly in hers, but his last remark brought her no joy. "Who will the place be for?" she said. "Unless you take another wife instead of me; I cannot bear you any children."
Tears rushed to her eyes; but he drew her close and held her tight in his arms: "Let us leave that to God," he said; "but now, and even then, we shall be young enough to enjoy the fruits of our labor ourselves."
She looked at him long with her dark eyes while he held her thus. "Forgive me, Hauke," she said, "at times I am a despondent woman."
He bent his face to hers and kissed her. "You are my wife and I am your husband, Elke! And nothing can change that."
At that she put her arms close round his neck. "You are right, Hauke, and whatever comes will come to us both." Then, blushing, she drew away from his arms. "You were going to tell me about the white horse," she said softly.
"Yes, I will, Elke. I've already told you that I was in high spirits over the good news that the chief dikegrave had given me; and just as I was riding out of the town, there, on the dam, behind the harbor, I met a ragged fellow; I didn't know whether he was a vagabond or a tinker or what. He was pulling the white horse on the halter after him and the animal raised its head and looked at me with pleading eyes, as if it were begging me for something; and at the moment I was certainly rich enough. 'Hello, fellow!' I shouted, 'where are you going with the old nag?'
"He stopped and the white horse stopped too. 'Going to sell it,' he said and nodded to me with cunning in his eyes.
"'To anyone else, but not to me!' I said merrily.
"'Why not?' he answered; 'it's a fine horse and well worth a hundred thalers.'
"I laughed in his face.
"'Oh, you needn't laugh,' he said; 'you needn't pay me that! But I can't use the beast; it would starve with me. It would soon look different if you had it a little while.'
"So I jumped down from my gelding and looked at the animal's mouth and saw that it was still young. 'How much do you want for it?' I asked, for the horse was looking at me again as if begging.
"'Take it for thirty thalers, sir,' said the fellow, 'and I'll throw in the halter.'
"And so, Elke, I took the brown, clawlike hand that the lad offered me and it was a bargain. So we have the white horse, and cheap enough too, I think. Only it was curious; as I rode away with the horse I heard laughing behind me and when I turned my head I saw the Slovak standing there, his legs apart, his arms behind his back, laughing like the devil."
"Phew!" exclaimed Elke; "if only the white horse doesn't bring you anything from his old master! I hope he'll thrive for you, Hauke."
"He shall thrive for his own sake, at least as far as I can manage it!" And with that the dikegrave went out to the stable as he had told the boy he would.
But this was not the only evening on which he fed the horse; from then on he always did it himself and kept it under his eye all the time; he wanted to show that he had made a good bargain and at least the horse should have every chance. And it was only a few weeks before the animal began to hold up its head; gradually the rough hair disappeared, a smooth, blue-mottled coat began to show and when, one day, he led it about the yard, it stepped out daintily with its strong, slender legs. Hauke thought of the tattered, adventurous fellow who had sold it: "The chap was a fool, or a scoundrel who had stolen it!" he murmured to himself. Soon, whenever the horse heard his step in the stable it would throw its head round and whinny to him, and then Hauke saw that its face was covered with hair as the Arabs like to have it while its brown eyes flashed fire. Then he led it out of the stall and put a light saddle on it, but he was hardly on its back before a whinny of joy broke from the animal and off it flew with him, down the mound onto the road and then towards the dike; but the rider sat tight and once they were on top the horse quieted down and stepped lightly, as if dancing, while it tossed its head towards the sea. Hauke patted and stroked its smooth neck but the caress was no longer necessary; the horse seemed to be entirely one with its rider and after he had ridden out a bit on the dike towards the north he turned it easily and rode back to the yard.
The men were standing below at the entrance to the driveway, waiting for their master to come back. "There, John," the latter called, as he sprang from his horse, "take him and ride him down to the fen, to the others; he carries you as if you were in a cradle!"
The horse tossed his head and whinnied loudly out into the sunny open country, while the man unbuckled the saddle and the boy carried it off to the harness-room; then he laid his head on his master's shoulder and suffered himself to be caressed. But when the man tried to swing himself up onto his back he sprang suddenly and sharply aside and then stood quiet again, his beautiful eyes fixed on his master. "Oh ho, Iven!" cried the latter, "did he hurt you?" and tried to help his man onto his feet.
Iven rubbed his hip hard. "No, master, it's not so bad; but the devil can ride the white horse!"
"And so will I!" added Hauke, laughing. "Take the rein and lead him to the fen, then."
And when the man, somewhat ashamed of himself, obeyed, the white horse quietly allowed himself to be led.
A few evenings later the man and the stable-boy were standing together at the stable door; behind the dike the evening glow had paled, and on the inner side the koog lay in deep dusk; occasionally the lowing of some startled cow came from the distance or the shriek of a lark as a weasel or water rat put an end to its life. The man was leaning against the door-post smoking a short pipe, the smoke of which he could no longer see; he and the boy had not yet spoken to each other. The latter had something on his mind, but he did not know how to approach the silent man with it. "Look, Iven," he said at last. "You know the horse's skeleton on Iverssand?"
"What about it?" asked the man.
"It isn't there any more; not in the daytime nor by moonlight; I've been out on the dike at least twenty times."
"I suppose the old bones have fallen apart!" said Iven, and went on smoking calmly.
"But I was out there by moonlight too; there's nothing walking about over on Jeverssand!"
"Well," said the man, "if the bones have fallen to pieces I suppose it can't get up any more."
"Don't joke, Iven! I know now; I can tell you where it is."
The man turned towards him with a start. "Well, where is it then?"
"Where?" the boy repeated impressively. "It's standing in our stable. It's been standing there ever since it has not been on the islet. It's not for nothing that the master always feeds it himself. I know what I'm talking about, Iven."
The man puffed away violently for a while. "You're a bit off, Karsten," he said at last; "our white horse? If ever a horse was alive it's he. How can a bright lad like you believe in such an old woman's tale!"
But the boy could not be convinced: if the devil was in the horse why shouldn't it be alive? On the contrary, so much the more for that! He started every time that he went into the stable towards evening, where even in summer the animal was sometimes bedded, when he saw it toss its fiery head towards him so sharply. "The devil take it!" he would murmur, then, "we shan't be together much longer."
So he began to look about him secretly for a new place, gave notice, and on All Saints' Day entered Ole Peters' service. There he found attentive listeners to his story of the dikegrave's devil-horse. Ole's fat wife, Vollina, and her stupid father, the former dike commissioner Jess Harders, listened to it with pleasurable shuddering, and later repeated it to everyone who had a spite against the dikegrave or who enjoyed tales of that kind.
In the meantime towards the end of March the order to begin work on the new dike had been received through the chief dikegrave. Hauke's first step was to call together the dike commissioners and they all assembled one day in the tavern up by the church and listened while he read the main points to them from the various documents: from his petition, from the report of the chief dikegrave, finally from the decision in which, above all, the profile that he had proposed was accepted, so that the new dike would not be steep like the other but slope gradually on the water-side; but they did not listen with cheerful or even satisfied faces.
"Yes, yes," said an old commissioner, "we are in for it now and no protests can help us, for the chief dikegrave is backing up our dikegrave."
"You're right enough, Dethlev Wiens," said another; "the spring work is at the door and now we've got to make miles of dike, so of course we must drop everything else."
"You can finish all that this year," said Hauke; "things won't move as fast as that."
Few of them were ready to admit it. "And your profile!" said a third, bringing up a new subject; "on the outside, towards the water, the dike will be wider than Lawrenz's child was long! Where are we to get the material? When will the work be done?"
"If not this year, then next; that will depend mainly on ourselves," said Hauke.
A laugh of annoyance passed through the company. "But why all this useless work? The dike is not to be any higher than the old one," shouted a new voice; "and that's been standing for more than thirty years I think!"
"That's right," said Hauke; "the old dike broke thirty years ago, then thirty-five years before that and again forty-five years before that; since then, although it still stands there steep and contrary to reason, the highest tides have spared us. But in spite of such tides the new dike will stand for a hundred and then another hundred years; it will not be broken through because the gentle slope towards the water offers no point of attack to the waves and so you will gain for yourselves and your children a safe and certain land, and that is why our sovereign and the chief dikegrave are backing me up; and it is that, too, that you ought to be able to see yourselves, for it is to your own advantage."
As no one seemed anxious to give an immediate answer to this an old white-haired man rose from his chair with difficulty. It was Elke's godfather, Jewe Manners, who still held office as commissioner at Hauke's request. "Dikegrave Hauke Haien," he said, "you are putting us to a great deal of trouble and expense and I wish you had waited for that till God had called me home; but—you are right, no one with reason can fail to see that. We ought to thank God every day that, in spite of our laziness, he has preserved that valuable piece of foreland from storm and water for us; but now it is the eleventh hour when we ourselves must take hold and try with all our knowledge and ability to save it for ourselves without depending any more on God's long-suffering. I am an old man, my friends; I have seen dikes built and broken; but the dike that Hauke Haien has projected, by virtue of the understanding that God has given him, and that he has succeeded in getting our sovereign to grant—that dike no one of you who are alive here today will ever see break; and if you yourselves will not thank him your grandchildren will one day not be able to refuse him the crown of honor that is his!"
Jewe Manners sat down again, took his blue handkerchief from his pocket and wiped a few drops from his forehead. The old man was still known for his thoroughness and inviolable uprightness, and as those assembled were not ready to agree with him they continued their silence. But Hauke Haien took the floor and they all saw how pale he had grown. "I thank you, Jewe Manners," he said, "for being here and for speaking as you have spoken; the rest of you, gentlemen, will please regard the new dike, for which indeed I am responsible, at least as something which cannot be changed now. Let us accordingly decide what is to be done next!"
"Speak," said one of the commissioners. Hauke spread the plan of the new dike out on the table. "A few minutes ago," he said, "one of you asked where we should get all the necessary earth. You see here that as far as the foreland extends out into the shallows there is a strip of land left free outside the line of the dike; we can take the earth from there and from the foreland that runs along the dike, north and south from the new koog. If we only have a good thick layer of clay on the water side, we can fill in, on the inside or in the middle, with sand. But now we must find a surveyor to stake out the line of the new dike on the foreland. The one who helped me to work out the plan will probably suit us best. Further, we must make contracts with several cartwrights for single tip-carts in which to haul the clay and other material. In damming up the water-course and on the inner sides, where we may have to do with sand, we shall need, I can't say now how many hundred loads of straw, perhaps more than we shall be able to spare here in the marsh. Let us consider then, how all this is to be obtained and arranged; and later we shall also want a capable carpenter to make the new sluice here on the west side towards the water."
The commissioners had gathered round the table, looked indifferently at the map and now gradually began to speak, but, as it seemed, more for the sake of saying something. When they came to discuss the engaging of a surveyor one of the younger ones said: "You have thought it out, dikegrave; you must know who would be best fitted for the work."
But Hauke replied: "As you are all under oath you must speak your own, not my opinion, Jacob Meyen; and if you can do better I will let my proposal drop."
"Oh well, it will be right enough," said Jacob Meyen.
But one of the older men did not think so. He had a nephew who was a surveyor, such a surveyor as had never been seen here in the marsh country; he was said to know even more than the dikegrave's blessed father, Tede Haien!
So the merits of both surveyors were discussed and it was finally decided to give the work to them both together. It was the same thing when they came to consider the tip-carts, the straw supply, and everything else, and Hauke arrived home late and almost exhausted, on the gelding which he still rode at that time. But he had no sooner sat down in the old easy chair which had belonged to his predecessor, who, though more ponderous, had lived more lightly, than his wife was at his side. "You look so tired, Hauke," she said, stroking the hair away from his forehead with her slender hand.
"I am, a little," he answered.
"And how is it going?"
"Oh, it's going," he said with a bitter smile; "but I must turn the wheels myself and I can be glad if somebody else does not hold them back."
"But they don't all do that, do they?"
"No, Elke; your godfather, Jewe Manners, is a good man; I wish he were thirty years younger."
A few weeks later, after the dike-line had been staked out and most of the tip-carts delivered, the dikegrave called a meeting in the parish tavern of all those who had shares in the koog which was to be surrounded by the new dike, and also of the owners of land that lay behind the old dike. His object was to lay before them a plan for the distribution of labor and expense, and to hear any objections they might have to make. The latter class of owners would have to do their part, too, inasmuch as the new dike and the new drains would diminish the cost of maintenance of the older ones. This plan had been a difficult piece of work for Hauke, and if, through the kind offices of the chief dikegrave, a dike messenger and a dike clerk had not been assigned to him he would not have finished it so soon, although every day for some time he had been working late into the night. Then, when, tired out, he sought his couch, he did not find his wife waiting for him in pretended sleep as formerly; she too had now such a full measure of daily work that at night she lay in imperturbable slumber as if at the bottom of a deep well.
When Hauke had read his plan and spread out again on the table the papers which had already lain in the tavern for three days so that they might be examined, it appeared that there were serious men present who regarded this conscientious diligence with deference, and after calm deliberation submitted to the dikegrave's just demands. Others, however, whose shares in the new territory had been sold either by themselves or their fathers or other former possessors, protested against being made to bear part of the cost of the new koog, in which they no longer had any interest, without considering that the new works would gradually disburden the old territory. And others again who were blessed with shares in the new koog shouted that they wanted to sell them, that they would let them go at a low price; for on account of the unjust demands made of them they could not afford to hold them. But Ole Peters, who was leaning against the door-post with wrath in his face, called out: "Think it over first and then trust to our dikegrave! He knows how to figure! After he already had most of the shares he persuaded me to sell him mine, and as soon as he had them he decided to build a dike around this new koog."
After he had spoken there was dead silence in the meeting for a moment. The dikegrave stood at the table on which he had spread out his papers before; he raised his head and looked at Ole Peters. "You know well, Ole Peters," he said, "that you slander me; you do it nevertheless because you know, as well, that a good deal of the mud with which you pelt me will stick! The truth is that you wanted to get rid of your shares and that I needed them at that time for sheep breeding; and, if you want to know more, I can tell you that it was the abusive words that you used in the tavern, when you said that I was only the dikegrave on my wife's account, that aroused me; I wanted to show you all that I could be a dikegrave on my own account, and so, Ole Peters, I have done what the dikegrave before me should have done long ago. And if you bear me a grudge because at that time your shares became mine—you hear yourself that there are men enough here who are offering theirs at a low price now, merely because this is more work than they want to do."
A murmur of applause broke from a small part of the men assembled and old Jewe Manners, who stood among them, shouted: "Bravo, Hauke Haien! God will give you success in your undertaking."
They were not able to finish, however, although Ole Peters was silent, and they did not disperse till supper time. A second meeting was necessary before everything could be arranged, and then only because Hauke took it upon himself to provide four teams for the following month instead of the three that would properly have fallen to his lot.
LIVING ROOM IN A FRISIAN FARMHOUSE
Jacob Alberts
Finally when the bells were all ringing through the country for Whitsuntide the work had been begun. Unceasingly the tip-carts moved from the foreland to the dike-line where they dumped their loads of clay, while an equal number were already making the return trip to the foreland for new loads. At the dike-line itself stood men with shovels and spades to shovel the clay into place and level it; tremendous wagons of straw were brought and unloaded; the latter was used not only to cover the lighter material such as the sand and loose earth on the inside of the dike, but also, when portions of the dike had been finished and covered with sod, a firm coat of straw was laid over that to protect it from the gnawing waves; overseers were appointed who walked hither and yon, and, in time of storm, stood with wide-open mouths shouting their orders through the wind and weather. Among them rode the dikegrave on his white horse, which he now used exclusively, and the animal flew here and there with its rider as he gave his short, dry orders, praised the laborers or, as sometimes happened, dismissed a lazy or incompetent man without mercy. "It's no use!" he would say at such times; "we can't have the dike spoiled on account of your laziness!" While he was still far away as he rode up out of the koog they heard his horse snorting and all hands began to work with a better will: "Look alive! Here comes the rider of the white horse!"
While the workmen were stretched off on the ground in groups eating their lunch Hauke rode along the deserted works and his eyes were keen to discover spots where careless hands had handled the spade. If, however, he rode up to the men and explained to them how the work must be done, they did indeed look up and went on chewing their bread patiently, but he never heard a word of agreement or any other remark from them. Once at that hour, it was already late, when he found a place in the dike where the work had been particularly well done; he rode up to the next group of lunchers, sprang from his horse, and asked pleasantly who had done such good work there, but they merely looked at him shyly and sullenly and named slowly a few men as if they did it against their will. The man whom he had asked to hold his horse, which was standing as quiet as a lamb, held it with both hands and looked, as if in fear, at the animal's beautiful eyes which, as usual, were fixed on its master.
"Well, Marten," said Hauke; "why do you stand as if you had been struck by lightning?"
"Your horse is as quiet, sir, as if it were thinking of some mischief."
Hauke laughed and took hold of the rein himself, when the horse at once began to rub its head caressingly against his shoulder. A few of the workmen looked fearfully over at horse and rider; others, as if all that did not concern them, continued to eat their lunch in silence, now and then throwing a crumb to the gulls which had remembered this feeding-place, and, balancing on their slender wings, tipped forward almost onto their heads. The dikegrave stood for a while, absently watching the begging birds as they caught the pieces thrown to them in their bills; then he sprang into the saddle and rode away without looking round at the men; the few words which they now spoke sounded to him almost like mockery. "What is it?" he said to himself; "was Elke right when she said they were all against me? Even these servants and small owners for many of whom my new dike means added prosperity?"
He spurred his horse so that it flew down to the koog like mad. He himself knew nothing, to be sure, of the uncanny nimbus that his former stable-boy had thrown about the rider of the white horse; but if only the people had seen him then as he galloped along, his eyes staring out of his lean face, and his horse's red nostrils cracking!
Summer and autumn had passed by; the work had gone on till near the end of November; then frost and snow had called a halt; the men had not been able to finish and it was decided to leave the koog lying open. Eight feet the dike rose above the level of the ground; only to the west towards the water where the sluice was to be laid a gap had been left; also above, in front of the old dike, the water-course was still untouched. Thus, as for the last thirty years, the tide could flow into the koog without doing much damage there or to the new dike. And so the work of men's hands was consigned to the great God above, and placed under his protection until the spring sun should make its completion possible.
In the meantime preparations had been made in the dikegrave's house for a happy event; in the ninth year of their married life a child was born to him and his wife. It was red and shriveled and weighed its seven pounds as new-born children should when, like this one, they belong to the female sex; only, its cry had been strangely muffled and did not please the midwife. But the worst was that on the third day Elke lay in a high fever, wandered in her speech and did not know either her husband or the old nurse. The wild joy that had seized upon Hauke at the sight of his child had turned into tribulation. The doctor had been fetched from the town; he sat beside the bed, felt Elke's pulse, wrote prescriptions and looked helplessly about him. Hauke shook his head; "He can't help; only God can help!" He had figured out a kind of Christianity for himself; but there was something that prevented his praying. When the old doctor had driven away he stood at the window staring out into the winter day and, while the patient screamed aloud in her delirium, he clasped his hands together tightly; he did not know himself whether it was an act of devotion or due to his tremendous fear of losing control of himself.
"Water! The water!" whimpered the sick woman. "Hold me!" she screamed; "hold me, Hauke!" Then her voice died down; it sounded as if she were crying; "into the sea, out into the ocean? O, dear God, I'll never see him again!"
At that he turned and pushed the nurse away from the bed. He dropped on his knees, put his arms round his wife and held her close: "Elke! Elke! Oh, know me, Elke, I am right here with you!"
But she only opened wide her eyes burning with fever and looked about her as if helplessly lost.
He laid her back on her pillows; then, twisting his hands together, he cried: "Oh Lord, my God, do not take her from me! Thou knowest I cannot be without her!" Then he seemed to recollect himself and added softly: "I know, indeed, Thou canst not always do as Thou wouldst, not even Thou; Thou art all-wise; Thou must do according to thy wisdom—Oh Lord, speak to me if only by a breath!"
It was as if a sudden stillness had fallen; he heard nothing but gentle breathing; when he turned to the bed his wife lay there in calm slumber; only the nurse looked at him with horrified eyes. He heard the door move: "Who was that?" he asked.
"The maid, Ann Grete, went out, sir; she came to bring the child-bed basket."
"Why do you look at me so confusedly, Mrs. Levke?"
"I? I was frightened at your prayer; such a prayer will never save anyone from death!"
Hauke looked at her with penetrating eyes: "Do you too, like Ann Grete, go to the conventicle where the Dutch jobbing tailor Jantje is?"
"Yes, sir; we both hold the living faith!"
Hauke did not answer her. The dissenting conventicle movement which was in great vogue at that time had also put forth blossoms among the Friesians; artisans who had come down in the world, or schoolmasters who had been dismissed for drunkenness, played the chief part in it, and girls, young and old women, loafers and lonely people assiduously attended the secret meetings in which anyone could play the priest. Of the dikegrave's household Ann Grete and the stable-boy, who was in love with her, spent their free evenings there. Elke, to be sure, had not failed to express her misgivings about this to Hauke; but it had been his opinion that no one should interfere in matters of faith; the conventicle would not hurt anyone and it was at least better than the tavern!
So it had gone on, and therefore too he had kept silence this time. But others did not keep silent about him! The words of his prayer circulated from house to house; he had denied God's omnipotence, and what was a God without omnipotence? He was an atheist; perhaps the affair of the devil-horse might be true, after all!
Hauke heard nothing of this; in those days he had eyes and ears only for his wife; even the child had vanished from his mind.
The old doctor came again, came every day, sometimes twice, then he stayed all night, wrote another prescription, and the man, Iven Johns, galloped off to the apothecary's with it. And then his face lost something of its seriousness, he nodded confidentially to the dikegrave: "We'll pull through! With God's help!" And one day—was it that his art had triumphed over the disease or, after Hauke had prayed, had God been able to find another way out after all—when the doctor was alone with the patient he spoke to her and the old man's eyes beamed: "Mrs. Haien, now I can tell you confidently, today the doctor has his holiday; things were bad with you, but now you belong to us again, to the living!"
At that a flood of joy broke from her dark eyes: "Hauke, Hauke, where are you?" she cried, and when in response to her clear call he rushed into the room and up to her bed, she threw her arms around his neck: "Hauke, my husband, I'm saved! I'm going to stay with you!"
The old doctor drew his silk handkerchief from his pocket, passed it over his forehead and cheeks and went out of the room nodding his head.
On the third evening after this day a pious orator—it was a slipper-maker who had been dismissed from work by the dikegrave—preached in the conventicle at the Dutch tailor's, and explained to his hearers God's qualities: "But whoever denies God's omnipotence, whoever says: 'I know Thou canst not do as Thou wouldst'—we all know the wretched one; he lies like a stone upon the community—he has fallen away from God and seeks the enemy of God, the lover of sins, to be his comforter; for man must reach out for some staff. But you, beware of him who prays thus; his prayer is a curse!"
This too was carried about from house to house. What is not in a small community? And it also came to Hauke's ears. He did not speak of it, not even to his wife; only at times he embraced her vehemently and held her close: "Be true to me, Elke! Be true to me!" Then her eyes looked up at him full of astonishment: "True to you? To whom else should I be true?" But after a little while the meaning of his words came to her: "Yes, Hauke, we are true to each other, not only because we need each other." And then he went about his work and she about hers.
So far that would have been well; but in spite of all his absorbing work there was a feeling of loneliness round him, and defiance and reserve towards others crept into his heart; only towards his wife did he always remain the same, and morning and evening he knelt by his child's cradle as if that were the place of his eternal salvation. With the servants and laborers however he grew stricter; the awkward and careless whom formerly he had reproved quietly were now startled by the sudden harshness of his rebuke and Elke sometimes had to go softly and put things right.
When spring approached work on the dike began again; the gap in the western line of the dike was now closed by a cofferdam dike, in the form of a half-moon both towards the inside and towards the outside, in order to protect the sluice which was now about to be built. And, like the sluice, the main dike grew gradually to its height, which had to be attained by more and more rapid labor. The dikegrave, who was directing the work, did not find it easier; for in place of Jewe Manners, who had died during the winter, Ole Peters had been appointed dike commissioner. Hauke had not wanted to try to prevent it; but, instead of the encouraging words and affectionate slaps on his left shoulder that went with them, which he had so often received from his wife's old godfather, he met with secret resistance and unnecessary objections from his successor, which had to be battered down with unnecessary reasons; for Ole did indeed belong to the men of consequence but, as far as dike matters were concerned, not to the wise men; and moreover the "scribbling farm-hand" of before was still in his way.
The most brilliant sky again spread out over sea and marsh, and the koog grew gay with strong cattle whose lowing from time to time interrupted the wide stillness; high in the air the larks sang unceasingly; one did not hear it till, for the length of a breath, the song was silent. No bad weather disturbed the work and the sluice already stood with its unpainted timber-structure without having needed the protection of the temporary dike even for one night; God seemed to favor the new work. Frau Elke's eyes also laughed to her husband when he came riding home from the dike on his white horse; "You've grown to be a good horse, after all," she would say and pat the animal's smooth neck. But Hauke, when she held the child, would spring down and let the tiny little thing dance in his arms; and when the white horse fixed its brown eyes on the child he would say perhaps, "Come here, you shall have the honor too!" Then he would put little Wienke—for so she had been christened—on his saddle and lead the horse round in a circle on the mound. Even the old ash-tree sometimes had the honor; he would seat the child on a springy bough and let it swing. The mother stood with laughing eyes in the door of the house, but the child did not laugh. Its eyes, on either side of a delicate little nose, looked rather dully out into the distance, and the tiny hands did not reach for the little stick that her father held out to her. Hauke did not notice it and of course he knew nothing of such little children; only Elke, when she saw the bright-eyed girl on the arm of her work-woman whose child had been born at the same time as hers, sometimes said sorrowfully: "My baby isn't as far along as yours, Stina!" and the woman, shaking the sturdy boy whom she held by the hand, with rough love, would answer: "Oh, well, children are different; this one here stole the apples out of the pantry before he had passed his second year!" And Elke stroked the curly hair out of the fat little boy's eyes and then secretly pressed her own quiet child to her heart.
By the time October was coming on the new sluices on the west side stood firm in the main dike, which closed on both sides, and now, with the exception of the gaps at the water-course, fell away with its sloping profile all round towards the water sides and rose fifteen feet above the ordinary tide. From its northwest corner there was an unobstructed view out past Ievers Islet to the shallows; but the winds here cut in more sharply; they blew one's hair about and anyone who wanted to look out from here had to have his cap firmly on his head.
At the end of November, when wind and rain had set in, there only remained the opening close up to the old dike to be stopped, on the bottom of which, on the north side, the sea-water shot through the water-course into the new koog. On both sides stood the walls of the dike: the gulf between them had now to be closed. Dry summer weather would undoubtedly have made the work easier but it had to be done now in any case, for if a storm broke the whole construction might be endangered. And Hauke did his utmost to carry the thing to a finish now. The rain streamed down, the wind whistled; but his haggard form on the fiery white horse appeared, now here, now there, out of the black mass of men who were working above as well as below, on the north side of the dike, beside the opening. Now he was seen down by the tip-carts which already had to bring the clay from far out on the foreland, and of which a compact body was just reaching the water-course and sought to dump its load there. Through the splashing of the rain and the blustering of the wind were heard from time to time the sharp orders of the dikegrave, who wanted to be the sole commander there that day; he called up the carts according to their numbers and ordered those who pushed forward back; "halt" sounded from his lips and the work below ceased. "Straw, a load of straw down here!" he called to those above, and from one of the carts on the top a load of straw plunged down onto the wet clay. Below, men jumped into it, tore it apart and called to those above not to bury them. And then new carts came and Hauke was already above once more, and looked down from his white horse into the gulf, and watched them shoveling and dumping; then he turned his eyes out to the sea. It was blowing hard and he saw how the fringe of water crept farther and farther up the dike and how the waves rose higher and higher; he saw too how the men were dripping and could scarcely breathe at their hard work for the wind, which cut off the air at their mouths, and for the cold rain that streamed down over them. "Stick to it, men! Stick to it!" he shouted down to them. "Only one foot higher, then it's enough for this tide!" And through all the din of the storm the noise of the workmen could be heard; the thud of the masses of clay as they were dumped, the rattling of the carts and the rustling of the straw as it slid down from above went on unceasingly. Now and then the whining of a little yellow dog became audible, that was knocked about among the men and teams, shivering and as if lost; but suddenly there sounded a piteous howl from the little creature, from down below in the gulf. Hauke looked down; he had seen it being thrown into the opening from above; an angry flush shot up into his face. "Stop! Hold on!" he shouted down to the carts, for the wet clay was being poured on without interruption.
"Why?" a rough voice from below called up to him; "surely not on account of the wretched beast of a dog?"
"Stop! I say," shouted Hauke again; "Bring me the dog! Our work shall not be stained by any outrage!"
But not a hand moved; only a few shovels of sticky clay still flew down beside the howling animal. Thereupon he put spurs to his horse, so that it shrieked aloud and dashed down the dike, and all stood back before him. "The dog!" he shouted; "I want the dog!"
A hand slapped him gently on the shoulder as if it were the hand of old Jewe Manners; but when he looked round it was only a friend of the old man's. "Take care, dikegrave!" he whispered to Hauke. "You have no friends among these men; let the dog be!"
The wind whistled, the rain streamed; the men had stuck their spades into the ground, some of them had thrown them down. Hauke bent down to the old man: "Will you hold my horse, Harke Jens?" he asked; and the man had scarcely got the reins into his hand before Hauke had jumped into the chasm and was holding the little whining creature in his arms; and almost in the same instant he was up again in the saddle and galloping back up the dike. His eyes traveled over the men who were standing by the wagons. "Who was it?" he called. "Who threw the creature down?"
For a moment they were all silent; for anger flashed from the dikegrave's haggard face and they had superstitious fear of him. From one of the teams a bull-necked fellow stepped up to him. "I did not do it, dikegrave," he said and biting a little end off a roll of chewing tobacco he calmly stuffed that into his mouth before he went on; "but whoever did it did right; if your dike is to hold, something living must go into it!"
"Something living? In what catechism did you learn that?"
"In none, sir," replied the fellow and an insolent laugh came from his throat; "even our grandfathers knew that, who could certainly have measured themselves with you in Christianity! A child is still better; if that can't be had, a dog probably does instead!"
"Be silent with your heathenish doctrines!" Hauke shouted at him; "it would fill it up better if you were thrown in!"
"Oh ho!" The shout rang out from a dozen throats and the dikegrave found himself surrounded by wrathful faces and clenched fists; he saw that these were indeed no friends; the thought of his dike came over him with a shock; what should he do if they should all throw down their shovels now? And as he looked down he saw again old Jewe Manners' friend going about among the workmen, speaking to this one and that, laughing to one, tapping another on the shoulder with a friendly smile, and one after the other took hold of his spade again; a few moments more and the work was once more in full swing. What more did he want? The water-course would have to be closed and he hid the dog securely enough in the folds of his cloak. With sudden decision he turned his white horse towards the nearest wagon: "Straw to the edge!" he shouted commandingly and mechanically the teamster obeyed; soon it rustled down into the depths and on all sides the work stirred anew and all hands took hold busily.
The work had gone on thus for another hour; it was after six o'clock and already deep dusk was descending; the rain had ceased. Hauke called the superintendents to him as he sat on his horse: "Tomorrow morning at four o'clock," he said, "every man must be at his place; the moon will still be up; with God's help we shall be able to finish then! And one more thing," he called as they were about to go. "Do you know this dog?" and he took the trembling animal out of his cloak.
They replied in the negative; only one of them said: "He's been running about begging in the village for days; he doesn't belong to anyone!"
"Then he is mine," said the dikegrave. "Don't forget—tomorrow morning at four o'clock!" and rode away.
When he got home Ann Grete was just coming out of the door; she was cleanly and neatly dressed and it passed through his mind that she was just on her way to the tailor in the conventicle: "Lift up your apron!" he called to her and as she involuntarily obeyed he threw the little dog, covered with clay as he was, into it. "Take him to little Wienke; he shall be her little playfellow! But wash and warm him first, thus you will be doing a deed that is pleasing to God, for the creature is almost benumbed."
And Ann Grete could not refuse to obey her master, and so on that evening she did not get to the conventicle.
And on the following day the last touch of a spade was put to the new dike; the wind had gone down; now and again the gulls and avocets hovered above the land and water in graceful flight; from Jevershallig resounded the thousand-voiced honking of the barnacle geese that even at that time of year were enjoying themselves on the coast of the North Sea, and out of the morning mist, which hid the broad expanse of marsh, a golden autumn day gradually rose and illumined the new work of men's hands.
A few weeks later the chief dikegrave came with the government commissioners to inspect it. A great banquet, the first since the funeral repast at the time of old Tede Volkerts' death, was given in the dikegrave's house. All the dike commissioners and the men having the largest holdings of land in the new koog were invited. After dinner the dikegrave's carriage and all those of the guests were got ready. The chief dikegrave put Elke into the gig, before which the brown gelding stood stamping; then he jumped in himself and took the reins; he wanted to drive his dikegrave's clever wife himself. So they drove off merrily from the mound and out into the road, up the way to the new dike and along the top of that round, recently reclaimed koog. In the meantime a light northwest wind had sprung up and the tide was driven up on the north and west sides of the new dike; but it could not fail to be noticed that the gentle slope broke the force of the waves. The government commissioners were loud in their praise of the dikegrave, soon drowning the doubts that the local commissioners now and then hesitatingly uttered.
This occasion too passed by; but there was still another satisfaction in store for the dikegrave one day when he was riding along the new dike sunk in quiet self-congratulatory thought. The question might well occur to him why the koog, which never would have been there but for him and in which the sweat of his brow and his sleepless nights were buried, had now been named "the new Caroline Koog," after one of the princesses of the ruling house; but it certainly was so: in all the documents pertaining to it that was the name used, in some of them it was even written in red Gothic letters. At that point he looked up and saw two laborers with their farm implements coming towards him, one some twenty paces behind the other: "Wait for me, then," he heard the one that was following call; but the other, who was just standing at the path that led down into the koog, called back: "Some other time, Jens! It's late; I've got to dig clay here!"
"Where?"
"Why here, in the Hauke-Haien-Koog!"
He called it aloud as he ran down the path as if he wanted the whole marsh that lay below to hear. But to Hauke it was as if he heard his fame proclaimed; he rose in his saddle, put spurs to his horse and looked with steady eyes across the broad scene that lay at his left. "Hauke-Haien-Koog!" he repeated softly; that sounded as if it could never be called anything else. Let them be as obstinate as they would, his name could not be downed; the princess' name—would it not soon exist only in mouldy old documents? The white horse galloped on proudly and in Hauke's ears the words continued to ring: "Hauke-Haien-Koog! Hauke-Haien-Koog!" In his thoughts the new dike almost grew to be an eighth wonder of the world; in all Friesland there was none to equal it! And he let the white horse dance; he felt as if he stood in the midst of all Friesians; he towered above them by a head and his keen glance swept over them with pity.
Gradually three years had passed since the building of the new dike; the latter had proved successful and the expense of repairs had been but slight. In the koog white clover was now blooming nearly everywhere and when you walked across the protected pastures the summer breeze wafted a whole cloud of sweet scent towards you. It had been necessary to replace the nominal shares with real ones and to assign permanent holdings to each of the men interested. Hauke had not been slow in acquiring a few new ones himself, before that; Ole Peters had held back stubbornly; no part of the new koog belonged to him. Even so it had not been possible to make the division without vexation and dispute; but it had been done nevertheless, and this day too lay behind the dikegrave.
From then on he lived a lonely life, devoting himself to his duties as a farmer and a dikegrave, and to his immediate family; his old friends were no longer alive and he was not fitted to make new ones. But under his roof was peace which even his quiet child did not disturb; it spoke little; the continual questioning that is peculiar to brighter children seldom came from its lips and when it did it was usually in such a way that it was difficult to answer; but the dear, simple little face almost always wore an expression of content. The little girl had two playfellows and that was all she wanted: when she wandered about the mound the little yellow dog that Hauke had saved always accompanied her, jumping and springing, and whenever the dog appeared little Wienke was not far away either. The dog was called "Perle" and her second comrade, a peewit-gull, was "Klaus."
It was a hoary old woman who had installed Klaus at the farm; the eighty-year-old Trien' Jans had no longer been able to make a living in her cottage on the outside dike, and Elke had thought that the worn-out servant of her grandfather might still find with them a few peaceful hours at the end of her life and a comfortable place to die. So half by force she and Hauke had fetched the old body to the farm and settled her in the little northwest room of the new barn, which the dikegrave had been obliged to build when he enlarged his place a few years before. A few of the maids had been given their rooms next to hers so that they could look after her at night. All round the walls she had her old household goods; a strong box made of red cedar, above which hung two colored pictures of the prodigal son, a spinning wheel which had long since been laid aside and a very clean four-post bed in front of which stood a clumsy footstool covered with the white skin of the deceased Angora cat. But she also still had something living, and had brought it with her: this was the gull Klaus that had stuck to her for years and been fed by her; when winter came, to be sure, it flew south with the other gulls and did not come again till the wormwood exhaled its sweet odor along the shore.
The barn lay somewhat farther down the mound; from her window the old woman could not see out over the dike to the sea. "You've got me here like a prisoner," she murmured one day when Hauke came in, and pointed with her gnarled finger to the fens which lay spread out below. "Where is Jeverssand? Out there above the red or above the black ox?"
"What do you want with Jeverssand?" asked Hauke.
"Oh, never mind Jeverssand," grumbled the old woman. "But I want to see where, long ago, my lad went to God!"
"If you want to see that," replied Hauke, "you must go and sit up under the ash-tree; from there you can look well out over the sea."
"Yes," said the old woman; "yes, if I had your young legs, dikegrave!"
For a long time such were the thanks for the aid that the dikegrave and his wife had given her; then all at once there was a change. One morning Wienke's little head peeped in at her through the half-open door. "Well!" called the old woman, who was sitting on her wooden chair with her hands clasped, "what message have you got to tell me?"
But the child came silently nearer and looked at her unceasingly with indifferent eyes.
"Are you the dikegrave's child?" asked Trien' Jans, and, as the child lowered her head as if nodding, she continued: "Sit down here on my footstool then! It was an Angora tom-cat—as big as that! But your father killed him. If he were still alive you could ride on him."
Wienke looked at the white skin dumbly; then she knelt down and began to stroke it with her little hands as children do a living cat or dog. "Poor Tomcat!" she said, and continued her caresses.
"There," exclaimed the old woman after a while, "now it's enough; and you can still sit on him today; perhaps your father only killed him for that!" Then she lifted the child up by both arms and set her down roughly on the stool. But as Wienke sat there silent and immovable, only looking at her all the time, she began to shake her head: "Thou art punishing him, Lord God! Yes, yes, Thou art punishing him!" she murmured; but pity for the child seemed to come over her after all: she put out her bony hand and stroked the little girl's sparse hair and an expression came into the child's eyes as if she liked the touch.
A QUIET CORNER
Jacob Alberts
From now on Wienke came to see the old woman in her room daily. Soon she sat down of her own accord on the Angora footstool and Trien' Jans gave her little pieces of meat or bread of which she always kept some on hand, and let her throw them on the floor; then the gull shot out of some corner, screeching, with outstretched wings, and fell upon them. At first the child used to be frightened and screamed at the big flapping bird; but soon it was like a game they had learnt, and as soon as she stuck even her head through the crack of the door the bird shot out towards her and lighted on her head or shoulder till the old woman came to her aid and the feeding could begin. Trien' Jans, who in general could not bear even to have anyone stretch out his hand towards her Klaus, now looked on patiently while the child gradually won the bird entirely away from her. It let Wienke catch it willingly; she carried it about and wrapped it in her apron, and, when, on the mound, the little yellow dog sometimes sprang about her and jumped jealously at the bird, she would cry out: "Not you, not you, Perle!" and would lift the gull so high in her little arms that it would free itself and fly away shrieking across the mound, and the dog would try to secure its place in her arms by jumping and rubbing against his little mistress.
When Hauke's or Elke's eyes chanced to fall on this odd group, like four leaves all held fast on one stem by only a common lack, a tender glance would indeed fly towards their child; when they turned away there remained in their faces only pain which each bore for himself, for they had never yet unburdened their hearts to each other about the child. One summer morning as Wienke was sitting with the old woman and the two animals on the big stone in front of the barn door, her parents, the dikegrave with his white horse behind him, the reins over his arm, passed by; he was going out on the dike and had fetched his horse from the fens himself; on the mound his wife had slipped her arm through his. The sun shone down warmly; it was almost sultry, and now and then there came a puff of wind from the south-southeast. The child must have found it tiresome where she was: "Wienke wants to go," she called, shook the gull from her lap, and reached for her father's hand.
"Come along then," he said.
But Elke exclaimed: "In this wind? She'll be blown away!"
"I'll hold on to her; and the air is warm today and the water merry; she can see it dance."
So Elke ran into the house and fetched a little shawl and a cap for her child. "But there's going to be bad weather," she said; "see that you hurry and go and get back again soon."
Hauke laughed: "That won't catch us!" and lifted the child up to his saddle in front of him. Elke remained out on the mound for a while and, shading her eyes with her hand, watched the two trotting out on the road and over to the dike; Trien' Jans sat on the stone and mumbled something incomprehensible with her faded lips.
The child lay without moving in her father's arm; and it seemed as if, oppressed by the thundery air, she were breathing with difficulty. He bent his head to her: "Well, Wienke?" he asked.
The child looked at him for a while. "Father," she said, "you can surely do that! Can't you do everything?"
"What ought I to be able to do, Wienke?"
But she was silent; she seemed not to have understood her own question.
It was high tide; when they came up on the dike the reflection of the sun on the great expanse of water shone in her eyes, a whirlwind drove the waves up high in an eddy, and others followed and beat splashingly against the shore; she clasped her little hands so fearfully about her father's fist in which he held the reins that the white horse bounded to one side. Her pale blue eyes looked up in confused terror to Hauke: "The water, Father, the water!" she cried.
But he freed himself gently and said: "Be quiet, child, you are with your father; the water won't hurt you!"
She smoothed the pale blonde hair away from her forehead and ventured to look out at the sea again. "It won't hurt me," she said trembling; "no, tell it not to hurt us; you can do that and then it won't hurt us."
"I can't do that, child," replied Hauke seriously; "but the dike on which we're riding protects us and it was your father who thought that out and had it built."
Her eyes looked at him as if she did not quite understand that; then she hid her strikingly small head in her father's loose coat.
"Why do you hide yourself, Wienke?" he whispered to her; "are you still frightened?" And a trembling voice came from the folds of his coat: "Wienke doesn't want to see; but you can do everything, can't you, Father?"
A distant clap of thunder rolled up against the wind. "Oh ho!" exclaimed Hauke, "there it comes!" and turned his horse to go back. "Now we'll go home to Mother."
The child drew a deep breath, but not until they had reached the mound and the house did she raise her little head from her father's breast. Then in the room when Elke had taken off the little shawl and the cap she remained standing like a little dumb ninepin in front of her mother. "Well, Wienke," said the latter and shook the little girl gently, "do you like the great water?"
But the child opened her eyes wide: "It speaks," she said; "Wienke is frightened."
"It doesn't speak; it only roars and surges."
The child looked off into the distance. "Has it legs?" she asked again; "can it come over the dike?"
"No, Wienke, your father takes care of that, he is a dikegrave."
"Yes," said the child and clapped her hands with an idiotic smile; "Father can do everything—everything." Then suddenly, turning away from her mother, she cried: "Let Wienke go to Trien' Jans, she has red apples!"
And Elke opened the door and let the child out. After she had shut it again she looked up at her husband, and an expression of the deepest sorrow lay in the eyes which hitherto had always brought consolation and courage to his aid.
He held out his hand and pressed hers as if there were no need of any further word between them; but she said softly: "No, Hauke, let me speak: the child that I have borne to you after waiting for years will always remain a child. O, dear God! She is feeble-minded; I must say it before you once."
"I have known it a long time," said Hauke, and held tight the hand that his wife wanted to draw away from him.
"And so we are still alone after all," she said.
But Hauke shook his head: "I love her and she throws her little arms around me and presses herself close against my breast; I would not do without that for any treasure!"
The woman looked darkly ahead of her: "But why?" she said; "What have I, poor mother, done to deserve it?"
"Yes, Elke, I too have asked that, asked Him who alone can know; but, as we both know, the Almighty gives men no answer—perhaps because we should not understand it."
He had taken his wife's other hand and drew her gently to him: "Don't let yourself grow disturbed and be hindered in loving your child, as you do; you can be sure she understands that."
At that Elke threw herself on her husband's breast and wept her fill and was no longer alone with her sorrow. Then suddenly she smiled at him; after pressing his hand vehemently she ran out and fetched her child from old Trien' Jans' room, and took her on her lap and fondled and kissed her till the little girl said stammeringly: "Mother, my dear Mother!"
Thus the people on the dikegrave's farm lived quietly together; if the child had not been there much would have been lacking.
Gradually the summer went by; the birds of passage had passed through, the air was empty of the song of the larks; only in front of the barns where they picked up grains of corn, while the threshing was going on, occasionally one or two could be heard as they flew away screeching; everything was already hard frozen. In the kitchen of the main house old Trien' Jans sat one afternoon on the wooden step of a stairway that led up from beside the range to the attic. During the last few weeks it seemed as if she had returned to life; she came gladly into the kitchen sometimes, and saw Elke at work there; there could no longer be any question of her legs not being able to carry her there, since one day when little Wienke had pulled her up there by her apron. Now the child knelt at her side and looked with her quiet eyes into the flames that flickered up out of the stove-hole. One of her little hands clasped the sleeve of the old woman, the other lay in her own pale blonde hair. Trien' Jans was telling a story: "You know," she said, "I was in your great grandfather's service as a housemaid and then I had to feed the pigs; he was cleverer than them all—then, it is terribly long ago, but one evening, the moon was shining and they closed the outer sluice and she could not get back into the sea. Oh, how she screamed and tore her hard shaggy hair with her little fish-hands! Yes, child, I saw it and heard her screaming myself! The ditches between the fens were all full of water and the moon shining on them made them sparkle like silver and she swam from one ditch into the other and lifted her arms and struck what were her hands together so that you could hear it a long way off, as if she wanted to pray; but, child, those creatures cannot pray. I was sitting in front of the door on a few beams that had been brought up there to be used in building, and looking far out across the fens; and the water-woman still swam in the ditches, and when she raised her arms they too glittered like silver and diamonds. At last I did not see her any more and the wild geese and gulls that I had not heard the whole time began to fly through the air again, hissing and cackling."
The old woman ceased; the child had caught up one word. "Could not pray?" she asked. "What do you say? Who was it?"
"Child," said the old woman, "it was the water-woman; those are accursed creatures who can never be saved."
"Never be saved," repeated the child and her little breast heaved with a deep sigh as if she had understood that.
"Trien' Jans," came a deep voice from the kitchen door and she started slightly. It was the dikegrave Hauke Haien who was leaning there against the post. "What are you saying to the child? Haven't I told you to keep your legends to yourself or to tell them to the geese and hens?"
The old woman looked at him with an angry glance and pushed the little girl away from her: "Those are no legends," she murmured half to herself, "my great-uncle told me that."
"Your great-uncle, Trien'? Why just now you said you had experienced it yourself!"
"It's all the same," said the old woman; "but you don't believe, Hauke Haien; I suppose you want to make my great-uncle out a liar." Then she drew nearer to the range and stretched her hands out over the flames in the grate.
The dikegrave threw a glance towards the window; it was scarcely dusk as yet outside. "Come, Wienke," he said and drew his feeble-minded child to him; "come with me; I want to show you something from out on the dike! Only we shall have to walk; the white horse is at the blacksmith's." Then he went with her into the living-room and Elke tied thick woolen shawls about the little girl's throat and shoulders; soon after her father took her out on the old dike towards the northwest, past Jeverssand, to where the flats lay broad before them almost farther than the eye could reach.
Part of the time he carried her, part of the time he led her by the hand; the twilight deepened gradually; in the distance everything disappeared in mist and vapor. But there, where one could still see, the invisibly swelling currents of the shallows had broken the ice, and, as Hauke had once seen it in his youth, smoking fog now rose from the cracks along which the uncanny, impish figures were once more to be seen hopping towards one another and bowing and suddenly stretching out wide, in a terrible fashion.
The child clung to her father in fear and covered her little face with his hand: "The sea-devils!" she whispered tremblingly between his fingers; "the sea-devils!"
He shook his head: "No, Wienke, neither water-women nor sea-devils; there are no such things; who told you about them?"
She looked up at him dully but did not answer. He stroked her cheeks tenderly: "Just look again," he said; "those are only poor hungry birds. Just see how the big one spreads his wings now; they are catching the fish that come into the steaming cracks."
"Fish," repeated Wienke.
"Yes, child, all those creatures are alive like us, there is nothing else. But God is everywhere!"
Little Wienke had fixed her eyes on the ground and held her breath; she looked as if she were gazing into an abyss terrified. Perhaps it only seemed so; her father looked at her long; he bent down and looked into her little face, but no feeling of her imprisoned soul was visible in it. He lifted her in his arms and stuck her benumbed hands into one of his thick woolen gloves: "there, my little Wienke," and the child probably did not hear the tone of intense tenderness in his words—"there, warm yourself close to me! You are our child after all, our only one. You love us——" The man's voice broke, but the little girl pressed her head tenderly into his rough beard.
Thus they went home full of peace.
After the New Year, trouble once more entered into the house; the dikegrave was seized with a marsh fever; it went hard with him too, and when, under Elke's nursing and care, he recovered, he scarcely seemed to be the same man. The languor of his body also lay upon his mind, and Elke was worried to see how easily content he was at all times. Nevertheless towards the end of March he was moved to mount his white horse and ride out again for the first time along the top of his dike. It was on an afternoon and the sun, which had been shining earlier in the day, had long since been concealed by the haze.
A few times during the winter there had been high tides but they had done no serious damage; only over on the other bank a herd of sheep on an islet had been drowned and a bit of the foreland had been washed away; here on this side and in the new koog no harm worth mentioning had been done. But in the previous night a stronger gale had raged and now the dikegrave himself had to ride out and inspect everything with his own eyes. He had already ridden all along the new dike, beginning below at the southeast corner, and everything was in good condition, but as he came towards the northeast corner where the new dike ran up to the old one, the former was indeed uninjured, but where before the water-course had reached the old one and flowed along beside it, he saw that a great strip of the grass-line had been destroyed and washed away, and a hollow had been eaten in the body of the dike by the tide, which moreover, had thus laid bare a whole maze of mouse-passages. Hauke dismounted and inspected the damage from nearby: the destructive mouse-passages seemed unmistakably to continue on beyond where they could be seen.
He was seriously frightened; all this should have been thought of and prevented at the time the new dike was built; as it had been overlooked then it must be taken care of now! The cattle were not yet out on the fens, the grass was unusually backward; in whatever direction he glanced it all looked bleak and empty. He mounted his horse and rode back and forth along the bank: the tide was low and he did not fail to perceive that the current from outside had bored a new bed for itself in the mud and had come from the northwest against the old dike: the new one however, as far as it was involved, had been able to withstand the onslaught of the waves owing to its gentler profile.
A new mountain of annoyance and work rose before the dikegrave's mental vision: not only would the old dike have to be strengthened here but its profile would also have to be approximated to the new one; above all, the water-course, from which danger now threatened again, would have to be diverted by new dams or brush hedges. Once more he rode along the new dike to the extreme northwest corner and then back again, his eyes fixed on the newly channeled bed of the water-course, which was plainly to be seen at his side in the bared mud. The white horse fretted to go on, and snorted and pawed the ground, but Hauke held him back; he wanted to ride slowly and he wanted also to master the inner disquietude which was fermenting and seething within him with ever-increasing strength.
If a storm should come bringing with it high tides—such a one as in 1655, when men and property were swallowed up uncounted—if it should come again as it had already come several times!—a hot shudder trickled over the rider—the old dike, it could never stand the violent attack that would be made on it! What, what could be done then? There would be one way, and one way only, to save perhaps the old koog, and the property and life in it. Hauke felt his heart stand still, his usually strong head whirl; he did not speak it aloud, but within him it was spoken clearly enough: your koog, the Hauke-Haien-Koog, would have to be sacrificed and the new dike broken through.
Already he saw in imagination the rushing flood breaking in and covering grass and clover with its salt seething froth. His spur gashed into the white horse's flank, and with a cry it flew forward along the dike and down the path that led to the dikegrave's mound.
His head full of inward alarm and confused plans, he came home. He threw himself into his armchair and when Elke entered the room with their daughter he stood up again, lifted the child up and kissed her; then he drove the little yellow dog away from him with a few light blows. "I've got to go up to the tavern again!" he said and took his cap from the peg on the door, where he had only just hung it.
His wife looked at him troubled: "What do you want to do there? It's already growing dark, Hauke."
"Dike affairs," he murmured. "I'll meet some of the commissioners there."
She followed him and pressed his hand, for by the time he had finished speaking he was already outside the door. Hauke Haien, who hitherto had made all his decisions alone, now felt anxious to hear a word from those whose opinions he had formerly regarded as scarcely worth considering. In the inn he found Ole Peters sitting at the card table with two of the commissioners and a man who lived in the koog. "You've come from out on the dike, I suppose, dikegrave," said the former picking up the half-dealt cards and throwing them down again.
"Yes, Ole," replied Hauke; "I was out there; it looks bad."
"Bad? Well, it will cost a few hundred sods and some straw work I suppose; I was out there too this afternoon."
"We shan't get off as cheap as that, Ole," answered the dikegrave. "The water-course is there again and even if it doesn't strike against the old dike from the north now, it does from the northwest."
"You ought to have left it where you found it," said Ole dryly.
"That means," replied Hauke, "you're not concerned in the new koog and therefore it should not exist. That is your own fault. But if we have to plant brush hedges to protect the old dike the green clover behind the new one will more than make up for that."
"What do you say, dikegrave?" cried the commissioners; "hedges? How many? You like to do everything the most expensive way!"
The cards lay on the table untouched. "I'll tell you, dikegrave," said Ole Peters leaning his arms on the table, "your new koog that you've foisted on us is eating us up. Everyone is still suffering under the cost of your broad dike; now it's consuming the old dike too and you want us to renew that! Fortunately it's not so bad; it held this time and will continue to do so. Just mount your white horse again tomorrow and look at it once more."
Hauke had come to the tavern out of the peace of his home. Behind the words he had just heard, which after all were fairly moderate, there lay—he could not fail to recognize it—an obstinate resistance. It seemed to him that he lacked the strength he had formerly had to cope with it. "I'll do as you advise, Ole," he said: "only I'm afraid I shall find it as I saw it today."
A restless night followed this day; Hauke tossed sleeplessly about on his pillow. "What is the matter?" asked Elke, kept awake by worry about her husband; "if there is anything on your mind tell it to me; we have always done that."
"It is not of any consequence, Elke," he replied; "there are some repairs to be made to the dike, to the sluices; you know that I always have to think such things out in my mind at night." He said nothing further; he wanted to keep himself free to act as he chose. Without his being conscious of it his wife's clear insight and strong mind were an obstacle to him in his present weakness and involuntarily he avoided it.
On the following morning as he came out onto the dike he saw a different world from the one he had found the day before; it was indeed low tide again but the day was growing and the rays from the bright spring sun fell almost perpendicularly on the shallows which extended as far as the eye could reach; the white gulls glided calmly hither and thither and, invisible above them, high under the azure sky the larks sang their eternal melody. Hauke, who did not know how nature can deceive us with her charm, stood on the northwest corner of the dike and sought the new bed of the water-course which had given him such a shock the day before; but with the sunlight darting directly down from the zenith he could not even find it at first; not until he shaded his eyes with his hand from the dazzling rays did it show itself unmistakably. Nevertheless the shadows in the dusk of the evening before must have deceived him; it was outlined but very weakly now; the mouse-passages that had been laid bare must have been more responsible for the damage done to the dike than the tide. To be sure, it must be changed; but by careful digging and, as Ole Peters had said, by fresh sodding and a few rods of straw work the damage could be repaired.
"It wasn't so bad, after all," he said to himself with relief, "you made a fool of yourself yesterday!" He called the commissioners together and the work was decided upon, for the first time without any objection being raised. The dikegrave thought he felt a strengthening calm spreading through his still weakened body; and in a few weeks everything was neatly carried out.
The year went on but the older it grew the more clearly the newly laid grass shot up green through its covering of straw, with the more agitation did Hauke walk or ride past this spot. He turned away his eyes, he rode close along the inside of the dike; several times when he would have had to pass the place and his horse was ready saddled for him to start he had it led back into the stable; then again, when he had nothing to do there, he would suddenly hurry out there on foot just so as to get away quickly and unseen from his mound; sometimes too he had turned back, he had not been able to trust himself to examine the dismal place anew; and finally he had felt as if he would like to tear everything open again with his hands; for this bit of the dike lay before his eyes like a prick of conscience that had taken form outside of him. And yet his hand could not touch it again and he could speak of it to no one, not even to his wife. Thus September had come; in the night a moderate wind had raged and finally had shifted to the northwest. On the following dull morning, when the tide was low, Hauke rode out on the dike and a start ran through him as he let his eyes rove over the shallows; there, coming from the northwest he suddenly saw it again and cut through more sharply and deeply, the new spectral bed of the water-course; exert his eyes as he might, it refused to disappear.
When he came home Elke took his hand; "What is the matter, Hauke?" she asked, looking into his gloomy face; "surely there is no new misfortune? We are so happy now; I feel as if you were at peace with them all."
In the face of these words he could not express his confused fear.
"No, Elke," he said, "no one makes an enemy of me; only it is a responsible office to protect the community from God's sea."
He freed himself so as to avoid further questioning from the wife that he loved. He went into the stable and shed as if he had to inspect everything; but he saw nothing around him; he was only intent on quieting his prick of conscience, on trying to convince himself that it was a morbidly exaggerated fear.
"The year of which I am telling you," said my host, the schoolmaster, after a while, "was the year 1756, which will never be forgotten about here; in Hauke Haien's house it brought with it a death. At the end of September the almost ninety-year-old Trien' Jans was found dying in the room which had been given up to her in the barn. According to her desire she had been propped up against her pillows and her eyes looked through the little leaded panes into the distance; there must have been a thinner over a denser layer of air lying there along the sky for at this moment there was a clear mirage and the sea was reflected like a glistening strip of silver above the edge of the dike so that it shone dazzlingly into the room; the south end of Jeverssand too was visible."
At the foot of the bed crouched little Wienke and held her father's hand tightly in one of hers as he stood close by. Death was just engraving the Hippocratic face on the dying woman and the child stared breathlessly at the uncanny, incomprehensible change in the plain countenance with which she was so familiar. "What is she doing? What is it, Father?" she whispered fearfully and dug her finger nails into her father's hand.
"She is dying," said the dikegrave.
"Dying," repeated the child and seemed to fall into confused thought.
But the old woman moved her lips once more: "Jins! Jins!" a shrill cry of distress broke from her and she stretched out her bony arms towards the reflection of the sea that glistened outside: "Help me! Help me! You are above the water. * * * God have mercy on the others!"
Her arms sank, there was a slight cracking of the bedstead; she had ceased to live.
The child drew a deep sigh and raised her pale eyes to her father: "Is she still dying?" she asked.
"She has finished!" said the dikegrave, and took the child in his arms. "She is far away from us now, with God."
"With God," repeated the child and was silent for a while as if she were thinking over the words. "Is it good to be with God?"
"Yes, best of all." But in Hauke's heart the dying woman's last words tolled heavily. "God have mercy on the others!"—the words sounded softly within him. What did the old witch mean? Can the dying prophesy?
Soon, after Trien' Jans had been buried up by the church, there began to be ever louder talk of all kinds of misfortune and curious vermin that were said to have frightened the people in northern Friesland. And it was certain that on the Sunday in Mid-Lent the golden cock had been thrown down from the top of the tower by a whirlwind; and it was true too that in midsummer a shower of large insects fell from heaven like snow so that it was impossible to open one's eyes and they lay nearly as high as a hand on the fens and no one had ever seen anything like it. But after the end of September when the head-man and the maid Ann Grete came back from town where they had driven with grain and butter for the market, they climbed down from their wagon with faces pale with fear. "What is it? What is the matter with you?" cried the other maids, who had come running out when they heard the sound of the wagon.
Ann Grete in her traveling dress stepped breathlessly into the roomy kitchen. "Oh, hurry up and tell us!" called the girls again, "where is the misfortune?"
"Oh, may our dear Jesus protect us!" cried Ann Grete. "You know from the other side, across the water, that old Molly from Siegelhof—we always stand together with our butter at the corner near the apothecary's—she told me about it and Iven Johns said too, 'that means a misfortune,' he said, 'a misfortune for the whole of northern Friesland; believe me Ann Grete!' And"—she lowered her voice—"perhaps after all it's not all right with the dikegrave's white horse."
"Ssh! Ssh!" said the other maids.
"Yes, yes; what does it matter to me! But over there, on the other side, it's going on worse than with us! Not only flies and vermin, blood too has fallen like rain from heaven; and on the Sunday morning after that when the pastor went to his washbasin there were five death's-heads, the size of peas, in it, and they all came to see it; in the month of August horrible red-headed caterpillars went through the land and ate up the grain and flour and bread and whatever they could find and no fire was able to destroy them!"
Ann Grete suddenly ceased; none of the maids had noticed that their mistress had come into the kitchen. "What tales are you telling there?" she asked. "Don't let your master hear that!" And as they all wanted to begin to tell her she went on, "It's not necessary; I heard enough of it; go about your work, that will do you more good!" Then she took Ann Grete with her into the sitting-room to go through her market accounts with her.
So in the dikegrave's house none of the family paid any attention to the superstitious gossip that was going about; but it was different in the other houses and the longer the evenings grew the more easily did it find its way in. Everyone lived as if in an oppressive atmosphere and secretly people said to themselves that a misfortune, and a heavy one, would fall on northern Friesland.
It was in October, before All Saints' Day. A strong wind had blown from the southwest all day; in the evening the crescent moon was in the sky, dark brown clouds drove past and a medley of shade and dull light flew across the earth; the storm was growing. In the dikegrave's room the empty supper table still stood; the men had been sent into the stable to look after the cattle; the maids were busy in the house and in the attics seeing that the doors and windows were securely fastened so that the storm should not gain an entrance and do damage. Hauke stood beside his wife at the window; he had just swallowed down his supper; he had been out on the dike. He had gone there on foot early in the afternoon; here and there, where the dike looked weak, he had had pointed stakes and sacks of clay or earth piled up; everywhere he had left men to drive in the stakes and make dams with the sacks in front as soon as the tide should begin to damage the dike. The largest number he had placed at the corner towards the northwest at the intersection of the old and new dikes; their instructions were not to leave the places assigned to them except in case of necessity. That was what he had left behind him and then, scarcely a quarter of an hour ago, he had come back to the house wet and disheveled and now, his ear fixed on the gusts of winds that rattled the leaded panes, he gazed out absently into the wild night; the clock behind the pane of glass in the wall was just striking eight. The child, who was standing beside her mother, started and buried her head in her mother's dress. "Klaus!" she called, crying, "where is my Klaus?"
She might well ask, for this year, as indeed the year before, the gull had not flown away for the winter. Her father did not heed the question, but her mother lifted the child in her arms. "Your Klaus is in the barn," she said, "he has a warm place there."
"Warm?" said Wienke, "is that good?"
"Yes, that's good."
The master still stood at the window. "It won't do any longer, Elke," he said; "call one of the girls, the storm will break in the panes; the shutters must be screwed on!"
A GENTLEMAN OF THE OLD SCHOOL
Jacob Alberts
At her mistress's word the maid had run out; they could see from the room how her skirts were blown about; but when she unfastened the catch the wind tore the shutter out of her hand and threw it against the window so that a few broken panes flew into the room and one of the lights flared and went out. Hauke himself had to go out to help and it was only with great difficulty that the shutters were at last got into place. When they opened the door again to come into the house a gust of wind followed them that made the glass and silver in the cupboard shake and clatter; upstairs in the house above their heads the beams trembled and cracked as if the gale were trying to tear the roof off the walls. But Hauke did not come back into the room. Elke heard him walking across the floor towards the stable. "The white horse! The white horse, John; quick!" She heard him call the order; then he came into the room, his hair tumbled but his gray eyes sparkling. "The wind has shifted!" he cried, "to the northwest, at half spring-tide! No wind; we have never experienced such a storm!"
Elke had grown as pale as death: "And you must go out there again?"
He seized both her hands and pressed them convulsively: "That I must, Elke."
Slowly she raised her dark eyes to his and for a few seconds they looked at each other; but it was like an eternity. "Yes, Hauke," answered the woman; "I know well that you must!"
There was a sound of trotting before the front door. She flung herself on Hauke's neck and for a moment it seemed as if she could not let him go; but that too was only for a second. "This is our fight," said Hauke; "you are safe here, no tide has ever come up to this house. And pray to God to be with me too!"
Hauke wrapped himself in his cloak and Elke took a scarf and wound it carefully round his neck; she wanted to say a word, but her trembling lips refused to utter it.
Outside the white horse neighed so that it sounded like a trumpet in the howling storm. Elke went out with her husband; the old ash creaked as if it were being split asunder. "Mount, master," called the man, "the white horse is as if mad; the rein might break." Hauke threw his arms round his wife: "I shall be here again at sunrise!"
Already he had leapt onto his horse; the animal reared; then, like a war-horse rushing into battle, it charged down the mound with its rider out into the night and the howling of the storm. "Father, my Father!" cried a child's plaintive voice after him: "my dear Father!"
Wienke had run out after them in the dark; but she had not gone more than a hundred steps before she stumbled against a heap of earth and fell.
The man Johns brought the crying child back to her mother; the latter was leaning against the trunk of the ash, the boughs of which lashed the air above her, staring out absently into the night in which her husband had disappeared; when the roaring of the gale and the distant thunder of the sea ceased for a moment she started as if frightened; she felt as if everything was trying just to destroy him and would be dumb instantly when it had got him. Her knees trembled, the wind had blown her hair down and now played with it at will. "Here is the child!" John shouted to her; "hold her tight!" and he pressed the little girl into her mother's arms.
"The child? I'd forgotten you, Wienke!" she exclaimed; "God forgive me." Then she hugged her to her breast as closely as only love can and dropped on her knees: "Lord God, and Thou, my Jesus, let us not become widow and orphan! Protect him, Oh dear God; only Thou and I, we alone know him!" And there was no more interruption to the gale; it resounded and thundered as if the whole world were coming to an end in one vast reverberation of sound.
"Go into the house, Missis!" said Johns; "come!" And he helped them and led the two into the house and into the sitting-room.
The dikegrave, Hauke Haien, flew forward on his white horse towards the dike. The narrow path was like a mire, for excessively heavy rain had fallen in the preceding days; nevertheless the wet sticky clay did not seem to hold the horse's hoofs, it moved as if treading on a firm dry road. The clouds drove across the sky in a mad chase; below, the wide marsh lay like an unrecognizable desert filled with agitated shades; from the water behind the dike came an ever-increasing dull roar as if it must swallow up everything else. "Forward, my white horse!" cried Hauke; "we're riding our worst ride!"
At that moment a sound like a death cry came from under his mount's hoofs. He pulled up and looked round; at his side, close above the ground, screeching mockingly as they went, moved a flock of white gulls, half flying, half tossed by the gale; they were seeking protection on shore. One of them—the moon shone fleetingly through the clouds—lay crushed on the path: it seemed to the rider as if a red ribbon fluttered from its neck. "Klaus!" he cried. "Poor Klaus!"
Was it his child's bird? Had it recognized horse and rider and tried to seek shelter with them? He did not know. "Forward!" he cried again, and the white horse had already lifted his hoofs for a new race when suddenly there was a pause in the storm and a deathlike silence took its place; it lasted but an instant, then the gale returned with renewed fury; but in the meantime the rider's ear had caught the sound of men's voices and the faint barking of dogs and when he turned his head back towards the village he distinguished, in the moonlight that broke forth, people on the mounds and in front of the houses busy about wagons that were loaded high; he saw, as if in flight, still other wagons driving hurriedly towards the upland; the lowing of cattle being driven up there out of their warm stables, met his ear. "Thank God, they are saving themselves and their cattle!" his heart cried; and then came an inward shriek of terror: "My wife! My child! No. No; the water will not come up to our mound!"
But it was only for a moment; everything flew by him like a vision.
A fearful squall came roaring up from the sea and into its face horse and rider stormed up the narrow path to the dike. Once on top Hauke halted his steed with force. But where was the sea? Where Jeverssand? Where lay the opposite shore? Nothing but mountains of water faced him, rising up threateningly against the night sky, seeking to overtop one another in the dreadful dusk, and beating, one over the next, on the shore. They came forward with white crests, howling, as if the roar of all the terrible beasts of prey in the wilderness were in them. The white horse pawed the ground and snorted out into the din; but it came over the rider as if here all human power were at an end; as if night, death, chaos must now set in.
Still he considered: after all it was a storm-tide; only he himself had never seen such a one as that; his wife, his child, they were safe on the high mound, in the solid house; but his dike—and pride shot through his heart—the Hauke-Haien-Dike, as the people called it; now was the time for it to prove how dikes must be built!
But—what was this? He was at the angle between the two dikes; where were the men whom he had ordered here, whose work it was to watch this spot? He looked north up the old dike; for he had sent a few up there too. Neither here nor there could he see a soul; he rode out a piece; but still he was alone: only the soughing of the storm and the surging of the sea that filled the air to an immeasurable distance smote deafeningly on his ear. He turned his horse back; he came again to the deserted corner and let his eyes pass along the line of the new dike; he saw distinctly, the waves rolled up here more slowly, less violently; it almost seemed as if there were other water there. "It will stand, all right!" he murmured and felt a laugh rise within him.
But his inclination to laugh soon passed as his eyes glanced farther along the line of his dike: on the northwest corner—what was that? He saw a dark swarm of moving beings; he saw how industriously they stirred and hurried—there could be no doubt, they were men! What were they trying to do, what work were they doing on his dike now! And already his spurs were in the white horse's flanks and the animal was flying with him thither; the gale came from the broad side, at times the gusts came with such force that they were almost swept down from the dike into the new koog; but horse and rider knew where they were riding. Hauke already perceived that probably a few dozen men were working industriously there together and already he saw distinctly that a gutter was cut right across through the new dike. Violently he reined in his horse. "Stop!" he cried, "stop! What devil's work are you doing here?"
The men had ceased shoveling with a start when they suddenly perceived the dikegrave among them; the wind had carried his words to them and he saw that several were trying to answer him; but he only caught their vehement gestures, for they all stood at his left and what they said was carried away by the gale which was so violent out here that it hurled them against one another so that they were obliged to crowd together. Hauke measured with his quick eyes the gutter that had been dug and the height of the water which, in spite of the new profile, dashed up almost to the top of the dike and spattered horse and rider. Only ten minutes more work and then—he saw it distinctly—then the high tide would break through the gutter and the Hauke-Haien Koog would be buried by the sea!
The dikegrave beckoned one of the laborers to the other side of his horse. "Now, speak," he shouted, "what are you doing here, what is the meaning of this?"
And the man shouted back: "We've got to break through the new dike, sir! So that the old dike doesn't break."
"What have you got to do?"
"Break through the new dike!"
"And flood the koog? What devil ordered you to do that?"
"No, sir, no devil; the commissioner Ole Peters has been here; he gave the order!"
Anger flamed up into the rider's eyes: "Do you know me?" he shouted. "Where I am Ole Peters has no orders to give! Away with you! Back to your places where I left you."
And as they hesitated he dashed into the group with his horse: "Away, to your own or the devil's grandmother!"
"Be careful, sir," shouted one of the group and struck at the madly careering animal with his spade; but a kick from the horse knocked the spade from his hand, another fell to the ground. At that moment there suddenly arose a shriek from the rest of the group, a shriek such as only deathly terror wrests from the human throat; for a moment all, even the dikegrave and the horse, stood as if paralyzed; only one of the laborers had extended his arm like a sign-post; he pointed to the northwest corner of the two dikes, where the new one ran up to the old one. Only the raging of the wind and the surging of the water could be heard. Hauke turned in his saddle: what was that there? His eyes grew large: "By God! A breach! A breach in the old dike!"
"Your fault, dikegrave," shouted a voice from the group. "Your fault! Take it with you before God's throne!"
Hauke's face, first red with anger, had grown pale as death; the moon which shone on it could not make it whiter; his arms hung limp, he scarcely knew that he held the rein. But that too only lasted for a second; already he drew himself up, a hard groan broke from his mouth; then dumbly he turned his horse and with a snort it raced away with him to the east along the dike. The rider's glance flew sharply in all directions; thoughts were whirling in his head: What blame had he to bear before God's throne? The break through the new dike—perhaps they would have accomplished it if he had not called "stop!" But—there was another thing and his heart grew hot, he knew it only too well—the summer before, if only Ole Peters' evil mouth had not held him back then—that was where it lay! He alone had recognized the weakness of the old dike; he should have pushed on the new work in spite of everything: "Lord God, I confess it," he cried out suddenly aloud into the storm. "I have discharged my office badly."
At his left, close to his horse's hoofs, raged the sea; before him, now in complete darkness, lay the old koog with its mounds and homes; the moon's pale light on the sky had disappeared entirely; only at one spot did light shine through the darkness. And something like comfort crept into the man's heart; it must be shining over from his own house, it seemed to him like a message from his wife and child. Thank God, they were safe on the high mound! The others, certainly, they were already in the upland village; more light glimmered from there than he had ever seen before; yes, even high up in the air, probably from the church-tower, light shone out into the night. "They will all have gone away," said Hauke to himself; "to be sure, on more than one mound a house will lie in ruins, bad years will come for the flooded fens; drains and sluices to be repaired! We must bear it and I will help, those too who have done me harm; only, Lord, my God, be merciful to us men!"
He turned his eyes to the side, towards the new koog; about it foamed the sea; but in it lay the peace of night. Involuntarily triumphant rejoicing rose in the rider's breast: "The Hauke-Haien-Dike, it must stand; it will hold after more than a hundred years!"
A roar like thunder at his feet roused him from these dreams; the white horse did not want to go on. What was that? The horse jumped back and he felt how a piece of the dike in front of him plunged down into the depths. He opened his eyes wide and shook off all meditation: he had stopped close to the old dike, the horse's front feet had been on it. Involuntarily he jerked the horse back; at that moment the last veiling of clouds swept from the moon and the mild planet illumined the horror that seething and hissing rushed down before him into the old koog.
Hauke stared at it senselessly; it was a deluge, come to swallow up man and beast. Then a light shone again into his eyes; it was the same one that he had seen before; it was still burning on his mound; and now as, encouraged, he looked down into the koog he perceived that behind the confusing whirl that dashed down clamorously before him, only a breadth of about a hundred feet was inundated; beyond that he could clearly distinguish the way that led up from the koog. He saw still more: a carriage, no, a two-wheeled gig came driving madly up towards the dike; a woman, yes, and a child too, were sitting in it. And now—was not that the shrill bark of a little dog that was borne by on the wind? Almighty God! It was his wife, his child! They were already coming quite close and the foaming mass of water was rushing towards them. A shriek, a shriek of desperation broke from the rider's breast: "Elke!" he shouted; "Elke! Back! Back!"
But wind and sea were not merciful, their raging tossed his words away; only the wind had caught his cloak and nearly flung him from his horse; and the approaching vehicle flew on steadily towards the rushing flood. As he looked he saw his wife stretch out her arms as if up towards him: had she recognized him? Had longing, had deathly anxiety about him driven her out of her secure house? And now—was she shouting a last word to him? These questions shot through his mind; they remained unanswered: all words from her to him, from him to her were lost; only an uproar as if the world were coming to an end filled their ears and excluded all other sounds.
"My child! Oh Elke, Oh faithful Elke!" cried Hauke out into the storm. Another large piece of the dike in front of him gave way and thunderingly the sea plunged in after it; once more he saw below the horse's head the wheels of the conveyance rise up out of the chaotic horror and then disappear in a whirl. The fixed eyes of the rider who stood so solitary on the dike saw nothing further. "The end!" he said softly to himself; then he rode to the edge of the abyss where, below him, the waters rushing uncannily were beginning to flood his home village; he still saw the light shining from his house; he felt that the soul had gone out of it. He raised himself high in the saddle and drove his spurs into the white horse's flanks; the animal reared and nearly fell over backwards; but the man's strength forced it down again. "Forward!" he cried once more as he had so often urged it on to a steady ride. "Take me, God; spare the others!"
Another pressure of the spurs; a shriek from the white horse that rose above the gale and the roar of the waves; then from the plunging stream below a dull splash, a brief struggle.
The moon looked down from above and illumined the scene; but on the dike beneath there was no longer any life save that of the savage waters which soon had almost completely covered the old koog. But still the mound where stood Hauke Haien's home rose up out of the swelling flood, the light still shone from there; and from the upland where the houses gradually grew dark, the solitary light from the church steeple threw its wavering beams across the seething waves.
The narrator ceased; I reached out for the filled glass that had long been standing before me; but I did not put it to my mouth; my hand remained lying on the table.
"That is the story of Hauke Haien," my host began again, "as I had to tell it according to my best knowledge. Our dikegrave's housekeeper, of course, would have made another tale; for this too people have to report: after the flood the white skeleton of the horse was to be seen again in the moonlight on Jevershallig as before; everyone in the village believed he saw it. So much is certain: Hauke Haien with his wife and child went down in that flood; I have not been able to find even their graves up in the churchyard; the dead bodies were undoubtedly carried back through the breach by the receding water out to sea, at the bottom of which they gradually were dissolved into their original component parts—thus they had peace from men. But the Hauke Haien Dike still stands now after a hundred years, and tomorrow if you ride to town and don't mind going half an hour out of your way you will have it beneath your horse's hoofs.
"The thanks Jewe Manners once promised the builder that the grandchildren should give have not come, as you have seen; for thus it is, sir: they gave Socrates poison to drink and our Lord Jesus Christ they nailed to the cross! It is not so easy to do such things as that any longer; but—to make a saint of a man of violence or a malicious bull-necked priest, or to make a ghost or a phantom of night of an able fellow just because he is a whole head above the rest of us—that can be done any day."
When the earnest little man had said that he got up and listened at the window. "It is different out there now," he said, and drew the woolen curtain back; it was bright moonlight. "See," he continued, "there are the commissioners coming back, but they are separating, they are going home; there must have been a break over on the other side; the water has fallen."
I looked out beside him; the windows upstairs, where we were, lay above the edge of the dike; it was as he had said. I took my glass and finished it: "I thank you for this evening," I said; "I think we can sleep in peace!"
"That we can," replied the little man; "I wish you a good night's sleep from my heart!"
In going down I met the dikegrave below in the hall; he wanted to take home with him a map that he had left in the tap-room. "It's all over," he said. "But our schoolmaster has told you a story of his own, I suppose; he belongs to the rationalists!"
"He seems to be a sensible man."
"Oh yes, certainly; but you can't mistrust your own eyes after all. And over on the other side, just as I said it would be, the dike is broken!"
I shrugged my shoulders: "We will have to take counsel with our pillows about that! Good night, dikegrave!"
He laughed. "Good night!"
The next morning, in the most golden of sunlights, which had risen on a wide devastation, I rode along the Hauke Haien Dike down to the town.
[TO A DECEASED][2]
But this is more than I can bear,
That still the laughing sun is bright,
As in the days when you were there,
That clocks are striking, unaware,
And mark the change of day and night—
That we, as twilight dims the air,
Assemble when the day is done,
And that the place where stood your chair
Already many others share,
And that you seem thus missed by none;
When meanwhile from the gate below
The narrow strips of moonlight spare
Into your vault down deeply go
And with a ghostly pallid glow
Are stealing o'er your coffin there.
[THE CITY][2]
The shore is gray, the sea is gray,
And there the city stands;
The mists upon the houses weigh
And through the calm, the ocean gray
Roars dully on the strands.
There are no rustling woods, there fly
No birds at all in May,
The wild goose with its callous cry
Alone on autumn nights soars by,
The wind-blown grasses sway.
And yet my whole heart clings to thee,
Gray city by the sea;
And e'er the spell of youth for me
Doth smiling rest on thee, on thee
Gray city by the sea.