The Modern Vikings: Stories of Life and Sport in the Norseland

by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

These were the very extraordinary sentiments which the parson had, at that remote period, professed toward Mrs. Parson, and these were the very words which Fiddle-John was now singing. No wonder the parson forgot that he had come to scold Fiddle-John. “I suppose that such good-for-nothings may be good for something, after all,” he said to his wife as he related the incident at the dinner-table.

Fiddle-John and his family lived in a little cottage close up under the mountain-side, where the sun did not reach until late in the afternoon. In the winter they were sometimes snowed down so completely that they had to work until noon before they could get a glimpse of the sky. The two boys, Alf and Truls, would go early in the morning with their snow-shovels and dig a tunnel to the cow-stable, where a lonely cow, a pig, and three sheep were penned up. Their father would then sit at the window, holding a lantern, the light of which vaguely penetrated the darkness and showed them in what direction they were digging; but, after awhile, this monotonous occupation wearied him, and he would take his fiddle and play the most mournful tunes he could think of. It never occurred to him to lend a helping hand; and it never occurred to the boys to ask him.

They accepted their fate without much reasoning; it seemed part of the right order of things that they and their mother should work, while their father played and sang. Ingeborg, their mother, had nursed a kind of tender reverence for him in their hearts, since they were babes. He seemed scarcely part of the coarse and common work-a-day world to which they belonged; with his gentle, handsome face, and his clear blue eyes, he seemed like some superior being who conferred a favor upon them by merely consenting to grant them his company. His songs travelled from one end of the valley to the other, and everybody learned them by heart and sang them at weddings, dances, and funerals. Even though the parishioners might themselves find fault with Fiddle-John, and call him quaint and queer, they stood up for him bravely if a stranger ventured to attack him.

They knew there was not another such singer in the whole land, and it was even said that people had come from foreign lands and had made him enormous offers if he would go with them and sing at concerts in the great foreign cities. Thousands of dollars he might have earned if he had gone, but Fiddle-John knew better than to abandon the valley of his birth, where he had been known since his babyhood, and trust himself to the faithless foreign world. Thousands of dollars! Only think of it! The very thought made Fiddle-John dizzy; ten or twenty dollars would have presented something definite to his imagination, which he would have comprehended, but thousands of dollars was a blank enormity which diffused itself like mist through his dazed brain. And yet Fiddle-John could never stop thinking of the thousands of dollars which he might have earned, if he had gone with the foreigner. If the truth must be told, he himself would have liked well enough to go; and it was only the persuasions of Ingeborg, his wife, which had restrained him. “What could you do in the great foreign world, John,” she had said to him; “you, with your want of book-learning and your simple peasant ways? They would laugh at you, John, dear, and that would make me cry, and we should both be miserable. And all the little children here in the valley, what would they do without you, and who would sing to them and tell them stories when you were gone?”

The last argument was what decided Fiddle-John, He did not believe that people would laugh at him in the great foreign world, but he did believe that the children would miss him when he was gone, and he could not bear to think of someone else sitting under the great maple-tree at the roadside and telling them stories. For all that, he regretted many a time that he had been soft-hearted, and had allowed the gate of glory to be slammed in his face, as he expressed it. He had never suspected it before; but now the thought began to grow upon him, that he was a great man, who might have gained honor and renown if his wife had not deprived him of the opportunity.

Every day the valley seemed to be growing darker and narrower; the sight of the mountains became oppressive; it was as if they weighed upon Fiddle-John’s breast and impeded his breath. With feverish restlessness he roamed about from farm to farm and played, until every string on his fiddle seemed on the point of snapping.

“I am a great man,” he reflected indignantly, “and might have earned thousands of dollars. And yet here I go and fiddle for half-drunken boors at twenty-five cents a night.”

And to drown the voices that rose clamorously out of the depths of his soul, he strummed the strings wildly; and the peasants whirled madly around him, shouted, and kicked the rafters in the ceiling. The gentleness and the mild radiance which had made the children love him passed out of his countenance; his eyes grew restless, his motions aimless and unsteady. Sometimes he flung back his head defiantly and mumbled threats between his teeth; at other times he shuffled along dejectedly, or lay under a tree, dreaming of the great world which had forever been closed to him.

“If I had only dared!” he whispered to himself; “oh, if I had only dared!”