The old town

by Jacob A. Riis

The Emperor’s Birthday.

It may be that the fact that the Emperor’s birthday came in summer, if my memory serves me right, had something to do with it. The most loyal friend of the Domkirke could not have sat out the services there in winter without discomfort. There was no way of heating it, had not been since the beginning of our century, when the “fire-pan” given to it by a pious burgher in 1473 was taken out and sold for old iron. A legacy went with it that was forever to keep it in coal, so that “the poor and the church-goers” should not suffer from the cold. What became of that, I don’t know. They did many queer things in the days before reverence for the great past, and its memories and landmarks, awoke with the struggle for nationality and for freedom in our own time. Among other things they stripped some of the ancient grave-stones of their beautiful engraved brass plates for the melting pot, when a new bell had to be cast. And down in Holstein, where the sacred banner that fell from heaven to the Danish knights in the Esthland crusade and saved the battle that was all but lost, had been left by the indifference of a later day in hostile hands, they took it at housecleaning time and, esteeming it just a moth-eaten and tattered rag, burned it with other rubbish in the public road.

In Ribe, for a hundred years the people put on their overcoats and mufflers and their rubbers when they went to church and sat it out as they could; or else they stayed at home. Even so clothed we sat and shivered, our toes growing numb on the stone floor. When it was over, we limped out and took a quick walk around the Castle Hill to “get up circulation.” The walls of the Domkirke were thick, and it was past Christmas before the winter had quite moved in; but then it stayed well into the summer, refusing to be dislodged by spring until the roses were in bloom. In the great restoration, of which more hereafter, it was at last the upstart factory across the Linden Square, that had once so piqued the conservatism of the Old Town, which, having been by that time abandoned, gave its boiler house to be a heating plant for the church. And so the old and the new met once again, and atonement was made for past misconduct.

I have spoken of the square red tower which, though part of the Domkirke, and its great and distinguishing feature seen from afar, did yet belong under the civil government as the stronghold of the burghers in time of trouble, typifying curiously the union of church and state, and crumbling slowly like that in my day. It had given fair warning to more than one generation. There was a house in Priest Street, straight up from the tower, with the old arms of the town picked out in colors above its door, which I never could pass without a shudder. As far as that, tradition had it, the tower fell on Christmas morning in the year 1283, when it collapsed during early mass while the church was full of people. Very many were killed. It was in the time after the death of the great Valdemar when the country was torn by dissension within and onslaught from without. An earthquake had shaken the land eleven years before, probably contributing its share to the insecurity of the tower, and one can imagine the “great fear that prevailed” among the people. Again in 1594 the upper part of the tower fell, and in the rebuilding it received the shape and height which it has kept.

The tower falcon, a fierce-eyed, solitary bird of prey, was its rightful tenant in my day; had been, I fancy, from the beginning. He seemed to fit in with its warlike traditions. The boys caught him in traps, sometimes, and kept him chained about the house, but never for long, for he was utterly untamable and his shriek was not melodious. Furthermore, his diet of meat, preferably live mice, kept us scurrying in a way we quickly tired of. The falcon has moved. A score of years ago they overhauled the village church at Seem, three miles up the river, and dislodged a family of rooks that lived there. In search of new quarters they struck the Domkirke, liked it, and stayed. The newcomers were great chatterers, while the falcon is a silent bird, and moreover they brought all their relations. In disgust, I suppose, at the racket they made, the falcon betook himself to the Plantage and became a dweller in trees. My boy reports that he is there yet. He has been up to see. The rooks stayed and multiplied exceedingly. At least I supposed them to be rooks, till, last summer, I stood on the top of the tower in Windsor Castle and was told by the caretaker that the black birds hopping about were jackdaws. They were the very same.

Jackdaws or rooks, they took possession of the big tower and of the little one, and they have kept it since. By day they go afield for their food; but sundown always finds them in loud and general debate on the stone railing of the red tower. They sit in military files discussing the subject in hand in very human fashion: now one at a time, and again all together, squawking at the top of their voices. Year by year their number grows, since no marten can reach them on their roost. There came a time when it seemed as if something ought to be done, if they were not to practically own the town. The matter came up in council, and the debate that ensued was worthy of the best days of the Old Town. The consensus of opinion was that they were getting to be a nuisance; but how to stop it was another matter.

“They are here,” said one of the city fathers, “and what are you going to do about it?” There was no answer. Upon the question what was their diet no one could shed any definite light; but it suggested a ray of hope to one.

“They might,” he ventured, “be good to eat.” The city fathers considered one another thoughtfully. They were certainly fat. If they were to turn out a new kind of game, now! It ended, after long debate, in a committee being appointed to take the matter under practical advisement, with directions to report at a future meeting whether the rooks were good eating, or, if not, how they disagreed with a councilman’s stomach. Six months had passed when last I fished with a member of the committee. He screwed up his mouth and shook his head dubiously as he made a cast for a pickerel hiding in the rushes.

“They are fat, yes,” he said ruefully. “They might be good, and then again—they might make you sick.”

Caution, says an ancient Danish proverb, is the virtue of a burgomaster. It ought at least to be the privilege of a councilman.