The old town

by Jacob A. Riis

A hundred years after the Reformation! Was there a maniac epidemic that swept the world and swept men’s reason away, as the Black Death did their lives in that fatal century? Fifty years later still, they hanged the witches at Salem, Massachusetts. They did not burn them, so I was informed once, when I fell into the error, by a scandalized citizen of that righteous commonwealth. They were not savages, he would have me know. The Ribe Christians had some bowels too. They tied a pound of powder on the woman’s back before they flung her into the fire, and so cut her sufferings short. Surely the devil came out of his hiding-place that day and helped feed the fire. The house in which Maren lived stands unchanged, except for a coat of paint, across the way from the jail. She confessed, is the record. Oh, yes! the Seventeenth Century had not forgotten the ways of the Inquisition, any more than the Twentieth has the fire when its passions are aroused, though the merciful pound of powder is left out. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but there was no swallow’s nest in that hall, with hungry mouths of little ones gaping to be fed, and no peaceful stork upon the roof. Even the rats shunned it: a weasel lived in the attic.

Poor Maren’s travail was brief, let us hope. Down the street there lived a man with whom it went through a life rich in benediction to his kind. A bishop was he, and a singer whose songs will live as long as the Danish tongue. He sang of human sorrow and travail and of the land yonder where the tears are wiped away, until one who did not know went to him once with a sneer. Easy for him to speak of trouble who had none—rich, well housed, all his lines cast in pleasant places! Bishop Brorson heard him out with a sad little smile.

“Come with me,” he beckoned, when he had done, and led the way to the top story of the house. There, in a room made strong with iron bars, sat his son, caged like a wild beast, a raving maniac.

“There,” he said, with a sigh that must have seared the man’s soul to his dying day—“there is my trouble.” The mark of the bars is there yet,—there were no insane asylums in those days,—but the good bishop’s troubles are long over.

So I wandered, and whithersoever I strayed, back to the Dom I came and lingered there. There was the seat in which She sat, in her fair girlhood, during the long Sunday sermons, while I was banished to the “men’s side” across the aisle. Yonder the door through which we had come in together on the day of our betrothal, when the doing gave notice to all the world forever after to hold its peace; and down this aisle we had walked, hand in hand, with the old parson’s blessing in our ears and our hearts, out into the world that had suddenly become glorified. And now, across the Square, there hung from a window She and I both well knew, the flag of freedom and of hope under which we were growing old together. I wanted it so that when we came back we should be within sight of the Domkirke and as near to it as might be. For the church is as much part of my life as is the memory of my father and mother. Indeed, it is a big part of the life of the Old Town, all of its past and more than half of the present.

With might and main did we wave our flag when the King came. For days the silent street had echoed with the tramp of troops come from far-off garrison towns to receive him. The children stared; they had never seen soldiers. In us of the past generation it touched a wound that ached still. Forty years had not made us forget those winter nights of weary waiting for our beaten army on its way to the north, its face still to the foe that followed fast. That spring we saw our country cut in twain and a wall of bayonets drawn between us and our brothers to the south. King Christian had not forgotten, either, the great tragedy of his and the nation’s life. I saw it in his furrowed face as he looked up at old Dannebrog flying from the church tower. Perhaps he thought of the thousands of hungry eyes riveted upon it across the frontier. Up there at least the enemy could not reach it, though he tore it from their homes.

But if the ghost sat at the banquet, no one gave any sign. In fact, no one did anything but run and shout for three whole days. It was Ribe’s one chance to cheer its King, and it dropped all else and went at it with a rush. Fifty times a day the alarm was given: “Here they come!” and men, women, and children ran and swung their hats and cheered until they were red in the face. We too. My little boy had announced with republican dignity that “he guessed the President was more than any King,” but when he saw the kind old face of King Christian he swung his flag and yelled louder than any of us.

“Gee! Mamma,” he said, when it was over for the moment, “I didn’t know it was like that. I just had to.”

The very guard at the fire-house that was there to rush out and toot and present arms whenever one of the red-coated royal drivers came into view on the box of a coach, lost its bearings and turned out to salute a scarlet-clad letter-carrier in the twilight. That the bugler discovered his mistake, choked off his tune in the middle, and so took the whole town into the joke, was as it should be. We were in it, all of us, and, as young America remarked, “up to the neck!” All except the cows. They had been warned off the streets during the King’s stay by police ordinance. Ordinarily they have the right of way, being taken back and forth twice a day, to and from the pasture. But now they must keep away three whole days. The police force of Ribe put the case to me convincingly:

“’Tain’t only for the sake of the streets,” he said; “we don’t mind they’re dirty; but s’pposin’ they came up against the Bishop and the parsons paradin’—them cows is lawless beasts—they wouldn’t let them pass, no more they wouldn’t.”