“Yes,” he said, “it did. We got through somehow, but on your life don’t you let the boy hear. He is in it now.”
All things come to an end, and this did too. When the King was gone and Ribe had settled down to talk it over, I had my chance of getting even for sundry little digs at my home across the seas that I had scored up. They will do it; it is in the blood. To the old country, when it is as old as Ribe, we shall remain, I suppose, to the end of time a lot of ex-savages, barely reclaimed from the woods and scalp-locks and such, and in the nature of things not made to last. It was at a social gathering where the one all-absorbing topic was the Domkirke, that the worm turned. The walls would stand now a hundred years, some one said, and shot a pitying glance at me, that said as plainly as speech: “Your whole republic isn’t much older than that, and where will it be in another hundred?” But I had been up in the roof of the church the day before with the boss carpenter to look at the big beams, and something there seemed familiar. To my question he nodded: Yes! he had bought the lot on the sea, a ship load of American timber, pitch-pine, and there it was. So I was not slow to rise to my friend’s bait.
“And,” I added, when I had told them, “your walls of old-world stone may stand a hundred years on your own showing; or give them two. But the carpenter told me that, barring accidents, there is no reason why the roof of American timber should not last a thousand and be as good as new.” I think I scored.
But we bore no grudges. I owe them too much for that. The sun shone so brightly upon my mother’s new-made grave, which hands of loving friends had garlanded with flowers against her boy’s home-coming; the grass was so green and the thrush sang so sweetly in the hedge, that the sting went out also of that sorrow and only the promise remained. It is good to have lived, and though its days be mostly gray under northern skies, glad am I that mine were framed in the memories of the Old Town. We sought and found it together, She and I, the house in which I dreamed as a boy, in the street of the Black Friars. The window-pane was still there upon which I wrote “From here I can see Elisabeth’s garden” beyond the river, heaven knows with what stylus to cut so deep. With a dozen little mouths to feed in our home, diamonds were not lying loose there. The trees have grown and shut garden and stream out of sight. But the river divides us no longer, and though the shadows lengthen and the frost is upon our heads, into our hearts it cannot come. Hand in hand, we look trustfully across to that farther shore, to the land of the rising sun where we shall find what we vainly seek here: our youth in the long ago.
So we came home. I shall not soon forget the morning when, to the wondering sight of our thousand immigrants, the panorama of the great world city rose out of the deep. They crowded the rail of the steamer as it came slowly up through the Narrows. Clad in their holiday clothes, they stood in quiet groups, gazing silently toward the land, all the fun and the horseplay of the voyage gone out of them. To the jester of the steerage it was but a dull mood, and, thinking to cheer them, he leaped upon a chest and harangued the crowd, telling them in their own language that they were coming to a land where the golden rule read, “Do others or they will do you.”
“Cheer up!” he shouted, “and let’s have a song. Who can give us a jolly one?”
There was no answer. Till somewhere in the crowd a lone, far-away voice began a verse of an old Norwegian hymn and sang it to the end in a clear alto. There was a little uneasy laugh in the corner by the wheel-house, but as the singer went on, never faltering, here and there a voice fell in, and before he had come to the end of the second verse it swelled in one common strain: “On this our festal day.” Everybody was singing. The jester had disappeared. He was forgotten, as they looked out, men and women, with folded hands toward their Promised Land. I thought of my friend who fears for our democracy, and wished he were there to hear his answer. For it was the answer. Such as these have its hope in keeping.
KING FREDERIK AT HOME
I had never met King Frederik—the Crown Prince he was then—until the summer of 1904, which we spent at Copenhagen. As a boy I had seen him often and pulled off my cap to him, and always in return had received a bow and a friendly smile. But at home, and to speak to, I had not met him till that summer. We were at luncheon at our hotel one day, nothing further from our thoughts than princes and courts, when the portier came in hot haste to announce a royal lackey who wished speech with me. Right behind him up loomed the messenger, in his gold lace and with his silver-headed cane ever so much more imposing a figure than the King himself. “Their Royal Highnesses, the Crown Prince and the Crown Princess,” so ran his message, “desired our attendance at dinner at Charlottenlund the next day but one.”