The old town

by Jacob A. Riis

“Suppose the lightning were to strike the house,” said my father.

The other looked stunned. “Why,” he said, “what beastly bad luck.”

With all this record of fight and fire and flood, the Old Town was the reverse of strenuous. Its prevailing note was of sweetness and rest. The west wind that cut like a knife in November was soft in June as the touch of a woman’s hand. The grass was never as green in meadow; the wild blossoms that nodded on the river bank were never so sweet; nor ever did bird sing in forest or field as sang the skylark to its mate in my childhood’s home, as it soared toward the sky. The streets in the Old Town were narrow and crooked, and in their cobble-stone pavements the rain stood in pools that tempted unwary feet. But there were lights in the windows for glad home-comers. Neighbor knew neighbor and shared his grief and his joys. No one was rich, as wealth is counted nowadays; but then no one was allowed to want for the daily bread. “Good day and God help” was the everyday salutation to a man at work; “God bless,” if he were eating. They were ways of speech, it is true, but they were typical of the good feeling that was over and above all the sign of the Old Town and its people.

CHAPTER II

Seal of the Old Town in The Thirteenth Century.

If war and war’s alarms creep into the story of the Old Town on every page, despite the fact that its name to me is peace, the reason is not far to seek. I was not yet a month old when my mother had to fly from home with me in her arms, on the outbreak of war. A report ran through the land that the “slaves,” that is, the prisoners in the Holstein state prison, had been freed by the Germans and were swarming north, the vanguard of an army that looted and laid waste where it went. The women with little children were hurriedly sent away, and the Old Town prepared to give battle to the invaders. Barricades were built and manned; the council requisitioned two hundred pounds of powder from the next town, to be carried in as he could by the village express, who made his trips on foot, and they dug up an old cannon that had done duty as a hitching post a hundred years or more, to impress it into the municipal defence. The unencumbered women moulded bullets and boiled water and pitch in the houses overlooking the route of the enemy’s supposed advance. The parishes roundabout sent squads of peasants to the defence armed with battle-axes and spears. They will show you those weapons yet in the Town Hall. They keep the record there, too, of the council at which peace prevailed, on the showing of military experts that it would cost two hundred daler[3] to dam the river and flood the fields to stop an army. That was voted to be too steep a price to pay for being sacked, perhaps, in the end, as a captured town. But it is not the whole story, I am sure. Better sense must have dawned, I imagine, at the sight of those armaments. That they would have died on the barricades to the last man in defence of their homes I know, for I knew them. How carefully and deliberately they planned is shown by the erection of one of the barricades in front of the drug store, where Hoffmann’s Drops would be handy “in case any were taken ill.” It was not faint-heartedness, but cool foresight.

When the summons came for the last time, I was a half-grown boy. I remember it, that gray October morning, when a gendarme, all dusty and famished from his long, hard ride, reined in his panting horse at the tavern in the market-place, where the children were just then swarming with their school books. I hear the clatter of the iron-shod hoofs in the quiet streets, the clanging of his sabre as he leaped from the saddle and spoke gravely to the inn-keeper. Far and fast as he had come, riding farther and riding farther; ghostly legions were even then hurrying from the south on his trail to grieve the echoes of the Old Town. I see the sudden awe in the faces as the whispered message went from mouth to mouth, “The King is dead,”—the King whom the people loved as their friend, last of his house, to whose life was linked inseparably the destiny of Denmark. I see the solemn face of our old Rector and hear the quiver in his voice as he bade us go home, there would be no school that day; a great sorrow had come upon the land.

I see our little band trooping homeward, all desire to skip or play swallowed up in a vague dread of nameless disaster. I live over again the dark days when, in the hush of all other sounds and cares, we listened by night and by day to the boom of cannon coming nearer and nearer from the Eider, where the little Danish flock was matched in unequal combat against the armies of two mighty empires. Then the flight of broken and scattered regiments, hunted, travel-worn, and desperate, through the town. The bivouac in the Square, with shotted guns pointing southward over the causeway. The smile that will come is followed by a tear as I recall the trembling eagerness, the feverish haste of faithful hands that packed our school arsenal—twenty-five historic muskets of the Napoleonic era—in boxes to be taken out to sea and sunk, lest they become the prey of the enemy. They are rusting there yet. After we had seen the Prussian needle-guns, they were left to their fate. And when the last friend was gone on his way, the long days of suspense, the nightly vigils at the South-gate, where at last we heard the tread of approaching armies which none of us should live to see return; for within our sight Denmark was cut in twain by German bayonets.

So, a child of the Old Town may be forgiven for calling up the Red Gods on occasion. Indeed, they had left their tracks where he who ran might read. The other day I heard how, in restoring the Bishop’s Manse, they had come upon traces of the old spiral stairway, which even in that house of peace wound to the right, as the custom was, so that the man defending it might have his right hand free, while the attacking enemy had to strike from the left. Perhaps, though, it was not always a house of peace, nor the enemy all of the world and the flesh, for I read in the archives of the Domkirke of a least one pitched battle between the Brethren of the Chapter, that is, the clerics attached to the cathedral, and the Bishop, in which the latter had his robe torn from his back. Three hundred years later I find the Chapter uniting in a round-robin to the Bishop, in which perjury, simony, and lewdness are among the open offences laid at his door. Unless he mend his ways, they give notice, they will have him before the Pope.