In February, during continuous frost, dead bodies were found washed up on the shore; they had lain out by the open sea on the frozen shoals. A young woman who had seen them being carried into the village stood and chattered to old Haien: "Don't think that they looked like people," she exclaimed, "no, they looked like sea-devils! Big heads like this," and she held up her hands with the fingers stretched out, far apart from each other, "black and wrinkled and shiny like freshly baked bread! And the crabs had nibbled them; the children screamed when they saw them."
Such a description was not exactly new to old Haien. "They have probably been washing about in the sea since November," he said indifferently.
Hauke stood beside them in silence. But as soon as he could he crept away out to the dike; no one could say whether he wanted to hunt for more corpses or whether the horror that still hung about the now deserted spots where the others had been found attracted him. He ran on farther and farther till he stood all alone in the bleakness where only the winds swept across the dike and where there was nothing but the plaintive voices of the great birds as they wheeled quickly by. On his left lay the wide empty marsh, on the other side the never-ending shore with the great expanse of shoals now glistening with ice; it seemed as if the whole world lay in white death.
Hauke remained standing on the dike and his keen eyes glanced far in all directions; but there were no more dead to be seen; only where the invisible currents moved under it the ice field rose and sank like a stream.
He ran home; but on one of the following evenings he was out there again. The ice was now broken in places: clouds of smoke seemed to rise out of the cracks and above the whole surface of the shallows was spread a net of steam and fog that combined strangely with the dusk of the evening. Hauke gazed at it with fixed eyes, for dark figures moved up and down in the fog, and as he watched them they seemed to be as large as men. There, far away on the edge of the smoking fissures, they walked back and forth, full of dignity but with long noses and necks and odd, terrifying gestures; suddenly they began to jump up and down in an uncanny way, like imps, the big ones over the little ones and the little ones towards the others; then they spread out and lost all form.
"What of them? Are they the spirits of those who were drowned?" thought Hauke. "Ahoy!" he shouted loudly into the night; but the forms heeded him not, merely continued their strange doings.
Then he suddenly thought of the fearful Norwegian sea-ghosts about whom an old captain had once told him, who instead of a head and face had only a tuft of sea-grass on their necks; he did not run away however, but dug the heels of his boots deep into the clay of the dike and gazed at the weird antics that went on before his eyes in the growing dusk. "Are you here with us too?" he asked in a hard voice. "You shall not drive me away."
Not till the darkness had covered everything did he start for home, walking with a stiff, slow step. But from behind him there seemed to come the whirring of wings and resounding laughter. He did not look round, neither did he quicken his step, and it was late when he reached home, but he is said never to have spoken to his father or anyone else of this experience. Only many years later, after God Almighty had laid the burden of an half-witted child upon him, he took the girl out on the dike with him at the same time of day and of the year and the same thing is said to have happened again out on the shallows. But he told her not to be afraid, those creatures were only herons and crows that looked so big and dreadful in the fog as they caught fish in the open cracks.
"God knows, Sir!" the schoolmaster interrupted himself; "there are all kinds of things in the world that may confuse an honest Christian's heart; but Hauke was neither a fool nor a dunce."
As I did not reply he was about to go on, but suddenly there was a stir among the other guests who hitherto had listened in silence, only filling the low room with dense tobacco smoke. First one or two, then nearly all of them turned towards the window. Outside—we could see through the uncurtained windows—the wind was driving the clouds, and light and darkness were madly intermingled; but it seemed to me, too, as if I had seen the haggard rider shoot by on his white horse.