A Saga of to-Day: I. The Old Country

OCTOBER, 1926

BY CARL CHRISTIAN JENSEN

I

IN a dingy room over a shop, where a man made wooden shoes, I grew aware of myself. The front window faced a narrow cobblestoned street, where the heather farmers passed with their slow-moving teams of oxen and their wagons loaded with sun-dried peat. The rear window faced a large yard that was closed in on one side by a hulky, odorous tannery and on the other by the sailor inn, Kridtpiben (The ChalkPipe). In the rear of the yard a garden with an orchard of dying apple trees sloped down to low, swampy pastures. Beyond these lay the dunes and the sea.

I must have been three years old. I remember rocking my newborn brother out of his cradle. The twins were a year older than I. In the garden we played with the tanner’s daughter, Hedvig. I fell into a mortar pit there, and all outside noises died away — Hedvig’s cries, the bricklayer scraping his trowel on the wall of the sailor inn, the clattering wheels on the street. The noises within my body demanded a hearing. My blood thundered in my ears; my heart pounded against my ribs. All my inside cried for air. And as I coughed out my last precious breath my mother’s hand reached down and caught me. Then the garden behind the yard was no longer the same.

Hedvig and I were the same age. One day we stole down the cellar steps of the sailor inn and turned the wooden spouts of several beer kegs. The cellar floor became foamy like the sea I had watched so often from the window. We splashed our feet in the white, frothing stuff until no more beer ran out of the spouts. Such fun! But how I feared that cellar ever after!

My mother made soup from oxtails which she fetched from the tannery. Once I followed her into the tannery shed, where she chopped off a dozen oxtails from a stack of fresh raw hides. But I no longer relished the soup she made. For the tannery gave me nausea.

There was only one side of the yard left. I loved to sit beside Hedvig on the steps of the wooden-shoe shop and inhale the odor of seasoned hardwood, watching an old man carve and chisel a formless chunk into a wooden shoe. Hedvig’s pink-eyed kitten played with the chips and shavings that coiled up in heaps on the floor while the chunk of hardwood gradually took the shape of a human foot. The heel and arch, the instep and toes, bulged out of the outer surface and caved into the inner surface.

Our eyes followed the curves of the wooden shoe. Hedvig said that the curves ‘talked to her.’ And she said that her eyes drew these curves of the wooden shoe on the inside of her eyelids. And she said that the picture inside her eyelids talked to her when she closed them — talked to her as did the curves of the wooden shoe. So Hedvig told me.

One day we went beyond the known boundary of our little world. We passed the cows lying on their stomachs in the pasture behind the garden, chewing their cuds. We followed a brook, where the song birds cooled themselves under the water plants. We reached a sandy road along the coast and met a farmer, sitting asleep on his load of peat, while his oxen sank knee-deep in the sand. We waded through coarse dune grass and fell down tired.

The sea lay quiet like a mirror, meeting the sky in the horizon. The smoke from the steamers rose in black, graceful columns that carried the dome of heaven. Hedvig’s cheeks were flushed from the long walk. She lay with her head resting in my lap, gazing up into the sky.

We were found at night by a fisherman, who carried us to his hut on the coast. And after our return home Hedvig was in bed many weeks. Daily I was at her bedside. And always she held my hand tight — very tight. When, one afternoon, she felt stronger, she wanted to sit in the sun on the porch. Her mother carried her out there and left us alone. Her eyes turned to the sky again, and a smile lighted up her face — and remained. . . .

Her mother loosened my hand from Hedvig’s cold grip and hugged me hysterically, and with a sudden violence and heartbreaking despair. She carried me to my mother; and the two ran back to Hedvig, leaving me alone with a new feeling of awe.

II

My grandfather was a man huge of frame and sturdy as an old oak. He was six feet six, with a back broad and sinewy, and with large, hairy fists. He was of a melancholy, brooding temperament, his mind burning like glowing embers that could flare into white heat. And when his anger was aroused he would stand tall and straight, with his arms crossed, his head lifted, his forehead high, smooth, and florid, and his eyes scintillating. It was not his words that terrified his wife and daughters, but rather the amplitude of his voice, and the rapidity with which he spoke. Only one of his seven daughters ever dared defy him — my mother. She would walk toward the angry Titan, look him in the eye, but remain silent. And he would lift his fists as if to crush her, but his arms would drop powerless. Then he would wander down to the coast and remain there, brooding.

I have never met a man with such physical strength, or with such anger and gentleness, or with such silence and ‘gift of gab.’ He came of peasant stock. And because he was a true peasant his deepest disappointment was that he had no sons. He had served his country twice — first as the King’s bodyguard, later during the German invasion of 1864. His property consisted of a small farm of peat bog, heather, and sand dunes. During the centuries an ancient oak forest had rotted, leaving a bog with a five-foot layer of muddy peat sandwiched in between the heather and the dunes. In the summer time he sliced off loads of mud, cutting the peat into bricks, which he threw to the surface to be baked by the sun. With his spade he carved his way through the bog, while his wife and daughters carried the peat away. Through several summers I saw him stand to his waist in mud, silent and melancholy. But he had only his wife to help him then.

His love for me was the only affection that I remember receiving in my childhood. He liked to have me visit him on the farm. At night we slept together, the old giant and I. A piece of rope hung from the ceiling over his bed, by means of which he would raise himself in the morning. He lay there the night long, embracing me with his huge, muscular arms, while I snuggled up to him hungrily.

His seven daughters ran away from home as soon as they became of age. His fluctuating moods drove them out. And for peasant daughters they married well. Malie became the second wife of my father’s brother, who owned a hog farm. Anna married an old, longwhiskered bachelor, who bought a farm with the savings of his toil in America. Juliana and Line became the brides of fairly prosperous dairy farmers. Sine and Tine married peasants of the sand dunes. Stine, my mother, was the only one who ran away to the harbor town.

I remember the seven sisters vividly — tall, husky, bright-eyed women, very noisy, quick to laugh, and quicker still to show anger. God! What a temper some of them had — especially my own mother! Once she broke a broom handle in two on my head.

At my grandparents’ golden wedding the seven sisters and their broods of children met together on the old farm. And they talked and ‘joshed’ each other and quarreled in their loud, broad peasant dialect, worse than a group of drunken sailors in The Chalk-Pipe. They are all alive at present except Malie. None save my mother have changed their social standing greatly.

My grandmother was a small, slender woman, cowed by her strong husband. None of her daughters looked like her. Her parents, who were a grade above the peasants, were against her wedding my grandfather. Her brother was a wealthy horse trader, whose son, my mother’s cousin, was the peach on the family tree. How proud my aunts were of him! For he was a lay preacher and a revivalist, holding religious meetings at night in the barns of the peasants — a sincere but dull, unattractive man, as I remember him.

My father’s parents died long before I was born. A black mystery hangs over his ancestors. And he refused to talk about them. But the fact is this, as I discovered later: his family for generations had gone to the devil. Some of them I saw with my own eyes go there. I remember his aunt, — his father’s sister, — an old, old beggar woman, walking on the cobblestoned streets with a stick in one hand and a basket in the other. She told me of a ‘curse’ that had haunted the family for ages, ruining a line of wealthy, powerful lairds in the valleys south of Frederikshavn. One estate after another had been lost by fire, flood, and famine, by drinking and gambling, and by the abolition of serfdom, when the peasants gained their independence. In her youth her own estate — and this I verified later — had been sold at public auction. She died in the poorhouse.

Two of my father’s brothers, UngeJens and Gamle-Jens (Young Jens and Old Jens), fared the best — though the latter almost went to the devil before my mother’s sister, Malie, took hold of his hog farm. He suffered all through life for the wild oats of his youth. His youngest son, who at present enjoys the reputation of being the slyest and most daring smuggler in the seas of Skagerrack and Cattegat, once hoisted me down a deep well, headfirst, to fetch a ball. Unge-Jens literally starved on various rented farms, while he and his wife brought up twelve sons. A third brother, Nikolaj, I remember as a bleary-eyed drunkard, whose wife and children I often saw walking from house to house begging crusts of bread. I was at his side the day before he died and saw him chew mouthfuls of bedstraw. He died of delirium tremens in the same poorhouse and in the same room as did his aunt. A fourth brother left the Old Country for Australia and was never heard from. A fifth went to America — Anton was his name — and was never heard from, either. (Today in an American prison of the South a young man, bearing my surname and not a few of the family traits, is serving ninety-nine years for murder. He tells me that his father, whose name was Anton, is dead, and that he came from a small country in Europe called Denmark.)

III

My world grew. The fifth child was born in my fifth year. The twins were going to school. My mother was always away from home during the day, sewing or washing for the rich grocer and the wealthy people across the street. My father was a longshoreman, working on the steamers in the harbor. The tanner’s wife took care of Anton and Lasse. And I was much alone.

On the dumping grounds of a clay pit I picked up bones and cowhorns, which I sold to the junk dealer. He paid me with copper coins which I spent for Danish pastry. Once I came into his junk yard when he was busy elsewhere. Hurriedly I stuck a pair of cowhorns from a heap into my sack. My heart began to beat fast. This was my first theft. He recognized the horns as soon as he peered into my sack, and threw them back on to the heap. But instead of getting angry he looked at me with a dismal expression in his eyes. He hooked my sack on to his scales and threw me a few coppers, according to the weight of the bones, and turned his back to me in disgust. And his scorn smarted longer than a thrashing would have done.

Near an old church a street was being lowered, and the workingmen were excavating a forgotten churchyard. Bones dyed in a vat of mud were dug up by the wagonload. One morning I filled my sack from the excavation and carried the bones to the junk dealer. But he refused to buy them, because they were black and decayed, and because they were human bones. He placed his hand on my head and looked at me with his grave, sombre eyes. He shook his head and bade me return the bones.

The wealthy grocer for whom my mother worked imported a dozen Shetland ponies from the Orkney Islands. Coming across the North Sea the ponies had become ill, and by mistake the grocer gave them poison instead of medicine. I saw them roll on the straw in his stable in paroxysmal torture. I was distressed at their suffering. The grocer and his wife were weeping. Yet my compassion for the sick animals was not able to remove my greed for their bones. When they had been killed I followed the stableman out to the heather and helped him to dig a grave, I shoveled the sand away from the edge as he threw it up to me. Soon the grave was so deep that his head was below the level of the heather. It would be strenuous work to dig up my treasure again.

We returned to the stable and drove a wagonload of dead ponies to the grave on the heather. The heather impressed me. It was clean and fragrant. I braided wreaths of heather flowers and placed these on the grave, and I marked the spot carefully, planning to return the following spring. Before the northern winter set in with snow and frost I was back, watching and dreaming over the ponies’ bones. But during the winter I lost all trace of the place. I was never able to find my buried treasure.

Fjolle-Valde, a mute beggar boy, ransacked the neighborhood with me. His eyes looked into mine with the devotion of a dumb beast, and he granted me a half-witted friendship in exchange for my own interest in him. He belonged to a destitute family. His father had been my mother’s fiancé previous to her marriage. But a scullery maid in the hotel where my mother worked had forestalled a tryst one night between the two lovers by borrowing my mother’s only pair of shoes without asking. The lovers had quarreled. My mother had married my father, who was twice her age; and her lover had married a woman many years his senior. My knowledge of my mother’s first romance drew me to FjolleValde with the compassion of one who had been saved from a great calamity.

One day my desire to see FjolleValde’s mother drove me across the town to his home. On a painter’s ladder in a dirty yard I climbed to the attic, where the gable door swung outward and almost pushed me off. I groped my way among bins of peat fuel that belonged to the tenants on the floor below. Through a roof window a sunbeam, bedizened with dust, stabbed into the darkness like a bejeweled rapier. And through the cracks in the red-tiled roof smaller beams of light penetrated. Children of various ages crawled around there, and, beaverlike, trailed paths of wet dirt across the floor. An untidy woman with her breasts exposed welcomed me and scrutinized me as wistfully as I did her. So this creature was the pick of the man who had jilted my beautiful mother! Yet, in her attic she aroused in me a cringing curiosity, which even later impelled me to pay her secret visits.

A horse butcher in the neighborhood would often send Fjolle-Valde and me into the country to bring back old critters that he had bought from a village grocer. And during the light summer nights, homeward bound, we rode over the sand dunes on the back of the same horse. He never entrusted us with more than one at a time. The full moon reddened the dunes and heather, and a sharp Oriental camel shadow stole along beside the skinny nag and its two riders. Ever so often FjolleValde fell off, at times hauling me with him headlong into the sand. And it was no easy task to catch the frightened animal.

In a dark alley near my home lived a dwarflike woman. She was a ‘ peat hag ’ — one of these poor, hard-working creatures who on wintry days hoisted peat from the farmer’s wagon to the attics of the rich. She drank brandy — the ugly stuff which the lay preacher said was made of dung from the streets. Akvavit, ‘the water of life, ‘ it was called in The Chalk-Pipe. Often she sat crouched on the stoop, tottering like a bear, and between hiccoughs warbled weird hallelujah hymns. Her hands, with their stubby fingers, resembled human feet. And when she sent me to the sailor inn for a pint of Akvavit she stroked my cheek brusquely, as though she had kicked me in the face with a hare foot.

At times she wept and sobbed convulsively, and besmeared her face with peat-stained paws. Then I ran after brandy as frantically as on my trip to the midwife on the night my sister was born. And a mere gulp of Akvavit revived the daunted witch.

She lived with her grown children — two helpless idiots, who night and day sal strapped to their benches in the only room she had. One was a grinning bewhiskered female, and the other was a reeling male, who dug his fingers into a furrow on the bench. Once a week my mother sent me to the peat hag with dry flounders. And at the smell of fish the female, like a baby strapped in its carriage, bounced impetuously on the bench, and drove through her throat a guttural sound that conveyed a world of bursting clouds within. The brother neither heard nor smelled. He only stared in listless apathy like a hungerstriking martyr before his last, raucous breath. He was busy scratching a solitary label deep into the wood — a cuneiform gesture of his own world of idiocy.

IV

Karla was the daughter of the wealthy railroad master in the house across the street, where my mother worked. She was as beautiful as Hedvig and her clothes were soft and fragrant. One afternoon we tramped through the woods that began at the end of the cobblestoned street. An innocent curiosity led us on. Her mother’s anger surprised me. She flared up and grew wild like an angry gypsy hag and added a great mystery to an already inscrutable mystery. From then I was branded as a bad boy in the neighborhood. And I was only six years of age.

During the summer a half-grown Copenhagen girl was visiting her aunt, who also lived in the house across the street. One day I was sitting by myself on the stoop of The Chalk-Pipe, watching the farmers drive their ox teams and their products to market. I caught her eyes resting on me — dark, burning eyes. She smiled and crossed the street. I was too bashful to talk to her. How beautiful she was! The odor of her body resembled the freshest butter. I sniffed at it. And her hands possessed a touch delicate and energetic.

We followed the oxcarts to the market place, where she bought me fruits and sweets. And we continued our walk to the end of the cobblestoned street and into the woods. Hand in hand we waded through layers of leaves. We sat down on the moss under an oak and listened to the language of silence.

She began to romp in the leaves like a wood nymph that I had seen in a picture book. And she flew around me and leaped in hiding behind the oaks, and dashed toward me, catching me up in her arms and running into the underbrush with me pressed to her body. Her eyes were agitated. She opened her mouth wide and showed me her tongue and teeth. She growled coquettishly, and with a sudden impulse pressed her teeth into the skin of my throat.

On my visits to my grandfather I met my cousin, Stine. She was born out of wedlock, of one of his seven daughters. And she was a wild girl who feared nobody except my grandfather, whom everybody feared. At night in the hog pen she watched over the breed-sows, while I lay in the arms of my grandfather, pondering, and while the sea, the heather, the cattle, and the grown-ups slept.

We took a swim one day in the brown peat bog. Her husky limbs and flat, sunburned peasant face reminded me of an Eskimo woman I had seen aboard a sailing vessel in the harbor. She was not beautiful like Hedvig, and Karla, and the rich Copenhagen girl. But she was terribly strong. She held me so close to her that I bit her breast, in anger. Then she threw me headlong into an ant hill. And the ants stung me and filled my wounds with a burning secretion. I cried until she knelt down and massaged my body with peat mud.

In the woods a band of gypsies had put up camp. The gypsies were kidnappers, so I was told. And my mother forbade me to approach them. But the warning aroused my curiosity. Indianlike, I crept through the grass and through the layers of leaves until, within a stone’s throw of the camp, I beheld ragged children and men with fierce pirate faces, blooming girls and wrinkled old hags. They swarmed among their tents and vans, quarreling with each other and kicking their dogs.

In the leaves near me a gypsy woman sat squatting with a pipe between her teeth. Beside her lay a young girl with raven-black hair spread out on the ground. The girl was ill. She moaned and writhed in agony, while the woman sat beside her smoking. At first the gypsies in camp caught my interest more than did the couple nearer at hand. But soon my senses became captivated by the delivery of a child. . . . The mother turned her head weakly and lifted her eyes to gaze at her child. And oh, the look of pain and love! It haunts me still. I ran home, weeping.

V

I joined a gang of boys and roamed the streets till late at night. We made ourselves chestnut pipes and smoked dry cherry leaves. And I learned to swear worse than any sailor. I would utter the common national curses: ‘ Cancer eat me (Krœft œde mig) if this is not the truth,’ and ‘May the Devil make me crazy (Fanden gale mig) if this is not so,’ and ‘That is an all-hellish lie (Det er en allerhelvedes LΦgn).'

At first I was shocked at myself. But soon I grew more callous than the rest of the gang. One night I was unable to fall asleep. I was thinking of all the curses I had said that day and about my friend the junk dealer, who had hanged himself in his shed during the afternoon. I stole out of bed, dressed without awakening my parents, and walked out into the cobblestoned street, where a peasant’s oxcart was passing by. The street watchman was singing his two-o’clock rhyme. I ran over and dropped my chestnut pipe in the cart. Then I went home and fell asleep.

Besides cursing and smoking, I also learned to steal. The bigger boys taught me to steal cakes from the pastry shops. They were errand boys for the rich grocer, and they would induce me to follow them into the stores where they delivered flour and raisins. While the saleslady followed them into the bakery behind the store I would fill my blouse with Danish pastry. And I was so excited at first that I forgot to watch the street through the show window. Once a wealthy woman saw me steal. She caught me dropping a kringle into my blouse. And when she entered the store she fetched four more kringles out of my bulky blouse. My boy friends scolded me to mislead the baker, who had been awakened from his slumber. And they promised him not to take me with them again. But I kept on stealing. I even began to steal money from my mother, first copper coins, then small silver coins, spending the money for sweets and tobacco.

The gang had its headquarters in the butchery, where we often watched the butcher aim a revolver at a worn-out critter which stood blindfolded in front of him. Then the fatal shot! And the horse dropped to the ground, stiff and lifeless. The cows were knocked down with a stroke of an axe. There was a knob on the flat end of the axe, and this knob generally crushed their skulls with a single blow. Sometimes, however, the cows were with calf — a small calf, three inches long, or a larger calf with hair on its body. Such a cow was ‘tough-lived.’ One stroke of the axe did not always floor it.

We imitated the butcher’s curses and began to chew his black tobacco. And we grew lusty for blood. I followed my gang into the cemetery, where we shot song birds with our sling shots. The trees were full of birds and we shot without aiming. My first shot brought down one, and it zigzagged through the air like a coin through deep water. I caught the little thing in my hand. The bird was still warm and was gasping for breath. Then I petted it with my finger tips and stroked its feathers. And I grew aware of a curious, pleasant sensation, not only in my fingers, but penetrating through my body.

We went hunting for bird nests. I stuck my arm into a thorny hedge and tore one out of its hiding. Four downy ones fell to the ground, while the mother bird cried so loud that the cemetery keeper gave us chase. He followed me home. And I was whipped with SpanskrΦret (the Spanish reed). This was the only real whipping that my father ever gave me. And from that day I was never again cruel to birds — except perhaps to my parrots at sea, years later, when I was training them to talk.

I often wondered at these streaks of cruelty, for I was also tender-hearted. T remember, for example, when the cemetery keeper once drained and refilled a cement pond for a shoal of goldfish. While the pond was being drained and the old keeper was wading with sea boots in the shallow water, the fish came closer and closer together. I was in a panic lest he should step on them. Sometimes one would swim under his heel before he put his foot down. And my heart would leap up in my throat, for fear that he might crush it. When the fish escaped I was relieved.

I also remember crossing a bridge where a woman stood throwing her poodle into the dam below. The dog rolled through the air, and its soft, curly stomach struck the water with a thud. Quite exhausted it reached the surface again and swam ashore, crawling back to the woman on the bridge. Again and again she threw the poodle into the dam. Its strength gave out, and, panting and waddling, without making headway against the current, it was no longer able to swim ashore. I ran down to the edge of the dam and helped the poodle ashore with a stick. It climbed to the woman, puled and fawned, and lay down at her feet. And I burst into tears, in the presence of my gang, for fear that she might throw it out again.

There was a chapel in the cemetery, behind which we found glass beads from discarded wreaths. It was a common belief that if we ran around the chapel three times and then looked through the keyhole we should see the Devil. I wanted to show my gang that I disbelieved this. Once I took courage and ran around the chapel and peeked through the keyhole. I saw something moving inside — the Devil, I thought. And I fled away over hedges and gravestones. Someone was following me - the cemetery keeper, who had been hiding in the chapel.

One Sunday morning I followed the people inside the State church, where I beheld a full-rigged sailing vessel in miniature, swinging on a wire. The immense columns and vast arches filled me with holy ecstasy, unknown to me in the barren sectarian church to which my parents had been converted. The State church drew me with wistful longings. I went home and whispered the Lord’s Prayer seven times to myself.

VI

The school nipped my delinquency in the bud. The school of my early childhood was situated near the harbor next to the State church. From the classroom windows I had a full view of the harbor. I could see every ship that passed in and out of its narrow mouth. The round granite fort, Krudttaarnet (the Powder Tower), with its tiled, cone-shaped roof and its cannon pointing seaward, lay a stone’s throw away. A fleet of fishing cutters lay rocking side by side in one corner of the harbor. Farther to the right the steamers and sailing vessels were unloading their cargoes. In a shipyard near by a new cutter was frequently being launched, throwing a white wave high in the air, and scudding off to get its finishing touch and its mast and rigging. The shallow Triangle and Square lay in the shadows of the left harbor wing, crowded with dories, sailboats, and small pleasure yachts. The two harbor wings swung seaward in long, graceful curves and terminated in a red and green lighthouse. Beyond the harbor wings, far seaward, Stendiget. (Rocky Dike) rose out of the water like a phantom ship. Still farther seaward another reef, Hirtsholmen, with its beacon light and foghorn and its two or three dwelling houses, skimmed the horizon.

And many fascinating people passed by outside the classroom windows. Tall fishermen in yellow oilskin suits and sou’westers came by. They were clean-shaven except for a tuft of blond beard on the throat — an extension of the thick growth on their chests — that was pruned off abruptly from ear to ear under their jawbones, and always reminded me of that man Esau, peeping out of his hairy ape-skin. Behind them came their wives, pushing the wheelbarrows, which were loaded with bundles of nets that had a hook and a rain worm on every mesh, and a flexible rim of cork and lead on the edges. Each sailor that entered port passed the school and the church on his way from his ship to the sailor inn. Once a Negro sailor passed by on the street outside, the first I had ever seen. My heart beat as when I read about Robinson Crusoe finding Friday. Another time a group of Chinese stokers came chattering by. And once a queenly lady and her bodyguard of twelve uniformed sailors marched by from her steam yacht. She was a German Grevinde (countess), the teacher said — immensely wealthy, and slightly demented. All this I was able to see from the classroom windows.

The walls of the classroom were hung with pictures. Three of these made a profound impression on me: a fox that had an alert look like Karla’s mother, with its offspring, outside its den in the dunes; a barnyard with a cow licking its calf, and so sad and lugubrious, like the junk dealer, that my eyes grew moist when I looked at it; old Abraham — he looked like my grandfather — standing with a dagger in his hand beside his son, Isaac, who was bound hand and foot, and was lying on top of a smoking cord of wood. I was alarmed lest the old patriarch should use the dagger too soon.

I remember my school-teachers only by their method of punishing me. The singing teacher specialized in earpulling, until he was arrested for injuring the ear of a boy. The gymnastics teacher, who later went to Africa to save the heathen, had a knack of burning my cheeks with the flat of his palm. The teacher of Danish slapped my hands with a ruler. The teacher of religion always lost his temper and whacked my ears clumsily. FrΦken Lem, my only woman teacher, used her walking stick on my back. Once she administered thirty-nine licks on my back for hitting her with a snowball. I had a strong dislike for her. She was in charge of the boys on the playground, where she spoiled many a good game. It was also her duty — and to my great chagrin — to keep watch at the showers and ‘scrubbing pool’ during our compulsory semimonthly bath.

There were other teachers — one whom we called ‘Goliath’ because he was very tall, and another whom we called ’The Fish’ because he was wabbly on his feet. But they did not leave any permanent impression on my memory. I do not even recall the subjects they taught. The former once gave me a whack that sent me spinning because I had forgotten his real name and addressed him in public by his nickname. And the latter once pinched my thigh because I refused to sit beside a girl whose breath was bad. My arithmetic teacher was fond of lifting me upon his knees in front of the class and rubbing his grizzly Vandyke beard against my cheek. I squirmed in his arms the hour long. The principal was a chummy gentleman with goldrimmed glasses and the proud possessor of a fountain pen — the only one in town. Once he lost it, and I found it. His joy knew no bounds when I handed it back to him.

I attended school from seven o’clock in the morning until noon, six days a week. The summer vacation was four weeks in length, and the Christmas and Easter vacations one week each. Every hour of the long forenoon I changed teachers. And I learned to fear and obey them. To this day I tremble when I think of these early years of schooling. I also learned the three R’s thoroughly. And I learned many Bible stories and poetic hymns and patriotic songs by heart—likewise the reign of all the Danish Kings from Gorm den Gamle to Kristian den Niende. But, above all else, I learned to use my eyes.

VII

Soon my childhood world included the harbor, with its steamers and sailing vessels, its wharves and piers. Many an early morning before school I climbed a mast, watching a hundred fishing cutters sail out of the harbor, and envying the pilots going out in their sailboats to meet the ships that came from the four corners of the earth. I lived in the forecastle or on the ratlines of these visitors, and ate the hardtack the sailors gave me. Before I was nine I tried to hide in an outgoing steamer, but was found and sent back with the pilot.

I watched the busy toilers — my father included — unload tea and spices from the Orient, maize from America, Russian wheat, fruit from Spain and Italy. I imitated the sailors by decorating my arms and chest with red and blue ink figures — writhing snakes, reproductions of Adam and Eve, wild tigers. A full-rigged sailing vessel rocked on my chest. Anchors drawn on my palms, with chains twisting around my arms and neck, held the vessel safe.

At night I became handy boy in The Chalk-Pipe, where I swept floors, washed tables, and rinsed glasses. This was life. Here the sea captains came to hire sailors for their ships in the harbor. Here fishermen came to sell their cargoes of new-caught flounders to the exporter. Here shipbuilders and shipowners met to discuss plans and prices for a new ship. When the steaming drink — a mixture of tea, sugar, and Akvavit — made these men merry, they spun wonderful yarns about wrecks and life-savings and drowned mates, and about their adventures in foreign lands.

At a table in the centre sat Captain Olsen, — the master of the lighthouse, — a man with huge shoulders and a thick neck that had ridges and ravines, craters and warts, like a lunar map. Here sat the rich herring dealer, whom I disliked because he smelled of herring, and because his face bore the likeness of a herring, with its worried, parsimonious stare. Here sat Bette-Fanden (Little Satan), a barrel-shaped fisherman, whose dazed countenance bespoke the fool, yet whose hidden shrewdness turned all business to his own advantage, and who more than once was able to cheat the herring dealer. Here sat an old rope spinner, whose habit, when he became talkative, of walking backward around the table, as though he were spinning rope, made everybody roar with laughter. And here the old harbor master was a constant visitor. For twenty years he had served the King at St. Thomas. The West Indian sun had shrunk his hide, but he was sinewy and strong as a mule. Once I saw him throw across the table the fat horse butcher, who had entered The Chalk-Pipe without the proper credentials.

Often I heard him tell the fishermen and the sea captains of his ancestors. When he was a child of my own age his father, who was then pastor of the parish, offered public prayers to God to send the fishermen a shipwreck. There was no rescue crew to shoot off the rocket and life line and to haul the shipwrecked sailors ashore. And when a ship foundered on the sand bars and its crew drowned, the fishermen gathered up the cargo, and gave God thanks.

Still further back, when his father was a child, the fishermen would walk along the coast at night with colored lanterns to deceive the sailors at sea and make them believe that the lights were from other ships nearer shore. In this manner many sailing vessels foundered on the sand bars.

What had changed the human heart ? I used to wonder at this. His grandfather had been a mean sea pirate. His father had been a saint and a shipwrecker. And he himself had been the first man on the coast to organize a rescue crew.

One night I watched the wreck of a large sailing vessel. It occurred on one of these demon nights of the North, when the evil powers of water, wind, and snow wrestled for supremacy. The harbor master came rushing into The Chalk-Pipe with salt water dripping from his oilskin suit and sou’wester. On stormy nights he always took his turn down on the coast, keeping a lookout for shipwrecks, and inspecting the life-saving rockets in the rescue stations. He ordered every man in The Chalk-Pipe down to the coast. And I followed the men. We pushed against the wind and slid down the dunes, climbed over the bowlders, and ran along the coast, until we found the shipwreck. Five hundred yards seaward the sailing vessel lay rolling on the sand bar like an immense sea bird bashing its broken wings in the surf. On the coast lay the skeleton of an old wreck. The harbor master set it on fire. Its tarred ribs caught readily, and soon the yellow flames and black smoke shot weird tongues into the air, dyeing the froth of the surf. I saw the sailors cling to the ratlines and shrouds, while surge upon surge leaped up from the depth.

The harbor master and his crew of weather-beaten fishermen got the tripod, the powder, and the rocket ready for a shot at the wreck. The line lay coiled up, sleek and light, for its race through the gale, He took slow and careful aim before he lighted the fuse. The line flew up with a jerk and out over the surf, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. But as its speed decreased it drifted with the wind and got entangled in the jib stay on the outermost point of the boom. He made ready for another rocket, while a sailor on the wreck crawled out on the boom to fetch the line.

‘He’ll never get back from there,’ remarked Bette-Fanden. ‘Better not lose any time.’

One surge after another washed over the fellow, shrouding him from view. He caught hold of the line and was ready to return when a breaker tore the boom to pieces, flinging him into the sea. Bette-Fanden hauled him ashore like a fish. The next line landed midships. The sailors hauled an attached hawser aboard and fastened it to the main mast. And the rescue crew was able, by means of a pulley line, to pull the conveyor basket out along the thrumming hawser.

Twenty men were hauled ashore, one by one, before the ship broke in two. The ends of the hull rolled away from each other and spurted masses of water into the air, like a pair of exploding sea bombs. And through the night the sea threw the rest of the men upon the bowlders. The harbor master laid them near the smouldering bonfire. Eight, I counted.

VIII

Afternoons I worked in a handdriven rope spinnery which was built on the sand along the open coast. The wooden flywheel was not even enclosed in a shed. A row of pine crosses, carrying the twisting yarns, strands, and hawsers, extended along the coast for a full mile. A bonfire for a tar pot and a shed for the hemp bales completed the primitive spinnery.

A hundred yards away the surf rolled in over the bowlders. And between the surf and the spinnery a flock of sea gulls sought shelter. Sometimes they would fly up with a noise as though a bowlder had been blasted and was scattering in many pieces; and sometimes they would rest themselves upon the twisting yarns, where their claws would get caught in the hemp and they would whirl around with the spindles, until the spinners, on their return for a fresh start, kicked them off.

At the age of seven I started to turn the wooden wheel. From bundles around their waists the five old spinners payed out wads of hemp on to the twisting rope yarns, until far on the horizon they looked like black dots. For a whole mile they walked backward, placing their yarns between pegs upon the pine crosses, and at last thrumming the yarns as a signal for me to stop for a moment until they fastened the yarn ends to a loose log. When I turned the wheel again, the yarns twisted themselves into a thick strand. So went the afternoon. A one-mile backward dash, and five yarns were spun; five backward dashes, and five thick strands were spun. Out of these the ship hawser, like a huge sea worm, suddenly came writhing into existence.

With this monster did I wrestle while I turned the wheel. I held it by the snout until it groaned. Its tentacles were hooked taut on to the spindles, and its one-mile-long body stretched itself upon the bowlders, and its hairs segments creaked as they twisted themselves tighter around each other. On ‘dipping days’ the hawser slid through my hands as I drowned it under the hot tar, inch by inch, while the spinners wound it into a coil. Then its fibre splinters tore the skin off my fingers, and the friction blistered my hands.

In the rope spinnery I had time to talk to myself. Out of the frail, short hemp fibre, plucked from plants on foreign soil, baled into compressed, disorganized masses, had come this long hawser. The hawser was all hemp, and the bale was all hemp. Vet what a difference!

And I watched the shaggy old spinners as much as I did the gulls, the sea, and the wooden wheel. What else could I do but watch the moving objects and discuss them with myself, pinned as I was the long afternoon to the wheel ? Their weird, backward walk caught my eye first. They faced me and shrank away from me like ghosts of the sea. Their bodies swayed and twisted from side to side in rhythm with their feet, which slid slowly over sand and rocks, groping for a ground grip. I took notice of their fingers, shredding the hemp fibre from bundles around their waists, and paying it out evenly to the twisting yarns. With what rapid motion their fingers tore the hemp off the bundle! Their hands caught the right amount, seizing the threads with their hairy, crooked fingers. Their hands were like huge spiders. And when they snatched new bundles, as the old ones gave out, and wrapped them around their waists, — snatched with one hand while the other hand continued to spin, — they were like sleight-of-hand performers in the market place. Then my eyes were not even able to follow their motions.

On the other side of the wooden flywheel the pulleys, belts, and spindles whirled around each other almost as smoothly as did the gulls in the air. The moment I started to swing the handle these began to revolve — some fast, others slow, but all moving together and stopping together. I followed my own invisible hand power with my eyes through the motions of the whole mechanism, from the handle of the flywheel far out along the twisting hemp yarns on the pine crosses.

From pulleys to belts, from spindles to hemp yarns, leaped my hand power. The wheel made me sweat and made my heart pound, and at times stopped my breath entirely. When the yarns were being spun, I gave out only a slight amount of hand power. But when the strand was being spun from the yarns I gave out much more. And during the making of a hawser from the strands I gave the wheel all that was in me. Then the wheel stopped at the moment I took my hands off the handle. It did not continue a few extra turns by itself, as it always did during the spinning of the hemp yarns, when I was able to make excursions within a radius of ten steps while the wheel continued to turn. For, even if it did slow down during my absence, I would rush back and leap up on the box again to reach the handle and turn the wheel double fast. And soon the new twists would catch up with those at the other end that were waning.

Above the spinnery the sea gulls dived and soared, their wings stretching and relaxing, their small heads, calm eyes, capable beaks, and pliable necks steering them safely through the thick of the traffic. On the blue sky they scrawled mystic symbols and drew curves of infinite variety. Perhaps the gulls had learned their own code of wing writing. Perhaps they talked to each other in a written code of curves. And perhaps their talk was more unequivocal than human speech. For they never collided.

Far at sea the surges from the tide were like endless hawsers in the process of being spun. Their spiral-shaped segments turned around, and their hemp fibre whirled on the circumference. I imagined that the fishing cutters were the rope spinners. They disappeared in the horizon like the spinners ashore. The tide that twisted the surges around was the wooden wheel. But I was not able to imagine the spinnery lad who turned that wheel. The tide that moved the sea gave me a feeling of awe — especially when the wind did not disturb the water. I found something that I was unable to discuss with myself — a supreme power, perhaps.

(In November will appear Chapter II, ’The Sea Is Calling’)