Chapter X: Part 1861: ). This novel deals with the conditions in Pomerania in (9)

During the ten years spent in Husum Storm's lyric talent came to full and characteristic development. The influence of Heine's _Book of Songs_, so apparent in the poems of his school and student days, is hardly seen any more. Eichendorff's poems and his novel, _Poets and Their Disciples_, do indeed still echo strongly, and we feel the influence of Mörike's lyrics in this period more clearly than before. But all this is insignificant in comparison with Storm's own creative power and the wealth that flowed to him out of his own life. As he was particularly happy at that time, it is natural that qualities should appear in his work which are too often overlooked in forming an estimate of his character and which were more strongly developed in this period than in any other. It is true that we still hear sad tones, even complaints of lost love and of love's suffering and loneliness, but the majority and the best poems are written in a contented, confident, energetic, even jubilant key. It is his love for his wife, of whom he sang so much, that transfigures life to the poet. Beneath her hand pain is stilled, in her arms life and death are overcome, and her presence turns the alien place into home. Separated from the world and from the day nothing can surpass the moments when he receives from her love's last and highest gifts. To the sound of clear bells on moonlight nights peace on earth and good-will to men seem to descend upon the little family circle over which God himself keeps watch. It was in those days, too, that the poet succeeded in writing his song of "the gray town by the sea" which nature has treated so slightingly and yet so singularly, and to which his whole heart goes out; for it is, after all, his mother town. Indeed, he hails with rejoicing the world, the beautiful, imperishable world, and every true heart that does not allow itself to be subdued but enjoys the golden days and has learned to gild the gray ones. He is even full of hope as regards the fate of his home country. In spite of all defeats, in spite of all disgrace and distress, he prophesies a new spring for her and calls the poet blessed who may then win for her "the jewel of poetry." It is only when he actually has to leave his home and move away with his wife and children that he begins to doubt as to his own return; then his hope changes into the prayer that at least his sons may once be able to go back, for "no man thrives without a fatherland."

In 1853 Storm had entered the Prussian service, and for three years held the position of assistant judge in the circuit court in Potsdam. There he was not content, in spite of the cordiality with which he was received, especially by Berlin poets, artists, and lovers of art. If we understand him aright, he was oppressed by the feeling that in the society of Potsdam the worth of the individual was determined by the office he held and by his descent, and that the human being in that State was sacrificed to the citizen and the official, the man to the soldier. During those years Storm's poetical production faltered, and it was fortunate for him that in the autumn of 1856 he was transferred as a circuit judge to Heiligenstadt in Central Germany. This cozy little town in the mountains appealed exceedingly to his nature, and on the whole he was able to live there much as he had been accustomed to in Husum. In addition, the improvement in his financial condition and the lesser burden of his professional work undoubtedly contributed to the re-awakening in him of the poet.

He was not so productive in lyric poetry as during the years in Husum, but, as regards artistic value, the poems of this period certainly do not stand below those of the earlier one. He tries his hand at folk-poetry and succeeds in striking its key of heartiness, simplicity, and spontaneity. He clothes the popular theme of the enamoured miller's daughter in a garment of artistic form, and yet, by means of roguish humor and naïve frankness, manages to sound the note of the folk-song. He employs one of the most telling means for lyric effect by drawing parallels between the conditions in nature and those in men, and in doing this he awakens the most delicate harmonies by portraying both conditions without pointing out the relation between them, or by placing an individual in the midst of a somewhat minutely described landscape and leading us to imagine him in a state that corresponds with that of nature.

But in contrast to those just mentioned the greater number of his poems are of a subjective kind. Again the poet writes of his wife, from whom after all comes every joy that he experiences away from home, and he only draws her all the closer to his heart since the passing years have imprinted the first signs of age on her gentle features. His love is mixed with yearning for the time when they were both young and--for his home. The yearning for home is at one time expressed in almost classically pure words, "nach drüben ist sein Auge stets gewandt" (his eye is ever roaming toward the other land); at another it merely underlies and glimmers through the devotion with which he paints a scene from home; at still another the poet's blood surges high and "fury and longing for home wrestle for his heart." At last he can no longer stifle his indignation; he calls upon the very dead to arise and to battle again, and in ringing words shouts to the world "_die deutschen Gräber sind ein Spott der Feinde_" (the German graves are mocked by enemies).

Even more strongly than in his political poems the specifically manly quality in Storm's poetry appears in what we may call his confessional lyrics. There he gives us his thoughts about immortality: that, in common with all creation, man too rebels against dissolution, and that the belief in immortality is only the final, refined, and spiritualized form of this rebellion. But the true man stands above his own fate and will not sacrifice reason even to the most seductive promises. The church stands opposed to such high development of the individual; Storm thinks poorly of it, and forbids the priest to attend at his grave.

_Permission Berlin Photo. Co., New York_]

As in the realm of the mind the poet opposes the church, so in the social sphere he attacks feudalism and the bureaucracy. Those whose national feeling is not deep and comprehensive enough to allow them to feel at one with the people he stigmatizes as the drop of poison in German blood. He holds up to ridicule those who need the pretentiousness of power in order to be happy and would like to gain it at the cost of the people's liberty. But in pithy words Storm advises his sons to keep to the truth uncompromisingly, to despise outward success, but to spare no pains in striving for true worth, not to sacrifice self-respect to consideration for others but always to remember that in this life, after all, every one can stand only on his own feet.

The years in Heiligenstadt are of special importance in Storm's whole artistic activity, inasmuch as poetry is gradually pushed into the second place by his prose works. At that time Storm was known to the greater public hardly at all by his lyrics but only by _Immensee_ (1849) and similar tales. Hence he was recognized as the author of lyric stories expressive chiefly of "transfigured resignation." This characterization, however, is only partially justified, for resignation finally disappears from Storm's stories and the share that the lyric element has in his tales changes entirely in the course of time. Of a number of his earlier narratives and sketches it can actually be said that they were written less for the sake of the tale than on account of the mood they express. And, in _Heiligenstadt_, Storm, who in all spheres sought untiringly for pure form, finally reached that kind of prose in which feeling and imagination have the widest scope, the "Märchen." He writes _The Rain-Witch_, perhaps the most perfect artistic fairy tale of German literature, in which he not only surpasses Goethe and the Romanticists but also himself. For, in Storm's own words, his _Hinzelmeier_ is only a "fantastic-allegorical creation," _Bulemann's House_, written in the style of E. T. A. Hoffmann, "an odd story," while _The Mirror of Cyprianus_ appears rather "in the elegant robe of the saga."

The last of these works was not finished in Heiligenstadt, but when Storm was back in his old home again. For in March, 1864, he had returned to Husum, where he was given the office of "Landvogt" (district magistrate), to which were attached authority in police matters and the administration of justice.

In taking this step he had followed the call of his fellow-citizens, for the death of Frederick VII. of Denmark had once more awakened in the Duchies the hope of freedom. The longed-for happiness of his return, however, was marred; for, instead of becoming independent, Schleswig-Holstein was finally made a Prussian province, and he was still more deeply stricken by a loss in his family. In May, 1865, his wife Konstanze died after the birth of her seventh child. Storm did indeed marry again--his second wife Dorothea Jensen was a friend and relative of his and Konstanze's, and this marriage too was happy--but his further poems bear witness to what he lost in Konstanze. One of his stories, also, _Viola Tricolor_ (1873), deals with the problem how a man can cultivate the memory of his dead wife without doing injury to his love for the living one; he called it a "Selbstbefreiung" (self-justification).

The evening of Storm's life was not spent in Husum, where memories threatened to engulf him, but in the village of Hademarschen nearby, whither he moved in 1880, when he retired from office. Here he was destined still to develop abundant artistic activity as a novelist until his death on the fourth of July, 1888.

After the completion of his imaginative writings a decided change in Storm's prose style began to take place. Formerly the lyrical element lay like a haze over and about objects and persons, and even now it does not disappear. Yet it no longer blurs and obliterates the outlines and connections, but rather streams out of the objects represented, as a fragrance rises from a flower. The first beginnings of this style are already noticeable in _At the Castle_ (1861), in which the problems of class differences and of enlightenment form to a certain extent the backbone of the narrative, and in _At the University_ (1862), which for a story of Storm's at that period contains a great wealth of incidents. But it was in such works as _In the Village on the Heath_ and _At Cousin Christian's_ that the poet first attained a purely objective narrative style. That he himself realized this is clear from his correspondence. On the twenty-fourth of January, 1873, he writes to Hebbel's biographer Kuh with reference to _In the Village on the Heath_: "I think I have shown by this that I can also write a story without the atmosphere of a distinct mood (Dunstkreis einer bestimmten Stimmung). I do not mean a mood which is spontaneously developed during the reading from the facts given, but a mood furnished _a priori_ by the author."

Hand in hand with the development of this "epic" style goes the transition to realism which we find also in Storm's poems. In prose it is best represented by works like _Eekenhof_ and _Der Herr Etatsrat_, or _Hans and Heinz Kirch_ and _Two-Souled_. Here the poet shrinks from no harshness. We find striking portraits the lines of which are drawn with a sharp, unflattering touch. Psychic conditions of the most brutal kind are portrayed and are made the more telling because it is almost only their effects that are given. In the same way the external world stands chiefly before us in its appearances while the conditions that have led to these appearances are neglected. Finally, Storm endeavors to step beyond the bounds of pure narrative. He seizes upon material of a dramatic nature and seeks to retain--nay more, to bring out--its dramatic character, even in the epic form. In one of his letters he calls the "Novelle" the epic sister of the drama, and goes on to say that it treats of the deepest problems of human life and requires for its perfection to be centred about some conflict. Such are works like _The Sons of the Senator_, where individual will is pitted against individual will; _Renate_ or _At the Brewer's_, where individuals struggle against a multitude who are sunk in error and superstition; and, above all, _The Rider of the White Horse_, where the individual wrestles with the mass, the man with the most elementary forces of nature.

_The Rider of the White Horse_ is Storm's last complete work and also, as we believe, the one that best reflects the whole man, as far as that is possible with a poet of such varied development. The scene is laid in his home, which is characterized with vividness and grandeur in its setting of marsh and sea. Like the stories of his youth it glorifies love, the love of two beings who are faithful to each other unto death, and at the same time it touches themes which deeply occupied Storm in his age, such as the problem of heredity in _Karsten Kurator_, or the relation between father and son in _Hans and Heinz Kirch_ or in _Basch the Cooper_. The charm of youth, to which our poet was always most susceptible, invests the chief characters, and they have that chaste reserve that holds all internal life sacred. Happiness is won, but it ends in tragedy, the tragedy which has taken the place of the resignation of his youthful works and which, after all, was more deeply rooted in Storm than the joyfulness that is sounded in _Psyche_. It is a man of sober intellect who tells the whole story and yet, like human life itself, it stands out against a mystic background. Remembrance of long ago has clarified everything, loving comprehension fills everything with deepest sympathy. It was granted to Storm to stand on a pinnacle of art at the end of his life, a pinnacle which he had to leave, but from which he did not need to descend.

_THEODOR STORM_

THE RIDER OF THE WHITE HORSE (1888)

TRANSLATED BY MURIEL ALMON

The story that I have to tell came to my knowledge more than half a century ago in the house of my great-grandmother, the wife of Senator Feddersen, when, sitting close up to her armchair one day, I was busy reading a number of some magazine bound in blue cardboard, either the _Leipziger_ or _Pappes Hamburger Lesefrüchte_, I have forgotten which. I still recall with a tremor how the old lady of more than eighty years would now and then pass her soft hand caressingly over her great-grandchild's hair. She herself, and that day, have long been buried and I have sought in vain for those old pages, so I can just as little vouch for the truth of the facts as defend them if anyone should question them. Only one thing I can affirm, that although no outward circumstance has since revived them in my mind they have never vanished from my memory.

On an October afternoon, in the third decade of our century--thus the narrator began his tale--I was riding in very bad weather along a dike in northern Friesland. For more than an hour I had been passing, on the left, a bleak marsh from which all the cattle had already gone, and, on the right, uncomfortably near, the marsh of the North Sea. A traveler along the dike was supposed to be able to see islets and islands; I saw nothing however but the yellow-gray waves that dashed unceasingly against the dike with what seemed like roars of fury, sometimes splashing me and the horse with dirty foam; in the background eerie twilight in which earth could not be distinguished from sky, for the moon, which had risen and was now in its second quarter, was covered most of the time by driving clouds. It was icy cold. My benumbed hands could scarcely hold the reins and I did not blame the crows and gulls that, cawing and shrieking, allowed themselves to be borne inland by the storm. Night had begun to fall and I could no longer distinguish my horse's hoofs with certainty; not a soul had met me; I heard nothing but the screaming of the birds, as their long wings almost brushed against me or my faithful mare, and the raging of wind and water. I do not deny that at times I wished myself in some secure shelter.

It was the third day of the storm and I had allowed myself to be detained longer than I should have by a particularly dear relative at his farm in one of the northern parishes. But at last I had to leave. Business was calling me in the town which probably still lay a few hours' ride ahead of me, to the south, and in the afternoon I had ridden away in spite of all my cousin and his kind wife could do to persuade me, and in spite of the splendid home-grown Perinette and Grand Richard apples which were yet to be tried. "Just wait till you get out by the sea," he had called after me from the door, "you will turn back then; we will keep your room ready for you!"

And really, for a moment, as a dark layer of clouds made it grow black as pitch around me and at the same time a roaring gust threatened to sweep both me and my horse away, the thought did flash through my head: "Don't be a fool! Turn back and sit down in comfort with your friends." But then it occurred to me that the way back was longer than the one to my journey's end, and so, drawing the collar of my cloak closer about my ears, I trotted on.

But now something was coming along the dike towards me. I heard nothing, but I thought I could distinguish more and more clearly, as a glimmer fell from the young moon, a dark figure, and soon, when it came nearer, I saw that it was riding a long-legged, lean white horse. A dark cloak fluttered about the figure's shoulders and as it flew past two burning eyes looked at me from a pale countenance.

Who was it? Why was it here? And now I remembered that I had heard no sound of hoofs nor of the animal's breathing, and yet horse and rider had passed close beside me.

Wondering about this I rode on. But I had not much time to wonder; it was already passing me again from behind. It seemed to me as if the flying cloak brushed against me and the apparition shot by as noiselessly as before. Then I saw it farther and farther ahead of me and suddenly it seemed to me as if its shadow was suddenly descending the land-side of the dike.

With some hesitation I followed. When I reached the spot where the figure had disappeared I could see close to the dike, below it and on the land-side, the glistening of water in one of those water-holes which the high tides bore in the earth during a storm and which then usually remain as small but deep-bottomed pools.

The water was remarkably still, even stiller than the protection of the dike would account for. The rider could not have disturbed it; I saw nothing more of him. But I did see something else that I greeted with joy; below me, on the reclaimed land, a number of scattered lights shone. They seemed to come from the long, narrow Friesian houses that stood singly on mounds of different heights; while close before me, halfway up the inside of the dike, stood a large house of the same sort. All its windows on the south side, to the right of the door, were illuminated; behind them I could see people and even thought I could hear them, in spite of the storm. My horse had already turned of its own accord onto the path down the side of the dike that would lead me to the house. It was evidently a public house, for in front of the windows I could see the beams, resting on two posts and provided with iron rings, to which the cattle and horses that stopped there were tied.

I fastened mine to one of the rings and then commended it to the care of the hostler who came to meet me as I stepped into the hall. "Is there a meeting here?" I asked him, hearing distinctly the sound of voices and the clatter of glasses through the open door of the room.

"Something of the kind," he replied in Low German, and I learnt later that this dialect in the place had been current, together with the Friesian, for over a hundred years. "The dikegrave and commissioners and some of the others interested! It's on account of the high water!"

Entering I saw about a dozen men sitting at a table which ran along under the windows; on it stood a bowl of punch over which a particularly stately man seemed to preside.

I bowed and asked to be allowed to sit down with them, which request was readily granted. "You are keeping watch here, I suppose," I said, turning to the stately man; "it is dirty weather outside; the dikes will have all they can do!"

"Yes, indeed," he replied; "but we here, on the east side, think we are out of danger now; it is only over on the other side that they are not safe. The dikes there are built, for the most part, after the old pattern; our main dike was moved and rebuilt as long ago as in the last century. We got chilled out there a little while ago, and you are certainly cold too," he added, "but we must stand it here for a few hours longer; we have our trustworthy men out there who come and report to us." And before I could give the publican my order a steaming glass was pushed towards me.

I soon learnt that my friendly neighbor was the dikegrave. We got into conversation and I began to tell him my singular experience on the dike. He grew attentive and I suddenly noticed that the conversation all around us had ceased. "The rider of the white horse!" exclaimed one of the company and all the rest started.

The dikegrave rose. "You need not be afraid," he said across the table; "that does not concern us alone. In the year '17 too it was meant for those on the other side; we'll hope that they are prepared for anything!"

Now the shudder ran through me that should properly have assailed me out on the dike. "Pardon me," I said, "who and what is this rider of the white horse?"

Apart from the rest, behind the stove, sat a little lean man in a scant and shabby black coat. He was somewhat bent and one of his shoulders seemed to be a little crooked. He had taken no part whatever in the conversation of the others, but his eyes, which in spite of his sparse gray hair were still shaded by dark lashes, showed clearly that he was not sitting there merely to nod off to sleep.

The dikegrave stretched out his hand towards him. "Our schoolmaster," he said, raising his voice, "will be able to tell you that better than any of the rest of us here--only in his own way, to be sure, and not as correctly as Antje Vollmers, my old housekeeper at home, would do it."

"You're joking, Dikegrave," came the somewhat thin voice of the schoolmaster from behind the stove, "to put your stupid dragon on an equality with me!"

"Yes, yes, Schoolmaster!" returned the other; "but tales of that kind you know are said to be best preserved among the dragons!"

"To be sure," said the little man. "We are not quite of the same opinion in this matter," and a smile of superiority passed over his delicately formed face.

"You see," the dikegrave whispered in my ear, "he is still a little haughty. He studied theology once, in his youth, and stuck here in his home as schoolmaster only on account of an unfortunate betrothal."

In the meantime the schoolmaster had come forward out of his corner and seated himself beside me at the long table. "Go on Schoolmaster, let us have the story," called a few of the younger ones in the party.

"To be sure," said the old man turning to me, "I am glad to oblige you; but there is much superstition interwoven with it and it requires art to tell the tale without including that."

"Please don't leave that out," I replied, "trust me to separate the chaff from the wheat myself."

The old man looked at me with a smile of understanding. "Well, then," he said, "in the middle of the last century, or rather, to be more exact, before and after the middle, there was a dikegrave here who understood more about dikes, drains and sluices than peasants and farmers usually do; yet even so it seems hardly to have been enough, for he had read but little of what learned experts have written about such things, and had only thought out his own knowledge for himself from the time he was a little child. You have probably heard, sir, that the Friesians are good at figures and undoubtedly you have heard some talk too about our Hans Mommsen of Fahretoft, who was a peasant and yet could make compasses and chronometers, telescopes and organs. Well, the father of this dikegrave was a bit like that too; only a bit, to be sure. He had a few fields in the fens where he planted rape and beans, and where a cow grazed. Sometimes in autumn and spring he went out surveying, and in winter when the northwester came and shook his shutters, he sat at home sketching and engraving. His boy generally sat there with him and looked up from his reader or his Bible at his father measuring and calculating, and buried his hand in his blond hair. And one evening he asked his father why that which he had just written had to be just like that and not otherwise, and gave his own opinion about it." But his father, who did not know what answer to give, shook his head and said: "I can't tell you why, it is enough that it is so; and you yourself are mistaken. If you want to know more go up to the attic tomorrow and hunt for a book in the box up there. The man who wrote it was called Euclid; you can find out from that book."

The next day the boy did go up to the attic and soon found the book, for there were not many in the whole house; but his father laughed when the boy laid it down before him on the table. It was a Dutch Euclid, and Dutch, although after all it is half German, was beyond them both.

"Yes, yes," he said, "the book was my father's, he understood it. Isn't there a German one there?"

The boy, who was a child of few words, looked quietly at his father and only said: "May I keep it? There is no German one there."

And when the old man nodded he showed him a second little volume, half torn. "This one too?" he asked again.

"Take them both," said Tede Haien; "they won't do you much good."

But the second book was a little Dutch grammar, and as most of the winter was still to come it did help the lad enough so that finally when the time came for the gooseberries to bloom in the garden he was able to understand nearly all of the Euclid, then very much in vogue.

"I am not unaware, Sir," the narrator interrupted himself, "that this same incident is told of Hans Mommsen; but, here with us, people used to tell it of Hauke Haien--that was the boy's name--before Mommsen was born. You know how it is, when a greater man arises, he is credited with everything that his predecessors may have done, in earnest or in fun."

When the old man saw that the lad cared nothing about cows or sheep and scarcely even noticed when the beans were in blossom--which after all is the joy of every man from the marshlands--and that his little place might indeed get on with a peasant and a boy, but not with a semi-scholar and a servant, and also because he himself had failed of prosperity, he sent his big boy to the dike, where from Easter till Martinmas he was to wheel his barrow of earth with the other laborers. "That will cure him of Euclid!" he said to himself.

And the lad pushed his wheelbarrow, but he kept the Euclid in his pocket all the time, and when the workmen ate their lunch or stopped for a bite in the late afternoon he sat on the bottom of a wheelbarrow with the book in his hand. And in autumn when the tides began to be higher, and the work had sometimes to be stopped he did not go home with the others, but stayed, and sat on the slope of the dike, his hands clasped round his knee, and watched for hours how the gray waves of the North Sea dashed up higher and higher towards the grass-line of the dike. Not until the water came in over his feet and the foam spattered in his face did he move up a few feet higher and then sit on there. He heard neither the splashing of the water nor the screaming of the gulls and shore-birds that flew above and around him, almost touching him with their wings, and flashing their black eyes into his; nor did he see how night came and enveloped the broad, wild desert of water in front of him. All that he saw was the hem of the water outlined by the surf which, when the tide was in, struck again and again with its heavy beat on the same spot in the dike and washed away the grass-line on its steep side before his very eyes.

After staring at it long he sometimes nodded his head slowly, or, without looking up, drew a soft line in the air with his hand as if he would thus give the dike a gentler slope. When it grew so dark that all earthly things vanished from his sight and only the tide continued to thunder in his ears, he got up and trotted home half wet through.

One evening when he came home in this state, his father, who was cleaning his measuring instruments, looked up and turned on him. "What have you been doing out there so long? You might have been drowned; the water is eating right into the dike today."

Hauke looked at him stubbornly.

"Don't you hear what I say? You might have been drowned."

"Yes," said Hauke; "but I didn't get drowned."

"No," replied the old man after a time and looked at him absent-mindedly--"not this time."

"But," went on Hauke, "our dikes are no good!"

"What's that, boy?"

"The dikes, I say!"

"What about the dikes?"

"They're no good, Father."

The old man laughed in his face. "Is that so, boy? I suppose you are the child prodigy of Lübeck!"

But the lad would not allow himself to be confused. "The water-side is too steep," he said; "if it should happen again as it has already happened more than once we may all drown in here, behind the dike too."

The old man pulled his tobacco out of his pocket, twisted off a piece and pushed it in behind his teeth. "And how many barrows did you wheel today?" he asked crossly, for he saw that working at the dike could not cure the boy of working with his mind.

"I don't know, Father; about the same as the others; perhaps half a dozen more. But--the dikes must be built different."

"Good," said his father with a laugh; "you may get to be dikegrave; then, build them different."

"Yes, Father," returned the boy.

The old man looked at him and swallowed once or twice; then he went out. He did not know what answer to give the lad.

* * * * *

When, at the end of October, work on the dike came to an end Hauke Haien still continued to find more pleasure in a walk out towards the north, to the sea, than in anything else. Just as the children of today look forward to Christmas, he looked forward to All Saints' Day, when the equinoctial gales burst over the land, an occasion for lamentation in Friesland. In spite of wind and weather he was certain to be found at the time of the high spring tides lying out on the dike all by himself; and when the gulls shrieked, when the waves dashed high against the dike, and in rolling back washed out whole pieces of sod into the sea, Hauke's angry laughter was something worth hearing.

"You can't do anything right," he shouted out into the noise, "just as people don't know how to do anything!" And at last, often when it was quite dark, he would turn away from the broad, bleak expanse and trot home along the dike till he reached the low door under his father's thatch, and his tall, overgrown figure slipped through and into the little room beyond.

Sometimes he brought a handful of clay with him. Then he sat down beside his father who had begun to let him go his own way, and, by the light of the thin tallow candle, kneaded all kinds of dike-models, laid them in a shallow dish of water and tried to imitate the way in which the waves washed out the bank. Or he took his slate and drew on it profiles of dikes on the water-side as he thought they ought to be.

It never entered his head to associate with the boys who had been his companions in school, and apparently they cared nothing about such a dreamer. When it came winter again and the frost had taken hold he wandered out along the dike farther than he had ever been before to where the ice-covered surface of the shoals stretched before him as far as the eye could reach.

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.

"Wait a bit, Schoolmaster," said the dikegrave softly.

"You need not be afraid, Dikegrave," replied the little story-teller. "I have not slandered him and have no reason to do so," and he looked up at him with his wise little eyes.

JACOB ALBERTS]

"Well, well," said the other, "just let me fill your glass again." And after that had been done and the listeners, most of them with disconcerted faces, had turned to him again the schoolmaster continued:

"Thus keeping to himself and loving best to live only with the wind and water and the images that solitude brings, Hauke grew up to be a tall, lean fellow. He had been confirmed for more than a year when things began to change with him, and that was owing to the old white Angora tom-cat which had been brought home from a Spanish sea voyage to old Trien' Jans by her son, who later perished on the flats. Trien' lived a good distance out on the dike in a little cottage and when she was working about in her house this monster of a cat used to sit in front of the door and blink out at the summer day, and the lapwings that flew by. When Hauke passed the cat mewed at him and Hauke nodded; they both knew what was going on between them."

Once, it was spring, and Hauke often lay out on the dike as was his habit, farther down nearer the water, among the shore-pinks and the sweet-smelling sea-wormwood, and let the sun, which was already strong, shine down on him. The day before, when he was on the uplands, he had filled his pockets with pebbles and when the low tide had laid bare the flats and the little gray sand-pipers hopped over them, piping as they went, he suddenly took a stone out of his pocket and threw it at the birds. He had practised this from childhood and generally managed to bring one down; but just as often it was impossible to go out on the mud after it; Hauke had often thought of bringing the cat with him and teaching it to retrieve. Here and there, however, there were firm spots in the mud or sandbanks and then he could run out and fetch his plunder himself. If the cat was still sitting in front of the door as he passed on his way home it mewed wild with rapacity until Hauke threw it one of the birds he had killed.

On this particular day as he went home, his jacket on his shoulder, he only had one bird, of a kind unknown to him but which was covered with beautiful plumage that looked like variegated silk and burnished metal. The cat looked at him and begged loudly as usual. But this time Hauke did not want to give up his prey--it may have been a kingfisher--and paid no attention to the animal's desire. "Turn and turn about," he called to him, "my turn today, yours tomorrow; this is no food for a tom-cat!" But the cat crept up cautiously towards him; Hauke stood and looked at him, the bird hanging from his hand and the cat stopped with its paw raised. But Hauke seems not to have understood his friend thoroughly, for, as he turned his back on him and prepared to go on his way he felt his plunder torn from his grasp with a jerk, and at the same time a sharp claw dug into his flesh. A sudden fury like that of a beast of prey surged in the young fellow's blood; he grabbed madly about him and had the robber by the neck in a moment. Holding up the powerful creature in his fist he strangled it till its eyes obtruded from the rough hair, not heeding the strong hind claws that were tearing the flesh from his arm. "Ho, ho!" he shouted and gripped it still tighter; "we'll see which of us can stand it longest!"

Suddenly the hind legs of the great cat dropped lifelessly from his arm and Hauke went back a few steps and threw it towards the cottage of the old woman. As the cat did not move he turned and continued his way home.

But the Angora cat had been its mistress's treasure; it was her companion and the only thing that her son, the sailor, had left her when he came to his sudden end on the coast hard by, while trying to help his mother catch prawns in a storm. Hauke had scarcely taken a hundred steps, sopping up the blood from his wounds with a cloth as he went, when a loud outcry and lamentation from the direction of the cottage struck on his ear. He turned and saw the old woman lying on the ground in front of it while the wind blew her gray hair about the red handkerchief that covered her head. "Dead!" she shrieked, "dead!" and stretched out her thin arm threateningly towards him: "you shall be cursed! You killed him, you useless vagabond; you weren't worthy to stroke his tail." She threw herself on the animal and gently wiped away with her apron the blood that flowed from its nose and mouth. Then she again began her loud lamentation.

"Will you soon be through?" called Hauke to her, "then let me tell you this: I will get you a tom-cat that is satisfied with the blood of rats and mice!"

With this he went on his way, not apparently paying heed to anything. But the dead cat must have confused his head all the same, for when he came to the village he went on past his father's house and all the others too, out a long way on the dike towards the south, where the town lies.

In the meantime Trien' Jans too wandered out in the same direction; she carried a burden in her arms wrapped in an old blue-checked pillow slip, holding it carefully as if it had been a child; and her gray hair blew about in the gentle spring breeze. "What are you carrying there, Trina?" asked a peasant who met her. "More than your house and home," she replied and went on eagerly. When she came near to old Haien's house, which stood down below, she turned down the "Akt" as we call the cattle-paths and footways that run up or down the side of the dike.

Old Tede Haien was just standing out in front of the door looking at the weather. "Well, Trien'!" he said as she stood before him, panting and digging the point of her stick into the ground. "What have you got new in your bag?"

"First let me come in, Tede Haien! Then I'll show you," she said with an odd gleam in her eyes.

"Come in then," said the old man. Why should he bother about the foolish woman's eyes?

And when they were both inside she went on: "Take the old tobacco box and writing things away from the table--what do you want to be always writing for? There! And now wipe it off nice and clean!" And the old man, who was beginning to be curious, did everything that she told him. Then she took the blue pillow slip by the corners and shook the body of the great cat out on the table. "There you have him," she cried, "your Hauke has killed him." Whereupon she began to cry bitterly. She stroked the thick fur of the dead animal, laid its paws together, bowed her long nose over its head and whispered indistinct words of endearment into its ear.

Tede Haien watched the scene. "So," he said, "Hauke killed him?" He did not know what to do with the blubbering woman.

She nodded grimly: "Yes, by God, he did it!" and she wiped away the tears from her eyes with her gnarled gouty hand. "No child, nothing alive any more!" she sobbed. "And you know yourself how it is with us old ones, after All Saints' Day's over our legs freeze at night in bed and instead of sleeping we listen to the northwester rattling at the shutters. I don't like to hear it, Tede Haien, it comes from where my lad went down in the mud."

Tede Haien nodded and the old woman stroked her dead cat's coat. "And this one here," she began again, "in the winter when I sat at my work and the spinning wheel and hummed he sat beside me and hummed too and looked at me with his green eyes! And when I was cold and crept into bed--it was not long before he sprang up too and laid himself on my shivering legs and then we slept warm together!" And the old woman looked at the old man standing beside her at the table with smouldering eyes as if she wanted his assent to this memory.

But Tede Haien said slowly: "I know a way to help you, Trien' Jans." He went to his strong box and took a silver coin out of the drawer. "You say that Hauke has robbed you of your pet and I know that you don't lie; but here is a crownpiece of Christian IV.; go and buy yourself a dressed lambskin to keep your legs warm. Besides, our cat will soon have kittens and you may pick out the largest of them. The two together ought to make up for an Angora tom-cat that is weak with old age. And now take the creature and carry it into town to the knacker, for aught I care, and hold your tongue about its having lain here on my respectable table!"

While he was speaking the woman had taken the crown and hidden it in a little bag that she wore under her skirts; then she stuffed the cat back into the pillow-case, wiped the spots of blood from the table with her apron and stumped out of the door. "Don't forget about the young kitten," she called back as she went.

Some time later, as old Haien was walking up and down in the little room, Hauke came in and threw his bright bird onto the table; but when he saw the blood-stains which were still recognizable on its white, scoured top he asked with apparent carelessness, "What's that?"

His father stood still. "That is the blood that you shed!"

The boy flushed hotly. "Oh, has Trien' Jans been here with her cat?"

The old man nodded. "Why did you kill it?"

Hauke bared his torn arm. "That's why," he said; "he snatched my bird away from me."

The old man said nothing. He began to walk up and down again for some time; then he stopped in front of his son and looked at him absently. "I have settled the matter of the cat," he said after a moment, "but you see Hauke, this cottage is too small; two masters can't _hold_ it--it is time now, you must get yourself something to do."

"Yes, Father," replied Hauke; "I have thought the same myself."

"Why?" asked the old man.

"Well, a fellow boils within, if he has not enough to do to work it off."

"So," said the old man, "and that's why you killed the Angora? That might easily lead to something worse!"

"You may be right, Father; but the dikegrave has sent his servant-boy off; I could do that work."

The old man began to walk up and down again and squirted a stream of black tobacco-juice from his mouth. "The dikegrave is a dunce, as stupid as an owl! He is only dikegrave because his father and grandfather were dikegraves before him and because of his twenty-nine fens. When Martinmas comes round and the dike and sluice accounts have to be made up he feeds the schoolmaster on roast goose and mead and wheat-cracknels, and just sits there and nods when the other man runs over the columns of figures and says: "Yes, indeed, Schoolmaster, may God reward you! What a man you are at figures!" But if at any time the schoolmaster can't or won't, then he has to do it himself and he sits and writes and crosses out again, and his big stupid head grows red and hot and his eyes stand out like glass balls as if what little brain he has was trying to get out there."

The boy stood up straight before his father and was amazed that he could make such a speech; he had never heard him talk like that before. "Yes, he is stupid enough, God knows," he said; "but his daughter Elke, she can figure!"

The old man looked at him sharply. "Oh ho, Hauke!" he exclaimed, "what do you know of Elke Volkerts?"

"Nothing, Father; only the schoolmaster told me so."

The old man made no answer to this; he merely shifted his tobacco quid slowly from one cheek to the other. "And you think," he said then, "that when you're there you will be able to help figure too."

"Oh, yes, Father, I could do that all right," answered the son and his mouth quivered with earnestness.

The old man shook his head: "Well, as far as I am concerned, you may try your luck!"