The Rider on the White Horse Page 10

  This, too, passed by. But the dikemaster received another satisfaction one day as he rode along on the new dike, in quiet, self-conscious meditation. The question naturally arose in his mind, why the new enclosure, which would not have had its being without him, into which he had put the sweat of his brow and his night watches, now finally was named after one of the princesses “the new Caroline-land.” But it was so: on all the documents concerned with it stood the name, on some even in red Gothic letters. Then, just as he was looking up, he saw two workmen coming toward him with their tools, the one about twenty paces behind the other. “Why don’t you wait!” he heard the one behind calling. The other, who was just standing by a path which led down into the new land, called to him: “Another time, Jens. I’m late; I have to dig clay here.”

  “Where?”

  “Down here, in the Hauke-Haien-land.”

  He called it aloud, as he trotted down the path, as if he wanted the whole marsh below to hear it. But Hauke felt as if he were hearing his fame proclaimed; he rose from his saddle, spurred on his horse and with steady eyes looked over the wide land that lay to his left. “Hauke-Haien-land! Hauke-Haien-land!” he repeated softly; that sounded as if in all time it could not have another name. Let them defy him as they would—they could not get round his name; the name of the princess—wouldn’t that soon moulder in old documents?—His white horse galloped proudly and in his ears he heard a murmur: “Hauke-Haien-land! Hauke-Haien-land!” In his thoughts the new dike almost grew into the eighth wonder of the world; in all Frisia there was not the like of it. And he let the white horse dance, for he felt as if he were standing in the midst of all the Frisians, towering over them the height of a head, and glancing down upon all keenly and full of pity.

  Gradually three years had gone by since the building of the dike. The new structure had proved its worth, the cost of repairing had been small. And now almost everywhere in the enclosed land white clover was blooming, and as one walked over the sheltered pastures, the summer wind blew toward one a whole cloud of sweet fragrance. Thus the time had come to turn the shares, which hitherto had only been ideal, into real ones, and to allot to each shareholder the piece which he was to keep as his own. Hauke had not been slow to acquire some new shares before this; Old Peters had kept back out of spite, and owned nothing in the new land. The distribution of the parts could not be accomplished without annoyance and quarreling; but it was done, nevertheless. This day, too, lay behind the dikemaster.

  From now on he lived in a lonely way for his duties as farmer and as dikemaster and for those who were nearest to him. His old friends were no longer living, and he was not the man to make new ones. But under his roof was a peace which even the quiet child did not mar. She spoke little, the constant questioning that is so characteristic of bright children was rare with her and usually came in such a way that it was hard to answer; but her dear, simple little face almost always wore an expression of content. She had two play-fellows, and they were enough: when she wandered over the hill, the rescued little yellow dog always jumped round her, and when the dog appeared, little Wienke did not stay away long. The second companion was a pewit gull. As the dog’s name was “Pearl” so the gull was called “Claus.”

  Claus had been installed on the farm by an aged woman. Eighty-year-old Trin Jans had not been able to keep herself any longer in her hut on the outer dike; and Elke had thought that the aged servant of her grandfather might find peaceful evening hours and a good room to die in at her home. So, half by force, she and Hauke had brought her to their farm and settled her in the little northwest room in the new barn that the dikemaster had had built beside the main house when he had enlarged his establishment. A few of the maids had been given rooms next to the old woman’s and could help her tonight. Along the walls she kept her old furnishings; a chest made of wood from sugar boxes, above it two coloured pictures of her lost son, then a spinning-wheel, now at rest, and a very neat canopied bed in front of which stood an unwieldy stool covered with the white fur of the defunct Angora cat. But something alive, too, she had had about her and brought with her: that was the gull Claus, which had been attached to her and fed by her for years. To be sure, when winter came, it flew with the other gulls to the south and did not come again until the wormwood was fragrant on the shore.

  The barn was a little lower down on the hill, so the old woman could not look over the dike at the sea from her window. “You keep me here as in prison, dikemaster,” she muttered one day, as Hauke stepped in to see her, and she pointed with her bent finger at the fens that spread out below. “Where is Jeverssand? Above those red oxen or those black ones?”

  “What do you want Jeverssand for?” asked Hauke.

  “Jeverssand!” muttered the old woman. “Why, I want to see where my boy that time went to God!”

  “If you want to see that,” Hauke replied, “you’ll have to sit up there under the ash tree. From there you can look over the whole sea.”

  “Yes,” said the old woman; “yes, if I had your young legs, dikemaster.”

  This was the style of thanks the dikemaster and his wife received for some time, until all at once everything was different. The little child’s head of Wienke one morning peeped in through her half-open door. “Well,” called the old woman, who sat with her hands folded on her wooden stool; “what have you to tell me?”

  But the child silently came nearer and looked at her constantly with its listless eyes.

  “Are you the dikemaster’s child?” Trin Jans asked, and as the child lowered its head a s if nodding, she went on: “Then sit down here on my stool. Once it was an Angora cat—so big! But your father killed it. If it wee still alive, you could ride on it.”

  Wienke silently turned her eyes to the white fur; then she knelt down and began to stroke lit with her little hands as children are wont to do with live cats or dogs. “Poor cat!” she said then and went on with her caresses.

  “Well,” cried the old woman after a while, “now that’s enough; and you can sit on him to-day, too. Perhaps your father only killed him for that.” Then she lifted up the child by both arms and set it down roughly on the stool. But when it remained sitting there, silent and motionless and only kept looking at her, she began to shake her head. “Thou art punishing him, Lord God! Yes, yes, Thou art punishing him!” she murmured. But pity for the child seemed to come over her; she stroked its scanty hair with her bony hand, and the eyes of the little girl seemed to show that this did her good.

  From now on Wienke came every day to the old woman in her room. Soon she sat down on the Angora stool of her own accord, and Trin Jans put small bits of meat and bread which she always saved into the child’s little hands, and made her throw them on the floor. Then the gull shot out of some corner with screams and wings spread out and pounced on the morsels. At first the great, rushing bird frightened the child and made her cry out; but soon it all happened like a game learned by heart, and her little head only had to appear in the opening of the door, when the bird rushed up to her and perched on her head and shoulders, until the old woman helped and the feeding could begin. Trin Jans who before never could bear to have anyone merely stretch out a hand after her “Claus,” now patiently watched the child gradually win over the bird altogether. It willingly let itself be chased, and she carried it about in her apron. Then, when on the hill the little yellow dog would jump round her and up at the bird in jealousy, she would cry: “Don’t, don’t, Pearl!” and lift the gull with her little arms so high, that the bird, after setting itself free, would fly screaming over the hill, and now the dog, by jumping and caressing, would try to win its place in her arms.

  When by chance Hauke’s or Elke’s eyes fell upon this strange four-leaved clover which, as it were, was held to the same stem only by the same defect—then they cast tender glances upon the child. But when they turned away, there remained on their faces only the pain that each carried away alone, for the saving word had not yet been spoken between them. One summer morning,
when Wienke sat with the old woman and the two animals on the big stones in front of the barn door, both her parents passed by—the dikemaster leading his white horse, with the reins flung over his arm. He wanted to ride on the dike and had got his horse out of the fens himself; on the hill his wife had taken his arm. The sun shone down warmly; it was almost sultry, and now and then a gust of wind blew from the south-southeast. It seemed that her seat was uncomfortable for the child. “Wienke wants to go too!” she cried, shook the gull out of her lap and seized her father’s hand.

  “Then come!” said he.

  But Elke cried: “In this wind? She’ll fly away from you!”

  “I’ll hold her all right; and to-day we have warm air and jolly water; then she can see it dance!”

  Then Elke ran into the house and got a shawl and a little cap for her child. “But a storm is brewing,” she said; “hurry and get on your way and be back soon.”

  Hauke laughed: “That shan’t get us!” and lifted the child to his saddle. Elke stayed a while on the hill and, shading her eyes with her hand, watched the two trot down the road and toward the dike. Trin Jan sat on the stone and murmured incomprehensible things with her lips.

  The child lay motionless in her father’s arms. It seemed as if it breathed with difficulty under the pressure of the sultry air. He bent down his head to her: “Well, Wienke?” he asked.

  The child looked at him a while: “Father,” she said, “you can do that. Can’t you do everything?”

  “What is it that I can do, Wienke?”

  But she was silent; she seemed not to have understood her own question.

  It was high tide. When they came to the dike, the reflection of the sun on the wide water flashed into her eyes, a whirlwind made the waves eddy and raised them high up, ever new waves came and beat splashing against the beach. Then, in her fear, her little hands clung round her father’s fist which was holding the reins, so that the horse made a bound to the side. The pale-blue eyes looked up at Hauke in confused fright: “The water, father! The water!” she cried.

  But he gently freed his hand and said: “Be calm, child; you are with your father; the water won’t hurt you!”

  She pushed her pale blond hair from her forehead and again dared to look upon the sea. “It won’t hurt me,” she said trembling; “no, tell it not to hurt us; you can do that, and then it won’t do anything to us!”

  “I can’t do that, child,” replied Hauke seriously; “but the dike on which we are riding shelters us, and this your father has thought out and has had built.”

  Her eyes turned upon him as if she did not quite understand that; then she buried her strikingly small head in the wide folds of her father’s coat.

  “Why are you hiding, Wienke?” he whispered to her; “are you afraid?” And a trembling little voice rose out of the folds of the coat: “Wienke would rather not look; but you can do everything, can’t you, father?”

  Distant thunder was rolling against the wind. “Hoho!” cried Hauke, “there it comes!” And he turned his horse round to ride back. “Now we want to go home to mother!”

  The child drew a deep breath; but not until they had reached the hill and the house did she raise her little head from her father’s breast. When Elke had taken off the little shawl and cap in the room, the child remained standing before her mother like a dumb little ninepin.

  “Well, Wienke,” she said, and shook her gently, “do you like the big water?”

  But the child opened her eyes wide. “It talks,” she said. “Wienke is afraid!”

  “It doesn’t talk; it only murmurs and roars!”

  The child looked into the void: “Has it got legs?” she asked again; “can it come over the dike?”

  “No, Wienke; your father looks out for that, he is the dikemaster.”

  “Yes,” said the child and clapped her little hands together with an idiotic smile. “Father can do everything—everything!” Then suddenly, turning away from her mother, she cried: “Let Wienke go to Trin Jans, she has red apples!”

  And Elke opened the door and let the child out. When she had closed it again, she glanced at her husband with the deepest anguish in her eyes from which hitherto he had drawn only comfort and courage that had helped him.

  He gave her his hand and pressed hers, as if there were no further need for words between them; then she said in a low voice: “No, Hauke, let me speak: the child that I have borne you after years will stay a child always. Oh, good God! It is feeble-minded! I have to say it once in your hearing.”

  “I knew it long ago,” said Hauke and held tightly his wife’s hand which she wanted to draw away.

  “So we are left alone after all,” she said again.

  But Hauke shook his head: “I love her, and she throws her little arms round me and presses close to my breast; for all the treasures of the world I wouldn’t miss that!”

  The woman stared ahead darkly: “But why?” she asked; “what have I, poor mother, done?”

  “Yes, Elke, that I have asked, too, of Him who alone can know; but you know, too, that the Almighty gives men no answer—perhaps because we would not grasp it.”

  “He had seized his wife’s other hand too, and gently drew her toward him. “Don’t let yourself be kept from loving your child as you do; be sure it understands that.”

  Then Elke threw herself on her husband’s breast and cried to her heart’s content and was on longer alone with her grief. Then suddenly she smiled at him; after pressing his hand passionately, she ran out and got her child from old Trin Jans’ room, took it on her lap and caressed and kissed it, until it stammered:

  “Mother, my dear mother!”

  Thus the people on the dikemaster’s farm lived quietly; if the child had not been there, it would have been greatly missed.

  Gradually the summer passed by; the migrating birds had flown away, the song of larks was no longer in the air; only in front of the barns, where they pecked at the grain in thrashing time, one could hear some of them scream as they flew away. Already everything was frozen hard. In the kitchen of the main house Trin Jans sat one afternoon on the wooden steps of a stairway that started beside the stove and led to the attic. In the last weeks it seemed as if a new life had entered into her. Now she liked to go into the kitchen occasionally and watch Elke at work; there was no longer any idea of her legs not being able to carry her so far, since one day little Wienke had pulled her up here by her apron. Now the child was kneeling beside her, looking with her quiet eyes into the flames that were blazing up out of the stove-hole; one of her little hands was clinging to the old woman’s sleeve, the other was in her own pale blonde hair. Trin Jans was telling a story: “You know,” she said, “I was in the service at your great-grandfather’s, as housemaid, and there I had to feed the pigs. He was cleverer than all the rest—then it happened—it was awfully long ago—but, one night, by moonlight, they had the lock to the sea closed, and she couldn’t go back into the sea. Oh, how she screamed and clutched her hard, bristly hair with her fish-hands! Yes, child, I saw her and heard her scream. The ditches between the fens were all full of water, and the moon beamed on them so that they shone like silver; and she swam from one ditch into another and raised her arms and clapped what hands she had together, so that one could hear the splash from far, as if she wanted to pray. But, child, those creatures can’t pray. I sat in front of the house door on a few beams that had been driven there to build with, and looked far over the fens; and the mermaid was still swimming in the ditches, and when she raised her arms, they were glittering with silver and diamonds. At last I saw her no longer, and the wild geese and gulls that I had not been hearing all the time were again flying through the air with whistling and cackling.”

  The old woman stopped. The child had caught one word: “Couldn’t pray?” she asked. “What are you saying? Who was that?”

  “Child,” said the old woman; “it was the mermaid; they are monsters and can’t be saved.”

  “Can’t be saved!” re
peated the child, and a deep sigh made her little breast heave, as if she had understood that.

  “Trin Jans!” a deep voice sounded from the kitchen door, and the old woman was a little startled. It was the dikemaster Hauke Haien, who leaned there by the post; “what are you telling the child? Haven’t I told you to keep your fairy-tales for yourself or else to tell them to the geese and hens?”

  The old woman looked at him with an angry glance and pushed the little girl away. “That’s no fairy-tale,” she murmured, “my great-uncle told it to me!”

  “Your great-uncle, Trin? You just said you had seen it yourself.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said the old woman; “but you don’t believe me, Hauke Haien; you want to make my great-uncle a liar!” Then she moved nearer to the stove and stretched her hands out over the flames of the stove-hole.

  The dikemaster cast a glance at the window: twilight had scarcely begun. “Come, Wienke!” he said and drew his feeble-minded child toward him; “come with me, I want to show you something outside, from the dike. But we have to walk; the white horse is at the blacksmith’s.” Then he took her into the room and Elke wrapped thick woolen shawls round the child’s neck and shoulders; and soon her father walked with her on the old dike toward the north-west, past Jeverssand, where the flats stretched out broad and almost endless.

  Now he would carry her, now she would walk holding his hand; the twilight thickened; in the distance everything vanished in mist and vapour. But in parts still in sight, the invisibly swelling streams that washed the flats had broken the ice and, as Hauke Haien had once seen it in his youth, steaming mists rose out of the cracks as at that time, and there again the uncanny foolish figures were hopping toward one another, bowed and suddenly stretched out into horrible breadths.