“You have found the best thing you could possibly find in the earth!” said the sheriff.
“The best!” thought Ib. “The very best for me—and in the ground! So then the gypsy woman was right about me too, since this was the best!”
Ib took the boat from Aarhus to Copenhagen. It was like a trip across the ocean for him, given that he had only sailed on the Guden. Once he arrived in Copenhagen, Ib was paid the value of the gold he found. It was a large sum: six hundred dollars. And Ib from the woods by the heath walked through the winding streets of great Copenhagen.
The evening before he was to take the ship back to Aarhus, he got lost in the streets and went in an entirely wrong direction than he wanted to go. He crossed the Knippels bridge and ended up in Christian’s Harbor instead of down by the rampart at Westport. He was heading westward as he should, but not where he should have gone. There was not a soul on the street. Then a little girl came out from a humble house. Ib asked her about the street he was looking for. She started, looked up at him, and was crying. Now he asked her what was wrong. She said something that he didn’t understand, and as they were both under a streetlight, and the light shone right into her face, a funny feeling came over him. She looked just like little Christine as he remembered her from their childhood.
He went with the little girl into the humble house, up the narrow worn stairs, high up to a tiny slanting room right under the roof. The air was heavy and stuffy, and there was no light. Over in the corner someone sighed and breathed wheezily. Ib lit a match. The child’s mother was lying on the shabby bed.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” asked Ib. “The little one brought me up, but I’m a stranger in town myself. Is there a neighbor or someone I can summon?” He lifted her head.
It was Christine from the heath.
For years her name hadn’t been mentioned at home in Jutland. It would have disturbed Ib’s quiet thoughts. And what was rumored, and what was true, wasn’t good either. All the money that her husband had inherited from his parents had made him arrogant and unbalanced. He had quit his job and traveled abroad for six months, come back and gone into debt, but still lived opulently. More and more the carriage tilted, and finally it tipped over. His many cheerful friends who had partied at his table said that he deserved what he got, because he had lived like a madman! His corpse was found one morning in the canal in the castle garden.
Christine was dying. Her youngest little child, only a few weeks old, conceived in prosperity but born in squalor, was already in its grave, and now Christine was deadly ill and forsaken in this wretched little room. She might have tolerated the wretchedness in her young years on the heath, but now used to better, she felt the misery of it. It was her elder little child, also named Christine, who suffered want and hunger with her, who had brought Ib up there.
“I’m afraid I’ll die and leave my poor child!” she sighed. “What in the world will become of her!” She couldn’t say more.
Ib lit another match and found a candle stump to lighten the miserable little chamber.
Then Ib looked at the little girl and thought about Christine when she was young. For her sake he would be good to this child, whom he didn’t know. The dying woman looked at him, and her eyes grew larger and larger. Did she recognize him? He didn’t know. He didn’t hear her utter a word.
It was in the woods by the Guden, close to the heath. The air was grey, and the heather out of bloom. The storms from the west drove the yellow leaves from the woods into the river and over the heath where the sod-house stood—Strangers lived there now. Under the lee of the ridge behind high trees stood the little house, white-washed and painted. Inside in the living room a peat fire was burning in the stove. There was sunshine in the room; it shone from two childish eyes. The spring trills of the lark rolled from the red, laughing mouth. There was life and cheerfulness because little Christine was there. She sat on Ib’s knee. Ib was father and mother to her since her parents were gone, gone like a dream for the child and the grown-up. Ib sat in his neat and pleasant little house, a well-to-do man. The little girl’s mother lay in the pauper’s cemetery in Copenhagen.
They said that Ib had provided for a rainy day—gold from mold, they said, and of course, he also had little Christine.
NOTES
1. Forested area in central Jutland (the peninsular continental portion of Denmark); between 1850 and 1880 nearly 200 barges were in service on the Guden River between Randers and Silkeborg.
THE ICE MAIDEN
1. LITTLE RUDY
LET’S VISIT SWITZERLAND. LET’S look around in that magnificent mountainous country where the forests grow upon steep rocky walls. Let’s climb upon the dazzling fields of snow, and go down again to the green meadows, where rivers and rivulets roar along as if they’re afraid that they won’t reach the sea soon enough and will disappear. The sun burns hot in the deep valley, and it also burns on the heavy masses of snow so that through the years they melt together to form bright blocks of ice that become rolling avalanches and towering glaciers.
Two such glaciers lie in the wide ravines under Schreckhorn and Wetterhorn,1 close to the little mountain town of Grindelwald. They’re extraordinary to see, and therefore many foreigners come here in the summer from all over the world. They come over the high, snow-covered mountains, or they come from down in the deep valleys, after a several hour climb. As they climb, the valley seems to sink deeper. They look down on it as if they were up in a hot-air balloon. At the top the clouds often hang like thick heavy curtains of smoke around the peaks, while down in the valley, where the many brown wooden houses are spread out, a ray of sun captures a patch of shiny green and makes it look transparent. The water roars, rumbles, and rushes down there. The water trickles and tinkles above. It looks like fluttering ribbons of silver falling down the cliffs.
On both sides of the road there are log chalets and each house has a little potato patch. This is a necessity because there are many mouths inside the doors. There are many children who have big appetites. They swarm out from all the houses and press around the tourists, both those on foot and in coaches. All the children are little merchants. The little ones offer and sell lovely little carved wooden houses, like the ones you see built there in the mountains. Rain or shine the swarms of children come out with their wares.
Twenty some years ago there was sometimes a little boy there, standing a little apart from the other children, who also wanted to sell his wares. He had such a serious face and stood with both hands tightly clasping his wooden box, as if he didn’t want to drop it. It was just this seriousness, and the fact that he was so little, that caused him to be noticed and called upon. Often he sold the most, but he himself didn’t know why. His grandfather, who carved the lovely, delicate houses, lived higher up the mountain. In the living room up there stood an old cabinet, full of all kinds of carvings. There were nut crackers, knives, forks, and boxes with carved leaves and jumping antelopes. There was everything there that could please the eyes of children, but the little boy—whose name was Rudy—looked with greatest pleasure and longing at the old rifle under the rafters. Grandfather had said that it would be his when he was big and strong enough to use it.
As little as he was, the boy was set to tend the goats, and if climbing with them was a sign of a good goatherd, then Rudy was a good goatherd. He climbed even higher than the goats. He liked gathering birds’ nests from high in the trees. He was daring and brave, but you only saw him smile when he was standing by a roaring waterfall, or when he heard an avalanche. He never played with the other children, and he was only together with them when his grandfather sent him down to sell carvings. Rudy didn’t care much for that, for he would rather clamber alone up in the mountains, or sit by grandfather and listen to him tell about the old days, or about the people close by in Meiringen where he was from. People hadn’t lived there from the beginning of the world, Grandfather said, they had migrated. They had come from way up north, and they had relatives there. T
hey were called Swedes. This was real knowledge, and Rudy knew that, but he received even more knowledge from other good companions, and those were the animals in the house. There was a big dog, Ajola, that Rudy had inherited from his father, and there was a tomcat who meant a lot to Rudy because he had taught him how to climb.
“Come out on the roof with me,” the cat had said, quite clearly and intelligibly. When you’re a child and can’t talk yet, you can understand hens and ducks, cats and dogs very well indeed. They are just as easy to understand as father and mother when you are really small. Even grandfather’s cane can whinny and become a horse with a head, legs, and tail. Some children lose this understanding later than others, and people say that those children are slow in developing and are children for an exceedingly long time. People say so many funny things!
“Come out on the roof, little Rudy,” was one of the first things the cat said, and Rudy understood. “All that about falling is just imagination. You won’t fall if you aren’t afraid of falling. Come on, set one paw like this, and the other like this! Feel your way with your front paws. Use your eyes, and be flexible in your limbs. If there’s a gap, then jump and hold on. That’s what I do.”
And that’s what Rudy did too. He often sat on the ridge of the roof with the cat. He sat with it in the tree tops too, and then he sat high on the edge of the cliffs, where the cat never went.
“Higher! higher!” the trees and bushes said. “Do you see how we climb up? How high we reach and how we hold on, even on the outer narrow cliff tops?”
And Rudy often reached the mountain top before the sun did, and there he’d have his morning drink, the fresh fortifying mountain air. The drink that only God can make, though people can read the recipe. It says: the fresh scent of mountain herbs and the valley’s mint and thyme. The hanging clouds absorb everything that’s heavy and then the winds card them in the spruce forests. The fragrances’ spirits become air, light and fresh, always fresher. This was Rudy’s morning drink.
The sunbeams—her daughters bringing blessings—kissed his cheeks and Vertigo lurked nearby, but didn’t dare approach. The swallows from grandfather’s house, where there were never less than seven nests, flew up to him and the goats, singing: “We and you, and you and we.” They brought greetings from home, even from the two hens, the only birds in the place, but Rudy never had anything to do with them.
As young as he was, he had traveled pretty far for such a little fellow. He had been born in the upper part of the canton of Valais2 and carried here from over the mountains. Recently he had walked to the near-by Staubbach3 that waves in the air like a silver ribbon in front of the snow-covered blinding white mountain, The Jungfrau.4 And he had been on the big glacier at Grindelwald, but that was a sad story. His mother had died there, and there, said his grandfather, “little Rudy’s childhood joy had been blown away.” His mother had written that when the boy was less than a year old, he laughed more than he cried, “but after he came out of the ice crevice his disposition had entirely changed.” Grandfather didn’t talk much about it, but everyone on the mountain knew about it.
Rudy’s father had been a postman, and the big dog in the living room had always followed him on the trip over the Simplon pass, down to Lake Geneva.5 Rudy’s relatives on his father’s side still lived in the canton of Valais in the Rhone valley. Rudy’s uncle was an excellent goat-antelope hunter and a well-known guide. Rudy was only a year old when he lost his father, and his mother wanted to return then with her little child to her family in Berner-Oberland. Her father lived a few hours from Grindelwald. He was a wood carver and earned enough from that to support himself. So in the month of June she walked, carrying her little child, homewards over the Gemmi pass towards Grindelwald in the company of two antelope hunters. They had almost finished their journey and had already gone through the high pass and reached the snow fields above her home town. They could see the familiar wooden houses spread out in the valley below, but they still had to cross the difficult upper part of one of the big glaciers. The snow had freshly fallen and hid a cleft that was deeper than a person’s height, although it did not reach all the way to the bottom, where the water roared. All at once the young woman, carrying her child, slipped, sank, and disappeared without a cry or a sigh. But they heard the little child crying. It took over an hour for the two guides to get a rope and poles from the closest house to try to help. After tremendous difficulty, two apparent corpses were brought out from the ice cleft. They used all the means they could to resuscitate them and succeeded in saving the child, but not the mother. And so the old grandfather ended up with a grandson in the house instead of a daughter, the little one, who laughed more than he cried. But now he had been broken of that habit. The change had most likely happened while he was in the cleft, in that cold strange world of ice, where the souls of the condemned are locked until the day of judgment, as the dwellers in the Swiss mountains believe.
The glacier lies not unlike roaring water, frozen to ice and pressed into green blocks of glass, one huge piece of ice toppled on the other. In the depths below roars the furious stream of melted snow and ice. Deep caves and mighty clefts rise in there, making a wonderful ice palace, which the Ice Maiden, the queen of the glacier, has made her dwelling. Half child of the air and half mistress of the mighty rivers, she kills and crushes, and can rise with the spring of a goat-antelope to the highest peak of the mountains where the most daring mountain climbers have to chop footholds for themselves in the ice. She sails on the thinnest spruce twig down the rushing river and leaps from cliff to cliff surrounded by her long, snow-white hair, wearing her blue-green dress that glimmers like the water of the deep Swiss lakes.
“To crush, hold tight! Mine is the power!” she says. “They stole a lovely boy from me, a boy I had kissed, but not to death. He’s amongst people again. He guards the goats on the mountain and climbs higher, always higher, away from the others, but not from me! He is mine and I shall fetch him.”
And she asked Vertigo to tend to her errands. It was too muggy in the summertime for the Ice Maiden in the greenery where the mint thrives. And Vertigo rose and bowed. Here came one and then three more. Vertigo has many sisters, a whole flock of them, and the Ice Maiden chose the strongest of the many who ruled both indoors and out. They sit on stair banisters and on tower railings. They run like squirrels along the mountain edge, leap out treading air like swimmers treading water, and lure their victims out and down into the abyss. Vertigo and the Ice Maiden both grasp after people like the octopus grasps anything that moves around it. Vertigo was to seize Rudy.
“Seize him who can!” said Vertigo. “I’m not able to do it! The cat, that wretch, has taught him her tricks. The child has a power that pushes me away. I can’t reach the little fellow when he hangs on the branches over the chasm where I’d like to tickle the soles of his feet, or give him a ducking in the air. I can’t do it.”
“We could do it!” said the Ice Maiden. “You or me! Me!”
“No, no!” A response came to them like a mountain echo of church bells, but it was a song and words in a fused chorus from other spirits of nature: the gentle, good and loving daughters of the sunbeams. They pitch camp each evening in a wreath around the mountain tops. They spread out their rosy wings that blush redder and redder as the sun sinks. The high Alps glow and people call it the Alpenglow. When the sun has set, they pull into the mountain tops, in the white snow and sleep there until the sun rises. Then they come out again. They especially love flowers, butterflies, and human beings, and among the human beings, they were particularly fond of Rudy.
“You won’t catch him! You won’t catch him!” they cried.
“I have caught and kept bigger and stronger people than him!” said the Ice Maiden.
Then the sun’s daughters sang a song about the wanderer whom the whirlwind tore the cloak from and carried away in a mad rush. The wind took his covering, but not the man. “You children of nature’s force can seize but not hold him. He is stronger. He
is more spiritual even than we are. He can rise higher even than the sun, our mother. He knows the magic words to bind wind and water so that they must serve and obey him. You release the heavy oppressive weight, and he lifts himself higher!”
Such was the lovely song of the bell-like choir.
And every morning the rays of the sun shone through the only small window in Grandfather’s house and fell on the quiet child. The sunshine’s daughters kissed him. They wanted to thaw out, warm up, and destroy the ice kisses that the glacier’s royal maiden had given him when he lay in the deep ice cleft in his dead mother’s lap and was saved as if by a miracle.
2. JOURNEY TO A NEW HOME
When Rudy was eight years old, his uncle in the Rhone valley, on the other side of the mountains, wanted to take the boy to live with him. He could be more easily educated there and would have more opportunities. Grandfather realized this too, and let him go.
Rudy was leaving. There were others besides Grandfather to whom he had to say good bye. First there was Ajola, the old dog.
“Your father was a postman, and I was a post dog,” said Ajola. “We traveled both up and down, and I know the dogs and people on the other side of the mountains. It’s never been my habit to talk much, but now that we won’t be able to talk to each other much longer, I will say a little more than usual. I will tell you a story that I’ve always thought a lot about. I don’t understand it, and you won’t be able to either, but that doesn’t matter because I have gotten this much out of it: things are not distributed quite the way they should be, either for dogs or for people in this world. Not everyone is created to sit on laps or drink milk. It’s not something I’ve been used to, but I have seen a puppy ride on the postal coach sitting in a passenger seat. The woman who was his mistress, or perhaps he was the master, had brought a milk bottle with her that he drank from. He was given cake, but he couldn’t be bothered to eat it. He just sniffed at it, and so she ate it herself. I was running in the mud beside the coach, as hungry as a dog. I chewed on my own thoughts. It wasn’t right, but then again there is much that isn’t. I hope you’ll end up on a lap and in the coach, but it’s not something you can do by yourself. I haven’t been able to, either by yipping or yawning.”
Fairy Tales Page 35