A Change of Time

by Ida Jessen

  For the time being, I content myself with little journeys in order to get used to the vehicle. Yesterday I was at Sejrup and Haarsbjerg Plantation. The people of the district find the straight rows of trees to be handsome. They are unfamiliar with deciduous woods and would most likely not even think them preferable, for they prefer nothing that cannot thrive in these parts. But not so long ago, even pine forest was an impossible thought. Twenty or thirty years ago there was nothing here but heather-clad hills and a very few stunted oaks, never taller than a child, and now this magnificent forest of white spruce and mountain pine. I climbed out of the car. It felt like there was an intake of breath between the trees, a stillness of something momentarily held back, as if the trees were breathing. After a short time, the animals that had crept into concealment began to emerge. Mice and squirrels. And goldcrests chirped among the branches.

  When the heathland here was planted up, I think I allowed the children off school for a time so they could help with the work. At any rate, there hangs a picture in the parish book collection of perhaps a dozen free-school pupils in aprons, with buckets containing saplings of white spruce, taken one early morning before they began their job. I think they earned money from it. The boys also earned money driving lambs from the sheds of the inn, where buyers came, to Kollemorten, and those who were lucky could earn money putting skittles back up in the inn’s skittle alley, though this was mostly the preserve of Oscar and Janus, the proprietor’s own boys.

  Emptying out my drawers after Vigand’s death, I found an old school photograph. It was taken outside my accommodation, at the south side of the building. It must have been a day in spring. There are no trees in the yard, so there is no way of telling what time of year it was taken, apart perhaps from the mud on the children’s wooden shoes, and the sunlight, which is sharp. I have looked at that picture quite a bit: their faces, their shoes, their clothes, but most of all their faces. I have looked especially at the faces of the smallest ones. There is something either scowling or faint-hearted about many of them, even verging on the simple-minded. Perhaps it is due to their being so unaccustomed to having their photographs taken. I am no better myself, and look nothing like I would wish.

  A few of them, and Oscar and Janus in particular come to mind, were mischief-makers.

  All were children used to hard work. One summer, Anders Blikker’s two boys were sent off with copperware on two long poles across their shoulders and told not to come home until the lot was sold. They walked to Nørre Snede, continued north and were gone more than a fortnight. Where did they sleep? In barns here and there. What did they see, and who did they talk to? I have no idea. They were no more than eight or nine years old. Without doubt they encountered both goodness and malice. One can only hope that goodness was the greater.

  As one must hope in general.

  From the age of ten, the boys could drive a pair of horses in front of a harrow, and when they were thirteen they could steer a plough and swing a flail and do all the work of a laborer. And before that they would water and move the cattle. They removed the rocks from the fields. They cut peat in the springtime. The girls looked after children and hens and did housework. They took up potatoes in the autumn and planted them in the spring with an apron full of dung tied about their waists so they could place a dollop on top of each potato. They told of headstrong cows they eventually had to thump with the tethering stake to make them behave. But they told too of larks’ nests and play. Each child could have as many as twenty nests they watched until the young had flown. They told of how they swam and fished in the ponds of the meadow, and of the joys of warming their bare feet by stepping in a fresh cowpat when they went out in the early morning to move the cattle and the grass was white with frost. Or their delight to feel the mire slowly seep through a hole in a wooden shoe. They kept lambs and kids, and for a whole year Jens Thiis Hansen took a tame jackdaw with him to school. It sat on his shoulder in lessons and seemed so wise and intelligent, and all of us missed it without exception when it died after having gorged itself on grain from an open sack in the grocer’s loft.

  They leapt in the straw of the stack-barns and clambered from beam to beam, holding on to the laths of the roof. It was how Jens Thiis met his death.

  When they came to school they would be smelling of straw and animals. It was the way the children smelled. Most of all, they smelled of the wind.

  * * *

  I left the car and followed a path into the forest, little more than a deep rut between the trees. After some twenty minutes I came to an overgrown peat bank and on the other side a stone-lined well with a rotten lid strewn with twigs and fallen branches. Sweet cicely was growing there, and gooseberry bushes covered in lichen. It was what remained of the garden of an abandoned heathland holding. Of the house neither foundation nor walls remained, though it could hardly have been more than thirty years since the place was inhabited. But there was a doorstep, on which I sat down.

  In such a place in spring one may find daffodils, in summer bleeding hearts and columbines. It is always curious to see such blooms in the inky depths of the forest.

  I told Hilda about the place when I came home. She knew it well. “It’s name is Knokkelborg,” she told me. It turned out the holding had belonged to her mother’s sister and that when she was little Hilda had lived there for months on end while her mother died of tuberculosis. “The gooseberries,” she said, “they were the best I’ve ever tasted.” I asked if she would care for a drive down the road. She thought not.

  Today, however, she changed her mind. We drove up to the station and turned around. She did not wish to be seen in the high street. But at the station we met Carl Carlsen, who was there to photograph the train. He asked if he might take our picture.

  And so we were photographed. When it was done, I asked him if he thought Dagmar and Inge might like to go for a drive with me one day.

  “Yes,” he replied. “One day I think they might.”

  “What about yourself?” I asked. “Would you like to?”

  “No, I don’t think I’d like to,” he replied.

  November 20

  After some days of increasingly longer drives into the district in Hilda’s company, Vigand’s voice one evening last week would suddenly not be ignored. “How splendidly charitable of us,” he said. “A pity it should smack so much of smugness.”

  The way he put it struck me as odd, for Vigand did not used to speak in such a stilted manner. What would he have said? “I see you’ve made friends with Hilda. What’s the idea, parading her about like that?”

  I was angry. “Mind your own business,” I burst out, and brought my plate down hard on the table. “We’re having a very nice time together.”

  And then I was embarrassed at myself and began to cry. He stayed with me all evening. I could not get rid of him. I packed a suitcase, as I now confess to having contemplated on many an occasion while he was alive, and the next day I drove to Fredericia, from where I took the ferry to Strib. I stayed on Fyn for three days, and have only just returned home. The house is so cold that even now after having lit the stoves there is little else to do but go to bed, though the time is hardly past eight o’clock.

  November 21

  When I applied for the job at Ryslinge I applied for other positions too. It was not easy to find employment in those years, and I was twenty-six years old. I had no desire to go home to my parents, though I would certainly have been a great help to them, nor did I wish to go back to my sister Agnete, for while Heaven knows she could have used me about the house, to lend a hand with the little ones and the milking and the hens and the laundry and the kitchen garden, and though I have never shied away from hard work, I was nevertheless aware that if ever I was to do good for others besides my nearest family, that time was then.

  The vacant positions were few. I applied for what there was. Hvalsømagle near Roskilde, Askov Folk High School and Thyregod Free S
chool, whose vacancy was to be filled in January 1904. I heard back by return of post from Hvalsømagle, who wished to see me for an interview, and from Thyregod Free School, who sent me a letter of appointment that same day, December 8. It turned out that Ervin had received a letter too that day — from Ryslinge, offering him a position in geography, history, and botany. He beamed with joy and felt sure that my not receiving any letter from them did not necessarily mean that they would not be sending a reply. It was quite conceivable that there would be several rounds of appointments, he said. I was happy on his behalf, but as for myself I had no idea what to think or do. The outcome was that I wrote to Thyregod’s chairman, Peder Møllergaard, that same evening and accepted the appointment. I felt in no way that I could manage to cross the Storebælt in winter for an interview that would perhaps lead to nothing, for the letter from Hvalsømagle had said they would be calling four applicants to interview. Besides, Thyregod was offering an exceptionally good salary for a free-school teacher: 325 kroner plus free residence and fuel. We corresponded a couple of times as to the position and the district, how many children would be attending and so on. I asked what the surrounding area looked like. “The land is heathland,” Peder Møllergaard replied. I hardly knew what heathland was at the time. But then, when everything was agreed and had fallen into place, I received a letter from Ryslinge Folk High School offering me a position in needlework, Danish, and physical education for girls. I said nothing to Ervin, not wishing to intervene in his joy at having secured his employment there. Perhaps he had also begun to think it best that I would be going to Thyregod.

  Oddly, the letter was also dated December 8 and must have been mislaid at a post office for some days before being found and sent on. I wrote to tell my father and mother, and I discovered the draft of that letter the other day when I was rummaging in the bureau: “I am happy that everything has now been agreed with Thyregod Free School; the position there will be less burdensome and is better paid, and with that in mind it was not in the slightest bit difficult to turn them down at Ryslinge.”

  The truth of the matter is that it was difficult indeed to turn down a position at Ryslinge Folk High School. And what I did not tell my parents at the time was that I had done my utmost to engage Rasmus Laursen in helping me be released from my agreement with Thyregod. I wanted so much more to go to Ryslinge. But of course it was out of the question that he would be party to me leaving Thyregod in the lurch.

  * * *

  —

  It is a dismal day. The thermometer by the kitchen doorstep shows two degrees Celsius. It is raining. I was at Rosenstand’s grocery earlier on, and while I was there I heard there was a young doctor who was interested in taking over the practice. Apparently he was already on his way from Southern Jutland and received his training in Germany. People are already afraid they will not understand a word he says, but I said: “Think of Dr. Bagge. He was trained in Berlin, and you understood him well enough.”

  When I got home I went upstairs and opened the cupboards.

  I do not know what to do with Vigand’s clothes and books. It is not hard to imagine that people in these parts would be glad of his clothes at least, and have need of them too. But would I be able to cope with the sight of Viggo Hat sauntering along in Vigand’s spring overcoat? Or to see his shoes on the feet of Jens Kristian Andersen?

  What do you say, Vigand?

  As ever, he has not the slightest doubt: “Oh, you’ll get used to it,” he says. No more than that, and no more is necessary. I believe him. Besides, I know him so well. If he were still alive, he would be amused at the thought of people in the town, people of no small means even, being envious of Terkelline’s ragged son because of a pair of secondhand shoes. “You’re wicked, Vigand,” I tell him out loud, and suddenly it occurs to me that he cannot contradict me.

  * * *

  I took a room at the hotel in Strib the first night, then drove on the next morning to Ryslinge, where it turned out Ervin was still a teacher there. That lovely place. He has two daughters now, and a wife who is quite as cheerful and attentive and good-humored as he. She too is a teacher there. In fact, she told me she had been given the position they later learned had originally been offered to me, and she had always been thankful for me having turned it down and was glad to be able to tell me so now. I imagine one cannot be anything but cheerful with Ervin for a husband.

  I felt like a stranger as I drove up to the main building in my car and Ervin himself came out onto the steps; a stranger also to myself, though Ervin is as fine as I remember him.

  I stayed there the whole day, and Ervin’s wife looked after me and was well-versed in our time at the School of Education. She was able to give me news of Erland too. He had started so well with a position at the folk high school at Ubberup, followed by marriage to a teacher there with whom he had three small girls, but seven or eight years ago he had caused a scandal by falling in love with one of his female students. It had ended in divorce, and Thit Jensen had raked him over the coals. An issue had been made of it in the newspapers, though somehow it had passed me by completely. And then, after all that, his relationship with the young woman had come to nothing and he had felt compelled to pack his bags and leave the school. “It was a shame for him,” said Ervin’s wife. It had been some time since they had last received word from him.

  I attended the singing in the evening. The students sat or lounged on the benches with their arms draped around each other, some almost entwined, and the music teacher, whose evening off it was by rights, accompanied them on most any song they suggested. None of them wished to stop, myself included. We sang for what seemed like hours.

  The next day, I went on to Faaborg. The poorhouse is no more. I knew, of course. But the tobacconist’s on the corner still exists, albeit with new proprietors. One could buy soap there. I bought two bars with a rose-petal scent, and this afternoon I have written to Agnete and told her about the farm that now stands in the place of our childhood home. I have described it as a fine structure, and healthy to inhabit, for the main house is built of red brick, like so many others in recent years. I am quite certain they are not pestered by rats. But the old house was our home, cozy, orderly, and safe. I asked if she remembered Skipper, the poodle we once had; our father fetched him as a puppy from Middelfart, and he grew up to be such a clever rat-catcher. Do you remember the two lime trees in the yard, Agnete? And the sound of the rain? And the red stone among the cobbles, that you said was yours?

  I placed a bar of soap in the same envelope and wrote that I kept another for myself so that we might think of each other and know that we smelled alike.

  * * *

  Now I shall go upstairs and do something about Vigand’s clothes.

  November 23

  I was thinking of that day in early January 1904 when I arrived with the train at Give. The railway ran no further at that time. With me I had a duffel bag and my bicycle, the rest of my things would be sent on. I had written to Peder Møllergaard saying that I intended to cycle the remainder of the way and had packed my bag accordingly so that it was no bigger than I could manage. When I left in the morning the weather had been fine, but as soon as we came to Vejle, where I had to change trains, the sky had become overcast and on the final half-hour of the way the air was a flurry of sleet. Grey-white globs darted past the window and there was hardly a tree in sight. Gusts of wind rocked the carriage.

  At Give the platform was busy with people, mostly come to collect goods and parcels. My bicycle was lifted out and there I stood, blinded by wet snow. The station master took me in to sit by the tiled stove in the waiting room. He said: “There’s always someone over from Thyregod to pick something up, and if all else fails you can go with the goods carrier. Wait here and I’ll find out.”

  From upstairs came the sound of someone playing a piano, and a female voice sang:…peep forth with petals small and white, that hearts may warm at such a sight, and t
hen, with emphatic and teacherly accentuation: Then comes the lapwing! Shortly afterwards, a little girl came skipping down the stairs, a roll of sheet music tucked under her arm, pulled open the door, and disappeared outside into the snow.

  A short time passed before the door suddenly pushed open again and a big dog thrust its way in, bounded up to me and laid its head in my lap. Its eyes seemed to say: “There, I found you.”

  And so it had, I soon found out, because then a man came in, his hat and shoulders covered in snow, and said: “I told Bernhard to go in and find you.”

  “Then he’s a very clever dog. If it was me he was meant to find, that is.”

  And indeed it was. We shook hands. His name was Peter Carlsen. It was the first time I saw him.

  * * *

  —

  He put my bicycle in the back of his cart. He had come to pick up some lime, he said, and had been thinking that he could give me a lift. We got to know each other straight away. The dog sat calmly between us with Peter Carlsen’s arm around it. “He likes you,” he said.

  “I like him too,” I said, then suggested we dispense with the formal address: “By all means, use du rather than De,” I said.

  “I’ve heard it’s customary at the folk high schools now,” he said. “I’m all for it. Du it is, then.”

  The wind came sideways and before long I realized that I would not have been able to cycle at all. The road deteriorated as we went, the taller vegetation vanished completely and the wind picked up. “How nice and warm to have a dog,” I shouted, and he shouted back and said yes, he was lucky that Bernhard liked to go out driving. We shuffled closer to the animal, which all the while sat bolt upright on the seat. He told me that he had always wanted the chance to attend a folk high school, but now at least they had managed to send his brother off. I asked if he had any children who would be going to the free school, but he told me he had none and that he was not yet married or even engaged, though he was very pleased the school had been founded. “It was rather a battle,” he said. “Grundtvigians against the Inner Mission. It’s all petered out now, though. Now we’re happy about the school and happy we managed to secure your services.”