The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11

Thus they went home full of peace.

After the New Year, trouble once more entered into the house; the dikegrave was seized with a marsh fever; it went hard with him too, and when, under Elke's nursing and care, he recovered, he scarcely seemed to be the same man. The languor of his body also lay upon his mind, and Elke was worried to see how easily content he was at all times. Nevertheless towards the end of March he was moved to mount his white horse and ride out again for the first time along the top of his dike. It was on an afternoon and the sun, which had been shining earlier in the day, had long since been concealed by the haze.

A few times during the winter there had been high tides but they had done no serious damage; only over on the other bank a herd of sheep on an islet had been drowned and a bit of the foreland had been washed away; here on this side and in the new koog no harm worth mentioning had been done. But in the previous night a stronger gale had raged and now the dikegrave himself had to ride out and inspect everything with his own eyes. He had already ridden all along the new dike, beginning below at the southeast corner, and everything was in good condition, but as he came towards the northeast corner where the new dike ran up to the old one, the former was indeed uninjured, but where before the water-course had reached the old one and flowed along beside it, he saw that a great strip of the grass-line had been destroyed and washed away, and a hollow had been eaten in the body of the dike by the tide, which moreover, had thus laid bare a whole maze of mouse-passages. Hauke dismounted and inspected the damage from nearby: the destructive mouse-passages seemed unmistakably to continue on beyond where they could be seen.

He was seriously frightened; all this should have been thought of and prevented at the time the new dike was built; as it had been overlooked then it must be taken care of now! The cattle were not yet out on the fens, the grass was unusually backward; in whatever direction he glanced it all looked bleak and empty. He mounted his horse and rode back and forth along the bank: the tide was low and he did not fail to perceive that the current from outside had bored a new bed for itself in the mud and had come from the northwest against the old dike: the new one however, as far as it was involved, had been able to withstand the onslaught of the waves owing to its gentler profile.

A new mountain of annoyance and work rose before the dikegrave's mental vision: not only would the old dike have to be strengthened here but its profile would also have to be approximated to the new one; above all, the water-course, from which danger now threatened again, would have to be diverted by new dams or brush hedges. Once more he rode along the new dike to the extreme northwest corner and then back again, his eyes fixed on the newly channeled bed of the water-course, which was plainly to be seen at his side in the bared mud. The white horse fretted to go on, and snorted and pawed the ground, but Hauke held him back; he wanted to ride slowly and he wanted also to master the inner disquietude which was fermenting and seething within him with ever-increasing strength.

If a storm should come bringing with it high tides – such a one as in 1655, when men and property were swallowed up uncounted – if it should come again as it had already come several times! – a hot shudder trickled over the rider – the old dike, it could never stand the violent attack that would be made on it! What, what could be done then? There would be one way, and one way only, to save perhaps the old koog, and the property and life in it. Hauke felt his heart stand still, his usually strong head whirl; he did not speak it aloud, but within him it was spoken clearly enough: your koog, the Hauke-Haien-Koog, would have to be sacrificed and the new dike broken through.

Already he saw in imagination the rushing flood breaking in and covering grass and clover with its salt seething froth. His spur gashed into the white horse's flank, and with a cry it flew forward along the dike and down the path that led to the dikegrave's mound.

His head full of inward alarm and confused plans, he came home. He threw himself into his armchair and when Elke entered the room with their daughter he stood up again, lifted the child up and kissed her; then he drove the little yellow dog away from him with a few light blows. "I've got to go up to the tavern again!" he said and took his cap from the peg on the door, where he had only just hung it.

His wife looked at him troubled: "What do you want to do there? It's already growing dark, Hauke."

"Dike affairs," he murmured. "I'll meet some of the commissioners there."

She followed him and pressed his hand, for by the time he had finished speaking he was already outside the door. Hauke Haien, who hitherto had made all his decisions alone, now felt anxious to hear a word from those whose opinions he had formerly regarded as scarcely worth considering. In the inn he found Ole Peters sitting at the card table with two of the commissioners and a man who lived in the koog. "You've come from out on the dike, I suppose, dikegrave," said the former picking up the half-dealt cards and throwing them down again.

"Yes, Ole," replied Hauke; "I was out there; it looks bad."

"Bad? Well, it will cost a few hundred sods and some straw work I suppose; I was out there too this afternoon."

"We shan't get off as cheap as that, Ole," answered the dikegrave. "The water-course is there again and even if it doesn't strike against the old dike from the north now, it does from the northwest."

"You ought to have left it where you found it," said Ole dryly.

"That means," replied Hauke, "you're not concerned in the new koog and therefore it should not exist. That is your own fault. But if we have to plant brush hedges to protect the old dike the green clover behind the new one will more than make up for that."

"What do you say, dikegrave?" cried the commissioners; "hedges? How many? You like to do everything the most expensive way!"

The cards lay on the table untouched. "I'll tell you, dikegrave," said Ole Peters leaning his arms on the table, "your new koog that you've foisted on us is eating us up. Everyone is still suffering under the cost of your broad dike; now it's consuming the old dike too and you want us to renew that! Fortunately it's not so bad; it held this time and will continue to do so. Just mount your white horse again tomorrow and look at it once more."

Hauke had come to the tavern out of the peace of his home. Behind the words he had just heard, which after all were fairly moderate, there lay – he could not fail to recognize it – an obstinate resistance. It seemed to him that he lacked the strength he had formerly had to cope with it. "I'll do as you advise, Ole," he said: "only I'm afraid I shall find it as I saw it today."

A restless night followed this day; Hauke tossed sleeplessly about on his pillow. "What is the matter?" asked Elke, kept awake by worry about her husband; "if there is anything on your mind tell it to me; we have always done that."

"It is not of any consequence, Elke," he replied; "there are some repairs to be made to the dike, to the sluices; you know that I always have to think such things out in my mind at night." He said nothing further; he wanted to keep himself free to act as he chose. Without his being conscious of it his wife's clear insight and strong mind were an obstacle to him in his present weakness and involuntarily he avoided it.

On the following morning as he came out onto the dike he saw a different world from the one he had found the day before; it was indeed low tide again but the day was growing and the rays from the bright spring sun fell almost perpendicularly on the shallows which extended as far as the eye could reach; the white gulls glided calmly hither and thither and, invisible above them, high under the azure sky the larks sang their eternal melody. Hauke, who did not know how nature can deceive us with her charm, stood on the northwest corner of the dike and sought the new bed of the water-course which had given him such a shock the day before; but with the sunlight darting directly down from the zenith he could not even find it at first; not until he shaded his eyes with his hand from the dazzling rays did it show itself unmistakably. Nevertheless the shadows in the dusk of the evening before must have deceived him; it was outlined but very weakly now; the mouse-passages that had been laid bare must have been more responsible for the damage done to the dike than the tide. To be sure, it must be changed; but by careful digging and, as Ole Peters had said, by fresh sodding and a few rods of straw work the damage could be repaired.

"It wasn't so bad, after all," he said to himself with relief, "you made a fool of yourself yesterday!" He called the commissioners together and the work was decided upon, for the first time without any objection being raised. The dikegrave thought he felt a strengthening calm spreading through his still weakened body; and in a few weeks everything was neatly carried out.

The year went on but the older it grew the more clearly the newly laid grass shot up green through its covering of straw, with the more agitation did Hauke walk or ride past this spot. He turned away his eyes, he rode close along the inside of the dike; several times when he would have had to pass the place and his horse was ready saddled for him to start he had it led back into the stable; then again, when he had nothing to do there, he would suddenly hurry out there on foot just so as to get away quickly and unseen from his mound; sometimes too he had turned back, he had not been able to trust himself to examine the dismal place anew; and finally he had felt as if he would like to tear everything open again with his hands; for this bit of the dike lay before his eyes like a prick of conscience that had taken form outside of him. And yet his hand could not touch it again and he could speak of it to no one, not even to his wife. Thus September had come; in the night a moderate wind had raged and finally had shifted to the northwest. On the following dull morning, when the tide was low, Hauke rode out on the dike and a start ran through him as he let his eyes rove over the shallows; there, coming from the northwest he suddenly saw it again and cut through more sharply and deeply, the new spectral bed of the water-course; exert his eyes as he might, it refused to disappear.

When he came home Elke took his hand; "What is the matter, Hauke?" she asked, looking into his gloomy face; "surely there is no new misfortune? We are so happy now; I feel as if you were at peace with them all."

In the face of these words he could not express his confused fear.

"No, Elke," he said, "no one makes an enemy of me; only it is a responsible office to protect the community from God's sea."

He freed himself so as to avoid further questioning from the wife that he loved. He went into the stable and shed as if he had to inspect everything; but he saw nothing around him; he was only intent on quieting his prick of conscience, on trying to convince himself that it was a morbidly exaggerated fear.

"The year of which I am telling you," said my host, the schoolmaster, after a while, "was the year 1756, which will never be forgotten about here; in Hauke Haien's house it brought with it a death. At the end of September the almost ninety-year-old Trien' Jans was found dying in the room which had been given up to her in the barn. According to her desire she had been propped up against her pillows and her eyes looked through the little leaded panes into the distance; there must have been a thinner over a denser layer of air lying there along the sky for at this moment there was a clear mirage and the sea was reflected like a glistening strip of silver above the edge of the dike so that it shone dazzlingly into the room; the south end of Jeverssand too was visible."

At the foot of the bed crouched little Wienke and held her father's hand tightly in one of hers as he stood close by. Death was just engraving the Hippocratic face on the dying woman and the child stared breathlessly at the uncanny, incomprehensible change in the plain countenance with which she was so familiar. "What is she doing? What is it, Father?" she whispered fearfully and dug her finger nails into her father's hand.

"She is dying," said the dikegrave.

"Dying," repeated the child and seemed to fall into confused thought.

But the old woman moved her lips once more: "Jins! Jins!" a shrill cry of distress broke from her and she stretched out her bony arms towards the reflection of the sea that glistened outside: "Help me! Help me! You are above the water. * * * God have mercy on the others!"

Her arms sank, there was a slight cracking of the bedstead; she had ceased to live.

The child drew a deep sigh and raised her pale eyes to her father: "Is she still dying?" she asked.

"She has finished!" said the dikegrave, and took the child in his arms. "She is far away from us now, with God."

"With God," repeated the child and was silent for a while as if she were thinking over the words. "Is it good to be with God?"

"Yes, best of all." But in Hauke's heart the dying woman's last words tolled heavily. "God have mercy on the others!" – the words sounded softly within him. What did the old witch mean? Can the dying prophesy?

Soon, after Trien' Jans had been buried up by the church, there began to be ever louder talk of all kinds of misfortune and curious vermin that were said to have frightened the people in northern Friesland. And it was certain that on the Sunday in Mid-Lent the golden cock had been thrown down from the top of the tower by a whirlwind; and it was true too that in midsummer a shower of large insects fell from heaven like snow so that it was impossible to open one's eyes and they lay nearly as high as a hand on the fens and no one had ever seen anything like it. But after the end of September when the head-man and the maid Ann Grete came back from town where they had driven with grain and butter for the market, they climbed down from their wagon with faces pale with fear. "What is it? What is the matter with you?" cried the other maids, who had come running out when they heard the sound of the wagon.

Ann Grete in her traveling dress stepped breathlessly into the roomy kitchen. "Oh, hurry up and tell us!" called the girls again, "where is the misfortune?"

"Oh, may our dear Jesus protect us!" cried Ann Grete. "You know from the other side, across the water, that old Molly from Siegelhof – we always stand together with our butter at the corner near the apothecary's – she told me about it and Iven Johns said too, 'that means a misfortune,' he said, 'a misfortune for the whole of northern Friesland; believe me Ann Grete!' And" – she lowered her voice – "perhaps after all it's not all right with the dikegrave's white horse."

"Ssh! Ssh!" said the other maids.

"Yes, yes; what does it matter to me! But over there, on the other side, it's going on worse than with us! Not only flies and vermin, blood too has fallen like rain from heaven; and on the Sunday morning after that when the pastor went to his washbasin there were five death's-heads, the size of peas, in it, and they all came to see it; in the month of August horrible red-headed caterpillars went through the land and ate up the grain and flour and bread and whatever they could find and no fire was able to destroy them!"

Ann Grete suddenly ceased; none of the maids had noticed that their mistress had come into the kitchen. "What tales are you telling there?" she asked. "Don't let your master hear that!" And as they all wanted to begin to tell her she went on, "It's not necessary; I heard enough of it; go about your work, that will do you more good!" Then she took Ann Grete with her into the sitting-room to go through her market accounts with her.

So in the dikegrave's house none of the family paid any attention to the superstitious gossip that was going about; but it was different in the other houses and the longer the evenings grew the more easily did it find its way in. Everyone lived as if in an oppressive atmosphere and secretly people said to themselves that a misfortune, and a heavy one, would fall on northern Friesland.

It was in October, before All Saints' Day. A strong wind had blown from the southwest all day; in the evening the crescent moon was in the sky, dark brown clouds drove past and a medley of shade and dull light flew across the earth; the storm was growing. In the dikegrave's room the empty supper table still stood; the men had been sent into the stable to look after the cattle; the maids were busy in the house and in the attics seeing that the doors and windows were securely fastened so that the storm should not gain an entrance and do damage. Hauke stood beside his wife at the window; he had just swallowed down his supper; he had been out on the dike. He had gone there on foot early in the afternoon; here and there, where the dike looked weak, he had had pointed stakes and sacks of clay or earth piled up; everywhere he had left men to drive in the stakes and make dams with the sacks in front as soon as the tide should begin to damage the dike. The largest number he had placed at the corner towards the northwest at the intersection of the old and new dikes; their instructions were not to leave the places assigned to them except in case of necessity. That was what he had left behind him and then, scarcely a quarter of an hour ago, he had come back to the house wet and disheveled and now, his ear fixed on the gusts of winds that rattled the leaded panes, he gazed out absently into the wild night; the clock behind the pane of glass in the wall was just striking eight. The child, who was standing beside her mother, started and buried her head in her mother's dress. "Klaus!" she called, crying, "where is my Klaus?"

She might well ask, for this year, as indeed the year before, the gull had not flown away for the winter. Her father did not heed the question, but her mother lifted the child in her arms. "Your Klaus is in the barn," she said, "he has a warm place there."

"Warm?" said Wienke, "is that good?"

"Yes, that's good."

The master still stood at the window. "It won't do any longer, Elke," he said; "call one of the girls, the storm will break in the panes; the shutters must be screwed on!"

At her mistress's word the maid had run out; they could see from the room how her skirts were blown about; but when she unfastened the catch the wind tore the shutter out of her hand and threw it against the window so that a few broken panes flew into the room and one of the lights flared and went out. Hauke himself had to go out to help and it was only with great difficulty that the shutters were at last got into place. When they opened the door again to come into the house a gust of wind followed them that made the glass and silver in the cupboard shake and clatter; upstairs in the house above their heads the beams trembled and cracked as if the gale were trying to tear the roof off the walls. But Hauke did not come back into the room. Elke heard him walking across the floor towards the stable. "The white horse! The white horse, John; quick!" She heard him call the order; then he came into the room, his hair tumbled but his gray eyes sparkling. "The wind has shifted!" he cried, "to the northwest, at half spring-tide! No wind; we have never experienced such a storm!"

Elke had grown as pale as death: "And you must go out there again?"

He seized both her hands and pressed them convulsively: "That I must, Elke."

Slowly she raised her dark eyes to his and for a few seconds they looked at each other; but it was like an eternity. "Yes, Hauke," answered the woman; "I know well that you must!"

There was a sound of trotting before the front door. She flung herself on Hauke's neck and for a moment it seemed as if she could not let him go; but that too was only for a second. "This is our fight," said Hauke; "you are safe here, no tide has ever come up to this house. And pray to God to be with me too!"

Hauke wrapped himself in his cloak and Elke took a scarf and wound it carefully round his neck; she wanted to say a word, but her trembling lips refused to utter it.

Outside the white horse neighed so that it sounded like a trumpet in the howling storm. Elke went out with her husband; the old ash creaked as if it were being split asunder. "Mount, master," called the man, "the white horse is as if mad; the rein might break." Hauke threw his arms round his wife: "I shall be here again at sunrise!"

Already he had leapt onto his horse; the animal reared; then, like a war-horse rushing into battle, it charged down the mound with its rider out into the night and the howling of the storm. "Father, my Father!" cried a child's plaintive voice after him: "my dear Father!"

Wienke had run out after them in the dark; but she had not gone more than a hundred steps before she stumbled against a heap of earth and fell.

The man Johns brought the crying child back to her mother; the latter was leaning against the trunk of the ash, the boughs of which lashed the air above her, staring out absently into the night in which her husband had disappeared; when the roaring of the gale and the distant thunder of the sea ceased for a moment she started as if frightened; she felt as if everything was trying just to destroy him and would be dumb instantly when it had got him. Her knees trembled, the wind had blown her hair down and now played with it at will. "Here is the child!" John shouted to her; "hold her tight!" and he pressed the little girl into her mother's arms.

"The child? I'd forgotten you, Wienke!" she exclaimed; "God forgive me." Then she hugged her to her breast as closely as only love can and dropped on her knees: "Lord God, and Thou, my Jesus, let us not become widow and orphan! Protect him, Oh dear God; only Thou and I, we alone know him!" And there was no more interruption to the gale; it resounded and thundered as if the whole world were coming to an end in one vast reverberation of sound.

"Go into the house, Missis!" said Johns; "come!" And he helped them and led the two into the house and into the sitting-room.

The dikegrave, Hauke Haien, flew forward on his white horse towards the dike. The narrow path was like a mire, for excessively heavy rain had fallen in the preceding days; nevertheless the wet sticky clay did not seem to hold the horse's hoofs, it moved as if treading on a firm dry road. The clouds drove across the sky in a mad chase; below, the wide marsh lay like an unrecognizable desert filled with agitated shades; from the water behind the dike came an ever-increasing dull roar as if it must swallow up everything else. "Forward, my white horse!" cried Hauke; "we're riding our worst ride!"

At that moment a sound like a death cry came from under his mount's hoofs. He pulled up and looked round; at his side, close above the ground, screeching mockingly as they went, moved a flock of white gulls, half flying, half tossed by the gale; they were seeking protection on shore. One of them – the moon shone fleetingly through the clouds – lay crushed on the path: it seemed to the rider as if a red ribbon fluttered from its neck. "Klaus!" he cried. "Poor Klaus!"

Was it his child's bird? Had it recognized horse and rider and tried to seek shelter with them? He did not know. "Forward!" he cried again, and the white horse had already lifted his hoofs for a new race when suddenly there was a pause in the storm and a deathlike silence took its place; it lasted but an instant, then the gale returned with renewed fury; but in the meantime the rider's ear had caught the sound of men's voices and the faint barking of dogs and when he turned his head back towards the village he distinguished, in the moonlight that broke forth, people on the mounds and in front of the houses busy about wagons that were loaded high; he saw, as if in flight, still other wagons driving hurriedly towards the upland; the lowing of cattle being driven up there out of their warm stables, met his ear. "Thank God, they are saving themselves and their cattle!" his heart cried; and then came an inward shriek of terror: "My wife! My child! No. No; the water will not come up to our mound!"

But it was only for a moment; everything flew by him like a vision.

A fearful squall came roaring up from the sea and into its face horse and rider stormed up the narrow path to the dike. Once on top Hauke halted his steed with force. But where was the sea? Where Jeverssand? Where lay the opposite shore? Nothing but mountains of water faced him, rising up threateningly against the night sky, seeking to overtop one another in the dreadful dusk, and beating, one over the next, on the shore. They came forward with white crests, howling, as if the roar of all the terrible beasts of prey in the wilderness were in them. The white horse pawed the ground and snorted out into the din; but it came over the rider as if here all human power were at an end; as if night, death, chaos must now set in.