Recollections of My Childhood and Youth Part 3

I had not thought as a boy that I should ever see Uncle Jacob's wife and children. And yet it so happened that I did. Many years afterwards, when I was a young man and went to Paris, after my uncle's death, I sought out Victorine and her children. I wished to bring her personally the monthly allowance that her relatives used to send her from Denmark. I found her prematurely old, humbled by poverty, worn out by privation.

How was it possible that she should be so badly off? Did she not receive the help that was sent from Copenhagen every month to uncle's best friend, M. Fontane, in the Rue Vivienne? Alas, no! M. Fontane gave her a little a.s.sistance once in a while, and at other times sent her and her children away with hard words.

It turned out that M. Fontane had swindled her, and had himself kept the money that had been sent for years to the widow of his best friend. He was a tall, handsome man, with a large business. No one would have believed that a scoundrel could have looked as he did. He was eventually compelled to make the money good. And when the cousin from Denmark rang after that at his French relatives' door, he was immediately hung round, like a Christmas tree, with little boys and one small girl, who jumped up and wound their arms round his neck, and would not let him go.

BOYHOOD'S YEARS

Our House--Its Inmates--My Paternal Grandfather--My Maternal Grandfather--School and Home--Farum--My Instructors--A Foretaste of Life --Contempt for the Masters--My Mother--The Mystery of Life--My First Glimpse of Beauty--The Head Master--Religion--My Standing in School-- Self-esteem--An Instinct for Literature--Private Reading--Heine's _Buch der Lieder_--A Broken Friendship.

I.

The house belonged to my father's father, and had been in his possession some twenty years. My parents lived on the second floor. It was situated in the busy part of the town, right in the heart of Copenhagen. On the first floor lived a West Indian gentleman who spoke Danish with a foreign accent; sometimes there came to see him a Danish man of French descent, Mr. Lafontaine, who, it was said, was so strong that he could take two rifles and bayonets and hold them out horizontally without bending his arm. I never saw Mr. Lafontaine, much less his marvellous feat of strength, but when I went down the stairs I used to stare hard at the door behind which these wonderful doings went on.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt lived Niels, manservant to the family, who, besides his domestic occupations, found time to develop a talent for business. In all secrecy he carried on a commerce, very considerable under the circ.u.mstances, in common watches and in mead, two kinds of wares that in sooth had no connection with each other. The watches had no particular attraction for a little boy, but the mead, which was kept in jars, on a shelf, appealed to me doubly. It was the beverage the old Northmen had loved so much that the dead drank it in Valhalla. It was astonishing that it could still be had. How nice it must be! I was allowed to taste it and it surpa.s.sed all my expectations. Sweeter than sugar! More delicious than anything else on earth that I had tasted! But if you drank more than a very small gla.s.s of it, you felt sick.

And I profoundly admired the dead warriors for having been able to toss off mead from large drinking-horns and eat fat pork with it. What a choice! And they never had stomach-ache!

II.

On the ground floor was the shop, which occupied the entire breadth and nearly the entire depth of the house, a silk and cloth business, large, according to the ideas of the time, which was managed by my father and grandfather together until my eleventh year, when Father began to deal wholesale on his own account. It was nice in the shop, because when you went down the a.s.sistants would take you round the waist and lift you over to the other side of the semi-circular counter which divided them from the customers. The a.s.sistants were pleasant, dignified gentlemen, of fine appearance and behaviour, friendly without wounding condescension.

Between my fifth and sixth years some alterations were done at the shop, which was consequently closed to me for a long time. When it was once more accessible I stood amazed at the change. A long, gla.s.s-covered gallery had been added, in which the wares lay stored on new shelves.

The extension of the premises was by no means inconsiderable, and simultaneously an extension had been made in the staff. Among the new arrivals was an apprentice named Gerhard, who was as tall as a grown man, but must have been very young, for he talked to me, a six-year-old child, like a companion. He was very nice-looking, and knew it. "You don't want harness when you have good hips," he would say, pointing to his mightily projecting loins. This remark made a great impression upon me, because it was the first time I had heard anyone praise his own appearance. I knew that one ought not to praise one's self and that self-praise was no recommendation. So I was astonished to find that self-praise in Gerhard's mouth was not objectionable; in fact, it actually suited him. Gerhard often talked of what a pleasure it was to go out in the evenings and enjoy one's self--what the devil did it matter what old people said?--and listen to women singing--amus.e.m.e.nts which his hearer could not manage to picture very clearly to himself.

It soon began to be said that Gerhard was not turning out well. The manner in which he procured the money for his pleasures resulted, as I learnt long afterwards, in his sudden dismissal. But he had made some slight impression on my boyish fancy--given me a vague idea of a heedless life of enjoyment, and of youthful defiance.

III.

On the landing which led from the shop to the stockroom behind, my grandfather took up his position. He looked very handsome up there, with his curly white hair. Thence, like a general, he looked down on everything--on the customers, the a.s.sistants, the apprentices, both before and behind him. If some specially esteemed lady customer came into the shop, he hurriedly left his exalted position to give advice. If the shopman's explanations failed to satisfy her, he put things right.

He was at the zenith of his strength, vigour, and apparently of his glory.

The glory vanished, because from the start he had worked his way up without capital. The Hamburg firm that financed the business lent money at too high a rate of interest and on too hard conditions for it to continue to support two families.

But when later on my grandfather had his time at his own disposal, he took up the intellectual interests which in his working years he had had to repress. In his old age, for instance, he taught himself Italian, and his visitors would find him, with Ta.s.so's _Gerusalemme liberata_ in front of him, looking out in a dictionary every word that presented any difficulty to him, and of such there were many.

The old man was an ardent Buonapartist, and, strangely enough, an even more ardent admirer of the Third Napoleon than of the First, because he regarded him as shrewder, and was convinced that he would bequeath the Empire to his son. But he and I came into collision on this point from the time I was fourteen years of age. For I was of course a Republican, and detested Napoleon III. for his breach of the Const.i.tution, and used to write secretly in impossible French, and in a still more impossible metre (which was intended to represent hexameters and pentameters) verses against the tyrant. An ode to the French language began:

"Ah! quelle langue magnifique, si belle, si riche, si sonore, Langue qu'un despote cruel met aux liens et aux fers!"

On the subject of Napoleon III. grandfather and grandson could not possibly agree. But this was the only subject on which we ever had any dispute.

IV.

My maternal grandfather was quite different, entirely devoid of impetuosity, even-tempered, amiable, very handsome. He too had worked his way up from straightened circ.u.mstances; in fact, it was only when he was getting on for twenty that he had taught himself to read and write, well-informed though he was at the time I write of. He had once been apprentice to the widow of Moller the dyer, when Oehlenschlager and the Oersteds used to dine at the house. After the patriarchal fashion of the day, he had sat daily at the same table as these great, much-admired men, and he often told how he had clapped his hands till they almost bled at Oehlenschlager's plays, in the years when, by reason of Baggesen's attack, opinions about them at the theatre were divided.

My great-grandfather, the father of my mother's stepmother, who wore high boots with a little ta.s.sel in front, belonged to an even older generation. He used to say: "If I could only live to see a Danish man- o'-war close with an English ship and sink it, I should be happy; the English are the most disgraceful pack of robbers in the world." He was so old that he had still a vivid recollection of the battle in the roadstead and of the bombardment of Copenhagen.

V.

School and Home were two different worlds, and it often struck me that I led a double life. Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school.

On Oct. 1st, 1849, I was taken to school, led in through the sober- looking doorway, and up into a cla.s.sroom, where I was received by a kindly man, the arithmetic master, who made me feel at my ease. I noticed at once that when the master asked a boy anything which another knew, this other had a right to publish his knowledge by holding up a finger--a right of which I myself made an excessive use in the first lessons, until I perceived the sense of not trying, in season and out of season, to attract attention to my knowledge or superiority, and kept my hands on the table in front of me.

VI.

Suddenly, with surprising vividness, a little incident of my childhood rises up before me. I was ten years old. I had been ill in the Winter and my parents had boarded me out in the country for the Summer holidays; all the love of adventure in me surged up. At the Straw Market a fat, greasy, grinning peasant promised to take me in his cart as far as the little town of Farum, where I was to stay with the schoolmaster.

He charged two dalers, and got them. Any sum, of course, was the same to me. I was allowed to drive the brown horses, that is to say, to hold the reins, and I was in high glee. Where Farum was, I did not know and did not care, but it was a new world. Until now I, who was a town child, had seen nothing of the country except my nurse's house and land at Glostrup,--but what lay in front of me was a village, a schoolhouse, a large farm, in short an adventure in grand style.

I had my shirts and blouses and stockings in a portmanteau, and amongst them a magnificent garment, never yet worn, a blue cloth jacket, and a white waistcoat belonging to it, with gold b.u.t.tons, which my mother had given me permission to wear on Sundays. For days, I always wore blouses, so the jacket implied a great step forward. I was eager to wear it, and regretted profoundly that it was still only Monday.

Half-way there, the peasant pulled up. He explained to me that he could not very well drive me any farther, so must put me down; he was not going to Farum himself at all. But a peat cart was coming along the road yonder, the driver of which was going to Farum, and he transferred me, poor defenceless child as I was, to the other conveyance. He had had my money; I had nothing to give the second man, and sadly I exchanged the quick trot of the brown horses for the walking pace of the jades in the peat-cart.

My first experience of man's perfidy.

At last I was there. On a high, wide hill--high and wide as it seemed to me then--towered the huge schoolhouse, a miniature Christiansborg Castle, with the schoolmaster's apartments on the right and the schoolroom on the left. And the schoolmaster came out smiling, holding a pipe which was a good deal taller than I, held out his hand, and asked me to come in, gave me coffee at once, and expressed the profoundest contempt for the peasant who had charged two rigsdaler for such a trifle, and then left me in the road. I asked at once for pen and paper, and wrote in cipher to a comrade, with whom I had concocted this mysterious means of communication, asking him to tell my parents that I had been most kindly received. I felt a kind of shyness at the schoolmaster seeing what I wrote home from his house. I gave him the sheet, and begged him to fold it up, as I could not do it myself. There were no envelopes in those days. But what was my surprise to hear him, without further ado, read aloud with a smile, from my manufactured cipher: "I have been most kindly received," etc. I had never thought such keen-wittedness possible. And my respect for him and his long pipe rose.

Just then there was a light knock at the door. In walked two girls, one tall and one short, the former of whom positively bewildered me. She was fair, her sister as dark as a negro. They were ten and eight years old respectively, were named Henrietta and Nina K., came from Brazil, where their home was, and were to spend a few years in Denmark; came as a rule every day, but had now arrived specially to inspect the strange boy.

After gazing for two minutes at the lovely Henrietta's fair hair and wonderful grey eyes, I disappeared from the room, and five minutes afterwards reappeared again, clothed in the dark-blue jacket and the white waistcoat with gold b.u.t.tons, which I had been strictly forbidden to wear except on Sundays. And from that time forth, sinner that I was, I wore my Sunday clothes every blessed day,--but with what qualms of conscience!

I can still see lovely fields, rich in corn, along the sides of which we played; we chased beautiful, gaudy b.u.t.terflies, which we caught in our hats and cruelly stuck on pins, and the little girls threw oats at my new clothes, and if the oats stuck fast it meant something, sweethearts, I believe. Sweethearts--and I!

Then we were invited to the manor, a big, stately house, a veritable castle. There lived an old, and exceedingly handsome, white-haired Chamberlain, called the General, who frequently dined with Frederik VII, and invariably brought us children goodies from dessert, lovely large pieces of barley sugar in papers with gay pictures on the outside of shepherd lovers, and crackers with long paper fringes. His youngest son, who owned a collection of insects and many other fine things, became my sworn friend, which means that I was his, for he did not care in the least about me; but I did not notice that, and I was happy and proud of his friendship and sailed with him and lots of other boys and girls on the pretty Farum lake, and every day was more convinced that I was quite a man. It was a century since I had worn blouses.

Every morning I took all the newspapers to Dr. Dorr, the German tutor at the castle, and every morning I accidentally met Henrietta, and after that we were hardly separated all day. I had no name for the admiration that attached me to her. I knew she was lovely, that was all. We were anxious to read something together, and so read the whole of a translation of _Don Quixote_, sitting cheek against cheek in the summer-house. Of course, we did not understand one-half of it, and I remember that we tried in vain to get an explanation of the frequently recurring word "doxy"; but we laughed till we cried at what we did understand. And after all, it is this first reading of _Don Quixote_ which has dominated all my subsequent attempts to understand the book.

But Henrietta had ways that I did not understand in the least; she used to amuse herself by little machinations, was inventive and intriguing.

One day she demanded that I should play the school children, small, white-haired boys and girls, all of whom we had long learnt to know, a downright trick. I was to write a real love-letter to a nine-year-old little girl named Ingeborg, from an eleven or twelve-year-old boy called Per, and then Henrietta would sew a fragrant little wreath of flowers round it. The letter was completed and delivered. But the only result of it was that next day, as I was walking along the high road with Henrietta, Per separated himself from his companions, called me a dandy from Copenhagen, and asked me if I would fight. There was, of course, no question of drawing back, but I remember very plainly that I was a little aghast, for he was much taller and broader than I, and I had, into the bargain, a very bad cause to defend. But we had hardly exchanged the first tentative blows before I felt overwhelmingly superior. The poor cub! He had not the slightest notion how to fight.

From my everyday school life in Copenhagen, I knew hundreds of tricks and feints that he had never learnt, and as soon as I perceived this I flung him into the ditch like a glove. He sprang up again, but, with lofty indifference, I threw him a second time, till his head buzzed.

That satisfied me that I had not been shamed before Henrietta, who, for that matter, took my exploit very coolly and did not fling me so much as a word for it. However, she asked me if I would meet her the same evening under the old May-tree. When we met, she had two long straps with her, and at once asked me, somewhat mockingly and dryly, whether I had the courage to let myself be bound. Of course I said I had, whereupon, very carefully and thoroughly, she fastened my hands together with the one strap. Could I move my arms? No. Then, with eager haste, she swung the other strap and let it fall on my back. Again and again.

My first smart jacket was a well-thrashed one. She thoroughly enjoyed exerting her strength. Naturally, my boyish ideas of honour would not permit me to scream or complain; I merely stared at her with the profoundest astonishment. She gave me no explanation, released my hands, we each went our own way, and I avoided her the rest of my stay.

This was my first experience of woman's perfidy.

Still, I did not bear a grudge long, and the evening before I left we met once again, at her request, and then she gave me the first and only kiss, neither of us saying anything but the one word, "Good-bye."

I have never seen her since. I heard that she died twenty years ago in Brazil. But two years after this, when I was feeling my first schoolboy affection for an eleven-year-old girl, she silenced me at a children's ball with the scoffing remark: "Ah! it was you who let Henrietta K.

thrash you under the May-tree at Farum." Yes, it was I. So cruel had my fair lady been that she had not even denied herself the pleasure of telling her friends of the ignominious treatment to which she had subjected a comrade who, from pure feeling of honour, had not struck back.