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
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. They 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
