Recollections of My Childhood and Youth | Page 9

there lay so many beautiful and wonderful things--rings and lovely earrings, with pearls in them--when the door to the kitchen opened and the maid came in. "Has Madame heard? The Christian VIII. has been blown up at Eckernf?rde and the Gefion is taken."
"Can it be possible?" said Mother. And she leaned over the sewing-table and burst into tears, positively sobbed. It impressed me as nothing had ever done before. I had never seen Mother cry. Grown-up people did not cry. I did not even know that they could. And now Mother was crying till the tears streamed down her face. I did not know what either the Christian VIII. or the Gefion were, and it was only now that the maid explained to me that they were ships. But I understood that a great misfortune had happened, and soon, too, how people were blown up with gunpowder, and what a good thing it was that one of our acquaintances, an active young man who was liked by everyone and always got on well, had escaped with a whole skin, and had reached Copenhagen in civilian's dress.
X.
About this time it dawned upon me in a measure what birth and death were. Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house. One day, when I was sitting on the sofa between Grandmamma and Grandpapa at their dining-table in Klareboderne, having dinner with a fairly large company, the door at the back of the room just opposite to me opened. My father stood in the doorway, and, without a good-morning, said: "You have got a little brother"--and there really was a little one in a cradle when I went home.
Death I had hitherto been chiefly acquainted with from a large, handsome painting on Grandfather's wall, the death of the King not having affected me. The picture represented a garden in which Aunt Rosette sat on a white-painted bench, while in front of her stood Uncle Edward with curly hair and a blouse on, holding out a flower to her. But Uncle Edward was dead, had died when he was a little boy, and as he had been such a very good boy, everyone was very sorry that they were not going to see him again. And now they were always talking about death. So and so many dead, so and so many wounded! And all the trouble was caused by the Enemy.
XI.
There were other inimical forces, too, besides the police and the Enemy, more uncanny and less palpable forces. When I dragged behind the nursemaid who held my younger brother by the hand, sometimes I heard a shout behind me, and if I turned round would see a grinning boy, making faces and shaking his fist at me. For a long time I took no particular notice, but as time went on I heard the shout oftener and asked the maid what it meant. "Oh, nothing!" she replied. But on my repeatedly asking she simply said: "It is a bad word."
But one day, when I had heard the shout again, I made up my mind that I would know, and when I came home asked my mother: "What does it mean?" "Jew!" said Mother. "Jews are people." "Nasty people?" "Yes," said Mother, smiling, "sometimes very ugly people, but not always." "Could I see a Jew?" "Yes, very easily," said Mother, lifting me up quickly in front of the large oval mirror above the sofa.
I uttered a shriek, so that Mother hurriedly put me down again, and my horror was such that she regretted not having prepared me. Later on she occasionally spoke about it.
XII.
Other inimical forces in the world cropped up by degrees. When you had been put to bed early the maids often sat down at the nursery table, and talked in an undertone until far on into the evening. And then they would tell stories that were enough to make your hair stand on end. They talked of ghosts that went about dressed in white, quite noiselessly, or rattling their chains through the rooms of houses, appeared to people lying in bed, frightened guilty persons; of figures that stepped out of their picture-frames and moved across the floor; of the horror of spending a night in the dark in a church--no one dared do that; of what dreadful places churchyards were, how the dead in long grave-clothes rose up from their graves at night and frightened the life out of people, while the Devil himself ran about the churchyard in the shape of a black cat. In fact, you could never be sure, when you saw a black cat towards evening, that the Devil was not inside it. And as easily as winking the Devil could transform himself into a man and come