The Rider on the White Horse | Page 5

profiles of the dikes toward the waterside as he thought they ought to be.
He had no idea of keeping up intercourse with his schoolmates; it seemed, too, as if they did not care for this dreamer. When winter had come again and the frost had appeared, he wandered still farther out on the dike to points he had never reached before, until the boundless ice-covered sand flats lay before him.
During the continuous frost in February, dead bodies were found washed ashore; they had lain on the frozen sand flats by the open sea. A young woman who had been present when they had taken the bodies into the village, stood talking fluently with old Haien.
"Don't you believe that they looked like people!" she cried; "no, like sea devils! Heads as big as this," and she touched together the tips of her outspread and outstretched hands, "coal-black and shiny, like newly baked bread! And the crabs had nibbled them, and the children screamed when they saw them." For old Haien this was nothing new.
"I suppose they have floated in the water since November!" he said indifferently.
Hauke stood by in silence, but as soon as he could, he sneaked out on the dike; nobody knew whether he wanted to look for more dead, or if he was drawn to the places now deserted by the horror that still clung to them. He ran on and on, until he stood alone in the solitary waste, where only the winds blew over the dike where there was nothing but the wailing voices of the great birds that shot by swiftly. To his left was the wide empty marshland, on the other side the endless beach with its sand flats now glistening with ice; it seemed as if the whole world lay in a white death.
Hauke remained standing on the dike, and his sharp eyes gazed far away. There was no sign of the dead; but when the invisible streams on the sand flats found their way beneath the ice, it rose and sank in streamlike lines.
He ran home, but on one of the next nights he was out there again. In places the ice had now split; smoke-clouds seemed to rise out of the cracks, and over the whole sand-stretch a net of steam and mist seemed to be spun, which at evening mingled strangely with the twilight. Hauke stared at it with fixed eyes, for in the mist dark figures were walking up and down that seemed to him as big as human beings. Far off he saw them promenade back and forth by the steaming fissures, dignified, but with strange, frightening gestures, with long necks and noses. All at once, they began to jump up and down like fools, uncannily, the big ones over the little ones, the little ones over the big ones--then they spread out and lost all shape.
"What do they want? Are they ghosts of the drowned?" thought Hauke. "Hallo!" he screamed out aloud into the night; but they did not heed his cry and kept on with their strange antics.
Then the terrible Norwegian sea spectres came to his mind, that an old captain had once told him about, who bore stubby bunches of sea grass on their necks instead of heads. He did not run away, however, but dug the heels of his boots faster into the clay of the dike and rigidly watched the farcical riot that was kept up before his eyes in the falling dusk. "Are you here in our parts too?" he said in a hard voice. "You shall not chase me away!"
Not until darkness covered all things did he walk home with stiff, slow steps. But behind him he seemed to hear the rustling of wings and resounding screams. He did not look round, neither did he walk faster, and it was late when he came home. Yet he is said to have told neither his father nor anyone else about it. But many years after he took his feeble-minded little girl, with whom the Lord later had burdened him, out on the dike with him at the same time of day and year, and the same riot is said to have appeared then out on the sand flats. But he told her not to be afraid, that these things were only the herons and crows, that seemed so big and horrible, and that they were getting fish out of the open cracks.
God knows, the schoolmaster interrupted himself, there are all sorts of things on earth that could confuse a Christian heart, but Hauke was neither a fool nor a blockhead.
As I made no response, he wanted to go on. But among the other guests, who till now had listened without making a sound, only filling the low room more and more thickly