p. 23

And the First Morning

Benjamin Sigismund opened his eyes and was almost blinded by a strong white light.

Where was he? In a strange land, in Copenhagen again? No, that time was long gone! He raised himself up on his elbows and stared with sleepy eyes at the walls, at the windows, and up at the ceiling. Yes, of course, he was in Bergstaden.

He felt completely rested. In spite of the hard bed, he had had a deep and refreshing sleep. Sleep had lightened his mind. Now he burned to get started.

Supposing he went for a walk in this early morning hour. There was no one here who knew him yet. It would give him the opportunity to make his own observations. Yes, up! up! The early bird catches the worm!

Half‐dressed, he stood in front of the bed and looked at Kathryn. She was asleep. She slept more than she thought. Sometimes, in his heart, he could reproach her for sleeping so much. But he who slept sinned not! Good! But to sleep was not to live completely. The blood moved too slowly; it didn’t pulse back to the heart often enough. Too much sleep made the human spirit burn with a low flame, it gave out too little light and warmth—there was always something barren and desolate about someone who slept too much.

Well! Well! He wasn’t only thinking of Kathryn. He thought, too, of other people he had met.

He tried to force himself to think about completely different things. Thoughts of that sort were not good. They were worldly.

Impatient with himself in the extreme, he pulled on his clothes in a flash. It was just as if he was trying to escape from something.

Then he noticed that he had put his waistcoat on inside out; that wasn’t a good sign. Bah! Only superstition! He tore off his coat and put his waistcoat on the right way round. Andp. 24 then he pulled his cap well down over his ears so that nobody should see his face—when he showed himself to his parishioners and the citizens of the town for the first time, he would have to have on his cassock.

He glanced at the wall where his priestly robe hung—it was still a little too crumpled to wear. And he stroked himself under the chin with the back of his hand. Actually, he ought to have shaved before he went out, but he hadn’t time, not now. He had first to get a glimpse of the town and its life.

Sigismund was very excited. Both the architecture and the life of this northern Bergstaden were supposed to be very unusual. Some years ago he had read a description of it, and even then it had interested him greatly. But then he hadn’t suspected that he would become the parish priest of the place.

As Sigismund went out of the entrance to the Leich house a strangely clear, cold air struck his face. The sulphur smoke from yesterday had gone. Everything around him glowed. Even the black walls of the houses had a bluish sheen. There had been a dawn frost and the ice cracked under the far too thin soles of his boots. Although it was still early in the morning—the clock in the church tower had just struck six—there was already a lively traffic in the streets of the town. It surprised him that almost everybody was driving loads, most of them with horses, but also some with oxen. Here and there a woman was driving, too. And they looked like men: big‐limbed, weather‐beaten, and freckled.

A little man in a pointed cap as tall as a tower, and wearing a shaggy sheepskin coat, came lurching towards him thrashing the air with a long stick; a mannikin who moved mechanically, lifting his feet in a comic manner high in the air.

“Stop!” Sigismund said. “Stop, my man!”

The man stopped.

“Be you the big boss!” he shouted. “Or what sort of bigwig be you?”

Sigismund realized that the man was a Lapp. The Lapps were a half‐heathen tribe who lived with their herds of reindeer around in the mountains. He had thought that thesep. 25 people kept themselves exclusively to the northernmost parts of the country.

“What’s your name, my man?”

“And yours?” the Lapp said. His pronunciation of Norwegian was almost incomprehensible.

Sigismund thought that the Lapp had said his name. Never before had he seen such a stunted figure.

It seemed, too, that the Lapp found Sigismund somewhat peculiar. As he moved away he shouted at the top of his voice: “Be you the fire chief?”

And when the Lapp didn’t get any answer, he began to laugh. He laughed until his laughter became a howl.

“Ho! Ho! Ho! What a comic of a bigwig!”

Sigismund was about to go back and reprimand the man for his impudent behavior—people couldn’t stand there screaming at their parish priest in that way—but then he remembered: Of course, the man couldn’t know he was a clergyman. He would remember him for a later occasion.

The colorful and varied attire of the people made Sigismund stop suddenly in the greatest amazement. There was something reminiscent of southern climes in all this color. Up through the Østerdal dress was more uniform. Their faces, too, were livelier, more mobile, than down there; but then, of course, the mining community here was of German extraction. Most of them had brown eyes. There was something coarsely sensuous in their gaze, especially the women who were driving wagons.

Sigismund made his way towards the church. “Bergstaden’s Crowning Glory.” The light increased in intensity all around him as he walked, it leapt forth over roofs and through side streets, and was reflected in the shining windows and in the quivering ice which had formed overnight on pools of water. When he got to the churchyard he stopped. There he stood for a long time, staring up at the great magnificent church. Here was the House of God and the Gates of Heaven! His going in was in the clear light of morning; in the radiant light from the East! But perhaps God in his omniscience had ordainedp. 26 that his going out from this temple should be in the shadows of the evening, in the shadows of eternal night?

The clock in the tower struck seven just then and a young woman dressed in red passed him. He felt the blood leave his face. He became quite cold. A memory from a long‐forgotten spring night in Copenhagen suddenly stood vividly before his inner eye. A bonfire and a dirty gypsy woman talking to him in Low German.

“Noble Sir,” she had mumbled. “I can see you early one morning going towards a church and a churchyard. Here you will meet a woman, that is certain. Beware! She will lead you to downfall and misfortune. Her dress is the color of blood; let that be a sign to you.”

What could that old hag know of his future after a quick glance into the hollow of his hand? “Fiction! Nothing but fiction!” It was not granted to any mortal to read the tablet of fate; that was kept, sealed with God’s seal, in our eternal home.

He walked quickly up towards the church. Whatever happened was predestined by God. “His will be done! His name be praised!” And Sigismund mounted the stone steps to the church door with firm step. The key was in the door. He turned it and went in. Reverently, he removed his cap and remained standing by the back row of pews, gazing up at the altar. The magnificence of the church amazed him. He had hardly seen the like. Then he walked slowly and quietly, with head bowed, up towards the altar and knelt at the altar rail. The penitent’s bench, the place of the seeker after grace— that was his place too.

A great joy flooded his mind. He felt himself in God’s presence, the everloving God.

He began to pray that He in his mercy might never leave him. Then he remembered Peter’s words: “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” No, he dared not in this place repeat the prayer of the holy apostle. Indeed, he needed far too sorely the presence of the Lord.

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“Breathe Thou on my countenance, Thou Son of God, and vouchsafe me, as Thou vouchsafed Thy disciples after Thy blessed resurrection, Thy Holy Spirit.” After which he said the Lord’s Prayer aloud. And when he came to, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,” tears began to drip down on to the red covering of the altar rail. And it was as if he heard a voice say, “Here, in this house, shall your task begin. Here, shall your day dawn.” And sobbing, he exclaimed, “That I have sworn to Jehovah, with a holy eternal oath!”

Yes, might he always be given strength to keep that promise, that oath sworn in the face of God. His own strength was of no avail.

He got up, strengthened. And he walked through the church, looking at the pictures on the walls, reading the inscriptions under them quickly, and taking a brief look at the ornamentation. Only when he reached the altar piece, which depicted the Last Supper, did he really notice what he was seeing: the Master, the Son of God, who in that night had been betrayed. The night atmosphere was so grippingly depicted in this old painting that he could well understand how people could throw themselves down on their knees in humbleness and prayer before pictures from the Holy Scriptures. Art vivified the Word.

Benjamin Sigismund was torn out of his reveries by the church clock striking again; eight heavy strokes. Now the sun broke in through the windows. The whole church lay bathed in a pale golden light. The reflection from the white spring snow outside and from the newly whitewashed church walls burned and glowed between the rows of pillars. And the two candlesticks up on the altar were like two flames which rose out of the white altar cloth.

Sigismund covered his eyes. All this light quite dazed him. And it was in this position that the mines’ secretary, Sigurd Olaus Dopp, found him.

Dopp had come shuffling down from the vestry. As he came he was polishing his spectacles with a green cloth.

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“Who are you?” he asked, and stared impudently straight at Sigismund.

“Who am I!” Sigismund repeated angrily. “May I ask you, Sir, what right you have to know that?”

“What! What!” Dopp stammered, confused, and rubbed his spectacles with the green cloth. He heard that the man’s speech was educated.

“Are you on a visit here?”

“My name is Sigismund, the Reverend Benjamin Sigismund.”

Dopp started back a little. This was his habit when something astonished him.

“Dopp,” he said. “Secretary to the mines.”

They shook hands quickly and without any warmth.

Dopp apologized profusely for his rude questions. He didn’t see very well. And since he had been of the opinion that an unauthorized person had penetrated into the church, he had thought that he had to——

“Of course,” Sigismund interrupted him. “No doubt the church plate and holy vessels are kept here?”

“Not here. They are in Mrs. Blom’s keeping. She is a very reliable person. One can trust her.”

And Dopp went on talking, while incessantly polishing and breathing on his spectacles, about a distant relation of his, Mrs. von Knagen, who was here on a visit to Bergstaden, and who last Sunday had lost a gold brooch. A very valuable heirloom it was. Mrs. von Knagen had only missed it yesterday evening. And as one might expect she was very upset about it.

Dopp looked up and smiled wryly. And half jokingly, half seriously, he said that a noble Danish lady was supposed to have given this brooch, at some time, to a Miss von Knagen for some service or the other she had rendered. But he had talked enough about it. Nevertheless the Danish lady, who was supposed to have been a rather remarkable person, had said that the day the brooch left the possession of the von Knagen family, misfortune was at hand. At that both Sigismund and Dopp laughed, their chuckles reverberating through the church.

p. 29

“Superstition,” Sigismund said. “Inherited blindness.”

“Yes, of course,” Dopp said. He twirled his spectacles round on one of the sidepieces. “The old lady is, as you understand, a little odd.”

Finally, Dopp put on his spectacles and stuck the green cloth in a pocket of his tail coat. With an affected smile in the corner of his twisted mouth he trotted up to his pew in the church and groped along the worn floor with his hand. Sigismund followed him good‐humoredly and also peered down at the floor for the brooch. In his mind he was still turning over what had happened just now outside the church gates. Was it chance that it was just there he had met this woman in the red dress?

The rasping sound of the witch’s voice again jarred in his ear.

Sigismund made a gesture with his hand. What that pagan gypsy had prophesied must be warded off. Kathryn had her faults. Yes, yes. That she had. She, like everyone else. He would never deceive her—with someone else; that was unthinkable. And Sigismund looked with all his might for the brooch.

“A blind hen will also find a grain of corn, Mr. Sigismund.”

Dopp held up the gold brooch in triumph. And then he moved his glasses right up onto his head, as was his habit when he wanted to look really closely at something. He held the brooch right up to his eyes. Yes, it was all there. Just a little dust on it which he tried to blow off—but he blew past it—for his breath, like his smile, came out of the corner of his twisted mouth. He handed it to Sigismund. And Sigismund looked at it carefully.

“Yes, yes. It’s certainly in the best order.”

It was scarcely a valuable piece of jewelry, but then it had its own little romantic secret. But— He wondered how the half‐blind Dopp could have found it. He himself should have been able to see it on the floor. There was something odd here. Could it be that Dopp had had the brooch concealed in his hand? He couldn’t make the man out.

p. 30

Sigismund and Dopp went out together. And Dopp turned the key in the lock.

When they were outside the churchyard gates he said a polite but cool farewell to the pastor and hurried away down one of the narrow streets; Sigismund made his way down Church Street.

He was annoyed at his meeting Dopp. There was some trickery connected with the brooch. Perhaps he had seen him enter the church and knew who he was. And— Oh, well! He couldn’t be bothered to think about it any more.

Outside Leich’s store in the main street they met each other again. This time they only nodded as they passed.