The Rider on the White Horse

by Theodor Storm

  When the meal was over, the white pipes were taken out of the corner and lighted, and Elke was again busy offering the filled coffee cups to her guests; for there was no economy in coffee, either, on this day. In the living-room, at the desk of the man just buried, the dikemaster general stood talking with the pastor and the white-haired dike overseer Jewe Manners.

  “Well, gentlemen,” said the former; “we have buried the old dikemaster with honor; but where shall we get the new one? I think, Manners, you will have to make up your mind to accept this dignity.”

  Old Manners smiled and lifted his little black velvet cap from his white hair: “Mr. Dikemaster General,” he said, “the game would be too short then; when the deceased Tede Volkers was made dikemaster I was made overseer and have been now for forty years.”

  “That is no defect, Manners; then you know the affairs all the better and won’t have any trouble with them.”

  But the old man shook his head: “No, no, your Honor, leave me where I am, then I can run along with the rest for a few years longer.”

  The pastor agreed with him: “Why not give the office,” he said, “to the man who has actually managed the affairs in the last years?”

  The dikemaster general looked at him: “I don’t understand you, pastor!”

  But the pastor pointed with his finger to the best parlor, where Hauke in a slow serious manner seemed to be explaining something to two older people. “There he stands,” he said; “the long Frisian over there with the keen grey eyes, the bony nose and the high, projecting forehead. He was the old man’s hired man and now has his own little place; to be sure, he is rather young.”

  “He seems to be about thirty,” said the dikemaster general, inspecting the man thus presented to him.

  “He is scarcely twenty-four,” remarked the overseer Manners; “but the pastor is right: all the good work that has been done with dikes and sluices and the like in the last years through the office of dikemaster has been due to him; the old man couldn’t do much toward the end.”

  “Indeed?” said the dikemaster general; “and you think, he would be the right man to move up into the office of his old master?”

  “He would be absolutely the right man,” replied Jewe Manners; “but he lacks what they call here ‘clay under one’s feet;’ his father had about fifteen, he may well have twenty acres; but with that nobody has yet been made dikemaster.”

  The pastor had already opened his mouth, as if he wanted to object, when Elke Volkers, who had been in the room for a while, spoke to them suddenly: “Will your Honor allow me a word?” she said to the dikemaster general; “I am speaking only to prevent a mistake from turning into a wrong.”

  “Then speak, Miss Elke,” he replied; “wisdom always sounds well from the lips of pretty girls.”

  “It isn’t wisdom, your Honor; I only want to tell the truth.”

  “That too one must be able to hear, Miss Elke.”

  The girl let her dark eyes glance sideways, as if she wanted to make sure that there were no superfluous ears about: “Your Honor,” she began then, and her breast heaved with a stronger motion, “my godfather, Jewe Manners, told you that Hauke Haien owned only about twenty acres; that is quite true in this moment, but as soon as it will be necessary, Hauke will call his own just so many more acres as my father’s, now my own farm, contains. All that together ought to be enough for a dikemaster.”

  Old Manners stretched his white head toward her, as if he had to see who was talking there: “What is that?” he said; “child, what are you talking about?”

  But Elke pulled a gleaming gold ring on a black ribbon out of her bodice: “I am engaged, godfather Manners,” she said; “here is my ring, and Hauke Haien is my betrothed.”

  “And when—I think I may ask that, as I held you at your baptism, Elke Volkerts—when did that happen?”

  “That happened some time ago; but I was of age, godfather Manners,” she said; “my father’s health had already fallen off, and as I knew him, I thought I had better not get him excited over this; now that he is with God, he will see that his child is in safekeeping with this man. I should have kept still about it through the year of mourning; but for the sake of Hauke and of the diked-in land, I had to speak.” And turning to the dikemaster general, she added: “Your Honor will please forgive me.”

  The three men looked at one another; the pastor laughed, the old overseer limited himself to a “hm, hm!” while the dikemaster general rubbed his forehead as if he were about to make an important decision. “Yes, dear miss,” he said at last, “but how about marriage property rights here in this district? I must confess I am not very well versed in these things at this moment in all this confusion.”

  “You don’t need to be, your Honor,” replied the daughter of the dikemaster, “before my wedding I shall make my goods over to my betrothed. I have my little pride too,” she added smiling; “I want to marry the richest man in the village.”

  “Well, Manners,” said the pastor, “I think you, as godfather, won’t mind if I join the young dikemaster with the old one’s daughter!”

  The old man shook his head gently: “Our Lord give His blessing!” he said devoutly.

  But the dikemaster general gave the girl his hand: “You have spoken truly and wisely, Elke Volkerts; I thank you for your firm explanations and hope to be a guest in your house in the future, too, on happier occasions than today. But that a dikemaster should have been made by such a young lady—that is the wonderful part of this story!”

  “Your Honor,” replied Elke and looked at the kindly high official with her serious eyes, “a true man ought to be allowed the help of his wife!” Then she went into the adjoining parlor and laid her hand silently in that of Hauke Haien.

  Several years had gone by: in the little house of Tede Haien now lived a vigorous workman with his wife and child; the young dikemaster Hauke Haien lived with his wife Elke Volkerts on the farm of her father. In summer the mighty ash tree murmured as before in front of the house; but on the bench that now stood beneath it, the young wife was usually seen alone in the evening, sitting with some sewing in her hands; there was no child yet from this marriage. The husband had other things to do than to sit in front of his house door, for, in spite of his having helped in the old man’s management before, there was still a multitude of labors to be done which, in those other times, he had not found it wise to touch upon; but now everything had to be cleared up gradually, and he swept with a stiff broom. Besides that, there was the management of the farm, enlarged by his own land, especially as he was trying to save a second hired man. So it came about that, except on Sundays, when they went to church, the two married people saw each other usually only during dinner, which Hauke ate with great haste, and at the rise and close of day; it was a life of continuous work, although one of content.

  Then a troublesome rumor started. When one Sunday, after church, a somewhat noisy company of young land-owners from the marshes and the higher land had stayed over their cups at the inn, they talked, when it came to the fourth and fifth glass, not about the king and the government, to be sure—they did not soar so high in those days—but about communal and higher officials, specially about the taxes demanded of the community. And the longer they talked, the less there was that found mercy in their eyes, particularly not the new dike taxes. All the sluices and locks had always held out before, and now they have to be repaired; always new places were found on the dike that required hundreds of cartloads of earth—the devil take the whole affair!

  “That’s all on account of your clever dikemaster,” cried one of the people of the higher land, “who always goes round pondering and sticks his finger into every pie!”

  “Yes, he is tricky and wants to win the favor of the dikemaster general; but we have caught him!”

  “Why did you let him be thrust on you?” said the other; “now you have to pay in cash.”

  Ole Peters laughed. “Yes, Marten Fedders, that’s the way it is here, and it ca
n’t be helped: the old one was made dikemaster on account of his father, the new one on account of his wife.” The laughter which ran round the table showed how this sally was appreciated.

  But as it had been spoken at the public table of an inn, it did not stay there, and it was circulated in the village of the high land as well as that of the marshes below; and so it reached Hauke. Again the row of ill-meaning faces passed by his inner eye, and he heard the laughter round the tavern table more jeering than it really was. “Dogs!” he shouted, and his eyes looked grimly to the side, as if he wanted to have these people whipped.

  Then Elke laid her hand upon his arm: “Let them be; they all would like to be what you are.”

  “That’s just it,” he replied angrily.

  “And,” she went on, “didn’t Ole Peters better himself by marriage?”

  “He did, Elke; but what he married with Vollina wasn’t enough to be dikemaster on.”

  “Say rather: he wasn’t enough,” and Elke turned her husband round so that he had to look into the mirror, for they stood between the windows in their room. “There is the dikemaster!” she said; “now look at him; only he who can manage an office has it.”

  “You’re not wrong,” he replied pensively, “and yet—Well, Elke, I have to go to the eastern lock; the gates won’t close again.”

  He went; but he was not gone long, before the repairing of the lock was forgotten. Another idea, which he had only half thought out and carried round with him for years, which, however, had been pushed back by the urgent affairs of his office, now took hold of him again and more powerfully than before, as if he had suddenly grown wings.

  Before he was really aware of it himself, he found himself on the sea-dike a good way south toward the city; the village that lay on this side had some time ago vanished to the left. He was still walking on, fixing his eyes constantly on the seaward side of the broad foreland. If some one had walked beside him, he must have seen what concentrated mental work was going on behind those eyes. At last he stood still: the foreland here dwindled into a narrow strip along the dike. “It will have to work!” he said to himself. “Seven years in the office—they shan’t say any more that I am dikemaster only because of my wife.”

  He was still standing there, and his eyes swept sharply and thoughtfully on all sides over the green foreland. Then he walked back until, here too, the broad plain that lay before him ended in a narrow strip of green pastureland. Through this, close by the dike, shot a strong arm of the sea which divided almost the whole foreland from the mainland and made it an island; a crude wooden bridge led to it, so that one could go back and forth with cattle or teams of hay or grain. It was low tide now, and the golden September sun was glistening on the strip of wet clay, about a hundred feet broad, and on the deep channel in the middle of it through which the sea was even now driving its waters. “That can be damned!” said Hauke to himself, after he had watched this playing of the water for a while. Then he looked up, and on from the dike upon which he stood, past the channel, he drew an imaginary line along the edge of the isolated land, round toward the south and back again to the east over the eastern continuation of the channel, up to the dike. But the line which he had drawn invisibly was a new dike, new also in the construction of its outline, which as yet existed only in his head.

  “That would make dammed-in land of about a thousand acres,” he said smiling to himself; “not so large; but—”

  Another calculation came into his mind: the foreland here belonged to the community, or rather, a number of shares to the single members, according to the size of their property in the municipality or other legal income. He began to count up how many shares he had received from his father and how many from Elke’s father, and how many he had already bought during his marriage, partly with a dim foreboding of future gain, partly because of his increased sheep stock. It was a considerable lot; for he had also bought all of Ole Peter’s shares when the latter had been disgusted because his best ram had been drowned, once when the foreland had been partly flooded. What excellent pasture and farm land that must make and how valuable it would be if it were all surrounded by his new dike! Like intoxication this idea rose into his brain; but he pressed his nails into the hollows of his hands and forced his eyes to see clearly and soberly what lay there before him: a great plain without a dike exposed to who knew what storms and floods in the next years, and at its outermost edge a herd of dirty sheep now wandering and grazing slowly. That meant a heap of work, struggle, and annoyance for him! In spite of all that, as he was walking on the footpath down from the dike across the fens toward his hill, he felt as if he were carrying home a great treasure.

  In the hall Elke came to meet him: “How about the lock?” she asked.

  He looked down at her with a mysterious smile: “We shall soon need another lock,” he said; “and sluices and a new dike.”

  “I don’t understand,” returned Elke, as they walked into the room; “what do you want to do, Hauke?”

  “I want,” he began slowly and then stopped for a second, “I want the big foreland that begins opposite our place and stretches on westward to be diked in and made into a solid enclosure. The high floods have left us in peace for almost a generation now; but when one of the bad ones comes again and destroys the growth down there—then all at once there’ll be an end to all this glory. Only the old slackway has let things stay like this till to-day.”

  She looked at him with astonishment: “Why, you are scolding yourself!” she said.

  “I am, Elke; but till now there were so many other things to do.”

  “Yes, Hauke; surely, you have done enough.”

  He had sat down in the armchair of the old dikemaster, and his hands were clutching both arms fast.

  “Have you the courage for it?” his wife asked him.

  “I have that, Elke,” he spoke hastily.

  “Don’t be too hasty, Hauke; that work is a matter of life and death; and almost all the people will be against you, they won’t thank you for your labor and trouble.”

  He nodded. “I know that!” he said.

  “And if it will only succeed,” she cried again, “ever since I was a child I heard that the channel can’t be stopped up, and that therefore one shouldn’t touch it.”

  “That was an excuse for the lazy ones!” said Hauke; “why shouldn’t one be able to stop up the channel?”

  “That I have not heard; perhaps because it goes right through; the rush of the water is too strong.” A remembrance came over her and an almost mischievous smile gleamed out of her serious eyes: “When I was a child,” she told, “I heard our hired men talk about it once; they said, if a dam was to hold there, some live thing would have to be thrown into the hold and diked up with the rest; when they were building a dike on the other side, about a hundred years ago, a gipsy child was dammed in that they had bought from its mother for a lot of money. But now I suppose no one would sell her child.”

  Hauke shook his head: “Then it is just as well that we have none; else they would do nothing less than demand it of us.”

  “They shouldn’t get it!” said Elke and folded her arms across her body as if in fear.

  And Hauke smiled; but she asked again: “And the huge cost? Have you thought of that?”

  “I have, Elke; what we will get out of it will far surpass the cost; even the cost of keeping up the old dike will be covered a good bit by the new one. We do our own work and there are over eight teams of horses in the community, and there is no lack of young strong arms. At least you shan’t have made me dikemaster for nothing, Elke; I want to show them that I am one!”

  She had been crouching in front of him and looking at him full of care; now she rose with a sigh. “I have to go back to my day’s work,” she said, and gently stroked his cheek; “you do yours, Hauke.”

  “Amen, Elke!” he said with a serious smile; “there is work enough for us both.”

  There was truly work enough for both, but the heaviest burd
en was now on the man’s shoulder. On Sunday afternoons, often too in the evenings, Hauke sat together with a good surveyor, deep in calculations, drawings and plans; when he was alone, he did the same and often did not stop till long after midnight. Then he would slip into their common sleeping-room—for the stuffy beds fixed to the wall in the living-room were no longer used in Hauke’s household—and his wife would lie with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep, so that he would get his rest at last, although she was really waiting for him with a beating heart. Then he would sometimes kiss her forehead and say a low word of love, and then lie down to sleep, though sleep often did not come to him before the first crowing of the cock. In the winter storms he ran out on the dike with pencil and paper in his hand, and stood and made drawings and took notes while a gust of wind would tear his cap from his head and make his long, light hair fly round his heated face. Soon, as long as the ice did not bar his way, he rowed with a servant out into the sea and with plumb line and rods measured the depths of the currents about which he was not yet sure. Often enough Elke trembled for his life, but when he was safely back, he could hardly have noticed anything, except by the tight clasp of her hand or by the bright lightning that gleamed from her usually so quiet eyes. “Have patience, Elke,” he said once when it seemed to him as if his wife would not let him alone; “I have to have the whole thing clear to myself before I propose it.” Then she nodded and let him be. There were no less rides into the city, either, to see the dikemaster general, and all these and the labors for house and farm were always followed by work late into the night. His intercourse with other people outside of his work and business vanished almost entirely; even with his wife it grew less and less. “These are bad times, and they will last long yet,” said Elke to herself and went to her work.