The Return of a Native

IT is a very delicate matter to visit the country of one’s childhood, especially when one has idealized it during an absence of years — fifteen years, to be exact. The country was Denmark in my case, and I left it for America at the age of fourteen and three-quarters. I came from a quiet happy childhood, in a quiet orderly small country, into a strained youth and a noisy, large country. Under these circumstances I could hardly help elevat ing Denmark into the peerage of dreams, the company of apple islands, the order of refuges from reality. And that is rather an impossible ideal for a good, practical little butter-country to live up to.

Still, in the roar of an American factory one does not think about coöperative creameries: one remembers how blue the Kattegat was, and how white the sand, and how warm the silence among the Rorvig dunes on a summer day. I do not pretend that this is fair to America. Blue seas and silver days are far from being Danish monopolies; in fact, the Danish winter is notoriously gray and wet. But a dream-country has only summer; memory is never treacherous enough to present any month except June in cherry-blossoms. The people too are in perennial June. No one ever crowds and pushes; no one is in too much of a hurry to be gentle and courteous. Nobody here to shove the weaker off the subway. And no subway. And no bill-boards. And in between the cobblestones of Nykjöbing the grass grows, a faint green embroidery, and the houses have red-tiled roofs.

Unimportant satisfactions. Impossible illusions. I knew all that; I knew it so well that I rather carefully avoided meeting any fellow Danes, my partners in exile, because they were usually the first to throw stones at Denmark. ‘A petty country,’ they liked to say. ‘No room for ambitions,’ or, ‘old-fashioned plumbing,’ or, ‘too radical,’ or, ‘not radical enough,’ and so on, until, as I said, I fled from my compatriots and almost decided never to go back. Of course, I knew that the croakers were wrong; but still, there is certainly an advantage in distance of time and space, and why risk it willfully?

There is also, however, a fact known as ‘losing touch.’ I could not help a feeling that this was happening to me, especially when, in expatiating on the charms of my country, I had to admit that my impressions were not exactly recent. And so I was in a way forced to go back. But I cautiously limited the stay to five weeks.

One day in June, with trembling expectations, I stood on thedeckofaNort h Sea steamer, waiting for the shore of Denmark. It had withdrawn from me, fifteen years ago, as a low, dark cloud at the gray water’s end. To-day the sun shone, the sea shimmered in soft blues, bluer than my gayest illusions, and against t his color there was suddenly a silver line — ethereal enough to be incredible; but it widened into a ribbon and broadened to a coast, a flat shining coast of t he whitest sand. Then, little dots of houses on it; then, in clear bright tones, a gathering of red-tiled roofs and green trees — the little city of Esbjerg, Denmark’s only harbor on the North Sea.

Esbjerg is not regarded as much more than a commercial success by the rest of Denmark; but I saw it in a haze of joy. I went around smiling fatuously at children, because they were pink and white and gold and wore sabots that went click-click on the pavement. I nodded to women in tiny houses, because they sat behind sparklingly clean windows, with snow-white curtains and gay flowerpots. I loved the windows, because they opened outward, as it seemed to me that windows should, instead of sliding up and down. I pointed out with swelling pride to my non-Danish companion the spotless streets, the immaculate shops, the large, handsome schools, the various coöperatives, the new post-office — which, although new, was clearly in the best of taste, and the order and dispatch inside it filled me with more rapture.

At the hotel where we spent the night, I was a little disappointed in the waiters: they had worked in London and were touched with international languor; but there was a fine democratic chambermaid, and I easily forgave Esbjerg the waiters. This was the beginning of the great discovery I made in Denmark — the simple elemental discovery that defects that I would criticize bitterly in any other country seemed unimportant here, and certainly not to be made as much of as the lovable advantages.

The next day, we went straight to Copenhagen. It takes about eight hours to go across Denmark, and every minute I had my nose in the window. The train really goes through the flattest and most uninteresting parts of Jutland and the islands; but, although I was apologetic for that, I was more aware of gardens and woods, swaying fields, and white, straw-thatched farmhouses. With twilight a drizzling rain began, and I waited anxiously for the midsummer-night fires. Undiscouraged, they leaped up after a while, here the flicker of brushwood and there the spurt of burning tar. Only those who as children have danced around these fires can know what their flaming welcome meant to me. Perhaps my chief grudge against America was that, having no elves and trolls, it could have no magic fires against them.

We were at last in Copenhagen. I was more afraid of meeting disillusion here than elsewhere, because my visits to Copenhagen as a child were glowing events, and I had remembered t he city accordingly. After the height of New York and the girth of London, might not my dream-capital seem too Lilliputian, too undistinguished? It was not. I can honestly say that I loved Copenhagen more in reality than in imagination. Here was a city, and a big city, that was clean, spacious, green with gracious parks, and charming with fantastic spires. It was a city of pastel colors, cool gray houses with slanting red roofs or with roofs of viridic bronze. The sea reached arms into it, and masts rose suddenly behind housetops. The harbor was filled with international shipping, but commerce had not been made an excuse for ugliness.

Langelin je, one of Copenhagen’s most beautiful walks, runs along the harbor, and on one of the stones in the water I was startled to see a dark, naked girl crouching, a bronze statue of the little mermaid. In all Copenhagen’s many lovely parks I do not remember seeing one tedious, vulgar statue, and there were many of distinguished beauty. And Tivoli, the central amusement park, offered not only merry-go-rounds and loop-the-loops, but some of the best music to be had anywhere, and for almost nothing. The cruder amusements stood meekly in a corner, leaving most of the space to fine promenades.

I suppose that, among these cruder amusements, one would ordinarily count eating; but, in spite of the Danes who sadly shake their heads and say, ‘We Danes eat too much,’ I must insist that eating in Copenhagen is one of the higher pleasures. The food is so good that nobody can be blamed for eating too much, especially if he or she has come from London restaurants, where absence of salt and presence of grease do certainly make for moderation in the stranger.

But I find myself using the belligerently demonst rative tone that I so often used in Denmark to my non-Danish companion, who, it seemed to me, did not rhapsodize as frequently and as loudly as I could have wished. As I look back I can hardly blame him. On the whole, my general behavior must have been rather as if Denmark were my special patented invention, which was working out to the inventor’s entire satisfaction. I have to confess that this is not altogether unlike the way I felt. I felt at least a sort of family pride in the pleasant achievements roundabout me, and a sort of family longing to throw a charitable cloak over any shortcomings.

When we left Copenhagen for the country, new chances for this vanity presented themselves in inspecting a bright coöperative dairy, a cozy home for the aged, and a free boarding-school for backward and neglected children, most intelligently and lovingly conducted by one Jeppe Hansen in Sondersted, per Regstrup. It really was so conducted. The children did not wear uniforms, and each had his or her own particular locker full of his or her own particular toys. And they had sunny blue-and-white bedrooms, and modern schoolrooms, and a splendid workshop. These three things, the dairy, the home for the aged, and the school, were all in a small country commune of probably about a thousand people. And they had a village hall, besides, where political meetings were held, and lectures and gymnastics and dances and any festivity for which the individual house might not be large enough. A silver wedding had been held there just before we came, to which the whole village had been invited. The artisans and storekeepers shut up shop, ‘as if it were a holiday,’ the silver bride told me, volunteering other details, such as green honor-gates and clarinet players in the early morning.

From that visit I got the sense that life in the Danish village is decidedly not stagnant, and that a farmer is not, by some occult agricultural necessity, a conservative. It is true, he is not likely to go Bolshevist and give his land away; but in Denmark, at least, he is not afraid to put money into schools, cooperat ives, village meeting-halls, good homes for old and young, and a little merriment now and then. And in Parliament, which the farmer controls, he has shown that he is not afraid even to apportion the land more equally, granting aid to the agricultural laborer, so that he may have his own house and piece of the earth.

Is the Danish farmer of a superior mental calibre to, say, the Irish or the backwoods American? I do not believe it, but he is usually a more educated farmer. One of his chief sources of education we visited. It is the folk highschool. The fees are low, but to the young men and women who cannot afford even a low fee the state is generous with scholarships. The high schools refuse direct support from the state, as they prize individualism above all things.

We saw Vallekilde, a school with beautiful buildings and gardens. It was indeed a place of plain living and high thinking. Some people complain that the thinking is more high than practical, but the high school meets this very well by saying, ‘We don’t pretend to give you finished technical courses in three or five months. We try to give you the enthusiasm for knowledge and beauty and right living that will make you want to go on from here to specialized education, say the agricultural high school or the technical school.’

Round about Vallekilde we saw farms where its influence could be seen in the simple, pretty furniture and the latest improvements in modern farmmachinery. One farm of about eighty acres was electrically lighted throughout, from parlor to pig-sty — a fact that made a particular impression on my companion. There are many such farms, using electricity stored by their own windmills. Not all, of course, are as fine as those within the immediate radius of a high school. At Vallekilde, when we were there, we found a German minister, one of a delegation which had come to study the Danish highschool system. ‘We realize, ’ these ministers said, ‘that the force which raised Denmark after Germany had crushed her in 1864 was the folk high-schools. Now we are crushed ourselves, and we have come to learn from you how to develop without militarism.’

But if I begin writing about Danish agricultural advance, I shall have to go into statistics; and while even these are gratifying to the patriot, it is not statistics that one gathers for remembrance. Far greater than any satisfaction in progress was the joy of returning to my small native town and finding that the grass still grew between the cobblestones. If Nykjöbing had progressed to asphalt, I should have been seriously disappointed. But it had not, and although I looked with great care, I could not see that it had changed one red tile from the day I left it fifteen years ago. And still it had changed in a subtle way. I never knew until now that Nykjöbing had charm. As a child I knew that it was a pleasant place, full of opportunities to spend the weekly allowance of two öre; not as big as Copenhagen, of course, but an impressive town. And now, looking at it with New York clattering in my mind, I felt that I would like to pick Nykjöbing up and hug it for being so tiny and one-storied and red and white and green and quiet. It had the calm of a town which, though small, has stood exactly where it stands since, in the year 800, it moved a little inland from the encroaching sea. I saw it, of course, as a pilgrim to the shrine of my early ego: here we had bought marionettes, there we had gone sledding, here was the wood for picnics, there the white beach for bathing. This pleasure went with the feeling that the quaintness and peace were my very own. Denmark as a whole had seemed mine, but Nykjöbing seemed even more so. Perhaps I ought to apologize. The possessive instinct is not pretty. But one must admit it. This time, when I left those oblique red roofs and shady gardens and the quiet harbor by the fjord, I felt that I was leaving the only place in the world that really belonged to me, and where I belonged.

These are not cosmopolitan or nobly international sentiments. I was rather a disappointment to myself in that respect. I had thought, from a long residence in the melting-pot, that any sentiment about flags and things had been melted out of me. This idea I lost in Slesvig — or Sonderjylland (South Jutland), as many Danes prefer to call it. We went down there to see the reunion festivities of the northern part, which had voted itself back to Denmark. We saw the King ride across the former German border, on his white horse, through crowds of people crying and laughing for joy, and we followed him through all of the regained province. Everywhere there was singing, shouting, happiness, transfigured old faces, and dancing children. Nationality meant to these people something which the scoffers at small states would find annoying to fit into their calculations. They sang with thundering verve the songs they had been forbidden to sing; they conducted their own forbidden language back with pomp into the schools and pulpits; they waved the forbidden national colors; and all the little boys and girls I saw trailed ecstatically behind the King’s Own Royal Guard from Copenhagen, six feet tall, with bearskin busbies on top of that, and with a sonorous band that marched all over, playing ‘Den Gang Jeg Dorg Afsted,’ and other music formerly seditious.

But it was not the happy crowds, or the songs, or the music, or even the touching faces of the old veterans, that made me feel the futility of trying to denationalize either others or one’s self. It was something quite mute and irrational, like the grass between the cobblestones; and it proves nothing except the great and perhaps deplorable influence of symbols.

We were driving through a part of eastern Sonderjylland. It was not very thickly settled, and most of the people were in town for the festivities. I had therefore my first chance to draw a breath and look at this countryside, which had come back to Denmark. To me it seemed absolutely lovely — fresh green woods and hills, abundant grainfields, a blue fjord stretching in, living hedges by the road, a golden summer peace over everything. ‘This,’ I could not help saying to myself, ‘ is ours again, and it’s well worth having.’

Then, rather far from the road, I saw a small farm, half hidden by its garden. Above the house, against the trees, flew the Danish flag. The white cross on the scarlet ground was like a living thing in the wind, and that flag, waving alone in the beauty and stillness, remains in my mind as the most impressive of all the celebrations in Sonderjylland.

But a flag, after all, is only a thing. What makes it a living thing is one’s sense of kinship with the people who choose it as their symbol. I felt that kinship far more than I had really dared to believe that I should feel it in Denmark. This does not mean that the Danes were the perennially sunny angels of my homesick imagination. We stayed a week at a middle-class summer hotel, and the dyspeptics and climbers and official conservatives and gossips and dull flirts we found there convinced me that summer-hotel people are an international tribe, afflicting every country, not excepting Denmark. But aside from that disconcerting experience, no illusions were broken. The people did generally find time to be gentle and courteous; even in the thickest crowds at the Sonderjylland ceremonies, no one pushed or used rough language; a great good humor permeated the throngs. And as for snobs — well, there may be snobs in Denmark; at any rate, the Danes assure one of that, with their usual derogatory candor about themselves; but we did n’t find any. The attitude was more or less summed up by saying, ‘We’re such a small, poor country, what’s the use of our putting on airs?’ And as for democracy, it seemed to me that the people here were much more democratic than —

But this is a comparison, and I did not mean to make comparisons. That lays one open to the inevitable question: ‘If you like your own country better than America, why don’t you go back to it?’ Granting the premise for a moment, all one can say is this: that, if one has, through the force of many painful circumstances, learned how to play the game of survival in America, one cannot suddenly shake off that experience and start all over in a new country. And, in the sense of adult experience, Denmark would be a new country to me. It might take me another fifteen years to learn my economical way about, if I went to settle there.

Must one then transfer one’s deeper affections to the country where one has learned to make a living? Must one reverse the historic order, and make the flag follow trade, so to speak? Perhaps one should; indeed, it would be nice if one could; but affections arc a notoriously difficult lot: they cannot be sent ahead like trunks; in fact, they cannot be delivered or ordered about at all. They can, of course, be won, or, as some might say, alienated. But it is beneath the dignity of a great state to speak in other tones than those of command.

And yet, I wonder if a country is not rather like that church whose boast it is that, if it may have a human being until he is fifteen, anybody else may have him afterward. The associations of childhood are more enduringly important than those of any other period, because they grow in the unconscious; they become involuntary. Something far deeper than my will rules my emotions about Denmark, my charity for its faults, my rosy appreciation of its virtues. It might as well have been Bohemia, I suppose, or Italy, or Poland, or America. It happens to be Denmark. And I am glad that even the reality of returning for a visit has not deprived me of having a country to idealize. Perhaps that is why I do not return altogether.