Excerpts from
The Royal Guest
By Henrik Pontoppidan
When people who tumble about in the bustle of a big city think now and then - perhaps with a little sigh of longing - of life in the country, there hovers in their minds the picture of an existence blessed with leisure. They imagine an endless series of quiet days in which every minute passes with the imposing serenity of a grandfather´s clock that measures eternity in the parlor of an old farmhouse.
And in reality, there is no place where time is more fleeting and where life seems shorter than in the country. Even if the individual days may be prosaic enough in their uniformity, the weeks are in a hurry - the years flee. One fine day life is over and everything disappears like a remnant of a summer or winter night´s dream.
Whenever the young physician Arnold Hojer and his pretty little wife remembered that they had been in Sonderbol for six whole years and had been married exactly the same length of time, they had to laugh with surprise. Six years! They felt that it was impossible that any more than six months could have elapsed since that unforgettable, starry night when they arrived on the stagecoach. They had nevertheless brought three children into the world in the interim, and their house, which at first was an indifferent piece of workmanship that still smelled of moist lime, had been the very center of the earth and the threshold to heaven.
They both belonged to Copenhagen, and in the midst of their great love and happiness both of them had in the beginning been quiet but despondent. The many new conditions and the curious customs, even the treeless Jutland landscape with its vastness of sky, made them as bewildered as a pair of stray kittens.
Emmy had sometimes felt tears come to her eyes when she but thought of Copenhagen. When Arnold was making a call, she sat in his room with an oppressive feeling of loneliness and did nothing but await his return.
How strange it was to think of those days now! Could she really have been so childish! There she had sat at the window, with her cheek resting solemnly on her hand, staring out over the dark, heathered hills with the giddy feeling that she had been left alone on a strange planet far out in the unending universe.
A more lonesome spot than Sonderbol would be difficult to find. It was twenty miles to the nearest railway station. A stagecoach served as the connecting link with the outside world, but they never even saw it. The big yellow coach with its scarlet-clad coachman, which might have enlivened the landscape a bit, passed through the village at night both to and from its destination. It served only to enhance their dreams when it rolled past on the country roads in the dark nights, its gleaming light trailed across the windowshade in the bedroom.
The village itself was composed of seven or eight scraggly farmhouses and twice that number of wretched huts. It harbored no pastor and his family - only a schoolteacher, who had proved to be a cantankerous fellow at that.
During the first year, they had been visited several times by their families and friends, who were curious to see how they had adapted themselves out in their wilderness. In the second year the visits had been less frequent, although, for that matter, they did not miss them any more. Now, after six years, they were no longer conscious of their loneliness.
They simply had no time for that. Emmy was engrossed with her home and her children, and when Arnold was not away on calls, he was busy out in the garden, or he stood sweating over the wood box, since, for the sake of exercise, he sawed and split for firewood everything they could gather in this treeless landscape. Aside from this, they received several daily newspapers for diversion, and during the winter they subscribed to a private book club, which brought a peck of the season´s best literature every fortnight.
It was written on their faces both in lines and in color that they were thriving and satisfied. Inside the wooden fence which surrounded their house and garden and gave them shelter from the west, there grew up a little earthly Eden, where a little Cain and a little Abel were bronzed by sun and wind, while a year-old daughter of Eve with blond locks rode pickaback on her mother, and where various sorts of useful and prolific animals quacked, cackled, and grunted out in the farmyard and in the farm buildings.
If only their neighbor, Sorensen, the schoolteacher, and his glassy-eyed wife had not existed, they would have felt themselves completely happy.
From: The Royal Guest - and Other Classical Danish Narrative.The University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Translated by P.M. Mitchell and Kenneth H. Ober
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