He searched for the house where he had attended the party, but he couldn’t find it. “Oh, this is horrible! I can’t even recognize East Street. Where are all the shops? The houses look as bad as those in the provinces. I am ill. I must not be proud, I need help. This is the house where I dined, I think.… It doesn’t look the same. But there’s a light on. Someone is up. I am terribly sick, I’ll have to go in.”
The door was ajar and he pushed it open. It was an inn, a tavern of the times. There were several people there: a sea captain, a couple of tradesmen or artisans, and two scholars. They were drinking beer and looking thoughtfully into their tankards. Since they were deep in a discussion, they paid no attention whatever to the new arrival.
“I am sorry to disturb you,” began Councilman Knap to the innkeeper’s wife, “but I am not feeling well. Could I trouble you to call a droshky? I have to go to Christian’s Harbor and there must still be some cabs at the King’s New Square …”
The woman stared at him, shook her head, and then spoke to him in German. The councilman thought she could only understand German and therefore repeated his request in that tongue. This, together with his strange dress, convinced the innkeeper’s wife that he was a foreigner. She realized, too, that he was ill and she brought him a glass of water. It had been drawn from the well in her garden and was very brackish.
The councilman buried his head in his hands, sighed, and tried to understand what could have happened. He felt that he must say something, and noticing a large sheet of paper lying on a table nearby, he asked, “Is that this evening’s newspaper?”
The innkeeper’s wife did not understand what he meant; but she handed him the sheet of paper. It was a woodcut of a vision in the sky above the city of Cologne. On seeing such an old print, the councilman got very excited.
“This is very valuable! Where have you found it? It is rare and very interesting! What’s written below the woodcut is nonsense, of course. Today we know that what they saw in the sky was the northern lights; and they are probably caused by electricity.”
Two of the men who sat near him heard what the councilman had said. One of them rose from his seat, politely doffed his hat, and said in a very serious tone, “You must be a very learned man.”
“Oh no!” protested Councilman Knap. “I know just a little about a lot of things, as one is expected to.”
“Modestia is one of the highest virtues,” exclaimed the other man. “Though I must comment: mihi secus videtur, to what you have said. But I should be only too glad to suspend my judicium.”
“May I be so bold as to ask whom I have the pleasure of speaking to?” asked the councilman.
“I hold a baccalaureus in the Holy Writ,” he replied.
The councilman thought that the man fitted his title. He was convinced that he was talking to an old schoolmaster from darkest Jutland, where one still could encounter such eccentrics.
“Here is not locus docendi,” continued the old man. “But still I beg you to speak, for I am sure you are well read in ancient literature.”
“Of course,” the councilman replied, “I like to read the classics, but I like to read modern authors as well. But not these new novels about everyday people; there are so many of them already.”
“Everyday people?”
“I mean the new naturalistic novels about the poor; they are filled with such romantic ideas,” the councilman explained.
“Oh yes!” the scholar smiled. “They are very well done. The king prefers the romances about Sir Iffven and Sir Gaudian, knights of King Arthur of the Round Table.”
“I don’t know which novel you are referring to, was it written by Heiberg?” asked the councilman, who was talking of the most popular Danish author of the middle of the nineteenth century.
“No, not Heiberg,” the man replied, much surprised. “It was put out by Godfred von Gehmen.”
“Von Gehmen, so that’s the author, he has a very old name; that’s what the first printer in Denmark was called.”
“Yes, he is our first and foremost printer of books,” agreed the scholar.
The conversation continued quite pleasantly for a while. One of the tradesmen talked about the plague that had harassed Copenhagen a few years before—by which he meant in 1484. The councilman nodded; he thought the man was talking about the cholera epidemic that had taken place when he was a young man. The conversation then turned to the activities of the English privateers, who in 1490 had captured the ships in the very harbor of Copenhagen; and since the councilman believed that the War of 1801 was being discussed, he agreed wholeheartedly when the English were condemned.
But then matters got worse; every few minutes he exchanged an undertaker’s smile with one of the other guests. The councilman thought the scholar very ignorant; and that man found him too fantastic and daring. Sometimes they just sat staring at each other in wonder; then the baccalaureus would break into Latin, thinking that the councilman understood that language more easily; but it was to no avail.
“How goes it with you, good man?” the innkeeper’s wife tugged the councilman’s sleeve in order to attract his attention; and the poor man—who while he was talking had forgotten what had happened to him—all at once recalled all his misery.
“Oh, my God! Where am I?” he wailed, and almost fainted.
“We want claret, mead, and Bremer beer!” shouted one of the customers. And you”—he pointed at the councilman—“are going to drink with us.”
Two girls, one of them wearing a bonnet of two different colors, curtsied and served them.
The councilman shivered, as if he were freezing. “What is this all about? What is happening to me?” he whimpered. But he had to drink and so he did; and he emptied his tankard as often as the other customers.
One of the tradesmen accused the councilman of being drunk. The councilman said that he did not doubt that he was, and begged the other man to get him a cab so he could go home.
“A what?” the man demanded.
“A cab … I want to hire a cab, a droshky.”
“He’s a Muscovite!” someone shouted angrily.
Never before had Councilman Knap been in such vulgar company. He decided that his country must have returned to heathenism. “This is the most horrible moment of my life,” he mumbled. And it was then that he got the idea of escaping by diving under the table and crawling toward the door. But just as he was nearing the portal his newly found friends discovered him and decided that he must not escape. They grabbed him by the legs; and luckily for him, they pulled off the galoshes, and that was the end of the magic.
Councilman Knap was lying on the sidewalk. The street lamp was burning brightly above him. The house before him was familiar. He was back on the East Street he knew. Not far from him sat a night watchman, who was sleeping.
“My God, I must have lain here in the street and dreamed it all. Yes, this is East Street. How horribly that one glass of punch upset me.”
A few minutes later he was sitting in a cab, on his way to his home in Christian’s Harbor. He thought of the misery and the terror he had just experienced; and he praised with all his heart the reality of his own time, which despite all its faults was superior to the age he had just been in. And that was very sensible of the councilman.
PART THREE: THE ADVENTURES OF THE NIGHT WATCHMAN
“Look, there are an old pair of galoshes,” said the night watchman. “They must belong to the lieutenant. They are lying right outside his front door.”
The night watchman would gladly have rung the bell and delivered the galoshes to their owner, but it was late and he was afraid of waking everyone in the house.
“Such overshoes must keep your feet warm. I wonder what it feels like to have them on?” he remarked as he pulled the galoshes over his shoes. “How soft the leather is.” They fitted him perfectly.
“Life is strange,” the night watchman philosophized, while he looked up at the lieutenant’s windows, where a light was still burning. “
He could be in his comfortable bed, sleeping; but he isn’t, he’s pacing the floor. He is a happy man. He has neither wife nor children, and every evening he is invited to another party. I wish I were the lieutenant, then I should be happy.”
No sooner had he said his desire aloud than the galoshes fulfilled it. The night watchman entered the body and the soul of the lieutenant. He was standing in his room and in his hand he had a sheet of pink paper, on which had been written a poem. The lieutenant had composed it himself.
And who has not, at some time or other, felt like writing poetry? You have a thought. You write it down, and there is a poem. This one was called: “I Wish I Were Rich!”
“I wish I were rich”—Oh, this I swore
Before my first long pants I wore.
“I wish I were rich” I cried in despair,
For then an officer’s uniform I would wear.
The silver spurs, the sword I gained,
But money, alas, I never obtained.
One evening when I was young and gay
A tiny girl kissed me in childish play.
I was rich in fairy tales and clever,
Though, in money, as poor as ever.
She cared only for these tales so old
And then I was wealthy, though not in gold.
“I wish I were rich,” without hope I moan,
The little girl into a woman has grown.
A maiden so perfect, so clever and good,
If she my heart’s fairy tale understood,
If she that loved me once, loves me still!
Oh, God! poverty breaks the strongest will.
I wish I were rich in solace and peace
And the pain of hope had long ago ceased.
You, whom I love, shed over this poem no tears.
Read it, as the old read verses from youthful years.
No, better it were if these words of despair
Were writ not on paper but in the night air.
Such are the verses one writes when one is in love; and a sensible man does not have them printed. A lieutenant, love, and poverty: that is an eternal triangle, a broken cupid’s arrow. That was the way the lieutenant felt too. He leaned against the windowpane and sighed.
“The poor night watchman, down in the street, is far happier than I am. He has a home, a wife, and children who are sad when he is sad and rejoice when he is gay. Oh, he is far happier than I am. I wish I were he!”
At that very moment the night watchman became the night watchman again; since the galoshes had made him a lieutenant, they could return him to being himself. “That was a terrible dream,” he mumbled. “I was the lieutenant, but that was no blessing. I missed my wife and my little ones.” He shook his head; the dream stayed with him. A shooting star flew across the heavens.
“There it fell,” the night watchman, who was still wearing the magic galoshes, said to himself. “I really wouldn’t mind being able to see such things a little closer; especially the moon, for that has a good size and wouldn’t slip through your fingers. The student whose clothes my wife washes claims that, when we die, our spirits go visiting the stars. That’s not true, I’m sure. But it would be fun to be able to see the moon. I wish my soul would leap up there; then, as far as I am concerned, my body could stay right here on this step.”
There are certain wishes that are best left unsaid, especially if you are wearing magic galoshes. Listen to what happened to the poor night watchman.
We have all traveled by steam: either by train or across the sea on a steamer. But the speed of steam is a snail’s pace compared to the speed of light. It flies nineteen million times quicker than the fastest race horse; and electricity is even faster than light. Death is an electric shock administered to our hearts; and with the wings of electricity our souls leave our bodies. It takes the light of the sun eight minutes and some seconds to travel more than a hundred million miles. But with the speed of electricity it takes the soul even less time to accomplish the same journey. The space between planets is for the soul no greater than the distance between our own home and that of a friend’s, even when the latter is very close by. Unfortunately, the electric shock to the heart deprives us of our bodies; unless, like the night watchman, one is lucky enough to be wearing magic galoshes.
Within seconds, the night watchman had traveled more than two hundred thousand miles and landed on the moon. The moon is made of much lighter material than the earth. It is as soft as new-fallen snow. He found himself overlooking one of the many mountain craters that you can see in Dr. Mälder’s Great Atlas of the Moon. I’m sure you know of it. A good mile down, inside the dead volcano, there was a city. It looked like the whites of eggs poured into a glass of water. Transparent towers, cupolas, and sail-shaped balconies swayed in the thin atmosphere. Our own earth floated like a fiery red globe far above him.
The town was inhabited by very strange-looking creatures, and all of them were, I suppose, what you would call human. One could hardly expect that the night watchman would be able to understand their language, but he could.
Without any difficulty at all, he followed their discussion about our earth and whether it was possible for people to live on it. They concluded that the atmosphere was too heavy to allow for any highly developed, thinking creature like a moonian to survive there. They agreed that only on the moon could be found the conditions necessary for life; and therefore, moonians were the first human beings.
But let’s return to East Street and see what happened to the body of the night watchman. Lifeless, he sat on the stairs; his spiked mace had fallen out of his hands, and his eyes were fixed on the moon, as if they were trying to watch his honest soul walking about up there.
“What is the time, night watchman?” asked a passer-by. When he got no answer, he flicked the good night watchman’s nose; and the body lost its balance and lay dead on the sidewalk.
The man who had touched the night watchman was terrified. He looked at the night watchman again: he was dead and dead he remained! It was reported and discussed, and the body taken to the hospital.
Now think what a strange situation it would have been if the soul had suddenly come back to East Street looking for its body and had not found it. Probably it would have gone first to the police station; then to the Lost and Found Office to look among the ownerless objects; and finally, to the hospital. But it’s comforting to know that the soul is more cunning when it’s on its own and doesn’t have a body to weigh it down.
As you know, the body was taken to the hospital and put into the bathroom to be washed. But first, of course, it had to be undressed; and the very first article of clothing that was removed were the galoshes. And the soul had to return; straight down from the moon it came and the night watchman came back to life at once. He declared that this had been the worst night in his life and he wouldn’t go through another like it, not even for two marks; but now it was over and done with.
The night watchman left the hospital the same day; but the galoshes stayed behind.
PART FOUR: THE TRAPPED HEAD AND A MOST UNUSUAL TRIP
Everyone who lives in Copenhagen knows what the entrance to Frederiks Hospital looks like; but since it is possible that this story will be read as well by people who don’t live there we had better describe it.
All around the hospital there’s a high fence of heavy iron bars and a gate that is locked at night. They say that very thin medical students have been able to squeeze themselves in and out between the bars, when they were supposed to be on duty. The part of the body which they always found most difficult to get through was the head. In this—as in many other uncomfortable situations in this world—the ones with the smallest heads were the luckiest. Enough, that will have to do as the introduction.
One night, one of the medical students, whose head could best be described—if we are speaking only physically—as fat, was on duty. It was also raining in torrents outside. But neither of these facts seemed to deter him; he had something to do in town which wou
ld only take about a quarter of an hour, and he didn’t want to have to explain to the gatekeeper the nature of his errand. He decided to try to squeeze through two of the bars in the fence.
He noticed the galoshes that the night watchman had left behind. “Lucky they’re here, I can use them in this rotten weather,” he thought, and put them on. “Now all I have to do is squeeze through those bars.
“If only my head were through,” he mumbled aloud. And immediately his big round head glided through the bars. Naturally, it was the galoshes that had accomplished this for him. But now, there he was, with his body on one side and his head on the other.
He took a deep breath and tried to squeeze his body through. “I’m too fat!” he cried as he continued to push. “I thought my head would be the most difficult to get through.”
Now he tried to pull his head back between the bars, but that was impossible. He could move his neck but that was all. The magic galoshes had placed him in a very difficult position. Unfortunately, he never thought of wishing out loud that his body and his head were both on the same side of the fence; he just pushed and pulled and yanked.
The rain was pouring down and the street was empty. He was too far away to be heard by the gatekeeper, no matter how loudly he shouted. He would have to stay right where he was until morning; then a blacksmith would be called to saw through one of the iron bars. But that would take time. All the boys, in their blue uniforms, from the school across the street would come to watch the blacksmith at his work, and so would half the neighborhood and all the passers-by. And there he would be like a prisoner in the stocks with the street filled with people laughing at him. He felt the blood rush to his head just thinking about it.