LITMIR.BIZ

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had presented himself to the inn wife as one who had been a soldier, he now had wit enough to present himself as a beggar. He took off his battered hat and asked for food and shelter. There was a certain honesty in his servility; he was half starved, and shaken with fatigue.

      The old woman had a kind face, a face full of wrinkles in a soft, fresh-colored skin. Her blue eyes were round and gentle, her head bound in a cap of dull blue camlet. The line of white which framed her face was not linen, but the smooth margin of white hair. She said:

      “Do you come from far?”

      “As far as from Hamburg within the last month. Before that, from Bohemia. But I was a boy in Aalsö parish. I did my catechism here,” he expatiated, “with Pastor Peder Korf.”

      “Did you so?” she said, taking a step forward. “But did you look to find Pastor Peder?”

      “They tell me that he is dead.”

      She nodded.

      “And that Pastor Juste is kind as Sören Qvist.”

      She did not smile at this, but nodded again, seriously. “Yes,” she said, “he is kind. If you will wait now, I will go tell him that you are here.”

      She edged by him and pushed the door open with her elbow, being careful not to joggle her hens, and pushed it shut again from within. She returned after a little time and let him into the kitchen of Aalsö parsonage.

      The room was so dark that at first he saw nothing but the light of the fire on the raised hearth, but it was warm, warm and snug. He felt with pleasure the closeness of the walls, the nearness of the heavy beams in the low ceiling. He had been too long out of doors under a sky crowded either with wind or with massing fog. It was fine to feel a roof close over his head. He made his way across the brick floor to a stool near the hearth and sat down, holding out his hands to the fire. The old woman busied herself in the darker corner of the kitchen. He heard her wooden shoes clapping on the bricks, the swish and swing of her heavy skirts, and, behind him, the rustling of feathers, a few sleepy clucks. In a short time the old woman came bearing a wooden plate on which was a loaf of bread, uncut. She dragged a small bench near the hearth, set the plate upon it, and stood back, winding her hands in her dark blue apron. The beggar looked from the loaf to the old woman, standing there solidly with the light from the fire on her face, on her white smock and yellow bodice and her blue apron, watching him. The light was golden upon the glazed side of the loaf. He eyed it, then, since she did not move, reached out his hand toward it.

      “Stop!” cried the old woman, dropping her apron and reaching toward the loaf herself. “You would not take my good loaf in your dirty hand, like that! Where is your knife? Cannot you cut yourself a piece, like a Christian man?”

      “I have no knife,” said the beggar, taken aback. “If I had had a knife I would have traded it for a can of beer at the inn. So help me, I have no knife, and I could not use it with great skill if I had it.”

      The old woman considered him. “Turn toward the fire,” she commanded him. Obediently he slewed around on his seat. “Very well,” she said, “you carry no knife on your back at least, and”—she hesitated a little, as if in slight apology—“I did not at first notice that your sleeve was empty. I saw a Spanish soldier,” she continued, “came with Wallenstein’s men, had a belt like yours over his shoulder and carried a long dagger in it, on his back. I will cut the bread. Were you ever a soldier?”

      “Until I lost my arm,” he said. “But what can a man do with only one arm? Since then I am a beggar.”

      When she had cut the bread, she gave him a slice of cheese as well, and she noted how the hand that reached for it shook with eagerness, and how, as the man ate, he seemed to forget where he was, and everything except the taste of food in his mouth. Watching him, as she had watched so many others here in the pastor’s kitchen, she felt her fear give way to pity, and having filled a pewter mug with beer, she set it close to the coals to warm. Starving men, starving animals, for over forty years this had been one of her duties, to feed them and to give them shelter. The bounty was less great now than in the old days because there was less to give. Still, what the pastor could bestow was for the homeless, and she had the bestowing of it.

      “You can sleep in the byre,” she said. “It is clean enough, and the beasts make it warm.”

      He consumed the bread and cheese to the last crumb, drank the warm beer, and sat, with his hand about the mug, staring into the fire for a few minutes before he spoke again.

      Then he said, half to himself, “I have nothing, you see, not even a knife. Nothing at all but the rags I wear. But it may not always be so.” The warm beer in an empty stomach made him feel sorry for himself. It was pleasant to be sorry for himself beside a warm fire. Slowly his mind began to work again, and he remembered why he had come back to Aalsö. Surely it was not to study Luther’s Catechism in the New Room, which was now gone. But he had needed to see Pastor Peder. He said to the old woman cautiously, yet as if it did not concern him greatly, “Do you know one Morten Bruus?”

      “Aye,” she answered without enthusiasm. “He was at one time of this parish.”

      “Then he is dead? As I hear?”

      “Yes, dead, and no one the sadder.”

      “Surely not myself,” said the beggar. “Well, we cannot all be mourned.”

      “We need not be hated,” said she.

      “So he was hated, eh?” said the beggar.

      “If you know his name, you know that he was hated,” she replied.

      She rose to put away the remnant of the loaf in a wooden chest on the farther side of the fire, and he watched her regretfully but did not venture to protest. Beyond the chest was a door, the door to the parson’s bedroom, as he remembered, and in the wall beyond it, at right angles, was the alcove where the housekeeper’s pillows and quilts were piled. In all the years that he had been away he had not paused once to try to remember this room, but now that he was here again everything returned to his memory as being just as it had been, except that the door to the New Room was now walled up. As for the old woman, he seemed somehow to remember her, and yet the more he thought, the more it came to him that the pastor’s housekeeper had been a smaller woman, with sharp black eyes and a quick hand. She had not had the patience of Peder Korf.

      “So the old pastor is dead,” he said at length. “Was it long since?”

      The old woman seated herself on the bench in which she had bestowed the bread.

      “Long since indeed,” she said. “I was young then. Well, at least I was but in my forties, and today that’s young.” She sighed, and the beggar inquired:

      “It was not old age then that did away with the pastor. Like enough it was the plague.”

      “A plague of Catholic bandits,” said the old woman. “A gang of Wallenstein’s men. May God never forgive them.”

      The beggar considered. “Yes, that was long since I had not been long out of Jutland then.”

      “Torstenson’s men were thieves and vandals also,” said the old woman, “but at least they were not Catholics but merely Swedes. Ah, but Jutland has suffered, suffered for all of Denmark. I wonder why God was willing to have us suffer so. But Wallenstein’s men were the worst.”

      The beggar said nothing, and the old woman, speaking out of an old and deep sadness, continued:

      “Everyone fled to the islands that had strength to move, or nearly everyone. Pastor wouldn’t go, and I stayed with Pastor. But when they came, and we saw the flames about Aalsö village and the nearby farms, I ran into the woods. Pastor stayed by the place. He was a brave man, Pastor Peder Korf. He said that his people might be running to him for help, and he meant to stay and protect them.” She paused, and the beggar kept silent, his head tipped forward, watching her from under his black brows with his little greenish eyes. She drew a deep breath and said, “When I came back to the place, Pastor was hanging from the

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