“Jeg vil verge mitt land, jeg vil bygge mitt land—”
“I will defend my country, I will build my country—”
They had no band, for Kringsjå was only a little country school, but they shouted and hurrahed, their voices shrill and glad.
Hans buzzed through the house like a bee in a bottle.
“My cap! Who’s seen my cap? And my wallet? Where’s my Seventeenth of May ribbon—and my flag?”
Then he sniffled and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his white sailor suit.
“Hans! Handkerchief, Hans!” shouted Mother and Thea and Ingeborg, each from her door, and each waving a white handkerchief at him as he scurried down the garden path.
When they came indoors again, Anders stood in the dining room, dressed in his third outfit for the day. Now he had on his blue sailor suit.
“Mother,” he began, “do you know where my flag is—and have you a Seventeenth of May ribbon for me? . . . Oh, Thea, I couldn’t find my garters, and there are no clean handkerchiefs in my drawer.”
“The way you boys can never look after your own things. It’s always Mamma this, and Mamma that, or someone else this, and someone else that, who’s supposed to keep things in order for you?”
“That’s what womenfolks are for, isn’t it?” muttered Anders, but then he smiled apologetically. “Thea, you couldn’t fry me an egg or two, could you? It was so crowded at Petra’s I couldn’t get my hands on anything but one solitary cupcake.”
Finally they were rid of Anders too. Mother would have time for a little breakfast and a cup of coffee before Böe arrived with the car. Mikkelsen and Mrs. Mikkelsen, the neighbors, had apparently already gone down, for Leddy, their beagle, was howling disconsolately and pulling at her chain. Njord and Neri sat happily thwacking their tails on the floor—they knew their folks would never chain them up and leave them. One could positively see them smile. Suddenly they leaped up, barking. They had heard Böe’s car down the road.
He had decorated the car with festoons of little paper flags and placed bouquets of blue and white anemones and red tulips in the vases inside the car. Tulla was helped in, where she sat bouncing with excitement. Njord and Neri stood on their hind legs in the car and looked out, each from his own window, although Njord ducked down and curled up at Mother’s feet as soon as he heard and smelled the first “grasshopper,” or jumping firecracker. Njord could not endure the smell of gunpowder. Neri growled ferociously at every boy who was shooting off firecrackers.
The town had five thousand inhabitants—or four thousand nine hundred forty-six, to be exact. And every single one of them must have been out to see the children’s procession, and at least as many had come in from the countryside round about. Already a wall of people stood along the route the procession was to take.
There are probably not many little children in Norway who have not prayed to God in their evening prayers on May sixteenth that He must let there be sunshine tomorrow. And no matter what the weather was—for it sometimes rained or even snowed—they must, and would wear their new spring outfits on the Seventeenth. They howled and shrieked if their mothers fussed at them “to put on your raincoats,” “wear your winter coats.” . . . But on such a Seventeenth of May as this one, with the lake free of ice and lying blue below the hills, with the blue sky and sunshine over the newly sprung leaves—then it was pleasant to see everyone in their new light summer clothes. It was pleasant to see them as they stood waiting for the children’s procession, holding in their arms their youngest children, who were too small to be in the procession, so they could wave their tiny little flags as brother or sister went by.
Most of the girls were dressed in the glensman’s costume of the Gudbrandsdal region. Their everyday dress is so pretty and practical—a skirt of narrow-striped red and black and gray wool, a Scottish plaid bodice, full white sleeves and a headdress of starched white batiste knotted becomingly. Some wore copies of the old styles in the museum and these were glorious—large-checked or broad-striped skirts embroidered all over with flowers, vests of yellow or red or green silk brocade, and on their bosoms or at their throats large filigree brooches. And everyone—men, women, and children—wore a bow of blue and white and red silk ribbon on his breast.
Böe found the parking place he knew Mother liked for viewing the procession—in Main Street at the corner near the school. From there one had a view down the hill by Horsters Institute, where all the old men and old women peered out the windows from behind the flowering potted plants. As the procession approached, it looked like a blood-red fluttering river—except that the river was running uphill—before it swung beneath the big old hardwood trees in Main Street.
Bom-bom-bom bom-bom, bom-bom-bom bom bom bom bom came the drums in the distance. It was “Sonner av Norge, det eldgamle rige” (“Sons of Norway, That Ancient Kingdom”)—the old national anthem known as the “crowned anthem.” It was highly pretentious, and it was hardly ever sung any more, since Björnstjerne Björnson wrote his songs that said so smoothly and simply how Norwegians feel about the country that is theirs. But in this little town it was a tradition that the band leading the Seventeenth of May procession play “Sonner av Norge,” and never anything else. And the children who usually knew no more of the old song than the first line, sang disrespectfully—
“Ompa-di-pompa di ompa-pompa-pompa,
Ompa-di-pompa di trivio-livo-lei . . .”
The brass horns shone and the drumsticks beat donk, donk, donk. Behind the band came the town councilmen in morning coats and high hats. The Chief of Police strutted, erect and solemn, and half the town whispered and buzzed as he went by.
“Wonder if he’s angry now?”
And Mother thought, a little conscience-stricken, that it was probably wrong, really, to let the children do as they like nearly always. Of course we also did as we liked, but if we got caught we were punished, so we learned the price of having our own way. Our children might get the idea that such things could be done at no cost. . . .
Up the hill came the flood of red flags, carried high by children’s hands. The junior college came first, the old familiar school banner waving over the stream, the teachers in their university caps marching alongside. Directly behind the banner, came the seniors—the graduating class of boys and girls who would enter the university this year. They wore red caps, red ribbons across their chests, and carried little canes with red bows. They hooted and shouted at the top of their lungs. The seniors considered the Seventeenth of May their own special day. They had finished their written examinations, though they would not know the results until the end of June. And the more reason they had to fear the day of judgment the more hilariously they celebrated the Seventeenth of May. It had happened that now and then a boy or girl had celebrated the Seventeenth of May as a senior twice, and even three times in succession.
Thea and Böe stood up in the car and waved.
“Did Madam see Anders? Tulla, did you see Anders?”
Mother had caught but a glimpse of the boy. He and all his classmates had donned monocles—presumably an idea of the Entertainment Committee.
Tulla was equally happy whether she saw her brothers or not. She shouted about the flags and the sun and the music, and now she recognized the melody of “Ja, Vi Elsker Dette Landet” (“Yes, We Love with Fond Devotion”). And she squeezed Mother’s hand in joy.
Now the public, or elementary, school was coming, headed by its own band. And they could play, these white-clad boys! Some of them were so little they could scarcely be seen for the horn or trombone they played. Everyone waved at them and shouted “hurray!” for the boys’ band in the public school was the pride of the whole town. It was unbelievable, considering the size of the town, the number of children that passed in review behind the public-school banner. The littlest girls were sweet beyond words, with their skirts and starched white kerchiefs that made them look like tiny peasant women.
It was a long procession, for the near-by country schools??
?Skogen, Kringsjå, and Åsmarka—were in it too. When the procession was over these children from the country would have all forenoon to walk around town and look at the fine things in the windows and everywhere else, so they were of all the children the happiest today.
As soon as the last school had passed, Böe started looking for a place to park where Tulla could see the whole procession once more. He did not even ask Mother’s permission—both Böe and Thea considered the day Tulla’s. And when she had seen the procession for the second time, Böe drove to the market place.
There, beneath the town’s huge silk flag, the speakers’ stand had been erected, and as the school children streamed in and gathered around beneath the golden maples, the mass looking like a bed of red-white-blue fuchsias in the sunshine. Around them stood a wall of people—fathers, with hats in hand and a baby on one arm, mothers, both hands busy with little children. All began to sing when the children started up the song.
Ja, vi elsker dette landet,
som det stiger frem,
furet, veirbitt over vandet
med de tusen hjem.
Elsker, elsker det, or tenker
på vår far og mor
og den saga-natt som senker
drömme på vår jord—
Yes, we love with fond devotion
Norway’s mountain domes
Rising storm-lashed o’er the ocean
With their thousand homes.
Love our country while we’re bending
Thoughts to fathers grand
And to saga-night that’s sending
Dreams upon our land . . .*
The speaker was a young instructor. It was not easy to hear what he said over here where Böe’s car stood, for they were not allowed to drive nearer than to the corner of Church Street. But toward the end of the speech a gust of wind carried a few sentences clearly and distinctly to where Mother sat.
“. . . and as you leave here, children, you have the entire day ahead of you for having fun, and for thinking up mischief. That is as it should be, in my opinion. If you can learn that back of all the fun that is truly fun, and back of all real and carefree joy, there lies always a deep and deadly seriousness. It is only those things in life which we have bought dearly that become so precious to us and the source of all our joys, our light hearts, and our hearty laughter. People complain nowadays that our youths are irresponsible and frivolous today—you have all heard that. I do not know, but I would be happy if you could come into possession of the true lightness of heart that men and women achieve when they have had to try their strength and come to know themselves—know they can take the hard way, and can bear the heaviest burdens . . .”
Then it was over, and the market place became a single mass of children, elbowing their way amid the grownups, threatening to put out people’s eyes with their flagsticks. Some were hunting their relatives, some going home with friends to have hot chocolate, but most of them were bound for the town’s four pastry shops. For that was part of it—that after the procession the children were to be allowed to eat innumerable cookies and tarts and quench their thirst from all the hurrahing and all the dust they had swallowed.
Streamers, or “air serpents,” of colored paper sailed over people’s heads and firecrackers spluttered and crackled underfoot. Hans now bobbed up at the car, perspiration rolling from his face, his white sailor suit not exactly white any longer—and three handkerchiefs lost.
“Do you want to come along and pick violets, Hans?”
It had become a fixed custom that after the procession Tulla was to have a long drive beside the lake.
Hans crawled in—and they had scarcely got out of town before the boy sank down there in the front seat where he sat with Böe and went to sleep.
It was strange and quiet along the country road today. Almost no cars, no carriages, no one out walking. The road along the lake was already white with dust, as in summer, and there was somehow a Sabbath stillness over the light-green landscape, even though there were people working in the fields in many places. Two heavy bay horses were before a plow and overturning the rich, dark soil on a hillside facing the sun. There was the soft creaking and jingling of harness as they turned at the end of a furrow, the man behind the plow clucking and shouting to them. Cows and sheep grazed in the pastures under the birch trees and junipers, and at one place a flock of frolicsome goats sprang about on a rocky hill below a large farmhouse. There was an odor of newly sprouted birch leaves and of dung that lay in heaps in the fields waiting to be spread out. Flocks of dirty-gray crows and decorative magpies in black frock coats and white shirt fronts ransacked for choice tidbits.
And at every farm they passed, Tulla threw out her arms and shouted “flag, flag.” For there was not a home, large or small, that did not have a flag raised at full mast today. Far on the other side of the lake, one could see them like tiny red flames against the light hills and the dark evergreen forest up along the ridge.
Every other minute Mother or Thea shouted to Böe to stop. One or the other of them had seen something—a slope densely dappled with the greenish-yellow clusters of Virgin Mary cowslips, a brook that wound and ambled through a little opening in the forest, its banks abloom with the first bright yellow marsh marigolds. On a ditchbank Thea found bumblebee flowers, and in a dark crevice in the cliff, where dirty snow still lay beneath the spruce firs, Mother came upon the last blue anemones.
Every time the car stopped the dogs leaped out. They had to drink from every brook, roll in all the grass—and finally Njord smelled sheep in the forest, and set out after them like one possessed. His forebears for several thousand years back had been shepherd dogs, and it was in his blood—when he saw sheep he had to go after them and drive them into a bunch. But sheep owners somehow did not appreciate having strange dogs take on that function and Mother was always on pins and needles for fear some unpleasantness with the owners would result when Njord hit on the idea of playing shepherd. Neri, the poor little fool, gave voice and set out after Njord—always certain that whatever the big dog did he also ought to do.
At long last Thea and Böe and Mother had the dogs back. For punishment, Mother put them on a leash.
And now, said Böe, it was high time to start driving back to town, if they wanted to see the senior parade.
Hans had slept like a rock all the time—not even the commotion with the dogs awoke him. And he did not wake up until Böe stopped the car on the hill by the junior college.
Along the street people stood waiting, whispering and chuckling expectantly. There were rumors that more than half of the Senior Standard had been confiscated by the censor, for one of the stories was so disgraceful that the author was to be banned from the oral examination that was coming up.
“Authoress,” corrected a prim, elderly lady. “Yes, isn’t it terrible? Think of it, they say it is the daughter of Archdeacon Bang in Norddal who wrote it, and it was something simply terrible. Indecent, it was! Her poor parents—they are completely upset. . . . The girl will certainly be suspended and they can hardly afford to keep her in school another year. . . .”
So it was something of a sensation when a group of senior girls in white dresses and red caps rushed out through the school gates and began to sell the much-discussed Senior Standard. Ingebjörg Bang, the archdeacon’s daughter, was in the lead, and it was supposed to be certain that she would be suspended. . . . Her dress was altogether too short, in the opinion of the elderly lady, and wasn’t she bold to wear red stockings and white shoes!
Now the sinner was smiling and curtsying to the Chief of Police and, sure enough, he bought a paper from Ingebjörg! People watched his face as he opened it, adjusted his pince-nez, and began to read.
Mother could not help but feel that the Senior Standard this year was rather innocent—the jokes were mild, and the “editorial” as well. But on the last page she found a “detective story” by “Black Peter” which she recognized as something Anders had written last winter for the school
paper: a story about someone having broken into Petra’s pastry shop and about an unjustly suspected schoolboy who had escaped from the Police Chief’s office—with the aid of the Police Chief’s daughter, who was in Anders’s class.
Mother had got no inordinately high opinion of Anders’s writing ability but the story was rather rough on the police. And here it was cooked up and brought up to date as an adventure supposed to have taken place on the eve of the Seventeenth of May. Officially, it was the seniors themselves who wrote the paper, but actually they accepted contributions from both younger school children and—some said—from grownups in town who took advantage of the fact that the seniors, to a certain degree, enjoyed unlimited freedom of speech.
The Police Chief read the “detective story” about himself, and smiled condescendingly. And when Anders and a group of his classmates came out—their features distorted with the effort of holding a monocle in place on their round boys’ faces—and began to stroll up and down in front of the row of spectators, he smiled again, all graciousness, even though the boys were mimicking him and his constables to the life. They pulled their faces into the sourest expressions they could muster, and pompously jabbed the large-girthed gentlemen lining the street. . . .
“Don’t crowd now—there, make a little room here, here comes the procession—stay back of the line, there!”
And now a great commotion started at the gates. With much howling and yowling, as a crowd of boys carrying “banners” on long poles that were only pieces of cardboard with sketches and inscriptions in colored crayon—the boys’ own comments on the affairs of the community and the world. More or less witty they were—mostly less. But there was a firm conviction among the townspeople—as in every other town where there was a junior college—that “our seniors” were the wittiest or—as some would say—the most impertinent in the entire country.
The first “banner” depicted the “Monarch of the Mountain,” an ancient eccentric who lived in a hut on the mountain and who had been appointed game warden for the Eastern Hunt Club. Whether this appointment had been meant as a joke, or seriously, no one had ever been able to find out. But the Monarch of the Mountain on the banner wore a cap and insignia that greatly resembled those of the town’s police. As caption the boys had used an old saying: “He to whom God gives a mission, He also gives understanding.”