The Town

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Title:     The Town
Author: Anthon B. E. Nilsen [More Titles by Nilsen]

Translator: W. J. Alexander Worster.

The last census showed a population of 19,991 inhabitants, but if anyone asked "Holm at the Corner" how big the place was, he would say "between twenty and thirty thousand"--a figure he considered reasonable enough, counting the annual increment in the families he knew.

The town had its own traditions. Natives could speak with pride of the days, now long passed, when the firms of C. B. Taline and Veuve Erik Strom had great cargoes of coffee coming direct from Rio, while Danish vessels by the dozen lay alongside the warehouses discharging corn, and unwieldy Dutchmen took in baulks large enough to cut up into arm-chair sections--ay, there was proper timber in those days, not like the thin weedy sticks that come down the river now!

And the place had other memories, apart from trade and commerce. There was a whole gallery of clerics whose brilliant names cast a glow of distinction long after they themselves were dead and gone; old men remembered them, and the town could feel itself, as it were, related to episcopal sees all over the country. Great trading houses of old standing came to ruin, fortunes were shattered, and crisis after crisis came and went, but every such period merely added a fresh chapter to the history of the town, making new stories for fathers to tell their sons. In course of time, a whole collection of such stories had grown up about these merchant princes, for trade was, after all, the chief interest of the place and so remained. When the old men got together, talk would invariably turn upon such matters as Nils Berg's grand speculations in the Crimean War, or the disastrous failure of Balle & Co.; while the younger ones, who were in the swim, enlisted further shareholders in their factories and ship-owning concerns. It was a town with plenty of grit in it, no lack of young stock to carry on the work.

True, there were times when it seemed to languish, to be dwindling away, when periods of crisis had swept away what appeared to be its chief support; but a breathing space was all that was needed, and soon the old spirit was awake once more, and life went on as bravely as before.

And so it went on for generation after generation, while the river flowed, broad and smooth as ever, down the valley, pouring its ice-water into the fjord each spring. Up the hillsides on either hand the roads turned up and curved among thicket and bush, and the higher one climbed the clearer showed the town below with its rows of houses and its churches.

Those who were born in the town and had spent their youth there, but whom fate had later moved to other parts of the country, made it a practice, when they came home, to climb the hillside and look out over the town, as it lay there rich in memories. And the longer one had been away, the stronger they seemed to grow; for there is a strange power in such memories of a little, old town.

[The end]
Anthon B. E. Nilsen's short story: Town

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