The Rider of the White Horse

The story that I have to tell came to my knowledge more than half a century ago in the house of my great-grandmother, the wife of Senator Feddersen, when, sitting close up to her armchair one day, I was busy reading a number of some magazine bound in blue cardboard, either the Leipziger or Pappes Hamburger Lesefrüchte, I have forgotten which. I still recall with a tremor how the old lady of more than eighty years would now and then pass her soft hand caressingly over her great-grandchild’s hair. She herself, and that day, have long been buried and I have sought in vain for those old pages, so I can just as little vouch for the truth of the facts as defend them if anyone should question them. Only one thing I can affirm, that although no outward circumstance has since revived them in my mind they have never vanished from my memory.

On an October afternoon, in the third decade of our century—thus the narrator began his tale—I was riding in very bad weather along a dike in northern Friesland. For more than an hour I had been passing, on the left, a bleak marsh from which all the cattle had already gone, and, on the right, uncomfortably near, the marsh of the North Sea. A traveler along the dike was supposed to be able to see islets and islands; I saw nothing however but the yellow-gray waves that dashed unceasingly against the dike with what seemed like roars of fury, sometimes splashing me and the horse with dirty foam; in the background eerie twilight in which earth could not be distinguished from sky, for the moon, which had risen and was now in its second quarter, was covered most of the time by driving clouds. It was icy cold. My benumbed hands could scarcely hold the reins and I did not blame the crows and gulls that, cawing and shrieking, allowed themselves to be borne inland by the storm. Night had begun to fall and I could no longer distinguish my horse’s hoofs with certainty; not a soul had met me; I heard nothing but the screaming of the birds, as their long wings almost brushed against me or my faithful mare, and the raging of wind and water. I do not deny that at times I wished myself in some secure shelter.