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And the comet came, shining with its fiery heart and threatening with its switch; it was watched from the rich man’s castle and the poor man’s cottage, by the crowds in the street and by the solitary traveller crossing the pathless heath; each had thoughts of their own.

“Come and see the sign in the heavens! Come and see the splendid sight!” people cried, and everyone hurried to look. But in one room a little boy and his mother were still sitting. The tallow candle was burning, and his mother thought she saw a wood shaving in the flame; the tallow rose to a point and curled, and to her this meant that the little boy must soon die, for the shaving pointed towards him.

It was an old superstition, and she believed in it. Yet the little boy was to live many years on earth, to live and see the comet when it appeared again more than sixty years later.

The little boy did not see the shaving in the candle, nor did he give a thought to the comet shining in the sky for the first time in his life. Before him stood a little earthenware bowl, riveted where it had cracked, in which soapy water had been whipped to a froth. Into it he dipped the bowl of a little clay pipe, then put the stem to his lips and blew soap bubbles, large and small. They trembled and floated in the loveliest colours, changing from yellow to red, purple and blue, and then turning green as a woodland leaf with the sun shining through it.

“May God grant you as many years on earth as the bubbles you blow!” “As many, as many!” said the little boy. “You can never blow all the soapy water away!” And he blew bubble after bubble.

“There flies a year! There flies a year! See how they fly!” he said with every bubble that broke free and floated away. A couple flew straight into his eyes; they stung and burned, and brought tears to his eyes. In every bubble he saw a vision of the future, shining and glittering.

“You can see the comet now!” the neighbours called. “Do come out! Don’t sit in there!” And his mother took the little boy by the hand; he had to put down his clay pipe and leave his game of blowing bubbles: the comet was there.

And the little boy saw the shining ball of fire with its radiant tail. Some said it appeared three ells long, others that it was millions of ells; people see things so differently.

“Our children and grandchildren may be dead before it appears again!” people said. Most of those who said so were indeed dead and gone when it next appeared; but the little boy towards whom the shaving in the candle had pointed, and of whom his mother had thought, “He will die soon!”—he was still alive, old now and white-haired. “White hairs are the flowers of old age,” says the proverb, and he had many of those flowers; he was now an old schoolmaster.

The schoolchildren said he was so wise, knew so much, knew history and geography and all that was known about the heavenly bodies. “Everything comes again!” he said. “Only take note of people and events, and you will see that they always come again, in a different dress, in a different country.”

And the schoolmaster had told them of William Tell, who was forced to shoot an apple from his son’s head, but who, before loosing his arrow, hid another against his breast to shoot into the breast of the wicked Gessler. This happened in Switzerland, but many years earlier the same thing had happened in Denmark to Palnatoke; he too had to shoot an apple from his son’s head, and like Tell he kept an arrow hidden with which to take his revenge. And more than a thousand years before that, the same story had been written down as having happened in Egypt. The same things come again, just like the comets: they fly away, disappear, and come again.

And he spoke of the comet that was expected, the comet he had seen as a little boy. The schoolmaster knew about the heavenly bodies and pondered them, but he did not forget history and geography on that account.

He had laid out his garden in the shape of a map of Denmark. Herbs and flowers grew there, each in its proper region of the country. “Fetch me some peas!” he would say, and off one went to the bed that represented Lolland. “Fetch me some buckwheat!” and off one went to Langeland. The lovely blue gentian and sweet gale were to be found up at Skagen, the glossy holly over by Silkeborg. The towns themselves were marked by little pedestals. Here stood St. Knud with the lindworm, which meant Odense. Absalon with his bishop’s crozier meant Sorø; the little boat with oars was a sign that here lay the town of Århus. You could learn the map of Denmark well from the schoolmaster’s garden, though first he had to explain it to you, and that was such a pleasure.

Now the comet was expected, and he told them about it, and about what people in the old days had said and believed when it was last there. “A comet year is a good wine year,” he said. “You can water the wine and no one will notice. Wine merchants are said to be very fond of comet years.”

The sky remained clouded for a full fourteen days and nights; the comet could not be seen, but it was there. The old schoolmaster sat in his little room beside the schoolroom. The Bornholm clock from his parents’ day stood in the corner; its heavy lead weights neither rose nor fell, its pendulum did not move. The little cuckoo that once came out to call the hours had sat silent behind its closed door for years. Everything within was hushed and still; the clock no longer went. But the old piano close by, also from his parents’ day, still had life in it. Its strings could sound, though a little hoarsely, and play the melodies of a whole lifetime. They brought back so much to the old man, both joyful and sad, from all the years between his first sight of the comet as a little boy and its return now. He remembered what his mother had said about the shaving in the candle; he remembered the lovely soap bubbles he had blown. Each was a year of life, he had said. How shining, how bursting with colour! Everything lovely and joyful he had seen in them: childhood games and the delights of youth, the whole wide world lying open in the sunshine, and he was to venture out into it! Those were bubbles of the future. As an old man he heard in the piano strings melodies from days gone by: bubbles of remembrance, glowing with the colours of memory. There sounded his grandmother’s knitting song:

“Surely no Amazon knitted the very first stocking.” There sounded the song the family’s old maid had sung to him as a child: “There are so many dangers in this world to undergo, for one who is still young and has so little wit to know.”

Now came tunes from his first ball, a minuet and a molinaski; now came soft, wistful notes, and tears rose in the old man’s eyes; now a war march thundered out, now a hymn, now merry tunes, bubble upon bubble, just as he had blown them from soapy water as a little boy.

His eyes were fixed on the window. A cloud in the sky outside drifted away, and in the clear air he saw the comet, its shining heart, its luminous veil of mist.

It was as though he had seen it only yesterday evening, and yet a whole rich human life lay between that time and now. Then he had been a child, looking “forward” into the bubbles; now the bubbles showed him “back.” He felt a child’s heart and a child’s faith within him; his eyes shone, his hand sank upon the keys—and there came a sound as though a string had snapped.

“Do come and look, the comet is here!” the neighbours called. “The sky is so beautifully clear! Come and have a proper look!” The old schoolmaster did not answer; he had gone to have a proper look. His soul had set out upon a greater orbit, into a wider space than the comet ever traverses. And the comet was watched once more from the rich man’s castle and the poor man’s cottage, by the crowds in the street and by the solitary traveller on the pathless heath. His soul was watched by God and by the dear ones who had gone before him, those for whom he longed.