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Title: A doorway in Fairyland
Author: Laurence Housman
Engraver: Clemence Housman
Release date: April 7, 2026 [eBook #78382]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1923
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78382
Credits: Tim Lindell, chenzw, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DOORWAY IN FAIRYLAND ***
A DOORWAY IN FAIRYLAND
This selection of fairy-tales is reprinted from the following original
editions, now out of print:
_A Farm in Fairyland_ (1894)
_The House of Joy_ (1895)
_The Field of Clover_ (1898)
_The Blue Moon_ (1904)
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
A DOORWAY IN FAIRYLAND
BY LAURENCE HOUSMAN
NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY
ENGRAVED BY
CLEMENCE HOUSMAN
]
_Made and
Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld.,
London and Aylesbury._
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE BLUE MOON 13
THE WISHING-POT 21
THE WAY OF THE WIND 33
THE BOUND PRINCESS:
THE FIRE-EATERS 53
THE GALLOPING PLOUGH 59
THE THIRSTY WELL 66
THE PRINCESS MELILOT 74
THE BURNING ROSE 82
THE CAMPHOR-WORM 90
THE RAT-CATCHER’S DAUGHTER 97
THE TRAVELLER’S SHOES 108
THE ROOTED LOVER 133
THE WOOING OF THE MAZE 147
THE MOON-FLOWER 156
THE WHITE KING 181
THE PASSIONATE PUPPETS 192
KNOONIE IN THE SLEEPING PALACE 211
THE BLUE MOON
Nillywill and Hands-pansy were the most unimportant and happy pair of
lovers the world has ever gained or lost. With them it had been a case
of love at first blindness since the day when they had tumbled into
each other’s arms in the same cradle. And Hands-pansy, when he first
saw her, did not discover that Nillywill was a real princess hiding her
birthright in the home of a poor peasant; nor did Nillywill, when she
first saw Hands, see in him the baby-beginnings of the most honest and
good heart that ever sprang out of poverty and humble parentage. So
from her end of their little crib she kicked him with her royal rosy
toes, and he from his kicked back and laughed: and thus, as you hear,
at first blindness they fell head over ears in love with one another.
Nothing could undo that; for day by day earth and sun and wind came to
rub it in deeper, and water could not wash it off. So when they had
been seven years together there could be no doubt that they felt as if
they had been made for each other in heaven. And then something very
big and sad came to pass; for one day Nillywill had to leave off being
a peasant child and become a princess once more. People very grand and
grown-up came to the woodside where she flowered so gaily, and caught
her by the golden hair of her head and pulled her up by her dear little
roots, and carried her quite away from Hands-pansy to a place she had
never been in before. They put her into a large palace, with woods and
terraces and landscape gardens on all sides of it; and there she sat
crying and pale, saying that she wanted to be taken back to Hands-pansy
and grow up and marry him, though he was but the poor peasant boy he
had always been.
Those that had charge of Nillywill in her high station talked wisely,
telling her to forget him. “For,” said they, “such a thing as a
princess marrying a peasant boy can only happen once in a blue moon!”
When she heard that, Nillywill began every night to watch the moon
rise, hoping some evening to see it grow up like a blue flower against
the dusk and shake down her wish to her like a bee out of its deep
bosom.
But night by night, silver, or ruddy, or primrose, it lit a place for
itself in the heavens; and years went by, bringing the Princess no
nearer to her desire to find room for Hands-pansy amid the splendours
of her throne.
She knew that he was five thousand miles away and had only wooden
peasant shoes to walk in; and when she begged that she might once
more have sight of him, her whole court, with the greatest utterable
politeness, cried “No!”
The Princess’s memory sang to her of him in a thousand tunes, like
woodland birds carolling; but it was within the cage which men call a
crown that her thoughts moved, fluttering to be out of it and free.
So time went on, and Nillywill had entered gently into sweet
womanhood--the comeliest princess that ever dropped a tear; and all
she could do for love was to fill her garden with dark-eyes pansies,
and walk among their humble upturned faces which reminded her so well
of her dear Hands--Hands who was a long five thousand miles away. “And,
oh!” she sighed, watching for the blue moon to rise, “when will it come
and make me at one with all my wish?”
Looking up, she used to wonder what went on there. She and Hands had
stolen into the woods, when children together, and watched the small
earth-fairies at play, and had seen them, when the moon was full, lift
up their arms to it, making, perhaps, signals of greeting to far-off
moon-brothers. So she thought to herself, “What kind are the fairies
up there, and who is the greatest moon-fairy of all who makes the blue
moon rise and bring goodwill to the sad wishers of the human race? Is
it,” thought Nillywill, “the moon-fairy who then opens its heart and
brings down healing therefrom to the lovers of earth?”
And now, as happens to all those who are captives of a crown, Nillywill
learned that she must wed with one of her own rank who was a stranger
to her save for his name and his renown as the lord of a neighbouring
country; there was no help for her, since she was a princess, but she
must wed according to the claims of her station. When she heard of it,
she went at nightfall to her pansies, all lying in their beds, and told
them of her grief. They, awakened by her tears, lifted up their grave
eyes and looked at her.
“Do you not hear?” said they.
“Hear what?” asked the Princess.
“We are low in the ground: we hear!” said the pansies. “Stoop down your
head and listen!”
The Princess let her head go to the ground; and “click, click,” she
heard wooden shoes coming along the road. She ran to the gate, and
there was Hands, tall and lean, dressed as a poor peasant, with a
bundle tied up in a blue cotton handkerchief across his shoulder, and
five thousand miles trodden to nothing by the faithful tramping of his
old wooden shoes.
“Oh, the blue moon, the blue moon!” cried the Princess; and running
down the road, she threw herself into his arms.
How happy and proud they were of each other! He, because she remembered
him and knew him so well by the sight of his face and the sound of his
feet after all these years; and she, because he had come all that way
in a pair of wooden shoes, just as he was, and had not been afraid that
she would be ashamed to know him again.
“I am so hungry!” said Hands, when he and Nillywill had done kissing
each other. And when Nillywill heard that, she brought him into the
palace through the pansies by her own private way; then with her own
hands she set food before him, and made him eat. Hands, looking at her,
said, “You are quite as beautiful as I thought you would be!”
“And you--so are you!” she answered, laughing and clapping her hands.
And “Oh, the blue moon,” she cried--“surely the blue moon must rise
to-night!”
Low down in the west the new moon, leaning on its side, rocked and
turned softly in its sleep; and there, facing the earth through the
cleared night, the blue moon hung like a burning grape against the sky.
Like the heart of a sapphire laid open, the air flushed and purpled to
a deeper shade. The wind drew in its breath close and hushed, till not
a leaf quaked in the boughs; and the sea that lay out west gathered its
waves together softly to its heart, and let the heave of its tide fall
wholly to slumber. Round-eyed, the stars looked at themselves in the
charmed water, while in a luminous azure flood the light of the blue
moon flowed abroad.
Under the light of many tapers within drawn curtains of tapestry, and
feasting her eyes upon the happiness of Hands, the Princess felt the
change that had entranced the outer world. “I feel,” she said, “I do
not know how--as if the palace were standing siege. Come out where we
can breathe the fresh air!”
The light of the tapers grew ghostly and dim, as, parting the thick
hangings of the window, they stepped into the night.
“The blue moon!” cried Nillywill to her heart; “oh, Hands, it is the
blue moon!”
All the world seemed carved out of blue stone; trees with stems
dark-veined as marble rose up to give rest to boughs which drooped the
altered hues of their foliage like the feathers of peacocks at roost.
Jewel within jewel they burned through every shade from beryl to onyx.
The white blossoms of a cherry-tree had become changed into turquoise,
and the tossing spray of a fountain as it drifted and swung was like a
column of blue fire. Where a long inlet of sea reached in and touched
the feet of the hanging gardens the stars showed like glow-worms,
emerald in a floor of amethyst.
There was no motion abroad, nor sound: even the voice of the
nightingale was stilled, because the passion of his desire had become
visible before his eyes.
“Once in a blue moon!” said Nillywill, waiting for her dream to become
altogether true. “Let us go now,” she said, “where I can put away my
crown! To-night has brought you to me, and the blue moon has come for
us: let us go!”
“Where shall we go?” asked Hands.
“As far as we can,” cried Nillywill. “Suppose to the blue moon!
To-night it seems as if one might tread on water or air. Yonder across
the sea, with the stars for stepping-stones, we might get to the blue
moon as it sets into the waves.”
But as they went through the deep alleys of the garden that led down to
the shore they came to a sight more wonderful than anything they had
yet seen.
Before them, facing toward the sea, stood two great reindeer, their
high horns reaching to the overhead boughs; and behind them lay a
sledge, long and with deep sides like the sides of a ship. All blue
they seemed in that strange light.
There, too, but nearer to hand, was the moon-fay himself waiting--a
great figure of lofty stature, clad in furs of blue fox-skin, and with
heron’s wings fastened above the flaps of his hood; and these lifted
themselves and clapped as Hands and the Princess drew near.
“Are you coming to the blue moon?” called the fay, and his voice
whistled and shrilled to them like the voice of a wind.
Hands-pansy gave back answer stoutly: “Yes, yes, we are coming!” And
indeed what better could he say?
“But,” cried Nillywill, holding back for a moment, “what will the blue
moon do for us?”
“Once you are there,” answered the moon-fay, “you can have your wish
and your heart’s desire; but only once in a blue moon can you have it.
Are you coming?”
“We are coming!” cried Nillywill. “Oh, let us make haste!”
“Tread softly,” whispered the moon-fay, “and stoop well under these
boughs, for if anything awakes to behold the blue moon, the memory of
it can never die. On earth only the nightingale of all living things
has beheld a blue moon; and the triumph and pain of that memory wakens
him ever since to sing all night long. Tread softly, lest others waken
and learn to cry after us; for we in the blue moon have our sleep
troubled by those who cry for a blue moon to return.” He looked towards
Nillywill, and smiled with friendly eyes. “Come!” he said again, and
all at once they had leapt upon the sledge, and the reindeer were
running fast down towards the sea.
The blue moon was resting with its lower rim upon the waters. At that
sight, before they were clear of the avenues of the garden, one of the
reindeer tossed up his great branching horns and snorted aloud for joy.
With a soft stir in the thick boughs overhead, a bird with a great
trail of feathers moved upon its perch.
The sledge, gliding from land, passed out over the smoothed waters,
running swiftly as upon ice; and the reflection of the stars shone
up like glow-worms as Nillywill and Hands-pansy, in the moon-fay’s
company, sped away along its bright surface.
The still air whistled through the reindeers’ horns; so fast they went
that the trees and the hanging gardens and the palace walls melted away
from view like wreaths of smoke. Sky and sea became one magic sapphire
drawing them in towards the centre of its life, to the heart of the
blue moon itself.
When the blue moon had set below the sea, then far behind them upon
the land they had left the leaves rustled and drew sharply together,
shuddering to get rid of the stony stillness, and the magic hues in
which they had been dyed; and again the nightingale broke out into
passionate triumph and complaint.
Then also, from the bough which the reindeer had brushed with its
horns, a peacock threw back its head and cried in harsh lamentation,
having no sweet voice wherewith to acclaim its prize. And so ever since
it cries, as it goes up into the boughs to roost, because it shares
with the nightingale its grief for the memory of departed beauty which
never returns to earth save once in a blue moon.
But Nillywill and Hands-pansy, living together in the blue moon, look
back upon the world, if now and then they choose to remember, without
any longing for it or sorrow.
THE WISHING-POT
Tulip was the son of a poor but prudent mother; from the moment of his
birth she had trained him to count ten before ever he wanted or asked
for anything. An otherwise reckless youth, he acquired an intrinsic
value through the practice of this habit. Only once, just as he was
reaching, but had not quite reached, years of discretion, did his habit
of precaution fail him; and this same failure became in the end the
opening of his fortunes.
Bathing one day in the river, to whose banks the woods ran down in
steep terraces, he heard a voice come singing along one of the upper
slopes; and looking up under the boughs of cedar and sycamore, he saw a
pair of green feet go dancing by, up and down like grasshoppers on the
prance.
There was such rhythm in them, and such sweetness in the voice, that
his heart was out of him before he could harness it to the number ten,
and he came out of the water the most natural and forlorn of lovers.
Before he was dressed the green feet and the voice were gone, and
before he got home his health and his appetite seemed to have gone
also. He pined industriously from day to day, and spent all his hours
in searching among the woods by the river side for his lady of the dear
green feet. He did not know so much as the size or colour of her face;
the sound of her voice alone, and the running up and down of her feet,
had, as he told his mother, “decimated his affections.”
In his trouble he could think of only one possible remedy, and that
he counted well over, knowing its risk. Away in the loneliest part of
the forest there lived a wise woman, to whom, now and then, folk went
for help when everything else had failed them. So he had heard tell
of a certain Wishing-Pot that was hers in which people might see the
thing they desired most, and into which for a fee she allowed lovers
and other poor fools of fortune to look. One thing, however, was told
against the virtues of this Wishing-Pot, that though many had had a
sight of it, and their wishes revealed to them therein, others had
gone and had never again returned to their homes, but had vanished
altogether from men’s sight, nor had any news ever been heard of them
after. There were some wise folk who held that they had only gone
elsewhere to seek the fortune that the Wishing-Pot had shown to them.
Nevertheless, for the most part, the wise woman and her Wishing-Pot had
an ill name in that neighbourhood.
To a lover’s heart risk gives value; so one fine morning Tulip kissed
his mother, counted ten, and set out for the woods.
Towards evening he came to the house of the witch and knocked at the
door. “Good mother,” said he, when she opened to him, “I have brought
you the fee to buy myself a wish over the Wishing-Pot.” “Ay, surely,”
answered the crone, and drew him in.
In one corner of the room stood a great crystal bowl. Nearly round
it was, and had a small opening at the top, to which a man might
place his eye and look in. To Tulip, as he looked at it, it seemed
all coloured fires and falling stars, and a soft crackling sound came
from it, as though heat burned in its veins. It threw long shapes and
lustres upon the walls, and within innumerable things writhed, and ran,
and whiffed in the floating of its vapours.
“You may have two wishes,” said the old witch, “a one and a two.” And
she said the spell that undid the secret of the Pot to the wisher.
Then Tulip bent down his head and looked in, counting softly to
himself, and at ten, he let the wish go to his lady of the dear green
feet.
The colours changed and sprang, as though stirred and fed with fresh
fuel; and down in the depths of the Wishing-Pot he saw the feet of his
Beloved go by in twinkling green slippers.
As soon as he saw that he began counting ten in great haste for the
second wish. “O to be inside the Wishing-Pot with her!” was his thought
now. He had got to nine, and the wish was almost on his tongue, when
he caught sight of the old woman’s eye looking at him. And the eye
had become like a large green spider, with great long limbs that kept
clutching up and out again!
His heart queegled to a jelly at the sight; but the green feet lured
him so, that he still thought how to get to them and yet be safe.
Surely, to be in the Wishing-Pot and out by the sound of the next
Angelus became the shape of his wish. He shut his eyes, cried ten upon
the venture, and was in the Wishing-Pot!
The little green feet were trebling over the glass with a sound like
running water; and he himself began running at full speed, shot off
into the Wishing-Pot like a pellet from a pop-gun. Nothing could he
see of his dear but her wee green feet. But above them as they ran he
heard showery laughter, and he knew that his lady was there before him,
though invisible to the eye.
The Pot, now he was in it, seemed bigger than the biggest dome in the
world; to run all round it took him two or three minutes. Away in the
centre of its base stood a great opal knob, like the axle to a wheel
round which he and the green feet kept circling.
However much he wished and wished, the green feet still kept their
distance, for now he was _in_ the Wishing-Pot wishes availed him
nothing. The green feet flew faster than his; the light laugh rang
further and further away; right across to the other side of the hall
his lady had passed from him now.
The magic fires of the crystal leaped and crackled under his tread;
now it seemed as if his feet ran on a green lawn, out of which broke
crocuses and daffodils, and now roses reddened in the track, and now
the purple of grapes spurted across the path like spilled wine. The
sound of the green feet and the running of overhead laughter, as they
distanced him in front, came nearer and nearer behind him from across
the hall. He felt that he must follow and not turn, however beaten he
might be.
Presently a voice, that he knew was his Beloved’s, cried,--
“Heart that would have me must hatch me!
Feet that would find me must catch me!
Man that would mate me must match me!”
Oh, how? wondered spent feet, and failing heart, and reeling brain.
He stumbled slower and slower in the race, till presently with quick
innumerable patterings the green feet grew closer, and were overtaking
him from the rear.
Warm breath was in his hair,--lips and a hand; he turned, open armed,
to snatch the mischievous morsel, but all that he clasped was a gust of
air; and he saw the green feet scudding out and away on a fresh start
before him.
Again, with laughter, the voice cried,--
“Lap for lap you must wind me:
Equal, before you can find me!
You are a lap behind me!”
Where they raced the surface of the glass sloped slightly to the upward
rise of its walls; Tulip shifted his ground, and ran where the footing
was leveller towards the centre, and the circle began to go smaller. So
he began to gain, till the green slippers, seeing how the advantage had
come about, shifted also in their turn.
Thus they ran on; there were no inner posts to mark the course, only
the great opal standing in the centre of all formed the pivot of the
race, and round and round it, a great way off, they ran.
All at once a big thought came into Tulip’s head; he waited not to
count ten, but, before Green Slippers knew what he was after, he had
reached the opal centre, and was circling it. Then quickly all the
laughter stopped; the green feet came twinkling sixteen to the dozen,
so as to get round the post before him and away.
One lap, he was before her; two laps, he turned again to her coming,
and found her falling into his arms. She blossomed into sight at his
touch: from top to toe she was there! All rosy and alive he had her in
his clasp, laughing, crying, clinging, yet struggling to be free. She
made a most endless handful, till Tulip had caught her by the hair and
kissed her between the eyes.
All round and overhead the magic crystal reared up arches of fire, to
a roof that dropped like rain, while Tulip and his prize sank down
exhausted on the great hub of opal to rest. As he touched it all the
secret wonders of the Wishing-Pot were opened and revealed to his gaze.
Crowds and crowds of faces were what he most saw; everywhere that he
turned he saw old friends and neighbours who, he thought, had been dead
and gone, looking sadly, and shaking long sorrowful faces at him. “You
here too, Tulip?” they seemed for ever to be saying. “Always another,
and another; and now you here too!”
There was the dairyman’s wife, who had waited seven years to have a
child, holding a little will-o’-the-wisp of a thing in her arms. Now
and then for a while it would lie still, and then suddenly it would
leap up and dart away; and she, poor soul, must up and after it, though
the chase were ever so long!
There also was Miller Dick with his broad thumbs, counting over a
rich pile of gold, which, ever and anon, spun up into the air, and
went strewing itself like dead leaves before the wind. Then he too
must needs up and after it, till it was all caught again, and added
together, and made right.
There were small playmates of Tulip’s childhood, each with its
little conceit of treasure: one had a toy, and another a lamb, another
a bird; and all of them hunted and caught the thing they loved, and
kissed it and again let go. So it went on, over and over again, more
sad than the sight of a quaker as he twiddles his thumbs.
[Illustration]
Whenever they were at peace for a moment, they turned their eyes his
way. “What, you here too, Tulip?” was always the thing they seemed to
be saying.
While Tulip sat looking at them, and thinking of it all, suddenly his
lady disappeared, and only her green feet darted from his side and
began running round and round in a circle. Then was he just about to
set off running after them, when he felt himself caught up to the
coloured fires of the roof and sent spinning ungovernably through
space. Suddenly he was dumped to the ground, and just as his feet were
gathering themselves up under him he heard the Angelus bell ringing
from the village below the slopes of the wood.
He was standing again by the side of the Wishing-Pot, and the old woman
sat cowering, and blinking her spider eye at him, too much astonished
to speak or move.
Tulip looked at her with a pleasant and engaging air. “Oh, good mother,
what a treat you have given me!” he said. “How I wish I had money for
another wish! what a pity it was ever to have wished myself back again!”
When the old witch heard that she thought still to entrap him, and
answered joyfully, “Why, kind Sir, surely, kind Sir, if you like it you
shall look again! Take another wish, and never mind about the money.”
So she said the spell once more which opened to him the wonders of the
Wishing-Pot.
Then cried Tulip, clapping his hands, “What better can I wish than to
have you in the Wishing-Pot, in the place of all those poor folk whom
you have imprisoned with their wishes!”
Hardly was the thing said than done; all the children who had been
Tulip’s playmates, and Miller Dick with his broad thumbs, and the
dairyman’s wife, were every one of them out, and the old witch woman
was nowhere to be seen.
But Tulip put his eye to the mouth of the Wishing-Pot; and there down
below he saw the old witch, running round and round as hard as she
could go, pursued by a herd of green spiders. And there without doubt
she remains.
And now everybody was happy except Tulip himself; for the children had
all of them their toys, and the old miller his gold, and as for the
dairyman’s wife, she found that she had become the mother of a large
and promising infant. But Tulip had altogether lost his lady of the
dear green feet, for in thinking of others he had forgotten to think of
himself. All the gratitude of the poor people he had saved was nothing
to him in that great loss which had left him desolate. For his part he
only took the Wishing-Pot up under his arm, and went sadly away home.
But before long the noise of what he had done reached to the king’s
ears; and he sent for Tulip to appear before him and his Court. Tulip
came, carrying the Wishing-Pot under his arm, very downcast and sad
for love of the lady of the dear green feet.
At that time all the Court was in half mourning; for the Princess
Royal, who was the king’s only child, and the most beautiful and
accomplished of her sex, had gone perfectly distraught with grief, of
which nothing could cure her. All day long she sat with her eyes shut,
and tears running down, and folded hands and quiet little feet. And
all this came, it was said, from a dream which she could not tell or
explain to anybody.
The king had promised that whoever could rouse her from her grief,
should have the princess for his wife, and become heir to the throne;
and when he heard that there was such a thing in the world as a
Wishing-Pot, he thought that something might be done with it.
From Tulip he learned, however, that no one knew the spell which opened
the resources of the Wishing-Pot save the old witch woman who was shut
up fast for ever in its inside. So it seemed to the king that the Pot
could be of no use for curing the princess.
But it was so beautiful, with its shooting stars and coloured fires,
that, when Tulip brought it, they carried it in to show to her.
After three hours the princess was prevailed upon to open her eyes; and
directly they fell upon the great opal bowl, all at once she started to
her feet and began laughing and dancing and singing.
These are the words that they heard her sing,--
“Lap for lap I must wind you;
Equal, before I can find you;
I am a lap behind you!”
Tulip, as soon as he heard the sweetness of that voice, and the words,
pushed his way past the king and all his court, to where the princess
was. And there over the heads of the crowd he saw his lady of the dear
green feet laughing and opening her white arms to him.
As she set eyes on his face the dream of the princess came true, and
all her unhappiness passed from her. So they loved and were married, to
the astonishment and edification of the whole court; and lived to be
greatly loved and admired by all their grandchildren.
THE WAY OF THE WIND
Where the world breaks up into islands among the blue waves of an
eastern sea, in a little house by the seashore, lived Katipah, the only
child of poor parents. When they died she was left quite alone and
could not find a heart in the world to care for her. She was so poor
that no man thought of marrying her, and so delicate and small that as
a drudge she was worth nothing to anybody.
Once a month she would go and stand at the temple gate, and say to the
people as they went in to pray, “Will nobody love me?” And the people
would turn their heads away quickly and make haste to get past, and
in their hearts would wonder to themselves: “Foolish little Katipah!
Does she think that we can spare time to love anyone so poor and
unprofitable as she?”
On the other days Katipah would go down to the beach, where everybody
went who had a kite to fly--for all the men in that country flew kites,
and all the children,--and there she would fly a kite of her own up
into the blue air; and watching the wind carrying it farther and
farther away, would grow quite happy thinking how a day might come at
last when she would really be loved, though her queer little outside
made her seem so poor and unprofitable.
Katipah’s kite was green, with blue eyes in its square face; and in
one corner it had a very small pursed-up red mouth holding a spray of
peach-blossom. She had made it herself; and to her it meant the green
world, with the blue sky over it when the spring begins to be sweet;
and there, tucked away in one corner of it, her own little warm mouth
waiting and wishing to be kissed: and out of all that wishing and
waiting the blossom of hope was springing, never to be let go.
All round her were hundreds of others flying their kites, and all had
some wish or prayer to Fortune. But Katipah’s wish and prayer were only
that she might be loved.
The silver sandhills lay in loops and chains round the curve of the
blue bay, and all along them flocks of gaily coloured kites hovered and
fluttered and sprang. And, as they went up into the clear air, the wind
sighing in the strings was like the crying of a young child. “Wahoo!
wahoo!” every kite seemed to cradle the wailings of an invisible infant
as it went mounting aloft, spreading its thin apron to the wind.
“Wahoo! wahoo!” sang Katipah’s blue-and-green kite, “shall I ever be
loved by anybody?” And Katipah, keeping fast hold of the string, would
watch where it mounted and looked so small, and think that surely some
day her kite would bring her the only thing she much cared about.
Katipah’s next-door neighbour had everything that her own lonely heart
most wished for: not only had she a husband, but a fine baby as well.
Yet she was such a jealous, cross-grained body that she seemed to get
no happiness out of the fortune Heaven had sent her. Husband and child
seemed both to have caught the infection of her bitter temper; all
day and night beating and brawling went on; there seemed no peace in
that house.
[Illustration]
But for all that the woman, whose name was Bimsha, was quite proud of
being a wife and a mother: and in the daytime, when her man was away,
she would look over the fence and laugh at Katipah, crying boastfully,
“Don’t think you will ever have a husband, Katipah: you are too poor
and unprofitable! Look at me, and be envious!”
Then Katipah would go softly away, and send up her kite by the seashore
till she heard a far-off, sweet, babe-like cry as the wind blew through
the strings high in air.
“Shall I ever be loved by anybody?” thought she, as she jerked at the
cord; and away the kite flew higher than ever, and the sound of its
call grew fainter.
One morning, in the beginning of the year, Katipah went up on to the
hill under plum-boughs white with bloom, meaning to gather field-sorrel
for her midday meal; and as she stooped with all her hair blowing over
her face, and her skirts knotting and billowing round her pretty brown
ankles, she felt as if someone had kissed her from behind.
“That cannot be,” thought Katipah, with her fingers fast upon a stalk
of field-sorrel; “it is too soon for anything so good to happen.” So
she picked the sorrel quietly, and put it into her basket. But now, not
to be mistaken, arms came round her, and she _was_ kissed.
She stood up and put her hands into her breast, quite afraid lest her
little heart, which had grown so light, should be caught by a puff of
wind and blown right away out of her bosom, and over the hill and into
the sea, and be drowned.
And now her eyes would not let her doubt; there by her side stood a
handsome youth, with quick-fluttering, posy-embroidered raiment. His
long dark hair was full of white plum-blossoms, as though he had just
pushed his head through the branches above. His hands also were loaded
with the same, and they kept sifting out of his long sleeves whenever
he moved his arms. Under the hem of his robe Katipah could see that he
had heron’s wings bound about his ankles.
“He must be very good,” thought Katipah, “to be so beautiful! and
indeed he must be very good to kiss poor me!”
“Katipah,” said the wonderful youth, “though you do not know me, I know
you. It is I who so often helped you to fly your green kite by the
shore. I have been up there, and have looked into its blue eyes, and
kissed its little red mouth which held the peach-blossom. It was I who
made songs in its strings for your heart to hear. I am the West Wind,
Katipah--the wind that brings fine weather. ‘Gamma-gata’ you must call
me, for it is I who bring back the wings that fly till the winter is
over. And now I have come down to earth, to fetch you away and make you
my wife. Will you come, Katipah?”
“I will come, Gamma-gata!” said Katipah, and she crouched and kissed
the heron-wings that bound his feet; then she stood up and let herself
go into his arms.
“Have you enough courage?” asked the West Wind.
“I do not know,” answered Katipah, “for I have never tried.”
“To come with me,” said the Wind, “you need to have much courage; if
you have not, you must wait till you learn it. But none the less for
that shall you be the wife of Gamma-gata, for I am the gate of the wild
geese, as my name says, and my heart is foolish with love of you.”
Gamma-gata took her up in his arms, and swung with her this way and
that, tossing his way through blossom and leaf; and the sunlight became
an eddy of gold round her, and wind and laughter seemed to become part
of her being, so that she was all giddy and dazed and glad when at last
Gamma-gata set her down.
“Stand still, my little one!” he cried--“stand still while I put on
your bridal veil for you; then your blushes shall look like a rose-bush
in snow!” So Katipah stood with her feet in the green sorrel, and
Gamma-Gata went up into the plum-tree and shook, till from head to foot
she was showered with white blossom.
“How beautiful you seem to me!” cried Gamma-gata when he returned to
ground.
Then he lifted her once more and set her in the top of a plum-tree, and
going below, cried up to her, “Leap, little Wind-wife, and let me see
that you have courage!”
Katipah looked long over the deep space that lay between them, and
trembled. Then she fixed her eyes fast upon those of her lover, and
leapt, for in the laughter of his eyes she had lost all her fear.
He caught her half-way in air as she fell. “You are not really brave,”
said he; “if I had shut my eyes you would not have jumped.”
“If you had shut your eyes just then,” cried Katipah, “I would have
died for fear.”
He set her once more in the tree-top, and disappeared from her sight.
“Come down to me, Katipah!” she heard his voice calling all round her.
Clinging fast to the topmost bough, “Oh, Gamma-gata,” she cried, “let
me see your eyes, and I will come.”
Then with darkened brow he appeared to her again out of his blasts, and
took her in his arms and lifted her down a little sadly till her feet
touched safe earth. And he blew away the beautiful veil of blossoms
with which he had showered her, while Katipah stood like a shamed child
and watched it go, shredding itself to pieces in the spring sunshine.
And Gamma-gata, kissing her tenderly, said: “Go home, Katipah, and
learn to have courage! and when you have learned it I will be faithful
and will return to you again. Only remember, however long we may be
parted, and whatever winds blow ill-fortune up to your door, Gamma-gata
will watch over you. For in deed and truth you are the wife of the West
Wind now, and truly he loves you, Katipah!”
“Oh, Gamma-gata!” cried Katipah, “tell the other winds, when they come,
to blow courage into me, and to blow me back to you: and do not let
that be long!”
“I will tell them,” said Gamma-gata; and suddenly he was gone. Katipah
saw a drift of white petals borne over the tree-tops and away to sea,
and she knew that there went Gamma-gata, the beautiful windy youth who,
loving her so well, had made her his wife between the showers of the
plum-blossom and the sunshine, and had promised to return to her as
soon as she was fit to receive him.
So Katipah gathered up her field-sorrel, and went away home and ate
her solitary midday meal with a mixture of pride and sorrow in her
timid little breast. “Some day, when I am grown brave,” she thought,
“Gamma-gata will come back to me; but he will not come yet.”
In the evening Bimsha looked over the fence and jeered at her. “Do not
think, Katipah,” she cried, “that you will ever get a husband, for all
your soft looks! You are too poor and unprofitable.”
Katipah folded her meek little body together like a concertina when it
shuts, and squatted to earth in great contentment of spirit. “Silly
Bimsha,” said she, “I already have a husband, a fine one! Ever so much
finer than yours!”
Bimsha turned pale and cold with envy to hear her say that, for she
feared that Katipah was too good and simple to tell her an untruth,
even in mockery. But she put a brave face upon the matter, saying only,
“I will believe in that fine husband of yours when I see him!”
“Oh, you will see him,” answered Katipah, “if you look high enough!
But he is far away over _your_ head, Bimsha; and you will not hear him
beating me at night, for that is not his way!”
At this soft answer Bimsha went back into her house in a fury, and
Katipah laughed to herself. Then she sighed, and said, “Oh, Gamma-gata,
return to me quickly, lest my word shall seem false to Bimsha, who
hates me!”
Every day after this Bimsha thrust her face over the fence to say:
“Katipah, where is this fine husband of yours? He does not seem to come
home often.”
Katipah answered slyly: “He comes home late, when it is dark, and he
goes away very early, almost before it is light. It is not necessary
for his happiness that he should see _you_.”
“Certainly there is a change in Katipah,” thought Bimsha: “she has
become saucy with her tongue.” But her envious heart would not allow
her to let matters be. Night and morning she cried to Katipah,
“Katipah, where is your fine husband?” And Katipah laughed at her,
thinking to herself: “To begin with, I will not be afraid of anything
Bimsha may say. Let Gamma-gata know that!”
And now every day she looked up into the sky to see what wind was
blowing; but east, or north, or south, it was never the one wind that
she looked for.
The east wind came from the sea, bringing rain, and beat upon Katipah’s
door at night. Then Katipah would rise and open, and standing in the
downpour, would cry, “East wind, east wind, go and tell your brother
Gamma-gata that I am not afraid of you any more than I am of Bimsha!”
One night the east wind, when she said that, pulled a tile off Bimsha’s
house, and threw it at her; and Katipah ran in and hid behind the
door in a great hurry. After that she had less to say when the east
wind came and blew under her gable and rattled at her door. “Oh,
Gamma-gata,” she sighed, “if I might only set eyes on you, I would fear
nothing at all!”
When the weather grew fine again Katipah returned to the shore and
flew her kite as she had always done before the love of Gamma-gata had
entered her heart. Now and then, as she did so, the wind would change
softly, and begin blowing from the west. Then little Katipah would pull
lovingly at the string, and cry, “Oh, Gamma-gata, have you got fast
hold of it up there?”
One day after dusk, when she, the last of all the flyers, hauled down
her kite to earth, there she found a heron’s feather fastened among the
strings. Katipah knew who had sent that, and kissed it a thousand times
over; nor did she mind for many days afterwards what Bimsha might say,
because the heron’s feather lay so close to her heart, warming it with
the hope of Gamma-gata’s return.
But as weeks and months passed on, and Bimsha still did not fail to say
each morning, “Katipah, where is your fine husband to-day?” the timid
heart grew faint with waiting. “Alas!” thought Katipah, “if Heaven
would only send me a child, I would show it to her; she would believe
me easily then! However tiny, it would be big enough to convince her.
Gamma-gata, it is a very little thing that I ask!”
And now every day and all day long she sent up her kite from the
seashore, praying that a child might be born to her and convince
Bimsha of the truth. Everyone said: “Katipah is mad about kite-flying!
See how early she goes and how late she stays: hardly any weather keeps
her indoors.”
One day the west wind came full-breathed over land and sea, and Katipah
was among the first on the beach to send up her messenger with word
to Gamma-gata of the thing for which she prayed. “Gamma-gata,” she
sighed, “the voice of Bimsha afflicts me daily; my heart is bruised by
the mockery she casts at me. Did I not love thee under the plum-tree,
Gamma-gata? Ask of Heaven, therefore, that a child may be born to
me--ever so small let it be--and Bimsha will become dumb. Gamma-gata,
it is a very little thing that I am asking!”
All day long she let her kite go farther up into the sky than all the
other kites. Overhead the wind sang in their strings like bees, or like
the thin cry of very small children; but Katipah’s was so far away she
could scarcely see it against the blue. “Gamma-gata,” she cried; till
the twilight drew sea and land together, and she was left alone.
Then she called down her kite sadly; hand over hand she drew it by
the cord, till she saw it fluttering over her head like a great moth
searching for a flower in the gloom. “Wahoo! wahoo!” she could hear the
wind crying through its strings like the wailing of a very small child.
It had become so dark that Katipah hardly knew what the kite had
brought her till she touched the tiny warm limbs that lay cradled
among the strings that netted the frame to its cord. Full of wonder
and delight, she lifted the windling out of its nest, and laid it in
her bosom. Then she slung her kite across her shoulder, and ran home,
laughing and crying for joy and triumph to think that all Bimsha’s
mockery must now be at an end.
So, quite early the next morning, Katipah sat herself down very
demurely in the doorway, with her child hidden in the folds of her
gown, and waited for Bimsha’s evil eye to look out upon her happiness.
She had not long to wait. Bimsha came out of her door, and looking
across to Katipah, cried, “Well, Katipah, and where is your fine
husband to-day?”
“My husband is gone out,” said Katipah, “but if you care to look you
can see my baby. It is ever so much more beautiful than yours.”
Bimsha, when she heard that, turned green and yellow with envy; and
there, plain to see, was Katipah holding up to view the most beautiful
babe that ever gave the sunlight a good excuse for visiting this wicked
earth. The mere sight of so much innocent beauty and happiness gave
Bimsha a shock from which it took her three weeks to recover. After
that she would sit at her window and for pure envy keep watch to see
Katipah and the child playing together--the child which was so much
more beautiful and well-behaved than her own.
As for Katipah, she was so happy now that the sorrow of waiting for
her husband’s return grew small. Day by day the west wind blew softly,
and she knew that Gamma-gata was there, keeping watch over her and her
child.
Every day she would say to the little one, “Come, my plum-petal, my
wind-flower, I will send thee up to thy father that he may see how fat
thou art getting, and be proud of thee!” And going down to the shore,
she would lay the child among the strings of her kite and send it up
to where Gamma-gata blew a wide breath over sea and land. As it went
she would hear the child crow with joy at being so uplifted from earth,
and laughing to herself, she would think, “When he sees his child so
patterned after his own heart, Gamma-gata will be too proud to remain
long away from me.”
When she drew the child back to her out of the sky, she covered it with
caresses, crying, “Oh, my wind-blown one, my cloudlet, my sky-blossom,
my little piece out of heaven, hast thou seen thy father, and has he
told thee that he loves me?” And the child would crow with mysterious
delight, being too young to tell anything it knew in words.
Bimsha, out of her window, watched and saw all this, not comprehending
it: and in her evil heart a wish grew up that she might by some means
put an end to all Katipah’s happiness. So one day towards evening, when
Katipah, alone upon the shore, had let her kite and her little one go
up to the fleecy edges of a cloud through which the golden sunlight was
streaming, Bimsha came softly behind and with a sharp knife cut the
string by which alone the kite was held from falling.
“Oh, silly Bimsha!” cried Katipah, “what have you done that for?”
Up in air the kite made a far plunge forward, fluttered and stumbled
in its course, and came shooting headlong to earth. “Oh dear!” cried
Katipah, “if my beautiful little kite gets torn, Bimsha, that will be
your fault!”
When the kite fell, it lay unhurt on one of the soft sandhills that
ringed the bay; but no sign of the child was to be seen. Katipah was
laughing when she picked up her kite and ran home. And Bimsha thought,
“Is it witchcraft, or did the child fall into the sea?”
In the night the West Wind came and tapped at Katipah’s window; and
rising from her bed, she heard Gamma-gata’s voice calling tenderly to
her. When she opened the window to the blindness of the black night, he
kissed her, and putting the little one in her arms, said, “Wait only a
little while longer, Katipah, and I will come again to you. Already you
are learning to be brave.”
In the morning Bimsha looked out, and there sat Katipah in her own
doorway, with the child safe and sound in her arms. And, plain to see,
he had on a beautiful golden coat and little silver wings were fastened
to his feet, and his head was garnished with a wreath of flowers the
like of which were never seen on earth. He was like a child of noble
birth and fortune, and the small motherly face of Katipah shone with
pride and happiness as she nursed him.
“Where did you steal those things?” asked Bimsha, “and how did that
child come back? I thought he had fallen into the sea and been drowned.”
“Ah!” answered Katipah slyly, “he was up in the clouds when the kite
left him, and he came down with the rain last night. It is nothing
wonderful. You were foolish, Bimsha, if you thought that to fall into
the clouds would do the child any harm. Up there you can have no idea
how beautiful it is--such fields of gold, such wonderful gardens, such
flowers and fruits: it is from there that all the beauty and wealth of
the world must come. See all that he has brought with him! and it is
all your doing, because you cut the cord of my kite. Oh, clever Bimsha!”
As soon as Bimsha heard that, she ran and got a big kite, and fastening
her own child into the strings, started it to fly. “Do not think,”
cried the envious woman, “that you are the only one whose child is to
be clothed in gold! My child is as good as yours any day; wait, and you
shall see!”
So presently, when the kite was well up into the clouds, as Katipah’s
kite had been, she cut the cord, thinking surely that the same fortune
would be for her as had been for Katipah. But instead of that, all at
once the kite fell headlong to earth, child and all; and when she ran
to pick him up, Bimsha found that her son’s life had fallen forfeit to
her own enviousness and folly.
The wicked woman went green and purple with jealousy and rage; and
running to the chief magistrate, she told him that while she was flying
a kite with her child fastened to its back, Katipah had come and cut
the string, so that by her doing the child was now dead.
When the magistrate heard that, he sent and caused Katipah to be thrown
into prison, and told her that the next day she should certainly be put
to death.
Katipah went meekly, carrying her little son in one hand and her
blue-and-green kite in the other, for that had become so dear to her
she could not now part from it. And all the way to prison Bimsha
followed, mocking her, and asking, “Tell us, Katipah, where is your
fine husband now?”
In the night the West Wind came and tapped at the prison window, and
called tenderly, “Katipah, Katipah, are you there?” And when Katipah
got up from her bed of straw and looked out, there was Gamma-gata once
more, the beautiful youth whom she loved and had been wedded to, and
had heard but had not seen since.
Gamma-gata reached his hands through the bars and put them round her
face. “Katipah,” he said, “you have become brave: you are fit now to
become the wife of the West Wind. To-morrow you shall travel with me
all over the world; you shall not stay in one land any more. Now give
me our son; for a little while I must take him from you. To prove your
courage you must find your own way out of this trouble which you have
got into through making a fool of Bimsha.” So Katipah gave him the
child through the bars of her prison window, and when he was gone lay
down and slept till it became light.
In the morning the chief magistrate and Bimsha, together with the whole
populace, came to Katipah’s cell to see her led out to death. And when
it was found that her child had disappeared, “She is a witch!” they
cried; “she has eaten it!” And the chief magistrate said that, being a
witch, instead of hanging she was to be burned.
“I have not eaten my child, and I am no witch,” said Katipah, as,
taking with her her blue-and-green kite she trotted out to the place
of execution. When she was come to the appointed spot she said to
the chief magistrate, “To every criminal it is permitted to plead in
defence of himself; but because I am innocent, am I not also allowed to
plead?” The magistrate told her she might speak if she had anything to
say.
“All I ask,” said Katipah, “is that I may be allowed once more to fly
my blue-and-green kite as I used to do in the days when I was happy;
and I will show you soon that I am not guilty of what is laid to my
charge. It is a very little thing that I ask.”
So the magistrate gave her leave; and there before all the people
she sent up her kite till it flew high over the roofs of the town.
Gently the West Wind took it and blew it away towards the sea. “Oh,
Gamma-gata,” she whispered softly, “hear me now, for I am not afraid.”
The wind blew hard upon the kite, and pulled as though to catch it
away, so Katipah twisted the cord once or twice round her waist that
she might keep the safer hold over it. Then she said to the chief
magistrate and to all the people that were assembled: “I am innocent of
all that is charged against me; for, first, it was that wicked Bimsha
herself who killed her own child.”
“Prove it!” cried the magistrate.
“I cannot,” replied Katipah.
“Then you must die!” said the magistrate.
“In the second place,” went on Katipah, “I did not eat my own child.”
“Prove it!” cried the chief magistrate again.
“I will,” said Katipah; “O Gamma-gata, it is a very little thing that I
ask.”
Down the string of the kite, first a mere speck against the sky, then
larger till plain for all to see came the missing one, slithering and
sliding, with his golden coat, and the little silver wings tied to his
ankles, and handfuls of flowers which he threw into his mother’s face
as he came. “Oh! cruel chief magistrate,” cried Katipah, receiving the
babe in her arms, “does it seem that I have eaten him?”
“You are a witch!” said the chief magistrate, “or how do you come to
have a child that disappears and comes again from nowhere! It is not
possible to permit such things to be: you and your child shall both be
burned together!”
Katipah drew softly upon the kite-string. “Oh, Gamma-gata,” she cried,
“lift me up now very high, and I will not be afraid!”
Then suddenly, before all eyes, Katipah was lifted up by the cord of
the kite which she had wound about her waist; right up from the earth
she was lifted till her feet rested above the heads of the people.
Katipah, with her babe in her arms, swung softly through the air, out
of reach of the hands stretched up to catch her, and addressed the
populace in these words:
“Oh, cruel people, who will not believe innocence when it speaks, you
must believe me now! I am the wife of the West Wind--of Gamma-gata, the
beautiful, the bearer of fine weather, who also brings back the wings
that fly till the winter is over. Is it well, do you think, to be at
war with the West Wind?
“Ah, foolish ones, I go now, for Gamma-gata calls me, and I am no
longer afraid: I go to travel in many lands, whither he carries me,
and it will be long before I return here. Many dark days are coming to
you, when you shall not feel the west wind, the bearer of fine weather,
blowing over you from land to sea; nor shall you see the blossoms
open white over the hills, nor feel the earth grow warm as the summer
comes in, because the bringer of fair weather is angry with you for
the foolishness which you have done. But when at last the west wind
returns to you, remember that Katipah the poor and unprofitable one, is
Gamma-gata’s wife, and that she has remembered, and has prayed for you.”
And so saying, Katipah threw open her arms and let go the cord of the
kite which held her safe. “Oh, Gamma-gata,” she cried, “I do not see
your eyes, but I am not afraid!” And at that, even while she seemed
upon the point of falling to destruction, there flashed into sight
a fair youth with dark hair and garments full of a storm of flying
petals, who, catching up Katipah and her child in his arms, laughed
scorn upon those below, and roaring over the roofs of the town,
vanished away seawards.
When a chief magistrate and his people, after flagrant wrong-doing,
become thoroughly cowed and frightened, they are apt also to be cruel.
Poor Bimsha!
THE BOUND PRINCESS
I
THE FIRE-EATERS
A long time ago there lived a man who had the biggest head in the
world. Into it he had crammed all the knowledge that might be gathered
from the four corners of the earth. Everyone said he was the wisest man
living. “If I could only find a wife,” said the sage, “as wise for a
woman as I am for a man, what a race of headpieces we could bring into
the world!”
He waited many years before any such mate could be found for him: yet,
at last, found she was--one into whose head was bestowed all the wisdom
that might be gathered from the four quarters of heaven.
They were both old, but kings came from all sides to their wedding, and
offered themselves as god-parents to the first-born of the new race
that was to be. But, to the grief of his parents, the child, when he
arrived, proved to be a simpleton; and no second child ever came to
repair the mistake of the first.
That he was a simpleton was evident; his head was small and his
limbs were large, and he could run long before he could talk or do
arithmetic. In the bitterness of their hearts his father and mother
named him Noodle, without the aid of any royal god-parents; and from
that moment, for any care they took in his bringing-up, they washed
their wise hands of him.
Noodle grew and prospered, and enjoyed life in his own foolish way.
When his father and mother died within a short time of each other, they
left him alone without any friend in the world.
For a good while Noodle lived on just what he could find in the house,
in a hand-to-mouth sort of way, till at last only the furniture and the
four bare walls were left to him.
One cold winter’s night he sat brooding over the fire, wondering where
he should get food for the morrow, when he heard feet coming up to the
door, and a knock striking low down upon the panel. Outside there was a
faint chirping and crackling sound, and a whispering as of fire licking
against the woodwork without.
He opened the door and peered forth into the night. There, just before
him, stood seven little men huddled up together; three feet high they
were, with bright yellow faces all shrivelled and sharp, and eyes whose
light leaped and sank like candle flame before a gust.
When they saw him, they shut their eyes and opened famished mouths
at him, pointing inwards with flickering finger-tips, and shivering
from head to foot with cold, although it seemed to the youth as if the
warmth of a slow fire came from them. “Alas!” said Noodle, in reply
to these signs of hunger, “I have not left even a crust of bread in
the house to give you! But at least come in and make yourselves warm!”
He touched the foremost, making signs for them all to enter. “Ah,” he
cried, “what is this, and what are you, that the mere touch of you
burns my finger?”
[Illustration]
Without answer they huddled tremblingly across the threshold; but
so soon as they saw the fire burning on the hearth, they yelped all
together like a pack of hounds, and, throwing themselves face forwards
into the hot embers, began ravenously to lap up the flames. They lapped
and lapped, and the more they lapped the more the fire sank away and
died. Then with their flickering finger-tips they stirred the hot logs
and coals, burrowing after the thin tapes and swirls of vanishing
flame, and fetching them out like small blue eels still wriggling for
escape.
After each blue wisp had been gulped down, they sipped and sucked at
their fingers for any least tricklet of flavour that might be left; and
at the last seemed more famished than when they began.
“More, more, O wise Noodle, give us more!” they cried; and Noodle threw
the last of his fuel on the embers.
They breathed round it, fanning it into a great blaze that leaped and
danced up to the rafters; then they fell on, till not a fleck or a
flake of it was left. Noodle, seeing them still famished, broke up a
stool and threw that on the hearth. And again they flared it with their
breath and gobbled off the flame. When the stool was finished he threw
in the table, then the dresser, and after that the oak-chest and the
window-seat.
Still they feasted and were not fed. Noodle fetched an axe, and broke
down the door; then he wrenched up the boards from the floor, and
pulled the beams and rafters out of the ceiling; yet, even so, his
guests were not to be satisfied.
“I have nothing left,” he said, “but the house itself; but since you
are still hungry you shall be welcome to it!”
He scattered the fire that remained upon the hearth, and threw it out
and about the room; and as he ran forth to escape, up against all the
walls and right through the roof rose a great crackling sheaf of flame.
In the midst of the fire, Noodle could see his seven guests lying along
on their bellies, slopping their hands in the heat, and lapping up the
flames with their tongues. “Surely,” he thought, “I have given them
enough to eat at last!”
After a while all the fire was eaten away, and only the black and
smouldering ruins were left. Day came coldly to light, and there sat
Noodle, without a home in the world, watching with considerate eye his
seven guests finishing their inordinate repast.
They all rose to their feet together, and came towards him bowing; as
they approached he felt the heat of their bodies as it had been seven
furnaces.
“Enough, O wise Noodle!” said they, “we have had enough!” “That,”
answered Noodle, “is the least thing left me to wonder at. Go your ways
in peace; but first tell me, who are you?” They replied, “We are the
Fire-eaters: far from our own land, and strangers, you have done us
this service; what, now, can we do to serve you?” “Put me in the way
of a living,” said Noodle, “and you will do me the greatest service of
all.”
Then the one of them who seemed to be chief took from his finger a ring
having for its centre a great firestone, and threw it into the snow,
saying, “Wait for three hours till the ring shall have had time to
cool, then take it, and wear it; and whatever fortune you deserve it
shall bring you. For this ring is the sweetener of everything that it
touches: bread it turns into rich meats, water into strong wine, grief
into virtue, and labour into strength. Also, if you ever need our help,
you have but to brandish the ring, and the gleam of it will reach us,
and we will be with you wherever you may be.”
With that they bowed their top-knots to the ground and departed,
inverting themselves swiftly till only the shining print of seven pairs
of feet remained, red-hot, over the place where they had been standing.
Noodle waited for three hours; then he took up the firestone ring, and
putting it on his finger set out into the world.
At the first door he came to, he begged a crust of bread, and touching
it with the ring found it tasted like rich meats, well cooked and
delicately flavoured. Also, the water which he drew in the hollow of
his hand from a brook by the roadside tasted to him like strong wine.
II
THE GALLOPING PLOUGH
Noodle went on many miles till he came near to a rich man’s farm.
Though it was the middle of winter, all the fields showed crops of corn
in progress; here it was in thin blade, and here green, but in full
ear; and here it was ripe and ready for harvest. “How is this,” he
said to the first man he met, “that you have corn here in the middle
of winter?” “Ah!” said the man, “you have not heard of the Galloping
Plough; you too have to fall under bondage to my master.” “What is your
master?” inquired Noodle, “and in what bondage does he bind men?” “My
master, and your master that shall soon be,” answered the old man, “is
the owner of all this land and the farmer of it. He is rich and sleek
and fat like his own furrows, for he has the Galloping Plough as his
possession. Ah, that! ’tis a very miracle, a wonder, a thing to catch
at the heartstrings of all beholders; it shines like a moonbeam, and is
better than an Arab mare for swiftness; it warms the very ground that
it enters, so that seeds take root and spring, though it be the middle
of winter. No man sees it but what he loses his heart to it, and sells
his freedom for the possession of it. All here are men like myself who
have become slaves because of that desire. You also, when you see it,
will become slave to it.”
Noodle went on through the summer and the spring corn, till he came
to bare fields. Ahead of him on a hill-top he saw the farmer himself,
sleek and rosy, and of full paunch, lolling like a lord at his ease;
yet with a working eye in the midst of his leisure.
To and fro, up to him and back, shot a silver gleam over the purple
brown of the fields; and Noodle’s heart gave a thump at the sight, for
the spell of the Galloping Plough was on him.
Now and then he heard a clear sound that startled him with its note.
It was like the sweet whistling cry of a bird many times multiplied.
Ever when the silver gleam of the Plough had run its farthest from the
farmer, the cry sounded; and at the sound the gleam wavered and stayed
and flew back dartingly to the farmer’s side. So Noodle understood how
this was the farmer’s signal for the Plough to return; and the Plough
knew it as a horse its master’s voice, and came so fast that the wind
whistled against its silver side.
As he watched, Noodle’s heart went down into the valley and up the
hillside, following in the track of the Galloping Plough. “I can never
be happy again,” thought he; “either I must possess it, or must die.”
He came to the farmer where he sat calling his Plough to him and
letting it go; and the farmer smiled, the wide indulgent smile of a man
who knows that a bargain is about to fall his way.
“What is the price,” asked Noodle, “of yonder Galloping Plough, that
runs like an Arab mare, and returns to you at your call?”
Said the farmer, “A year’s service; and if the Plough will follow you,
it is yours; if not, then you must be my bondman until you die!”
Noodle looked once the way of the Galloping Plough, and his heart
flapped at his side like a sail which the wind drops and lets go; and
he had no thought or will left in him but to be where the Galloping
Plough was. So he closed hands on the bargain, to be the farmer’s
servant either for a year, or for his whole life.
For a year he worked upon the farm, and all the while plotted how he
might win the Galloping Plough to himself. The farmer kept no watch
upon it, nor put it under lock and key, for the Plough recognised no
voice but his own, nor went nor came save at his bidding. In the night
Noodle would go down to the shed or field where it lay, and whistle to
it, trying to put forth notes of the same magical power as those which
came through the farmer’s lips.
But no sound that came from his lips ever stroked life into its silver
sides. The year was nearly run out, and Noodle was in despair.
Then he remembered the firestone ring, the Sweetener. “Maybe,” said
he, “since it changes to sweetness whatever I eat and drink, it will
sweeten my voice also, so that the Plough will obey.” So he put the
ring between his lips and whistled; and at the sound his heart turned
a somersault for joy, for he felt that out of his mouth the farmer’s
magic had been over-topped and conquered.
The Galloping Plough stirred faintly from the furrow where it lay,
breaking the ground and marring its smooth course. Then it shook its
head slowly, and returned impassively to rest.
In the morning the farmer came and saw the broken earth close under
the Plough’s nose. Noodle, hiding among the corn hard by, heard him
say, “What hast thou heard in the night, O my moonbeam, my miracle,
that thy lily-foot has trodden up the ground? Hast thou forgotten whose
hand feeds thee, whose corn it is thou lovest, whose heart’s care also
cherishes thee?”
[Illustration]
The farmer went away, and presently came back bearing a bowl of corn;
and Noodle saw the Plough lift its head to its master’s palm, and feed
like a horse on the grain.
Then Noodle, gay of heart, waited till it was night, and surely his
time was short, for on the morrow his wages were to be paid, and the
Plough was to be his, or else he was to be the farmer’s bond-servant
for the rest of his life. He took with him three handfuls of corn, and
went down to where the Plough stood waiting by the furrow. Shaping his
lips to the ring, he whistled gently like a lover, and immediately the
Plough stirred, and lifted up its head as if to look at him.
“O my moonbeam, my miracle,” whispered Noodle, “wilt thou not come to
the one that feeds thee?” and he held out a handful of corn. But the
Plough gave no regard to him or his grain: slowly it moved away from
him back into the furrow.
Then Noodle laughed softly and dropped his ring, the Sweetener, into
the hand that held the grain; and barely had he offered the corn before
he felt the silver Plough nozzling at his palm, and eating as a horse
eats from the hand of its master.
Then he whistled again, placing the Sweetener back between his lips;
and the Galloping Plough sprang after him, and followed at his heels
like a dog.
So, finding himself its master, he bid it stay for the night; and in
the morning he said to the farmer, “Give me my wages, and let me go!”
And the farmer laughed, saying, “Take your wages, and go!”
Then Noodle took off his ring, the Sweetener, and laid it between his
lips and blew through it; and up like a moonbeam, and like an Arab
mare, sprang the Galloping Plough at his call. So he leaped upon its
back, crying, “Carry me away out of this land, O thou moonbeam, and
miracle of beauty, and never slacken nor stay except I bid thee!”
Vainly the farmer, borne down on a torrent of rage and amazement,
whistled his best, and threw corn and rice from the rear; for the
whistling of Noodle was sweeter to the ear, and his corn sweeter to the
taste, and he nearer to the heart of the Galloping Plough than was the
old master whom it left behind.
III
THE THIRSTY WELL
So they escaped, slitting the swift hours with ungovernable speed. The
furrow they two made in the world that day, as they went shooting over
the round of it, was called in after times the Equator, and men still
know it by the heat of it, though it has since been covered over by the
dust of ages.
To Noodle, as he went careering round it, the whole world’s circuit ran
in a line across his brain, entering his vision and passing through it
as a thread through the needle’s eye. Nor would he of his own will
ever have stopped his galloping, but that at the completion of the
first round a mighty thirst took hold of him. “O my moonbeam,” he said,
choking behind parched lips, and sick at heart, “check me, or I faint!”
And the Galloping Plough stopped at once, and set him to earth in a
green space under the shadow of overhanging boughs.
He found himself in a richly grown garden, a cool paradise for a
traveller to rest in. Close at hand and inviting to the eye was a well
with a bucket slung ready to be let down. Noodle had little thought of
seeking for the owner of the garden to beg for a drink, since water is
an equal gift to all and the right of any man; but as he drew near he
found the means to it withheld from him, the lid being fast locked. He
went on in search of the owner, till at length he came upon the same
lying half asleep under a thorn-bush with the key in her hand. She was
an old woman, so withered and dry, she looked as if no water could have
ever passed her lips.
When Noodle asked for a drink from the well, she looked at him bright
and sharp, and said: “Before any man drinks of my water he must make a
bargain with me.” “What is the bargain?” asked Noodle; and she led him
down to the well.
Then she unlocked the lid and bade him look in; and at the sight Noodle
knew for a second time that his heart had been stolen from him, and
that to be happy he must taste that water or die.
Again he asked, with his eyes intent upon the blue wrimpling of the
water in the well’s depth, “What is the bargain?” And the old woman
answered, “If you fail to draw water out of the well you must fling
yourself into it.” For answer Noodle swung down the bucket, lowering
it as fast as it would go; then he set both hands to the windlass and
wound.
He heard the water splashing off the sides of the bucket all the way
up, as the shortening rope brought it near; but when he drew it over
the well’s brink wonder and grief held him fast, for the bucket was as
empty as vanity. From behind him came a noise of laughter, and there
was the old witch running round and round in a circle; and everywhere a
hedge of thorns came shooting up to enclose him and keep him fast for
her.
“What a trap I am in!” thought Noodle; but once more he lowered the
bucket, and once more it returned to him empty.
The old woman climbed up into the thorn-hedge, and sat on its top,
singing:
“Overground, underground, round-about spell;
The Thirsty has come to the Thirsty Well!”
Again Noodle let down the bucket; and this time as he drew it up he
looked over into the well’s heart, and saw all the way up the side
a hundred blue arms reaching out crystal scallops and drawing water
out of the bucket as hard as they could go. He saw thick lips like
sea-anemones thrust out between the crevices of the wall, sucking the
crystals dry as fast as they were filled. “Truly,” he said to himself,
“this is a thirsty well, but myself am thirstier!”
[Illustration]
When he had drawn up the bucket empty for the third time, he stood
considering; and at last he fastened to it the firestone ring, the
Sweetener, and lowered it once more. Then he laughed to himself as he
drew up, and felt the bucket lightening at every turn till it touched
the surface of things.
Empty he found it, with only his firestone hanging by the rim, and once
again he let it down to be refilled. But this time as he wound up,
nothing could keep him from letting a curious eye go over the brink,
to see how the Well-folk fared over their wine; and in what he beheld
there was already comfort for his soul.
The blue arms went like oars out of unison; like carpet-beaters
stricken in the eyes and throat with dust, they beat foolishly against
the sides and bottom of the bucket, shattering and letting fall their
goblets in each unruly attempt. And because Noodle wound leniently at
the rope, willing that they should have their fill, at the last gasp
they were able to send the bucket empty to the top. It was the last
staving off of destiny that lay in their power to make; thereafter wine
conquered them.
Quickly Noodle drew out the ring, and sent the bucket flying on its
last errand. It smacked the water, heeled over, and dipped under a
full draught. Then Noodle spun the windlass with the full pinch of his
energies, calling on the bucket to ascend. He heard the water spilling
from its sides, and knew that the blue arms were there, battling to
arrest it as it flew, and to pay him back once more with emptiness and
mockery. Yet in spite of them the bucket hasted and lightened not, but
was drawn up to the well’s head brimming largely, and winking a blue
eye joyously to the light of day.
Over head and ears Noodle plunged for the quenching of his thirst, nor
stayed nor drew back till his head had smitten upon the bottom of the
bucket in his pursuit of the draught. Then it was apparent that only
a third of the water remained, the rest having obeyed the imperative
suction of his throat, and that the thirsty well had at last found a
master under the eye of heaven.
In the depth of the bucket the water flashed like a burning sapphire
and swung circling, curling and coiling, tossing this way and that,
as if struggling to get out. At last with a laugh it threw down the
bucket, and tore back into the well with a crash like thunder.
Up from the well rose a chant of voices:
“Under Heaven, over Hell,
You have broken the spell,
You are lord of the Well.”
Noodle stepped over the brink of his new realm, calling the Well-folk
to reach hands for him and bear him down. All round, the blue arms
started out, catching him and handing him on from one to another
ladderwise, down, and down, and down. As he went, anemone lips came out
of the crannies in the wall, and kissed his feet and hands in token of
allegiance. “You are lord of the well!” they said, as they passed him
each one to the next.
He came to the bottom of the well; under his feet, wherever he stepped
upon its waters, hands came up and sustained him. The knowledge of
everything that was there had become his. “Give me,” he said, “the
crystal cup that is for him who holds kingship over you; so shall I be
lord of you in all places wherever I go.”
A blue arm reached down and drew up from the water a small crystal,
that burned through the darkness with a blue fire, and gave it to
Noodle. “Now I am your king, however far from you!” said Noodle. And
they answered, chanting:
“Under Heaven, over Hell,
You have broken the spell,
You are lord of the Well.”
“Lift me up!” said he; and the blue arms caught him and lifted him up;
from one to another they passed him in ascending circles, till he came
to the mouth of the well.
There overhead was the old witch, crouching and looking in to know what
had become of him; and her hair hung far down over her eyes into the
well. He caught her to him by it over the brink. “Old witch,” he said,
“you must change places with me now!” and he tossed her down to the
bottom of the well.
She went like a falling shuttlecock, shrieking as she fell; and as she
struck the water, the drowned bodies of the men she had sent there came
to the surface, and caught her by the feet and hair, and drew her down,
making an end of her, as she also had made of them.
IV
THE PRINCESS MELILOT
When Noodle, carrying the crystal with him, set foot once more upon
dry land, straightway he was again upon the back of the Galloping
Plough, with the world flying away under him. But now weariness came
over him, and his head weighed this way and that, so that earth and
sky mixed themselves before his gaze, and he was so drugged with sleep
that he had no wits to bid the Plough slacken from its speed. Therefore
it happened that as they passed a wood, a hanging bough caught him,
and brushed him like a feather from his place, landing him on a green
bosom of grass, where he slept the sleep of the weary, nor ever lifted
his head to see the Plough fast disappearing over hill and valley and
plain, out of sound of his voice or sight of his eye.
When Noodle awoke and found that the Plough was gone, he was bitter
against himself for his folly. “So poor a use to make of so noble
a steed!” he cried; “no wonder it has gone from me to seek for a
worthier master! If by good fortune I find it again, needs must I do
great things by its aid to be worthy of its service.” So he set out,
following the furrow of its course, determined, however far he must
seek, to journey on till he found it.
For a whole year he travelled, till at length he came, footsore and
weary, to a deserted palace standing in the midst of an overgrown
garden. The great gates, which lay wide open, were overrun with
creepers, and the paths were green with weeds. That morning he had
thought that he saw far away on the hills the gleam of his silver
Plough, and now hope rose high, for he could see by its track that
the Plough had passed before him into the garden of the palace. “O my
moonbeam,” he thought, “is it here I shall find you at last?”
Within the garden there was a sound of cross questions and crooked
answers, of many talking with loud voices, and of one weeping apart
from the rest. When he got quite close, he was struck still with awe,
and joy, and wonder. For first there lay the Galloping Plough in the
middle of a green lawn, and round it a score of serving-men, tugging at
it and trying to make it move on. Near by stood an old woman, wringing
her hands and begging them to leave it alone: “For,” cried she, “if the
Plough touches but the feet of the Princess, she will be uprooted, and
will presently wither away and die. Of what use is it to break one, if
the other enchantments cannot be broken?”
In the centre of the lawn grew a bower of roses, and beneath the bower
stood the loveliest princess that ever eye beheld; but she stood there
motionless, and without sign of life. She seemed neither to hear, nor
see, nor breathe; her feet were rooted to the ground; though they
seemed only to rest lightly under her weight upon the grass, no man,
nor a hundred men, could stir her from where she stood. And, as the
spell that held her fast bound to the spot, even so was the spell that
sealed her senses,--no man might lift it from her. When Noodle set eyes
upon her he knew that for the third time his heart had been stolen
from him, and that to be happy he must possess her, or die.
He ran quickly to the old woman, who, unregarded by the serving-men,
stood weeping and wringing her hands. “Tell me,” said Noodle, “who is
this sleeper who stands enchanted and rooted like a flower to earth?
And who are you, and these others who work and cry at cross purposes?”
The old woman cried from a wide mouth: “It is my mistress, the
honey-jewel of my heart, whom you see here so grievously enchanted. All
the gifts of the fairies at her christening did not prevent what was
foretold of her at her birth. In her seventeenth year, as you see her
now, so it was told of her that she should be.”
“Does she live?” asked Noodle; “is she asleep? She is not dead; when
will she wake? Tell me, old woman, her history, and how this fate has
come upon her.”
“She was the daughter of the king of this country by his first wife,”
said the old woman, “and heir to the throne after his death; but when
her mother died the king married again, and the three daughters he had
by his second wife were jealous of the beauty, and charm, and goodness
which raised their sister so high above them in the estimation of all
men. So they asked their mother to teach them a spell that should rob
Melilot of her charms, and make them useless in the eyes of men. And
their mother, who was wise in such arts, taught to each of them a
spell, so that together they might work their will.
[Illustration]
“One day they came running to Melilot, and said, ‘Come and play with
us a new game that our mother has taught us!’ Then they began turning
themselves into flowers. ‘I will be a hollyhock!’ said one. ‘And I will
be a columbine!’ said another; and saying the spell over each other
they became each the flower they had named.
“Then they unloosed the spells, and became themselves again. ‘Oh, it is
so nice to be a flower!’ they cried, laughing and clapping their hands.
But Melilot knew no spell.
“At last, seeing how her sisters turned into flowers, and came back
safe again, ‘I will be a rose!’ she cried; ‘turn me into a rose and out
again!’
“Then her three sisters joined their tongues together, and finished the
spell over her. And so soon as she had become a rose-tree, the three
sisters turned into three moles, and went down under the earth and
gnawed at the roots.
“Then they came up, and took their own forms again, and sang,--
“‘Sister, sister, here you are now,
Till the ploughman come with the Galloping Plough!’
“Then they turned into bees, and sucked out the honey from the roses,
and coming to themselves again they sang,--
“‘Sister, here you must doze and doze,
Till they bring you a flower of the Burning Rose!’
“Then they shook the dewdrops out of her eyes, crying,--
“‘Sister, your brain lies under our spell,
Till water be brought from the Thirsty Well!’
“Then they took the top blossom of all, and broke it to pieces, and
threw the petals away as they cried,--
“‘Sister, your life goes down for a term,
Till they bring you breath from the Camphor-Worm!’
“And when they had done all this, they turned her back into her
true shape, and left her standing even as you see her now, without
warmth, or sight, or memory, or motion, dead saving for her beauty,
that never changes or dies. And here she must stand till the spells
which have been fastened upon her have been unloosed. No long time
after, the wickedness of the three sisters and of their cruel mother
was discovered to the king, and they were all put to death for the
crime. Yet the ill they had done remained; and the king’s grief became
so great to see his loved daughter standing dead before him that he
removed with his court to another place, and left this palace to the
care of only a few serving-men, and myself to keep watch and guard over
the Princess.
“So now four-fold is the spell that holds her, and to break the
lightest of them the water of the Thirsty Well is needed; with two of
its drops laid upon her eyes memory will come back to her, and her mind
will remember of the things of the past. And for the breaking of the
second spell is needed a blossom of the Burning Rose, and the plucking
of that no man’s hand can achieve; but when the Rose is laid upon her
breast, her heart will belong to the world once more, and will beat
again under her bosom. And for the breaking of the third spell one must
bring the breath of the Camphor-Worm that has lain for a whole year
inside its body, and breathe it between her lips; then she will breathe
again, and all her five senses will return to her. And for the last
spell only the Galloping Plough can uproot her back to life, and free
her feet for the ways of earth. Now, here we have the Galloping Plough
with no man who can guide it, and what aid can it be? If these fools
should be able to make it so much as but touch the feet of my dear
mistress, she will be mown down like grass, and die presently for lack
of earth; for only the three other charms I have told you of can put
whole life back into her.”
“As for the mastery of the Plough,” said Noodle, “I will fetch that
from them in a breath. See, in a moment, how marvellous will be the
uplifting of their eyes!” He put to his lips the firestone ring--the
Sweetener--and blew but one note through it. Then in a moment the crowd
divided hither and thither, with cries of wonder and alarm, for the
Plough turned and bounded back to its master quickly, as an Arab mare
at the call of her owner.
The old woman, weeping for gladness, cried: “Thou art master of the
Plough! art thou master of all the other things as well?”
He said: “Of one thing only. Tell me of the Burning Rose and the
Camphor-Worm; what and where are they? For I am the master of the ends
of the earth by reason of the speed with which this carries me; and I
am lord of the Thirsty Well, and have the Fire-eaters for my friends.”
The old woman clapped her hands, and blessed him for his youth, and his
wisdom, and his courage. “First,” she said, “restore to the Princess
her memory by means of the water of the Thirsty Well; then I will show
you the way to the Burning Rose, for the easier thing must be done
first.”
Then Noodle drew out the crystal and breathed in it, calling on the
Well-folk for the two drops of water to lay on Princess Melilot’s
eyes. Immediately in the bottom of the cup appeared two blue drops of
water, that came climbing up the sides of the glass and stood trembling
together on the brim. And Noodle, touching them with the firestone ring
to make the memory of things sweet to her, bent back the Princess’s
face, and let them fall under her closed lids.
“Look!” cried the faithful nurse, “light trembles within those eyes of
hers! In there she begins to remember things; but as yet she sees and
hears nothing. Now it is for you to be swift and fetch her the blossom
of the Burning Rose. Be wise, and you shall not fail!”
V
THE BURNING ROSE
She told him how he was to go, across the desert southward, till he
found a giant, longer in length than a day’s journey, lying asleep upon
the sand. Over his head, it was told, hung a cloud, covering him from
the heat and resting itself against his brows; within the cloud was a
dream, and within the dream grew the garden of the Burning Rose. Than
this she knew no more, nor by what means Noodle might gain entrance and
become possessor of the Rose.
Noodle waited for no more; he mounted upon the Galloping Plough, and
pressed away over the desert to the south. For three days he travelled
through parched places, refreshing himself by the way with the water of
the Thirsty Well, calling on the Well-folk for the replenishment of his
crystal, and turning the draught to wine by the sweetness of his magic
ring.
At length he saw a cloud rising to him from a distance; like a great
opal it hung motionless between earth and heaven. Coming nearer he saw
the giant himself stretched out for a day’s journey across the sand.
His head lay under the colours of the dawn, and his feet were covered
with the dusk of evening, and over his middle shone the noonday sun.
Under the giant’s shadow Noodle stopped, and gazed up into the cloud;
through the outer covering of its mists he saw what seemed to be balls
of fire, and knew that within lay the dream and the garden of the
Burning Rose.
The giant laughed and muttered in his sleep, for the dream was sweet
to him. “O Rose,” he said, “O sweet Rose, what end is there of thy
sweetness? How innumerable is the dance of the Roses of my Rose-garden!”
Noodle caught hold of the ropes of the giant’s hair, and climbed till
he sat within the hollow of his right ear. Then he put to his lips the
ring, the Sweetener, and sang till the giant heard him in his sleep;
and the sweet singing mixed itself with the sweetness of the Rose in
the giant’s brain, and he muttered to himself, saying: “O bee, O sweet
bee, O bee in my brain, what honey wilt thou fetch for me out of the
roses of my Rose-garden?”
So, more and more, Noodle sweetened himself to the giant, till the
giant passed him into his brain and into the heart of the dream, even
into the garden of the Burning Rose.
Far down below the folds of the cloud, Noodle remembered that the
Galloping Plough lay waiting a call from him. “When I have stolen the
Rose,” thought he, “I may need swift heels for my flight.” And he put
the Sweetener to his lips and whistled the Plough up to him.
It came, cleaving the encirclement of clouds like a silver gleam of
moonlight, and for a moment, where they parted, Noodle saw a rift of
blue sky, and the light of the outer world clear through their midst.
The giant turned uneasily in his sleep, and the garden of the Burning
Rose rocked to its foundations as the edge of things real pierced into
it.
“While I stay here there is danger,” thought Noodle. “Surely I must
make haste to possess myself of the Rose and to escape!”
All round him was a garden set thick with rose-trees in myriads of
blossom, rose behind rose as far as the eye could reach, and the
fragrance of them lay like a heavy curtain of sleep upon the senses.
Noodle, beginning to feel drowsy, stretched out his hand in haste to
the nearest flower, lest in a little while he should be no more than a
part of the giant’s dream. “O beloved Heart of Melilot!” he cried, and
crushed his fingers upon the stem.
[Illustration]
The whole bough crackled and sprang away at his touch; the Rose turned
upon him, screaming and spouting fire; a noise like thunder filled all
the air. Every rose in the garden turned and spat flame at where he
stood. His face and his hands became blistered with the heat.
Leaping upon the back of his Plough, he cried, “Carry me to the borders
of the garden where there are open spaces! The price of the Princess is
upon my head!”
The Plough bounded this way and that, searching for some outlet by
which to escape. It flew in spirals and circles, it leaped like a
flea, it burrowed like a mole, it ploughed up the rose-trees by the
roots. But so soon as it had passed they stood up unharmed again, and
to whatever point of refuge the Plough fled, that way they all turned
their heads and darted out vomitings of fire.
In vain did Noodle summon the Well-folk to his aid; his crystal shot
forth fountains of water that turned into steam as they rose, and fell
back again, scalding him.
Then with two deaths threatening to devour him, he brandished the ring,
calling upon the Fire-eaters for their aid.
They laughed as they came. “Here is food for you!” he cried. “Multiply
your appetites about me, or I shall be consumed in these flames!”
“Brandish again!” cried they--the same seven whom he had fed. “We are
not enough; this fire is not quenchable.”
Noodle brandished till the whole garden swarmed with their kind. One
fastened himself upon every rose, a gulf opposing itself to a torrent.
All sight of the conflagration disappeared; but within there went a
roaring sound, and the bodies of the Fire-eaters crackled, growing
large and luminous the while.
“Do your will quickly and begone!” cried the Fire-eaters. “Even now we
swell to bursting with the pumping in of these fires!”
Noodle seized on a rose to which one hung, sucking out its heats. He
tugged, but the strong fibres held. Then he locked himself to the back
of the Plough, crying to it and caressing its speed with all names
under heaven, and beseeching it in the name of Melilot to break free.
And the Plough giving but one plunge, the Rose came away into Noodle’s
hand, panting and a prisoner. All blushing it grew and radiant, with a
soft inner glow, and an odour of incomparable sweetness. He seemed to
see the heart of Melilot beating before him.
But now there came a blast of fire behind him, for the Fire-eaters
had disappeared, and all was whirling and shaken before his eyes;
and the Plough sped desperately over earthquake and space. For the
plucking of the Rose had awakened the giant from his sleep; and the
dream shrivelled and spun away in a whirl of flame-coloured vapours.
Leaping into clear day out of the unravelment of its mists, Noodle
found himself and his Plough launching over an edge of precipice for a
downward dive into space. The giant’s hair, standing upright from his
head in the wrath and horror of his awakening, made a forest ending in
his forehead that bowered them to right and to left. Quitting it they
slid ungovernably over the bulge of his brow, and went at full spurt
for the abyss.
Dexterously the Plough steered its descent, catching on the bridge and
furrowing the ridge of the nose; nine leagues were the duration of a
second.
The giant, thinking some venomous parasite was injuring his flesh,
aimed, and a moment too late had thumped his fist upon the place. But
already the Plough skirting the amazed opening of his mouth was lost
in the trammels of his beard. Thence, as it escaped the rummaging
of his fingers, it flew scouring his breast, and inflicted a flying
scratch over the regions of his abdomen. Then, still believing it to
be the triumphal procession of a flea, he pursued it to his thigh, and
mistaking the shadow for the substance allowed it yet again to escape.
At his kneecap there was but a hair’s-breadth between Noodle and the
weight of his thumb; but thereafter the Plough out-distanced his every
effort, and, with Noodle preserved whole and alive, sped fast and far,
bearing the Burning Rose to the heart of the beloved Melilot.
The crone was aware of his coming before she heard him, or saw the
gleam of his Plough running beam-like over the land. From her seat by
the Princess’s bower she clapped her hands, and springing to his neck
ere he alighted: “A long way off, and a long time off,” she cried, “I
knew what fortune was with you; for when you plucked off the Rose,
and bore it out of the heart of the dream, the scent of it filled the
world; and I felt the sweetness of youth once more in my blood.”
Then she led him to the Princess, and bade him lay the Rose in her
breast, that her heart might be won back into the world. Looking at
her face again, Noodle saw how memory had made it more beautiful than
ever, and how between her lips had grown the tender parting of a smile.
Then he laid the Rose where the movement of the heart should be; and
presently under the white breast rose the music of its beating.
“Ah!” cried the old nurse, weeping for happiness, “now her heart that
loved me is come back, and I can listen all day to the sound of it! You
have brought memory to her, you have brought love; now bring breath,
and the awakening of her five senses. Surely the light of her eyes will
be your reward!”
VI
THE CAMPHOR-WORM
“Tell me quickly of the Camphor-Worm,” cried the youth as he feasted
his eyes on the Princess’s loveliness, made more unendurable by the
awakening within of love. “Where and what is it?” “It is not so far
as was the way to the Burning Rose,” answered the crone; “an hour on
the back of the Plough shall bring it near to you; but the danger
and difficulty of this quest is more, not less. For to reach the
Camphor-Worm you need to be a diver in deep waters, whose weight
crushes a man; and to touch its lips you must master the loathing of
your nature; and to carry away its breath you must have strength of
will and endurance beyond what is mortal.” “You trouble me with things
I need not know,” cried Noodle. “Tell me,” he said, “how I may reach
the Camphor-Worm; and of it and its ways.”
“By this path, and by that,” said the old woman, pointing him, “go on
till you come to the thick waters of the Bitter Lake; they are blacker
than night, and their weight is heavier than lead, and in the depths
dwells the Camphor-Worm. Once a year, when the air is sweetest with the
scents of summer, she rises to breathe, lifting her black snout through
the surface of the waters. Then she draws fresh air into her lungs,
flavoured with leaves and flowers, and after she has breathed it in she
lets go the last bubble of the breath she drew from the summer of the
year before; and it is this bubble of breath alone that will give back
life to the five senses of Princess Melilot. But the Worm’s time for
rising is far; and how you shall bear the weight in the depths of those
waters, or make the Worm give up the bubble before her time, or at last
bear back the bubble to lay it on the lips of the Princess so that she
may wake,--these are things I know not the way of, for to my eyes they
seem dark with difficulty and peril.”
Then Noodle, opening the petals of the Burning Rose as it lay upon
the heart of Melilot, drew out honey from its centre, filling his
hand with the golden crumblings of fragrance; and he leapt upon the
Galloping Plough, urging it in the way the Princess’s nurse had pointed
out to him. As they went he caressed it with all the names under
heaven, stroking it with his hand and praising it for the delicacy of
its steering: saying, “O my moonbeam, if thou wouldst save the life
of thy master, or restore the five senses of the Princess Melilot,
thou must surpass thyself to-day. Listen, thou heaven-sent limb, thou
miracle of quicksilver, and have a long mind to my words; for in a
short while I shall have no speech left in me till the thing be done,
and the deliverance, from head to feet, of my Beloved accomplished.”
Even while he spoke they came to the edge of the Bitter Lake--a small
pool, but its waters were blacker than night, and its heart heavier
than lead. Then Noodle leapt down from the Plough, and caressed it for
the last time, saying: “Set thy face for the garden where the Princess
Melilot is; and when I am come back to thee speechless out of the Lake
and am striding thee once more, then wait not for a word but carry me
to her with more speed than thou hast ever mustered to my aid till now;
go faster than wind or lightning or than the eye of man can see! So, by
good fortune, I may live till I reach her lips; but if thou tarry at
all I am a dead man. And when thou art come to Melilot set thy share
beneath the roots of her feet, and take her up to me out of the ground.
Do this tenderly, but abate not speed till it be done!”
Then the youth put into his mouth the honey of the Burning Rose, and
into his lips the Sweetener, and stripped himself as a bather to the
pool. And the Plough, remembering its master’s word, turned and set its
face to where lay the garden with Melilot waiting to be relieved of her
enchantment. Whereat Noodle, bowing his head, and blessing it with lips
of farewell, turned shortly and slid down into the blackness of the
lake.
The weight of that water was like a vice upon his limbs, and around
his throat, as he swam out into the centre of the pool. As he went he
breathed upon the water, and the scent of the honey of the Burning Rose
passing through the Sweetener made an incomparable fragrance, gentle,
and subtle, and wooing to the senses.
When he came to the middle of the lake he stayed breathing full
breaths, till the air deepened with fragrance around him. Presently
underneath him he felt the movement of a great thing coming up from
the bottom of the pool. It touched his feet and came grazing along his
side; and all at once shuddering and horror took hold upon him, for his
whole nature was filled with loathing of its touch.
Out of the pool’s surface before him rose a great black snout, that
opened, showing a round hole. Then he thought of Melilot and her beauty
laid fast under a charm, and drawing a full breath he laid his lips
containing the ring, the Sweetener, to the lips of the Worm.
The Worm began to breathe. As the Worm drank the air out of him, he
drew in more through his nostrils, and more and more, till the great
gills were filled and satisfied.
Then the Worm let go the last bubble of air which remained from the
year before, and had lain ever since in its body, by which alone life
could be given back to the five senses of Melilot. Then drawing in its
head it lowered itself once more to the bottom of the pool; and Noodle,
feeling in his mouth the precious globule of air, fastened his lips
upon it and shot out for shore.
Against the weight of those leaden waters a longing to gasp possessed
him; but he knew that with the least breath the bubble would be lost,
and all his labour undone. Not too soon his feet caught hold of the
bank, and drew him free to land. He cast himself speechless across the
back of the Galloping Plough and clung.
The Plough gathered itself together and sprang away through space.
Remembering its master’s word it showed itself a miracle of speed; like
lightning became its flight.
The eye of Noodle grew blind to the passing of things; he could take no
count of the collapsing leagues. More and more grew the amazingness of
the Plough’s leaps, things only to be measured by miles, and counted
as joltings on the way; while fast to the back of it clung Noodle, and
endured, praying that shortness of breath might not overmaster him, or
the check of his lungs give way and burst him to the emptiness of a
drum. His senses rocked and swayed; he felt the gates of his resolve
slackening and forcing themselves apart; and still the Galloping Plough
plunged him blindly along through space.
But now the shrill crying of the crone struck in upon his ears, and
he stretched open his arms for the accomplishment of the deliverance.
Even in that nick of time was the end of the thing brought about; for
the Plough, guiding itself as a thread to the needle’s eye, gave the
uprooting stroke to the white feet of Melilot; and Noodle, swooning for
the last gasp, saw all at once her beauty swaying level to his gaze and
her body bending down upon his.
Then he fastened his lips upon hers, and loosed the bubble from his
mouth; and panting and sobbing themselves back to life they hung in
each other’s arms. She warmed and ripened in his embrace, opening upon
him the light of her eyes; and the greatness and beauty of the reward
abashed him and bore him down to earth.
He heard the old crone clucking and crowing, like a hen over its egg,
of the happiness that had come to her old years; till recognising the
youth’s state she covered him over with a cloak amid exclamations of
astonishment.
The Princess saw nothing but her lover’s face and the happy feasting of
his eyes. She bent her head nearer and nearer to his, and the story of
what he had done became a dream that she remembered, and that waking
made true. “O you Noodle,” she said, laughing, “you wise, wise Noodle!”
And then everything was finished, for she had kissed him!
So Noodle and the Princess were married, and came to the throne
together and reigned over a happy land. The Fire-eaters were their
friends, and the gifts of fortune were theirs. The Galloping Plough
made all the waste places fertile; and the water of the Thirsty Well
rose and ran in rivers through the land; and over the walls of their
palace, where they had planted it, grew the flower of the Burning Rose.
[Illustration]
THE RAT-CATCHER’S DAUGHTER
Once upon a time there lived an old rat-catcher who had a daughter, the
most beautiful girl that had ever been born. Their home was a dirty
little cabin; but they were not so poor as they seemed, for every night
the rat-catcher took the rats he had cleared out of one house and let
them go at the door of another, so that on the morrow he might be sure
of a fresh job.
His rats got quite to know him, and would run to him when he called;
people thought him the most wonderful rat-catcher, and could not make
out how it was that a rat remained within reach of his operations.
Now anyone can see that a man who practised so cunning a roguery was
greedy beyond the intentions of Providence. Every day, as he watched
his daughter’s beauty increase, his thoughts were: “When will she be
able to pay me back for all the expense she has been to me?” He would
have grudged her the very food she ate, if it had not been necessary
to keep her in the good looks which were some day to bring him his
fortune. For he was greedier than any gnome after gold.
Now all good gnomes have this about them: they love whatever is
beautiful, and hate to see harm happen to it. A gnome who lived far
away underground below where stood the rat-catcher’s house, said to his
fellows: “Up yonder is a man who has a daughter; so greedy is he, he
would sell her to the first comer who gave him gold enough! I am going
up to look after her.”
So one night, when the rat-catcher set a trap, the gnome went and got
himself caught in it. There in the morning, when the rat-catcher came,
he found a funny little fellow, all bright and golden, wriggling and
beating to be free.
“I can’t get out!” cried the little gnome. “Let me go!”
The rat-catcher screwed up his mouth to look virtuous. “If I let you
out, what will you give me?”
“A sack full of gold,” answered the gnome, “just as heavy as
myself--not a pennyweight less!”
“Not enough!” said the rat-catcher. “Guess again!”
“As heavy as you are!” cried the gnome, beginning to plead in a thin,
whining tone.
“I’m a poor man,” said the rat-catcher; “a poor man mayn’t afford to be
generous!”
“What is it you want of me?” cried the gnome.
“If I let you go,” said the rat-catcher, “you must make me the richest
man in the world!” Then he thought of his daughter: “Also you must make
the king’s son marry my daughter; then I will let you go.”
The gnome laughed to himself to see how the trapper was being trapped
in his own avarice as, with the most melancholy air he answered: “I can
make you the richest man in the world; but I know of no way of making
the king’s son marry your daughter, except one.”
“What way?” asked the rat-catcher.
“Why,” answered the gnome, “for three years your daughter must come and
live with me underground, and by the end of the third year her skin
will be changed into pure gold like ours. And do you know any king’s
son who would refuse to marry a beautiful maiden who was pure gold from
the sole of her foot to the crown of her head?”
The rat-catcher had so greedy an inside that he could not believe in
any king’s son refusing to marry a maiden of pure gold. So he clapped
hands on the bargain, and let the gnome go.
The gnome went down into the ground, and fetched up sacks and sacks of
gold, until he had made the rat-catcher the richest man in the world.
Then the father called his daughter, whose name was Jasomé, and bade
her follow the gnome down into the heart of the earth.
It was all in vain that Jasomé begged and implored; the rat-catcher was
bent on having her married to the king’s son. So he pushed, and the
gnome pulled, and down she went; and the earth closed after her.
The gnome brought her down to his home under the hill upon which stood
the town. Everywhere round her were gold and precious stones; the very
air was full of gold dust, so that when she remained still it settled
on her hands and her hair, and a soft golden down began to show itself
over her skin. So there in the house of the gnome sat Jasomé, and
cried; and, far away overhead, she heard the days come and go, by the
sound of people walking and the rolling of wheels.
The gnome was very kind to her; nothing did he spare of underground
commodities that might afford her pleasure. He taught her the legends
of all the heroes that have gone down into earth, and been forgotten,
and the lost songs of the old poets, and the buried languages that once
gave wisdom to the world: down there all these things are remembered.
She became the most curiously accomplished and wise maiden that ever
was hidden from the light of day. “I have to train you,” said the
gnome, “to be fit for a king’s bride!” But Jasomé, though she thanked
him, only cried to be let out.
In front of the rat-catcher’s house rose a little spring of salt water
with gold dust in it, that gilded the basin where it sprang. When he
saw it, he began rubbing his hands with delight, for he guessed well
enough that his daughter’s tears had made it; and the dust in it told
him how surely now she was being turned into gold.
And now the rat-catcher was the richest man in the world: all his traps
were made of gold, and when he went rat-hunting he rode in a gilded
coach drawn by twelve hundred of the finest and largest rats. This was
for an advertisement of the business. He now caught rats for the fun of
it, and the show of it, but also to get money by it; for, though he was
so rich, ratting and money-grubbing had become a second nature to him;
unless he were at one or the other, he could not be happy.
Far below, in the house of the gnome, Jasomé sat and cried. When the
sound of the great bells ringing for Easter came down to her, the gnome
said: “To-day I cannot bind you; it is the great rising day for all
Christians. If you wish, you may go up, and ask your father now to
release you.”
[Illustration]
So Jasomé kissed the gnome, and went up the track of her own tears,
that brought her to her father’s door. When she came to the light of
day, she felt quite blind; a soft yellow tint was all over her, and
already her hair was quite golden.
The rat-catcher was furious when he saw her coming back before her
time. “Oh, father,” she cried, “let me come back for a little while
to play in the sun!” But her father, fearing lest the gilding of her
complexion should be spoiled, drove her back into the earth, and
trampled it down over her head.
The gnome seemed quite sorry for her when she returned; but already,
he said, a year was gone--and what were three years, when a king’s son
would be the reward?
At the next Easter he let her go again; and now she looked quite
golden, except for her eyes, and her white teeth, and the nails on her
pretty little fingers and toes. But again her father drove her back
into the ground, and put a heavy stone slab over the spot to make sure
of her.
At last the third Easter came, and she was all gold.
She kissed the gnome many times, and was almost sorry to leave him,
for he had been very kind to her. And now he told her about her father
catching him in the trap, and robbing him of his gold by a hard
bargain, and of his being forced to take her down to live with him,
till she was turned into gold, so that she might marry the king’s son.
“For now,” said he, “you are so compounded of gold that only the
gnomes could rub it off you.”
So this time, when Jasomé came up once more to the light of day, she
did not go back again to her cruel father, but went and sat by the
roadside, and played with the sunbeams, and wondered when the king’s
son would come and marry her.
And as she sat there all the country-people who passed by stopped and
mocked her; and boys came and threw mud at her because she was all
gold from head to foot--an object, to be sure, for all simple folk to
laugh at. So presently, instead of hoping, she fell to despair, and sat
weeping, with her face hidden in her hands.
Before long the king’s son came that road, and saw something shining
like sunlight on a pond; but when he came near, he found a lovely
maiden of pure gold lying in a pool of her own tears, with her face
hidden in her hair.
Now the king’s son, unlike the country-folk, knew the value of gold;
but he was grieved at heart for a maiden so stained all over with it,
and more, when he beheld how she wept. So he went to lift her up;
and there, surely, he saw the most beautiful face he could ever have
dreamed of. But, alas! so discoloured--even her eyes, and her lips,
and the very tears she shed were the colour of gold! When he could
bring her to speak, she told him how, because she was all gold, all the
people mocked at her, and boys threw mud at her; and she had nowhere to
go, unless it were back to the kind gnome who lived underground, out of
sight of the sweet sun.
So the prince said, “Come with me, and I will take you to my father’s
palace, and there nobody shall mock you, but you shall sit all your
days in the sunshine, and be happy.”
And as they went, more and more he wondered at her great beauty--so
spoiled that he could not look at her without grief--and was taken with
increasing wonder at the beautiful wisdom stored in her golden mind;
for she told him the tales of the heroes which she had learned from the
gnome, and of buried cities; also the songs of old poets that have been
forgotten; and her voice, like the rest of her, was golden.
The prince said to himself, “I shut my eyes, and am ready to die loving
her; yet, when I open them, she is but a talking statue!”
One day he said to her, “Under all this disguise you must be the most
beautiful thing upon earth! Already to me you are the dearest!” and he
sighed, for he knew that a king’s son might not marry a figure of gold.
Now one day after this, as Jasomé sat alone in the sunshine and cried,
the little old gnome stood before her, and said, “Well, Jasomé, have
you married the king’s son?”
“Alas!” cried Jasomé, “you have so changed me: I am no longer human!
Yet he loves me, and, but for that, he would marry me.”
“Dear me!” said the gnome. “If that is all, I can take the gold off you
again: why, I said so!”
Jasomé entreated him, by all his former kindness, to do so for her now.
“Yes,” said the gnome, “but a bargain is a bargain. Now is the time
for me to get back my bags of gold. Do you go to your father, and let
him know that the king’s son is willing to marry you if he restores to
me my treasure that he took from me; for that is what it comes to.”
Up jumped Jasomé, and ran to the rat-catcher’s house. “Oh, father,” she
cried, “now you can undo all your cruelty to me; for now, if you will
give back the gnome his gold, he will give my own face back to me, and
I shall marry the king’s son!”
But the rat-catcher was filled with admiration at the sight of her, and
would not believe a word she said. “I have given you your dowry,” he
answered; “three years I had to do without you to get it. Take it away,
and get married, and leave me the peace and plenty I have so hardly
earned!”
Jasomé went back and told the gnome. “Really,” said he, “I must show
this rat-catcher that there are other sorts of traps, and that it isn’t
only rats and gnomes that get caught in them! I have given him his
taste of wealth; now it shall act as pickle to his poverty!”
So the next time the rat-catcher put his foot out of doors the ground
gave way under it, and, snap!--the gnome had him by the leg.
“Let me go!” cried the rat-catcher; “I can’t get out!”
“Can’t you?” said the gnome. “If I let you out, what will you give me?”
“My daughter!” cried the rat-catcher; “my beautiful golden daughter!”
“Oh no!” laughed the gnome. “Guess again!”
“My own weight in gold!” cried the rat-catcher, in a frenzy; but
the gnome would not close the bargain till he had wrung from the
rat-catcher the promise of his last penny.
So the gnome carried away all the sacks of gold before the
rat-catcher’s eyes; and when he had them safe underground, then at last
he let the old man go. Then he called Jasomé to follow him, and she
went down willingly into the black earth.
For a whole year the gnome rubbed and scrubbed and tubbed her to get
the gold out of her composition; and when it was done, she was the most
shiningly beautiful thing you ever set eyes on.
When she got back to the palace, she found her dear prince pining for
love of her, and wondering when she would return. So they were married
the very next day; and the rat-catcher came to look on at the wedding.
He grumbled because he was in rags, and because he was poor; he wept
that he had been robbed of his money and his daughter. But gnomes and
daughters, he said, were in one and the same box; such ingratitude as
theirs no one could beat.
THE TRAVELLER’S SHOES
A long while ago there lived a young cobbler named Lubin, who, when
his father died, was left with only the shop and the shoe-leather out
of which to make his fortune. From morning to night he toiled, making
and mending the shoes of the poor village folk; but his earnings were
small, and he seemed never able to get more than three days ahead of
poverty.
One day, as he sat working at his window-bench, the door opened, and in
came a traveller. He had on a pair of long red shoes with pointed ends;
but of one the seams had split, so that all his toes were coming out of
it.
The stranger, putting up one foot after the other, took off both shoes,
and giving that one which wanted cobbling to Lubin, he said: “To-night
I shall be sleeping here at the inn; have this ready in good time
to-morrow, for I am in haste to go on!” And having said this he put the
other shoe into his pocket, and went out of the door barefoot.
“What a funny fellow,” thought Lubin, “not to make the most of one shoe
when he has it!” But without stopping to puzzle himself he took up the
to-be-mended shoe and set to work. When it was finished he threw it
down on the floor behind him, and went on working at his other jobs. He
meant to work late, for he had not enough money yet to get himself his
Sunday’s dinner; so when darkness shut in he lighted a rushlight and
cobbled away, thinking to himself all the while of the roast meat that
was to be his reward.
It came close on midnight, and he was just putting on the last heel of
the last pair of shoes when he was aware of a noise on the floor behind
him. He looked round, and there was the red shoe with the pointed toe,
cutting capers and prancing about by itself in the middle of the room.
“Peace on earth!” exclaimed Lubin. “I never saw a shoe do a thing so
tipsy before!” He went up and passed his hand over it and under it,
but there was nothing to account for its caperings; on it went, up and
down, toeing and heeling, skipping and sliding, as if for a very wager.
Lubin could even tell himself the name of the reel and the tune that it
was dancing to, for all that the other foot was missing. Presently the
shoe tripped and toppled, falling heel up upon the floor; nor, although
Lubin watched it for a full hour, did it ever start upon a fresh jig.
Soon after daybreak, when Lubin had but just opened his shutters and
sat himself down to work, in came the traveller, limping upon bare
feet, with the shoe’s fellow pointing its red toe out of his pocket.
“Oh, so,” he said, seeing the other shoe ready mended and waiting for
him, “how much am I owing you for the job?”
“Just a gold piece,” said Lubin, carelessly, carrying on at his work.
“A gold piece for the mere mending of a shoe!” cried the stranger. “You
must be either a rogue or a funny fellow.”
“Neither!” said Lubin, “and for mending a shoe my charge is only
a penny; but for mending _that_ shoe, and for all the worry and
temptation to make it my own and run off with it--a gold piece!”
“To be sure, you are an honest fellow,” said the traveller, “and
honesty is a rare gift; though, had you made off with it, I should have
soon caught you. Still, you were not so wise as to know that, so here’s
your gold piece for you.” He pulled out a big bag of gold as he spoke,
pouring its contents out on to the window bench.
“That is a lot of money for a lonely man to carry about,” said Lubin.
“Are you not afraid?”
“Why, no,” answered the man. “I have a way, so that I can always follow
it up even if I lose it.” He took two of the gold pieces, and dropped
one into the sole of each shoe as he was putting them on. “There!”
said he, “now, if any man steal my money, I need only wait till it is
midnight; and then I have but to say to my shoes ‘Seek!’ and up they
jump, with me in them, and carry me to where my stolen property is,
were it to the world’s end. It is as if they had the nose and sagacity
of a pair of bloodhounds. Ah, son of a cobbler, had you run off with
the one I should have very soon caught you with the other; for if one
walks the other is bound to follow. But, as you were honest, we part
friends; and I trust God may bring you to fortune.” Then the traveller
did up his bag of gold, nodded to the cobbler from the doorway, and was
gone.
Lubin laid down his work, and went off to the inn. “Did anything
happen here last night?” he asked.
“Nothing of much note,” answered the innkeeper. “Three travelling
fiddlers were here, and afterwards a man came in barefoot, but with a
red shoe sticking out of his pocket. I thought of turning the fellow
away, till he let me see the colour of his gold. Presently the fiddlers
started to play and the other man to drink. At first when they called
on him to dance he excused himself for his feet’s sake; but presently,
what with the music and the liquor, he got so lively in his head that
he pulled on his one shoe and danced like three ordinary men put
together.”
“What time was that?” asked Lubin.
“Getting on for midnight,” answered the innkeeper.
“Ah!” said Lubin, and went home thinking much on the way.
Towards evening he found that he had run out of leather, and must go
into the town, ten miles off, to buy more. “Now my gold piece comes
in handy,” thought he; so he locked up the house, put the key in his
pocket, and set out.
Though it was the season of long days it was growing dark when he came
to a part of the road that led through the wood; but being so poor a
man he had no fear, nor thought at all about the robbers who were said
to be in those parts. But as he went, he saw all at once by the side of
the road two red spikes sticking up out of a ditch, their bright colour
making them plain to the eye. He came quite near and saw that they were
two red shoes with pointed toes; and then he saw more clearly that
along with them lay the traveller, his wallet empty and with a dagger
stuck through his heart.
The cobbler’s son was as sorry as he could be. “Alas, poor soul,”
thought he, “what good are the shoes to you now? Now that thieves have
killed you and taken away your gold, surely I do no harm if I give an
honest man your shoes!” He stooped down, and was about taking them off
when he saw the eyes of the dead man open. The eyes looked at him as if
they would remind him of something; and at once, when he loosed hold of
the shoes, they seemed satisfied. Then he remembered, and thought to
himself, “The world has many marvels in it; I will wait till midnight
and see.”
For over three hours he kept watch by the dead man’s side. “Only last
night,” he said to himself, “this poor fellow was dancing as merry a
measure as ever I saw, for the half of it surely I saw; and now!” Then
he judged that midnight must be come, so he bent over the shoes and
whispered to them but one word.
The dead man stood up in his shoes and began running. Lubin followed
close, keeping an eye on him, for the shoes made no sound on the earth.
They ran on for two hours, till they had come to the thickest part
of the forest; then some way before them Lubin began to see a light
shining. It came from a small square house in a court-yard, and round
the court-yard lay a deep moat; only one narrow plank led over and up
to the entrance.
The red shoes, carrying the dead man, walked over, and Lubin followed
them. When they were at the other side they turned, facing towards the
plank that they had crossed, and Lubin seemed to read in the dead man’s
eye what he was to do.
Then he turned and lifted the plank away from over the moat, so that
there was no longer any entrance or exit to the place. Through the
window of the house he could see the three fiddlers quarrelling over
the dead man’s gold.
The red shoes went on, carrying their dead owner, till they got to the
threshold, and there stopped. Then Lubin came and clicked up the latch,
and pushed open the door, and in walked the dead man with the dagger
sticking out of his heart.
The three fiddlers, when they saw that sight, dropped their gold and
leapt out of the window; and as they fled, shrieking, thinking to
cross the moat by the plank-bridge that was no longer there, one after
the other they fell into the water, and, clutching each other by the
throat, were drowned.
But the red shoes stayed where they were, and, tilting up his feet, let
the traveller go gently upon the ground; and when Lubin held down the
lantern to his face, on it lay a good smile, to tell him that the dead
man thanked him for all he had done.
So in the morning Lubin went and fetched a priest to pray for the
repose of the traveller’s soul, and to give him good burial; and to him
he gave all the dead man’s money, but for himself he took the red shoes
with the pointed toes, and set out to make his fortune in the world.
Walking along he found that however far he went he never grew tired.
When he had gone on for more than a hundred miles, he came to the
capital where the King lived with his Court.
All the flags of the city were at half-mast, and all the people were in
half-mourning. Lubin asked at the first inn where he stopped what it
all meant.
“You must indeed be a stranger,” said his host, “not to know, for ’tis
now nearly a year since this trouble began; and this very night more
cause for mourning becomes due.”
“Tell me of it, then,” said Lubin, “for I know nothing at all.”
“At least,” returned the innkeeper, “you will know how, a little more
than a year ago, the Queen, who was the most beautiful woman in the
world, died, leaving the King with twelve daughters, who, after her,
were reckoned the fairest women on earth, though the King says that all
their beauty rolled into one would not equal that of his dead wife;
and, indeed, poor man, there is no doubt that he loved her devotedly
during her life, and mourns for her continually now she is dead.”
“Only a small part of all this have I known,” said Lubin.
“Well, but at least,” said the innkeeper, “you will have heard how the
Princesses were famed for their hair; so beautiful it was, so golden,
and so long! And now, at every full moon, one of them goes bald in a
night; and bald her head stays as a stone, for never an inch of hair
grows on it again; and with her hair all her beauty goes pale, so that
she is but the shadow of her former self--a thin-blooded thing, as if
a vampire had come and sucked out half her life. Yes; ten months this
has happened, and ten of the Princesses have lost their looks and
their hair as well; and now only the Princess Royal and the youngest
of all remain untouched; and doubtless one of them is to lose her crop
to-night.”
“But how does it happen?” cried Lubin. “Is no one put to keep watch, to
guard them from the thing being done?”
“Ah! you talk, you talk!” said the innkeeper. “How? The King has
offered half his kingdom to anyone who can tell him how the mischief is
done; and the other half to the man who will put an end to it. To put
it shortly, if you believe yourself a clever enough man, you may have
the King for your father-in-law, with the pick of his daughters for
your bride, and be his heir and lord of all when he dies!”
“For such a reward,” said Lubin, “has no man made the attempt?”
“Aye, one a month; every time there has been some man fool enough to
think himself so clever; and he has been turned out of the palace next
day with his ears cropped.”
“I will risk having my ears cropped,” said Lubin; for his heart was
sorry for the young Princesses, and the vanishing of their beauty. So
he went up and knocked at the gates of the palace.
They went and told the King that a new man had come willing and wanting
to have his ears cropped on the morrow. “Well, well,” said the King,
“let the poor fool in!” for indeed he had given up all hope. From the
King Lubin heard the whole story over again. The old man sighed so it
took him whole hours to tell it.
“I would be glad to be your son,” said Lubin, when the King had ended;
“but I would like better to make you rid of your sorrow.”
“That is kind of you,” said the King. “Perhaps I will only crop one of
your ears to-morrow.”
“When may one see the Princesses?” asked Lubin.
“They will be down to supper, presently,” answered the King; “then you
shall see them, what there is left of them.”
Though it was reckoned that the next day Lubin would have to be drummed
out of the palace with his ears cropped short, on this day he was to be
treated like an honoured guest. When they went in to supper the King
made him sit upon his right hand.
The twelve Princesses came in, their heads bowed down with weeping;
all were fair, but ten of them were thin and pale, and wore white
wimples over their heads like nuns; only the Princess Royal, who was
the eldest, and Princess Lyneth, who was the youngest, had gold hair
down to their feet, and were both so shiningly beautiful that the poor
cobbler was altogether dazzled by the sight of them.
The King looked out of the window and said: “Heigho! There is the full
moon beginning to rise.” Then they all said grace and sat down.
But when the viands were handed round, all the Princesses sat weeping
into their plates, and seemed unable to eat anything. For the pale and
thin ones said: “To-night another of our sisters will lose her golden
hair and her good looks, and be like us!” Therefore they wept.
And Lyneth said: “To-night, either my dear sister or myself will fall
under the spell!” Therefore she wept more than the other ten. But the
Princess Royal sat trembling, and crying:
“To-night I know that the curse is to fall upon me, and me only!”
Therefore she wept more than all.
Lubin sat, and watched, and listened, with his head bent down over
his golden plate. “Which of these two shall I try most to save?” he
thought. “How shall I test them, so as to know? If I could only tell
which of them was to lose her hair to-night, then I might do something.”
He saw that the youngest sister cried so much that she could eat
nothing; but the Princess Royal, between her bursts of grief, picked up
a morsel now and again from her plate, and ate it as though courage or
despair reminded her that she must yet strive to live.
When the meat-courses were over, the King said to the Princesses: “I
wish you would try to eat a little pudding! Here is a very promising
youth, who is determined by all that is in him that harm shall happen
to none of you to-night.”
“To-morrow he will be sent away with his ears cut short!” said Princess
Lyneth; and her tears, as she spoke, ran down over the edge of her
plate on to the cloth.
When supper was over the Princess Royal came up to Lubin, and said: “Do
not be angry with my sister for what she said! It has only been too
true of many who came before; to-night, unless you do better than them
all, I shall lose my hair. It has been a wonder to me how I have been
spared so long, seeing that I am the eldest, and, as some will have
it, the fairest. Will you keep a good guard over me to-night, as though
you knew for certain that I am to be the one this time to suffer?”
“I will guard you as my own life,” said Lubin, “if you will but do as I
ask you.”
“Pledge yourself to me, then, in this cup!” said she, and lifted
to his lips a bowl of red wine. Over the edge of it her eyes shone
beautifully; he drank gazing into their clear depth.
“Where am I to be for the night,” he asked of the King, “so that I may
watch over the two Princesses?”
The King took him to a chamber with two further doors that opened out
of it. “Here,” said the King, “you are to sleep, and in the inner rooms
sleep the Princess Royal and the Princess Lyneth. There is no entrance
or exit to them but through this; therefore, when you are here with
your door bolted, one would suppose that you had them safe. Alas! ten
other men have tried like you to ward off the harm, and have failed;
and so to-day I have ten daughters with no looks left to them, and no
hair upon their heads.”
As they were speaking, the two Princesses, with their sisters, came up
to bed. And the pale ones, wearing their white wimples, came and kissed
the golden hair of the other two, crying over it, and saying, “To one
of you we are saying good-bye; to-morrow one of you will be like us!”
Then they went away to their sleeping-place, and the Princess Royal and
Lyneth kissed each other, and parted weeping, each into her own chamber.
“Watch well over us!” said Lyneth to Lubin, as she passed through.
“Watch over me!” said the Princess Royal. And then the two doors were
closed.
[Illustration]
Lubin said to the King, “Could I now see the two Princesses, without
being seen by them, it would help me to know what to do.”
“Come down to my cabinet,” said the King. “I have an invisible cap
there, that I can lend you if you think you can do any good with it.”
So they went; and the King reached down the cap from the wall and gave
it to Lubin.
“Now, good-night, your Majesty,” said Lubin; “I will do for you all I
can.”
The King answered, “Either you shall be my son-in-law to-morrow, or you
shall have no ears. My wishes are with you that the former state may be
yours.”
Lubin went into his chamber and closed and bolted the door; then he put
the bed up against it. “Now, at least,” he thought, “there are three of
us, and no more!” He put on his invisible cap, and going softly to the
Princess Royal’s door, opened it and peeped in.
She stood up before her glass, combing out her long gold hair, and
smiling proudly because of its beauty. She gathered it up by all its
ends and kissed it; then, letting it fall, she went on combing as
before.
Lubin went out, closing the door again; then he took off his cap and
knocked, and presently he heard the Princess Royal saying, “Come in!”
She was lying down upon the bed, squeezing her eyes with her hands.
“Princess,” he said, “I will watch over you like my own life, if you
will do what I bid you. I am but a poor man, and the best that I can
do is but poor; but I think, if you will, I can save your head from
becoming as bare as a billiard ball.”
The Princess asked him how.
“You know,” said he, “that to-night something is to happen to one of
you” (“To me!” said the Princess), “and all your hair will be stolen in
such a way that nothing will ever make it grow again. See, here I have
a pair of common scissors; let me but cut your hair close off all over
your head, and then who can steal it? For a few months you will be a
fright, but it can grow again.”
“I think you are a silly fellow!” said the Princess. “Better for you to
get to bed, and have your ears cropped quietly in the morning! After
all, it may be my sister’s turn to lose her hair, not mine. I shall not
make myself a fright for a year of my life in order to save you.”
“If you think so poorly of my offer,” said Lubin, “I had better go to
bed and sleep, and not trouble the Princess Lyneth at all with it.”
“No, indeed!” said the Princess Royal. “Go to bed and sleep, poor
fool!” And, in truth, Lubin was feeling so sleepy that he could hardly
keep open his eyes.
Then he left her, and, pulling the invisible cap once more over his
head, crept softly into Princess Lyneth’s chamber.
She was standing before her glass with all her beautiful hair flowing
down from shoulders to feet; and tears were falling fast out of her
eyes as she kept drawing her hair together in her hands, kissing and
moaning over it.
Then Lubin went out again, and, taking off his cap, knocked softly at
the door.
“Come in!” said the Princess; and when he went in she was still
standing before the glass weeping and moaning for her beautiful hair,
that might never see another day. On the bed was lying a white wimple,
ready for her to put on when her head was become bald.
“Princess,” said Lubin, very humbly, “will you help me to save your
beautiful hair, by doing what I ask?”
“What is it that you ask?” said she.
“Only this,” he answered; “I am a poor man, and cannot do much for you,
but only my best. To-night you or your sister must lose your hair; and
we know that afterwards, if that happen, it can never grow again. Now,
come, here I have a common pair of scissors; if I could cut your hair
quite short, in a few months it will grow again, and there will be
nothing to-night that the Fates can steal. Will you let me do this for
you in true service?”
The Princess looked at him, and looked at her glass. “Oh, my hair, my
hair!” she moaned. Then she said, “What matters it? You mean to be good
to me, and a month is the most that my fortune can last. If I do not
lose it to-night, I lose it at the next full moon!” Then she shut her
eyes and bade him take off all he wished. When he had finished, she
picked up the wimple and covered her head with it; but Lubin took up
the long coil of gold hair and wound it round his heart.
He knelt down at her feet. “Princess,” he said, “be sure now that I can
save you! Only I have one other request to make.”
“What is that?” asked the Princess.
He took off one of his red shoes with the pointed toes. “Will you, for
a strange thing, put on this shoe and wear it all to-night in your
sleep? And in the morning I will ask you for it again.”
The Princess promised faithfully that she would do so. Even before he
had left the room she had put foot in it, promising that only he should
take it off again.
Lubin’s eyes were shut down with sleep as he groped his way to bed;
he lay down with the other red shoe upon his foot. “Watch for your
fellow!” he said to it; and then his senses left him and he was fast
asleep.
In the middle of the night, while he was deep in slumber, the red shoe
caught him by the foot and yanked him out of bed; he woke up to find
himself standing in the middle of the room, and there before him stood
the two doors of the inner chambers open; through that of the Princess
Royal came a light. He heard the Princess Lyneth getting very softly
out of her bed, and presently she stood in the doorway, with her hands
out and her eyes fast shut; and the red shoe was on one foot, and the
white wimple on her head. Little tears were running down from under her
closed lids; and she sighed continually in her sleep. “Have pity on
me!” she said.
She crossed slowly from one door to the other; and Lubin, putting on
his invisible cap, crept softly after her. The Princess Royal’s chamber
was empty, but her glass was opened away from the wall like a door, and
beyond lay a passage and steps. At the top of the steps was another
door, and through it light came, and the sound of a soft voice singing.
Princess Lyneth, knowing nothing in her sleep, passed along the passage
and up the steps till she came to the further doorway. Looking over
her shoulder Lubin saw the Princess Royal sitting before a loom. In it
lay a great cloth of gold, like a bride’s mantle, into which she was
weaving the last threads of her skein. Close to her side lay a pair of
great shears that shone like blue fire; and while she sang they opened
and snapped, keeping time to the music she made.
Without ever turning her head the Princess Royal sat passing her
fingers along the woof and crying:
“Sister, sister, bring me your hair,
Of our Mother’s beauty give me your share.
You must grow pale, while I must grow fair!”
And while she was so singing, Lyneth drew nearer and nearer, with her
eyes fast shut, and the white wimple over her head. “Have pity on me!”
she said, speaking in her sleep.
As soon as the Princess Royal heard that she laughed for joy, and
catching up the great flaming shears, turned herself round to where
Lyneth was standing. Then she opened the shears, and took hold of the
wimple, and pulled it down.
All in a moment she was choking with rage, for horrible was the sight
that met her eye. “Ah! cobbler’s son,” cried she, “you shall die for
this! To-morrow not only shall you have your two ears cropped, but you
shall die: do not be afraid!”
Lubin looked at her and smiled, knowing how little she thought that he
heard her words. “Ah! Princess Royal,” he said to himself, “there is
another who should now be afraid, but is not.”
Then for very spite the Princess began slapping her sister’s face. “Ah!
wicked little sister,” she cried, “you have cheated me this time! But
go back and wait till your hair has grown, and then my gown of gold
shall be finished, although this once you have been too sly!” She threw
down the shears, and drove her sister back by stair and passage, and
through the looking-glass door at the other end.
Lubin following, stayed first to watch how by a secret spring the
Princess Royal closed the mirror back into the wall; then he slipped
on before, and taking his cap off, lay down on his bed pretending to
be fast asleep. He heard Princess Lyneth return to her couch, and then
came the Princess Royal and ground her teeth at him in the darkness.
Presently she, too, returned to her bed and lay down; and an hour after
Lubin got up very softly and went into her chamber. There she lay
asleep, with her beautiful hair all spread out upon the pillow; but
Lubin had Princess Lyneth’s hair wound round his heart. He touched the
secret spring, so that the mirror opened to him, and he passed through
toward the little chamber where stood the loom.
There hung the cloth of gold, all but finished; beside it the shears
opened and snapped, giving out a blue light. He took up the shears in
his hand, and pulled down the gold web from the loom, and back he went,
closing the mirror behind him.
Then he came to the Princess Royal as she lay asleep; and first he laid
the cloth of gold over her, and saw how at once she became ten times
more fair than she was by rights, as fair almost as her dead mother,
lacking one part only. But her beauty did not win him to have pity on
her.
“There can be thieves, it seems, in high places!” he said; and with
that he opened the shears over her head and let them snap: then all her
long hair came out by the roots, and she lay white and withered before
his eyes, and as bald as a stone.
He gathered up all her hair with one hand, and the cloth of gold with
the other, and went quietly away. Then, hiding the shears in a safe
place, first he burnt the Princess Royal’s hair, till it became only a
little heap of frizzled cinders; and after that he went to the chamber
of the ten Princesses, whose hair and whose sweet youth had been stolen
from them. There they lay all in a row in ten beds, with pale, gentle
faces, asleep under their white wimples.
He went to the first, and, laying the cloth of hair over her, cried:
“Sister, sister, I bring you your hair,
Of your Mother’s beauty I give you your share.
One must grow pale, but you must grow fair!”
And as he said the words one part of the cloth unwove itself from the
rest, and ran in ripples up the coverlet, and on to the pillow where
the Princess’s head lay. There it coiled itself under the wimple, a
great mass of shining gold, and the face of the Princess flushed warm
and lovely in her sleep.
Lubin passed on to the next bed, and there uttered the same words;
and again one part of the web came loose, and wound itself about the
sleeper’s face, that grew warm and lovely at its touch. So he went from
bed to bed, and when he came to the end there was no more of the web
left.
He went back into his own chamber, laughing in his heart for joy, and
there he dropped himself between the sheets and fell into a sound
slumber.
He was awakened in the morning by the King knocking and trying to get
into the room. Lubin pulled back the bed, and in came the King with a
mournful countenance.
“Which of them is it?” said he.
“Go and ask them!” said Lubin.
The King went over and knocked at the Princess Royal’s door: the
knocking opened her eyes. Lubin heard her suddenly utter a yell. “Ah!
now she has looked at herself in the glass,” thought he.
“What is the matter?” called the King. “Come out and let me look at
you!” But the Princess Royal would not come out. She ran quick to
her mirror, and touched the secret spring. “At least,” she thought,
“though fiends have robbed me of all my beauty, I can get it back by
wearing the cloth woven from my sisters’ hair!” She skipped along the
passage and up the steps to the little chamber where the loom was.
The King, getting no answer, went across and knocked at Lyneth’s door;
she came out, all fresh in her beauty, but wearing upon her head the
wimple. “Ah!” said the King dolorously; and he snipped his fingers at
Lubin.
Lubin laughed out. “But look at her face!” he said. “Surely she is
beautiful enough?”
The Princess lifted up her wimple, and showed the King her hair all
shorn beneath. “That was my doing,” said Lubin; “’twas the way of
saving it.”
“What a Dutchman’s remedy!” cried the King; and just then the Princess
Royal’s door flew open.
She came out tearing herself to pieces with rage; her face was pale and
thin, and her head was as bare as a billiard ball. “Have that clown of
a cobbler killed!” she cried in a passion. “That fool, that numbskull,
that cheat! Have him beheaded, I say!”
“No, no, I am only to have one of my ears cropped off!” said Lubin,
looking hard at her all the time.
“I am not at all sure,” said the King. “You have done foolishly and
badly, for not only have you let the disease go on, but your very
remedy is as bad. Two heads of hair gone in one night! You had better
have kept away. If the Princesses wish it, certainly I will have you
put to death.”
“Will you not see the other Princesses too?” asked Lubin. “Let them
decide between them whether I am to live or die!”
The King was just going to call for them, when suddenly the ten
Princesses opened the door of their chamber, and stood before him
shining like stars, with all their golden hair running down to their
feet.
“Now put me to death!” said Lubin; and all the time he kept his eye
upon the Princess Royal, who turned flame-coloured with rage.
“No, indeed!” cried the King. “Now you must be more than pardoned! You
see, my dears,” he said to Lyneth and the Princess Royal, “though you
have suffered, your sisters have recovered all that they lost. They are
ten to two; and I can’t go back on arithmetic; I am bound to do even
more than pardon him for this.”
“Indeed and indeed yes!” replied the Princess Lyneth. “He has done ten
times more than we thought of asking him!” And she went from one to
another of her recovered sisters, kissing their beautiful long hair for
pure gladness of heart. But when she came to the Princess Royal, she
kissed her many times, and stooped down her face upon her shoulder, and
cried over her.
“Tell me now,” said the King to Lubin, “for you are a very wonderful
fellow, how did it all happen?”
Lubin looked at the Princess Royal; after all he could not betray a
lady’s secret. “I cannot tell you,” he said; “if I did, there would be
a death in the family.”
“Well,” said the King, “however you may have done it, I own that you
have earned your reward. You have only to choose now which of my
daughters is to make you my son-in-law. From this day you shall be
known as my heir.” He ranged all the Princesses in line, according to
their ages. “Now choose,” said the King, “and choose well!”
Lubin went up to the Princess Royal. “I won’t have you!” he said,
looking very hard at her; and the Princess Royal dropped her eyes. Then
he went on to the next. “Sweet lady,” he said, “I dare not ask one with
such beautiful hair as yours to marry me, who am a poor cobbler’s son.”
But all the while he had the Princess Lyneth’s hair bound round his
heart.
He went on from one to another, and of each he kissed the hand, saying
that she was too fair to marry him.
He came to Lyneth and knelt down at her feet. “Lyneth,” he said, “will
you give the poor cobbler back his shoe?”
Lyneth, looking in his eyes, saw all that he meant. “And myself in it,”
she said, “for you love me dearly!” She put her arms round his neck,
and whispered, “You marry me because I am a fright, and have no hair!”
But Lubin said, “I have your hair all wound round my heart, making it
warm!”
So they were married, and lived together more happily than cobbler
and princess ever lived in the world before. And the cobbler dropped
mending shoes: only his wife’s shoes he always mended. Very soon
Lyneth’s hair grew again, more shining and beautiful than before; but
the Princess Royal remained pale, and thin, and was bald to the day of
her death.
THE ROOTED LOVER
Morning and evening a ploughboy went driving his team through a lane at
the back of the palace garden. Over the hedge the wind came sweet with
the scents of a thousand flowers, and through the hedge shot glimpses
of all the colours of the rainbow, while now and then went the sheen
of silver and gold tissue when the Princess herself paced by with her
maidens. Also above all the crying and calling of the blackbirds and
thrushes that filled the gardens with song, came now and then an airy
exquisite voice flooding from bower to field; and that was the voice of
the Princess Fleur-de-lis herself singing.
When she sang all the birds grew silent; new flowers came into bud to
hear her and into blossom to look at her; apples and pears ripened and
dropped down at her feet; her voice sang the bees home as if it were
evening: and the ploughboy as he passed stuck his face into the thorny
hedge, and feasted his eyes and ears with the sight and sound of her
beauty.
He was a red-faced boy, red with the wind and the sun: over his face
his hair rose like a fair flame, but his eyes were black and bold, and
for love he had the heart of a true gentleman.
Yet he was but a ploughboy, rough-shod and poorly clad in a coat of
frieze, and great horses went at a word from him. But no word from him
might move the heart of that great Princess; she never noticed the
sound of his team as it jingled by, nor saw the dark eyes and the
bronzed red face wedged into the thorn hedge for love of her.
“Ah! Princess,” sighed the ploughboy to himself, as the thorns pricked
into his flesh, “were it but a thorn-hedge which had to be trampled
down, you should be my bride to-morrow!” But shut off by the thorns, he
was not a whit further from winning her than if he had been kneeling at
her feet.
He had no wealth in all the world, only a poor hut with poppies growing
at the door; no mother or father, and his own living to get. To think
at all of the Princess was the sign either of a knave or a fool.
No knave, but perhaps a fool, he thought himself to be. “I will go,” he
said at last, “to the wise woman who tells fortunes and works strange
cures, and ask her to help me.”
So he took all the money he had in the world and went to the wise
woman in her house by the dark pool, and said, “Show me how I may win
Princess Fleur-de-lis to be my wife, and I will give you everything I
possess.”
“That is a hard thing you ask,” said the wise woman; “how much dare you
risk for it?”
“Anything you can name,” said he.
“Your life?” said she.
“With all my heart,” he replied; “for without her I shall but end by
dying.”
“Then,” said the wise woman, “give me your money, and you shall take
your own risk.”
Then he gave her all.
“Now,” said she, “you have but to choose any flower you like, and I
will turn you into it; then, in the night I will take you and plant you
in the palace garden; and if before you die the Princess touches you
with her lips and lays you as a flower in her bosom, you shall become a
man again and win her love; but if not, when the flower dies you will
die too and be no more. So if that seem to you a good bargain, you have
but to name your flower, and the thing is done.”
[Illustration]
“Agreed, with all my heart!” cried the ploughboy. “Only make me into
some flower that is like me, for I would have the Princess to know what
sort of a man I am, so that she shall not be deceived when she takes me
to her bosom.”
He looked himself up and he looked himself down in the pool which was
before the wise woman’s home; at his rough frieze coat with its frayed
edges, his long supple limbs, and his red face with its black eyes, and
hair gleaming at the top.
“I am altogether like a poppy,” he said, “what with my red head, and my
rough coat, and my life among fields which the plough turns to furrow.
Make a poppy of me, and put me in the palace garden and I will be
content.”
Then she stroked him down with her wand full couthly, and muttered her
wise saws over him, for she was a wonderful witch-woman; and he turned
before her very eyes into a great red poppy, and his coat of frieze
became green and hairy all over him, and his feet ran down into the
ground like roots.
The wise woman got a big flower-pot and a spade; and she dug him up out
of the ground and planted him in the pot, and having watered him well,
waited till it was quite dark.
As soon as the pole-star had hung out its light she got across her
besom, tucked the flower-pot under her arm, and sailed away over hedge
and ditch till she came to the palace garden.
There she dug a hole in a border by one of the walks, shook the
ploughboy out of his flower-pot, and planted him with his feet deep
down in the soil. Then giving a wink all round, and a wink up to the
stars, she set her cap to the east, mounted her besom, and rode away
into thin space.
But the poppy stood up where she had left him taking care of his
petals, so as to be ready to show them off to the Princess the next
morning. He did not go fast asleep, but just dozed the time away, and
found it quite pleasant to be a flower, the night being warm. Now and
then small insects ran up his stalks, or a mole passed under his roots,
reminding him of the mice at home. But the poppy’s chief thought was
for the morning to return; for then would come the Princess walking
straight to where he stood, and would reach out a hand and gather him,
and lay her lips to his and his head upon her bosom, so that in the
shaking of a breath he could turn again to his right shape, and her
love would be won for ever.
Morning came, and gardeners with their brooms and barrows went all
about, sweeping up the leaves, and polishing off the slugs from the
gravel-paths. The head gardener came and looked at the poppy. “Who has
been putting this weed here?” he cried. And at that the poppy felt a
shiver of red ruin go through him; for what if the gardener were to
weed him up so that he could never see the Princess again?
All the other gardeners came and considered him, twisting wry faces at
him. But they said, “Perhaps it is a whim of the Princess’s. It’s none
of our planting.” So after all they let him be.
The sun rose higher and higher, and the gardeners went carrying away
their barrows and brooms; but the poppy stood waiting with his black
eye turned to the way by which the Princess should come.
It was a long waiting, for princesses do not rise with the lark, and
the poppy began to think his petals would be all shrivelled and old
before she came. But at last he saw slim white feet under the green
boughs and heard voices and shawm-like laughter and knew that it was
the Princess coming to him.
Down the long walks he watched her go, pausing here and there to taste
a fruit that fell or to look at a flower that opened. To him she would
come shortly, and so bravely would he woo her with his red face, that
she would at once bend down and press her lips to his, and lift him
softly to her bosom. Yes, surely she would do this.
She came; she stopped full and began looking at him: he burned under
her gaze. “That is very beautiful!” she said at last. “Why have I not
seen that flower before? Is it so rare, then, that there is no other?”
But, “Oh, it is too common!” cried all her maids in a chorus; “it is
only a common poppy such as grows wild in the fields.”
“Yet it is very beautiful,” said the Princess; and she looked at it
long before she passed on. She half bent to it. “Surely now,” said the
poppy, “her lips to mine!”
“Has it a sweet smell?” she asked. But one of her maids said, “No,
only a poor little stuffy smell, not nice at all!” and the Princess
drew back.
“Alas, alas,” murmured the poor poppy in his heart, as he watched her
departing, “why did I forget to choose a flower with a sweet smell?
then surely at this moment she would have been mine.” He felt as if his
one chance were gone, and death already overtaking him. But he remained
brave; “At least,” he said, “I will die looking at her; I will not
faint or wither, till I have no life left in me. And after all there is
to-morrow.” So he went to sleep hoping much, and slept late into the
morning of the next day.
Opening his eyes he was aware of a great blaze of red in a border
to his right. Ears had been attentive to the words of Princess
Fleur-de-lis, and a whole bed of poppies had been planted to gratify
her latest fancy. There they were, in a thick mass burning the air
around them with their beauty. Alas! against their hundreds what chance
had he?
And the Princess came and stood by them, lost in admiration, while
the poppy turned to her his love-sick eye, trying to look braver than
them all. And she being gracious, and not forgetful of what first had
given her pleasure, came and looked at him also, but not very long;
and as for her lips, there was no chance for him there now. Yet for
the delight of those few moments he was almost contented with the fate
he had chosen--to be a flower, and to die as a flower so soon as his
petals fell.
Days came and went; they were all alike now, save that the Princess
stayed less often to look at him or the other poppies which had stolen
his last chance from him. He saw autumn changes coming over the
garden; flowers sickened and fell, and were removed, and the nights
began to get cold.
Beside him the other poppies were losing their leaves, and their
flaming tops had grown scantier; but for a little while he would hold
out still; so long as he had life his eye should stay open to look at
the Princess as she passed by.
The sweet-smelling flowers were gone, but the loss of their fragrant
rivalry gave him no greater hopes: one by one every gorgeous colour
dropped away; only when a late evening primrose hung her lamp beside
him in the dusk did he feel that there was anything left as bright as
himself to the eye. And now death was taking hold of him, each night
twisting and shrivelling his leaves; but still he held up his head,
determined that, though but for one more day, his eye should be blessed
by a sight of his Princess. If he could keep looking at her he believed
he should dream of her when dead.
At length he could see that he was the very last of all the poppies,
the only spot of flame in a garden that had gone grey. In the cold dewy
mornings cobwebs hung their silvery hammocks about the leaves, and the
sun came through mist, making them sparkle. And beautiful they were,
but to him they looked like the winding-sheet of his dead hopes.
Now it happened just about this time that the Prince of a neighbouring
country was coming to the Court to ask Princess Fleur-de-lis’ hand in
marriage. The fame of his manners and his good looks had gone before
him, and the Princess being bred to the understanding that princesses
must marry for the good of nations according to the bidding of their
parents, was willing, since the King her father wished it, to look upon
his suit with favour. All that she looked for was to be wooed with
sufficient ardour, and to be allowed time for a becoming hesitancy
before yielding.
A great ball was prepared to welcome the Prince on his arrival; and
when the day came, Princess Fleur-de-lis went into the garden to find
some flower that she might wear as an adornment of her loveliness. But
almost everything had died of frost, and the only flower that retained
its full beauty was the poor bewitched poppy, kept alive for love of
her.
“How wonderfully that red flower has lasted!” she said to one of her
maidens. “Gather it for me, and I will wear it with my dress to-night.”
The poppy, not knowing that he was about to meet a much more dangerous
rival than any flower, thrilled and almost fainted for bliss as the
maid picked him from the stalk and carried him in.
He lay upon Princess Fleur-de-lis’ toilet-table and watched the putting
on of her ballroom array. “If she puts me in her breast,” he thought,
“she must some time touch me with her lips; and then!”
And then, when the maid was giving soft finishing touches to the
Princess’s hair, the beloved one herself took up the poppy and arranged
it in the meshes of gold. “Alas!” thought the poppy, even while he
nestled blissfully in its warm depths, “I shall never reach her lips
from here; but I shall dream of her when dead; and for a ploughboy,
that surely is enough of happiness.”
So he went down with her to the ball, and could feel the soft
throbbing of her temples, for she had not yet seen this Prince who
was to be her lover, and her head was full of gentle agitation and
excitement to know what he would be like. Very soon he was presented to
her in state. Certainly he was extremely passable: he was tall and fine
and had a pair of splendid mustachios that stuck out under his nostrils
like walrus-tusks, and curled themselves like ram’s horns. Beyond a
slight fear that these might sweep her away when he tried to kiss her,
she favoured his looks sufficiently to be prepared to accept his hand
when he offered it.
Then music called to them invitingly, and she was led away to the dance.
As they danced the Prince said: “I cannot tell how it is, I feel as if
someone were looking at me.”
“Half the world is looking at you,” said the Princess in slight
mockery. “Do you not know you are dancing with Princess Fleur-de-lis?”
“Beautiful Princess,” said the Prince, “can I ever forget it? But it
is not in that way I feel myself looked at. I could swear I have seen
somewhere a man with a sunburnt face and a bold black eye looking at
me.”
“There is no such here,” said the Princess; and they danced on.
When the dance was over the Prince led her to a seat screened from view
by rich hangings of silken tapestry; and Princess Fleur-de-lis knew
that the time for the wooing was come.
She looked at him; quite clearly she meant to say “Yes.” Without being
glad, she was not sorry. If he wooed well she would have him.
“It is strange,” said the Prince, “I certainly feel that I am being
looked at.”
The Princess was offended. “I am not looking at you in the least,” she
said slightingly.
“Ah!” replied the other, “if you did, I should lose at once any less
pleasant sensation; for when your eyes are upon me I know only that I
love you--you, Princess, who are the most beautiful, the most radiant,
the most accomplished, the most charming of your sex! Why should I
waste time in laying my heart bare before you? It is here; it is yours.
Take it!”
“Truly,” thought the Princess, “this is very pretty wooing, and by no
means ill done.” She bent down her head, and she toyed and she coyed,
but she would not say “Yes” yet.
But the poppy, when he heard the Prince’s words, first went all of a
tremble, and then giving a great jump fell down at the Princess’s feet.
And she, toying and coying, and not wishing to say “Yes” yet, bent down
and taking up the poppy from where it had fallen, brushed it gently to
and fro over her lips to conceal her smiles, and then tucking her chin
down into the dimples of her neck began to arrange the flower in the
bosom of her gown.
As she did so, all of a sudden a startled look came over her face. “Oh!
I am afraid!” she cried. “The man, the man with the red face, and the
strong black eyes!”
“What is the matter?” demanded the Prince, bending over her in the
greatest concern.
“No, no!” she cried, “go away! Don’t touch me! I can’t and I won’t
marry you! Oh, dear! oh, dear! what is going to become of me?” And
she jumped up and ran right away out of the ballroom, and up the great
staircase, where she let the poppy fall, and right into her own room,
where she barred and bolted herself in.
In the palace there was the greatest confusion: everybody was running
about and shaking heads at everybody else. “Heads and tails! has it
come to this?” cried the King, as he saw a party of serving-men turning
out a ploughboy who by some unheard of means had found his way into the
palace. Then he went up to interview his daughter as to her strange and
sudden refusal of the Prince.
The Princess wrung her hands and cried: she didn’t know why, but she
couldn’t help herself: nothing on earth should induce her to marry him.
Then the King was full of wrath, and declared that if she were not
ready to obey him in three days’ time, she should be turned out into
the world like a beggar to find a living for herself.
So for three days the Princess was locked up and kept on nothing but
bread and water; and every day she cried less, and was more determined
than ever not to marry the Prince.
“Whom do you suppose you are going to marry then?” demanded the King in
a fury.
“I don’t know,” said the Princess, “I only know he is a dear; and has
got a beautiful tanned face and bold black eyes.”
The King felt inclined to have all the tanned faces and bold black eyes
in his kingdom put to death: but as the Princess’s obstinacy showed no
signs of abating, he ended by venting all his anger upon her. So on
the third day she was clothed in rags, and had all her jewellery taken
off her, and was turned out of the palace to find her way through the
world alone.
And as she went on and on, crying and wondering what would become
of her, she suddenly saw by the side of the road a charming cottage
with winter poppies growing at the door. And in the doorway stood a
beautiful man, with a tanned face and bold black eyes, looking as like
a poppy as it was possible for a man to look.
Then he opened his arms: and the Princess opened her arms: and he ran,
and she ran. And they ran and they ran and they ran, till they were
locked in each other’s arms, and lived happily ever after.
THE WOOING OF THE MAZE
Once upon a time there lived a beautiful Princess named Rosemary who
had all she wanted in the world but freedom. She had riches, and power,
and glory without end; but above and beyond all these things, her
beauty was like the sound of a trumpet.
If she lifted the veil from her face, or looked out from her window
at morning as she combed her bright hair, the whole plain at her
feet became like an army of banners, and the hillsides dark with the
galloping of her suitors.
Rejected potentates went clamouring to the four winds of heaven, of her
charm and of her cruelty; and the saying went that she had paved the
floor of her palace with the hearts which she had broken.
But she was weary, was weary of saying “No” to wooers she did not love;
and often when alone she would cry that her riches and her power and
her glory might vanish away from her, and her beauty too, save so much
of it as would win her the heart of the one man she loved, and leave
her to be tended by his hands, as was her sweet namesake rosemary.
One day at noon, when it was the middle of summer, she was lying on a
couch in the palace watching how the flies’ wings threw a network on
the air as they made love to each other and played. It seemed to her so
like the net that the swarm of her suitors threw round her day by day,
that she caught one of the flies, and to make it more like herself,
sprinkled it with gold dust so that it shone; then she let it go. But
to her surprise all the other flies avoided it, and the gilded one went
about solitary and alone.
“Oh! why then,” she cried, “am I not left free like yonder fly
sprinkled with gold?”
Just then under the window a young gardener at his work among the
flowers began singing; and this is what he sang:
“What will I do for my rose of the roses?
Build her a window that looks at the sky;
Fashion her bower with a door that so closes,
No man shall open or enter but I.”
The Princess waited till the words of the song were ended; then a smile
broke over her face; she took up her guitar, and with musically skilled
fingers played over the air as it had been sung. One by one the clear
notes sprang through the open window and fell upon the ears of the
listener on the green lawn below. Also her voice took up the air and
sang:
“Thus, in her heart, saith thy rose of the roses,
‘Build me a window with heaven for its brow;
Fashion my bower with a door that so closes,
No man shall open or enter but thou.’”
That same day the Princess, sitting upon her throne and having crown
and sceptre in her hands, caused the gardener to be called into her
presence. The courtiers thought it was very strange that the Princess
should have a thing of such importance to make known to a gardener that
it was necessary for her to receive him with crown and throne and
sceptre, as if it were an affair of state.
To the gardener, when he stood before her, she said, “Gardener, it
is my wish that there should be fashioned for me a very great maze,
so intricate and deceitful that no man who has not the secret of it
shall be able to penetrate therein. Inmost is to be a little tower and
fountains, and borders of sweet-smelling flowers and herbs. But the
man who fashions this maze and has its secret must remain in it for
ever lest he should betray his knowledge to others. So it is my will
that you should devise such a maze for my delight, and be yourself the
prisoner of your own craft when it is accomplished.”
The gardener lifted his head where he knelt, and saw the Princess
sitting with eyes fast shut and hard-bitten lips, and hands down loose
on either side of her, from which had fallen the crown and sceptre they
had held. Then he answered her, “Princess, by all the might of my craft
I will be, and it shall be so as you wish.”
Now the Princess gave it out to the world that, being so wooed, she was
minded to put all men who required her hand to a great test, that so
he who deserved her most might win her. Therefore at such and such a
time she made it to be known that she would withdraw herself from all
men’s eyes to the centre of a great maze strongly knit round by magic,
and that whoever desired her beauty and could penetrate through all the
deceits and dangers of that maze should possess herself and her lands
and her power, and live in glory of his achievement.
Day by day, out of her palace window, she watched the great maze as
it grew. Wondrously it wound like a huge serpent, gathering into its
fold many miles of country--wood and hill and valley, and great pits
and caverns. And far within rose a small round tower about which stood
fountains like silver willows blown by the wind; but the door no man
could see, for mighty hedges and walls circled all ways about, cutting
off what was below the eye, so that the inner garden lay hidden like a
skylark’s nest in the corn.
One day when the Princess asked, “How strong is this maze to be?” the
gardener answered, “As strong as love.” And when she asked, “How hard
will its way be to find?” he answered, “As hard as is the foolishness
of the kings and princes who shall seek thee therein.” Then she laughed
and was comforted in her heart when the day approached on which all the
world was to be parted from her.
On that day a hundred suitors had gathered to the Court, eager to prove
their prowess and win the most beautiful woman in all the world for a
bride. At night the palace was ablaze from floor to roof, for there a
great feast was held, at which sat Princess Rosemary, magnificent in
her beauty and the splendour of her robes and crown. And all the kings
and princes and lords bent round her with love and worship.
When the clocks struck midnight she rose, and all her jewels shone in
the fashion of a star, so thickly clustered the eye might not discern
one from other; but from heel to crown they clothed her as in a sheet
of fire. She passed down the midst of the hall, bowing both ways to
the assembly in gracious farewell, and her train as it went from floor
to floor was as a great retinue following her when she herself had
passed forth.
She went from terrace to terrace of garden under great trees where
torches and trombones hung, blown by the wind, till she came to the
entrance of the maze. Then she drew out of her breast a small chart,
and gazing thereon went as though fate-led out of sight and sound. And
all the crowd standing without watched the mysterious jewelled train of
her robe passing in after she was gone, as though itself knew the way
it had to go and the windings that led into the very heart of the maze.
A whispered tale went from mouth to mouth that he who had devised and
fashioned the maze had disappeared--was dead, lest the secret should be
betrayed. Some said “Poison”; some said nothing, but shook their heads
darkly and seemed wise.
At the first dawn of day the hundred kings, princes, and knights went
forth to the wooing of the maze, for there were many paths, and each
one went his own way.
For many days the doors remained sealed and silent as a tomb, and the
crowds that gathered daily to watch began dwindling away, and went back
to resume their neglected trades. At last the countries whose kings
did not return sent ambassadors with messages that became more and
more urgent in demanding their presence. They spoke of the balance of
thrones, and the encroachments of neighbouring powers, and the deaths
of relatives. These ambassadors went down to the various entrances at
which their masters had been seen to go in, and thence shot arrows at a
venture with the urgent messages attached to them. But yet none came to
answer.
Then the ambassadors were summoned away, for new kings had seized on
the vacant thrones, and the return of their predecessors became no
longer expedient. People almost forgot at last to trouble their heads,
save when fresh suitors came desirous of joining in the great wooing of
the maze, the more by reason of its apparent dangers. Then indeed for a
time gossips would wait and talk, but afterwards they went away.
Many years went by, and at last there came forth a knight with grizzled
hair and bowed head. He walked in loops and circles, and his eyes slid
from right to left over the ground at his feet. He seemed crazed, and
stuttered when he spoke. They asked him how he had fared. He showed
them many badges of other knights fastened about his shield and helmet.
“I overthrew these,” he said, “till I met one who said, ‘I am Old Age:
turn back!’”
They watched after him with his middle-aged stoop, till he had stumbled
his way into his own country. Some remembered him as a gallant young
knight fifteen years ago.
Yet the story went that the wondrous beauty of the Princess did not
fade; and the people became proud of a legend that spread so great a
distinction for their land, and would point to the maze and the far-off
fountains, and say, “There waits our beautiful Princess till one come
worthy to woo her.”
Twenty years had gone by when one day a goodly young Prince, with a
smiling countenance, and two long lances slung over his back, made his
appearance at the palace and demanded admittance to the maze. Half
the population streamed out to meet him, for it was many years since
the last wooer had come and vanished never to return. The country
remembered its importance, and gave him a great welcome. “Look what
long lances he has!” shouted the crowd. And then the doors of the maze
closed on him, and they went back to their work.
When the Prince had made some way into the maze, he fastened his horse
to a tree, took down his lances and--chopped off their points. Lo, and
behold! he had turned them into stilts, great high stilts, so that by
mounting them he could see far away over the windings of the maze into
the very heart of it.
Far off he could see the silver glint of fountains like grey willows
blown slantwise in the wind. That way with a pleasant tune in his heart
he straddled merrily along. If he found himself in a blind alley, or
being carried back by the windings of the road, he stood on one stilt
and went “leg over” with the other; thus his goings prospered.
Here and there, he came upon dead men lying in their armour; some of
them were quite old, others had long lances by their sides; they must
have been hard of understanding and foolish. He passed them all by.
For the whole long day he travelled, till towards evening he came upon
a little wood, and saw through the tree-boles the grey stones of the
little tower, and felt on his face the spray of the fountains carried
by the wind. Also he heard the sound of pleasant voices, and the stroke
of a spade in the earth.
Free of the wood the path led straight on, till at the end of it,
over a high hedge, lay a dainty bright garden. A man and a woman were
bending together over a border of flowers. Their faces were close
together, full of smiles as their hands gathered sprays of rosemary;
their hair was wet with the drift of the fountains.
Both were in the early middle-age of life, the woman tall and
broad-bosomed, her hair like a plaited crown of gold.
The man, as her face brushed his, laughed and began singing:
“What shall I do for my rose of the roses?
Build her a window that looks at the sky,
Fashion a door to her bower that so closes,
No man shall open or enter but I.”
The Prince came and looked over the hedge; at the end of the song the
gardener and his wife had raised themselves; the woman had her face
resting on the man’s shoulder, and her arms about his waist. As she
stood, her eyes came straight upon the intruder, who hung a laughing
head and shoulders over the garden hedge. Her mouth and eyes went wide
open, but breath was wanting for speech. She pinched her husband to
make him look round.
The Prince smiling, addressed them with the utmost courtesy, “Good Sir
and Madam, can you tell me whether the Princess is at home?” As he
spoke he lifted a stilt and planted it down on the flower-bed inside.
One more stride and he was in. There was a sudden clapping of hands.
“He’s a humorist!” cried the gardener’s wife.
“Please,” said he, as he climbed down from his height and stood once
more on his own feet, “please, I am come for the Princess; and I hope
she is not tired of waiting, and is as beautiful, and as young, as
report has led me to believe.”
The gardener’s wife laughed and ran into the tower. Presently from roof
to floor it was filled with a great rustling sound, and all the windows
shone with the colour of fire. Then out of the door came a lovely girl
blazing with jewels and drawing behind her a wonderful great train.
“Here is your Princess,” said her mother. How beautiful she was, how
radiant, how young! She came softly towards the Prince, laughing
and holding out her hand. He took it, and as he did so the whole of
the maze disappeared, and only the little tower with its fountains
remained. So the young couple went back to the palace and were married,
but the other couple stayed at home; and there they lived happily ever
after.
THE MOON-FLOWER
Princess Berenice sat by a window of her father’s palace, looking out
of the Moon. In her hand she held a great white pearl, and smiled, for
it was her mother’s birthday gift. The chamber in which she sat was of
pure silver, and in the floor was a small window by which she could see
out of the Moon and right down on to the Earth, where the moonbeams
were going. There it lay like a great green emerald; and wherever the
clouds parted to let the moonbeams go through, she could see the tops
of the trees, and broad fields with streams running by.
“Yonder is the land of the coloured stones,” she said to herself, “that
the merchants go down the moonbeams and bring home and sell.” And as
she bent lower and lower and gazed with curious eyes, the great pearl
rolled from her hand and fell out of the Moon, and went slipping and
sliding down a moonbeam, never stopping till it got to the Earth.
“My mother’s pearl!” cried the Princess, “the most beautiful of all her
pearls that she gave me. I must run down and bring it back; for if I
wait it will be lost. And as to-night is the full-moon down there upon
Earth, I can return before anyone finds out that I am gone.”
The Earth was sparkling a brighter green under the approach of night.
“Oh, land of the coloured stones!” cried the Princess; and, slipping
through the window, she stepped out of the Moon, and went running down
the same moonbeam by which the pearl had fallen.
Night came; and the Earth and the Moon lay looking at each other in
the midst of heaven, like an emerald and a pearl; but through the
palace, and within, over all its gardens and terraces there began
to be callings on the Princess Berenice; and presently there were
heart-searchings and fear, for they found the empty room with its open
window: and the Princess Berenice was not there.
Now, not long before this, upon our own Earth there had lived and died
a King who had four sons, but only three kingdoms. So when he came to
die he gave to each of his three eldest sons a kingdom apiece; but to
the youngest, having nothing else left to give, he gave only a pair of
travelling shoes, and said: “Wear these, and some day they will take
you to fortune!”
So, when the King was dead, the young Prince wore the shoes night and
day, hoping that some time or another they would take him to fortune.
His brothers laughed at him, and said: “Our father was wise to play
those old shoes off upon you! If it had been either of us we would have
gone and bought ourselves an army and fought for a just share in the
inheritance. But you seem pleased, so we ought to be.”
Now one day the Prince went out hunting in the forest, and there,
having become separated from all his friends, he thoroughly lost his
way. Wherever he turned the wood seemed to grow denser, the thickets
higher, and the solitude more than he ever remembered before. Night
came on, and, there being nothing else that he could do, he lay down
and wrapped himself in his cloak and slept.
When he awoke it was day, but the woods were as still as death; no
bird sang, and not a cricket chirped among the grass. As he sat up he
noticed that the shoe was gone from his left foot, nor could he see
it anywhere near. “’Tis the half of my inheritance gone!” he said to
himself, and got up to search about him. But still no shoe could he
find. At last he gave up the search as useless, and set off walking
without it. Then as it seemed to him so ridiculous to go limping along
with only one shoe on, he took off the remaining one, and threw it
away, saying: “Go, stupid, and find your fellow!”
To the Prince’s great astonishment, it set off at a rapid pace through
the wood, all of its own accord. The Prince, barefoot except for his
stockings, began to run after it.
Presently he found that he was losing his breath. “Hie, hie!” he
called out, “not quite so fast, little leather-skins!” But the shoe
paid him no heed and went on as before. It skipped through the grass
and brushwood, as if a young girl’s foot were dancing inside it; and
whenever it came to a fallen tree, or a boulder of rock it was up and
over with a jump like a grasshopper.
Before long the Prince’s stockings were nothing but holes and tatters;
as he ran they fluttered from his legs like ribbons. He had lost his
hat, and his cloak was torn into patterns, and he felt from head to
foot like a house all doors and windows. He was almost on his last
gasp when he saw that the shoe was making straight for a strange little
house of green bronze, shut in by a high wall, and showing no windows;
and in the middle of the wall was a bronze door shut fast. As he came
near he found that outside, on the doorstep, stood his other shoe as if
waiting to be let in. “So it was worth running for!” thought he; and
then, putting on both shoes again, he began knocking at the door.
As he knocked the door opened. It opened in such a curious way, flat
down like a swing-bridge or like the lid of a box. For some time he
was half afraid to walk in on the top of it. Presently, however, he
summoned up his courage and stepped across it.
The door closed behind him like a trap, and he found himself in a
beautiful house; all its walls were hung with gold and precious stones,
but everywhere was the emptiness and the silence of death.
He went from room to room seeking for any that lived there, but could
see no one. In one place he found thrown down a fan of white feathers
and pearl; and in another flowers, fresh plucked, lying close by a
cushion dinted and hollowed, as though the weight of a head or arm had
rested there. But beyond these there was no sign of a living thing to
be found.
Through the windows he saw deep bowery gardens hemmed in by high walls,
within which grew flowers of the loveliest kinds. All the paths were of
smooth grass, and everywhere were the traces of gentle handiwork; but
still not a soul was to be seen.
It seemed to the Prince now and then that there was something in the
garden which moved, distinct from the flowers, and shifting with a
will of its own. Though the sun shone full down, casting clear shadows
across the lawns, this that he saw was altogether misty and faint. Now
it seemed like a feather blown to and fro in the wind, and now like
broken gossamer threads, or like filmy edges of clouds melting away in
the heat. Where it went the flowers moved as though to make way for it,
swaying apart and falling together again as it passed.
The Prince watched and watched. He tired his eyes with watching, yet he
could see no more; and no way could he find to the garden, for all the
doors leading to it were locked fast and barred.
There was another strange thing he noticed which seemed to him to have
no meaning. All over the garden, between the trees and the sky, was
stretched a silver net, so fine that it showed only as a faint film
against the blue; but a net for all that. Here and there, the light of
the sun catching it, hung sparkling in its silver meshes. It was like
the net that a gardener throws over strawberry beds or currant bushes
to keep off the birds from the fruit. So was it with this net; through
it no bird could enter the garden, and no bird that was in the garden
could leave it.
All day the Prince had these two things before his eyes to wonder
about, till the sun went down and it began to get dusk.
At the moment when the sun sank below the earth there was a sound of
opening doors all over the house. The Prince ran and found one of the
doors leading into the garden wide open, and through it he could see
the stir of leaves, and the deep colours of the flowers growing deeper
in the dusk; only the evening primroses were lighting their soft lamps.
[Illustration]
From a distant part of the garden came the sound of falling water, and
a voice singing. As he approached he saw something shining against the
dark leaves higher than the heads of the flowers; and before he well
knew what he saw, he found before his eyes the most lovely woman that
the mind of man could believe in.
In her hand hung a watering-can, with the water falling from it in
sprays on to the flower beds beneath. Her head was bent far down, yet
how she looked slender and tall! She was very pale, yet a soft light
seemed to grow from her, the light of a new moon upon a twilight sky.
And now the Prince heard clearly the sweet voice, and the words that
she was singing:
“Listen, listen, listen,
O heart of the sea!
I am the Pearl of pearls
I am the Mother of pearls,
And the Mother of thee.
Glisten, glisten, glisten,
O bed of the sea!
Lost is the Pearl of pearls,
And all the divers for pearls
Are drowning for me.”
He stood enchanted to hear her; but the words of the song ended
suddenly in a deep sigh. The singer lifted her head; her eyes moved
like grey moths in the dusk, amid the whiteness of her face. At sight
of him they grew still and large, widening with a quiet wonder. Then
the beautiful face broke into smiles, and the Princess stretched out
her hands to him and laughed.
“Have you come,” she said, “to set me free?”
“To set you free?” asked the Prince.
“I am a prisoner,” she told him.
“Alas, then!” answered the Prince, “I am a prisoner also, and can
free no one; but were I now free to go wherever I would, I should be
a prisoner still, for I have seen the face of the loveliest heart on
earth!”
“Alas!” she sighed, “and can you not set me free?”
“Tell me,” he said, “what makes you a prisoner here?”
She pointed to the net over their heads, to the walls that stood on all
sides of them, and to the ground beneath their feet. “That,” she said,
“and that, and this.”
“Who are you?” he asked, “and where do you come from? and whose power
is it that now holds you captive?”
She led him on to a terrace, from which they could see out towards the
west; and there lay the new Moon, low down in the sky. “Yonder,” she
said, pointing to it, “is my home!” She wept. “Shall I ever return to
it?”
The Prince, gazing at her in wonder, cried, “Are you one of a Fairy
race?”
“No, oh, no!” she sighed. “I am but mortal like yourself; only my home
is there, while yours is here. We, who dwell in the Moon, are as you
are, but the sun has greater power over us; the light of it falling on
us makes us pale and unsubstantial, so that we weigh not so much as a
gossamer and become transparent as thin fleeces of cloud. Then we can
go where you cannot go, treading the light as it flies; but at sunset
we regain our strength, and our bodies come to us again; and we are as
you see me now--no different from yourselves, the inhabitants of the
Earth.”
“Tell me,” said the Prince, “of yourself, and the dwellers in the Moon!
Is it not cold there, and barren?”
She answered smiling, for the memory of her home was sweet to her,
“Outside, the Moon is cold and barren; but within it is very warm and
rich and fertile; more beautiful than any place I have seen on earth.
It is there we live; and we have flocks, and herds, and woods, and
rivers, and harbours, and seas. Also we have great cities built inside
the Moon’s crust, for the Moon is a great hollow shell, and we walk
upon its inner surface and are warm. The sunlight comes to us through
craters and clefts in the ground; and the beams of it are like solid
pillars of gold that quiver and sway as they shoot upwards into the
opal twilight of our world; and the shine and the warmth of it come to
us, and colour the air above our heads; but we are safe from its full
light falling on us, for the ground is between us and it. Only when
we pass through to the outer side do we become pale and faint, a mere
whisper of our former selves. And then we are so light that if we
step upon a moonbeam it will bear our weight; and the moonbeam carries
us swiftly as its own light travels, till it reaches the Earth: so we
come. But to return there is another way.”
And when the Prince asked her, she told him of the other way back into
the Moon.
“When we wish to return,” she went on “(for the falling light of a
moonbeam cannot carry us back), we must go where there is a pool of
still water and wait for the reflection of the Moon to fall on it; and
when the Moon is full, and throws its image into the water, then we
dive down, and with our lips touch the reflection of its face, crying,
‘Open, open to me, for I am a Moon-child!’ And the Moon will open her
face like a door of pearl, and let us pass in; and when she draws her
reflection out of the pool, we find ourselves once again among our own
people and in our own land. Many of us have so come and so returned,”
she sighed deeply, “but I fear that I shall never again return.”
Then the Prince asked her further whose power it was that held her
captive; and she told him how she had dropped the pearl that her mother
had given her, and had come down seeking it. Then she said, “In the
Moon we have many jewels, for we have opals and onyxes, and pearls and
moonstones, but we have no rubies, or emeralds, or sapphires, or stones
of a single colour, such as you have. Therefore, we have a passion for
these things, and our merchants come down and bring them back to us at
a great price.
“Now it chanced that in my search I came upon a gnome who had dealings
with our merchants and had many jewels to sell, and he, seeming to be
kind, helped me until my pearl was found. Then he took me to see his
own treasures; and, alas, while my eyes were feasting on the colours
of the stones he showed to me, my poor beauty inflamed the avarice of
his evil heart, and the desire to have me for his wife became great. So
when I asked him the price of his jewels, he vowed that the only price
at which he would let them go was that of my own hand in marriage.
Alas, I am young and innocent, and without subtlety, nor did I know how
great was his power and wickedness. As I laughed at his request his
face grew dark with rage, and I saw that I had incurred the undying
enmity of his cruel heart. And now for a whole year he has held me in
his enchantment, striving to break me to his will by the length and
weariness of my captivity; and lest search or any help should come
for me from my father’s people, he has covered me in with a net, and
surrounded me with walls; and here there is no pool into which the full
Moon may fall, and at the mere touch of my lips upon its face, open and
draw me free from my enchantment, and back into the heart of my own
land. Only yonder, in the corner of the garden is a deep well, where
the Moon never shines; so there is no way here left for me by which I
may get free.”
“Does not the gnome ever come to see you in your captivity?” asked the
Prince. “If so, I may by some means be able to entrap him, and force
him to let you go.”
“Twice in the year he has visited me,” answered the Princess. “He comes
up out of the ground in the form of a Red Mole; but he looks at me
wickedly and cunningly with the eyes of a man, seeming to say, ‘Will
you have me yet?’ And when I shake my head he burrows under again, and
is gone till another six months shall be past.”
The Prince thought for a while and said, “I do not know whether I have
the power or the wit to make you free; if love only were needed for the
work, to-morrow would see you as free as a bird.”
The Princess, between smiles and sighs, said, “I have been most lonely
here; already you make my imprisonment seem less.” Then she led him
within doors, from room to room, showing him the splendours of her
prison. Wherever they went, out of the floor before them rose burning
jewels that hung hovering over their heads to light them as they
passed; and when she struck her hands together, up from the ground rose
a table covered with fruit and dainties of all sorts; and when she and
the Prince had eaten, she clapped her hands again, and they disappeared
by the same way that they had come.
The Prince was struck with admiration at the delicacy of these marvels.
“When I think of the Red Mole, they sicken me!” said the Moon-Princess.
The good youth used all his arts to cheer her, promising to devote
himself, and if need be his life, to the task of setting her free. And
now and then she laughed and was almost merry again, forgetting the
walls that still held her spell-bound from her own people and her own
land.
She showed the Prince a chamber where he might sleep; and so soft and
warm was the couch after his last hard night on the ground, that it
was full day before he awoke. The Princess Berenice appeared before him
misty and faint, for the sunlight threw a veil upon her beauty; but
still as he looked at her he did not love her less, and it still seemed
to him that hers was the face of the loveliest heart on earth.
All day he watched her drifting about the garden, seeming to feed
herself on the scent of the flowers. In the evening, when the sun set,
her body grew strong and her face shone out to him like the new Moon
upon a twilight sky.
Then he drew water for her from the well, and watched her as she
watered the flowers which were her only delight. Presently he said,
“There is much water in the well, for the rope goes down into it many
fathoms; and yet I find no bottom.”
“Yes,” answered the Princess, “I doubt not that the well is deep.”
“Before many days are over,” said the Prince, “the well shall become a
pool.”
The Princess wondered to hear him. “Is there,” he went on, “no such
thing as a spade for me to dig with?” Then she led him to a shed, where
lay all the needed implements for gardening. So his eyes brightened,
while he cried, “O, beautiful Princess Berenice, as I love you, before
many weeks are over you shall be free!”
The next morning he arose very early, and in the centre of the garden,
where the ground hollowed somewhat, he marked out a space and set to
work to dig.
All day the Princess went to and fro, faint and pale as a mist,
watching him at his work. At dusk her beauty shone full upon him, and
she said, “What is this that you are doing?” He answered, “What I am
making shall presently become a pool; then when the pool is full, and
the full Moon comes and shines on it, you shall go down into the water,
and shall kiss the face of its reflection with your lips, and be free
from your enchantment.”
Princess Berenice looked long at him, and her eyes clung to his like
soft moths in the gloom. “But you?” she said, “You are no Moon-child,
and this will never set you free.”
“Ever since I saw you,” said the Prince, “I have not thought of
freedom; my dearest wish is but to set you free.”
The Princess gave him her hand. “And mine,” she said, “my dearest wish
henceforth is to set you free also. Yet I know but one way, and I
cannot name it.” She smiled tenderly on him, and bowed her face into
the shadow of her hair.
The Prince caught her in his arms, “One way is my way!” he cried. “Your
way,” she said, “is my way.” Then, when he had finished kissing her,
she said, “Look, on my finger is a ring; this ring is for him to whom
I give myself in marriage. Surely, it opens to him the heart of my own
people, and he becomes one of us, a child of the Moon.” She showed him
an opal ring, full of fires. “If your way is my way,” she said, “draw
this off my finger, and put it upon your own, and take me to be your
wife!”
So the Prince drew off the ring from her finger, and set it upon his
own; and as he did so he felt indeed the heart of the Moon-people
become his own, and the love of the Moon strike root in him. Yet did
the love of the Earth remain his as well, making it seem as if all the
love in his heart had but doubled itself.
So he and the most beautiful Berenice were married there by the
light of the new Moon, and all thought of sorrow or danger from the
encirclement that bound them was lost in their great joy.
During the whole of the next day the Prince went on with his digging,
making a broad shallow in the ground. “Before the full Moon comes,” he
said, “I will make it deep.” And he worked on, refusing to take any
rest.
The Princess loved him more and more as she watched him; and his love
for her daily increased, for every day, while the Moon grew full, her
beauty shone in greater perfection and splendour. “Here,” she said to
him, “the coming of the full Moon is like the coming of Spring to me: I
feel it in my blood. After the full Moon my beauty will wane and grow
paler. But in my own land I do not feel these changes, for there it is
always the full Moon.” The Prince answered her, “To me your beauty,
though it grows more, will not ever grow less.”
At last, on the day before that of the full Moon, the pit which he had
dug was broad and deep; then he began to fill it with water from the
well. “To-morrow,” he said to his wife, when the pool was nearly full,
as she came and stood by his side at sunset in the full blaze of her
beauty, “to-morrow we shall be free; and you will carry me away with
you into your own land.”
“I do not know,” said the Princess; “I begin to be afraid!” and she
sighed heavily. “Any day the Red Mole may come: one day is not too soon
for him to be here.”
“But why need you fear him now?” asked the Prince. “Since you are
married to me, you cannot be married to him.”
“As to that,” said she, “I fear that to have outwitted him will but
make his malice all the greater against us!” Then she walked softly
among the moonbeams, bathing her hands in them, and letting them fall
upon the loveliness of her face; and as she stood in their light, tears
rained down out of her eyes.
In the morning it seemed as if her happiness had returned. The Prince,
as he toiled under the blazing sun, carrying water from the well to the
pool, felt her moving by his side, and heard her light shadowy laughter
when, just before sunset, the water flowed level to the pool’s brink.
And when dusk rose out of the grass, there she stood glowing with the
full Moon of her beauty and leaning in all the light of her loveliness
towards him.
The happy night drew round them; out of the East came the glow of the
full Moon as it rose; soon, soon it would cross the tops of the trees
and rest its face upon the quiet waters of the pool. They clung in each
other’s arms, entranced. “My beautiful,” said the Prince, “shall we not
take to your mother some of those jewels she loves--the green, and the
red, and the blue, and the pearl which was hers, the quest of which has
cost you so much?” He ran into one of the jewelled chambers where lay
the pearl, and caught from the walls the largest stones he could find.
Quickly he went and returned, for the Moon was now fast cresting the
avenues of the garden. He came bearing the jewels in his hands.
Princess Berenice stood no longer by the brink of the pool, though
therein lay the image of the Moon’s face, a circle of pale gold upon
the water. “Berenice,” called the Prince, and ran through the garden
searching for her. “Berenice!” he cried by the well; but she was not
there. “Berenice!” His voice grew trembling and weak, and quick fear
took hold of him. “O, my beautiful, my beloved, where are you?”
Only the silence stood up to answer him. Under his feet ran a Red Mole.
It scampered across the grass, and disappeared through a burrow in the
ground. Then the Prince knew that the worst had surely come, and that
his Princess had been taken away from him. Where she was he could not
know; within her former prison she was nowhere to be seen.
All night the Prince lay weeping by the brink of the pool, where she
had last stood before his sight; the print of her dear feet still
lay on the lawn where she had stayed waiting with him so long. “O,
miserable wretch that I am!” he cried, kissing the trodden grass. “Now
never again may I hope to behold you, or hear your dear voice!”
All the day following he wandered like a ghost from place to place,
filling the empty garden with memories of her presence, and sighing
over and over again the music of her name. All the flowers glowed
round him in their accustomed beauty; new buds came into life, and full
blooms broke and fell; not a thing seemed to sorrow for her loss except
himself. As for the flowers, he paid them little heed.
In his sleep that night a dream came to him, a dream as of something
that whispered and laughed in his ear. Over and over again it seemed to
be saying, “The Red Mole came, and the full Moon came, and the Princess
jumped down into the water!” Then his heart knocked so loud for joy
that he started awake, and saw the Red Mole scuffling away to its
borrow in the ground.
Then he feared that the dream was but a thing devised to cheat his
fancy, and get rid of him by making him go away and search for his
Princess in the land of the Moon, by the way that she had told him.
But he thought to himself, “If the Red Mole wants so much to get me
away, it means that my beloved is somewhere near at hand. Is she in the
well?” he began wondering; and as soon as it was light he went to where
lay the well in its corner under the shadow of the wall. But though he
searched long and diligently, there was no trace of her that he could
find.
Yet every time he came near to the well sorrow seemed to take hold of
him, and, mixed with it, a kind of joy, as though indeed the heart of
his beloved beat in this place. Near to the well stood a tall flower
with bowed head. It seemed to him the only one in the whole garden that
had any share in his sorrow: he wondered if the flower had grown up to
mark the sad place of her burial.
“O, my beloved Berenice, art thou near me now?” he murmured,
heart-broken, one day as he passed by: then it seemed to him that all
at once the flower stirred. He turned to look at it; it was like a
sunflower, but white even to its centre, and its head kept drooping as
if for pure grief. “Berenice, Berenice!” he wept, passing it.
At dusk he returned again; and now the flower’s head was lifted up, and
shone with a strange lustre. The Prince, as he went by on his way to
the well, saw the flower turn its head, bending its face ever towards
where he was. Then grief and joy stirred in his heart. “The flower
knows where she is!” he said.
So he bent, whispering, “Where, then, is Berenice?” and the flower
lifted its head, and hung quite still, looking at him.
Then the Prince whispered again, “The Red Mole came, and the full Moon
came, and the Princess jumped down into the water?”
But the flower swayed its head from side to side, and the Prince found
that it had answered “No.”
Then he had it in his mind to ask of it further things; but, as he was
about to speak, he beheld its face all brimming over with tears, that
suddenly broke and fell down in a shower over its leaves.
At that his heart leaped, and his voice choked as he cried, “Art _thou_
my beloved, my Berenice?” And all at once the flower swayed down, and
leaned, and fell weeping against his breast.
So at last he knew! And joy and grief struggled together in him for
mastery.
All that night he knelt with the flower’s head upon his heart, stroking
its soft leaves, and letting it rest between his hands; till, towards
dawn, it seemed to him that peace was upon it and sleep.
All through the day it hung faint upon its stem; but when evening came
it lifted its head and shone in moon-like beauty; and so deep for it
was the Prince’s love and compassion that he could hardly bear to be
absent from its side one moment of the day or night.
And, when he was very weary, he lay down under its shadow to sleep; and
the Moon-flower bent down and rested its head upon his face.
All night long in dreams Berenice came back to him. He seemed to hear
how the Red Mole had come, and changed her to a rooted shape, lest the
full Moon in the water should carry her away from him back into her own
land. Yet it was only a dream, and the Prince could learn nothing there
of the way by which he might set her free.
A month went by, and he said to his Flower, “To-night is the night of
the full Moon: now, if I drew you from the ground, and carried you
down, and called for the Moon’s face to open to us, would you not
be free from the enchantment, when you were come again to your own
people?” But the Moon-flower shook its head, as if to bid him still
wait and watch patiently.
Now, as the Prince came and went day by day, he began to notice that
the Moon-flower had its roots in a small green mound, no bigger than a
mole-hill; and he thought to himself, “surely that mound was not there
at first: the Red Mole must be down below at work!” So he watched it
from day to day; and at last he knew for certain that, as time went on,
the mound grew larger.
Month by month the mound upon which the Moon-flower had root increased
in size; yet the Flower thrived, and its beauty shone brighter as each
full Moon approached, so that at last the Prince’s fear lest the Red
Mole were working mischief against its life, passed away.
Once, on the night of a full Moon, as the Prince lay with his head
upon Earth, and the Moon-flower bowed over his face, he heard under
the mound a peal of silvery laughter; and at the sound of it the
Moon-flower started, and stood erect, and a stir of delight seemed to
take hold of its leaves. Again the laughter came, and the soft earth
moved at the sound of it.
The Prince started up, and ran and fetched a spade, and struck it down
under the loose soil of the mound. When he lifted up the earth, out
sprang a tiny child like a lobe of quicksilver, laughing merrily with
its first leap into the light. But even then its laughter changed into
a cry; for out after it darted the Red Mole, with fury in its whiskers,
and wrath flashing out of its eyes.
The quicksilver child sprang away, darting swiftly over the grass
towards the margin of the pool. There lay the full Moon’s image upon
the clear stillness of the water; and the child leapt down the bank,
and laughed as it sprang safely away. Then there followed a tiny
splash; and the Prince, amid the rings upon the water’s surface, saw,
like a door of pearl, the Moon’s face open and close again. And the
Red Mole went down into the earth gnashing its teeth for rage.
The Prince ran back to the Moon-flower, and found it bent forwards
and trembling with fear. Then he drew its head towards his heart, and
whispered “The Red Mole came, and the full Moon came, and the silver
child jumped down into the water!” And at that the Flower lifted its
head and began clapping its leaves for joy.
A month went by, and the green mound had disappeared from beneath the
Moon-flower’s roots; and still every night the Prince lay down under
the shadow of its leaves; and the Flower bent over him, and laid its
head against his face.
As he lay so, one night, and watched the full Moon travelling high
overhead, he saw a shadow begin to cross over it; and he knew that it
was the eclipse, which is the shadow of the Earth passing over the face
of the Moon; then he rose softly, leaving the Moon-flower asleep, and
went and stood by the brink of the pool.
Up in the Moon the silver child felt the shadow of the Earth fall upon
the face of the Moon; and he came and touched the Earth’s shadow with
his lips, crying, “Open, open to me, for I am an Earth-child!” Then
the Earth’s shadow that was upon the Moon opened, and the silver child
sprang through.
The Prince, watching the veiled image of the Moon’s face in the water,
saw the Earth’s shadow open like a door, so that for an instant the
brightness of the Moon shone through, and out sprang the quicksilver
child, up to the surface of the pool.
He leapt laughing up the bank, and went running over the grass to where
the Moon-flower was standing. He reached up his arms, and caught the
Flower by the head.
“O mother, mother, mother!” he cried as he kissed it.
And at the touch of his lips the Moon-flower opened and changed,
growing wondrously tall and fair; and the flower turned into a face,
and the leaves disappeared, till it was the beautiful Princess Berenice
herself, who stooped down and took the quicksilver child up into her
arms.
She cried, fondling him, “Did they give you your name?”
And the child laughed. “They call me Gammelyn,” he said.
The Prince caught them both together in his arms. “Come, come!” he
shouted and laughed, “for yonder is the full Moon waiting for us!” And,
lifting them up, he ran with them to the borders of the pool.
And the Red Mole came, and the full Moon came; and the Prince, and the
Princess, and the silver child jumped down into the water.
Then the Prince laid his lips against the reflection of the Earth’s
shadow, crying, “Open, open to me, for I am a child of the Earth!”
And the shadow opened like a door to let them pass through. Then they
pressed their lips against the reflection of the Moon’s face crying,
“Open, open to us, for we are Moon-children!” And the Moon opened her
face like a door of pearl, so that they sprang through together, and
were safe.
And when the Moon drew its reflection out of the pool, they found
themselves in the land of the Moon, in the silver chamber with the
round window, in the palace of Princess Berenice’s father.
Looking out through the window, down at the end of a long moonbeam they
saw the Red Mole gnashing his whiskers for rage. Then the Prince took
off his shoes, and threw them with all his might down the moonbeam at
the Mole.
As the shoes fell, they went faster, and faster, and faster, till they
came to earth; and they struck the Mole so hard upon the head that he
died.
Now as for Gammelyn and the shoes we may hear of them again elsewhere;
but as for the Prince and his beautiful Princess Berenice, the
happiness in which they lived for the rest of their days is too great
even to be told.
THE WHITE KING
Many years ago there lived a Queen who could not keep count of the
countries over which she ruled. Her wealth and her wonderful beauty
made her an apple of discord to all the kings who lived round about her
borders. For love of her they waged perpetual war upon one another,
and every King who proved victorious made a gift to the Queen of the
country of the one whom he had conquered, in the hopes of thereby
strengthening his claim to her favour. Thus it came about that she
could no longer keep count of the lands which had fallen under her
rule; yet still of all her suitors she chose none.
Now at this time there was one King, and only one, who had not
succeeded in losing his heart to the Queen’s majesty, in spite of her
wealth and power, and all her wonderful beauty. And so, during a long
time, since his fancy was thus free, he was left in undisturbed peace
and prosperity, while other kings fought out their jealous battles, and
stole away each other’s lands. And because his reign was so quiet and
his country in such rest, his people for a pet-name and for their pride
in him, named him the White King.
Now after a time the Queen took it as an insult that anyone should be
so indifferent to the power of her charms, and she began to threaten
him with war for this reason and for that, wishing thereby to cajole
him into becoming her suitor. But the White King saw through all
the disguises with which she covered her meaning, and understood the
arrogance of her claim; so one day he sent to her as a gift a statue of
himself with his sword sheathed, and all his armour covered over with
the cloak of peace. Round the base of it was written
“When a heart in stone doth move,
Then your lover I may prove;
But until the marvel’s done,
Fruitlessly your wars are won.”
The Queen looked once at the statue, and for a long time after never
looked away; and when at last she did her heart had been taken captive.
Then she looked at the words beneath, and the red flush that rose to
her face was not gone when the last of her army passed out of the city
gates to carry war into the country of the man who had dared thus to
speak scorn of her.
For a whole year the White King fought with the forces she sent against
him; but when all the other kings came to her aid, then, stronghold by
stronghold, all his cities were taken, and his lands were laid waste
and their villages burnt, and nothing but defeat and ruin remained.
Yet in the last battle, when his enemies thought to have him a
safe prisoner, all of a sudden they found that the White King had
disappeared.
Back came the Queen’s armies in triumph with their allies, and the
conquered territory was added as one more to the many that formed her
realm. But the Queen sighed as she looked at the White King’s statue,
and her triumph grew bitter to her. Day by day, as she looked at the
calm marble face, her love for it increased, and she owned sadly to
herself, “He whom I have conquered has conquered me!”
Of the lost King himself no tidings could be learned, though search was
made far and wide. Minstrels came to the court, and sang of his great
deeds in fighting against odds, but of his end they sang variously.
Some sang that he lay buried beneath the thickest of the slain; others
that from his last battle he had been carried by good fairies, and that
after he had been healed of his wounds, he would return in a hundred
years and recover his kingdom.
One minstrel came to stay at the court who sang of ruined homes and
wasted fields, and a happy land laid desolate, and how its King
wandered friendless and unknown through the world, hiding himself in
disguise, sometimes in the cottages of the poor, and sometimes in the
dwellings of the rich. But from no one could the Queen learn any news
that satisfied her or gave hope that he would at last bend down his
pride, and come and sue to her for forgiveness.
Wishing to have a hiding place for her grief, she caused the statue to
be set up in a green glade in the most lonely part of the gardens; and
there often she would go and gaze on the calm noble face (whose closed
eyes seemed even now to disdain her love), and would wonder how long a
queen’s heart took to break.
But after a time she thought, “Though I may never win the love of the
White King for my own, is there no way by which my passion can assuage
itself, when by lifting my finger I can summon half fairyland to my
aid?”
So she called to her the most powerful fairy she knew, and taking her
into the green glade, began sighing and weeping in front of the White
King’s statue. “This,” she said, “is the image of the only man on earth
I can love! But the man himself is lost, gone I know not where; and my
heart is breaking for grief! Give this statue a life and a heart, and
teach it to love me, else soon I shall surely be dead!”
The Fairy said to her, “All the might of Fairyland could not do so
much; but a little of it I can do; and if Fate is kind to you, Fate may
bring the rest of it to pass.”
“How much can you do?” asked the Queen.
“This only,” said the Fairy, “but even that you must do for yourself.
I can but show you the way. Stone is stone, and out of stone I cannot
make a heart; but a heart may grow into it, and this is the way to
compass it.
“You must find first a man who is loved, but does not love (for if
he loves, the statue’s heart when it wakes will turn from you); and
him you must kill with your own hand, and take out his heart and bury
it beneath the feet of the statue. Then I will work my charms, and
gradually, as a flower draws its life out of the ground, so the statue
will draw life out of the human heart buried below. And after a little
time you will see it move, and in a little time more its senses will
come, and it will be able to hear, and see, and speak. But full life
will not come to it until it has learned to love. Then, so soon as it
learns to love, it will become no longer stone, but a human being.”
But the Queen said, “Supposing its love were to turn from me to
another, where should I be then?”
“Surely,” said the Fairy, “the secret will be your own, and the
watching of its life as it grows will be yours. Your voice it will
hear, your face it will see; whom, then, will it learn to love more
than you?”
“Wait, then, till I have found the man,” said the Queen, “and we will
do this thing between us!”
She searched long among her court for some man whose heart was whole,
but who was himself loved. Generally, however, she found it was all the
other way. There was not a man at the court who was not in love, or did
not think himself so; and if there were one who had no thought of love,
he was too poor and mean for the love of any woman to be his.
But one day the Queen heard a minstrel in the palace courtyard singing
and making merry against love. It was that same minstrel who sang only
sad songs of the White King’s lands laid waste and himself a wanderer:
a fellow with a dark sunburnt face, and thick hair hanging over his
eyes. And as he sang and rattled his jests at the courtiers who stood
by to listen, the Queen noticed one of her waiting-women looking out of
a small lattice, who, as she watched the singer’s face, and listened to
his words, had tears running fast down out of her eyes.
“Is this a case,” thought the Queen, “of a man who is loved but who
does not love?”
She sent for the minstrel, and said to him, when he stood bending his
head before her, “Is this pretty scorn that you cast on love earnest or
jest?”
“Nay,” he answered, “I jest in good earnest; for to speak of love in
earnest is to jest about it.”
“So,” said the Queen, “you are heart-whole?”
“Why,” said the minstrel, “I doubt if a mouse could find its way in;
and if I am heart-whole in your presence, I ought to be safe from all
the world!”
“Now,” thought the Queen, “if only my waiting-woman answers the test,
here is the heart I will have out!”
Then she bade the minstrel follow her to where stood the White King’s
statue, bidding him sit down under it and sing her more of his rhymes
about love.
So the minstrel crossed his legs in the long grass and sang. His song
became bitter to the Queen’s ears, for he took the words that were
round the statue, and rhymed them and chimed them, and threw them
laughing in the Queen’s face. She hated him so that she could have
poisoned him; but she remembered that his life was necessary for her
experiment to reach its end. So she sent instead for a sleepy wine,
which she gave him to drink, and presently his voice grew thick and his
head dropped down upon his breast, and his legs slid out and brought
him down level with the grass. When night came on she left him soundly
sleeping with his head between the feet of the White King’s statue.
Then she sent for the waiting-woman and said, “Go down to the White
King’s statue, and find for me my handkerchief which I have dropped
there.” But as the girl went, the Queen stole secretly after her, and
watched her come to where the minstrel lay asleep.
[Illustration]
And when the waiting-maid saw him lying so, with his face thrown back,
she knelt down in the grass by his side, and putting her arms softly
about him, kissed him upon the lips over and over again as though she
could never come to an end; and her tears dropped down on to his face,
and, as if her mind were gone mad for love of him, the Queen heard her
sighing, “Oh, White King, my White King, my Beloved, whom I love, but
who loves me not!”
As soon as the waiting-maid was gone, the Queen came softly to the
place, and with a sharp knife she cut out the minstrel’s heart and
buried it at the base of the statue.
In the morning the minstrel was found lying dead with his heart gone;
and when they washed the dead face and put back the hair that covered
the eyes, they found that it was the White King himself.
That day, and for many days after, there were two women weeping in the
palace: one was the Queen and the other was the waiting-woman. But the
body of the White King they buried close by the statue in the green
glade.
Now presently, when the first violence of her grief was over, the Queen
came to look at the place; and, sure enough, the Fairy had been there
with her spells. When the wind blew the statue swayed gently like a
tree in the wind.
The Queen caused gates and barriers to be put up so that no one should
enter the glade but herself; only Love found a way, and at night, when
all the world was asleep, the waiting-woman crept through a loose pale
in the barriers, and came to moan over the place where her lover had
been slain.
All night she would lie with her arms round the feet of the White
King’s statue, and dream of the dead minstrel whom she had loved and
known through all his disguise. And all night long her lips would
murmur his name, and whisper over and over again the sad story of her
love.
And presently, as the statue drew life from the heart buried beneath
its feet, its ears were opened and it heard.
In the daytime the Queen would come and sit before it and whisper words
of love, offering it all the gifts of riches and power that are in the
hands of kings to give; but at night came the waiting-woman and offered
it only love.
Out of the ground the Queen saw grow a small plant, that began to creep
upwards and to wind itself round the base of the statue; and when she
saw that its flower was the deadly nightshade, her heart trembled and
her conscience made her afraid.
But the waiting-maid, when she saw it, picked the sad blossoms and made
a crown for the statue’s head as of pale amethyst and gold: for she
said to herself, “Down below my dear lies dead, and the roots of this
flower are in his hair.”
One day as the Queen came into the glade, she heard the dead minstrel’s
voice, and her heart shook with terror as she saw the statue open its
white lips and sing, and recognised the tune and the words as those
which had made her heart feel so bitter against him; for she thought,
“What if he knows that it is I who have slain him?”
Now that she saw that the stone had its five senses, and could see and
speak and hear, she pleaded to it all day out of the greatness of her
grief and her love. But the statue never returned her a word.
At night, lying with her face bowed between the White King’s statue’s
feet, the waiting-woman knew nothing of all this change; only the
statue heard and saw and knew. And at last one day as her tears dropped
on them, she felt the feet grow warm between her hands; and a voice
over her head that she remembered and loved, said, “Little heart, why
are you weeping so?”
In the morning the Queen came and found the statue gone. There on the
pedestal was only the print of his feet, half covered by the deadly
nightshade which had climbed up to his knees and fallen. There it lay
heavy and half-withered, clasping the hollows where his feet had been.
The Queen knelt down and caught the bare stone pedestal in her arms.
“Oh, Love,” she cried, “have you left me? Oh, White King, my White
King, have you betrayed me?” And as she clung there weeping, her lips
touched the deadly nightshade; and the nightshade thrilled, and felt
joy give new life down into its roots.
It reached up and laid its arms about the Queen, about her throat,
and about her feet and about her waist. “Dearly, dearly we love each
other,” said the nightshade, “do we not?”
At night the courtiers came, and found only a dead Queen lying, and the
statue gone.
But the White King had gone home to his own land to marry the
waiting-woman.
THE PASSIONATE PUPPETS
When the long days of summer began, Killian, the cow-herd, was able
to lead his drove up into the hills, giving them the high pastures to
range. Then from sunrise to sunset he was alone, except when, early
each morning, Grendel and the other girls came up to carry down the
milk to the villages.
All day long the cow-bells sounded in his ears, but still the time of
his wedding was a long way off; it would be five years before he and
Grendel could afford to set up a house and farm, with cows of their own.
The great stretch of world that lay out under him, like a broad map
coloured blue and green, made him full of a restless longing to try
his fortune. Yonder he could pick out the towns with their spires and
glittering roofs, and the overhead mists, that gave token of crowded
life below. It was there that wealth could be got; and with wealth men
married soon, and were at ease. Somewhere, he had heard, lived kings
and queens, wearing rich robes and gold crowns on the top of their
heart’s desire. For kings and queens, he supposed, loved as did he and
Grendel, regarding nothing else as much in the world besides.
So Killian, putting heart into his deft hands, set to work.
One evening Grendel came up from the valley, after her day’s work, to
have a look at her lover; she had brought him some brown cakes and a
bottle of wine. But Killian, who had caught sight of her eyes over the
green rise at his feet, was hiding something behind his back.
“Whatever have you there?” she asked, as she saw chips, and tools, and
bits of bright foil, lying scattered about the ground. Yet for three
days he would show her nothing, only he said, “What I do is because we
love each other so.”
At the end of that time, he showed her what he had done. There she saw
a little king and queen, about six inches high; he was in blue, and
she in white; and they were both as dear as they were small. The king
was partly like a cow-herd, having a crown over his broad-brimmed hat,
with thick wooden shoes, and leather-bound legs; and the queen was
like Grendel, with great long plaits past her waist, and a gold-worked
bodice, such as Grendel had for Sunday wear. “Aye, aye,” cried Grendel,
“why, it is you and me!”
Then Killian showed her how the joints of the little puppets moved on
delicate wires, and how four strings ran up, one from each limb, to be
fastened to the player’s fingers, so that he might make them act as
though life were in them.
“I shall take these down with me to the valley,” said Killian. “First I
shall go about among the villages; then, when I can do better, I shall
go to the towns. After that no doubt the kings and queens will hear of
me, and will send for me to play before them, and I shall become rich.
Then I shall come home and marry you.”
Grendel thought her lover the most wonderful man in the world, and it
is the truth he was very clever; she kissed him a hundred times, and
the little marionettes also. “Ah,” she said, “now we shall not have to
wait five years! in five months you will come back rich and famous, and
we shall marry, and live happily.”
How Killian had loved her while making his puppets, only she knew as
well as he. Truly, he had put his heart into them, so that they were
like living beings,--and so small that their very smallness made them
a marvel. Being a lover, he had put inside each breast a little heart,
and, for the luck of the thing, had christened them with a drop of his
own blood, and a drop of Grendel’s; so each heart had in it one little
drop of blood. Now he was to go out, and try his fortune.
He found a lad to come and take his place and see after the cows; then
he said good-bye to Grendel, and set off on a round of all the villages
of the plain.
At every inn where he put up, he called the country folk together to
the sound of his shepherd’s bag-pipes, and showed them his play. It was
only himself and Grendel, no story at all, merely lovers parting and
meeting again, each believing the other dead, and in the end living
happily to the sound of cow-bells, that showed how rich they were in
herds.
And the villagers laughed and cried, and gave him pence, and a night’s
lodging, and food; so that presently he was able to make himself a
little travelling-stage, and hire a piper to play dance-music for him.
But it was always the one story of himself and Grendel, and no other,
though the two puppets wore crowns upon their heads.
* * * * *
The little marionettes had hearts. That was the beginning of things:
they remembered nothing else. When their eyes had grown open to the
fact, then for them life had begun. After that they lived like bee and
blossom, only that the bee never flew away, and the honey remained in
the blossom.
How this came to pass was a question they never asked; why they loved
each other they did not know. If they had had to think of it they would
have said, “It is because we cannot help it.” And every day one same
thing happened to them that they could not help, the most beautiful
thing in life. It came to them by instinct, taking hold of them from
head to feet and saying, “Love, love, love,” in all sorts of wonderful
ways.
Whenever this thing happened they began to move about softly, going
to and fro, and round and round, dancing, and holding each other by
the hand, putting their cheeks so close together that their eyelids
brushed, and sometimes their little hearts that heaved. And all the
while music from somewhere was giving a meaning to these things; and
over and over again, “Love, love, love” was what it kept saying to them.
Their happiness was so great, that they would begin playing with it,
pretending that it was all turned into grief. First he would kiss her
from forehead to chin, and into the hollow of her little throat; and
then all down each dear arm, even to the finger-tips; and last of all
her feet; and again last of all her lips, and again last of all her
breast. And then he would go away, walking backwards most of the time,
or if not, still turning round and round to take another look at her.
Then when he was altogether out of sight, she would sit down and cry,
though all the while he would be peeping at her from his hiding-place,
to let her know that he was not really gone. Then she would lie down,
and cry more, and at last leave off crying and stay almost still on a
little bed, that seemed to come to her from nowhere, just when she was
ready to fall on it. Then, at last, she would shut her eyes, and cover
her face up very slowly with a sheet, and lie so still that he would
grow quite frightened, and come running from his hiding-place, and lift
the sheet, and look at her; then he would fall down as if his legs had
been cut from under him; then he would get up and throw flowers over
her, and at last catch her up and begin to carry her; and at that she
would wake up all at once and kiss him, to a sound of bells.
They did not know why they did this; it was so beautiful they could not
have thought of it for themselves, and yet it said everything of life
that they wanted to say. For love was the beginning and the end of it;
and always, as they came to the sad part, they had tender tremblings
for fear the other should think the sorrow was real: he, lest she
should think he had really gone away and left her, never to return; and
she, lest he should believe that she always meant to lie so cruelly
still, with a sheet over her eyes. Yet the kissings that came after
made the fearfulness almost the sweetest thing in their prayer-sayings
to each other.
For to them this was a daily prayer, the most solemn thing in their
lives; heart praying to heart, and hand reaching to hand; and from
somewhere overhead gentle monitions as to what they must do next coming
to them, so that they knew how to pray best, now by lifting a hand, or
now by turning the head, or now by running fast with both feet. And
all this beautiful worship of love their bodies learned to do more
perfectly day by day; yet the little quaking of fear was still in the
centre of it all.
* * * * *
Killian’s fingers grew nimble; and yet he often wondered to see how
true to life his puppets were, how they sighed, how they embraced and
clung, as if their hearts were coming in two when the parting drew
near. How lingeringly the little queen drew up the sheet over her
face, when her lover did not return, and let it fall to cover her with
a quiet sigh. Often he cried when she did that part, so like Grendel
was it,--the tender waiting, and the last giving in! And then, how the
little king shuddered as he drew the cloth from her face; and how he
threw the flowers, as if there were not enough in the world to express
his grief! And yet it was only a play, made by the twitching of the
strings tied to his fingers, with love as the beginning and end of it.
Killian was getting quite rich in copper coin, so he sent some of it
home to Grendel, that she might buy stock for the home that was so soon
to be theirs. And presently he made bold to go into the towns, where,
instead of copper, he might gain silver. He built a bigger stage,
and had more music to go to the dance; but still it was the story of
himself and Grendel, with crowns upon their heads, and nothing more.
And now, indeed, people began to cry, “Here is a wonderful new actor!
He has it all at the ends of his fingers! What a pity he has no better
play in which to show himself off!” But Killian said, “It is the only
play I know how to do.”
Presently there came a sharp fellow to him, who said: “If you will go
shares with me I will make your fortune. We have only to put our heads
together, and the thing is done. I will write the plays for you, and
you shall play them on the strings. What is wanted is a little more
real life.”
Killian was a simple fellow, who believed all the world to be wiser
than himself. He was glad enough to meet with a clever fellow who could
write plays for him. His partner wanted him to make new dresses for
the marionettes, to suit their new parts; but to that Killian would
not agree. So whatever they were they still wore their broad hats and
crowns, and their wooden shoes, that still he might watch in his own
mind himself and Grendel making their way to fortune and happiness.
The marionettes grew bewildered with their new taking; they did not
understand the meaning of all the coarse things they had to do. So
in the middle of a play, the little queen would fail now and then in
her part, and move awkwardly, wondering what her lover meant when he
sprawled to and fro, and seemed trying to find in the air more feet
than he had upon the ground.
Yet the crowd found her bashful fear so irresistibly funny, that it
roared again. Also, when the little cow-herd with the crown on his
head, lifted his hand or foot towards his partner, and then shrank
trembling away, it roared yet more at the poltroon manner of the thing.
Killian’s partner said, “You alter all my plays, but the way you do
them is something to marvel at. Only, why do you always bring them
round again to that silly lovers’ ending?”
“I cannot help it,” said Killian; “often now, with these new plays, I
can’t get the strings to work properly. I think the poor puppets are
getting worn out.”
His partner began examining the puppets, and watching how Killian
played them, with more attention; and presently he knew that there was
more in it than met the eye. “It is the puppets who are the marvel, not
the man,” he said to himself. “I could work them better myself, if I
had practice.”
Soon after this he proposed that they should set off for another town;
it was the chief town of all, where they hoped at last to be allowed
to show their plays to the queen herself. “It must be a real play this
time,” said the partner, “a tragedy; but it wants a third person. You
must make another puppet, while I write the play!”
So Killian set to work. But he had no love for the third puppet, which
was neither himself nor Grendel, and he put no heart inside it, and no
little drop of blood. So the new marionette was but limbs, and a head
drawn on wires.
“Soon,” thought Killian, “I shall be rich enough to go home and marry
Grendel. Then I will throw this stupid third one away; but the other
two we will always keep close to the niche with the statue of Our Lady,
to help to make us thankful for the good things God gives us in this
world.”
It was beautiful late spring weather when he and his companion set out
for the capital. On the way Killian’s partner told him the play that
would have to be played before the queen, and said, “In case three
should be too much for you to manage, you had better teach me also to
handle the strings.” So Killian began to teach him, with the two little
marionettes alone, the first play which he had brought down with him
from the mountains,--that being the easiest of all to learn, and the
one he loved best to teach.
The partner was surprised to find how wonderfully the puppets followed
the leading-strings; in spite of his clumsiness the story acted itself
to perfection.
Simple-hearted Killian was charmed. “Ah! you clever townsman,” said
he, “see how at first trial you equal poor me, who have been at it for
months! It had better be you, after all, to do the play when it is
called for at the court.” And this Killian proposed truly out of pure
modesty, but also because he did not like the play his partner had made
for him. “It is too cruel a one!” he said. “After they have played it
together so long, I feel as if my two puppets can do nothing else so
well as love each other, and live happily.”
“Ah, but,” said his partner, “the queen would find that very dull!”
Killian could not see why; but he believed that the townsman was wiser
than himself, and gave in. All he wanted now was to get money enough to
run back home with, and throw himself into his dear Grendel’s arms for
life.
So they journeyed on, and at last, one day, they came in sight of the
capital. But it had been such a long way to come that when they reached
the gates they found them shut.
The night was warm, and a high moon was overhead. “Come,” said Killian,
“and let us lie down in one of these orchards that are outside the
walls!” So they left the high road, and went and lay down.
First they ate some food that they carried with them. Then Killian
opened the case in which lay the two marionettes, and looked them over
to see that they were in working order. His partner took up the odd
number, and began practising it; but Killian’s attention all went to
the little king-cowherd and his queen.
He fondled them gently with his hands, and as he looked at them his
heart went up into the mountains to pray for his dear Grendel.
Presently he began dreaming to himself like Jacob, only his dream was
just of the simple things of earth. Down the great green uplands came
troops of white cattle; but to him they seemed to be bridesmaids coming
to Grendel’s wedding day, and the ringing of the cow-bells was as
sweet to him as the songs of angels. Before he was fast asleep the two
marionettes had slipped off his knee and lay in the deep grass looking
up at the sky.
* * * * *
They had never seen so beautiful a sight before, for never had they
spent a night in the sweet open air till now. Over their heads swung
dusky clusters of blossom, that would look white by day; and over them
the moon went kissing its way from star to star.
Now and then single blossoms dropped as if they had something to say to
the little cow-herd and his queen, lying there in the cool grass.
But the marionettes said nothing; their hearts were very full; now, at
last, they found their old happiness return to them. Their prayers,
that they used to say to each other so tenderly, had been going wrong
for quite a long time; sudden starts and tremblings of fear had taken
hold of their light-hearted deceptions of each other; and every day
things had been going worse. But now they felt like entering upon a
long rest.
As they lay, their hands met together. The little cow-herd could count
her fingers across the palm of his hand, and never once did she pretend
to be drawing them away. How good it all seemed!
Close by them the odd man was strutting in stiff, ungainly attitudes,
cricking his neck and elbows, and tossing up his toes. How foolish he
seemed to them in their innocent wisdom! They knew he was nothing to
them, for he had no heart; he was nothing but a trick on springs. Yet
they wished he would go away, and give them room to be alone, while the
moon was making a white dream over their lives.
* * * * *
The partner grumbled to himself at the awkward ways of the new
puppet. Instead of obeying, it kicked at the leading strings, and did
everything like a stick, all angles and corners. Presently he put
it back into its box; and then he saw the little king and queen lying
together on the damp grass. He picked them up, growling at Killian as
a simpleton, for leaving them there to get rusty with the dew. Then he
put them also away, and curled himself up to dream about the success of
his play on the morrow.
[Illustration]
Quite early in the morning he and Killian went into the city, and set
up their stage in a corner of the market-place. The wonderful acting
of the little king and queen, compared with the ungainly hobblings
and jerkings of the odd man, threw the townspeople into ecstasies of
laughter. They declared they had never seen so funny a sight in their
lives as the beautiful nervous acting of the pair, side by side with
the stiff-jointed awkwardness of the other.
Presently, sure enough, the queen heard tell of this new form of
entertainment, and sent word for the mummers to appear at the palace.
Killian said to his partner: “There is something the matter with the
puppets to-day; they want careful handling. I am glad we settled that
you are to do the new play; for, before the queen and her great ladies,
I am likely to lose my head.”
All the court was gathered together to watch the puppet-play, while
behind the scenes the partner took all the leading strings into his own
hands.
* * * * *
The two marionettes opened their eyes, and saw daylight; they began
moving to and fro softly; every now and then they put their faces
together and kissed. The stupid odd man seemed to have gone; they were
so glad to be left alone.
Soon the little king lay down, pretending to be tired, but it was only
that he might put his head in the queen’s lap. She bent over him, and
laid her fingers on his eyes, seeming to say, “Go to sleep, then! I
will shut your eyes for you.” How pretty it was of her!
Then she covered his face over with her handkerchief; and all at once
in came the odd man, walking on the points of his toes. The little
king, now that the handkerchief was over his face, opened his eyes, and
looked through it, to see what his dear queen would be doing now. The
odd man had his arms round her neck, and was kissing her, and the queen
looked as if she were going to kiss him back; but all at once she had
pushed away the odd man so hard that he fell down with his heels in the
air; and then she snatched the handkerchief from the king’s face, and
began trembling, and kissing him.
The whole of the court shouted, first with laughter at the odd man’s
fall, and then with admiration at the wonderful acting of the little
queen.
Behind the scenes the partner began grumbling to Killian: “They are
going all wrong! It’s all your doing, leaving them to lie in the damp
grass last night!”
But still the whole court shouted and applauded. So the play went on;
and now, more and more, the showman had cause to grumble. Whenever he
came to a part where the play required that the queen should turn from
her own cow-herd to the ugly odd man, everything went wrong. “Very
well,” thought he at last, “she may be as innocent as Desdemona but it
will all come to the same at the last!”
And so, still more, as the play went on, the little marionettes
trembled and shook with fear. They wished the silly odd man would go
away, and not come interrupting their prayers; and all the while they
loved each other so! No idea of jealousy ever entered the little king’s
head; and as for the queen, if the odd man came and put his arms round
her neck and kissed her, could she help it? All she could do was to run
and put her arms round her own lover when he reappeared; and how the
court shouted and applauded, when she went so quick from one to the
other.
At last the final act was begun; the king came running in with a sword
in his hand, why, he did not know, until he saw his poor little queen
struggling in the arms of the odd man. “Ah,” thought he, “it is to
drive him away! Then we shall be by ourselves again, and happy.”
No one ever fought so wonderfully on a stage before as the little
cow-herd. All the court started to their feet, shouting; and still,
while they shouted, they laughed to see the impossible odd man scooping
about with his sword, and jerking head over heels, and high up into the
air, to get away from the little king’s sword-play. The partner had to
keep snatching him up out of harm’s way, for fear of a wrong ending.
Then, suddenly he let him come down with a jump on the little king’s
head. And at that the king fell back upon the ground, and felt a sharp
pain go through his heart.
The odd man drew out his sword and laughed; on the end of it was a tiny
drop of blood. The poor little queen ran up, and bent down to look in
her lover’s face, to know if he were really hurt. And then a terrible
thing happened.
Three times the little king raised his sword and pointed it at her
heart, and dropped it again. And all the time the partner was tugging
at the strings, and swearing by all the worst things he knew.
The little king felt himself growing weak; he was very frightened. He
felt as if he were going away altogether, and leaving her to think he
did not love her any more. And still his arm went up and down, pointing
the sword at her heart.
The showman tugged angrily; then there was the sound of a wire that
snapped--the king had thrown away his sword.
He reached up his two arms, and laid them fast round the queen’s neck.
“Now at last she knows that I have not left off loving her.” He felt
her drawing herself away, he held her more and more tightly to his
breast; and now her little face lay close against his. Nothing can take
her away from him now!
The showman pulled violently with all his might, to get her away; there
was a snapping of strings, and then--the queen reached out two weak
little hands, and laid them under her lover’s head.
They lay quite still, quite still for a long time, and never moved.
“The play is over!” said the showman, disgusted and angry at the wreck
of his plot.
Suddenly the whole stage became showered with gold; the great queen and
all her court threw out showers of it like rain. It fell all over the
two marionettes, covering them where they lay, just as the babes in the
wood when they died were covered over with leaves.
Killian dropped his head on to the boards of the little stage, and
sobbed. The partner let down the curtain, and began gathering up the
gold.
And still, from without, the queen and her court clapped, and cried
their applause; and still within lay Killian with his head upon the
stage, sobbing for the two little marionettes, lying still with all the
springs and strings of their bodies quite broken. Inside, though he
could not see them, their hearts were broken also. “Now,” he thought,
“I must go back to Grendel, or I too shall die!”
Later, in the middle of the night, the partner went away, carrying
with him all the gold that the little marionettes had earned by their
deaths. And these, indeed, he left, seeing that they were useless any
more. But to Killian, when he woke the next morning, they were the only
things left him in the world, to take back to Grendel.
He took them just as they were, locked in each other’s arms, and went
back all the long way to Grendel, up into the hills of his home, as
poor in money as when he first started.
But Grendel saw that he had come back rich; for his face was grown
tender and wise. And for five years they waited very patiently
together, till by cow-keeping he had earned enough for them to keep
some cows of their own, and to live in married happiness.
The little marionettes they put on a shelf, beneath the cross, and the
statue of our Lady; and there, locked in each other’s arms, those two
disciples and martyrs of love lie at peace, feeling no pain any more in
their broken hearts.
KNOONIE IN THE SLEEPING PALACE
Just when the palace fell into its deep sleep, the porter’s son had run
out to follow a swarm of bees which had flown over the fish-ponds into
the woods lying outside the royal demesne. In the very minute after
he had climbed the wood-pales, to the time when the shifty swarm came
swinging its long bright tangle for home, calling on him to retrace
his pursuit, sleep had clapped down like a great eyelid over the whole
palace.
Knoonie made a clear leap over the palings into the royal clover; and
then felt something hurting his heart, he could not know what or why,
very strange, very frightening; it was like waking up all alone in
the middle of a dark night, and feeling that something was standing
quite still in the silence before him--quite still, because he himself
had moved. He took one step forward, and at that sprang aside as if a
snake were under him: his foot had made no sound in the clover! Then,
thinking his ears must have deceived him, he tried once more. Ah! now
it was so frightful that his courage went utterly: “Help, help!” he
cried with all the force of his lungs: but his voice gave no sound. The
dead silence that weighed on his struggles to cry, drove him wild with
terror.
He set off running as if Death were after him: running like a blind
thing; and knew nothing more till he fell half-stunned and bleeding
into the gateway of the palace-courtyard.
He sprang, and tapped with his hand on the porter’s wicket. “Father,
dear father, open quick!” he cried. But the words fell mute, and the
wicket did not open. Then he began beating with his fists on the bronze
panels, and, seizing hold of the knocker, battered for dear life.
For dear life! But dear reason almost died in the attempt. The great
bronze knocker beat without making a sound. He stopped his ears with
his fingers to get rid of the stillness which was so terrible: and then
at last he began to think that while in the wood he must have gone
stone-deaf. But he was frightened; though he was deaf, others surely
should hear him: again he beat and beat upon the knocker, throwing his
whole weight upon it, and cried with the tears running down his face
for his father to come to him.
Surely somebody must come. No, all was quite still as well as silent:
nothing moved: everywhere it was the same. There was a sentry on guard
over the gate: Knoonie could see his helmet and the top of his halbert
shining in the sun. He cried to him to come down and let him in; but
the man stood so still that he began to think he must truly have lost
the power of speech as well as of hearing. He stooped down, and taking
up a stone, threw it at the soldier to make him turn round; moving away
from the wall so as to get a better aim, he was able to see more of
him. The sentry stood very strangely; he must be asleep or sun-struck,
for a small green paroquet had come and perched on his shoulder.
The fifth stone Knoonie threw (for fear had made his hand tremble) hit
the soldier on the head; and yet he did not wake up, and the strange
little paroquet remained as if stuffed and glued to its perch.
Then Knoonie, casting his eyes all round for anything to help, saw a
new sight. All down the broad avenues of the park a movement was taking
place from the earth upwards: it came nearer and nearer: it was like a
green army on the march: it waved long prickly spears and many-pointed
crests, and sent green things like lizards swarming into the high
trees that stood in its way. Up and up, closer and higher to the very
gates of the palace it came--a wall of thistles, magic in strength and
stature, over-ranked by beetling heads of hemlock, and under-run by
long snakey loops of bramble, that writhed in and out of the earth like
huge worms.
“I must be dreaming!” thought Knoonie for a way out of his distress.
“It’s all one horrid dream which will come to an end just as the worst
thing happens.” But the giant thistles came crowding close, reaching
hungry hands at him. He caught hold of the knocker, and dragging
himself up was able in his terror to force open the wicket, and work
his small body through, just as the first thistle caught him by the
leg. He escaped shoeless and with all his hose torn into ribands from
the knee. Inside he came upon his father, sitting in his accustomed
niche, keys in hand, sitting quite still with head bent and closed eyes.
The child began to tremble and cry; he forgot any longer to think it
was a dream; a remembrance like the touch of dead lips chilled his
heart: the remembrance that while his father had been sitting there
almost within reach of his hand, he, Knoonie, had cried and beaten
with all his force upon the door, and had not been heard. He threw his
arms round his father’s neck, and clinging close to the deaf face he
loved: “Father, father,” he cried, “wake!” But his words had no sound,
and the porter made no sound or stir.
Dead, dead! Knoonie threw up his hands, and trying vainly to utter one
call for help, darted into the palace.
After a long time, he came out again with a white face, looking dazed
into the sunlight: what was it he had seen in there? Beautiful lords
and ladies, still as death, smiling and bending over golden plates and
half-tasted wine; serving men who stood upright and still as death,
carrying dishes and tilting out the wine into great tankards; and, over
all, the yellow sunlight streaming in licked the dead faces as a beast
licks carrion.
He ran tottering over the marble pavement, as fast as fear would send
him; to get away out of the palace and fetch help for all these dead or
dying people: for there must still be somebody left somewhere. But when
he came to the porter’s lodge, there was a sight in the wicket that
stopped him: the small square aperture was bulged through by thistle
and bramble, in the midst of which his little shoe hung trussed and
skewered; the hard grasp of the thistles had bent it out of shape, and
the thorns of the bramble had cut into the leather like the steel teeth
of a trap. Looking through, he could see nothing but one dense forest
of thistles, made the more impassable by a thick mesh of creepers that
clung about their stems. He climbed up on to the walls: everywhere
was the same; those death’s heads of hemlock had grown higher than the
trees of the park, and threw their shadows over the whole palace.
Slowly, the meaning of the horror which had first been so impossible
for his mind to take in grew clear to his imagination. The sleeping
palace, that whispered tale of his childhood, was embodied before him;
and of all those who had heard it told, and laughed it lightly away
because every day brought sameness of life to each sense, he alone
was left awake to drink the full cup of this sleep of doom, he alone,
amid others unconscious of their arrested life, with all the ways
of knowledge closed from him by an overwhelming silence, he and he
only must live and move, and endure this living tomb, till the Prince
Rescuer should come, of whom the same tale gave promise. The great
palace where he had been such a little thing at everybody’s beck and
call, one for the grooms to tease, and for maids and serving-men to
harry, was his own possession now, to do in what he would; but no joy
came to him with this growing sense of a strange liberty. He went from
place to place, tiptoeing at first, hardly daring to enter those grand
chambers where the king and his great lords were sitting in state; but
the lords-in-waiting stood making way for him with closed eyes; and he
might see and touch and taste whatever he chose.
He went and stood behind great ladies, and stroked their shining hair,
and touched their white wondrous throats, and the strong hands of the
knights, the King’s even, with its gold signet ring; but there was no
joy in any of these things. And when hunger came on him he put out
his hand and helped himself from the King’s plate: yet though he had
tasted no such delicacies in his life before, they gave him no pleasure
now. He looked at all the beautiful ladies with their sweet-smiling
lips, and remembered how he had thought that to be kissed by them would
be almost death, so great must be the delight. Now he climbed up to the
sweetest of them all, and tried to imagine her as the mother he had
never known; yet when he kissed, and saw how the lips went smiling on,
it was such bitterness that the tears burst from his eyes, and fell
into the velvet lap of her dress. He caught up a napkin, “For when
she wakes up she will see what a mess I have made and be angry,” he
thought: then he remembered the hundred years, and cried still more.
At last, when it began to get dark, weary with sorrow, and drawn
thither by a growing fear of his loneliness, he went back to the gate,
and there, kissing him, lay down with his head on his father’s knee,
and clinging to the hand that had hold of the keys of his prison, wept
himself to sleep. Ah! how happy would he be if sleep would join his
lot to theirs, and his eyes never open again till the whole day of
deliverance was come. Alas! that the bees should have led him beyond
reach of the charm which would have brought sleep, and only back to be
enclosed in the impenetrable embrace of that thorny fastness.
The next day’s sun shone down and opened Knoonie’s eyes; and he rose
up into the life-long silence that encompassed him; and, kissing
his father’s face, went forth into the joyless splendours of his
prison-house.
This day he climbed all the towers, and strained his eyes for a glimpse
of the great unsleeping world beyond. But high and far the forest of
thorns had stretched itself; and he could only see here and there the
blue of the most distant hills through gaps of thicket.
Then he went down, and sought out all his old acquaintances, the
stable-boys who played with him, the grooms who bullied, and the maids
who teased. He came face to face with the terrible head-cook, who had
so many times threatened to beat him to a jelly; now Knoonie could have
boxed the tyrant’s head off, and no hand would be there to stay him;
but he only stood and looked at the big grim face and the closed eyes,
and longed hungrily for a blow from that coarse red fist.
He went on to the stables; and now who was there to forbid him his
heart’s desire to climb on to the back of the King’s great charger, who
stood sleeping with beautifully arched neck: yet when he had clambered
his way up by the manger, it was no pride to him to be there: he only
bowed his face down into the black mane and wept.
That same day he found the Princess sleeping in her chamber;
oh! so beautiful she was with her little white hand laid on the
spinning-wheel, a small prick of scarlet showing on the delicate skin.
So beautiful she was, he dared not kiss her yet, for he did not know
that anyone who could win entrance into the sleeping palace, could
by kissing the Princess break the charm and gain her for his bride.
Already more than one brave knight had entered that vast forest of
thorns and thrown away his life in striving to get to those lips which
were Knoonie’s for a little stooping. But he was a child and he did not
understand.
The days went by, the weeks went by, and the child fell in with ever
deepening sadness to the loneliness of his environment. His wistful
face grew beautiful and pure in that still air, and the picture of
courtly life that encircled his lent him an unconscious grace. Yet
he stayed humble and sad, and every night, leaving beds of down and
pillows of lace untouched, went back to kiss his father’s face and lie
with his head on his knee. As for food, that great palace held stores
which would suffice him through many lives; and during the magic sleep
nothing changed or decayed: even the milk stayed fresh through the many
years to come; a hundred shining pails of it standing in the king’s
dairy.
The weeks, the months, even the years went by; but the child forgot the
passing of time; and the less and less of a child, retained the child’s
heart still, lonely and sad; with a child’s will and brain, with the
memory of its childish prattle dying away, and no words or thoughts of
a growing man to take its place; and amid that sleep of dreamless men,
where even the thought of evil did not enter, his heart was left to
him, gentle, simple, and pure.
Every night at his father’s knee Knoonie knelt and said his evening
prayer, and slept well, with the porter’s hand in his. Years made his
body fair and of a slender strength, and through the deep silence he
grew tall. And he would go and look at the sweet-faced women, and
wonder why he sighed, and why it was so sad to kiss their lips that
smiled and yet cared nothing--so sad that as years went on he left
off from that which seemed to put a double silence on his life, the
pain being too keen for his heart. And then he would go and look at the
Princess whose lips he had never kissed: and that seemed the saddest
thing of all.
Still years went on, and his mild mute life bore him very slowly on
to age: and still night by night, a young man once, and then a man in
his full prime, and then a man with grey hair showing on his head, and
then a man beginning to bend down with age, went and said his childish
prayer, and kissed his father’s face, and slept with his head against
his father’s knee.
Very gently had life cradled him to age when a hundred years came
round: he had lost all knowledge or thought of speech, save that one
form of daily use, and his silver-grey face was a reflection of the
spirit that brooded over the sleeping palace.
The great day came when all the palace clocks, and the sounds of
speech and laughter woke back to life. The thorns and thistles
had disappeared, dropping a child’s shoe for luck over the palace
threshold: the Prince had come and broken the spell. The cook was
screaming that a hundred cats had been at the cream.
In a far-off corner of the palace Knoonie heard, and knew what these
sounds meant, and his heart trembled for joy: but it was so very
terrible! To him the pain, the bewilderment, the multitude of sights
and sounds made this renewed life an agony past knowing; he was so
giddy he could only creep hand over hand along the wall towards the
gate where his father sat. Now his one thought was to see his father.
As he came under the archway, the porter took him by the shoulder
roughly, and turned him out of doors. “We want no naked old mendicants
here.”
Knoonie found no words to say; he just walked on and on, a beautiful
bowed down old man, bespoken of none, until one night he knocked at a
doorway in fairyland, and there with me found contentment and a home.
_Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld.,
London and Aylesbury._
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Hyphens restored in “will-o’-the-wisp” (page 26) and “Fire-eaters”
(page 88). All other inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left
unchanged.
Page 145: Extraneous quotation mark in “I don’t know,” removed.
Page 171: Typo “Princesss” corrected.
Missing puncutation restored: “out of his heart.” (page 113); “kissed
the hand,” (page 131); “try his fortune.” (page 192).
Some illustrations have been moved from the original positions for
readability.
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