by John Gardner
“Very well, I’ll tell you,” said the maiden, “but take my word for it, there’s no relief in sight, and I tell you my troubles only because I owe you, I suppose, an explanation.” With these words, her blue eyes both weeping and flashing, the maiden sat down on the green, mossy bank beside the road, and the dwarf disguised as a sparrow settled comfortably on a branch.
Chapter Three
The girl was a blacksmith’s daughter by the name of Armida. Her childhood had been happy, for her mother was a great, fierce, chortling woman who might have been a blacksmith herself if matters had gone otherwise and she’d been born a boy. But she took her misfortune in good spirit, as she always took everything in life, and pleased herself mostly with woman’s work, cooking and sewing and tending to the cow, which she sometimes carried to the field, for pure sport, on her shoulder. Armida’s father was a gentle, simple-hearted man who never cared a tittle for what people thought, as long as he got his dinner and his wife was good to him. He paid no attention—in those days anyway—if neighbors scoffed at the lack of decorum and convention in his house, for what was it to him? Their horses still needed shoeing, didn’t they, whether or not his wife, for pure pleasure, chopped down timber? They still needed chains made, and plowshares shaped, though his wife in her spare time carved tombstones. His household got increasingly out of hand, at least from his neighbors’ point of view, but the father grinned placidly, sipped hot, flat ale from his dented tin cup, and continued to let things slide. Thus it befell that when Armida was a baby, she got the habit of puttering in the glow of the forge, shoveling in coal or fashioning door-bolts or bending heavy iron in the company of her father, instead of helping her mother in the kitchen where she might have learned woman’s work.
“You’re a fool, Otto Ott,” the neighbors said, upbraiding her father. “That daughter of yours will grow up headstrong and powerful as an ox in May, and not a man in this world will ever hazard his life by marrying her.”
“God’s will be done,” said her father with a grin, for Armida was just nine, and it seemed to him no problem.
“Perhaps the neighbors are right, Otto,” her mother sometimes said, for though she was a merry, boisterous person, she had a deep, uncommon mind, and understood things as nobody else did.
But Armida’s father, who always enjoyed it when her mother opposed him, however casually, would guffaw and feint and get the drop on Armida’s mother and would pin her arm tight-as-a-clam behind her back, and the two of them would wrestle, laughing and puffing and kicking up dirt by the wheelbarrow-load, until her mother sucked in breath and broke her father’s hold and slammed him against the barn’s oak wall and knocked the last gasp of wind out of him. Then they’d laugh and laugh.
One night when Armida and her father came in from bending iron bars, they found her mother’s two feet sticking straight up like stumps under the wellhouse roof, and her head under the water, and to their horror and terrible sorrow she was dead. The neighbors, though perhaps they meant no harm, could not help feeling that the fault was Armida’s father’s. Had Armida been working in the kitchen, as she should have been, the tragedy, they said, would not have happened.
Her father’s heart was broken, and his self-confidence as well, and so, after he’d buried Armida’s mother—in a grave he’d dug out of solid rock and covered with a foot-thick iron door—he gave in, to the last detail, to his neighbors’ whims. He married a widow who had distant relatives at the king’s palace, and into her hands he put the training and grooming of Armida.
Alas that Armida had not died in that well with her mother!
The step-mother, who had a daughter of her own who happened to be exactly Armida’s age (and whose name was Clarella), was wonderfully gentle and kind to Armida when her father was near; but whenever his back was turned, she was mean as a snake. “Hopeless, hopeless!” she would hiss, with a look of spiteful glee, for Armida could do nothing right. She made her read books to see what heroines are like and told her to study her step-sister. She showed her paintings and read her poems and gave her exercises.
In one of the exercises which the step-mother used, trying to make Armida “an aristocrat,” she said, “instead of a staggering, rolling-eyed horse,” it was necessary to carry a book on one’s head. Armida, though pretty as a picture, heaven knows, was so strong that the weight of a book was like the weight of a feather in her hair, so that for the life of her she couldn’t tell where the book was and thus couldn’t balance it. Strange to say, out of love for her father—and because she shared, deep down, his remorseful feeling that the family had gone wrong, and that the neighbors were right—Armida was eager to please the step-mother, cruel as she might be, and learn, like a dutiful student, all her step-mother had to teach. Though she had liked her old life and loved her true mother, she couldn’t help feeling that what the step-mother said was true: Armida ought to be, like Clarella and the heroines in poems and stories—to say nothing of the ladies at tournaments and fairs, or at railroad stations—flimsy and graceful, helpless and fluttery when gentlemen were near, and whenever conversation turned serious, silly as a duck.
For this reason Armida worked night and day, part of the time reading, part of the time trying to balance books on her head and make her posture aristocratic—all to no avail. But Armida, like her mother before her, was gifted with an uncommonly good mind, and so she thought at last of a stratagem: when everyone was asleep she unfastened the stovepipe from the wall and put the stove on her head, and in this way she learned to walk head-erect, with the grace and light-footedness of a kitten. She learned, soon after, how to hide the fact that she had bones in her arms, and after that—by imitation of her step-sister, and by long hours of diligence—she learned to talk stupidly, as if nothing, even simple addition, could penetrate her skull.
In hardly more time than it takes to tell, Armida became—to her step-mother’s horror, to say nothing of the horror of her jealous stepsister—the most sought-after eligible young lady in the Suicide Mountains. Her father was neither pleased nor displeased, so far as one could tell; he merely drank his ale, fondling his dented tin cup as if it were his one last possession, and the more Armida watched him—furtively peeking out past the flowered chintz curtains on the kitchen window while she scrubbed the pots and pans—the more fearful she became in her heart. Then one night, by accident or not, her father fell into the forge which he’d fanned with his bellows to its hottest, and all that was left in the morning was the soles of his shoes.
Poor Armida! If her life had been terrible before, it was now ten times more terrible. When suitors came to visit, her cruel step-mother and cruel step-sister would listen critically at the door, and whenever she made some mistake, they would cackle like two witches. Nevertheless, the suitors kept coming until the whole house reeked with their flowers and was piled like a granary with their greeting cards and favors.
“Disgusting!” said her step-mother, picking up a love locket, newly delivered, between her long, pale, lumpy fingers.
“Well hello! It’s the walking honey pot,” said her step-sister, and gave a quick jerk to Armida’s yellow hair.
Poor Armida could well understand their scorn, for however she might hide it, her intelligence grew keener every day. She was a living lie, that was the heart of it. It was that, she could see, that lured those admirers to her door like ants: the aura of mystery that, in spite of her best intentions, she gave off like a scent of sachet. Little did they dream, those innumerable admirers, how simple, how unspeakably vulgar, was that mystery at the core: behind her elegant, filagreed facade, her studied femininity, those shoddily stolen little tactics of her step-sister’s—the fluttering lashes, the shy gazelle eyes—she was manlike, firm of flank as a farmer. They wrote her sonnets and graceful, silly sestets, gave her thimbles and real-silver sealing-wax sets, invited her to ride in their canoes by the summer’s moonlight. What would they have thought if she were suddenly to reveal that beneath the pink ribbons of her lacy dress sh
e had the muscles of a drafthorse, and under her burst of yellow hair the acumen of a banker? Yet it was so.
“Ah, mother, father, how unhappy I am,” she would sometimes whisper, lying in bed beside her sleeping step-sister, and a tear would trickle down her cheek. The more she was loved, the more she hated herself, and also the more she hated everyone around her. It began to be the case that, however soft her gestures, however unintelligible her murmured words, her blue eyes had moments of sparking like the eyes of an anarchist. Though admirers kept coming—she had never a free minute—she could see that they were jumpy, suspicious as cows on the train to the slaughterhouse, in the presence of her choked-in violence. The number of her admirers increased as the frightening sense of mystery increased, and she grew still more unhappy. Moreover, she could not help feeling sometimes, rightly or wrongly, that on rare occasions—but now increasingly often—the admirer sitting primly in the plush chair across from her, speaking lightly, amusingly (with slightly trembling fingers) of the bloodthirsty exploits of the “six-fingered man” (of whom she’d never heard and in whose bloodthirsty exploits she felt no slightest curiosity or interest)—or the admirer standing heavy-footed as a mule, pretending to listen as she played for him Für Elise—was glancing furtively past her in the direction of her step-sister. How much happier her admirers would have been with Clarella, had they only the sense to see it—Clarella whose femininity had been nurtured from her earliest childhood, so that by now it was as real, as whole and translucently unmysterious as a china dish or, say, a potato sprout.
The world rolled on, and things went from bad to worse for Armida, and she began to despair. A tragic realization had come to her by now: She hated her admirers for being fooled by her sham; and she hated and envied her step-sister Clarella, for whom the sham was second nature, as it would never be for poor Armida. She hated, in a word, everything. Lying in the wooden bed, irritably listening to her step-sister’s snoring, Armida began to dream up schemes. Perhaps she would travel to some distant village and “cross over,” as they say—put on the trousers and jacket and heavy leather apron of a blacksmith, and start up a blacksmith’s shop. But the thought at once sent cold shivers up her back. There’d been a time when the idea might have appealed to her, but the memory of her former, farmhorse ways was repulsive to her now. She thought then perhaps she would run off to Russia and become a bear tamer, with gleaming boots and a whip and fur hat—feminine but fierce, barbaric but not downright masculine. And maybe in the middle of a performance, a great, black bear would grow unexpectedly rebellious, would lash at her throat in his lightning-fast rage …
Tears brimmed up in Armida’s eyes and she found herself thinking about suicide.
It might have ended there, for in the morning she felt better; but the following afternoon, young Gnoff the Miller’s Son, her stepsister’s only suitor, brought Armida a rosewood box and Clarella nothing. After supper she heard her step-mother and step-sister whispering, and on tiptoe she went over to listen, bending down beside the door.
“Mother,” said her step-sister, sobbing into her hankie, “I’ve had all I can stand. Armida imitates me day and night—she’s like a walking mirror—and now she’s stolen from me my one and only suitor!”
“Hush, dear, Mama knows,” the wicked step-mother said. “Buck up, my child. Do as I say and your troubles will all be over.” Then, whispering still more softly, covering her mouth with her two milky hands (peeking through the keyhole Armida saw it all), the stepmother said, “Tonight when Armida’s fast asleep, you push her clear over to the edge of the bed, and then stay back out of the way, and I’ll come and chop her head off.”
Armida listened in horror to these words, then hurried back to scrub the pots and pans.
That night she lay awake at the edge of the bed until she heard her step-sister’s snoring, and then she got over on the side against the wall and pushed Clarella to the edge and lay perfectly still, waiting. Sure enough, in came her wicked step-mother carrying an ax. She groped about in the dark with her hand until she found Clarella’s ear, and she felt for where the neck was, and then down she came with all her might with the ax and so chopped her own daughter’s head off. Then she groped back to the stairs and went down to her bed.
“What a sinner I am,” thought Armida. It was as if she’d awakened from a witch’s spell and could suddenly see things plainly. She sat bolt upright, then crawled out of the bed before the blood could get all over her, and she hunted till she found an old birthday candle, and with trembling hands lit it, and as she held it up to look into the staring, once lovely gray eyes of Clarella she thought, bursting into tears, “I might as well have murdered my poor step-sister myself! What’s become of me? I must be mad!”
And now in a rush all the nice things Clarella had ever done for her came leaping—once, for instance, Clarella had shared her sandwich with Armida, after someone had stolen Armida’s lunch. Armida stepped away from the body, sickened, the back of one pale hand pressed against her forehead, tears streaming down her nose and cheeks. As she was stepping back another step, and after that another, she caught a glimpse of her frail white reflection in the mirror, and the image made her skin crawl. It seemed not the image of herself at all, but the image of feeble, nigh-transparent Clarella, all gossamer shimmies and expiring fibrillations, all rolled-up eyes and drooping sighs, but with manly shoulders and powerful thighs.
“Horrible!” she thought again. “I’ve become neither of us—nothing!
That moment the door opened at the bottom of the stairs, and Armida’s step-mother called up sweetly, “Is that you, dear?”
“Yes, Mama,” Armida called down in Clarella’s voice. But Armida’s step-mother wasn’t fooled for one minute and came flying up the stairs like a hawk after a chicken, and she was waving the ax and rolling her eyes around, and would have killed Armida for sure this time, had not Clarella done Armida one last favor. The old woman in her haste stepped on Clarella’s severed head, which rolled so that her feet went flying out from under her, and the ax went flying from the old woman’s fingers and came smack down on her own forehead, which it split in two pieces like a pumpkin.
“Horrible and more horrible!” thought Armida, and wrung her fingers. By morning she felt so guilty she made it definite: she would go up in the mountains, and the first good place she saw, she would kill herself.
“And that,” said Armida, rising with a sigh from the bank where she’d been sitting, “is the reason I’m up here, traveling through the mountains, full of remorse and, sometimes, rage.”
“But my dear girl,” cried the sparrow. Every feather stood on end and he was fluttering and fussing, distressed by Armida’s story and alarmed by her intention. He cocked his head, winked one black eye, and suddenly he was Chudu the Goat’s Son, leathery cheeks twitching.
Chapter Four
My dear girl, you mustn’t do it!” said Chudu the Goat’s Son, twitching and winking like a madman. Now, too late, he realized he’d made a mistake in turning back into himself. Armida was staring at him in righteous indignation, her fine eyebrows arched, her chin drawn inward and quivering, and to make matters worse her whole body was in confusion, torn between kicking him, as a farmer would kick a horse, and fainting dead away, eyes rolled upward, like a maiden shocked.
“You tricked me!” exclaimed Armida, her soft voice helpless, and she resolved the conflict toward the maidenly, and wept. “You’ve made me tell secrets I’d never told anyone!” Her hands, like orphans, clung tightly to one another, and her face, drained of blood, was as white as snow. “Oh, I wish I were dead!” she moaned, so sincerely that his heart almost stopped in its tracks. And now she wept in earnest.
The dwarf was so upset, so angry at himself and eager to atone, somehow be made use of—even if she should send him to point at pheasants, like a dog—that he tore off his hat without thinking and threw it on the ground and stomped on it. “Please, master, please!” cried the hat, but he went right on stomping it.
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When he’d vented his emotion, or some of it, he plucked up the hat again and put it on his head—where it sat trembling and whimpering, swearing to itself—and he said: “Armida, let me tell you I understand how you feel. No one knows better than I what a terrible thing it is to—”
But he saw she wasn’t listening; she’d taken advantage of his tantrum to collect herself. Still weeping and sniffling and brushing tears from her cheeks, but shaking her yellow hair out, her breast heaving less now, she’d walked up onto the road and was prepared to stride on. He gave a little jump when he saw what she was doing, and hurried to catch up with her.
“I too have a double identity of sorts, Armida,” said the Goat’s Son, awkwardly running along beside her now, pitifully looking up at her, the top of his head not even level with her waist. There was nobody else in the world to whom he’d have confessed his secret. He threw a quick look around the dark, slanting woods to see if anyone had heard him. There were a couple of round, brown bears bumping shoulders, and a wide-racked deer standing absolutely still, and on every hand there were twittering songbirds, but so far as he could tell they were all authentic, not shape-shifters. He pressed on fervently: “As a matter of fact I came up here into the mountains myself, just like you, to kill myself.” He stretched out his arms, skipping sideways, imploring her to listen, and awaited her reaction.
“Beat it,” she said angrily—not with cruel hostility but like an older sister, as if the troubles she experienced were beyond his ken-beyond, ha!, the emotional understanding of Chudu the Goat’s Son, who was two hundred and seven years old! Yet he saw himself accepting it: he would burble, grovel, do handsprings; he, Chudu, was her captive, he’d be anything she pleased.
Perhaps it was Armida’s intuition of that—the abject adoration of the ugly little dwarf with the great, black shark-mouth, the short arms extended in miserable entreaty, the crooked legs hurrying like the blades of a butterchurn—that made Armida once more burst out crying; for love is no small imposition, especially unrequited love; and though his experience was limited, even after two hundred years and more, since he was seldom even liked, Chudu the Goat’s Son understood pretty well all the ironies that enclosed her like the ribwork of a cage: here stood he for whose deformed and spiky love she had no faintest desire, and back in her village sat those foolish suitors. She had no one she respected who could love her for herself. It grieved and enraged him that he, Chudu, should be the cause of such distress—that his horrible adoration should awaken in her heart an idea of the kind of adoration she desired and, in all probability, would never never find in this whole vast universe.