“Two of them came over to me; the most distinguished of them pointed at my sausage pin and said, ‘This is exactly what we need! It has been cut to the right size.’ The more he looked at my walking cane, the happier he became.
“ ‘You may borrow it but not keep it,’ said I.
“ ‘Not keep it,’ repeated all the little creatures who now had gathered around my pin. I let go of it and they carried it over to the spot where the moss was so particularly soft; and there in the center they raised the sausage pin. They wanted a maypole too; and I must admit, the pin was just the right size for them. Then they decorated it and that was a beautiful sight!
“Tiny little spiders spun golden threads all around it; and on these veils and banners were hung; they were so white that they hurt one’s eyes to look upon. They had been bleached in moonlight. Colors gathered from butterflies’ wings were sprinkled on the white linen; and then the banners and veils looked like flowers and glittered like diamonds. I could hardly recognize my old sausage pin. Such a maypole as it became you could not match in the whole world. Not until now did the main party of the elves arrive. They had no clothes on at all, because among elves that is considered most elegant. I was invited to attend the party, but at a distance, because I was too big.
“Now began the music! It was as if a thousand glass bells were being struck. At first I thought that swans were singing; then I believed that I recognized the voices of the thrush and the cuckoo. ‘All the forest is singing,’ I thought. I seemed to hear chldren’s voices and birds’ songs and glass bells all merging in the most beautiful melodies. And all that lovely music came from the elves’ maypole, which was nothing but my sausage pin! I couldn’t believe that so much could be made out of a wooden peg, but I suppose that everything depends not upon the material but upon whose hands form it. I was so touched that I cried for joy as only a little mouse can.
“The night was all too short, but that far north it isn’t very long at that time of the year. As day broke, there came a breeze; ripples appeared upon the surface of the lake, and all the banners and veils disappeared into the air, as did the bridges and balconies the spiders had strung from leaf to leaf in the trees. Six elves brought the sausage pin back and asked me if I had any wish that they could grant me. I begged them to tell me how one cooked soup on a sausage pin.
“ ‘How we do it you have already seen,’ laughed their leader. ‘I am sure even you did not recognize your old sausage pin.’
“ ‘But that was not cooking soup,’ I said, and explained why I had set out on my travels and what I was expected to find out. ‘What use is it to our king, or to our great kingdom, that I have seen this wonderful sight? I can’t shake it out of the pin while I declare: “Here comes the soup!” Though I suppose it would do as a dish for the mind after one’s stomach was filled.’
“The elf dipped his finger in a blue violet and said to me, ‘Watch, now I will stroke your walking cane, and when you have returned to the mouse king’s palace, then touch the warm, royal chest of the king with the cane and immediately violets will be growing all the way up the stick; and that even if it is the middle of the winter. That is a gift worth bringing home and I will give you something more.…’ ”
But before the little mouse told what else the elf had given her, she touched the chest of the king and immediately the loveliest bouquet of flowers sprang forth. It smelled so strongly that the mouse king ordered the mice who stood nearest the fire to put their tails into it so that the smell of singeing hair could clear the air. The odor of violets was not a favorite; everyone found it nauseating.
“Yes,” said the little mouse, “that, I believe, is what is called the first course.” She turned; the sausage pin and the flowers were gone and she stood with the bare stick in her hand. Now she lifted it as if it were a conductor’s baton.
“ ‘Violets are for sight, smell, and feeling,’ said the elf to me, ‘but I will give you something, too, to please hearing and taste.’ ”
Now the little mouse swung her baton and the music began—not the kind she had heard in the forest when the elves held their ball; no, it was the kind fit for a kitchen. What a lot of noise! It was as though the wind suddenly were whirling down the chimney and through all the stovepipes. Pots and kettles boiled over. The big frying pan clattered as if it were going to jump down on the floor; then suddenly all was silent and you could hear the little teakettle’s solitary song. It sounded so strange; it had neither a beginning nor an end. Then the pots and pans began again; they did not care for harmony but sang each its own song. The little mouse swung her baton more and more wildly. Again the pots boiled over and the wind shot down the chimney. Ugh! it was a frightening racket; and at last the little mouse got so scared herself that she dropped the baton: her sausage pin.
“That was strong soup,” said the old mouse king. “Are you going to serve it now?”
“That was all,” declared the little mouse, and curtsied.
“Was that all?” said the mouse king. “Well, let us hear what the next one has to tell us.”
WHAT THE SECOND LITTLE MOUSE HAD TO TELL
“I was born in the royal library,” began the second mouse. “Neither my family nor I had ever had the pleasure of being in a dining room, not to speak of a larder. Not before I had traveled did I see a kitchen like the one we are gathered in. Frankly, we starved in the library; but we did acquire knowledge. The rumor reached us about the royal reward that had been promised the one who could cook soup upon a sausage pin. My old grandmother drew forth a manuscript wherein it was written—she couldn’t read herself, but had heard it once read aloud—that poets could cook soup upon a sausage pin. Now she asked me if I was a poet. I told her no, whereupon she told me to become one.
“ ‘But how does one do that?’ I asked, for that seemed to me as difficult as cooking soup. But my grandmother, who had listened to a lot of books being read out loud, said that three ingredients were necessary, namely: intelligence, fantasy, and feeling! If I could manage to get those things inside me, then I would be a poet, and the problem of the sausage pin would be easily solved.
“I walked west, out into the wide world, to become a poet.
“I knew that intelligence was the most important, the other two parts were not nearly as respected. Therefore I set out to acquire intelligence first; but where was it to be found? Go to the ant to become wise, an old king of the Jews had once said. This I knew from the library, so I went straight for the nearest anthill and hid near it, in order to become wise.
“They are a very respectable nation, the ants; they are pure intelligence. Everything in their world is solved as though it were an arithmetic problem; it is all figured out. To work and lay eggs, they say, is living: both in your own time and in the future; and that is what they do. They are divided into the clean ants and the dirty. All ranks are numbered: the queen ant is number one, and her opinions are the only ones that count, for she has swallowed all the wisdom there is.
“Now that was very important for me to know. She said so much that was so clever that I found it stupid. She said that the top of her anthill was the highest point in the world; it was built right next to an old oak tree, and that the oak tree was much higher than the anthill could not be disputed; so the ants never talked about the tree. One day one of the ants, having lost its way, climbed up the trunk of the tree. It didn’t get to the top but just a bit of the way up. When it returned home to the hill, it told everyone of the discovery it had made: that there existed in the world outside something much taller than their hill. The ants found this an insult to them, to their nation, and to society. The ant who had made the discovery was condemned to wear a muzzle and to spend the rest of its life in solitary confinement. A short time later, another ant made the same, journey and came to the same conclusion. He, too, spoke about his discovery but in a learned and vague manner. Since he was a very respectable ant and belonged to the faction called ‘clean,’ the other ants believed him. When he died an
eggshell was put up as a monument to him, for all the ants agreed that they respected science.
“I noticed,” continued the little mouse, “that the ants carried their eggs on their backs. One of them lost hers and in spite of her strenuous efforts could not get them up on her back again.… Two other female ants came running over to help her. They pushed and they shoved until they were almost about to lose their own eggs in the process; but then they stopped trying to assist the other poor ant, for they believe that one has to think of oneself first. The queen ant said they showed both heart and brain: ‘These are the two attributes that place us first among respectable creatures! But intelligence must be the master, it is far more important, and I have more brains than any other ant.’ She stood up on her two hind legs, you couldn’t mistake any of the lesser ants for her, and I ate her.
“ ‘Go to the ant and become wise.’ Now I had swallowed the queen.
“I walked over to the oak tree. It was very ancient; it had a massive trunk and a great spreading crown. I knew from my time in the library that within each tree lives a woman called a dryad; she is born with the tree and dies when it does. When this oak girl saw me she screamed, for she was as afraid of mice as all women are. But in truth she had more reason to be; after all, I could have gnawed the tree in two, and then she would have died. But I spoke to her in a friendly and warm manner to put her at her ease, and she allowed me to climb right up on her fine little hand. I told her why I had gone out into the wide world and she promised me that that very evening she would help me to obtain another of the treasures I was searching for. She told me that Fantasy was a very dear friend of hers and that he often came to rest under the boughs of the tree. She told me that he was as beautiful as the God of Love and that he called her ‘his dryad.’
“ ‘This great rugged, craggy, beautiful old oak tree is just to his taste, with its roots deep down under the ground and its crown high up in the sky. This oak has experienced drifts of cold snow, sharp and bitter winds, and the sweet sunshine: to know them all is a blessing.’ Yes, that is the way the dryad talked.
“ ‘The birds in my branches sing about foreign lands, on one of my dead limbs a stork has built its nest; it looks nice and I like to hear about the land of the pyramids,’ the dryad explained. ‘Fantasy likes all this too, but it is not enough for him, I have to tell him tales of life in the woods as well; about my own childhood when I was a little sapling—so small that the nettles grew taller than I—and all that I have experienced since then. Hide over there among the woodruff, and when Fantasy comes I shall tear a little feather from his wings. You can have it; no poet has ever had a better one.’
“Fantasy came and the dryad tore a little feather from one of his wings and I caught it,” said the little female mouse. “I put it in water to soften it a bit, for it was very difficult to digest; but I finally managed to get it down. It is not so easy to become a poet by the way of the stomach, one has to swallow an awful lot. But now I had both intelligence and fantasy; and the third ingredient necessary for a poet, I knew, could be found in the library. I had heard a critic of much importance say that novels exist to free humanity from superfluous tears; in other words, they are a kind of sponge that absorbs feelings. I recalled a couple of these books, and they had always looked very appetizing to me; they had been read so often and were so filled with greasy fingerprints that I felt sure they had a wealth of feeling within them.
“I hurried home to the library and ate almost a whole novel that very first day. I only ate the soft part, which is the most important; the crust or the binding, as it is called, I didn’t touch. When I had digested two novels I could already feel things moving inside me. I ate a little of a third and then I had become a poet—that is what I said to myself and everybody agreed with me.—I had headaches, stomach-aches, and … I can hardly list all the aches I had.
“I began to think of all the stories that one could make up about a sausage pin. My thoughts were full of pins—the queen ant must have had an extraordinary brain. I thought of the man who became invisible when he put a white pin in his mouth; and the pin people used to pin their hopes with; and the pins and needles that people sat on; not to speak of the length of the pin needed to pin one down. All my thoughts became pins. And for every pin a story could be told, for I am a poet and I have worked hard to become one. I can serve you a pin, a story each day of the week, that is my soup!”
“Let us hear the third mouse,” said the mouse king.
“Pip, pip,” someone said at the kitchen door. That was the fourth mouse: the one they had all believed to be dead. She came running in so fast that she overturned the sausage pin with the black crepe around it. She had been running both day and night, and even though she had been able to ride on a freight train for part of the way, she had almost come too late. She pushed her way through the crowd until she stood before the king. She looked awfully rumpled. She had lost her sausage pin but not her tongue. She began to talk at once. She must have thought that everyone had just been waiting to hear her, and that nothing in the world was as important as what she had to say. She took them all by surprise and gave no one time to object while she talked. This is what she had to say.
WHAT THE FOURTH MOUSE, WHO SPOKE BEFORE THE THIRD MOUSE, HAD TO RECOUNT
“I set out for the big city immediately,” she began. “The name of it I don’t recall; I have such difficulty remembering names. I had traveled by rail and was taken from the station, among some confiscated goods, to the courthouse. There I happened to overhear a prison warden who was talking about his prisoners. He was especially talking about one of them; this prisoner had said some rash words that had been printed and commented upon all over the city. ‘It is all soup upon a sausage pin,’ said the warden, ‘but that soup may cost him his head.’
“This naturally made me very interested in that prisoner and I managed to get into his cell, for behind every locked door there is usually a mousehole. He looked very pale. He had a long beard and two shining eyes. The lamp smoked but the walls and the ceiling were used to it, they couldn’t have got any blacker than they were. The prisoner scratched pictures and verses on the wall, white on black. I did not read them. I think he was lonely; I was a welcome guest. He tempted me with little pieces of bread and whistled softly to make me come nearer. He was so happy to see me that I gained confidence and we became friends. He shared his bread and water with me and gave me sausage and cheese to eat.
“I lived well but it was especially the company that kept me there. He let me run up and down his arms, even inside his sleeve. I climbed into his beard and he called me his little friend; I grew very fond of him and he of me. I forgot my errand out in the wide world; I forgot my sausage pin. It fell into a crack in the floor and is lying there still. I wanted to stay where I was, for, if I left, the poor prisoner would have no one, and that is too little to possess in this world.
“I stayed but he didn’t! He talked ever so sorrowfully to me that last night we were together, and gave me a double ration of bread and cheese; then he threw me a finger kiss and was gone. I never saw him again. I do not know his story.
“ ‘Soup on a sausage pin,’ the warden had said, and I moved in with him; but I should never have trusted him. He took me in his hands but only to put me in a cage, in a treadmill. You can run and run in that as long as you want to; you will still stay in the same place. The only thing that happens is that you make a fool of yourself.
“But the warden’s little grandchild was a sweet little girl with golden curly hair, happy eyes, and a mouth made for laughing. ‘Poor little mouse,’ she said, while she looked into my ugly cage; then she pulled out the iron pin and let me go. I jumped down upon the window sill, and from there out on the roof and down in the gutter. I was free, free! That was my only thought, not the purpose of my journey.
“It was dark, the middle of the night; I had found shelter in an old tower where there lived a watchman and an owl. I didn’t trust either of them, least of all
the owl. It looks like a cat and has one great fault: it eats mice. But one can make a mistake, and I had, for the owl was a very respectable old bird, terribly well educated; she knew more than the night watchman and almost as much as I.
“The little owlets made a fuss over everything. ‘Don’t make soup on a sausage stick,’ their mother would say, and that was just about the strongest reprimand she ever gave them, for she loved her young ones dearly. I felt so confident, so trusting toward her, that I said aloud, ‘Pip,’ from where I was hiding. My faith in her made her very pleased and she assured me that she would protect and keep all other animals from harming me; she wouldn’t eat me before winter, when it was hard to find food.
“She was very intelligent and wise. She proved to me that the night watchman could not hoot unless he used the horn that hung from his shoulder. ‘He thinks so much of himself. He believes that he is as wise as an owl. They are supposed to be so great, and they are so little. Soup on a sausage stick!’
“I asked her then for the recipe and she explained to me. ‘Soup on a sausage stick is a phrase human beings have constructed; it can be interpreted in many ways, and every person thinks his own is the best. But the truth of the matter is that it is nothing.’
“ ‘It is nothing!’ I repeated, and then the truth dawned on me. The truth is often unpleasant, yet nothing is above it, and to this the owl agreed. I thought long about it; finally I decided that when I brought back the truth with me, then I was bringing more than soup on a sausage pin. I hurried in order to get home in time.” She took a deep breath and then announced: “The mice are an enlightened nation, and the king of the mice is above everyone else. He will make me his queen, for truth’s sake!”
The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories Page 59