“I wonder whether she will ever come again,” said the man, and looked so intently at the door that he saw black spots in front of his eyes and on the floor. “But maybe it is not blood,” he muttered, “maybe it is bits from the mourning bands of the dark days that are only just past.”
Suddenly it occurred to him that the fairy tales might be in hiding like the princesses in the old tales: that, like the princesses, they wanted to be found, and when, finally, they were discovered they would be more brilliant and more beautiful than they had ever been before.
“Who knows where a fairy tale can hide? It can be under a piece of straw that has been carelessly dropped at the edge of a well. I must be careful … ever so careful. It can be hidden in a withered flower that has been pressed between the leaves of one of the big, heavy books on my bookshelves.”
The man walked over to his bookcase and took down the latest book; it was very serious and he thought it would help to clear his mind. There was no flower pressed between any of its leaves, but only a learned discourse concerning the national hero of his country: Holger the Dane. It seems that this very courageous man had never existed but had been invented by a French monk, who wrote a novel that was “translated into and widely printed in the Danish language.” So Holger the Dane could never have taken part in any battle, nor was he liable to come to save his native land, if and when the nation were in mortal danger. Danish children could sing of his exploits, and even the grownups could hope it was not only a legend that he would return; but Holger the Dane was no different from William Tell. Both of them were no more than hot air, not worth wasting one’s time on, according to the author of this very scholarly book.
“I believe what I believe,” said the man, and put the book back. “No path is made where no foot has trod.”
He went to the window sill and looked at the plants and flowers. Maybe the fairy tale had hidden in the red tulip with the golden-edged petals, or in the rose, or in the colorful camellia. But he did not find any fairy tale; only the sunshine playing among the leaves.
“The flowers that bloomed in our days of sorrow were more beautiful than these. But those we cut and made into wreaths to decorate the coffins that were draped in flags. Maybe the fairy tale was buried with the flowers. But would not the flowers have known, and the earth? Yes, even the coffin would have sensed it; and the new flowers as they bloomed—and even each blade of grass—would have told us that fairy tales do not die.
“Maybe it has been here and knocked at my door, but I did not hear it. Then life seemed so hard to bear, and all our thoughts were dark. Spring seemed an intrusion then, and the songs of the birds and the fresh green leaves on the trees, that should have made us happy, instead almost made us angry. Even the old songs that we loved were put aside with all the other things that were so dear to us, because our hearts were too heavy to bear them. Yes, then the fairy tale could have knocked on our doors and it would not have been heard; and no one would have bade it welcome. It probably just knocked and when no one answered it walked away.
“I shall go out and search for it, out in the country, in the forest, by the open sea.”
Far away from any city there stood an old castle with red brick walls, corbie gables, and towers, one of which had a banner flying above it. Here the nightingale sits singing on the branch of a beech tree, gazing at the apple blossoms and believing them to be roses. In summer the bees swarm around their queen, singing their own songs. In the autumn storms raid the forest, whip the leaves from the branches, to tell of man’s fate. At Christmas, from the open sea, one hears the song of the wild swan, while up at the castle everyone moves closer to the stove and is in a mood to hear the old ballads and sagas.
In the older part of the garden there was an avenue of chestnut trees, and there, attracted by their shade, walked the man who had set out to find a fairy tale. For here the wind had once sung to him the story of “Valdemar Daae and His Daughters.” Here, too, a druid, who lived in an old oak tree—she is the mother of all the fairy tales—had told him the tale of the old oak tree’s last dream. When his grandmother on his mother’s side had been alive, there had been hedges here that had been carefully trimmed; but now there were only ferns and nettles that grew as they pleased and concealed almost all the sculpture. The mosses grew right up into the old stone figures’ eyes. For all of that they could see just as well as they always had been able to, but the man who was searching for the fairy tale could not. He could not see the fairy tales any more. Where could they be?
From the tops of the old trees crows by hundreds cried, “Here! Here! Here!”
He left the garden by crossing the bridge over the moat, and entered the little copse of alder trees. Here were the henyard and the duckpond, and the little hexagonal house where the old woman who ruled over this little world lived. She knew exactly how many eggs had been laid and how many chickens had been hatched; but she was not a fairy tale, for she had been both baptized and vaccinated, and lying in the top drawer of her chest, she had certificates to prove it.
Not far from the old woman’s house was a hillock covered with red hawthorn and lovely yellow laburnum bushes. Here there was an old tombstone. It had been brought there many years before from the churchyard in the market town, where it had been chiseled to honor the memory of a former member of the town council. There he was surrounded by his wife and five daughters, all wearing ruff collars and with their hands folded. If you look long enough at such a stone it becomes part of your thoughts; then it is as if your mind has entered the stone until both are one, and it will tell you about bygone times. In any case, that was what happened to the man who was looking for the fairy tale.
This particular day, he found a living butterfly resting on the stone head of the councilor. It fluttered its wings and flew a little distance away, as if it meant to show the man what was growing there. He bent down. The butterfly had alighted on a four-leaf clover. Four-leaf clovers bring good luck, and here there was not only one but seven of them.
“Luck comes in crowds,” said the man, and picked them all and put them in his pockets. “They say that good luck is like ready cash, but I would have preferred to find a fairy tale,” he added with disappointment.
The large red sun went down, and from the meadows vapors rose. The bog witch was brewing something.
It was late in the evening. The man stood alone by the window in his room and looked out over the garden, the fields, the meadows, and beyond them to the seacoast. The moon was almost full and its rays played upon the mist and made the meadow appear like a silver lake, as if the moon wished to prove the old legend true that told how there once had been a lake there. The man thought about the book he had read explaining that William Tell and Holger the Dane were merely folklore. “As the moonlight can make the lake that is no longer there reappear, so can the beliefs of the ordinary people make the legends of old live. Oh yes, Holger the Dane is not dead! And when his country is in mortal danger he will come back!” the man concluded.
There was a noise at the window. Perhaps it was a bird: an owl or a bat; the kind of guests one does not open the window for, no matter how often they knock. Suddenly the window opened by itself and there stood an old woman looking in at him.
“I beg your pardon!” exclaimed the man, very surprised. “Who are you? You must be standing on a ladder because my room is on the second story.”
“You have four-leaf clovers in your pocket, seven of them, and one is a six-leaf clover.” The old woman sniffed and looked about the room.
“Who are you?” demanded the man.
“I am the bog witch,” she replied at last. “The bog witch who brews, that’s me. And I am brewing beer right now, but one of the bog children, in a fit of temper, pulled the tap out of the barrel and cast it up here, at the castle, where it hit your window; and now all the beer is running out, which is really to no one’s advantage.”
“Please,” began the man, who was looking for a fairy tale, “could you tell
me—”
“Maybe I could,” she interrupted, “but now I have something more important to attend to.” And she was gone.
Just as the man was about to close the window she was back again.
“Well, that’s done,” she said. “Half of the beer has run out, and I’ll have to brew again tomorrow, if the weather keeps. What did you want to ask me? I’ve come back again because I always keep my word. Besides, you have seven four-leaf clovers in your pocket, one of which is a six-leaf clover, and that I respect. A six-leaf clover is one of nature’s medals. It can be found growing along the side of the road but not by just anyone. What do you want? Don’t stand on ceremony, I have to get back to my barrels and my brewing.”
The man asked the bog witch whether she had seen a fairy tale.
“By the eternal brewing vat!” said the bog witch, and laughed. “Haven’t you known enough fairy tales? I am sure most people have. In our times, we have more important things to think about. Why, even the children don’t care about them any more. The little girls would rather have a new dress; and as for the boys, I think they’d prefer a cigar. To listen to fairy tales! You are behind the times! Today we don’t listen, we do things!”
“What do you mean?” asked the man. “How can you know so much about the world when you only associate with frogs and will-o’-the-wisps?”
“Yes, you be careful of the will-o’-the-wisps; they’ve got loose. Come down to the meadow and I’ll tell you about it. I haven’t the time to stand here any longer. But hurry, while your four-leaf clovers are still fresh and the moon is up.” And away she went.
The bell in the tower clock struck twelve. Before the quarter chimes were heard, the man had run through the garden and was approaching the meadow. The fog was gone. The bog witch had finished her brewing.
“What a time it took you,” said the bog witch. “Troll beings are faster than human beings. I am glad I was born a troll.”
“What can you tell me?” The man was quite out of breath because he had hurried so much. “Is it something about a fairy tale?”
“Can’t you talk about anything else?” The bog witch sounded irritated.
“Can you tell me what the poetry of the future will be like?”
“Don’t be so high-flown. Come down to earth and maybe I’ll answer you,” replied the bog witch. “You only think about poetry and the fairy tale—as if she were the madam who ruled the roost. She is probably older than I am though she looks younger. I know her quite well.… I was young once myself—and that’s not a disease that only children suffer from. I was quite a beautiful elf maiden then. And, like the others, I danced by the light of the moon and listened to the song of the nightingale; and I went for walks in the forest where I sometimes met the fairy tale. She was always running about. She would sleep one night in a tulip and the next in a rose; and then she used to like to dress herself up in the mourning crepe that was draped around the candles in the church.”
“You know a lot of lovely things,” said the man quite humbly.
“I know as much as you do, anyway,” said the bog witch, and wrinkled her nose, which wasn’t as pretty as it had been when she was an elf maiden. “Poetry and the fairy tales are cut from the same cloth; and as far as I am concerned, they can go and lie down wherever they please. All their work and all their talk—the same stuff can be brewed both cheaper and faster than they do it. I’ll give you some for nothing. I have a chestful of bottled poetry. There you will find the essence of poetry, the very best of it, brewed from both bitter and sweet herbs: all the poetry that a man needs, and he can put a drop or two on his handkerchief for Sundays and holidays.”
“How amazing!” exclaimed the man. “You mean you actually have poetry in bottles?”
“More than you could bear to sniff,” answered the bog witch. “Have you heard the story about the girl who stepped on a loaf of bread to avoid getting her shoes dirty? I believe someone wrote it down and it has since been printed.”
“I am the one who wrote it,” said the man.
“Well, in that case you must be familiar with it. Do you remember what happened to the girl, how she sank down into the ground? Well, she landed right in my brewery, on the very day when the Devil’s great-grandmother was paying me a visit. ‘Give me that creature who’s just sunk down here as a memento,’ begged the Devil’s great-grandmother, ‘and I’ll put her on a pedestal to remind me of my visit with you.’
“So I gave her the girl and the Devil’s great-grandmother in return gave me her portable medicine chest—not that I have any use for it, it’s filled with poetry in bottles. Look around! You have your seven four-leaf clovers in your pocket and one of them is a six-leaf clover, so you ought to be able to see it.”
There in the middle of the meadow was something that looked like the stump of an alder tree, but it was the cabinet that had belonged to the Devil’s great-grandmother. “Anyone in the whole world could come and make use of it, the problem is to be able to find it,” said the bog witch.
The cabinet could be opened in front and in back, on all four sides, and at the corners. It was a work of art and yet it resembled an ordinary tree stump. Poets from all over the world, but especially from our own Denmark, were to be found here in imitation. The best of their work had been selected, criticized, improved upon, and finally brought up to date. With great talent—that is the word generally used when one does not want to say “genius”—the Devil’s great-grandmother had taken from nature the smell or the taste that seemed most like this or that poet, added a bit of witchcraft to it, and presto! she had poetry in bottles, preserved for eternity.
“Let me have a look inside!” begged the man.
“I have more important things than that to talk with you about,” the bog witch insisted.
“But now that we are here,” mumbled the man as he opened the chest. “There are bottles of all different sizes,” he said excitedly. “What’s in this one? … And in that?”
“That one is called ‘Aroma of May.’ ” The bog witch stared at the small green bottle. “I haven’t tried it, but they say that, if you spill a little on the floor, where it falls a beautiful pond appears, the kind you find in the forest in which water lilies and mint are growing. A drop or two in a notebook, even one from the first grade, and you have a comedy of fragrance strong enough to be produced and long enough to make you fall asleep. I am sure that it is meant as a compliment to me that the label reads: ‘Brewed by the Bog Witch.’ ”
Another bottle was called “Scandal.” It looked as if it contained only dirty water, and that was what was in it; but a powder of town gossip, made up of two grains of truth and two barrels of lies, had been added to make it fizz. The mixture had been carefully stirred with a birch branch—not one that had been used on a criminal’s back or by a schoolmaster on naughty children, but a branch that had been taken from a broom with which the gutters were swept.
There was also a bottle of devotional poetry, ready to be set to music like the psalms. Every drop in the bottle had been inspired by the portals of hell, and penned with the sweat and blood of penance. Some say that this bottle contains only the gall of doves; but others, who know nothing about zoology, claim that doves are so good and gentle that they don’t have any gall.
There stood the bottle of all bottles: the largest of them all, and it took up half the space in the cabinet. It was filled with true-to-life everyday stories. It had been doubly sealed with skin from both the hide and the bladder of a pig, because it lost its flavor so easily. From this bottle, every nation could make its own soup, all depending on how you turned and tipped the bottle. There was old German blood soup with robber dumplings; tasteless English governess soup; a French potage à la Coque, made from the legs of cock and sparrows’ eggs—in Danish, it is called cancan soup. There was also a soup for those who like high society, with counts and courtiers in the bottom of the plate and a greasy glob of philosophy floating on top. Oh, there was an endless variety in that bottle;
but the best soup of all was Copenhagen soup, at least that was what everybody in Denmark said.
Tragedy had been put into champagne bottles because it must begin with a bang. Light comedy was nothing but a bottleful of sand to throw into the eyes of the audience. There were bottles of the more vulgar kind of comedy but they were empty except for the playbills, on which the titles were in the boldest type: “Do You Dare to Spit in the Machine?” “A Right to the Jaw.” “The Sweet Donkey.”
The man looked thoughtfully at all the bottles, but the bog witch had no patience with them, she had more important matters to think about.
“You have looked long enough at that junk shop,” she said. “Now you know what’s to be found there, but what it is really important for you to know I haven’t told you yet. The will-o’-the-wisps are in town; and some people, who have more sense in their legs than in their heads, have already fallen into the bog chasing them. This is more important than talking about poetry or fairy tales. Maybe I should keep quiet about it, but something—I don’t know what it is, maybe fate—bids me speak. It is stuck in my throat and has to come out: the will-o’-the-wisps are in town! They are on the loose. Beware, all human beings!”
The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories Page 91