The King said: “Old enough, my dear, why, yes. But wise enough? Who can say?”
The Queen said, “What are you hiding in your hand, my dear, in the folds of your gown?”
The Princess laughed again and said it was a secret.
“Maybe,” said the Princess, “it is a flower, or maybe it is a pin for my hair, or maybe it is neither of these; but this very night I will show it you.” And again she laughed.
So for the moment they were contented, she was so gay and happy. But when the King and Queen had gone away and were closeted together in their own private room, their fears began to stir in them again, and they decided that the very next day they would tell the Princess of the Fairy Woman and warn her against her wiles.
But, alas! even when the King and the Queen were still talking together, the Princess had taken out the spindle again, and was twisting it in her hand. It was a pretty, slender thing, made cunningly out of the wood of the coral-berried prickwood or spindle-tree, but at one end sharp as a needle. And as she twisted and stayed, twisted and stayed, wondering as she did so why her young fingers were so clumsy, there sounded suddenly in the hush of the evening the wild-yelling screech of an owl at her window. She started, the spindle twisted in her hand, and the sharp point pricked deep into her thumb.
Before even the blood had welled up to the size of a bead upon her thumb, the wicked magic of the Fairy Woman began to enter into her body. Slowly, drowsily, the Princess’s eyelids began to descend over her dark blue eyes; her two hands slid softly down on either side of her; her head drooped lower and lower towards her pillow. She put out her two hands, as if groping her way; sighed; sank lower; and soon she had fallen fast, fast asleep.
Not only the Princess, either. Over the King and Queen, as they sat talking together, a dense, stealthy drowsiness began to descend, though they knew not what had caused it, and they too, in a little while, were mutely slumbering in their chairs. The Lord Treasurer, alone with his money bags, the Astronomer over his charts, the ladies in their chamber, the chief butler in his pantry, and the cooks with their pots and ladles, and the scullions at their basting and boiling, and the maids at their sewing and sweeping—over each and every one of them this irresistible drowsiness descended, and they too were soon asleep.
The grooms in the stables, the gardeners in the garden, the huntsmen and the beekeepers and the herdsmen and the cowmen and the goat-girl and the goose-girl; the horses feeding at their mangers, the hounds in their kennels, the pigs in their sties, the hawks in their cages, the bees in their skeps, the hens on their roosting-sticks, the birds in the trees and bushes—even the wakeful robin hopping upon the newly-turned clods by the hedgeside, drooped and drowsed; and a deep slumber overwhelmed them one and all.
The fish in the fish-ponds, the flies crawling on the walls, the wasps hovering over the sweetmeats, the moths flitting in search of some old clout in which to lay their eggs, stayed one and all where the magic had found them. All, all were entranced—fell fast, fast asleep.
Throughout the whole castle there was no sound or movement whatsoever, but only the gentle sighings and murmurings of a deep, unfathomable sleep.
Darkness gathered over its battlements and the forests around it; the stars kindled in the sky; and then, at last, the April night gone by, came dawn and daybreak and the returning sun in the East. It glided slowly across the heavens and once more declined into the west; but still all slept on. Days, weeks, months, years went by. Time flowed on, without murmur or ripple, and, wonder of wonders, its passing brought no change.
The Princess, who had been young and lovely, remained young and lovely. The King and Queen aged not at all. They had fallen asleep talking, and the King’s bearded mouth was still ajar. The Lord High Chancellor in his gown of velvet, his head at rest upon his money bags, looked not a moment older, though old indeed he looked. A fat scullion standing at a table staring at his fat cheeks and piggy eyes in the bottom of a copper pot continued to stand and stare, and the reflection of those piggy eyes and his tow-coloured mop at the bottom of it changed not at all. The flaxen-haired goose-girl with her switch and her ball of cowslips sat in the meadow as still and young and changeless as her geese. And so it was throughout the castle—the living slumbered on, time flowed away.
But with each returning spring the trees in the garden grew taller and greener, the roses and brambles flung ever wider their hooked and prickled stems and branches. Bindweed and bryony and woodbine and traveller’s joy mantled walls and terraces. Wild fruit and bushes of mistletoe flaunted in the orchards. Moss, greener than samphire and seaweed, crept over the stones. The roots of the water-lilies in the moat swelled to the girth of Asian serpents; its water shallowed; and around the castle there sprang up, and every year grew denser, an immense thorny hedge of white-thorn and briar, which completely encircled it at last with a living wall of green.
At length, nine-and-ninety winters with their ice and snow and darkness had come and gone, and the dense thorn-plaited hedge around the castle began to show the first tiny knobs that would presently break into frail green leaf; the first of spring was come again once more. Wild sang the missel-thrush in the wind and rain. The white-thorn blossomed; the almond-tree; the wilding peach. Then returned the cuckoo, its cuck-oo echoing against the castle’s walls; and soon the nightingale, sweet in the far thickets.
At last, a little before evening of the last day of April, a Prince from a neighbouring country, having lost his way among mountains that were strange to him in spite of his many wanderings, saw from the hillside the distant turrets of a castle.
Now, when this Prince was a child his nurse had often told him of the sleeping Princess and of the old Fairy Woman’s spell, and as he stared down upon the turrets from the hillside the thought came to him that this might be the very castle itself of this old story. So, with his hounds beside him, he came riding down the hill, until he approached and came nearer to the thicket-like hedge that now encircled it even beyond its moat, as if in warning that none should spy or trespass further.
But, unlike other wayfarers who had come and gone, this Prince was not easily turned aside. Having tied his hunting-horn to a jutting branch, he made a circuit and rode round the hedge until he came again to the place from which he had started and where his horn was left dangling. But nowhere had he found any break or opening or make-way in the hedge. “Then,” thought he, “I must hack my way through.” So a little before dark he began to hack his way through with his hunting-knife.
He slashed and slashed at the coarse, prickly branches, pressing on inch by inch until his hands were bleeding and his hunting-gloves in tatters. Darkness came down, and at midnight he hadn’t won so much as half-way through the hedge. So he rested himself, made a fire out of the dry twigs and branches, and, exhausted and wearied out, lay down intending to work on by moonlight. Instead, he unwittingly fell fast asleep. But while he slept, a little wind sprang up, and carried a few of the glowing embers of the Prince’s fire into the tindery touchwood in the undergrowth of the hedge. There the old, dead leaves began to smoulder, then broke into flame, and by dawn the fire had burnt through the hedge and then stayed. So that when beneath the bright morning sky, wet with dew but refreshed with sleep, the Prince awoke, his way was clear.
He made his way over the rotting drawbridge, and went into the castle.
He crept through the ashen hole into the garden beyond, full of great trees, many of them burdened with blossom. But there was neither note of bird nor chirp of insect. He made his way over the rotting drawbridge, and went into the castle. And there, as they had fallen asleep a hundred years ago, he saw the King’s soldiers and retainers. Outside the guard-house sat two of them, mute as mummies, one with a dice-box between his fingers, for they had been playing with the dice when sleep had come over them a hundred years ago.
At last the Prince came to the bedchamber of the Princess; its door stood ajar, and he looked in. For a while he could see nothing but a green dusk in the
room, for its stone windows were overgrown with ivy. He groped slowly nearer to the bed, and looked down upon the sleeper. Her faded silks were worn thin as paper and crumbled like tinder at a touch, yet Time had brought no change at all in her beauty. She lay there in her loveliness, the magic spindle still clasped in her fingers. And the Prince, looking down upon her, had never seen anything in the world so enchanting or so still.
Then, remembering the tale that had been told him, he stooped, crossed himself, and gently kissed the sleeper, then put his hunting-horn to his lips, and sounded a low, but prolonged clear blast upon it, which went echoing on between the stone walls of the castle. It was like the sound of a bugle at daybreak in a camp of soldiers. The Princess sighed; the spindle dropped from her fingers, her lids gently opened, and out of her dark eyes she gazed up into the young man’s face. It was as if from being as it were a bud upon its stalk she had become suddenly a flower; and they smiled each at the other.
For a while he could see nothing.
At this same moment the King, too, stirred, lifted his head, and looked about him uneasily, as if in search of something. But seeing the dark beloved eyes of the Queen moving beneath their lids, he put out his hand and said, “Ah, my dear!” as if he were satisfied. The Lord High Chancellor, lifting his grey beard from his money table, began to count again his money. The ladies began again to laugh and to chatter over their embroideries. The fat chief butler rose up from stooping over his wine-bottles in the buttery. The cooks began to stir their pots; the scullions began to twist their spits; the grooms began to groom their horses; the gardeners to dig and prune. The huntsmen rode out to their hunting; the cowman drove in his cows; the goat-girl her goats; and the goose-girl in the meadow cried “Ga! ga!” to her geese. There was a neighing of horses and a baying of hounds and a woofing of pigs and a mooing of cows. There was a marvellous shrill crowing of cocks and a singing of birds and a droning of bees and a flitting of butterflies and a buzzing of wasps and a stirring of ants and a cawing of rooks and a murmuration of starlings. The round-eyed robin hopped from clod to clod, and the tiny wren, with cocked-up tail, sang shrill as a bugle amid the walls of the orchards.
For all living things within circuit of the castle at sound of the summons of the Prince’s horn had slipped out of their long sleep as easily as a seed of gorse in the hot summer slips out of its pod, or a fish slips from out under a stone. Hearts beat pit-a-pat, tongues wagged, feet clattered, pots clashed, doors slammed, noses sneezed: and soon the whole castle was as busy as a newly-wound clock.
The seventh day afterwards was appointed for the marriage of the Prince and the Princess. But when word was sent far and near, bidding all the Fairy Women to the wedding—and these think no more of time than fish of water—one of them again was absent. And since—early or late—she never came, it seems that come she couldn’t. At which the King and Queen heartily rejoiced. The dancing and feasting, with music of harp and pipe and drum and tabor, continued till daybreak; for, after so long a sleep, the night seemed short indeed.
Molly Whuppie
Once upon a time, there was an old woodcutter who had too many children. Work as hard as he might, he couldn’t feed them all. So he took the three youngest of them, gave them a last slice of bread and treacle each, and abandoned them in the forest.
They ate their bread and treacle and walked and walked until they were worn out and utterly lost. Soon they would have lain down together like the babes in the wood, and that would have been the end of them if—as it was beginning to get dark—they had not spied a small and beaming light between the trees. Now this light was chinkling out from a window. So the youngest of them, who was called Molly Whuppie and was by far the cleverest, went and knocked at the door. A woman came to the door and asked them what they wanted. Mollie Whuppie said: “Something to eat.”
“Eat!” said the woman. “Eat! Why, my husband’s a giant, and soon as say knife, he’d eat you.”
But they were tired out and famished, and still Molly begged the woman to let them in.
So at last the woman took them in, sat them down by the fire on a billet of wood, and gave them some bread and milk. Hardly had they taken a sup of it when there came a thumping at the door. No mistaking that: it was the giant come home; and in he came.
“Hai!” he said, squinting at the children. “What have we here?”
“Three poor, cold, hungry, lost little lasses,” said his wife. “You get to your supper, my man, and leave them to me.”
The giant said nothing, sat down and ate up his supper; but between the bites he looked at the children.
Now the giant had three daughters of his own, and the giant’s wife put the whole six of them into the same bed. For so she thought she would keep the strangers safe. But before he went to bed the giant, as if in play, hung three chains of gold round his daughters’ necks, and three of golden straw round Molly’s and her sisters’ between the sheets.
Soon the other five were fast asleep in the great bed, but Molly lay awake listening. At last she rose up softly, and, creeping across, changed over one by one the necklaces of gold and of straw. So now it was Molly and her sisters who wore the chains of gold, and the giant’s three daughters the chains of straw. Then she lay down again.
In the middle of the night the giant came tiptoeing into the room, and, groping cautiously with finger and thumb, he plucked up out of the bed the three children with the straw necklaces round their necks, carried them downstairs, and bolted them up in his great cellar.
“So, so, my pretty chickabiddies!” he smiled to himself as he bolted the door. “Now you’re safe!”
As soon as all was quiet again, Molly Whuppie thought it high time she and her sisters were out of that house. So she woke them, whispering in their ears, and they slipped down the stairs together and out into the forest, and never stopped running till morning.
She rose up softly, and . . . changed over one by one the necklaces.
But daybreak came at last, and lo and behold, they came to another house. It stood beside a pool of water full of wild swans, and stone images there, and a thousand windows; and it was the house of the King. So Molly went in, and told her story to the King. The King listened, and when it was finished, said:
“Well, Molly, that’s one thing done, and done well. But I could tell another thing, and that would be a better.” This King, indeed, knew the giant of old; and he told Molly that if she would go back and steal for him the giant’s sword that hung behind his bed, he would give her eldest sister his eldest son for a husband, and then Molly’s sister would be a princess.
Molly looked at the eldest prince, for there they all sat at breakfast, and she smiled and said she would try.
So, that very evening, she muffled herself up, and made her way back through the forest to the house of the giant. First she listened at the window, and there she heard the giant eating his supper; so she crept into the house and hid herself under his bed.
In the middle of the night—and the shutters fairly shook with the giant’s snoring—Molly climbed softly up on to the great bed and unhooked the giant’s sword that was dangling from its nail in the wall. Lucky it was for Molly this was not the giant’s great fighting sword, but only a little sword. It was heavy enough for all that, and when she came to the door, it rattled in its scabbard and woke up the giant.
Then Molly ran, and the giant ran, and they both ran, and at last they came to the Bridge of the One Hair, and Molly ran over. But not the giant; for run over he couldn’t. Instead, he shook his fist at her across the great chasm in between, and shouted:
“Woe betide ye, Molly Whuppie,
If ye e’er come back again!”
But Molly only laughed and said:
“Maybe twice I’ll come to see ’ee,
If so be I come to Spain.”
Then Molly carried off the sword to the King; and her eldest sister married the King’s eldest son.
“Well,” said the King, when the wedding was ov
er, “that was a better thing done, Molly, and done well. But I know another, and that’s better still. Steal the purse that lies under the giant’s pillow, and I’ll marry your second sister to my second son.”
Molly looked at the King’s second son, and laughed, and said she would try.
So she muffled herself up in another-coloured hood, and stole off through the forest to the giant’s house, and there he was, guzzling as usual at supper. This time she hid herself in his linen closet. A stuffy place that was.
About the middle of the night, she crept out of the linen closet, took a deep breath, and pushed in her fingers just a little bit betwixt his bolster and pillow. The giant stopped snoring and sighed, but soon began to snore again. Then Molly slid her fingers in a little bit further under his pillow. At this the giant called out in his sleep as if there were robbers near. And his wife said: “Lie easy, man! It’s those bones you had for supper.”
Then Molly pushed in her fingers even a little bit further, and then they felt the purse. But as she drew out the purse from under the pillow, a gold piece dropped out of it and clanked on to the floor, and at sound of it the giant woke.
Then Molly ran, and the giant ran, and they both ran. And they both ran and ran until they came to the Bridge of the One Hair. And Molly got over, but the giant stayed; for get over he couldn’t. Then he cried out on her across the chasm:
“Woe betide ye, Molly Whuppie,
If ye e’er come back again!”
But Molly only laughed, and called back at him:
“Once again I’ll come to see ’ee,
If so be I come to Spain.”
So she took the purse to the King, and her second sister married his second son; and there were great rejoicings.
“Well, well,” said the King to Molly, when the feasting was over, “that was yet a better thing done, Molly, and done for good. But I know a better yet, and that’s the best of all. Steal the giant’s ring for me from off his thumb, and you shall have my youngest son for yourself. And all solemn, Molly, you always were my favourite.”
Told Again Page 16