“ ‘Willowy Wollowy’!” screamed several of the children.
“ ‘Humpty-dumpty’!” screamed the others; and the room was filled with their shouting.
“Isn’t there something that I am supposed to do?” thought the tree, not knowing that it had already done everything that it was supposed to do.
The man told the story of “How Humpty-dumpty Fell Down the Stairs but Won the Princess Anyway.” When he had finished all the children screamed that they wanted more, for they hoped to be able to persuade him to tell the story of “Willowy, Wollowy” too; but they couldn’t. They had to be satisfied with the story about Humpty-dumpty.
The pine tree stood still, deep in its own thoughts. The birds out in the forest had never told a story like that. “No, that’s the way of the world,” it said to itself. “Humpty-dumpty falls down the stairs but he wins the princess anyway.” The tree believed that the story it had heard was true because the man who had told it looked so trustworthy. “Yes, who knows?” it whispered to itself. “Maybe I, too, will fall down the stairs and win the princess.” And the tree looked forward to the next day, when it would again be decorated with lights and hung with toys.
“Tomorrow,” it thought, “tomorrow I shan’t tremble as I did today. I shall really enjoy myself, and hear the story of Humpty-dumpty again; and maybe the one about ‘Willowy, Wollowy’ too.” All night long the tree silently thought of the glory that was to come on the following day.
The next morning the servants came.
“Now it all starts all over again,” thought the tree.
But it didn’t. The servants dragged the tree up two flights of stairs into the attic, where they threw it in a dark corner which the daylight never reached.
“What is the meaning of this?” the tree asked itself. “Why have I been put here? What will happen now?”
The tree leaned itself up against the wall and thought and thought. It had plenty of time for thinking, because days and nights went by without anyone coming into the attic to disturb it. When finally someone did come, it was only to put some old boxes up there. The tree was hidden in the corner and quite forgotten.
“Now it is winter outside,” thought the tree. “The earth is so hard and covered with snow that they cannot plant me. They are sheltering me here till spring. How considerate man is! I just wish it weren’t so dark and so terribly lonely! There isn’t even a rabbit here. It was so nice out in the forest when the ground was covered with snow and the rabbits darted about. Though I didn’t like it when I was very small and they could jump over me. But here it is so quiet and I am terribly lonely.”
“Twick … twick,” said a little mouse, and nipped its way out of the wall.
“Twick … twick …” And another, even smaller mouse appeared.
The two little mice sniffed at the tree and then climbed up among the branches.
“It is cold,” remarked the mice. “But otherwise it is a quite nice attic. Don’t you think so, old pine tree?”
“I am not old,” protested the pine tree. “There are lots of trees in the forest much older than I am.”
“Where do you come from?” asked one of the little mice. Those little creatures were very curious and they asked the tree one question after another. “What do you know? What can you tell us? Tell us about the most beautiful place in the world. Have you been there? … Have you ever been in the larder, by the way? In the larder where there are cheeses lying on shelves, hams hanging from the ceiling, and where you can dance on tallow candles; and where you can come in thin and go out fat?”
“I don’t know of any such place,” replied the tree. “But I know the forest where the sun shines and the birds sing.” And the pine tree told them of its youth in the woods.
The little mice listened quietly, for they had never heard of such a place; and when the tree was finished they said, “Think how much you have seen! How happy you must have been!”
“Happy?” repeated the pine tree, and thought about what it had told the little mice. “Yes, I suppose I had a quite good time,” it confessed. Then the tree told about Christmas Eve and how it had been decorated with candles and sweets.
“Oh,” sighed the mice, “how fortunate you have been, old pine tree.”
“I am not old!” protested the tree. “I have come this very winter from the forest. I am in my prime. I just appear a little stunted because I have been cut down.”
“You tell about everything so marvelously,” exclaimed the little mice; and the next night they brought along four of their friends.
The pine tree again told the story of its youth in the forest and what had happened to it on Christmas Eve; and the more it told, the more clearly it could remember everything.
“Yes, they were good times; and they can come again. They will come again! Humpty-dumpty fell down the stairs but he won the princess anyway.” And the pine tree remembered a little birch tree that had grown nearby it in the forest, for to the pine tree the little birch was a real princess.
“Who was Humpty-dumpty?” asked the little mice.
The pine tree told them the fairy tale it had heard. It could remember every word of it. The little mice were so pleased that they climbed to the very top of the tree to show their appreciation. The next night more mice came; and on Sunday two rats arrived. But they criticized the story and said it wasn’t amusing at all. This made the poor little mice sad, for now they thought less of the story too.
“Don’t you know any other stories?” asked one of the rats.
“No, I only know that one,” admitted the pine tree. “I heard it on the happiest night of my life; but then I didn’t know that it was the happiest night.”
“It is a particularly uninteresting story. Don’t you know any about bacon or candle stumps? No stories that take place in a larder?”
“No,” the tree answered.
“Well, in that case you’re not worth listening to,” said the rats, and left.
The mice stayed away too; and the pine tree sighed in its loneliness. “It was nice when the quick little animals came visiting and listened to what I had to tell. But now that is over too. I must remember to be happy when I am taken out again,” the tree muttered. “I wonder when that will be.”
Finally, one morning it happened. The servants came up to the attic and started moving boxes about; they were cleaning up. When they found the tree in the corner they handled it roughly and threw it about. At last a young man carried it down the many flights of stairs out into the yard.
“Now life begins again,” it thought. There was fresh air and it felt the sun’s rays. Everything was happening so fast, and it was so excited at being outside, that the tree looked at the world about it but not at itself. The yard was bordered by a garden where all the bushes and trees were in flower. The roses covered the little fence and smelled so sweetly. The linden tree was in bloom. The swallows flew about singing, “Tweet, tweet … My lover has come.” But they didn’t mean the pine tree.
“Now I am going to live!” shouted the tree joyously, and spread out its branches. But all its needles were yellow and dead. It was thrown into a corner of the yard where the nettles prospered. The golden star from Christmas Eve was still on its top and the sun reflected in it.
Playing in the yard were two of the children who had danced around the tree on Christmas Eve and had loved it so much then. The younger child now ran over and tore the golden star from the tree.
“Look what I found on this horrid old Christmas tree,” he said. He was wearing boots and he kicked the tree’s branches so that many of them broke.
The pine tree saw all the greenness about it; then it looked at itself and wished it had been left in the dark corner of the attic. It remembered its youth in the forest, the glory of Christmas Eve, and the little mice who had listened so contentedly to the story about Humpty-dumpty.
“Gone! Gone!” sighed the poor tree. “If I only could have been happy while I had a chance to be. Now it is all over
and gone! Everything!”
One of the servants came and cut the tree up for kindling. It became a little pile of wood. The cook used it to light the kitchen range. It flared up instantly and the tree sighed so deeply that it sounded like a shot. The children who were playing in the yard heard it, and they ran in and sat down in front of the stove.
“Bang! Bang!” they cried.
Every time the tree sighed, it thought of a summer day in the forest, or a winter night when the stars are brightest, and it remembered Christmas Eve and Humpty-dumpty: the only fairy tale it had ever heard and knew how to tell. Then it became ashes.
The children returned to the yard to play. The little boy had fastened the golden star to his chest. The star the pine tree had worn on the happiest evening of its life. But that was a long time ago; now the pine tree is no more, just as this story is over; for all stories—no matter how long they are—must eventually come to an end.
29
The Snow Queen
a fairy tale told in seven stories
THE FIRST STORY, WHICH CONCERNS ITSELF WITH A BROKEN MIRROR AND WHAT HAPPENED TO ITS FRAGMENTS
All right, we will start the story; when we come to the end we shall know more than we do now.
Once upon a time there was a troll, the most evil troll of them all; he was called the devil. One day he was particularly pleased with himself, for he had invented a mirror which had the strange power of being able to make anything good or beautiful that it reflected appear horrid; and all that was evil and worthless seem attractive and worth while. The most beautiful landscape looked like spinach; and the kindest and most honorable people looked repulsive or ridiculous. They might appear standing on their heads, without any stomachs; and their faces would always be so distorted that you couldn’t recognize them. A little freckle would spread itself out till it covered half a nose or a whole cheek.
“It is a very amusing mirror,” said the devil. But the most amusing part of it all was that if a good or a kind thought passed through anyone’s mind the most horrible grin would appear on the face in the mirror.
It was so entertaining that the devil himself laughed out loud. All the little trolls who went to troll school, where the devil was headmaster, said that a miracle had taken place. Now for the first time one could see what humanity and the world really looked like—at least, so they thought. They ran all over with the mirror, until there wasn’t a country or a person in the whole world that had not been reflected and distorted in it.
At last they decided to fly up to heaven to poke fun of the angels and God Himself. All together they carried the mirror, and flew up higher and higher. The nearer they came to heaven, the harder the mirror laughed, so that the trolls could hardly hold onto it; still, they flew higher and higher: upward toward God and the angels, then the mirror shook so violently from laughter that they lost their grasp; it fell and broke into hundreds of millions of billions and some odd pieces. It was then that it really caused trouble, much more than it ever had before. Some of the splinters were as tiny as grains of sand and just as light, so that they were spread by the winds all over the world. When a sliver like that entered someone’s eye it stayed there; and the person, forever after, would see the world distorted, and only be able to see the faults, and not the virtues, of everyone around him, since even the tiniest fragment contained all the evil qualities of the whole mirror. If a splinter should enter someone’s heart—oh, that was the most terrible of all!—that heart would turn to ice.
Some of the pieces of the mirror were so large that windowpanes could be made of them, although through such a window it was no pleasure to contemplate your friends. Some of the medium-sized pieces became spectacles—but just think of what would happen when you put on such a pair of glasses in order to see better and be able to judge more fairly. That made the devil laugh so hard that it tickled in his stomach, which he found very pleasant.
Some of the tiniest bits of the mirror were still flying about in the air. And now you shall hear about them.
THE SECOND STORY, WHICH IS ABOUT A LITTLE BOY AND A LITTLE GIRL
In a big city, where there live so many people and are so many houses that not every family can have a garden of its own and so must learn to be satisfied with a potted plant, there once lived a poor little girl and a poor little boy who had a garden a little bit larger than a flowerpot. They weren’t brother and sister but loved each other as much as if they had been. Their parents lived right across from each other; each family had a little apartment in the garret, but the houses were built so close together that the roofs almost touched. Between the two gutters that hung from the eaves and collected the water when it rained, there was only a very narrow space, and the two families could visit each other by climbing from one gable window to the other.
In front of the windows each family had a wooden box filled with earth, where herbs and other useful plants grew; but in each box there was also a little rose tree. The parents got the idea that, instead of setting the boxes parallel to their windows, they could set them across, so they reached from one window to the other. In that manner, the two gables were connected by a little garden. The peas climbed over the sides and hung down; and the little rose trees grew as tall as the windows and joined together, so that they looked like a green triumphal arch. The sides of the boxes were quite high and since the children could be relied upon not to try to climb over them, they were allowed to take their little wooden stools outside and sit under the rose trees; and there it was pleasant to play.
In winter that was not possible; then the windows were tightly closed and sometimes they would be covered by ice. Then the little children would heat copper coins on the stove and press them against the glass until the roundest of holes would melt in the ice; through each of these peeped the loveliest little eye: one belonged to a little boy and the other to a little girl. His name was Kai and hers was Gerda. In summer they had to take only a few steps to be together; but in the winter they had to run down and up so many stairs and across a yard covered by snowdrifts.
“The white bees are swarming,” said the old Grandmother.
“Do they have a queen too?” asked Kai, for he knew that real bees have such a ruler.
“Yes, they have,” said the old woman. “She always flies right in the center of the swarm, where the most snowflakes are. She is the biggest of them all, but she never lies down to rest as the other snowflakes do. No, when the wind dies she returns to the black clouds. Many a winter night she flies through the streets of the town and looks in through the windows; then they become covered by ice flowers.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that!” said first one child and then the other; and now they knew that what the Grandmother said was true.
“Could the Snow Queen come inside, right into our room?” asked the little girl.
“Let her come,” said Kai.” I will put her right on top of the stove and then she will melt.”
The Grandmother patted his head and told them another story. But that night, as Kai was getting undressed, he climbed up on the chair by the window and looked out through his peephole. It was snowing gently; one of the flakes fell on the edge of the wooden box and stayed there; other snowflakes followed and they grew until they took the shape of a woman. Her clothes looked like the whitest gauze. It was made of millions of little star-shaped snowflakes. She was beautiful but all made of ice: cold, blindingly glittering ice; and yet she was alive, for her eyes stared at Kai like two stars, but neither rest nor peace was to be found in her gaze. She nodded toward the window and beckoned. The little boy got so frightened that he jumped down from the chair; and at that moment a shadow crossed the window as if a big bird had flown by.
The next day there was frost; but by noon the weather changed and it thawed. Soon it was spring again and the world grew green; the swallows returned to build their nests and the windows were opened. The little children sat in their boxes, above the eaves and high above all the other stories of the houses.
The roses bloomed particularly marvelously that summer. The little girl had learned a psalm in which roses were mentioned in one of the verses; her own roses reminded her of it, and so she sang, and the boy joined her:
“In the valley where the roses be
There the child Jesus you will see.”
The two little children held each other’s hands, kissed the flowers, and looked up into the blessed sunshine. Oh, these were lovely summer days, and it was ever so pleasant to sit under the little rose trees that never seemed to stop flowering.
One afternoon as Kai and Gerda sat looking at a picture book with animals and flowers in it—it was exactly five o’clock, for the bells in the church tower had just struck the hour—Kai said, “Ouch, ouch! Something pricked my heart!” And then again, “Ouch, something sharp is in my eye.”
The little girl put her arms around his neck and looked into his eyes but there was nothing to be seen. Still, it hurt and little Gerda cried out of sympathy.
“I think it is gone now,” said Kai. But he was wrong, two of the splinters from the devil’s mirror had hit him: one had entered his heart and the other his eyes. You remember the mirror, it was that horrible invention of the devil which made everything good and decent look small and ridiculous, and everything evil and foul appear grand and worth while. Poor Kai, soon his heart would turn to ice and his eyes would see nothing but faults in everything. But the pain, that would disappear.
“Why are you crying?” he demanded. “You look ugly when you cry. There is nothing the matter with me. Look!” he shouted. “That rose up there has been gnawed by a worm; and look at that one, it is all crooked. They are ugly roses, as ugly as the boxes they grew in.” Then he kicked the sides of the box and tore off the two roses.
The Complete Fairy Tales Page 28