The Complete Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen

  Six years passed, and the master of the manor had to leave his fine estate; he was a poor man. The new owner had once been a peddler. Honesty and thrift had brought him far. He was the same man who had been made to drink beer from a stocking; now he was the master of the house. From that time on, card playing was never allowed.

  “When the Devil saw the Bible he sneered. Then he invited a deck of cards and called them his Bible, but they are not good reading,” he declared.

  The new owner took a wife and whom do you think it was? The girl who had tended the geese and had always been good-natured, kind, and gentle. In her new clothes she looked as beautiful as any young lady born to wealth and position. How did all this come about? Well, that is too long a story to tell in times as busy as ours, but it did happen; besides, the more important part of the story comes later.

  Everything on the old manor prospered; the master ran the farm and his wife the house. It was truly a blessed time. Wealth brought more wealth. The old house was painted and restored, inside and out. The moat was cleaned and an orchard planted. The floors in the hall were scoured until they were white, and there during the long winter evenings the mistress sat with her maids spinning. Every Sunday evening the master, who held the title of privy councilor, read aloud from the Bible. They grew old and their children—and they had quite a few of them—grew up. They were all given a good education; although, as is true in most families, they were not equally intelligent.

  The willow branch had become a tall lovely tree, which had never been shaped as such trees usually are in Denmark. “It is our family tree, remember to honor and protect it,” said the old people to all their children, also the ones who were not so intelligent.

  A hundred years went by.

  Now we are in our times; the moat has become a swamp and the old manor house is no more. Some stonework reveals where once the old bridge was, and here a wonderful old willow tree still stands. The old “family tree” is a fine example of how beautiful a willow tree can be if it is allowed to grow freely, without being pruned.

  True, a storm has twisted the tree; and there’s also a cleft in the trunk, from the root all the way up. In all its cracks, crevices, and the cleft, the wind has deposited dirt and soil; and flowers and grass now grow there. At the top, where the boughs go each its own way, there’s a hanging garden of wild flowers and raspberry bushes. Even a little rowan tree has taken root and stands, straight and slender, up against the old willow tree. When the wind blows the green algae down to the other end of the swamp, then the tree mirrors itself in the dark waters. Across the fields there’s a little path that leads past it.

  The new farm buildings stand on a high hill, and from there the view is beautiful. It’s a grand house with big windows that are so polished that one can hardly see the glass. A broad flight of stairs leads up to the front door. There are lovely roses, and the lawns are so green that one might think that each blade of grass was inspected morning and evening. On the walls of the lofty rooms valuable paintings hang. Handsome chairs and sofas, upholstered in silk and leather, are in every corner. Some of the chairs have legs carved to resemble lion’s claws, so that they look as if they could get up and walk by themselves. On the marble tops of the tables lie books bound in morocco, with gilt edges.… Yes, a rich family must own this house: distinguished people; and they are, for the father is a baron.

  This family, too, felt that “everything should be in its right place.” And all the paintings that once held honorable places in the old manor houses were now hung along the servants’ corridors. They were junk, especially the portraits of the man in a pink robe, wearing a wig, and the one of a woman with powdered hair, holding a rose in her hands. Both figures were encircled by a wreath of willow branches. There were so many holes in the canvases because the sons of the baron had used them for targets when they were playing with their bows and arrows. They were the portraits of the privy councilor and his wife, from whom the family descended.

  “But they are not really part of the family,” declared one of the young boys. “He was once a peddler and she a barefooted girl tending geese. The weren’t at all like our mama and papa.”

  They were poor paintings and if “Everything in its right place” is your motto, then they belonged in the servants’ quarters, even if they were the great-grandparents of the master of the house.

  One day the parson’s son, who had been hired as private tutor, took the baron’s sons and their older sister for a walk. They went down toward the swamp where the old willow tree grew. The young girl, who had been confirmed that spring, was picking a bouquet of wild flowers. She did it with taste and, since every flower was put in its right place, it looked beautiful. She listened with pleasure to the young man, who was talking about the power of nature and drawing portraits, in words, of great men and women from history. She had been blessed with a sweet and healthy nature. Her soul and thoughts were noble; she had a heart that welcomed everything that God had created.

  They stopped by the old willow tree and the youngest boy demanded that their teacher make him a willow flute. The young man broke off a branch.

  “Please don’t!” exclaimed the young baroness, but it was too late. “It is our famous old tree,” she said, and smiled. “I love it so! They all laugh at me for it, but I don’t care. You know, there is a story about that tree.…”

  Now she told the story that we have already heard, about the poor little girl tending the geese and the peddler who met here, and how they became the ancestors of a noble family.

  “The old couple refused a title,” said the young daughter of the baron. “They had a motto, ‘Everything in its right place,’ and they felt that nobility bought by money would not bring them in their right place. It was their son, my grandfather, who became the first baron. He is supposed to have been very learned and was always being invited to the royal court. He is the one my family thinks most highly of. But I don’t know … I think there’s something so cozy about the old couple that makes me love them. I look back on their times with a kind of longing. I can see them: the old man, like an old patriarch, reading from the Bible, while my great-grandmother sits with her maids, who are sewing and spinning.”

  “Yes, they must have been wonderful people and very sensible,” agreed the young tutor, and very soon they were deep in a discussion about nobility and the bourgeoisie. And if one had not known better, one would have believed that parson’s son did not belong to the middle class, so warmly did he speak of the aristocracy.

  “It is good fortune to belong to a family that has distinguished itself,” he began, “for that is a spur that drives one forward to further excellence. It is a blessing to have a name that opens all doors to one. Nobility ennobles. It is a golden coin stamped with its value.

  “I know it is the fashion of the day—and many a poet dances to that tune—to say that everything aristocratic is stupid and bad. They claim that only among the poor—and the lower you decend the better—does true gold glitter. But that is not my opinion; I think it is wrong, absolutely false reasoning. Among the highest classes one can often observe the most elevated traits. My mother can tell of many examples; here is one, though I know many more. Once when my mother was visiting one of the most distinguished homes in Copenhagen—I believe my grandmother had been the nurse to the noble mistress—she was standing in the hall conversing with the old aristocratic gentleman who was the master of the house, when he spied through the window an old beggar woman who had come for her weekly alms. He noticed how difficult it was for her to walk. ‘Poor old thing,’ he said, and ran down the stairs himself to give her the few shillings. His Excellency is over seventy. Oh, it was a deed of no importance but, like the widow’s mite, it came from the heart. It is toward things like that our poets should point, for they atone and redeem. But where nobility has gone to a man’s head and he behaves like an Arabian horse that rears and kicks, just because his blood is pure and he has a pedigree, there nobility has degenerated. When
noblemen sniff the air in a room because a plain citizen has been there and say, ‘It smells of the street,’ why then Thespis should exhibit them to the just ridicule of satire.”

  That was the parson’s son’s speech; it was a bit long but in the meantime the whistle had been finished.

  There was a big party at the manor house. People had come from the neighborhood and from Copenhagen. Some ladies were dressed with taste and others without. The big hall was filled with people. The local ministers stood humbly in a little group by themselves; they looked as though they were attending a funeral but they weren’t, they were being entertained! Or they were going to be, for it hadn’t really started yet.

  Since there was going to be a concert, the little son of the baron had taken his willow flute along, but he couldn’t get a tone out of it, and neither had his papa been able to when he tried, so the willow flute was declared a failure.

  The music and the singing were of the kind that give greater pleasure to the performers than to the audience. But on the whole it was enjoyable.

  “But you are a virtuoso, I hear,” exclaimed a young cavalier who was his parents’ darling. “You not only can play the flute, you carve them yourself. You are the genius who commands—the one who is seated on the right side—God preserve us! But I follow the fashion, one has to. Please, will you not charm us all by performing on this little instrument?” With these words he handed the little willow flute to the young tutor, while announcing loudly that the young man now would play a little piece for solo flute.

  That he was to be made the butt of a joke was easy to see, and the young tutor refused to play. But now the rest of the company entreated him and finally he put the little willow flute to his mouth and blew.

  It was a strange flute! The tone that came from it sounded like the whistle of a steam engine, but it was even louder and could be heard all throughout the farm, in the forest, and for miles around. At the same time a storm broke and the wind roared: “Everything in its place!”

  Papa, the baron, was blown right down into the little cottage where the man who tended the cows lived, and that fellow was carried right up into—no, not into the grand hall of the manor house, that was not “his place”; he flew up among the most important of the servants: the ones who wore silk stockings. They were dumfounded at seeing a person of such low quality daring to sit down among them.

  In the grand hall the young baroness flew up to the head of the table, because that was her place, and the young tutor got a seat right beside her. They looked like a bride and groom. An old count, who belonged to one of the oldest families in the country, remained seated where he was, for the whistle was just—and that it is important to be. The witty young cavalier who was the cause of it all, the one who was his parents’ darling, flew headfirst right down into the henhouse and he was not the only one who ended up there.

  The whistle, as I have said, could be heard for miles and it caused strange things to happen. A wealthy merchant who always drove with four horses in front of his carriage was blown right out of it, together with his family, and none of them was even allowed to stand on the back of the carriage as a footman. Two rich peasants who had grown too big for their breeches were blown into a muddy ditch.

  That willow flute certainly was dangerous; luckily it cracked this first time that it was played upon. Back into the young man’s pocket it went, “everything in its right place.”

  The next morning nobody talked about what had happened and everything was back in its old order, except for the portraits of the peddler and his wife: they had blown up on the wall in the grand hall. An art expert who saw them declared that they had been painted by a master; they were repaired and given the very best place on the wall to hang. After all, the baron had not known they were valuable, how could he have? “Everything in its right place,” and eventually everything is put in its right place. Eternity is long, a lot longer than this story.

  65

  The Pixy and the Grocer

  There once was a proper student; he lived in a garret and didn’t own a thing. There once was a proper grocer; he lived on the first floor and owned the whole house. Now the pixy stayed with the grocer, for there on Christmas Eve he was given a whole bowlful of porridge with a lump of butter in it. That the grocer could afford, therefore the pixy lived in his store, and from that a moral can be drawn.

  One evening the student came knocking on the grocer’s back door. He needed a candle and a piece of cheese for his supper; and he was, as usual, his own errand boy. He was given his wares and paid for them. The grocer wished him good evening and the grocer’s wife gave him a friendly nod, though she was a woman who could do more than nod her head: she could talk anyone’s ear off. The student nodded back and would have gone, had he not started reading what was written on the paper that the cheese had been wrapped in. It was a page torn from an old book of poetry that deserved a better fate than to be used as wrapping paper.

  “Most of the pages of that book are still here,” said the grocer. “I gave an old woman some coffee beans for it; you can have the rest for eight pennies.”

  “Thank you,” replied the student. “Let me have what is left of the book instead of the cheese, I can eat plain bread for supper. It would be a pity if all of it were torn to pieces. You are a splendid person, a practical man, but you have no more idea of what poetry is than that old barrel over there.”

  Now that was not a very nice thing to say, especially about the barrel. But both the grocer and the student laughed; it had been said in fun. It annoyed the pixy though. He had overheard the remark and thought it was an insult to the grocer, who owned the whole house and sold the very best quality butter.

  Night fell; the store was closed and everyone had gone to sleep except the student and the pixy. He sneaked into the grocer’s bedroom. The grocer’s wife was sleeping with her mouth open and the pixy stole her sharp tongue: she didn’t use it while she slept. Everything in the whole house that he put the tongue on was given the power of speech. Each of them could express its feelings and formulate its thoughts just as well as the grocer’s wife could. But since there was only one tongue, they could only speak one at a time, which was a blessing, I am sure, or they all would have talked at once.

  The first thing that was allowed to borrow the tongue was the barrel; it was filled with old newspapers. “Is it really true,” asked the pixy, “that you don’t know what poetry is?”

  “Certainly I know what poetry is,” said the barrel. “It’s something printed on the back page of a newspaper that people cut out sometimes. I think that I have more poetry inside me than the student has. And what am I compared to the grocer, just a poor old barrel.”

  Then the pixy put the tongue on the coffee grinder and there it certainly wagged. He also put it on the tub of butter and the cash drawer just to hear their opinions. They agreed unanimously with the barrel, and the opinion of the majority must be respected.

  “I will fix that student!” muttered the pixy, and sneaked up the back stairs to the garret where the young man lived. The student was still up, a light was burning in his room. The pixy looked through the keyhole. The young man was sitting reading the old book he had bought for eight pennies.

  How bright the room seemed! It was as if a ray of light came from the book, a luminous tree whose branches spread out across the ceiling. The leaves were fresh and green and on each branch flowers bloomed and fruit hung. The flowers were faces of young maidens, some with radiant dark eyes and other with clear blue ones. The fruits were sparkling stars. All the while the most beautiful music could be heard.

  Such splendor the little pixy had never seen or even thought possible. He stood on his toes and looked and looked until the light was put out. Even when the student had blown out his candle and gone to bed, the pixy tarried. He could still hear the music, a song so soft and comforting; a lovely lullaby for the student, who was falling asleep.

  “But that was fantastic!” mumbled the pixy. “That I h
ad not expected! I think I will move in with the student!” Then he thought—and he thought very sensibly—“But the student does not have any porridge.” And he sighed.

  Down the stairs he went, down to the grocer. And that was lucky, for the barrel had almost worn out the grocer’s wife’s tongue. It had lectured, giving all the opinions that were written in the old newspapers inside it. When the pixy came it had just begun to repeat them. He took the tongue and gave it back to its owner. But from that time on the whole store, from the cash drawer to the firewood that lay by the stove, all had the same opinions as the barrel, whom they so honored and respected that when the grocer, in the evening, would read aloud the theater column to his wife, they thought that the barrel had written it.

  But the pixy no longer stayed downstairs in the evening to listen to the grocer and his wife. No, as soon as the student had lit his candle, it was as if the light from the garret were an anchor cable that drew him up. He had to go and peek through the keyhole. He experienced greatness. He saw what we see when God, disguised as the storm, walks across the turbulent ocean. He cried without knowing why he cried, but found that in those tears happiness was hidden. “How wonderful it must be,” he thought, “to sit under the magic tree together with the student.” But that was not possible; he had to be satisfied with looking through the keyhole.

  The autumn winds blew; the cold air whistled through the loft and down the corridor where the little pixy was standing, his eyes glued to the keyhole of the student’s door. It was cold, wretchedly cold; but the pixy did not feel it before the student had put out his light and the sound of the music that came from the garret had ceased. But then he froze! He hurried down into his own little warm corner that was so cozy and comfortable.

  At Christmas when the porridge with the lump of butter in it was served, the pixy acknowledged no other master than the grocer.