“Ink skirt!” screamed the pen.
“Scribble pin!” shouted the inkwell.
Each of them thought his own repartee the cleverer, and there is nothing so satisfying as the feeling that one has had the last word. It makes for pleasant slumber, and both the inkwell and the pen went to sleep. But the poet was not asleep; like tones from a violin, thoughts upon thoughts came to him. They fell like pearls and rode through the forest as the storm; he felt the cry of his own heart and the spark of the Eternal Master.
To Him alone belongs the honor and the glory!
97
The Dead Child
The house was in mourning, and sorrow lived in every heart. The youngest child in the family, a four-year-old boy, had died. The parents’ pride and hope, their only son. They had two daughters. One of them was to be confirmed that year; they were kind and good girls, both of them. But the child one loses is always closest to one’s heart, and this child had been the youngest, and their only son. It was a time of trial. The two young sisters mourned, as young hearts do; they were especially moved by the sorrow of their parents. The father walked as if he were bent by sorrow, but their mother was completely beside herself with grief.
Night and day she had sat beside the bed of her sick child, she had lifted him in her arms, carried him, and nursed him. The child had become an inseparable part of her; and now she could not believe that he was dead and had to be placed in a coffin and hidden in a grave.
How could God take her child from her? But it had happened; and when she could no longer say that it was not so, then in her grief and distress she cried: “God does not know about it. His servants are heartless and do what pleases them. They do not listen to a mother’s prayers.”
Her pain was so great that she let go of God; and dark thoughts came, thoughts about eternal death—that all was over when our bodies became dust in the dust. With such thoughts, she could hold onto nothing, and she fell into the deepest despair.
She could no longer cry. She paid no attention to her daughters, nor did she notice the tears in her husband’s eyes. All her thoughts were with her dead child. She tried to remember everything he had done, every childish, innocent word he had uttered.
The day of the funeral came. The night before she had not slept, except for an hour in the early morning when tiredness had overwhelmed her. During that time the coffin was moved to the most distant room in the house and the lid was nailed down.
When she woke she wanted to see her child again, but her husband, with tears in his eyes, said, “We have closed the coffin, we had to.”
“If God is hard and cruel toward me, why should I expect better treatment from you?” she said, sobbing.
The coffin was carried to its grave. The mother, who could find consolation nowhere, sat with her daughters but she did not see them. Her thoughts were homeless, she had abandoned herself to her grief; she was floundering now in a dark ocean, like a ship that has lost its rudder. Thus passed the day of the funeral, and the days that followed were as uniformly filled with suffering. With eyes red from weeping, her family looked at her. They tried to console her but she did not hear them; and maybe they could not find the right words, for they were grieving too.
She and sleep had parted company, although he could have been her best friend, for she needed rest to strengthen her body and give peace to her soul. Her husband persuaded her that she must lie down; and she did. She was not asleep; she only pretended to be by lying very still. Her husband, who was listening to her breathing, was convinced that she had finally fallen asleep. He closed his own eyes and soon slept deeply. He did not hear his wife rise and dress herself. Silently, she let herself out of the house and hurried to that place which her thoughts did not leave, neither day nor night: her son’s grave. She saw no one on her way along the path that crossed the meadows to the churchyard; and no one saw her.
The sky was clear and all the stars were out; it was in the beginning of September and the air was warm. The little grave of her child was still covered with flowers; their perfume smelled strongly in the still night. She sat down and bent her head, as if she hoped to be able to see down through the earth to her little boy.
Everything about him was still alive to her. She remembered his smile, the expression of love for her in his face. How could anyone forget how eloquently his little face had spoken as he lay on his sickbed? She remembered how she had bent down over him and taken his hand when he was so weak he could not move it. As she had sat by his bed, she now sat by his grave, but here she could weep freely and her tears fell on his grave.
“Do you want to go down to your child?” asked a voice near her. It sounded so deep and clear, as if her own heart had spoken to her. She turned her head and saw standing beside her a man dressed in a long black cloak with a hood that hid his face. As he looked down at her, she caught a glimpse of his features. He looked austere and yet inspired confidence rather than fear, and his eyes sparkled like a young man’s.
“Down to my child,” she repeated, and her words sounded like a desperate prayer.
“Do you dare follow me?” asked the man. “I am Death!”
She nodded and suddenly all the stars seemed to shine with the power and glory of the full moon. She noticed the splendor of the flowers that covered the grave, as the earth grew soft under her and she sank slowly down into it. Death covered her with his cape and it was night, and dark as death. She sank deeper than the gravedigger’s spade ever will reach; the churchyard became a roof over her head.
Death’s cape fell away from her and she was standing in a great hall. Although it was twilight all about her, the place was more comforting than frightening.
There was her child! She pressed him to her heart. He smiled and laughed and looked even more beautiful than he had when he was alive. She shouted for joy but was aware at the same moment that no sound came from her lips. From far away beautiful and strange music reached her ears; it seemed to come nearer and nearer, only to recede again. It came from somewhere beyond the great curtain, black as night, that divided the hall from the land of eternity.
“My sweet mother, my own mother!” she heard her little boy say. Oh, it was his voice, the voice she loved. Kiss followed kiss, in one unending joy.
The little boy pointed toward the curtain and said: “It is not as beautiful up on earth as it is here. Look, Mother! Do you see them all? Such is heavenly bliss.”
The mother looked in the direction her son was pointing, but she saw nothing except the curtain dark as night. Her eyes belonged still to the earth, and she could not see what he saw. She heard the music and the singing that came from beyond, but she could not understand the words that were sung.
“I can fly now, Mother,” said the child, “fly together with all the other happy children, right up to God. I would like to so much, but your tears hold me back. When you weep I cannot leave you, and I want to. Please let me go, may I? After all, it is but so short a time, and then you will be with me.”
“No, stay, stay!” cried the mother. “Only a little while longer. Let me look at you just once more, and kiss you and hold you in my arms!”
And she held onto the child and she kissed him. Mournfully her name was called by someone up above. Who could it be?
“Do you hear?” asked the child. “It is Father who is calling you.”
Then she heard deep sobs, like those children make when they have cried too long.
“Hear my sisters,” said the boy. “You have forgotten them!”
Suddenly she remembered all that she had left behind. She saw shades fly by her, through the hall of death, and thought that she recognized some of them. What if one of those shades should prove to be her husband or her daughters! No, she could still hear their sighs and their weeping. She had forgotten them for the sake of her dead child.
“Now all the bells of heaven ring,” said the little boy. “Mother, the sun is rising!”
A blinding light engulfed her, the child was go
ne, and she rose upward. She felt bitterly cold and lifted her head to see where she was. She was in the churchyard; she had been lying on the grave of her dead child. But in her dream God had guided her and taught her to understand. She fell on her knees and prayed, “Forgive me, Lord, that I would keep a soul from its flight toward you, and forgive me for forgetting my duties toward the living.”
In these words her heart found peace. The sun rose; a bird sang above her head and she heard it. The bells of the church rang for morning prayers. She felt the holiness of everything around her, and that sacred holiness was in her heart as well. She knew again her God and her duties. Longingly she ran toward her home. She bent over her sleeping husband and woke him with a kiss; and they talked, words that came from their hearts. And she was strong and yet at the same time gentle, as a wife should be. Her strength she found in the belief that God’s will is always for the best.
Her husband asked her, “Where did you get the strength to comfort others?”
She kissed him and she kissed her children. “From God,” she said, “and from my dead child in his grave.”
98
The Cock and the Weathercock
There were two cocks on the farm, one on the roof and one on the manure heap. They were vain and proud, both of them. But which one had the greater right to be? Tell us your opinion—it won’t make any difference, we will stick to our own anyway.
The henyard was divided from the manure heap by a wooden fence and in the manure grew a cucumber; it knew that it was a vegetable and it was proud of being one.
“That is something one is by birth,” the cucumber mumbled to herself. “We can’t all be born cucumbers; there must be other species as well. Hens and ducks and the other animals on the farm had to be created too. The cock I look up to; he is always sitting on the fence crowing. He is of a great deal more importance than the weathercock, who is placed a little too high up and can’t even say, ‘Peep,’ not to speak of crowing. He has no hens or chickens of his own, and when he sweats, it is green. He never thinks about anyone but himself. Now the cock on the farm, he is something else! When he struts about, it is a dance, a ballet. When he crows, it is music! Wherever he goes, people know how important a trumpeter is! If he came in here and ate me up, leaves and stalk and all, I would call it a blessed death. My body would become his!” said the cucumber.
Toward night there was a horrible storm. The hens, the chickens, and the cock sought shelter. The wooden fence fell, which made a frightening noise. Several tiles flew off the roof, but the weathercock stayed where he was, he did not even turn. He couldn’t, which was really strange since he was quite new and had been cast recently. But he was the kind that was born old; steady and sober-minded from birth. He resembled in no way the fluttering birds of the air, the swallows or the sparrows; as a matter of fact, he despised them. “Small birds, common and ordinary,” he called them. As for shape and coloring, he found the pigeons more to his taste; their feathers shone like mother-of-pearl, they could almost pass for weathercocks. But he declared that they were fat and stupid and never thought about anything except filling their stomachs. They were uninteresting company. Most of the migrating birds had visited the weathercock and told him fantastic stories about foreign lands, where there were eagles and great birds of prey. The tales had been amusing and interesting the first time he heard them, but the birds always repeated themselves and that the weathercock found tedious. They were tiresome, and life was boring. There was no one worth associating with, everything was flat and dull!
“The world is no good!” he declared. “Twaddle and nonsense: all of it!”
The weathercock was oversophisticated. The cucumber would have found him very interesting and attractive, but she didn’t know him, so she admired the cock from the henyard; and now that the fence had blown down, he came visiting.
“What did you all think of that cock’s crow?” he asked the hens and the chickens—he was referring to the storm. “I found it a bit raw, it lacked elegance.”
Then he stepped up on the manure pile with the determined step of a hussar—he was wearing spurs. All the hens and chickens followed him.
“Vegetable,” he said to the cucumber; and in that one word she found such breeding and refinement that she did not even notice that the cock pecked at her and ate her up.
“A blessed death!”
The hens gathered around and the chickens came too, for where one ran the others followed. They clucked and they peeped and they all looked at the cock and admired him, for he was one of their own kind.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo,” he crowed. “All the chickens become hens in the henyards of the world, if and when I say so!”
The hens and the chickens clucked and peeped in agreement, all of them. Then the cock crowed some news to the world: “A cock can lay eggs! And do you know what is in such an egg? In it lies a basilisk! No one dares or can stand to look at such a monster. Human beings know it and now you know it too. Now you understand what I am capable of! What a fantastic creature I am!”
The cock flapped his wings, raised his red cockscomb, and crowed once more. All the hens and chickens were a little scared, and very thrilled that someone they knew so well should be such an incredibly important creature. They clucked and peeped so loud that the weathercock could hear them.
And he did; but he pretended that he hadn’t, and didn’t move. “Nonsense, all of it!” he said to himself. “Henyard roosters cannot lay eggs; and I can’t be bothered to lay one. If I wanted to, I am sure I could, but the world is not worthy of an egg. Everything is tiresome, life is a bore! I can’t even be bothered to sit here any longer!”
And at that moment the weathercock broke and fell down into the yard. It didn’t hit the rooster and kill it. “Though that was its intention,” declared all the hens.
Here is the moral of the story: “It is better to boast and crow than to be blasé and break.”
99
“Lovely”
The sculptor Hans Alfred, you know him, I am sure. We all know him. He received the gold medal when he graduated from the Art Academy, then he traveled to Italy and came home again. That was when he was young. Oh, he is still young, although he is at least ten years older now than he was then.
After his return he visited one of the smaller towns on Zealand. Everybody knew who he was and in his honor a party was given by one of the richer families of the town. Everyone who was anybody, or owned anything, was invited. It was an important event and the whole town knew about it without the town crier having mentioned it. Outside the house stood a group of apprentices and children—and a few of their parents, too—staring up at the curtained windows through which a festive glare shone. One might think that the night watchmen were having a party, so many people were there in the street. The spectators felt that they at least got a whiff of the amusements going on inside. And truly it was a grand party; after all, Mr. Alfred the sculptor was there.
He liked to talk, to tell about his travels, and everyone listened to him with pleasure and some with more than that. An elderly widow, whose husband had been a civil servant, was particularly impressed by the young man. Like a sponge she soaked up everything he said and asked for more. She was most naïve and unbelievably ignorant: a female Caspar Hauser.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing Rome,” she said. “It must be a pretty town. Why, everyone in the whole world visits it. Now describe Rome for us. What do you see when you enter the city gate?”
“It is not so easy to describe,” said the young sculptor. “There is a great square and in the center of it stands an obelisk that is four thousand years old.”
“An organist!” exclaimed the widow. She had never heard of an obelisk before.
Some of the other guests smiled, and others were about to laugh—the young man among them. But he didn’t, for just at that moment he noticed two eyes, as blue as the sea, staring at him. They belonged to the daughter of the widow; and if one has such a daughter, it does not matte
r that one is a bit naïve and talkative. Mama was a gushing fountain of questions, her daughter was the fountain’s beautiful nymph. She was lovely! There was something for a sculptor to look at and admire, he need not talk with her. And the young lady hardly ever opened her mouth.
“Has the Pope a big family?” asked Mama.
The young man answered as if the question had been just incorrectly phrased. “No, the Pope does not come from a large family.”
“That is not what I mean!” said the old lady. “Does he have a wife and children?”
“The Pope does not dare marry,” said the young man.
“I don’t like that!” was the widow’s verdict.
She could have spoken more cleverly and asked more intelligent questions, but if she had, would her daughter have leaned so close to her and looked at her with such a gentle and sweet smile?
Mr. Alfred spoke about the splendid colors of Italy, the pale blue mountains and the deep blue Mediterranean Sea. “Only in the color of the eyes of our women here in the north,” he declared, “is that blueness surpassed.” It was meant as allusion to the young lady’s eyes, but she acted as if she had not understood it; and that, too, the sculptor found “lovely.”
“Italy,” sighed some of the guests.
“To travel,” whispered others. “Lovely, lovely.”
“When I win the fifty thousand silver marks in the lottery,” exclaimed Mama, “then my daughter and I will travel. We will take you, Mr. Alfred, along as a guide. We will go abroad, the three of us. And we will take a few of our old friends along too.” And then she nodded so gaily to everyone around her that each had a right to believe that she meant him.
The Complete Fairy Tales Page 73