“That is a very serious disease, especially for a snowman to get.” The old watchdog shook his head. “I have suffered from it myself, but I got over it.… Out! Out! Get out! … I have a feeling that the weather is going to change.”
And it did. It became warmer and the snowman became smaller. He didn’t say a word, not even one of complaint, and that’s a very telling sign.
One morning he fell apart. His head rolled off and something that looked like the handle of a broom stuck up from where he had stood. It was what the boys had used to help hold the snowman together and make him stand upright.
“Now I understand why he longed for the stove,” said the old watchdog. “That’s the old poker he had inside him. No wonder. Well, now that’s over.… Out! Out! Out!”
And soon the winter was over, and the little girls sang:
“Come, anemones, so pure and white,
Come, pussy willows, so soft and light,
Come, lark and cuckoo, and sing
That in February we have spring.”
And no one thought about the snowman.
108
In the Duckyard
In the duckyard … The hens called it the henyard, for there were hens there too, but this story is about a duck, so we shall call it the duckyard since that is the name the ducks prefer.… In the duckyard there once was a duck who came from Portugal. She had laid eggs, been slaughtered, and then eaten; and that was her biography. But all the little ducklings who had crawled out of her eggs had been called Portuguese and that name they were very proud of. When our story takes place there was only one member of the family left, and she was very fat, which is considered beautiful among ducks.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo,” cried the cock, who had twelve wives and was very haughty.
“Ugh, how his crowing hurts my ears,” the Portuguese said. “I wish he would learn to modulate his voice. But he is beautiful. I won’t deny it, even though he isn’t a drake. But to be able to modulate your voice is a sign of culture. Now the little songbirds who nest in the linden tree, they know the art. They sing so beautifully.… There’s something in their songs that touches me indescribably.… I call it something Portuguese. If I had such a little songbird I would be a mother to it—kind and loving! It is part of my nature to be loving. It is in my blood: my Portuguese blood.”
She had no sooner finished speaking than a little songbird fell, headfirst, from the roof of the house into the duckyard. The cat had caught the poor little fellow, and somehow he had managed to escape but not without a broken wing.
“Isn’t that exactly what you would expect from a cat—brutality!” exclaimed the Portuguese. “I know that cat, hasn’t he eaten two of my ducklings? That such a creature should be allowed to walk about freely, especially on roofs, is more than I can understand. It would never be allowed in Portugal.”
She felt very sorry for the little songbird, and so did all the other ducks, even though they weren’t Portuguese. As they stood in a circle around him, they said, “Poor unfortunate creature. We cannot sing, but we appreciate music and are sensitive to art, though we don’t talk about it.”
“And why not?” said the Portuguese. “Just to show my appreciation, I will do something for the poor little thing, for that is a duty.” Then she climbed into the water trough and splashed with her wings.
The water streamed down over the little songbird and he nearly drowned, but he knew he had been drenched out of kindness.
“That was a good deed!” said the Portuguese to the other ducks. “I hope it will be a good example to all of you.”
“Pip,” said the little songbird. His broken wing made it very difficult for him to shake himself dry. “You have a good heart, madam.” He wanted to show his appreciation for the shower, though he hoped he would never get another.
“I have never thought about being good-hearted,” the Portuguese began, and spread her wings. “But this I know: I love all my fellow creatures, all except the cat. And to demand that I should love the cat would be quite unreasonable. You can make yourself at home. I am from a foreign land, and you can see it by the beauty of my feathers and my posture. All the other ducks are natives. They don’t have my blood. But it hasn’t gone to my head. Only this I must say: if anyone here understands you, then it is I.”
“She has a wortugal stuck in her gizzard,” cried one of the ordinary ducklings, who was known to be wittier than all the others.
The other ordinary ducks nudged each other and snickered. “Wortugal…Quack…Quack…Wortugal, Portugal…Quack…Quack…” They all agreed that their companion’s joke was one of the funniest they had ever heard “Wortugal, Portugal.” But now it was time that they, too, befriended the little songbird.
“We don’t waddle around with long and difficult words in our bills, but that doesn’t mean that we are not kind or sensitive. We care about you too, but when we do you a favor we won’t shout about it. Kind acts are best done quietly.”
“You have a beautiful voice,” one of the older drakes began as he stepped closer to the songbird. “It must be very gratifying for you to know how much pleasure you give to others. Not that I understand art; and that is why I keep my bill shut about it. After all, it is better to be silent than to say a lot of stupidities, as some people do.”
“Don’t pester him,” the Portuguese ordered. “He needs lots of rest and proper attention.” Turning to the little bird, she suggested, “Would you like another shower?”
“Oh no. Please let me stay dry,” whispered the songbird.
“Water is the best cure for everything. It has never done me any harm,” the Portuguese argued. “Amusing company helps too. Look who’s coming. It’s the Chinese hens. They have feathers on their legs, but they are quite respectable anyway. They have foreign blood in their veins, but they were born here, and that in my opinion is a virtue.”
The Chinese hens came and before them walked the cock. “You are a songbird,” he said politely, and this was very unusual, for he considered courtesy unmasculine. “You do what you can with the little voice you have and I appreciate it. But in order really to be heard one needs a chest,” he asserted while he took a deep breath and held it as long as he could.
“Isn’t he sweet?” remarked one of the Chinese hens. The songbird looked up at her; his feathers were still wet and ruffled from his shower. “He looks almost as beautiful as a newly hatched Chinese chick.”
The Chinese hens spoke kindly to the songbird—very softly and in the most educated Chinese. Every word had a ph sound. “We belong to the same race as you do. The ducks, even the Portuguese, are web-footed. You don’t know us yet, but then, who does? Who has taken the trouble to find out who we are? No one! And yet we are members of an aristocratic family, born to position above the others. We don’t make a fuss about it. We try to see everyone else’s good points and only talk about their virtues—though this can be difficult when so few of the creatures here have any. Excluding ourselves and the cock, there isn’t an intelligent fowl in the henhouse, but at least they are all respectable, that’s more than you can say about any of the ducks. Don’t trust that duck with the curled tail, she is false. As for the one with the green feathers in her wings, she is too talkative. She won’t let you get a word in edgewise, and she has never held an opinion worth listening to. The fat one is a gossip, always telling malicious tales. We couldn’t talk that way if we wanted to, because it would be against our nature; we say nice things about others or we don’t say anything at all. The Portuguese is the only one of the whole lot of them who is the least bit educated, and she is too passionate and talks too much about Portugal.”
“Goodness, how those Chinese hens whisper,” said one ordinary duck to another ordinary duck. “But what a bore they are, and that’s why we’ve never talked to them.”
The drake joined the little group around the songbird. He was a little surprised at all the attention it was receiving, for he thought it was a sparrow. “I can’t see the difference,
” he explained. “They all belong to the artistic crowd and they are all the same size. Since they exist, we shall have to put up with them.”
“Don’t mind him,” the Portuguese whispered to the little songbird. “He is all business and business is all to him.… Now I think I had better take a nap. One owes it to oneself to take good care of oneself. I must grow fat, otherwise I shall never be stuffed and roasted, and this, after all, is the purpose of life.”
The Portuguese blinked. She was a good duck; she found a good place to lie down, and there she slept soundly. The little songbird plucked at his broken wing, then he nestled as close as he could to his protector. “The duckyard is a pleasant place to be,” he thought.
The hens walked about among the ducks only while they were looking for food; now that there was nothing more to be found, they went back to their own part of the yard, led by the Chinese hens.
The witty duckling remarked to the other ducklings that the Portuguese was waddling about in her second “ducklinghood.”
“Ducklinghood … Ducklinghood!” screamed all the other young ducks. “My, how clever he is.…” Then they eagerly repeated his previous joke over and over again: “Wortugal … Portugal …” they cried until they grew tired and fell asleep.
For a while all was quiet, then a maid came from the kitchen of the farmhouse and emptied a bucketful of garbage into the duckyard. Splash!
At once all the ducks were up and about with their wings spread. The Portuguese woke too, and as she rose she stepped right on top of the little songbird.
“Peep,” he cried. “You are so heavy, madam.”
“It was your own fault, weren’t you in the way? Don’t be so thin-skinned. I am nervous too, but you will never hear me say ‘Peep.’ ”
“Don’t be angry,” said the little bird, “the peep just escaped me by mistake.”
The Portuguese was not listening. She was too busy eating, gobbling down garbage as quickly as she could. In the meantime the songbird composed a song for her, and when she had finished eating and again lay down, he began to sing:
“Tweet … Tweet …
Of your good heart I sing
And its message bring,
Tweet … Tweet …
To the sky
Oh, so high.
Tweet … Tweet …”
“I always rest after meals,” the Portuguese complained. “When you live in a duckyard you must learn to behave like a duck. Now it is time to sleep.”
The poor little songbird was amazed and unhappy; he had only meant to please the Portuguese. While she slept he found a grain of wheat and placed it in front of her. But when the duck woke up she was irritable because she had slept badly.
“That’s something for a chicken, not for me; and please don’t bother me all the time.”
“Why are you mad at me, when all I want to do is to make you happy?” the songbird cried.
“Mad!” she exclaimed. “How dare you call me mad? Don’t ever make such a mistake again.”
“Yesterday,” sniffed the little songbird, “yesterday there was only sunshine. Today everything is dark and gray. It makes me so sad.”
“Hum.… You can’t tell time,” replied the Portuguese crossly. “The day isn’t done yet. Don’t stand there with such a long, sad face.”
“Please don’t look at me like that,” the little bird begged. “That’s the way those two evil eyes looked at me just before I fell down from the roof into the duckyard.”
“Of all the nerve!” screamed the Portuguese. “Imagine anyone comparing me to a cat, to a carnivorous animal! I who haven’t a mean bone in my body! I who have taken such good care of you! I’ll teach you better manners, I will!” And she bit off the songbird’s head and left his body dead and still.
“Now what have I done?” the Portuguese asked herself. “Was I too severe? Well, if he couldn’t take that, then he wasn’t meant for this world. Didn’t I try to be a mother to him? How could I have done otherwise, when I have such a kind heart?”
The neighbor’s cock stuck his head over the fence and crowed so that he could be heard in the next county.
“You’ll be the death of us all, with your crowing,” the Portuguese cried. “The little songbird lost his head because of it, and I almost lost mine.”
“He doesn’t look like much now,” the cock admitted as he glanced at the headless songbird.
“Speak with respect of him,” snapped the Portuguese. “His breast was small but he sang with true artistry. And he had that loving nature and tender soul which all animals and so-called human beings ought to have.”
All the ducks gathered around the body of the little songbird. Ducks have a passionate nature and their passions are most deeply aroused by envy and pity. And as there was no reason to envy the songbird, they were filled with pity.
They were joined by the Chinese hens. “We shall never see another songbird like him.… He was almost Chinese,” they said. And then they clucked and cried. And all the other hens clucked and cried. But the ducks had the reddest eyes.
“We have soft hearts,” the ducks exclaimed. “No one can deny it.”
“It is true,” cried the Portuguese. “Ducks are almost as softhearted here as they are in Portugal.”
But the drake, who hadn’t cried, grunted, “What about something to eat! Is there anything more important than eating? A dead musician more or less doesn’t matter. There are plenty more where he came from.”
109
The Muse of the Twentieth Century
The muse of the twentieth century we shall never know, but our children may and our grandchildren certainly will. Yet we cannot help wondering what she will look like or what songs she will sing: which string in man’s soul she will touch, and to what heights she will raise her age.
What a lot of questions to ask in a time like ours, when poesy is only in the way, a time when we know full well that what our “immortal” poets compose will, in the future, exist, if at all, as scratchings on the walls of prisons, and be of interest only to the curious few.
Poesy ought to take an interest in what is to come; it should be the fuse that starts those struggles, causing both blood and ink to flow.
You think that I am only expressing my own opinion. You want to protest that poetry is not forgotten in our age.
I will grant that there are still people who on a weekday—when they have nothing else to do—feel a need for poetry; and that when this “hunger” makes them uncomfortable in their precious organs, they send a messenger to the bookstore to buy four crowns’ worth of the latest poetry: a copy of the volume that has received the most laurel leaves from the critics. That is, if they are not content with the poetry that they get free from the grocer who wraps his wares in printed sheets. The publisher sells these pages very cheaply.
Cheapness is a virtue in an age as busy as ours. We have need of what we have, and that is enough! The poetry of the future and its music are subjects for Don Quixote. To spend time wondering about such things is as fruitful as discussing a trip to the remote planet Uranus. Our time is too valuable and too short for games of fantasy. Shouldn’t we decide, once and for all, to talk reasonably about literature? What is poetry? Those notes, those sounds that try to express thought and feeling, and are caused by the movement and vibrations of our nerves. All joy, all happiness, all pain—yes, even our material ambitions—are, the learned tell us, determined by the functioning of our nervous systems. We are merely stringed instruments: all of us!
But who plays upon the strings? Who makes them throb? The spirit, the invisible God’s spirit, plucks them; and the other stringed instruments, inspired by His movements and His mood, respond in harmony or in disharmony and discord. So it has always been and so it will always be, even in the next century when men will make great strides forward because they will be conscious of their freedom.
Each century—also each millennium—reflects its greatest in poesy. Born at the end of one epoch, it steps forward t
o rule the next. In our busy machine age she is already born, she who will be the muse of the coming century. We send her our greetings. Someday she may hear them or read them, as I have already said, scratched on the walls of a prison.
Her cradle is large, stretching as far south as explorers have gone, and as far south as astronomers have pointed their telescopes. But we do not hear the cradle rock; for the sound of it is drowned out by the banging and whirring of the machines from our factories, the locomotive whistles, and the explosions as both real rock cliffs and the spiritual ties that bind us to the past are blown to pieces. She was born in our factories where steam and the machine rule: Master Bloodless and his helpers, who are hard at work both night and day.
She is capable of love and possesses a real woman’s heart; full of the flames of the virgin and the fire of passion. Her intelligence shines in all the colors of the spectrum, since thousands of years of dispute have proven that which color is the most beautiful is only a matter of taste. Her strength and her pride are her great swan wings of fantasy. Science constructed them for her and the laws of nature lent them power.
In the muse’s veins two very different bloods have mixed. On her father’s side she is related to the people. Her soul and thoughts are healthy; the expression of her eyes is earnest and on her mouth a smile plays. Her mother was wellborn, brought up strictly by the academy. As an immigrant’s daughter, this noble woman had memories of the golden rococo.
The gifts the muse received at her birth were extravagant. She was given so many of nature’s secrets, one might suppose that they were merely sweets to be eaten and forgotten. From the depths of the oceans the diving bell brought her the strangest species. A map of the heavens—that silent ocean with millions of islands, each one a world—was her coverlet.
Her nanny sang to her. She chose verses from the great skald Eivild, from Firdausi, from the minnesingers, and Heine, who sang with the eagerness of a boy from the depth of a truly poetic soul. She recited the Eddas, those tales of blood and vengeance that belong to our primeval ancestors. All of The Thousand and One Nights were recounted in a quarter of an hour. The muse learned much from her nanny.
The Complete Fairy Tales Page 82