But the thistle bush didn’t answer. She grew more and more thoughtful. She thought and thought, and at Christmas her thinking bore a flower: “When your children are inside the fence, then a mother doesn’t mind being outside herself.”
“What a kind thought,” said the sun ray. “You, too, will go far.”
“Will I be put in a pot or a frame?” asked the thistle bush.
“You will be put in a fairy tale,” answered the sun ray.
And here it is!
139
A Question of Imagination
There was once a young man who was studying to be an author, and he wanted to become one before Easter; then he would marry and live by his pen. It would be easy, if only he could find something to write about, but no ideas ever came to him. He had been born too late; everything had been thought about and written down before he came into the world.
“How fortunate the people were who were born a thousand years ago,” he said. “Even those born a hundred years ago were luckier than I am, for then there was still something left to write about. Everything in the world has been written up; no wonder I can’t find anything to write down.”
He studied and thought so long and so hard that he made himself ill. No doctor could help him, but maybe the old wise woman could. She lived in a little house where the road entered the pastures. She was the gatekeeper; she lifted the latch for carriages and those on horseback. But she knew a great deal more than how to open a gate. Some say that she knew even more than the doctor, even though he drove in his own carriage and had to pay “rank tax,” which only the nobility and the very rich must pay.
“I’ll visit her,” declared the young man.
Though her house was small, it was nice, if a bit ordinary. There wasn’t a tree or a flower anywhere near it. Next to the door there was a beehive—very useful! There was a little potato patch—very useful! There was a hedge of blackthorn bushes; they had already flowered but their berries would be bitter until after the first frost.
“The very picture of our prosaic times,” thought the young man, and that, after all, was a thought: a pearl found in front of the old wise woman’s house.
“Write it down,” she said. “Crumbs are also bread. I know why you’ve come, you want to be an author by Easter and you cannot find anything to write about. You have no ideas.”
“Everything is already written. Our times are not like the old.”
“No,” she agreed, “they are not. In the old times they used to burn old wise women like me at the stake, and the poets had empty stomachs as well as empty pockets. These times are not only just right: they are the best! It is you who have poor eyes. You cannot see and I doubt if you can hear either. Have you been saying your prayers before you go to bed? … There is enough to write about if you can write. You will find, peeping out of the earth with the first flowers, stories enough for your pen. In the running water of the brook or the still waters of the lake there are poems to be caught like fish. All you have to do is to learn to understand, learn to catch a sun ray and keep it in your hand. Now you can try my glasses and my ear trumpet. Pray to God, and stop thinking about yourself.”
The last thing was the most difficult, and really more than the old wise woman could demand.
The young man put on the glasses and stuck the ear trumpet in his ear. They were standing in the middle of the potato patch, and the old wise woman picked up a potato and gave it to him. It spoke, told its story: the history of the potato, an everyday tale in ten lines.
What did it tell? It talked about itself and its family: how it had come to Europe as an immigrant and had at first been persecuted and condemned because of misunderstanding and ignorance, until finally its true value, which was greater than gold’s, was recognized. “By royal messenger, we were distributed to all the town halls in the country, and our importance was proclaimed. But the people didn’t believe it, and they did not know how to plant us. One man dug a hole and dumped a whole bushel of us into it. Another planted us here and there in the garden; he expected that we would grow up like trees and that he would be able to shake down the fruit. We grew, flowered, and set fruit, and then we withered and no one thought that below us in the earth lay that blessed wealth, the potato. Yes, we have suffered; that is, our forefathers have. But if you have any family feeling, then you can feel the suffering yourself. We have a most interesting history.”
“That’s enough,” said the old wise woman, and threw the potato back on the ground. “Now take a look at the blackthorn bush.”
“We have family abroad, in the home of the potato,” said the blackthorn bushes, “but farther north than they grow. The Norsemen came, steering a westerly course, through storms and fogs to an unknown land, and there—beyond the ice and snowbound coast—they found herbs, green grass, and bushes with deep blue berries the color of grapes. Sloeberries are turned into fruit as sweet as grapes by the first frost. The same will happen to our berries. They called that country Vineland, Greenland, Sloenland!”
“That was a very romantic story,” said the young man.
“Yes, but come along.” The old wise woman had heard the blackthorn bush’s story before. She led the young man to the beehive.
He could see right through it. What a busy place it was! In all the corridors stood bees fluttering their wings in order to keep the air fresh in the great factory: that was their job. Bees came streaming in from the outside. They had been born with little baskets on their legs, which they filled with pollen. The baskets were emptied, and the pollen was sorted and made into honey and wax. The bees flew away again. The queen bee wanted to fly too, but wherever she flew, all the other bees would have to follow; and it wasn’t the season for changing hives. Still she wanted to fly, so the wings were bitten off Her Majesty by the other bees, and then she had to stay where she was.
“Come along,” the old wise woman said, and tapped the young man on the shoulder. “Let’s go out into the road and look at the travelers.”
“What a mass of people!” exclaimed the young man. “And each one of them has a story. It’s too much for me, we’d better go back.”
“No, go straight ahead, right into the midst of the multitude. Look at them, listen to them, and try to understand them with your heart. Then you will find that you have lots of ideas and plenty to write about. But before you go, give me back my glasses and my ear trumpet.” And she took both of them away from the young man.
“I cannot see anything!” he complained. “I can’t hear a thing.”
“Then you can’t become an author by Easter.” The old wise woman shook her head.
“What shall I do then?” wailed the young man.
“Neither by Easter nor by Whitsun. Imagination can’t be taught.”
“But what am I to do? I would love to earn a living by serving the muses.”
“That’s not difficult, that can be arranged in time for the Mardi Gras. Buy some masks and make faces at the poets. Even when you understand them, don’t be impressed, just make a grimace, and you’ll get paid well enough to feed a family.”
“Isn’t that amazing,” said the young man, and followed her advice. He became an expert at looking down his nose at poets because he couldn’t become one himself.
The old wise woman told me his story, and she has so much imagination that she would give it away, if only one could.
140
Luck Can be Found in a Stick
I want to tell you a story about luck. We all know what it means to be lucky or have good fortune. To some it is a daily experience, to others something that may happen once a year, and a few may be lucky only once in their lifetime. But we all have good fortune at least once.
Now I don’t have to tell what everyone knows: that is that God brings little children and lays them in their mothers’ laps. Some He brings to a castle and some are born on the open fields where the cold wind plays. But what everyone does not know—and it is just as true—is that God also gives to each ch
ild a piece of good fortune. This gift He does not place beside the child where everyone can see it. No, He hides it where you would least think of searching for it, and yet you will find it. The good fortune can lie in an apple; that happened to a learned man named Newton: the apple fell and he caught his good fortune. If you don’t know the story ask someone who does to tell it to you. I want to tell you another story, and it is a story about a pear. Once upon a time there was a poor man. He had been born poor and grown up in poverty; and on that fortune, he had married. By profession he was a turner; he made wooden handles for umbrellas, but he earned so little by it that he and his family lived from hand to mouth.
“I never have any luck,” he would say. This story is really true. I could give both the man’s name and his address, though it wouldn’t change the story—but I won’t.
Rowan trees, with their pretty but sour red berries, grew around his house. In the middle of the lawn stood a pear tree that had never borne any fruit, and yet the gift of good fortune was locked in that very tree, in its invisible pears.
One night there was such a terrible storm that the stagecoach was lifted off the road and thrown into the ditch, “as if the heavy wagon were a rag”—so it had been described in the newspapers. The storm broke a great branch off the pear tree. This was taken into the workroom and cut up. The turner put a piece of pearwood on his lathe and made a pear. He did it for fun, and he made a whole family of pears, the smallest was no bigger than the nail on your little finger.
“Now at last the pear tree has borne pears,” he said, and gave them to his children to play with.
An umbrella is a necessity in a wet country. The turner had only one for his whole family to use. Sometimes the wind turned it inside out and broke it, but the turner fixed it every time. The most irritating thing that happened—and it happened often—was that the little button that held the umbrella together when it was closed would break off.
One day when the button got lost, the turner looked all over the floor for it. He didn’t find it, but he did find the smallest of the wooden pears he had made.
“I can’t find the button,” he said. “Well then, this will do just as well.” He drilled a hole in the little wooden pear, sewed it on, slipped it through the little ring, and it worked even better than the button. Why, it was the best closing mechanism the umbrella had ever had!
When next he sent some umbrella handles to the factory that made the finished umbrellas, he sent along a few of his little wooden pears and asked them to try them instead of buttons. They did, and some of them were sent to America. Over there they soon found out that the little pears closed the umbrellas much more securely than the buttons did. From then on, the Americans demanded that all the umbrellas they bought be closed with little wooden pears.
Now there was work to do, wooden pears by the thousands, one on each umbrella. The turner worked hard at his lathe; the whole pear tree was soon made into pears. And silver and gold took its place.
“That pear tree was my good fortune,” said the turner. Now he had several men working for him, and apprentices as well. He was always in splendid humor and as content as he ought to be. “Luck can be found in a stick,” he would say.
I, who am telling his story, say the same. You know that people say that one can become invisible if one puts a white stick in one’s mouth. It is true, but it has to be the right stick: the one God has given you as good fortune. I have found mine and, just like the turner, I can make it change into gold: the most lustrous, the most valuable gold of all: the one that shines from a child’s eye, the one whose value can be tested by a child’s laughter. When father or mother reads aloud, I am there standing in the room, but I have my white stick in my mouth and am invisible; and if I feel that one of my stories has made them happier, then I join the turner in saying, “Luck can be found in a stick.”
141
The Comet
The comet came! It flashed with its fiery tail across the heavens and brought omens of the future. Everybody looked at it: the rich from their balconies, the poor from the streets, and the lonely traveler wandering across the pathless heath. Each one had his own thoughts at the sight.
“Come! Look, it is a sign from heaven. Hurry outside, it is beautiful!” And everybody did hurry and almost everyone saw it.
Inside a little room sat a mother and her child. On the table a candle burned. The wick had curled like a wood shaving.
“That is a bad sign,” thought the mother. “It is an omen that the boy won’t live.” That was an old superstition and she was filled with them.
The boy was, in fact, to have a long life here on earth; he was to live to see the comet when it returned sixty years later.
The little boy had not noticed the wick or thought about the comet—this first time during his life that it appeared in the sky. He gave all his attention to a little cracked bowl filled with soapsuds in front of him. He dipped the head of a little clay pipe into it, gently lifted it up, and blew soap bubbles. The bubbles floated through the air. There were big ones and small ones. They had the most beautiful colors. They changed from yellow to red, to purple and blue, and then became as green as a leaf in the forest when the sun shines through it.
“May God give you as many years of life on earth as you can blow soap bubbles,” said his mother.
“So many, so many,” laughed the little one. “Why, I have so much soapsuds that I will never be able to finish.” And then he dipped the clay pipe again and blew some more.
“There flies a year, and there another, look how they fly!” he exclaimed every time a bubble loosened itself from the pipe and glided away. Some of them burst as they hit his face. The soapy water made his eyes smart and brought forth a tear. In each bubble he saw his future brilliantly reflected.
“Come, now you can see the comet clearly,” called the neighbors. “Do come, don’t stay inside!”
The mother took her son’s hand in hers. He had to leave his pipe and bowl of soapy water to see the comet. He saw the fiery ball with its long tail of sparks. Some said it was nine feet long; others, nine million. People see so differently.
“Our children and our grandchildren will be dead before it comes again,” the people said.
And that was true. Most of the people who saw the comet then were dead when it again appeared. But the little boy for whom the wick had curled like a wood shaving, and whose mother had thought he soon would die, was still alive. He was old and his hair was white. There is an old saying: “A white hair is the flower of age.” And of these the old schoolteacher had many.
His pupils said he was wise; he knew so much about geography, history, and all the stars in the sky.
“Everything repeats itself,” he would say. “Notice that when something happens in one country it soon happens again in another, just ‘dressed’ a little differently.”
The schoolteacher told them about William Tell, who had had to shoot an apple off his son’s head, and how he had hid another arrow inside his cloak, to shoot into the heart of evil Gessler. It was in Switzerland that this happened, but the same events had taken place many years earlier in Denmark, when Palnatoke had been forced to shoot an apple off the head of his son; and he also had kept an extra arrow for revenge. More than a thousand years earlier still, in Egypt, the same story had been written down. These stories are like the comets: they disappear, are forgotten, and then reappear.
He talked about the comet that was to appear, the one he had seen as a young boy. The old schoolmaster knew a lot about astronomy, but that did not mean that he had forgotten history or geography. He had arranged his garden so that it was a map of all of Denmark; in each flower bed, which was shaped like the island it represented, grew the plants native to that district.
“Get the peas,” he would say to one of his pupils, and the child would find them in Laaland.
“Get the buckwheat,” he would order, and one of the children would walk over to Langeland.
Sweet gale and blu
e gentian flowers were planted on the very tip of northern Jutland, and holly near Silkeborg. The towns were marked by little statues. St. Knud stood in Odense, Absalon with his bishop’s staff at Sorø. Oh yes, in the schoolteacher’s garden you could learn the geography of Denmark; but first he had to explain everything about it, and that was the best part.
Now when the comet was expected he told the children what the people had said when last it was seen. “The comet year is supposed to be a good wine year,” he said, “and the wine merchants can add water to the wine without their customers finding out. Wine merchants should be very fond of comets.”
The weather had been cloudy, both day and night, for fourteen days. The comet could not be seen, but it was there.
The old schoolmaster sat in his study, near the schoolroom. The old grandfather clock that he had inherited from his parents stood in the corner. Its heavy lead weights did not move, the pendulum was still, and the little cuckoo sat soundlessly behind a closed door. The room was silent. It had been years since the clock stopped. But the piano—that, too, he had from his parents—could still be played on, and even though it sounded a little out of tune, it still contained a whole lifetime of melodies. When the old man played, memories came to him, both of moments of happiness and of times of sorrow—all that had happened during the long years that had passed since he first saw the comet. Now he recalled what his mother had said about the curly wick of the candle. He remembered the lovely soap bubbles he had blown, each of which was to be a year of his life. How they had glistened and sparkled. Then they had seemed to him to contain all happiness and beauty. The whole wide world had been mirrored in them and, with the lightheartedness of childhood and the desire of youth, he had wanted to go out into it. They had been bubbles of the future and had held nothing but sunshine. Now, as the old man played, the music was the bubbles of memory, melodies from a time past. Lines and phrases occurred to him, the song his grandmother sang when knitting:
The Complete Fairy Tales Page 110