One of her servingwomen, who was named Laila, was dearer to her than all the rest and knew her mind better than anyone. One evening, as the two of them walked arm in arm in the king’s gardens, Laila asked her, “How long have you carried the king’s child?”
The queen fanned out two fingers across her stomach.
“You will not be surprised, I think, to learn that you are not the first woman at court to do it,” Laila said. “I can help you, if you wish it. Would you like to keep the king’s child, and raise it, and be a mother to his son?”
And the queen shook her head. Behind her, a flock of swans landed noiselessly on the surface of one of the king’s pools.
“Would you like to be rid of it now?”
The queen nodded. The swans drifted idly along the water.
That night Laila brought an evil-smelling cup to the queen’s bedside and bade her drink it. The next day, Laila said to the king, “Your wife is unwell, and must not see anybody if you value her health.” Three days later, the king had no child. It had only been an ordinary, common kind of suffering, and the queen was grateful for it.
The next year, after the completion of another shirt, the queen found herself in the same predicament as before. This time, the king’s mother whispered to him that the woman he married was unlucky or worse, but he would not believe it.
“Have I not taught her to treat her hands as if they were my own? She has come to see that we are as one body, and that any crime she committed against herself would be a crime against my own person.”
But the king could not make up his mind to dismiss these charges quite, and when the queen failed to keep his child a third time, he had her drawn up in front of the whole court and accused her. She was unable to speak in her own defense, and, unwilling that her servingwoman should suffer alongside her, she was condemned under the law.
It so happened that the day of her sentence was the last day of her seven years’ silence. All but a single sleeve on the sixth shirt was done. As she was led away to the stake, she draped the shirts over her right arm. The king saw them and cried out at the sight: “Those accursed shirts! The witch was always secreting herself away, spinning and toiling at God knows what, and wishes to take her tokens with her—take them away! Strip her before she burns!”
She closed her eyes and heard the sound of wings. Before one of his men could reach her, the six swans landed in a circle at her feet, and her heart sang for joy. She threw a shirt over each of their heads, and the crowd drew back.
All her brothers stood before her, tall and clear-eyed and beautiful. One of them grabbed the king by the scruff of the neck and held him near the fire intended for her.
“Sister,” he said, “is it your wish that this man should live? Only say the word, and we will spare him.”
And she said nothing.
“You need not fear to speak now,” Elyas told her, putting his arm around her. His shirt had lacked only one sleeve, and in place of the other arm, he retained a swan’s wing, which he kept folded at his side. “The time is over, and you have suffered beautifully. There is no reason to hold your silence any longer.”
The king struggled in her brother’s grip. “Woman—woman—use the tongue in your head!” He hurled every invective imaginable at her—accusing her of spite, of obstinacy, of wretched ingratitude, of heartlessness, of a lack of womanly affection, of coldness—and she heard them all.
“Perhaps she would rather save her first words for something more deserving,” Elyas said.
“Sister,” her brother said, “I begin to weary of the tender embraces of this kicking jackass, and I think I know how to address our situation. Say the word if you wish to spare him. Say nothing and I shall consign him to the flames and wish him the very best of luck with them.”
She looked at her brother and was startled into smiling. She smiled at all her brothers then. She smiled at her husband, too. She said nothing. The flames grew very hot and very high.
FIVE
The Rabbit
There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. Later, he was something other than splendid, but this was the beginning, and splendid will do for a start. He was fat and sleek, as a good rabbit should be; his coat was skewbald with deep rust brown patches, he had real thread for whiskers, and the insides of his ears were slick with pink.
It was Christmas, and there were other presents in the boy’s stocking, but the Rabbit was the best of them all. For at least two hours, the boy loved him, and then the family came to dinner in great clumps of aunts and uncles and cousins, and then there was a frantic unwrapping of parcels and papers. In the excitement of looking at all the new presents the Velveteen Rabbit was put aside, and he learned for the first time what it was to be ignored, and he did not forget it.
For a long time he lived in a cupboard with the other unnecessary toys, and no one thought very much about him. As he was made merely of velveteen, and his ears were of georgette, rather than real satin, some of the more expensive toys snubbed him, and he did not forget that either. The mechanical toys were very superior and looked down on everything that neither clacked, nor opened and shut on command, that was not a model of a plane or a boat or a car. Even the model train, which could run only on magnets along the track it was sold with, and could not be pushed along a table or the floor, never missed an opportunity to refer to his engineering in the most technical of terms. The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn’t know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself. Sometimes he imagined what the other toys would look like with fistfuls of sawdust jammed into their open eyes and their painted mouths, down into their stomachs. Among them all, the Rabbit was made to feel very insignificant and commonplace, and the only one who was kind to him at all was the Skin Horse.
“Whose skin do you have?” the Rabbit had asked him, and the Skin Horse had shivered to hear the excitement in his voice. “Whose skin did you get?”
“Not like that,” he explained. “Not skin like that.” The Rabbit sat in silence, and the Skin Horse knew he had not liked the answer. The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others, and he was so old that his coat was rubbed bald and most of the threads of his tail had been ripped out. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive and swagger and break their springs and pass away, and he knew they would never turn into anything else. The Rabbit would not be like the mechanical toys, and he would not let himself pass away. The Rabbit would not break for anything.
“What is Real?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side on the nursery floor. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse—the Rabbit, who had quite liked the idea of having something buzzing inside of him, was rather disappointed at this—“but a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time—not just to play with—but really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt quite so much.” This was a relief to the Rabbit, who was more than a little let down by how dull being Real sounded.
“Can you hurt something else,” asked the Rabbit, “when you become Real?”
“I don’t know,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.
“Can you take someone else’s Real,” he asked, “or are you stuck having to get it brand-new each time on your own?” The Skin Horse looked at the Rabbit then.
“What I mean is,” the Rabbit said carefully, and his voice was a crawling black thing across the floor, “if something else was already Real, could you take it from them, and keep it for yourself?”
“No,” the Skin Horse said. “You can’t take Real from another toy.” A truth, which was no small relief to the
Skin Horse, who was no fool and could tell in what direction the conversation was tending. But the Rabbit had not yet finished with his questions.
“Can you take the Real out of a boy, then? Can you take his heart into your own self and leave him stuffed with sawdust on the nursery floor in your place?”
And the Skin Horse did not say anything to that.
“I suppose you are Real?” said the Rabbit, and the Skin Horse was afraid for the first time in a long while.
“Yes,” he said quickly, closing his eyes. “From the boy’s uncle. That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real, you can’t become Unreal again. It lasts for always.”
“I wonder if that’s true,” the Rabbit said.
“It is true,” the Skin Horse said. “It’s very true,” and he kept his eyes closed.
“How did you make him?” the Rabbit, who was no longer lying down, asked with a terrible sort of eagerness. “How did you make him give it to you?”
But the Skin Horse did not move and did not talk again. The walls of the room were old and yellow and painted with late-afternoon shadows, and suddenly the Skin Horse felt he had been Real for too long.
After that the Skin Horse was seen no longer in the nursery, and the Rabbit’s eyes gleamed a brighter black and his ears glowed a livelier pink.
* * *
In the nursery, there was a tiresome sort of person called the nanny. The nanny was difficult to anticipate; sometimes she took no notice of the things lying about, and sometimes, for no reason whatsoever, she swooped about the place like a windstorm and bundled all the toys away in cupboards. She called this tidying up, and everyone but the nanny hated it. The Rabbit especially hated it, and he did not forget the times he had been tidied. The Rabbit was not in the business of forgetting, especially once he decided that he had been cheated of something. After one such tidying, the Rabbit had been cheated of his place on the floor, and he would not forget it. The nanny was most assuredly not Real.
Sometimes the Rabbit thought it was entirely possible that nothing at all was Real, that Real had been a lie of the Skin Horse from the beginning. But if there was Real, the Rabbit would find it. If there was not Real, then the Rabbit would decide what would happen next.
One evening, when the boy was going to bed, he couldn’t find the little white horsehair dog that always slept with him. The nanny was in a rush, so she simply looked about her, and seeing that the toy cupboard door stood open, she fetched the Rabbit out with an efficient hand.
“Here,” she said, “take the old bunny—he’ll do to sleep with.” And she dragged the Rabbit out by one ear, and put him into the boy’s arms, and the Rabbit felt the Realness of the boy’s warm heartbeat and the boy’s soft and fluttering throat, and he knew that the Skin Horse had not been lying.
That night, and for many nights after, the Velveteen Rabbit slept in the boy’s bed. At first the Rabbit found it rather uncomfortable, for the boy hugged him very tight, and sometimes he rolled over on him, and sometimes he pushed him so far under the pillow that the Rabbit could scarcely breathe. The Rabbit found he missed the long, dark quiet of the nursery, when everything else in the house slept and was still. The boy did not sleep like everything else in the house. The boy slept in motion, and he snored, and rolled over, and grunted, and chapped his lips, and muttered in his sleep. The boy had jam on his bedclothes and shoved crackers in his flat and flabby mouth. But the Rabbit bore his discomfort graciously and waited for the boy to start loving him.
The boy insisted on talking to the Rabbit, spilling the secrets of his stupid and inane boy’s heart, and he made ridiculous tunnels for the Rabbit under the bedclothes that he said were like the burrows that real rabbits lived in. Then the Rabbit knew that there were others like him and that the boy had kept him from them. And he did not forget that, and when the boy made him play his insipid games after the nanny had gone to bed, the Rabbit burned in shame and anger. But when the boy dropped off to sleep, the Rabbit would wriggle down under the boy’s small hot chin and above his small hot heart and listen to his dreams. And then it was the Rabbit’s turn to play.
On some mornings the boy would wake up dizzy and red-faced and cross and tangled in his bedclothes, and on some mornings the boy could not get out of bed at all. One morning, the boy woke up and was sick in the hallway. The Rabbit was his only comfort then, on mornings when his limbs were so sleep-heavy that he stumbled on the way to the kitchen and spilled his breakfast with a trembling hand, and he grew afraid of the body he lived in.
So time went on, and the little Rabbit was very happy.
Spring came, and there were long days out in the garden, for now the boy never went anywhere without his Rabbit. There were rides on the wheelbarrow, and picnics on the grass near the nursery door (the boy could not go past the flower border without becoming quite short of breath and complaining of dark stars behind his eyes). Once, when the boy slipped and fell down and had to be carried inside, the Rabbit was left out on the lawn until long after dusk, and the nanny had to come and look for him with the candle because the boy couldn’t go to sleep unless he was there. The Rabbit was wet through and quite earthy from creeping along the burrows the boy had made for him in the flowerbed, and the nanny grumbled as she cleaned him off with a corner of her apron. She had not seen him when he was an inching, bunching thing streaming darkly through the tunnels under her feet, and the Rabbit rejoiced that he had not been seen until he wished to be.
“You must have your old bunny!” she said to the boy. “Fancy all that fuss for a toy!”
The boy sat up in bed and thrust out his shuddering hands. “You mustn’t say that. He isn’t a toy. He’s real.”
When the little Rabbit heard that, he was too happy to sleep. That night he grew fatter and sleeker and stronger, and into his boot-button eyes, that had long ago lost their polish, there came a look of happiness so bright that even the nanny noticed it the next morning when she picked him up, and she smiled to see it.
That day the boy was especially ill, and complained of a thick feeling in his lungs and dust in his eyes. The nanny was cross, for she was never ill, and there is nothing the healthy find more tiresome than the sick. “Is there anything else you need, love?” she said, bustling about the sickbed, but the Rabbit knew she meant “Why don’t you get up and get better?”
“Why don’t you get up and get better?” the Rabbit whispered to the boy that night. The next morning the boy woke with four teeth cracked open to the root.
* * *
Now it was summer, and the sun shone so hot that all the next month the servants found fox after fox lying along the edges of the grounds like gifts, mouths strewn open and flecked with white, quite dead from the heat.
Near the house there was a wood, and in the long summer evenings the boy liked to go there after tea to play, on the evenings that he could stand and keep both eyes open. He would march off brokenly, dragging a wagon with the Rabbit riding behind him. Some nights as the sun set, and his cracked lips bled, the boy would cry a long, noisy child’s cry, and the Rabbit would endure it with perfect patience as the boy built him a nest and told him all his stupid, childish sorrows.
One evening, while the Rabbit was lying alone on the grass watching the light play over his own splendid paws, he saw two funny little creatures creep out of the tall brush near him. They were rabbits like himself, but differently made, as they seemed quite brand-new. Their joints didn’t show in the least, and they changed shape queerly as they moved: one minute they were low to the ground and whispersome and the next thickly gathered together into a neat bundle of flesh. They slid and spilled about him, one quite the shadow of the other. The Rabbit stared as they crept close to him, looking for the key that wound them up and made them jump so. The rabbits stared back at him, twitching their noses all the while, until one of them finally asked, “Why don’t you get up and run with us?”
“I don’t feel like it,” said the Rabbit, which was true.
“Don
’t you?” asked the other rabbit. “It’s easy as anything.” And he gave a great juddering lurch sideways and caught himself violently on his hind feet. “I don’t believe you can do it,” he said.
“I can,” said the Rabbit. “I can run like anything and jump, too,” and he meant it.
“Can you?” asked the laughing, lurching rabbit, and he shivered from side to side in a funny little hopping sort of dance. The grass behind him was pale, and the long, slim trees beyond paler still. The garden was a shuddering black thing, the winding path back to the house a ghastly river, white as termites. The Velveteen Rabbit could only sit madly in the middle of the pale path—he had no hind legs at all, only a single stiff-brushed cushion his head was sewn onto.
“I don’t want to,” he said again. But the slumping, slinking rabbits had very sharp eyes, and they peered at him and peered at him, and stretched out their necks wildly, and gaped at him as much as they pleased.
“He hasn’t got any legs to run with,” one of them said to his rabbit-shadow, and they each grinned at him with their mouths. “He hasn’t got any legs to run with.” The other creature bobbed his head up and down in gibbering agreement.
“I have got them,” cried the little Rabbit wildly. “I have got them! I’m only sitting on them, and I don’t care for you to see them!”
One rabbit danced closer and thrust his eyes up under the Velveteen Rabbit’s nose, then shook his head and flattened his ears and jumped backward. “You don’t smell right,” he said. “You don’t smell right at all, and you aren’t anything that I know of, and you aren’t real.” The other twitched his nose in agreement.
Just then came the slow, slumping sound of the boy approaching, and with a fierce whirling of feet, the rabbits disappeared. For a long time the Velveteen Rabbit lay very still, looking at the grass and everything that moved over it and everything that moved under it. The sun trembled lower and lower in the sky until it tipped and spilled itself out over the grass. Presently the boy came limping back up the white path, and picked up the Rabbit and carried him home.
The Merry Spinster Page 7