square grows light and fills with people. Now come the heralds again,
and they sound their trumpets and proclaim that the Knight of the Swan
is to have the crown of his bride's father, and is to be called
Guardian instead of Duke, that the accuser of his bride is an outcast
and must be shunned by all men, and finally that everybody to-day is to
come to the marriage, but that to-morrow all the men must go to the
defence of the King and the country. And now, with all its sparkle and
glitter, comes the procession, leading the bride to the church, when,
just as she is at the door, right before her stands the witch, full of
anger and pride, and cries aloud that it is her place to go before this
woman, and no one shall keep her from the place that is hers, and she
taunts the bride with not knowing who or what her knight is; and so a
great clamor arises among the people, and in the midst of it come the
King and the Knight of the Swan and their train. The witch's wicked
husband comes, too, and calls out that the knight beat him yesterday by
magic and not by honest fighting, and he demands that the King ask the
knight who he is. But he and his wife are put aside, and the procession
goes into the church, and as I look into the church itself now the
whole of the fire is a blaze of candles on the altar. Now turn your
face away from the fire as it was before and shut your eyes again.
There is no more to be seen in this wedding than there was in the
battle of the two knights, and all that there is I will tell you.
"The light of the candles on the altar changes to a blaze of wedding
torches, and the King and the knights and the ladies are leading the
bride and the bridegroom to their chamber. Slowly and solemnly, yet
joyfully, they march along, and it is all so clear to me that I can
even hear the music that they chant as they come. Soft and low it is at
first, and then it swells out fuller and stronger and clearer but
always so noble and pure and stately in its melody and its rhythm that
nobody who had once heard it could ever forget how grand and beautiful
it was. I have heard it many times, and you will hear it often, too,
and once, I hope--I almost know--you will hear it at one of the
sweetest moments of your life, and whenever you hear it I think it will
be more full of meaning for you if you will think of the Knight of the
Swan and his bride. But do not think of what comes to them afterward,
for that need never come to you or to anyone who remembers what I told
you a little while ago; and if ever you feel tempted to forget for one
moment, then think of this true and lovely music--you will know it well
and can think of it when you like by that time--and I am sure you will
feel truer and better again at once.
"But the torches pass away and out of sight, and the knight and his
bride are left alone; and now comes the sad part, for the poor bride
has listened too much to those who spoke evil of her husband, or
something evil has come into her own mind and made her forget her
promise, for she tells him that she loves him so much that she wishes
she might know what he is whom she loves. Now this may be very natural
and might be very right if she had not promised never to ask; but
though he begs her not to demand of him this one thing, yet she
implores him more and more to tell her, till at last she speaks very
cruelly to him, and as much as tells him that he does not love her at
all. You would never think that she was the same poor girl who knelt by
the river and prayed that her knight might be sent to help her in her
danger. And suddenly, as he is about to tell her all she asks, her old
accuser breaks into the room with his men, and rushes with his sword
drawn to kill the knight, and now indeed his bride does seize his sword
and hold it out to him, while he draws it from the sheath; then there
is one little flash of a flame as he swings it high above his head, and
his enemy lies at last dead before him. He tells the men to take him
away and to lead his bride before the King, where he will come and tell
her everything.
"It is morning again on the banks of the river, and the knights and the
people are coming in crowds as I saw them in the beginning. The King
comes, and the poor bride, sadder now even than she was at first. The
Knight of the Swan comes too, and he asks the King if he did right to
kill his wicked enemy, who was trying to kill him unprepared. The King
answers that he did right. Then he says that he cannot go with the King
to his wars, because his bride has forgotten her promise to him, and
has asked him whence he came, and now, by the law which he obeys, as
soon as he has answered her, he must leave her and all the rest
forever. Then, while they all listen in sorrow, he tells them that he
is a Knight of the Holy Grail, and must go back to the temple which he
left to come here and help his bride. And while she weeps at the
thought of losing him, suddenly I see the swan again on the river,
drawing the little boat as before, ready to take the knight away, and
then he tells his bride that if she could but have trusted him and
never questioned him for a year, her brother would have come back to
her.
"And now for one last time the witch stands up, more proud and
revengeful then ever, and cries out that she has beaten them all, for
the swan is really the brother, and that it was she who wound the chain
about his neck that enchanted him and made him a swan. But while she
exults in her triumph, there flies down over the heads of all of them a
beautiful white dove. It is the dove that comes once a year to the
temple and strengthens the power of the Holy Grail, and as the knight
sees it he kneels and prays and then rises and unwinds the silver chain
from the swan's neck, and at the very instant the swan is changed into
a beautiful boy, the lost brother, and he runs to his sister and they
clasp each other in their arms, while the witch falls down upon the
ground, overcome at last and powerless, and the knight steps into the
boat, the dove lifts the silver chain, and they glide away upon the
river, farther and farther, and the little spot where they were, that
was the brightest in the fire, grows dimmer and fainter and goes out
and is dark."
"And won't the knight come back at all?" asked the little girl.
"No," I answered, "the brother and the sister are close in each other's
arms and they are gazing away upon the river as far as they can see,
but the Knight of the Swan will never come back."
THE PRIZE OF A SONG
The fire was almost out. It was so late in the spring that none at all
was needed, but we liked it to look at. As for the little girl and me,
we should hardly have known how to get on without it, and the little
girl's mother chose to humor us, so we wasted a great deal of wood, as
ignorant people would think, and were just as comfortable with the sky
smiling and the trees budding all around us as if we had been in the
midst of snow-drifts and howling storms. This afternoon the sun had
been shining right in upon the fire, as if he would like to know what
it was doing there at all, when he was making the weather quite warm
enough, in the house as well as out. A fire never burns well when the
sun shines on it, and besides, nobody had taken much care of ours, so
that after the sun had gone it looked very low and discouraged.
"Do you think anybody could see anything in a fire like that?" the
little girl asked, with a doubtful gaze into it and a meaning, clearly
enough, that, if I thought it at all possible for anybody to see
anything, she wished that I myself would try.
"We will put on another stick," I said, "and have a better fire. It
will not be a very hot fire even then, and with all this soft spring
air about us, I don't think we can see any more gods and giants and
knights and dragons in it. But we may see some simpler people, with
bright young hearts that begin to stir and move and to beat quicker and
harder in the spring, as young hearts ought to do, not only in the
spring of the year, but in their own spring, and we may perhaps see
some people with older hearts, which stirred and beat too in their
time, and we shall see by them that those which move freest and grow
warmest in their spring are the fullest and the richest in their autumn
and can never be hurt in the winter, just as the tree in which the sap
flows best in the spring spreads out the broadest shade in the fierce
heat of the summer, bears the finest fruit in the autumn, and lives the
strongest till the next spring comes. If you ever tell any very learned
people what we see here in this fire they may tell you, perhaps, that
it all happened on Midsummer Day and not in the spring at all, and they
will be quite right, in their own poor way of being right, but
Midsummer Day is not in the middle of the summer, you know, but just at
the beginning of it, when the spring has been gone only a few days. It
is then that the lovely touch of the spring has done all that it can
for the world, when the sun climbs his very highest in the heavens to
look at all the sweetness and beauty that have been spread over the
earth, when the summer is young and happy and kind and has not begun to
burn and wither everything that would like to love its brightness and
its power. So if you would see all the joy and the light that the
spring can bring, you must look for them not far from Midsummer Day.
"We shall not begin to see all this till our new stick begins to burn
better, but in the meantime we may see some things that are pleasant
enough, if they are not quite so radiant, and while the fire is still
rather dark, just burning quietly in a few little places, we seem to me
to be in a dim, old church. The service is just ending. In one of the
pews sits a pretty girl who is behaving herself in a most unbecoming
way, for she is constantly sending shy glances toward a young man who
leans against a pillar not far off and looks at her in his turn in a
way that really ought to shock her, instead of pleasing her, as it
seems to do."
"Is he a knight?" asked the little girl, instinctively knowing him for
the hero of the story.
"Do you want him to be a knight?"
"Oh, yes; let's have just one knight, if we can't have any giants or
dragons."
"I believe you are beginning to see the pictures in the fire yourself.
Well, he shall be a knight, but he shall not wear any armor and he
shall not fight, and all the rest of the people we see shall be quite
common people, mere tradesmen, a goldsmith and a tailor and a toy-maker
and a cobbler and the like. But whether the young man is a knight or
not, he and the pretty girl ought to know better than to look at each
other in that way in church, with looks that seem to mean so much and
yet to have no connection with the service at all. The service is over
now and the people all leave the church, except a few, but the young
knight and the pretty girl stay behind, and he does not lose a minute
in telling her that he loves her and that he is dreadfully anxious to
know if she can love him. Now, of course, as she has done nothing all
through the service but steal glances at him and probably could not
even tell what hymns were sung, or whether there was a sermon or not,
and has been thinking all the time how handsome he was, and knows very
well that he was looking at her all the time, and knows very well, too,
being a pretty girl, that he was thinking how pretty she was, of
course, you see, she could not tell at all whether she could love him
or not, and such a question naturally throws her into the greatest
confusion.
"But while the young man is saying all the pretty things that the time
allows, and the young woman is trying to think what she shall answer,
her maid, who has been running about all this time, looking for things
she has lost, bustles up, hears a part of what the young man says, and
tells him that her mistress is already betrothed; and the mistress
quickly says yes, but that nobody yet knows to whom. This is such a
surprising state of things that it needs an explanation; so the maid
tells the young knight that her mistress is to be given as bride for a
prize to-morrow, which will be Midsummer Day, to the man who shall sing
the best song. He asks if the bride herself is to judge whose song is
best; and at that she makes up her mind at last, and says that she will
choose nobody but him. But there is something else, for nobody can even
try for the prize unless he belongs to a certain company or society of
poets and singers here in the town, and the knight, though he has a
pretty good opinion of the song he could make if he should try, is
quite a stranger here. And now, as if for the very purpose of helping
the knight, comes another young man, who turns out to be a prentice,
and he begins arranging benches and chairs in some queer sort of way,
while the looks that he casts at the maid and the looks she throws back
at him show that they are not total strangers; and he tells them that
these very poets and singers are to meet here in a few minutes, and
that if anybody wants to join them he will have a chance to sing to
them and to prove whether he is worthy.
"So the young man of course determines that he will try, and it is
clear that he expects nothing in the world but that he will carry
everything before him; and while the young women hurry away, the
prentice tells him something about the singers, who are always called
masters, and the queer rules that they have for making all their songs.
Queer enough they are, too, and so many that if you were to hear them
all you would think that they were quite enough to prevent anybody's
ever making a song at all; but the most important thing that the knight
learns is that, while he is singing, the judge will make a mark with
chalk every time he breaks a rule, and, if more than seven chalk marks
are scored against him, he cannot be a master, and so cannot try for
the prize that he wants so much to win to-morrow.
"Now the masters begin to gather for their meeting, coming in one by
one and two by two. First comes a goldsmith, the father of the pretty
girl we have just seen. With him is a queer-looking, awkward, self-
conceited man, who, anybody can see in a minute, must be a town clerk.
From what he is saying to the goldsmith it is clear that he means to
try for the prize of his daughter's hand to-morrow. He is in no doubt
that he can sing better than anybody else, but is not sure that the
goldsmith's daughter will think so. That is a very unlucky thing that
happens to singers sometimes; they themselves know perfectly well that
they can sing better than anybody else anywhere about, but all the
other people are so stupid that they will not understand it.
"The young knight, who knows the goldsmith, tells him now that he wants
to join this company of singers, and be a master too; and the goldsmith
says that he shall be glad to help all he can. But the town clerk
overhears them, and he sees at once that what the knight wants is to
sing for the prize to-morrow. Now, the rule is, you remember, that
nobody but a master may even try for the prize; so the jealous town
clerk resolves that he will keep the young man from becoming a master.
And it happens, by good luck for him and bad luck for the knight, that
it is his turn to-day to take the chalk and mark the mistakes that are
made in singing by anybody who tries to prove himself worthy to be a
master.
"When the masters are all met, the goldsmith makes a little speech, and
tells them how the prize is to be given to-morrow. They are to decide
who wins, but his daughter is to judge too. She may choose none without
their voice, but she may refuse any. That is no more than fair, of
course. No girl would like to be married to a man just because the
lines of his poetry came out right when somebody else counted them. Yet
the masters all argue and dispute and suggest about the rules; but in
the end they agree to do just what the goldsmith says, since they
cannot do anything else.
"Now comes the trial of the young knight who wants to be a master. The
town clerk goes behind a curtain, with his slate and his chalk, and you
may be sure he does not forget his promise to himself that the knight
shall fail. Then the young man stands up in the midst of them all and
sings his song. A happy, free, beautiful song it is. It tells first how
the spring came into the forest and awakened the trees and brought the
flowers. Then it tells how the spring came into the young man's own
heart, as you know I told you it ought to do, and how it made him sing
of love; and that is quite right too, though perhaps I forgot to say so
before.
"But happy and beautiful as the song is, it is scarcely begun before
the most dreadful scratching of the chalk is heard behind the curtain.
All the masters begin to shake their heads, too, for this knight is
bold enough to make his own song in his own way, and he knows and cares
no more about the rules and measures of these masters for making songs
than you know or care about the game laws of Scotland. So by the time
the song is half over, out rushes the town clerk with his slate, not
with the eight marks on it that would end the singer's hopes of being a
master, but with nearer eighty. He vows the case is hopeless, and as he
shows the slate to the other masters they all seem to agree with him,
though they are not all quite so jealous as he is.
"All but one; for there is one old shoemaker who says that he thinks
the song was very good. It did not follow the rules, but it had rules
of its own, and he liked it. Then there is trouble indeed. For any man
to say in this old church and this old town that a song can be good
when it has one line too many or one rhyme too few is almost as bad as
for him to say that the King is bald-headed and that the oldest
princess has freckles. All the masters say that to let such a song pass
is out of the question, and that the shoemaker is quite absurd to think
of such a thing. At this the shoemaker declares that the town clerk is
not a fair judge, because he is jealous. At that again the town clerk
says that the shoemaker had better not talk so much about poetry, but
go home and finish the shoes he has ordered. Now, the shoemaker is
really the only one of all the masters who knows anything at all about
poetry; but now and then, years ago, a man who knew a great deal had to
stand aside and let others, who knew very little but could talk louder,
do what they liked in their own way. That is what the shoemaker has to
do now, and for this time the knight has failed.
"What a bad fire we have, to be sure! It is getting lower and lower,
and even our new stick will not burn. While everything is as dark as
this we shall have to think that it is night. Never mind, we can see a
little still, and the little that I can see is the street of the old
town, with its queer old houses and peaked roofs and sharp steeples.
Here, on one side, where there is a bit of light shining like a glow in
a window, is the shop of our old cobbler; and over there, with no light
at all, the fire is so bad, is the goldsmith's house. The cobbler is
sitting outside his door, trying to work; but the light is as bad for
him as it is for us, and, besides, he cannot think of his work, much
less do it. He is thinking, I know, of the young knight and his song,
and is wishing that he might win the prize to-morrow, master or no
master. His heart had its spring-time once, you may be sure, and its
glowing summer, and they have brought it a rich, peaceful autumn, such
as they alone can bring. That was why he knew all the meaning of the
song and liked it, though it broke every one of his own rules. And so,
like the good old fellow that he is, he wishes the man who sang the
song all joy and good luck--and the prize.
"While he is thinking of all this, comes the goldsmith's daughter, for
she has heard that the young man has failed, and she is sad, and wants
to talk to some one. Perhaps, too, she wants to know something. They
talk about to-morrow, of course, and the shoemaker tells her that the
town clerk means to sing for the prize. At that the prize herself gets
quite alarmed, for she likes the town clerk no better than you or I do.
'But why should he not win?' the shoemaker says; 'there will not be
many bachelors there to try.'
"'And might not a widower try?' she asks slyly.
"Now, the shoemaker knows that she means himself, but he says no, he is
too old. And then the absurd girl actually urges him to try, though she
does not want him the least bit, and does not want anybody except the
young knight, who makes such beautiful songs that are all out of shape.
When you get to be a woman, perhaps you will know why she does this;
but I confess I do not. Perhaps she thinks that the shoemaker would not
be half so bad as the town clerk, or perhaps she only wants to find out
if the shoemaker really does mean to sing, so that she may know whether
he is the knight's friend or his enemy. At any rate, he pretends to be
not half so much the friend of the young people as I know he really is,
and when she is beginning to get quite angry with him her maid comes
and tries to lead her into the house. But just at this moment the
knight himself is seen coming down the street, and not a step toward
the house does she go after that.
"The shoemaker has gone into his shop now, and the lovers are alone. He
tells her how he sang his very best, that he might be a master, because
that was the only way to win her, and it was of no use. But she does
not care whether he failed or not. She declares that he is a poet, that
she will give the prize herself and to nobody but him; so now what do
you suppose it matters to him if all the masters in the world said that
his songs were wrong? He will not sing for them, and they need not
listen.
"There is just one way now, as anybody can see, for him to make sure of
the prize, and that is to take it while he has it. And that is just
what he is about to do. But I am sorry to see that the cobbler, behind
the door of his shop, has been impolite enough to listen to all this
important talk about poets and songs; and he sees that if he lets these
two run away together now, there will be no prize and no singing for
to-morrow. So he sets a lamp in his window, right there where the fire
is kind enough to burn for us a little at last, and sends the light
streaming out across the street, and the lovers know that if they try
to pass they will be seen. And while they are helping each other think
what they can do, somebody else comes slowly down the street, walking
in the shadows and looking around to see if he is watched, like a
burglar. It is the town clerk, and he has come here just to sing under
the window of the goldsmith's daughter the song that he means to sing
to-morrow, to see if she will like it and if she will probably give it
the prize. Oh, he is a good, honest poet and faithful lover, and he
means to leave nothing untried that can help him. One does not get a
chance to marry a goldsmith's daughter every day.
"All this is annoying enough, but there is nothing for the lovers to do
but to wait for the town clerk to sing and go away; so they get into
the deepest shadow, and then they put their arms around each other so
that they can stand closer and not be seen so easily. It is a good plan
for another reason, too, because some people can wait much more
patiently in that position than in any other. But things are getting
worse and worse, for the shoe-maker seems bound to have his part of the
fun too; and just as the town clerk is about to sing he begins to work
again and to hammer on his last. This is the most impolite shoemaker, I
suppose, that this polite old town ever saw, if he is a poet. Think of
a man who will hammer on a shoe when a town clerk is going to sing, and
a song that he made himself, too. Something must be done, of course; so
the town clerk comes and talks with the cobbler, and pretends that he
is very anxious to get his opinion of the song he is going to sing.
That seems natural enough, because everybody knows that the cobbler is
the best poet in town. So they agree that whenever the town clerk
breaks a rule in his song the cobbler shall strike one blow on his
last, just as if he were marking the mistakes on the slate, the way the
town clerk himself did with the knight.