THE FAIRY TALE
"Levez-vous! Levez-vous! Levez-vous! Ta-ra-ra! Pom, pom! Hi! God's
teeth, my knife! What does it here?"
Joubert could sound the réveille with his mouth almost as well as a
trumpeter, and he was grand at imitating the big drum.
Up I shot in bed, rubbing my eyes.
"Your what?"
"My knife. Ha! I've caught you. Cutting your sticks and carving your
name with my couteau de chasse! You have been to my bedroom. Don't
answer me! You have been to my bedroom, and taken it from the pocket of
my coat. A pretty thing!"
Joubert's temper all yesterday had been savage; his infernal amours were
not prospering, it seems. In fact, as I afterwards learned from his own
lips, a scullion, resenting his addresses, had called him an old French
dog without teeth.
"It was sticking in my pillow when I came to bed!" cried I, indignant at
the accusation.
"Your pillow, when you came to bed!" Joubert seized me, ran me across
the room by my shoulders to a large mirror, pointed to the reflection of
my shrinking form, and yelled:
"Do you see that?"
"Mais, oui."
"Then you see a liar."
"But, Joubert----"
"Not a word!"
"But I want to _tell_ you----"
"Not a word!"
That was always Joubert's way--"Not a word."
"But I want to _tell_ you!"
"Not a word!" And he jabbed the sponge in my mouth, for I was standing
by this time in the bath.
I never could tell whether Joubert was joking or in earnest, so I said
no more; but it was none the less irritating to be called a liar by
Joubert, whose lies about battle, murder, and sudden death were
palpable, and sometimes cynically self-confessed.
Little Carl did not appear at breakfast, and Eloise was very despondent,
not about Carl, but about going away. She would not touch jam, and she
made use sometimes, in a secretive manner, of a handkerchief, small
enough, goodness knows, yet chiefly composed of lace.
"It is not the going away," said Eloise; "it is the parting from friends
that makes going away so sad."
She was a terribly sentimental child by fits and starts, falling into
sentiment and falling out of it again with the facility of a newly
dislocated limb from its socket.
Next moment I was chasing her down the corridor, both of us making the
corridor echoes ring with our laughter. At the end, just by the glass
door leading to the garden, down she plumped in a corner and put her
little pinafore over her head.
I believe she wanted, or expected, me to pull the pinafore away and kiss
her, but I didn't. I just pulled her up by the arm, and we both bundled
out into the garden, and in a moment she had forgotten kissing amidst
the flowers, plucking the asters and the Michaelmas daisies, and chasing
the butterflies that were still plentiful in the late summer of that
year.
We passed the fountains, and stopped to admire the running man. His
face, worn away by time and weather, still had a ferocious expression.
One wondered what he was chasing with the spear that seemed for ever on
the point of leaving his hand.
"Toto," said Eloise, "yesterday when we took the drum with us, we forgot
to bring little Carl's sticks: we left them by the pond."
"So we did," said I.
"Let's go and fetch them," said Eloise.
"Come on," I replied.
We took the forest path leading to the lake.
It was like plunging into a well of twilight.
These trees that surrounded us were no tame trees of a pleasaunce: they
were the outposts of the immortal forest, a thing as living and
mysterious as the sea. Their twilight was but the fringe of a robe,
extending for hundreds and hundreds of square leagues.
I am a lover of the forest. The forest, and the sea, and the blue sky of
God are all that are left to remind us of the youth of the world and the
poetry of it, and the old German forests retain most of that lost charm.
They are haunted. The forests of the volcanic Eiffel, the Hartz, the
Taunus, still hold the ghost of Pan. I have been afraid in them.
By the lake fringed with ferns, Eloise fell into another sentimental and
despairing fit. We were sitting on the lake edge, and I was playing with
the recovered drumsticks.
"Ay di mi!" wept Eloise. "When you are gone! I mean when I am gone--when
we are departed----"
"Courage!" said I.
"It is the going away," sniffed Eloise, carefully arranging her little
skirt around her.
"I know," I said, rattling the sticks; "but it will be soon over."
Unhappy child! I believe she had fallen really in love with me,
unconscious of the fact that if I cared for any woman in the world it
was for the lovely Countess Feliciani, her mother, and that I had no
eyes at all for a thing of my own age in frilled pantalettes, no matter
how pretty she might be.
Before Eloise could reply to my unintentionally brutal remark, a figure
came out from amidst the trees and towards us. It was one of the jägers.
A man past middle age, bent and warped like a tree that has stood the
tempest for years.
This man's name was Vogel, and good cause I have to remember that name.
"Aha!" said he. "The children! Fräulein Eloise, Gretel is seeking for
you in the house."
We rose.
"Come," said Eloise. And I was turning to go with her, but Vogel, who
held a stick in one hand and a small penknife in the other, said to me
as he whittled at the stick:
"See you, have you ever made a whistle?"
"No," I replied, interested, despite the man's German accent and his
face, which was not attractive, for his cheeks were sucked in as though
he were perpetually drawing at a pipe, and his nose, too small for his
face, was hooked. I have never seen a nose so exactly like the beak of a
screech-owl.
Vogel, without a word, sat down and began cutting away at the whistle.
"Are you not coming?" said little Eloise.
"In a minute," I replied, looking over Vogel's shoulder at his
handiwork.
"Then stay," she pouted. And away she ran.
I looked on at Vogel and his work, one foot preparing to go, the other
foot holding me.
"There is an old woman who lives in the wood," said Vogel, as he cut at
the stick, "and she makes whistles."
"Does she?" I replied.
"She does," said Vogel. "She makes them of silver, and of glass, and of
gold, and when you blow on them they go----"
A strange warbling sound filled the wood. It was Vogel showing how the
whistles of the old woman sounded when you blew into them.
He had put a bird-call--the thing foresters use for snaring
birds--between his lips. He removed it again with a laugh, and went on
with his work.
"She lives in a house made of gingerbread," went on the fowler. "And
know you what the panes of her windows are made of?"
"No."
"Sugar, clear as your eye. And guess you what the door is made of?"
"No."
"Marzipan. Ah! that is a good house to live in," said Vogel. And I
mentally concurred.
"She keeps white mice, and rabbits with green eyes."
"Green eyes?"
"Yes; and she gave little Carl a rabbit for himself last time I took him
to see her. There." He handed the whistle, which was finished, up to me
over his shoulder, and I blew on it and found it good.
"Would you like to have a rabbit like that?" asked Vogel, filling his
pipe and lighting it.
"I would."
"Well, you can have one. I will get one for you to-morrow, or to-day, if
you like to come with me to see the old woman who makes the whistles.
Will you come?"
"What time?" said I, hesitating.
"Now," said Vogel.
My answer was cut short by a sound from behind--the clinking of a
bucket--and Joubert and a stout servant-maid appeared from the path
leading to the lake. They were coming to gather water-plants for some
household decoration.
Joubert was gallantly carrying the bucket.
Vogel sprang to his feet.
"I must go," said he. "It was my joke. I am the old woman who makes the
whistles."
Off he went.
I have often thought since that much weariness, much sorrow to me, and
much plotting and planning to the Great Writer of love-stories. Who
lives above, might have been saved if I had gone that day with Vogel to
see "the old woman who makes the whistles."
"What was Skull-face saying to you?" asked Joubert.
"He made me this," said I, showing him the pithed stick.
The Felicianis departed at three o'clock. Eloise, with her cheeks
flushed, was laughing with excitement: she seemed quite to have
forgotten her grief. Four horses drew their carriage. They were bound
for Homburg, where they would pass the night before going on to
Frankfort.
I remember, as the carriage drove off. Countess Feliciani looked back
and smiled at us--at my father, myself, Von Lichtenberg, Major von der
Goltz, and General Hahn, all grouped on the steps. God! had she known
the happenings to follow, how that smile would have withered on her
lips!
Carl was still invisible, and the great schloss, now that Eloise was
gone, seemed strangely empty to me. It is wonderful how much space a
child can fill with its presence. Eloise's happy little form had
diffused itself, spreading happiness and innocence far and wide, and
dispelling I know not what evil things. If a rose can fill a room with
its perfume, who knows how far may reach the perfume of an innocent and
beautiful soul!
At six o'clock I was in the library; a box of tin soldiers, which my
father had bought for me at Carlsruhe, stood open on the table, and the
armies were opposed.
I was not too old to play with soldiers like these, for there were
shoals of them: officers, and drummers, and gunners, cannon,
flags--everything. As a matter of fact, Major von der Goltz had been
playing with me, too, and I'll swear he took just as much interest in
them as I.
He had gone now, and I was tired of the soldiers. I turned my attention
to the books. I was walking along by the shelves, examining the backs of
the volumes and trying to imagine what the German titles could mean,
when suddenly, from amidst the books, I heard a child's voice.
The child seemed singing and talking to itself, and the sound seemed to
come from the volumes on the shelves. It was strange to hear it coming
from amidst the books like that, as though some volume of fairy tales
had suddenly become vocal, and Hänsel, playing by the witch-woman's
door, had found a voice.
Then I noticed that the books before me were not real books, but
imitation.
In the centre of one of these imitation book-racks there was a little
brass knob. I pressed it, and the wall gave, disclosing a passage. The
book-backs were but the covering of a narrow door.
This passage, suddenly disclosed, fascinated me.
It was dimly lit from above, and ended in a door of muffed glass. About
half way down on the floor stood a toy horse--a dappled-grey horse with
a broom-like tail and a well-worn saddle--evidently left there by some
child, and forgotten.
I could hear the child's voice now distinctly. He or she was singing,
singing in a monotonous fashion, just as a child sings when quite alone.
I came down the passage to the door. The muffing of the door had been
scratched. There was a spyhole, evidently made by a child, for it was
just on a level with my own eye, and there was a word scratched on the
paint of the muffing which, though I had to read it backwards, I made
out to be--
CARL.
I peeped through the hole. It disclosed a room, evidently a nursery,
plainly but pleasantly furnished. On the window-seat, looking out and
drumming an accompaniment on the glass to the tune he was singing, knelt
Carl.
I looked for the handle of the door, found it, turned it, opened the
door, without knocking, and entered the room.
The child at the window turned, and, when he saw me, flung up his arms
with a gesture of terror and glanced round wildly, as if for somewhere
to hide. It cut me to the heart; it frightened me, too--this terror of
the child for me. I remembered Eloise's words: "Little Carl is a girl."
"Gretel! Gretel! Gretel!" cried the child as I ran forward, took him in
my arms, and kissed him on the forehead.
Whether he had expected me to hit him or not I don't know; but at this
treatment he ceased his cries, and, pushing me away from him, looked at
me dubiously.
"I won't hurt you, little Carl!" And at the words a whole ocean of
tenderness welled up in my heart for the trembling and lonely little
figure in the soldier's dress, this Pomeranian grenadier, timorous as a
rabbit. I must, in this heart of mine, have some good; for, boy as I
was, with all the fighting instincts of the Mahons in my blood, I felt
no boyish ridicule for this creature that a blow would make cry, but all
the tenderness of a nurse, or a person who holds a live and trembling
bird in his hand.
"I won't hurt you. I didn't _mean_ to knock you in the pond."
"But you did," said Carl, still dubious.
"I know, and I'm sorry. See here, Carl, I'll give you my dog."
"Your big dog?" asked Carl, for he had seen Marengo bounding about the
lawn.
"Yes," said I, knowing full well that the promise was about equivalent
to the promise of the moon.
The little hand fell into mine.
"Gretel," said Carl, now in a confidential tone, "told me you would kill
me if I played with you, or went near you, or if I looked at you."
"Oh, how wicked!" I cried. "_I_ kill you!" And I clasped the little form
more tightly.
"I know," said Carl.
He was a personage of few words, and those two words told me quite
plainly that he believed me and had confidence in me.
"It's not you," he said, after a pause. "She said you didn't want to do
it, but you'd have to do it; for you were a bad man once, and you'd have
to do it over again," said Carl. "What you'd done before, for someone
had said so. I don't know who they were." He had got the tale so mixed
up that I could scarcely follow his meaning. "When will you give me the
dog?" he finished, irrelevantly enough.
"I'll give you him--I'll give you him to-morrow," I said, "if father
will let me. But he's sure to, if I ask him."
Scarcely had I finished speaking than the door opened and Gretel
appeared.
She stood for a moment when she saw us together, as though the sight had
turned her into stone.
Then she came towards us.
"How did you get here?" said she to me.
"Through that door," I answered her.
She took me by the hand and led me away. As she did so, something closed
round my neck, and something touched me on the cheek.
It was Carl, who had put his arms round my neck and kissed me.
Ah, little Carl, little Carl! Little we knew how next we should meet, or
the manner of that meeting!