Seven Tales and Alexander Read online

  ‘I always said she was a good donkey and now I know it!’ he shouted.

  ‘Silence! Answer the charge!’

  ‘God’s truth, how could I help it? I was abed and asleep when she went and did it.’

  ‘Order! Order! You must answer the charge!’

  ‘What could I do? There she was in the field of vetches when I woke——’

  ‘Guilty or not guilty?’ the Superintendent thundered.

  ‘If she was in the vetches she was in the vetches and what could I do? Not guilty!’

  The Court tittered: the Superintendent read out the facts; witnesses were called; and, finally, the magistrates conferred.

  All the time Jonas had to be prevented from saying such things as ‘She was there when I woke! If she was there she was there, and what could I do?’ Finally he did succeed in shouting loudly ‘She might have had the vetches, but when my old cart bust itself she brought me in, didn’t she? I rode her in. Ain’t that good enough?’

  ‘Order! Order!’ he was commanded again. ‘You will be fined twenty shillings or ten days in default.’

  ‘But God’s truth,’ he protested desperately, ‘if it hadn’t been for her I should never have been here at all! I couldn’t have done it!’

  And as he waddled up to pay his twenty shillings he could not understand why the Court was laughing at him, for as he stood there thinking of his donkey, his broken cart, and his wife it seemed to him an altogether serious thing.

  The King Who Lived on Air: A Child’s Tale

  The crown on the king’s head was no larger than a daffodil, and it was yellow in colour also, being of the purest gold. Years before, when he had ascended the throne on his twelfth birthday, it had fitted him perfectly, for he had been even in those days a man of small stature, unable to reach the very lowest branches of a pomegranate tree.

  But he was a lazy king and it is doubtful whether he would have reached if he had been tall enough to do so. Any one of his five hundred courtiers in blue breeches and yellow stockings would, after all, have reached in his stead.

  So he grew up in indolence, with a great round stomach and a limited vocabulary. If he was pleased he would say ‘Ah, yes!’ and if not, ‘Tush!’ and nothing more.

  Of late years his favourite pastime had been to shoot ripe pomegranate seeds into the left ear of his chancellor kneeling ten yards away. But even at that pastime he had become so proficient that to hit the mark with three seeds in succession meant nothing to him.

  Every room in the palace was littered with pomegranate seeds, and if ever a young courtier paused to pass the time of day with a housemaid she had either been, or was about to go, or was at that moment engaged in, sweeping up the litter of the king’s last pomegranate game. At all the doors of the palace men in yellow and blue stood holding pomegranates. In the trees yellow stockings dangled down from among the leaves. Everywhere lackeys stood ready to obey the voice which might suddenly say:

  ‘Pome! Pome!’ too lazy even to finish the word.

  It happened at last that the pomegranate crop came to an end. The trees stood bare. And the chancellor, whose left ear had already grown to twice the size of his right, approached the king and said:

  ‘Restrain yourself, your Majesty, for pomegranates are no longer plentiful.’

  ‘Pome!’ cried the king. ‘Pome!’

  The chancellor, profoundly upset, and not knowing what measures to take next, was forced to retire.

  A little later, however, he happened to find two pomegranates about to be thrown to the king’s pigs, and with these he returned and once more kneeled wearily down before the king to be shot at.

  All the next day the king cried: ‘Pome! Pome!’

  Consternation spread, couriers were despatched to bring the precious fruit, and the word passed from mouth to mouth that the king had pomegranate fever.

  ‘This is serious,’ men said.

  ‘Will he die?’ children asked.

  And people gathered at the palace gates with cucumber seeds, tomato seeds, sunflower seeds, with all kinds of seeds, with peaches and nuts, wheat and barley, white peas and lentils, piling them in a great heap higher than a church.

  ‘Let our dear king shoot these at the chancellor, if it will save his life,’ they implored.

  The chancellor himself trembled. But at the wish of the people he approached the king. The king, selfish and stupid as ever, only cried more bitterly:

  ‘Pome! Pome!’

  In all the great heap of fruit at the palace gates there was not a single pomegranate, however.

  Then, at the very moment when the situation was most serious, a poor man who stuffed birds, of whom no one had ever heard, appeared and said:

  ‘For two gold pieces I will make stuffed pomegranates, complete with seeds, which will satisfy the king.’

  ‘Marvellous!’ cried all. ‘Why didn’t we think of it?’

  And the poor man was given a hundred gold pieces to make a bushel of them.

  The very first to arrive were taken to the king. He, unfortunately, not having slept or eaten for two days, dug his teeth into the first one, so famished was he and so life-like was the pomegranate.

  ‘Tush!’ cried the king and spat tow all over the furniture as soon as he had tasted it.

  The court trembled. The king began weeping with disappointment and rage, and suddenly, throwing off his kingly indolence and reserve, cried out:

  ‘Oh, God! the father of mice and elephants alike, grant me but one single pomegranate!’

  ‘A vain request,’ thought they who heard it, for they had lost all hope.

  So days passed and the stomach of the king fitted his costly waistcoat of white shark’s-skin less well than when he had been measured for it. For hours, in his foolish, spoilt way, he wept, crying: ‘Pome! Pome!’ At last he began throwing his daffodil-crown at the wall.

  This was intolerable. And the chancellor with one ear more like a cabbage than the other, went to him and said:

  ‘Your majesty, this is not nice. A bad impression will be created. Pray have mercy and listen. Not only is there a famine in pomegranates, but in wheat and other things. Very soon, I have no doubt, we shall be starving.’

  ‘What is all this? What is starving?’ asked the king in all his kingly ignorance.

  The courtier, forgetting himself in his determination, cried: ‘Our bellies will be empty!’

  ‘Tush!’ was all the king would say.

  ‘Nevertheless we shall have to restrict ourselves,’ replied the chancellor gravely, scratching his cabbage-ear.

  And he caused notices to be posted on the palace-gates, on inn-doors, on trees and on bread-shops, asking men gravely to eat one loaf where previously they had eated two, and two loaves where they had eaten four.

  In the palace the king, tired of crying ‘Pome! Pome!’ and never being answered, asked for game to be killed. And to his astonishment, for by that time all the wild birds had flown to other and richer lands, two tame pelicans, their feet tied together with purple string, were brought roasted before him on a golden charger.

  Having tasted them he astonished himself and everyone else by crying: ‘Spenderb! Spenderb!’ which was, apparently, a term of praise.

  He asked for more pelicans. And for a week he craved for pelicans as he had craved for pomegranates, eating pelican-soup, pelican-pie, pelican-in-jelly and truly all the known dishes into which pelican may be made. He smacked his lips, secretly thought that famine must be a time of plenty, and threw bones at the chancellor.

  The chancellor developed an abscess on his left ear. The same day, in great pain, he hobbled to the king and declared: ‘Your majesty, pelicans are not to be had for love or money.’

  ‘Tush!’ spat the king and cried: ‘Bring me peacocks instead!’

  With tears in his eyes and his ear as big as an artichoke, the chancellor caused a peacock and a peahen to be slain within an hour. With his own hand he tied their feet together with a scarlet bow, set them before the king,
weeping openly, and cut the first slice for him.

  ‘Spenderb! Spenderb!’ the king cried again as he tasted it. But the chancellor shook his head as he helped the king to stuffing. ‘In a week there will be no more peacocks,’ he said.

  The king took no notice. For a week he gorged on peacock as he had gorged on pelican, eating ten peacock-pies, five peacocks-in-jelly, and one hundred dishes of peacock soup. It was so good that he thought, ‘As for this famine, it’s much better than shooting seeds into the chancellor’s ear,’ and cried out:

  ‘More famine! More famine!’

  People were shocked by this tactlessness and stupidity, for many of them were glad by this time to eat crab-apples. The chancellor was shocked, too.

  ‘Let me persuade you to practise a little self-restraint, your majesty,’ he said, ‘for the last of the peacocks has gone.’

  But the king, trying hard to look like a flat balloon, had only the ignorance and impatience to reply:

  ‘Then bring me anything—swans, kingfishers, eider-ducks, coots, terns, waders!’

  The result of this piece of folly was that within a week everything with wings had been eaten by the king. No one heard the note of a bird.

  Beyond the palace-gates the people were starving. Still the king cried: ‘More famine! More famine!’

  In despair the chancellor killed an antelope. The king gorged. The abscess on the chancellor’s left ear was struck by a rib-bone and burst.

  There came a day when there remained neither antelopes nor swans, eider-ducks nor geese, to satisfy the king’s sudden and enormous greed.

  In desperation the king shouted ‘Monstrous!’ for the first time in his life, beat his stomach, tore the string out of his royal under-shirt and shook the chancellor like a rabbit.

  It was then that the chancellor cried out: ‘Go to the window! Look out! Look at your people!’

  With reluctance the king obeyed that request. And there, from the window high up above the branches of the bare trees, he saw the wan, narrow faces of the people who were starving.

  His voice became a whisper. ‘What is it? Why do they look like that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the famine!’ the chancellor wept.

  The king was silent.

  And from that moment there was a change in him. He grew silent, sat motionless, and ate nothing, staring mournfully at the two worn patches in the floor, where, long ago, the chancellor had knelt to be shot at. Only once, coming out of this awful silence in answer to the chancellor’s ‘What will you eat for breakfast, your majesty?’ he whispered gravely:

  ‘A dandelion-leaf.’

  It was winter; all leaves and grass had withered. The country was bare and brown. But on the edge of a birch-copse a child discovered a dandelion-leaf and it was conveyed to the king.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said for the first time in his life.

  He extended his hand, took the leaf and began nibbling it. One leaf lasted him two days.

  Already he was growing thinner. His shark’s skin waistcoat sagged again, his silk stockings slipped through his garters. The strangest humour that had ever befallen a king fell upon him, and outside the palace gates people wept in the cold not only for themselves, but for his sad plight. And now, by the gates, where they had once piled up and wasted the fruits of summer, they brought loaves no bigger than pint-pots and potatoes the size of farthings. In the frosty air they stood and offered them for the starving king.

  But it was of no avail. ‘The king eats nothing,’ they were told.

  The king had grown to the shadow of himself. Now, when he walked in the palace gardens he was sometimes mistaken for a pomegranate-tree.

  All alone he would sit and listen for birds to sing and leaves to murmur in the wind. But there were no leaves and no birds.

  ‘Where are my peacocks?’ he asked one day.

  The chancellor only shrugged his shoulders and looked at the lake, as who should say: ‘What am I?’

  Day by day the king grew thinner; now he was mistaken for a birch-tree, now a rake, now the dead stalk of a sunflower, until he was the thinnest man in the land.

  He fed on nothing but the cold winter air. But he was happy and would think wistfully of the days when he played with pomegranate seeds, eaten peacocks and pelicans, and had foolishly thought famine meant plenty. And he reproached himself for being a stupid and thoughtless king.

  Every day the chancellor begged him to eat. Always he refused, in a voice so weak and low that the chancellor, with his abscessed ear, could scarcely hear.

  A long time passed, and the king, in his simple life, grew happier and happier, lighter and lighter in heart. And now he was all alone; no one came and visited him, which was as well, for they would not have seen in him the king they once knew. More than that, he went about naked except for his daffodil-crown, for there were no clothes small enough to fit him.

  All that long, cold winter he had no desire to eat.

  At last, one day when the sun was warm and golden as the skin of an apricot and the wind blew soft songs from the pomegranate boughs under which the king sat, he felt something stir and wake in him. And glancing up he saw on a branch a shoot of green no bigger than his own finger. It danced and trembled against the blue sky, backwards and forwards, as if beckoning him.

  The king longed hungrily for the leaf. And he stretched his frail body up to it, extending his arms ecstatically until he almost touched it.

  And then suddenly, for he was frail and all his life had been a man of small stature, not able to reach the lowest branches of a pomegranate tree, he felt himself lifted gently from the ground.

  A moment later the little wind that blew soft and sweet songs from the spring branches had borne him away.

  Lanko’s White Mare

  Every morning just after daybreak Lanko, the quoits man, led out the white mare along with the other horses from the fair and watered her. She was a conspicuous figure, the only white horse in a long line of handsome greys, chestnuts, blacks and piebalds.

  On Lanko’s head there were white hairs, also, and in spite of his flashing dark eyes, he was slow and steady when he walked. He and the mare never went too fast for each other and he never grew impatient with her, but on the contrary understood her perfectly, trusting her to walk wherever he wished merely by a touch on her side. She in turn knew his touch unmistakably, for he had given it her with the same unfailing gentleness and care for nearly fifteen years.

  One morning, in order to be ready to depart with the rest, Lanko was in haste to return to the fair-ground. He was a little farther behind the other horses than usual. In the fair-ground itself, ever since before dawn, there had been commotion: the rattling of buckets, shrill voices, the jingle of harness, the heavy cough of great engines making their steam. Coming out of the gates, Lanko had had an argument with the ‘Fat Lady’ man, a trivial and foolish argument, but which nevertheless had aroused a spark of anger in his eyes and had thrown him behind the rest.

  For the first time when taking the white mare to drink he felt impatient: in the chilly morning air, with the sounds of departure behind him and the clatter of hoofs in front, the distance to the drinking-place seemed immense. He knew that the white mare did not understand this. Her pace did not once quicken, she did not notice the absence of her fellow-creatures. Yet he felt that because she had been understanding and obedient for nearly fifteen years she must understand now.

  ‘We’re late!’ he told her. He slapped her ribs.

  Her pace did not alter. After a moment Lanko ran a little in front of her and beckoned her, pulling the halter gently. She seemed to recognise his presence, but without responding or increasing her pace even a little. He began to run at her side, slapping her ribs again, as if to encourage her to imitation. But she would not run, or disturb herself, or even turn her head.

  Lanko began to grow puzzled. A little more than halfway to the drinking-place he saw the rest of the horses begin to return. This was an unprecedented thing: he had been
there, day after day, for fifteen years with the rest. Now he would be forced to meet them returning, would have to stand aside while the handsome, many-coloured crowd cantered past. In his mood of half-disappointment, half-consternation, he even desisted from urging the mare onward, and they fell into their habitual pace again, neither one too fast for the other, as if their patient and mutual understanding had suffered no break.

  In a moment the long line of blacks and piebalds, roans and browns began to trot past him. He awoke from his mood of disappointment. He drew the white mare to the road-side, holding her there while the rest cantered disdainfully past, the men flaunting their arms, whistling and shouting, demanding what had become of him in a good-natured tirade which he could not understand. It seemed to him an hour before the mass of clattering hoofs filed past: he had not thought before that so many horses could come from the fair.

  The last of the men, suddenly distasteful and aggravating to him in their red and check shirts, shouted: ‘She’s only a filly!—Make her gallop—you’ll never get away!’ They turned on the bare backs of their horses and laughed at him.

  Their reproaches stung him. With sudden anger he struck the mare’s ribs again. It was a blow under which he had expected her to leap forward, as if startled by a shot. Instead she moved onward slowly, patient and steady, with habitual faith and obedience. Enraged by this, Lanko ran before and behind her, entreating, urging, beckoning her, pulling her halter, striking her ribs with even heavier blows than before, but without ever inducing her to change her pace. He pulled at her head and glared into her eyes.

  Like this he managed to get her to the drinking-pool at last, leading her down to the edge by the halter, pulling down her head until it touched the water. This was his every morning custom, a gesture of tender assistance, as towards a child. The white mare always responded, always drank her fill. But on this morning she only sniffed the water, gazed downward as if at her own reflection in the surface, then lifted her head and turned away.

  Lanko was puzzled. The pool was muddy from the feet of the other horses, but he had seen her drink during fifteen years the foulest and most stagnant of waters. She too had suffered hardships. He patted her head in understanding of this. In a moment she would drink, he thought, if only he were patient, if only he waited.