The Complete Fairy Tales

  “I am too fine for this world,” she remarked when she finally came to rest at the bottom of a gutter. “But I know who I am and where I come from, and that is always something.” And the darning needle kept her back straight and remained cheerful.

  All sorts of garbage were floating by above her: twigs, straw, pieces of newspaper. “Look how they sail on,” mumbled the needle. “They have no idea what is sticking up right beneath them; and I can stick! Look at that old twig; it does not think about anything else in the whole world but twigs, because it is one. There goes a straw.… Look how it turns first one way and then the other.… Don’t think so much of yourself, or you may get hurt on the curbstone.… There comes a newspaper; everything written in it is already forgotten, and yet it spreads itself out as if it were of great importance.… I sit patiently and wait. I know who I am and that I shall never change.”

  One day something shiny came to rest near the needle. It was a glass splinter from a broken bottle, but the darning needle thought it was a diamond. Since it glittered so nicely, she decided to converse with it. She introduced herself as a brooch. “I presume you are a diamond,” she said. And the glass splinter hastily agreed that he was “something of that nature.” Each of them believed that the other was valuable, and so they began to discuss how proud and haughty the rest of the world was.

  “I have lived in a box belonging to a young lady,” began the darning needle. “She was a cook, and she had five fingers on each hand. There never existed creatures so conceited as those fingers; and yet they were only there to take me out of the box and put me back.”

  “Did they shine?” asked the glass splinter.

  “Shine!” sneered the needle. “Oh, they were haughty. They were five brothers: all born fingers; and they stood in a row next to each other, in spite of there being so much difference in their sizes. The one who resembled the others the least was the thumb. He was short and fat and had only one joint in his back, so he could only bend once. He always kept to himself, and said that if he were ever chopped off a man’s hand that man could not become a soldier. The other four fingers stuck together. The first one was always pointing at everything, and if the cook wanted to find out whether a sauce was too sour or too sweet, that finger was stuck into the dish or the pot; and it guided the pen when she wrote. The next finger was the tallest and he looked down on the others. The third one wore a gold ring around his stomach; and the fourth one never did anything, and that’s what he was proud of. They bragged and boasted day and night! That was all they could do well. And I dived into the sink.”

  “And here we sit and glitter,” said the glass splinter. At that moment the water in the gutter suddenly rose and went over its sides, taking the glass splinter with it.

  “Well, he got his advancement,” said the darning needle. “I was left behind, but I am too refined to complain. That, too, is a form of pride but it is respectable.” And the needle kept her back straight and went on thinking.

  “I am almost convinced that a sun ray must have given birth to me. When I think of it, the sun is always searching for me underneath the water; but I am so fine that my own mother cannot find me. If I had my old eye—the one that was broken off—I think I would cry. No, I wouldn’t anyway, crying is so vulgar.”

  One day some street urchins were rummaging in the gutter. They found nails, coins, and the like. They made themselves filthy and they enjoyed doing it.

  “Ow!” cried one of the boys. The needle had pricked him. “What kind of a fellow are you?”

  “Fellow! I am a lady!” protested the darning needle. The sealing wax had long since worn off and she was black; but black things look thinner, so she thought that now she was even finer than before.

  “Here comes an eggshell!” shouted another boy, and stuck the pin into it.

  “How well it becomes a black needle to stand before a white sail! Everyone can see me. I hope I shan’t get seasick and throw up, that is so undignified.

  “There is no remedy against seasickness better than an iron stomach, and the awareness of being just a bit above the common herd. I feel much better. The more refined one is, the more one can bear.”

  “Crash!” said the eggshell. A wagon wheel had rolled over it.

  “Ow!” cried the darning needle. “Something is pressing against me. I think I am going to be seasick after all. I fear I will break!”

  But it didn’t break, even though a loaded wagon drove over it. There it lay, lengthwise in the gutter; and there we’ll leave it.

  32

  The Bell

  In the narrow streets of the city, at dusk, just as the sun was setting and painting the clouds above the chimney pots a fiery red, people would sometimes hear a strange sound like the knell of a great churchbell. Only for a moment could it be heard, then the noise of the city—the rumbling of the carts and the shouting of the peddlers—would drown it out. “It is the vesper bell, calling folk to evening prayers; the sun must be setting,” was the usual explanation.

  To those who lived on the outskirts of the town, where the houses were farther away from each other and had gardens around them—some places were even separated by a field—the sunset was much more beautiful and the sound of the bell much louder. It seemed to come from a church in the depth of a fragrant forest, and it made the people who heard it feel quite solemn as they looked toward the darkening woods.

  As time passed people began to ask each other whether there wasn’t a church in the woods. And it was not far from that thought to the next: “The bell sounds so beautiful, why don’t we go out and try to find it?”

  Now the rich people got into their carriages and the poor people walked; but to all of them the road to the forest seemed very long. When they finally reached some weeping willows that grew on the edge of the woods they sat down under the trees to rest; and, looking up into the branches, believed that they were sitting in the middle of the forest. One of the bakers from town pitched a tent there and sold cakes. Business was good, and soon there were two bakers. The second one to arrive hung above his tent a bell, which was tarred on the outside to protect it from the rain, but it had no tongue.

  When the people came back to town they said that their outing had been very romantic; and that word is not as tepid as a teaparty. Three persons claimed to have penetrated the forest and come out on the other side. They had heard a bell, but they said that the sound seemed to come not from the woods but from the town. One of them had written a sonnet about the bell, in which he compared its sound to that of a mother’s voice when she speaks to her lovely, beloved child; the last line declared that no melody could be sweeter than that bell’s song.

  At last the emperor heard about it, and he promised that whoever found out where the sound came from would be given the title of “Bell Ringer of the World”; and that even if he discovered that it wasn’t a bell that made it.

  Now many people went out in search of the bell; they did it for the title and for the wages that went with it. But only one returned with an answer: an explanation of a sort. He had been no farther in the forest than the rest—and that hadn’t been very far—but he claimed that the bell-like sound came from a great owl who was sitting inside a hollow tree. It was the bird of wisdom and it was incessantly knocking its head against the trunk; but whether the ringing was caused by the bird’s head or the tree trunk he had not yet decided. The emperor bestowed upon him the title of “Bell Ringer of the World,” and every year he published a paper on the subject, without anyone becoming any wiser.

  One Sunday in May, when the children who had reached the age of fourteen were confirmed, the minister preached so movingly that all the young people present had tears in their eyes. It was a solemn occasion; after all, it was expected that they should become grownups; and that as soon as the ceremony was over, their child-souls would enter the bodies of reasonable adults. It was a beautiful day, and after the service all the children who had been confirmed walked, in a flock, to the forest. The sound o
f the unknown bell was particularly strong that day; and all of them had a great desire to go and search for it. That is, all of them except three: One girl had to hurry home for the final fitting of her new dress, which had been especially sewn for a ball she was to attend that night The dress and the ball had been her real reasons for being confirmed. Another was a poor boy who had had to borrow both shoes and suit from the son of his parents’ landlord; and they were to be delivered back as soon as the ceremony was over. The third was a boy who declared that he never went anywhere without his parents’ permission. He had always been a good boy and would continue to be one even after he was confirmed; that is nothing to poke fun at—but all the other children did.

  So three of them stayed behind but all the rest went on. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the young people who had just been confirmed were singing too. They walked hand in hand, for they hadn’t become anything in the world yet, and they could afford to be friendly.

  Soon two of the smallest became tired and turned back toward the town; and a couple of girls sat down in a meadow to braid wreaths of wild flowers; so they were four fewer. When the rest of the group reached the weeping willow trees, where the baker’s tent was pitched, most of them said, “Well, here we are; you can see that the bell doesn’t really exist. It is just something one imagines.”

  But from deeper in the woods came the sound of the bell: sweet and solemn; and five of the children decided to go on, just a little farther. It was not easy to make one’s way through the forest; the trees grew close together, blackberry brambles and other thorny bushes were everywhere. But it was beautiful; the sun rays played and they heard the nightingale sing. It was glorious, but it was no place for girls; their dresses would be torn.

  They came to great boulders covered with different kinds of moss. They heard the gurgling of a spring: “Gluck, gluck.”

  “I wonder if that isn’t the bell,” said one of the five, and lay down on the ground in order to hear the bubbling of the water better. “I think I ought to investigate this some more,” he added, and let the other four go on without him.

  They came to a house made of branches and bark. A huge wild apple tree towered above it and roses grew in such abundance up its walls that they covered the roof of the little cottage. On one of the ramblers hung a little silver bell. Was that the bell that they had heard? All but one of the boys agreed that it was. He claimed that this bell was too small and delicate to be heard so far away; besides, it did not produce the kind of music that could touch a man’s heart. “No,” he said. “It is an entirely different bell that we heard before.”

  But the youth who had spoken was a king’s son, and one of his comrades remarked, “Oh, his kind always wants to think themselves cleverer than the rest of us.”

  They let him go on alone. When the cottage and his friends were lost from sight, the great loneliness of the forest engulfed the prince. He could still hear the little bell, which had pleased his friends, tingle merrily; and from farther away—borne on the wind’s back—came the sound of the people at the baker’s tent singing as they drank their tea. But the knell of the great bell of the forest grew stronger and stronger; then it seemed to be accompanied by an organ; he thought the sound of it came from the left where the heart is.

  Leaves rustled, twigs snapped; someone else was making his way through the woods. The prince turned; in front of him stood another boy. He had wooden shoes on his feet, and the sleeves of his tunic were too short because he had outgrown it. He was the youth who had had to return the clothes he had worn at confirmation, as soon as the ceremony was over. The landlord’s son had got his finery back, and the poor lad had put on his own old clothes, stuck his feet into his clogs, and set off in search of the great bell whose deep clang had called on him so powerfully that he had had to follow it.

  “Let us go on together,” proposed the prince. But the poor boy looked down at his wooden shoes and pulled at the sleeves of his tunic to make them a little longer. His poverty made him shy, and he excused himself by saying that he feared he could not walk as fast as the prince. Besides, he thought that the bell was to be found on the other side of the forest; on the right, where everything great and marvelous is.

  “Then I suppose we shall not meet again,” said the prince, and nodded to the poor boy, who walked into the densest part of the forest, where brambles and thorns would tear his worn-out clothes to shreds and scratch his face, legs, and hands till blood streamed down them. The prince did not escape being scratched, but the sun did shine on the path he took, and we shall follow him, for he was a good and courageous boy.

  “I will find the bell,” he declared, “if I have to go to the end of the world to do it.”

  On the limbs of a tree sat ugly monkeys; they grinned and screamed to each other: “Throw something at him! Throw something at him. He is a royal child!”

  But the prince did not even notice them; he walked on deeper and deeper into the forest. Here grew the strangest flowers: lilies shaped like white stars, with blood-red stamens; tulips as blue as the sky; and apple trees, whose fruit looked like soap bubbles.—How such a tree would have glittered in the sunlight!—He passed green meadows where deer played in the grass underneath solitary oak trees. In every crack and crevice of their trunks grew grass and moss.

  There were many lakes in which white swans swam; he could hear the beating of their great wings. He lingered and listened. More than once he wondered whether the knell might not come from somewhere deep inside one of the lakes; but then, when he strained his ears, he understood that the sound came from far away, from the very depth of the forest.

  The sun was setting and the sky turned red as fire. The forest became so still that the prince sank down on his knees and said, “I shall never find what I seek! The sun is setting; soon the night will come—the dark, dark night … But maybe I can still get another glimpse of the sun, see it once more before it disappears, by climbing that cliff over there, which is higher than the tallest trees.”

  His hands grabbed the brambles that grew among the wet stones, and he pulled himself upward. So eager was he to reach the top of the cliff that he noticed neither the slimy snakes nor the toads who barked like dogs.

  Just before the sun set he reached the summit. Oh, what splendor! Below him stretched the ocean, that great sea that was flinging its long waves toward the shore. Like a shining red altar the sun stood where sea and sky met. All nature became one in the golden sunset: the song of the forest and the song of the sea blended and his heart seemed to be part of their harmony. All nature was a great cathedral: the flowers and the grass were the mosaic floors, the tall trees and swaying clouds were its pillars and heaven itself was the dome. High above the red color was disappearing for the sun had set. The millions of stars were lighted: the millions of little diamond lamps. The prince spread out his arms toward it all: the forest, the ocean, and the sky. But just at that moment, from the right side of the cliff came the poor boy with his ragged tunic and his wooden shoes. He had arrived there almost as quickly by going his own way.

  The two boys ran to meet each other. There they stood, hand in hand, in the midst of nature’s and poetry’s great cathedral; and far above the great invisible holy bell was heard in loud hosanna.

  33

  Grandmother

  Grandmother is terribly old. She has white, white hair and her face is filled with wrinkles; yet her eyes sparkle like two stars and are even more beautiful, for when you look in them, they are so gentle and filled with love. She wears a long dress with flowers printed on it. It is made of silk and rustles when she walks; and she can tell so many stories. Grandmother knows more than Father and Mother do, that is certain, because she has lived much longer. Grandmother’s hymnbook has a silver clasp to close it, and she reads in it often. Between two of the pages of the book lies a rose; it is pressed and dry and not nearly as pretty to look at as the roses that stand in a vase on the table in her room. Yet Grandmother smiles more kind
ly toward it than toward the fresh roses; and sometimes the sight of it will bring tears into her eyes.

  Why do you think that Grandmother looks with such fondness at the pressed rose in the old book? Do you know why? Every time that a tear falls from Grandmother’s eyes down upon the wizened rose, it regains its color and freshness and the whole room is filled with its fragrance. The walls of her room disappear as the morning mist and, instead, she is in the middle of a forest and the sun is shining down through the green leaves. Grandmother has become a girl again, with yellow hair and red cheeks: lovely and young, like a flowering rose. But her eyes, her gentle loving eyes, they are the same, they are still Grandmother’s. Beside her sits a young and handsome man; he plucks the rose and hands it to her and she smiles. No, that smile is not Grandmother’s.—Oh, but it is! He is gone. Many thoughts, many persons pass by in the green forest, but at last they all disappear as the young man did. The rose is back in the hymnbook and Grandmother is again an old woman, sitting looking at the withered rose in the book.

  Now Grandmother is dead. She sat in her easy chair and had just finished telling a long, long story. “That is the end of it,” she said. “Now I think I am tired, let me sleep a little.” She leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes, and breathed ever so softly. The room grew quieter and quieter; her face looked so peaceful, so happy, as though the sun were shining on it. Then they said that she had died.

  She was put into a black coffin; there she lay wrapped in white linen. She looked beautiful even though her eyes were closed. All the wrinkles were gone, and on her lips was a smile. She looked so dignified with her silver-white hair, and not frightening at all. She was our sweet, good grandmother. The hymnbook was put under her head, as she had wanted it to be, and in the old book lay the rose. Then Grandmother was buried.