The Goose Girl and Other Stories (31 page)

But when he came near to her he saw more clearly the slanting eyebrows, the long scarlet nose, her somewhat ridiculous expression; and he felt a strong disinclination to embrace so unattractive a woman. The Queen held out her hands to him.

‘Kiss her,' said Geroin importantly.

Making an effort to overcome his distaste, Malis let his lips touch the Queen's cheek. He stood back and looked to see if her appearance should change. But nothing happened.

‘Kiss her again,' cried Geroin testily. ‘Kiss her closely, kiss her properly!'

With even more reluctance, and now barely concealing his dislike of the poor Queen, Malis kissed her on the other cheek, and again stood sulkily away. And still nothing happened.

The courtiers began to murmur, and Geroin shouted angrily: ‘Do you not know what kissing means? Kiss her on the mouth, you fool!'

‘Malis,' said the Queen, pleading, and took his hands and looked yearningly at him. ‘Will you not kiss me now as once you kissed me?' And she smiled like one who seeks to please, tremulous and eager for her happiness. But when her lips parted she disclosed a broken tooth and some others that were more yellow than white. And emotion had made her nose unusually red.

‘Kiss her!' commanded Geroin.

But Malis shrieked suddenly, ‘No, no, no!' The poor Queen shrank back and into the stricken silence of the court the echoes of the storyteller's words horribly rebounded. Then Malis laughed, not mirthfully, but wildly as a madman laughs, and pointing his finger at Perdis screamed, ‘God likes them plain! Not I, not man, but God! Let God, then, kiss her, for God likes them plain. But not I! No, no, no! Not I, not I!'

And turning, he ran swiftly out of the palace, so swiftly that before any could move to restrain him he had gone. Nor was he ever seen again, and because a swift river runs through Jocynthia people came to the conclusion that he had jumped into it and been drowned.

So Perdis was ugly for the rest of her days, and though in many ways her life was richer because of the great wit she had taken from Malis, many years passed and her hair turned white before she grew reconciled to the loss of her beauty.

Jocynthia, it is true, flourished exceedingly under her wise rule, for the storyteller's mind turned easily to the government of people whom
previously it had contrived to make happy. But it is also true that the people, especially the common people, often grumbled because their life was duller than it had been, for though they all became prosperous, they no longer had the merry tales of Brother Bonamy to make them laugh.

For Karl Ragnar Gierow

Trimander, Folander, And Torssander were all poets. They were big men, between six and seven feet tall, and whenever they stood together, or went walking together, or argued with each other in their deep voices, they made a great impression on people who observed them; which, indeed, no one ever failed to do who had the opportunity.

Trimander was the tallest—standing tiptoe with his hat on he came within a finger's breadth of seven feet—but he was hardly so robust as the others, and his long face, his dark eyes, and drooping mouth and aristocratic nose, gave him an air of distinguished melancholy.

Folander was the fattest, and Torssander the burliest. Folander was like a beautiful overgrown baby, all curves, an enormous dimpled plumpness with blue eyes and yellow hair; but in middle age his face became an angry red and his fatness was gathered into a tremendous paunch. Torssander throughout his life was an heroic figure with a chest as broad as a door and a fierce mane of reddish hair. He was also the laziest of the three, and to be recognised as such in what was often said to be the idlest trio in Sweden was a distinction indeed.

They had been students together in the University of Lund, than which there is no more humane or pleasant a seat of learning in the world. Leisure, that poor fugitive from the great cities of our time, has found a welcome home there, and is most tenderly entreated. It is no sin to waste time in Lund, for they have plenty of it and count it no more carefully than a rich man his pennies. In summer the days are long, in winter the nights: no one, therefore, need be in a hurry to go to bed, or in haste to get up. When they sit down to dine their tables are so heavily burdened, so broadly spread, so delicately garnished with all the riches of a fat green land and the populous sea which borders it, that to sit for less than two hours would be a mortal insult to the landlord and his cook, to the farmers and fishermen of Scania, to the brewers and distillers in adjacent provinces, to the
vignerons
of their dear neighbour France, and even perhaps to God Himself. There is, however, little danger of such rudeness, for the good people of Lund
all know their duty, and the better sort, to show their piety, will sit for four hours or five.

Because learning has flourished there for many hundreds of years, they regard it easily, being familiar with it, and do not set to work on their books like the starving men in illiterate newly discovered countries, who fear that their imported culture may vanish overnight and therefore gobble and swallow it in huge undigested collops as quickly as they can. The art of learning has had a long life in Lund, and life itself, they have discovered there, is long enough if you are not in a hurry. Even the terms at the University are generously long, and so the students rarely trouble themselves to attend for the first week or two; and as scores of thousands of lectures have been delivered there, and thousands upon thousands are waiting to be delivered in the minds of strong men now living, and in the unpredictable minds of babes unborn, the students are not so foolish as to try and attend them all, or even to be punctual at those they do attend; for the lectures themselves are very long.

But the students do not scamp their education. They are not careless of it, or indifferent to the value of learning. On the contrary, dear reader. It is you, who at your own university spent perhaps no more than three curt years, who are more likely to have disregarded both that and other values too; for haste is the mother of many evils, the largest being vulgarity. Had you kept your terms at Lund—as now, too late, you wish you had—you might have spent nine, ten, or twelve years there, and no one been surprised.

So Trimander, Folander, and Torssander passed their youth, and in comparison with the great majority of humankind received a very good education. But because they had acquired it in the leisurely manner of Nature herself—who took at least fifty thousand years to make
us,
and we, God knows, are no more than a trial pull—because of the decent manner of their education they made no parade of it, nor set themselves up above their fellows by insisting on their superior taste and greater knowledge, but continued to live in a state of innocent wonder before Creation, and perpetual interest in the world about them. By some, indeed, they were blamed for their failure to make a commercial use of all they had learnt, and put their genius to daily work; but as it never entered their heads to do this, the continuing belief in their genius became an act of faith, and thereby a blessing to all their admirers. Each of them, during their twelve years of residence at Lund, had published a small volume of poetry, and as twenty years passed without their publishing more, their admirers had had plenty of time to get their work by heart.

Trimander's generous spirit had been fired by history, and in particular by the lives of the great and terrible kings of Sweden: by Gustavus Vasa and Gustavus Adolphus, by Charles the Tenth and Charles the Twelfth. What proud tempers they had had, what a fierce compelling energy, and demoniac ambition; and how, like a famine or the discovery of a gold-mine, they had changed the lives of all their subjects, and of many thousands of human beings far beyond their frontiers!—But what of themselves, of their own characters? What little spring, close-coiled, and powerful, had lain in their souls, and striven for release against what external pressure, to give their wars and imperial policies so great a force?

In his tomb in the great ugly church at Uppsala, Gustavus Vasa lay with a hole in his lower jaw. A hole that a peasant could stick his thick mid-finger into. He had suffered, poor king, from a rodent toothache. Year after year corroding pain had bitten deeper into the shrinking jaw, digging like an evil mole; but the distracted king had made Sweden safe from its foundations to the roof. What toothache had moved the others?

In his volume of poems, of eighty-two pages, Trimander had told four anecdotes of the kings, and written four heroic songs. Three of the songs became widely popular, and were sung wherever and whenever people felt in the mood for such noble themes.

Folander, fat Folander, found a different inspiration. The opening leaves of a beech tree moved him more deeply than memories of a mortal king, and the nimble yet prudent balance of a fish in a pool seemed to him more delicately to express the miraculous ability of living things than the headlong career of famous Generals and their sweaty squadrons. Dragonflies would perch upon his plump hand while he memorised their hues, and he knew all the tunes of the smaller birds. His observation was acute, his understanding born of a lively unpretentious sympathy, and his language mellifluous. His book of poems was slightly larger than Trimander's, and every well-brought-up girl in Sweden could recite at least a dozen of them.

Some of Torssander's more superficial friends used to wonder why he, like Trimander, had not been attracted to the heroic past. His broad chest, his thews, and his stature all suggested an affinity with the warrior ages, and his mind was no less powerful than his muscles. But Torssander bent all his strength to the confection of wit. He spent the power of his understanding on the analysis of human motives and the disentanglement of human situations; and then his heroic lungs produced a great wind of laughter, while his literary
talent compressed his findings into the smallest possible number of lines. His laughter was kind, however, and in the resolution of the problems he considered, his wit discovered a dry benignity. By his poems unhappy lovers were reconciled to disappointment, husbands compared their betrayal with the notorious horns of the great philosophers, philanthropists perceived that ingratitude is native to man, and romantic girls with narrow ribs and imperceptible small breasts realised that living men did not behave like the figments of a birthday dream. His book had wider margins, far deeper spaces under the last lines, than Trimander's or Folander's, and some of his poems, that occupied a whole page, were merely impudent and quite unanswerable riddles. But he had one irreverent song that everybody learnt, and in single lines or couplets he was quoted even more often than the others.

And now, most patient reader, you are in a mood to ask me this question: How, if they were all so idle, how did they live?

There is nowadays, perhaps, too much interest in the mechanics of existence. I have said before, and I shall probably repeat it, that the
how
of life is of little consequence in comparison with the
why.
—But you are not to be blamed, sir, for your curiosity, and I, like you, am more commonly concerned with the flavour of a shoulder of mutton than the philosophical justification for keeping sheep, and so, without too much detail, I shall answer your question.

Trimander was subsidised by the nobility. They, the simplest and most trustful of humankind, all firmly believed that in his forthcoming exegesis of history he would, by mere truth's compulsion, exalt the heroic deeds and accomplishments of their ancestors; and so they used to make him their guest for six months or a year, with a free run of their archives and the picture gallery, or in town would tactfully leave upon his table a cheque for two thousand crowns. He, being single-minded, was no spender except upon books and writing-paper, and lived easily enough.

Folander married a widow with some property of her own, in Dalecarlia, and the bequest of her late husband's shares in the steel-works at Sandviken. Folander had no cause to worry.

Torssander, on the death of his parents, inherited a little money, and spending it freely while it lasted, established for himself the abiding reputation of being well-to-do. As a consequence of this wise investment, casual friends used to invite him to stay with them, who would never have embarrassed themselves with hospitality to a poor man who might have shown unseemly gratitude. Publishers, aware of his independence, begged his opinion of difficult manuscripts, and
paid him handsomely. Three of them, at different times, offered him substantial advances on his autobiography, which he had no intention of writing, and he accepted their money with a kindly thought of composing, in the indeterminate future, some genial fictions that would satisfy them and please their public. Editors bribed him to write reviews, which he did with a just appraisal, but always six months late. Torssander's receipt of money was irregular, but he lived; and on the whole lived well.

A further question may be asked, and since it is prompted by simple ignorance, mere courtesy compels an answer to it. How, comes the new demand, did Trimander Folander, and Torssander not only maintain their poetical reputation—but, in point of fact, enhance it—if for twenty years after leaving Lund they wrote nothing to substantiate it?

The answer to that lies buried—but buried quite comfortably alive—in the character of Sweden and the nature of the Swedish people.

Sweden is both large and little. Geographically measured, it is so long as to stretch from Copenhagen to Naples if it could be unhooked and hung as a pendicle from a suitable place; but socially it is small and fairly compact. People in one part of it are well aware of what people in another part are doing, and of the thoughts that promote their actions. Everyone, for example, knows that the people of Småland are deplorably like the Scotch, and though the southerners of Malmö pretend to believe that the northern suburbs of Stockholm are infested by Lapps, they and everyone else in Scania have rich uncles there who are doing very well for themselves. Nor is anyone in the southern half of the country in any doubt about the shocking morality, especially in winter-time, of everyone in northern parts. Stockholm itself is such a lordly capital that hardly can Europe match it, save perhaps with Venice, yet even in Stockholm there is something small and familiar such as more often exists in a little prosperous market town.