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Ebook has 1346 lines and 109250 words, and 27 pages

THE PRINCESS POURQUOI 1

THE CLEVER NECROMANCER 43

THE PRINCESS AND THE MICROBE 81

THE SEVEN STUDIOUS SISTERS 131

THE GENTLE ROBBER 175

SIDE BY SIDE THEY WALKED TOGETHER 22

"IT'S GOT TO BE KILLED," SAID THE PRINCESS STURDILY 101

"WHAT!" THUNDERED HIS MAJESTY 142

CAME RIDING FROM ALL PARTS OF THE KINGDOM 148

HE BEGAN TO WEAR THE LOOK OF THOSE WHO SEE MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE 185

FOR SOME HALF SMILED AND HID THEIR SMILES AS BEST THEY COULD 203

A GLIMPSE OF AN HERETIC BEING BURNED TO DEATH 210

THE PRINCESS POURQUOI

THE

PRINCESS POURQUOI

Once upon a time, in a country very far away, a new princess was born. As is usual in such cases, the King, her father, and the Queen, her mother, held a great christening feast, to which were invited all the crowned heads for miles around, all the nobility of their own kingdom, and the fairies whose good wishes were considered desirable. In the middle of the ceremony, as is also customary, a very angry little old lady, with a nose like a beak, burst into the room.

"May I ask why I was not invited?" she demanded. "These are here," and she pointed to the fairy who rules the hearts of men, and to the fairy who rules circumstance. She herself was the fairy who rules men's minds.

"You!" stammered his Majesty. "Why, it is only a girl. We--we thought you would be offended. Later, if a son should be born"--

"You thought!" shrieked the enraged little creature, gathering her shoulder-shawl about her. "You thought nothing whatever about it. I am insulted, and I shall be revenged. Before anything yet has been given to this child I shall curse her"--

"Oh!" begged the crowned heads and the nobility.

"Anything but that," groaned his Majesty.

"Not that for a woman-child," moaned the mother, from under her silken coverlid.

"Yes," said the fairy, and her wicked black eyes snapped over her withered red cheeks. "She is a woman-child, and yet she shall think. She shall be alien to her own sex, and undesired by the other. She shall ask and it will not be given her. She shall achieve and it shall count her for naught. Men shall point the finger at her like this" , "and shall whisper, 'There goes the woman with brains, poor thing!' As for your Majesty, in her shall you find your punishment. She shall think what you do not know, and divine what you cannot find out. Now," added the wicked fairy, turning to the two godmothers who stood by the child's cradle, "see if you, with all your giving, can do anything to lessen the curse that I have spoken," and she rushed away like a whirlwind, leaving every face dismayed.

The fairy who rules circumstance stood by the cradle and spoke. Her face was the face of one who wavers two ways, and her voice was unsure.

"The child shall have fortune," she said, "good-fortune, so far as is consistent with what has already been given. I wish," she added apologetically, "that I had spoken first."

"Why didn't you?" grumbled his Majesty under his whiskers, but he dared not speak aloud, for he was afraid of circumstance, being a king.

The other fairy stood silent, looking down into the child's face.

"But she shall know love," she said softly, after a little time. The sleeping princess smiled.

From the time that it was spoken the curse was felt. Before the baby could talk, she would lie in the royal cradle, fixing upon the King, her father, and the Queen, her mother, when they came to see her, eyes so big, so wise, so full of question, that his Majesty fled, and her Majesty covered her face with her hands, wondering what it could be that the child remembered and she forgot. The first word the Princess uttered was "Why." She said it so often that presently, through the whole length and breadth of the kingdom, she was known as the "Princess Pourquoi," though her real name was Josefa Maria Alexandra Ren?e Naftaline.

"Why," she asked, when she was very small, "did trees grow this way, instead of the other end up? Why did people stand on their feet instead of on their heads? Why did you like some people better than others, and why couldn't it be just as easy to like them all alike?"

She was a good little girl, but she had all the credit of being a bad one. She saw through what she was not intended to see through; she heard what she was not meant to hear; she understood what others wished to keep hidden. Therefore it came to pass that she was very lonely. She had a way of climbing affectionately up to the neck of some favored person, drawing down the head for a loving embrace, and then asking some terrible question, whereupon she was quickly put down on the floor and left alone. There she would sit, with so grieved a look in her big blue eyes that the next one who entered would pity the golden-haired baby, and would take her up, only to become a victim to some other unanswerable inquiry.

When she was four and five, her questions were theological or philosophical. "Why was she made at all, if she were as naughty as people said? Wouldn't it have been less trouble not to have made her, or to have made her good? Why were you you, and I I? Who was going to bury the last man?" The king's philosophers stood about in silence and gnawed their beards. They were terribly afraid of the little girl with chubby legs and dimples. As she grew older, her questioning turned more toward social matters and practical affairs. "Why," she asked his Majesty, her father, who also was afraid of her, "did he say that he loved his neighbor and yet make war? Why was he king? Was it because he was wiser and better than other people?" She looked at him so long and so doubtfully that his Majesty wriggled in the royal chair. He felt that this wretched child was endangering his power. Sometimes he was so miserable that he would willingly have abdicated, but he could not abdicate his little daughter. Besides, he was a king, and he did not have any place to go. Other children had been granted him, a line of little princesses, who wore long, stiff embroidered robes; and a nice, fat, stupid little prince, who was a great comfort to his father. All these other princelets obeyed the court etiquette and wore the court clothes, and never felt the ripple of an idea across their little minds, but they could not atone to the King for the thorn in his flesh known as Josefa Maria Alexandra Ren?e Naftaline.

The Princess Pourquoi objected to wearing a stomacher, for she liked to lie flat on her face in the park, watching the ants. She objected to making the court bow, and smiling the court smile, and putting out her hand to be kissed. Why should she? The ladies-in-waiting could only tell her, "It was so." She objected to taking mincing walks in the royal gardens among the peacocks, and sometimes, to the horror of all the court, escaped and played games with peasant children outside. She disliked her lessons. Why should she say, like a parrot, what her governess told her to, when there were birds and beasts and creeping things outside to study, and a library inside full of things really worth learning? So she went her own way, growing wistful and more lonely, and every day her big eyes grew wiser and fuller of secrets. Those who saw her crossed themselves and murmured, "The Curse!"

Once his Majesty held a great festival to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the founding of his kingdom by his imperial ancestor, Multus Pulvius Questus, who had conquered 500,000 men with his own arm, and had laid the cornerstone of a great principality. The festival was a brilliant one, and all the royal neighbors came. Just before the ceremonies began, in the large audience chamber, the governess of the Princess Pourquoi, stung by questions she could not answer regarding the achievements of Multus Pulvius, burst out with:

"You are a naughty little girl, and if you act this way, the fairy prince will never come."

"I don't want a fairy prince," replied the Princess proudly, looking at her governess with steady blue eyes. "I want a real one."

A little prince standing near, in a red velvet suit, looked at her very hard.

As time went on, the Princess Pourquoi was not quite content. She was too eager for that.

"I shall be happy when I find out," she said sadly one day.

"Find out what, your Highness?" asked the chief philosopher.

"It," answered the girl, and she pointed toward the horizon. "What it means, where we came from, what you are for and I am for."

The chief philosopher took a golden goblet of wine that a page had brought him and drank it to its dregs. Perhaps he meant this for an answer. Then he winked at his fellow-philosopher, and the two went arm in arm down a long path between box hedges in the garden. The Princess entered the royal palace and knelt at the feet of the King.

"Your Majesty," she asked, "why are people who do not know anything called wise men and philosophers?"

It was soon after this that the King made a great proclamation, offering the hand of his daughter to any one who would answer one of her questions satisfactorily. Suitors came by scores, although her unfortunate propensity was known, for the Princess was growing to be very beautiful, and his Majesty the King was very rich. The aspirant to her hand usually stood before the royal throne in the presence of the court, and the Princess was ushered in by the major domo. The Princess Pourquoi did not trouble herself to find new questions; she only asked some of the old ones over again, and the Crown Prince of Kleptomania, the Heir Apparent to the throne of Rumfelt Holstein, the reigning King of Nemosapientia, besides dozens of others, went sorrowfully back to their homes, rejected. When it was found that the ordeal was terrible, and the result always the same, the suitors gradually ceased coming, and the Princess Pourquoi remained a great matrimonial problem, aged fifteen, on the hands of her parents.

It was at this time that the Princess resolved to study, and to achieve something that was really her own. People should respect her, not because she was a princess, but because she could do great things. She pleaded with his Majesty until he ordered the greatest scholar in his kingdom to act as tutor for her, the greatest sculptor to teach her modeling, the greatest painter to teach her how to draw. For five long years the Princess worked and was happy, but the eyes of her mother were full of pity when they rested on her, and the passers-by in the streets whispered, "Poor thing!" Mothers drew their little ones closer to them when they saw her, and said: "Take care! It is the woman with a mind!" And the young ladies of the court, when they came out into the park with their long trains, and saw the Princess seated by herself with a book under a tree, said to themselves, under their breath: "Like that, too, but for the grace of God!"

"What masculine strength of handling!" said the artists.

"What wonderful inner meaning!" said the philosophers.

The Princess Pourquoi came one day to visit it, and stood a long time watching the people who saw it. The outspoken praise made her eyes glisten. A workingman, in a peasant's blue blouse, strolled near. There was fine powder of chipped stone upon his sleeve.

"There is great power there," said the workingman, "but the work is crude."

The peasant was hustled out of the room, and an admiring crowd gathered about the statue of the groping woman. Some one whispered that it was not a man's work at all, but the work of a woman. Surprise, incredulity, disapproval passed in waves over the faces of the crowd. The rumor was established as a fact, though the woman's name was withheld. Every one could see faults now.

"We suspected it from the first," said the philosophers. "The lack of virility is apparent."

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