The Princess and Curdie
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George MacDonald >> The Princess and Curdie
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12 The Princess and Curdie
by George MacDonald
CONTENTS
1 The Mountain
2 The White Pigeon
3 The Mistress of the Silver Moon
4 Curdie's Father and Mother
5 The Miners
6 The Emerald
7 What Is in a Name?
8 Curdie's Mission
9 Hands
10 The Heath
11 Lina
12 More Creatures
13 The Baker's Wife
14 The Dogs of Gwyntystorm
15 Derba and Barbara
16 The Mattock
17 The Wine Cellar
18 The King's Kitchen
19 The King's Chamber
20 Counterplotting
21 The Loaf
22 The Lord Chamberlain
23 Dr Kelman
24 The Prophecy
25 The Avengers
26 The Vengeance
27 More Vengeance
28 The Preacher
29 Barbara
30 Peter
31 The Sacrifice
32 The King's Army
33 The Battle
34 Judgement
35 The End
CHAPTER 1
The Mountain
Curdie was the son of Peter the miner. He lived with his father
and mother in a cottage built on a mountain, and he worked with his
father inside the mountain.
A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without
knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people
were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not
come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated
them - and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have
learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel
quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.
I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the
heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below,
and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great
wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals,
but of glowing hot, melted metals and stones. And as our hearts
keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it
is a huge power of buried sunlight - that is what it is.
Now think: out of that cauldron, where all the bubbles would be as
big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain
bubbles have bubbled out and escaped - up and away, and there they
stand in the cool, cold sky - mountains. Think of the change, and
you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about
the very look of a mountain: from the darkness - for where the
light has nothing to shine upon, much the same as darkness - from
the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest - up, with a
sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the
starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the
blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their
grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt,
the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and
everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and
caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are
studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and
the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of
the glaciers fresh born.
Think, too, of the change in their own substance - no longer molten
and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold.
Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the
birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of
its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the
valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its
armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and
the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and
green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices
down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful
gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound
lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of
ice.
All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what
lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles
thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin
or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones - perhaps a brook,
with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaselessly, cold and
babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes,
or over a gravel of which some of the stones arc rubies and
emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires - who can tell? - and
whoever can't tell is free to think - all waiting to flash, waiting
for millions of ages - ever since the earth flew off from the sun,
a great blot of fire, and began to cool.
Then there are caverns full of water, numbingly cold, fiercely hot
- hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water
cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in
the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the
great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it
out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and
kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to
the light, and rushes down the Mountainside in torrents, and down
the valleys in rivers - down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs
of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and
cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to
mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by
millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun,
it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds
back to the mountaintops and the snow, the solid ice, and the
molten stream.
Well, when the heart of the earth has thus come rushing up among
her children, bringing with it gifts of all that she possesses,
then straightway into it rush her children to see what they can
find there. With pickaxe and spade and crowbar, with boring chisel
and blasting powder, they force their way back: is it to search for
what toys they may have left in their long-forgotten nurseries?
Hence the mountains that lift their heads into the clear air, and
are dotted over with the dwellings of men, are tunnelled and bored
in the darkness of their bosoms by the dwellers in the houses which
they hold up to the sun and air.
Curdie and his father were of these: their business was to bring to
light hidden things; they sought silver in the rock and found it,
and carried it out. Of the many other precious things in their
mountain they knew little or nothing. Silver ore was what they
were sent to find, and in darkness and danger they found it. But
oh, how sweet was the air on the mountain face when they came out
at sunset to go home to wife and mother! They did breathe deep
then!
The mines belonged to the king of the country, and the miners were
his servants, working under his overseers and officers. He was a
real king - that is, one who ruled for the good of his people and
not to please himself, and he wanted the silver not to buy rich
things for himself, but to help him to govern the country, and pay
the ones that defended it from certain troublesome neighbours, and
the judges whom he set to portion out righteousness among the
people, that so they might learn it themselves, and come to do
without judges at all. Nothing that could be got from the heart of
the earth could have been put to better purposes than the silver
the king's miners got for him. There were people in the country
who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by locking it up in
a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called mammon, and bred
all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the king's hands it
never made any but friends, and the air of the world kept it clean.
About a year before this story began, a series of very remarkable
events had just ended. I will narrate as much of them as will
serve to show the tops of the roots of my tree.
Upon the mountain, on one of its many claws, stood a grand old
house, half farmhouse, half castle, belonging to the king; and
there his only child, the Princess Irene, had been brought up till
she was nearly nine years old, and would doubtless have continued
much longer, but for the strange events to which I have referred.
At that time the hollow places of the mountain were inhabited by
creatures called goblins, who for various reasons and in various
ways made themselves troublesome to all, but to the little princess
dangerous. Mainly by the watchful devotion and energy of Curdie,
however, their designs had been utterly defeated, and made to
recoil upon themselves to their own destruction, so that now there
were very few of them left alive, and the miners did not believe
there was a single goblin remaining in the whole inside of the
mountain.
The king had been so pleased with the boy - then approaching
thirteen years of age - that when he carried away his daughter he
asked him to accompany them; but he was still better pleased with
him when he found that he preferred staying with his father and
mother. He was a right good king and knew that the love of a boy
who would not leave his father and mother to be made a great man
was worth ten thousand offers to die for his sake, and would prove
so when the right time came. As for his father and mother, they
would have given him up without a grumble, for they were just as
good as the king, and he and they understood each other perfectly;
but in this matter, not seeing that he could do anything for the
king which one of his numerous attendants could not do as well,
Curdie felt that it was for him to decide. So the king took a kind
farewell of them all and rode away, with his daughter on his horse
before him.
A gloom fell upon the mountain and the miners when she was gone,
and Curdie did not whistle for a whole week. As for his verses,
there was no occasion to make any now. He had made them only to
drive away the goblins, and they were all gone - a good riddance -
only the princess was gone too! He would rather have had things as
they were, except for the princess's sake. But whoever is diligent
will soon be cheerful, and though the miners missed the household
of the castle, they yet managed to get on without them.
Peter and his wife, however, were troubled with the fancy that they
had stood in the way of their boy's good fortune. it would have
been such a fine thing for him and them, too, they thought, if he
had ridden with the good king's train. How beautiful he looked,
they said, when he rode the king's own horse through the river that
the goblins had sent out of the hill! He might soon have been a
captain, they did believe! The good, kind people did not reflect
that the road to the next duty is the only straight one, or that,
for their fancied good, we should never wish our children or
friends to do what we would not do ourselves if we were in their
position. We must accept righteous sacrifices as well as make
them.
CHAPTER 2
The White Pigeon
When in the winter they had had their supper and sat about the
fire, or when in the summer they lay on the border of the
rock-margined stream that ran through their little meadow close by
the door of their cottage, issuing from the far-up whiteness often
folded in clouds, Curdie's mother would not seldom lead the
conversation to one peculiar personage said and believed to have
been much concerned in the late issue of events.
That personage was the great-great-grandmother of the princess, of
whom the princess had often talked, but whom neither Curdie nor his
mother had ever seen. Curdie could indeed remember, although
already it looked more like a dream than he could account for if it
had really taken place, how the princess had once led him up many
stairs to what she called a beautiful room in the top of the tower,
where she went through all the - what should he call it? - the
behaviour of presenting him to her grandmother, talking now to her
and now to him, while all the time he saw nothing but a bare
garret, a heap of musty straw, a sunbeam, and a withered apple.
Lady, he would have declared before the king himself, young or old,
there was none, except the princess herself, who was certainly
vexed that he could not see what she at least believed she saw.
As for his mother, she had once seen, long before Curdie was born,
a certain mysterious light of the same description as one Irene
spoke of, calling it her grandmother's moon; and Curdie himself had
seen this same light, shining from above the castle, just as the
king and princess were taking their leave. Since that time neither
had seen or heard anything that could be supposed connected with
her. Strangely enough, however, nobody had seen her go away. if
she was such an old lady, she could hardly be supposed to have set
out alone and on foot when all the house was asleep. Still, away
she must have gone, for, of course, if she was so powerful, she
would always be about the princess to take care of her.
But as Curdie grew older, he doubted more and more whether Irene
had not been talking of some dream she had taken for reality: he
had heard it said that children could not always distinguish
betwixt dreams and actual events. At the same time there was his
mother's testimony: what was he to do with that? His mother,
through whom he had learned everything, could hardly be imagined by
her own dutiful son to have mistaken a dream for a fact of the
waking world.
So he rather shrank from thinking about it, and the less he thought
about it, the less he was inclined to believe it when he did think
about it, and therefore, of course, the less inclined to talk about
it to his father and mother; for although his father was one of
those men who for one word they say think twenty thoughts, Curdie
was well assured that he would rather doubt his own eyes than his
wife's testimony.
There were no others to whom he could have talked about it. The
miners were a mingled company - some good, some not so good, some
rather bad - none of them so bad or so good as they might have
been; Curdie liked most of them, and was a favourite with all; but
they knew very little about the upper world, and what might or
might not take place there. They knew silver from copper ore; they
understood the underground ways of things, and they could look very
wise with their lanterns in their hands searching after this or
that sign of ore, or for some mark to guide their way in the
hollows of the earth; but as to great-great-grandmothers, they
would have mocked Curdie all the rest of his life for the absurdity
of not being absolutely certain that the solemn belief of his
father and mother was nothing but ridiculous nonsense. Why, to
them the very word 'great-great-grandmother' would have been a
week's laughter! I am not sure that they were able quite to
believe there were such persons as great-great-grandmothers; they
had never seen one. They were not companions to give the best of
help toward progress, and as Curdie grew, he grew at this time
faster in body than in mind - with the usual consequence, that he
was getting rather stupid - one of the chief signs of which was
that he believed less and less in things he had never seen. At the
same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that
this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind. Still,
he was becoming more and more a miner, and less and less a man of
the upper world where the wind blew. On his way to and from the
mine he took less and less notice of bees and butterflies, moths
and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds. He was
gradually changing into a commonplace man.
There is this difference between the growth of some human beings
and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in
the other a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes
at length to know at once whether a thing is true the moment it
comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more
afraid of being taken in, so afraid of it that he takes himself in
altogether, and comes at length to believe in nothing but his
dinner: to be sure of a thing with him is to have it between his
teeth.
Curdie was not in a very good way, then, at that time. His father
and mother had, it is true, no fault to find with him and yet - and
yet - neither of them was ready to sing when the thought of him
came up. There must be something wrong when a mother catches
herself sighing over the time when her boy was in petticoats, or a
father looks sad when he thinks how he used to carry him on his
shoulder. The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old
child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to
be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's
pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever
fresh born.
Curdie had made himself a bow and some arrows, and was teaching
himself to shoot with them. One evening in the early summer, as he
was walking home from the mine with them in his hand, a light
flashed across his eyes. He looked, and there was a snow-white
pigeon settling on a rock in front of him, in the red light of the
level sun. There it fell at once to work with one of its wings, in
which a feather or two had got some sprays twisted, causing a
certain roughness unpleasant to the fastidious creature of the air.
It was indeed a lovely being, and Curdie thought how happy it must
be flitting through the air with a flash - a live bolt of light.
For a moment he became so one with the bird that he seemed to feel
both its bill and its feathers, as the one adjusted the other to
fly again, and his heart swelled with the pleasure of its
involuntary sympathy. Another moment and it would have been aloft
in the waves of rosy light - it was just bending its little legs to
spring: that moment it fell on the path broken-winged and bleeding
from Curdie's cruel arrow.
With a gush of pride at his skill, and pleasure at his success, he
ran to pick up his prey. I must say for him he picked it up gently
- perhaps it was the beginning of his repentance. But when he had
the white thing in his hands its whiteness stained with another red
than that of the sunset flood in which it had been revelling - ah
God! who knows the joy of a bird, the ecstasy of a creature that
has neither storehouse nor barn! - when he held it, I say, in his
victorious hands, the winged thing looked up in his face - and with
such eyes! - asking what was the matter, and where the red sun had
gone, and the clouds, and the wind of its flight. Then they
closed, but to open again presently, with the same questions in
them.
And as they closed and opened, their look was fixed on his. It did
not once flutter or try to get away; it only throbbed and bled and
looked at him. Curdie's heart began to grow very large in his
bosom. What could it mean? It was nothing but a pigeon, and why
should he not kill a pigeon? But the fact was that not till this
very moment had he ever known what a pigeon was. A good many
discoveries of a similar kind have to be made by most of us. Once
more it opened its eyes - then closed them again, and its throbbing
ceased. Curdie gave a sob: its last look reminded him of the
princess - he did not know why. He remembered how hard he had
laboured to set her beyond danger, and yet what dangers she had had
to encounter for his sake: they had been saviours to each other -
and what had he done now? He had stopped saving, and had begun
killing! What had he been sent into the world for? Surely not to
be a death to its joy and loveliness. He had done the thing that
was contrary to gladness; he was a destroyer! He was not the
Curdie he had been meant to be!
Then the underground waters gushed from the boy's heart. And with
the tears came the remembrance that a white pigeon, just before the
princess went away with her father, came from somewhere - yes, from
the grandmother's lamp, and flew round the king and Irene and
himself, and then flew away: this might be that very pigeon!
Horrible to think! And if it wasn't, yet it was a white pigeon,
the same as this. And if she kept a great Many pigeons - and white
ones, as Irene had told him, then whose pigeon could he have killed
but the grand old princess's?
Suddenly everything round about him seemed against him. The red
sunset stung him; the rocks frowned at him; the sweet wind that had
been laving his face as he walked up the hill dropped - as if he
wasn't fit to be kissed any more. Was the whole world going to
cast him out? Would he have to stand there forever, not knowing
what to do, with the dead pigeon in his hand? Things looked bad
indeed. Was the whole world going to make a work about a pigeon -
a white pigeon? The sun went down. Great clouds gathered over the
west, and shortened the twilight. The wind gave a howl, and then
lay down again. The clouds gathered thicker. Then came a
rumbling. He thought it was thunder. It was a rock that fell
inside the mountain. A goat ran past him down the hill, followed
by a dog sent to fetch him home. He thought they were goblin
creatures, and trembled. He used to despise them. And still he
held the dead pigeon tenderly in his hand.
It grew darker and darker. An evil something began to move in his
heart. 'What a fool I am!' he said to himself. Then he grew
angry, and was just going to throw the bird from him and whistle,
when a brightness shone all round him. He lifted his eyes, and saw
a great globe of light - like silver at the hottest heat: he had
once seen silver run from the furnace. It shone from somewhere
above the roofs of the castle: it must be the great old princess's
moon! How could she be there? Of course she was not there! He
had asked the whole household, and nobody knew anything about her
or her globe either. it couldn't be! And yet what did that
signify, when there was the white globe shining, and here was the
dead white bird in his hand? That moment the pigeon gave a little
flutter. 'It's not dead!' cried Curdie, almost with a shriek. The
same instant he was running full speed toward the castle, never
letting his heels down, lest he should shake the poor, wounded
bird.
CHAPTER 3
The Mistress of the Silver Moon
When Curdie reached the castle, and ran into the little garden in
front of it, there stood the door wide open. This was as he had
hoped, for what could he have said if he had had to knock at it?
Those whose business it is to open doors, so often mistake and shut
them! But the woman now in charge often puzzled herself greatly to
account for the strange fact that however often she shut the door,
which, like the rest, she took a great deal of unnecessary trouble
to do, she was certain, the next time she went to it, to find it
open. I speak now of the great front door, of course: the back
door she as persistently kept wide: if people could only go in by
that, she said, she would then know what sort they were, and what
they wanted. But she would neither have known what sort Curdie
was, nor what he wanted, and would assuredly have denied him
admittance, for she knew nothing of who was in the tower. So the
front door was left open for him, and in he walked.
But where to go next he could not tell. It was not quite dark: a
dull, shineless twilight filled the place. All he knew was that he
must go up, and that proved enough for the present, for there he
saw the great staircase rising before him. When he reached the top
of it, he knew there must be more stairs yet, for he could not be
near the top of the tower. Indeed by the situation of the stairs,
he must be a good way from the tower itself. But those who work
well in the depths more easily understand the heights, for indeed
in their true nature they are one and the same; miners are in
mountains; and Curdie, from knowing the ways of the king's mines,
and being able to calculate his whereabouts in them, was now able
to find his way about the king's house. He knew its outside
perfectly, and now his business was to get his notion of the inside
right with the outside.
So he shut his eyes and made a picture of the outside of it in his
mind. Then he came in at the door of the picture, and yet kept the
picture before him all the time - for you can do that kind of thing
in your mind - and took every turn of the stair over again, always
watching to remember, every time he turned his face, how the tower
lay, and then when he came to himself at the top where he stood, he
knew exactly where it was, and walked at once in the right
direction.
On his way, however, he came to another stair, and up that he went,
of course, watching still at every turn how the tower must lie. At
the top of this stair was yet another - they were the stairs up
which the princess ran when first, without knowing it, she was on
her way to find her great-great-grandmother. At the top of the
second stair he could go no farther, and must therefore set out
again to find the tower, which, as it rose far above the rest of
the house, must have the last of its stairs inside itself.
Having watched every turn to the very last, he still knew quite
well in what direction he must go to find it, so he left the stair
and went down a passage that led, if not exactly toward it, yet
nearer it. This passage was rather dark, for it was very long,
with only one window at the end, and although there were doors on
both sides of it, they were all shut. At the distant window
glimmered the chill east, with a few feeble stars in it, and its
like was dreary and old, growing brown, and looking as if it were
thinking about the day that was just gone. Presently he turned
into another passage, which also had a window at the end of it; and
in at that window shone all that was left of the sunset, just a few
ashes, with here and there a little touch of warmth: it was nearly
as sad as the east, only there was one difference - it was very
plainly thinking of tomorrow.
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