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Quart stoups, tankards, goblets, glasses, flagons, and pint-pots rang and jingled marvellously. And the good wine rolled in waves down thirsty throats.
During this ringing, and while the wind brought to the ears of Claes from the town, in gusts, songs of men and women and children, he spake once again to the hermit, asking him what heavenly boon these good folk looked to win by these rough devotions.
The hermit answered, laughing:
“Thou seest upon this chapel two carven images, representing two bulls. They are placed there in memory of the miracle whereby Saint Martin transformed two bullocks into bulls, by making them fight with their horns. Then he rubbed their muzzles with a candle and green wood for an hour and longer.
“Wotting of the miracle, and fortified with a brief from His Holiness, for which I paid roundly, I came hither and established myself.
“Thenceforward all the ancient coughers and big-bellies in Meyborg and the country roundabout, persuaded by my arguments, were certain that having once beaten one another soundly with the candle, the which is unction, and with the cudgel, that is power, they would win favour of Our Lady. The women send their ancient husbands hither. The children born by virtue of this pilgrimage are violent, bold, fierce, nimble, and make perfect soldiers.”
Suddenly the hermit said to Claes:
“Dost thou know me?”
“Yea,” said Claes, “thou art Josse my brother.”
“I am,” replied the hermit; “but what is this little man that makes faces at me?”
“It is thy nephew,” said Claes.
“What difference dost thou make between me and the Emperor Charles?”
“It is great,” replied Claes.
“It is but small,” rejoined Josse, “for we do both alike, we two: he makes men to slay one another, I to beat one another for our gain and pleasure.”
Then he brought them to his hermitage, where they held feast and revel for eleven days without pause or truce.
XIII
Claes, when he parted from his brother, mounted his donkey once more, taking Ulenspiegel on the crupper behind him. He passed by the great square of Meyborg, and there beheld, assembled in groups, a great number of pilgrims, who seeing them became enraged and flourishing their cudgels they all suddenly cried out, “Scamp!” because of Ulenspiegel, who, opening his breeches, plucked up his shirt and showed them his nether visage.
Claes, seeing that it was his son they were threatening, said to him:
“What did you do for them to be so angry against you?”
“Dear father,” replied Ulenspiegel, “I am sitting on the donkey, saying no word to any man, and nevertheless they say I am a scamp.”
Then Claes set him in front.
In this position Ulenspiegel thrust out his tongue at the pilgrims, who, roaring, shook their fists at him, and lifting up their cudgels, would fain have beaten Claes and the donkey.
But Claes smote the beast with his heels to flee from their wrath, and while they pursued, losing their breath, he said to his son:
“Thou wert then born on a luckless day, for thou art sitting in front of me, doing no harm to any, and yet they would fain destroy thee.”
Ulenspiegel laughed.
Passing by Liège, Claes learned that the poor Rivageois were starving and that they had been placed under the jurisdiction of the Official, a tribunal composed of ecclesiastical judges. They made a riot demanding bread and lay judges. Some were beheaded or hanged, and the rest banished out of the country, such at that time was the clemency of Monseigneur de la Marck, the gentle archbishop.
Claes saw by the way the banished folk, fleeing from the pleasant vale of Liège, and on the trees near to the town the bodies of men hanged for being hungry. And he wept over them.
XIV
When he came home, riding upon his donkey, and provided with a bag full of patards his brother Josse had given him and a goodly tankard of pewter, there were in the cottage Sunday good cheer and daily feasts, for every day they had meat and beans to eat.
Claes filled often the great pewter tankard with dobbel-cuyt and emptied it as often.
Ulenspiegel ate for three and paddled in the dishes like a sparrow in a heap of corn.
“Look,” said Claes, “he’s eating the saltcellar, too!”
Ulenspiegel answered:
“When the saltcellar, as in our house, is made of a hollow piece of bread, it must be eaten now and then, lest the worms might come in it as it gets old.”
“Why,” said Soetkin, “do you wipe your greasy hands on your breeches?”
“So that I may never have my thighs wet,” replied Ulenspiegel.
At this moment Claes drank a deep draught from his tankard. Ulenspiegel said to him:
“Why have you so big a cup, I have only a poor little mug?”
Claes answered:
“Because I am your father and the baes of this house.”
Ulenspiegel retorted:
“You have been drinking for forty years, I for nine only; your time to drink is passed, mine is come; it is therefore for me to have the tankard and for you to take the mug.”
“Son,” said Claes, “he that would pour a hogshead into a keg would throw his beer into the gutter.”
“You will then be wise to pour your keg into my hogshead, for I am bigger than your tankard,” replied Ulenspiegel.
And Claes, delighted, gave him his tankard to drain. In this wise Ulenspiegel learned how to talk for his drink.
XV
Soetkin carried beneath her girdle the signs of renewed maternity; Katheline, too, was with child, but for fear dared not stir out of her house.
When Soetkin went to see her:
“Ah!” said she, lamenting, “what shall I do with the poor fruit of my womb? Must I strangle it? I would rather die. But if the constables take me, for having a child without being married, they will make me pay twenty florins, like a girl of loose life, and I shall be whipped on the marketplace.”
Soetkin then said some soothing word to console her, and having left her, went home pondering. Then one day she said to Claes:
“If instead of one child I had two, would you beat me, husband?”
“I don’t know that,” replied Claes.
“But,” said she, “if this second were not born of me, and like Katheline’s were the offspring of an unknown, of the devil, mayhap?”
“Devils,” replied Claes, “engender fire, death, and foul smoke, but not children. I will hold as mine the child of Katheline.”
“You would do this?” she said.
“I have said,” replied Claes.
Soetkin went to tell Katheline.
Hearing it, the latter cried out, overjoyed.
“He has spoken, good man, spoken for the sake of my poor body. He will be blessed by God, and blessed of the devil, if it is a devil,” she said, shuddering, “that hath made thee, poor babe that movest in my bosom.”
Soetkin and Katheline brought into the world one a lad, the other a girl. Both were borne to baptism, as son and daughter of Claes. Soetkin’s son was named Hans, and did not live, Katheline’s daughter was named Nele and throve well.
She drank the wine of life from four flagons, two of Katheline and two of Soetkin. And the two women quarrelled softly which should give the babe to drink. But against her desire Katheline must needs allow her milk to dry up, so that none might ask whence it came without her having been a mother.
When little Nele, her daughter, was weaned, she took her home and only let the child go to Soetkin’s when she had called her her mother.
The neighbours said it was well done of Katheline, who was well to do, to feed the child of the Claes, who for the most part lived in poverty their toilsome life.
XVI
Ulenspiegel found himself alone one morning at home, and for want of something better to do, he began to cut up one of his father’s shoes to make a little ship. Already he had planted the mainmast in the sole and bored the toe for the bowsprit, when at the half door he saw passing the bust of a horseman and the head of a horse.
“Is any one within?” asked the horseman.
“There are,” replied Ulenspiegel, “a man and a half and a horse’s head.”
“How so?” asked the horseman.
“Because I see here a whole man, which is me; the half of a man, which is your bust; and a horse’s head, which is that of your steed.”
“Where are your father and your mother?” asked the man.
“My father has gone to make bad worse,” replied Ulenspiegel, “and my mother is engaged in bringing us shame or loss.”
“Explain,” said the horseman.
Ulenspiegel answered:
“My father at this moment is deepening the holes in his field so as to bring from bad to worse the huntsmen who trample down his corn. My mother has gone to borrow money: if she repays too little ’twill shame us, if too much ’twill be our loss.”
The man asked then which way he should go.
“Where the geese are,” replied Ulenspiegel.
The man went away and came back just when Ulenspiegel was making an oared galley out of Claes’s other shoe.
“You have misled me,” said he: “where the geese are is nothing but mud and marsh in which they are paddling.”
Ulenspiegel answered to this:
“I did not tell you to go where the geese paddle, but where they go.”
“Show me, at any rate,” said the man, “a road that goes to Heyst.”
“In Flanders, it is the travellers that go and not the roads,” said Ulenspiegel.
XVII
One day Soetkin said to Claes:
“Husband, my heart is sad: it is now three days since Thyl left the house; dost thou not know where he is?”
Claes replied ruefully:
“He is where homeless dogs are, on some highway with a crew of other vagabonds of his own kidney. God was cruel to give us such a son. When he was born, I beheld in him the joy of our age, a tool more in the house; I looked to make a craftsman of him, and wicked fate makes him a thief and a drone.”
“Be not so hard, husband,” said Soetkin, “our son being but nine years old is in the heyday of childish thoughtlessness and folly. Is it not so that like the trees, he must shed the young buds before the coming of the full leaves, which for the human tree are honour and virtue? He is full of tricks, I am not blind to them, but they will turn later to his advantage, if instead of employing them to ill ends, he applies them to some useful trade. He is prone to flout his neighbours; but later this will help him to hold his own in merry company. He laughs ever and always; but faces sour before they are ripe are an ill omen for the countenance to come. If he runs, ’tis that he must grow; if he does not work, it is for that he is not yet of an age to feel that work is duty, and if now and then he spends day and night away from home for half a week together, ’tis that he knows nothing of what grief he gives us, for he has a good heart, and he loves us.”
Claes wagged his head and made no answer, and while he slept, Soetkin wept alone. And in the morning, thinking that her son was sick in a corner of some highway, she went out on the doorstep to see if he was not coming back; but she saw nothing, and she sate near the window, looking thence into the street. And many a time her heart danced in her bosom at the sound of the light foot of some lad; but when he passed, she saw it was not Ulenspiegel, and then she wept, poor dolorous mother.
In the meanwhile, Ulenspiegel with his vagabond companions was at Bruges, at the Saturday fair.
There might be seen cobblers and shoemakers in booths apart, tailors selling clothes, miesevangers from Antwerp, who catch tits with an owl at night; poultry sellers, dog stealers, vendors of catskins for gloves, waistcoats, and doublets, buyers of every kind and condition, burgesses and their womenfolk, menservants and maidservants, pantlers, butlers, and all together, sellers and buyers, crying up and crying down, vaunting and disparaging the wares.
In one corner of the fair there was a fine canvas tent erected on four poles. At the door of the tent, a churl from the flat country of Alost, with two monks who were there to get something for themselves, was showing the curious devout, for a patard, a piece of the shoulder blade of Saint Mary of Egypt. Hoarsely he bawled out the saint’s merits, and omitted not from his song how, having no silver, she paid a young ferryman in kind, so as not to sin against the Holy Ghost by refusing the labourer his hire.
And the two monks nodded their heads to show that what the churl said was true. By them was a woman fat and ruddy, lascivious as Astarte, violently inflating a wretched bagpipe, while a pretty young girl sang beside her like a nightingale; but no one listened to her. Above the entrance to the tent was hung on two poles, held by cords in the two handles, a bucket full of holy water that had been blessed in Rome, according to the fat woman, while the two monks waggled head to bear witness to her tale. Ulenspiegel, beholding the bucket, became pensive.
To one of the poles supporting the tent was fastened a donkey that was fed more upon hay than on oats: head down it was gazing at the earth, with no hope of seeing thistles spring up from it.
“Comrades,” said Ulenspiegel, pointing with his finger at the fat woman, the two monks, and the ass, “since the masters sing so sweetly, we must make the donkey dance as well.”
So saying, he went off to the next booth, bought six liards’ worth of pepper, pulled up the donkey’s tail and clapped the pepper underneath.
The donkey, feeling the pepper at work, looked round under his tail to see whence proceeded this unwonted heat. Thinking he had a red-hot devil there, he would fain run away to escape him, began to bray and rear, and shook the tent pole with all his might. At the first shock, the tub between the two poles spilled all its holy water on the tent and on those who were within it. And presently collapsing, the tent covered with a moist mantle those who were hearkening to the history of Mary of Egypt. And from under the canvas Ulenspiegel and his companions heard a great noise of moaning and lamenting, for the devout who were there were wild with anger and exchanged furious thwacks and thumps with one another. The canvas rose and fell at the struggles of the combatants. Every time Ulenspiegel saw a roundness shape itself under the cloth, he stuck a needle into it. Then there were louder shrieks beneath the canvas and a more liberal distribution of thwackings.
And he was transported, but more still seeing the donkey fleeing and dragging behind him tent, tub, and poles, while the baes of the tent, his wife and his daughter, hung desperately on to the baggage. The donkey, which could run no longer, lifted his head into the air and ceased not to sing, except in order to look beneath his tail to see if the fire there burning would not soon be extinguished.
All this while the devout were going on with their battle; the monks, without giving them a thought, were picking up the money that had fallen from the collecting dishes, and Ulenspiegel was helping them, most devoutly, not without profiting.
XVIII
