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Whilst the vagabond son of the coalman was growing up gay and frolicsome, in lean melancholy vegetated the dolorous scion of the sublime Emperor. Lords and ladies saw the pitiful little weakling dragging through the rooms and corridors of Valladolid his frail body and his tottering limbs that could scarce sustain the weight of his big head, covered with fair stiff hair.
Ever seeking out the darkest corridors, there he would sit for hours thrusting out his legs in front of him. If a servant trod on him by accident, he had the man flogged, and took pleasure in hearing him cry out under the lashes, but he never laughed.
The next day, going elsewhere to set the same trap, he would sit again in some corridor with his legs thrust out. The ladies, lords, and pages who might pass there going fast or slow would trip over him, fall down and hurt themselves. He took pleasure in this, also, but he never laughed.
When one of them, having run into him, failed to fall, he would cry out as if he had been struck, and he was delighted to see their fear, but he never laughed.
His Sacred Majesty was informed of his behaviour and gave orders to take no notice of the boy, saying that if he did not wish to have his legs trodden on, he ought not to put them in the way of people’s feet.
This angered Philip, but he said nothing, and no one saw him after, except when on bright summer days he went to warm his shivering body in the sunshine in the courtyard.
One day, coming back from the wars, Charles saw him steeped in melancholy in this fashion.
“Son,” said he, “how different art thou from me! At thy age, I loved to climb among trees to hunt the squirrels; I had myself lowered by a rope down some steep cliff to take eaglets from the nest. At this play I might have left my bones behind me; they but became the harder for it. In the chase the wild things fled to their dens when they saw me coming with my good arquebus.”
“Ah,” sighed the boy, “I have a pain in the belly, monseigneur my father.”
“The wine of Paxaretos,” said Charles, “is a sovereign cure.”
“I do not like wine; my head aches, monseigneur my father.”
“Son,” said Charles, “thou must run and leap and romp as do other boys of thine own years.”
“My legs are stiff, monseigneur my father.”
“How,” said Charles, “how can they be otherwise if thou usest them no more than if they were legs of wood? I will have thee fastened on some nimble steed.”
The boy wept.
“Do not so,” said he, “I have a pain in my loins, monseigneur my father.”
“But,” said Charles, “you have a pain everywhere then?”
“I would not be ill at all if I were left in peace,” replied the child.
“Dost thou think,” rejoined the Emperor, impatiently, “to pass thy royal life in brooding as do clerks? For them, if it must be, in order that they may soil their parchments with ink, from the silence, solitude, and retirement; for thee, son of the sword, there needs hot blood, the eye of a lynx, the cunning of the fox, the strength of Hercules. Why dost thou make the holy sign? God’s blood! ’tis not for the lion’s cub to ape paternoster-mongering females.”
“Hark, the Angelus, monseigneur my father,” replied the child.
XIX
This year May and June were verily the months of flowers. Never did any see in Flanders hawthorn so fragrant, never in the gardens so many roses, such heaps of jasmine and honeysuckle. When the wind that blew up out of England drove the incense of this flowery land towards the east, every man, and specially in Antwerp, nose in air with delight, would say:
“Do you smell the sweet wind that comes from Flanders?”
In like wise the busy bees sucked the flowers’ honey, made wax, laid their eggs in hives too small to harbour their swarms. What music of labour under the blue sky that covered the rich earth with its dazzling tent!
Men made hives out of rushes, of straw, of osiers, of plaited hay. Basketmakers, tubmakers, coopers were wearing out their tools over the work. As for the wood carvers, for a long time they had been unequal to the task.
The swarms were of full thirty thousand bees and two thousand seven hundred drones. The honeycombs were so delicious that because of their rare quality, the dean of Damme sent eleven to the Emperor Charles, by way of thanks for having through his edicts restored the Holy Inquisition to all its full vigour. It was Philip that ate them, but they did him no good.
Tramps, beggars, vagabonds, and all that ragtag and bobtail of idle rogues that parade their laziness about the roads, preferring to be hanged rather than to work, enticed by the taste of the honey, came to get their share of it. And they prowled about by night, in crowds.
Claes had made hives to attract the swarming bees to them; some were full and others empty, awaiting the bees. Claes used to watch all night to guard this sugared wealth. When he was tired, he used to bid Ulenspiegel take his place. And the boy did so with a good will.
Now one night Ulenspiegel, to avoid the cold air, had taken shelter in a hive, and, all huddled up, was looking through the openings, of which there were two, in the top of the hive.
As he was on the point of falling asleep, he heard the little trees and bushes of the hedge crackling and heard the voices of two men whom he took to be robbers. He looked out through one of the openings in the hive, and saw that they both had long hair and a long beard, though the beard was the mark and sign of noble rank.
They went from hive to hive, and came to his own, and picking it up, they said:
“Let us take this one: it is the heaviest.”
Then they carried it off, using their sticks to do it. Ulenspiegel took no pleasure in being thus carted in a hive. The night was clear and bright, and the thieves walked along without uttering a word. Every fifty paces they stopped, clean out of breath, to go on their way again presently. The one in front grumbled furiously at having so heavy a weight to bear, and the one behind whimpered melancholy-wise. For in this world there are two kinds of idle cowards, those who grow angry with work, and those that whine when there is work to be done.
Ulenspiegel, having nothing else to do, pulled the hair of the robber who went in front, and the beard of the one behind, so that growing tired of this game, the angry one said to the snivelling one:
“Stop pulling my hair, or I will give you such a wallop on the head with my fist that it will sink down into your chest and you will look through your ribs like a thief through the bars of his prison.”
“I wouldn’t dare, my friend,” said the sniveller, “but it is you that are pulling me by the beard.”
The angry one answered:
“I don’t go hunting vermin in beggar fellows’ fur.”
“Sir,” replied the sniveller, “do not make the hive jump about so much; my poor arms are nearly breaking in two.”
“I’ll have them off altogether,” answered the angry fellow.
Then, putting off his leathern gear he set the hive down on the ground, and leaped upon his comrade. And they fought with each other, the one cursing and swearing, the other crying for mercy.
Ulenspiegel, hearing the blows pattering down, came out of the hive, dragged it with him as far as the nearest wood so as to find it there again, and went back to Claes’s house.
And thus it is that in quarrellings sly folk find their advantage.
XX
When he was fifteen, Ulenspiegel erected a little tent at Damme upon four stakes, and he cried out that everyone might see within, represented in a handsome frame of hay, his present and future self.
When there came a man of law, haughty and puffed up with his own importance, Ulenspiegel would thrust his head out of the frame, and mimicking the face of an old ape, he would say:
“An old mug may decay, but never flourish; am I not your very mirror, good sir of the doctoral phiz?”
If he had a stout soldier for client, Ulenspiegel would hide and show in the middle of the frame, instead of his face, a dishful of meat and bread, and say:
“Battle will make hash of you; what will you give me for my prophecy, O soldier beloved of the big-mouthed sakers?”
When an old man, wearing ingloriously his hoary head, would bring Ulenspiegel his wife, a young woman, the boy, hiding himself as he had done for the soldier, and showing in the frame a little tree, on whose branches were hung knife handles, caskets, combs, inkhorns, all made of horn, would call out:
“Whence come all these fine nicknacks, Messire? Is it not from the hornbeam that groweth within the garden of old husbands? Who shall say now that cuckolds are folk useless in a commonweal?”
And Ulenspiegel would display his young face in the frame alongside the tree.
The old man, hearing him, would cough with masculine anger, but his dear wife would soothe him with her hand, and smiling, come up to Ulenspiegel.
“And my mirror,” she would say, “wilt thou show it to me?”
“Come closer,” Ulenspiegel would answer.
She would obey, and he then, kissing her wherever he could:
“Thy mirror,” he would say, “is stark youth with proud codpiece.”
And the darling would go away also, but not without giving him florins one or two.
To the fat, blear-eyed monk who would ask to see his present and future self, Ulenspiegel would answer:
“Thou art a ham cupboard, and so thou shalt be a still room for cervoise ale; for salt calleth upon drinking, is not this true, great belly? Give me a patard for not having lied.”
“My son,” the monk would reply, “we never carry money.”
“’Tis then the money carries thee,” would Ulenspiegel answer, “for I know thou dost put it between two soles under thy feet. Give me thy sandal.”
But the monk:
“My son, ’tis the property of the Convent; I will none the less take from it, if I must, two patards for thy trouble.”
The monk gave them. Ulenspiegel received them graciously.
Thus showed he their mirror to the folk of Damme, of Bruges, of Blankenberghe, nay, even as far away as Ostend.
And instead of saying to them in his Flemish speech: “Ik ben u lieden Spiegel,” “I am your mirror,” he said to them, shortening it, “Ik ben ulen spiegel,” even as it is still said to-day in East and West Flanders.
And from thence there came to him his surname of Ulenspiegel.
XXI
As he grew up, he conceived a liking for wandering about through fairs and markets. If he saw there any one playing on the hautbois, the rebeck, or the bagpipes, he would, for a patard, have them teach him the way to make music on these instruments.
He became above all skilled in playing on the rommel-pot, an instrument made of a pot, a bladder, and a stout straw. This is how he arranged them: he damped the bladder and strained it over the pot, fastened with a string the middle of the bladder round the knot on the straw, which was touching the bottom of the pot, on the rim of which he then fixed the bladder stretched to bursting point. In the morning, the bladder, being dried, gave the sound of a tambourine when it was struck, and if the straw of the instrument was rubbed it hummed better than a viol. And Ulenspiegel, with his pot booming and sounding like a mastiff’s barking, went singing carols at house doors in company with youngsters, one of whom carried the shining star made out of paper on Twelfth Night.
If any master painter came to Damme to pourtray, on their knees on canvas, the companions of some Guild, Ulenspiegel, desiring to see how he wrought, would ask to be allowed to grind his colours, and for all salary would accept only a slice of bread, three liards, and a pint of ale.
Applying himself to the grinding, he would study his master’s manner. When the master was away, he would try to paint like him, but put vermilion everywhere. He tried to paint Claes, Soetkin, Katheline, and Nele, as well as quart pots and sauce-pans. Claes prophesied to him, seeing his works, that if he would be bold and persevering, he might one day earn florins by the score, painting inscriptions on the speel-wagen, which are pleasure carts in Flanders and in Zealand.
He learned, too, from a master mason how to carve wood and stone, when the man came to make, in the choir of Notre Dame, a stall so constructed that when it was necessary the aged dean could sit down on it while still seeming to remain standing.
It was Ulenspiegel who carved the first handle for the knife used by the Zealand folk. This handle he made in the shape of a cage. Within there was a loose death’s head; above it a dog in a lying posture. These emblems taken together signify “Blade faithful to the death.”
And in this wise Ulenspiegel began to fulfil the prediction of Katheline, showing himself painter, sculptor, clown, noble, all at once and together, for from father to son the Claes bore for arms three quart pots argent on a field of bruinbier.
But Ulenspiegel was constant to no trade, and Claes told him if this game went on, he would turn him away from the cottage.
XXII
The Emperor being returned from war, asked why his son Philip had not come to greet him.
The Infante’s archbishop-governor replied that he had not desired to do so, for, so he said, he cared for nothing but books and solitude.
The Emperor enquired where he was at that moment.
The governor answered that they must seek him in every place where it was dark. They did so.
Having gone through a goodly number of chambers, they came at last to a kind of closet, unpaven, and lit by a skylight. There they saw stuck in the earth a post to which was fastened by the waist a pretty little tiny monkey, that had been sent to His Highness from the Indies to delight him with its youthful antics. At the foot of this stake faggots still red were smoking, and in the closet there was a foul stench of burnt hair.
The little beast had suffered so much dying in this fire that its little body seemed to be not an animal that ever had life, but a fragment of some wrinkled twisted root, and in its mouth, open as though to cry out on death, bloody foam was visible, and the water of its tears made its face wet.
“Who did this?” asked the Emperor.
The governor did not dare to reply, and both men remained silent, sad, and wrathful.
Suddenly in this silence there was heard a low little sound of a cough that came from a corner in the shadow behind them. His Majesty, turning about, received the Infante Philip, all clad in black and sucking a lemon.
“Don Philip,” said he, “come and salute me.”
The Infante, without budging, looked at him with his timid eyes in which there was no affection.
“Is it thou,” asked the Emperor, “that hast burned this little beast in this fire?”
The Infante hung his head.
But the Emperor:
“If thou wert cruel enough to do it, be brave enough to confess it.”
The Infante made no answer.
His Majesty plucked the lemon out of his hands and flung it on the ground, and he was about to beat his son melting away with fright, when the archbishop, stopping him, whispered in his ear:
“His Highness will be a great burner of heretics one day.”
The Emperor smiled, and the two men went away, leaving the Infante alone with his monkey.
But there were others that were no monkeys and died in the flames.
XXIII
November had come, the month of hail in which coughing folk give themselves up wholehearted to the music of phlegm. In this month also the small boys descend in bands on the turnip fields, pilfering what they can from them, to the great rage of the peasants, who vainly run after them with sticks and forks.
