Part 8 (2/2)
I was well received by my father-in-law, who gave a great feast to all the Brahmans of the village on the occasion. He made me stay three days, during which there was nothing but festivity. At length the time of our departure having arrived, he suffered my wife and myself to leave him, after pouring out blessings on us both, and wis.h.i.+ng us a long and happy life, enriched with a numerous progeny. When we took leave of him, he shed abundance of tears, as if he had foreseen the misery that awaited us.
It was then the summer solstice, and the day was exceedingly hot. We had to cross a sandy plain of more than two leagues; and the sand, being heated by the burning sun, scorched the feet of my young wife, who, being brought up too tenderly in her father's house, was not accustomed to such severe trials. She began to cry, and being unable to go on, she lay down on the ground, saying she wished to die there. I was in dreadful trouble, and knew not what step to take; when a merchant came up, travelling the contrary way. He had a train of fifty bullocks, loaded with various kinds of merchandise. I ran to meet him, and told him the cause of my anxiety with tears in my eyes; and entreated him to aid me with his good advice in the distressing circ.u.mstances in which I was placed. He immediately answered, that a young and delicate woman, such as my wife was, could neither remain where she lay nor proceed on her journey, under a hot sun, without being exposed to certain death.
Rather than that I should see her perish, and run the hazard of being suspected of having killed her myself, and being guilty of one of the five crimes which the Brahmans consider as the most heinous, he advised me to give her to him, and then he would mount her on one of his cattle and take her along with him. That I should be a loser, he admitted; but, all things considered, it was better to lose her, with the merit of having saved her life, than equally to lose her, under the suspicion of being her murderer. ”Her trinkets,” he said, ”may be worth fifteen paG.o.das; take these twenty and give me your wife.”
The merchant's arguments appeared unanswerable; so I yielded to them, and delivered to him my wife, whom he placed on one of his best oxen, and continued his journey without delay. I continued mine also, and got home in the evening, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, and with my feet almost roasted with the burning sand, over which I had walked the greater part of the day. Frightened to see me alone, ”Where is your wife?” cried my mother. I gave her a full account of everything that had happened from the time I left her. I spoke of the agreeable and courteous manner in which my father-in-law had received me, and how, by some delay, we had been overtaken by the scorching heat of the sun at noon, so that my wife must have perished and myself suspected of having caused her death, had we proceeded; and that I had preferred to sell her to a merchant who met us for twenty paG.o.das. And I showed my mother the money.
When I had done, my mother fell into an ecstasy of fury. She lifted up her voice against me with cries of rage, and overwhelmed me with imprecations and awful curses. Having given way to these first emotions of despair, she sank into a more moderate tone: ”What hast thou done!
Sold thy wife, hast thou! Delivered her to another man! A Brahmanari is become the concubine of a vile merchant! Ah, what will her kindred and ours say when they hear the tale of this brutish stupidity--of folly so unexampled and degrading?”
The relations of my wife were soon informed of the sad adventure that had befallen their unhappy girl. They came over to attack me, and would certainly have murdered me and my innocent mother, if we had not both made a sudden escape. Having no direct object to wreak their vengeance upon, they brought the matter before the chiefs of the caste, who unanimously fined me in two hundred paG.o.das, as a reparation to my father-in-law, and issued a proclamation against so great a fool being ever allowed to take another wife; denouncing the penalty of expulsion from the caste against any one who should a.s.sist me in such an attempt.
I was therefore condemned to remain a widower all my life, and to pay dear for my folly. Indeed, I should have been excluded for ever from my caste, but for the high consideration in which the memory of my late father is still held, he having lived respected by all the world.
Now that you have heard one specimen of the many follies of my life, I hope you will not consider me as beneath those who have spoken before me, nor my pretensions altogether undeserving of the salutation of the soldier.
_Conclusion_.
The heads of the a.s.sembly, several of whom were convulsed with laughter while the Brahmans were telling their stories, decided, after hearing them all, that each had given such absolute proofs of folly as to be ent.i.tled, in justice, to a superiority in his own way: that each of them, therefore, should be at liberty to call himself the greatest fool of all, and to attribute to himself the salutation of the soldier. Each of them having thus gained his suit, it was recommended to them all to continue their journey, if it were possible, in amity. The delighted Brahmans then rushed out of court, each exclaiming that he had gained his cause.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A Samaradanam is one of the public festivals given by pious people, and sometimes by those in power, to the Brahmans, who on such occasions a.s.semble in great numbers from all quarters.
[2] In a Sinhalese story, referred to on [”p. 68” in original. This approximates to the reference to Chapter III, Footnote 5 in this e-text], it is, curiously enough, the woman herself ”who has her head shaved, so as not to lose the services of the barber for the day when he came, and her husband was away from home.” The story probably was introduced into Ceylon by the Tamils; both versions are equally good as noodle-stories.
CHAPTER VII.
THE THREE GREAT NOODLES.
Few folk-tales are more widely diffused than that of the man who set out in quest of as great noodles as those of his own household. The details may be varied more or less, but the fundamental outline is identical, wherever the story is found; and, whether it be an instance of the transmission of popular tales from one country to another, or one of those ”primitive fictions” which are said to be the common heritage of the Aryans, its independent development by different nations and in different ages cannot be reasonably maintained.
Thus, in one Gaelic version of this diverting story--in which our old friends the Gothamites reappear on the scene to enact their unconscious drolleries--a lad marries a farmer's daughter, and one day while they are all busily engaged in peat-cutting, she is sent to the house to fetch the dinner. On entering the house, she perceives the speckled pony's packsaddle hanging from the roof, and says to herself, ”Oh, if that packsaddle were to fall and kill me, what should I do?” and here she began to cry, until her mother, wondering what could be detaining her, comes, when she tells the old woman the cause of her grief, whereupon the mother, in her turn, begins to cry, and when the old man next comes to see what is the matter with his wife and daughter, and is informed about the speckled pony's packsaddle, he, too, ”mingles his tears” with theirs. At last the young husband arrives, and finding the trio of noodles thus grieving at an imaginary misfortune, he there and then leaves them, declaring his purpose not to return until he has found three as great fools as themselves. In the course of his travels he meets with some strange folks: men whose wives make them believe whatever they please--one, that he is dead; another, that he is clothed, when he is stark naked; a third, that he is not himself. He meets with the twelve fishers who always miscounted their number; the noodles who went to drown an eel in the sea; and a man trying to get his cow on the roof of his house, in order that she might eat the gra.s.s growing there.
But the most wonderful incident was a man coming with a cow in a cart: and the people had found out that the man had stolen the cow, and that a court should be held upon him, and so they did; and the justice they did was to put the horse to death for carrying the cow.[1]
In another Gaelic version a young husband had provided his house with a cradle, in natural antic.i.p.ation that such an interesting piece of furniture would be required in due time. In this he was disappointed, but the cradle stood in the kitchen all the same. One day he chanced to throw something into the empty cradle, upon which his wife, his mother, and his wife's mother set up loud lamentations, exclaiming, ”Oh, if _he_ had been there, he had been killed!” alluding to a potential son. The man was so much shocked at such an exhibition of folly that he left the country in search of three greater noodles. Among other adventures, he goes into a house and plays tricks on some people there, telling them his name is ”_Saw ye ever my like_?” When the old man of the house comes home he finds his people tied upon tables, and asks, ”What's the reason of this?” ”Saw ye ever my like?” says the first. Then going to a second man, he asks, ”What's the reason of this?” ”Saw ye ever my like?” says the second. ”I saw thy like in the kitchen,” replies the old man, and then he goes to the third: ”What's the reason of this?”
”Saw ye ever my like?” says the third. ”I have seen plenty of thy like,”
quoth the old man; ”but never before this day,” and then he understood that some one had been playing tricks on his people.[2]
In Russian variants the old parents of a youth named Lutonya weep over the supposit.i.tious death of a potential grandchild, thinking how sad it would have been if a log which the old woman had dropped had killed that hypothetical infant. The parents' grief appears to Lutonya so uncalled for that he leaves the house, declaring he will not return until he has met with people more foolish than they. He travels long and far, and sees several foolish doings. In one place a horse is being inserted into its collar by sheer force; in another, a woman is fetching milk from the cellar a spoonful at a time; and in a third place some carpenters are attempting to stretch a beam which is not long enough, and Lutonya earns their grat.i.tude by showing them how to join a piece to it.[3]
A well-known English version is to this effect: There was a young man who courted a farmer's daughter, and one evening when he came to the house she was sent to the cellar for beer. Seeing an axe stuck in a beam above her head, she thought to herself, ”Suppose I were married and had a son, and he were to grow up, and be sent to this cellar for beer, and this axe were to fall and kill him--oh dear! oh dear!” and there she sat crying and crying, while the beer flowed all over the cellar-floor, until her old father and mother come in succession and blubber along with her about the hypothetical death of her imaginary grown-up son. The young man goes off in quest of three bigger fools, and sees a woman hoisting a cow on to the roof of her cottage to eat the gra.s.s that grew among the thatch, and to keep the animal from falling off, she ties a rope round its neck, then goes into the kitchen, secures at her waist the rope, which she had dropped down the chimney, and presently the cow stumbles over the roof, and the woman is pulled up the flue till she sticks half-way. In an inn he sees a man attempting to jump into his trousers--a favourite incident in this cla.s.s of stories; and farther along he meets with a party raking the moon out of a pond.
Another English variant relates that a young girl having been left alone in the house, her mother finds her in tears when she comes home, and asks the cause of her distress. ”Oh,” says the girl, ”while you were away, a brick fell down the chimney, and I thought, if it had fallen on me I might have been killed!” The only novel adventure which the girl's betrothed meets with, in his quest of three bigger fools, is an old woman trying to drag an oven with a rope to the table where the dough lay.
Several versions are current in Italy and Sicily, which present a close a.n.a.logy to those of other European countries. The following is a translation of one in Bernoni's Venetian collection:
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