STORIES. Our town takes pride in the practical and useful arts. We are well known for our door panels and brass hinges, our stove tiles and weather vanes, our tomb effigies and stone crucifixes, whereas our literature rarely rises above the level of doggerel verses, carnival plays, and dull philosophical poems in monotonous meters and rigid rhymes. Our imagination is far better expressed in the famous work of our metal masters, above all in the brilliant productions of our church-bell casters, our bladesmiths, our makers of spice mills, astrolabes, and articulated figures for clocks. And yet it would be a mistake to think of us as entirely deficient in the art of the word. Although we are practical citizens, who keep our accounts strictly and go to bed early, we have all listened to tales in the nursery, tales that are never written down but may appear suddenly in distorted or fragmentary form in a song heard in a tavern or at a carnival play; and foremost among these stories of our childhood are tales of the castle. The same tales are told by minstrels in the courtyards of inns, and sung by peasants in the fields and villages of our territorial domain. In another form the tales show themselves in the early parts of our chronicles, where legend and fact are interwoven, and many episodes have been joined together by unknown hands and written down on sheets of parchment, which are bound in ivory and metal on wood, purchased by wealthy merchants, and read by their wives. Such stories, reaching far down into the deepest past of our town, attach themselves likewise to the castle of the present day, so that the actual dwellers in the castle come to seem nothing but passing actors asked to perform the changeless gestures of an eternal play. Thus it comes about that, although we are practical and commercial by nature, we too have our stories.
THE SUMMONS. One morning after a night of shattering dreams the Prince summoned his dwarf to a private chamber and informed the little man that he desired a service of him. Scarbo bowed, noting once again the signs of change in his master and saying that he desired only to be of service to his Prince. With a show of impatience the Prince said that of late he had been preoccupied with pressing affairs, that he feared the Princess was too much alone, and that he desired his dwarf to spend more time in her company, attending to her needs, listening to her thoughts, and serving her in every way; and he further desired that he should report to the Prince each morning, concerning the state of her happiness. The dwarf understood instantly that he was being asked to spy on the Princess. His pride thrilled at the gravity of the mission, for the Prince was in effect conspiring with his dwarf against his own wife, but Scarbo recognized a danger: the Prince, while desiring evidence against the Princess, would not necessarily welcome the proof he sought, nor be grateful to his spy for easing his way into his wife’s confidence and ferreting out her secrets. It would not do to be overzealous in the performance of his duty. Wariness was all.
ON VAGUENESS AND PRECISION. It is precisely because of our ignorance that we see across the river with such precision. We know the precise carvings on the capital of each stone pillar and the precise history of each souclass="underline" they are transparent to our understanding. On our side of the river, even the most familiar lanes bear surprises around well-known bends; we see only a certain distance into the hearts of our wives and friends, before darkness and uncertainty begin. Perhaps, after all, this is the lure of legend: not the dreamy twilight of the luxuriating fancy, in love with all that is misty and half-glimpsed, but the sharp clarity forbidden by our elusive lives.
A WALK IN THE GARDEN. One sunny afternoon the Princess, who had been walking in the courtyard, dismissed her ladies-in-waiting at the garden gate and entered her garden alone. The walls were higher than her head; paths of checkered stone ran between beds of white, red, and yellow flowers; at one end stood a small orchard of pear, apple, quince, and plum trees. In the center of the garden, surrounded by a tall hedge with a wicker gate, stood the Princess’s bower, shaped like a pavilion and composed of trelliswork covered with vines. The Princess, in her azure tunic and her heart-shaped headdress, walked with bowed head among the fruit trees of the orchard, raising her eyes at the slightest noise and looking swiftly about. After a time she began to walk along the paths of checkered stone between the flower beds, passing two turf-covered benches, an octagon of white and red roses, and a white jasper three-tiered fountain with a column surmounted by a unicorn. At the central hedge she hesitated and seemed to listen; then she pushed open the gate and entered, bending low under a trellised arch. In the green shade of her bower sat two couches covered in crimson silk. Scarbo, seated in the corner of a couch, at once stood up and bowed. The Princess sat down stiffly on the couch opposite and stared as if harshly at the dwarf, who met her gaze and did not turn his eyes aside. “I cannot do what you propose,” she began, in a toneless voice. The dwarf, rigid with attention, listened patiently. He was well pleased with his progress.
A LACK OF SOMETHING. Although ours is a flourishing town — and we flourish, according to some, precisely to the extent that the inhabitants of the castle have declined in power and serve a largely symbolic or representative function — we nevertheless feel a lack of something. Our metal artisans are admired far and wide, our sturdy houses with their steep gables and oak window frames fill the eye with delight, beyond the walls our fields and vineyards overflow with ripeness. Our church steeples rise proudly into the sky, and toll out the hours on great bells cast by masters. In fact, it is not too much to say that our lives pass in a harmony and tranquility that are the envy and admiration of the region. Nor is ours a dull tranquility, stifling all that is joyful or dark; for not only are we engaged in vigorous lives, but we are human beings like all human beings, we know the joys and sorrows that come to human hearts. And yet it remains true that, now and then, we feel a lack of something. We do not know what it is, this thing that we lack. We know only that on certain summer afternoons, when the too-blue sky stretches on and on, or in warm twilights when the blackbird cries from the hill, a restlessness comes over us, an inner dissatisfaction. Like children we grow suddenly angry for no reason, we want something. Then we turn to the castle, high on the other shore, and all at once we feel a savage quickening. With a kind of violence our hearts exult. For across the sun-sparkling river, there on the far shore, we feel a heightened sense of things, and we dare for a moment to cry out our forbidden desire: for exaltation, for devastation, for revelation.