The Princess Pourquoi (collection)/The Princess Pourquoi
THE PRINCESS POURQUOI
THE
PRINCESS POURQUOI
Once upon a time, in a country very far away, a new princess was born. As is usual in such cases, the King, her father, and the Queen, her mother, held a great christening feast, to which were invited all the crowned heads for miles around, all the nobility of their own kingdom, and the fairies whose good wishes were considered desirable. In the middle of the ceremony, as is also customary, a very angry little old lady, with a nose like a beak, burst into the room.
"May I ask why I was not invited?" she demanded. "These are here," and she pointed to the fairy who rules the hearts of men, and to the fairy who rules circumstance. She herself was the fairy who rules men's minds.
"You!" stammered his Majesty. "Why, it is only a girl. We—we thought you would be offended. Later, if a son should be born"—
"You thought!" shrieked the enraged little creature, gathering her shoulder-shawl about her. "You thought nothing whatever about it. I am insulted, and I shall be revenged. Before anything yet has been given to this child I shall curse her"—
"Oh!" begged the crowned heads and the nobility.
"Yes," said the fairy, stamping and growing angrier, "I shall curse her with a mind."
"Anything but that," groaned, his Majesty.
"Not that for a woman-child," moaned the mother, from under her silken coverlid.
"Yes," said the fairy, and her wicked black eyes snapped over her withered red cheeks. "She is a woman-child, and yet she shall think. She shall be alien to her own sex, and undesired by the other. She shall ask and it will not be given her. She shall achieve and it shall count her for naught. Men shall point the finger at her like this" (and she pointed one skinny forefinger at the King), "and shall whisper, 'There goes the woman with brains, poor thing!' As for your Majesty, in her shall you find your punishment. She shall think what you do not know, and divine what you cannot find out. Now," added the wicked fairy, turning to the two godmothers who stood by the child's cradle, "see if you, with all your giving, can do anything to lessen the curse that I have spoken," and she rushed away like a whirlwind, leaving every face dismayed.
The fairy who rules circumstance stood by the cradle and spoke. Her face was the face of one who wavers two ways, and her voice was unsure.
"The child shall have fortune," she said, "good-fortune, so far as is consistent with what has already been given. I wish," she added apologetically, "that I had spoken first."
"Why did n't you?" grumbled his Majesty under his whiskers, but he dared not speak aloud, for he was afraid of circumstance, being a king.
The other fairy stood silent, looking down into the child's face.
"But she shall know love," she said softly, after a little time. The sleeping princess smiled.
From the time that it was spoken the curse was felt. Before the baby could talk, she would lie in the royal cradle, fixing upon the King, her father, and the Queen, her mother, when they came to see her, eyes so big, so wise, so full of question, that his Majesty fled, and her Majesty covered her face with her hands, wondering what it could be that the child remembered and she forgot. The first word the Princess uttered was "Why." She said it so often that presently, through the whole length and breadth of the kingdom, she was known as the "Princess Pourquoi," though her real name was Josefa Maria Alexandra Renée Naftaline.
"Why," she asked, when she was very small, "did trees grow this way, instead of the other end up? Why did people stand on their feet instead of on their heads? Why did you like some people better than others, and why could n't it be just as easy to like them all alike?"
She was a good little girl, but she had all the credit of being a bad one. She saw through what she was not intended to see through; she heard what she was not meant to hear; she understood what others wished to keep hidden. Therefore it came to pass that she was very lonely. She had a way of climbing affectionately up to the neck of some favored person, drawing down the head for a loving embrace, and then asking some terrible question, whereupon she was quickly put down on the floor and left alone. There she would sit, with so grieved a look in her big blue eyes that the next one who entered would pity the golden-haired baby, and would take her up, only to become a victim to some other unanswerable inquiry. When she was four and five, her questions were theological or philosophical.
"Why was she made at all, if she were as naughty as people said? Would n't it have been less trouble not to have made her, or to have made her good? Why were you you, and I I? Who was going to bury the last man?" The king's philosophers stood about in silence and gnawed their beards. They were terribly afraid of the little girl with chubby legs and dimples. As she grew older, her questioning turned more toward social matters and practical affairs. "Why," she asked his Majesty, her father, who also was afraid of her, "did he say that he loved his neighbor and yet make war? Why was he king? Was it because he was wiser and better than other people?" She looked at him so long and so doubtfully that his Majesty wriggled in the royal chair. He felt that this wretched child was endangering his power. Sometimes he was so miserable that he would willingly have abdicated, but he could not abdicate his little daughter. Besides, he was a king, and he did not have any place to go. Other children had been granted him, a line of little princesses, who wore long, stiff embroidered robes; and a nice, fat, stupid little prince, who was a great comfort to his father. All these other princelets obeyed the court etiquette and wore the court clothes, and never felt the ripple of an idea across their little minds, but they could not atone to the King for the thorn in his flesh known as Josefa Maria Alexandra Renée Naftaline.
The Princess Pourquoi objected to wearing a stomacher, for she liked to lie flat on her face in the park, watching the ants. She objected to making the court bow, and smiling the court smile, and putting out her hand to be kissed. Why should she? The ladies-in-waiting could only tell her, "It was so." She objected to taking mincing walks in the royal gardens among the peacocks, and sometimes, to the horror of all the court, escaped and played games with peasant children outside. She disliked her lessons. Why should she say, like a parrot, what her governess told her to, when there were birds and beasts and creeping things outside to study, and a library inside full of things really worth learning? So she went her own way, growing wistful and more lonely, and every day her big eyes grew wiser and fuller of secrets. Those who saw her crossed themselves and murmured, "The Curse!"
Once his Majesty held a great festival to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the founding of his kingdom by his imperial ancestor, Multus Pulvius Questus, who had conquered 500,000 men with his own arm, and had laid the cornerstone of a great principality. The festival was a brilliant one, and all the royal neighbors came. Just before the ceremonies began, in the large audience chamber, the governess of the Princess Pourquoi, stung by questions she could not answer regarding the achievements of Multus Pulvius, burst out with:
"You are a naughty little girl, and if you act this way, the fairy prince will never come."
"I don't want a fairy prince," replied the Princess proudly, looking at her governess with steady blue eyes. "I want a real one."
A little prince standing near, in a red velvet suit, looked at her very hard.
As time went on, the Princess Pourquoi was not quite content. She was too eager for that.
"I shall be happy when I find out," she said sadly one day.
"Find out what, your Highness?" asked the chief philosopher.
"It," answered the girl, and she pointed toward the horizon. "What it means, where we came from, what you are for and I am for."
The chief philosopher took a golden goblet of wine that a page had brought him and drank it to its dregs. Perhaps he meant this for an answer. Then he winked at his fellow-philosopher, and the two went arm in arm down a long path between box hedges in the garden. The Princess entered the royal palace and knelt at the feet of the King.
"Your Majesty," she asked, "why are people who do not know anything called wise men and philosophers?"
It was soon after this that the King made a great proclamation, offering the hand of his daughter to any one who would answer one of her questions satisfactorily. Suitors came by scores, although her unfortunate propensity was known, for the Princess was growing to be very beautiful, and his Majesty the King was very rich. The aspirant to her hand usually stood before the royal throne in the presence of the court, and the Princess was ushered in by the major domo. The Princess Pourquoi did not trouble herself to find new questions; she only asked some of the old ones over again, and the Crown Prince of Kleptomania, the Heir Apparent to the throne of Rumfelt Holstein, the reigning King of Nemosapientia, besides dozens of others, went sorrowfully back to their homes, rejected. When it was found that the ordeal was terrible, and the result always the same, the suitors gradually ceased coming, and the Princess Pourquoi remained a great matrimonial problem, aged fifteen, on the hands of her parents.
It was at this time that the Princess resolved to study, and to achieve something that was really her own. People should respect her, not because she was a princess, but because she could do great things. She pleaded with his Majesty until he ordered the greatest scholar in his kingdom to act as tutor for her, the greatest sculptor to teach her modeling, the greatest painter to teach her how to draw. For five long years the Princess worked and was happy, but the eyes of her mother were full of pity when they rested on her, and the passers-by in the streets whispered, "Poor thing!" Mothers drew their little ones closer to them when they saw her, and said: "Take care! It is the woman with a mind!" And the young ladies of the court, when they came out into the park with their long trains, and saw the Princess seated by herself with a book under a tree, said to themselves, under their breath: "Like that, too, but for the grace of God!"
At one of the annual exhibitions of works of art in the city was a statue, anonymously exhibited, that won great praise. It was of white marble, and represented a woman standing on tiptoe and reaching up and out with one hand. The fingers closed on nothing, and the look of the face was disappointed. Perhaps the greatest skill was shown in the rendering of the eyes. Their expression was baffling, and no one could say whether the woman was blind or not.
"What masculine strength of handling!" said the artists.
"What wonderful inner meaning!" said the philosophers.
The Princess Pourquoi came one day to visit it, and stood a long time watching the people who saw it. The outspoken praise made her eyes glisten. A workingman, in a peasant's blue blouse, strolled near. There was fine powder of chipped stone upon his sleeve.
"There is great power there," said the workingman, "but the work is crude."
The peasant was hustled out of the room, and an admiring crowd gathered about the statue of the groping woman. Some one whispered that it was not a man's work at all, but the work of a woman. Surprise, incredulity, disapproval passed in waves over the faces of the crowd. The rumor was established as a fact, though the woman's name was withheld. Every one could see faults now.
"We suspected it from the first," said the philosophers. "The lack of virility is apparent."
"You can see the woman's carelessness in regard to details in every fold of the drapery!" said the artists.
The Princess Pourquoi listened. Presently she faced the crowd.
"It is my work," she said simply. Then she summoned her lackeys and ordered her carriage, and disappeared before artists or philosophers could find any knot-holes to crawl through.
Their Majesties, the royal parents, were greatly pleased when they heard of this scene. Perhaps this condemnation of her statue would bring their daughter to her senses.
It was very fortunate that just at this time there came rumors of the advent of the Fairy Prince. From Bobitania, a kingdom leagues away, he was reported to be approaching, presumably to woo the Princess Pourquoi. The King and the Queen chuckled in secret together the day a messenger arrived to announce the advent of his Royal Highness, Prince Ludwig Jerome Victor Christian Ernst, Heir-Apparent to the throne of Bobitania. This was a very great principality, indeed. Surely the Princess would for once act like other people, and would, for the sake of all that was to be gained, profess herself satisfied in regard to her questions.
The royal household was ordered into its very best clothing. The King and the Queen, the Prince and the Princesses, shimmered in velvet and jewels. The pages were resplendent in yellow and silver. The philosophers were profound in rich black. The woolly white dogs of the ladies-in-waiting were combed and tied with the colors of Bobitania, crimson and black. Everywhere, in jewels, in flower devices, among the hangings on the wall, were displayed the arms of Bobitania, a crimson star on a dusky background.
After the ceremonies of greeting were over, when Prince Ludwig Jerome Victor had bent before the King and the Queen on their throne, and had had presented to him all the royal offspring, the Princess Pourquoi was requested to show his Highness the garden of flowers, that his eyes might be refreshed after his long journey. So side by side they walked, talking 
SIDE BY SIDE THEY WALKED TOGETHER
As they paced the garden, the peacocks retreated slowly, a statelier procession than they. They passed a fountain where a single workman was busy sculpturing a figure from a block of gray granite. His face was shaded by a cap, but the splendid action of strong arms and muscular shoulders was visible. The Princess paused, and the waiting-women turned, pretending to be busy with the box of the hedges or the pink-tipped daisies at their feet. The face of Prince Ludwig Jerome Victor grew uneasy, for he felt that the hour for his questioning had come. But the Princess was not thinking of him, for her eyes were following the workman's fingers.
"Why blue jean for one man's arm and velvet with pearls for another?" she said half to herself. "Why hunger for that man, and for me surfeit?"
"Most gracious Princess," answered Prince Ludwig Jerome Victor, secure in his reply, "the earth with all upon it is glad to lie as dirt beneath the feet of the most beautiful lady in the world."
He fell upon one knee and kissed her hand. She looked down intently into his narrow, upraised face.
"Queen among princesses," he begged, "question me and accept my answer. From far Bobitania I have come to woo, and if I fail, I die. What is the question I must answer?"
"You have answered," said the Princess. "Rise."
The hand of the workman had paused, uplifted, with a sculptor's hammer in its grasp. There was a queer little smile upon his face below the shadow of the cap. The waiting-women paced in silence behind the Princess back to the presence of the King.
"Most august Sovereign," said the Prince, bending his knee in the royal presence, "I have come to place my kingdom at your daughter's feet. Deign to ask her if I have found favor in her eyes."
"What say you, my daughter?" asked the King, his delight shining through his face.
"Is it not a noble prince and a fair offer?"
"My Lord and Father," said the Princess Pourquoi, bending in courtesy, then standing erect, more haughty than before, "it is no prince, but a man with a lackey's soul. He may come to reign, but a king he can never be. As for my hand, he may not again touch it. I go to make it clean."
Then she turned and walked, in a great silence, between the parted lines of frightened people, out of the audience-chamber and away.
How Prince Ludwig Jerome Victor Christian Ernst went away in great anger, how the royal apologies were presented in vain, how the Princess Pourquoi was imprisoned for three days in her chamber with no books to read and was held in deep disgrace by all the court, is a long story, and one that would take much time to tell. But the Princess only smiled serenely, presented her duty to her parents, saying that she was deeply grieved if her necessary words had hurt them, and, the first day she was free, went walking in the royal garden alone.
The artisan was there at the fountain, working at the same stone figure. The Princess stood in silence and watched him. At her approach he had taken off his cap and had laid it on the grass. Yellow autumn leaves fell on his blue blouse and on her crimson velvet robe.
"Do you like to work?" asked the Princess Pourquoi timidly.
A look of amusement crept into the man's keen, dark eyes, and his lips quivered with a suppressed smile.
"Yes, your Highness," he answered, making an inclination of his head. And he went on working.
"Why?" asked the Princess Pourquoi.
"Gracious Lady and Princess," replied the artisan, "I do not know."
The Princess stared at his deft fingers and the quivering muscles of his arms. Then she strolled away to pick a late white rose, and presently wandered back, as if forgetful where her feet were going.
"I have seen you before," she remarked absent-mindedly.
He bent again, and murmured something respectful that she could not hear. The chance given him to continue the subject he did not improve.
"Once," continued the Princess, "in a hovel among other hovels at the foot of the hill. Through the open door of the sick-room where I stood, I saw you sitting at a poor man's table, sharing his black bread and muddy ale. Why were you there?"
"He was my friend," said the artisan. "His hut was then my home."
"Why do you wear a workingman's blouse and carve in stone?" demanded the Princess abruptly.
"Madame and Princess," replied the man, "it is the work that I have chosen," and he went on chipping away fine flakes of stone.
The lady walked away again, this time following a wayward peacock across the grass. The workingman paused to look after her, with the sunshine falling on her brown hair. Then he picked up a chisel that he had dropped, and, in doing so, bent to kiss the grass where her feet had rested, for she had trodden very close.
When the Princess came back the next time, she spoke with the quiet air of one who is greeting an old friend.
"You criticised my statue," she remarked. "You called it crude."
"Whoever reported my poor opinion to the Princess," said the man, "had evidently heard but part of what I said."
The Princess showed no curiosity as to the rest.
"Why were the others so unjust?" she demanded. "They praised my work when they thought it was a man's. They turned upon it and called it bad when they knew a girl had done it, and did not yet know that it was a princess. What can one do when it is all so unfair?"
The artisan answered not a word, but went on chipping, chipping, bending all his energy to the curve of a finger. The Princess watched with eyes in which all the blue of the autumn sky and all the shining of the autumn sun seemed centred. When the young man at length looked at her, her head was thrown back, and her face wore the look of one who feels her blood to be royal.
"Do you know," she asked sternly, though the expression of her eyes was of one who pleads, "what fate is reserved for the man who answers even one of my questions satisfactorily."
"Gracious Lady and Princess," he said humbly, "I have answered nothing, for I did not know. My mind, too, has questioned ceaselessly into the injustice of many things. I only"—
"You only," said the Princess, with a sweep of her hand,—"you only kept on working! Come!"
Refusing to walk at her side, he followed at a little distance, stepping unsurely, as one would walk in a dream. The lackeys looked at him and sneered as he went. His Majesty the King and her Majesty the Queen looked down in impatience from the throne when they saw the Princess Pourquoi leading in a peasant clad in blue jean.
"Some injury to redress!" muttered his Majesty. "Always a new grievance! I never have time to sleep or think."
The Princess swept across the audience-chamber with the air of one whom nature, not circumstance alone, had made a queen. She bent before her royal parents, then laid her hand upon that of the artisan.
"Your Majesties will remember," she said, "the decree made regarding me when I was fifteen years old. This man alone has answered one question of mine to my satisfaction. I come to beg"—and her face wore a frightened look, yet shone with a sudden gleam of mischief—"I come to beg that he incur the penalty."
Her Majesty fainted and was carried from the room. His Majesty turned purple, and the calves of his legs swelled with rage. The ladies-in-waiting hid their faces behind their hands and whispered, "Shameless!" The philosophers shook their heads and muttered, "The Curse!" As soon as the King could find his voice he thundered: "Away with him to the donjon keep! Let the executioner come and do his duty! Cut off the head of the impostor who would steal my daughter's hand!"
"He is no impostor," said the Princess scornfully. "Whatever his birth may be, his soul is royal."
The men-at-arms came forward to seize him, but the Princess flung herself between him and them. He put her gently aside, and stepped forward to defy them all, but his eyes rested all the while on her with a look that made great throbbings in her wrists. The clash of arms in the chamber was interrupted by the sound of commotion outside. Shouts of "Make way!" were heard. Then there were cries of: "A messenger, a messenger from his Grace of Bobitania!" Free way was left in the crowded hall for a man in a travel-stained riding-costume, who entered and hurried toward the throne.
"May it please your Grace," he panted, "his Majesty the King of Bobitania desires to make known that the Heir-Apparent to the throne, who disappeared many weeks ago, has not been discovered. News has just reached Bobitania that his valet, who stole much of the Prince's clothing after his disappearance, has been here representing himself to be the Prince. Let it therefore be known that the person who of late called himself Prince Ludwig Jerome Victor Christian Ernst of Bobitania is an impostor, being the son of a liberated serf, and the grandson of a swineherd."
The nobles, the ladies-in-waiting, the philosophers crowded about the messenger. While he was explaining that Prince Ludwig Jerome Victor was eccentric, though deeply loved by every man, woman, and child in Bobitania; how he had insisted on learning a trade; how he had often disappeared for a time, living in disguise among his poorest subjects—the Princess was looking at the stone-cutter's face and smiling. She forbore to cast one glance of triumph upon the King.
The messenger took his leave of his Majesty and turned to go. Suddenly he fell upon his knees and kissed the hand of the peasant.
"My Lord the Prince!" he cried. And the vaulted ceiling gave back the cry, for all the people in waiting took it up and shouted for the Prince who wore blue jean.
"Why did you do it?" asked the Princess Pourquoi, two hours later, when she stood in the garden with her betrothed, the real Ludwig Jerome Victor Christian Ernst, Heir-Apparent to the throne of Bobitania.
"Gracious Lady and Princess," he answered, laughing, "I wanted to be real."
Then he told her how, many years ago, he, a tiny princeling, had heard a naughty little princess, in that very audience-chamber, demanding, not a fairy prince, but a real one.
"I took the only way I knew to become real," he said. "Have I found favor in your eyes, O beloved of my heart?"
"How long beloved?" asked the Princess anxiously, for she was much ashamed of the way in which she had wooed him.
"All my life long," he answered. And the peacocks never told how he kissed her.
His Majesty the King and her Majesty the Queen were delighted with the match. The royal father spent hours in telling the young Prince how great a delight his daughter's mind had always been to him, and how he should miss companionship with her when she was far away in Bobitania. All the court agreed with their Highnesses that they had had suspicions of the valet-prince from the very first, and the lackeys mentioned to the Princess the fact that from the first they had suspected the stone-cutter to be something more than appeared on the outside. The Princess Pourquoi became very popular up and down the length and breadth of the kingdom, and the philosophers, as they sipped their wine in the afternoon sunshine, said over and over what a wonderful child she had been, and how they had always prophesied a great destiny for her.
So there was a great wedding, the preparations for which shook Christendom to its foundations. All the crowned heads that were known were there. Barbaric kings from beyond Bobitania graced the ceremony in gorgeous embroidered robes sewn with diamonds and rubies and pearls. No colors that are known could paint the procession with its rainbow tints of banners and of clothing. Man has not senses enough to take in a description of the food that was provided. Peacocks' brains, served in golden dishes, were the simplest viands there.
The Princess Pourquoi was attired in white velvet, with a train eleven feet and six inches long; her lord and master glowed like a tropical bird in scarlet, and Christendom exclaimed that there had never been so beautiful a pair. While the trumpets were blowing and the dishes were rattling, and the after-dinner speeches of the philosophers were reaching their most blatant point, Prince Victor was quietly telling his bride that he had no intention of giving up his occupation of stone-cutter, and none of sitting upon his father's throne unless requested to by all the inhabitants of Bobitania. They talked in snatched whispers about the drawing-schools they would establish for the poor, and the model cottages that should be built from end to end of Bobitania, and they made great plans for the Princess's further work in sculpture. What else they said in sweet whispers, I shall not tell, for it was no one's affair but their own.
The most magnificent guest of all was the fairy godmother who had cursed the bride in her cradle. This wicked person was attired in black samite, made with incredible puffs and a train. She had a stomacher picked out with jet, and wore a very stiff ruff underneath her hooked chin. Her general expression was very fierce, but once she was heard to murmur, hiding a pleased smile behind her bony hand:—
"A pretty age of the world, when not even the curse of a mind can harm a woman!"