When the emperor heard the uproar that followed the return of the beetle with the silver helmet, he sent for him. Silver Helmet refused to go to the emperor for the simple reason that his helmet was so high he couldn’t get inside the box that was the emperor’s palace. There was just room for ordinary beetles, without anything on their heads, to crawl into the box. Silver Helmet sent word to the emperor that if the emperor wanted to see him the emperor would have to come outside. This arrogant pronouncement awed the beetles who heard it and when Silver Helmet went on with a long rigmarole about how the helmet had been placed on his head by a goddess—a great and magnificent goddess, who was supremely lovely and benign—they began to believe that the brightly crowned beetle had been divinely ordained to seize the throne from the emperor and rule over them in his stead. Times weren’t any worse in the beetle empire than they were anywhere else at this particular epoch, but the beetles gradually talked themselves into believing that the old emperor was responsible for everything that hadn’t gone exactly right and that the beetle with the silver crown would bring an unheard-of peace and prosperity to the community. There were a few beetles who took no interest one way or the other, because they believed that the world was coming to an end anyway, but the great majority rallied around the silver-crowned beetle and declared him emperor. The dethroned emperor, warned of the revolt, fled just in time, with his wife and seventy-eight children. They escaped to another kingdom simply by crawling through a small hole in the fence, leading to the next yard. The new emperor took up his headquarters under a smaller box in the yard into which he could crawl, helmet and all, and ruled the beetles, in a rather so-so fashion, for several weeks, sitting around in the sun, taking no part in the gathering of food or in anything else, and elaborating on his story of the beautiful goddess who had given him the silver helmet. He asserted that he was immortal and that he was glorified and that he was immune from illness or injury and that the laws which applied to everybody else did not apply to him. The other beetles were deeply impressed and brought him the nicest bits of cereal and other delicacies that they found. He grew so fat that he could squeeze in and out of his palace only by a great effort and still keep his silver crown on.
One day a lady and a small child who lived in the house to which the yard belonged came out into the yard because it was a fine sunshiny day. The little girl, who was four years old, and known as the nastiest child in the neighborhood, saw the silver-crowned beetle and set up a cry. “Oh, Grace,” she cried (for she called her mother Grace), “look, there’s the bug I caught and put my thimble on!” She pointed at the emperor’s magic crown, which was, indeed, a tiny thimble that had been a birthday present to the little girl from her Aunt Clara, who lives in Bronxville. “Well, of all things,” said the child’s mother, and she started for the beetle. It ran and so did all the others, but whereas all the others escaped, the emperor was unable to find any hole or crevice large enough for him to get into hurriedly. The child’s mother killed him with an old broom, used for sweeping up trash, and recovered the thimble. “Now don’t you ever put it on a bug’s head again,” she said. “The idea! What would Aunt Clara think?”
After the mother and child had gone back into the house, the beetles crept cautiously out of their hiding places and looked, in awe, at the dead emperor. He looked like any dead beetle now. Then they sent a delegate into the next yard to ask the old emperor to return, which he did, with his wife and ninety-eight children, and the beetles all settled down to a drab and uneventful life. Of the many morals which attach to the story, the one I like best is something about never accepting a gift of radiance from a woman, of whatever age, for the moment of glory it gives cannot compensate for the disaster which must inevitably follow.
The Princess and the Tin Box
Illustrated by Blair Thornley
ONCE UPON A TIME, in a far country, there lived a king whose daughter was the prettiest princess in the world. Her eyes were like the cornflower, her hair was sweeter than the hyacinth, and her throat made the swan look dusty.
From the time she was a year old, the princess had been showered with presents. Her nursery looked like Cartier’s window. Her toys were all made of gold or platinum or diamonds or emeralds. She was not permitted to have wooden blocks or china dolls or rubber dogs or linen books, because such materials were considered cheap for the daughter of a king.
When she was seven, she was allowed to attend the wedding of her brother and throw real pearls at the bride instead of rice. Only the nightingale, with his lyre of gold, was permitted to sing for the princess. The common blackbird, with his boxwood flute, was kept out of the palace grounds. She walked in silver-and-samite slippers to a sapphire-and-topaz bathroom and slept in an ivory bed inlaid with rubies.
On the day the princess was eighteen, the king sent a royal ambassador to the courts of five neighboring kingdoms to announce that he would give his daughter’s hand in marriage to the prince who brought her the gift she liked the most.
The first prince to arrive at the palace rode a swift white stallion and laid at the feet of the princess an enormous apple made of solid gold which he had taken from a dragon who had guarded it for a thousand years. It was placed on a long ebony table set up to hold the gifts of the princess’s suitors.
The second prince, who came on a gray charger, brought her a nightingale made of a thousand diamonds, and it was placed beside the golden apple.
The third prince, riding on a black horse, carried a great jewel box made of platinum and sapphires, and it was placed next to the diamond nightingale.
The fourth prince, astride a fiery yellow horse, gave the princess a gigantic heart made of rubies and pierced by an emerald arrow. It was placed next to the platinum-and-sapphire jewel box.
Now the fifth prince was the strongest and handsomest of all the five suitors, but he was the son of a poor king whose realm had been overrun by mice and locusts and wizards and mining engineers so that there was nothing much of value left in it. He came plodding up to the palace of the princess on a plow horse and he brought her a small tin box filled with mica and feldspar and hornblende which he had picked up on the way.
The other princes roared with disdainful laughter when they saw the tawdry gift the fifth prince had brought to the princess. But she examined it with great interest and squealed with delight, for all her life she had never seen tin before or mica or feldspar or hornblende. The tin box was placed next to the ruby heart pierced with an emerald arrow.
“Now,” the king said to his daughter, “you must select the gift you like best and marry the prince that brought it.”
The princess smiled and walked up to the table and picked up the present she liked the most. It was the platinum-and-sapphire jewel box, the gift of the third prince.
“The way I figure it,” she said, “is this. It is a very large and expensive box, and when I am married, I will meet many admirers who will give me precious gems with which to fill it to the top. Therefore, it is the most valuable of all the gifts my suitors have brought me and I like it the best.”
The princess married the third prince that very day in the midst of great merriment and high revelry. More than a hundred thousand pearls were thrown at her, and she loved it.
MORAL: All those who thought the princess was going to select the tin box filled with worthless stones instead of one of the other gifts will kindly stay after class and write one hundred times on the blackboard “I would rather have a hunk of aluminum silicate than a diamond necklace.”
The Last Clock: A Fable for the Time, Such as It Is of Man
Illustrated by Calef Brown
IN A COUNTRY the other side of tomorrow, an ogre who had eaten a clock and had fallen into the habit of eating clocks was eating a clock in the clockroom of his castle when his ogress and their ilk knocked down the locked door and shook their hairy heads at him.
“Wulsa malla?” gurgled the ogre, for too much clock oil had turned all his “t”s to “l”s.
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br /> “Just look at this room!” exclaimed the ogress, and they all looked at the room, the ogre with eyes as fogged as the headlights of an ancient limousine. The stone floor of the room was littered with fragments of dials, oily coils and springs, broken clock hands, and pieces of pendulums. “I’ve brought a doctor to look at you,” the ogress said.
The doctor wore a black beard, carried a black bag, and gave the ogre a black look. “This case is clearly not in my area,” he said.
The ogre struck three, and the doctor flushed.
“This is a case for a clockman,” the doctor said, “for the problem is not what clocks have done to the ogre but what the ogre has done to clocks.”
“Wulsa malla?” the ogre gurgled again.
“Eating clocks has turned all his ‘t’s to ‘l’s,” the ogress said. “That’s what clocks have done to him.”
“Then your clockman may have to call in consultation a semanticist or a dictionist or an etymologist or a syntaxman,” the non-clock doctor said, and he bowed stiffly and left the room.
The next morning, the ogress brought into the clockroom a beardless man with a box of tools under his arm. “I’ve brought a clockman to see you,” she told the ogre.
“No, no, no,” said the beardless man with a box of tools under his arm. “I’m not a clockman. I thought you said clogman. I’m a clogman. I cannot ethically depart from my area, which is clogged drains and gutters. I get mice out of pipes, and bugs out of tubes, and moles out of tiles, and there my area ends.” The clogman bowed and went away.
“Wuld wuzzle?” the ogre wanted to know. He hiccuped, and something went spong! “That was an area man, but the wrong area,” the ogress explained. “I’ll get a general practitioner.” And she went away and came back with a general practitioner.
“This is a waste of time,” he said. “As a general practitioner, modern style, I treat only generals. This patient is not even a private. He sounds to me like a public place—a clock tower, perhaps, or a belfry.”
“What should I do?” asked the ogress. “Send for a tower man, or a belfry man?”
“I shall not venture an opinion,” said the general practitioner. “I am a specialist in generals, one of whom has just lost command of his army and of all his faculties, and doesn’t know what time it is. Good day.” And the general practitioner went away.
The ogre cracked a small clock, as if it were a large walnut, and began eating it. “Wulsy wul?” the ogre asked.
The ogress, who could now talk clocktalk fluently, even oilily, but wouldn’t, left the room to look up specialists in an enormous volume entitled Who’s Who in Areas. She soon became lost in a list of titles: clockmaker, clocksmith, clock-wright, clockmonger, clockician, clockometrist, clockologist, and a hundred others dealing with clockness, clockism, clockship, clockdom, clockation, clockition, and clockhood.
The ogress decided to call on an old inspirationalist who had once advised her father not to worry about a giant he was worrying about. The inspirationalist had said to the ogress’s father, “Don’t pay any attention to it, and it will go away.” And the ogress’s father had paid no attention to it, and it had gone away, taking him with it, and this had pleased the ogress. The inspirationalist was now a very old man whose inspirationalism had become a jumble of mumble. “The final experience should not be mummum,” he mumbled.
The ogress said, “But what is mummum?”
“Mummum,” said the inspirationalist, “is what the final experience should not be.” And he mumbled to a couch, lay down upon it, and fell asleep.
As the days went on, the ogre ate all the clocks in the town—mantel clocks, grandfather clocks, traveling clocks, stationary clocks, alarm clocks, eight-day clocks, steeple clocks, and tower clocks—sprinkling them with watches, as if the watches were salt and pepper, until there were no more watches. People overslept, and failed to go to work, or to church, or anyplace else where they had to be on time. Factories closed down, shopkeepers shut up their shops, schools did not open, trains no longer ran, and people stayed at home. The town council held an emergency meeting and its members arrived at all hours, and some did not show up at all.
A psychronologist was called to the witness stand to testify as to what should be done. “This would appear to be a clear case of clock-eating, but we should not jump easily to conclusions,” he said. “We have no scientific data whatever on clock-eating, and hence no controlled observation. All things, as we know, are impossible in this most impossible of all impossible worlds. That being the case, no such thing as we think has happened could have happened. Thus the situation does not fall within the frame of my discipline. Good day, gentlemen.” The psychronologist glanced at where his wristwatch should have been and, not finding it there, was disturbed. “I have less than no time at all,” he said, “which means that I am late for my next appointment.” And he hurriedly left the council room.
The Lord Mayor of the town, arriving late to preside over the council meeting, called a clockonomist to the stand. “What we have here,” said the clockonomist, “appears on the surface to be a clockonomic crisis. It is the direct opposite of what is known, in my field, as a glut of clocks. That is, instead of there being more clocks than the consumer needs, so that the price of clocks would decrease, the consumer has consumed all the clocks. This should send up the cost of clocks sharply, but we are faced with the unique fact that there are no clocks. Now, as a clockonomist, my concern is the economy of clocks, but where there are no clocks there can be no such economy. The area, in short, has disappeared.”
“What do you suggest, then?” demanded the Lord Mayor.
“I suggest,” said the clockonomist, “that it is now high time I go into some other line of endeavor, or transfer my clockonomy to a town which has clocks. Good day, gentlemen.” And the clockonomist left the council room. A clockosopher next took the witness stand. “If it is high time,” he said, “then there is still time. The question is: How high is high time? It means, if it means anything, which I doubt, that it is time to act. I am not an actor, gentlemen, but a clockosopher, whose osophy is based upon clocks, not necessarily upon their physical existence, but upon clocks as a concept. We still have clocks as a concept, but this meeting is concerned chiefly with clocks as objects. Thus its deliberations fall well outside my range of interest, and I am simply wasting time here, or would be if there were time to waste. Good day, gentlemen.” And the clockosopher left the council room.
The clockmakers of the town, who had been subpoenaed, were then enjoined, in a body, from making more clocks. “You have been supplying the ogre with clocks,” the Lord Mayor said severely, “whether intentionally or willy-nilly is irrelevant. You have been working hand in glove, or clock in hand, with the ogre.” The clockmakers left, to look for other work.
“I should like to solve this case,” the Lord Mayor said, “but, as a container of clocks, he would have to be exported, not deported. Unfortunately, the law is clear on this point: clocks may not be exported in any save regulation containers, and the human body falls outside that legal definition.”
Three weeks to the day after the ogre had eaten the last clock, he fell ill and took to his bed, and the ogress sent for the chief diagnostician of the Medical Academy, a diagnostician familiar with so many areas that totality itself had become to him only a part of wholeness. “The trouble is,” said the chief diagnostician, “we don’t know what the trouble is. Nobody has ever eaten all the clocks before, so it is impossible to tell whether the patient has clockitis, clockosis, clockoma, or clocktheria. We are also faced with the possibility that there may be no such diseases. The patient may have one of the minor clock ailments, if there are any, such as clockets, clockles, clocking cough, ticking pox, or clumps. We shall have to develop area men who will find out about such areas, if such areas exist, which, until we find out that they do, we must assume do not.”
“What if he dies?” demanded the ogress eagerly.
“Then,” said the chief di
agnostician, “we shall bury him.” And the chief diagnostician left the ogre’s room and the castle.
The case of the town’s clocklessness was carried to the Supreme Council, presided over by the Supreme Magistrate. “Who is prosecuting whom?” the Supreme Magistrate demanded. The Supreme Prosecutor stood up. “Let somebody say something, and I will object,” he said. “We have to start somewhere, even if we start nowhere.”
A housewife took the witness stand. “Without a clock,” she said, “I cannot even boil a three-minute egg.”
“Objection,” said the Supreme Prosecutor. “One does not have to boil a three-minute egg. A three-minute egg, by definition, has already been boiled for three minutes, or it wouldn’t be a three-minute egg.”
“Objection sustained,” droned the Supreme Magistrate.
The Leader of the Opposition then took the stand. “The party in power has caused the mess in the ogre’s castle,” he said.
“Objection,” said the Supreme Prosecutor. “There isn’t any party in power. The ogre was the party in power, but he no longer has any power. Furthermore, the mess caused by the party cleaning up the mess caused by the party in power, which is no longer in power, would be worse than the mess left by the party that was in power.”
“Objection sustained,” droned the Supreme Magistrate.
The Secretary of Status Quo was the next man to take the stand. “We are not getting anywhere,” he said, “and therefore we should call a summit conference without agenda. A summit conference without agenda is destined to get even less than nowhere, but its deliberations will impress those who are impressed by deliberations that get less than nowhere. This has unworked in the past, and it will unwork now. If we get less than nowhere fast enough, we shall more than hold our own, for everything is circular and cyclical, and where there are no clocks, clockwise and counterclockwise are the same.”
Collected Fables Page 13
