“Butch? Is that you?” It was a rhetorical question, for who else could it be? “What hit me?”
“The P,” said Butch in shorthand.
“The P?”
“You really are blind!” said Eleanor.
“Let me see,” said Jamesy. He held his fingers up in front of his eyes and wiggled them. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three,” said the Princess.
“Rats,” said Jamesy. “Still blind.”
Butch laughed long and hard, but Eleanor failed to see the humor. She’d knocked down a blind man and was feeling just the way you’d feel if you’d done such a thing. And if you wouldn’t feel miserable, then you’re a brat and need a good spanking. And so do your parents.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to . . . are you all right?”
“Oh, yes,” Jamesy replied. “Everything’s still connected, as far as I can tell. You don’t happen to see my cane lying around, do you?”
Eleanor picked it up and handed it to him, apologizing once again.
“Where were you going in such a hurry?”
“She was fetchin’ a—” Butch began, but Eleanor shot him a glance that nearly fused his knee joints, and he swallowed the remainder of the sentence.
“Never mind about that,” said Eleanor quickly. “As long as you’re okay. I’m so . . .
“Sorry?” said Jamesy, who had picked up on the general leitmotif. There followed a brief silence during which Eleanor’s tummy began to growl. “Say,” said Jamesy. “Is anyone hungry?”
There was general assent.
“But the only way you get food around here is if people throw it at you,” Eleanor observed.
“Odd,” said Jamesy. “I’ve always found folks quite friendly. Perhaps you could steady me a bit?” She put her arm through his and they began to walk down the narrow winding street. Butch followed close behind, making vulgar noises with his hand in his armpit, an art whose finer points were all but lost on Eleanor.
Once she’d settled into the rhythm of her task, the Princess was able to study Jamesy more closely. He was handsome in a rough sort of way. He stood nice and straight and a smile was always tickling the corners of his mouth. He looked . . . noble. The notion produced concern.
“You’re not a prince, are you?”
“Not that I know of,” said Jamesy.
Eleanor was relieved. “Just checking.”
In a few moments the trio found themselves in front of a baker’s shop. Hot bread was cooling on the wooden ledge and the smell was heavenly. “You there! Baker!” Eleanor said sharply. “Give us some of your best bread at once! And don’t be stingy with the butter and jam!”
From the darkened interior of the shop there proceeded, as if shot from a catapult, a volley of moldy bread and, immediately on its heels, an adult-size portion of rancid jam, all of which smote the Princess about the head and shoulders with surprising accuracy. She stepped out of range. “See?” she said.
Jamesy nodded knowingly. “I think I’m beginning to detect the problem,” he said. “Let’s see if the milk seller is in a little more agreeable mood this morning, shall we?” And they made their way thence.
Eleanor was inhaling to reassume her role as spokesperson for the group when Jamesy drew her gently aside. “Mind if I try this time?”
Eleanor stood aside and let him approach the door, whereon he knocked. A young lady answered.
“Hello, Jamesy!” she said enthusiastically, though she surveyed Eleanor with some disapprobation. “How are you this morning?”
“I’m fine, Melody, my love,” said Jamesy. “How’s your shoulder today?”
“Oh, much better, thanks,” Melody replied with a smile. “Once you rubbed that knot out, I ain’t had a problem since.”
“Happy to hear it,” said Jamesy.
Eleanor noticed something in Jamesy’s voice as he talked to the milkmaid. Something genuine, and caring, and warm. It was as if he’d forgotten she was only a milkmaid.
“And your father?” Jamesy continued. “Was he able to get the new cow?”
“He was, thanks to your few words to farmer Matthews.”
“Glad to be of service,” said Jamesy with a bow.
“I don’t suppose I could interest you and your friends in a spot of milk, then, could I? It’s from the new cow.”
“I’ll say!” said Butch.
“If you can spare it,” said Jamesy. “Winter’s coming, you know.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Melody as she filled three big wooden cups. “If you don’t give in times of plenty, you can’t expect to receive in times of need. That’s what Pa says.”
Jamesy took a swallow from the cup she’d placed in his hands. “God bless him.” Butch seconded the motion. Eleanor, as she drank, was thinking new thoughts.
Once finished, they returned the cups, together with their thanks, bade her good-day, and moved along.
Eleanor was about to say something when Jamesy squeezed her arm and held his fingers to his lips. “Listen!” A child’s cry filtered through the noise of the marketplace. “That’s Cassie. Lost again, I’ll bet. Take me to her.”
Soon they found themselves in a cluster of rickety old houses that overhung the river. A girl about three years old with a huge nest of brown hair and large, black eyes, was standing up to her ankles in still water crying her eyes out.
“Cassie!” said Jamesy, tapping his way to her side. At the sound of his voice, the girl stopped weeping, opened her eyes and threw her arms around his neck as he stooped to pick her up. “Wandering from mum’s side again, are you? Naughty girl. Come along. We’ll find her.”
Under Butch’s guidance, they found the girl’s mother, the fruit seller, who had abandoned her cart to search for the girl. “Cassie!” she said, taking her child from Jamesy’s arms. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere!” The child, having taken up crying again in a pretty hearty fashion, was unable to reply. “Thank you, Jamesy,” said the woman, tears in her eyes. “That’s twice now! I don’t know where we’d be without you!”
“Never mind,” said Jamesy. “Let’s find your cart.”
So, off they set.
The cart had been left in the square and they arrived just as the first wave of princes rode into town.
“My cart!” said the woman, but it was too late. One of the princes had already kicked it out of the way and others drove their horses over it, laughing as they did so. The fruit seller put Cassie down and began picking up the scattered remains of her wares. Butch, Jamesy, and Eleanor helped.
“How could they do such a thing!” Eleanor cried. “I’ll have them . . .” she edited herself. “If I were the Princess, I’d have them all whipped within an inch of their lives.”
“Why?” Jamesy asked.
“Why, to punish them!”
“They are what their hearts have made them,” said Jamesy. “Imagine being the prisoner of such a heart, never knowing love, or truth, or beauty. I should think that ample punishment. Here they haven’t simply wrecked an honest woman’s livelihood, they’ve scarred their souls.”
Several people had gathered round and were helping the woman with her cart. Others merely stood by and stared, and shook their heads. Others laughed scornfully. Some ignored them altogether, or pretended to.
“Beauty,” Eleanor said softly. She saw it in the faces of the people who were taking time to help, noble and common alike. She perceived its absence from the eyes of those who merely stood by and criticized or mocked. “It’s all on the inside, isn’t it?”
“That’s where it starts,” said Jamesy with a smile. The cart was upright again. He picked Cassie up and sat her on the tailboard. “Now, you stay there, young lady. Hear me?” He tickled the child and she laughed. “No more wandering away.” He turned to Eleanor. “Whatever is in your heart overflows to those around you, good or bad. If your first response to someone else’s tragedy is to laugh, or to ridicule . . . or to ign
ore it, then there is a bitter ugliness in your heart. But, if your impulse is to help . . .”
“That’s beauty,” said Eleanor softly.
Jamesy smiled again.
Butch, who was thinking that critics in the popular media would regard the foregoing dialogue as sentimental and treacly and that they were, therefore, idiots, had noticed a change in Eleanor. “Say,” he said. “Ain’t beatury what you was questin’ for?”
So it was.
Eleanor had come to the end of her quest. And, needless to say, things changed in a big way.
Of course she married Jamesy in the biggest, most wonderful wedding anyone had ever seen. And of course everyone was invited, especially all the fairy godmothers. And of course Butch was best man, despite the fact that he kept sticking his tongue out at the priest. And of course they went out of their way to fix up the town, and set up Cassie’s mother in a proper fruit stand together with other corrective measures. And of course they helped all those who were willing to help themselves. And of course everyone noticed that, somehow, Princess Eleanor had become lovelier than ever, a beauty no one noticed more than Jamesy, though he couldn’t see her at all. And, of course, Eleanor no longer had her “problem,” though Butch always watched her carefully in hopes that she’d “turn into something interestinger than just a girl.”
So it was that, as in any decent fairy tale, the Princess and Jamesy lived happily ever after, though Jamesy was forever amazed how his cane came back to him no matter how hard or far he threw it.
Cummings, upon Rat’s recovery from his most recent adventure as a princess, seemed troubled. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, twiddling his thumbs. “Sitting” is perhaps too explicit a descriptor, for he was invisible from the shoulders downward. Nevertheless, Rat discerned from the butler’s general posture that that part of him that could not be seen, could it be seen, would be seen to be sitting.
Rat, rather than remarking that the most recent installment had left him living happily ever after as he was about to do, revised the prepared text. “I see, Cummings, that the condition has advanced. Or don’t see, to be more empirically correct.”
Cummings ceased twiddling momentarily. “Yes, sir.”
“You are left ‘up in the air,’ so to speak.”
“Very humorous, sir.”
“I don’t mean to make light of the situation, Cummings,” said Rat. “But you are otherwise not unwell?”
“No, sir. I have no other complaint. However, I confess,” said the butler, “being thus reduced by degrees to fewer than the customary dimensions does leave one feeling uncertain about one’s future.”
Rat sat up in bed and, casually entwining his fingers behind his head, said: “You feel as though the condition will, despite sterling references from a long list of satisfied clients, adversely impact employment henceforth?”
Cummings hung his head. A large, immaculately laundered, many-faceted tear formed in his eye. “There are some deficits that people are not predisposed to overlook, sir.”
“Being invisible, you mean?” said Rat. “Yes, I can see the drawback. Of those entities that haunt the darkened halls and byways of your typical mansion, ghosts are preferred to remain invisible, while the general help is not.”
“Precisely, sir. I am not sanguine as to what the outcome might be.”
“Well,” said Rat conversationally, “I believe I may offer succor and comfort.” He paused. “Are they not the same thing?”
“One may be taken to define the other, sir, yes.”
“Then pick the one you like, either succor or comfort, or both if one ratifies the other.”
“I am failing to follow, sir.”
“No need, my good man. Merely a grammatical exercise. The point is this: recent experience leads me to suppose you are being transmunessed.”
Cummings, whose familiarity with the Mother Tongue was not inconsiderable, cocked an eyebrow. “I am not conversant with the term, sir.”
“Nor is Mr. Webster,” said Rat. “It is of my own design and may be subdivided as follows: ‘trans’ for transported, ‘mu’ for mutated, ‘esse’ for essence. I bunged the ‘n’ in to make it scan well. Its meaning? The transposition of your essence, that which is singularly and quintessentially you, from one state of being to another.”
“As in death, sir?”
“Let us rather say from conception to birth.”
Cummings sniffed into the back of his gloved hand. An inviolable tenet of the butlery code was that one in service kept one’s problems to oneself. He was, therefore, struggling mightily to express himself while maintaining a professional detachment. “In much the same way your soul has ‘transmunessed’, sir?” His present difficulties notwithstanding, the word was tasty upon his tongue and he folded it into his vocabulary for future reference, in the event he should emerge from those difficulties with a future at all.
“The perfect analogy!” said Rat. “The project that is my soul is nearing completion.”
“I am pleased to hear it, sir.”
“And well you may be, for yours in this odd and offbeat morality play was no small part.”
One of Cummings’ earlobes flushed slightly. “Thank you, sir. It is good of you to say.”
“No doubt your efforts will, in time, be attested to by a superabundance of whatever medals and ribbons are handed out in your profession, and these will vastly outweigh whatever humble thanks I can offer. But that’s all beside the point, which is this: does it not stand to reason that, having successfully executed your duties in regard to the project under review, your job is done?”
“Done, sir?” said Cummings, contorting the creases in his forehead so as to accommodate the possibility. “I had never imagined an end to my career.”
“Then imagine it, my good man. Wade through it barefoot! When the painter applies the final stroke to his masterpiece, he does not continue stroking, does he? When the mother gives birth to the child, she does not continue in labor. When the theologian writes ‘The End’ to his latest sixty-pound tome of commentary on First John 4:7-8, he ceases toming. When . . .”
“I grasp your meaning, sir,” Cummings interjected. “You feel as though you are the masterpiece in question, the culmination of my ‘art’?”
“I blush, Cummings, in the manner recently exhibited by your earlobe. No doubt that determination is in the hands of the critics. Nevertheless, you have done your best with a fistful of pretty raw material. Now, just as I see what I am to become,” he tossed an almost indifferent glance at the reflection of his soul in the full-length mirror, suspended from the turret ceiling by delicate golden chains, “I see that your job is done, or very nearly so. You are progressing, albeit by discomfiting degrees, to a higher calling.”
The declaration jarred. “There is no higher calling than service, sir.”
“I concur,” said Rat. “Let us say, rather, that you are being called to service on a higher plane.”
The suggestion was not without appeal. “You mean, to be of greater service?”
“Just so,” said Rat. “It is my contention, upon review of my curious adventures in this place, that existence is a series of progressions, from the zygote to the fully-formed individual, from the puling infant to the ambulatory adolescent, from physical awareness to spiritual enlightenment. You will grant me the hypothesis?”
“Heartily, sir.”
“Then it stands to reason that you are not immune to the same process.”
The appeal deepened. “Do you really think so, sir?”
“I do,” said Rat, taking a confident sip of the guava juice Cummings had earlier prepared. “In illustration of which I present the Princess Eleanor I have recently been.”
“The lady transmunessed, sir?”
“In a big way, Cummings. At the outset I was . . . that is, she was . . . a stick-fetching prig of the lowest order, possessed of the notion that beauty is solely an outward trait, a concept, I confess, of which I was guilty.”
“And in the end?”
“She realized that beauty radiates from within. That humanity, humility, and humor can so overwhelm outward appearance as to render it of no consequence.” Rat fell silent for a moment, then continued. “It is both enlivening and ennobling to spend time in the company of someone who radiates these qualities, Cummings. Conversely—if I may expound a philosophy that appears at once on my mind and my tongue—those who are consumed by outward appearance, like an incubus, suck the life from their surroundings, deadening the spirit with their emphasis on the superficial and inane. It is vain and hopeless to strive for the appearance of youth, Cummings. The struggle and its inevitable failure ultimately make one ugly without and bitter within.”
“Your thoughtfulness does you credit, sir.”
“Humanity, humility, and humor, Cummings. Make a note. Nip and tuck these words into the prodigious folds of your gray matter. Surgically implant them upon the hidden precincts of your heart. It is a simple lesson, but one whose wisdom I have been put through a good deal to acquire.”
“I shall be pleased to serve as your amanuensis in this regard, sir,” said Cummings. With a heart much lightened, what remained of him stood up and began the process of preparing the Occupant for his final night in residence. “In your absence I shall apply my mind to your commentary and, I hope, adapt myself, or as much of myself as remains, to its precepts.”
“You would do well so to do,” said Rat as Cummings zipped the sleeping bag around him.
“Another day has intervened?”
“It has, sir.”
“I trust I did not disappoint.”
“In no regard, sir.”
“My pontifications aside, you have found my presence entertaining?”
“Most, sir. Your innovation and imagination in regard to certain . . . activities . . . beggars description.”
“Then I’ve done my job,” said Rat somnolently. “We seem to be in a laboratory of sorts.”
Cummings remarked a distinction. “An observatory, I believe, sir, if I may deduce as much from the telescope.” He fluffled Rat’s pillow and dimmed the light. “Your last night, sir. It may be a difficult one.”
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