Strangely, even though things are going swimmingly with me currently, I haven’t been finding things to write about. I’m working a lot, occasionally finding time to visit Elizabeth, and working on things around the house. Nothing all that exciting that I need to write about. . .
I was reading a book the other day and came across a very interesting story and moral. The story is told near the climax of the book as a test to determine which of two claimants is the rightful king to a throne. At the end of the story he asks a question.
Here it is:
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Listen to me. Listen to the sadness I must relate. Live it.
Listen to me. Live it.
Once there was a woman married to a blacksmith in Ruen. As wives are wont to do, she waxed great with child, and one afternoon her time came. Her husband sent for the local midwife, but she was busy elsewhere, and the midwife from the neighborhood next to theirs answered the call. She was a short woman, stout, and she had a hunched shoulder, a twisted arm, and wall eyes that stared at deviant angles. When she entered the birthing chamber, the wife cried out in shock and terror, and the midwife took affront.
In spite the midwife sat back when the woman bled, and let her life’s blood drain into useless pools in the bed. And from these cooling pools she lifted a baby girl even as the mother took one last shuddering breath and died. “I curse you,” the midwife cried to the infant, “to a sad life!” Then she picked up her instruments, laid the infant down by her dead mother, and left the room.
The blacksmith mourned his wife, for she had been useful, and blamed his infant daughter for his loss. He put her out to a wet nurse, begrudging her every coin he had to pay to let his daughter suck at the woman’s breast, and only reluctantly took her back into his house when she was four. The blacksmith already had three older sons, and he did not want this daughter, but he was obliged to take her.
She grew, but following the midwife’s curse she grew only into sadness. Her father and brothers treated her with cold indifference that too often bordered on hostility. The girl spent her days attending their needs, never leaving the house or the forge that abutted it, keeping her head bowed, never smiling. She had no reason to smile.
She grew into young womanhood, yet her days were as gray and featureless as they had been as a child. Her only comfort was her mother’s small collection of books which she kept under her bed and only pulled out to read once everyone else in the house was asleep. These books were her only friends. Until . . . until one day a young man came to the forge, bringing his horse which had cast a shoe. He spied the woman as she sought to hide in the shadows, and managed a quiet word to her. Over the next few weeks, with increasing courage, she met him for snatched minutes in the alley behind the house, exchanging words, hopes, dreams. For the first time in her life she learned to smile.
Alas!
Alas! One night she determined to run away with the young man, run to an inn nearby where they planned to consummate their love and from there move into a world of hope. But she was careless, and in her eagerness left her father’s house before she had dried the dishes washed from the evening meal. Her brothers followed her, furious at her slovenliness, and found her even as her lover’s lips were for the first time lowering to hers.
They seized him, crowing with fury, and bore him to the ground. They were strong men, and could have killed him quickly, but they chose to take their time, and they drew out his death until his screams shattered the night. And yet no one threw open their shuttered windows to investigate. No one. When he was dead they turned to their sister, and one took his knife and, as the others held her down, he put out her eyes so that she would never be tempted again.
Now even her treasured books were denied her. Long hours she would sit on her bed, late at night, feeling their taunting shapes beneath her hands, her tearless sorrow ravaging her face. There was nothing for her now. Her father grew old and died, and her brothers took wives, bringing them home to live in their house. She continued as the household drudge, creeping blindly about the house, sometimes but not always evading the sharp corners of furniture deliberately moved into her path and the stabbing fingers of her sisters-in-law. Nieces and nephews were born, and they soon learned the sharp ways of their parents. The woman learned to accept pinches and punches, and she bowed her head to fate.
After some years, she became aware of a comforting presence that lingered in the back alleyway. It was a great shaggy dog, a stray, that someone had discarded. Gradually he became used to her, and accepted careful scraps from her fingers, licking them gratefully when he had finished. He was her only friend, and somehow she conceived the idea that the dog was her lover’s soul come back to aid her. The thought comforted her. One day, the dog went a-roaming, as dogs are wont to do, and he caught a squirrel, wandering madly through the back streets of Ruen. As the dog caught the squirrel the rodent bit him, and the dog yelped in surprise and let the creature go. Two days later he felt a madness building in his mind.
The woman was relieved when she heard the dog scratching at the door, and she hurried to give it a pat and a hug. But as she leaned down the dog snarled and bit her hand, and she screamed and tore loose, and the brothers and their wives and their numerous children came a-running through the house and dragged her inside, slapping her for her foolishness, and stomped the dog to death.
But it was too late. She grew feverish, her body wracked with convulsing agony. Her sisters-in-law tended her only enough to keep her alive, but they wished they had not bothered when the woman finally struggled up from her sickbed. The fever had crippled her back and twisted one leg shorter than the other. Even as a drudge, she was useless.
There is not much left to tell. They threw her out to wander the streets, where she begged what food she could and slept in doorways when she was able. She accepted the abuse meted out by those who prey on the week and helpless, and knew her time was short. Winter approached, and winter is never kind to those lacking both home and comfort.
So she curled up about her rags and sought the only answer to her pain. I ask you now to venture the ordeal. What was her answer? What answer could she find to her pain and her sorrow?
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Well. . . what was her answer? What did she do? What would you do? I am glad to say that I answered correctly. I will post up the answer given in a few days, but I would like to see what other people think. What answer would you give?
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The answer given was “She laughed. She laughed. It was the only thing left for her to do.”
The short stanza I used as a title for these posts was used repeatedly in the books, and after that story was fully finished the end was revealed.
Who comes to Claim?
Who dares to dream
and daring - laughs.
To which the test giver responds - “Yes. Laughs. To laugh is to dare, because laughter dares fate and sorrow and the weight of all injustices.”
So people, laugh. Laugh at life. Don't take it too serious.
Remember “A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.” - Gustave Flaubert
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