“Ha,” neighed the troll, looking up, “you have come to consult me, Princess Gurli.” “I have not,” said the Princess. “I do not like trolls.” “But I,” said the troll, “am not like other trolls.” “That is what all trolls say,” replied the Princess scornfully. “Perhaps,” said the troll, “but I am the greatest Scandinavian authority on psycho-analysis!” “What in Valhalla,” said the Princess, “is that?” “The study of souls,” cried the troll with a significant chuckle. “Oh,” said the Princess, “you can’t study mine. I haven’t got one.” “This is interesting,” said the troll; “you are undoubtedly suffering from an advanced condition of mermaid-complex.” “What does that mean?” said the Princess. “It means that you have a suppressed passion for a Mer-King,” replied the troll, “and if you give way to it you will be cured immediately.” “I have never heard anything so disgusting,” said the Princess. “Why, a Mer-King is half a fish.” “Half a fish,” said the troll sententiously, “is better than no fish.” “I had meant,” said the Princess, “to drown myself in the sea because the loss of my soul troubled me. But now that I know that souls are things that can be studied by creatures like you, I am very glad I have not got one.”
The troll was so shocked at this outburst that he fell backwards into the sea, where he was instantly seized by mermaids and drowned. But the Princess went back, slim and gold, through the shadow of the pines, and married the youngest son of the nearest fishmonger.
XII
ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS
AT about half-past eleven on a summer evening there might have been observed, wending her way slowly along the Rue du Soleil Levant into the Cour de St. Pierre at Geneva, a small black kitten with her tail straight up. There was nobody in the cobbled square except the beech-tree in the middle with a wooden seat round him. The kitten, who was being brought up on a severely anti-religious basis, doubted whether the tree might not have been influenced by the cathedral window, in whose shadow he had dreamed summer and winter for more than a hundred years. She was therefore on the point of slipping into a most engaging gutter of stone, like a deep mouse-track, that leads past the chapel of Calvin to the railings that overlook the Passage des Degrés des Poules.
But the beech wasn’t going to stand that. On the contrary! He dropped one little fidgety brown leaf—puff!—between the kitten’s paws, who, throwing religious prejudice to the winds, played with it as enchantingly as though it had been a convert to Epistemological Radicalism.
Then the moon looked over the crooked gables into the square, and proceeded to light her cold lamp in all the dark cathedral windows. But the beech rustled her leaves warningly at her. “What is it?” said the moon, and then she saw the little black kitten dancing with the leaf on the cobbles. “Who is your little black faun of a friend?” she inquired of the beech. “I don’t know her name,” said the beech, “but she certainly dances extremely well.”
At this point the kitten stopped abruptly and said a little harshly, “What are you two old ones whispering about?” “We were remembering,” said the beech, who was a kindly old fellow, “the time when we also danced with our shadows in the joy of our youth.” “How can that be?” said the kitten impatiently. “The moon never was young, and you never had but one leg, and that stuck in the ground. You are telling me fairy tales, and I have no patience with them. Let me tell you my dancing is merely automatic muscular reaction.” “Dear me,” said the moon mildly, “what long words that child uses! But tell me, little one, if you don’t like fairy tales, you won’t want to hear the story of the cat and the fiddle.” “Does it observe the dramatic unities?” inquired the kitten. “I don’t know what they are,” said the moon, “but it has a moral.” “Which is more than you have, you little wretch,” said the beech severely. “Oh well,” said the kitten ungraciously, “I suppose I must hear it, though I expect that it will be representational.”
“Once upon a time,” said the moon, “there was a cat that had the soul of a musician. But when she tried to render her thoughts into sound she excited no sympathetic response. On the contrary, people threw boots and bottles at her. ‘I do not care,’ said the cat, ‘my songs are for posterity.’ But nevertheless the constant succession of missiles disturbed her.”