When she had finished it she cried:
“Old man! open the door wide.”
He opened it, and the fox sprang out of the bath-room and ran off home. The old man went into the bath-room and looked about him. Nothing was to be seen but the old woman’s bones under the bench—and those picked so clean! As for the oatmeal and the butter, they had all been eaten up. So the old man was left alone and in poverty.
This story is evidently a combination of two widely differing tales. The catastrophe we may for the present pass over, but about the opening some few words may be said. The Beanstalk myth is one which is found among so many peoples in such widely distant regions, and it deals with ideas of such importance, that no contribution to its history can be considered valueless. Most remarkable among its numerous forms are those American and Malayo-Polynesian versions of the “heaven-tree” story which Mr. Tylor has brought together in his “Early History of mankind.”[382] In Europe it is usually found in a very crude and fragmentary form, having been preserved, for the most part, as the introduction to some other story which has proved more attractive to the popular fancy. The Russian versions are all, as far as I am aware, of this nature. I have already[383] mentioned one of them, in which, also, the Fox plays a prominent part. Its opening words are, “There once lived an old man and an old woman, and they had a little daughter. One day she was eating beans, and she let one fall on the ground. The bean grew and grew, and grew right up to heaven. The old man climbed up to heaven, slipped in there, walked and walked, admired and admired, and said to himself, ‘I’ll go and fetch the old woman; won’t she just be delighted!’” So he tries to carry his wife up the bean stalk, but grows faint and lets her fall; she is killed, and he calls in the Fox as Wailer.[384]
In a variant of the “Fox Physician” from the Vologda Government, it is a pea which gives birth to the wondrous tree. “There lived an old man and an old woman; the old man was rolling a pea about, and it fell on the ground. They searched and searched a whole week, but they couldn’t find it. The week passed by, and the old people saw that the pea had begun to sprout. They watered it regularly, and the pea set to work and grew higher than the izba. When the peas ripened, the old man climbed up to where they were, plucked a great bundle of them, and began sliding down the stalk again. But the bundle fell out of the old man’s hands and killed the old woman.”[385]
According to another variant, “There once lived a grandfather and a grandmother, and they had a hut. The grandfather sowed a bean under the table, and the grandmother a pea. A hen gobbled up the pea, but the bean grew up as high as the table. They moved the table, and the bean grew still higher. They cut away the ceiling and the roof; it went on growing until it grew right up to the heavens (nebo). The grandfather climbed up to heaven, climbed and climbed—there stood a hut (khatka), its walls of pancakes, its benches of white bread, the stove of buttered curds. He began to eat, ate his fill, and lay down above the stove to sleep. In came twelve sister-goats. The first had one eye, the second two eyes, the third three, and so on with the rest, the last having twelve eyes. They saw that some one had been meddling with their hut, so they put it to rights, and when they went out they left the one-eyed to keep watch. Next day the grandfather again climbed up there, saw One-Eye and began to mutter[386] ‘Sleep, eye, sleep!’ The goat went to sleep. The man ate his fill and went away. Next day the two-eyed kept watch, and after it the three-eyed and so on. The grandfather always muttered his charm ‘Sleep, eye! Sleep, second eye! Sleep, third eye!’ and so on. But with the twelfth goat he failed, for he charmed only eleven of her eyes. The goat saw him with the twelfth and caught him,”—and there the story ends.[387]
In another instance the myth has been turned into one of those tales of the Munchausen class, the title of which is the “saw” Ne lyubo, ne slushai, i.e., “If you don’t like, don’t listen”—the final words being understood; “but let me tell you a story.” A cock finds a pea in the part of a cottage under the floor, and begins calling to the hens; the cottager hears the call, drives away the cock, and pours water over the pea. It grows up to the floor, up to the ceiling, up to the roof; each time way is made for it, and finally it grows right up to heaven (do nebushka). Says the moujik to his wife:
“Wife! wife, I say! shall I climb up into heaven and see what’s going on there? May be there’s sugar there, and mead—lots of everything!”
“Climb away, if you’ve a mind to,” replies his wife.
So he climbs up, and there he finds a large wooden house. He enters in and sees a stove, garnished with sucking pigs and geese and pies “and everything which the soul could desire.” But the stove is guarded by a seven-eyed goat; the moujik charms six of the eyes to sleep, but overlooks the seventh. With it the goat sees him eat and drink and then go to sleep. The house-master comes in, is informed by the goat of all that has occurred, flies into a passion, calls his servants, and has the intruder turned out of the house. When the moujik comes to the place where the pea-stalk had been, “he looks around—no pea-stalk is there.” He collects the cobwebs “which float on the summer air,” and of them he makes a cord; this he fastens “to the edge of heaven” and begins to descend. Long before he reaches the earth he comes to the end of his cord, so he crosses himself, and lets go. Falling into a swamp, he remains there some time. At last a duck builds her nest on his head, and lays an egg in it. He catches hold of the duck’s tail, and the bird pulls him out of the swamp; whereupon he goes home rejoicing, taking with him the duck and her egg, and tells his wife all that has happened.[388]