“Why, this way. The soldier wanted to marry one of three princesses, but the elder one and the second one told their father that they’d sooner marry the devil than the soldier. So you see both of them are ours.”
After he had heard this explanation, “the grandfather acknowledged that the little devil was in the right, and ordered him to be set free. The imp, you see, understood his business.”
[For two German versions of this story, see the tales of “Des Teufels russiger Bruder,” and “Der Bärenhäuter” (Grimm, Nos. 100, 101, and Bd. iii. pp. 181, 182). More than twelve centuries ago, Hiouen-Thsang transferred the following story from India to China. A certain Rishi passed many times ten thousand years in a religious ecstasy. His body became like a withered tree. At last he emerged from his ecstasy, and felt inclined to marry, so he went to a neighboring palace, and asked the king to bestow upon him one of his daughters. The king, exceedingly embarrassed, called the princesses together, and asked which of them would consent to accept the dreaded suitor (who, of course, had not paid the slightest attention to his toilette for hundreds of centuries). Ninety-nine of those ladies flatly refused to have anything to do with him, but the hundredth, the last and youngest of the party, agreed to sacrifice herself for her father’s sake. But when the Rishi saw his bride he was discontented, and when he heard that her elder and fairer sisters had all refused him, he pronounced a curse which made all ninety-nine of them humpbacks, and so destroyed their chance of marrying at all. Stanislas Julien’s “Mémoires sur les contrées occidentales,” 1857, i. pp. 244-7.]
As the idea that “a hasty word” can place its utterer or its victim in the power of the Evil One (not only after death, but also during this life) has given rise to numerous Russian legends, and as it still exists, to some extent, as a living faith in the minds of the Russian peasantry, it may be as well to quote at length one of the stories in which it is embodied. It will be recognized as a variant of the stories about the youth who visits the “Water King” and elopes with one of that monarch’s daughters. The main difference between the “legend” we are about to quote, and the skazkas which have already been quoted, is that a devil of the Satanic type is substituted in it for the mythical personage—whether Slavonic Neptune or Indian Rákshasa—who played a similar part in them.
The Hasty Word.[470]
In a certain village there lived an old couple in great poverty, and they had one son. The son grew up,[471] and the old woman began to say to the old man:
“It’s time for us to get our son married.”
“Well then, go and ask for a wife for him,” said he.
So she went to a neighbor to ask for his daughter for her son: the neighbor refused. She went to a second peasant’s, but the second refused too—to a third, but he showed her the door. She went round the whole village; not a soul would grant her request. So she returned home and cried—