The King of Maccaroonia
The King of Maccaroonia, who was just in the prime of life, and in fact had been there for some time past, arose one morning and sat himself down in his night attire upon a chair by the side of his bed. His Minister of State stood before him holding his stockings, one of which had a large hole in the heel. Although he carefully turned the stocking in such a way that the king should not perceive the hole, and although it was much more in the king’s line to have an eye for dainty boots than for well-mended stockings, the hole had not escaped his royal penetration. With horror he seized the stocking, put his fore-finger through the hole up to his knuckles, and then remarked with a sigh—
“What good is there in being a king, so long as I have no queen! What think you of the project of taking a wife?”
“That, your Majesty, is indeed a sublime idea,” replied the Minister; “an idea which I am confident I, your humble subject, should have made bold to conceive, had I not felt that your Majesty himself would deign to utter it this very day.”
“Very well then!” answered the king; “but do you think it will be an easy matter for me to find just the right kind of a wife?”
“Pooh!” said the Minister, “you’ll find a dozen!”
“Do not forget that I am very fastidious. To please me, a princess must be beautiful and clever. And then there is another point that I would lay special stress on. You know how fond I am of ginger-nuts. In my whole kingdom there is not a person who knows how to bake them—that is, to bake them as they should be baked, not too hard and not too soft, but just nice and crisp. She must partout know how to bake ginger-nuts.”
When the Minister heard this his heart fell. But he soon recovered, and replied: “A king like your Majesty will, without doubt, be able to find a princess who can bake ginger-nuts.”
“Well then, we will look about us!” said the king; and that same day he set out accompanied by his Minister on a journey to such of his neighbours as had princesses to dispose of. But it so happened that only three princesses were discovered whose beauty and cleverness were sufficient to satisfy the king, and none of the three could bake ginger-nuts.
“I am sorry to say I can’t bake ginger-nuts,” said the first princess, in answer to the king’s question, “but I can bake delicious little almond-cakes. Wouldn’t those do?”
“No!” replied the king, “nothing short of ginger-nuts will do!”
The second princess snapped her fingers when he asked her, and said pettishly, “Go away with your nonsense! There is no such thing as a princess who can bake ginger-nuts.”
But the king fared worse than this even with the third, who was, alas! the fairest and cleverest. She gave him no opportunity to ask his question; before he could do so, she confronted him with a query on her part asking him if he knew how to play on the Jew’s-harp. When he answered in the negative she rejected him, politely expressing her regrets. She liked him well enough, she said; but she had a particular fancy for the Jew’s-harp, and it was her firm intention to marry no man unable to play upon that instrument.
So the king and his minister drove home again, and as he was getting down from the carriage he said quite dejectedly, “So this was a wild-goose chase!”
But a king must needs have a queen, and some time later he sent for the minister once more, and informed him that he had given up finding a wife who could bake ginger-nuts, and resolved to marry the princess they had visited first. “It is the one who knows how to bake little almond-cakes,” he added. “Go and ask her if she will be my wife.”
The next day the minister came back, and narrated to him how the princess was quite out of the reach of such offers, having married the king of the land where capers grow.
“Well, then, go to the second princess!” But this time too the minister came home again without having accomplished his errand. The old king, he said, regretted exceedingly that it was quite out of his power to gratify him, his daughter having unfortunately died.
The king was very thoughtful for a while, but being quite determined to have a queen, he ordered his minister to go once more to the third princess, as there was no knowing but she too might have changed her mind. And the minister yielded to his orders, although his own inclination was quite averse to the project, and although his wife told him it would be quite useless. The king awaited his return in some trepidation. He was thinking of the question concerning the Jew’s-harp, and the recollection was no agreeable one.
But the third princess received the minister very graciously, and told him that once she had been quite determined to have only such a husband as could play on the Jew’s-harp; but that now, after all, she had come to the conclusion that dreams are flighty, especially the dreams of youth. She saw now, she said, that the realisation of her wish was quite out of the question, and as she had taken a fancy to the king she was willing to have him.
Then the minister drove home as fast as his horses would go, and the king embraced him, and gave him a tremendous medal to wear about his neck. Bright flags decorated the town, garlands were hung from house to house across the streets, and altogether the wedding was such a splendid affair that nothing else was talked of for the next fortnight.
The king and the young queen lived in a state of bliss and rapture for the space of an entire year. The king never thought of ginger-nuts, and that little matter of the Jew’s-harp had quite slipped out of the queen’s mind.
But one morning the king got up with his wrong leg first, and everything went wrong. It rained the whole day long; the imperial globe fell down, and the little cross on top of it broke off; then the court painter came and brought the new map of the kingdom, and when the king looked at it he found that the land was painted red instead of blue, as he had ordered it; and besides all this, the queen had a headache.
So it happened that the couple had their first quarrel; what it was all about they themselves did not know next morning, or if they did know it they did not want to say. In short, the king grumbled and the queen pouted and would always have the last word. After they had wrangled for some time, the queen shrugged her shoulders contemptuously and said—
“It seems to me you might be silent, and stop finding fault with everything you set your eyes on, when you yourself don’t even know how to play on the Jew’s-harp.”
But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than the king petulantly interrupted her with the words, “And you cannot so much as bake ginger-nuts!”
Thereupon the queen for the first time had no repartee upon her tongue’s end, and succumbed into silence, and without another word they both walked away. The queen sat down in a corner of her sofa in her own room, weeping bitterly, and thinking, “What a foolish woman I am! Where did I have my senses? That was the silliest thing I could have done!”
The king walked up and down in his room, gleefully rubbing his hands, and saying, “What a piece of good fortune it is that my wife doesn’t know how to bake ginger-nuts! If she did, I should have been sadly put to for an answer when she reproached me for being unable to play on the Jew’s-harp!”
After he had repeated this three or four times his mood brightened visibly. He began to whistle a favourite tune, then he went and looked at a large likeness of the queen hanging on the wall. He got up on a chair and took out his handkerchief to brush off a cobweb hanging down straight over the queen’s nose, and at last he said—
“She must have been very much put out, the dear little woman! I will go and see what she is doing!”
With that he went out into the hall, into which all the rooms opened. But this being a day on which everything went wrong, the valet had forgotten to light the lamps, although it was already eight o’clock, and moreover pitch dark.
So the king put out his hands before him so as not to bump his royal head, and cautiously felt his way along the wall. Suddenly he came upon something. “Who is there?” he asked.
“It is I,” answered the queen.
“What are you looking for, my love?”
“I was coming to ask your forgiveness,” replied the queen, “because I hurt your feelings.”
“You needn’t do that!” said the king, putting his arms about her neck. “The fault was more mine than yours, and I don’t give it another thought. But I’ll tell you one thing: two words shall be forbidden on pain of death in our kingdom, Jew’s-harp and——”
“And ginger-nuts,” the queen interrupted him, laughing and secretly wiping a tear from the corner of her eye; and that is the end of the story.
Professor Volkmann (1830-1891).