Short Stories Old and New Part 4

9. And Parmashta, and Arisai, and Aridai, and Vajezatha,

10. The ten sons of Haman the son of Hammedatha, the enemy of the Jews, slew they; but on the spoil laid they not their hand.

11. On that day the number of those that were slain in Shushan the palace was brought before the king.

12. And the king said unto Esther the queen, The Jews have slain and destroyed five hundred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of Haman; what have they done in the rest of the king's provinces? now what is thy pet.i.tion? and it shall be granted thee: or what is thy request further? and it shall be done.

13. Then said Esther, If it please the king, let it be granted to the Jews which are in Shushan to do to-morrow also according unto this day's decree, and let Haman's ten sons be hanged upon the gallows.

14. And the king commanded it so to be done: and the decree was given at Shushan; and they hanged Haman's ten sons.

15. For the Jews that were in Shushan gathered themselves together on the fourteenth day also of the month Adar, and slew three hundred men at Shushan; but on the prey they laid not their hand.

16. But the other Jews that were in the king's provinces gathered themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest from their enemies, and slew of their foes seventy and five thousand, but they laid not their hands on the prey,

17. On the thirteenth day of the month Adar; and on the fourteenth day of the same rested they, and made it a day of feasting and gladness.

18. But the Jews that were at Shushan a.s.sembled together on the thirteenth day thereof, and on the fourteenth thereof; and on the fifteenth day of the same they rested, and made it a day of feasting and gladness.

19. Therefore the Jews of the villages, that dwelt in the unwalled towns, made the fourteenth day of the month Adar a day of gladness and feasting, and a good day, and of sending portions one to another.

THE FEAST OF PURIM

20. And Mordecai wrote these things, and sent letters unto all the Jews that were in all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, both nigh and far,

21. To establish this among them, that they should keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar, and the fifteenth day of the same, yearly,

22. As the days wherein the Jews rested from their enemies, and the month which was turned unto them from sorrow to joy, and from mourning into a good day: that they should make them days of feasting and joy, and of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor.

23. And the Jews undertook to do as they had begun, and as Mordecai had written unto them;

24. Because Haman the son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the enemy of all the Jews, had devised against the Jews to destroy them, and had cast Pur, that is, the lot, to consume them, and to destroy them;

25. But when Esther came before the king, he commanded by letters that his wicked device, which he devised against the Jews, should return upon his own head, and that he and his sons should be hanged on the gallows.

26. Wherefore they called these days Purim after the name of Pur.

Therefore for all the words of this letter, and of that which they had seen concerning this matter, and which had come unto them,

27. The Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them, so as it should not fail, that they would keep these two days according to their writing, and according to their appointed time every year;

28. And that these days should be remembered and kept throughout every generation, every family, every province, and every city; and that these days of Purim should not fail from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them perish from their seed.

29. Then Esther the queen, the daughter of Abihail, and Mordecai the Jew, wrote with all authority, to confirm this second letter of Purim.

30. And he sent the letters unto all the Jews, to the hundred twenty and seven provinces of the kingdom of Ahasuerus, with words of peace and truth,

31. To confirm these days of Purim in their times appointed, according as Mordecai the Jew and Esther the queen had enjoined them, and as they had decreed for themselves and for their seed, the matters of the fastings and their cry.

32. And the decree of Esther confirmed these matters of Purim; and it was written in the book.

CHAPTER X

MORDECAI PRIME MINISTER

1. And the king Ahasuerus laid a tribute upon the land, and upon the isles of the sea.

2. And all the acts of his power and of his might, and the declaration of the greatness of Mordecai, whereunto the king advanced him, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia?

3. For Mordecai the Jew was next unto king Ahasuerus, and great among the Jews, and accepted of the mult.i.tude of his brethren, seeking the wealth of his people, and speaking peace to all his seed.

II. THE HISTORY OF ALI BABA AND THE FORTY ROBBERS[*]

[* From "The Arabian Nights."]

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

[_Setting_. This story, like "Esther," takes place in Persia. The stories of "The Arabian Nights" as a whole probably originated in India, were modified and augmented by the Persians, and had the finishing touches put upon them by the Arabians. Bagdad on the Tigris is the city that figures most prominently in the stories, and the good caliph Haroun Al-Raschid (or Alraschid), who ruled from 786 to 809, A.D., is the monarch most often mentioned.

"A goodly place, a goodly time, For it was in the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid."

However old the germs of the stories are, the form in which we have them hardly antedates the year 1450. The absence of all mention of coffee and tobacco precludes, at least, a date much later. They began to be translated into the languages of Europe during the reign of Queen Anne and, with the exception of the Old Testament, have been the chief orientalizing influence in modern literature. The setting of "Ali Baba"

shows the four characteristics of all these Perso-Arabian tales: it has to do with town life, not country life; it presupposes one faith, the Mohammedan; it shows a fondness for magic; and it takes for granted an audience interested not in moral or ethical distinctions but in story-telling for story-telling's sake.

_Plot_. The plot of the short story as a distinct type of literature has been said to show a steady progress from the impossible through the improbable and probable to the inevitable. When we say of a story that the conclusion is inevitable we mean that, with the given background and characters, it could not have ended in any other way, just as, with a given multiplier and multiplicand, one product and only one is possible.

This cannot be said of "Ali Baba," because the five parts are not linked together in a logical sequence as are the events in "The Gold-Bug," or by any controlling idea of reform such as we find in "A Christmas Carol," or by any underlying moral purpose like that which gives unity and dignity to "The Great Stone Face." These Perso-Arabian tales, in other words, are stories of random incident, loosely but charmingly told, with always the note of strangeness and unexpectedness. The incidents, however, reflect accurately the manners and customs of time and place. We do not believe that a door ever opened to the magic of mere words, but we do believe and cannot help believing that the author tells the truth when he writes of leather jars full of oil, of bands of mounted robbers, of a poor man who could support himself by hauling wood from the free-for-all forest, of slavery from which one might escape by notable fidelity, of funeral rites performed by the imaum and other ministers of the mosque, and of the unwillingness of an a.s.sa.s.sin to attempt the life of a man with whom he had just eaten salt. Fancy, it is true, mingles with fact in "The Arabian Nights," but it does not replace fact.

_Characters_. Morgiana is the leading character. She furnishes all the brains employed in the story. The narrator praises her "courage" twice, but she had more than courage. Fidelity, initiative, and resourcefulness must also be put among her a.s.sets. We can hardly imagine her as acting from Esther's high motive, but she lived up to the best standards of conduct that she knew. Whoever serves as a model for his own time may serve as a model for ours. Duties change, but duty remains.]

I

Ca.s.sIM, ALI BABA'S BROTHER, DISCOVERED AND KILLED BY THE ROBBERS

There once lived in a town of Persia two brothers, one named Ca.s.sim and the other Ali Baba. Their father divided his small property equally between them. Ca.s.sim married a very rich wife, and became a wealthy merchant. Ali Baba married a woman as poor as himself, and lived by cutting wood and bringing it upon three a.s.ses into the town to sell.

One day, when Ali Baba had cut just enough wood in the forest to load his a.s.ses, he noticed far off a great cloud of dust. As it drew nearer, he saw that it was made by a body of hors.e.m.e.n, whom he suspected to be robbers. Leaving the a.s.ses, he climbed a large tree which grew on a high rock, and had branches thick enough to hide him completely while he saw what pa.s.sed beneath. The troop, forty in number, all well mounted and armed, came to the foot of the rock on which the tree stood, and there dismounted. Each man unbridled his horse, tied him to a shrub, and hung about his neck a bag of corn. Then each of them took off his saddle-bag, which from its weight seemed to Ali Baba full of gold and silver. One, whom he took to be their captain, came under the tree in which Ali Baba was concealed; and, making his way through some shrubs, spoke the words: "Open, Sesame."[*] As soon as the captain of the robbers said this, a door opened in the rock, and after he had made all his troop enter before him, he followed them, when the door shut again of itself.

[* Sesame (p.r.o.nounced _sessamy_), a small grain.]