The Strange Story Book Part 33

Curious to say, the chief and his sons had been quite deceived by the fine clothes of the daughter's husband, and resolved to make him presents suited to his rank. Therefore one day the people of the village beheld a procession of canoes paddling over the sea, one filled with furs, another containing the father and brothers of the girl, and a third, in which sat the slaves with green feathers in their hair, taken from the heads of drakes. The old man saw them likewise, and called to some boys to come and help him clean up the house. But they only answered, 'Clean up yourself, for you are dirty enough.'

'Well, at least carry up the strangers' goods; they are now landing,'

said he, but the boys replied as they had done before, 'Carry them yourself.' In the end, it was the strangers who carried them and put them down where they could; and they noticed that the old man's sister was crying, and the strangers felt sorry for her.

The old man soon found that he would get no help from anybody, for they were all angry with him for having married a chief's daughter. If he asked them to lend him a basket for his guests to eat off, they told him to use his own; if he begged them to fetch water, they bade him get it himself, and even when he took a very dirty old basket to fill at the stream, as he stooped down the water moved a little further away and then a little further still, as if it also had a spite at him. Indeed, it did this so often that at last he found himself in the mountains, where it vanished into a house. Once more he followed it and beheld a very old woman sitting inside.

'What is the matter?' said she. 'Is there anything I can do for you?'

'You can do a great deal for me if you only will,' answered he. 'I am very poor and have married a n.o.ble wife, whose father and brothers have come to visit me. I have nothing to give them, and my neighbours will not help.'

'Is that all?' she said.

'Yes, all! Is it not enough?' But the old woman only smoothed his hair with her hand, and in a moment it was thick and black as it had been in his youth, and his rags became handsome garments. Even the very basket changed into a beautiful new one.

'Go and dip the basket into the spring that is in the corner,' said she, and when he drew it up it was full of water and of sh.e.l.ls.

The man made all the haste he could down the mountain, but n.o.body recognised him except his wife, and those who had seen him when he went to marry her. He refreshed them all with water and gave them handfuls of the sh.e.l.ls, which they prized greatly, in return for the slaves and furs his father-in-law had presented to him, for it is the custom of that tribe that, if a man receives a gift from a father-in-law, he shall pay it back with something of much greater value. And he soon grew so rich that the people made him chief of the town.

Now that happened which was bound to happen. The people who had mocked him when he was poor were ready to bow down to him when he was rich, while he and his wife grew harder and prouder every day. They built themselves a large house where they gave magnificent feasts, but they pa.s.sed most of their time on the roof of the house, watching all that went on below.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHAT BEAUTIFUL BIRDS! I SHOULD LIKE TO MARRY ONE OF THEM!]

One fine spring evening they were sitting there as usual, when a flock of swans flew across the sky from the south-east. 'What beautiful birds!

I should like to marry one of them!' exclaimed the wife, as the swans gradually disappeared in the distance. Of course she did not mean anything, any more than when she repeated the same words on seeing the sand-cranes overhead, or the brants which presently came past. But the brants did not know this, and as soon as they heard her they flew down and carried her off on their wings. Her husband ran after them but he never reached them, only now and then she let fall some of the loose clothes that covered her. By and bye--for they found she was heavier than they expected--the brants let the woman fall too. Luckily they were then over the sandy beach so she was not hurt, but she was quite naked and even her hair had been rubbed off. She got up and walked quickly, crying as she went, to some trees which had large leaves, and these she twisted together till she had made a kind of ap.r.o.n. Then she wandered along the beach not knowing where she was going, and thinking sadly of her home and her husband, till she came to a house with an old woman sitting in it. The sight gladdened her heart, and she entered and held out the head of a red snapper which she had picked up on the sh.o.r.e, saying, 'Let us cook this red snapper head for dinner.'

'Yes, let us cook it,' answered the old woman, and after they had eaten it she bade the chief's wife go back to the beach and try to find something else. This time the girl brought in a fish called a sculpin, and it was cooked also; but while they were eating it the chief's wife heard the noise of boys shouting, though she could see no one.

'Take the tray with the food out to that hole,' said the old woman, and as the chief's wife did so she beheld many hands sticking up out of the ground. She placed the tray in the hands, and waited as it disappeared.

In a moment it rose to the surface again, with two fine fox skins on it, which she carried back to the old woman.

'Make yourself some robes out of them,' said she, and the girl did so.

When she was dressed, the old woman spoke to her again, and said:

'Your father and mother live in a salmon creek, a little way along the beach. It might be well for you to go and pay them a visit.' So the girl went, and after a time she saw her father out in a canoe spearing salmon, and her mother was with him. The girl ran quickly down to the water's edge in order to meet them, but when her father saw her he cried out:

'Here comes a fox; where are my bow and arrows?' And his daughter heard him and ran as fast as she could to the woods.

After a while she stopped running, for she knew she was safe, and then she made her way to the old woman.

'Why are you crying? Did you not see your father?'

'Yes, and he took me for a fox.'

'Why, what else do you think you are?' asked the old woman in surprise.

'But return at once to your father who will want to kill you; and be sure you let him do it.'

'Very well, I will do your bidding,' answered the girl, though the order seemed strange to her.

The next day the girl went down to the beach and saw her father fishing still closer to the sh.o.r.e.

'Why, here is that big fox again,' cried he, and she did not move, but waited while he fitted an arrow to his bow and shot her in the heart.

Then his wife got out of the canoe and began to skin the fox, and as she did so she found something on its foreleg which made her start.

'Surely that is my daughter's bracelet,' said she. 'Yet that is not possible!' And she continued her work. By and by she came to the throat, and there lay a necklace. 'Surely that is my daughter's necklace,' she repeated, and then she called to her husband, saying:

'I found our daughter's necklace and bracelet in this skin. Something that we know not of must have turned her into a fox.' And they both cried, for they remembered how the fox had run to meet them instead of going away.

But Indians are learned in things of which other people are ignorant, and they quickly set to work and laid the fox's body on a mat, and covered it with bags of eagle's down which every tribe has ready to use, and over all they placed a mat, weeping as they did so. After that they fasted and cleaned up their houses, and the girl's relations fasted likewise and cleaned up their houses. For many days they did this, and at length, at midnight, the father and mother felt their house shaking beneath them, and heard a noise coming from the room where the body lay.

Taking a burning stick, the mother hastened to the room, and found her daughter in her own shape, having become a doctor or shaman. Happy indeed were they to behold her thus; but, curious to say, the girl's husband at that moment lost all his wealth and was as poor as ever.

[_Tlingit Myths._]

_THE BOYHOOD OF A PAINTER_

If we are to believe the proverb, a 'Jack of all Trades is master of none,' and it is mostly true. But here and there even in our own day, we meet with some gifted person who seems to be able to do anything he desires, and during the periods of history when men--and boys--were left more to themselves and allowed to follow their own bent, these geniuses were much less rare than at present.

Now during the last half of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth there lived in Italy a group of men who were in the highest possible degree Jacks of all Trades, or could have been so if they had chosen. They are known to us princ.i.p.ally as painters, but the people amongst whom they lived very soon became aware that more than one of them could arrange you a water supply which would turn your mill wheel if there was no stream handy, or build you a palace if you were a rich citizen and wanted one, or help you to fortify your walls if you were the Lord of Milan or Florence or Ferrara; or fashion you a gold brooch as a present for your wife, if that was what you were seeking. As for making you a statue of yourself on horseback, to adorn the great square of the city over which you ruled--why, it was as easy to do that as to paint your portrait!

Chief among these 'Universal Geniuses,' as we should call them, was one Leonardo, son of the Florentine notary or lawyer, Piero da Vinci. He was born in the year 1452 not far from Florence and near the river Arno, and was declared by everyone to be one of the most beautiful children that ever was seen. As soon as he could crawl, he would scramble away (if his mother was busy and not thinking about him) to a place in the garden where there was always a heap of mud after a shower of rain, and sit happily on the ground pinching the mud into some sort of shape, which as he grew older, took more and more the form of something he knew. When his mother missed him and came in search of him, he would utter screams of disgust. Then the only way to quiet him was to play to him on the lute; for throughout his life Leonardo loved music, and at one time even had serious thoughts of being a professional musician.

Ser Piero was very proud of his astonishing little son, and the boy was still very young when his father decided that he must be taught by the best masters that could be found for him. Leonardo was quite willing.

Lessons were no trouble to him and he speedily took away the breath of all his teachers by the amazing quickness with which he grasped everything. It did not matter if the subject was arithmetic, or the principles of music, or the study of geometry; it was enough for the boy to hear a thing once for him to understand and remember, and he constantly asked his master such difficult questions and expressed doubts so hard to explain, that the poor man was thankful indeed when school hours were ended.

But whatever lessons he might be doing, Leonardo spent most of his spare time in drawing and in modelling figures in clay, as he had done from his babyhood. His father watched him for a time in silence, wondering within himself which of the boy's many talents ought to be made the occupation of his life, and at length he decided to take Leonardo to his friend Andrea del Verrocchio, and consult him on the matter. Verrocchio, like his pupil, was a painter, a geometrician, a sculptor, a goldsmith and a musician, but had at last settled down as a sculptor, and only now and then amused himself with other arts. When father and son entered his studio or workshop, Piero gave Leonardo some clay, and bade him model anything he fancied. The boy sat down on the floor, and soon finished a tiny statuette which might have been the work of Verrocchio himself, so true to life was the figure. The sculptor was delighted, and declared that Leonardo must come to him, and that he was very sure the pupil would shortly know as much as the master.

But though he had the gift of genius, Leonardo took as much trouble with his work as if he had just been an ordinary child, with his whole future life depending on his industry. And as some of you are perhaps fond of drawing, you may like to hear how one of the greatest artists in the world set about his pictures. First he took a handful of clay and poked it and pinched it until he had got his figure exactly as he wanted it to be. Then he dipped pieces of soft material in plaster, and arranged them in folds over the naked figure. Often the stuff was too stiff and would not go in the proper lines, but long ago Leonardo had learned that no man could be an artist of any kind unless he was possessed of endless patience, and he would sit for hours over his figure, taking the drapery off and trying it afresh, till at length it a.s.sumed exactly the right shape. As soon as he had a model precisely to his mind, he would stretch a bit of very fine cambric or linen, that was old and soft, upon a board, and on this--or sometimes on paper--he would copy his figure in pencil. As he grew older, Verrocchio would teach him how you could raise heavy weights by the help of levers or cranes, how to draw up water from immense depths, or how to tunnel through mountains--for the Italians have always been famous for their skill as engineers. But it was the boy Leonardo, and not the man Verrocchio, who invented the plan of so altering the course of the river Arno that a ca.n.a.l might be cut between the cities of Florence and Pisa. Leonardo did not live to see this done, but two hundred years after his death a pupil of the astronomer Galileo executed it after his scheme, for the Medici ruler of Florence. He was very anxious also to raise the Church of San Giovanni and to rest it on stone 'steps,' as he called them, and showed the Signory or governing citizens of Florence how it could be done. And, says his chronicler, so persuasive was his tongue and so good seemed his reasons that while he was speaking he moved them to belief in his words, although out of his presence they all well knew it was impossible.

_Was_ it? one wonders now.

Many stories, of course, were told of him during these years--for the Florentines were not slow to find out the genius who dwelt among them--and here is one that is very characteristic of the boy. Verrocchio was working on a picture of the baptism of our Lord by St. John, and he entrusted the painting of the Angel standing by to his pupil. When it was finished the master came and looked at it, and remained silently gazing at the figure. He was too true an artist not to feel at once that he and Leonardo had changed places, and that the boy's Angel was worth more than all the rest of the picture. The chronicler tells us that he was so wounded at this discovery that he never touched paint any more, but though it is always rather hard to find ourselves thrown into the shade, probably Verrocchio's renunciation of painting lay deeper than mere envy. Why should he do badly what another could do perfectly? The boy's genius was greater than his: let his master be the first to admit it.

Leonardo's father, Ser Piero, had gone to his country house to escape the heats of a Florentine summer. He was resting one evening in his garden when a servant appeared, saying that one of his farmers desired to speak with him. Ser Piero gave orders that the man should be brought to him, as he knew him well, and they had often fished together.

'Well, what now, Francisco?' he asked, as the farmer came up bowing, and bearing in his hands a wooden shield. The man explained that he had cut down a fig tree near his house, because it was old and bore no fruit, and had himself cut the shield he was carrying out of the wood, and had brought it to his lord, humbly hoping that Ser Piero might have the goodness to get it painted with some design, for he wished to hang it up in his kitchen, as a remembrance of the old tree.

'Very willingly will I do so,' answered Ser Piero, and when next he went to Florence he sought out his son and handed him the shield, merely telling him to paint something on it. Leonardo happened to be busy at the moment, but as soon as he had time to examine the piece of wood he found it was rough and ill made, and would need much attention before it would be possible to paint it. The first thing he did was to hold the shield before the fire till the fibres were softened and the crookedness could be straightened out. The surface was then planed and made smooth, and covered with gypsum.

So far he had not thought what the picture should be, but now he began to consider this important matter, and as he pondered a look of mischief danced in his eyes.