Сказки / Fairy Tales
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‘I am your mother.’
‘You are mad to say so,’ cried the Star-Child angrily. ‘I am not your son, you are a beggar, and ugly, and in rags. Therefore get out, and let me never see your foul face!’
‘But you are indeed my little son, whom I bare in the forest,’ she cried. She fell on her knees, and held out her arms to him. ‘The robbers stole you from me, and left you to die,’ she murmured, ‘but I recognized you when I saw you. I also recognized the signs, the cloak of golden tissue and the amber chain. Therefore please come with me! Come with me, my son, I need your love.’
But the Star-Child did not move from his place. He shut the doors of his heart against her. The woman wept for pain.
At last he spoke to her, and his voice was hard and bitter.
‘If you are really my mother,’ he said, ‘stay away, and do not come here to bring me to shame. I thought I was the child of a Star, and not a beggar’s child, as you tell me that I am. Therefore get away, and let me never see you again!’
‘Alas! my son,’ she cried, ‘will you not kiss me before I go? I suffered much to find you.’
‘No,’ said the Star-Child, ‘you are very foul, I can’t look at you. I prefer to kiss the adder or the toad than you.’
So the woman rose up, and went away into the forest. She wept bitterly. When the Star-Child saw that she was away, he was glad, and ran back to his playmates to play with them.
But when they beheld him, they mocked him and said,
‘Oh, you are as foul as the toad, and as loathsome as the adder. Go away, because we don’t want to play with you!’
And they drove him out [11] of the garden.
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they drove him out –
The Star-Child frowned and said to himself,
‘What is this that they say to me? I will go to the river and look into it. It will tell me of my beauty.’
So he went to the river and looked into it, and lo! His face was as the face of a toad, and his body was like an adder. And he fell down on the grass and wept, and said to himself,
‘Surely this is the result of my sin. I denied my mother, and drove her away. I was proud, and cruel to her. I will go and seek her through the whole world. I will ask her to forgive me!’
A little daughter of the Woodcutter came to him. She put her hand upon his shoulder and said,
‘You lost your beauty – it does not matter [12] . Stay with us, and I will not mock at you.’
And he said to her,
‘No, I was cruel to my mother, and this evil is a punishment. I must go and wander through the world till I find her. I hope she will give me her forgiveness.’
So he ran away into the forest and called out to his mother to come to him, but there was no answer. All day long he called to her, and, when the sun set he lay down to sleep on a bed of leaves. The birds and the animals fled from him. They remembered his cruelty. He was alone save for the toad and the adder that watched him.
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it does not matter – это не имеет значения
In the morning he rose up, and plucked some bitter berries from the trees and ate them. After that he went through the wood and wept sorely. And he wanted to know if anybody saw his mother.
He said to the Mole,
‘You can go beneath the earth. Tell me, is my mother there?’
And the Mole answered,
‘You blinded my eyes. How can I know?’
He said to the Linnet,
‘You can fly over the tops of the tall trees. You can see the whole world. Tell me, can you see my mother?’
And the Linnet answered,
‘You hurt my wings for your pleasure. How can I fly?’
And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said,
‘Where is my mother?’
And the Squirrel answered,
‘You killed my children. Do you want to kill her, too?’
And the Star-Child wept and bowed his head, and prayed forgiveness of God’s creatures. He went on through the forest, he looked for the beggar-woman. On the third day he came to the other side of the forest and went down into the plain [13] .
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went down into the plain –
When he passed through the villages the children mocked him, and threw stones at him. The farmers did not let him sleep even in the byres, because he was very foul. The workers drove him away, and there was none who had pity on him. Nor could he hear anywhere of the beggar-woman who was his mother.
During three years he wandered over the world, and often saw beggars on the road. But he met his mother nowhere.
He wandered over the world, and in the world there was neither love nor kindness nor charity for him. It was such a world as he made for himself in the days of his great pride.
One evening he came to the gate of a city that stood by a river. He was weary and footsore and tried to enter. But the soldiers who stood on guard dropped their halberts [14] across the entrance, and said roughly to him,
‘What do you want in the city?’
‘I look for my mother,’ he answered, ‘please let me enter in, she may be in this city.’
But the soldiers mocked at him. One of them wagged a black beard, and set down his shield and cried,
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halberds – алебарды
‘Truly, your mother will not be merry when she sees you, because you are uglier than the toad of the marsh, or the adder that crawls in the fen. Get away! Your mother does not dwell in this city.’
And another soldier, who held a yellow banner in his hand, said to him,
‘Who is your mother? Why are you not together with her?’
The Star-Child answered,
‘My mother is a beggar as I am. I treated her evilly. Please let me pass that she may give me her forgiveness, if she lives in this city.’