Fairy Tales

THE SNOWMAN

“I’M CREAKING ALL OVER in this delightfully cold weather!” said the snowman. “The wind bites life into you, that’s for sure. And how that glowing one is glowering!” He meant the sun that was just about to set. “She won’t get me to blink. I know how to hang on to my bits and pieces!” These were two big triangular pieces of roof tile that he had for eyes. His mouth was a piece of an old rake, and so he had teeth. He had been born to the shouts of “hurrah” from the boys, and greeted by the ringing bells and cracking whips of the sleighs.

The sun went down, and the full moon came up, round and huge, clear and lovely in the blue sky.

“There she is again from a different direction,” said the snowman. He thought it was the sun again. “I’ve broken her of glaring! Now she can just hang there and give some light so I can see myself. If I only knew how one goes about moving. I would so dearly like to move! If I could do that, I would go down and slide on the ice like I saw the boys doing. But I don’t know how to run!”

“Be gone! Gone!” barked the old watchdog. He was a little hoarse and had been ever since he was a house dog and lay under the stove. “The sun will teach you how to run, I’m sure. I saw that with your predecessor last year and his predecessor too. Gone! Gone! And they’re all gone.”

“I don’t understand you, buddy,” said the snowman. “Shall that thing up there teach me how to run?” He meant the moon. “Well she ran before, it’s true, when I stared at her. Now she’s sneaking up from another direction.”

“You don’t know anything,” said the watchdog, “but, of course, you’ve just been slapped up. The one you see there is called the moon. The one who went was the sun. She’ll come back tomorrow and certainly teach you to run down to the moat. There’ll soon be a change in the weather. I can tell by my left hind leg—it has a shooting pain in it. We’ll have a weather change!”

“I don’t understand him,” said the snowman, “but I have the impression that he’s saying something unpleasant. The one who glared and went away, the one he calls the sun—she’s not my friend. I have a feeling about that!”

“Be gone! Gone!” barked the watchdog, turned around three times, and went into his kennel to sleep.

There actually was a change in the weather. A fog, thick and dank, lay over the whole neighborhood in the early hours, and at dawn a wind came up. The wind was so icy, and there was a heavy frost. But what a sight to see when the sun came up! All the trees and bushes were covered with hoar-frost. It was like an entire forest of white coral, as if all the branches were heaped with gleaming white flowers. Each and every one of the countless fine little branches that you couldn’t see in the summer because of the leaves, now stood out. It looked like lace, and was so shiny white that it was as if every branch shone with a dazzling white radiance. The weeping birch stirred in the wind. There was life in it, as there is in the trees in summer. It was all incomparably beautiful. And when the sun shone, how everything sparkled as if it were powdered with diamond dust, and across the snow-cover big diamonds glittered, or you could have imagined that there were innumerable tiny little candles burning, whiter even than the white snow.

“What matchless beauty!” said a young girl, who stepped out into the garden with a young man. They stopped right by the snowman and looked at the brilliant trees. “There’s no more beautiful sight in the summer,” she said, her eyes shining.

“And you wouldn’t find such a fellow as that either,” said the young man, pointing at the snowman. “He’s splendid.”

The young girl laughed, nodded to the snowman, and danced with her friend across the snow, that crunched under their feet as if they were walking on starch.

“Who were those two?” the snowman asked the watchdog. “You’ve been here longer than I have. Do you know them?”

“Yes, I do,” said the watchdog. “She has petted me, and he gave me a bone. I wouldn’t bite them!”

“But what are they doing here?” asked the snowman.

“They’re sweethearrrrrrts,” growled the watchdog. “They are going to move into a doghouse and gnaw bones together. Be gone! Gone!”

“Are those two as important as you and I?” asked the snowman.

“Well, they belong to the family,” said the watchdog. “You sure don’t know much when you’re born yesterday! I can see that from you. I have age and wisdom and know everyone here! And I knew a time when I didn’t stand here in the cold in chains. Gone! Gone!”

“The cold is lovely,” said the snowman. “Tell me, tell me! But don’t rattle your chain because it makes me queasy.”

“Gone! Gone!” barked the watchdog. “I was a puppy once. Little and lovely, they said. At that time I lay in a velvet chair in the house, and in the lap of the master. I was kissed on the snout, and had my paws wiped with an embroidered handkerchief. I was called ‘the loveliest’ and ‘little doggy-woggy,’ but then I got too big for them! They gave me to the housekeeper, and I went down to the basement. You can see in there from where you’re standing. You can see the room where I was the master because that’s what I was at the housekeeper’s. I guess it was a poorer home than upstairs, but it was more comfortable. I wasn’t squeezed and carried around by the children like I was upstairs. The food was just as good as before, and there was more of it! I had my own pillow, and then there was the stove, which is the loveliest thing of all this time of year! I crawled way back under it, so I disappeared. Oh, I still dream about that stove! Gone! Gone!”

“Is a stove so lovely?” asked the snowman. “Does it look like me?”

“It’s the very opposite of you! It’s coal black. It has a long neck with a brass collar. It eats wood so flames come out of its mouth. You have to stay close to its side, very close, or under it. It’s a boundless pleasure! You should be able to see it through the window from where you’re standing.”

And the snowman looked, and he really did see a black shiny polished object with a brass collar. The fire was shining out from below. The snowman felt so strange. He had a sensation that he couldn’t himself account for. Unknown feelings came over him, but they were feelings that all human beings know, if they aren’t snowmen.

“And why did you leave her?” asked the snowman. He felt that it must be a female being. “How could you leave such a place?”

“I couldn’t help it,” said the watchdog. “They threw me out and put me here on a chain. I bit the youngest boy in the shank because he took a shank-bone I was gnawing on. A shank for a shank, I thought. But they took it badly, and from that time on I’ve been chained here. I’ve lost my clear voice. Listen to how hoarse I am: Gone! Gone! That was the end of it.”

The snowman wasn’t listening any longer. He stared steadily into the housekeeper’s basement, into the room where the stove stood on its four iron legs, about the same size as the snowman himself.

“There’s such a strange creaking inside me,” he said. “Will I never be able to get inside there? It’s an innocent wish, and our innocent wishes surely must be granted. It’s my greatest wish, my only wish, and it would really be injustice if it weren’t fulfilled. I must get in there. I must lean up against her, even if I have to break the window!”

“You’ll never get in there,” said the watchdog. “And if you did get to the stove, you’d be a goner. Gone!”

“I’m as good as gone,” said the snowman. “I think I’m breaking in two.”

All day the snowman stood looking in the window. At dusk the room was even more inviting. There was such a soft glow coming from the stove, not like the light of the moon or the sun. No, like only a stove can glow when there’s something in it. When someone opened the door, flames shot out of the stove, as was its habit. The snowman’s white face turned red, and the red glow spread across his chest.

“I can’t bear this,” he said. “How it becomes her to stick out her tongue!”

The night was very long, but not for the snowman. He stood there with his own lovely thoughts that all froze creaking hard.

In the morning the basement windows were frosted over. They had the most beautiful ice flowers on them that any snowman could wish for, but they hid the stove. The panes wouldn’t thaw out, and he couldn’t see her. There was creaking and crunching, and it was just the kind of frosty weather that should please a snowman, but he was not pleased. He could and should have felt so happy, but he wasn’t happy. He had Stuck-on-Stove Syndrome.

“That’s a very dangerous illness for a snowman,” said the watchdog. “I suffered from it myself, but I’ve recovered! Be gone! Gone! We’re going to have a change in the weather.”

And the weather did change. It changed to a thaw.

The thawing increased, and the snowman decreased. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t complain, and that’s a sure sign.

One morning he collapsed. There was something that looked like a broomstick standing in the air where he had been. The boys had built him around it.

“Now I understand his longing,” said the watchdog. “The snowman had a stove poker inside him! That’s what moved him so, but now it’s over. Gone! Gone!”

And soon the winter was gone too.

“Be gone! Gone!” barked the watchdog. But the little girls sang in the yard:“Sweet woodruff, fresh and proud, now sprout.

And woolly willow, hang your mittens out.

Come larks and cuckoos, sing so airy—

Spring has sprung in February.

‘Cuckoo—tweet tweet’—I’ll sing along.

Come dear sun—shine soon and long!”

And then no one thinks of the snowman.