“I want to go to war! I want to go to war!” shouted the tin soldier as loudly as he could and threw himself right down on the floor.
What happened to him? The old man searched for him, and the little boy searched for him, but the tin soldier was gone, and gone he remained. “I’m sure I’ll find him,” said the old man, but he never did find him. The floor was cracked and had holes in it. The tin soldier had fallen through a crack and lay there as if in an open grave.
And that day passed by, and the little boy went home. The week passed and several more weeks went by. The windows were frosted over. The little boy had to breathe on them to get a little peep-hole where he could look over to the old house, and there the snow had drifted into all the scrolls and inscriptions. It covered up the steps as if there was no one at home, and there wasn’t anyone at home. The old man was dead!
A carriage stopped there in the evening, and they carried him out to it in his coffin. He was going to be buried out in the country, and the carriage drove away, but no one followed along. All of his friends were dead, you see. The little boy blew kisses to the coffin as it was driven away.
A few days later there was an auction at the old house, and the little boy watched from his window as things were carried away: the old knights and the old women, the herb pots with the long ears, the old chairs and the old cabinets. Some went to one place, some to another. The portrait of the woman that was found at the second-hand shop was returned there again, and there it would always hang, since no one knew her any longer. No one cared about the old picture.
In the spring the house itself was torn down, because people said it was a monstrosity. You could look right into the room with the pigskin wallpaper, which was tattered and torn. All the greenery around the balcony hung randomly on the fallen beams. And then it was cleaned up.
“That helped,” said the neighbor houses.
A beautiful house was built there with wide windows and smooth white walls. But in front, right where the old house had stood, they planted a little garden and wild grapevines grew up the neighbor’s walls. In front of the garden a big iron fence with an iron gate was built. It looked magnificent. People stood outside and peeked in. And scores of sparrows hung on the vines and chirped all at once as best they could, but they weren’t chattering about the old house because they couldn’t remember that. So many years had passed, and the little boy had grown up to be a good and capable man whom his parents were proud of. He had gotten married and with his young wife, had moved into the house where the garden was. He was there with her one day when she planted a wild flower that she thought was so lovely. She planted it with her little hand and patted the earth into place with her fingers. Oh! What was that? Something pricked her. Something sharp was sticking out of the soft soil.
It was—just think! It was the tin soldier, the one who had disappeared in the old man’s house, and who had been rumbled and tumbled about between beams and gravel and then finally had been lying for many years in the ground.
The young wife cleaned off the soldier, first with a green leaf and then with her fine handkerchief that had such a lovely fragrance! And for the tin soldier, it was as if he woke up from a trance.
“Let me see him,” said the young man, and he laughed and shook his head. “Well, it couldn’t be him, but he reminds me of a story about a tin soldier I once had when I was a little boy.” And then he told his wife about the old house, the old man, and the tin soldier he had sent over to him because he was so terribly alone. He told the story exactly as it had happened so that his young wife got tears in her eyes hearing about the old house and the old man.
“It’s possible that it’s the same tin soldier,” she said. “I’m going to save it and remember everything you’ve told me, but you have to show me the old man’s grave.”
“I don’t know where it is,” he said. “No one knows! All his friends were dead. No one looked after it, and I was just a little boy.”
“How terribly alone he must have been,” she said.
“Terribly alone,” said the tin soldier, “but it’s lovely not being forgotten!”
“Lovely,” shouted something near by, but no one but the tin soldier saw that it was a piece of the pigskin wallpaper. All the gold was gone, and it looked like wet earth, but it had an opinion and gave it:
However the tin soldier didn’t believe it.
THE RAGS
OUTSIDE THE FACTORY THERE were bundles of rags piled up in big stacks, gathered up from far and wide. Each rag had its story—each had a tale to tell, but we can’t listen to all of them. Some of the rags were domestic, and others came from foreign countries. There was a Danish rag lying right beside a Norwegian rag. The one was Danish through and through, and the other was utterly Norwegian, and that was the entertaining thing about them, as every sensible Norwegian or Dane would agree.
They recognized each other by their speech, although the Norwegian said that their languages were as different from each other as French from Hebrew. “We go to the mountains to fetch our language raw and original, and the Dane makes his sugar-coated mushy gibberish.”1
The rags continued to talk, and a rag is a rag in every country. They only count for something when they’re in a rag pile.
“I am Norwegian!” said the Norwegian rag. “And when I say that I’m Norwegian, that’s all I need to say! I’m as firm in my fibers as the primordial mountains of old Norway, a country that has a constitution just like free America! It tickles my threads to think of what I am and to let my thoughts clink like ore in words of granite!”
“But we have literature!” said the Danish rag. “Do you understand what that is?”
“Understand!” repeated the Norwegian. “You flat land liver!—I should lift you into the mountains and let the Northern lights enlighten you, rag that you are! When the ice thaws in the Norwegian sun, then old Danish tubs sail up to us with butter and cheese, actually edible wares, but Danish literature follows along as ballast! We don’t need it! Where fresh water bubbles, you can dispense with stale beer, and in Norway there is a well that hasn’t been drilled, that the newspapers haven’t spread around and made known all over Europe, and that hasn’t been
