grey, ice-cold hand with long thin awl-like fingers. Each of them was a tool of torture. The thumb and index finger were pliers and a thumbscrew. The middle finger ended in a sharp awl. The ring finger was a drill, and the little finger a needle injecting mosquito poison.
“I’ll teach you to write poetry!” she shouted. “A great poet shall have a great toothache. A small poet, a small toothache.”
“Oh, let me be a small one!” I begged. “Or not be at all! And I’m not a poet. I only have bouts of writing, like I have bouts of toothache. Go away! Go away!”
“Then do you acknowledge that I am more powerful than poetry, philosophy, mathematics, and all music?!” she asked. “More powerful than all the feelings and sensations painted and carved in marble? I am older than all of them. I was born right beside the Garden of Eden, outside where the wind blew, and the soggy toadstools grew. I got Eve to put on clothing in cold weather, and Adam too. You’d better believe there was power in that first toothache!”
“I believe all of it!” I said. “Go away! Go away!”
“Well, if you’ll give up being a poet, never set verse on paper, blackboard or any other writing material again, then I’ll let you go. But I’ll come back if you start writing.”
“I swear!” I said. “Just never let me see or sense you ever again!”
“You will see me, but in a plumper figure, more dear to you than I am now! You will see me as Aunt Mille, and I’ll say ‘Write, my sweet boy! You are a great poet, perhaps the greatest we have!’ But if you believe me and start writing, then I’ll set your verses to music and play them on your mouth organ! You sweet child!—Remember me when you see Aunt Mille!”
And then she disappeared.
As she left, I felt a glowing stab of the awl in my cheekbone, but it soon subsided. I felt like I was gliding on soft water, saw white water lilies with their wide green leaves bending, sinking down under me, then withering, dissolving—and I sank with them, dissolving in peace and rest.
“Die, melt away like snow” sang and clang in the water. “Dissolve into the clouds, drift away like the clouds!”
Great lighted names shone down to me through the water, inscriptions on waving victory banners— Immortality’s patent applications—written on Mayfly wings.
My sleep was deep, sleep without dreams. I didn’t hear the whistling wind, the slamming gate, the neighbor’s ringing portal bell, or the lodger’s heavy exercising.
Such bliss!
Then a gust of wind blew open the locked door to where Auntie was sleeping. She leapt up, put on her shoes and clothes, and came in to me.
I was sleeping like an angel of God, she said, and she didn’t have the heart to wake me.
I awoke on my own, opened my eyes and had completely forgotten that Auntie was in the house. But I soon remembered it, and remembered my toothache vision. Dream and reality merged together.
“I don’t suppose you wrote anything last night, after we said good night to each other?” she asked. “I wish you had! You’re my poet, now and always.”
It seemed to me that she smiled so cunningly. I wasn’t sure if it was the good Auntie Mille, who loved me, or the terrible figure I had sworn to in the night.
“Did you write anything, dear child?”
“No, no!” I cried. “You are Aunt Mille, aren’t you?”
“Who else?” she said. And it
She kissed me, got a cab, and went home.
I wrote down what’s written here. It’s not in verse, and it will never be printed—.
Here the manuscript ended.
My young friend, the future greengrocer apprentice, couldn’t procure the missing pages. They had gone into the world as wrapping paper around salt herring, butter and green soap. They had fulfilled their destiny.
The brewer is dead. Auntie is dead. And the student is dead, he whose sparks of poetry went into the waste barrel.
Everything goes to waste.
And that’s the end of the story, the story about Auntie Toothache.
NOTES
1 Pen name of German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825).
2 Equating the toothache with the devil, Andersen adds the Latin
THE CRIPPLE
THERE WAS AN OLD estate with an excellent young master and mistress. They had blessings and riches. They enjoyed themselves, and they also did a lot of good. They wanted everyone to be as happy as they themselves were.
On Christmas Eve a beautiful, decorated Christmas tree stood in the old great hall. Fires were burning in the fireplaces, and the old portraits were decorated with spruce branches. The master and mistress and their guests gathered here, and there was singing and dancing.
