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How the Quest Began

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“Who would understand a poet and a poet’s work, must go to a poet’s land.”—Goethe.

On the day when they first thought of the life of the Insect Man it was hot summer under the Yew Tree, in spite of the primroses by the old church wall and the first white violets in the grass. Geraldine was alone with her French governess and feeling very hot, because she was angry and naughty and it was summer. But Mademoiselle, happening to glance down at the flowers, and feeling that they were supporting her opinion that it was merely a sunny March day in a cold English spring, drew her fur coat closer round her and grew angrier with the bare-armed, bareheaded, cotton-frocked person on the other side of the table.

She had lost one battle that morning about lessons over the fire in the comfortable schoolroom and now she was in a fair way to lose another. “Never let a child win a skirmish,” she registered mentally for the hundred and first time, while her fur bristled irritably against the cotton opposite. There was something definitely wrong with cotton; there was so little of it—just a little blue, like the sky—tipped by that wisp of a face, two blue eyes, which recalled the cotton and a golden wave above, like a sunny cloud; and the whole so naughty, so stiff, so unbendable!

Mademoiselle had tried everything, everything short of yielding, of allowing Geraldine to alter the words of the fable which she had been told to learn. Mademoiselle suspected her of knowing the thing quite well, of being therefore merely naughty in changing the title of La Fontaine’s famous fable, “The Grasshopper and the Ant.” She had repeated it in English docilely enough with her own pleasant little rhythmic swing, in an English that sounded unfamiliar and almost as if she had put it into verse herself:

The grasshopper who sung

All the summer through

By bitter want was stung

When the stark wind blew.

Not a bit of fly

Nor scrap of little worm

To put into her pie!

Hunger held her firm.

Then to the ant she turned

To beg a grain or two.

“I’ll pay back when I’ve earned—

Capital and interest too.”

The ant no lender she!

“What did you ’neath the Sun?”

“I sang!” “Oh! Dearie, me!”

“Now dance, till dinner you’ve won.”

But when it came to the French: “La sauterelle ayant chanté” began Geraldine over and over again, and Mademoiselle, with that low correcting voice of hers: “No! Geraldine. La cigale ayant chanté.”

A pause, and then Geraldine again: “La sauterelle ayant....”

“La cigale is not la sauterelle,” stamped Mademoiselle at the end of her patience.

“No,” said Geraldine darkly, “I know.”

“Then why don’t you say what La Fontaine wrote?”

“Because he made a silly mistake.”

Mademoiselle’s face was a delightful study for the scrap in cotton, though she probably did not quite understand the French woman’s deep, awed conviction of the perfect rightness of the great fabulist. For a French woman there are no mistakes in La Fontaine’s fables.

Conversation between the two ceased to be possible and no one knows what would have happened, or if this tale ever would have been written, if Penelope had not appeared suddenly with her basket of daffodils from the rhododendron path.

“Ah! Miss Penelope,” cried Mademoiselle, “This Child! this morning! She is insupportable! She says La Fontaine made a mistake! I know not what is in her head, but La Fontaine! a mistake!”

Penelope took the third chair, resting her slender clasped fingers on her basket’s high handle, while a little slow smile crept first into her blue eyes and then caught her long, curving, kind lips. Behind Penelope’s smile there was such a long, long tale, a tale thousands of years old, that caused the smile, as she thought of how French La Fontaine was mixed up in it, and the old Greek Æsop and the tale-tellers of ancient India and the Insect Man; especially the Insect Man! And now her little step-sister was in it, who had taken up the cudgels last night on behalf of the cigale, which was only a grasshopper, and was fighting her governess this morning, because she would not have the cigale’s character blackened by any poet however great; and Mademoiselle was in it, whose reverence for La Fontaine was almost religious. Penelope knew all about it, because she had heard her father, who liked doing Geraldine’s prep. with her, telling her the story as a reward for making a rhymed translation of the fable. But between the necessity of upholding governesses and the equal necessity of taking sides with her sister who happened to be in the right, she was in a quandary.

Geraldine, she said, those two old ladies will never find that key unless you get it for them. When you come back, you can tell Mademoiselle what your Insect Man says about the cigale and the ant, and if you tell it very well, I will tell you the perfectly new, lovely idea I have just thought of for our holiday.

Geraldine was back in the twinkling of an eye and with her gaze fixed on Penelope to see if she was content with the telling, she began, while Penelope prayed silently that Mademoiselle would consent to listen:

The Insect Man

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