"I know as much as you do, anyway," said the marsh witch, and wrinkled her nose, which wasn't as pretty as it had been when she was an elf maiden. "Poetry and fairytales and stage plays are cut from one and the same cloth, as is all other literature; and as far as I am concerned, they can go and lie down wherever they please. All their work and all their talk--the same stuff can be brewed both cheaper and faster than they do it. I'll give you some for nothing. I have a chestful of bottled literature right here in this tantalus. There you will find the essence of poetry, and prose, and drama, the very best of it, brewed from both sharp and sweet herbs: all the literature that a person needs, and one can put a drop or two on one's handkerchief for Sundays and bank holidays."
"How amazing!" exclaimed the man, who was none other than H.C. Andersen himself. "You mean you actually have a liquor cabinet of literature in bottles?"
"More than you could bear to sniff," answered the marsh witch. "Have you heard the story about the maid who stepped on a loaf of bread to avoid getting her shoes dirty? I believe someone wrote it down and it has since been printed and published."
"I am the one who wrote it," said the man.
"Well, in that case you must be familiar with it. Do you remember what happened to the maid Ingrid, how she sank down into the ground? Well, she landed right in my potion brewery, on the very day when the boogeyman's great-grandmother was paying me a visit. 'Give me that creature who's just sunk down here as a memento, as a knickknack,' begged the great-grandmother, 'and I'll put her on a pedestal to remind me of my visit with you.' So I gave her the girl and the great-grandmother in return gave me her portable medicine chest and tantalus, or liquor cabinet--not that I have any use for it, it's a whole cupboard filled with literature in bottles. Look around! You have your seven four-leaf clovers in your pocket and on top of those a six-leaf clover, so, if you put that six-leaf clover over your left eye for a monocle, you ought to be able to see it."
There in the middle of the meadow was something that looked like the hollow stump of an alder tree, but it was the liquor cabinet that had belonged to the boogeyman's great-grandmother, a very poisonous old creature (as old as Time itself) who was never idle and always doing something. She never goes out without taking some needlework with her, and she had brought some this time. She was sewing bits of leather to put in people's red shoes, so that they should have no rest, and keep on dancing even after their hearts fail, as their bodies decay. She embroidered lies, and worked up into mischief and slander thoughtless words that would otherwise have fallen harmlessly to the ground, had she not strung them together. Yes, she could sew, embroider, and weave, that old great-grandmother! "Anyone in the whole wide world could come and make use of it, the problem is to be able to find it," said the marsh witch. The cabinet could be opened in front and in back, on all four sides, and at the corners. It was a work of art and yet it resembled an ordinary hollow tree stump. Poets and novelists and playwrights from all over the world, but especially from our own Scandinavia, were to be found here in imitation. The rather artistic bas-reliefs represented all of them, as caricatures. The best of their work had been selected, criticized, improved upon, and finally brought up to date. With great talent--that is the word generally used when one does not want to say "genius"--the great-grandmother had taken from nature the smell or the flavour that seemed most like the style of this or that writer, then added a bit of wicked witchcraft to it, and presto! voilà! she had fiction and poetry and drama in bottles, preserved for eternity.
"Let me have a look inside!" begged the man.
"I have more important things than that to talk with you about," the marsh witch insisted.
"But now that we are here," mumbled the man as he opened the tantalus. "There are bottles of all different sizes," he said excitedly. "What's in this one? . . . And in that?"
"Here we have one that is called 'Essence of May.'" The witch stared at the small green bottle. "I haven't tried it, but they say that, if you spill a little on the floor, where it falls a beautiful lily-pond appears, the kind you find in the forest, in which water-lilies and cattails and irises and spearmint are growing. A drop or two in a notebook, even one from a school-child of the first grade, and you have a springtime idyl of fragrance strong enough to be produced on the stage and long enough to make you fall asleep. I am sure that it is meant as a courteous compliment to me that the label reads: 'Brewed by the Marsh Witch.'"
Another bottle was called "Scandal." It looked as if it contained only dirty water, and that was what was in it, only dirty water; but an effervescent powder of street gossip, made up of two grains of truth and two gallons of lies, had been added to make it fizz. The mixture, that tasted like vitriol, had been carefully stirred with a twig--not one that had been used in a cat-of-nine-tails on a criminal's back or by a harsh schoolteacher on naughty children, but a twig that had been taken from a broom with which the streets were swept.
There was also a bottle of devotional piety, ready to be set to sacred music like hymns. Every drop in the bottle had been inspired by the portals of hell, so that it sounded like a clanging door slam shut of those same hell-gates, and penned with the sweat and blood and tears of punishment and penance of the damned.
There stood the bottle of all bottles: the largest of them all, and it took over half the cabinet. It was a large beast-skin bag filled with true-to-life everyday realistic stories. It had been wrapped and covered and doubly sealed with both a whole pigskin and the urine bladder of that pig, so that it couldn't lose any of its strength, because it lost its flavour so easily. From this bottle, each and every nation could make its own soup, all depending on how you turned and tipped the bottle; what would come forth would depend upon how you'd turn and tip the pigskin. There was old Prussian Blutsuppe, blood soup with cannon-meatballs; tasteless English governess soup; and French pot au coq, made from chicken legs (rooster leg bones) and frogs' eggs--in other languages, it is called cancan soup or cabaret soup. There was also a thin peasant soup for those who like high society, with real counts and courtiers who lay like vegetables on the bottom of the plate and greasy globs of philosophy, like fat philosophical eyes, floating on top in the middle. Oh, there was an endless variety in that bottle, but the thickest of all soups was the Russian borscht. And it is still regarded as such.
Tragedy was bottled in champagne bottles that start out with a bang, as tragedy should. Light Comedy was nothing but a bottleful of fine itching or sneezing powder to throw into the eyes of the audience. There were bottles of the more vulgar kind of comedy, but they were empty except for the playbills, in fact Coarse Comedy consisted only of future playbills, on which the titles were in the boldest typeface; there were some excellent titles: for instance, "One Right on the Jaw!" "The Sweet Jackass!" and "She's Drunk as a Newt!"
The man looked thoughtfully at all the bottles, but the marsh witch had no patience with them, she had more important matters to think about.
"You have looked long enough at that junk shop," she said.
While the man, the author, was completely lost in his thoughts, the Woman of the Marsh thought ahead; she wanted to put an end to this.
"By now you must have seen enough of the hodgepodge cabinet," she said. "You know what it is now."
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