CHAPTER VIII CONTINUATION OF THE TALE OF THE HARD KNOT Now you well know,
The judge told the children the next evening,
Why the queen was keeping their beautiful princess so carefully guarded.
How could she help but worry that Lady Mouserings would return and make good on her threat to bite the princess to death.
Joselmeier's contraptions were of no use against the clever and shrewd Lady Mouserings.
And the court astronomer,
Who was also the royal family's private astrologer,
Had said that Mr.
Purr and his family would be able to keep Lady Mouserings away from the cradle.
Therefore it happened that every attendant was ordered to hold a tomcat on her lap and stroke his back to make his job a little less tedious.
One night at midnight,
One of the attendants woke from a deep sleep.
The room was silent,
There was not a purr to be heard.
One could have heard the woodworms nibbling at the timbers.
Then she saw a large,
Ugly mouse standing on its hint feet near the princess's face.
With a frightened cry that woke everyone else,
The attendant jumped to her feet.
Lady Mouserings,
For it was none other,
Ran into a corner.
The cats ran after her,
But they were too late.
She disappeared into a crack in the floor.
Just then,
Pearly Bat woke up from the noise and began crying pitifully.
Thank heavens,
She's alive,
They said.
But what horror awaited them?
Instead of an angelic little face and a perfectly little body,
A hideous and huge head was attached to a shrunken and shrivelled body.
Her sparkling little azure eyes had become staring green eyes that almost looked as if they'd pop out of her head,
And her sweet little mouth now stretched from ear to ear.
The queen shut herself away in mourning,
And the walls of the king's study had to be paddled,
Because he would very often bang his head against the walls and cry most pitifully.
Oh,
What an unhappy monarch am I!
One might think that he might have realized that it may have been better to go on eating his sausages without fat,
And leave Lady Mouserings and her family in peace,
Under the stove.
But he didn't.
Instead he put all the blame on the court,
Clockmaker and wizard,
Christian Elias Drosselmayr of Nuremberg,
And issued him an order,
Restore the princess to her former self within four weeks,
Or find a cure that was certain to work,
Or suffer the disgraceful death of beheading.
Drosselmayr was in no small state of terror,
But he trusted in his craft and in luck,
And said to the first thing that seemed useful to him.
He carefully took the little princess apart without harming her,
And examined her internal structure.
But all he could discover what was that the larger the princess grew,
The worse her condition would become.
He put the princess back together again,
And sat down by her cradle in despair,
Which he was not allowed to leave.
It was in the fourth week,
Wednesday in fact,
When the king looked at Drosselmayr with eyes flashing in rage and cried,
Christian Elias Drosselmayr,
Cure the princess,
Or die.
Drosselmayr began to cry bitterly,
But Princess Pearly Bat happily cracked nuts.
For the first time,
Drosselmayr took note of the princess's unusual appetite for nuts,
Which she cracked with the very teeth she had been born with.
In fact,
The princess had cried for hours after her transformation,
Until a nut chanced to roll by.
She promptly snatched it up,
Cracked it open,
Ate the core,
And immediately quieted down.
Since then,
All attendants were advised to bring nuts whenever they came in.
Then,
O holy instinct of nature,
Present in all things,
Christian Elias Drosselmayr cried,
You now show me the door to the answer to this mystery.
I will knock,
And it will open.
He immediately requested to speak with the court astronomer,
And was led by guards to him.
Both men tearfully embraced each other,
For they were close friends.
Then they went together into a secret room,
Where they consulted many books concerning instincts,
Sympathies,
Antipathies,
And other such mysteries.
When night fell,
The astronomer looked at the stars,
And with the help of Drosselmayr,
Who was also quite familiar with astrology,
Took the princess's horoscope.
It was no easy task,
For the lines of the stars were so crossed and tangled,
But at last it became clear,
That in order to break the curse and restore the princess's beauty,
All she would have to do is eat the sweet core of the nut-cracker-took.
Now the nut-cracker-took had such a hard shell,
That you could run the wheel of cannon over it without breaking it.
This nut had to be given to a young man who had neither yet shaven,
Nor worn boots,
And he would have to bite it open before the princess,
And give the core to her with his eyes closed.
What's more,
He could not open his eyes until he had taken seven steps backward,
Without chipping or stumbling.
Drosselmayr and the astronomer worked for three days and three nights.
That Saturday the king had sat down for his midday meal,
When Drosselmayr,
Who was scheduled to be executed the following Sunday,
Joyously rushed into the room and announced that he had found the means to restore the princess's lost beauty.
The king gave Drosselmayr a fierce bear hug,
And promised him a diamond sword,
Four medals,
And two new Sunday suits.
After lunch I expect you to get to work on this,
And I trust excellent wizard that you'll make sure that this young man with the nutcracker took in hand hasn't had any wine to drink so he doesn't trip when he goes walking seven steps backward like a crab.
Afterward he can drink all he wants.
Drosselmayr was dismayed at this,
And with trembling and fear informed the king that they neither began the search for the nut or the boy to crack it,
And it was uncertain whether nut or nutcracker would ever be found.
The king waved his scepter high above his head in a rage and wrote,
Then the beheading shall proceed as scheduled.
Fortunately for Drosselmayr,
The food had tasted particularly good that day,
And the king was in a better mood than usual.
This made him more open when the queen,
Who was touched by Drosselmayr's distress,
And asked that he reconsider.
Drosselmayr gathered his courage and explained that he had indeed found out how to cure the princess,
And had therefore rightfully won his life back.
The king decided that Drosselmayr was stalling,
With sin excuses,
But after taking a tonic for his stomach,
He announced that both the clockmaker and astronomer should set off on foot and not return until they had the nutcracker took in their possession.
The queen suggested that they could find the man to do the cracking by regularly placing advertisements in local and foreign newspapers,
And here the judge broke off again and promised to tell the rest of the story the next evening.
