That’s what Aunt Mille said, and she kissed me.
Who was Aunt Mille, and who was brewer Rasmussen?
II.
We children always called mother’s aunt “auntie.” We had no other name for her.
She gave us jam and sugar, even though it was bad for our teeth. She said she had a soft spot for the sweet children. It was cruel to deny them a little of the sweets that they loved so much.
And so we loved Auntie very much too.
She was an old maid, and as far back as I can remember she was always old. Her age never changed.
In earlier years she had suffered a lot from toothaches and was always talking about it. That’s why her friend, brewer Rasmussen, jokingly started calling her Auntie Toothache.
In his last years he no longer did brewing, but lived off the interest of his money. He often visited Auntie and was older than she was. He had no teeth at all, just some black stumps. He told us children that he had eaten too much sugar as a child, and that’s what one looks like from doing that.
Auntie must not have eaten any sugar in her childhood because she had the most beautiful white teeth.
Brewer Rasmussen said that she saved on using them—she didn’t sleep with them at night! We children knew it was mean to say that, but Auntie said he hadn’t meant anything by it.
One morning at breakfast she told us a bad dream she had had that night. One of her teeth had fallen out. “That means I am going to lose a true friend,” she said.
“If it was a false tooth,” the brewer chuckled, “then it only means you’ll lose a false friend.”
“You’re a rude old man!” Auntie said as angrily as I have ever seen her, before or since. Later she said that he had only been teasing her. He was the noblest person on earth, and when he died some day, he would become a little angel of God in heaven.
I thought a lot about that transformation and wondered if I would be able to recognize him in his new form.
When Auntie was young, and he was young too, he had proposed to her. But she deliberated over it too long and didn’t make up her mind. Didn’t make up her mind for too long, and so became an old maid, but she was always a loyal friend to him.
And then brewer Rasmussen died.
He was driven to his grave in the most expensive hearse, and a big procession followed, many people with medals and wearing uniforms.
Auntie stood by the window in her black mourning together with all us children, except for my little brother, whom the stork had brought a week ago.
When the hearse and procession had passed and the street was empty, Auntie wanted to go, but I didn’t want to. I was waiting for the angel, brewer Rasmussen. He had become a little winged child of God and had to appear.
“Auntie,” I said, “Don’t you think he’ll be coming now? Or when the stork brings us another little brother, will he bring angel Rasmussen?”
Auntie was completely overwhelmed by my imagination and said, “That child will become a great poet!” She repeated that all through my school years, after my confirmation, and now into my years as a college student.
She was and is the most sympathetic friend to me, both in my pains with my poetry and pains in my teeth. I have bouts of both.
“Just write down all your thoughts,” she said, ”and put them in the drawer. That’s what jean Paul1 did, and he became a great poet, although I don’t really like him. He isn’t exciting. You must be exciting! And you will be exciting!”
The night after this conversation I lay awake in longing and distress, with the want and need to become the great poet that Auntie saw and sensed in me. I was in “poet pain,” but there’s a worse pain, and that’s a toothache. It crushed and squashed me. I became a writhing worm with an herbal hot pad on my cheek and Spanish fly.
“I know all about that,” said Auntie. She had a sad smile on her lips, and her teeth shone so white.
I must start a new section of my story and Auntie’s.
III.
I had moved into my new apartment and had lived there a month. I talked with Auntie about it.
“I live with a quiet family. They don’t pay any attention to me, even if I ring three times. Actually it’s a real madhouse with racket and noises of wind and weather and people. I live right over the entrance portal, and every coach that drives in or out makes the pictures on the wall shake. The gate slams and shakes the house as if it were an earthquake. If I’m lying in bed, the jolts go through all my limbs, but that is supposed to be good for the nerves. If the wind’s blowing, and it’s always windy here in this country, then the long casement window hooks dangle back and forth and slam against the brick wall. The neighbor’s portal bell rings with every gust of wind.
The residents of the building come home in batches from late in the evening until far into the night. The lodger right above me, who gives trombone lessons during the day, comes home last, and he doesn’t go to bed until he has had a little midnight walk around his room with heavy tromping in iron-clad boots.
There are no double windows, but there’s a broken pane that the landlady has pasted paper over. The wind blows through the crack anyway and makes a sound like a humming horsefly. It’s music to put you to sleep. When I finally do fall asleep, I’m soon awakened by the crow of the rooster. The rooster and hens announce from the chicken coop of the man in the cellar that it’ll soon be morning. The little ponies, who don’t have a stable, are tethered in the sandpit below the stairs. They kick at the door and the walls for exercise.
At daybreak, the janitor, who lives in the attic with his family, comes lumbering down the stairs. Wooden shoes clack, the gate slams, the house shakes, and when that’s over, the lodger upstairs begins his exercises. He lifts a heavy iron ball in each hand, but he can’t keep a hold of them. They fall again and again, while at the same time all the children in the building run screaming on their way to school. I go to the window and open it to get some fresh air—it’s refreshing when I can get it—if the lady in the back building isn’t washing gloves in stain remover. That’s how she makes her living. All in all, it’s a nice building, and I live with a quiet family.”
That was the account I gave my aunt about my apartment. It was more lively though, because an oral presentation is more vivid than the written word.
“You’re a poet!” shouted Auntie. “Just write up what you said, and you’ll be just as good as Dickens. Actually you interest me much more. You paint when you speak! You describe your building so that one can see it. It makes one shudder! Keep writing, make it come alive. Put people in, beautiful people and preferably unhappy ones!”
I really did write it down, as it stands with the noises and sounds, but just with myself in it, no action. That came later!
IV.
It was in the winter, late in the evening after the theater. There was a terrible snowstorm, so it was almost impossible to make any headway walking.
Auntie had been to the theater, and I was there to see her home, but it was hard to walk oneself, much less help someone else. All the cabs were taken. Auntie lived far over in town, but my room was close to the theater. If that hadn’t been the case, we would have had to stand in the sentry box for who knows how long.
We struggled along in the deep snow, surrounded by the whirling snowflakes. I lifted her, held her, and pushed her along. We only fell twice, but we fell softly.
We reached my gate where we shook ourselves off. We shook ourselves on the stairs too, and we still had enough snow on us to fill up the floor in the entry.
We took off our coats and other clothing that could be taken off. The landlady lent Auntie dry stockings and a robe. She said it was a necessity, and added that Auntie could not possibly get home that night, which was true. She asked her to make do with the sofa in her living room, where she would make up a bed in front of the always locked door to my room. And that was done.
A fire burned in my stove. The teapot was brought to the table, and the little room became cozy, if not
as cozy as at Auntie’s, where there are thick curtains in front of the door in the winter, thick curtains over the windows, and two-ply carpets with three layers of heavy paper underneath. You sit there as if in a tightly corked bottle of warm air. But, as I said, it was cozy there in my place too. Outside the wind howled.
Auntie talked and told stories. Back came the days of her youth and back came the brewer, old memories.
She remembered when I got my first tooth, and the pleasure the family took in it. The first tooth! The tooth of innocence, shining like a little white drop of milk—the milk tooth.
First came one, then others, a whole line. Side by side, upper and lower—the most lovely baby teeth, but yet just the vanguards, not the real ones that have to last for a lifetime.
They came too, and the wisdom teeth also. Flankers of the rank, born in pain and with great difficulty.
And they leave again, every one of them! They go before their service is up. Even the last tooth goes, and that’s not a day of celebration. It’s a melancholy day.
And then you’re old, even if your spirit is young.
Such thoughts and talk aren’t pleasant, and yet we talked about all this. We went back to childhood years. We talked and talked. It was midnight before Auntie went to bed in the room next door.
“Good night, my sweet child,” she called. “Now I’ll sleep as if I’m lying in my own bed.”
And she slept peacefully, but there was no peace either in the house or outside. The storm shook the windows, slammed the long dangling iron hooks, and rang the neighbor’s portal bell in the back building. The lodger upstairs had come home. He was still taking his little walk up and down. He took off his boots and went to bed and to rest, but he snores so loudly that good ears can hear it through the ceiling.
I couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t calm down. The weather didn’t calm down either. It was immensely lively. The wind whistled and sang in its fashion and my teeth also began to get lively. They whistled and sang in their fashion, and struck up a terrific toothache.
There was a draft from the window. The moonlight shone onto the floor. The lighting changed as the clouds came and went in the stormy weather. There was a shifting of shadow and light, but at last the shadow on the floor took shape and looked like something. I looked at the moving shape and sensed an icy cold blast.
A figure was sitting on the floor, thin and long, as when a child tries to draw a person on a blackboard with chalk. The body is a single long line. A line and one more are the arms, and the legs are also each just a line, with the head a polygon.
The figure soon became more distinct. It seemed to have some kind of dress on—very thin and fine, but that showed the figure was a female.
I heard a humming sound. Was it her, or the wind that was buzzing like a horsefly in the window crack?
No, it was Mrs. Toothache herself! Her Awfulness Satania infernalis. 2 God deliver and preserve us from her visits!
“It’s nice to be here,” she hummed. “These are good lodgings. Swampy ground, boggy ground. The mosquitoes have been buzzing around here with poison in their sting, and now I have the stinger. It has to be sharpened on human teeth, and they’re shining so whitely on him in the bed. They have held their own against sweet and sour, hot and cold, shells of nuts and stones of plums! But I am going to rock them and shock them, nourish their roots with a drafty wind, and give them cold feet!”
It was a horrible speech from a horrible guest.
“So you’re a poet!” she said. “Well, I’ll teach you all the meters of agony. I’ll give you iron and steel in your body, and put wires in all your nerves.”
It was as if a glowing awl plunged into my cheekbone. I twisted and turned.
“An excellent set of teeth!” she said. “An organ to play upon—a mouth-organ concert, splendid, with kettledrums and trumpets, a piccolo, and a trombone in the wisdom tooth! Great music for a great poet!”
She struck up her music, and she looked horrible, even though I saw no more of her than her hand—a shadow 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 was Aunt Mille.
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 infernalis (of hell) to create his title for the personified toothache.
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.
There had already been Christmas joy in the servants’ hall earlier in the evening. Here too was a big spruce tree with lighted red and white candles, small Danish flags, cut-out paper swans, and paper hearts woven of colorful paper filled with goodies. The poor children of the district were invited, and each had its mother along. They didn’t look at the tree much, but at the tables with gifts. There was wool and linen cloth for sewing dresses and trousers. That’s what the mothers and older children looked at. Only the very little ones stretched out their hands towards the candles, gold tinsel, and flags.
The gathering took place early in the afternoon. Everyone ate Christmas pudding and roast goose with red cabbage. And when the tree had been looked at, and the gifts distributed, everyone got a little cup of punch and apple fritters filled with apples.
Then they went home to their poor rooms and talked about “the good way of life,” that is to say, the good food, and the gifts were once again carefully inspected.
Garden-Kirsten and Garden-Ole were a married couple who kept their home and made their living by weeding and tending the garden on the estate. At each Christmas celebration they always got their share of presents. They had five children, and all five were clothed by the master and mistress.