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The dwarf stood stock-still, still with his hat off, watching her hurry up the mountain, around the sharp bend, and out of sight, and then he went and sat on a stump and got his pipe out and stoked it. He pondered and pondered, puffing smoke into the trees, trying to unscramble the riddle of the hurrying maiden: but not even the comforting tobacco could help him, and so at last, with great dignity shaking his head and brushing the ashes from his long black beard, he stood up, absently put the pipe in his vest, turned himself into a sparrow, and hurried to catch up with her.

When he caught sight of her, the maiden was standing by an ancient, towering oak, with her left foot drawn back and the muscles of both legs bunched, preparing to deliver the tree such a kick as would tear it from its footing. In his disguise as a sparrow, the dwarf flew down to her, screeching as if in terror in his piping voice, “Oh yes, destroy our home! Do whatever you please with us! What are poor hapless little sparrows to you — you who have the powers of a dragon? We look forward, at best, to but a year or so of life, but you, you live a thousand, unless I miss my guess, so you can easily afford to hold life cheap!”

At this, to his astonishment, the maiden put her left foot on the ground beside her right and began to weep and cry more heart-brokenly than before, like a poor spanked schoolgirl.

“Little do you know,” the maiden brought out at last, “how far I am from holding life cheap! You must forgive me for threatening to harm your home. I only meant to vent my rage at the cruelty of my fate.” And now again she was sobbing.

“It must be a terrible fate indeed,” said the sparrow, ruffling up his neck feathers, still pretending to be angry, “—it must be a terrible fate indeed that you should feel yourself justified in taking it out on harmless bystanders! But tell us your story, for many’s the grief for which God is relief, and there’s one or two for which I am.”

“Very well, I’ll tell you,” said the maiden, “but take my word for it, there’s no relief in sight, and I tell you my troubles only because I owe you, I suppose, an explanation.” With these words, her blue eyes both weeping and flashing, the maiden sat down on the green, mossy bank beside the road, and the dwarf disguised as a sparrow settled comfortably on a branch.

Chapter Three

The girl was a blacksmith’s daughter by the name of Armida. Her childhood had been happy, for her mother was a great, fierce, chortling woman who might have been a blacksmith herself if matters had gone otherwise and she’d been born a boy. But she took her misfortune in good spirit, as she always took everything in life, and pleased herself mostly with woman’s work, cooking and sewing and tending to the cow, which she sometimes carried to the field, for pure sport, on her shoulder. Armida’s father was a gentle, simple-hearted man who never cared a tittle for what people thought, as long as he got his dinner and his wife was good to him. He paid no attention — in those days anyway — if neighbors scoffed at the lack of decorum and convention in his house, for what was it to him? Their horses still needed shoeing, didn’t they, whether or not his wife, for pure pleasure, chopped down timber? They still needed chains made, and plowshares shaped, though his wife in her spare time carved tombstones. His household got increasingly out of hand, at least from his neighbors’ point of view, but the father grinned placidly, sipped hot, flat ale from his dented tin cup, and continued to let things slide. Thus it befell that when Armida was a baby, she got the habit of puttering in the glow of the forge, shoveling in coal or fashioning door-bolts or bending heavy iron in the company of her father, instead of helping her mother in the kitchen where she might have learned woman’s work.

“You’re a fool, Otto Ott,” the neighbors said, upbraiding her father. “That daughter of yours will grow up headstrong and powerful as an ox in May, and not a man in this world will ever hazard his life by marrying her.”

“God’s will be done,” said her father with a grin, for Armida was just nine, and it seemed to him no problem.

“Perhaps the neighbors are right, Otto,” her mother sometimes said, for though she was a merry, boisterous person, she had a deep, uncommon mind, and understood things as nobody else did.

But Armida’s father, who always enjoyed it when her mother opposed him, however casually, would guffaw and feint and get the drop on Armida’s mother and would pin her arm tight-as-a-clam behind her back, and the two of them would wrestle, laughing and puffing and kicking up dirt by the wheelbarrow-load, until her mother sucked in breath and broke her father’s hold and slammed him against the barn’s oak wall and knocked the last gasp of wind out of him. Then they’d laugh and laugh.

One night when Armida and her father came in from bending iron bars, they found her mother’s two feet sticking straight up like stumps under the wellhouse roof, and her head under the water, and to their horror and terrible sorrow she was dead. The neighbors, though perhaps they meant no harm, could not help feeling that the fault was Armida’s father’s. Had Armida been working in the kitchen, as she should have been, the tragedy, they said, would not have happened.

Her father’s heart was broken, and his self-confidence as well, and so, after he’d buried Armida’s mother — in a grave he’d dug out of solid rock and covered with a foot-thick iron door — he gave in, to the last detail, to his neighbors’ whims. He married a widow who had distant relatives at the king’s palace, and into her hands he put the training and grooming of Armida.

Alas that Armida had not died in that well with her mother!

The step-mother, who had a daughter of her own who happened to be exactly Armida’s age (and whose name was Clarella), was wonderfully gentle and kind to Armida when her father was near; but whenever his back was turned, she was mean as a snake. “Hopeless, hopeless!” she would hiss, with a look of spiteful glee, for Armida could do nothing right. She made her read books to see what heroines are like and told her to study her step-sister. She showed her paintings and read her poems and gave her exercises.

In one of the exercises which the step-mother used, trying to make Armida “an aristocrat,” she said, “instead of a staggering, rolling-eyed horse,” it was necessary to carry a book on one’s head. Armida, though pretty as a picture, heaven knows, was so strong that the weight of a book was like the weight of a feather in her hair, so that for the life of her she couldn’t tell where the book was and thus couldn’t balance it. Strange to say, out of love for her father — and because she shared, deep down, his remorseful feeling that the family had gone wrong, and that the neighbors were right — Armida was eager to please the step-mother, cruel as she might be, and learn, like a dutiful student, all her step-mother had to teach. Though she had liked her old life and loved her true mother, she couldn’t help feeling that what the step-mother said was true: Armida ought to be, like Clarella and the heroines in poems and stories — to say nothing of the ladies at tournaments and fairs, or at railroad stations — flimsy and graceful, helpless and fluttery when gentlemen were near, and whenever conversation turned serious, silly as a duck.

For this reason Armida worked night and day, part of the time reading, part of the time trying to balance books on her head and make her posture aristocratic — all to no avail. But Armida, like her mother before her, was gifted with an uncommonly good mind, and so she thought at last of a stratagem: when everyone was asleep she unfastened the stovepipe from the wall and put the stove on her head, and in this way she learned to walk head-erect, with the grace and light-footedness of a kitten. She learned, soon after, how to hide the fact that she had bones in her arms, and after that — by imitation of her step-sister, and by long hours of diligence — she learned to talk stupidly, as if nothing, even simple addition, could penetrate her skull.