Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/417

 Rh when once cut down we can never live again. Human beings, however, have a soul which lives forever—which lives after the body has become dust: it rises up through the clear air, up to all the shining stars. Just as we rise up out of the sea and see the countries of the world, so do they ascend to unknown beautiful places which we shall never see."

"Why did we not receive an immortal soul?" asked the little mermaid in a sad tone. "I would give all the hundreds of years I have to live to be a human being only for a day, and afterward share the joys of the upper world!"

"You must not go on thinking of that," said the old lady; "we are much happier and better off than the human beings up there."

"So I must die and float as foam upon the sea! I shall not hear the music of the billows, or see the beautiful flowers and the red sun! Can I, then, do nothing at all to win an immortal soul?"

"No," said the old queen-dowager. "Only if a man came to love you so much that you were more to him than his father or mother, if he clung to you with all his heart and all his love, and let the parson put his right hand into yours with a promise to be faithful to you here and for all eternity, then his soul would flow into your body, and you would also partake of the happiness of mankind. He would give you his soul and still retain his own. But that can never happen. What we here in the sea consider most beautiful, our fish's tail, they would consider ugly upon earth. They do not understand any better. Up there you must have two clumsy supports which they call legs to be considered beautiful."

Then the little mermaid sighed, and looked sadly at her fish's tail.

"Let us be satisfied with our lot," said the old lady; "we will frisk and leap about during the three hundred years we have to live in. That is surely long enough. After that one can rest all the more contentedly in one's grave. This evening we are going to have a court ball."

No such display of splendor has ever been witnessed on earth. The walls and ceiling in the large ball-room were of thick but transparent glass. Several hundreds of colossal mussel-shells, pink and grass-green, were placed in rows on each side, with blue fires, which lighted up the whole hall and shone through the walls, so that the sea outside was quite lit up. One could see all the innumerable fishes, great and small, swimming up to the glass walls. On some the scales shone in purple, and on others they appeared to be silver and gold.

Through the middle of the hall flowed a broad stream, in which the mermen and mermaids danced to their own song. Such beautiful voices the inhabitants of the earth never possessed. The little mermaid sang the most beautifully of all, and they clapped their hands to her, and for a moment she felt joyful at heart, for she knew that she had the loveliest voice of any to be found on earth or in the sea. But soon she began again to think of the world above. She could not forget the handsome