“So that I may never have my thighs wet,” replied Ulenspiegel.
At this moment Claes drank a deep draught from his tankard. Ulenspiegel said to him:
“Why have you so big a cup, I have only a poor little mug?”
Claes answered:
“Because I am your father and the baes of this house.”
Ulenspiegel retorted:
“You have been drinking for forty years, I for nine only; your time to drink is passed, mine is come; it is therefore for me to have the tankard and for you to take the mug.”
“Son,” said Claes, “he that would pour a hogshead into a keg would throw his beer into the gutter.”
“You will then be wise to pour your keg into my hogshead, for I am bigger than your tankard,” replied Ulenspiegel.
And Claes, delighted, gave him his tankard to drain. In this wise Ulenspiegel learned how to talk for his drink.
XV
Soetkin carried beneath her girdle the signs of renewed maternity; Katheline, too, was with child, but for fear dared not stir out of her house.
When Soetkin went to see her:
“Ah!” said she, lamenting, “what shall I do with the poor fruit of my womb? Must I strangle it? I would rather die. But if the constables take me, for having a child without being married, they will make me pay twenty florins, like a girl of loose life, and I shall be whipped on the marketplace.”
Soetkin then said some soothing word to console her, and having left her, went home pondering. Then one day she said to Claes:
“If instead of one child I had two, would you beat me, husband?”
“I don’t know that,” replied Claes.
“But,” said she, “if this second were not born of me, and like Katheline’s were the offspring of an unknown, of the devil, mayhap?”
“Devils,” replied Claes, “engender fire, death, and foul smoke, but not children. I will hold as mine the child of Katheline.”
“You would do this?” she said.
“I have said,” replied Claes.
Soetkin went to tell Katheline.
Hearing it, the latter cried out, overjoyed.
“He has spoken, good man, spoken for the sake of my poor body. He will be blessed by God, and blessed of the devil, if it is a devil,” she said, shuddering, “that hath made thee, poor babe that movest in my bosom.”
Soetkin and Katheline brought into the world one a lad, the other a girl. Both were borne to baptism, as son and daughter of Claes. Soetkin’s son was named Hans, and did not live, Katheline’s daughter was named Nele and throve well.
She drank the wine of life from four flagons, two of Katheline and two of Soetkin. And the two women quarrelled softly which should give the babe to drink. But against her desire Katheline must needs allow her milk to dry up, so that none might ask whence it came without her having been a mother.
When little Nele, her daughter, was weaned, she took her home and only let the child go to Soetkin’s when she had called her her mother.
The neighbours said it was well done of Katheline, who was well to do, to feed the child of the Claes, who for the most part lived in poverty their toilsome life.
XVI
Ulenspiegel found himself alone one morning at home, and for want of something better to do, he began to cut up one of his father’s shoes to make a little ship. Already he had planted the mainmast in the sole and bored the toe for the bowsprit, when at the half door he saw passing the bust of a horseman and the head of a horse.
“Is any one within?” asked the horseman.
“There are,” replied Ulenspiegel, “a man and a half and a horse’s head.”
“How so?” asked the horseman.
“Because I see here a whole man, which is me; the half of a man, which is your bust; and a horse’s head, which is that of your steed.”
“Where are your father and your mother?” asked the man.
“My father has gone to make bad worse,” replied Ulenspiegel, “and my mother is engaged in bringing us shame or loss.”
“Explain,” said the horseman.
Ulenspiegel answered:
“My father at this moment is deepening the holes in his field so as to bring from bad to worse the huntsmen who trample down his corn. My mother has gone to borrow money: if she repays too little ’twill shame us, if too much ’twill be our loss.”
The man asked then which way he should go.
“Where the geese are,” replied Ulenspiegel.
The man went away and came back just when Ulenspiegel was making an oared galley out of Claes’s other shoe.
“You have misled me,” said he: “where the geese are is nothing but mud and marsh in which they are paddling.”
Ulenspiegel answered to this:
“I did not tell you to go where the geese paddle, but where they go.”
“Show me, at any rate,” said the man, “a road that goes to Heyst.”
“In Flanders, it is the travellers that go and not the roads,” said Ulenspiegel.
XVII
One day Soetkin said to Claes:
“Husband, my heart is sad: it is now three days since Thyl left the house; dost thou not know where he is?”
Claes replied ruefully:
“He is where homeless dogs are, on some highway with a crew of other vagabonds of his own kidney. God was cruel to give us such a son. When he was born, I beheld in him the joy of our age, a tool more in the house; I looked to make a craftsman of him, and wicked fate makes him a thief and a drone.”
“Be not so hard, husband,” said Soetkin, “our son being but nine years old is in the heyday of childish thoughtlessness and folly. Is it not so that like the trees, he must shed the young buds before the coming of the full leaves, which for the human tree are honour and virtue? He is full of tricks, I am not blind to them, but they will turn later to his advantage, if instead of employing them to ill ends, he applies them to some useful trade. He is prone to flout his neighbours; but later this will help him to hold his own in merry company. He laughs ever and always; but faces sour before they are ripe are an ill omen for the countenance to come. If he runs, ’tis that he must grow; if he does not work, it is for that he is not yet of an age to feel that work is duty, and if now and then he spends day and night away from home for half a week together, ’tis that he knows nothing of what grief he gives us, for he has a good heart, and he loves us.”
Claes wagged his head and made no answer, and while he slept, Soetkin wept alone. And in the morning, thinking that her son was sick in a corner of some highway, she went out on the doorstep to see if he was not coming back; but she saw nothing, and she sate near the window, looking thence into the street. And many a time her heart danced in her bosom at the sound of the light foot of some lad; but when he passed, she saw it was not Ulenspiegel, and then she wept, poor dolorous mother.
In the meanwhile, Ulenspiegel with his vagabond companions was at Bruges, at the Saturday fair.
There might be seen cobblers and shoemakers in booths apart, tailors selling clothes, miesevangers from Antwerp, who catch tits with an owl at night; poultry sellers, dog stealers, vendors of catskins for gloves, waistcoats, and doublets, buyers of every kind and condition, burgesses and their womenfolk, menservants and maidservants, pantlers, butlers, and all together, sellers and buyers, crying up and crying down, vaunting and disparaging the wares.
In one