The Dryad Page #5

"The Dryad" is an intricate tale by Danish fairy tale legend, Hans Christian Andersen. The storyline follows a Dryad - a mythological tree spirit - who impatiently longs to explore beyond her solitary existence in a grand ancient tree. Lured by the festive glamour of the Paris exhibition, she abandons her roots only to find the bustling, industrialized city overwhelming and herself feeling lost and homesick. In this narrative, Andersen explores themes of nature, industrialization, alienation, and longing.

• Children

								

strangers stepped down, leaving the starlit air and the cheerful
life of the upper world behind them.

"I am afraid," said one of the women who stood around, to her
husband, "I cannot venture to go down, nor do I care for the wonders
down yonder. You had better stay here with me."

"Indeed, and travel home," said the man, "and quit Paris without
having seen the most wonderful thing of all--the real wonder of the
present period, created by the power and resolution of one man!"

"I will not go down for all that," was the reply.

"The wonder of the present time," it had been called. The Dryad
had heard and had understood it. The goal of her ardent longing had
thus been reached, and here was the entrance to it. Down into the
depths below Paris? She had not thought of such a thing; but now she
heard it said, and saw the strangers descending, and went after them.

The staircase was of cast iron, spiral, broad and easy. Below
there burned a lamp, and farther down, another. They stood in a
labyrinth of endless halls and arched passages, all communicating with
each other. All the streets and lanes of Paris were to be seen here
again, as in a dim reflection. The names were painted up; and every
house above had its number down here also, and struck its roots
under the macadamized quays of a broad canal, in which the muddy water
flowed onward. Over it the fresh streaming water was carried on
arches; and quite at the top hung the tangled net of gas-pipes and
telegraph-wires.

In the distance lamps gleamed, like a reflection from the
world-city above. Every now and then a dull rumbling was heard. This
came from the heavy wagons rolling over the entrance bridges.

Whither had the Dryad come?

You have, no doubt, heard of the CATACOMBS? Now they are vanishing
points in that new underground world--that wonder of the present
day--the sewers of Paris. The Dryad was there, and not in the
world's Exhibition in the Champ de Mars.

She heard exclamations of wonder and admiration.

"From here go forth health and life for thousands upon thousands
up yonder! Our time is the time of progress, with its manifold
blessings."

Such was the opinion and the speech of men; but not of those
creatures who had been born here, and who built and dwelt here--of the
rats, namely, who were squeaking to one another in the clefts of a
crumbling wall, quite plainly, and in a way the Dryad understood well.

A big old Father-Rat, with his tail bitten off, was relieving
his feelings in loud squeaks; and his family gave their tribute of
concurrence to every word he said:

"I am disgusted with this man-mewing," he cried--"with these
outbursts of ignorance. A fine magnificence, truly! all made up of gas
and petroleum! I can't eat such stuff as that. Everything here is so
fine and bright now, that one's ashamed of one's self, without exactly
knowing why. Ah, if we only lived in the days of tallow candles! and
it does not lie so very far behind us. That was a romantic time, as
one may say."

"What are you talking of there?" asked the Dryad. "I have never
seen you before. What is it you are talking about?"

"Of the glorious days that are gone," said the Rat--"of the
happy time of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. Then it
was a great thing to get down here. That was a rat's nest quite
different from Paris. Mother Plague used to live here then; she killed
people, but never rats. Robbers and smugglers could breathe freely
here. Here was the meeting-place of the most interesting personages,
whom one now only gets to see in the theatres where they act
melodrama, up above. The time of romance is gone even in our rat's
nest; and here also fresh air and petroleum have broken in."

Thus squeaked the Rat; he squeaked in honor of the old time,
when Mother Plague was still alive.

A carriage stopped, a kind of open omnibus, drawn by swift horses.
The company mounted and drove away along the Boulevard de
Sebastopol, that is to say, the underground boulevard, over which
the well-known crowded street of that name extended.

The carriage disappeared in the twilight; the Dryad disappeared,
lifted to the cheerful freshness above. Here, and not below in the
vaulted passages, filled with heavy air, the wonder work must be found
which she was to seek in her short lifetime. It must gleam brighter
than all the gas-flames, stronger than the moon that was just
gliding past.

Yes, certainly, she saw it yonder in the distance, it gleamed
before her, and twinkled and glittered like the evening star in the
sky.

She saw a glittering portal open, that led to a little garden,
where all was brightness and dance music. Colored lamps surrounded
little lakes, in which were water-plants of colored metal, from
whose flowers jets of water spurted up. Beautiful weeping willows,
real products of spring, hung their fresh branches over these lakes
like a fresh, green, transparent, and yet screening veil. In the
bushes burnt an open fire, throwing a red twilight over the quiet huts
of branches, into which the sounds of music penetrated--an ear
tickling, intoxicating music, that sent the blood coursing through the
veins.

Beautiful girls in festive attire, with pleasant smiles on their
lips, and the light spirit of youth in their hearts--"Marys," with
roses in their hair, but without carriage and postilion--flitted to
and fro in the wild dance.

Where were the heads, where the feet? As if stung by tarantulas,
they sprang, laughed, rejoiced, as if in their ecstacies they were
going to embrace all the world.

The Dryad felt herself torn with them into the whirl of the dance.
Round her delicate foot clung the silken boot, chestnut brown in
color, like the ribbon that floated from her hair down upon her bare
shoulders. The green silk dress waved in large folds, but did not
entirely hide the pretty foot and ankle.

Had she come to the enchanted Garden of Armida? What was the
name of the place?

The name glittered in gas-jets over the entrance. It was
"Mabille."

The soaring upwards of rockets, the splashing of fountains, and
the popping of champagne corks accompanied the wild bacchantic
dance. Over the whole glided the moon through the air, clear, but with
a somewhat crooked face.

A wild joviality seemed to rush through the Dryad, as though she
were intoxicated with opium. Her eyes spoke, her lips spoke, but the
sound of violins and of flutes drowned the sound of her voice. Her
partner whispered words to her which she did not understand, nor do we
understand them. He stretched out his arms to draw her to him, but
he embraced only the empty air.

The Dryad had been carried away, like a rose-leaf on the wind.
Before her she saw a flame in the air, a flashing light high up on a
tower. The beacon light shone from the goal of her longing, shone from
the red lighthouse tower of the Fata Morgana of the Champ de Mars.
Thither she was carried by the wind. She circled round the tower;
the workmen thought it was a butterfly that had come too early, and
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