The Devil's Storybooks Page 3

  The artist didn’t know of the Devil’s plan, of course. He went on calmly with his work, creating pictures of unmatchable evil, and whenever he went out, little children would follow him and birds would perch on his shoulders, and people would say: “Here comes the artist! What a good fellow he is, in spite of his terrible pictures—surely the best fellow in the World!”

  It wasn’t long, however, before the fortieth picture was completed, and when that time came, the Devil, true to his plan, sneaked up out of Hell and stole the whole kit and caboodle. He dropped the easel, brushes, and things in a dusty corner of his throne room, but he hung the pictures in his gallery and they were a huge success, with streams of the damned and all manner of major and minor demons filing through every day to study them approvingly over a cup of punch.

  Up in the World the artist, meanwhile, was baffled by what had happened. He asked around his village, but no one knew anything at all about the disappearance of the pictures, and even less about the theft of the easel and the rest. The artist grew very worried because he was a poor man who earned the money for his tools by digging holes, since no one ever bought his pictures, and he knew that he would have to dig holes for a very long time before he had enough money to begin again.

  “Lovely!” said the Devil when word came to him in Hell of the artist’s distress. “Now we shall see what we shall see.” And he sat back and smiled and waited.

  As day after day went by, with no more pictures to work on and nothing to do but dig, the artist began to alter. He stopped smiling, and chased little children away when they tried to follow him, and shooed the birds from his shoulders. He grew silent and ill-tempered and even cast off from the friends who loved him. And when he walked scowling in the village, the people would move out of his way and say to each other: “Here comes the artist. What a terrible fellow he is after all, just like the pictures he used to paint!”

  The Devil was enormously pleased by these developments. His plan was working perfectly. “I’ll have the fellow himself in the end, as well as his pictures,” he said, and he sat back and smiled and waited some more.

  One day, however, as the artist was digging holes in the earth, he came to a rich layer of clay. He scooped out a large lump and put it aside, and when the day was over he took it home to his studio. All night he worked with it and when morning came he had finished a little statue. Strange to say, however, the statue showed a mother bending over to touch a small child clinging to her skirts, and the mood of it was one of great goodness and love.

  This was the beginning of a new life for the artist. He modeled more and more small statues, similar to the first, and people liked them so much that he sold every one and didn’t need to dig any more except when he needed more clay. Soon he could afford to work in stone, and as his fame spread, he was asked to carve fine marble statues and these in time could be found in every great church and courtyard in the land.

  But the artist’s ill temper grew worse and worse as his statues grew more and more loving. He became at last quite the opposite of what he had been before. And the people who had once been his friends, still believing there is good and evil in everyone, said it seemed as if all the good in the artist came out in his work and left behind nothing but evil in the man himself.

  The Devil was hard put to understand what had gone wrong. On the one hand he was well pleased with the kind of man the artist had become, but at the same time he was disgusted with the statues. “That fellow is as useless to me now as he was before, and I don’t know what to do,” he said with a gnash of teeth. “So I will do the best thing: just forget all about him.”

  And that’s what the Devil did. He forgot about the artist altogether and turned his attention to other things. As for the artist, nobody knows what became of him. His paintings are admired in Hell to this day, and his statues are admired in Heaven, but the man himself seems to have been lost somewhere in between. No matter. He’s sure to have plenty of company.

  ASHES

  THERE WAS a very bad man once, a certain Mr. Bezzle, who made a great deal of money by cheating shamefully, and on his death, which happened all of a sudden and was the plain result of too much roasted pig, his wife had his body cremated and kept the ashes in a silver urn on the mantelpiece, where it was nice and warm. This was entirely appropriate, though she may not have known it, for her husband had gone directly to Hell when he died, and was every bit as nice and warm there as his ashes were up in the World.

  Now, it happened that Mrs. Bezzle, grown lonesome with her husband gone, took on a large, ill-mannered dog to keep her company. “He’s got whiskers and he snores,” she told her friends, “so it’s just like having Bezzle back again.” She was devoted to the dog and spoiled him dreadfully, even to the point of allowing him to gnaw bones in the house, though this practice was a great annoyance to the housemaid, whose task it was to keep things tidy.

  One day, on coming across a greasy pork bone on the hearthrug, the housemaid, in a fit of temper, seized it and flung it into the fire, where it burned away to ashes with no one any the wiser. And then, on the next day, when the housemaid was at her daily chores, the handle of her broom bumped Mr. Bezzle’s urn and down it fell onto the hearth, spilling that bad man’s earthly remains into the fireplace.

  “Horrors!” said the housemaid, and then she looked around. Mrs. Bezzle was nowhere in sight. “Oh, well,” said the housemaid, and she knelt down and carefully scooped the ashes back into the urn with the fire shovel.

  This was all very well, perhaps, and one way out of a bad situation, but the trouble was that some of Mr. Bezzle’s ashes had got mixed with the ashes in the fireplace; and some of the ashes in the fireplace were the ashes of the pork bone which the housemaid had thrown into the fire the day before. So what happened was that the pork-bone ashes got into the urn too, where they clearly didn’t belong, and no one knew a thing about it.

  Next morning, down in Hell, the Devil was sitting in his throne room writing poems when Mr. Bezzle came in and demanded an interview.

  “What’s the problem?” asked the Devil, going on with his writing.

  “Problem?” cried Bezzle. “Problem? Why, look for yourself!”

  So the Devil looked and saw that a large pig had come in with Mr. Bezzle and was standing pressed against his legs, looking up at him fondly.

  “What are you doing with that pig?” asked the Devil.

  “What am I doing?” cried Bezzle. “What is it doing? That’s the question. See here now. Everything’s gone along well since I came down. Good company, plenty to eat and drink, a nice room all to myself. Then yesterday this pig appears out of nowhere, follows me about like a puppy, and even insists on getting into bed with me. I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t know why or how. Do you?”

  “I haven’t the least idea,” said the Devil.

  “Well, something has to be done,” said Bezzle, trying to push the pig away, though this seemed to be entirely useless, seeing as the pig merely pressed the closer and continued to gaze up at Bezzle with a look of great warmth and affection in its little red eyes.

  “It’s a nice enough pig,” observed the Devil, peering at it, “and quite attached to you, evidently.”

  “Never mind that,” said Bezzle. “Just do something. I really don’t want to spend Eternity stomach to stomach with a pig.”

  “I’ll ask around,” said the Devil. “No doubt we can figure things out.”

  So Bezzle went away, the pig at his heels, and the Devil called in a couple of scholars, who looked through a couple of books; and the next day, when Bezzle came back, the Devil said, “It appears that you must have been buried with the pig, somehow or other.”

  “Impossible,” said Bezzle. “I was cremated. And my wife keeps my ashes in an urn on the mantelpiece.”

  “Oh?” said the Devil. “Well, still, you’re mixed up with the pig somewhere along the line. It’s the only explanation.”

  “Then I’ll just have to get unmixed,�
�� said Bezzle, moving his feet so the pig—who of course was still with him—wouldn’t step on his toes. “One more night like the last two and I’ll be crackers.”

  So the Devil went up to the World to Bezzle’s house and when no one was looking he stole the urn, brought it down to Hell, and dumped out its contents in a quiet corner. “Well, there they are,” he said to Bezzle. “You’ll have to pick out the pig’s part yourself, assuming you can tell the difference.”

  “There’s got to be a difference between my ashes and a pig’s,” said Bezzle. And he set to work at once with high hopes, tweezers, and a large magnifying glass.

  Day after day Bezzle sat in the corner, working away, while the pig rested its chin on his knee and gazed at him, and after a year he had separated a thimbleful of ashes that he thought must be the pig’s because they were a slightly different shade of gray. After two years, and two thimblesful, it appeared that he was right, for the pig seemed less attentive. Its gaze was sometimes distracted from Bezzle’s face, and it took to spending an hour or two, now and then, wandering off by itself. Bezzle was delighted, and attacked his work with fresh vigor.

  And then, after three years, when the task was nearly done and the pig was only coming by for lunch, Mrs. Bezzle’s housemaid died of ill temper and arrived in Hell, still clutching her broom. And the first thing she noticed was the two piles of ashes, left alone for a moment in the quiet corner where Bezzle had been laboring so long.

  “This place is a mess,” said the housemaid.

  And she swept the two piles into one pile, swept the one pile into her dustpan, carried it all out, and buried it by the gates.

  All Bezzle ever knew was that one minute the ashes were gone and the next minute the pig was back full time. Still, after a while, when the first rude shock had worn away, he grew resigned to having the pig around. They were together day and night, after all, and there was nothing for it but to make do. But Bezzle, in time, did more than that. He found that the pig was really rather good company and altogether his best friend in the place. Before a hundred years were out, he had even managed to teach it to play gin rummy, though it cheated shamefully. As for the housemaid, she settled down in another part of Hell and kept her fireplace—and her hearthrug—shining clean.

  PERFECTION

  THERE WAS a little girl once called Angela who always did everything right. In fact, she was perfect. She had better manners than anyone, and not only that, but she hung up her clothes and never forgot to feed the chickens. And not only that, but her hair was always combed and she never bit her fingernails. A lot of people, all of them fair-to-middling, disliked her very much because of this, but Angela didn’t care. She just went right on being perfect and let things go as they would.

  Now, when the Devil heard about Angela, he was revolted. “Not,” he explained to himself, “that I give a hang about children as a rule, but this one! Imagine what she’ll be like when she grows up—a woman whose only fault is that she has no faults!” And the very thought of it made him cross as crabs. So he wrote up a list of things to do that he hoped would make Angela edgy and, if all went well, even make her lose her temper. “Once she loses her temper a few times,” said the Devil, “she’ll never be perfect again.”

  However, this proved harder to do than the Devil had expected. He sent her chicken pox, then poison ivy, and then a lot of mosquito bites, but she never scratched and didn’t even seem to itch. He arranged for a cow to step on her favorite doll, but she never shed a tear. Instead, she forgave the cow at once, in public, and said it didn’t matter. Next the Devil fixed it so that for weeks on end her cocoa was always too hot and her oatmeal too cold, but this, too, failed to make her angry. In fact, it seemed that the worse things were, the better Angela liked it, since it gave her a chance to show just how perfect she was.

  Years went by. The Devil used up every idea on his list but one, and Angela still had her temper, and her manners were still better than anyone’s. “Well, anyway,” said the Devil to himself, “my last idea can’t miss. That much is certain.” And he waited patiently for the proper moment.

  When that moment came, the Devil’s last idea worked like anything. In fact, it was perfect. As soon as he made it happen, Angela lost her temper once a day at least, and sometimes oftener, and after a while she had lost it so often that she was never quite so perfect again.

  And how did he do it? Simple. He merely saw that she got a perfect husband and a perfect house, and then—he sent her a fair-to-middling child.

  THE ROSE AND THE MINOR DEMON

  THERE WAS a minor demon once, a wistful, sentimental creature who really didn’t belong in Hell at all, though Heaven knows there was nowhere else for him to go. And the Devil was embarrassed to have him around because he was so different from everyone else. So a job was found for him which kept him out of sight, and this job was to guard the Devil’s treasure room.

  The minor demon worked at his task every day, which is to say that he sat in the treasure room with nothing to do, since no one ever came near the place; and while he sat there, he would fall to mooning over all the thousand objects that filled the shelves, everything from silver pitchers to golden calves. But the object he mooned over most was a large porcelain vase which had a lot of roses painted on it. The roses, he thought, were lovely, all colors of the rainbow, and he wished like anything that there were roses just like them in Hell.

  But there were no roses of any kind in Hell, or rainbows either, for that matter. And yet, the more he mooned about it, the more the minor demon wanted some, and at last he went to the Devil to ask if he could have a garden.

  “Well now,” said the Devil. “That’s a funny thing to ask for. What in the World do you want a garden for?”

  “I just want to plant things,” said the minor demon. “Flowers.”

  “Flowers?” exclaimed the Devil. “What kind of flowers?”

  “Oh,” said the minor demon nervously, “just some roses or something.”

  “Ugh!” said the Devil. “Roses? In Hell? Where did you get an idea like that?”

  “From the porcelain vase in the treasure room,” said the minor demon, and then he blushed a darker shade of red than he was already. “I guess,” he confessed, “I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for roses.”

  “What kind of a minor demon are you anyway?” said the Devil in exasperation. “A soft spot? In your heart? You haven’t got a heart. And as for soft spots, you know what they say about that. A soft spot in an apple means it’s going bad, and one bad apple can spoil a barrelful. So let’s have no more talk about soft spots and hearts. Or roses, either. Roses are entirely out of the question. If you really want a garden, you can have one, I suppose, but you’ll have to plant sensible things. Like henbane or hemlock or aconite.”

  “All right,” said the minor demon sadly, and he went away to a quiet place and hoed up the ground and planted henbane and hemlock and aconite and even a little deadly nightshade. But he wasn’t satisfied, not even when all the things he had planted grew like weeds, which is after all exactly what they were. For he still wanted roses.

  At last he could stand it no longer. He crept out of Hell one night, which was quite against the rules for minor demons, and made his way up to the World, where everything was sweet with May; and he stole a little rosebush and brought it back down and planted it at the back of his garden, with the hemlock growing up tall around it to hide it from view.

  The minor demon was amazed at his own daring and trembled very much to think what might happen when the deed was discovered. But for a long while no one suspected that the rosebush was there. Even the Devil, passing by, admired the hemlock and the deadly nightshade, and told the minor demon that the garden was a good idea. But then one morning one of the buds on the rosebush opened into a blossom, white and silky as a baby’s fist.

  The minor demon was enchanted when he saw the blossom, but right away he was frightened too. For although it was just like the roses on the porcelain vase, a
nd most enormously pleasing, it had one thing the painted roses didn’t have, and that one thing was fragrance. The minor demon hadn’t known about the fragrance. And now the air all over that part of Hell was rich with it.

  Up rose the Devil in his throne room, sniffing like Jack in the Beanstalk’s giant, except that he didn’t say “Fee fie foe fum.” Instead, he said, “What’s that smell?” and wrinkled up his nose. And he trailed around, up and down, looking for it everywhere.

  But the minor demon, afraid that exactly this would happen, had hurriedly picked the single blossom and buried it, so that the fragrance drifted off at last and disappeared.

  “Humph!” said the Devil. “Must have been a bad dream.” And he put it out of his mind and went back to his usual business.

  The minor demon grieved for the buried flower. “But what else could I have done?” he reflected with a sigh. And next morning, of course, the same thing happened again. Another blossom opened, spilled its fragrance, and had to be picked and buried.

  This time, however, the Devil knew that the smell he smelled was not a dream after all. “It’s that pesty minor demon, that’s what it is,” he said to himself. “He’s got a rosebush in that garden of his or I miss my guess. And tomorrow I’ll catch him red-handed.”

  So the morning after, the Devil got up early and went directly to the minor demon’s garden, where he found that the smell of roses was powerful indeed. And of course it took no time at all to uncover the rosebush, back behind the hemlock, with another heavy blossom nodding on its stem. Not only that, but there crouched the minor demon in the very act of picking it.

  “Aha!” cried the Devil triumphantly. “What have we here?”