APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/poe/hopfrog/HOPFROG

Text File | 1996-07-21 | 20.3 KB | 390 lines

                             Hop-Frog

I never knew any one so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He
seemed to live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kind,
and to tell it well, was the surest road to his favour. Thus it happened
that his seven ministers were all noted for their accomplishments as
jokers. They all took after the king, too, in being large, corpulent,
oily men, as well as inimitable jokers. Whether people grow fat by
joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to
a joke, I have never been quite able to determine; but certain it is
that a lean joker is a rara avis in terris.

About the refinements, or, as he called them, the 'ghosts' of wit, the
king troubled himself very little. He had an especial admiration for
breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length, for the sake of
it. Over-niceties wearied him. He would have preferred Rabelais's
Gargantua to the Zadig of Voltaire; and, upon the whole, practical jokes
suited his taste far better than verbal ones.

At the date of my narrative, professing jesters had not altogether gone
out of fashion at court. Several of the great continental 'powers' still
retained their 'fools', who wore motley, with caps and bells, and who
were expected to be always ready with sharp witticisms, at a moment's
notice, in consideration of the crumbs that fell from the royal table.

Our king, as a matter of course, retained his 'fool'. The fact is, he
required something in the way of folly--if only to counterbalance the
heavy wisdom of the seven wise men who were his ministers--not to
mention himself.

His fool, or professional jester, was not only a fool, however. His
value was trebled in the eyes of the king by the fact of his being also
a dwarf and a cripple. Dwarfs were as common at court, in those days, as
fools; and many monarchs would have found it difficult to get through
their days (days are rather longer at court than elsewhere) without both
a jester to laugh with, and a dwarf to laugh at. But, as I have already
observed, your jesters, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, are fat,
round, and unwieldy--so that it was no small source of self-gratulation
with our king that, in Hop-Frog (this was the fool's name) he possessed
a triplicate treasure in one person.

I believe the name 'Hop-Frog' was not given to the dwarf by his sponsors
at baptism, but it was conferred upon him, by general consent of the
seven ministers, on account of his inability to walk as other men do. In
fact, Hop-Frog could only get along by a sort of interjectional
gait--something between a leap and a wriggle--a movement that afforded
illimitable amusement, and of course consolation, to the king, for
(notwithstanding the protuberance of his stomach and a constitutional
swelling of the <p 255> head) the king, by his whole court, was
accounted a capital figure.

But although Hop-Frog, through the distortion of his legs, could move
only with great pain and difficulty along a road or floor, the
prodigious muscular power which nature seemed to have bestowed upon his
arms, by way of compensation for deficiency in the lower limbs, enabled
him to perform many feats of wonderful dexterity, where trees or ropes
were in question, or anything else to climb. At such exercises he
certainly much more resembled a squirrel, or a small monkey, than a
frog.

I am not able to say, with precision, from what country Hop- Frog
originally came. It was from some barbarous region, however, that no
person ever heard of--a vast distance from the court of our king.
Hop-Frog, and a young girl very little less dwarfish than himself
(although of exquisite proportions, and a marvellous dancer), had been
forcibly carried off from their respective homes in adjoining provinces,
and sent as presents to the king, by one of his ever-victorious
generals.

Under these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that a close
intimacy arose between the two little captives. Indeed, they soon became
sworn friends. Hop-Frog, who, although he made a great deal of sport,
was by no means popular, had it not in his power to render Trippetta
many services; but she, on account of her grace and exquisite beauty
(although a dwarf), was universally admired and petted: so she possessed
much influence; and never failed to use it, whenever she could, for the
benefit of Hop-Frog.

On some grand state occasion--I forget what--the king determined to have
a masquerade; and whenever a masquerade, or anything of that kind,
occurred at our court, then the talents both of Hop-Frog and Trippetta
were sure to be called in play.  Hop-Frog, in especial, was so inventive
in the way of getting up pageants, suggesting novel characters and
arranging costume for masked balls, that nothing could be done, it
seems, without his assistance.

The night appointed for the fete had arrived. A gorgeous hall had been
fitted up, under Trippetta's eye, with every kind of device which could
possibly give eclat to a masquerade. The whole court was in a fever of
expectation. As for costumes and characters, it might well be supposed
that everybody had come to a decision on such points. Many had made up
their minds as to what roles they should assume, a week, or even a
month, in advance; and, in fact, there was not a particle of indecision
anywhere--except in the case of the king and his seven ministers.  Why
they hesitated I never could tell, unless they did it by way of a joke.
More probably, they found it difficult, on account of being so fat, to
make up their minds. At all events, time flew; and, as a last resource,
they sent for Trippetta and Hop-Frog.

When the two little friends obeyed the summons of the king, they found
him sitting at his wine with the seven members of his cabinet council;
but the monarch appeared to be in a very ill humour. He knew that
Hop-Frog was not fond of wine; for it excited the poor cripple almost to
madness; and madness is no comfortable thing. But the king loved his
practical jokes, and took pleasure in forcing Hop-Frog to drink and (as
the king called it) 'to be merry'.

'Come here, Hop-Frog,' said he, as the jester and his friend entered the
room: 'swallow this bumper to the health of your absent friends' (here
Hop-Frog sighed), 'and then let us have the benefit of your invention.
We want characters--characters, man-- something novel--out of the way.
We are wearied with this everlasting sameness. Come, drink! the wine
will brighten your wits.'

Hop-Frog endeavoured, as usual, to get up a jest in reply to these
advances from the king; but the effort was too much. It happened to be
the poor dwarf's birthday, and the command to drink to his 'absent
friends' forced the tears to his eyes. Many large, bitter drops fell
into the goblet as he took it, humbly, from the hand of the tyrant.

'Ah! ha! ha! ha!' roared the latter, as the dwarf reluctantly drained
the beaker. 'See what a glass of good wine can do!  Why, your eyes are
shining already!'

Poor fellow! his large eyes gleamed rather than shone, for the effect of
wine on his excitable brain was not more powerful than instantaneous. He
placed the goblet nervously on the table, and looked round upon the
company with a half-insane stare. They all seemed highly amused at the
success of the king's 'joke'.

'And now to business,' said the prime minister, a very fat man.

'Yes,' said the king; 'come, Hop-Frog, lend us your assistance.
Characters, my fine fellow; we stand in need of characters--all of
us--ha! ha! ha!' and as this was seriously meant for a joke, his laugh
was chorused by the seven.

Hop-Frog also laughed, although feebly and somewhat vacantly.

'Come, come,' said the king, impatiently, 'have you nothing to suggest?'

'I am endeavouring to think of something novel,' replied the dwarf,
abstractedly, for he was quite bewildered by the wine.

'Endeavouring!' cried the tyrant, fiercely; 'what do you mean by that?
Ah, I perceive. You are sulky, and want more wine. Here, drink this!'
and he poured out another gobletful and offered it to the cripple, who
merely gazed at it, gasping for breath.

'Drink, I say!' shouted the monster, 'or by the fiends--'

The dwarf hesitated. The king grew purple with rage. The courtiers
smirked. Trippetta, pale as a corpse, advanced to the monarch's seat,
and, falling to her knees before him, implored him to spare her friend.

The tyrant regarded her, for some moments, in evident wonder at her
audacity. He seemed quite at a loss what to do or say-- how most
becomingly to express his indignation. At last, without uttering a
syllable, he pushed her violently from him, and threw the contents of
the brimming goblet in her face.

The poor girl got up as best she could, and, not daring even to sigh,
resumed her position at the foot of the table.

There was a dead silence for about half a minute, during which the
falling of a leaf, or of a feather, might have been heard. It was
interrupted by a low, but harsh and protracted grating sound which
seemed to come at once from every corner of the room.

'What--what--what are you making that noise for?' demanded the king,
turning furiously to the dwarf.

The latter seemed to have recovered, in great measure, from his
intoxication, and looking fixedly but quietly into the tyrant's face,
merely ejaculated:

'I--I?  How could it have been me?'

'The sound appeared to come from without,' observed one of the
courtiers. 'I fancy it was the parrot at the window, whetting his bill
upon his cage-wires.'

'True,' replied the monarch, as if much relieved by the suggestion;
'but, on the honour of a knight, I could have sworn that it was the
gritting of this vagabond's teeth.'

Hereupon the dwarf laughed (the king was too confirmed a joker to object
to any one's laughing), and displayed a set of large, powerful, and very
repulsive teeth. Moreover, he avowed his perfect willingness to swallow
as much wine as desired. The monarch was pacified; and having drained
another bumper with no very perceptible ill effect, Hop-Frog entered at
once, and with spirit, into the plans for the masquerade.

'I cannot tell what was the association of idea,' observed he, very
tranquilly, and as if he had never tasted wine in his life, 'but just
after your majesty had struck the girl and thrown the wine in her
face--just after your majesty had done this, and while the parrot was
making that odd noise outside the window, there came into my mind a
capital diversion--one of my own country frolics--often enacted among
us, at our masquerades: but here it will be new altogether.
Unfortunately, however, it requires a company of eight persons, and--'

'Here we are!' cried the king, laughing at his acute discovery of the
coincidence; 'eight to a fraction--I and my seven ministers. Come! what
is the diversion?'

'We call it,' replied the cripple, 'the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs,
and it really is excellent sport if well enacted.'

'We will enact it,' remarked the king, drawing himself up, and lowering
his eyelids.

'The beauty of the game,' continued Hop-Frog, 'lies in the fright it
occasions among the women.'

'Capital!' roared in chorus the monarch and his ministry.

'I will equip you as ourang-outangs,' proceeded the dwarf; 'leave all
that to me. The resemblance shall be so striking that the company of
masqueraders will take you for real beasts--and, of course, they will be
as much terrified as astonished.'

'Oh, this is exquisite!' exclaimed the king. 'Hop-Frog!  I will make a
man of you.'

'The chains are for the purpose of increasing the confusion by their
jangling. You are supposed to have escaped, en masse, from your keepers.
Your majesty cannot conceive the effect produced, at a masquerade, by
eight chained ourang-outangs, imagined to be real ones by most of the
company, and rushing in with savage cries among the crowd of delicately
and gorgeously habited men and women. The contrast is inimitable.'

'It must be,' said the king: and the council arose hurriedly (as it was
growing late), to put in execution the scheme of Hop- Frog.

His mode of equipping the party as ourang-outangs was very simple, but
effective enough for his purposes. The animals in question had, at the
epoch of my story, very rarely been seen in any part of the civilized
world; and as the imitations made by the dwarf were sufficiently
beast-like and more than sufficiently hideous, their truthfulness to
nature was thus thought to be secured.

The king and his ministers were first encased in tight- fitting
stockinette shirts and drawers. They were then saturated with tar. At
this stage of the process, some one of the party suggested feathers; but
the suggestion was at once overruled by the dwarf, who soon convinced
the eight, by ocular demonstration, that the hair of such a brute as the
ourang-outang was much more efficiently represented by flax. A thick
coating of the latter was accordingly plastered upon the coating of tar.
A long chain was now procured. First, it was passed about the waist of
the king, and tied; then about another of the party, and also tied, then
about all successively, and in the same manner. When this chaining
arrangement was complete, and the party stood as far apart from each
other as possible, they formed a circle; and to make all things appear
natural, Hop-Frog passed the residue of the chain, in two diameters, at
right angles, across the circle, after the fashion adopted, at the
present day, by those who capture Chimpanzees, or other large apes, in
Borneo.

The grand saloon in which the masquerade was to take place, was a
circular room, very lofty, and receiving the light of the sun only
through a single window at top. At night (the season for which the
apartment was especially designed), it was illuminated principally by a
large chandelier, depending by a chain from the centre of the sky-light,
and lowered, or elevated, by means of a counterbalance as usual; but (in
order not to look unsightly) this latter passed outside the cupola and
over the roof.

The arrangements of the room had been left to Trippetta's
superintendence; but, in some particulars, it seems, she had been guided
by the calmer judgment of her friend the dwarf. At his suggestion it was
that, on this occasion, the chandelier was removed. Its waxen drippings
(which, in weather so warm, it was quite impossible to prevent) would
have been seriously detrimental to the rich dresses of the guests, who,
on account of the crowded state of the saloon, could not all be expected
to keep from out its centre--that is to say, from under the chandelier.
Additional sconces were set in various parts of the hall, out of the
way; and a flambeau, emitting sweet odour, was placed in the right hand
of each of the Caryatides that stood against the wall--some fifty or
sixty altogether.

The eight ourang-outangs, taking Hop-Frog's advice, waited patiently
until midnight (when the room was thoroughly filled with masqueraders)
before making their appearance. No sooner had the clock ceased striking,
however, than they rushed, or rather rolled in, all together--for the
impediment of their chains caused most of the party to fall, and all to
stumble as they entered.

The excitement among the masqueraders was prodigious, and filled the
heart of the king with glee. As had been anticipated, there were not a
few of the guests who supposed the ferocious- looking creatures to be
beasts of some kind in reality, if not precisely ourang-outangs. Many of
the women swooned with affright; and had not the king taken the
precaution to exclude all weapons from the saloon, his party might soon
have expiated their frolic in their blood. As it was, a general rush was
made for the doors; but the king had ordered them to be locked
immediately upon his entrance; and, at the dwarf's suggestion, the keys
had been deposited with him.

While the tumult was at its height, and each masquerader attentive only
to his own safety (for, in fact, there was much real danger from the
pressure of the excited crowd), the chain by which the chandelier
ordinarily hung, and which had been drawn up on its removal, might have
been seen very gradually to descend, until its hooked extremity came
within three feet of the floor.

Soon after this, the king and his seven friends, having reeled about the
hall in all directions, found themselves, at length, in its centre, and,
of course, in immediate contact with the chain. While they were thus
situated, the dwarf, who had followed closely at their heels, inciting
them to keep up the commotion, took hold of their own chain at the
intersection of the two portions which crossed the circle diametrically
and at right angles. Here, with the rapidity of thought, he inserted the
hook from which the chandelier had been wont to depend; and, in an
instant, by some unseen agency, the chandelier-chain was drawn so far
upward as to take the hook out of reach, and, as an inevitable
consequence, to drag the ourang-outangs together in close connection,
and face to face.

The masqueraders, by this time, had recovered, in some measure, from
their alarm; and, beginning to regard the whole matter as a
well-contrived pleasantry, set up a loud shout of laughter at the
predicament of the apes.

'Leave them to me!' now screamed Hop-Frog, his shrill voice making
itself easily heard through all the din. 'Leave them to me. I fancy I
know them. If I can only get a good look at them, I can soon tell who
they are.'

Here, scrambling over the heads of the crowd, he managed to get to the
wall; when, seizing a flambeau from one of the Caryatides, he returned,
as he went, to the centre of the room-- leaped, with the agility of a
monkey, upon the king's head--and thence clambered a few feet up the
chain--holding down the torch to examine the group of ourang-outangs,
and still screaming, 'I shall soon find out who they are!'

And now, while the whole assembly (the apes included) were convulsed
with laughter, the jester suddenly uttered a shrill whistle; when the
chain flew violently up for about thirty feet-- dragging with it the
dismayed and struggling ourang-outangs, and leaving them suspended in
mid-air between the sky-light and the floor. Hop-Frog, clinging to the
chain as it rose, still maintained his relative position in respect to
the eight maskers, and still (as if nothing were the matter) continued
to thrust his torch down towards them, as though endeavouring to
discover who they were.

So thoroughly astonished were the whole company at this ascent, that a
dead silence, of about a minute's duration, ensued. It was broken by
just such a low, harsh, grating sound, as had before attracted the
attention of the king and his councillors, when the former threw the
wine in the face of Trippetta. But, on the present occasion, there could
be no question as to whence the sound issued. It came from the fang-
like teeth of the dwarf, who ground them and gnashed them as he foamed
at the mouth, and glared, with an expression of maniacal rage, into the
upturned countenances of the king and his seven companions.

'Ah, ha!' said at length the infuriated jester. 'Ah, ha!  I begin to see
who these people are, now!'  Here, pretending to scrutinize the king
more closely, he held the flambeau to the flaxen coat which enveloped
him, and which instantly burst into a sheet of vivid flame. In less than
half a minute the whole eight ourang-outangs were blazing fiercely, amid
the shrieks of the multitude who gazed at them from below,
horror-stricken, and without the power to render them the slightest
assistance.

At length the flames, suddenly increasing in virulence, forced the
jester to climb higher up the chain, to be out of their reach; and as he
made this movement, the crowd again sank, for a brief instant, into
silence. The dwarf seized his opportunity, and once more spoke:

'I now see distinctly,' he said, 'what manner of people these maskers
are. They are a great king and his seven privy- councillors--a king who
does not scruple to strike a defenceless girl, and his seven councillors
who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the
jester--and this is my last jest.'

Owing to the high combustibility of both the flax and the tar to which
it adhered, the dwarf had scarcely made an end of his brief speech
before the work of vengeance was complete. The eight corpses swung in
their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass.
The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the
ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light.

It is supposed that Trippetta, stationed on the roof of the saloon, had
been the accomplice of her friend in his fiery revenge, and that,
together, they effected their escape to their own country: for neither
was seen again.