The Kathá Sarit Ságara; or, Ocean of the Streams of Story
shoulder, as before, and fled to his place on the asoka-tree. And
the king, as before, followed him quickly to bring him back again;
for the wise never flag in an enterprise which they have begun,
until it is finished.
CHAPTER LXXXII.
(Vetála 8.)
Then king Trivikramasena returned to the asoka-tree, and again caught
the Vetála, and put him on his shoulder, and set out with him. And as
he was going along, the Vetála again said to him from his shoulder,
"King, in order that you may forget your toil, listen to this question
of mine."
Story of the three fastidious men.
There is a great tract of land assigned to Bráhmans in the country of
Anga, called Vrikshaghata. In it there lived a rich sacrificing Bráhman
named Vishnusvámin. And he had a wife equal to himself in birth. And
by her he had three sons born to him, who were distinguished for
preternatural acuteness. In course of time they grew up to be young
men. One day, when he had begun a sacrifice, he sent those three
brothers to the sea to fetch a turtle. So off they went, and when they
had found a turtle, the eldest said to his two brothers,--"Let one
of you take the turtle for our father's sacrifice, I cannot take it,
as it is all slippery with slime." When the eldest brother said this,
the two younger ones answered him, "If you hesitate about taking it,
why should not we?" When the eldest heard that, he said, "You two must
take the turtle; if you do not, you will have obstructed our father's
sacrifice; and then you and he will certainly sink down to hell." When
he told the younger brothers this, they laughed, and said to him,
"If you see our duty so clearly, why do you not see that your own is
the same?" Then the eldest said, "What, do you not know how fastidious
I am? I am very fastidious about eating, and I cannot be expected
to touch what is repulsive." The middle brother, when he heard this
speech of his, said to his brother,--"Then I am a more fastidious
person than you, for I am a most fastidious connoisseur of the fair
sex." When the middle one said this, the eldest went on to say,
"Then let the younger of you two take the turtle!" Then the youngest
brother frowned, and in his turn said to the two elder, "You fools, I
am very fastidious about beds, so I am the most fastidious of the lot."
So the three brothers fell to quarrelling with one another, and being
completely under the dominion of conceit, they left that turtle and
went off immediately to the court of the king of that country, whose
name was Prasenajit, and who lived in a city named Vitankapura, in
order to have the dispute decided. There they had themselves announced
by the warder, and went in, and gave the king a circumstantial account
of their case. The king said, "Wait here, and I will put you all in
turn to the proof:" so they agreed and remained there. And at the
time that the king took his meal, he had them conducted to a seat of
honour, and given delicious food fit for a king, possessing all the
six flavours. And while all were feasting around him, the Bráhman,
who was fastidious about eating, alone of all the company did not
eat, but sat there with his face puckered up with disgust. The king
himself asked the Bráhman why he did not eat his food, though it was
sweet and fragrant, and he slowly answered him, "I perceive in this
cooked rice an evil smell of the reek from corpses, so I cannot bring
myself to eat it, however delicious it may be." When he said this
before the assembled multitude, they all smelled it by the king's
orders, and said, "This food is prepared from white rice and is good
and fragrant." But the Bráhman, who was so fastidious about eating,
would not touch it, but stopped his nose. Then the king reflected, and
proceeded to enquire into the matter, and found out from his officers
[314], that the food had been made from rice which had been grown in
a field near the burning-ghát of a certain village. Then the king
was much astonished, and being pleased, he said to him, "In truth
you are very particular as to what you eat; so eat of some other dish."
And after they had finished their dinner, the king dismissed the
Bráhmans to their apartments, and sent for the loveliest lady of
his court. And in the evening he sent that fair one, all whose limbs
were of faultless beauty, splendidly adorned, to the second Bráhman,
who was so squeamish about the fair sex. And that matchless kindler
of Cupid's flame, with a face like the full moon of midnight, went,
escorted by the king's servants, to the chamber of the Bráhman. But
when she entered, lighting up the chamber with her brightness, that
gentleman, who was so fastidious about the fair sex, felt quite faint,
and stopping his nose with his left hand, said to the king's servants,
"Take her away; if you do not, I am a dead man, a smell comes from
her like that of a goat." When the king's servants heard this,
they took the bewildered fair one to their sovereign, and told him
what had taken place. And the king immediately had the squeamish
gentleman sent for, and said to him, "How can this lovely woman,
who has perfumed herself with sandal-wood, camphor, black aloes,
and other splendid scents, so that she diffuses exquisite fragrance
through the whole world, smell like a goat?" But though the king used
this argument with the squeamish gentleman, he stuck to his point;
and then the king began to have his doubts on the subject, and at last
by artfully framed questions he elicited from the lady herself, that,
having been separated in her childhood from her mother and nurse,
she had been brought up on goat's milk.
Then the king was much astonished, and praised highly the discernment
of the man who was fastidious about the fair sex, and immediately had
given to the third Bráhman who was fastidious about beds, in accordance
with his taste, a bed composed of seven mattresses placed upon a
bedstead. White smooth sheets and coverlets were laid upon the bed,
and the fastidious man slept on it in a splendid room. But, before
half a watch of the night had passed, he rose up from that bed, with
his hand pressed to his side, screaming in an agony of pain. And the
king's officers, who were there, saw a red crooked mark on his side,
as if a hair had been pressed deep into it. And they went and told
the king, and the king said to them, "Look and see if there is not
something under the mattresses." So they went and examined the bottom
of the mattresses one by one, and they found a hair in the middle of
the bedstead underneath them all. And they took it and shewed it to
the king, and they also brought the man who was fastidious about beds,
and when the king saw the state of his body, he was astonished. And
he spent the whole night in wondering how a hair could have made so
deep an impression on his skin through seven mattresses.
And the next morning the king gave three hundred thousand gold pieces
to those three fastidious men, because they were persons of wonderful
discernment and refinement. And they remained in great comfort in
the king's court, forgetting all about the turtle, and little did
they reck of the fact that they had incurred sin by obstructing their
father's sacrifice.
When the Vetála, seated on the shoulder of the king, had told him
this wonderful tale, he again asked him a question in the following
words, "King, remember the curse I previously denounced, and tell me
which was the most fastidious of these three, who were respectively
fastidious about eating, the fair sex, and beds?" When the wise king
heard this, he gave the Vetála the following answer, "I consider the
man who was fastidious about beds, in whose case imposition was out of
the question, the most fastidious of the three, for the mark produced
by the hair was seen conspicuously manifest on his body, whereas the
other two may have previously acquired their information from some
one else." When the king said this, the Vetála left his shoulder,
as before, and the king again went in quest of him, as before,
without being at all depressed.
NOTE.
The above story resembles No. 2, in the Cento Novelle Antiche, and one
in the Addition to the Arabian tales published by Mr. Scott. (Dunlop's
History of Fiction, Vol. I, p. 415; Liebrecht's translation, p. 212
and note 282.) See also Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 203. In the
Cento Novelle Antiche a prisoner informs the king of Greece, that a
horse has been suckled by a she-ass, that a jewel contains a worm,
and that the king himself is the son of a baker.
The incident of the mattress reminds one of the test applied by the
queen to her son's wife in "The Palace that stood on Golden Pillars,"
(Thorpe's Yuletide Stories, p. 64). In order to find out whether her
daughter-in-law is of high birth, she puts first a bean, then peas,
under her pillow. The prince's wife, who is really the daughter of
a peasant, is apprised of the stratagem by her cat, which resembles
Whittington's. Rohde in his Griechische Novellistik, p. 62, compares
a story told by Aelian about the Sybarite Smindyrides, who slept on a
bed of rose-leaves and got up in the morning covered with blisters. He
also quotes from the Chronicle of Tabari a story of a princess who
was made to bleed by a rose-leaf lying in her bed. Oesterley refers
us to Babington's Vetála Cadai, p. 33, and the Chevalier de Mailly's
version of the three Princes of Serendip. The three are sitting at
table, and eating a leg of lamb, sent with some splendid wine from
the table of the Emperor Behram. The eldest maintains that the wine
was made of grapes that grew in a cemetery, the second that the lamb
was brought up on dog's milk, the third says that the emperor had put
to death the vazir's son, and the latter was bent on vengeance. All
three statements turn out to be well-grounded. There are parallel
stories in the 1001 Nights (Breslau). In Night 458 it is similarly
conjectured that the bread was baked by a sick woman, that the kid was
suckled by a bitch, and that the Sultan is illegitimate. In Night 459
a gem-cutter guesses that a jewel has an internal flaw, a man skilled
in the pedigrees of horses divines that a horse is the offspring of a
female buffalo, and a man skilled in human pedigrees that the mother
of the favourite queen was a rope-dancer. Cp. also the decisions of
Hamlet in Saxo Grammaticus, 1839, p. 138, in Simrock's Quellen des
Shakespeare, 1, 81-85; 5, 170; he lays down that some bread tastes
of blood, (the corn was grown on a battle-field), that some liquor
tastes of iron, (the malt was mixed with water taken from a well,
in which some rusty swords had lain), that some bacon tastes of
corpses, (the pig had eaten a corpse), lastly that the king is a
servant and his wife a serving-maid. Oesterley refers also to the
beginning of Donatus' life of Virgil, and to Heraclius Von Otte,
also to the parallels quoted above from Liebrecht. The brother,
who was so fastidious about beds, may be compared with a princess
in Andersen's Tale of "The Princess on a pea," Gesammelte Märchen,
Part III, 8, 62, (Leipzig, 1847). This is identical with a tale found
in Cavallius' Schwedische Volkssagen und Märchen, German version,
Vienna, 1848, p. 222, which resembles No. 182 in the older editions
of Grimm's Kindermärchen. (Andersen's story is clearly the same as
Thorpe's referred to above.) Nearly akin is Diocletian's test in the
Seven Wise Masters. His masters put an ash-leaf under the bed; and he
remarks, "Either the floor has risen, or the roof sunk." (Oesterley,
p. 215.) In the version in Simrock's Deutsche Volksbücher, Vol. XII,
p. 122, it is an ivy-leaf. See also Ellis's Metrical Romances, p. 412.
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
(Vetála 9.)
So king Trivikramasena again went to the asoka-tree, and taking the