While the cart rolled along upon a dyke between the canal and a pond, Ulenspiegel, in deep thought, caressed the ashes of Claes on his breast. He asked himself if the vision was false or true, if those spirits had mocked him or if they had by riddles told him what in good sooth he must find to make the land of his fathers happy.

Vainly groping for the interpretation, he could not discover what the Seven and the Girdle meant.

Thinking upon the dead Emperor, the living King, the Lady Governor, the Pope of Rome, the Grand Inquisitor, the General of the Jesuits, he found in these six great tormentors of the country whom he would gladly have burned alive. But he thought it was not they, for they were too easy to burn, so the Seven must be elsewhere.

And in his own mind he was always repeating:

When the North
Shall kiss the West,
Ruin shall end,
Love thou the Seven,
The Girdle Love.

“Alas!” said he to himself, “in death, blood, and tears, find seven, burn seven, love seven! My poor wit fails, for who then burns what he loves?”

The cart having already swallowed up a long stretch of the road, they heard a noise of feet on the sandy earth, and a voice singing:

“Good travellers, saw you him, I pray,
My wild lost lover gone astray?
He roams at random here and there,
Saw you him, pray?

“As lamb by eagle of the air
He bore my heedless heart away:
A man whose face shows little hair.
Saw you him, pray?

“When he is met, that Nele with care
And toil is very weary, say,
Beloved Thyl, where dost delay?
Saw you him, pray?

“Does he not know the dove’s despair
What time her mate abroad doth stay?
Much more a faithful heart must bear.
Saw you him, pray?”

Ulenspiegel smote upon Lamme’s paunch and said to him:

“Hold thy breath, big belly.”

“Alas!” answered Lamme, “that is a hard thing for a man of my corpulence!”

But Ulenspiegel, paying him no heed, hid behind the tilt of the cart, and imitating the voice of a wheezy fellow lilting after drinking, he sang:

“Thy wild lover I saw, I say,
Within an old worm-eaten shay
Beside a glutton one fine day,
I saw, I say.”

“Thyl,” said Lamme, “thou hast an ill tongue this morning.”

Ulenspiegel, without listening to him, thrust his head out through the opening of the tilt and said:

“Nele, do you not know me?”

She, seized with fear, weeping and laughing at the same time, for her cheeks were all wet, said to him:

“I see you, nasty traitor!”

“Nele,” said Ulenspiegel, “if you want to beat me I have a yard stick in here. It is heavy to make the strokes sink well in and knotty to make them leave their mark.”

“Thyl,” said Nele, “art thou going towards the Seven?”

“Aye,” answered Ulenspiegel.

Nele was carrying a satchel that looked ready to burst; it was so full.

“Thyl,” she said, holding it up to him, “I thought it was unwholesome for a man to travel without taking with him a good fat goose, a ham, and Ghent sausages. And you must eat this in remembrance of me.”

As Ulenspiegel was looking at Nele and not at all thinking of taking the satchel, Lamme thrust out his head through another hole in the canvas and said:

“Forethinking damsel, if he does not accept, it is but in forgetfulness; but give me that ham, give me that goose, tender me those sausages; I shall keep them for him.”

“What,” said Nele, “is this good moonface?”

“That,” said Ulenspiegel, “is a victim of marriage, who, devoured by sorrow, would wither away like an apple in the oven, if he did not recuperate his strength with constant nourishment.”

“Thou hast said the truth, son,” sighed Lamme.

The sun, which was shining strong, burned and scorched Nele’s head. She covered herself up with her apron. Wishing to be alone with her, Ulenspiegel said to Lamme:

“Seest thou that woman wandering yonder in the meadow?”

“I see her,” said Lamme.

“Dost thou recognize her?”

“Ah, me!” said Lamme, “could it be my wife? She is not clad like a townswoman.”

“Thou doubtest still, blind mole,” said Ulenspiegel.

“If it were not she?” said Lamme.

“Thou wouldst lose nothing by going; on the left there, towards the north, there is a kaberdoesje where thou wilt find good bruinbier. We shall go thither to join thee. And here is ham to salt thy natural thirst withal.”

Lamme, getting out of the cart, ran quickly towards the woman that was in the meadow.

Ulenspiegel said to Nele:

“Why do you not come beside me?”

Then, helping her to get up into the cart, he made her sit beside him, took the apron from about her head and the cloak from her shoulders: then giving her a hundred kisses, he said:

“Whither wert thou going, my beloved?”

She answered no word, but she seemed all entranced in ecstasy. And Ulenspiegel, transported even as she, said to her:

“So thou art here, indeed! The sweetbriar roses in the hedges have not the lovely redness of your fresh skin. You are no queen, but let me make you a crown of kisses. Darling arms, all soft, all rosy, that Love himself made all on purpose for kissing! Ah, beloved maid, will not my rugged man’s hands wither that shoulder? The light butterfly settles on the crimson carnation, but can I rest on your dazzling whiteness without withering it, clumsy lout that I am? God is in his heaven, the king upon his throne, and the sun is aloft, triumphing; but am I God, the king, or sunlight, to be so near you? Oh, hair softer than flossy silk! Nele, I strike, I rend, I tear to pieces! But do not be afraid, my love. Thy darling little foot! How comes it to be so white! Has it been bathed in milk?”

She would fain have risen.

“What fearest thou?” said Ulenspiegel. “’Tis not the sun that shineth on us and paints thee all in gold. Lower not thine eyes. See in mine what a lovely fire he lighteth there. Listen, beloved; hear, my darling; it is the silent hour of noon; the peasant is in his home feeding on his soup, shall not we feed upon love? Why have not I a thousand years to pluck one by one on thy knees like a string of pearls from the Indies!”

“Golden tongue!” said she.

And Master Sun blazed through the white canvas of the cart, and a lark sang above the clover, and Nele drooped her head upon Ulenspiegel’s shoulder.

III

Meanwhile Lamme came back sweating big drops of perspiration, and puffing and blowing like a dolphin.

“Alas!” he said, “I was born under an ill star. After I had to run hard to come up with that woman, who was not my wife and who was old, I saw by her face that she was full forty-five years of age, and by her headdress that she had never been married. She asked me tartly what I was coming to do among the clover with my paunch.

“‘I am looking for my wife, who has left me,’ I replied with all gentleness, ‘and taking you for her, I came hastening towards you.’

“At that word the old maid told me I had nothing to do but to go back whence I had come, and that if my wife had left me, she had done right, seeing that all men were scoundrels, heretics, disloyal, poisoners, deceiving poor maids despite even their ripe years, and that anyhow she would make her dog eat me if I did not make myself scarce as quickly as possible.

“I did so, though not without apprehension; for I could see a huge mastiff lying growling at her feet. When I had cleared the boundary of her field, I sat down and to restore myself I bit into your piece of ham you gave me. I was at that moment between two patches of clover; suddenly I heard a noise behind me, and turning round, I saw the old girl’s big mastiff, not threatening now, but wagging his tail to and fro with amiability and appetite. It was my ham he was sharp set against. So I gave him a few little pieces, when his mistress came up, and she cried out:

“‘Seize the fellow! seize him, put your teeth in him, my son!’

“And I started to run, and the big mastiff at my stockings, and he took a piece of them and the flesh with it. But being angered with the pain of this, turning round on him I fetched him such a sour blow of my stick on his front paws that I broke at least one of them for him. He fell, crying out in his dog’s speech ‘mercy,’ which I accorded him. Meanwhile, his mistress was throwing clods of earth at me for want of stones. And I ran.

“Alas! is it not cruel and unjust that because a girl had not enough beauty to find a man to marry her, she should take revenge on poor innocent folk like myself?

“I went away all melancholy to the kaberdoesje that you had pointed out to me, hoping to find there the bruinbier of consolation, were it but one quart or half a dozen. But I was deceived, for when I went within I saw a man and a woman and they fighting. I asked them to be so good as to interrupt their battle to give me a pot of bruinbier, were it one quart or half a dozen; but the woman, a regular stokfisch, in a fury, answered that if I did not be off from there as quickly as possible she would make me swallow the sabot with which she was beating her husband over the head. And so, my friend, here I am, sweating sore and sore wearied. Have you not anything to eat?”

“Aye,” said Ulenspiegel.

“At last!” said Lamme.

IV

Thus re-united, they went on their way together. The donkey, laying back his ears, pulled the cart along.

“Lamme,” said Ulenspiegel, “here be we four food comrades: the ass, the beast of the good God, feeding on chance-found thistles along the meadows; thou, good belly, seeking her that fled from thee; she, sweet girl beloved, tender hearted, finding one that is not worthy of her, I mean myself the fourth.

“Now, then, my children, courage! the leaves are yellowing and the skies will be more gorgeous, for soon will Master Sun go to rest amid the autumnal mists, winter will come, the image and likeness of death, covering with snowy shrouds those that sleep beneath our feet, and I shall be trudging it for the happiness of the land of our fathers. Poor dead ones; Soetkin who didst die of grief; Claes that diedst in the fire; oak of goodness and ivy of love, I, your seedling, I suffer greatly and I shall avenge you, beloved ashes that beat upon my breast.”

Lamme said:

“We must not weep those that die for justice’s sake.”

But Ulenspiegel remained rapt in thought; all at once he said:

“This, Nele, is the hour of farewell, for a long long time, and never again, it may be, shall I look on thy sweet face.”

Nele, looking at him with her eyes gleaming like stars:

“Why,” said she, “why do you not leave this cart to come with me into the forest where you would find good and dainty things to eat; for I know the plants and how to call the birds to me?”

“Damsel,” said Lamme, “’tis ill done of thee to seek to stop Ulenspiegel in the way, for he must look for the Seven and help me to find my wife again.”

“Not yet,” said Nele; and she wept, laughing tenderly through her tears upon her friend Ulenspiegel.

He, seeing this, answered him:

“Your wife, you will always find her soon enough, when you want to seek a new sorrow.”

“Thyl,” said Lamme, “wilt thou leave me thus alone in my cart for this damsel? Thou dost not answer and art thinking of the forest, where the Seven are not, nor my wife, either. Let us rather seek her along this stone paven road on which carts go so well and handily.”

“Lamme,” said Ulenspiegel, “you have a full satchel in the cart, you will not therefore die of hunger if you go without me from here to Koolkerke, where I shall join you again. You must be alone there, for there you will know towards which point of the compass you must direct yourself in order to find your wife again. Listen and hearken. You will go at once with your cart to Koolkerke, three leagues away, the cool church, so named because like many others it is beaten upon by the four winds all at once. Upon the spire there is a vane shapen like a cock and swinging to all the winds on its rusty hinges. It is the screeching of these hinges that indicates to poor men that have lost their lovers the way they must follow to find them again. But first they must strike each wall seven times with a hazel wand. If the hinges cry out when the wind blows from the north, that is the direction in which you must go, but prudently, for the northern wind is a wind of war; if from the south, go lightly thither, it is a love wind; if from the east, run along full speed, it is gaiety and light; if from the west, go softly, it is the wind of rain and tears. Go, Lamme, go to Koolkerke, and wait for me there.”

“I go thither,” said Lamme.

And he set off in his cart.

While Lamme was trundling towards Koolkerke, the wind, which was both high and warm, drove like a flock of sheep in the sky the gray clouds drifting in bands; the trees complained like the waves of a swelling sea. Ulenspiegel and Nele were now a long while in the forest alone together. Ulenspiegel was hungry, and Nele looked for roots that were good to eat, and found nothing but the kisses her friend gave her, and acorns.

Ulenspiegel, having laid down snares, whistled to call the birds down, in order to catch and cook any that might come. A nightingale settled on a leafy branch close to Nele; she did not catch it, for she wished to leave it to sing; a warbler came, and she had pity on it, because it was so pretty and proud in its air; then came a lark, but Nele told it it would do better to fly away into the heights of the sky and sing a hymn to Nature, than to come stupidly to struggle on the murderous point of a spit.

And she said the truth, for in the meantime Ulenspiegel had lighted a clear fire and cut a wooden spit that only awaited its victims.

But no more birds came now, except a few evil ravens that croaked a long way up over their heads.

And so Ulenspiegel did not eat at all.

Now the time had come when Nele must go away and return to Katheline. And she went weeping, and Ulenspiegel from afar off watched her go.

But she came back, and flinging herself on his neck:

“I am going,” she said.

Then she went a few steps, came back again, saying once more:

“I am going.”

And thus twenty times and more over and over.

Then she went indeed, and Ulenspiegel remained alone. He set off then to go and find Lamme.

When he came up with him, he found him sitting at the foot of the tower, with a great pot of bruinbier between his legs and nibbling most melancholy-wise at a hazel wand.

“Ulenspiegel,” said he, “I think you but sent me here that you might be alone with the damsel; I smote as you bade me, seven times with the hazel wand on each wall of the tower, and though the wind is blowing like the devil, the hinges have not made a sound.”

“Without doubt, then, they must have been oiled,” replied Ulenspiegel.

Then they went away in the direction of the Duchy of Brabant.

V

King Philip, dark and gloomy, dabbled with paper with no respite all day long, and even by night, and scribbled over papers and parchments. To them he confided the thoughts of his hard heart. Loving no man in his life, knowing that no man loved him, fain to bear his immense empire alone, a dolorous Atlas, he bowed beneath the burden. Phlegmatic and melancholy of temperament, his excessive toil devoured his weak body. Detesting every bright or merry face, he had conceived hatred for our country because of its gaiety; for our traders because of their wealth; for our nobles because of their free speech, frank ways and manners, the sanguine mettlesomeness of their gallant joviality. He knew, for he had been told, that long before Cardinal de Cousa had indicted the abuses of the Church and preached the need for reforms, the revolt against the Pope and the Romish Church, having been manifested throughout our country under different kinds of sect, was in every head like boiling water in a tight shut kettle.

Obstinate and mulish, he thought that his will ought to lie heavy on the whole world like the will of God; he desired that our countries, little used to ways of servile obedience, should bow beneath the old yoke without obtaining any reform. He wanted his Holy Mother the Catholic Church, Apostolic and Roman, to be one, entire and universal with neither modification nor change, and with no other grounds for wanting this except that he did want it so. Acting in this like an unreasonable woman, tossing and turning by night on his bed as though a couch of thorns, incessantly tormented by his thoughts.

“Yea, Master Saint Philip, yea, Lord God, were I to be forced to make of the Low Countries a common grave and throw into it all the inhabitants, they shall come back to you, my blessed patron, and to you, Madame Virgin Mary, and to you, all ye Saints of Paradise.”

And he sought to do even as he said, and thus he was more Roman than the Pope and more Catholic than the councils.

And Ulenspiegel and Lamme, and the people of Flanders and the Low Countries, full of anguish, imagined that they could see from far within the gloomy haunt of the Escurial, that crowned spider, with long legs and open claws, spreading out his web to entangle them around and suck the best of their heart’s blood.

Although the Papal Inquisition had, under the reign of Charles, killed at the stake, by burying alive, and by the rope, a hundred thousand Christians; though the goods of the poor condemned folk had found their way into the coffers of the Emperor and the King, as the rain flows into the drain, Philip deemed that it was insufficient; he imposed new bishops upon the country and proposed to introduce into it the Spanish Inquisition.

And the town heralds everywhere read out to the sound of trump and tambourine proclamations decreeing to all heretics, men and women and girls, death by fire to those who did not abjure their error, by the rope to those who should abjure. Women and girls would be buried alive, and the executioner should dance upon their bodies.

And the flame of resistance ran throughout the whole land.

VI

The fifth of April, before Easter Day, the lords Count Louis of Nassau, Culembourg, and Brederode, the Drinking Hercules, entered with three hundred other gentlemen of birth into the Court of Brussels, to the Duchess of Parma, the Lady Governor. Going in ordered ranks of four, they went in this way up the great stair of the palace.

Being in the chamber where Madame was they presented to her a request in which they asked her to seek to obtain from King Philip the rescinding of the proclamations touching upon religion and also of the Spanish Inquisition, declaring that within our roused and discontented country there could result from it only troubles, ruins, and universal distress.

And this request was termed The Compromise.

Berlaymont, who later was so treacherous and so cruel to the land of his fathers, was standing beside Her Highness, and said to her, mocking at the poverty of certain of the confederated nobles:

“Madame, fear nothing, they are nothing but beggars.”

Meaning thus that these nobles had ruined themselves in the king’s service or else in trying to match the Spanish lords by their sumptuous display.

To turn to scorn the speech of the Sieur de Berlaymont, the lords declared afterwards that they “held it an honour to be esteemed and called beggars for the king’s service and the good of these lands.”

They began to wear a gold medallion about their neck, having the king’s effigy on one side and on the other two hands locked and passing through a beggar’s wallet, with these words: “Faithful to the king even unto the beggar’s wallet.” They wore also in their hats and bonnets little gold jewels in the shape of beggars’ bowls and beggars’ hats.

Meanwhile, Lamme was taking his paunch throughout the whole town, looking for his wife and not finding her.

VII

Ulenspiegel said to him one morning:

“Follow me: we are going to pay our respects to a high, noble, powerful, and redoubted personage.”

“Will he tell me where my wife is?” asked Lamme.

“If he knows,” answered Ulenspiegel.

And they went to call on Brederode, the Drinking Hercules. He was in the courtyard of his house.

“What wouldst thou with me?” he asked of Ulenspiegel.

“To speak with you, Monseigneur,” answered Ulenspiegel.

“Speak,” replied Brederode.

“You,” said Ulenspiegel, “are a goodly, valiant, and mighty lord. You strangled, once long ago, a Frenchman within his cuirass like a mussel in its shell: but if you are mighty and valiant, you are also of good counsel. Why, then, do you wear this medal on which I read ‘Faithful to the king even unto the beggar’s wallet?’”

“Aye,” asked Lamme, “why, Monseigneur?”

But Brederode made no reply whatever and looked hard at Ulenspiegel. The latter continued:

“Why are you, you noble lords, fain to be faithful to the king even to the wallet? Is it for the great good he wills you, for the goodly amity he bears you? Why, instead of being faithful to him unto the wallet, why do ye not make it so that the despoiled tormentor of his countries should be ever faithful to the beggar’s wallet?”

And Lamme nodded his head in sign of assent.

Brederode looked at Ulenspiegel with his keen glance and smiled, seeing his friendly open mien.

“If thou art not,” said he, “a spy of King Philip’s, thou art a good Fleming, and I shall reward thee for either case.”

He brought him along, Lamme following, into his office. There, pulling his ear till the blood came:

“That,” he said, “is for the spy.”

Ulenspiegel uttered no cry.

“Bring,” he said to his cellarer, “bring that kettle of wine with cinnamon.”

The cellarer brought the kettle and a great tankard of mulled wine perfuming the air.

“Drink,” said Brederode to Ulenspiegel; “this is for the good Fleming.”

“Ah!” said Ulenspiegel, “good Flemish, lovely cinnamon speech, the saints speak not its like.”

Then having drunk the half of the wine, he passed the other half to Lamme.

“Who is he?” said Brederode, “this big-bellied papzak who is rewarded without having done anything?”

“This,” answered Ulenspiegel, “is my friend Lamme, who every time he drinks wine mulled imagines he is going to find his wife again.”

“Aye,” said Lamme, draining the wine from the tankard with devout zeal.

“Whither go ye as now?” asked Brederode.

“We are going,” answered Ulenspiegel, “in search of the Seven that shall save the land of Flanders.”

“What Seven?” asked Brederode.

“When I have found them, I shall tell you what they are,” answered Ulenspiegel.

But Lamme, all merry disposed from having drunk:

“Thyl,” said he, “if we were to go to the moon to look for my wife?”

“Order the ladder,” answered Ulenspiegel.

In May, the month of greenery, Ulenspiegel said to Lamme:

“Lo the lovely month of May! Ah! the clear sky of blue, the happy swallows; see the branches on the trees ruddy with sap, the earth is in love. ’Tis the moment to hang and burn for religion. They are there, the dear little inquisitors. What noble countenances! They have all power to correct, to punish, to degrade, to hand over to the secular judges, to have their prisons. Ah, the lovely month of May! – to arrest the person, to conduct law suits without adhering to the customary forms of justice, to burn, hang, behead, and dig for poor women and girls the grave of premature death. The finches sing in the trees. The good inquisitors have their eye on the rich. And the king shall be heir. Go, damsels, dance in the meadows to the sound of pipes and shawms. Oh! the lovely month of May!”

The ashes of Claes beat upon the breast of Ulenspiegel.

“Let us on,” he said to Lamme. “Happy they that will keep an upright heart, and the sword aloft in the black days that are to come!”