clad only in a petticoat, a jacket of white linen, and an apron of black stuff, full of holes.
Chemises and other woman’s linen was bleaching on cords: the girl, still turned towards Ulenspiegel, was taking chemises down from the lines, and putting them back and smiling and still looking at him, and sat down on linen bands, swinging on the two ends knotted together.
Near by Ulenspiegel heard a cock crowing and saw a nurse playing with a child whose face she turned towards a man that was standing, saying:
“Boelkin, look nicely at papa!”
The child wept.
And the pretty girl continued to walk about in the garden, displacing and replacing the linen.
“She is a spy,” said Lamme.
The girl put her hands before her eyes, and smiling between her fingers, looked at Ulenspiegel.
Then pressing up her two breasts with her hands, she let them fall back, and swung again without her feet touching the ground. And the linen, unwinding itself, made her turn like a top, while Ulenspiegel saw her arms, bare to the shoulders, white and round in the pallid sunshine. Turning and smiling, she kept always looking at him. He went out to find her. Lamme followed him. At the hedge of the garden he searched for an opening to pass through, but found none.
The girl, seeing what he was doing, looked again, smiling between her fingers.
Ulenspiegel tried to break through the hedge, while Lamme, holding him back, said to him:
“Do not go there; she is a spy, we shall be burned.”
Then the girl walked about the garden, covering up her face with her apron, and looking through the holes to see if her chance friend would not be coming soon.
Ulenspiegel was going to leap over the hedge with a running jump, but he was prevented by Lamme, who caught hold of him by the leg and made him fall, saying:
“Rope, sword, and gallows, ’tis a spy, do not go there.”
Sitting on the ground, Ulenspiegel struggled against him. The girl cried out, pushing up her head above the hedge:
“Adieu, Messire, may Love keep your Longanimousness hanging!”
And he heard a burst of mocking laughter.
“Ah!” said he, “it is in my ears like a packet of pins!”
Then a door shut noisily.
And he was melancholy.
Lamme said to him, still holding him:
“You are counting over the sweet treasures of beauty thus lost to your shame. ’Tis a spy. You fall in luck when you fall. I am going to burst with laughing.”
Ulenspiegel said not a word, and both got up on their asses once more.
XX
They went on their way each well astride his ass.
Lamme, chewing the cud of his last meat, sniffed up the cool air rejoicing. Suddenly Ulenspiegel fetched him a great stinging slash of his whip on his behind, which was like a cushion in the saddle.
“What are you doing?” cried Lamme, piteously.
“What!” answered Ulenspiegel.
“This lash with the whip?” said Lamme.
“What lash with the whip?”
“The one I got from you,” returned Lamme.
“On the left?” asked Ulenspiegel.
“Aye, on the left and on my behind. Why did you do that, scandalous vagabond?”
“In ignorance,” replied Ulenspiegel. “I know well enough what a whip is, and very well, too, what a behind of small compass is upon a saddle. But seeing this one wide, swollen, tight, and overflowing the saddle, I said to myself: ‘Since it could never be pinched with a finger, a stroke of the whip could not sting it either with the lash.’ I was wrong.”
Lamme smiling at this speech, Ulenspiegel went on in these terms:
“But I am not the only one in this world to sin through ignorance, and there is more than one past-master idiot displaying his fat on a donkey saddle who could give me points. If my whip sinned on your behind, you sinned much more weightily on my legs in preventing them from running after the girl who was coquetting in her garden.”
“Crow’s meat!” said Lamme, “so it was revenge then?”
“Just a little one,” replied Ulenspiegel.
XXI
At Damme Nele the unhappy lived alone with Katheline who still for love called the cold devil who never came.
“Ah!” she would say, “thou art rich, Hanske my darling, and mightest bring me back the seven hundred carolus. Then would Soetkin come back alive from limbo to this earth, and Claes would laugh in the sky: well canst thou do this. Take away the fire, the soul would fain come out; make a hole, the soul would fain come out.”
And without ceasing she pointed her finger to the place where the tow had been.
Katheline was very poor, but the neighbours helped her with beans, with bread and meat according to their means. The commune gave her some money. And Nele sewed dresses for rich women in the town; went to their houses to iron their linen, and in this way earned a florin a week.
And Katheline still repeated:
“Make a hole; take away my soul. It knocks to get out. He will give back the seven hundred carolus.”
And Nele, listening to her, wept.
XXII
Meanwhile, Ulenspiegel and Lamme, armed with their passes, came to a little inn backed up against the rocks of the Sambre, which in certain places are covered with trees. And on the sign there was written: Chez Marlaire.
Having drunk many a flask of Meuse wine of the fashion of Burgundy and eaten much fish, they gossiped with the host, a Papist of the deepest dye, but as talkative as a magpie through the wine he had drunk and all the time winking an eye cunningly. Ulenspiegel, divining some mystery under this winking, made him drink more, so much that the host began to dance and burst out into laughter, then returning to the table:
“Good Catholics,” he said, “I drink to you.”
“To you we drink,” replied Lamme and Ulenspiegel.
“To the extinction of all plague, of rebellion and heresy.”
“We drink,” replied Lamme and Ulenspiegel, who kept replenishing the goblet the host could never allow to stay full.
“You are good fellows,” said he. “I drink to your Generosities; I make a profit on wine drunk. Where are your passes?”
“Here they are,” answered Ulenspiegel.
“Signed by the
