A Tale Without a Name Read Online Free PDF

do you say this, brother?”
    “Because we too are no different. Neither you nor I nor anyone else from the palace ever did anything for the common good… Yes, Little Irene, this is how the State was brought to its ruin…”
    Brother and sister continued their way without speaking, each lost in thought.
    They reached another hamlet, as impoverished and deserted as the first.
    In a small garden, unkempt, overgrown, untilled, there sat, next to some half-parched furrow weeds, a poorly dressed little old man; he was busy wool-gathering and playing with a rosary to pass the time.
    “A very good day to you,” he said as brother and sister went past.
    “Good afternoon to you, grandfather,” replied the Prince. “Would you let us sit a little in your garden, to rest?”
    “You most certainly may, my children. Why don’t you come in indeed, share a word or two with old Penniless here, so I may forget my troubles?” answered the old man.
    They entered the garden, and sat on the bench next to him.
    “It distresses me deeply that I have nothing left to offer you,” said the old man. “Only they stole from me the one thing that I had, wretch that I am, some few fresh raspberries, which were my pride and joy! Where are you headed, my young lord and lady?”
    “To the capital,” replied Little Irene.
    “Is that so? You travel far. And what will you do in the capital?”
    “We go to find work,” said the Prince.
    The old man barely suppressed a smile:
    “You will only be wasting your time, my children. There is no work to be found in the capital any more.”
    “Why?”
    “Because no one is so foolish as to work so that he may earn the bread that his neighbour will eat in his stead.”
    And he pointed all around him to the thorny thistles and the weeds that covered the earth.
    “The entire country prospers in this same way, like my little garden here,” he went on. Once upon a while, this tiny corner of the earth was blessed by God. Yet who would know it now? My boy is gone away, I am left alone, and I am tired of working for the benefit of others.”
    “Why did your son go away?” asked the Prince.
    “What else might he do here? Together we cultivated our fields, which stretched as far as there yonder, and we sold our yield to the neighbouring villages. We even grew oranges, apples and grapes. The choicest greens and fruit ripened here, before they did so anywhere else. The palace would send here for its provisions of all the fine things it wanted. But things changed, our good King died, and his son is having forty winks. That is why we are all going to the devil.”
    “Why do you say he is having forty winks?” asked Little Irene, flushing red, her eyes filling with tears.
    “Well, he may not be really asleep and dead to the world, but it amounts to much the same thing, since he only knew how to command evening balls, and great feasts; and he never cared about work of any sort, till he consumed all he had, and more that he did not—”
    “This does not tell us why your son went away,” interrupted the Prince, who did not wish to hear more about his father.
    “How does it not? Back then, in the good times, when Prudentius I was still alive, the palace paid for what it received. And it paid well. Afterwards, it no longer paid, but it still received. So, hurriedly and furtively, we would harvest and send away the choicest things in the land, so we might earn some money at least. Yet the roads, with no one to care for them, fell to ruin, our carts would smash in the ditches. Before long, not even our beasts of burden could get through. Our grain would rot in the storehouses, or the palace would feed on it, without paying. Poverty and misery fell upon the land, commerce was ruined, the storehouses crumbled and collapsed, the young men left, the best went to foreign lands, others went to the capital, to become, they said, scientists, and are still there now, starving. The worst stayed behind and are scraping a