The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl

She was singularly ugly.

This fact about herself the Princess discovered at puberty. From then on she was in a sulk about it. By the time she was 15, her in any case unshapely mouth had set in a pout; 20, and her already pinched brow contracted into a permanent frown.

At 21, she became liable to the duty of making frequent ceremonial appearances in public. Because she knew the sight of her could give no pleasure to her subjects, her voice took on the rasp of continual rage, and her gait congealed into the stumpy, stamping steps of perpetual fury.

Not since childhood had she liked anybody. In childhood she had happily played with the lodge-keeper’s daughter, her exact contemporary, who happened to be as pretty as the Princess was hideous. Both children were, however, too young to notice. When they were nine, the difference in their stations parted them. The Princess occasionally felt regret for the sole friendship she had experienced. But she recognised that, if difference of station had not divided them then, difference in comeliness would have done soon after.

Now that she was 25, the Princess was being urgently advised by her Council of State to marry – a suggestion which she, knowing no one would willingly woo her, considered tactless and distasteful. After a long afternoon’s urging on the part of the Council, it was with a rage unusually intense even for her that the Princess clattered over the cobblestones past the guards and set off alone into a cool early-summer evening in the Palace gardens.

As soon as, having crossed two lawns, a rose-plantation and an arbour, she knew herself out of sight, her anger became more expressive, and she took to petulantly kicking a fairish-sized stone in front of her along the paved paths of the water garden.

She paused beside an ornamental pond over which dusk was already collecting. The surface of the water was the colour of
a wet lead roof. Peering across it, the Princess saw a large toad sitting on the artificial island at the centre of the pond.

Although a pond was a habitat more appropriate to a frog, the Princess was pedantically sure she had classified the beast correctly. Even by the uncertain light it was brown, not green. It was far too large for a frog. Strictly, it was too large even for a toad. And the Princess distinctly made out that its big body was covered in warts – including a huge one on its head that appeared to be actually and repellently crimson, like a
bloodshot
extra eye.

Although her general animosity usually excused animals, the Princess felt strong, sudden disgust. She picked up the stone she had been kicking and flung it stingingly at the toad.

A loud splash informed her that the toad had dived off the rockery island just in time – just before the Princess’s pebble clanged on the rock and then, with a lesser splash, bounced into the water.

Annoyed, because her aim was as a rule accurate, the Princess looked down as if to continue angrily kicking her stone along – and was doubly annoyed to remember that she had herself thrown it away.

She kicked instead at the masonry coping which, six inches or so high and equally broad, formed the surround of the pond. In a spasm of displeasure against the toad, she said aloud ‘Hideous creature.’

She thought that a voice – raucous, deep in itself and seeming to come from under the water – replied: ‘
You’re
in no position to talk.’

‘No more are you,’ the Princess answered sharply, in her own raucous but higher-pitched voice. ‘Toads
can’t
talk.’

The pond splashed, immediately beside her. She looked down and saw, through the dusk, a toad hand emerge from the dark water. In an instant the toad was out of the pond and sitting on top of the now shadowy stone-work of the surround, its body glistening with wetness.

‘Magic toads can,’ it said insolently.

‘Then it
was
you?’

‘You know perfectly well no one else in the kingdom would dare address you so frankly.’

‘That’s true,’ the Princess admitted, ‘and in a way a relief.
But what’s the good’, she went on crossly, because her thoughts, once recovered from being startled, had returned to their usual sulk about her own situation, ‘of being magic, if it doesn’t stop you being so hideous?’

‘Me hideous?’ the toad said. ‘Why; don’t you admire the jewel in my forehead?’

‘Jewel? You don’t mean that wart?’

‘Wart nothing. Look closer.’

Stooping in an ungainly manner, the Princess did so. What she had taken for a bloodshot wart was a ruby bigger and of deeper crimson than any in the treasury.

‘Put your finger on it,’ said the toad.

‘O, I
couldn
’
t
,’ the Princess replied. ‘Even though it isn’t a wart, and even though I am quite interested in zoology, the very thought disgusts me.’

‘If you put your finger on my ruby and express a wish, your wish will come true.’

The Princess, still stooped over the toad, stretched her
forefinger
tremblingly towards the ruby. She shuddered, hesitated and then reached shudderingly on and pressed the pad of her finger against the precious stone. ‘I wish to be the best looking girl in the kingdom.’

‘Wish granted,’ the toad said and dived noisily into the pond.

The Princess flung herself belly-down onto the coping and, hanging out over the pond, tried to consult its surface as a mirror.

Darkness and the ripples the toad had just caused frustrated her.

She scrambled up and set ungracefully off to run back to the Palace. Without consideration, she lumped her way past the consterned guards, scattered the indoor footmen, heaved herself up the grand staircase, burst into her suite and flung herself at her glass.

Only her own old accustomed face stared imploringly back at her, more hideous than ever under sweat, panting, hope
disappointed
and the dishevelment of her lank hair.

*

The Princess did not forget the toad during the next few days, but she made a point of keeping it out of her thoughts – which meant it had to be frequently present to them in order to
be warded off. The toad was, in fact, the image that came
immediately
to her mind when she was summoned unexpectedly to an improvised Council-meeting – the toad, plus her own impatience with it because it had seemed to offer, but had failed to supply, a route out of the problem of the royal marriage.

The First Minister, as the Princess arrived at the Council Chamber, appeared to have been stricken white-faced. ‘
Highness
,’ he began almost before she was through the stately
doorway
, ‘disaster mounting well nigh to tragedy has fallen upon us.’

‘It is not very polite of you’, the Princess said, pushing past him to the throne, ‘to allude to us as a disaster.’

‘To
you
, Highness?’

‘I suppose an unmanageable princess
is
well nigh tragedy.’

‘O, we’re not bothering now about the royal marriage. That question—’

‘—has become a minor one?’ enquired the Princess, her voice attempting hauteur but coming out as a squeak.

‘That entirely joyful question’, said the Second Minister, edging himself diplomatically forward, ‘may be kept as a treat in store. Alas, we are now faced, urgently, with something sad.’

‘What?’ the Princess demanded, looking round, from the throne, at the circle of standing ministers.

‘A sort of blight,’ said the First Minister, wringing his hands.

‘Indeed, virtually a sort of plague,’ said the Second Minister.

‘Of, in fact,’ said the Third, ‘epidemic proportions.’

‘So. An epidemic,’ said the Princess briskly. ‘Livestock or people?’

‘People, alas. But dropping like flies.’

‘Your Highness’s subjects. Your Highness’s poor, poor
subjects
.’

‘Is the “poor” literal or emotional?’ demanded her Highness.

‘Rich and poor alike. A broad spectrum. Like flies.’

‘You’ve consulted the scientists?’

‘They can’t identify it. Some bacterium unknown to
microbiology
.’

‘Your Highness’s advisers are at their wits’ ends.’

‘Panic stalks the kingdom.’

‘Sorrow shadows our hearths, both humble and proud.’

‘The symptoms are sudden fever – coma – death. Like flies.’

‘One curious phenomenon connected with the outbreak is that the disease appears to attack only females. Indeed, only young females.’

‘Hah,’ said the Princess. She sat up straighter, alert against the tall back of the throne.

‘This point was difficult to establish during the initial stages because, of course, men and old people continued to die of natural, though sometimes not immediately explicable, causes, and their statistics got mixed up with those of the epidemic. However, as the statistics of the latter have, alas, increased, a pattern has unmistakably emerged. The mysterious plague
exclusively
afflicts females between the ages of 15 and 30.’

‘It’s so dreadful’, said the First Minister, breaking into sobs, ‘to think of all those pretty young girls dropping like flies.’

‘What a sentimentalist you are,’ the Princess said, passing him her handkerchief. After a moment’s thought, she stood resolutely up and addressed the meeting from the dais.

‘We shall give the epidemic our personal attention. We decree that the Court go into mourning. Meanwhile, we adjourn this Council. You needn’t’, she added, alluding to her
handkerchief
now sodden into a ball in the First Minister’s hand, ‘bother to give that back. But tell my Comptroller to order me six dozen with black edges.’

As soon as the sun had set, the Princess hurried, alone, into the Palace grounds. Urgently she stalked the stone paths of the water garden, calling, at first with cross impatience, then bitterly and at last forlornly: ‘Toad! Toad!’

She heard two or three splashes, a silken skittering that might have been webbed hands on the surface tension of the water, and, once, what she took to be a raucous laugh coming from beneath a water lily in the dark. But not an articulate word answered her.

It was deep night before, slow with tiredness and sadness, she walked back to the Palace.

Fatigued by sitting up for her, her maid made a tug as she combed a tangle in the Princess’s hair.

Expecting slapping words or an actual slap, the maid – who was 47 – retreated several paces.

No reproof came – not even for the minute’s inactivity while the maid stood incredulous.

Cautiously the maid returned to behind her mistress’s chair and peered round it into her mistress’s face. Tears stood in the Princess’s eyes.

‘I’m very sorry, ma’am,’ the maid said gruffly. ‘That was a painful tug.’

‘It’s not that,’ the Princess replied. ‘It’s because I’m so lonely, and so sad.’

‘The epidemic, ma’am?’

‘Yes,’ said the Princess, ‘and I have no one to confide in, no one to consult.’

‘The Council of State, ma’am—,’ began the maid. But

‘No,’ the Princess cut in, though not urgently. ‘
They’re
no help. But I have an idea.’

‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘You may go to bed now,’ the Princess said, taking the comb from the maid’s hand. ‘I’ll finish for myself. But first thing in the morning send the coach to fetch the lodge keeper’s daughter. I want to see her alone, quite privately, up here in my suite.’

But the next morning the coach rolled back empty up the drive, its wheels spasmodically squeaking because no load bore them down into silence. The frightened footman whispered to the major-domo. The major-domo trembled his way up the grand staircase, had himself announced in the Princess’s suite and, in a state of terror, informed the Princess that the lodge-keeper’s daughter had been one of the first victims of the epidemic.

As the entire household had expected, the Princess threw a tantrum. No one dared approach near enough to notice that it was a tantrum not of temper but of grief.

*

‘Highness, the danger—’

‘The risk, ma’am, of contagion—’

‘We cannot permit ourselves—’

‘Our scientific advisers can offer no guarantee—’

‘We WILL’, cried the Princess, stamping on the parquet floor of the Council Chamber, ‘go. We are NOT afraid.’

The Ministers, grey-skinned, blear-eyed, stubble-jowled from weariness and worry, settled into a shaky silence.

The Princess’s stamp had not been her wonted stamp of petulance. There was command in it.

Perhaps she had taken heart from the surprising fact – she had never had the opportunity to try before – that black was a colour almost becoming to her.

Commandingly, she left the silence she had created to be absorbed. It sank into the piles of newspapers, thick with obituaries, which lay on the console tables, and into the maps and charts that, hastily hung over the tapestries on the walls, recorded on which population centres the disease had so far fallen most thickly and chronicled its still steeply, painfully, rising incidence.

‘The State Coach is to be hung with crêpe,’ the Princess commanded in a quiet voice. ‘The horses’ heads will wear black plumes. Three waggons will follow after, bearing everything that is at present in bloom or in fruit in the royal gardens and hot-houses. We are going among our people to bring comfort.’

No one dared deprecate further – though, as the Princess, with a new stateliness in her mien, left the Chamber, the First Minister sobbed a little into the handkerchief she had given him. ‘So young, so generous, so brave,’ he murmured. ‘How awful if she—’

‘Shh,’ said the diplomatic Second Minister. ‘Absit omen.’

She drove first to the lodge at her own palatial gates. Her behaviour, whether through sorrow or because, behind the black veil she had assumed, she felt her ugliness secure from scrutiny, was regal yet compassionate.

The lodge-keeper and his wife were so touched and flurried by the condescension shewn them that they did, for the ten
minutes
of the Princess’s visit, forget their bereavement and take respite from the hard work of grieving. But when the Princess had gone they reminded themselves of their dead daughter again by remarking to each other that the Princess was not, no matter what unkind rumours said, the least bit spoilt, but remained as simple and unstuck-up as she had been when, at nine, she had used to play in their garden – which was the last time, till now, they had seen her to speak to.