The Nutcracker
A wooden soldier with a broken jaw, a king of mice with seven heads, and a journey through a coat sleeve
Page 1
On the twenty-fourth of December, in a town in Germany, the children of Judge Stahlbaum were not allowed into the big parlour all day long. Not at noon, not at three, not at dusk. They sat in the little back room in the dark with their noses nearly touching, Marie who was seven and Fritz who was a good deal older and said so, and listened to the sounds coming through the wall: somebody moving furniture, somebody on a stepladder, and once — unmistakably — the small dry cough of Godfather Drosselmeier, who was the cleverest man either of them knew and who always brought something nobody else in the world could have made. Outside, the snow came down on the whole town and the lamps were lit along the street, and inside, behind that door, the tree was being dressed.
Page 2
When the bell rang at last and the doors were thrown open, the parlour was blazing with a hundred candles on a tree that went nearly to the ceiling, and the long table under it was covered with everything two children could want. Fritz had a squadron of tin hussars. Marie had a silk dress and books and a doll. And Godfather Drosselmeier's present stood at the end of the table under a cloth, and when the cloth came off it was a castle — a real one, of gilded paper and glass, with towers and a mirror lake, and when he wound the key, little ladies and gentlemen came out and walked round and round and went in again, and a tiny man exactly the shape of Drosselmeier himself looked out of a window and bowed. It was the most wonderful thing in the room. The children watched it for ten minutes and then wanted to know whether the little people could walk anywhere else, and Drosselmeier said that they could not, and after that nobody looked at the castle again. Marie, meanwhile, had found something else. At the back of the table, behind the candles, stood a small wooden man with an enormous head and a red coat, and he was not handsome at all, and she loved him the moment she saw him.
Page 3
Fritz wanted the Nutcracker too, of course, the moment he saw that Marie had him. He took him and fed him the biggest nuts in the bowl, one after another — the hardest ones, the old brown ones at the bottom — because he said that a soldier should be able to manage. And on the fourth one there was a crack, and three of the Nutcracker's little teeth went into the hearthrug, and his wooden jaw hung loose on one side. Fritz said that it served him right for being badly made. Marie did not shout at her brother, though she wanted to. She picked the Nutcracker up off the rug, and sat down with him in her lap, and took the white ribbon off her own Christmas frock and bound up his jaw with it, very carefully, and wrapped him in her handkerchief and would not let anybody else touch him for the rest of the evening.
Page 4
When everybody had gone up to bed, Marie begged for five minutes more and was given them, and she put the Nutcracker to bed on a shelf in the glass toy cabinet with her dolls, and stood in front of it in her nightgown in the dark. The clock in the corner began to strike twelve. It struck strangely — a dry whirring, and then a sound very like a cough. And on the last stroke the floor of that parlour came alive. Mice came up through the boards in hundreds, squeaking, pouring out from the skirting and under the stove, and in the middle of them, pushing up through the floor itself, came a mouse the size of a cat with SEVEN heads on it, each head wearing a little gold crown. And in the cabinet behind the glass, Marie heard a small clear voice giving orders, and the Nutcracker climbed down off his shelf with her ribbon still round his jaw.
Page 5
What happened next on that floor was a battle, and it was a proper one. The cabinet doors came open and the toys came out — Fritz's tin hussars in two squadrons, the dolls, a regiment of gingerbread men, a clown, a nightlight army with a cannon made of a sugar box — and the Nutcracker led them, standing on a footstool and giving orders in that small clear voice. The mice came on in waves. The hussars held, and broke, and re-formed. The gingerbread men were badly handled. And at last the Nutcracker was alone in the middle of the floor with the seven-headed Mouse King coming at him, and Marie, who had been standing with her back against the cabinet unable to move, pulled off her left slipper and threw it as hard as she could straight at the Mouse King. Then everything went white and she felt the cabinet glass break behind her, and after that she did not know anything more.
Page 6
She woke in her own bed with her arm bandaged and her mother sitting beside her, and was told that she had knocked the glass out of the toy cabinet in her sleep and cut herself, and that there had been no mice. Marie said that there had been. Everybody was very kind about it and nobody believed a word, and she had to stay in bed for days. And then Godfather Drosselmeier came, and sat down by the bed with his hat on his knee, and without any preamble at all told her the story of the hard nut: about Princess Pirlipat, and the Mouse Queen who was angry about some sausage fat, and the enchantment that spoiled the princess's beauty, and the nut called Krakatuk that could not be cracked by anybody, and the young man who cracked it and walked backwards seven steps and trod on the Mouse Queen's tail — and so took the curse onto himself, and became a wooden nutcracker with a huge head and a white wool beard. Marie listened to the whole of it and did not say one word until the end. Then she said that she had known there was a reason.
Page 7
After that the Mouse King came to her at night. He climbed up onto the end of her bed with all seven of his crowns on and told her, in seven small squeaking voices at once, that unless she handed over her sugar dolls and her marzipan he would bite the Nutcracker to pieces. So Marie gave him her sugar dolls. The next night he came for her marzipan, and the night after that for her picture books, and he would have had everything in the room by the end of the week. She did not tell her mother, because her mother did not believe in the mice. She told the Nutcracker instead — and the Nutcracker, propped on her shelf with the ribbon round his jaw, said in his small clear voice that if she could only get him a sword, he would deal with it himself. She went to Fritz the next morning and asked for one off his hussars. Fritz, who was not unkind and simply did not care, handed one over without even asking why.
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She gave the Nutcracker the sabre and put him on the floor by the skirting board, and went to bed, and did not sleep. Somewhere in the small hours there was a scuffling and a squeaking and a sound like a chair being dragged, and then nothing. And in the morning the Nutcracker was standing on the rug at her bedside, with the sabre in one wooden hand and SEVEN tiny gold crowns held up in the other. The Mouse King had been beaten and had run for his hole and left his crowns on the floor behind him, and he was never once seen in that house again. The Nutcracker gave the crowns to Marie, and said — in that small clear voice — that since she had given him the means to defend himself and had stood by him when nobody else would, there was something he would very much like to show her, if she would come with him; and it was not far; and the way was through the sleeve of her father's fox-fur travelling coat, which hung in the wardrobe in the hall.
Page 9
They went in through the wardrobe in the hall, and up the sleeve of her father's fox-fur travelling coat — which took no time at all and which Marie could never afterwards explain — and came out at the top of it into a country made entirely of sweets. There was a meadow of spun sugar, and a wood of glazed almonds where the leaves rang faintly when the wind went through them, and a river of orange juice running between banks of candied peel, with boats made of nutshells rowed by sugar men. There was a town called Bonbonville with houses of gingerbread. And at the end of a long avenue of barley-sugar trees stood the Marzipan Castle, pink and white and enormous, with a hundred turrets, and a court of little figures who came out to meet them and who all, without any surprise at all, called the Nutcracker their prince.
Page 10
She woke on the sofa in the parlour with the winter sun on the carpet and her mother saying that she had been asleep for hours, and when she tried to tell them about the orange river and the Marzipan Castle they were all very kind about that too. So Marie stopped telling them. But she kept the seven little gold crowns in a box, and she showed them to Godfather Drosselmeier — who turned them over in his long fingers, and looked at her with his one eye for rather a long time, and said nothing at all. And she went on sitting with the Nutcracker on her knee, and one day she said out loud that she would not have been like Princess Pirlipat; that she would not have stopped caring for somebody because of a wooden face. There was a crack like a nut being opened. And a year and a day later a young man came to the house — a nephew of Drosselmeier's, from Nuremberg, a polite young man with a white wool beard of a coat collar and a slightly crooked jaw — and he brought Marie a marzipan castle, and asked her, in front of everybody, whether she remembered an orange river. And they say she went away with him afterwards to be queen of that country, where the almond woods ring when the wind goes through them, and where she is queen still.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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