The Cuckold and the Cakes

There was a man, in the old days, whose comely young wife was continually baking succulent cakes of sugar and butter. But did she allow him to eat any of them? No, she did not. Nary a cake would she give him, though his mouth watered at the smell of them. "Hands off, husband!" she would cry. "These cakes are not for mortal mouths. I am taking them to the shrine by the river, there to offer them to the goddess."

"Surely the goddess," said the man, "can spare one of these small cakes? Or perhaps two? She is fatter than I."

"Hands off, I said!"

"It is not fitting that a man's wife should squander his entire store of butter and sugar and other savories on cakes for a goddess and let the man who pays for these things go hungry."

"Silence, wretch!" said his wife. "Your words will invoke the anger of the goddess."

"Your cakes invoke the hunger of your husband. To whom do you owe your first duty?"

"To the goddess," she snapped. "We women must look out for each other, or you men would crush us under heel."

"The way you starve me," he rejoined, "I have not the strength to crush a roach under heel."

"I cannot bandy idle words with such a blasphemer as you," said his wife. "I must take my cakes to the river-shrine while they are fresh from the oven."

"My compliments to the goddess," said the husband. "I hope she chokes on them."

As his wife left, the rich, sweet smell of the cakes wafted back to him, putting an even keener edge on his appetite. "Curse her for a lying jade!" he growled to himself. "I will wager she goes off and gluts herself on the cakes all alone!" With this suspicion nibbling at his mind, he crept out and followed her.

But she went directly to the shrine by the river. There she took off her clothes and took the ceremonial bath. At the sight of her smooth, strong body, the man realized that his hunger for cakes was not the only hunger his wife had not been assuaging of late. He hid behind a convenient nearby tree while his wife performed the rest of the intricate ritual, the anointing, the burning of incense, and so on. Then he saw her take from her basket precisely one cake and lay it on the altar.

"Great goddess," she said. "I give you one of the cakes I have baked for my beloved ..."

("For me?" marveled her hidden husband. "She has not given me one!")

"... It is all I can do to keep them from my husband," the wife went on. "And yet if I do not bring cakes to my lover, he will sulk and fret and think I no longer love him. But this is not my greatest trouble. Every day I grow more fearful that my husband will discover my infidelity. These many weeks I have not once lain in his couch. I fear he begins to suspect. Goddess, tell me, how may I make him blind, so that I may entertain my lover, and my husband not be the wiser?"

At this, the husband could scarcely contain his ire. He had a strong urge to leap out and strangle his perfidious wife. But instead, he crept behind the statue, elevated his voice to a feminine falsetto, and said, in eerie tones:

"Little housewife, how long has it been since your husband has eaten such tasty cakes as these?"

"Great goddess," replied the wife, "for all I know, he may never have eaten such. I have never wasted my time and provender in making delicacies for him."

"Ah," replied the husband in his disguised voice, "then hear me: it is a secret of the ancients that a man unaccustomed to a rich diet will, if suddenly surfeited with dainties, sicken and grow blind. It is written that sugar, and also butter, are particularly efficacious! I have spoken."

"Oh, goddess!" cried the wife in gratitude. "It is good of you to help me thus in my adventure!"

"Little one," came back the answer, "we women must look out for each other, or our men would crush us under heel. Begone now and may fortune speed your steps."

The husband then hurried home and, by means of a short-cut he knew of, arrived there before his wife. When she came in, he said, "Well, did the goddess gorge herself on my butter and sugar?"

"Only one cake did she accept," replied his wife. "The rest, she insisted, rightfully should be eaten by you."

"The goddess said that? She is a wise (concluded on page 74)Cuckold and the Cakes(Continued from page 50) and just deity!" And, so saying, he uncovered the basket and began to devour the delicious cakes. Then, leaning back and uttering a long sigh of satisfaction, he said, "I do not know when I have eaten such fine fare. I grow sleepy, wife, and fain would lie down. My dreams will be sweet, composed of sugar and of butter!"

The next morning, upon awakening, he called to his wife: "Why do you not open the shutters, woman?"

"They are open," she replied.

"Then why is it so dark? Has the sun failed to rise? Is it not morning?"

"Indeed it is," said the wife, scarcely able to contain her joy, "and the sunlight is streaming in the house. Can you not see it?"

"Alack, no, although I feel its warmth. Oh, wife, I fear I have been stricken blind!"

His wife made a great show of concern and commiserated with his lamentable condition. "I will bake some more cakes," she said. "Perhaps the eating of them will restore your sight. And while they are in the oven, I will go at once to the goddess and ask her advice."

After putting the batter in the oven, the wife left–going straight to her lover, an indolent fellow who thought it great sport to glut himself on another man's cakes and another man's wife. When he heard the good news of her husband's blindness, he said, "What a fine joke it would be to take our pleasure before his darkened eyes! Come, let us return to your house."

They hurried there, and the wife took the cakes from the oven. "Eat heartily, my poor blinded husband," she said. "The goddess told me that the eating of cakes such as these would assuredly restore your eyes to health!" While he made a substantial breakfast of the cakes, his wife and her lover took themselves to his couch. The husband watched them, eating the cakes the while, and let no sign of rage escape his mouth even though the licentious sights he beheld would have driven any husband into fits. He ate, moaned the loss of his sight, praised the flavor of his wife's cakes, and then, just at the very moment of the plotting pair's highest pleasure, he laid hands upon the lover, tore him away from the couch, and rained blow after blow upon him with a club.

"Villain!" the husband cried. "Usurper! Spoiler of wives! Wrecker of homes! Eater of cakes! Take that and that and that!"

Bruised and bleeding, his bones shattered, the lover crawled away from the house and, a few days later, died of his wounds. In accordance with ancient law, the ties of marriage were dissolved, and the ex-wife suffered the loss of her nose by judicial decree.

Her erstwhile husband married again, and spent the rest of his days enjoying the charms–and the cakes–of his lovely second wife.

She made the offering to the goddess.

"Would you mind locking me in the vault with that young lady in the polka dot dress?"