This content is the preface and first few chapters of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," introducing the premise of a 19th-century American engineer transported to 6th-century Britain and his subsequent attempts to modernize the era.
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Gates of Imagination presents: "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court" by Mark Twain. Read by Josh Greenwood. This title was chosen to be recorded by our
patrons. If you would like to participate in nominating future titles that will appear on our
channel, become our patron on YouTube. Preface.
The ungentle laws and customs touched upon in this tale are historical,
and the episodes which are used to illustrate them are also historical. It is not pretended
that these laws and customs existed in England in the sixth century; no, it is only pretended
that inasmuch as they existed in the English and other civilizations of far later times,
it is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in
practice in that day also. One is quite justified in inferring that whatever one of these laws or
customs was lacking in that remote time, its place was competently filled by a worse one.
The question as to whether there is such a thing as divine right of kings is not settled in this
book. It was found too difficult. That the executive head of a nation should be a person
of lofty character and extraordinary ability was manifest and indisputable;
that none but the Deity could select that head unerringly was also manifest and indisputable;
that the Deity ought to make that selection, then, was likewise manifest and indisputable;
consequently, that He does make it, as claimed, was an unavoidable deduction. I mean,
until the author of this book encountered the Pompadour, and Lady Castlemaine,
and some other executive heads of that kind; these were found so difficult to work into the scheme,
that it was judged better to take the other tack in this book (which must be issued this fall),
and then go into training and settle the question in another book. It is, of course, a thing which
ought to be settled, and I am not going to have anything particular to do next winter anyway.
Mark Twain.
Hartford, July twenty-first,
eighteen eighty-nine. A word of explanation.
It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk
about. He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient
armor, and the restfulness of his company—for he did all the talking. We fell together,
as modest people will, in the tail of the herd that was being shown through,
and he at once began to say things which interested me. As he talked along, softly,
pleasantly, flowingly, he seemed to drift away imperceptibly out of this world and time,
and into some remote era and old forgotten country; and so he gradually wove such a spell
about me that I seemed to move among the specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity,
holding speech with a relic of it! Exactly as I would speak of my nearest personal friends or
enemies, or my most familiar neighbors, he spoke of Sir Bedivere, Sir Bors de Ganis, Sir Launcelot
of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all the other great names of the Table Round—and how old, old,
unspeakably old and faded and dry and musty and ancient he came to look as he went on! Presently
he turned to me and said, just as one might speak of the weather, or any other common matter—
"You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transposition of epochs—and bodies?"
I said I had not heard of it. He was so little interested—just as when people speak of the
weather—that he did not notice whether I made him any answer or not. There was half
a moment of silence, immediately interrupted by the droning voice of the salaried cicerone:
"Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the Round Table;
said to have belonged to the knight Sir Agramor le Desirous; observe the round hole through the
chain-mail in the left breast; can't be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet
since invention of firearms—perhaps maliciously by Cromwell's soldiers."
My acquaintance smiled—not a modern smile, but one that must have gone
out of general use many, many centuries ago—and muttered apparently to himself:
"Wit ye well, I saw it done." Then, after a pause, added: "I did it myself."
By the time I had recovered from the electric surprise of this remark, he was gone.
All that evening I sat by my fire at the Warwick Arms,
steeped in a dream of the olden time, while the rain beat upon the windows,
and the wind roared about the eaves and corners. From time to time I dipped into
old Sir Thomas Malory's enchanting book, and fed at its rich feast of prodigies and adventures,
breathed in the fragrance of its obsolete names, and dreamed again. Midnight being
come at length, I read another tale, for a nightcap—this which here follows, to wit...
How Sir Launcelot Slew Two Giants, And Made A Castle Free.
Anon withal came there upon him two great giants, well armed, all save the heads,
with two horrible clubs in their hands. Sir Launcelot put his shield afore him,
and put the stroke away of the one giant, and with his sword he clave his head asunder. When
his fellow saw that, he ran away as he were mad, for fear of the horrible strokes, and Sir
Launcelot after him with all his might, and smote him on the shoulder, and clave him to the middle.
Then Sir Launcelot went into the hall, and there came afore him three score ladies and damsels,
and all kneeled unto him, and thanked God and him of their deliverance. For, sir, said they,
the most part of us have been here this seven year their prisoners, and we have worked all manner
of silk works for our meat, and we are all great gentlewomen born, and blessed be the time, knight,
that ever thou wert born; for thou hast done the most worship that ever did knight in the world,
that will we bear record, and we all pray you to tell us your name, that we may tell our friends
who delivered us out of prison. Fair damsels, he said, my name is Sir Launcelot du Lake.
And so he departed from them and betaught them unto God. And then he mounted upon his horse,
and rode into many strange and wild countries, and through many waters and valleys, and evil was he
lodged. And at the last by fortune him happened against a night to come to a fair courtilage,
and therein he found an old gentlewoman that lodged him with a good-will, and there he had
good cheer for him and his horse. And when time was, his host brought him into a fair garret over
the gate to his bed. There Sir Launcelot unarmed him, and set his harness by him, and went to bed,
and anon he fell on sleep. So, soon after there came one on horseback, and knocked at the gate
in great haste. And when Sir Launcelot heard this he rose up, and looked out at the window,
and saw by the moonlight three knights come riding after that one man, and all three lashed on him at
once with swords, and that one knight turned on them knightly again and defended him. Truly, said
Sir Launcelot, yonder one knight shall I help, for it were shame for me to see three knights on one,
and if he be slain I am partner of his death. And therewith he took his harness and went out at a
window by a sheet down to the four knights, and then Sir Launcelot said on high, Turn you knights
unto me, and leave your fighting with that knight. And then they all three left Sir Kay, and turned
unto Sir Launcelot, and there began great battle, for they alight all three, and strake many strokes
at Sir Launcelot, and assailed him on every side. Then Sir Kay dressed him for to have holpen Sir
Launcelot. Nay, sir, said he, I will none of your help, therefore as ye will have my help let me
alone with them. Sir Kay for the pleasure of the knight suffered him for to do his will, and so
stood aside. And then anon within six strokes Sir Launcelot had stricken them to the earth.
And then they all three cried, Sir Knight, we yield us unto you as man of might matchless. As
to that, said Sir Launcelot, I will not take your yielding unto me, but so that ye yield you unto
Sir Kay the seneschal, on that covenant I will save your lives and else not. Fair knight, said
they, that were we loath to do; for as for Sir Kay we chased him hither, and had overcome him had ye
not been; therefore, to yield us unto him it were no reason. Well, as to that, said Sir Launcelot,
advise you well, for ye may choose whether ye will die or live, for an ye be yielden, it shall
be unto Sir Kay. Fair knight, then they said, in saving our lives we will do as thou commandest us.
Then shall ye, said Sir Launcelot, on Whitsunday next coming go unto the court of King Arthur,
and there shall ye yield you unto Queen Guenever, and put you all three in her grace and mercy,
and say that Sir Kay sent you thither to be her prisoners. On the morn Sir Launcelot arose early,
and left Sir Kay sleeping; and Sir Launcelot took Sir Kay's armor and his shield and armed him,
and so he went to the stable and took his horse, and took his leave of his host,
and so he departed. Then soon after arose Sir Kay and missed Sir Launcelot;
and then he espied that he had his armor and his horse. Now by my faith I know well that
he will grieve some of the court of King Arthur; for on him knights will be bold,
and deem that it is I, and that will beguile them; and because of his armor and shield I
am sure I shall ride in peace. And then soon after departed Sir Kay, and thanked his host.
As I laid the book down there was a knock at the door, and my stranger came in. I gave him
a pipe and a chair, and made him welcome. I also comforted him with a hot Scotch whisky;
gave him another one; then still another—hoping always for his story. After a fourth persuader,
he drifted into it himself, in a quite simple and natural way...
The stranger's history.
I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the state of Connecticut—anyway,
just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and
nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose—or poetry, in other words. My father was a blacksmith,
my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to the great
arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything:
guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why,
I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn't make any difference what; and
if there wasn't any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as
rolling off a log. I became head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men under me.
Well, a man like that is a man that is full of fight—that goes without saying.
With a couple of thousand rough men under one, one has plenty of that sort of amusement. I had,
anyway. At last I met my match, and I got my dose. It was during a misunderstanding
conducted with crowbars with a fellow we used to call Hercules. He laid me out with a crusher
alongside the head that made everything crack, and seemed to spring every joint in my skull and
made it overlap its neighbor. Then the world went out in darkness, and I didn't feel anything more,
and didn't know anything at all—at least for a while. When I came to again, I was sitting under
an oak tree, on the grass, with a whole beautiful and broad country landscape all to myself—nearly.
Not entirely; for there was a fellow on a horse, looking down at me—a fellow fresh out
of a picture-book. He was in old-time iron armor from head to heel, with a helmet on his head the
shape of a nail-keg with slits in it; and he had a shield, and a sword, and a prodigious spear;
and his horse had armor on, too, and a steel horn projecting from his forehead, and gorgeous
red and green silk trappings that hung down all around him like a bedquilt, nearly to the ground.
"Fair sir, will ye just?" said this fellow. "Will I which?"
"Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for—"
"What are you giving me?" I said. "Get along back to your circus, or I'll report you."
Now what does this man do but fall back a couple of hundred yards and then come rushing at me as
hard as he could tear, with his nail-keg bent down nearly to his horse's neck and his long
spear pointed straight ahead. I saw he meant business, so I was up the tree when he arrived.
He allowed that I was his property, the captive of his spear. There was argument
on his side—and the bulk of the advantage—so I judged it best to humor him. We fixed up an
agreement whereby I was to go with him and he was not to hurt me. I came down, and we started away,
I walking by the side of his horse. We marched comfortably along, through glades and over
brooks which I could not remember to have seen before—which puzzled me and made me wonder—and
yet we did not come to any circus or sign of a circus. So I gave up the idea of a circus,
and concluded he was from an asylum. But we never came to an asylum—so I was up a stump,
as you may say. I asked him how far we were from Hartford. He said he had never heard of the place;
which I took to be a lie, but allowed it to go at that. At the end of an hour we saw a
far-away town sleeping in a valley by a winding river; and beyond it on a hill,
a vast gray fortress, with towers and turrets, the first I had ever seen out of a picture.
"Bridgeport?" said I, pointing. "Camelot," said he.
My stranger had been showing signs of sleepiness. He caught himself nodding,
now, and smiled one of those pathetic, obsolete smiles of his, and said:
"I find I can't go on; but come with me,
I've got it all written out, and you can read it if you like."
In his chamber, he said: "First, I kept a journal; then by and by,
after years, I took the journal and turned it into a book. How long ago that was!"
He handed me his manuscript, and pointed out the place where I should begin:
"Begin here—I've already told you what goes before." He was steeped in drowsiness by
this time. As I went out at his door I heard him murmur sleepily: "Give you good den, fair sir."
I sat down by my fire and examined my treasure. The first part of it—the
great bulk of it—was parchment, and yellow with age. I scanned a leaf particularly and
saw that it was a palimpsest. Under the old dim writing of the Yankee historian appeared
traces of a penmanship which was older and dimmer still—Latin words and sentences:
fragments from old monkish legends, evidently. I turned to the place indicated by my stranger and
began to read—as follows: Chapter 1. Camelot.
"Camelot... Camelot," said I to myself.
"I don't seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely."
It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday.
The air was full of the smell of flowers, and the buzzing of insects, and the twittering of birds,
and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir of life, nothing going on.
The road was mainly a winding path with hoof-prints in it, and now and then a faint
trace of wheels on either side in the grass—wheels that apparently had a tire as broad as one's hand.
Presently a fair slip of a girl, about ten years old, with a cataract of golden hair streaming down
over her shoulders, came along. Around her head she wore a hoop of flame-red poppies. It was as
sweet an outfit as ever I saw, what there was of it. She walked indolently along, with a mind
at rest, its peace reflected in her innocent face. The circus man paid no attention to her;
didn't even seem to see her. And she—she was no more startled at his fantastic make-up than if she
was used to his like every day of her life. She was going by as indifferently as she might have
gone by a couple of cows; but when she happened to notice me, then there was a change! Up went
her hands, and she was turned to stone; her mouth dropped open, her eyes stared wide and timorously,
she was the picture of astonished curiosity touched with fear. And there she stood gazing, in
a sort of stupefied fascination, till we turned a corner of the wood and were lost to her view. That
she should be startled at me instead of at the other man, was too many for me; I couldn't make
head or tail of it. And that she should seem to consider me a spectacle, and totally overlook her
own merits in that respect, was another puzzling thing, and a display of magnanimity, too, that was
surprising in one so young. There was food for thought here. I moved along as one in a dream.
As we approached the town, signs of life began to appear. At intervals we passed a wretched cabin,
with a thatched roof, and about it small fields and garden patches in an
indifferent state of cultivation. There were people, too; brawny men, with long, coarse,
uncombed hair that hung down over their faces and made them look like animals.
They and the women, as a rule, wore a coarse tow-linen robe that came well below the knee,
and a rude sort of sandal, and many wore an iron collar. The small boys and girls were always
naked; but nobody seemed to know it. All of these people stared at me, talked about me, ran into the
huts and fetched out their families to gape at me; but nobody ever noticed that other fellow,
except to make him humble salutation and get no response for their pains.
In the town were some substantial windowless houses of stone scattered among a wilderness of
thatched cabins; the streets were mere crooked alleys, and unpaved; troops of dogs and nude
children played in the sun and made life and noise; hogs roamed and rooted contentedly about,
and one of them lay in a reeking wallow in the middle of the main thoroughfare and suckled her
family. Presently there was a distant blare of military music; it came nearer, still nearer,
and soon a noble cavalcade wound into view, glorious with plumed helmets and flashing
mail and flaunting banners and rich doublets and horse-cloths and gilded spearheads; and through
the muck and swine, and naked brats, and joyous dogs, and shabby huts, it took its gallant way,
and in its wake we followed. Followed through one winding alley and then another,—and climbing,
always climbing—till at last we gained the breezy height where the huge castle stood. There was an
exchange of bugle blasts; then a parley from the walls, where men-at-arms, in hauberk and morion,
marched back and forth with halberd at shoulder under flapping banners with the rude figure of
a dragon displayed upon them; and then the great gates were flung open, the drawbridge was lowered,
and the head of the cavalcade swept forward under the frowning arches; and we, following, soon found
ourselves in a great paved court, with towers and turrets stretching up into the blue air on all
the four sides; and all about us the dismount was going on, and much greeting and ceremony,
and running to and fro, and a gay display of moving and intermingling colors, and an altogether
pleasant stir and noise and confusion. Chapter 2. King Arthur's Court.
The moment I got a chance I slipped aside privately and touched an ancient common
looking man on the shoulder and said, in an insinuating, confidential way:
"Friend, do me a kindness. Do you belong to the asylum,
or are you just on a visit or something like that?"
He looked me over stupidly, and said:
"Marry, fair sir, me seemeth—"
"That will do," I said; "I reckon you are a patient."
I moved away, cogitating, and at the same time keeping an eye out for any
chance passenger in his right mind that might come along and give me some light.
I judged I had found one, presently; so I drew him aside and said in his ear:
"If I could see the head keeper a minute—only just a minute—"
"Prithee do not let me."
"Let you what?"
"Hinder me, then, if the word please thee better." Then he went on to say he was an under-cook and
could not stop to gossip, though he would like it another time; for it would comfort his very liver
to know where I got my clothes. As he started away he pointed and said yonder was one who was
idle enough for my purpose, and was seeking me besides, no doubt. This was an airy slim
boy in shrimp-colored tights that made him look like a forked carrot, the rest of his gear was
blue silk and dainty laces and ruffles; and he had long yellow curls, and wore a plumed
pink satin cap tilted complacently over his ear. By his look, he was good-natured; by his gait,
he was satisfied with himself. He was pretty enough to frame. He arrived, looked me over
with a smiling and impudent curiosity; said he had come for me, and informed me that he was a page.
"Go along," I said; "you aren't more than a paragraph."
It was pretty severe, but I was nettled. However, it never phased him; he didn't appear to know he
was hurt. He began to talk and laugh, in happy, thoughtless, boyish fashion, as we walked along,
and made himself old friends with me at once; asked me all sorts of questions about myself
and about my clothes, but never waited for an answer—always chattered straight ahead,
as if he didn't know he had asked a question and wasn't expecting any reply, until at last
he happened to mention that he was born in the beginning of the year five hundred thirteen.
It made the cold chills creep over me! I stopped and said, a little faintly:
"Maybe I didn't hear you just right. Say it again—and say it slow. What year was it?"
"Five hundred thirteen."
"Five hundred thirteen! You don't look it! Come, my boy,
I am a stranger and friendless; be honest and honorable with me. Are you in your right mind?"
He said he was.
"Are these other people in their right minds?"
He said they were.
"And this isn't an asylum? I mean, it isn't a place where they cure crazy people?"
He said it wasn't.
"Well, then," I said, "either I am a lunatic,
or something just as awful has happened. Now tell me, honest and true, where am I?"
"In King Arthur's Court."
I waited a minute, to let that idea shudder its way home, and then said:
"And according to your notions, what year is it now?"
"Five hundred twenty-eight—nineteenth of June."
I felt a mournful sinking at the heart, and muttered: "I shall never see my friends
again—never, never again. They will not be born for more than thirteen hundred years yet."
I seemed to believe the boy, I didn't know why. Something in me seemed to believe him—my
consciousness, as you may say; but my reason didn't. My reason straightway began to clamor;
that was natural. I didn't know how to go about satisfying it, because I knew that the testimony
of men wouldn't serve—my reason would say they were lunatics, and throw out their evidence.
But all of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by luck. I knew that the only total eclipse
of the sun in the first half of the sixth century occurred on the twenty-first of June,
Anno Domini five hundred twenty-eight, old style, and began at three minutes after twelve noon. I
also knew that no total eclipse of the sun was due in what to me was the present year — that is,
eighteen hundred seventy-nine. So, if I could keep my anxiety and curiosity from eating the
heart out of me for forty-eight hours, I should then find out for certain whether
this boy was telling me the truth or not. Wherefore, being a practical Connecticut man,
I now shoved this whole problem clear out of my mind till its appointed day and hour should come,
in order that I might turn all my attention to the circumstances of the present moment,
and be alert and ready to make the most out of them that could be made. One thing at a time,
is my motto—and just play that thing for all it is worth, even if it's only two pair and a jack.
I made up my mind to two things: if it was still the nineteenth century and I was among lunatics
and couldn't get away, I would presently boss that asylum or know the reason why; and if,
on the other hand, it was really the sixth century, all right, I didn't want any softer
thing: I would boss the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would have the
start of the best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years and upward. I'm
not a man to waste time after my mind's made up and there's work on hand; so I said to the page:
"Now, Clarence, my boy—if that might happen to be your name—I'll get you to post me up a
little if you don't mind. What is the name of that apparition that brought me here?"
"My master and thine? That is the good knight and great lord Sir Kay the Seneschal,
foster brother to our liege the king."
"Very good; go on, tell me everything."
He made a long story of it; but the part that had immediate interest for me was this:
He said I was Sir Kay's prisoner, and that in the due course of custom I would be flung into
a dungeon and left there on scant commons until my friends ransomed me—unless I chanced to rot,
first. I saw that the last chance had the best show, but I didn't waste any bother about that;
time was too precious. The page said, further, that dinner was about ended in the great hall
by this time, and that as soon as the sociability and the heavy drinking should begin, Sir Kay would
have me in and exhibit me before King Arthur and his illustrious knights seated at the Round Table,
and would brag about his exploit in capturing me, and would probably exaggerate the facts a little,
but it wouldn't be good form for me to correct him, and not over safe, either;
and when I was done being exhibited, then ho for the dungeon; but he, Clarence, would find
a way to come and see me every now and then, and cheer me up, and help me get word to my friends.
Get word to my friends! I thanked him; I couldn't do less; and about this time a lackey came to
say I was wanted; so Clarence led me in and took me off to one side and sat down by me.
Well, it was a curious kind of spectacle, and interesting. It was an immense place,
and rather naked—yes, and full of loud contrasts. It was very, very lofty; so lofty that the banners
depending from the arched beams and girders away up there floated in a sort of twilight;
there was a stone-railed gallery at each end, high up, with musicians in the one, and women,
clothed in stunning colors, in the other. The floor was of big stone flags laid in black and
white squares, rather battered by age and use, and needing repair. As to ornament, there wasn't any,
strictly speaking; though on the walls hung some huge tapestries which were probably taxed
as works of art; battle pieces, they were, with horses shaped like those which children cut out
of paper or create in gingerbread; with men on them in scale armor whose scales are represented
by round holes—so that the man's coat looks as if it had been done with a biscuit punch. There
was a fireplace big enough to camp in; and its projecting sides and hood, of carved and pillared
stonework, had the look of a cathedral door. Along the walls stood men-at-arms, in breastplate and
morion, with halberds for their only weapon—rigid as statues; and that is what they looked like.
In the middle of this groined and vaulted public square was an oaken table which they
called the Round Table. It was as large as a circus ring; and around it sat a great company
of men dressed in such various and splendid colors that it hurt one's eyes to look at
them. They wore their plumed hats, right along, except that whenever one addressed
himself directly to the king, he lifted his hat a trifle just as he was beginning his remark.
Mainly they were drinking—from entire ox horns; but a few were still munching bread or gnawing
beef bones. There was about an average of two dogs to one man; and these sat in expectant
attitudes till a spent bone was flung to them, and then they went for it by brigades and divisions,
with a rush, and there ensued a fight which filled the prospect with a tumultuous chaos
of plunging heads and bodies and flashing tails, and the storm of howlings and barkings
deafened all speech for the time; but that was no matter, for the dog-fight was always a bigger
interest anyway; the men rose, sometimes, to observe it the better and bet on it,
and the ladies and the musicians stretched themselves out over their balusters with
the same object; and all broke into delighted ejaculations from time to time. In the end,
the winning dog stretched himself out comfortably with his bone between his paws, and proceeded to
growl over it, and gnaw it, and grease the floor with it, just as fifty others were already doing;
and the rest of the court resumed their previous industries and entertainments.
As a rule, the speech and behavior of these people were gracious and courtly;
and I noticed that they were good and serious listeners when anybody was telling anything—I
mean in a dog-fightless interval. And plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot;
telling lies of the stateliest pattern with a most gentle and winning naivety,
and ready and willing to listen to anybody else's lie, and believe it, too.
It was hard to associate them with anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in
tales of blood and suffering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget to shudder.
I was not the only prisoner present. There were twenty or more. Poor devils, many of them were
maimed, hacked, carved, in a rightful way; and their hair, their faces, their clothing,
were caked with black and stiffened drenchings of blood. They were suffering sharp physical pain,
of course; and weariness, and hunger and thirst, no doubt; and at least none had given them the
comfort of a wash, or even the poor charity of a lotion for their wounds; yet you never heard them
utter a moan or a groan, or saw them show any sign of restlessness, or any disposition to complain.
The thought was forced upon me: "The rascals—they have served other people so in their day; it being
their own turn, now, they were not expecting any better treatment than this; so their philosophical
bearing is not an outcome of mental training, intellectual fortitude, reasoning; it is mere
animal training; they are white Indians." Chapter 3. Knights of the Table Round.
Mainly the Round Table talk was monologues—narrative accounts of the
adventures in which these prisoners were captured and their friends and backers killed and stripped
of their steeds and armor. As a general thing—as far as I could make out—these murderous adventures
were not forays undertaken to avenge injuries, nor to settle old disputes or sudden fallings out;
no, as a rule they were simply duels between strangers—duels between people who had never
even been introduced to each other, and between whom existed no cause of offense
whatever. Many a time I had seen a couple of boys, strangers, meet by chance, and say simultaneously,
"I can lick you," and go at it on the spot; but I had always imagined until now that that
sort of thing belonged to children only, and was a sign and mark of childhood; but here
were these big boobies sticking to it and taking pride in it clear up into full age and beyond.
Yet there was something very engaging about these great simple-hearted creatures, something
attractive and lovable. There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak,
to bait a fish-hook with; but you didn't seem to mind that, after a little, because you soon
saw that brains were not needed in a society like that, and indeed would have marred it,
hindered it, spoiled its symmetry—perhaps rendered its existence impossible.
There was a fine manliness observable in almost every face; and in some a certain
loftiness and sweetness that rebuked your belittling criticisms and stilled them. A
most noble benignity and purity reposed in the countenance of him they called Sir Galahad,
and likewise in the king's also; and there was majesty and greatness in the
giant frame and high bearing of Sir Launcelot of the Lake.
There was presently an incident which centered the general interest upon this Sir Launcelot. At
a sign from a sort of master of ceremonies, six or eight of the prisoners rose and came forward
in a body and knelt on the floor and lifted up their hands toward the ladies' gallery and
begged the grace of a word with the queen. The most conspicuously situated lady in
that massed flower-bed of feminine show and finery inclined her head by way of assent,
and then the spokesman of the prisoners delivered himself and his fellows into her hands for free
pardon, ransom, captivity, or death, as she in her good pleasure might elect; and this,
as he said, he was doing by command of Sir Kay the Seneschal, whose prisoners they were,
he having vanquished them by his single might and prowess in sturdy conflict in the field.
Surprise and astonishment flashed from face to face all over the house;
the queen's gratified smile faded out at the name of Sir Kay, and she looked disappointed;
and the page whispered in my ear with an accent and manner expressive of extravagant derision—
"Sir Kay, forsooth! Oh, call me pet names, dearest, call me a marine! In twice a thousand
years shall the unholy invention of man labor at odds to beget the fellow to this majestic lie!"
Every eye was fastened with severe inquiry upon Sir Kay. But he was equal to the occasion. He
got up and played his hand like a major—and took every trick. He said he would state
the case exactly according to the facts; he would tell the simple straightforward tale,
without comment of his own; "and then," said he, "if you find glory and honor due, you will give
it unto him who is the mightiest man of his hands that ever bare shield or strake with sword in the
ranks of Christian battle—even him that sitteth there!" and he pointed to Sir Launcelot. Ah,
he fetched them; it was a rattling good stroke. Then he went on and told how Sir Launcelot,
seeking adventures, some brief time gone by, killed seven giants at one sweep of his sword,
and set one hundred and forty-two captive maidens free; and then went further,
still seeking adventures, and found him (Sir Kay) fighting a desperate fight against nine
foreign knights, and straightway took the battle solely into his own hands, and conquered the nine;
and that night Sir Launcelot rose quietly, and dressed him in Sir Kay's armor and took Sir Kay's
horse and got him away into distant lands, and vanquished sixteen knights in one pitched battle
and thirty-four in another; and all these and the former nine he made to swear that about
Whitsuntide they would ride to Arthur's court and yield them to Queen Guenever's hands as captives
of Sir Kay the Seneschal, spoil of his knightly prowess; and now here were these half dozen,
and the rest would be along as soon as they might be healed of their desperate wounds.
Well, it was touching to see the queen blush and smile, and look embarrassed and happy, and fling
furtive glances at Sir Launcelot that would have got him shot in Arkansas, to a dead certainty.
Everybody praised the valor and magnanimity of Sir Launcelot; and as for me, I was perfectly
amazed that one man, all by himself, should have been able to beat down and capture such battalions
of practiced fighters. I said as much to Clarence; but this mocking featherhead only said:
"And Sir Kay had had time to get another skin of sour wine into him,
you had seen the account doubled."
I looked at the boy in sorrow; and as I looked, I saw the cloud of a deep despondency settle upon
his countenance. I followed the direction of his eye, and saw that a very old and white-bearded
man, clothed in a flowing black gown, had risen and was standing at the table upon unsteady legs,
and feebly swaying his ancient head and surveying the company with his watery and wandering eye.
The same suffering look that was in the page's face was observable in all the
faces around—the look of dumb creatures who know that they must endure and make no moan.
"Marry, we shall have it again," sighed the boy;
"that same old weary tale that he has told a thousand times in the same words,
and that he will tell till he dies, every time he has gotten his barrel full and
feels his exaggeration mill a-working. Would God I had died or I saw this day!"
"Who is it?"
"Merlin, the mighty liar and magician, perdition singe him for the weariness he worketh with his
one tale! But that men fear him for that he has the storms and the lightnings and all the devils
that be in hell at his beck and call, they would have dug his entrails out these many
years ago to get at that tale and squelch it. He tells it always in the third person,
making believe he is too modest to glorify himself—maledictions light
upon him, misfortune be his dole! Good friend, prithee call me for evensong."
The boy nestled himself upon my shoulder and pretended to go to sleep. The old man began his
tale; and presently the lad was asleep in reality; so also were the dogs, and the court, the lackeys,
and the files of men-at-arms. The droning voice droned on; a soft snoring arose on all sides and
supported it like a deep and subdued accompaniment of wind instruments. Some heads were bowed upon
folded arms, some lay back with open mouths that issued unconscious music; the flies buzzed and
bit, unmolested, the rats swarmed softly out from a hundred holes, and pattered about, and made
themselves at home everywhere; and one of them sat up like a squirrel on the king's head and held a
bit of cheese in its hands and nibbled it, and dribbled the crumbs in the king's face with naive
and impudent irreverence. It was a tranquil scene and restful to the weary eye and the jaded spirit.
This was the old man's tale. He said: "Right so the king and Merlin departed,
and went until a hermit that was a good man and a great leech. So the hermit searched all his wounds
and gave him good salves; so the king was there three days, and then were his wounds well amended
that he might ride and go, and so departed. And as they rode, Arthur said, I have no sword. No force,
said Merlin, hereby is a sword that shall be yours and I may. So they rode till they came to a lake,
the which was a fair water and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of an arm
clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand. Lo, said Merlin, yonder is that sword
that I spake of. With that they saw a damsel going upon the lake. What damsel is that? said Arthur.
That is the Lady of the Lake, said Merlin; and within that lake is a rock, and therein is as
fair a place as any on earth, and richly beseen, and this damsel will come to you anon, and then
speak ye fair to her that she will give you that sword. Anon withal came the damsel unto Arthur
and saluted him, and he her again. Damsel, said Arthur, what sword is that, that yonder the arm
holdeth above the water? I would it were mine, for I have no sword. Sir Arthur King, said the damsel,
that sword is mine, and if ye will give me a gift when I ask it you, ye shall have it. By my faith,
said Arthur, I will give you what gift ye will ask. Well, said the damsel, go ye into
yonder barge and row yourself to the sword, and take it and the scabbard with you, and I will
ask my gift when I see my time. So Sir Arthur and Merlin alight, and tied their horses to two trees,
and so they went into the ship, and when they came to the sword that the hand held, Sir Arthur took
it up by the handles, and took it with him. And the arm and the hand went under the water; and so
they came unto the land and rode forth. And then Sir Arthur saw a rich pavilion. What signifieth
yonder pavilion? It is the knight's pavilion, said Merlin, that ye fought with last, Sir Pellinore,
but he is out, he is not there; he hath ado with a knight of yours, that hight Egglame,
and they have fought together, but at the last Egglame fled, and else he had been dead, and he
hath chased him even to Carlion, and we shall meet with him anon in the highway. That is well said,
said Arthur, now have I a sword, now will I wage battle with him, and be avenged on him. Sir,
ye shall not so, said Merlin, for the knight is weary of fighting and chasing, so that ye shall
have no worship to have ado with him; also, he will not lightly be matched of one knight living;
and therefore it is my counsel, let him pass, for he shall do you good service in short time,
and his sons, after his days. Also ye shall see that day in short space ye shall be right glad
to give him your sister to wed. When I see him, I will do as ye advise me, said Arthur. Then Sir
Arthur looked on the sword, and liked it passing well. Whether liketh you better, said Merlin,
the sword or the scabbard? Me liketh better the sword, said Arthur. Ye are more unwise,
said Merlin, for the scabbard is worth ten of the sword, for while ye have the scabbard upon you
ye shall never lose no blood, be ye never so sore wounded; therefore, keep well the scabbard always
with you. So they rode into Carlion, and by the way they met with Sir Pellinore; but Merlin had
done such a craft that Pellinore saw not Arthur, and he passed by without any words. I marvel,
said Arthur, that the knight would not speak. Sir, said Merlin, he saw you not; for and he had seen
you ye had not lightly departed. So they came unto Carlion, whereof his knights were passing glad.
And when they heard of his adventures they marveled that he would jeopard his person so
alone. But all men of worship said it was merry to be under such a chieftain that would put his
person in adventure as other poor knights did." Chapter 4. Sir Dinadan the Humorist.
It seemed to me that this quaint lie was most simply and beautifully told;
but then I had heard it only once, and that makes a difference;
it was pleasant to the others when it was fresh, no doubt.
Sir Dinadan the Humorist was the first to awake, and he soon roused the rest with a practical
joke of a sufficiently poor quality. He tied some metal mugs to a dog's tail and turned him loose,
and he tore around and around the place in a frenzy of fright, with all the other dogs
bellowing after him and battering and crashing against everything that came in their way and
making altogether a chaos of confusion and a most deafening din and turmoil; at which every man and
woman of the multitude laughed till the tears flowed, and some fell out of their chairs and
wallowed on the floor in ecstasy. It was just like so many children. Sir Dinadan was so proud of his
exploit that he could not keep from telling over and over again, to weariness, how the immortal
idea happened to occur to him; and as is the way with humorists of his breed, he was still laughing
at it after everybody else had got through. He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech—of
course a humorous speech. I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my
life. He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus. It seemed peculiarly sad
to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten
jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards.
It about convinced me that there isn't any such thing as a new joke possible.
Everybody laughed at these antiquities—but then they always do; I had noticed that,
centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn't laugh—I mean the boy. No, he scoffed;
there wasn't anything he wouldn't scoff at. He said the most of Sir Dinadan's jokes were rotten
and the rest were petrified. I said "petrified" was good; as I believed, myself, that the only
right way to classify the majestic ages of some of those jokes was by geologic periods. But that
neat idea hit the boy in a blank place, for geology hadn't been invented yet. However,
I made a note of the remark, and calculated to educate the commonwealth up to it if I pulled
through. It is no use to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn't ripe yet.
Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his history-mill with me for fuel. It was time for
me to feel serious, and I did. Sir Kay told how he had encountered me in a far land of barbarians,
who all wore the same ridiculous garb that I did—a garb that was a work of enchantment,
and intended to make the wearer secure from hurt by human hands.
However, he had nullified the force of the enchantment by prayer, and had killed my thirteen
knights in a three hours' battle, and taken me prisoner, sparing my life in order that so strange
a curiosity as I was might be exhibited to the wonder and admiration of the king and the court.
He spoke of me all the time, in the blandest way, as "this prodigious giant," and "this
horrible sky-towering monster," and "this tusked and taloned man-devouring ogre," and everybody
took in all this bosh in the naivest way, and never smiled or seemed to notice that there was
any discrepancy between these watered statistics and me. He said that in trying to escape from
him I sprang into the top of a tree two hundred cubits high at a single bound, but he dislodged
me with a stone the size of a cow, which "all-to brast" the most of my bones, and then swore me to
appear at Arthur's court for sentence. He ended by condemning me to die at noon on the twenty-first;
and was so little concerned about it that he stopped to yawn before he named the date.
I was in a dismal state by this time; indeed, I was hardly enough in my right mind to keep the
run of a dispute that sprung up as to how I had better be killed, the possibility of
the killing being doubted by some, because of the enchantment in my clothes. And yet it was nothing
but an ordinary suit of fifteen dollar slop shops. Still, I was sane enough to notice this detail,
to wit: many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great assemblage
of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would have made a Comanche blush. Indelicacy is
too mild a term to convey the idea. However, I had read "Tom Jones," and "Roderick Random," and other
books of that kind, and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England had
remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and conduct which such talk implies,
clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact clear into our own nineteenth century—in which century,
broadly speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and real gentleman discoverable in
English history—or in European history, for that matter—may be said to have made their appearance.
Suppose Sir Walter, instead of putting the conversations into the mouths of his characters,
had allowed the characters to speak for themselves? We should have had talk from
Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena which would embarrass a tramp in our day.
However, to the unconsciously indelicate all things are delicate. King Arthur's people were
not aware that they were indecent and I had presence of mind enough not to mention it.
They were so troubled about my enchanted clothes that they were mightily relieved,
at last, when old Merlin swept the difficulty away for them with a common-sense hint. He asked
them why they were so dull—why didn't it occur to them to strip me. In half a minute I was as
naked as a pair of tongs! And dear, dear, to think of it: I was the only embarrassed
person there. Everybody discussed me; and did it as unconcernedly as if I had been a cabbage.
Queen Guenever was as naively interested as the rest, and said she had never seen anybody
with legs just like mine before. It was the only compliment I got—if it was a compliment.
Finally I was carried off in one direction, and my perilous clothes in another. I was shoved into a
dark and narrow cell in a dungeon, with some scant remnants for dinner, some moldy straw for a bed,
and no end of rats for company. Chapter 5. An Inspiration.
I was so tired that even my fears were not able to keep me awake long.
When I next came to myself, I seemed to have been asleep a very long time. My first thought was,
"Well, what an astonishing dream I've had! I reckon I've waked only just in time to keep
from being hanged or drowned or burned or something.... I'll nap again till the
whistle blows, and then I'll go down to the arms factory and have it out with Hercules."
But just then I heard the harsh music of rusty chains and bolts,
a light flashed in my eyes, and that butterfly,
Clarence, stood before me! I gasped with surprise; my breath almost got away from me.
"What!" I said, "you here yet? Go along with the rest of the dream! Scatter!"
But he only laughed, in his light-hearted way, and fell to making fun of my sorry plight.
"All right," I said resignedly, "let the dream go on; I'm in no hurry."
"Prithee what dream?"
"What dream? Why, the dream that I am in Arthur's court—a person who never existed;
and that I am talking to you, who are nothing but a work of the imagination."
"Oh, la, indeed! And is it a dream that you're to be burned tomorrow? Ho-ho—answer me that!"
The shock that went through me was distressing. I now began to reason
that my situation was in the last degree serious, dream or no dream;
for I knew by past experience of the lifelike intensity of dreams, that to be burned to death,
even in a dream, would be very far from being a jest, and was a thing to be avoided,
by any means, fair or foul, that I could contrive. So I said beseechingly:
"Ah, Clarence, good boy, only friend I've got,—for you are my friend,
aren't you?—don't fail me; help me to devise some way of escaping from this place!"
"Now do but hear thyself! Escape? Why, man, the corridors are in guard and keep of men-at-arms."
"No doubt, no doubt. But how many, Clarence? Not many, I hope?"
"Full a score. One may not hope to escape." After a pause—hesitatingly:
"And there be other reasons—and weightier."
"Other ones? What are they?"
"Well, they say—oh, but I daren't, indeed daren't!"
"Why, poor lad, what is the matter? Why do you blench? Why do you tremble so?"
"Oh, in sooth, there is need! I do want to tell you, but—"
"Come, come, be brave, be a man—speak out, there's a good lad!"
He hesitated, pulled one way by desire, the other way by fear; then he stole to the door and peeped
out, listening; and finally crept close to me and put his mouth to my ear and told me
his fearful news in a whisper, and with all the cowering apprehension of one who was venturing
upon awful ground and speaking of things whose very mention might be freighted with death.
"Merlin, in his malice, has woven a spell about this dungeon, and there
bides not the man in these kingdoms that would be desperate enough to
essay to cross its lines with you! Now God pity me, I have told it! Ah, be kind to me,
be merciful to a poor boy who means thee well; for an thou betray me I am lost!"
I laughed the only really refreshing laugh I had had for some time; and shouted:
"Merlin has wrought a spell! Merlin, forsooth! That cheap old humbug, that maundering old ass?
Bosh, pure bosh, the silliest bosh in the world! Why, it does seem to me that of all the childish,
idiotic, chuckle-headed, chicken-livered superstitions that ever—oh, damn Merlin!"
But Clarence had slumped to his knees before I had half finished,
and he was like to go out of his mind with fright.
"Oh, beware! These are awful words! Any moment these walls may crumble upon us
if you say such things. Oh call them back before it is too late!"
Now this strange exhibition gave me a good idea and set me to thinking. If everybody about here
was so honestly and sincerely afraid of Merlin's pretended magic as Clarence was,
certainly a superior man like me ought to be shrewd enough to contrive some way to take
advantage of such a state of things. I went on thinking, and worked out a plan. Then I said:
"Get up. Pull yourself together; look me in the eye. Do you know why I laughed?"
"No—but for our blessed Lady's sake, do it no more."
"Well, I'll tell you why I laughed. Because I'm a magician myself."
"Thou!" The boy recoiled a step, and caught his breath, for the thing hit him rather sudden;
but the aspect which he took on was very, very respectful. I took quick note of that;
it indicated that a humbug didn't need to have a reputation in this asylum;
people stood ready to take him at his word, without that. I resumed.
"I've known Merlin seven hundred years, and he—"
"Seven hun—" "Don't interrupt me. He has died and
come alive again thirteen times, and traveled under a new name every time: Smith, Jones,
Robinson, Jackson, Peters, Haskins, Merlin—a new alias every time he turns up. I knew him in Egypt
three hundred years ago; I knew him in India five hundred years ago—he is always blethering around
in my way, everywhere I go; he makes me tired. He doesn't amount to shucks, as a magician;
knows some of the old common tricks, but has never got beyond the rudiments, and never will. He is
well enough for the provinces—one-night stands and that sort of thing, you know—but dear me,
he oughtn't to set up for an expert—anyway not where there's a real artist. Now look here,
Clarence, I am going to stand your friend, right along, and in return you must be mine. I want you
to do me a favor. I want you to get word to the king that I am a magician myself—and the Supreme
Grand High-yu-Muck-amuck and head of the tribe, at that; and I want him to be made to understand that
I am just quietly arranging a little calamity here that will make the fur fly in these realms if Sir
Kay's project is carried out and any harm comes to me. Will you get that to the king for me?"
The poor boy was in such a state that he could hardly answer me. It was pitiful to
see a creature so terrified, so unnerved, so demoralized. But he promised everything;
and on my side he made me promise over and over again that I would remain his friend,
and never turn against him or cast any enchantments upon him. Then he worked
his way out, staying himself with his hand along the wall, like a sick person.
Presently this thought occurred to me: how heedless I have been! When the boy gets calm,
he will wonder why a great magician like me should have begged a boy like him to help
me get out of this place; he will put this and that together, and will see that I am a humbug.
I worried over that heedless blunder for an hour, and called myself a great many hard names,
meantime. But finally it occurred to me all of a sudden that these animals didn't reason;
that they never put this and that together; that all their talk showed
that they didn't know a discrepancy when they saw it. I was at rest, then.
But as soon as one is at rest, in this world, off he goes on something else to worry about.
It occurred to me that I had made another blunder: I had sent the boy off to alarm his betters with
a threat—I intending to invent a calamity at my leisure; now the people who are the readiest and
eagerest and willingest to swallow miracles are the very ones who are hungriest to see
you perform them; suppose I should be called on for a sample? Suppose I should be asked to name
my calamity? Yes, I had made a blunder; I ought to have invented my calamity first. "What shall I do?
what can I say, to gain a little time?" I was in trouble again; in the deepest kind of trouble...
"There's a footstep!—they're coming. If I had only just a moment to think.... Good,
I've got it. I'm all right."
You see, it was the eclipse. It came into my mind in the nick of time, how Columbus,
or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages,
and I saw my chance. I could play it myself, now, and it wouldn't be any plagiarism,
either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand years ahead of those parties.
Clarence came in, subdued, distressed, and said:
"I hastened the message to our liege the king, and straightaway he had me to his presence.
He was frightened even to the marrow, and was minded to give order for your instant enlargement,
and that you be clothed in fine raiment and lodged as befitted one so great; but then came
Merlin and spoiled all; for he persuaded the king that you are mad, and know not whereof you speak;
and said your threat is but foolishness and idle vaporing. They disputed long, but in the end,
Merlin, scoffing, said, 'Wherefore hath he not named his brave calamity? Verily it is
because he cannot.' This thrust did in a most sudden sort close the king's mouth,
and he could offer naught to turn the argument; and so, reluctant, and full loth to do you the
discourtesy, he yet prayeth you to consider his perplexed case, as noting how the matter stands,
and name the calamity—if so be you have determined the nature of it and the time of its coming. Oh,
prithee delay not; to delay at such a time were to double and treble the
perils that already compass thee about. Oh, be thou wise—name the calamity!"
I allowed silence to accumulate while I got my impressiveness together, and then said:
"How long have I been shut up in this hole?"
"You were shut up when yesterday was well spent. It is nine of the morning now."
"No! Then I have slept well, sure enough. Nine in the morning now! And yet it is
the very complexion of midnight, to a shade. This is the twentieth, then?"
"The twentieth—yes."
"And I am to be burned alive tomorrow." The boy shuddered.
"At what hour?"
"At high noon." "Now then, I will tell you what to say."
I paused, and stood over that cowering lad a whole minute in awful silence; then, in a voice deep,
measured, charged with doom, I began, and rose by dramatically graded stages to my colossal climax,
which I delivered in as sublime and noble a way as ever I did such a thing in my life: "Go back
and tell the king that at that hour I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight;
I will blot out the sun, and he shall never shine again; the fruits of the earth shall rot for lack
of light and warmth, and the peoples of the earth shall famish and die, to the last man!"
I had to carry the boy out myself, he sunk into such a collapse. I handed him over to
the soldiers, and went back. Chapter 6. The Eclipse.
In the stillness and the darkness, realization soon began to supplement
knowledge. The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact,
it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a
man being stabbed to the heart, and seeing it done. In the stillness and the darkness,
the knowledge that I was in deadly danger took to itself deeper and deeper meaning all the time;
a something which was realization crept inch by inch through my veins and turned me cold.
But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury
has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up,
and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself,
if anything can be done. When my rally came, it came with a bound. I said to myself that
my eclipse would be sure to save me, and make me the greatest man in the kingdom besides;
and straightway my mercury went up to the top of the tube, and my solicitudes all vanished. I was
as happy a man as there was in the world. I was even impatient for tomorrow to come,
I so wanted to gather in that great triumph and be the center of all the nation's wonder
and reverence. Besides, in a business way it would be the making of me; I knew that.
Meantime there was one thing which had got pushed into the background of my mind.
That was the half-conviction that when the nature of my proposed calamity should be reported to
those superstitious people, it would have such an effect that they would want to compromise. So,
by and by when I heard footsteps coming, that thought was recalled to me, and I said to myself,
"As sure as anything, it's the compromise. Well, if it is good, all right, I will accept;
but if it isn't, I mean to stand my ground and play my hand for all it is worth."
The door opened, and some men-at-arms appeared. The leader said:
"The stake is ready. Come!"
The stake! The strength went out of me,
and I almost fell down. It is hard to get one's breath at such a time,
such lumps come into one's throat, and such gaspings; but as soon as I could speak, I said:
"But this is a mistake—the execution is tomorrow."
"Order changed; been set forward a day. Haste thee!"
I was lost. There was no help for me. I was dazed, stupefied; I had no command over myself,
I only wandered purposely about, like one out of his mind; so the soldiers took hold of me,
and pulled me along with them, out of the cell and along the maze of underground corridors, and
finally into the fierce glare of daylight and the upper world. As we stepped into the vast enclosed
court of the castle I got a shock; for the first thing I saw was the stake, standing in the center,
and near it the piled bundles of wood and a monk. On all four sides of the court the
seated multitudes rose rank above rank, forming sloping terraces that were rich with color. The
king and the queen sat in their thrones, the most conspicuous figures there, of course.
To note all this, occupied but a second. The next second Clarence had slipped from some place of
concealment and was pouring news into my ear, his eyes beaming with triumph and gladness. He said:
"'Tis through me the change was wrought! And main hard have I worked to do it, too.
But when I revealed to them the calamity in store, and saw how mighty was the terror it did engender,
then saw I also that this was the time to strike! Wherefore I diligently pretended,
unto this and that and the other one, that your power against the sun could not reach its
full until the morrow; and so if any would save the sun and the world, you must be slain today,
while your enchantments are but in the weaving and lack potency. Odsbodikins, it was but a dull lie,
a most indifferent invention, but you should have seen them seize it and swallow it, in the frenzy
of their fright, as it were salvation sent from heaven; and all the while was I laughing in my
sleeve the one moment, to see them so cheaply deceived, and glorifying God the next, that He
was content to let the meanest of His creatures be His instrument to the saving of thy life. Ah
how happy has the matter sped! You will not need to do the sun a real hurt—ah, forget not that,
on your soul forget it not! Only make a little darkness—only the littlest little darkness, mind,
and cease with that. It will be sufficient. They will see that I spoke falsely,—being ignorant,
as they will fancy—and with the falling of the first shadow of that darkness you shall
see them go mad with fear; and they will set you free and make you great! Go to thy triumph,
now! But remember—ah, good friend, I implore thee remember my supplication,
and do the blessed sun no hurt. For my sake, thy true friend."
I choked out some words through my grief and misery; as much as to say I would spare the sun;
for which the lad's eyes paid me back with such deep and loving gratitude that I had not the heart
to tell him his good-hearted foolishness had ruined me and sent me to my death.
As the soldiers assisted me across the court, the stillness was so profound that if I had
been blindfolded I should have supposed I was in a solitude instead of walled in by
four thousand people. There was not a movement perceptible in those masses of humanity;
they were as rigid as stone images, and as pale; and dread sat upon every countenance. This hush
continued while I was being chained to the stake; it still continued while the wooden logs were
carefully and tediously piled about my ankles, my knees, my thighs, my body. Then there was a pause,
and a deeper hush, if possible, and a man knelt down at my feet with a blazing torch; the
multitude strained forward, gazing, and parting slightly from their seats without knowing it;
the monk raised his hands above my head and his eyes toward the blue sky, and began some words
in Latin; in this attitude he droned on and on a little while and then stopped. I waited
two or three moments; then looked up; he was standing there petrified. With a common impulse,
the multitude rose slowly up and stared into the sky. I followed their eyes, as sure as guns,
there was my eclipse beginning! The life went boiling through my veins; I was a new
man! The rim of black spread slowly into the sun's disk, my heart beat higher and higher,
and still the assemblage and the priest stared into the sky, motionless. I knew that this gaze
would be turned upon me next. When it was, I was ready. I was in one of the most grand attitudes
I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You could see
the shudder sweep the mass like a wave. Two shouts rang out, one close upon the heels of the other:
"Apply the torch!"
"I forbid it!"
The one was from Merlin, the other from the king.
Merlin started from his place—to apply the torch himself, I judged. I said:
"Stay where you are. If any man moves—even the king—before I give him leave,
I will blast him with thunder, I will consume him with lightnings!"
The multitude sank meekly into their seats, and I was just expecting they would. Merlin hesitated a
moment or two, and I was on pins and needles during that little while. Then he sat down,
and I took a good breath; for I knew I was master of the situation now. The king said:
"Be merciful, fair sir, and essay no further in this perilous matter, lest disaster follow. It was
reported to us that your powers could not attain unto their full strength until the morrow; but—"
"Your Majesty thinks the report may have been a lie? It was a lie."
That made an immense effect; up went appealing hands everywhere,
and the king was assailed with a storm of supplications that I might be bought off
at any price, and the calamity stayed. The king was eager to comply. He said:
"Name any terms, reverend sir, even to the halving of my kingdom;
but banish this calamity, spare the sun!"
My fortune was made. I would have taken him up in a minute, but I couldn't stop an eclipse;
the thing was out of the question. So I asked time to consider. The king said:
"How long—ah, how long, good sir? Be merciful;
look, it groweth darker, moment by moment. Prithee how long?"
"Not long. Half an hour—maybe an hour."
There were a thousand pathetic protests, but I couldn't shorten up any, for I couldn't remember
how long a total eclipse lasts. I was in a puzzled condition, anyway, and wanted to think. Something
was wrong about that eclipse, and the fact was very unsettling. If this wasn't the one I was
after, how was I to tell whether this was the sixth century, or nothing but a dream? Dear me,
if I could only prove it was the latter! Here was a glad new hope. If the boy was right about
the date, and this was surely the twentieth, it wasn't the sixth century. I reached for the
monk's sleeve, in considerable excitement, and asked him what day of the month it was.
Hang him, he said it was the twenty-first! It made me turn cold to hear him. I begged
him not to make any mistake about it; but he was sure; he knew it was the twenty-first. So,
that feather-headed boy had botched things again! The time of the day was right for the
eclipse; I had seen that for myself, in the beginning, by the dial that was near by. Yes,
I was in King Arthur's court, and I might as well make the most out of it I could.
The darkness was steadily growing, the people becoming more and more distressed. I now said:
"I have reflected, Sir King. For a lesson, I will let this darkness proceed,
and spread night in the world; but whether I blot out the sun for good, or restore it,
shall rest with you. These are the terms, to wit: You shall remain king over all your dominions,
and receive all the glories and honors that belong to the kingship; but you shall appoint
me your perpetual minister and executive, and give me for my services one percent of such
actual increase of revenue over and above its present amount as I may succeed in creating for
the state. If I can't live on that, I sha'n't ask anybody to give me a lift. Is it satisfactory?"
There was a prodigious roar of applause, and out of the midst of it the king's voice rose, saying:
"Away with his bonds, and set him free! and do him homage, high and low, rich and poor,
for he has become the king's right hand, is clothed with power and authority,
and his seat is upon the highest step of the throne! Now sweep away this creeping night,
and bring the light and cheer again, that all the world may bless thee."
But I said:
"That a common man should be shamed before the world, is nothing;
but it were dishonor to the king if any that saw his minister naked should not
also see him delivered from his shame. If I might ask that my clothes be brought again—"
"They are not meet," the king broke in. "Fetch raiment of another sort;
clothe him like a prince!"
My idea worked. I wanted to keep things as they were till the eclipse was total, otherwise they
would be trying again to get me to dismiss the darkness, and of course I couldn't do it.
Sending for the clothes gained some delay, but not enough. So I had to make another excuse. I said it
would be but natural if the king should change his mind and repent to some extent of what he
had done under excitement; therefore I would let the darkness grow a while, and if at the end of
a reasonable time the king had kept his mind the same, the darkness should be dismissed. Neither
the king nor anybody else was satisfied with that arrangement, but I had to stick to my point.
It grew darker and darker and blacker and blacker, while I struggled with
those awkward sixth-century clothes. It got to be pitch dark, at last,
and the multitude groaned with horror to feel the cold uncanny night breezes fan through the
place and see the stars come out and twinkle in the sky. At last the eclipse was total,
and I was very glad of it, but everybody else was in misery; which was quite natural. I said:
"The king, by his silence, still stands to the terms." Then I lifted
up my hands—stood just so a moment—then I said, with the most awful solemnity:
"Let the enchantment dissolve and pass harmless away!"
There was no response, for a moment, in that deep darkness and that graveyard
hush. But when the silver rim of the sun pushed itself out, a moment or two later,
the assemblage broke loose with a vast shout and came pouring down like a
deluge to smother me with blessings and gratitude; and Clarence was not the last
of the wash, to be sure. Chapter 7. Merlin's Tower.
Inasmuch as I was now the second personage in the kingdom, as far as political power and authority
were concerned, much was made of me. My raiment was of silks and velvets and cloth of gold, and
by consequence was very showy, also uncomfortable. But habit would soon reconcile me to my clothes; I
was aware of that. I was given the choicest suite of apartments in the castle, after the king's.
They were aglow with loud-colored silken hangings, but the stone floors had nothing
but rushes on them for a carpet, and they were misfit rushes at that, being not all of one
breed. As for conveniences, properly speaking, there weren't any. I mean little conveniences;
it is the little conveniences that make the real comfort of life. The big oaken chairs,
graced with rude carvings, were well enough, but that was the stopping place. There was no soap,
no matches, no looking-glass—except a metal one, about as powerful as a pail of water.
And not a chromo. I had been used to chromos for years, and I saw now that without my suspecting
it a passion for art had got worked into the fabric of my being, and was become a part of me.
It made me homesick to look around over this proud and gaudy but heartless barrenness and
remember that in our house in East Hartford, all unpretending as it was, you couldn't go into a
room but you would find an insurance chromo, or at least a three-color God Bless Our Home
over the door; and in the parlor we had nine. But here, even in my grand room of state, there wasn't
anything in the nature of a picture except a thing the size of a bedquilt, which was either woven or
knitted (it had darned places in it), and nothing in it was the right color or the right shape;
and as for proportions, even Raphael himself couldn't have botched them more formidably,
after all his practice on those nightmares they call his "celebrated Hampton Court cartoons."
Raphael was a bird. We had several of his chromos; one was his "Miraculous Draught of Fishes," where
he puts in a miracle of his own—puts three men into a canoe which wouldn't have held a dog
without upsetting. I always admired to study R.'s art, it was so fresh and unconventional.
There wasn't even a bell or a speaking tube in the castle. I had a great many servants, and
those that were on duty lolled in the anteroom; and when I wanted one of them I had to go and
call for him. There was no gas, there were no candles; a bronze dish half full of boarding house
butter with a blazing rag floating in it was the thing that produced what was regarded as light.
A lot of these hung along the walls and modified the dark, just toned it down enough to make it
dismal. If you went out at night, your servants carried torches. There were no books, pens,
paper or ink, and no glass in the openings they believed to be windows. It is a little
thing—glass is—until it is absent, then it becomes a big thing. But perhaps the worst of all was,
that there wasn't any sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco. I saw that I was just another Robinson
Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals,
and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did—invent, contrive, create,
reorganize things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy. Well, that was in my line.
One thing troubled me along at first—the immense interest which people took in me.
Apparently the whole nation wanted a look at me. It soon transpired that the eclipse had
scared the British world almost to death; that while it lasted the whole country,
from one end to the other, was in a pitiable state of panic, and the churches, hermitages,
and monkeries overflowed with praying and weeping poor creatures who thought the end of the world
had come. Then had followed the news that the producer of this awful event was a stranger,
a mighty magician at Arthur's court; that he could have blown out the sun like a candle,
and was just going to do it when his mercy was purchased, and he then dissolved his enchantments,
and was now recognized and honored as the man who had by his unaided might saved the globe
from destruction and its peoples from extinction. Now if you consider that everybody believed that,
and not only believed it, but never even dreamed of doubting it, you will easily understand that
there was not a person in all Britain that would not have walked fifty miles to get a sight of me.
Of course I was all the talk—all other subjects were dropped; even the king became suddenly a
person of minor interest and notoriety. Within twenty-four hours the delegations began to arrive,
and from that time onward for a fortnight they kept coming. The village was crowded,
and all the countryside. I had to go out a dozen times a day and show myself to these
reverent and awe-stricken multitudes. It came to be a great burden, as to time and trouble,
but of course it was at the same time compensatingly agreeable to be so celebrated
and such a center of homage. It turned Brer Merlin green with envy and spite, which was
a great satisfaction to me. But there was one thing I couldn't understand—nobody had asked
for an autograph. I spoke to Clarence about it. By George! I had to explain to him what it was. Then
he said nobody in the country could read or write but a few dozen priests. Land! think of that.
There was another thing that troubled me a little. Those multitudes presently began to agitate for
another miracle. That was natural. To be able to carry back to their far homes the boast that they
had seen the man who could command the sun, riding in the heavens, and be obeyed, would make them
great in the eyes of their neighbors, and envied by them all; but to be able to also say they had
seen him work a miracle themselves—why, people would come a distance to see them. The pressure
got to be pretty strong. There was going to be an eclipse of the moon, and I knew the date and hour,
but it was too far away. Two years. I would have given a good deal for license to hurry it up and
use it now when there was a big market for it. It seemed a great pity to have it wasted so,
and come lagging along at a time when a body wouldn't have any use for it, as like as not.
If it had been booked for only a month away, I could have sold it short; but, as matters stood,
I couldn't seem to cipher out any way to make it do me any good, so I gave up trying. Next,
Clarence found that old Merlin was making himself busy on the sly among those people. He was
spreading a report that I was a humbug, and that the reason I didn't accommodate the people with
a miracle was because I couldn't. I saw that I must do something. I presently thought out a plan.
By my authority as executive I threw Merlin into prison—the same cell I had occupied myself. Then
I gave public notice by herald and trumpet that I should be busy with affairs of state for a
fortnight, but about the end of that time I would take a moment's leisure and blow up Merlin's stone
tower by fires from heaven; in the meantime, whoso listened to evil reports about me, let him beware.
Furthermore, I would perform but this one miracle at this time, and no more; if it failed to satisfy
and any murmured, I would turn the murmurers into horses, and make them useful. Quiet ensued.
I took Clarence into my confidence, to a certain degree, and we went to work privately.
I told him that this was a sort of miracle that required a trifle of preparation,
and that it would be sudden death to ever talk about these preparations to anybody. That made
his mouth safe enough. Clandestinely we made a few bushels of first-rate blasting powder,
and I superintended my armorers while they constructed a lightning rod and some wires.
This old stone tower was very massive—and rather ruinous, too, for it was Roman,
and four hundred years old. Yes, and handsome, after a rude fashion, and clothed with ivy from
base to summit, as with a shirt of scale mail. It stood on a lonely eminence, in good view from
the castle, and about half a mile away. Working by night, we stowed the powder in
the tower—dug stones out, on the inside, and buried the powder in the walls themselves,
which were fifteen feet thick at the base. We put in a peck at a time, in a dozen places. We
could have blown up the Tower of London with these charges. When the thirteenth night was
come we put up our lightning rod, bedded it in one of the batches of powder, and ran wires from
it to the other batches. Everybody had shunned that locality from the day of my proclamation,
but on the morning of the fourteenth I thought best to warn the people, through the heralds,
to keep clear away—a quarter of a mile away. Then added, by command, that at some time during
the twenty-four hours I would consummate the miracle, but would first give a brief notice;
by flags on the castle towers if in the daytime, by torch baskets in the same places if at night.
Thunder showers had been tolerably frequent of late, and I was not much afraid of a failure;
still, I shouldn't have cared for a delay of a day or two;
I should have explained that I was busy with affairs of state yet, and the people must wait.
Of course, we had a blazing sunny day—almost the first one without a cloud for three weeks;
things always happen so. I kept secluded, and watched the weather. Clarence dropped in from
time to time and said the public excitement was growing and growing all the time,
and the whole country filling up with human masses as far as one could see from the battlements. At
last the wind sprang up and a cloud appeared—in the right quarter, too, and just at nightfall.
For a little while I watched that distant cloud spread and blacken, then I judged it was time
for me to appear. I ordered the torch baskets to be lit, and Merlin liberated and sent to
me. A quarter of an hour later I ascended the parapet and there found the king and the court
assembled and gazing off in the darkness toward Merlin's Tower. Already the darkness was so heavy
that one could not see far; these people and the old turrets, being partly in deep shadow
and partly in the red glow from the great torch baskets overhead, made a good deal of a picture.
Merlin arrived in a gloomy mood. I said:
"You wanted to burn me alive when I had not done you any harm, and latterly you have been trying
to injure my professional reputation. Therefore I am going to call down fire and blow up your tower,
but it is only fair to give you a chance; now if you think you
can break my enchantments and ward off the fires, step to the bat, it's your innings."
"I can, fair sir, and I will. Doubt it not."
He drew an imaginary circle on the stones of the roof, and burnt a pinch of powder in it,
which sent up a small cloud of aromatic smoke, whereat everybody fell back and began to cross
themselves and get uncomfortable. Then he began to mutter and make passes in the air with his hands.
He worked himself up slowly and gradually into a sort of frenzy, and got to thrashing around with
his arms like the sails of a windmill. By this time the storm had about reached us; the gusts
of wind were flaring the torches and making the shadows swash about, the first heavy drops of rain
were falling, the world abroad was black as pitch, the lightning began to wink fitfully. Of course,
my rod would be loading itself now. In fact, things were imminent. So I said:
"You have had time enough. I have given you every advantage,
and not interfered. It is plain your magic is weak. It is only fair that I begin now."
I made about three passes in the air, and then there was an awful crash and that old
tower leaped into the sky in chunks, along with a vast volcanic fountain of fire that
turned night to noonday, and showed a thousand acres of human beings groveling on the ground
in a general collapse of consternation. Well, it rained mortar and masonry the
rest of the week. This was the report; but probably the facts would have modified it.
It was an effective miracle. The great bothersome temporary population vanished.
There were a good many thousand tracks in the mud the next morning, but they were all outward
bound. If I had advertised another miracle I couldn't have raised an audience with a sheriff.
Merlin's stock was flat. The king wanted to stop his wages; he even wanted to banish him, but I
interfered. I said he would be useful to work the weather, and attend to small matters like that,
and I would give him a lift now and then when his poor little parlor magic soured on him. There
wasn't a rag of his tower left, but I had the government rebuild it for him, and advised him
to take boarders; but he was too high-toned for that. And as for being grateful, he never even
said thank you. He was a rather hard lot, take him how you might; but then you couldn't fairly expect
a man to be sweet that had been set back so. Chapter 8. The Boss.
To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing;
but to have the on-looking world consent to it is a finer. The tower episode solidified my power,
and made it impregnable. If any were perchance disposed to be jealous and critical before that,
they experienced a change of heart now. There was not any one in the
kingdom who would have considered it good judgment to meddle with my matters.
I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances. For a time, I used to wake up,
mornings, and smile at my "dream," and listen for the Colt's factory whistle; but that sort of thing
played itself out, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realize that I was actually living
in the sixth century and in Arthur's court, not a lunatic asylum. After that, I was just as much at
home in that century as I could have been in any other; and as for preference, I wouldn't
have traded it for the twentieth. Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains,
pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was; and
all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn't a baby to me in acquirements and capacities;
whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be foreman of a factory, that is
about all; and could drag a seine down street any day and catch a hundred better men than myself.
What a jump I had made! I couldn't keep from thinking about it and contemplating it,
just as one does who has struck oil. There was nothing back of me that could approach it,
unless it might be Joseph's case; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equal it, quite.
For it stands to reason that as Joseph's splendid financial ingenuities advantaged
nobody but the king, the general public must have regarded him with a good deal of disfavor,
whereas I had done my entire public a kindness in sparing the sun, and was popular by reason of it.
I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himself was the
shadow. My power was colossal; and it was not a mere name, as such things have generally been,
it was the genuine article. I stood here, at the very spring and source of the second great
period of the world's history; and could see the trickling stream of that history
gather and deepen and broaden, and roll its mighty tides down the far centuries;
and I could note the upspringing of adventurers like myself in the shelter of its long array
of thrones: De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers, Villierses; the war-making,
campaign-directing wantons of France, and Charles the Second's scepter-wielding drabs; but nowhere
in the procession was my full-sized fellow visible. I was a unique; and glad to know that
that fact could not be dislodged or challenged for thirteen centuries and a half, for sure. Yes,
in power I was equal to the king. At the same time there was another power that was a trifle stronger
than both of us put together. That was the Church. I do not wish to disguise that fact. I couldn't,
if I wanted to. But never mind about that, now; it will show up, in its proper place,
later on. It didn't cause me any trouble in the beginning—at least any of consequence.
Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the people! They were
the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why, they were nothing but rabbits.
It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to
their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility;
as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave
has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why,
dear me, any kind of royalty, howsoever modified, any kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned,
is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you
probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you.
It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has
always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people
that have always figured as its aristocracies—a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule,
would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.
The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves, pure and simple, and bore that name,
and wore the iron collar on their necks; and the rest were slaves in fact, but without the name;
they imagined themselves men and freemen, and called themselves so. The truth was, the nation
as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble;
to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play,
drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and
jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the
degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the
gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt;
and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.
Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. I had mine,
the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit,
and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long
contract on his hands. For instance, those people had inherited the idea that all men without title
and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural gifts and acquirements or hadn't,
were creatures of no more consideration than so many animals, bugs, insects;
whereas I had inherited the idea that human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams
of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at. The way I was
looked upon was odd, but it was natural. You know how the keeper and the public regard the elephant
in the menagerie: well, that is the idea. They are full of admiration of his vast bulk and his
prodigious strength; they speak with pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvels which
are far and away beyond their own powers; and they speak with the same pride of the fact that in his
wrath he is able to drive a thousand men before him. But does that make him one of them? No;
the raggedest tramp in the pit would smile at the idea. He couldn't comprehend it;
couldn't take it in; couldn't in any remote way conceive of it. Well, to the king, the nobles,
and all the nation, down to the very slaves and tramps, I was just that kind of an elephant, and
nothing more. I was admired, also feared; but it was as an animal is admired and feared. The animal
is not reverenced, neither was I; I was not even respected. I had no pedigree, no inherited title;
so in the king's and nobles' eyes I was mere dirt; the people regarded me with wonder and awe,
but there was no reverence mixed with it; through the force of inherited ideas they were not able to
conceive of anything being entitled to that except pedigree and lordship. There you see the hand of
that awful power, the Roman Catholic Church. In two or three little centuries it had converted
a nation of men to a nation of worms. Before the day of the Church's supremacy in the world,
men were men, and held their heads up, and had a man's pride and spirit and independence;
and what of greatness and position a person got, he got mainly by achievement, not by
birth. But then the Church came to the front, with an axe to grind; and she was wise, subtle,
and knew more than one way to skin a cat—or a nation; she invented "divine right of kings," and
propped it all around, brick by brick, with the Beatitudes—wrenching them from their good purpose
to make them fortify an evil one; she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedience to superiors,
the beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached (to the commoner) meekness under insult; preached
(still to the commoner, always to the commoner) patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance under
oppression; and she introduced heritable ranks and aristocracies, and taught all the Christian
populations of the earth to bow down to them and worship them. Even down to my birth century that
poison was still in the blood of Christendom, and the best of English commoners was still content
to see his inferiors impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as lordships
and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country did not allow him to aspire;
in fact, he was not merely contented with this strange condition of things, he was even able to
persuade himself that he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn't anything you can't stand,
if you are only born and bred to it. Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title,
had been in our American blood, too—I know that; but when I left America it had disappeared—at
least to all intents and purposes. The remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses. When
a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly be said to be out of the system.
But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur's kingdom. Here I was,
a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles:
by all rational measurement the one and only actually great man in that whole British world;
and yet there and then, just as in the remote England of my birthtime, the sheep-witted earl
who could claim long descent from a king's leman, acquired at secondhand from the slums of London,
was a better man than I was. Such a personage was fawned upon in Arthur's realm and reverently
looked up to by everybody, even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence,
and his morals as base as his lineage. There were times when he could sit down in the king's
presence, but I couldn't. I could have got a title easily enough, and that would have raised
me a large step in everybody's eyes; even in the king's, the giver of it. But I didn't ask for it;
and I declined it when it was offered. I couldn't have enjoyed such a thing with my notions;
and it wouldn't have been fair, anyway, because as far back as I could go, our tribe had always been
short of the bar sinister. I couldn't have felt really and satisfactorily fine and proud and set
up over any title except one that should come from the nation itself, the only legitimate source;
and such one I hoped to win; and in the course of years of honest and honorable endeavor,
I did win it and did wear it with a high and clean pride. This title fell casually from
the lips of a blacksmith, one day, in a village, was caught up as a happy thought and tossed from
mouth to mouth with a laugh and an affirmative vote; in ten days it had swept the kingdom, and
was become as familiar as the king's name. I was never known by any other designation afterward,
whether in the nation's talk or in grave debate upon matters of state at the council board of
the sovereign. This title, translated into modern speech, would be the boss. Elected
by the nation. That suited me. And it was a pretty high title. There were very few the’s,
and I was one of them. If you spoke of the duke, or the earl, or the bishop, how could anybody
tell which one you meant? But if you spoke of the king or the queen or the boss, it was different.
Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him—respected the office;
at least respected it as much as I was capable of respecting any unearned supremacy;
but as men I looked down upon him and his nobles—privately. And he and they liked me,
and respected my office; but as an animal, without birth or sham title, they looked down upon me—and
were not particularly private about it, either. I didn't charge for my opinion about them,
and they didn't charge for their opinion about me: the account was square, the books balanced,
everybody was satisfied. Chapter 9. The Tournament.
They were always having grand tournaments there at Camelot; and very stirring and picturesque and
ridiculous human bull-fights they were, too, but just a little wearisome to the practical mind.
However, I was generally on hand—for two reasons: a man must not hold himself aloof from the things
which his friends and his community have at heart if he would be liked—especially as a statesman;
and both as a business man and statesman I wanted to study the tournament and see if
I couldn't invent an improvement on it. That reminds me to remark, in passing,
that the very first official thing I did, in my administration—and it was on the very first
day of it, too—was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent
office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways.
Things ran along, a tournament nearly every week; and now and then the boys used to want
me to take a hand—I mean Sir Launcelot and the rest—but I said I would by and by; no hurry yet,
and too much government machinery to oil up and set to rights and start a-going.
We had one tournament which was continued from day to day during more than a week,
and as many as five hundred knights took part in it, from first to last. They were weeks gathering.
They came on horseback from everywhere; from the very ends of the country, and even from
beyond the sea; and many brought ladies, and all brought squires and troops of servants.
It was a most gaudy and gorgeous crowd, as to costumery, and very characteristic
of the country and the time, in the way of high animal spirits, innocent indecencies of language,
and happy-hearted indifference to morals. It was fight or look on, all day and every day;
and sing, gamble, dance, carouse half the night every night. They had a most noble good time. You
never saw such people. Those banks of beautiful ladies, shining in their barbaric splendors,
would see a knight sprawl from his horse in the lists with a lance shaft the thickness of your
ankle clean through him and the blood spouting, and instead of fainting they would clap their
hands and crowd each other for a better view; only sometimes one would dive into her handkerchief,
and look ostentatiously broken-hearted, and then you could lay two to one that
there was a scandal there somewhere and she was afraid the public hadn't found it out.
The noise at night would have been annoying to me ordinarily, but I didn't mind it in the
present circumstances, because it kept me from hearing the quacks detaching legs and
arms from the day's cripples. They ruined an uncommon good old cross-cut saw for me,
and broke the saw-buck, too, but I let it pass. And as for my axe—well,
I made up my mind that the next time I lent an axe to a surgeon I would pick my century.
I not only watched this tournament from day to day, but detailed an intelligent priest from my
Department of Public Morals and Agriculture, and ordered him to report it; for it was my purpose by
and by, when I should have gotten the people along far enough, to start a newspaper. The first thing
you want in a new country, is a patent office; then work up your school system; and after that,
out with your paper. A newspaper has its faults, and plenty of them, but no matter, it's hark from
the tomb for a dead nation, and don't you forget it. You can't resurrect a dead nation without it;
there isn't any way. So I wanted to sample things, and be finding out what sort of reporter material
I might be able to rake together out of the sixth century when I should come to need it.
Well, the priest did very well, considering. He got in all the details, and that is a good
thing in a local item: you see, he had kept books for the undertaker department of his
church when he was younger, and there, you know, the money's in the details;
the more details, the more swag: bearers, mutes, candles, prayers—everything counts;
and if the bereaved don't buy prayers enough you mark up your candles with a forked pencil,
and your bill shows up all right. And he had a good knack at getting in the
complimentary thing here and there about a knight that was likely to advertise—no,
I mean a knight that had influence; and he also had a neat gift of exaggeration,
for in his time he had kept door for a pious hermit who lived in a sty and worked miracles.
Of course this novice's report lacked whoop and crash and lurid description, and therefore wanted
the true ring; but its antique wording was quaint and sweet and simple, and full of the
fragrances and flavors of the time, and these little merits made up in a measure for its more
important lacks. Here is an extract from it: Then Sir Brian de les Isles and Grummore
Grummorsum, knights of the castle, encountered with Sir Aglovale and Sir Tor, and Sir Tor smote
down Sir Grummore Grummorsum to the earth. Then came Sir Carados of the dolorous tower
and Sir Turquine, knights of the castle, and there encountered with them Sir Percivale de Galis and
Sir Lamorak de Galis, that were two brethren, and there encountered Sir Percivale with Sir Carados,
and either brake their spears unto their hands, and then Sir Turquine with Sir Lamorak, and either
of them smote down other, horse and all, to the earth, and either parties rescued other and horsed
them again. And Sir Arnold and Sir Gauter, knights of the castle, encountered with Sir Brandiles
and Sir Kay, and these four knights encountered mightily and brake their spears to their hands.
Then came Sir Pertolope from the castle, and there encountered with him Sir Lionel, and there
Sir Pertolope the green knight smote down Sir Lionel, brother to Sir Launcelot. All this was
marked by noble heralds, who bare him best, and their names. Then Sir Bleobaris brake his spear
upon Sir Gareth, but of that stroke Sir Bleobaris fell to the earth. When Sir Galihodin saw that,
he bade Sir Gareth keep him, and Sir Gareth smote him to the earth. Then Sir Galihud gat
a spear to avenge his brother, and in the same wise Sir Gareth served him, and Sir Dinadan and
his brother La Cote Male Taile, and Sir Sagramore le Disirous, and Sir Dodinas le Savage; all these
he bare down with one spear. When King Aswisance of Ireland saw Sir Gareth fare so he marvelled
what he might be, that one time seemed green, and another time, at his again coming, he seemed blue.
And thus at every course that he rode to and fro he changed his color, so that there might neither
king nor knight have ready cognizance of him. Then Sir Agwisance the King of Ireland encountered with
Sir Gareth, and there Sir Gareth smote him from his horse, saddle and all. And then came King
Carados of Scotland, and Sir Gareth smote him down horse and man. And in the same wise he served King
Uriens of the land of Gore. And then there came in Sir Bagdemagus, and Sir Gareth smote him down
horse and man to the earth. And Bagdemagus's son Meliganus brake a spear upon Sir Gareth mightily
and knightly. And then Sir Galahault the noble prince cried on high, Knight with the many colors,
well hast thou justed; now make thee ready that I may just with thee. Sir Gareth heard him,
and he gat a great spear, and so they encountered together, and there the prince brake his spear;
but Sir Gareth smote him upon the left side of the helm, that he reeled here and there, and he had
fallen down had not his men recovered him. Truly, said King Arthur, that knight with the many colors
is a good knight. Wherefore the king called unto him Sir Launcelot, and prayed him to encounter
with that knight. Sir, said Launcelot, I may as well find in my heart to forbear him at this time,
for he hath had travail enough this day, and when a good knight doth so well upon some day,
it is no good knight's part to let him of his worship, and, namely, when he seeth a knight hath
done so great labour; for peradventure, said Sir Launcelot, his quarrel is here this day,
and peradventure he is best beloved with this lady of all that be here, for I see well he paineth
himself and enforceth him to do great deeds, and therefore, said Sir Launcelot, as for me,
this day he shall have the honour; though it lay in my power to put him from it, I would not.
There was an unpleasant little episode that day, which for reasons of state I struck out of my
priest's report. You will have noticed that Garry was doing some great fighting in the engagement.
When I say Garry I mean Sir Gareth. Garry was my private pet name for him; it suggests that I had a
deep affection for him, and that was the case. But it was a private pet name only, and never spoken
aloud to any one, much less to him; being a noble, he would not have endured a familiarity like that
from me. Well, to proceed: I sat in the private box set apart for me as the king's minister.
While Sir Dinadan was waiting for his turn to enter the lists, he came in there and sat down
and began to talk; for he was always making up to me, because I was a stranger and he liked to have
a fresh market for his jokes, most of them having reached that stage of wear where the teller has
to do the laughing himself while the other person looks sick. I had always responded to his efforts
as well as I could, and felt a very deep and real kindness for him, too, for the reason that if by
malice of fate he knew the one particular anecdote which I had heard oftenest and had most hated and
most loathed all my life, he had at least spared it me. It was one which I had heard attributed
to every humorous person who had ever stood on American soil, from Columbus down to Artemus Ward.
It was about a humorous lecturer who flooded an ignorant audience with the killingest jokes for an
hour and never got a laugh; and then when he was leaving, some gray simpletons wrung him gratefully
by the hand and said it had been the funniest thing they had ever heard, and "it was all
they could do to keep from laughing right out in meeting." That anecdote never saw the day that it
was worth the telling; and yet I had sat under the telling of it hundreds and thousands and millions
and billions of times, and cried and cursed all the way through. Then who can hope to know
what my feelings were, to hear this armor-plated ass start in on it again, in the murky twilight
of tradition, before the dawn of history, while even Lactantius might be referred to as "the late
Lactantius," and the Crusades wouldn't be born for five hundred years yet? Just as he finished,
the call-boy came; so, haw-hawing like a demon, he went rattling and clanking out like a crate of
loose castings, and I knew nothing more. It was some minutes before I came to, and then I opened
my eyes just in time to see Sir Gareth fetch him an awful welt, and I unconsciously out with the
prayer, "I hope to gracious he's killed!" But by ill-luck, before I had got half through with the
words, Sir Gareth crashed into Sir Sagramor le Desirous and sent him thundering over his
horse's crupper, and Sir Sagramor caught my remark and thought I meant it for him.
Well, whenever one of those people got a thing into his head, there was no getting it out again.
I knew that, so I saved my breath, and offered no explanations. As soon as Sir Sagramor got well,
he notified me that there was a little account to settle between us,
and he named a day three or four years in the future; place of settlement,
the lists where the offense had been given. I said I would be ready when he got back. You see,
he was going for the Holy Grail. The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then. It
was a several years' cruise. They always put in the long absence snooping around,
in the most conscientious way, though none of them had any idea where the Holy Grail really was,
and I don't think any of them actually expected to find it, or would have known what to do with
it if he had run across it. You see, it was just the Northwest Passage of that day, as you may say;
that was all. Every year expeditions went out holy grailing, and next year relief expeditions
went out to hunt for them. There was worlds of reputation in it, but no money. Why, they actually
wanted me to put in! Well, I should smile. Chapter 10. Beginnings of Civilization.
The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it was a good deal discussed,
for such things interested the boys. The king thought I ought now to set forth in
quest of adventures, so that I might gain renown and be the more worthy to meet Sir
Sagramor when the several years should have rolled away. I excused myself for the present;
I said it would take me three or four years yet to get things well fixed up and going smoothly;
then I should be ready; all the chances were that at the end of that time Sir Sagramor would
still be out grailing, so no valuable time would be lost by the postponement;
I should then have been in office six or seven years, and I believed my system and machinery
would be so well developed that I could take a holiday without its working any harm.
I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished. In various quiet nooks
and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under way—nuclei of future vast
factories, the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization. In these were gathered
together the brightest young minds I could find, and I kept agents out raking the country for more,
all the time. I was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts—experts in
every sort of handiwork and scientific calling. These nurseries of mine went
smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their obscure country retreats, for nobody
was allowed to come into their precincts without a special permit—for I was afraid of the Church.
I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-schools the first thing;
as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded schools in full blast in those places,
and also a complete variety of Protestant congregations all in a prosperous and
growing condition. Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted to;
there was perfect freedom in that matter. But I confined public religious teaching to
the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings.
I could have given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian without any trouble,
but that would have been to affront a law of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are
as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man
is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape
and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities,
and stature of the individual who wears it; and, besides, I was afraid of a united Church; it makes
a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands,
as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.
All mines were royal property, and there were a good many of
them. They had formerly been worked as savages always work mines—holes
grubbed in the earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide by hand, at the rate of a ton a day;
but I had begun to put the mining on a scientific basis as early as I could.
Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramor's challenge struck me.
Four years rolled by—and then! Well, you would never imagine it in the world. Unlimited power
is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands. The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely
perfect government. An earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly government,
if the conditions were the same, namely, the despot the perfectest individual of the human
race, and his lease of life perpetual. But as a perishable perfect man must die,
and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor,
an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible.
My works showed what a despot could do with the resources of a kingdom at his command. Unsuspected
by this dark land, I had the civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very nose!
It was fenced away from the public view, but there it was, a gigantic and unassailable fact—and to be
heard from, yet, if I lived and had luck. There it was, as sure a fact and as substantial a fact as
any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokeless summit in the blue sky and giving no
sign of the rising hell in its bowels. My schools and churches were children four years before;
they were grown-up now; my shops of that day were vast factories now; where I had a dozen
trained men then, I had a thousand now; where I had one brilliant expert then, I had fifty now.
I stood with my hand on the cock, so to speak, ready to turn it on and flood the midnight world
with light at any moment. But I was not going to do the thing in that sudden way. It was not
my policy. The people could not have stood it; and, moreover, I should have had the established
Roman Catholic Church on my back in a minute. No, I had been going cautiously all the while.
I had had confidential agents trickling through the country for some time,
whose office was to undermine knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnaw a little
at this and that and the other superstition, and so prepare the way gradually for a better order
of things. I was turning on my light one candle power at a time, and meant to continue to do so.
I had scattered some branch schools secretly about the kingdom, and they were doing very well.
I meant to work this racket more and more, as time wore on, if nothing occurred to
frighten me. One of my deepest secrets was my West Point—my military academy. I kept
that most jealously out of sight; and I did the same with my naval academy which
I had established at a remote seaport. Both were prospering to my satisfaction.
Clarence was twenty-two now, and was my head executive, my right hand. He was a darling;
he was equal to anything; there wasn't anything he couldn't turn his hand to. Of late I had been
training him for journalism, for the time seemed about right for a start in the newspaper line;
nothing big, but just a small weekly for experimental circulation in my civilization
nurseries. He took to it like a duck; there was an editor concealed in him,
sure. Already he had doubled himself in one way; he talked sixth century and wrote nineteenth. His
journalistic style was climbing, steadily; it was already up to the back settlement Alabama mark,
and couldn't be told from the editorial output of that region either by matter or flavor.
We had another large departure on hand, too. This was a telegraph and a telephone;
our first venture in this line. These wires were for private service only, as yet,
and must be kept private until a riper day should come. We had a gang of men on the road,
working mainly by night. They were stringing ground wires; we were afraid to put up poles,
for they would attract too much inquiry. Ground wires were good enough, in both instances,
for my wires were protected by an insulation of my own invention which was perfect.
My men had orders to strike across country, avoiding roads, and establishing connection
with any considerable towns whose lights betrayed their presence, and leaving experts in charge.
Nobody could tell you how to find any place in the kingdom, for nobody ever went intentionally
to any place, but only struck it by accident in his wanderings, and then generally left it
without thinking to inquire what its name was. At one time and another we had sent out topographical
expeditions to survey and map the kingdom, but the priests had always interfered and raised trouble.
So we had given the thing up, for the present; it would be poor wisdom to antagonize the Church.
As for the general condition of the country, it was as it had been when I arrived in it,
to all intents and purposes. I had made changes, but they were necessarily slight,
and they were not noticeable. Thus far, I had not even meddled with taxation,
outside of the taxes which provided the royal revenues. I had systematized those, and put the
service on an effective and righteous basis. As a result, these revenues were already quadrupled,
and yet the burden was so much more equably distributed than before, that all the kingdom
felt a sense of relief, and the praises of my administration were hearty and general.
Personally, I struck an interruption, now, but I did not mind it, it could not have happened at
a better time. Earlier it could have annoyed me, but now everything was in good hands and
swimming right along. The king had reminded me several times, of late, that the postponement
I had asked for, four years before, had about run out now. It was a hint that I ought to be
starting out to seek adventures and get up a reputation of a size to make me worthy of the
honor of breaking a lance with Sir Sagramor, who was still out grailing, but was being hunted for
by various relief expeditions, and might be found any year, now. So you see I was expecting this
interruption; it did not take me by surprise. Chapter 11. The Yankee in Search of Adventures.
There never was such a country for wandering liars; and they were of both sexes. Hardly a
month went by without one of these tramps arriving; and generally loaded with a tale
about some princess or other wanting help to get her out of some far-away castle where she was held
in captivity by a lawless scoundrel, usually a giant. Now you would think that the first
thing the king would do after listening to such a novelette from an entire stranger, would be to
ask for credentials—yes, and a pointer or two as to the locality of the castle, best route to it,
and so on. But nobody ever thought of so simple and common-sense a thing at that. No, everybody
swallowed these people's lies whole, and never asked a question of any sort or about anything.
Well, one day when I was not around, one of these people came along—it was a she one, this time—and
told a tale of the usual pattern. Her mistress was a captive in a vast and gloomy castle,
along with forty-four other young and beautiful girls, pretty much all of them princesses;
they had been languishing in that cruel captivity for twenty-six years; the masters of the castle
were three stupendous brothers, each with four arms and one eye—the eye in the center of the
forehead, and as big as a fruit. Sort of fruit not mentioned; their usual slovenliness in statistics.
Would you believe it? The king and the whole Round Table were in raptures over
this preposterous opportunity for adventure. Every knight of the Table jumped for the chance,
and begged for it; but to their vexation and chagrin the king conferred it upon me,
who had not asked for it at all.
By an effort, I contained my joy when Clarence brought me the news. But he—he could not contain
his. His mouth gushed delight and gratitude in a steady discharge—delight in my good fortune,
gratitude to the king for this splendid mark of his favor for me. He could keep neither his
legs nor his body still, but pirouetted about the place in an airy ecstasy of happiness.
On my side, I could have cursed the kindness that conferred upon me this benefaction, but I kept my
vexation under the surface for policy's sake, and did what I could to let on to be glad. Indeed,
I said I was glad. And in a way it was true; I was as glad as a person is when he is scalped.
Well, one must make the best of things, and not waste time with useless fretting, but get down
to business and see what can be done. In all lies there is wheat among the chaff; I must get at the
wheat in this case: so I sent for the girl and she came. She was a comely enough creature, and
soft and modest, but, if signs went for anything, she didn't know as much as a lady's watch. I said:
"My dear, have you been questioned as to particulars?"
She said she hadn't.
"Well, I didn't expect you had, but I thought I would ask, to make sure; it's the way I've been
raised. Now you mustn't take it unkindly if I remind you that as we don't know you,
we must go a little slow. You may be all right, of course, and we'll hope that you are; but to take
it for granted isn't business. You understand that. I'm obliged to ask you a few questions;
just answer up fair and square, and don't be afraid. Where do you live, when you are at home?"
"In the land of Moder, fair sir."
"Land of Moder. I don't remember hearing of it before. Parents living?"
"As to that, I know not if they be yet alive,
since it is many years that I have lain shut up in the castle."
"Your name, please?"
"I hight the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise, an it please you."
"Do you know anybody here who can identify you?"
"That were not likely, fair lord, I being come hither now for the first time."
"Have you brought any letters—any documents—any proofs that you are trustworthy and truthful?"
"Of a surety, no; and wherefore should I? Have I not a tongue, and cannot I say all that myself?"
"But your saying it, you know, and somebody else's saying it, is different."
"Different? How might that be? I fear me I do not understand."
"Don't understand? Land of—why, you see—you see—why, great Scott,
can't you understand a little thing like that? Can't you understand the
difference between your—why do you look so innocent and idiotic!"
"I? In truth I know not, but an it were the will of God."
"Yes, yes, I reckon that's about the size of it. Don't mind my seeming excited;
I'm not. Let us change the subject. Now as to this castle, with forty-five princesses in it,
and three ogres at the head of it, tell me—where is this harem?"
"Harem?"
"The castle, you understand; where is the castle?"
"Oh, as to that, it is great, and strong,
and well beseen, and lies in a far country. Yes, it is many leagues."
"How many?" "Ah, fair sir,
it were woundily hard to tell, they are so many, and do so lap the one upon the other,
and being made all in the same image and tincted with the same color, one may not
know the one league from its fellow, nor how to count them except they be taken apart, and ye
wit well it were God's work to do that, being not within man's capacity; for ye will note—"
"Hold on, hold on, never mind about the distance;
whereabouts does the castle lie? What's the direction from here?"
"Ah, please you sir, it hath no direction from here; by reason that the road lieth not straight,
but turneth evermore; wherefore the direction of its place abideth not, but is some time under the
one sky and anon under another, whereso if ye be minded that it is in the east,
and wend thitherward, ye shall observe that the way of the road doth yet again turn upon itself
by the space of half a circle, and this marvel happing again and yet again and still again,
it will grieve you that you had thought by vanities of the mind to thwart and bring to
naught the will of Him that giveth not a castle a direction from a place except it pleaseth Him,
and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all castles and all directions thereunto
vanish out of the earth, leaving the places wherein they tarried desolate and vacant,
so warning His creatures that where He will He will, and where He will not He—"
"Oh, that's all right, that's all right, give us a rest; never mind about the direction,
hang the direction—I beg pardon, I beg a thousand pardons, I am not well today;
pay no attention when I soliloquize, it is an old habit, an old, bad habit,
and hard to get rid of when one's digestion is all disordered with eating food that was
raised forever and ever before he was born; good land! a man can't keep his functions
regular on spring chickens thirteen hundred years old. But come—never mind about that;
let's—have you got such a thing as a map of that region about you? Now a good map—"
"Is it peradventure that manner of thing which of late the unbelievers have brought from over
the great seas, which, being boiled in oil, and an onion and salt added thereto, doth—"
"What, a map? What are you talking about? Don't you know what a map is? There,
there, never mind, don't explain, I hate explanations; they fog a thing up so that
you can't tell anything about it. Run along, dear; good day; show her the way, Clarence."
Oh, well, it was reasonably plain, now, why these donkeys didn't prospect these liars for details.
It may be that this girl had a fact in her somewhere, but I don't believe you could
have sluiced it out with a hydraulic; nor got it with the earlier forms of blasting,
even; it was a case for dynamite. Why, she was a perfect ass; and yet the king and his
knights had listened to her as if she had been a leaf out of the gospel. It kind of sizes up
the whole party. And think of the simple ways of this court: this wandering wench hadn't any
more trouble to get access to the king in his palace than she would have had to get into the
poorhouse in my day and country. In fact, he was glad to see her, glad to hear her tale;
with that adventure of hers to offer, she was as welcome as a corpse is to a coroner.
Just as I was ending up these reflections, Clarence came back. I remarked upon the barren
result of my efforts with the girl; hadn't got hold of a single point that could help
me to find the castle. The youth looked a little surprised, or puzzled, or something, and intimated
that he had been wondering to himself what I had wanted to ask the girl all those questions for.
"Why, great guns," I said, "don't I want to find the castle? And how else would I go about it?"
"La, sweet your worship, one may lightly answer that,
I ween. She will go with thee. They always do. She will ride with thee."
"Ride with me? Nonsense!"
"But of a truth she will. She will ride with thee. Thou shalt see."
"What? She browse around the hills and scour the woods with me—alone—and I as
good as engaged to be married? Why, it's scandalous. Think how it would look."
My, the dear face that rose before me! The boy was eager to know all about this tender matter.
I swore him to secrecy and then whispered her name—"Puss Flanagan." He looked disappointed,
and said he didn't remember the countess. How natural it was for
the little courtier to give her a rank. He asked me where she lived.
"In East Har—" I came to myself and stopped,
a little confused; then I said, "Never mind, now; I'll tell you some time."
And might he see her? Would I let him see her some day?
It was but a little thing to promise—thirteen hundred years or so—and he so eager; so I said
yes. But I sighed; I couldn't help it. And yet there was no sense in sighing, for she wasn't
born yet. But that is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.
My expedition was all the talk that day and that night, and the boys were very good to me,
and made much of me, and seemed to have forgotten their vexation and disappointment,
and come to be as anxious for me to hive those ogres and set those ripe old virgins loose as
if it were themselves that had the contract. Well, they were good children—but just children,
that is all. And they gave me no end of points about how to scout for giants,
and how to scoop them in; and they told me all sorts of charms against enchantments,
and gave me salves and other rubbish to put on my wounds. But it never occurred to one
of them to reflect that if I was such a wonderful necromancer as I was pretending to be, I ought not
to need salves or instructions, or charms against enchantments, and, least of all, arms and armor,
on a foray of any kind—even against fire-spouting dragons, and devils hot from perdition, let alone
such poor adversaries as these I was after, these commonplace ogres of the back settlements.
I was to have an early breakfast, and start at dawn, for that was the usual way; but I had the
demon's own time with my armor, and this delayed me a little. It is troublesome to get into, and
there is so much detail. First you wrap a layer or two of blanket around your body, for a sort
of cushion and to keep off the cold iron; then you put on your sleeves and shirt of chain mail—these
are made of small steel links woven together, and they form a fabric so flexible that if you
toss your shirt onto the floor, it slumps into a pile like a peck of wet fish-net; it is very heavy
and is nearly the uncomfortablest material in the world for a night shirt, yet plenty used it for
that—tax collectors, and reformers, and one-horse kings with a defective title, and those sorts
of people; then you put on your shoes—flat boats roofed over with interleaving bands of steel—and
screw your clumsy spurs into the heels. Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and your cuisses
on your thighs; then come your backplate and your breastplate, and you begin to feel crowded;
then you hitch onto the breastplate the half-petticoat of broad overlapping bands of
steel which hangs down in front but is scolloped out behind so you can sit down, and isn't any real
improvement on an inverted coal scuttle, either for looks or for wear, or to wipe your hands on;
next you belt on your sword; then you put your stove-pipe joints onto your arms, your iron
gauntlets onto your hands, your iron rat-trap onto your head, with a rag of steel web hitched onto it
to hang over the back of your neck—and there you are, snug as a candle in a candle-mould. This is
no time to dance. Well, a man that is packed away like that is a nut that isn't worth the cracking,
there is so little of the meat, when you get down to it, by comparison with the shell.
The boys helped me, or I never could have got in. Just as we finished, Sir Bedivere happened in,
and I saw that as like as not I hadn't chosen the most convenient outfit for a long trip. How
stately he looked; and tall and broad and grand. He had on his head a conical steel casque that
only came down to his ears, and for visor had only a narrow steel bar that extended down to his upper
lip and protected his nose; and all the rest of him, from neck to heel, was flexible chain mail,
trousers and all. But pretty much all of him was hidden under his outside garment,
which of course was of chain mail, as I said, and hung straight from his shoulders to his ankles;
and from his middle to the bottom, both before and behind, was divided, so that he could ride and let
the skirts hang down on each side. He was going grailing, and it was just the outfit for it, too.
I would have given a good deal for that ulster, but it was too late now to be fooling around. The
sun was just up, the king and the court were all on hand to see me off and wish me luck;
so it wouldn't be etiquette for me to tarry. You don't get on your horse yourself; no, if you tried
it you would get disappointed. They carry you out, just as they carry a sun-struck man to the drug
store, and put you on, and help get you to rights, and fix your feet in the stirrups; and all the
while you do feel so strange and stuffy and like somebody else—like somebody that has been married
on a sudden, or struck by lightning, or something like that, and hasn't quite fetched around yet,
and is sort of numb, and can't just get his bearings. Then they stood up the mast they
called a spear, in its socket by my left foot, and I gripped it with my hand; lastly they hung
my shield around my neck, and I was all complete and ready to up anchor and get to sea. Everybody
was as good to me as they could be, and a maid of honor gave me the stirrup cup her own self. There
was nothing more to do now, but for that damsel to get up behind me on a pillion, which she did,
and put an arm or so around me to hold on. And so we started, and everybody gave us a goodbye
and waved their handkerchiefs or helmets. And everybody we met, going down the hill and through
the village was respectful to us, except some shabby little boys on the outskirts. They said:
"Oh, what a guy!" And hove clods at us.
In my experience boys are the same in all ages. They don't respect anything,
they don't care for anything or anybody. They say "Go up, baldhead" to the prophet going his
unoffending way in the gray of antiquity; they sass me in the holy gloom of the Middle Ages;
and I had seen them act the same way in Buchanan's administration; I remember,
because I was there and helped. The prophet had his bears and settled with his boys; and I wanted
to get down and settle with mine, but it wouldn't answer, because I couldn't have gotten up again.
I hate a country without a derrick. Chapter 12. Slow torture.
Straight off, we were in the country. It was most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in
the early cool morning in the first freshness of autumn. From hilltops we saw fair green valleys
lying spread out below, with streams winding through them, and island groves of trees here
and there, and huge lonely oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade; and beyond the
valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze, stretching away in billowy perspective to
the horizon, with at wide intervals a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we knew was
a castle. We crossed broad natural lawns sparkling with dew, and we moved like spirits, the cushioned
turf giving out no sound of footfall; we dreamed along through glades in a mist of green light that
got its tint from the sun-drenched roof of leaves overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest
of runlets went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of whispering music,
comfortable to hear; and at times we left the world behind and entered into the solemn great
deeps and rich gloom of the forest, where furtive wild things whisked and scurried by
and were gone before you could even get your eye on the place where the noise was; and where only
the earliest birds were turning out and getting to business with a song here and a quarrel yonder
and a mysterious far-off hammering and drumming for worms on a tree trunk away somewhere in the
impenetrable remotenesses of the woods. And by and by out we would swing again into the glare.
About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung out into the glare—it was along there
somewhere, a couple of hours or so after sun-up—it wasn't as pleasant as it had been. It was
beginning to get hot. This was quite noticeable. We had a very long pull, after that, without
any shade. Now it is curious how progressively little frets grow and multiply after they once
get a start. Things which I didn't mind at all, at first, I began to mind now—and more and more,
too, all the time. The first ten or fifteen times I wanted my handkerchief I didn't seem to care;
I got along, and said never mind, it isn't any matter, and dropped it out of my mind. But now
it was different; I wanted it all the time; it was nag, nag, nag, right along, and no rest;
I couldn't get it out of my mind; and so at last I lost my temper and said hang a man that
would make a suit of armor without any pockets in it. You see I had my handkerchief in my helmet;
and some other things; but it was that kind of a helmet that you can't take off by yourself. That
hadn't occurred to me when I put it there; and in fact I didn't know it. I supposed it would
be particularly convenient there. And so now, the thought of its being there, so handy and close by,
and yet not get-at-able, made it all the worse and the harder to bear. Yes, the thing that you can't
get is the thing that you want, mainly; every one has noticed that. Well, it took my mind off from
everything else; took it clear off, and centered it in my helmet; and mile after mile, there it
stayed, imagining the handkerchief, picturing the handkerchief; and it was bitter and aggravating
to have the salt sweat keep trickling down into my eyes, and I couldn't get at it. It seems like
a little thing, on paper, but it was not a little thing at all; it was the most real kind of misery.
I would not say it if it was not so. I made up my mind that I would carry along a reticule next
time, let it look how it might, and people say what they would. Of course these iron dudes of
the round table would think it was scandalous, and maybe raise Sheol about it, but as for me,
give me comfort first, and style afterwards. So we jogged along, and now and then we struck a stretch
of dust, and it would tumble up in clouds and get into my nose and make me sneeze and cry; and of
course I said things I oughtn't to have said, I don't deny that. I am not better than others.
We couldn't seem to meet anybody in this lonesome Britain, not even an ogre; and,
in the mood I was in then, it was well for the ogre; that is, an ogre with a handkerchief.
Most knights would have thought of nothing but getting his armor; but so I got his bandanna,
he could keep his hardware, for all of me. Meantime, it was getting hotter and hotter
in there. You see, the sun was beating down and warming up the iron more and more all the
time. Well, when you are hot that way, every little thing irritates you. When I trotted,
I rattled like a crate of dishes, and that annoyed me; and moreover I couldn't seem to
stand that shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now around my back;
and if I dropped into a walk my joints creaked and screeched in that wearisome way that a wheelbarrow
does, and as we didn't create any breeze at that gait, I was likely to get fried in that stove;
and besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron settled down on you and the more and
more tons you seemed to weigh every minute. And you had to be always changing hands, and passing
your spear over to the other foot; it got so irksome for one hand to hold it long at a time.
Well, you know, when you perspire that way, in rivers, there comes a time when you—when you—well,
when you itch. You are inside, your hands are outside; so there you are;
nothing but iron between. It is not a light thing, let it sound as it may. First it is one place;
then another; then some more; and it goes on spreading and spreading, and at last the
territory is all occupied, and nobody can imagine what you feel like, nor how unpleasant it is. And
when it had got to the worst, and it seemed to me that I could not stand anything more,
a fly got in through the bars and settled on my nose, and the bars were stuck and wouldn't work,
and I couldn't get the visor up; and I could only shake my head, which was baking hot by this time,
and the fly—well, you know how a fly acts when he has got a certainty—he only minded the shaking
enough to change from nose to lip, and lip to ear, and buzz and buzz all around in there,
and keep on lighting and biting, in a way that a person, already so distressed as I was, simply
could not stand. So I gave in, and got Alisande to unship the helmet and relieve me of it.
Then she emptied the conveniences out of it and fetched it full of water, and I drank and then
stood up, and she poured the rest down inside the armor. One cannot think how refreshing it
was. She continued to fetch and pour until I was well soaked and thoroughly comfortable.
It was good to have a rest—and peace. But nothing is quite perfect in this life,
at any time. I had made a pipe a while back, and also some pretty fair tobacco;
not the real thing, but what some of the Indians use: the inside bark of the willow,
dried. These comforts had been in the helmet, and now I had them again, but no matches.
Gradually, as the time wore along, one annoying fact was borne in upon my understanding—that we
were weather-bound. An armed novice cannot mount his horse without help and plenty of it. Sandy was
not enough; not enough for me, anyway. We had to wait until somebody should come along. Waiting,
in silence, would have been agreeable enough, for I was full of matter for reflection,
and wanted to give it a chance to work. I wanted to try and think out how it was that rational or
even half-rational men could ever have learned to wear armor, considering its inconveniences;
and how they had managed to keep up such a fashion for generations when it was plain
that what I had suffered today they had had to suffer all the days of their lives.
I wanted to think that out; and moreover I wanted to think out some way to reform
this evil and persuade the people to let the foolish fashion die out; but thinking was out
of the question in the circumstances. You couldn't think, where Sandy was.
She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow of talk that
was as steady as a mill, and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in a city. If she had
had a cork she would have been a comfort. But you can't cork that kind; they would die. Her clack
was going all day, and you would think something would surely happen to her works, by and by;
but no, they never got out of order; and she never had to slack up for words. She could grind,
and pump, and churn, and buzz by the week, and never stop to oil up or blow out. And yet the
result was just nothing but wind. She never had any ideas, any more than a fog has. She
was a perfect blatherskite; I mean for jaw, jaw, jaw, talk, talk, talk, jabber, jabber, jabber;
but just as good as she could be. I hadn't minded her mill that morning, on account of
having that hornets' nest of other troubles; but more than once in the afternoon I had to say:
"Take a rest, child; the way you are using up all the domestic air,
the kingdom will have to go to importing it by tomorrow, and it's a low enough
treasury without that." Chapter 13. Freemen.
Yes, it is strange how little a while at a time a person can be contented.
Only a little while back, when I was riding and suffering, what a heaven this peace, this rest,
this sweet serenity in this secluded shady nook by this purling stream would have seemed, where I
could keep perfectly comfortable all the time by pouring a dipper of water into my armor now and
then; yet already I was getting dissatisfied; partly because I could not light my pipe—for,
although I had long ago started a match factory, I had forgotten to bring matches with me—and partly
because we had nothing to eat. Here was another illustration of the childlike improvidence of
this age and people. A man in armor always trusted to chance for his food on a journey,
and would have been scandalized at the idea of hanging a basket of sandwiches on his spear.
There was probably not a knight of all the Round Table combination who would not rather have died
than been caught carrying such a thing as that on his flagstaff. And yet there could not be
anything more sensible. It had been my intention to smuggle a couple of sandwiches into my helmet,
but I was interrupted in the act, and had to make an excuse and lay them aside, and a dog got them.
Night approached, and with it a storm. The darkness came on fast. We must camp,
of course. I found a good shelter for the demoiselle under a rock, and went off and found
another for myself. But I was obliged to remain in my armor, because I could not get it off by
myself and yet could not allow Alisande to help, because it would have seemed so like undressing
before folk. It would not have amounted to that in reality, because I had clothes on underneath;
but the prejudices of one's breeding are not gotten rid of just at a jump,
and I knew that when it came to stripping off that bob-tailed iron petticoat I should be embarrassed.
With the storm came a change of weather; and the stronger the wind blew, and the wilder the rain
lashed around, the colder and colder it got. Pretty soon, various kinds of bugs and ants
and worms and things began to flock in out of the wet and crawl down inside my armor to get warm;
and while some of them behaved well enough, and snuggled up amongst my clothes and got
quiet, the majority were of a restless, uncomfortable sort, and never stayed still,
but went on prowling and hunting for they did not know what; especially the ants,
which went tickling along in wearisome procession from one end of me to the other by the hour,
and are a kind of creatures which I never wish to sleep with again.
It would be my advice to persons situated in this way, to not roll or thrash around,
because this excites the interest of all the different sorts of animals and makes every
last one of them want to turn out and see what is going on, and this makes things worse than they
were before, and of course makes you objurgate harder, too, if you can. Still, if one did not
roll and thrash around he would die; so perhaps it is as well to do one way as the other; there
is no real choice. Even after I was frozen solid I could still distinguish that tickling, just as a
corpse does when he is taking electric treatment. I said I would never wear armor after this trip.
All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yet was in a living fire, as you may say,
on account of that swarm of crawlers, that same unanswerable question kept circling and circling
through my tired head: How do people stand this miserable armor? How have they managed to stand
it all these generations? How can they sleep at night for dreading the tortures of next day?
When the morning came at last, I was in a bad enough plight: seedy, drowsy, fagged, from want of
sleep; weary from thrashing around, famished from long fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of
the animals; and crippled with rheumatism. And how had it fared with the nobly born,
the titled aristocrat, the demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise? Why, she was as fresh as a squirrel;
she had slept like the dead; and as for a bath, probably neither she nor any other noble in the
land had ever had one, and so she was not missing it. Measured by modern standards, they were merely
modified savages, those people. This noble lady showed no impatience to get to breakfast—and that
smacks of the savage, too. On their journeys those Britons were used to long fasts,
and knew how to bear them; and also how to freight up against probable fasts before starting, after
the style of the Indian and the anaconda. As like as not, Sandy was loaded for a three-day stretch.
We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind. In half an hour we came
upon a group of ragged poor creatures who had assembled to mend the thing which was regarded
as a road. They were as humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast with them,
they were so flattered, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of mine that at
first they were not able to believe that I was in earnest. My lady put up her scornful lip and
withdrew to one side; she said in their hearing that she would as soon think of eating with the
other cattle—a remark which embarrassed these poor devils merely because it referred to them,
and not because it insulted or offended them, for it didn't. And yet they were not slaves,
not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. Seven tenths of the free population
of the country were of just their class and degree: small independent farmers, artisans,
et cetera; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual nation; they were about all of it that
was useful, or worth saving, or really respect worthy, and to subtract them would have been to
subtract the nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and
gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort
of use or value in any rationally constructed world. And yet, by ingenious contrivance,
this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was
marching head up and banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be the nation,
and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long that they had come at last to accept it as
a truth; and not only that, but to believe it right and as it should be. The priests had told
their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of things was ordained of God; and so,
not reflecting upon how unlike God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially such
poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter there and become respectfully quiet.
The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly American ear. They were
freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission;
they could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at
his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their
own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece
of somebody else's without remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain
for him gratis, and be ready to come at a moment's notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by
the threatened storm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their
indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit gatherers trampled the grain around the trees;
they had to smother their anger when his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste
the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the
swarms from my lord's dovecote settled on their crops they must not lose their temper and kill
a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came the
procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off its fat tenth,
then the king's commissioner took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad upon
the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn,
in case it was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes,
and taxes again, and yet other taxes—upon this free and independent pauper, but none upon his
lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility or the all devouring Church;
if the baron would sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day's work and whip the
ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's daughter—but no, that last infamy of monarchical
government is unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures,
found his life unendurable under such conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and
refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at
midnight at the crossroads with a stake through his back, and his master the baron or the bishop
confiscated all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.
And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the
bishop's road three days each—gratis; every head of a family, and every son of a family,
three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for their servants. Why,
it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution,
which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal-wave of blood—one: a settlement
of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had
been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong
and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of
Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the
other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years;
the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions;
but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak;
whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger,
cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death
by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror
which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France
could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and
awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me,
were as full of humble reverence for their king and church and nobility as their worst enemy could
desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation
of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family
and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of
all other families—including the voter's; and would also elect that a certain hundred families
should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories
and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families—including his own.
They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before,
and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man
could have a say in the government. I said I had seen one—and that it would last until
it had an established church. Again they were all unhit—at first. But presently one
man looked up and asked me to state that proposition again; and state it slowly,
so it could soak into his understanding. I did it; and after a little he had the idea,
and he brought his fist down and said he didn't believe a nation where every man had a vote would
voluntarily get down in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal from a
nation its will and preference must be a crime and the first of all crimes. I said to myself:
"This one's a man. If I were backed by enough of his sort,
I would make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove myself its
loyalist citizen by making a wholesome change in its system of government."
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions
or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing;
it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous,
they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable,
cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags,
to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal;
it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut,
whose constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people,
and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit;
and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to
alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient."
Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political
clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal;
he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him;
it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if
they do not see the matter as he does. And now here I was, in a country where a
right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand
of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with
the regnant system and propose to change it would have made the whole six shudder as one man; it
would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I had become a
stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all
the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction
and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed
was a new deal. The thing that would have best suited the circus side of my nature would have
been to resign the boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution;
but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating
his materials up to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain to get left. I had never been
accustomed to getting left, even if I do say it myself. Wherefore, the "deal" which had been for
some time working into shape in my mind was of a quite different pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort.
So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man there who sat munching black bread
with that abused and mistaught herd of human sheep, but took him aside and talked matter
of another sort to him. After I had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from his veins;
and with this and a sliver I wrote on a piece of bark—
Put him in the man-factory—
and gave it to him, and said:
"Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into
the hands of Amyas le Poulet, whom I call Clarence, and he will understand."
"He is a priest, then," said the man, and some of the enthusiasm went out of his face.
"How—a priest? Didn't I tell you that no chattel of the Church,
no bond-slave of pope or bishop can enter my man-factory? Didn't I tell you that you
couldn't enter unless your religion, whatever it might be, was your own free property?"
"Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; wherefore it liked me not,
and bred in me a cold doubt, to hear of this priest being there."
"But he isn't a priest, I tell you."
The man looked far from satisfied. He said:
"He is not a priest, and yet can read?"
"He is not a priest and yet can read—yes, and write, too, for that matter. I taught him myself."
The man's face cleared. "And it is the first thing that you yourself will be taught in that factory—"
"I? I would give blood out of my heart to know that art. Why, I will be your slave, your—"
"No you won't, you won't be anybody's slave. Take your family and go along.
Your lord the bishop will confiscate your small property, but no matter.
Clarence will fix you all right." Chapter 14. Defend Thee, Lord.
I paid three pennies for my breakfast, and a most extravagant price it was, too,
seeing that one could have breakfasted a dozen persons for that money;
but I was feeling good by this time, and I had always been a kind of spendthrift anyway;
and then these people had wanted to give me the food for nothing, scant as their provision was,
and so it was a grateful pleasure to emphasize my appreciation and sincere thankfulness with a good
big financial lift where the money would do so much more good than it would in my helmet, where,
these pennies being made of iron and not stinted in weight, my half-dollar's worth was a good deal
of a burden to me. I spent money rather too freely in those days, it is true; but one reason
for it was that I hadn't got the proportions of things entirely adjusted, even yet, after
so long a sojourn in Britain—hadn't got along to where I was able to absolutely realize that
a penny in Arthur's land and a couple of dollars in Connecticut were about one and the same thing:
just twins, as you may say, in purchasing power. If my start from Camelot could have been delayed
a very few days I could have paid these people in beautiful new coins from our own mint, and that
would have pleased me; and them, too, not less. I had adopted the American values exclusively. In a
week or two now, cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half dollars, and also a trifle of gold,
would be trickling in thin but steady streams all through the commercial veins of the kingdom, and I
looked to see this new blood freshen up its life. The farmers were bound to throw in something,
to sort of offset my liberality, whether I would or not; so I let them give me a flint and steel;
and as soon as they had comfortably bestowed Sandy and me on our horse, I lit my pipe. When the first
blast of smoke shot out through the bars of my helmet, all those people broke for the woods,
and Sandy went over backwards and struck the ground with a dull thud. They thought I was one of
those fire-belching dragons they had heard so much about from knights and other professional liars.
I had infinite trouble to persuade those people to venture back within explaining distance. Then I
told them that this was only a bit of enchantment which would work harm to none but my enemies. And
I promised, with my hand on my heart, that if all who felt no enmity toward me would come forward
and pass before me they should see that only those who remained behind would be struck dead.
The procession moved with a good deal of promptness. There were no casualties
to report, for nobody had curiosity enough to remain behind to see what would happen.
I lost some time, now, for these big children, their fears gone, became so ravished with wonder
over my awe-compelling fireworks that I had to stay there and smoke a couple of pipes out before
they would let me go. Still the delay was not wholly unproductive, for it took all that time to
get Sandy thoroughly wonted to the new thing, she being so close to it, you know. It plugged up her
conversation mill, too, for a considerable while, and that was a gain. But above all other benefits
accruing, I had learned something. I was ready for any giant or any ogre that might come along, now.
We tarried with a holy hermit, that night, and my opportunity came about
the middle of the next afternoon. We were crossing a vast meadow by way of short-cut,
and I was musing absently, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, when Sandy
suddenly interrupted a remark which she had begun that morning, with the cry:
"Defend thee, lord!—peril of life is toward!"
And she slipped down from the horse and ran a little way and stood. I looked up and saw,
far off in the shade of a tree, half a dozen armed knights and their squires;
and straightway there was bustle among them and tightening of saddle-girths for the mount.
My pipe was ready and would have been lit, if I had not been lost in thinking about how to banish
oppression from this land and restore to all its people their stolen rights and manhood without
disobliging anybody. I lit up at once, and by the time I had got a good head of reserved steam on,
here they came. All together, too; none of those chivalrous magnanimities which one reads so much
about—one courtly rascal at a time, and the rest standing by to see fair play. No,
they came in a body, they came with a whirr and a rush, they came like a volley from a battery;
came with heads low down, plumes streaming out behind, lances advanced at a level.
It was a handsome sight, a beautiful sight—for a man up a tree. I laid my lance in rest and waited,
with my heart beating, till the iron wave was just ready to break over me,
then spouted a column of white smoke through the bars of my helmet. You should have seen
the wave go to pieces and scatter! This was a finer sight than the other one.
But these people stopped, two or three hundred yards away, and this troubled me.
My satisfaction collapsed, and fear came; I judged I was a lost man. But Sandy was radiant;
and was going to be eloquent—but I stopped her, and told her my magic had miscarried,
somehow or other, and she must mount, with all despatch, and we must ride for life. No,
she wouldn't. She said that my enchantment had disabled those knights; they were not riding on,
because they couldn't; wait, they would drop out of their saddles presently, and we would get
their horses and harness. I could not deceive such trusting simplicity, so I said it was a mistake;
that when my fireworks killed at all, they killed instantly; no, the men would not die,
there was something wrong about my apparatus, I couldn't tell what; but we must hurry and
get away, for those people would attack us again, in a minute. Sandy laughed, and said:
"Lack-a-day, sir, they be not of that breed! Sir Launcelot will give battle to dragons,
and will abide by them, and will assail them again, and yet again, and still again, until he
do conquer and destroy them; and so likewise will Sir Pellinore and Sir Aglovale and Sir Carados,
and mayhap others, but there be none else that will venture it, let the idle say what the idle
will. And, la, as to yonder base rufflers, think ye they have not their fill, but yet desire more?"
"Well, then, what are they waiting for? Why don't they leave? Nobody's hindering. Good land,
I'm willing to let bygones be bygones, I'm sure."
"Leave, is it? Oh, give thyself easement as to that. They dream not of it, no,
not they. They wait to yield them."
"Come—really, is that sooth—as you people say? If they want to, why don't they?"
"It would like them much; but an ye wot how dragons are esteemed,
ye would not hold them blamable. They fear to come."
"Well, then, suppose I go to them instead, and—"
"Ah, wit ye well they would not abide your coming. I will go."
And she did. She was a handy person to have along on a raid. I would have considered this a doubtful
errand, myself. I presently saw the knights riding away, and Sandy coming back. That was a
relief. I judged she had somehow failed to get the first innings—I mean in the conversation;
otherwise the interview wouldn't have been so short. But it turned out that she had managed
the business well; in fact, admirably. She said that when she told those people I was the boss,
it hit them where they lived: "smote them sore with fear and dread" was her word;
and then they were ready to put up with anything she might require. So she swore them to appear
at Arthur's court within two days and yield them, with horse and harness, and be my knights
henceforth, and subject to my command. How much better she managed that thing than I should have
done it myself! She was a daisy. Chapter 15. Sandy's Tale.
"And so I'm proprietor of some knights," said I, as we rode off. "Who would ever
have supposed that I should live to list up assets of that sort. I shan't know what to do with them;
unless I raffle them off. How many of them are there, Sandy?"
"Seven, please you, sir, and their squires."
"It is a good haul. Who are they? Where do they hang out?"
"Where do they hang out?"
"Yes, where do they live?"
"Ah, I understood thee not. That will I tell eftsoons." Then she said musingly, and softly,
turning the words daintily over her tongue: "Hang they out—hang they out—where hang—where do they
hang out; eh, right so; where do they hang out. Of a truth the phrase hath a fair and winsome grace,
and is prettily worded withal. I will repeat it anon and anon in mine idlesse,
whereby I may peradventure learn it. Where do they hang out. Even
so! already it falleth trippingly from my tongue, and forasmuch as—"
"Don't forget the cowboys, Sandy."
"Cowboys?"
"Yes; the knights, you know: You were going to tell me about them. A while back,
you remember. Figuratively speaking, game's called."
"Game—"
"Yes, yes, yes! Go to the bat. I mean, get to work on your statistics,
and don't burn so much kindling getting your fire started. Tell me about the knights."
"I will well, and lightly will begin. So they two departed and rode into a great forest. And—"
"Great Scott!"
You see, I recognized my mistake at once. I had set her works a-going; it was my own fault; she
would be thirty days getting down to those facts. And she generally began without a preface and
finished without a result. If you interrupted her she would either go right along without noticing,
or answer with a couple of words, and go back and say the sentence over again.
So, interruptions only did harm; and yet I had to interrupt, and interrupt pretty frequently, too,
in order to save my life; a person would die if he let her monotony drip on him right along all day.
"Great Scott!" I said in my distress. She went right back and began over again:
"So they two departed and rode into a great forest. And—"
"Which two?"
"Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine. And so they came to an abbey of monks,
and there were well lodged. So on the morn they heard their masses in the abbey, and so they rode
forth till they came to a great forest; then was Sir Gawaine ware in a valley by a turret,
of twelve fair damsels, and two knights armed on great horses, and the damsels went to and
fro by a tree. And then was Sir Gawaine ware how there hung a white shield on that tree,
and ever as the damsels came by it they spit upon it, and some threw mire upon the shield—"
"Now, if I hadn't seen the like myself in this country, Sandy, I wouldn't believe it. But I've
seen it, and I can just see those creatures now, parading before that shield and acting
like that. The women here do certainly act like all possessed. Yes, and I mean your best,
too, society's very choicest brands. The humblest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could
teach gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur's land."
"Hello-girl?"
"Yes, but don't you ask me to explain; it's a new kind of a girl; they don't have them here;
one often speaks sharply to them when they are not the least in fault,
and he can't get over feeling sorry for it and ashamed of himself in thirteen hundred years,
it's such shabby mean conduct and so unprovoked;
the fact is, no gentleman ever does it—though I—well, I myself, if I've got to confess—"
"Peradventure she—"
"Never mind her; never mind her;
I tell you I couldn't ever explain her so you would understand."
"Even so be it, sith ye are so minded. Then Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine went and saluted them,
and asked them why they did that despite to the shield. Sirs, said the damsels,
we shall tell you. There is a knight in this country that owneth this white shield,
and he is a passing good man of his hands, but he hateth all ladies and gentlewomen,
and therefore we do all this despite to the shield. I will say you, said Sir Gawaine,
it beseemeth evil a good knight to despise all ladies and gentlewomen, and peradventure
though he hate you he hath some cause, and peradventure he loveth in some other places
ladies and gentlewomen, and to be loved again, and he such a man of prowess as ye speak of—"
"Man of prowess—yes, that is the man to please them, Sandy. Man of brains—that is a thing they
never think of. Tom Sayers—John Heenan—John L. Sullivan—pity but you could be here. You would
have your legs under the Round Table and a 'Sir' in front of your names within the
twenty-four hours; and you could bring about a new distribution of the married princesses and
duchesses of the Court in another twenty-four. The fact is, it is just a sort of polished-up
court of Comanches, and there isn't a squaw in it who doesn't stand ready at the dropping
of a hat to desert to the buck with the biggest string of scalps at his belt."
"—and he be such a man of prowess as you speak of, said Sir Gawaine. Now,
what is his name? Sir, said they, his name is Marhaus the king's son of Ireland."
"Son of the king of Ireland, you mean; the other form doesn't mean anything.
And look out and hold on tight, now, we must jump this gully.... There,
we are all right now. This horse belongs in the circus; he is born before his time."
"I know him well, said Sir Uwaine, he is a passing good knight as any is alive."
"Alive. If you've got a fault in the world, Sandy,
it is that you are a shade too archaic. But it isn't any matter."
"—for I saw him once proved at a justs where many knights were gathered, and that time there might
no man withstand him. Ah, said Sir Gawaine, damsels, methinketh you are to blame, for it
is to suppose he that hung that shield there will not be long therefrom, and then may those knights
match him on horseback, and that is more your worship than thus; for I will abide no longer
to see a knight's shield dishonored. And therewith Sir Uwaine and Sir Gawaine departed a little from
them, and then were they ware where Sir Marhaus came riding on a great horse straight toward them.
And when the twelve damsels saw Sir Marhaus they fled into the turret as they were wild,
so that some of them fell by the way. Then the one of the knights of the tower dressed his shield,
and said on high, Sir Marhaus defend thee. And so they ran together that the knight broke his spear
on Marhaus, and Sir Marhaus smote him so hard that he broke his neck and the horse's back—"
"Well, that is just the trouble about this state of things, it ruins so many horses."
"That saw the other knight of the turret, and dressed him toward Marhaus, and they went so
eagerly together, that the knight of the turret was soon smitten down, horse and man, stark dead—"
"Another horse gone; I tell you it is a custom that ought to be broken
up. I don't see how people with any feeling can applaud and support it."
...
"So these two knights came together with great random—"
I saw that I had been asleep and missed a chapter, but I didn't say anything. I judged that the Irish
knight was in trouble with the visitors by this time, and this turned out to be the case.
"—that Sir Uwaine smote Sir Marhaus that his spear burst in pieces on the shield, and Sir Marhaus
smote him so sore that horse and man he bore to the earth, and hurt Sir Uwaine on the left side—"
"The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little too simple; the vocabulary is too limited,
and so, by consequence, descriptions suffer in the matter of variety;
they run too much to level Saharas of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail; this throws
about them a certain air of the monotonous; in fact the fights are all alike: a couple of
people come together with great random—random is a good word, and so is exegesis, for that matter,
and so is holocaust, and defalcation, and usufruct and a hundred others, but land! a body ought to
discriminate—they come together with great random, and a spear is burst, and one party broke his
shield and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and broke his neck,
and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and burst his spear, and the other man broke his
shield, and down he goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and broke his neck, and then there's
another elected, and another and another and still another, till the material is all used up;
and when you come to figure up results, you can't tell one fight from another, nor who whipped;
and as a picture, of living, raging, roaring battle, sho! why, it's pale and noiseless—just
ghosts scuffling in a fog. Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest
spectacle?—the burning of Rome in Nero's time, for instance? Why, it would merely say, 'Town burned
down; no insurance; boy broke a window, fireman broke his neck!' Why, that ain't a picture!"
It was a good deal of a lecture, I thought, but it didn't disturb Sandy, didn't turn a feather;
her steam soared steadily up again, the minute I took off the lid:
"Then Sir Marhaus turned his horse and rode toward Gawaine with his spear. And
when Sir Gawaine saw that, he dressed his shield, and they adventured their spears,
and they came together with all the might of their horses, that either knight smote
other so hard in the midst of their shields, but Sir Gawaine's spear broke—"
"I knew it would."
—"but Sir Marhaus's spear held; and therewith Sir Gawaine and his horse rushed down to the earth—"
"Just so—and broke his back." —"and lightly Sir Gawaine rose upon
his feet and pulled out his sword, and dressed him toward Sir Marhaus on foot, and therewith either
came unto other eagerly, and smote together with their swords, that their shields flew in cantels,
and they bruised their helms and their hauberks, and wounded either other. But Sir Gawaine,
from it passed nine of the clock, waxed by the space of three hours ever stronger and stronger
and thrice his might was increased. All this espied Sir Marhaus, and had great wonder how
his might increased, and so they wounded other passing sore; and then when it was come noon—"
The pelting sing-song of it carried me forward to scenes and sounds of my boyhood days:
"New Haven! ten minutes for refreshments—conductor will strike the gong-bell two minutes before
train leaves—passengers for the Shore line please take seats in the rear car,
this car don't go no further—ahh-ples, oranges, bananas, sandwiches, popcorn!"
—"and waxed past noon and drew toward evensong. Sir Gawaine's strength feebled and waxed passing
faint, that unnethes he might dure any longer, and Sir Marhaus was then bigger and bigger—"
"Which strained his armor, of course;
and yet little would one of these people mind a small thing like that."
—"and so, Sir Knight, said Sir Marhaus, I have well felt that ye are a passing good knight,
and a marvelous man of might as ever I felt any, while it lasteth, and our quarrels are not great,
and therefore it were a pity to do you hurt, for I feel you are passing feeble. Ah, said
Sir Gawaine, gentle knight, ye say the word that I should say. And therewith they took off their
helms and either kissed other, and there they swore together either to love other as brethren—"
But I lost the thread there, and dozed off to slumber, thinking about what a pity it was that
men with such superb strength—strength enabling them to stand up cased in cruelly burdensome
iron and drenched with perspiration, and hack and batter and bang each other for
six hours on a stretch—should not have been born at a time when they could put
it to some useful purpose. Take a jackass, for instance: a jackass has that kind of strength,
and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because he is a jackass;
but a nobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that
is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet,
once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.
When I came to myself again and began to listen, I perceived that I had lost another chapter,
and that Alisande had wandered a long way off with her people.
"And so they rode and came into a deep valley full of stones,
and thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was the head of the stream,
a fair fountain, and three damsels sitting thereby. In this country,
said Sir Marhaus, came never knight since it was christened, but he found strange adventures—"
"This is not good form, Alisande. Sir Marhaus the king's son of Ireland talks like all the rest;
you ought to give him a brogue, or at least a characteristic expletive;
by this means one would recognize him as soon as he spoke, without his ever being
named. It is a common literary device with the great authors. You should make him say,
'In this country, be jabers, came never knight since it was christened,
but he found strange adventures, be jabers.' You see how much better that sounds."
—"came never knight but he found strange adventures, be jabers. Of a truth it doth indeed,
fair lord, albeit 'tis passing hard to say, though peradventure that will not tarry but
better speed with usage. And then they rode to the damsels, and either saluted other, and the
eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and she was threescore winter of age or more—"
"The damsel was?"
"Even so, dear lord—and her hair was white under the garland—"
"Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not—the loose-fit kind,
that go up and down like a portcullis when you eat, and fall out when you laugh."
"The second damsel was of thirty winter of age,
with a circlet of gold about her head. The third damsel was but fifteen years of age—"
Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and the voice faded out of my hearing!
Fifteen! Break—my heart! Oh, my lost darling! Just her age who was so gentle, and lovely,
and all the world to me, and whom I shall never see again! How the thought of her carries me back
over wide seas of memory to a vague dim time, a happy time, so many, many centuries hence,
when I used to wake in the soft summer mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say "Hello,
Central!" just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a "Hello, Hank!" that
was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear. She got three dollars a week, but she was worth it.
I could not follow Alisande's further explanation of who our captured knights were,
now—I mean in case she should ever get to explaining who they were. My interest was gone,
my thoughts were far away, and sad. By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale,
caught here and there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague way that each of these three
knights took one of these three damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode north,
another east, the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after year and day. Year
and day—and without baggage. It was of a piece with the general simplicity of the country.
The sun was now setting. It was about three in the afternoon when Alisande had begun to
tell me who the cowboys were; so she had made pretty good progress with it—for her.
She would arrive some time or other, no doubt, but she was not a person who could be hurried.
We were approaching a castle which stood on high ground; a huge, strong,
venerable structure, whose gray towers and battlements were charmingly draped with ivy,
and whose whole majestic mass was drenched with splendors flung from the sinking sun.
It was the largest castle we had seen, and so I thought it might be the one we were after,
but Sandy said no. She did not know who owned it; she said she had passed it without calling,
when she went down to Camelot. Chapter 16. Morgan Le Fay.
If knights errant were to be believed, not all castles were desirable places to seek
hospitality in. As a matter of fact, knights errant were not persons to be believed—that is,
measured by modern standards of veracity; yet, measured by the standards of their own time,
and scaled accordingly, you got the truth. It was very simple: you discounted
a statement ninety-seven percent; the rest was fact. Now after making this allowance,
the truth remained that if I could find out something about a castle before ringing the
doorbell—I mean hailing the warders—it was the sensible thing to do. So I was pleased when I
saw in the distance a horseman making the bottom turn of the road that wound down from this castle.
As we approached each other, I saw that he wore a plumed helmet, and seemed to be otherwise clothed
in steel, but bore a curious addition also—a stiff square garment like a herald's tabard. However,
I had to smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer and read this sign on his tabard:
"Persimmon's Soap All the Prime-Donna Use It."
That was a little idea of my own, and had several wholesome purposes in view
toward the civilizing and uplifting of this nation. In the first place, it was a furtive,
underhand blow at this nonsense of knight errantry, though nobody suspected that but me.
I had started a number of these people out—the bravest knights I could get—each sandwiched
between bulletin boards bearing one device or another, and I judged that by and by when they
got to be numerous enough they would begin to look ridiculous; and then, even the steel-clad
ass that hadn't any board would himself begin to look ridiculous because he was out of the fashion.
Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating suspicion or exciting alarm,
introduce a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from them it would work down to
the people, if the priests could be kept quiet. This would undermine the Church. I mean would
be a step toward that. Next, education—next, freedom—and then she would begin to crumble.
It being my conviction that any Established Church is an established crime, an established slave-pen,
I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in any way or with any weapon that promised to
hurt it. Why, in my own former day—in remote centuries not yet stirring in the womb of
time—there were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been born in a free country:
a "free" country with the Corporation Act and the Test still in force in it—timbers propped against
men's liberties and dishonored consciences to shore up an established anachronism with.
My missionaries were taught to spell out the gilt signs on their tabards—the showy gilding was a
neat idea, I could have got the king to wear a bulletin board for the sake of that barbaric
splendor—they were to spell out these signs and then explain to the lords and ladies what soap
was; and if the lords and ladies were afraid of it, get them to try it on a dog. The missionary's
next move was to get the family together and try it on himself; he was to stop at no experiment,
however desperate, that could convince the nobility that soap was harmless;
if any final doubt remained, he must catch a hermit—the woods were full of them;
saints they called themselves, and saints they were believed to be. They were unspeakably holy,
and worked miracles, and everybody stood in awe of them. If a hermit could survive a wash,
and that failed to convince a duke, give him up, let him alone.
Whenever my missionaries overcame a knight errant on the road they washed him, and when he got well
they swore him to go and get a bulletin board and disseminate soap and civilization the rest
of his days. As a consequence the workers in the field were increasing by degrees,
and the reform was steadily spreading. My soap factory felt the strain early.
At first I had only two hands; but before I had left home I was already employing fifteen,
and running night and day; and the atmospheric result was getting so pronounced that the king
went sort of fainting and gasping around and said he did not believe he could stand it much longer,
and Sir Launcelot got so that he did hardly anything but walk up and down
the roof and swear, although I told him it was worse up there than anywhere else,
but he said he wanted plenty of air; and he was always complaining that a palace was no place for
a soap factory anyway, and said if a man was to start one in his house he would be damned if he
wouldn't strangle him. There were ladies present, too, but much these people ever cared for that;
they would swear before children, if the wind was their way when the factory was going.
This missionary knight's name was La Cote Male Taile, and he said that this castle
was the abode of Morgan le Fay, sister of King Arthur, and wife of King Uriens,
monarch of a realm about as big as the District of Columbia—you could stand in
the middle of it and throw bricks into the next kingdom. "Kings" and "kingdoms" were as
thick in Britain as they had been in little Palestine in Joshua's time, when people had
to sleep with their knees pulled up because they couldn't stretch out without a passport.
La Cote was much depressed, for he had scored here the worst failure of his
campaign. He had not worked off a cake; yet he had tried all the tricks of the trade,
even to the washing of a hermit; but the hermit died. This was, indeed, a bad failure,
for this animal would now be dubbed a martyr, and would take his place among the saints of
the Roman calendar. Thus made he his moan, this poor Sir La Cote Male Taile, and sorrowed passing
sore. And so my heart bled for him, and I was moved to comfort and stay him. Wherefore I said:
"Forbear to grieve, fair knight, for this is not a defeat. We have brains,
you and I; and for such as have brains there are no defeats,
but only victories. Observe how we will turn this seeming disaster into an advertisement;
an advertisement for our soap; and the biggest one, to draw, that was ever thought of;
an advertisement that will transform that Mount Washington defeat into a Matterhorn victory. We
will put on your bulletin board, 'Patronized by the elect.' How does that strike you?"
"Verily, it is wonderly bethought!"
"Well, a body is bound to admit that for just a modest little one-line ad, it's a corker."
So the poor colporteur's griefs vanished away. He was a brave fellow,
and had done mighty feats of arms in his time. His chief celebrity rested upon the events of
an excursion like this one of mine, which he had once made with a damsel named Maledisant,
who was as handy with her tongue as was Sandy, though in a different way,
for her tongue churned forth only railings and insult, whereas Sandy's music was of a
kindlier sort. I knew his story well, and so I knew how to interpret the compassion that
was in his face when he bade me farewell. He supposed I was having a bitter hard time of it.
Sandy and I discussed his story, as we rode along, and she said that La Cote's bad luck had begun
with the very beginning of that trip; for the king's fool had overthrown him on the first day,
and in such cases it was customary for the girl to desert to the conqueror, but Maledisant didn't do
it; and also persisted afterward in sticking to him, after all his defeats. But, said I, suppose
the victor should decline to accept his spoil? She said that that wouldn't answer—he must. He
couldn't decline; it wouldn't be regular. I made a note of that. If Sandy's music got to be too
burdensome, some time, I would let a knight defeat me, on the chance that she would desert to him.
In due time we were challenged by the warders, from the castle walls, and after a parley
admitted. I have nothing pleasant to tell about that visit. But it was not a disappointment,
for I knew Mrs. le Fay by reputation, and was not expecting anything pleasant. She was held in awe
by the whole realm, for she had made everybody believe she was a great sorceress. All her ways
were wicked, all her instincts devilish. She was loaded to the eyelids with cold malice. All her
history was black with crime; and among her crimes murder was common. I was most curious to see her;
as curious as I could have been to see Satan. To my surprise she was beautiful;
black thoughts had failed to make her expression repulsive, age had failed to wrinkle her satin
skin or mar its bloomy freshness. She could have passed for old Uriens' granddaughter, she could
have been mistaken for sister to her own son. As soon as we were fairly within the castle gates
we were ordered into her presence. King Uriens was there, a kind-faced old man with a subdued look;
and also the son, Sir Uwaine le Blanchemains, in whom I was, of course, interested on account
of the tradition that he had once done battle with thirty knights, and also on account of
his trip with Sir Gawaine and Sir Marhaus, which Sandy had been aging me with. But Morgan was the
main attraction, the conspicuous personality here; she was head chief of this household,
that was plain. She caused us to be seated, and then she began, with all manner of pretty graces
and graciousnesses, to ask me questions. Dear me, it was like a bird or a flute, or something,
talking. I felt persuaded that this woman must have been misrepresented, lied about. She trilled
along, and trilled along, and presently a handsome young page, clothed like the rainbow, and as easy
and undulatory of movement as a wave, came with something on a golden salver, and, kneeling to
present it to her, overdid his graces and lost his balance, and so fell lightly against her knee. She
slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a way as another person would have harpooned a rat!
Poor child! He slumped to the floor, twisted his silken limbs in one great straining contortion of
pain, and was dead. Out of the old king was wrung an involuntary "O-h!" of compassion.
The look he got made him cut it suddenly short and not put any more hyphens in it. Sir Uwaine,
at a sign from his mother, went to the anteroom and called some servants,
and meanwhile madame went rippling sweetly along with her talk.
I saw that she was a good housekeeper, for while she talked she kept a corner of her eye
on the servants to see that they made no balks in handling the body and getting it out; when they
came with fresh clean towels, she sent back for the other kind; and when they had finished wiping
the floor and were going, she indicated a crimson fleck the size of a tear which their duller eyes
had overlooked. It was plain to me that La Cote Male Taile had failed to see the mistress of
the house. Often, how louder and clearer than any tongue, does dumb circumstantial evidence speak.
Morgan le Fay rippled along as musically as ever. Marvelous
woman. And what a glance she had: when it fell in reproof upon those servants,
they shrunk and quailed as timid people do when the lightning flashes out of a cloud.
I could have got the habit myself. It was the same with that poor old Brer Uriens;
he was always on the ragged edge of apprehension; she could not even turn toward him but he winced.
In the midst of the talk I let drop a complimentary word about King Arthur,
forgetting for the moment how this woman hated her brother. That one little compliment was
enough. She clouded up like storm; she called for her guards, and said:
"Hale me these varlets to the dungeons."
That struck cold on my ears, for her dungeons had a reputation. Nothing
occurred to me to say—or do. But not so with Sandy. As the guard
laid a hand upon me, she piped up with the tranquilest confidence, and said:
"God's wounds, dost thou covet destruction, thou maniac? It is The Boss!"
Now what a happy idea that was!—and so simple; yet it would never have occurred to me.
I was born modest; not all over, but in spots; and this was one of the spots.
The effect upon madame was electrical. It cleared her countenance and brought back
her smiles and all her persuasive graces and blandishments; but nevertheless she was not
able to entirely cover up with them the fact that she was in a ghastly fright. She said:
"La, but do list to thine handmaid! As if one gifted with powers like to mine might
say the thing which I have said unto one who has vanquished Merlin, and not be jesting. By
mine enchantments I foresaw your coming, and by them I knew you when you entered here. I
did but play this little jest with hope to surprise you into some display of your art,
as not doubting you would blast the guards with occult fires, consuming them to ashes on the spot,
a marvel much beyond mine own ability, yet one which I have long been childishly curious to see."
The guards were less curious, and got out as soon as they got permission.
Chapter 17. A Royal Banquet.
Madame, seeing me pacific and unresentful, no doubt judged that I was deceived by her excuse;
for her fright dissolved away, and she was soon so importunate to have me give
an exhibition and kill somebody, that the thing grew to be embarrassing. However,
to my relief she was presently interrupted by the call to prayers. I will say this much for
the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were,
they were deeply and enthusiastically religious. Nothing could divert them from the regular and
faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church. More than once I had seen a noble who
had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat;
more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and dispatching his enemy,
retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly give thanks, without even waiting to
rob the body. There was to be nothing finer or sweeter in the life of even Benvenuto Cellini,
that rough-hewn saint, ten centuries later. All the nobles of Britain, with their families,
attended divine service morning and night daily, in their private chapels, and even the worst of
them had family worship five or six times a day besides. The credit of this belonged entirely to
the Church. Although I was no friend to that Catholic Church, I was obliged to admit this.
And often, in spite of me, I found myself saying, "What would this country be without the Church?"
After prayers we had dinner in a great banqueting hall which was lighted by hundreds of grease-jets,
and everything was as fine and lavish and rudely splendid as might become the royal degree of the
hosts. At the head of the hall, on a dais, was the table of the king, queen, and their son,
Prince Uwaine. Stretching down the hall from this was the general table, on the floor. At this,
above the salt, sat the visiting nobles and the grown members of their families, of both sexes,
the resident Court, in effect—sixty-one persons; below the salt sat minor officers of
the household, with their principal subordinates: altogether a hundred and eighteen persons sitting,
and about as many liveried servants standing behind their chairs, or serving in one capacity
or another. It was a very fine show. In a gallery a band with cymbals, horns, harps, and other
horrors, opened the proceedings with what seemed to be the crude first draft or original agony of
the wail known to later centuries as "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." It was new and ought to have been
rehearsed a little more. For some reason or other the queen had the composer hanged after dinner.
After this music, the priest who stood behind the royal table said a noble long
grace in ostensible Latin. Then the battalion of waiters broke away from their posts and darted,
rushed, flew, fetched and carried, and the mighty feeding began; no words anywhere,
but absorbing attention to business. The rows of chops opened and shut in vast unison,
and the sound of it was like to the muffled burr of subterranean machinery.
The havoc continued an hour and a half, and unimaginable was the destruction of
substantials. Of the chief feature of the feast—the huge wild boar that
lay stretched out so portly and imposing at the start—nothing was left but the semblance of a
hoop-skirt; and he was but the type and symbol of what had happened to all the other dishes.
With the pastries and so on, the heavy drinking began—and the talk. Gallon
after gallon of wine and mead disappeared, and everybody got comfortable, then happy,
then sparklingly joyous—both sexes—and by and by pretty noisy. Men told anecdotes
that were terrific to hear, but nobody blushed; and when the nub was sprung,
the assemblage let go with a horse-laugh that shook the fortress. Ladies answered back with
historiettes that would almost have made Queen Margaret of Navarre or even the great Elizabeth
of England hide behind a handkerchief, but nobody hid here, but only laughed—howled,
you may say. In pretty much all of these dreadful stories, ecclesiastics were the hardy heroes,
but that didn't worry the chaplain any, he had his laugh with the rest; more than that,
upon invitation he roared out a song which was of as daring a sort as any that was sung that night.
By midnight everybody was fagged out and sore with laughing; and, as a rule, drunk:
some weepingly, some affectionately, some hilariously, some quarrelsomely,
some dead and under the table. Of the ladies, the worst spectacle was a lovely young duchess,
whose wedding eve this was; and indeed she was a spectacle, sure enough. Just as she was she
could have sat in advance for the portrait of the young daughter of the Regent d'Orleans,
at the famous dinner whence she was carried, foul-mouthed, intoxicated,
and helpless, to her bed, in the lost and lamented days of the Ancient Regime.
Suddenly, even while the priest was lifting his hands, and all conscious heads were bowed
in reverent expectation of the coming blessing, there appeared under the arch of the far-off door
at the bottom of the hall an old and bent and white-haired lady, leaning upon a crutch stick;
and she lifted the stick and pointed it toward the queen and cried out:
"The wrath and curse of God fall upon you, woman without pity,
who have slain my innocent grandchild and made desolate this old heart that had nor chick,
nor friend nor stay nor comfort in all this world but him!"
Everybody crossed himself in a grisly fright, for a curse was an awful thing to those people; but
the queen rose up majestic, with the death-light in her eye, and flung back this ruthless command:
"Lay hands on her! To the stake with her!"
The guards left their posts to obey. It was a shame; it was a cruel thing to see.
What could be done? Sandy gave me a look; I knew she had another inspiration. I said:
"Do what you choose."
She was up and facing toward the queen in a moment. She indicated me, and said:
"Madame, he saith this may not be. Recall the commandment, or he will
dissolve the castle and it shall vanish away like the instable fabric of a dream!"
Confound it, what a crazy contract to pledge a person to! What if the queen—
But my consternation subsided there, and my panic passed off; for the queen,
all in a collapse, made no show of resistance but gave a countermanding sign and sunk into
her seat. When she reached it she was sober. So were many of the others. The assemblage rose,
whiffed ceremony to the winds, and rushed for the door like a mob; overturning chairs,
smashing crockery, tugging, struggling, shouldering, crowding—anything to get out
before I should change my mind and puff the castle into the measureless dim vacancies of space. Well,
well, well, they were a superstitious lot. It is all a body can do to conceive of it.
The poor queen was so scared and humbled that she was even afraid to hang the composer without
first consulting me. I was very sorry for her—indeed, anyone would have been,
for she was really suffering; so I was willing to do anything that was reasonable, and had no
desire to carry things to wanton extremities. I therefore considered the matter thoughtfully,
and ended by having the musicians ordered into our presence to play that Sweet Bye and Bye again,
which they did. Then I saw that she was right, and gave her permission to hang
the whole band. This little relaxation of sternness had a good effect upon the queen.
A statesman gains little by the arbitrary exercise of iron-clad authority upon all occasions that
offer, for this wounds the just pride of his subordinates, and thus tends to undermine his
strength. A little concession, now and then, where it can do no harm, is the wiser policy.
Now that the queen was at ease in her mind once more, and measurably happy,
her wine naturally began to assert itself again, and it got a little the start of
her. I mean it set her music going—her silver bell of a tongue. Dear me, she was a master
talker. It would not become me to suggest that it was pretty late and that I was a tired man
and very sleepy. I wished I had gone off to bed when I had the chance. Now I must stick it out;
there was no other way. So she tinkled along and along, in the otherwise profound and ghostly
hush of the sleeping castle, until by and by there came, as if from deep down under us,
a far-away sound, as of a muffled shriek—with an expression of agony about it that made my
flesh crawl. The queen stopped, and her eyes lighted with pleasure; she tilted her graceful
head as a bird does when it listens. The sound bored its way up through the stillness again.
"What is it?" I said.
"It is truly a stubborn soul, and endureth long. It is many hours now."
"Endureth what?"
"The rack. Come—you shall see a blithe sight. An he yield not his secret now,
ye shall see him torn asunder."
What a silky smooth hellion she was; and so composed and serene, when the cords all down
my legs were hurting in sympathy with that man's pain. Conducted by mailed guards bearing flaring
torches, we tramped along echoing corridors, and down stone stairways dank and dripping,
and smelling of mould and ages of imprisoned night—a chill, uncanny journey and a long one,
and not made the shorter or the cheerier by the sorceress's talk,
which was about this sufferer and his crime. He had been accused by an anonymous informer,
of having killed a stag in the royal preserves. I said:
"Anonymous testimony isn't just the right thing,
your Highness. It were fairer to confront the accused with the accuser."
"I had not thought of that, it being but of small consequence. But an I would,
I could not, for that the accuser came masked by night, and told the forester,
and straightway got him hence again, and so the forester knoweth him not."
"Then is this unknown the only person who saw the stag killed?"
"Marry, no man saw the killing, but this unknown saw this hardy wretch near to the
spot where the stag lay, and came with right loyal zeal and betrayed him to the forester."
"So the unknown was near the dead stag, too? Isn't it just possible that he did
the killing himself? His loyal zeal—in a mask—looks just a shade suspicious. But what
is your highness's idea for racking the prisoner? Where is the profit?"
"He will not confess, else; and then were his soul lost. For his crime his life is forfeited by the
law—and of a surety will I see that he payeth it!—but it were peril to my own soul to let
him die unconfessed and unabsolved. Nay, I were a fool to fling me into hell for his accommodation."
"But, your highness, suppose he has nothing to confess?"
"As to that, we shall see, anon. An I rack him to death and he confess not, it will peradventure
show that he had indeed naught to confess—ye will grant that that is sooth? Then shall I
not be damned for an unconfessed man that had naught to confess—wherefore, I shall be safe."
It was the stubborn unreasoning of the time. It was useless to argue with her.
Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the
waves wear a cliff. And her training was everybody's. The brightest intellect in
the land would not have been able to see that her position was defective.
As we entered the rack-cell, I caught a picture that will not go from me; I wish it would.
A native young giant of thirty or thereabouts lay stretched upon the frame on his back,
with his wrists and ankles tied to ropes which led over windlasses at either end. There was no
color in him; his features were contorted and set, and sweat-drops stood upon his forehead. A priest
bent over him on each side; the executioner stood by; guards were on duty; smoking torches stood in
sockets along the walls; in a corner crouched a poor young creature, her face drawn with anguish,
a half-wild and hunted look in her eyes, and in her lap lay a little child asleep. Just as
we stepped across the threshold the executioner gave his machine a slight turn, which wrung a
cry from both the prisoner and the woman; but I shouted, and the executioner released the strain
without waiting to see who spoke. I could not let this horror go on; it would have killed me
to see it. I asked the queen to let me clear the place and speak to the prisoner privately;
and when she was going to object I spoke in a low voice and said I did not want to make a
scene before her servants, but I must have my way; for I was King Arthur's representative,
and was speaking in his name. She saw she had to yield. I asked her to indorse me to these people,
and then leave me. It was not pleasant for her, but she took the pill; and even went further than
I was meaning to require. I only wanted the backing of her own authority; but she said:
"You will do in all things as this lord shall command. It is the boss."
It was certainly a good word to conjure with: you could see it by the squirming of these rats.
The queen's guards fell into line, and she and they marched away, with their torch-bearers, and
woke the echoes of the cavernous tunnels with the measured beat of their retreating footfalls. I had
the prisoner taken from the rack and placed upon his bed, and medicaments applied to his hurts, and
wine given him to drink. The woman crept near and looked on, eagerly, lovingly, but timorously,—like
one who fears a repulse; indeed, she tried furtively to touch the man's forehead, and
jumped back, the picture of fright, when I turned unconsciously toward her. It was pitiful to see.
"Lord," I said, "stroke him, lass, if you want to. Do anything you're a mind to; don't mind me."
Why, her eyes were as grateful as an animal's when you do it a kindness that it understands.
The baby was out of her way and she had her cheek against the man's in a minute and her
hands fondling his hair, and her happy tears running down. The man revived and caressed
his wife with his eyes, which was all he could do. I judged I might clear the den,
now, and I did; cleared it of all but the family and myself. Then I said:
"Now, my friend, tell me your side of this matter; I know the other side."
The man moved his head in sign of refusal. But
the woman looked pleased—as it seemed to me—pleased with my suggestion. I went on—
"You know of me?"
"Yes. All do, in Arthur's realms."
"If my reputation has come to you right and straight, you should not be afraid to speak."
The woman broke in, eagerly:
"Ah, fair my lord, do thou persuade him! Thou canst an thou wilt. Ah, he suffereth so;
and it is for me—for me! And how can I bear it? I would I might see him die—a sweet,
swift death; oh, my Hugo, I cannot bear this one!"
And she fell to sobbing and grovelling about my feet, and still imploring. Imploring what?
The man's death? I could not quite get the bearings of the thing.
But Hugo interrupted her and said: "Peace! Ye wit not what ye ask. Shall
I starve whom I love, to win a gentle death? I wend thou knewest me better."
"Well," I said, "I can't quite make this out. It is a puzzle. Now—"
"Ah, dear my lord, an ye will but persuade him! Consider how these his tortures wound me! Oh,
and he will not speak!—whereas, the healing, the solace that lie in a blessed swift death—"
"What are you maundering about? He's going
out from here a free man and whole—he's not going to die."
The man's white face lit up, and the woman flung herself at me in
a most surprising explosion of joy, and cried out:
"He is saved!—for it is the king's word by the mouth of the king's servant—Arthur,
the king whose word is gold!"
"Well, then you do believe I can be trusted, after all. Why didn't you before?"
"Who doubted? Not I, indeed; and not she."
"Well, why wouldn't you tell me your story, then?"
"Ye had made no promise; else had it been otherwise."
"I see, I see.... And yet I believe I don't quite see,
after all. You stood the torture and refused to confess;
which shows plain enough to even the dullest understanding that you had nothing to confess—"
"I, my lord? How so? It was I that killed the deer!"
"You did? Oh, dear, this is the most mixed-up business that ever—"
"Dear lord, I begged him on my knees to confess, but—"
"You did! It gets thicker and thicker. What did you want him to do that for?"
"Sith it would bring him a quick death and save him all this cruel pain."
"Well—yes, there is reason in that. But he didn't want the quick death."
"He? Why, of a surety he did."
"Well, then, why in the world didn't he confess?"
"Ah, sweet sir, and leave my wife and chick without bread and shelter?"
"Oh, heart of gold, now I see it! The bitter law takes the convicted
man's estate and beggars his widow and his orphans. They could torture you to death,
but without conviction or confession they could not rob your wife and baby.
You stood by them like a man; and you—true wife and the woman that you are—you would
have bought him release from torture at cost to yourself of slow starvation and death—well,
it humbles a body to think what your sex can do when it comes to self-sacrifice.
I'll book you both for my colony; you'll like it there; it's a factory where I'm going to
turn groping and grubbing automata into men." Chapter eighteen. In the Queen's Dungeons.
Well, I arranged all that; and I had the man sent to his home. I had a great desire
to rack the executioner; not because he was a good, painstaking and pain-giving official,
for surely it was not to his discredit that he performed his functions well—but to pay him back
for wantonly cuffing and otherwise distressing that young woman. The priests told me about this,
and were generously hot to have him punished. Something of this disagreeable sort was turning up
every now and then. I mean, episodes that showed that not all priests were frauds and self-seekers,
but that many, even the great majority, of these that were down on the ground among the
common people, were sincere and right-hearted, and devoted to the alleviation of human troubles and
sufferings. Well, it was a thing which could not be helped, so I seldom fretted about it, and never
many minutes at a time; it has never been my way to bother much about things which you can't cure.
But I did not like it, for it was just the sort of thing to keep people reconciled to an established
church. We must have a religion—it goes without saying—but my idea is, to have it cut up into
forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States
in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an established church is only
a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that;
it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and
scattered condition. That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel: it was only an opinion—my opinion, and
I was only a man, one man: so it wasn't worth any more than the pope's—or any less, for that matter.
Well, I couldn't rack the executioner, neither would I overlook the just complaint of the
priests. The man must be punished somehow or other, so I degraded him from his office and
made him leader of the band—the new one that was to be started. He begged hard, and said
he couldn't play—a plausible excuse, but too thin; there wasn't a musician in the country that could.
The queen was a good deal outraged, next morning when she found she was going to have neither
Hugo's life nor his property. But I told her she must bear this cross; that while by law and custom
she certainly was entitled to both the man's life and his property, there were extenuating
circumstances, and so in Arthur the king's name I had pardoned him. The deer was ravaging the man's
fields, and he had killed it in sudden passion, and not for gain; and he had carried it into
the royal forest in the hope that that might make detection of the misdoer impossible. Confound her,
I couldn't make her see that sudden passion is an extenuating circumstance in the killing of
venison—or of a person—so I gave it up and let her sulk it out. I did think I was going to make her
see it by remarking that her own sudden passion in the case of the page modified that crime.
"Crime!" she exclaimed. "How thou talkest! Crime, forsooth! Man, I am going to pay for him!"
Oh, it was no use to waste sense on her. Training—training is everything; training is
all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what
we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own,
no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us,
and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point
of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from,
a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam clam or grasshopper
or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And
as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the
eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that
one microscopic atom in me that is truly me: the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.
No, confound her, her intellect was good, she had brains enough, but her training made her an
ass—that is, from a many-centuries-later point of view. To kill the page was no crime—it was
her right; and upon her right she stood, serenely and unconscious of offense. She
was a result of generations of training in the unexamined and unassailed belief that the law
which permitted her to kill a subject when she chose was a perfectly right and righteous one.
Well, we must give even Satan his due. She deserved a compliment for one thing;
and I tried to pay it, but the words stuck in my throat. She had a right to kill the boy, but
she was in no wise obliged to pay for him. That was law for some other people, but not for her.
She knew quite well that she was doing a large and generous thing to pay for that lad,
and that I ought in common fairness to come out with something handsome about it,
but I couldn't—my mouth refused. I couldn't help seeing, in my fancy,
that poor old grandma with the broken heart, and that fair young creature lying butchered,
his little silken pomps and vanities laced with his golden blood. How could she pay for him!
Whom could she pay? And so, well knowing that this woman, trained as she had been, deserved praise,
even adulation, I was yet not able to utter it, trained as I had been. The best I could do
was to fish up a compliment from outside, so to speak—and the pity of it was, that it was true:
"Madame, your people will adore you for this."
Quite true, but I meant to hang her for it some day if I lived. Some of those laws were too bad,
altogether too bad. A master might kill his slave for nothing—for mere spite, malice,
or to pass the time—just as we have seen that the crowned head could do it with his slave, that is
to say, anybody. A gentleman could kill a free commoner, and pay for him—cash or garden-truck.
A noble could kill a noble without expense, as far as the law was concerned,
but reprisals in kind were to be expected. Anybody could kill somebody,
except the commoner and the slave; these had no privileges. If they killed, it was murder,
and the law wouldn't stand murder. It made short work of the experimenter—and of his family, too,
if he murdered somebody who belonged up among the ornamental ranks. If a commoner gave a noble even
so much as a Damiens scratch which didn't kill or even hurt, he got Damiens' dose for it just the
same; they pulled him to rags and tatters with horses, and all the world came to see the show,
and crack jokes, and have a good time; and some of the performances of the best people present
were as tough, and as properly unprintable, as any that have been printed by the pleasant
Casanova in his chapter about the dismemberment of Louis the fifteenth's poor awkward enemy.
I had had enough of this grisly place by this time, and wanted to leave, but I couldn't,
because I had something on my mind that my conscience kept prodding me about,
and wouldn't let me forget. If I had the remaking of man,
he wouldn't have any conscience. It is one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person;
and although it certainly does a great deal of good, it cannot be said to pay, in the long run;
it would be much better to have less good and more comfort. Still, this is only my opinion,
and I am only one man; others, with less experience, may think differently.
They have a right to their view. I only stand to this: I have noticed my conscience for many years,
and I know it is more trouble and bother to me than anything else I started with. I suppose that
in the beginning I prized it, because we prize anything that is ours; and yet how foolish it
was to think so. If we look at it in another way, we see how absurd it is: if I had an anvil in me
would I prize it? Of course not. And yet when you come to think, there is no real difference between
a conscience and an anvil—I mean for comfort. I have noticed it a thousand times. And you could
dissolve an anvil with acids, when you couldn't stand it any longer; but there isn't any way
that you can work off a conscience—at least so it will stay worked off; not that I know of, anyway.
There was something I wanted to do before leaving, but it was a disagreeable matter,
and I hated to go at it. Well, it bothered me all the morning. I could have mentioned it to the old
king, but what would be the use?—he was but an extinct volcano; he had been active in his time,
but his fire was out, this good while, he was only a stately ash-pile now; gentle enough, and
kindly enough for my purpose, without doubt, but not usable. He was nothing, this so-called king:
the queen was the only power there. And she was a Vesuvius. As a favor, she might consent to warm a
flock of sparrows for you, but then she might take that very opportunity to turn herself loose and
bury a city. However, I reflected that as often as any other way, when you are expecting the worst,
you get something that is not so bad, after all. So I braced up and placed my matter before her
royal highness. I said I had been having a general jail delivery at Camelot and among neighboring
castles, and with her permission I would like to examine her collection, her bric-a-brac — that
is to say, her prisoners. She resisted; but I was expecting that. But she finally consented. I was
expecting that, too, but not so soon. That about ended my discomfort. She called her guards and
torches, and we went down into the dungeons. These were down under the castle's foundations, and
mainly were small cells hollowed out of the living rock. Some of these cells had no light at all.
In one of them was a woman, in foul rags, who sat on the ground, and would not answer a question or
speak a word, but only looked up at us once or twice, through a cobweb of tangled hair, as if
to see what casual thing it might be that was disturbing with sound and light the meaningless
dull dream that had become her life; after that, she sat bowed, with her dirt-caked fingers idly
interlocked in her lap, and gave no further sign. This poor rack of bones was a woman of middle age,
apparently; but only apparently; she had been there nine years, and was eighteen when she
entered. She was a commoner, and had been sent here on her bridal night by Sir Breuse Sance Pite,
a neighboring lord whose vassal her father was, and to which said lord she had refused what has
since been called le droit du seigneur, and, moreover, had opposed violence to violence and
spilled half a gill of his almost sacred blood. The young husband had interfered at that point,
believing the bride's life in danger, and had flung the noble out into the midst of the humble
and trembling wedding guests, in the parlor, and left him there astonished at this strange
treatment, and implacably embittered against both bride and groom. The said lord being cramped for
dungeon room had asked the queen to accommodate his two criminals, and here in her bastille they
had been ever since; hither, indeed, they had come before their crime was an hour old, and had never
seen each other since. Here they were, kenneled like toads in the same rock; they had passed nine
pitch dark years within fifty feet of each other, yet neither knew whether the other was alive or
not. All the first years, their only question had been—asked with beseechings and tears that might
have moved stones, in time, perhaps, but hearts are not stones: "Is he alive?" "Is she alive?" But
they had never got an answer; and at last that question was not asked any more—or any other.
I wanted to see the man, after hearing all this. He was thirty-four years old, and looked sixty.
He sat upon a squared block of stone, with his head bent down, his forearms resting on his knees,
his long hair hanging like a fringe before his face, and he was muttering to himself.
He raised his chin and looked us slowly over, in a listless dull way, blinking with the distress of
the torchlight, then dropped his head and fell to muttering again and took no further notice of us.
There were some pathetically suggestive dumb witnesses present. On his wrists
and ankles were cicatrices, old smooth scars, and fastened to the stone on which he sat was
a chain with manacles and fetters attached; but this apparatus lay idle on the ground,
and was thick with rust. Chains cease to be needed after the spirit has gone out of a prisoner.
I could not rouse the man; so I said we would take him to her, and see—to the bride who was the
fairest thing on the earth to him, once—roses, pearls, and dew made flesh, for him; a wonder
work, the master work of nature: with eyes like no other eyes, and voice like no other voice, and a
freshness, and lithe young grace, and beauty, that belonged properly to the creatures of dreams—as he
thought—and to no other. The sight of her would set his stagnant blood leaping; the sight of her—
But it was a disappointment. They sat together on the ground and looked dimly wondering into
each other's faces a while, with a sort of weak animal curiosity;
then forgot each other's presence, and dropped their eyes, and you saw that they were away again
and wandering in some far land of dreams and shadows that we know nothing about.
I had them taken out and sent to their friends. The queen did not like it much.
Not that she felt any personal interest in the matter, but she thought it disrespectful
to Sir Breuse Sance Pite. However, I assured her that if he found he couldn't
stand it I would fix him so that he could. I set forty-seven prisoners loose out of those
awful rat-holes, and left only one in captivity. He was a lord, and had killed another lord,
a sort of kinsman of the queen. That other lord had ambushed him to assassinate him,
but this fellow had got the best of him and cut his throat. However, it was not for that that I
left him jailed, but for maliciously destroying the only public well in one of his wretched
villages. The queen was bound to hang him for killing her kinsman, but I would not allow it:
it was no crime to kill an assassin. But I said I was willing to let her hang him for
destroying the well; so she concluded to put up with that, as it was better than nothing.
Dear me, for what trifling offenses the most of those forty-seven men and women were shut up
there! Indeed, some were there for no distinct offense at all, but only to gratify somebody's
spite; and not always the queen's by any means, but a friend's. The newest prisoner's crime
was a mere remark which he had made. He said he believed that men were about all alike, and one
man as good as another, barring clothes. He said he believed that if you were to strip the nation
naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he couldn't tell the king from a quack doctor,
nor a duke from a hotel clerk. Apparently here was a man whose brains had not been reduced to
an ineffectual mush by idiotic training. I set him loose and sent him to the factory.
Some of the cells carved in the living rock were just behind the face of the precipice, and in each
of these an arrow-slit had been pierced outward to the daylight, and so the captive had a thin ray
from the blessed sun for his comfort. The case of one of these poor fellows was particularly hard.
From his dusky swallow's hole high up in that vast wall of native rock, he could peer out
through the arrow-slit and see his own home off yonder in the valley; and for twenty-two years
he had watched it, with heartache and longing, through that crack. He could see the lights shine
there at night, and in the daytime he could see figures go in and come out—his wife and children,
some of them, no doubt, though he could not make out at that distance. In the course of years he
noted festivities there, and tried to rejoice, and wondered if they were weddings or what they might
be. And he noted funerals; and they wrung his heart. He could make out the coffin, but he could
not determine its size, and so could not tell whether it was wife or child. He could see the
procession form, with priests and mourners, and move solemnly away, bearing the secret with them.
He had left behind him five children and a wife; and in nineteen years he had seen five funerals
issue, and none of them humble enough in pomp to denote a servant. So he had lost five of his
treasures; there must still be one remaining—one now infinitely, unspeakably precious—but which
one? wife, or child? That was the question that tortured him, by night and by day,
asleep and awake. Well, to have an interest, of some sort, and half a ray of light, when you are
in a dungeon, is a great support to the body and preserver of the intellect. This man was
in pretty good condition yet. By the time he had finished telling me his distressful tale, I was in
the same state of mind that you would have been in yourself, if you have got average human curiosity;
that is to say, I was as burning up as he was to find out which member of the family it was
that was left. So I took him over home myself; and an amazing kind of a surprise party it was,
too—typhoons and cyclones of frantic joy, and whole Niagaras of happy tears; and by George!
we found the aforetime young matron graying toward the imminent verge of her half century,
and the babies all men and women, and some of them married and experimenting familywise
themselves—for not a soul of the tribe was dead! Conceive of the ingenious devilishness of that
queen: she had a special hatred for this prisoner, and she had invented all those funerals herself,
to scorch his heart with; and the sublimest stroke of genius of the whole thing was leaving
the family-invoice a funeral short, so as to let him wear his poor old soul out guessing.
But for me, he never would have got out. Morgan le Fay hated him with her whole heart, and she
never would have softened toward him. And yet his crime was committed more in thoughtlessness
than deliberate depravity. He had said she had red hair. Well, she had; but that was no way to
speak of it. When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.
Consider it: among these forty-seven captives there were five whose names, offenses,
and dates of incarceration were no longer known! One woman and four men—all bent, and wrinkled,
and mind-extinguished patriarchs. They themselves had long ago forgotten these details; at any rate
they had mere vague theories about them, nothing definite and nothing that they repeated twice in
the same way. The succession of priests whose office it had been to pray daily with the
captives and remind them that God had put them there, for some wise purpose or other, and teach
them that patience, humbleness, and submission to oppression was what He loved to see in parties of
a subordinate rank, had traditions about these poor old human ruins, but nothing more. These
traditions went but little way, for they concerned the length of the incarceration only, and not the
names of the offenses. And even by the help of tradition the only thing that could be proven
was that none of the five had seen daylight for thirty-five years: how much longer this privation
has lasted was not guessable. The king and the queen knew nothing about these poor creatures,
except that they were heirlooms, assets inherited, along with the throne, from the former firm.
Nothing of their history had been transmitted with their persons, and so the inheriting
owners had considered them of no value, and had felt no interest in them. I said to the queen:
"Then why in the world didn't you set them free?"
The question was a puzzler. She didn't know why she hadn't, the thing had never come up in her
mind. So here she was, forecasting the veritable history of future prisoners of the Castle d'If,
without knowing it. It seemed plain to me now, that with her training,
those inherited prisoners were merely property—nothing more, nothing less. Well,
when we inherit property, it does not occur to us to throw it away, even when we do not value it.
When I brought my procession of human bats up into the open world and the glare of the afternoon
sun—previously blindfolding them, in charity for eyes so long untortured by light—they were
a spectacle to look at. Skeletons, scarecrows, goblins, pathetic frights, every one; legitimatest
possible children of monarchy by the grace of God and the established Church. I muttered absently:
"I wish I could photograph them!"
You have seen that kind of people who will never let on that they don't know the meaning of a
new big word. The more ignorant they are, the more pitifully certain they
are to pretend you haven't shot over their heads. The queen was just one of that sort,
and was always making the stupidest blunders by reason of it. She hesitated a moment; then her
face brightened up with sudden comprehension, and she said she would do it for me.
I thought to myself: She? why what can she know about photography? But it was a poor
time to be thinking. When I looked around, she was moving on the procession with an axe!
Well, she certainly was a curious one, was Morgan le Fay. I have seen a good many kinds of women in
my time, but she laid over them all for variety. And how sharply characteristic of her this episode
was. She had no more idea than a horse of how to photograph a procession; but being in doubt,
it was just like her to try to do it with an axe. Chapter 19. Knight-errantry as a trade.
Sandy and I were on the road again, next morning, bright and early. It was so good to open up one's
lungs and take in whole luscious barrels-full of the blessed God's untainted, dew-fashioned,
woodland-scented air once more, after suffocating body and mind for two days and nights in the moral
and physical stenches of that intolerable old buzzard-roost! I mean, for me: of course the place
was all right and agreeable enough for Sandy, for she had been used to high life all her days.
Poor girl, her jaws had had a wearisome rest now for a while, and I was expecting to get
the consequences. I was right; but she had stood by me most helpfully in the castle,
and had mightily supported and reinforced me with gigantic foolishnesses which were worth
more for the occasion than wisdoms double their size; so I thought she had earned a
right to work her mill for a while, if she wanted to, and I felt not a pang when she started it up:
"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirty winters of age southward—"
"Are you going to see if you can work up another half-stretch on the trail of the cowboys, Sandy?"
"Even so, fair my lord."
"Go ahead, then. I won't interrupt this time, if I can help it. Begin over again;
start fair, and shake out all your reefs, and I will load my pipe and give good attention."
"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirty winters of age southward. And
so they came into a deep forest, and by fortune they were nighted, and rode along in a deep way,
and at the last they came into a courtelage where abode the duke of South Marches, and there they
asked harbour. And on the morn the duke sent unto Sir Marhaus, and bade him make him ready. And so
Sir Marhaus arose and armed him, and there was a mass sung afore him, and he brake his fast,
and so mounted on horseback in the court of the castle, there they should do the battle. So there
was the duke already on horseback, clean armed, and his six sons by him, and every one had a spear
in his hand, and so they encountered, whereas the duke and his two sons brake their spears upon him,
but Sir Marhaus held up his spear and touched none of them. Then came the four sons by couples,
and two of them brake their spears, and so did the other two. And all this while Sir Marhaus
touched them not. Then Sir Marhaus ran to the duke, and smote him with his spear that horse
and man fell to the earth. And so he served his sons. And then Sir Marhaus alight down,
and bade the duke yield him or else he would slay him. And then some of his sons recovered,
and would have set upon Sir Marhaus. Then Sir Marhaus said to the duke, "Cease thy sons, or
else I will do the uttermost to you all." When the duke saw he might not escape the death, he cried
to his sons, and charged them to yield them to Sir Marhaus. And they kneeled all down and put the
pommels of their swords to the knight, and so he received them. And then they holp up their father,
and so by their common assent promised unto Sir Marhaus never to be foes unto King Arthur,
and thereupon at Whitsuntide after, to come he and his sons, and put them in the king's grace.
"Even so standeth the history, fair Sir Boss. Now ye shall wit that that very duke and his
six sons are they whom but few days past you also did overcome and send to Arthur's court!"
"Why, Sandy, you can't mean it!"
"If I speak not sooth, let it be the worse for me."
"Well, well, well,—now who would ever have thought it? One whole duke and six dukelets; why, Sandy,
it was an elegant haul. Knight-errantry is a most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedious hard work,
too, but I begin to see that there is money in it, after all, if you have luck. Not that I would ever
engage in it as a business, for I wouldn't. No sound and legitimate business can be established
on a basis of speculation. A successful whirl in the knight-errantry line—now what is it when you
blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It's just a corner in pork, that's all,
and you can't make anything else out of it. You're rich—yes,—suddenly rich—for about a day, maybe a
week; then somebody corners the market on you, and down goes your bucket-shop; ain't that so, Sandy?"
"Whethersoever it be that my mind miscarrieth,
bewraying simple language in such sort that the words do seem to come endlong and overthwart—"
"There's no use in beating about the bush and trying to get around it that way, Sandy,
it's so, just as I say. I know it's so. And, moreover, when you come right down to the bedrock,
knight-errantry is worse than pork; for whatever happens, the pork's left,
and so somebody's benefited anyway; but when the market breaks, in a knight-errantry whirl,
and every knight in the pool passes in his checks, what have you got for assets? Just a
rubbish-pile of battered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware. Can you call those
assets? Give me pork, every time. Am I right?" "Ah, peradventure my head being distraught
by the manifold matters whereunto the confusions of these but late adventured
haps and fortunings whereby not I alone nor you alone, but every each of us, meseemeth—"
"No, it's not your head, Sandy. Your head's all right, as far as it goes,
but you don't know business; that's where the trouble is. It unfits you to argue about business,
and you're wrong to be always trying. However, that aside, it was a good haul, anyway,
and will breed a handsome crop of reputation in Arthur's court. And speaking of the cowboys,
what a curious country this is for women and men that never get old. Now there's Morgan le Fay,
as fresh and young as a Vassar pullet, to all appearances, and here is this old duke of the
South Marches still slashing away with sword and lance at his time of life, after raising such a
family as he has raised. As I understand it, Sir Gawaine killed seven of his sons,
and still he had six left for Sir Marhaus and me to take into camp. And then there was that damsel
of sixty winters of age still excursioning around in her frosty bloom—How old are you, Sandy?"
It was the first time I ever struck a still place in her. The mill had shut
down for repairs, or something. Chapter 20. The Ogre's Castle.
Between six and nine we made ten miles, which was plenty for a horse carrying triple—man,
woman, and armor; then we stopped for a long nooning under some trees by a limpid brook.
Right so came by and by a knight riding; and as he drew near he made dolorous moan, and by
the words of it I perceived that he was cursing and swearing; yet nevertheless was I glad of his
coming, for that I saw he bore a bulletin board whereon in letters all of shining gold was writ:
"Use Peterson's Prophylactic Tooth-Brush—All The Go."
I was glad of his coming, for even by this token I knew him for knight of mine. It was Sir Madok
de la Montaine, a burly great fellow whose chief distinction was that he had come within an ace
of sending Sir Launcelot down over his horse-tail once. He was never long in a stranger's presence
without finding some pretext or other to let out that great fact. But there was another fact
of nearly the same size, which he never pushed upon anybody unasked, and yet never withheld when
asked: that was, that the reason he didn't quite succeed was, that he was interrupted and sent down
over horse-tail himself. This innocent vast lubber did not see any particular difference between the
two facts. I liked him, for he was earnest in his work, and very valuable. And he was so fine
to look at, with his broad mailed shoulders, and the grand leonine set of his plumed head,
and his big shield with its quaint device of a gauntleted hand clutching a prophylactic
tooth-brush, with motto: "Try Noyoudont." This was a tooth-wash that I was introducing.
He was weary, he said, and indeed he looked it; but he would not alight. He said he was
after the stove polish man; and with this he broke out cursing and swearing anew. The
bulletin boarder referred to was Sir Ossaise of Surluse, a brave knight,
and of considerable celebrity on account of his having tried conclusions in a tournament once,
with no less a mogul than Sir Gaheris himself—although not successfully.
He was of a light and laughing disposition, and to him nothing in this world was serious. It was
for this reason that I had chosen him to work up a stove polish sentiment. There were no stoves yet,
and so there could be nothing serious about stove polish. All that the agent needed to do was to
deftly and by degrees prepare the public for the great change, and have them established in
predilections toward neatness against the time when the stove should appear upon the stage.
Sir Madok was very bitter, and broke out anew with cursings. He said he had cursed his soul to rags;
and yet he would not get down from his horse, neither would he take any rest, or listen to
any comfort, until he should have found Sir Ossaise and settled this account. It appeared,
by what I could piece together of the unprofane fragments of his statement, that he had chanced
upon Sir Ossaise at dawn of the morning, and been told that if he would make a short cut
across the fields and swamps and broken hills and glades, he could head off a company of travelers
who would be rare customers for prophylactics and tooth-wash. With characteristic zeal Sir
Madok had plunged away at once upon this quest, and after three hours of awful crosslot riding
had overhauled his game. And behold, it was the five patriarchs that had been released from the
dungeons the evening before! Poor old creatures, it was all of twenty years since any one of them
had known what it was to be equipped with any remaining snag or remnant of a tooth.
"Blank-blank-blank him," said Sir Madok, "an I do not stove polish him an I may find him,
leave it to me; for never no knight that hight Ossaise or aught else may do me this disservice
and bide on live, an I may find him, the which I have thereunto sworn a great oath this day."
And with these words and others, he lightly took his spear and got him thence. In the middle of
the afternoon, we came upon one of those very patriarchs ourselves, on the edge of a poor
village. He was basking in the love of relatives and friends whom he had not seen for fifty years;
and about him and caressing him were also descendants of his own body whom
he had never seen at all till now; but to him, these were all strangers, his memory was gone,
his mind was stagnant. It seemed incredible that a man could outlast half a century shut
up in a dark hole like a rat, but here were his old wife and some old comrades to testify to it.
They could remember him as he was in the freshness and strength of his young manhood, when he kissed
his child and delivered it to its mother's hands and went away into that long oblivion.
The people at the castle could not tell within half a generation the length of time the man had
been shut up there for his unrecorded and forgotten offense; but this old wife knew;
and so did her old child, who stood there among her married sons and daughters trying to realize
a father who had been to her a name, a thought, a formless image, a tradition, all her life,
and now was suddenly concreted into actual flesh and blood and set before her face.
It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account that I have made room for it here,
but on account of a thing which seemed to me still more curious. To wit,
that this dreadful matter brought from these downtrodden people no outburst of
rage against these oppressors. They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty and outrage
so long that nothing could have startled them but a kindness. Yes, here was a curious revelation,
indeed, of the depth to which these people had been sunk in slavery. Their entire being
was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining
acceptance of whatever might befall them in this life. Their very imagination was dead.
When you can say that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower deep for him.
I rather wished I had gone some other road. This was not the sort of experience for a statesman
to encounter who was planning out a peaceful revolution in his mind. For it could not help
bringing up the unget-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary
notwithstanding, no people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk
and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood,
whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that. What these
folk needed, then, was a reign of terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.
Two days later, toward noon, Sandy began to show signs of excitement and feverish
expectancy. She said we were approaching the ogre's castle. I was surprised into
an uncomfortable shock. The object of our quest had gradually dropped out of my mind;
this sudden resurrection of it made it seem quite a real and startling thing for a moment,
and roused up in me a smart interest. Sandy's excitement increased every moment; and so did
mine, for that sort of thing is catching. My heart got to thumping. You can't reason with your heart;
it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns. Presently,
when Sandy slid from the horse, motioned me to stop, and went creeping stealthily,
with her head bent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes that bordered a declivity,
the thumpings grew stronger and quicker. And they kept it up while she was gaining her ambush and
getting her glimpse over the declivity; and also while I was creeping to her side on my
knees. Her eyes were burning now, as she pointed with her finger, and said in a panting whisper:
"The castle! The castle! Lo, where it looms!"
What a welcome disappointment I experienced! I said:
"Castle? It is nothing but a pigsty; a pigsty with a wattled fence around it."
She looked surprised and distressed. The animation faded out of her face;
and during many moments she was lost in thought and silent. Then:
"It was not enchanted aforetime," she said in a musing fashion, as if to herself. "And
how strange is this marvel, and how awful—that to the one perception it is enchanted and dight in a
base and shameful aspect; yet to the perception of the other it is not enchanted, hath suffered
no change, but stands firm and stately still, girt with its moat and waving its banners in the
blue air from its towers. And God shield us, how it pricks the heart to see again these gracious
captives, and the sorrow deepened in their sweet faces! We have tarried long, and are to blame."
I saw my cue. The castle was enchanted to me, not to her. It would be wasted time to try to
argue her out of her delusion, it couldn't be done; I must just humor it. So I said:
"This is a common case—the enchanting of a thing to one eye and leaving it in its proper form to
another. You have heard of it before, Sandy, though you haven't happened to experience it.
But no harm is done. In fact, it is lucky the way it is. If these ladies were hogs to everybody and
to themselves, it would be necessary to break the enchantment, and that might be impossible if one
failed to find out the particular process of the enchantment. And hazardous, too;
for in attempting a disenchantment without the true key, you are liable to err, and turn your
hogs into dogs, and the dogs into cats, the cats into rats, and so on, and end by reducing your
materials to nothing finally, or to an odorless gas which you can't follow—which, of course,
amounts to the same thing. But here, by good luck, no one's eyes but mine are under the enchantment,
and so it is of no consequence to dissolve it. These ladies remain ladies to you, and to
themselves, and to everybody else; and at the same time they will suffer in no way from my delusion,
for when I know that an ostensible hog is a lady, that is enough for me, I know how to treat her."
"Thanks, oh, sweet my lord, you talk like an angel. And I know that you will deliver them,
for that you are minded to great deeds and are as strong a knight
of your hands and as brave to will and to do, as any that is alive."
"I will not leave a princess in the sty,
Sandy. Are those three yonder that to my disordered eyes are starveling swine-herds—"
"The ogres, are they changed also? It is most wonderful. Now am I fearful;
for how can you strike with sure aim when five of their nine cubits of stature are
to you invisible? Ah, go warily, fair sir; this is a mightier emprise than I wend."
"You be easy, Sandy. All I need to know is, how much of an ogre is invisible;
then I know how to locate his vitals. Don't you be afraid,
I will make short work of these bunco-steerers. Stay where you are."
I left Sandy kneeling there, corpse-faced but plucky and hopeful, and rode down to the pigsty,
and struck up a trade with the swine-herds. I won their gratitude by buying out all the
hogs at the lump sum of sixteen pennies, which was rather above latest quotations.
I was just in time; for the Church, the lord of the manor, and the rest of
the tax-gatherers would have been along next day and swept off pretty much all the stock,
leaving the swine-herds very short of hogs and Sandy out of princesses. But now the tax people
could be paid in cash, and there would be a stake left besides. One of the men had ten children;
and he said that last year when a priest came and of his ten pigs took the fattest one for tithes,
the wife burst out upon him, and offered him a child and said:
"You beast without bowels of mercy, why leave me my child,
yet rob me of the wherewithal to feed it?"
How curious. The same thing had happened in the Wales of my day, under this same old established
Church, which was supposed by many to have changed its nature when it changed its disguise.
I sent the three men away, and then opened the sty gate and beckoned Sandy to come—which she did;
and not leisurely, but with the rush of a prairie fire. And when I saw her
fling herself upon those hogs, with tears of joy running down her cheeks,
and strain them to her heart, and kiss them, and caress them,
and call them reverently by grand princely names, I was ashamed of her, ashamed of the human race.
We had to drive those hogs home—ten miles; and no ladies were ever more fickle-minded or contrary.
They would stay in no road, no path; they broke out through the brush on all sides,
and flowed away in all directions, over rocks, and hills, and the roughest places they could
find. And they must not be struck, or roughly accosted; Sandy could not bear to see them treated
in ways unbecoming their rank. The troublesomest old sow of the lot had to be called my lady,
and your highness, like the rest. It is annoying and difficult to scour around after hogs, in
armor. There was one small countess, with an iron ring in her snout and hardly any hair on her back,
that was the devil for perversity. She gave me a race of an hour, over all sorts of country,
and then we were right where we had started from, having made not a rod of real progress.
I seized her at last by the tail, and brought her along squealing. When I overtook Sandy she was
horrified, and said it was in the last degree indelicate to drag a countess by her train.
We got the hogs home just at dark—most of them. The princess Nerovens de Morganore was missing,
and two of her ladies in waiting: namely, Miss Angela Bohun, and the demoiselle Elaine
Courtemains, the former of these two being a young black sow with a white star in her forehead,
and the latter a brown one with thin legs and a slight limp in the forward shank on the starboard
side—a couple of the tryingest blisters to drive that I ever saw. Also among the missing
were several mere baronesses—and I wanted them to stay missing; but no, all that sausage meat
had to be found; so servants were sent out with torches to scour the woods and hills to that end.
Of course, the whole drove was housed in the house, and, great guns!—well, I never saw
anything like it. Nor ever heard anything like it. And never smelt anything like it. It was like an
insurrection in a gasometer. Chapter 21. The Pilgrims.
When I did get to bed at last I was unspeakably tired; the stretching out, and the relaxing of the
long-tense muscles, how luxurious, how delicious! But that was as far as I could get—sleep was out
of the question for the present. The ripping and tearing and squealing of the nobility up
and down the halls and corridors was pandemonium come again, and kept me broad awake. Being awake,
my thoughts were busy, of course; and mainly they busied themselves with Sandy's curious delusion.
Here she was, as sane a person as the kingdom could produce; and yet, from my point of view
she was acting like a crazy woman. My land, the power of training! Of influence! Of education!
It can bring a body up to believe anything. I had to put myself in Sandy's place to realize that she
was not a lunatic. Yes, and put her in mine, to demonstrate how easy it is to seem a lunatic to
a person who has not been taught as you have been taught. If I had told Sandy I had seen a wagon,
uninfluenced by enchantment, spin along fifty miles an hour; had seen a man,
unequipped with magic powers, get into a basket and soar out of sight among the clouds;
and had listened, without any necromancer's help, to the conversation of a person who
was several hundred miles away, Sandy would not merely have supposed me to be crazy, she would
have thought she knew it. Everybody around her believed in enchantments; nobody had any doubts;
to doubt that a castle could be turned into a sty, and its occupants into hogs, would have been the
same as my doubting among Connecticut people the actuality of the telephone and its wonders,—and in
both cases would be absolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandy was sane;
that must be admitted. If I also would be sane—to Sandy—I must keep my superstitions
about unenchanted and unmiraculous locomotives, balloons, and telephones, to myself. Also,
I believed that the world was not flat, and hadn't pillars under it to support it,
nor a canopy over it to turn off a universe of water that occupied all space above;
but as I was the only person in the kingdom afflicted with such impious and criminal opinions,
I recognized that it would be good wisdom to keep quiet about this matter, too,
if I did not wish to be suddenly shunned and forsaken by everybody as a madman.
The next morning Sandy assembled the swine in the dining room and gave them their breakfast,
waiting upon them personally and manifesting in every way the deep reverence which the natives of
her island, ancient and modern, have always felt for rank, let its outward casket and the mental
and moral contents be what they may. I could have eaten with the hogs if I had had birth
approaching my lofty official rank; but I hadn't, and so accepted the unavoidable slight and made
no complaint. Sandy and I had our breakfast at the second table. The family were not at home. I said:
"How many are in the family, Sandy, and where do they keep themselves?"
"Family?"
"Yes."
"Which family, good my lord?"
"Why, this family; your own family."
"Sooth to say, I understand you not. I have no family."
"No family? Why, Sandy, isn't this your home?"
"Now how indeed might that be? I have no home."
"Well, then, whose house is this?"
"Ah, wit you well I would tell you an I knew myself."
"Come—you don't even know these people? Then who invited us here?"
"None invited us. We but came; that is all."
"Why, woman, this is a most extraordinary performance. The effrontery of it is beyond
admiration. We blandly march into a man's house, and cram it full of
the only really valuable nobility the sun has yet discovered in the earth,
and then it turns out that we don't even know the man's name. How did you ever venture to take this
extravagant liberty? I supposed, of course, it was your home. What will the man say?"
"What will he say? Forsooth what can he say but give thanks?"
"Thanks for what?"
Her face was filled with a puzzled surprise:
"Verily, thou troublest mine understanding with
strange words. Do ye dream that one of his estate is like to have the honor twice in
his life to entertain company such as we have brought to grace his house withal?"
"Well, no—when you come to that. No,
it's an even bet that this is the first time he has had a treat like this."
"Then let him be thankful, and manifest the same by grateful speech and due humility;
he were a dog, else, and the heir and ancestor of dogs."
To my mind, the situation was uncomfortable. It might become
more so. It might be a good idea to muster the hogs and move on. So I said:
"The day is wasting, Sandy. It is time to get the nobility together and be moving."
"Wherefore, fair sir and Boss?"
"We want to take them to their home, don't we?"
"La, but list to him! They be of all the regions of the earth! Each must hie to her own home;
wend you we might do all these journeys in one so brief life as He hath appointed that created life,
and thereto death likewise with help of Adam, who by sin done through persuasion of his helpmeet,
she being wrought upon and bewrayed by the beguilements of the great enemy of man,
that serpent hight Satan, aforetime consecrated and set apart unto that evil work by overmastering
spite and envy begotten in his heart through fell ambitions that did blight and mildew a
nature erst so white and pure whenso it hove with the shining multitudes its brethren-born
in glade and shade of that fair heaven wherein all such as native be to that rich estate and—"
"Great Scott!"
"My lord?"
"Well, you know we haven't got time for this sort of thing. Don't you see,
we could distribute these people around the earth in less time than it is going
to take you to explain that we can't. We mustn't talk now, we must act. You want to be careful;
you mustn't let your mill get the start of you that way, at a time like this.
To business now—and sharp's the word. Who is to take the aristocracy home?"
"Even their friends. These will come for them from the far parts of the earth."
This was lightning from a clear sky, for unexpectedness; and the relief of it was
like pardon to a prisoner. She would remain to deliver the goods, of course.
"Well, then, Sandy, as our enterprise is handsomely and successfully ended,
I will go home and report; and if ever another one—"
"I also am ready; I will go with thee."
This was recalling the pardon.
"How? You will go with me? Why should you?"
"Will I be traitor to my knight, dost think? That were dishonor. I may not part from thee
until in knightly encounter in the field some overmatching champion shall fairly
win and fairly wear me. I were to blame an I thought that that might ever hap."
"Elected for the long term," I sighed to myself.
"I may as well make the best of it." So then I spoke up and said:
"All right; let us make a start."
While she was gone to cry her farewells over the pork, I gave that whole peerage away to
the servants. And I asked them to take a duster and dust around a little where the nobilities
had mainly lodged and promenaded; but they considered that that would be hardly worth while,
and would moreover be a rather grave departure from custom, and therefore likely to make talk.
A departure from custom—that settled it; it was a nation capable of committing any crime
but that. The servants said they would follow the fashion, a fashion grown sacred through immemorial
observance; they would scatter fresh rushes in all the rooms and halls, and then the evidence of the
aristocratic visitation would be no longer visible. It was a kind of satire on nature:
it was the scientific method, the geologic method; it deposited the history of the family
in a stratified record; and the antiquary could dig through it and tell by the remains of each
period what changes of diet the family had introduced successively for a hundred years.
The first thing we struck that day was a procession of pilgrims. It was not going our way,
but we joined it, nevertheless; for it was hourly being borne in upon me now,
that if I would govern this country wisely, I must be posted in the details of its life,
and not at second hand, but by personal observation and scrutiny.
This company of pilgrims resembled Chaucer's in this: that it had in it a
sample of about all the upper occupations and professions the country could show,
and a corresponding variety of costume. There were young men and old men, young women and old women,
lively folk and grave folk. They rode upon mules and horses, and there was not a side-saddle in
the party; for this specialty was to remain unknown in England for nine hundred years yet.
It was a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious, happy, merry and full of unconscious coarsenesses
and innocent indecencies. What they regarded as the merry tale went the continual round and caused
no more embarrassment than it would have caused in the best English society twelve centuries later.
Practical jokes worthy of the English wits of the first quarter of the far-off nineteenth century
were sprung here and there and yonder along the line, and compelled the delightedest applause;
and sometimes when a bright remark was made at one end of the procession and started on its travels
toward the other, you could note its progress all the way by the sparkling spray of laughter
it threw off from its bows as it plowed along; and also by the blushes of the mules in its wake.
Sandy knew the goal and purpose of this pilgrimage, and she posted me. She said:
"They journey to the Valley of Holiness, for to be
blessed of the godly hermits and drink of the miraculous waters and be cleansed from sin."
"Where is this watering place?" "It lieth a two-day journey hence,
by the borders of the land that hight the Cuckoo Kingdom."
"Tell me about it. Is it a celebrated place?"
"Oh, of a truth, yes. There be none more so. Of old time there lived there an abbot and his
monks. Belike were none in the world more holy than these; for they gave themselves to study of
pious books, and spoke not the one to the other, or indeed to any, and ate decayed herbs and naught
thereto, and slept hard, and prayed much, and washed never; also they wore the same garment
until it fell from their bodies through age and decay. Right so came they to be known of all
the world by reason of these holy austerities, and visited by rich and poor, and reverenced."
"Proceed."
"But always there was lack of water there. Whereas, upon a time, the holy abbot prayed,
and for answer a great stream of clear water burst forth by miracle in a desert place.
Now were the fickle monks tempted of the Fiend, and they wrought
with their abbot unceasingly by beggings and beseechings that he would construct a bath;
and when he was become aweary and might not resist more, he said have ye your will, then,
and granted that they asked. Now mark thou what 'tis to forsake the ways of purity the
which He loveth, and wanton with such as be worldly and an offense. These monks did enter
into the bath and come thence washed as white as snow; and lo, in that moment His sign appeared,
in miraculous rebuke! for His insulted waters ceased to flow, and utterly vanished away."
"They fared mildly, Sandy, considering how that kind of crime is regarded in this country."
"Belike; but it was their first sin; and they had been of perfect life for long,
and differing in naught from the angels. Prayers, tears, torturings of the flesh,
all was vain to beguile that water to flow again. Even processions; even burnt-offerings;
even votive candles to the Virgin, did fail every each of them; and all in the land did marvel."
"How odd to find that even this industry has its financial panics, and at times sees its
assignats and greenbacks languish to zero, and everything come to a standstill. Go on, Sandy."
"And so upon a time, after year and day, the good abbot made humble surrender and destroyed
the bath. And behold, His anger was in that moment appeased, and the waters gushed richly
forth again, and even unto this day they have not ceased to flow in that generous measure."
"Then I take it nobody has washed since."
"He that would essay it could have his halter free; yes, and swiftly would he need it, too."
"The community has prospered since?"
"Even from that very day. The fame of the miracle went abroad into all lands.
From every land came monks to join; they came even as the fishes come, in shoals;
and the monastery added building to building, and yet others to these,
and so spread wide its arms and took them in. And nuns came, also; and more again, and yet more; and
built over against the monastery on the yon side of the vale, and added building to building, until
mighty was that nunnery. And these were friendly unto those, and they joined their loving labors
together, and together they built a fair great foundling asylum midway of the valley between."
"You spoke of some hermits, Sandy."
"These have gathered there from the ends of the earth. A hermit thrive best where there
be multitudes of pilgrims. Ye shall not find no hermit of no sort wanting. If any shall
mention a hermit of a kind he thinketh new and not to be found but in some far strange land,
let him but scratch among the holes and caves and swamps that line that Valley of Holiness,
and whatsoever be his breed, it skills not, he shall find a sample of it there."
I closed up alongside of a burly fellow with a fat good-humored face, purposing to make myself
agreeable and pick up some further crumbs of fact; but I had hardly more than scraped
acquaintance with him when he began eagerly and awkwardly to lead up, in the immemorial way,
to that same old anecdote—the one Sir Dinadan told me, what time I got into trouble with Sir Sagramor
and was challenged of him on account of it. I excused myself and dropped to the rear of the
procession, sad at heart, willing to go hence from this troubled life, this vale of tears,
this brief day of broken rest, of cloud and storm, of weary struggle and monotonous defeat;
and yet shrinking from the change, as remembering how long eternity is, and how many
have wended thither who know that anecdote. Early in the afternoon, we overtook another
procession of pilgrims; but in this one was no merriment, no jokes, no laughter, no playful ways,
nor any happy giddiness, whether of youth or age. Yet both were here, both age and youth;
gray old men and women, strong men and women of middle age, young husbands, young wives,
little boys and girls, and three babies at the breast. Even the children were smileless;
there was not a face among all these half a hundred people but was cast down and bore that
set expression of hopelessness which is bred of long and hard trials and old acquaintance
with despair. They were slaves. Chains led from their fettered feet and their manacled hands to
a sole-leather belt about their waists; and all except the children were also linked together in
a file six feet apart, by a single chain which led from collar to collar all down the line.
They were on foot and had tramped three hundred miles in eighteen days, upon the cheapest odds
and ends of food, and stingy rations of that. They had slept in these chains every night,
bundled together like swine. They had upon their bodies some poor rags, but they could not be said
to be clothed. Their irons had chafed the skin from their ankles and made sores which were
ulcerated and wormy. Their naked feet were torn, and none walked without a limp. Originally there
had been a hundred of these unfortunates, but about half had been sold on the trip.
The trader in charge of them rode a horse and carried a whip with a short handle and a long
heavy lash divided into several knotted tails at the end. With this whip he cut the shoulders
of any that tottered from weariness and pain and straightened them up. He did not speak;
the whip conveyed his desire without that. None of these poor creatures looked up as we
rode along by; they showed no consciousness of our presence. And they made no sound but one;
that was the dull and awful clank of their chains from end to end of the long file, as forty-three
burdened feet rose and fell in unison. The file moved in a cloud of its own making.
All these faces were gray with a coating of dust.
One has seen the like of this coating upon furniture in unoccupied houses and has written his
idle thought in it with his finger. I was reminded of this when I noticed the faces of some of those
women, young mothers carrying babes that were near to death and freedom, how a something in their
hearts was written in the dust upon their faces, plain to see, and lord, how plain to read! for it
was the track of tears. One of these young mothers was but a girl, and it hurt me to the heart to
read that writing and reflect that it was come up out of the breast of such a child, a breast that
ought not to know trouble yet, but only the gladness of the morning of life; and no doubt—
She reeled just then, giddy with fatigue, and down came the lash and flicked a flake of skin
from her naked shoulder. It stung me as if I had been hit instead. The master halted the file and
jumped from his horse. He stormed and swore at this girl and said she had made annoyance enough
with her laziness, and as this was the last chance he should have, he would settle the account now.
She dropped on her knees and put up her hands and began to beg and cry and implore,
in a passion of terror, but the master gave no attention. He snatched the child from her
and then made the men-slaves who were chained before and behind her throw her on the ground
and hold her there and expose her body; and then he laid on with his lash like a madman
till her back was flayed, she shrieking and struggling the while piteously. One of the men
who was holding her turned away his face, and for this humanity, he was reviled and flogged.
All our pilgrims looked on and commented—on the expert way in which the whip was handled. They
were too much hardened by lifelong everyday familiarity with slavery to notice that there
was anything else in the exhibition that invited comment. This was what slavery could do, in the
way of ossifying what one may call the superior lobe of human feeling; for these pilgrims were
kind-hearted people, and they would not have allowed that man to treat a horse like that.
I wanted to stop the whole thing and set the slaves free, but that would not do. I must
not interfere too much and get myself a name for riding over the country's laws and the
citizen's rights roughshod. If I lived and prospered, I would be the death of slavery,
that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so that when I became its executioner
it should be by command of the nation. Just here was the wayside shop of a smith;
and now arrived a landed proprietor who had bought this girl a few miles back,
deliverable here where her irons could be taken off. They were removed; then there was a squabble
between the gentleman and the dealer as to which should pay the blacksmith. The moment the girl was
delivered from her irons, she flung herself, all tears and frantic sobbings, into the arms of the
slave who had turned away his face when she was whipped. He strained her to his breast,
and smothered her face and the child's with kisses, and washed them with the rain of his
tears. I suspected. I inquired. Yes, I was right; it was husband and wife. They had to be torn apart
by force; the girl had to be dragged away, and she struggled and fought and shrieked like one gone
mad till a turn of the road hid her from sight; and even after that, we could still make out the
fading plaint of those receding shrieks. And the husband and father, with his wife and child gone,
never to be seen by him again in life?—well, the look of him one might not bear at all,
and so I turned away; but I knew I should never get his picture out of my mind again,
and there it is to this day, to wring my heartstrings whenever I think of it.
We put up at the inn in a village just at nightfall, and when I rose next morning and
looked abroad, I was ware where a knight came riding in the golden glory of the new day,
and recognized him for knight of mine—Sir Ozana le Cure Hardy. He was in the gentlemen's furnishing
line, and his missionarying specialty was plug hats. He was clothed all in steel,
in the beautifulest armor of the time—up to where his helmet ought to have been;
but he hadn't any helmet, he wore a shiny stove-pipe hat, and was as ridiculous a spectacle
as one might want to see. It was another of my surreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood
by making it grotesque and absurd. Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather hat boxes,
and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him into my service and fitted him
with a plug and made him wear it. I dressed and ran down to welcome Sir Ozana and get his news.
"How is trade?" I asked.
"Ye will note that I have but these four left; yet were they sixteen whenas I got me from Camelot."
"Why, you have certainly done nobly, Sir Ozana. Where have you been foraging of late?"
"I am but now come from the Valley of Holiness, please you sir."
"I am pointed for that place myself. Is there
anything stirring in the monkery, more than common?"
"By the mass ye may not question it!.... Give him good feed, boy, and stint it not,
an thou valuest thy crown; so get ye lightly to the stable and do even as I bid.... Sir,
it is parlous news I bring, and—be these pilgrims? Then ye may not do better, good folk,
than gather and hear the tale I have to tell, sith it concerneth you, forasmuch as ye go to
find that ye will not find, and seek that ye will seek in vain, my life being hostage for my word,
and my word and message being these, namely: That a hap has happened whereof the like has
not been seen no more but once this two hundred years, which was the first and
last time that that said misfortune strake the holy valley in that form by commandment of the
Most High whereto by reasons just and causes thereunto contributing, wherein the matter—"
"The miraculous fount hath ceased to flow!" This shout burst from twenty pilgrim mouths at once.
"Ye say well, good people. I was verging to it, even when ye spake."
"Has somebody been washing again?"
"Nay, it is suspected, but none believe it. It is thought to be some other sin, but none wit what."
"How are they feeling about the calamity?"
"None may describe it in words. The fount is these nine days dry. The prayers that did begin then,
and the lamentations in sackcloth and ashes, and the holy processions, none of these have
ceased nor night nor day; and so the monks and the nuns and the foundlings be all exhausted,
and do hang up prayers writ upon parchment, sith that no strength is left in man to lift up voice.
And at last they sent for thee, Sir Boss, to try magic and enchantment; and if you could not come,
then was the messenger to fetch Merlin, and he is there these three days now,
and saith he will fetch that water though he burst the globe and wreck its kingdoms to accomplish it;
and right bravely doth he work his magic and call upon his hellions
to hie them hither and help, but not a whiff of moisture hath he started yet,
even so much as might qualify as mist upon a copper mirror an ye count not the barrel of
sweat he sweateth betwixt sun and sun over the dire labors of his task; and if ye—
Breakfast was ready. As soon as it was over I showed to Sir Ozana these words
which I had written on the inside of his hat: "Chemical Department, Laboratory extension,
Section G. Send two of first size, two of number three, and six of number four,
together with the proper complementary details—and two of my trained assistants." And I said:
"Now get you to Camelot as fast as you can fly, brave knight, and show the writing to Clarence,
and tell him to have these required matters in the Valley of Holiness with all possible dispatch."
"I will well, Sir Boss," and he was off. Chapter 22. The Holy Fountain.
The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently.
They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and
they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or
cats or angle-worms would probably have done—turn back and get at something profitable—no, anxious
as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as
anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.
We made good time; and a couple of hours before sunset we stood upon the high confines of the
Valley of Holiness, and our eyes swept it from end to end and noted its features. That is,
its large features. These were the three masses of buildings. They were distant and isolated
temporalities shrunken to toy constructions in the lonely waste of what seemed a desert—and was. Such
a scene is always mournful, it is so impressively still, and looks so steeped in death. But there
was a sound here which interrupted the stillness only to add to its mournfulness; this was the
faint far sound of tolling bells which floated fitfully to us on the passing breeze, and so
faintly, so softly, that we hardly knew whether we heard it with our ears or with our spirits.
We reached the monastery before dark, and there the males were given lodging,
but the women were sent over to the nunnery. The bells were close at hand now,
and their solemn booming smote upon the ear like a message of doom. A superstitious despair possessed
the heart of every monk and published itself in his ghastly face. Everywhere,
these black-robed, soft-sandaled, tallow-visaged specters appeared,
flitted about and disappeared, noiseless as the creatures of a troubled dream, and as uncanny.
The old abbot's joy to see me was pathetic. Even to tears;
but he did the shedding himself. He said:
"Delay not, son, but get to thy saving work. If we bring not the water back again, and soon, we are
ruined, and the good work of two hundred years must end. And see thou do it with enchantments
that be holy, for the Church will not endure that work in her cause be done by devil's magic."
"When I work, Father, be sure there will be no devil's work
connected with it. I shall use no arts that come of the devil,
and no elements not created by the hand of God. But is Merlin working strictly on pious lines?"
"Ah, he said he would, my son, he said he would, and took oath to make his promise good."
"Well, in that case, let him proceed."
"But surely you will not sit idle by, but help?"
"It will not answer to mix methods, Father; neither would it be professional courtesy.
Two of a trade must not underbid each other. We might as well cut rates and be done with it;
it would arrive at that in the end. Merlin has the contract;
no other magician can touch it till he throws it up."
"But I will take it from him;
it is a terrible emergency and the act is thereby justified. And if it were not so,
who will give law to the Church? The Church giveth law to all; and what she wills to do,
that she may do, hurt whom it may. I will take it from him; you shall begin upon the moment."
"It may not be, Father. No doubt, as you say, where power is supreme, one can do as one likes
and suffer no injury; but we poor magicians are not so situated. Merlin is a very good magician
in a small way, and has quite a neat provincial reputation. He is struggling along, doing the
best he can, and it would not be etiquette for me to take his job until he himself abandons it."
The abbot's face lighted.
"Ah, that is simple. There are ways to persuade him to abandon it."
"No, no, Father, it skills not, as these people say. If he were persuaded against his will, he
would load that well with a malicious enchantment which would balk me until I found out its secret.
It might take a month. I could set up a little enchantment of mine which I call the telephone,
and he could not find out its secret in a hundred years. Yes, you perceive,
he might block me for a month. Would you like to risk a month in a dry time like this?"
"A month! The mere thought of it maketh me to shudder. Have it thy way, my son. But my heart
is heavy with this disappointment. Leave me, and let me wear my spirit with weariness and waiting,
even as I have done these ten long days, counterfeiting thus the thing that is
called rest, the prone body making outward sign of repose where inwardly is none."
Of course, it would have been best, all round, for Merlin to waive etiquette and
quit and call it half a day, since he would never be able to start that water,
for he was a true magician of the time; which is to say, the big miracles, the ones that gave
him his reputation, always had the luck to be performed when nobody but Merlin was present;
he couldn't start this well with all this crowd around to see; a crowd was as bad for
a magician's miracle in that day as it was for a spiritualist's miracle in mine; there was sure to
be some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at the crucial moment and spoil everything. But I
did not want Merlin to retire from the job until I was ready to take hold of it effectively myself;
and I could not do that until I got my things from Camelot, and that would take two or three days.
My presence gave the monks hope, and cheered them up a good deal; insomuch that they ate a
square meal that night for the first time in ten days. As soon as their stomachs had been
properly reinforced with food, their spirits began to rise fast; when the mead began to go
round they rose faster. By the time everybody was half-seas over, the holy community was in
good shape to make a night of it; so we stayed by the board and put it through on that line.
Matters got to be very jolly. Good old questionable stories were told that made the
tears run down and cavernous mouths stand wide and the round bellies shake with laughter; and
questionable songs were bellowed out in a mighty chorus that drowned the boom of the tolling bells.
At last I ventured a story myself; and vast was the success of it. Not right off, of course, for
the native of those islands does not, as a rule, dissolve upon the early applications of a humorous
thing; but the fifth time I told it, they began to crack in places; the eighth time I told it,
they began to crumble; at the twelfth repetition they fell apart in chunks; and at the fifteenth
they disintegrated, and I got a broom and swept them up. This language is figurative. Those
islanders—well, they are slow pay at first, in the matter of return for your investment of effort,
but in the end they make the pay of all other nations poor and small by contrast.
I was at the well next day betimes. Merlin was there, enchanting away like a beaver,
but not raising the moisture. He was not in a pleasant humor;
and every time I hinted that perhaps this contract was a shade too hefty for a
novice he unlimbered his tongue and cursed like a bishop—French bishop of the Regency days, I mean.
Matters were about as I expected to find them. The "fountain" was an ordinary well, it had been
dug in the ordinary way, and stoned up in the ordinary way. There was no miracle about it.
Even the lie that had created its reputation was not miraculous; I could have told it myself,
with one hand tied behind me. The well was in a dark chamber which stood in the center of
a cut-stone chapel, whose walls were hung with pious pictures of a workmanship that would have
made a chromo feel good; pictures historically commemorative of curative miracles which had
been achieved by the waters when nobody was looking. That is, nobody but angels;
they are always on deck when there is a miracle to the fore—so as to get put in the picture,
perhaps. Angels are as fond of that as a fire company; look at the old masters.
The well-chamber was dimly lighted by lamps; the water was drawn with a windlass and chain by
monks, and poured into troughs which delivered it into stone reservoirs outside in the chapel—when
there was water to draw, I mean—and none but monks could enter the well-chamber. I entered it, for
I had temporary authority to do so, by courtesy of my professional brother and subordinate. But
he hadn't entered it himself. He did everything by incantations; he never worked his intellect.
If he had stepped in there and used his eyes, instead of his disordered mind,
he could have cured the well by natural means, and then turned it into a miracle
in the customary way; but no, he was an old numskull, a magician who believed in
his own magic; and no magician can thrive who is handicapped with a superstition like that.
I had an idea that the well had sprung a leak; that some of the wall stones near the bottom
had fallen and exposed fissures that allowed the water to escape. I measured the chain—ninety-eight
feet. Then I called in a couple of monks, locked the door, took a candle, and made
them lower me in the bucket. When the chain was all paid out, the candle confirmed my suspicion;
a considerable section of the wall was gone, exposing a good big fissure.
I almost regretted that my theory about the well's trouble was correct, because I had
another one that had a showy point or two about it for a miracle. I remembered that in America, many
centuries later, when an oil well ceased to flow, they used to blast it out with a dynamite torpedo.
If I should find this well dry and no explanation of it, I could astonish these people most nobly
by having a person of no especial value drop a dynamite bomb into it. It was my idea to appoint
Merlin. However, it was plain that there was no occasion for the bomb. One cannot have everything
the way he would like it. A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway;
he ought to make up his mind to get even. That is what I did. I said to myself,
I am in no hurry, I can wait; that bomb will come good yet. And it did, too.
When I was above ground again, I turned out the monks, and let down a fish-line;
the well was one hundred and fifty feet deep,
and there was forty-one feet of water in it. I called in a monk and asked:
"How deep is the well?"
"That, sir, I wit not, having never been told."
"How does the water usually stand in it?"
"Near to the top, these two centuries,
as the testimony goeth, brought down to us through our predecessors."
It was true—as to recent times at least—for there was witness to it, and better witness than a monk;
only about twenty or thirty feet of the chain showed wear and use, the rest of it was unworn
and rusty. What had happened when the well gave out that other time? Without doubt some
practical person had come along and mended the leak, and then had come up and told the abbot he
had discovered by divination that if the sinful bath were destroyed the well would flow again.
The leak had befallen again now, and these children would have prayed, and processioned,
and tolled their bells for heavenly succor till they all dried up and blew away,
and no innocent of them all would ever have thought to drop a fish-line into the well or
go down in it and find out what was really the matter. Old habit of mind is one of the
toughest things to get away from in the world. It transmits itself like physical form and feature;
and for a man, in those days, to have had an idea that his ancestors hadn't had,
would have brought him under suspicion of being illegitimate. I said to the monk:
"It is a difficult miracle to restore water in a dry well, but we will try, if my brother Merlin
fails. Brother Merlin is a very passable artist, but only in the parlor-magic line,
and he may not succeed; in fact, is not likely to succeed. But that should be nothing to his
discredit; the man that can do this kind of miracle knows enough to keep a hotel."
"Hotel? I mind not to have heard—"
"Of hotel? It's what you call a hostel. The man that can do this miracle can
keep a hostel. I can do this miracle; I shall do this miracle; yet I do not try
to conceal from you that it is a miracle to tax the occult powers to the last strain."
"None knoweth that truth better than the brotherhood, indeed;
for it is of record that aforetime it was parlous difficult and took a year. Natheless,
God send you good success, and to that end will we pray."
As a matter of business it was a good idea to get the notion around that the
thing was difficult. Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind
of advertising. That monk was filled up with the difficulty of this enterprise;
he would fill up the others. In two days the solicitude would be booming.
On my way home at noon, I met Sandy. She had been sampling the hermits. I said:
"I would like to do that myself. This is Wednesday. Is there a matinee?"
"A which, please you, sir?"
"Matinee. Do they keep open afternoons?"
"Who?"
"The hermits, of course."
"Keep open?"
"Yes, keep open. Isn't that plain enough? Do they knock off at noon?"
"Knock off?"
"Knock off?—yes, knock off. What is the matter with knock off? I never saw such
a dunderhead; can't you understand anything at all? In plain terms,
do they shut up shop, draw the game, bank the fires—"
"Shut up shop, draw—"
"There, never mind, let it go; you make me tired. You can't seem to understand the simplest thing."
"I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me dole and sorrow that I fail,
albeit since I am but a simple damsel and taught of none, being from the cradle unbaptized in
those deep waters of learning that do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh of that
most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend state to the mental eye of the humble mortal who,
by bar and lack of that great consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a symbol of that
other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to the pitying eye with sackcloth
trappings whereon the ashes of grief do lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall
in the darkness of his mind encounter these golden phrases of high mystery, these shut-up-shops, and
draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is but by the grace of God that he burst not for envy of the
mind that can beget, and tongue that can deliver so great and mellow-sounding miracles of speech,
and if there do ensue confusion in that humbler mind, and failure to divine the meanings of these
wonders, then if so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true, wit ye well it
is the very substance of worshipful dear homage and may not lightly be misprized, nor had been,
an ye had noted this complexion of mood and mind and understood that that I would I could not,
and that I could not I might not, nor yet nor might nor could, nor might not nor could not,
might be by advantage turned to the desired would, and so I pray you mercy of my fault,
and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive it, good my master and most dear lord."
I couldn't make it all out—that is, the details—but I got the general idea; and
enough of it, too, to be ashamed. It was not fair to spring those nineteenth century technicalities
upon the untutored infant of the sixth and then rail at her because she couldn't get their drift;
and when she was making the honest best drive at it she could, too, and no fault of hers that
she couldn't fetch the home plate; and so I apologized. Then we meandered pleasantly away
toward the hermit holes in sociable converse together, and better friends than ever.
I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl;
nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those
horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was
standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this,
that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the
very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned,
sure. She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere
remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single
sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are
going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon. It was a most strange menagerie.
The chief emulation among them seemed to be, to see which could manage to be the uncleanest
and most prosperous with vermin. Their manner and attitudes were the last expression of complacent
self-righteousness. It was one anchorite's pride to lie naked in the mud and let the
insects bite him and blister him unmolested; it was another's to lean against a rock,
all day long, conspicuous to the admiration of the throng of pilgrims and pray; it was
another's to go naked and crawl around on all fours; it was another's to drag about with him,
year in and year out, eighty pounds of iron; it was another's to never lie down when he slept,
but to stand among the thorn-bushes and snore when there were pilgrims around to look;
a woman, who had the white hair of age, and no other apparel, was black from crown to heel
with forty-seven years of holy abstinence from water. Groups of gazing pilgrims stood around
all and every of these strange objects, lost in reverent wonder, and envious of the fleckless
sanctity which these pious austerities had won for them from an exacting heaven.
By and by we went to see one of the supremely great ones. He was a mighty celebrity;
his fame had penetrated all Christendom; the noble and the renowned journeyed from the remotest lands
on the globe to pay him reverence. His stand was in the center of the widest part of the valley;
and it took all that space to hold his crowds. His stand was a pillar sixty feet high,
with a broad platform on the top of it. He was now doing what he had been doing every day for
twenty years up there—bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly almost to his feet. It was his way of
praying. I timed him with a stopwatch, and he made one thousand two hundred forty-four revolutions
in twenty-four minutes and forty-six seconds. It seemed a pity to have all this power going
to waste. It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedal movement;
so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some day to apply a system of
elastic cords to him and run a sewing machine with it. I afterward carried out that scheme,
and got five years' good service out of him; in which time he turned out upward
of eighteen thousand first-rate tow-linen shirts, which was ten a day. I worked him Sundays and all;
he was going, Sundays, the same as week days, and it was no use to waste the power. These
shirts cost me nothing but just the mere trifle for the materials—I furnished those myself,
it would not have been right to make him do that—and they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a
dollar and a half apiece, which was the price of fifty cows or a blooded racehorse in Arthurdom.
They were regarded as a perfect protection against sin, and advertised as such by my
knights everywhere, with the paint pot and stencil plate; insomuch that there was not a
cliff or a boulder or a dead wall in England but you could read on it at a mile distance:
"Buy the only genuine Saint Stylite; patronized by the nobility. Patent applied for."
There was more money in the business than one knew what to do with. As it extended,
I brought out a line of goods suitable for kings, and a nobby thing for duchesses and that sort,
with ruffles down the fore hatch and the running gear clewed up with a feather
stitch to leeward and then hauled aft with a back stay and triced up with a half turn
in the standing rigging forward of the weather gaskets. Yes, it was a daisy.
But about that time I noticed that the motive power had taken to standing on one leg,
and I found that there was something the matter with the other one;
so I stocked the business and unloaded, taking Sir Bors de Ganis into camp financially along
with certain of his friends; for the works stopped within a year,
and the good saint got him to his rest. But he had earned it. I can say that for him.
When I saw him that first time—however, his personal condition will not quite bear description
here. You can read it in the Lives of the Saints. Chapter 23. Restoration of the fountain.
Saturday noon I went to the well and looked on a while. Merlin was still burning smoke-powders,
and pawing the air, and muttering gibberish as hard as ever, but looking pretty down-hearted,
for of course he had not started even a perspiration in that well yet. Finally I said:
"How does the thing promise by this time, partner?"
"Behold, I am even now busied with trial of the powerfulest enchantment known to the princes of
the occult arts in the lands of the East; an it fail me, naught can avail. Peace, until I finish."
He raised a smoke this time that darkened all the region, and must have made matters uncomfortable
for the hermits, for the wind was their way, and it rolled down over their dens in a dense
and billowy fog. He poured out volumes of speech to match, and contorted his body and sawed the
air with his hands in a most extraordinary way. At the end of twenty minutes he dropped down panting,
and about exhausted. Now arrived the abbot and several hundred monks and nuns, and behind them
a multitude of pilgrims and a couple of acres of foundlings, all drawn by the prodigious smoke,
and all in a grand state of excitement. The abbot inquired anxiously for results. Merlin said:
"If any labor of mortal might break the spell that binds these waters,
this which I have but just essayed had done it. It has failed; whereby I do now know that that
which I had feared is a truth established; the sign of this failure is, that the most
potent spirit known to the magicians of the East, and whose name none may utter and live,
has laid his spell upon this well. The mortal does not breathe, nor ever will,
who can penetrate the secret of that spell, and without that secret none can break it. The
water will flow no more forever, good father. I have done what man could. Suffer me to go."
Of course this threw the abbot into a good deal of
a consternation. He turned to me with the signs of it in his face, and said:
"You have heard him. Is it true?"
"Part of it is."
"Not all, then, not all! What part is true?"
"That that spirit with the Russian name has put his spell upon the well."
"God's wounds, then are we ruined!"
"Possibly."
"But not certainly? You mean, not certainly?"
"That is it."
"Wherefore, you also mean that when he saith none can break the spell—"
"Yes, when he says that, he says what isn't necessarily true. There are conditions under which
an effort to break it may have some chance—that is, some small, some trifling chance—of success."
"The conditions—"
"Oh, they are nothing difficult. Only these: I want the well and the
surroundings for the space of half a mile, entirely to myself from sunset today until
I remove the ban—and nobody allowed to cross the ground but by my authority."
"Are these all?"
"Yes."
"And you have no fear to try?"
"Oh, none. One may fail, of course;
and one may also succeed. One can try, and I am ready to chance it. I have my conditions?"
"These and all others you may name. I will issue commandment to that effect."
"Wait," said Merlin, with an evil smile. "You wit that he that would
break this spell must know that spirit's name?"
"Yes, I know his name."
"And wit you also that to know it skills not of itself,
but you must likewise pronounce it? Ha-ha! Knew you that?"
"Yes, I knew that, too."
"You had that knowledge! Art a fool? Are you minded to utter that name and die?"
"Utter it? Why certainly. I would utter it if it was Welsh."
"You are even a dead man, then; and I go to tell Arthur."
"That's all right. Take your gripsack and get along. The thing for you to do
is to go home and work the weather, John W. Merlin."
It was a home shot, and it made him wince; for he was the worst weather-failure in the kingdom.
Whenever he ordered up the danger-signals along the coast there was a week's dead calm, sure,
and every time he prophesied fair weather it rained brickbats. But I kept him in the
weather bureau right along, to undermine his reputation. However, that shot raised his bile,
and instead of starting home to report my death, he said he would remain and enjoy it.
My two experts arrived in the evening, and pretty well fagged, for they had traveled
double tides. They had pack-mules along, and had brought everything I needed—tools, pump,
lead pipe, Greek fire, sheaves of big rockets, roman candles, colored fire sprays, electric
apparatus, and a lot of sundries—everything necessary for the stateliest kind of a miracle.
They got their supper and a nap, and about midnight we sallied out through a solitude
so wholly vacant and complete that it quite overpassed the required conditions. We took
possession of the well and its surroundings. My boys were experts in all sorts of things,
from the stoning up of a well to the constructing of a mathematical instrument.
An hour before sunrise we had that leak mended in ship-shape fashion, and the water began to rise.
Then we stowed our fireworks in the chapel, locked up the place, and went home to bed.
Before the noon mass was over, we were at the well again; for there was a deal to do yet,
and I was determined to spring the miracle before midnight, for business reasons:
for whereas a miracle worked for the Church on a week-day is worth a good deal, it is worth six
times as much if you get it in on a Sunday. In nine hours the water had risen to its customary
level—that is to say, it was within twenty-three feet of the top. We put in a little iron pump,
one of the first turned out by my works near the capital; we bored into a stone reservoir which
stood against the outer wall of the well-chamber and inserted a section of lead pipe that was long
enough to reach to the door of the chapel and project beyond the threshold, where the gushing
water would be visible to the two hundred and fifty acres of people I was intending
should be present on the flat plain in front of this little holy hillock at the proper time.
We knocked the head out of an empty hogshead and hoisted this hogshead to the flat roof of the
chapel, where we clamped it down fast, poured in gunpowder till it lay loosely an inch deep
on the bottom, then we stood up rockets in the hogshead as thick as they could loosely stand,
all the different breeds of rockets there are; and they made a portly and imposing sheaf,
I can tell you. We grounded the wire of a pocket electrical battery in that powder,
we placed a whole magazine of Greek fire on each corner of the roof—blue on one corner,
green on another, red on another, and purple on the last—and grounded a wire in each.
About two hundred yards off, in the flat, we built a pen of scantlings, about four feet high,
and laid planks on it, and so made a platform. We covered it with swell tapestries borrowed for
the occasion, and topped it off with the abbot's own throne. When you are going to do a miracle
for an ignorant race, you want to get in every detail that will count; you want to make all the
properties impressive to the public eye; you want to make matters comfortable for your head guest;
then you can turn yourself loose and play your effects for all they are worth. I know the value
of these things, for I know human nature. You can't throw too much style into a miracle. It
costs trouble, and work, and sometimes money; but it pays in the end. Well, we brought the wires to
the ground at the chapel, and then brought them under the ground to the platform, and hid the
batteries there. We put a rope fence a hundred feet square around the platform to keep off the
common multitude, and that finished the work. My idea was, doors open at ten thirty, performance
to begin at eleven twenty-five sharp. I wished I could charge admission, but of course that
wouldn't answer. I instructed my boys to be in the chapel as early as ten, before anybody was around,
and be ready to man the pumps at the proper time, and make the fur fly. Then we went home to supper.
The news of the disaster to the well had traveled far by this time; and now for two or three days a
steady avalanche of people had been pouring into the valley. The lower end of the valley had become
one huge camp; we should have a good house, no question about that. Criers went the rounds
early in the evening and announced the coming attempt, which put every pulse up to fever heat.
They gave notice that the abbot and his official suite would move in state and occupy
the platform at ten thirty, up to which time all the region which was under my ban must be clear;
the bells would then cease from tolling, and this sign should be permission to the
multitudes to close in and take their places. I was at the platform and all ready to do the
honors when the abbot's solemn procession hove in sight—which it did not do till it
was nearly to the rope fence, because it was a starless black night and no torches permitted.
With it came Merlin, and took a front seat on the platform; he was as good as his word for
once. One could not see the multitudes banked together beyond the ban, but they were there,
just the same. The moment the bells stopped, those banked masses broke and poured over the
line like a vast black wave, and for as much as a half hour it continued to flow, and then
it solidified itself, and you could have walked upon a pavement of human heads to—well, miles.
We had a solemn stage-wait, now, for about twenty minutes—a thing I had counted on for effect;
it is always good to let your audience have a chance to work up its expectancy. At length,
out of the silence a noble Latin chant—men's voices—broke and swelled up and rolled away
into the night, a majestic tide of melody. I had put that up,
too, and it was one of the best effects I ever invented.
When it was finished I stood up on the platform and extended my hands abroad, for two minutes,
with my face uplifted—that always produces a dead hush—and then slowly pronounced this
ghastly word with a kind of awfulness which caused hundreds to tremble, and many women to faint:
