A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Page 23

  CHAPTER XX

  THE OGRE'S CASTLE

  Between six and nine we made ten miles, which was plenty for ahorse carrying triple--man, woman, and armor; then we stoppedfor a long nooning under some trees by a limpid brook.

  Right so came by and by a knight riding; and as he drew near hemade dolorous moan, and by the words of it I perceived that hewas cursing and swearing; yet nevertheless was I glad of hiscoming, for that I saw he bore a bulletin-board whereon in lettersall 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 forknight of mine. It was Sir Madok de la Montaine, a burly greatfellow whose chief distinction was that he had come within an aceof sending Sir Launcelot down over his horse-tail once. He wasnever long in a stranger's presence without finding some pretextor other to let out that great fact. But there was another factof nearly the same size, which he never pushed upon anybody unasked,and yet never withheld when asked: that was, that the reason hedidn't quite succeed was, that he was interrupted and sent downover horse-tail himself. This innocent vast lubber did not seeany particular difference between the two facts. I liked him,for he was earnest in his work, and very valuable. And he was sofine to look at, with his broad mailed shoulders, and the grandleonine set of his plumed head, and his big shield with its quaintdevice of a gauntleted hand clutching a prophylactic tooth-brush,with motto: "Try Noyoudont." This was a tooth-wash that I wasintroducing.

  He was aweary, he said, and indeed he looked it; but he would notalight. He said he was after the stove-polish man; and with thishe broke out cursing and swearing anew. The bulletin-boarderreferred to was Sir Ossaise of Surluse, a brave knight, and ofconsiderable celebrity on account of his having tried conclusionsin a tournament once, with no less a Mogul than Sir Gaherishimself--although not successfully. He was of a light and laughingdisposition, and to him nothing in this world was serious. It wasfor this reason that I had chosen him to work up a stove-polishsentiment. There were no stoves yet, and so there could be nothingserious about stove-polish. All that the agent needed to do wasto deftly and by degrees prepare the public for the great change,and have them established in predilections toward neatness againstthe time when the stove should appear upon the stage.

  Sir Madok was very bitter, and brake out anew with cursings. Hesaid he had cursed his soul to rags; and yet he would not get downfrom his horse, neither would he take any rest, or listen to anycomfort, until he should have found Sir Ossaise and settled thisaccount. It appeared, by what I could piece together of theunprofane fragments of his statement, that he had chanced uponSir Ossaise at dawn of the morning, and been told that if he wouldmake a short cut across the fields and swamps and broken hills andglades, he could head off a company of travelers who would be rarecustomers for prophylactics and tooth-wash. With characteristiczeal Sir Madok had plunged away at once upon this quest, and afterthree hours of awful crosslot riding had overhauled his game. Andbehold, it was the five patriarchs that had been released from thedungeons the evening before! Poor old creatures, it was all oftwenty years since any one of them had known what it was to beequipped with any remaining snag or remnant of a tooth.

  "Blank-blank-blank him," said Sir Madok, "an I do not stove-polishhim an I may find him, leave it to me; for never no knight thathight Ossaise or aught else may do me this disservice and bideon live, an I may find him, the which I have thereunto sworn agreat oath this day."

  And with these words and others, he lightly took his spear andgat him thence. In the middle of the afternoon we came upon oneof those very patriarchs ourselves, in the edge of a poor village.He was basking in the love of relatives and friends whom he had notseen for fifty years; and about him and caressing him were alsodescendants 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 mindwas stagnant. It seemed incredible that a man could outlast halfa century shut up in a dark hole like a rat, but here were his oldwife and some old comrades to testify to it. They could rememberhim as he was in the freshness and strength of his young manhood,when he kissed his child and delivered it to its mother's handsand went away into that long oblivion. The people at the castlecould not tell within half a generation the length of time the manhad been shut up there for his unrecorded and forgotten offense;but this old wife knew; and so did her old child, who stood thereamong her married sons and daughters trying to realize a fatherwho had been to her a name, a thought, a formless image, a tradition,all her life, and now was suddenly concreted into actual fleshand blood and set before her face.

  It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account thatI have made room for it here, but on account of a thing whichseemed to me still more curious. To wit, that this dreadful matterbrought from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage againstthese oppressors. They had been heritors and subjects of crueltyand outrage so long that nothing could have startled them buta kindness. Yes, here was a curious revelation, indeed, of thedepth to which this people had been sunk in slavery. Their entirebeing was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation,dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them inthis life. Their very imagination was dead. When you can saythat of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lowerdeep for him.

  I rather wished I had gone some other road. This was not the sortof experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning outa peaceful revolution in his mind. For it could not help bringingup the unget-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizingto the contrary notwithstanding, no people in the world ever didachieve 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 teachesanything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was aReign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.

  Two days later, toward noon, Sandy began to show signs of excitementand feverish expectancy. She said we were approaching the ogre'scastle. I was surprised into an uncomfortable shock. The objectof our quest had gradually dropped out of my mind; this suddenresurrection of it made it seem quite a real and startling thingfor a moment, and roused up in me a smart interest. Sandy'sexcitement increased every moment; and so did mine, for that sortof thing is catching. My heart got to thumping. You can't reasonwith your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things whichthe intellect scorns. Presently, when Sandy slid from the horse,motioned me to stop, and went creeping stealthily, with her headbent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes that bordereda declivity, the thumpings grew stronger and quicker. And theykept it up while she was gaining her ambush and getting her glimpseover the declivity; and also while I was creeping to her side onmy knees. Her eyes were burning now, as she pointed with herfinger, 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 wattledfence around it."

  She looked surprised and distressed. The animation faded out ofher face; and during many moments she was lost in thought andsilent. 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 baseand shameful aspect; yet to the perception of the other it is notenchanted, hath suffered no change, but stands firm and statelystill, girt with its moat and waving its banners in the blue airfrom its towers. And God shield us, how it pricks the heart tosee again these gracious captives, and the sorrow deepened in theirsweet faces! We have tarried along, and are to blame."

  I saw my cue. The castle was enchanted to _me_, not to her. It wouldbe wasted time to try to argue her out of her delusion, it couldn'tbe done; I must just humor it. So I said:

  "This is a com
mon case--the enchanting of a thing to one eye andleaving it in its proper form to another. You have heard of itbefore, Sandy, though you haven't happened to experience it.But no harm is done. In fact, it is lucky the way it is. If theseladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, it would benecessary to break the enchantment, and that might be impossibleif one failed to find out the particular process of the enchantment.And hazardous, too; for in attempting a disenchantment without thetrue 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 byreducing your materials to nothing finally, or to an odorless gaswhich you can't follow--which, of course, amounts to the samething. But here, by good luck, no one's eyes but mine are underthe enchantment, and so it is of no consequence to dissolve it.These ladies remain ladies to you, and to themselves, and toeverybody else; and at the same time they will suffer in no wayfrom my delusion, for when I know that an ostensible hog is alady, that is enough for me, I know how to treat her."

  "Thanks, oh, sweet my lord, thou talkest like an angel. And I knowthat thou wilt deliver them, for that thou art minded to greatdeeds and art as strong a knight of your hands and as brave to willand to do, as any that is on live."

  "I will not leave a princess in the sty, Sandy. Are those threeyonder that to my disordered eyes are starveling swine-herds--"

  "The ogres, Are _they_ changed also? It is most wonderful. Nowam I fearful; for how canst thou strike with sure aim when five oftheir nine cubits of stature are to thee 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 ogreis invisible; then I know how to locate his vitals. Don't you beafraid, I will make short work of these bunco-steerers. Staywhere 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 theswine-herds. I won their gratitude by buying out all the hogsat the lump sum of sixteen pennies, which was rather above latestquotations. I was just in time; for the Church, the lord of themanor, and the rest of the tax-gatherers would have been alongnext day and swept off pretty much all the stock, leaving theswine-herds very short of hogs and Sandy out of princesses. Butnow the tax people could be paid in cash, and there would bea stake left besides. One of the men had ten children; and hesaid that last year when a priest came and of his ten pigs tookthe fattest one for tithes, the wife burst out upon him, and offeredhim a child and said:

  "Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leave me my child, yetrob 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 manyto have changed its nature when it changed its disguise.

  I sent the three men away, and then opened the sty gate and beckonedSandy to come--which she did; and not leisurely, but with the rushof a prairie fire. And when I saw her fling herself upon thosehogs, with tears of joy running down her cheeks, and strain themto her heart, and kiss them, and caress them, and call themreverently by grand princely names, I was ashamed of her, ashamedof the human race.

  We had to drive those hogs home--ten miles; and no ladies wereever more fickle-minded or contrary. They would stay in no road,no path; they broke out through the brush on all sides, and flowedaway in all directions, over rocks, and hills, and the roughestplaces they could find. And they must not be struck, or roughlyaccosted; Sandy could not bear to see them treated in ways unbecomingtheir rank. The troublesomest old sow of the lot had to be calledmy Lady, and your Highness, like the rest. It is annoying anddifficult to scour around after hogs, in armor. There was onesmall countess, with an iron ring in her snout and hardly any hairon her back, that was the devil for perversity. She gave me a raceof an hour, over all sorts of country, and then we were right wherewe 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 thelast degree indelicate to drag a countess by her train.

  We got the hogs home just at dark--most of them. The princessNerovens 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 starin her forehead, and the latter a brown one with thin legs and aslight limp in the forward shank on the starboard side--a coupleof the tryingest blisters to drive that I ever saw. Also amongthe missing were several mere baronesses--and I wanted them tostay missing; but no, all that sausage-meat had to be found; soservants were sent out with torches to scour the woods and hillsto that end.

  Of course, the whole drove was housed in the house, and, greatguns!--well, I never saw anything like it. Nor ever heard anythinglike it. And never smelt anything like it. It was like aninsurrection in a gasometer.