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 aweary, 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 that 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 brake 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
gat him thence. In the middle
of the afternoon we came upon
one of those very patriarchs
ourselves, in 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 this 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 this 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 along, 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, thou talkest
like an angel. And
I know that thou wilt deliver
them, for that thou art minded
to great deeds and art as strong
a knight of your hands and as
brave to will and to do, as any
that is on live."
"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 canst thou
strike with sure aim when five
of their 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 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:
"Thou 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. |