A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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.
CHAPTER XXI
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