A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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 eight 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--98 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 a 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 hotel.”
“Hotel? I mind not to have heard--”
“Of hotel? It's what you call hostel. The man that can do this
miracle can keep 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 sith 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