A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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
stop watch, and he made 1,244 revolutions in 24 minutes and
46 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 race horse 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 St. 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 forehatch and the running-gear clewed up with a featherstitch
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.*
[*All the details concerning the hermits, in this chapter, are from
Lecky--but greatly modified. This book not being a history but
only a tale, the majority of the historian's frank details were too
strong for reproduction in it.--_Editor_]
CHAPTER XXIII
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:
“Ye 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? Ye mean, not certainly?”
“That is it.”
“Wherefore, ye 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 to-day 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 ye may name. I will issue commandment
to that effect.”
“Wait,” said Merlin, with an evil smile. “Ye 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 ye
must likewise pronounce it? Ha-ha! Knew ye that?”
“Yes, I knew that, too.”
“You had that knowledge! Art a fool? Are ye minded to utter
that name and die?”
“Utter it? Why certainly. I would utter it if it was Welsh.”
“Ye 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