A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
two or three days beforehand.”
“Indeed, yes, I mind it now.”
“Well, I could have done it as much as forty times easier, and
piled on a thousand times more detail into the bargain, if it had
been five hundred years away instead of two or three days.”
“How amazing that it should be so!”
“Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five
hundred years away easier than he can a thing that's only five
hundred seconds off.”
“And yet in reason it should clearly be the other way; it should
be five hundred times as easy to foretell the last as the first,
for, indeed, it is so close by that one uninspired might almost
see it. In truth, the law of prophecy doth contradict the likelihoods,
most strangely making the difficult easy, and the easy difficult.”
It was a wise head. A peasant's cap was no safe disguise for it;
you could know it for a king's under a diving-bell, if you could
hear it work its intellect.
I had a new trade now, and plenty of business in it. The king
was as hungry to find out everything that was going to happen
during the next thirteen centuries as if he were expecting to live
in them. From that time out, I prophesied myself bald-headed
trying to supply the demand. I have done some indiscreet things in
my day, but this thing of playing myself for a prophet was the
worst. Still, it had its ameliorations. A prophet doesn't have
to have any brains. They are good to have, of course, for the
ordinary exigencies of life, but they are no use in professional
work. It is the restfulest vocation there is. When the spirit of
prophecy comes upon you, you merely take your intellect and lay it
off in a cool place for a rest, and unship your jaw and leave it
alone; it will work itself: the result is prophecy.
Every day a knight-errant or so came along, and the sight of them
fired the king's martial spirit every time. He would have forgotten
himself, sure, and said something to them in a style a suspicious
shade or so above his ostensible degree, and so I always got him
well out of the road in time. Then he would stand and look with
all his eyes; and a proud light would flash from them, and his
nostrils would inflate like a war-horse's, and I knew he was
longing for a brush with them. But about noon of the third day
I had stopped in the road to take a precaution which had been
suggested by the whip-stroke that had fallen to my share two days
before; a precaution which I had afterward decided to leave untaken,
I was so loath to institute it; but now I had just had a fresh
reminder: while striding heedlessly along, with jaw spread and
intellect at rest, for I was prophesying, I stubbed my toe and
fell sprawling. I was so pale I couldn't think for a moment;
then I got softly and carefully up and unstrapped my knapsack.
I had that dynamite bomb in it, done up in wool in a box. It was
a good thing to have along; the time would come when I could do
a valuable miracle with it, maybe, but it was a nervous thing
to have about me, and I didn't like to ask the king to carry it.
Yet I must either throw it away or think up some safe way to get
along with its society. I got it out and slipped it into my scrip,
and just then here came a couple of knights. The king stood,
stately as a statue, gazing toward them--had forgotten himself again,
of course--and before I could get a word of warning out, it was
time for him to skip, and well that he did it, too. He supposed
they would turn aside. Turn aside to avoid trampling peasant dirt
under foot? When had he ever turned aside himself--or ever had
the chance to do it, if a peasant saw him or any other noble knight
in time to judiciously save him the trouble? The knights paid
no attention to the king at all; it was his place to look out
himself, and if he hadn't skipped he would have been placidly
ridden down, and laughed at besides.
The king was in a flaming fury, and launched out his challenge
and epithets with a most royal vigor. The knights were some little
distance by now. They halted, greatly surprised, and turned in
their saddles and looked back, as if wondering if it might be worth
while to bother with such scum as we. Then they wheeled and
started for us. Not a moment must be lost. I started for _them_.
I passed them at a rattling gait, and as I went by I flung out a
hair-lifting soul-scorching thirteen-jointed insult which made
the king's effort poor and cheap by comparison. I got it out of
the nineteenth century where they know how. They had such headway
that they were nearly to the king before they could check up;
then, frantic with rage, they stood up their horses on their hind
hoofs and whirled them around, and the next moment here they came,
breast to breast. I was seventy yards off, then, and scrambling up
a great bowlder at the roadside. When they were within thirty
yards of me they let their long lances droop to a level, depressed
their mailed heads, and so, with their horse-hair plumes streaming
straight out behind, most gallant to see, this lightning express
came tearing for me! When they were within fifteen yards, I sent
that bomb with a sure aim, and it struck the ground just under
the horses' noses.
Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see. It resembled
a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi; and during the next
fifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic
fragments of knights and hardware and horse-flesh. I say we,
for the king joined the audience, of course, as soon as he had got
his breath again. There was a hole there which would afford steady
work for all the people in that region for some years to come
--in trying to explain it, I mean; as for filling it up, that service
would be comparatively prompt, and would fall to the lot of a
select few--peasants of that seignory; and they wouldn't get
anything for it, either.
But I explained it to the king myself. I said it was done with a
dynamite bomb. This information did him no damage, because it
left him as intelligent as he was before. However, it was a noble
miracle, in his eyes, and was another settler for Merlin. I thought
it well enough to explain that this was a miracle of so rare a sort
that it couldn't be done except when the atmospheric conditions
were just right. Otherwise he would be encoring it every time we
had a good subject, and that would be inconvenient, because I
hadn't any more bombs along.
CHAPTER XXVIII
DRILLING THE KING
On the morning of the fourth day, when it was just sunrise, and we
had been tramping an hour in the chill dawn, I came to a resolution:
the king _must_ be drilled; things could not go on so, he must be
taken in hand and deliberately and conscientiously drilled, or we
couldn't ever venture to enter a dwelling; the very cats would know
this masquerader for a humbug and no peasant. So I called a halt
and said:
“Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are all right, there
is no discrepancy; but as between your clothes and your bearing,
you are all wrong, there is a most noticeable discrepancy. Your
soldierly stride, your lordly port--these will not do. You stand
too straight, your looks are too high, too confident. The cares
of a kingdom do not stoop the shoulders, they do not droop the chin,
they do not depress the high level of the eye-glance, they do not
put doubt and fear in the heart and hang out the signs of them
in slouching body and unsure step. It is the sordid cares of
the lowly born that do these things. You must learn the trick;
you must imitate the trademarks of poverty, misery, oppression,
insult, and the other several and common inhumanities that sap
the manliness out of a man and make him a loyal and proper and
approved subject and a satisfaction to his masters, or the very
infants will know you for better than your disguise, and we shall go
to pieces at the first hut we stop at. Pray try to walk like this.”
The king took careful note, and then tried an imitation.
“Pretty fair--pretty fair. Chin a little lower, please--there, very
good. Eyes too high; pray don't look at the horizon, look at the
ground, ten steps in front of you. Ah--that is better, that is
very good. Wait, please; you betray too much vigor, too much
decision; you want more of a shamble. Look at me, please--this is
what I mean.... Now you are getting it; that is the idea--at least,
it sort of approaches it.... Yes, that is pretty fair. _But!_
There is a great big something wanting, I don't quite know what
it is. Please walk thirty yards, so that I can get a perspective
on the thing.... Now, then--your head's right, speed's right,
shoulders right, eyes right, chin right, gait, carriage, general
style right--everything's right! And yet the fact remains, the
aggregate's wrong. The account don't balance. Do it again,
please.... _Now_ I think I begin to see what it is. Yes, I've
struck it. You see, the genuine spiritlessness is wanting; that's
what's the trouble. It's all _amateur_--mechanical details all
right, almost to a hair; everything about the delusion perfect,
except that it don't delude.”
“What, then, must one do, to prevail?”
“Let me think... I can't seem to quite get at it. In fact, there
isn't anything that can right the matter but practice. This is
a good place for it: roots and stony ground to break up your
stately gait, a region not liable to interruption, only one field
and one hut in sight, and they so far away that nobody could
see us from there. It will be well to move a little off the road
and put in the whole day drilling you, sire.”
After the drill had gone on a little while, I said:
“Now, sire, imagine that we are at the door of the hut yonder,
and the family are before us. Proceed, please--accost the head
of the house.”
The king unconsciously straightened up like a monument, and said,
with frozen austerity:
“Varlet, bring a seat; and serve to me what cheer ye have.”
“Ah, your grace, that is not well done.”
“In what lacketh it?”
“These people do not call _each other_ varlets.”
“Nay, is that true?”
“Yes; only those above them call them so.”
“Then must I try again. I will call him villein.”
“No-no; for he may be a freeman.”
“Ah--so. Then peradventure I should call him goodman.”
“That would answer, your grace, but it would be still better if
you said friend, or brother.”
“Brother!--to dirt like that?”
“Ah, but _we_ are pretending to be dirt like that, too.”
“It is even true. I will say it. Brother, bring a seat, and
thereto what cheer ye have, withal. Now 'tis right.”
“Not quite, not wholly right. You have asked for one, not _us_
--for one, not both; food for one, a seat for one.”
The king looked puzzled--he wasn't a very heavy weight, intellectually.
His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do
it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.
“Would _you_ have a seat also--and sit?”
“If I did not sit, the man would perceive that we were only pretending
to be equals--and playing the deception pretty poorly, too.”
“It is well and truly said! How wonderful is truth, come it in
whatsoever unexpected form it may! Yes, he must bring out seats
and food for both, and in serving us present not ewer and napkin
with more show of respect to the one than to the other.”
“And there is even yet a detail that needs correcting. He must
bring nothing outside; we will go in--in among the dirt, and
possibly other repulsive things,--and take the food with the
household, and after the fashion of the house, and all on equal
terms, except the man be of the serf class; and finally, there
will be no ewer and no napkin, whether he be serf or free. Please
walk again, my liege. There--it is better--it is the best yet;