| |
Mark
Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Chapter 13
FREEMEN
YES, it is strange how little a while at a time a person can be
contented. Only a little while back, when I was riding and suffering,
what a heaven this peace, this rest, this sweet serenity in this secluded
shady nook by this purling stream would have seemed, where I could
keep perfectly comfortable all the time by pouring a dipper of water
into my armor now and then; yet already I was getting dissatisfied;
partly because I could not light my pipe -- for, although I had long
ago started a match factory, I had forgotten to bring matches with
me -- and partly because we had nothing to eat. Here was another illustration
of the childlike improvidence of this age and people. A man in armor
always trusted to chance for his food on a journey, and would have
been scandalized at the idea of hanging a basket of sandwiches on
his spear. There was probably not a knight of all the Round Table
combination who would not rather have died than been caught carrying
such a thing as that on his flagstaff. And yet there could not be
anything more sensible. It had been my intention to smuggle a couple
of sandwiches into my helmet, but I was interrupted in the act, and
had to make an excuse and lay them aside, and a dog got them.
Night approached, and with it a storm. The darkness came on fast.
We must camp, of course. I found a good shelter for the demoiselle
under a rock, and went off and found another for myself. But I was
obliged to remain in my armor, because I could not get it off by myself
and yet could not allow Alisande to help, because it would have seemed
so like undressing before folk. It would not have amounted to that
in reality, because I had clothes on underneath; but the prejudices
of one's breeding are not gotten rid of just at a jump, and I knew
that when it came to stripping off that bob-tailed iron petticoat
I should be embarrassed.
With the storm came a change of weather; and the stronger the wind
blew, and the wilder the rain lashed around, the colder and colder
it got. Pretty soon, various kinds of bugs and ants and worms and
things began to flock in out of the wet and crawl down inside my armor
to get warm; and while some of them behaved well enough, and snuggled
up amongst my clothes and got quiet, the majority were of a restless,
uncomfortable sort, and never stayed still, but went on prowling and
hunting for they did not know what; especially the ants, which went
tickling along in wearisome procession from one end of me to the other
by the hour, and are a kind of creatures which I never wish to sleep
with again. It would be my advice to persons situated in this way,
to not roll or thrash around, because this excites the interest of
all the different sorts of animals and makes every last one of them
want to turn out and see what is going on, and this makes things worse
than they were before, and of course makes you objurgate harder, too,
if you can.
Still, if one did not roll and thrash around he would die; so perhaps
it is as well to do one way as the other; there is no real choice.
Even after I was frozen solid I could still distinguish that tickling,
just as a corpse does when he is taking electric treatment. I said
I would never wear armor after this trip.
All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yet was in a living
fire, as you may say, on account of that swarm of crawlers, that same
unanswerable question kept circling and circling through my tired
head: How do people stand this miserable armor? How have they managed
to stand it all these generations? How can they sleep at night for
dreading the tortures of next day?
When the morning came at last, I was in a bad enough plight: seedy,
drowsy, fagged, from want of sleep; weary from thrashing around, famished
from long fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of the animals;
and crippled with rheumatism. And how had it fared with the nobly
born, the titled aristocrat, the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise?
Why, she was as fresh as a squirrel; she had slept like the dead;
and as for a bath, probably neither she nor any other noble in the
land had ever had one, and so she was not missing it. Measured by
modern standards, they were merely modified savages, those people.
This noble lady showed no impatience to get to breakfast -- and that
smacks of the savage, too. On their journeys those Britons were used
to long fasts, and knew how to bear them; and also how to freight
up against probable fasts before starting, after the style of the
Indian and the anaconda. As like as not, Sandy was loaded for a three-day
stretch.
We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind.
In half an hour we came upon a group of ragged poor creatures who
had assembled to mend the thing which was regarded as a road. They
were as humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast
with them, they were so flattered, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary
condescension of mine that at first they were not able to believe
that I was in earnest. My lady put up her scornful lip and withdrew
to one side; she said in their hearing that she would as soon think
of eating with the other cattle -- a remark which embarrassed these
poor devils merely because it referred to them, and not because it
insulted or offended them, for it didn't. And yet they were not slaves,
not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. Seven-tenths
of the free population of the country were of just their class and
degree: small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which
is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about
all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy,
and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave
behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and
gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting
and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed
world. And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead
of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching
head up and banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself
to be the Nation, and these innumerable clams had permitted it so
long that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and not only
that, but to believe it right and as it should be. The priests had
told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of things
was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it
would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially such poor
transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter there and become
respectfully quiet.
The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly
American ear. They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates
of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not
prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their
bread baked at his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same;
they could not sell a piece of their own property without paying him
a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody
else's without remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had
to harvest his grain for him gratis, and be ready to come at a moment's
notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened storm;
they had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep
their indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers
trampled the grain around the trees; they had to smother their anger
when his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste
the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves
themselves, and when the swarms from my lord's dovecote settled on
their crops they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful
would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then
came the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first
the Church carted off its fat tenth, then the king's commissioner
took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad upon
the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty to bestow
the remnant in his barn, in case it was worth the trouble; there were
taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and
yet other taxes -- upon this free and independent pauper, but none
upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility
or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would sleep unvexed, the
freeman must sit up all night after his day's work and whip the ponds
to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's daughter -- but no, that
last infamy of monarchical government is unprintable; and finally,
if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found his life
unendurable under such conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death
for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire,
the gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake
through his back, and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated
all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.
And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work
on their lord the bishop's road three days each -- gratis; every head
of a family, and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and
a day or so added for their servants. Why, it was like reading about
France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution,
which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave
of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion
of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed
by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries
of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated
but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would
but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion,
the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the
other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten
thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders
are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary
Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by
the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty,
and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death
by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins
filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught
to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the
coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter
and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness
or pity as it deserves.
These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and
their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their king
and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was
something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed
a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's
hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should
reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion
of all other families -- including the voter's; and would also elect
that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits
of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges
to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families -- including
his own.
They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had
never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them
that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say
in the government. I said I had seen one -- and that it would last
until it had an Established Church. Again they were all unhit -- at
first. But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that
proposition again; and state it slowly, so it could soak into his
understanding. I did it; and after a little he had the idea, and he
brought his fist down and said HE didn't believe a nation where every
man had a vote would voluntarily get down in the mud and dirt in any
such way; and that to steal from a nation its will and preference
must be a crime and the first of all crimes. I said to myself:
"This one's a man. If I were backed by enough of his sort,
I would make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to
prove myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in
its system of government."
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to
its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing,
the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch
over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous,
they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged,
cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease,
and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags,
to die for rags -- that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal;
it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep
it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that
all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments
are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and
that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to
alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think
expedient."
Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's
political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not
agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may
be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him;
it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others
to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does.
And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country
should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand
of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express
dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it,
would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been
so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak,
I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and
ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the
work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction
and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred
and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal. The thing that would
have best suited the circus side of my nature would have been to resign
the Boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution;
but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing
without first educating his materials up to revolution grade is almost
absolutely certain to get left. I had never been accustomed to getting
left, even if I do say it myself. Wherefore, the "deal"
which had been for some time working into shape in my mind was of
a quite different pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort.
So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man there who sat
munching black bread with that abused and mistaught herd of human
sheep, but took him aside and talked matter of another sort to him.
After I had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from his veins;
and with this and a sliver I wrote on a piece of bark --
Put him in the Man-factory --
and gave it to him, and said:
"Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into the hands
of Amyas le Poulet, whom I call Clarence, and he will understand."
"He is a priest, then," said the man, and some of the
enthusiasm went out of his face.
"How -- a priest? Didn't I tell you that no chattel of the
Church, no bond-slave of pope or bishop can enter my Man-Factory?
Didn't I tell you that YOU couldn't enter unless your religion, whatever
it might be, was your own free property?"
"Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; wherefore
it liked me not, and bred in me a cold doubt, to hear of this priest
being there."
"But he isn't a priest, I tell you."
The man looked far from satisfied. He said:
"He is not a priest, and yet can read?"
"He is not a priest and yet can read -- yes, and write, too,
for that matter. I taught him myself." The man's face cleared.
"And it is the first thing that you yourself will be taught in
that Factory -- "
"I? I would give blood out of my heart to know that art. Why,
I will be your slave, your -- "
"No you won't, you won't be anybody's slave. Take your family
and go along. Your lord the bishop will confiscate your small property,
but no matter. Clarence will fix you all right."
Contents:
Copyright © www.book-portal.net |
|
map