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Mark
Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Chapter 20
THE OGRE'S CASTLE
BETWEEN six and nine we made ten miles, which was plenty for a horse
carrying triple -- man, woman, and armor; then we stopped for a long
nooning under some trees by a limpid brook.
Right so came by and by a knight riding; and as he drew near he
made dolorous moan, and by the words of it I perceived that he was
cursing and swearing; yet nevertheless was I glad of his coming, for
that I saw he bore a bulletin-board whereon in letters all of shining
gold was writ:
"USE PETERSON'S PROPHYLACTIC TOOTH-BRUSH -- ALL THE GO."
I was glad of his coming, for even by this token I knew him for
knight of mine. It was Sir Madok de la Montaine, a burly great fellow
whose chief distinction was that he had come within an ace of sending
Sir Launcelot down over his horse-tail once. He was never long in
a stranger's presence without finding some pretext or other to let
out that great fact. But there was another fact of nearly the same
size, which he never pushed upon anybody unasked, and yet never withheld
when asked: that was, that the reason he didn't quite succeed was,
that he was interrupted and sent down over horse-tail himself. This
innocent vast lubber did not see any particular difference between
the two facts. I liked him, for he was earnest in his work, and very
valuable. And he was so fine to look at, with his broad mailed shoulders,
and the grand leonine set of his plumed head, and his big shield with
its quaint device of a gauntleted hand clutching a prophylactic tooth-brush,
with motto: "Try Noyoudont." This was a tooth-wash that
I was introducing.
He was aweary, he said, and indeed he looked it; but he would not
alight. He said he was after the stove-polish man; and with this he
broke out cursing and swearing anew. The bulletin-boarder referred
to was Sir Ossaise of Surluse, a brave knight, and of considerable
celebrity on account of his having tried conclusions in a tournament
once, with no less a Mogul that Sir Gaheris himself -- although not
successfully. He was of a light and laughing disposition, and to him
nothing in this world was serious. It was for this reason that I had
chosen him to work up a stove-polish sentiment. There were no stoves
yet, and so there could be nothing serious about stove-polish. All
that the agent needed to do was to deftly and by degrees prepare the
public for the great change, and have them established in predilections
toward neatness against the time when the stove should appear upon
the stage.
Sir Madok was very bitter, and brake out anew with cursings. He
said he had cursed his soul to rags; and yet he would not get down
from his horse, neither would he take any rest, or listen to any comfort,
until he should have found Sir Ossaise and settled this account.
It appeared, by what I could piece together of the unprofane fragments
of his statement, that he had chanced upon Sir Ossaise at dawn of
the morning, and been told that if he would make a short cut across
the fields and swamps and broken hills and glades, he could head off
a company of travelers who would be rare customers for prophylactics
and tooth-wash. With characteristic zeal Sir Madok had plunged away
at once upon this quest, and after three hours of awful crosslot riding
had overhauled his game. And behold, it was the five patriarchs that
had been released from the dungeons the evening before! Poor old creatures,
it was all of twenty years since any one of them had known what it
was to be equipped with any remaining snag or remnant of a tooth.
"Blank-blank-blank him," said Sir Madok, "an I do
not stove-polish him an I may find him, leave it to me; for never
no knight that hight Ossaise or aught else may do me this disservice
and bide on live, an I may find him, the which I have thereunto sworn
a great oath this day."
And with these words and others, he lightly took his spear and gat
him thence. In the middle of the afternoon we came upon one of those
very patriarchs ourselves, in the edge of a poor village. He was basking
in the love of relatives and friends whom he had not seen for fifty
years; and about him and caressing him were also descendants of his
own body whom he had never seen at all till now; but to him these
were all strangers, his memory was gone, his mind was stagnant. It
seemed incredible that a man could outlast half a century shut up
in a dark hole like a rat, but here were his old wife and some old
comrades to testify to it. They could remember him as he was in the
freshness and strength of his young manhood, when he kissed his child
and delivered it to its mother's hands and went away into that long
oblivion. The people at the castle could not tell within half a generation
the length of time the man had been shut up there for his unrecorded
and forgotten offense; but this old wife knew; and so did her old
child, who stood there among her married sons and daughters trying
to realize a father who had been to her a name, a thought, a formless
image, a tradition, all her life, and now was suddenly concreted into
actual flesh and blood and set before her face.
It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account that I
have made room for it here, but on account of a thing which seemed
to me still more curious. To wit, that this dreadful matter brought
from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage against these oppressors.
They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty and outrage so long
that nothing could have startled them but a kindness. Yes, here was
a curious revelation, indeed, of the depth to which this people had
been sunk in slavery. Their entire being was reduced to a monotonous
dead level of patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance
of whatever might befall them in this life. Their very imagination
was dead. When you can say that of a man, he has struck bottom, I
reckon; there is no lower deep for him.
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 un-get-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.
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