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Mark
Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Chapter 40
THREE YEARS LATER
WHEN I broke the back of knight-errantry that time, I no longer
felt obliged to work in secret. So, the very next day I exposed my
hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine factories
and workshops to an astonished world. That is to say, I exposed the
nineteenth century to the inspection of the sixth.
Well, it is always a good plan to follow up an advantage promptly.
The knights were temporarily down, but if I would keep them so I must
just simply paralyze them -- nothing short of that would answer. You
see, I was "bluffing" that last time in the field; it would
be natural for them to work around to that conclusion, if I gave them
a chance. So I must not give them time; and I didn't.
I renewed my challenge, engraved it on brass, posted it up where
any priest could read it to them, and also kept it standing in the
advertising columns of the paper.
I not only renewed it, but added to its proportions. I said, name
the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up against the
massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it.
I was not bluffing this time. I meant what I said; I could do what
I promised. There wasn't any way to misunderstand the language of
that challenge. Even the dullest of the chivalry perceived that this
was a plain case of "put up, or shut up." They were wise
and did the latter. In all the next three years they gave me no trouble
worth mentioning.
Consider the three years sped. Now look around on England. A happy
and prosperous country, and strangely altered. Schools everywhere,
and several colleges; a number of pretty good newspapers. Even authorship
was taking a start; Sir Dinadan the Humorist was first in the field,
with a volume of gray-headed jokes which I had been familiar with
during thirteen centuries. If he had left out that old rancid one
about the lecturer I wouldn't have said anything; but I couldn't stand
that one. I suppressed the book and hanged the author.
Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation
had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph,
the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and all the thousand willing and
handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into
favor. We had a steamboat or two on the Thames, we had steam warships,
and the beginnings of a steam commercial marine; I was getting ready
to send out an expedition to discover America.
We were building several lines of railway, and our line from Camelot
to London was already finished and in operation. I was shrewd enough
to make all offices connected with the passenger service places of
high and distinguished honor. My idea was to attract the chivalry
and nobility, and make them useful and keep them out of mischief.
The plan worked very well, the competition for the places was hot.
The conductor of the 4.33 express was a duke; there wasn't a passenger
conductor on the line below the degree of earl. They were good men,
every one, but they had two defects which I couldn't cure, and so
had to wink at: they wouldn't lay aside their armor, and they would
"knock down" fare -- I mean rob the company.
There was hardly a knight in all the land who wasn't in some useful
employment. They were going from end to end of the country in all
manner of useful missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering,
and their experience in it, made them altogether the most effective
spreaders of civilization we had. They went clothed in steel and equipped
with sword and lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn't persuade
a person to try a sewing-machine on the installment plan, or a melodeon,
or a barbed-wire fence, or a prohibition journal, or any of the other
thousand and one things they canvassed for, they removed him and passed
on.
I was very happy. Things were working steadily toward a secretly
longed-for point. You see, I had two schemes in my head which were
the vastest of all my projects. The one was to overthrow the Catholic
Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins -- not as an Established
Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and the other project was to get
a decree issued by and by, commanding that upon Arthur's death unlimited
suffrage should be introduced, and given to men and women alike --
at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and to all mothers who at
middle age should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at
twenty-one. Arthur was good for thirty years yet, he being about my
own age -- that is to say, forty -- and I believed that in that time
I could easily have the active part of the population of that day
ready and eager for an event which should be the first of its kind
in the history of the world -- a rounded and complete governmental
revolution without bloodshed. The result to be a republic. Well, I
may as well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it:
I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first president
myself. Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found that
out.
Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modified
way. His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but with
a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective
chief magistrate. He believed that no nation that had ever known the
joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not
fade away and die of melancholy. I urged that kings were dangerous.
He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would
answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family,
they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the
same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other
royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know
it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as
sound a divine right as any other royal house, and "Tom VII.,
or Tom XI., or Tom XIV. by the grace of God King," would sound
as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with
tights on. "And as a rule," said he, in his neat modern
English, "the character of these cats would be considerably above
the character of the average king, and this would be an immense moral
advantage to the nation, for the reason that a nation always models
its morals after its monarch's. The worship of royalty being founded
in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become
as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would
presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned
nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must
be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human
king, and would certainly get it. The eyes of the whole harried world
would soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal
butchers would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would
fill the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we should
become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within
forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we should furnish
the cats. The reign of universal peace would begin then, to end no
more forever...... Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow -- fzt! -- wow!"
Hang him, I supposed he was in earnest, and was beginning to be
persuaded by him, until he exploded that cat-howl and startled me
almost out of my clothes. But he never could be in earnest. He didn't
know what it was. He had pictured a distinct and perfectly rational
and feasible improvement upon constitutional monarchy, but he was
too feather-headed to know it, or care anything about it, either.
I was going to give him a scolding, but Sandy came flying in at that
moment, wild with terror, and so choked with sobs that for a minute
she could not get her voice. I ran and took her in my arms, and lavished
caresses upon her and said, beseechingly:
"Speak, darling, speak! What is it?"
Her head fell limp upon my bosom, and she gasped, almost inaudibly:
"HELLO-CENTRAL!"
"Quick!" I shouted to Clarence; "telephone the king's
homeopath to come!"
In two minutes I was kneeling by the child's crib, and Sandy was
dispatching servants here, there, and everywhere, all over the palace.
I took in the situation almost at a glance -- membranous croup! I
bent down and whispered:
"Wake up, sweetheart! Hello-Central"
She opened her soft eyes languidly, and made out to say:
"Papa."
That was a comfort. She was far from dead yet. I sent for preparations
of sulphur, I rousted out the croup-kettle myself; for I don't sit
down and wait for doctors when Sandy or the child is sick. I knew
how to nurse both of them, and had had experience. This little chap
had lived in my arms a good part of its small life, and often I could
soothe away its troubles and get it to laugh through the tear-dews
on its eyelashes when even its mother couldn't.
Sir Launcelot, in his richest armor, came striding along the great
hall now on his way to the stock-board; he was president of the stock-board,
and occupied the Siege Perilous, which he had bought of Sir Galahad;
for the stock-board consisted of the Knights of the Round Table, and
they used the Round Table for business purposes now. Seats at it were
worth -- well, you would never believe the figure, so it is no use
to state it. Sir Launcelot was a bear, and he had put up a corner
in one of the new lines, and was just getting ready to squeeze the
shorts to-day; but what of that? He was the same old Launcelot, and
when he glanced in as he was passing the door and found out that his
pet was sick, that was enough for him; bulls and bears might fight
it out their own way for all him, he would come right in here and
stand by little Hello-Central for all he was worth. And that was what
he did. He shied his helmet into the corner, and in half a minute
he had a new wick in the alcohol lamp and was firing up on the croup-kettle.
By this time Sandy had built a blanket canopy over the crib, and everything
was ready.
Sir Launcelot got up steam, he and I loaded up the kettle with unslaked
lime and carbolic acid, with a touch of lactic acid added thereto,
then filled the thing up with water and inserted the steam-spout under
the canopy. Everything was ship-shape now, and we sat down on either
side of the crib to stand our watch. Sandy was so grateful and so
comforted that she charged a couple of church-wardens with willow-bark
and sumach-tobacco for us, and told us to smoke as much as we pleased,
it couldn't get under the canopy, and she was used to smoke, being
the first lady in the land who had ever seen a cloud blown. Well,
there couldn't be a more contented or comfortable sight than Sir Launcelot
in his noble armor sitting in gracious serenity at the end of a yard
of snowy church-warden. He was a beautiful man, a lovely man, and
was just intended to make a wife and children happy.
But, of course, Guenever -- however, it's no use to cry over what's
done and can't be helped.
Well, he stood watch-and-watch with me, right straight through,
for three days and nights, till the child was out of danger; then
he took her up in his great arms and kissed her, with his plumes falling
about her golden head, then laid her softly in Sandy's lap again and
took his stately way down the vast hall, between the ranks of admiring
men-at-arms and menials, and so disappeared. And no instinct warned
me that I should never look upon him again in this world! Lord, what
a world of heart-break it is.
The doctors said we must take the child away, if we would coax her
back to health and strength again. And she must have sea-air. So we
took a man-of-war, and a suite of two hundred and sixty persons, and
went cruising about, and after a fortnight of this we stepped ashore
on the French coast, and the doctors thought it would be a good idea
to make something of a stay there. The little king of that region
offered us his hospitalities, and we were glad to accept. If he had
had as many conveniences as he lacked, we should have been plenty
comfortable enough; even as it was, we made out very well, in his
queer old castle, by the help of comforts and luxuries from the ship.
At the end of a month I sent the vessel home for fresh supplies,
and for news. We expected her back in three or four days. She would
bring me, along with other news, the result of a certain experiment
which I had been starting. It was a project of mine to replace the
tournament with something which might furnish an escape for the extra
steam of the chivalry, keep those bucks entertained and out of mischief,
and at the same time preserve the best thing in them, which was their
hardy spirit of emulation. I had had a choice band of them in private
training for some time, and the date was now arriving for their first
public effort.
This experiment was baseball. In order to give the thing vogue from
the start, and place it out of the reach of criticism, I chose my
nines by rank, not capacity. There wasn't a knight in either team
who wasn't a sceptered sovereign. As for material of this sort, there
was a glut of it always around Arthur. You couldn't throw a brick
in any direction and not cripple a king. Of course, I couldn't get
these people to leave off their armor; they wouldn't do that when
they bathed. They consented to differentiate the armor so that a body
could tell one team from the other, but that was the most they would
do. So, one of the teams wore chain-mail ulsters, and the other wore
plate-armor made of my new Bessemer steel. Their practice in the field
was the most fantastic thing I ever saw. Being ball-proof, they never
skipped out of the way, but stood still and took the result; when
a Bessemer was at the bat and a ball hit him, it would bound a hundred
and fifty yards sometimes. And when a man was running, and threw himself
on his stomach to slide to his base, it was like an iron-clad coming
into port. At first I appointed men of no rank to act as umpires,
but I had to discontinue that. These people were no easier to please
than other nines. The umpire's first decision was usually his last;
they broke him in two with a bat, and his friends toted him home on
a shutter. When it was noticed that no
So we took a Man-of-war umpire ever survived a game, umpiring got
to be unpopular. So I was obliged to appoint somebody whose rank and
lofty position under the government would protect him.
Here are the names of the nines:
BESSEMERS
KING ARTHUR.
KING LOT OF LOTHIAN.
KING OF NORTHGALIS.
KING MARSIL.
KING OF LITTLE BRITAIN.
KING LABOR.
KING PELLAM OF LISTENGESE.
KING BAGDEMAGUS.
KING TOLLEME LA FEINTES.
ULSTERS
EMPEROR LUCIUS.
KING LOGRIS.
KING MARHALT OF IRELAND.
KING MORGANORE.
KING MARK OF CORNWALL.
KING NENTRES OF GARLOT.
KING MELIODAS OF LIONES.
KING OF THE LAKE.
THE SOWDAN OF SYRIA.
Umpire -- CLARENCE.
The first public game would certainly draw fifty thousand people;
and for solid fun would be worth going around the world to see. Everything
would be favorable; it was balmy and beautiful spring weather now,
and Nature was all tailored out in her new clothes.
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