The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0127/01274.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 13KB | 204 lines

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$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 8}
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$Author{Twain, Mark}
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$Date{1889}
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Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

Chapter 8

The Boss

     To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the
onlooking world consent to it is a finer.  The tower episode solidified my
power, and made it impregnable.  If any were perchance disposed to be jealous
and critical before that, they experienced a change of heart, now.  There was
not anyone in the kingdom who would have considered it good judgment to
meddle with my matters.

     I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances.  For a
time, I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my "dream," and listen for the
Colt's factory whistle; but that sort of thing played itself out, gradually,
and at last I was fully able to realize that I was actually living in the
sixth century, and in Arthur's court, not a lunatic asylum.  After that, I was
just as much at home in that century as I could have been in any other; and as
for preference, I wouldn't have traded it for the twentieth.  Look at the
opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to
sail in and grow up with the country.  The grandest field that ever was; and
all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn't a baby to me in
acquirements and capacities; whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth
century?  I should be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag
a seine downstreet any day and catch a hundred better men than myself.

     What a jump I had made!  I couldn't keep from thinking about it, and
contemplating it, just as one does who has struck oil.  There was nothing
back of me that could approach it, unless it might be Joseph's case; and
Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equal it, quite.  For it stands to
reason that as Joseph's splendid financial ingenuities advantaged nobody but
the king, the general public must have regarded him with a good deal of
disfavor, whereas I had done my entire public a kindness in sparing the sun,
and was popular by reason of it.

     I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himself was the
shadow.  My power was colossal; and it was not a mere name, as such things
have generally been, it was the genuine article.  I stood here, at the very
spring and source of the second great period of the world's history; and
could see the trickling stream of that history gather, and deepen and
broaden, and roll its mighty tides down the far centuries; and I could note
the upspringing of adventurers like myself in the shelter of its long array
of thrones: De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers, Villierses; the war-making,
campaign-directing wantons of France, and Charles the Second's
scepter-wielding drabs; but nowhere in the procession was my full-sized
fellow visible.  I was a Unique; and glad to know that fact could not be
dislodged or challenged for thirteen centuries and a half, for sure.

     Yes, in power I was equal to the king.  At the same time there was
another power that was a trifle stronger than both of us put together.  That
was the Church.  I do not wish to disguise that fact.  I couldn't, if I
wanted to.  But never mind about that, now; it will show up, in its proper
place, later on.  It didn't cause me any trouble in the beginning - at least
any of consequence.

     Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest.  And the people!
They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why, they were
nothing but rabbits.  It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free
atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward
their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love
and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the
lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him!  Why, dear
me, any kind of royalty, howsoever modified, any kind of aristocracy,
howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up
under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself,
and don't believe it when somebody else tells you.  It is enough to make a
body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always
occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate
people that have always figured as its aristocracies - a company of monarchs
and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if
left, like their betters, to their own exertions.

     The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves, pure and simple,
and bore that name, and wore the iron collar on their necks; and the rest
were slaves in fact, but without the name; they imagined themselves men and
freemen, and called themselves so.  The truth was, the nation as a body was
in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church
and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be
fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be
happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they
might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the
degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride
and think themselves the gods of this world.  And for all this, the thanks
they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they
took even this sort of attention as an honor.

     Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and
examine.  I had mine, the king and his people had theirs.  In both cases they
flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have
proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract
on his hands.  For instance, those people had inherited the idea that all men
without title and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural gifts and
acquirements or hadn't, were creatures of no more consideration than so many
animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the idea that human daws who
can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and
unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at.  The way I was looked
upon was odd, but it was natural.  You know how the keeper and the public
regard the elephant in the menagerie: well, that is the idea.  They are full
of admiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious strength; they speak with
pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvels which are far and away
beyond their own powers; and they speak with the same pride of the fact that
in his wrath he is able to drive a thousand men before him.  But does that
make him one of them?  No; the raggedest tramp in the pit would smile at the
idea.  He couldn't comprehend it; couldn't take it in; couldn't in any remote
way conceive of it.  Well, to the king, the nobles, and all the nation, down
to the very slaves and tramps, I was just that kind of an elephant, and
nothing more.  I was admired, also feared; but it was as an animal is admired
and feared.  The animal is not reverenced, neither was I; I was not even
respected.  I had no pedigree, no inherited title; so in the king's and
nobles' eyes I was mere dirt; the people regarded me with wonder and awe, but
there was no reverence mixed with it; through the force of inherited ideas
they were not able to conceive of anything being entitled to that except
pedigree and lordship.  There you see the hand of that awful power, the Roman
Catholic Church.  In two or three little centuries it had converted a nation
of men to a nation of worms.  Before the day of the Church's supremacy in the
world, men were men, and held their heads up, and had a man's pride and
spirit and independence; and what of greatness and position a person got