Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0128/01286.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob01286}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 20}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{sandy
sir
hogs
how
castle
like
never
old
upon
yet}
$Date{1889}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

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 Toothbrush - 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 horsetail 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
other 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
horsetail 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
toothbrush, with motto: "Try Noyoudont."  This was a toothbrush 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
than 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 shortcut 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 toothwash.  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 their 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 philosophising 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 long, 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 swineherds" -

     "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 swineherds.  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
swineherds 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.