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$Unique_ID{bob01288}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 22}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{miracle
time
like
merlin
mind
water
way
get
day
might}
$Date{1889}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

Chapter 22

The Holy Fountain

     The pilgrims were human beings.  Otherwise they would have acted
differently.  They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the
journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had
come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angleworms
would probably have done - turn back and get at something profitable - no,
anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as
much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be.
There is no accounting for human beings.

     We made good time, and a couple of hours before sunset we stood upon the
high confines of the Valley of Holiness and our eyes swept it from end to end
and noted its features.  That is, its large features.  These were the three
masses of buildings.  They were distant and isolated temporalities shrunken
to toy constructions in the lonely waste of what seemed a desert - and was.
Such a scene is always mournful, it is so impressively still, and looks so
steeped in death.  But there was a sound here which interrupted the stillness
only to add to its mournfulness; this was the faint far sound of tolling
bells which floated fitfully to us on the passing breeze, and so faintly, so
softly, that we hardly knew whether we heard it with our ears or with our
spirits.

     We reached the monastery before dark, and there the males were given
lodging, but the women were sent over to the nunnery.  The bells were close
at hand, now, and their solemn booming smote upon the ear like a message of
doom.  A superstitious despair possessed the heart of every monk and
published itself in his ghastly face.  Everywhere, these black-robed,
soft-sandled, tallow-visaged specters appeared, flitted about, and
disappeared, noiseless as the creatures of a troubled dream, and as uncanny.

     The old abbot's joy to see me was pathetic.  Even to tears; but he did
the shedding himself.  He said:

     "Delay not, son, but get to thy saving work.  An we bring not the water
back again, and soon, we are ruined, and the good work of two hundred years
must end.  And see thou do it with enchantments that be holy, for the Church
will not endure that work in her cause be done by devil's magic."

     "When I work, Father, be sure there will be no devil's work connected
with it.  I shall use no arts that come of the devil, and no elements not
created by the hand of God.  But is Merlin working strictly on pious lines?"

     "Ah, he said he would, my son, he said he would, and took oath to make
his promise good."

     "Well, in that case, let him proceed."

     "But surely you will not sit idle by, but help?"

     "It will not answer to mix methods, Father; neither would it be
professional courtesy.  Two of a trade must not underbid each other.  We
might as well cut rates and be done with it; it would arrive at that in the
end.  Merlin has the contract; no other magician can touch it till he throws
it up."

     "But I will take it from him; it is a terrible emergency and the act is
thereby justified.  And if it were not so, who will give law to the Church?
The Church giveth law to all; and what she wills to do, that she may do, hurt
whom it may.  I will take it from him; you shall begin upon the moment."

     "It may not be, Father.  No doubt, as you say, where power is supreme,
one can do as one likes and suffer no injury; but we poor magicians are not
so situated.  Merlin is a very good magician in a small way, and has quite a
neat provincial reputation.  He is struggling along, doing the best he can,
and it would not be etiquette for me to take his job until he himself
abandons it."

     The abbot's face lighted.

     "Ah, that is simple.  There are ways to persuade him to abandon it."

     "No-no, Father, it skills not, as these people say.  If he were
persuaded against his will, he would load that well with a malicious
enchantment which would balk me until I found out its secret.  It might take
a month.  I could set up a little enchantment of mine which I call the
telephone, and he could not find out its secret in a hundred years.  Yes, you
perceive, he might block me for a month.  Would you like to risk a month in a
dry time like this?"

     "A month!  The mere thought of it maketh me to shudder.  Have it thy
way, my son.  But my heart is heavy with this disappointment.  Leave me, and
let me wear my spirit with weariness and waiting, even as I have done these
ten long days, counterfeiting thus the thing that is called rest, the prone
body making outward sign of repose where inwardly is none."

     Of course it would have been best, all round, for Merlin to waive
etiquette and quit and call it half a day, since he would never be able to
start that water, for he was a true magician of the time: which is to say,
the big miracles, the ones that gave him his reputation, always had the luck
to be performed when nobody but Merlin was present; he couldn't start this
well with all this crowd around to see; a crowd was as bad for a magician's
miracle in that day as it was for a spiritualist's miracle in mine: there was
sure to be some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at the crucial moment and
spoil everything.  But I did not want Merlin to retire from the job until I
was ready to take hold of it effectively myself; and I could not do that
until I got my things from Camelot, and that would take two or three days.

     My presence gave the monks hope, and cheered them up a good deal;
insomuch that they ate a square meal that night for the first time in ten
days.  As soon as their stomachs had been properly reinforced with food,
their spirits began to rise fast; when the mead began to go round they rose
faster.  By the time everybody was half-seas over, the holy community was in
good shape to make a night of it; so we stayed by the board and put it
through on that line.  Matters got to be very jolly.  Good old questionable
stories were told that made the tears run down and cavernous mouths stand
wide and the round bellies shake with laughter; and questionable songs were
bellowed out in a mighty chorus that drowned the boom of the tolling bells.

     At last I ventured a story myself; and vast was the success of it.  Not
right off, of course, for the native of those islands does not as a rule
dissolve upon the early applications of a humorous thing; but the fifth time
I told it, they began to crack, in places; the eighth time I told it, they
began to crumble; at the twelfth repetition they fell apart in chunks; and at
the fifteenth they disintegrated, and I got a broom and swept them up.  This
language is figurative.  Those islanders - well, they are slow pay, at first,
in the matter of return for your investment of effort, but in the end they
make the pay of all other nations poor and small by contrast.

     I was at the well next day betimes.  Merlin was there, enchanting away
like a beaver, but not raising the moisture.  He was not in a pleasant humor;
and every time I hinted that perhaps this contract was a shade too hefty for
a novice he unlimbered his tongue and cursed like a bishop - French bishop of
the Regency days, I mean.

     Matters were about as I expected to find them.  The "fountain" was an
ordinary well, it had been dug in the ordinary way, and stoned up in the
ordinary way.  There was no miracle about it.  Even the lie that had created
its reputation was not miraculous; I could have told it myself, with one hand
tied behind me.  The well was in a dark chamber which stood in the center of
a cut-stone chapel, whose walls were hung with pious pictures of a
workmanship that would have made a chromo feel good; pictures historically
commemorative of curative miracles which had been achieved by the waters when
nobody was looking.  That is, nobody but angels: they are always on deck when
there is a miracle to the fore - so as to get put in the picture, perhaps.
Angels are as fond of that as a fire company; look at the old masters.

     The well chamber was dimly lighted by lamps; the water was drawn with a
windlass and chain, by monks, and poured into troughs which delivered it into
stone reservoirs outside, in the chapel - when there was water to draw, I
mean - and none but monks could enter the well chamber.  I entered it, for I
had temporary authority to do so, by courtesy of my professional brother and
subordinate.  But he hadn't entered it himself.  He did everything by
incantations; he never worked his intellect.  If he had stepped in there and
used his eyes, instead of his disordered mind, he could have cured the well
by natural means, and then turned it into a miracle in the customary way; but
no, he was an old numskull, a magician who believed in his own magic; and no
magician can thrive who is handicapped with a superstition like that.

     I had an idea that the well had sprung a leak; that some of the wall
stones near the bottom had fallen and exposed fissures that allowed the water
to escape.  I measured the chain - ninety-eight feet.  Then I called in a
couple of monks, locked the door, took a candle, and made them lower me in
the bucket.  When the chain was all paid out, the candle confirmed my
suspicion; a considerable section of the wall was gone, exposing a good big
fissure.

     I almost regretted that my theory about the well's trouble was correct,
because I had another one that had a showy point or two about it for a
miracle.  I remembered that in America, many centuries later, when an oil
well ceased to flow, they used to blast it out with a dynamite torpedo.  If I
should find this well dry, and no explanation of it, I could astonish these
people most nobly by having a person of no especial value drop a dynamite
bomb into it.  It was my idea to appoint Merlin.  However, it was plain that
there was no occasion for the bomb.  One cannot have everything the way he
would like it.  A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment,
anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.  That is what I did.  I
said to myself, I am in no hurry, I can wait; that bomb will come good, yet.
And it did, too.

     When I was above ground again, I turned out the monks, and let down a
fishline: the well was a hundred and fifty feet deep, and there was forty-one
feet of water in it!  I called in a monk and asked:

     "How deep is the well?"

     "That, sir, I wit not, having never been told."

     "How does the water usually stand in it?"

     Near to the top, these two centuries, as the testimony goeth, brought
down to us through our predecessors."

     It was true - as to recent times at least - for there was witness to it,
and better witness than a monk: only about twenty or thirty feet of the chain
showed wear and use, the rest of it was unworn and rusty.  What had happened
when the well gave out that other time?  Without doubt some practical person
had come along and mended the leak, and then had come up and told the abbot
he had discovered by divination that if the sinful bath were destroyed the
well would flow again.  The leak had befallen again, now, and these children
would have prayed, and processioned, and tolled their bells for heavenly
succor till they all dried up and blew away, and no innocent of them all
would ever have thought to drop a fishline into the well or go down in it and
find out what was really the matter.  Old habit of mind is one of the
toughest things to get away from in the world.  It transmits itself like
physical form and feature; and for a man, in those days, to have had an idea
that his ancestors hadn't had, would have brought him under suspicion of
being illegitimate.  I said to the monk:

     "It is a difficult miracle to restore water in a dry well, but we will
try, if my brother Merlin fails.  Brother Merlin is a very passable artist,
but only in the parlor magic line, and he may not succeed; in fact is not
likely to succeed.  But that should be nothing to his discredit; the man that
can do this kind of  miracle knows enough to keep hotel."

     "Hotel?  I mind not to have heard -"

     "Of hotel?  It's what you call hostel.  The man that can do this miracle
can keep hostel.  I can do this miracle; I shall do this miracle; yet I do
not try to conceal from you that it is a miracle to tax the occult powers to
the last strain."

     "None knoweth that truth better than the brotherhood, indeed; for it is
of record that aforetime it was parlous difficult and took a year.
Natheless, God send you good success, and to that end will we pray."

     As a matter of business it was a good idea to get the notion around that
the thing was difficult.  Many a small thing has been made large by the right
kind of advertising.  That monk was filled up with the difficulty of this
enterprise; he would fill up the others.  In two days the solicitude would be
booming.

     On my way home at noon, I met Sandy.  She had been sampling the hermits.
I said:

     "I would like to do that, myself.  This is Wednesday.  Is there a
matinee?"

     "A which, please you, sir?"

     "Matinee.  Do they keep open, afternoons?"

     "Who?"

     "The hermits, of course."

     "Keep open?"

     "Yes, keep open.  Isn't that plain enough?  Do they knock off at noon."

     "Knock off?"

     "Knock off - yes, knock off.  What is the matter with knock off?  I
never saw such a dunderhead; can't you understand anything at all?  In plain
terms, do they shut up shop, draw the game, bank the fires -"

     "Shut up shop, draw -"

     "There, never mind, let it go.  You make me tired.  You can't seem to
understand the simplest thing."

     "I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me dole and sorrow that
I fail, albeit sith I am but a simple damsel and taught of none, being from
the cradle unbaptized in those deep waters of learning that do anoint with a
sovereignty him that partaketh of that most noble sacrament, investing him
with reverend state to the mental eye of the humble mortal who, by bar and
lack of that great consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a
symbol of that other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to the
pitying eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of grief do lie
bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall in the darkness of his mind
encounter these golden phrases of high mystery, these shut-up-shops, and
draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is but by the grace of God that he
burst not for envy of the mind that can beget, and tongue that can deliver so
great and mellow-sounding miracles of speech, and if there do ensue confusion
in that humbler mind, and failure to divine the meanings of these wonders,
then if so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true, wit ye
well it is the very substance of worshipful dear homage and may not lightly
be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted this complexion of my mood and
mind and understood that that I would I could not, and that I could not I
might not, nor yet nor might nor could, nor might-not nor could-not, might be
by advantage turned to the desired would, and so I pray you mercy of my
fault, and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive it, good my
master and most dear lord."

     I couldn't make it all out - that is, the details - but I got the
general idea; and enough of it, too, to be ashamed.  It was not fair to
spring those nineteenth century technicalities upon the untutored infant of
the sixth and then rail at her because she couldn't get their drift; and when
she was making the honest best drive at it she could, too, and no fault of
hers that she couldn't fetch the  home plate; and so I apologized.  Then we
meandered pleasantly away toward the hermit holes in sociable converse
together, and better friends than ever.

     I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for
this girl; for nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her
train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences
of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of
the Mother of the German Language.  I was so impressed with this, that
sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I
unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and
if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure.  She had exactly the
German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark,
or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into
a single sentence, or die.  Whenever the literary German dives into a
sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the
other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

     We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon.  It was a most
strange menagerie.  The chief emulation among them seemed to be, to see which
could manage to be the uncleanest and most prosperous with vermin.  Their
manner and attitudes were the last expression of complacent
self-righteousness.  It was one anchorite's pride to lie naked in the mud and
let the insects bite him and blister him unmolested; it was another's to lean
against a rock, all day long, conspicuous to the admiration of the throng of
pilgrims, and pray; it was another's to go naked, and crawl around on all
fours; it was another's to drag about with him, year in and year out, eighty
pounds of iron; it was another's to never lie down when he slept, but to
stand among the thornbushes and snore when there were pilgrims around to
look; a woman, who had the white hair of age, and no other apparel, was black
from crown to heel with forty-seven years of holy abstinence from water.
Groups of gazing pilgrims stood around all and every of these strange
objects, lost in reverent wonder, and envious of the fleckless sanctity which
these pious austerities had won for them from an exacting heaven.

     By and by we went to see one of the supremely great ones.  He was a
mighty celebrity; his fame had penetrated all Christendom; the noble and the
renowned journeyed from the remotest lands  on the globe to pay him
reverence.  His stand was in the center of the widest part of the valley; and
it took all that space to hold his crowds.

     His stand was a pillar sixty feet high, with a broad platform on the top
of it.  He was now doing what he had been doing every day for twenty years up
there - bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly almost to his feet.  It was
his way of praying.  I timed him with a stopwatch, and he made twelve hundred
and forty-four revolutions in twenty-four minutes and forty-six seconds.  It
seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste.  It was one of the most
useful motions in mechanics, the pedal movement; so I made a note in my
memorandum book, purposing some day to apply a system of elastic cords to him
and run a sewing machine with it.  I afterwards carried out that scheme, and
got five years' good service out of him; in which time he turned out upwards
of eighteen thousand first-rate tow-linen shirts, which was ten a day.  I
worked him Sundays and all; he was going Sundays the same as weekdays, and it
was no use to waste the power.  These shirts cost me nothing but just the
mere trifle for the materials - I furnished those myself, it would not have
been right to make him do that - and they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a
dollar and a half apiece, which was the price of fifty cows or a blooded
racehorse in Arthurdom.  They were regarded as a perfect protection against
sin, and advertised as such by my knights everywhere, with the paintpot and
stencil plate; insomuch that there was not a cliff or a boulder or a dead
wall in England but you could read on it at a mile distance:

     "Buy the only genuine St. Stylite; patronized by the Nobility.  Patent
applied for".

     There was more money in the business than one knew what to do with.  As
it extended, I brought out a line of goods suitable for kings, and a nobby
thing for duchesses and that sort, with ruffles down the fore hatch and the
running gear clewed up with a featherstitch to leeward and then hauled aft
with a backstay and triced up with a half-turn in the standing rigging
forward of the weather gaskets.  Yes, it was a daisy.

     But about that time I noticed that the motive power had taken to
standing on one leg, and I found that there was something the matter with the
other one; so I stocked the business and unloaded, taking Sir Bors de Ganis
into camp financially along with certain of his friends: for the works
stopped within a year, and the good saint got him to his rest.  But he had
earned it.  I can say that for him.

     When I saw him that first time - however, his personal condition will
not quite bear description here.  You can read it in the Lives of the
Saints.^*

[Footnote *: All the details concerning the hermits, in this chapter, are
from Lecky - but greatly modified.  This book not being a history but only a
tale, the majority of the historian's frank details were too strong for
reproduction in it. - Editor.]