Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0129/01294.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 9KB | 184 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01294}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 28}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{right
too
work
king
now
please
call
like
shoulders
}
$Date{1889}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

Chapter 28

Drilling The King

     On the morning of the fourth day, when it was just sunrise, and we had
been tramping an hour in the chill dawn, I came to a resolution: the king
must be drilled; things could not go on so, he must be taken in hand and
deliberately and conscientiously drilled, or we couldn't ever venture to
enter a dwelling; the very cats would know this masquerader for a humbug and
no peasant.  So I called a halt and said:

     "Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are all right, there is no
discrepancy; but as between your clothes and your bearing, you are all wrong,
there is a most noticeable discrepancy.  Your soldierly stride, your lordly
port - these will not do.  You stand too straight, your looks are too high,
too confident.  The cares of a kingdom do not stoop the shoulders, they do not
droop the chin, they do not depress the high level of the eye glance, they do
not put doubt and fear in the heart and hang out the signs of them in
slouching body and unsure step.  It is the sordid cares of the lowly born that
do these things.  You must learn the trick; you must imitate the trademarks of
poverty, misery, oppression, insult, and the other several and common
inhumanities that sap the manliness out of a man and make him a loyal and
proper and approved subject and a satisfaction to his masters, or the very
infants will know you for better than your disguise, and we shall go to pieces
at the first hut we stop at.  Pray try to walk like this."

     The king took careful note, and then tried an imitation.

     "Pretty fair - pretty fair.  Chin a little lower, please - there, very
good.  Eyes too high; pray don't look at the horizon, look at the ground, ten
steps in front of you.  Ah - that is better, that is very good.  Wait,
please; you betray too much vigor, too much decision; you want more of a
shamble.  Look at me, please - this is what I mean....  Now you are getting
it; that is the idea - at least, it sort of approaches it....  Yes, that is
pretty fair.  But!  There is a great big something wanting, I don't quite
know what it is.  Please walk thirty yards, so that I can get a perspective
on the thing....  Now, then - your head's right, speed's right, shoulders
right, eyes right, chin right, gait, carriage, general style right -
everything's right!  And yet the fact remains the aggregate's wrong.  The
account don't balance.  Do it again, please...now I think I begin to see what
it is.  Yes, I've struck it.  You see, the genuine spiritlessness is wanting;
that's what's the trouble.  It's all amateur - mechanical details all right,
almost to a hair; everything about the delusion perfect, except that it don't
delude."

     "What, then, must one do to prevail?"

     "Let me think...I can't seem to quite get at it.  In fact there isn't
anything that can right the matter but practice.  This is a good place for
it: roots and stony ground to break up your steady gait, a region not liable
to interruption, only one field and one hut in sight, and they so far away
that nobody could see us from there.  It will be well to move a little off
the road and put in the whole day drilling you, sire."

     After the drill had gone on a little while, I said:

     "Now, sire, imagine that we are at the door of the hut yonder, and the
family are before us.  Proceed, please - accost the head of the house."

     The king unconsciously straightened up like a monument and said, with
frozen austerity:

     "Varlet, bring a seat; and serve to me what cheer ye have."

     "Ah, your grace, that is not well done."

     "In what lacketh it?"

     "These people do not call each other varlets."

     "Nay, is that true?"

     "Yes; only those above them call them so."

     "Then must I try again.  I will call him villein."

     "No-no; for he may be a freeman."

     "Ah - so.  Then peradventure I should call him goodman."

     "That would answer, your grace, but it would be still better if you said
friend, or brother."

     "Brother!  To dirt like that?"

     "Ah, but we are pretending to be dirt like that, too."

     "It is even true.  I will say it.  Brother, bring a seat, and thereto
what cheer ye have, withal.  Now 'tis right."

     "Not quite, not wholly right.  You have asked for one, not us - for one,
not both; food for one, a seat for one."

     The king looked puzzled - he wasn't a very heavy weight, intellectually.
His head was an hourglass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain
at a time, not the whole idea at once.

     "Would you have a seat also - and sit?"

     "If I did not sit, the man would perceive that we were only pretending
to be equals - and playing the deception pretty poorly, too."

     "It is well and truly said!  How wonderful is truth, come it in
whatsoever unexpected form it may!  Yes, he must bring out seats and food for
both, and in serving us present not ewer and napkin with more show of respect
to the one than to the other."

     "And there is even yet a detail that needs correcting.  He must bring
nothing outside - we will go in - in among the dirt, and possibly other
repulsive things - and take the food with the household, and after the
fashion of the house, and all on equal terms, except the man be of the serf
class; and finally, there will be no ewer and no napkin, whether he be serf
or free.  Please walk again, my liege.  There - it is better - it is the best
yet; but not perfect.  The shoulders have known no ignobler burden than iron
mail, and they will not stoop."

     "Give me, then, the bag.  I will learn the spirit that goeth with
burdens that have not honor.  It is the spirit that stoopeth the shoulders, I
ween, and not the weight; for armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a
man standeth straight in it....  Nay, but me no buts, offer me no objections.
I will have the thing.  Strap it upon my back."

     He was complete, now, with that knapsack on, and looked as little like a
king as any man I had ever seen.  But it was an obstinate pair of shoulders;
they could not seem to learn the trick of stooping with any sort of deceptive
naturalness.  The drill went on, I prompting and correcting:

     "Now, make believe you are in debt, and eaten up by relentless
creditors; you are out of work - which is horseshoeing, let us say - and can
get none; and your wife is sick, your children are crying because they are
hungry -"

     And so on, and so on.  I drilled him as representing in turn, all sorts
of people out of luck and suffering dire privations and misfortunes.  But
lord it was only just words, words - they meant nothing in the world to him,
I might just as well have whistled.  Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to
you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words
try to describe.  There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and
complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's
hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and
is righteously entitled to much bigger pay.  Why, they really think that, you
know, because they know all about the one, but haven't tried the other.  But
I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough
in the universe to hire me to swing a pickax thirty days, but I will do the
hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher
it down - and I will be satisfied, too.

     Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is
its own highest reward.  The poorest paid architect, engineer, general,
author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher,
singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the
magician with the fiddle bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great
orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him
- why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's
a sarcasm just the same.  The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but
there it is: and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the
worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also.  And it's
also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and
kingship.