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7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | How have they managed to stand it all these generations? |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | How can they sleep at night for dreading the tortures of next day? |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | When the morning came at last, I was in a bad enough plight: seedy, drowsy, fagged, from want of sleep; weary from thrashing around, famished from long fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of the animals; and crippled with rheumatism. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | And how had it fared with the nobly born, the titled aristocrat, the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise? |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Why, she was as fresh as a squirrel; she had slept like the dead; and as for a bath, probably neither she nor any other noble in the land had ever had one, and so she was not missing it. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Measured by modern standards, they were merely modified savages, those people. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | This noble lady showed no impatience to get to breakfast--and that smacks of the savage, too. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | On their journeys those Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how to bear them; and also how to freight up against probable fasts before starting, after the style of the Indian and the anaconda. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | As like as not, Sandy was loaded for a three-day stretch. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | In half an hour we came upon a group of ragged poor creatures who had assembled to mend the thing which was regarded as a road. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | They were as humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast with them, they were so flattered, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of mine that at first they were not able to believe that I was in earnest. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | My lady put up her scornful lip and withdrew to one side; she said in their hearing that she would as soon think of eating with the other cattle--a remark which embarrassed these poor devils merely because it referred to them, and not because it insulted or offended them, for it didn't. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | And yet they were not slaves, not chattels. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy, and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be the Nation, and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and not only that, but to believe it right and as it should be. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | The priests had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially such poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter there and become respectfully quiet. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly American ear. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else's without remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him gratis, and be ready to come at a moment's notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grain around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarms from my lord's dovecote settled on their crops they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off its fat tenth, then the king's commissioner took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case it was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and yet other taxes--upon this free and independent pauper, but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day's work and whip the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's daughter--but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back, and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the bishop's road three days each--gratis; every head of a family, and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for their servants. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood--one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror --that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families--including the voter's; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families--_including his own_. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man _could_ have a say in the government. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I said I had seen one--and that it would last until it had an Established Church. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Again they were all unhit--at first. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that proposition again; and state it slowly, so it could soak into his understanding. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I did it; and after a little he had the idea, and he brought his fist down and said _he_ didn't believe a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily get down in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal from a nation its will and preference must be a crime and the first of all crimes. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I said to myself: "This one's a man. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in its system of government." |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags--that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have _at all times_ an undeniable and indefeasible right to _alter their form of government_ in such a manner as they may think expedient." |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | The thing that would have best suited the circus side of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution; but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating his materials up to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain to get left. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I had never been accustomed to getting left, even if I do say it myself. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Wherefore, the "deal" which had been for some time working into shape in my mind was of a quite different pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man there who sat munching black bread with that abused and mistaught herd of human sheep, but took him aside and talked matter of another sort to him. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | After I had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from his veins; and with this and a sliver I wrote on a piece of bark-- Put him in the Man-factory-- and gave it to him, and said: "Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into the hands of Amyas le Poulet, whom I call Clarence, and he will understand." |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | "He is a priest, then," said the man, and some of the enthusiasm went out of his face. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | "How--a priest? |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Didn't I tell you that no chattel of the Church, no bond-slave of pope or bishop can enter my Man-Factory? |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Didn't I tell you that _you_ couldn't enter unless your religion, whatever it might be, was your own free property?" "Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; wherefore it liked me not, and bred in me a cold doubt, to hear of this priest being there." |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | "But he isn't a priest, I tell you." |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | The man looked far from satisfied. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | He said: "He is not a priest, and yet can read?" |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | "He is not a priest and yet can read--yes, and write, too, for that matter. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I taught him myself." |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | The man's face cleared. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | "And it is the first thing that you yourself will be taught in that Factory--" "I? |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I would give blood out of my heart to know that art. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Why, I will be your slave, your--" "No you won't, you won't be anybody's slave. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Take your family and go along. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Your lord the bishop will confiscate your small property, but no matter. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Clarence will fix you all right." |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | CHAPTER XIV "DEFEND THEE, LORD" |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I paid three pennies for my breakfast, and a most extravagant price it was, too, seeing that one could have breakfasted a dozen persons for that money; but I was feeling good by this time, and I had always been a kind of spendthrift anyway; and then these people had wanted to give me the food for nothing, scant as their provision was, and so it was a grateful pleasure to emphasize my appreciation and sincere thankfulness with a good big financial lift where the money would do so much more good than it would in my helmet, where, these pennies being made of iron and not stinted in weight, my half-dollar's worth was a good deal of a burden to me. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I spent money rather too freely in those days, it is true; but one reason for it was that I hadn't got the proportions of things entirely adjusted, even yet, after so long a sojourn in Britain--hadn't got along to where I was able to absolutely realize that a penny in Arthur's land and a couple of dollars in Connecticut were about one and the same thing: just twins, as you may say, in purchasing power. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | If my start from Camelot could have been delayed a very few days I could have paid these people in beautiful new coins from our own mint, and that would have pleased me; and them, too, not less. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I had adopted the American values exclusively. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | In a week or two now, cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, and also a trifle of gold, would be trickling in thin but steady streams all through the commercial veins of the kingdom, and I looked to see this new blood freshen up its life. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | The farmers were bound to throw in something, to sort of offset my liberality, whether I would or no; so I let them give me a flint and steel; and as soon as they had comfortably bestowed Sandy and me on our horse, I lit my pipe. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | When the first blast of smoke shot out through the bars of my helmet, all those people broke for the woods, and Sandy went over backwards and struck the ground with a dull thud. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | They thought I was one of those fire-belching dragons they had heard so much about from knights and other professional liars. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I had infinite trouble to persuade those people to venture back within explaining distance. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Then I told them that this was only a bit of enchantment which would work harm to none but my enemies. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | And I promised, with my hand on my heart, that if all who felt no enmity toward me would come forward and pass before me they should see that only those who remained behind would be struck dead. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | The procession moved with a good deal of promptness. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | There were no casualties to report, for nobody had curiosity enough to remain behind to see what would happen. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I lost some time, now, for these big children, their fears gone, became so ravished with wonder over my awe-compelling fireworks that I had to stay there and smoke a couple of pipes out before they would let me go. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | Still the delay was not wholly unproductive, for it took all that time to get Sandy thoroughly wonted to the new thing, she being so close to it, you know. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | It plugged up her conversation mill, too, for a considerable while, and that was a gain. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | But above all other benefits accruing, I had learned something. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I was ready for any giant or any ogre that might come along, now. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | We tarried with a holy hermit, that night, and my opportunity came about the middle of the next afternoon. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | We were crossing a vast meadow by way of short-cut, and I was musing absently, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, when Sandy suddenly interrupted a remark which she had begun that morning, with the cry: "Defend thee, lord!--peril of life is toward!" |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | And she slipped down from the horse and ran a little way and stood. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I looked up and saw, far off in the shade of a tree, half a dozen armed knights and their squires; and straightway there was bustle among them and tightening of saddle-girths for the mount. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | My pipe was ready and would have been lit, if I had not been lost in thinking about how to banish oppression from this land and restore to all its people their stolen rights and manhood without disobliging anybody. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I lit up at once, and by the time I had got a good head of reserved steam on, here they came. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | All together, too; none of those chivalrous magnanimities which one reads so much about --one courtly rascal at a time, and the rest standing by to see fair play. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | No, they came in a body, they came with a whirr and a rush, they came like a volley from a battery; came with heads low down, plumes streaming out behind, lances advanced at a level. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | It was a handsome sight, a beautiful sight--for a man up a tree. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | I laid my lance in rest and waited, with my heart beating, till the iron wave was just ready to break over me, then spouted a column of white smoke through the bars of my helmet. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | You should have seen the wave go to pieces and scatter! |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | This was a finer sight than the other one. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | But these people stopped, two or three hundred yards away, and this troubled me. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | My satisfaction collapsed, and fear came; I judged I was a lost man. |
7,244 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 3. | But Sandy was radiant; and was going to be eloquent--but I stopped her, and told her my magic had miscarried, somehow or other, and she must mount, with all despatch, and we must ride for life. |
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