King Arthur Collection (220 page)

I set forty-seven prisoners loose out of those awful rat-holes, and left only one in captivity.  He was a lord, and had killed another lord, a sort of kinsman of the queen.  That other lord had ambushed him to assassinate him, but this fellow had got the best of him and cut his throat.  However, it was not for that that I left him jailed, but for maliciously destroying the only public well in one of his wretched villages.  The queen was bound to hang him for killing her kinsman, but I would not allow it:  it was no crime to kill an assassin.  But I said I was willing to let her hang him for destroying the well; so she concluded to put up with that, as it was better than nothing.

Dear me, for what trifling offenses the most of those forty-seven men and women were shut up there!  Indeed, some were there for no distinct offense at all, but only to gratify somebody's spite; and not always the queen's by any means, but a friend's.  The newest prisoner's crime was a mere remark which he had made.  He said he believed that men were about all alike, and one man as good as another, barring clothes.  He said he believed that if you were to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he couldn't tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel clerk.  Apparently here was a man whose brains had not been reduced to an ineffectual mush by idiotic training.  I set him loose and sent him to the Factory.

Some of the cells carved in the living rock were just behind the face of the precipice, and in each of these an arrow-slit had been pierced outward to the daylight, and so the captive had a thin ray from the blessed sun for his comfort.  The case of one of these poor fellows was particularly hard.  From his dusky swallow's hole high up in that vast wall of native rock he could peer out through the arrow-slit and see his own home off yonder in the valley; and for twenty-two years he had watched it, with heartache and longing, through that crack.  He could see the lights shine there at night, and in the daytime he could see figures go in and come out—his wife and children, some of them, no doubt, though he could not make out at that distance.  In the course of years he noted festivities there, and tried to rejoice, and wondered if they were weddings or what they might be.  And he noted funerals; and they wrung his heart.  He could make out the coffin, but he could not determine its size, and so could not tell whether it was wife or child.  He could see the procession form, with priests and mourners, and move solemnly away, bearing the secret with them.  He had left behind him five children and a wife; and in nineteen years he had seen five funerals issue, and none of them humble enough in pomp to denote a servant.  So he had lost five of his treasures; there must still be one remaining—one now infinitely, unspeakably precious,—but
which
one? wife, or child? That was the question that tortured him, by night and by day, asleep and awake.  Well, to have an interest, of some sort, and half a ray of light, when you are in a dungeon, is a great support to the body and preserver of the intellect.  This man was in pretty good condition yet.  By the time he had finished telling me his distressful tale, I was in the same state of mind that you would have been in yourself, if you have got average human curiosity; that is to say, I was as burning up as he was to find out which member of the family it was that was left.  So I took him over home myself; and an amazing kind of a surprise party it was, too—typhoons and cyclones of frantic joy, and whole Niagaras of happy tears; and by George! we found the aforetime young matron graying toward the imminent verge of her half century, and the babies all men and women, and some of them married and experimenting familywise themselves—for not a soul of the tribe was dead!  Conceive of the ingenious devilishness of that queen:  she had a special hatred for this prisoner, and she had
invented
all those funerals herself, to scorch his heart with; and the sublimest stroke of genius of the whole thing was leaving the family-invoice a funeral
short
, so as to let him wear his poor old soul out guessing.

But for me, he never would have got out.  Morgan le Fay hated him with her whole heart, and she never would have softened toward him. And yet his crime was committed more in thoughtlessness than deliberate depravity.  He had said she had red hair.  Well, she had; but that was no way to speak of it.  When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

Consider it:  among these forty-seven captives there were five whose names, offenses, and dates of incarceration were no longer known!  One woman and four men—all bent, and wrinkled, and mind-extinguished patriarchs.  They themselves had long ago forgotten these details; at any rate they had mere vague theories about them, nothing definite and nothing that they repeated twice in the same way.  The succession of priests whose office it had been to pray daily with the captives and remind them that God had put them there, for some wise purpose or other, and teach them that patience, humbleness, and submission to oppression was what He loved to see in parties of a subordinate rank, had traditions about these poor old human ruins, but nothing more.  These traditions went but little way, for they concerned the length of the incarceration only, and not the names of the offenses.  And even by the help of tradition the only thing that could be proven was that none of the five had seen daylight for thirty-five years:  how much longer this privation has lasted was not guessable.  The king and the queen knew nothing about these poor creatures, except that they were heirlooms, assets inherited, along with the throne, from the former firm.  Nothing of their history had been transmitted with their persons, and so the inheriting owners had considered them of no value, and had felt no interest in them.  I said to the queen:

"Then why in the world didn't you set them free?"

The question was a puzzler.  She didn't know
why
she hadn't, the thing had never come up in her mind.  So here she was, forecasting the veritable history of future prisoners of the Castle d'If, without knowing it.  It seemed plain to me now, that with her training, those inherited prisoners were merely property—nothing more, nothing less.  Well, when we inherit property, it does not occur to us to throw it away, even when we do not value it.

When I brought my procession of human bats up into the open world and the glare of the afternoon sun—previously blindfolding them, in charity for eyes so long untortured by light—they were a spectacle to look at.  Skeletons, scarecrows, goblins, pathetic frights, every one; legitimatest possible children of Monarchy by the Grace of God and the Established Church.  I muttered absently:

"I
wish
I could photograph them!"

You have seen that kind of people who will never let on that they don't know the meaning of a new big word.  The more ignorant they are, the more pitifully certain they are to pretend you haven't shot over their heads.  The queen was just one of that sort, and was always making the stupidest blunders by reason of it.  She hesitated a moment; then her face brightened up with sudden comprehension, and she said she would do it for me.

I thought to myself:  She? why what can she know about photography? But it was a poor time to be thinking.  When I looked around, she was moving on the procession with an axe!

Well, she certainly was a curious one, was Morgan le Fay.  I have seen a good many kinds of women in my time, but she laid over them all for variety.  And how sharply characteristic of her this episode was.  She had no more idea than a horse of how to photograph a procession; but being in doubt, it was just like her to try to do it with an axe.

CHAPTER XIX. KNIGHT-ERRANTRY AS A TRADE
 

Sandy and I were on the road again, next morning, bright and early. It was so good to open up one's lungs and take in whole luscious barrels-ful of the blessed God's untainted, dew-fashioned, woodland-scented air once more, after suffocating body and mind for two days and nights in the moral and physical stenches of that intolerable old buzzard-roost!  I mean, for me:  of course the place was all right and agreeable enough for Sandy, for she had been used to high life all her days.

Poor girl, her jaws had had a wearisome rest now for a while, and I was expecting to get the consequences.  I was right; but she had stood by me most helpfully in the castle, and had mightily supported and reinforced me with gigantic foolishnesses which were worth more for the occasion than wisdoms double their size; so I thought she had earned a right to work her mill for a while, if she wanted to, and I felt not a pang when she started it up:

"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirty winter of age southward—"

"Are you going to see if you can work up another half-stretch on the trail of the cowboys, Sandy?"

"Even so, fair my lord."

"Go ahead, then.  I won't interrupt this time, if I can help it. Begin over again; start fair, and shake out all your reefs, and I will load my pipe and give good attention."

"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirty winter of age southward.  And so they came into a deep forest, and by fortune they were nighted, and rode along in a deep way, and at the last they came into a courtelage where abode the duke of South Marches, and there they asked harbour.  And on the morn the duke sent unto Sir Marhaus, and bad him make him ready.  And so Sir Marhaus arose and armed him, and there was a mass sung afore him, and he brake his fast, and so mounted on horseback in the court of the castle, there they should do the battle.  So there was the duke already on horseback, clean armed, and his six sons by him, and every each had a spear in his hand, and so they encountered, whereas the duke and his two sons brake their spears upon him, but Sir Marhaus held up his spear and touched none of them.  Then came the four sons by couples, and two of them brake their spears, and so did the other two.  And all this while Sir Marhaus touched them not.  Then Sir Marhaus ran to the duke, and smote him with his spear that horse and man fell to the earth. And so he served his sons.  And then Sir Marhaus alight down, and bad the duke yield him or else he would slay him.  And then some of his sons recovered, and would have set upon Sir Marhaus.  Then Sir Marhaus said to the duke, Cease thy sons, or else I will do the uttermost to you all.  When the duke saw he might not escape the death, he cried to his sons, and charged them to yield them to Sir Marhaus.  And they kneeled all down and put the pommels of their swords to the knight, and so he received them.  And then they holp up their father, and so by their common assent promised unto Sir Marhaus never to be foes unto King Arthur, and thereupon at Whitsuntide after, to come he and his sons, and put them in the king's grace.*

[*Footnote:  The story is borrowed, language and all, from the Morte d'Arthur.—M.T.]

"Even so standeth the history, fair Sir Boss.  Now ye shall wit that that very duke and his six sons are they whom but few days past you also did overcome and send to Arthur's court!"

"Why, Sandy, you can't mean it!"

"An I speak not sooth, let it be the worse for me."

"Well, well, well,—now who would ever have thought it?  One whole duke and six dukelets; why, Sandy, it was an elegant haul. Knight-errantry is a most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there
is
money in it, after all, if you have luck.  Not that I would ever engage in it as a business, for I wouldn't.  No sound and legitimate business can be established on a basis of speculation.  A successful whirl in the knight-errantry line—now what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts?  It's just a corner in pork, that's all, and you can't make anything else out of it. You're rich—yes,—suddenly rich—for about a day, maybe a week; then somebody corners the market on
you
, and down goes your bucket-shop; ain't that so, Sandy?"

"Whethersoever it be that my mind miscarrieth, bewraying simple language in such sort that the words do seem to come endlong and overthwart—"

"There's no use in beating about the bush and trying to get around it that way, Sandy, it's
so
, just as I say.  I
know
it's so.  And, moreover, when you come right down to the bedrock, knight-errantry is
worse
than pork; for whatever happens, the pork's left, and so somebody's benefited anyway; but when the market breaks, in a knight-errantry whirl, and every knight in the pool passes in his checks, what have you got for assets?  Just a rubbish-pile of battered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware.  Can you call
those
assets?  Give me pork, every time.  Am I right?"

"Ah, peradventure my head being distraught by the manifold matters whereunto the confusions of these but late adventured haps and fortunings whereby not I alone nor you alone, but every each of us, meseemeth—"

"No, it's not your head, Sandy.  Your head's all right, as far as it goes, but you don't know business; that's where the trouble is.  It unfits you to argue about business, and you're wrong to be always trying.  However, that aside, it was a good haul, anyway, and will breed a handsome crop of reputation in Arthur's court.  And speaking of the cowboys, what a curious country this is for women and men that never get old.  Now there's Morgan le Fay, as fresh and young as a Vassar pullet, to all appearances, and here is this old duke of the South Marches still slashing away with sword and lance at his time of life, after raising such a family as he has raised.  As I understand it, Sir Gawaine killed seven of his sons, and still he had six left for Sir Marhaus and me to take into camp.  And then there was that damsel of sixty winter of age still excursioning around in her frosty bloom—How old are you, Sandy?"

It was the first time I ever struck a still place in her.  The mill had shut down for repairs, or something.