King Arthur Collection (223 page)

I closed up alongside of a burly fellow with a fat good-humored face, purposing to make myself agreeable and pick up some further crumbs of fact; but I had hardly more than scraped acquaintance with him when he began eagerly and awkwardly to lead up, in the immemorial way, to that same old anecdote—the one Sir Dinadan told me, what time I got into trouble with Sir Sagramor and was challenged of him on account of it.  I excused myself and dropped to the rear of the procession, sad at heart, willing to go hence from this troubled life, this vale of tears, this brief day of broken rest, of cloud and storm, of weary struggle and monotonous defeat; and yet shrinking from the change, as remembering how long eternity is, and how many have wended thither who know that anecdote.

Early in the afternoon we overtook another procession of pilgrims; but in this one was no merriment, no jokes, no laughter, no playful ways, nor any happy giddiness, whether of youth or age.  Yet both were here, both age and youth; gray old men and women, strong men and women of middle age, young husbands, young wives, little boys and girls, and three babies at the breast.  Even the children were smileless; there was not a face among all these half a hundred people but was cast down, and bore that set expression of hopelessness which is bred of long and hard trials and old acquaintance with despair.  They were slaves.  Chains led from their fettered feet and their manacled hands to a sole-leather belt about their waists; and all except the children were also linked together in a file six feet apart, by a single chain which led from collar to collar all down the line.  They were on foot, and had tramped three hundred miles in eighteen days, upon the cheapest odds and ends of food, and stingy rations of that.  They had slept in these chains every night, bundled together like swine.  They had upon their bodies some poor rags, but they could not be said to be clothed.  Their irons had chafed the skin from their ankles and made sores which were ulcerated and wormy.  Their naked feet were torn, and none walked without a limp.  Originally there had been a hundred of these unfortunates, but about half had been sold on the trip.  The trader in charge of them rode a horse and carried a whip with a short handle and a long heavy lash divided into several knotted tails at the end.  With this whip he cut the shoulders of any that tottered from weariness and pain, and straightened them up.  He did not speak; the whip conveyed his desire without that.  None of these poor creatures looked up as we rode along by; they showed no consciousness of our presence. And they made no sound but one; that was the dull and awful clank of their chains from end to end of the long file, as forty-three burdened feet rose and fell in unison.  The file moved in a cloud of its own making.

All these faces were gray with a coating of dust.  One has seen the like of this coating upon furniture in unoccupied houses, and has written his idle thought in it with his finger.  I was reminded of this when I noticed the faces of some of those women, young mothers carrying babes that were near to death and freedom, how a something in their hearts was written in the dust upon their faces, plain to see, and lord, how plain to read! for it was the track of tears.  One of these young mothers was but a girl, and it hurt me to the heart to read that writing, and reflect that it was come up out of the breast of such a child, a breast that ought not to know trouble yet, but only the gladness of the morning of life; and no doubt—

She reeled just then, giddy with fatigue, and down came the lash and flicked a flake of skin from her naked shoulder.  It stung me as if I had been hit instead.  The master halted the file and jumped from his horse.  He stormed and swore at this girl, and said she had made annoyance enough with her laziness, and as this was the last chance he should have, he would settle the account now. She dropped on her knees and put up her hands and began to beg, and cry, and implore, in a passion of terror, but the master gave no attention.  He snatched the child from her, and then made the men-slaves who were chained before and behind her throw her on the ground and hold her there and expose her body; and then he laid on with his lash like a madman till her back was flayed, she shrieking and struggling the while piteously.  One of the men who was holding her turned away his face, and for this humanity he was reviled and flogged.

All our pilgrims looked on and commented—on the expert way in which the whip was handled.  They were too much hardened by lifelong everyday familiarity with slavery to notice that there was anything else in the exhibition that invited comment.  This was what slavery could do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior lobe of human feeling; for these pilgrims were kind-hearted people, and they would not have allowed that man to treat a horse like that.

I wanted to stop the whole thing and set the slaves free, but that would not do.  I must not interfere too much and get myself a name for riding over the country's laws and the citizen's rights roughshod.  If I lived and prospered I would be the death of slavery, that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so that when I became its executioner it should be by command of the nation.

Just here was the wayside shop of a smith; and now arrived a landed proprietor who had bought this girl a few miles back, deliverable here where her irons could be taken off.  They were removed; then there was a squabble between the gentleman and the dealer as to which should pay the blacksmith.  The moment the girl was delivered from her irons, she flung herself, all tears and frantic sobbings, into the arms of the slave who had turned away his face when she was whipped.  He strained her to his breast, and smothered her face and the child's with kisses, and washed them with the rain of his tears.  I suspected.  I inquired.  Yes, I was right; it was husband and wife.  They had to be torn apart by force; the girl had to be dragged away, and she struggled and fought and shrieked like one gone mad till a turn of the road hid her from sight; and even after that, we could still make out the fading plaint of those receding shrieks.  And the husband and father, with his wife and child gone, never to be seen by him again in life?—well, the look of him one might not bear at all, and so I turned away; but I knew I should never get his picture out of my mind again, and there it is to this day, to wring my heartstrings whenever I think of it.

We put up at the inn in a village just at nightfall, and when I rose next morning and looked abroad, I was ware where a knight came riding in the golden glory of the new day, and recognized him for knight of mine—Sir Ozana le Cure Hardy.  He was in the gentlemen's furnishing line, and his missionarying specialty was plug hats.  He was clothed all in steel, in the beautifulest armor of the time—up to where his helmet ought to have been; but he hadn't any helmet, he wore a shiny stove-pipe hat, and was ridiculous a spectacle as one might want to see.  It was another of my surreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd.  Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather hat boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it.  I dressed and ran down to welcome Sir Ozana and get his news.

"How is trade?" I asked.

"Ye will note that I have but these four left; yet were they sixteen whenas I got me from Camelot."

"Why, you have certainly done nobly, Sir Ozana.  Where have you been foraging of late?"

"I am but now come from the Valley of Holiness, please you sir."

"I am pointed for that place myself.  Is there anything stirring in the monkery, more than common?"

"By the mass ye may not question it!....  Give him good feed, boy, and stint it not, an thou valuest thy crown; so get ye lightly to the stable and do even as I bid....  Sir, it is parlous news I bring, and—be these pilgrims?  Then ye may not do better, good folk, than gather and hear the tale I have to tell, sith it concerneth you, forasmuch as ye go to find that ye will not find, and seek that ye will seek in vain, my life being hostage for my word, and my word and message being these, namely:  That a hap has happened whereof the like has not been seen no more but once this two hundred years, which was the first and last time that that said misfortune strake the holy valley in that form by commandment of the Most High whereto by reasons just and causes thereunto contributing, wherein the matter—"

"The miraculous fount hath ceased to flow!"  This shout burst from twenty pilgrim mouths at once.

"Ye say well, good people.  I was verging to it, even when ye spake."

"Has somebody been washing again?"

"Nay, it is suspected, but none believe it.  It is thought to be some other sin, but none wit what."

"How are they feeling about the calamity?"

"None may describe it in words.  The fount is these nine days dry. The prayers that did begin then, and the lamentations in sackcloth and ashes, and the holy processions, none of these have ceased nor night nor day; and so the monks and the nuns and the foundlings be all exhausted, and do hang up prayers writ upon parchment, sith that no strength is left in man to lift up voice.  And at last they sent for thee, Sir Boss, to try magic and enchantment; and if you could not come, then was the messenger to fetch Merlin, and he is there these three days now, and saith he will fetch that water though he burst the globe and wreck its kingdoms to accomplish it; and right bravely doth he work his magic and call upon his hellions to hie them hither and help, but not a whiff of moisture hath he started yet, even so much as might qualify as mist upon a copper mirror an ye count not the barrel of sweat he sweateth betwixt sun and sun over the dire labors of his task; and if ye—"

Breakfast was ready.  As soon as it was over I showed to Sir Ozana these words which I had written on the inside of his hat:  "Chemical Department, Laboratory extension, Section G. Pxxp.  Send two of first size, two of No. 3, and six of No. 4, together with the proper complementary details—and two of my trained assistants."  And I said:

"Now get you to Camelot as fast as you can fly, brave knight, and show the writing to Clarence, and tell him to have these required matters in the Valley of Holiness with all possible dispatch."

"I will well, Sir Boss," and he was off.

CHAPTER XXII. 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 angle-worms 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-sandaled, 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 eight 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—98 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 fish-line; 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 fish-line 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 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."