King Arthur Collection (233 page)

There was a general gasp of awed astonishment, Dickon the mason murmured, with raised eyes and hands:

"More than three weeks' pay for one day's work!"

"Riches!—of a truth, yes, riches!" muttered Marco, his breath coming quick and short, with excitement.

"Wages will keep on rising, little by little, little by little, as steadily as a tree grows, and at the end of three hundred and forty years more there'll be at least
one
country where the mechanic's average wage will be
two hundred
cents a day!"

It knocked them absolutely dumb!  Not a man of them could get his breath for upwards of two minutes.  Then the coal-burner said prayerfully:

"Might I but live to see it!"

"It is the income of an earl!" said Smug.

"An earl, say ye?" said Dowley; "ye could say more than that and speak no lie; there's no earl in the realm of Bagdemagus that hath an income like to that.  Income of an earl—mf! it's the income of an angel!"

"Now, then, that is what is going to happen as regards wages. In that remote day, that man will earn, with
one
week's work, that bill of goods which it takes you upwards of
fifty
weeks to earn now.  Some other pretty surprising things are going to happen, too.  Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring, what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and servant shall be for that year?"

"Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council; but most of all, the magistrate.  Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes the wages."

"Doesn't ask any of those poor devils to
help
him fix their wages for them, does he?"

"Hm!  That
were
an idea!  The master that's to pay him the money is the one that's rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice."

"Yes—but I thought the other man might have some little trifle at stake in it, too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures. The masters are these:  nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally. These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall have who
do
work.  You see?  They're a 'combine'—a trade union, to coin a new phrase—who band themselves together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to give.  Thirteen hundred years hence—so says the unwritten law—the 'combine' will be the other way, and then how these fine people's posterity will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions!  Yes, indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from now clear away down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing; and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself. Ah, he will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation to settle."

"Do ye believe—"

"That he actually will help to fix his own wages?  Yes, indeed. And he will be strong and able, then."

"Brave times, brave times, of a truth!" sneered the prosperous smith.

"Oh,—and there's another detail.  In that day, a master may hire a man for only just one day, or one week, or one month at a time, if he wants to."

"What?"

"It's true.  Moreover, a magistrate won't be able to force a man to work for a master a whole year on a stretch whether the man wants to or not."

"Will there be
no
law or sense in that day?"

"Both of them, Dowley.  In that day a man will be his own property, not the property of magistrate and master.  And he can leave town whenever he wants to, if the wages don't suit him!—and they can't put him in the pillory for it."

"Perdition catch such an age!" shouted Dowley, in strong indignation. "An age of dogs, an age barren of reverence for superiors and respect for authority!  The pillory—"

"Oh, wait, brother; say no good word for that institution.  I think the pillory ought to be abolished."

"A most strange idea.  Why?"

"Well, I'll tell you why.  Is a man ever put in the pillory for a capital crime?"

"No."

"Is it right to condemn a man to a slight punishment for a small offense and then kill him?"

There was no answer.  I had scored my first point!  For the first time, the smith wasn't up and ready.  The company noticed it. Good effect.

"You don't answer, brother.  You were about to glorify the pillory a while ago, and shed some pity on a future age that isn't going to use it.  I think the pillory ought to be abolished.  What usually happens when a poor fellow is put in the pillory for some little offense that didn't amount to anything in the world?  The mob try to have some fun with him, don't they?"

"Yes."

"They begin by clodding him; and they laugh themselves to pieces to see him try to dodge one clod and get hit with another?"

"Yes."

"Then they throw dead cats at him, don't they?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, suppose he has a few personal enemies in that mob and here and there a man or a woman with a secret grudge against him—and suppose especially that he is unpopular in the community, for his pride, or his prosperity, or one thing or another—stones and bricks take the place of clods and cats presently, don't they?"

"There is no doubt of it."

"As a rule he is crippled for life, isn't he?—jaws broken, teeth smashed out?—or legs mutilated, gangrened, presently cut off?—or an eye knocked out, maybe both eyes?"

"It is true, God knoweth it."

"And if he is unpopular he can depend on
dying
, right there in the stocks, can't he?"

"He surely can!  One may not deny it."

"I take it none of
you
are unpopular—by reason of pride or insolence, or conspicuous prosperity, or any of those things that excite envy and malice among the base scum of a village?  
You
wouldn't think it much of a risk to take a chance in the stocks?"

Dowley winced, visibly.  I judged he was hit.  But he didn't betray it by any spoken word.  As for the others, they spoke out plainly, and with strong feeling.  They said they had seen enough of the stocks to know what a man's chance in them was, and they would never consent to enter them if they could compromise on a quick death by hanging.

"Well, to change the subject—for I think I've established my point that the stocks ought to be abolished.  I think some of our laws are pretty unfair.  For instance, if I do a thing which ought to deliver me to the stocks, and you know I did it and yet keep still and don't report me,
you
will get the stocks if anybody informs on you."

"Ah, but that would serve you but right," said Dowley, "for you
must
inform.  So saith the law."

The others coincided.

"Well, all right, let it go, since you vote me down.  But there's one thing which certainly isn't fair.  The magistrate fixes a mechanic's wage at one cent a day, for instance.  The law says that if any master shall venture, even under utmost press of business, to pay anything
over
that cent a day, even for a single day, he shall be both fined and pilloried for it; and whoever knows he did it and doesn't inform, they also shall be fined and pilloried.  Now it seems to me unfair, Dowley, and a deadly peril to all of us, that because you thoughtlessly confessed, a while ago, that within a week you have paid a cent and fifteen mil—"

Oh, I tell
you
it was a smasher!  You ought to have seen them to go to pieces, the whole gang.  I had just slipped up on poor smiling and complacent Dowley so nice and easy and softly, that he never suspected anything was going to happen till the blow came crashing down and knocked him all to rags.

A fine effect.  In fact, as fine as any I ever produced, with so little time to work it up in.

But I saw in a moment that I had overdone the thing a little. I was expecting to scare them, but I wasn't expecting to scare them to death.  They were mighty near it, though.  You see they had been a whole lifetime learning to appreciate the pillory; and to have that thing staring them in the face, and every one of them distinctly at the mercy of me, a stranger, if I chose to go and report—well, it was awful, and they couldn't seem to recover from the shock, they couldn't seem to pull themselves together. Pale, shaky, dumb, pitiful?  Why, they weren't any better than so many dead men.  It was very uncomfortable.  Of course, I thought they would appeal to me to keep mum, and then we would shake hands, and take a drink all round, and laugh it off, and there an end. But no; you see I was an unknown person, among a cruelly oppressed and suspicious people, a people always accustomed to having advantage taken of their helplessness, and never expecting just or kind treatment from any but their own families and very closest intimates. Appeal to
me
to be gentle, to be fair, to be generous?  Of course, they wanted to, but they couldn't dare.

CHAPTER XXXIV. THE YANKEE AND THE KING SOLD AS SLAVES
 

Well, what had I better do?  Nothing in a hurry, sure.  I must get up a diversion; anything to employ me while I could think, and while these poor fellows could have a chance to come to life again.  There sat Marco, petrified in the act of trying to get the hang of his miller-gun—turned to stone, just in the attitude he was in when my pile-driver fell, the toy still gripped in his unconscious fingers.  So I took it from him and proposed to explain its mystery.  Mystery! a simple little thing like that; and yet it was mysterious enough, for that race and that age.

I never saw such an awkward people, with machinery; you see, they were totally unused to it.  The miller-gun was a little double-barreled tube of toughened glass, with a neat little trick of a spring to it, which upon pressure would let a shot escape.  But the shot wouldn't hurt anybody, it would only drop into your hand.  In the gun were two sizes—wee mustard-seed shot, and another sort that were several times larger.  They were money.  The mustard-seed shot represented milrays, the larger ones mills.  So the gun was a purse; and very handy, too; you could pay out money in the dark with it, with accuracy; and you could carry it in your mouth; or in your vest pocket, if you had one.  I made them of several sizes—one size so large that it would carry the equivalent of a dollar. Using shot for money was a good thing for the government; the metal cost nothing, and the money couldn't be counterfeited, for I was the only person in the kingdom who knew how to manage a shot tower. "Paying the shot" soon came to be a common phrase.  Yes, and I knew it would still be passing men's lips, away down in the nineteenth century, yet none would suspect how and when it originated.

The king joined us, about this time, mightily refreshed by his nap, and feeling good.  Anything could make me nervous now, I was so uneasy—for our lives were in danger; and so it worried me to detect a complacent something in the king's eye which seemed to indicate that he had been loading himself up for a performance of some kind or other; confound it, why must he go and choose such a time as this?

I was right.  He began, straight off, in the most innocently artful, and transparent, and lubberly way, to lead up to the subject of agriculture.  The cold sweat broke out all over me. I wanted to whisper in his ear, "Man, we are in awful danger! every moment is worth a principality till we get back these men's confidence;
don't
waste any of this golden time."  But of course I couldn't do it.  Whisper to him?  It would look as if we were conspiring.  So I had to sit there and look calm and pleasant while the king stood over that dynamite mine and mooned along about his damned onions and things.  At first the tumult of my own thoughts, summoned by the danger-signal and swarming to the rescue from every quarter of my skull, kept up such a hurrah and confusion and fifing and drumming that I couldn't take in a word; but presently when my mob of gathering plans began to crystallize and fall into position and form line of battle, a sort of order and quiet ensued and I caught the boom of the king's batteries, as if out of remote distance:

"—were not the best way, methinks, albeit it is not to be denied that authorities differ as concerning this point, some contending that the onion is but an unwholesome berry when stricken early from the tree—"

The audience showed signs of life, and sought each other's eyes in a surprised and troubled way.

"—whileas others do yet maintain, with much show of reason, that this is not of necessity the case, instancing that plums and other like cereals do be always dug in the unripe state—"

The audience exhibited distinct distress; yes, and also fear.

"—yet are they clearly wholesome, the more especially when one doth assuage the asperities of their nature by admixture of the tranquilizing juice of the wayward cabbage—"

The wild light of terror began to glow in these men's eyes, and one of them muttered, "These be errors, every one—God hath surely smitten the mind of this farmer."  I was in miserable apprehension; I sat upon thorns.

"—and further instancing the known truth that in the case of animals, the young, which may be called the green fruit of the creature, is the better, all confessing that when a goat is ripe, his fur doth heat and sore engame his flesh, the which defect, taken in connection with his several rancid habits, and fulsome appetites, and godless attitudes of mind, and bilious quality of morals—"

They rose and went for him!  With a fierce shout, "The one would betray us, the other is mad!  Kill them!  Kill them!" they flung themselves upon us.  What joy flamed up in the king's eye!  He might be lame in agriculture, but this kind of thing was just in his line.  He had been fasting long, he was hungry for a fight. He hit the blacksmith a crack under the jaw that lifted him clear off his feet and stretched him flat on his back.  "St. George for Britain!" and he downed the wheelwright.  The mason was big, but I laid him out like nothing.  The three gathered themselves up and came again; went down again; came again; and kept on repeating this, with native British pluck, until they were battered to jelly, reeling with exhaustion, and so blind that they couldn't tell us from each other; and yet they kept right on, hammering away with what might was left in them.  Hammering each other—for we stepped aside and looked on while they rolled, and struggled, and gouged, and pounded, and bit, with the strict and wordless attention to business of so many bulldogs.  We looked on without apprehension, for they were fast getting past ability to go for help against us, and the arena was far enough from the public road to be safe from intrusion.

Well, while they were gradually playing out, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what had become of Marco.  I looked around; he was nowhere to be seen.  Oh, but this was ominous!  I pulled the king's sleeve, and we glided away and rushed for the hut.  No Marco there, no Phyllis there!  They had gone to the road for help, sure. I told the king to give his heels wings, and I would explain later. We made good time across the open ground, and as we darted into the shelter of the wood I glanced back and saw a mob of excited peasants swarm into view, with Marco and his wife at their head. They were making a world of noise, but that couldn't hurt anybody; the wood was dense, and as soon as we were well into its depths we would take to a tree and let them whistle.  Ah, but then came another sound—dogs!  Yes, that was quite another matter.  It magnified our contract—we must find running water.

We tore along at a good gait, and soon left the sounds far behind and modified to a murmur.  We struck a stream and darted into it. We waded swiftly down it, in the dim forest light, for as much as three hundred yards, and then came across an oak with a great bough sticking out over the water.  We climbed up on this bough, and began to work our way along it to the body of the tree; now we began to hear those sounds more plainly; so the mob had struck our trail.  For a while the sounds approached pretty fast.  And then for another while they didn't.  No doubt the dogs had found the place where we had entered the stream, and were now waltzing up and down the shores trying to pick up the trail again.

When we were snugly lodged in the tree and curtained with foliage, the king was satisfied, but I was doubtful.  I believed we could crawl along a branch and get into the next tree, and I judged it worth while to try.  We tried it, and made a success of it, though the king slipped, at the junction, and came near failing to connect. We got comfortable lodgment and satisfactory concealment among the foliage, and then we had nothing to do but listen to the hunt.

Presently we heard it coming—and coming on the jump, too; yes, and down both sides of the stream.  Louder—louder—next minute it swelled swiftly up into a roar of shoutings, barkings, tramplings, and swept by like a cyclone.

"I was afraid that the overhanging branch would suggest something to them," said I, "but I don't mind the disappointment.  Come, my liege, it were well that we make good use of our time.  We've flanked them.  Dark is coming on, presently.  If we can cross the stream and get a good start, and borrow a couple of horses from somebody's pasture to use for a few hours, we shall be safe enough."

We started down, and got nearly to the lowest limb, when we seemed to hear the hunt returning.  We stopped to listen.

"Yes," said I, "they're baffled, they've given it up, they're on their way home.  We will climb back to our roost again, and let them go by."

So we climbed back.  The king listened a moment and said:

"They still search—I wit the sign.  We did best to abide."

He was right.  He knew more about hunting than I did.  The noise approached steadily, but not with a rush.  The king said:

"They reason that we were advantaged by no parlous start of them, and being on foot are as yet no mighty way from where we took the water."

"Yes, sire, that is about it, I am afraid, though I was hoping better things."

The noise drew nearer and nearer, and soon the van was drifting under us, on both sides of the water.  A voice called a halt from the other bank, and said:

"An they were so minded, they could get to yon tree by this branch that overhangs, and yet not touch ground.  Ye will do well to send a man up it."

"Marry, that we will do!"

I was obliged to admire my cuteness in foreseeing this very thing and swapping trees to beat it.  But, don't you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight?  Awkwardness and stupidity can.  The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.  Well, how could I, with all my gifts, make any valuable preparation against a near-sighted, cross-eyed, pudding-headed clown who would aim himself at the wrong tree and hit the right one?  And that is what he did.  He went for the wrong tree, which was, of course, the right one by mistake, and up he started.

Matters were serious now.  We remained still, and awaited developments. The peasant toiled his difficult way up.  The king raised himself up and stood; he made a leg ready, and when the comer's head arrived in reach of it there was a dull thud, and down went the man floundering to the ground.  There was a wild outbreak of anger below, and the mob swarmed in from all around, and there we were treed, and prisoners.  Another man started up; the bridging bough was detected, and a volunteer started up the tree that furnished the bridge.  The king ordered me to play Horatius and keep the bridge.  For a while the enemy came thick and fast; but no matter, the head man of each procession always got a buffet that dislodged him as soon as he came in reach.  The king's spirits rose, his joy was limitless.  He said that if nothing occurred to mar the prospect we should have a beautiful night, for on this line of tactics we could hold the tree against the whole country-side.

However, the mob soon came to that conclusion themselves; wherefore they called off the assault and began to debate other plans. They had no weapons, but there were plenty of stones, and stones might answer.  We had no objections.  A stone might possibly penetrate to us once in a while, but it wasn't very likely; we were well protected by boughs and foliage, and were not visible from any good aiming point.  If they would but waste half an hour in stone-throwing, the dark would come to our help.  We were feeling very well satisfied.  We could smile; almost laugh.

But we didn't; which was just as well, for we should have been interrupted.  Before the stones had been raging through the leaves and bouncing from the boughs fifteen minutes, we began to notice a smell.  A couple of sniffs of it was enough of an explanation—it was smoke!  Our game was up at last.  We recognized that.  When smoke invites you, you have to come.  They raised their pile of dry brush and damp weeds higher and higher, and when they saw the thick cloud begin to roll up and smother the tree, they broke out in a storm of joy-clamors.  I got enough breath to say:

"Proceed, my liege; after you is manners."

The king gasped:

"Follow me down, and then back thyself against one side of the trunk, and leave me the other.  Then will we fight.  Let each pile his dead according to his own fashion and taste."

Then he descended, barking and coughing, and I followed.  I struck the ground an instant after him; we sprang to our appointed places, and began to give and take with all our might.  The powwow and racket were prodigious; it was a tempest of riot and confusion and thick-falling blows.  Suddenly some horsemen tore into the midst of the crowd, and a voice shouted:

"Hold—or ye are dead men!"

How good it sounded!  The owner of the voice bore all the marks of a gentleman:  picturesque and costly raiment, the aspect of command, a hard countenance, with complexion and features marred by dissipation. The mob fell humbly back, like so many spaniels.  The gentleman inspected us critically, then said sharply to the peasants: