King Arthur Collection (234 page)

"What are ye doing to these people?"

"They be madmen, worshipful sir, that have come wandering we know not whence, and—"

"Ye know not whence?  Do ye pretend ye know them not?"

"Most honored sir, we speak but the truth.  They are strangers and unknown to any in this region; and they be the most violent and bloodthirsty madmen that ever—"

"Peace!  Ye know not what ye say.  They are not mad.  Who are ye? And whence are ye?  Explain."

"We are but peaceful strangers, sir," I said, "and traveling upon our own concerns.  We are from a far country, and unacquainted here.  We have purposed no harm; and yet but for your brave interference and protection these people would have killed us. As you have divined, sir, we are not mad; neither are we violent or bloodthirsty."

The gentleman turned to his retinue and said calmly:  "Lash me these animals to their kennels!"

The mob vanished in an instant; and after them plunged the horsemen, laying about them with their whips and pitilessly riding down such as were witless enough to keep the road instead of taking to the bush.  The shrieks and supplications presently died away in the distance, and soon the horsemen began to straggle back.  Meantime the gentleman had been questioning us more closely, but had dug no particulars out of us.  We were lavish of recognition of the service he was doing us, but we revealed nothing more than that we were friendless strangers from a far country.  When the escort were all returned, the gentleman said to one of his servants:

"Bring the led-horses and mount these people."

"Yes, my lord."

We were placed toward the rear, among the servants.  We traveled pretty fast, and finally drew rein some time after dark at a roadside inn some ten or twelve miles from the scene of our troubles.  My lord went immediately to his room, after ordering his supper, and we saw no more of him.  At dawn in the morning we breakfasted and made ready to start.

My lord's chief attendant sauntered forward at that moment with indolent grace, and said:

"Ye have said ye should continue upon this road, which is our direction likewise; wherefore my lord, the earl Grip, hath given commandment that ye retain the horses and ride, and that certain of us ride with ye a twenty mile to a fair town that hight Cambenet, whenso ye shall be out of peril."

We could do nothing less than express our thanks and accept the offer.  We jogged along, six in the party, at a moderate and comfortable gait, and in conversation learned that my lord Grip was a very great personage in his own region, which lay a day's journey beyond Cambenet.  We loitered to such a degree that it was near the middle of the forenoon when we entered the market square of the town.  We dismounted, and left our thanks once more for my lord, and then approached a crowd assembled in the center of the square, to see what might be the object of interest.  It was the remnant of that old peregrinating band of slaves!  So they had been dragging their chains about, all this weary time.  That poor husband was gone, and also many others; and some few purchases had been added to the gang.  The king was not interested, and wanted to move along, but I was absorbed, and full of pity.  I could not take my eyes away from these worn and wasted wrecks of humanity. There they sat, grounded upon the ground, silent, uncomplaining, with bowed heads, a pathetic sight.  And by hideous contrast, a redundant orator was making a speech to another gathering not thirty steps away, in fulsome laudation of "our glorious British liberties!"

I was boiling.  I had forgotten I was a plebeian, I was remembering I was a man.  Cost what it might, I would mount that rostrum and—

Click! the king and I were handcuffed together!  Our companions, those servants, had done it; my lord Grip stood looking on.  The king burst out in a fury, and said:

"What meaneth this ill-mannered jest?"

My lord merely said to his head miscreant, coolly:

"Put up the slaves and sell them!"

Slaves!
 The word had a new sound—and how unspeakably awful!  The king lifted his manacles and brought them down with a deadly force; but my lord was out of the way when they arrived.  A dozen of the rascal's servants sprang forward, and in a moment we were helpless, with our hands bound behind us.  We so loudly and so earnestly proclaimed ourselves freemen, that we got the interested attention of that liberty-mouthing orator and his patriotic crowd, and they gathered about us and assumed a very determined attitude. The orator said:

"If, indeed, ye are freemen, ye have nought to fear—the God-given liberties of Britain are about ye for your shield and shelter! (Applause.)  Ye shall soon see. Bring forth your proofs."

"What proofs?"

"Proof that ye are freemen."

Ah—I remembered!  I came to myself; I said nothing.  But the king stormed out:

"Thou'rt insane, man.  It were better, and more in reason, that this thief and scoundrel here prove that we are
not
freemen."

You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws; by words, not by effects.  They take a
meaning
, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.

All hands shook their heads and looked disappointed; some turned away, no longer interested.  The orator said—and this time in the tones of business, not of sentiment:

"An ye do not know your country's laws, it were time ye learned them.  Ye are strangers to us; ye will not deny that. Ye may be freemen, we do not deny that; but also ye may be slaves.  The law is clear:  it doth not require the claimant to prove ye are slaves, it requireth you to prove ye are not."

I said:

"Dear sir, give us only time to send to Astolat; or give us only time to send to the Valley of Holiness—"

"Peace, good man, these are extraordinary requests, and you may not hope to have them granted.  It would cost much time, and would unwarrantably inconvenience your master—"

"
Master
, idiot!" stormed the king.  "I have no master, I myself am the m—"

"Silence, for God's sake!"

I got the words out in time to stop the king.  We were in trouble enough already; it could not help us any to give these people the notion that we were lunatics.

There is no use in stringing out the details.  The earl put us up and sold us at auction.  This same infernal law had existed in our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience, a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly hellish.  Well, that's the way we are made.

Yes, we were sold at auction, like swine.  In a big town and an active market we should have brought a good price; but this place was utterly stagnant and so we sold at a figure which makes me ashamed, every time I think of it.  The King of England brought seven dollars, and his prime minister nine; whereas the king was easily worth twelve dollars and I as easily worth fifteen.  But that is the way things always go; if you force a sale on a dull market, I don't care what the property is, you are going to make a poor business of it, and you can make up your mind to it.  If the earl had had wit enough to—

However, there is no occasion for my working my sympathies up on his account.  Let him go, for the present; I took his number, so to speak.

The slave-dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto that long chain of his, and we constituted the rear of his procession.  We took up our line of march and passed out of Cambenet at noon; and it seemed to me unaccountably strange and odd that the King of England and his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men and women, and under windows where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark. Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all.  He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king.  But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him.  I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.

CHAPTER XXXV. A PITIFUL INCIDENT
 

It's a world of surprises.  The king brooded; this was natural. What would he brood about, should you say?  Why, about the prodigious nature of his fall, of course—from the loftiest place in the world to the lowest; from the most illustrious station in the world to the obscurest; from the grandest vocation among men to the basest. No, I take my oath that the thing that graveled him most, to start with, was not this, but the price he had fetched!  He couldn't seem to get over that seven dollars.  Well, it stunned me so, when I first found it out, that I couldn't believe it; it didn't seem natural.  But as soon as my mental sight cleared and I got a right focus on it, I saw I was mistaken; it
was
natural.  For this reason:  a king is a mere artificiality, and so a king's feelings, like the impulses of an automatic doll, are mere artificialities; but as a man, he is a reality, and his feelings, as a man, are real, not phantoms.  It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth, and the king certainly wasn't anything more than an average man, if he was up that high.

Confound him, he wearied me with arguments to show that in anything like a fair market he would have fetched twenty-five dollars, sure—a thing which was plainly nonsense, and full or the baldest conceit; I wasn't worth it myself.  But it was tender ground for me to argue on.  In fact, I had to simply shirk argument and do the diplomatic instead.  I had to throw conscience aside, and brazenly concede that he ought to have brought twenty-five dollars; whereas I was quite well aware that in all the ages, the world had never seen a king that was worth half the money, and during the next thirteen centuries wouldn't see one that was worth the fourth of it.  Yes, he tired me.  If he began to talk about the crops; or about the recent weather; or about the condition of politics; or about dogs, or cats, or morals, or theology—no matter what—I sighed, for I knew what was coming; he was going to get out of it a palliation of that tiresome seven-dollar sale.  Wherever we halted where there was a crowd, he would give me a look which said plainly:  "if that thing could be tried over again now, with this kind of folk, you would see a different result."  Well, when he was first sold, it secretly tickled me to see him go for seven dollars; but before he was done with his sweating and worrying I wished he had fetched a hundred.  The thing never got a chance to die, for every day, at one place or another, possible purchasers looked us over, and, as often as any other way, their comment on the king was something like this:

"Here's a two-dollar-and-a-half chump with a thirty-dollar style. Pity but style was marketable."

At last this sort of remark produced an evil result.  Our owner was a practical person and he perceived that this defect must be mended if he hoped to find a purchaser for the king.  So he went to work to take the style out of his sacred majesty.  I could have given the man some valuable advice, but I didn't; you mustn't volunteer advice to a slave-driver unless you want to damage the cause you are arguing for.  I had found it a sufficiently difficult job to reduce the king's style to a peasant's style, even when he was a willing and anxious pupil; now then, to undertake to reduce the king's style to a slave's style—and by force—go to! it was a stately contract.  Never mind the details—it will save me trouble to let you imagine them.  I will only remark that at the end of a week there was plenty of evidence that lash and club and fist had done their work well; the king's body was a sight to see—and to weep over; but his spirit?—why, it wasn't even phased.  Even that dull clod of a slave-driver was able to see that there can be such a thing as a slave who will remain a man till he dies; whose bones you can break, but whose manhood you can't.  This man found that from his first effort down to his latest, he couldn't ever come within reach of the king, but the king was ready to plunge for him, and did it.  So he gave up at last, and left the king in possession of his style unimpaired. The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.

We had a rough time for a month, tramping to and fro in the earth, and suffering.  And what Englishman was the most interested in the slavery question by that time?  His grace the king!  Yes; from being the most indifferent, he was become the most interested. He was become the bitterest hater of the institution I had ever heard talk.  And so I ventured to ask once more a question which I had asked years before and had gotten such a sharp answer that I had not thought it prudent to meddle in the matter further. Would he abolish slavery?

His answer was as sharp as before, but it was music this time; I shouldn't ever wish to hear pleasanter, though the profanity was not good, being awkwardly put together, and with the crash-word almost in the middle instead of at the end, where, of course, it ought to have been.

I was ready and willing to get free now; I hadn't wanted to get free any sooner.  No, I cannot quite say that.  I had wanted to, but I had not been willing to take desperate chances, and had always dissuaded the king from them.  But now—ah, it was a new atmosphere!  Liberty would be worth any cost that might be put upon it now.  I set about a plan, and was straightway charmed with it.  It would require time, yes, and patience, too, a great deal of both.  One could invent quicker ways, and fully as sure ones; but none that would be as picturesque as this; none that could be made so dramatic.  And so I was not going to give this one up.  It might delay us months, but no matter, I would carry it out or break something.

Now and then we had an adventure.  One night we were overtaken by a snow-storm while still a mile from the village we were making for.  Almost instantly we were shut up as in a fog, the driving snow was so thick.  You couldn't see a thing, and we were soon lost.  The slave-driver lashed us desperately, for he saw ruin before him, but his lashings only made matters worse, for they drove us further from the road and from likelihood of succor. So we had to stop at last and slump down in the snow where we were.  The storm continued until toward midnight, then ceased. By this time two of our feebler men and three of our women were dead, and others past moving and threatened with death.  Our master was nearly beside himself.  He stirred up the living, and made us stand, jump, slap ourselves, to restore our circulation, and he helped as well as he could with his whip.

Now came a diversion.  We heard shrieks and yells, and soon a woman came running and crying; and seeing our group, she flung herself into our midst and begged for protection.  A mob of people came tearing after her, some with torches, and they said she was a witch who had caused several cows to die by a strange disease, and practiced her arts by help of a devil in the form of a black cat.  This poor woman had been stoned until she hardly looked human, she was so battered and bloody.  The mob wanted to burn her.

Well, now, what do you suppose our master did?  When we closed around this poor creature to shelter her, he saw his chance.  He said, burn her here, or they shouldn't have her at all.  Imagine that!  They were willing.  They fastened her to a post; they brought wood and piled it about her; they applied the torch while she shrieked and pleaded and strained her two young daughters to her breast; and our brute, with a heart solely for business, lashed us into position about the stake and warmed us into life and commercial value by the same fire which took away the innocent life of that poor harmless mother.  That was the sort of master we had.  I took
his
number.  That snow-storm cost him nine of his flock; and he was more brutal to us than ever, after that, for many days together, he was so enraged over his loss.

We had adventures all along.  One day we ran into a procession. And such a procession!  All the riffraff of the kingdom seemed to be comprehended in it; and all drunk at that.  In the van was a cart with a coffin in it, and on the coffin sat a comely young girl of about eighteen suckling a baby, which she squeezed to her breast in a passion of love every little while, and every little while wiped from its face the tears which her eyes rained down upon it; and always the foolish little thing smiled up at her, happy and content, kneading her breast with its dimpled fat hand, which she patted and fondled right over her breaking heart.

Men and women, boys and girls, trotted along beside or after the cart, hooting, shouting profane and ribald remarks, singing snatches of foul song, skipping, dancing—a very holiday of hellions, a sickening sight.  We had struck a suburb of London, outside the walls, and this was a sample of one sort of London society.  Our master secured a good place for us near the gallows. A priest was in attendance, and he helped the girl climb up, and said comforting words to her, and made the under-sheriff provide a stool for her.  Then he stood there by her on the gallows, and for a moment looked down upon the mass of upturned faces at his feet, then out over the solid pavement of heads that stretched away on every side occupying the vacancies far and near, and then began to tell the story of the case.  And there was pity in his voice—how seldom a sound that was in that ignorant and savage land! I remember every detail of what he said, except the words he said it in; and so I change it into my own words:

"Law is intended to mete out justice.  Sometimes it fails. This cannot be helped.  We can only grieve, and be resigned, and pray for the soul of him who falls unfairly by the arm of the law, and that his fellows may be few.  A law sends this poor young thing to death—and it is right.  But another law had placed her where she must commit her crime or starve with her child—and before God that law is responsible for both her crime and her ignominious death!

"A little while ago this young thing, this child of eighteen years, was as happy a wife and mother as any in England; and her lips were blithe with song, which is the native speech of glad and innocent hearts.  Her young husband was as happy as she; for he was doing his whole duty, he worked early and late at his handicraft, his bread was honest bread well and fairly earned, he was prospering, he was furnishing shelter and sustenance to his family, he was adding his mite to the wealth of the nation.  By consent of a treacherous law, instant destruction fell upon this holy home and swept it away!  That young husband was waylaid and impressed, and sent to sea.  The wife knew nothing of it.  She sought him everywhere, she moved the hardest hearts with the supplications of her tears, the broken eloquence of her despair.  Weeks dragged by, she watching, waiting, hoping, her mind going slowly to wreck under the burden of her misery.  Little by little all her small possessions went for food.  When she could no longer pay her rent, they turned her out of doors.  She begged, while she had strength; when she was starving at last, and her milk failing, she stole a piece of linen cloth of the value of a fourth part of a cent, thinking to sell it and save her child.  But she was seen by the owner of the cloth.  She was put in jail and brought to trial. The man testified to the facts.  A plea was made for her, and her sorrowful story was told in her behalf.  She spoke, too, by permission, and said she did steal the cloth, but that her mind was so disordered of late by trouble that when she was overborne with hunger all acts, criminal or other, swam meaningless through her brain and she knew nothing rightly, except that she was so hungry!  For a moment all were touched, and there was disposition to deal mercifully with her, seeing that she was so young and friendless, and her case so piteous, and the law that robbed her of her support to blame as being the first and only cause of her transgression; but the prosecuting officer replied that whereas these things were all true, and most pitiful as well, still there was much small theft in these days, and mistimed mercy here would be a danger to property—oh, my God, is there no property in ruined homes, and orphaned babes, and broken hearts that British law holds precious!—and so he must require sentence.

"When the judge put on his black cap, the owner of the stolen linen rose trembling up, his lip quivering, his face as gray as ashes; and when the awful words came, he cried out, 'Oh, poor child, poor child, I did not know it was death!' and fell as a tree falls.  When they lifted him up his reason was gone; before the sun was set, he had taken his own life.  A kindly man; a man whose heart was right, at bottom; add his murder to this that is to be now done here; and charge them both where they belong—to the rulers and the bitter laws of Britain.  The time is come, my child; let me pray over thee—not
for
thee, dear abused poor heart and innocent, but for them that be guilty of thy ruin and death, who need it more."

After his prayer they put the noose around the young girl's neck, and they had great trouble to adjust the knot under her ear, because she was devouring the baby all the time, wildly kissing it, and snatching it to her face and her breast, and drenching it with tears, and half moaning, half shrieking all the while, and the baby crowing, and laughing, and kicking its feet with delight over what it took for romp and play.  Even the hangman couldn't stand it, but turned away.  When all was ready the priest gently pulled and tugged and forced the child out of the mother's arms, and stepped quickly out of her reach; but she clasped her hands, and made a wild spring toward him, with a shriek; but the rope—and the under-sheriff—held her short.  Then she went on her knees and stretched out her hands and cried: