The Complete Novels of Mark Twain and the Complete Biography of Mark Twain (213 page)

Said I to myself, as I coiled my lariat and hung it on my saddle-horn, and sat there drunk with glory, "The victory is perfect—no other will venture against me—knight-errantry is dead."  Now imagine my astonishment—and everybody else's, too—to hear the peculiar bugle-call which announces that another competitor is about to enter the lists!  There was a mystery here; I couldn't account for this thing.  Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then I noticed that my lasso was gone!  The old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.

The bugle blew again.  I looked, and down came Sagramor riding again, with his dust brushed off and his veil nicely re-arranged. I trotted up to meet him, and pretended to find him by the sound of his horse's hoofs.  He said:

"Thou'rt quick of ear, but it will not save thee from this!" and he touched the hilt of his great sword.  "An ye are not able to see it, because of the influence of the veil, know that it is no cumbrous lance, but a sword—and I ween ye will not be able to avoid it."

His visor was up; there was death in his smile.  I should never be able to dodge his sword, that was plain.  Somebody was going to die this time.  If he got the drop on me, I could name the corpse.  We rode forward together, and saluted the royalties. This time the king was disturbed.  He said:

"Where is thy strange weapon?"

"It is stolen, sire."

"Hast another at hand?"

"No, sire, I brought only the one."

Then Merlin mixed in:

"He brought but the one because there was but the one to bring. There exists none other but that one.  It belongeth to the king of the Demons of the Sea.  This man is a pretender, and ignorant, else he had known that that weapon can be used in but eight bouts only, and then it vanisheth away to its home under the sea."

"Then is he weaponless," said the king.  "Sir Sagramore, ye will grant him leave to borrow."

"And I will lend!" said Sir Launcelot, limping up.  "He is as brave a knight of his hands as any that be on live, and he shall have mine."

He put his hand on his sword to draw it, but Sir Sagramor said:

"Stay, it may not be.  He shall fight with his own weapons; it was his privilege to choose them and bring them.  If he has erred, on his head be it."

"Knight!" said the king.  "Thou'rt overwrought with passion; it disorders thy mind.  Wouldst kill a naked man?"

"An he do it, he shall answer it to me," said Sir Launcelot.

"I will answer it to any he that desireth!" retorted Sir Sagramor hotly.

Merlin broke in, rubbing his hands and smiling his lowdownest smile of malicious gratification:

"'Tis well said, right well said!  And 'tis enough of parleying, let my lord the king deliver the battle signal."

The king had to yield.  The bugle made proclamation, and we turned apart and rode to our stations.  There we stood, a hundred yards apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues. And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute, everybody gazing, nobody stirring.  It seemed as if the king could not take heart to give the signal.  But at last he lifted his hand, the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramor's long blade described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him come.  I sat still.  On he came.  I did not move.  People got so excited that they shouted to me:

"Fly, fly!  Save thyself!  This is murther!"

I never budged so much as an inch till that thundering apparition had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell what had happened.

Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramor, stone dead.

The people that ran to him were stricken dumb to find that the life was actually gone out of the man and no reason for it visible, no hurt upon his body, nothing like a wound.  There was a hole through the breast of his chain-mail, but they attached no importance to a little thing like that; and as a bullet wound there produces but little blood, none came in sight because of the clothing and swaddlings under the armor.  The body was dragged over to let the king and the swells look down upon it.  They were stupefied with astonishment naturally.  I was requested to come and explain the miracle.  But I remained in my tracks, like a statue, and said:

"If it is a command, I will come, but my lord the king knows that I am where the laws of combat require me to remain while any desire to come against me."

I waited.  Nobody challenged.  Then I said:

"If there are any who doubt that this field is well and fairly won, I do not wait for them to challenge me, I challenge them."

"It is a gallant offer," said the king, "and well beseems you. Whom will you name first?"

"I name none, I challenge all!  Here I stand, and dare the chivalry of England to come against me—not by individuals, but in mass!"

"What!" shouted a score of knights.

"You have heard the challenge.  Take it, or I proclaim you recreant knights and vanquished, every one!"

It was a "bluff" you know.  At such a time it is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to "call," and you rake in the chips.  But just this once—well, things looked squally!  In just no time, five hundred knights were scrambling into their saddles, and before you could wink a widely scattering drove were under way and clattering down upon me.  I snatched both revolvers from the holsters and began to measure distances and calculate chances.

Bang!  One saddle empty.  Bang! another one.  Bang—bang, and I bagged two.  Well, it was nip and tuck with us, and I knew it. If I spent the eleventh shot without convincing these people, the twelfth man would kill me, sure.  And so I never did feel so happy as I did when my ninth downed its man and I detected the wavering in the crowd which is premonitory of panic.  An instant lost now could knock out my last chance.  But I didn't lose it. I raised both revolvers and pointed them—the halted host stood their ground just about one good square moment, then broke and fled.

The day was mine.  Knight-errantry was a doomed institution.  The march of civilization was begun.  How did I feel?  Ah, you never could imagine it.

And Brer Merlin?  His stock was flat again.  Somehow, every time the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de-rol got left.

THREE YEARS LATER

When I broke the back of knight-errantry that time, I no longer felt obliged to work in secret.  So, the very next day I exposed my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine factories and workshops to an astonished world.  That is to say, I exposed the nineteenth century to the inspection of the sixth.

Well, it is always a good plan to follow up an advantage promptly. The knights were temporarily down, but if I would keep them so I must just simply paralyze them—nothing short of that would answer.  You see, I was "bluffing" that last time in the field; it would be natural for them to work around to that conclusion, if I gave them a chance.  So I must not give them time; and I didn't.

I renewed my challenge, engraved it on brass, posted it up where any priest could read it to them, and also kept it standing in the advertising columns of the paper.

I not only renewed it, but added to its proportions.  I said, name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up
against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it
.

I was not bluffing this time.  I meant what I said; I could do what I promised.  There wasn't any way to misunderstand the language of that challenge.  Even the dullest of the chivalry perceived that this was a plain case of "put up, or shut up."  They were wise and did the latter.  In all the next three years they gave me no trouble worth mentioning.

Consider the three years sped.  Now look around on England.  A happy and prosperous country, and strangely altered.  Schools everywhere, and several colleges; a number of pretty good newspapers.  Even authorship was taking a start; Sir Dinadan the Humorist was first in the field, with a volume of gray-headed jokes which I had been familiar with during thirteen centuries.  If he had left out that old rancid one about the lecturer I wouldn't have said anything; but I couldn't stand that one.  I suppressed the book and hanged the author.

Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized.  The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor.  We had a steamboat or two on the Thames, we had steam warships, and the beginnings of a steam commercial marine; I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discover America.

We were building several lines of railway, and our line from Camelot to London was already finished and in operation.  I was shrewd enough to make all offices connected with the passenger service places of high and distinguished honor.  My idea was to attract the chivalry and nobility, and make them useful and keep them out of mischief.  The plan worked very well, the competition for the places was hot.  The conductor of the 4.33 express was a duke; there wasn't a passenger conductor on the line below the degree of earl.  They were good men, every one, but they had two defects which I couldn't cure, and so had to wink at:  they wouldn't lay aside their armor, and they would "knock down" fare—I mean rob the company.

There was hardly a knight in all the land who wasn't in some useful employment.  They were going from end to end of the country in all manner of useful missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering, and their experience in it, made them altogether the most effective spreaders of civilization we had.  They went clothed in steel and equipped with sword and lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn't persuade a person to try a sewing-machine on the installment plan, or a melodeon, or a barbed-wire fence, or a prohibition journal, or any of the other thousand and one things they canvassed for, they removed him and passed on.

I was very happy.  Things were working steadily toward a secretly longed-for point.  You see, I had two schemes in my head which were the vastest of all my projects.  The one was to overthrow the Catholic Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins—not as an Established Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and the other project was to get a decree issued by and by, commanding that upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced, and given to men and women alike—at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and to all mothers who at middle age should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one.  Arthur was good for thirty years yet, he being about my own age—that is to say, forty—and I believed that in that time I could easily have the active part of the population of that day ready and eager for an event which should be the first of its kind in the history of the world—a rounded and complete governmental revolution without bloodshed.  The result to be a republic.  Well, I may as well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it: I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first president myself.  Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found that out.

Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modified way.  His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but with a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate.  He believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy.  I urged that kings were dangerous.  He said, then have cats.  He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose.  They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house, and "Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the grace of God King," would sound as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on.  "And as a rule," said he, in his neat modern English, "the character of these cats would be considerably above the character of the average king, and this would be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reason that a nation always models its morals after its monarch's.  The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it.  The eyes of the whole harried world would soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butchers would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fill the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we should become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we should furnish the cats.  The reign of universal peace would begin then, to end no more forever....  Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow—fzt!—wow!"