A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

CHAPTER XXXI

MARCO

We strolled along in a sufficiently indolent fashion now, andtalked. We must dispose of about the amount of time it oughtto take to go to the little hamlet of Abblasoure and put justiceon the track of those murderers and get back home again. Andmeantime I had an auxiliary interest which had never paled yet,never lost its novelty for me since I had been in Arthur's kingdom:the behavior--born of nice and exact subdivisions of caste--of chancepassers-by toward each other. Toward the shaven monk who trudgedalong with his cowl tilted back and the sweat washing down hisfat jowls, the coal-burner was deeply reverent; to the gentlemanhe was abject; with the small farmer and the free mechanic he wascordial and gossipy; and when a slave passed by with a countenancerespectfully lowered, this chap's nose was in the air--he couldn'teven see him. Well, there are times when one would like to hangthe whole human race and finish the farce.

Presently we struck an incident. A small mob of half-naked boysand girls came tearing out of the woods, scared and shrieking.The eldest among them were not more than twelve or fourteen yearsold. They implored help, but they were so beside themselves thatwe couldn't make out what the matter was. However, we plungedinto the wood, they skurrying in the lead, and the trouble wasquickly revealed: they had hanged a little fellow with a bark rope,and he was kicking and struggling, in the process of choking todeath. We rescued him, and fetched him around. It was some morehuman nature; the admiring little folk imitating their elders;they were playing mob, and had achieved a success which promisedto be a good deal more serious than they had bargained for.

It was not a dull excursion for me. I managed to put in the timevery well. I made various acquaintanceships, and in my qualityof stranger was able to ask as many questions as I wanted to.A thing which naturally interested me, as a statesman, was thematter of wages. I picked up what I could under that head duringthe afternoon. A man who hasn't had much experience, and doesn'tthink, is apt to measure a nation's prosperity or lack of prosperityby the mere size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, thenation is prosperous; if low, it isn't. Which is an error. Itisn't what sum you get, it's how much you can buy with it, that'sthe important thing; and it's that that tells whether your wagesare high in fact or only high in name. I could remember how itwas in the time of our great civil war in the nineteenth century.In the North a carpenter got three dollars a day, gold valuation;in the South he got fifty--payable in Confederate shinplastersworth a dollar a bushel. In the North a suit of overalls costthree dollars--a day's wages; in the South it cost seventy-five--which was two days' wages. Other things were in proportion.Consequently, wages were twice as high in the North as they werein the South, because the one wage had that much more purchasingpower than the other had.

Yes, I made various acquaintances in the hamlet and a thing thatgratified me a good deal was to find our new coins in circulation--lots of milrays, lots of mills, lots of cents, a good many nickels,and some silver; all this among the artisans and commonaltygenerally; yes, and even some gold--but that was at the bank,that is to say, the goldsmith's. I dropped in there while Marco,the son of Marco, was haggling with a shopkeeper over a quarterof a pound of salt, and asked for change for a twenty-dollar goldpiece. They furnished it--that is, after they had chewed the piece,and rung it on the counter, and tried acid on it, and asked mewhere I got it, and who I was, and where I was from, and whereI was going to, and when I expected to get there, and perhapsa couple of hundred more questions; and when they got aground,I went right on and furnished them a lot of information voluntarily;told them I owned a dog, and his name was Watch, and my first wifewas a Free Will Baptist, and her grandfather was a Prohibitionist,and I used to know a man who had two thumbs on each hand and a warton the inside of his upper lip, and died in the hope of a gloriousresurrection, and so on, and so on, and so on, till even thathungry village questioner began to look satisfied, and also a shadeput out; but he had to respect a man of my financial strength,and so he didn't give me any lip, but I noticed he took it out ofhis underlings, which was a perfectly natural thing to do. Yes,they changed my twenty, but I judged it strained the bank a little,which was a thing to be expected, for it was the same as walkinginto a paltry village store in the nineteenth century and requiringthe boss of it to change a two thousand-dollar bill for you allof a sudden. He could do it, maybe; but at the same time hewould wonder how a small farmer happened to be carrying so muchmoney around in his pocket; which was probably this goldsmith'sthought, too; for he followed me to the door and stood there gazingafter me with reverent admiration.

Our new money was not only handsomely circulating, but its languagewas already glibly in use; that is to say, people had droppedthe names of the former moneys, and spoke of things as being worthso many dollars or cents or mills or milrays now. It was verygratifying. We were progressing, that was sure.

I got to know several master mechanics, but about the most interestingfellow among them was the blacksmith, Dowley. He was a live manand a brisk talker, and had two journeymen and three apprentices,and was doing a raging business. In fact, he was getting rich,hand over fist, and was vastly respected. Marco was very proud ofhaving such a man for a friend. He had taken me there ostensiblyto let me see the big establishment which bought so much of hischarcoal, but really to let me see what easy and almost familiarterms he was on with this great man. Dowley and I fraternizedat once; I had had just such picked men, splendid fellows, underme in the Colt Arms Factory. I was bound to see more of him, soI invited him to come out to Marco's Sunday, and dine with us.Marco was appalled, and held his breath; and when the grandeeaccepted, he was so grateful that he almost forgot to be astonishedat the condescension.

Marco's joy was exuberant--but only for a moment; then he grewthoughtful, then sad; and when he heard me tell Dowley I shouldhave Dickon, the boss mason, and Smug, the boss wheelwright, outthere, too, the coal-dust on his face turned to chalk, and he losthis grip. But I knew what was the matter with him; it was theexpense. He saw ruin before him; he judged that his financialdays were numbered. However, on our way to invite the others,I said:

”You must allow me to have these friends come; and you must alsoallow me to pay the costs.”

His face cleared, and he said with spirit:

”But not all of it, not all of it. Ye cannot well bear a burdenlike to this alone.”

I stopped him, and said:

”Now let's understand each other on the spot, old friend. I amonly a farm bailiff, it is true; but I am not poor, nevertheless.I have been very fortunate this year--you would be astonishedto know how I have thriven. I tell you the honest truth when I sayI could squander away as many as a dozen feasts like this and nevercare _that_ for the expense!” and I snapped my fingers. I couldsee myself rise a foot at a time in Marco's estimation, and whenI fetched out those last words I was become a very tower for styleand altitude. ”So you see, you must let me have my way. Youcan't contribute a cent to this orgy, that's _settled_.”

”It's grand and good of you--”

”No, it isn't. You've opened your house to Jones and me in themost generous way; Jones was remarking upon it to-day, just beforeyou came back from the village; for although he wouldn't be likelyto say such a thing to you--because Jones isn't a talker, and isdiffident in society--he has a good heart and a grateful, andknows how to appreciate it when he is well treated; yes, you andyour wife have been very hospitable toward us--”

”Ah, brother, 'tis nothing--_such_ hospitality!”

”But it _is_ something; the best a man has, freely given, is alwayssomething, and is as good as a prince can do, and ranks rightalong beside it--for even a prince can but do his best. And sowe'll shop around and get up this layout now, and don't you worryabout the expense. I'm one of the worst spendthrifts that everwas born. Why, do you know, sometimes in a single week I spend--but never mind about that--you'd never believe it anyway.”

And so we went gadding along, dropping in here and there, pricingthings, and gossiping with the shopkeepers about the riot, and nowand then running across pathetic reminders of it, in the persons ofshunned and tearful and houseless remnants of families whose homeshad been taken from them and their parents butchered or hanged.The raiment of Marco and his wife was of coarse tow-linen andlinsey-woolsey respectively, and resembled township maps, it beingmade up pretty exclusively of patches which had been added, townshipby township, in the course of five or six years, until hardly ahand's-breadth of the original garments was surviving and present.Now I wanted to fit these people out with new suits, on account ofthat swell company, and I didn't know just how to get at it--with delicacy, until at last it struck me that as I had alreadybeen liberal in inventing wordy gratitude for the king, it wouldbe just the thing to back it up with evidence of a substantialsort; so I said:

”And Marco, there's another thing which you must permit--out ofkindness for Jones--because you wouldn't want to offend him.He was very anxious to testify his appreciation in some way, buthe is so diffident he couldn't venture it himself, and so he beggedme to buy some little things and give them to you and Dame Phyllisand let him pay for them without your ever knowing they came fromhim--you know how a delicate person feels about that sort of thing--and so I said I would, and we would keep mum. Well, his ideawas, a new outfit of clothes for you both--”

”Oh, it is wastefulness! It may not be, brother, it may not be.Consider the vastness of the sum--”

”Hang the vastness of the sum! Try to keep quiet for a moment,and see how it would seem; a body can't get in a word edgeways,you talk so much. You ought to cure that, Marco; it isn't goodform, you know, and it will grow on you if you don't check it.Yes, we'll step in here now and price this man's stuff--and don'tforget to remember to not let on to Jones that you know he hadanything to do with it. You can't think how curiously sensitiveand proud he is. He's a farmer--pretty fairly well-to-do farmer--and I'm his bailiff; _but_--the imagination of that man! Why,sometimes when he forgets himself and gets to blowing off, you'dthink he was one of the swells of the earth; and you might listento him a hundred years and never take him for a farmer--especially ifhe talked agriculture. He _thinks_ he's a Sheol of a farmer; thinkshe's old Grayback from Wayback; but between you and me privatelyhe don't know as much about farming as he does about runninga kingdom--still, whatever he talks about, you want to drop yourunderjaw and listen, the same as if you had never heard suchincredible wisdom in all your life before, and were afraid youmight die before you got enough of it. That will please Jones.”

It tickled Marco to the marrow to hear about such an odd character;but it also prepared him for accidents; and in my experience whenyou travel with a king who is letting on to be something else andcan't remember it more than about half the time, you can't taketoo many precautions.

This was the best store we had come across yet; it had everythingin it, in small quantities, from anvils and drygoods all the waydown to fish and pinchbeck jewelry. I concluded I would bunchmy whole invoice right here, and not go pricing around any more.So I got rid of Marco, by sending him off to invite the mason andthe wheelwright, which left the field free to me. For I never careto do a thing in a quiet way; it's got to be theatrical or I don'ttake any interest in it. I showed up money enough, in a carelessway, to corral the shopkeeper's respect, and then I wrote downa list of the things I wanted, and handed it to him to see if hecould read it. He could, and was proud to show that he could.He said he had been educated by a priest, and could both readand write. He ran it through, and remarked with satisfaction thatit was a pretty heavy bill. Well, and so it was, for a littleconcern like that. I was not only providing a swell dinner, butsome odds and ends of extras. I ordered that the things be cartedout and delivered at the dwelling of Marco, the son of Marco,by Saturday evening, and send me the bill at dinner-time Sunday.He said I could depend upon his promptness and exactitude, it wasthe rule of the house. He also observed that he would throw ina couple of miller-guns for the Marcos gratis--that everybodywas using them now. He had a mighty opinion of that cleverdevice. I said:

”And please fill them up to the middle mark, too; and add thatto the bill.”

He would, with pleasure. He filled them, and I took them withme. I couldn't venture to tell him that the miller-gun was alittle invention of my own, and that I had officially ordered thatevery shopkeeper in the kingdom keep them on hand and sell themat government price--which was the merest trifle, and the shopkeepergot that, not the government. We furnished them for nothing.

The king had hardly missed us when we got back at nightfall. Hehad early dropped again into his dream of a grand invasion of Gaulwith the whole strength of his kingdom at his back, and the afternoonhad slipped away without his ever coming to himself again.