A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

CHAPTER XL

THREE YEARS LATER

When I broke the back of knight-errantry that time, I no longerfelt obliged to work in secret. So, the very next day I exposedmy hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestinefactories 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 soI must just simply paralyze them--nothing short of that wouldanswer. 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 whereany priest could read it to them, and also kept it standing inthe 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 dowhat I promised. There wasn't any way to misunderstand the languageof that challenge. Even the dullest of the chivalry perceivedthat this was a plain case of ”put up, or shut up.” They werewise and did the latter. In all the next three years they gaveme no trouble worth mentioning.

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

Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law;taxation had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, thephonograph, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and all the thousandwilling and handy servants of steam and electricity were workingtheir way into favor. We had a steamboat or two on the Thames,we had steam warships, and the beginnings of a steam commercialmarine; I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discoverAmerica.

We were building several lines of railway, and our line fromCamelot to London was already finished and in operation. I wasshrewd enough to make all offices connected with the passengerservice places of high and distinguished honor. My idea wasto attract the chivalry and nobility, and make them useful and keepthem out of mischief. The plan worked very well, the competitionfor the places was hot. The conductor of the 4.33 express wasa duke; there wasn't a passenger conductor on the line belowthe degree of earl. They were good men, every one, but they hadtwo defects which I couldn't cure, and so had to wink at: theywouldn'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 usefulemployment. They were going from end to end of the country in allmanner of useful missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering,and their experience in it, made them altogether the most effectivespreaders of civilization we had. They went clothed in steel andequipped with sword and lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn'tpersuade 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 secretlylonged-for point. You see, I had two schemes in my head whichwere the vastest of all my projects. The one was to overthrow theCatholic Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins--not as an Established Church, but a go-as-you-please one; andthe other project was to get a decree issued by and by, commandingthat upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced,and given to men and women alike--at any rate to all men, wiseor unwise, and to all mothers who at middle age should be foundto know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one. Arthur wasgood for thirty years yet, he being about my own age--that isto say, forty--and I believed that in that time I could easilyhave the active part of the population of that day ready and eagerfor an event which should be the first of its kind in the historyof the world--a rounded and complete governmental revolutionwithout bloodshed. The result to be a republic. Well, I mayas well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it:I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first presidentmyself. Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I foundthat out.

Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modifiedway. His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but witha hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an electivechief magistrate. He believed that no nation that had ever knownthe joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of itand not fade away and die of melancholy. I urged that kings weredangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royalfamily of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as usefulas any other royal family, they would know as much, they wouldhave the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same dispositionto get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughablyvain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive;finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any otherroyal house, and ”Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the graceof God King,” would sound as well as it would when applied tothe ordinary royal tomcat with tights on. ”And as a rule,” saidhe, in his neat modern English, ”the character of these cats wouldbe considerably above the character of the average king, and thiswould be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reasonthat a nation always models its morals after its monarch's. Theworship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful andharmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties,and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed thatthey hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflictedno cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy ofa deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, andwould certainly get it. The eyes of the whole harried world wouldsoon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butcherswould presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fillthe vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we shouldbecome a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; withinforty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we shouldfurnish the cats. The reign of universal peace would begin then,to end no more forever.... Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow--fzt!--wow!”

Hang him, I supposed he was in earnest, and was beginning to bepersuaded by him, until he exploded that cat-howl and startled mealmost out of my clothes. But he never could be in earnest. Hedidn't know what it was. He had pictured a distinct and perfectlyrational and feasible improvement upon constitutional monarchy,but he was too feather-headed to know it, or care anything aboutit, either. I was going to give him a scolding, but Sandy cameflying in at that moment, wild with terror, and so choked with sobsthat for a minute she could not get her voice. I ran and took herin my arms, and lavished caresses upon her and said, beseechingly:

”Speak, darling, speak! What is it?”

Her head fell limp upon my bosom, and she gasped, almost inaudibly:

”HELLO-CENTRAL!”

”Quick!” I shouted to Clarence; ”telephone the king's homeopathto come!”

In two minutes I was kneeling by the child's crib, and Sandy wasdispatching servants here, there, and everywhere, all over thepalace. I took in the situation almost at a glance--membranouscroup! I bent down and whispered:

”Wake up, sweetheart! Hello-Central.”

She opened her soft eyes languidly, and made out to say:

”Papa.”

That was a comfort. She was far from dead yet. I sent forpreparations of sulphur, I rousted out the croup-kettle myself;for I don't sit down and wait for doctors when Sandy or the childis sick. I knew how to nurse both of them, and had had experience.This little chap had lived in my arms a good part of its small life,and often I could soothe away its troubles and get it to laughthrough the tear-dews on its eye-lashes when even its mother couldn't.

Sir Launcelot, in his richest armor, came striding along the greathall now on his way to the stock-board; he was president of thestock-board, and occupied the Siege Perilous, which he had boughtof Sir Galahad; for the stock-board consisted of the Knights ofthe Round Table, and they used the Round Table for business purposesnow. Seats at it were worth--well, you would never believe thefigure, so it is no use to state it. Sir Launcelot was a bear, andhe had put up a corner in one of the new lines, and was just gettingready to squeeze the shorts to-day; but what of that? He wasthe same old Launcelot, and when he glanced in as he was passingthe door and found out that his pet was sick, that was enoughfor him; bulls and bears might fight it out their own way for allhim, he would come right in here and stand by little Hello-Centralfor all he was worth. And that was what he did. He shied hishelmet into the corner, and in half a minute he had a new wickin the alcohol lamp and was firing up on the croup-kettle. By thistime Sandy had built a blanket canopy over the crib, and everythingwas ready.

Sir Launcelot got up steam, he and I loaded up the kettle withunslaked lime and carbolic acid, with a touch of lactic acid addedthereto, then filled the thing up with water and inserted thesteam-spout under the canopy. Everything was ship-shape now,and we sat down on either side of the crib to stand our watch.Sandy was so grateful and so comforted that she charged a coupleof church-wardens with willow-bark and sumach-tobacco for us,and told us to smoke as much as we pleased, it couldn't get underthe canopy, and she was used to smoke, being the first lady in theland who had ever seen a cloud blown. Well, there couldn't bea more contented or comfortable sight than Sir Launcelot in hisnoble armor sitting in gracious serenity at the end of a yardof snowy church-warden. He was a beautiful man, a lovely man,and was just intended to make a wife and children happy. But, ofcourse Guenever--however, it's no use to cry over what's done andcan't be helped.

Well, he stood watch-and-watch with me, right straight through,for three days and nights, till the child was out of danger; thenhe took her up in his great arms and kissed her, with his plumesfalling about her golden head, then laid her softly in Sandy'slap again and took his stately way down the vast hall, betweenthe ranks of admiring men-at-arms and menials, and so disappeared.And no instinct warned me that I should never look upon him againin this world! Lord, what a world of heart-break it is.

The doctors said we must take the child away, if we would coaxher back to health and strength again. And she must have sea-air.So we took a man-of-war, and a suite of two hundred and sixtypersons, and went cruising about, and after a fortnight of this westepped ashore on the French coast, and the doctors thought itwould be a good idea to make something of a stay there. The littleking of that region offered us his hospitalities, and we were gladto accept. If he had had as many conveniences as he lacked, weshould have been plenty comfortable enough; even as it was, wemade out very well, in his queer old castle, by the help of comfortsand luxuries from the ship.

At the end of a month I sent the vessel home for fresh supplies,and for news. We expected her back in three or four days. Shewould bring me, along with other news, the result of a certainexperiment which I had been starting. It was a project of mineto replace the tournament with something which might furnish anescape for the extra steam of the chivalry, keep those bucksentertained and out of mischief, and at the same time preservethe best thing in them, which was their hardy spirit of emulation.I had had a choice band of them in private training for some time,and the date was now arriving for their first public effort.

This experiment was baseball. In order to give the thing voguefrom the start, and place it out of the reach of criticism, I chosemy nines by rank, not capacity. There wasn't a knight in eitherteam who wasn't a sceptered sovereign. As for material of thissort, there was a glut of it always around Arthur. You couldn'tthrow a brick in any direction and not cripple a king. Of course,I couldn't get these people to leave off their armor; they wouldn'tdo that when they bathed. They consented to differentiate thearmor so that a body could tell one team from the other, but thatwas the most they would do. So, one of the teams wore chain-mailulsters, and the other wore plate-armor made of my new Bessemersteel. Their practice in the field was the most fantastic thing Iever saw. Being ball-proof, they never skipped out of the way,but stood still and took the result; when a Bessemer was at the batand a ball hit him, it would bound a hundred and fifty yardssometimes. And when a man was running, and threw himself on hisstomach to slide to his base, it was like an iron-clad coming intoport. At first I appointed men of no rank to act as umpires, butI had to discontinue that. These people were no easier to pleasethan other nines. The umpire's first decision was usually hislast; they broke him in two with a bat, and his friends toted himhome on a shutter. When it was noticed that no umpire ever surviveda game, umpiring got to be unpopular. So I was obliged to appointsomebody whose rank and lofty position under the government wouldprotect him.

Here are the names of the nines:

BESSEMERS ULSTERS

KING ARTHUR. EMPEROR LUCIUS. KING LOT OF LOTHIAN. KING LOGRIS. KING OF NORTHGALIS. KING MARHALT OF IRELAND. KING MARSIL. KING MORGANORE. KING OF LITTLE BRITAIN. KING MARK OF CORNWALL. KING LABOR. KING NENTRES OF GARLOT. KING PELLAM OF LISTENGESE. KING MELIODAS OF LIONES. KING BAGDEMAGUS. KING OF THE LAKE. KING TOLLEME LA FEINTES. THE SOWDAN OF SYRIA.

Umpire--CLARENCE.

The first public game would certainly draw fifty thousand people;and for solid fun would be worth going around the world to see.Everything would be favorable; it was balmy and beautiful springweather now, and Nature was all tailored out in her new clothes.