CHAPTER XI
THE YANKEE IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES
There never was such a country for wandering liars; and they wereof both sexes. Hardly a month went by without one of these trampsarriving; and generally loaded with a tale about some princess orother wanting help to get her out of some far-away castle whereshe was held in captivity by a lawless scoundrel, usually a giant.Now you would think that the first thing the king would do afterlistening to such a novelette from an entire stranger, would beto ask for credentials--yes, and a pointer or two as to localityof castle, best route to it, and so on. But nobody ever thoughtof so simple and common-sense a thing at that. No, everybodyswallowed these people's lies whole, and never asked a questionof any sort or about anything. Well, one day when I was notaround, one of these people came along--it was a she one, thistime--and told a tale of the usual pattern. Her mistress wasa captive in a vast and gloomy castle, along with forty-four otheryoung and beautiful girls, pretty much all of them princesses;they had been languishing in that cruel captivity for twenty-sixyears; the masters of the castle were three stupendous brothers,each with four arms and one eye--the eye in the center of theforehead, and as big as a fruit. Sort of fruit not mentioned;their usual slovenliness in statistics.
Would you believe it? The king and the whole Round Table werein raptures over this preposterous opportunity for adventure.Every knight of the Table jumped for the chance, and begged for it;but to their vexation and chagrin the king conferred it upon me,who had not asked for it at all.
By an effort, I contained my joy when Clarence brought me the news.But he--he could not contain his. His mouth gushed delight andgratitude in a steady discharge--delight in my good fortune,gratitude to the king for this splendid mark of his favor for me.He could keep neither his legs nor his body still, but pirouettedabout the place in an airy ecstasy of happiness.
On my side, I could have cursed the kindness that conferred uponme this benefaction, but I kept my vexation under the surfacefor policy's sake, and did what I could to let on to be glad.Indeed, I _said_ I was glad. And in a way it was true; I was asglad as a person is when he is scalped.
Well, one must make the best of things, and not waste time withuseless fretting, but get down to business and see what can bedone. In all lies there is wheat among the chaff; I must get atthe wheat in this case: so I sent for the girl and she came. Shewas a comely enough creature, and soft and modest, but, if signswent for anything, she didn't know as much as a lady's watch. I said:
"My dear, have you been questioned as to particulars?"
She said she hadn't.
"Well, I didn't expect you had, but I thought I would ask, to makesure; it's the way I've been raised. Now you mustn't take itunkindly if I remind you that as we don't know you, we must goa little slow. You may be all right, of course, and we'll hopethat you are; but to take it for granted isn't business. _You_understand that. I'm obliged to ask you a few questions; justanswer up fair and square, and don't be afraid. Where do youlive, when you are at home?"
"In the land of Moder, fair sir."
"Land of Moder. I don't remember hearing of it before.Parents living?"
"As to that, I know not if they be yet on live, sith it is manyyears that I have lain shut up in the castle."
"Your name, please?"
"I hight the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise, an it please you."
"Do you know anybody here who can identify you?"
"That were not likely, fair lord, I being come hither now forthe first time."
"Have you brought any letters--any documents--any proofs thatyou are trustworthy and truthful?"
"Of a surety, no; and wherefore should I? Have I not a tongue,and cannot I say all that myself?"
"But _your_ saying it, you know, and somebody else's saying it,is different."
"Different? How might that be? I fear me I do not understand."
"Don't _understand_? Land of--why, you see--you see--why, great Scott,can't you understand a little thing like that? Can't you understandthe difference between your--_why_ do you look so innocent and idiotic!"
"I? In truth I know not, but an it were the will of God."
"Yes, yes, I reckon that's about the size of it. Don't mind myseeming excited; I'm not. Let us change the subject. Now asto this castle, with forty-five princesses in it, and three ogresat the head of it, tell me--where is this harem?"
"Harem?"
"The _castle_, you understand; where is the castle?"
"Oh, as to that, it is great, and strong, and well beseen, andlieth in a far country. Yes, it is many leagues."
"_How_ many?"
"Ah, fair sir, it were woundily hard to tell, they are so many,and do so lap the one upon the other, and being made all in thesame image and tincted with the same color, one may not knowthe one league from its fellow, nor how to count them exceptthey be taken apart, and ye wit well it were God's work to dothat, being not within man's capacity; for ye will note--"
"Hold on, hold on, never mind about the distance; _whereabouts_does the castle lie? What's the direction from here?"
"Ah, please you sir, it hath no direction from here; by reasonthat the road lieth not straight, but turneth evermore; whereforethe direction of its place abideth not, but is some time underthe one sky and anon under another, whereso if ye be minded thatit is in the east, and wend thitherward, ye shall observe thatthe way of the road doth yet again turn upon itself by the spaceof half a circle, and this marvel happing again and yet again andstill again, it will grieve you that you had thought by vanitiesof the mind to thwart and bring to naught the will of Him thatgiveth not a castle a direction from a place except it pleasethHim, and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all castlesand all directions thereunto vanish out of the earth, leaving theplaces wherein they tarried desolate and vacant, so warning Hiscreatures that where He will He will, and where He will not He--"
"Oh, that's all right, that's all right, give us a rest; never mindabout the direction, _hang_ the direction--I beg pardon, I bega thousand pardons, I am not well to-day; pay no attention whenI soliloquize, it is an old habit, an old, bad habit, and hardto get rid of when one's digestion is all disordered with eatingfood that was raised forever and ever before he was born; goodland! a man can't keep his functions regular on spring chickensthirteen hundred years old. But come--never mind about that;let's--have you got such a thing as a map of that region aboutyou? Now a good map--"
"Is it peradventure that manner of thing which of late the unbelievershave brought from over the great seas, which, being boiled in oil,and an onion and salt added thereto, doth--"
"What, a map? What are you talking about? Don't you know whata map is? There, there, never mind, don't explain, I hateexplanations; they fog a thing up so that you can't tell anythingabout it. Run along, dear; good-day; show her the way, Clarence."
Oh, well, it was reasonably plain, now, why these donkeys didn'tprospect these liars for details. It may be that this girl hada fact in her somewhere, but I don't believe you could have sluicedit out with a hydraulic; nor got it with the earlier forms ofblasting, even; it was a case for dynamite. Why, she was a perfectass; and yet the king and his knights had listened to her as ifshe had been a leaf out of the gospel. It kind of sizes up thewhole party. And think of the simple ways of this court: thiswandering wench hadn't any more trouble to get access to the kingin his palace than she would have had to get into the poorhousein my day and country. In fact, he was glad to see her, gladto hear her tale; with that adventure of hers to offer, she wasas welcome as a corpse is to a coroner.
Just as I was ending-up these reflections, Clarence came back.I remarked upon the barren result of my efforts with the girl;hadn't got hold of a single point that could help me to findthe castle. The youth looked a little surprised, or puzzled,or something, and intimated that he had been wondering to himselfwhat I had wanted to ask the girl all those questions for.
"Why, great guns," I said
, "don't I want to find the castle? Andhow else would I go about it?"
"La, sweet your worship, one may lightly answer that, I ween.She will go with thee. They always do. She will ride with thee."
"Ride with me? Nonsense!"
"But of a truth she will. She will ride with thee. Thou shalt see."
"What? She browse around the hills and scour the woods with me--alone--and I as good as engaged to be married? Why, it's scandalous.Think how it would look."
My, the dear face that rose before me! The boy was eager to knowall about this tender matter. I swore him to secrecy and thenwhispered her name--"Puss Flanagan." He looked disappointed,and said he didn't remember the countess. How natural it was forthe little courtier to give her a rank. He asked me where she lived.
"In East Har--" I came to myself and stopped, a little confused;then I said, "Never mind, now; I'll tell you some time."
And might he see her? Would I let him see her some day?
It was but a little thing to promise--thirteen hundred yearsor so--and he so eager; so I said Yes. But I sighed; I couldn'thelp it. And yet there was no sense in sighing, for she wasn'tborn yet. But that is the way we are made: we don't reason,where we feel; we just feel.
My expedition was all the talk that day and that night, and theboys were very good to me, and made much of me, and seemed to haveforgotten their vexation and disappointment, and come to be asanxious for me to hive those ogres and set those ripe old virginsloose as if it were themselves that had the contract. Well, they_were_ good children--but just children, that is all. And theygave me no end of points about how to scout for giants, and howto scoop them in; and they told me all sorts of charms againstenchantments, and gave me salves and other rubbish to put on mywounds. But it never occurred to one of them to reflect that ifI was such a wonderful necromancer as I was pretending to be,I ought not to need salves or instructions, or charms againstenchantments, and, least of all, arms and armor, on a foray of anykind--even against fire-spouting dragons, and devils hot fromperdition, let alone such poor adversaries as these I was after,these commonplace ogres of the back settlements.
I was to have an early breakfast, and start at dawn, for that wasthe usual way; but I had the demon's own time with my armor,and this delayed me a little. It is troublesome to get into, andthere is so much detail. First you wrap a layer or two of blanketaround your body, for a sort of cushion and to keep off the coldiron; then you put on your sleeves and shirt of chain mail--theseare made of small steel links woven together, and they form a fabricso flexible that if you toss your shirt onto the floor, it slumpsinto a pile like a peck of wet fish-net; it is very heavy andis nearly the uncomfortablest material in the world for a nightshirt, yet plenty used it for that--tax collectors, and reformers,and one-horse kings with a defective title, and those sorts ofpeople; then you put on your shoes--flat-boats roofed over withinterleaving bands of steel--and screw your clumsy spurs intothe heels. Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and yourcuisses on your thighs; then come your backplate and your breastplate,and you begin to feel crowded; then you hitch onto the breastplatethe half-petticoat of broad overlapping bands of steel which hangsdown in front but is scolloped out behind so you can sit down,and isn't any real improvement on an inverted coal scuttle, eitherfor looks or for wear, or to wipe your hands on; next you belton your sword; then you put your stove-pipe joints onto your arms,your iron gauntlets onto your hands, your iron rat-trap onto yourhead, with a rag of steel web hitched onto it to hang over the backof your neck--and there you are, snug as a candle in a candle-mould.This is no time to dance. Well, a man that is packed away likethat is a nut that isn't worth the cracking, there is so little ofthe meat, when you get down to it, by comparison with the shell.
The boys helped me, or I never could have got in. Just as wefinished, Sir Bedivere happened in, and I saw that as like as notI hadn't chosen the most convenient outfit for a long trip. Howstately he looked; and tall and broad and grand. He had on hishead a conical steel casque that only came down to his ears, andfor visor had only a narrow steel bar that extended down to hisupper lip and protected his nose; and all the rest of him, fromneck to heel, was flexible chain mail, trousers and all. Butpretty much all of him was hidden under his outside garment, whichof course was of chain mail, as I said, and hung straight from hisshoulders to his ankles; and from his middle to the bottom, bothbefore and behind, was divided, so that he could ride and let theskirts hang down on each side. He was going grailing, and it wasjust the outfit for it, too. I would have given a good deal forthat ulster, but it was too late now to be fooling around. The sunwas just up, the king and the court were all on hand to see me offand wish me luck; so it wouldn't be etiquette for me to tarry.You don't get on your horse yourself; no, if you tried it youwould get disappointed. They carry you out, just as they carrya sun-struck man to the drug store, and put you on, and help getyou to rights, and fix your feet in the stirrups; and all the whileyou do feel so strange and stuffy and like somebody else--likesomebody that has been married on a sudden, or struck by lightning,or something like that, and hasn't quite fetched around yet, andis sort of numb, and can't just get his bearings. Then theystood up the mast they called a spear, in its socket by my leftfoot, and I gripped it with my hand; lastly they hung my shieldaround my neck, and I was all complete and ready to up anchorand get to sea. Everybody was as good to me as they could be,and a maid of honor gave me the stirrup-cup her own self. There wasnothing more to do now, but for that damsel to get up behind me ona pillion, which she did, and put an arm or so around me to hold on.
And so we started, and everybody gave us a goodbye and waved theirhandkerchiefs or helmets. And everybody we met, going down the hilland through the village was respectful to us, except some shabbylittle boys on the outskirts. They said:
"Oh, what a guy!" And hove clods at us.
In my experience boys are the same in all ages. They don't respectanything, they don't care for anything or anybody. They say"Go up, baldhead" to the prophet going his unoffending way inthe gray of antiquity; they sass me in the holy gloom of theMiddle Ages; and I had seen them act the same way in Buchanan'sadministration; I remember, because I was there and helped. Theprophet had his bears and settled with his boys; and I wantedto get down and settle with mine, but it wouldn't answer, becauseI couldn't have got up again. I hate a country without a derrick.
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