"That saw the other knight of the turret, and dressed him toward Marhaus, and they went so eagerly together, that the knight of the turret was soon smitten down, horse and man, stark dead--"
"_Another_ horse gone; I tell you it is a custom that ought to be broken up. I don"t see how people with any feeling can applaud and support it."
"So these two knights came together with great random--"
I saw that I had been asleep and missed a chapter, but I didn"t say anything. I judged that the Irish knight was in trouble with the visitors by this time, and this turned out to be the case.
"--that Sir Uwaine smote Sir Marhaus that his spear brast in pieces on the shield, and Sir Marhaus smote him so sore that horse and man he bare to the earth, and hurt Sir Uwaine on the left side--"
"The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little _too_ simple; the vocabulary is too limited, and so, by consequence, descriptions suffer in the matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail; this throws about them a certain air of the monotonous; in fact the fights are all alike: a couple of people come together with great random --random is a good word, and so is exegesis, for that matter, and so is holocaust, and defalcation, and usufruct and a hundred others, but land! a body ought to discriminate--they come together with great random, and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast _his_ spear, and the other man brast his shield, and down _he_ goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and brake _his_ neck, and then there"s another elected, and another and another and still another, till the material is all used up; and when you come to figure up results, you can"t tell one fight from another, nor who whipped; and as a _picture_, of living, raging, roaring battle, sho! why, it"s pale and noiseless--just ghosts scuffling in a fog.
Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest spectacle?--the burning of Rome in Nero"s time, for instance?
Why, it would merely say, "Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window, fireman brake his neck!" Why, _that_ ain"t a picture!"
It was a good deal of a lecture, I thought, but it didn"t disturb Sandy, didn"t turn a feather; her steam soared steadily up again, the minute I took off the lid:
"Then Sir Marhaus turned his horse and rode toward Gawaine with his spear. And when Sir Gawaine saw that, he dressed his shield, and they aventred their spears, and they came together with all the might of their horses, that either knight smote other so hard in the midst of their shields, but Sir Gawaine"s spear brake--"
"I knew it would."
--"but Sir Marhaus"s spear held; and therewith Sir Gawaine and his horse rushed down to the earth--"
"Just so--and brake his back."
--"and lightly Sir Gawaine rose upon his feet and pulled out his sword, and dressed him toward Sir Marhaus on foot, and therewith either came unto other eagerly, and smote together with their swords, that their shields flew in cantels, and they bruised their helms and their hauberks, and wounded either other. But Sir Gawaine, fro it pa.s.sed nine of the clock, waxed by the s.p.a.ce of three hours ever stronger and stronger and thrice his might was increased.
All this espied Sir Marhaus, and had great wonder how his might increased, and so they wounded other pa.s.sing sore; and then when it was come noon--"
The pelting sing-song of it carried me forward to scenes and sounds of my boyhood days:
"N-e-e-ew Haven! ten minutes for refreshments--knductr"ll strike the gong-bell two minutes before train leaves--pa.s.sengers for the Sh.o.r.e line please take seats in the rear k"yar, this k"yar don"t go no furder--_ahh_-pls, _aw_-rnjz, b"_nan_ners, _s-a-n-d_"ches, p--_op_-corn!"
--"and waxed past noon and drew toward evensong. Sir Gawaine"s strength feebled and waxed pa.s.sing faint, that unnethes he might dure any longer, and Sir Marhaus was then bigger and bigger--"
"Which strained his armor, of course; and yet little would one of these people mind a small thing like that."
--"and so, Sir Knight, said Sir Marhaus, I have well felt that ye are a pa.s.sing good knight, and a marvelous man of might as ever I felt any, while it lasteth, and our quarrels are not great, and therefore it were a pity to do you hurt, for I feel you are pa.s.sing feeble. Ah, said Sir Gawaine, gentle knight, ye say the word that I should say. And therewith they took off their helms and either kissed other, and there they swore together either to love other as brethren--"
But I lost the thread there, and dozed off to slumber, thinking about what a pity it was that men with such superb strength --strength enabling them to stand up cased in cruelly burdensome iron and drenched with perspiration, and hack and batter and bang each other for six hours on a stretch--should not have been born at a time when they could put it to some useful purpose. Take a jacka.s.s, for instance: a jacka.s.s has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because he is a jacka.s.s; but a n.o.bleman is not valuable because he is a jacka.s.s. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.
When I came to myself again and began to listen, I perceived that I had lost another chapter, and that Alisande had wandered a long way off with her people.
"And so they rode and came into a deep valley full of stones, and thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was the head of the stream, a fair fountain, and three damsels sitting thereby. In this country, said Sir Marhaus, came never knight since it was christened, but he found strange adventures--"
"This is not good form, Alisande. Sir Marhaus the king"s son of Ireland talks like all the rest; you ought to give him a brogue, or at least a characteristic expletive; by this means one would recognize him as soon as he spoke, without his ever being named.
It is a common literary device with the great authors. You should make him say, "In this country, be jabers, came never knight since it was christened, but he found strange adventures, be jabers."
You see how much better that sounds."
--"came never knight but he found strange adventures, be jabers.
Of a truth it doth indeed, fair lord, albeit "tis pa.s.sing hard to say, though peradventure that will not tarry but better speed with usage. And then they rode to the damsels, and either saluted other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and she was threescore winter of age or more--"
"The _damsel_ was?"
"Even so, dear lord--and her hair was white under the garland--"
"Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not--the loose-fit kind, that go up and down like a portcullis when you eat, and fall out when you laugh."
"The second damsel was of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of gold about her head. The third damsel was but fifteen year of age--"
Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and the voice faded out of my hearing!
Fifteen! Break--my heart! oh, my lost darling! Just her age who was so gentle, and lovely, and all the world to me, and whom I shall never see again! How the thought of her carries me back over wide seas of memory to a vague dim time, a happy time, so many, many centuries hence, when I used to wake in the soft summer mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say "h.e.l.lo, Central!"
just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a "h.e.l.lo, Hank!" that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear.
She got three dollars a week, but she was worth it.
I could not follow Alisande"s further explanation of who our captured knights were, now--I mean in case she should ever get to explaining who they were. My interest was gone, my thoughts were far away, and sad. By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale, caught here and there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague way that each of these three knights took one of these three damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, another east, the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after year and day. Year and day--and without baggage. It was of a piece with the general simplicity of the country.
The sun was now setting. It was about three in the afternoon when Alisande had begun to tell me who the cowboys were; so she had made pretty good progress with it--for her. She would arrive some time or other, no doubt, but she was not a person who could be hurried.
We were approaching a castle which stood on high ground; a huge, strong, venerable structure, whose gray towers and battlements were charmingly draped with ivy, and whose whole majestic ma.s.s was drenched with splendors flung from the sinking sun. It was the largest castle we had seen, and so I thought it might be the one we were after, but Sandy said no. She did not know who owned it; she said she had pa.s.sed it without calling, when she went down to Camelot.
CHAPTER XVI
MORGAN LE FAY
If knights errant were to be believed, not all castles were desirable places to seek hospitality in. As a matter of fact, knights errant were _not_ persons to be believed--that is, measured by modern standards of veracity; yet, measured by the standards of their own time, and scaled accordingly, you got the truth. It was very simple: you discounted a statement ninety-seven per cent; the rest was fact. Now after making this allowance, the truth remained that if I could find out something about a castle before ringing the door-bell--I mean hailing the warders--it was the sensible thing to do. So I was pleased when I saw in the distance a horseman making the bottom turn of the road that wound down from this castle.
As we approached each other, I saw that he wore a plumed helmet, and seemed to be otherwise clothed in steel, but bore a curious addition also--a stiff square garment like a herald"s tabard.
However, I had to smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer and read this sign on his tabard:
"Persimmon"s Soap -- All the Prime-Donna Use It."
That was a little idea of my own, and had several wholesome purposes in view toward the civilizing and uplifting of this nation. In the first place, it was a furtive, underhand blow at this nonsense of knight errantry, though n.o.body suspected that but me. I had started a number of these people out--the bravest knights I could get--each sandwiched between bulletin-boards bearing one device or another, and I judged that by and by when they got to be numerous enough they would begin to look ridiculous; and then, even the steel-clad a.s.s that _hadn"t_ any board would himself begin to look ridiculous because he was out of the fashion.
Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness among the n.o.bility, and from them it would work down to the people, if the priests could be kept quiet. This would undermine the Church.
I mean would be a step toward that. Next, education--next, freedom --and then she would begin to crumble. It being my conviction that any Established Church is an established crime, an established slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to a.s.sail it in any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it. Why, in my own former day--in remote centuries not yet stirring in the womb of time--there were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been born in a free country: a "free" country with the Corporation Act and the Test still in force in it--timbers propped against men"s liberties and dishonored consciences to sh.o.r.e up an Established Anachronism with.
My missionaries were taught to spell out the gilt signs on their tabards--the showy gilding was a neat idea, I could have got the king to wear a bulletin-board for the sake of that barbaric splendor--they were to spell out these signs and then explain to the lords and ladies what soap was; and if the lords and ladies were afraid of it, get them to try it on a dog. The missionary"s next move was to get the family together and try it on himself; he was to stop at no experiment, however desperate, that could convince the n.o.bility that soap was harmless; if any final doubt remained, he must catch a hermit--the woods were full of them; saints they called themselves, and saints they were believed to be.
They were unspeakably holy, and worked miracles, and everybody stood in awe of them. If a hermit could survive a wash, and that failed to convince a duke, give him up, let him alone.
Whenever my missionaries overcame a knight errant on the road they washed him, and when he got well they swore him to go and get a bulletin-board and disseminate soap and civilization the rest of his days. As a consequence the workers in the field were increasing by degrees, and the reform was steadily spreading.
My soap factory felt the strain early. At first I had only two hands; but before I had left home I was already employing fifteen, and running night and day; and the atmospheric result was getting so p.r.o.nounced that the king went sort of fainting and gasping around and said he did not believe he could stand it much longer, and Sir Launcelot got so that he did hardly anything but walk up and down the roof and swear, although I told him it was worse up there than anywhere else, but he said he wanted plenty of air; and he was always complaining that a palace was no place for a soap factory anyway, and said if a man was to start one in his house he would be d.a.m.ned if he wouldn"t strangle him. There were ladies present, too, but much these people ever cared for that; they would swear before children, if the wind was their way when the factory was going.
This missionary knight"s name was La Cote Male Taile, and he said that this castle was the abode of Morgan le Fay, sister of King Arthur, and wife of King Uriens, monarch of a realm about as big as the District of Columbia--you could stand in the middle of it and throw bricks into the next kingdom. "Kings" and "Kingdoms"
were as thick in Britain as they had been in little Palestine in Joshua"s time, when people had to sleep with their knees pulled up because they couldn"t stretch out without a pa.s.sport.