Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
PART 4: CHAPTER XX THE OGRE'S CASTLE
Between six and nine we made ten miles, which was plenty for a horse carrying
triple--man, woman, and armor; then we stopped for a long nooning under some trees
by a limpid brook.
Right so came by and by a knight riding; and as he drew near he made dolorous moan,
and by the words of it I perceived that he was cursing and swearing; yet nevertheless
was I glad of his coming, for that I saw he
bore a bulletin-board whereon in letters all of shining gold was writ:
"USE PETERSON'S PROPHYLACTIC TOOTH-BRUSH-- ALL THE GO."
I was glad of his coming, for even by this token I knew him for knight of mine.
It was Sir Madok de la Montaine, a burly great fellow whose chief distinction was
that he had come within an ace of sending Sir Launcelot down over his horse-tail
once.
He was never long in a stranger's presence without finding some pretext or other to
let out that great fact.
But there was another fact of nearly the same size, which he never pushed upon
anybody unasked, and yet never withheld when asked: that was, that the reason he
didn't quite succeed was, that he was
interrupted and sent down over horse-tail himself.
This innocent vast lubber did not see any particular difference between the two
facts.
I liked him, for he was earnest in his work, and very valuable.
And he was so fine to look at, with his broad mailed shoulders, and the grand
leonine set of his plumed head, and his big shield with its quaint device of a
gauntleted hand clutching a prophylactic tooth-brush, with motto: "Try Noyoudont."
This was a tooth-wash that I was introducing.
He was aweary, he said, and indeed he looked it; but he would not alight.
He said he was after the stove-polish man; and with this he broke out cursing and
swearing anew.
The bulletin-boarder referred to was Sir Ossaise of Surluse, a brave knight, and of
considerable celebrity on account of his having tried conclusions in a tournament
once, with no less a Mogul than Sir Gaheris himself--although not successfully.
He was of a light and laughing disposition, and to him nothing in this world was
serious.
It was for this reason that I had chosen him to work up a stove-polish sentiment.
There were no stoves yet, and so there could be nothing serious about stove-
polish.
All that the agent needed to do was to deftly and by degrees prepare the public
for the great change, and have them established in predilections toward
neatness against the time when the stove should appear upon the stage.
Sir Madok was very bitter, and brake out anew with cursings.
He said he had cursed his soul to rags; and yet he would not get down from his horse,
neither would he take any rest, or listen to any comfort, until he should have found
Sir Ossaise and settled this account.
It appeared, by what I could piece together of the unprofane fragments of his
statement, that he had chanced upon Sir Ossaise at dawn of the morning, and been
told that if he would make a short cut
across the fields and swamps and broken hills and glades, he could head off a
company of travelers who would be rare customers for prophylactics and tooth-wash.
With characteristic zeal Sir Madok had plunged away at once upon this quest, and
after three hours of awful crosslot riding had overhauled his game.
And behold, it was the five patriarchs that had been released from the dungeons the
evening before!
Poor old creatures, it was all of twenty years since any one of them had known what
it was to be equipped with any remaining snag or remnant of a tooth.
"Blank-blank-blank him," said Sir Madok, "an I do not stove-polish him an I may find
him, leave it to me; for never no knight that hight Ossaise or aught else may do me
this disservice and bide on live, an I may
find him, the which I have thereunto sworn a great oath this day."
And with these words and others, he lightly took his spear and gat him thence.
In the middle of the afternoon we came upon one of those very patriarchs ourselves, in
the edge of a poor village.
He was basking in the love of relatives and friends whom he had not seen for fifty
years; and about him and caressing him were also descendants of his own body whom he
had never seen at all till now; but to him
these were all strangers, his memory was gone, his mind was stagnant.
It seemed incredible that a man could outlast half a century shut up in a dark
hole like a rat, but here were his old wife and some old comrades to testify to it.
They could remember him as he was in the freshness and strength of his young
manhood, when he kissed his child and delivered it to its mother's hands and went
away into that long oblivion.
The people at the castle could not tell within half a generation the length of time
the man had been shut up there for his unrecorded and forgotten offense; but this
old wife knew; and so did her old child,
who stood there among her married sons and daughters trying to realize a father who
had been to her a name, a thought, a formless image, a tradition, all her life,
and now was suddenly concreted into actual flesh and blood and set before her face.
It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account that I have made room for
it here, but on account of a thing which seemed to me still more curious.
To wit, that this dreadful matter brought from these downtrodden people no outburst
of rage against these oppressors.
They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty and outrage so long that nothing
could have startled them but a kindness.
Yes, here was a curious revelation, indeed, of the depth to which this people had been
sunk in slavery.
Their entire being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience,
resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them in this life.
Their very imagination was dead.
When you can say that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower
deep for him. I rather wished I had gone some other road.
This was not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning out
a peaceful revolution in his mind.
For it could not help bringing up the unget-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant
and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in the world
ever did achieve their freedom by goody-
goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that
will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward.
If history teaches anything, it teaches that.
What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the
wrong man for them.
Two days later, toward noon, Sandy began to show signs of excitement and feverish
expectancy. She said we were approaching the ogre's
castle.
I was surprised into an uncomfortable shock.
The object of our quest had gradually dropped out of my mind; this sudden
resurrection of it made it seem quite a real and startling thing for a moment, and
roused up in me a smart interest.
Sandy's excitement increased every moment; and so did mine, for that sort of thing is
catching. My heart got to thumping.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which
the intellect scorns.
Presently, when Sandy slid from the horse, motioned me to stop, and went creeping
stealthily, with her head bent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes that
bordered a declivity, the thumpings grew stronger and quicker.
And they kept it up while she was gaining her ambush and getting her glimpse over the
declivity; and also while I was creeping to her side on my knees.
Her eyes were burning now, as she pointed with her finger, and said in a panting
whisper: "The castle!
The castle!
Lo, where it looms!" What a welcome disappointment I
experienced! I said:
"Castle?
It is nothing but a pigsty; a pigsty with a wattled fence around it."
She looked surprised and distressed.
The animation faded out of her face; and during many moments she was lost in thought
and silent. Then:
"It was not enchanted aforetime," she said in a musing fashion, as if to herself.
"And how strange is this marvel, and how awful --that to the one perception it is
enchanted and dight in a base and shameful aspect; yet to the perception of the other
it is not enchanted, hath suffered no
change, but stands firm and stately still, girt with its moat and waving its banners
in the blue air from its towers.
And God shield us, how it pricks the heart to see again these gracious captives, and
the sorrow deepened in their sweet faces! We have tarried along, and are to blame."
I saw my cue.
The castle was enchanted to me, not to her. It would be wasted time to try to argue her
out of her delusion, it couldn't be done; I must just humor it.
So I said:
"This is a common case--the enchanting of a thing to one eye and leaving it in its
proper form to another. You have heard of it before, Sandy, though
you haven't happened to experience it.
But no harm is done. In fact, it is lucky the way it is.
If these ladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, it would be necessary to
break the enchantment, and that might be impossible if one failed to find out the
particular process of the enchantment.
And hazardous, too; for in attempting a disenchantment without the true key, you
are liable to err, and turn your hogs into dogs, and the dogs into cats, the cats into
rats, and so on, and end by reducing your
materials to nothing finally, or to an odorless gas which you can't follow--which,
of course, amounts to the same thing.
But here, by good luck, no one's eyes but mine are under the enchantment, and so it
is of no consequence to dissolve it.
These ladies remain ladies to you, and to themselves, and to everybody else; and at
the same time they will suffer in no way from my delusion, for when I know that an
ostensible hog is a lady, that is enough for me, I know how to treat her."
"Thanks, oh, sweet my lord, thou talkest like an angel.
And I know that thou wilt deliver them, for that thou art minded to great deeds and art
as strong a knight of your hands and as brave to will and to do, as any that is on
live."
"I will not leave a princess in the sty, Sandy.
Are those three yonder that to my disordered eyes are starveling swine-herds-
-"
"The ogres, Are they changed also? It is most wonderful.
Now am I fearful; for how canst thou strike with sure aim when five of their nine
cubits of stature are to thee invisible?
Ah, go warily, fair sir; this is a mightier emprise than I wend."
"You be easy, Sandy.
All I need to know is, how much of an ogre is invisible; then I know how to locate his
vitals. Don't you be afraid, I will make short work
of these bunco-steerers.
Stay where you are." I left Sandy kneeling there, corpse-faced
but plucky and hopeful, and rode down to the pigsty, and struck up a trade with the
swine-herds.
I won their gratitude by buying out all the hogs at the lump sum of sixteen pennies,
which was rather above latest quotations.
I was just in time; for the Church, the lord of the manor, and the rest of the tax-
gatherers would have been along next day and swept off pretty much all the stock,
leaving the swine-herds very short of hogs and Sandy out of princesses.
But now the tax people could be paid in cash, and there would be a stake left
besides.
One of the men had ten children; and he said that last year when a priest came and
of his ten pigs took the fattest one for tithes, the wife burst out upon him, and
offered him a child and said:
"Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leave me my child, yet rob me of the
wherewithal to feed it?" How curious.
The same thing had happened in the Wales of my day, under this same old Established
Church, which was supposed by many to have changed its nature when it changed its
disguise.
I sent the three men away, and then opened the sty gate and beckoned Sandy to come--
which she did; and not leisurely, but with the rush of a prairie fire.
And when I saw her fling herself upon those hogs, with tears of joy running down her
cheeks, and strain them to her heart, and kiss them, and caress them, and call them
reverently by grand princely names, I was ashamed of her, ashamed of the human race.
We had to drive those hogs home--ten miles; and no ladies were ever more fickle-minded
or contrary.
They would stay in no road, no path; they broke out through the brush on all sides,
and flowed away in all directions, over rocks, and hills, and the roughest places
they could find.
And they must not be struck, or roughly accosted; Sandy could not bear to see them
treated in ways unbecoming their rank.
The troublesomest old sow of the lot had to be called my Lady, and your Highness, like
the rest. It is annoying and difficult to scour
around after hogs, in armor.
There was one small countess, with an iron ring in her snout and hardly any hair on
her back, that was the devil for perversity.
She gave me a race of an hour, over all sorts of country, and then we were right
where we had started from, having made not a rod of real progress.
I seized her at last by the tail, and brought her along squealing.
When I overtook Sandy she was horrified, and said it was in the last degree
indelicate to drag a countess by her train.
We got the hogs home just at dark--most of them.
The princess Nerovens de Morganore was missing, and two of her ladies in waiting:
namely, Miss Angela Bohun, and the Demoiselle Elaine Courtemains, the former
of these two being a young black sow with a
white star in her forehead, and the latter a brown one with thin legs and a slight
limp in the forward shank on the starboard side--a couple of the tryingest blisters to
drive that I ever saw.
Also among the missing were several mere baronesses--and I wanted them to stay
missing; but no, all that sausage-meat had to be found; so servants were sent out with
torches to scour the woods and hills to that end.
Of course, the whole drove was housed in the house, and, great guns!--well, I never
saw anything like it.
Nor ever heard anything like it. And never smelt anything like it.
It was like an insurrection in a gasometer.