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PART 3: CHAPTER XIII FREEMEN
Yes, it is strange how little a while at a time a person can be contented.
Only a little while back, when I was riding and suffering, what a heaven this peace,
this rest, this sweet serenity in this secluded shady nook by this purling stream
would have seemed, where I could keep
perfectly comfortable all the time by pouring a dipper of water into my armor now
and then; yet already I was getting dissatisfied; partly because I could not
light my pipe--for, although I had long ago
started a match factory, I had forgotten to bring matches with me--and partly because
we had nothing to eat.
Here was another illustration of the childlike improvidence of this age and
people.
A man in armor always trusted to chance for his food on a journey, and would have been
scandalized at the idea of hanging a basket of sandwiches on his spear.
There was probably not a knight of all the Round Table combination who would not
rather have died than been caught carrying such a thing as that on his flagstaff.
And yet there could not be anything more sensible.
It had been my intention to smuggle a couple of sandwiches into my helmet, but I
was interrupted in the act, and had to make an excuse and lay them aside, and a dog got
them.
Night approached, and with it a storm. The darkness came on fast.
We must camp, of course.
I found a good shelter for the demoiselle under a rock, and went off and found
another for myself.
But I was obliged to remain in my armor, because I could not get it off by myself
and yet could not allow Alisande to help, because it would have seemed so like
undressing before folk.
It would not have amounted to that in reality, because I had clothes on
underneath; but the prejudices of one's breeding are not gotten rid of just at a
jump, and I knew that when it came to
stripping off that bob-tailed iron petticoat I should be embarrassed.
With the storm came a change of weather; and the stronger the wind blew, and the
wilder the rain lashed around, the colder and colder it got.
Pretty soon, various kinds of bugs and ants and worms and things began to flock in out
of the wet and crawl down inside my armor to get warm; and while some of them behaved
well enough, and snuggled up amongst my
clothes and got quiet, the majority were of a restless, uncomfortable sort, and never
stayed still, but went on prowling and hunting for they did not know what;
especially the ants, which went tickling
along in wearisome procession from one end of me to the other by the hour, and are a
kind of creatures which I never wish to sleep with again.
It would be my advice to persons situated in this way, to not roll or thrash around,
because this excites the interest of all the different sorts of animals and makes
every last one of them want to turn out and
see what is going on, and this makes things worse than they were before, and of course
makes you objurgate harder, too, if you can.
Still, if one did not roll and thrash around he would die; so perhaps it is as
well to do one way as the other; there is no real choice.
Even after I was frozen solid I could still distinguish that tickling, just as a corpse
does when he is taking electric treatment. I said I would never wear armor after this
trip.
All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yet was in a living fire, as you may
say, on account of that swarm of crawlers, that same unanswerable question kept
circling and circling through my tired
head: How do people stand this miserable armor?
How have they managed to stand it all these generations?
How can they sleep at night for dreading the tortures of next day?
When the morning came at last, I was in a bad enough plight: seedy, drowsy, ***,
from want of sleep; weary from thrashing around, famished from long fasting; pining
for a bath, and to get rid of the animals; and crippled with rheumatism.
And how had it fared with the nobly born, the titled aristocrat, the Demoiselle
Alisande la Carteloise?
Why, she was as fresh as a squirrel; she had slept like the dead; and as for a bath,
probably neither she nor any other noble in the land had ever had one, and so she was
not missing it.
Measured by modern standards, they were merely modified savages, those people.
This noble lady showed no impatience to get to breakfast--and that smacks of the
savage, too.
On their journeys those Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how to bear them;
and also how to freight up against probable fasts before starting, after the style of
the Indian and the anaconda.
As like as not, Sandy was loaded for a three-day stretch.
We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind.
In half an hour we came upon a group of ragged poor creatures who had assembled to
mend the thing which was regarded as a road.
They were as humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast with them,
they were so flattered, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of mine
that at first they were not able to believe that I was in earnest.
My lady put up her scornful lip and withdrew to one side; she said in their
hearing that she would as soon think of eating with the other cattle--a remark
which embarrassed these poor devils merely
because it referred to them, and not because it insulted or offended them, for
it didn't. And yet they were not slaves, not chattels.
By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen.
Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and
degree: small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were
the nation, the actual Nation; they were
about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy, and to
subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs,
some refuse, in the shape of a king,
nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting
and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world.
And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the
tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and banners flying, at
the other end of it; had elected itself to
be the Nation, and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long that they had come
at last to accept it as a truth; and not only that, but to believe it right and as
it should be.
The priests had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of
things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it would be
to amuse himself with sarcasms, and
especially such poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter there and
become respectfully quiet. The talk of these meek people had a strange
enough sound in a formerly American ear.
They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop
without his permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have
their corn ground and their bread baked at
his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece
of their own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor
buy a piece of somebody else's without
remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him
gratis, and be ready to come at a moment's notice, leaving their own crop to
destruction by the threatened storm; they
had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation to
themselves when his heedless fruit- gatherers trampled the grain around the
trees; they had to smother their anger when
his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of their
patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarms from
my lord's dovecote settled on their crops
they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when
the harvest was at last gathered, then came the procession of robbers to levy their
blackmail upon it: first the Church carted
off its fat tenth, then the king's commissioner took his twentieth, then my
lord's people made a mighty inroad upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman
had liberty to bestow the remnant in his
barn, in case it was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and
more taxes, and taxes again, and yet other taxes--upon this free and independent
pauper, but none upon his lord the baron or
the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron
would sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day's work and whip
the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the
freeman's daughter--but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is
unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found
his life unendurable under such conditions,
and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church
condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-
roads with a stake through his back, and
his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and turned his
widow and his orphans out of doors.
And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the
bishop's road three days each--gratis; every head of a family, and every son of a
family, three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for their servants.
Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and
blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift
tidal-wave of blood--one: a settlement of
that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that
had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten
centuries of wrong and shame and misery the
like of which was not to be mated but in hell.
There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the
one wrought *** in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one
lasted mere months, the other had lasted a
thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a
hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the
momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas,
what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from
hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart- break?
What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake?
A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have
all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly
contain the coffins filled by that older
and real Terror --that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been
taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with
me, were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their
worst enemy could desire.
There was something pitifully ludicrous about it.
I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote
in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should
reign over it forever, whether gifted or
***, to the exclusion of all other families--including the voter's; and would
also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank,
and clothed on with offensive transmissible
glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families--
including his own.
They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it
before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that
every man could have a say in the government.
I said I had seen one--and that it would last until it had an Established Church.
Again they were all unhit--at first.
But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that proposition again; and
state it slowly, so it could soak into his understanding.
I did it; and after a little he had the idea, and he brought his fist down and said
he didn't believe a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily get down in
the mud and dirt in any such way; and that
to steal from a nation its will and preference must be a crime and the first of
all crimes. I said to myself:
"This one's a man.
If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would make a strike for the welfare of this
country, and try to prove myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome
change in its system of government."
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or
its office-holders.
The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is
the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous,
they are its mere clothing, and clothing
can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from
winter, disease, and death.
To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags--that is a
loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by
monarchy; let monarchy keep it.
I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is
inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority
and instituted for their benefit; and that
they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of
government in such a manner as they may think expedient."
Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political
clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit,
is disloyal; he is a traitor.
That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is
his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they
do not see the matter as he does.
And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be
governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population.
For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant
system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it
would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason.
So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and
ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the
other six elected themselves a permanent
board of direction and took all the dividends.
It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new
deal.
The thing that would have best suited the circus side of my nature would have been to
resign the Boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution;
but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat
Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating his materials up to revolution
grade is almost absolutely certain to get left.
I had never been accustomed to getting left, even if I do say it myself.
Wherefore, the "deal" which had been for some time working into shape in my mind was
of a quite different pattern from the Cade- Tyler sort.
So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man there who sat munching black bread
with that abused and mistaught herd of human sheep, but took him aside and talked
matter of another sort to him.
After I had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from his veins; and with this
and a sliver I wrote on a piece of bark-- Put him in the Man-factory-- and gave it to
him, and said:
"Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into the hands of Amyas le Poulet, whom
I call Clarence, and he will understand."
"He is a priest, then," said the man, and some of the enthusiasm went out of his
face. "How--a priest?
Didn't I tell you that no chattel of the Church, no bond-slave of pope or bishop can
enter my Man-Factory?
Didn't I tell you that you couldn't enter unless your religion, whatever it might be,
was your own free property?"
"Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; wherefore it liked me not, and bred in me a
cold doubt, to hear of this priest being there."
"But he isn't a priest, I tell you."
The man looked far from satisfied. He said:
"He is not a priest, and yet can read?" "He is not a priest and yet can read--yes,
and write, too, for that matter.
I taught him myself." The man's face cleared.
"And it is the first thing that you yourself will be taught in that Factory--"
"I?
I would give blood out of my heart to know that art.
Why, I will be your slave, your--" "No you won't, you won't be anybody's
slave.
Take your family and go along. Your lord the bishop will confiscate your
small property, but no matter. Clarence will fix you all right."