A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Page 11
CHAPTER VIII
THE BOSS
To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to havethe on-looking world consent to it is a finer. The tower episodesolidified my power, and made it impregnable. If any were perchancedisposed to be jealous and critical before that, they experienceda change of heart, now. There was not any one in the kingdomwho would have considered it good judgment to meddle with my matters.
I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances.For a time, I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my "dream,"and listen for the Colt's factory whistle; but that sort of thingplayed itself out, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realizethat I was actually living in the sixth century, and in Arthur'scourt, not a lunatic asylum. After that, I was just as muchat home in that century as I could have been in any other; andas for preference, I wouldn't have traded it for the twentieth.Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains,pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country.The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor;not a man who wasn't a baby to me in acquirements and capacities;whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I shouldbe foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a seinedown street any day and catch a hundred better men than myself.
What a jump I had made! I couldn't keep from thinking about it,and contemplating it, just as one does who has struck oil. Therewas nothing back of me that could approach it, unless it might beJoseph's case; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equalit, quite. For it stands to reason that as Joseph's splendidfinancial ingenuities advantaged nobody but the king, the generalpublic must have regarded him with a good deal of disfavor, whereasI had done my entire public a kindness in sparing the sun, and waspopular by reason of it.
I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himselfwas the shadow. My power was colossal; and it was not a merename, as such things have generally been, it was the genuinearticle. I stood here, at the very spring and source of the secondgreat period of the world's history; and could see the tricklingstream of that history gather and deepen and broaden, and rollits mighty tides down the far centuries; and I could note theupspringing of adventurers like myself in the shelter of its longarray of thrones: De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers, Villierses;the war-making, campaign-directing wantons of France, and Charlesthe Second's scepter-wielding drabs; but nowhere in the processionwas my full-sized fellow visible. I was a Unique; and glad to knowthat that fact could not be dislodged or challenged for thirteencenturies and a half, for sure. Yes, in power I was equal tothe king. At the same time there was another power that wasa trifle stronger than both of us put together. That was the Church.I do not wish to disguise that fact. I couldn't, if I wanted to.But never mind about that, now; it will show up, in its properplace, later on. It didn't cause me any trouble in the beginning--at least any of consequence.
Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And thepeople! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race;why, they were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a personborn in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humbleand hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Churchand nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honorking and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honorthe lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him!Why, dear me, _any_ kind of royalty, howsoever modified, _any_ kindof aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if youare born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probablynever find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebodyelse tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his raceto think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its throneswithout shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate peoplethat have always figured as its aristocracies--a company of monarchsand nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty andobscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.
The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves, pure andsimple, and bore that name, and wore the iron collar on theirnecks; and the rest were slaves in fact, but without the name;they imagined themselves men and freemen, and called themselvesso. The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for oneobject, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble;to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they mightbe fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs thatthey might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks andjewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them,be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and posturesof adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselvesthe gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got werecuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they tookeven this sort of attention as an honor.
Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observeand examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs.In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit,and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reasonand argument would have had a long contract on his hands. Forinstance, those people had inherited the idea that all men withouttitle and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural giftsand acquirements or hadn't, were creatures of no more considerationthan so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the ideathat human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shamsof inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good butto be laughed at. The way I was looked upon was odd, but it wasnatural. You know how the keeper and the public regard the elephantin the menagerie: well, that is the idea. They are full ofadmiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious strength; theyspeak with pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvelswhich are far and away beyond their own powers; and they speakwith the same pride of the fact that in his wrath he is ableto drive a thousand men before him. But does that make him oneof _them_? No; the raggedest tramp in the pit would smile atthe idea. He couldn't comprehend it; couldn't take it in; couldn'tin any remote way conceive of it. Well, to the king, the nobles,and all the nation, down to the very slaves and tramps, I wasjust that kind of an elephant, and nothing more. I was admired,also feared; but it was as an animal is admired and feared.The animal is not reverenced, neither was I; I was not evenrespected. I had no pedigree, no inherited title; so in the king'sand nobles' eyes I was mere dirt; the people regarded me withwonder and awe, but there was no reverence mixed with it; throughthe force of inherited ideas they were not able to conceive ofanything being entitled to that except pedigree and lordship.There you see the hand of that awful power, the Roman CatholicChurch. In two or three little centuries it had converted a nationof men to a nation of worms. Before the day of the Church'ssupremacy in the world, men were men, and held their heads up,and had a man's pride and spirit and independence; and whatof greatness and position a person got, he got mainly by achievement,not by birth. But then the Church came to the front, with an axeto grind; and she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one wayto skin a cat--or a nation; she invented "divine right of kings,"and propped it all around, brick by brick, with the Beatitudes--wrenching them from their good purpose to make them fortifyan evil one; she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedienceto superiors, the beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached (to thecommoner) meekness under insult; preached (still to the commoner,always to the commoner) patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistanceunder oppression; and she introduced heritable ranks andaristocracies, and taught all the Christian populations of the earthto bow down to them and worship them. Even down to my birth-centurythat poison was still in the blood of Christendom, and the bestof English commoners was still content to see his inferiorsimpudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such aslordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his countrydid not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contentedwith this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuadehimself that he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn'tanything you can't stand,
if you are only born and bred to it.Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had beenin our American blood, too--I know that; but when I left Americait had disappeared--at least to all intents and purposes. Theremnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses. Whena disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairlybe said to be out of the system.
But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur's kingdom.Here I was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a masterintelligence among intellectual moles: by all rational measurementthe one and only actually great man in that whole British world;and yet there and then, just as in the remote England of mybirth-time, the sheep-witted earl who could claim long descentfrom a king's leman, acquired at second-hand from the slums ofLondon, was a better man than I was. Such a personage was fawnedupon in Arthur's realm and reverently looked up to by everybody,even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence,and his morals as base as his lineage. There were times when_he_ could sit down in the king's presence, but I couldn't. I couldhave got a title easily enough, and that would have raised mea large step in everybody's eyes; even in the king's, the giverof it. But I didn't ask for it; and I declined it when it wasoffered. I couldn't have enjoyed such a thing with my notions;and it wouldn't have been fair, anyway, because as far back asI could go, our tribe had always been short of the bar sinister.I couldn't have felt really and satisfactorily fine and proudand set-up over any title except one that should come from the nationitself, the only legitimate source; and such an one I hoped to win;and in the course of years of honest and honorable endeavor, I didwin it and did wear it with a high and clean pride. This titlefell casually from the lips of a blacksmith, one day, in a village,was caught up as a happy thought and tossed from mouth to mouthwith a laugh and an affirmative vote; in ten days it had sweptthe kingdom, and was become as familiar as the king's name. I wasnever known by any other designation afterward, whether in thenation's talk or in grave debate upon matters of state at thecouncil-board of the sovereign. This title, translated into modernspeech, would be THE BOSS. Elected by the nation. That suited me.And it was a pretty high title. There were very few THE'S, andI was one of them. If you spoke of the duke, or the earl, orthe bishop, how could anybody tell which one you meant? But ifyou spoke of The King or The Queen or The Boss, it was different.
Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him--respectedthe office; at least respected it as much as I was capable ofrespecting any unearned supremacy; but as MEN I looked down uponhim and his nobles--privately. And he and they liked me, andrespected my office; but as an animal, without birth or sham title,they looked down upon me--and were not particularly private about it,either. I didn't charge for my opinion about them, and they didn'tcharge for their opinion about me: the account was square, thebooks balanced, everybody was satisfied.