Chapter Chapter 20 · THE OGRE'S CASTLE

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.