Kabanata Kabanata 27 · THE YANKEE AND THE KING TRAVEL INCOGNITO

THE YANKEE AND THE KING TRAVEL INCOGNITO

About bedtime I took the king to my private quarters to cut his

hair and help him get the hang of the lowly raiment he was to wear.

The high classes wore their hair banged across the forehead but

hanging to the shoulders the rest of the way around, whereas the

lowest ranks of commoners were banged fore and aft both; the slaves

were bangless, and allowed their hair free growth. So I inverted

a bowl over his head and cut away all the locks that hung below it.

I also trimmed his whiskers and mustache until they were only

about a half-inch long; and tried to do it inartistically, and

succeeded. It was a villainous disfigurement. When he got his

lubberly sandals on, and his long robe of coarse brown linen cloth,

which hung straight from his neck to his ankle-bones, he was no

longer the comeliest man in his kingdom, but one of the unhandsomest

and most commonplace and unattractive. We were dressed and barbered

alike, and could pass for small farmers, or farm bailiffs, or

shepherds, or carters; yes, or for village artisans, if we chose,

our costume being in effect universal among the poor, because of

its strength and cheapness. I don't mean that it was really cheap

to a very poor person, but I do mean that it was the cheapest

material there was for male attire--manufactured material, you

understand.

We slipped away an hour before dawn, and by broad sun-up had made

eight or ten miles, and were in the midst of a sparsely settled

country. I had a pretty heavy knapsack; it was laden with

provisions--provisions for the king to taper down on, till he

could take to the coarse fare of the country without damage.

I found a comfortable seat for the king by the roadside, and then

gave him a morsel or two to stay his stomach with. Then I said

I would find some water for him, and strolled away. Part of my

project was to get out of sight and sit down and rest a little

myself. It had always been my custom to stand when in his presence;

even at the council board, except upon those rare occasions when

the sitting was a very long one, extending over hours; then I had

a trifling little backless thing which was like a reversed culvert

and was as comfortable as the toothache. I didn't want to break

him in suddenly, but do it by degrees. We should have to sit

together now when in company, or people would notice; but it would

not be good politics for me to be playing equality with him when

there was no necessity for it.

I found the water some three hundred yards away, and had been

resting about twenty minutes, when I heard voices. That is all

right, I thought--peasants going to work; nobody else likely to be

stirring this early. But the next moment these comers jingled into

sight around a turn of the road--smartly clad people of quality,

with luggage-mules and servants in their train! I was off like

a shot, through the bushes, by the shortest cut. For a while it

did seem that these people would pass the king before I could

get to him; but desperation gives you wings, you know, and I canted

my body forward, inflated my breast, and held my breath and flew.

I arrived. And in plenty good enough time, too.

“Pardon, my king, but it's no time for ceremony--jump! Jump to

your feet--some quality are coming!”

“Is that a marvel? Let them come.”

“But my liege! You must not be seen sitting. Rise!--and stand in

humble posture while they pass. You are a peasant, you know.”

“True--I had forgot it, so lost was I in planning of a huge war

with Gaul”--he was up by this time, but a farm could have got up

quicker, if there was any kind of a boom in real estate--“and

right-so a thought came randoming overthwart this majestic dream

the which--”

“A humbler attitude, my lord the king--and quick! Duck your head!

--more!--still more!--droop it!”

He did his honest best, but lord, it was no great things. He looked

as humble as the leaning tower at Pisa. It is the most you could

say of it. Indeed, it was such a thundering poor success that

it raised wondering scowls all along the line, and a gorgeous

flunkey at the tail end of it raised his whip; but I jumped in

time and was under it when it fell; and under cover of the volley

of coarse laughter which followed, I spoke up sharply and warned

the king to take no notice. He mastered himself for the moment,

but it was a sore tax; he wanted to eat up the procession. I said:

“It would end our adventures at the very start; and we, being

without weapons, could do nothing with that armed gang. If we

are going to succeed in our emprise, we must not only look the

peasant but act the peasant.”

“It is wisdom; none can gainsay it. Let us go on, Sir Boss.

I will take note and learn, and do the best I may.”

He kept his word. He did the best he could, but I've seen better.

If you have ever seen an active, heedless, enterprising child

going diligently out of one mischief and into another all day

long, and an anxious mother at its heels all the while, and just

saving it by a hair from drowning itself or breaking its neck with

each new experiment, you've seen the king and me.

If I could have foreseen what the thing was going to be like,

I should have said, No, if anybody wants to make his living

exhibiting a king as a peasant, let him take the layout; I can

do better with a menagerie, and last longer. And yet, during

the first three days I never allowed him to enter a hut or other

dwelling. If he could pass muster anywhere during his early

novitiate it would be in small inns and on the road; so to these

places we confined ourselves. Yes, he certainly did the best he

could, but what of that? He didn't improve a bit that I could see.

He was always frightening me, always breaking out with fresh

astonishers, in new and unexpected places. Toward evening on

the second day, what does he do but blandly fetch out a dirk

from inside his robe!

“Great guns, my liege, where did you get that?”

“From a smuggler at the inn, yester eve.”

“What in the world possessed you to buy it?”

“We have escaped divers dangers by wit--thy wit--but I have

bethought me that it were but prudence if I bore a weapon, too.

Thine might fail thee in some pinch.”

“But people of our condition are not allowed to carry arms. What

would a lord say--yes, or any other person of whatever condition

--if he caught an upstart peasant with a dagger on his person?”

It was a lucky thing for us that nobody came along just then.

I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as

persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing

itself. We walked along, silent and thinking. Finally the king said:

“When ye know that I meditate a thing inconvenient, or that hath

a peril in it, why do you not warn me to cease from that project?”

It was a startling question, and a puzzler. I didn't quite know

how to take hold of it, or what to say, and so, of course, I ended

by saying the natural thing:

“But, sire, how can I know what your thoughts are?”

The king stopped dead in his tracks, and stared at me.

“I believed thou wert greater than Merlin; and truly in magic

thou art. But prophecy is greater than magic. Merlin is a prophet.”

I saw I had made a blunder. I must get back my lost ground.

After a deep reflection and careful planning, I said:

“Sire, I have been misunderstood. I will explain. There are two

kinds of prophecy. One is the gift to foretell things that are but

a little way off, the other is the gift to foretell things that

are whole ages and centuries away. Which is the mightier gift,

do you think?”

“Oh, the last, most surely!”

“True. Does Merlin possess it?”

“Partly, yes. He foretold mysteries about my birth and future

kingship that were twenty years away.”

“Has he ever gone beyond that?”

“He would not claim more, I think.”

“It is probably his limit. All prophets have their limit. The limit

of some of the great prophets has been a hundred years.”

“These are few, I ween.”

“There have been two still greater ones, whose limit was four

hundred and six hundred years, and one whose limit compassed

even seven hundred and twenty.”

“Gramercy, it is marvelous!”

“But what are these in comparison with me? They are nothing.”

“What? Canst thou truly look beyond even so vast a stretch

of time as--”

“Seven hundred years? My liege, as clear as the vision of an eagle

does my prophetic eye penetrate and lay bare the future of this

world for nearly thirteen centuries and a half!”

My land, you should have seen the king's eyes spread slowly open,

and lift the earth's entire atmosphere as much as an inch! That

settled Brer Merlin. One never had any occasion to prove his

facts, with these people; all he had to do was to state them. It

never occurred to anybody to doubt the statement.

“Now, then,” I continued, “I _could_ work both kinds of prophecy

--the long and the short--if I chose to take the trouble to keep

in practice; but I seldom exercise any but the long kind, because

the other is beneath my dignity. It is properer to Merlin's sort

--stump-tail prophets, as we call them in the profession. Of course,

I whet up now and then and flirt out a minor prophecy, but not

often--hardly ever, in fact. You will remember that there was

great talk, when you reached the Valley of Holiness, about my

having prophesied your coming and the very hour of your arrival,

two or three days beforehand.”

“Indeed, yes, I mind it now.”

“Well, I could have done it as much as forty times easier, and

piled on a thousand times more detail into the bargain, if it had

been five hundred years away instead of two or three days.”

“How amazing that it should be so!”

“Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five

hundred years away easier than he can a thing that's only five

hundred seconds off.”

“And yet in reason it should clearly be the other way; it should

be five hundred times as easy to foretell the last as the first,

for, indeed, it is so close by that one uninspired might almost

see it. In truth, the law of prophecy doth contradict the likelihoods,

most strangely making the difficult easy, and the easy difficult.”

It was a wise head. A peasant's cap was no safe disguise for it;

you could know it for a king's under a diving-bell, if you could

hear it work its intellect.

I had a new trade now, and plenty of business in it. The king

was as hungry to find out everything that was going to happen

during the next thirteen centuries as if he were expecting to live

in them. From that time out, I prophesied myself bald-headed

trying to supply the demand. I have done some indiscreet things in

my day, but this thing of playing myself for a prophet was the

worst. Still, it had its ameliorations. A prophet doesn't have

to have any brains. They are good to have, of course, for the

ordinary exigencies of life, but they are no use in professional

work. It is the restfulest vocation there is. When the spirit of

prophecy comes upon you, you merely take your intellect and lay it

off in a cool place for a rest, and unship your jaw and leave it

alone; it will work itself: the result is prophecy.

Every day a knight-errant or so came along, and the sight of them

fired the king's martial spirit every time. He would have forgotten

himself, sure, and said something to them in a style a suspicious

shade or so above his ostensible degree, and so I always got him

well out of the road in time. Then he would stand and look with

all his eyes; and a proud light would flash from them, and his

nostrils would inflate like a war-horse's, and I knew he was

longing for a brush with them. But about noon of the third day

I had stopped in the road to take a precaution which had been

suggested by the whip-stroke that had fallen to my share two days

before; a precaution which I had afterward decided to leave untaken,

I was so loath to institute it; but now I had just had a fresh

reminder: while striding heedlessly along, with jaw spread and

intellect at rest, for I was prophesying, I stubbed my toe and

fell sprawling. I was so pale I couldn't think for a moment;

then I got softly and carefully up and unstrapped my knapsack.

I had that dynamite bomb in it, done up in wool in a box. It was

a good thing to have along; the time would come when I could do

a valuable miracle with it, maybe, but it was a nervous thing

to have about me, and I didn't like to ask the king to carry it.

Yet I must either throw it away or think up some safe way to get

along with its society. I got it out and slipped it into my scrip,

and just then here came a couple of knights. The king stood,

stately as a statue, gazing toward them--had forgotten himself again,

of course--and before I could get a word of warning out, it was

time for him to skip, and well that he did it, too. He supposed

they would turn aside. Turn aside to avoid trampling peasant dirt

under foot? When had he ever turned aside himself--or ever had

the chance to do it, if a peasant saw him or any other noble knight

in time to judiciously save him the trouble? The knights paid

no attention to the king at all; it was his place to look out

himself, and if he hadn't skipped he would have been placidly

ridden down, and laughed at besides.

The king was in a flaming fury, and launched out his challenge

and epithets with a most royal vigor. The knights were some little

distance by now. They halted, greatly surprised, and turned in

their saddles and looked back, as if wondering if it might be worth

while to bother with such scum as we. Then they wheeled and

started for us. Not a moment must be lost. I started for _them_.

I passed them at a rattling gait, and as I went by I flung out a

hair-lifting soul-scorching thirteen-jointed insult which made

the king's effort poor and cheap by comparison. I got it out of

the nineteenth century where they know how. They had such headway

that they were nearly to the king before they could check up;

then, frantic with rage, they stood up their horses on their hind

hoofs and whirled them around, and the next moment here they came,

breast to breast. I was seventy yards off, then, and scrambling up

a great bowlder at the roadside. When they were within thirty

yards of me they let their long lances droop to a level, depressed

their mailed heads, and so, with their horse-hair plumes streaming

straight out behind, most gallant to see, this lightning express

came tearing for me! When they were within fifteen yards, I sent

that bomb with a sure aim, and it struck the ground just under

the horses' noses.

Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see. It resembled

a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi; and during the next

fifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic

fragments of knights and hardware and horse-flesh. I say we,

for the king joined the audience, of course, as soon as he had got

his breath again. There was a hole there which would afford steady

work for all the people in that region for some years to come

--in trying to explain it, I mean; as for filling it up, that service

would be comparatively prompt, and would fall to the lot of a

select few--peasants of that seignory; and they wouldn't get

anything for it, either.

But I explained it to the king myself. I said it was done with a

dynamite bomb. This information did him no damage, because it

left him as intelligent as he was before. However, it was a noble

miracle, in his eyes, and was another settler for Merlin. I thought

it well enough to explain that this was a miracle of so rare a sort

that it couldn't be done except when the atmospheric conditions

were just right. Otherwise he would be encoring it every time we

had a good subject, and that would be inconvenient, because I

hadn't any more bombs along.