LITMIR.BIZ

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sore; and then when it was come noon — ”

      The pelting singsong of it carried me forward to scenes and sounds of my boyhood days:

      “N-e-e-ew Haven! ten minutes for refreshments — knductr’ll strike the gong-bell two minutes before train leaves — passengers for the Shore-line please take seats in the rear k’yar, this k’yar don’t go no furder — ahh -pls, aw -rnjz, b’nan ners, s-a-n-d’ches, p — op-corn!”

      — ”and waxed past noon and drew toward evensong. Sir Gawaine’s strength feebled and waxed passing faint, that unnethes he might dure any longer, and Sir Marhaus was then bigger and bigger — ”

      “Which strained his armor, of course; and yet little would one of these people mind a small thing like that.”

      — ”and so, Sir Knight, said Sir Marhaus, I have well felt that ye are a passing good knight, and a marvelous man of might as ever I felt any, while it lasteth, and our quarrels are not great, and therefore it were a pity to do you hurt, for I feel you are passing feeble. Ah, said Sir Gawaine, gentle knight, ye say the word that I should say. And therewith they took off their helms and either kissed other, and there they swore together either to love other as brethren — ”

      But I lost the thread there, and dozed off to slumber, thinking about what a pity it was that men with such superb strength — strength enabling them to stand up cased in cruelly burdensome iron and drenched with perspiration, and hack and batter and bang each other for six hours on a stretch — should not have been born at a time when they could put it to some useful purpose. Take a jackass, for instance: a jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because he is a jackass; but a nobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.

      When I came to myself again and began to listen, I perceived that I had lost another chapter, and that Alisande had wandered a long way off with her people.

      “And so they rode and came into a deep valley full of stones, and thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was the head of the stream, a fair fountain, and three damsels sitting thereby. In this country, said Sir Marhaus, came never knight since it was christened, but he found strange adventures — ”

      “This is not good form, Alisande. Sir Marhaus the king’s son of Ireland talks like all the rest; you ought to give him a brogue, or at least a characteristic expletive; by this means one would recognize him as soon as he spoke, without his ever being named. It is a common literary device with the great authors. You should make him say, ‘In this country, be jabers, came never knight since it was christened, but he found strange adventures, be jabers.’ You see how much better that sounds.”

      — ”came never knight but he found strange adventures, be jabers. Of a truth it doth indeed, fair lord, albeit ‘tis passing hard to say, though peradventure that will not tarry but better speed with usage. And then they rode to the damsels, and either saluted other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and she was threescore winter of age or more — ”

      “The damsel was?”

      “Even so, dear lord — and her hair was white under the garland — ”

      “Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not — the loose-fit kind, that go up and down like a portcullis when you eat, and fall out when you laugh.”

      “The second damsel was of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of gold about her head. The third damsel was but fifteen year of age — ”

      Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and the voice faded out of my hearing!

      Fifteen! Break — my heart! oh, my lost darling! Just her age who was so gentle, and lovely, and all the world to me, and whom I shall never see again! How the thought of her carries me back over wide seas of memory to a vague dim time, a happy time, so many, many centuries hence, when I used to wake in the soft summer mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say “Hello, Central!” just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a “Hello, Hank!” that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear. She got three dollars a week, but she was worth it.

      I could not follow Alisande’s further explanation of who our captured knights were, now — I mean in case she should ever get to explaining who they were. My interest was gone, my thoughts were far away, and sad. By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale, caught here and there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague way that each of these three knights took one of these three damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, another east, the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after year and day. Year and day — and without baggage. It was of a piece with the general simplicity of the country.

      The sun was now setting. It was about three in the afternoon when Alisande had begun to tell me who the cowboys were; so she had made pretty good progress with it — for her. She would arrive some time or other, no doubt, but she was not a person who could be hurried.

      We were approaching a castle which stood on high ground; a huge, strong, venerable structure, whose gray towers and battlements were charmingly draped with ivy, and whose whole majestic mass was drenched with splendors flung from the sinking sun. It was the largest castle we had seen, and so I thought it might be the one we were after, but Sandy said no. She did not know who owned it; she said she had passed it without calling, when she went down to Camelot.

      Chapter XVI.

       Morgan Le Fay

       Table of Contents

      If knights errant were to be believed, not all castles were desirable places to seek hospitality in. As a matter of fact, knights errant were not persons to be believed — that is, measured by modern standards of veracity; yet, measured by the standards of their own time, and scaled accordingly, you got the truth. It was very simple: you discounted a statement ninety-seven per cent; the rest was fact. Now after making this allowance, the truth remained that if I could find out something about a castle before ringing the doorbell — I mean hailing the warders — it was the sensible thing to do. So I was pleased when I saw in the distance a horseman making the bottom turn of the road that wound down from this castle.

      As we approached each other, I saw that he wore a plumed helmet, and seemed to be otherwise clothed in steel, but bore a curious addition also — a stiff square garment like a herald’s tabard. However, I had to smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer and read this sign on his tabard:

      ”Persimmon’s Soap — All the Prime-Donna Use It.”

      That was a little idea of my own, and had several wholesome purposes in view toward the civilizing and uplifting of this nation. In the first place, it was a furtive, underhand blow at this nonsense of knight errantry, though nobody suspected that but me. I had started a number of these people out — the bravest knights I could get — each sandwiched between bulletin-boards bearing one device or another, and I judged that by and by when they got to be numerous enough they would begin to look ridiculous; and then, even the steel-clad ass that hadn’t any board would himself begin to look ridiculous because he was out of the fashion.

      Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from them it would work down to the people, if the priests could be kept quiet. This would undermine the Church. I mean would be a step toward that. Next, education — next, freedom — and then she would begin to crumble. It being my conviction that any Established Church is an established crime, an established slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it. Why, in my own former day — in remote centuries not yet stirring in the womb of time — there were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been born in a free country: a “free” country with the

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