<p><SPAN name="c8" id="c8"></SPAN></p>
<h2> CHAPTER VIII </h2>
<p><br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="08-095.jpg (131K)" src="images/08-095.jpg" width-obs="100%" /></div>
<p><br/></p>
<p>THE BOSS</p>
<p>To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the
on-looking world consent to it is a finer. The tower episode
solidified my power, and made it impregnable. If any were perchance
disposed to be jealous and critical before that, they experienced a change
of heart, now. There was not any one in the kingdom who would have
considered it good judgment to meddle with my matters.</p>
<p>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 thing played itself out,
gradually, and at last I was fully able to realize that I was actually
living in the sixth century, and in Arthur's court, not a lunatic asylum.
After that, I was just as much at home in that century as I could
have been in any other; and as 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 should be foreman of a
factory, that is about all; and could drag a seine down street any day and
catch a hundred better men than myself.</p>
<p>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. There was
nothing back of me that could approach it, unless it might be Joseph's
case; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equal it, quite. For
it stands to reason that as Joseph's splendid financial ingenuities
advantaged nobody but the king, the general public must have regarded him
with a good deal of disfavor, whereas I had done my entire public a
kindness in sparing the sun, and was popular by reason of it.</p>
<p>I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himself was the
shadow. My power was colossal; and it was not a mere name, as such
things have generally been, it was the genuine article. I stood
here, at the very spring and source of the second great period of the
world's history; and could see the trickling stream of that history gather
and deepen and broaden, and roll its mighty tides down the far centuries;
and I could note the upspringing of adventurers like myself in the shelter
of its long array of thrones: De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers,
Villierses; the war-making, campaign-directing wantons of France, and
Charles the Second's scepter-wielding drabs; but nowhere in the procession
was my full-sized fellow visible. I was a Unique; and glad to know
that that fact could not be dislodged or challenged for thirteen centuries
and a half, for sure. Yes, in power I was equal to the king. At
the same time there was another power that was a 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 proper place, later on. It didn't cause
me any trouble in the beginning—at least any of consequence.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="08-097.jpg (118K)" src="images/08-097.jpg" width-obs="100%" /></div>
<p><br/></p>
<p>Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the
people! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race;
why, they were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person born
in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty
outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if
they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble
than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and
honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, <i>any</i> kind of
royalty, howsoever modified, <i>any</i> kind of aristocracy, howsoever
pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under
that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and
don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make
a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always
occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the
seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies—a
company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only
poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.</p>
<p>The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves, pure and simple, and
bore that name, and wore the iron collar on their necks; and the rest were
slaves in fact, but without the name; they imagined themselves men and
freemen, and called themselves so. The truth was, the nation as a
body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before
king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve
that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the
dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and
jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar
all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that
they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world.
And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and
so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as
an honor.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="08-099.jpg (168K)" src="images/08-099.jpg" width-obs="100%" /></div>
<p><br/></p>
<p>Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and
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 reason and argument would have had
a long contract on his hands. For instance, those people had
inherited the idea that all men without title and a long pedigree, whether
they had great natural gifts and acquirements or hadn't, were creatures of
no more consideration than so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had
inherited the idea that human daws who can consent to masquerade in the
peacock-shams of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good
but to be laughed at. The way I was looked upon was odd, but it was
natural. You know how the keeper and the public regard the elephant
in the menagerie: well, that is the idea. They are full of
admiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious strength; they speak with
pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvels which are far and away
beyond their own powers; and they speak with the same pride of the fact
that in his wrath he is able to drive a thousand men before him. But
does that make him one of <i>them</i> ? No; the raggedest tramp in
the pit would smile at the idea. He couldn't comprehend it; couldn't
take it in; couldn't in any remote way conceive of it. Well, to the
king, the nobles, and all the nation, down to the very slaves and tramps,
I was just 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 even respected. I
had no pedigree, no inherited title; so in the king's and nobles' eyes I
was mere dirt; the people regarded me with wonder and awe, but there was
no reverence mixed with it; through the force of inherited ideas they were
not able to conceive of anything being entitled to that except pedigree
and lordship. There you see the hand of that awful power, the Roman
Catholic Church. In two or three little centuries it had converted a
nation of men to a nation of worms. Before the day of the Church's
supremacy in the world, men were men, and held their heads up, and had a
man's pride and spirit and independence; and what of greatness and
position a person got, he got mainly by achievement, not by birth. But
then the Church came to the front, with an axe to grind; and she was wise,
subtle, and knew more than one way to 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 fortify an evil one; she preached (to the commoner) humility,
obedience to superiors, the beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached (to the
commoner) meekness under insult; preached (still to the commoner, always
to the commoner) patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance under
oppression; and she introduced heritable ranks and aristocracies, and
taught all the Christian populations of the earth to bow down to them and
worship them.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="08-101.jpg (123K)" src="images/08-101.jpg" width-obs="100%" /></div>
<p><br/></p>
<p>Even down to my birth-century that poison was still in the blood of
Christendom, and the best of English commoners was still content to see
his inferiors impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as
lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country did
not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented with this
strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade himself that he
was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn't anything you
can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it. Of course that taint,
that reverence for rank and title, had been in our American blood, too—I
know that; but when I left America it had disappeared—at least to
all intents and purposes. The remnant of it was restricted to the
dudes and dudesses. When a disease has worked its way down to that
level, it may fairly be said to be out of the system.</p>
<p>But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur's kingdom. Here I
was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master intelligence
among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement the one and
only actually great man in that whole British world; and yet there and
then, just as in the remote England of my birth-time, the sheep-witted
earl who could claim long descent from a king's leman, acquired at
second-hand from the slums of London, was a better man than I was. Such
a personage was fawned upon 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 <i>he</i> could sit down in the king's presence, but I
couldn't. I could have got a title easily enough, and that would
have raised me a large step in everybody's eyes; even in the king's, the
giver of it. But I didn't ask for it; and I declined it when it was
offered. I couldn't have enjoyed such a thing with my notions; and
it wouldn't have been fair, anyway, because as far back as I could go, our
tribe had always been short of the bar sinister. I couldn't have felt
really and satisfactorily fine and proud and set-up over any title except
one that should come from the nation itself, the only legitimate source;
and such an one I hoped to win; and in the course of years of honest and
honorable endeavor, I did win it and did wear it with a high and clean
pride. This title fell casually from the lips of a blacksmith, one
day, in a village, was caught up as a happy thought and tossed from mouth
to mouth with a laugh and an affirmative vote; in ten days it had swept
the kingdom, and was become as familiar as the king's name. I was
never known by any other designation afterward, whether in the nation's
talk or in grave debate upon matters of state at the council-board of the
sovereign. This title, translated into modern speech, would be THE
BOSS. Elected by the nation. That suited me. And it was a
pretty high title. There were very few <i>the's</i>, and I was one of them.
If you spoke of the duke, or the earl, or the bishop, how could
anybody tell which one you meant? But if you spoke of The King or
The Queen or The Boss, it was different.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="08-102.jpg (36K)" src="images/08-102.jpg" width-obs="100%" /></div>
<p><br/></p>
<p>Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him—respected the
office; at least respected it as much as I was capable of respecting any
unearned supremacy; but as <i>men </i>I looked down upon him and his nobles—privately.
And he and they liked me, and respected 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't charge for their opinion about me:
the account was square, the books balanced, everybody was satisfied.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="09-105.jpg (117K)" src="images/09-105.jpg" width-obs="100%" /></div>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />
1 of 2
2 of 2
Previous
Next
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.