The Boss 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.
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.
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.
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 fullsized fellow visible.Iwas 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 Iwas 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.Ido 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.
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,ANY kind of royalty,howsoever modified,ANY 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.
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.
