Chapter XX: The Ogre's Castle

by Mark Twain

　　Between six and nine we made ten miles, whichwas 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 hedrew near he made dolorous moan, and by the wordsof it I perceived that he was cursing and swearing; yetnevertheless was I glad of his coming, for that I sawhe bore a bulletin-board whereon in letters all ofshining gold was writ:"USE PETERSON S PROPHYLACTIC TOOTH-BRUSH- ALL THE GO."I was glad of his coming, for even by this token Iknew him for knight of mine. It was Sir Madok dela Montaine, a burly great fellow whose chief distinction was that he had come within an ace of sending SirLauncelot down over his horse-tail once. He wasnever long in a stranger's presence without findingsome pretext or other to let out that great fact. Butthere was another fact of nearly the same size, whichhe never pushed upon anybody unasked, and yet neverwithheld when asked: that was, that the reason hedidn't quite succeed was, that he was interrupted andsent down over horse-tail himself. This innocent vastlubber did not see any particular difference betweenthe two facts. I liked him, for he was earnest in hiswork, and very valuable. And he was so fine to lookat, with his broad mailed shoulders, and the grandleonine set of his plumed head, and his big shieldwith its quaint device of a gauntleted hand clutching a prophylactic tooth-brush, with motto: "TryNoyoudont." This was a tooth-wash that I wasintroducing.He was aweary, he said, and indeed he looked it;but he would not alight. He said he was after thestove-polish man; and with this he broke out cursingand swearing anew. The bulletin-boarder referred towas Sir Ossaise of Surluse, a brave knight, and ofconsiderable celebrity on account of his having triedconclusions in a tournament once, with no less a Mogulthat Sir Gaheris himself -- although not successfully.He was of a light and laughing disposition, and to himnothing in this world was serious. It was for thisreason that I had chosen him to work up a stove-polishsentiment. There were no stoves yet, and so therecould be nothing serious about stove-polish. All thatthe agent needed to do was to deftly and by degreesprepare the public for the great change, and have themestablished in predilections toward neatness against thetime when the stove should appear upon the stage.Sir Madok was very bitter, and brake out anew withcursings. He said he had cursed his soul to rags;and yet he would not get down from his horse, neitherwould he take any rest, or listen to any comfort, untilhe should have found Sir Ossaise and settled this account. It appeared, by what I could piece togetherof the unprofane fragments of his statement, that hehad chanced upon Sir Ossaise at dawn of the morning,and been told that if he would make a short cut acrossthe fields and swamps and broken hills and glades, hecould head off a company of travelers who would berare customers for prophylactics and tooth-wash. Withcharacteristic zeal Sir Madok had plunged away atonce upon this quest, and after three hours of awfulcrosslot riding had overhauled his game. And behold,it was the five patriarchs that had been released fromthe dungeons the evening before! Poor old creatures,it was all of twenty years since any one of them hadknown what it was to be equipped with any remainingsnag or remnant of a tooth."Blank-blank-blank him," said Sir Madok, "an Ido not stove-polish him an I may find him, leave it tome; for never no knight that hight Ossaise or aughtelse may do me this disservice and bide on live, an Imay find him, the which I have thereunto sworn agreat oath this day."And with these words and others, he lightly took hisspear 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 baskingin the love of relatives and friends whom he had notseen for fifty years; and about him and caressing himwere also descendants of his own body whom he hadnever seen at all till now; but to him these were allstrangers, his memory was gone, his mind was stagnant. It seemed incredible that a man could outlasthalf a century shut up in a dark hole like a rat, buthere were his old wife and some old comrades totestify to it. They could remember him as he was inthe freshness and strength of his young manhood,when he kissed his child and delivered it to its mother'shands and went away into that long oblivion. Thepeople at the castle could not tell within half a generation the length of time the man had been shut up therefor his unrecorded and forgotten offense; but this oldwife knew; and so did her old child, who stood thereamong her married sons and daughters trying to realizea father who had been to her a name, a thought, aformless image, a tradition, all her life, and now wassuddenly concreted into actual flesh and blood and setbefore her face.It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account that I have made room for it here, but onaccount of a thing which seemed to me still morecurious. To wit, that this dreadful matter broughtfrom these downtrodden people no outburst of rageagainst these oppressors. They had been heritors andsubjects of cruelty and outrage so long that nothingcould have startled them but a kindness. Yes, herewas a curious revelation, indeed, of the depth to whichthis people had been sunk in slavery. Their entirebeing was reduced to a monotonous dead level ofpatience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptanceof whatever might befall them in this life. Their veryimagination was dead. When you can say that of aman, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is nolower deep for him.I rather wished I had gone some other road. Thiswas not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning out a peaceful revolution inhis mind. For it could not help bringing up the unget-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people inthe world ever did achieve their freedom by goodygoody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable lawthat all revolutions that will succeed must begin inblood, whatever may answer afterward. If historyteaches anything, it teaches that. What this folkneeded, 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 showsigns of excitement and feverish expectancy. Shesaid we were approaching the ogre's castle. I wassurprised into an uncomfortable shock. The object ofour quest had gradually dropped out of my mind; thissudden resurrection of it made it seem quite a real andstartling thing for a moment, and roused up in me asmart interest. Sandy's excitement increased everymoment; and so did mine, for that sort of thing iscatching. My heart got to thumping. You can'treason with your heart; it has its own laws, andthumps about things which the intellect scorns. Presently, when Sandy slid from the horse, motioned meto stop, and went creeping stealthily, with her headbent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes thatbordered a declivity, the thumpings grew stronger andquicker. And they kept it up while she was gainingher 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 herfinger, and said in a panting whisper:"The castle! The castle! Lo, where it looms!"What a welcome disappointment I experienced! Isaid:"Castle? It is nothing but a pigsty; a pigsty witha wattled fence around it."She looked surprised and distressed. The animationfaded out of her face; and during many moments shewas lost in thought and silent. Then:"It was not enchanted aforetime," she said in amusing fashion, as if to herself. "And how strangeis 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 notenchanted, hath suffered no change, but stands firmand stately still, girt with its moat and waving its banners in the blue air from its towers. And God shieldus, how it pricks the heart to see again these graciouscaptives, 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, notto her. It would be wasted time to try to argue herout of her delusion, it couldn't be done; I must justhumor it. So I said:"This is a common case -- the enchanting of a thingto one eye and leaving it in its proper form to another.You have heard of it before, Sandy, though youhaven't happened to experience it. But no harm isdone. In fact, it is lucky the way it is. If theseladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, itwould be necessary to break the enchantment, and thatmight be impossible if one failed to find out the particular process of the enchantment. And hazardous,too; for in attempting a disenchantment without thetrue key, you are liable to err, and turn your hogs intodogs, and the dogs into cats, the cats into rats, and soon, and end by reducing your materials to nothingfinally, or to an odorless gas which you can't follow --which, of course, amounts to the same thing. Buthere, by good luck, no one's eyes but mine are underthe enchantment, and so it is of no consequence todissolve it. These ladies remain ladies to you, and tothemselves, and to everybody else; and at the sametime they will suffer in no way from my delusion, forwhen I know that an ostensible hog is a lady, that isenough for me, I know how to treat her.""Thanks, oh, sweet my lord, thou talkest like anangel. And I know that thou wilt deliver them, forthat thou art minded to great deeds and art as strong aknight 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. Arethose three yonder that to my disordered eyes arestarveling swine-herds --""The ogres, Are they changed also? It is mostwonderful. Now am I fearful; for how canst thoustrike with sure aim when five of their nine cubits ofstature 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, howmuch of an ogre is invisible; then I know how tolocate his vitals. Don't you be afraid, I will makeshort work of these bunco-steerers. Stay where youare."I left Sandy kneeling there, corpse-faced but pluckyand hopeful, and rode down to the pigsty, and struckup a trade with the swine-herds. I won their gratitudeby buying out all the hogs at the lump sum of sixteenpennies, which was rather above latest quotations. Iwas just in time; for the Church, the lord of themanor, and the rest of the tax-gatherers would havebeen along next day and swept off pretty much all thestock, leaving the swine-herds very short of hogs andSandy out of princesses. But now the tax peoplecould be paid in cash, and there would be a stake leftbesides. One of the men had ten children; and hesaid that last year when a priest came and of his tenpigs took the fattest one for tithes, the wife burst outupon him, and offered him a child and said:"Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leaveme my child, yet rob me of the wherewithal to feed it?"How curious. The same thing had happened in theWales of my day, under this same old EstablishedChurch, which was supposed by many to have changedits nature when it changed its disguise.I sent the three men away, and then opened the stygate 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 strainthem to her heart, and kiss them, and caress them,and call them reverently by grand princely names, Iwas ashamed of her, ashamed of the human race.We had to drive those hogs home -- ten miles; andno ladies were ever more fickle-minded or contrary.They would stay in no road, no path; they broke outthrough the brush on all sides, and flowed away in alldirections, over rocks, and hills, and the roughestplaces they could find. And they must not be struck,or roughly accosted; Sandy could not bear to seethem treated in ways unbecoming their rank. Thetroublesomest old sow of the lot had to be called myLady, 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 hersnout and hardly any hair on her back, that was thedevil for perversity. She gave me a race of an hour,over all sorts of country, and then we were right wherewe had started from, having made not a rod of realprogress. I seized her at last by the tail, and broughther along squealing. When I overtook Sandy she washorrified, and said it was in the last degree indelicateto drag a countess by her train.We got the hogs home just at dark -- most of them.The princess Nerovens de Morganore was missing, andtwo of her ladies in waiting: namely, Miss AngelaBohun, and the Demoiselle Elaine Courtemains, theformer of these two being a young black sow with awhite star in her forehead, and the latter a brown onewith thin legs and a slight limp in the forward shankon the starboard side -- a couple of the tryingest blisters to drive that I ever saw. Also among the missingwere several mere baronesses -- and I wanted them tostay missing; but no, all that sausage-meat had to befound; so servants were sent out with torches to scourthe 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 smeltanything like it. It was like an insurrection in a gasometer.