A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court / Янки из Коннектикута при дворе короля Артура. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Марк Твен
the telling; and yet I had sat under the telling of it hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times, and cried and cursed all the way through. Then who can hope to know what my feelings were, to hear this armor-plated ass start in on it again, in the murky twilight of tradition, before the dawn of history, while even Lactantius[55] might be referred to as “the late Lactantius,” and the Crusades wouldn’t be born for five hundred years yet? Just as he finished, the call-boy came; so, haw-hawing like a demon, he went rattling and clanking out like a crate of loose castings[56], and I knew nothing more. It was some minutes before I came to, and then I opened my eyes just in time to see Sir Gareth fetch him an awful welt, and I unconsciously out with the prayer, “I hope to gracious he’s killed!” But by ill luck, before I had got half through with the words, Sir Gareth crashed into Sir Sagramour le Desirous and sent him thundering over his horse’s crupper, and Sir Sagramour caught my remark and thought I meant it for him. Well, whenever one of those people got a thing into his head, there was no getting it out again. I knew that, so I saved my breath, and offered no explanations. As soon as Sir Sagramour got well he notified me that there was a little account to settle between us, and he named a day three or four years in the future; place of settlement, the lists where the offence had been given. I said I would be ready when he got back. You see, he was going for the Holy Grail[57]. The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then. It was a several-years’ cruise. They always put in the long absence snooping around, in the most conscientious way, though none of them had any idea where the Holy Grail really was, and I don’t think any of them actually expected to find it, or would have known what to do with it if he had run across it. You see, it was just the Northwest Passage of that day, as you may say; that was all. Every year expeditions went out holy grailing, and next year relief expeditions went out to hunt for them. There was worlds of reputation in it, but no money[58]. Why, they actually wanted me to put in! Well, I should smile.
Chapter 10
Beginnings of Civilization
The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it was a good deal discussed, for such things interested the boys. The king thought I ought now to set forth in quest of adventures, so that I might gain renown and be the more worthy to meet Sir Sagramour when the several years should have rolled away. I excused myself for the present; I said it would take me three or four years, yet, to get things well fixed up and going smoothly; then I should be ready; all the chances were that at the end of that time Sir Sagramour would still be out grailing, so no valuable time would be lost by the postponement; I should then have been in office six or seven years, and I believed my system and machinery would be so well developed that I could take a holiday without its working any harm.
I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished. In various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under way – nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization. In these were gathered together the brightest young minds I could find, and I kept agents out raking the country for more, all the time. I was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts – experts in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling. These nurseries of mine went smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their obscure country retreats, for nobody was allowed to come into their precincts without a special permit – for I was afraid of the Church.
I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday schools the first thing; as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded schools in full blast in those places, and also a complete variety of Protestant congregations all in a prosperous and growing condition. Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that matter. But I confined public religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday schools, permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings. I could have given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions and features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities and stature of the individual who wears it; and besides, I was afraid of a united church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty, and paralysis to human thought.
All mines were royal property, and there were a good many of them. They had formerly been worked as savages always work mines – holes grubbed in the earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide by hand, at the rate of a ton a day; but I had begun to put the mining on a scientific basis as early as I could.
Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramour’s challenge struck me.
Four years rolled by – and then! Well, you would never imagine it in the world. Unlimited power is the ideal thing – when it is in safe hands. The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government. An earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly government, if the conditions were the same, namely, the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual. But as a perishable perfect man must die, and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible.
My works showed what a despot could do, with the resources of a kingdom at his command. Unsuspected by this dark land, I had the civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very nose! It was fenced away from the public view, but there it was, a gigantic and unassailable fact – and to be heard from, yet, if I lived and had luck. There it was, as sure a fact, and as substantial a fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokeless summit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its bowels. My schools and churches were children four years before; they were grown-up, now; my little shops of that day were vast factories, now; where I had a dozen trained men then, I had a thousand now; where I had one brilliant expert then, I had fifty now. I stood with my finger on the button, so to speak, ready to press it and flood the midnight world with intolerable light at any moment. But I was not going to do the thing in that sudden way. It was not my policy. The people could not have stood it; and moreover I should have had the Established Roman Catholic Church on my back in a minute.
No, I had been going cautiously, all the while. I had had confidential agents trickling through the country some time, whose office was to undermine knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnaw a little at this and that and the other superstition, and so prepare the way gradually for a better order of things. I was turning on my light one candle-power at a time, and meant to continue to do so.
I had scattered some branch schools secretly about the kingdom, and they were doing very well. I meant to work this racket more and more, as time wore on, if nothing occurred to frighten me. One of my deepest secrets was my West Point – my military academy. I kept that most jealously out of sight; and I did the same with my naval academy which I had established at a remote seaport. Both were prospering to my satisfaction.
Clarence was twenty-two, now, and was my head executive, my right hand. He was a darling; he was equal to anything; there wasn’t anything he couldn’t turn his hand to[59]. Of late I had been training him for journalism, for the time seemed about right for a start in the newspaper line; nothing big, but just a small weekly for experimental circulation in my civilization-nurseries. He took to it like a duck[60]; there was an editor concealed in him sure. Already he had doubled himself in one way: he talked sixth century, and wrote nineteenth. His journalistic style was climbing, steadily; it was already up to the back-settlement Alabama mark, and couldn’t be told from the editorial output of that region either by matter or flavor.
We had another large departure on hand, too. This was a telegraph and a telephone; our first venture in this line. These wires were for private service only, as yet, and must be kept private until a riper day should come. We had
Lactantius – Лактанций, Люций Цецилий Фирмиан, христианский писатель IV века родом из Африки; автор многих богословских сочинений на латинском языке
like a crate of loose castings – (
Holy Grail – чаша святого Грааля, сосуд с кровью Христа, якобы собранной при распятии одним из его учеников. В рыцарских романах XII века на поиски этой чаши, как символа нравственного совершенства, отправляются рыцари Персиваль, Ланселот, Гавейн и пр.
There was worlds of reputation in it, but no money. – (
there wasn’t anything he couldn’t turn his hand to – (
He took to it like a duck – (