A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (mobi reader android .txt) 📕

I was at the well next day betimes.  Merlin was there, enchanting away like a beaver, but not raising the moisture.  He was not in a pleasant humor; and every time I hinted that perhaps this contract was a shade too hefty for a novice he unlimbered his tongue and cursed like a bishop—French bishop of the Regency days, I mean.

Matters were about as I expected to find them.  The “fountain” was an ordinary well, it had been dug in the ordinary way, and stoned up in the ordinary way.  There was no miracle about it.  Even the lie that had created its reputation was not miraculous; I could have told it myself, with one hand tied behind me.  The well was in a dark chamber which stood in the center of a cut-stone chapel, whose walls were hung with pious pictures of a workmanship that would have made a chromo feel good; pictures historically commemorative of curative miracles which had been achieved by the waters when nobody was looking.  That is, nobody but angels; they are always on deck when there is a miracle to the fore—so as to get put in the picture, perhaps.  Angels are as fond of that as a fire company; look at the old masters.

The well-chamber was dimly lighted by lamps; the water was drawn with a windlass and chain by monks, and poured into troughs which delivered it into stone reservoirs outside in the chapel—when there was water to draw, I mean—and none but monks could enter the well-chamber.  I entered it, for I had temporary authority to do so, by courtesy of my professional brother and subordinate. But he hadn’t entered it himself.  He did everything by incantations; he never worked his intellect.  If he had stepped in there and used his eyes, instead of his disordered mind, he could have cured the well by natural means, and then turned it into a miracle in the customary way; but no, he was an old numskull, a magician who believed in his own magic; and no magician can thrive who is handicapped with a superstition like that.

I had an idea that the well had sprung a leak; that some of the wall stones near the bottom had fallen and exposed fissures that allowed the water to escape.  I measured the chain—98 feet.  Then I called in a couple of monks, locked the door, took a candle, and made them lower me in the bucket.  When the chain was all paid out, the candle confirmed my suspicion; a considerable section of the wall was gone, exposing a good big fissure.

I almost regretted that my theory about the well’s trouble was correct, because I had another one that had a showy point or two about it for a miracle.  I remembered that in America, many centuries later, when an oil well ceased to flow, they used to blast it out with a dynamite torpedo.  If I should find this well dry and no explanation of it, I could astonish these people most nobly by having a person of no especial value drop a dynamite bomb into it.  It was my idea to appoint Merlin.  However, it was plain that there was no occasion for the bomb.  One cannot have everything the way he would like it.  A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.  That is what I did.  I said to myself, I am in no hurry, I can wait; that bomb will come good yet.  And it did, too.

When I was above ground again, I turned out the monks, and let down a fish-line; the well was a hundred and fifty feet deep, and there was forty-one feet of water in it.  I called in a monk and asked:

“How deep is the well?”

“That, sir, I wit not, having never been told.”

“How does the water usually stand in it?”

“Near to the top, these two centuries, as the testimony goeth, brought down to us through our predecessors.”

It was true—as to recent times at least—for there was witness to it, and better witness than a monk; only about twenty or thirty feet of the chain showed wear and use, the rest of it was unworn and rusty.  What had happened when the well gave out that other time?  Without doubt some practical person had come along and mended the leak, and then had come up and told the abbot he had discovered by divination that if the sinful bath were destroyed the well would flow again.  The leak had befallen again now, and these children would have prayed, and processioned, and tolled their bells for heavenly succor till they all dried up and blew away, and no innocent of them all would ever have thought to drop a fish-line into the well or go down in it and find out what was really the matter.  Old habit of mind is one of the toughest things to get away from in the world.  It transmits itself like physical form and feature; and for a man, in those days, to have had an idea that his ancestors hadn’t had, would have brought him under suspicion of being illegitimate.  I said to the monk:

“It is a difficult miracle to restore water in a dry well, but we will try, if my brother Merlin fails.  Brother Merlin is a very passable artist, but only in the parlor-magic line, and he may not succeed; in fact, is not likely to succeed.  But that should be nothing to his discredit; the man that can do this kind of miracle knows enough to keep hotel.”

“Hotel?  I mind not to have heard—”

“Of hotel?  It’s what you call hostel.  The man that can do this miracle can keep hostel.  I can do this miracle; I shall do this miracle; yet I do not try to conceal from you that it is a miracle to tax the occult powers to the last strain.”

“None knoweth that truth better than the brotherhood, indeed; for it is of record that aforetime it was parlous difficult and took a year.  Natheless, God send you good success, and to that end will we pray.”

As a matter of business it was a good idea to get the notion around that the thing was difficult.  Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.  That monk was filled up with the difficulty of this enterprise; he would fill up the others. In two days the solicitude would be booming.

On my way home at noon, I met Sandy.  She had been sampling the hermits.  I said:

“I would like to do that myself.  This is Wednesday.  Is there a matinee?”

“A which, please you, sir?”

“Matinee.  Do they keep open afternoons?”

“Who?”

“The hermits, of course.”

“Keep open?”

“Yes, keep open.  Isn’t that plain enough?  Do they knock off at noon?”

“Knock off?”

“Knock off?—yes, knock off.  What is the matter with knock off? I never saw such a dunderhead; can’t you understand anything at all? In plain terms, do they shut up shop, draw the game, bank the fires—”

“Shut up shop, draw—”

“There, never mind, let it go; you make me tired.  You can’t seem to understand the simplest thing.”

“I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me dole and sorrow that I fail, albeit sith I am but a simple damsel and taught of none, being from the cradle unbaptized in those deep waters of learning that do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh of that most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend state to the mental eye of the humble mortal who, by bar and lack of that great consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a symbol of that other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to the pitying eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of grief do lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall in the darkness of his mind encounter these golden phrases of high mystery, these shut-up-shops, and draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is but by the grace of God that he burst not for envy of the mind that can beget, and tongue that can deliver so great and mellow-sounding miracles of speech, and if there do ensue confusion in that humbler mind, and failure to divine the meanings of these wonders, then if so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true, wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear homage and may not lightly be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted this complexion of mood and mind and understood that that I would I could not, and that I could not I might not, nor yet nor might nor could, nor might-not nor could-not, might be by advantage turned to the desired would , and so I pray you mercy of my fault, and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive it, good my master and most dear lord.”

I couldn’t make it all out—that is, the details—but I got the general idea; and enough of it, too, to be ashamed.  It was not fair to spring those nineteenth century technicalities upon the untutored infant of the