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 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.
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.
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 them? 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. 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.
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 he 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 THE’S, 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.
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 MEN 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.