Chapter II. Which deals with the first sally the ingenious Don Quixote made from his homeland

These preparations made, then, he would wait no longer to put his plan into effect, spurred on by the loss he believed the world was suffering through his delay, so many were the grievances he meant to undo, the wrongs to set straight, the injustices to amend, the abuses to reform, and the debts to discharge. And so, without telling a soul of his intention, and without anyone seeing him, one morning before daybreak, on one of the hot days of July, he put on all his armor, mounted Rocinante with his badly patched helmet on his head, slipped his leather shield onto his arm, took up his lance, and went out through the back gate of a yard into the open country, overjoyed and elated to see how easily he had made a start on his good desire. But scarcely was he out in the fields when a terrible thought assailed him, so terrible that it nearly made him give up the enterprise he had begun: it came to his mind that he had not been dubbed a knight, and that, by the law of chivalry, he neither could nor should take up arms against any knight; and even if he had been dubbed, he would have to wear white armor, as a novice knight, with no device on his shield until he had won one by his own prowess. These thoughts made him waver in his purpose; but, his madness proving stronger than any other reason, he resolved to have himself dubbed a knight by the first person he came across, in imitation of many others who had done the same, as he had read in the books that had brought him to this state. As for the white armor, he intended, as soon as he had the chance, to scour his own until it was whiter than an ermine; and with that his mind was at rest, and he went on his way, taking no other road than the one his horse chose, for he believed that the whole force of adventures lay in that.

As our brand-new adventurer went along, then, he was talking to himself and saying:

“Who can doubt that in times to come, when the true history of my famous deeds comes to light, the sage who writes them down, when he comes to tell of this first sally of mine so early in the morning, will put it in this fashion: ‘Scarcely had ruddy Apollo spread over the face of the wide and spacious earth the golden threads of his beautiful hair, and scarcely had the little painted birds with their harp-sweet tongues hailed in sweet and mellifluous harmony the coming of rosy Dawn, who, leaving the soft bed of her jealous husband, was showing herself to mortals at the doors and balconies of the Manchegan horizon, when the famous knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, forsaking the idle down of his bed, mounted his famous horse Rocinante and began to ride across the ancient and well-known plain of Montiel’?”

And it was the truth that he was riding across it. And he went on, adding:

“Happy the age, and happy the century, in which my famous exploits shall come to light, worthy to be cast in bronze, carved in marble, and painted on panels as a memorial for ages to come! O you, sage enchanter, whoever you may be, whose lot it shall be to become the chronicler of this singular history, I pray you not to forget my good Rocinante, my everlasting companion on all my journeys and courses!”

Then he would begin again, as if he were truly in love:

“O Princess Dulcinea, mistress of this captive heart! Great wrong have ye done me in dismissing me and reproaching me with the stern insistence of your command that I appear not before your beauteousness. May it please you, lady, to remember this your subject heart, which suffers so many woes for love of you.”

With these he strung together other absurdities, all after the manner his books had taught him, imitating their language as far as he could. And all the while he rode so slowly, and the sun climbed so fast and with such heat, that it would have been enough to melt his brains, if he had had any.

Almost all that day he rode on without anything befalling him worth the telling, and this made him despair, for he wanted to meet, right away, this very minute, someone on whom to try the valor of his mighty arm. There are authors who say that his first adventure was the one at Puerto Lápice; others say it was the windmills; but what I have managed to discover in this matter, and what I have found set down in the Annals of La Mancha, is that he rode all that day, and at nightfall his nag and he found themselves worn out and dying of hunger; and that, looking all around to see whether he could spy some castle or some shepherds’ fold where he might take shelter and relieve his great hunger and need, he saw, not far from the road he was traveling, an inn, which was as if he had seen a star guiding him not merely to the stable door but to the very citadel of his redemption. He made haste, and he reached it just as night was falling.

At the door, as chance would have it, there stood two young women, of the kind they call women of the town, who were going to Seville with some mule drivers who had happened to stop at the inn for the night; and since everything our adventurer thought, saw, or imagined seemed to him to be done and to happen just as in what he had read, as soon as he saw the inn he pictured it as a castle with its four towers and spires of gleaming silver, not lacking its drawbridge and deep moat, together with all the appurtenances with which such castles are painted. He rode up to the inn, which to him seemed a castle, and a little way off he reined in Rocinante, waiting for some dwarf to appear between the battlements and give the signal with a trumpet that a knight was coming to the castle. But when he saw that they were slow about it, and that Rocinante was in a hurry to reach the stable, he went up to the door of the inn and saw the two loose young women who were standing there, and they seemed to him two beautiful damsels or two charming ladies taking their ease before the castle gate. Just then it so happened that a swineherd, gathering a herd of hogs out of some stubble fields—for that, and no pardon begged, is what they are called—blew a horn, at whose signal they come together, and at once Don Quixote saw in it what he desired, which was that some dwarf was signaling his arrival; and so, with uncommon delight, he came up to the inn and to the ladies, who, when they saw a man of that sort coming at them, in armor and with lance and leather shield, were turning in fright to go into the inn; but Don Quixote, gathering their fear from their flight, raised his pasteboard visor, uncovered his dry and dusty face, and with a gracious air and a calm voice said to them:

“Flee not, your graces, nor fear any foul wrong; for it doth not touch nor pertain to the order of chivalry that I profess to do such to anyone, much less to damsels so highborn as your presences declare you to be.”

The girls kept looking at him, their eyes hunting for his face, which the wretched visor hid; but when they heard themselves called damsels, a thing so far from their profession, they could not keep from laughing, and they laughed in such a way that Don Quixote grew offended and said to them:

“Modesty becomes the fair, and laughter that springs from slight cause is great folly besides; but I say this not that ye should be grieved or show an ill mien; for mine hath no other bent than to serve you.”

The language, which the ladies did not understand, and the sorry figure our knight cut, made their laughter grow and his anger too; and matters would have gone much further had the innkeeper not come out at that moment, a man who, being very fat, was very peaceable, and who, seeing that misshapen figure armed with gear as ill-matched as the bridle, lance, leather shield, and corselet, came within a hair of joining the damsels in their display of merriment. But in effect, fearing that great engine of equipment, he decided to speak to him civilly, and so he said:

“If your grace, sir knight, is looking for lodging, setting aside a bed (for there is none in this inn), everything else will be found here in great abundance.”

Don Quixote, seeing the humility of the warden of the fortress, for such the innkeeper and the inn appeared to him, answered:

“For me, sir castellan, anything will do, for
my trappings are my weapons,
my rest is in the fight, etc.”

The host thought that he had been called castellan, as one might say Castilian, because he had struck the knight as one of the sound men of Castile, though he was an Andalusian, and from the beach at Sanlúcar besides, no less a thief than Cacus and no less a rogue than a well-schooled page; and so he answered him:

“By that reckoning, your grace’s beds will be hard rocks, and your grace’s sleep an endless watch; and that being so, your grace may safely dismount, sure of finding in this hovel occasion and occasions for not sleeping for a whole year, let alone a single night.”

And, saying this, he went to hold the stirrup for Don Quixote, who dismounted with great difficulty and labor, like a man who had not broken his fast all that day.

Then he told the host to take great care of his horse, for he was the best creature that ever ate bread in the world. The innkeeper looked the horse over, and he did not seem as good as Don Quixote said, not even half as good; and, having settled him in the stable, he came back to see what his guest might want, whom the damsels, who had by now made their peace with him, were unarming; and though they had taken off his breastplate and backplate, they never knew how, nor were they able, to unfasten his gorget or take off the counterfeit helmet, which he had tied on with some green ribbons, and these would have had to be cut, since there was no undoing the knots; but he would on no account consent to it, and so he kept the helmet on all that night, and made the most comical and outlandish figure that could be imagined; and while they were unarming him, since he imagined that those much-handled women who were taking off his armor were great ladies and gentlewomen of that castle, he said to them with much wit:

“Never was there knight on earth
by ladies served so well
as was Don Quixote served
when from his village he came:
damsels waited upon him,
princesses upon his nag,

“or Rocinante, for that, my ladies, is the name of my horse, and Don Quixote of La Mancha is mine; for though I would not have revealed myself ere the feats wrought in your service and behalf had revealed me, the need to fit this old ballad of Lancelot to the present purpose hath caused you to learn my name before all due season; but the time will come when your ladyships shall command and I obey, and when the valor of my arm shall make plain the desire I have to serve you.”

The girls, who were not used to hearing such flights of rhetoric, did not answer a word; they only asked him whether he would like something to eat.

“Aught would I dine upon,” answered Don Quixote, “for, as I understand it, it would do me a great deal of good.”

As luck would have it, that day happened to be a Friday, and there was nothing in the whole inn but a few portions of a fish that in Castile they call pollack, and in Andalusia cod, and in other parts curadillo, and in still others truchuela, little trout. They asked him whether his grace might perhaps eat little trout, since there was no other fish to give him.

“So long as there are plenty of little trout,” answered Don Quixote, “they can serve for one trout, for it is all the same to me whether I am paid eight reales in small coins or in a single piece of eight. What is more, it may be that these little trout are like veal, which is better than beef, and kid, which is better than goat. But, be that as it may, let it come at once, for the toil and weight of arms cannot be borne without good governance of the guts.”

They set the table for him at the door of the inn, for the sake of the cool air, and the host brought him a portion of the ill-soaked and worse-cooked cod, and a loaf as black and grimy as his armor; but it was a matter for great laughter to watch him eat, because, as he had the helmet on and the visor raised, he could not put anything into his mouth with his own hands unless someone else gave it to him and put it there; and so one of those ladies performed this service. But when it came to giving him a drink, it was not possible, nor would it ever have been, had the innkeeper not bored through a reed and, setting one end in his mouth, poured the wine in at the other; and all this he bore patiently, rather than break the ribbons of his helmet.

While this was going on, a gelder of hogs happened to come to the inn; and as soon as he arrived he blew his reed pipe four or five times, and this finally confirmed Don Quixote in the belief that he was in some famous castle, and that they were serving him with music, and that the pollack was trout; the bread, of the finest white wheat; the harlots, ladies; and the innkeeper, the castellan of the castle; and with this he counted his resolve and his sally well bestowed. But what troubled him most was not yet being dubbed a knight, for it seemed to him that he could not lawfully set out on any adventure without receiving the order of knighthood.