Chapter XXI. Which deals with the high adventure and rich prize of Mambrino’s helmet, with other things that happened to our invincible knight

At this point it began to rain a little, and Sancho would have liked them to go into the fulling mill; but Don Quixote had taken such a loathing to the place for the heavy joke it had played on them that he would on no account go inside; and so, turning off to the right, they came out on another road like the one they had taken the day before.

Shortly after, Don Quixote caught sight of a man on horseback with something on his head that glittered as if it were gold, and he had scarcely seen him when he turned to Sancho and said:

“It seems to me, Sancho, that there is no proverb that is not true, because every one of them is a maxim taken from experience itself, which is the mother of all the sciences, and above all the one that says, ‘Where one door shuts, another opens.’ I say this because if last night fortune shut on us the door of the adventure we were looking for, deceiving us with the fulling mills, now it opens wide another for us, onto another better and surer adventure; and if I do not manage to go in by it, the fault will be mine, and I shall not be able to lay it on my small knowledge of fulling mills or on the darkness of the night. I say this because, unless I am mistaken, there comes toward us one who wears on his head the helmet of Mambrino, about which I swore the oath you know of.”

“Mind well what your grace says, and better still what you do,” said Sancho, “for I wouldn’t want it to be more fulling mills to finish fulling and pounding the sense out of us.”

“The devil take you, man!” replied Don Quixote. “What has a helmet to do with fulling mills?”

“I don’t know anything,” answered Sancho, “but, on my faith, if I could talk as much as I used to, maybe I’d give such reasons that your grace would see you were mistaken in what you say.”

“How can I be mistaken in what I say, you hair-splitting traitor?” said Don Quixote. “Tell me, do you not see that knight coming toward us on a dappled gray horse, who wears a helmet of gold on his head?” “What I see and make out,” answered Sancho, “is nothing but a man on a brown ass, like mine, who has something on his head that shines.” “Well, that is Mambrino’s helmet,” said Don Quixote. “Stand aside and leave me alone with him: you will see how, without speaking a word, to save time, I conclude this adventure, and the helmet I have so longed for remains mine.”

“I’ll take care to stand aside, all right,” replied Sancho, “but God grant, I say again, that it be oregano and not fulling mills.”

“I have told you already, brother, not to mention to me, nor so much as think of, that business of the fulling mills again,” said Don Quixote, “for I swear… and I say no more, that I shall full your soul for you.”

Sancho fell silent, fearing that his master might carry out the vow he had flung at him, round as a ball.

The truth of the matter, then, about the helmet, and the horse and the knight that Don Quixote saw, was this: in that neighborhood there were two villages, one so small that it had neither an apothecary’s shop nor a barber, and the other, which was close by, had both; and so the barber of the bigger one served the smaller, in which a sick man had need of being bled and another of being shaved, and for this the barber was coming, and he was carrying a brass basin; and as luck would have it, just as he was on his way, it began to rain, and so that his hat would not be spoiled, for it must have been a new one, he put the basin on his head; and, since it was clean, it shone from half a league off. He was riding a brown ass, as Sancho said, and this was why to Don Quixote it seemed a dappled gray horse, and a knight, and a helmet of gold; for all the things he saw he very easily fitted to his crazed chivalries and his ill-errant thoughts. And when he saw the poor knight drawing near, without entering into any talk with him, at Rocinante’s top speed he bore down on him with his long lance couched low, meaning to run him through from side to side; but as he came up to him, never slowing the fury of his gallop, he said to him:

“Defend yourself, wretched creature, or yield me of your own will what is so justly my due!”

The barber, who, without any thought or fear of it, saw that phantom bearing down on him, had no other way of saving himself from the blow of the lance than to let himself fall off his ass; and he had no sooner touched the ground than he was up again, nimbler than a deer, and began to run across that plain so fast the wind could not have caught him. He left the basin on the ground, with which Don Quixote was content, and he said that the pagan had acted sensibly and had imitated the beaver, which, finding itself hard pressed by the hunters, bites and tears off with its teeth that for which it knows, by natural instinct, it is being hunted. He ordered Sancho to pick up the helmet, and Sancho, taking it in his hands, said:

“By God, it’s a good basin, and it’s worth a piece of eight if it’s worth a maravedí.”

And when he gave it to his master, Don Quixote put it on his head at once, turning it this way and that, looking for the fit; and, since he could not find it, he said: “Beyond a doubt the pagan to whose measure this famous helmet was first forged must have had a very large head, and the worst of it is that half of it is missing.” When Sancho heard the basin called a helmet, he could not hold back his laughter; but his master’s anger came into his mind, and he stopped halfway through it. “What are you laughing at, Sancho?” said Don Quixote.

“I’m laughing,” he answered, “to think of the big head the pagan who owned this helmet had, for it looks for all the world like a barber’s basin, the very spit of one.” “Do you know what I imagine, Sancho? That this famous piece of this enchanted helmet, through some strange mishap, must have fallen into the hands of someone who did not know how to recognize or value its worth, and, without knowing what he was doing, seeing that it was of purest gold, he must have melted down the other half to profit by the price, and out of the other half he made this, which looks like a barber’s basin, as you say. But, be that as it may, for to me, who know it for what it is, its transmutation makes no difference; for I shall have it set right in the first village where there is a smith, and in such a way that not even the one the god of smithies made and forged for the god of battles shall surpass it or so much as come near it; and in the meantime I shall wear it as best I can, for something is better than nothing; all the more since it will surely be enough to defend me from a stone or two.”

“That’ll be so,” said Sancho, “as long as they don’t throw with a sling, the way they threw in the fight between the two armies, when they gave your grace’s molars the sign of the cross and broke the flask that held that most blessed brew that made me throw up my guts.”

“I am not much grieved at having lost it, for you know already, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that I have the recipe in my memory.”

“So have I,” answered Sancho, “but if ever in my life I make it or taste it again, may this be my last hour. Besides, I don’t intend to put myself in the way of needing it, because I intend to keep myself with all my five senses from being wounded or wounding anybody. As for being tossed in a blanket again, I say nothing, for misfortunes like that can hardly be foreseen, and if they come there’s nothing to be done but shrug your shoulders, hold your breath, shut your eyes, and let yourself go wherever luck and the blanket take you.”

“You are a bad Christian, Sancho,” said Don Quixote on hearing this, “for you never forget an injury once done you; know, then, that it belongs to noble and generous hearts to pay no heed to trifles. What foot did you come away lame from it, what rib broken, what head cracked, that you cannot forget that jest? For, when the thing is well looked into, it was a jest and a pastime; for if I did not take it so, I would have gone back there by now and done more damage in your revenge than the Greeks did for the stolen Helen. Who, if she had lived in this age, or my Dulcinea in hers, could be sure she would not have had the fame for beauty that she has.”

And here he heaved a sigh, and sent it up to the clouds. And Sancho said:

“Let it pass for a jest, since the vengeance can’t pass in earnest; but I know what kind of earnest and jest it was, and I know too that they’ll never drop out of my memory, any more than they’ll ever come off my back. But, leaving this aside, tell me, your grace, what we’re to do with this dappled gray horse that looks like a brown ass, which that Martino your grace knocked down has left here forsaken; for, from the way he took to the dust and took Villadiego’s road, he shows no sign of ever coming back for it; and by my beard, but this gray is a good one!”

“It is never my custom,” said Don Quixote, “to strip those I conquer, nor is it the usage of chivalry to take their horses from them and leave them on foot, unless it be that the victor has lost his own in the fight; for in such a case it is lawful to take the vanquished man’s horse, as won in lawful war. So, Sancho, leave that horse, or ass, or whatever you would have it be, for as soon as its owner sees we have gone far off, he will come back for it.”

“God knows I’d like to take it,” replied Sancho, “or at least swap it for this one of mine, which doesn’t seem to me as good. Truly the laws of chivalry are strict, since they don’t stretch to letting a man swap one ass for another; and I’d like to know whether I could swap the harness, at least.”

“On that point I am not very certain,” answered Don Quixote, “and, in case of doubt, until I am better informed, I say you may make the exchange, if you are in extreme need of it.”

“So extreme,” answered Sancho, “that if it were for my own person I couldn’t need it more.”

And then, armed with that license, he performed the mutatio caparum (change of copes) and decked out his donkey till he looked a thousand times finer, leaving him bettered by a third and a fifth, like a favored heir. This done, they breakfasted on the leftovers of the camp stores they had plundered from the sumpter mule, and drank from the stream of the fulling mills, without turning their faces to look at them: such was the loathing they had for them because of the fright they had given them.

Their choler, then, cut short by the meal, and even their melancholy, they mounted, and, without taking any set road, since it is very much the way of knights-errant to take no fixed one, they set off wherever Rocinante’s will chose to go, which drew after it his master’s, and even the ass’s, who always followed him wherever he led, in good love and fellowship. For all that, they came back to the highroad, and went on along it at random, with no other design at all.

As they were going along, then, Sancho said to his master:

“Sir, will your grace give me leave to have a little talk with you? For since you laid on me that harsh commandment of silence, more than four things have rotted in my stomach, and I wouldn’t like just one that I have now on the tip of my tongue to go to waste.”

“Say it,” said Don Quixote, “and be brief in your discourse, for none is pleasing if it is long.”

“I say, then, sir,” answered Sancho, “that for some days now I’ve been thinking how little is earned and gained by going about looking for these adventures your grace goes looking for in these wildernesses and crossroads, where, even if the most dangerous ones are overcome and finished off, there’s nobody to see them or know about them; and so they’ll have to stay in perpetual silence, to the prejudice of your grace’s intent and of what they deserve. And so it seems to me it would be better, saving your grace’s better opinion, for us to go and serve some emperor, or some other great prince who has some war on, in whose service your grace might show the worth of your person, your great strength, and your greater understanding; for when the lord we serve sees this, he’ll be bound to reward us, each according to his merits, and there won’t be anybody lacking there to put your grace’s exploits in writing, for perpetual memory. Of mine I say nothing, since they mustn’t go beyond squirely bounds; though I can say that, if it’s the custom in chivalry to write down the exploits of squires, I don’t think mine will be left between the lines.”

“You do not speak amiss, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote, “but, before it comes to that point, a knight must go about the world, as on probation, looking for adventures, so that, by achieving some, he may win such a name and fame that, when he goes to the court of some great monarch, the knight is already known by his deeds; and that the boys have scarcely seen him ride in at the city gate when they all follow him and crowd round him, shouting and saying, ‘This is the Knight of the Sun,’ or of the Serpent, or of some other device under which he has achieved great exploits. ‘This is he,’ they will say, ‘who vanquished in single combat the huge giant Brocabruno of the Great Strength; he who disenchanted the Great Mameluke of Persia from the long enchantment in which he had lain nearly nine hundred years.’ So, passing from hand to hand, they will go proclaiming your deeds, and presently, at the uproar of the boys and the other people, the king of that land will come out to the windows of his royal palace, and the moment he lays eyes on the knight, knowing him by his armor or by the device on his shield, he must needs say: ‘Ho, there! Let my knights, as many as are at my court, go forth to receive the flower of chivalry who comes yonder!’ At which command they will all go forth, and he will come down to the middle of the staircase and embrace him most closely, and give him the kiss of peace upon the cheek; and then he will lead him by the hand to the chamber of the lady queen, where the knight will find her with the princess, her daughter, who must be one of the fairest and most perfect damsels that could with great pains be found in a great part of the known earth. After this it will come about, straightway and on the spot, that she will set her eyes on the knight and he his on hers, and each will seem to the other a thing more divine than human; and, without knowing how or how not, they will be caught and tangled in the inextricable net of love, and with great woe in their hearts at not knowing how to speak to each other to reveal their longings and feelings. From there they will take him, no doubt, to some richly furnished room of the palace, where, having taken off his armor, they will bring him a rich mantle of scarlet to cover himself with; and if he looked well in armor, as well and better still must he look in a quilted doublet. When night comes he will sup with the king, the queen, and the princess, where he will never take his eyes off her, gazing at her by stealth from those present, and she will do the same with the same cunning, for, as I have said, she is a very clever damsel. The tables will be cleared, and suddenly through the door of the hall will come in an ugly little dwarf with a fair duenna, who comes behind the dwarf between two giants, with a certain adventure, contrived by a most ancient sage, such that he who achieves it shall be held the best knight in the world. The king will then order all who are present to try it, and none will bring it to its end and conclusion but the guest knight, much to the profit of his fame, at which the princess will be most content, and will hold herself content and well repaid besides for having set and placed her thoughts so high. And the beauty of it is that this king, or prince, or whatever he may be, is waging a very hard-fought war with another as powerful as he, and the guest knight (after some days at his court) asks his leave to go and serve him in that said war. The king will give it to him with a very good will, and the knight will courteously kiss his hands for the favor he doth him. And that night he will bid farewell to the princess his lady at the grating of a garden onto which the chamber where she sleeps looks out, through which he had already spoken to her many other times, a damsel whom the princess much trusted being go-between and privy to it all. He will sigh, she will swoon, the damsel will bring water, and will be sorely woeful because morning is coming, and she would not have them discovered, for the sake of her lady’s honor. At last the princess will come to herself and will put her white hands out through the grating to the knight, and he will kiss them a thousand and a thousand times and bathe them in tears. It will be arranged between the two of them how they are to let each other know of their good or ill fortunes, and the princess will beg him to stay away as short a time as he can; he will promise it with many oaths; he kisses her hands again, and takes his leave with such feeling that he comes near to ending his life. From there he goes to his chamber, throws himself on his bed, cannot sleep for the grief of parting, rises very early in the morning, goes to take leave of the king and the queen and the princess; they tell him, when he has taken leave of the two, that the lady princess is indisposed and cannot receive visitors; the knight believes it comes of grief at his going, his heart is run through, and he is within a little of giving open sign of his pain. The go-between damsel is present, she must note it all, she goes to tell it to her lady, who receives her with tears and tells her that one of the greatest griefs she has is not knowing who her knight is, and whether he is of the lineage of kings or not; the damsel assures her that so much courtesy, gallantry, and valor as her knight’s could only be found in a royal and noble person; the woeful lady is consoled by this; she strives to console herself so as not to give her parents a bad sign of herself, and, at the end of two days, she appears in public. The knight has gone by now: he fights in the war, overcomes the king’s enemy, takes many cities, is victor in many battles, comes back to court, sees his lady where he is accustomed to, it is agreed that he shall ask her father for her hand in payment for his services. The king will not give her to him, because he does not know who he is; but, for all that, whether carried off or in some other way, the princess comes to be his wife and her father comes to hold it a great piece of good fortune, because it came to be established that this knight is the son of a valiant king of I do not know what kingdom, for I believe it cannot be on the map. The father dies, the princess is his heir, and, to put it in two words, the knight is king. Here at once comes the bestowing of favors on his squire and on all those who helped him rise to so high an estate: he marries his squire to one of the princess’s damsels, who will doubtless be the one who was the go-between in their love, and who is the daughter of a very great duke.”

“That’s what I ask, and fair dealing,” said Sancho. “That’s what I hold to, for all of it, to the letter, has to happen to your grace, now that you’re called the Knight of the Sorry Figure.”

“Do not doubt it, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “for by that same way and by those same steps I have told you of, knights-errant climb, and have climbed, to be kings and emperors. All that is lacking now is to see which king of the Christians or of the pagans has a war and has a beautiful daughter; but there will be time to think of that, since, as I have told you, a knight must first win fame elsewhere before he goes to court. There is another thing I lack, too; for, supposing a king is found with a war and a beautiful daughter, and that I have won unbelievable fame through all the universe, I do not know how it could be found that I am of the lineage of kings, or at least a second cousin to an emperor; for the king will not want to give me his daughter to wife unless he is first fully informed on this point, however much my famous deeds may merit it. So, for this lack, I fear to lose what my arm has well deserved. True it is that I am a hidalgo of known ancestral house, with possessions and property, and entitled to the five hundred sueldos of damages; and it might be that the sage who writes my history will so trace out my kindred and descent that he will find me a king’s grandson five or six times removed. For I would have you know, Sancho, that there are two kinds of lineage in the world: some that draw and derive their descent from princes and monarchs, which time has little by little undone, and they have ended in a point, like a pyramid turned upside down; others had their beginning in low people, and go rising from degree to degree until they come to be great lords. So the difference is that some were what they no longer are, and others are what they were not before; and it might be that I am one of those who, once it is looked into, had a great and famous beginning, and with that the king who is to be my father-in-law should be satisfied. And if not, the princess must love me in such a way that, in spite of her father, even if she knows full well that my father is a water carrier, she will accept me as her lord and husband; and if not, then here comes the carrying her off and taking her wherever I please; for time or death must put an end to her parents’ anger.”

“There what some heartless people say fits in well too,” said Sancho: “‘Don’t ask as a favor what you can take by force’; though it fits better to say, ‘Better a leap from the thicket than the pleas of good men.’ I say this because if the lord king, your grace’s father-in-law, won’t be tamed into handing over my lady the princess to you, there’s nothing for it but, as your grace says, to carry her off and spirit her away. But the trouble is that, until peace is made and the kingdom is enjoyed in peace, the poor squire may be left with nothing between his teeth in this matter of favors. Unless it is that the go-between damsel, who is to be his wife, goes off with the princess, and he shares his bad luck with her until heaven ordains otherwise; for his master, I think, may very well give her to him straightaway as his lawful wife.”

“There is no one who can stop that,” said Don Quixote.

“Well, as long as that’s so,” answered Sancho, “there’s nothing for it but to commend ourselves to God and let luck run wherever He best steers it.”

“May God bring it about,” answered Don Quixote, “as I desire and you, Sancho, have need of; and base be he who holds himself base.”

“So be it, by God,” said Sancho, “for I’m an Old Christian, and to be a count that’s enough for me.”

“And more than enough,” said Don Quixote, “and even if you were not, it would make no difference, because, if I am king, I can very well give you nobility without your buying it or doing me any service for it. For, once I make you a count, there you are, a gentleman, and let them say what they will; for on my faith they will have to call you ‘your lordship,’ however much it galls them.”

“And don’t you think I’d know how to lend weight to the tittle!” said Sancho. “Title, you should say, not tittle,” said his master.

“Have it so,” answered Sancho Panza. “I say I’d know how to carry it well, for, upon my life, I was once the beadle of a confraternity, and the beadle’s gown sat on me so well that everybody said I had the presence to be the steward of the same confraternity. Then what will it be when I throw a duke’s robe over my shoulders, or get myself up in gold and pearls the way a foreign count does? It’s my belief they’ll come to see me from a hundred leagues off.” “You will look well,” said Don Quixote, “but you will need to shave your beard often; for, thick and tangled and unkempt as you have it, if you do not shave it with a razor every two days at least, what you are will be seen a musket shot away.”

“What more is there to it,” said Sancho, “than to take on a barber and keep him on wages in the house? And even, if need be, I’ll make him follow behind me, like a grandee’s master of horse.”

“Why, how do you know,” asked Don Quixote, “that grandees have their masters of horse ride behind them?”

“I’ll tell you,” answered Sancho. “Some years back I spent a month at court, and there I saw a very small gentleman, who they said was a very great grandee, out taking the air, and a man followed him on horseback at every turn he took, so that he looked for all the world like his tail. I asked why that man didn’t ride up alongside the other, but always went behind him. They answered that he was his master of horse, and that it was the custom of grandees to have such men behind them. Ever since then I’ve known it so well that I’ve never forgotten it.”

“I say you are right,” said Don Quixote, “and that in the same way you may have your barber follow you; for customs did not all come at once, nor were they invented all together, and you may be the first count to have his barber ride behind him; and indeed shaving a man’s beard is a matter of greater trust than saddling a horse.”

“Leave the business of the barber to me,” said Sancho, “and let it be left to your grace to manage to become a king and to make me a count.”

“So it shall be,” answered Don Quixote.

And, lifting his eyes, he saw what the following chapter will tell.