Chapter XXVIII. Of things that, Benengeli says, whoever reads him will learn if he reads with attention

When the brave man flees, foul play has been uncovered, and it is for prudent men to keep themselves for a better occasion. This truth was borne out in Don Quixote, who, giving way to the fury of the village and the ill intentions of that angry squadron, took to the dusty road and, without a thought for Sancho or the danger he was leaving him in, drew off as far as seemed to him enough to be safe. Sancho followed him, slung across his donkey as has been told. He came up at last, having come to his senses by then, and on arriving let himself fall off the gray at Rocinante’s feet, all in distress, all bruised, and all beaten. Don Quixote got down to look at his wounds; but, since he found him sound from top to toe, he spoke to him in no little anger:

“In an evil hour you learned to bray, Sancho! And where did you find it was a good thing to mention rope in the hanged man’s house? To music of brays, what counterpoint could be played but one of cudgels? And give thanks to God, Sancho, that, since they crossed you with a stick, they did not make the per signum crucis (by the sign of the cross) on you with a cutlass.”

“I’m in no state to answer,” answered Sancho, “because it seems to me I’m talking through my back. Let’s mount and get away from here, for I’ll put silence on my braying, but not on saying that knights-errant run away and leave their good squires ground like henna, or like grist, in the power of their enemies.”

“He who retreats does not flee,” answered Don Quixote, “for you must know, Sancho, that valor that does not rest on prudence as its base goes by the name of rashness, and what the rash achieve is credited more to good fortune than to his courage. And so I confess that I have retreated, but not fled; and in this I have imitated many valiant men who have kept themselves for better times, and the histories are full of this, which I do not relate to you now, since they would be of no profit to you or pleasure to me.”

By now Sancho was on horseback, helped by Don Quixote, who likewise mounted Rocinante, and little by little they went to take cover in a poplar grove that could be seen about a quarter of a league from there. From time to time Sancho heaved some very deep ayes and painful groans; and, when Don Quixote asked him the cause of such bitter feeling, he answered that from the tip of his backbone to the nape of his neck he ached so that it drove him out of his senses.

“The cause of that pain must be, no doubt,” said Don Quixote, “that, as the stick they hit you with was long and wide, it caught you all across the back, where all those parts that hurt you are included; and if it had caught more of you, more of you would hurt.”

“By God,” said Sancho, “your grace has got me out of a great doubt, and explained it to me in fine terms! Body of me! Was the cause of my pain so hidden that it had to be told to me that I hurt all over everywhere the stick reached? If my ankles hurt, it might still be that someone would go about guessing why they hurt, but for what they pounded to hurt me is no great guessing. On my faith, sir, our master, another man’s ill hangs by a hair, and every day I’m finding out more ground about how little I can hope for from keeping company with your grace; for if this time you’ve let me be cudgeled, another time, and a hundred others, we’ll be back to the blanketings of yore and other boyish pranks, which, if they’ve come out on my back now, will come out in my eyes later. I’d do much better, only I’m a barbarian and won’t do anything that’s any good in my whole life; I’d do much better, I say again, to go back to my house, and to my wife, and to my children, and keep her and raise them on what God has been pleased to give me, and not go trailing after your grace along roads with no road to them and paths and tracks that have none, drinking badly and eating worse. And then there’s the sleeping! Count out, brother squire, seven feet of earth, and if you want more, take as many again, for the ladling is in your own hands, and stretch out to your heart’s content. May I see burned and turned to dust the first man who put a stitch into knight-errantry, or at least the first who wanted to be squire to such fools as all the knights-errant of old must have been. Of the present ones I say nothing, for since your grace is one of them I respect them, and because I know that your grace knows a point more than the devil in all you say and all you think.”

“I would make a good wager with you, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that now that you are talking without anyone holding you back, nothing hurts you anywhere in your whole body. Say, my son, everything that comes into your head and your mouth; for, in exchange for nothing hurting you, I will take as a pleasure the annoyance your impertinences give me. And if you so much want to go back to your house with your wife and children, God forbid I should stand in your way; you hold money of mine: work out how long ago we set out from our village on this third sally, and see what you can and should earn each month, and pay yourself with your own hand.”

“When I was in service,” answered Sancho, “with Tomé Carrasco, the father of the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, whom your grace knows well, I earned two ducats a month, besides my food; with your grace I don’t know what I can earn, though I do know that the squire of a knight-errant has more work than a man who serves a farmer; for, in short, those of us who serve farmers, however hard we work by day, however bad things get, at night we have stew for supper and sleep in a bed, which I haven’t slept in since I’ve been serving your grace. Except for the little while we spent at Don Diego de Miranda’s house, and my feast on the skimmings I got out of Camacho’s pots, and what I ate and drank and slept at Basilio’s house, all the rest of the time I’ve slept on the hard ground, under the open sky, subject to what they call the inclemencies of heaven, keeping myself alive on slivers of cheese and crusts of bread and drinking waters, now from brooks, now from springs, the ones we come across in these out-of-the-way places we go about in.”

“I confess,” said Don Quixote, “that all you say, Sancho, may be true. How much more does it seem to you I should give you than Tomé Carrasco gave you?”

“To my mind,” said Sancho, “with two reales more that your grace added each month, I’d count myself well paid. That’s as to the wages for my work; but as to making good to me the word and promise your grace has given me to give me the government of an isle, it would be fair to add another six reales, which would make thirty in all.”

“Very well,” replied Don Quixote, “and, according to the wages you have set for yourself, it is 23 days since we left our village: reckon, Sancho, pro rata, and see what I owe you, and pay yourself, as I have told you, with your own hand.”

“Oh, body of me!” said Sancho. “Your grace is very much mistaken in this reckoning, because for the promise of the isle it has to be counted from the day your grace promised it to me up to this present hour we’re in.”

“Well, how long is it, Sancho, since I promised it to you?” said Don Quixote.

“If I remember rightly,” answered Sancho, “it must be more than twenty years, three days more or less.”

Don Quixote struck his forehead a great slap and fell to laughing with right good will, and said:

“Why, I was not in the Sierra Morena, nor in the whole course of our sallies, more than two months at most, and you say, Sancho, that it is twenty years since I promised you the isle? Now I say that you want all the money of mine you have to be swallowed up in your wages; and if that is so, and you wish it, I give it to you here and now, and much good may it do you; for in exchange for seeing myself rid of so bad a squire, I shall be glad to be left poor and without a blanca. But tell me, you corrupter of the squirely ordinances of knight-errantry, where have you seen or read that any squire of a knight-errant has ever stood bargaining with his master over so much and how much you must give me each month to serve you? Go in, go in, you miscreant, you caitiff, you monster, for you look like all of them; go in, I say, into the mare magnum (the great sea) of their histories, and if you find that any squire has said, or thought, what you have said here, I want you to nail it on my forehead and, on top of that, give me four good stamped-and-sealed chucks under the chin. Turn the reins, or the halter, of the gray, and go back home, for not one step more from here are you going any further with me. O bread ill acknowledged! O promises ill bestowed! O man who has more of the beast than of the human being! Now, when I was thinking of setting you up in a station, and such a one that, in spite of your wife, they would call you your lordship, you take your leave? Now you go, when I was coming with the firm and valid intention of making you lord of the best isle in the world? In short, as you have said at other times, honey isn’t…, et cetera. An ass you are, and an ass you will be, and as an ass you will end when the course of your life is run; for I take it that your life will reach its last term before you hit on it and realize that you are a beast.”

Sancho stared at Don Quixote fixedly while he was hurling these reproaches at him, and was so stricken with remorse that the tears came to his eyes, and in a sorrowful and feeble voice he said to him:

“Master, I confess that to be an ass altogether I lack nothing but the tail; if your grace will put it on me, I’ll count it well put, and I’ll serve you as your donkey all the days I have left of my life. Forgive me, your grace, and take pity on my youth, and bear in mind that I know little, and that if I talk a lot, it comes more from infirmity than from malice; but who errs and mends, to God commends.”

“I would have marveled, Sancho, if you had not mixed some little proverb into your talk. Well, then, I forgive you, provided that you mend your ways and do not show yourself from now on so fond of your own interest, but try to enlarge your heart and take courage and spirit to hope for the fulfillment of my promises, which, though it is slow in coming, is not made impossible.”

Sancho answered that he would, even if he had to draw strength from weakness.

With this they went in among the poplars, and Don Quixote made himself comfortable at the foot of an elm, and Sancho at the foot of a beech; for these trees and others like them always have feet and not hands. Sancho spent a painful night, for the cudgel blow made itself felt the more in the night air. Don Quixote spent it in his continual memories; but for all that, they gave their eyes to sleep, and at the break of dawn they went on their way in search of the banks of the famous Ebro, where there befell them what will be told in the coming chapter.