Penny Dreadfuls, 1923 · page 101 of 116
The Taking of Helen by John Masefield — page 101: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page Description This is a page of running prose from page 89 of a Victorian penny dreadful titled *The Taking of Helen*. The text presents a first-person monologue in which a speaker recounts seizing a king's wife during a hunting expedition. The narrator describes his contempt for the weak king (comparing him to an empty eggshell), his bold public declaration before the royal court that the king's wife is now his, and the king's pathetic failure to respond—he merely giggled. The speaker boasts that when he and the woman rode through the court defying the king and his armed courtiers, they simply looked away rather than resist.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE TAKING OF HELEN 89 he had, if you can call it a quality.”” He drooped his head while he thought of the old King’s quality, but contempt grew upon his face as he thought, whatever it was, he could not call it a quality; he put it fiercely from him. “Out of the routine, he was the shell of a sucked egg,’ he said. “He was less, for with egg-shell you can make, whatever it is you make with egg-shell. Gods serve us, why do I speak of him? ‘“T tied him in his throne with my own hands, in a game, and afterwards I took his wife. “Upon a dewy morning we went to hunt the stag. We held the hounds outside; the huntsman rode the cover ; When my stallion heard the horn his mane shook like a flag, My heart leaped like the stag, as I looked upon my lover. “The King was there; not that he ever hunted, but it was his routine, to do whatever was done. “There was trodden sage there and the smell of the horses, and we were seven miles from the sea. ‘So I and his wife rode up to him, before all his Court, and there I told him that she was mine, and that if he had anything to say, let him say it. Say it? He had noth- ing to say. He giggled. “T rode along the whole of that Court; she beside me; and I told them that she was mine. They were his creatures; they had bows and spears, and we defied them. They did nothing. They looked at him, then they looked at us; then they looked away.” GOMIGIOOKS (C(O)