Once & Future King 05 - The Book of Merlyn

by T. H. White

  "Yes," said the king meekly.

  "Do I look like a dream?"

  "Yes."

  Merlyn seemed to gasp with vexation, then put the whole beard into his mouth at one mouthful. After this he blew his nose and went away to stand in a corner, with his face to the canvas, where he began to soliloquise indignantly.

  "Of all the persecutions and floutings," he stated. "How can a necromancer prove he is not a vision, when suspected of the baseness? A ghost may prove he is alive by being pinched: but not so with a by-our-lady dream. For, argal, you can dream of pinches. Yet hist! There is the noted remedy, in which the dreamer pinches his own leg."

  "Arthur," he directed, turning round like a top, "be pleased to pinch yourself."

  "Yes."

  "Now, does this prove you are awake?"

  "I doubt it,"

  The vision examined him sadly.

  "I was afraid it would not," it agreed; and it returned to its corner, where it began to recite some complicated passages from Burton, Jung, Hippocrates and Sir Thomas Browne. 13

  After five minutes, it struck its fist into the palm of the other hand and marched back to the candle light, inspired by the bed of Cleopatra.

  "Listen," Merlyn announced. "Have you ever dreamed of a smell?"

  "Dreamed of a smell?"

  "Do not repeat."

  "I can hardly..."

  "Come, come. You have dreamed of a sight, have you not? And of a feeling: everybody has dreamed of a feeling. You may even have dreamed of a taste. I recollect that once when I had forgotten to eat anything for a fortnight, I dreamed of a chocolate pudding: which I distinctly tasted, but it was snatched away. The question is, have you ever dreamed of a smell?"

  "I do not think I have: not to smell it."

  "Make sure. Do not stare like an idiot, my dear man, but attend to the matter in hand. Have you ever dreamed with your nose?"

  "Never. I cannot remember dreaming of a smell."

  "You are positive?"

  "Positive."

  "Then smell that!" cried the necromancer, snatching off his skull-cap and presenting it under Arthur's nose, with its cargo of mice, frogs and a few shrimps for salmon-fishing which he had overlooked.

  "Phew!"

  "Am I a dream now?"

  "It does not smell like one."

  "Well, then..."

  "Merlyn," said the king. "It makes no difference whether you are a dream or not, so long as you are here. Sit down and be patient for a little, if you can. Tell me the reason of your visit. Talk. Say you have come to save us from this war."

  The old fellow had achieved his object of artificial respiration as well as he could; so now he sat down comfortably, and took the matter in hand.

  "No," he said. "Nobody can be saved from anything, unless they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people—it is often very dangerous indeed to do things at all—and the only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, the people are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the course of the millennia. Such is the business of the philosopher, to open new ideas. It is not his business to impose them on people."

  "You did not tell me this before."

  "Why not?"

  "You have egged me into doing things during all my life... The Chivalry and the Round Table which you made me invent, what were these but efforts to save people, and to get things done?"

  "They were ideas," said the philosopher firmly, "rudimentary ideas. All thought, in its early stages, begins as action. The actions which you have been wading through have been ideas, clumsy ones of course, but they had to be established as a foundation before we could begin to think in earnest. You have been teaching man to think in action. Now it is time to think in our heads."

  "So my Table was not a failure—Master?"

  "Certainly not. It was an experiment. Experiments lead to new ones, and this is why 1 have come to take you to our burrow."

  "I am ready," he said, amazed to find that he was feeling happy.

  "The Committee discovered that there had been some gaps in your education, two of them, and it was determined that these ought to be put right before concluding the active stage of the Idea."

  "What is this committee? It sounds as if they had been making a report."

  "And so we did. You will meet them presently in the cave. But now, excuse my mentioning it, there is a matter to arrange before we go."

  Here Merlyn examined his toes with a doubtful eye, hesitating to continue.

  "Men's brains," he explained in the end, "seem to get petrified as they grow older. The surface becomes perished, like worn leather, and will no longer take impressions. You may have noticed it?"

  "I feel a stiffness in my head."

  "Now children have resilient, plastic brains," continued the magician with relish, as if he were talking about caviare sandwiches. "They can take impressions before you could say Jack Robinson. To learn a language when you are young, for instance, might literally be called child's play: but after middle age one finds it is the devil." "I have heard people say so."

  "What the committee suggested was, that if you are to learn these things we speak of, you ought— ahem—you ought to be a boy. They have

  furnished me with a patent medicine to do it. You understand: you would become the Wart once more."

  "Not if I had to live my life again," replied the other old fellow evenly.

  They faced each other like image and object in a mirror, the outside corners of their eyes drawn down with the hooded lids of age.

  "It would be only for the evening."

  "The Elixir of Life?"

  "Exactly. Think of the people who have tried to find it."

  "If I were to find such a thing, I would throw it away."

  "I hope you are not being stupid about children," asked Merlyn, looking vaguely about him. "We have high authority for being born again, like little ones. Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free from this?"

  "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents."

  "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not."

  "Our readers of that time," continued the necromancer in a grim voice, "have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The 17

  second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. The whole illusion may be labelled Progress, and anybody who questions it is called puerile, reactionary, or an escapist. The March of Mind, God help them."

  He considered these facts for some time, then added: "And a fourth piece of scientific clap-trap which they are to have, rejoices in the name of anthropomorphism. Even their children are supposed to be so superior to the animals that you must never mention the two creatures in the same breath. If you begin considering men as animals, they put it the other way round and say that you are considering animals as men, a sin which they hold to be worse than bigamy. Imagine a scientist being merely an animal, they say! Tut-tut, and Tilly-fol-de-rido!"

  "Who are these readers?"

  "The readers of the book."

  "What book?"

  "The book we are in."

  "Are we in a book?"

  "We had better attend to the job," said Merlyn hastily.

  He took hold of his wand, rolled up his sleeves, and fixed a tight eye on the patient. "Do you agree?" he asked.

  But the old king stopped him.

  "No," he said, with a sort of firm apology. "I have earned my body and mind with many years of labour. It would be undignified to change them. I am not too proud to be a child, Merlyn,

>   18 but too old. If it were my body which were to be made young, it would be unsuitable to keep an old mind in it. While, if you were to change them both, the labour of living all those years would turn to vanity. There is nothing else for it, Master. We must keep the state of life to which it has pleased God to call us."

  The magician lowered the wand.

  "But your brain," he complained. "It is like a fossilised sponge. And would you not have liked to be young, to frisk about and feel your knees again? Young people are happy, are they not? We had meant it for a pleasure."

  "It would indeed have been a pleasure, and thank you for thinking of it. But life is not invented for happiness, I do believe. It is made for something else."

  Merlyn chewed the end of his stick while he considered.

  "You are right," he said in the end. "I was against the proposal from the start. But something will have to be done to souple your intellects, for all that, or you will never catch the new idea. I suppose there would be no objection to a cerebral massage, if I could manage it? I should have to get my galvanic batteries, my extra-reds and under-violets: my french chalk and my pinches of this and that: a touch of adrenalin and a sniff of garlic. You know the kind of thing?"

  "No, if you think it is right."

  He extended his hand into the ether, with a well-remembered gesture, and the apparatus began to materialise obediently: muddled up as usual.

  THE TREATMENT WAS UNPLEASANT. It Was like having one's hair brushed vigorously the wrong way, or like having a sprained ankle flexed by that dreadful kind of masseuse who urges people to relax. The king gripped the arms of his chair, closed his eyes, clenched his teeth and sweated. When he opened them for the second time that evening, it was on a different world.

  "Good heavens!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. In leaving the chair he did not take his weight upon his wrists, like an old man, but upon the palms and phalanges. "Look at the dog's hollow eyes! The candles are reflected from the back, not from the front, as if it were from the bottom of a cup. Why have I never noticed this before? And look here: there is a hole in Bathsheba's bath, which needs darning. What is this entry in the book? Susp.?* Who has betrayed us into hanging people? Nobody deserves to be hanged. Merlyn, why is there no reflection from your eyes, when I put the candles between us? Why have I never thought about it? The light comes red from a fox, green from a cat, yellow from a horse, saffron from a dog... And look at that falcon's beak: it has a tooth in it like a saw! Goshawks and sparrow-hawks do not have a tooth. It must be a peculiarity offalco. What an extraordinary thing a tent is! Half of it is trying to push it up, and the other half is trying to pull it down. Ex nihilo res fit. t And look at those chessmen! Check-mate indeed! Nay, we will try the ploy again..."

  *Abbreviation for suspendaiur, "let him be hanged."

  Imagine a rusty bolt on the garden door, which has been set wrong, or the door has sagged on its hinges since it was put on, and for years that bolt has never been shot efficiently: except by hammering it, or by lifting the door a little, and wriggling it home with effort. Imagine then that the old bolt is unscrewed, rubbed with emery paper, bathed in paraffin, polished with fine sand, generously oiled, and reset by a skilled workman with such nicety that it bolts and unbolts with the pressure of a finger—with the pressure of a feather—almost so that you could blow it open or shut. Can you imagine the feelings of the bolt? They are the feelings of glory which convalescent people have, after a fever. It would look forward

  "Something comes of nothing." This is a parody or adaptation of ex nihilo nihilfit, that is, "nothing comes of nothing," familiar (though not in that exact form) from both Lucretius and Persius. to being bolted, yearning for the rapture of its sweet, successful motion.

  For happiness is only a bye-product of function, as light is a bye-product of the electric current running through the wires. If the current cannot run efficiently, the light does not come. That is why nobody finds happiness, who seeks it on its own account. But man must seek to be like the working bolt; like the unimpeded run of electricity; like the convalescent whose eyes, long thwarted in their sockets by headache and fever, so that it was a grievous pain to move them, now flash from side to side with the ease of clean fishes in clear water. The eyes are working, the current is working, the bolt is working. So the light shines. That is happiness: working well.

  "Hold hard," said Merlyn. "After all, we have no train to catch."

  "No train?"

  "I beg your pardon. It is a quotation which a friend of mine used to apply to human progress. However, as you look as if you were feeling better, shall we start for the cave at once?"

  "Immediately."

  They made no further ado but lifted the tent-flap and were gone, leaving the sleeping greyhound to watch the hooded hawk in solitude. Hearing the tent-flap lift, the blinded bird screamed out in raucous accents for attention.

  It was a bracing walk for both of them. The wild wind and the speed of their passage tugged their beards to left or right over their shoulders, accordingly as they did not face exactly into the eye of it, which gave a tight feeling at the hair-roots, as if they were in curl papers. They sped over Salisbury plain, past the thought-provoking monument of Stonehenge, where Merlyn, in passing, cried a salutation to the old gods whom Arthur could not see: to Crom, Bell and others. They whirled over Wiltshire, strode beyond Dorset and sped through Devon, as fast as a wire cutting cheese. The plains, downs, forests, moors and hillocks fell behind them. The glinting rivers swung past like the spokes of a turning wheel. In Cornwall they halted, by the side of an ancient tumulus like an enormous mole-hill, with a dark opening in its side.

  "We go in."

  "I have been to this place before," said the king, standing still in a kind of catalepsy.

  "Yes."

  "When?"

  "When yourself?"

  He groped, searched in his mind, feeling that the revelation was in his heart. But "No," he said, "I cannot remember."

  "Come and see."

  They went down the labyrinthine passages, past the turnings which led to the bedchambers, to the middens, to the storerooms and to the place where you went if you wanted to wash your hands. At last the king stopped, with his fingers on the door latch at the end of a passage, and announced: "I know where I am."

  Merlyn watched.

  "It is the badger's sett, where I went when I was a child." 'Yes.'

  "Merlyn, you villain! I have been mourning you for half a lifetime, because I thought you were shut up like a toad in a hole, and all the time you have been sitting in the Combination Room, arguing with badger!"

  "Open the door, and look."

  He opened it. There was the well-remembered room. There were the portraits of long-dead badgers, famous for scholarship or godliness: there were the glow-worms and the mahogany fans and the tilting board for circulating the decanters. There were the moth-eaten gowns and the chairs of stamped leather. But, best of all, there were his earliest friends—the preposterous committee.

  They were rising shyly to their feet to greet him. They were confused in their humble feelings, partly because they had been looking forward to the surprise so much, and partly because they had never met real kings before—so that they were afraid he might be different. Still, they were determined that they ought to do the thing in style. They had arranged that the proper thing would be to stand up, and perhaps to bow or smile a bit. There had been solemn consultations among them about whether he ought to be addressed as "Your Majesty" or as "Sir," about whether his hand ought to be kissed, about whether he would be much changed, and even, poor souls, about whether he would remember them at all.

  They were there in a circle round the fire: badger hoisting himself bashfully to his feet while a perfect avalanche of manuscript shot out of his lap into the fender: T. natrix uncoiling himself and flickering an ebon tongue, with which he proposed to kiss the royal hand if necessary. Archimedes bobbing up and down with pleasure and anticipation, half spreading his
wings and causing them to flutter, like a small bird asking to be fed: Balin looking crushed for the first time in his life, because he was afraid he might have been forgotten: Cavall, so agonised by the glory of his feelings that he had to go away into a corner and be sick: goat, who had given the emperor's salute in a flash of foresight long before: hedgehog standing loyal and erect at the bottom of the circle, where he had been made to sit apart from the others on account of his fleas, but full of patriotism and anxiety to be noticed if possible. Even the enormous stuffed pike, which was a novelty over the mantelpiece beneath the Founder, seemed to regard him with a supplicating eye.

  "Oh, people!" exclaimed the king.

  Then they all flushed a great deal, and shuffled their feet, and said that he must please to excuse their humble home, or Welcome to Your Majesty, or We did mean to put up a banner only it had got lost, or Are your regal feet wet? or Here comes the squire, or Oh, it is so lovely to see you after all these years! Hedgehog saluted stiffly, saying "Rule Britannia!"

  The next moment a rejuvenated Arthur was shaking hands with all, kissing them and thumping them on the back, until the tears stood in every eye. "We did not know..." sniffed the badger.

  "We were afraid you might have forgot.. ."

  "Do we say Your Majesty, or do we say Sir?"

  He sensibly answered the question on its merits.

  "It is Your Majesty for an emperor, but for an ordinary king it is Sir."

  So from that moment they thought of him as the Wart, without considering the matter further.

  When the excitement had died down, Merlyn closed the door and took control of the situation.

  "Now," he said. "We have a great deal of business to transact, and very little time to do it in. Here you are, king: here is a chair for you at the head of the circle, because you are our leader, who does the hard work and suffers the pains. And you, urchin, it is your turn to be Ganymede, so you had better fetch the madeira wine and be quick about it. Hand round a big cup for everybody, and then we will start the meeting."

  Hedgehog brought the first cup to Arthur, and served him with importance on a bended knee, keeping one grubby thumb in the glass. Then, while he moved off round the circle, the sometime Wart had leisure to look about him.