Once & Future King 05 - The Book of Merlyn

by T. H. White

  "And that," she explained, "is how great-uncle became an admiral."

  "It seems an excellent way."

  "Look at his bars," she said respectfully, and they both glanced at the portly patriarch, whose breast was indeed barred with black stripes, like the gold rings on an admiral's sleeve.

  On another occasion, he asked about the joys and amibitions of the geese. He told her apologetically that among the human beings a life without spectacular acquisitions, or even without warfare, might tend to be regarded as tedious.

  "Humans," he said, "make for themselves great stores of ornaments, riches, luxuries, pleasures and so forth. This gives them an objective in their lives. It is also said to lead to war. But I fear that if they were reduced to the minimum of possessions, with which you geese are contented, they might be unhappy."

  "They certainly would be. Their brains are differently shaped from ours. If you tried to make the humans live exactly like the geese, they would be as wretched as the geese would be, if you tried to make them live exactly like the humans. That does not mean that one of them cannot learn a little from the other,"

  "I am beginning to think that the geese cannot learn very much from us."

  "We have been on the earth for millions of years longer than you have, poor creatures, so you can hardly be blamed."

  "But tell me," he said, "about your pleasures, your ambitions or objectives or whatever you may call them. Surely they are rather limited?" She laughed at this. "Our main object in life," she said with amusement, "is to be alive. I think your humans may have forgotten this one. Our pleasures, however, if they are to be compared with ornaments and riches, are not so dull as they seem. We have a song about them, called The Boon of Life." "Sing it."

  "I will, in a minute. But I must say, before I begin, that it has always seemed a pity to me that one great boon has been left out. The people in the song are supposed to be arguing about the joys of the geese, and nobody mentions travel, I think this is silly. We travel a hundred times further than the humans, and see such interesting things, and have such delightful change and novelty all the time, that I cannot understand how the poet can have forgotten it. Why, my grandmother went to Micklegarth: I had an uncle who had been to Burma: and great-grand-dad used to say he had visited Cuba."

  As the king knew that Micklegarth was the Scandinavian name for Constantinople, while he had only heard of Burma from T. natrix, and Cuba had not been invented at all, he was suitably impressed.

  "It must be heavenly," he said, "to travel."

  He thought of the lovely wings, and of the songs of flight, and of the world pouring, always new and new, beneath their pinions.

  "This is the song," she said without further preamble, and she began to sing it gracefully to a wild-goose air:

  THE BOON OF LIFE

  Ky-yow replied: The boon of life is health.

  Paddle-foot, Feather-straight, Supple-neck,

  Button-eye:

  These have the world's wealth.

  Aged Ank answered: Honour is our all. Path-finder, People-feeder, Plan-provider,

  Sage-commander: These hear the high call.

  Lyo-lyok the lightsome said: Love I had liefer. Douce-down, Tender-tread, Warm-nest and

  Walk-in-line: These live forever. Aahng-ung was for Appetite. Ah, he said,

  Eating! Gander-gobble, Tear-grass, Stubble-stalk,

  Stuff-crop: These take some beating.

  Wink-wink praised Comrades, the fair free

  fraternity.

  Line-astern, Echelon, Arrow-head, Over-cloud: These learn Eternity.

  But I, Lyow, choose Lay-making, of loud lilts which linger.

  Horn-music, Laughter-song, Epic-heart, Ape-the-world:

  These Lyow, the singer.

  It was a beautiful song in a way, he thought, given with her tender gravity. He began counting the boons which she had mentioned on his toes: but, as he only had three in front and a sort of knob behind, he had to go round twice. Travel, health, honour, love, appetite, comradeship, music, poetry and, as she had stated, being alive itself.

  It did not seem a bad list in its simplicity, particularly as she might have added something like Wisdom.

  BUT THERE WAS a growing excitement among the host. The young geese flirted outrageously, or collected in parties to discuss their pilots. They played games also, like children excited at the prospect of a party. One of these games was to stand in a circle, while the young ganders, one after another, walked into the middle of it with their heads stretched out, pretending to hiss. When they were half-way across the circle they would run the last part, flapping their wings. This was to shew how brave they were, and what excellent admirals they would make, when they grew up. Also the strange habit of shaking their bills sideways, which was usual before flight, began to grow upon them. The elders and sages, who knew the migration routes, became uneasy also. They kept a wise eye on the cloud formations, summing up the wind, and the strength of it, and what airt it was coming from. The admirals, heavy with responsibility, paced their quarter-decks with ponderous tread.

  "Why am I restless?" he asked. "Why do I have this feeling in my blood?"

  "Wait and see," she said mysteriously. "Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after..."

  And her eyes assumed the expression of dreams, a look of far away and long ago.

  When the morrow came, there was a difference about the salt marsh and the slob. The antHke man, who had walked out so patiently every day to his long nets, with the tides fixed firmly in his head, because to make a mistake in them was certain death, heard a far bugle in the sky. He saw no thousands on the mud-flats, and there were none in the pastures from which he had come. He was a nice little man in his way; for he stood still solemnly, and took off his hat. He did this every spring religiously, when the wild geese left him, and every autumn, when he saw the first returning gaggle.

  How far is it across the North Sea? In a steamer it takes us two or three days, so many hours of slobbering through the viscous water. But for the geese, for the sailors of the air, for the angled wedges of heaven tearing clouds to tatters, for those singers of the empyrean with the gale behind them—seventy miles an hour behind another seventy—for those mysterious geographers—three miles up, they say—with cumulus for their floor instead of water: what was it for them? One thing it was, and that was joy. The king had never seen his friends so gleeful. The songs they sang, hour after hour, were mad with it. Some were vulgar, which we shall have to leave for another time, some were sagas beautiful beyond comparison, some were lighthearted to a degree. One silly one which amused him, was as follows:

  We wander the sky with many a Cronk And land in the pasture fields with a Plonk, Hank-hank, Hink-hink, Honk-honk.

  Then we bend ow necks with a curious kink Like the bend which the plumber puts under the

  sink,

  Honk-honk, Hank-hank, Hink-hink.

  And we feed away in a sociable rank Tearing the grass with a sideways yank. Hink-hink, Honk-honk, Hank-hank.

  But Hink or Honk we relish the Plonk, And Honk or Hank we relish the rank, And Hank or Hink we think it a jink To Honk or Hank or Hink!

  A sentimental one was:

  Wild and free, wild and free, Bring back my gander to me, to me.

  While, when they were passing over a rocky island populated by barnacle geese, who all looked like spinsters in black leather gloves, grey toques and jet beads, the entire squadron burst out derisively with:

  Branta bernicla sits a-slumming in the slob, Branta bernicla sits a-slumming in the slob, Branta bernicla sits a-slumming in the slob,

  While we go sauntering along. Glory, glory, here we go, dear. Glory, glory, here we go, dear. Glory, glory, here we go, dear.

  To the North Pole sauntering along.

  But it is no good trying to tell about the beauty. It was just that life was beautiful beyond belief, and that is a kind of joy which has to be lived.

  Sometimes, when they came down from the cirrus levels
to catch a better wind, they would find themselves among the flocks of cumulus: huge towers of modelled vapour, looking as white as Monday's washing and as solid as meringues. Perhaps one of these piled-up blossoms of the sky, these snow-white droppings of a gigantic Pegasus, would He before them several miles away. They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth; and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncertain. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. Then, in a moment of time, they would be in the jewelled world once more: a sea under them like turquoise and all the gorgeous palaces of heaven new created, with the dew of Eden not yet dry.

  One of the peaks of the migration came when they passed a rock-cliff of the ocean. There were other peaks, when, for instance, their line of flight was crossed by an Indian file of Bewick swans who were off to Abisko, making a noise as they went like little dogs barking through handkerchiefs, or when they overtook a horned owl plodding manfully along, among the warm feathers of whose back, so they said, a tiny wren was taking her free ride. But the lonely island was the best of all.

  For it was a town of birds. They were all hatching, all quarrelling, all friendly nevertheless. On top of the cliff, where the short turf was, there were myriads of puffins busy with their burrows; below them, in Razor-bill Street, the birds were packed so close, and on such narrow ledges, that they had to stand with their backs to the sea, holding tight with long toes; in Guillemot Street, below that, the guillemots held their sharp, toylike faces upwards, as thrushes do when hatching; lowest of all, there were the Kittiwake Slums. And all the birds—who, like humans, only laid one egg each—were jammed so tight that their heads were interlaced: had so little of this famous living-space of ours that, when a new bird insisted upon landing at a ledge which was already full, one of the other birds had to tumble off. Yet they were all in such good humour, all so cheerful and cockneyfied and teasing one another! They were like an innumerable crowd of fish-wives on the largest grand-stand in the world, breaking out into private disputes, eating out of paper bags, chipping the referee, singing comic songs, admonishing their children and complaining of their husbands. "Move over a bit, auntie," they said, or "Shove along, grandma"; "There's that Flossie gone and sat on the shrimps"; "Put the toffee in your pocket, dearie, and blow yer nose"; "Lawks, if it isn't Uncle Albert with the beer"; "Any room for a little 'un?"; "There goes Aunt Emma, fallen off the ledge"; "Is me hat on straight?"; "Crickey, if this isn't arf a do!"

  They kept more or less to their own kind, but they were not mean about it. Here and there, in Guillemot Street, there would be an obstinate kittiwake sitting on a projection and determined to have her rights. Perhaps there were half a million of them, and the noise they made was deafening.

  The king could not help wondering how a human town of mixed races would get on, in such conditions.

  Then there were the fiords and islands of Norway. It was about one of these islands, by the way, that the great W. H. Hudson related a true goose-story which is liable to make one think. There was a coastal farmer, he tells us, whose islands suffered under a nuisance of foxes; so he set up a fox-trap on one of them. When he visited the trap the next day, he found that an old wild goose had been caught in it, obviously a Grand Admiral, because of his toughness and his heavy bars. This farmer took the goose home alive, pinioned it, bound up its leg, and turned it out with his own ducks and poultry in the farmyard. Now one of the effects of the fox plague was that the farmer had to lock his hen-house at night. He used to go round in the evening to drive them in, and then he would lock the door. After a time, he began to notice a curious circumstance, which was that the hens, instead of having to be collected, would be found waiting for him in the hut. He watched the process one evening, and discovered that the.old wild goose had taken upon himself the responsibility which he had with his own intelligence observed. Every night at locking-up time, the sagacious old admiral would round up his domestic comrades, whose leadership he had assumed, and would prudently assemble them in the proper place by his own efforts, as if he had fully understood the situation. Nor did the free wild geese, his some-time followers, ever again settle on the other island—previously a haunt of theirs—from which their judicious captain had been spirited away.

  Last of all, beyond the islands, there was the landing at their first day's destination. Oh, the whiffling of delight and self-congratulation! They tumbled down out of the sky, sideslipping, stunting, even doing spinning nose-dives. They were terrifically proud of themselves and of their pilot, agog for the family pleasures which were in store.

  They planed for the last part on down-curved wings. At the last moment they scooped the wind with them, flapping them vigorously. Next, bump, they were on the ground. They held their wings above their heads for a moment, then folded them up with a quick and pretty neatness. They had crossed the North Sea.

  THE SIBERIAN BOGLAND, which they reached a few days later, was a bowl of sunlight. Its mountains still retained a lacework of snow, which, as it melted, brought the little rivers down in a spate like ale. The lakes glittered under clouds of mosquitos, and, among the stunted birch trees round their margins, the amiable reindeer wandered curiously, snuffling at the goose-nests, while the geese hissed back at them.

  Lyo-lyok settled down at once to build her nursery, although unmarried, and the king had time to think.

  He was an uncritical man, certainly not a bitter one. The treachery to which he had been subjected by his human race had only just begun to weigh upon him. He had never put it in plain terms to himself: but the truth was that he had been betrayed by everybody, even by his own wife and by his oldest friend. His son was the least of the traitors. His Table had turned on him, or half of it had, and so had half the country for which he had been working all his life. Now they were asking him to go back into service for the men of treason, and at last he realised, for the first time, that to do so would mean his end. For what hope had he among mankind? They had murdered, almost invariably, every decent person who had spoken to them since the time of Socrates. They had even murdered their God. Anybody who told them the truth was the legitimate object of their treachery, and Merlyn's sentence on himself was one of death.

  But here, he realised, among the geese, to whom murder and treason were an obscenity, he was happy and at rest. Here there was good hope for a person with a heart. Sometimes a tired man who has a religious vocation to become a monk will feel an actual yearning for the cloister, for the place where he can expand his soul like a flower and grow towards his idea of good. That is what the old man felt with a sudden longing, except that his cloister was the sun-drenched bog. He wanted to have done with man, to settle down.

  To settle down with Lyo-lyok, for instance: it seemed to him that a weary spirit might do worse. He began comparing her wistfully with the women he had known, not always to her disadvantage. She was healthier than they were, nor had she ever had the megrims or the vapours or the hysterics. She was as healthy as himself, as strong, as able on the wing. There was nothing that he could do, which she could not do: so that their community of interests would be exact. She was docile, prudent, faithful, conversable. She was a great deal cleaner than most women, because she spent one half of the day in preening herself and the other half in water, nor were her features disfigured by a single smear of paint. Once she had been married, she would accept no further lovers. She was more beautiful than the average woman, because she possessed a natural shape instead of an artificial one. She was graceful an
d did not waddle, for all the wild geese do their walking easily, and he had learned to think her plumage handsome. She would be a loving mother.

  He found in his old heart a warm feeling for Lyo-lyok, even if there was little passion. He admired her sturdy legs, with the knob at the top, and her neat bill. It had serrations like teeth, and a large tongue which seemed to fill it. He liked her for not being in a hurry.

  The nest-making enthralled her, which made him watch it with pleasure. It was not an architectural triumph, but it was what was needed. She had been fussy about the tussock which she meant to choose, and then, after the situation had been finally decided, she had lined the peaty hollow, which was like some soft damp brown and crumbled blotting-paper, or like the tan in a circus, with heather, lichens, moss, and down from her own breast. This was as soft as cob-webs. He had brought her a few bits of grass himself, as a present, but they had generally been of the wrong shape. In plucking them, he had discovered by accident the wonderful universe of the bog on which they walked.

  For it was a miniature world, the same kind as the Japanese are said to make in bowls. No Japanese gardener has ever bred a stunted tree more like a real one than a stalk of heather is, with its regular knots along the stalk, like buttonholes. There, at his feet, there were forests of gnarled trees, with glades and landscapes. There was the closest moss for grass, and an undergrowth of lichens. There were fallen tree-trunks lying picturesquely, and even a strange kind of flower: a minute grey-green stalk, very dry and brittle, with a scarlet blob on the end of it, like sealing-wax. There were microscopic toadstools, except that their umbrellas turned upwards, like eggcups. And through the desiccated sylvan scene there scuttled, for rabbits and foxes, beetles of a glossy blackness which looked oily, who adjusted their wings by twirling their pointed tails. These were the dragons of the enchantment, rather than the rabbits, and they were of endless variety: beetles as green as jewels, spiders as small as pin-heads, lady-birds like red enamel. In depressions of the peat, which was resilient to the foot, there were small pools of brown water populated by sea-dragons: newts and water-boatmen. Here, in the wetter soil, there was a riot of mosses, each differing from the other: some with thin red stalks and green heads, like a peculiar corn for the Lilliputians. There, where the heather had been burned by some natural agency such as the sun shining through a dew drop—and not by man, who chooses to burn his bogs in the spring time, when they were full of nesting birds—there was a desolation of charred stumps, with tiny snail-shells, bleached white, no bigger than pepper-corns, also putty-coloured lichens like parched sponges, whose stalks were hollow when he broke them up.