The Book of Merlyn

by T. H. White

  He stood as sentry. He did not know what he was watching, nor could he see any enemy, except the tussocks and his nibbling mates; but he was not sorry to be a trusted sentinel. He was surprised to find that he was not averse to seeming masculine, in case the lady might be watching. He was still too innocent, after all his years, to know that she would certainly be doing so.

  “What ever are you doing?” she asked, passing him after half an hour.

  “I was on guard.”

  “Go on with you,” she said with a giggle, or should it be a gaggle? “You are a silly one.”

  “Why?”

  “Go on. You know.”

  “Honestly,” he said, “I do not. Am I doing it wrong? I do not understand.”

  “Peck the next one. You have been on for twice your time, at least.”

  He did as he was bid, at which the grazer next to him took over, and then he walked along to feed beside her. They nibbled, noting each other out of beady eyes, until he came to a decision.

  “You think I am stupid,” he said awkwardly, confessing the secret of his species for the first time in a varied intercourse with animals, “but it is because I am not a goose. I was born a human. This is my first flight among the grey people.”

  She was only mildly surprised.

  “It is unusual,” she said. “The humans generally try the swans. The last lot we had were the Children of Lir. However, I suppose we are all Anseriformes together.”

  “I have heard of the Children of Lir.”

  “They did not enjoy it. They were hopelessly nationalistic and religious, which resulted in their always hanging about round one of the chapels in Ireland. You could say that they hardly noticed the other swans at all.”

  “I am enjoying it,” he said politely.

  “I noticed you were. What were you sent for?”

  “To learn about the world.”

  They grazed away in silence, until his own words reminded him of his mission.

  “The sentries,” he enquired. “Are we at war?”

  She did not understand.

  “War?”

  “Are we fighting against people?”

  “Fighting?” she asked doubtfully. “The men fight sometimes, about their wives and that. Of course there is no bloodshed, only scuffling to find the better man. Is that what you mean?”

  “No. I meant fighting against armies: against other geese, for instance.”

  She was amused at this.

  “How ridiculous! You mean a lot of geese all scuffling at the same time. It would be amusing to watch.”

  Her tone surprised him.

  “Amusing to watch them kill each other!”

  “To kill each other? An army of geese to kill each other?”

  She began to understand the idea very slowly and doubtfully, an expression of grief and distaste coming over her face. When it had sunk in, she left him. She went away to another part of the field in silence. He followed her, but she turned her back. Moving round to get a glimpse of her eyes, he was startled by their abhorrence: a look as if he had made an obscene suggestion.

  He said lamely: “I am sorry. You do not understand.”

  “Leave talking about it.”

  “I am sorry.”

  Later he added: “A person can ask, I suppose. It seems a natural question, with the sentries.”

  But she was thoroughly angry, almost tearful.

  “Will you stop about it at once! What a horrible mind you must have! You have no right to say such things. And of course there are sentries. There are the jerfalcons and the peregrines, are there not: the foxes and the ermines and the humans with their nets? These are natural enemies. But what creature could be so low and treacherous as to murder the people of its blood?”

  He thought: it is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.

  Out loud, he said: “I was trying to learn.”

  She relented with an obvious effort to be good-natured. She wanted to be broad-minded if she could, as she was rather a blue-stocking.

  “You have a long way to go.”

  “Then you must teach me. You must tell me about the goose-people, so that I improve my mind.”

  She was doubtful, after the shock which he had given her, but her heart was not a malicious one. Like all the geese, she had a mildness which found forgiving easy. Soon they were friends.

  “What would you like to know?”

  He discovered, in the next few days, for they spent much time together, that Lyó-lyok was a charming person. She had told him her name at the beginning of their acquaintance, and had advised him to have one of his own. They had chosen Kee-kwa, a distinguished title taken from the rare red-breasted geese whom she had met in Siberia. Afterwards, once they were on name terms, she had buckled to his education manfully.

  Lyó-lyok’s mind did not run upon flirtation only. She took a rational interest in the wide world in her prudent way, and, although she was puzzled by his questions, she learned not to be disgusted by them. Most of these questions were based on his experience among the ants, and that was why they puzzled her.

  He wanted to know about nationalism, about state-control, individual liberty, property and so forth: the things whose importance had been mentioned in the Combination Room, or which he had noticed in the ant-hill. As most of these things had to be explained to her, before she could explain herself, there were interesting things to talk about. They conversed amiably, and, as his education prospered, the surprised old man began to feel a sort of deep humility and even an affection for her geese: rather like the feelings which Gulliver must have had, among the horses.

  No, she explained to him: there was no state-control among the grey people. They had no communal possessions, nor did they make a claim to any part of the world. The lovely globe, they thought, could not belong to anybody except itself, and all their geese had access to its raw materials. Neither was any state discipline imposed upon the individual bird. The story of how a returning ant could be sentenced to death if it did not disgorge some food when asked for it, revolted her. Among the geese, she said, everybody ate as much as he could get hold of, and, if you trespassed upon an individual who had found a succulent patch of grass, he would very properly peck you soundly. And yes, she said, they did have private property besides their meals: a married couple would repair to the same nest, year by year, although they might have travelled many thousand miles between. The nest was private, and so was family life. Geese, she explained, were not promiscuous in their love-affairs, except in adolescence; which, she believed, was as it should be. When they were married, they were married for their lives. Their politics, so far as they had any, were patriarchal or individualistic, founded on free choice. And of course they never went to war.

  He asked her about the system of leadership. It was obvious that certain geese were accepted as leaders—generally they were venerable old gentlemen whose breasts were deeply mottled—and that these leaders flew at the head of their formations. Remembering the queen ants, who, like Borgias, slew one another for the highest place, he wondered how the captains of the geese had been elected.

  They were not elected, she said, not in a formal way. They simply became captains.

  When he pressed her on the point, she went off into a long talk about migration. This was how she put it. “The first goose,” she said, “I suppose, who made the flight from Siberia to Lincolnshire and back again, must have brought up a family in Siberia. Then, when the winter came upon them and it was necessary to find new food, he must have groped his way over the same route, being the only one who knew it. He will have been followed by his growing family, year after year, their pilot and their admiral. When the time came for him to die, obviously the next best pilots would have been his eldest sons, who would have covered the route more often than the others. Nat
urally the younger sons and fledgelings would have been uncertain about it, and therefore would have been glad to follow somebody who knew. Perhaps, among the eldest sons, there would have been some who were notoriously muddle-headed, and the family would hardly care to trust to them.

  “This,” she said, “is how an admiral is elected. Perhaps Wink-wink will come to our family in the autumn, and he will say: ‘Excuse me, but have you by any chance got a reliable pilot in your lot? Poor grand-dad died at cloud-berry time, and Uncle Onk is inefficient. We were looking for somebody to follow.’ Then we will say: ‘Great-uncle will be delighted if you care to hitch up with us; but mind, we cannot take responsibility if things go wrong.’ ‘Thank you very much,’ he will say.’ I am sure your great-uncle can be relied upon. Do you mind if I mention this matter to the Honks, who are, I happen to know, in the same difficulty?’ ‘Not at all.’

  “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 ambitions 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.

  Lyó-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.

  14

  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 antlike 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 light-hearted 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 our necks with a curious kink

  Like the bend which the plumber puts under the sink.

&n
bsp; 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 lie 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 uncreation. 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.