The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  ‘Ants are Perpetual Motion,’ said Merlyn, ‘I suppose. I never thought of that.’

  ‘The most dreadful thing about them was that they were like human beings – not human, but like humans, a bad copy.’

  ‘There is nothing surprising in that. The ants adopted the line of politics which man is flirting with at present, in the infinite past. They perfected it thirty million years ago, so that no further development was possible, and, since then, they have been stationary. Evolution ended with the ants some 30,000,000 years before the birth of Christ. They are the perfect communist state.’

  Here Merlyn raised his eyes devoutly to the ceiling, and remarked: ‘My old friend Marx may have been a first—rate economist; but, Holy Ghost, he was a by—our—lady rotten hand at natural history.’

  Badger, who always took the kindly view of everybody, even of Karl Marx, whose arrangement of his materials was about as lucid as the badger’s, by the way, said: ‘Surely that is hardly fair to actual communism? I would have thought that ants were more like Mordred’s fascists than John Ball’s communists…’

  ‘The one is a stage of the other. In perfection they are the same.’

  ‘But in a proper communist world…’

  ‘Give the king some wine,’ said Merlyn. ‘Urchin, what on earth are you thinking about?’

  The hedgehog scuttled off for the decanter, and brought it with a glass. He thrust a moist nose against the king’s ear, breathed heavily into it with a breath that smelt of onions, and whispered hoarsely: ‘Us wor a watchin of ’ee, us wor. Trust tiggy. Tha woulder beat ’em, tha ‘ood. Mollocky beästs.’ Here he nodded his head repeatedly, spilled the madeira, and made boxing movements against the air with the decanter in one hand and the glass in the other. ‘Free cheers for his Maggy’s tea, ez wot us says, that’s wot us says. Let un get at ’em, us says, for to lay darn me life with the Shire. And us woulder done, that us ‘ood, bim—bam, only for they wouldernt let ’un.’

  Badger did not wish to be cheated of his defence. He began again patiently as soon as the king was served.

  ‘The ants fight wars,’ he said, ‘so they cannot be communists. In a proper communist world there would be no war, because the whole world would be a union. You must not forget that communism has not been properly achieved until all the nations in the world are communistic, and fused together in a Union of socialist soviet republics. Now the ant—hills are not fused with one another into a union, so they are not fully communistic, and that is why they fight.’

  ‘They are not united,’ said Merlyn crossly, ‘only because the smallness of the ant—hills compared with the bigness of the world, and of the natural obstacles such as rivers and so forth, makes communication impossible for animals of their size and number of fingers. Still, if you like, I will agree that they are perfect Thrashers, prevented from developing into perfect Lollards by geographic and physical features.’

  ‘You must therefore withdraw your criticism of Karl Marx.’

  ‘Withdraw my criticism?’ exclaimed the philosopher.

  ‘Yes; for Marx did solve the king’s puzzle of war, by his Union of SSR.’

  Merlyn became blue in the face, bit off a large piece of his beard, pulled out tufts of his hair and threw them in the air, prayed fervently for guidance, sat down beside the badger, and, taking him by the hand, looked beseechingly into his spectacles.

  ‘But do you not see,’ he asked pathetically, ‘that a union of anything will solve the problem of war? You cannot have war in a union, because there must be a division before you can begin one. There would be no war if the world consisted of a union of mutton chops. But this does not mean that we must all rush off and become a series of mutton chops.’

  ‘In fact,’ said the badger, after pondering for some time, ‘you are not defining the ants as fascists or communists because they fight wars, but because…’

  ‘I am lumping all three sects together on their basic assumption, which is, ultimately, to deny the rights of the individual.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Theirs is the totalitarian theory: that men or ants exist for the sake of the state or world, not vice versa.’

  ‘And why did you say that Marx was bad at natural history?’

  ‘The character of my old friend Karl,’ said the magician severely, ‘is outside the province of this committee. Kindly remember that we are not sitting on communism, but on the problem of organized murder. It is only in so far as communism is contingent with war, that we are concerned with him at all. With this proviso I reply to your question as follows: that Marx was a bad naturalist because he committed the gross blunder of over—looking the human skull in the first place, because he never considered the geese, and because he subscribed to the Égalité Fallacy, which is abhorrent to nature. Human beings are no more equal in their merits and abilities, than they are equal in face and stature. You might just as well insist that all the people in the world should wear the same size of boot. This ridiculous idea of equality was adopted by the ants more than 30,000,000 years ago, and, by believing it all that time, they have managed to make it true. Now look what a mess they are in.’

  ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity…’ began the badger.

  ‘Liberty, Brutality and Obscenity,’ rejoined the magician promptly. ‘You should try living in some of the revolutions which use that slogan. First they proclaim it: then they announce that the aristos must be liquidated, on high moral grounds, in order to purge the party or to prune the commune or to make the world safe for democracy; and then they rape and murder everybody they can lay their hands on, more in sorrow than in anger, or crucify them, or torture them in ways which I do not care to mention. You should have tried the Spanish Civil War. Yes, that is the equality of man. Slaughter anybody who is better than you are, and then we shall be equal soon enough. All equally dead.’

  Chapter XI

  T. natrix spoke up suddenly.

  ‘You humans,’ he said, ‘have no idea of the eternity which you prattle about, with your souls and purgatories and so on. If any of you really did believe in Eternity, or even in very long stretches of Time, you would think twice about equality. I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable in the long past, has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe. If we had all been equal, all one sort of creature, we should have begged for euthanasia long ago. Fortunately there is no such thing in nature as equality of ability, merit, opportunity, or reward. Every species of animal which is still alive – we leave aside the things like ants – is intensely individualistic, thanks be to God. Otherwise we should die of boredom, or become automatons. Even sticklebacks, which, on a first inspection, you would think were pretty much the same as one another: even sticklebacks have geniuses and dunces, all competing for the morsel of food, and it is the geniuses who get it. There was a man who always fed his sticklebacks by putting a glass jar into the aquarium, with the food inside it. Some of them found the way in after three or four attempts, and remembered it, while others, so far as I know or care, are trying still. If this were not so, Eternity would be too terrible to contemplate, because it would be devoid of difference, and therefore change.’

  ‘None of this is in order. We are supposed to be considering war.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘King,’ asked the magician, ‘can you face the geese yet, or do you want a rest?’

  ‘It is impossible,’ he added in parentheses, ‘to consider the subject sensibly, until he has the facts.’

  The old man said: ‘I think I must rest. I am not so young as I was, in spite of your massage, and you have been asking me to learn a great many things, in little time. Can you spare a few short minutes?’

  ‘Certainly. The nights are long. Urchin, dip this handkerchief in vinegar and put it on his head. There, put your feet on a chair and close your eyes. Now then, everybody is to keep quite quiet and give him air.’


  So the animals sat as still as mice, nudging each other when they coughed, and the king, with closed eyes and a sense of thankfulness, slipped into his own thoughts.

  For they had been pressing him hard. It was difficult to learn it in one night, and he was only human, as well as old.

  Perhaps, after all, the careworn person who had been brought from the tent at Salisbury ought never to have been Merlyn’s choice. He had been an undistinguished child, although he had been a loving one, and he was far from being a genius still. Perhaps, after all, the whole of our long story has been about a rather dim old gentleman, who would have been better off at Cranford or at Badger’s Green, arranging for the village cricket and the choir treat.

  There was a thing which he had been wanting to think about. His face, with the hooded eyes, ceased to be like the boy’s of long ago. He looked tired, and was the king: which made the others watch him seriously, with fear and sorrow.

  They were good and kind, he knew. They were people whose respect he valued. But their problem was not the human one. It was well for them, who had solved their social questions before his men were ever on the earth, to consider wisely in their happy College of Life. Their benevolence, with wine and firelight and security towards each other, was easier for them than his sad work for him, their tool.

  The old king’s eyes being shut, he slid back into the real world from which he had come, his wife abducted, his best friend banished, his nephews slain, his son at his throat. The worst was the impersonal: that all his fellow beings were in it. It was true indeed that man was ferocious, as the animals had said. They could say it abstractly, even with a certain dialectic glee, but for him it was the concrete: it was for him to live among yahoos in flesh and blood. He was one of them himself, cruel and silly like them, and bound to them by the strange continuum of human consciousness. He was an Englishman, and England was at war. However much he hated it, or willed to stop it, he was lapped round in a real but intangible sea of English feeling which he could not control. To go against it, to wrestle with the sea, was more than he could face again.

  And he had been working all his life. He knew he was not a clever man. Goaded by the conscience of that old scientist who had fastened on his soul in youth, hag—ridden and devoured, burdened like Sinbad, stolen away from himself and claimed remorselessly for abstract service, he had toiled for Gramarye since before he could remember. He had not even understood the whole of what he was doing, a beast of burden tugging at the traces. And always, he now saw, Merlyn had been behind him – that very ruthless old believer – and man in front: ferocious, stupid, unpolitical.

  They wanted him, he now saw, to go back to the labour: to do it worse, and more. Just when he had given up, just when he had been weeping and defeated, just when the old ox had dropped in the traces, they had come again to prick him to his feet. They had come to teach a further lesson, and to send him on.

  But he had never had a happiness of his own, never had himself: never since he was a little boy in the Forest Sauvage. It was not fair to steal away everything from him. They had made him like the blinded gold—finch they were speaking of, which was to pour out its song for man until it burst its heart, but always blind.

  He felt, now that they had made him younger, the intense beauty of the world which they denied him. He wanted to have some life; to lie upon the earth, and smell it: to look up into the sky like anthropos, and lose himself in clouds. He knew suddenly that nobody, living upon the remotest, most barren crag in the ocean, could complain of a dull landscape so long as he would lift his eyes. In the sky there was a new landscape every minute, in every pool of the sea rocks, a new world. He wanted time off, to live. He did not want to be sent back to pull, with lowered eyes, at the weary yoke. He was not quite old even now. Perhaps he would be able to live for another ten years – but years in the sunlight, years without loads, years with the birds singing as they did sing still, no doubt, although he had ceased to notice them until the animals reminded him.

  Why must he go back to Homo ferox, probably to be killed by those he was trying to help, certainly, if not, to die in harness, when he could abdicate the labour? He could walk out now, straight from the tumulus, and be seen no more. The monks of the Thebaiad, the early saints on Skellig Michael: these fortunate people had escaped from man, into a nature which was surrounded by peace. And that was what he wanted, he discovered, more than anything else – only Peace. Earlier in the evening he had wanted death, and had been ready to accept it: but now they had given him a glimpse of life, of the old happiness and of the things he had loved. They had revived, how cruelly, his boyhood. He wanted to be let alone, to be off duty like a boy, to retire perhaps into a cloister, to have tranquillity for his own old heart.

  But they woke him with words, their cruel, bright weapons.

  ‘Now then, king. We must see to these geese, or the night will be over.’

  ‘Do you feel better?’

  ‘Has anybody seen the cantrip?’

  ‘You are looking tired.’

  ‘Have a sip of wine before you go.’

  Chapter XII

  The place where he was, was absolutely flat. In the human world we seldom see flatness, for the trees and houses and hedges give a serrated edge to the landscape: even the grass sticks up with its myriad blades. But here, in the belly of the night, the illimitable, flat, wet mud was as featureless as a dark junket. If it had been wet sand, even, it would have had those little wave marks, like the palate of one’s mouth.

  And, in this enormous flatness, there lived one element: the wind. For it was an element; it was a dimension, a power of darkness. In the human world, the wind comes from somewhere, and goes somewhere, and, as it goes, it passes through somewhere: through trees or streets or hedgerows. This wind came from nowhere. It was going through the flatness of nowhere, to no place. Horizontal, soundless except for a peculiar boom, tangible, infinite, the astounding dimensional weight of it streamed across the mud. You could have ruled it with a straightedge. The titanic grey line of it was unwavering and solid. You could have hooked the crook of your umbrella over it, and it would have hung there.

  The king, facing into this wind, felt that he was uncreated. Except for the wet solidity under his webbed feet, he was living in nothing: a solid nothing, like chaos. His were the feelings of a point in geometry, existing mysteriously on the shortest distance between two points: or of a line, drawn on a plane surface which had length, breadth but no magnitude. No magnitude! It was the very self of magnitude. It was power, current, force, direction, a pulseless world—stream steady in limbo.

  Bounds had been set to this unhallowed purgatory. Far away to the east, perhaps a mile distant, there was an unbroken wall of sound. It surged a little, seeming to expand and contract, but it was solid. It was menacing, being desirous for victims: for it was the huge, the remorseless sea.

  Two miles to the west, there were three spots of light in a triangle. They were the weak wicks from fishermen’s cottages, who had risen early to catch a tide in the complicated creeks of the salt marsh. Its waters sometimes ran contrary to the ocean. These were the total features of his world, the sea sound and the three small lights: darkness, flatness, vastness, wetness: and, in the gulf of night, the gulf—stream of the wind.

  When daylight began to come, by premonition, he found that he was standing among a crowd of people like himself. They were seated on the mud, which now began to be disturbed by the angry, thin, returning sea, or else were already riding on the water, wakened by it, outside the annoyance of the surf. The seated ones were large teapots, their spouts tucked under their wings. The swimming ones occasionally ducked their heads and shook them. Some, waking on the mud, stood up and wagged their wings vigorously. Their profound silence became broken by a conversationable gabble. There were about four hundred of them in the grey vicinity: very beautiful creatures, the wild White—Fronted Geese, whom, once a man has seen them, he will never forget.

  Long before th
e sun came, they were making ready for their flight. Family parties of the previous year’s breeding were coming together in batches, and these batches were themselves inclined to join up with other ones, possibly under the command of a grandfather, or of a great—grandfather, or else of some noted leader in the host. When the drafts were complete, there came a faint tone of excitement into their speech. They began moving their heads from side to side in jerks. And then, turning into the wind, suddenly they would all be in the air together, fourteen or forty at a time, with wide wings scooping the blackness and a cry of triumph in their throats. They would wheel round, climbing rapidly, and be gone from sight. Twenty yards up, they were invisible in the dark. The earlier departures were not vocal: they were inclined to be taciturn before the sun came, only making occasional remarks, or crying their single warning—note if danger threatened. Then, at the warning, they would all rise vertically to the sky.

  He began to feel an uneasiness in himself. The dim squadrons about him, setting out minute by minute, infected him with a tendency. He became restless to embrace their example, but he was shy. Perhaps their family groups, he thought, would resent his intrusion: yet he wanted not to be lonely: he wanted to join in, and to enjoy the exercise of morning flight, which was so evidently a pleasure to them. They had a comradeship, a free discipline and joie—de—vivre.