The Once and Future King (67 page)

Yet there was something in the old white head which could not accept the godly view. Obviously you might cure a cancer of the womb by not having a womb in the first place. Sweeping and drastic remedies could cut out anything – and life with the cut. Ideal advice, which nobody was built to follow, was no advice at all. Advising heaven to earth was useless.

Another worn—out circle spun before him. Perhaps war was
due to fear: to fear of reliability. Unless there was truth, and unless people told the truth, there was always danger in everything outside the individual. You told the truth to yourself, but you had no surety for your neighbour. This uncertainty must end by making the neighbour a menace. Such, at any rate, would have been Lancelot’s explanation of the war. He had been used to say that man’s most vital possession was his Word. Poor Lance, he had broken his own Word: all the same, there had been few men with such a good one.

Perhaps wars happened because nations had no confidence in the Word. They were frightened, and so they fought. Nations were like people – they had feelings of inferiority, or of superiority, or of revenge, or of fear. It was right to personify nations.

Suspicion and fear: possessiveness and greed: resentment for ancestral wrong: all these seemed to be a part of it. Yet they were not the solution. He could not see the real solution. He was too old and tired and miserable to think constructively. He was only a man who had meant well, who had been spurred along that course of thinking by an eccentric necromancer with a weakness for humanity. Justice had been his last attempt – to do nothing which was not just. But it had ended in failure. To do at all had proved too difficult. He was done himself.

Arthur proved that he was not quite done, by lifting his head. There was something invincible in his heart, a tincture of grandness in simplicity. He sat upright and reached for the iron bell.

‘Page,’ he said, as the small boy trotted in, knuckling his eyes.

‘My lord.’

The King looked at him. Even in his own extremity he was able to notice others, especially if they were fresh or decent. When he had comforted the broken Gawaine in his tent, he had been the one who was more in need of comfort.

‘My poor child,’ he said. ‘You ought to be in bed.’

He observed the boy with a strained, thread—bare attention. It was long since he had seen youth’s innocence and certainty.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘will you take this note to the bishop? Don’t wake him if he is asleep.’

‘My lord.’

‘Thank you.’

As the live creature went, he called it back.

‘Oh, page?’

‘My lord?’

‘What is your name?’

‘Tom, my lord,’ it said politely.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Near Warwick, my lord.’

‘Near Warwick.’

The old man seemed to be trying to imagine the place, as if it were Paradise Terrestre, or a country described by Mandeville.

‘At a place called Newbold Revell. It is a pretty one.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I shall be thirteen in November, my lord.’

‘And I have kept you up all night.’

‘No, my lord. I slept a lot on one of the saddles.’

‘Tom of Newbold Revell,’ he said with wonder. ‘We seem to have involved a lot of people. Tell me, Tom, what do you intend to do tomorrow?’

‘I shall fight, sir. I have a good bow.’

‘And will you kill people with this bow?’

‘Yes, my lord. A great many, I hope.’

‘Suppose they were to kill you?’

‘Then I should be dead, my lord.’

‘I see.’

‘Shall I take the letter now?’

‘No. Wait a minute. I want to talk to somebody, only my head is muddled.’

‘Shall I fetch a glass of wine?’

‘No, Tom. Sit down and try to listen. Lift those chessmen off the stool. Can you understand things when they are said?’

‘Yes, my lord. I am good at understanding.’

‘Could you understand if I asked you not to fight tomorrow?’

‘I should want to fight,’ it said stoutly.

‘Everybody wants to fight, Tom, but nobody knows why. Suppose I were to ask you not to fight, as a special favour to the King? Would you do that?’

‘I should do what I was told.’

‘Listen, then. Sit for a minute and I will tell you a story. I am a very old man, Tom, and you are young. When you are old, you will be able to tell what I have told tonight, and I want you to do that. Do you understand this want?’

‘Yes, sir. I think so.’

‘Put it like this. There was a king once, called King Arthur. That is me. When he came to the throne of England, he found that all the kings and barons were fighting against each other like madmen, and, as they could afford to fight in expensive suits of armour, there was practically nothing which could stop them from doing what they pleased. They did a lot of bad things, because they lived by force. Now this king had an idea, and the idea was that force ought to be used, if it were used at all, on behalf of justice, not on its own account. Follow this, young boy. He thought that if he could get his barons fighting for truth, and to help weak people, and to redress wrongs, then their fighting might not be such a bad thing as once it used to be. So he gathered together all the true and kindly people that he knew, and he dressed them in armour, and he made them knights, and taught them his idea, and set them down, at a Round Table. There were a hundred and fifty of them in the happy days, and King Arthur loved his Table with all his heart. He was prouder of it than he was of his own dear wife, and for many years his new knights went about killing ogres, and rescuing damsels and saving poor prisoners, and trying to set the world to rights. That was the King’s idea.’

‘I think it was a good idea, my lord.’

‘It was, and it was not. God knows.’

‘What happened to the King in the end?’ asked the child, when the story seemed to have dried up.

‘For some reason, things went wrong. The Table split into factions, a bitter war began, and all were killed.’

The boy interrupted confidently.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not all. The King won. We shall win.’

Arthur smiled vaguely and shook his head. He would have nothing but the truth.

‘Everybody was killed,’ he repeated, ‘except a certain page. I know what I am talking about.’

‘My lord?’

‘This page was called young Tom of Newbold Revell near Warwick, and the old King sent him off before the battle, upon pain of dire disgrace. You see, the King wanted there to be somebody left, who would remember their famous idea. He wanted badly that Tom should go back to Newbold Revell, where he could grow into a man and live his life in Warwickshire peace – and he wanted him to tell everybody who would listen about this ancient idea, which both of them had once thought good. Do you think you could do that, Thomas, to please the King?’

The child said, with the pure eyes of absolute truth: ‘I would do anything for King Arthur.’

‘That’s a brave fellow. Now listen, man. Don’t get these legendary people muddled up. It is I who tell you about my idea. It is I who am going to command you to take horse to Warwickshire at once, and not to fight with your bow tomorrow at all. Do you understand all this?’

‘Yes, King Arthur.’

‘Will you promise to be careful of yourself afterward? Will you try to remember that you are a kind of vessel to carry on the idea, when things go wrong, and that the whole hope depends on you alive?’

‘I will.’

‘It seems selfish of me to use you for it.’

‘It is an honour for your poor page, good my lord.’

‘Thomas, my idea of those knights was a sort of candle, like these ones here. I have carried it for many years with a hand to shield it from the wind. It has flickered often. I am giving you the candle now – you won’t let it out?’

‘It will burn.’

‘Good Tom. The light—bringer. How old did you say you were?’

‘Nearly thirteen.’

‘Sixty more years then, perhaps. Half a century.’

‘I will give it to other people, King. English people.’

‘You will say to them in Warwickshire: Eh, he wor a wonderly fine candle?’

‘Aye, lad, that I will.’

‘Then ’tis: Na, Tom, for thee must go right quickly. Thou’lt take the best son of a mare that thee kinst find, and thou wilt ride post into Warwickshire, lad, wi’ nowt but the curlew?’

‘I will ride post, mate, so that the candle burn.’

‘Good Tom, then, God bless ’ee. Doant thee ferget thick Bishop of Rochester, afore thou goest.’

The little boy kneeled down to kiss his master’s hand – his surcoat, with the Malory bearings, looking absurdly new.

‘My lord of England,’ he said.

Arthur raised him gently, to kiss him on the shoulder.

‘Sir Thomas of Warwick,’ he said – and the boy was gone.

The tent was empty, tawny and magnificent. The wind wailed and the candles guttered. Waiting for the bishop, the old, old man sat down at his reading desk. Presently his head drooped forward on the papers. The greyhound’s eyes, catching the candles as she watched him, burned spectrally, two amber cups of feral light. Mordred’s cannonade, which he was to keep up through the darkness until the morning’s battle, began to thud and bump outside. The King, drained of his last effort, gave way to sorrow. Even when his visitor’s hand lifted the tent flap, the silent drops coursed down his nose and fell on the parchment with regular ticks, like an ancient clock. He turned his head aside, unwilling to be seen, unable to do better. The flap fell, as the strange figure in cloak and hat came softly in.

‘Merlyn?’

But there was nobody there: he had dreamed him in a catnap of old age.

Merlyn?

He began to think again, but now it was as clearly as it had ever been. He remembered the aged necromancer who had educated him – who had educated him with animals. There were, he remembered, something like half a million different species of animal, of which mankind was only one. Of course man was an animal – he was not a vegetable or a mineral, was he? And Merlyn had taught him about animals so that the single species might learn by looking at the problems of the thousands. He remembered the belligerent ants, who claimed their boundaries, and the pacific geese, who did not. He remembered his lesson from the badger. He remembered Lyó—lyok and the island which they had seen on their migration, where all those puffins, razor—bills, guillemots and kittiwakes had lived together peacefully, preserving their own kinds of civilization without war – because they claimed no boundaries. He saw the problem before him as plain as a map. The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing – literally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines. There was no visible line between Scotland and England, although Flodden and Bannockburn had been fought about it. It was geography which was the cause – political geography. It was nothing else. Nations did not need to have the same kind of civilization, nor the same kind of leader, any more than the puffins and the guillemots did. They could keep their own civilizations, like Esquimaux and Hottentots, if they would give each other freedom of trade and free passage and access to the world. Countries would have to become counties – but counties which could keep their own culture and local laws. The imaginary lines on the earth’s surface only needed to be unimagined. The airborne birds skipped them by nature. How mad the frontiers had seemed to Lyó—lyok, and would to man if he could learn to fly.

The old King felt refreshed, clear—headed, almost ready to begin again.

There would be a day – there must be a day – when he would come back to Gramarye with a new Round Table which had no corners, just as the world had none – a table without boundaries
between the nations who would sit to feast there. The hope of making it would lie in culture. If people could be persuaded to read and write, not just to eat and make love, there was still a chance that they might come to reason.

But it was too late for another effort then. For that time it was his destiny to die, or, as some say, to be carried off to Avilion, where he could wait for better days. For that time it was Lancelot’s fate and Guenever’s to take the tonsure and the veil, while Mordred must be slain. The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.

The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.

EXPLICIT LIBER REGIS QUONDAM REGISQUE FUTURI THE BEGINNING

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

When T. H. White revised
The Sword in the Stone
for its inclusion in
The Once and Future King
, he included versions of certain passages from
The Book of Merlyn
, notably those on pages 739–748 and pages 756–773. In adding
The Book of Merlyn
to this edition, we have not attempted to alter the text, and so these repetitions inevitably occur.

It was not the Bishop of Rochester.

The king turned his head away from the newcomer, incurious as to his identity. The tears, running down his loose cheeks with their slow plods, made him feel ashamed to be seen: yet he was too vanquished to check them. He turned stubbornly from the light, unable to do more. He had reached the stage at which it was not worth—while to hide an old man’s misery.

Merlyn sat down beside him and took the worn hand, which made the tears flow faster. The magician patted the hand, holding it quietly with a thumb on its blue veins, waiting for life to revive.

‘Merlyn?’ asked the king.

He did not seem to be surprised.

‘Are you a dream?’ he asked. ‘Last night I dreamed that Gawaine came to me, with a troupe of fair ladies. He said they were allowed to come with him, because he had rescued them in his lifetime, and they had come to warn us that we should all be killed tomorrow. Then I had another dream, that I was sitting on a throne strapped to the top of a wheel, and the wheel turned over, and I was thrown into a pit of snakes.’

‘The wheel is come full circle: I am here.’

‘Are you a bad dream?’ he asked. ‘If you are, do not torment me.’

Merlyn still held the hand. He stroked along the veins, trying to make them sink into the flesh. He soothed the flaky skin and poured life into it with mysterious concentration, encouraging it to resilience. He tried to make the body flexible under his finger—tips, helping the blood to course, putting a bloom and smoothness on the swollen joints, but not speaking.

‘You are a good dream,’ said the king. ‘I hope you will go on dreaming.’

‘I am not a dream at all. I am the man whom you remembered.’

‘Oh, Merlyn, it has been so miserable since you left! Everything which you helped to do was wrong. All your teaching was deception. Nothing was worth doing. You and I will be forgotten, like people who never were.’

‘Forgotten?’ asked the magician. He smiled in the candlelight, looking round the tent as if to assure himself of its furs and twinkling mail and the tapestries and vellums.

‘There was a king,’ he said, ‘whom Nennius wrote about, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Archdeacon of Oxford was said to have had a hand in him, and even that delightful ass, Gerald the Welshman. Brut, Layamon and the rest of them: what a lot of lies they all managed to tell! Some said that he was a Briton painted blue, some that he was in chain mail to suit the ideas of the Norman romancers. Certain lumbering Germans dressed him up to vie with their tedious Siegfrieds. Others put him into plate, like your friend Thomas of Hutton Coniers, and others again, notably a romantic Elizabethan called Hughes, recognized his extraordinary problem of love. Then there was a blind poet who tried to justify God’s ways to man, and he weighed Arthur against Adam, wondering which was the more important of the two. At the same time came masters of music like Purcell, and later still such titans as the Romantics, endlessly dreaming about our king. There came men who dressed him in armour like ivy—leaves, and who made all his friends to stand about among ruins with brambles twining round them, or else to swoon backward with a mellow blur kissing them on the lips. Also there was Victoria’s lord. Even the most unlikely people meddled with him, people like Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated his history. After a bit there was poor old White, who thought that we represented the ideas of chivalry. He said that our importance lay in our decency, in our resistance against the bloody mind of man. What an anachronist he was, dear fellow! Fancy starting after William the Conqueror, and ending in the Wars of the Roses…Then there were people who turned out the
Morte d’Arthur
in mystic waves like the wireless,
and others in an undiscovered hemisphere who still pretended that Arthur and Merlyn were the natural fathers of themselves in pictures which would move. The Matter of Britain! Certainly we were forgotten, Arthur, if a thousand years and half a thousand, and yet a thousand years again, are to be the measure of forgetfulness.’

‘Who is this Wight?’

‘A fellow,’ replied the magician absently. ‘Just listen, will you, while I recite a piece from Kipling?’ And the old gentleman proceeded to intone with passion the famous paragraph out of
Pook’s Hill
: “I’ve seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagil Castle for Hy—Brasil in the teeth of a sou’—westerly gale, with the spray flying all over the castle, and the Horses of the Hill wild with fright. Out they’d go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they’d be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again…It was Magic – Magic as black as Merlin could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hill picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes!
That
was how it was in the old days!”

‘There is description for you,’ he added, when he had finished the piece. ‘There is prose. No wonder that Dan cried, ‘Splendid!’ at the end of it. And all was written about ourselves or about our friends.’

‘But Master, I do not understand.’

The magician stood up, looking at his ancient pupil in perplexity. He twisted his beard into several rat tails, put the corners in his mouth, twirled his moustachios, and cracked his finger joints. He was frightened of what he had done to the king, feeling as if he were trying to revive a drowned man with artificial respiration, who was nearly too far gone. But he was not ashamed. When you are a scientist you must press on without remorse, following the only thing of any importance, Truth.

Later he asked quietly, as if he were calling somebody who was asleep: ‘Wart?’

There was no reply.

‘King?’

The bitter answer was: ‘
Le roy s’advisera.
’

It was worse than he had feared. He sat down, took the limp hand, and began to wheedle.

‘One more try,’ he asked. ‘We are not quite done.’

‘What is the use of trying?’

‘It is a thing which people do.’

‘People are dupes, then.’

The old fellow replied frankly: ‘People are dupes, and wicked too. That is what makes it interesting to get them better.’

His victim opened his eyes, but closed them wearily.

‘The thing which you were thinking about before I came, king, was true. I mean about
Homo ferox.
But hawks are
ferae natura
also: that is their interest.’

The eyes remained closed.

‘The thing which you were thinking about…about people being machines: that was not true. Or, if it is true, it does not signify. For if we are all machines ourselves, then there are none to bother about.’

‘I see.’

Curiously enough, he did see. Also his eyes came open and remained open.

‘Do you remember the angel in the bible, who was ready to spare whole cities provided that one just man could be found? Was it one? That applies to
Homo ferox
, Arthur, even now.’

The eyes began to watch their vision closely.

‘You have been taking my advice too literally, king. To disbelieve in original sin, does not mean that you must believe in original virtue. It only means that you must not believe that people are utterly wicked. Wicked they may be, and even very wicked, but not utterly. Otherwise, I agree, it would be no use trying.’

Arthur said, with one of his sweet smiles: ‘This is a good dream. I hope it will be long.’

His teacher took out his spectacles, polished them, put them on his nose, and examined the old man carefully. There was a hint of satisfaction behind the lenses.

‘Unless,’ he said, ‘you had lived this, you would not have known it. One has to live one’s knowledge. How are you?’

‘Fairly well. How are you?’

‘Very well.’

They shook hands, as if they had just met.

‘Will you be staying?’

‘Actually,’ replied the necromancer, now blowing his nose furiously in order to hide his glee, or perhaps to hide his contrition, ‘I shall hardly be here at all. I have been sent with an invitation.’

He folded his handkerchief and replaced it in his cap.

‘Any mice?’ asked the king with a first faint twinkle. The skin of his face twitched as it were, or tautened itself for the fraction of a second, so that you could see underneath it, in the bone perhaps, the freckled, snub—nosed countenance of a little boy who had once been charmed by Archimedes.

Merlyn took the skull—cap off indulgently.

‘One,’ he said. ‘I think it was a mouse: but it has become partly shrivelled. And here, I see, is the frog I picked up in the summer. It had been run over, poor creature, during the drought. A perfect silhouette.’

He examined it complacently before putting it back, then crossed his legs and examined his companion in the same way, nursing his knee.

‘The invitation,’ he said. ‘We were hoping you would pay us a visit. Your battle can look after itself until tomorrow, we suppose?’

‘Nothing matters in a dream.’

This seemed to anger him, for he exclaimed with some vexation: ‘I wish you would stop about dreams! How would you like it if I were to call you a dream? You must consider other people.’

‘Never mind.’

‘The invitation, then. It was to visit my cave, where young Nimue put me. Do you remember her? There are some friends in it, waiting to meet you.’

‘It would be beautiful.’

‘Your battle is arranged, I believe, and you would hardly sleep in any case. It might cheer your heart to come.’

‘Nothing is arranged,’ said the king. ‘But dreams arrange themselves.’

At this the aged gentleman leaped from his seat, clutching his forehead as if he had been shot in it, and raised his wand of lignum vitae to the skies.

‘Merciful powers! Dreams again!’

He took off his conical hat with a stately gesture, looked piercingly upon the bearded figure opposite which looked as old as he did, and banged himself on the head with his wand as a mark of exclamation. Then he sat down, half stunned, having misjudged the emphasis.

The old king watched him with a warming mind. Now that he was dreaming of his long—lost friend so vividly, he began to see why Merlyn had always clowned on purpose. It had been a means of helping people to learn in a happy way. He began to feel the greatest affection, which was even mixed with awe, for his tutor’s ancient courage: which could go on believing and trying with undaunted crankiness, spite of ages of experience. He began to be lightened at the thought that benevolence and valour could persist. In the lightening of his heart he smiled, closed his eyes, and dropped asleep in earnest.