The sword in the stone (22 page)

"But we shot them," Kay put in. "I shot a hundred."

"So now I want to see if Merlyn can restore him to his wits."

"Master Art," said the nurse sternly. She had been breathless up to now on account of Sir Ector's rebuke. "Master Art, thy room and thy bed is where thou art tending to, and that this instant. Wold fools may be wold fools, whether by yea or by nay, but I ha'nt served the Family for fifty year without a-learning of my duty. A flibberty-gibbeting about wi' a lot of want-wits, when thy own arm may be dropping to the floor at any moment!"

"Yes, thou wold turkey-cock," she added, turning fiercely upon Sir Ector. "And thou canst keep thy magician away from the poor mite's room till he's rested, that thou canst."

"A-wantoning wi' monsters and lunaticals," continued the victor as she led her helpless captive from the stricken field. I never heard the like."

"Please someone to tell Merlyn to look after Wat," cried the victim over his shoulder, in diminishing tones.

"Sniffings, indeed," they heard her concluding. "I'll give him sniffings."

The Wart woke up in his cool bed, feeling better. The dear old fire-eater who looked after him had covered the windows with a curtain, so that the room was dark and comfortable, but he could tell by the one ray of sunlight which shot golden across the floor that it was late afternoon. He not only felt better. He felt very well indeed, so well that it was quite impossible to stay in bed. He moved quickly to throw back the sheet, but stopped with a hiss at the creak or scratch of his shoulder, which he had forgotten about in his sleep. Then he got out more carefully, by sliding down the bed and pushing himself upright with one hand, shoved his bare feet into a pair of slippers, and managed to wrap a dressing-gown round him more or less. He padded off through the stone passages up the worn circular stairs to find Merlyn.

When he reached the schoolroom, he found that Kay was continuing his First Rate Eddication. He was evidently doing dictation, for as Wart opened the door he heard Merlyn pronouncing in measured tones, "Sciant presentes et futuri Quod," and Kay saying, "Wait a bit. My pen has gone all squee-gee."

"You'll catch it," remarked Kay, when he saw him. "You're supposed to be in bed, dying of gangrene or something."

"Merlyn," said the Wart, "what have you done with Wat?"

"You should try to speak without assonances," said Merlyn. "For instance, 'The beer is never clear near here, dear' is unfortunate, even as an assonance. And then again, your sentence is ambiguous to say the least of it. 'What what?' I might reply, taking it to be a conundrum, or if I were King Pellinore, 'What what, what?' Nobody can be too careful about their habits of speech."

Kay had evidently been doing his dictation well and the old gentleman was in a good humor.

"You know what I mean," said the Wart. "What have you done with the old man with no nose?"

"He's cured him," said Kay.

"Well," said Merlyn, "you might call it that, and then again you might not. Of course, when one has lived in the world as long as I have, and backwards at that, one does learn to know a thing or two about pathology. The wonders of analytical psychology and plastic surgery are, I am afraid, to this generation but a closed book."

He leaned back in high delight.

"What did you do to him? "

"Oh, I just psycho-analyzed him, you know," said Merlyn grandly.

"That, and of course I sewed on a new nose on to both of them."

"What kind of nose?" asked the Wart.

"It's too funny," said Kay. "He wanted to have the griffin's nose for one, but I wouldn't let him. So then he took the noses off two young pigs which we are going to have for supper, and used those. Personally I think they will both grunt."

"A ticklish operation," said Merlyn, "but a successful one."

"Well," said the Wart doubtfully. "I hope it will be all right. What did they do then?"

"They went off to the kennels together. Old Wat is very sorry for what he did to the Dog Boy, but he says he can't remember having done it. He says that suddenly everything went black, when they were throwing stones once, and he can't remember anything since. The Dog Boy forgave him and said he didn't mind a bit. They are going to work together in the kennels in future, and not think of what's past any more. The Dog Boy says that the old man was very good to him while they were prisoners of the Fairy Queen, and that he knows he ought not to have thrown stones at him in the first place. He says he often thought about that when the other boys were throwing stones at him."

"Well," said the Wart. "I'm glad it's all turned out for the best. Do you think I could go and visit them?"

"For heaven's sake, don't do anything to annoy your nurse," exclaimed Merlyn, looking about him anxiously. "That old woman hit me with a broom when I came to see you this forenoon, and broke my spectacles. Couldn't you wait until tomorrow?"

On the morrow Wat and the Dog Boy were the firmest of friends. Their common experiences of being stoned by the mob and then turned into ornaments by Morgan served as a bond and a topic of reminiscence, as they lay among the dogs at night, for the rest of their lives; and, by the morning, they had both pulled off the noses which Merlyn had so kindly given them. They explained that they had got used to having no noses, now, and anyway they preferred to live with dogs.

THE SUMMER was over at last, and nobody could deny any longer that the autumn was definitely there. It was that rather sad time of year when for the first time for many months the fine old sun still blazes away in a cloudless sky, but does not warm you, and the hoar-frosts and the mists and the winds begin to stir their faint limbs at morning and evening, with the gossamer, as the sap of winter vigor remembers itself in the cold corpses which brave summer slew. The leaves were still on the trees, and still green, but it was the leaden green of old leaves which have seen much since the gay colors and happiness of spring — that seems so lately and, like all happy things, so quickly to have passed. The sheep fairs had been held. The plums had tumbled off the trees in the first big winds, and here and there, in the lovely sunlight too soon enfeebled, a branch of beech or oak was turning yellow: the one to die quickly and mercifully, the other perhaps to hold grimly to the frozen tree and to hiss with its papery skeletons all through the cast winds of winter, until the spring was there again.

The Wart's arm did not hurt any more, but he was not allowed to do his martial exercises under the sergeant-at-arms in the afternoons, for fear of spoiling it before it was properly mended. He went for walks instead, kept watch on a playful family of five hobbies, who shouted

"Cui-Cui-Cui-Cui-Cui" and would be migrating any day now — they were late already — and he collected the enormous caterpillars of moths which had been through all their changes and now sought lumberingly for a convenient place in which to turn into the chrysalis. His best capture was the four-inch plum and apricot upholstery of a Goat Moth, which buried itself quite cheerfully among trails of silk in a box of loose earth which he kept beside his bed. It had taken three years to reach its present size and would lie perdue for another, before the big dun moth crept out of its old armor and pumped the blood into the veins of its expanding wings. Merlyn caught a male grass snake on one of these walks. They met by chance, face to face, as each was turning the corner of a big bed of seeded nettles from opposite directions, and the magician pounced upon the reptile before it had time to flick its black tongue twice. He held it up, wriggling, hissing and smelling strongly of acetylene, while the Wart examined it in horror.

"Don't be afraid of it," said Merlyn. "It is only a piece of olive lightning with an ochre V behind its shining black head. It can t sting you and won't bite you. It has never done harm to anybody, and can only flee and stink."

"See," he said, and began stroking it from the head downwards: a touch which the poor creature tried to evade but soon accepted, in its ceaseless efforts to pour and pour away.

"Everybody kills them," said Merlyn indignantly. "Some by-our-lady fool once said that you could tell an adder because it had a V on its head, which stood for viper. It would take you five minutes to find the mark on an adder's head anyway, but these helpless beauties with their bright yellow black-bordered V get bashed to death in consequence. Here, catch hold of him."

The Wart took the serpent gingerly into his hands, taking care to hold it well away from the vent from which the white smell came. He had thought that snakes were slimy as well as dangerous, but this was not. It was as dry as a piece of living rope, and had, like rope, a pleasing texture to the fingers, on account of its scales. Every ounce of it was muscle, every plate of its belly was a strong and moving foot. He had held toads before, and they, the fat, philosophical warty creatures, had been a little clammy on account of their loose flesh. This creature, on the other hand, was dry and delicately rough and liquid power. It was the same temperature as the ground on which it basked.

"You asked to be turned into a snake once," said Merlyn. "Do you still want that?"

"Yes, please."

"It isn't much of a life. I don't think you'll get anything very exciting to happen to you. This chap probably only eats about once a week or once a fortnight, and the rest of the time he dreams. Still, if I turned you into one, you might get him to talk. It won't be more than that."

"I should like it all the same."

"Well, it will be a rest after shooting griffins."

Merlyn loosed the grass snake, which immediately flashed off into the nettles. Then he exchanged a few words in Greek with an invisible gentleman called Aesculapius, and turned to the Wart.

He said, "I shall stay here for an hour or two, and perhaps I shall sit down against that tree and have a nap. Then I want you to come out to me when I call you. Good-by."

The Wart tried to say Good-by, but found that he was dumb. He looked quickly at his hands, but they were not there. Aesculapius had accepted him so gently that he had not noticed it, and he was lying on the ground.

"Pour off, then," said Merlyn. "Go and search for him in the nettles." Some people say that snakes are deaf, and others that they deafen themselves in order to escape being charmed by music. The thoughtful adder, for instance, is said by many learned persons to lay one ear upon the ground and to stick the point of his tail into the other so that he cannot hear your music. Wart found that as a matter of fact snakes were not deaf. He had an ear anyway, which was conscious of deep roaring sounds that were approximate to the noises which he had learned as a boy. For instance, if somebody bangs on the side of the bath or if the pipes begin to gurgle when your ears are under water, you hear sounds which are different from those which would be heard in a normal position. But you would soon get accustomed to these sounds, and connect the roaring and bumbling with water-pipes, if you kept your head under water for long. In fact, although you heard a different kind of noise, you would still be hearing the pipes which human beings hear in the upper air. So the Wart could hear what Merlyn said, though it sounded very thin and high, and he therefore hoped to be able to talk to the snake. He darted out his tongue, which he used as a sort of feeler such as the long stick with which an explorer might probe the bogs in front of him, and he slid off into the nettles in search of his companion.

The other snake was lying flat on its face in a state of great agitation. It had managed to push itself into the very roots of the coarse grass among the nettles, for there is always a kind of empty layer between the green grass and the actual mud. The top green layer is supported on pillars of bleached roots, and it was in this secret acre-huge chamber, which covers every grass field, floored with mud and roofed with green, that the poor snake had sought concealment. It was lamenting to itself in a very sweet, cold, simple voice and crying, "Alas, Alas!" It is difficult to explain the way in which snakes talk, except by this. Everybody knows that there are rays of light, the infra-red and the ultra-violet and those beyond them, in which ants, for instance, can see, and men cannot. just so there are waves of sound higher than the bat's squeak, which Mozart once heard delivered by Lucrezia Ajugari in 1770, and lower than the distant thunder which pheasants hear (or is it that they see the flash?) before man. It was in these profound melodious accents that the snake conversed.

"Who are you?" asked the snake, trembling, as Wart poured himself into the secret chamber beside it. "Did you see that human? It was an H. sapiens, I believe. I only just got away."