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The Book of Merlyn

T. H. WHITE

The Book of Merlyn

The Unpublished Conclusion to
The Once and Future King
Prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Illustrations by Trevor Stubley

University of Texas Press, Austin

The original manuscript of The Book of Merlyn is in
the T. H. White Collection, Humanities Research Center,
the University of Texas at Austin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

White, Terence Hanbury, 1906- 1964.
The book of Merlyn.

1. Arthurian romances. I. White, Terrence Hanbury,
1906 — 1964. The once and future king. II. Title.
PZ3.W5854BO4 [PR6045.H2] 82.3'. 9'i2 77-3454
isbn 0-292-70769-x pbk.

Copyright © 1977 by Shaftesbury Publishing Company
All rights reserved

Pages 47-62 and 73-92 of The Book of Merlyn have
appeared, in slightly modified form, in The Once
and Future King, copyright © 1939, 1940 by T. H. White,
© 1958 by T. H. White and published by G. P. Putnam's
Sons, pages 122-130 and 164-177. The same pages
have also appeared in the original British edition of The
Once and Future King, published by William Collins'
Sons &c Co.

First Paperback Printing, 1988

Set in Sabon by G&S Typesetters, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Richard Hendel

Contents

publisher's STATEMENT VII
THE STORY OF THE BOOK IX
INTRODUCING THE BOOK OF MERLYN XXI
THE BOOK OF MERLYN I

Publisher's Statement

The Book of Merlyn, written by T. H. White during World
War II, was intended to be the concluding book of a planned
five-book volume entitled The Once and Future King. While
The Once and Future King was indeed finally published in
1958, The Book of Merlyn was not included. This is the first
time it has ever fully appeared in print.

White did not see proofs of The Book of Merlyn after the
complete manuscript was submitted for publication late in
194 1, and, as he was in the habit of making corrections and
revisions once his work was set in type, this manuscript was
not in final form when it came to us. However, it seemed to
be so nearly finished that only minimal editing was necessary.

The 1958 Putnam edition of The Once and Future King
was used as a guide in our editing. The use of punctuation in
dialogue was regularized. All errors in spelling were cor-
rected, and British and archaic spellings were retained. Book
titles and, usually, genus/species names were italicized, and,
where White had been inconsistent in capitalizing such
words as badger, man, and democracy, capitalization was
regularized. In a few cases, where the typist had obviously
omitted a word, that word has been inserted.

Two episodes in The Book of Merlyn — scenes where
Merlyn transforms Arthur into an ant and later into a goose
— have already appeared somewhat out of context in The
Sword in the Stone as published in the tetralogy. White had
originally written them for The Book of Merlyn in his five-
book version of The Once and Future King, and we have
therefore let them stand.

Where Latin or Greek is not translated in the original manu-
script, a translation has kindly been provided by Peter Green.

The Story of the Book

The dream, like the one before it, lasted about half an
hour. In the last three minutes of the dream some fishes,
dragons and such-like ran hurriedly about. A dragon swal-
lowed one of the pebbles, but spat it out.

In the ultimate twinkling of an eye, far tinier in time than
the last millimetre on a six-foot rule, there came a man. He
split up the one pebble which remained of all that mountain
with blows; then made an arrow-head of it, and slew his
brother.

The Sword in the Stone
Chapter 18, original version

"My father made me a wooden castle big enough to get
into, and he fixed real pistol barrels beneath its battlements
to fire a salute on my birthday, but made me sit in front the
first night — that deep Indian night — to receive the salute,
and I, believing I was to be shot, cried."

Throughout his life White was subject to fears: fears from
without — a menacing psychopathic mother, the prefects at
Cheltenham College "rattling their canes," poverty, tubercu-
losis, public opinion; fears from within — fear of being afraid,
of being a failure, of being trapped. He was afraid of death,
afraid of the dark. He was afraid of his own proclivities,
which might be called vices: drink, boys, a latent sadism.
Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the
human race. His life was a running battle with these fears,
which he fought with courage, levity, sardonic wit, and
industry. He was never without a project, never tired of
learning, and had a high opinion of his capacities.

x This high opinion was shared by his teachers at the Uni-
The Story versity of Cambridge. When tuberculosis tripped him in his
of the Book second year, a group of dons made up a sum of money suffi-
cient to send him to Italy for a year's convalescence. He took
to Italy like a duck to water, learned the language, made
some low friends, studied pension life, and wrote his first
novel, They Winter Abroad. The inaugurator of the con-
valescent fund recalled: 44 . . . he returned in great form,
determined to have the examiner's blood in Part II; and sure
enough in 1929 he took a tearing First Class with Distinc-
tion."

In 1932, on a Cambridge recommendation, he was
appointed head of the English Department at Stowe School.

It was a position of authority under an enlightened head-
master who allowed him ample rope. His pupils still remem-
ber him, some for the stimulus of his teaching, others for the
sting of his criticism, others again for extracurriculum
rambles in search of grass snakes. He learned to fly, in order
to come to terms with a fear of falling from high places, and
to think rather better of the human race by meeting farm
laborers at the local inn. After a couple of years he tired of
Stowe, and decided on no evidence that his headmaster
meant to get rid of him. With poverty a fear to be reckoned
with, he constructed two potboilers and compiled another.
An Easter holiday fishing in rain and solitude on a Highland
river showed him what he really wanted — to write in free-
dom, to land a book of his own as well as a salmon.

At midsummer 1936 he gave up his post and rented a
gamekeeper's cottage at Stowe Ridings on the Stowe estate.
The compiled potboiler, made up of extracts from his fishing,
hunting, shooting, and flying diaries and called England
Have My Bones, sold so well that its publisher undertook to
pay him £200 a year against a yearly book.

The gamekeeper's cottage stood among woodlands — a
sturdy Victorian structure without amenities. It was by
lamplight that White pulled from a shelf the copy of the
Morte d' Arthur he had used for the essay on Malory he sub-
mitted for the English tripos, Part I. Then he had been con-
cerned with the impression he would make on the examiners.
Now he read with a free mind.

One of the advantages of having taken a First Class with
Distinction in English is a capacity to read. White read the

Morte d' Arthur as acutely as though he were reading a brief.
The note in which he summarized his findings may be his
first step toward The Once and Future King:

'The whole Arthurian story is a regular greek doom, com-
parable to that of Orestes.

"Uther started the wrong-doing upon the family of the
duke of Cornwall, and it was the descendant of that family
who finally revenged the wrong upon Arthur. The fathers
have eaten sour grapes etc. Arthur had to pay for his father's
initial transgression, but, to make it fairer, the fates ordained
that he himself should also make a transgression (against the
Cornwalls) in order to bind him more closely in identifica-
tion with the doom.

"It happened like this.

"The Duke of Cornwall married Igraine and they had
three daughters, Morgan le Fay, Elaine and Morgause.

"Uther Pendragon fell in love with Igraine and slew her
husband in war, in order to get her. Upon her he begot
Arthur, so that Arthur was half brother to the three girls.
But he was brought up separately.

"The girls married Uriens, Nentres and Lot, all kings.
They would naturally have a dislike for Uther and anybody
who had anything to do with Uther.

"When Uther died and Arthur succeeded him in mysteri-
ous circumstances, naturally Arthur inherited this feud. The
girls persuaded their husbands to lead a revolt of eleven
kings.

"Arthur had been told that Uther was his father, but Uther
had been a vigourous old gentleman and Merlyn had very
stupidly forgotten to tell Arthur who his mother was.

"After a great battle in which the n kings were subdued,
Morgause, the wife of King Lot, came to Arthur on an
embassy. They did not know of their relationship at this
time. They fell for each other, went to bed together, and the
result was Mordred. Mordred was thus the fruit of incest (his
father was his mother's half brother), and it was he who
finally brought the doom on Arthur's head. The sin was in-
cest, the punishment Guinever, and the instrument of punish-
ment Mordred, the fruit of the sin. It was Mordred who
insisted on blowing the gaff on Launcelot and Guinever's
affair, which Arthur was content to overlook, so long as it
was not put into words."

xii En trentiesme annee de mon aage
The Story Quand toutes mes hontes j'ai hues
of the Book

White was thirty when he rented the gamekeeper's cottage.
He had done with his past, he was on good terms with him-
self, he was free. His solitude was peopled by a succession of
hawks, a rescued tawny owl, a setter bitch on whom he un-
loosed his frustrated capacity to love. Now in the Morte
d' Arthur , he had a subject into which he could unloose his
frustrated capacity for hero worship, his accumulated mis-
cellany of scholarship, his love of living, his admiration of
Malory. It is as though, beginning a new subject, he wrote as
a novice. Instead of the arid dexterity of the potboilers, The
Sword in the Stone has the impetus and recklessness of a
beginner's work. It is full of poetry, farce, invention, icono-
clasm, and, above all, the reverence due to youth in its por-
trayal of the young Arthur. It was accepted for publication
on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the United States was
being considered by the Book of the Month Club — who took
it. But it was 1938, the year of Munich; the pistol barrels in
the toy fort were charged for more than a salute. Fear of war
half choked him when he was fitted with a gasmask, re-
treated when Chamberlain bought peace on Hitler's terms,
but could not be dismissed.

White's thinking was typical of the postwar epoch. War
was a ruinous dementia. It silenced law, it killed poets, it
exalted the proud, filled the greedy with good things, and
oppressed the humble and meek; no good could come of it,
it was hopelessly out of date. No one wanted it. (Unfortu-
nately, no one had passionately wanted the League of Na-
tions, either.) If, against reason and common sense, another
war should break out, he must declare himself a conscien-
tious objector. In the first lemming rush to volunteer, he
wrote to David Garnett: "I have written to Siegfried Sassoon
and the headmaster of Stowe (my poor list of influential
people) to ask them if they can get me any sensible job in this
wretched war, if it starts. This is the ultimatum: I propose to
enlist as a private soldier in one month after the outbreak of
hostilities, unless one of you gets me an efficient job before
that."

Chamberlain capitulated, the crisis went off the boil,
White began The Witch in the Wood (the second volume of

The Once and Future King) and was diverted to Grief for the xiii
Grey Geese, a novel he never finished. It was conceived in a The Story
state of intense physical excitement. He was alone, he was in of the Book
the intimidating sea-level territory of the Wash, he was pur-
suing a long-ambitioned desire, intricately compounded of
sporting prowess and sadism — to shoot a wild goose in flight.
The theme is significant. The geese are warred on by the
goose shooters. Among the goose shooters is a renegade who
takes sides with the geese, deflecting their flight away from
the ranks of the shooters. White plainly identifies himself
with the renegade, while bent on shooting a wild goose.

In January 1939 he wrote to Garnett, who had invited
him to go salmon fishing in Ireland: "If only I can get out of
this doomed country before the crash, I shall be happy. Two
years of worry on the subject have convinced me that I had
better run for my life, and have a certain right to do so. I
may just as well do this as shoot myself on the outbreak of
hostilities. I don't like war, I don't want war, and I didn't
start it. I think I could just bear life as a coward, but I
couldn't bear it as a hero."

A month later he was in Ireland, lodging in a farmhouse
called Doolistown, in County Meath, where he proposed to
stay long enough to finish The Witch in the Wood (published
shortly thereafter) and catch a salmon. It was his home for
the next six and a half years. For six of them he never heard
an English voice and rarely a cultivated one. Provincial
Ireland swallowed him like a deep bog.

He had escaped his doomed country, but he could not
avoid being in earshot of it.

Diary, April 26th, 1939

Conscription is now seriously spoken of in England, and
everybody lives from one speech of Hitler's to the next. I
read back in this book at the various tawdry little decisions
which I have tried to make under the pressure of the Beast:
to be a conscientious objector, and then to fight, and then to
seek some constructive wartime employment which might
combine creative work with service to my country. All these
sad and terrified dashes from one hunted corner to the next.

Meanwhile he tried to protect his peace of mind by dashes
in new directions. Lodging in a Catholic household and
treated as one of the family, he considered becoming a

xiv Catholic. Because his father had happened to be born in Ire-
The Story land, he deluded himself with an idea of Irish ancestry. He
of the Book read books on Irish history, with scholarly dispassionateness
reading authors on either side of that vexed question; he
tried to learn Erse, going once a week to the local school-
master for lessons and "doing an hour's prep every morn-
ing"; he looked for a habitation, and rented a house called
Sheskin Lodge in County Mayo for the shooting; later, he
made researches into the legendary Godstone on the island of
Inniskea. More to the purpose, being involuntary, he was
captured by the somber beauty, the desolate charm, of Erris
— that part of County Mayo lying between the Nephin Beg
range and the sea.

It was at Sheskin Lodge, embowered in fuchsias and
rhododrendron thickets and surrounded by leagues of bog,
that he heard the last English voices. They were saying Good-
bye. War had been declared, the visiting Garnetts were going
back to England.

The tenancy of Sheskin ran out, he returned to Doolistown
and listened to the news.

October 20th, 1939

There don't seem to be many people being killed yet — no
hideous slaughters of gas and bacteria.

But the truth is going.

We are suffocating in propaganda instead of gas, slowly
feeling our minds go dead.

October 23rd

The war as one hears of it over the wireless is more terrible
than anything I can imagine of mere death. It seems to me
that death must be a noble and terrible mystery, whatever
one's creed or one's circumstance of dying. It is a natural
thing, anyway. But what is happening over the wireless is not
natural. The timbre of the voices which sing about Hitler and
death is a sneering, nasal mock-timbre. Devils in hell must
sing like this.

By then he was preparing for The Ill-Made Knight (The
Witch in the Wood, delivered to his publisher six months
earlier, had been returned with a request that it might be
rewritten) and making an analysis of the character of Malory's
Sir Lancelot — with traits akin to his own: "Probably sadistic,

or he would not have taken such frightful care to be gentle. ... xv

Fond of being alone." The Story

In the analysis of Guenever, where he had nothing personal of the Book
to go on, he speculates, and does his best to overcome his
aversion to women. "Guenever had some good characteris-
tics. She chose the best lover she could have done and was
brave enough to let him be her lover." "Guenever hardly
seems to have been a favourite of Malory's, whatever Tenny-
son may have thought about her."

It was a new departure for White to approach a book so
deliberately or write it so compactly. There is no easy-going
writing in The Ill-Made Knight, where the Doom tightens on
Arthur, and Lancelot is compelled to be instrumental in it by
his love for Guenever.

He wrote it in Erris, in the small-town hotel at Belmullet,
between researches into the Godstone, lying out on freezing
mornings waiting for the passage of the wild geese, local
jovialities, and drinking fits after which he would lock himself
in his hotel bedroom in terror of the I.R.A.

On October i st, having completed The Ill-Made Knight, he
put Erris behind him and went back to Doolistown to write
The Candle in the Wind. This, the last Morte d' Arthur book,
in which the doomed king staggers from defeat to defeat,
already existed as the skeleton of a play. White was incapable
of writing slowly. By midautumn the play was brought to life
as a narrative, and he was considering titles for the complete
tetralogy: The Ancient Wrong . . . Arthur Pendragon . . .

November 14th, 1940

Pendragon can still be saved, and elevated into a superb
success, by altering the last part of Book 4, and taking Arthur
back to his animals. The legend of his going underground at
the end, into the badger s sett, where badger, hedgehog, snake,
pike (stuffed in case) and all the rest of them can be waiting to
talk it over with him. Now, with Merlyn, they must discuss
war from the naturalist's point of view, as I have been doing in
this diary lately. They must decide to talk thoroughly over,
during Arthur's long retirement underground, the relation of
Man to the other animals, in the hope of getting a new angle on
his problem from this. Such, indeed, was Merlyn s original
objective in introducing him to the animals in the first place.
Now what can we learn about abolition of war from animals?

xvi Pendragon can still be saved. Another salvation was in-
The Story volved.
of the Book White had gone to Belmullet assuming himself to be at

home in Ireland. He came away an Englishman in exile. He
had been received, and welcomed as something new to talk
about; he had never been accepted. Another Ancient Wrong
forbade it — the cleft between the hated and the hating race. He
was believed to be a spy (the rumour of an English invasion
had kept most of Belmullet sitting up all night) ; his movements
were watched; he was reported to the police and not allowed
to leave the mainland; he had joined the local security force,
but was asked not to attend parades. His disillusionment may
have been rubbed in by the parallel with The Candle in the
Wind, where Arthur's goodwill is of no avail against his
hereditary enemies. Now another winter lay before him, a
winter of intellectual loneliness, with only himself to consult,
only himself to feed on. He had a roof over his head, a room to
be alone in, regular meals, the hedged landscape of County
Meath to walk his dog in, nothing much to complain of,
nothing to go on with. War had imprisoned him in a padded
cell.

It was his own salvation he leaped at.

On December 6th, he wrote to L. J. Potts, formerly his tutor
at Cambridge, continuously his Father Confessor in Letters:
"The next volume is to be called The Candle in the Wind (one
has to add D.V. nowadays) ... It will end on the night before
the last battle, with Arthur absolutely wretched. And after
that I am going to add a new 5th volume, in which Arthur
rejoins Merlyn underground (it turns out to be the badger's
sett of Vol. 1) and the animals come back again, mainly ants
and wild geese. Don't squirm. The inspiration is godsent. You
see, I have suddenly discovered that (1) the central theme of
Morte d'Arthur is to find an antidote to war, (2) that the best
way to examine the politics of man is to observe him, with
Aristotle, as a political animal. I don't want to go into all this
now, it will spoil the freshness of the future book, but I have
been thinking a great deal, in a Sam Butlerish way, about man
as an animal among animals — his cerebrum, etc. I think I can
really make a comment on all these futile isms (communism,
fascism, conservatism, etc.) by stepping back — right back into
the real world, in which man is only one of the innumerable
other animals. So to put my 'moral' across (but I shan't state

it), I shall have the marvellous opportunity of bringing the xvii
wheel full circle, and ending on an animal note like the one 1 The Story
began on. This will turn my completed epic into a perfect fruit, of the Book
'rounded off and bright and done.' "

On the same day he wrote to Garnett, asking what book it
was in which Garnett alleged having read that Malory raided a
convent, and continuing, "So far as I can see, my fifth volume
is going to be all about the anatomy of the brain. It sounds odd
for Arthur, but it is true. Do you happen to know, off hand, of
a pretty elementary but efficient book about brain anatomy in
animals, fish, insects, etc. ? I want to know what sort of
cerebellum an ant has, also a wild goose. You are the sort of
person who would know this."

Though White uses the future tense in his letter to Potts, it is
unlikely that he waited from November 1 4th to December 6th
before beginning The Book of Merlyn. Book 5, taking up
where the original Book 4 ended, has an immediacy of plain
statement that could not have brooked much delay. Arthur is
still sitting alone in his tent at Salisbury, awaiting his last battle
in the final insolvency of his hopes, and weeping the slow tears
of old age. When Merlyn enters to renew their former
master-pupil relationship and sees the extent of Arthur's
misery, he is not sure whether he can do so at this late hour.
His assurance that legend will perpetuate Arthur and the
Round Table long after history has mislaid them falls on
inattentive ears. He invokes their past relationship. The pupil
has outgrown the master and puts him off with a Le roy
s'advisera. Nowhere in the four previous volumes had White
made Arthur so much a king as in this portrayal of him
defeated. In Farewell Victoria, his novel of the early thirties,
he hit on the phrase "the immortal generals of defeat." In the
first chapter of The Book of Merlyn he substantiated it.

But the scheme of Book 5 is to take Arthur underground,
where the animals of Book 1 are waiting to talk to him, and
where Merlyn is to subject him to the contents of White's
notebook so that he may discover what can be learned from
animals about the abolition of war.

Since animals avoid warring with their kind, this could be a
good subject to examine.

But the discussion is slanted from the first by Merlyn's
insistence on the inferiority of man. Liber scriptus proferetur
. . . Merlyn has opened White's notebook, and finds small

xviii evidence that man deserves to be placed among the two
The Story thousand eight hundred and fifty species of mammalian ani-
ofthe Book mals in the world. They know how to behave befittingly,
existing without war or usurpation. Man does not. Merlyn
weakens the denunciation by adding the insult that man is a
parvenu.

At this point no one present is impious enough to suggest
that man may do better in time.

At a later stage of the discussion Arthur, the representative
of the parvenu species, suggests that man has had a few good
ideas, such as buildings and arable fields. He is put in his place
by the achievements of coral animals, beavers, seed-carrying
birds, and finally felled with the earthworm, so much es-
teemed by Darwin. The distinction between performing and
planned performance is not allowed to occur to him, and the
conversation sweeps on to nomenclature: Homo ferox {sa-
piens being out of the question), Homo stultus, Homo im-
politicus. The last is the most damning; man must remain
savage and dunderheaded till, like the other mammalian
species, he learns to live peaceably.

It is easy to pick holes in White's rhetoric. The Book of
Merlyn was written with the improvidence of an impulse. It
holds much that is acute, disturbing, arresting, much that is '
brilliant, much that is moving, besides a quantity of informa-
tion. But Merlyn, the main speaker, is made a mouthpiece for
spleen, and the spleen is White's. His fear of the human race,
which he seemed to have got the better of, had recurred, and
was intensified into fury, fury against the human race, who
make war and glorify it.

No jet of spleen falls on the figure of Arthur. Whenever he
emerges from the torrent of instruction, he is a good character:
slow to anger, willing to learn, and no fool. He is as recupera-
ble as grass, and enjoys listening to so much good talk. When
Merlyn tells him that to continue his education he must
become an ant, he is ready and willing. Magicked into an ant,
he enters the ants' nest which Merlyn keeps for scientific
purposes. What he sees there is White's evocation of the
totalitarian state. Compelled by his outward form to function
as a working ant, he is so outraged by the slavish belligerence
and futility of his fellow workers that he opposes an ant army
in full march, and has to be snatched away by Merlyn.

For his last lesson White consigns him to what by then must

have seemed an irrecoverable happiness: the winter of 1938 xix
when he went goose shooting. The Story

It is an insight into how many experiences White packed of the Book
into his days and how vividly he experienced them that little
more than two years had elapsed between Grief for the Grey
Geese and The Book ofMerlyn. He had taken the goose book
with him when he went to fish in Ireland, and Chapter 1 2 of
The Book ofMerlyn opens with its description of the dimen-
sionless dark flatness of the Lincolnshire Wash and the hori-
zontal wind blowing over it. But now it is Arthur, become a
goose, who faces the wind and feels the slob under his webbed
feet, though he is not completely a goose as he has yet to fly.
When the flock gathers and takes off for the dawn flight, he
rises with it.

The old patch shames the new garment. In that winter of
two years before, White was at the height of himself, braced
against an actual experience, his senses alert, his imagination
flaring like a bonfire in the wind. "I am so physically healthy,"
he wrote to Sydney Cockerell, "that I am simply distended
with sea-air and icebergs and dawn and dark and sunset, so
hungry and sober and wealthy and wise, that my mind has
gone quite to sleep."

At Doolistown his mind was insomniac, vexed, and de-
manding. It allowed him to extend the vitality of the old patch
over the few pages where Arthur watches the geese. But with
Chapter 13 the intention to convince drives out the creative
intention to state, and with but one intermission — when the
hedgehog leads Arthur to a hill in the west-country, where he
sits looking at his sleeping kingdom under the moon and is
reconciled to the bad because of the good — the book clatters
on like a factory with analysis, proof and counterproof,
exhortation, demonstration, explanation, historical exam-
ples, parables from nature — even the hedgehog talks too
much.

Yet the theme was good, and timely, and heartfelt, and
White preserves an awareness of persons and aerates the
dialectics with traits of character and colloquial asides. It is
clear from the typescript that he recognized the need for this,
for many of these mitigations were added by hand. Whenever
he can escape from his purpose — no less aesthetically fell for
being laudable — into his rightful kingdom of narrative, The
Book ofMerlyn shows him still master of his peculiar powers.

xx It is as though the book were written by two people: the
The Story storyteller and the clever man with the notebook who shouts
of the Book him down.

Perhaps he went astray in that stony desert of words and
opinions because he lacked his former guide. In the final
chapter, Malory has returned. Under his tutelage White tells
how, after Arthur's death in battle, Guenever and Lancelot,
stately abbess and humble hermit, came to their quiet ends.
These few pages are among the finest that White ever wrote.
Cleverness and contention and animus are dismissed: there is
no place for them in the completed world of legend, where
White and Malory stand farewelling at the end of the long
journey that began by lamplight in the gamekeeper's cottage
at Stowe Ridings.

This is the true last chapter of The Once and Future King,
and should have its place there. Fate saw otherwise. "I have
suddenly discovered that . . . the central theme of Morte
d'Arthur is to find an antidote to war." To give weight to his
discovery by making it seem less sudden, White incorporated
new material into the already published three volumes. In
November 1 94 1 he sent them, together with The Candle in the
Wind and The Book ofMerlyn, to his London publisher, to be
published as a whole. Mr. Collins was disconcerted. He
replied that the proposal would need thinking over. So long a
book would take a great deal of paper. The prosecution of war
made heavy demands on the paper supply: forms in triplicate,
regulations, reports, instructions to civilians, light reading for
forces, etc. White insisted that the five books should appear as
a whole. After prolonged negotiations, in the course of which
White's demand to see The Book ofMerlyn in proof escaped
notice — a grave pity, for he was accustomed to rely on print to
show up what was faulty or superfluous — the fivefold Once
and Future King was laid by.

The Once and Future King was not published till 1958. It
was published as a tetralogy. The Book of Merlyn, that
attempt to find an antidote to war, had become a war casualty.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Introducing The Book of Merlyn

We now find King Arthur of England, sitting in his campaign
tent on the eve of battle. Tomorrow, he will face his bastard
son Mordred and that youth's army of Nazi-like Thrashers
on the battlefield.

His reign has been painfully long for Arthur, and he is bent
with age and sadness and defeat. After a happy youth at Sir
Ector's castle in the Forest Sauvage, where Merlyn the magi-
cian introduced him to the political ideologies found in the
animal kingdom by temporarily transforming him into vari-
ous beasts, Arthur was placed on the throne by destiny,
compelled by his sense of justice and harmony to create the
"civilized world" and the famous Round Table, to stimulate
the Quest for the Holy Grail in an effort to keep man from
killing man.

But a darker fate also dictated his ignorant siring of an
illegitimate son by his own half sister and forced his wife
Guenever and his best knight Lancelot into each other's arms,
thus causing rivalry, deceit, and jealousy among the knights.

These last proved to be the old king's downfall. Forgotten
were his achievements for the Might of Right and for peace on
earth. Forgotten too was his own anguish at having tried his
best and failed. The Quest had led nowhere, the Round Table
was dispersed. Now Guenever was besieged by Mordred and
his Thrashers in the Tower of London and Lancelot was exiled
in France, both victims of Mordred's obsession to gain Ar-
thur's throne.

So now Arthur is alone, fulfilling his royal duties by ab-
sentmindedly going through the day's paperwork, feeling his
losses and his pain. He looks up at a movement at his tent
door.

The Book of Merlyn

Incipit Liber Quintus

He thought a little and said:

"I have found the Zoological Gardens
of service to many of my patients.
I should prescribe for Mr. Pontifex
a course of the larger mammals.
Don't let him think he is taking
them medicinally. . . "

I

It was not the Bishop of Rochester.

The king turned his head away from the newcomer, incuri-
ous 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 speak-
ing.

4 "You are a good dream," said the king. " I hope you will go
The Book on dreaming."

of Merlyn " I am not a dream at all. I am the man whom you remem-
bered."

"Oh, Merlyn, it has been so miserable since you left! Every-
thing 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 candle
light, 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, recognised 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 mel-
low 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' Ar-
thur in mystic waves like the wireless, and others in an undis-
covered hemisphere who still pretended that Arthur and Mer-
lyn were the natural fathers of themselves in pictures which

would move. The Matter of Britain ! Certainly we were forgot- 5
ten, Arthur, if a thousand years and half a thousand, and yet a The Booh
thousand years again, are to be the measure of forgetfulness." of Merlyn
"Who is this Wight?"

"A fellow," replied the magician absently. "Just listen, will
you, while I recite a piece from Kipling?" And the old gentle-
man 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 Tintagel 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."

6 "People are dupes, then."
The Book The old fellow replied frankly: "People are dupes, and
of Merlyn 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 naturae also: that is their interest."

The eyes remained closed.

"The thing which you were thinking about . . . about peo-
ple 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 7
skin of his face twitched as it were, or tautened itself for the 7 be Hook
fraction of a second, so that you could see underneath it, in the of Merlyn
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

8 see why Merlyn had always clowned on purpose. It had been a
The Book means of helping people to learn in a happy way. He began to
of Merlyn 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, in spite of ages of experi-
ence. 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.

2

When he opened them, it was still dark. Merlyn was there,
moodily scratching the greyhound's ears and muttering. He
had saved his pupil from misery before, by being nasty to him
when he was a young boy called the Wart, but he knew that
the poor old chap before him now had suffered too much
misery for the trick to work again. The next best thing was to
distract the king's attention, he must have decided, for he set
to work as soon as the eyes were open, in a way which all
magicians understand. They are accustomed to palm things
off on people, under a mirage of patter.

"Now," he said. "Dreams. We must get this over for good
and all. Apart from the maddening indignity of being called a
dream — personally, because it muddles you — it confuses
other people. How about the learned readers? And it is
degrading to ourselves. When I was a third-rate schoolmaster
in the twentieth century — or was it in the nineteenth — every
single boy I ever met wrote essays for me which ended: Then
he woke up. You could say that the Dream was the only
literary convention of their most degraded classrooms. Are we
to be this? We are the Matter of Britain, remember. And what
of oneirocriticism, I ask? What are the psychologists to make
of it? Stuff as dreams are made of is stuff and nonsense in my
opinion."

"Yes," said the king meekly.

"Do I look like a dream?"

"Yes."

Merlyn seemed to gasp with vexation, then put the whole
beard into his mouth at one mouthful. After this he blew his
nose and went away to stand in a corner, with his face to the
canvas, where he began to soliloquise indignantly.

io "Of all the persecutions and floutings," he stated. "How
The Book can a necromancer prove he is not a vision, when suspected of
of Merlyn the baseness? A ghost may prove he is alive by being pinched:
but not so with a by-our-lady dream. For, argal, you can
dream of pinches. Yet hist! There is the noted remedy, in
which the dreamer pinches his own leg.

"Arthur," he directed, turning round like a top, "be pleased
to pinch yourself."
"Yes."

"Now, does this prove you are awake?"
"I doubt it."

The vision examined him sadly.

" I was afraid it would not," it agreed; and it returned to its
corner, where it began to recite some complicated passages
from Burton, Jung, Hippocrates and Sir Thomas Browne.

After five minutes, it struck its fist into the palm of the other
hand and marched back to the candle light, inspired by the bed
of Cleopatra.

"Listen," Merlyn announced. "Have you ever dreamed of a
smell?"

"Dreamed of a smell?"
"Do not repeat."
"lean hardly. . ."

"Come, come. You have dreamed of a sight, have you not?
And of a feeling: everybody has dreamed of a feeling. You may
even have dreamed of a taste. I recollect that once when I had
forgotten to eat anything for a fortnight, I dreamed of a
chocolate pudding: which I distinctly tasted, but it was
snatched away. The question is, have you ever dreamed of a
smell?"

"I do not think I have: not to smell it."

"Make sure. Do not stare like an idiot, my dear man, but
attend to the matter in hand. Have you ever dreamed with
your nose?"

"Never. I cannot remember dreaming of a smell."

"You are positive?"

"Positive."

"Then smell that!" cried the necromancer, snatching off his
skull-cap and presenting it under Arthur's nose, with its cargo
of mice, frogs and a few shrimps for salmon-fishing which he
had overlooked.

"Phew!"

"Am I a dream now?" | ,

"It does not smell like one." The Hook

"Well, then .. ." of Merlyn

"Merlyn," said the king. "It makes no difference whether
you are a dream or not, so long as you are here. Sit down and
be patient for a little, if you can. Tell me the reason of your
visit. Talk. Say you have come to save us from this war."

The old fellow had achieved his object of artificial respira-
tion as well as he could; so now he sat down comfortably, and
took the matter in hand.

"No," he said. "Nobody can be saved from anything, unless
they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people — it
is often very dangerous indeed to do things at all — and the
only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of
ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, the people
are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process
the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or
rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the
course of the millennia. Such is the business of the philos-
opher, to open new ideas. It is not his business to impose
them on people."

"You did not tell me this before."
"Why not?"

"You have egged me into doing things during all my life . . .
The Chivalry and the Round Table which you made me
invent, what were these but efforts to save people, and to get
things done?"

"They were ideas," said the philosopher firmly, "rudimen-
tary ideas. All thought, in its early stages, begins as action. The
actions which you have been wading through have been ideas,
clumsy ones of course, but they had to be established as a
foundation before we could begin to think in earnest. You
have been teaching man to think in action. Now it is time to
think in our heads."

"So my Table was not a failure — Master?"

"Certainly not. It was an experiment. Experiments lead to
new ones, and this is why I have come to take you to our
burrow."

"I am ready," he said, amazed to find that he was feeling
happy.

"The committee discovered that there had been some gaps
in your education, two of them, and it was determined that

1 2 these ought to be put right before concluding the active stage
The Book of the Idea."

of Merlyn "What is this committee? It sounds as if they had been
making a report."

"And so we did. You will meet them presently in the cave.
But now, excuse my mentioning it, there is a matter to arrange
before we go."

Here Merlyn examined his toes with a doubtful eye, hesitat-
ing to continue.

"Men's brains," he explained in the end, "seem to get
petrified as they grow older. The surface becomes perished,
like worn leather, and will no longer take impressions. You
may have noticed it?"

"I feel a stiffness in my head."

"Now children have resilient, plastic brains," continued the
magician with relish, as if he were talking about caviare
sandwiches. "They can take impressions before you could say
Jack Robinson. To learn a language when you are young, for
instance, might literally be called child's play: but after middle
age one finds it is the devil."

"I have heard people say so."

"What the committee suggested was, that if you are to learn
these things we speak of, you ought — ahem — you ought to be
a boy. They have furnished me with a patent medicine to do it.
You understand: you would become the Wart once more."

"Not if I had to live my life again," replied the other old
fellow evenly.

They faced each other like image and object in a mirror, the
outside corners of their eyes drawn down with the hooded lids
of age.

"It would be only for the evening."
"The Elixir of Life?"

"Exactly. Think of the people who have tried to find it."

"If I were to find such a thing, I would throw it away."

"I hope you are not being stupid about children," asked
Merlyn, looking vaguely about him. "We have high authority
for being born again, like little ones. Grown-ups have de-
veloped an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting
themselves for their degradation by pretending that children
are childish. I trust we are free from this?"

"Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than
their parents."

"You and I know it, but the people who are going to read
this book do not.

"Our readers of that time," continued the necromancer in a
grim voice, "have exactly three ideas in their magnificent
noddles. The first is that the human species is superior to
others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to
other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the
twentieth century are superior to their young. The whole
illusion may be labelled Progress, and anybody who questions
it is called puerile, reactionary, or an escapist. The March of
Mind, God help them."

He considered these facts for some time, then added: "And
a fourth piece of scientific clap-trap which they are to have,
rejoices in the name of anthropomorphism. Even their chil-
dren are supposed to be so superior to the animals that you
must never mention the two creatures in the same breath. If
you begin considering men as animals, they put it the other
way round and say that you are considering animals as men, a
sin which they hold to be worse than bigamy. Imagine a
scientist being merely an animal, they say! Tut-tut, and Tilly-
fol-de-rido!"

"Who are these readers?"

"The readers of the book."

"What book?"

"The book we are in."

"Are we in a book?"

"We had better attend to the job," said Merlyn hastily.
He took hold of his wand, rolled up his sleeves, and fixed a
tight eye on the patient. "Do you agree?" he asked.
But the old king stopped him.

"No," he said, with a sort of firm apology. " I have earned
my body and mind with many years of labour. It would be
undignified to change them. I am not too proud to be a child,
Merlyn, bu t too old. If it were my body which were to be made
young, it would be unsuitable to keep an old mind in it. While,
if you were to change them both, the labour of living all those
years would turn to vanity. There is nothing else for it, Master.
We must keep the state of life to which it has pleased God to
call us."

The magician lowered the wand.

"But your brain," he complained. "It is like a fossilised
sponge. And would you not have liked to be young, to frisk

14 about and feel your knees again? Young people are happy, are
The Book they not? We had meant it for a pleasure."
of Merlyn "It would indeed have been a pleasure, and thank you for
thinking of it. But life is not invented for happiness, I do
believe. It is made for something else."

Merlyn chewed the end of his stick while he considered.

"You are right," he said in the end. "I was against the
proposal from the start. But something will have to be done to
souple your intellects, for all that, or you will never catch the
new idea. I suppose there would be no objection to a cerebral
massage, if I could manage it? I should have to get my galvanic
batteries, my extra-reds and under-violets: my french chalk
and my pinches of this and that: a touch of adrenalin and a
sniff of garlic. You know the kind of thing?"

"No, if you think it is right."

He extended his hand into the ether, with a well-remem-
bered gesture, and the apparatus began to materialise obedi-
ently: muddled up as usual.

3

The treatment was unpleasant. It was like having one's
hair brushed vigorously the wrong way, or like having a
sprained ankle flexed by that dreadful kind of masseuse who
urges people to relax. The king gripped the arms of his chair,
closed his eyes, clenched his teeth and sweated. When he
opened them for the second time that evening, it was on a
different world.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. In
leaving the chair he did not take his weight upon his wrists,
like an old man, but upon the palms and phalanges. "Look at
the dog's hollow eyes! The candles are reflected from the back,
not from the front, as if it were from the bottom of a cup. Why
have I never noticed this before? And look here: there is a hole
in Bathsheba's bath, which needs darning. What is this entry
in the book? Susp.} * Who has betrayed us into hanging peo-
ple? Nobody deserves to be hanged. Merlyn, why is there no
reflection from your eyes, when I put the candles between us?
Why have I never thought about it? The light comes red from a
fox, green from a cat, yellow from a horse, saffron from a dog
. . . And look at that falcon's beak: it has a tooth in it like a
saw! Goshawks and sparrow-hawks do not have a tooth. It
must be a peculiarity of falco. What an extraordinary thing a
tent is! Half of it is trying to push it up, and the other half is
trying to pull it down. Ex nihilo res fit J And look at those
chess-men! Check-mate indeed! Nay, we will try the ploy
again . . ."

Imagine a rusty bolt on the garden door, which has been set

* Abbreviation for suspendatur, "let him be hanged."

"^'Something comes of nothing." This is a parody or adaptation of ex
nihilo nihil fit, that is, "nothing comes of nothing," familiar (though not
in that exact form) from both Lucretius and Persius.

1 6 wrong, or the door has sagged on its hinges since it was put on,
The Book and for years that bolt has never been shot efficiently: except
of Merlyn by hammering it, or by lifting the door a little, and wriggling it
home with effort. Imagine then that the old bolt is unscrewed,
rubbed with emery paper, bathed in paraffin, polished with
fine sand, generously oiled, and reset by a skilled workman
with such nicety that it bolts and unbolts with the pressure of a
finger — with the pressure of a feather — almost so that you
could blow it open or shut. Can you imagine the feelings of the
bolt? They are the feelings of glory which convalescent people
have, after a fever. It would look forward to being bolted,
yearning for the rapture of its sweet, successful motion.

For happiness is only a bye-product of function, as light is a
bye-product of the electric current running through the wires.
If the current cannot run efficiently, the light does not come.
That is why nobody finds happiness, who seeks it on its own
account. But man must seek to be like the working bolt; like
the unimpeded run of electricity; like the convalescent whose
eyes, long thwarted in their sockets by headache and fever, so
that it was a grievous pain to move them, now flash from side
to side with the ease of clean fishes in clear water. The eyes are
working, the current is working, the bolt is working. So the
light shines. That is happiness: working well.

"Hold hard," said Merlyn. "After all, we have no train to
catch."

"No train?"

" I beg your pardon. It is a quotation which a friend of mine
used to apply to human progress. However, as you look as if
you were feeling better, shall we start for the cave at once?"

"Immediately."

They made no further ado but lifted the tent-flap and were
gone, leaving the sleeping greyhound to watch the hooded
hawk in solitude. Hearing the tent-flap lift, the blinded bird
screamed out in raucous accents for attention.

It was a bracing walk for both of them. The wild wind and
the speed of their passage tugged their beards to left or right
over their shoulders, accordingly as they did not face exactly
into the eye of it, which gave a tight feeling at the hair-roots, as
if they were in curl papers. They sped over Salisbury plain,
past the thought-provoking monument of Stonehenge, where
Merlyn, in passing, cried a salutation to the old gods whom

Arthur could not see: to Crom, Bel and others. They whirled i 7
over Wiltshire, strode beyond Dorset and sped through De- The Booh
von, as fast as a wire cutting cheese. The plains, downs, of Merlyn

forests, moors and hillocks fell behind them. The glinting
rivers swung past like the spokes of a turning wheel. In
Cornwall they halted, by the side of an ancient tumulus like an
enormous mole-hill, with a dark opening in its side.
"We go in."

"I have been to this place before," said the king, standing
still in a kind of catalepsy.
"Yes."
"When?"
"When yourself?"

He groped, searched in his mind, feeling that the revelation
was in his heart. But "No," he said, "I cannot remember."
"Come and see."

They went down the labyrinthine passages, past the
turnings which led to the bedchambers, to the middens, to the
storerooms and to the place where you went if you wanted to
wash your hands. At last the king stopped, with his ringers on
the door latch at the end of a passage, and announced: "I
know where I am."

Merlyn watched.

" It is the badger's sett, where I went when I was a child."
"Yes."

"Merlyn, you villain! I have been mourning you for half a
lifetime, because I thought you were shut up like a toad in a
hole, and all the time you have been sitting in the Combination
Room, arguing with badger!"

"Open the door, and look."

He opened it. There was the well-remembered room. There
were the portraits of long-dead badgers, famous for schol-
arship or godliness: there were the glow-worms and the
mahogany fans and the tilting board for circulating the decan-
ters. There were the moth-eaten gowns and the chairs of
stamped leather. But, best of all, there were his earliest
friends — the preposterous committee.

They were rising shyly to their feet to greet him. They were
confused in their humble feelings, partly because they had
been looking forward to the surprise so much, and partly
because they had never met real kings before — so that they
were afraid he might be different. Still, they were determined

zo that they ought to do the thing in style. They had arranged that
The Book the proper thing would be to stand up, and perhaps to bow or
of Merlyn smile a bit. There had been solemn consultations among them
about whether he ought to be addressed as "Your Majesty" or
as "Sir," about whether his hand ought to be kissed, about
whether he would be much changed, and even, poor souls,
about whether he would remember them at all.

They were there in a circle round the fire: badger hoisting
himself bashfully to his feet while a perfect avalanche of
manuscript shot out of his lap into the fender: T. natrix
uncoiling himself and flickering an ebon tongue, with which
he proposed to kiss the royal hand if necessary: Archimedes
bobbing up and down with pleasure and anticipation, half
spreading his wings and causing them to flutter, like a small
bird asking to be fed: Balin looking crushed for the first time in
his life, because he was afraid he might have been forgotten:
Cavall, so agonised by the glory of his feelings that he had to
go away into a corner and be sick: goat, who had given the
emperor's salute in a flash of foresight long before: hedgehog
standing loyal and erect at the bottom of the circle, where he
had been made to sit apart from the others on account of his
fleas, but full of patriotism and anxiety to be noticed if
possible. Even the enormous stuffed pike, which was a novelty
over the mantelpiece beneath the Founder, seemed to regard
him with a supplicating eye.

"Oh, people!" exclaimed the king.

Then they all flushed a great deal, and shuffled their feet,
and said that he must please to excuse their humble home, or
Welcome to Your Majesty, or We did mean to put up a banner
only it had got lost, or Are your regal feet wet? or Here comes
the squire, or Oh, it is so lovely to see you after all these years!
Hedgehog saluted stiffly, saying "Rule Britannia!"

The next moment a rejuvenated Arthur was shaking hands
with all, kissing them and thumping them on the back, until
the tears stood in every eye.

"We did not know . . ." sniffed the badger.

"We were afraid you might have forgot . . ."

"Do we say Your Majesty, or do we say Sir?"

He sensibly answered the question on its merits.

"It is Your Majesty for an emperor, but for an ordinary
king it is Sir."

So from that moment they thought of him as the Wart, z i
without considering the matter further. The Book

When the excitement had died down, Merlyn closed the of Merlyn
door and took control of the situation.

"Now," he said. uWe have a great deal of business to
transact, and very little time to do it in. Here you are, king:
here is a chair for you at the head of the circle, because you are
our leader, who does the hard work and suffers the pains. And
you, urchin, it is your turn to be Ganymede, so you had better
fetch the madeira wine and be quick about it. Hand round a
big cup for everybody, and then we will start the meeting."

Hedgehog brought the first cup to Arthur, and served him
with importance on a bended knee, keeping one grubby
thumb in the glass. Then, while he moved off round the circle,
the some-time Wart had leisure to look about him.

The Combination Room had changed since his last visit, a
change which hinted strongly at his tutor's personality. For
there, on all the spare chairs and on the floor and on the tables,
lying open to mark significant passages, were thousands of
books of all descriptions, each one forgotten since it had been
laid down for future reference, and all covered with a fine layer
of dust. There was Thierry and Pinnow and Gibbon and
Sigismondi and Duruy and Prescott and Parkman and Jus-
serand and d' Alton and Tacitus and Smith and Trevelyan and
Herodotus and Dean Millman and MacAllister and Geoffrey
of Monmouth and Wells and Clausewitz and Giraldus
Cambrensis — including the lost volumes on England and
Scotland — and Tolstoy's War and Peace and the Comic His-
tory of England and the Saxon Chronicle and the Four
Masters. There were de Beer's Vertebrate Zoology, Elliott-
Smith's Essays on the Evolution of Man, Eltringham's Senses
of Insects, Browne's Vulgar Errors, Aldrovandus, Matthew
Paris, a Bestiary by Physiologus, Frazer in the complete edi-
tion, and even Zeus by A. B. Cook. There were encyclopedias,
charts of the human and other bodies, reference books like
Witherby, about every sort of bird and animal, dictionaries,
logarithm tables, and the whole series of the D.N.B. On one
wall there was a digest made out in Merlyn's longhand, which
shewed, in parallel columns, a concordance of the histories of
the human races for the last ten thousand years. The Assyr-
ians, Sumerians, Mongols, Aztecs etc. each had a separate

ink, and the year a.d. or B.C. was written on a vertical line at i j

the left of the columns, so that it was like a graph. Then, on The Book

another wall, which was even more interesting, there was a of Merlyn

real graph which shewed the rise and fall of various animal

races for the last thousand million years. When a race became

extinct, its line met the horizontal asymptote and vanished.

One of the latest to do this was the Irish elk. A map, done for

fun, shewed the position of the local birds' nests in the

previous spring. In a corner of the room remote from the fire,

there was a work table with a microscope on it, under whose

lens there was laid out an exquisite piece of micro-dissection,

the nervous system of an ant. On the same table there were the

skulls of men, apes, fish and wild geese, also dissected, in order

to shew the relation between neopallium and corpus striatum.

Another corner was fitted up with a sort of laboratory, in

which, in indescribable confusion, there stood retorts, test

tubes, centrifuges, germ-cultures, beakers and bottles labelled

Pituitary, Adrenalin, Furniture Polish, Venticatchellum's

Curry Powder, or De Kuyper's Gin. The latter had a pencilled

inscription on the label, which said: The Level on this Bottle is

MARKED, Finally there were meat-safes containing live

specimens of mantes, locusts and other insects, while the

remainder of the floor carried a debris of the magician's

passing crazes. These were croquet mallets, knitting needles,

pastels surfins, lino-cutting tools, kites, boomerangs, glue,

boxes of cigars, home-made wood-wind instruments, cookery

books, a bull-roarer, a telescope, a tin of grafting wax and a

hamper marked Fortnum and Mason's on the bottom.

The old king heaved a sigh of contentment, and forgot
about the actual world.

"Now, badger," said Merlyn, who was bristling with im-
portance and officiousness, "hand me the minutes of the last
meeting."

"We did not take any. There was no ink."

"Never mind. Give me the notes on the Great Victorian
Hubris."

"They were used to light the fire."

"Confound it. Then pass the Prophecies."

"Here they are," said the badger proudly, and he stooped
down to scrape together the flood of papers which had shot
into the fender when he first stood up. " I had them ready," he
explained, "on purpose."

24 They had caught light, however, and, when he had blown
The Book them out and delivered them to the magician, it was found that
of Merlyn all the pages had been burned in half.

"Really, this is too vexatious! What have you done with the
Thesis on Man, and the Dissertation Concerning Might?"
"I had them under my hand a moment ago."
And the poor badger, who was supposed to be the secretary
of the committee, but he was not a good one, began rummag-
ing about short-sightedly among the boomerangs, looking
very much ashamed and worried.

Archimedes said, "It might be easier to do it without
papers, Master, just by talking."
Merlyn glared at him.

"We have only to explain," suggested T. natrix.
Merlyn glared at him also.

" It is what we shall have to do in the end," said Balin, "in
any case."

Merlyn gave up glaring and went into the sulks.

Cavall, who had come secretly, sneaked into the king's lap
with an imploring look, and was not prevented. Goat stared
into the fire with his jewel eyes. Badger sat down again with a
guilty expression, and hedgehog, sitting primly in his corner
away from the others with his hands folded in his lap, gave an
unexpected lead.

"Tell 'un," he said.

Everybody looked at him in surprise, but he was not to be
put down. He knew why people moved away when he sat next
to them, but a mun had rights for all that.

"Tell 'un," he repeated.

The king said, " I would like it very much if you did tell me.
At present I do not understand anything, except that I have
been brought here to fill some gaps in this extraordinary
education. Could you explain from the beginning?"

"The trouble is," said Archimedes, "that it is difficult to
decide which is the beginning."

"Tell me about the committee, then. Why are you a commit-
tee, and what on?"

"You could say we are the Committee on Might in Man. We
have been trying to understand your puzzle."

" It is a Royal Commission," explained the badger proudly.
" It was felt that a mixture of animals would be able to advise
upon the different departments ..."

Here Merlyn could contain himself no longer. Even for the 15
sake of his sulks, it was impossible to hold off when it came to The Book
talking, of Merlyn

"Allow me," he said. " I know exactly where to begin, and
now I shall do it. Everybody to listen.

"My dear Wart," he continued, after the hedgehog had said
Hear-hear and, as an afterthought, Order-order, "I must ask
you at the outset to cast your mind back to the beginning of my
tutorship. Can you remember?"

"It was with animals."

"Exactly. And has it occurred to you that this was not for
fun?"

"Well, it was fun. . . ."

"But why, we are asking you, with animals?"

"Suppose you were to tell me."

The magician crossed his knees, folded his arms and
frowned with importance.

"There are two hundred and fifty thousand separate species
of animal in this world," he said, "not counting the living
vegetables, and of these no less than two thousand eight
hundred and fifty are mammals like man. They all of them
have some form of politics or another — it was the one mistake
my old friend Aristotle made, when he defined his man as a
Political Animal — yet man himself, this miserable nonentity
among two hundred and forty-nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-nine others, goes drivelling along his tragic politi-
cal groove, without ever lifting his eyes to the quarter million
examples which surround him. What makes it still more
extraordinary is that man is a parvenu among the rest, nearly
all of which had already solved his problems in one way or
another, many thousand years before he was created."

There was a murmur of admiration from the committee,
and the grass-snake added gently: " It was why he tried to give
you an idea of nature, king, because it was hoped that when
you were struggling with the puzzle, you would look about
you."

"The politics of all animals," said the badger, "deal with the
control of Might."

"But I do not see . . ." he began, only to be anticipated.

"Of course you do not see," said Merlyn. "You were going
to say that animals have no politics. Take my advice, and think
it over."

26 "Have they?"
The Book "Of course they have, and very efficient ones they are. Some
of Merlyn of them are communists or fascists, like many of the ants:
some are anarchists, like the geese. There are socialists like
some of the bees, and, indeed, among the three thousand
families of the ant itself, there are other shades of ideology
besides fascism. Not all are slave-makers or warfarers. There
are bank-balance-holders like the squirrel, or the bear who
hibernates on his fat. Any nest or burrow or feeding ground is
a form of individual property, and how do you think the
crows, rabbits, minnows, and all the other gregarious crea-
tures contrive to live together, if they have not faced the
questions of Democracy and of Force?"

It was evidently a well-worn topic, for the badger inter-
rupted before the king could reply.

44 You have never given us," he said, "and you never will give
us, an example of capitalism in the natural world."
Merlyn looked unhappy.

"And," he added, "if you cannot give an example, it only
shews that capitalism is unnatural."

The badger, it may be mentioned, was inclined to be
Russian in his outlook. He and the other animals had argued
with the magician so much during the past few centuries that
they had all come to express themselves in highly magic terms,
talking of bolshevists and nazis with as much ease as if they
had been little more than the Lollards and Thrashers of
contemporary history.

Merlyn, who was a staunch conservative — which was
rather progressive of him, when you reflect that he was living
backwards — defended himself feebly.

"Parasitism," he said, "is an ancient and respectable com-
partment in nature, from the cuckoo to the flea."

"We are not talking about parasitism. We are talking about
capitalism, which has been exactly defined. Can you give me a
single example, other than man, of a species whose individuals
will exploit the labour value of individuals of the same spe-
cies? Even fleas do not exploit fleas."

Merlyn said: "There are certain apes which, when kept in
captivity, have to be closely watched by their keepers. Other-
wise the dominant individuals will deprive their comrades of
food, even compelling them to regurgitate it, and the com-
rades will starve."

"It seems a shaky example."

Merlyn folded his hands and looked more unhappy than
ever. At last he screwed his courage to the sticking point, took
a deep breath, and faced the truth.

"It is a shaky example," he said. "I find it impossible to
mention an example of true capitalism in nature."

28 He had no sooner said it than his hands unfolded themselves
The Book like lightning, and the fist of one flashed into the palm of the
of Merlyn other.

"I have it!" he cried. "I knew I was right about capitalism.
We are looking at it the wrong way round."
"We generally are."

"The main specialisation of a species is nearly always
unnatural to other species. Just because there are no examples
of capital in nature, it does not mean that capital is unnatural
for man, in the sense of its being wrong. You might as well say
that it is wrong for a giraffe to eat the tops of trees, because
there are no other antelopes with necks as long as his, or that it
was wrong for the first amphibian to crawl out of the water,
because there were no other examples of amphibians at the
time. Capitalism is man's speciality, just as his cerebrum is.
There are no other examples in nature of a creature with a
cerebrum like that of man. This does not mean that it is
unnatural for man to have a cerebrum. On the contrary, it
means that he must go ahead with it. And the same with his
capitalism. It is, like his brain, a speciality, a jewel in the
crown! Now I come to think of it, capitalism may be actually
consequent upon the possession of a developed cerebrum.
Otherwise, why should our only other example of capitalism
— those apes I mentioned — occur among the anthropoids
whose brains are akin to man's? Yes, yes, I knew I was
right to be a minor capitalist all the time. I knew there was a
sensible reason why the Russians of my youth should have
modified their ideas. The fact that it is unique does not mean
that it is wrong: on the contrary, it means that it is right. Right
for man, of course, not for the other animals. It means . . ."

"Do you realise," asked Archimedes, "that the audience has
not understood a single word you are saying, for several
minutes?"

Merlyn stopped abruptly and looked at his pupil, who had
been following the conversation with his eyes more than
anything else, looking from one face to the other.

"I am sorry."

The king spoke absently, almost as if he were talking to
himself.

"Have I been stupid?" he asked slowly, "stupid not to
notice animals?"

"Stupid !" cried the magician, triumphant once again, for he

was in high delight over his discovery about capital. 'There at 19

last is a crumb of truth on a pair of human lips! Nunc The Book

dimittis!"* ofMerlyn

And he immediately leaped upon his hobby-horse, to gallop
off in all directions.

"The cheek of the human race," he exclaimed, "is some-
thing to knock you footless. Begin with the unthinkable
universe; narrow down to the minute sun inside it; pass to the
satellite of the sun which we are pleased to call the Earth;
glance at the myriad algae, or whatever the things are called,
of the sea, and at the uncountable microbes, going backwards
to a minus infinity, which populate ourselves. Drop an eye on
those quarter million other species which I have mentioned,
and upon the unmentionable expanses of time through which
they have lived. Then look at man, an upstart whose eyes,
speaking from the point of view of nature, are scarcely open
further than the puppy's. There he is, the — the gollywog — "
He was becoming so excited that he had no time to think of
suitable epithets. "There he is, dubbing himself Homo sa-
piens, forsooth, proclaiming himself the lord of creation, like
that ass Napoleon putting on his own crown! There he is,
condescending to the other animals: even condescending, God
bless my soul and body, to his ancestors! It is the Great
Victorian Hubris, the amazing, ineffable presumption of the
nineteenth century. Look at those historical novels by Scott, in
which the human beings themselves, because they lived a
couple of hundred years ago, are made to talk like imitation
warming pans! Man, proud man, stands there in the twentieth
century, complacently believing that the race has 'advanced'
in the course of a thousand miserable years, and busy blowing
his brothers to bits. When will they learn that it takes a million
years for a bird to modify a single one of its primary feathers?
There he stands, the crashing lubber, pretending that every-
thing is different because he has made an internal combustion
engine. There he stands, ever since Darwin, because he has
heard that there is such a thing as evolution. Quite regardless
of the fact that evolution happens in million-year cycles, he
thinks he has evolved since the Middle Ages. Perhaps the

* Literally, "now you send away" or "now you let depart," from the
Canticle of Simeon, Luke 2:29. This has come to be used in a general sense,
signifying "I've seen it all now; I can die happy."

30 combustion engine has evolved, but not he. Look at him
The Book sniggering at his own progenitors, let alone the other types of
of Merlyn mammal, in that insufferable Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court. The sheer, shattering sauce of it! And making
God in his own image! Believe me, the so-called primitive
races who worshipped animals as gods were not so daft as
people choose to pretend. At least they were humble. Why
should not God have come to the earth as an earth-worm?
There are a great many more worms than men, and they do a
great deal more good. And what is it all about, anyway?
Where is this marvellous superiority which makes the twen-
tieth century superior to the Middle Ages, and the Middle
Ages superior to primitive races and to the beasts of the field?
Is man so particularly good at controlling his Might and his
Ferocity and his Property? What does he do? He massacres the
members of his own species like a cannibal ! Do you know that
it has been calculated that, during the years between 1 100 and
1900, the English were at war for four hundred and nineteen
years and the French for three hundred and seventy-three? Do
you know that Lapouge has reckoned that nineteen million
men are killed in Europe in every century, so that the amount
of blood spilled would feed a fountain of blood running seven
hundred litres an hour since the beginning of history? And let
me tell you this, dear sir. War, in Nature herself outside of
man, is so much a rarity that it scarcely exists. In all those two
hundred and fifty thousand species, there are only a dozen or
so which go to war. If Nature ever troubled to look at man, the
little atrocity, she would be shocked out of her wits.

"And finally," concluded the magician, pulling up into a
canter, "leaving his morals out of account, is the odious
creature important even in a physical sense? Would neutral
Nature be compelled to notice him, more than the greenfly or
the coral insect, because of the changes which he has effected
on the surface of the earth?"

4

The king said politely, stunned by such a lot of declama-
tion: "Surely she would. Surely we are important from what
we have done?"

"How?" demanded his tutor fiercely.

"Well, I must say. Look at the buildings which we have
made on the earth, and towns, and arable fields . . ."

"The Great Barrier Reef," observed Archimedes, looking at
the ceiling, "is a building a thousand miles long, and it was
built entirely by insects."

"But that is only a reef . . ."

Merlyn dashed his hat on the floor, in his usual way.

"Can you never learn to think impersonally?" he de-
manded. "The coral insect would have as much right to reply
to you, that London is only a town."

"Even then, if all the towns in the world were placed end to
end. . ."

Archimedes said: " If you begin producing all the towns in
the world, I shall begin producing all the coral islands and
atolls. Then we will weigh them carefully against each other,
and we shall see what we shall see."

"Perhaps coral insects are more important than men, then,
but this is only one species . . ."

Goat said slyly: "The committee had a note somewhere
about the beaver, I think, in which he was said to have made
whole seas and continents. . . ."

"The birds," began Balin with exaggerated nonchalance,
"by carrying the seeds of trees in their droppings, are said to
have made forests so large . . ."

"Them rabbits," interrupted the urchin, "whatter nigh
deflopulated Austrylia . . ."

32 "The Foraminifera of whose bodies the 'white cliffs of
The Book Dover' are actually composed . . ."
of Merlyn "The locusts . . ."

Merlyn held up his hand.

"Give him the humble earth-worm," he said majestically.

So the animals recited in unison: "The naturalist Darwin
has pointed out that there are about 25,000 earth-worms
in every field acre, that they turn over in England alone
320,000,000 tons of soil a year, and that they are to be found
in almost every region of the world. In thirty years they will
alter the whole earth's surface to the depth of seven inches.
'The earth without worms,' says the immortal Gilbert White,
'would soon become cold, hard-bound, void of fermentation,
and consequently sterile.' "

5

"It seems to me," said the king happily, for these high
matters seemed to be taking him far from Mordred and
Lancelot, far from the place where, as they put it in King Lear,
humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the
deep, into the peaceful world where people thought and talked
and loved each other without the misery of doing, "it seems to
me, if what you say is true, that it would do my fellow humans
good to take them down a peg. If they could be taught to look
at themselves as another species of mammal for a change, they
might find the novelty a tonic. Tell me what conclusions the
committee has come to, for I am sure you have been discussing
it, about the human animal?"

"We have found ourselves in difficulty about the name."

"What name?"

"Homo sapiens," explained the grass-snake. "It became
obvious that sapiens was hopeless as an adjective, but the
trouble was to find another."

Archimedes said: "Do you remember that Merlyn once told
you why the chaffinch was called coelebs ? A good adjective for
a species has to be appropriate to some peculiarity of it, like
that."

"The first suggestion," said Merlyn, "was naturally ferox,
since man is the most ferocious of the animals."

" It is strange that you should mention ferox. I was thinking
that very word an hour ago. But you are exaggerating, of
course, when you say that he is more ferocious than a tiger."

"Am I?"

"I have always found that men were decent on the whole
Merlyn took off his spectacles, sighed deeply, polished

34 them, put them on again, and examined his disciple with
The Book curiosity: as if he might at any moment begin to grow some
of Merlyn long, soft, furry ears.

"Try to remember the last time you went for a walk," he
suggested mildly.
"A walk?"

"Yes, a walk in the English country lanes. Here comes
Homo sapiens, taking his pleasure in the cool of the evening.
Picture the scene. Here is a blackbird singing in the bush. Does
it fall silent and fly away with a curse? Not a bit of it. It sings
all the louder and perches on his shoulder. Here is a rabbit
nibbling the short grass. Does it rush in terror towards its
burrow? Not at all. It hops towards him. Here are field mouse,
grass-snake, fox, hedgehog, badger. Do they conceal them-
selves, or accept his presence?

"Why," cried the old fellow suddenly, flaming out with a
peculiar, ancient indignation, "there is not a humble animal in
England that does not flee from the shadow of man, as a burnt
soul from purgatory. Not a mammal, not a fish, not a bird.
Extend your walk so that it passes by a river bank, and the very
fish will dart away. It takes something, believe me, to be
dreaded in all the elements there are.

"And do not," he added quickly, laying his hand on Ar-
thur's knee, "do not imagine that they fly from the presence of
one another. If a fox walked down the lane, perhaps the rabbit
would scuttle: but the bird in the tree and the rest of them
would agree to his being. If a hawk swung by, perhaps the
blackbird would cower: but the fox and the others would
allow its arrival. Only man, only the earnest member of the
Society for the Invention of Cruelty to Animals, only he is
dreaded by every living thing."

"But these animals are not what you could really call wild.
A tiger, for instance . . ."

Merlyn stopped him with his hand again.

"Let the walk be in the Darkest Indies," he said, "if you like.
There is not a tiger, not a cobra, not an elephant in the Afric
jungle, but what he flies from man. A few tigers who have gone
mad from tooth-ache will attack him, and the cobra, if hard
pressed, will fight in self-defence. But if a sane man meets a
sane tiger on a jungle path, it is the tiger who will turn aside.
The only animals which do not run from man are those which
have never seen him, the seals, penguins, dodos or whales of

the Arctic seas, and these, in consequence, are immediately
reduced to the verge of extinction. Even the few creatures
which prey on man, the mosquito and the parasitic flea: even
these are terrified of their host, and keep a sharp lookout to be
beyond his fingers.

"Homo ferox " continued Merlyn, shaking his head, "that
rarity in nature, an animal which will kill for pleasure! There is
not a beast in this room who would not scorn to kill, except for
a meal. Man affects to feel indignation at the shrike, who
keeps a small larder of snails etc. speared on thorns: yet his
own well-stocked larder is surrounded by herds of charming
creatures like the mooning bullock, and the sheep with its
intelligent and sensitive face, who are kept solely in order to be
slaughtered on the verge of maturity and devoured by their
carnivorous herder, whose teeth are not even designed for
those of a carnivore. You should read Lamb's letter to
Southey, about baking moles alive, and sport with cockchaf-
ers, and cats in bladders, and crimping skates, and anglers,
those 'meek inflictors of pangs intolerable.' Homo ferox, the
Inventor of Cruelty to Animals, who will rear pheasants at
enormous expense for the pleasure of killing them: who will
go to the trouble of training other animals to kill: who will
burn living rats, as I have seen done in Eriu, in order that their
shrieks may intimidate the local rodents: who will forcibly
degenerate the livers of domestic geese, in order to make
himself a tasty food: who will saw the growing horns off
cattle, for convenience in transport: who will blind gold-
finches with a needle, to make them sing: who will boil
lobsters and shrimps alive, although he hears their piping
screams: who will turn on his own species in war, and kill
nineteen million every hundred years: who will publicly mur-
der his fellow men when he has adjudged them to be criminals:
and who has invented a way of torturing his own children with
a stick, or of exporting them to concentration camps called
Schools, where the torture can be applied by proxy . . . Yes,
you are right to ask whether man can properly be described as
ferox , for certainly the word in its natural meaning of wild life
among decent animals ought never to be applied to such a
creature."

"Goodness," said the king. "You seem to lay it on."

But the old magician would not be appeased.

"The reason," he said, "why we felt doubts about using

ferox, was because Archimedes suggested that stultus would
be more appropriate."

"Stultus} I thought we were intelligent?"

"In one of the miserable wars when I was a younger man,11
said the magician, taking a deep breath, "it was found neces-
sary to issue to the people of England a set of printed cards
which entitled them to food. These cards had to be filled in by
hand, before the food could be bought. Each individual had to
write a number in one part of the card, his name in another
part, and the name of the food-supplier in a third. He had to
perform these three intellectual feats — one number and two
names — or else he would get no food and starve to death. His
life depended on the operation. It was found in the upshot, so
far as I recollect, that two thirds of the population were unable
to perform the sequence without mistake. And these people,
we are told by the Catholic Church, are to be trusted with
immortal souls!"

"Are you sure of the facts?" asked the badger doubtfully.

The old man had the grace to blush.

"I did not note them down," he said, "but they are true in
substance, if not in detail. I clearly remember, for instance,
that a woman was found standing in a queue for bird-seed in
the same war, who, upon interrogation, was discovered to
possess no birds."

Arthur objected.

"It does not prove very much, even if they were unable to
write their three things properly. If they had been any of the
other animals, they would not have been able to write at all."

"The short answer to that," replied the philosopher, "is that
not a single human being can bore a hole in an acorn with his
nose."

"I do not understand."

"Well, the insect called Balaninus elephas is able to bore
acorns in the way I mention, but it cannot write. Man can
write, but cannot bore acorns. These are their own specialisa-
tions. The important difference is, however, that while
Balaninus bores his holes with the greatest efficiency, man, as
I have shown you, does not write with any efficiency at all.
That is why I say that, species for species, man is more
inefficient, more stultus, than his fellow beasts. Indeed, no
sensible observer would expect the contrary. Man has been so

The Book
of Merlyn

short a time upon our globe, that he can scarcely be expected
to have mastered much."

The king had found that he was beginning to feel depressed.

"Did you think of many other names?" he asked.

"There was a third suggestion, made by badger."

At this the happy badger shuffled his feet with satisfaction,
peeped sideways at the company round the corner of his
spectacles, and examined his long nails.

"Impoliticus " said Merlyn. "Homo impoliticus. You re-
member that Aristotle defined us as political animals. Badger
suggested examining this, and, after we had looked at his
politics, impoliticus seemed to be the only word to use."

"Go on, if you must."

"We found that the political ideas of Homo ferox were of
two kinds: either that problems could be solved by force, or
that they could be solved by argument. The ant-men of the
future, who believe in force, consider that you can determine
whether twice two is four by knocking people down who dis-
agree with you. The democrats, who are to believe in argu-
ment, consider that all men are entitled to an opinion, because
all are born equal — 'I am as good a man as you are,' the first
instinctive ejaculation of the man who is not."

"If neither force nor argument can be relied on," said the
king, "I do not see what can be done."

"Neither force, nor argument, nor opinion," said Merlyn
with the deepest sincerity, "are thinking. Argument is only a
display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order
to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are the blind alleys of
lazy or of stupid men, who are unable to think. If ever a true
politician really thinks a subject out dispassionately, even
Homo stultus will be compelled to accept his findings in the
end. Opinion can never stand beside truth. At present, how-
ever, Homo impoliticus is content either to argue with opin-
ions or to fight with his fists, instead of waiting for the truth in
his head. It will take a million years, before the mass of men
can be called political animals."

"What are we, then, at present?"

"We find that at present the human race is divided politi-
cally into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of
every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine
knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most
knavish among them, and become 'politicians': the wise man

stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly out- $9
numbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics or The Hook
philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of Merlyn
of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of
chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have com-
mand, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and
that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover,
the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is
democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of
parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if
communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except
the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders,
the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be
much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will
be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he
will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will
be liquidated. This is an optimistic but on the whole a scientific
statement of the habits of Homo impoliticus ."

The king said grimly: "Well, I am sorry. I suppose I had
better go away and drown myself. I am cheeky, insignificant,
ferocious, stupid and impolitic. It hardly seems to be worth
our going on."

But at this the animals seemed much upset. They rose in a
body, stood round him, fanned him, and offered him drink.

"No," they said. "Really, we were not trying to be rude.
Honestly, we were trying to help. There, do not take it to
heart. We are sure there must be plenty of humans who are
sapiens, and not a bit ferocious. We were telling you these
things as a sort of foundation, so as to make it easier to solve
your puzzle later. Come now, have a glass of madeira and
think no more about it. Truly, we think that man is the most
marvellous creature anywhere, quite the best there is."

And they turned upon Merlyn crossly, saying: "Now look
what you have done! This is the result of all your jibber and
jabber! The poor king is perfectly miserable, and all because
you throw your weight about, and exaggerate, and prattle like
a poop!"

Merlyn only replied: "Even the Greek definition anthropos,
He Who Looks Up, is inaccurate. Man seldom looks above his
own height after adolescence."

6

The new Arthur, the oiled bolt, was cosseted back to good
humour; but he immediately committed the blunder of open-
ing the subject once again.

"Surely," he said, "the affections of men, their love and
heroism and patience: surely these are respectable things?"

His tutor was not abashed by the scolding which he had
received. He accepted the gage with pleasure.

"Do you suppose that the other animals," he asked, "have
no love or heroism or patience — or, which is the more im-
portant, no co-operative affection? The love-lives of ravens,
the heroism of a pack of weasels, the patience of small birds
nursing a cuckoo, the co-operative love of bees- — all these
things are shewn much more perfectly on every side in nature,
than they have ever been shewn in man."

"Surely," asked the king, "man must have some respect-
able feature?"

At this his magician relented.

"I am inclined to think," he said, "that there may be one.
This, insignificant and childish as it must seem, I mention in
spite of all the lucubrations of that fellow Chalmers-Mitchell.
I refer to man's relation with his pets. In certain households
there are dogs which are of no use as hunters or as watchmen,
and cats which refuse to go mousing, but which are treated
with a kind of vicarious affection by their human fellows, in
spite of uselessness or even trouble. I cannot help thinking that
any traffic in love, which is platonic and not given in exchange
for other commodities, must be remarkable. I knew a donkey
once, who lived in the same field with a horse of the same sex.
They were deeply attached to one another, although nobody
could see that either of them was able to confer a material

benefit on the other. This relationship does, it seems to me, 4 1
exist to a respectable extent between Homo ferox and his The Book
hounds in certain cases. But it also exists among the ants, so of Merlyn
we must not put too much store upon it."
Goat observed slyly: "Parasites."

At this, Cavall got off his master's lap, and he and the new
king walked over to the goat on stiff legs. Cavall spoke in
human speech for the first and last time in his long life, in
unison with his master. His voice sounded like a teuton's
speaking through a trumpet.

"Did you say Parasites?" they asked. "Just say that once
again, will you, until we punch your head?"

The goat regarded them with amused affection, but refused
to have a row.

" If you punched my head," he said, "you would get a pair
of bloody knuckles. Besides, I take it back."

42 They sat down again, while the king congratulated himself
The Book on having something nice in his heart at any rate. Cavall
ofMerlyn evidently thought the same thing, for he licked his nose.

"What I cannot understand," said Arthur, "is why you
should take the trouble to think about man and his problems,
or to sit in committee on them, if the only respectable thing
about him is the way he treats a few pets. Why not let him
extinguish himself without fuss?"

This set the committee a problem: they remained still to
think it over, holding the mahogany fans between their faces
and the firelight, and watching the inverted flames in the
smoky brown of the madeira.

" It is because we love you, king, yourself," said Archimedes
eventually.

This was the most wonderful compliment which he had ever
received.

" It is because the creature is young," said the goat. "Young
and helpless creatures make you want to aid them, instinc-
tively."

"It is because helping is a good thing anyway," said
T. natrix.

"There is something important in humanity," said Balin.
"I cannot at present describe it."

Merlyn said: " It is because one likes to tinker with things, to
play with possibilities."

The hedgehog gave the best reason, which was simply:
"Whoy shouldernt 'un?"

Then they fell silent, musing on the flames.

"Perhaps I have painted a dark picture of the humans," said
Merlyn doubtfully, "not very dark, but it might have been a
shade lighter. It was because I wanted you to understand
about looking at the animals. I did not want you to think that
man was too grand to do that. In the course of a long
experience of the human race, I have learned that you can
never make them understand anything, unless you rub it in."

"You are wanting me to find something out, by learning
from the beasts."

"Yes. At last we are getting to the object of your visit. There
are two creatures which I forgot to shew you when you were
small, and, unless you see them now, we shall get no further."

"I will do what you like."

'They are the Ant and the Wild Goose. We want you to 43
meet them tonight. Of course it will be only one kind of ant, The Booh
out of many hundreds, but it is a kind which we want you to of Merlyn
see.

"Very well," said the king. "I am ready and willing."

"Have you the Sanguinea-spell at hand, my badger?"

The wretched animal immediately began to rummage in its
chair, searching inside the seams, lifting the corner of the
carpet, and turning up slips of paper covered with Merlyn's
handwriting in all directions.

The first slip was headed More Hubris Under Victoria. It
said: "Dr. John of Gaddesden, court physician to Edward II,
claimed to have cured the king's son of small-pox by wrapping
the patient up in red cloth, putting red curtains on the win-
dows, and seeing that all the hangings of the room were red.
This raised a merry Victorian guffaw at the expense of
mediaeval simplicity, until it was discovered by Dr. Niels
Finsen of Copenhagen in the twentieth century that red and
infra-red light really did affect the pustules of small-pox, even
helping in the cure of the disease."

The next slip said briefly: "Half a rose noble each way on
Golden Miller."

The third, which smelt strongly of Quelques Fleurs, and was
not in Merlyn's hand, said: "Queen Philippa's monument at
Charing Cross, seven-thirty, under the spire." There were a lot
of kisses on the bottom of it, and, on the back, some notes for a
poem to be addressed to the sender. These were in Merlyn's
writing, and said: Hooey? Coue? Chop-suey? The poem itself,
which began

Cooee
Nimue,

was erased.

Another slip was headed: "Other Races, Victorian Conde-
scension to, as well as to Own Ancestors, Animals, etc." It
said: "Colonel Wood-Martin, the Antiquarian, writing in
1895, observes with a giggle that 'one of the most-depraved of
all races, the now extinct Tasmanians, believed that stones,
especially certain kinds of quartz crystals, could be used as
mediums, or as means of communication . . . with living
persons at a distance !' Within a few years of this note, wireless
was imported into the western hemisphere. I prefer to conjee-

ture that these depraved people were a million years in front of
the colonel, along the same foul road, and that they had
become extinct by constantly listening to swing-music on their
crystal sets."

"Here we are," said badger. "I think this is it."

He handed over a strip on which was written: "Formica est
exemplo magni laboris* Dative of the Purpose."

It proved ineffectual.

At last everybody was commanded to stand up, search on
their chairs, look in their pockets, etc. The hedgehog, produc-
ing a tattered fragment covered with dry mud and crumbled
leaves, on which he had been sitting, asked: "Be 'un thic?"
After it had been wiped, flapped and dusted, it was found to
read: Dragguls uobt, Tna ebt ot og, and Merlyn said it was
the one they wanted.

So a couple of ants' nests were fetched from the meat-safe,

*"The ant is an example of great industry."

4 6 where they stood supported in saucers of water. They were
The Book placed on a table in the middle of the room, while the animals
of Merlyn sat down to watch, for you could see inside the nests by means
of glass plates coloured red. Arthur was made to sit on the
table beside the larger nest, the inverted pentagram was
drawn, and Merlyn solemnly pronounced the cantrip.

7

He felt that it was strange to be visiting the animals again at
his age, Perhaps, he thought to himself with shame, I am
dreaming in my second childhood, perhaps I am given over to
my dotage.

But it made him remember his first childhood vividly, the
happy times swimming in moats or flying with Archimedes,
and he realised that he had lost something since those days. It
was something which he thought of now as the faculty of
wonder. Then, his delights had been indiscriminate. His atten-
tion, or his sense of beauty, or whatever it was to be called, had
attached itself fortuitously to oddments. Perhaps, while Ar-
chimedes had been lecturing him about the flight of birds, he
himself would have been lost in admiration at the way in
which the fur went on the mouse in the owl's claws. Or the
great Mr. M. might have been making him a speech about
Dictatorship, while he, all the time, would have seen only the
bony teeth, poring on them in an ecstasy of experience.

This, his faculty of wonder, was gone from inside him,
however much Merlyn might have furbished up his brain. It
was exchanged — for the faculty of discrimination, he sup-
posed. Now he would have listened to Archimedes or to Mr.
M. He would never have seen the grey fur or the yellow teeth.
He did not feel proud of the change.

The old man yawned — for ants do yawn, and they stretch
themselves too, just like human beings, when they have had a
sleep — after which he gathered his wits for the business in
hand. He did not feel pleased to be an ant, as he would have
been transported to be one in the old days, but only thought to
himself: well, it is a piece of work which I must do. How to
begin?

48 The nests were made by spreading earth in a thin layer, less
The Book than half an inch deep, on small tables like footstools. Then,
of Merlyn on top of the layer of earth, a sheet of glass was placed, with a
piece of cloth over it to give darkness for the nurseries. By
removing the cloth, you could see into the underground
shelters as if you had a cross section. You could see the circular
chamber where the pupae were being tended, as if it were a
conservatory with a glass roof.

The actual nests were only at the end of the footstools, the
glass reaching less than half the way along. In front were plain
aprons of earth, open to the sky, and, at the further end of each
footstool, there were the watch-glasses in which the syrup was
left for food. There was no communication between the two
nests. The footstools were separate, side by side but not
touching, with their legs in the saucers.

Of course it did not seem like this at the time. The place
where he was seemed like a great field of earthen boulders,
with a flattened fortress at one end of it. The fortress was
entered by tunnels, and, over the entrance to each tunnel, there
was a notice which said:

EVERYTH ING NOT FORB IDDEN IS COMPULSORY 49

BY NEW ORDER The Book

of Merlyn

He read the notice with a feeling of dislike, though he did
not appreciate its meaning, and he thought to himself: I will
take a turn round, before going in. For some reason the notice
gave him a reluctance to go, making the rough tunnel look
sinister.

He waved his antennae carefully, considering the notice,
assuring himself of his new senses, planting his feet squarely in
the new world as if to brace himself in it. He cleaned his
antennae with his forefeet, frisking and smoothing them so
that he looked like a Victorian villain twirling his mous-
tachios. Then he became conscious of something which had
been waiting for consciousness all the time: that there was
a noise in his head which was articulate. It was either a noise
or a complicated smell, and the easiest way for us to explain it
is to say that it was like a wireless broadcast. It came to him
through his antennae, like music.

50 The music had a monotonous rhythm like a pulse, and the
The Book words which went with it were about June — moon — noon —
ofMerlyn spoon or Mammy — mammy— mammy — mammy or Ever —
never or Blue — true — you. He liked them at first, especially the
ones about Love — dove — above, until he found that they were
not variable. As soon as they had been finished once, they were
begun again. After an hour or two of them, he was to feel that
they would make him scream.

There was a voice in his head also, during the pauses of the
music, which seemed to be giving directions. "All two-day-
olds to be moved to the West Aisle," it would say, or "Number
210397/wD to report to the syrup squad, in replacement of
333 105 /wd who has fallen off the nest." It was a charming,
fruity voice, but seemed to be somehow impersonal: as if the
charm were an accomplishment that had been perfected like a
circus trick. It was dead.

The king, or perhaps we ought to say the ant, walked away
from the fortress as soon as he was prepared to walk about. He
began prospecting the desert of boulders uneasily, reluctant to
visit the place from which the orders were coming, yet bored
with the narrow view. He found small pathways among the
boulders, wandering tracks both aimless and purposeful,-
which led toward the syrup store and also in various other
directions which he could not understand. One of these latter
paths ended at a clod with a natural hollow underneath it. In
the hollow, again with the queer appearance of aimless pur-
pose, he found two dead ants. They were laid there tidily but
yet untidily, as if a very tidy person had taken them to the place
but forgotten the reason when he got there. They were curled
up, and they did not seem to be either glad or sorry to be dead.
They were there, like a couple of chairs.

While he was looking at the two corpses, a live ant came
down the pathway carrying a third.

It said: "Heil, Sanguinea!"

The king said Hail, politely.

In one respect, of which he knew nothing, he was fortunate.
Merlyn had remembered to give him the proper smell for this
particular nest; for, if he had smelled of any other nest, they
would have killed him at once. If Miss Edith Cavell had been
an ant, they would have had to write on her pedestal: smell is

NOT ENOUGH.

The new ant put down its cadaver vaguely and began

dragging the other two in various directions. It did not seem to 5 1

know where to put them; or rather, it knew that a certain The Book

arrangement had to be made, but it could not figure out how of Merlyn

to make it. It was like a man with a tea-cup in one hand and a

sandwich in the other, who wants to light a cigarette with a

match. But, where the man would invent the idea of putting

down the cup and sandwich, before picking up the cigarette

and match, this ant would have put down the sandwich and

picked up the match, then it would have been down with the

match and up with the cigarette, then down with the cigarette

and up with the sandwich, then down with the cup and up

with the cigarette, until finally it had put down the sandwich

and picked up the match. It was inclined to rely upon a series

of accidents in order to achieve its objects. It was patient, and

did not think. When it had pulled the three dead ants into

several positions they would doubtless fall into line under the

clod eventually, and that was its whole duty.

The king watched the arrangements with a surprise which
turned into vexation and then into dislike. He felt like asking
why it did not think things out in advance — that annoyed
feeling which one has on seeing a job being badly done. Later
he began to wish that he could put several other questions,
such as "Do you like being a sexton?" or "Are you a slave?" or
even "Are you happy?"

But the extraordinary thing was that he could not ask such
questions. In order to ask them, he would have had to put
them into the ant language through his antennae: and he now
discovered, with a helpless feeling, that there were no words
for half the things he wanted to say. There were no words for
happiness, for freedom, or for liking, nor were there any
words for their opposites. He felt like a dumb man trying to
shout "Fire!" The nearest he could get to Right and Wrong,
even, was Done or Not-Done.

The ant finished fiddling with its corpses and turned back
down the pathway, leaving them in the queer haphazard
order. It found that Arthur was in its way, so it stopped,
waving its wireless aerials at him as if it were a tank. With its
mute, menacing helmet of a face, and its hairiness, and the
things like spurs at each leg-joint, perhaps it was more like a
knight-in-armour on an armoured horse: or like a combina-
tion of the two, a hairy centaur-in-armour.

It said "Heil, Sanguinea" once again.

"Hail."

"What are you doing?"

The king answered truthfully but not wisely: "I am not
doing anything."

It was baffled by this for several seconds, as you would be if
Einstein were to tell you his latest ideas about space. Then it
extended the twelve joints of its aerial and spoke past him into
the blue.

It said: "105978/UDC reporting from square five. There is
an insane ant on square five. Over to you."

The word it used for insane was Not-Done. Later on, he was
to discover that there were only two qualifications in the
language — Done and Not-Done — which applied to all ques-
tions of value. If the syrup which Merlyn left for them was
sweet, it was a Done syrup: if he had left them some corrosive
sublimate, it would have been a Not-Done syrup, and that was
that. Even the moons, mammies, doves etc. in the broadcasts
were completely described when they were stated to be Done
ones.

The broadcast stopped for a moment, and the fruity voice
said: "G.H.Q. replying to 105978/UDC. What is its number?
Over."

The ant asked: "What is your number?"
"I do not know."

When this news had been exchanged with headquarters, a
message came back to ask whether he could give an account of
himself. The ant asked him whether he could, using the same
words as the broadcaster had used, and in the same flat voice.
It made him feel uncomfortable and angry, two emotions
which he disliked.

"Yes," he said sarcastically, for it was obvious that the
creature could not detect sarcasm, " I have fallen on my head
and cannot remember anything about it."

"105978/UDC reporting. Not-Done ant is suffering from
concussion through falling off the nest. Over."

"G.H.Q. replying to 105978/uDC. Not-Done ant is number
4243 6/wd, who fell off the nest this morning while working
with syrup squad. If it is competent to continue its duties — "
Competent-to-continue-its-duties was easier in the ant speech,
for it was simply Done, like everything else that was not
Not-Done: but enough of this language question. "If it is

54 competent to continue its duties, instruct 4243 6/wd to rejoin
The Book syrup squad, relieving 2 1 0021 /wd, who was sent to replace it.
of Merlyn Over."

"Do you understand?" asked the ant.
It seemed that he could not have made a better explanation
of himself than this about falling on his head, even if he had
meant to; for the ants did occasionally tumble off their
footstools, and Merlyn, if he happened to notice them, would
lift them back with the end of his pencil.
"Yes."

The sexton paid no further attention to him, but crawled off
down the path for another body or for anything else that
needed to be scavenged.

Arthur took himself away in the opposite direction, to join
the syrup squad, memorising his own number and the number
of the unit who had to be relieved.

8

The syrup squad were standing motionless round the
watch-glass, like a circle of worshippers. He joined the circle,
announcing that 210021/wD was to return to the nest. Then
he began filling himself with the sweet nectar like the others.
At first it was delicious to him, so that he ate greedily, but in a
few seconds it began to be unsatisfactory: he could not
understand why. He ate hard, copying the rest of the squad,
but it was like eating a banquet of nothing, or like a dinner-
party on the stage. In a way it was like a nightmare, under
which you might continue to consume huge masses of putty
without being able to stop.

There was a coming and going round the watch-glass.
Those ants who had filled their crops to the brim were walking
back to the fortress, to be replaced by a procession of empty
ants who were coming from the same direction. There were
never any new ants in the procession, but only this same dozen
going backwards and forwards, as they would do during all
their lives.

He realized suddenly that what he was eating was not going
into his stomach. Only a tiny proportion of it had penetrated
to his private self at the beginning, and now the main mass was
being stored in a kind of upper stomach or crop, from which it
could be removed. It dawned on him at the same time that
when he joined the westward stream he would have to dis-
gorge this store, into a larder or something of that sort.

The sugar squad conversed with each other while they
worked. He thought this was a good sign at first, and listened,
to pick up what he could.

"Oh hark!" one of them would say. ''Here comes that
Mammy — mammy — mammy — mammy song again. I do

56 think that Mammy — mammy — mammy — mammy song is
The Book loverly (Done). It is so high-class (Done)."
of Merlyn Another would remark: "I do think our beloved Leader is
wonderful, do not you? They say she was stung three hundred
times in the last war, and was awarded the Ant Cross for
Valour."

"How lucky we are to be born of the Sanguinea blood, don't
you think, and would it not be awful to be one of those filthy
Formicae fuscaeV

"Was it not awful about 310099/wD, who refused to
disgorge his syrup when he was asked. Of course he was
executed at once, by special order of our beloved Leader."

"Oh hark! Here comes that Mammy — mammy —
mammy — mammy song again. I do think . . ."

He walked off to the nest with a full gorge, leaving them to
do the round again. For they had no news, no scandal, nothing

to talk about. Novelties did not happen to them. Even the 57
remarks about the executions were in a formula, and only The Book
varied as to the registration number of the criminal. When ofMeflyn
they had finished with the Mammy — mammy — mammy —
mammy, they had to go on to the beloved Leader and then to
the filthy fuscae and to the latest execution. It went round in a
circle. Even the beloveds, wonderfuls, luckies and so on were
all Dones, and the awfuls were Not-Dones.

He found himself in the vast hall of the fortress, where
hundreds and hundreds of ants were licking or feeding in the
nurseries, carrying grubs to various aisles in order to get an
even temperature, and opening or closing the ventilation
passages. In the middle, the giant Leader sat complacently,
laying eggs, attending to the broadcasts, issuing directions or
commanding executions, surrounded by a sea of adulation.
(He learned later from Merlyn that the method of succession
among these Leaders was variable according to the different
species of ant. In Bothriomyrmex, for instance, the ambitious
founder of a New Order would invade a nest of Tapinoma and
jump upon the back of the older tyrant: there, dissimulated by
the smell of her host, she would slowly saw off her head, until
she herself had achieved the right of leadership.)

There was no larder for his store of syrup after all. He found
that he must walk about like a living dumb-waiter at the
convenience of the indoor workers. When they wanted a meal,
they stopped him, he opened his mouth, and they fed from it.
They did not treat him as a person, and, indeed, they were
impersonal themselves. He was a dumb-waiter from which
dumb-diners fed. Even his stomach was not his own.

But do not let us go on about these ants in too much detail:
they are not a pleasant topic. He lived among them patiently,
conforming to their habits, watching them in order to under-
stand as much as possible, but unable to ask them questions. It
was not only that their language was destitute of the words in
which he was interested, so that it was impossible to ask them
whether they believed in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of
Happiness, but also that it was dangerous to ask them ques-
tions at all. A question was a sign of insanity to them, because
their life was not questionable: it was dictated. He crawled
from nest to syrup and back again, exclaimed that the
Mammy song was loverly, opened his jaws to regurgitate, and
tried to understand as well as he could.

58 He had reached the screaming stage when the enormous
The Book hand came down from the clouds, carrying a straw. It placed
of Merlyn the straw between the two nests, which had been separate

before, so that now there was a bridge between them. Then it
went away.

9

Later in the day a black ant came wandering over the new
bridge: one of the wretched fuscae, a humble race who would
only fight in self-defence. It was met by one of the scavengers
and murdered.

The broadcasts changed after this news had been reported,
as soon as it had been established by spies that the fusca nest
had also its glass of syrup.

Mammy — mammy — mammy gave place to Antland, Ant-
land Over All, while the stream of orders were discontinued in
favour of lectures about war, patriotism and the economic
situation. The fruity voice announced that their beloved coun-
try was being encircled by a horde of filthy fuscae — at which
the wireless chorus sang

When fusca blood spurts from the knife,
Then everything is fine —

and it also explained that Ant the Father had ordained in his
inscrutable wisdom that black pismires should always be the
slaves of red ones. Their beloved country had no slaves at
present, a disgraceful state of affairs which would have to be
remedied if the master race were not to perish. A third
statement was that the national property of Sanguinea was
being threatened: their syrup was to be stolen, their domestic
animals, the beetles, were to be kidnapped, and their com-
munal stomach would be starved. The king listened to two of
these talks carefully, so that he was able to remember them
afterwards.

The first one was arranged as follows:

60 A. We are so numerous that we are starving.

^A/r^°/°^ Therefore we must not cut down our numbers but

of er yn encourage large families in order to become still more
numerous and starving.

C. When we are so numerous and starving as all that,
obviously we have a right to take other people's syrup.
Besides, we shall by then have a numerous and starving
army.

It was only after this logical train of thought had been put
into practise, and the output of the nurseries trebled — Merlyn
meanwhile giving them ample syrup daily for all their needs:
for it has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be
quite so poor that they cannot afford to have far more
expensive armaments than anybody else — that the second
type of lecture was commenced.

This is how the second kind went:

A. We are more numerous than they are, therefore we have
a right to their syrup.

B. They are more numerous than we arey therefore they are
wickedly trying to steal our syrup.

C. We are a mighty race and have a natural right to
subjugate their puny one.

D. They are a mighty race and are unnaturally trying to
subjugate our inoffensive one.

E. We must attack in self-defence.

F. They are attacking us by defending themselves.

G. If we do not attack them today, they will attack us
tomorrow.

H. In any case we are not attacking them at all: we are
offering them incalculable benefits.

After the second type of address, the religious services
began. These dated, he discovered, from a fabulous past so
ancient that he could scarcely find a date for it, in which the
emmets had not yet settled down to socialism. They came
from a time when ants were still like men, and terribly
impressive some of them were.

A psalm at one of these services, beginning, if we allow for
the difference of language, with the well-known words, "the
earth is the Sword's and all that therein is, the compass of the
bomber and they that bomb therefrom," ended with the
terrific conclusion: "Blow up your heads, O ye Gates, and be
ye blown up, ye Everlasting Doors, that the King of Tories
may come in. Who is the King of Tories? Even the Lord of
Ghosts, He is the King of Tories."

A strange feature was that the common ants were neither
exalted by the songs nor interested by the lectures. They
accepted them as matters of course. They were rituals to them,
like the Mammy songs or the conversations about their be-
loved Leader. They did not regard these things as good or bad,
exciting, rational or terrible: they did not regard them at all,
but accepted them as Done.

Well, the time came for the slave war. All the preparations
were in order, all the soldiers were drilled to the last ounce, all
the walls of the nest carried patriotic slogans such as Stings or
Syrup? or J Vow to Thee, my Smell , and the king was past
hoping. He thought he had never been among such horrible
creatures, unless it were at the time when he had lived among
men, and he was beginning to sicken with disgust. The repeti-
tive voices in his head, which he could not shut off: the absence
of all privacy, under which others ate from his stomach while
others again sang in his brain: the dreary blank which replaced
feeling: the dearth of all but two values: the monotony more
even than the callous wickedness: these had killed the joy of
life which had been Merlyn's gift at the beginning of the
evening. He was as miserable again as he had been when the
magician found him weeping at his papers, and now, when the
Red Army marched to war at last, he suddenly faced about in
the middle of the straw like an insane creature, ready to
oppose their passage with his life.

62

The Book
of Merlyn

IO

"Dear God," said Merlyn, who was patting the beads of
sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief, "you certainly
have a flair for getting into trouble. That was a difficult
minute."

The animals looked at him anxiously, to see if any bones
were broken.
"Are you safe?"
"Perfectly."

They discovered that he was furiously angry. His hands
were trembling with rage.

"The brutes!" he exclaimed. "The brutes!"
"They are not attractive."

" I would not have minded," he burst out, "if they had been
wicked — if they had wanted to be wicked. I would not have
minded if they had chosen to be wicked for some reason, or for
fun. But they did not know, they had not chosen. They —
they — they did not exist!"

"Sit down," said the badger, "and have some rest."

"The horrible creatures! It was like talking to minerals
which could move, like talking to statues or to machines. If
you said something which was suitable to the mechanism,
then it worked: if not, it did not work, it stood still, it was
blank, it had no expression. Oh, Merlyn, how hideous! They
were the walking dead. When did they die? Did they ever have
any feelings? They have none now. They were like that door in
the fairy story, which opened when you said Sesame. I believe
that they only knew about a dozen words, or collections of
words. A man with those in his mind could have made them do
all the things they could do, and then . . . Then you would

64 have had to start again ! Again and again and again ! It was like
The Book being in Hell. Except that none of them knew they were there.
of Merlyn None of them knew anything. Is there anything more terrible
than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing,
without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change,
without an end?"

"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 com-
munists . . ."

"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 beasts."
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 65
'em, us says, for to lay darn me life with the Shire. And us The Book
woulder done, that us 'ood, bim-bam, only for they wouldernt of Merlyn
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 com-
munists. 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,

66 makes communication impossible for animals of their size and
The Book number of fingers. Still, if you like, I will agree that they are
of Merlyn 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 S.S.R."

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 as-
sumption, 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 organised murder. It is only in so far as com-
munism 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 Egalite Fallacy, which is abhorrent to nature.

Human beings are no more equal in their merits and abilities, 67

than they are equal in face and stature. You might just as well The Book

insist that all the people in the world should wear the same size of Merlyn

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 an-
nounce 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."

II

T. NATRIX SPOKE UP SUDDENLY.

44 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 crea-
tures 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 69
subject sensibly, until he has the facts." The Book

The old man said: " I think I must rest. I am not so young as of Merlyn
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 handker-
chief 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, al-
though 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 ques-
tions 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 7 1
continuum of human consciousness. He was an Englishman, The Booh
and England was at war. However much he hated it, or willed of A 1 erlyn
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.

72 Why must he go back to Homo ferox, probably to be killed
The Book by those he was trying to help, certainly, if not, to die in
of Merlyn 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 tranquility 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."

12

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 some-
where, 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 straight-edge. 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

74 away to the east, perhaps a mile distant, there was an unbro
The Book ken wall of sound. It surged a little, seeming to expand and
of Merlyn 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 dis-
turbed 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 vigourously. Their
profound silence became broken by a conversational gabble.
There were about four hundred of them in the grey vicinity:

j6 very beautiful creatures, the wild White-Fronted Geese,
The Book whom, once a man has seen them, he will never forget.
of Merlyn Long before the 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 com-
mand 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 squad-
rons 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.

When the goose next to him spread her wings and leaped, he
did so automatically. Some eight of those nearby had been
jerking their bills, which he had imitated as if the act were
catching, and now, with these same eight, he found himself on
pinion in the horizontal air. The moment he had left the earth,
the wind had vanished: its restlessness and brutality had
dropped away as if cut off by a knife: he was in it, and at peace.

The eight geese spread out in line astern, evenly spaced, with
him behind. They made for the east, where the poor lights had
been, and now, before them, the bold sun began to rise. A
crack of orange broke the black cloud-bank far beyond the
land; the glory spread, the salt marsh growing visible below.
He saw it like a featureless moor or bogland, which had
become maritime by accident; its heather, still looking like

heather, having mated with the seaweed until it was a salt wet 77
heather, with slippery fronds. The burns which should have The Booh
run through the moorland were of sea-water on blueish mud. of Merlyn
There were long nets here and there, erected on poles, into
which unwary geese might fly. These, he now guessed, had
been the occasions of those warning-notes. Two or three
widgeon hung in one of them, and, far away to the eastward, a
fly-like man was plodding over the slob in tiny persistence, to
collect his bag.

The sun, as it rose, tinged the quicksilver of the creeks and
the gleaming slime itself with flame. The curlew, who had been
piping their mournful plaints since long before the light, flew
now from weed-bank to weed-bank: the widgeon, who had
slept on water, came whistling their double notes, like whistles
from a Christmas cracker: the mallard toiled from land,
against the wind: the redshanks scuttled and prodded like
mice: a cloud of tiny dunlin, more compact than starlings,
turned in the air with the noise of a train: the black-guard of
crows rose from the pine trees on the dunes with merry cheers:
shore birds of every sort populated the tide line, filling it with
business and beauty.

The dawn, the sea-dawn and the mastery of ordered flight,
were of such intense beauty that he was almost moved to sing.
All the sorrow of his thoughts about man, the miserable
wishes for peace which had beset him in the Combination
Room so lately, these fell from him for the moment in the glory
of his wings. He would have liked to cry a chorus to life, and,
since a thousand geese were on the wing about him, he had not
long to wait. The lines of these creatures, wavering like smoke
upon the sky as they breasted the sunrise, were all at once in
music and in laughter. Each squadron of them was in different
voice, some larking, some triumphant, some in sentiment or
glee. The vault of daybreak filled itself with heralds, and this is
what they sang:

Oh, turning world, pouring beneath our pinions,
Hoist the hoar sun to welcome morning's minions.

See, on each breast the scarlet and vermillion,
Hear, from each throat the clarion and carillion.

yS Mark, the wild wandering lines in black battalions,

The Book Heaven s horns and hunters, dawn-bright hounds and

of Merlyn stallions.

Free, free: far, far: and fair on wavering wings
Comes Anser albifrons, and sounds, and sings.

13

He found himself in a coarse field, in daylight. His compan-
ions of the flight were grazing round him, plucking the grass
with sideways wrenches of their soft small bills, bending their
necks into abrupt loops, unlike the graceful curves of the
swan. Always, as they fed, one of their number was on guard,
its head erect and snakelike. They had mated during the winter
months, or else in previous winters, so that they tended to feed
in pairs within the family and squadron. The young female, his
neighbour of the mud-flats, was unmated. She kept an in-
telligent eye upon him.

The old man who had remembered his boyhood, watching
her secretly, could not help thinking she was beautiful. He
even felt a tenderness towards her downy breast, as yet quite
innocent of bars; towards her plump compacted frame and the
neat furrows of her neck. These furrows, he saw out of the
corner of his eye, were caused by a difference in the feathering.
The feathers were concave, which separated them from one
another, making a texture of ridges which he considered
graceful.

Presently the young woman gave him a shove with her bill.
She had been acting sentry.

"Go on," she said vulgarly. "You next."

She lowered her head without waiting for an answer, and
began to graze in the same movement. Her feeding took her
from his side.

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 <S i
innocent, after all his years, to know that she would certainly The Book
be doing so. of Merlyn

"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 some-
times, about their wives and that. Of course there is no

82 bloodshed, only scuffling to find the better man. Is that what
The Book you mean?"

of Merlyn "No. I meant righting 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 doubt-
fully, 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, 83
but her heart was not a malicious one. Like all the geese, she The Book
had a mildness which found forgiving easy. Soon they were of Merlyn
friends.

"What would you like to know?"

He discovered, in the next few days, for they spent much
time together, that Lyo-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.

Lyo-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

84 besides their meals: a married couple would repair to the same
The Book nest, year by year, although they might have travelled many
of Merlyn 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.
Naturally 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 responsibil-
ity 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 ambi-
tions 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 ambi-
tions 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

86 has always seemed a pity to me that one great boon has been
The Book left out. The people in the song are supposed to be arguing
of Merlyn 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 de-
lightful change and novelty all the time, that I cannot under-
stand how the poet can have forgotten it. Why, my grand-
mother 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.

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 89

pastures from which he had come. He was a nice little man in The Booh

his way; for he stood still solemnly, and took off his hat. He of Merlyn
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 Flonk.
Hank-hanky Hink-hink, Honk-honk.

Then we bend our 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.

90 While, when they were passing over a rocky island popu-
The Book lated by barnacle geese, who all looked like spinsters in black
of Merlyn 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 motion-
less 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.

One of the peaks of the migration came when they passed a 9 1
rock-cliff of the ocean. There were other peaks, when, for The Booh
instance, their line of flight was crossed by an Indian file of of Merlyn
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 ref-
eree, 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?";
"Crikey, 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.

92 Then there were the fiords and islands of Norway. It was
The Book about one of these islands, by the way, that the great W. H.
of Merlyn 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 circum-
stance, 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, side-
slipping, 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
vigourously. 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.

i5

The Siberian bogland, which they reached a few days later,
was a bowl of sunlight. Its mountains still retained a lace-
work 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, al-
though 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

94 can expand his soul like a flower and grow towards his idea of
The Book good. That is what the old man felt with a sudden longing,
of Merlyn 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, pru-
dent, faithful, conversable. She was a great deal cleaner than
most women, because she spent one half of the day in preen-
ing 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 and
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, 95
with its regular knots along the stalk, like button-holes. There, The Booh
at his feet, there were forests of gnarled trees, with glades and of Merlyn
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 toad-
stools, except that their umbrellas turned upwards, like egg-
cups. 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 are 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.

And there was the vastness of it, on top of its microscopic
size: there was the bog smell and the clean air, which tastes so
much wider on bogs: there was the sun, positively pelting it
with vigour, who only slept for a couple of hours at night: and,
Heaven defend us, there were the mosquitos!

He had often thought that it must be boring for a bird to sit
on eggs. He now knew that Lyo-lyok would have a universe to
watch before her, a whole world bustling beneath her nose.

He proposed himself one afternoon, not ardently, for he
had known the world too long, but gently and hopefully,
when they were on the dazzling lake. Its waters, in their frame
of brown, reflected the sky to a tone of even deeper blue, as
blue as a blackbird's eggs without the spots. He swam towards

96 her with his tail high in the water, his head and neck stretched
The Book flat, like a swimming snake. He told her of his sorrows, of his
of Merlyn unworthy nature, and of his admiration. He told her how, by
joining her, he hoped to escape from Merlyn and the world.
Lyo-lyok, as usual, did not seem to be surprised. She too
lowered her neck and swam towards him. He was very happy
when he saw the douceness of her eyes.

But a dark hand came to fetch him, as you may have
guessed. He found himself swept backwards, not on pinion,
not migrating, but dragged down into the filthy funnel of
magic. He snatched one floating feather as he vanished, and
Lyo-lyok was before his face no more.

i6

"Now," cried the magician, almost before the traveller had
materialised. "Now we can begin to forge ahead with the main
idea. We are beginning to see the light at last."

"Give him a chance," said the goat. "He is looking un-
happy."

Merlyn swept the suggestion away.

"Unhappy? Nonsense. He is perfectly well. I was saying we
could begin to forge ahead . . ."

"Communism," began the badger, who was short-sighted
and wrapped up in the subject.

"No, no. We are finished with the bolsheviks. He is in
possession of the data, and we can begin to deal with Might.
But he must be allowed to think for himself. King, will you
choose any animals you please, and I will explain to you why
they do or do not go to war?

"There is no deception," he added, leaning forward as if to
press the animals upon his hopeless victim, like sweetmeats,
with a fascinating smile. "You can have any animals you
fancy. Adders, amoebae, antelopes, apes, asses, axolotls . . ."

"Suppose he has ants and geese," suggested the badger
nervously.

"No, no. Not geese. Geese are too easy. We must be fair,
and let him choose what he pleases. Suppose we say rooks?"

"Very well," said the badger. "Rooks."

Merlyn leaned back in his chair, put his finger-tips together,
and cleared his throat.

"The first thing," he said, "which we must do before consid-
ering examples, is to define the subject. What is War? War, I
take it, may be defined as an aggressive use of might between
collections of the same species. It must be between collections,

98 for otherwise it is mere assault and battery. An attack of one
The Book mad wolf upon a pack of wolves would not be war. And then
of Merlyn again, it must be between members of the same species. Birds
preying on locusts, cats preying on mice, or even tunny
preying on herrings — that is, fish of one species preying upon
fish of another — none of these are true examples of war. Thus
we see that there are two essentials: that the combatants
should be of the one family, and that they should be of a
gregarious family. We can therefore begin by dismissing all
animals which are not gregarious, before we search for exam-
ples of warfare in nature. Having done that, we find ourselves
left with large numbers of animals such as starlings, minnows,
rabbits, bees, and thousands of others. Upon beginning our
search for warfare among these, however, we find a dearth of
examples. How many animals can you think of, which take
concerted aggressive action against groups of their own
species?"

Merlyn waited two seconds for the old man to answer, and
continued with his lecture.

"Exactly. You were about to mention a few insects, man,
various microbes or blood corpuscles — if these can be said to
be of the same species — and then you would have been at a
loss. The gross immorality of warfare is, as I mentioned
before, an oddity in nature. We sit down, therefore, relieved
by this fortunate coincidence of a bundle of data which might
have proved too bulky, and we examine the special pecu-
liarities of those species which do engage in hostilities. What
do we find? Do we find, as badger's famous communists
would postulate, that it is the species which owns individual
property that fights? On the contrary, we find that the war-
faring animals are the very ones which tend to limit or to
banish individual possessions. It is the ants and bees, with
their communal stomachs and territories, and the men, with
their national property, who slit each other's throats; while it
is the birds, with their private wives, nests and hunting
grounds, the rabbits with their own burrows and stomachs,
the minnows with their individual homesteads, and the lyre-
birds with their personal treasure houses and ornamental
pleasure-grounds, who remain at peace. You must not despise
mere nests and hunting grounds as forms of property: they are
as much a form of property to the animals as a home and
business is to man. And the important thing is that they are

private property. The owners of private property in nature are 99
pacific, while those who have invented public property go to The Hook
war. This, you will observe, is exactly the opposite of the ofMerlyn
totalist doctrine.

"Of course the owners of private property in nature are
sometimes forced to defend their holdings against piracy by
other individuals. This rarely results in bloodshed, and men
themselves need not fear it, because our king has already
persuaded them to adopt the principle of a police force.

"But you want to object that perhaps the link which binds
the warfaring animals together is not the link of nationalism:
perhaps they go to war for other reasons — because they are all
manufacturers, or all owners of domestic animals, or all
agriculturalists like some of the ants, or because they all have
stores of food. I need not trouble you with a discussion of
possibilities, for you must examine them for yourself. Spiders
are the greatest of manufacturers, yet do no battle: bees have
no domestic animals or agriculture, yet go to war: many ants
who are belligerent have no stores of food. By some such
mental process as this, as in finding out the Highest Common
Factor in mathematics, you will end with the explanation
which I have offered: an explanation which is, indeed, self-
evident when you come to look at it. War is due to communal
property, the very thing which is advocated by nearly all the
demagogues who peddle what they call a New Order.

"I have out-run my examples. We must return to the
concrete instances, to examine the case. Let us look at a
rookery.

"Here is a gregarious animal like the ant, which lives
together with its comrades in airy communities. The rookery
is conscious of its nationalism to the extent that it will molest
other rooks, from distant congeries, if they attempt to build in
its own trees. The rook is not only gregarious but also faintly
nationalistic. But the important thing is that it does not make
any claim to national property in its feeding grounds. Any
adjacent field that is rich in seed or worms will be frequented
not only by the rooks of this community but also by those of
all nearby communities, and, indeed, by the jackdaws and
pigeons of the neighbourhood, without the outbreak of hos-
tilities. The rooks, in fact, do not claim national property
except to the minor extent of their nesting site, and the result is
that they are free from the scourge of war. They agree to the

ioo obvious natural truth, that access to raw materials must be
The Book free to private enterprise.

of Merlyn "Then turn to the geese: one of the oldest races, one of the
most cultured, one of the best supplied with language. Admi-
rable musicians and poets, masters of the air for millions of
years without ever having dropped a bomb, monogamous,
disciplined, intelligent, gregarious, moral, responsible, we find
them adamant in their belief that the natural resources of the
world cannot be claimed by any particular sect or family of
their tribe. If there is a good bed of Zostera marina or a good
field of stubble, there may be two hundred geese on it today,
ten thousand tomorrow. In one skein of geese which is moving
from feeding ground to resting place, we may find white-
fronts mingled with pink-feet or grey-lags or even with the
bernicles. The world is free to all. Yet do not suppose that they
are communists. Each individual goose is prepared to assault
his neighbour for the possession of a rotten potato, while their
wives and nests are strictly private. They have no communal
home or stomach, like the ants. And these beautiful creatures,
who migrate freely over the whole surface of the globe without
making claim to any part of it, have never fought a war.

64 It is nationalism, the claims of small communities to parts
of the indifferent earth as communal property, which is the
curse of man. The petty and drivelling advocates of Irish or
Polish nationalism: these are the enemies of man. Yes, and
the English, who will fight a major war ostensibly for 'the
rights of small nations,' while erecting a monument to a
woman who was martyred for the remark that patriotism was
not good enough, these people can only be regarded as a
collection of benevolent imbeciles conducted by bemused
crooks. Nor is it fair to pick on the English or the Irish or the
Poles. All of us are in it. It is the general idiocy of Homo
impoliticus . Aye, and when I speak rudely of the English in
this particular, I would like to add at once that I have lived
among them during several centuries. Even if they are a
collection of imbecile crooks, they are at least bemused and
benevolent about it, which I cannot help thinking is preferable
to the tyrannous and cynical stupidity of the Huns who fight
against them. Make no mistake about that."

"And what," asked the badger politely, "is the practical
solution?"

"The simplest and easiest in the world. You must abolish i o i
such things as tariff barriers, passports and immigration laws, The Hook
converting mankind into a federation of individuals. In fact, of Merlyn
you must abolish nations, and not only nations but states also;
indeed, you must tolerate no unit larger than the family.
Perhaps it will be necessary to limit private incomes on a
generous scale, for fear that very rich people might become a
kind of nation in themselves. That the individuals should be
turned into communists or anything else is quite unnecessary,
however, and it is against the laws of nature. In the course of a
thousand years we should hope to have a common language if
we were lucky, but the main thing is that we must make it
possible for a man living at Stonehenge to pack up his traps
overnight and to seek his fortune without hindrance in Tim-
buktu . . .

"Man might become migratory," he added as an after-
thought, with some surprise.

"But this would spell disaster!" exclaimed the badger.
"Japanese labour . . . Trade would be undercut!"

"Fiddlesticks. All men have the same physical structure and
need of nourishment. If a coolie can ruin you by living on a
bowl of rice in Japan, you had better go to Japan and buy a
bowl of rice. Then you can ruin the coolie, who will by then, I
suppose, be sporting it in London in your Rolls-Royce."

"But it would be the deathblow of civilisation! It would
lower the standard of living . . ."

"Fudge. It would raise the coolie's standard of living. If he
is as good a man as you are in open competition, or a better
one, good luck to him. He is the man we want. As for
civilisation, look at it."

"It would mean an economic revolution!"

"Would you rather have a series of Armageddons? Nothing
of value was ever yet got in this world, my badger, without
being paid for."

"Certainly," agreed the badger suddenly, "it seems the
thing to do."

"So there you have it. Leave man to his petty tragedy, if he
prefers to embrace it, and look about you at two hundred and
fifty thousand other animals. They, at any rate, with a few
trifling exceptions, have political sense. It is a straight choice
between the ant and the goose, and all our king will need to do,

102 when he returns, will be to make their situation obvious."
The Book The badger, who was a faithful opponent to all kinds of
of Merlyn exaggeration, objected strongly.

"Surely," he said, "this is a piece of muddled thinking, to
say that man may choose between the ants and the geese? In
the first place man can be neither, and secondly, as we know,
the ants are not unhappy as themselves."

Merlyn covered his argument at once.

"I should not have said so. It was a manner of speaking.
Actually there are never more than two choices open to a
species: either to evolve along its own lines of evolution, or
else to be liquidated. The ants had to choose between being
ants or being extinct, and the geese had to choose between
extinction and being geese. It is not that the ants are wrong
while the geese are right. Antism is right for ants and goosy-
ness is right for geese. In the same way, man will have to
choose between being liquidated and being manly. And a great
part of being manly lies in the intelligent solution of these very
problems of force, which we have been examining through the
eyes of other creatures. That is what the king must try to make
them see."

Archimedes coughed and said, "Excuse me, Master, but is
your backsight clear enough today, to tell us if he will suc-
ceed?"

Merlyn scratched his head and wiped his spectacles.

"He will succeed in the end," he said eventually. "That I am
certain of. Otherwise the race must perish like the American
wood-pigeons, who, I may add, were considerably more
numerous than the human family, yet became extinct in the
course of a dozen years at the end of the nineteenth century.
But whether it is to be this time or another is still obscure to
me. The difficulty of living backwards and thinking forwards
is that you become confused about the present. It is also the
reason why one prefers to escape into the abstract."

The old gentleman folded his hands upon his stomach,
toasted his feet at the fire, and, reflecting upon his own
predicament in Time, began to recite from one of his favourite
authors.

"I saw," he quoted, "the histories of mortal men of many
different races being enacted before my eyes. . . . kings and
queens and emperors and republicans and patricians and
plebeians swept in reverse order across my view. . . . Time

rushed backward in tremendous panoramas. Great men died 1 03
before they won their fame. Kings were deposed before they The Book
were crowned. Nero and the Borgias and Cromwell and of Merlyn

Asquith and the Jesuits enjoyed eternal infamy and then began
to earn it. My motherland . . . melted into barbaric Britain;
Byzantion melted into Rome; Venice into Henetian Altino;
Hellas into innumerable migrations. Blows fell; and then were
struck."

In the silence which succeeded this impressive picture, the
goat returned to an earlier topic.

"He is looking unhappy," said he, "whatever you may say."

So they looked at the king for the first time since his return,
and all fell silent.

17

He was watching them with the feather in his hand. He held
it out unconsciously, his fragment of beauty. He kept them off
with it, as if it were a weapon to hold them back.

"I am not going," he said. "You must find another ox to
draw for you. Why have you brought me away? Why should I
die for man when you speak of him contemptuously your-
selves? For it would be death. It is all too true that people are
ferocious and stupid. They have given me every sorrow but
death. Do you suppose that they will listen to wisdom, that the
dullard will understand and throw down his arms? No, he will
kill me for it: kill me as the ants would have killed an albino.

"And Merlyn," he cried, " I am afraid to die, because I have
never had a chance to live! I never had a life of my own, nor
time for beauty, and I had just begun to find it. You shew me
beauty, and snatch it from me. You move me like a piece at
chess. Have you the right to take my soul and twist it into
shapes, to rob a mind of its mind?

"Oh, animals, I have failed you, I know. I have betrayed
your trust. But I cannot face the collar again, because you have
driven me into it too long. Why should I leave Lyo-lyok? I was
never clever, but I was patient, and even patience goes. No-
body can bear it all his life."

They did not dare to answer, could think of nothing to say.

His feeling of guilt and of love frustrated had made him
wretched, so that now he had to rage in self-defence.

"Yes, you are clever. You know the long words and how to
juggle with them. If the sentence is a pretty one, you laugh and
make it. But these are human souls you are cackling about,
and it is my soul, the only one I have, which you have put in
the index. And Lyo-lyok had a soul. Who made you into gods

to meddle with destiny, or set you over hearts to bid them 105
come and go? I will do this filthy work no longer; I will The Hook

trouble with your filthy plans no further; I will go away into of Merlyn
some quiet place with the goose-people, where I can die in
peace."

His voice broke down into that of an old and miserable
beggar, as he threw himself back in the chair, covering his eyes
with his hands.

The urchin was found to be standing in the middle of the
floor. With his little, purplish fingers clenched into tight fists,
with a truculent nose questing for opposition, breathing heav-
ily, bristling with dead twigs, small, indignant, vulgar and
flea-bitten, the hedgehog confronted the committee and faced
them down.

"Leave off, wullee?" he demanded. "Stand back, carnt 'ee?
Give ter lad fair play."

And he placed his body sturdily between them and his hero,
prepared to knock the first man down who interfered.

"Ar," he said sarcastically, "A fine parcel of bougers, us do
say. A fine picking o' Bumtious Pilates, for to depose of Man.
Gibble-gabble, gibble-gabble. But ding the mun as stirs is
finger or us busts un's bloudie neck."

Merlyn protested miserably: "Nobody would have wished
him to do anything that he did not want . . ."

The hedgehog walked up to him, put his twitching nose to
within an inch of the magician's spectacles, so that he drew
back in alarm, and blew in his face.

"Ar," he said. "Nobody wished nuthink never. Excepting
for to remember as 5ee mighter wished suthink for 'isself."

Then he returned to the broken-hearted king, halting at a
distance with tact and dignity, because of his fleas.

"Nay, Measter," he said. "Tha hast been within too long.
Let thee come art along of a nugly hurchin, that tha mayest
sniff God's air to thy nostrils, an lay thy head to the boozum o'
the earth.

"Teak no thought fer them bougers," he continued. "Lave
'un fer to argyfy theirselves inter the hy-stericks, that 'ull plaze
'un. Let thee smell a peck of air wi' ter humble mun, an have
thy pleasure of the sky."

Arthur held out his hand for the urchin's, who gave it reluc-
tantly, after wiping it on the prickles of his back.

"He'm verminous," he explained regretfully, "but he'm 107
honest." The Book

They went together to the door, where the hedgehog, of Mcrlyn

turning round, surveyed the field.

"Orryvoyer," he observed good-humouredly, regarding the
committee with ineffable contempt. "Mind yer doant destroy
ter universt afore as we comes back. No creating of another,
mind."

And he bowed sarcastically to the stricken Merlyn.
"God ter Father."

To the wretched Archimedes, who elongated himself,
closed his eyes, and looked the other way.
"God ter Son."
To the imploring badger.
"And God ter Holy Post."

i8

There is nothing so wonderful as to be out on a spring night
in the country; but really in the latest part of night, and, best of
all, if you can be alone. Then, when you can hear the wild
world scamper, and the cows chewing just before you tumble
over them, and the leaves living secretly, and the nibblings and
grass pluckings and the blood's tide in your own veins: when
you can see the loom of trees and hills in deeper darkness and
the stars twirling in their oiled grooves for yourself: when
there is one light in one cottage far away, marking a sickness
or an early riser upon a mysterious errand: when the horse
hoofs with squeaking cart behind plod to an unknown mar-
ket, dragging their bundled man, in sacks, asleep: when the
dogs' chains rattle at the farms, and the vixen yelps once, and
the owls have fallen silent: then is a grand time to be alive and
vastly conscious, when all else human is unconscious, home-
bound, bed-sprawled, at the mercy of the midnight mind.

The wind had dropped to rest. The powdery stars expanded
and contracted in the serene, making a sight which would have
jingled, if it had been a sound. The great tor which they were
climbing rose against the sky, a mirk of majesty, like a horizon
which aspired.

The little hedgehog, toiling from tussock to tussock, fell into
the marshy puddles with grunts, panted as he struggled with
the miniature cliffs. The weary king gave him a hand at the
worst places, hoisting him into a better foothold or giving him
a shove behind, noticing how pathetic and defenceless his bare
legs looked from the back.

"Thank 'ee," he said. "Much obliged, us 'm sure."

When they had reached the top, he sat down puffing, and
the old man sat beside him to admire the view.

It was England that came out slowly, as the late moon rose: 1 09
his royal realm of Gramarye. Stretched at his feet, she spread The Bo< /
herself away into the remotest north, leaning towards the of Merlyn
imagined Hebrides. She was his homely land. The moon made
her trees more important for their shadows than for them-
selves, picked out the silent rivers in quicksilver, smoothed the
toy pasture fields, laid a soft haze on everything. But he felt
that he would have known the country, even without the light.
He knew that there must be the Severn, there the Downs and
there the Peak: all invisible to him, but inherent in his home. In
this field a white horse must be grazing, in that some washing
must be hanging on a hedge. It had a necessity to be itself.

He suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being,
apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being
was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him
with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but
because it was: because of the shadows of the corn stooks on a
golden evening; because the sheep's tails would rattle when
they ran, and the lambs, sucking, would revolve their tails in
little eddies; because the clouds in daylight would surge it into
light and shade; because the squadrons of green and golden
plover, worming in pasture fields, would advance in short,
unanimous charges, head to wind; because the spinsterish
herons, who keep their hair up with fish bones according to
David Garnett, would fall down in a faint if a boy could stalk
them and shout before he was seen; because the smoke from
homesteads was a blue beard straying into heaven; because
the stars were brighter in puddles than in the sky; because
there were puddles, and leaky gutters, and dung hills with
poppies on them; because the salmon in the rivers suddenly
leaped and fell; because the chestnut buds, in the balmy wind
of spring, would jump out of their twigs like jacks-in-boxes, or
like little spectres holding up green hands to scare him;
because the jackdaws, building, would hang in the air with
branches in their mouths, more beautiful than any ark-
returning dove; because, in the moonlight there below, God's
greatest blessing to the world was stretched, the silver gift of
sleep.

He found that he loved it — more than Guenever, more than
Lancelot, more than Lyo-lyok. It was his mother and his
daughter. He knew the speech of its people, would have felt it
change beneath him, if he could have shot across it like the

no goose which once he was, from Zummerzet to Och-aye. He
The Book could tell how the common people would feel about things,
of Merlyn about all sorts of things, before he asked them. He was their
king.

And they were his people, his own responsibility of stultus
or ferox, a responsibility like that old goose-admiral's upon
the farm. They were not ferocious now, because they were
asleep.

England was at the old man's feet, like a sleeping man-child.
When it was awake it would stump about, grabbing things

and breaking them, killing butterflies, pulling the cat's tail,
nourishing its ego with amoral and relentless mastery. But in
sleep its masculine force was abdicated. The man-child
sprawled undefended now, vulnerable, a baby trusting the
world to let it sleep in peace.

All the beauty of his humans came upon him, instead of
their horribleness. He saw the vast army of martyrs who were
his witnesses: young men who had gone out even in the first
joy of marriage, to be killed on dirty battle-fields like Bede-
graine for other men's beliefs: but who had gone out voluntar-

in ily: but who had gone because they thought it was right: but
The Book who had gone although they hated it. They had been ignorant
of Merlyn young men perhaps, and the things which they had died for
had been useless. But their ignorance had been innocent. They
had done something horribly difficult in their ignorant inno-
cence, which was not for themselves.

He saw suddenly all the people who had accepted sacrifice:
learned men who had starved for truth, poets who had refused
to compound in order to achieve success, parents who had
swallowed their own love in order to let their children live,
doctors and holy men who had died to help, millions of
crusaders, generally stupid, who had been butchered for their
stupidity — but who had meant well.

That was it, to mean well! He caught a glimpse of that
extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare and
obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists main-
tain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo
was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position
to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous
nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to
continue with the sublime assertion because there was some-
thing which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To
recognise and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing
which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved,
his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be
stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and
there, oh so seldom, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were
those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner,
and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater
than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's.
Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it,
and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand
years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as
Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and
martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum
of all they ignorantly had.

But then again there came the wave of sorrow over him, the
thought of the man-child when he woke: the thought of that
cruel and brutish majority, to whom the martyrs were such
rare exceptions. It moves, for all that. How few and pitifully
few the ones who would be ready to maintain it!

He could have wept for the pity of the world, its horrible- i i j
ness which still was pitiful. j\n, q00/.

The hedgehog remarked: "Pretty place, annit?" 0f Merlyn

"Aye, mun. But there is nowt that I can do for 'un."
"Tha hast done champion."

A cottage woke in the valley. Its eye of light winked out, and
he could feel the man who had made it: a poacher probably,
somebody as slow and clumsy and patient as the badger,
pulling on his heavy boots.

The hedgehog asked: "Shire?"

"Sire, mun: and 'tis Majesty, not Maggy's tea."

"Majesty?"

"Aye, mun."

"Dost tha mind as how us used for to sing to 'un?"
" I minds 'un well. 'Twas Rustic Bridge, and Genevieve and
. . . and . . ."

"Home Sweet Home/'
The king quite suddenly bowed his head.
"Shall us sing 'un for 'ee agean, Majesty mun?"
He could only nod.

The hedgehog stood in the moonlight, assuming the proper
attitude for song. He planted his feet squarely, folded his
hands on his stomach, fixed his eye upon a distant object.
Then, in his clear country tenor, he sang for the King of
England about Home Sweet Home.

The silly, simple music died away — but not silly in the
moonlight, not on a mountain of your realm. The hedgehog
shuffled, coughed, was wishful for something more. But the
king was speechless.

"Majesty," he mentioned shyly, "us gotter fresh 'un."

There was no reply.

"When us knowed as you was acoming, us larned a fresh
'un. 'Twas for thy welcome, like. Us larned it off of that there
Mearn."

"Sing it," gasped the old man. He had stretched his bones
upon the heather, because it was all too much.

And there, upon the height of England, in a good pronunci-
ation because he had learned it carefully from Merlyn, to
Parry's music from the future, with his sword of twigs in one
grey hand and a chariot of mouldy leaves, the hedgehog stood
to build Jerusalem: and meant it.

Give me my bow of burning gold.

Bring me my arrows of desire.

Bring me my spear. Oh, clouds unfold.

Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental strife

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till I have built Jerusalem

On England's green and pleasant land.

19

The pale faces of the committee, hunched round the fire,
turned towards the door in a single movement, and six pairs of
guilty eyes were fastened on the king. But it was England who
came in.

There was no need to say anything, no need to explain: they
could see it in his face.

Then they were rising up, and coming towards him, and
standing round him humbly. Merlyn, to his surprise, was an
old man with hands which shook like leaves. He was blowing
his nose very much indeed on his own skull-cap, from which
there was falling a perfect shower of mice and frogs. The
badger was weeping bitterly, and absent-mindedly swatting
each tear as it appeared on the end of his nose. Archimedes had
turned his head completely back to front, to hide his shame.
Cavall's expression was of torment. T. natrix had laid his head
on the royal foot, with one clear tear in each nostril. And
Balin's nictating membrane was going with the speed of the
Morse code.

"God save the king," they said.

"You may be seated."

So they sat down deferentially, after he had taken the first
seat: a Privy Council.

"We will be returning soon," he said, "to our bright realm.
Before we go, there are questions we must ask. In the first
place, it has been said that there will be a man like John Ball;
who is to be a bad naturalist because he claims that men
should live like ants. What is the objection to his claim?"

Merlyn stood up and took off his hat.

"It is a matter of natural morality, Sir. The committee

1 1 6 suggests that it is moral for a species to specialise in its own
The Book speciality. An elephant must attend to its trunk, a giraffe or
of Merlyn camelopard to its neck. It would be immoral for an elephant
to fly, because it has no wings. The speciality of man, as much
developed in him as the neck is in the camelopard, is his
neopallium. This is the part of the brain which, instead of
being devoted to instinct, is concerned with memory, deduc-
tion and the forms of thought which result in recognition by
the individual of his personality. Man's top-knot makes him
conscious of himself as a separate being, which does not often
happen in animals and savages, so that any form of pro-
nounced collectivism in politics is contrary to the specialisa-
tion of man.

"This, by the way," continued the old gentleman slowly,
drawing a film over his eyes as if he were a weary, second-
sighted vulture, "is why I have, during a lifetime extending
backwards over several tiresome centuries, waged my little
war against might under all its forms, and it is why I have
rightly or wrongly seduced others into waging it. It is why I
once persuaded you, Sir, to regard the Games-Maniac with
contempt: to oppose your wisdom against the baron of Fort
Mayne: to believe in justice rather than in power: and to
investigate with mental integrity, as we have tried to do this
long-drawn evening, the causes of the battle we are waging:
for war is force unbridled, at a gallop. I have not engaged in
this crusade because the fact of force can be considered wrong,
in an abstract sense. For the boa-constrictor, who is practi-
cally one enormous muscle, it would be literally true to say
that Might is Right: for the ant, whose brain is not constituted
like the human brain, it is literally true that the State is more
important than the Individual. But for man, whose speciality
lies in the personality-recognising creases of his neopallium
— as much developed in him as the muscles are in the boa-
constrictor — it is equally true to say that mental truth,
not force, is right; and that the Individual is more important
than the State. He is so much more important that he should
abolish it. We must leave the boa-constrictors to admire
themselves for being muscular athletes: Games-Mania, Fort
Mayne and so forth are right for them. Perhaps the reticula-
tions of the python are really some form of ist XI jersey. We
must leave the ants to assert the glory of the state: totali-
tarianism is their line of country, no doubt. But for man,

and not on an abstract definition of right and wrong, but on i i 7
nature's concrete definition that a species must specialise in its / he Book
own speciality, the committee suggests that might was never 0/ Merlyn
right: that the state never excelled the individual: and that the
future lies with the personal soul."

"Perhaps you ought to speak about the brain."

"Sir, there are a great many things going on in this old
brain-box; but for the purposes of our investigation we
confine ourselves to two compartments, the neopallium and
the corpus striatum. In the latter, to put it simply, my instinc-
tive and mechanical actions are determined: in the former I
keep that reason in honour of which our race has curiously
been nicknamed sapiens. Perhaps I can explain it with one of
those dangerous and often misleading similes. The corpus
striatum is like a single mirror, which reflects instinctive
actions outwards, in return for the stimuli which come in. In
the neopallium, however, there are two mirrors. They can see
each other, and for that reason they know that they exist.
Man, know thyself, said somebody or other: or, as another
philosopher had put it, the proper study of mankind is man.
This is because he has specialised in the neopallium. In brainy
animals other than man, the emphasis is not on the double-
mirrored room, but on the single one. Few animals, except
man, are conscious of their own personality. Even in primitive
races of the human family there still exists a confusion be-
tween the individual and his surroundings — for the savage
Indian, as you may know, distinguishes so little between
himself and the outside world that he himself will spit, if he
wants the clouds to rain. The ant's nervous system may be said
to be a single mirror like the savage's, and that is why it suits
the ant to be a communist, to lose himself in a crowd. But it is
because civilised man's brain is a double-mirror that he will
always have to specialise in individuality, in recognition of
himself, or whatever you may like to call it: it is because of the
two mirrors reflecting each other that he can never wholly
succeed as an unselfish member of the proletariat. He must
have a self and all that goes with a self so highly developed —
including selfishness and property. Pray forgive my simile, if I
have seemed to use it unfairly."

"Has the goose a neopallium?"

Merlyn stood up again.

"Yes, a fairly good one for a bird. The ants have a different

n8 form of nervous system, on the lines of the corpora striata."
The Book "The second question deals with War. It has been suggested
of Merlyn that we ought to abolish it, in one way or another, but nobody
has given it the chance to speak for itself. Perhaps there is
something to be said in favour of war. We would like to be
told."

Merlyn put his hat on the floor and whispered to the
badger, who, after scuttling off to his pile of agenda, returned,
to the wonder of all, with the proper piece of paper.

"Sir, this question has been before the attention of the
committee, who have ventured to draw up a list of Pros and
Cons, which we are ready to recite."

Merlyn cleared his throat, and announced in a loud voice:
"PRO."

"In favour of war," explained the badger.

"Number One," said Merlyn. "War is one of the main-
springs of romance. Without war, there would be no Rolands,
Maccabees, Lawrences or Hodsons of Hodson's Horse. There
would be no Victoria Crosses. It is a stimulant to so-called
virtues, such as courage and co-operation. In fact, war has
moments of glory. It should also be noted that, without war,
we should lose at least one half of our literature. Shakespeare
is packed with it.

"Number Two. War is a way of keeping down the popula-
tion, though it is a hideous and inefficient one. The same
Shakespeare, who seems on the subject of war to have been in
agreement with the Germans and with their raving apologist
Nietzsche, says, in a scene which he is supposed to have
written for Beaumont & Fletcher, that it heals with blood the
earth when it is sick and cures the world of the pleurisy of
people. Perhaps I may mention in parentheses, without ir-
reverence, that the Bard seems to have been curiously insensi-
tive on the subject of warfare. King Henry V is the most
revolting play I know, as Henry himself is the most revolting
character.

"Number Three. War does provide a vent for the pent-up
ferocity of man, and, while man remains a savage, something
of the sort seems to be needed. The committee finds from an
examination of history that human cruelty will vent itself in
one way, if it is denied another. During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, when war was a limited exercise
confined to professional armies recruited from the criminal

classes, the general mass of the population resorted to public i i ^
executions, dental operations without anaesthetics, brutal The Book

sports and flogging their children. In the twentieth centur\ , of Merlyn
when war was extended to embrace the masses, hanging,
hacking, cock-fighting and spanking went out of fashion.

"Number Four. The committee is at present occupied about
a complicated investigation into the physical or psychological
necessity. We do not feel that a report can be made at this stage
with profit, but we think we have observed that war does
answer a real need in man, perhaps connected with the
ferocity mentioned in Article Three, but perhaps not. It has
come to our notice that man becomes restless or dejected after
a generation of Peace. The immortal if not omniscient Swan of
Avon remarks that Peace seems to breed a disease, which,
coming to a head in a sort of ulcer, bursts out into war. ' War,'
he says, 'is the imposthume of much wealth and peace, which
only breaks, shewing no outward cause why the man dies.'
Under this interpretation, it is the peace which is regarded as a
slow disease, while the bursting of the imposthume, the war,
must be assumed to be beneficial rather than the reverse. The
committee has suggested two ways in which Wealth and Peace
might destroy the race, if war were prevented: by emasculat-
ing it, or by rendering it comatose through glandular troubles.
On the subject of emasculation, it should be noted that wars
double the birth-rate. The reason why women tolerate war is
because it promotes virility in men.

"Number Five. Finally, there is the suggestion which would
probably be made by every other animal on the face of this
earth, except man, namely that war is an inestimable boon to
creation as a whole, because it does offer some faint hope of
exterminating the human race.

"CON," announced the magician; but the king prevented
him.

"We know the objections," he said. "The idea that it is
useful might be considered a little more. If there is some
necessity for Might, why is the committee ready to stop it?"

"Sir, the committee is attempting to trace the physiological
basis, possibly of a pituitary or adrenal origin. Possibly the
human system requires periodical doses of adrenalin, in order
to remain healthy. (The Japanese, as an instance of glandular
activity, are said to eat large quantities of fish, which, by
charging their bodies with iodine, expands their thyroids and

no makes them touchy.) Until this matter has been properly
The Book investigated the subject remains vague, but the committee
of Merlyn desires to point out that the physiological need could be

supplied by other means. War, it has already been observed, is
an inefficient way of keeping down the population: it may also
be an inefficient way of stimulating the adrenal glands through
fear."

"What other ways?"

"Under the Roman Empire, the experiment of offering
bloody spectacles in the circus was attempted as a substitute.
They provided the Purgation which Aristotle talks about, and
some such alternative might be found efficient. Science, how-
ever, would suggest more radical cures. Either the glandular
deficiency might be supplied by periodical injections of the
whole population with adrenalin — or with whatever the de-
ficiency may prove to be— or else some form of surgery might
be found effective. Perhaps the root of war is removable, like
the appendix."

"We were told that war is caused by National Property:
now we are told that it is due to a gland."

"Sir, the two things may be related, though they may not be
consequent upon one another. For instance, if wars were
solely due to national property, we should expect them to
continue without intermission so long as national property
continued: that is, all the time. We find, however, that they are
interrupted by frequent lulls, called Peace. It seems as if the
human race becomes more and more comatose during
these periods of truce, until, when what you may call the
saturation-point of adrenalin deficiency has been reached, it
seizes upon the first handy excuse for a good shot of fear-
stimulant. The handy excuse is national property. Even if the
wars are dolled up as religious ones, such as crusades against
Saladin or the Albigensians or Montezuma, the basis remains
the same. Nobody would have troubled to extend the benefits
of Christianity to Montezuma, if his sandals had not been
made of gold, and nobody would have thought the gold itself a
sufficient temptation, if they had not been needing a dose of
adrenalin."

"You suggest an alternative like the circus, pending the
investigation of your gland. Have you considered it?"
Archimedes giggled unexpectedly.

"Merlyn wants to have an international fair, Sir. He wants

to have a lot of flip-flaps and giant wheels and scenic railways i z i

in a reservation, and they are all to be slightly dangerous, so as / h Honk

to kill perhaps one man in a hundred. Entrance is to be of Merlyn

voluntary, for he says that the one unutterably wicked thing

about a war is conscription. He says that people will go to the

fair of their own free-will, through boredom or through

adrenalin deficiency or whatever it is, and that they are likely

to feel the need for it during their twenty-fifth, thirtieth, and

forty-fifth years. It is to be made fashionable and glorious to

go. Every visitor will get a commemorative medal, while those

who go fifty times will get what he calls the D.S.O. or the V.C.

for a hundred visits."

The magician looked ashamed and cracked his fingers.

'The suggestion," he said humbly, "was more to provoke
thought, than to be thought of."

"Certainly it does not seem a practical suggestion for the
present year of grace. Are there no panaceas for war, which
could be used in the meantime?"

"The committee has suggested an antidote which might
have a temporary effect, like soda for an acid stomach. It
would be of no use as a cure for the malady, though it might
alleviate it. It might save a few million lives in a century."

"What is this antidote?"

"Sir, you will have noticed that the people who are respon-
sible for the declaration and the higher conduct of wars do not
tend to be the people who endure their extremes. At the battle
of Bedegraine Your Majesty dealt with something of the same
sort. The kings and the generals and the leaders of battles have
a peculiar aptitude for not being killed in them. The committee
has suggested that, after every war, all the officials on the
losing side who held a higher rank than colonel ought to be
executed out of hand, irrespective of their war-guilt. No doubt
there would be a certain amount of injustice in this measure,
but the consciousness that death was the certain result of
losing a war would have a deterrent effect on those who help
to promote and to regulate such engagements, and it might, by
preventing a few wars, save millions of lives among the lower
classes. Even a Fuhrer like Mordred might think twice about
heading hostilities, if he knew that his own execution would
be the result of being unlucky in them."

"It seems reasonable."

"It is less reasonable than it seems, partly because the

122 responsibility for warfare does not lie wholly with the leaders.
The Book After all, a leader has to be chosen or accepted by those whom
of Merlyn he leads. The hydra-headed multitudes are not so innocent as
they like to pretend. They have given a mandate to their
generals, and they must abide by the moral responsibility."

"Still, it would have the effect of making the leaders reluc-
tant to be pushed into warfare by their followers, and even
that would help."

"It would help. The difficulty would lie in persuading the
leading classes to agree to such a convention in the first place.
Also, I am afraid that you will find there is always a type of
maniac, anxious for notoriety at any price, or even for mar-
tyrdom, who would accept the pomp of leadership with even
greater alacrity because it was enhanced by melodramatic
penalties. The kings of Irish mythology were compelled by
their station to march in the forefront of the battle, which
occasioned a frightful mortality among them, yet there never
seems to have been a lack of kings or battles in the history of
the Green Isle."

"What about this new-fangled Law," asked the goat sud-
denly, "which our king has been inventing? If individuals can
be deterred from murder by fear of a death penalty, why
cannot there be an international law, under which nations can
be deterred from war by similar means? An aggressive nation
might be kept at peace by the knowledge that, if it began a war,
some international police force would sentence it to dispersal,
by mass transportation to other countries for instance."

"There are two objections to that. First, you would be
trying to cure the disease, not to prevent it. Second, we know
from experience that the existence of a death penalty does not
in fact abolish murder. It might, however, prove to be a
temporary step in the right direction."

The old man folded his hands in his sleeves, like a China-
man, and looked round the council table, doggedly, waiting
for further questions. His eyes had begun to discharge their
watch.

"He has been writing a book called the Libellus Merlini, the
Prophecies of Merlyn ," continued Archimedes wickedly,
when he saw that this subject had been concluded, "which he
had intended to read aloud to Your Majesty, as soon as you
arrived."

"We will hear a reading." | 2 j

Merlyn wrung his hands. / he Book

"Sir," he said. " It is mere fortune-telling, only gypsy tricks. of Merlyn
It had to be written because there was a good deal of fuss
about it in the twelfth century, after which we are to lose sight
of it until the twentieth. But, oh Sir, it is merely a parlour
game — not worth Your Majesty's attention at present."

"Read me some part of it, none the less."

So the humiliated scientist, all of whose quips and quiddities
had been knocked out of him in the last hour, fetched the
burnt manuscript from the fender and handed round a collec-
tion of such slips as were still legible, as if it had been a parlour
game in earnest. The animals read them out in turn, like
mottos from crackers, and this is what they said:

"God will provide, the Dodo will remark."

"The Bear will cure his headache by cutting off his head —
but it will leave him with a sore behind."

"The Lion will lie down with the Eagle, saying, At last all
the animals are united! But the Devil will see the joke."

"The Stars which taught the Sun to rise must agree with him
at noon — or vanish."

"A child standing in Broadway will cry, Look mother, there
is a man!"

"How long it takes to build Jerusalem, the spider will say,
pausing exhausted at his web on the ground floor of the
Empire State Building."

"Living-space leads to space for the coffin, observed the
Beetle."

"Force makes force."

"Wars of community, county, country, creed, continent,
colour. After that the hand of God, if not before."

"Imitation (/u/x/rjcris) before action will save mankind."

"The Elk died because it grew its horns too big."

"No collision with the moon was required to exterminate
the Mammoth."

"The destiny of all species is extinction as such, fortunately
for them."

There was a pause after the last motto, while the listeners
thought them over.

"What is the meaning of the one with the Greek word?"

1 24 "Sir, a part of its meaning, but only a small part, is that the
The Book one hope for our human race must lie in education without
of Merlyn coercion. Confucius has it that:

In order to propagate virtue to the world, one must first rule

one's country.
In order to rule one's country, one must first rule one's

family.

In order to rule one's family, one must first regulate one's

body by moral training.
In order to regulate one's body, one must first regulate one's

mind.

In order to regulate the mind, one must first be sincere in

one's intentions.
In order to be sincere in one's intentions, one must first

increase one's knowledge."

"I see."

"Have the rest any relevant meaning?" added the king.
"None whatever."

"One further question before we rise. You have said that
politics are out of order, but they seem so closely tied to the
question of warfare that they must be faced to some extent. At
an earlier stage you claimed to be a capitalist. Are you sure of
these views?"

" If I said so, Your Majesty, I did not mean it. Badger was
talking at me like a communist of the nineteen-twenties, which
made me talk like a capitalist in self-defence. I am an anarch-
ist, like any other sensible person. In point of fact the race will
find that capitalists and communists modify themselves so
much during the ages that they end by being indistinguishable
as democrats: and so will the fascists modify themselves, for
that matter. But whatever may be the contortions adopted by
these three brands of collectivism, and however many the
centuries during which they butcher each other out of childish
ill-temper, the fact remains that all forms of collectivism are
mistaken, according to the human skull. The destiny of man is
an individualistic destiny, and it is in that sense that I may
have implied a qualified approval of capitalism, if I did imply
it. The despised Victorian capitalist, who did at least allow a
good deal of play to the individual, was probably more truly
futuristic in his politics than all the New Orders shrieked for in

the twentieth century. He was of the future, because indi- i 2 5

vidualism lies in the future of the human brain. He was not so The Hook
old-fashioned as the fascists and communists. But of course he of Merlyn
was considerably old-fashioned for all that, and that is why I
prefer myself to be an anarchist: that is, to be a little up-to-
date. The geese are anarchists, you remember. They realise
that the moral sense must come from inside, not from out-
side."

" I thought," said the badger plaintively, "that communism
was supposed to be a step towards anarchy. I thought that
when communism had been properly achieved the state would
wither away."

"People have told me so, but I doubt it. I cannot see how
you may emancipate an individual by first creating an om-
nipotent state. There are no states in nature, except among
monstrosities like the ants. It seems to me that people who go
creating states, as Mordred is trying to do with his Thrashers,
must tend to become involved in them, and so unable to
escape. But perhaps what you say is true. I hope it is. In any
case let us leave these dubious questions of politics to the dingy
tyrants who look after them. Ten thousand years from now it
may be time for the educated to concern themselves with such
things, but meanwhile they must wait for the race to grow up.
We for our part have offered a solution this evening to the
special problem of force as an arbiter: the obvious platitude
that war is due to national property, with the rider that it is
stimulated by certain glands. Let us leave it at that for the
present, in God's name."

The old magician swept his notes away with a trembling
hand. He had been deeply wounded by the hedgehog's earlier
criticisms, because, in the secrecy of his heart, he loved his
student dearly. He knew now, since the royal hero had
returned victorious in his choice, that his own wisdom was not
the end. He knew that he had finished his tutorship. Once he
had told the king that he would never be the Wart again: but it
had been an encouraging thing to say: he had not meant it.
Now he did mean it, now knew that he himself had yielded
place, had stepped down from the authority to lead or to
direct. The abdication had cost him his gaiety. He would not
be able to rant any more, or to twinkle and mystify with the
flashing folds of his magic cloak. The condescension of learn-
ing was pricked in him. He was feeling ancient and ashamed.

The old king, whose childhood had vanished also, toyed 1 17
with a slip left on the table. He was at his trick of watching his The Book
hands, when in abstraction. He folded the paper this way, that of Merlyn
way, carefully, and unfolded it. It was one of Merlyn's notes
for the card-index, which badger had muddled with the
Prophecies: a quotation from a historian called Friar Clynn,
who had died in 1348. This friar, employed as the annalist of
his abbey to keep the historical records, had seen the Black
Death coming to fetch him — possibly to fetch the whole
world, for it had killed a third of the population of Europe
already. Carefully leaving some pieces of blank parchment
with the book in which he was to write no longer, he had
concluded with the following message, which had once
awakened Merlyn's strange respect. "Seeing these many ills,"
he had written in Latin, "and as it were the whole world
thrust into malignancy, waiting among the dead for death to
come to me, I have put into writing what I have truthfully
heard and examined. And, lest the writing should perish with
the writer or the work fail with the workman, I am now
leaving some paper for the continuation of it — in case by any
chance a man may remain alive in the future, or any person of
the race of Adam may escape this pestilence, to carry on the
labour once begun by me."

The king folded it neatly, measured it on the table. They
watched him, knowing he was about to rise and ready to
follow his example.

"Very good," he said. "We understand the puzzle."

He tapped the table with the paper, then got to his feet.

"We must return before the morning."

The animals were rising too. They were conducting him to
the door, crowding round him to kiss his hand and bid
farewell. His now retired tutor, who must conduct him home,
was holding the door for him to pass. Whether he was a dream
or not, he had begun to flicker, as had they all. They were
saying "Good success to Your Majesty, a speedy and success-
ful issue."

He smiled gravely, saying: "We hope it will be speedy."

But he was referring to his death, as one of them knew.

"It is only for this time, Majesty," said T. natrix. "You
remember the story of St. George, and Homo sapiens is like
that still. You will fail because it is the nature of man to slay, in
ignorance if not in wrath. But failure builds success and nature

128 changes. A good man's example always does instruct the
The Book ignorant and lessens their rage, little by little through the ages,
of Merlyn until the spirit of the waters is content: and so, strong courage
to Your Majesty, and a tranquil heart."

He inclined his head to the one who knew, and turned to go.

At the last moment a hand was tugging at his sleeve,
reminding him of the friend he had forgotten. He lifted the
hedgehog with both hands under its armpits, and held it at
arm's length, face to face.

"Ah, tiggy," he said. "Us have thee to thank for royalty.
Farewell, tiggy, and a merry life to thee and thy sweet songs."

But the hedgehog paddled its feet as if it were bicycling,
because it wanted to be put down. It tugged the sleeve again,
when it was safe upon the floor, and the old man lowered his
ear to hear the whisper.

"Nay, nay," it mentioned hoarsely, clutching his hand,
looking earnestly in his face. "Say not Farewell."

It tugged again, dropping its voice to the brink of silence.

"Orryvoyer," whispered the urchin. "Orryvoyer."

20

Well, we have reached it at last, the end of our winding
story.

Arthur of England went back to the world, to do his duty as
well as he could. He called a truce with Mordred, having made
up his mind that he must offer half his kingdom for the sake of
peace. To tell the truth, he was prepared to yield it all if
necessary. As a possession it had long ceased to be of value to
him, and he had come to know for sure that peace was more
important than a kingdom. But he felt it was his duty to retain
a half if he could, and it was for this reason: that if he had even
half a world to work on, he might be able still to introduce, in
it, the germs of that good sense which he had learned from
geese and animals.

The truce was made, the armies drawn up in their battles,
face to face. Each had a standard made from a ship's mast set
on wheels, at the top of which a small box held the consecrated
Host, while, from the masts, there flew the banners of the
Dragon and the Thistle. The knights of Mordred's party were
dressed in sable armour, their plumes were sable also, and, on
their arms, the scarlet whip of Mordred's badge glared with
the sinister tint of blood. Perhaps they looked more terrible
than they felt. It was explained to the waiting ranks that none
of them must make a hostile demonstration, but all must keep
their swords in sheath. Only, for fear of treachery, it was told
that they might charge to rescue, if any sword was seen
unharnessed at the parley.

Arthur went forward to the space between the armies with
his staff, and Mordred, with his own staff in their black
accoutrements, came out to meet him. They encountered, and
the old king saw his son's face once again. It was taut and

haggard. He too, poor man, had strayed beyond Sorrow and
Solitude to the country of Kennaquhair; but he had gone
without a guide and lost his way.

The treaty was agreed on, to the surprise of all, more easily
than had been hoped. The king was left with half his realm.
For a moment joy and peace were in the balance.

But, at that knife-edge of a moment, the old Adam reared
itself in a different form. The feudal war, baronial oppression,
individual might, even ideological rebellion: he had settled
them all in one way or another, only to be beaten on the last
lap now, by the epeisodic fact that man was a slayer by
instinct.

A grass-snake moved in the meadow near their feet, close to
an officer of Mordred's staff. This officer stepped back instinc-
tively and swung his hand across his body, his armlet with the
whip shewing for a second's flash. The bright sword flamed
into being, to destroy the so-called viper. The waiting armies,
taking it for treachery, raised their shout of rage. The lances on
both sides bowed to rest. And, as King Arthur ran towards his
own array, an old man with white hair trying to stem the

endless tide, holding out the knuckled hands in a gesture of
pressing them back, struggling to the last against the flood of
Might which had burst out all his life at a new place wheneve r
he had dammed it, so the tumult rose, the war-yell sounded,
and the meeting waters closed above his head.

Lancelot arrived too late. He had made his best speed, but it
had been in vain. All he could do was to pacify the country and
give burial to the dead. Then, when a semblance of order had
been restored, he hurried to Guenever. She was supposed to be
in the Tower of London still, for Mordred's siege had failed.

But Guenever had gone.

In those days the rules of convents were not so strict as they
are now. Often they were more like hostelries for their well-
born patrons. Guenever had taken the veil at Amesbury.

She felt that they had suffered enough, and had caused
enough suffering to others. She refused to see her ancient lover
or to talk it over. She said, which was patently untrue, that she
wished to make her peace with God.

132. Guenever never cared for God. She was a good theologian,
The Book but that was all. The truth was that she was old and wise: she
of Merlyn knew that Lancelot did care for God most passionately, that it
was essential he should turn in that direction. So, for his sake,
to make it easier for him, the great queen now renounced what
she had fought for all her life, now set the example, and stood
to her choice. She had stepped out of the picture.

Lancelot guessed a good deal of this, and, when she refused
to see him, he climbed the convent wall with Gallic, ageing
gallantry. He waylaid her to expostulate, but she was adamant
and brave. Something about Mordred seems to have broken
her lust for life. They parted, never to meet on earth.

Guenever became a worldly abbess. She ruled her convent
efficiently, royally, with a sort of grand contempt. The little
pupils of the school were brought up in the great tradition of
nobility. They saw her walking in the grounds, upright, rigid,
her fingers flashing with hard rings, her linen clean and fine
and scented against the rules of her order. The novices wor-
shipped her unanimously, with schoolgirl passions, and whis-
pered about her past. She became a Grand Old Lady. When
she died at last, her Lancelot came for the body, with his
snow-white hair and wrinkled cheeks, to carry it to her
husband's grave. There, in the reputed grave, she was buried:
a calm and regal face, nailed down and hidden in the earth.

As for Lancelot, he became a hermit in earnest. With seven
of his own knights as companions he entered a monastery near
Glastonbury, and devoted his life to worship. Arthur,
Guenever and Elaine were gone, but his ghostly love re-
mained. He prayed for all of them twice a day, with all his
never-beaten might, and lived in glad austerities apart from
man. He even learned to distinguish bird-songs in the woods,
and to have time for all the things which had been denied to
him by Uncle Dap. He became an excellent gardener, and a
reputed saint.

" Ipse," says a mediaeval poem about another old crusader,
a great lord like Lancelot in his day, and one who also retired
from the world:

Ipse post militiae cursum temporalis,
Illustratus gratia doni spiritualis,
Esse Christi cupiens miles specialis,
In hac domo monachus factus est claustralis.

He, after the bustle of temporal warfare,

Enlightened with the grace of a spiritual gift,
Covetous to be the special soldier of Christ,
In this house was made a cloistered monk.

ofMerlyn

133

The Book

More than usually placid, gentle and benign,
As white as a swan on account of his old age,
Bland and affable and lovable,
He possessed in himself the grace of the Holy Spirit.

For he often frequented Holy Church,

Joyfully listened to the mysteries of the Mass,
Proclaimed such praises as he was able,
And mentally ruminated the heavenly glory.

His gentle and jocose conversation,
Highly commendable and religious,
Was thus pleasing to the whole fraternity,
Because it was neither stuffy nor squeamish.

Here, as often as he rambled across the cloister,
He bowed from side to side to the monks,
And he saluted with a bob of his head, thus,
The ones whom he loved most intimately.

Hie per claustrum quotiens transiens meavit,
Hinc et hinc ad monachos caput inclinavit,
Et sic nutu capitis eos salutavit,
Quos affectu intimo plurimum amavit.

When his own death-hour came, it was accompanied by
visions in the monastery. The old abbot dreamed of bells
sounding most beautifully, and of angels, with happy laugh-
ter, hauling Lancelot to Heaven. They found him dead in his
cell, in the act of accomplishing the third and last of his
miracles. For he had died in what was called the Odour of
Sanctity. When saints die, their bodies fill the room with lovely
scent: perhaps of new hay, or of blossom in the spring, or of
the clean sea-shore.

Ector pronounced his brother's keen, one of the most
touching pieces of prose in the language. He said: "Ah,
Lancelot, thou wert head of all Christian knights. And now I
dare say, thou Sir Lancelot there thou liest, that thou were
never matched of earthly knight's hand. And thou were the

134 courtliest knight that ever bare shield. And thou were the
The Book truest friend of thy lover that ever bestrode horse. And thou
of Merlyn were the truest lover, of a sinful man, that ever loved woman.

And thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword.
And thou were the godliest person that ever came among press
of knights. And thou were the meekest man and gentlest that
ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou were the sternest
knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in rest."

The Round Table had been smashed at Salisbury, its few
survivors thinning out as the years went by. At last there were
only four of them left: Bors the misogynist, Bleoberis, Ector,
and Demaris. These old men made a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land, for the repose of the souls of all their comrades, and
there they died upon a Good Friday for God's sake, the last of
the Round Table. Now there are none of them left: only
knights of the Bath and of other orders degraded by compari-
son.

About King Arthur of England, that gentle heart and centre
of it all, there remains a mystery to this day. Some think that he
and Mordred perished on each other's swords. Robert of
Thornton mentions that he was attended by a surgeon of
Salerno who found by examination of his wounds that he
could never be whole again, so "he said In manus * boldly on
the place where he lay . . . and spake no more." Those who
adhere to this account claim that he was buried at Glaston-
bury, under a stone which said: HIC JACET ARTURUS
REX QUONDAM REX QUE FUTURUS^ and that his
body was exhumed by Henry II as a counter-blast to Welsh
nationalism — for the Cymry were claiming even then that the
great king had never perished. They believed that he would
come again to lead them, and they also mendaciously asserted,
as usual, his British nationality. Adam of Domerham tells us,
on the other hand, that the exhumation took place in April
1278, under Edward I, and that he himself was a witness of
the proceedings; while it is known that a third search took
place in vain under Edward III — who, by the way, revived the
Round Table in 1 3 44 as a serious order of knighthood like the

*"Into Thy hands." The entire phrase, from the death of Jesus (Luke
23:46), is "into Thy hands, I commend my spirit."
t"Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future King."

Garter. Whatever the real date may have been, tradition has it
that the bones when exhumed were of gigantic stature, and
Guenever's had golden hair.

Then there is another tale, widely supported, that our hero
was carried away to the Vale of Affalach by a collection of
queens in a magic boat. These are believed to have ferried him
across the Severn to their own country, there to heal him of his
wounds.

The Italians have got hold of an idea about a certain Arturo
Magno who was translated to Mount Etna, where he can still
be seen occasionally, they say. Don Quixote the Spaniard, a
very learned gentleman, indeed he went mad on account of it,
maintains that he became a raven — an assertion which may
not seem so wholly ridiculous to those who have read our little
story. Then there are the Irish, who have muddled him up with
one of the FitzGeralds and declare that he rides round a rath,
with sword upraised, to the Londonderry Air. The Scots, who
have a legend about

Arthur Knygbt
Wha raid on nycht
Wi' gilten spur
And candel lycht,

still swear to him in Edinburgh, where they believe that he
presides from Arthur's Seat. The Bretons claim to have heard
his horn and to have seen his armour, and they also believe he
will return. A book called The High History of the Holy Grail,
which was translated by an irascible scholar called Dr. Sebas-
tian Evans, says, on the contrary, that he was safely buried in a
house of religion "that standeth at the head of the Moors
Adventurous." A Miss Jessie L. Weston mentions a manu-
script which she pleases to call 1533, supported by Le Morte
d: 'Arthur, in which it is stated that the queen who came to
carry him away was none other than the aged enchantress
Morgan, his half-sister, and that she took him to a magic
island. Dr. Sommer regards the entire account as absurd. A lot
of people called Wolfram von Eschenbach, Ulrich von Zat-
zikhoven, Dr. Wechssler, Professor Zimmer, Mr. Nutt and so
forth, either scout the question wholly, or remain in learned
confusion. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,
Wordsworth, Tennyson and a number of other reliable wit-

136 nesses agree that he is still on earth: Milton inclining to the
The Book view that he is underneath it (Arturumque etiam sub terris
of Merlyn bella moventem)* while Tennyson is of the opinion that he
will come again to visit us "like a modern Gentleman of state-
liest port," possibly like the Prince Consort. Shakespeare's
contribution is to place the beloved Falstaff, at his death, not
in Abraham's, but in Arthur's bosom.

The legends of the common people are beautiful, strange
and positive. Gervase of Tilbury, writing in 1 2 1 2, says that, in
the woods of Britain, ''the foresters tell that on alternate days,
about noon, or at midnight when the moon is full and shiny,
they often see an array of huntsmen who, in answer to
enquirers, say they are of the household and fellowship of
Arthur." These, however, were probably real bands of Saxon
poachers, like the followers of Robin Wood, who had named
their gang in honour of the ancient king. The men of Devon
are accustomed to point out "the chair and oven" of Arthur
among the rocks of their coast. In Somersetshire there are
some villages called East and West Camel (ot), mentioned by
Leland, which are beset with legends of a king still sitting in a
golden crown. It is to be noted that the river Ivel, whence,
according to Drayton, our "knightly deeds and brave
achievements sprong," is in the same county. So is South
Cadbury, whose rector reports his parishioners as relating
how "folks do say that in the night of the full moon King .
Arthur and his men ride round the hill, and their horses are
shod with silver, and a silver shoe has been found in the track
where they do ride, and when they have ridden round the hill
they do stop to water their horses at the wishing well." Finally
there is the little village of Bodmin in Cornwall, whose inhab-
itants are certain that the king inhabits a local tumulus. In
11 13 they even assaulted, within the sanctuary, a party of
monks from Brittany — an unheard-of thing to do — because
they had thrown doubts upon the legend. It has to be admitted
that some of these dates scarcely fit in with the thorny subject
of Arthurian chronology, and Malory, that great man who is
the noblest source of all this history, maintains a discreet
reserve.

As for myself, I cannot forget the hedgehog's last farewell,
coupled with Quixote's hint about the animals and Milton's

*"And Arthur too, stirring up wars beneath the earth."

subterranean dream. It is little more than a theory, hut i \j

perhaps the inhabitants of Bodmin will look at their tumulus, 7 be B< *ok

and, if it is like an enormous mole-hill with a dark opening in of Merlyn

its side, particularly if there are some badger tracks in the

vicinity, we can draw our own conclusions. For I am inclined

to believe that my beloved Arthur of the future is sitting at this

very moment among his learned friends, in the Combination

Room of the College of Life, and that they are thinking away

in there for all they are worth, about the best means to help our

curious species: and I for one hope that some day, when not

only England but the World has need of them, and when it is

ready to listen to reason, if it ever is, they will issue from their

rath in joy and power: and then, perhaps, they will give us

happiness in the world once more and chivalry, and the old

mediaeval blessing of certain simple people — who tried, at any

rate, in their own small way, to still the ancient brutal dream

of Attila the Hun.

Explicit liber Regis Quondam, graviter et laboriose scriptus
inter annos mdccccxxxvi et mdccccxlii, nationibus in
diro bello certantibus. Hie etiam incipit, si forte in futuro
homo superstes pestilenciam possit evadere et opus con-
tinuare inceptum, spes Regis Futuri. Ora pro Thoma
Malory Equite, discipuloque humili ejus, qui nunc sua
sponte libros deponit ut pro specie pugnet.

Here ends the book of the Onetime King, written with much
toil and effort between the years 1936 and 1942, when the
nations were striving in fearful warfare. Here also begins — if
perchance a man may in future time survive the pestilence and
continue the task he has begun — the hope of the Future King.
Pray for Thomas Malory, Knight, and his humble disciple,
who now voluntarily lays aside his books to fight for his kind.

bookofmerlynOOthwh

bookofmerlynOOthwh

bookofmerlynOOthwh

This magical account of King Arthurs last night on earth, re-
discovered in a collection of T. H. Whites papers in the University
of Texas Humanities Research Center, spent weeks on the New York
Times best-seller list following its publication in 1977.

The tale begins with an aged and weary King Arthur sitting alone
in his tent at Salisbury, awaiting his final, fatal battle with his bastard
son, Mordred. His childhood mentor, Merlyn, returns to give Arthur
one last lesson in life, whisking him away to the badgers sett to meet
again with the Animal Council, who long before had helped the
young Wart prepare for his royal role.

The deliberations of the Animal Council center on ways to abolish
war, a question of intense personal interest to White, who was ago-
nizing over whether to go to war against Nazi Germany as he wrote
The Book of Merlyn. More self-revealing than any other of White s
books, Merlyn shows White's mind at work, venting his fury against
the human race who make war and glorify it.

Even in addressing the profound issues of war and peace, The Book
of Merlyn retains the life and sparkle for which White is known. The
story moves with the impetus of poetry, farce, invention, and icon-
oclasm which marks his earlier work, and Trevor Stubley's illustra-
tions capture this spirit magnificently. The tale brings Arthur full
circle, an ending, White wrote, that uwill turn my completed epic
into a perfect fruit, 'rounded off and bright and done.'"

"This is the true last chapter of The Once and Future King and
should have its place there."

— from the Prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner

"This mythic political fable for our time wasn't published when it
was written because the world wasn't ready for it." — Peter Green

"... The Book of Merlyn is a personal as well as historical story
that crisscrosses the centuries on the question of war and
peace. " — New York Times

1

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