The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  ‘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, but 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 fossilized sponge. And would you not have liked to be young, to frisk about and feel your knees again? Young people are happy, are they not? We had meant it for a pleasure.’

  ‘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—remembered gesture, and the apparatus began to materialize obediently: muddled up as usual.

  Chapter III

  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 people? 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.† And look at those chessmen! Check—mate indeed! Nay, we will try the ploy again…’

  Imagine a rusty bolt on the garden door, which has been set wrong, or the door has sagged on its hinges since it was put on, and for years that bolt has never been shot efficiently: except 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 by—product of function, as light is a by—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 over Wiltshire, strode beyond Dorset and sped through Devon, as fast as a wire cutting cheese. The plains, downs, 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 fingers 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 scholarship or godliness: there were the glow—worms and the mahogany fans and the tilting board for circulating the decanters. 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 that they ought to do the thing in style. They had arranged that the proper thing would be to stand up, and perhaps to bow or smile a bit. There had been solemn consultations among them ab
out 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 agonized 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, without considering the matter further.

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

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘We 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 Jusserand 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 History 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 edition, 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 DNB. 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 Assyrians, Sumerians, Mongols, Aztecs, etc. each had a separate ink, and the year A.D. or B.C. was written on a vertical line at the left of the columns, so that it was like a graph. Then, on another wall, which was even more interesting, there was a 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, showed 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 débris of the magician’s passing crazes. These were croquet mallets, knitting needles, pastels surfins, linocutting tools, kites, boomerangs, glue, boxes of cigars, homemade 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 importance 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.’

  They had caught light, however, and, when he had blown them out and delivered them to the magician, it was found that 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 rummaging 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 committee, 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 sake of his sulks, it was impossible to hold off when it came to talking.

  ‘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 political 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.’