The Once and Future King

Chapter XIX

There was something magical about the time and space commanded by Merlyn, for the Wart seemed to be passing many days and nights among the grey people, during the one spring night when he had left his body asleep under the bearskin.

He grew to be fond of Lyó-lyok, in spite of her being a girl. He was always asking her questions about the geese. She taught him what she knew with gentle kindness, and the more he learned, the more he came to love her brave, noble, quiet and intelligent relations. She told him how every White-front was an individual – not governed by laws or leaders, except when they came about spontaneously. They had no kings like Uther, no laws like the bitter Norman ones. They did not own things in common. Any goose who found something nice to eat considered it his own and would peck any other one who tried to thieve it. At the same time, no goose claimed any exclusive territorial right in any part of the world – except its nest, and that was private property. She told him a great deal about migration.

‘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 and it was necessary to find 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 famous for being 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 old 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 responsibility if things go wrong.” “Thank you very much,” he will say. “I am sure your great-uncle can be relied on. 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 is a good 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.

There was a growing excitement among the host. The young geese flirted outrageously, or collected in parties to discuss their pilots. They played games, too, like children excited at the prospect of a party. One of these games was to stand in a circle, while the junior 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 show 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 part 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 …’

When the day came, there was a difference about the salt marsh and the slob. The ant-like man, who had walked out so patiently every sunrise 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 pastures from which he had come. He was a nice man in his way – for he stood still solemnly, and took off his leather hat. He did this every spring religiously, when the wild geese left him, and every autumn, when he saw the first returning gaggle.

In a steamer it takes two or three days to cross the North Sea – so many hours of slobbering through the viscous water. But for the geese, for the sailors of the air, for the angled wedges tearing clouds to tatters, for the singers of the sky 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 – for them it was a different matter.

The songs they sang were full of it. Some were vulgar, some were sagas, some were light-hearted to a degree. One silly one which amused the Wart was as follows:

We wander the sky with many a Cronk

And land in the pasture fields with a Plonk.

Hank-hank, Hink-hink, Honk-honk.

Then we bend our necks with a curious kink

Like the bend which the plumher 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.

And once, while they were passing over a rocky island populated by barnacle geese, who looked like spinsters in black leather gloves, grey toques and jet beads, the entire squadron burst out derisively with:

Branta bernicla sits a-slumming in the slob,

While we go sauntering along.

Glory, glory, here we go, dear.

To the North Pole sauntering along.

One of the more Scandinavian songs was called ‘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 call.

Lyó-lyok the lightsome said: Love I had liefer.

Douce-down, Tender-tread, Warm-nest and Walk-in-line:

These live for ever.

Aahng 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, choose Lay-making, of loud lilts which linger.

Horn-music, Laughter song, Epic-heart,

Ape-the-world:

These Lyow, the singer.

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 towards it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth – and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seemingly 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 rock-cliff of the ocean. There were other peaks, when, for instance, their line of flight was crossed by an Indian file of Bewick Swans who were off to Abisco, 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.

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 Razorbill 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, toy-like faces upward, 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 on landing at a ledge which was already full, one of the other birds had to tumble off. Yet they were in good humour, so cheerful and cockneyfied and teasing one another. They were like an innumerable crowd of fish-wives on the largest grandstand in the world, breaking out into private disputes, eating out of paper bags, chipping the referee, 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 your 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, 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 ten thousand of them, and the noise they made was deafening.

Then there were the fiords and islands of Norway. It was about one of these islands, by the way, that the great W. H. Hudson related a true goose-story which ought to make people 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 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 circumstance, 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 captive potentate had taken on 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 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 out of the sky, side-slipping, stunting, even doing spinning nose-dives. They were 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 vigorously. Next – bump – they were on the ground. They held their wings above their heads for a moment, then folded them with a quick and pretty neatness. They had crossed the North Sea.

‘Well, Wart,’ said Kay in an exasperated voice, ‘do you want all the rug? And why do you heave and mutter so? You were snoring, too.’

‘I don’t snore,’ replied the Wart indignantly.

‘You do.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You do. You honk like a goose.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You do.’

‘I don’t. And you snore worse.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘How can I snore worse if you don’t snore at all?’

By the time they had thrashed this out, they were late for breakfast. They dressed hurriedly and ran out into the spring.