The Once and Future King

Chapter XXI

The day for the ceremony drew near, the invitations to King Pellinore and Sir Grummore were sent out, and the Wart withdrew himself more and more into the kitchen.

‘Come along, Wart, old boy,’ said Sir Ector ruefully. “I didn’t think you would take it so bad. It doesn’t become you to do this sulkin.’”

‘I am not sulking,’ said the Wart. ‘I don’t mind a bit and I am very glad that Kay is going to be a knight. Please don’t think I am sulking.’

‘You are a good boy,’ said Sir Ector. ‘I know you’re not sulkin’ really, but do cheer up. Kay isn’t such a bad stick, you know, in his way.’

‘Kay is a splendid chap,’ said the Wart. ‘Only I was not happy because he did not want to go hawking or anything, with me, any more.’

‘It is his youthfulness,’ said Sir Ector. ‘It will all clear up.’

‘I am sure it will,’ said the Wart. ‘It is only that he does not want me to go with him, just at the moment. And so, of course, I don’t go.

‘But I will go,’ added the Wart. ‘As soon as he commands me, I will do exactly what he says. Honestly, I think Kay is a good person, and I was not sulking a bit.’

‘You have a glass of this canary,’ said Sir Ector, ‘and go and see if old Merlyn can’t cheer you up.’

‘Sir Ector has given me a glass of canary,’ said the Wart, ‘and sent me to see if you can’t cheer me up.’

Sir Ector,’ said Merlyn, ‘is a wise man.’

‘Well,’ said the Wart, ‘what about it?’

‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theo-criticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.’

‘Apart from all these things,’ said the Wart, ‘what do you suggest for me just now?’

‘Let me see,’ said the magician, considering. ‘We have had a short six years of this, and in that time I think I am right in saying that you have been many kinds of animal, vegetable, mineral, etc. – many things in earth, air, fire and water?’

‘I don’t know much,’ said the Wart, ‘about the animals and earth.’

‘Then you had better meet my friend the badger.’

‘I have never met a badger.’

‘Good,’ said Merlyn. ‘Except for Archimedes, he is the most learned creature I know. You will like him.

‘By the way,’ added the magician, stopping in the middle of his spell, ‘there is one thing I ought to tell you. This is the last time I shall be able to turn you into anything. All the magic for that sort of thing has been used up, and this will be the end of your education. When Kay has been knighted my labours will be over. You will have to go away then, to be his squire in the wide world, and I shall go elsewhere. Do you think you have learned anything?’

‘I have learned, and been happy.’

‘That’s right, then,’ said Merlyn. ‘Try to remember what you learned.’

He proceeded with the spell, pointed his wand of lignum vitae at the Little Bear, which had just begun to glow in the dimness as it hung by its tail from the North Star, and called out cheerfully, ‘Have a good time for the last visit. Give my love to Badger.’

The call sounded from far away, and Wart found himself standing by the side of an ancient tumulus, like an enormous mole-hill, with a black hole in front of him.

‘Badger lives in there,’ he said to himself, ‘and I am supposed to go and talk to him. But I won’t. It was bad enough never to be a knight, but now my own dear tutor that I found on the only Quest I shall ever have is to be taken from me also, and there will be no more natural history. Very well, I will have one more night of joy before I am condemned, and, as I am a wild beast now, I will be a wild beast, and there it is.’

So he trundled off fiercely over the twilight snow, for it was winter.

If you are feeling desperate, a badger is a good thing to be. A relation of the bears, otters, and weasels, you are the nearest thing to a bear now left in England, and your skin is so thick that it makes no difference who bites you. So far as your own bite is concerned, there is something about the formation of your jaw which makes it almost impossible to be dislocated – and so, however much the thing you are biting twists about, there is no reason why you should ever let go. Badgers are one of the few creatures which can munch up hedgehogs unconcernedly, just as they can munch up everything else from wasp’s nests and roots to baby rabbits.

It so happened that a sleeping hedgehog was the first thing which came in the Wart’s way.

‘Hedge-pig,’ said the Wart, peering at his victim with blurred, short-sighted eyes, ‘I am going to munch you up.’

The hedgehog, which had hidden its bright little eye-buttons and long sensitive nose inside its curl, and which had ornamented its spikes with a not very tasteful arrangement of dead leaves before going to bed for the winter in its grassy nest, woke up at this and squealed most lamentably.

‘The more you squeal,’ said the Wart, ‘the more I shall gnash. It makes my blood boil within me.’

‘Ah, Measter Brock,’ cried the hedgehog, holding himself tight shut. ‘Good Measter Brock, show mercy to a poor urchin and don’t ’ee be tyrannical. Us be’nt no common tiggy, measter, for to be munched and mumbled. Have mercy, kind sir, on a harmless, flea-bitten crofter which can’t tell his left hand nor his right.’

‘Hedgehog,’ said the Wart remorselessly, ‘forbear to whine, neither thrice nor once.’

‘Alas, my poor wife and childer!’

‘I bet you have not got any. Come out of that, thou tramp. Prepare to meet thy doom.’

‘Measter Brock,’ implored the unfortunate pig, ‘come now, doan’t ’ee be okkered, sweet Measter Brock, my duck. Hearken to an urchin’s prayer! Grant the dear boon of life to this most uncommon tiggy, lordly measter, and he shall sing to thee in numbers sweet or teach ’ee how to suck cow’s milk in the pearly dew.’

‘Sing?’ asked the Wart, quite taken aback.

‘Aye, sing,’ cried the hedgehog. And it began hurriedly to sing in a very placating way, but rather muffled because it dared not uncurl.

‘Oh, Genevieve,’ it sang most mournfully into its stomach, ‘Sweet Genevieve,

                              Ther days may come,

                              Ther days may go,

                              But still the light of Mem’ry weaves

                              Those gentle dreams

                              Of long ago.’

It also sang, without pausing for a moment between the songs, Home Sweet Home and The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill. Then, because it had finished its repertoire, it drew a hurried but quavering breath, and began again on Genevieve. After that, it sang Home Sweet Home and The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill.

‘Come,’ said the Wart, ‘you can stop that. I won’t bite you.’

‘Clementious measter,’ whispered the hedge-pig humbly. ‘Us shall bless the saints and board of governors for thee and for thy most kindly chops, so long as fleas skip nor urchins climb up chimbleys.’

Then, for fear that its brief relapse into prose might have hardened the tyrant’s heart, it launched out breathlessly into Genevieve, for the third time.

‘Stop singing,’ said the Wart, ‘for heaven’s sake. Uncurl. I won’t do you any harm. Come, you silly little urchin, and tell me where you learned these songs.’

‘Uncurl is one word,’ answered the porpentine tremblingly – it did not feel in the least fretful at the moment – ‘but curling up is still another. If ’ee was to see my liddle naked nose, measter, at this dispicuous moment, ’ee might feel a twitching in thy white toothsomes; and all’s fear in love and war, that we do know. Let us sing to ’ee again, sweet Measter Brock, concerning thic there rustic mill?’

‘I don’t want to hear it any more. You sing it very well, but I don’t want it again. Uncurl, you idiot, and tell me where you learned to sing.’

‘Us be’nt no common urchin,’ quavered the poor creature, staying curled up as tight as ever. ‘Us wor a-teuk when liddle by one of them there gentry, like, as it might be from the mother’s breast. Ah, don’t ’ee nip our tender vitals, lovely Measter Brock, for ee wor a proper gennelman, ee wor, and brought us up full comely on cow’s milk an’ that, supped out from a lordly dish. Ah, there be’nt many urchins what a drunken water outer porcelain, that there be’nt.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ said the Wart.

‘Ee wor a gennelman,’ cried the hedgehog desperately, ‘like I tell ’ee. Ee teuk un when us wor liddle, and fed un when us ha’nt no more. Ee wor a proper gennelman what fed un in ter parlour, like what no urchin ha’nt zeen afore nor since; fed out from gennelman’s porcelain, aye and a dreary day it wor whenever us left un for nought but wilfulness, that thou may’st be sure.’

‘What was the name of this gentleman?’

‘Ee wor a gennelman, ee wor. Ee hadden no proper neame like, not like you may remember, but ee wor a gennelman, that ee wor, and fed un out a porcelain.’

‘Was he called Merlyn?’ asked the Wart curiously.

‘Ah, that wor is neame. A proper fine neame it wor, but us never lay tongue to it by nary means. Ah, Mearn ee called to itself, and fed un out a porcelain, like a proper fine gennelman.’

‘Oh, do uncurl,’ exclaimed the Wart. ‘I know the man who kept you, and I think I saw you, yourself, when you were a baby in cotton wool at his cottage. Come on, urchin, I am sorry I frightened you. We are friends here, and I want to see your little grey wet twitching nose, just for old time’s sake.’

‘Twitching noase be one neame,’ answered the hedgehog obstinately, ‘and a-twitching of that noase be another, measter. Now you move along, kind Measter Brock, and leave a poor crofter to teak ’is winter drowse. Let you think of beetles or honey, sweet baron, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’

‘Nonsense,’ exclaimed the Wart. ‘I won’t do you any harm, because I knew you when you were little.’

‘Ah, them badgers,’ said the poor thing to its stomach, ‘they go a-barrowing about with no harm in their hearts, Lor bless ’em, but doan’t they fair give you a nip without a-noticing of it, and Lor bless ’ee what is a retired mun to do? It’s that there skin of theirs, that’s what it be, from earliest childer they’ve been a-nipping of among each other, and also of their ma’s, without a-feeling of anything among themselves, so naturally they nips elsewhere like the seame. Now my poor gennelman, Measter Mearn, they was allars a-rushing arter his ankels, with their yik-yik-yik, when they wanted to be fed like, those what ee kept from liddles – and, holy church, how ee would scream! Aye, ’tis a mollocky thing to deal with they badgers, that us may be sure.

‘Doan’t see nothing,’ added the hedgehog, before the Wart could protest. ‘Blunder along like one of they ambling hearth rugs, on the outsides of their girt feet. Get in their way for a moment, just out of fortune like, without nary wicked intention and ’tis snip-snap, just like that, out of self-defence for the hungry blind, and then where are you?

‘On’y pleace us can do for un,’ continued the urchin, ‘is to hit un ter noase. A killee’s heel they neame un on ter scriptures. Hit one of they girt trollo’s on ter noase, bim-bam, like that ’ere, and the sharp life is fair outer him ere ee can snuffle. ’Tis a fair knock-out, that it is.

‘But how can a pore urchin dump un on ter noase? When ee han’t got nothing to dump with, nor way to hold ’un? And then they comes about ’ee and asks ’ee for to uncurl!’

‘You need not uncurl,’ said the Wart resignedly. ‘I am sorry I woke you up, chap, and I am sorry I frightened you. I think you are a charming hedgehog, and meeting you has made me feel more cheerful again. You just go off to sleep like you were when I met you, and I shall go to look for my friend badger, as I was told to do. Good night, urchin, and good luck in the snow.’

‘Good night it may be,’ muttered the pig grumpily. ‘And then again it mayern’t. First it’s uncurl and then it’s curl. One thing one moment, and another thing ter next. Hey-ho, ‘tis a turvey world. But Good night, Ladies, is my motter, come hail, come snow, and so us shall be continued in our next.’

With these words the humble animal curled himself up still more snugly than ever before, gave several squeaky grunts, and was far away in a dream-world so much deeper than our human dreams as a whole winter’s sleep is longer than the quiet of a single night.

‘Well,’ thought the Wart, ‘he certainly gets over his troubles pretty quickly. Fancy going to sleep again as quick as that. I dare say he was never more than half-awake all the time, and will think it was only a dream when he gets up properly in the spring.’

He watched the dirty little ball of leaves and grass and fleas for a moment, curled up tightly inside its hole, then grunted and moved off toward the badger’s sett, following his own oblong footmarks backward in the snow.

‘So Merlyn sent you to me,’ said the badger, ‘to finish your education. Well, I can only teach you two things – to dig, and love your home. These are the true ends of philosophy.’

‘Would you show me your home?’

‘Certainly,’ said the badger, ‘though, of course, I don’t use it all. It is a rambling old place, much too big for a single man. I suppose some parts of it may be a thousand years old. There are about four families of us in it, here and there, take it by and large, from cellar to attics, and sometimes we don’t meet for months. A crazy old place, I suppose it must seem to you modern people – but there, it’s cosy.’

He went ambling down the corridors of the enchanted sett, rolling from leg to leg with the queer badger paddle, his white mask with its black stripes looking ghostly in the gloom.

‘It’s along that passage,’ he said, ‘if you want to wash your hands.’

Badgers are not like foxes. They have a special midden where they put out their used bones and rubbish, proper earth closets, and bedrooms whose bedding they turn out frequently, to keep it clean. The Wart was charmed with what he saw. He admired the Great Hall most, for this was the central room of the tumulus – it was difficult to know whether to think of it as a college or as a castle – and the various suites and bolt holes radiated outward from it. It was a bit cobwebby, owing to being a sort of a common-room instead of being looked after by one particular family, but it was decidedly solemn. Badger called it the Combination Room. All round the panelled walls there were ancient paintings of departed badgers, famous in their day for scholarship or godliness, lit from above by shaded glow-worms. There were stately chairs with the badger arms stamped in gold on their Spanish leather seats – the leather was coming off – and a portrait of the Founder over the fireplace. The chairs were arranged in a semi-circle round the fire, and there were mahogany fans with which everybody could shield their faces from the flames, and a kind of tilting board by means of which the decanters could be slid back from the bottom of the semi-circle to the top. Some black gowns hung in the passage outside, and all was extreme ancient.

‘I am a bachelor at the moment,’ said the badger apologetically, when they got back to his own snug room with the flowered wallpaper, ‘so I am afraid there is only one chair. You will have to sit on the bed. Make yourself at home, my dear, while I brew some punch, and tell me how things are going in the wide world.’

‘Oh, they go on much the same. Merlyn is well, and Kay is to be made a knight next week.’

‘An interesting ceremony.’

‘What enormous arms you have,’ remarked the Wart, watching him stir the spirits with a spoon. ‘So have I, for that matter.’ And he looked down at his own bandy-legged muscles. He was mainly a tight chest holding together a pair of forearms, mighty as thighs.

‘It is to dig with,’ said the learned creature complacently. ‘Mole and I, I suppose you would have to dig pretty quick to match with us.’

‘I met a hedgehog outside.’

‘Did you now? They say nowadays that hedgehogs can carry swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease.’

‘I thought he was rather nice.’

‘They do have a sort of pathetic appeal,’ said the badger sadly, ‘but I’m afraid I generally just munch them up. There is something irresistible about pork crackling.

‘The Egyptians,’ he added, and by this he meant the gypsies, ‘are fond of them for eating, too.’

‘Mine would not uncurl.’

‘You should have pushed him into some water, and then he’d have shown you his poor legs quick enough. Come, the punch is ready. Sit down by the fire and take your ease.’

‘It is nice to sit here with the snow and wind outside.’

‘It is nice. Let us drink good luck to Kay in his knighthood.’

‘Good luck to Kay, then.’

‘Good luck.’

‘Well,’ said the badger, setting down his glass again with a sigh. ‘Now what could have possessed Merlyn to send you to me?’

‘He was talking about learning,’ said the Wart.

‘Ah, well, if it is learning you are after, you have come to the right shop. But don’t you find it rather dull?’

‘Sometimes I do,’ said the Wart, ‘and sometimes I don’t. On the whole I can bear a good deal of learning if it is about natural history.’

‘I am writing a treatise just now,’ said the badger, coughing diffidently to show that he was absolutely set on explaining it, ‘which is to point out why Man has become the master of the animals. Perhaps you would like to hear it?

‘It’s for my doctor’s degree, you know,’ he added hastily, before the Wart could protest. He got few chances of reading his treatises to anybody, so he could not bear to let the opportunity slip by.

‘Thank you very much,’ said the Wart.

‘It will be good for you, dear boy. It is just the thing to top off an education. Study birds and fish and animals: then finish off with Man. How fortunate that you came! Now where the devil did I put that manuscript?’

The old gentleman scratched about with his great claws until he had turned up a dirty bundle of papers, one corner of which had been used for lighting something. Then he sat down in his leather armchair, which had a deep depression in the middle of it; put on his velvet smoking-cap with the tassel; and produced a pair of tarantula spectacles, which balanced on the end of his nose.

‘Hem,’ said the badger.

He immediately became paralysed with shyness, and sat blushing at his papers, unable to begin.

‘Go on,’ said the Wart.

‘It is not very good,’ he explained coyly. ‘It is just a rough draft, you know. I shall alter a lot before I send it in.’

‘I am sure it must be interesting.’

‘Oh no, it is not a bit interesting. It is just an odd thing I threw off in an odd half-hour, just to pass the time. But still, this is how it begins.

‘Hem!’ said the badger. Then he put on an impossibly high falsetto voice and began to read as fast as possible.

‘People often ask, as an idle question, whether the process of evolution began with the chicken or the egg. Was there an egg out of which the first chicken came, or did a chicken lay the first egg? I am in a position to say that the first thing created was the egg.

‘When God had manufactured all the eggs out of which the fishes and the serpents and the birds and the mammals and even the duck-billed platypus would eventually emerge, He called the embryos before Him, and saw that they were good.

‘Perhaps I ought to explain,’ added the badger, lowering his papers nervously and looking at the Wart over the top of them, ‘that all embryos look very much the same. They are what you are before you are born – and, whether you are going to be a tadpole or a peacock or a cameleopard or a man, when you are an embryo you just look like a peculiarly repulsive and helpless human being. I continue as follows:

‘The embryos stood in front of God, with their feeble hands clasped politely over their stomachs and their heavy heads hanging down respectfully, and God addressed them.

‘He said: “Now, you embryos, here you are, all looking exactly the same, and We are going to give you the choice of what you want to be. When you grow up you will get bigger anyway, but We are pleased to grant you another gift as well. You may alter any parts of yourselves into anything which you think would be useful to you in later life. For instance, at the moment you cannot dig. Anybody who would like to turn his hands into a pair of spades or garden forks is allowed to do so. Or, to put it another way, at present you can only use your mouths for eating. Anybody who would like to use his mouth as an offensive weapon, can change it by asking and be a corkindrill or a sabre-toothed tiger. Now then, step up and choose your tools, but remember that what you choose you will grow into, and will have to stick to.”

‘All the embryos thought the matter over politely, and then, one by one, they stepped up before the eternal throne. They were allowed two or three specializations, so that some chose to use their arms as flying machines and their mouths as weapons, or crackers, or drillers, or spoons, while others selected to use their bodies as boats and their hands as oars. We badgers thought very hard and decided to ask three boons. We wanted to change our skins for shields, our mouths for weapons, and our arms for garden forks. These boons were granted. Everybody specialized in one way or another, and some of us in very queer ones. For instance, one of the desert lizards decided to swap his whole body for blotting-paper, and one of the toads who lived in the drouthy antipodes decided simply to be a water-bottle.

‘The asking and granting took up two long days – they were the fifth and sixth, so far as I remember – and at the very end of the sixth day, just before it was time to knock off for Sunday, they had got through all the little embryos except one. This embryo was Man.

‘“Well, Our little man,” said God. “You have waited till the last, and slept on your decision, and We are sure you have been thinking hard all the time. What can We do for you?”

‘“Please, God,” said the embryo, “I think that You made me in the shape which I now have for reasons best known to Yourself, and that it would be rude to change. If I am to have my choice I will stay as I am. I will not alter any of the parts which You gave me, for other and doubtless inferior tools, and I will stay a defenceless embryo all of my life, doing my best to make myself a few feeble implements out of the wood, iron and the other materials which You have seen fit to put before me. If I want a boat I will try to construct it out of trees, and if I want to fly, I will put together a chariot to do it for me. Probably I have been very silly in refusing to take advantage of Your kind offer, but I have done my very best to think it over carefully, and now hope that the feeble decisions of this small innocent will find favour with Yourself.”

‘“Well done,” exclaimed the Creator in delighted tones. “Here, all you embryos, come here with your beaks and what-nots to look upon Our first Man. He is the only one who has guessed Our riddle, out of all of you, and We have great pleasure in conferring upon him the Order of Dominion over the Fowls of the Air, and the Beasts of the Earth, and the Fishes of the Sea. Now let the rest of you get along, and love and multiply, for it is time to knock off for the week-end. As for you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo till they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally undeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man, but partly hopeful. Run along then, and do your best. And listen, Man, before you go …”

‘“Well?” asked Adam, turning back from his dismissal.

‘“We were only going to say,” said God shyly, twisting His hands together. “Well, We were just going to say, God bless you.”’

‘It’s a good story,’ said the Wart doubtfully. ‘I like it better than Merlyn’s one about the Rabbi. And it is interesting, too.’

The badger was covered with confusion.

‘No, no, dear boy. You exaggerate. A minor parable at most. Besides, I fear it is a trifle optimistic.’

‘How?’

‘Well, it is true that man has the Order of Dominion and is the mightiest of the animals – if you mean the most terrible one – but I have sometimes doubted lately whether he is the most blessed.’

‘I don’t think Sir Ector is very terrible.’

‘All the same, if even Sir Ector was to go for a walk beside a river, not only would the birds fly from him and the beasts run away from him, but the very fish would dart to the other side. They don’t do this for each other.’

‘Man is the king of the animals.’

‘Perhaps. Or ought one to say the tyrant? And then again we do have to admit that he has a quantity of vices.’

‘King Pellinore has not got many.’

‘He would go to war, if King Uther declared one. Do you know that Homo sapiens is almost the only animal which wages war?’

‘Ants do.’

‘Don’t say “Ants do” in that sweeping way, dear boy. There are more than four thousand different sorts of them, and from all those kinds I can only think of five which are belligerent. There are the five ants, one termite that I know of, and Man.’

‘But the packs of wolves from the Forest Sauvage attack our flocks of sheep every winter.’

‘Wolves and sheep belong to different species, my friend. True warfare is what happens between bands of the same species. Out of the hundreds of thousands of species, I can only think of seven which are belligerent. Even Man has a few varieties like the Esquimaux and the Gypsies and the Lapps and certain Nomads in Arabia, who do not do it, because they do not claim boundaries. True warfare is rarer in Nature than cannibalism. Don’t you think that is a little unfortunate?’

‘Personally,’ said the Wart. ‘I should have liked to go to war, if I could have been made a knight. I should have liked the banners and the trumpets, the flashing armour and the glorious charges. And oh, I should have liked to do great deeds, and be brave, and conquer my own fears. Don’t you have courage in warfare, Badger, and endurance, and comrades whom you love?’

The learned animal thought for a long time, gazing into the fire.

In the end, he seemed to change the subject.

‘Which did you like best,’ he asked, ‘the ants or the wild geese?’