The Once and Future King

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 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 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.’

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.’

‘Have they?’

‘Of course they have, and very efficient ones they are. Some 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 creatures 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 interrupted before the king could reply.

‘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 compartment 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 species? 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. Otherwise the dominant individuals will deprive their comrades of food, even compelling them to regurgitate it, and the comrades 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.’

He had no sooner said it than his hands unfolded themselves like lightning, and the fist of one flashed into the palm of the 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 specialization 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 realize,’ 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 last is a crumb of truth on a pair of human lips! Nunc dimittis!^*’

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

‘The cheek of the human race,’ he exclaimed, ‘is something 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 sapiens, 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 everything 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 combustion engine has evolved, but not he. Look at him sniggering at his own progenitors, let alone the other types of 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 twentieth 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 1100 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?’