The Once and Future King

Chapter VI

The new Arthur, the oiled bolt, was cosseted back to good humour; but he immediately committed the blunder of opening 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 important, 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 shown in man.’

‘Surely,’ asked the King, ‘man must have some respectable 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, exist to a respectable extent between Homo ferox and his hounds in certain cases. But it also exists among the ants, so 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.’

They sat down again, while the king congratulated himself on having something nice in his heart at any rate. Cavall 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, instinctively.’

‘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 meet them tonight. Of course it will be only one kind of ant, out of many hundreds, but it is a kind which we want you to 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 windows, and seeing that all the hangings of the room were red. This raised a merry Victorian guffaw at the expense of medieval 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 Condescension 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 conjecture 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, producing 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 uoht, Tna eht ot og, and Merlyn said it was the one they wanted.

So a couple of ants’ nests were fetched from the meat-safe, where they stood supported in saucers of water. They were placed on a table in the middle of the room, while the animals 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.