The Once and Future King

Chapter X

‘Dear God,’ said Merlyn, who was patting the beads of sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief, ‘you certainly have a flair for getting into trouble. That was a difficult minute.’

The animals looked at him anxiously, to see if any bones were broken.

‘Are you safe?’

‘Perfectly.’

They discovered that he was furiously angry. His hands were trembling with rage.

‘The brutes!’ he exclaimed. ‘The brutes!’

‘They are not attractive.’

‘I would not have minded,’ he burst out, ‘if they had been wicked – if they had wanted to be wicked. I would not have minded if they had chosen to be wicked for some reason, or for fun. But they did not know, they had not chosen. They – they – they did not exist!’

‘Sit down,’ said the badger, ‘and have some rest.’

‘The horrible creatures! It was like talking to minerals which could move, like talking to statues or to machines. If you said something which was suitable to the mechanism, then it worked: if not, it did not work, it stood still, it was blank, it had no expression. Oh, Merlyn, how hideous! They were the walking dead. When did they die? Did they ever have any feelings? They have none now. They were like that door in the fairy story, which opened when you said Sesame. I believe that they only knew about a dozen words, or collections of words. A man with those in his mind could have made them do all the things they could do, and then … Then you would have had to start again! Again and again and again! It was like being in Hell. Except that none of them knew they were there. None of them knew anything. Is there anything more terrible than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing, without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change, without an end?’

‘Ants are Perpetual Motion,’ said Merlyn, ‘I suppose. I never thought of that.’

‘The most dreadful thing about them was that they were like human beings – not human, but like humans, a bad copy.’

‘There is nothing surprising in that. The ants adopted the line of politics which man is flirting with at present, in the infinite past. They perfected it thirty million years ago, so that no further development was possible, and, since then, they have been stationary. Evolution ended with the ants some 30,000,000 years before the birth of Christ. They are the perfect communist state.’

Here Merlyn raised his eyes devoutly to the ceiling, and remarked: ‘My old friend Marx may have been a first-rate economist; but, Holy Ghost, he was a by-our-lady rotten hand at natural history.’

Badger, who always took the kindly view of everybody, even of Karl Marx, whose arrangement of his materials was about as lucid as the badger’s, by the way, said: ‘Surely that is hardly fair to actual communism? I would have thought that ants were more like Mordred’s fascists than John Ball’s communists …’

‘The one is a stage of the other. In perfection they are the same.’

‘But in a proper communist world …’

‘Give the king some wine,’ said Merlyn. ‘Urchin, what on earth are you thinking about?’

The hedgehog scuttled off for the decanter, and brought it with a glass. He thrust a moist nose against the king’s ear, breathed heavily into it with a breath that smelt of onions, and whispered hoarsely: ‘Us wor a watchin of ’ee, us wor. Trust tiggy. Tha woulder beat ’em, tha ’ood. Mollocky beästs.’ Here he nodded his head repeatedly, spilled the madeira, and made boxing movements against the air with the decanter in one hand and the glass in the other. ‘Free cheers for his Maggy’s tea, ez wot us says, that’s wot us says. Let un get at ’em, us says, for to lay darn me life with the Shire. And us woulder done, that us ’ood, bim-bam, only for they wouldernt let ’un.’

Badger did not wish to be cheated of his defence. He began again patiently as soon as the king was served.

‘The ants fight wars,’ he said, ‘so they cannot be communists. In a proper communist world there would be no war, because the whole world would be a union. You must not forget that communism has not been properly achieved until all the nations in the world are communistic, and fused together in a Union of socialist soviet republics. Now the ant-hills are not fused with one another into a union, so they are not fully communistic, and that is why they fight.’

‘They are not united,’ said Merlyn crossly, ‘only because the smallness of the ant-hills compared with the bigness of the world, and of the natural obstacles such as rivers and so forth, makes communication impossible for animals of their size and number of fingers. Still, if you like, I will agree that they are perfect Thrashers, prevented from developing into perfect Lollards by geographic and physical features.’

‘You must therefore withdraw your criticism of Karl Marx.’

‘Withdraw my criticism?’ exclaimed the philosopher.

‘Yes; for Marx did solve the king’s puzzle of war, by his Union of SSR.’

Merlyn became blue in the face, bit off a large piece of his beard, pulled out tufts of his hair and threw them in the air, prayed fervently for guidance, sat down beside the badger, and, taking him by the hand, looked beseechingly into his spectacles.

‘But do you not see,’ he asked pathetically, ‘that a union of anything will solve the problem of war? You cannot have war in a union, because there must be a division before you can begin one. There would be no war if the world consisted of a union of mutton chops. But this does not mean that we must all rush off and become a series of mutton chops.’

‘In fact,’ said the badger, after pondering for some time, ‘you are not defining the ants as fascists or communists because they fight wars, but because …’

‘I am lumping all three sects together on their basic assumption, which is, ultimately, to deny the rights of the individual.’

‘I see.’

‘Theirs is the totalitarian theory: that men or ants exist for the sake of the state or world, not vice versa.’

‘And why did you say that Marx was bad at natural history?’

‘The character of my old friend Karl,’ said the magician severely, ‘is outside the province of this committee. Kindly remember that we are not sitting on communism, but on the problem of organized murder. It is only in so far as communism is contingent with war, that we are concerned with him at all. With this proviso I reply to your question as follows: that Marx was a bad naturalist because he committed the gross blunder of over-looking the human skull in the first place, because he never considered the geese, and because he subscribed to the Égalité Fallacy, which is abhorrent to nature. Human beings are no more equal in their merits and abilities, than they are equal in face and stature. You might just as well insist that all the people in the world should wear the same size of boot. This ridiculous idea of equality was adopted by the ants more than 30,000,000 years ago, and, by believing it all that time, they have managed to make it true. Now look what a mess they are in.’

‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity …’ began the badger.

‘Liberty, Brutality and Obscenity,’ rejoined the magician promptly. ‘You should try living in some of the revolutions which use that slogan. First they proclaim it: then they announce that the aristos must be liquidated, on high moral grounds, in order to purge the party or to prune the commune or to make the world safe for democracy; and then they rape and murder everybody they can lay their hands on, more in sorrow than in anger, or crucify them, or torture them in ways which I do not care to mention. You should have tried the Spanish Civil War. Yes, that is the equality of man. Slaughter anybody who is better than you are, and then we shall be equal soon enough. All equally dead.’