The Once and Future King

Chapter XI

T. natrix spoke up suddenly.

‘You humans,’ he said, ‘have no idea of the eternity which you prattle about, with your souls and purgatories and so on. If any of you really did believe in Eternity, or even in very long stretches of Time, you would think twice about equality. I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable in the long past, has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe. If we had all been equal, all one sort of creature, we should have begged for euthanasia long ago. Fortunately there is no such thing in nature as equality of ability, merit, opportunity, or reward. Every species of animal which is still alive – we leave aside the things like ants – is intensely individualistic, thanks be to God. Otherwise we should die of boredom, or become automatons. Even sticklebacks, which, on a first inspection, you would think were pretty much the same as one another: even sticklebacks have geniuses and dunces, all competing for the morsel of food, and it is the geniuses who get it. There was a man who always fed his sticklebacks by putting a glass jar into the aquarium, with the food inside it. Some of them found the way in after three or four attempts, and remembered it, while others, so far as I know or care, are trying still. If this were not so, Eternity would be too terrible to contemplate, because it would be devoid of difference, and therefore change.’

‘None of this is in order. We are supposed to be considering war.’

‘Very well.’

‘King,’ asked the magician, ‘can you face the geese yet, or do you want a rest?’

‘It is impossible,’ he added in parentheses, ‘to consider the subject sensibly, until he has the facts.’

The old man said: ‘I think I must rest. I am not so young as I was, in spite of your massage, and you have been asking me to learn a great many things, in little time. Can you spare a few short minutes?’

‘Certainly. The nights are long. Urchin, dip this handkerchief in vinegar and put it on his head. There, put your feet on a chair and close your eyes. Now then, everybody is to keep quite quiet and give him air.’

So the animals sat as still as mice, nudging each other when they coughed, and the king, with closed eyes and a sense of thankfulness, slipped into his own thoughts.

For they had been pressing him hard. It was difficult to learn it in one night, and he was only human, as well as old.

Perhaps, after all, the careworn person who had been brought from the tent at Salisbury ought never to have been Merlyn’s choice. He had been an undistinguished child, although he had been a loving one, and he was far from being a genius still. Perhaps, after all, the whole of our long story has been about a rather dim old gentleman, who would have been better off at Cranford or at Badger’s Green, arranging for the village cricket and the choir treat.

There was a thing which he had been wanting to think about. His face, with the hooded eyes, ceased to be like the boy’s of long ago. He looked tired, and was the king: which made the others watch him seriously, with fear and sorrow.

They were good and kind, he knew. They were people whose respect he valued. But their problem was not the human one. It was well for them, who had solved their social questions before his men were ever on the earth, to consider wisely in their happy College of Life. Their benevolence, with wine and firelight and security towards each other, was easier for them than his sad work for him, their tool.

The old king’s eyes being shut, he slid back into the real world from which he had come, his wife abducted, his best friend banished, his nephews slain, his son at his throat. The worst was the impersonal: that all his fellow beings were in it. It was true indeed that man was ferocious, as the animals had said. They could say it abstractly, even with a certain dialectic glee, but for him it was the concrete: it was for him to live among yahoos in flesh and blood. He was one of them himself, cruel and silly like them, and bound to them by the strange continuum of human consciousness. He was an Englishman, and England was at war. However much he hated it, or willed to stop it, he was lapped round in a real but intangible sea of English feeling which he could not control. To go against it, to wrestle with the sea, was more than he could face again.

And he had been working all his life. He knew he was not a clever man. Goaded by the conscience of that old scientist who had fastened on his soul in youth, hag-ridden and devoured, burdened like Sinbad, stolen away from himself and claimed remorselessly for abstract service, he had toiled for Gramarye since before he could remember. He had not even understood the whole of what he was doing, a beast of burden tugging at the traces. And always, he now saw, Merlyn had been behind him – that very ruthless old believer – and man in front: ferocious, stupid, unpolitical.

They wanted him, he now saw, to go back to the labour: to do it worse, and more. Just when he had given up, just when he had been weeping and defeated, just when the old ox had dropped in the traces, they had come again to prick him to his feet. They had come to teach a further lesson, and to send him on.

But he had never had a happiness of his own, never had himself: never since he was a little boy in the Forest Sauvage. It was not fair to steal away everything from him. They had made him like the blinded gold-finch they were speaking of, which was to pour out its song for man until it burst its heart, but always blind.

He felt, now that they had made him younger, the intense beauty of the world which they denied him. He wanted to have some life; to lie upon the earth, and smell it: to look up into the sky like anthropos, and lose himself in clouds. He knew suddenly that nobody, living upon the remotest, most barren crag in the ocean, could complain of a dull landscape so long as he would lift his eyes. In the sky there was a new landscape every minute, in every pool of the sea rocks, a new world. He wanted time off, to live. He did not want to be sent back to pull, with lowered eyes, at the weary yoke. He was not quite old even now. Perhaps he would be able to live for another ten years – but years in the sunlight, years without loads, years with the birds singing as they did sing still, no doubt, although he had ceased to notice them until the animals reminded him.

Why must he go back to Homo ferox, probably to be killed by those he was trying to help, certainly, if not, to die in harness, when he could abdicate the labour? He could walk out now, straight from the tumulus, and be seen no more. The monks of the Thebaiad, the early saints on Skellig Michael: these fortunate people had escaped from man, into a nature which was surrounded by peace. And that was what he wanted, he discovered, more than anything else – only Peace. Earlier in the evening he had wanted death, and had been ready to accept it: but now they had given him a glimpse of life, of the old happiness and of the things he had loved. They had revived, how cruelly, his boyhood. He wanted to be let alone, to be off duty like a boy, to retire perhaps into a cloister, to have tranquillity for his own old heart.

But they woke him with words, their cruel, bright weapons.

‘Now then, king. We must see to these geese, or the night will be over.’

‘Do you feel better?’

‘Has anybody seen the cantrip?’

‘You are looking tired.’

‘Have a sip of wine before you go.’