The Once and Future King

Chapter XVII

He was watching them with the feather in his hand. He held it out unconsciously, his fragment of beauty. He kept them off with it, as if it were a weapon to hold them back.

‘I am not going,’ he said. ‘You must find another ox to draw for you. Why have you brought me away? Why should I die for man when you speak of him contemptuously yourselves? For it would be death. It is all too true that people are ferocious and stupid. They have given me every sorrow but death. Do you suppose that they will listen to wisdom, that the dullard will understand and throw down his arms? No, he will kill me for it: kill me as the ants would have killed an albino.

‘And Merlyn,’ he cried, ‘I am afraid to die, because I have never had a chance to live! I never had a life of my own, nor time for beauty, and I had just begun to find it. You show me beauty, and snatch it from me. You move me like a piece at chess. Have you the right to take my soul and twist it into shapes, to rob a mind of its mind?

‘Oh, animals, I have failed you, I know. I have betrayed your trust. But I cannot face the collar again, because you have driven me into it too long. Why should I leave Lyó-lyok? I was never clever, but I was patient, and even patience goes. Nobody can bear it all his life.’

They did not dare to answer, could think of nothing to say.

His feeling of guilt and of love frustrated had made him wretched, so that now he had to rage in self-defence.

‘Yes, you are clever. You know the long words and how to juggle with them. If the sentence is a pretty one, you laugh and make it. But these are human souls you are cackling about, and it is my soul, the only one I have, which you have put in the index. And Lyó-lyok had a soul. Who made you into gods to meddle with destiny, or set you over hearts to bid them come and go? I will do this filthy work no longer; I will trouble with your filthy plans no further; I will go away into some quiet place with the goose-people, where I can die in peace.’

His voice broke down into that of an old and miserable beggar, as he threw himself back in the chair, covering his eyes with his hands.

The urchin was found to be standing in the middle of the floor. With his little, purplish fingers clenched into tight fists, with a truculent nose questing for opposition, breathing heavily, bristling with dead twigs, small, indignant, vulgar and flea-bitten, the hedgehog confronted the committee and faced them down.

‘Leave off, wullee?’ he demanded. ‘Stand back, carnt ’ee? Give ter lad fair play.’

And he placed his body sturdily between them and his hero, prepared to knock the first man down who interfered.

‘Ar,’ he said sarcastically. ‘A fine parcel of bougers, us do say. A fine picking o’ Bumtious Pilates, for to depose of Man. Gibble-gabble, gibble-gabble. But ding the mun as stirs is finger or us busts un’s bloudie neck.’

Merlyn protested miserably: ‘Nobody would have wished him to do anything that he did not want …’

The hedgehog walked up to him, put his twitching nose to within an inch of the magician’s spectacles, so that he drew back in alarm, and blew in his face.

‘Ar,’ he said. ‘Nobody wished nuthink never. Excepting for to remember as ’ee mighter wished suthink for ’isself.’

Then he returned to the broken-hearted king, halting at a distance with tact and dignity, because of his fleas.

‘Nay, Mëaster,’ he said. ‘Tha hast been within too long. Let thee come art along of a nugly hurchin, that tha mayest sniff God’s air to thy nostrils, an lay thy head to the boozum o’ the earth.

‘Tëak no thought fer them bougers,’ he continued. ‘Lave ’un fer to argyfy theirselves inter the hy-stericks, that’ull plaze ’un. Let thee smell a peck of air wi’ ter humble mun, an have thy pleasure of the sky.’

Arthur held out his hand for the urchin’s, who gave it reluctantly, after wiping it on the prickles of his back.

‘He’m verminous,’ he explained regretfully, ‘but he’m honest.’

They went together to the door, where the hedgehog, turning round, surveyed the field.

‘Orryvoyer,’ he observed good-humouredly, regarding the committee with ineffable contempt. ‘Mind yer doant destroy ter universt afore as we comes back. No creating of another, mind.’

And he bowed sarcastically to the stricken Merlyn.

‘God ter Father.’

To the wretched Archimedes, who elongated himself, closed his eyes, and looked the other way.

‘God ter Son.’

To the imploring badger.

‘And God ter Holy Post.’