Once & Future King 05 - The Book of Merlyn (9 page)

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 not 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 bea'sts." 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 S.S.R."

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 ants exist for the sake of the state or 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 organised 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 fegalite Fallacy, which is abhorrent to nature. Human beings are nornore equal in theiFmerifs 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."

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 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 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 tike 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

98 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 the 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 Homoferox, 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 SkelHg 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 tranquility for his own old heart.