The sword in the stone (17 page)

"Come on," said the Wart. "Merlyn told me to tell you that there was something along here that was specially for you."

"What sort of thing?'' asked Kay.

"An adventure."

"How do we get to it?"

"We ought to follow along the line which this strip makes, and I suppose that would take us into the forest. We should have to keep the sun just there on our left, but allow for its moving."

"All right," said Kay. "What is the adventure?"

"I don't know."

They went along the strip, and followed its imaginary line over the park and over the chase, keeping their eyes skinned all the time for some miraculous happening. They wondered whether half a dozen young pheasants they started had anything curious about them, and Kay was ready to swear that one of them was white. If it had been white, and if a black eagle had suddenly swooped down upon it from the sky, they would have known quite well that wonders were afoot, and that all they had to do was to follow the pheasant — or the eagle — until they reached the maiden in the enchanted castle. However, the pheasant was not white and no eagle appeared.

At the edge of the forest Kay said, "I suppose we shall have to go into this?"

"Merlyn said to follow the line."

"Well," said Kay, "I'm not afraid. If the adventure was specially for me, it's bound to be a jolly good one."

They went in, and were surprised to find that the going was not bad at all. It was about the same as a big wood might be nowadays, whereas the common forest of those tunes was much more like a jungle on the Amazon. There were no pheasant-shooting proprietors then, to see that the undergrowth was thinned, and not one thousandth part of the number of the present-day timber merchants who prune away judiciously at the few remaining woods. The most of the Forest Sauvage was almost impenetrable, an enormous barrier of eternal trees, the dead ones fallen against the live and held to them by ivy, the living struggling up in competition with each other towards the sun which gave them life, the floor boggy through lack of drainage, or tindery from old wood so that you might suddenly tumble through a decayed tree trunk into an ant's nest, or laced with brambles and bindweed and honeysuckle and convolvulus and teazles and the stuff which country people call sweethearts, until you would be torn to pieces in three yards.

This part was good. Hob's line pointed down what seemed to be a succession of glades, shady and murmuring places in which the wild thyme was droning with bees. The insect season was past its peak, for it was really the time for wasps on fruit, but there were many fritillaries still, with tortoise-shells and red admirals on the flowering mint. Wart pulled a leaf of this, and munched it like chewing-gum as they walked.

"It's queer," he said, "but there have been people here. Look, there is a hoof-mark, and it was shod."

"You don't see much," said Kay, "for there is a man." Sure enough, there was a man at the end of the next glade, sitting with a wood-ax by the side of a tree which he had felled. He was a queer-looking, tiny man, with a hunchback and a face like mahogany, and he was dressed in numerous pieces of old leather which he had secured about his brawny legs and arms with pieces of cord. He was eating a hunch of bread and cheese with a knife which years of sharpening had worn into a mere streak, leaning his back against one of the highest trees that they had ever seen. The white flakes of wood lay all about him. The dressed stump of the felled tree looked very new. His eyes were bright like a fox's.

"I expect he will be the adventure," whispered Wart.

"Pooh," said Kay, "you have knights-in-armor, or dragons or things like that in an adventure, not dirty old men cutting wood."

"Well, I'm going to ask him what happens along here, anyway." They went up to the small munching woodman, who did not seem to have seen them, and asked him where the glades were leading to. They asked two or three times before they discovered that the poor fellow was either deaf or mad, or both. He neither answered nor moved.

"Oh, come on," said Kay. "He's probably loopy like Wat, and doesn't know what he is at. Let's go on and leave the old fool." They went on for nearly a mile, and still the going was good. There were no paths exactly, and the glades were not continuous. Anybody who came there by chance would have thought that there was just the one glade which he was in, a couple of hundred yards long, unless he went to the end of it and discovered another one, screened by a few trees. Now and then they found a cut stump with the marks of the ax on it, but mostly these had been carefully covered over with brambles or altogether grubbed up. The Wart considered that the glades must have been made. Kay caught the Wart by the arm, at the edge of a clearing, and pointed silently towards its further end. There was a grassy bank there, swelling up gently towards a gigantic sycamore, upwards of ninety feet high, which stood upon its top. On the bank there was an equally gigantic man lying at his ease, with a dog beside him. This man was as notable as the sycamore, for he stood or lay seven feet without his shoes, and he was dressed in nothing but a kind of kilt made of Lincoln green worsted. He had a leather bracer on his left forearm. His enormous brown chest supported the dog's head — it had pricked its ears and was watching the boys, but made no other movement — which the muscles gently lifted as they rose and fell. The man appeared to be fast asleep. There was a seven-foot bow beside him, with some arrows more than a clothyard long. He, like the woodman, was the color of mahogany, and the curled hairs on his chest made a golden haze where the sun caught them.

"He's it," whispered Kay excitedly.

They went up to the man cautiously, for fear of the dog; but the dog only followed them with its eyes, keeping its chin pressed firmly to the chest of its beloved master, and giving them the least suspicion of a wag from its tail. It moved its tail without lifting it, two inches in the grass. The man opened his eyes — obviously he had not been asleep at all — smiled at the boys, and jerked his thumb in a direction which pointed further up the glade. Then he stopped smiling and shut his eyes.

"Excuse me," said Kay, "what happens up there?" The man made no answer and kept his eyes closed, but he lifted his hand again and pointed onwards with his thumb.

"He means us to go on," said Kay.

"It certainly is an adventure," said the Wart. "I wonder if that dumb woodman could have climbed up the big tree he was leaning against and sent a message to this tree that we were coming? He certainly seems to have been expecting us."

At this the naked giant opened one eye and looked at Wart in some surprise. Then he opened both eyes, laughed all over his big twinkling face, sat up, patted the dog, picked up his bow, and rose to his feet.

"Very well, then, young measters," he said, still laughing. "Us will come along with 'ee arter all. Young heads still meake the sharpest, they do say."

Kay looked at him in blank surprise. "Who are you?" he asked.

"Naylor," said the giant, "John Naylor in the wide world it were, till us come to be a man of the 'ood, Then 'twere John Little for some time, in the 'ood like, but mostly folk puts it backward now, and calls us Little John."

"Oh!" cried the Wart in delight. "I've heard of you, often, when they tell stories in the evening, of you and Robin Hood."

"Not Hood," said Little John reprovingly. "That bain't the way to name 'un, measter, not in the 'ood."

"But it's Robin Hood in the stories," said Kay.

"Ah, them book-learning chaps. They don't know all. How'm ever, 'tis time us be stepping along."

They fell in on either side of the enormous happy man, and had to run one step in three to keep up with him, for, although he talked very slowly, he walked on his bare feet very fast. The dog trotted at heel.

"Please," asked the Wart, "where are you taking us?"

"Why, to Robin 'ood, seemingly. Ant you sharp enough to guess that also, Measter Art?"

The giant gave him a sly peep out of the corner of his eye at this, for he knew quite well that he had set the boys two problems at once — first, what was Robin's real name, and second, how did he come to know the Wart's?

The Wart fixed on the second question first.

"How did you know my name?"

"Ah," said Little John. "Us knowed."

"Does Robin 'ood know we are coming?"

"Nay, my duck, a young scholard like thee should speak his name scholarly."

"Well, what is his name?" cried the Wart, between exasperation and being out of breath from running to keep up. "You said 'ood."

"So it is 'ood, my duck. Robin 'ood, like the 'oods you'm running through. And a grand fine name it is."

"Robin Wood!"

"Aye, Robin 'ood. What else should un be, seeing as he loves 'em. They'm free pleaces, the 'oods, and fine pleaces. Let thee sleep in 'em, come summer, come winter, withouten brick nor thatch; and hunt in 'em for thy commons lest thee starve; and smell to 'em with the good earth in the springtime; and number of 'em as they brings forward their comely bright leaves, according to order, or loses of 'em by the same order backwards: let thee stand in 'em that thou be'st not seen, and move in

'em that thou be'st not heard, and warm thee with 'em in the golden light of their timbers as thou fall'st on sleep — ah, they'm proper fine pleaces, the 'oods, for a free man of hands and heart."

Kay said, "But I thought all Robin Wood's men wore hose and jerkins of Lincoln green?"

"That us do," replied Little John. "In the winter like, when us needs

'em, or with leather leggings at 'ood 'ork: but here by summer 'tis more seasonable thus for the pickets, who have nought to do save watch."

"Were you a sentry then?"

"Aye, and so were wold Much, as you spoke to by the felled tree."

"And I think," exclaimed Kay triumphantly, "that this next big tree which we are coming to will be the stronghold of Robin Wood!" They were indeed approaching the monarch of the forest. It was a lime tree as great as that which used to grow at Moor Park in Herefordshire, no less than one hundred feet in height and seventeen feet in girth, a yard above the ground. Its smooth beech-like trunk was embellished with a sort of beard of little twigs at the bottom, and, where each of the great branches had sprung from the trunk, the bark had split and was now discolored with rain water or sap. The bees zoomed among its bright and sticky leaves, higher and higher towards heaven, and a rope ladder disappeared among the foliage. Nobody could have climbed that tree without a ladder, even with irons.

"You think well, Measter Kay," said Little John. "And there be Measter Robin, a-dallying atween her roots."

The boys, who had been more interested in the look-out man perched in a crow's nest at the very top of that swaying and whispering glory of the earth, lowered their eyes at once and clapped them upon Robin Wood.

He was not, as they had expected, a romantic man — or not at first. Nearly as tall as Little John — these two, of course, were the only people in the world who have ever shot an arrow the distance of a mile, with the English longbow — or at any rate more than six feet high, he was a sinewy fellow whose body did not carry an ounce of fat. He was not half-naked, like John, but clad discreetly in faded green with a silvery bugle at his side. He was clean-shaven, sunburned, nervous, gnarled like the roots of the trees which he loved; but gnarled and mature with weather and with poetry rather than with age, for he was about thirty years old. (Eventually he lived to be eighty-seven, and attributed his Iong life to smelling the turpentine in the pines.) At the moment he was lying flat on his back and looking upwards, but not into the sky.

It had been beautiful to see little leather-clad Much sitting complacently at his dinner, more beautiful to see the great limbs of Little John sprawling in company with his dog. But now there was something which was most beautiful of all, for Robin Wood lay happily with his head in Marian's lap. She sat between the roots of the lime tree, clad in a one-piece smock of green girded in with a quiver of arrows, and her feet and arms were bare. She had let down the brown shining waterfall of her hair, which was usually kept braided in pig-tails for convenience in hunting and cookery, and with the falling waves of this she framed his up-looking head. She was singing a duet with him softly, and tickling the end of his nose with the finest hairs. Nobody nowadays could write the song which they were singing:

"Under the greenwood tree," sang Maid Marian,

"Who loves to lie with me,

And tune his merry note

Unto the sweet bird's throat,"

"Come hither, come hither, come hither," sang Robin.

"Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather."

They laughed happily and began again, singing lines alternately: