The sword in the stone (30 page)

She was a conqueror.

Archimedes kissed her tenderly. He was not overawed by her, but saluted her almost with pity, as if he were a man of the world visiting his sister, a nun who did not understand how to get on in his world, or perhaps a prosperous banker who had always tried to be reasonably decent, meeting the man whose destiny it was to be nailed up and left to die of sunstroke, agony and exhaustion, in order to save the prosperous bankers.

Even Archimedes did not understand her.

She knew this.

"Hail, mother," said Archimedes. "I have brought you a young human, who is to learn things, by decree."

When the Wart came to think about it afterwards, he realized that he had not only never seen the goddess but that he had also never heard her speak. The owl spoke, and he spoke; but the words of Athene did not come out of a mouth.

"This part," said Archimedes with a sort of purr, "is at the rate of thirty years in a minute. It is one of our owl's dreams, you know, such as we gain our wisdom from in the sighing of the night."

Athene did not speak, but she held the Wart in the hollow of her kind hand, and he knew that he was to look in front of him.

He saw the world with his own eyes now, no longer using the strange spectrum which he had experienced since he came out with Archimedes, and no doubt this was done in order to make things easier for him. They needed to be made easier, for it was now his business to watch a world in which a year passed in two seconds. It was a world of trees.

"We dream of this," explained Archimedes, "when we perch on a tree in the winds of winter, or sleep in its hollow in the rains of spring." Sometimes nowadays you can see a cinema film of a flower, for instance, in which one exposure has been taken every hour. In it you see the petals expand and throb open or shut for day or night, until the whole story is over and the seeds have been thrown out upon the wind. There was a woodland now in front of the Wart, and in it an oak sapling which grew, flourished and shed its leaves into nakedness, all in the time during which you could slowly count three. A whole year had passed in that time, with all its human joys and sorrows.

"This," said Athene, or at any rate it is what she seemed to be saying, in the most glorious of voices, "is called the Dream of the Trees." People don't think of trees as alive. We never see them moving unless the wind disturbs them, and then it is not their movement but the wind's. The Wart saw now that trees are living, and do move. He saw all that forest, like seaweed on the ocean's floor, how the branches rose and groped about and waved, how they panted forth their leaves like breathing (and indeed they were breathing) and, what is still more extraordinary, how they talked.

If you should be at a cinema when the talking apparatus breaks down, you may have the experience of hearing it start again too slowly. Then you will hear the words which would be real words at a proper speed now droning out unintelligibly in long roars and sighs, which give no meaning to the human brain. The same thing happens with a gramophone whose disc is not revolving fast.

So it is with humans. We cannot hear the trees talking, except as a vague noise of roaring and hushing which we attribute to the wind in the leaves, because they talk too slowly for us. These noises are really the syllables and vowels of the trees.

"You may speak for yourselves," said Athene.

Oak spoke first, as became the noblest of all. He stood throbbing his leaves in the twilight, to which Time had mixed down day and night; stretching out his great muscular branches; yawning, as it were, like a noble giant of the earth who cracks his limbs in the morning when he wakes.

"Ah," said the oak. "It's good to be alive. Look at my biceps, will you?

Do you see how the other trees are afraid of Gravity, afraid that he will break their branches off? They point them up in the air, or down at the ground, so as to give the old earth-giant his least purchase upon them. Now I am ready to challenge Gravity, and I can stretch my branches straight out in a line parallel to the earth. He may swing on them for all I care, but, bless you, they won't break. Do you know how long I live? A thousand years is my expectation. Three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live, and three hundred years to die. And when I am dead, what of that? They make me into timber, into ships and house beams that will be good for another thousand. My leaves come the last and go the last. I am a conservative, I am; and out of my apples they make ink, whose words may live as long as me, even as me, the oak." Ash said softly, "I am the Venus of the forest. I am pliable."

"My dear Madam," said a rather society box, in smirking, urban, scholastic, eighteenth-century accents, "a decoction of boxwood promotes the growth of hair, while an oil distilled from its shavings is a cure for haemorrhoids, toothache, epilepsy, and stomach worms. So, at least, we are told."

"If it comes to being sarcastic," replied a homely hazel, who was a good fellow at heart, although he was inclined to snap, "may I mention that hazel chips will clear turbid wine in twenty-four hours, and twigs of hazel twisted together will serve for yeast in brewing? You may be a sort of Lord Chesterfield, but at least you will have to yield to me in the matter of genteel tipsyfication practiced by the elegant gentlemen of your century."

"As far as drink goes," said an impossible female ivy, who was always clinging to her husband, putting her oar in, and making his life a misery,

"ground ivy is used for clarifying beer."

She simpered when she said the word "beer" in the most unpleasant way. She was a sour creature in any light.

"I don't know why we are talking about drink," said a dignified beech. "But if we are talking about it I may as well mention that Virgil's drinking bowl, divini opus Alcimedontis, was turned out of my wood."

"Great men," remarked a close-grained svelte lime, "are always going back to the trees. Grindling Gibbons would never carve his nets and baskets out of anything but me."

"And Salvator Rosa," said a chestnut, "was always painting me."

"Corot," said a willow sighing, "was fond of me."

"How your humans do spin about," remarked a crafty elm coldly.

"What a speed they live at. It is rather good sport trying to spot them, and then to drop an old bough on their heads if you can get them directly underneath. But of course you have to stand very stiff and give no signs of dropping it till the actual moment. The cream of the joke is that they make the coffins out of me afterwards."

"You always were a treacherous fellow," replied an old yew. "What's the point of it? Surely it's better to help than to hinder? Now Oak here, and a few others of us, we take pride in keeping faith. We like to be steadfast. Everybody prizes me because, like Alder, I scorn to rot in water. My gateposts are more durable than iron, for they do not even rust."

"Yes," chimed in some cypresses, sycamores and others. "Live and let live, that's the best motto. We and our sisters are always pleased to see the grass growing under our shade."

"On the contrary," said a fir who always killed the grass beneath him, and a nervous aspen joined in, "kill or be killed, that's the way to get on."

"But please don't talk of killing," added the aspen. "The cross was made out of me, and I have trembled ever since. I only kill, you know, because I am frightened. It is a terrible thing always to be afraid." A cedar decided to cheer her up. "Oh, come," he remarked, twinkling his dusky spines. "What's the point of all this argument and boasting about your powers? It seems to me that you all take life too seriously. Look at my old friend Sequoia here, who has had the humorous idea of constructing himself a very hard-looking bark out of soft blotting-paper, so that you can punch him without hurting yourself. If it comes to that, look at me. What is my mission in life? You may think it a humble one, considering my size, but I find it amusing. I am antipathetic to fleas."

All the trees laughed at this — it resulted in a splendid summer that year — and decided to go on with their dance. It was a sort of Indian dance, in which they moved their bodies but not their feet, and a very graceful one it was. The Wart watched while the whole troop of them rippled their twigs like serpents, or made slow ritual gestures about their heads and bodies with the larger boughs. He saw how they grew big and lusty in their dancing, how they threw their arms out towards heaven in an ecstasy of being alive. The younger trees tired first. The little fruit trees stopped waving, hung their weary heads for a moment, then fell down on the ground. The big ones moved more slowly, faltered and fell one by one; till only Oak was left. He stood with his chin sunk upon his chest, kept upright by his mighty will, thinking of the lovely dance which now was over. He sighed and looked upwards to Athene, stretched out his bare arms sorrowfully to her, to ask her why, and then he also fell on sleep.

"The next dream," said Athene, "is called the Dream of the Stones."

"It is the last dream she will give you," added Archimedes, and this one goes at two million years a second. You will have to keep your eyes skinned."

Wart saw a darkness in front of him, with lights in it. The dark was so dark that it was like lampblack, and the lights so light that the coldest blue fire of diamonds could not touch them. The harsh contrast between them made his eyes ache. He was looking at Sirius, actually, just as he had been looking at him a few hours before, but it took him quite a time before he realized that he was looking at a star at all. There was none of the mellow velvet which he had been accustomed to see through the earth's atmosphere, but only this fierce emptiness of black and white, and, besides this fact, the constellations were in different positions. It was a few thousand million years ago and all the shapes of the evening have altered since then.

The nearest star, which looked the biggest for that reason, burned with a roar of terrible gases, and another star was coming towards it. You could see them surging on their endless paths into eternity, marking their aimed but aimless courses across the universe with straight lines of remembered fire — like the meteors with which the Creator sometimes stitches together the weak seams of our dome, the bright darning-needles suddenly darted in and out of the velvet by a finger on the other side. As the two stars came closer together a huge mountain of flame was dragged out by attraction from each. When they were at their closest point the top of this mountain broke off from the smaller star and streamed through the emptiness towards the bigger. Some of it reached its destination; but the bigger star was proceeding quickly on its way, and some of it was left behind. This part hung in space, lost to both its parent and its seducer, a whirling cigar of fire. Its mists of flame began to crystallize as they cooled, to turn into drops, as water does when it is cooled from steam. The drops took up a circular path of their own, spinning round the star from which they had been dragged.

The Wart found himself closer to the third drop. Its haze of incandescent worms crawled in and out of it, formed into funnels and whirlpools, crept over its round surface, sometimes leaped out into space, curled over, and rained back. They were flames. The light died down from far beyond white to blue, to red, to a dim brown. It became a ball of steam. Out of this steam a smaller ball shot out. The first ball shrank and was a globe of boiling water.

The water began to cool but the fires still burned inside it. They convulsed the surface of the water, threw up great continents and islands of the interior rock. The centuries were passing so quickly that even these continents seemed to bubble like porridge, as the volcanoes and mountains and earthquakes came and went. The unbridled furnace within was still unstable, and, till quite late in the dream, the globe did not always spin on the same axis, but lurched over sideways as some stress gave way inside. The lurches destroyed continents and made more.

The Wart found himself closer still. He was actually on the globe and facing an enormous cliff. At two million years a second, the cliff's mountain moved. It was alive as the trees had been, and roared most dreadfully. It fell, it folded on itself, it shoved itself along the surface of the globe, pushing a bow wave of its own folds for miles. Its great rock split and powdered, pouring stone torrents into the heaving sea. The sea itself grew tired of the mountain, made it to sink down and to be covered. Another convulsion threw up the remains again, streaming.

Round the foot of the chastened mountain there lay its powder and its pebbles, great rocks worn smooth by the sea. The rocks themselves broke and were scattered, the sea always rolling and rolling them together between its hands until the tiny fragments were often as round as their mother had been, the globe.