The Book of Merlyn / Книга Мерлина (by T. H. White, 1977) - аудиокнига на английском

The Book of Merlyn Incipit Liber Quintus He thought a tittle and said: "I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients. I should prescribe for Mr. Pontifex a course of the larger mammals. Don't let him think he is taking them medicinally" IT WAS NOT the Bishop of Rochester. The king turned his head away from the newcomer, incurious as to his identity. The tears, running down his loose cheeks with their slow plods, made him feel ashamed to be seen: yet he was too vanquished to check them. He turned stubbornly from the light, unable to do more. He had reached the stage at which it was not worthwhile to hide an old man's misery. Merlyn sat down beside him and took the worn hand, which made the tears flow faster. The magician patted the hand, holding it quietly with a thumb on its blue veins, waiting for life to revive. "Merlyn?" asked the king. He did not seem to be surprised. "Are you a dream?" he asked. "Last night I dreamed that Gawaine came to me, with a troupe of fair ladies. He said they were allowed to comewith him, because he had rescued them in his lifetime, and they had come to warn us that we should all be killed tomorrow. Then I had another dream, that I was sitting on a throne strapped to the top of a wheel, and the wheel turned over, and I was thrown into a pit of snakes." "The wheel is come full circle: I am here." "Are you a bad dream?" he asked. "If you are, do not torment me." Merlyn still held the hand. He stroked along the veins, trying to make them sink into the flesh. He soothed the flaky skin and poured life into it with mysterious concentration, encouraging it to resilience. He tried to make the body flexible under his finger-tips, helping the blood to course, putting a bloom and smoothness on the swollen joints, but not speaking. "You are a good dream," said the king. "I hope you will go on dreaming." "I am not a dream at all. I am the man whom you remembered." "Oh, Merlyn, it has been so miserable since you left! Everything which you helped to do was wrong. All your teaching was deception. Nothing was worth doing. You and I will be forgotten, like people who never were." "Forgotten?" asked the magician. He smiled in the candle light, looking round the tent as if to assure himself of its furs and twinkling mail and the tapestries and vellums. "There was a king," he said, "whom Nennius wrote about, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Archdeacon of Oxford was said to have had a hand in him, and even that delightful ass, Gerald the Welshman. Brut, Layamon and the rest of them: what a lot of lies they all managed to tell! Some said that he was a Briton painted blue, some that he was in chain mail to suit the ideas of the Norman romancers. Certain lumbering Germans dressed him up to vie with their tedious Siegfrieds. Others put him into plate, like your friend Thomas of Hutton Coniers, and others again, notably a romantic Elizabethan called Hughes, recognised his extraordinary problem of love. Then there was a blind poet who tried to justify God's ways to man, and he weighed Arthur against Adam, wondering which was more important of the two. At the same time came masters of music like Purcell, and later still such titans as the Romantics, endlessly dreaming about our king. There came men who dressed him in armour like ivy-leaves, and who made all his friends to stand about among ruins with brambles twining round them, or else to swoon backward with a mellow blur kissing them on the lips. Also there was Victoria's lord. Even the most unlikely people meddled with him, people like Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated his history. After a bit there was poor old White, who thought that we represented the ideas of chivalry. He said that our importance lay in our decency, in our resistance against the bloody mind of man. What an anachronist he was, dear fellow! Fancy starting after William the Conqueror, and ending in the Wars of the Roses. Then there were people who turned out the Morte d'Arthur in mystic waves like the wireless, and others in an undiscovered hemisphere who still pretended that Arthur and Merlyn were the natural fathers of themselves in pictures which would move. The Matter of Britain! Certainly we were forgotten, Arthur, if a thousand years and half a thousand, and yet a thousand years again, are to be the measure of forgetfulness." "Who is this Wight?" "A fellow," replied the magician absently. "Just listen, will you, while I recite a piece from Kipling?" And the old gentleman proceeded to intone with passion the famous paragraph out of Pook's Hill: '"I've seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou'-westerly gale, with the spray flying all over the castle, and the Horses of the Hill wild with fright. Out they'd go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they'd be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again It was Magic—Magic as black as Merlin could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hill picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes! That was how it was in the old days!' "There is description for you," he added, when he had finished the piece. "There is prose. No wonder that Dan cried 'Splendid!' at the end of it. And all was written about ourselves or about our friends." "But Master, I do not understand." The magician stood up, looking at his ancient pupil in perplexity. He twisted his beard into several rat tails, put the corners in his mouth, twirled his moustachios, and cracked his finger joints. He was frightened of what he had done to the king, feeling as if he were trying to revive a drowned man with artificial respiration, who was nearly too far gone. But he was not ashamed. When you are a scientist you must press on without remorse, following the only thing of any importance, Truth. Later he asked quietly, as if he were calling somebody who was asleep: "Wart?" There was no reply. "King?" The bitter answer was: "Le roy s'advisera." It was worse than he had feared. He sat down, took the limp hand, and began to wheedle. "One more try," he asked. "We are not quite done." "What is the use of trying?" "It is a thing which people do." "People are dupes, then." The old fellow replied frankly: "People are dupes, and wicked too. That is what makes it interesting to get them better." His victim opened his eyes, but closed them wearily. "The thing which you were thinking about before I came, king, was true. I mean about Homoferox. But hawks are ferae naturae also: that is their interest." The eyes remained closed. "The thing which you were thinking about. about people being machines: that was not true. Or, if it is true, it does not signify. For if we are all machines ourselves, then there are none to bother about." "I see." Curiously enough, he did see. Also his eyes came open and remained open. "Do you remember the angel in the Bible, who was ready to spare whole cities provided that one just man could be found? Was it one? That applies to Homoferox, Arthur, even now." The eyes began to watch their vision closely. "You have been taking my advice too literally, king. To disbelieve in original sin, does not mean that you must believe in original virtue. It only means that you must not believe that people are utterly wicked. Wicked they may be, and even very wicked, but not utterly. Otherwise, I agree, it would be no use trying." Arthur said, with one of his sweet smiles: "This ts a good dream. I hope it will be long." His teacher took out his spectacles, polished them, put them on his nose, and examined the old man carefully. There was a hint of satisfaction behind the lenses. "Unless," he said, "you had lived this, you would not have known it. One has to live one's knowledge. How are you?" "Fairly well. How are you?" "Very well." They shook hands, as if they had just met. "Will you be staying?" "Actually," replied the necromancer, now blowing his nose furiously in order to hide his glee, or perhaps to hide his contrition, "I shall hardly be here at all. I have been sent with an invitation." He folded his handkerchief and replaced it in his cap. "Any mice?" asked the king with a first faint twinkle. The skin of his face twitched as it were, or tautened itself for the fraction of a second, so that you could see underneath it, in the bone perhaps, the freckled, snub-nosed countenance of a little boy who had once been charmed by Archimedes. Merlyn took the skull-cap off indulgently. "One," he said. "I think it was a mouse: but it has become partly shrivelled. And here, I see, is the frog I picked up in the summer. It had been run over, poor creature, during the drought. A perfect silhouette." He examined it complacently before putting it back, then crossed his legs and examined his companion in the same way, nursing his knee. "The invitation," he said. "We were hoping you would pay us a visit. Your battle can look after itself until tomorrow, we suppose?" "Nothing matters in a dream." This seemed to anger him, for he exclaimed with some vexation: "I wish you would stop about dreams! You must consider other people." "Never mind." "The invitation, then. It was to visit my cave, where young Nimue put me. Do you remember her? There are some friends in it, waiting to meet you." "It would be beautiful." "Your battle is arranged, I believe, and you would hardly sleep in any case. It might cheer your heart to come." "Nothing is arranged," said the king. "But dreams arrange themselves." At this the aged gentleman leaped from his seat, clutching his forehead as if he had been shot in it, and raised his wand of libnum vitae to the skies. "Merciful powers! Dreams again!" He took off his conical hat with a stately gesture, looked piercingly upon the bearded figure opposite which looked as old as he did, and banged himself on the head with his wand as a mark of exclamation. Then he sat down, half stunned, having misjudged the emphasis. The old king watched him with a warming mind. Now that he was dreaming of his long-lost friend so vividly, he began to see why Merlyn had always clowned on purpose. It had been a means of helping people to learn in a happy way. He began to feel the greatest affection, which was even mixed with awe, for his tutor's ancient courage: which could go on believing and trying with undaunted crankiness, in spite of ages of experience. He began to be lightened at the thought that benevolence and valour could persist. In the lightening of his heart he smiled, closed his eyes, and dropped asleep in earnest. WHEN HE OPENED THEM, it was still dark. Merlyn was there, moodily scratching the greyhound's ears and muttering. He had saved his pupil from misery before, by being nasty to him when he was a young boy called the Wart, but he knew that the poor old chap before him now had suffered too much misery for the trick to work again. The next best thing was to distract the king's attention, he must have decided, for he set to work as soon as the eyes were open, in a way which all magicians understand. They are accustomed to palm things off on people, under a mirage of patter. "Now," he said. "Dreams. We must get this over for good and all. Apart from the maddening indignity of being called a dream—personally, because it muddles you—it confuses other people. How about the learned readers? And it is degrading to ourselves. When I was a third-rate schoolmaster in the twentieth century—or was it in the nineteenth—every single boy I ever met wrote essays for me which ended: Then he woke up. You could say that the Dream was the only literary convention of their most degraded classrooms. Are we to be this? We are the Matter of Britain, remember. And what of oneirocriticism, I ask? What are the psychologists to make of it? Stuff as dreams are made of is stuff and nonsense in my opinion." "Yes," said the king meekly. "Do I look like a dream?" "Yes." Merlyn seemed to gasp with vexation, then put the whole beard into his mouth at one mouthful. After this he blew his nose and went away to stand in a corner, with his face to the canvas, where he began to soliloquise indignantly. "Of all the persecutions and floutings," he stated. "How can a necromancer prove he is not a vision, when suspected of the baseness? A ghost may prove he is alive by being pinched: but not so with a by-our-lady dream. For, argal, you can dream of pinches. Yet hist! There is the noted remedy, in which the dreamer pinches his own leg. "Arthur," he directed, turning round like a top, "be pleased to pinch yourself." "Yes." "Now, does this prove you are awake?" "I doubt it," The vision examined him sadly. "I was afraid it would not," it agreed; and it returned to its corner, where it began to recite some complicated passages from Burton, Jung, Hippocrates and Sir Thomas Browne. After five minutes, it struck its fist into the palm of the other hand and marched back to the candle light, inspired by the bed of Cleopatra. "Listen," Merlyn announced. "Have you ever dreamed of a smell?" "Dreamed of a smell?" "Do not repeat." "I can hardly." "Come, come. You have dreamed of a sight, have you not? And of a feeling: everybody has dreamed of a feeling. You may even have dreamed of a taste. I recollect that once when I had forgotten to eat anything for a fortnight, I dreamed of a chocolate pudding: which I distinctly tasted, but it was snatched away. The question is, have you ever dreamed of a smell?" "I do not think I have: not to smell it." "Make sure. Do not stare like an idiot, my dear man, but attend to the matter in hand. Have you ever dreamed with your nose?" "Never. I cannot remember dreaming of a smell." "You are positive?" "Positive." "Then smell that!" cried the necromancer, snatching off his skull-cap and presenting it under Arthur's nose, with its cargo of mice, frogs and a few shrimps for salmon-fishing which he had overlooked. "Phew!" "Am I a dream now?" "It does not smell like one." "Well, then." "Merlyn," said the king. "It makes no difference whether you are a dream or not, so long as you are here. Sit down and be patient for a little, if you can. Tell me the reason of your visit. Talk. Say you have come to save us from this war." The old fellow had achieved his object of artificial respiration as well as he could; so now he sat down comfortably, and took the matter in hand. "No," he said. "Nobody can be saved from anything, unless they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people—it is often very dangerous indeed to do things at all—and the only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, the people are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the course of the millennia. Such is the business of the philosopher, to open new ideas. It is not his business to impose them on people." "You did not tell me this before." "Why not?" "You have egged me into doing things during all my life. The Chivalry and the Round Table which you made me invent, what were these but efforts to save people, and to get things done?" "They were ideas," said the philosopher firmly, "rudimentary ideas. All thought, in its early stages, begins as action. The actions which you have been wading through have been ideas, clumsy ones of course, but they had to be established as a foundation before we could begin to think in earnest. You have been teaching man to think in action. Now it is time to think in our heads." "So my Table was not a failure—Master?" "Certainly not. It was an experiment. Experiments lead to new ones, and this is why 1 have come to take you to our burrow." "I am ready," he said, amazed to find that he was feeling happy. "The Committee discovered that there had been some gaps in your education, two of them, and it was determined that these ought to be put right before concluding the active stage of the Idea." "What is this committee? It sounds as if they had been making a report." "And so we did. You will meet them presently in the cave. But now, excuse my mentioning it, there is a matter to arrange before we go." Here Merlyn examined his toes with a doubtful eye, hesitating to continue. "Men's brains," he explained in the end, "seem to get petrified as they grow older. The surface becomes perished, like worn leather, and will no longer take impressions. You may have noticed it?" "I feel a stiffness in my head." "Now children have resilient, plastic brains," continued the magician with relish, as if he were talking about caviare sandwiches. "They can take impressions before you could say Jack Robinson. To learn a language when you are young, for instance, might literally be called child's play: but after middle age one finds it is the devil." "I have heard people say so." "What the committee suggested was, that if you are to learn these things we speak of, you ought— ahem—you ought to be a boy. They have furnished me with a patent medicine to do it. You understand: you would become the Wart once more." "Not if I had to live my life again," replied the other old fellow evenly. They faced each other like image and object in a mirror, the outside corners of their eyes drawn down with the hooded lids of age. "It would be only for the evening." "The Elixir of Life?" "Exactly. Think of the people who have tried to find it." "If I were to find such a thing, I would throw it away." "I hope you are not being stupid about children," asked Merlyn, looking vaguely about him. "We have high authority for being born again, like little ones. Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free from this?" "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents." "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not. "Our readers of that time," continued the necromancer in a grim voice, "have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. The whole illusion may be labelled Progress, and anybody who questions it is called puerile, reactionary, or an escapist. The March of Mind, God help them." He considered these facts for some time, then added: "And a fourth piece of scientific clap-trap which they are to have, rejoices in the name of anthropomorphism. Even their children are supposed to be so superior to the animals that you must never mention the two creatures in the same breath. If you begin considering men as animals, they put it the other way round and say that you are considering animals as men, a sin which they hold to be worse than bigamy. Imagine a scientist being merely an animal, they say! Tut-tut, and Tilly-fol-de-rido!" "Who are these readers?" "The readers of the book." "What book?" "The book we are in." "Are we in a book?" "We had better attend to the job," said Merlyn hastily. He took hold of his wand, rolled up his sleeves, and fixed a tight eye on the patient. "Do you agree?" he asked. But the old king stopped him. "No," he said, with a sort of firm apology. "I have earned my body and mind with many years of labour. It would be undignified to change them. I am not too proud to be a child, Merlyn, but too old. If it were my body which were to be made young, it would be unsuitable to keep an old mind in it. While, if you were to change them both, the labour of living all those years would turn to vanity. There is nothing else for it, Master. We must keep the state of life to which it has pleased God to call us." The magician lowered the wand. "But your brain," he complained. "It is like a fossilised sponge. And would you not have liked to be young, to frisk about and feel your knees again? Young people are happy, are they not? We had meant it for a pleasure." "It would indeed have been a pleasure, and thank you for thinking of it. But life is not invented for happiness, I do believe. It is made for something else." Merlyn chewed the end of his stick while he considered. "You are right," he said in the end. "I was against the proposal from the start. But something will have to be done to souple your intellects, for all that, or you will never catch the new idea. I suppose there would be no objection to a cerebral massage, if I could manage it? I should have to get my galvanic batteries, my extra-reds and under-violets: my french chalk and my pinches of this and that: a touch of adrenalin and a sniff of garlic. You know the kind of thing?" "No, if you think it is right." He extended his hand into the ether, with a well-remembered gesture, and the apparatus began to materialise obediently: muddled up as usual. THE TREATMENT WAS UNPLEASANT. It Was like having one's hair brushed vigorously the wrong way, or like having a sprained ankle flexed by that dreadful kind of masseuse who urges people to relax. The king gripped the arms of his chair, closed his eyes, clenched his teeth and sweated. When he opened them for the second time that evening, it was on a different world. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. In leaving the chair he did not take his weight upon his wrists, like an old man, but upon the palms and phalanges. "Look at the dog's hollow eyes! The candles are reflected from the back, not from the front, as if it were from the bottom of a cup. Why have I never noticed this before? And look here: there is a hole in Bathsheba's bath, which needs darning. What is this entry in the book? Susp.?* Who has betrayed 'Abbreviation for suspendaiur, "let him be hanged."us into hanging people? Nobody deserves to be hanged. Merlyn, why is there no reflection from your eyes, when I put the candles between us? Why have I never thought about it? The light comes red from a fox, green from a cat, yellow from a horse, saffron from a dog. And look at that falcon's beak: it has a tooth in it like a saw! Goshawks and sparrow-hawks do not have a tooth. It must be a peculiarity offalco. What an extraordinary thing a tent is! Half of it is trying to push it up, and the other half is trying to pull it down. Ex nihilo res fit. t And look at those chessmen! Check-mate indeed! Nay, we will try the ploy again." Imagine a rusty bolt on the garden door, which has been set wrong, or the door has sagged on its hinges since it was put on, and for years that bolt has never been shot efficiently: except by hammering it, or by lifting the door a little, and wriggling it home with effort. Imagine then that the old bolt is unscrewed, rubbed with emery paper, bathed in paraffin, polished with fine sand, generously oiled, and reset by a skilled workman with such nicety that it bolts and unbolts with the pressure of a finger—with the pressure of a feather—almost so that you could blow it open or shut. Can you imagine the feelings of the bolt? They are the feelings of glory which convalescent people have, after a fever. It would look forward fSomething comes of nothing." This is a parody or adaptation of ex nihilo nihilfit, that is, "nothing comes of nothing," familiar (though not in that exact form) from both Lucretius and Persius. to being bolted, yearning for the rapture of its sweet, successful motion. For happiness is only a bye-product of function, as light is a bye-product of the electric current running through the wires. If the current cannot run efficiently, the light does not come. That is why nobody finds happiness, who seeks it on its own account. But man must seek to be like the working bolt; like the unimpeded run of electricity; like the convalescent whose eyes, long thwarted in their sockets by headache and fever, so that it was a grievous pain to move them, now flash from side to side with the ease of clean fishes in clear water. The eyes are working, the current is working, the bolt is working. So the light shines. That is happiness: working well. "Hold hard," said Merlyn. "After all, we have no train to catch." "No train?" "I beg your pardon. It is a quotation which a friend of mine used to apply to human progress. However, as you look as if you were feeling better, shall we start for the cave at once?" "Immediately." They made no further ado but lifted the tent-flap and were gone, leaving the sleeping greyhound to watch the hooded hawk in solitude. Hearing the tent-flap lift, the blinded bird screamed out in raucous accents for attention. It was a bracing walk for both of them. The wild wind and the speed of their passage tugged their beards to left or right over their shoulders, accordingly as they did not face exactly into the eye of it, which gave a tight feeling at the hair-roots, as if they were in curl papers. They sped over Salisbury plain, past the thought-provoking monument of Stonehenge, where Merlyn, in passing, cried a salutation to the old gods whom Arthur could not see: to Crom, Bell and others. They whirled over Wiltshire, strode beyond Dorset and sped through Devon, as fast as a wire cutting cheese. The plains, downs, forests, moors and hillocks fell behind them. The glinting rivers swung past like the spokes of a turning wheel. In Cornwall they halted, by the side of an ancient tumulus like an enormous mole-hill, with a dark opening in its side. "We go in." "I have been to this place before," said the king, standing still in a kind of catalepsy. "Yes." "When?" "When yourself?" He groped, searched in his mind, feeling that the revelation was in his heart. But "No," he said, "I cannot remember." "Come and see." They went down the labyrinthine passages, past the turnings which led to the bedchambers, to the middens, to the storerooms and to the place where you went if you wanted to wash your hands. At last the king stopped, with his fingers on the door latch at the end of a passage, and announced: "I know where I am." Merlyn watched. "It is the badger's sett, where I went when I was a child." 'Yes.' "Merlyn, you villain! I have been mourning you for half a lifetime, because I thought you were shut up like a toad in a hole, and all the time you have been sitting in the Combination Room, arguing with badger!" "Open the door, and look." He opened it. There was the well-remembered room. There were the portraits of long-dead badgers, famous for scholarship or godliness: there were the glow-worms and the mahogany fans and the tilting board for circulating the decanters. There were the moth-eaten gowns and the chairs of stamped leather. But, best of all,1 there were his earliest friends—the preposterous committee. They were rising shyly to their feet to greet him. They were confused in their humble feelings, partly because they had been looking forward to the surprise so much, and partly because they had never met real kings before—so that they were afraid he might be different. Still, they were determined that they ought to do the thing in style. They had arranged that the proper thing would be to stand up, and perhaps to bow or smile a bit. There had been solemn consultations among them about whether he ought to be addressed as "Your Majesty" or as "Sir," about whether his hand ought to be kissed, about whether he would be much changed, and even, poor souls, about whether he would remember them at all. They were there in a circle round the fire: badger hoisting himself bashfully to his feet while a perfect avalanche of manuscript shot out of his lap into the fender: T. natrix uncoiling himself and flickering an ebon tongue, with which he proposed to kiss the royal hand if necessary. Archimedes bobbing up and down with pleasure and anticipation, half spreading his wings and causing them to flutter, like a small bird asking to be fed: Balin looking crushed for the first time in his life, because he was afraid he might have been forgotten: Cavall, so agonised by the glory of his feelings that he had to go away into a corner and be sick: goat, who had given the emperor's salute in a flash of foresight long before: hedgehog standing loyal and erect at the bottom of the circle, where he had been made to sit apart from the others on account of his fleas, but full of patriotism and anxiety to be noticed if possible. Even the enormous stuffed pike, which was a novelty over the mantelpiece beneath the Founder, seemed to regard him with a supplicating eye. "Oh, people!" exclaimed the king. Then they all flushed a great deal, and shuffled their feet, and said that he must please to excuse their humble home, or Welcome to Your Majesty, or We did mean to put up a banner only it had got lost, or Are your regal feet wet? or Here comes the squire, or Oh, it is so lovely to see you after all these years! Hedgehog saluted stiffly, saying "Rule Britannia!" The next moment a rejuvenated Arthur was shaking hands with all, kissing them and thumping them on the back, until the tears stood in every eye. "We did not know." sniffed the badger. "We were afraid you might have forgot .** "Do we say Your Majesty, or do we say Sir?" He sensibly answered the question on its merits. "It is Your Majesty for an emperor, but for an ordinary king it is Sir." So from that moment they thought of him as the Wart, without considering the matter further. When the excitement had died down, Merlyn closed the door and took control of the situation. "Now," he said. "We have a great deal of business to transact, and very little time to do it in. Here you are, king: here is a chair for you at the head of the circle, because you are our leader, who does the hard work and suffers the pains. And you, urchin, it is your turn to be Ganymede, so you had better fetch the madeira wine and be quick about it. Hand round a big cup for everybody, and then we will start the meeting." Hedgehog brought the first cup to Arthur, and served him with importance on a bended knee, keeping one grubby thumb in the glass. Then, while he moved off round the circle, the sometime Wart had leisure to look about him. The Combination Room had changed since his last visit, a change which hinted strongly at his tutor's personality. For there, on all the spare chairs and on the floor and on the tables, lying open to mark significant passages, were thousands of books of all descriptions, each one forgotten since it had been laid down for future reference, and all covered with a fine layer of dust. There was Thierry and Pinnow and Gibbon and Sigismondi and Duruy and Prescott and Parkman and Juserand and d'Alton and Tacitus and Smith and Trevelyan and Herodotus and Dean Millman and MacAllister and Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wells and Clausewitz and Giraidus Cambrensis— including the lost volumes on England and Scotland—and Tolstoy's War and Peace and the Comic History of England and the Saxon Chronicle and the Four Masters. There were de Beer's Vertebrate Zoology, Elliott-Smitn's Essays on the Evolution of Man, Eltringham's Senses of Insects, Browne's Vulgar Errors, Aldrovandus, Matthew Paris, a Bestiary by Physiologus, Frazer in the complete edition, and even Zeus by A. B. Cook. There were encyclopedias, charts of the human and other bodies, reference books like Witherby, about every sort of bird and animal, dictionaries, logarithm tables, and the whole series of the D.N.B. On one wall there was a digest made out in Merlyn's longhand, which shewed, in parallel columns, a concordance of the histories of the human races for the last ten thousand years. The Assyrians, Sumerians, Mongols, Aztecs etc. each had a separate ink, and the year A.D. or B.C. was written on a vertical line at the left of the columns, so that it was like a graph. Then, on another wall, which was even more interesting, there was a real graph which shewed the rise and fall of various animal races for the last thousand million years. When a race became extinct, its line met the horizontal asymptote and vanished. One of the latest to do this was the Irish elk. A map, done for fun, shewed the position of the local birds* nests in the previous spring. In a corner of the room remote from the fire, there was a worktable with a microscope on it, under whose lens there was laid out an exquisite piece of micro-dissection, the nervous system of an ant. On the same table there were the skulls of men, apes, fish and wild geese, also dissected, in order to shew the relation between neopallium and corpus striatum. Another corner was fitted up with a sort of laboratory, in which, in indescribable confusion, there stood retorts, test tubes, centrifuges, germ-cultures, beakers and bottles labelled Pituitary, Adrenalin, Furniture Polish, Venticatchellum's Curry Powder, or De Kuyper's Gin. The latter had a pencilled inscription on the label, which said: The Level on this Bottle is MARKED. Finally there were meat-safes containing live specimens of mantes, locusts and other insects, while the remainder of the floor carried a debris of the magician's passing crazes. There were croquet mallets, knitting needles, pastels surfins, lino-cutting tools, kites, boomerangs, glue, boxes of cigars, home-made wood-wind instruments, cookery books, a bull-roarer, a telescope, a tin of grafting wax and a hamper marked Fortnum and Mason's on the bottom. The old king heaved a sigh of contentment, and forgot about the actual world. "Now, badger," said Merlyn, who was bristling with importance and officiousness, "hand me the minutes of the last meeting." "We did not take any. There was no ink." "Never mind. Give me the notes on the Great Victorian Hubris." "They were used to light the fire." "Confound it. Then pass the Prophecies." "Here they are," said the badger proudly, and he stooped down to scrape together the flood of papers which had shot into the fender when he first stood up. "I had them ready," he explained, "on purpose." They had caught light, however, and, when he had blown them out and delivered them to the magician, it was found that all the pages had been burned in half. "Really, this is too vexatious! What have you done with the Thesis on Man, and the Dissertation Concerning Might?" "I had them under my hand a moment ago." And the poor badger, who was supposed to be the secretary of the committee, but he was not a good one, began rummaging about short-sightedly among the boomerangs, looking very much ashamed and worried. Archimedes said, "It might be easier to do it without papers, Master, just by talking." Merlyn glared at him. "We have only to explain," suggested T. natrix. Merlyn glared at him also. "It is what we shall have to do in the end," said Balin, "in any case." Merlyn gave up glaring and went into the sulks. Cavall, who had come secretly, sneaked into the king's lap with an imploring look, and was not prevented. Goat stared into the fire with his jewel eyes. Badger sat down again with a guilty expression, and hedgehog, sitting primly in his corner away from the others with his hands folded in his lap, gave an unexpected lead. "Tell 'un," he said. Everybody looked at him in surprise, but he was not to be put down. He knew why people moved away when he sat next to them, but a mun had rights for all that. "Tell 'un," he repeated. The king said, "I would like it very much if you did tell me. At present I do not understand anything, except that I have been brought here to fill some gaps in this extraordinary education. Could you explain from the beginning?" "The trouble is," said Archimedes, "that it is difficult to decide which is the beginning." "Tell me about the committee, then. Why are you a committee, and what on?" "You could say we are the Committee on Might in Man. We have been trying to understand your puzzle." "It is a Royal Commission," explained the badger proudly. "It was felt that a mixture of animals would be able to advise upon the different departments." Here Merlyn could contain himself no longer. Even for the sake of his sulks, it was impossible to hold off when it came to talking. "Allow me," he said. "I know exactly where to begin, and now I shall do it. Everybody to listen. "My dear Wart," he continued, after the hedgehog had said Hear-hear and, as an afterthought, Order-order, "I must ask you at the outset to cast your mind back to the beginning of my tutorship. Can you remember?" "It was with animals." "Exactly. And has it occurred to you that this was not for fun?" "Well, it was fun" "But why, we are asking you, with animals?" "Suppose you were to tell me." The magician crossed his knees, folded his arms and frowned with importance. "There are two hundred and fifty thousand separate species of animal in this world," he said, "not counting the living vegetables, and of these no less than two thousand eight hundred and fifty are mammals like man. They all of them have some form of politics or another—it was the one mistake my old friend Aristotle made, when he defined his man as a Political Animal—yet man himself, this miserable nonentity among two hundred and forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others, goes drivelling along his tragic political groove, without ever lifting his eyes to the quarter million examples which surround him. What makes it still more extraordinary is that man is a parvenu among the rest, nearly all of which had already solved his problems in one way or another, many thousand years before he was created." There was a murmur of admiration from the committee, and the grass-snake added gently: "It was why he tried to give you an idea of nature, king, because it was hoped that when you were struggling with the puzzle, you would look about you." "The politics of all animals," said the badger, "deal with the control of Might." "But I do not sec." he began, only to be anticipated. "Of course you do not see," said Merlyn. "You were going to say that animals have no politics. Take my advice, and think it over." "Have they?" "Of course they have, and very efficient ones they are. Some of them are communists or fascists, like many of the ants: some are anarchists, like the geese. There are socialists like some of the bees, and, indeed, among the three thousand families of the ant itself, there are other shades of ideology besides fascism. Not all are slave-makers or warfarers. There are bank-balance-holders like the squirrel, or the bear who hibernates on his fat. Any nest or burrow or feeding ground is a form of individual property, and how do you think the crows, rabbits, minnows, and all the other gregarious creatures contrive to live together, if they have not faced the questions of Democracy and of Force?" It was evidently a well-worn topic, for the badger interrupted before the king could reply. "You have never given us," he said, "and you never will give us, an example of capitalism in the natural world." Merlyn looked unhappy. "And," he added, "if you cannot give an example, it only shews that capitalism is unnatural." The badger, it may be mentioned, was inclined to be Russian in his outlook. He and the other animals had argued with the magician so much during the past few centuries that they had all come to express themselves in highly magic terms, talking of bolshevists and nazis with as much ease as if they had been little more than the Lollards and Thrashers of contemporary history. Merlyn, who was a staunch conservative— which was rather progressive of him, when you reflect that he was living backwards—defended himself'feebly. "Parasitism," he said, "is an ancient and respectable compartment in nature, from the cuckoo to the flea." "We are not talking about parasitism. We are talking about capitalism, which has been exactly defined. Can you give me a single example, other than man, of a species whose individuals will exploit the labour value of individuals of the same species? Even fleas do not exploit fleas." Merlyn said: "There are certain apes which, when kept in captivity, have to be closely watched by their keepers. Otherwise the dominant individuals will deprive their comrades of food, even compelling them to regurgitate it, and the comrades will starve." "It seems a shaky example." Merlyn folded his hands and looked more unhappy than ever. At last he screwed his courage to the sticking point, took a deep breath, and faced the truth. "It is a shaky example," he said. "I find it impossible to mention an example of true capitalism in nature." He had no sooner said it than his hands unfolded themselves like lightning, and the fist of one flashed into the palm of the other. "I have it!" he cried. "I knew I was right about capitalism. We are looking at it the wrong way round." "We generally are." "The main specialisation of a species is nearly always unnatural to other species. Just because there are no examples of capital in nature, it does not mean that capital is unnatural for man, in the sense of its being wrong. You might as well say that it is wrong for a giraffe to eat the tops of trees, because there are no other antelopes with necks as long as his, or that it was wrong for the first amphibian to crawl out of the water, because there were no other examples of amphibians at the time. Capitalism is man's speciality, just as his cerebrum is. There are no other examples in nature of a creature with a cerebrum like that of man. This does not mean that it is unnatural for man to have a cerebrum. On the contrary, it means that he must go ahead with it. And the same with his capitalism. It is, like his brain, a speciality, a jewel in the crown! Now I come to , think of it, capitalism may be actually consequent upon the possession of a developed cerebrum. Otherwise, who should our only other example of capitalism—those apes I mentioned—occur among the anthropoids whose brains are akin to man's? Yes, yes, I knew I was right to be a minor capitalist all the time. I knew there was a sensible reason why the Russians of my youth should have modified their ideas. The fact that it is unique does not mean that it is wrong: on the contrary, it means that it is right. Right for man, of course, not for the other animals. It means." "Do you realise," asked Archimedes, "that the audience has not understood a single word you are saying, for several minutes?" Merlyn stopped abruptly and looked at his pupil, who had been following the conversation with his eyes more than anything else, looking from one face to the other. "I am sorry." The king spoke absently, almost as if he were talking to himself. "Have I been stupid?" he asked slowly, "stupid not to notice animals?" "Stupid!" cried the magician, triumphant once again, for he was in high delight over his discovery about capital. "There at last is a crumb of truth on a pair of human lips! Nunc dimittis!"* And he immediately leaped upon his hobbyhorse, to gallop off in all directions. "The cheek of the human race," he exclaimed, "is something to knock you footless. Begin with the unthinkable universe; narrow down to the minute sun inside it; pass to the satellite of the sun which we are pleased to call the Earth; glance at the myriad algae, or whatever the things are called, of the sea, and at the uncountable microbes, going backwards to a minus infinity, which populate ourselves. Drop an eye on those quarter million other species which I have mentioned, and upon the unmentionable expanses of time through which they have lived. Then look at man, an upstart whose eyes, speaking from the point of view of nature, are scarcely open further than the puppy's. There he is, the—the gollywog—" He was becoming so excited that he had no time to think of suitable epithets. "There he is, dubbing himself Homo sapiens, forsooth, proclaiming himself the lord of creation, like that "Literally, "now you send away" or "now you let depart," from the Canticle of Simeon, Luke 2:29. This has come to be used in a general sense, signifying "I've seen it all now; I can die happy." ass Napoleon putting on his own crown! There he is, condescending to the other animals: even condescending, God bless my soul and body, to his ancestors! It is the Great Victorian Hubris, the amazing, ineffable presumption of the nineteenth century. Look at those historical novels by Scott, in which the human beings themselves, because they lived a couple of hundred years ago, are made to talk like imitation wanning pans! Man, proud man, stands there in the twentieth century, complacently believing that the race has 'advanced' in the course of a thousand miserable years, and busy blowing his brothers to bits. When will they learn that it takes a million years for a bird to modify a single one of its primary feathers? There he stands, the crashing lubber, pretending that everything is different because he has made an internal combustion engine. There he stands, ever since Darwin, because he has heard that there is such a thing as evolution. Quite regardless of the fact that evolution happens in million-year cycles, he thinks he has evolved since the Middle Ages. Perhaps the combustion engine has evolved, but not he. Look at him sniggering at his own progenitors, let alone the other types of mammal, in that insufferable Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The sheer, shattering sauce of it! And making God in his own image! Believe me, the so-called primitive races who worshipped animals as gods were not so daft as people choose to pretend. At least they were humble. Why should not God have come to the earth as an earth-worm? There are a great many more worms than men, and they do a great deal more good. And what is it all about, anyway? Where is this marvellous superiority which makes the twentieth century superior to the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages superior to primitive races and to the beasts of the field? Is man so particularly good at controlling his Might and his Ferocity and his Property? What does he do? He massacres the members of his own species like a cannibal! Do you know that it has been calculated that, during the years between 1100 and 1900, the English were at war for four hundred and nineteen years and the French for three hundred and seventy-three? Do you know that Lapouge has reckoned that nineteen million men are killed in Europe in every century, so that the amount of blood spilled would feed a fountain of blood running seven hundred litres an hour since the beginning of history? And let me tell you this, dear sir. War, in Nature herself outside of man, is so much a rarity that it scarcely exists. In all those two hundred and fifty thousand species, there are only a dozen or so which go to war. If Nature ever troubled to look at man, the little atrocity, she would be shocked out of her wits. "And finally," concluded the magician, pulling up into a canter, "leaving his morals out of account, is the odious creature important even in a physical sense? Would neutral Nature be compelled to notice him, more than the greenfly or the coral insect, because of the changes which he has effected on the surface of the earth?" THE KING SAID POLITELY, stunned by such a lot of declamation: "Surely she would. Surely we are important from what we have done?" "How?" demanded his tutor fiercely. "Well, I must say. Look at the buildings which we have made on the earth, and towns, and arable fields," "The Great Barrier Reef," observed Archimedes, looking at the ceiling, "is a building a thousand miles long, and it was built entirely by insects." "But that is only a reef." Merlyn dashed his hat on the floor, in his usual way. "Can you never learn to think impersonally?" he demanded. "The coral insect would have as much right to reply to you, that London is only a town." "Even then, if all the towns in the world were placed end to end .** Archimedes said: "If you begin producing all the towns in the world, I shall begin producing all the coral islands and atolls. Then we will weigh them carefully against each other, and we shall see what we shall see." "Perhaps coral insects are more important than men, then, but this is only one species." Goat said slyly: "The committee had a note somewhere about the beaver, I think, in which he was said to have made whole seas and continents" "The birds," began Balin with exaggerated nonchalance, "by carrying the seeds of trees in their droppings, are said to have made forests so large." "Them rabbits," interrupted the urchin, "whatter nigh depopulated Austrylia." "The Foraminifera of whose bodies the 'white cliffs of Dover' are actually composed." "The locusts." Merlyn held up his hand. "Give him the humble earth-worm," he said majestically. So the animals recited in unison: "The naturalist Darwin has pointed out that there are about 25,000 earth-worms in every field acre, that they turn over in England alone 320,000,000 tons of soil a year, and that they are to be found in almost every region of the world. In thirty years they will alter the whole earth's surface to the depth of seven inches. 'The earth without worms,* says the immortal Gilbert White, 'would soon become cold, hard-bound, void of fermentation, and consequently sterile.'" **!T SEEMS TO ME," said the king happily, for these high matters seemed to be taking him far from Mordred and Lancelot, far from the place where, as they put it in King Lear, humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep, into the peaceful world where people thought and talked and loved each other without the misery of doing, "it seems to me, if what you say is true, that it would do my fellow humans good to take them down a peg. If they could be taught to look at themselves as another species of mammal for a change, they might find the novelty a tonic. Tell me what conclusions the committee has come to, for I am sure you have been discussing it, about the human animal?" "We have found ourselves in difficulty about the name." "What name?" "Homo sapiens," explained the grass-snake. "It became obvious that sapiens was hopeless as an adjective, but the trouble was to find another." Archimedes said: "Do you remember that Merlyn once told you why the chaffinch was called coelebsl A good adjective for a species has to be appropriate to some peculiarity of it, like that." "The first suggestion," said Merlyn, "was naturally ferox, since man is the most ferocious of the animals." "It is strange that you should mention/