The Book of Merlyn Page 10

  One of the peaks of the migration came when they passed a rock-cliff of the ocean. There were other peaks, when, for instance, their line of flight was crossed by an Indian file of Bewick swans who were off to Abisko, making a noise as they went like little dogs barking through handkerchiefs, or when they overtook a horned owl plodding manfully along, among the warm feathers of whose back, so they said, a tiny wren was taking her free ride. But the lonely island was the best of all.

  For it was a town of birds. They were all hatching, all quarrelling, all friendly nevertheless. On top of the cliff, where the short turf was, there were myriads of puffins busy with their burrows; below them, in Razor-bill Street, the birds were packed so close, and on such narrow ledges, that they had to stand with their backs to the sea, holding tight with long toes; in Guillemot Street, below that, the guillemots held their sharp, toylike faces upwards, as thrushes do when hatching; lowest of all, there were the Kittiwake Slums. And all the birds—who, like humans, only laid one egg each—were jammed so tight that their heads were interlaced: had so little of this famous living-space of ours that, when a new bird insisted upon landing at a ledge which was already full, one of the other birds had to tumble off. Yet they were all in such good humour, all so cheerful and cockneyfied and teasing one another! They were like an innumerable crowd of fish-wives on the largest grand-stand in the world, breaking out into private disputes, eating out of paper bags, chipping the referee, singing comic songs, admonishing their children and complaining of their husbands. “Move over a bit, auntie,” they said, or “Shove along, grandma”; “There’s that Flossie gone and sat on the shrimps”; “Put the toffee in your pocket, dearie, and blow yer nose”; “Lawks, if it isn’t Uncle Albert with the beer”; “Any room for a little ‘un?”; “There goes Aunt Emma, fallen off the ledge”; “Is me hat on straight?”; “Crikey, if this isn’t arf a do!”

  They kept more or less to their own kind, but they were not mean about it. Here and there, in Guillemot Street, there would be an obstinate kittiwake sitting on a projection and determined to have her rights. Perhaps there were half a million of them, and the noise they made was deafening.

  The king could not help wondering how a human town of mixed races would get on, in such conditions.

  Then there were the fiords and islands of Norway. It was about one of these islands, by the way, that the great W. H. Hudson related a true goose-story which is liable to make one think. There was a coastal farmer, he tells us, whose islands suffered under a nuisance of foxes; so he set up a fox-trap on one of them. When he visited the trap the next day, he found that an old wild goose had been caught in it, obviously a Grand Admiral, because of his toughness and his heavy bars. This farmer took the goose home alive, pinioned it, bound up its leg, and turned it out with his own ducks and poultry in the farmyard. Now one of the effects of the fox plague was that the farmer had to lock his hen-house at night. He used to go round in the evening to drive them in, and then he would lock the door. After a time, he began to notice a curious circumstance, which was that the hens, instead of having to be collected, would be found waiting for him in the hut. He watched the process one evening, and discovered that the old wild goose had taken upon himself the responsibility which he had with his own intelligence observed. Every night at locking-up time, the sagacious old admiral would round up his domestic comrades, whose leadership he had assumed, and would prudently assemble them in the proper place by his own efforts, as if he had fully understood the situation. Nor did the free wild geese, his some-time followers, ever again settle on the other island—previously a haunt of theirs—from which their judicious captain had been spirited away.

  Last of all, beyond the islands, there was the landing at their first day’s destination. Oh, the whiffling of delight and self-congratulation! They tumbled down out of the sky, sideslipping, stunting, even doing spinning nose-dives. They were terrifically proud of themselves and of their pilot, agog for the family pleasures which were in store.

  They planed for the last part on down-curved wings. At the last moment they scooped the wind with them, flapping them vigourously. Next, bump, they were on the ground. They held their wings above their heads for a moment, then folded them up with a quick and pretty neatness. They had crossed the North Sea.

  15

  THE SIBERIAN BOGLAND, which they reached a few days later, was a bowl of sunlight. Its mountains still retained a lace-work of snow, which, as it melted, brought the little rivers down in a spate like ale. The lakes glittered under clouds of mosquitos, and, among the stunted birch trees round their margins, the amiable reindeer wandered curiously, snuffling at the goose-nests, while the geese hissed back at them.

  Lyó-lyok settled down at once to build her nursery, although unmarried, and the king had time to think.

  He was an uncritical man, certainly not a bitter one. The treachery to which he had been subjected by his human race had only just begun to weigh upon him. He had never put it in plain terms to himself: but the truth was that he had been betrayed by everybody, even by his own wife and by his oldest friend. His son was the least of the traitors. His Table had turned on him, or half of it had, and so had half the country for which he had been working all his life. Now they were asking him to go back into service for the men of treason, and at last he realised, for the first time, that to do so would mean his end. For what hope had he among mankind? They had murdered, almost invariably, every decent person who had spoken to them since the time of Socrates. They had even murdered their God. Anybody who told them the truth was the legitimate object of their treachery, and Merlyn’s sentence on himself was one of death.

  But here, he realised, among the geese, to whom murder and treason were an obscenity, he was happy and at rest. Here there was good hope for a person with a heart. Sometimes a tired man who has a religious vocation to become a monk will feel an actual yearning for the cloister, for the place where he can expand his soul like a flower and grow towards his idea of good. That is what the old man felt with a sudden longing, except that his cloister was the sun-drenched bog. He wanted to have done with man, to settle down.

  To settle down with Lyó-lyok, for instance: it seemed to him that a weary spirit might do worse. He began comparing her wistfully with the women he had known, not always to her disadvantage. She was healthier than they were, nor had she ever had the megrims or the vapours or the hysterics. She was as healthy as himself, as strong, as able on the wing. There was nothing that he could do, which she could not do: so that their community of interests would be exact. She was docile, prudent, faithful, conversable. She was a great deal cleaner than most women, because she spent one half of the day in preening herself and the other half in water, nor were her features disfigured by a single smear of paint. Once she had been married, she would accept no further lovers. She was more beautiful than the average woman, because she possessed a natural shape instead of an artificial one. She was graceful and did not waddle, for all the wild geese do their walking easily, and he had learned to think her plumage handsome. She would be a loving mother.

  He found in his old heart a warm feeling for Lyó-lyok, even if there was little passion. He admired her sturdy legs, with the knob at the top, and her neat bill. It had serrations like teeth, and a large tongue which seemed to fill it. He liked her for not being in a hurry.

  The nest-making enthralled her, which made him watch it with pleasure. It was not an architectural triumph, but it was what was needed. She had been fussy about the tussock which she meant to choose, and then, after the situation had been finally decided, she had lined the peaty hollow, which was like some soft damp brown and crumbled blotting-paper, or like the tan in a circus, with heather, lichens, moss, and down from her own breast. This was as soft as cob-webs. He had brought her a few bits of grass himself, as a present, but they had generally been of the wrong shape. In plucking them, he had discovered by accident the wonderful universe of the bog on which they walked.

  For it was a minia
ture world, the same kind as the Japanese are said to make in bowls. No Japanese gardener has ever bred a stunted tree more like a real one than a stalk of heather is, with its regular knots along the stalk, like button-holes. There, at his feet, there were forests of gnarled trees, with glades and landscapes. There was the closest moss for grass, and an undergrowth of lichens. There were fallen tree-trunks lying picturesquely, and even a strange kind of flower: a minute grey-green stalk, very dry and brittle, with a scarlet blob on the end of it, like sealing-wax. There were microscopic toadstools, except that their umbrellas turned upwards, like egg-cups. And through the desiccated sylvan scene there scuttled, for rabbits and foxes, beetles of a glossy blackness which looked oily, who adjusted their wings by twirling their pointed tails. These were the dragons of the enchantment, rather than the rabbits, and they were of endless variety: beetles as green as jewels, spiders as small as pin-heads, lady-birds like red enamel. In depressions of the peat, which was resilient to the foot, there were small pools of brown water populated by sea-dragons: newts and water-boatmen. Here, in the wetter soil, there was a riot of mosses, each differing from the other: some with thin red stalks and green heads, like a peculiar corn for the Lilliputians. There, where the heather had been burned by some natural agency such as the sun shining through a dew drop—and not by man, who chooses to burn his bogs in the spring time, when they are full of nesting birds—there was a desolation of charred stumps, with tiny snail-shells, bleached white, no bigger than pepper-corns, also putty-coloured lichens like parched sponges, whose stalks were hollow when he broke them up.

  And there was the vastness of it, on top of its microscopic size: there was the bog smell and the clean air, which tastes so much wider on bogs: there was the sun, positively pelting it with vigour, who only slept for a couple of hours at night: and, Heaven defend us, there were the mosquitos!

  He had often thought that it must be boring for a bird to sit on eggs. He now knew that Lyó-lyok would have a universe to watch before her, a whole world bustling beneath her nose.

  He proposed himself one afternoon, not ardently, for he had known the world too long, but gently and hopefully, when they were on the dazzling lake. Its waters, in their frame of brown, reflected the sky to a tone of even deeper blue, as blue as a blackbird’s eggs without the spots. He swam towards her with his tail high in the water, his head and neck stretched flat, like a swimming snake. He told her of his sorrows, of his unworthy nature, and of his admiration. He told her how, by joining her, he hoped to escape from Merlyn and the world. Lyó-lyok, as usual, did not seem to be surprised. She too lowered her neck and swam towards him. He was very happy when he saw the douceness of her eyes.

  But a dark hand came to fetch him, as you may have guessed. He found himself swept backwards, not on pinion, not migrating, but dragged down into the filthy funnel of magic. He snatched one floating feather as he vanished, and Lyó-lyok was before his face no more.

  16

  “NOW,” CRIED THE MAGICIAN, almost before the traveller had materialised. “Now we can begin to forge ahead with the main idea. We are beginning to see the light at last.”

  “Give him a chance,” said the goat. “He is looking unhappy.”

  Merlyn swept the suggestion away.

  “Unhappy? Nonsense. He is perfectly well. I was saying we could begin to forge ahead …”

  “Communism,” began the badger, who was short-sighted and wrapped up in the subject.

  “No, no. We are finished with the bolsheviks. He is in possession of the data, and we can begin to deal with Might. But he must be allowed to think for himself. King, will you choose any animals you please, and I will explain to you why they do or do not go to war?

  “There is no deception,” he added, leaning forward as if to press the animals upon his hopeless victim, like sweetmeats, with a fascinating smile. “You can have any animals you fancy. Adders, amoebae, antelopes, apes, asses, axolotls …”

  “Suppose he has ants and geese,” suggested the badger nervously.

  “No, no. Not geese. Geese are too easy. We must be fair, and let him choose what he pleases. Suppose we say rooks?”

  “Very well,” said the badger. “Rooks.”

  Merlyn leaned back in his chair, put his finger-tips together, and cleared his throat.

  “The first thing,” he said, “which we must do before considering examples, is to define the subject. What is War? War, I take it, may be defined as an aggressive use of might between collections of the same species. It must be between collections, for otherwise it is mere assault and battery. An attack of one mad wolf upon a pack of wolves would not be war. And then again, it must be between members of the same species. Birds preying on locusts, cats preying on mice, or even tunny preying on herrings—that is, fish of one species preying upon fish of another—none of these are true examples of war. Thus we see that there are two essentials: that the combatants should be of the one family, and that they should be of a gregarious family. We can therefore begin by dismissing all animals which are not gregarious, before we search for examples of warfare in nature. Having done that, we find ourselves left with large numbers of animals such as starlings, minnows, rabbits, bees, and thousands of others. Upon beginning our search for warfare among these, however, we find a dearth of examples. How many animals can you think of, which take concerted aggressive action against groups of their own species?”

  Merlyn waited two seconds for the old man to answer, and continued with his lecture.

  “Exactly. You were about to mention a few insects, man, various microbes or blood corpuscles—if these can be said to be of the same species—and then you would have been at a loss. The gross immorality of warfare is, as I mentioned before, an oddity in nature. We sit down, therefore, relieved by this fortunate coincidence of a bundle of data which might have proved too bulky, and we examine the special peculiarities of those species which do engage in hostilities. What do we find? Do we find, as badger’s famous communists would postulate, that it is the species which owns individual property that fights? On the contrary, we find that the warfaring animals are the very ones which tend to limit or to banish individual possessions. It is the ants and bees, with their communal stomachs and territories, and the men, with their national property, who slit each other’s throats; while it is the birds, with their private wives, nests and hunting grounds, the rabbits with their own burrows and stomachs, the minnows with their individual homesteads, and the lyrebirds with their personal treasure houses and ornamental pleasure-grounds, who remain at peace. You must not despise mere nests and hunting grounds as forms of property: they are as much a form of property to the animals as a home and business is to man. And the important thing is that they are private property. The owners of private property in nature are pacific, while those who have invented public property go to war. This, you will observe, is exactly the opposite of the totalist doctrine.

  “Of course the owners of private property in nature are sometimes forced to defend their holdings against piracy by other individuals. This rarely results in bloodshed, and men themselves need not fear it, because our king has already persuaded them to adopt the principle of a police force.

  “But you want to object that perhaps the link which binds the warfaring animals together is not the link of nationalism: perhaps they go to war for other reasons—because they are all manufacturers, or all owners of domestic animals, or all agriculturalists like some of the ants, or because they all have stores of food. I need not trouble you with a discussion of possibilities, for you must examine them for yourself. Spiders are the greatest of manufacturers, yet do no battle: bees have no domestic animals or agriculture, yet go to war: many ants who are belligerent have no stores of food. By some such mental process as this, as in finding out the Highest Common Factor in mathematics, you will end with the explanation which I have offered: an explanation which is, indeed, self-evident when you come to look at it. War is due to communal property, the very thing which is adv
ocated by nearly all the demagogues who peddle what they call a New Order.

  “I have out-run my examples. We must return to the concrete instances, to examine the case. Let us look at a rookery.

  “Here is a gregarious animal like the ant, which lives together with its comrades in airy communities. The rookery is conscious of its nationalism to the extent that it will molest other rooks, from distant congeries, if they attempt to build in its own trees. The rook is not only gregarious but also faintly nationalistic. But the important thing is that it does not make any claim to national property in its feeding grounds. Any adjacent field that is rich in seed or worms will be frequented not only by the rooks of this community but also by those of all nearby communities, and, indeed, by the jackdaws and pigeons of the neighbourhood, without the outbreak of hostilities. The rooks, in fact, do not claim national property except to the minor extent of their nesting site, and the result is that they are free from the scourge of war. They agree to the obvious natural truth, that access to raw materials must be free to private enterprise.

  “Then turn to the geese: one of the oldest races, one of the most cultured, one of the best supplied with language. Admirable musicians and poets, masters of the air for millions of years without ever having dropped a bomb, monogamous, disciplined, intelligent, gregarious, moral, responsible, we find them adamant in their belief that the natural resources of the world cannot be claimed by any particular sect or family of their tribe. If there is a good bed of Zostera marina or a good field of stubble, there may be two hundred geese on it today, ten thousand tomorrow. In one skein of geese which is moving from feeding ground to resting place, we may find white-fronts mingled with pink-feet or grey-lags or even with the bernicles. The world is free to all. Yet do not suppose that they are communists. Each individual goose is prepared to assault his neighbour for the possession of a rotten potato, while their wives and nests are strictly private. They have no communal home or stomach, like the ants. And these beautiful creatures, who migrate freely over the whole surface of the globe without making claim to any part of it, have never fought a war.