The Book of Merlyn Read online

  “It is nationalism, the claims of small communities to parts of the indifferent earth as communal property, which is the curse of man. The petty and drivelling advocates of Irish or Polish nationalism: these are the enemies of man. Yes, and the English, who will fight a major war ostensibly for ‘the rights of small nations,’ while erecting a monument to a woman who was martyred for the remark that patriotism was not good enough, these people can only be regarded as a collection of benevolent imbeciles conducted by bemused crooks. Nor is it fair to pick on the English or the Irish or the Poles. All of us are in it. It is the general idiocy of Homo impoliticus. Aye, and when I speak rudely of the English in this particular, I would like to add at once that I have lived among them during several centuries. Even if they are a collection of imbecile crooks, they are at least bemused and benevolent about it, which I cannot help thinking is preferable to the tyrannous and cynical stupidity of the Huns who fight against them. Make no mistake about that.”

  “And what,” asked the badger politely, “is the practical solution?”

  “The simplest and easiest in the world. You must abolish such things as tariff barriers, passports and immigration laws, converting mankind into a federation of individuals. In fact, you must abolish nations, and not only nations but states also; indeed, you must tolerate no unit larger than the family. Perhaps it will be necessary to limit private incomes on a generous scale, for fear that very rich people might become a kind of nation in themselves. That the individuals should be turned into communists or anything else is quite unnecessary, however, and it is against the laws of nature. In the course of a thousand years we should hope to have a common language if we were lucky, but the main thing is that we must make it possible for a man living at Stonehenge to pack up his traps overnight and to seek his fortune without hindrance in Timbuktu …

  “Man might become migratory,” he added as an afterthought, with some surprise.

  “But this would spell disaster!” exclaimed the badger. “Japanese labour … Trade would be undercut!”

  “Fiddlesticks. All men have the same physical structure and need of nourishment. If a coolie can ruin you by living on a bowl of rice in Japan, you had better go to Japan and buy a bowl of rice. Then you can ruin the coolie, who will by then, I suppose, be sporting it in London in your Rolls-Royce.”

  “But it would be the deathblow of civilisation! It would lower the standard of living …”

  “Fudge. It would raise the coolie’s standard of living. If he is as good a man as you are in open competition, or a better one, good luck to him. He is the man we want. As for civilisation, look at it.”

  “It would mean an economic revolution!”

  “Would you rather have a series of Armageddons? Nothing of value was ever yet got in this world, my badger, without being paid for.”

  “Certainly,” agreed the badger suddenly, “it seems the thing to do.”

  “So there you have it. Leave man to his petty tragedy, if he prefers to embrace it, and look about you at two hundred and fifty thousand other animals. They, at any rate, with a few trifling exceptions, have political sense. It is a straight choice between the ant and the goose, and all our king will need to do, when he returns, will be to make their situation obvious.”

  The badger, who was a faithful opponent to all kinds of exaggeration, objected strongly.

  “Surely,” he said, “this is a piece of muddled thinking, to say that man may choose between the ants and the geese? In the first place man can be neither, and secondly, as we know, the ants are not unhappy as themselves.”

  Merlyn covered his argument at once.

  “I should not have said so. It was a manner of speaking. Actually there are never more than two choices open to a species: either to evolve along its own lines of evolution, or else to be liquidated. The ants had to choose between being ants or being extinct, and the geese had to choose between extinction and being geese. It is not that the ants are wrong while the geese are right. Antism is right for ants and goosy-ness is right for geese. In the same way, man will have to choose between being liquidated and being manly. And a great part of being manly lies in the intelligent solution of these very problems of force, which we have been examining through the eyes of other creatures. That is what the king must try to make them see.”

  Archimedes coughed and said, “Excuse me, Master, but is your backsight clear enough today, to tell us if he will succeed?”

  Merlyn scratched his head and wiped his spectacles.

  “He will succeed in the end,” he said eventually. “That I am certain of. Otherwise the race must perish like the American wood-pigeons, who, I may add, were considerably more numerous than the human family, yet became extinct in the course of a dozen years at the end of the nineteenth century. But whether it is to be this time or another is still obscure to me. The difficulty of living backwards and thinking forwards is that you become confused about the present. It is also the reason why one prefers to escape into the abstract.”

  The old gentleman folded his hands upon his stomach, toasted his feet at the fire, and, reflecting upon his own predicament in Time, began to recite from one of his favourite authors.

  “I saw,” he quoted, “the histories of mortal men of many different races being enacted before my eyes. … kings and queens and emperors and republicans and patricians and plebeians swept in reverse order across my view. … Time rushed backward in tremendous panoramas. Great men died before they won their fame. Kings were deposed before they were crowned. Nero and the Borgias and Cromwell and Asquith and the Jesuits enjoyed eternal infamy and then began to earn it. My motherland … melted into barbaric Britain; Byzantion melted into Rome; Venice into Henetian Altino; Hellas into innumerable migrations. Blows fell; and then were struck.”

  In the silence which succeeded this impressive picture, the goat returned to an earlier topic.

  “He is looking unhappy,” said he, “whatever you may say.”

  So they looked at the king for the first time since his return, and all fell silent.

  17

  HE WAS WATCHING THEM with the feather in his hand. He held it out unconsciously, his fragment of beauty. He kept them off with it, as if it were a weapon to hold them back.

  “I am not going,” he said. “You must find another ox to draw for you. Why have you brought me away? Why should I die for man when you speak of him contemptuously yourselves? For it would be death. It is all too true that people are ferocious and stupid. They have given me every sorrow but death. Do you suppose that they will listen to wisdom, that the dullard will understand and throw down his arms? No, he will kill me for it: kill me as the ants would have killed an albino.

  “And Merlyn,” he cried,” I am afraid to die, because I have never had a chance to live! I never had a life of my own, nor time for beauty, and I had just begun to find it. You shew me beauty, and snatch it from me. You move me like a piece at chess. Have you the right to take my soul and twist it into shapes, to rob a mind of its mind?

  “Oh, animals, I have failed you, I know. I have betrayed your trust. But I cannot face the collar again, because you have driven me into it too long. Why should I leave Lyó-lyok? I was never clever, but I was patient, and even patience goes. Nobody can bear it all his life.”

  They did not dare to answer, could think of nothing to say.

  His feeling of guilt and of love frustrated had made him wretched, so that now he had to rage in self-defence.

  “Yes, you are clever. You know the long words and how to juggle with them. If the sentence is a pretty one, you laugh and make it. But these are human souls you are cackling about, and it is my soul, the only one I have, which you have put in the index. And Lyó-lyok had a soul. Who made you into gods to meddle with destiny, or set you over hearts to bid them come and go? I will do this filthy work no longer; I will trouble with your filthy plans no further; I will go away into some quiet place with the goose-people, where I can die in peace.”

  His
voice broke down into that of an old and miserable beggar, as he threw himself back in the chair, covering his eyes with his hands.

  The urchin was found to be standing in the middle of the floor. With his little, purplish fingers clenched into tight fists, with a truculent nose questing for opposition, breathing heavily, bristling with dead twigs, small, indignant, vulgar and flea-bitten, the hedgehog confronted the committee and faced them down.

  “Leave off, wullee?” he demanded. “Stand back, carnt ‘ee? Give ter lad fair play.”

  And he placed his body sturdily between them and his hero, prepared to knock the first man down who interfered.

  “Ar,” he said sarcastically. “A fine parcel of bougers, us do say. A fine picking o’ Bumtious Pilates, for to depose of Man. Gibble-gabble, gibble-gabble. But ding the mun as stirs is finger or us busts un’s bloudie neck.”

  Merlyn protested miserably: “Nobody would have wished him to do anything that he did not want…”

  The hedgehog walked up to him, put his twitching nose to within an inch of the magician’s spectacles, so that he drew back in alarm, and blew in his face.

  “Ar,” he said. “Nobody wished nuthink never. Excepting for to remember as ‘ee mighter wished suthink for ‘isself.”

  Then he returned to the broken-hearted king, halting at a distance with tact and dignity, because of his fleas.

  “Nay, Mëaster,” he said. “Tha hast been within too long. Let thee come art along of a nugly hurchin, that tha mayest sniff God’s air to thy nostrils, an lay thy head to the boozum o’ the earth.

  “Teak no thought fer them bougers,” he continued. “Lave ‘un fer to argyfy theirselves inter the hy-stericks, that ‘ull plaze ‘un. Let thee smell a peck of air wi’ ter humble mun, an have thy pleasure of the sky.”

  Arthur held out his hand for the urchin’s, who gave it reluctantly, after wiping it on the prickles of his back.

  “He’m verminous,” he explained regretfully, “but he’m honest.”

  They went together to the door, where the hedgehog, turning round, surveyed the field.

  “Orryvoyer,” he observed good-humouredly, regarding the committee with ineffable contempt. “Mind yer doant destroy ter universt afore as we comes back. No creating of another, mind.”

  And he bowed sarcastically to the stricken Merlyn.

  “God ter Father.”

  To the wretched Archimedes, who elongated himself, closed his eyes, and looked the other way.

  “God ter Son.”

  To the imploring badger.

  “And God ter Holy Post.”

  18

  THERE IS NOTHING SO wonderful as to be out on a spring night in the country; but really in the latest part of night, and, best of all, if you can be alone. Then, when you can hear the wild world scamper, and the cows chewing just before you tumble over them, and the leaves living secretly, and the nibblings and grass pluckings and the blood’s tide in your own veins: when you can see the loom of trees and hills in deeper darkness and the stars twirling in their oiled grooves for yourself: when there is one light in one cottage far away, marking a sickness or an early riser upon a mysterious errand: when the horse hoofs with squeaking cart behind plod to an unknown market, dragging their bundled man, in sacks, asleep: when the dogs’ chains rattle at the farms, and the vixen yelps once, and the owls have fallen silent: then is a grand time to be alive and vastly conscious, when all else human is unconscious, home-bound, bed-sprawled, at the mercy of the midnight mind.

  The wind had dropped to rest. The powdery stars expanded and contracted in the serene, making a sight which would have jingled, if it had been a sound. The great tor which they were climbing rose against the sky, a mirk of majesty, like a horizon which aspired.

  The little hedgehog, toiling from tussock to tussock, fell into the marshy puddles with grunts, panted as he struggled with the miniature cliffs. The weary king gave him a hand at the worst places, hoisting him into a better foothold or giving him a shove behind, noticing how pathetic and defenceless his bare legs looked from the back.

  “Thank ‘ee,” he said. “Much obliged, us ’m sure.”

  When they had reached the top, he sat down puffing, and the old man sat beside him to admire the view.

  It was England that came out slowly, as the late moon rose: his royal realm of Gramarye. Stretched at his feet, she spread herself away into the remotest north, leaning towards the imagined Hebrides. She was his homely land. The moon made her trees more important for their shadows than for themselves, picked out the silent rivers in quicksilver, smoothed the toy pasture fields, laid a soft haze on everything. But he felt that he would have known the country, even without the light. He knew that there must be the Severn, there the Downs and there the Peak: all invisible to him, but inherent in his home. In this field a white horse must be grazing, in that some washing must be hanging on a hedge. It had a necessity to be itself.

  He suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was: because of the shadows of the corn stooks on a golden evening; because the sheep’s tails would rattle when they ran, and the lambs, sucking, would revolve their tails in little eddies; because the clouds in daylight would surge it into light and shade; because the squadrons of green and golden plover, worming in pasture fields, would advance in short, unanimous charges, head to wind; because the spinsterish herons, who keep their hair up with fish bones according to David Garnett, would fall down in a faint if a boy could stalk them and shout before he was seen; because the smoke from homesteads was a blue beard straying into heaven; because the stars were brighter in puddles than in the sky; because there were puddles, and leaky gutters, and dung hills with poppies on them; because the salmon in the rivers suddenly leaped and fell; because the chestnut buds, in the balmy wind of spring, would jump out of their twigs like jacks-in-boxes, or like little spectres holding up green hands to scare him; because the jackdaws, building, would hang in the air with branches in their mouths, more beautiful than any ark-returning dove; because, in the moonlight there below, God’s greatest blessing to the world was stretched, the silver gift of sleep.

  He found that he loved it—more than Guenever, more than Lancelot, more than Lyó-lyok. It was his mother and his daughter. He knew the speech of its people, would have felt it change beneath him, if he could have shot across it like the goose which once he was, from Zummerzet to Och-aye. He could tell how the common people would feel about things, about all sorts of things, before he asked them. He was their king.

  And they were his people, his own responsibility of stultus or ferox, a responsibility like that old goose-admiral’s upon the farm. They were not ferocious now, because they were asleep.

  England was at the old man’s feet, like a sleeping man-child. When it was awake it would stump about, grabbing things and breaking them, killing butterflies, pulling the cat’s tail, nourishing its ego with amoral and relentless mastery. But in sleep its masculine force was abdicated. The man-child sprawled undefended now, vulnerable, a baby trusting the world to let it sleep in peace.

  All the beauty of his humans came upon him, instead of their horribleness. He saw the vast army of martyrs who were his witnesses: young men who had gone out even in the first joy of marriage, to be killed on dirty battle-fields like Bede-graine for other men’s beliefs: but who had gone out voluntarily: but who had gone because they thought it was right: but who had gone although they hated it. They had been ignorant young men perhaps, and the things which they had died for had been useless. But their ignorance had been innocent. They had done something horribly difficult in their ignorant innocence, which was not for themselves.

  He saw suddenly all the people who had accepted sacrifice: learned men who had starved for truth, poets who had refused to compound in order to achieve success, parents who had swallowed
their own love in order to let their children live, doctors and holy men who had died to help, millions of crusaders, generally stupid, who had been butchered for their stupidity—but who had meant well.

  That was it, to mean well! He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognise and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldom, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate’s. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.