The Once and Future King

Chapter XVII

‘I think it must be time,’ said Merlyn, looking at him over the top of his spectacles one afternoon, ‘that you had another dose of education. That is, as Time goes.’

It was an afternoon in early spring and everything outside the window looked beautiful. The winter mantle had gone, taking with it Sir Grummore, Master Twyti, King Pellinore, and the Questing Beast – the latter having revived under the influence of kindliness and bread and milk. It had bounded off into the snow with every sign of gratitude, to be followed two hours later by the excited King, and the watchers from the battlements had observed it confusing its snowy footprints most ingeniously, as it reached the edge of the chase. It was running backward, bounding twenty foot sideways, rubbing out its marks with its tail, climbing along horizontal branches, and performing many other tricks with evident enjoyment. They had also seen King Pellinore – who had dutifully kept his eyes shut and counted ten thousand while this was going on – becoming quite confused when he arrived at the difficult spot, and finally galloping off in the wrong direction with his brachet trailing behind him.

It was a lovely afternoon. Outside the schoolroom window the larches of the distant forest had already taken on the fullness of their dazzling green, the earth twinkled and swelled with a million drops, and every bird in the world had come home to court and sing. The village folk were forth in their gardens every evening, planting garden beans, and it seemed that, what with these emergencies and those of the slugs (coincidentally with the beans), the buds, the lambs, and the birds, every living thing had conspired to come out.

‘What would you like to be?’ asked Merlyn.

Wart looked out of the window, listening to the thrush’s twice-done song of dew.

He said, ‘I have been a bird once, but it was only in the mews at night, and I never got a chance to fly. Even if one ought not to do one’s education twice, do you think I could be a bird so as to learn about that?’

He had been bitten with the craze for birds which bites all sensible people in the spring, and which sometimes even leads to excesses like bird’s nesting.

‘I can see no reason why you should not,’ said the magician. ‘Why not try it at night?’

‘But they will be asleep at night.’

‘All the better chance of seeing them, without their flying away. You could go with Archimedes this evening, and he would tell you about them.’

‘Would you do that, Archimedes?’

‘I should love to,’ said the owl. ‘I was feeling like a little saunter myself.’

‘Do you know,’ asked the Wart, thinking of the thrush, ‘why birds sing, or how? Is it a language?’

‘Of course it is a language. It is not a big language like human speech, but it is large.’

‘Gilbert White,’ said Merlyn, ‘remarks, or will remark, however you like to put it, that “the language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, little is said, but much is intended.” He also says somewhere that “the rooks, in the breeding season, attempt sometimes, in the gaiety of their hearts, to sing – but with no great success.”’

‘I love rooks,’ said the Wart. ‘It is funny, but I think they are my favourite birds.’

‘Why?’ asked Archimedes.

‘Well, I like them. I like their sauce.’

‘Neglectful parents,’ quoted Merlyn, who was in a scholarly mood, ‘and saucy, perverse children.’

‘It is true,’ said Archimedes reflectively, ‘that all the corvidae have a distorted sense of humour.’

Wart explained.

‘I love the way they enjoy flying. They don’t just fly, like other birds, but they fly for fun. It is lovely when they hoist home to bed in a flock at night, all cheering and making rude remarks and pouncing on each other in a vulgar way. They turn over on their backs sometimes and tumble out of the air, just to be ridiculous, or else because they have forgotten they are flying and have coarsely begun to scratch themselves for fleas, without thinking about it.’

‘They are intelligent birds,’ said Archimedes, ‘in spite of their low humour. They are one of the birds that have parliaments, you know, and a social system.’

‘Do you mean they have laws?’

‘Certainly they have laws. They meet in the autumn, in a field, to talk them over.’

‘What sort of laws?’

‘Oh, well, laws about the defence of the rookery, and marriage, and so forth. You are not allowed to marry outside the rookery, and, if you do become quite lost to all sense of decency, and bring back a sable virgin from a neighbouring settlement, then everybody pulls your nest to pieces as fast as you can build it up. They make you go into the suburbs, you know, and that is why every rookery has out-lying nests all round it, several trees away.’

‘Another thing I like about them,’ said the Wart, ‘is their Go. They may be thieves and practical jokers, and they do quarrel and bully each other in a squawky way, but they have got the courage to mob their enemies. I should think it takes some courage to mob a hawk, even if there is a pack of you. And even while they are doing it they clown.’

‘They are mobs,’ said Archimedes, loftily. ‘You have said the word.’

‘Well, they are larky mobs, anyway,’ said the Wart, ‘and I like them.’

What is your favourite bird?’ asked Merlyn politely, to keep the peace.

Archimedes thought this over for some time, and then said, ‘Well, it is a large question. It is rather like asking you what is your favourite book. On the whole, however, I think that I must prefer the pigeon.’

‘To eat?’

‘I was leaving that side of it out,’ said the owl in civilized tones. ‘Actually the pigeon is the favourite dish of all raptors, if they are big enough to take her, but I was thinking of nothing but domestic habits.’

‘Describe them.’

‘The pigeon,’ said Archimedes, ‘is a kind of Quaker. She dresses in grey. A dutiful child, a constant lover, and a wise parent, she knows, like all philosophers, that the hand of every man is against her. She has learned throughout the centuries to specialize in escape. No pigeon has ever committed an act of aggression nor turned upon her persecutors: but no bird, likewise, is so skilful in eluding them. She has learned to drop out of a tree on the opposite side to man, and to fly low so that there is a hedge between them. No other bird can estimate a range so well. Vigilant, powdery, odorous and loose-feathered – so that dogs object to taking them in their mouths – armoured against pellets by the padding of these feathers, the pigeons coo to one another with true love, nourish their cunningly hidden children with true solicitude, and flee from the aggressor with true philosophy – a race of peace lovers continually caravanning away from the destructive Indian in covered wagons. They are loving individualists surviving against the forces of massacre only by wisdom in escape.

‘Did you know,’ added Archimedes, ‘that a pair of pigeons always roosts head to tail, so that they can keep a look-out in both directions?’

‘I know our tame pigeons do,’ said the Wart. ‘I suppose the reason why people are always trying to kill them is because they are so greedy. What I like about wood-pigeons is the clap of their wings, and how they soar up and close their wings and sink, during their courting flights, so that they fly rather like woodpeckers.’

‘It is not very like woodpeckers,’ said Merlyn.

‘No, it is not,’ admitted the Wart.

‘And what is your favourite bird?’ asked Archimedes, feeling that his master ought to be allowed a say.

Merlyn put his fingers together like Sherlock Holmes and replied immediately, ‘I prefer the chaffinch. My friend Linnaeus calls him coelebs or bachelor bird. The flocks have the sense to separate during the winter, so that all the males are in one flock and all the females in the other. For the winter months, at any rate, there is perfect peace.’

‘The conversation,’ observed Archimedes, ‘arose out of whether birds could talk.’

‘Another friend of mine,’ said Merlyn immediately, in his most learned voice, ‘maintains, or will maintain, that the question of the language of birds arises out of imitation. Aristotle, you know, also attributes tragedy to imitation.’

Archimedes sighed heavily, and remarked in prophetic tones, ‘You had better get it off your chest.’

‘It is like this,’ said Merlyn. ‘The kestrel drops upon a mouse, and the poor mouse, transfixed with those needle talons, cries out in agony his one squeal of K-e-e-e! Next time the kestrel sees a mouse, his own soul cries out Kee in imitation. Another kestrel, perhaps his mate, comes to that cry, and after a few million years all the kestrels are calling each other with their individual note of Kee-kee-kee.’

‘You can’t make the whole story out of one bird,’ said the Wart.

‘I don’t want to. The hawks scream like their prey. The mallards croak like the frogs they eat, the shrikes also, like these creatures in distress. The blackbirds and thrushes click like the snail-shells they hammer to pieces. The various finches make the noise of cracking seeds and the woodpecker imitates the tapping on wood which he makes to get the insects that he eats.’

‘But all birds don’t give a single note!’

‘No, of course not. The call-note arises out of imitation and then the various bird songs are developed by repeating the call-note and descanting upon it.’

‘I see,’ said Archimedes coldly. ‘And what about me?’

‘Well, you know quite well,’ said Merlyn, ‘that the shrew-mouse you pounce upon squeals out Kweek! That is why the young of your species call Kee-wick.’

‘And the old?’ inquired Archimedes sarcastically.

‘Hooroo, Hooroo,’ cried Merlyn, refusing to be damped. ‘It is obvious, my dear fellow. After their first winter, that is the wind in the hollow trees where they prefer to sleep.’

‘I see,’ said Archimedes, more coolly than ever. ‘This time, we note, it is not a question of prey at all.’

‘Oh, come along,’ replied Merlyn. ‘There are other things besides the things you eat. Even a bird drinks sometimes, for instance, or bathes itself in water. It is the liquid notes of a river that we hear in a robin’s song.’

‘It seems now,’ said Archimedes, ‘that it is no longer a question of what we eat, but also what we drink or hear.’

‘And why not?’

The owl said resignedly, ‘Oh, well.’

‘I think it is an interesting idea,’ said the Wart, to encourage his tutor. ‘But how does a language come out of these imitations?’

‘They repeat them at first,’ said Merlyn, ‘and then they vary them. You don’t seem to realize what a lot of meaning there resides in the tone and the speed of voice. Suppose I were to say, “What a nice day,” just like that. You would answer, “Yes, so it is.” But if I were to say, “What a nice day,” in caressing tones, you might think I was a nice person. But then again, if I were to say, “What a nice day,” quite breathless, you might look about you to see what had put me in a fright. It is like this that the birds have developed their language.’

‘Would you mind telling us,’ said Archimedes, ‘since you know so much about it, how many various things we birds are able to express by altering the tempo and emphasis of the elaborations of our call-notes?’

‘But a large number of things. You can cry Kee-wick in tender accents, if you are in love, or Kee-wick angrily in challenge or in hate: you can cry it on a rising scale as a call-note, if you do not know where your partner is, or to attract their attention away if strangers are straying near your nest: If you go near the old nest in the winter-time you may cry Kee-wick lovingly, a conditioned reflex from the pleasures which you once enjoyed within it, and if I come near to you in a startling way you may cry out Keewick-keewick-keewick, in loud alarm.’

‘When we come to conditioned reflexes,’ remarked Archimedes sourly. ‘I prefer to look for a mouse.’

‘So you may. And when you find it I dare say you will make another sound characteristic of owls, though not often mentioned in books of ornithology. I refer to the sound “Tock” or “Tck” which human beings call a smacking of the lips.’

‘And what sound is that supposed to imitate?’

‘Obviously, the breaking of mousy bones.’

‘You are a cunning master,’ said Archimedes, ‘and as far as a poor owl is concerned you will just have to get away with it. All I can tell you from my personal experience is that it is not like that at all. A tit can tell you not only that it is in danger, but what kind of danger it is in. It can say, “Look out for the cat,” or “Look out for the hawk,” or “Look out for the tawny owl,” as plainly as ABC.’

‘I don’t deny it,’ said Merlyn. ‘I am only telling you the beginnings of the language. Suppose you try to tell me the song of any single bird which I can’t attribute originally to imitation?’

‘The night-jar,’ said the Wart.

‘The buzzing of the wings of beetles,’ replied his tutor at once.

‘The nightingale,’ cried Archimedes desperately.

‘Ah,’ said Merlyn, leaning back in his comfortable chair. ‘Now we are to imitate the soul-song of our beloved Proserpine, as she stirs to wake in all her liquid self.’

‘Tereu,’ said the Wart softly.

‘Pieu,’ added the owl quietly.

‘Music!’ concluded the necromancer in ecstasy, unable to make the smallest beginnings of an imitation.

‘Hallo,’ said Kay, opening the door of the afternoon school room. ‘I’m sorry I am late for the geography lesson. I was trying to get a few small birds with my cross-bow. Look, I have killed a thrush.’

Chapter XVIII

The Wart lay awake as he had been told to do. He was to wait until Kay was asleep, and then Archimedes would come for him with Merlyn’s magic. He lay under the great bearskin and stared out of the window at the stars of spring, no longer frosty and metallic, but as if they had been new washed and had swollen with the moisture. It was a lovely evening, without rain or cloud. The sky between the stars was of the deepest and fullest velvet. Framed in the thick western window, Aldebaran and Betelgeuse were racing Sirius over the horizon, the hunting dog-star looking back to his master Orion, who had not yet heaved himself above the rim. In at the window came also the unfolding scent of benighted flowers, for the currants, the wild cherries, the plums and the hawthorn were already in bloom, and no less than five nightingales within earshot were holding a contest of beauty among the bowery, the looming trees.

Wart lay on his back with his bearskin half off him and his hands clasped behind his head. It was too beautiful to sleep, too temperate for the rug. He watched out at the stars in a kind of trance. Soon it would be the summer again, when he could sleep on the battlements and watch these stars hovering as close as moths above his face – and, in the Milky Way at least, with something of the mothy pollen. They would be at the same time so distant that unutterable thoughts of space and eternity would baffle themselves in his sighing breast, and he would imagine to himself how he was falling upward higher and higher among them, never reaching, never ending, leaving and losing everything in the tranquil speed of space.

He was fast asleep when Archimedes came for him.

‘Eat this,’ said the owl, and handed him a dead mouse.

The Wart felt so strange that he took the furry atom without protest, and popped it into his mouth without any feelings that it was going to be nasty. So he was not surprised when it turned out to be excellent, with a fruity taste like eating a peach with the skin on, though naturally the skin was not so nice as the mouse.

‘Now, we had better fly,’ said the owl. ‘Just flip to the window-sill here, to get accustomed to yourself before we take off.’

Wart jumped for the sill and automatically gave himself an extra kick with his wings, just as a high jumper swings his arms. He landed on the sill with a thump, as owls are apt to do, did not stop himself in time, and toppled straight out of the window. ‘This,’ he thought to himself, cheerfully, ‘is where I break my neck.’ It was curious, but he was not taking life seriously. He felt the castle walls streaking past him, and the ground and the moat swimming up. He kicked with his wings, and the ground sank again, like water in a leaking well. In a second that kick of his wings had lost its effect, and the ground was welling up. He kicked again. It was strange, going forward with the earth ebbing and flowing beneath him, in the utter silence of his down-fringed feathers.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ panted Archimedes, bobbing in the dark air beside him, ‘stop flying like a woodpecker. Anybody would take you for a Little Owl, if the creatures had been imported. What you are doing is to give yourself flying speed with one flick of your wings. You then rise on that flick until you have lost flying speed and begin to stall. Then you give another just as you are beginning to drop out of the air, and do a switch-back. It is confusing to keep up with you.’

‘Well,’ said the Wart recklessly, ‘if I stop doing this I shall go bump altogether.’

‘Idiot,’ said the owl. ‘Waver your wings all the time, like me, instead of doing these jumps with them.’

The Wart did what he was told, and was surprised to find that the earth became stable and moved underneath him without tilting, in a regular pour. He did not feel himself to be moving at all.

‘That’s better.’

‘How curious everything looks,’ observed the boy with some wonder, now that he had time to look about him.

And, indeed, the world did look curious. In some ways the best description of it would be to say that it looked like a photographer’s negative, for he was seeing one ray beyond the spectrum which is visible to human beings. An infra-red camera will take photographs in the dark, when we cannot see, and it will also take photographs in daylight. The owls are the same, for it is untrue that they can only see at night. They see in the day just as well, only they happen to possess the advantage of seeing pretty well at night also. So naturally they prefer to do their hunting then, when other creatures are more at their mercy. To the Wart the green trees would have looked whitish in the daytime, as if they were covered with apple-blossom, and now, at night, everything had the same kind of different look. It was like flying in a twilight which had reduced everything to shades of the same colour, and, as in the twilight, there was a considerable amount of gloom.

‘Do you like it?’ asked the owl.

‘I like it very much. Do you know, when I was a fish there were parts of the water which were colder or warmer than the other parts, and now it is the same in the air.’

‘The temperature,’ said Archimedes, ‘depends on the vegetation of the bottom. Woods or weeds, they make it warm above them.’

‘Well,’ said the Wart, ‘I can see why the reptiles who had given up being fishes decided to become birds. It certainly is fun.’

‘You are beginning to fit things together,’ remarked Archimedes. ‘Do you mind if we sit down?’

‘How does one?’

‘You must stall. That means you must drive yourself up until you lose flying speed, and then, just as you feel yourself beginning to tumble – you sit down. Have you never noticed how birds fly upward to perch? They don’t come straight down on the branch, but dive below it and then rise. At the top of their rise they stall and sit down.’

‘But birds land on the ground too. And what about mallards on the water? They can’t rise to sit on that.’

‘Well, it is perfectly possible to land on flat things, but more difficult. You have to glide in at stalling speed all the way, and then increase your wind resistance by cupping your wings, dropping your feet, tail, etc. You may have noticed that few birds do it gracefully. Look how a crow thumps down and how the mallard splashes. The spoon-winged birds like heron and plover seem to do it best. As a matter of fact, we owls are not so bad at it ourselves.’

‘And the long-winged birds like swifts, I suppose they are the worst, for they can’t rise from a flat surface at all?’

‘The reasons are different,’ said Archimodes, ‘yet the fact is true. But need we talk on the wing? I am getting tired.’

‘So am I.’

‘Owls usually prefer to sit down every hundred yards.’

The Wart copied Archimedes in zooming up toward the branch which they had chosen. He began to fall just as they were above it, clutched it with his furry feet at the last moment, swayed backward and forward twice, and found that he had landed successfully. He folded up his wings.

While the Wart sat still and admired the view, his friend proceeded to give him a lecture about flight in birds. He told how, although the swift was so fine a flyer that he could sleep on the wing all night, and although the Wart himself had claimed to admire the way in which rooks enjoyed their flights, the real aeronaut of the lower strata – which cut out the swift – was the plover. He explained how plovers indulged in aerobatics, and would actually do such stunts as spins, stall turns and even rolls for the mere grace of the thing. They were the only birds which made a practice of slipping off height to land – except occasionally the oldest, gayest and most beautiful of all the conscious aeronauts, the raven. Wart paid little or no attention to the lecture, but got his eyes accustomed to the strange tones of light instead, and watched Archimedes from the corner of one of them. For Archimedes, while he was talking, was absent-mindedly spying for his dinner. This spying was an odd performance.

A spinning top which is beginning to lose its spin slowly describes circles with its highest point before falling down. The leg of the top remains in the same place, but the apex makes circles which get bigger and bigger toward the end. This is what Archimedes was absent-mindedly doing. His feet remained stationary, but he moved the upper part of his body round and round, like somebody trying to see from behind a fat lady at a cinema, and uncertain which side of her gave the best view. As he could also turn his head almost completely round on his shoulders, you may imagine that his antics were worth watching.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the Wart.

Even as he asked, Archimedes was gone. First there had been an owl talking about plover, and then there was no owl. Only, far below the Wart, there was a thump and a rattle of leaves, as the aerial torpedo went smack into the middle of a bush, regardless of obstructions.

In a minute the owl was sitting beside him again on the branch, thoughtfully breaking up a dead sparrow.

‘May I do that?’ asked the Wart, inclined to be blood-thirsty.

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Archimedes, after waiting to crop his mouthful, ‘you may not. The magic mouse which turned you into an owl will be enough for you – after all, you have been eating as a human all day – and no owl kills for pleasure. Besides, I am supposed to be taking you for education, and, as soon as I have finished my snack here, that is what we shall have to do.’

‘Where are you going to take me?’

Archimedes finished his sparrow, wiped his beak politely on the bough, and turned his eyes full on the Wart. These great, round eyes had, as a famous writer had expressed it, a bloom of light upon them like the purple bloom on a grape.

‘Now that you have learned to fly,’ he said, ‘Merlyn wants you to try the Wild Geese.’

The place in which he found himself was absolutely flat. In the human world we seldom see flatness, for the trees and houses and hedges give a serrated edge to the landscape. Even the grass sticks up with its myriad blades. But here, in the belly of the night, the illimitable, flat, wet mud was as featureless as a dark junket. If it had been wet sand, even, it would have had those little wave marks, like the palate of your mouth.