The Sword in the Stone

It had been difficult to go to sleep in the bright summer moonlight, but once he was there it was not difficult to stay. The sun came early, causing him to turn over in protest, but in going to sleep he had learnt to vanquish light, and now the light could not rewake him. It was nine o’clock, five hours after daylight, before he rolled over, opened his eyes, and was awake at once. He was hungry.

The Wart had heard about people who lived on berries, but this did not seem practical at the moment because it was July, and there were none. He found two wild strawberries and ate them greedily. They tasted nicer than anything, so he wished there were more. Then he wished it was April, so that he could find some birds’ eggs and eat those, or that he had not lost his goshawk Cully, so that the bird could catch him a rabbit which he would cook by rubbing two sticks together like the base Indian. But he had lost Cully, or he would not have lost himself, and probably the sticks would not have lit in any case. He decided that he could not have gone more than three or four miles from home, so the best thing he could do would be to sit still and listen. Then he might hear the noise of the haymakers, if he was lucky with the wind, and could hearken his way home by that.

What he did hear was a faint clanking noise, which made him think that King Pellinore must be after the Questing Beast again, close by. Only the noise was so regular and single in intention that it made him think of King Pellinore doing some special action with great patience and concentration, trying to scratch his back without taking off his armour, for instance. He went towards the noise.

There was a clearing in the forest, and in this clearing there was a snug little cottage built of stone. It was a cottage, although the Wart could not notice this at the time, which was divided into two bits. The main bit was the hall or every-purpose room, which was high because it extended from floor to roof, and this room had a fire on the floor whose smoke issued eventually out of a hole in the thatch of the roof. The other half of the cottage was divided into two rooms by a horizontal floor which made the top half into a bedroom and study, while the bottom half served for a larder, store-room, stable and barn. A white donkey lived in this downstairs room, and a ladder led to the one upstairs.

There was a well in front of the cottage, and the metallic noise which the Wart had heard was caused by a very old gentleman who was drawing water out of it by means of a handle and chain.

Clank, clank, clank, said the chain, until the bucket hit the lip of the well, and “Oh, drat the whole thing,” said the old gentleman. You would think that after all these years of study one could do better for oneself than a by-our-lady well with a by-our-lady bucket, whatever the by-our-lady cost.

“I wish to goodness,” added the old gentleman, heaving his bucket out of the well with a malevolent glance, “that I was only on the electric light and company’s water, drat it.”

The old gentleman that the Wart saw was a singular spectacle. He was dressed in a flowing gown with fur tippets which had the signs of the zodiac embroidered all over it, together with various cabalistic signs, as of triangles with eyes in them, queer crosses, leaves of trees, bones and birds and animals and a planetarium whose stars shone like bits of looking glass with the sun on them. He had a pointed hat like a dunce’s cap, or like the headgear worn by ladies of that time, except that the ladies were accustomed to have a bit of veil floating from the top of it. He also had a wand of lignum vitae, which he had laid down in the grass beside him, and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles like those of King Pellinore. They were extraordinary spectacles, being without earpieces, but shaped rather like scissors or the the antennae of the tarantula wasp.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the Wart, “but can you tell me the way to Sir Ector’s castle, if you don’t mind?”

The aged gentleman put down his bucket and looked at the Wart.

“Your name would be Wart,” he said.

“Yes, sir, please, sir,” said the Wart.

“My name,” said the aged gentleman, “is Merlyn.”

“How do you do?” said the Wart.

“How do you do?” said Merlyn. “It is clement weather, is it not?”

“It is,” said the Wart, “for the time of the year.”

When these formalities had been concluded, the Wart had leisure to examine his new acquaintance more closely. The aged gentleman was staring at him with a kind of unwinking and benevolent curiosity which made him feel that it would not be at all rude to stare back, no ruder than it would be to stare at one of his guardian’s cows who happened to be ruminating his personality as she leant her head over a gate.

Merlyn had a long white beard and long white moustache which hung down on either side of it, and close inspection showed that he was far from clean. It was not that he had dirty finger-nails or anything like that, but some large bird seemed to have been nesting in his hair. The Wart was familiar with the nests of spar-hawk and gos, those crazy conglomerations of sticks and oddments which had been taken over from squirrels and crows, and he knew how the twigs and the tree foot were splashed with white mutes, old bones, muddy feathers and castings. This was the impression which he gathered from Merlyn. The old gentleman was streaked with droppings over his shoulders, among the stars and triangles of his gown, and a large spider was slowly lowering itself from the tip of his hat, as he gazed and slowly blinked at the little boy in front of him. He had a faintly worried expression, as though he were trying to remember some name which began with Chol but which was pronounced in quite a different way, possibly Menzies or was it Dalziel? His mild blue eyes, very big and round under the tarantula spectacles, gradually filmed and clouded over as he gazed at the boy, and then he turned his head away with a resigned expression, as though it was all too much for him after all.

“Do you like peaches?” asked the old gentleman.

“Very much indeed,” answered the Wart, and his mouth began to water so that it was full of sweet, soft liquid.

“It is only July, you know,” said the old man reprovingly, and walked off in the direction of the cottage without looking round.

The Wart followed after him, since this was the simplest thing to do, and offered to carry the bucket (which seemed to please the old gentleman, who gave it to him) and waited while he counted his keys, and muttered and mislaid them and dropped them in the grass. Finally, when they had got their way into the black and white cottage with as much trouble as if they were burglaring it, he climbed up the ladder after his host and found himself in the upstairs room.

It was the most marvellous room that the Wart had ever been in.

There was a real corkindrill hanging from the rafters, very lifelike and horrible with glass eyes and scaly tail stretched out behind it. When its master came into the room it winked one eye in salutation, although it was stuffed. There were hundreds of thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the bookshelves and others propped up against each other as if they had had too much spirits to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure. Then there were stuffed birds, popinjays, and maggot-pies, and kingfishers, and peacocks with all their feathers but two, and tiny birds like beetles, and a reputed phoenix which smelt of incense and cinnamon. It could not have been a real phoenix, because there is only one of these at a time. Over the mantelpiece there was a fox’s mask, with GRAFTON. BUCKINGHAM TO DAVENTRY, 2 HRS 20 MINS written under it, and also a forty-pound salmon with AWE, 43 MIN., BULLDOG written under it, and a very life-like basilisk with CROWHURST OTTER HOUNDS in Roman print. There were several boars’ tusks and the claws of tigers and libbards mounted in symmetrical patterns, and a big head of Ovis Poli, six live grass snakes in a kind of aquarium, some nests of the solitary wasp nicely set up in a glass cylinder, an ordinary beehive whose inhabitants went in and out of the window unmolested, two young hedgehogs in cotton wool, a pair of badgers which immediately began to cry Yik-Yik-Yik-Yik in loud voices as soon as the magician appeared, twenty boxes which contained stick caterpillars and sixths of the puss-moth, and even an oleander that was worth two and six, all feeding on the appropriate leaves, a guncase with all sorts of weapons which would not be invented for half a thousand years, a rod-box ditto, a lovely chest of drawers full of salmon flies which had been tied by Merlyn himself, another chest whose drawers were labelled Mandragora, Mandrake, Old Man’s Beard, etc., a bunch of turkey feathers and goose-quills for making pens, an astrolabe, twelve pairs of boots, a dozen purse-nets, three dozen rabbit wires, twelve corkscrews, an ant’s nest between two glass plates, ink-bottles of every possible colour from red to violet, darning-needles, a gold medal for being the best scholar at Eton, four or five recorders, a nest of field mice all alive-o, two skulls, plenty of cut glass, Venetian glass, Bristol glass and a bottle of Mastic varnish, some satsuma china and some cloisonné, the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (marred as it was by the sensationalism of the popular plates), two paint-boxes (one oil, one water-colour), three globes of the known geographical world, a few fossils, the stuffed head of a camel-leopard, six pismires, some glass retorts with cauldrons, bunsen burners, etc., and the complete set of cigarette cards depicting wildfowl by Peter Scott.

Merlyn took off his pointed hat when he came into this extraordinary chamber, because it was too high for the roof, and immediately there was a little scamper in one of the dark corners and a flap of soft wings, and a young tawny owl was sitting on the black skull-cap which protected the top of his head.

“Oh, what a lovely owl!” cried the Wart.

But when he went up to it and held out his hand, the owl grew half as tall again, stood up as stiff as a poker, closed its eyes so that there was only the smallest slit to peep through, as one is in the habit of doing when told to shut one’s eyes at hide-and-seek, and said in a doubtful voice:

“There is no owl.”

Then it shut its eyes entirely and looked the other way.

“It’s only a boy,” said Merlyn.

“There is no boy,” said the owl hopefully, without turning round.

The Wart was so startled by finding that the owl could talk that he forgot his manners and came closer still. At this the owl became so nervous that it made a mess on Merlyn’s head – the whole room was quite white with droppings – and flew off to perch on the farthest tip of the corkindrill’s tail, out of reach.

“We see so little company,” explained Merlyn, wiping his head with half a worn-out pair of pyjama tops which he kept for that purpose, “that Archimedes is a little shy of strangers. Come, Archimedes, I want you to meet a friend of mine called Wart.”

Here he held out his hand to the owl, who came waddling like a goose along the corkindrill’s back – he waddled with this rolling gait so as to keep his tail from being damaged – and hopped down on to Merlyn’s finger with every sign of reluctance.

“Hold out your finger,” said Merlyn, “and put it behind his legs. No, lift it up under his train.”

When the Wart had done this Merlyn moved the owl gently backwards, so that the Wart’s finger pressed against its legs from behind, and it either had to step back on the finger or get pushed off its balance altogether. It stepped back. The Wart stood there delighted, while the furry little feet held tight on to his finger and the sharp claws prickled his skin.

“Say how d’you do properly,” said Merlyn.

“I won’t,” said Archimedes, looking the other way and holding very tight.

“Oh, he is lovely,” said the Wart again. “Have you had him very long?”

“Archimedes has stayed with me since he was quite small, indeed since he had a tiny head like a chicken’s.”

“I wish he would talk to me,” said the Wart.

“Perhaps if you were to give him this mouse here, politely, he might learn to know you better.”

Merlyn took the dead mouse out of his skull-cap – “I always keep them there,” he explained, “and worms too, for fishing. I find it most convenient” – and handed it to the Wart, who held it out rather gingerly towards Archimedes. The nutty little curved beak looked as if it were capable of doing damage, but Archimedes looked closely at the mouse, blinked at the Wart, moved nearer on the finger, closed his eyes and leant forward. He stood there with closed eyes and an expression of rapture on his face, as if he were saying grace, and then, with the absurdest little sideways nibble, took the morsel so gently that he would not have broken a soap bubble. He remained leaning forward with closed eyes, with the mouse suspended from his beak, as if he were not sure what to do with it. Then he lifted his right foot – he was right-handed – and took hold of the mouse. He held it up like a boy holding a stick of rock or a constable with his truncheon, looked at it, nibbled its tail. He turned it round so that it was head first, for the Wart had offered it the wrong way round, and gave one gulp. He looked round at the company with the tail hanging out of the corner of his mouth – as much as to say, “I wish you would not all stare at me so” – turned his head away, politely swallowed the tail, scratched his sailor’s beard with his left toe, and began to ruffle out his feathers.

“Let him alone,” said Merlyn, “now. For perhaps he does not want to be friends with you until he knows what you are like. With owls, it is never easy-come and easy-go.”

“Perhaps he will sit on my shoulder,” said the Wart, and with that he instinctively lowered his hand, so that the owl, who liked to be as high as possible, ran up the slope and stood shyly beside his ear.

“Now breakfast,” said Merlyn.

The Wart saw that the most perfect breakfast was laid out neatly for two, on the table before the window. There were peaches. There were also melons, strawberries and cream, rusks, brown trout piping hot, grilled perch which were much nicer, chicken devilled enough to burn one’s mouth out, kidneys and mushrooms on toast, fricassee, curry, and a choice of boiling coffee or best chocolate made with cream in large cups.

“Have some mustard,” said Merlyn, when they had got to the kidneys.

The mustard-pot got up and walked over to his plate on thin silver legs that waddled like the owl’s. Then it uncurled its handles and one handle lifted its lid with exaggerated courtesy while the other helped him to a generous spoonful.

“Oh, I love the mustard-pot!” cried the Wart. “Where ever did you get it?”

At this the pot beamed all over its face and began to strut a bit; but Merlyn rapped it on the head with a teaspoon, so that it sat down and shut up at once.

“It’s not a bad pot,” he said grudgingly. “Only it is inclined to give itself airs.”

The Wart was so much impressed by the kindness of the old magician, and particularly by all the lovely things which he possessed, that he hardly liked to ask him personal questions. It seemed politer to sit still and speak when he was spoken to. But Merlyn did not speak very much, and when he did speak it was never in questions, so that the Wart had little opportunity for conversation. At last his curiosity got the better of him, and he asked something which had been puzzling him for some time.

“Would you mind if I ask you a question?”

“It is what I am for,” said Merlyn sadly.

“How did you know to set the breakfast for two?”

The old gentleman leaned back in his chair and lit an enormous meerschaum pipe – Good gracious, he breathes fire, thought the Wart, who had never heard of tobacco – before he was ready to reply. Then he looked puzzled, took off his skull-cap – three mice fell out – and scratched in the middle of his bald head.

“Have you ever tried to draw in a looking-glass?” asked Merlyn.

“I don’t think I have,” said the Wart.

“Looking-glass,” said the old gentleman, holding out his hand. Immediately there was a tiny lady’s vanity-glass in his hand.

“Not that kind, you fool,” said Merlyn angrily. “I want one big enough to shave in.”

The vanity-glass vanished, and in its place there was a shaving mirror about a foot square. Merlyn then demanded pencil and paper in quick succession; got an unsharpened pencil and the Morning Post; sent them back; got a fountain-pen with no ink in it and six reams of brown-paper suitable for parcels; sent them back; flew into a passion in which he said by-our-lady quite often, and ended up with a carbon pencil and some cigarette papers which he said would have to do.

He put one of the papers in front of the glass and made five dots on it like this:

“Now,” he said, “I want you to join those five dots up to make a W, looking only in the glass.”

The Wart took the pen and tried to do as he was bid, but after a lot of false starts the letter which he produced was this:

“Well, it isn’t bad,” said Merlyn doubtfully, “and in a way it does look a bit like an M.”

Then he fell into a reverie, stroking his beard, breathing fire, and staring at the paper.

“About the breakfast?” asked the Wart timidly, after he had waited five minutes.

“Ah, yes,” said Merlyn. “How did I know to set breakfast for two? That was why I showed you the looking-glass. Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.”

Merlyn stopped talking and looked at the Wart in an anxious way.

“Have I told you this before?” he inquired suspiciously.

“No,” said the Wart. “We only met about half an hour ago.”

“So little time to pass as that?” said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pyjama tops and added anxiously, “Am I going to tell it you again?”

“I don’t know,” said the Wart, “unless you haven’t finished telling me yet.”

“You see,” said Merlyn, “one gets confused with Time, when it is like that. All one’s tenses get muddled up, for one thing. If you know what’s going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it so difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened, if you see what I mean? Like drawing in a mirror.”

The Wart did not quite see, but was just going to say that he was sorry for Merlyn if these things made him unhappy, when he felt a curious sensation at his ear. “Don’t jump,” said Merlyn, just as he was going to do so, and the Wart sat still. Archimedes, who had been standing forgotten on his shoulder all this time, was gently touching himself against him. His beak was right against the lobe of his ear, which its bristles made to tickle, and suddenly, a soft hoarse little voice whispered, “How d’you do,” so that it sounded right inside his head.

“Oh, owl!” cried the Wart, forgetting about Merlyn’s troubles instantly. “Look, he has decided to talk to me!”

The Wart gently leant his head against the soft feathers, and the brown owl, taking the rim of his ear in its beak, quickly nibbled right round it with the smallest nibbles.

“I shall call him Archie!” exclaimed the Wart.

“I trust you will do nothing of the sort,” cried Merlyn instantly, in a stern and angry voice, and the owl withdrew to the farthest corner of his shoulder.

“Is it wrong?”

“You might as well call me Wol, or Olly,” said the owl sourly, “and have done with it.

“Or Bubbles,” added the owl in a bitter voice.

Merlyn took the Wart’s hand and said kindly, “You are only young, and do not understand these things. But you will learn that owls are the politest and the most courteous, single-hearted and faithful creatures living. You must never be familiar, rude or vulgar with them, or make them to look ridiculous. Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, though they are often ready to play the buffoon for your amusement, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise. No owl can possibly be called Archie.”

“I am sorry, owl,” said the Wart.

“And I am sorry, boy,” said the owl. “I can see that you spoke in ignorance, and I bitterly regret that I should have been so petty as to take offence where none was intended.”

The owl really did regret it, and looked so remorseful and upset that Merlyn had to put on a very cheerful manner and change the conversation.

“Well,” said he, “now that we have finished breakfast, I think it is high time that we should all three find out way back to Sir Ector.”

“Excuse me a moment,” he added as an afterthought, and, turning round to the breakfast things, he pointed a knobbly finger at them and said in a stern voice, “Wash up.”

At this all the china and cutlery scrambled down off the table, the cloth emptied the crumbs out of the window, and the napkins folded themselves up. All ran off down the ladder, to where Merlyn had left the bucket, and there was such a noise and yelling as if a lot of children had been let out of school. Merlyn went to the door and shouted, “Mind, nobody is to get broken.” But his voice was entirely drowned in shrill squeals, splashes, and cries of “My, it is cold,” “I shan’t stay in long,” “Look out, you’ll break me,” or “Come on, let’s duck the teapot.”

“Are you really coming all the way home with me?” asked the Wart, who could hardly believe the good news.

“Why not?” said Merlyn. “How else can I be your tutor?”

At this the Wart’s eyes grew rounder and rounder, until they were about as big as the owl’s who was sitting on his shoulder, and his face got redder and redder, and a big breath seemed to gather itself beneath his heart.

“My!” exclaimed the Wart, while his eyes sparkled with excitement at the discovery. “I must have been on a Quest.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Wart started talking before he was halfway over the drawbridge. “Look who I’ve brought,” he said. “Look! I’ve been on a Quest. I was shot at with three arrows. They had black and yellow stripes. The owl is called Archimedes. I saw King Pellinore. This is my tutor, Merlyn. I went on a Quest for him. He was after the Questing Beast. I mean King Pellinore. It was terrible in the forest. Merlyn made the plates wash up. Hallo, Hob. Look, we have got Cully.”

Hob just looked at the Wart, but so proudly that the Wart went quite red. It was such a pleasure to be back home again with all his friends, and everything achieved.

Hob said gruffly, “Ah, master, us shall make an austringer of ’ee yet.”

He came for Cully, as if he could not keep his hands off him any longer, but he patted the Wart too, fondling them both because he was not sure which he was gladder to see back. He took Cully on his own fist, reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost.