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While he was looking at the corpses, a live ant came down the pathway carrying a third one.
It said: ‘Hail, Barbarus!’
The boy said Hail, politely.
In one respect, of which he knew nothing, he was lucky Merlyn had remembered to give him the proper smell for the nest – for, if he had smelt of any other nest, they would have killed him at once. If Miss Cavell had been an ant, they would have had to write on her statue: SMELL IS NOT ENOUGH.
The new ant put down the cadaver vaguely and began dragging the other two in various directions. It did not seem to know where to put them. Or rather, it knew that a certain arrangement had to be made, but it could not figure how to make it. It was like a man with a tea-cup in one hand and a sandwich in the other, who wants to light a cigarette with a match. But, where the man would invent the idea of putting down the cup and sandwich – before picking up the cigarette and the match – this ant would have put down the sandwich and picked up the match, then it would have been down with the match and up with the cigarette, then down with the cigarette and up with the sandwich, then down with the cup and up with the cigarette, until finally it had put down the sandwich and picked up the match. It was inclined to rely on a series of accidents to achieve its object. It was patient, and did not think. When it had pulled the three dead ants into several positions, they would fall into line under the clod eventually, and that was its duty.
Wart watched the arrangements with a surprise which turned into vexation and then into dislike. He felt like asking why it did not think things out in advance – the annoyed feeling which people have on seeing a job being badly done. Later he began to wish that he could put several questions, such as ‘Do you like being a sexton?’ or ‘Are you a slave?’ or even ‘Are you happy?’
The extraordinary thing was that he could not ask these questions. In order to ask them, he would have had to put them into ant language through his antennae – and he now discovered, with a helpless feeling, that there were no words for the things he wanted to say. There were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites. He felt like a dumb man trying to shout, ‘Fire!’ The nearest he could get to Right or Wrong, even, was to say Done or Notre Done.
The ant finished fiddling with its corpses and turned back down the pathway, leaving them in the haphazard order. It found that the Wart was in its way, so it stopped, waving its wireless aerials at him as if it were a tank. With its mute, menacing helmet of a face, and its hairiness, and the things like spurs on the front leg-joint, perhaps it was more like a knight-in-armour on an armoured horse: or like a combination of the two, a hairy centaur-in-armour.
It said, ‘Hail Barbarus!’ again.
‘Hail!’
‘What are you doing?’
The boy answered truthfully: ‘I am not doing anything.’
It was baffled by this for several seconds, as you would be if Einstein had told you his latest ideas about space. Then it extended the twelve joints of its aerial and spoke past him into the blue.
It said: ‘105978/UDC reporting from square five. There is an insane ant on square five. Over to you.’
The word it used for insane was Not-Done. Later on, the Wart discovered that there were only two qualifications in the language, Done and Not-Done – which applied to all questions of value. If the seeds which the collectors found were sweet, they were Done seeds. If somebody had doctored them with corrosive sublimate, they would have been Not-Done seeds, and that was that. Even the moons, mammies, doves, etc., in the broadcasts were completely described when they were stated to be Done ones.
The broadcast stopped for a moment, and the fruity voice said: ‘GHQ replying to 105978/UDC. What is its number? Over.’
The ant asked: ‘What is your number?’
‘I don’t know.’
When this news had been exchanged with headquarters, a message came back to ask whether he could give an account of himself. The ant asked him. It used the same words as the broadcaster had used, and in the same voice. This made him feel uncomfortable and angry, two emotions which he disliked.
‘Yes,’ he said sarcastically, for it was obvious that the creature could not detect sarcasm, ‘I have fallen on my head and can’t remember anything about it.’
‘105978/UDC reporting. Not-Done ant has a black-out from falling off the nest. Over.’
‘GHQ replying to 105978/UDC. Not-Done ant is number 42436/WD, who fell off the nest this morning while working with mash squad. If it is competent to continue its duties –’ Competent-to-continue-its-duties was easier in the ant speech, for it was simply Done, like everything else that was not Not Done. But enough of the language question. ‘If it is competent to continue its duties, instruct 42436/WD to rejoin mash squad, relieving 210021/WD, who was sent to replace it. Over.’
The creature repeated the message.
It seemed that he could not have made a better explanation than this one about falling on his head, even if he had meant to – for the ants did occasionally tumble off. They were a species of ant called Messor barbarus.
‘Very well.’
The sexton paid no further attention to him, but crawled off down the path for another body, or for anything else that needed to be scavenged.
The Wart took himself away in the opposite direction, to join the mash squad. He memorized his own number and the number of the unit who had to be relieved.
The mash squad were standing in one of the outer chambers of the fortress like a circle of worshippers. He joined the circle, announcing that 210021/WD was to return to the main nest. Then he began filling himself with the sweet mash like the others. They made it by scraping the seeds which others had collected, chewing up the scrapings till they made a kind of paste or soup, and then swallowing it into their own crops. At first it was delicious to him, so that he ate greedily, but in a few seconds it began to be unsatisfactory. He could not understand why. He chewed and swallowed busily, copying the rest of the squad, but it was like eating a banquet of nothing, or like a dinner-party on the stage. In a way it was like a nightmare, in which you might continue to consume huge masses of putty without being able to stop.
There was a coming and going round the pile of seeds. The ants who had filled their crops to the brim were walking back to the inner fortress, to be replaced by a procession of empty ants who were coming from the same direction. There were never any new ants in the procession, only this same dozen going backward and forward, as they would do during all their lives.
He realized suddenly that what he was eating was not going into his stomach. A small proportion of it had penetrated to his private self at the beginning, and now the main mass was being stored in a kind of upper stomach or crop, from which it could be removed. It dawned on him at the same time that when he joined the westward stream he would have to disgorge the store, into a larder or something of that sort.
The mash squad conversed with each other while they worked. He thought this was a good sign at first, and listened, to pick up what he could.
‘Oh Ark!’ one of them would say. ‘Ear comes that Mammy – mammy – mammy – mammy song again. I dew think that Mammy – mammy – mammy – mammy song is loverly (done). It is so high-class (done).’
Another remark, ‘I dew think our beloved Leader is wonderful, don’t yew? They sigh she was stung three hundred times in the last war, and was awarded the Ant Cross for Valour.’
‘How lucky we are born in the “A” nest, don’t yew think, and wouldn’t it be hawful to be one of those orrid “B”s.’
‘Wasn’t it hawful about 310099/WD! Of course he was executed at once, by special order of ar beloved Leader.’
‘Oh Ark! Ear comes that Mammy – mammy – mammy – mammy song again. I dew think …’
He walked away to the nest with a full gorge, leaving them to do the round again. They had no news, no scandal, nothing to talk about. Novelties did not happen to them. Even the remarks about the executions were in a formula, and only varied as to the registration number of the criminal. When they had finished with the Mammy – mammy – mammy – mammy, they had to go on to the beloved Leader, and then to the filthy Barbarus B and to the latest execution. It went round in a circle. Even the beloveds, wonderfuls, luckies and so on were all Dones, and the awfuls were Not-Dones.
The boy found himself in the hall of the fortress, where hundreds and hundreds of ants were licking or feeding in the nurseries, carrying grubs to various aisles to get an even temperature, and opening or closing the ventilation passages. In the middle, the Leader sat complacently, laying eggs, attending to the broadcasts, issuing directions or commanding executions, surrounded by a sea of adulation. (He learned from Merlyn later that the method of succession among these Leaders was variable according to the different kind of ant. In Bothriomyrmex, for instance, the ambitious founder of a New Order would invade a nest of Tapinoma and jump on the back of the older tyrant. There, concealed by the smell of her host, she would slowly saw off the latter’s head, until she herself had achieved the right of leadership.)
There was no larder for his store of mash, after all. When anybody wanted a meal, they stopped him, got him to open his mouth, and fed from it. They did not treat him as a person, and indeed, they were impersonal themselves. He was a dumb-waiter from which dumb-diners fed. Even his stomach was not his own.
But we need not go on about the ants in too much detail – they are not a pleasant subject. It is enough to say that the boy went on living among them, conforming to their habits, watching them so as to understand as much as he could, but unable to ask questions. It was not only that their language had not got the words in which humans are interested – so that it would have been impossible to ask them whether they believed in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – but also that it was dangerous to ask questions at all. A question was a sign of insanity to them. Their life was not questionable: it was dictated. He crawled from nest to seeds and back again, exclaimed that the Mammy song was loverly, opened his jaws to regurgitate, and tried to understand as well as he could.
Later in the afternoon a scouting ant wandered across the rush bridge which Merlyn had commanded him to make. It was an ant of exactly the same species, but it came from the other nest. It was met by one of the scavenging ants and murdered.
The broadcasts changed after this news had been reported – or rather, they changed as soon as it had been discovered by spies that the other nest had a good store of seeds.
Mammy – mammy – mammy gave place to Antland, Antland Over All, and the stream of orders were discontinued in favour of lectures about war, patriotism or the economic situation. The fruity voice said that their beloved country was being encircled by a horde of filthy Other-nesters – at which the wireless chorus sang:
When other blood spurts from the knife,
Then everything is fine.
It also explained that Ant the Father had ordained in his wisdom that Othernest pismires should always be the slaves of Thisnest ones. Their beloved country had only one feeding tray at present – a disgraceful state of affairs which would have to be remedied if the dear race were not to perish. A third statement was that the national property of Thisnest was being threatened. Their boundaries were to be violated, their domestic animals, the beetles, were to be kidnapped, and their communal stomach would be starved. The Wart listened to two of these broadcasts carefully, so that he would be able to remember them afterwards.
The first one was arranged as follows:
A. We are so numerous that we are starving.
B. Therefore we must encourage still larger families so as to become yet more numerous and starving.
C. When we are so numerous and starving as all that, obviously we shall have a right to take other people’s stores of seed. Besides, we shall by then have a numerous and starving army.
It was only after this logical train of thought had been put into practice, and the output of the nurseries trebled – both nests meanwhile getting ample mash for all their needs from Merlyn – for it has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else – it was only then that the second type of lecture was begun.
This is how the second kind went:
A. We are more numerous than they are, therefore we have a right to their mash.
B. They are more numerous than we are, therefore they are wickedly trying to steal our mash.
C. We are a mighty race and have a natural right to subjugate their puny one.
D. They are a mighty race and are unnaturally trying to subjugate our inoffensive one.
E. We must attack them in self-defence.
F. They are attacking us by defending themselves.
G. If we do not attack them today, they will attack us tomorrow.
H. In any case we are not attacking them at all. We are offering them incalculable benefits.
After the second kind of address, the religious services began. These dated – the Wart discovered later – from a fabulous past so ancient that one could scarcely find a date for it – a past in which the emmets had not yet settled down to communism. They came from a time when ants were still like men, and very impressive some of the services were.
A psalm at one of them – beginning, if we allow for the difference of language, with the well-known words, ‘The earth is the Sword’s and all that therein is, the compass of the bomber and they that bomb therefrom’ – ended with the terrific conclusion: ‘Blow up your heads, O ye Gates, and be ye blown up, ye Everlasting Doors, that the King of Glory may come in. Who is the King of Glory? Even the Lord of Ghosts, He is the King of Glory.’
A strange feature was that the ordinary ants were not excited by the songs, nor interested by the lectures. They accepted them as matters of course. They were rituals to them, like the Mammy songs or the conversations about their Beloved Leader. They did not look at these things as good or bad, exciting, rational or terrible. They did not look at them at all, but accepted them as Done.
The time for the war came soon enough. The preparations were in order, the soldiers were drilled to the last ounce, the walls of the nest had patriotic slogans written on them, such as ‘Stings or Mash?’ or ‘I Vow to Thee, my Smell,’ and the Wart was past hoping. The repeating voices in his head, which he could not shut off – the lack of privacy, under which others ate from his stomach while the others again sang in his brain – the dreary blank which replaced feeling – the dearth of all but two values – the total monotony more than the wickedness: these had begun to kill the joy of life which belonged to his boyhood.
The horrible armies were on the point of joining battle, to dispute the imaginary boundary between their glass trays, when Merlyn came to his rescue. He magicked the sickened explorer of animals back to bed, and glad enough he was to be there.
Chapter XIV (#ulink_1a4318c5-d8d0-5e6e-bc21-cb5845fe7f3e)
In the autumn everybody was preparing for the winter. At night they spent the time rescuing Daddy-long-legs from their candles and rushlights. In the daytime the cows were turned into the high stubble and weeds which had been left by the harvest sickles. The pigs were driven into the purlieus of the forest, where boys beat the trees to supply them with acorns. Everybody was at a different job. From the granary there proceeded an invariable thumping of flails; in the strip fields the slow and enormously heavy wooden ploughs sailed up and down for the rye and the wheat, while the sowers swung rhythmically along, with their hoffers round their necks, casting right hand for left foot and vice versa. Foraging parties came lumbering in with their spike-wheeled carts full of bracken, remarking wisely that they must:
Get whome with ee breakes ere all summer be gone
For tethered up cattle to sit down upon,
while others dragged in timber for the castle fires. The forest rang in the sharp air with the sound of beetle and wedge.
Everybody was happy. The Saxons were slaves to their Norman masters if you chose to look at it in one way – but, if you chose to look at it in another, they were the same farm labourers who get along on too few shillings a week today. Only neither the villein nor the farm labourer starved, when the master was a man like Sir Ector. It has never been an economic proposition for an owner of cattle to starve his cows, so why should an owner of slaves starve them? The truth is that even nowadays the farm labourer accepts so little money because he does not have to throw his soul in with the bargain – as he would have to do in a town – and the same freedom of spirit has obtained in the country since the earliest times. The villeins were labourers. They lived in the same one-roomed hut with their families, few chickens, litter of pigs, or with a cow possibly called Crumbocke – most dreadful and insanitary! But they liked it. They were healthy, free of an air with no factory smoke in it, and, which was most of all to them, their heart’s interest was bound up with their skill in labour. They knew that Sir Ector was proud of them. They were more valuable to him than his cattle even, and, as he valued his cattle more than anything else except his children, this was saying a good deal. He walked and worked among his villagers, thought of their welfare, and could tell the good workman from the bad. He was the eternal farmer, in fact – one of those people who seem to be employing labour at so many shillings a week, but who were actually paying half as much again in voluntary overtime, providing a cottage free, and possibly making an extra present of milk and eggs and home-brewed beer into the bargain.
In other parts of Gramarye, of course, there did exist wicked and despotic masters – feudal gangsters whom it was to be King Arthur’s destiny to chasten – but the evil was in the bad people who abused it, not in the feudal system.
Sir Ector was moving through these activities with a brow of thunder. When an old lady who was sitting in a hedge by one of the strips of wheat, to scare away the rooks and pigeons, suddenly rose up beside him with an unearthly screech, he jumped nearly a foot in the air. He was in a nervous condition.
‘Dang it,’ said Sir Ector. Then, considering the subject more attentively, he added in a loud, indignant voice, ‘Splendour of God!’ He took the letter out of his pocket and read it again.
The Overlord of The Castle of Forest Sauvage was more than a farmer. He was a military captain, who was ready to organize and lead the defence of his estate against the gangsters, and he was a sportsman who sometimes took a day’s joustin’ when he could spare the time. But he was not only these. Sir Ector was an MFH – or rather a Master of stag and other hounds – and he hunted his own pack himself. Clumsy, Trowneer, Phoebe, Colle, Gerland, Talbot, Luath, Luffra, Apollon, Orthros, Bran, Gelert, Bounce, Boy, Lion, Bungey, Toby, Diamond and Cavall were not pet dogs. They were the Forest Sauvage Hounds no subscription, two days a week, huntsman the Master.
This is what the letter said, if we translate it from the Latin:
The King to Sir Ector, etc.
We send you William Twyti, our huntsman, and his fellows to hunt in the Forest Sauvage with our boar-hounds (canibus nostris porkericis) in order that they may capture two or three boars. You are to cause the flesh they capture to be salted and kept in good condition, but the skins you are to cause to be bleached which they give you, as the said William shall tell you. And we command you to provide necessaries for them as long as they shall be with you by our command, and the cost, etc., shall be accounted, etc.
Witnessed at the Tower of London, 20 November, in the twelfth year of our reign.
UTHER PENDRAGON
12 Uther.
Now the forest belonged to the King, and he had every right to send his hounds to hunt in it. Also he maintained a number of hungry mouths – what with his court and his army – so that it was natural that he should want as many dead boars, bucks, roes, etc., to be salted down as possible.
He was in the right. This did not take away the fact that Sir Ector regarded the forest as his forest, and resented the intrusion of the royal hounds – as if his own would not do just as well! The King had only to send for a couple of boars and he would have been delighted to supply them himself. He feared that his coverts would be disturbed by a lot of wild royal retainers – never know what these city chaps will be up to next – and that the King’s huntsman, this fellow Twyti, would sneer at his humble hunting establishment, unsettle the hunt servants and perhaps even try to interfere with his own kennel management. In fact, Sir Ector was shy. Then there was another thing. Where the devil were the royal hounds to be kept? Was he, Sir Ector, to turn his own hounds into the street, so as to put the King’s hounds in his kennels? ‘Splendour of God!’ repeated the unhappy master. It was as bad as paying tithes.
Sir Ector put the accursed letter in his pocket and stumped off the ploughing. The villeins, seeing him go, remarked cheerfully, ‘Our wold measter be on the gad again seemingly.’
It was a confounded piece of tyranny, that was what it was. It happened every year, but it was still that. He always solved the kennel problem in the same way, but it still worried him. He would have to invite his neighbours to the meet specially, to look as impressive as possible under the royal huntsman’s eye, and this would mean sendin’ messengers through the forest to Sir Grummore, etc. Then he would have to show sport. The King had written early, so that evidently he intended to send the fellow at the very beginnin’ of the season. The season did not begin till the 25th of December. Probably the chap would insist on one of these damned Boxin’ Day meets – all show-off and no business – with hundreds of foot-people all hollerin’ and headin’ the boar and trampin’ down the seeds and spoilin’ sport generally. How the devil was he to know in November where the best boars would be on Boxin’ Day? What with sounders and gorgeaunts and hogsteers, you never knew where you were. And another thing. A hound that was going to be used next summer for the proper Hart huntin’ was always entered at Christmas to the boar. It was the very beginnin’ of his eddication – which led up through hares and what-nots to its real quarry – and this meant that the fellow Twyti would be bringin’ down a lot of raw puppies which would be nothin’ but a plague to everybody. ‘Dang it!’ said Sir Ector, and stamped upon a piece of mud.
He stood gloomily for a moment, watching his two boys trying to catch the last leaves in the chase. They had not gone out with that intention, and did not really, even in those distant days, believe that every leaf you caught would mean a happy month next year. Only, as the west wind tore the golden rags away, they looked fascinating and difficult to catch. For the mere sport of catching them, of shouting and laughing and feeling giddy as they looked up, and of darting about to trap the creatures, which were certainly alive in the cunning with which they slipped away, the two boys were prancing about like young fauns in the ruin of the year. Wart’s shoulder was well again.
The only chap, reflected Sir Ector, who could be really useful in showin’ the King’s huntsman proper sport was that fellow Robin Hood. Robin Wood, they seemed to be callin’ him now – some new-fangled idea, no doubt. But Wood or Hood, he was the chap to know where a fine tush was to be found. Been feastin’ on the creatures for months now, he would not be surprised, even if they were out of season.
But you could hardly ask a fellow to hunt up a few beasts of venery for you, and then not invite him to the meet. While, if you did invite him to the meet, what would the King’s huntsman and the neighbours say at havin’ a partisan for a fellow guest? Not that this Robin Wood was not a good fellow: he was a good chap, and a good neighbour too. He had often tipped Sir Ector the wink when a raiding party was on its way from the Marches, and he never molested the knight or his farming in any way. What did it matter if he did chase himself a bit of venison now and then? There was four hundred square miles of forest, so they said, and enough for all. Leave well alone, that was Sir Ector’s motto. But that did not alter the neighbours.
Another thing was the riot. It was all very well for the crack hunts in practically artificial forests like those at Windsor, where the King hunted, but it was a different thing in the Forest Sauvage. Suppose His Majesty’s famous hounds were to go runnin’ riot after a unicorn or something? Everybody knew that you could never catch a unicorn without a young virgin for bait (in which case the unicorn meekly laid its white head and mother-of-pearl horn in her lap) and so the puppies would go chargin’ off into the forest for leagues and leagues, and never catch it, and get lost, and then what would Sir Ector say to his sovereign? It was not only unicorns. There was the Beast Glatisant that everybody had heard so much about. If you had the head of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion, and were footed like a hart, and especially if you made a noise like thirty couple of hounds questin’, it stood to reason that you would account for an excessive number of royal puppies before they pulled you down. Serve them right too. And what would King Pellinore say if Master William Twyti did succeed in killing his beast? Then there were the small dragons which lived under stones and hissed like kettles – dangerous varmints, very. Or suppose they were to come across one of the really big dragons? Suppose they were to run into a griffin?
Sir Ector considered the prospect moodily for some time, then began to feel better. It would be a jolly good thing, he concluded, if Master Twyti and his beastly dogs did meet the Questing Beast, yes, and get eaten up by it too, every one.
Cheered by this vision, he turned round at the edge of the ploughing and stumped off home. At the hedge where the old lady lay waiting to scare rooks he was lurky enough to spot some approaching pigeons before she was aware of him or them, which gave him a chance to let out such a screech that he felt amply repaid for his own jump by seeing hers. It was going to be a good evening after all. ‘Good night to you,’ said Sir Ector affably, when the old lady recovered herself enough to drop him a curtsey.
He felt so much restored by this that he called on the parish priest, half-way up the village street, and invited him to dinner. Then he climbed to the solar, which was his special chamber, and sat down heavily to write a submissive message to King Uther in the two or three hours which remained to him before the meal. It would take him quite that time, what with sharpening pens, using too much sand to blot with, going to the top of the stairs to ask the butler how to spell things, and starting again if he had made a mess.
Sir Ector sat in the solar, while the wintering sunlight threw broad orange beams across his bald head. He scratched and spluttered away, and laboriously bit the end of his pen, and the castle room darkened about him. It was a room as big as the main hall over which it stood, and it could afford to have large southern windows because it was on the second storey. There were two fireplaces, in which the ashy logs of wood turned from grey to red as the sunlight retreated. Round these, some favourite hounds lay snuffling in their dreams, or scratching themselves for fleas, or gnawing mutton bones which they had scrounged from the kitchens. The peregrine falcon stood hooded on a perch in the corner, a motionless idol dreaming of other skies.
If you were to go now to view the solar of Castle Sauvage, you would find it empty of furniture. But the sun would still stream in at those stone windows two feet thick, and, as it barred the mullions, it would catch a warmth of sandstone from them – the amber light of age. If you went to the nearest curiosity shop you might find some clever copies of the furniture which it was supposed to contain. These would be oak chests and cupboards with Gothic panelling and strange faces of men or angels – or devils – carved darkly upon them, black beeswaxed, worm-eaten and shiny – gloomy testimonies to the old life in their coffin-like solidity. But the furniture in the solar was not like that. The devils’ heads were there and the linen-fold panelling, but the wood was six or seven or eight centuries younger. So, in the warm-looking light of sunset, it was not only the mullions which had an amber glow. All the spare, strong chests in the room (they were converted for sitting by laying bright carpets on them) were their young, the golden oak, and the cheeks of the devils and cherubim shone as if they had been given a good soaping.
Chapter XV (#ulink_cf81a340-f39b-5c26-8070-88ab1ca7c86c)
It was Christmas night, the eve of the Boxing Day Meet. You must remember that this was in the old Merry England of Gramarye, when the rosy barons ate with their fingers, and had peacocks served before them with all their tail feathers streaming, or boar’s heads with the tusks stuck in again – when there was no unemployment because there were too few people to be employed – when the forests rang with knights walloping each other on the helm, and the unicorns in the wintry moonlight stamped with their silver feet and snorted their noble breaths of blue upon the frozen air. Such marvels were great and comfortable ones. But in the Old England there was a greater marvel still. The weather behaved itself.
In the spring, the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang. In the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed. In the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory. And in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.
It was Christmas night in The Castle of the Forest Sauvage, and all around the castle the snow lay as it ought to lie. It hung heavily on the battlements, like thick icing on a very good cake, and in a few convenient places it modestly turned itself into the clearest icicles of the greatest possible length. It hung on the boughs of the forest trees in rounded lumps, even better than apple-blossom, and occasionally slid off the roofs of the village when it saw the chance of falling on some amusing character and giving pleasure to all. The boys made snowballs with it, but never put stones in them to hurt each other, and the dogs, when they were taken out to scombre, bit it and rolled in it, and looked surprised but delighted when they vanished into the bigger drifts. There was skating on the moat, which roared with the gliding bones which they used for skates, while hot chestnuts and spiced mead were served on the bank to all and sundry. The owls hooted. The cooks put out plenty of crumbs for the small birds. The villagers brought out their red mufflers. Sir Ector’s face shone redder even than these. And reddest of all shone the cottage fires down the main street of an evening while the winds howled outside and the old English wolves wandered about slavering in an appropriate manner, or sometimes peeping in at the key-holes with their bloody-red eyes.
It was Christmas night and the proper things had been done. The whole village had come to dinner in hall. There had been boar’s head and venison and pork and beef and mutton and capons – but no turkey, because this bird had not yet been invented. There had been plum pudding and snap-dragon, with blue fire on the tips of one’s fingers, and as much mead as anybody could drink. Sir Ector’s health had been drunk with ‘Best respects, Measter,’ or ‘Best compliments of the Season, my lords and ladies, and many of them.’ There had been murmurs to play an exciting dramatic presentation of a story in which St George and a Saracen and a funny Doctor did surprising things, also carol-singers who rendered ‘Adeste Fideles’ and ‘I Sing of a Maiden,’ in high, clear, tenor voices. After that, those children who had not been sick from their dinner played Hoodman Blind and other appropriate games, while the young men and maidens danced morris dances in the middle, the tables having been cleared away. The old folks sat round the walls holding glasses of mead in their hands and feeling thankful that they were past such capers, hoppings and skippings, while those children who had not been sick sat with them, and soon went to sleep, the small heads leaning against their shoulders. At the high table Sir Ector sat with his knightly guests, who had come for the morrow’s hunting, smiling and nodding and drinking burgundy or sherries sack or malmsey wine.
After a bit, silence was prayed for Sir Grummore. He stood up and sang his old school song, amid great applause – but forgot most of it and had to make a humming noise in his moustache. Then King Pellinore was nudged to his feet and sang bashfully:
