The Once and Future King. T. White H.

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СКАЧАТЬ since the beginning of the conversation, and now he definitely began to snuffle. ‘It is the curse of the Pellinores,’ he exclaimed. ‘Always mollocking about after that beastly Beast. What on earth use is she, anyway? First you have to stop to unwind the brachet, then your visor falls down, then you can’t see through your spectacles. Nowhere to sleep, never know where you are. Rheumatism in the winter, sunstroke in the summer. All this horrid armour takes hours to put on. When it is on it’s either frying or freezing, and it gets rusty. You have to sit up all night polishing the stuff. Oh, how I do wish I had a nice house of my own to live in, a house with beds in it and real pillows and sheets. If I was rich that’s what I would buy. A nice bed with a nice pillow and a nice sheet that you could lie in, and then I would put this beastly horse in a meadow and tell that beastly brachet to run away and play, and throw all this beastly armour out of the window, and let the beastly Beast go and chase himself – that I would.’

      ‘If you could show me the way home,’ said the Wart craftily, ‘I am sure Sir Ector would put you up in a bed for the night.’

      ‘Do you really mean it?’ cried the King. ‘In a bed?’

      ‘A feather bed.’

      King Pellinore’s eyes grew round as saucers. ‘A feather bed!’ he repeated slowly. ‘Would it have pillows?’

      ‘Down pillows.’

      ‘Down pillows!’ whispered the King, holding his breath. And then, letting it out in one rush, ‘What a lovely house your gentleman must have!’

      ‘I do not think it is more than two hours away,’ said the Wart, following up his advantage.

      ‘And did this gentleman really send you out to invite me in?’ (He had forgotten about the Wart being lost.) ‘How nice of him, how very nice of him, I do think, what?’

      ‘He will be pleased to see us,’ said the Wart truthfully.

      ‘Oh, how nice of him,’ exclaimed the King again, beginning to bustle about with his various trappings. ‘And what a lovely gentleman he must be to have a feather bed!

      ‘I suppose I should have to share it with somebody?’ he added doubtfully.

      ‘You could have one of your own.’

      ‘A feather bed of one’s very own, with sheets and a pillow – perhaps even two pillows, or a pillow and a bolster – and no need to get up in time for breakfast! Does your guardian get up in time for breakfast?’

      ‘Never,’ said the Wart.

      ‘Fleas in the bed?’

      ‘Not one.’

      ‘Well!’ said King Pellinore. ‘It does sound too nice for words, I must say. A feather bed and none of those fewmets for ever so long. How long did you say it would take us to get there?’

      ‘Two hours,’ said the Wart – but he had to shout the second of these words, for the sounds were drowned in his mouth by a noise which had that moment arisen close beside them.

      ‘What was that?’ exclaimed the Wart.

      ‘Hark!’ cried the King.

      ‘Mercy!’

      ‘It is the Beast!’

      And immediately the loving huntsman had forgotten everything else, but was busied about his task. He wiped his spectacles upon the seat of his trousers, the only accessible piece of cloth about him, while the belling and bloody cry arose all round. He balanced them on the end of his long nose, just before the visor automatically clapped to. He clutched his jousting lance in his right hand, and galloped off in the direction of the noise. He was brought up short by the rope which was wound round the tree – the vacuous brachet meanwhile giving a melancholy yelp – and fell off his horse with a tremendous clang. In a second he was up again – the Wart was convinced that the spectacles must be broken – and hopping round the white horse with one foot in the stirrup. The girths stood the test and he was in the saddle somehow, with his jousting lance between his legs, and then he was galloping round and round the tree, in the opposite direction to the one in which the brachet had wound herself up. He went round three times too often, the brachet meanwhile running and yelping the other way, and then, after four or five casts, they were both free of the obstruction. ‘Yoicks, what!’ cried King Pellinore, waving his lance in the air, and swaying excitedly in the saddle. Then he disappeared into the gloom of the forest, with the unfortunate hound trailing behind him at the other end of the cord.

Chapter III

      The boy slept well in the woodland nest where he had laid himself down, in that kind of thin but refreshing sleep which people have when they begin to lie out of doors. At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep, and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water, so close to the surface that he fancied himself in air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axes, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth.

      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 learned 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 that 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 hawk 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 lighted in any case. He decided that he could not have gone more than three or four miles from home, and that the best thing he could do would be to sit still and listen. Then he might bear the noise of the haymakers, if he were lucky with the wind, and he could hearken his way to the castle 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 toward the noise.

      There was a clearing in the forest, and in this clearing there was a snug 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 came out eventually from 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 СКАЧАТЬ