‘Come here!’
The Wart and Archimedes looked at each other, wondering which was meant – Archimedes had been sitting all the while on the window-sill and looking at the view, for, of course, he never left his master – but Merlyn did not pay them any attention.
‘Now,’ said Merlyn furiously, apparently to nobody, ‘do you think you are being funny?
‘Very well then, why do you do it?
‘That is no excuse. Naturally I meant the one I was wearing.
‘But wearing now, of course, you fool. I don’t want a hat I was wearing in 1890. Have you no sense of time at all?’
Merlyn took off the sailor hat which had just appeared and held it out to the air for inspection.
‘This is an anachronism,’ he said severely. ‘That is what it is, a beastly anachronism.’
Archimedes seemed to be accustomed to these scenes, for he now said in a reasonable voice: ‘Why don’t you ask for the hat by name, master? Say, “I want my magician’s hat,” not “I want the hat I was wearing.” Perhaps the poor chap finds it as difficult to live backwards as you do.’
‘I want my magician’s hat,’ said Merlyn sulkily.
Instantly the long pointed cone was standing on his head.
The tension in the air relaxed. Wart sat down again on the floor, and Archimedes resumed his toilet, passing his pinions and tail feathers through his beak to smooth the barbs together: Each barb had hundreds of little hooks or barbules on it, by means of which the barbs of the feather were held together. He was stroking them into place.
Merlyn said, ‘I beg your pardon. I am not having a very good day today, and there it is.’
‘About Kay,’ said the Wart. ‘Even if you can’t change him into things, could you not give us both an adventure without changing?’
Merlyn made a visible effort to control his temper, and to consider this question dispassionately. He was sick of the subject altogether,
‘I cannot do any magic for Kay,’ he said slowly, ‘except my own magic that I have anyway. Backsight and insight and all that. Do you mean anything I could do with that?’
‘What does your backsight do?’
‘It tells me what you would say is going to happen, and the insight sometimes says what is or was happening in other places.’
‘Is there anything happening just now, anything that Kay and I could go to see?’
Merlyn immediately struck himself on the brow and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Now I see it all. Yes, of course there is, and you are going to see it. Yes, you must take Kay and hurry up about it. You must go immediately after Mass. Have breakfast first and go immediately after Mass. Yes, that is it. Go straight to Hob’s strip of barley in the open field and follow that line until you come to something. That will be splendid, yes, and I shall have a nap this afternoon instead of those filthy Summulae Logicales. Or have I had the nap?’
‘You have not had it,’ said Archimedes. ‘That is still in the future, Master.’
‘Splendid, splendid. And mind, Wart, don’t forget to take Kay with you so that I can have my nap.’
‘What shall we see?’ asked the Wart.
‘Ah, don’t plague me about a little thing like that. You run along now, there’s a good boy, and mind you don’t forget to take Kay with you. Why ever didn’t you mention it before? Don’t forget to follow beyond the strip of barley. Well, well, well! This is the first half-holiday I have had since I started this confounded tutorship. First I think I shall have a little nap before luncheon, and then I think I shall have a little nap before tea. Then I shall have to think of something I can do before dinner. What shall I do before dinner, Archimedes?’
‘Have a little nap, I expect,’ said the owl coldly, turning his back upon his master, because he, as well as the Wart, enjoyed to see life.
Wart knew that if he told the elder boy about his conversation with Merlyn, Kay would refuse to be condescended to, and would not come. So he said nothing. It was strange, but their battle had made them friends again, and each could look the other in the eye, with a kind of confused affection. They went together unanimously though shyly, without explanations, and found themselves standing at the end of Hob’s barley strip after Mass. The Wart had no need to use ingenuity. When they were there it was easy.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Merlyn told me to tell you that there was something along here that was specially for you.’
‘What sort of thing?’ asked Kay.
‘An adventure.’
‘How do we get to it?’
‘We ought to follow the line which this strip makes, and I suppose that would take us into the forest. We should have to keep the sun just there on our left, but allow for it moving.’
‘All right,’ said Kay. ‘What is the adventure?’
‘I don’t know.’
They went along the strip, and followed its imaginary line over the park and over the chase, keeping their eyes skinned for some miraculous happening. They wondered whether half a dozen young pheasants they started had anything curious about them and Kay was ready to swear that one of them was white. If it had been white, and if a black eagle had suddenly swooped down upon it from the sky, they would have known quite well that wonders were afoot, and that all they had to do was to follow the pheasant – or the eagle – until they reached the maiden in the enchanted castle. However, the pheasant was not white.
At the edge of the forest Kay said, ‘I suppose we shall have to go into this?’
‘Merlyn said to follow the line.’
‘Well,’ said Kay, ‘I am not afraid. If the adventure was for me, it is bound to be a good one.’
They went in, and were surprised to find that the going was not bad. It was about the same as a big wood might be nowadays, whereas the common forest of those times was like a jungle on the Amazon. There were no pheasant-shooting proprietors then, to see that the undergrowth was thinned, and not one thousandth part of the number of the present-day timber merchants who prune judiciously at the few remaining woods. The most of the Forest Sauvage was almost impenetrable, an enormous barrier of eternal trees, the dead ones fallen against the live and held to them by ivy, the living struggling up in competition with each other toward the sun which gave them life, the floor boggy through lack of drainage, or tindery from old wood so that you might suddenly tumble through a decayed tree trunk into an ants’ nest, or laced with brambles and bindweed and honeysuckle and convolvulus and teazles and the stuff which country people call sweethearts, until you would be torn to pieces in three yards.
This part was good. Hob’s line pointed down what seemed to be a succession of glades, shady and murmuring places in which the wild thyme was droning with bees. The insect season was past its peak, for it was really the time for wasps and fruit;
