glistened and the sweet sticky smell filled the room. That was why Mr. Bultitude had pawed so insistently at the door that he was finally admitted and now sat as near the magician as he could possibly get, his nostrils twitching. He had never smelled such an interesting man before.
“Sir,” said Merlin, in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him, “I give you great thanks. I cannot, indeed, understand the way you live, and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it: a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone, with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh, but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there is warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit. Sir, I tell you these things because you have asked me. They are of no importance. Now that none hears us save the last of the seven bears of Logres, it is time that we should open counsels to each other.”
He glanced at the Director’s face as he spoke and then, as if startled by what he saw there, leaned sharply forward.
“Does your wound pain you?” he asked.
Ransom shook his head. “No,” he said, “it is not the wound. We have terrible things to talk of.”
“Sir,” said Merlinus in a deeper and softer voice, “I could take all the anguish from your heel as though I were wiping it out with a sponge. Give me but seven days to go in and out and up and down and to and fro, to renew old acquaintance. These fields and I, this wood and I, have much to say to one another.”
As he said this he was leaning forward so that his face and the bear’s were almost side by side, and it almost looked as if those two might have been engaged in some kind of furry and grunted conversation. The druid’s face had a strangely animal appearance: not sensual nor fierce, but full of the patient, unarguing sagacity of a beast. Ransom’s, meanwhile, was full of torment.
“You might find the country much changed,” he said, forcing a smile.
“No,” said Merlin. “I do not reckon to find it much changed.” The distance between the two men was increasing every moment. Merlin was like something that ought not to be indoors. Bathed and anointed though he was, a sense of mould, gravel, wet leaves, weedy water, hung about him.
“Not changed,” he repeated in an almost inaudible voice. And in that deepening inner silence of which his face bore witness, one might have believed that he listened continually to a murmur of evasive sounds; rustling of mice and stoats, thumping progression of frogs, the small shock of falling hazel nuts, creaking of branches, runnels trickling, the very growing of grass. The bear had closed its eyes. The whole room was growing heavy with a sort of floating anaesthesia.
“Through me,” said Merlin, “you can suck up from the Earth oblivion of all pains.”
“Silence,” said the Director sharply. He had been sinking down into the cushions of his sofa with his head drooping a little towards his chest. Now he suddenly sat bolt upright. The magician started and straightened himself likewise. The air of the room was cleared. Even the bear opened its eyes again.
“No,” said the Director. “God’s glory, do you think you were dug out of the earth to give me a plaster for my heel? We have drugs that could cheat the pain as well as your earth-magic or better, if it were not my business to bear it to the end. I will hear no more of that. Do you understand?”
“I hear and obey,” said the magician. “But I meant no harm. If not to heal your own wound, yet for the healing of Logres, you will need my commerce with field and water. It must be that I should go in and out, and to and fro, renewing old acquaintance. It will not be changed, you know—not what you would call changed.”
Again that sweet heaviness, like the smell of hawthorn, seemed to be flowing back over the Blue Room.
“No,” said the Director in a still louder voice, “that cannot be done any longer. The soul has gone out of the wood and water. Oh, I dare say you could awake them—a little. But it would not be enough. A storm, or even a river-flood, would be of little avail against our present enemy. Your weapon would break in your hands. For the Hideous Strength confronts us, and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.”
“Hidden it may be,” said Merlinus, “but not changed. Leave me to work, Lord. I will wake it. I will set a sword in every blade of grass to wound them and the very clods of earth shall be venom to their feet. I will——”
“No,” said the Director, “I forbid you to speak of it. If it were possible, it would be unlawful. Whatever of spirit may still linger in the earth has withdrawn fifteen hundred years further away from us since your time. You shall not speak a word to it. You shall not lift your little finger to call it up. I command you. It is in this age utterly unlawful.” Hitherto he had been speaking sternly and coldly. Now he leaned forward and said in a different voice, “It never was very lawful, even in your day. Remember, when we first knew that you would be awaked, we thought you would be on the side of the enemy. And because Our Lord does all things for each, one of the purposes of your reawakening was that your own soul should be saved.”
Merlin sank back into his chair like a man unstrung. The bear licked his hand where it hung, pale and relaxed, over the arm of the chair.
“Sir,” said Merlin presently, “if I am not to work for you in that fashion, then you have taken into your house a silly bulk of flesh, for I am no longer much of a man of war. If it comes to point and edge, I avail little.”
“Not that way either,” said Ransom, hesitating like a man who is reluctant to come to the point. “No power that is merely earthly,” he continued at last, “will serve against the Hideous Strength.”
“Then let us all to prayers,” said Merlinus. “But there also . . . I was not reckoned of much account . . . they called me a devil’s son, some of them. It was a lie. But I do not know why I have been brought back.”
“Certainly, let us stick to our prayers,” said Ransom, “now and always. But that was not what I meant. There are celestial powers: created powers, not in this Earth, but in the Heavens.”
Merlinus looked at him in silence.
“You know well what I am speaking of,” said Ransom. “Did not I tell you when we first met that the Oyéresu were my masters?”
“Of course,” said Merlin. “And that was how I knew you were of the college. Is it not our password all over the Earth?”
“A password?” exclaimed Ransom, with a look of surprise. “I did not know that.”
“But . . . but,” said Merlinus, “if you knew not the password, how did you come to say it?”
“I said it because it was true.”
The magician licked his lips which had become very pale.
“True
