Once & Future King 05 - The Book of Merlyn Read Online Free PDF Page A

you are here. Sit down and be patient for a little, if you can. Tell me the reason of your visit. Talk. Say you have come to save us from this war."
    The old fellow had achieved his object of artificial respiration as well as he could; so now he sat down comfortably, and took the matter in hand.
    "No," he said. "Nobody can be saved from anything, unless they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people—it is often very dangerous indeed to do things at all—and the only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, the people are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the course of the millennia. Such is the business of the philosopher, to open new ideas. It is not his business to impose them on people."
    "You did not tell me this before."
    "Why not?"
    "You have egged me into doing things during all my life... The Chivalry and the Round Table which you made me invent, what were these but efforts to save people, and to get things done?"
    "They were ideas," said the philosopher firmly, "rudimentary ideas. All thought, in its early stages, begins as action. The actions which you have been wading through have been ideas, clumsy ones of course, but they had to be established as a foundation before we could begin to think in earnest. You have been teaching man to think in action. Now it is time to think in our heads."
    "So my Table was not a failure—Master?"
    "Certainly not. It was an experiment. Experiments lead to new ones, and this is why 1 have come to take you to our burrow."
    "I am ready," he said, amazed to find that he was feeling happy.
    "The Committee discovered that there had been some gaps in your education, two of them, and it was determined that these ought to be put right before concluding the active stage of the Idea."
    "What is this committee? It sounds as if they had been making a report."
    "And so we did. You will meet them presently in the cave. But now, excuse my mentioning it, there is a matter to arrange before we go."
    Here Merlyn examined his toes with a doubtful eye, hesitating to continue.
    "Men's brains," he explained in the end, "seem to get petrified as they grow older. The surface becomes perished, like worn leather, and will no longer take impressions. You may have noticed it?"
    "I feel a stiffness in my head."
    "Now children have resilient, plastic brains," continued the magician with relish, as if he were talking about caviare sandwiches. "They can take impressions before you could say Jack Robinson. To learn a language when you are young, for instance, might literally be called child's play: but after middle age one finds it is the devil." "I have heard people say so."
    "What the committee suggested was, that if you are to learn these things we speak of, you ought— ahem—you ought to be a boy. They have
    furnished me with a patent medicine to do it. You understand: you would become the Wart once more."
    "Not if I had to live my life again," replied the other old fellow evenly.
    They faced each other like image and object in a mirror, the outside corners of their eyes drawn down with the hooded lids of age.
    "It would be only for the evening."
    "The Elixir of Life?"
    "Exactly. Think of the people who have tried to find it."
    "If I were to find such a thing, I would throw it away."
    "I hope you are not being stupid about children," asked Merlyn, looking vaguely about him. "We have high authority for being born again, like little ones. Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free from this?"
    "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents."
    "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not."
    "Our readers of that