White, T H - The Once and Future King.htm The Once and Future King by T. H. White Blurb and Printing Information Contents THE SWORD IN THE STONE THE QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS THE ILL-MADE KNIGHT THE CANDLE IN THE WIND The critics on T. H. White's THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING "A gay, warm, sad, glinting, rich, mystical, true and beautiful tapestry of human history and human spirit. Read it and laugh. Read it and learn. Read it and be glad you are human." —Minneapolis Tribune "Intensely contemporary and pungent . not only better . and richer for being a retelling, it is also more original ... In fact, there is everything in this great book." —Saturday Review "... should be enormously popular and become one of the curious classics of English literature." —David Garnett file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Index.htm (1 of 3)14-10-2007 15:44:42 White, T H - The Once and Future King.htm Other Books by T. H. White THE BOOK OF MERLYN ENGLAND HAVE MY BONES LETTERS TO A FRIEND THE MAHARAJAH AND OTHER STORIES MISTRESS MASHAM'S REPOSE _T.H. WHITE. ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." This Ace Book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading, and was printed from new film. THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING An Ace Book / published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons PRINTING HISTORY G. P. Putnam's Sons edition published 1965 Berkley edition / July 1966 Ace edition / June 1987 All rights reserved. Copyright 1939, 1940, 1958 by T. H. White. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Index.htm (2 of 3)14-10-2007 15:44:42 White, T H - The Once and Future King.htm For information address: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016. ISBN: 0-441-62740-4 ACE® Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016. ACE and the "A" design are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 Back to Top Proofed by Crows December 13, 2004 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Index.htm (3 of 3)14-10-2007 15:44:42 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html Back to Table of Contents Incipit Liber Quartus THE CANDLE IN THE WIND "He thought a little and said: I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients. I should prescribe Mr. Pontifex a course of the larger mammals. Don't let him think he is taking them medicinally....'" The addition of years had not been kind to Agravaine. Even when he was forty he had looked his present age, which was fifty-five. He was seldom sober. Mordred, the cold wisp of a man, did not seem to have any age. His years, like the depths of his blue eyes and the inflexions of his musical voice, were non-committal. The two were standing in the cloisters of the Orkney palace at Camelot, looking out at the hawks who sat beneath the sun, on their blocks in the green courtyard. The cloisters had the new-fashioned flamboyant arches, in whose graceful frames the hawks stood out with noble indifference— a jerfalcon, a goshawk, a falcon and her tiercel, and four little merlins who had been kept all winter, yet had survived. The blocks were clean—for the sportsmen of those days considered that, if you went in for blood sports, it was your duty to conceal the beastliness with scrupulous care. All were lovingly ornamented with Spanish leather in scarlet, and with gold tooling. The leashes of the hawks were plaited out of white horse leather. The jer had a snow-white leash and jesses cut from guaranteed unicorn skin, as a tribute to her station in life. She had been brought all the way from Iceland, and that was the least they could do for her. Mordred said pleasantly: "For God his sake let's get out of this. The place stinks." When he spoke the hawks moved slightly, so that their bells gave a whisper of sound. The bells had been brought from the Indies, regardless of expense, and the pair worn by the jer were made of silver. An enormous eagle-owl who was sometimes used as a decoy, but who was at present standing on a perch in the shade of the cloister, opened his eyes when the bells rang. Before he had opened them, he might have been a stuffed owl, a dowdy bundle of feathers. The moment they had dawned, he was a creature file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html (1 of 114)14-10-2007 15:44:46 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html from Edgar Allan Poe. You hardly liked to look at him. They were red eyes, homicidal, terrific, seeming actually to give out light. They were like rubies filled with flame. He was called the Grand Duke. "I don't smell anything," said Agravaine. He sniffed suspiciously, frying to smell. But his palate was gone, both for smell and taste, and he had a headache. "It stinks of Sport," said Mordred in inverted commas, "and the Done Thing and the Best People. Let's go to the garden." Agravaine returned tenaciously to the subject which they had been discussing. "It is no good making a fuss about it," he said. "We know the rights and wrongs, but nobody else knows. Nobody would listen." "But they must listen," Small flecks in the iris of Mordred's eyes burned with a turquoise light, as bright as the owl's. Instead of being a foppish man with a crooked shoulder, dressed in extravagant clothes, he became a Cause. He became, on this matter, everything which Arthur was not— the irreconcilable opposite of the Englishman. He became the invincible Gael, the scion of desperate races more ancient than Arthur's, and more subtle. Now, when he was on fire with his Cause, Arthur's justice seemed bourgeois and obtuse beside him. It seemed merely to be dull complacency, beside the savagery and feral wit of the Pict. His maternal ancestors crowded into his face when he was spurning at Arthur— ancestors whose civilization, like Mordred's, had been matriarchal: who had ridden bare-back, charged in chariots, fought by stratagem, and ornamented their grisly strongholds with the heads of enemies. They had marched, long-haired and ferocious, an ancient writer tells us, "sword in hand, against rivers in flood or against the storm-tossed ocean." They were the race, now represented by the Irish Republican Army rather than by the Scots Nationalists, who had always murdered landlords and blamed them for being murdered—the race which could make a national hero of a man like Lynchahaun, because he bit off a woman's nose and she a Gall—the race which had been expelled by the volcano of history into the far quarters of the globe, where, with a venomous sense of grievance and inferiority, they even nowadays proclaim their ancient megalomania. They were the Catholics who could fly directly in the face of any pope or saint—Adrian, Alexander or St. Jerome—if the saint's policies did not suit their own convenience: the hysterically touchy, sorrowful, flayed defenders of a broken heritage. They were the race whose barbarous, cunning, valiant defiance had been enslaved, long centuries before, by the foreign people whom Arthur represented. This was one of the barriers between the father and his son. Agravaine said: "Mordred, I want to talk. There doesn't seem to be anywhere to sit. Sit on that thing, and I will sit here. Nobody can hear us." "I don't mind if they do hear. That is what we want. It should be said out loud, not whispered in file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html (2 of 114)14-10-2007 15:44:46 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html cloisters." "The whispers will get there in the end." "No, they won't. That is what they won't do. He doesn't want to hear, and, so long as we whisper, he can always pretend that he can't. You are not the King of England for all these years, without knowing how to use hypocrisy." Agravaine was uncomfortable. His hatred for the King was not a reality like Mordred's—indeed, he had little personal feeling against anybody except Lancelot. His attitude was more of malice at random. "I don't think it is any good complaining about what happened in the past," he said gloomily. "We can't expect other people to side with us when everything is complicated, and happened so long ago." "It may have happened long ago, but that doesn't alter the fact that Arthur is my father, and that he turned me adrift in a boat as a baby." "It may not alter it for you," said Agravaine, "but it alters it for other people. It is such a muddle that nobody cares. You can't expect ordinary people to remember about grandfathers and half-sisters and things of that sort.