The Once and Future King. T. H. White

which pointed further up the glade. Then he stopped smiling and shut his eyes.

      ‘Excuse me,’ said Kay, ‘what happens up there?’

      The man made no answer and kept his eyes closed, but he lifted his hand again and pointed onward with his thumb.

      ‘He means us to go on,’ said Kay.

      ‘It certainly is an adventure,’ said the Wart. ‘I wonder if that dumb woodman could have climbed up the big tree he was leaning against and sent a message to this tree that we were coming? He certainly seems to have been expecting us.’

      At this the naked giant opened one eye and looked at Wart in some surprise. Then he opened both eyes, laughed all over his big twinkling face, sat up, patted the dog, picked up his bow, and rose to his feet.

      ‘Very well, then, young measters,’ he said, still laughing, ‘Us will come along of ’ee arter all. Young heads still meake the sharpest, they do say.’

      Kay looked at him in blank surprise. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

      ‘Naylor,’ said the giant, ‘John Naylor in the wide world it were, till us come to be a man of the ’ood. Then ’twere John Little for some time, in the ’ood like, but mostly folk does put it back’ard now, and calls us Little John.’

      ‘Oh!’ cried the Wart in delight. ‘I have heard of you, often, when they tell Saxon stories in the evening, of you and Robin Hood.’

      ‘Not Hood,’ said Little John reprovingly. ‘That bain’t the way to name ’un, measter, not in the ’ood.’

      ‘But it is Robin Hood in the stories,’ said Kay.

      ‘Ah, them book-learning chaps. They don’t know all. How’m ever, ’tis time us do be stepping along.’

      They fell in on either side of the enormous man, and had to run one step in three to keep up with him; for, although he talked very slowly, he walked on his bare feet very fast. The dog trotted at heel.

      ‘Please,’ asked the Wart, ‘where are you taking us?’

      ‘Why, to Robin ’ood, seemingly. Ain’t you sharp enough to guess that also, Measter Art?’

      The giant gave him a sly peep out of the corner of his eye at this, for he knew that he had set the boys two problems at once – first, what was Robin’s real name, and second, how did Little John come to know the Wart’s?

      The Wart fixed on the second question first.

      ‘How did you know my name?’

      ‘Ah,’ said Little John. ‘Us knowed.’

      ‘Does Robin ’ood know we are coming?’

      ‘Nay, my duck, a young scholard like thee should speak his name scholarly.’

      ‘Well, what is his name?’ cried the boy, between exasperation and being out of breath from running to keep up. ‘You said ’ood.’

      ‘So it is ’ood, my duck. Robin ’ood, like the ’oods you’m running through. And a grand fine name it is.’

      ‘Robin Wood!’

      ‘Aye, Robin ’ood. What else should un be, seeing as he rules ’em. They’m free pleaces, the ’oods, and fine pleaces. Let thee sleep in ’em, come summer, come winter, and hunt in ’em for thy commons lest thee starve; and smell to ’em as they brings forward their comely bright leaves, according to order, or loses of ’em by the same order back’ard: let thee stand in ’em that thou be’st not seen, and move in ’em that thou be’st not heard, and warm thee with ’em as thou fall’st on sleep – ah, they’m proper fine pleaces, the ’oods, for a free man of hands and heart.’

      Kay said, ‘But I thought all Robin Wood’s men wore hose and jerkins of Lincoln green?’

      ‘That us do in the winter like, when us needs ’em, or with leather leggins at ’ood ’ork: but here by summer ’tis more seasonable thus for the pickets, who have nought to do save watch.’

      ‘Were you a sentry then?’

      ‘Aye, and so were wold Much, as you spoke to by the felled tree.’

      ‘And I think,’ exclaimed Kay triumphantly, ‘that this next big tree which we are coming to will be the stronghold of Robin Wood!’

      They were coming to the monarch of the forest.

      It was a lime tree as great as that which used to grow at Moor Park in Hertfordshire, no less than one hundred feet in height and seventeen feet in girth, a yard above the ground. Its beech-like trunk was embellished with a beard of twigs at the bottom, and where each of the great branches had sprung from the trunk the bark had split and was now discoloured with rain water or sap. The bees zoomed among its bright and sticky leaves, higher and higher toward heaven, and a rope ladder disappeared among the foliage. Nobody could have climbed it without a ladder, even with irons.

      ‘You think well, Measter Kay,’ said Little John. ‘And there be Measter Robin, atween her roots.’

      The boys, who had been more interested in the look-out man perched in a crow’s nest at the top of that swaying and whispering pride of the earth, lowered their eyes at once and clapped them on the great outlaw.

      He was not, as they had expected, a romantic man – or not at first – although he was nearly as tall as Little John. These two, of course, were the only people in the world who have ever shot an arrow the distance of a mile, with the English long-bow. He was a sinewy fellow whose body did not carry fat. He was not half-naked, like John, but dressed discreetly in faded green with a silvery bugle at his side. He was clean-shaven, sunburned, nervous, gnarled like the roots of the trees; but gnarled and mature with weather and poetry rather than with age, for he was scarcely thirty years old. (Eventually he lived to be eighty-seven, and attributed his long life to smelling the turpentine in the pines.) At the moment he was lying on his back and looked upward, but not into the sky.

      Robin Wood lay happily with his head in Marian’s lap. She sat between the roots of the lime tree, clad in a one-piece smock of green girded with a quiver of arrows, and her feet and arms were bare. She had let down the brown shining waterfalls of her hair, which was usually kept braided in pigtails for convenience in hunting and cookery, and with the falling waves of this she framed his head. She was singing a duet with him softly, and tickling the end of his nose with the fine hairs.

       Under the greenwood tree, sang Maid Marian,

       Who loves to lie with me,

       And tune his merry note

       Unto the sweet bird’s throat.

      ‘Come hither, come hither, come hither,’ mumbled Robin.

       Here shall he see

       No enemy

       But winter and rough weather.

      They laughed happily and began again, singing lines alternately:

       Who doth ambition shun

       And loves to lie in the sun,

       Seeking the food he eats

       And pleased with what he gets,

      then, both together:

       Come hither, come hither, come hither:

       Here shall he see

       No enemy

       But winter and rough weather.

      The song ended in laughter. Robin, who had been twisting his brown fingers in the silk-fine threads which fell about his face, gave them a shrewd tug and scrambled to his feet.

      ‘Now, John,’ he said, seeing them at once.

      ‘Now, Measter,’ said Little John.

      ‘So