T. H. White - The Sword in the Stone

“What sort of fish?”

It was almost too hot to think about this, but the Wart stared down into the cool amber depths where a school of small perch were aimlessly hanging about.

“I think I should like to be a perch,” he said. “They are braver than the silly roach, and not quite so slaughterous as the pike.”

Merlyn took off his hat, raised his staff of lignum vitae politely in the air, and said slowly, “Snylrem stnemilpmoc ot enutpen dna lliw eh yldnik tpecca siht yob sa a hsif?”

Immediately there was a loud blowing of sea-shells, conches and so forth, and a stout, jolly-looking gentleman appeared seated on a well-blown-up cloud above the battlements. He had an anchor tattooed on his tummy and a handsome mermaid with Mabel written under her on his chest. He ejected a quid of tobacco, nodded affably to Merlyn and pointed his trident at the Wart. The Wart found he had no clothes on. He found that he had tumbled off the draw-bridge, landing with a smack on his side in the water. He found that the moat and the bridge had grown hundreds of times bigger. He knew that he was turning into a fish.

“Oh, Merlyn,” cried the Wart. “Please come too.”

“Just for this once,” said the large and solemn tench beside his ear, “I will come. But in future you will have to go by yourself. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”

The Wart found it difficult to be a fish. It was no good trying to swim like a human being, for it made him go corkscrew and much too slowly. He did not know how to swim like a fish.

“Not like that,” said the tench in ponderous tones. “Put your chin on your left shoulder and do jack-knives. Never mind about the fins to begin with.”

The Wart’s legs had fused together into his backbone and his feet and toes had become a tail fin. His arms had become two more fins – also of a delicate pinkish colour – and he had sprouted some more somewhere about his tummy. His head faced over his shoulder, so that when he bent in the middle his toes were moving towards his ear instead of towards his forehead. He was a beautiful olive-green colour with rather scratchy plate-armour all over him, and dark bands down his sides. He was not sure which were his sides and which were his back and front, but what now appeared to be his tummy had an attractive whitish colour, while his back was armed with a splendid great fin that could be erected for war and had spikes in it. He did jack-knives as the tench directed and found that he was swimming vertically downwards into the mud.

“Use your feet to turn to left or right with,” said the tench, “and spread those fins on your tummy to keep level. You are living in two planes now, not one.”

The Wart found that he could keep more or less level by altering the inclination of his arm fins and the ones on his stomach. He swam feebly off, enjoying himself very much.

“Come back,” said the tench solemnly. “You must learn to swim before you can dart.”

The Wart turned to his tutor in a series of zig-zags and remarked, “I don’t seem to keep quite straight.”

“The trouble with you is that you don’t swim from the shoulder. You swim as if you were a boy just bending at the hips. Try doing your jack-knives right from the neck downwards, and move your body exactly the same amount to the right as you are going to move it to the left. Put your back into it.”

Wart gave two terrific kicks and vanished altogether in a clump of mare’s tail several yards away.

“That’s better,” said the tench, now quite out of sight in the murky olive water, and the Wart backed himself out of his tangle with infinite trouble, by wriggling his arm fins. He undulated back towards the voice in one terrific shove, to show off.

“Good,” said the tench, as they collided end to end, “but discretion is the better part of valour.

“Try if you can do this one,” said the tench.

Without apparent exertion of any kind he swam off backwards under a water-lily. Without apparent exertion; but the Wart, who was an enterprising learner, had been watching the slightest movement of his fins. He moved his own fins anti-clockwise, gave the very tip of his own tail a cunning flick, and was lying alongside the tench.

“Splendid,” said Merlyn. “Let’s go for a little swim.”

The Wart was on an even keel now, and reasonably able to move about. He had leisure to observe the extraordinary universe into which the tattooed gentleman’s trident had plunged him. It was very different from the universe to which he had hitherto been accustomed. For one thing, the heaven or sky above him was now a perfect circle poised a few inches above his head. The horizon had closed in to this. In order to imagine yourself into the Wart’s position, you will have to picture a round horizon, a few inches above your head, instead of the flat horizon which you have usually seen. Under this horizon of air you will have to imagine another horizon under water, spherical and practically upside down – for the surface of the water acted partly as a mirror to what was below it. It is difficult to imagine. What makes it a great deal more difficult to imagine is that everything which human beings would consider to be above the water level was fringed with all the colours of the spectrum. For instance, if you had happened to be fishing for the Wart, he would have seen you, at the rim of the tea saucer which was the upper air to him, not as one person waving a fishing-rod, but as seven people, whose outlines were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, all waving the same rod whose colours were as varied. In fact, you would have been a rainbow man to him, a beacon of flashing and radiating colours, which ran into one another and had rays all about. You would have been burnt upon the water like Cleopatra in the poem by Herédia. The reference may possibly be to Shakespeare.

The next most lovely thing was that the Wart had no weight. He was not earth-bound any more and did not have to plod along on a flat surface, pressed down by gravity and the weight of the atmosphere. He could do what men have always wanted to do, that is, fly. There is practically no difference between flying in the water and flying in the air. The best of it was that he did not have to fly in a machine, by pulling levers and sitting still, but could do it with his own body. It was like the dreams people have.

Just as they were going to swim off their tour of inspection, a timid young roach appeared from between two waving bottle brushes of mare’s tail and hung about, looking quite pale with agitation. It looked at them with big apprehensive eyes and evidently wanted something, but could not make up its mind.

“Approach,” said Merlyn gravely.

At this the roach rushed up like a hen, burst into tears and began stammering its message.

“If you p-p-p-please, Doctor,” stammered the poor creature, gabbling so that they could scarcely understand what it said, “we have such a d-dretful case of s-s-s-something or other in our family, and we w-w-w-wondered if you could s-s-s-spare the time? It’s our d-d-d-dear Mamma, who w-w-w-will swim a-a-a-all the time upside d-d-d-down, and she d-d-d-does look so horrible and s-s-s-speaks so strange, that we r-r-r-really thought she ought to have a d-d-d-doctor, if it w-w-w-wouldn’t be too much? C-C-C-Clara says to say so sir, if you s-s-s-see w-w-w-what I m-m-m-mean?”

Here the little roach began fizzing so much, what with its stammer and its tearful disposition, that it became perfectly inarticulate and could only stare at Merlyn with big mournful eyes.

“Never mind, my little man,” said Merlyn. “There, there, lead me to your poor Mamma, and we shall see what we can do.”

They all three swam off into the murk under the draw-bridge upon their errand of mercy.