T. White - The Once and Future King

‘I expect he will be the adventure,’ whispered Wart.

‘Pooh,’ said Kay, ‘you have knights-in-armour, or dragons, or things like that in an adventure, not dirty old men cutting wood.’

‘Well, I am going to ask him what happens along here, anyway.’

They went up to the small munching woodman, who did not seem to have seen them, and asked him where the glades were leading to. They asked two or three times before they discovered that the poor fellow was either deaf or mad, or both. He neither answered nor moved.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Kay. ‘He is probably loopy like Wat, and does not know what he is at. Let’s go on and leave the old fool.’

They went on for nearly a mile, and still the going was good. There were no paths exactly, and the glades were not continuous. Anybody who came there by chance would have thought that there was just the one glade which he was in, a couple of hundred yards long, unless he went to the end of it and discovered another one, screened by a few trees. Now and then they found a stump with the marks of an axe on it, but mostly these had been carefully covered with brambles or altogether grubbed up. The Wart considered that the glades must have been made.

Kay caught the Wart by the arm, at the edge of a clearing, and pointed silently toward its further end. There was a grassy bank there, swelling gently to a gigantic sycamore, upward of ninety feet high, which stood upon its top. On the bank there was an equally gigantic man lying at his ease, with a dog beside him. This man was as notable as the sycamore, for he stood or lay seven feet without his shoes, and he was dressed in nothing but a kind of kilt made of Lincoln green worsted. He had a leather bracer on his left forearm. His enormous brown chest supported the dog’s head – it had pricked its ears and was watching the boys, but had made no other movement – which the muscles gently lifted as they rose and fell. The man appeared to be asleep. There was a seven-foot bow beside him, with some arrows more than a cloth-yard long. He, like the woodman, was the colour of mahogany, and the curled hairs on his chest made a golden haze where the sun caught them.

‘He is it,’ whispered Kay excitedly.

They went to the man cautiously, for fear of the dog. But the dog only followed them with its eyes, keeping its chin pressed firmly to the chest of its beloved master, and giving them the least suspicion of a wag from its tail. It moved its tail without lifting it, two inches sideways in the grass. The man opened his eyes – obviously he had not been asleep at all – smiled at the boys, and jerked his thumb in a direction 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.