Ray Bradbury. Henry the Ninth

                Ray Bradbury
                http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal

                Henry the Ninth
                1969

      "There he is!"
       The  two men leaned. The helicopter tilted with their lean. The coastline
whipped by below.
       "No. Just a bit of rock and some moss -" The pilot lifted his head, which
signaled the lift of the helicopter to swivel and rush away. The white cliffs of
Dover  vanished.  They  broke  over  green meadows and so wove back and forth, a
giant dragonfly excursioning the stuffs of winter that sleeted their blades.
      "Wait! There! Drop!"
      The machine fell down, the grass came up. The second man, grunting, pushed
the  bubble-eye  aside and, as if he needed oiling, carefully let himself to the
earth.  He ran. Losing his breath instantly he slowed to cry bleakly against the
wind:
      "Harry!"
      His yell caused a ragged shape on the rise ahead to stumble up and run.
      "I've done nothing!"
      "It's not the law, Harry! It's me! Sam Welles!"
       The  old man who fled before him slowed, then stopped, rigid, on the edge
of the cliff above the sea, holding to his long beard with two gloved hands.
       Samuel Welles, gasping, trudged up behind, but did not touch, for fear of
putting him to flight.
       "Harry,  you  damn  fool.  It's been weeks. I was afraid I might not find
you."
      "And I was afraid you _would_."
      Harry, whose eyes had been tight shut, now opened them to look tremblingly
down  at  his  beard, his gloves, and over at his friend Samuel. Here they were,
two  old  men,  very  gray, very cold, on a rise of raw stone on a December day.
They  had  known each other so long, so many years, they had passed each other's
expression back and forth between their faces. Their mouths and eyes, therefore,
were  similar. They might have been ancient brothers. The only difference showed
in  the man who had unhinged himself from the helicopter. Under his dark clothes
you  could  spy  an incongruous Hawaiian-colored sport shirt. Harry tried not to
stare at it.
      Right now, anyway, both their eyes were wet.
      "Harry, I came to warn you."
      "No need. Why do you think I've been hiding. This is the final day?"
      "The final, yes."
      They stood and thought on it.
       Christmas  tomorrow.  And now this Christmas Eve afternoon the last boats
leaving.  And  England,  a  stone  in a sea of mist and water, would be a marble
monument to herself left written on by rain and buried in fog. After today, only
the gulls would own the island. And a billion monarch butterflies in June rising
up like celebrations tossed on parades to the sea.
      Harry, his eyes fixed to the tidal shore, spoke:
      "By sunset, will every damn stupid idiot fool clear off the Isle?"
      "That's about the shape of it."
      "And a dread shape it is. And you, Samuel, have you come to kidnap me?"
      "Persuade is more like it."
       "Persuade?  Great God, Sam, don't you know me after fifty years? Couldn't
you  guess  I  would want to be the last man in all Britain, no, that hasn't the
proper sound. _Great_ Britain?"
       Last  man  in Great Britain, thought Harry, Lord, listen. It tolls. It is
the great bell of London heard through all the mizzles down through time to this
strange  day  and  hour when the last, the very last save one, leave this racial
mound,  this  burial  touch  of  green set in a sea of cold light. The last. The
last.
      "Samuel, listen. My grave is dug. I'd hate to leave it behind."
      "Who'll put you _in_ it?"
      "Me, when the time's right."
      "And who's to cover over?"
       "Why, there's dust to cover dust, Sam. The wind will see to it. Ah, God!"
Not  wishing  it,  the words exploded from his mouth. He was amazed to see tears
flung  out  on  the air from his blinking eyes. "What are we doing here? Why all
the  good-byes?  Why  are  the last boats in the Channel and the last jets gone?
Where did people go, Sam? What happened, what _happened_!"
       "Why,"  said Samuel Welles quietly, "it's simple, Harry. The weather here
is  bad. Always _has_ been. No one dared speak of it, for nothing could be done.
But now, England is finished. The future belongs -"
      Their eyes moved jointly South.
      "To the damn Canary Islands?"
      "Samoa."
      "To the Brazilian shores?"
      "Don't forget California, Harry."
      Both laughed, gently.
       "California.  Air  the  jokes.  That funny place. And yet, aren't there a
million English from Sacramento to Los Angeles this noon?"
      "And another million in Florida."
      "Two million Down Under, the past four years alone."
      They nodded at the sums.
       "Well,  Samuel,  man says one thing. The sun says another. So man goes by
what  his  skin  tells his blood. And the blood at last says: South. It has been
saying  it  for two thousand years. But we pretended not to hear. A man with his
first  sunburn  is  a  man  in  the  midst of a new love affair, know it or not.
Finally, he lies out under some great foreign sky and says to the Minding light:
Teach me, oh God, gently, teach.''
      Samuel Welles shook his head with awe. "Keep talking like that and I won't
_have_ to kidnap you!"
       "No,  the  sun  may have taught you, Samuel, but cannot quite teach me. I
wish  it  could.  The  truth is, 'twill be no fun here alone. Can't I argue you,
Sam,  to  stay  on,  the  old  team, you and me, like when we were boys, eh?" He
buffed the other's elbow roughly, dearly.
      "God, you make me feel I'm deserting King and Country."
      "Don't. You desert nothing, for no one's here. Who would have dreamt, when
we  were  kids in 1980, the day would come when a promise of always summer would
leak John Bull to the four corners of beyond?"
       "I've  been  cold  all my life, Harry. Too many years putting on too many
sweaters and not enough coal in the scuttle. Too many years when the sky did not
show  so  much as a crack of blue on the first day of June nor a smell of hay in
July  nor  a  dry day and winter begun August 1st, year on year. I can't take it
any more, Harry, I can't."
       "Nor need you. Our race has suffered itself well. You have earned, all of
you, you deserve, this long retirement in Jamaica, Port-au-Prince, and Pasadena.
Give me that hand. Shake hard again! It's a great moment in history. You and me,
_We're_ living it!"
      "So we are, by God."
       "Now  look  here, Sam, when you've gone and settled in Sicily, Sidney, or
Navel  Orange,  California, tell this 'moment' to the news. They might write you
in a column. And history books? Well, shouldn't there be half a page for you and
me,  the  last  gone  and  the last stayed behind? Sam, Sam, you're breaking the
bones, but shake away, hold tight, this is our last tussle."
      They stood off, panting, wet-eyed.
      "Harry, now, will you walk me as far as the copter?"
       "No. I fear the damn contraption. The thought of the sun on this dark day
might leap me in and fly me off with you."
      "And what harm in that?"
      "Harm! Why, Samuel, I must guard our coast from invasion. The Normans, the
Vikings,  the Saxons. In the coming years I'll walk the entire isle, stand guard
from Dover north on round the reefs and back through Folkestone, here again."
      "Will Hitler invade, chum?"
      "He and his iron ghosts just might."
      "And how will you fight him, Harry?"
       "Do  you  think I walk alone? No. Along the way, I may find Caesar on the
shore.  He  loved it so he left a road or two. Those roads I'll take, and borrow
just  those  ghosts of choice invaders to repel less choice. It's up to me, yes,
to commit or uncommit ghosts, choose or not choose out of the whole damn history
of the land?"
      "It is. It is."
       The  last  man  wheeled to the north and then to the west and then to the
south.
       "And  when I've seen all's well from castle here to lighthouse there, and
listened  to  battles  of  gunfires  in the plunge off Firth, and bagpiped round
Scotland  with  a  sour  mean pipe, m each New Year's week, Sam, I'll scull back
down-Thames  and  there  each  December  31st  to  the end of my life, the night
watchman  of London, meaning me, yes, me, will make his clock rounds and say out
the  bells  of  the old rhymed churches. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St.
Clemens.  Bow  bells. St. Marguerite's. Paul's. I shall dance rope-ends for you,
Sam,  and hope the cold wind blown south to the warm wind wherever you are stirs
some small gray hairs in your sunburnt ears."
      "I'll be listening, Harry."
       "Listen  more!  I'll  sit  in the houses of Lords and Commons and debate,
losing one hour but to win the next. And say that never before in history did so
many owe so much to so few and hear the sirens again from old remembered records
and things broadcast before we both were born.
      "And a few seconds before January 1st I shall climb and lodge with mice in
Big Ben as it strikes the changing of the year.
       "And  somewhere  along  the  line,  no doubt, I shall sit on the Stone of
Scone."
      "You wouldn't!"
       "Wouldn't  I?  Or  the  place where it was, anyway, before they mailed it
south  to Summer's Bay. And hand me some sort of sceptre, a frozen snake perhaps
stunned by snow from some December garden. And fit a kind of paste-up crown upon
my  head.  And name me friend to Richard, Henry, outcast kin of Elizabeths I and
II. Alone in Westminster's desert with Kipling _mum_ and history underfoot, very
old,  perhaps  mad,  mightn't I, ruler and ruled, elect myself king of the misty
isles?"
      "You might, and who would blame you?"
       Samuel  Welles  bearhugged  him  again,  then  broke and half ran for his
waiting machine. Halfway he turned to call back:
       "Good God. I just thought. Your name _is_ Harry. What a _fine_ name for a
king!"
      "Not bad."
      "Forgive me for leaving?!"
      "The sun forgives all, Samuel. Go where it wants you."
      "But will England forgive?"
       "England  is where her people are. I stay with old bones. You go with her
sweet flesh, Sam, her fair sunburnt skin and blooded body, get!"
      "Good-bye."
      "Good be with you, too, oh you and that bright yellow sport shirt!"
       And  the wind snatched between and though both yelled more neither heard,
waved,  and  Samuel  hauled  himself into that machine which swarmed the air and
floated off like a vast white summer flower.
      And the last man left behind in great gasps and sobs cried out to himself:
       Harry!  Do  you hate change? Against progress? You do see, don't you, the
reasons  for  all  this? That ships and jets and planes and a promise of weather
piped  all  the  folk away? I see, he said, I see. How could they resist when at
long last forever August lay just across the sill?
      Yes, yes! He wept and ground his teeth and leaned up from the cliff rim to
shake his fists at the vanishing craft in the sky.
      "Traitors! Come back!"
       You  can't  leave  old England, can't leave Pip and Humbug, Iron Duke and
Trafalgar,  the  Horse Guard in the rain, London burning, buzz bombs and sirens,
the  new babe held high on the palace balcony, Churchill's funeral cortege still
in  the  street,  man, _still_ in the street! and Caesar not gone to his Senate,
and strange happenings this night at Stonehenge! Leave all this, this, _this_!?
       Upon  his  knees, at the cliffs edge, the last and final king of England,
Harry Smith wept alone.
       The helicopter was gone now, called toward august isles where summer sang
its sweetness in the birds.
       The old man turned to see the countryside and thought, why this is how it
was  one  hundred thousand years ago. A great silence and a great wilderness and
now, quite late, the empty shell towns and King Henry, Old Harry, the Ninth.
       He  rummaged  half blindly about in the grass and found his lost book bag
and  chocolate  bits  in  a  sack  and  hoisted  his  Bible, and Shakespeare and
much-tumbed  Johnson and much-tongued Dickens and Dryden and Pope, and stood out
on the road that led all round England.
       Tomorrow:  Christmas.  He  wished  the  world well. Its people had gifted
themselves  already  with  sun, all over the globe. Sweden lay empty. Norway had
flown.  None  lived  any  longer  in  God's  cold  climes.  All  basked upon the
continental  hearths  of  His best lands in fair winds under mild skies. No more
fights just to survive. Men, reborn like Christ on such as tomorrow, in southern
places, were truly returned to an eternal and fresh-grown manger.
       Tonight,  in  some  church,  he  would  ask  forgiveness for calling them
traitors.
      "One last thing, Harry. Blue."
      "Blue?" he asked himself.
       "Somewhere  down  the  road find some blue chalk. Didn't English men once
color themselves with such?"
      "Blue men, yes, from head to foot!"
      "Our ends are in our beginnings, eh?"
      He pulled his cap tight. The wind was cold. He tasted the first snowflakes
that fell to brush his lips.
       "O remarkable boy!" he said, leaning from an imaginary window on a golden
Christmas  morn,  an old man reborn and gasping for joy, "Delightful boy, there,
is  the  great  bird,  the turkey, still hung in the poulterer's window down the
way?"
      "It's hanging there now," said the boy.
      "Go buy it! Come back with the man and I'll give you a shilling. Come back
in less than five minutes and I'll give you a crown!"
      And the boy went to fetch.
       And  buttoning  his  coat, carrying his books. Old Harry Ebenezer Scrooge
Julius Caesar Pickwick Pip and half a thousand others marched off along the road
in  winter  weather.  The road was long and beautiful. The waves were gunflre on
the coast. The wind was bagpipes in the north.
       Ten minutes later, when he had gone singing beyond a hill, by the look of
it,  all  the  lands  of  England  seemed ready for a people who someday soon in
history might arrive...