It was a time in which Bracken learned to stop worrying about physical danger as he and the other moles concentrated on the guidance that Medlar gave them. Like Hulver, Medlar gave a mole the feeling that when he crouched in a burrow, time chose to crouch still with him, and from this stillness some of Medlar’s wisdom went out to all of them.
Each took something different from him, though it was to be a very long time before any of them understood that he was teaching them. For as well as the curious exercises he made them do—Boswell, for instance, had to attack a wall ‘in slow motion’ for many days in succession, while Bracken had to crouch opposite Mullion and guess ‘what he was thinking and whether he likes you or not’—he instructed them in the art of sitting still and doing nothing, ‘which is where you will meet your first, and perhaps your only real opponent—yourselves’.
But for his extraordinary display of fighting skill against Stonecrop, and the sense of truth he seemed to carry in everything he did, all three of them, at one time or another, might well have given up what seemed a fruitless effort.
As Stonecrop—who soon learned to respect Bracken—was to say one night, ‘I’ve come here to learn how to fight, not to sit on my belly all day trying to think about nothing.’ Yet there was never a time when all three wanted to leave all at once and, indeed, at any one time there was always at least one of them who positively felt he was learning something, though none of them was ever quite sure what.
The fact was that Medlar had seen from the first that the three moles who appeared in the chamber so unexpectedly each had unusual abilities in some directions and were underdeveloped in others. Stonecrop, for example, was one of the most physically harmonious moles he had ever met but for the key fact that his mind was unpeaceful and often confused and full of anger about his brother’s death, so that he could never be a really good fighter because he was not at one with himself. So Medlar made him sit still and allow time for the anger to evaporate.
Boswell, on the other paw, was one of the most spiritually developed moles Medlar had come across—indeed, Boswell was to teach Medlar a great deal about the philosophy of the Stone in talks they had to which Bracken listened, though Stonecrop and Mullion found them boring.
But Medlar understood clearly Boswell’s difficulty in believing that he could extend the use of his body into something as straightforwardly physical as fighting—a natural doubt, given his deformity. But if there was one thing Medlar had learned in his years of showing others how to fight, it was that most moles underestimated what they were capable of doing, killing off their own instincts with the false opinions others held of them.
As for Bracken, Medlar found him the most interesting of the three. It was obvious to Medlar from the moment he first saw him that he was a mole of enormous physical and mental stamina. But it was only slowly that Medlar understood that the fugitive life he had lived, alone with himself and with real danger, had given him no way of valuing the strengths he truly had. He was like a hungry mole who is too insensitive to see that food lies all around him. Medlar’s task was to make him see the qualities he had developed inside himself without knowing it—an ability to act independently and alone for long periods, and very real physical power.
Medlar’s skill lay in making each of the three moles not only see these different qualities in themselves but actually experience them, the only way to pursue truth that he knew. ‘You may tell a mole ten times he is strong and he may believe you, but he will still remain weak; only let him experience his own strength once, and he will always be strong,’ he was fond of saying. So he made Stonecrop experience stillness, Boswell experience gracefulness and Bracken experience his own independence and staying power.
Bracken’s view of Medlar—and indeed of Boswell, Mullion and Stonecrop—changed several times as the molemonths went by. His early awe gave way to exasperation at having to do such pointless-seeming things, and then blind trust took over when he found he could do things that were difficult; then a kind of cocksure disrespect when he thought it was all very easy; and then, when more molemonths had passed, he discovered a new awe bordering on love as he understood that Medlar was teaching him things, without him knowing it, whose very conception he could not even have had at first. Like the question that Medlar had first raised with them about how a great fighter loves his opponent.
