The Once and Future King (39 page)

Sir Bevidere came and admitted how he had swapped off his adulterous wife’s head. He had brought it with him, and was told to take it to the Pope as a penance – he became very holy after that. Gawaine came gruffly and told in Scottish English how he had been rescued from Sir Carados. Gaheris, at the head of a deputation of sixty—four knights with rusty shields, related his rescued from Sir Turquine. The daughter of King Bagdemagus arrived in an enthusiastic state and told about the tournament with the King of Northgalis. Besides these, there were many people from adventures which we have left out –
mainly knights who had yielded to Sir Lancelot when he was disguised as Sir Kay. You may remember from the first book that Kay was inclined to throw his tongue a bit too much, and he had got himself unpopular on account of this. Lancelot had been compelled during the quest to rescue him from three knights who were pursuing him. Then, so that Kay could get home to court unmolested, Lancelot had changed armour with him one night while he was asleep – and thereafter the knights who went for Lancelot under the impression that he was Kay had gotten the surprise of their lives, while the knights who met Kay in Lancelot’s armour had given him a wide berth. Knights yielded under this category included Gawaine, Uwaine, Sagramour, Ector de Maris, and three others. Also there came a knight called Sir Meliot de Logres, who had been rescued under supernatural circumstances.

All these people gave themselves up, not to King Arthur, but to Guenever. Lancelot had kept himself away for a whole year, but there was a limit to his endurance. Thinking of her all the time and longing to be back with her, he had allowed himself this one indulgence. He had sent his captives to kneel at her feet. It was a fatal course of action.

It is difficult to explain about Guenever, unless it is possible to love two people at the same time. Probably it is not possible to love two people in the same way, but there are different kinds of love. Women love their children and their husbands at the same time – and men often feel a lusty thought for one woman while they are feeling a love of the heart for another. In some way such as this Guenever did come to love the Frenchman without losing her affection for Arthur. She and Lancelot were hardly more than children when it began, and the King was about eight years their senior. At twenty—two, the age of thirty seems to be the verge of senility. The marriage between
her and Arthur had been what they call a ‘made’ marriage. That is to say, it had been fixed by treaty with King Leodegrance, without consulting her. It had been a successful union, as ‘made’ marriages generally are, and before Lancelot came on the scene the young girl had adored her famous husband, even if he was so old. She had felt respect for him, with gratitude, kindness, love, and a sense of protection. She had felt more than this – you might say that she had felt everything except the passion of romance.

And then the captives arrived. A blushing queen of little more than twenty summers on her throne, and the whole flamelit hall filling with noble knights on bended knee. ‘Whose prisoner are you?’ ‘I am the Queen’s prisoner, to live or die, sent by Sir Lancelot.’ ‘Whose you?’ ‘The Queen’s, by Lancelot’s arm.’ Sir Lancelot – the name on everybody’s lips: the best knight in the world, top of the averages, even above Tristram: the courtly, the merciful, the ugly, the invincible: and he had sent them all to her. It was like a birthday party, so many presents. It was like the story books.

Guenever sat straight and bowed royally to her prisoners. She pardoned them all. Her eyes were brighter than her crown.

Lancelot came last. There was a stir among the torchbearers near the door, and a sound went round the hall. The clatter of knives and plates and tankards, the noise of friendly shouting which had sounded a moment before like a meeting of seabirds on St Kilda, the yells for more mutton or a pint of mead were stilled – and the blurs of white faces turned toward the door. There was Lancelot, no longer in armour but dressed in a magnificent velvet robe, scalloped and diapered. He hesitated in the dark frame, hideous and friendly, wondering why the silence was – and the lights showed him up. Then the faces turned back again, the seabird meeting started once more, and Lancelot came forward to kiss the King’s hand.

It was the moment. Perhaps it is better than trying to explain.

‘Well, Lance,’ said Arthur cheerfully, ‘these are some high jinks, and no mistake about it. Jenny can hardly sit still, with all her captives.’

‘They were for her,’ said Lancelot. The Queen and he did not look at each other. They had done so with the click of two magnets coming together, the moment that he crossed the threshold.

‘I can’t help thinking they were for me too,’ said the King. ‘The result ought to be that you have made me a present of about three counties.’

Lancelot felt a need to prevent silence. He began talking too quickly.

‘Three counties is not much,’ he said, ‘for the Emperor of all Europe. You speak as if you had never conquered the Dictator of Rome. How are your dominions getting on?’

‘They are getting on as you make them, Lance. It was no good conquering the Dictator, unless you and the others do the civilizing part. What is the use of being the Emperor of Europe, if the whole place is fighting mad?’

Guenever supported her hero in the effort against silence. It was their first partnership.

‘You are a strange man,’ she said, ‘Arthur dear. You fight all the time, and conquer countries and win battles, and then you say that fighting is a bad thing.’

‘So it is a bad thing. It is the worst thing in the world. Oh, God, we needn’t explain it again.’

‘No.’

‘How is the Orkney faction?’ asked the younger man hastily. ‘How is your famous civilization going? Might for Right? You mustn’t forget I have been away a year.’

The King put his head in his hands and looked miserably at the table between his elbows. He was a kind, conscientious, peace—loving fellow, who had been afflicted in his youth by a tutor of genius. Between the two of them they had worked out their theory that killing people, and being a tyrant over them, was wrong. To stop this sort of thing, they had invented the idea of the Table – a vague idea like democracy, or sportsmanship, or morals – and now, in an effort to impose a world of peace, he found himself up to the elbows in blood. When he was feeling healthy he did not grieve much, because he knew the dilemma
was inevitable – but in weak moments he was persecuted by shame and indecision. He was one of the first Nordic men who had invented civilization, or who had desired to do otherwise than Attila the Hun had done, and the battle against chaos sometimes did not seem to be worth fighting. He often thought that it might have been better for all his dead soldiers to be alive – even if they had lived under tyranny and madness – rather than be quite dead.

‘The Orkney faction is bad,’ he said. ‘So is civilization, except for the bit which you have just brought in. Before you came, I was thinking that I was the Emperor of nothing – now I feel as if I were the Emperor of three counties.’

‘What is wrong with the Orkney faction?’

‘Oh, God, must we talk about it when we were feeling happy because you had come back? I suppose we must.’

‘It is Morgause,’ said the Queen.

‘Partly. Morgause is having love affairs with anybody she can get hold of, now that Lot is dead. How I wish King Pellinore had not had that unfortunate accident when he killed him! It is having a bad effect on her children.’

‘How do you mean?’

The King scratched on the table and stated: ‘I wish you had not conquered Gawaine, that time when you were disguised as Kay. I almost wish you had not made such brilliant successes in rescuing him and his brothers from Carados and Turquine.’

‘Why not?’

‘This Round Table,’ said the older man slowly, ‘was a good thing when we thought of it. It was necessary to invent a way for the fighting men to express themselves without doing harm. I can’t see how we could have done it otherwise than by starting a fashion, like children. To get them in, we had to have a gang, as kids have in schools. Then the gang had to swear a darksome oath that they would only fight for our ideas. You could call it for civilization. What I meant by civilization when I invented it, was simply that people ought not to take advantage of weakness – not violate maidens, and rob widows, and kill a man
when he was down. People ought to be civil. But it has turned into sportsmanship. Merlyn always said that sportsmanship was the curse of the world, and so it is. My scheme is going wrong. All these knights now are making a fetish of it. They are turning it into a competitive thing. Merlyn used to call it Games—Mania. Everybody gossips and nags and hints and speculates about who unseated whom last, and who has rescued most virgins, and who is the best knight of the Table. I made it a round table to prevent that very thing, but it has not prevented it. The Orkney faction have got the craze worst. I suppose their sense of insecurity over their mother makes it necessary for them to be sure of a safe place at the top of the list. They have to excel, to make up for her. That is why I wish you had not beaten Gawaine. He is a decent chap but he will hold it against you inside himself. You have hurt him in his tilting average – it is a part of their make—up which has now become more important to my knights than their souls. If you are not careful, you will have the Orkney faction after your blood, as well as after poor Pellinore’s. It’s a foul position. People will do the basest things on account of their so—called honour. I wish I had never invented honour, or sportsmanship, or civilization.’

‘What a speech!’ said Lancelot. ‘Cheer up. The faction won’t hurt me, even if it does come after my blood. As for your scheme going wrong, that is nonsense. The Round Table is the best thing that ever happened.’

Arthur, whose head was still in his hands, raised his eyes. He saw that his friend and his wife were looking at each other with the wide pupils of madness, so he quickly attended to his plate.

Uncle Dap said, turning the helm round in his hands: ‘Your mantling is cut and torn. We shall have to get another. It is honourable to have the mantling slashed, but dishonourable to keep it so when there is an opportunity to replace it. Such a course of action would be boastful.’

They were talking in a little closet with a north window, cold and grey, and the blue light lay like frozen oil upon the steel.

‘Yes.’

‘How did Joyeux go? Is he sharp still? Did you like his balance?’

Joyeux had been made by Galand, the greatest swordsmith of the Middle Ages.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes! Yes!’ cried Uncle Dap. ‘Can you say nothing but Yes? Death of my soul, Lancelot, but one asks if you are dumb! What in the world is this that has come over you, in the end?’

Lancelot had been smoothing the panache of feathers which was used as a distinguishing mark on the helm in Uncle Dap’s hands. It was detachable. People have got it into their heads, through the cinema and the comic advertisements, that knights in armour generally wore ostrich plumes, nodding like stalks of pampas grass. This was not the case. Kay’s panache, for instance, was shaped like a rigid, flat fan, with its edges pointing fore and aft. It was carefully arranged out of the eyes of peacock feathers, exactly as if a stiff peacock fan had been erected end—wise on his head. It was not a tuft of plumes, and it did not nod. It was rather like the adipose fin of a fish, but gaudy. Lancelot, who did not care for gaudy things, wore a few heron’s hackles bound with silver thread, which suited the argent of his shield. He had been stroking them. Now he threw them
violently into a corner and stood up. He began walking the narrow room in a jerky way.

‘Uncle Dap,’ he said. ‘do you remember how I asked you not to talk about something?’

‘I do.’

‘Is Guenever in love with me?’

‘You should ask her,’ replied his uncle, with French logic.

‘What must I do?’ he cried. ‘What must I do?’

If it is difficult to explain about Guenever’s love for two men at the same time, it is almost impossible to explain about Lancelot. At least it would be impossible nowadays, when everybody is so free from superstitions and prejudice that it is only necessary for all of us to do as we please. Why did not Lancelot make love to Guenever, or run away with his hero’s wife altogether, as any enlightened man would do today?

One reason for his dilemma was that he was a Christian. The modern world is apt to forget that several people were Christians in the remote past, and in Lancelot’s time there were no Protestants – except John Scotus Erigena. His Church, in which he had been brought up – and it is difficult to escape from your upbringing – directly forbade him to seduce his best friend’s wife. Another stumbling block to doing as he pleased was the very idea of chivalry or of civilization which Arthur had first invented and then introduced into his own young mind. Perhaps a bad baron who believed in the Strong Arm might have gone off with Guenever, even in the face of his Church’s councils, because taking your neighbour’s wife was really a form of Fort Mayne. It was a matter of the stronger bull winning. But Lancelot had spent his childhood between knightly exercises and thinking out King Arthur’s theory for himself. He believed as firmly as Arthur did, as firmly as the benighted Christian, that there was such a thing as Right. Finally, there was the impediment of his nature. In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something which we cannot explain. He could not have explained either, and for us it is all too long ago. He loved
Arthur and he loved Guenever and he hated himself. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self—esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo’s, there was shame and self—loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.

‘It seems to me,’ said Uncle Dap, ‘that it depends very largely on what the Queen wants to do.’