The Once and Future King (42 page)

The year of their happiness ended with Arthur’s return – and almost immediately collapsed in ruin, but not on account of the King. The evening after his home—coming, while he was still giving them details of the defeat of Claudas as they happened to come into his memory, there was a disturbance at the Porter’s Lodge, and Sir Bors was ushered into the Great Hall at dinner. He was Lancelot’s cousin, and had been spending a holiday at the castle of Corbin, investigating the hauntings. He had some news for Lancelot, which he told him in a whisper after dinner – but unfortunately he was a misogynist, and, like most people of that sort, he had the female failing of indiscretion. He told the news to some of his bosom friends as well. Soon it was all over the court. The news was that Elaine of Corbin had given birth to a fine son, whom she had christened Galahad – which was Lancelot’s first name, as you remember.

‘So this,’ said Guenever, when she next saw her lover alone, ‘so this is why you lost your miracles. It was all lies about your giving them to me.’

‘What do you mean?’

Guenever began to breathe through her nose. She was feeling as if there were two red thumbs behind her eyeballs, trying to push them out, and she did not want to look at him. She was trying not to make a scene, and she dreaded her heart. She had shame and hatred of what she might say, but she could not help saying it. She was like a person swimming in a rough sea.

‘You know what I mean,’ she said bitterly, looking away.

‘Jenny, I wanted to tell you, but it was too difficult to explain.’

‘I can understand the difficulty.’

‘It is not what you think.’

‘What I think!’ she cried. ‘How do you know what I think? I think what everybody would think – that you are a mean seducer, just a liar, you and your miracles. And I was fool enough to believe you.’

Lancelot turned his head at each of her stabs, as if he were trying to let them glance off him. He looked on the ground, to hide his eyes. He had wide eyes, which generally gave him an expression of fear or surprise.

‘Elaine means nothing to me,’ he said.

‘Then she ought to do. How can you say that she means nothing to you when she is the mother of your child? When you tried to keep her secret? No, don’t touch me, go away.’

‘I can’t go away, when it is like this.’

‘If you touch me I shall go to the King.’

‘Guenever, I was made drunk at Corbin. Then they told me that you were waiting for me at Case, and they took me to a dark room with Elaine in it. I came away next morning.’

‘A clumsy lie.’

‘It is true.’

‘A baby wouldn’t believe it.’

‘I can’t make you believe it, if you don’t want to. I drew my sword to kill Elaine, when I found out.’

‘I will have her killed.’

‘It was not her fault.’

The Queen began plucking at the neck of her dress, as if it were too tight for her.

‘You are standing up for her,’ she said. ‘You are in love with her, and deceiving me. I thought so all along.’

‘I swear I am telling the truth.’

She suddenly gave up and began to cry.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had a baby? Why have you lied to me all the time? I suppose she was your famous miracle, which you were so proud of.’

Lancelot, who also suffered from violent emotions, began to cry in turn. He put his arms round her.

‘I didn’t know I had one,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want one. It was not my seeking.’

‘If you had told me the truth, I could have believed you.’

‘I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. I was afraid you would be hurt.’

‘It has hurt me worse like this.’

‘I know it has.’

The Queen dried her tears and looked at him, smiling like a spring shower. In a minute they were kissing, feeling like the green earth refreshed by rain. They thought that they understood each other once more – but their doubt had been planted. Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.

In the castle of Corbin, the child Elaine was making ready for her journey. She was coming to capture Lancelot from Guenever, an expedition of which everybody except herself could feel the pathos. She had no weapons to fight with, and did not
know how to fight. She was quite without character. Lancelot did not love her. And she was in the yet more hopeless position of loving him. She had nothing to oppose against the Queen’s maturity except her own immaturity and humble love, nothing except the fat baby which she was carrying to its father – a baby which was to him only the symbol of a cruel trick. It was an expedition like that of an army without weapons against an impregnable fortress, an army which at the same time had its hands tied behind its back. Elaine, with an artlessness which could only be explained by the fact that she had spent most of her life in the seclusion of her magic cauldron, had decided to meet Guenever on her own ground. She had ordered gowns of the utmost magnificence and sophistication – and in these, which would only make her look all the more stupid and provincial, she was going to Camelot to fight her battle with the English Queen.

If Elaine had not been Elaine, she might have taken Galahad as her weapon. Pathos and proprietorship, rightly applied to a nature like Lancelot’s, might have been successful in binding him. But Elaine was not clever, did not understand the attempt to bind her hero. She took Galahad because she adored him. She took him only because she did not want to be parted from her baby, and because she wanted to show him off to his father, and partly because she wanted to compare the faces. It was a year since she had set eyes on the man for whom her child—mind lived.

Lancelot, while Elaine was planning his capture, remained with the Queen at court. But he now remained without the temporary peace of heart which he had been able to invent for himself while the King was away. In the King’s absence he had been able to drown himself in the passing minute – but Arthur was perpetually at his elbow now, as a comment on his treachery. He had not buried his love for Arthur in his passion for Guenever, but still felt for him. To a medieval nature like Lancelot’s, with its fatal weakness for loving the highest when he saw it, this was a position of pain. He could not bear to be made to feel that his sentiment for Guenever was an ignoble
sentiment, for it was the profound feeling of his life – yet every circumstance now conspired to make it seem ignoble. The hasty moments together, the locked doors and base contrivances, the guilty manoeuvres which the husband’s presence forced on the lovers – these had the effect of soiling what had no excuse unless it was beautiful. On top of this stain there was the torture of knowing that Arthur was kind, simple and upright – of knowing that he was always on the edge of hurting Arthur dreadfully, although he loved him. Then there was pain about Guenever herself, the tiny plant of bitterness which they had sown, or seen sown, in each other’s eyes, on the occasion of their first quarrel of suspicion. It was a pain to him to be in love with a jealous and suspicious woman. She had given him a mortal blow by not believing his explanation about Elaine instantly. Yet he was unable not to love her. Finally there were the revolted elements of his own character – his strange desire for purity and honour and spiritual excellence. All these things, working together with the unconscious dread of Elaine’s arrival with his son, broke his happiness without allowing him to escape. He seldom sat down, but strayed about with nervous movements, picking things up and setting them down without looking at them, walking to windows and looking out but seeing nothing.

For Guenever the dread of Elaine’s arrival was not unconscious. She had known from the first moment that Elaine was bound to come. For her, however, as for all women, the dreads were in advance of the male horizon. Men often accuse women of driving them to unfaithfulness by senseless jealousy, before there has been any thought of unfaithfulness on their own part. Yet the thought was probably there, unconscious and undetectable except to women. The great Anna Karenina, for instance, forced Vronsky into a certain position by the causeless jealousy of a maniac – yet that position was the only real solution to their problem, and it was the inevitable solution. Seeing so much further into the future than he did, she pressed towards it with passionate tread, wrecking the present because the future was bound to be a wreck.

So with Guenever. Probably she was not over—strained by Elaine’s immediate problem. Probably she had no real suspicion against that side of Lancelot. Yet, with her prescience, she was aware of dooms and sorrows outside her lover’s purview. It would not be accurate to say that she was aware of them in a logical sense, but they were present in her deeper mind. It is a pity that language is such a clumsy weapon that we cannot say that a mother was ‘unconscious’ of her baby crying in the next room – with the meaning that the mother somehow, unconsciously, knew that it
was
crying. Facts of which Guenever was subconscious, in this sense, included the whole of the Arthur—Lancelot situation, most of the future tragedy at court, and the grievous fact of her own childlessness – which was never to be remedied.

She said to herself that Lancelot had betrayed her, that she was the victim of Elaine’s cunning, that her lover was sure to betray her again. She tormented herself with a thousand words of the same sort. But what she felt to herself, in the uncharted regions of her heart, was a different matter. Perhaps she was actually jealous, not of Elaine, but of the baby. Perhaps it was Lancelot’s love for Arthur that she feared. Or it may have been a fear of the whole position, of its instability and the nemesis inherent in it. Women know, far better than men, that God’s laws are not mocked. They have more cause to know it.

Whatever the explanation of Guenever’s attitude, the fruits of it were pain for her lover. She became as restless as he was, more unreasonable, and much more cruel.

Arthur’s feelings completed the misery of the court. He, unfortunately for himself, had been beautifully brought up. His teacher had educated him as the child is educated in the womb, where it lives the history of man from fish to mammal – and, like the child in the womb, he had been protected with love meanwhile. The effect of such an education was that he had grown up without any of the useful accomplishments for living – without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty, and the commoner forms of selfishness. Jealousy seemed to him the most ignoble
of vices. He was sadly unfitted for hating his best friend or for torturing his wife. He had been given too much love and trust to be good at these things.

Arthur was not one of those interesting characters whose subtle motives can be dissected. He was only a simple and affectionate man, because Merlyn had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.

Now, with a situation developing before his eyes which has always been notoriously difficult of solution – so difficult that it has been given a label and called the Eternal Triangle, as if it were a geometrical problem like the Pons Asinorum in Euclid – Arthur was only able to retreat. It is generally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack. Arthur was strong and gentle enough to hope that, if he trusted Lancelot and Guenever, things would come right in the end. It seemed to him that this was better than trying to bring them right at once by such courses as, for instance, by cutting off the lovers’ heads for treason.

Arthur did not know that Lancelot and Guenever were lovers. He had never actually found them together or unearthed proofs of their guilt. It was in the nature of his bold mind to hope, in these circumstances, that he would not find them together – rather than to lay a trap by which to wreck the situation. This is not to say that he was a conniving husband. It is simply that he was hoping to weather the trouble by refusing to become conscious of it. Unconsciously, of course, he knew perfectly well that they were sleeping together – knew too, unconsciously, that if he were to ask his wife, she would admit it. Her three great virtues were courage, generosity and honesty. So he could not ask her.

Such an attitude to the position did not make it easier for the King to be happy. He became, not excitable like Guenever nor restless like Lancelot, but reserved. He moved about his own palace like a mouse. Yet he made one effort to grasp the nettle.

‘Lancelot,’ said the King, finding him one afternoon in the
rose garden, ‘you have been looking wretched lately. Is there anything the matter?’

Lancelot had snapped off one of the roses, and was pinching the sepals. These ancient roses, it has lately been asserted, were so constructed that the five sepals did actually stick out beyond the petals – just as they are represented to do in the heraldic rose.

‘Is it anything,’ asked the King, hoping against hope, ‘about this girl who is said to have had your baby?’

If Arthur had left him alone with the first question, and a silence to answer it in, perhaps they would have had the matter out. But Arthur was afraid of what might come in the silence, and, once he had given the lead of the second question, the chance was gone.

‘Yes,’ said Lancelot.

‘You could not bring yourself to marry her, I suppose?’

‘I don’t love her.’

‘Well, you know your own business best.’

Lancelot, with an uncontrollable desire to get some of his misery off his chest by telling about it – and yet unable to tell the true story to this particular listener – began a long rigmarole about Elaine. He began telling Arthur half the truth: how he was ashamed and had lost his miracles. But he was forced to make Elaine the central figure of this confession, and, after half an hour, he had unwittingly presented the King with a story to believe in – a story with which Arthur could content himself if he did not want to be conscious of the true tale. This half—truth was of great use to the poor fellow, who learned to substitute it for the real trouble in later years. We civilized people, who would immediately fly to divorce courts and alimony and other forms of attrition in such circumstances, can afford to look with proper contempt upon the spineless cuckold. But Arthur was only a medieval savage. He did not understand our civilization, and knew no better than to try to be too decent for the degradation of jealousy.

Guenever was the next person to find Lancelot in the rose garden. She was all sweetness and reason.

‘Lance, have you heard the news? A messenger has just arrived to say that this girl who is persecuting you is on her way to court, bringing the baby. She will be here this evening.’

‘I knew she would come.’

‘We shall have to do our best for her, of course. Poor child. I expect she is unhappy.’

‘It is not my fault if she is unhappy.’

‘No, of course it isn’t. But people get made unhappy by the world, and we must help them when we can.’

‘Jenny, it is sweet of you to be kind about it.’

He turned towards her, and made a movement to catch her hand. Her words had made him hope that all would be well. But Jenny took her hand away.

‘No, dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to make love to me until she has gone. I want you to be quite free.’

‘Free?’

‘She is the mother of your baby, and she is unmarried. We two can’t ever be married. I want you to be able to marry her if you would like it, because that is the only thing which can be done.’

‘But, Jenny –’

‘No, Lance. We must be sensible. I want you to keep away from me while she is here, and to find out whether you could love her after all. It is the least that I can do for you.’