The Once and Future King

Chapter VI

What sort of picture do people have of Sir Lancelot from this end of time? Perhaps they only think of him as an ugly young man who was good at games. But he was more than this. He was a knight with a medieval respect for honour.

There is a phrase which you sometimes come across in country districts even nowadays, which sums up a good deal of what he might have tried to say. Farmers use it in Ireland, as praise or compliment, saying, ‘So-and-so has a Word. He will do what he promised.’

Lancelot tried to have a Word. He considered it, as the ignorant country people still consider it, to be the most valuable of possessions.

But the curious thing was that under the king-post of keeping faith with himself and with others he had a contradictory nature which was far from holy. His Word was valuable to him not only because he was good, but also because he was bad. It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them. For one thing, he liked to hurt people. It was for the strange reason that he was cruel, that the poor fellow never killed a man who asked for mercy, or committed a cruel action which he could have prevented. One reason why he fell in love with Guenever was because the first thing he had done was to hurt her. He might never have noticed her as a person, if he had not seen the pain in her eyes.

People have odd reasons for ending up as saints. A man who was not afflicted by ambitions of decency in his mind might simply have run away with his hero’s wife, and then perhaps the tragedy of Arthur would never have happened. An ordinary fellow, who did not spend half his life torturing himself by trying to discover what was right so as to conquer his inclination towards what was wrong, might have cut the knot which brought their ruin.

When the two friends arrived in England from the Roman war, the fleet landed at Sandwich. It was a grey September day, with the blue and copper butterflies flitting in the aftergrass, the partridges calling like crickets, the blackberries colouring, and the hazel nuts still nursing their tasteless little kernels in cradles of cotton wool. Queen Guenever was on the beach to meet them, and the first thing Lancelot knew after she had kissed the King, was that she was able to come between them after all. He made a movement as if his entrails were tying themselves in knots, saluted the Queen, went off to bed in the nearest inn at once, and lay awake all night. In the morning, he asked leave of absence from the court.

‘But you have hardly been at court at all,’ said Arthur. ‘Why do you want to go away so soon?’

‘I ought to go away.’

‘Ought to go away?’ asked the King. ‘What do you mean, you ought to go away?’

Lancelot clenched his fist until the knuckles stood out, and said, ‘I want to go on a quest. I want to find an adventure.’

‘But, Lance –’

‘It is what the Round Table is for, isn’t it?’ shouted the young man. ‘The knights are to go on quests, aren’t they, to fight against Might? What are you trying to stop me for? It’s the whole point of the idea.’

‘Oh, come,’ said the King. ‘You needn’t get excited about it. If you want to go, of course you can do whatever you like. I only thought it would be nice to have you with us for a little. Don’t be cross, Lance. I don’t know what has come over you.’

‘Come back soon,’ said the Queen.