The Once and Future King

Chapter VIII

Lancelot had several other adventures during his first quest – it lasted a year – but perhaps only two are worth repeating in detail. They were both mixed up with the conservative ethics of Force Majeure against which the King had started his crusade. It was the old school, the Norman baronial attitude, which provided the adventures at this period – for few people can hate so bitterly and so self-righteously as the members of a ruling caste which is being dispossessed. The knights of the Round Table were sent out as a measure against Fort Mayne, and the choleric barons who lived by Fort Mayne took up the cudgels with the ferocity of despair. They would have written to The Times about it, if there had been such a paper. The best of them convinced themselves that Arthur was newfangled, and that his knights were degenerate from the standards of their fathers. The worst of them made up uglier names than bolshevist even, and allowed the brutal side of their natures to dwell on imaginary enormities which they attributed to the knights. The situation became divorced from common sense, so that atrocity stories were accepted by the atrocious people. Many of the barons whom Lancelot had to put down had worked themselves into such a state about him through fear of losing their ancient powers, that they believed him to be a sort of poison-gas man. They fought him with as much unscrupulousness and hatred as if he had been an antichrist, and they truly believed themselves to be defending the right. It became a civil war of ideologies.

One day in the fine summer, he was riding through the park land of a castle which was strange to him. The trees grew dispersedly about the sward – great elms and oaks and beeches – and Lancelot was thinking about Guenever with a heavy heart. Before he had parted from the lady who led him to Sir Turquine – and he had done the thing for her which he had promised – they had started a conversation about marriage, which had upset him. The lady had said that he ought either to have a wife or a mistress, and Lancelot had been angry. ‘I can’t stop people from saying things if they want to,’ he had said, ‘but circumstances make it impossible for me to marry, while I consider that having a mistress is no good.’ They argued about it for some time, and then parted. Now, although he had passed several adventures in between, he was still thinking of the lady’s advice and feeling wretched.

There was the sound of bells in the air – and he looked up immediately.

A fine peregrine falcon, with her music jingling in the whistling wind alt clear, and her creance trailing behind her, was beating along above his head toward the top of one of the elms. She was in a temper. As soon as she reached the top of the elm she sat down in it, looking about her with raging eye and panting beak. The creance wrapped itself three times, round the nearest bough. When she noticed Sir Lancelot riding toward her, she tried to fly away again in fury. The creance caught her. She hung upside down, bating with her wings. His heart came into his mouth for fear that she would break some feathers. In a few moments she ceased to flap, and hung upside down, revolving slowly, looking ignoble and indignant and ridiculous, holding her head the right way up like a snake’s.

‘Oh, Sir Lancelot, Sir Lancelot!’ cried an unknown gentlewoman, riding toward him at full speed and evidently trying to wring her hands in spite of the reins. ‘Oh, Sir Lancelot! I have lost my falcon.’

‘There she is,’ he said, ‘in that tree.’

‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear!’ cried the lady. ‘I was only trying to call her in cranes, and the string broke! My husband will kill me if I do not catch her again. He is so hasty and such a keen falconer.’

‘But surely he will not kill you?’

‘Oh, he will! He will not mean it, but he will do it! He is such a hasty man.’

‘Perhaps I could stop him?’

‘Oh, no,’ said the gentlewoman. ‘That would not do at all. You might hurt him. I would not like you to hurt my dear husband. Don’t you think you could climb up the tree and catch the hawk instead?’

Lancelot looked at the gentlewoman and at the tree. Then he heaved a deep sigh and remarked, as Malory reports him: ‘Well, fair lady, since that ye know my name, and require me of my knighthood to help you, I will do what I may to get your hawk; and yet truly I am an ill climber, and the tree is passing high, and few boughs to help me withal.’

He had spent his childhood learning to be a fighter. It had left him no time for birds’-nesting like other boys. The lady’s request, which would have given no trouble to people brought up like Arthur or Gawaine, really was an upset for him.

Lancelot took off his armour sadly, with an occasional crooked glance at the horrible tree, until he was dressed in his shirt and breeches. Then he assaulted the first boughs manfully, while the gentlewoman ran about underneath, talking about hawks and husbands and the nice weather they were having.

‘All right,’ he said, with his eyes full of bark and a hideous scowl on his face. ‘All right. All right.’

At the top of the tree, the falcon was in such a tangle with her creance – she had wound it round her neck and wings, as usual, and was under the impression that it was assaulting her – that Lancelot had to let her stand on his bare hand. This she gripped with the fury of hysteria, but he patiently disentangled her without minding the stabs. Falconers seldom fuss when their hawks hurt them. They are too interested.

When the hawk was safely rescued from the branches, he realized that he would not be able to climb down again with one hand.

He shouted to the lady, who seemed small at the foot of the tree: ‘Look out, I am going to tie her jesses to a heavy branch, if I can break one off, and then throw her down. I will get one that is not too heavy, so that she comes gently. I shall have to throw her out a bit, so that she is clear of the boughs.’

‘Oh, do be careful!’ cried the lady.

When Lancelot had done what he said, he began to make his way down again with care. There were some bad bits on the way, where he had to rely on balance alone. He was about twenty feet from the ground when a fat knight in full armour came galloping up.

‘Ha, Sir Lancelot!’ shouted the fat knight. ‘Now I have you where I want you.’

The lady picked up the falcon and began to go away.

‘Lady!’ said Lancelot, wondering how everybody came to know his name.

The fat man screamed out: ‘You leave her alone, you assassin. That is my wife, that is. She has only been doing what I told her. It was a trick. Ha! Ha! Now I have got you without any of your famous armour on, and I am going to kill you, like drowning a kitten.’

‘It is not very knightly,’ said Lancelot, with a grimace. ‘You might at least let me arm and fight fair.’

‘Let you arm, you puppy! Whatever do you take me for? I don’t want any of this newfangled nonsense. When I catch a man who eats human children roasted, I kill him like the vermin he is.’

‘But really –’

‘Come down, come down! I can’t wait about all day. Come down and take your medicine like a man, if you are a man.’

‘I assure you that I do not roast children.’

The fat knight grew quite purple in the face and shouted: ‘Liar! Liar! Devil! Come down at once.’

Lancelot sat on a branch and dangled his feet and bit his finger-nails.

‘Do you mean to say,’ he asked, ‘that you loosed that falcon on purpose, with her cranes on, so as to be able to murder me when I was naked?’

‘Come down!’

‘If I come down, I shall do my best to kill you.’

‘Buffoon!’ cried the fat knight.

‘Well,’ said Lancelot, ‘it is your own fault. You should not play dirty tricks. For the last time, will you let me arm like a gentleman?’

‘Certainly not.’

Lancelot broke off a bough of rotten wood, and jumped down on the other side of his horse, so that the horse was between them. The fat knight rode at him, and tried to swipe off his head, leaning across the horse between. Lancelot parried the stroke with his bough, and the knight’s sword stuck in the wood. Then he took the sword away from its owner and slit his throat.

‘Go away,’ said Lancelot to the gentlewoman. ‘Stop howling. Your husband was a fool and you are a bore. I am not sorry I killed him.’

But he was sorry.

The last adventure was also concerned with treachery and a lady. The young man was riding mournfully through the fen country – which had not been drained in those days and was probably the wildest part of England. It was all secret ways through the marshes, which were known only to the Saxon marsh men who had been conquered by Uther Pendragon, and the whole sea-smelling plain was one vast quack under the low sky. The bitterns boomed and the marsh harriers skimmed over the reeds and millions of widgeon and mallard and tufted ducks flew about in various wedges, looking like champagne bottles balanced on a nimbus of wings. On the salt marshes the geese from Spitzbergen walked and nibbled, with their necks bent into their peculiar loop, and the fen men stalked them with nets and engines. The fen people had spotted bellies and their toes were webbed – at any rate that was the belief in the rest of England. They generally killed foreigners.

While Lancelot was riding along a straight road which seemed to lead nowhere, he saw two people galloping towards him from the other end. They turned out to be a knight and his lady. The lady was in front, going like mad, and the knight was after her. His sword flashed against the dull sky.

‘Here! Here!’ cried Lancelot, riding at them.

‘Help!’ screamed the lady. ‘Oh, save me! He is trying to cut my head off.’

‘Leave her alone! Get out!’ shouted the knight. ‘She is my wife, and she has been committing adultery!’

‘I never did,’ wailed the lady. ‘Oh, sir, save me from him. He is a cruel, beastly brute. Just because I am fond of my cousin german, he is jealous. Why should I not be fond of my cousin german?’

‘Scarlet woman!’ exclaimed the knight, and he tried to get at her.

Lancelot rode between them and said: ‘Really, you must not go for a woman like that. I don’t care whose fault it is, but you can’t kill women.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since King Arthur was king.’

‘She is my wife,’ said the knight. ‘She is nothing to do with you. Get out! And she is an adulteress, whatever she says.’

‘Oh no, I am not,’ said the lady. ‘But you are a bully. And you drink.’

‘Who made me drink, then? And, besides, it is no worse to drink than be an adulteress.’

‘Be quiet,’ said Lancelot, ‘both of you. This is a nuisance. I shall have to ride between you until you cool off. I suppose you would not care to have a fight with me, sir, instead of killing this lady?’

‘Certainly not,’ said the knight. ‘I know by your argent, a bend gules, that you are Lancelot; and I would not be such a fool as to fight you, especially for a bitch like this. What the devil has it got to do with you?’

‘I will go,’ said Lancelot, ‘as soon as you promise on your knighthood not to kill women.’

‘Well, I won’t promise.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ said the lady. ‘Anyway, you would not keep your promise, if you did.’

‘There are some marsh soldiers,’ said the knight, ‘cantering after us. Look behind. They are armed cap-à-pie.’

Lancelot reined his horse and looked over his shoulder. At the same moment the knight leaned over to his near side and swapped off the lady’s head. When Lancelot looked back again, without seeing any soldiers, he found the lady sitting beside him with no head on. She slowly began to sag to the left, throbbing horribly, and fell in the dust. There was blood all over his horse.

Lancelot grew white about the nostrils.

He said, ‘I shall kill you for that.’

The knight immediately jumped off his horse and lay on the ground.

‘Don’t kill me!’ he said. ‘Mercy! She was an adulteress.’

Lancelot dismounted also and drew his sword.

‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Get up and fight, you, you –’

The knight scrambled along the ground toward him, and threw his arms round his thighs. By being close to the avenger, he made it difficult for him to swing the sword. ‘Mercy!’ His abjection made Lancelot feel horrible.

‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Get up and fight. Look, I will take my armour off and fight you with my sword only.’

But ‘Mercy, mercy!’ was all the knight would say.

Lancelot began to shudder, not at the knight but at the cruelty in himself. He held his sword loathingly, and pushed the knight away.

‘Look at all the blood,’ he said.

‘Don’t kill me,’ said the knight. ‘I yield. I yield. You can’t kill a man at mercy.’

Lancelot put up his sword and went back from the knight, as if he were going back from his own soul. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.

‘Get up,’ he said. ‘I won’t hurt you. Get up, go.’

The knight looked at him, on all fours like a dog, and stood up, crouching uncertainly.

Lancelot went away and was sick.

At the feast of Pentecost it was customary for the knights who had been on Table quests to gather again at Carlion so as to relate their adventures. Arthur had found that this made people keener on fighting in the new way of Right, if they had to tell about it afterwards. Most of them preferred to bring their prisoners with them, as witnesses to their stories. It was as if some Inspector General of Police in a very distant part of Africa were to send out his superintendents into the jungle, asking them to come back next Christmas with all the savage chiefs whom they had brought to righteousness. For one thing, it impressed the savage chiefs to see the great court, and they often went home reformed.

The Pentecost next after Lancelot’s first quest was almost a fiasco. A few seedy giants of the Strong Arm, who had been captured by the Orkney faction, turned up and said their homage, but the Lancelot contingent was a spate. ‘Whose man are you?’ ‘Lancelot’s.’ And whose are you, my good fellow?’ ‘Lancelot’s.’ After a bit the whole table began shouting the answers. Arthur would say: ‘You are welcome to Carlion, Sir Belleus, and may I ask which of my knights you have yielded to?’ ‘Lancelot,’ the Table would shout in chorus. And Sir Belleus, blushing rather and wondering whether the laughter was at him, would say in a small voice: ‘Yes, I yielded to Sir Lancelot.’

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.