The Once and Future King

Chapter X

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 endwise 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.’