The Once and Future King

Chapter XI

Lancelot stayed at the court for several weeks this time, and each week made it more difficult to go away. On top of the more or less social tangle in which he found himself, there was a personal puzzle – for he put a higher value on chastity than is fashionable in our century. He believed, like the man in Lord Tennyson, that people could only have the strength of ten on account of their hearts being pure. It so happened that his strength was as the strength of ten, and such was the medieval explanation which had been discovered for it. As a corollary to this belief, he supposed that if he gave in to the Queen he would lose his tenfold might. So, for this reason, as well as for the other ones, he fought against her with the courage of despair. It was not pleasant for Guenever either.

One day Uncle Dap said: ‘You had better go away. You have lost nearly two stone in weight. If you go away something will either snap or not snap. It is better to get it over quickly.’

Lancelot said: ‘I cannot go.’

Arthur said: ‘Please stay.’

Guenever said: ‘Go.’

The second quest which he embarked upon was the turning-point of his life. There had been a good deal of talk in Camelot about a certain King Pelles, who was lame and lived in the haunted castle of Corbin. He was supposed to be slightly mad, because he believed himself to be a relation of Joseph of Arimathaea. He was the sort of man who would become a British Israelite nowadays, and spend the rest of his life prophesying the end of the world by measuring the passages in the Great Pyramid. However, King Pelles was only slightly mad, and his castle was certainly haunted. It had a haunted room in it, with innumerable doors out of which things came and fought you in the night. Arthur thought it was worth sending Lancelot to investigate the place.

On the way to Corbin Lancelot had a strange adventure, which he remembered for many years with awful grief. He was to look back on it as the last adventure of his virginity, and to believe, day by day for the next twenty years, that before it had happened he had been God’s man, while, after it, he had become a lie.

There was a village under the castle of Corbin, which seemed a prosperous one. It had cobbled streets and stone houses and old bridges. The castle stood on a hill to one side of the valley and there was a handsome pele tower on the hill of the other side. All the people of the village were in the street, as if they were waiting for him, and there was a dreamlike quality in the air, as if a shower of gold dust had come from the sun. Lancelot felt peculiar. His blood might have had too much oxygen in it, from the way he was conscious of every stone in every wall, and all the colours in the valley, and the joyful stepping of his horse. The people of the enchanted village knew his name.

‘Welcome, Sir Lancelot Dulac,’ they cried, ‘the flower of all knighthood! By thee we shall be holpen out of danger.’

He reined his horse and spoke to them.

‘Why do you call out to me?’ he asked, thinking of other things. ‘How do you know my name? What is the matter?’

They answered in chorus, speaking together solemnly and without difficulty:

‘Ah, fair knight,’ they said. ‘Do you see that tower on the hill? There is a dolorous lady in it, who has been kept boiling in scalding water for many winters by magic, and nobody can get her out except the best knight in the world. Sir Gawaine was here last week, but he could not do it.’

‘If Sir Gawaine could not do it,’ he said, ‘I am sure that I can’t.’

He did not like this sort of competition. The danger about being the best knight in the world was that if you were always being tested about it, the day was bound to come when you would fail to retain the title.

‘I think I had better ride on,’ he said, and he gave his reins a shake.

‘No, no,’ said the people gravely. ‘You are Sir Lancelot and we know it. You will get our lady out of the boiling water.’

‘I must go.’

‘She is in pain.’

Lancelot leaned on the withers of his horse, lifted his right leg over the crupper, and found himself on the ground.

‘Tell me what I must do,’ he said.

The people formed in a procession round him, and the mayor of the village took him by the hand. They walked together silently up the hill to the pele tower, except that the mayor explained the situation as they went.

‘Our lady of the manor,’ said the mayor, ‘used to be the most beautiful girl in the country. So Queen Morgan le Fay and the Queen of Northgalis grew jealous of her, and they have put her in this magic for revenge. It is terrible how it hurts her, and she has been boiling for five years. Only the best knight in the world can get her out.’

When they came to the tower gate, another strange thing happened. It was heavily bolted and barred in the old-fashioned way. The masonry of the doorway was constructed with deep slots in it, in which heavy beams ran to and fro – heavy enough to withstand a battering ram. Now these beams withdrew into the wall of their own accord, and the iron locks turned their own wards with a grinding noise. The door quietly opened.

‘Go in,’ said the mayor, and the people stood still outside, waiting for what was to happen.

On the first floor of the tower there was the furnace which kept the magic water hot. Lancelot could not enter there. On the second floor there was a room full of steam, so that he could not see across it. He went into this room, holding his hands joined together in front of him, as blind people do, until he heard a squeak. A clearing in the steam, caused by the draught from the door so long unopened, showed him the lady who had given the squeak. She was sitting shyly in the bath looking at him, a charming little lady, who was – as Malory puts it – as naked as a needle.

‘Well!’ he said.

The girl blushed, so far as she could blush when she was boiled, and said in a small voice: ‘Please give me your hand.’ She knew how the magic had to be undone.

Lancelot gave her his hand, and she stood up, and got out of the bath, and all the people outside began cheering, as though they knew exactly what was happening. They had brought a dress with them, and the proper underwear, and the ladies of the village formed a circle in the gateway while the pink girl was dressed.

‘Oh, it does feel lovely to be dressed!’ she said.

‘My popsy!’ cried a fat old woman who had evidently been her nurse when she was small, weeping tears of joy.

‘Sir Lancelot done it,’ shouted the villagers. ‘Three cheers for Sir Lancelot!’

When the cheering had died away, the boiled girl came to him and put her hand in his.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Ought we to go to church now, and thank God as well as you?’

‘Certainly we must.’

So they went to the clean little chapel in the village and thanked God for His mercies. They kneeled between the frescoed walls, where some important-looking saints with blue haloes were standing on tiptoe to avoid foreshortening, and the gay paints of the stained-glass window poured upon their heads. They were cobalt blue, purple from manganese, yellow from copper, red, and a green which was also got from copper. The whole inside of the place was a tankful of colour. It was half-way through the service before he realized that he had been allowed to do a miracle, just as he had always wanted.

King Pelles limped down from his castle on the other side of the valley, to find out what the excitement was about. He looked at Lancelot’s shield, kissed the boiled child absent-mindedly, leaning over like an obedient stork to have his cheek pecked, and remarked: ‘Dear me, you are Sir Lancelot! And I see you have fetched my daughter out of that kettle arrangement. How kind of you! It was prophesied long ago. I am King Pelles, near cousin to Joseph of Arimathaea – and you, of course, are but the eighth degree from Our Lord Jesus Christ.’

‘Good gracious!’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ said King Pelles. ‘It is all written down arithmetically in the stones at Stonehenge, and I have some sort of holy dish in my castle at Carbonek, together with a dove which flies about in various directions holding a censer of gold in its beak. Still, it was extremely kind of you to fetch my daughter out of the kettle.’

‘Daddy,’ said the girl. ‘We ought to be introduced.’

King Pelles waved his hand as if he were trying to scare away the midges.

‘Elaine,’ he said. It was another one with the same name. ‘This is my daughter, Elaine. How do you do? And this is Sir Lancelot Dulac. How do you do? All written in the stones.’

Lancelot perhaps slightly biased by having first met her with no clothes on, thought that Elaine was the most beautiful girl he had seen, except Guenever. He felt shy too.

‘You must come and stay with me,’ said the King. ‘That is in the stones also. Show you the holy dish some day, and all that. Teach you arithmetic. Nice weather. Don’t have daughters unboiled every day. I think dinner will be ready.’