The Once and Future King

Chapter XXXIX

If people want to read about the Corbin tournament, Malory has it. He was a passionate follower of tournaments – like one of those old gentlemen who nowadays frequent the cricket pavilion at Lord’s – and he may have had access to some ancient Wisden, or even to the score-books themselves. He reports the celebrated tournaments in full, with the score of each knight, and the name of the man who bowled him over, or how knocked out. But the accounts of old cricket matches are inclined to be boring for those who did not actually play in them, so we must leave it unreported. The only things which are apt to be dull in Malory are the detailed score-sheets, which he gives two or three times – and even they are not dull for anybody who knows the form of the various smaller knights. It is sufficient for our purposes to say that Lancelot hit the other side all round the field – his skill had come back to him since the Grail – and that he would have carried his sword after the innings of a lifetime, if the wound which he got from Sir Mador had not broken out afresh. It is strange that he should have played well on this occasion – for he was distracted by the triple misery of Guenever and God and Elaine – but great performances have been given by others in similar circumstances. Finally, when he had made thirty or forty in spite of the old wound (and, incidently, he had knocked out Mordred and Agravaine), three knights set upon him at the same time, and the spear of one of them penetrated his defence. It broke, leaving the head of the spear in his side.

Lancelot withdrew from the field while he could still sit his horse, and galloped away, lolling in the saddle, to find a place where he could be alone. When he was badly hurt he had this instinct for solitude. To him, there was something private about death – so that, if he had to die, he tried to get a chance of doing it by himself. Only one knight went with him – he was too weak to shake him off – and it was this knight who helped him to draw the spearhead from his ribs, and who eased him when he finally fainted by ‘turning him into the wind.’ It was also this knight who brought the distracted Elaine to his bedside, after he had been put to bed.

The importance of the Winchester tournament did not lie in any particular feat of arms, nor even in Lancelot’s grievous hurt – for he eventually recovered from it. Where it did touch the lives of our four friends was in a circumstance which remains to be told. For Lancelot, suddenly faced with the unlucky Elaine’s unfounded conviction that he was going to stay with her for ever, had faltered in telling her the truth. Perhaps he was a weak man in most ways – weak to have taken Guenever from his best friend in the first place, weak to have tried to exchange his mistress for his God, and weakest of all to have helped Elaine by telling her he would come back. Now, in the face of the poor lady’s simple hope, he had lacked the courage to break her illusion with an immediate blow.

One of the troubles in dealing with Elaine, in spite of her simplicity or ignorance, was that her nature was a sensitive one – more sensitive than Guenever’s, in fact, although she lacked the power of that bold and extraverted queen. She had been sensitive enough not to overwhelm him with welcomes when he came home from his long absence: not to reproach him – she had never felt that she had reason to reproach him: and, above all, not to suffocate him with pity for herself. She had held her heart with a firm hand while they waited at Corbin for the tournament, carefully hiding the long years during which she had hoped for her lord, and her absolute loneliness now that their son was gone. Lancelot had known quite well what she was hiding. Uncertain and sensitive himself, he had forgotten about the way in which their peculiar relationship had started. He had begun to blame himself exclusively for Elaine’s sorrows.

So, when she did make her small request, after having spared him so many tears and welcomes, what could he do but seek her pleasure? He had still to tell her that her unflinching hope was baseless. He was putting it off. Feeling like an executioner who knows that he must kill tomorrow, he had tried to give a little joy today.

‘Lance,’ she said before the tournament, asking her strange favour humbly and childishly, ‘now that we are together, you will wear my token at the fight?’

Now that we are together! And in her tone of voice he had read a picture of twenty years’ desertion, realizing for the first time that during all that period she had been following his career of chivalry like a schoolchild doting on the batsman Hobbs. The poor bird had been picturing all the fights – almost certainly picturing them quite wrong: nourishing a starved heart on second-hand accounts in secret: wondering whose token was in the place of honour today. Perhaps she had been telling herself for twenty years that some day the great champion would fight under a favour of her own – one of those ridiculous ambitions with which the wretched soul consoles itself, for lack of decent fare.

‘I never wear favours,’ he had said, truthfully.

She had not pleaded or complained, and she had truly tried to hid her disappointment.

‘I will wear yours,’ he had said immediately. ‘I shall be proud to wear it. And, besides, it will help my disguise very much. Just because everybody knows that I don’t wear favours, it will be a splendid disguise to wear one. How clever of you to think of it! And it will make me fight better. What is it to be?’

It was a scarlet sleeve embroidered with large pearls. You can do good embroidery in twenty years.

A fortnight after the Winchester tournament, while Elaine nursed her hero back to life, Guenever was having a scene with Sir Bors at court. Being a woman-hater, Bors always had instructive scenes with women. He said what he thought, and they said what they thought, and neither of them understood the other a bit.

‘Ah, Sir Bors,’ said the Queen, having sent for him in great haste as soon as she heard about the red sleeve – Bors being one of Lancelot’s closest relations. ‘Ah, Sir Bors, have ye heard say how falsely Sir Lancelot hath betrayed me?’

Bors noted that the Queen was ‘nigh out of her mind for wrath,’ blushed deeply, and said with exaggerated patience: ‘If anybody has been betrayed, it is Lancelot himself. He has been mortally wounded by three knights at once.’

‘And I am glad,’ cried the Queen, ‘glad to hear it! A good thing if he dies. He is a false traitor knight!’

Bors shrugged his shoulders and turned his back, as much as to say that he was not going to listen to talk like that. The whole of his back, as he went to the door, showed what he thought about women. The Queen rushed after him, to retain him by force if necessary. She was not going to be cheated of her scene as easily as that.

‘Why should I not call him a traitor,’ she shouted, ‘when he bore the red sleeve upon his head at Winchester, at the great jousts?’

Bors, afraid that he was going to be physically assaulted, said: ‘I am sorry about the sleeve. If he had not worn it as a disguise, perhaps people would not have set upon him three to one.’

‘Fie on him,’ exclaimed the Queen. ‘He got a good thrashing anyway, in spite of all his pride and boasting. He was beaten in fair fight.’

‘No, he was not. It was three to one, and his old wound broke out too.’

‘Fie on him,’ repeated the Queen. ‘I heard Sir Gawaine say in front of the King that it was wonderful how much he loved Elaine.’

‘I can’t stop Gawaine saying things,’ retorted Sir Bors hotly, desperately, pathetically, furiously, and with terror. Then he went out and slammed the door, leaving the honours about even.

At Corbin, Elaine and Lancelot were holding hands. He smiled feebly at her and said in a pale voice: ‘Poor Elaine. You always seem to be nursing me back from something. You never seem to have me, except when I am only half alive.’

‘I have you for good now,’ she said radiantly.

‘Elaine,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you.’