The Once and Future King (53 page)

It so happened that the Patrick accusation was cleared up next day, when Nimue arrived with a second—sighted explanation. Merlyn, before letting her lock him up in the cave, had given the Matter of Britain into her hands. He had made her promise – it was all that he could do – that she would watch over Arthur herself, now that she knew his own magic. Then he had gone meekly to his imprisonment, casting a last, long doting look upon her. Nimue, though scatterbrained and unpunctual, was a good girl in her way. She turned up a day late, told how the apple had come to be poisoned and went back to her own concerns. Sir Pinel confirmed the statement by running away the same morning, leaving a written confession, and everybody had to admit that it was a lucky thing Sir Lancelot had been about.

It was not so lucky for the Queen. She was alive and saved, it was true – but the unbelievable happened. In spite of the tears, in spite of the fountain of feeling which had sprung between them once again, Lancelot persisted in remaining loyal to his Grail.

Well for him, she exclaimed – she was growing madder every day, and it hurt people to watch it – well for him to wrap himself in his new delight. He had a grand feeling, no doubt, a compensation of vigour and clarity and uplifting of the heart. Perhaps his famous God did give him something which she could not give. Perhaps he was happier with God, and would soon begin doing miracles left and right. But what about her? He was not considering what she got out of God. The position was exactly the same, she railed at him, as if he had left her for another woman. He had taken the best of her, and now that she was old and worthless he had gone elsewhere. He was behaving with the beastly selfishness of Man, taking all he could get from one quarter, and then, when that was used, going to
another. He was a sneak—thief. And to think that she had believed in him! She did not love him any more now, would not let him come near her if he were to pray for it on bended knees. As a matter of fact, she had despised him even before the search for the Grail began – yes, despised him, and had determined to throw him over. He was not to think that he was deserting her: it was quite the contrary. She was tossing him away, like a dirty clout, because she felt nothing but contempt for him. For his poses and swelled head and meanness and childishness and conceit. For his futile little God, and his goody—goody lies. To tell him the truth, and really she felt no further interest in concealing it, there was a young knight at court who was already her lover: had been her lover long before the Grail! He was a much finer young man than Lancelot. What would she want with a sour husk when she had a rosy boy at her feet who worshipped her, yes, worshipped the ground she trod on? Lancelot had better return to Elaine, to the mother of his famous son. Perhaps they would be able to say their prayers together, one frump with the other frump, all night. They could talk about their baby, their Galahad, who had found the loathsome Grail, and they could laugh at her if they liked, yes, they were welcome to laugh at her, laughing because she had never managed to bear a son.

Then Guenever would begin the laughing – while always one part of her looked out from the eye windows, and hated the noise which she was making – and the tears would come after the laughter, and she would weep with all her heart.

A strange feature was that Arthur, who wanted to arrange a tournament in celebration of the Queen’s acquittal, fixed upon a place near Corbin as the spot where the tournament was to be held. The place may have been Winchester or Brackley, where one of the four surviving English tilting grounds is to be found. It does not matter where it was – what does matter is that Corbin was the castle where the now childless Elaine lived out her lonely middle age.

‘I suppose you will go to this tournament?’ asked the Queen fiercely. ‘I suppose you will go to be near your trull?’

Lancelot said: ‘Jenny, couldn’t you forgive her? She is probably ugly as well as miserable now. She never had much to fall back on.’

‘The generous Lancelot!’

‘If you don’t want me to go,’ he said, ‘I won’t. You know I have never loved any human being except you.’

‘Only Arthur,’ said the Queen. ‘Only Elaine. Only God. Unless there are some others I haven’t heard about.’

Lancelot shrugged his shoulders – one of the stupidest things to do, when the other party wants to have a fight.

‘Are you going?’ he asked.

‘I going? Am I to watch you flirting with that turnip? Certainly I shan’t go, and I forbid you to go either.’

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will tell Arthur that I am ill. I could say that my wound has not healed yet.’

He went to find the King.

Everybody had started for the tournament, and the court was empty, when Guenever changed her mind. Perhaps she had kept Lancelot behind so as to be alone with him, and, finding that it was no good being alone with him, had reversed her decision – but we do not know the reason.

‘You had better go,’ she said. ‘If I keep you here you will say it was because I was jealous, and you will cast it in my teeth. Besides, there may be a scandal if you stay with me. And I don’t want you. I don’t want to see your face. Take it away. Go!’

‘Jenny,’ he said reasonably, ‘I can’t go now. There will be much more of a scandal if I do go after all, when I have said that my wound prevents me. They will think that we have had a quarrel.’

‘Let them think what they please. The only thing I tell you is that you are to go, before you drive me mad.’

‘Jenny,’ he said.

He felt that his heart was breaking in two pieces, and that
the madness which she had given him once before might well be coming again. Perhaps she noticed this too. At all events, she suddenly relented in her manner. She saw him off to Corbin with a loving kiss.

‘I promise I will come back,’ he had said, and now he was keeping his promise. It was unthinkable that he should go to the tournament without visiting Elaine. He had not only promised to return to her, but he was the repository of all the last messages of their only son, now dead or at least translated. The cruellest man could hardly have refused to visit her with such messages.

He would lodge at Corbin, tell her about Galahad, and fight in the tournament disguised. He would explain to Arthur that he had pleaded the wound so as to come unexpectedly, in disguise, because that was one of the new—fashioned things to do. This subterfuge would be assisted by the fact of his staying at Corbin Castle, instead of at the actual place of the tournament. It would prevent any scandal about a last—minute quarrel with the Queen.

He was surprised to find, as he rode up the avenue to the moat, through the cheval de frise, that Elaine was waiting for him on the battlements, in the same attitude as that in which he had left her twenty years before. She met him at the Great Gate.

‘I was waiting for you.’

She was plump and dumpy now, rather like Queen Victoria, and she received him faithfully. He had said that he would come back and here he was. She had expected nothing else.

With her next words she stabbed him to the heart.

‘You will be staying for good now,’ said she, hardly as a question. It was in this way that she had construed his answer when they parted all that time ago.

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.’