The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  A week later, Lancelot and Uncle Dap were sitting in a peculiar boat in the middle of the English Channel. The boat had a sort of castle at each end. There was another castle half—way up the single mast, which gave it the appearance of a dovecote. It had flags fore and aft. The one gay sail had a Cross Potent on it, while an enormous streamer floated from the top of the mast. There were eight oars, and the two passengers were seasick.

  Chapter IV

  The hero—worshipper rode towards Camelot with a bitter heart. It was hard for him at eighteen to have given his life to a king, only to be forgotten – hard to have spent those sorrowful hours with the heavy arms in the dust of the Armoury, only to see Sir Gawaine knighted first – hardest of all to have broken his body for the older man’s ideal, only to find this mincing wife stepping in at the end of it to snatch away his love at no cost at all. Lancelot was jealous of Guenever, and he was ashamed of himself for being so.

  Uncle Dap rode behind the grieving boy in silence. He knew a thing which the other was still too green to know – that he had taught the finest knight in Europe. Like an excited tit which had nursed a cuckoo, Uncle Dap fluttered along behind his prodigy. He was carrying the fighting harness, which was strapped up in apple—pie order according to his own dodges and wrinkles – for, from now on, he was Lancelot’s squire.

  They came to a clearing in the wood, and a little stream ran through the middle. There was a ford here and the stream ran tinkling over the clean stones, only a few inches deep. The sun shone down into the clearing. Some wood—pigeons sang drowsily their Take Two Cows Taffy, and, on the other side of the musical water, there was an enormous knight in black armour with his tilting helm in position. He sat motionless on a black charger, and his shield was still in its canvas case. It was impossible to read his blazon. Being so still, so portly in his iron sheath, and having the great blind helm over his head so that he had no proper face, he had a look of danger about him. You did not know what he was thinking, nor what action he might be going to take. He was a menace.

  Lancelot halted, and so did Uncle Dap. The black knight walked his horse into the shallow water, and drew rein in front of them. He raised his lance in a gesture of salute, then pointed with it to a place behind Lancelot’s back. Either he was telling him to go home again, or else he was pointing out a good position from which they could start their charges. Whichever the case might be, Lancelot saluted with his gauntlet and turned round to go to the place. He took one of his spears from Uncle Dap, pulled his tilting helm round in front of him – it had been hanging behind on a chain – and lifted the steel turret into position on his head. He laced it on. Now he too had become a man without an expression.

  The two knights faced each other from opposite ends of the little glade. Then, although neither of them had so far spoken a word, they fewtered their spears, put spurs to their horses, and began to charge. Uncle Dap, drawn up safely behind a near—by tree, could hardly contain his delight. He knew what was going to happen to the black knight, although Lancelot did not know, and he began to snap his fingers.

  The first time you do a thing, it is often exciting. To go alone in an airplane for the first time used to be so exciting that it nearly choked you. Lancelot had never ridden a serious joust before – and, although he had charged at hundreds of quintains and thousands of rings, he had never taken his life in his hands in earnest. In the first moment of the charge, he felt to himself: ‘Well, now I am off. Nothing can help me now.’ In the second moment he settled down to behave automatically, in the same way as he had always behaved with the quintain and the rings.

  The point of his spear took the black knight under the rim of his shoulder—harness at exactly the right place. His mount was in full gallop, and the black knight’s was still in a canter. The black knight and his horse revolved rapidly toward their sinister side, left the ground together in a handsome parabola, and came down again with a clash. As Lancelot rode by, he could see them sprawling on the ground together, with the knight’s broken lance between the horse’s legs and one flashing horse—shoe tearing the canvas from the fallen shield. The man and the horse were mixed together. Each was afraid of the other, and each was kicking against the other in the effort to be parted. Then the horse got up on its forelegs, its haunches heaved upright, and the knight sat up, lifting one steel gauntlet, as if to rub his head. Lancelot reined in and rode back to him.

  Generally, when one knight had given another a fall with the lance, the fallen one used to lose his temper, blame the fall on his horse, and insist upon fighting it out with swords on foot. The usual excuse was to say: ‘The son of a mare hath failed me, but I wote well my father’s sword never shall.’

  The black knight, however, did not do the usual thing. He was evidently a more cheerful kind of person than the colour of his armour would suggest, for he sat up and blew through the split of his helm, making a note of surprise and admiration. Then he took off the helm and mopped his brow. The shield, whose cover the horse’s hoof had torn, bore, or, a dragon rampant gules.

  Lancelot threw his spear into a bush, got off his horse very quickly, and knelt down beside the knight. All his love was back again inside him. It was typical of Arthur not to lose his temper, typical of him to sit on the ground making noises of admiration when he had just been given a great fall.

  ‘Sir,’ said Lancelot, taking off his own helm with a humble gesture; and he bowed his head in the French fashion.

  The King began scrambling to his feet in great excitement.

  ‘Lancelot!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, it’s the boy Lancelot! You are the king’s son of Benwick. I remember seeing you when he came over for the Battle of Bedegraine. What a fall! I never saw anything like it. Where did you learn to do this? It was terrific! Were you coming to my Court? How is King Ban? How is your charming mother? Really, my dear chap, this is magnificent!’

  Lancelot looked up at the breathless King, who held out both hands to help him to his feet, and his jealousy and grief were over.

  They caught their horses and jogged off toward the palace side by side, forgetting Uncle Dap. They had so much to say to each other that they both talked all the time. Lancelot gave imaginary messages from King Ban or from Queen Elaine, and Arthur talked about how Gawaine had killed a lady. He told how King Pellinore had got so courageous since his marriage that he had killed King Lot of Orkney by mistake in a tournament, and how the Round Table was going as well as could be expected, but very slowly, and how, now that Lancelot had arrived, everything would come right before they knew where they were.

  He was knighted the first day – he might have been knighted at any time during the past two years, but he had refused to be done by anybody except Arthur – and he was introduced to Guenever the same evening. There is a story that her hair was yellow, but it was not. It was so black that it was startling, and her blue eyes, deep and clear, had a sort of fearlessness which was startling too. She was surprised by the young man’s twisted face, but not frightened.

  ‘Now,’ said the King, putting their hands together. ‘This is Lancelot, the one I told you about. He is going to be the best knight I have. I never saw such a fall as he gave me. I want you to be kind to him, Gwen. His father is one of my oldest friends.’

  He kissed the Queen’s hand coldly.

  He did not notice anything particular about her, because his mind was filled with previous pictures which he had made for himself. There was no room for pictures of what she was really like. He thought of her only as the person who had robbed him, and, since robbers are deceitful, designing, and heartless people, he thought of her as these.

  ‘How do you do?’ asked the Queen.

  Arthur said: ‘We shall have to tell him what has been happening since he went away. What a lot of things to tell! Where can we begin?’

  ‘Begin with the Table,’ said Lancelot.

  ‘Oh dear!’

  The Queen laughed and smiled at the new knight.

  ‘Arthur thinks about it
all the time,’ she said. ‘He even dreams about it at night. He won’t be able to tell you unless he talks for a week.’

  ‘It is not going badly,’ said the King. ‘You can’t expect a thing like that to go smoothly the whole time. The idea is there, and people are beginning to understand it, and that is the great thing. I am sure it will work.’

  ‘What about the Orkney faction?’

  ‘They will come round in time.’

  ‘Is that Gawaine?’ inquired Lancelot. ‘What is the matter with the Orkney faction?’

  The King looked uncomfortable. He said: ‘The real matter with them is Morgause, their mother. She brought them up with so little love or security that they find it difficult to understand warm—hearted people themselves. They are suspicious and frightened. They don’t get hold of the idea as I wanted them to do. We have three of them here – Gawaine, Gaheris and Agravaine. It is not their fault.’

  ‘Arthur had his first Pentecost fast the year we were married,’ explained Guenever, ‘and sent everybody out looking for good adventures, to see how the idea would work. When they came back, Gawaine had cut a lady’s head off, and even dear old Pellinore had failed to rescue a damsel in distress. Arthur was furious about it.’

  ‘It is not Gawaine’s fault,’ said the King. ‘He is a nice fellow. I like him. It is the fault of that woman.’

  ‘I hope things have got better since then?’

  ‘Yes. It is slow work, of course, but I am sure we could say that things have got better.’

  ‘Did Pellinore repent?’

  Arthur said: ‘Pellinore repented, yes. There was not much to repent. It was one of his muddles. But the trouble is that he has got so valiant since he married the Queen’s daughter of Flanders that he has taken to jousting in earnest, and quite often wins. I was telling you how he killed King Lot one day, when they were having a practice. It has created a great deal of ill—feeling. The Orkney children have sworn to revenge their father’s death, and they are out on the war path for poor old Pellinore’s blood. I am having difficulty in making them behave.’

  ‘Lancelot will help you.’ said the Queen. ‘It will be nice to have an old friend to help.’

  ‘Yes, it will be nice. Now, Lance, I expect you will want to see your room.’

  It was the second half of summer, and the amateur falconers in Camelot were bringing their peregrines to the last stages of their training. If you are a clever falconer, you get your hawk on the wing quickly. If you are not, you are apt to make mistakes, and the result is that the hawk does not finish her training for some time. So all the falconers in Camelot were trying to show that they were clever ones – by getting their hawks entered as quickly as possible – and, in all directions, if you went for a walk in the fields, there were atrabilious hawk—masters stretching out their creances and quarrelling with their assistants. Hawking, as James the First pointed out, is an extreme stirring up of passions. It is because the hawks themselves are furious creatures, and the people who associate with them catch it.

  Arthur presented Sir Lancelot with an inter—mewed jerfalcon, with which to keep himself amused. This was a great compliment, for jerfalcons were only supposed to be used by kings. At any rate that is what the Abbess Juliana Berners tell us – perhaps incorrectly. An emperor was allowed an eagle, a king could have a jerfalcon, and after that there was the peregrine for an earl, the merlin for a lady, the goshawk for a yeoman, the sparrow hawk for a priest, and the musket for a holy—water clerk. Lancelot was pleased with his present, and settled down busily in competition with the other angry falconers, who were hard at work criticizing each other’s methods and sending each other messages of sugary venom and getting yellow about the eyeballs.

  The jerfalcon which had been given to Lancelot was not properly through her moult. Like Hamlet, she was fat and scant of breath. Her long confinement in the mews, while she moulted, had got her into a sulky and temperamental state. So Lancelot had to fly her on the creance for several days before he could be sure that she was safe to the lure.

  If you have ever flown a hawk on a creance, which is a long line tied to the hawk’s jesses so that she cannot fly away, you know what a nuisance the thing can be. Nowadays people use a fishing reel, which makes it easier to stretch it out and to wind it up – but in Lancelot’s day there were no good reels, and you simply had to wind your creance into a ball, like string. There were two main horrors to which it was subject, the first of which was the horror peculiar to all balls of string – that they invariably become tangles instead of balls. The second was that if you flew the hawk in any field which had not been carefully mowed, the string became wound round thistles or tufts of grass, thus checking the hawk and doing damage to its training. So Lancelot, and all the other angry men, went circling round Camelot in a bitter atmosphere of knots and competition and bating hawks.

  King Arthur had asked his wife to be kind to the young man. She was fond of her husband, and she realized that she had come between him and his friend. She was not such a fool as to try to atone to Lancelot for this, but she had taken a fancy for him as himself. She liked his broken face, however hideous it was, and Arthur had asked her to be kind. There was a shortage of assistants in Camelot for the hawking, because there were so many people at it. So Guenever began going with Lancelot to help him with the balls of string.

  He did not take much notice of the woman. ‘Here comes that woman,’ he would remark to himself, or ‘There goes that woman.’ He was already deep in the hawking atmosphere, which was only partly an affair for females, and he seldom thought of her more than that. He had grown into a beautifully polite youth, in spite of his ugliness, and he was too self—conscious to allow himself to have petty thoughts for long. His jealousy had turned into unconsciousness of her existence. He went on with his hawk—mastery, thanking her politely for her help and accepting it with courtesy.

  One day there was particular trouble with a thistle, and he had miscalculated the amount of food which ought to have been given the day before. The jerfalcon was in a foul temper, and Lancelot caught its mood. Guenever, who was not particularly good with hawks and had no special interest in them, was frightened by his frowning brow, and, because she was frightened, she became clumsy. She was sweetly trying her best to help, but she knew that she was not clever at falconry, and there was confusion in her mind. Very carefully and kindly, and with the best intentions, she wound the creance up quite wrong.

  He took the wretched ball away from her with a gesture which was almost rough.

  ‘That’s no good,’ he said, and he began to unwind her hopeful work with angry fingers. His eyebrows made a horrible scowl.

  There was a moment in which everything stood still. Guenever stood, hurt in her heart. Lancelot, sensing her stillness, stood also. The hawk stopped bating and the leaves did not rustle.

  The young man knew, in this moment, that he had hurt a real person of his own age. He saw in her eyes that she thought he was hateful, and that he had surprised her badly. She had been giving kindness, and he had returned it with unkindness. But the main thing was that she was a real person. She was not a minx, not deceitful, not designing and heartless. She was pretty Jenny, who could think and feel.

  Chapter V

  The first two people to notice that Lancelot and Guenever were falling in love with each other were Uncle Dap and King Arthur himself. Arthur had been warned about this by Merlyn – who was now safely locked up in his cave by the fickle Nimue – and he had been fearing it subconsciously. But he always hated knowing the future and had managed to dismiss it from his mind. Uncle Dap’s reaction was to give his pupil a lecture, as they stood in the mews with the chastened jer.

  ‘God’s Feet!’ said Uncle Dap, with other exclamations of the same kind. ‘What is this? What are you doing? Is the finest knight in Europe to throw away everything I have taught him for the sake of a lady’s beautiful eyes? And a married lady too!’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’<
br />
  ‘Don’t know! Won’t know! Holy Mother!’ shouted Uncle Dap. ‘Is it Guenever I am talking about, or is it not? Glory be to God for evermore!’

  Lancelot took the old gentleman by the shoulders and sat him down on a chest.

  ‘Look, Uncle,’ he said with determination. ‘I have been wanting to talk to you. Isn’t it time you went back to Benwick?’

  ‘Benwick!’ cried his uncle, as if he had been stabbed to the heart.

  ‘Yes, Benwick. You can’t go on pretending to be my squire for ever. For one thing, you are the brother of two kings, and for another thing, you are three times as old as I am. It would be against the laws of arms.’

  ‘Laws of arms!’ shouted the old man. ‘Pouf!’

  ‘Well, it is no good saying Pouf.’

  ‘And me that has taught you everything you know! Me to go back to Benwick without having seen you prove yourself at all! Why, you have not even used your sword in front of me, not used Joyeux! It is ingratitude, perfidy, treachery! Sorrow to the grave! My faith! By the Blue!’

  And the agitated old fellow went off into a long string of Gallic remarks, including the so—called William the Conqueror’s oath of Per Splendorem Dei, and the Pasque Dieu which was the imaginary King Louis the Eleventh’s idea of a joke. Inspired by the royal train of thought he added the exclamations of Rufus, Henry the First, John, and Henry the Third, which were, in that order, By the Holy Face of Lucca, By God’s Death, By God’s Teeth, and By God’s Head. The jerfalcon, seeming to appreciate the display, roused his feathers heartily, like a housemaid shaking a mop out of the window.

  ‘Well, if you won’t go, you won’t,’ said Lancelot. ‘But please don’t talk to me about the Queen. I can’t help it if we are fond of each other, and there is nothing wrong in being fond of people, is there? It is not as if the Queen and I were villains. When you begin lecturing me about her, you are making it seem as if there was something wrong between us. It is as if you thought ill of me, or did not believe in my honour. Please do not mention the subject again.’