The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  He got up and dusted his knees.

  ‘Tell him to wait in the tilt yard,’ he said. ‘I will be twenty minutes.’

  The tilt yard was a long, sanded passage between the walls, with a tower at each end. It had galleries looking down on it from the walls, like a racquets court, and was open to the sky. Elaine and the domestics sat in these galleries to watch, and the two knights fought beneath them for a long time. The tilting was even – each of them had a fall – and the sword—play lasted for two hours. At the end of this time, the strange knight cried: ‘Stop!’

  Lancelot stopped at once, as if he were a farm labourer who had been given permission to knock off for his dinner. He stuck his sword in the ground, as if it were a pitchfork, and stood patiently. He had, indeed, only been working with the quiet patience of a farm hand. He had not been trying to hurt his opponent.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the stranger. ‘Please tell me your name? I have never met a man like you.’

  Lancelot suddenly lifted both gauntlets to his helm, as if he were trying to bury in them the face which was already hidden, and said miserably: ‘I am Sir Lancelot Dulac.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘I am Lancelot, Degalis.’

  Degalis threw his sword against the stone wall with a clang, and began running back towards the tower by the moat. His iron feet threw echoes down the yard. He unlaced and tossed away his helm as he ran. When he had reached the portcullis of the gatehouse, he put his hands to his mouth and shouted with all his might:

  ‘Ector! Ector! It is Lancelot! Come over!’

  Immediately he was running back towards his friend.

  ‘Lancelot! My dear, dear fellow! I was sure it was you. I was sure it was you!’

  He began fumbling with the laces, trying to get the helm off with clumsy fingers. He snatched off his own gauntlets and hurled them, too, with a clash against the wall. He could hardly wait to see Sir Lancelot’s face. Lancelot stood still, like a tired child being undressed.

  ‘But what have you been doing? Why are you here? It was feared that you were dead.’

  The helm came off, and went to join the rest of the discards.

  ‘Lancelot!’

  ‘Did you say that Ector was with you?’

  ‘Yes, it is your brother Ector. We have been looking for you for two years. Oh, Lancelot, I am glad to see you!’

  ‘You must come in,’ he said, ‘and refresh yourselves.’

  ‘But what have you been doing all this time? Where have you been hidden? The Queen sent out three knights to search for you at the beginning. In the end there were twenty—three of us. It must have cost her twenty thousand pounds.’

  ‘I have been here and there.’

  ‘Even the Orkney faction helped. Sir Gawaine is one of the searchers.’

  By this time Sir Ector had arrived in the boat – Sir Ector Demaris, not King Arthur’s guardian – and the portcullis had been raised for him. He ran for the Chevalier, as if he were to tackle him at football.

  ‘Brother!’

  Elaine had come down from her gallery and was waiting at the end of the tilt yard. She was now to welcome, as she knew well, the people who were to break her heart. She did not interfere with their greetings, but watched them like a child who had been left out of a game. She stood still, gathering her forces. All her powers, all the frontier guards of her spirit, were being called in and concentrated at the citadel of her heart.

  ‘This is Elaine.’

  They turned to her and began to bow.

  ‘You are welcome to Bliant Castle.’

  Chapter XXIV

  ‘I can’t leave Elaine,’ he said.

  Ector Demaris said: ‘Why not? You don’t love her. You are under no obligation to her. You are only making yourselves miserable by staying together.’

  ‘I am under an obligation to her. I can’t explain it, but I am.’

  ‘The Queen,’ said Degalis, ‘is desperate. She has spent a fortune looking for you.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘It is no good sulking,’ said Ector. ‘It seems to me that you are sulking. If the Queen is sorry for what she has done, whatever it was, you ought to behave generously and forgive her.’

  ‘I have nothing to forgive the Queen.’

  ‘That is just what I say. You ought to go back to court and follow your career. For one thing, you owe it to Arthur: don’t forget that you are one of his sworn knights. He has been needing you badly.’

  ‘Needing me?’

  ‘There is the usual trouble with the Orkneys.’

  ‘What have the Orkneys been doing? Oh, Degalis, you don’t know how it does my heart good to hear the old names. Tell me all the gossip. Has Kay been making a fool of himself lately? Is Dinadan still laughing? What is the news about Tristram and King Mark?’

  ‘If you are so keen about the news, you ought to come back to court.’

  ‘I have told you I can’t.

  ‘Lancelot, you are not looking at this realistically. Do you seriously think you can stay here incognito with this wench. and still be yourself? Do you think you can beat five hundred knights in a tournament without being recognized?’

  ‘The moment we heard about the tournament,’ said Ector, ‘we came at once. Degalis said: “That is Lancelot, or I’m a Dutchman.”’

  ‘It would mean,’ said Degalis, ‘if you insist on staying here, that you would have to give up arms altogether. One more fight, and you would be known all over the country. For that matter, I think you are known already.’

  ‘Staying with Elaine would mean giving up everything. It would mean absolute retirement – no quests, no tournaments, no honour, no love: and you might even have to stay indoors all day. Yours is not an easy face to forget, you know.’

  ‘Whatever it means, Elaine is kind and good. Ector, when people trust you and depend on you, you can’t hurt them. You could not treat a dog so.’

  ‘People don’t marry dogs, however.’

  ‘Damn it, this girl loves me.’

  ‘So does the Queen.’

  Lancelot turned the cap round in his hands.

  ‘The last time I saw the Queen,’ he said, ‘she told me never to come near her again.’

  ‘But she has spent twenty thousand pounds looking for you.’

  He waited for some time and then asked, in a voice which sounded rough: ‘Is she well?’

  ‘She is absolutely wretched.’

  Ector said: ‘She knows it was her fault. She cried a great deal, and Bors told her she was a fool, but she didn’t argue with him. Arthur is wretched too, because the whole Table is upside down.’

  Lancelot threw his cap on the ground and stood up.

  ‘I told Elaine,’ he said, ‘that I would not promise to stay with her: so I must.’

  ‘Do you love her?’ asked Degalis, cutting to the root.

  ‘Yes, I do. She has been good to me. I am fond of her.’

  At their looks, he changed the word.

  ‘I love her,’ he said defiantly.

  The knights had been staying for a week, and Lancelot, listening hungrily to their Table news, was weakening every day. Elaine, sitting at the high table beside her lord at dinner, lived in a flow of conversation about people whose names she had never heard and about events which she could not understand. There was nothing to do except to offer second helpings, which Ector would accept without interrupting the anecdote of the moment. They leaned across her and talked and laughed, and Elaine busily laughed too. Every day Lancelot went to his turret at sunset – she had tiptoed away when she first found him there, and he did not know it was a discovered rendezvous.

  ‘Lancelot,’ she said one morning, ‘there is a man waiting on the other side of the moat, with a horse and armour.’

  ‘A knight?’

  ‘No. He looks like a squire.’

  ‘I wonder who it can be this time. Tell the porter to fetch him across.’

  ‘The porter says he won’t come across. He says he
will wait there for Sir Lancelot.’

  ‘I will go and see.’

  Elaine detained him as he went down to the boat.

  ‘Lancelot,’ she said, ‘what do you want me to do with Galahad, if you should go away?’

  ‘Go away? Who says I am going away?’

  ‘Nobody has said so, but I want to know.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you are talking about.’

  ‘I want to know how Galahad is to be brought up.’

  ‘Well, I suppose in the usual way. He will learn to be a good knight, I hope. But the whole question is imaginary.’

  ‘That is what I wanted to know.’

  She detained him once more, however.

  ‘Lancelot, will you tell me one other thing? If you should go away, if you should have to leave me – would you be coming back?’

  ‘I have told you that I am not going away.’

  She was trying the meaning of her words, as she made them, like a man walking slowly over a bog and feeling in front of him as he went.

  ‘It would help me to go on with Galahad – it would help me to go on living – if I knew that it was for something – if I knew that one day – if I knew that you would be coming back.’

  ‘Elaine, I don’t know why you are talking like this.’

  ‘I am not trying to stop you, Lance. Perhaps it will be best for you to go. Perhaps it is a thing which has to happen. Only, I wanted to know if I should see you again – because it is important to me.’

  He took her hands.

  ‘If I go,’ he said, ‘I will come back.’

  The man on the other side of the moat was Uncle Dap. He was standing with Lancelot’s old charger, now two years older, and all his accustomed armour neatly stowed on the saddle, as if for a kit inspection. Everything was correctly folded and strapped in the proper military place. The habergeon was rolled in a tight bundle. The helm, pauldrons, and vambraces were polished, literally by weeks of polishing, to that veneer or patina of light which is to be found only on things bought newly from the shop before they have been dulled by household cleaning. There was a smell of saddle soap, mixed with the unmistakable, personal smell of armour – as individual a smell as that which you get in the professional’s shop on a golf course, and, to a knight, as exciting.

  All Lancelot’s muscles made an emphatic sortie towards the feeling of his own armour, which he had not seen since he left Camelot. His forefinger felt where the handle of his sword would use it for a fulcrum. His thumb knew the exact weight in ounces which it would have to exert on the near side of the fulcrum. The pad on the inside of his palm lusted for the gripe of the hilt. His whole arm remembered the balance of Joyeux and wanted to wag him in the air.

  Uncle Dap looked older, and would not speak. He only held the bridle and displayed the gear, waiting for the knight to mount and ride. His stern eye, as fierce as a goshawk’s, waited on his charge. He held out the great tilting helm silently, with its familiar panache of heron hackles and the silver thread.

  Lancelot took the helm from Uncle Dap, with both hands, and turned it round. His hands knew the weight to expect – exactly twenty—two and a half pounds. He saw the superb polish, the fresh padding, and the new mantling set behind. It was of azure sarsenet, hand—embroidered in gold thread with the numerous small fleur—de—lis of ancient France. He knew at once whose fingers had done the embroidery. He lifted the helm to his nose and sniffed the mantling.

  Immediately she was there – not the Guenever whom he had remembered on the battlements, but the real Jenny, in a different posture, with every lash of her eyelids and every pore of her skin and every note of her voice and every articulation of her smile.

  He did not look back as he rode away from Bliant Castle – and Elaine, standing on the barbican tower, did not wave. She watched him going with a still—struck concentration, like somebody who, shipwrecked, gets as much fresh water into the little boat as possible. She had a few seconds left, to make her store of Lancelot that must last her through the years. There would be only this store, and their son, and a lot of gold. He had left her all his money, enough to bring a thousand pounds a year for life – in those days a huge sum.

  Chapter XXV

  Fifteen years after leaving Elaine, Lancelot was still at court. The King’s relations with Guenever and her lover were much as they had always been. The great difference was that everybody was older. Lancelot’s hair, which had already turned badger—grey when he first came back from his madness as a fellow of twenty—six, was quite white. Arthur’s also was prematurely snowed – but both men’s lips were red in their silky nests of beard. Guenever alone had contrived to keep the raven on her head. She looked a splendid figure when she was forty.

  Another difference was that a new generation had come to court. In their own hearts the chief characters of the Round Table felt the ardent feelings which they had always felt – but now they were figures instead of people. They were surrounded by younger clients for whom Arthur was not the crusader of a future day, but the accepted conqueror of a past one – for whom Lancelot was the hero of a hundred victories, and Guenever the romantic mistress of a nation. To these young people, a sight of Arthur as he hunted in the greenwood was like seeing the idea of Royalty. They saw no man at all, but England. When Lancelot rode by, laughing at some private joke with the Queen, the commonalty were amazed that he could laugh. ‘Look,’ they would say to each other, ‘he is laughing, as if he were a vulgar person like ourselves. How condescending, how splendidly democratic of Sir Lancelot, to laugh, as if he were an ordinary man! Perhaps he eats and drinks as well, or even sleeps at night.’ But in their hearts the new generation was quite sure that the great Dulac did no such things.

  Indeed, a lot of water had flowed under the bridges of Camelot in twenty—one years. They had been the years of building. When they began, they had been years of perrières and mangonels trundling along the rutty highways from one siege to another, to hurl destruction over castle walls – of movable wooden towers on wheels, going lumbering against recreant keeps, so that the archers, shooting down from the top of them, could throw death into treacherous strongholds – of companies of engineers marching along in clouds of summer dust, their picks and shovels on their shoulders, to undermine revolted bartizans so that the great stones caved and fell tottering. When Arthur had been unable to take a strong—arm castle by assault, he had caused tunnels to be dug under selected parts of the wall. These tunnels, being supported on beams of wood which could be burned away with fire at the proper moment, had collapsed, bringing the rubble—filled baileys down on top of them.

  The early years had been times of battle, in which those who insisted on living by the sword had been made to die by it. They had been years lit by whole towersful of combatants roasting like so many Guy Fawkes – for the great objection to a pele tower as a stronghold was that it made a first—class chimney – years ringing with the sound of battle—axes thudding on battle—axe—proof doors – which were constructed by nailing the first ply of boards horizontally, and the second ply vertically, so that the wood could not be split along the grain – years illustrated by the shambling tumble of Norman giants – who were most conveniently dealt with by cutting off their legs first, so that you could get a fair reach at their heads – and by the flicker of swords round helmets or elbow—cops, a flickering which, in extreme cases, was attended by such a shower of sparks as to make the struggling knights seem perfectly incandescent.

  Wherever you went, during the first years, every vista had been terminated by a marching column of mercenaries, robbing and pillaging from the Marches – or by a knight of the new order exchanging buffets with a conservative baron whom he was trying to restrain from murdering serfs – or by a golden—haired maiden being rescued out of some lofty keep by means of leather ladders – or by Sir Bruce Saunce Pité riding a full wallop with Sir Lancelot coming deliverey after him – or by a few surgeons carefully ransacking the wounds of an unfortunate combat
ant, and making him eat onions or garlic, so that, by smelling at the wound, they could discover whether the intestines had been perforated or not. When they had examined the wounds they dressed them with the oily wool from the udders of sheep, which made a natural lanolin dressing. Here would be Sir Gawaine sitting on his antagonist’s chest, and finishing him off, through the ventails of his helm, with the long sharp poignard called the Mercy of God. There would be a couple of knights who had suffocated themselves in their own helms during the course of a battle, a misfortune which frequently happened in those days of violent exercise and small vents. On one side would be a commodious gibbet set up by some old—fashioned princeling to hang King Arthur’s knights and the common Saxons who trusted them – a gibbet perhaps nearly as sumptuous as that constructed at Montfaucon, which could support sixty bodies depending like drab fuchsias between its sixteen stone pillars. The humbler gallows had rungs on them, like the footholds on telegraph poles, so that the executioners could scramble up and down. On another side would be a demesne so hedged about with man—traps in its shrubberies that none dared walk within a mile of it. In front of you, there might be a daffish knight who had been caught in a buck—trap, which, swinging him into the air on the end of a stout branch released by the action of the trap, had left him dangling helplessly between heaven and earth. Behind you, there might be a savage tournament or faction fight going on, with all the heralds crying out, ‘Laissez les aller’ to ranks of chivalry who were about to charge – a cry which was exactly equivalent to the shout, ‘They’re off!’ which is still to be heard at the Grand National today.

  The World had been expected to end in the year one thousand, and, in the reaction which followed its reprieve, there had been a burst of lawlessness and brutality which had sickened Europe for centuries. It had been responsible for the doctrine of Might which was the Table’s enemy. The fierce lords of the Strong Arm had hunted the wild woodlands – only, of course, there had always been exceptions like the good Sir Ector of Forest Sauvage – till John of Salisbury had been forced to advise his readers: ‘If one of these great and merciless hunters shall pass by your habitation, bring forth hastily all the refreshment you have in your house, or that you can readily buy, or borrow from your neighbour: that you may not be involved in ruin, or even accused of treason.’ Children, Duruy tells us, had been seen hanging in trees, by the sinews of their thighs. It had been no uncommon sight to see a man—at—arms whistling like a lobster, and looking like porridge, because they had emptied a bucket of boiling bran over his armour during a siege. Other spectacles even more dramatic have been mentioned by Chaucer: the smyler with the knyf under the cloke, the careyne in the bush with throte y’corve, or the colde deeth with mouth gaping upright. Everywhere it had been blood on steel, and smoke on sky, and power unbridled – and, in the general confusion of the times, Gawaine had at last contrived to murder our dear old friend King Pellinore, in revenge for the death of his own father, King Lot.