The Once and Future King: Part Four

Now, when he was on fire with his Cause, Arthur’s justice seemed bourgeois and obtuse beside him.

His maternal ancestors crowded into his face when he was spurning at Arthur—ancestors whose civilization, like Mordred’s, had been matriarchal: who had ridden bare-back, charged in chariots, fought by stratagem, and ornamented their grisly strongholds with the heads of enemies.

Perhaps there was something childish about all the paladins of Arthur’s story—if being simple is the same as childishness.

...then you would have met the mendicants by the roadside...

What an amazing time the age of chivalry was! Everybody was essentially himself—was riotously busy fulfilling the vagaries of human nature.

Towards the remoter distance perhaps a bankrupt might have been getting a vigorous whacking in some muscovite marketplace—not out of ill-feeling toward himself, but in the fervent hope that if only he squealed loud enough some of his friends or relations in the crowd would pay his debts out of commiseration.

If you can suggest another way of settling moot points, except by personal combat, I will be glad to try it.

There were clerks with neat little skull-caps to keep their tonsures warm, dressed in sober clothes which contrasted with the laity.

But thou, false recreant knight, what cause hadst thou to slay my brother, that loved thee more than all my kin?

You owe everything...The King made you his deputy...Your fealty...It would not be true!

The noises it made sounded like inchoate masses of silk being pulled through trees, as we pull hair through a comb...

The slates flew off and shat­tered themselves with desultory crashes.

His Table was dispersed.

A leader was surely forced to offer something which appealed to those he led? He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be toppling on its own account before it fell?

If everything one did, or which one's fathers had done, was an endless sequence of Doings doomed to break forth bloodily, then the past must be obliterated and a new start made.