asked. 'Go back to Camelot and tell the King and the knights that you
fought him and that he could not hurt you. Nobody will know but us. We
never go to court and we never would tell anybody what you had done.'
"'No, no,' said Gawain, 'I promised him that I would find him. Now I
must find him or I never could go back to King Arthur's court or be one
of his knights again.'
"Then the girl started to go out of the hall, but when she was at the
door she turned and came back to Gawain. 'Will you let me kiss you just
once?' she said. And Gawain let her kiss him and she went away.
"At night, when the lord of the castle came home from the hunt, he
brought with him a deer that he had killed. He gave it to Gawain and
said: 'This is what I got in the hunt; now give me what you got by
staying behind.'
"Then Gawain gave him a kiss. 'Indeed,' said the lord, 'I think that
you have done better than I. Where did you get this?'
"'It was not in our bargain,' said Gawain, 'that I should tell you
that.'
"'Very well, then,' said the lord, 'shall we make the same bargain for
to-morrow?'
"'Yes,' said Gawain, 'if you wish it.'
"So the next day the lord rode to the hunt again and Gawain stayed
behind, as he had done before. And again the lord's daughter came to
him as he sat in the hall. 'Sir Knight,' she said, 'is it because you
have some other lady whom you love that you will not let me be your
lady? I do not ask you to love me, you know, only to let me love you.'
"'No,' Gawain answered, 'I have no lady, and if I might have any now, I
could love you as well as any other, but I have only two more days to
live and I must not think of such things.'
"Then the girl kissed him twice and went away. When the lord came back
that evening he brought the head and the sides of a wild boar that he
had killed. He gave these to Gawain and Gawain gave him two kisses.
'You always have better luck than I,' said the lord.
"Then they made the same bargain for the third day, and in the morning
the lord rode to the hunt and Gawain stayed behind. As he sat in the
hall the lord's daughter came to him again. 'Sir Knight,' she said,
'since you will do nothing else, will you not wear something of mine, as
the knights at King Arthur's court do for their ladies? See, this is
it, my girdle of green lace. And it is good for a knight to wear, for
while you have this around your body you can never be wounded.'
"Then Gawain thought that such a girdle as this would indeed be of use
to him, when the time came for the Knight of the Green Chapel to strike
him with his axe. So he took the girdle and thanked her for it, and she
kissed him three times and went away.
"That night the lord of the castle brought home the skin of a fox. He
gave it to Gawain and Gawain gave him three kisses. 'Your luck grows
better every day,' said the lord.
"Early the next morning Gawain rose and called for his armor and his
horse. One of the lord's servants was to show him the way to the Green
Chapel. The snow was falling again and there was a fierce, cold wind.
It was not daylight yet. They rode over rough hills and through deep
valleys for a long time, and at last, when it had grown as light as it
would be at all on such a dull, dreary day, the servant stopped. 'You
are not far now,' he said, 'from the Green Chapel. I can go with you no
farther. Ride on into this valley. When you are at the bottom of it
look to your left and you will see the chapel.'
"Then the servant turned back and left Gawain alone. He rode to the
bottom of the valley and looked about, but nothing like a chapel did he
see. But at last he saw a hole in a great rock, a cave, with vines,
loaded down with snow, almost hiding its mouth. Then it seemed to
Gawain that he heard a sound inside the cave, and he called aloud: 'Is
the Knight of the Green Chapel here? Gawain has come to keep his
promise to him. He has brought his axe, so that he may pay back the
blow that he received a year ago. Is the Knight of the Green Chapel
here?'
"Then a voice from the cave said: 'I am here, Sir Gawain, and I am
waiting for you. You have kept your time well.'
"And then out of the cave came the Green Knight. It seemed to Gawain
that he looked stronger and fiercer than when he was at Arthur's court,
and that his hair and beard were longer and of a brighter green. 'Give
me my axe,' he cried, 'and take off your helmet and be ready for my
stroke. Let us not delay!'
"'I want no delay,' said Gawain, and he took off his helmet, knelt down
on the snow and bent his neck, ready for the knight to strike. The
Green Knight raised his axe, and then, in spite of himself, Gawain drew
a little away from him.
"'How is this?' said the Green Knight; 'are you afraid? I did not
flinch when you struck me, a year ago.'
"'I shall not flinch again,' said Gawain; 'strike quickly.'
"Then the knight raised his axe a second time and Gawain was as still as
a stone. But this time the axe did not fall. 'Now I must strike you,'
said the Green Knight.
"'Strike, then, and do not talk about it,' said Gawain; 'I believe you
yourself are losing heart.'
"This time the knight swung the axe quickly up over his head and brought
it down with a mighty force upon Gawain's neck, and it made only a
little scratch. The girdle of green lace would not let him be wounded.
Then he sprang up and drew his sword and cried: 'Now, Knight of the
Green Chapel, take care of yourself. I have kept my promise and let you
strike me once, but I warn you that if you strike again I shall resist
you.'
"'Put up your sword,' the Knight of the Green Chapel answered; 'I do not
want to harm you. I could have used you much worse than I have, if I
had wished. I tried only to prove you, and you are the bravest and the
truest knight that I have ever found. I am the lord of the castle where
you have stayed for this last week. I knew where you got your kisses,
for I myself sent my daughter to you to try you, and you would not do
what you thought would not be right toward me, and you would not let any
thoughts of love turn you aside from your promise to the Knight of the
Green Chapel. You were well tried and you proved most true. It was
because of that and because you kept your word to me on the first two
days that I went to the hunt, that I did not strike you the first or the
second time that I raised my axe. But the third time I did strike you,
because you were untrue to me in one little thing. For you said that
you would give me all that you got by staying in the castle, yet you did
not give me the girdle of green lace. It was I who sent that to you by
my daughter, too. But you kept it only to save your life, and so I
forgive you, and to show you that I forgive you, you may keep it now
always.'
"But Gawain tore off the girdle and threw it at the feet of the Knight
of the Green Chapel. 'Take it back!' he cried, 'I do not deserve ever to
be called an honorable knight again! I came here for the honor of the
Round Table, and then I broke my promise to you. Tell me why you came
to our court and why you brought me to this shame, and then I will go
back to King Arthur and tell him that I am not worthy any longer to be
one of his knights. He will ask me why you did this, so tell me and let
me go away, for now I have lied to you and I cannot look you in the
face.'
"'I did it,' said the Knight of the Green Chapel, 'because the great
enchantress, Queen Morgan-le-Fay, King Arthur's sister, who hates him,
told me that all his knights were cowards. She said that all who praised
them lied or were themselves deceived and that some good knight ought to
go and prove them to be the cowards that they were. So I went to try
whether they were brave or not, and it was by the magic of Queen
Morgan-le-Fay that I was not killed when you cut off my head. But now I
see that what I did was wrong. It was Morgan-le-Fay, I see now, who
hoped to bring shame on King Arthur's court, because she hated him. And
you have shown me that Arthur's knights are brave and true, for you took
my challenge and came up here into the North to find me and to let me
kill you. Now come back with me to my castle and help us to keep the
festival of the New Year. Take up your girdle and come.'
"But Gawain was still filled with shame and horror at what he had done.
'I will not go back with you,' he said, 'but I will keep the girdle to
remind me of this time. If I ever feel that I am doing better things
and if I ever begin to grow proud of them, I will look at this girdle
and it will make me remember how I broke my word.'
"And Gawain would not listen to anything more that the knight said, but
he mounted his horse and turned him toward the south and rode away.
Gawain never knew what happened to him on that journey back to Camelot.
Perhaps the nights were as cold and the ways as rough as they had been
before. Perhaps the wild beasts came against him again. Perhaps the
storms still drove the snow and the sleet against him, so that they cut
him in the face and froze into his armor. He cared for none of these
things and he remembered none of them afterwards. His one thought was
to get back to Camelot and tell the King that he was no longer worthy to
be his knight, and then to go where no one who had known him should ever
see him again.
"And so he rode on, as fast as he could, for he did not know how many
days, and at last, in the early winter evening, he saw the glow in the
windows of the castle at Camelot. Once more he hurried his horse till
he reached the gate. He threw himself down from the saddle and hastened
to the hall, where a great shout went up: 'Gawain is alive and he has
come back!' and the knights and the ladies crowded around him to ask him
where he had been and what he had seen and done. He pushed his way
through them all and threw himself down upon the floor before the King.
He told all of his story, how he had gone out for the honor of the Round
Table and how he had broken his word and been shamed, and at the end he
held up the girdle of green lace and said: 'My lord, I shall leave you
now and I shall never see you again, for I am not worthy to be your
knight, but I shall carry this with me, and shall always wear it, so
that I never can forget my shame."
"And the King answered: 'Gawain, you are still among the best of my
knights. You failed a little at last, but it was no coward and no false
knight who went up there to seek his death and to keep a promise that he
need not have kept. Wear your girdle, but it shall be no shame to you.
And that it may be none all my knights shall wear girdles of green lace
like it.
"So the story says that all of King Arthur's knights wore green lace
girdles in honor of Gawain. I don't know what became of the girdles
afterwards, but they cannot have worn them always, or at least Gawain
cannot have worn his. For you know he could never be wounded while he
had it on, and he certainly was wounded afterwards. But I will tell you
about that when I get to it."
About the time that we got to the end of this story we came to a place
which the driver said was as far from Glastonbury as he had ever been in
this direction. We stopped at a little inn by the road, and the driver
asked the way to Queen Camel. We also asked the man who told him if he
had ever heard of a hill or of any sort of place about here called
Camelot, but he never had. So we went on to find it for ourselves.
After more riding and more asking of the way and more showers, we came
to Queen Camel. It was past luncheon-time then, and, what was more to
the point, it was past the horse's luncheon-time. So we decided that we
would not go any farther till we had all had something to eat.
The Bell looked like the best hotel in the place, so we went there and
astonished the proprietor and all the servants by asking for something
to eat. But we got it, and while we were at luncheon the driver put the
horse in the stable and then talked with the proprietor, to find out
whether he knew anything about Camelot. Now the keeper of this bit of an
hotel must have been a remarkably intelligent man, for he really did
know something about it. He came in to see us and he said that he
thought that it must be Cadbury Castle that we were looking for. Then a
great light shone upon me and I remembered what I ought to have
remembered before, that one of my books at home had said that it was
called Cadbury Castle now. "But do they not call it Camelot too?" I
asked him. I did not like to give up that name.
"Oh, yes, sir," he said, "they call it Camelot too."
"And do they say that King Arthur lived there?"
"No, sir, he didn't live there; he placed his army there."
Then the landlord went away and came back with a big book, a history of
Somersetshire, or something of that sort, to show us what it had to say
about Cadbury Castle. It did not say much that I did not know before,
but it said enough to prove what I wanted to know most of all. And that
was that this Cadbury Castle was without any doubt the place that we
were looking for. We finished our luncheon, the landlord showed us our
way, and we went on again.
It was only a little way now. We were to find a steep road that led up
the side of the hill to Cadbury Castle. It was too steep, we were told,
to take our carriage up, and we should have to leave it at the bottom
and walk. And so it proved. We found the hill and the steep little
track up its side. We got down from the carriage, and, while we waited
for the driver to find a safe place to leave the horse, we gazed up the
hill, along the rough little road, and knew that at last we were before
the gates of Camelot.
[Illustration: "The city and the fortress of the rabbits"]
*CHAPTER III*
*THE BOY FROM THE FOREST*
We walked up the steep road, and just before we came to the top of the
hill the rain began again. There was one little house near the top and
we decided to let Camelot wait for a few minutes longer and go into the
house and stay till the rain stopped.
The woman of the house seemed to be glad to see us, and she asked us to
write our names in her visitors' book. The names and the dates in the
book showed that Camelot had some six or eight visitors a year. Of
course we tried to get the woman to tell us something about the place,
and of course we failed. She knew that it was called Cadbury Castle and
sometimes Camelot and sometimes the Camp. She knew that the well close
by her house was called King Arthur's Well, but she did not know why.
The water in it was not good to drink, and in dry times they could not
get water from it at all. She got drinking-water and in dry times all
the water that she used from St. Anne's Wishing Well, a quarter of a
mile around the hill. She did not know what that name meant either. She
used to have a book that told all about the place, but she couldn't show
it to us, because it had been lent to somebody and had never been
returned. The vicar had studied a good deal about the place too, and he
knew all about it. Could we find the vicar and get him to tell us about
it? Oh, no, it wasn't the present vicar, it was the old vicar, and he
was dead.
So we gave up learning anything and waited for the rain to stop, and
then went out to see as much as we could for ourselves. The hilltop was
broad and level. I can't tell just how broad, because I am no judge of
acres, but I believe it was several. It had a low wall of earth around
it, covered with grass, of course, like all the rest of the place. When
we stood on the top of this wall and looked down, we saw that the ground
sloped away from us till it made a sort of ditch, and then rose again
and made another earth wall, a little way down the hillside. Then it
did the same thing again, and yet once more. So in its time this
hilltop must have had four strong walls around it. It really looked
much more like a fort or camp than like a city. It seemed too small for
a city, though it might have been a pretty big camp. If we had been
looking for hard facts, I think we should have believed what the
hotel-keeper had said, that this was not where King Arthur lived, but
where he placed his army.
I remembered reading somewhere that the Britons and the Romans and the
Saxons had all held this place at different times. I had read, too, I
was sure, that parts of old walls, of a dusky blue stone, and old coins
had been found here. It was a fine place for a camp or a castle. It was
so high and breezy and we could see for so many miles across the
country, that we could understand how useful and pleasant it must have
been for either or for both. It was pleasant enough now, this broad,
grassy hilltop, with its four grassy walls and the woodland sloping away
from it all around. But nobody lived here now to enjoy it--nobody, that
is to say, but the rabbits. For the place is theirs now, and they dig
holes in the ground and make their houses where King Arthur's castle
stood, where he and his knights sat in the hall about the Round Table,
and where all the greatest of the world came to see all that was richest
and noblest and best for kings and knights to be and to enjoy.
The rabbits scuttled across our way, as we walked about, and leaped into
their holes, when we came near, and then looked timidly out again, when
we had gone past, and wondered what we were doing and what right we had
here in their Camelot. There were only these holes now, where once
there were palaces and churches, and no traces of old glories, but the
walls of earth and turf. Yet it seemed better to me that Camelot should
be left alone and forgotten, like this, the city and the fortress of the
rabbits, but still high and open and fresh and free, than that it should
be a poor little town, full of poor little people, like Camelford.
Helen said that she thought so too, when I asked her, and she was
willing that this should be Camelot, if I thought that it really was.
"Really and truly and honestly," I said, "I think that this is as likely
to have been Camelot as any place that we have seen or shall see. It is
lucky for us that we know more about it than the people who live about
here do. If we did not I am afraid it would not interest us much. I
think that I have read somewhere that the King and his knights were
still here on the hilltop, kept here and made invisible by some
enchantment, that at certain times they could be seen, and that some
people had really seen them. I don't believe this story, but while we
are here let us believe at least, with all our might, that we are really
and truly in Camelot.
"Now here is a story, with Camelot in it, that you ought to hear. You
must not mind if it makes you think of a story that we saw once in the
fire. There are different ways of telling the same story, you know, and
this is a different way of telling that same story.
"Once, when Arthur was first King of England, he had a good knight
called Sir Percivale. He was killed in a tournament by a knight whom no
one knew. Some who saw the fight said that it was not a fair one and
that Sir Percivale was as good as murdered. The knight who killed him
wore red armor, and once, when his visor was up, Arthur saw his face.
No one knew where the knight went afterward and Arthur could never find
him to make him answer for the death of Sir Percivale.
"Now this Sir Percivale had seven sons and a daughter, and six of his
sons were killed also, in tournaments or battles. But the youngest of
the sons was not old enough yet to be a knight, and when his mother had
lost her husband and all her sons but him, she resolved that he should
never be a knight. His name was Percivale, like his father's. It was
right, she thought, for her to keep this last son that she had safe and
not to let him fight and be killed, as his father and his brother's had
been. And she feared so much that when he grew up he would want to be a
knight, like the others, that she resolved that he should never know
anything about knights or tournaments or wars or arms.
"She took him far away from the place where they had lived, and made a
home in the woods. It was far from the towns and the tournaments and
the courts, and it was even away from the roads that led through the
country. It was a lonely place that the mother chose, and she hoped
that no one would ever come to it from the world that she had left. She
brought her daughter with her, I suppose, though the story says nothing
about her just here, and she brought nobody else but servants--women and
boys and old men. Nobody in her house was ever allowed to speak of
knights or arms or battles or anything that had to do with them. She
would not even have any big, strong horses kept about the place, because
they reminded her of the war horses that knights rode. She tried to
bring up her boy so that he should know only of peaceful things. He
should know the trees and the flowers of the woods, she thought; he
should know the goats and the sheep and the cows that they kept, how the
fruits grew in the orchard, how the birds lived in the trees and the
bees in their hive; but he should never know the cruel ways of men out
in the world. He should see the axe of the woodman, not the battle-axe;
the scythe, not the sword; the crook of the shepherd, not the spear.
"So the boy grew up in the forest and ran about wherever he would and
climbed the trees and followed the squirrels and studied the nests of
the birds and knew all the plants that grew and all the animals that
lived about him. If it had not been for many things that his mother
taught him he would have been almost like one of the animals of the wood
himself. He could run almost as fast as the deer and he could climb
almost as well as the squirrel, and he could sing as well as some of the
birds.
"When he grew a little older his mother let him have a bow and arrows to
play with and shoot at marks, but nobody told him that men used bows and
arrows to shoot at one another or that men ever wanted to harm one
another. But he began to shoot at the birds with his arrows, and at
last he hit one of them and killed it. Then he looked at the dead bird
lying at his feet and he heard the other birds singing all around him.
And he thought: 'I have done a dreadful thing; a little while ago this
bird was singing too, and was as happy as the rest of them, and now it
can never sing any more or be happy any more, because I have killed it.'
And he broke his bow and threw it away and he threw himself down on the
ground beside the little dead bird and cried at what he had done. And
when his mother saw how grieved he was she said that all the birds
should be driven away, so that they should not trouble him. But
Percivale begged her to let them stay. He liked to hear them sing, and
to drive them off would be a crueler thing than he had done already.
And his mother thought: 'The boy is right; I brought him here to find
peace and safety for both of us, and why should I not let the poor birds
stay in peace and safety too?'
"But it was foolish for the poor woman to think that she could keep her
boy so that he would never know anything of the world. The world was
all around him, no matter how far off, and it was sure some time to come
where he was. And so, one day, as he was wandering in the wood, he saw
three horses coming, larger and stronger and finer than any horses he
had ever seen before. And on their backs, he thought, were three men,
but he could not feel sure, for they did not look like any men whom he
had ever seen. They seemed to be all covered with iron, which was
polished so that it glistened where the light touched it, and they wore
many gay and beautiful colors besides. He stood and looked at them till
they came close to him, and then one of them said: 'My boy, have you
seen a knight pass this way?'
"'I do not know what a knight is,' Percivale answered.
"'We are knights,' the man on the horse said; 'have you seen anyone like
us?'
"But Percivale was wondering so much at what he saw that he could not
answer. 'What is this?' he asked, touching the knight's shield.
"'That?' the knight answered, 'that is my shield.'
"'And what is it for?'
"'To keep other knights from hitting me with their spears or their
swords.'
"'Spears? What are they?'
"'This is a spear,' the knight answered, showing him one.
"'And what is this?'
"'That is a saddle.'
"'And what is this?'
"'A sword.'
"And so Percivale asked the knights about everything that they wore and
everything that they carried and all that was on their horses. 'And
where did you get these things?' he asked. 'Did you always wear them?'
"'No,' the knight answered; 'King Arthur gave me these arms when he made
me a knight.'
"'Then you were not always a knight?' Percivale asked again.
"'Why, no, I was a squire, a young man, like you, and King Arthur made
me a Knight and gave me these arms.'
"'Who is King Arthur, and where is he?'
"'He is the King of the country, and he lives at Camelot.'