Antal Szerb - Love in a Bottle

Nor did his misery return the next morning. The sun shone. There was a cheerful clonking of bells under his window as a line of cattle went past on their way to the meadow, and the whole beautiful world was filled with the comforting smell of manure. The breakfast liqueur (a light vermouth) and the rabbit pâté that followed were both extremely pleasant. Lancelot felt an irresistible urge to bathe in the lake and then fall asleep in the grass.

And then he remembered the dragon, the three mountain passes bristling with robbers, and all the dismal hardships of the life of derring-do. For some hours he waged a difficult struggle with himself.

Finally, towards midday, he pulled on his boots and, thus attired, stamped his foot decisively on the floor.

“No, I won’t!”

And he set off, back towards Carreol, without the Queen’s shoe. And the dragon lived happily ever after, in its cave under the peak of the mountain popularly known as the Carnival Doughnut.

“He’s only human, after all,” Lancelot told himself.

A curious dullness crept through his brain. He was living in a new universe, one in which everything was pleasant and amiable — and that was precisely what was so terrifying and incomprehensible. The landscape of this new world was so impossible to find his way around that it simply annihilated thought. He felt like a man who has drunk a great deal of beer. And not without cause. He had knocked back a pint at every hostelry along the way.

And thus he arrived at Carreol, where Arthur held court in those days. He washed off the dust of the road and prepared to enter the exalted presence of the Queen. But he had barely stepped out of the door of his lodgings when he bumped into Gawain, who greeted him with the exciting news that it was two-all at half-time in the crucially important jousting tournament between Cornwall and Wales, and promptly dragged him along to watch. After the match there was a banquet in honour of the victors. Lancelot completely forgot himself in the general jollity, which continued until well after midnight, and it was only the next morning that he remembered his audience with the Queen.

By the time he reached the Palace she was already out walking with her ladies in the park. Fortunately he was very familiar with the route she took, and he dashed off to take his place behind the lime tree whence, according to the courtly custom that had grown up over the years, he would step out into her path, as if by chance, as she came strolling by.

But he arrived too late. She was already in the avenue. To hide behind a tree and then instantly reappear from behind it now seemed a rather pointless formality.

He knelt before her and kissed the hem of her garment. An ambiguous smile played on her lips, and she did not immediately pronounce her usual “Pray rise, worthy knight!” until Lancelot had grown tired of kneeling and a degree of irritation had infused itself into him.

“They tell me you came back yesterday,” she suddenly remarked.

“That is so, my lady,” he replied, blushing.

“Indeed? Then rise, worthy knight,” she declared, but with an offhand brusqueness that reduced the time-honoured phrase to a casual insult. Lancelot was deeply disconcerted. What worried him most was that the Queen’s anger seemed so distant — as if it had not been directed at him at all.

“My lady has grown even more beautiful in my absence, if that were possible,” he ventured, both clumsily and without any of the old sense of his heart in his throat at the sight of Guinevere’s newly enhanced beauty. She was extremely beautiful, to be sure, but some little monster hidden in the trees had whispered in Lancelot’s ear: “So what?”

“From which it is quite clear that you have never loved me,” she continued, somewhat illogically. “I simply do not understand your behaviour. But no matter. The question is — have you brought my shoe? Hand it over!”

“Indeed, my lady,” he stuttered. “That is to say… as regards the shoe… I forgot… I left it in my lodgings.”

“You left it in your lodgings?” (eyebrows raised to an impossible height).

“Strictly speaking, it isn’t actually in my lodgings, it’s…”

“It’s where, precisely?”

“That is to say, on my way back, it was stolen from me…”

“From you, the knight without a stain?”

“Now I remember — it was during a card game. I was forced to offer it as a pledge. To an Ishmaelite.”

“And how many heads did the dragon have?” she suddenly asked.

“Just the one,” he replied guiltily.

“And you didn’t cut it off!” she yelled.

“No. What happened was…”

But he was not allowed to explain. The Queen looked him up and down with unspeakable disdain, then turned her head away and made off at great speed, trailing her female entourage behind her.

Lancelot stood there, his head down on his collar. He had lost the Queen’s favour! He had expected the thunderbolt. He had expected the ground to open under his feet. He had been prepared for his soul to sizzle and flash as it was cleft in twain in indescribable agony. But the lightning had not struck. The ground, and his soul, had not been cleft in twain. In the new world in which he found himself, it seemed there were no thunderstorms, only little squirrels in the branches, and babbling brooks among the trees, and a general beer-swilling happiness. It was horrible.

That evening, over dinner at court, the Queen made his loss of favour clear to all by calling for Gawain to pass her the peaches. The next day the whole town was talking about it. Whenever Lancelot entered a room in the palace, the laughter instantly stopped and the ladies of the court gazed at him with tears in their eyes.

Lancelot threw himself into gambling, won steadily, bought himself three new horses and a first-class sword, and went carefully through his bailiff’s accounts. He took out two books he had purchased in his youth, Cato’s Wise Sayings and Peter Abelard’s enthralling tome on the Holy Trinity that had caused such stir in its day. He resolved to make himself perfect in the Latin language. Suddenly his life had so much more scope than before. And it pained him grievously. What pained him beyond words was that he was no longer miserable.

The time came when he could deny it no longer, and could even say it out loud:

“I do not love Queen Guinevere.”

The whole miracle was both ugly and incomprehensible. Such things did not happen in the course of nature. You might lose a pair of spurs, or an overcoat. You could even mislay, as he once had, a sword. But not Love! Except of course by magic. And he remembered the night he had spent at Chatelmerveil.

Lancelot was a man of action. He was instantly on his horse and speeding towards Klingsor’s castle.

From his tower the magician saw him coming and hurried out to greet him.

“He’s come to thank me for my kindness,” he whispered, and tears welled up in his eyes.

But Lancelot leapt down from the saddle and most decisively seized the magician by the beard.

“You scoundrel!” he bellowed. “Uncle of dogs and lover of bitches! But why do I waste words? Give me back my Love this minute!”

“Oh, oh, oh,” sobbed Klingsor. “So you haven’t been any happier all this time? Don’t you see now how much broader life is, and how full of interesting things, when you’re not bound hand and foot to Love?”

“Stop mouthing, you cousin of toads and hedgehogs, fiend and Devil and all his works!” Lancelot added vigorously, and gave Klingsor’s beard a twist. “Give me back my Love, this minute!”

“As you wish,” Klingsor replied, with a disappointed sigh.

He led Lancelot into the castle. From the row of bottles he took down the one with “Amor, amoris , masc.” on the label, cut the string and lifted the Love spirit out with his pincers. He wrapped it in a wafer and handed it to Lancelot, who swallowed it with a glass of water.