"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

they were bad for us, they would mean peace for the people. And our knights would have no excuse for
carrying on the feud, because they would have to obey the Church...."
He could find no words.
"Well?"
She turned to him with a face of composure and relief тАФthe efficient and undramatic face which women
achieve when they have nursing to do, or some other eployment of efficiency. He did not know how to
answer it.
"We can send a messenger tomorrow," she said.
"Jenny!"
He could not bear it that she was allowing herself to be handed from one to another, no longer young, or

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that he was to lose her, or that he was not to lose her. Between men's lives and their love and his old
totems, he was left with nothing but shame. This she saw, and helped him with it also. She kissed him
tenderly. Outside, the daily chorus was beginning:
"Traitor knight
Come out to fight
Yah! Yah! Yah!"

"There," she said, stroking his white hair. "Don't listen to them. My Lancelot must stay in the castle, and
there will be a happy ending."


10
"So His Holiness has made their peace for them," said Mordred savagely.
"Aye."
They were in the Justice Room, Gawaine and himself, waiting for the last stages of the negotiations.
Both were in blackтАФbut with the strange difference that Mordred was resplendent in his, a sort of
Hamlet, while Gawaine looked more like the grave-digger. Mordred had begun dressing with this
dramatic simplicity since the time when he had become a leader of the popular party. Their aims were
some kind of nationalism, with Gaelic autonomy, and a massacre of the Jews as well, in revenge for a
mythical saint called Hugh of Lincoln. There were already thousands, spread over the country, who
carried his badge of a scarlet fist clenching a whip, and who called thelmselves Thrashers. About the
older man, who only wore the uniform to please his brother, there was a homespun blackness, the true,
despairing dark of mourning.
"Just fancy," Mordred went on. "If it had not been for the Pope, we should never have had this beautiful
procession with everybody carrying olive branches and the innocent lovers dressed in white," "It was a
guid procession,"
Gawaine's mind did not move easily along the paths of irony, so he accepted the sneer as statement of
fact. "It was well stage-managed."
The older brother moved uncomfortably, as if to ease his position, but returned to the same one from
which he had started.
He said doubtfully, almost as if it were a question or an appeal: "Lancelot says in his letters that he
killed our Gareth by mistake. He says he didna see him,"
"It would be just like Lancelot to lay about him at unarmed men, without looking to see who they were.

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