The Brazen Head (11 page)

It was at this moment before the cook departed, and in the dead silence between them created by a simple instruction on one side and unquestioning obedience on the other, that a faint tap upon the door of the cell became audible. Being quite close to it, the departing Tuck opened it immediately, but the figure standing on the threshold surprised him so much that he hurriedly drew back to let it enter, and then, with what was clearly a strong feeling that the more closely confined to the chief participants concerned this encounter was, the better for all it would be, he cautiously and very
secretively closed the door behind the intruding figure and returned into the room.

The new-comer was obviously, and both men saw it at once, of the female sex, although she was well muffled in a black mantle. But the slope of the shoulders and what was visible of the ankles and feet would have betrayed her, even if, though her hair was hidden, the delicate whiteness of her face and the size of her dark liquid eyes had not revealed a most magnetic femininity.

Roger Bacon walked straight up to her and taking off her cloak handed it to the somewhat disturbed Tuck, who kept muttering, half audibly and half inaudibly, what the Friar, and probably the girl too, recognized as the opening words of a familiar Latin collect; but who now, dragging a chair from beneath the table and carrying it to the wall near the foot of the bed, sat down with an air of patient submission to inexplicable proceedings and covered his knees with the girl’s cloak.

“I came my lord Doctor, because I had one of my
presentiments
that you would be glad to talk to me. As Brother Tuck may have told you, I’ve come to help in the Convent; but being—as perhaps you can see from my appearance—of foreign extraction, in fact of Palestinian Hebrew blood, I am at present without friends. But I’ve heard that there’s an
armour-bearer
, or whatever the name for that office may be in your country, in the Fortress of Roque, whom I once met in the East and whom I would most dearly love to meet again. He is easy to describe to you, my lord Doctor, as he resembles Goliath of Gath or Samson of Israel, being in fact what all over the world is called a giant. His lord and master here, they tell me, finds him——”

At this point Friar Bacon firmly, though very gently,
interrupted
her and led her to his bed, upon which, almost within arm’s length of where Brother Tuck’s chair stood against the wall, he made her seat herself.

“What did you mean just now,” the scholar enquired, standing over her with a certain judicial authority, although still very gently and kindly, “by your presentiment? Oh yes! And may I ask you at once whether I am right in calling you Ghosta? I don’t at all want, my dear daughter, to be rudely
inquisitive, but would it be ill-mannered of me to ask you whether your parents gave you this unusual name?”

The girl gave him a confiding, responsive, and grateful smile. “It’s rather a long story,” she began, “and I don’t like, O most admirable Doctor, keeping you standing while I tell it.”

“O it’s good for me,” said the Friar quickly. “I’ve been sitting all day—so please go on.”

The girl took him at his word, and glancing quickly round, as if to make sure she was only keeping the learned Friar, and not the Priory cook too, in a standing position, she
permitted
herself to indulge in quite a long biographical narrative.

“I expect it’s Jewish ancestry,” she began, “that really explains these queer
presentiments
. I call them that; but I’ve been told in the Convent that I ought to give them a different name. But never mind the name!
You
will know, O most admirable Doctor, much better, I expect, than I do, what these things are. But you see my grandfather was a Rabbi. Both my parents”—here the girl arranged herself more
comfortably
on the Friar’s bed, evidently reassured a great deal by the way he was standing at ease and listening with what looked like most attentive interest—“were murdered in a crusading massacre soon after I was born. It was my
great-aunt
Rebecca who took care of me. She gave me my name to bear witness to her conversion to the Christian Faith; for she always believed that it was a special intervention by the Holy Ghost that led to her acceptance of Christ as her God. Great-aunt Rebecca’s belief in this has struck many people as both presumptuous and blasphemous. But knowing Aunt Rebecca so well, and having lost in her when she died the only person in the world I’ve ever understood, or indeed have wanted to understand, until I met the man they now swear to me is armour-bearer at the Fortress, it’s impossible for me to feel that her name for me was blasphemous. As for these ‘
presentiments
’, as I call them, though there’s a nun where I work who swears to me that ‘intimations’ would be a better word, I put
them
down, myself, entirely to my Jewishness. Aunt Rebecca taught me to read Hebrew, and my favourite reading all my life has always been the Books of Moses; and Moses was always being told what to do directly out of the mouth
of the Nameless One who was the God of Israel, known only by the Four Mystic Letters ‘
Y.H.W.H
..’

“And it’s no doubt from reading the Books of Moses so much that there come moments—not in sleep you must
understand
, but in reveries or trances or wanderings of thought, when I seem to hear the voice of the God of Israel speaking to me and telling me to do something. And three times lately this voice has come to me and said: ‘Go to the cell of the
Admirable
Doctor and talk to him’——

“But, O most admirable lord Doctor, I see that Brother Tuck here whom”—and she turned her lustrous eyes to the still uneasy cook sitting awkwardly against the wall with her cloak across his knees—“whom I already know quite well by sight, has brought you your supper,” and she made a gesture with one of her hands towards the great apple-pasty on the table, “so I oughtn’t to stay any longer.”

At this point she gave a quaintly reckless little laugh. “But the truth is, O most admirable Doctor, I keep hearing—it’s very faint, you know, but I’ve learnt from experience to catch it—the far-off voice of the Nameless One of Israel telling me that there’s some way in which I can help you with something that’s very much on your mind. Of course you may feel from your worship of a Trinity, where Jesus Christ is the centre if not the circumference, that this Voice of the Nameless One, speaking to me in the same Voice wherein it spoke to Miriam the sister of Moses, means little, or as far as a Christian is concerned, nothing at all; but my voice tells me you don’t and cannot treat it so lightly. O my Lord, O most admirable Doctor, I do beg and beseech you to tell me——” Here the girl leapt up from the Friar’s bed and stood erect before him with her back to the disturbed and agitated cook—“to tell me what it is that the Voice keeps commanding me to do for you!”

Very calmly and quietly Friar Bacon took the situation into his own hands. He showed himself as skilful at the
stage-management
of human puppets as he did at the invention of automatic and mechanical ones. He was indeed soon standing with his left hand on the sleeve of brother Tuck and his right on the elbow of Ghosta.

He had already induced the former to hide the corpse of the yellowhammer in his tunic-pocket, and the latter to take the
mantle the man had been holding and place it on the bed; and now they were, all three, in unencumbered freedom of action confronting the mysterious black curtain behind which was the Brazen Head.

Releasing Ghosta’s arm, but retaining his hold on Tuck’s sleeve, the Friar now drew aside this curtain from the most renowned shrine not only in Britain but, save for the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, in the whole world, and as he did so he was aware of a shivering motion in the muscles and nerves of both his companions, as if they were being compelled to make an involuntary prostration before the revealed mystery.

But he did not give them time for the smallest unrehearsed gesture. “What I want
you
to do,” he said to Tuck, “is to prop up the Head and to steady it and prevent it from falling while I lift our maid upon its shoulder,” and to Ghosta he said, “I want
you
to arrange your garments as if you were intending to make water, so that it is from contact with your nakedness that the Head looks forth upon the world.”

It was in an incredibly short space of time, after giving the man and the woman these precise instructions, that Friar Bacon got both of them, and got the Brazen Head as well, into the position he desired; and the expression on the
countenance
of that Brazen Head, as its powerfully moulded eyes and ears and nose and mouth looked forth from between Ghosta’s thighs and from under her naked belly, was like the expression in a marble head of the god Hermes, attributed to Praxiteles, that a nameless crusade had recently brought to the King’s house in London.

“Will you both, if you don’t mind,” the Friar murmured, “since the ancients knew, long before the Mother of God was revealed to us, the divine power of virginity, follow me in repeating the sounds of an ancient invocation, the exact meaning of which has been lost to the world for two thousand years?”

And so slowly and clearly did Roger Bacon utter these
evidently
latinized syllables that neither Ghosta in her extravagant position, nor Tuck using all his strength and all his intelligence to keep the Image and its Burden upright, had any difficulty in repeating them after him:
Birginis, Sirginis, Flirginis,
Virginis
;
and these simple sounds had hardly died away, and the curious white light which the cunning art of the inventor had
caused to play over the countenance of the Bronze Head had scarcely faded, when the Friar lifted Ghosta down upon her feet and handed her her mantle. Then he removed from the foot of his bed a cloak of his own and wrapped it round Brother Tuck. “Better take her to the Convent yourself,” he said gravely. “Two cloaked figures won’t excite the same interest as one alone. I shall pray for you both very particularly this night. You have helped me greatly.”

“It was indeed a special act of Providence,” replied the General of the Franciscan Order of Friars from his seat on the back of the deformed animal known to its owner as Cheiron, “that we met at those cross-roads. I should have had to spend the night under these pines if we hadn’t; because to tell you the truth, my good Master Spardo, nothing would have made me stop hunting for this Castle of Lost Towers except falling dead in my tracks or being killed by a wolf.”

The satisfaction of the General of the Grey Friars in the absoluteness of his God-Intoxication was so deep that the ground beneath Cheiron’s hooves seemed to rise to meet it. Unseen by the borrower of the deformed beast, Spardo wiped a blob of bird’s dropping from the back of one of his hands upon the fringe of the ecclesiastical garment dangling at the animal’s side.

“How did it happen, if your reverent generalship will not take offence at the question, that you, whom we all call the Seraphic Doctor, should be wandering about alone without a single servant?”

This not altogether unexpected question helped the bubbling spring of Bonaventura’s self-love to overflow again.

“I’ve got the best of all possible ones
now
, haven’t I?” he replied to Spardo, with an ingratiating smile. “Didn’t you tell me just now that you were unemployed?”

“Hitherto,” replied the bastard son of the King of Bohemia, “it has been my destiny to serve laymen: lordly laymen, it is true, and persons not devoid of coins of silver and coins of gold, but people tell me that great churchmen like thyself, O most
Seraphic Doctor, are very particular and very exacting about the way your food is prepared and your off-scourings disposed of and your garments kept clean. I can see at this actual moment, O most saintly of doctors, several very filthy stains on your beautiful grey mantle, due no doubt—no! I’m not being rude to you, my lord doctor; I’m just indicating the absolute necessity that men like yourself who are so spiritual and so sensitive, and who so feel very, very,
very
far from the stupid unenlightened masses of men, and just as far from their stupid unenlightened authorities——”

“Silence, man! Who has taught you to talk like that? Are we not all equal before God? Are we not all equally stupid and ignorant in the presence of his holy spirit? Are we not all equally selfish and greedy and lascivious and treacherous and deceitful under the blinding fire of his eternal righteousness and the terrible thunder of his fearful truth?”

The deformed Cheiron was so agitated by this threatening voice so close to his ears that he came to a stop and began trembling from head to tail.

“To whom have you been listening?” repeated the
grey-robed
rider on Cheiron’s back. “
You
, fresh from our religious France and our more than religious Italy,
you
, a wanderer across Christian Europe from the idolatries of the East, where, I ask you, have
you
picked up this devilish talk about ignorant masses and stupid authorities? Have
you
been listening to this Satanic sorcerer who has dared to assume the dress of a Friar just because he has lost his money, this thrice-accurst Roger Bacon? Or are all the misbegotten islanders in this
Godforsaken
Britain of yours so savage that if anyone wants to win their favour they’ve got to talk to them in this unholy way? But do you really think, O most generous of all possible
wanderers
through haunted forests, that you can go on guiding me to Lost Towers? You seem to me, Master Spardo, a rather tired and worn-out man yourself. I can’t help seeing that you drag your feet very heavily, and even kick the tree-stumps and the earth-mounds and the fallen logs as you go along; and I noticed just now that your eyes kept shutting of their own accord, as if at any moment you might fall asleep as you walked.”

“We shan’t be much longer now, reverend lord,” replied
Spardo, “and once there I may find a place where I can sleep in their kitchen and my horse may be able to sleep in their stable, while you, being entertained by Baron Maldung and Lady Lilt, will come to your own conclusion about their daughter Lilith, of whom rumour round here says things I won’t repeat to a sacred gentleman like yourself.”

After that brief summary of the situation, the three of them moved on, with the saintly Bonaventura in the saddle, with Cheiron on his faithfully plodding four legs, and with Spardo’s weary head and half-closed eyes drooping and nodding more and more heavily.

Spardo’s thoughts, in spite of what he had just said, were by no means in any kitchen. They were in a much grander place. He was imagining himself luxuriating on heaps of soft cushions and sipping the particular kind of French wine, of a yellowish tint, which from his Bohemian childhood he had always loved best of all the wines in the world.

As for Bonaventura, he was thinking very hard, as he rode on, about his own future destiny. “If I continue,” he was saying to himself, “as effectively as I have done hitherto, in dominating my lower nature by my higher nature; if, in fact, I do attain in the eyes of the world the reputation of being a real saint, will this reputation interfere with my chance, for there can be no doubt I have a very good chance, of being elected Pope?

“Of course it does satisfy me to a mighty large extent to dominate my lower nature like I do, and to feel that in me, and to feel that others feel that in me, the Will of God
triumphs
over the Will of Satan. But with a character like mine it isn’t enough to dominate Satan in myself; I feel an
imperative
need to dominate Satan in others too. Yes! and not only in individuals. I feel a need to dominate Satan in groups, classes, societies, tribes, races, countries, nations, hemispheres, worlds! But my real life is my inward life. And I and God alone know the majestic secrets of my inner life.

“The wonderful thing about me, and the thing wherein I differ most from ordinary people, is that I don’t want to dominate the world by action. I want to dominate it by just being what I am; by just being myself. And in this I resemble Jesus Christ. I and God alone know what a destiny-changing
moment it was in the history of Christendom when Saint Francis sought me out, among all the rest, and gave me that gift of Healing which he gave to nobody else.

“But what I and God alone know is a yet deeper secret even than that; a secret that I would not have let God know if I hadn’t decided he would have found it out for himself; the way my mother before I was born felt me give a leap in her womb every time God was mentioned. She even—and this deep secret nobody in the world knows but I and God—she even prayed to God all night long, while my father by her side was snoring like a Lombardy hog, that just one tiny little infinitesimal drop of God’s holy ethereal spiritual and invisible seed might mingle with the substance of their earthly terrestrial and mundane seeds, when she and my father became one in my begetting.

“Yes! I and God, alone in all the world, heard that prayer of my mother; and I and God, alone in all the world, know how lovely the face of my mother was—how it was
transformed
, transfigured, illuminated, entranced, and beside itself with mystical love, when she made that prayer. For I was in you, then, God, wasn’t I, and not in my mother’s womb? O how can I thank you enough, God, for separating me from, and selecting me out of, and putting me above, the myriads of ordinary souls whereof the world is so full! But I must think, think,
think
, whether it would be better for me, from now on, to go forward increasing my spirituality as a saint, or to develop that other side of sanctity which is quite as deeply natural to me and implanted in me—the sort of
wisdom
that Solomon had when he decided between those two women with the living baby and the dead baby. That is the sort of wisdom we need in our Pope, and if I were Pope, I would have the greatest opportunity anyone could have in the whole world to make people obey the will of God as
opposed
to the will of Satan.

“Perhaps,” so Bonaventura’s thoughts ran on, “the
inspiration
of mine about converting to God and His Church this whole outpost of Devilry they call Lost Towers does really and truly combine both the spirituality and the wisdom of a true saint. But suppose this devil of a Baron Maldung puts me to death?”

He gave a little gasp like a frog in a cave at the striking of flint and steel. “Well, in
that
case
I wonder how far my——” But Bonaventura’s thoughts of spiritual advancement and of everlasting felicity were now interrupted by the sound of a horn quite close to them; and he quickly turned to his
companion
, who was evidently, although still plodding along by Cheiron’s side, so nearly asleep that he could hear nothing.

“What’s that over there? Did you hear that? For God’s sake, listen, man! It’s just the other side of those trees!”

Spardo slowly turned his head causing his long, slender, wispy beard to brush away several flies from Cheiron’s
deformity
. “Yes, by Holy Jesus I do hear it,” he groaned, “and what’s more, O most seraphic of doctors, I can tell you whose horn it is! It’s the horn of Bailiff Sygerius and I expect he’s calling for one of his own rascally boys! The fellow hasn’t been bailiff for more than six months. His dad, old Heber Sygerius, has only just given up the job, and I rather——”

Spardo was interrupted by an inrush upon them of several persons. A broad-shouldered, obstinate-looking, middle-aged man, who obviously was the bailiff in question, pushed
forward
through some closely growing pine-tree trunks, and advanced into the open, making, as he did so, several rough and brutal jerks to get rid of the hold upon his sleeve of an old and extremely agitated serf, who in his turn was clutching the hand of a little girl, who, with big frightened eyes, surveyed the two men and the deformed horse as if they had been beings from another world.

The bailiff made the appropriate gesture of respect to the man on the horse, who was obviously, although in the garb of a Franciscan Friar, some sort of high-ranking ecclesiastic from abroad.

“Pardon me for disturbing you like this, reverend Father, but I must settle the affair of this troublesome fellow before I can pay my proper respects to you.”

The serf’s voice had a piercingly pitiful tone of appeal which arrested Spardo’s critical attention at once. “You’re taking our whole life, master bailiff,” the old man was saying, “when you take away our horse. My daughter has a good job in the Convent’s washhouse and her children are good children; but
if you take away our horse, considering my son’s dead, you take the bread out of all our mouths.”

It would have been clear to any less self-absorbed listeners than the two men upon whom this group of people flung itself, that in the familiar pleading tone of her grand-dad’s voice there was something that spread a reassuring atmosphere round the child who was holding his hand. Tragic enough though the old man’s words were, there were so many
use-and
-wont associations aroused in her by his special tone that her eyes ceased to be so big and scared.

It even began to be exciting to her to watch this weird horse’s neck, with what really looked like a human head growing out of it, while the man with the feathery beard, like the moulting tail of Granny’s jackdaw, seemed to be making funny faces at her, as if he wanted her to play a game with him.

It was early afternoon by now, and the rays of the February sun were shimmering between the pine branches at an angle about midway between earth and sky.

“I tell you, master bailiff, if you take our horse it will be just simply a death-sentence to us all!”

“Pardon me, holy sir,” said the bailiff, looking straight into the twitching, high-coloured face of Bonaventura, whose excited eyes, always very prominent, were now literally bulging from his head; “pardon me till I’ve dealt with this fellow!”

Meanwhile the little girl, whose hand her grandfather was still tightly clutching, couldn’t keep the idea out of her mind that the interest of this hooded rider in what was going on was so intense that it might at any moment project those
inflated
eyes of his out of his head like a pair of globular puff-balls.

She was even beginning to imagine the simultaneous pop with which those two voracious peerers would strike the tree beside her and the amount of effervescent juice that would pour down the tree’s trunk at their bursting, when she heard the bailiff protest to the owner of those same orbs that he would give him his full attention as soon as he had got rid of these tiresome people.

“Full attention” was the very last thing any one of the group of human bipeds flung together beneath these pines could hope for. But at least the ragged little girl, whose name
was Bet, and who had been endowed by Nature with several extra drops of imagination, derived an agreeably alarming impression from the bulging eyes of the saintly General of the Franciscan Order of Friars.

But there was nothing but distress in the shock she received when she saw her grand-dad throw himself down on his knees before ‘Master Sygerius and actually embrace his straddling pair of sturdy legs, while with head thrown back he gazed up imploringly at all that could possibly be seen from that position of the man’s physiognomy, which could only have been the reddish-brown beard protruding from the obstinately square jaw.

“If you take our horse away, master,” cried the old man, “it just means starvation! While my son was alive, he could plough as fast as any man on the manor. And plough he did, and sow and reap too, with the best in the land. But if after his death our only horse is to be what’s called your Heriot, considering I’m too old and feeble to plough or to sow or to reap or to carry in the harvest, it’s just murder you’re committing! Yes, what you’re doing, bailiff, is sheer murder! I tell you, here and now, it’s squeezing the orange dry!”

The bailiff, evidently no less conscious of the staring eyes of the hooded man on Cheiron’s back than was the ragged little Bet, stepped away so hurriedly that the old supplicant, losing his balance, fell forward with both his hands outstretched upon the red-brown earth. The spot where the old man fell was a spot strewn with several generations of pine-needles, but it was quite bare of moss and quite bare also of that particular sort of forest-grass, soft as the hair of a Dryad, which grew luxuriantly in those parts, especially in the district between the Fortress and Lost Towers.