The Brazen Head (16 page)

“Father sent me,” John said, “because he thought it might help if I were to go into the Convent and say that mother was very anxious to see her and had sent me to fetch her; and then, of course, after we three were out of their sight, I could come home alone. Father said it would seem quite all right for you to take her back later, and that mother would really be very glad to see her at the Fortress.”

Peleg stared down at him for a second in silence. Then he said slowly, “Your Father is extremely wise in these things. And of course when my friend and I are once safe in the Fortress, we can find out whether Lady Val would really like to see her or not. Yes, come on Master John, and we’ll see what happens!”

But as they threaded their way together between the trunks of the pines, that seemed to grow especially tall in this
particular
corner of the Manor, Peleg cursed the hour he had decided to take his master into his confidence. “It’s always unsafe to get their help,” he told himself. “They are so different from us. They do everything quicker, and yet, in a manner, more sideways, than we do things. But I expect I’m silly in not being overjoyed at this young master’s help. And yet I don’t know! How can I be glad to have anyone else, anybody at all, present when I first see Ghosta again? O but I’ve been a prize fool to let them into my secret! And yet on the other hand what would I have done with Ghosta if I hadn’t had this help? Where, in the name of all the devils, would I have taken her? As it is
now
, Lady Val
may
give her a place in their Fortress kitchen? But will she want that to happen? Girls are queer cattle! They live their own life quite apart from us.
Thai’s
what these damned Nordic
crusaders
never have, and never will, understand!”

Peleg was so moved by this psychic discovery that he broke his silence. “What is your opinion of girls, Master John?”

John’s eyes became absolutely brilliant, like two lamps lit by a divine flame in the Holy Tabernacle of the Ark of the Covenant.

“O I adore them! I worship them! I embrace—in my mind of course, or in my imagination—every single one of them I meet! Off, off, off, off I slip their pretty clothes! And oh! so quickly I’m hugging them! But that’s the worst of it, for it’s the whole of the best of it, and the end of it! For I have an ecstasy at once, and all my soul rushes out, and all my seed is gone, in a minute, and I’ve no strength left to ravish them and take their divine maidenheads!

“That’s my trouble, Peleg; and I don’t see how I can get over it! I don’t see how I’m ever to enjoy a woman properly, or ever to have a child, or ever to become a grandfather and a great-grandfather and a great-great-grandfather and a real proper ancestor! Tilton’s quite different. I
think
—only it’s a great secret, of course, between you and me—but I
think
Tilton’s already got a girl who lives round here. She’s a very, very slim girl, and she goes about with a little child, her niece I think it is, called Bet, who’s a very nice kid.

“Bet and I made great friends when we were waiting for Tilton. Tilton doesn’t like girls—he says they don’t
understand
architecture. His girl’s name is Oona and her Father or Grandfather is that rebellious serf, you know the one I mean? The one who got on so well with old Heber; but then Heber has the trick of propitiating everybody; whereas this Dod Pole—I expect you know him—is now in perpetual trouble with Randy.”

Having finished his discourse John flung upwards a quick glance from his lustrous eyes to see whether the giant at his side had taken it all in, or had allowed his mind to wander; for with an intense interest in particular aspects of life, and a tendency to philosophise at some length on these aspects, young John frequently caught people’s attention wandering from what he was saying; and this made him intermittently cautious, though he hated to have to stop and scrutinize his listener.

But just then he had to be content with a hurried nod, for they had arrived at the door of the Convent. “Father said for me to go straight in,” the lad now whispered to Peleg who was bending down to hear his instructions, “and not to come out with the girl—her name is Ghosta, isn’t it?—but to wait inside till you’ve gone off with her: but I expect I’ll be seeing you later, and maybe her too, so I’ll only say ‘good-luck’ and not ‘good night’, Peleg”; and with these last syllables vibrating round his youthful figure, he advanced boldly to the great loose chain which was hanging from an aperture in the top part of the massive black door, and this he pulled three times, and Peleg could distinctly catch the reverberation of its echoing resonance from inside the building.

The ringer hadn’t to wait. The door opened almost at once, making an aperture of about six inches, and after a brief parley with a dim, white-coifed figure, like a pale kernel in a cracked nut, the lad went inside and the door was closed. There was only one tree near this closed entrance and that was an ancient birch with a remarkably mottled trunk and only two branches, which branches, being very high up, were like the arms of a crucified queen who guarded the place by day and night and threatened every intruder.

Calmly and deliberately the huge Hebraic Mongol settled himself on the ground with his back against this solitary tree
and awaited his fate. He had to wait a long time; but the curious thing was that while he waited now he felt himself to be entirely free from that sickening lethargy which had so loosened his knees and which required a whole bottle of Neapolitan white wine to remove from his midriff.

And then the closed doors opened, opened more quietly than when they had shut, and there she was! He automatically clutched his iron mace, as if the building behind her and the tree behind him had been a host of enemies, and with it in his hand he leapt up from the ground and bounded towards her.

When he reached that tall, stately, slender figure, in a black mantle with a black hood—who gazed straight into his face with eyes as dark and beautiful, and, to his feelings, just then, as terrifyingly prophetic, as must have been the eyes of Deborah, the wife of Heber the Kenite, or of Miriam, the sister of Moses—Peleg allowed his mace with its terrible spikes to fall to the ground. He could do nothing but just stand helplessly in front of her, muttering over and over again the blind words: “Ghosta! So you’ve really and truly come! Ghosta! So you’ve really and truly come!”

But she, with a gesture like that of a warrior-queen, whose lightest word was obeyed by thousands, lifted both her arms towards him, took his bare head in her bare hands, and, drawing it down towards her breast, kissed him on the
forehead
.

Peleg felt this to be a momentous kiss, a sacramental kiss, a kiss belonging to a ritual for the union of a man and a woman that was older than Sodom and Gomorrha, older than Tyre and Sidon, older than Babylon and Nineveh.

For a moment he stood with his eyes closed; and then, with a deep gasp for breath, as if he had just defeated an army of rivals, he bent down and picked up his iron weapon. This he now grasped tightly in his right hand, and taking Ghosta’s right hand in his own left, he led her away, up a mossy slope between scattered yellow stalks of last autumn’s bracken and a few dead clumps of last summer’s heather, till, completely hidden from any possible onlookers from either Convent or Priory, he led her into the entrance chamber of the cave of Manawyddan, which had been a favourite resort of his since he first followed Sir Mort to that district of Wessex.

The cave was indeed so completely hidden by a grove of alders and willows that it was by no means universally known even to natives of those parts. The two of them had no sooner entered it than Ghosta’s whole attitude changed. The maternal heart in her was at once touched to the quick by the various little semi-domestic arrangements that this gigantic lover of hers had made in this secret hermitage of his, such as the strewings of dry reeds that covered the floor, such as a couple of great iron trivets, one of which was carrying a deep copper basin and the other supporting a kind of extempore frying-pan which had clearly served its purpose extremely well not so very long ago. In one corner of the cave there was a large earthenware bowl of water and by the side of it a little jug with a handle that looked more Greek than Roman for ladling the water into other receptacles.

As Peleg noticed the deeply amused, and intensely practical interest that Ghosta took in all these objects, he told himself that he had been wise to keep the existence of this cave, which had originally been shown to him by a travelling tinker from Wales, entirely to himself. This Welsh tinker had told him about certain ancient Welsh gods, who had travelled through the land like himself doing work in leather and in various metals. He had explained that he himself, in every district he visited, selected some special spot where he could labour unmolested at his job and fulfil the various professional orders he obtained in that neighbourhood; and he swore that it had been in a vision of one of these old tribal deities, a being who called himself Manawyddan fab-Llyr, that he had learnt of this cave and been assured, that if he kept the secret to himself, nobody would disturb him there.

It was too early for more than a few tiny leaf-buds to have appeared on the willow and alder boughs that in a confused mass hid the mouth of the cave; but at about ten yards distance outside this half-circle of entangled trunks, and closely twisted twigs, grew an immense pine.

The rough bark of this tree, for it was a tree that stood with its back, so to speak, to the cave and to the cave’s
bodyguard
of entwined branches and twigs, had become for Peleg a token of the precise hour; for its colour darkened and
lightened
, flickered and shadowed, according to the advancing
and retreating, the self-concealing and self-revealing, of Sun and Moon and the intermittent rising and falling of the wind.

Though he had only once or twice actually passed a night in this cave, he had of late amused himself by making careful preparations for a winter night there. He had prepared a tall barrier of wooden bars that exactly fitted the mouth of the cave, but was easily lifted up and could be deposited, after use, beneath one of the interior walls, a barrier that he could render proof against wind and snow and rain by covering it with the skins of cattle and sheep.

What he felt especially proud of, as he showed the cave’s domestic conveniences to his beautiful Hebrew friend, was a tightly wedged mass of clean and dry hay, with which he had packed from floor to ceiling a rocky recess in one of the cave’s corners, towards which the ground sloped upwards a little.

He studied every flicker of her expression with boyish
solemnity
, as he now proceeded to strew on the ground at the back of the cave a thick sprinkling of this pleasantly-scented
summer-hay
for their February siesta. It seemed to him that she whitened a little at the first glance she threw upon this lover’s bed, then reddened a little, but she continued to watch his every movement with an expression that it would have been totally impossible for him to interpret; but which revealed in reality something of that infinitely maternal and desperately romantic tenderness that young Tilton was struggling now so intensely, day after day, with his hammer and chisel, to convey to his carved image of the Virgin as he imagined her uttering her immemorial “Magnificat”.

And quite suddenly, and as it may well be imagined, to Peleg’s wonder and delight, Ghosta took the whole situation into her own hands. “Let’s make a good fire,” she cried, “and warm the whole place before we lie down! And let’s heat some water and have a good drink of hot red wine!”

Such had been his secret meticulous preparations for a situation exactly like this one, only built up entirely in his imagination, that few lovers would believe, however deeply they trusted their tale-bearers, how small was the lapse of time before a blazing fire of sticks and logs, unattended by any great volume of smoke, was burning triumphantly, and before
they were exchanging with each other deep draughts of red wine mixed with bubbling water.

The effect of these timely preparations were enhanced by the noon-day sunshine, which poured down upon them past the great pine-tree outside, one of whose two big boughs lay on the ground, while the other was extended wide, with a gesture as comprehensive as that with which Jacob, after wrestling all night with the angel, must have greeted the hills and valleys and rivers of the Promised Land.

Then as they replaced the goblets, from which they had been drinking, on the wide shelf that ran round the cave, Ghosta uttered the most astonishing words that her companion had ever heard issuing from human lips.

“Now is the moment, O my friend, when you and I must strip ourselves of all. For a man knoweth not the woman he loves, nor does a woman know the man she loves, until each is as naked as the other.”

The words struck him like a ritual, mystical and solemn, but the natural, half-laughing way she came close up to him and proceeded to loosen the buckle of his belt, and then, drawing back a few paces, began with incredible rapidity, but with gay and laughing interjections, and indeed with half-humorous and almost mischievous smiles at certain particularly crucial moments, to fling off every stitch of her clothing, made him feel at ease with the whole universe.

Peleg imitated her as fast as he could; but perhaps it was significant of the double stream of blood in his veins that, before they lay down together on that sweet-scented bed of hay, he lifted his wooden screen across the entrance to their amorous hermitage and hung over it a large bull’s hide.

As he did so he couldn’t help being struck by the sun-warmth which reached his fingers from this same skin, for he had snatched it up from the top of a pile that ever since dawn had been in reach of the Sun. Nor did the gigantic amorist, while the Sun above the bull’s-hide screen caressed his own swarthy neck, fail to note with something like philosophical vanity that he was not so absorbed by the passion of love as to be unable to get, even at this moment of moments, a quite definite sensuous pleasure from the touch of the Lord of Life.