The Brazen Head (10 page)

In the depths of his pluralistic soul the Friar was now repeating over and over to himself the name “Ghosta”, but he said, “Sit down, Brother,” in the particular tone of a
person
who murmurs almost mechanically, “And now we come back to real life.”

And when Brother Tuck had jerked into position a chair of the same shape as the one occupied by the Friar and
containing
a cushion of identically the same colour and size, the latter added the words: “And you might, if you don’t mind, get the bottle and glasses”; a suggestion that was taken with the quickest alacrity. From a small shelf in an open recess near the door was extracted a beautifully heavy and almost opaque cut-glass container half-full of the reddest Burgundian wine from which, when it stood between them on the table, the Brother filled both their glasses.

Then followed, but with the same matter-of-fact, mechanical inevitability, a very curious gesture, traditional in Bumset Priory—a gesture that Raymond de Laon was wont to declare
he had heard from none other than the Papal Legate to this country who subsequently became Clement IV, was
prehistoric
and pre-Christian, and went back to the days of Homer and Hesiod, when, before touching any wine, you had to sprinkle drops of it on the ground and on the air. What in fact both the men did now was to dip their longest finger into their glass and lightly flip a few drops of the wine they were about to drink towards each other.

“Here’s news for you, my friend and God’s friend,” Brother Tuck began. “The Mother Superior next door, you know, has now got a really extraordinary Jewish girl to help the old nun who cooks for them. That poor old bitch—if you’ll excuse me, sir—has never had time enough to cook properly; to cook, I mean, things that she herself enjoys. She spends half her time carrying dishes around to sick nuns. But now, with this new girl there, things are going, Prior Bog assures me, so marvellously well that Sister Mandrake, the nun who cooks for them, is happy again, and poor old Serga Kathalorum has found time to look round her a bit and enjoy life a little—found time to feel that being a Mother Superior isn’t quite the worst fate that could have befallen a god-fearing elderly respectable lady. Pardon me, Master Friar, but has any new devil entered your mind, like that one that made you say, ‘Time is Past’ over and over, just as if it were ‘et cum Spiritum tuum’?”

Brother Tuck emptied his glass, holding it to his lips in order that its last drops—drops that were no doubt called “the dregs” in countries where certain accumulations of
strongly-smelling
residue could always be drained from the bottom of wine-glasses—and then, having allowed his uplifted eye-balls—and while he did this his expression resembled that of a frog, with its chin on a lily-leaf, searching the empyrean for thunder—to scour the discoloured interior of the glass he was holding, he repeated “cum Spiritum tuum” in a dying fall of unction that resolved itself, ere it passed wholly away, into a diffused question.

Brother Tuck was still gazing with an uneasy relaxed
interrogatory
stare into the abstracted eyes before him, and across the empty glass and the full glass, when to his startled and rather shocked surprise he saw the Friar rise slowly to his feet.

“Please answer me, Brother Tuck, my old friend,” said the risen man gravely. “No! Stay as you are. Don’t get up. Here, drink my glass. I can have another later. But it’s necessary for me to ask you rather an important question. What’s this new girl’s name? I mean this one you’re talking about, who is such a help to Serga Kathalorum at the Convent, and to the old nun—Sister Mandrake they call her, don’t they?—who does their cooking?

“No, don’t get up, old friend. Stay where you are. It’s for the person who is asking the questions to stand. But it’s important to me and important purely for myself. Yes, you must understand
that
, Brother Tuck. You mustn’t think I am asking you for any reason except a special peculiar, and quite definite one of my own. But to me this matter is of extreme importance; for it has to do with the particular thing I’m working on just now, namely—though I don’t want to bother you, old friend, with these peculiarly difficult matters—the question as to how far at any definite point in the passing of time—you can see roughly, old friend, can’t you, what I’m talking about?—our natural human apparatus for looking ahead can be used for purposes of prediction and how far it must hopelessly collapse; and why I asked you about this person, Tuck, my friend, was because——”

At this moment not only did a sudden gust of wind from the north cause the wooden framework of the small window to shake, but an agitated yellowhammer, with wings and feathers ruffled and with nerves and brain confused and befuddled to such a degree by an airy panic emanating from a whirling flock of frightened starlings, that everything in the world except that little, low-roofed philosophic chamber seemed all beak and claws, burst into the room, and aware of Brother Tuck’s square shoulders stooping over two glasses and Friar Bacon’s bottle-neck shoulders erect over nothing, flung itself in a wild panic against the three walls in front of it, and fell dead on the floor before reverting to the fourth.

Both men went to pick up the bird, and there was something almost like a boyish scuffle between them as to which should reach it first. In the event, attained in two seconds, it was Friar Bacon who got the motionless creature into his hands and smoothed down its feathers and let its head fall limp across his thumb.

“Well! tell me now, Tuck, old friend; has this new girl at the convent got a name that suggests death or anything to do with death?” As he spoke the Friar lifted the bird’s head from the back of his thumb just about an eighth of an inch and then let it sink down again. “Anything to do with Death, old friend, that’s the question. And when you’ve answered I’ll tell you exactly why I put this question to you. But sit down again, and I’ll sit down too. It’s queer, isn’t it, how much more tiring it is to stand than to walk?”

Both the men were silent, looking at each other across the table, the Friar mechanically caressing the dead bird on his lap and the Lay-Brother mechanically running his finger round the edge of the wine-glass that was nearest to him. If only one among Friar Bacon’s unrealized inventions had been present then that had the power, the moment you touched a particular knob, of uttering in a strong firm voice the thoughts of each person in turn, towards whose cranium, whether hairy or bald, the spear-point of its machinery had been directed, what a moment this would have been for a perfect proof as to how the most unorthodox, improper, shameless, outrageous thoughts flit through the heads of upright, honest, and
thoroughly
good men busy with entirely blameless activities!

For Brother Tuck wondered how soon Prior Bog would detect something amiss if he, Tuck of Abbotsbury, fried his own excrement for the Priory supper; and Roger of Ilchester
wondered
whether it would be possible for a female
yellow-hammer
to lay eggs if she were impregnated by a dead mate who had been galvanized into momentary sexual excitement by a thunderstorm.

“Please tell me, Tuck,” enquired Bacon earnestly, “whether any idea, even the very remotest idea of Death entered the mind of the baptizer when he was baptizing this new girl at work in the convent?”

It was then that it happened to Lay-Brother Tuck, that calm, well-balanced, and practical person upon whose
competence
all Bumset Priory depended, to leap up from that perilous round table and from a mouth as wide open as a water-rat’s hole in a river-bank to utter an astounded “O! O! O! O!” For it was one thing to give poor Prior Bog the only pleasure he got from life in the form of at least one more delicious meal before the sun went down again in the phantom waves of the sea of time, but it was quite a different thing to find that a weird Friar, doing penance among them for heaven alone could say what mysterious sins, could actually know by some magic power what other people had to find out by long years of seeing and hearing and feeling.

“You don’t mean to say that you knew her name was Ghosta before I told you!”

Roger Bacon rose from his seat using self-conscious
deliberation
, where the other used thoughtless haste.

“Certainly I knew
the sort of name
she had. I can’t swear I ever actually uttered the word ‘Ghosta’ to myself; but now that you’ve uttered it it seems curiously natural to me, almost as if I’d known it all my life.”

There was now between the two men on their feet almost as significant a silence as there had been when they were seated. Of this the Friar was fully and completely aware. It is indeed quite possible that in the whole of the west country from Poole to Penzance there was then no living man who was more
self-conscious
than Roger Bacon. He had been born so, and from his earliest boyhood he had deliberately developed this
birthright
.

It had been from the start his daily habit to tell himself exciting stories; and the essence of these stories, their burden and the secret of their enchantment, was the fact that young Roger was always imagining himself, or better say discovering himself, to be surrounded by a motley multiplicity of objects, belonging to the four levels of existence, namely of human beings, of sub-human beings, of vegetable beings, and of mineral substances.

And as Roger Bacon grew older and began his studies at the Universities of Oxford and Paris, this intense consciousness of the various existences, whether animate, or inanimate, that surrounded him at any given moment, including his own
self-consciousness
, came to be the supreme interest of his whole life. His temperament and general nervous sensibility were such that he could not help feeling a special and quite personal “rapport” with each one of these various existences: and for good and ill each of them affected him profoundly.

Thus at this moment our morbidly self-conscious Friar was aware of a curious contest in his soul, between a desire to lie down in delicious relaxation and deep peace within the pale light-green eyes of the honest Tuck and a desire to go on gazing at the dead yellowhammer, until, through its body, he was able to pursue its soul till he found it re-incarnated in a tiny snow-white hair-like fungus, wherein it would have to await the mating-moment of a new pair of yellowhammers.

This latter desire of the insatiable scholar having thus been gratified, he was suddenly seized with a pang of remorse for not having already thrown the bird’s little feathered corpse out of the window so that the first-born of the innumerable little worms that were bound to be engendered out of the putrefying corpse beneath those tender feathers might not perish in being thus separated from the elements.

“I’ll run down with it presently,” he thought, “and put it somewhere, where——” And then he remembered what in following in his mind that small corpse’s corruption he’d entirely forgotten—that he was, save for certain appointed hours each day, a prisoner in this chamber.

“Do you know, my friend, from what race or from what country,” Friar Bacon now enquired of Tuck, “this
Ghosta-girl
comes?”

It was always a great comfort to brother Tuck to be asked any direct and simple question by the Priory’s illustrious captive and he brightened up enormously at this.

“Yes, indeed I do,” he hurriedly replied. “Ghosta’s a Jewess from Mesopotamia or Dalmatia or somewhere not very far from the Red Sea; in fact I daresay quite near to the River Jordan.”

He spoke with profound satisfaction. And indeed it was wonderful to him that he, Brother Tuck, chief cook to Prior Bog of Bumset, could teach their learned captive something of which he was entirely ignorant.

Roger Bacon let his massive head sink heavily down, letting it fall in front of him till his chin seemed to rest upon the centre of his chest, midway between his breast-bones. While he did this, he closed his eyes, and fell into a momentary trance of deep thinking. But no wrinkle, no frown, no furrow,
appeared
on the broad expanse of his forehead, nor were his arched eyebrows drawn together.

Tuck watched him with absorbed reverence; for the cook felt exactly as he felt sometimes when a thin film of exquisitely delicate yellow-brown, which faintly resembled pure gold, yet wasn’t really like pure gold, began to appear on the
surface
of what he was cooking.

Then Roger raised his head with a jerk, while Tuck noticed, and not for the first time either, that when the Friar was excited by some daring or original idea, it was not so much that his eyes shone as that an intense inner flame, like a magic candle burning in his very midriff, suddenly revealed itself
through his eyes
.

“Listen, my friend,” Roger Bacon exclaimed, bending forward a little, and while with the exterior portion of his eyes he stared through the body of his interlocutor, and, as it seemed, through the wall of his cell, and even across the swaying tops of the forest-trees, he was unable to stop the gleaming flame of his new idea from magnetizing the amazed Tuck.

“Listen,” he repeated. And then, in a perfectly calm and easy tone, while he re-possessed himself once more of the corpse of the yellowhammer. “What I want you to do, my faithful one, is to bring this Jewish maid up here to me so that I can ask her a few important questions. No! You needn’t look so scared. You’ll be here all the time she’s here! I haven’t
the faintest wish to enjoy her, far less ravish her. All I want is to talk to her. But I want to be absolutely frank and open with you, old friend, and there is, I confess, one other thing I want with her—no! don’t look like that! It’s nothing
whatever
to do with sex. It’s only that being a virgin—for I know from my own experience that the Jews are very particular about the virginity of their maids—she’ll have it in her to give the final touch to the Brazen Head over there!”

Thus speaking, he pointed with the hand that held the feathered body towards a large alcove at the foot of his small bed—an alcove which at that moment was covered by a heavy velvet curtain hanging from a cord. Intimately well-known to every living soul in both the Priory and Convent of Bumset was that alcove in the cell of their inventive prisoner; for, of all the magical creations of this extraordinary person, his Brazen Head with the power of speech—and indeed, so it seemed to some among them, with the power of thought too—was the most astounding.

“O! of course, Doctor of all Doctors,” murmured Brother Tuck with low-breathed obeisance, “anything I can do or this Hebrew Virgin can do to help with your Head of Brass
must
be done; since the Head, as we all know, is what alone can save our country and our king from destruction.”

“Nothing,” thought Roger Bacon, “that I have ever done in the interest of my life’s work was more effective with the populace than when I told Fulcode, before he was Cardinal or Legate, that I was trying to make an Ark of the Tabernacle for the Nameless One of Israel that should protect us from our enemies as the Jewish Ark protected the Chosen People from the Philistines. Fulcode scattered that story about the Brazen Head being Britain’s peculiar and special magical Protector. It is Fulcode’s spreading of that tale that has protected my work from Bonaventura’s hatred more than anything else! Well! while it protects my inventions it
does
protect my king and my country. The Legate could have soon found out, if he made any enquiries, how completely my family ruined itself by helping the King against the Barons. Anyone who knows anything at all knows how much more liberty there has been under poor old Henry than there’s ever been under the Barons and their accurst house of De Montford!”

“Listen to me, Tuck, my dear friend,” he said aloud. “The practical question for us now is how to get this girl through the entrance-hall and all those passages and up the stairs to this room. And what I’ve thought of is this. You know how often great fish are found stranded on Weymouth sands and on Chesil Beach? Well then! Why shouldn’t I have developed a mania for trying to bring to life dolphins and porpoises and other large fish by various secret methods of my own? And why shouldn’t you explain all this to the girl and persuade her to let you carry her—wrapped up of course so that nothing of her is visible—through those front passages and up these stairs? If you did it after the evening meal, there wouldn’t be many people about, and those you did meet would be sufficiently dazed with meat and drink as not to be very observant or very astute in explanation of what they
did
see! Do you think you could manage to do this tomorrow night, Tuck? It would be a good night for it, because, if it’s not cloudy, this new Moon will be having a steady influence by then.”

The artful cook of Bumset Priory nodded knowingly, made a hurried sign of the cross upon the air in the direction of the small window, and had already turned to go, when Bacon exclaimed:

“O please take this, will you, Tuck, and bury it
somewhere
? Bury it
just
underground, not more than an inch or two deep—you can make a hole with a stick, or anything you find under your hand: it needn’t be deep down—but I want it to be quickly and properly eaten by worms, not flown away with by carrion-crows, or lugged off down a rat-hole! See what I mean, Tuck, my old friend? And bring——”