The Brazen Head (24 page)

“I’m glad I came out,” he told himself, “if only to be able to brood over the unbelievable advantage of being allowed to sit by the fire in my own chair in that faithful old armoury until I die. But—Jesus help us!—these young folk seem to think I’m half-dead already! Not one of them asked me whether I wanted to spend my days and nights with the Friar’s Head of Brass! But I’m glad they didn’t. For it would have been terribly hard to explain what I do want! And now that I come to think of it I seriously believe it was some queer
understanding
between the Head and me that brought me out here tonight! I wonder what time it is? About two o’clock in the morning, I wouldn’t wonder!
It has that kind of feeling
. O! but this Ghosta-girl had better be careful how near to this Head her home-sickness for Palestine and Jerusalem draws her! I didn’t have that queer presentiment for nothing that night when I sat with Lil-Umbra waiting for her lover Raymond!

“Sitting alone by the same fire, day in, day out, a person picks up a few little things about life here below, things that great giant Jews dream not of! And when I watched that little sister of yours, Master John, and talked of this same Head, I knew all of a sudden, and for a certainty, that this Thing, created not by God but by Friar Roger,
needed
, to make it complete, to make it its real self, to make it a true oracle of life’s hidden secrets, to be in some way connected with amaiden, who, without officially losing her maidenhead to the Head, would lose something of her inmost self, her secretest feminine self, to it, giving it that unique power of revelation, of
illumination
, of ultimate vision, that virgins alone possess!

“There’s the Fortress! We shall be there in a minute! Whether spending the rest of my days with a living intelligence created by man and not by God will lengthen or shorten my
days, I don’t know and don’t greatly care! But that it will make life far more interesting to me is certain. I’ve always hoped for something like this to happen and now it
has
happened
! Maybe this will prove a moment in the history of our race of an importance second only to the creation of Adam! We shall see!

“Meanwhile what I’ve got to do now is clear. I must make them all take off their shoes, and not utter a word, even in a whisper! And as for this pair of antics, this Colin and Clamp, hanging on to that pathetic old stick as if it were the sceptre of Solomon, I suppose I must find a corner for them to sleep in, in the Manor kitchen. They won’t do any harm, wherever they are; and I certainly can’t have them in my armoury!”

Several months had passed away into the revolving
rubbish-heap
of time—or, to placate our final resting-place with a grander name, into the palindromic abyss—since an abode was found for the Head in the armoury of the Fortress and under the guardianship of the old ex-bailiff.

“Why did you straddle me in my nakedness round the neck of that thing of brass?”

These startling words were the first that greeted Friar Bacon from the lips of Ghosta, when the old factotum of his
prison-chamber
brought her to see him.

“Sit down, my daughter,” the Friar replied, laying down his pen and pushing back across the table from beneath his wrists the parchment upon which he was at work.

“There, child, sit down
there
!” And he pointed to an
upright
seat on the opposite side of the table, a seat which in appearance was the sort of chair that any young girl in any epoch would have associated with some sort of goblin royalty and elfin ritual. “And you may leave me,” he added, turning to the lay-brother, “for a few minutes now. I shall not be doing any harm to this good maid, but I want to talk to her alone for a while if you don't mind.”

Brother Tuck gave them a quick glance and a grave nod, and, shuffling to the door, took himself off.

“Well, my dear, I'll tell you exactly why, so to speak, I behaved to you as the angel, on Annunciation Day, behaved to our Lady.”

“You don't mean, I hope, Father,” Ghosta interrupted earnestly, “that you did really marry me to the Head, because
if you did I must, with all the power I have, beg you to divorce me at once; for the truth is, Father, I want to marry a man of my own faith and my own race, which, as I expect you already know, is the Jewish faith and the Hebrew race. Yes, Father, I belong and always shall belong to the House of Israel; and it is as impossible for me to enter into such a covenant with any Christian as it would be for a sea-gull to swear fidelity to a
barn-door
fowl!”

“Listen, dear child,” said the Friar, speaking very slowly and in a voice that was as grave as if he were reciting a pardon on a scaffold. “There are moments in all our lives when it is necessary for us to act in a way that makes use of both good and evil. In actual reality—for we need not drag in that treacherous word ‘truth', which can cover and justify a thousand
abominations
—in actual living reality we are compelled—and if you ask me ‘compelled by whom or by what?' I can only say I do not know—but we are compelled by a force, that may be as much outside the Devil as it is outside God, to do something which is clearly contrary to goodness and righteousness and morality and sanctity and holiness and virtue.

“You must understand, my dear child, that I'm not saying we have at these moments to become one with any devilish power that is opposing God or defying all that the prophets have taught us down the ages. We must honestly recognise, however, that without becoming a part of the Evil Power that opposes itself to God, we are at this particular moment acting contrary to what we know to be the good way and the righteous way.

“The point is that we are acting thus in obedience to a force within us, which we feel by an overpowering instinct to be as much outside the Good as it is outside the Evil, and as much outside God as it is outside the Devil. What we feel, my dear child, at these moments—I mean what I, your old Friar, feels—is that I am obeying an absolutely new revelation, a revelation that may change the entire world.”

Ghosta, who had been listening with concentrated attention to all this, now lifted her elbows onto the table and rested her chin upon her two hands.

“Was it a part,” she enquired earnestly, “of your creation of a living soul in a Bronze Head to make me embrace that
Image as you did, straddling across its neck in my nakedness? How did you manage to read my secret thoughts and the hidden feelings of my most secret life? For you were right, Father, you were perfectly right. It had been my desire, while remaining a virgin—for I always had an absolute horror of losing my maidenhead—to experience once in my life before I died, the sensation of giving in a clinging embrace the life-drops from my innermost being to
Something
that I pressed close against me.

“It needn't have been a man! That was the queer thing about the longing I had. It was that I, Ghosta, might, in my virginity, and without losing my maidenhead, and indeed, if possible, without having any love for this Something—I didn't care what it was—which I embraced, be the creator of a
completely
new, new, new,—No! I was never presumptuous enough to think of it as a new world, let me call it a new form of life in the world. I was always—but you know me through and through already, Father, my Friar of Friars—fascinated by the word
Parthenogenesis
.

“It is a long word, and I have been told it is a Greek word, and that its meaning is the giving birth to a new life by a girl without losing her maidenhead or forfeiting anything of her natural virginity. So that when you hoisted me a-straddle that day round the neck of the Head of Brass, with my nakedness pressing against its brazen skin, I had an ecstasy. I said to myself: ‘What is happening to me now is the very thing I have always longed for! I am not losing my maidenhead, and yet I am drawing from the inmost depths of myself a dew-drop of living creation.'”

A look of indescribable relief passed over the Friar's troubled face, and he leaned forward across the table and touched with the tips of his long fingers the head which the girl was
supporting
on her arms as she leant forward.

“The Lord bless thee and keep thee!” he said gravely, “and lift up the light of his countenance upon thee and give thee peace!” And then he added, withdrawing his right hand from his guest's forehead and his left hand from his own manuscript, and tilting his chair a little to the rear on its back legs, “I swear I don't know, my dear daughter, any living woman I could talk to as freely as I am now talking to you. I certainly
couldn't do so to any of the ladies who rule the Manors and Castles round here! Have you, my dear child, realized why it is that I go on so steadily refusing all invitations to leave this prison-chamber and go where I'd have more freedom of movement?”

Ghosta smiled a quite whimsical smile. “Yes indeed, Father, I can answer that! This old Prior who is master here, as I know well from my life in the Convent, where the nuns always consider him and his ideas and his policy above any line they are ordered to follow by the lady who immediately rules us, has only one object in life—namely, to enjoy himself as much as he possibly can in the narrow circle into the centre of which fate has dropt him.

“What he has to consider are the hours for meals, for strolling in the grounds, for listening to the anthems and chants from his choir-pew in the chapel, for studying the particular Latin text, whether from the Priory library or from his own private shelves, which carries in its train the largest number of old memories of his far-off youth. Now when we consider this matter quite clearly and honestly, Friar, my revered Father, we find nothing less than the surprising fact that this devotion to his own personal pleasure and interest for the whole of the day, and for whatever portion of the night is at the disposal of his personal will—for we can hardly include the hours when the worthy man is asleep, for our dreams, and I'm sure you'll agree with me there, Father, are
not
under the control of our will—is identical with what thinking people like ourselves are absorbed in.

“Whereas these rulers of great manorial castles, with their Ladies and their Bailiffs, and these royal rulers of great lands with their Treasurers and Chancellors and Bishops and Captains and Princes, are occupied day and night with meddling in other people's affairs, with invading other people's territories, with taking away other people's property, with imprisoning and murdering other people's subjects and citizens. Haven't I been speaking truly, Father, in what I've just said?”

Ghosta had indeed been uttering these unpopular and
unorthodox
feelings in a voice not only a good deal louder than the one she generally used, but a great deal more heavily charged with emotion.

Friar Bacon brought his chair back to the table with a jerk and stretched out his right arm clear across his manuscript, upon which from the small square aperture in the roof the sun was at that moment throwing down a long straight ray, a ray more crowded with sun-motes than Ghosta, had she been in a mood to observe such things, would have had to confess she had ever seen in a sun-ray before.

In spite of the fact that they were looking straight into each other's eyes, the Friar's gesture was so unexpected that for a second she disregarded it. Then she met it with her own right hand; and, in the warm pressure that followed, the heart-felt alliance between them was sworn and sealed.

The Friar's hand rested once more on the edge of his manuscript, and hers once more clasped its fellow and propped her chin while her elbows remained on the dark, smooth-polished wood of that round table. And now both the Friar and Ghosta smiled at each other and turned their eyes away. This they both did naturally and instinctively; but having done so, the quick and lively perception they each possessed was severally attracted by the quivering and elongated sun-ray above their heads and its myriads of tiny little dancing specks.

“Isn't it queer to think,” commented Ghosta, “how many historical characters such as we read about in the scriptures, and such as they lecture about in the universities, like Moses and Joshua and like Plato and Socrates and Julius Caesar and Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, must have noticed in their colleges and palaces and temples, and especially at crucial moments in their lives, these millions of dancing atoms! What did Socrates feel when these tiny atoms came dancing into his cell while he was waiting for the executioner with the Hemlock?”

“A question indeed, my dear!” echoed the Friar. “And I'd mighty well like to hear how Plato, who was so confoundedly clever at reaching that great teacher's secret thoughts, and cleverer still at giving them the particular twist that would make them fit into his own ideal system, would describe how the great self-doomed corrupter of youth would have argued with such an one, if some God had endowed one of those motes up there with the power of speech and started it off on a
metaphysical
protest against the claim of the human race to be the only judge amid the atomic children of the Cosmos!”

“O Father, my dear Father!” cried Ghosta in huge delight. “
Do
go on imagining what one of those tiny dots of matter would say to Socrates if it did question him!”

“Well! for one thing, my dear child,” rejoined the Friar, and then he stopped abruptly.

Ghosta, who was turning from him to that descending
sun-fall
of dancing motes, and then back again to him, had a look of reverence on her face as if he'd really been the great magician that most of his enemies and a few of his friends considered him, and as if he might, at any moment, without moving a hand or a foot, give orders to that sun-stream to alter its course, and as if the sun-ray might obey him, and after making a
disconcerting
circle round their chamber, might hasten to the door, and vanish down the tower-stairs.

But he went on quite calmly. “Don't you suppose, my dear, that this whole business of being one of the lucky millions of dust-specks, out of the trillions and quadrillions of less lucky ones, must be so exciting to every one of those little objects that the whole of its being would be so absorbed in what is happening to it that it wouldn't have a particle of power left to ask any question of anybody. Yes, and I would say—and wouldn't you, my dear girl, say the same?—that if it had any choice left to it, it would feel it was wiser to lavish all its power of response on that lucky moment than to ponder on suitable philosophical questions to put to——”

At this point they were interrupted by shouts and cries
outside
, by a clatter of feet on the stairs, and by the flinging open of the door. It was young John who now rushed in, followed by Colin and Clamp, and three or four of the Fortress's most active retainers. John was carrying a broken piece of statuary pressed against his chest; and this he hurriedly flung down on the Friar's bed in the corner, after a quick nervous glance at the despoiled alcove hard-by where once stood the Brazen Head.

“What on earth is this, Master John?” cried Ghosta, rising to her full height and hurrying to the bed to see what the young man had deposited there. But Friar Bacon remained seated with his pen still between his fingers, and the only special movement he made that Clamp and Colin, who were both observing him closely, were able to discern, was that he began
to draw some sort of Euclidian figure at the bottom of the parchment in front of him, and that this Euclidian figure was an equal-sided square surrounded by a circle.

“Father! Father!” murmured Ghosta a moment later, “do, for Heaven's sake, look at this!” and, shaking off young John, who tried to hold her back, and advancing straight to the Friar's chair, from the side opposite to where Clamp had already begun to watch with mute and fascinated absorption the movements of the Friar's pen, she thrust under Roger Bacon's eyes what clearly was the broken half of a female head, elaborately chiselled out of a block of very hard stone.

But a torrent of verbal eloquence, like the sound of a
breaking
wave to the splashing tune of which the Friar studied what Ghosta thrust beneath his eyes, was uttered by the excitable Colin, and accompanied by such lavish gesticulation that it was like being addressed by one of those flocks of winged angels speaking with one voice, such as in religious altar-pieces often form the flying chariot of God the Father as it descends from Heaven.