The Brazen Head (25 page)

“The General of the Franciscan Order, this thrice-accurst Bonaventura,” cried Colin making his voice resound through every portion of the chamber, and it was as if the quivering sun-ray, which had removed itself altogether, had suddenly returned in a new incarnation of pure sound, “has now with the help of those ruffians from Lost Towers, whom he swears he has converted, and at the command of the Pope, whom he swears he represents, begun meddling with Master Tilton's statue of Our Lady in that shrine he's building!

“And do you know what this false saint has done now? He has started a shocking and wicked rumour, entirely a lie, of course, but you know how these lies spread—that Master John's sister and his brother Tilton have been found guilty of incest! And—as if
that
wasn't enough!—do you know what further lie he's invented? He swears that our Master Tilton, heir to the Manor of Roque and to the Fortress Castle, which his mother's family have held since the days of King Stephen, has an even greater sin on his conscience than incest with his sister! For—says this pretty saint, who behaves far worse than Judas—our Master Tilton has committed the supreme sacrilegious sin, of carving the face of Our Lady in the centre
of this shrine so that she shall resemble his sister with whom he has sinned!”

“Has Bonaventura really had the gall, John my friend, to go to such lengths as this man says?”

The Friar's voice was as steady, and his manner as quiet and collected, as if he were referring to no more than a point of propriety in some public, metaphysical debate; but Ghosta noticed that he made a slight motion of his hand as if to wave back a little both Colin and Clamp and the two or three armed men who accompanied them.

“Yes, Master, across my heart and on my life,” replied John. “That's what he's done! My mother is so upset that she has shut herself up with my sister and won't allow her to go riding with Raymond de Laon, as the two of them had arranged to do today, for fear that this wretched Bonaventura, with his Lost Towers troop, might kidnap her or imprison her, or even carry her with him in a ship to Rome, as he has already done with other ladies who have been accused of various offences of the same sort.

“As for my father, he refuses to take the thing seriously. He says that Tilton ought to be hunting wild boars in the forest instead of building shrines with his own hands and using Lil-Umbra as his model for the Mother of God. But I notice that he has remained at home since the trouble started, and that he's set a guard outside the shrine, to make sure that this mock-saint doesn't excite his cohort of ‘converted' robbers to destroy the whole shrine and ruin Tilton's hard work on it for nearly a year!

“What drove me to come, most honoured Friar, to make a special appeal to you, was the fact that I chanced to hear” —young John flushed a little as he announced this, revealing the fact that he had not been able to resist the temptation to listen at his parents' door—“to hear my father tell my mother that if they attacked the shrine again, or came anywhere near the postern-gate again, he would arm all our people, both serfs and freemen, and make such an attack on that damned Lost Towers as would settle them for ever and a day! You see, most reverend Friar, this man undoubtedly was at one time the Pope's emissary or legate or ambassador or whatever the proper legal name is—round here they use a word for him
that's too bawdy to repeat—and no doubt at
that
time when he had the proper seals of office he might have been able to carry off Lil-Umbra, and Tilton too, to Rome and accuse them there. But as it is, with no official credentials from the Pope, and with no proper royal support from our sick King, I don't believe he can do very much to hurt us, except start rumours and spread lies.”

Friar Bacon groaned, and bowed his head for a second over his pen and paper. Then he said quietly, but without looking up:

“Sit down a moment, lad, while we consider all this as steadily as we can. What woul
d
y
ou advise us to do, Ghosta? Both John and I—that's true, isn't it, lad?—hold the view that at most dangerous and ticklish crises, it's often from the feminine mind we get the best hint as to what to do.”

Ghosta didn't hesitate a second. “How did the shock of this wicked accusation,” she enquired, “strike your sister and brother, Master John?”

“Well, to tell you the truth—” and it was clear to
everybody
that young John was very glad to be asked that question, “I felt proud of the way they took it! You know it was Nurse who first told us about the dastardly fabricated tale which this devilish wretch started; and we were all together up in the nursery at the top of the house when she blurted it out. Father had come up about this attack on Tilton's shrine; and no sooner had Nurse used the word than Tilton threw his arms round Lil-Umbra's neck, and gave her a great hug and a lot of loud kisses all over her face. ‘Don't you mind, my darling!' he cried. ‘If I ever tried to do such wickedness to you I'm sure the good God would strike me dead before it was done!'”

Roger Bacon's face lit up with satisfaction, and with a certain humorous amusement too, young John thought, as he eagerly watched him; but the Friar's words when he spoke were anything but final or conclusive:

“But now listen to me, my children both, and you two also my kind friends,” and he made a double gesture with the hand that held his pen, one in the direction of Colin, and the other in the direction of Clamp, “what we've got to do now is to think of some way of out-witting this self-appointed
representative
of the Holy Father, supported—and the thing's not without
precedent in the history of our mad purblind human race—by this local nest of rapscallions. If any better idea comes into your head, Ghosta, while I'm explaining my scheme, let's hear it at once, and don't mind interrupting me if you're afraid of forgetting what you suddenly thought of!

“But this is what has just come into my mind as a good plan. A week ago I had a communication from my friend Peter Peregrinus, who is now lecturing in France, to tell me that the famous master in philosophy, Albert of Cologne—who belongs to the Dominican order, and indeed is such a loyal Dominican that, when he speaks in the University of Paris, he defends his view of Aristotle against both all the Arabian and all the Latin Averroists and completely demolishes them—is at this very moment visiting Oxford! This is an astonishing piece of news to me. I
had
heard that he was interested in the
Summa
Theologicae
of Alexander of Hales, but I never thought I'd live to hear that the great Albert of Cologne should actually be in this island, still less that he should be visiting Oxford!

“I have exchanged letters with him a good many times, as I suppose all disciples of Aristotle have done, and he and I have always agreed that the science of life didn't end with Plato or with Aristotle or even with Grosseteste or with any other student of philosophy. But, my dears, the reputation of Albert of Cologne all over the world is terrific, greater than that of any other modern master. Every man who can read and write in this whole west country, whether they're Franciscans or Dominicans, Monks, or Friars, Abbots, or Priors or parish priests, have heard nothing but praise of him since they first began their A. B. C.! When you come to metaphysics he's the top boy, so to speak, of the whole
schola mundi
, if you leave out Israel and India and China! Now if we could send to Albertus some wise and diplomatic representative of our side, in this quarrel with Bonaventura, it strikes me that it's not at all impossible that the great teacher from Cologne might be persuaded to come, as the most famous Dominican, to confront this troublesome Franciscan.

“That would soon, as we used to say in Ilchester, ‘settle the hash,' of our Bona, the Venturesome! I am perfectly certain that what started the whole thing was the fact that your excellent parents, John, gave shelter in the Fortress to my Brazen Head.
It was this that kindled all this obstinate rage in our ex-legate's mind. He's somehow got it lodged in his one-track sanctified midriff that the Holy Trinity we all worship has received a staggering blow from my having dared to create in the person of my Brazen Head a rival creation to Adam and Eve. I tell you, my good friends, I tell you, John dear, if we could only hit upon the right person to send as an ambassador to the great Albert now in Oxford, a person who would be in a position to escort him down here, with him as the chief Dominican to confront this pseudo-saint of the Franciscans, the whole affair would soon be settled.”

As can well be imagined, both Ghosta and John were now murmuring, each with their own special manner of emphasis and intensity, the name of Raymond de Laon; and Friar Bacon, as if to seek still further confirmation of this idea, looked first at Colin and then at Clamp. Both men came so close on getting this faintly interrogative glance that they completely hid the Friar from Ghosta and John, but a double vote of unqualified recognition of Raymond as their Ambassador to Albert of Cologne these two certainly did give; for the voice of Colin seemed to flap its wings in widening circles above every back and every head in the place; and the voice of Clamp seemed to drive in one rusty nail after another as he fastened up their decision over the Norman arch of the event.

“Well then, my friends,” cried the Friar, rising from his seat and moving quickly round the two men who were bending over him, “we may take it that our Council chamber has uttered its decisive verdict, and that Raymond de Laon shall be our ambassador to the great Albert in Oxford. Will you convey our request to him, John my lad, and let us know the result as quickly as possible? And now I think I must beg you all to descend to the lower regions of this hospitable Priory; for it is really absolutely necessary for me to finish this page of what I am calling my
Opus Major
before I sleep tonight; and your arrival, gentlemen, is the cause of this necessity, and I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you all for being this same cause.

“For the real truth is that your sudden appearance and the more than startling interest of what you have announced to me, combined with the expectation of encountering, man to
man, he a Dominican and myself a Franciscan, the great Albert of Cologne, has caused me to remember certain intensely important details that I had completely forgotten relating to the journey of Brother William of Rubruck to the Grand Khan at Karakorum in Tartary, where he stayed from December 1253 till July 1254.

“It was Brother William himself when I met him in Paris who told me these things; and although at this moment I was writing about the sermon he told me he preached in
Constantinople
on Palm Sunday 1253, I had absolutely forgotten that great congress of religions over which the Mongolian Khan presided at Karakorum, a congress of the Mohammedan, Buddhist, and Christian religions, and I really must write about it while it has come back so vividly to my mind. I am sure I would have left out Brother William's description of that Karakorum congress of religions altogether if our little meeting tonight, and our decision to send an ambassador to bring the head of the Dominicans to deal with the head of the Franciscans, hadn't stirred up my memory of what the brother told me.”

A universal murmur, in such low tones among themselves as almost to convey the impression that, having been thus commended for stirring up the Friar's mind, they were seized with the fear of so disturbing it by their lively discussion that the effect on his
Opus Major
would be destructive of the good they had already done, was the immediate result of this grateful appeal to their courtesy. Then without another word, and headed by Colin and Clamp, and followed by Ghosta and young John, they gave a series of quaint little good-night salutations and descended the stairs.

Friar Bacon was left standing alone in that topmost chamber of Bumset Priory. He still held the handle-end, so to speak, of the pen he had been using when he rose to return their valedictory gestures; and now automatically began moving it to and fro, as if the talk-charged air of that recently crowded room were itself the parchment upon which it was his destiny to hand down to posterity his ideas and his discoveries. Strange and far-reaching were the thoughts that passed through his head.

“Here am I,” he told himself, “one of the curious animals produced upon this planet that have come to be called men, and are now confronted by the necessity of recording for the benefit of future specimens of such creatures, what were the actual causes of our appearance upon this particular promontory of matter.”

The Friar at this point ceased inditing invisible words upon the invisible air, and, after deliberately replacing his pen upon the table by the side of his unfinished parchment page, crossed over to his bed and stretched himself out on his back upon it, with his head on the pillow, and clasped his shins with his hands.

“Little did I think,” he pondered, “what I should be doing in three years that night when Fontancourt showed me the letter he’d just had from our friend Petrus! Didn’t Fontancourt swear to me that Petrus would never stop studying magnetism or writing about his studies? Three years ago that was! O God, O God! what things have happened since then and are still happening!

“Why didn’t I tell those fellows just now before they went away that it was Peter Peregrinus, and not their old Roger, who first thought of using a lodestone to draw like to like; and that if it hadn’t been for that divine inspiration of his I could never have invented my Brazen Head? How we
damnable
inventors do love to hug our inventions and get drunk on the glory of them! And now I must needs defend my precious discoveries by setting this Dominican wolf upon our Franciscan fox!”

At this point the Friar let his thin legs sink down side by side on his bed, and lifting his clasped hands as high above his head as they could reach began murmuring—not in Latin, far less in Hebrew, but in the Wessex dialect of his native Ilchester—a homely and natural prayer: “O Everlasting God, who lookest down from far outside all this curst universe of matter which thou hast created”—and here he couldn’t resist using, with a wry touch of the incorrigible humour which not only characterized all his intercourse with others, but displayed itself even in his secretest thoughts about himself, and about the whole confused arena of contemporary
speculation
, as a little private joke between God and himself, the quaint, precise, technical, academic and metaphysical phrase for “outside our whole system of things”, namely the phrase “
ab exstrinsico
”, which, as he now muttered it aloud with a sort of chuckle in that slowly darkening room, would have had a queer effect upon any eavesdropper—“and
ab exstrinsico
save me!”

But after making this appeal to the Mystery at the back of all life, Roger Bacon closed his eyes with such a peaceful sigh that it was clear that he himself felt perfectly satisfied with his little private interview with his creator.

The Friar’s descent, or ascent shall we say, into the blessed land of oblivion, now gently and deliciously invaded by the feathered dreams of sleep, was soon disturbed however by a resolutely firm and yet cautiously light knocking at the door, a knocking which did not wake him at first, but mingled with his dreams, and mingled with them in such a curiously prophetic manner that he became vividly aware, even before he awoke, of the personality of the intruder, who was none other than his faithful friend and devoted adherent of a great many years, his servant Miles.

Miles and he had indeed been young men when their association first began, and Miles always absolutely refused to be known by any other name than this Roman word for a soldier. Miles came from the old Roman town of Durnovaria, a town which the people of Wessex had already begun to call Dorchester, just as the older name of Friar Roger’s own ancient market-town had recently come to be changed into Ilchester.

Yes! His waking dream had not misled him. There, in the fading, late-afternoon twilight, when he went to the door and opened it, standing erect on the threshold, was his friend, his man, his devoted under-study, his partner, his disciple, his obedient slave, his servitor, his alter ego, Miles of Dorchester!

“
Master
!” cried Miles in an ecstasy of joy; and flinging his hawk-feather cap into the middle of the room, he fell upon his knees, clasped the Friar tightly round the waist, and pressed his forehead hard against his hero’s navel.

“There, there, there!” murmured this latter reassuringly and tenderly, and very much in the tone with which a
responsive
dog-lover would soothe a majestic, over-emotional, over-sensitive wolf-hound; and as he spoke he raised Miles to his feet, led him across the floor incidentally picking up the man’s hawk-feather cap and handing it to him as they went, and seating him in the chair recently occupied by Ghosta, sat down opposite to him and laid his two clasped fists upon his page with the air of one who has decided to substitute some different form of urgent pressure for the one associated with pens and parchment.

One remarkable peculiarity of the man Miles was the way his countenance altered in a moment from a majestic,
monumental
, and commanding reserve, not unmixed with an astute alertness that had in it something of the primeval and
bottomless
cunning of a simple animal, into a melting abandonment to an emotion of devotion so extreme that it was almost painful to witness.

The Friar pressed his hand on the man’s shoulder as he himself got up again to set before them both some wine and a couple of goblets. Then, when the Dorchester-born warrior, who, while lifting his glass, looked, with his massive neck and his clear-cut profile, distinctly like a well-known bust of Caesar Augustus, had rested and refreshed himself a little, the Friar
put the straight question to him, “Well, old friend,” he enquired, “and what’s the news?”

“He’s down there now. I left him in the lobby. They are all busy in the kitchen, and the Prior’s begun his dinner. So I left him in that dark entrance on that cushioned seat. He’ll be asleep, I wouldn’t wonder, when I go down to him. Shall I tell them in the kitchen that you’d like him to have his supper up here with you? And that whatever they’ve got for you will do for him too? Shall I tell them that you’d like a bottle or so more of wine and of the best they’ve got? And shall I say that they’d better bring out a mattress for him into the lobby where he is now and a few coverings for it?”

Had Ghosta been there still, or indeed had any feminine being been there, she would not have failed to follow the varying expressions that crossed the Friar’s face as he listened to this speech, and to follow them with growing astonishment. Friar Bacon’s countenance, together with the shape of his head, represented, as any intelligent woman would have recognised at once, or any man either, who happened to be possessed of that sort of visual penetration in which most women leave most men far behind, a perfect example of the pure intellect as it struggles almost always with difficulty, and generally totally in vain, to cope with the irrational changes and chances of human life upon this planet.

The Friar had a delicate face in the precise sense in which all the way down the centuries the word “sensitive” has been used. Anyone could see at one glance that the man was abnormally porous to impressions. And it was indeed clear at this moment that the impressions which reached him from the revelations that this Durnovarian retainer of his was so calmly and
relentlessly
disclosing were of the most crucial intensity; for little complicated patterns of criss-cross interlinings began to appear on his forehead and under his eyes that resembled
frost-marks
on an exposed window.

It was only when Miles, having entirely finished what it was his business to report, had permitted his Roman features to assume that patient expectant look of an officer anxious to catch from the lips of his general every faintest nuance of the orders issued, that the Friar realized that their relative positions had been reversed, and that it was himself who was
now standing in front of Miles, watching and pondering, and asking, not this unqualified fellow-man, but the inscrutable features of Fate itself, what on earth had to be done now.

What he said, when it came, was pathetic enough in its simplicity. “What do you advise me to do, Miles?”

That this typical Centurion had, from old experience of the master he loved so passionately, expected just exactly this supplication, this appeal to a knowledge of life as it went along such as had nothing to do with learning, was proved by the military decisiveness of his answer.

“I think,” he replied firmly, putting down his glass, and speaking in his calmest and most Roman tone, “that you’d better send me into the kitchen to emphasize this man’s importance, and yet to make it plain that it would be more considerate to Prior Bog to spare him any immediate invasion; at any rate to let us all have dinner in peace before we do anything and before he has to do anything.”

A sigh of relief so deep that it seemed to come from the soles of his sandals shook Friar Bacon from head to foot.

“But you’ll have to bring him up here, I suppose?”

And when Miles nodded to this his master accepted it as if it were the word of destiny, escape from which would be hopeless.

“Very well,” he conceded. “Bring him up; and explain to him that you’ll come up yourself a little later with his meal. We don’t want anyone else up here, do we?” This last sentence the Friar added in what was almost an appealing tone. And Miles, already at the door, answered with a significant shake of his head.

The moments that followed were among the most painful in Roger Bacon’s life. From his habitual loneliness as a scientific prisoner of religion, he had come to be a man of two different worlds; and since each of these worlds required, if he was to deal with it adequately, all the creative power as well as all the destructive power he possessed in his own personality, it was no easy thing to deal with both these worlds at the same time.

It was natural to him to concentrate his attention upon his private world of lonely thought and lonely experiment, and to feel a peculiar kind of nervous suffering whenever it was
necessary for him to face the shocks and clashes and
misunderstandings
of real life.

“And now,” he told himself, “I have to meet the one man in all the world with whom I find it hardest to deal.”

Yes! There he was!
And since the door had been deliberately left open by the departing Miles, it was inevitable that after a series of rather dragging footsteps—to which the Friar, as he stood in the centre of the room, listened with something like a suspension of breath—the man who entered made no pretence of knocking.

He was of low stature and of a thin weak body; but the extraordinary thing about him was his head. The head of Master Peter Peregrinus of Picardy was simply enormous. It made his body and legs look like those of a dwarf, though in reality they weren’t quite as small as that. The skin of his face was so deadly white that, if you had come upon him asleep, you would have certainly assumed that he was a corpse. His hair was straight, not curly, and of a glossy jet-black, with each individual hair as thick as that of a horse, so that their combined weight, massed together on the top of his skull, give his whole figure at a distance the effect of a wooden post on an exposed sea-bank, with either a thick growth of dusky seaweed covering the top of it, or a big black feathery bird perched upon it.

The chief peculiarity of Master Peter’s mouth was its absence of lips. It was simply a slit in smooth white marbly stone. And it seemed as if in dispensing with lips it had also decided to dispense with teeth. What did appear, and that not unfrequently, was Master Peter’s tongue. This object, abnormally long, and unusually pointed, was always shooting out from that slit in its marbly home, and every time it
with-drew
it gave the impression of having licked up some form of life which it would shortly be digesting.

But what the most ramificating, debouching,
circumnavigating
, deviating, perambulating chronicler would have had to be leading up to all this while, like a slippery serpent approaching something as hard to catch off-guard as itself, are, as the simplest reader has long ago guessed, Master Peter’s eyes. These were so large that when the man was excited, as he always was when not stunned by a blow or sunk into an impenetrable gulf of sleep, they conveyed the impression of
being a pair of outlets for some interior volcano that if it were blocked up or barred down, would burst the cranium that contained it into a million smithereens.

It was doubtless to evade, for at least a couple of beats of the pulse of time, a glance into this explosive crater that Roger Bacon, uttering, as casually as he could, the exclamation, “Well! Well! Well!” made a deliberately slow circuit round his visitor from Picardy, and firmly, calmly, magisterially, and yet very softly, closed the door.

On returning from this breathing-space it can be believed he felt no surprise when he found Master Peter already seated at the table, not only tapping with the narrow finger-nail of his longest finger the word “vibrationem” half-way down the parchment page in front of him, but even steering a little horn-cup, with red wine-stains inside it, up and down among the oddly-patterned wood-marks of the table’s edge.

Master Peter’s demonic spirit did indeed so completely dominate the situation that the nervous Friar found himself seated at his own table in the visitor’s seat with the visitor in the host’s seat, found himself staring blindly into those two black holes, each of them a swirling Charybdisian vortex, and listening to the man’s words without asking him a single question or contradicting a single statement he made.