The Brazen Head (30 page)

“Well, my Lord Albertus, shall we move on again? It’s not more than a mile from here.”

“I’m at your service, my son; and I warrant that you, my lads”—and he gave the Cone Castle group a friendly smile—“will be thankful enough to exchange our theology for a beaker of good ale or even a flagon of cider!”

The silence of them all was very marked as they threaded their way between mossy fir-stumps and ferny rocks, while the hot noon-rays, hidden by one branch and revealed between two branches, and forever being broken and intercepted by the dark feathery foliage of ancestral pines, turned the endless
bluebells
, upon which it seemed impossible to avoid treading, into an elfin army of some aboriginal pixy-monarch, who though confronted by a cohort of giants was by no means frustrated in his attempt to add yet another outpost to his sylvan realm. It was indeed a natural part, this speechless silence of them all, of the sweltering docility of every forest creature under the royal glare of the lord of life.

When they came in sight of the Great Gate of the Fortress a curious psychic event occurred. This was an event that, in itself without any further evidence, is a proof that all those wild and desperate feelings which reach us from every quarter of the horizon, passing from the north to the west, and from the west, through the north again, to the south, are sometimes fully justified.

For here, precisely and exactly here, where, by a superhuman and Herculean heave, such as more than the muscles of any ordinary human frame could have endured without cracking or breaking, the Lord of the Manor of Roque lifted the horse Cheiron from his four hooves and rolled him over on the ground, the appalling strain of the effort he made, and the weird
desperation
of the awareness accompanying it, had actually created a living spirit.

And at this point in their approach to this spot every single
one of this small company, including Raymond and Albert the Great, felt a definite stab in the region of their heart, as if an invisible spirit had struck them just there.

And if Albert of Cologne had boldly enquired: “To what tribe of spirits do you belong?” this “Genius Loci” might well have answered with the words: “I am the spirit of a
supernatural
effort, an effort that was not only an effort of muscles but an effort of will and an effort of mind and an effort that drew into itself a positively unlawful, insupportable, and intolerable strength from all the living things about it, from the trees, from the creatures of the earth, from the birds of the air, from the actual stones and rocks and earth-mould of this place, so that”, thus might the spirit of that shock, the spirit of that superhuman strain have replied to the bold question of the sage from Cologne, “so that I am a spirit which to the end of time, yes! until ice from above, or fire from below, destroy this whole forest, will embody in a shudder of this air the effort this man made; one of the most terrific efforts ever made on this earth since Hercules lifted up the Giant Antaeus in his arms to strangle him in the air; and I, the spirit of this appalling effort, will remain here to guard this man’s gate against all his enemies unto the third and fourth millennium of his descendants!”

It was about this man, the Lord of the Manor of Roque and the master of the Fortress, that Albertus Magnus enquired at once, the moment he was ushered by Raymond de Laon in to the presence of Lady Val.

“Yes, O yes!” the lady replied, “and I’ll certainly tell him that your first question, reverend sir, was about his health. He strained something inside him. Gorthruk, our manor leech, who came here five years ago straight from Oxford, and is said to have studied medicine under the court physician in Paris, is of opinion that though the injury itself can never, by the nature of it, heal itself, my husband will very shortly be well enough to resume his hunting and fishing and his usual protective investigations round the outskirts of the Manor.

“Gorthruk has given us an ivory box containing three or four compartments each one of which contains several differently tasting tablets. Gorthruk says that, in his own village of Tintinhull, the blacksmith has been kept alive by just such
curative pills for four and twenty years, after a strain similar to the one suffered by my husband; only his trouble—the blacksmith’s I mean—was caused by a wrestling-match with the bailiff of the Manor of Montacute who was a very heavy man, and thus, when the blacksmith of Tintinhull picked him up in his arms and threw him into the village duck-pond, the village priest, whose name was Humph, and who came from Gloster, had to wade into the pond to get him out; for he hit his head on Gammer Grundy’s bucket, which had lain there, down in the mud, since the days of Thomas a Becket.”

Raymond de Laon had never before heard his betrothed’s mother talk in this free and easy way; but he told himself it must be due to the fact that all women, especially those in responsible positions and those with important households to look after, are invariably anxious to win favour with church dignitaries.

They are also, Raymond’s erratic thoughts ran on, often much more interested than are their hunting and fishing and fighting husbands, in historical and philosophical subjects, in spite of the fact that their opportunities for such studies are so much less. As to the easy homeliness of Lady Val’s talk, “don’t they all go on in that sort of way,” Raymond said to himself, “when they want to captivate us? The only alternative I suppose would be sculleries, store-cupboards, and
meat-skewers
, with a sagacious allusion, or even a sly glance now and again, towards bed-clothes.”

Whether sage or sly in her welcome, Lady Val soon disposed of her chief guest, and arranged for the Gone Castle contingent to dine at an earlier hour than was usual and at a special table in the dining-hall. She likewise gave her most regal and gracious permission to Raymond, as a reward for his skill as a tutelary ambassador, to take Lil-Umbra for a couple of hours’ ride in the forest.

“You’d better,” she added, as the pair went off, “start, and come back too, by the main entrance. Your father has placed such a powerful guard at Tilton’s shrine that there’s no possible danger from that quarter. But as nurse always used to say, ‘It’s silly to shout till the Devil’s gone out.’”

With a big silver tray arranged conveniently between them upon a stool made of exquisitely slender delicately twisted willow-twigs, upon which stood two glasses and a huge beaker
of red wine and a few oaten cakes, the old ex-bailiff of the manor of Roque found a perfect listener to his rambling talk in the great Albert of Cologne.

Accustomed to the part of the chief talker in the presence of less experienced, less volatile, less egocentric and much younger hearers, it was an indescribable relief to Albert the Great to rest and recline in this ancient armoury and listen in peace to this old gentleman’s rambling stories of an up-
and-down
long life full of the simple power of representative authority and of the simple piety of unquestionable conviction.

There in the background, just as if “It” also was listening to the old man’s talk, stood the Brazen Head, its confused
multiple-mooded
expression rejecting placidly any dogmatic solution of the entangled problem of existence. It may well be believed that Albertus Magnus didn’t confine himself to listening. Every now and again with the subtle wisdom of a born decipherer of difficult old documents he interpolated at certain
turning-points
a question by which into the unpremeditated
debouchings
of the senile narrator there was insinuated a flickering lantern, tied, as it were, round the neck of a darting bird, a lantern that might be compared to some providential
firefly
giving a celestial clarification to our dark pilgrimage through the mists of Chaos to the City of Cosmos.

But what struck Albertus Magnus most about this loquacious old gentleman was his attitude towards the Brazen Head. There was the Brazen Head, quite close to the ex-bailiff’s side, in fact almost touching the old man’s right shoulder; but its presence didn’t seem to disturb him in the least. Nor was it as if he altogether disregarded it. It was as if
he and
it had already reached some personal understanding between themselves, by virtue of which there was no longer any necessity for both of them to speak, since, when the ex-bailiff spoke, he spoke for them both.

“The whole trouble in this Fortress,” the ex-bailiff was presently murmuring, “comes from the fact that Lil-Umbra’s brothers are so different from each other that they are always arguing and disputing. This makes it necessary for Lil-Umbra to keep the balance between them, sometimes taking the side of Tilton the elder one, and sometimes the side of John the younger one.”

“But I should have thought,” protested the great teacher from Cologne, “that just for that very reason their sister’s mind would gain enormously and show signs of wonderful development.”

“You see, it’s like this, great Master,” murmured the old man rather querulously. “The elder boy is mad about architecture and about carving, while the younger thinks of nothing but what Friar Bacon has lately written or is likely to write; and the moment the poor girl feels sympathetic towards the artist brother, the other one, the younger one, gets indignant and begins railing against God and the church; and this of course sets the elder one off upon
his
particular hobby-horse, and they argue with each other just as, we are always being told, you great doctors of divinity dispute together, about essences and qualities and aspects and substances and forms, and how powerful angels are, and how crafty devils are, and whether the world had a beginning and whether it will have an end: and the result of all this is just the very opposite of what you have just now suggested; for the dear girl—and she is, I tell you, my lord, the sweetest and loveliest creature you ever saw—begins to hate the whole subject and to wish she’d been born a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist, or anything rather than a Christian.”

“You will, I hope,” threw in Albert of Cologne eagerly, for he recognized at once that he was on dangerous ground; and he didn’t fail to notice that this peace-loving old gentleman, who wandered a little in his mind, had a deep tenderness for this young maiden who was the betrothed of Raymond de Laon, “you will, I hope, forgive an impertinent and even a discourteous question, but I’d be very thankful if you’d tell me what it was in the relations between this maid of whom you speak and her brother Tilton, the builder and sculptor with his own hands of a shrine to Our Lady, that made it possible for Bonaventura to accuse them of the terrible sin of incest?”

To his great relief this daring, rude, and even outrageous
question
did not seem to trouble the old ex-bailiff in the very least.

“O
that’s
easily explained, great Doctor! Searching round in the ardent spirit of a born sculptor for some living model for the figure of Our Lady that he was so anxious to carve for the
shrine he was building, it naturally came into his head to make use of the perfect form and heavenly features of his chaste and beautiful sister.

“But when this accurst Bonaventura saw Master Tilton’s Blessed Virgin holding the Holy Babe, he commanded those bandits from Lost Towers to hammer the whole thing to bits! You may well indeed look horrified, O greatest of all Churchly Doctors, but I haven’t sat here since my retirement from office, with the lady Lil-Umbra visiting me daily, and Master Tilton and Master John, one or the other of them, coming in to see me pretty well once a week, without learning something of what goes on; learning, I mean, what historians learn by living
after the event
, only I’ve been learning it by watching the event closely and yet watching it from a certain distance
while it was going on.

“And I can tell you this, great Doctor—and do you, as Master John, who has been trying to learn Greek, says Homer always says, ‘and do you lay it to heart’—all persons, whether male or female, who make it the chief object of their lives to seek out and uncover sexual sins and sexual obliquities in other persons, are themselves—and you can perceive it, O most renowned Doctor, in their countenance, especially in their mouths and nostrils and eyes—are themselves just the very ones to be most easily assailed by an itching desire to enjoy the very same lecherous sensations which they are so anxious to condemn.

“Now, O mighty Sage, please accept my word. The moment I encountered this Bonaventura at close quarters, I knew at once from the man’s eyes and mouth and lips and nostrils that he was the sort of person who could easily be completely obsessed by sexual lust. What sins this man has committed in his own life I have not of course, O great one from Cologne, any way of knowing. But this I can tell you and this I do know; though being a little shaky in my mind from old age, you must take what I tell you with your own reservations. This abominable legend about Lil-Umbra and Tilton is simply the outward and visible expression of the viciousness of the fellow’s own nature.”

These final words of the ex-bailiff were uttered with such intensity that the face of his hearer, which was as much a
hieroglyph of sympathy as, according to the old man,
Bonaventura’s
was of lechery, positively became a quivering crow’s beak of concentrated attention.

“I would like to know very much indeed, O most renowned of doctors,” went on the old man, “just what you feel about this matter of Roger Bacon’s influence over young people, like our mutual friend Raymond de Laon and like Lady Lil-Umbra’s brother John. Do you consider that this Friar, who is such an adept in all these new scientific inventions, has a good or a bad influence over our younger generation? Whether because of the presence of
That Thing
”—and the old man gave a significant jerk of his shoulder in the direction of the object indicated—“or because of this wicked lie invented by
Bonaventura
, or simply because I’ve been more impressed than ever of late by the goodness and sweetness of Lady Lil-Umbra, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Friar Roger and his new science; and I’ve come to the conclusion, mighty Doctor, that there’s a change coming over the whole of Christendom—I might go so far as to say over the whole world—and I’ve decided that it’s the duty of all of us who are believers, to think out carefully for ourselves what our position is.