The Brazen Head (8 page)

“O! how I’d love to tell this sweet child everything I’ve worked out for myself about the wisest, cunningest, craftiest ways of enjoying life and holding our own against our enemies! And yet I’m not allowed by our absurd conventions to utter a single word to her as a man of the same race and the same village, face to face, an old man to a young woman, a wise grand-dad to a hasty child! O how I’d like to describe to you, you darling little creature, exactly what can be picked up of subtle wisdom from these half-burnt logs that are warming us both at this second!”

Lil-Umbra’s eyes were now fixed upon the door of the room, through which there undoubtedly did come at this
moment a stir and a murmur as of a noisy and rather excited crowd. Glancing from her profile to the fire the old man couldn’t help noticing a perfect little blue flame that was leaping up and down on the segment of a log that still carried minute patches of greyish lichen upon its crumbling bark.

Then he looked back again at her exquisite profile. How could he, he asked himself, describe to her the very curious elation which he had felt a second ago through all his senses, an elation that gave him now a delicious aftermath of
satisfaction
, like a wave drawing back over a bank of pebbles? O how he longed to describe to this lovely young girl just what he had felt, and to ask her if she herself a minute ago, when that blue flame was flickering up and down between those logs, had felt anything in the least resembling it! Why was she staring so at the door at this moment? Expecting to be called by her nurse?

“No! I warrant she’s listening intently for the step of some particular young man! Well, if that’s the case,” thought the old man, “she certainly isn’t in the right mood to listen to an elaborate discussion centring round blue flames and burning logs.”

And then it struck the old man that, quite apart from the difficulties of sex, it was a shame that he couldn’t talk to this intelligent and sympathetic young woman about the
life-philosophy
he had worked out for himself. Since he had handed over the reeveship to his sturdy son, he had had a grand opportunity to work out the whole logical basis of a real
life-philosophy
that was entirely original and entirely his own.

And what he felt now was that he could make this girl understand things that neither of her brothers, nor Raymond de Laon nor young Sir William Boncor, would be able to apprehend, discoursed he to them never so wisely! O! why couldn’t he now boldly tell this clever little lady that there was such a thing as a subtle trick of so manipulating our nerves and our senses by our mind and our will that we could render ourselves completely independent of the fate that had made us a man, or a woman, or young, or old, or well-born or
self-born
, or strong, or weak, or naturally courageous, or naturally full of fear?

Why couldn’t he tell her about this discovery of his and 
about its connection with a power he had recently begun to develop in himself, old as he was, the power of getting into touch with something that was almost like consciousness in things that are considered completely inanimate.

It was at this moment that he gave a violent start and looked at Lil-Umbra in such a way that it came near to seriously scaring her.

“Didn’t you feel something then, little lady,” he cried, “something you never felt before in your whole life, no! not till a minute or two ago? I felt it; and though I’ve lived more than ten times as long as you, I’ve never felt anything like it! It was as if our thoughts, your beautiful young thoughts and my ugly old thoughts, had, for a second, yes! for half the beat of the pulse of a second, become one. No doubt it had to do with our sitting in silence by these dancing flames—and then we saw something, something that was standing between us, standing between you on your stool and me in this chair, something that was like that statue of Our Lady in Prior Bog’s private refectory—the one that’s so dark—dark as a gipsy, dark as a Jewess!”

Not a syllable of all this had been missed by Lil-Umbra, and it had its effect. The thoughts in that preposterously bare skull and in that delicate girlish head
had
in some mysterious unique manner become one, and “Something,” as old Heber had put it, had entered the room, had stayed in the room, and had stood or sat or crouched or planted itself between them.

And the thing that had done this
was
, as the young girl knew quite as fully and distinctly as the old man, nothing less than an image, or what the ancient Greeks called an “Eidolon”, of that dark and terribly beautiful woman, whom she had recently seen encountering Lilith of Lost Towers!

What the old man hadn’t sufficiently remembered during this whole interview was that they were waiting for the
appearance
of Lil-Umbra’s father, under whose authority they would both go to take their places at the first meal of the day. He himself had already swallowed a substantial bowl of
barley-meal
washed down by a good draught of ale, whereas
Lil-Umbra
, though she had got up so early and been with Peleg to the Stone Circle, had not tasted a thing. Her nervous agitation at this moment was certainly accentuated by this fasting.

It may even have had something to do with the nervous leap to her feet and the irrepressible cry, almost a little scream, with which she now greeted the opening of the door and the sudden appearance of the very person she was hoping for, namely young Raymond de Laon, accompanied by none other than her recent companion, the Tartar-Jew Peleg.

Polite and friendly, if extremely airy and casual, were the greetings with which young Raymond de Laon saluted the ex-bailiff as he carried off the girl, who herself was so excited that she even forgot to turn her head to nod to the old man till her curls were hidden by young De Laon’s broad shoulders. Peleg however closed the door quietly behind them and came straight up to Heber’s side.

“Has Sir Mort come back?” the old man enquired. Peleg nodded.

“And is this confounded Bonaventura, this ‘General’, if that’s what they call him, of the Friars come too?”

“He’s here now anyway,” answered Peleg, “but you never know with these clerical almighties! He’ll probably stroll round the kitchen first to see what sort of feast there’s going to be! Some say he’s one for fasting. But I doubt if he can practise that little game when he’s travelling! He won’t want to get so light that his horse will shake him off like a dead leaf.”

Heber smiled his most endearing smile at the tall Mongol.

“Lend me a hand, my boy, will you, to help me up? And, maybe, you’ll give me your arm to the dung-house next door, and then help me down to the hall?”

The Jewish Mongol obeyed and gravely helped him to his feet, and while he did so the eyes of both of them were drawn to the fire by a curious dance which a couple of lively blue flames took upon themselves to perform, for the special benefit, it might almost seem, of these two men.

We say “it might almost seem”, but as a matter of fact it was a completely different set of impressions that the
middle-aged
man and the old man derived from that dance. If there really were any sub-human and sub-conscious psychic impulse behind the motion of those two blue flames as they raced up and down that thin strip of pine-wood between a large
spruce-log
and a small larch-log, both logs having their own
particular
reaction of this performance, and if this psychic impulse
had been interpreted by some new technical machine invented by Friar Bacon, it would at any rate have been made clear that such an impulse was a sub-sexual as well as a sub-human one.

“If Sir Mort,” thought Peleg, “supposes that my gratitude is such a slavish thing that I’m going to take passively whatever happens, he really will have to give more attention to my character as a person. I’m ready to serve him in every possible way, but I’m a born fighter and to be nothing but a
guiding-dog
to a drooling old fellow like this, and nothing but a schoolmaster-nurse to a little Lady First-Love like that pretty child, is not enough. Besides—O hell’s damnation take it all!”

This last outcry was due to the fact that the giant suddenly realized for the first time that he’d forgotten to leave his iron mace in its usual hiding-place and had carried it along with him. Its awkward presence in his hand at this moment set him upon imagining a terrific attack upon the fortress by a band of formidable enemies, among whom he now felt himself wildly rushing, in full fighting ecstasy for the House of Abyssum, swinging his club with its iron spikes and converting a crowd of living men into a ghastly heaving mass of bones and hair and flesh and swirling blood.

Whether an invisible spirit, reading the thoughts of Peleg at this moment, would have been shocked at the pictorial images the mind of the giant conjured up, would doubtless depend on the nature of the spirit; but these enemies twisting and jerking, scriggling and wriggling, as Peleg certainly saw them groaning and moaning, weltering and sweltering, howling and mowling, in a blood-red palpitating swirl of bodies and bones and hair and teeth and eyes and entrails, over which, with his free thumb testing the spikes of his weapon, he could stride in triumph while what
had
been living and beautiful bodies fouled his legs with filth, would certainly have disturbed some spirits.

What old Heber saw as that dance of blue flame kept repeating itself in his mind as the Mongol led him away, was nothing less than Friar Bacon’s manufactured Brazen Head, enormous in size, hideous beyond all human imagination, and uttering words in a completely unknown tongue, but a tongue
that was felt by all who heard it to be a multitudinous voice out of the Infinite.

By the time however that Peleg had got the old man out of the dung-house and back into the passage leading towards the dining-hall, the weird vision or revelation, which proximity to the excited heart of little Lil-Umbra had conjured into the ex-bailiff’s hairless skull, had given place to something
completely
different. But the thing to which it had given place was still quite sufficiently interesting to the old man to compel him to stand still himself and to make the unfortunate Peleg who guided him not only stand still also, but stare along with him at the dusky smoke-begrimed wall of the passage down which they were shuffling.

“Look, look, my good friend, look, I beseech you! Do you see these hieroglyphs on the wall? Shall I tell you what they mean? I know you pass these by, as most people do on their way to the dung-yard, like queer meaningless senseless marks, figures of some sort, mathematical figures, not human ones of course. But what they really are is an oracular announcement, yes! an announcement to the whole world that the idea of there being only three Gods, as the niggardly theologians teach, is a grievous error. There are Four Gods! That is what the great ancient thinker, Pythagoras, taught to his Greek colony in Italy; and that is what I, Heber Sygerius, am now teaching you, Peleg, the Jewish Mongol! Yes! there are Four Gods. But the strange thing that I now understand as I stare at those marks—No! Please, Peleg! Please wait here a minute longer! —is that we have to go to some especial and quite different spot to worship each of these Four Gods!”

Peleg gave vent to a hopeless sigh. “Has the old dotard,” he thought, “forgotten that our breakfast is waiting for us?”

Peleg looked desperately up and down the passage that led to the sleeping-rooms of Sir Mort and his lady and the
sleeping-rooms
of their two sons. He looked at the floor. He looked at the withered knuckles of the old man clutching his arm with the intensity of an aged hawk.

“What in Hell’s name can I do?” he asked himself. “Sir Mort will curse me like the devil. He is sure to see us coming in at the bottom of the table. Besides, this old fool’s son
Randolph
will be keeping a place for him, you bet your life, near
to the top! Not that
he
won’t be as pleased as Pilate for me to get cursed for not dragging the old fool along more quickly! But, O Jehovah, hear me just this one single time in my life! Let me meet the whole blasted Sygerius family except this poor old doddipole for whom I’ve got some sort of crazy fondness, and I’ll scatter their brains with my iron club on that pretty patch of green grass they’re all so proud of, outside their damned front door!”

His vows of vengeance were interrupted by yet more
astonishing
behaviour on the part of the old man. He was now turning round in violent jerks and stamping on the ground at each spot, as he faced what he considered the four quarters of the compass.

“
North!
” he muttered in a hoarse and even frightened voice. “That’s the forest of course and Lost Towers. All the worst devils in the whole world come from the north!”

He jerked himself to the right. “
East
!
” he cried in an exultant tone. “
That
’s where the miraculous Doctor Bacon is constructing the Brazen Head!
That
’s where the Fourth God will speak one day!” Again he jerked himself round. “
South
!
” he cried. “And
that
’s Boncor Castle and all those noble and righteous people!”

And then with a final hop and skip and a fierce clutch from Peleg to keep him from falling: “
South!
” he shouted, “where our Tilton is erecting with spade and hammer and chisel and nails a shrine of his own to Our Blessed Lady!”

“That
must
be the end,” groaned Peleg to himself.

But the old man went on, still keeping them both rooted to that place in front of the wretched blotches on that dark and filthy wall. “Do you know how I discovered that there are Four Gods, Peleg, my friend? I discovered it by the help of another discovery: in fact by finding out that there is a faint dim vague obscure consciousness in everything made by the hands of men! I have found that out for myself, Peleg, my boy! And do you know what else I’ve found out, my good friend?”

“If this goes on much longer,” thought the desperate
Mongol
, “I’ll pick you up, Master Heber, carry you into the dining-hall and lay you down at Sir Mort’s feet!”