The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  “Will you both, if you don’t mind,” the Friar murmured, “since the ancients knew, long before the Mother of God was revealed to us, the divine power of virginity, follow me in repeating the sounds of an ancient invocation, the exact meaning of which has been lost to the world for two thousand years?”

  And so slowly and clearly did Roger Bacon utter these evidently latinized syllables that neither Ghosta in her extravagant position, nor Tuck using all his strength and all his intelligence to keep the Image and its Burden upright, had any difficulty in repeating them after him: Birginis, Sirginis, Flirginis, Virginis; and these simple sounds had hardly died away, and the curious white light which the cunning art of the inventor had caused to play over the countenance of the Bronze Head had scarcely faded, when the Friar lifted Ghosta down upon her feet and handed her her mantle. Then he removed from the foot of his bed a cloak of his own and wrapped it round Brother Tuck. “Better take her to the Convent yourself,” he said gravely. “Two cloaked figures won’t excite the same interest as one alone. I shall pray for you both very particularly this night. You have helped me greatly.”

  VIII

  THE MAN OF GOD

  “It was indeed a special act of Providence,” replied the General of the Franciscan Order of Friars from his seat on the back of the deformed animal known to its owner as Cheiron, “that we met at those cross-roads. I should have had to spend the night under these pines if we hadn’t; because to tell you the truth, my good Master Spardo, nothing would have made me stop hunting for this Castle of Lost Towers except falling dead in my tracks or being killed by a wolf.”

  The satisfaction of the General of the Grey Friars in the absoluteness of his God-Intoxication was so deep that the ground beneath Cheiron’s hooves seemed to rise to meet it. Unseen by the borrower of the deformed beast, Spardo wiped a blob of bird’s dropping from the back of one of his hands upon the fringe of the ecclesiastical garment dangling at the animal’s side.

  “How did it happen, if your reverent generalship will not take offence at the question, that you, whom we all call the Seraphic Doctor, should be wandering about alone without a single servant?”

  This not altogether unexpected question helped the bubbling spring of Bonaventura’s self-love to overflow again.

  “I’ve got the best of all possible ones now, haven’t I?” he replied to Spardo, with an ingratiating smile. “Didn’t you tell me just now that you were unemployed?”

  “Hitherto,” replied the bastard son of the King of Bohemia, “it has been my destiny to serve laymen: lordly laymen, it is true, and persons not devoid of coins of silver and coins of gold, but people tell me that great churchmen like thyself, O most Seraphic Doctor, are very particular and very exacting about the way your food is prepared and your off-scourings disposed of and your garments kept clean. I can see at this actual moment, O most saintly of doctors, several very filthy stains on your beautiful grey mantle, due no doubt—no! I’m not being rude to you, my lord doctor; I’m just indicating the absolute necessity that men like yourself who are so spiritual and so sensitive, and who so feel very, very, very far from the stupid unenlightened masses of men, and just as far from their stupid unenlightened authorities——”

  “Silence, man! Who has taught you to talk like that? Are we not all equal before God? Are we not all equally stupid and ignorant in the presence of his holy spirit? Are we not all equally selfish and greedy and lascivious and treacherous and deceitful under the blinding fire of his eternal righteousness and the terrible thunder of his fearful truth?”

  The deformed Cheiron was so agitated by this threatening voice so close to his ears that he came to a stop and began trembling from head to tail.

  “To whom have you been listening?” repeated the grey-robed rider on Cheiron’s back. “You, fresh from our religious France and our more than religious Italy, you, a wanderer across Christian Europe from the idolatries of the East, where, I ask you, have you picked up this devilish talk about ignorant masses and stupid authorities? Have you been listening to this Satanic sorcerer who has dared to assume the dress of a Friar just because he has lost his money, this thrice-accurst Roger Bacon? Or are all the misbegotten islanders in this Godforsaken Britain of yours so savage that if anyone wants to win their favour they’ve got to talk to them in this unholy way? But do you really think, O most generous of all possible wanderers through haunted forests, that you can go on guiding me to Lost Towers? You seem to me, Master Spardo, a rather tired and worn-out man yourself. I can’t help seeing that you drag your feet very heavily, and even kick the tree-stumps and the earth-mounds and the fallen logs as you go along; and I noticed just now that your eyes kept shutting of their own accord, as if at any moment you might fall asleep as you walked.”

  “We shan’t be much longer now, reverend lord,” replied Spardo, “and once there I may find a place where I can sleep in their kitchen and my horse may be able to sleep in their stable, while you, being entertained by Baron Maldung and Lady Lilt, will come to your own conclusion about their daughter Lilith, of whom rumour round here says things I won’t repeat to a sacred gentleman like yourself.”

  After that brief summary of the situation, the three of them moved on, with the saintly Bonaventura in the saddle, with Cheiron on his faithfully plodding four legs, and with Spardo’s weary head and half-closed eyes drooping and nodding more and more heavily.

  Spardo’s thoughts, in spite of what he had just said, were by no means in any kitchen. They were in a much grander place. He was imagining himself luxuriating on heaps of soft cushions and sipping the particular kind of French wine, of a yellowish tint, which from his Bohemian childhood he had always loved best of all the wines in the world.

  As for Bonaventura, he was thinking very hard, as he rode on, about his own future destiny. “If I continue,” he was saying to himself, “as effectively as I have done hitherto, in dominating my lower nature by my higher nature; if, in fact, I do attain in the eyes of the world the reputation of being a real saint, will this reputation interfere with my chance, for there can be no doubt I have a very good chance, of being elected Pope?

  “Of course it does satisfy me to a mighty large extent to dominate my lower nature like I do, and to feel that in me, and to feel that others feel that in me, the Will of God triumphs over the Will of Satan. But with a character like mine it isn’t enough to dominate Satan in myself; I feel an imperative need to dominate Satan in others too. Yes! and not only in individuals. I feel a need to dominate Satan in groups, classes, societies, tribes, races, countries, nations, hemispheres, worlds! But my real life is my inward life. And I and God alone know the majestic secrets of my inner life.

  “The wonderful thing about me, and the thing wherein I differ most from ordinary people, is that I don’t want to dominate the world by action. I want to dominate it by just being what I am; by just being myself. And in this I resemble Jesus Christ. I and God alone know what a destiny-changing moment it was in the history of Christendom when Saint Francis sought me out, among all the rest, and gave me that gift of Healing which he gave to nobody else.

  “But what I and God alone know is a yet deeper secret even than that; a secret that I would not have let God know if I hadn’t decided he would have found it out for himself; the way my mother before I was born felt me give a leap in her womb every time God was mentioned. She even—and this deep secret nobody in the world knows but I and God—she even prayed to God all night long, while my father by her side was snoring like a Lombardy hog, that just one tiny little infinitesimal drop of God’s holy ethereal spiritual and invisible seed might mingle with the substance of their earthly terrestrial and mundane seeds, when she and my father became one in my begetting.

  “Yes! I and God, alone in all the world, heard that prayer of my mother; and I and God, alone in all the world, know how lovely the face of my mother was—how it was transformed, transfigured, illuminated, entranced, and beside itself with mystical love, when she made that prayer. For I w
as in you, then, God, wasn’t I, and not in my mother’s womb? O how can I thank you enough, God, for separating me from, and selecting me out of, and putting me above, the myriads of ordinary souls whereof the world is so full! But I must think, think, think, whether it would be better for me, from now on, to go forward increasing my spirituality as a saint, or to develop that other side of sanctity which is quite as deeply natural to me and implanted in me—the sort of wisdom that Solomon had when he decided between those two women with the living baby and the dead baby. That is the sort of wisdom we need in our Pope, and if I were Pope, I would have the greatest opportunity anyone could have in the whole world to make people obey the will of God as opposed to the will of Satan.

  “Perhaps,” so Bonaventura’s thoughts ran on, “the inspiration of mine about converting to God and His Church this whole outpost of Devilry they call Lost Towers does really and truly combine both the spirituality and the wisdom of a true saint. But suppose this devil of a Baron Maldung puts me to death?”

  He gave a little gasp like a frog in a cave at the striking of flint and steel. “Well, in that case I wonder how far my——” But Bonaventura’s thoughts of spiritual advancement and of everlasting felicity were now interrupted by the sound of a horn quite close to them; and he quickly turned to his companion, who was evidently, although still plodding along by Cheiron’s side, so nearly asleep that he could hear nothing.

  “What’s that over there? Did you hear that? For God’s sake, listen, man! It’s just the other side of those trees!”

  Spardo slowly turned his head causing his long, slender, wispy beard to brush away several flies from Cheiron’s deformity. “Yes, by Holy Jesus I do hear it,” he groaned, “and what’s more, O most seraphic of doctors, I can tell you whose horn it is! It’s the horn of Bailiff Sygerius and I expect he’s calling for one of his own rascally boys! The fellow hasn’t been bailiff for more than six months. His dad, old Heber Sygerius, has only just given up the job, and I rather——”

  Spardo was interrupted by an inrush upon them of several persons. A broad-shouldered, obstinate-looking, middle-aged man, who obviously was the bailiff in question, pushed forward through some closely growing pine-tree trunks, and advanced into the open, making, as he did so, several rough and brutal jerks to get rid of the hold upon his sleeve of an old and extremely agitated serf, who in his turn was clutching the hand of a little girl, who, with big frightened eyes, surveyed the two men and the deformed horse as if they had been beings from another world.

  The bailiff made the appropriate gesture of respect to the man on the horse, who was obviously, although in the garb of a Franciscan Friar, some sort of high-ranking ecclesiastic from abroad.

  “Pardon me for disturbing you like this, reverend Father, but I must settle the affair of this troublesome fellow before I can pay my proper respects to you.”

  The serf’s voice had a piercingly pitiful tone of appeal which arrested Spardo’s critical attention at once. “You’re taking our whole life, master bailiff,” the old man was saying, “when you take away our horse. My daughter has a good job in the Convent’s washhouse and her children are good children; but if you take away our horse, considering my son’s dead, you take the bread out of all our mouths.”

  It would have been clear to any less self-absorbed listeners than the two men upon whom this group of people flung itself, that in the familiar pleading tone of her grand-dad’s voice there was something that spread a reassuring atmosphere round the child who was holding his hand. Tragic enough though the old man’s words were, there were so many use-and-wont associations aroused in her by his special tone that her eyes ceased to be so big and scared.

  It even began to be exciting to her to watch this weird horse’s neck, with what really looked like a human head growing out of it, while the man with the feathery beard, like the moulting tail of Granny’s jackdaw, seemed to be making funny faces at her, as if he wanted her to play a game with him.

  It was early afternoon by now, and the rays of the February sun were shimmering between the pine branches at an angle about midway between earth and sky.

  “I tell you, master bailiff, if you take our horse it will be just simply a death-sentence to us all!”

  “Pardon me, holy sir,” said the bailiff, looking straight into the twitching, high-coloured face of Bonaventura, whose excited eyes, always very prominent, were now literally bulging from his head; “pardon me till I’ve dealt with this fellow!”

  Meanwhile the little girl, whose hand her grandfather was still tightly clutching, couldn’t keep the idea out of her mind that the interest of this hooded rider in what was going on was so intense that it might at any moment project those inflated eyes of his out of his head like a pair of globular puff-balls.

  She was even beginning to imagine the simultaneous pop with which those two voracious peerers would strike the tree beside her and the amount of effervescent juice that would pour down the tree’s trunk at their bursting, when she heard the bailiff protest to the owner of those same orbs that he would give him his full attention as soon as he had got rid of these tiresome people.

  “Full attention” was the very last thing any one of the group of human bipeds flung together beneath these pines could hope for. But at least the ragged little girl, whose name was Bet, and who had been endowed by Nature with several extra drops of imagination, derived an agreeably alarming impression from the bulging eyes of the saintly General of the Franciscan Order of Friars.

  But there was nothing but distress in the shock she received when she saw her grand-dad throw himself down on his knees before ‘Master Sygerius and actually embrace his straddling pair of sturdy legs, while with head thrown back he gazed up imploringly at all that could possibly be seen from that position of the man’s physiognomy, which could only have been the reddish-brown beard protruding from the obstinately square jaw.

  “If you take our horse away, master,” cried the old man, “it just means starvation! While my son was alive, he could plough as fast as any man on the manor. And plough he did, and sow and reap too, with the best in the land. But if after his death our only horse is to be what’s called your Heriot, considering I’m too old and feeble to plough or to sow or to reap or to carry in the harvest, it’s just murder you’re committing! Yes, what you’re doing, bailiff, is sheer murder! I tell you, here and now, it’s squeezing the orange dry!”

  The bailiff, evidently no less conscious of the staring eyes of the hooded man on Cheiron’s back than was the ragged little Bet, stepped away so hurriedly that the old supplicant, losing his balance, fell forward with both his hands outstretched upon the red-brown earth. The spot where the old man fell was a spot strewn with several generations of pine-needles, but it was quite bare of moss and quite bare also of that particular sort of forest-grass, soft as the hair of a Dryad, which grew luxuriantly in those parts, especially in the district between the Fortress and Lost Towers.

  Little Bet had so far only spent seven years upon earth but she had already noticed that, when her elders quarrelled among themselves and began to argue, something always seemed to be drawn into the contention that came from far away. Yes! she had often noticed that some unexpected bird or beast or reptile appeared at such times, or an unusual storm of wind, or a torrent of water, or even a falling star. And it now came about that as Bet’s grand-dad, whose name was Dod Pole, scrambled to his feet, with the palms of his hands and the undersides of his fingers pricking viciously from the pine-needles, and commenced in unabashed indignation to express his feelings, a tiny little bird, on the look-out for the crumbs that it had come to associate with these meetings of vociferous bipeds, was so absorbed in its own private quest that it remained oblivious to the nearby hovering of a hungry hawk, who, instinctively aware that no arrows were to be feared from that preoccupied party, descended like a feathered plummet and made its fellow-citizen of the air its helpless prey.

  “O you bailiffs and reeves and forest-wardens,” shouted old Do
d Pole, his voice growing harsher and huskier as he went on and his grip on little Bet’s hand hurting the child’s fingers more and more, “you are all the same in your fat-headed stupidity! You think the land belongs to the Barons whose castles on it we have built, or to the Church, whose barley and wheat and fruit and vegetables we have grown. O you wooden-headed coxcombs! I tell you a day will come when we shall have a King after our own hearts, a King as wise as Solomon, and as strong as Coeur-de-Lion, and as well-supported as Caesar, and with as many magic weapons as King Arthur, who will raise us up and thrust you down! Who gave your precious Barons the right to make us thresh our corn on their threshing-floors and grind it with their grind-stones? Are your Barons so many Gods? Did they create the land that we cultivate? Did they create the wheat and the barley that we sow and reap and gather in barns?

  “Just because you call taking our horse a Heriot—a mighty grand lawyers’ word the word Heriot, ain’t it?—you think all is settled! You wait a bit, my good master bailiff, you wait a bit, my noble lord, Sir Mort! A day will come when it will be to a really great and true King chosen by us, yes! by us, who are now serfs and slaves, that you and your barons will have to come for the making of all the laws in the land! And I’ll tell you this, too, Master Sygerius——”

  The obstinate bailiff, at whom this revolutionary outburst was aimed, still stood his ground sullenly, silently, tenaciously and with an ugly purpose in his grim countenance. But the aged Dod Pole still went on. Indeed as he recklessly and desperately flung out these thoughts, he felt in his soul as if over all the countries in the world millions of serfs and slaves like himself were uttering the same thoughts, and he couldn’t but believe that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, if not the God of Jesus, was their inspiration and would avenge them upon their enemies.