The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  “Bet and I made great friends when we were waiting for Tilton. Tilton doesn’t like girls—he says they don’t understand architecture. His girl’s name is Oona and her Father or Grandfather is that rebellious serf, you know the one I mean? The one who got on so well with old Heber; but then Heber has the trick of propitiating everybody; whereas this Dod Pole—I expect you know him—is now in perpetual trouble with Randy.”

  Having finished his discourse John flung upwards a quick glance from his lustrous eyes to see whether the giant at his side had taken it all in, or had allowed his mind to wander; for with an intense interest in particular aspects of life, and a tendency to philosophise at some length on these aspects, young John frequently caught people’s attention wandering from what he was saying; and this made him intermittently cautious, though he hated to have to stop and scrutinize his listener.

  But just then he had to be content with a hurried nod, for they had arrived at the door of the Convent. “Father said for me to go straight in,” the lad now whispered to Peleg who was bending down to hear his instructions, “and not to come out with the girl—her name is Ghosta, isn’t it?—but to wait inside till you’ve gone off with her: but I expect I’ll be seeing you later, and maybe her too, so I’ll only say ‘good-luck’ and not ‘good night’, Peleg”; and with these last syllables vibrating round his youthful figure, he advanced boldly to the great loose chain which was hanging from an aperture in the top part of the massive black door, and this he pulled three times, and Peleg could distinctly catch the reverberation of its echoing resonance from inside the building.

  The ringer hadn’t to wait. The door opened almost at once, making an aperture of about six inches, and after a brief parley with a dim, white-coifed figure, like a pale kernel in a cracked nut, the lad went inside and the door was closed. There was only one tree near this closed entrance and that was an ancient birch with a remarkably mottled trunk and only two branches, which branches, being very high up, were like the arms of a crucified queen who guarded the place by day and night and threatened every intruder.

  Calmly and deliberately the huge Hebraic Mongol settled himself on the ground with his back against this solitary tree and awaited his fate. He had to wait a long time; but the curious thing was that while he waited now he felt himself to be entirely free from that sickening lethargy which had so loosened his knees and which required a whole bottle of Neapolitan white wine to remove from his midriff.

  And then the closed doors opened, opened more quietly than when they had shut, and there she was! He automatically clutched his iron mace, as if the building behind her and the tree behind him had been a host of enemies, and with it in his hand he leapt up from the ground and bounded towards her.

  When he reached that tall, stately, slender figure, in a black mantle with a black hood—who gazed straight into his face with eyes as dark and beautiful, and, to his feelings, just then, as terrifyingly prophetic, as must have been the eyes of Deborah, the wife of Heber the Kenite, or of Miriam, the sister of Moses—Peleg allowed his mace with its terrible spikes to fall to the ground. He could do nothing but just stand helplessly in front of her, muttering over and over again the blind words: “Ghosta! So you’ve really and truly come! Ghosta! So you’ve really and truly come!”

  But she, with a gesture like that of a warrior-queen, whose lightest word was obeyed by thousands, lifted both her arms towards him, took his bare head in her bare hands, and, drawing it down towards her breast, kissed him on the forehead.

  Peleg felt this to be a momentous kiss, a sacramental kiss, a kiss belonging to a ritual for the union of a man and a woman that was older than Sodom and Gomorrha, older than Tyre and Sidon, older than Babylon and Nineveh.

  For a moment he stood with his eyes closed; and then, with a deep gasp for breath, as if he had just defeated an army of rivals, he bent down and picked up his iron weapon. This he now grasped tightly in his right hand, and taking Ghosta’s right hand in his own left, he led her away, up a mossy slope between scattered yellow stalks of last autumn’s bracken and a few dead clumps of last summer’s heather, till, completely hidden from any possible onlookers from either Convent or Priory, he led her into the entrance chamber of the cave of Manawyddan, which had been a favourite resort of his since he first followed Sir Mort to that district of Wessex.

  The cave was indeed so completely hidden by a grove of alders and willows that it was by no means universally known even to natives of those parts. The two of them had no sooner entered it than Ghosta’s whole attitude changed. The maternal heart in her was at once touched to the quick by the various little semi-domestic arrangements that this gigantic lover of hers had made in this secret hermitage of his, such as the strewings of dry reeds that covered the floor, such as a couple of great iron trivets, one of which was carrying a deep copper basin and the other supporting a kind of extempore frying-pan which had clearly served its purpose extremely well not so very long ago. In one corner of the cave there was a large earthenware bowl of water and by the side of it a little jug with a handle that looked more Greek than Roman for ladling the water into other receptacles.

  As Peleg noticed the deeply amused, and intensely practical interest that Ghosta took in all these objects, he told himself that he had been wise to keep the existence of this cave, which had originally been shown to him by a travelling tinker from Wales, entirely to himself. This Welsh tinker had told him about certain ancient Welsh gods, who had travelled through the land like himself doing work in leather and in various metals. He had explained that he himself, in every district he visited, selected some special spot where he could labour unmolested at his job and fulfil the various professional orders he obtained in that neighbourhood; and he swore that it had been in a vision of one of these old tribal deities, a being who called himself Manawyddan fab-Llyr, that he had learnt of this cave and been assured, that if he kept the secret to himself, nobody would disturb him there.

  It was too early for more than a few tiny leaf-buds to have appeared on the willow and alder boughs that in a confused mass hid the mouth of the cave; but at about ten yards distance outside this half-circle of entangled trunks, and closely twisted twigs, grew an immense pine.

  The rough bark of this tree, for it was a tree that stood with its back, so to speak, to the cave and to the cave’s bodyguard of entwined branches and twigs, had become for Peleg a token of the precise hour; for its colour darkened and lightened, flickered and shadowed, according to the advancing and retreating, the self-concealing and self-revealing, of Sun and Moon and the intermittent rising and falling of the wind.

  Though he had only once or twice actually passed a night in this cave, he had of late amused himself by making careful preparations for a winter night there. He had prepared a tall barrier of wooden bars that exactly fitted the mouth of the cave, but was easily lifted up and could be deposited, after use, beneath one of the interior walls, a barrier that he could render proof against wind and snow and rain by covering it with the skins of cattle and sheep.

  What he felt especially proud of, as he showed the cave’s domestic conveniences to his beautiful Hebrew friend, was a tightly wedged mass of clean and dry hay, with which he had packed from floor to ceiling a rocky recess in one of the cave’s corners, towards which the ground sloped upwards a little.

  He studied every flicker of her expression with boyish solemnity, as he now proceeded to strew on the ground at the back of the cave a thick sprinkling of this pleasantly-scented summer-hay for their February siesta. It seemed to him that she whitened a little at the first glance she threw upon this lover’s bed, then reddened a little, but she continued to watch his every movement with an expression that it would have been totally impossible for him to interpret; but which revealed in reality something of that infinitely maternal and desperately romantic tenderness that young Tilton was struggling now so intensely, day after day, with his hammer and chisel, to convey to his carved image of the Virgin as he imagined her uttering her imm
emorial “Magnificat”.

  And quite suddenly, and as it may well be imagined, to Peleg’s wonder and delight, Ghosta took the whole situation into her own hands. “Let’s make a good fire,” she cried, “and warm the whole place before we lie down! And let’s heat some water and have a good drink of hot red wine!”

  Such had been his secret meticulous preparations for a situation exactly like this one, only built up entirely in his imagination, that few lovers would believe, however deeply they trusted their tale-bearers, how small was the lapse of time before a blazing fire of sticks and logs, unattended by any great volume of smoke, was burning triumphantly, and before they were exchanging with each other deep draughts of red wine mixed with bubbling water.

  The effect of these timely preparations were enhanced by the noon-day sunshine, which poured down upon them past the great pine-tree outside, one of whose two big boughs lay on the ground, while the other was extended wide, with a gesture as comprehensive as that with which Jacob, after wrestling all night with the angel, must have greeted the hills and valleys and rivers of the Promised Land.

  Then as they replaced the goblets, from which they had been drinking, on the wide shelf that ran round the cave, Ghosta uttered the most astonishing words that her companion had ever heard issuing from human lips.

  “Now is the moment, O my friend, when you and I must strip ourselves of all. For a man knoweth not the woman he loves, nor does a woman know the man she loves, until each is as naked as the other.”

  The words struck him like a ritual, mystical and solemn, but the natural, half-laughing way she came close up to him and proceeded to loosen the buckle of his belt, and then, drawing back a few paces, began with incredible rapidity, but with gay and laughing interjections, and indeed with half-humorous and almost mischievous smiles at certain particularly crucial moments, to fling off every stitch of her clothing, made him feel at ease with the whole universe.

  Peleg imitated her as fast as he could; but perhaps it was significant of the double stream of blood in his veins that, before they lay down together on that sweet-scented bed of hay, he lifted his wooden screen across the entrance to their amorous hermitage and hung over it a large bull’s hide.

  As he did so he couldn’t help being struck by the sun-warmth which reached his fingers from this same skin, for he had snatched it up from the top of a pile that ever since dawn had been in reach of the Sun. Nor did the gigantic amorist, while the Sun above the bull’s-hide screen caressed his own swarthy neck, fail to note with something like philosophical vanity that he was not so absorbed by the passion of love as to be unable to get, even at this moment of moments, a quite definite sensuous pleasure from the touch of the Lord of Life.

  But when once those two lay down together, all other thoughts, impressions, experiences, sensations were absorbed and engulfed in the blind intermingling of two bodies, two souls, two spirits; so much so that the shock and the blood of her ravishment by him, and the furious onslaught of his possession of her, were both swept into a whirling vortex of rainbow-irradiated bubbles, tossed into space, as the confluent torrents of their two life-streams became one terrific river.

  Calling up these blinding moments in calmer blood, our Mongolian giant could not help being struck by the fact that it was Ghosta, and not he, who fell into a sleep of blissful exhaustion when their ecstasy was over. This, he decided after long and delicate ponderings, was due to the fact that, in her case, body, soul, and spirit were much more intimately united than in his; so that when their union had been fully achieved, there was no residual reservoir left, of “energeia akinesis”, or “unruffled force”, such as could keep her consciousness alert and observant: while in his case, whether due to his masculinity or to his stature, there remained a definite level of mental awareness that was completely unaffected by what senses, or soul, or spirit, were feeling or had felt.

  And this awareness was closely allied to action. What Peleg did, therefore, when the trance of their beatitude had ebbed and she was asleep, was to slip noiselessly from Ghosta’s side, and—with the stealthy movements of a male panther arranging the fragments of his half-devoured prey before distributing them to its little ones while their mother slept—to re-assume his garments one by one, till he was completely clad. Then, with a fond but not lingering glance at his sleeping mate, he stole into the interior of the cave and began completing, as far as it was possible to do such a thing without the usual accompanying sounds, all the preparations upon which of late he had been secretly engaged, so that he might be in a position to offer his re-discovered bride, when the moment came, the sort of romantic, but deliciously tasting and completely satisfying meal, that was worthy of such a never-to-be-repeated occasion.

  Perhaps nothing since they had found each other again—for their supreme embrace just now had been to them something outside time and space—struck Ghosta’s Hebrew-girlish mind more poignantly than what she saw when, fully awake at last and with her clothes on again, she entered that inner chamber of the cave and beheld her lover’s quaint preparations for what might have been called their consummation feast.

  But she kept her feelings to herself, for it was a deeply congenital characteristic of Ghosta’s nature to avoid above everything the quick exclamations and exuberant outcries with which it seems irresistible to some of the nicest ladies in the world to express, or at least to convey the impression that they’re expressing, the feelings of the heart.

  But her smile told a lot; and as far as the preparation for their love-feast went, which he had so quaintly and crudely set in motion, her quick and competent hands soon had them seated side by side on a bench of pine-wood opposite a big round shield on a tall brazen tripod, covered with a white cloth and a couple of large earthenware plates.

  Peleg was soon explaining that, when they had finished their meal, he was anxious to take her to the Fortress, where he hoped she would be able by her beauty and the power of her personality to persuade Lady Val to let her join the large-kitchen-establishment of Roque, which, though situated, as he explained, within the confines of the Fortress, was really an independent organization by whose methods of procedure the whole Manor benefited.

  He was so eager and voluble about this idea of his that she should find a place for herself, and so certain that such a place would be pretty near the top, that for a long while he never saw how little she was responding to the picture he was so vigorously painting of their future at the Fortress.

  When at last he paused, however, he was not only startled but shocked and hurt. He had stopped in mid-flow, so to speak, with the idea of clearing the channel-bed of his torrent of exultant prediction, so that her stream of consciousness might join and mingle absolutely with his own, and he was stunned and confounded by the way she replied.

  “No, no, my darling Peleg!” she cried. “I can’t imagine myself working in the midst of this great manorial kitchen! I know too well all it takes to prepare meals for those who plough and sow and plant and reap and bind and clear the ground of weeds! And as for having to be polite to this presumptuous and insolent bailiff of theirs, this brutal Randolph Sygerius—Heavens! I wouldn’t consider it for a second. But don’t look sad, my precious Peleg; for I wouldn’t mind coming across to the Fortress now and again, whenever Lady Val was short-handed or had any special visitors to cater for.

  “But to work as a rule and every day in your manorial kitchen, the Lord God of Israel forbid! No, my dearest one! No, no, no! I’ll go with you to Rome. I’ll go with you to Jerusalem. I’ll go with you to Sicily. I’ll go with you to Constantinople. I’ll go with you to Corinth. I’ll go with you to Samarcand or to Trebizond or to Jericho. But even for you, my first and my last true love, I will not work in an English manorial kitchen!”

  Peleg turned round and laid his great hands on her shoulders and stared at her. They were sitting side by side with their backs to a wall of wet dark stone. Down this wall dripped continually small trickles of water; while the wall itself was broken her
e and there by deep greenish-black clefts of incredible depth. In fact these cracks in the wall gave the impression that, were they enlarged so that a small person could worm himself into them, they might be found to lead, if the explorer had the courage to persevere and follow one of them to the bitter end, right to the very centre of the whole planet, where such an explorer would be liable to be devoured by that fabulous creature called the Horm, the legends about whom were evidently so appalling, and so likely to be disclosing a horrible reality, that, long before any written chronicler existed, they must have been deliberately suppressed by the self-preservative consciousness of the human race.

  When Peleg turned towards her in his startled surprise and clutched her shoulders, they both had their backs to these sinister cracks in the wall and their faces towards the ponderous arch under which they had made their bed; and beyond that arch, outside the cave altogether, they could see, outlined against the sky, that huge mystical pine-tree, which stretched out its branch-arm for, or against, the frequenters of that ancient cave, in a gesture as wholly inscrutable as it seemed to be wholly indestructible.

  “Do you realize what you’re saying, child?” Peleg groaned, as he shook the girl slowly forward and slowly backward, while his large hands, had anywandering progeny of that subterranean Horm been peering at them from behind, would have hidden completely beneath their knuckles and veins and wrinkles and creases of loose pendulous skin all the lovely rondures of the girl’s feminine shoulders.

  “Don’t you understand,” he muttered, “that I am for ever committed, body and soul, to the service of Sir Mort Abyssum? I could no more leave the Fortress than that old tree out there could leave the place where it grows, unless a hurricane uprooted it, or lightning struck it, or a savage tree-hater cut it down with a murderous axe!”

  He let her shoulders go and dropped his arms; and for some time they just stared at each other, both angry, but both afraid of what they might say or do in their anger. Peleg had learnt in his world, just as Ghosta had learnt in hers, that it is wiser not to quarrel with a creature who instinctively gathers itself together before hitting back, so that, when it does strike, the blow shall be a deadly one.