The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  After a second’s hesitation the old man began a rather bewildering and long-winded rigmarole about something he wanted to ask John. With considerable difficulty, but with more tact than he knew he possessed, John now listened to an agitated and complicated account of a conversation the ex-bailiff of Roque had had earlier in the month with John’s sister, Lil-Umbra.

  The old gentleman seemed to have been deeply impressed not only by Lil-Umbra’s beauty but by her intelligence; and, as far as her young brother could make out from what he now heard, there had come a moment in the conversation when some mysterious presence, a presence whose nature neither of them really comprehended, seemed to come between them and to hover over them.

  The old man had got it lodged in his head—John could see as much as that—that there was some magic bond, or some fatal link, between this mysterious Brazen Head of Friar Bacon’s invention and a beautiful young woman; and John himself was anxious to learn whether his own vague sense of something weird and unusual, and something that he couldn’t describe as either good or evil, either angelic or devilish, had been felt by Lil-Umbra also.

  Old Heber’s hope was that Lil-Umbra may have talked to John about it; as he knew she was in the habit of discussing religious matters with both her brothers. The truth really was that Lil-Umbra’s nerves were so strung-up, and her heart was in such a state of tension, as to whether Raymond de Laon would or would not come to the armoury that night, that the whole subject of Friar Bacon and his Brazen Head passed her by very lightly indeed.

  But now to the complete surprise of both the young man and the old man, and somewhat to the displeasure of Peleg, who by this time was towering above the three of them, and was by no means indifferent to this thing they were discussing, Ghosta broke in. “What was wanted,” she said quietly, “to the completion of Friar Bacon’s creation I was myself ready to supply; and at the request of the Friar, I did supply it.”

  The sound of Peleg’s voice above their heads had a queerly hoarse note in it at this moment. “The best thing we can do tonight,” he said slowly, “is to carry the Head out of this forest and into the Fortress; and I would suggest that we straightway convey it into the armoury where it will remain under the particular protection of our friend here. I believe”—and at this point the giant laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder—“that your Father, Master John, will have no objection when he learns of this having been done. I don’t think our conveying the Head into the armoury need disturb anybody’s night’s rest. In fact I can make certain that it doesn’t by carrying it there myself, while Ghosta helps you, master bailiff.

  “No one can have heard you leave or they’d have come with you. No one but yourself, I expect—isn’t that the case, master bailiff?—heard the noise those wretched Lost Towers men were making; and as you came out you couldn’t possibly have barred the door. The whole Fortress is no doubt asleep at this moment; and we shall take care to move so silently that we shan’t disturb a living soul in the place. I’ll be glad enough to have a rest and a lie-down myself; but I’m not so done-in as not to be able to take this old Brazen Head into our armoury! Once there, I warrant nobody will dare to meddle with it. It’ll soon become a regular shrine, and as sacred as Master Tilton’s Blessed Virgin.”

  While her giant was addressing them above their heads, Ghosta and the old man, who still had his back against the tree and John’s woollen neck-cloth under his buttocks, were exchanging some extremely curious thoughts. No scrupulous chronicler of human affairs can help being aware out of the instinctive observation of the narrating mind, of the weird manner in which, amid any group of agitated people, when one voice has been monopolizing everybody’s attention for several minutes, a hollow gulf of silence is created, across which all manner of disturbing thoughts pass from one person to another.

  John himself at this moment, in his corner of this psychic gulf created by Peleg’s somewhat dictatorial and irritable monologue, felt so utterly tired, after all the energy he had spent that night, that his mind, in its exhausted state, like the mind of a person who stares vacantly at his bed-posts, began vaguely to wonder whether in this silence around them and with this hoarse voice sounding above their heads, other feelings than human ones, might be in the act of being exchanged, feelings for instance of the mosses, of the ferns, of the tree-roots even, that surrounded them on that forest-floor.

  Such vegetation-feelings, John pondered, might be entangling themselves with his own human feelings at this very moment; for after all it was this group of trees and bushes which he had known since his infancy, and which, from what he had seen daily of them out of that postern-door of his birthplace, had become like the fireguard in his nursery, a malleable background to every story he told himself in his day-dreams at noon and to every story he was told by his night-dreams at midnight; and it would be only natural if, on its side, the background of roots and mosses and ferns and lichens and ivy and blades of grass projected obscure invisible sensations, which flitted in and out of his human ones.

  But what was this? There was something else. Yes, there was something else at this moment, something that was intruding itself between the furtive and fitful feelings of mosses and roots and ferns and his own weightier cogitations.

  “What the hell,” he groaned, “is this confounded thing that has now come into my head?” It was certainly in accordance with the multifarious influences that flit about in our life-stream, like shadowy tadpoles beneath thin ice, that it should have been what the Brazen Head itself was thinking—those thoughts, not of a God-created man, but of a man-created machine, which now butted in, like a misty cloud in the shape of the Minotaur, between the vegetation-feelings of that forest recess and the ideas, whatever they were, that were being exchanged between Ghosta and the old man with his back against the tree.

  For there is no doubt that the “something” of which John suddenly became aware was some thought from the Brazen Head. And what the chronicler of these things cannot escape calling to mind was the lack of response that the old ex-bailiff had found in John’s sister Lil-Umbra when the latter, her head full of the possible appearance of Raymond de Laon in the armoury, was doing her best to be nice to him. But this lack of response was now wholly compensated for in the old bailiff’s mind by Ghosta’s attitude.

  Young John and the old man were however both vaguely conscious that it was some mysterious connection between the Brazen Head and Ghosta that was now giving to the voice of Peleg, as it rumbled hoarsely above their heads, an irritable and dictatorial tone. The giant concluded with these words: “I’ll fetch the Head now, and carry it straight to the postern; for I can see exactly where we are, torch or no torch! Better give the torch back to Master John, Ghosta, and then you all——” and he threw this out, like a handful of crumbs, in the direction of Colin and Clamp, who, conscious of not being altogether indispensable as the drama thickened, had linked themselves together in the last few minutes in a rather childish though very natural way.

  Clamp had picked up a moss-grown stick from the ground that had a couple of tiny ferns growing out of the middle of it, and had poked Colin with it to show him this phenomenon, and the flickering torch had at once revealed those small ferns; and Colin had promptly seized the end of this interesting stick, and now neither of this quaint pair would be likely to relax his grasp.

  It was clear that, in their uneasiness as to whether they would be allowed to follow the others into the interior of the Fortress, this mossy stick gave them some curious support, as well as uniting them on this particular occasion.

  “And then you can all,” Peleg concluded, “follow me to the little door. Isn’t that the thing, Master John?”

  John, who had begun to long for his comfortable bed in the little room that had been his own now for a couple of years, agreed at once; and Peleg, without even glancing at Ghosta, who had obediently handed the torch to John, snatched up the latter’s woollen scarf upon which the old man was no longer sitting, and clapping it upon his
own head like a turban, rushed over to where the Brazen Head was surveying them all with the stark indifference of a rocky landscape, and seizing it in his two hands heaved it into the air till he held it propt up on the top of his head. The effort required for this was so great that it drew from him a really terrifying sound, a sound such as Samson must have made when, with the central pillars of the Temple of Dagon in his arms, he bowed himself down and brought down with him the whole of that great building.

  An outrush of blood from the two arrow-hurts in his shoulders accompanied this sound; and John, who was close to Ghosta, heard a similar sound, bursting unconsciously it would seem, from her; and it certainly was all he could do to restrain in himself a cry of amazement.

  But he had the wit to see what the two of them had to do at this important juncture. He began hurriedly helping the ex-bailiff to his feet. “You take hold of him on your side,” he said to Ghosta, “and I’ll help him on my side!”

  And then he shouted after the departing figure of their friend, who was carrying away the Brazen Head on his own head as if it were a gargoyle made of the fossilized features of some antediluvian giant, belonging to the same race, though of an earlier breed, as the man who was carrying it. “Wait for us at the postern, Peleg! We’ll help you in with it!”

  The thoughts and feelings of the old man as he stumbled along over the tree-roots and over the mossy stones, while John’s torch flung the sort of wayward and flickering bursts of illumination that can be both angelic guides and devilish betrayers, grew more and more intense and more and more unrestrained as they drew near the postern-gate.

  “I’m glad I came out,” he told himself, “if only to be able to brood over the unbelievable advantage of being allowed to sit by the fire in my own chair in that faithful old armoury until I die. But—Jesus help us!—these young folk seem to think I’m half-dead already! Not one of them asked me whether I wanted to spend my days and nights with the Friar’s Head of Brass! But I’m glad they didn’t. For it would have been terribly hard to explain what I do want! And now that I come to think of it I seriously believe it was some queer understanding between the Head and me that brought me out here tonight! I wonder what time it is? About two o’clock in the morning, I wouldn’t wonder! It has that kind of feeling. O! but this Ghosta-girl had better be careful how near to this Head her home-sickness for Palestine and Jerusalem draws her! I didn’t have that queer presentiment for nothing that night when I sat with Lil-Umbra waiting for her lover Raymond!

  “Sitting alone by the same fire, day in, day out, a person picks up a few little things about life here below, things that great giant Jews dream not of! And when I watched that little sister of yours, Master John, and talked of this same Head, I knew all of a sudden, and for a certainty, that this Thing, created not by God but by Friar Roger, needed, to make it complete, to make it its real self, to make it a true oracle of life’s hidden secrets, to be in some way connected with amaiden, who, without officially losing her maidenhead to the Head, would lose something of her inmost self, her secretest feminine self, to it, giving it that unique power of revelation, of illumination, of ultimate vision, that virgins alone possess!

  “There’s the Fortress! We shall be there in a minute! Whether spending the rest of my days with a living intelligence created by man and not by God will lengthen or shorten my days, I don’t know and don’t greatly care! But that it will make life far more interesting to me is certain. I’ve always hoped for something like this to happen and now it has happened! Maybe this will prove a moment in the history of our race of an importance second only to the creation of Adam! We shall see!

  “Meanwhile what I’ve got to do now is clear. I must make them all take off their shoes, and not utter a word, even in a whisper! And as for this pair of antics, this Colin and Clamp, hanging on to that pathetic old stick as if it were the sceptre of Solomon, I suppose I must find a corner for them to sleep in, in the Manor kitchen. They won’t do any harm, wherever they are; and I certainly can’t have them in my armoury!”

  XIV

  FRIAR BACON’S CHAMBER

  Several months had passed away into the revolving rubbish-heap of time—or, to placate our final resting-place with a grander name, into the palindromic abyss—since an abode was found for the Head in the armoury of the Fortress and under the guardianship of the old ex-bailiff.

  “Why did you straddle me in my nakedness round the neck of that thing of brass?”

  These startling words were the first that greeted Friar Bacon from the lips of Ghosta, when the old factotum of his prison-chamber brought her to see him.

  “Sit down, my daughter,” the Friar replied, laying down his pen and pushing back across the table from beneath his wrists the parchment upon which he was at work.

  “There, child, sit down there!” And he pointed to an upright seat on the opposite side of the table, a seat which in appearance was the sort of chair that any young girl in any epoch would have associated with some sort of goblin royalty and elfin ritual. “And you may leave me,” he added, turning to the lay-brother, “for a few minutes now. I shall not be doing any harm to this good maid, but I want to talk to her alone for a while if you don’t mind.”

  Brother Tuck gave them a quick glance and a grave nod, and, shuffling to the door, took himself off.

  “Well, my dear, I’ll tell you exactly why, so to speak, I behaved to you as the angel, on Annunciation Day, behaved to our Lady.”

  “You don’t mean, I hope, Father,” Ghosta interrupted earnestly, “that you did really marry me to the Head, because if you did I must, with all the power I have, beg you to divorce me at once; for the truth is, Father, I want to marry a man of my own faith and my own race, which, as I expect you already know, is the Jewish faith and the Hebrew race. Yes, Father, I belong and always shall belong to the House of Israel; and it is as impossible for me to enter into such a covenant with any Christian as it would be for a sea-gull to swear fidelity to a barn-door fowl!”

  “Listen, dear child,” said the Friar, speaking very slowly and in a voice that was as grave as if he were reciting a pardon on a scaffold. “There are moments in all our lives when it is necessary for us to act in a way that makes use of both good and evil. In actual reality—for we need not drag in that treacherous word ‘truth’, which can cover and justify a thousand abominations—in actual living reality we are compelled—and if you ask me ‘compelled by whom or by what?’ I can only say I do not know—but we are compelled by a force, that may be as much outside the Devil as it is outside God, to do something which is clearly contrary to goodness and righteousness and morality and sanctity and holiness and virtue.

  “You must understand, my dear child, that I’m not saying we have at these moments to become one with any devilish power that is opposing God or defying all that the prophets have taught us down the ages. We must honestly recognise, however, that without becoming a part of the Evil Power that opposes itself to God, we are at this particular moment acting contrary to what we know to be the good way and the righteous way.

  “The point is that we are acting thus in obedience to a force within us, which we feel by an overpowering instinct to be as much outside the Good as it is outside the Evil, and as much outside God as it is outside the Devil. What we feel, my dear child, at these moments—I mean what I, your old Friar, feels—is that I am obeying an absolutely new revelation, a revelation that may change the entire world.”

  Ghosta, who had been listening with concentrated attention to all this, now lifted her elbows onto the table and rested her chin upon her two hands.

  “Was it a part,” she enquired earnestly, “of your creation of a living soul in a Bronze Head to make me embrace that Image as you did, straddling across its neck in my nakedness? How did you manage to read my secret thoughts and the hidden feelings of my most secret life? For you were right, Father, you were perfectly right. It had been my desire, while remaining a virgin—for I always had an absolute horror of losing my maidenh
ead—to experience once in my life before I died, the sensation of giving in a clinging embrace the life-drops from my innermost being to Something that I pressed close against me.

  “It needn’t have been a man! That was the queer thing about the longing I had. It was that I, Ghosta, might, in my virginity, and without losing my maidenhead, and indeed, if possible, without having any love for this Something—I didn’t care what it was—which I embraced, be the creator of a completely new, new, new,—No! I was never presumptuous enough to think of it as a new world, let me call it a new form of life in the world. I was always—but you know me through and through already, Father, my Friar of Friars—fascinated by the word Parthenogenesis.

  “It is a long word, and I have been told it is a Greek word, and that its meaning is the giving birth to a new life by a girl without losing her maidenhead or forfeiting anything of her natural virginity. So that when you hoisted me a-straddle that day round the neck of the Head of Brass, with my nakedness pressing against its brazen skin, I had an ecstasy. I said to myself: ‘What is happening to me now is the very thing I have always longed for! I am not losing my maidenhead, and yet I am drawing from the inmost depths of myself a dew-drop of living creation.’”

  A look of indescribable relief passed over the Friar’s troubled face, and he leaned forward across the table and touched with the tips of his long fingers the head which the girl was supporting on her arms as she leant forward.

  “The Lord bless thee and keep thee!” he said gravely, “and lift up the light of his countenance upon thee and give thee peace!” And then he added, withdrawing his right hand from his guest’s forehead and his left hand from his own manuscript, and tilting his chair a little to the rear on its back legs, “I swear I don’t know, my dear daughter, any living woman I could talk to as freely as I am now talking to you. I certainly couldn’t do so to any of the ladies who rule the Manors and Castles round here! Have you, my dear child, realized why it is that I go on so steadily refusing all invitations to leave this prison-chamber and go where I’d have more freedom of movement?”