A universal murmur, in such low tones among themselves as almost to convey the impression that, having been thus commended for stirring up the Friar’s mind, they were seized with the fear of so disturbing it by their lively discussion that the effect on his Opus Major would be destructive of the good they had already done, was the immediate result of this grateful appeal to their courtesy. Then without another word, and headed by Colin and Clamp, and followed by Ghosta and young John, they gave a series of quaint little good-night salutations and descended the stairs.
XV
VISITOR FROM PICARDY
Friar Bacon was left standing alone in that topmost chamber of Bumset Priory. He still held the handle-end, so to speak, of the pen he had been using when he rose to return their valedictory gestures; and now automatically began moving it to and fro, as if the talk-charged air of that recently crowded room were itself the parchment upon which it was his destiny to hand down to posterity his ideas and his discoveries. Strange and far-reaching were the thoughts that passed through his head.
“Here am I,” he told himself, “one of the curious animals produced upon this planet that have come to be called men, and are now confronted by the necessity of recording for the benefit of future specimens of such creatures, what were the actual causes of our appearance upon this particular promontory of matter.”
The Friar at this point ceased inditing invisible words upon the invisible air, and, after deliberately replacing his pen upon the table by the side of his unfinished parchment page, crossed over to his bed and stretched himself out on his back upon it, with his head on the pillow, and clasped his shins with his hands.
“Little did I think,” he pondered, “what I should be doing in three years that night when Fontancourt showed me the letter he’d just had from our friend Petrus! Didn’t Fontancourt swear to me that Petrus would never stop studying magnetism or writing about his studies? Three years ago that was! O God, O God! what things have happened since then and are still happening!
“Why didn’t I tell those fellows just now before they went away that it was Peter Peregrinus, and not their old Roger, who first thought of using a lodestone to draw like to like; and that if it hadn’t been for that divine inspiration of his I could never have invented my Brazen Head? How we damnable inventors do love to hug our inventions and get drunk on the glory of them! And now I must needs defend my precious discoveries by setting this Dominican wolf upon our Franciscan fox!”
At this point the Friar let his thin legs sink down side by side on his bed, and lifting his clasped hands as high above his head as they could reach began murmuring—not in Latin, far less in Hebrew, but in the Wessex dialect of his native Ilchester—a homely and natural prayer: “O Everlasting God, who lookest down from far outside all this curst universe of matter which thou hast created”—and here he couldn’t resist using, with a wry touch of the incorrigible humour which not only characterized all his intercourse with others, but displayed itself even in his secretest thoughts about himself, and about the whole confused arena of contemporary speculation, as a little private joke between God and himself, the quaint, precise, technical, academic and metaphysical phrase for “outside our whole system of things”, namely the phrase “ab exstrinsico”, which, as he now muttered it aloud with a sort of chuckle in that slowly darkening room, would have had a queer effect upon any eavesdropper—“and ab exstrinsico save me!”
But after making this appeal to the Mystery at the back of all life, Roger Bacon closed his eyes with such a peaceful sigh that it was clear that he himself felt perfectly satisfied with his little private interview with his creator.
The Friar’s descent, or ascent shall we say, into the blessed land of oblivion, now gently and deliciously invaded by the feathered dreams of sleep, was soon disturbed however by a resolutely firm and yet cautiously light knocking at the door, a knocking which did not wake him at first, but mingled with his dreams, and mingled with them in such a curiously prophetic manner that he became vividly aware, even before he awoke, of the personality of the intruder, who was none other than his faithful friend and devoted adherent of a great many years, his servant Miles.
Miles and he had indeed been young men when their association first began, and Miles always absolutely refused to be known by any other name than this Roman word for a soldier. Miles came from the old Roman town of Durnovaria, a town which the people of Wessex had already begun to call Dorchester, just as the older name of Friar Roger’s own ancient market-town had recently come to be changed into Ilchester.
Yes! His waking dream had not misled him. There, in the fading, late-afternoon twilight, when he went to the door and opened it, standing erect on the threshold, was his friend, his man, his devoted under-study, his partner, his disciple, his obedient slave, his servitor, his alter ego, Miles of Dorchester!
“Master!” cried Miles in an ecstasy of joy; and flinging his hawk-feather cap into the middle of the room, he fell upon his knees, clasped the Friar tightly round the waist, and pressed his forehead hard against his hero’s navel.
“There, there, there!” murmured this latter reassuringly and tenderly, and very much in the tone with which a responsive dog-lover would soothe a majestic, over-emotional, over-sensitive wolf-hound; and as he spoke he raised Miles to his feet, led him across the floor incidentally picking up the man’s hawk-feather cap and handing it to him as they went, and seating him in the chair recently occupied by Ghosta, sat down opposite to him and laid his two clasped fists upon his page with the air of one who has decided to substitute some different form of urgent pressure for the one associated with pens and parchment.
One remarkable peculiarity of the man Miles was the way his countenance altered in a moment from a majestic, monumental, and commanding reserve, not unmixed with an astute alertness that had in it something of the primeval and bottomless cunning of a simple animal, into a melting abandonment to an emotion of devotion so extreme that it was almost painful to witness.
The Friar pressed his hand on the man’s shoulder as he himself got up again to set before them both some wine and a couple of goblets. Then, when the Dorchester-born warrior, who, while lifting his glass, looked, with his massive neck and his clear-cut profile, distinctly like a well-known bust of Caesar Augustus, had rested and refreshed himself a little, the Friar put the straight question to him, “Well, old friend,” he enquired, “and what’s the news?”
“He’s down there now. I left him in the lobby. They are all busy in the kitchen, and the Prior’s begun his dinner. So I left him in that dark entrance on that cushioned seat. He’ll be asleep, I wouldn’t wonder, when I go down to him. Shall I tell them in the kitchen that you’d like him to have his supper up here with you? And that whatever they’ve got for you will do for him too? Shall I tell them that you’d like a bottle or so more of wine and of the best they’ve got? And shall I say that they’d better bring out a mattress for him into the lobby where he is now and a few coverings for it?”
Had Ghosta been there still, or indeed had any feminine being been there, she would not have failed to follow the varying expressions that crossed the Friar’s face as he listened to this speech, and to follow them with growing astonishment. Friar Bacon’s countenance, together with the shape of his head, represented, as any intelligent woman would have recognised at once, or any man either, who happened to be possessed of that sort of visual penetration in which most women leave most men far behind, a perfect example of the pure intellect as it struggles almost always with difficulty, and generally totally in vain, to cope with the irrational changes and chances of human life upon this planet.
The Friar had a delicate face in the precise sense in which all the way down the centuries the word “sensitive” has been used. Anyone could see at one glance that the man was abnormally porous to impressions. And it was indeed clear at this moment that the impressions which reached him from the revelations that this Durnovarian retainer of his was so calmly and relentlessly disclosing
were of the most crucial intensity; for little complicated patterns of criss-cross interlinings began to appear on his forehead and under his eyes that resembled frost-marks on an exposed window.
It was only when Miles, having entirely finished what it was his business to report, had permitted his Roman features to assume that patient expectant look of an officer anxious to catch from the lips of his general every faintest nuance of the orders issued, that the Friar realized that their relative positions had been reversed, and that it was himself who was now standing in front of Miles, watching and pondering, and asking, not this unqualified fellow-man, but the inscrutable features of Fate itself, what on earth had to be done now.
What he said, when it came, was pathetic enough in its simplicity. “What do you advise me to do, Miles?”
That this typical Centurion had, from old experience of the master he loved so passionately, expected just exactly this supplication, this appeal to a knowledge of life as it went along such as had nothing to do with learning, was proved by the military decisiveness of his answer.
“I think,” he replied firmly, putting down his glass, and speaking in his calmest and most Roman tone, “that you’d better send me into the kitchen to emphasize this man’s importance, and yet to make it plain that it would be more considerate to Prior Bog to spare him any immediate invasion; at any rate to let us all have dinner in peace before we do anything and before he has to do anything.”
A sigh of relief so deep that it seemed to come from the soles of his sandals shook Friar Bacon from head to foot.
“But you’ll have to bring him up here, I suppose?”
And when Miles nodded to this his master accepted it as if it were the word of destiny, escape from which would be hopeless.
“Very well,” he conceded. “Bring him up; and explain to him that you’ll come up yourself a little later with his meal. We don’t want anyone else up here, do we?” This last sentence the Friar added in what was almost an appealing tone. And Miles, already at the door, answered with a significant shake of his head.
The moments that followed were among the most painful in Roger Bacon’s life. From his habitual loneliness as a scientific prisoner of religion, he had come to be a man of two different worlds; and since each of these worlds required, if he was to deal with it adequately, all the creative power as well as all the destructive power he possessed in his own personality, it was no easy thing to deal with both these worlds at the same time.
It was natural to him to concentrate his attention upon his private world of lonely thought and lonely experiment, and to feel a peculiar kind of nervous suffering whenever it was necessary for him to face the shocks and clashes and misunderstandings of real life.
“And now,” he told himself, “I have to meet the one man in all the world with whom I find it hardest to deal.”
Yes! There he was! And since the door had been deliberately left open by the departing Miles, it was inevitable that after a series of rather dragging footsteps—to which the Friar, as he stood in the centre of the room, listened with something like a suspension of breath—the man who entered made no pretence of knocking.
He was of low stature and of a thin weak body; but the extraordinary thing about him was his head. The head of Master Peter Peregrinus of Picardy was simply enormous. It made his body and legs look like those of a dwarf, though in reality they weren’t quite as small as that. The skin of his face was so deadly white that, if you had come upon him asleep, you would have certainly assumed that he was a corpse. His hair was straight, not curly, and of a glossy jet-black, with each individual hair as thick as that of a horse, so that their combined weight, massed together on the top of his skull, give his whole figure at a distance the effect of a wooden post on an exposed sea-bank, with either a thick growth of dusky seaweed covering the top of it, or a big black feathery bird perched upon it.
The chief peculiarity of Master Peter’s mouth was its absence of lips. It was simply a slit in smooth white marbly stone. And it seemed as if in dispensing with lips it had also decided to dispense with teeth. What did appear, and that not unfrequently, was Master Peter’s tongue. This object, abnormally long, and unusually pointed, was always shooting out from that slit in its marbly home, and every time it with-drew it gave the impression of having licked up some form of life which it would shortly be digesting.
But what the most ramificating, debouching, circumnavigating, deviating, perambulating chronicler would have had to be leading up to all this while, like a slippery serpent approaching something as hard to catch off-guard as itself, are, as the simplest reader has long ago guessed, Master Peter’s eyes. These were so large that when the man was excited, as he always was when not stunned by a blow or sunk into an impenetrable gulf of sleep, they conveyed the impression of being a pair of outlets for some interior volcano that if it were blocked up or barred down, would burst the cranium that contained it into a million smithereens.
It was doubtless to evade, for at least a couple of beats of the pulse of time, a glance into this explosive crater that Roger Bacon, uttering, as casually as he could, the exclamation, “Well! Well! Well!” made a deliberately slow circuit round his visitor from Picardy, and firmly, calmly, magisterially, and yet very softly, closed the door.
On returning from this breathing-space it can be believed he felt no surprise when he found Master Peter already seated at the table, not only tapping with the narrow finger-nail of his longest finger the word “vibrationem” half-way down the parchment page in front of him, but even steering a little horn-cup, with red wine-stains inside it, up and down among the oddly-patterned wood-marks of the table’s edge.
Master Peter’s demonic spirit did indeed so completely dominate the situation that the nervous Friar found himself seated at his own table in the visitor’s seat with the visitor in the host’s seat, found himself staring blindly into those two black holes, each of them a swirling Charybdisian vortex, and listening to the man’s words without asking him a single question or contradicting a single statement he made.
At last the man broke into his own tricky rigmarole by asking a plain blunt question. “Can you guess what I’m doing now?”
“Doing?” echoed Bacon in puzzled bewilderment.
“Yes, yes! Doing! to earn my bread, of course! Doing what you yourself were forced to do when your family was ruined by those scurvy De Montforts and their bloody Barons! You put on a Friar’s grey rags: and I put on sword and shield. And I’m still a man of war, Roger old friend. Get that into your pullulating pipkin! In Picardy, let me tell you, when once you’ve served your Lord in a vital campaign and given your bowels more action than they’re used to, by living on hedges and in ditches, you’ll soon find that the lords and prelates, who gain by the blood you lose and the sweat you’re drained of and the dung you evacuate, will see to it—it’s as much their interest, as it’s the interest of the dear God Himself, to have worshippers—that you don’t die in an almshouse but live to sit at street-corners, selling burnt almonds, singing ballads, and praising the king.”
Petrus Peregrinus had arrived at the two syllables “dear God” in the rush of these words, when, moving very slowly, the door began creaking a little and swinging inwards. By lolling his black head an inch to the left of the Friar’s grey shoulder he was able to envisage the appearance of a large metal tray, the rim of which, directed by the hands that held it, was itself propelling the massive weight of that huge oblong of impenetrable wood.
It was as impossible for the troubled apprehension of Roger Bacon to miss this gesture of his formidable visitor as it was for him, the second he observed it, to restrain his cry: “But, Miles, Miles! what we need now——”
Nobody will ever know for a certainty just what was in the Friar’s mind at that moment; although it would be easy to imagine several things. But what happened was that the Friar at that particular moment lost consciousness. Whether he fell, chair and all, to the floor and was lifted up by both men after the tra
y had been deposited on the table, or whether he had himself, after losing all consciousness of what he was doing, stumbled across the room to his bed and laid himself down on it, must be left as a blank lacuna in any narration of these events, until either Petrus or Miles chooses to reveal what each of them must have retained very clearly in his memory.
What we do know from the consciousness of the Friar himself is that when he awoke from his trance, or whatever may be the correct name for the overwhelming mental oblivion that descended upon him, he found himself lying on his bed with the devoted Miles kneeling beside him and watching his awakening with the most intense and concentrated attention.
“Is he gone?” was the Friar’s first question.
“Yes, dear Master,” replied Miles. “He’s gone.”
“Do you know where he’s gone?”
“I think, great Master, he’s gone to the Fortress.”
“Do they expect him there?”
“It is my impression, O most Admirable of all Teachers,” responded Miles, “that they have been expecting him for some time.”
“How did they know he was here?”
“From what I could make out from him as we went along,” replied Miles, rising from his knees and standing, grave and upright, like a majestic Roman statue at the foot of the Friar’s bed, “but you know, great master, what he is, and what dung-hill talk he uses and how little he cares whether the person he’s talking to understands one jot of what he’s saying! I don’t take to him, master, and that’s the bone truth! He’s a scholar right enough. I don’t quarrel with his learning. Thee be a man of learning, thee wone self, and I admire ‘ee and look up to ‘ee for’t, like as thee were a kind of God in ‘eaven and no nonsense!
The Brazen Head Page 25