The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  “But this bob-by-night, and I don’t care who hears me say so, be the sort of Mumbo-Jumbo—Prick-and-Thumbo what they do tell I be found in them girt Fairs in London and Paris and Consinotabel, such as travelling pipshaws do visit in their carry-otteries by day and by night.

  “But the man be a man of Latin and Greek, us must allow ‘im that much, for all it be worth to ‘in, but when I do think of thee, master of mine, and how thy girt wisdom do go along with a girt heart, and how ye do give scoops and bowls o’t, yea! basinsfull o’t, to all and sundry as comes to beg for a crumb of real learning, it do make my gorge to ‘eave up. Thee do use thee’s girt learning to give us more pottage in all our porringers; but this man thinks only of inventing magnets to draw the gold from other men’s treasure-chests into his own. There! If I’ve not gone and done the one thing I didn’t ought to ‘a done—made ‘ee, O master my dear, dead-tired by listening to I!”

  At this pathetic self-accusation the Friar quickly opened his eyes.

  “No, no!” he cried, “you’ve put new life into me, Miles old friend, by giving me your real and actual feeling about Petrus Peregrinus. But you were beginning to tell me why you thought they were expecting him at the Fortress.”

  At this the majestic Roman physiognomy of Miles dissolved into the love-ravaged confusion of a guilty hero-worshipper, and with a convulsive sob he sank on his knees.

  “He ate and he drank,” were the words that that crumpled visage now moaned into the edge of the prisoner’s coverlet, “everything I’d brought for both of ye! And then, when he was satisfied, he just went off. He glanced at you before he went and kept muttering to himself without taking any notice of me, “O he’ll come to life in a minute or two! come to life in a minute or two! He’ll come to life in a minute or two!” And off the man went. But I do think I picked up from his randy chat, while I was pegging along by his side and carrying his bundles, that he had been told of your Brazen Head having been taken into the Fortress and put into the armoury; and I think myself, master, that it was with the idea of visiting your Brazen Head that he wanted to get in touch with the lord of the Fortress. At any rate we met young John, and John must have told them to expect him.”

  The tone in which Miles uttered this last sentence contained, in its military resonance, a finality which conveyed such an utter removal of all responsibility for what was happening from the recipients of the news it brought, that Roger Bacon, only just hoisted up from the heavenly tide of oblivious sleep, turned over on his bed and closed his eyes.

  XVI

  THE LODESTONE

  Petrus Peregrinus had found no difficulty, when once he had descended the stairs, in persuading, by the offer of a sufficient bribe, one of the pleasant-speaking boys from the Prior’s kitchen to lead him to the Fortress. Once inside the Fortress he had no difficulty on that particular evening in obtaining a leisurely and agreeable interview with the Lord of the Manor of Roque.

  The Baron’s curiosity in relation to this singular intruder was lively from the first moment he heard the rumours about him, but as soon as he met him face to face on this night of the man’s departure from the Priory, he felt it was imperative that he should have him to himself in private for at least a quarter of an hour.

  No! He couldn’t deal with the fellow in the presence of the family. For here was his forever indignant, forever outraged, forever grievanced Lady Val, whom he always thought of in his own mind as “Valentia the Irreconcilable”, and here was his excitable daughter Lil-Umbra, and here was his anxious, concentrated, architectural-minded elder son Tilton, and finally here was the adventurous young John, who of late had become such a fierce champion of Friar Bacon that he had rendered himself as fully liable to ecclesiastical censure as was the Friar’s older friend Raymond, whom Lady Val had already accepted as Lil-Umbra’s betrothed.

  Here they were, all the lot of them, gathered together in high spirits after a lively evening meal, and simply waiting for some event of an exciting nature to occur. What could he do to get the fellow entirely to himself for a while? He looked first at one of them and then at another, as they all stood round him while the young man from the Priory, having ushered Master Peter into their presence, made a little speech, as dignified as it was natural, emphasizing the fact that the fame of the Brazen Head, possessed of the power of speaking and perhaps even of the power of thinking was what no doubt had brought this notable visitor.

  At last the Lord of the Manor of Roque got an inspiration. And it was Lil-Umbra who gave it to him. The others had already begun to talk among themselves when she spoke up boldly and clearly, addressing her father.

  “Better take Maître Pierre de Maricourt”—for the traveller had evidently instructed the boy from the Priory kitchen exactly how to announce him—“upstairs to your little room, Father. And then you’ll be able to tell us better and clearer about him, so that Mother, and we all, can do him the honour which we feel sure he deserves. Tilton and John and I are so keen to know all about him that we might be a bother to him. But with you to explain——” And Lil-Umbra ended with a pathetically beseeching glance at Lady Val, as much as to say, “I’ll be very very good and do everything, yes, everything, you want me to do, if only you’ll agree to this!”

  But the Lord of the Fortress was so quick in taking his daughter’s wise hint that Lady Val had no chance to intervene, nor had her brothers a chance to accompany the two of them, even with the politest intentions. For throwing his powerful right arm round the slim, frail, weedy little body of his guest, as if he were his uncle rather than his host, he hurried him upstairs to the “little room” to which Lil-Umbra referred.

  This, as a matter of fact, was a small apartment next door to their large bed-chamber, an apartment where the Baron kept the smaller, rarer, daintier, more delicate, more breakable utensils of his hunting, fishing, spearing and arrow-shooting gear.

  The Baron himself and Peter of Maricourt in Picardy would have indeed been a perfect subject for a painter in oils, had one such been there to watch them; and indeed the mere sight of them, as they sat facing each other in the Baron’s “Little Room”, might possibly, had Tilton been daring enough and unscrupulous enough to slip up there after them and peep at them through the half-open door, have turned him from a sculptor into a painter.

  It was a characteristic of several of the rooms in the Fortress that the doors were so constructed that it was physically impossible for them to be properly shut, so that the young man could have watched them for some time with an interest that might have inspired him with a passion for portrait-painting.

  Yes, if the boy had been rude enough to follow them, the effect of the extraordinary vibrations thrown off all the time from the person of Master Peter might have affected this serious-minded young man’s life in a really startling manner.

  But Tilton did not follow them into that little room with the door that couldn’t shut. We may imagine his doing so; but he didn’t and that ends it. The chance came. The chance was not taken. The particular sight that, if it had been taken, would have changed his whole life, was never seen by him.

  Chroniclers of human history talk of Fate, or Destiny, of what Homer calls “Keer” or doom. But all the time it is the great goddess of Chance—the present chronicler shirks using her name, because to anglicize it we have to turn the Greek letter called “upsilon” into our “Y”, which always tempts us to pronounce it like our “i”, which spoils its beauty altogether—yes, all the time it is the great goddess of Chance who turns the scale at the supreme crises of our life.

  But though the sight of their figures facing each other remained unseen, Master Peter of Maricourt in Picardy and the Lord of the Fortress of Roque certainly did not “beat”, as the saying is, “about the bush”.

  “What is that fool of a Friar made of,” queried Master Peter, “that he spends all his time, now that you people have got his Brazen Head, in writing long elaborate criticisms of these miserable doctors in Oxford and Paris, when he must kno
w perfectly well that they are all tarred with the same brush and the same tar, the brush of obstruction and the tar of abstraction?

  “And what a simple mind the fellow must have to make these attacks on the stupidity of the great mass of people and on the ignorance of their teachers! What does the man expect of our poor wretched human race? Hasn’t it been the same from the beginning? Can you or anybody else imagine anything different? Jesus Holy! How can the fellow suppose that even the cleverest of our masters with a class of young men before him as simple as our boys are—and they weren’t very different in the days of Confucius or the days of Socrates!—can bring, to what he tells these kids, inspiration and wit and insight enough to start them off looking up words in their Greek and Latin dictionaries?

  “And the double-dyed idiot goes further even than that! Do you know, my lord, what I saw with my own eyes written on one of his carefully chosen parchment sheets? You would never guess! Nothing less than a passionate appeal to these teachers and to the young men who themselves want to become teachers, young men of good birth, like your own sons, to study Hebrew! Of course he’s perfectly right—you and I, my lord, don’t need a Grey Friar to tell us that—in indicating that the translations of Hebrew, all except that of the incomparable Jerome, are pretty rotten. But will these kids he’s catering for find the time, find the grammars, find the god-given or devil-given wit, to correct these treacherous and dangerous mistakes?

  “How much better it would be for him, my Lord, if he would do what I do—that is to say leave all this theological business alone, and concentrate on experiment and invention; on experiment first, to find out what can be invented so as to be in harmony with Nature; and then, when we’ve got our invention, experiment again to find how far its use can go and yet remain in harmony with Nature.”

  The perfectly abysmal self-satisfaction expressed at that moment in the unnaturally large face, under the alarmingly large forehead and beneath that huge crop of jet black hair, roused in the Baron of Roque more anger than he had felt for many a long year. But he succeeded in restraining himself from displaying anything but the alert interest of a polite host in the presence of a voluble guest for several seconds of expectant silence.

  “Surely, O great Experimenter, surely, O great Inventor,” his alert pose seemed to say, as he leant forward from the round, hard, circular, gilded seat of his small upright armchair and clasped his fingers over his right knee, letting his foot thus balanced in the air sway interrogatively, “surely a man of your calibre didn’t allow a simple grey friar of the order we all know so well,” the Baron’s mute expectancy went on, “to reduce you to the position of a silent listener at a theological lecture?”

  The invisible chronicler of all these events, which were of course both physical and psychical, cannot help noting how much more detached from any sort of egotism or self-assertion was this lord of the biggest Manor in Wessex than this plain soldier from Maricourt in Picardy.

  The psychic difference between them displayed itself physically with nearly perfect propriety in the way the two men consciously or unconsciously managed their mouths. The red point of Master Peter’s tongue kept darting out from between his lips, just as if it were the instantaneously deadly sting of a human-headed Goblin armed with the poison of a hornet; while behind the lips of the Baron’s mouth some unspoken word seemed roaming about, testing and trying every surface of the walls of its prison-house, as if conscientiously seeking the entrance to a promised passage of escape, concerning whose existence, though it was supported by universal consent, he himself was rather doubtful.

  The only light in what, throughout the whole Fortress, was known as “The Little Room” came from a large oil-lamp in which two wicks, each with its own particular flame, floated quietly, and by their light, on the thin sill of a small square window, looking out on nothing but darkness and square stone towers, a small gnat could be seen marching resolutely up and down.

  The only heat in the little room—but this was quite sufficient to make it perfectly warm—came from a stately bronze receptacle containing red-hot coals, with which the Baron’s retainers kept it liberally supplied both by day and by night.

  What Master Peter was thinking at that moment had certainly little to do with either theology or metaphysics.

  “Would it be to my advantage or to my disadvantage,” he was asking himself, “to tell this patronizing English lord about the magnetic shock I gave to this fool of a friar? What’s against my doing so is the fact that I don’t yet know how long the shock I gave him actually lasted; indeed I don’t know yet whether it knocked the breath out of him forever! I rather hope it didn’t, because there is still that little point about the value of manganese as an ingredient in the making of an elixir, that I ought to ask him. God knows why I forgot.”

  What the Baron was thinking was: “All these confounded quacks, whether they call themselves scientists or astrologists or alchemists or metaphysicians or inventors or theologians, are only plotting to get power for themselves over other people and glory for themselves over each other! What we must realize is that life goes on exactly the same whether we’re with them or without them! When Lord Edward comes home from these absurd crusades we shall all know better where we stand. These damnable Scots want to be hammered into quiescence by somebody who understands the art of war, not the art of changing metals.

  “And for these Welsh thieves who keep invading this country, if once metal-changers and sorcerers really begin, as they seem to be beginning, to rule the world, it won’t be long before we shall be conquered by some ancient British robber who claims to be descended from Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar.

  “But I know what I must do with this rogue—for it’s clear he’s some sort of oriental gipsy with the devil knows what games and tricks up his sleeve—is to get that fellow Spardo to take him round the ring of all the manors about here, even if he’s got to mount him on that unfortunate beast with a man’s head coming out of his neck! They told me out yonder that this fellow swears he comes from Picardy and that he likes to be called Maitre Pierre. Well! he can Maître-Pierre it to his heart’s content with old Spardo dancing round him, and with that horse—what’s its classic name?—to ride on! By God! that’s what I’ll do!”

  At this point, in this curious dialogue between two silences, there suddenly opened one of those queer holes, or gaps, or gulfs, or chasms in the psychic-contact of two speechless persons who are watching each other like two animals, each wondering, in a sort of trance of expectation, not exactly whether it would be a good thing to leap at the other’s throat, but whether the power that moves the world, whatever that power may be, will decide on their battling or embracing; and in this hollow void it was brought home to the Lord of the Manor that this Master Peter in front of him was really and truly some kind of Medium.

  For what did my lord hear, clearly and unmistakably, at that identical instant, but the familiar voice, carried up on the eddying wind from the darkened forest below, of Spardo himself addressing his weird horse and of Cheiron answering his owner’s voice with one of those indescribable sounds made by a self-conscious and self-possessed animal, a sound that had grown to have its quite definite meaning in the language of their mutual understanding.

  “Come out with me for a moment, Master Peter of Maricourt, will you please? I want you to meet some very old friends of mine!”

  The wanderer from Picardy followed him without hesitation or demur. When they reached the ground-floor the Baron hurried his guest through the anteroom and the entrance-hall, till he got him to the main entrance of the Fortress, and once there, with nothing but a humorous nod to the gate-keeper and the exchange of a more reserved and even a slightly enigmatic quip with the gate-keeper’s wife, he pushed open one of the big gates, and with a hand on Master Peter’s shoulder got him into the open, where by the light of a lantern hung on the branch of a tree they found Cheiron eating a supper of oats, and his master squatting on a fir-stump beside him devouring fr
om a bowl on his knees some sort of steaming stew which the gate-keeper’s wife must have provided.

  “Where are you going to sleep tonight, Spardo?” The Lord of the Fortress never for a moment lost his special and peculiar power of propitiating the oddest, queerest, and most intransigent personalities in the world, whether in the human or sub-human sphere of life.

  At this moment, without ceasing to transport to his mouth as much stew as his wooden spoon could carry, Spardo didn’t hesitate for a second in his reply to this question.

  “With your permission, good my lord, I should like to tie up Cheiron in the horse-stall behind the Fortress; for I’ve got the permission of the dame at your gate, if yourself, good my lord, have no objection, to sleep in her gate-house across there.”

  “Could the same good lady, do you suppose,” said the Lord of the Fortress, “find room on a mattress in the same retreat for my friend Maître Pierre, a foreign gentleman from Picardy?”

  The said Master Peter, as may easily be imagined, did not miss one jot of the instinctive sagacity with which the Baron, upon whose good or bad, wise of foolish behaviour so many destinies in that corner of the west country depended, managed to eliminate himself completely, as the local potentate whose whim was law, and to create a half-humorous atmosphere of adventure in which they all were taking chances.

  Nor did he miss the perfectly natural manner in which Spardo, who was now scraping the inside of his bowl with his spoon, entered into this game, and instead of rising from the tree-stump on which he was squatting, when he saw Cheiron straining to get some fodder that was just beyond his reach, called out to the Baron, “Kick that stuff nearer the horse, my lord, if you don’t mind!”