The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  “It was all very well when we were young to just repeat the lessons taught us by our parents or by our priest or in our school, but when we become men—that’s what I’ve been thinking lately in this old armoury of ours, great master—we ought to ‘put away’, as holy scripture says, ‘childish things’; and not only so, but we ought to examine, yes! examine down to the very bottom, all our inherited presumptions, suppositions, and beliefs, everything in fact to which we’ve become accustomed, everything that we now take for granted; yes, examine it all, examine it over and over again from the very start, rejecting this and retaining that, as our separate, independent, individual spirit tells us, for it is our individual spirit that, at the bottom of everything, is, and always will——”

  He was interrupted in his speech, and the magnate from Cologne was interrupted in his sympathetic listening by the sudden opening of the armoury door and the entrance of none other than the gigantic Mongolian Jew, Peleg. Peleg walked with slow deliberate steps straight to where the two men were seated, and addressed himself to the ex-bailiff.

  “Lady Val has sent me, sir,” he said, “to convey you, if you will be good enough to allow me to help you, to my lord’s Little Room. My lady wishes me to say that her first thought was to have the two young masters’ beds moved there for the night, but my lord felt strongly that you would yourself prefer the Little Room to any other and feel more independent there. You will be, my lady wished me to say, quite as comfortable there, perhaps more comfortable than you are here in the armoury.”

  The relief on the face of the old man at hearing this news was so evident to Albertus Magnus, that this latter suppressed his instinctive inclination to make a polite apology for being so anxious to spend the night quite alone with the Image of Brass.

  “If,” he thought, “I make a fuss about any of this business, I shall be only confusing the issue. What I want is to have this armoury to myself for just one night—to myself along with this man-created man—if that’s what you are!” and he shot at the Brazen Head a challenging and yet a pitying glance before turning his half-scouring, half-cleansing, and altogether benevolent little eyes upon the gigantic Peleg.

  “The little room!” cried the old man. “Nothing in this place could please me better! And, Peleg, old friend, I am indeed perfectly ready to go there at once if you will give me your support.”

  Without further speech, and with one of Peleg’s powerful arms round his shoulder, the old man rose stiffly to his feet, and laying his left hand with a sublime indifference to this weird entity’s claim to be a living soul, upon the shoulder of the Brazen Head, as if it had been the wooden back of a negligible bench in some public hall-way, he offered his right hand to Albert of Cologne.

  “We shall meet, your—your—your Eminence,” he murmured, clearly regarding their visitor as a Papal Legate, or at least as a Cardinal, “and then we shall, I hope, be able to finish our conversation.”

  Albert of Cologne looked at him with all that humorous tenderness he liked to think he had learnt from Jesus. “I shan’t forget, you may be sure,” he said, “the exact point we’ve reached in our talk! Peleg here can well imagine,” and he gave Peleg a subtly-charged smile, as if he’d known him for years rather than was now seeing him for the first time, “just what we were discussing! and perhaps you wouldn’t,” he added, “mind telling the Lady Valentia that I feel too exhausted to require any dinner tonight, and shall soon take advantage of the excellent bed I see ready for me. And no doubt I shall dream of all the wonderful people and of all the amazing things I shall encounter tomorrow.”

  With these final words he lowered himself in his chair, thrust out his heels with a somnolent leathery sound across the reed-woven rug in front of him, and closed his eyes, while Peleg in dutiful silence led the ex-bailiff from the room.

  Into the deep quiet that followed their departure Albertus sank down, as if into the original ocean of silence out of which all sounds first sprang. Sleep was certainly what the man from Cologne needed, and he must have slept till not only the light of that long June afternoon was over, but its evening twilight too; for, when he awoke, the armoury was nearly dark.

  As soon as he was on his feet, however, the first thing he looked at, by the light of the small uncovered oil-lamp that stood in front of it, was a tiny image of the Virgin, which had been a gift to the ex-bailiff by his grandmother in his childhood and which was very precious to him.

  What, to confess the truth, made it especially precious to him was the fact that his little sister—who was his only youthful companion, for his parents had no other children—had once, in one of her moods, whether a mood of skittishness or of naughtiness, or because she had overheard it in some argument between priests, carved in big letters, clear across the base of the little image, the single word Parthenogenesis.

  Moira had been drowned in the river Wey and her body carried out to sea before she was fourteen, and the ex-bailiff’s son, Randolph, had steadily refused, probably because of some prejudice of his wife against the child’s name, which is Greek for Destiny or Fate, to use it for any of his own daughters, of whom he had several. So nowhere upon earth save in her brother’s heart, and in the exquisite trouble she herself had taken to form those fifteen letters, did there exist any memorial of the little carver of that big word.

  It certainly was not of those significant syllables, nor of the question as to who had inscribed them upon that small image, that Albertus Magnus of Cologne was thinking as, by the help of the flame at that tiny shrine, he lit the chief light of the armoury and began making his preparations for the night. Once safe in bed, with an excellent pillow under his throbbing skull, and the armoury-light turned low, and a couple of warm blankets over him, he gazed steadily at the Brazen Head.

  “If you can manage for me to spend one night entirely alone with the Head,” he had told Raymond de Laon, “I will most certainly come.”

  Well! Here he was, alone with It, and there were four or five hours of total darkness in front of him and no apparent danger of any interruption to whatever communion of body, mind, or even spirit he could bring about between this man-created Being and himself.

  Albertus had by nature an outward-working mind, and his natural urge to talk, to teach, to write, to read, to direct, to examine, to explore, to plan, to construct, to build, to organise, to reform, to originate, was so powerful that it was extremely difficult—O much worse than difficult!—extremely repulsive and even loathsome to him to indulge in any sort of introspection.

  It was pain and grief to him to analyse his own thoughts, feelings, impressions, and reactions. He might have been bolder in this direction, if he had not known by instinct that there were sleeping devils in the intricate corridors of his mind that it would be dangerous to disturb. He was indeed continuously aware of a particular region in his response to life that held a dark, ultimate, indescribable horror for him.

  It was in fact so horrible that it was imperative for him to avoid this region of his mind at all costs. It was a region which, if he couldn’t steer his way round it, and, as far as this was humanly possible, forget it, and behave as if it didn’t exist, would eventually by the pressure of its sheer horror disintegrate his whole intelligence.

  It is perfectly possible for an energetic and powerfully galvanic will to win renown for its owner, while the deepest part of the personality which that towering will-power has to carry along with it, just as a swiftly driving chariot might have to carry in the belly of its body a writhing and squirming serpent, may be secretly twitching and quivering with all manner of maniacal distastes and repugnances.

  “All my life,” thought Albertus Magnus, “I’ve been escaping from myself. What I’ve been always secretly afraid of is neither God nor the Devil, neither man nor beast: it is simply and solely myself!”

  He had grown so accustomed to make certain deeply intimate and yet automatic debouchings and deviations from the direct path in his consciousness of life, so as to dodge, and careful
ly circumnavigate, and craftily avoid, all those places where his most fearful personal mania and most horrified shrinking would be brought into play, that it was a dangerous shock to him to find that the presence of the Brazen Head disturbed this wise habit.

  The only companion, whether male or female, to whom he had ever given a hint of this lake of horror in a secret valley of his soul, was Thomas Aquinas, with whom he had shared lodgings in more than one great seat of learning, and of whom he would retort when the others ridiculed Thomas as a dumb ox, “when this dumb ox starts bellowing, he’ll make the whole world listen.” But we can well believe that it would not have been easy to make a young metaphysician of Thomas’s calibre realize the existence of such a background to his adored teacher’s lively lessons.

  But whether Thomas Aquinas realized before he died—for the master outlived the pupil by several years—all that the great Albert’s benevolent energy concealed behind its absorbing and compelling instruction, there can be little doubt that this supreme teacher’s frightful necessity to keep his own nervous malady in the background had something to do with the desperate fervour of his way of teaching.

  The more passionately and comprehendingly he could follow and interpret the subtle distinctions in theology, the further he was able to withdraw himself from that appalling lake of horror in the secret depths of his own mind.

  What he found himself wondering now—as with rather a troublesome effort he squeezed the thickest of his two pillows under the back of his own head and stared at the Head of Brass—was why the word, that he had by chance noticed inscribed in childish capital letters on that little image of the Blessed Virgin, kept hovering on the intervening air, like faint streaks of splashed blood, between himself and the expressionless countenance of the Brazen Head.

  “But surely,” he thought, “in the creation of that Image and in the elaborate workmanship or exquisite machinery that he gave to it,” here he jerked his own head forward almost defiantly—“yes! I’m talking of you, you new Adam, you Adam of wires and wheels and screws and scuttles, and I’m telling you now, here and now, that what your man-maker forgot when he wound you up was the touch of a Virgin!”

  What happened then was a volcano-like explosion of feeling, an explosion to which both Magnus and the Brazen Head must have contributed something. The accumulation of force which burst at that moment drew from Albertus, in one whole rush, all the smouldering depths of the spirit with which he had for the best years of his life flooded the gaping arteries of his devoted pupils; while the imprisoned demonic power in the Brazen Head, which seemed only to have been waiting an opportunity to escape, burst forth to meet what the other was giving.

  It was not until much later that Albertus was able to offer—to himself we must understand—some kind of an account of what happened. He felt as if the whole dark, enormous, inscrutable mass of blackish-greyish matter, which Aristotle called “Hulee”, and which the philosopher and many of his disciples held was eternal, indestructible, and without beginning, was now around him on every side. He could see it, he could feel it, he could smell it, and it was bearing him up, up, up, on the titanic curves of an agglomeration of merciless substance!

  Wildly and desperately Albertus realized that the material substance of his own body had begun to grow larger and larger; and as he was carried upward he became frantically and dizzily aware that in front of him was only empty Space, yes! Space absolutely empty, leading on and on and on, with no limit and without an end!

  And then suddenly he spoke to himself in a still small voice. “Albert, old friend,” he said to himself, “there’s no need for you to be alone in Space like this. You have forgotten what all creatures ought never to forget. You have forgotten that there is also Time.”

  And at the thought of Time—Time that can reduce Space by measuring the segments of it, Time that can remember backwards to wherever man has been or might have been, Time that can imagine forwards to wherever man will be or could be, Time that’s our friendly and customary home, Time that belonged to our fathers before us and will belong to our children after us, Time that clothes us as with familiar raiment and nourishes us as with bread and wine, Time that gives us a bed to sleep on, Time that gives us a tent to cover us and a fire to warm us—Albertus of Cologne had no sooner uttered these words in a low voice, himself speaking to himself, than lo and behold! he was back again in the armoury of the Fortress, back again with his thickest pillow squeezed under his neck, back again with the flickering blood-stained letters of the word Parthenogenesis hovering in the darkness between himself and the Brazen Head.

  And he was only aware of being back again, for a second or two of submission to Time, the magic power which had delivered him, when he was lost, to all that was and all that might be, in a deep and dreamless sleep.

  XIX

  MASTER PETER PEREGRINUS

  It was not until the late summer of the year of grace 1272 that Petrus Peregrinus of Picardy approached the channel between France and England with the intention of crossing to the district in this latter country, where his scientific rival Roger Bacon was still incarcerated. He had been supporting himself in his usual manner, till what he called his “experiments in magnetism” brought him serious enemies, and so discomforted the local authorities as to endanger his freedom of movement. It was then that he decided upon a bold move.

  In plain words he joined, for the time being, and with an understanding that he could leave it whenever he wished, no less important a body of European soldiers than one of the divisions of the King of France. He took service in this particular body of men not from any hostility to the Swiss or the Spanish or the Portuguese or the Italians or the Germans, but purely from a desire to earn money which he could save up and spend on leisure to study magnetism and to write a treatise on it.

  He had been in luck this particular summer; for though the force he chose to join had had nothing to do with any crusade, nor had been used for any important campaign, it had been posted in a part of the country where there was a constant demand for military aid in the protection of rich farmers and of their flocks and their barns from wandering bands of marauders, whose extreme destitution had made them freebooters.

  Petrus had given himself up to all manner of mad dreams while his camp was moved from place to place; but in one way and another he had saved up quite a little hoard of such silver pieces as were exchangeable coins, if not current coins, in most of the countries of Europe.

  It was on a hot day in late summer, and he had reached a little circular valley in Savoy, when an event occurred that was of importance in his life. He suddenly came upon a cross-road hut in the centre of this little valley, which was inhabited by a couple of persons who were so aged as to look barely human. He had been along this border of Savoy before but had never before passed through this particular valley, but it was here he was destined to receive, or here that pure chance flung upon him, an inspiration of a very curious kind.

  Whether this inspiration came from an angel, and had an angelic purpose behind it, or came from a devil, and had a diabolic purpose behind it, it would be impossible to say. But either, if for the nonce we rule pure chance out of it as the arbiter of such events, was certainly possible.

  An angelic power might very well have decided that, before Peter Peregrinus had continued his tortuous career for another day, it would be good for the world in general if it were cut short. On the other hand a devilish power might easily have come to the conclusion that there was nobody on earth at this hour who, if only preserved alive for a few moons longer, could work so much harm to the human race as this traveller from Picardy.

  “What do you call your turnpike corner?” enquired Peter of this couple of age-stricken ones, as they sat side by side on a wooden bench, filling a big wooden bucket with a mess of sour milk and mouldy bread and bad potatoes, while a big bristling sow of a yellowish colour uplifted her snout from a hollow place scooped out of the ground before them.

  “What does
the lord on his feet say?” enquired the antiquity who wore male clothes, addressing the antiquity who wore female clothes.

  The woman made no reply to this question. But she rose to her feet and held out a long skinny arm with a regular birds’ claw at the end of it.

  “Give silver, great lord of the highway,” she murmured huskily in a queer French patois: “and me yes! even me, will give you the magic word for your long travel.”

  The enormous head of Peter of Maricourt moved a little, or perhaps we ought to say drooped a little forward, while from the white expanse of his face, like the sting of a creature that might have stung itself to death in the days of the father of Abraham, protruded the sharp tip of a presumably human tongue.

  His black eyes seemed to the companion of the female antiquity, who still kept opening and closing her extended fingers, to flow into each other till they ceased to be two bottomless blacknesses and became one. But whether they were one or two, they evidently read in the Cretan Maze of feminine wrinkles upon which they were now concentrated that that seemingly dried up fountain of wisdom had a tap that was well worth tapping.

  “Yes, by Satan,” the traveller must have thought, “I’ll get something out of you!” for he was not only nodding with his head now, but he was also searching in the lining of his jerkin.

  At last he brought out a couple of silver coins, a big one and a little one. These he turned over in his fingers many times, so as to make sure the woman saw just what they were and the difference between them. Having satisfied himself that both these things had been observed, he negligently flipped the edges of the two pieces of silver together and permitted his own raptorial orbs to relapse into their respective hollows, while they took in the geographical position of this most pitiful of all possible turnpikes.