The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  All that morning Albertus Magnus had been saying to himself: “Whatever it was that brought all these people here and brought me on the top of them all, I’d be worse than the self-conscious fool I am if I didn’t take advantage of it in some way. That’s what’s the matter with me. I’m no good at creating situations. I just accept them and make the necessary plunges and darts and dives and gestures as seem called for.

  “The one single act of my whole life”—so the great teacher’s thoughts ran on, even after he had begun acting his part for today—“that I did entirely on my own and under no influence from outside was when I gave up that bishopric: aye!” and Albertus indulged in a grotesque dramatic shudder and wrinkled up all his malleable features; “aye! aye! but it was an appalling experience, those two years of being a bishop! But what on earth am I going to do with this chance the Lord has thrown in my path?”

  And then the inspiration came to him.

  “Sex is the maddest force there is. Why then not consecrate this madness? All the way down the history of our race—not to speak of certain beasts and birds—males and females have gone through curious ceremonies to celebrate this union. When we Christianize marriage, it is to demonstrate our share in Christ’s own desperate and eternal act of faith that He was the Son of God. Sex is the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain in life; and the ceremonious consecration of the joining together of sex-mates has been the instinctive retort of all animal life to the insanity of sex from the beginning of the world.”

  Thus did the thoughts of Albertus Magnus run on, even while he began the quaint performance into which his “guardian angel”, or, if you like, “his conscience”—although that word introduces just as many insoluble riddles—had now precipitated him.

  “Come hither my son Tilton, sculptor and carver and builder of a shrine! Come hither my daughter Una, of the family of Pole, largest of all the families upon the said manor! If you Tilton take you Una to be your wedded wife, and if you Una take you Tilton to be your wedded husband, all the old deep rifts, between those who work on the land and those who own and fight for the land, will be healed!”

  To the absolute amazement of Brother Tuck and of a good many others of those who were watching this queer scene, but not to the surprise of young John, who was now standing at Sir Mort’s side and explaining to him more things than Sir Mort could or would or can be imagined ever wanting to understand, both Tilton and Una now appeared hand-in-hand before Albertus Magnus.

  So accustomed was Albertus to this particular ceremony, every word of which he knew by heart, that it was not long before this pair’s union was consecrated, consecrated before men and before birds and beasts and angels and demons, consecrated as one flesh.

  This had no sooner been done than bursting forth from the band of people who surrounded Sir Mort, and followed with obvious anxiety by both the Baron Boncor and his boy-knight Sir William, there emerged in a furious rush of frenzy like a shrieking Valkyrie the figure of Lady Ulanda, whose whole body—since to increase her speed, or perhaps deliberately to enhance the effect of her wrath, she kept tearing from her person one flimsy garment after another—was positively contorted with emotion.

  It was purely against Friar Bacon that her anger was directed; for, by his cold refusal on that one fatal visit of hers to his room, to play the part of her dresser-up and devoted medico-magico, he had hurt that centre of a woman’s life-illusion, a blow to which goes deeper into her essential being than if you cut off one of her arms at the wrist or one of her feet at the ankle.

  When she reached the spot where the gigantic Peleg was standing, with Roger Bacon’s Brazen Head upon his shoulder, to the pedestal of which—for the Head had nothing except that neck upon which Ghosta had confessed to have had, in complete nakedness, a mysterious sexual ecstasy—Ghosta’s perfect white arms were now raised, Ulanda for one second stood still.

  Then with a wild cry she flung herself, not only against the weird Object, alive and yet not alive, created by the Friar, but upon all three of them, clawing at Peleg’s throat with one hand, seizing Ghosta’s right arm with the other, and shaking them both so violently that the Brazen Head fell to the ground!

  By what some would call Providence, others Chance, and yet others the protective power of the Devil, the Brazen Head descended to the earth the right way up, and indeed sank into a patch of grass so smoothly and easily that it rested there at once in complete quiescence, as if that little patch of greenery had risen to meet it out of the abyss as its destined home.

  There was something about this startling event, whether you considered it an event in favour of the Head or against the interest of the Head, that affected everybody who was looking on. The person who was most affected was young John; for his link with Roger Bacon was so intimate and close that to see Roger’s creation fall from the giant Peleg’s shoulder clear to the ground was more than young John’s heart could bear, and he acted as a child might have done.

  He fell on his knees, covered his face with his hands, and burst into a fit of violent sobbing and weeping. Young John’s sobs, however, since he knelt on the ground and pressed his hands to his face, were not loud enough to turn people’s attention away from Albertus Magnus.

  This simple-minded great man, who had become without knowing it the most important teacher in the world, having successfully married John’s dear brother Tilton to the beautiful Una or Oona and thus having ended the feud between the old rebel Dod Pole and the bailiff-family of Sygerius, had evidently, in that energetic innocence and inspired foolhardiness that characterized him, decided to continue his marriage campaign and had summoned, loudly and clearly, Raymond de Laon and Lil-Umbra to come before him.

  The sound of their names roused Sir Mort from the trance he’d fallen into, a trance, or a cessation of every bodily activity save breath and pulse and heart-beat, which was more familiar to his family than any other mood of his, but which covered in reality a much more consciously philosophical attitude to life than Lady Val or his three children realized.

  Sir Mort was a queer mixture of a predatory animal with the sort of animal that predatory creatures, including men, are so addicted to hunting: and it now struck him that here was a supreme opportunity for an absolute escape from all those accompaniments of marriage that Lady Val would most certainly have insisted upon. It pleased him also to note that Lady Ulanda, who was now clinging to her husband’s arm with an expression of abandoned and doting felicity, was evidently beside herself with satisfaction at having caused the collapse of Roger Bacon’s Brazen Head, even if no further than to the ground.

  It was a lucky thing for young John, this abrupt and unexpected summons of Lil-Umbra and her betrothed Raymond to this unpremeditated exchange of marriage vows; for Tilton and his bride had roused Sir Mort from his “hunter’s trance,” and were conversing eagerly with him, and there was no one immediately available to hold the horses of these new candidates for the marriage sacrament. So that it fell to the lot of young John to stand between these two horses, one of which was called “Rip” and the other “Strip”, and get a tight hold on both pairs of reins.

  The impetuously well-meaning Albertus was himself just then a little bit worried by a tickling at the back of one of his ears, which he erroneously fancied to be due to some mis-arrangement of his head-dress, but which really was caused by the fluttering of a midge. And it was this small annoyance that made him completely forget to use one rather important sentence in the course of the ceremony, a sentence the omission of which made no real difference but had an odd effect. But though the excited Lil-Umbra did not notice this lapse, her calmer companion stored it up in his mind as one of those humorous accidents that seem intentionally to disturb the dignity of our human life upon earth as a professional fool rattles his bells.

  Although the accident to the Brazen Head had set John weeping like a child it now became necessary for him to take the two horses down the hill, where he tied them, with the help of Lay-Brother Tuck, to Friar Bacon
’s oak-tree.

  It was a much less agitating meeting than he expected that young John had then with his adored master. The Friar treated him, he noticed, with deep pride and satisfaction, rather as a responsible fully grown-up man and as an equal, than as a pupil or disciple.

  “You and I mustn’t let ourselves,” the Friar told him quietly, “get too agitated, whatever they do to our Brazen Head. We know he is, poor old dear, only about a fiftieth part of a real person. We’ve given him the power of calculation along certain lines; and I hope, though I am not quite sure about that, that in a great crisis he might even speak. But I am afraid the poor dear is still devoid of real life, for so far we haven’t learnt the art of creating life, though we may learn it before we’ve done.

  “But we must remember that all living creatures, even worms and insects and sea-shells, have a consciousness of being themselves and only themselves, and have the power of saying to themselves like Jehovah, I am that I am. I wish I could believe that our poor old Brazen Head, whom an angry woman just now threw to the ground, has the power of saying to itself: ‘I am the Brazen Head, made by Roger Bacon. I am as much of a real conscious self as that daddy-long-legs now resting on my shoulder!’”

  Young John couldn’t even smile at this, for the occasion was too serious. Pressing his knuckles against his own cheek to prevent the flush he felt mounting up under his skin, he boldly asked him a very delicate and crucial question.

  “I needn’t tell you, Father,” he said, “how you have always taken the place for me since I was a boy of all other human loves and devotions. When I think of embracing anyone or of being embraced and of the closest intimacies”—at this point, as he felt his cheeks begin to burn, he thought with relief that, in the burning sun-ray that poured between those branches, nothing of what he experienced beneath his skin could possibly be observed—“I seem never able to think of anybody but of you, my beloved master. Now that Tilton, my elder brother, has found a mate, it’s not, I hope, my duty to marry anybody, or. to have children by anybody. Nor, as long as I feel no special call to join a religious order, is it, I hope, my duty to become a monk or a friar? What I want to do, master most dear, is to serve you and help you, until I die. When you let me take that ‘Opus’ of yours abroad and place it where I knew it would reach the Holy Father, I felt happier than I’d ever been in my life before. You don’t think, master, do you, that I’m shirking my duty by refusing to marry and have children?”

  Friar Bacon only revealed by a very faint trembling in his voice how deeply he was affected by his pupil’s words. What he said was emphatic and definite.

  “As long as we are considerate to other people,” he said, “and as kind and sympathetic towards them as our circumstances permit, we have all got to live to ourselves, for ourselves, in ourselves and by ourselves. This is how, as Aristotle teaches, matter produces us out of itself, as a product to satisfy its deep ‘privation’, or its desperate yearning and craving to possess what it feels could proceed from it, but what, so far in its long history, has not proceeded from it!

  “You, my son, have so far dedicated your whole life to learning. And as long as you feel thus impelled, I think you should so continue. But on the other hand if by fate or chance you met a girl you loved, and who loved you, I would say you had better marry and use your education to help this old world of ours out of its ignorance in some practical and active way.

  “As long as I am alive I shall cling to your help and hold fast to your love as the most precious help and the most sacred love that life has allowed me to know. And when death divides us, remember this. The fruits of a learning that has been harder than slavery to acquire will be sweeter than the roses of Sharon to enjoy.”

  Ghosta had sunk down beside the Brazen Head the moment it was upon the ground, and she was still pressing the palms of her hands against its neck and against its shoulders and upon its implacably oracular chin. She wasn’t weeping as John had wept, but she was evidently affected by some strong interior emotion.

  And it would have been clear to anyone present at this unusual scene, whose interest had been aroused by these two immigrants from Palestine, that the gigantic Peleg, who was standing over her, was not a little disturbed by this emotion of hers.

  “Have mercy upon me Almighty Jehovah, Lord God of Israel, Lord God of Sarah and Leah, of Rachel and Rebecca!” this proud, reserved, and most beautiful daughter of Israel prayed. And as she prayed, she reminded herself that in a certain sense she had quite deliberately mingled her virginal life in a weird erotic ecstasy with the sub-human, sub-animal, sub-vegetable life of this Brazen Head beside her.

  “Is there,” she allowed herself to whisper to the thing, “is there any way I can get rid of this mad terror I have of the passing of time?”

  But Ghosta and Peleg weren’t the only pair of lovers brought to that place by the magnetism of “Little Pretty.”

  “What is it my angel?” asked Raymond de Laon of Lil-Umbra, as in their new relation they descended the slope towards their horses. “Are you hurt? Are you afraid? Have you seen something? Have you thought of something?”

  For the first time since they first met Raymond noticed that Lil-Umbra had difficulty in replying. But with an effort she spoke clearly and distinctly.

  “Something terrible is going to happen! I feel it all through me. But not to us, Raymond; no, not to you or to me. But stop, Raymond. Turn and look at those closed doors!”

  He gazed at her in silence, and they both swung round, her eyes wide and terrified, staring at the entrance to the Castle, but his still fixed on her face. But as so often happens in a human crisis, they were suddenly jerked out of their tension by a voice at Raymond’s side; and there, close at his elbow, was none other than Lay-Brother Tuck!

  “He’s gone to sleep, my lord of Laon! He’s gone to sleep, my lady of Leon! And I thought perhaps you’d take him back to the Priory on one of your horses and perhaps take me on the other! If you will agree to celebrate your union by this great charity before going to—to wherever you are going for your wedding-night—to the Fortress I expect—I can promise you not only my own special prayers, but the special prayers of the whole Priory of Bumset!

  “The most lucky first night,” Brother Tuck went on, “that a bride and bridegroom can possibly have for their first bed together is a great and sweet charity, such as it would be to both me and the Friar if you found it in you to do for us this gallant and beautiful deed!”

  Lay-Brother Tuck now began to bob and babble and bubble and burble round them so buoyantly that the tender clasp with which Lil-Umbra was holding Raymond’s hand became first an indignant pressure and then an angry clutch.

  “Bridegroom with Bride you be!” he went on. “And I be a’begging of ‘ee to let me’s wone baby-self and Friar’s man-mighty self sit astride of your ‘osses while you makes ‘em gallop. ‘Gallopy up and gallopy to it! Gie her a sup and she’ll let ‘un do it!’ Don’t ‘ee understand, O most elegant lord of far-away Leon, that if the blessed Friar be behind she, and me wone self be behind thee, it won’t take long to be at Priory door; and a holy charity you’ll have performed.”

  Lay-Brother Tuck kept bobbing round them so vigorously and making with his short bare arms so many effective if quite inaudible shoo-ings and shush-ings that, in their present dazed state, Lil-Umbra upset by her premonition of catastrophe, and Raymond wondering what Lady Val would say if they did follow Tuck’s suggestion and spend their wedding night in the Fortress, they were rushed down the hill just as if they’d been a goose and a gander, until they actually reached the oak under which Friar Bacon, in complete abstraction from all immediate events, was composing one of his most comprehensive sentences as to the relation between astronomy and astrology; and before they really knew what had happened to them, they were cantering rapidly towards Bumset and towards an extremely bewildered reception by Prior Bog.

  Albertus Magnus of Cologne, having finished what in the energetic and impulsive simplicity of his
mind he had suddenly conceived to be the will of the Maker and Sustainer of our incomprehensible universe, came slowly down the slope towards the group of manorial lords and their families who now surrounded Tilton and his bride Una. To the end of that generation some sticklers for local tradition persisted in calling Una by the more romantic name of Oona; and in his desire to make his brother as poetical as he could, so that he might be as far as possible from his own scientific and philosophical ideal, young John always warmly and ardently supported the Oona side in the division of opinion as to this maiden’s name.

  Indeed it more than once crossed the mind of Lil-Umbra, when she noted Tilton’s interest in this beautiful member of what might be called the revolutionary family of old Dod Pole, whose influence was so great among the serfs of the Manor of Roque, that there was really something more daring and unconventional about Tilton’s unashamed attraction to a girl of this class than in all young John’s free-thinking attitude towards the foundations of the Christian faith.

  What on earth their mother would think, what on earth their mother would feel, what on earth their mother would do and say, when Tilton and his bride, whether she was called Una or Oona, got home to the family hearth that night, she hardly dared to imagine.

  “I mustn’t, I can’t wish this man from Cologne hadn’t come among us,” she said to herself. “But with Mother’s excitable nerves where anything to do with marriage comes in, and her sensitiveness about noble blood and noble manners, she may be furious with Father for letting this Albertus marry us off like this, as calmly as a Spanish prince breeds Arabian horses!”