The Brazen Head (9 page)

“I’ve found out,” went on the old man, “that on any piece
of earth where old rituals have been going on for six or seven or eight centuries, the actual essence of the substance of the earth begins to stir in its sleep, craving it doesn’t know what! Friar Bacon teaches this—did you know that? And he calls this craving by a very curious metaphysical name. He calls it
Privation
—yes, the ‘Privation of Matter’.”

Peleg groaned. “O he calls it ‘Privation’, does he?” he murmured hoarsely; and then getting desperate he made a reckless plunge. “I am sorry to hurry you, Master Heber,” he began, speaking heavily and with as much effort as if he were forcing the handles of a wooden plough through frozen mind, “but we must hasten to the hall! Tonight after supper it will be most gracious of you if you’ll explain to us about the thoughts of sticks and stones and the ‘Privation’ they suffer when the Blessed Trinity mismanages matters and how the Fourth God eases things up.”

His voice was low, but Heber caught quickly enough the new tone in it and yielded without a struggle. But move his feet as fast as he could, it was physically impossible for him to quicken to a run, and while he had breath to walk he had breath to talk.

“Of course,” he said, “we needn’t believe all those tales about Lost Towers. But there must be something in them. They say that when the bishop laid his hand in blessing on the head of the daughter of that house, drops of such foul-smelling blood followed his ringers when he took them away that everybody else had to leave the church or the chapel or wherever it was, so perfectly appalling was the smell! And of course you’ve heard how poor old King Henry, who is sick to death while the Lord Edward is crusading nobody knows where, knighted young Will Boncor of Cone the other day in
Westminster
? The reason for that of course was to keep young Raymond de Laon from going back to France. Young men of his age aren’t happy without a comrade. They
have
to go about in pairs or they just die of tedium.”

“Tedium, do you call it,” cried the Jewish Tartar. “I call it by a different name! But let
that
go!… The point is he’s come back, and Cone Castle is stronger than it’s ever been in the memory of man! But so also, Master Heber, is the Barony of Lost Towers! Very, very, very strong
that 
also has become! And I tell you, Master Heber, I wouldn’t like to make my way against that castle, with its forest and its swamp, and its bottomless black moat where the waters go straight down to Gehenna!”

It was at that moment that a flickering torch became
suddenly
visible, carried round a sharp corner of the passage they were following, and the long, narrow, cadaverous countenance of Sir Mort Abyssum, Lord of the Manor of Roque, made its appearance.

“What in the name of all the angels and of all the devils has been happening to you two?” cried the apparition, as it advanced towards them entirely alone and holding in one hand the torch, now quite useless for there were plenty of lights in the passage now, and in the other a naked sword.

There sometimes arise moments in the lives of men upon earth when there is no human power or human art or human skill, whether of painter or sculptor or musician or poet or tale-teller, that could possibly do what Aristotle called “imitate nature”, or what Goethe called “realize the intention of nature”, or what Shakespeare and Rubens did without
thinking
of what they were doing.

On these occasions certain human figures make their
appearance
where and when there is no onlooker, no observer, no audience, no witness that is possessed of the faintest or remotest understanding of what is being presented to its attention. Its own nature has rendered this awareness as oblivious as fire to water, even when it is about to be put out by it, and as earth to air even when it is about to be dissolved into it. The human figures who thus appear and make not the smallest, faintest, weakest, slightest impression might be described as appearing in a complete void. There is for them, when they appear, a total absence of every conceivable recording and of every possible reflection or memorial.

It was in such a void that the long, narrow, hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked, ghastly-white visage of the Lord of the Manor of Roque manifested itself on this occasion. But all the same had there been any truth—and perhaps there was some truth —in the discovery by the ex-bailiff of Roque of the
semi-consciousness
of certain inanimate elements, these walls of the passage between the dung-yard and the dining-hall of that
place would have recorded the appearance of a human figure and a human face that seemed to be crying out to the whole universe, from the deepest pit of Hell to the highest peak of Heaven, a protest against life having been created, or having created itself, or having been brought about by chance, after the accursed manner we all know so well.

A few days after the departure of those disturbing visitors to the Fortress heralded by Spardo and his deformed horse, Roger Bacon in his attic prison in the Priory of Bumset was at work on his
Opus Tertium
. He was seated on a high-backed chair with a well-stuffed black cushion under his buttocks and all his writing materials conveniently before him. These included some specially adaptable pages of parchment cut carefully into folio size and studiously covered with straight lines to guide the writer’s pen, save where at certain
premeditated
places on the page these lines came to an end in order to admit of the insertion of large illuminated capital letters in every shade of colour and designed with every sort of fanciful decoration.

The famous Friar, a beardless, clean-shaved man, gave the impression at first sight of a sedentary person of high rank who might easily have been himself the Prior of Bumset, or rather perhaps, for his air and manners were not entirely ecclesiastical, some highly placed secular lawyer from old King Henry’s court in London. Although beardless, Roger was the reverse of bald, and a second glance at his appearance might even have given a stranger the impression, not in this case altogether erroneous, of a man endowed with a certain fastidious self-respect in regard to the appearance and the cleanliness of his own hair and skin.

Roger Bacon always looked a good deal younger than he really was; and very likely it was this dainty youthfulness, both in his look and in his manner, that excited no small part of the almost morbid severity with which he had been treated
for some time by the ecclesiastical authorities; that is to say by all except one. This one was Guido Fulcode, who had only taken orders after the death of his wife and who, as a skilful lawyer, had been the lay adviser of Louis IX of France long before, as a cardinal, he became Papal Legate in England in 1263 and was elected Pope in 1265 under the name of Clement IV.

It was only three years ago that this wise ruler of the western world’s religion had himself received its last rites; but before he died both Raymond de Laon, and even Raymond’s friend, the then extremely youthful John of the Fortress of Roque, had played their part as devoted adherents of Bacon and sometimes even as intermediaries between him and this briefly reigning Pope.

But this interlude of hope and harmony was now over
forever
; and the incorrigible Friar was left to fight for himself. From the present Pope, Gregory X, a friend of the saintly Bonaventura, he could hope for nothing. The authorities who hated him had in fact got him where they wanted. His revolt had been suppressed; and the influence of his revolutionary metaphysic, allowing such dangerous scope both to experience and to experiment, would now, so his enemies hoped and prayed, die away as quickly as the same sort of curiosity such as the study of astrology, and the same sort of scholarship such as the study of Greek and Hebrew, died away after the death of that over-clever Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, nearly twenty years ago.

The Friar now pushed back his table an inch or two with both hands and jerked back his chair a little. It had suddenly occurred to him that this was certainly the day, and probably the hour too, for the return of his faithful servant whom everybody called “Miles”, or just simply “Master Soldier”, from an important errand. He had sent him to meet someone on board a ship arriving at the London docks who had been a pupil of the great student of magnetism, Master Peter
Peregrinus
of Maricourt in Picardy, for he was very anxious to learn if Master Peter had ever, among his many experiments, invented anything in the least resembling a mechanical Head capable of uttering oracles. Roger knew that the pupils of this Petrus Peregrinus were generally as reticent as to what
they had learnt from him, as the man himself, save to a very few, was reticent about what he taught; but the Friar hoped the astute Miles would have been able to get from this particular voyager the information he so greatly desired.

Smoothing out a couple of little wrinkly excrescences from the manuscript before him, Roger Bacon now leant back in his chair and contemplated the curtained alcove near his bed where stood his now almost finished Brazen Head, the boldest as well as the most intricate of all his world-changing inventions.

“What it now needs,” he told himself, “is something—something I mean in my own peculiar way of thinking—to play the part for it that the priests assure us is played for us in Baptism. And, I know very well the kind of Baptism that my Head wants. O I know so well!”

And lifting one of his hands from the manuscript before him he rubbed the back of his knuckles against his forehead. “What it wants is the inspiration of Virginity. The best Baptism of all for it would be from an old maid, for old maids—O and don’t I know it!—are the ones who have the Secret. For who in Iscalis taught me the rudiments of Latin, and more than the rudiments of the Lingua Franca, but great-aunt Katharina? And who but Aunt Katharina collected for me what scraps of learning came blowing across the roofs of Iscalis and whirling like drifting leaves through its market-place? One day when they elect a Pope again as interested in learning as Fulcode was, I must write a treatise on all the prophetesses and oracular teachers in human history from the beginning of the world, who have been old maids. I begin to think there is something in the loss of virginity, especially when followed by pregnancy, that destroys the power in a woman to become a medium for that ‘Secretum Secretorum’, that ‘Secret of Secrets’, through which the ultimate Mystery of Life is revealed.”

At this point in his exciting thoughts Friar Bacon rose from his seat at the table and began walking up and down that small room. Any intelligent onlooker peering in upon him through some crack in that chamber’s wall would have noted that the excitement within him was not worrying him or troubling him or making him anxious or distressed. It was filling him with elation.

At last he stopped before the black curtain that concealed this thing of brass which he had created out of nothing. “O Head of all my Labour,” he cried in his heart with a sudden desperate outburst of long-suppressed feeling. “O child of the
essence
as well as of
the being
of my deepest soul! O thou only son of
both
the energies of my soul! If only I could baptize thee with the living spirit of a true Virgin, whether she were an old maid or a young maid, I would be content!”

Suddenly there arose a most extraordinary sound from behind the black curtain which covered that alcove near the head of his bed. “It’s beginning! It’s beginning!” cried the especial self within the Friar that he was so anxious to establish once for all as a soul much more complicated than any of his contemporaries could imagine. And it certainly would have seemed, to any invisible reader of human thoughts, that mingled with this exultation there was a throb of something very like pure unmitigated terror.

“Have I, plain man as I am,” the Friar evidently couldn’t help thinking, “just by my obstinate perseverance in
dissecting
, as they say Democritus did, every nerve and sinew and fibre in the skulls of the dead, actually played the part, without knowing it, of God? Have I actually created a
rational soul
, above and beyond those others that are engendered out of the substance of Matter? Have I flung this new soul into the machinery of my entirely artificial and purely material Head of Brass, so that it has
come to life
? Have I created an angelic superhuman creature, to be my living oracle for the rest of my days?”

He listened intently for any recurrence of the strange sound he had heard. Was this newly-created Being, he asked
himself
, going through a period parallel to human babyhood? Was it even now uttering unintelligible and inarticulate babblings?

Yes!
By God and Christ! There was that sound again! “I
must
take a look at it!” And although he caught himself in an actual shiver of fear, he rushed to the alcove and pulled the curtain aside! The Brazen Image regarded him with a cold, callous, indifferent, non-human stare. It was a figure constructed to be about the height of a man, but it looked larger than human owing to the fact that it was without legs
or arms. It was in fact what in ancient Greek cities used to be called a “Herm”—that is to say, a four-square milestone or miniature obelisk, like the formal pedestal of a classic bust, the bust of an emperor if it were Roman, and of a philosopher if it were Greek.

In the case of this angelic or demonic creation of his, the Brazen Head itself, whose massive base was of marble, rose from this short column as a head might rise from a square neck on narrow shoulders and, as their eyes met, the Head’s creator fancied he heard his creation mutter these queer
Latin-sounding
words:
“Birginis, Sirginis, Flirginis, Virginis.”

Roger Bacon behaved now as if he were indeed so excited by the result of his creative power that he felt an emotion filling him at one and the same moment with joy and fear. Hurriedly he pulled back the black curtain over the Brazen Head. And it was then that any crafty spy peering in at him—
not
from the window where the sweet-scented twilight hovered over the tops of the forest-trees and through which a lovely air was blowing, but through a crack in one of the other three walls—would have heard him give an exultant little cry: “By Christ, I’d forgotten! Didn’t a voice wake me in the night with the word ‘ghosta’?”

And then such a spy would have seen him rush with the excitement of a boy in his teens to a small square of wood set among the bare boards of that attic-chamber and marked with the letter “A”. This piece of wood the excited Friar extracted neatly from its fixed position, using his nails to achieve this result, and bending down above the orifice, stared at a vellum-covered volume that lay hidden there, on the outside of which was written in bold purple letters the words
Fons Vitae Avicebron
, “You are my master and teacher.” He thought as he stared at these words, “You, you,
you
, more than anyone else in the world!”

And as he bent and stared at that title
Fons Vitae
and at that name
Avicebron
, he made one of the greatest efforts he had ever made in his life to visualize, as if they really could be
apprehended
by our ordinary senses, that plurality of separate souls within us, of which he had finally decided that what we generally call, and feel too often enough, to be our normal human soul, actually is composed.

Intensely he struggled, as he stared at the name of his admired Jewish thinker, actually to visualize the primal elements in these souls of ours that he had come to the conclusion arise automatically within the body by the potentiality of matter itself and have no connection with the
rational soul
which is created directly, immediately, and instantaneously, by God Himself, and created ready and prepared to be joined with the body, as soon as the infant, already possessed of the primal elements of its soul, is born into this world.

At this moment as he stared at that square hole in the floor, at the title
Fons Vitae
, only just visible in the growing twilight, and at the name
Avicebron
, whose darkened letters he had to supply from his own head, he saw the first evolution of the primal soul within the womb as a wave of incurving,
ingathering
, insatiable water, desperately craving nourishment and rushing furiously through the solidest as well as through the softest substances, and possessed of the swallowing mouth of a hungry fish. And he saw the second evolution of this same primal soul as a wave of quivering vapour, rushing also through everything, but endowing the matter out of which it springs, the matter that is from the start able to engender it, with all the reactions of our human senses.

And at that intense moment he actually saw the
rational soul
which he had admitted must be directly created by God, saw it as a flame of something more than ordinary fire, saw it indeed as a flame created in the shape of a man-god, a flame that could wholly possess the body and yet according to its own will and pleasure could reach out from the body to which it has been joined and inspire other bodies.

“O, if I could only decide,” the Friar cried in his excited heart, “what to think about the embryo of an infant, within a pregnant mother, before it is born into this world at all and before it is given its God-created
rational soul
! O I must think and think how you, our Jewish Master of all Masters, would have dealt with this problem of the embryo had you been called upon to consider it!”

With this question in his mind Roger Bacon bent down and replaced the square piece of wood and rose to his full height. “A Jewish Maid,” he thought triumphantly, “after a Jewish Sage! That’s the way I’ll give new life to the Brazen one!
Yes! you’ve been yourself a ghost for years,
Avicebron
, and it was your teaching about the pluralism of the soul that set me thinking first—just
why
I have no notion: it is all a mystery—of creating our Brazen one, even as God creates the
rational soul
within us! And now that I’ve looked at your book I know that it was you who put it into my mind in the night to cry out the name Ghosta!”

Friar Bacon now went back happily and quietly to his chair and table and to that piece of foolscap parchment half-covered with his quite legible but by no means very elegant
handwriting
. But he soon had to put down his pen again, for he was interrupted by the familiar sound, not of any Master Miles returning from London, but of the heavy steps of lay-brother Tuck, ascending the narrow turret-stairs to his low-roofed chamber, bringing him his supper.

It was a beautifully tranquil and by no means a very cold twilight that had by this time diffused itself over all the western provinces of our Island, and pleasant pine-wood scents mingled with the nutty waftures from the well-spiced apple-pasty that Brother Tuck, the moment he entered, carefully set down in the middle of the empty square space on the table from which Roger Bacon had hurriedly cleared all his papers.