It was then that it happened to Lay-Brother Tuck, that calm, well-balanced, and practical person upon whose competence all Bumset Priory depended, to leap up from that perilous round table and from a mouth as wide open as a water-rat’s hole in a river-bank to utter an astounded “O! O! O! O!” For it was one thing to give poor Prior Bog the only pleasure he got from life in the form of at least one more delicious meal before the sun went down again in the phantom waves of the sea of time, but it was quite a different thing to find that a weird Friar, doing penance among them for heaven alone could say what mysterious sins, could actually know by some magic power what other people had to find out by long years of seeing and hearing and feeling.
“You don’t mean to say that you knew her name was Ghosta before I told you!”
Roger Bacon rose from his seat using self-conscious deliberation, where the other used thoughtless haste.
“Certainly I knew the sort of name she had. I can’t swear I ever actually uttered the word ‘Ghosta’ to myself; but now that you’ve uttered it it seems curiously natural to me, almost as if I’d known it all my life.”
There was now between the two men on their feet almost as significant a silence as there had been when they were seated. Of this the Friar was fully and completely aware. It is indeed quite possible that in the whole of the west country from Poole to Penzance there was then no living man who was more self-conscious than Roger Bacon. He had been born so, and from his earliest boyhood he had deliberately developed this birthright.
It had been from the start his daily habit to tell himself exciting stories; and the essence of these stories, their burden and the secret of their enchantment, was the fact that young Roger was always imagining himself, or better say discovering himself, to be surrounded by a motley multiplicity of objects, belonging to the four levels of existence, namely of human beings, of sub-human beings, of vegetable beings, and of mineral substances.
And as Roger Bacon grew older and began his studies at the Universities of Oxford and Paris, this intense consciousness of the various existences, whether animate, or inanimate, that surrounded him at any given moment, including his own self-consciousness, came to be the supreme interest of his whole life. His temperament and general nervous sensibility were such that he could not help feeling a special and quite personal “rapport” with each one of these various existences: and for good and ill each of them affected him profoundly.
Thus at this moment our morbidly self-conscious Friar was aware of a curious contest in his soul, between a desire to lie down in delicious relaxation and deep peace within the pale light-green eyes of the honest Tuck and a desire to go on gazing at the dead yellowhammer, until, through its body, he was able to pursue its soul till he found it re-incarnated in a tiny snow-white hair-like fungus, wherein it would have to await the mating-moment of a new pair of yellowhammers.
This latter desire of the insatiable scholar having thus been gratified, he was suddenly seized with a pang of remorse for not having already thrown the bird’s little feathered corpse out of the window so that the first-born of the innumerable little worms that were bound to be engendered out of the putrefying corpse beneath those tender feathers might not perish in being thus separated from the elements.
“I’ll run down with it presently,” he thought, “and put it somewhere, where——” And then he remembered what in following in his mind that small corpse’s corruption he’d entirely forgotten—that he was, save for certain appointed hours each day, a prisoner in this chamber.
“Do you know, my friend, from what race or from what country,” Friar Bacon now enquired of Tuck, “this Ghosta-girl comes?”
It was always a great comfort to brother Tuck to be asked any direct and simple question by the Priory’s illustrious captive and he brightened up enormously at this.
“Yes, indeed I do,” he hurriedly replied. “Ghosta’s a Jewess from Mesopotamia or Dalmatia or somewhere not very far from the Red Sea; in fact I daresay quite near to the River Jordan.”
He spoke with profound satisfaction. And indeed it was wonderful to him that he, Brother Tuck, chief cook to Prior Bog of Bumset, could teach their learned captive something of which he was entirely ignorant.
Roger Bacon let his massive head sink heavily down, letting it fall in front of him till his chin seemed to rest upon the centre of his chest, midway between his breast-bones. While he did this, he closed his eyes, and fell into a momentary trance of deep thinking. But no wrinkle, no frown, no furrow, appeared on the broad expanse of his forehead, nor were his arched eyebrows drawn together.
Tuck watched him with absorbed reverence; for the cook felt exactly as he felt sometimes when a thin film of exquisitely delicate yellow-brown, which faintly resembled pure gold, yet wasn’t really like pure gold, began to appear on the surface of what he was cooking.
Then Roger raised his head with a jerk, while Tuck noticed, and not for the first time either, that when the Friar was excited by some daring or original idea, it was not so much that his eyes shone as that an intense inner flame, like a magic candle burning in his very midriff, suddenly revealed itself through his eyes.
“Listen, my friend,” Roger Bacon exclaimed, bending forward a little, and while with the exterior portion of his eyes he stared through the body of his interlocutor, and, as it seemed, through the wall of his cell, and even across the swaying tops of the forest-trees, he was unable to stop the gleaming flame of his new idea from magnetizing the amazed Tuck.
“Listen,” he repeated. And then, in a perfectly calm and easy tone, while he re-possessed himself once more of the corpse of the yellowhammer. “What I want you to do, my faithful one, is to bring this Jewish maid up here to me so that I can ask her a few important questions. No! You needn’t look so scared. You’ll be here all the time she’s here! I haven’t the faintest wish to enjoy her, far less ravish her. All I want is to talk to her. But I want to be absolutely frank and open with you, old friend, and there is, I confess, one other thing I want with her—no! don’t look like that! It’s nothing whatever to do with sex. It’s only that being a virgin—for I know from my own experience that the Jews are very particular about the virginity of their maids—she’ll have it in her to give the final touch to the Brazen Head over there!”
Thus speaking, he pointed with the hand that held the feathered body towards a large alcove at the foot of his small bed—an alcove which at that moment was covered by a heavy velvet curtain hanging from a cord. Intimately well-known to every living soul in both the Priory and Convent of Bumset was that alcove in the cell of their inventive prisoner; for, of all the magical creations of this extraordinary person, his Brazen Head with the power of speech—and indeed, so it seemed to some among them, with the power of thought too—was the most astounding.
“O! of course, Doctor of all Doctors,” murmured Brother Tuck with low-breathed obeisance, “anything I can do or this Hebrew Virgin can do to help with your Head of Brass must be done; since the Head, as we all know, is what alone can save our country and our king from destruction.”
“Nothing,” thought Roger Bacon, “that I have ever done in the interest of my life’s work was more effective with the populace than when I told Fulcode, before he was Cardinal or Legate, that I was trying to make an Ark of the Tabernacle for the Nameless One of Israel that should protect us from our enemies as the Jewish Ark protected the Chosen People from the Philistines. Fulcode scattered that story about the Brazen Head being Britain’s peculiar and special magical Protector. It is Fulcode’s spreading of that tale that has protected my work from Bonaventura’s hatred more than anything else! Well! while it protects my inventions it does protect my king and my country. The Legate could have soon found out, if he made any enquiries, how completely my family ruined itself by helping the King against the Barons. Anyone who knows anything at all knows how much more liberty there has been under poor old Henry than there’s ever been under the Barons and their accurst house of De Montford!”
The artful cook of Bumset Priory nodded knowingly, made a hurried sign of the cross upon the air in the direction of the small window, and had already turned to go, when Bacon exclaimed:
“O please take this, will you, Tuck, and bury it somewhere? Bury it just underground, not more than an inch or two deep—you can make a hole with a stick, or anything you find under your hand: it needn’t be deep down—but I want it to be quickly and properly eaten by worms, not flown away with by carrion-crows, or lugged off down a rat-hole! See what I mean, Tuck, my old friend? And bring——”
It was at this moment before the cook departed, and in the dead silence between them created by a simple instruction on one side and unquestioning obedience on the other, that a faint tap upon the door of the cell became audible. Being quite close to it, the departing Tuck opened it immediately, but the figure standing on the threshold surprised him so much that he hurriedly drew back to let it enter, and then, with what was clearly a strong feeling that the more closely confined to the chief participants concerned this encounter was, the better for all it would be, he cautiously and very secretively closed the door behind the intruding figure and returned into the room.
The new-comer was obviously, and both men saw it at once, of the female sex, although she was well muffled in a black mantle. But the slope of the shoulders and what was visible of the ankles and feet would have betrayed her, even if, though her hair was hidden, the delicate whiteness of her face and the size of her dark liquid eyes had not revealed a most magnetic femininity.
Roger Bacon walked straight up to her and taking off her cloak handed it to the somewhat disturbed Tuck, who kept muttering, half audibly and half inaudibly, what the Friar, and probably the girl too, recognized as the opening words of a familiar Latin collect; but who now, dragging a chair from beneath the table and carrying it to the wall near the foot of the bed, sat down with an air of patient submission to inexplicable proceedings and covered his knees with the girl’s cloak.
“I came my lord Doctor, because I had one of my presentiments that you would be glad to talk to me. As Brother Tuck may have told you, I’ve come to help in the Convent; but being—as perhaps you can see from my appearance—of foreign extraction, in fact of Palestinian Hebrew blood, I am at present without friends. But I’ve heard that there’s an armour-bearer, or whatever the name for that office may be in your country, in the Fortress of Roque, whom I once met in the East and whom I would most dearly love to meet again. He is easy to describe to you, my lord Doctor, as he resembles Goliath of Gath or Samson of Israel, being in fact what all over the world is called a giant. His lord and master here, they tell me, finds him——”
At this point Friar Bacon firmly, though very gently, interrupted her and led her to his bed, upon which, almost within arm’s length of where Brother Tuck’s chair stood against the wall, he made her seat herself.
“What did you mean just now,” the scholar enquired, standing over her with a certain judicial authority, although still very gently and kindly, “by your presentiment? Oh yes! And may I ask you at once whether I am right in calling you Ghosta? I don’t at all want, my dear daughter, to be rudely inquisitive, but would it be ill-mannered of me to ask you whether your parents gave you this unusual name?”
The girl gave him a confiding, responsive, and grateful smile. “It’s rather a long story,” she began, “and I don’t like, O most admirable Doctor, keeping you standing while I tell it.”
“O it’s good for me,” said the Friar quickly. “I’ve been sitting all day—so please go on.”
The girl took him at his word, and glancing quickly round, as if to make sure she was only keeping the learned Friar, and not the Priory cook too, in a standing position, she permitted herself to indulge in quite a long biographical narrative.
“I expect it’s Jewish ancestry,” she began, “that really explains these queer presentiments. I call them that; but I’ve been told in the Convent that I ought to give them a different name. But never mind the name! You will know, O most admirable Doctor, much better, I expect, than I do, what these things are. But you see my grandfather was a Rabbi. Both my parents”—here the girl arranged herself more comfortably on the Friar’s bed, evidently reassured a great deal by the way he was standing at ease and listening with what looked like most attentive interest—“were murdered in a crusading massacre soon after I was born. It was my great-aunt Rebecca who took care of me. She gave me my name to bear witness to her conversion to the Christian Faith; for she always believed that it was a special intervention by the Holy Ghost that led to her acceptance of Christ as her God. Great-aunt Rebecca’s belief in this has struck many people as both presumptuous and blasphemous. But knowing Aunt Rebecca so well, and having lost in her when she died the only person in the world I’ve ever understood, or indeed have wanted to understand, until I met the man they now swear to me is armour-bearer at the Fortress, it’s impossible for me to feel that her name for me was blasphemous. As for these ‘presentiments’, as I call them, though there’s a nun where I work who swears to me that ‘intimations’ would be a better word, I put them down, myself, entirely to my Jewishness. Aunt Rebecca taught me to read Hebrew, and my favourite reading all my life has always been the Books of Moses; and Moses was always being told what to do directly out of the mouth of the Nameless One who was the God of Israel, known only by the Four Mystic Letters ‘Y.H.W.H..’
“And it’s no doubt from reading the Books of Moses so much that there come moments—not in sleep you must understand, but in reveries or trances or wanderings of thought, when I seem to hear the voice of the God of Israel speaking to me and telling me to do something. And three times lately this voice has come to me and said: ‘Go to the cell of the Admirable Doctor and talk to him’——
“But, O most admirable lord Doctor, I see that Brother Tuck here whom”—and she turned her lustrous eyes to the still uneasy cook sitting awkwardly against the wall with her cloak across his knees—“whom I already know quite well by sight, has brought you your supper,” and she made a gesture with one of her hands towards the great apple-pasty on the table, “so I oughtn’t to stay any longer.”
At this point she gave a quaintly reckless little laugh. “But the truth is, O most admirable Doctor, I keep hearing—it’s very faint, you know, but I’ve learnt from experience to catch it—the far-off voice of the Nameless One of Israel telling me that there’s some way in which I can help you with something that’s very much on your mind. Of course you may feel from your worship of a Trinity, where Jesus Christ is the centre if not the circumference, that this Voice of the Nameless One, speaking to me in the same Voice wherein it spoke to Miriam the sister of Moses, means little, or as far as a Christian is concerned, nothing at all; but my voice tells me you don’t and cannot treat it so lightly. O my Lord, O most admirable Doctor, I do beg and beseech you to tell me——” Here the girl leapt up from the Friar’s bed and stood erect before him with her back to the disturbed and agitated cook—“to tel
l me what it is that the Voice keeps commanding me to do for you!”
Very calmly and quietly Friar Bacon took the situation into his own hands. He showed himself as skilful at the stage-management of human puppets as he did at the invention of automatic and mechanical ones. He was indeed soon standing with his left hand on the sleeve of brother Tuck and his right on the elbow of Ghosta.
He had already induced the former to hide the corpse of the yellowhammer in his tunic-pocket, and the latter to take the mantle the man had been holding and place it on the bed; and now they were, all three, in unencumbered freedom of action confronting the mysterious black curtain behind which was the Brazen Head.
Releasing Ghosta’s arm, but retaining his hold on Tuck’s sleeve, the Friar now drew aside this curtain from the most renowned shrine not only in Britain but, save for the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, in the whole world, and as he did so he was aware of a shivering motion in the muscles and nerves of both his companions, as if they were being compelled to make an involuntary prostration before the revealed mystery.
But he did not give them time for the smallest unrehearsed gesture. “What I want you to do,” he said to Tuck, “is to prop up the Head and to steady it and prevent it from falling while I lift our maid upon its shoulder,” and to Ghosta he said, “I want you to arrange your garments as if you were intending to make water, so that it is from contact with your nakedness that the Head looks forth upon the world.”
It was in an incredibly short space of time, after giving the man and the woman these precise instructions, that Friar Bacon got both of them, and got the Brazen Head as well, into the position he desired; and the expression on the countenance of that Brazen Head, as its powerfully moulded eyes and ears and nose and mouth looked forth from between Ghosta’s thighs and from under her naked belly, was like the expression in a marble head of the god Hermes, attributed to Praxiteles, that a nameless crusade had recently brought to the King’s house in London.
The Brazen Head Page 10
