The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  And not only to them. To horses, dogs and cats, to birds in cages, to pigs in sties, to sheep in folds, to cattle in stalls—to them all he sang his song and danced his dance! When he was eating out-of-doors he would pay court to the nearest toad or frog or blind-worm. When he was sucking an orange before going to bed, he would make overtures to a spider.

  He had no pride, and he had very little vanity. He was as conceited of his eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, legs, ankles, feet, as he was of his voice, his manners, and his knowledge of the world. It was enough that the quality, the feature, the member was his quality, his feature, his member, for it to be the most remarkable quality, feature, member in the world!

  His self-admiration was wholly indiscriminate. He wasn’t vain of his hair, or of his eyes or his figure, or of his skill in riding or fencing, compared with other people’s hair and so forth. He compared them with nothing. They were his; and that alone made them incomparable.

  Sir William never spent, as some young men do, considerable time at the mirror, arranging his hair, his expression, his pose, his dress, his gestures. He never wasted his own or other people’s time by explaining and justifying his opinions. They were his: that was enough. When asked for them he handed them to the asker, as a pilgrim might hand out pebbles from a sacred shore, or an exorcizer might sprinkle holy water on the walls of a haunted chamber.

  He was younger than John, and a good deal younger than Tilton; whereas Raymond de Laon was over twenty-five. Sir William enjoyed life so intensely that it was a pleasure to everybody who knew him to be with him. So absolutely lacking in pride was he that he seemed to be as tickled by his own blunders, by his own foolishness, by his own cowardice, by his own weakness, by his own superstition, as were his friends in their affectionate entertainment and as were his enemies in their malicious amusement.

  It must have been this gift of being all things to all men, on the strength of a conceit so immeasurable, that had enabled this singular boy at a yet earlier age to be actually able, under the wise encouragement of his father, to act in collusion with young John as one of the intermediaries between Roger Bacon and Pope Clement IV.

  “How is your father’s injury from those Lost Towers devils?” enquired Lady Val of the lad, just as he was launching forth, for the benefit of Ghosta and her Tartar, upon a tale he had heard about a miraculous and terraqueous crusade of sea-eagles, who conveyed in their beaks from Chesil-Beach to the Holy Land enough pebble-stones of carnelian to enable the walls of Jerusalem to rival the hanging gardens of Babylon.

  “O he’s healing up quick and easy, Lady,” replied Sir William: “the great difficulty at home just now is mother’s quarrel with both Raymond and Friar Bacon. She tells father he ought never to have invited Raymond here at all, because somebody younger, somebody more like me, she says, would look better going about with Lil-Umbra.”

  These words caused even Ghosta to awake from a trance that had already made her lover recall the expression in the eyes of the horse Cheiron. But it can be imagined how they roused in Lady Val’s soul a sharp-pointed, outward-whirling arrow-head of flame-like fury. The idea of her only female offspring, the only daughter she would ever have—and do we not know that the closest association possible between human personalities is between a mother and a daughter?—becoming the official lady-love of this popinjay of a nursery-antic struck her on the quick.

  She had had a good many more day-dreams about Lil-Umbra’s future than Lil-Umbra ever had herself. For just as her father did, Lil-Umbra lived in the four elements, and one of the reasons why she had such a special partiality for Heber Sygerius was that the old ex-bailiff had, like Sir Mort, only in a different way, unusual awareness of the less palpable and more mysterious qualities of earth, air, fire and water.

  Thus it was that when young Sir William blurted this out about his mother’s attitude to Raymond de Laon, who, after all, was himself only a young man, an intense and violent surge of emotion rose in Lady Val’s deepest being, swept up from the pit of her stomach into both her breasts, whirled up dizzily from there into her brain, and finally exploded in an outburst, the essence of which was irrepressible fury with fate because her secret, wild, ideal dreams about her daughter’s future had been blighted forever; but, odd though it may sound, the form this fury took was nothing more or less than a desperate curiosity.

  “Do, O please do, my dear William, tell me what that wise, clever, deep-seeing mother of yours finds wrong with Raymond de Laon! I expect she has a hundred times more insight than I shall ever have, and knows the world a hundred times better than I shall ever know it. Does your dear intellectual mother feel that something is wrong with Raymond’s religion, or with his morals, or with his manners, or with his proper wish to get on in the world and to give his wife, when he has a wife, a proper position in the world? Or does your deep-searching mother—come a bit nearer, my boy, for I don’t want to be overheard—feel that Raymond is perhaps not quite, not altogether, not wholly and entirely—I see you know what I mean, so I can speak quite simply—right in his mind? I have seen Lil-Umbra look strangely at him once or twice when they’ve been talking, as if he were saying something rather, you know what I mean, my dear boy, rather wild and—and funny?”

  The youngest of all the knights on whom the aged and ailing son of the brother of Richard Coeur-de-Lion had bestowed the accolade shut his open mouth, half-closed his roving eyes, and frowned. He was evidently thinking hard: not pretending to think, but really thinking.

  Then, with an upward leap of his whole slender little person and a metallic tinkling of the hilt of his dagger against the hilt of his sword as his excitable hands rushed to his belt, Sir William Boncor exclaimed eagerly: “Yes! oh yes! I heard him say once, when someone was talking about the Day of Judgment and the Last Day: ‘In my Philosophy,’ he said, ‘there is no Day of Judgment nor any Last Day. There is only Now. We are born. We grow up: we have children: we die. And then the next generation is born; grows up; and dies. That’s my Philosophy as to the way things go.”

  Sir William’s flickering little frame subsided upon its heels with a gasp of ineffable self-satisfaction. The confident smile of generations of just men condemning a crazy aberration broadened upon his triumphant face. With a faint shrug of his shoulders he seemed to be saying to every doubting devil in the universe, “I am righteous, I am!” It was at this well-timed moment that the wily Mogol took advantage of the long, half-amused, half-puzzled, but by no means disarmed look, that Lady Val fixed upon the self-satisfied young knight, and without asking permission, or letting his companion make the slightest parting obeisance, took Ghosta’s arm and led her out of that vortex of crazy foam by the way they had entered it.

  “Mother thinks,” Sir William began again, “that you don’t realize half of what Raymond puts into Lil-Umbra’s head. Mother even told father yesterday, when she was angry with him because he wouldn’t shave off his beard, that Raymond will soon be dressing up Lil-Umbra in boy’s clothes and taking her with him to Paris.”

  The unction with which this youngest of all the newly-dubbed knights at the court of the doting old man, who had reigned longer than any living monarch in Christendom, let these words fall upon Lady Val’s tense nerves, was like the squeezing of a gobbet of spikenard upon an itching skin. As the ointment oozed forth upon the inflamed place, the fever behind it was driven in, not drawn out.

  Lady Val’s whole face twitched and her fingers clasped and unclasped the brooch at her waist. And then, as she gazed at this tricked-out image of youthful conceit, who was talking to her about the vindictiveness—and didn’t she know intricacies of that underground stream well enough!—of her rival at Cone, there suddenly whirled up within her the blindest and most desperate wave of emotion she had ever felt in her life.

  Her own mind, as it grew aware of what she felt, interpreted it as pure unmitigated and entirely justifiable indignation with Lady Ulanda of Cone, but in reality it was far more complicated. It was compounded of an intense re
volt against the way fate had been treating her of late, mingled with a wild longing that her children’s Dormaquil blood might suddenly assert itself and turn the whole tide of events in a completely new direction. Under the pressure of this surge of emotion, in the flood of which so many long pent-up feelings were breaking loose, she felt as though at any moment she might easily do something unexpectedly violent. It was an emotion too general, as well as too blind, to be fully interpreted by the simple definition “hatred of Lady Ulanda”, but as the thing uncoiled itself from the deepest centre of her being she began to be afraid of what she might do.

  Lady Val had very rarely been as conscious of her personal inner life as she was at this moment. The sudden loosening within her of this long dammed up reservoir of suppressed fury forced the torrent of emotion into a psychic channel that so far had been left high and dry. She very rarely thought of herself at all when she was angry with Sir Mort or with Tilton or John; and in Lil-Umbra’s case she was so used to associating her daughter’s personality with her own that, when she got angry with her, it was like her right hand getting angry with her left hand.

  Anger with Lil-Umbra was indeed a unique feeling, too deep-rooted to be easily articulated. But what she felt at this particular moment was a wild identification of herself with the very substance of the great house in which she lived. She felt as if she herself were the Fortress of Roque, and that every stone, every carving, every buttress, every arrow-slit, every stair, every tower, every wall, every rafter, every gate, every door, every threshold to every door, of this whole old place was calling out from within herself to herself, and reminding her that they and she together were a living part and portion of the diffused presence of the spirits of all her ancestors.

  She suddenly felt that the whole place, which was herself and yet much more than herself, was being threatened by her and her children with a ghastly doom, a doom irretrievable, inescapable, and final. She told herself that it was she and none other who had brought this doom upon them all; and that she had done it by yielding to her love for Sir Mort and letting him be the father of her children.

  As with most of us at some desperate climax of our lives, the wild passion of anger, which had driven this tragic awareness into an inner chamber of her consciousness, changed its own nature when it had achieved this end. It was a strange sadness that now filled Lady Val’s soul, as she thought of this fatal name “Abyssum” drifting and floating and flowing across every surface and through every crevice and crack of the massive stones whereof the Fortress of Roque was built.

  “He is too queer, too eccentric, too remote from real life,” she told herself, “to be able to save this place and to guard our name from oblivion.”

  It was as if the agitated lady’s soul had been whirling round the outside of the Fortress as violently as it had whirled round the inside, for it happened at that moment that a single dead alder-leaf, stirred up from the bank of a small stream in the direction of Cone Castle, and wafted through one of the arrow-slit windows in some higher portion of the Fortress, came floating down to the floor of that ante-room.

  Where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest; and it rested on the ground almost mid-way between the comically pretentious young knight and the desperately agitated lady of the house. Whether either of them noticed this wrinkled symbol of the passing generations, as it fell between them, neither of them later would have been able to say. Very likely they both did, but without any reaction capable of being recalled.

  Situations like this, when two human beings are brought together by fate, one of them in a state of feverish mental activity and the other in a state of complacent quiescence, one of them with nerves quivering and senses vibrant, and the other with both nerves and senses lulled into a trance of self-satisfaction, have the effect sometimes of putting very queer thoughts into the mind of one or other of the pair.

  What came into the head of Lady Val at that moment was a fantastic theory of her husband’s about which he was in the habit of expatiating at great length and upon the most inopportune occasions. Sir Mort’s theory was—and though he would swear to her and to the children that it was based on his own experience, she never could see, however excited he got about it, that it was possible for one man’s experience to cover such an immense field—that there was what he was pleased to describe as an invisible Dimension that existed over the whole surface of land and sea; and that into this Dimension rushed all the thoughts and feelings and passions and even sensations of everything that was subject to these things.

  His theory culminated in the amazing dogma that everything that existed had such feelings, not even excluding rocks and stones and earth-mould. And he further held that this invisible Dimension was much more crowded and much more active at certain geographical points round the surface of land and water than at others. Even where there are no human beings, this spiritual atmosphere would, he maintained, be there just the same. For not only must there be, universally emanating from the whole body of our planet, feelings that we must think of as the feelings of our Mother the Earth herself, but there must also be the feelings—or semi-conscious vibrations corresponding to feelings—of all the separate material elements whereof the substance of the planet is composed.

  In fact Sir Mort insisted that all the feelings of all the things in the world are to be found in this invisible Dimension, and the fact that the earth as the earth has universal feelings does not mean that the separate parts and diverse substances of which she is composed are lacking in individual feelings. In fact he insisted that this invisible Dimension, or atmospheric sounding-board, of the planet upon which we live, while predominant in it are the feelings of all living men, women, and children, includes also the feelings of all beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects and worms as well as of trees, plants, mosses, funguses, grasses and all vegetation.

  And when we thus speak of the projected thoughts and feelings and emotions of all things, it must be remembered that we are not suggesting the existence of any actual souls that can survive the death of their bodily presence. When we are dead, Sir Mort maintained, we are absolutely dead. But while we live we are all, including the myriads of sub-human lives in air, on land, and in water, from whales to earth-worms and the tiniest gnats, in constant contact with an invisible overshadowing atmospheric mist, crowded with feelings and dreams and emotions and what might be called sense-emanations and thought-eidola issuing from all that exists, whether superhuman, human, or sub-human, whether organic or inorganic. This atmospheric dimension does not, Sir Mort argued, contain the sort of entities we are in the habit of thinking of as souls; for these perish when we perish, but it contains the thoughts and feelings and intimations and sensations which, though they grow fainter with time, do not cease to exist when the body and soul which projected them have both come to an end.

  While we are still struggling, enduring, enjoying, as we move or rest in the earth, air, or water, of our terraqueous globe, there will always be this atmospheric aura about us where the psychic reactions engendered by the attractions and repulsions, the devourings and escapings, that go on in life mount up and remain, drifting and floating here and there in a curious chaotic mixture of the pleasant and the unpleasant.

  And it is because of this atmospheric arena always about us, whether indoors or out-of-doors, whether on the surface of plains or mountains, whether in earth-mines or undersea-caverns, whether in any level of the air, or above any fiery crater or tumultuous sea, that those among us—and Sir Mort obviously included himself in this select category—who are alive to these rarefied visitations, are frequently exhilarated or saddened without any apparent inward or outward cause.

  These sudden variations of mood without apparent cause are—Sir Mort would explain, though he assumed that his wife knew nothing of such subtle emotions—extremely puzzling phenomena. But they can, he would point out, be made less mysterious if we think of this atmospheric dimension of psychic reactions as composed not only of the sensations of
all living things from the cleverest human beings and the most intelligent animals, birds, fishes and reptiles, to the most simple-minded tadpoles, jelly-fish, star-fish, earth-worms, and insects, together with the vast mass of all the vegetable growth in the world, but of such sensations as they occur in the strain and stress of cosmogonic chance.

  It was all in a second curiously enough, as this tidal memory of her husband’s ten-thousand times repeated harangue swept over her, that she actually found herself wondering whether there might not really be a grain of truth in all this craziness. Dimension or no dimension, there must be a reason for this ebbing and flowing of our feelings, and for our being sometimes so mysteriously happy, and sometimes so unutterably sad.

  “Well,” she thought, “I can’t stand here staring at little Popinjay all night! I must get rid of the boy somehow.” And as she raised her hands to feel whether her hair was in proper order, she became half conscious of that alder-leaf on the floor between herself, the self-questioning Lady Val, and her visitor, the quiescent and self-approving Sir William.

  “She,” Sir William was thinking, “must be suffering a lot. Poor, poor woman! She must know, after all I’ve said, that she has given her daughter to the wrong man! So I really must be kind to her in her unhappiness.”

  But what the unhappy lady was thinking was this: “I’ll tell Ulanda what we all feel about Baron Boncor’s beard, for I think that will trouble her arrogant mind more than anything else.”

  And what, we might wonder, was that alder-leaf’s parent-tree thinking in its nakedness as it bowed before the wind? Was it thinking, “If only I could stretch a quarter of an inch nearer the water I would tell this blind, stupid, silly, deaf, dumb, idiotic stream in what direction it ought to flow if it wants to reach the sea.”