The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  Colin himself had already begun to laugh, as was his habitual custom under all the chances and changes of mortal life. When he laughed, which was a simple and natural return to his normal condition, his childishly excited face, with the straight, pale, yellow hair waving above it, assumed the appearance of a flickering candleflame, of which his thin flexible body was the candlestick or empty bottle, from which protruded the finger of wax which contained the burning wick.

  John had grown vaguely aware as they ran, though it was too dark to make out exactly what was happening to this companion of his, that poor Colin had begun to suffer, under the stress of their effort, some queer change in his appearance; and it was a comfort to see him restored once more to his accustomed look of a wildly blown candle in a dark bottle.

  The stoical Clamp, on the contrary, turned towards them both in that flickering torch-ray his usual expression of obstinate indifference to all outward circumstance, or, to be more rigidly correct, to everything that occurred, whether it occurred within the mind or outside the mind.

  It was clear that what Master Clamp had been destined by nature to be, or had by sheer force of will moulded himself into being, was what you might call a conscious inanimate, a thing made of wood, or of leather, or of baked clay, whose whole outward and inward nature implied submission—submission to whatever it might be, nervously interior or mechanically exterior, that pushed, impelled, flung, thrust, projected, rejected, lowered, elevated, inflamed, inspired, benumbed, froze, petrified it, according to a definite purpose.

  He had a store of rhyming patter which he was in the habit of using as a sort of oil, or slaver, or low-pitched humming accompaniment to this sub-human submission to fate. He would say, without the least flicker of protest, or of complaint, far less of indignation: “That’s the gear; I’ve got it clear: I’ve got to climb the bank up there. I’ve got to swish that river through. Under those bushes I’ve got to go, whether the danger’s from spear or bow. It may wipe me off; it may help me on. We be all born; but we bain’t all gone.”

  At this particular moment for instance, while Colin was laughing with his hair, his eyes, his lips, his skin, his ribs, his hips, his shins, his ankles, and with the fluttering fingers of both his hands, what Clamp said was: “If them’s going to kill we, them’s going to kill we; and if us be going to kill they, that’s how t’will be; us’ll be alive and them’ll be stark staring. Jesus Holy will be Jesus Holy just the same; and Uncle Satan will be Uncle Satan just the same. Yes, frost will freeze and fire will burn and water will drown just the same, whether Roque eat up Towers or Towers eat up Roque. Freeze and burn and drown them will, whether a girt wave of the sea swallows all the bloody land in this blasted world, or whether the waves of every sea on the earth dry up and turn into the sands of the Desert of Sodom; just the same will it be for me, just the same will it be for thee, and just the same for this quiet old tree.”

  Young John kept turning this torch that Colin had been carrying so carefully for him, and that he himself had so carefully lit, from one vista of the forest to another, and then to the trunk of the tree at their side, and then up to the misty sky. And he thought in his heart:

  “How many moments like this have passed for how many men like me since the beginning of the world! Here I am with these two: one dancing and chuckling with glee simply because he doesn’t know whether we’re going to save the Friar’s Brazen Head or not, and the other already sick to death of the whole affair, and ready to be dead rather than make the effort to go on with it! And when I think how my Friar, who is, since Archimedes, the wisest sage and subtlest inventor in history, has created this Head and has given it enough brain to think and enough language to say what it thinks, and how this band of crazy miscreants is at this moment hunting for some heap of stones whereon and wherewith they may hammer it to fragments, I feel as if—as if——”

  And at this point John indeed felt so much as if he were gazing into a bottomless garbage-pit of the whole creation that he concluded his thoughts with a lamentable sigh, a sigh so deep that Colin ceased to laugh upwards and Clamp ceased to groan downwards, while the six troubled apertures which those three persons called their eyes just stared at one another.

  And then, without any warning at all, a startling hullabaloo rose widely into the air from the men they were following; and a wild medley of sounds made up of cries, shouts, screams, howls, appeals, threats, curses, surged tumultuously through the forest.

  “Come on, for heaven’s sake!” gasped young John, brandishing his blazing torch in one hand and his grotesque axe at the end of a pole in the other, and rushing headlong towards the tumult. What they saw when they arrived was the towering figure of Peleg the Mongolian, swinging his terrifying mace with its orbicular head of iron spikes, but himself in evident danger of his life.

  John shuddered when he saw what was threatening this strongest of all the supporters of his parents. For two of the Lost Towers men, each of them with one of his knees on the ground while on the other he balanced the end of his bow, were shooting arrow after arrow at him; and already the head-feathers of two arrows were sticking out of his left shoulder.

  Luckily for Peleg he was wearing about his shoulders a thick leathery scarf, and so, though the points of the arrows entered his flesh and stuck there, they did not really seriously wound him. Of our three friends young John with his funny-looking weapon and his torch was in front, and queerly enough it was the humpty-dumpty figure of Clamp that was a close second, while Colin, the long-legged, flipperty-flappity antic, made a poor third. This happened, either because, in spite of all his zest for life, Colin was scared of facing the arrows of that dangerous pair, or because—but these secrets belong to those interior thoughts about which not even the boldest historian dares to be dogmatic—if he’d been in front of Clamp, he’d have missed the exquisitely comical sight of the heroic spurt in which that grim little stoic indulged himself at the final lap.

  But suddenly, as young John had often in his short life noticed before, but had put it down to the spiritual atmosphere of that particular district, and had even interpreted it to his brother Tilton as the influence of some quite definite “genius loci,” the whole situation reversed itself in an instant, and in a contagious rush of wild and desperate panic, the gang of bandits, with those two competent arrow-shooters taking the lead, fled as fast as it was possible for active outlaws to flee, in the general direction of Lost Towers. It was now revealed to John that Peleg with his mace had not been alone when the three of them had heard this unnatural noise in the forest and had hunted it down.

  And what made the whole lot of the bandits scoot off in terror was not Peleg’s giant size nor his mace, but the sudden apparition, just to the left of those two kneeling bowmen, of what struck the whole lot of them as a Supernatural Being, possibly the Mother of God Herself, come to put an end to their nonsense.

  It was Ghosta. But her black robe, and her white head-covering, and also, though it was too dark to see her features, her formidable dignity of movement, evoked, at that time of night, a spasm of awe that must have resembled the bewildered panic which some prowling rascal, up to no good, would have experienced had he drifted and loafed, without knowing in the least where he was going, along a cemetery path leading to the particular tomb out of which, at the very moment he arrived, Lazarus was being called forth from the dead.

  The terror produced by the appearance of Ghosta was of course accentuated by her own powerful spirit. Tough nerves and thick skins and simple minds are sometimes dominated quite unexpectedly by a particular type of formidable intelligence, an intelligence which may easily strike those affected by it as supernatural, whereas in reality it may only be the power of an inspired personality.

  Young John himself was affected by the apparition of Ghosta. His heart glowed within him, as, panting for breath after his run and waving his torch in a vigorous boyish manner, he stood staring at the Brazen Head which itself at that moment in the torch-light looked quite as ind
ifferent to all outward events as Clamp himself, whose eyes kept turning heavily from the arrows in Peleg’s shoulder to Ghosta’s black robe, as if both these noticeable things had only been door-handles needing professional attention.

  At any rate when Ghosta, who held a small lantern in her hand, came forward and moved straight to her gigantic Mongolian friend, it was not only those two arrow-shooters, both of whom leapt to their feet in consternation, who bolted in desperate panic, but every man-jack of that whole Lost Towers crowd.

  Down on the earth fell the Brazen Head along with the poles on which it was carried and the cords by which it was tied, and a strange and sudden silence fell on the whole forest. Ghosta must have already seen young John and his friends approaching, but she did not even look round as they drew near. She had gone straight up to Peleg; and by the time John was at their side she had pulled out both the arrows which indeed the young man had already surmised must have left only shallow flesh-wounds, and was already bandaging the bleeding places with strips of white linen.

  Did she always carry about with her, the young man wondered, these useful medicaments, or had she torn them from her own garments as she approached the scene?

  The interest of both Colin and Clamp was concentrated on the Brazen Head upon which John’s torch, though only held mechanically in his hand, now flung a direct blaze of light. The violent jolt with which the Head had been dropped, in the supernatural panic produced by Ghosta’s appearance, had flung it clear of the poles and had dislodged from its shoulders one of the two ropes, that bound it.

  The blaze of torch-light now flung upon its indefinitely moulded features gave it a most extraordinary expression. Its gaze was fixed upon Something. But upon what? That was the question which the airy Colin, as he whirled about it in protracted circle after circle, turning, so to speak, on his own axis, as he made of it a sort of cosmogonic axis for his saraband, and the round-bellied Clamp as he picked up a broken segment of rotten wood from the ground and leant on it, pressing his chin into the moss that covered its natural handle, might well have both been pondering, for they were obviously magnetized as they stared at it, to what degree it actually had been endowed with consciousness.

  Its features had been so mistily and vaguely indicated by its human creator that it would have been as impossible for the most inquisitive scrutinizer to make out any expression at all. They seemed to have been arranged by their designer to prevent the possibility of their being used as a medium for any one single human emotion.

  The contemplation of them always gave young John the feeling that he was surveying a wide-spread landscape from the top of a mountain. But the Head’s eyes were undeniably gazing at something. Was this something a completely different world from the one out of whose elements its human creator had fashioned it, a different world in fact from the one with which we are all familiar?

  Ever since the flight of that riotous Lost Towers band it had struck both the mind and the senses of our friend John that a strange silence had fallen upon the whole forest. Was this in fact due, John asked himself, to some real mental gesture of the Brazen Head?

  Was it possible that, in creating this automatic Being, Friar Bacon had really created a living actual mind different altogether from all the minds so far created by the natural processes of life and nature? If this was possible, if in fact this is exactly what had happened, might it not be, John couldn’t help wondering, that the activity of a mind, whose power of thought was completely different from any mind that has ever existed in the world before, might have such a formidable effect upon the mysterious galvanic forces that constitute the motions of the universe that a definite change would soon become evident not only in every star and planet in the firmament but in every living creature, however small and helpless, in our own immediate earth?

  With such thoughts obscurely flitting through his brain John left Ghosta and Peleg to their enjoyment of what he imagined must have been for them both one of the most important moments in their lives. Together they had vanquished the enemy; and John felt sure that after Ghosta’s ministration the giant’s arrow-hurts would soon heal.

  What he didn’t feel sure of, as he turned from the two Hebraic lovers to Colin and Clamp, who were by this time engaged in what looked like an extremely absorbing whispered argument, was what effect this shock of falling with a jerk upon the earth would have upon the Head itself.

  John had now been left, by the movement, so it seemed to him, of unadulterated fate, alone with the Head. He moved up so close to it that he soon stood within an arm’s reach of those inchoate and incomprehensible features.

  The Head’s face, though it had been emptied by the deliberate intention of its creator, of all human expression, was in no way a blank face. The young man couldn’t help uttering an inward and entirely inarticulate prayer to that chaotic brazen physiognomy, while he made absurd attempts to rouse it to some emotion, if only to the emotion of anger, by moving the fiery gleam of the torch he held with repeated switches and twitches and flashes and dashes and whirlings and twirlings between himself and that imperturbably chaotic visage.

  But the countenance of the Brazen Head remained completely unmoved. John might just as well have endeavoured to evoke an earthquake or a volcanic eruption by brandishing his torch at the floor of the forest, or to draw down flashes of lightning and torrents of rain by challenging with it what could be seen of the black sky above the tops of the dark trees!

  But suddenly the young man felt impelled to stop playing this silly game, and to shift the manner of his hold upon the torch he was carrying. He now began holding it as humbly and reverently as if he were at the rear end of a long procession of worshippers who were moving towards a temple.

  And he made this change at the identical moment when they all heard a familiar voice calling to them from the forest and not very far away.

  “Good God!” cried John, “that’s the old man! I’d know his voice anywhere! Peleg, do you hear him? It’s the old bailiff! What on earth is he doing out there at this time of night? The family would be furious if they knew! How have they let him get out of the Fortress? Is he alone?”

  But John was talking now to nobody but Ghosta; for Peleg had at once responded to the voice, and had been followed at a mad rush by Colin, whose crazy chucklings and wild gestures had been reduced to the purposeful leapings of a high-mettled steed, and also by Clamp, who kept blurting out as he bounced and bumped along, “I know’d it! I know’d it! I know’d it! I could have told ‘ee the whole tale if ye’d cuzzensented to ask it of I! Yes, I could have lighted up this whole blind, blubbered, bloated, blistered fog-patch we’ve gone and got lost in! Why didn’t ye come to I ‘stead of letting this kid of a Colin What’s-a-clock show itself off?”

  And indeed it now struck young John, who was standing close to Ghosta, while she calmly watched the tide of events, that it was only the special kind of darkness of this particular night that had prevented them from recognizing how close they were at this moment to that little postern-door into the Fortress, of which Tilton and he had made use all their lives.

  “Here we all are, Master!” The genial voice of the Jewish Mongol carried such an implication of relief, of storms over and haven reached at last, that, as Ghosta moved forward to greet the old bailiff, John knew at once that his flash of insight was absolutely correct, and that they were now at this actual moment at the furthest end of the thick group of oaks and pines, which he had looked at since he was a child and about which, since they were first conscious of such things, they had heard their parents arguing.

  Lady Val had always wanted to have those trees cut down, or at least considerably thinned out, as she regarded them as a perfect ambush both for wolves and for wolfish men; but such dense thickets of forest-growth were what, in the whole of Roque, her husband, who was a born hunter, especially loved.

  Ghosta had never met the ex-bailiff before, as the old man only left the armoury for the Fortress dinner, his other meals being brought
to him as he sat by the fire; so there now ensued in that wild place quite a formal and even courtly ceremonial. John felt it was incumbent upon him in the absence of both the lord and the mistress of the Manor, as well as of their elder son, to play the part of host; and the already somewhat exhausted old gentleman, who approached them leaning very heavily on Peleg’s arm, was now compelled to stand as erect as he could and shake hands, not only with Ghosta, but with both Colin and Clamp, while John, constantly interrupted by each gentleman in turn, did his best, with a good deal of blundering pedantry and not a little silly facetiousness, to introduce the one as a lively court-jester and the other as a disillusioned, cynical sage.

  But, before he had finished, the look of pitiful exhaustion on the ex-bailiff’s face forced him to interrupt himself.

  “Here, master,” he murmured, “sit down on this, and lean your back against this!” And lugging off the sheep’s wool neck-cloth that he had been wearing all that night, he laid it on the ground under the nearest tree-trunk and helped the old man to sit down.

  Ghosta at once bent over him, while Colin and Clamp moved off. “Where—is—the—the—the Head?” murmured the old man anxiously, turning his own head this way and that.

  Ghosta took the torch from John and ran to Peleg’s side; and John noticed that the first thing she whispered to the giant must have had to do with the arrow-wounds he’d received, for the giant promptly uncovered the places and held the light for her while she examined them.

  “So all’s well?” John heard him utter in an interrogative whisper; and it was clear to him that the reply was reassuring.

  As soon as she came back, still holding the torch, she asked the old man whether he wanted Peleg to bring the Brazen Head near to him, so that he could examine it. John could see that this bold question at once excited and troubled the ex-bailiff, for, snatching at Ghosta’s robe, he pulled her towards him till she sank on one knee, the torch held at arm’s length above her head.