The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  Ghosta smiled a quite whimsical smile. “Yes indeed, Father, I can answer that! This old Prior who is master here, as I know well from my life in the Convent, where the nuns always consider him and his ideas and his policy above any line they are ordered to follow by the lady who immediately rules us, has only one object in life—namely, to enjoy himself as much as he possibly can in the narrow circle into the centre of which fate has dropt him.

  “What he has to consider are the hours for meals, for strolling in the grounds, for listening to the anthems and chants from his choir-pew in the chapel, for studying the particular Latin text, whether from the Priory library or from his own private shelves, which carries in its train the largest number of old memories of his far-off youth. Now when we consider this matter quite clearly and honestly, Friar, my revered Father, we find nothing less than the surprising fact that this devotion to his own personal pleasure and interest for the whole of the day, and for whatever portion of the night is at the disposal of his personal will—for we can hardly include the hours when the worthy man is asleep, for our dreams, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me there, Father, are not under the control of our will—is identical with what thinking people like ourselves are absorbed in.

  “Whereas these rulers of great manorial castles, with their Ladies and their Bailiffs, and these royal rulers of great lands with their Treasurers and Chancellors and Bishops and Captains and Princes, are occupied day and night with meddling in other people’s affairs, with invading other people’s territories, with taking away other people’s property, with imprisoning and murdering other people’s subjects and citizens. Haven’t I been speaking truly, Father, in what I’ve just said?”

  Ghosta had indeed been uttering these unpopular and unorthodox feelings in a voice not only a good deal louder than the one she generally used, but a great deal more heavily charged with emotion.

  Friar Bacon brought his chair back to the table with a jerk and stretched out his right arm clear across his manuscript, upon which from the small square aperture in the roof the sun was at that moment throwing down a long straight ray, a ray more crowded with sun-motes than Ghosta, had she been in a mood to observe such things, would have had to confess she had ever seen in a sun-ray before.

  In spite of the fact that they were looking straight into each other’s eyes, the Friar’s gesture was so unexpected that for a second she disregarded it. Then she met it with her own right hand; and, in the warm pressure that followed, the heart-felt alliance between them was sworn and sealed.

  The Friar’s hand rested once more on the edge of his manuscript, and hers once more clasped its fellow and propped her chin while her elbows remained on the dark, smooth-polished wood of that round table. And now both the Friar and Ghosta smiled at each other and turned their eyes away. This they both did naturally and instinctively; but having done so, the quick and lively perception they each possessed was severally attracted by the quivering and elongated sun-ray above their heads and its myriads of tiny little dancing specks.

  “Isn’t it queer to think,” commented Ghosta, “how many historical characters such as we read about in the scriptures, and such as they lecture about in the universities, like Moses and Joshua and like Plato and Socrates and Julius Caesar and Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, must have noticed in their colleges and palaces and temples, and especially at crucial moments in their lives, these millions of dancing atoms! What did Socrates feel when these tiny atoms came dancing into his cell while he was waiting for the executioner with the Hemlock?”

  “A question indeed, my dear!” echoed the Friar. “And I’d mighty well like to hear how Plato, who was so confoundedly clever at reaching that great teacher’s secret thoughts, and cleverer still at giving them the particular twist that would make them fit into his own ideal system, would describe how the great self-doomed corrupter of youth would have argued with such an one, if some God had endowed one of those motes up there with the power of speech and started it off on a metaphysical protest against the claim of the human race to be the only judge amid the atomic children of the Cosmos!”

  “O Father, my dear Father!” cried Ghosta in huge delight. “Do go on imagining what one of those tiny dots of matter would say to Socrates if it did question him!”

  “Well! for one thing, my dear child,” rejoined the Friar, and then he stopped abruptly.

  Ghosta, who was turning from him to that descending sun-fall of dancing motes, and then back again to him, had a look of reverence on her face as if he’d really been the great magician that most of his enemies and a few of his friends considered him, and as if he might, at any moment, without moving a hand or a foot, give orders to that sun-stream to alter its course, and as if the sun-ray might obey him, and after making a disconcerting circle round their chamber, might hasten to the door, and vanish down the tower-stairs.

  But he went on quite calmly. “Don’t you suppose, my dear, that this whole business of being one of the lucky millions of dust-specks, out of the trillions and quadrillions of less lucky ones, must be so exciting to every one of those little objects that the whole of its being would be so absorbed in what is happening to it that it wouldn’t have a particle of power left to ask any question of anybody. Yes, and I would say—and wouldn’t you, my dear girl, say the same?—that if it had any choice left to it, it would feel it was wiser to lavish all its power of response on that lucky moment than to ponder on suitable philosophical questions to put to——”

  At this point they were interrupted by shouts and cries outside, by a clatter of feet on the stairs, and by the flinging open of the door. It was young John who now rushed in, followed by Colin and Clamp, and three or four of the Fortress’s most active retainers. John was carrying a broken piece of statuary pressed against his chest; and this he hurriedly flung down on the Friar’s bed in the corner, after a quick nervous glance at the despoiled alcove hard-by where once stood the Brazen Head.

  “What on earth is this, Master John?” cried Ghosta, rising to her full height and hurrying to the bed to see what the young man had deposited there. But Friar Bacon remained seated with his pen still between his fingers, and the only special movement he made that Clamp and Colin, who were both observing him closely, were able to discern, was that he began to draw some sort of Euclidian figure at the bottom of the parchment in front of him, and that this Euclidian figure was an equal-sided square surrounded by a circle.

  “Father! Father!” murmured Ghosta a moment later, “do, for Heaven’s sake, look at this!” and, shaking off young John, who tried to hold her back, and advancing straight to the Friar’s chair, from the side opposite to where Clamp had already begun to watch with mute and fascinated absorption the movements of the Friar’s pen, she thrust under Roger Bacon’s eyes what clearly was the broken half of a female head, elaborately chiselled out of a block of very hard stone.

  But a torrent of verbal eloquence, like the sound of a breaking wave to the splashing tune of which the Friar studied what Ghosta thrust beneath his eyes, was uttered by the excitable Colin, and accompanied by such lavish gesticulation that it was like being addressed by one of those flocks of winged angels speaking with one voice, such as in religious altar-pieces often form the flying chariot of God the Father as it descends from Heaven.

  “The General of the Franciscan Order, this thrice-accurst Bonaventura,” cried Colin making his voice resound through every portion of the chamber, and it was as if the quivering sun-ray, which had removed itself altogether, had suddenly returned in a new incarnation of pure sound, “has now with the help of those ruffians from Lost Towers, whom he swears he has converted, and at the command of the Pope, whom he swears he represents, begun meddling with Master Tilton’s statue of Our Lady in that shrine he’s building!

  “And do you know what this false saint has done now? He has started a shocking and wicked rumour, entirely a lie, of course, but you know how these lies spread—that Master John’s sister and his brother Tilton have been found guilty
of incest! And—as if that wasn’t enough!—do you know what further lie he’s invented? He swears that our Master Tilton, heir to the Manor of Roque and to the Fortress Castle, which his mother’s family have held since the days of King Stephen, has an even greater sin on his conscience than incest with his sister! For—says this pretty saint, who behaves far worse than Judas—our Master Tilton has committed the supreme sacrilegious sin, of carving the face of Our Lady in the centre of this shrine so that she shall resemble his sister with whom he has sinned!”

  “Has Bonaventura really had the gall, John my friend, to go to such lengths as this man says?”

  The Friar’s voice was as steady, and his manner as quiet and collected, as if he were referring to no more than a point of propriety in some public, metaphysical debate; but Ghosta noticed that he made a slight motion of his hand as if to wave back a little both Colin and Clamp and the two or three armed men who accompanied them.

  “Yes, Master, across my heart and on my life,” replied John. “That’s what he’s done! My mother is so upset that she has shut herself up with my sister and won’t allow her to go riding with Raymond de Laon, as the two of them had arranged to do today, for fear that this wretched Bonaventura, with his Lost Towers troop, might kidnap her or imprison her, or even carry her with him in a ship to Rome, as he has already done with other ladies who have been accused of various offences of the same sort.

  “As for my father, he refuses to take the thing seriously. He says that Tilton ought to be hunting wild boars in the forest instead of building shrines with his own hands and using Lil-Umbra as his model for the Mother of God. But I notice that he has remained at home since the trouble started, and that he’s set a guard outside the shrine, to make sure that this mock-saint doesn’t excite his cohort of ‘converted’ robbers to destroy the whole shrine and ruin Tilton’s hard work on it for nearly a year!

  “What drove me to come, most honoured Friar, to make a special appeal to you, was the fact that I chanced to hear” —young John flushed a little as he announced this, revealing the fact that he had not been able to resist the temptation to listen at his parents’ door—“to hear my father tell my mother that if they attacked the shrine again, or came anywhere near the postern-gate again, he would arm all our people, both serfs and freemen, and make such an attack on that damned Lost Towers as would settle them for ever and a day! You see, most reverend Friar, this man undoubtedly was at one time the Pope’s emissary or legate or ambassador or whatever the proper legal name is—round here they use a word for him that’s too bawdy to repeat—and no doubt at that time when he had the proper seals of office he might have been able to carry off Lil-Umbra, and Tilton too, to Rome and accuse them there. But as it is, with no official credentials from the Pope, and with no proper royal support from our sick King, I don’t believe he can do very much to hurt us, except start rumours and spread lies.”

  Friar Bacon groaned, and bowed his head for a second over his pen and paper. Then he said quietly, but without looking up:

  “Sit down a moment, lad, while we consider all this as steadily as we can. What would you advise us to do, Ghosta? Both John and I—that’s true, isn’t it, lad?—hold the view that at most dangerous and ticklish crises, it’s often from the feminine mind we get the best hint as to what to do.”

  Ghosta didn’t hesitate a second. “How did the shock of this wicked accusation,” she enquired, “strike your sister and brother, Master John?”

  “Well, to tell you the truth—” and it was clear to everybody that young John was very glad to be asked that question, “I felt proud of the way they took it! You know it was Nurse who first told us about the dastardly fabricated tale which this devilish wretch started; and we were all together up in the nursery at the top of the house when she blurted it out. Father had come up about this attack on Tilton’s shrine; and no sooner had Nurse used the word than Tilton threw his arms round Lil-Umbra’s neck, and gave her a great hug and a lot of loud kisses all over her face. ‘Don’t you mind, my darling!’ he cried. ‘If I ever tried to do such wickedness to you I’m sure the good God would strike me dead before it was done!’”

  Roger Bacon’s face lit up with satisfaction, and with a certain humorous amusement too, young John thought, as he eagerly watched him; but the Friar’s words when he spoke were anything but final or conclusive:

  “But now listen to me, my children both, and you two also my kind friends,” and he made a double gesture with the hand that held his pen, one in the direction of Colin, and the other in the direction of Clamp, “what we’ve got to do now is to think of some way of out-witting this self-appointed representative of the Holy Father, supported—and the thing’s not without precedent in the history of our mad purblind human race—by this local nest of rapscallions. If any better idea comes into your head, Ghosta, while I’m explaining my scheme, let’s hear it at once, and don’t mind interrupting me if you’re afraid of forgetting what you suddenly thought of!

  “But this is what has just come into my mind as a good plan. A week ago I had a communication from my friend Peter Peregrinus, who is now lecturing in France, to tell me that the famous master in philosophy, Albert of Cologne—who belongs to the Dominican order, and indeed is such a loyal Dominican that, when he speaks in the University of Paris, he defends his view of Aristotle against both all the Arabian and all the Latin Averroists and completely demolishes them—is at this very moment visiting Oxford! This is an astonishing piece of news to me. I had heard that he was interested in the Summa Theologicae of Alexander of Hales, but I never thought I’d live to hear that the great Albert of Cologne should actually be in this island, still less that he should be visiting Oxford!

  “I have exchanged letters with him a good many times, as I suppose all disciples of Aristotle have done, and he and I have always agreed that the science of life didn’t end with Plato or with Aristotle or even with Grosseteste or with any other student of philosophy. But, my dears, the reputation of Albert of Cologne all over the world is terrific, greater than that of any other modern master. Every man who can read and write in this whole west country, whether they’re Franciscans or Dominicans, Monks, or Friars, Abbots, or Priors or parish priests, have heard nothing but praise of him since they first began their A. B. C.! When you come to metaphysics he’s the top boy, so to speak, of the whole schola mundi, if you leave out Israel and India and China! Now if we could send to Albertus some wise and diplomatic representative of our side, in this quarrel with Bonaventura, it strikes me that it’s not at all impossible that the great teacher from Cologne might be persuaded to come, as the most famous Dominican, to confront this troublesome Franciscan.

  “That would soon, as we used to say in Ilchester, ‘settle the hash,’ of our Bona, the Venturesome! I am perfectly certain that what started the whole thing was the fact that your excellent parents, John, gave shelter in the Fortress to my Brazen Head. It was this that kindled all this obstinate rage in our ex-legate’s mind. He’s somehow got it lodged in his one-track sanctified midriff that the Holy Trinity we all worship has received a staggering blow from my having dared to create in the person of my Brazen Head a rival creation to Adam and Eve. I tell you, my good friends, I tell you, John dear, if we could only hit upon the right person to send as an ambassador to the great Albert now in Oxford, a person who would be in a position to escort him down here, with him as the chief Dominican to confront this pseudo-saint of the Franciscans, the whole affair would soon be settled.”

  As can well be imagined, both Ghosta and John were now murmuring, each with their own special manner of emphasis and intensity, the name of Raymond de Laon; and Friar Bacon, as if to seek still further confirmation of this idea, looked first at Colin and then at Clamp. Both men came so close on getting this faintly interrogative glance that they completely hid the Friar from Ghosta and John, but a double vote of unqualified recognition of Raymond as their Ambassador to Albert of Cologne these two certainly did give; for the voice of Colin seem
ed to flap its wings in widening circles above every back and every head in the place; and the voice of Clamp seemed to drive in one rusty nail after another as he fastened up their decision over the Norman arch of the event.

  “Well then, my friends,” cried the Friar, rising from his seat and moving quickly round the two men who were bending over him, “we may take it that our Council chamber has uttered its decisive verdict, and that Raymond de Laon shall be our ambassador to the great Albert in Oxford. Will you convey our request to him, John my lad, and let us know the result as quickly as possible? And now I think I must beg you all to descend to the lower regions of this hospitable Priory; for it is really absolutely necessary for me to finish this page of what I am calling my Opus Major before I sleep tonight; and your arrival, gentlemen, is the cause of this necessity, and I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you all for being this same cause.

  “For the real truth is that your sudden appearance and the more than startling interest of what you have announced to me, combined with the expectation of encountering, man to man, he a Dominican and myself a Franciscan, the great Albert of Cologne, has caused me to remember certain intensely important details that I had completely forgotten relating to the journey of Brother William of Rubruck to the Grand Khan at Karakorum in Tartary, where he stayed from December 1253 till July 1254.

  “It was Brother William himself when I met him in Paris who told me these things; and although at this moment I was writing about the sermon he told me he preached in Constantinople on Palm Sunday 1253, I had absolutely forgotten that great congress of religions over which the Mongolian Khan presided at Karakorum, a congress of the Mohammedan, Buddhist, and Christian religions, and I really must write about it while it has come back so vividly to my mind. I am sure I would have left out Brother William’s description of that Karakorum congress of religions altogether if our little meeting tonight, and our decision to send an ambassador to bring the head of the Dominicans to deal with the head of the Franciscans, hadn’t stirred up my memory of what the brother told me.”