John Powys - The Brazen Head

There was not a serf on the manor who didn’t feel towards him, in all the minutest details of their communal life, as if he really were a wise and understanding, though somewhat inscrutable and secretive, elderly relative. Like many another indulgent grand-dad, he was cruelly missed by all who suffered under less considerate successors.

What none of his own family had ever realized in the least, and what even Raymond de Laon and young Sir William Boncor among the aristocracy of that district had never properly understood, was the disturbing effect upon Heber’s peculiar nature of what he had picked up and imbibed of the teachings of Friar Bacon. The Friar’s ideas had not reached him directly from the philosopher’s own mouth; but indirectly and, as may well be imagined, in a distorted form from various persons, male and female, employed in all sorts of capacities, within and without both Bumset Priory and Fenawl Convent, whose pastures, enclosures, fallows, and forest-tracks, together with their well-appointed tithe-barns and their movable sheep-folds, offered extensive if not specifically trained employment.

The sequestration of Friar Bacon under conditions of semi-condemnation and semi-imprisonment so close to Roque Manor had naturally a disturbing, exciting, and agitating effect upon others beside Heber; but of all who were affected by the Friar’s presence in that neighbourhood the old ex-bailiff was undoubtedly the one who gave himself up to pondering on the subject with the most serious and the most simple concentration.

Such was the power of the imprisoned Friar’s mind that the first difficulty the old man had encountered, and he had pondered on this for a pathetically long while, was whether these exciting new ideas belonged to the realm of religion, or of science, or of philosophy. By his using his shrewd native commonsense he decided in favour of philosophy. He felt that it was certainly easier to include both religion and science under philosophy than it would be to squeeze philosophy into the murderous arsenals of the fanatics of religion on one hand or of science on the other.

As the grandfather of this little manorial realm, to which both the Priory and the Convent might well have looked with daughter-like piety, for they were, in a real historic sense, its offspring, Heber Sygerius never let himself forget what his son and successor was only too apt to do — that the thrice-precious manorial threshing-floor and grind-stone, upon which the lives of the whole little community depended, were actually within the purlieus of the Priory; and that therefore when the serfs, who came to thresh and to grind the corn, which, when, once ground, was the bread of their life and the whole basis of their mortal existence, talked as they were bound to do with the servants of the Priory and the Convent, there was no escape from the contagion of the Friar’s dangerous ideas.

For revolutionary indeed these ideas were! In fact some of them led directly to the sort of peasant-revolts against the owners of manors which were beginning to be frequent on the continent of Europe. Some of them led to the serfs of Roque Manor for instance asking themselves point-blank whether, if the Lord of the Manor could make them pay for threshing on his threshing-floor and grinding with his grind-stone, he might suddenly exact payment — in fact wasn’t this what he was doing? — for the privilege of living on the earth at all? Then there were all those innumerable magic sayings of the Friar in his role of race-sorcerer or tribal soothsayer; most especially those sayings connected with the most notorious of all his achievements, his construction of a Brazen Head that uttered oracles on behalf of Britain against the world.

The armoury of Roque Manor was indeed what might literally have been called, as Lil-Umbra had always called it, a magic room, for this was by no means the first time that a most strangely procreative and pregnant set of thoughts had been engendered here. But none had ever been born in this place stranger or more vibrant with eventful consequence than the thought-child now created by this casual and accidental contact between a precocious young girl and an unbelievably shrewd-witted old man.

There was something about this occasion, when Lil-Umbra’s mind was dallying with the hope that at any second Raymond de Laon might appear, and when old Heber’s mind was full of a difficult adjustment between the four points of the compass and the geography of the Manor, that gave to the warmth of that particular fire the power of so affecting the sympathetic silence in which they both were enveloped that there actually did come into existence by a sort of spontaneous generation a thought-child of the most significant kind, an offspring for which they were alone responsible.

Indeed they both felt in a weird and rather frightening manner that between the two of them, on this special day of this special month of the year of grace twelve hundred and seventy-two, an extremely formidable thought-child had been born, a thought-child, or rather a fate-child, for whose growth in power and for whose increase in stature a moment was as a day and a day was as a year; so that before a few months were over something would happen that would make their coming together on this particular morning a fearful and memorable milestone, not merely in the history of Roque Manor but in the history of the planet Earth.

As with so many other fatal events that have become inaugural turning-points in the story of our race, the chief actors in this divine or devilish drama only felt in the dimmest, faintest, indirectest, obliquest, shadowiest manner the generative importance of their encounter. In so far as they did apprehend it they attributed it — and indeed where else could they have looked for a cause? — to the effect of the warmth of a burning fire upon an absolute silence. The old man would no doubt have defended himself from any charge of spiritual rape by emphasizing the extreme fragility, not to mention the quivering evasiveness, of a girl-child’s maidenhood; while Lil-Umbra would unquestionably have sworn that her whole being was entirely dominated by one sense alone, namely by the sense of hearing. Indeed she might well have argued that all the while the spirit of Fire in this magic armoury of Roque was satisfying its desire upon the spirit of Silence, she herself was completely absorbed in listening for any sound outside the door that could possibly mean the approach of the youth who filled her thoughts.

As for old Heber Sygerius, with this sylph-like figure crouching at his side, he really had begun to permit to his natural impulses certain liberties of imagination, such as would never have been allowed to lift their heads above the ground in the mind of her Mongol friend with his Hebraic conscience. “How strange it is,” the old man was pondering now to himself, “that the traditional separation between my lord’s daughter and my lord’s bailiff should totally stop, not only the faintest attempt on my part to meddle with this exquisite little creature, but also should prevent my explaining to her any of my private ideas about life in general, ideas that I worked out in my own head years and years before Friar Bacon was forced to leave Oxford and come among us as a half-condemned and half-imprisoned heretic.

“O! how I’d love to tell this sweet child everything I’ve worked out for myself about the wisest, cunningest, craftiest ways of enjoying life and holding our own against our enemies! And yet I’m not allowed by our absurd conventions to utter a single word to her as a man of the same race and the same village, face to face, an old man to a young woman, a wise grand-dad to a hasty child! O how I’d like to describe to you, you darling little creature, exactly what can be picked up of subtle wisdom from these half-burnt logs that are warming us both at this second!”