John Powys - The Brazen Head

“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 tell 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.

“Will you both, if you don’t mind,” the Friar murmured, “since the ancients knew, long before the Mother of God was revealed to us, the divine power of virginity, follow me in repeating the sounds of an ancient invocation, the exact meaning of which has been lost to the world for two thousand years?”

And so slowly and clearly did Roger Bacon utter these evidently latinized syllables that neither Ghosta in her extravagant position, nor Tuck using all his strength and all his intelligence to keep the Image and its Burden upright, had any difficulty in repeating them after him: Birginis, Sirginis, Flirginis, Virginis; and these simple sounds had hardly died away, and the curious white light which the cunning art of the inventor had caused to play over the countenance of the Bronze Head had scarcely faded, when the Friar lifted Ghosta down upon her feet and handed her her mantle. Then he removed from the foot of his bed a cloak of his own and wrapped it round Brother Tuck. “Better take her to the Convent yourself,” he said gravely. “Two cloaked figures won’t excite the same interest as one alone. I shall pray for you both very particularly this night. You have helped me greatly.”

“It was indeed a special act of Providence,” replied the General of the Franciscan Order of Friars from his seat on the back of the deformed animal known to its owner as Cheiron, “that we met at those cross-roads. I should have had to spend the night under these pines if we hadn’t; because to tell you the truth, my good Master Spardo, nothing would have made me stop hunting for this Castle of Lost Towers except falling dead in my tracks or being killed by a wolf.”

The satisfaction of the General of the Grey Friars in the absoluteness of his God-Intoxication was so deep that the ground beneath Cheiron’s hooves seemed to rise to meet it. Unseen by the borrower of the deformed beast, Spardo wiped a blob of bird’s dropping from the back of one of his hands upon the fringe of the ecclesiastical garment dangling at the animal’s side.

“How did it happen, if your reverent generalship will not take offence at the question, that you, whom we all call the Seraphic Doctor, should be wandering about alone without a single servant?”

This not altogether unexpected question helped the bubbling spring of Bonaventura’s self-love to overflow again.

“I’ve got the best of all possible ones now , haven’t I?” he replied to Spardo, with an ingratiating smile. “Didn’t you tell me just now that you were unemployed?”

“Hitherto,” replied the bastard son of the King of Bohemia, “it has been my destiny to serve laymen: lordly laymen, it is true, and persons not devoid of coins of silver and coins of gold, but people tell me that great churchmen like thyself, O most Seraphic Doctor, are very particular and very exacting about the way your food is prepared and your off-scourings disposed of and your garments kept clean. I can see at this actual moment, O most saintly of doctors, several very filthy stains on your beautiful grey mantle, due no doubt — no! I’m not being rude to you, my lord doctor; I’m just indicating the absolute necessity that men like yourself who are so spiritual and so sensitive, and who so feel very, very, very far from the stupid unenlightened masses of men, and just as far from their stupid unenlightened authorities—”

“Silence, man! Who has taught you to talk like that? Are we not all equal before God? Are we not all equally stupid and ignorant in the presence of his holy spirit? Are we not all equally selfish and greedy and lascivious and treacherous and deceitful under the blinding fire of his eternal righteousness and the terrible thunder of his fearful truth?”

The deformed Cheiron was so agitated by this threatening voice so close to his ears that he came to a stop and began trembling from head to tail.

“To whom have you been listening?” repeated the grey-robed rider on Cheiron’s back. “ You , fresh from our religious France and our more than religious Italy, you , a wanderer across Christian Europe from the idolatries of the East, where, I ask you, have you picked up this devilish talk about ignorant masses and stupid authorities? Have you been listening to this Satanic sorcerer who has dared to assume the dress of a Friar just because he has lost his money, this thrice-accurst Roger Bacon? Or are all the misbegotten islanders in this Godforsaken Britain of yours so savage that if anyone wants to win their favour they’ve got to talk to them in this unholy way? But do you really think, O most generous of all possible wanderers through haunted forests, that you can go on guiding me to Lost Towers? You seem to me, Master Spardo, a rather tired and worn-out man yourself. I can’t help seeing that you drag your feet very heavily, and even kick the tree-stumps and the earth-mounds and the fallen logs as you go along; and I noticed just now that your eyes kept shutting of their own accord, as if at any moment you might fall asleep as you walked.”