John Powys - The Brazen Head

And they all could see that to the human nerves of the good Baron Boncor such provocation was unendurable. In fact all that that good-natured warrior found gall enough to do under such exceptional tension was to take a dignified and simple farewell of Bonaventura and to give Spardo a definite invitation.

“Don’t you forget, Master Spardo, that you’ll always be welcome at Gone Castle, whenever your wanderings bring you our way!”

And then, not without some difficulty — for Basileus was showing signs in a manner not quite seemly in so warlike a steed, of being unduly attracted to Cheiron’s deformity — Baron Boncor turned his horse clear round and urged him into a rather shy and not wholly polite retreat.

But to retreat from Lost Towers, when once you had discovered it, was more difficult than the discovery. Lady Lilt lifted one long white arm to direct her husband’s attention to this retirement of their chief antagonist; and with her other arm she groped for the bow and quiver hanging over the shoulder of Baron Maldung. This small bow, with its arrow already notched against its extended string she thrust into Maldung’s hands. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” she hissed. And when the Baron of Lost Towers released the string and the feathered shaft pierced the flesh of Boncor’s right shoulder and remained there quivering, the blood that dripped in big drops upon the mane of Basileus was a much brighter red than the red-brown of the Lost Towers retinue.

But, though the blood was bright enough, the hand which held the bridle-reins was reduced to helpless impotence. But Basileus leaped forward and at a gallop now; nor was there any sign before they disappeared of the Baron falling from the horse’s back. It was then and only then, that Lady Lilt turned to lead their visitors past the still half-naked Lilith into the interior of Lost Towers.

The crowd of attendants, in their rich red-brown attire, seemed suddenly stricken with a weird sort of lethargy, and indeed displayed a tendency to drift and drift and drift without any purpose. But no aimless drifting disturbed the imperious though comical figure of Maldung, now busy at a job which absolutely absorbed him. This was nothing less, as Bonaventura quickly had an opportunity of realizing, than directing the covering with suitable colour of the carved mantles in the entrance-hall of Lost Towers of certain imperial Roman heads. These had been selected by the despotic Maldung — at least as far as Bonaventura was able to realize — purely for the sake of the devilish obsessions which possessed them.

But past this avenue of diabolical physiognomies the now thoroughly agitated General of the Franciscan Friars felt he had to go, if the obsequious salutation of Baron Maldung and the engaging gestures of Lady Lilt implied that at any rate tonight, whatever happened in the future, and he did begin to feel a little doubtful about converting these people, he was at least sure of a savoury supper and a comfortable bed.

It had been a comfort to him that the murderous arrow which he had seen lodged in the shoulder of Boncor hadn’t brought that worthy man down: and what he must do now was to make it clear that his stately strides towards the portal of Lost Towers were not accelerated by the sight of the provocative figure of the daughter of the house, just perceptible beyond the wicked and desperately unhappy visage of Tiberius Caesar, sated with his sadistic orgies, with his sub-human obsessions, with his super-human atrocities, and looking now as if scooped out, gouged out, thunder-blasted out, after years of petrifaction from the substance of an internal rock.

Lilith was still playing her perpetual game; and it was revealed to Lady Lilt, and not wholly concealed even from our friend Spardo, that the present object of the girl’s felonious wiles was none other than the saintly personage, armoured in the chastity of grey cloth, wrapped in the chastity of grey vapourings, fortified in the chastity of grey theocracy, cramped in the chastity of grey idealism, who was now approaching the entrance to Lost Towers between the door-post on the left and the profile of Tiberius Caesar on the right.

More momentous to Lady Lilt than the galvanic though invisible cord, that was stretched so taut between the flitting and wavering adumbrations of her daughter’s milk-white thighs and the furtive attention of Bonaventura, was a parallel psychic cord that she now caught sight of, and by no means for the first time, between those same exposed whitenesses and the eyes of the girl’s father.

Aye, but O! what Spardo would have given, possibly even the remaining golden coin he had robbed him of, to know exactly what this Man in grey, this special pet of St. Francis, was thinking just then! Would the fellow have the gall to do what everybody else was far too scared to think of doing? Would he be brave enough actually to enter Lost Towers?

He himself felt glad enough to give Cheiron’s bridle a gentle twist and to turn the head of the half-human animal due south — that is to say, in the direction taken by that rider upon Basileus who now rode with an arrow in his shoulder. Nobody was interested enough, either in Spardo or his deformed steed, to follow their retreat; but had anyone done so, they would have been absolutely astonished at the speed with which Cheiron could move at such a crisis.

Meanwhile every step taken by Bonaventura towards the entrance to Lost Towers was attended by an intense and meticulous process of thought. In a certain sense the man was undoubtedly acting with real courage, and might without exaggeration have been called a very brave man. But his exorbitant notion of his own importance in the eyes of the God he worshipped, his puffed up conceit as to the eternal importance of the particular kind of sanctity he cultivated, tainted this honourable courage with a less worthy tinge. “If,” he now said to himself, “I obstinately refuse to look at that girl, I shall make them think I am afraid of being tempted. What I must do is to make them understand that I and God—”

However bulging the man’s eyes may have been and however assiduously he kept feeling in his pocket to make certain his imperial gold pieces were still safe, it must be allowed that there was an element of childlike simplicity in this page-boy of omnipotence oddly mingled with his inordinate conceit.

Some might say that men think in words and women in images; but if in the case of Bonaventura we were to enter the slippery topic of the syntax of psychic expression and begin to quarrel with his way of saying “I and God”, it is only fair to remember that in speaking of his earthly parent he always said “I and my Father” instead of “My Father and I”.

“What,” so the man’s thoughts ran on, as he gravely advanced beneath an unusually high arch and proceeded to leave the marble Tiberius and his sadistic stare behind, “I must make them understand is that I enjoy resisting temptation too much to run away, though it is true that in the Paternoster I pray God not to lead me into it. But I must make them understand that I have so yielded myself to God that His will is now my will and my will entirely His will. It would not be for people’s good for me to let them know how much I enjoy gazing at the lovely little white breasts and delicious little white limbs of young girls; for vulgar, crude, rough, brutal, stupid, ordinary men wouldn’t be able to get the pleasure I get from this. It is all in my love for God and in God’s love for me. We love each other so much that I feel sure God allowed me to be with him — for this past-and-present intimacy is what you get when your love for God makes you feel one with Him — when He took the rib from Adam and out of it made Eve. When anyone loves God as I do He gives you wonderful privileges. For the sake of my great love for Him, God put back Time for me and allowed me to watch those embraces of Adam and Eve that created the human race, and the pleasure I get now from looking at this young girl is part of the pleasure which God, in return for my great love, allowed me to enjoy when He let me watch Adam embracing Eve.”