John Powys - The Brazen Head

Bonaventura had actually been clever enough as a boy to fool Saint Francis himself in this matter; for Saint Francis had regarded it as a perpetual miracle of grace the way in which his young friend resisted temptation, when all the while his young friend was enjoying the process of temptation itself more than he could possibly have enjoyed any fruition of desire.

Bonaventura was indeed thinking at this very moment that he might derive great satisfaction from a few weeks’ residence in Lost Towers, as long as he could pretend he was resisting the most maddening temptation of his life, whereas in reality he was resisting nothing. He went on trailing his grey mantle, in this crafty pretence, through corridor after corridor, followed by the growling and grimacing, the gurgling and grinning, the gallivanting and gobemouching Baron Maldung, and in reality deliciously enlivened, not at all, as they were all believing, tormented, teased, and tantalized to the last exquisite point of provocation, by lovely little Lilith.

Farther and farther, on and on, he was led, trailing his grey garment, while the fingers of his left hand never loosened their firm clutch on the leather bag under his robe. Up stairway after stairway he had to go, down passage after passage, till the guest-chamber, where he was to sleep when supper was over, was reached at last. He had been in many feudal castles and o a few royal palaces all over Europe. He had been in several Moorish and Byzantine and Coptic sanctuaries all through Mesopotamia. But he had never been before in such a luxurious room as this. It was clear at once to him, as he turned his devouringly prominent eyes on the bed that was to receiveU him, and on the hot and cold and lukewarm water that was to bathe him, and on the incredible varieties of ointments and balmy balsams that were to anoint him, and on all these conveniently exposed and yet daintily barred coals of fire that were to warm him, and above all on the three lovely and alluring young sylphs, all delicately wearing the transparent fabrics and red-brown dyes and exotic hieroglyphs of Lost Towers, who were so anxious to serve him that if “he and God” decided to devote a few weeks to the purification, regeneration, sanctification, of all the dwellers in, and of all the dependents upon, these Lost Towers, there would be nothing in such delay to trouble the bodily well-being or vex the spiritual peace of God’s chosen servant.

But what was this? Suddenly, without warning, all his attendants vanished, and there was revealed to him a different aspect of life in this place. Borne upon winds that blew wildly through all its walls and over all its roofs, from forests that seemed to be beyond any forests of this world, and from swamps beyond any swamps of which he had ever heard, there came into that chamber the weird lamentable cry, ghastly and desperate, that had passed through every human building raised by the hand of man upon that particular spot since Britain was first divided from France by the salt sea: the cry of the wind that since the beginning of Time had made Lost Towers what it was.

Washed, anointed, oiled, combed and curled, catered for and courted by lovely attendants, and his purpose crowned by a miraculous concatenation of convenient conditions, Bonaventura’s instinctive reaction, when he heard this unusual wailing in the rafters of the roof above him and this long-drawn melancholy moaning in the corridors and landings and stair-ways and cellars beneath him, was simply to feel peevishly annoyed with the God he worshipped. He didn’t feel towards him as one heroic conspirator feels to another who has been propitiated and wheedled and fooled into betraying their cause.

What he felt was a simple irritation. God, he told himself, ought to have known better than allow the Powers of Darkness to make a saint, possessed of a piety like his piety, shiver. For shiver he did. The ministering angels who had been hovering round him must have known at the first faint stirring of these ancient black tapestries what was going to happen; for they all vanished before it happened.

There are those who might feel that, left alone with these alarming sounds, our saint’s vexation with his deity was not uncalled for. All around him was black tapestry representing terrifying battles between unicorns and river-horses, the former more red than brown, and the latter more brown than red, but both of them woven against that background of black in such a way as to annihilate completely in that portion of the building all those emanations from free space, and all those blessed airs of boundless liberation, that are projected upon any atmosphere by the colours blue and green, quite apart from the objects that we are accustomed to see wearing these colours, such as blue sky and green grass. Reddish brown, and brownish red, and both of these in a peculiar and special mingling, such as Bonaventura had never seen in his life before, were diffused, not only from the tapestry in this weird place, but from rafters and ceilings and panels and doors, until a sort of atmospheric soul of that appalling colour, something that might indeed be called the mystic eidolon of that fearful and awful colour, permeated every square inch of the invisible air within these ill-fated walls.

Though of course in a sense you could only see it, in reality you were compelled to taste it, to swallow it, to touch it, to feel it, to absorb it, till it filled your whole body, as air fills a bubble.

Yes, those attendant sylphs must have known perfectly well what was coming, for at the first quivering ripple in the tapestry of his chamber, they were off. And then it seemed to Bonaventura that this devil in the wind had begun to cause, not only ructions in the wood-work of the room — for there were groanings and creakings everywhere — but yawning chasms in the floor of life; for gobbets of red-brownishness and globules of brown-reddishness seemed being belched forth from a pre-historic cleft in the original matter of creation itself, as if this protoplasm of all existing things were relieving itself of some obnoxious suppuration due to a primal injury.

Everybody he met in this part of Wessex, as he pursued his obstinate enquiries with regard to what he loved to call the devil-worship of Friar Bacon, had told him about this particular wind that had been felt at this particular spot since the world began; but he had never anticipated that he himself would feel it as powerfully as this. He felt disturbed, not frightened, he hastened to assure himself, but agitated. He found it impossible to walk up and down with his accustomed dignified stride. He gave way to a series of jerky impulsive movements.

Probably he would not have yielded to these nervous debouchings to north and west, to south and east, and then round the world again, if he had not been alone; for it is queer with us mortals how some of us have completely different codes of behaviour for moments in solitude and moments when others, even if it be only one other, are there.

Bonaventura’s relations with God were peculiar to himself; for they were absolutely in the mind, or in the soul, that is to say, in his thoughts. He always took it for granted that God, being a Spirit, took no interest in, and had no effect upon, the movements of his body; unless points of conscience entered, which of course changed everything.

Poor Bonaventura! He hurried headlong down the passage outside his door till it ended in a door that was sealed up, as if it led to a mausoleum of the bones of lost angels. Back again he hurried, till he reached the top of the stairs that led down to the lower floors of the building; at which point he suddenly felt the curious sensation, not amounting to a night-mare-panic but belonging to the same special kind of fantastic horror, that he used to feel when his pious mother told him in his childhood how the Witch of Endor called up the prophet from the grave.