John Powys - The Brazen Head

Perhaps nothing since they had found each other again — for their supreme embrace just now had been to them something outside time and space — struck Ghosta’s Hebrew-girlish mind more poignantly than what she saw when, fully awake at last and with her clothes on again, she entered that inner chamber of the cave and beheld her lover’s quaint preparations for what might have been called their consummation feast.

But she kept her feelings to herself, for it was a deeply congenital characteristic of Ghosta’s nature to avoid above everything the quick exclamations and exuberant outcries with which it seems irresistible to some of the nicest ladies in the world to express, or at least to convey the impression that they’re expressing, the feelings of the heart.

But her smile told a lot; and as far as the preparation for their love-feast went, which he had so quaintly and crudely set in motion, her quick and competent hands soon had them seated side by side on a bench of pine-wood opposite a big round shield on a tall brazen tripod, covered with a white cloth and a couple of large earthenware plates.

Peleg was soon explaining that, when they had finished their meal, he was anxious to take her to the Fortress, where he hoped she would be able by her beauty and the power of her personality to persuade Lady Val to let her join the large-kitchen-establishment of Roque, which, though situated, as he explained, within the confines of the Fortress, was really an independent organization by whose methods of procedure the whole Manor benefited.

He was so eager and voluble about this idea of his that she should find a place for herself, and so certain that such a place would be pretty near the top, that for a long while he never saw how little she was responding to the picture he was so vigorously painting of their future at the Fortress.

When at last he paused, however, he was not only startled but shocked and hurt. He had stopped in mid-flow, so to speak, with the idea of clearing the channel-bed of his torrent of exultant prediction, so that her stream of consciousness might join and mingle absolutely with his own, and he was stunned and confounded by the way she replied.

“No, no, my darling Peleg!” she cried. “I can’t imagine myself working in the midst of this great manorial kitchen! I know too well all it takes to prepare meals for those who plough and sow and plant and reap and bind and clear the ground of weeds! And as for having to be polite to this presumptuous and insolent bailiff of theirs, this brutal Randolph Sygerius — Heavens! I wouldn’t consider it for a second. But don’t look sad, my precious Peleg; for I wouldn’t mind coming across to the Fortress now and again, whenever Lady Val was short-handed or had any special visitors to cater for.

“But to work as a rule and every day in your manorial kitchen, the Lord God of Israel forbid! No, my dearest one! No, no, no! I’ll go with you to Rome. I’ll go with you to Jerusalem. I’ll go with you to Sicily. I’ll go with you to Constantinople. I’ll go with you to Corinth. I’ll go with you to Samarcand or to Trebizond or to Jericho. But even for you, my first and my last true love, I will not work in an English manorial kitchen!”

Peleg turned round and laid his great hands on her shoulders and stared at her. They were sitting side by side with their backs to a wall of wet dark stone. Down this wall dripped continually small trickles of water; while the wall itself was broken here and there by deep greenish-black clefts of incredible depth. In fact these cracks in the wall gave the impression that, were they enlarged so that a small person could worm himself into them, they might be found to lead, if the explorer had the courage to persevere and follow one of them to the bitter end, right to the very centre of the whole planet, where such an explorer would be liable to be devoured by that fabulous creature called the Horm, the legends about whom were evidently so appalling, and so likely to be disclosing a horrible reality, that, long before any written chronicler existed, they must have been deliberately suppressed by the self-preservative consciousness of the human race.

When Peleg turned towards her in his startled surprise and clutched her shoulders, they both had their backs to these sinister cracks in the wall and their faces towards the ponderous arch under which they had made their bed; and beyond that arch, outside the cave altogether, they could see, outlined against the sky, that huge mystical pine-tree, which stretched out its branch-arm for, or against, the frequenters of that ancient cave, in a gesture as wholly inscrutable as it seemed to be wholly indestructible.

“Do you realize what you’re saying, child?” Peleg groaned, as he shook the girl slowly forward and slowly backward, while his large hands, had anywandering progeny of that subterranean Horm been peering at them from behind, would have hidden completely beneath their knuckles and veins and wrinkles and creases of loose pendulous skin all the lovely rondures of the girl’s feminine shoulders.

“Don’t you understand,” he muttered, “that I am for ever committed, body and soul, to the service of Sir Mort Abyssum? I could no more leave the Fortress than that old tree out there could leave the place where it grows, unless a hurricane uprooted it, or lightning struck it, or a savage tree-hater cut it down with a murderous axe!”

He let her shoulders go and dropped his arms; and for some time they just stared at each other, both angry, but both afraid of what they might say or do in their anger. Peleg had learnt in his world, just as Ghosta had learnt in hers, that it is wiser not to quarrel with a creature who instinctively gathers itself together before hitting back, so that, when it does strike, the blow shall be a deadly one.

At last, very quitely, Ghosta spoke: “I am ready to agree, my friend,” she said, “if you are anxious for me to go with you to the Fortress and have an interview with your Lady Val; but I can tell you this in advance, and you’ll see for yourself the truth of my prediction, if you accompany me into the presence of this lady: Lady Val will loathe the sight of me, and will command Sir Mort to have nothing to do with me! I don’t say for a moment that he’ll obey her in this, but she’ll no more want to have me working in the manorial kitchen than I want to work there. It’s this ancient hatred of us Jews which all the races in Europe feel, and which a certain class of men and women in this country especially suffers from.

“I’ve thought about it a lot lately; and I think it is purely due to our superior intelligence. They feel instinctively that they’re not our equals in intelligence and that makes them hate us, and their hatred is continually being intensified by contempt every time they see how, in archery and hunting and tournaments and in all manly sports and in all athletic contests and public games, the simplest and stupidest among them can play a part, whereas we Hebrews — just as did the great Avicebron when he was a child, Avicebron for whom Friar Bacon has such a passion — have always thought that our mighty men of battle, our Samsons and Sauls and Joshuas and Abners and Joabs, were of far less account than our prophets and priests and men of God.”

“But Ghosta, my Ghostal What are you saying? Aren’t our Scriptures full of the victories of Judah and Israel over their enemies? Wasn’t the Lord of Hosts always giving his chosen people triumphant. victories over Syrians and the Assyrians and Babylonians and Philistines?”

Ghosta gave him a most peculiar look, a look that seemed to say: “I shall have to consider this very carefully. You are a man. I am a woman. I shall have to consider whether I can talk to you about these things, and tell you all that I’ve thought about them for a long time. Don’t ‘ee look like that, Peleg darling — as if I’d slapped you across the cheek. I shall always tell you the important things of my life, and you’ll always tell me the important things of your life. These political and religious questions aren’t the true reality of any actual life of a man and a woman who love each other. You might be very interested in them and might be totally indifferent to them, and we could live out our life in perfect contentment.