John Powys - The Brazen Head

But now to the complete surprise of both the young man and the old man, and somewhat to the displeasure of Peleg, who by this time was towering above the three of them, and was by no means indifferent to this thing they were discussing, Ghosta broke in. “What was wanted,” she said quietly, “to the completion of Friar Bacon’s creation I was myself ready to supply; and at the request of the Friar, I did supply it.”

The sound of Peleg’s voice above their heads had a queerly hoarse note in it at this moment. “The best thing we can do tonight,” he said slowly, “is to carry the Head out of this forest and into the Fortress; and I would suggest that we straightway convey it into the armoury where it will remain under the particular protection of our friend here. I believe”—and at this point the giant laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder—“that your Father, Master John, will have no objection when he learns of this having been done. I don’t think our conveying the Head into the armoury need disturb anybody’s night’s rest. In fact I can make certain that it doesn’t by carrying it there myself, while Ghosta helps you, master bailiff.

“No one can have heard you leave or they’d have come with you. No one but yourself, I expect — isn’t that the case, master bailiff? — heard the noise those wretched Lost Towers men were making; and as you came out you couldn’t possibly have barred the door. The whole Fortress is no doubt asleep at this moment; and we shall take care to move so silently that we shan’t disturb a living soul in the place. I’ll be glad enough to have a rest and a lie-down myself; but I’m not so done-in as not to be able to take this old Brazen Head into our armoury! Once there, I warrant nobody will dare to meddle with it. It’ll soon become a regular shrine, and as sacred as Master Tilton’s Blessed Virgin.”

While her giant was addressing them above their heads, Ghosta and the old man, who still had his back against the tree and John’s woollen neck-cloth under his buttocks, were exchanging some extremely curious thoughts. No scrupulous chronicler of human affairs can help being aware out of the instinctive observation of the narrating mind, of the weird manner in which, amid any group of agitated people, when one voice has been monopolizing everybody’s attention for several minutes, a hollow gulf of silence is created, across which all manner of disturbing thoughts pass from one person to another.

John himself at this moment, in his corner of this psychic gulf created by Peleg’s somewhat dictatorial and irritable monologue, felt so utterly tired, after all the energy he had spent that night, that his mind, in its exhausted state, like the mind of a person who stares vacantly at his bed-posts, began vaguely to wonder whether in this silence around them and with this hoarse voice sounding above their heads, other feelings than human ones, might be in the act of being exchanged, feelings for instance of the mosses, of the ferns, of the tree-roots even, that surrounded them on that forest-floor.

Such vegetation-feelings, John pondered, might be entangling themselves with his own human feelings at this very moment; for after all it was this group of trees and bushes which he had known since his infancy, and which, from what he had seen daily of them out of that postern-door of his birthplace, had become like the fireguard in his nursery, a malleable background to every story he told himself in his day-dreams at noon and to every story he was told by his night-dreams at midnight; and it would be only natural if, on its side, the background of roots and mosses and ferns and lichens and ivy and blades of grass projected obscure invisible sensations, which flitted in and out of his human ones.

But what was this? There was something else. Yes, there was something else at this moment, something that was intruding itself between the furtive and fitful feelings of mosses and roots and ferns and his own weightier cogitations.

“What the hell,” he groaned, “is this confounded thing that has now come into my head?” It was certainly in accordance with the multifarious influences that flit about in our life-stream, like shadowy tadpoles beneath thin ice, that it should have been what the Brazen Head itself was thinking — those thoughts, not of a God-created man, but of a man-created machine, which now butted in, like a misty cloud in the shape of the Minotaur, between the vegetation-feelings of that forest recess and the ideas, whatever they were, that were being exchanged between Ghosta and the old man with his back against the tree.

For there is no doubt that the “something” of which John suddenly became aware was some thought from the Brazen Head. And what the chronicler of these things cannot escape calling to mind was the lack of response that the old ex-bailiff had found in John’s sister Lil-Umbra when the latter, her head full of the possible appearance of Raymond de Laon in the armoury, was doing her best to be nice to him. But this lack of response was now wholly compensated for in the old bailiff’s mind by Ghosta’s attitude.

Young John and the old man were however both vaguely conscious that it was some mysterious connection between the Brazen Head and Ghosta that was now giving to the voice of Peleg, as it rumbled hoarsely above their heads, an irritable and dictatorial tone. The giant concluded with these words: “I’ll fetch the Head now, and carry it straight to the postern; for I can see exactly where we are, torch or no torch! Better give the torch back to Master John, Ghosta, and then you all—” and he threw this out, like a handful of crumbs, in the direction of Colin and Clamp, who, conscious of not being altogether indispensable as the drama thickened, had linked themselves together in the last few minutes in a rather childish though very natural way.

Clamp had picked up a moss-grown stick from the ground that had a couple of tiny ferns growing out of the middle of it, and had poked Colin with it to show him this phenomenon, and the flickering torch had at once revealed those small ferns; and Colin had promptly seized the end of this interesting stick, and now neither of this quaint pair would be likely to relax his grasp.

It was clear that, in their uneasiness as to whether they would be allowed to follow the others into the interior of the Fortress, this mossy stick gave them some curious support, as well as uniting them on this particular occasion.

“And then you can all,” Peleg concluded, “follow me to the little door. Isn’t that the thing, Master John?”

John, who had begun to long for his comfortable bed in the little room that had been his own now for a couple of years, agreed at once; and Peleg, without even glancing at Ghosta, who had obediently handed the torch to John, snatched up the latter’s woollen scarf upon which the old man was no longer sitting, and clapping it upon his own head like a turban, rushed over to where the Brazen Head was surveying them all with the stark indifference of a rocky landscape, and seizing it in his two hands heaved it into the air till he held it propt up on the top of his head. The effort required for this was so great that it drew from him a really terrifying sound, a sound such as Samson must have made when, with the central pillars of the Temple of Dagon in his arms, he bowed himself down and brought down with him the whole of that great building.

An outrush of blood from the two arrow-hurts in his shoulders accompanied this sound; and John, who was close to Ghosta, heard a similar sound, bursting unconsciously it would seem, from her; and it certainly was all he could do to restrain in himself a cry of amazement.

But he had the wit to see what the two of them had to do at this important juncture. He began hurriedly helping the ex-bailiff to his feet. “ You take hold of him on your side,” he said to Ghosta, “and I’ll help him on my side!”