John Powys - The Brazen Head

And then he shouted after the departing figure of their friend, who was carrying away the Brazen Head on his own head as if it were a gargoyle made of the fossilized features of some antediluvian giant, belonging to the same race, though of an earlier breed, as the man who was carrying it. “Wait for us at the postern, Peleg! We’ll help you in with it!”

The thoughts and feelings of the old man as he stumbled along over the tree-roots and over the mossy stones, while John’s torch flung the sort of wayward and flickering bursts of illumination that can be both angelic guides and devilish betrayers, grew more and more intense and more and more unrestrained as they drew near the postern-gate.

“I’m glad I came out,” he told himself, “if only to be able to brood over the unbelievable advantage of being allowed to sit by the fire in my own chair in that faithful old armoury until I die. But — Jesus help us! — these young folk seem to think I’m half-dead already! Not one of them asked me whether I wanted to spend my days and nights with the Friar’s Head of Brass! But I’m glad they didn’t. For it would have been terribly hard to explain what I do want! And now that I come to think of it I seriously believe it was some queer understanding between the Head and me that brought me out here tonight! I wonder what time it is? About two o’clock in the morning, I wouldn’t wonder! It has that kind of feeling . O! but this Ghosta-girl had better be careful how near to this Head her home-sickness for Palestine and Jerusalem draws her! I didn’t have that queer presentiment for nothing that night when I sat with Lil-Umbra waiting for her lover Raymond!

“Sitting alone by the same fire, day in, day out, a person picks up a few little things about life here below, things that great giant Jews dream not of! And when I watched that little sister of yours, Master John, and talked of this same Head, I knew all of a sudden, and for a certainty, that this Thing, created not by God but by Friar Roger, needed , to make it complete, to make it its real self, to make it a true oracle of life’s hidden secrets, to be in some way connected with amaiden, who, without officially losing her maidenhead to the Head, would lose something of her inmost self, her secretest feminine self, to it, giving it that unique power of revelation, of illumination, of ultimate vision, that virgins alone possess!

“There’s the Fortress! We shall be there in a minute! Whether spending the rest of my days with a living intelligence created by man and not by God will lengthen or shorten my days, I don’t know and don’t greatly care! But that it will make life far more interesting to me is certain. I’ve always hoped for something like this to happen and now it has happened! Maybe this will prove a moment in the history of our race of an importance second only to the creation of Adam! We shall see!

“Meanwhile what I’ve got to do now is clear. I must make them all take off their shoes, and not utter a word, even in a whisper! And as for this pair of antics, this Colin and Clamp, hanging on to that pathetic old stick as if it were the sceptre of Solomon, I suppose I must find a corner for them to sleep in, in the Manor kitchen. They won’t do any harm, wherever they are; and I certainly can’t have them in my armoury!”

Several months had passed away into the revolving rubbish-heap of time — or, to placate our final resting-place with a grander name, into the palindromic abyss — since an abode was found for the Head in the armoury of the Fortress and under the guardianship of the old ex-bailiff.

“Why did you straddle me in my nakedness round the neck of that thing of brass?”

These startling words were the first that greeted Friar Bacon from the lips of Ghosta, when the old factotum of his prison-chamber brought her to see him.

“Sit down, my daughter,” the Friar replied, laying down his pen and pushing back across the table from beneath his wrists the parchment upon which he was at work.

“There, child, sit down there !” And he pointed to an upright seat on the opposite side of the table, a seat which in appearance was the sort of chair that any young girl in any epoch would have associated with some sort of goblin royalty and elfin ritual. “And you may leave me,” he added, turning to the lay-brother, “for a few minutes now. I shall not be doing any harm to this good maid, but I want to talk to her alone for a while if you don’t mind.”

Brother Tuck gave them a quick glance and a grave nod, and, shuffling to the door, took himself off.

“Well, my dear, I’ll tell you exactly why, so to speak, I behaved to you as the angel, on Annunciation Day, behaved to our Lady.”

“You don’t mean, I hope, Father,” Ghosta interrupted earnestly, “that you did really marry me to the Head, because if you did I must, with all the power I have, beg you to divorce me at once; for the truth is, Father, I want to marry a man of my own faith and my own race, which, as I expect you already know, is the Jewish faith and the Hebrew race. Yes, Father, I belong and always shall belong to the House of Israel; and it is as impossible for me to enter into such a covenant with any Christian as it would be for a sea-gull to swear fidelity to a barn-door fowl!”

“Listen, dear child,” said the Friar, speaking very slowly and in a voice that was as grave as if he were reciting a pardon on a scaffold. “There are moments in all our lives when it is necessary for us to act in a way that makes use of both good and evil. In actual reality — for we need not drag in that treacherous word ‘truth’, which can cover and justify a thousand abominations — in actual living reality we are compelled — and if you ask me ‘compelled by whom or by what?’ I can only say I do not know — but we are compelled by a force, that may be as much outside the Devil as it is outside God, to do something which is clearly contrary to goodness and righteousness and morality and sanctity and holiness and virtue.

“You must understand, my dear child, that I’m not saying we have at these moments to become one with any devilish power that is opposing God or defying all that the prophets have taught us down the ages. We must honestly recognise, however, that without becoming a part of the Evil Power that opposes itself to God, we are at this particular moment acting contrary to what we know to be the good way and the righteous way.

“The point is that we are acting thus in obedience to a force within us, which we feel by an overpowering instinct to be as much outside the Good as it is outside the Evil, and as much outside God as it is outside the Devil. What we feel, my dear child, at these moments — I mean what I, your old Friar, feels — is that I am obeying an absolutely new revelation, a revelation that may change the entire world.”

Ghosta, who had been listening with concentrated attention to all this, now lifted her elbows onto the table and rested her chin upon her two hands.

“Was it a part,” she enquired earnestly, “of your creation of a living soul in a Bronze Head to make me embrace that Image as you did, straddling across its neck in my nakedness? How did you manage to read my secret thoughts and the hidden feelings of my most secret life? For you were right, Father, you were perfectly right. It had been my desire, while remaining a virgin — for I always had an absolute horror of losing my maidenhead — to experience once in my life before I died, the sensation of giving in a clinging embrace the life-drops from my innermost being to Something that I pressed close against me.

“It needn’t have been a man! That was the queer thing about the longing I had. It was that I, Ghosta, might, in my virginity, and without losing my maidenhead, and indeed, if possible, without having any love for this Something — I didn’t care what it was — which I embraced, be the creator of a completely new, new, new, — No! I was never presumptuous enough to think of it as a new world, let me call it a new form of life in the world. I was always — but you know me through and through already, Father, my Friar of Friars — fascinated by the word Parthenogenesis .