John Powys - The Brazen Head

“It is a long word, and I have been told it is a Greek word, and that its meaning is the giving birth to a new life by a girl without losing her maidenhead or forfeiting anything of her natural virginity. So that when you hoisted me a-straddle that day round the neck of the Head of Brass, with my nakedness pressing against its brazen skin, I had an ecstasy. I said to myself: ‘What is happening to me now is the very thing I have always longed for! I am not losing my maidenhead, and yet I am drawing from the inmost depths of myself a dew-drop of living creation.’”

A look of indescribable relief passed over the Friar’s troubled face, and he leaned forward across the table and touched with the tips of his long fingers the head which the girl was supporting on her arms as she leant forward.

“The Lord bless thee and keep thee!” he said gravely, “and lift up the light of his countenance upon thee and give thee peace!” And then he added, withdrawing his right hand from his guest’s forehead and his left hand from his own manuscript, and tilting his chair a little to the rear on its back legs, “I swear I don’t know, my dear daughter, any living woman I could talk to as freely as I am now talking to you. I certainly couldn’t do so to any of the ladies who rule the Manors and Castles round here! Have you, my dear child, realized why it is that I go on so steadily refusing all invitations to leave this prison-chamber and go where I’d have more freedom of movement?”

Ghosta smiled a quite whimsical smile. “Yes indeed, Father, I can answer that! This old Prior who is master here, as I know well from my life in the Convent, where the nuns always consider him and his ideas and his policy above any line they are ordered to follow by the lady who immediately rules us, has only one object in life — namely, to enjoy himself as much as he possibly can in the narrow circle into the centre of which fate has dropt him.

“What he has to consider are the hours for meals, for strolling in the grounds, for listening to the anthems and chants from his choir-pew in the chapel, for studying the particular Latin text, whether from the Priory library or from his own private shelves, which carries in its train the largest number of old memories of his far-off youth. Now when we consider this matter quite clearly and honestly, Friar, my revered Father, we find nothing less than the surprising fact that this devotion to his own personal pleasure and interest for the whole of the day, and for whatever portion of the night is at the disposal of his personal will — for we can hardly include the hours when the worthy man is asleep, for our dreams, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me there, Father, are not under the control of our will — is identical with what thinking people like ourselves are absorbed in.

“Whereas these rulers of great manorial castles, with their Ladies and their Bailiffs, and these royal rulers of great lands with their Treasurers and Chancellors and Bishops and Captains and Princes, are occupied day and night with meddling in other people’s affairs, with invading other people’s territories, with taking away other people’s property, with imprisoning and murdering other people’s subjects and citizens. Haven’t I been speaking truly, Father, in what I’ve just said?”

Ghosta had indeed been uttering these unpopular and unorthodox feelings in a voice not only a good deal louder than the one she generally used, but a great deal more heavily charged with emotion.

Friar Bacon brought his chair back to the table with a jerk and stretched out his right arm clear across his manuscript, upon which from the small square aperture in the roof the sun was at that moment throwing down a long straight ray, a ray more crowded with sun-motes than Ghosta, had she been in a mood to observe such things, would have had to confess she had ever seen in a sun-ray before.

In spite of the fact that they were looking straight into each other’s eyes, the Friar’s gesture was so unexpected that for a second she disregarded it. Then she met it with her own right hand; and, in the warm pressure that followed, the heart-felt alliance between them was sworn and sealed.

The Friar’s hand rested once more on the edge of his manuscript, and hers once more clasped its fellow and propped her chin while her elbows remained on the dark, smooth-polished wood of that round table. And now both the Friar and Ghosta smiled at each other and turned their eyes away. This they both did naturally and instinctively; but having done so, the quick and lively perception they each possessed was severally attracted by the quivering and elongated sun-ray above their heads and its myriads of tiny little dancing specks.

“Isn’t it queer to think,” commented Ghosta, “how many historical characters such as we read about in the scriptures, and such as they lecture about in the universities, like Moses and Joshua and like Plato and Socrates and Julius Caesar and Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, must have noticed in their colleges and palaces and temples, and especially at crucial moments in their lives, these millions of dancing atoms! What did Socrates feel when these tiny atoms came dancing into his cell while he was waiting for the executioner with the Hemlock?”

“A question indeed, my dear!” echoed the Friar. “And I’d mighty well like to hear how Plato, who was so confoundedly clever at reaching that great teacher’s secret thoughts, and cleverer still at giving them the particular twist that would make them fit into his own ideal system, would describe how the great self-doomed corrupter of youth would have argued with such an one, if some God had endowed one of those motes up there with the power of speech and started it off on a metaphysical protest against the claim of the human race to be the only judge amid the atomic children of the Cosmos!”

“O Father, my dear Father!” cried Ghosta in huge delight. “ Do go on imagining what one of those tiny dots of matter would say to Socrates if it did question him!”

“Well! for one thing, my dear child,” rejoined the Friar, and then he stopped abruptly.

Ghosta, who was turning from him to that descending sun-fall of dancing motes, and then back again to him, had a look of reverence on her face as if he’d really been the great magician that most of his enemies and a few of his friends considered him, and as if he might, at any moment, without moving a hand or a foot, give orders to that sun-stream to alter its course, and as if the sun-ray might obey him, and after making a disconcerting circle round their chamber, might hasten to the door, and vanish down the tower-stairs.

But he went on quite calmly. “Don’t you suppose, my dear, that this whole business of being one of the lucky millions of dust-specks, out of the trillions and quadrillions of less lucky ones, must be so exciting to every one of those little objects that the whole of its being would be so absorbed in what is happening to it that it wouldn’t have a particle of power left to ask any question of anybody. Yes, and I would say — and wouldn’t you, my dear girl, say the same? — that if it had any choice left to it, it would feel it was wiser to lavish all its power of response on that lucky moment than to ponder on suitable philosophical questions to put to—”

At this point they were interrupted by shouts and cries outside, by a clatter of feet on the stairs, and by the flinging open of the door. It was young John who now rushed in, followed by Colin and Clamp, and three or four of the Fortress’s most active retainers. John was carrying a broken piece of statuary pressed against his chest; and this he hurriedly flung down on the Friar’s bed in the corner, after a quick nervous glance at the despoiled alcove hard-by where once stood the Brazen Head.