John Powys - The Brazen Head

“Gorthruk has given us an ivory box containing three or four compartments each one of which contains several differently tasting tablets. Gorthruk says that, in his own village of Tintinhull, the blacksmith has been kept alive by just such curative pills for four and twenty years, after a strain similar to the one suffered by my husband; only his trouble — the blacksmith’s I mean — was caused by a wrestling-match with the bailiff of the Manor of Montacute who was a very heavy man, and thus, when the blacksmith of Tintinhull picked him up in his arms and threw him into the village duck-pond, the village priest, whose name was Humph, and who came from Gloster, had to wade into the pond to get him out; for he hit his head on Gammer Grundy’s bucket, which had lain there, down in the mud, since the days of Thomas a Becket.”

Raymond de Laon had never before heard his betrothed’s mother talk in this free and easy way; but he told himself it must be due to the fact that all women, especially those in responsible positions and those with important households to look after, are invariably anxious to win favour with church dignitaries.

They are also, Raymond’s erratic thoughts ran on, often much more interested than are their hunting and fishing and fighting husbands, in historical and philosophical subjects, in spite of the fact that their opportunities for such studies are so much less. As to the easy homeliness of Lady Val’s talk, “don’t they all go on in that sort of way,” Raymond said to himself, “when they want to captivate us? The only alternative I suppose would be sculleries, store-cupboards, and meat-skewers, with a sagacious allusion, or even a sly glance now and again, towards bed-clothes.”

Whether sage or sly in her welcome, Lady Val soon disposed of her chief guest, and arranged for the Gone Castle contingent to dine at an earlier hour than was usual and at a special table in the dining-hall. She likewise gave her most regal and gracious permission to Raymond, as a reward for his skill as a tutelary ambassador, to take Lil-Umbra for a couple of hours’ ride in the forest.

“You’d better,” she added, as the pair went off, “start, and come back too, by the main entrance. Your father has placed such a powerful guard at Tilton’s shrine that there’s no possible danger from that quarter. But as nurse always used to say, ‘It’s silly to shout till the Devil’s gone out.’”

With a big silver tray arranged conveniently between them upon a stool made of exquisitely slender delicately twisted willow-twigs, upon which stood two glasses and a huge beaker of red wine and a few oaten cakes, the old ex-bailiff of the manor of Roque found a perfect listener to his rambling talk in the great Albert of Cologne.

Accustomed to the part of the chief talker in the presence of less experienced, less volatile, less egocentric and much younger hearers, it was an indescribable relief to Albert the Great to rest and recline in this ancient armoury and listen in peace to this old gentleman’s rambling stories of an up-and-down long life full of the simple power of representative authority and of the simple piety of unquestionable conviction.

There in the background, just as if “It” also was listening to the old man’s talk, stood the Brazen Head, its confused multiple-mooded expression rejecting placidly any dogmatic solution of the entangled problem of existence. It may well be believed that Albertus Magnus didn’t confine himself to listening. Every now and again with the subtle wisdom of a born decipherer of difficult old documents he interpolated at certain turning-points a question by which into the unpremeditated debouchings of the senile narrator there was insinuated a flickering lantern, tied, as it were, round the neck of a darting bird, a lantern that might be compared to some providential firefly giving a celestial clarification to our dark pilgrimage through the mists of Chaos to the City of Cosmos.

But what struck Albertus Magnus most about this loquacious old gentleman was his attitude towards the Brazen Head. There was the Brazen Head, quite close to the ex-bailiff’s side, in fact almost touching the old man’s right shoulder; but its presence didn’t seem to disturb him in the least. Nor was it as if he altogether disregarded it. It was as if he and it had already reached some personal understanding between themselves, by virtue of which there was no longer any necessity for both of them to speak, since, when the ex-bailiff spoke, he spoke for them both.

“The whole trouble in this Fortress,” the ex-bailiff was presently murmuring, “comes from the fact that Lil-Umbra’s brothers are so different from each other that they are always arguing and disputing. This makes it necessary for Lil-Umbra to keep the balance between them, sometimes taking the side of Tilton the elder one, and sometimes the side of John the younger one.”

“But I should have thought,” protested the great teacher from Cologne, “that just for that very reason their sister’s mind would gain enormously and show signs of wonderful development.”

“You see, it’s like this, great Master,” murmured the old man rather querulously. “The elder boy is mad about architecture and about carving, while the younger thinks of nothing but what Friar Bacon has lately written or is likely to write; and the moment the poor girl feels sympathetic towards the artist brother, the other one, the younger one, gets indignant and begins railing against God and the church; and this of course sets the elder one off upon his particular hobby-horse, and they argue with each other just as, we are always being told, you great doctors of divinity dispute together, about essences and qualities and aspects and substances and forms, and how powerful angels are, and how crafty devils are, and whether the world had a beginning and whether it will have an end: and the result of all this is just the very opposite of what you have just now suggested; for the dear girl — and she is, I tell you, my lord, the sweetest and loveliest creature you ever saw — begins to hate the whole subject and to wish she’d been born a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist, or anything rather than a Christian.”

“You will, I hope,” threw in Albert of Cologne eagerly, for he recognized at once that he was on dangerous ground; and he didn’t fail to notice that this peace-loving old gentleman, who wandered a little in his mind, had a deep tenderness for this young maiden who was the betrothed of Raymond de Laon, “you will, I hope, forgive an impertinent and even a discourteous question, but I’d be very thankful if you’d tell me what it was in the relations between this maid of whom you speak and her brother Tilton, the builder and sculptor with his own hands of a shrine to Our Lady, that made it possible for Bonaventura to accuse them of the terrible sin of incest?”

To his great relief this daring, rude, and even outrageous question did not seem to trouble the old ex-bailiff in the very least.

“O that’s easily explained, great Doctor! Searching round in the ardent spirit of a born sculptor for some living model for the figure of Our Lady that he was so anxious to carve for the shrine he was building, it naturally came into his head to make use of the perfect form and heavenly features of his chaste and beautiful sister.

“But when this accurst Bonaventura saw Master Tilton’s Blessed Virgin holding the Holy Babe, he commanded those bandits from Lost Towers to hammer the whole thing to bits! You may well indeed look horrified, O greatest of all Churchly Doctors, but I haven’t sat here since my retirement from office, with the lady Lil-Umbra visiting me daily, and Master Tilton and Master John, one or the other of them, coming in to see me pretty well once a week, without learning something of what goes on; learning, I mean, what historians learn by living after the event , only I’ve been learning it by watching the event closely and yet watching it from a certain distance while it was going on.