John Powys - The Brazen Head

She could hear her mother’s voice indignantly intervening as the two young men pushed their way through the astonished guests with the evident intention of going out through the door by which she and Peleg had come in.

“I know exactly what’s happened,” she told herself. “Tilton’s had his breakfast early, in the kitchen, as he often does, and he’s going out to work at his Lady Chapel.” And then, as she noticed that both brothers had caught sight of her, “I pray they’re not going to drag me into their dispute! If they try to I shall just say that we’d better leave theology to people who’re too old for anything else!”

But though both her brothers, and her mother too, had seen her, as she stood there by Peleg’s side, it was clearly not easy for them to disentangle themselves from the press of people. Lil-Umbra moved a little closer to her gigantic companion. On this particular morning, when she had seen the advancing Sun and the receding Moon exchanging some mysterious zodiacal password as they separated to pursue their different paths through space and time, it seemed to her as if some special wave of fate had swept this giant, with his Jewish father and his Tartar mother, into her life as a colossal raft, to which, if she could only cling tightly enough, all would end well.

A sharp-cutting phrase used by her brother John, as he and Tilton shook off the interference of their mother, reached her now like a high-pitched fog-bell in a storm-rocked harbour-mouth; but more agitating to her than John’s wild talk was a startling vision she suddenly had of Nurse Rampant hovering behind Lady Val. Her reply to this presence in the background was to twist her ringers desperately and tightly round a fold in the Tartar’s cloak; and the hard little knot made by this bird-like clutch upon the pliant silk of the man’s mantle became, as Lil-Umbra kept striking her other clenched hand upon it, a sort of musical instrument of inspired resistance to constituted authority.

Nor did this quaint combination of gigantic passivity with girlish revolt prove unsuccessful; for Nurse Rampant, who knew both the character of the mother and the character of the daughter better than anyone else in the world, saw so clearly the way things were drifting that she decided to leave Lady Valentia to deal with her three children and their unsocial behaviour as best she could, and turning her back upon them all hurried off to her own quarters.

“If I’m to dress the child,” she said to herself, “to please this crowd, they’ll have to send her up to me. I’m not going to wait any longer in this crazy hurly-burly!”

Things were indeed getting out of control. Both her brothers were now appealing to Lil-Umbra. Tilton was already finishing what was evidently a sentence he had begun before she had begun to listen to him. “Our learned rulers,” Tilton was saying, “are surely appointed by the Church, John, to direct our campaign against Satan, just as much as our secular captains are appointed by the State to organize our campaign against Saracens and Arabians and Turks and all other enemies.”

“But what I say,” broke in the shrill, high-pitched, rather rasping voice of John, “is that when we come to philosophy, and science, and mechanical invention, we touch a totally different aspect of life from that with which religion is concerned. If you take philosophy for instance,” and here John’s voice rose to such a penetrating pitch that all sorts of resplendently dressed ladies looked significantly at each other and drew nearer to listen, thinking perhaps that here was one of those dangerous heretics that the great Saint who accompanied them was on his way to suppress, “for instance, in regard to the difference between Mind and Matter, what, I ask you,” cried John, beginning to gesticulate like a practised teacher of philosophy, “are we to decide about the Aristotelian view of the Higher Reality compared with Plato’s system of Ideas? Or what are we to think about the nature of these immaculate ‘Ideas’? Are they perhaps to be considered as Godlike Entities in Themselves, or merely as subjective symbols of—”

“Stop this nonsense, John!” The interruption came from Lady Val. It may easily be believed that Lady Val’s indignant outcry had an instantaneous effect upon the already excited, jostling crowd that surrounded them. Everyone heard her words and everyone turned round to look at her; and those who were already absorbed in watching Tilton and John turned from them to their little sister, as if they felt sure that the only female among these precocious youngsters would have some opinion on “the Ideas of Plato” different from any that had ever been promulgated to a puzzled world.

The young girl began to feel as if from every little group of people round them there emanated a violent explosion of human emotion expressed in terms of intensely coloured and passionately gleaming inanimate objects. She had heard that the great “General” of the Franciscan order of preaching Friars — this Bonaventura they were all talking about — was furiously fond of preaching to vast crowds; and she seemed to see him now, as she clung to Peleg’s cloak in a sort of exhausted trance, as a great wavering pillar of light broken up into glittering facets in all manner of metallic mirrors across which were moving a wild array of gesticulating reflections.

On every side she felt aware of glimpses of blue and crimson ribbons, hastily caught flashes of waving feathers, shoulders scintillating with the polished links of special chain-armour that the wearers had been reluctant to remove, jewelled clasps at the folds of carefully adjusted robes, and silver-bordered gleaming knots of satin and silk fabrics holding together the slippery waftures of waving mantles, while here and there she actually noticed, among the ornaments worn by some of the foreign ladies who had appeared, convoluted sea-shells most curiously and fantastically tinctured with weird and unearthly colours totally alien to the sea-shore from which they had been gathered.

John neither hung his head nor answered back under Lady Val’s words. He just clutched his elder brother Tilton by the belt and went on sermonizing him in a murmur too low for their mother to hear. Lil-Umbra glanced up quickly at the countenance of her tall friend Peleg; and she saw that in spite of his height the Mongolian could follow John’s words and even approved of them.

Meanwhile she noticed that Lady Val had been suddenly captured by one of the grandest of the Bonaventurian female intruders, who wore a travelling-robe of black velvet over-scrawled by amazing hieroglyphics in purple and white of the most fantastic monsters to ward off all danger of bad luck; and by scrutinising this robe while its wearer’s volubility absorbed her mother’s attention, she derived a certain curious satisfaction which proved to herself though her brother would not have believed it that she had a real taste of her own for beautiful shapes and rare colours and artful designs.

John was now giving Tilton a long and extremely complicated discourse on the importance of never allowing his pious opinions about unusual yet perfectly natural events, such as falling stars, whirlpools, cloud-bursts, earthquakes, tidal waves, and the like, to interfere with his daily observation of the ways and characteristics of the persons with whom he had to live, or to let these same theological opinions terrify him with apprehensions about the future of the world.

“Where Science and Philosophy are concerned,” John was now assuring his brother, “it is as bad for the authorities to interfere as it is for the brutal ignorance of the common herd! What I hold is—”

“How John does love to say ‘I hold’,’ ‘thought his little sister, “but I expect he’s right or Peleg wouldn’t look so pleased and mother wouldn’t look as if she didn’t even notice the exquisitely designed robe that lady’s got on!”