Both men went to pick up the bird, and there was something almost like a boyish scuffle between them as to which should reach it first. In the event, attained in two seconds, it was Friar Bacon who got the motionless creature into his hands and smoothed down its feathers and let its head fall limp across his thumb.
“Well! tell me now, Tuck, old friend; has this new girl at the convent got a name that suggests death or anything to do with death?” As he spoke the Friar lifted the bird’s head from the back of his thumb just about an eighth of an inch and then let it sink down again. “Anything to do with Death, old friend, that’s the question. And when you’ve answered I’ll tell you exactly why I put this question to you. But sit down again, and I’ll sit down too. It’s queer, isn’t it, how much more tiring it is to stand than to walk?”
Both the men were silent, looking at each other across the table, the Friar mechanically caressing the dead bird on his lap and the Lay-Brother mechanically running his finger round the edge of the wine-glass that was nearest to him. If only one among Friar Bacon’s unrealized inventions had been present then that had the power, the moment you touched a particular knob, of uttering in a strong firm voice the thoughts of each person in turn, towards whose cranium, whether hairy or bald, the spear-point of its machinery had been directed, what a moment this would have been for a perfect proof as to how the most unorthodox, improper, shameless, outrageous thoughts flit through the heads of upright, honest, and thoroughly good men busy with entirely blameless activities!
For Brother Tuck wondered how soon Prior Bog would detect something amiss if he, Tuck of Abbotsbury, fried his own excrement for the Priory supper; and Roger of Ilchester wondered whether it would be possible for a female yellow-hammer to lay eggs if she were impregnated by a dead mate who had been galvanized into momentary sexual excitement by a thunderstorm.
“Please tell me, Tuck,” enquired Bacon earnestly, “whether any idea, even the very remotest idea of Death entered the mind of the baptizer when he was baptizing this new girl at work in the convent?”
It was then that it happened to Lay-Brother Tuck, that calm, well-balanced, and practical person upon whose competence all Bumset Priory depended, to leap up from that perilous round table and from a mouth as wide open as a water-rat’s hole in a river-bank to utter an astounded “O! O! O! O!” For it was one thing to give poor Prior Bog the only pleasure he got from life in the form of at least one more delicious meal before the sun went down again in the phantom waves of the sea of time, but it was quite a different thing to find that a weird Friar, doing penance among them for heaven alone could say what mysterious sins, could actually know by some magic power what other people had to find out by long years of seeing and hearing and feeling.
“You don’t mean to say that you knew her name was Ghosta before I told you!”
Roger Bacon rose from his seat using self-conscious deliberation, where the other used thoughtless haste.
“Certainly I knew the sort of name she had. I can’t swear I ever actually uttered the word ‘Ghosta’ to myself; but now that you’ve uttered it it seems curiously natural to me, almost as if I’d known it all my life.”
There was now between the two men on their feet almost as significant a silence as there had been when they were seated. Of this the Friar was fully and completely aware. It is indeed quite possible that in the whole of the west country from Poole to Penzance there was then no living man who was more self-conscious than Roger Bacon. He had been born so, and from his earliest boyhood he had deliberately developed this birthright.
It had been from the start his daily habit to tell himself exciting stories; and the essence of these stories, their burden and the secret of their enchantment, was the fact that young Roger was always imagining himself, or better say discovering himself, to be surrounded by a motley multiplicity of objects, belonging to the four levels of existence, namely of human beings, of sub-human beings, of vegetable beings, and of mineral substances.
And as Roger Bacon grew older and began his studies at the Universities of Oxford and Paris, this intense consciousness of the various existences, whether animate, or inanimate, that surrounded him at any given moment, including his own self-consciousness, came to be the supreme interest of his whole life. His temperament and general nervous sensibility were such that he could not help feeling a special and quite personal “rapport” with each one of these various existences: and for good and ill each of them affected him profoundly.
Thus at this moment our morbidly self-conscious Friar was aware of a curious contest in his soul, between a desire to lie down in delicious relaxation and deep peace within the pale light-green eyes of the honest Tuck and a desire to go on gazing at the dead yellowhammer, until, through its body, he was able to pursue its soul till he found it re-incarnated in a tiny snow-white hair-like fungus, wherein it would have to await the mating-moment of a new pair of yellowhammers.
This latter desire of the insatiable scholar having thus been gratified, he was suddenly seized with a pang of remorse for not having already thrown the bird’s little feathered corpse out of the window so that the first-born of the innumerable little worms that were bound to be engendered out of the putrefying corpse beneath those tender feathers might not perish in being thus separated from the elements.
“I’ll run down with it presently,” he thought, “and put it somewhere, where—” And then he remembered what in following in his mind that small corpse’s corruption he’d entirely forgotten — that he was, save for certain appointed hours each day, a prisoner in this chamber.
“Do you know, my friend, from what race or from what country,” Friar Bacon now enquired of Tuck, “this Ghosta-girl comes?”
It was always a great comfort to brother Tuck to be asked any direct and simple question by the Priory’s illustrious captive and he brightened up enormously at this.
“Yes, indeed I do,” he hurriedly replied. “Ghosta’s a Jewess from Mesopotamia or Dalmatia or somewhere not very far from the Red Sea; in fact I daresay quite near to the River Jordan.”
He spoke with profound satisfaction. And indeed it was wonderful to him that he, Brother Tuck, chief cook to Prior Bog of Bumset, could teach their learned captive something of which he was entirely ignorant.
Roger Bacon let his massive head sink heavily down, letting it fall in front of him till his chin seemed to rest upon the centre of his chest, midway between his breast-bones. While he did this, he closed his eyes, and fell into a momentary trance of deep thinking. But no wrinkle, no frown, no furrow, appeared on the broad expanse of his forehead, nor were his arched eyebrows drawn together.
Tuck watched him with absorbed reverence; for the cook felt exactly as he felt sometimes when a thin film of exquisitely delicate yellow-brown, which faintly resembled pure gold, yet wasn’t really like pure gold, began to appear on the surface of what he was cooking.
Then Roger raised his head with a jerk, while Tuck noticed, and not for the first time either, that when the Friar was excited by some daring or original idea, it was not so much that his eyes shone as that an intense inner flame, like a magic candle burning in his very midriff, suddenly revealed itself through his eyes.
“Listen, my friend,” Roger Bacon exclaimed, bending forward a little, and while with the exterior portion of his eyes he stared through the body of his interlocutor, and, as it seemed, through the wall of his cell, and even across the swaying tops of the forest-trees, he was unable to stop the gleaming flame of his new idea from magnetizing the amazed Tuck.