He was interrupted in his speech, and the magnate from Cologne was interrupted in his sympathetic listening by the sudden opening of the armoury door and the entrance of none other than the gigantic Mongolian Jew, Peleg. Peleg walked with slow deliberate steps straight to where the two men were seated, and addressed himself to the ex-bailiff.
“Lady Val has sent me, sir,” he said, “to convey you, if you will be good enough to allow me to help you, to my lord’s Little Room. My lady wishes me to say that her first thought was to have the two young masters’ beds moved there for the night, but my lord felt strongly that you would yourself prefer the Little Room to any other and feel more independent there. You will be, my lady wished me to say, quite as comfortable there, perhaps more comfortable than you are here in the armoury.”
The relief on the face of the old man at hearing this news was so evident to Albertus Magnus, that this latter suppressed his instinctive inclination to make a polite apology for being so anxious to spend the night quite alone with the Image of Brass.
“If,” he thought, “I make a fuss about any of this business, I shall be only confusing the issue. What I want is to have this armoury to myself for just one night — to myself along with this man-created man — if that’s what you are!” and he shot at the Brazen Head a challenging and yet a pitying glance before turning his half-scouring, half-cleansing, and altogether benevolent little eyes upon the gigantic Peleg.
“The little room!” cried the old man. “Nothing in this place could please me better! And, Peleg, old friend, I am indeed perfectly ready to go there at once if you will give me your support.”
Without further speech, and with one of Peleg’s powerful arms round his shoulder, the old man rose stiffly to his feet, and laying his left hand with a sublime indifference to this weird entity’s claim to be a living soul, upon the shoulder of the Brazen Head, as if it had been the wooden back of a negligible bench in some public hall-way, he offered his right hand to Albert of Cologne.
“We shall meet, your — your — your Eminence,” he murmured, clearly regarding their visitor as a Papal Legate, or at least as a Cardinal, “and then we shall, I hope, be able to finish our conversation.”
Albert of Cologne looked at him with all that humorous tenderness he liked to think he had learnt from Jesus. “I shan’t forget, you may be sure,” he said, “the exact point we’ve reached in our talk! Peleg here can well imagine,” and he gave Peleg a subtly-charged smile, as if he’d known him for years rather than was now seeing him for the first time, “just what we were discussing! and perhaps you wouldn’t,” he added, “mind telling the Lady Valentia that I feel too exhausted to require any dinner tonight, and shall soon take advantage of the excellent bed I see ready for me. And no doubt I shall dream of all the wonderful people and of all the amazing things I shall encounter tomorrow.”
With these final words he lowered himself in his chair, thrust out his heels with a somnolent leathery sound across the reed-woven rug in front of him, and closed his eyes, while Peleg in dutiful silence led the ex-bailiff from the room.
Into the deep quiet that followed their departure Albertus sank down, as if into the original ocean of silence out of which all sounds first sprang. Sleep was certainly what the man from Cologne needed, and he must have slept till not only the light of that long June afternoon was over, but its evening twilight too; for, when he awoke, the armoury was nearly dark.
As soon as he was on his feet, however, the first thing he looked at, by the light of the small uncovered oil-lamp that stood in front of it, was a tiny image of the Virgin, which had been a gift to the ex-bailiff by his grandmother in his childhood and which was very precious to him.
What, to confess the truth, made it especially precious to him was the fact that his little sister — who was his only youthful companion, for his parents had no other children — had once, in one of her moods, whether a mood of skittishness or of naughtiness, or because she had overheard it in some argument between priests, carved in big letters, clear across the base of the little image, the single word Parthenogenesis.
Moira had been drowned in the river Wey and her body carried out to sea before she was fourteen, and the ex-bailiff’s son, Randolph, had steadily refused, probably because of some prejudice of his wife against the child’s name, which is Greek for Destiny or Fate, to use it for any of his own daughters, of whom he had several. So nowhere upon earth save in her brother’s heart, and in the exquisite trouble she herself had taken to form those fifteen letters, did there exist any memorial of the little carver of that big word.
It certainly was not of those significant syllables, nor of the question as to who had inscribed them upon that small image, that Albertus Magnus of Cologne was thinking as, by the help of the flame at that tiny shrine, he lit the chief light of the armoury and began making his preparations for the night. Once safe in bed, with an excellent pillow under his throbbing skull, and the armoury-light turned low, and a couple of warm blankets over him, he gazed steadily at the Brazen Head.
“If you can manage for me to spend one night entirely alone with the Head,” he had told Raymond de Laon, “I will most certainly come.”
Well! Here he was, alone with It, and there were four or five hours of total darkness in front of him and no apparent danger of any interruption to whatever communion of body, mind, or even spirit he could bring about between this man-created Being and himself.
Albertus had by nature an outward-working mind, and his natural urge to talk, to teach, to write, to read, to direct, to examine, to explore, to plan, to construct, to build, to organise, to reform, to originate, was so powerful that it was extremely difficult — O much worse than difficult! — extremely repulsive and even loathsome to him to indulge in any sort of introspection.
It was pain and grief to him to analyse his own thoughts, feelings, impressions, and reactions. He might have been bolder in this direction, if he had not known by instinct that there were sleeping devils in the intricate corridors of his mind that it would be dangerous to disturb. He was indeed continuously aware of a particular region in his response to life that held a dark, ultimate, indescribable horror for him.
It was in fact so horrible that it was imperative for him to avoid this region of his mind at all costs. It was a region which, if he couldn’t steer his way round it, and, as far as this was humanly possible, forget it, and behave as if it didn’t exist, would eventually by the pressure of its sheer horror disintegrate his whole intelligence.
It is perfectly possible for an energetic and powerfully galvanic will to win renown for its owner, while the deepest part of the personality which that towering will-power has to carry along with it, just as a swiftly driving chariot might have to carry in the belly of its body a writhing and squirming serpent, may be secretly twitching and quivering with all manner of maniacal distastes and repugnances.
“All my life,” thought Albertus Magnus, “I’ve been escaping from myself. What I’ve been always secretly afraid of is neither God nor the Devil, neither man nor beast: it is simply and solely myself!”
He had grown so accustomed to make certain deeply intimate and yet automatic debouchings and deviations from the direct path in his consciousness of life, so as to dodge, and carefully circumnavigate, and craftily avoid, all those places where his most fearful personal mania and most horrified shrinking would be brought into play, that it was a dangerous shock to him to find that the presence of the Brazen Head disturbed this wise habit.