Although the accident to the Brazen Head had set John weeping like a child it now became necessary for him to take the two horses down the hill, where he tied them, with the help of Lay-Brother Tuck, to Friar Bacon’s oak-tree.
It was a much less agitating meeting than he expected that young John had then with his adored master. The Friar treated him, he noticed, with deep pride and satisfaction, rather as a responsible fully grown-up man and as an equal, than as a pupil or disciple.
“You and I mustn’t let ourselves,” the Friar told him quietly, “get too agitated, whatever they do to our Brazen Head. We know he is, poor old dear, only about a fiftieth part of a real person. We’ve given him the power of calculation along certain lines; and I hope, though I am not quite sure about that, that in a great crisis he might even speak. But I am afraid the poor dear is still devoid of real life, for so far we haven’t learnt the art of creating life, though we may learn it before we’ve done.
“But we must remember that all living creatures, even worms and insects and sea-shells, have a consciousness of being themselves and only themselves, and have the power of saying to themselves like Jehovah, I am that I am. I wish I could believe that our poor old Brazen Head, whom an angry woman just now threw to the ground, has the power of saying to itself: ‘I am the Brazen Head, made by Roger Bacon. I am as much of a real conscious self as that daddy-long-legs now resting on my shoulder!’”
Young John couldn’t even smile at this, for the occasion was too serious. Pressing his knuckles against his own cheek to prevent the flush he felt mounting up under his skin, he boldly asked him a very delicate and crucial question.
“I needn’t tell you, Father,” he said, “how you have always taken the place for me since I was a boy of all other human loves and devotions. When I think of embracing anyone or of being embraced and of the closest intimacies”—at this point, as he felt his cheeks begin to burn, he thought with relief that, in the burning sun-ray that poured between those branches, nothing of what he experienced beneath his skin could possibly be observed—“I seem never able to think of anybody but of you, my beloved master. Now that Tilton, my elder brother, has found a mate, it’s not, I hope, my duty to marry anybody, or. to have children by anybody. Nor, as long as I feel no special call to join a religious order, is it, I hope, my duty to become a monk or a friar? What I want to do, master most dear, is to serve you and help you, until I die. When you let me take that ‘Opus’ of yours abroad and place it where I knew it would reach the Holy Father, I felt happier than I’d ever been in my life before. You don’t think, master, do you, that I’m shirking my duty by refusing to marry and have children?”
Friar Bacon only revealed by a very faint trembling in his voice how deeply he was affected by his pupil’s words. What he said was emphatic and definite.
“As long as we are considerate to other people,” he said, “and as kind and sympathetic towards them as our circumstances permit, we have all got to live to ourselves, for ourselves, in ourselves and by ourselves. This is how, as Aristotle teaches, matter produces us out of itself, as a product to satisfy its deep ‘privation’, or its desperate yearning and craving to possess what it feels could proceed from it, but what, so far in its long history, has not proceeded from it!
“You, my son, have so far dedicated your whole life to learning. And as long as you feel thus impelled, I think you should so continue. But on the other hand if by fate or chance you met a girl you loved, and who loved you, I would say you had better marry and use your education to help this old world of ours out of its ignorance in some practical and active way.
“As long as I am alive I shall cling to your help and hold fast to your love as the most precious help and the most sacred love that life has allowed me to know. And when death divides us, remember this. The fruits of a learning that has been harder than slavery to acquire will be sweeter than the roses of Sharon to enjoy.”
Ghosta had sunk down beside the Brazen Head the moment it was upon the ground, and she was still pressing the palms of her hands against its neck and against its shoulders and upon its implacably oracular chin. She wasn’t weeping as John had wept, but she was evidently affected by some strong interior emotion.
And it would have been clear to anyone present at this unusual scene, whose interest had been aroused by these two immigrants from Palestine, that the gigantic Peleg, who was standing over her, was not a little disturbed by this emotion of hers.
“Have mercy upon me Almighty Jehovah, Lord God of Israel, Lord God of Sarah and Leah, of Rachel and Rebecca!” this proud, reserved, and most beautiful daughter of Israel prayed. And as she prayed, she reminded herself that in a certain sense she had quite deliberately mingled her virginal life in a weird erotic ecstasy with the sub-human, sub-animal, sub-vegetable life of this Brazen Head beside her.
“Is there,” she allowed herself to whisper to the thing, “is there any way I can get rid of this mad terror I have of the passing of time?”
But Ghosta and Peleg weren’t the only pair of lovers brought to that place by the magnetism of “Little Pretty.”
“What is it my angel?” asked Raymond de Laon of Lil-Umbra, as in their new relation they descended the slope towards their horses. “Are you hurt? Are you afraid? Have you seen something? Have you thought of something?”
For the first time since they first met Raymond noticed that Lil-Umbra had difficulty in replying. But with an effort she spoke clearly and distinctly.
“Something terrible is going to happen! I feel it all through me. But not to us, Raymond; no, not to you or to me. But stop, Raymond. Turn and look at those closed doors!”
He gazed at her in silence, and they both swung round, her eyes wide and terrified, staring at the entrance to the Castle, but his still fixed on her face. But as so often happens in a human crisis, they were suddenly jerked out of their tension by a voice at Raymond’s side; and there, close at his elbow, was none other than Lay-Brother Tuck!
“He’s gone to sleep, my lord of Laon! He’s gone to sleep, my lady of Leon! And I thought perhaps you’d take him back to the Priory on one of your horses and perhaps take me on the other! If you will agree to celebrate your union by this great charity before going to — to wherever you are going for your wedding-night — to the Fortress I expect — I can promise you not only my own special prayers, but the special prayers of the whole Priory of Bumset!
“The most lucky first night,” Brother Tuck went on, “that a bride and bridegroom can possibly have for their first bed together is a great and sweet charity, such as it would be to both me and the Friar if you found it in you to do for us this gallant and beautiful deed!”
Lay-Brother Tuck now began to bob and babble and bubble and burble round them so buoyantly that the tender clasp with which Lil-Umbra was holding Raymond’s hand became first an indignant pressure and then an angry clutch.
“Bridegroom with Bride you be!” he went on. “And I be a’begging of ‘ee to let me’s wone baby-self and Friar’s man-mighty self sit astride of your ‘osses while you makes ‘em gallop. ‘Gallopy up and gallopy to it! Gie her a sup and she’ll let ‘un do it!’ Don’t ‘ee understand, O most elegant lord of far-away Leon, that if the blessed Friar be behind she, and me wone self be behind thee, it won’t take long to be at Priory door; and a holy charity you’ll have performed.”