“Well, my dear, I’ll tell you exactly why, so to speak, I behaved to you as the angel, on Annunciation Day, behaved to our Lady.”
“You don’t mean, I hope, Father,” Ghosta interrupted earnestly, “that you did really marry me to the Head, because if you did I must, with all the power I have, beg you to divorce me at once; for the truth is, Father, I want to marry a man of my own faith and my own race, which, as I expect you already know, is the Jewish faith and the Hebrew race. Yes, Father, I belong and always shall belong to the House of Israel; and it is as impossible for me to enter into such a covenant with any Christian as it would be for a sea-gull to swear fidelity to a barn-door fowl!”
“Listen, dear child,” said the Friar, speaking very slowly and in a voice that was as grave as if he were reciting a pardon on a scaffold. “There are moments in all our lives when it is necessary for us to act in a way that makes use of both good and evil. In actual reality — for we need not drag in that treacherous word ‘truth’, which can cover and justify a thousand abominations — in actual living reality we are compelled — and if you ask me ‘compelled by whom or by what?’ I can only say I do not know — but we are compelled by a force, that may be as much outside the Devil as it is outside God, to do something which is clearly contrary to goodness and righteousness and morality and sanctity and holiness and virtue.
“You must understand, my dear child, that I’m not saying we have at these moments to become one with any devilish power that is opposing God or defying all that the prophets have taught us down the ages. We must honestly recognise, however, that without becoming a part of the Evil Power that opposes itself to God, we are at this particular moment acting contrary to what we know to be the good way and the righteous way.
“The point is that we are acting thus in obedience to a force within us, which we feel by an overpowering instinct to be as much outside the Good as it is outside the Evil, and as much outside God as it is outside the Devil. What we feel, my dear child, at these moments — I mean what I, your old Friar, feels — is that I am obeying an absolutely new revelation, a revelation that may change the entire world.”
Ghosta, who had been listening with concentrated attention to all this, now lifted her elbows onto the table and rested her chin upon her two hands.
“Was it a part,” she enquired earnestly, “of your creation of a living soul in a Bronze Head to make me embrace that Image as you did, straddling across its neck in my nakedness? How did you manage to read my secret thoughts and the hidden feelings of my most secret life? For you were right, Father, you were perfectly right. It had been my desire, while remaining a virgin — for I always had an absolute horror of losing my maidenhead — to experience once in my life before I died, the sensation of giving in a clinging embrace the life-drops from my innermost being to Something that I pressed close against me.
“It needn’t have been a man! That was the queer thing about the longing I had. It was that I, Ghosta, might, in my virginity, and without losing my maidenhead, and indeed, if possible, without having any love for this Something — I didn’t care what it was — which I embraced, be the creator of a completely new, new, new, — No! I was never presumptuous enough to think of it as a new world, let me call it a new form of life in the world. I was always — but you know me through and through already, Father, my Friar of Friars — fascinated by the word Parthenogenesis.
“It is a long word, and I have been told it is a Greek word, and that its meaning is the giving birth to a new life by a girl without losing her maidenhead or forfeiting anything of her natural virginity. So that when you hoisted me a-straddle that day round the neck of the Head of Brass, with my nakedness pressing against its brazen skin, I had an ecstasy. I said to myself: ‘What is happening to me now is the very thing I have always longed for! I am not losing my maidenhead, and yet I am drawing from the inmost depths of myself a dew-drop of living creation.’”
A look of indescribable relief passed over the Friar’s troubled face, and he leaned forward across the table and touched with the tips of his long fingers the head which the girl was supporting on her arms as she leant forward.
“The Lord bless thee and keep thee!” he said gravely, “and lift up the light of his countenance upon thee and give thee peace!” And then he added, withdrawing his right hand from his guest’s forehead and his left hand from his own manuscript, and tilting his chair a little to the rear on its back legs, “I swear I don’t know, my dear daughter, any living woman I could talk to as freely as I am now talking to you. I certainly couldn’t do so to any of the ladies who rule the Manors and Castles round here! Have you, my dear child, realized why it is that I go on so steadily refusing all invitations to leave this prison-chamber and go where I’d have more freedom of movement?”
Ghosta smiled a quite whimsical smile. “Yes indeed, Father, I can answer that! This old Prior who is master here, as I know well from my life in the Convent, where the nuns always consider him and his ideas and his policy above any line they are ordered to follow by the lady who immediately rules us, has only one object in life — namely, to enjoy himself as much as he possibly can in the narrow circle into the centre of which fate has dropt him.
“What he has to consider are the hours for meals, for strolling in the grounds, for listening to the anthems and chants from his choir-pew in the chapel, for studying the particular Latin text, whether from the Priory library or from his own private shelves, which carries in its train the largest number of old memories of his far-off youth. Now when we consider this matter quite clearly and honestly, Friar, my revered Father, we find nothing less than the surprising fact that this devotion to his own personal pleasure and interest for the whole of the day, and for whatever portion of the night is at the disposal of his personal will — for we can hardly include the hours when the worthy man is asleep, for our dreams, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me there, Father, are not under the control of our will — is identical with what thinking people like ourselves are absorbed in.
“Whereas these rulers of great manorial castles, with their Ladies and their Bailiffs, and these royal rulers of great lands with their Treasurers and Chancellors and Bishops and Captains and Princes, are occupied day and night with meddling in other people’s affairs, with invading other people’s territories, with taking away other people’s property, with imprisoning and murdering other people’s subjects and citizens. Haven’t I been speaking truly, Father, in what I’ve just said?”
Ghosta had indeed been uttering these unpopular and unorthodox feelings in a voice not only a good deal louder than the one she generally used, but a great deal more heavily charged with emotion.
Friar Bacon brought his chair back to the table with a jerk and stretched out his right arm clear across his manuscript, upon which from the small square aperture in the roof the sun was at that moment throwing down a long straight ray, a ray more crowded with sun-motes than Ghosta, had she been in a mood to observe such things, would have had to confess she had ever seen in a sun-ray before.
In spite of the fact that they were looking straight into each other’s eyes, the Friar’s gesture was so unexpected that for a second she disregarded it. Then she met it with her own right hand; and, in the warm pressure that followed, the heart-felt alliance between them was sworn and sealed.
The Friar’s hand rested once more on the edge of his manuscript, and hers once more clasped its fellow and propped her chin while her elbows remained on the dark, smooth-polished wood of that round table. And now both the Friar and Ghosta smiled at each other and turned their eyes away. This they both did naturally and instinctively; but having done so, the quick and lively perception they each possessed was severally attracted by the quivering and elongated sun-ray above their heads and its myriads of tiny little dancing specks.