The Friar had a delicate face in the precise sense in which all the way down the centuries the word “sensitive” has been used. Anyone could see at one glance that the man was abnormally porous to impressions. And it was indeed clear at this moment that the impressions which reached him from the revelations that this Durnovarian retainer of his was so calmly and relentlessly disclosing were of the most crucial intensity; for little complicated patterns of criss-cross interlinings began to appear on his forehead and under his eyes that resembled frost-marks on an exposed window.
It was only when Miles, having entirely finished what it was his business to report, had permitted his Roman features to assume that patient expectant look of an officer anxious to catch from the lips of his general every faintest nuance of the orders issued, that the Friar realized that their relative positions had been reversed, and that it was himself who was now standing in front of Miles, watching and pondering, and asking, not this unqualified fellow-man, but the inscrutable features of Fate itself, what on earth had to be done now.
What he said, when it came, was pathetic enough in its simplicity. “What do you advise me to do, Miles?”
That this typical Centurion had, from old experience of the master he loved so passionately, expected just exactly this supplication, this appeal to a knowledge of life as it went along such as had nothing to do with learning, was proved by the military decisiveness of his answer.
“I think,” he replied firmly, putting down his glass, and speaking in his calmest and most Roman tone, “that you’d better send me into the kitchen to emphasize this man’s importance, and yet to make it plain that it would be more considerate to Prior Bog to spare him any immediate invasion; at any rate to let us all have dinner in peace before we do anything and before he has to do anything.”
A sigh of relief so deep that it seemed to come from the soles of his sandals shook Friar Bacon from head to foot.
“But you’ll have to bring him up here, I suppose?”
And when Miles nodded to this his master accepted it as if it were the word of destiny, escape from which would be hopeless.
“Very well,” he conceded. “Bring him up; and explain to him that you’ll come up yourself a little later with his meal. We don’t want anyone else up here, do we?” This last sentence the Friar added in what was almost an appealing tone. And Miles, already at the door, answered with a significant shake of his head.
The moments that followed were among the most painful in Roger Bacon’s life. From his habitual loneliness as a scientific prisoner of religion, he had come to be a man of two different worlds; and since each of these worlds required, if he was to deal with it adequately, all the creative power as well as all the destructive power he possessed in his own personality, it was no easy thing to deal with both these worlds at the same time.
It was natural to him to concentrate his attention upon his private world of lonely thought and lonely experiment, and to feel a peculiar kind of nervous suffering whenever it was necessary for him to face the shocks and clashes and misunderstandings of real life.
“And now,” he told himself, “I have to meet the one man in all the world with whom I find it hardest to deal.”
Yes! There he was! And since the door had been deliberately left open by the departing Miles, it was inevitable that after a series of rather dragging footsteps — to which the Friar, as he stood in the centre of the room, listened with something like a suspension of breath — the man who entered made no pretence of knocking.
He was of low stature and of a thin weak body; but the extraordinary thing about him was his head. The head of Master Peter Peregrinus of Picardy was simply enormous. It made his body and legs look like those of a dwarf, though in reality they weren’t quite as small as that. The skin of his face was so deadly white that, if you had come upon him asleep, you would have certainly assumed that he was a corpse. His hair was straight, not curly, and of a glossy jet-black, with each individual hair as thick as that of a horse, so that their combined weight, massed together on the top of his skull, give his whole figure at a distance the effect of a wooden post on an exposed sea-bank, with either a thick growth of dusky seaweed covering the top of it, or a big black feathery bird perched upon it.
The chief peculiarity of Master Peter’s mouth was its absence of lips. It was simply a slit in smooth white marbly stone. And it seemed as if in dispensing with lips it had also decided to dispense with teeth. What did appear, and that not unfrequently, was Master Peter’s tongue. This object, abnormally long, and unusually pointed, was always shooting out from that slit in its marbly home, and every time it with-drew it gave the impression of having licked up some form of life which it would shortly be digesting.
But what the most ramificating, debouching, circumnavigating, deviating, perambulating chronicler would have had to be leading up to all this while, like a slippery serpent approaching something as hard to catch off-guard as itself, are, as the simplest reader has long ago guessed, Master Peter’s eyes. These were so large that when the man was excited, as he always was when not stunned by a blow or sunk into an impenetrable gulf of sleep, they conveyed the impression of being a pair of outlets for some interior volcano that if it were blocked up or barred down, would burst the cranium that contained it into a million smithereens.
It was doubtless to evade, for at least a couple of beats of the pulse of time, a glance into this explosive crater that Roger Bacon, uttering, as casually as he could, the exclamation, “Well! Well! Well!” made a deliberately slow circuit round his visitor from Picardy, and firmly, calmly, magisterially, and yet very softly, closed the door.
On returning from this breathing-space it can be believed he felt no surprise when he found Master Peter already seated at the table, not only tapping with the narrow finger-nail of his longest finger the word “vibrationem” half-way down the parchment page in front of him, but even steering a little horn-cup, with red wine-stains inside it, up and down among the oddly-patterned wood-marks of the table’s edge.
Master Peter’s demonic spirit did indeed so completely dominate the situation that the nervous Friar found himself seated at his own table in the visitor’s seat with the visitor in the host’s seat, found himself staring blindly into those two black holes, each of them a swirling Charybdisian vortex, and listening to the man’s words without asking him a single question or contradicting a single statement he made.
At last the man broke into his own tricky rigmarole by asking a plain blunt question. “Can you guess what I’m doing now?”
“Doing?” echoed Bacon in puzzled bewilderment.
“Yes, yes! Doing! to earn my bread, of course! Doing what you yourself were forced to do when your family was ruined by those scurvy De Montforts and their bloody Barons! You put on a Friar’s grey rags: and I put on sword and shield. And I’m still a man of war, Roger old friend. Get that into your pullulating pipkin! In Picardy, let me tell you, when once you’ve served your Lord in a vital campaign and given your bowels more action than they’re used to, by living on hedges and in ditches, you’ll soon find that the lords and prelates, who gain by the blood you lose and the sweat you’re drained of and the dung you evacuate, will see to it — it’s as much their interest, as it’s the interest of the dear God Himself, to have worshippers — that you don’t die in an almshouse but live to sit at street-corners, selling burnt almonds, singing ballads, and praising the king.”