Yes! and in something else within him, beyond both nerves and conscience; for Friar Roger in his own spirit was always aware of the presence of an almighty force behind the whole panorama of experience, behind the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds, behind infinite space and infinite time, behind all possible suns, moons, planets and stars, in fact behind all possible, as well as all existing, universes.
It was his consciousness of this remote and ultimate power that Roger Bacon felt he needed to keep his peace of mind and keep him happy and contented in his work. Thus there was always something, in spite of his admiration for Pierre of Picardy, that frightened him about his friend’s attitude, for it struck him as reducing not only his own life, as he knew it himself, but the lives of all other entities as they knew them themselves, the lives of insects, such as midges and moths, the lives of plants and trees, the lives of worms and serpents, the lives of fish in the sea, birds in the air, the lives of the beasts of forest and field; reducing in fact all these lives to the level of lonely, desperate, lost souls, clinging to each other in a boundless, godless, cavernous nothingness, in fact to what he had heard a travelling Welsh tinker call Diddym, “the ultimate Void”.
To the original mind and autocratic humour of the Lord of the Manor of Roque there was something about this scene under the light of that suspended lantern that seemed monstrously comical as well as strangely weird and startling. What was this man up to now?
Master Peter had clearly and obviously some concentrated purpose; but who could possibly know that he was pressing that lodestone of his, in its absurd sheath of flexible velvet, against his naked organs of generation? His eyes, as he did this, were fixed on the head of the horse Cheiron, who was snorting rather indignantly and gazing rather reproachfully at his master, Spardo.
Spardo himself never moved from his seat on the tree-stump which had become for him a sort of elfin throne from which he could, though without any oracular authority, and without attempting to claim any mundane weight, play the part of a wandering goblin, who happened to be making a grave attempt to be an historian of the primitive antics of the human race.
Nor was it very long before both the eccentric Baron of Roque and the observant owner of Cheiron had something to set down in their “year-book” of manorial history. With his hands pressing more and more strongly, and with ever intenser concentration, his precious lodestone against his privy parts, Peter did really seem at that moment to be a man possessed by a fit of insane devilry. It is likely enough that what made him select Cheiron, rather than Cheiron’s master, for his magnetic experiment was the passing glimpse he may have had, when the darkness was broken by some gleam from the lantern swaying in the wind, of that deformity in the horse’s neck.
But whatever it was that set him off practising his tricks in this direction, the result was sufficiently unexpected. Cheiron suddenly leapt up on his hind-legs and advanced, pawing the air with his front-legs, straight upon Master Peter, who promptly scuttled behind the Lord of Roque.
And this moment really produced, if the truth had been carried over the length and breadth of his manorial domain, one of those situations in which this extraordinary owner of this by no means extraordinary strip of fir-forest had a chance of showing that it was not for nothing that the skull of his grandfather, when by some chance it was exposed to the air long after it was buried, had a twist of dark hair gathered round it, indicating, so an Assyrian astrologer who saw it declared, that its zodiacal tendency belonged to the constellation of the Ram, since there had always been known, from the beginning of history, certain rare persons born under that influence, the roots of whose hair came from a deeper level than their skin.
Instead therefore of being in the least perturbed by the towering belly and menacing hooves hovering above him, the Lord of Roque experienced the sort of exultation that Job declares Behemoth felt when he believed he could drain Jordan to the dregs of all its waters.
Spardo was so astonished at what he now beheld that he rose from his seat on the tree-stump and stood like one confounded. Master Peter whose magnetic experiment was the cause of this classic catastrophe, did what Friar Bacon’s collapse had clearly not made him do. He carefully shifted, in a number of minute jerks, his perilous lodestone. He did this knowing the thing couldn’t be lost, for its velvet container was suspended by a cord from his waist; and he adjusted it now so that while it was still in contact with his bare skin, it was at the base of his stomach and quite out of reach of his organs of generation.
But not a soul in that small lantern-lit group was more astonished than was Cheiron himself when he felt, hurled against his privy parts — which were, and this was no doubt an additional effect of Master Peter’s experiment, unusually excited just then — the formidable skull of the Lord of Roque.
Unable now to bring his legs to the ground, the angry horse found his right hoof hanging helplessly over the man’s left shoulder and his left hoof thrust out at an extremely awkward and even a painful angle over the man’s right shoulder, while he himself, his whole equine shape and deformed neck, was lifted bodily off the ground!
It only lasted a second, this incredible display of human strength, a display that Hercules himself would have witnessed with amazement: but when it was over the Lord of Roque and his deformed antagonist were struggling together on the ground.
And it was then that there occurred the same total collapse of consciousness in the brain of the Lord of the Manor as had occurred some half a dozen hours earlier in the case of Friar Bacon. At one second he was saying to himself: “I am a beast. Man is no more. Your own beasthood learn to adore!” and was beginning to force himself to enjoy the strong hirsute odour of Cheiron’s under-belly, when suddenly, without any warning at all, everything became dark, and he himself became as nonexistent as if he had never been born.
The sharp-eyed dame of the gate-keeper had already left her less alert husband’s side; and with a thick scarf round her head, and a still thicker one round her shoulders, was soon at the side of her unconscious master; and it can be imagined, with an experienced old lady of her sort at the head of affairs, and with the gate-keeper, inspired by her example, obedient to her least hint, how soon it was that the Lord of the Fortress lay stretched out on his own bed with Lady Val bending over him and his three children, along with excited emissaries from every part of the Fortress, hovering round the door.
Both Spardo and Cheiron were comfortably asleep, and also in closer proximity to each other than anyone who had witnessed the recent struggle and its surprising termination would have predicted, before Master Peter of Maricourt had succeeded in persuading the perspicacious lady of the gate-house to allow him a sleeping-place. This indeed, when she found it for him, could not be called under her roof, for it was in the back premises of the Fortress on the opposite side from the entrance, but such as it was, it was so much in the warmest part of the whole building and so surrounded by the sleeping-places of animals, that when Peter of Picardy had settled his great black head on the sack of wool that formed his substantial pillow, he found that the melancholy wailing of the wind across the forest was so comfortably animalized by the noises of the beasts in his immediate vicinity that his thoughts became so agreeable to him that he felt reluctant to fall asleep too quickly.