Capricorn and Cancer

by Geoffrey Household

  The boys—well, of course the quest itself had singled them out. It was impossible that any boy capable of starting and finishing such an adventure should not have the face of a dreamer. They looked like young Galahads, like any sentimental Victorian engraving of ardent youth. The oddness of some of the faces—to his Gentile eye—simply didn’t count. If Joseph had been one of those boys, his whole warm character was still in keeping. The blade of youth, now sharpened down to a more serviceable flexibility, was set for ever into his lean, sensitive features and the eagerness of his mind.

  ‘My name then was Joseph Wald. Horsha is the Hebrew translation.’

  ‘Wald, of course! A fiery little scamp you were!’

  ‘Not rude, I hope?’

  ‘None of you was ever rude. You had no need to be. You knew you were irresistible.’

  ‘That was really the impression we gave?’ Aviva Ben Aron asked. ‘I’m glad I didn’t spoil it. I was just fifteen—and an imaginative little girl.’

  ‘You weren’t afraid?’ Horsha asked incredulously.

  ‘Wasn’t I? To be put ashore in Port Said with no protection but you visionary male children—’

  Perhaps those two round-faced Midland sentries at the foot of the brow had been justified after all, Mayne thought. To the girls, at any rate, rifle and bayonet couldn’t have been half so frightening as all those evil Egyptian faces. After all the years he was still offended at the Italian lack of common sense in proposing to sling overboard, like so much cargo, twenty-six starry-eyed children.

  ‘You leave the Italians alone,’ Horsha told him. ‘Responsibility is your forte. Emotional sympathy is theirs.’

  ‘One does expect some sanity all the same.’

  ‘No! Sanity would have been out of place in dealing with us. We had made our own world, where sanity didn’t exist at all.’

  The conspiracy, Horsha explained, had run through the high schools of Cracow like a childish epidemic. No one knew who started it; no one could tell who would resist it. Those who went down with the highest fever had been the least Jewish of Jews. That wasn’t surprising. The submerged and the religious had not yet assimilated the Balfour Declaration. To them it was just another prophecy, not an immediate invitation to act.

  He told of his own romantic concept as precisely as if it had been read rather than lived. His family had been cultured Poles. The medieval courts of the legends had been as familiar to him as the court of King Solomon, and morally preferable. That had been true—though perhaps in a lesser degree—for most of his companions as well.

  Their Zionism was the natural flower of Christian chivalry and Jewish tradition, owing nothing at all to propaganda. A last crusade had driven the Turks from Jerusalem. A statesman of the conquerors had declared that Palestine was open to the Jews. The facts did not belong to the modern world; they were gay and stirring as the summoning song of a minstrel. What gesture could one make in answer but to put up the Star of David upon an imaginary shield, and march?

  At the first secret meeting there might have been a hundred boys and girls, aged from twelve to seventeen. When the cautious had weeded themselves out, thirty were left. They came from respectable, conventional families, but the ebb and flow of war had destroyed their natural fear of movement. Soldiers in thousands tramped over Europe, seeking their legitimate or spiritual homes. Therefore children could do the same, all the way to Palestine.

  They even called themselves Crusaders, without any sense of incompatibility with their Jewish traditions. Who could refuse to let them pass provided that their voluntary dedication was plainly to be seen?

  In the privacy of a ruined factory belonging to Horsha’s parents they took their solemn vows—to be honourable in all their dealing, to protect the weak, to preserve chastity. That final promise, though at their age not hard to fulfil, seemed to them the most important. It was an echo not so much of saintliness as of the precepts of parents.

  ‘It’s unbelievable that we could have been so cruel to them,’ Aviva said.

  ‘Birds leave the nest.’

  ‘Yes. You used that argument then. It sounded as if it meant something.’

  ‘We did warn them,’ Joseph protested, still with the guilty laugh of a boy.

  Yes—and the parents had given parental and understanding replies. Of course the children, if they were sure, quite sure, they wanted it, could go to Palestine as soon as education was finished, as soon as the routes were open, as soon as arrangements could be made to receive them. Fathers and mothers could well afford to be sympathetic. Travel was manifestly impossible till the aftermath of war had been cleared.

  But instinctively the children knew that only in a time of unrest could their crusade succeed. The world which they had imagined was close to reality. That casual, medieval society which endured for months before frontiers were formally re-established had little interest in stopping the determined traveller.

  Horsha and Aviva Ben Aron, both talking at once as if they had eagerly returned to childhood, tumbled incident upon incident. The children had kept their secret profoundly well. They bought and hid packs and water-bottles, and put their money, collected by small economies and the naïve, ingenious tricks of the young, into a common store. They chose for their departure the early morning of a day when there was no school, and said—for they were determined not to start with a lie—that they were off on an expedition, that they didn’t know when they would be back and that they promised all to keep together. The smallest, in much need of comfort, remembered the hundreds of boys who had enlisted well under military age without telling their parents.

  So fathers and mothers, patient for a whole day and three-quarters of a night, discovered at last, like burghers of Hamelin, that their children had vanished and did not even guess, till a joint telegram arrived, what piper had summoned them. Meanwhile the thirty had pushed their way among peasants and demobilised soldiers from train to crowded train, and were beyond recall.

  The two frontiers which they crossed were still hardly delineated, and officials easily allowed them to pass through to Vienna. They were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their identity cards were in order. It was nobody’s business to hold them for enquiries.

  But also it was nobody’s business to send them back. The urgent requests of the Cracow police were presumably dropped into trays marked Pending. Austrians who were going to remain Austrians and Austrians who were going to be Czechs had no interest in the problems of Austrians who were going to be Poles. Children bursting with health and excitement on their way to Palestine? Good luck to them! It would be time enough to bother if the Italians refused to let them pass.

  At Vienna they bought several days’ supply of bread and sausage, and used the last of their money to travel clear of the too curious city and its suburbs. When they got off the train they were as destitute as all the sanitly beggars of history. That, indeed, was high adventure for the sake of their quest. They felt at last free. Confident and singing, they began their march over the mountain roads towards the Italian frontier two hundred miles away.

  Aviva laughed like a girl at the memory.

  ‘I’ve never been so sure in my life that what I was doing was right—unsurpassably right!’ she said. ‘And ever since, when I think my conscience is happy, I have been able to test it by that day.’

  ‘We were giving joy, too,’ Joseph added. ‘I don’t think any of us realised it then. We just assumed that the world was as good as the first day God made it. But to the villagers we were the return of joy and innocence after four years of war. It was enough for them to see our faces. They gave us barns and sometimes their beds to sleep in. They showered us with milk and food.’

  ‘And wine,’ said Aviva. ‘How inhuman little male saints can be!’

  ‘No, no! You never understood. It was essential that our spirit should not be lost—that nothing should be dissipated.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re taking about,’ Mayne reminded them.

&n
bsp; ‘One of our sixteen-year-olds got drunk,’ Aviva explained. ‘The other boys court-martialled him and sent him home—or rather back to Vienna, where he fortunately had an uncle. The mayor of the village lent him money for his fare.’

  The mayor had done his best for the offender, too. Drunkenness wasn’t such a crime, he told the children. Why, before the war the dear Wandervögel were often merry in the evening! Yes, he understood that they had set themselves a religious standard, but didn’t the boy’s shame count with them?

  It did not. The young faces regarded advocate and criminal with blank severity. They knew they were right. Horsha still declared that they were right. They were following, quite blindly, a European tradition. Only that tradition, reflected in their joy and their purity of manners and living, could carry the pilgrims through the Holy Land.

  As they drew nearer to the frontier, they were told again and again that the Italians would never let them through. The Italians, said the sentimental Austrians, were not in the least like themselves. The children would meet the victors in full flush of insolence. And what of girls of fifteen and sixteen unprotected among Latins?

  The whole countryside was fascinated by their march, and in committee for their welfare. It was considered that they would appear to have some official backing if they crossed the Julian Alps by rail; so friendly railwaymen gave them a lift in a goods train over the pass, and unloaded the twenty-nine on the frontier station.

  ‘You must have felt pretty forlorn then,’ said Mayne.

  No, Joseph insisted, they had not. But possibly their faces showed enough anxiety to make them appear as suppliants—enough to prevent the feeling in any sensitive official that his beloved frontier was about to be ravished against its will.

  The children’s unity of purpose was such that it had never occurred to them to elect or appoint a leader. But the Latin mind demanded a leader. One couldn’t talk with twenty-nine children at the same time—that was reasonable, wasn’t it? It was indeed, though to the children the problem was how to explain themselves at all when eight Italians were talking at once. At last there was no sound in the mountain silence but the hissing of the locomotive. The utter improbability of the situation had imposed itself.

  Those kindly Italians! A sergeant of Bersaglieri laid his hand upon the shoulder of the youngest, choosing him as spokesman. He was twelve and looked, after the hardships of the journey, no more then ten. The sergeant questioned him in bad German, while the frontier officials, instantly appreciating this paternal gesture, gathered round them.

  The boy spoke up boldly. Money? No, they hadn’t any. Was it then so important? They had reached Italy without it, and so they could reach Palestine.

  But the sea? Hadn’t one to cross the sea to go to the Palestine?

  Yes, certainly, said the twelve-year-old spokesman, surer of his geography than the sergeant. The English who had promised them the land and who had so many ships would provide.

  Italian imagination, swift to identify itself with generosity, assumed its part in promise and victory alike. Had not Italy ships? Had not Italy, too, been engaged against the Turks? And was it not a historic occasion, this arrival of pilgrim children on their frontier?

  ‘It was you, I remember, who put that point to them, Aviva.’

  ‘Yes. I felt it so strongly that I found myself stammering it all out in spite of shyness. I was sure that we were the first of many—the first, that is, to go in a body to a Palestine that was ours again. How right children are and how absurd! A little big-eyed prophet telling the commander of an Italian frontier post that the eyes of history were on him!’

  It had been enough, at any rate, for the commander to spread his wings and send a wire to Venice. Meanwhile the children, no longer laughing but still confident that these excitable strangers could not refuse them, were herded into the barracks by the friendly sergeant and given two empty rooms—a large one for the boys, a smaller for the girls.

  That was their worst night. They made their first acquaintance with hungry bugs. They remembered the warnings of the Austrian peasants. Crusading gallantry rose to the occasion. Horsha and his bosom friend slept on the bare boards of the passage outside the girls’ door, and awoke to find the licentious Italian soldiery tenderly tiptoeing about their military business with bare feet in order not to disturb them.

  The following afternoon came a reply, permitting the Polish children who claimed to be Jews to be sent down to Venice.

  ‘Our frontier friends couldn’t have put it better,’ said Horsha ironically. ‘Polish children who claim to be Jews sound much more sympathetic than Jewish children who claim to be Poles.’

  ‘And all that is over for us!’ Aviva exclaimed. ‘All finished by the name Israeli!’

  They caught the imagination of a people. The newspapers christened their march a new Children’s Crusade. The great, grave Jewish-Italian families took them to their bosoms.

  ‘You can’t imagine how we were fêted—and how it seemed somehow to spoil all the beautiful simplicity!’

  Even the Church was fascinated, and held up the children as examples of the conduct to be expected of Christians as well. But Christian children, who had no comparable objective, only felt that self-discipline when presented as adventure was a fraud. What it was really worth while to imitate they understood. Parties, armed with axes and their fathers’ carving knives, set out in stolen boats to conquer Fiume or Africa, and were brought home weeping. The Church quietly and decisively moved the pilgrims on to Rome.

  At Rome it was harder still to preserve their common flame. By letters they were in touch at last with parents, and their proud sense of isolation was disturbed by remittances of money and loving reproaches. Then the Roman matrons put out as well the light of chivalry by separating girls from boys. To march singing across the foothills of the Alps had been easy. The journey through Vanity Fair was a more searching test.

  The boys insisted on remaining together. Their dormitory was the vast empty salon of a palace, where the neat beds were lined against marble walls like insignificant white mice. Only their impatience saved them from being extinguished. To go on. That was all they wanted—to go on. Their hosts, though ravished by their innocent courage, found them obstinate and insensitive.

  One of the girls fell in love and became engaged to be married—as young as Juliet and just as ecstatic. They thought this an indecency, plain evidence of the approaching moral rot. And then the eldest of them, a few months over seventeen, was led astray by the daughter of a Jewish family which was great but not so grave.

  If he had confessed, he might have been expelled with dignity. But he boasted.

  ‘We flung him out,’ said Horsha savagely, ‘flung him out with everything that belonged to him!’

  ‘They had to keep their illusions,’ Aviva explained in half apology. ‘Illusion was the driving force.’

  ‘I had no idea that the girls were not in full sympathy,’ Joseph Horsha remarked, still with the remains of disquiet from thirty-five years before.

  ‘We were. But it was such a relief in Rome, for a little while, not to have to play your game. Attachments had grown, you see—all very innocent and romantic.’

  ‘Not with any of us!’

  She did not answer. But even if a few of the little warriors were being civilised in secret by their ladies, there was no deflecting either from their purpose. The Roman matrons found their pets untamable, and dismissed them with the magnificent gesture of a free passage to Egypt.

  Presumably some diplomat, general or influential prince was ordered to approach the British authorities. He may indeed have written; but, if he did, his letter was slipped into some file reserved for the improbable and impossible. Palestine did not yet exist, only a Syria about to be divided between French and British. There was no government but the staff of Allenby’s army, sorting out, with brusque military common sense, the unfamiliar complexities of Turkish administration.

  At Genoa twenty-six children, over
joyed to be again together and in movement, went on board the freighter and down to a baggage room which had been roughly partitioned for the boys and girls, and furnished with camp beds. Of the original thirty, one was to be married, two had been guilty of unknightly behaviour, and a fourth had died in Italy of influenza. They couldn’t have said what on earth they expected to find on arrival: turbaned Turks, perhaps, or even some modern remnant of Pharaoh’s linen-kilted courtiers—certainly not an impersonal military organisation, with its Captain Maynes and its sentries blandly unaffected by any crusade but their own.

  After the first hours of looking down from the deck upon Port Said, excitement lost its edge. Not even imagination was justified. True, there were palms and sand. But Egyptians did not ride camels; they unloaded dead horses and loaded coal. Where were the glittering caravans of the orient, and the British cavalry which had ridden to Jerusalem? Where the curiosity or enmity that their arrival should have occasioned? The heroes of Balfour and Allenby were red-faced, red-kneed soldiers, wearing ridiculous shorts like very little boys. They entered things in note-books and bawled at the Egyptians instead of clinking their sabres magnificently up and down the quay. This busy world had nothing in common with kindly Europe, continuous, in spite of varying scenery and manners, from Cracow to Rome.

  During the morning all action was inhibited. Outside the refuge of the ship’s awnings the sun smote dishearteningly upon stone and iron. The strange inhabitants of the quay continued to work. The Italian captain was fuming and unapproachable. British naval and military officers came and went, passing the eager group with non-committal smiles.

  Then the spirit of the crusade reasserted itself. There was a moment’s talk, and the children picked up their packs, without any order given or any formal agreement between them, and marched together down the gangway. They ignored the casual request to hop it and the subsequent sharp command to halt. Nor was the sentry’s bayonet in itself decisive.