The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  After that we were as popular as a foreign military mission can ever hope to be. The local population used to talk to me about their history and religion—which seemed one and the same thing—and take me to visit their schools of wisdom. I made very little of it all, but I did learn to feel the mystery behind the words.

  One summer evening several of my friends rowed me over to the east shore of the lake to listen to a philosopher who was making a considerable stir by his healing and his curious doctrines. They were doubtful about his politics, and I think they may have wanted me to question him. He was sitting by the side of a goat track and talking to some fishermen. I listened for half an hour, or more. Once our eyes met, and he smiled at me. But I had no right to speak.

  I cannot describe him to you at all. You know what every intelligent man thinks when he worships Caesar as a god—that he could never have been such a master of his own luck unless he were as much above plain mortals as the gods are. So was this philosopher compared to ordinary men. He was divine. But his gold was the dust haze of the road, and his purple the bare hills in the last of the sun. He made me believe that law and the sword are only a beginning, and that the true virtue in making order is to prepare the way for gentleness and pity. I tell you he was young and lovely as Apollo in the stories of the Golden Age.

  Soon after that Silvanus got his last attack of marsh fever. A shocking place for it, the Jordan Valley! I saw that he obeyed the doctor’s orders to stay off the low ground, but it made no difference. The disease kept on coming back. And when hæmorrhage set in, the doctor said Silvanus had had it. A clever Greek he was, true to his Hippocratic oath and excellent on wounds. Provided you could crawl off the field at all, you had a good chance of recovery.

  If Silvanus had just been indispensable, I do not think I could have done what I did. But I loved the man; and that, I felt, gave me the right to call in the Galilaean philosopher. When you appealed to him for the right reason he would heal. Never for show, or for money.

  Of course I asked our Greek first. He called the cures harmless witchcraft, which was efficacious when a man felt ill and wasn’t, and of no use at all in a case of acute marsh fever.

  Sound medical theory, no doubt. Yet I believe that if you feel ill you are, and healing is just as mysterious whether it is marsh fever or a Parthian spear in your liver or thinking you are Cincinnatus at the full moon. Somewhere is a divine law which we do not understand.

  I did not like to ask the Galilaean to come to my quarters where Silvanus was lying. I had a bust of grandfather up, and a Roma Dea and my delightful little bronze Aphrodite from Alexandria. Not that I thought he would have objected. But I hate putting people in a false position.

  So I wrote him one of those flowery oriental letters which all Syrians understand, saying that I was not worthy to receive him but that I should much appreciate a word from him about Silvanus.

  And just to be on the safe side, I asked a delegation of my Capernaum friends to carry the letter, as I knew they would tell him all about the temple, and that for a Roman centurion I was a reasonable companion. Myself, I doubted if any of this ceremoniousness was necessary. Apollo would not expect you to carry on like the court jeweller trying to get something on account out of Herod Antipas.

  Having made all the proper gestures, I walked down the valley to see him myself. I left my uniform at home. I knew he would not be impressed by it. As a matter of fact, I do not think his own followers had any clear idea who I was. They were not interested in Rome.

  And then a second time I looked into his eyes. It was as one soldier to another, as if I were saluting Caesar. You know the feeling. There you are, a very small part of the world and yet in contact with all of it. But, as I have tried to tell you, he had an utterly different kind of greatness. We were not in Caesar’s world.

  I told him about Silvanus, and how I loved the man.

  ‘You need not go out of your way, sir,’ I said. ‘Just—do it.’

  ‘What makes you think I can?’ he said.

  I am very bad at explaining myself. But I had a sense that what I said would, in some strange way, matter—matter more, I mean, than even words of mine which could now compel life or death on the frontier.

  ‘Because there is a law in life as in the Legion,’ I answered, ‘and you, sir, know what it is. I give an order. I say to a man Go, and he goes; or Come, and he comes. I do not have to be present to see that the order is carried out. Nor do you.’

  ‘Go back,’ he said. ‘Your servant is healed.’

  And then he turned to the crowd which had collected, and told them he had not seen such faith in all the Jews.

  I do not understand what he meant to this day. I have no faith at all. I am a professional soldier, not a priest. But I know the power to command when I see it, and who was I to impose any limit upon his?

  I shall never forget him. I cannot help recognising that he must have gone to his death as willingly as you would or I, provided we knew it our duty to civilisation—though, speaking for myself, if I foresaw that pain was going to be as cruel as upon the cross I should think twice about it. Yes, he was crucified by Pilate.

  Children’s Crusade

  HE found it hard to believe that Israel was as welcoming to every tourist. His host, Joseph Horsha, was a mere professor of history, internationally known but not so distinguished that he could lay down an invisible red carpet for any Englishman who happened to be staying in his house. Looking out over the glittering Mediterranean from the top of Carmel and green shade, Mayne’s sense of well-being was near perfect, yet faintly disturbed by the suspicion that he was the subject of gossip, that everyone—Horsha, this Ben Aron woman and even the taxi-driver who had brought her—knew something which he did not.

  Aviva Ben Aron claimed mysteriously to have met him before, though he was quite certain she was wrong. A most exceptional woman. Calm—that had been his impression of her during lunch. Not a quality you would expect from an overworked Under-secretary of State in a new and sensitive country. It was as if she had had some experience—a superb love affair, perhaps—which gave her enough pity and self-confidence to last a lifetime.

  ‘And all this time you have never been in Israel, when it was Palestine?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Only looked at it from afar like Moses. I was a soldier in Egypt then. Thirty-five years ago. And, Lord, how young!’

  ‘Gloriously young!’ she answered, smiling.

  ‘Now, just what is this attractive mystery?’ he demanded. ‘Where did we meet?’

  ‘I was one of the children, Mr Mayne—one of the twenty-six.’

  It was like all his memories of the first war, vanished if he were alone, vivid the instant some sharer recalled them. At once he was back on the quays of Port Said, the dust blowing, the crowd of diseased and powerful Egyptian labourers laughing at a crane as it dumped on the wharf dead and dying horses from the holds of a cattle-ship which had met bad weather in the Indian Ocean. The sterile, vulgarian sun pointed the details of every dried and eddying patch of filfth; and meanwhile the smart Italian freighter glided to her berth with twenty-six boys and girls leaning over the rails and staring with excited eyes at the hideous orient as if it were the gate of heaven.

  He had not recognised the pattern of the future. At the end of that first and, to civilians, kindlier war there had been no need of any elaborate organisation to deal with refugees and displaced persons. The Middle East had few, and those belonging to obscure and persecuted Christian sects—simple souls whose problems could be solved by the loan of a donkey to carry their baggage. As for Zionists, nobody in 1919, outside political circles, had ever heard of them. In dealing with these astonishing Jewish children, who ought to have been in school and wanted to go to Palestine, Mayne had no precedent at all to follow.

  The naval authorities and the Egyptian police had passed the muddle to him, for it was obvious that the children, if allowed to land, would become the responsibility of the Military Government. Mayne w
as the Port Control Officer. What he decided would be, for the time being, accepted. He had been well aware of his exact value to his superiors: a man who knew his own mind, saved everyone trouble and was sufficiently unimportant to be sacrificed if anything went wrong.

  He went up to the captain’s cabin under the bridge to see what the devil this Italian thought he was about. The fellow’s enthusiasm annoyed him. It appeared that the children had made an overwhelming impression upon his emotional people; but twenty-six young lunatics from unknown depths of Central Europe, with the sketchiest of papers and very little money, couldn’t just be dumped on the Port Said waterfront while a rapturous captain sailed back to Italy, rubbing his hands with easy satisfaction at a good deed done.

  Under the circumstances a blaze of Latin oratory was impertinent. Mayne refused to allow the children to land, and posted a solid pair of sentries at the foot of the gangway.

  ‘You had not the slightest idea of the difficulties,’ he said, the memory of the day and the Italian captain adding a hardness to his voice.

  ‘It never even occurred to us that there were any,’ Joseph Horsha replied.

  ‘Were you with them too, Jo? Why have you never told me?’

  ‘Look—it was as if we had both assisted at some secret, sacred ceremony. Something to remember, not to talk of. And when we met again so many years later, I couldn’t tell whether you recognised me or not. The silences of Englishmen are so effective. One has to respect them.’

  Mayne searched his vague memory of the children whose eyes had followed him so gaily and confidently as he went ashore to put his sentries on the gangway. There had been five girls, more stern than attractive. Perhaps that was to be expected. A girl who preferred such a mad pilgrimage to the enthralling adventure of becoming a woman was bound to lack the charm of adolescence—or rather to have ripened her character before her emotions. That would account for the grey-haired, classical grace of Aviva Ben Aron. The foundation of her was indeed a love affair—though not in the generally accepted sense.

  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.

&
nbsp; 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 saintly 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.’