The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘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.

  ‘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 wandervogel 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 to 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 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 obsinate 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, overjoyed 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.

  The bayonet belonged in their world—which, after all, contained the possibility of martyrdom though no chance of it had yet appeared. But while the boys hesitated before that unwavering point at the foot of the gangway the sentry’s companion gave them a broad grin and a wink, and with a jerk of the thumb dismissed them. His confidence was unshakeable as their own, and his friendly gesture intelligible; it pointed out that the bayonet was not really sharp steel but merely a wall, an unclimbable wall, around the stately park of empire. The irresistible force had met the immovable object.

  ‘And in the end there is no way out of that,’ Aviva said, ‘but to learn to hate.’

  ‘No, you can’t find parallels,’ Horsha went on. ‘There aren’t any. The British, as they were in 1919—yes, and later—had the art of making the rest of the world feel ashamed of impatience. That sentry—with his tiny private share of it—was quite enough for twenty-six crusaders.’

  Thereafter the slow mass of bureaucracy crept over and engulfed them. Up and down that gangway, to them forbidden, passed the Egyptian police, the port authorities, the Italian consul and the agent of the line. From the conferences in the saloon the Italians emerged profane and glowering, the English unyielding and self-satisfied; and all of them combined to make the children appear in their own eyes young nuisances rather than young heroes. But never did it occur to them that they were unreasonable, or that their knightliness could be defeated. Hardest of all to bear was the young army captain, Mayne, who spoke in courtly French quite intelligible to the high school students, and merely seemed to be amused.

  ‘You didn’t mind the general,’ Mayne protested. ‘He was just as amused as I.’

  ‘We were good Polish citizens,’ Joseph answered. ‘We treated generals with respect. And he understood us. A man who isn’t a boy at heart can never become a general. Half his job is to persuade men that they are really having the marvellously exciting time they dreamed of when they were twelve.’

  ‘It wasn’t till much later,’ explained Aviva, ‘that we realised you had brought the general yourself.’

  Well, of course, he had. And it was true that he had been amused—delighted was a better word—by the glorious folly of the pilgrimage. He was surprised to find himself most reluctant to have the children’s fire put out by a great wad of paper, or to return them to Italy. His sentries, as a precaution, were correct; as a solution, they were intolerable.

  He persuaded the general to take the children off the ship and, pending a decision, to send them down the Suez Canal to a camp at Kantara. The old professional had been impressed by their quality—by their tremendous button-polishing capacity if they had any buttons. All the same, he insisted, some inexpensive method of returning them to Poland would have to be found. It was impossible to allow them into Palestine, utterly impossible.

  ‘He didn’t really mean us to go on then?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘He dithered. We both did. So you were always in command of your own destiny.’

  It hadn’t felt like it. There the children were, just as on the Italian frontier, under the benevolent control of military; but this time nobody’s enthusiasm suggested that something was bound to happen. They were merely well looked after, and visited occasionally by the smiling Captain Mayne who told them to be patient as if he had never realised that a divine impatience was their inspiring force. The only contact with the world of their imagination was that they were living in tents on the edge of the desert.

  And that hard, lion-coloured surface was all which separated them from Palestine? Couldn’t they walk there? Hadn’t all the conquerors of ancient history crossed the Sinai desert? In the grey of dawn, stealthily, an advance party set out with their water and the unexpended portion of the day’s rations. Their tents were outside the military cantonments. No one saw them leave but the prowling Egyptian children; sleepers and scavengers who rose from the dust and accompanied them, mocking, capering and gesticulating obscenely. The little column marched on unconcerned, following a straight course across packed sand and gravel never disturbed by the wheel-tracks of any of the armies which had cautiously hastened from Egypt into Syria. The palms of the Canal vanished over the horizon. The native children scuttled back to the safety of mud walls.

  ‘I am always surprised that you found us,’ Horsha said.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t difficult! The trouble was that I had been away. So you had two days’ start, and the little wretches you left behind wouldn’t say a word. But I knew exactly what you would do. Didn’t I tell you that I, too, was very young then? You would march on Jerusalem by your compass.’

  That was their route when Mayne and his hastily borrowed cavalrymen discovered them marching east-north-east through the midday heat, stumbling, their water gone, but still in good close order. They reckoned to cover another five miles of deadly emptiness before they collapsed.

  No more resistance was possible for the general. There were two good reasons for that. One was the children’s determination. They could not be guarded night and day to prevent some further lunacy. The other was their chivalry. The beauty of the relationship between girls and boys was so obvious that it had never occurred to Mayne or his general that anyone could object to the proximity of their various tents. But there was no keeping out the chaplains and the welfare workers, and it was their business to protest.

  The plaguing of the general increased and, like Pharaoh, he had no reasonable solution. He might have invented an excuse for putting one or two children on the new military railway to Haifa, but not twenty-six—for he was only the commander of a base. He would have had the politicians down on him, let alone Allenby’s Chief of Staff.

  ‘Did he put the blame on you?’ Aviva asked.

  ‘Only da
mned my eyes in a general way. There were no real reproaches. We were both emotionally affected by your spirit, you see. You had to go to Palestine. Had to go. That was why at last I gave you my promise that you should.’

  It had been a knightly gathering, though the banners and shields were only there in the eye of imagination. The children were drawn up in the space between the tents and took oath, eager-eyed and solemn-faced, that they would not leave the camp without permission. And in his turn Mayne gave his word of honour that he would lead them to Palestine.

  ‘You were tremendously impressive,’ Horsha assured him. ‘You, the young Count of the Empire who had galloped up to our rescue!’

  ‘Then it was my turn to radiate a confidence I hadn’t got,’ Mayne answered. ‘I remember wondering how on earth I was going to keep my word.’

  But the fact that he had given it was a third good reason for the general, who provided all that was in his power to provide—two lorries and rations, a week’s leave for the importunate Captain Mayne and a pass which would take the whole party to Palestine so long as no one questioned it. And he wrote privately to the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, for he could not think of anyone else to arrange the children’s reception.

  ‘We addressed him as Your Grace,’ said Mayne with a chuckle. ‘His rank, we reckoned, must be equivalent to an archbishop. And we told the general’s pet runner, who carried the letter, to be extra polite and mind his saluting.’

  The still Canal had just ceased to reflect the stars when the two lorries drove down it towards the desert track. The children were the first band of illegal immigrants, although, as in all their journey, they had no thought of breaking any law. Where there was none, their spirit supplied it.

  Mayne, the drivers and their mates caught the infection of romance. They felt themselves explorers, and would have deliberately supplied adventure if there had not been enough in reality. The crossing of deserts by motor vehicles was then too new to be taken for granted. The lorries on their solid tyres ponderously ground and bumped over irregularities of surface. Halts were frequent, and the running repairs of heavy complexity and doubtful value. The children were battered and bruised by the journey; but at night, wrapped in blankets on the sand, they abandoned themselves utterly to sleep—sleep which all their lives, said Joseph and Aviva, they remembered for its quality of peace. The next day they would have conquered.