Yet this village had not always known peace. It had been fought for by Crusader and Saracen, by Greek and Moslem; it had been conquered by the Turk, and even now, yonder, the blood was scarcely dried of British and Germans and their allies who had made it a minor battleground. Tumults had arisen, the streets had run with the blood of massacres. But it was Nazareth, and nothing which had occurred or ever could occur there could deprive it of the blessing which must have been bestowed upon it because it had sustained and nurtured and instructed the youthful Master. . . .
A hodgepodge of nationalities and jealous religions it might be, a crazy quilt of Moslems, orthodox Greeks, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Maronites—each residing in his own section, and each, doubtless, ready to issue forth at the call of fanaticism to fall upon his neighbors, but no ripple upon the surface made this apparent. They met, greeted, passed in friendship. Had not Hana Effendi pointed out these things and what might grow from such a pot if it were not well watched, she would never have guessed.
She came to know the carpenter shop where tradition says Joseph labored at his trade; the synagogue where Jesus himself gave instruction; the Place of the Annunciation, with the spot well marked where stood Mary listening as the angel gave to her his message, and the latin inscription, "Verbum caro hic factum est." At a greater distance from town she visited the precipice down which His fellow-townsmen were enraged to hurl Him when, to their amazement and consternation, He was no longer there, but had vanished from their sight, out of touch of their frenzied hands. From this tongue and that she learned the traditions which embellished, without destroying, the truth which underlay. . . .
Rhoda had arrived on a Thursday; it was on a Wednesday afternoon when she set out to climb to the heights of Jebel es-Sikh, above the high perched orphanage, to be shown the view by Hana Effendi. Since her arrival he had discovered a new interest in views and went about collecting them as a connoisseur might search for pieces of Rackka ware. There were days when he seemed to have much time at his disposal, and scarcely one day when he did not find an hour to spend with Rhoda. Paul Dare resented him mutely, much to his own disgust. They were traversing the narrow, tortuous, cobbled streets of the bazaar, making their way from the house of Fatima Kaleel to the main road, from which they would presently turn to the left and begin to climb. Their way took them through the Haret el Islam, or Mohammedan quarter, past the face of Haret el-Rûm—the dwelling-place of orthodox Greeks where they would follow for a while the highway leading to Acre and the sea before they left good footing to attack the hillside.
He talked endlessly like a boy, but, it might have been noted, whenever he could do so without detection his always-laughing eyes turned to Rhoda's face and remained there as if with great pleasure until he was obliged to turn them away again.
"I like your America, and New York most especially," he said. "No, no, not to go there, but to hear about. Here is my place. But I can talk about your America like a house afire, eh? To beat the band!"
"You must come there sometime," she said.
"No," he laughed at himself, "I am all set. I know when I am as well off."
She glanced at him appraisingly, wondering what was his origin, what his history. She thought there must be some history, for he was a man of parts, as one holding his position of responsibility and authority must be. But how came he to choose his trade? How came he, a Greek, not a Levantine Greek, but a genuine expatriate of Hellas, to have settled himself here, first as an official of the Turk, now of the British? She was never to learn. Frank, a gay, incessant talker, yet there were reserves, gaps in his loquacity, matters upon which he never touched.
"Now," he said, "it is just my luck. I have word that a man over in El Kûlâh has killed a neighbor over a black ox with a star on its forehead. What do you know about that? So things bust loose. I have sent two of my men, but I may have to go myself. It depends on what the sheiks do."
"The sheiks? What have they to do with it?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "They want to do with everything," he said, "but the English have put it on their eye. In the day of the Turk it was different—by now there would have been half a dozen murders back and forth, just to make it more difficult and so the sheiks would drag down baksheesh from more people."
"I don't understand."
"Why, the sheiks pretty much ran things under the Turks. If one man has a lawsuit with another, he first goes to the sheik and gives him baksheesh to use his influence with the judge. Maybe the lawsuit is over a field. Then the other party goes to the sheik and also gives baksheesh. It doesn't make difference which man wins in the end, because the sheik owns the field. See? They are rich, they own everything, and the people, the farmers and herdsmen, were forever growing poorer."
"But it is different now?"
"And they don't like it. They stir up the people against the English. That is because you can't monkey with the buzz saw. A little at a time the people find out they get a square deal in the courts. They cannot buy. So the sheik is out of a job. ... I hope this killing won't amount to much. The murderer's family will pay blood money to the family of the dead man—and that is that."
Suddenly he paused as a man rounded a corner before them, stopped abruptly—too abruptly not to have attracted attention—and dodged back from view.
"Excuse," said Hana Effendi, chuckling, and took one great stride forward, reached out a long arm and drew it back with a small man, kicking and clawing, in his fist.
"Eh, old top!" he said, gayly. "So you take a look and duck? Well, well! So you have come to Nazareth. To jazz us up a little, maybe?"
The smaller man twisted and snarled, then became quiescent, with fez awry and beady eyes glittering venomously. Rhoda recognized him; it was Abdullah. The sight of him brought in its train a sharp stab of apprehension, unwanted questions about Jaunty Bailey.
"Where have you been all my life?" Hana Effendi asked in high good humor. "You should peek around corners, showing only one eye, my friend. Then you see who comes without being seen. Oh, I could give you lessons. . . . Do you remember last time? I see you do. It is well. Personally I'd rather you went away—a long ways away. Then I do not have to worry about your getting into a fix. Will you go away?"
Abdullah snarled something in Arabic, but his eyes, as he spoke, were not directed toward Hana Effendi, but toward Rhoda. There was something in them she did not like, something like a confidence, as if there was a thing between them.
"You stay, eh?" The police inspector grinned at Abdullah as if he were a favorite companion. "Then you take a tumble to yourself. That is right. I want no big trouble here, and I know you never go about gathering fly-specks." He loosened his hold upon the man's collar and shook a warning finger at him, his eyes half shut by the crinkle of a smile. "You be a good leetle boy or I'll have to upset your apple cart."
Abdullah paused to dart a meaning glance at Rhoda, then scuttled away.
"Who is he? What is he doing here?" Rhoda asked.
Hana Effendi made a grimace. "He is the kind of a man that you know he did it but you can't prove it—if you get what I mean. He is all bad from his inside out, and very clever also. You—" he paused to glance at her with business-like speculation, "don't happen to be very rich?"
"No."
"Or to have any great valuables with you?"
"No."
"Then it can't be you. But he looked at you, Miss Fair. I saw him. Maybe it was just because a cat may look at a king, eh?"
Rhoda's mind flashed to the jewels! It was within the bounds of possibility that Jaunty had delegated this man to return them to him.
"Anyhow," said Hana Effendi, reflectively, "if you go out at night be with a man. Preferably myself." At this he grinned mischievously. "And stay away from lonely places until I have time to—er—to bounce this bird."
The view was marvelous, but Rhoda did not grow enthusiastic over it, as Hana Effendi had expected. She was distrait, subdued.
"Now have I frightened you
with that Abdullah?" he asked, with self-accusation in his voice.
"No," she said. "I am not afraid of him. I was not thinking of him."
"But of someone else, is it not? A train of thought, maybe. This Abdullah made you think of someone else that you are afraid of."
She shook her head in denial, alarmed at his acuteness, at his guess or his deduction. She would have to be on her guard with this friendly young man; he was altogether too well equipped for his trade!
"Let us go down now," she said, presently.
"And may I come again tomorrow—if there are no more killings or anything like that to bother me?"
"I never heard of a policeman with so much time to spend on a girl," she taunted him.
"You never saw such a good policeman," he countered, "nor a girl who could make him neglect his business. You will be getting reprimand from my superior. . . . Well, if we must go. Also I have today a package of New York papers. I get them. Not the news of yesterday, but I like to read, all the same. About a month old, mostly. May I send them to you?"
"Thank you," she said, and then a thought came to her, disturbing, unpleasant in its possibilities. Papers a month old! That would be about the time she left New York. It might be they would contain something about Rhoda Fair the younger following in the footsteps of her illustrious mother! And Hana Effendi was not one to see such a reference without piecing together the jig-sawed picture. . . .
Chapter Thirteen
PAUL DARE was taking stock of himself, inquiring into his motives, peering at his reactions, and doing what he could to discover some reasonable purpose. He held the idea that he was doing a thing never done before, was embarked on a new species of errantry, and that he might present to the eyes of the world an absurdity. He did not know that since the dawn of time young men who could afford the luxury have pursued young women over the face of the earth. His experience could now show him that, at his age, this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and commendable. So he sat under various olive trees and wondered if he were making a fool of himself.
It is true he differed somewhat from the millions of questing young men who preceded him, differed in this, that while they loved and endeavored to run down and capture the objects of their passions, he did not know if he loved, but pursued with the object of assaying his emotions, of finding if they were gold or dross. In effect it was the same thing. The difference was only in the temperament of the pursuer, for Paul Dare was as much in love as any of the youths of romance whom he did not know he emulated.
That he did love Rhoda Fair was a conclusion toward which he was moving with increasing rapidity. If he satisfied himself, then even his mind would admit the propriety of his journey to Nazareth and his remaining there to put his fortunes to the test. . . . He was being helped to a decision by Hana Effendi, for it was evident to the least unobserving that the police inspector harbored no doubts at all as to the state of his affections. . . . In short, Paul Dare was jealous without suspecting the nature of his ailment.
Nor was it this matter of the heart alone which vexed him—it was everything! He stood at the end and at the beginning, in a sort of limbo from which he could look neither backward nor forward, lost, bewildered, resentful. No more settled, regulated life could be imagined than the one he had believed, until a few weeks ago, lay before him. It was safe, circumscribed, satisfactory. Of a sudden it had been snatched away, all of it; with dreadful definiteness it had been concluded and the book closed forever. Even his dry-as-dust belief in himself and the infallibility of his reason was taken from him. . . . Following this had come days of bitter resentment, of apprehension, of struggle to find some foothold capable of sustaining his weight. The matter of livelihood must be considered; the wracking problem of adjusting himself to the heavings and jostlings of a world with which he was wholly unfamiliar! But above and overshadowing all the need to find himself, to ask himself that question which normal people ask sometimes in moments of day dreaming—ask to the point of frightened bewilderment—an unanswerable question: Who am I? It is not good to ponder overmuch on the matter of identity, to perceive the fact that you are the one creature in the universe whose reality you can guarantee. The why of existence!
It is not pleasant to awaken suddenly to a knowledge that you are actually concerned with life and death; that events which, academically, you have known may and do happen to other people—shadow people who flit about you—may and must happen to you. A sudden shock of knowledge that you—this entity which you have been forced to recognize as your conscious self—must submit to the heritage of all men, life and death, is one to shake as the earthquake shakes.
All this he saw, and because he did not perceive it through gradual stages of realization, but at once, in a flash, as it were, it was appalling. But, having seen, it was characteristic he should accept and set about it to see how he should adjust himself. . . . A sense of dreadful helplessness assailed him, a nightmare of being driven chiplike on some rushing black torrent which plunged relentlessly toward the depths of some mysterious cavern was with him. . . . And here in Nazareth he had leisure to think it out, and, so thinking, he who had believed himself the possessor of knowledge that was almost ultimate was compelled to the admission that he did not know anything! That fine, inquiring brain of his told him that he was reborn into a world and without equipment, to begin life as a baby begins life—excepting that he possessed mature sensitory organs and a mature mind.
And for the first time he became concerned concretely with life and death! All the great questions of mankind he had solved in his cloistered days—such matters as the existence of a God and of a hereafter—a life after death. These questions he had decided as impassionately and impersonally as one works out a problem in geometry. Now, realizing that he—he, Paul Dare—actually was a part of the world, these solved problems became occult again. He who had dismissed the continuity of life after death with a gesture, now—in that quiet of mountain and distant plain, in that ancient spot, hallowed by the footsteps of Him who was the greatest protagonist of immortality—he was forced to a recognition of the fact that the greatest question in the world, the overshadowing question, the one question which mankind must have answered for it, was, Is my soul immortal?
In the answer to that question lay the conquest of death and of the fear of death. In it lay the answer to the seeming futility of life and the negligibility of the individual. If life were but a stepping-stone, then all was well; if life were the beginning and the end, then all was ill indeed and one was justified in bitter irony and defiant selfishness. In the answer lay the answer to that other question of ethics: Does it matter how I conduct myself? If the soul persisted consciously, then personal behavior was of importance and right and wrong were things to think upon deeply; if the soul did not persist, but vanished with the corporeal body, then the matter of human conduct was negligible and there was neither right nor wrong!
So he began at the beginning.
Paul Dare struggled from within; shortly life was to press and batter from without. The lesson he was to master was that one must learn to live by living and not by taking thought; and events were upon his very threshold, waiting to wrench, to overturn, to modify. The stage was set, the drama ready—the actors in their places in the wings. No pedant; no recluse of academic corridors, no reader of books, may live and affect life. His had been an existence of the printed page; his reflections such as had grown from the data and the philosophies of others. Of actualities he knew nothing. . . . But he was about to learn.
One thing he discovered, and that was a new zest, a sort of boyish enthusiasm for seeing. For he had never seen. The new sights, the new spectacles, the movement and color and life of this distant land appealed to a part of him which long had lain dormant, if ever it existed: mounted Arab policemen with rifles slung across their backs who dashed up to the hotel to report to Hana Effendi; farmer girls at the well, with ragged trousers and tattooed faces; camels, donkeys—little pictures out
of the illustrated family Bible which he remembered from his boyhood; the bazaar with its movement and life; the stalls of the makers of cutlery for which Nazareth was famous—all these things excited him pleasurably and he never tired of watching them. . . . He was no horseman, but the roads and the bypaths called to him and he rode about upon a tiny donkey, his long legs dangling grotesquely. In his fresh hunger to observe and to learn he met and was impressed by the gentle Franciscans in whose keeping were the Carpenter Shop, the Place of the Annunciation, and such other holy places as make the village an object for pious tourists. . . . And he watched and studied the people, scrutinizing their lives and endeavoring to penetrate to their motives and ideals.
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