The Brides of Solomon (23 page)

Don Felipe, left out of the conversation in disgrace, also looked closely at the Icuari nursery class. He knew what Father Hilario was up to. Either of them, from long experience, could
distinguish as little as one-eighth of white blood. There was none.

He ventured to reassert himself with a delicate question:

‘Sister Janet, the bride whom we have just seen married—would you describe her as … well … inexperienced?’

‘Certainly not, Don Felipe. She was one of my best pupils.’

The administrator blinked his fever-yellowed eyes under the impact of such innocence, but tried again.

‘And you see nothing questionable in this second marriage?’

‘No, Don Felipe. After all they are quite normal girls. They would be very disappointed if they had to belong to Mr Carver’s family for ever, wouldn’t they?’

Father Hilario opened his arms in a jovial gesture which included the desolate, rain-sodden hill-top and all the children, old and young, upon it. His bark of laughter sounded through Icuari
mists the sunlit trumpets of Europe.

‘What’s up? What’s amusing you?’ asked Carver suspiciously.

‘My dear, noble friend! Ah, but you must see the jest of it!’

‘I do not,’ Don Salomón insisted formally. ‘You must forgive me. The Icuari laugh seldom. One loses the habit.’

Don Felipe silently agreed. It was appallingly true—poor devils that they were out there in the uninhabitable. He himself, before this journey with Father Hilario, had for years seen no
reason for any more than a melancholy smile.

‘You have never any thought of the world outside—you and your two angels?’

‘I must admit, padre, there are times when we think of home. But what with keeping each other alive and speaking the language to each other, we do tend to become
single-minded—indeed, apart from our purpose, to have few thoughts the Icuari cannot share.’

‘But they would not mind, I suppose,’ Father Hilario asked, ‘if the girls you buy were your wives in fact as well as name?’

‘Mind? No, of course they wouldn’t. Oh, I understand at last! Laughing at yourself, were you? The inquisitor descending upon Bluebeard! But, my dear fellow, it beats me that you
couldn’t see from your own experience how that sort of thing interferes with a mission.’

The administrator gasped at so uncompromising a rejection of opportunity.

‘If you had any faith, Don Salomón, you would be a saint!’ he protested.

‘Don Felipe,’ said Father Hilario, ‘when God has produced the miracle before the faith, we should not, I think, be too ready to advise Him from our own experiments in mere
trifles of administration which should come first and which second.’

T
HE
older I get, the more I see that it is trust between man and man which keeps civilisation together. You wondered just now how I stand the strain of
commanding on the Syrian frontier. And I must admit that Caesar has graciously given me more responsibility than troops.

Tell him we are alert, but not alarmed. I have the confidence of the Parthian governor across the border, and between the pair of us we settle any frontier incidents. A much more able general
than I am; he can do what he likes with his home government. As soon as I realised that, I set myself to win his friendship.

If the fates send you a man worthy of trust, then trust him—that has always been my principle! I will give you a very odd instance. It happened twenty years ago. Do you remember Silvanus?
Yes, that one—a possible for colour-sergeant if only he had been tall enough. Now there’s a man who has left a beloved memory behind him!

You were at Caesarea then with the Legion, and I was commanding the detachment of instructors which we had lent to Herod Antipas to train his local levies. A delicate job for any centurion, even
of my seniority! But it was no use sending Herod a battalion commander. Except for the very few who have come up the hard way, like ourselves, they never know anything about drill.

We made a handy little force of the levies, too—just as fast as the Arab raiders and twice as efficient. Lack of discipline always means so much unnecessary bloodshed.

I often wonder how much it was all due to Silvanus. I should never have persuaded him to come with me, if he hadn’t been feeling mutinous because the pay was cut. He was just a loyal,
sturdy Italian peasant who might have gone far if only he could have bothered to learn to read and write. As it was, a proper old soldier, wise as an owl and not above feathering his nest! The gods
know he needed it! But a man on whom his centurion could utterly rely. You know how fond of them one gets.

Of course my handful of instructors thought themselves Romans among barbarians when they first arrived, and I saw that Silvanus sweated the wine out of them on an early parade in our own
barracks before turning them loose on recruits. Meanwhile I made it my business to learn Aramaic in order to keep the lot of them out of trouble.

They looked for it sometimes. At Capernaum there was a beautiful little grove with its own stream, set just where the blue spearhead of Lake Tiberias would join the shaft, which they insisted
was the perfect site for a temple to Jupiter.

I quite agreed with them. But it could not possibly be allowed. Jews are absurdly sensitive about what they call graven images. You remember all the excitement when Pilate carried the Eagles
into Jerusalem—a first-class revolt on his hands in twenty-four hours! Myself, I used to warn the villagers whenever there was a colour party marching up the Damascus road from Caesarea, so
that they could look the other way. And they did—all but the small boys of course.

Well, the main point was that there should be some sort of worship on a site which was made for it, and my fellows were not fussy about the various aspects of Jove. So I asked the headman of
Capernaum if they would take over the services of a temple themselves, and dedicate it to their own Jupiter. Rather like Plato’s God, if I understand it—who must exist, but a simple
soul like mine needs an intermediary. They were delighted, and so were my instructors. We had a couple of army surveyors with us, training road foremen, and it was child’s play for them to
run up a temple from the priest’s drawings, though it looked a bit bare to me when it was finished.

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.

H
E
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.