The Brides of Solomon (24 page)

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 was 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.

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.’

‘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!’