Kitabı oku: «Mary Magdalen: A Chronicle», sayfa 7
CHAPTER X
In a sook near the Gannath Gate Mary stood. In the distance the palace of Herod defied the sun. Beyond the gate lay the Hennom Valley, the Geia Hennom, contracted by the people into Ge’ Hennom, or Gehenna, and converted by them into a sewer, a place where carrion was thrown, and the filth of a great city. In earlier days children had been immolated to Moloch there, human victims had been burned; it was a place accursed, and to purify the air, as a safeguard against pestilence, the offal was consumed by bonfires that were constantly renewed and never extinguished. At its extremity was an elevation, a hilly contour which to the popular fancy suggested a skull. To the west it fell steeply away. It was called Gülgolta.
The sook in which Mary stood was affected by shoemakers. Against the dwelling of one of them she leaned. The mantle was gone from her now, and the olive robe had a rent, but the splendor of her hair fell unconfined, the perils of her eyes had increased; yet in their depths where love had been was hate. One arm lay along the resisting stone, the other hung at her side; her face was turned to the palace, her thin nostrils quivering, her breath coming and going with that spasmodic irregularity which the consciousness of outrage brings. She laid it all to Judas; he must have returned to Kerioth, she thought. The sook itself was silent, stirred merely by some echo of the uproar in the palace beyond.
From a grilled lattice near by an old man peered out. He had the restless eyes of a ferret, and a white beard that was very long. He too was looking toward the palace. Now and then he muttered inaudibly in Aramaic to himself. In the shadow of a neighboring house a woman appeared; he shook at the lattice as an ape does at the bars of a cage, and spat a bestial insult at her. The woman shrank back. Instinctively Mary turned. In the retreating figure she recognized Ahulah, and at once, without conscious effort, she divined that the dwelling against which she leaned was that of Baba Barbulah, the husband of the woman whom the Master had declined to condemn.
But other things possessed her – the outrage to the Christ, perplexity as to how the trial would result, more remotely the indignity to herself, the slurs of the tetrarch and of the procurator; and with them, sapping her heart as fever might, was that thirst for reparation, unquenchable in its intensity, which comes to those who have seen their own life wrecked and its ideals dispersed.
Already Ahulah was forgot. On the wings of vagabond fancy she was in Rome, demanding vengeance of Tiberius, wresting it from him by the sheer force of entreaty, and with it exulting in the death-throes of the procurator. Oh, to see his nails pulled out, his outer skin removed, his tongue severed, his eyes seared with irons, his wrists slowly twisted till they snapped! to hear him cry for mercy! to promise it and not fulfil! – dear God, what joy was there!
From the alley into which Ahulah had shrunk a man issued. He was sturdy as a bludgeon, and he had a growth of thick black hair that curled about an honest face. In his hand was a basket. At the sight of Mary his steps hesitated, and his eyes followed hers to where the palace lay. Then he crossed the zigzag of the intervening space, but he had to touch her outstretched arm before she noticed him.
“Simon!” she exclaimed, with that start one has when suddenly awaked.
“Yes, Simon indeed;” and through the silence of the sook his clear laugh rang.“I frightened you, did I not?”
Mary interrupted him. “Haven’t you heard? Has not Eleazer told you – ”
“When I left Bethany he was sleeping with both fists closed. Martha – ”
“The Master is arrested. Last night he was before the Sanhedrim; he is before the procurator now.”
Hurriedly Mary gave an account of what had occurred. As the recital continued, Simon’s expression grew darker than his curling hair, he clutched at the basket which he held, so tightly that the handle severed, the basket fell, and fruit that imprisoned the sunlight rolled on the ground.
“They were for the Master,” he said.“I thought he would sup with us to-night.”
“He may do so yet,” she answered.“Perhaps – ”
“Never!” cried a voice from the lattice.“They are leading him to Gülgolta now.”
Beyond, through the palace gate, a mass undulated, the body elongated, expanding as it moved. It was black, but at the sides was the glisten that cobras have. About it dust circled, and from it came the rumble of thunder heard afar. As the bulk increased, the roar deepened; the black lessened into varying hues. To the glisten came the glint of steel; the cobra changed into a multitude, the escort of a squad of soldiery, fronted by a centurion and led by the banner of Imperial Rome.
Behind the centurion, Jesus, in his faded sagum, staggered, overweighted by the burden of a cross. Two comrades in misery were at his side, but they moved with steadier step, bearing their crosses with the brawn of muscular and untired arms. The soldiers marched impassibly, preceding the executioners – four stalwart Cypriotes, distinguishable by the fatness of their calves – while behind was the Sanhedrim, and, extending indefinitely to the rear, the rabble of yelling Jews.
In a cobra’s coils is death, its eyes transfix. Neither Mary nor Simon had spoken, and now, as the soldiery was upon them, they leaned yet nearer the wall. For a moment Mary hid her face. At her feet the Christ had fallen, and from her came one wail, choked down at once. She stooped to aid him, but he stood up unassisted and reached to the wall for support.
The bars of the lattice shook; the old man peered out.
“Don’t touch my house, you vagabond! Move on!” he cried.
Calcol had turned to Simon, who was raising the cross. “Carry it for him,” he commanded.
Baba Barbulah still shook at the lattice.“Move on!” he repeated. “Seducer of the people, remitter of sins, upholder of adultery, move on; don’t touch my house, it will fall down on you! Move on, I say!”
Calcol’s command Simon had anticipated. He shouldered the cross. It was heavier to him than to the Christ, not in weight, perhaps, but in purpose. In the narrowness of the sook the crowd was impeded, but from the rear they pushed, surprised at the halt.
Mary sprang at the lattice. “It is you that shall move on,” she cried; “yes, you; and forever. The desert will call to you, ‘March;’ and the sea will snarl, ‘Further yet.’ The gates of cities will deny you, and the doors of hamlets be closed. The eagles may return to their eyrie, the panthers retreat to their lair, but you will have no home, no rest, and, till time dies, no tomb.”
The old man gnashed back at her an insult more bestial than he used before, and spat at her through the bars. But Mary had turned to the Christ. He was surrounded now by some women who had filtered through the alley above. Johanna, Mary Clopas, the wife of Zebdia, and Bernice, a fragile girl newly enrolled. The latter was wiping from his face the stains of blood and dust. The others were beating their breasts, crying aloud.
Of the disciples there was no trace, nor yet of any of those who had greeted him as the Messiah. It may be that the admiring throngs that had gathered about him had faded before a superior force. It may be they had lost heart, belief perhaps as well. Invective never propitiates. Recently he had omitted to prophesy, he argued. The exquisite parables with which he had been wont to charm even the recalcitrant seemed to have been put aside, and with them those wonders which rumor held him to have worked. But now that pathos and grace which endeared, that perfection of sentiment and expression which exalted the heart, returned to him, accentuated perhaps by the agonies he had endured.
“Weep for me no more,” he entreated.“But weep for yourselves and for your children. The days are coming,” he added, with a gesture at the impatient mob – “the days are coming in which they shall say to the mountains, Fall on us; to the hills, Cover us. For if these things are done in the green tree, what will be done in the dry?”
And in this entreaty, in which he exhorted them to view disaster otherwise than from the external and evanescent aspect, the voice of the prophet rang once more.
Mary as yet had not realized the full portent of the soldiery and the mob. When it was approaching it had occurred to her that it might be another triumphal escort, such as she had once seen surround him on his way to a feast. As it advanced, the roar bewildered, and she had ceased to conjecture; then the Master had fallen, and the old Jew had vomited his slime. At the moment it was that, and that only, which had impressed her, and she had answered with the force of that new strength which suddenly she had found. But now at the sight of the women beating their breasts, and the blood-stained face of the Master, an inkling came to her; she stared open-mouthed at the cross, at Calcol, and at the executioners that were there.
Then immediately that horrible longing to know the worst beset her, and she darted to where the centurion stood.
“What is it?” she gasped. “What are you to do with him?”
By way of answer Calcol extended his arms straight out from either side, his head thrown back. He was a good-natured ruffian, with clear and pleasant eyes.
“Not crucify?” she cried. “Tell me, it is not that?”
Calcol nodded. To him one Jew more, one Jew less, was immaterial, provided he had his pay, and the prospect of a return to Rome was not too long delayed. Yet none the less in some misty way he wondered why this woman, with her splendid hair and scorching eyes, should have upbraided the tetrarch and abused the procurator because of the friendless Galilean whom he was leading to the cross. Woman to him, however, was, as she has been to others wiser than he, an enigma he failed to solve. And so he nodded merely, not unkindly, and smiled in Mary’s face.
The horrible longing now was stilled. She knew the worst; yet as the knowledge of it penetrated her being, it seemed to her as though it could not be true, that she was the plaything of some hallucination, her mind inhabited by a nightmare from which she must presently awake. The howl of the impatient mob undeceived her. It was real; it was actual; it was life. She stared at Calcol, her fair mouth agape. There were many things she wanted to say; her thoughts teemed with arguments, her mind with persuasions; but she could utter nothing; she was as one struck dumb; and it was not until the centurion smiled that the spell dissolved and the power of speech returned.
“Ah, that never; you shall kill me first!” she cried. And already she saw herself circumventing the centurion, blinding the soldiery, defying the mob, and leading the Master through byways and underground passages out of the accursed city into the fresh glades of Gethsemane, over the hill, down the hollows to the Jordan, and into the desert beyond. There was one spot she knew very well; one that only a bird could find; one that she would mention to no one, but to which she could take him and keep him hidden there in the brakes till night came, and the fording of the river was safe.
“That never!” she cried. And brush ing Bernice off, she caught the Master by the cloak. “Come with me,” she murmured.“I know a way – ”
And she would have dragged him perhaps, regardless of the others, but the centurion had her by the arm.
“See here, my pretty friend, your place is not here.”
With a twist he sent her spinning back to Baba Barbulah’s wall.
“March!” he ordered.
The soldiery, disarranged, fell in line. The two robbers picked up their burden. The Master turned to Mary, to the others as well, with that expression which he alone possessed, that look which both promised and assuaged, and, it may be, would have said some word of encouragement, but Mary was at his side again, her hand upon his cloak.
“It shall never be,” she repeated.“They must kill me first.”
Calcol wheeled. His short sword glistened, reversed, and her cheek was laid open by the hilt. She staggered back. The soldiery moved on. The women surrounded her and stanched the wound. To her the blow held the difference between a cut and a cancer; she knew that it could never heal; and, as the blood poured down her face, for the first time she divined the uselessness of revolt.
Presently a wave of the mob caught her, separating her from the other women, and carrying her in its eddy through the gate, into the valley and on to the hillock beyond. On one side were the glimmer of fires, the smell of smoke, of offal too. On the infrequent trees vultures perched. To the right was a nest of gardens and of tombs.
In the eddies Mary lost foothold and lagged a little to the rear. When she reached Gülgolta the soldiery had formed three sides of a square. In it were the executioners, the prisoners, and the centurion. At the place where a fourth side might have been a steep decline began.
Within the square three crosses lay; before them the prisoners stood, stripped of their clothing now, and naked.
The Sanhedrim was grouped about that side of the square which leaned to the south, the horned bonnet of Caiaphas towering its lacework above the others. To the wide and cruel corners of his mouth had come the calm of a cheetah devouring its prey. At the outer angle, to the right, the standard of the empire swayed; and from an oak two vultures soared with a scream into the air, their eyes fixed on the vision of bare white flesh.
Through the ranks an elder passed. In his hand was a gourd, which he offered to one of the thieves.
“Drink of it, Dysmas,” he invited.“In it grains of frankincense have been dissolved.”
To the rear Annas nodded his approval. His lean, lank jaws parted. “Give strong drink,” he announced, authoritatively;“give strong and heady drink to those about to die, and wine to those that sorrow.”
Dysmas drank abundantly of the soporific, and held the gourd to his comrade.
“Take it, Stegas.”
As the second thief raised it to his lips, with a motion of arm and knee an executioner caught Dysmas beneath the chin, behind the leg, and the thief lay on a cross. In a second his wrists were bound, his feet as well. There was the blow of a hammer on a nail, a spurt of blood from the open hand; another blow, another spurt; and the cross, upraised, settled in a cavity already prepared, a beam behind it for support.
Stegas, his thirst slaked, fell as Dysmas had, and the elder caught the gourd and offered it to the Christ. If he had been tempted in the desert, as rumor alleged, the temptation could have been as nothing in comparison to the enticements of that cup. It held relief from thought, from the acutest pain that flesh can know, from life, from death.
He waved it aside. The executioner started with surprise; but he had his duty to perform, and, recovering himself, he caught the Christ, and in a moment he too was down, his hands transfixed, the cross upraised. The blood dripped lei surely on the sand beneath. Across his features a shadow passed and vanished. His lips moved.
“Father,” he murmured, “forgive them; they know not what they do.”
Calcol gave an order. Over the heads of Dysmas and of Stegas the sanis were affixed, wooden tablets smeared with gypsum, bearing the name of the crucified and with it the offence. They were simple and terse; but above the Christ appeared a legend in three tongues, in Aramaic, in Greek, and in Latin:
Ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων
Rex Judæorum
Caiaphas sprang back as from the point of a sword.
“Mâlkâ dî Jehudâje!” he bellowed.“King of the Jews! It is a blasphemy, an iniquity, and an outrage. Centurion, tear it down.”
Calcol shrugged his shoulders, and pointed to the palace. “What the procurator has written he has written,” he answered.
In the tone, in the gesture that preceded it, and in its impertinence Caiaphas read Pilate’s one yet supreme revenge, the expression of his absolute contempt for the whole Sanhedrim and the nation that it ruled.
From the rear the mob jumped at the title as at a catchword. To them the irony of the procurator presumably was lost.
“King of the Jews!” they shouted.“Mâlkâ dî Jehudâje, come down from your cross!”
It was a great festival, and as they jeered at Jesus they enjoyed themselves hugely.
In their vast delight the voice of Stegas was drowned.
“I am a Roman citizen,” he kept repeating, his head swaying, and indicating with his eyes the wounds in his hands, the torture he endured. “Kill me,” he implored. And finding entreaty idle, he reviled the centurion, cursed the soldiery, and would have spat at them, but to his burning throat no spittle came.
The tongue of Dysmas lolled from his mouth. He had not the ability to speak, even if in speech relief could come. Flame licked at his flesh, his joints were severing, each artery was a nerve exposed, and something was crunching his brain. He could no longer groan; he could suffer merely, such suffering as hell perhaps has failed to contrive, that apogee of agony which it was left for man to devise.
Stegas, catching the refrain the mob repeated, turned his eyes from the soldiery to the adjacent cross.
“If you are as they say,” he cried,“save yourself and us.”
As a taunt to Caiaphas, Calcol echoed,“Behold your king!” and raising a stalk of hyssop, on which was a sponge that he had dipped in the posca, the thin wine the soldiers drink, he offered it to the Christ.
The sun was nearing the horizon. Caiaphas gathered his ample folds about him. He had seen enough. The feast, wretchedly embittered, was nearly done. There was another at which he must officiate: the shofa presently would sound; the skewering of the Paschal lamb it was needful for him to superintend. It was time, he knew, to return to the Temple; and as he gave a last indignant look at the placard, the lips of the Christ parted to one despairing cry:
“Elî, Elî, lemâh shebâktanî?”
Caiaphas, nodding to the elders, smiled with satisfaction.
At last the false pretender was forced to acknowledge the invalidity of his claims. The Father whose son he vaunted himself to be had disowned him when his recognition was needed, if ever it had been needed at all. And so, with the smile of one whose labor has had its recompense, Caiaphas patted his skirt, and the elders about him strolled back through the Gannath Gate to the Temple that awaited him.
The multitude meanwhile had decreased. To the crowd also the Temple had its attractions, its duties, and its offices. Moreover, the spectacle was at an end. With a blow of the mallet the legs of the thieves had been broken. They had died without a shriek, a thing to be regretted. The Galilean too, pierced by the level stroke of a spear, had succumbed without a word. Sundown was approaching. Clearly it was best to be within the walls where other gayeties were. The mob dispersed, leaving behind but the dead, the circling vultures, a group of soldiers throwing dice for the garments of the crucified, and, remotely, a group of women huddled beneath a protecting oak.
During the hour or two that intervened, the force which had visited Mary evaporated in strength overtaxed. She was conscious only that she suffocated. The words of the women that had drawn her to them were empty as blanks in a dream; the jeers of the mob vacant as an empty bier. To but one thing was she alive, the fact that death could be. Little by little, as the impossible merged into the actual, the understanding came to her that the worst that could be had been done, and she ceased to suffer. The departing hierarchy, the dispersing mob, retreating before encroaching night, left her unimpressed. To her the setting sun was Christ.
The soldiers passed. She did not see them. Calcol called to her. She did not hear. The women had gone from her; she did not notice it. She stood as a cataleptic might, her eyes on the cross. Once only, when the Christ had uttered his despairing cry, she too had cried in her despair. In the roar of the mob the cry was lost as a stone tossed in the sea. Since then she had been dumb, sightless also, existing, if at all, unconsciously, her life-springs nourished by death.
Though she gazed at the cross, she had ceased to distinguish it. A little group that had reached it before the soldiery left had been unmarked by her. On the platform of her dream a serpent had emerged. In its coils were her immortal hopes. It was that she saw, and that alone. Those moments of agony in which the imagination oscillates between the past and the future, devouring the one, fumbling the other, had been endured, and resignation failed to bring its balm. She had believed with a faith so firm that now in its demolition there was nothing left – an abyss merely, where light was not.
A hand touched her, and she quivered as a leaf does at the wing of a bird.“Mary, come with us,” some one was saying; “we are taking him to a tomb.”
Just beyond were men and women whom she knew. Joseph of Haramathaïm, a close follower of the Master; Nikodemon, the richest man in all Judæa; Johanna, Mary Clopas, Salomè, Bernice, and the servants of the opulent Jew. It was Ahulah who had touched her; and as Mary started she saw before her a coffin which the others bore.
“Come with us,” Ahulah repeated; and Mary crossed the intervening ridge to where the gardens were and the tombs she had already passed.
At the door of a sepulchre the brief procession halted. Within was a room, a little grotto furnished with a stone slab and a lamp that flickered, surmounted by an arch. The coffin, placed on the slab, routed a bat that flew to the arch, and a lizard that scurried to a crevice. In the coffin the Christ lay, his head wrapped in a napkin, the body wound about by broad bands of linen that were secured with gum and impregnated with spices and with myrrh. The odor of aromatics filled the tomb. The bat escaped to the night. A stone was rolled before the opening, the brief procession withdrew, and Mary was left with the dead.
The momentary exertion, the bier, the sepulchre, the sight of the Christ in his cerements, the brooding quiet – these things had roused her. Her mind was nimbler, and thought more active. One by one the stars appeared. They would vanish, she told herself, as her hopes had done. Only they would reappear, and belief could not. It had come as a rainbow does, and disappeared as vaporously, little by little, before the full glare of might. For a minute, hours perhaps, she stood quite still, interrogating the past in which so much had been, gauging the future in which so much was to be. The one retreated, the other fled. Thoughts came to her evanescently, and faded before they were wholly formed. At one moment she was beckoning the unicorns from the desert, the winged lions from the yonderland, commanding them to bear her to the home of some immense revenge. At others she was asking her way of griffins, propounding the problem to the Sphinx. But the unicorns and lions took flight, the griffins spread their wings, the Sphinx fell asleep. There was no answer to her appeal.
Behind the sepulchre the moon rose; it dropped a beam near by. There is light somewhere, it seemed to say; and in that telegram from Above, she thought of Rome. She remembered now, in Rome was Tiberius, and in him Revenge. She smiled at her own forgetfulness. Yes, it was there. She would go to him, she would exact reparation; there should be another crucifixion. Pilate should be nailed to the cross, Judas on one side, Caiaphas on the other. Only it would be at Rome where there was no Passover to interfere with the torture they endured. Things were done better there. Men were crucified, not with the head up, but with the feet; and so remained, not for hours, but for days; and died, not of their wounds alone, but of hunger too.
A chariot of dream caught her, and, borne across the intervening space, she saw herself in a palace where there were gods and monsters, columns of transparent quartz, floors of malachite, roofs of gold. And there, on a dais, the Cæsar lay. Behind him a fan, luminous as a peacock’s tail, oscillated to the tinkling of mysterious keys. In his crown was the lividity of uncolored dawns, in his sceptre the dominion of the world. An ulcer devoured his face, and in his ear a boy repeated the maxims of Elephantis. Mary threw herself at his feet, her tears fell on them as rain on leaves. “Vengeance,”she implored; but he listened merely to the boy at his side. “Death is your ser vant,” she cried. “You command, it obeys.” The ulcer oozed, the face grew vague, he gave no answer. She stood up and menaced him. “Behind you spectres crouch; you may not see them. I do; their name is To-morrow.” The murmurs of the boy were her sole reply. The roof crumbled, the flooring disappeared, the emperor faded, and Mary stared into space.
The moon that had struck aslant the tomb had gone, but where its beams had fallen the message remained. There is light somewhere, it repeated. Across the heavens a meteor shot like a bee. In the air voices whispered confusedly. It is not in Rome, one seemed to say. It is not on earth, another called.
Mary clutched at her beating breast. The sky now was an opening rose. What the sunset had sown the dawn would reap. In the night that had enveloped, day raised a lattice, and through it came a gust of higher thought. It is not in revenge, a voice whispered. It is not in regret, another called.
“I know it,” Mary gasped. “Yes, yes, I know it now. It is in faith.”
“And in abnegation of self.”
The stone which stood before the sepulchre had rolled away. At her side the Christ stood. In his eyes were golden parables, in his face Truth shone revealed. She stared, dumb with the unexpected joy of belief confirmed, blinded by the sudden light, while he who had rent the bonds of death passed on into the budding day.
When the brief procession of the night before returned to the tomb, it was empty. At the door Mary lay, her arms outstretched and vacant.
