The Brook Kerith: A Syrian story Read online

  CHAP. V.

  Gone to the study of the law! Dan said, as he walked up and down theroom, glancing often into Joseph's letter, for it figured to him theTemple with the Scribes meditating on the law, or discussing it witheach other while their wives remained at home doing the work. So dotheir lives pass over, he said, in the study of the law. Nothing else isto them of any worth.... My poor boy hopes that I shall forgive him fornot returning home after the Feast of the Passover! Does he suspect thatI would prefer him indifferent to the law in Magdala, rather thanimmersed in it at Jerusalem? A little surprised and shocked at thelicentiousness of his thoughts, he drew them into order with theadmission that it is better in every way that a young man should go toJerusalem early in his life and acquire reverence for the ritual andtraditions of his race, else he will drift later on into heresy, ormaybe go to live in cities like Tiberias, amongst statues. But why do Itrouble myself like this? For there was a time before I had a son, andthe time is getting very close now when I shall lose him. And Dan stoodswallowed up in the thought of the great gulf into which precarioushealth would soon pitch him out of sight of Joseph for ever. It wasRachel coming into the room that awoke him. She too! he muttered. Hebegan to fuss about, seeking for writing materials, for he was nowintent to send Joseph a letter of recommendation to the High Priest,having already forgotten the gulf that awaited him, in the pleasurablerecollection of the courtesy and consideration he received from the mostdistinguished men the last time he was in Jerusalem--from Hanan the sonof Seth and father-in-law of Kaiaphas: Kaiaphas was now High Priest, theHigh Priest of that year; but in truth, Hanan, who had been High Priestbefore him, retained all the power and importance of the office and waseven called the High Priest. Dan remembered that he had been receivedwith all the homage due to a man of wealth. He liked his wealth to beacknowledged, for it was part of himself: he had created it; and it waswith pride that he continued his letter to Hanan recommending his son tohim, saying that anything that was done to further Joseph's interestswould be a greater favour than any that could be conferred on himself.

  The letter was sent off by special messenger and Joseph was enjoined tocarry it himself at once to Hanan, which he did, since it was hisfather's pleasure that he should do so. He would have preferred to beallowed to pick his friends from among the people he met casually, butsince this was not to be he assumed the necessary reverence and cameforward in the proper spirit to meet Hanan, who expressed himself asentirely gratified by Joseph's presence in Jerusalem and promised tosupport his election for the Sanhedrin. But if the councillors rejectme? For you see I am still a young man. The innocency of Joseph's remarkpleased Hanan, who smiled over it, expressing a muttered hope that theSanhedrin would not take upon itself the task of discussing the meritsand qualifications of those whom he should deem worthy to present forelection. The great man purred out these sentences, Joseph's remarkhaving reminded him of his exalted position. But thinking his remarkhad nettled Hanan, Joseph said: you see I have only just come toJerusalem; and this remark continued the flattery, and with an impulsivemovement Hanan took Joseph's hands and spoke to him about his father interms that made Joseph feel very proud of Dan, and also of being inJerusalem, which had already begun to seem to him more wonderful than hehad imagined it to be: and he had imagined it very wonderful indeed. Butthere was a certain native shrewdness in Joseph; and after leaving theHigh Priest's place he had not taken many steps before he began to seethrough Hanan's plans: which no doubt are laid with the view to impressme with the magnificence of Jerusalem and its priesthood. He walked afew yards farther, and remembered that there are always dissensionsamong the Jews, and that the son of a rich man (one of first-rateimportance in Galilee) would be a valuable acquisition to the priestlycaste.

  But though he saw through Hanan's designs, he was still the dupe ofHanan, who was a clever man and a learned man; his importance loomed upvery large, and Joseph could not be without a hero, true or false; so itcould not be otherwise than that Hanan and Kaiaphas and the Sadducees,whom Joseph met in the Sanhedrin and whose houses he frequented,commanded his admiration for several months and would have held it formany months more, had it not been that he happened to be a genuinelyreligious man, concerned much more with an intimate sense of God thanwith the slaying of bullocks and rams.

  He had accepted the sacrifices as part of a ritual which should not bequestioned and which he had never questioned: yet, without discussion,without argument, they fell in his estimation without pain, as naturallyas a leaf falls. A friend quoted to him a certain well-known passage inIsaiah, and not the whole of it: only a few words; and from that momentthe Temple, the priests and the sacrifices became every day moredistasteful to him than they were the day before, setting him ponderingon the mind of the man who lives upon religion while laughing in hisbeard at his dupe; he contrasted him with the fellow that drives in hisbeast for slaughter and pays his yearly dole; he remembered how he lovedthe prophets instinctively though the priests always seemed a littlealien, even before he knew them. Yet he never imagined them to be as farfrom true religion (which is the love of God) as he found them; for theydid not try to conceal their scepticism from him: knowing him to be afriend of the High Priest, it had seemed to them that they might indulgetheir wit as they pleased, and once he had even to reprove some priests,so blasphemous did their jests appear to him. An unusually fat bullockcaused them to speak of the fine regalement he would be to Jahveh'snostrils. One sacristan, mentioning the sacred name, figured Jahveh aspressing forward with dilated nostrils. There is no belly in heaven, hesaid: its joys are entirely olfactory, and when this beast is smoking,Jahveh will call down the angels Michael and Gabriel. As if notsatisfied with this blasphemy, as if it were not enough, he turned tothe sacristans by him, to ask them if they could not hear the angelssniffing as they leaned forward out of their clouds. My priests aredoing splendidly: the fat of this beast is delicious in our nostrils;were the words he attributed to Jahveh. Michael and Gabriel, he said,would reply: it is indeed as thou sayest, Sire!

  Joseph marvelled that priests could speak like this, and tried to forgetthe vile things they said, but they were unforgettable: he treasuredthem in his heart, for he could not do else, and when he did speak, itwas at first cautiously, though there was little need for caution; forhe found to his surprise that everybody knew that the Sadducees did notbelieve in a future life and very little in the dogma that the Jews werethe sect chosen by God, Jahveh. He was their God and had upheld theJewish race, but for all practical purposes it was better to put theirfaith henceforth in the Romans, who would defend Jerusalem against allbarbarians. It was necessary to observe the Sabbath and to preach itsobservances and to punish those who violated it, for on the Sabbathrested the entire superstructure of the Temple itself, and all beliefmight topple if the Sabbath was not maintained, and rigorously. In thehouses of the Sadducees Joseph heard these very words, and their crudescepticism revolted his tender soul: he was drawn back to his own sect,the Pharisees, for however narrow-minded and fanatical they might be hecould not deny to them the virtue of sincerity. It was with a delightfulsense of community of spirit that he returned to them, and in theconviction that it would be well to let pass without protest theobservances which himself long ago in Galilee began to look upon withamusement.

  A sudden recollection of the discussion that had arisen in the yardbehind the counting-house, whether an egg could be eaten if it had beenlaid the day after the Sabbath, brought a smile to his face, but adifferent smile from of yore, for he understood now better than he hadunderstood then, that this (in itself a ridiculous) question was nomore serious than a bramble that might for a moment entangle the garmentof a wayfarer: of little account was the delay, if the feet were on theright road. Now the scruple of conscience that the question had awakenedmight be considered as a desire to live according to a law which,observed for generations, had become part of the national sense andspirit. On this he fell to thinking that it is only by laws andtraditions that we may know ourselves--
whence we have come and whitherwe are going. He attributed to these laws and traditions the love of theJewish race for their God, and their desire to love God, and to formtheir lives in obedience to what they believed to be God's will. Withoutthese rites and observances their love of God would not have survived.It was not by exaggeration of these laws but by the scepticism of theSadducees that the Temple was polluted. If the priests degraded religionand made a vile thing of it, there were others that ennobled the Templeby their piety.

  And as these thoughts passed through Joseph's mind, his eyes went to thesimple folk who never asked themselves whether they were Sadducees orPharisees, but were content to pray around the Temple that the Lordwould not take them away till they witnessed the triumph of Israel,never asking if the promised resurrection would be obtained in thisworld--if not in each individual case, by the race itself--or whetherthey would all be lifted by angels out of their graves and carried awayby them into a happy immortality.

  The simple folk on whom Joseph's eyes rested favourably, prayed,untroubled by difficult questions: they were content to love God; and,captured by their simple unquestioning faith, which he felt to be theonly spiritual value in this world, he was glad to turn away from bothSadducees and Pharisees and mix with them. Sometimes, and to his greatregret, he brought about involuntarily the very religious disputationsthat it was his object to quit for ever when he withdrew himself fromthe society of the Pharisees. A chance word was enough to set some ofthem by the ears, asking each other whether the soul may or can descendagain into the corruptible body; and it was one day when this questionwas being disputed that a disputant, pressing forward, announced hisbelief that the soul, being alone immortal, does not attempt to regainthe temple of the body. A doctrine which astonished Joseph, so simpledid it seem and so reasonable; and as he stood wondering why he had notthought of it himself, his eyes telling his perplexity, he was awakenedfrom his dream, and his awakening was caused by the word "Essene." Heasked for a meaning to be put upon it, to the great astonishment of thepeople, who were not aware that the fame of this third sect of the Jewswas not yet spread into Galilee. There were many willing to instructhim, and almost the first thing he learnt about them was that they werenot viewed with favour in Jerusalem, for they did not send animals tothe Temple for sacrifice, deeming blood-letting a crime. A still morefundamental tenet of this sect was its denial of private property: allthey had, belonged to one brother as much as to another, and they livedin various places, avoiding cities, and setting up villages of their ownaccord; notably one on the eastern bank of the Jordan, from whencerecruiting missionaries sometimes came forth, for the Essenes disdainedmarriage, and relied on proselytism for the maintenance of the order.The rule of the Essenes, however, did not exclude marriage because theybelieved the end of the world was drawing nigh, but because they wishedto exclude all pleasure from life. To do this, to conceive the duty ofman to be a cheerful exclusion of all pleasure, seemed to Josephwonderful, an exaltation of the spirit that he had not hitherto believedman to be capable of: and one night, while thinking of these things, hefell on a resolve that he would go to Jericho on the morrow to see forhimself if all the tales he heard about the brethren were true. At thesame time he looked forward to getting away from the seven windy hillswhere the sun had not been seen for days, only grey vapour coiling anduncoiling and going out, and where, with a patter of rain in his ears,he was for many days crouching up to a fire for warmth.

  But in Jericho he would be as it were back in Galilee: a pleasant winterresort, to be reached easily in a day by a path through the hills, soplainly traced by frequent usage that a guide was not needed. A servanthe could not bring with him, for none was permitted in the cenoby, adifferent mode and colour of life prevailing there from any he everheard of, but he hoped to range himself to it, and--thinking how thismight be done--he rode round the hillside, coming soon into view ofBethany over against the desert. From thence he proceeded by longdescents into a land tossed into numberless hills and torn up into suchdeep valleys that it seemed to him to be a symbol of God's anger in amoment of great provocation. Or maybe, he said to himself, these valleysare the ruts of the celestial chariot that passed this way to takeElijah up to heaven? Or maybe ... His mind was wandering, and--forgetfulof the subject of his meditation--he looked round and could see littleelse but strange shapes of cliffs and boulders, rocks and lofty scarpsenwrapped in mist so thick that he fell to thinking whence came thefume? For rocks are breathless, he said, and there are only rocks here,only rocks and patches of earth in which the peasants sow patches ofbarley. At that moment his mule slid in the slime of the path to withina few inches of a precipice, and Joseph uttered a cry before the gulfwhich startled a few rain-drenched crows that went away cawing, makingthe silence more melancholy than before. A few more inches, Josephthought, and we should have been over, though a mule has never beenknown to walk or to slide over a precipice. A moment after, his mule wasclimbing up a heap of rubble; and when they were at the top Josephlooked over the misted gulf, thinking that if the animal had crossed hislegs mule and rider would both be at the bottom of a ravine by now. Andthe crows that my cry startled, he said, would soon return, scentingblood. He rode on, thinking of the three crows, and when he returned tohimself the mule was about to pass under a projecting rock, regardless,he thought, of the man on his back, but the sagacious animal had takenhis rider's height into his consideration, so it seemed, for at leastthree inches were to spare between Joseph's head and the rock. Nor didthe mule's sagacity end here; for finding no trace of the path on theother side he started to climb the steep hill as a goat might,frightening Joseph into a tug or two at the bridle, to which the mulegave no heed but continued the ascent with conviction and after a littlecircuit among intricate rocks turned down the hill again and slid intothe path almost on his haunches. A wonderful animal truly! Joseph said,marvelling greatly; he guessed that the path lay under the mass ofrubble come down in some landslip. He knew he would meet it farther on:he may have been this way before. A wonderful animal all the same, aperfect animal, if he could be persuaded not to walk within ten inchesof the brink! and Joseph drew the mule away to the right, under thehillside, but a few minutes after, divining that his rider's thoughtswere lost in those strange argumentations common to human beings, themule returned to the brink, out of reach of any projecting rocks. He washappily content to follow the twisting road, giving no faintestattention to the humped hills always falling into steep valleys andalways rising out of steep valleys, as round and humped as the hillsthat were left behind. Joseph noticed the hills, but the mule did not:he only knew the beginning and the end of his journey, whereas Josephbegan very soon to be concerned to learn how far they were come, and asthere was nobody about who could tell him he reined up his mule, whichbegan to seek herbage--a dandelion, an anemone, a tuft of wildrosemary--while his rider meditated on the whereabouts of the inn. Theroad, he said, winds round the highest of these hills, reaching at lasta tableland half-way between Jerusalem and Jericho, and on the top of itis the inn. We shall see it as soon as yon cloud lifts.