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 brushing 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 leisurely 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:
[Aramaic: Mâlkâ dî Jehudâje]
_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 servant,” 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.
FINIS MARIÆ.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
The table of contents has been added in the electronic version.
The following changes have been made to the text:
page 36, “forget” changed to “forgot”, “Hew” changed to “Her”
page 38, “a” added before “sword”
page 46, period added following “roof”
page 108, “surperber” changed to “superber”
page 118, “is” changed to “it”