THE FIRST MARTYR
Mid-March in Judea was the querulous age of the young year. It was a
time of a tempered sun and intervals of long rains and chill winds.
Under such persuasion, the rounded hills which upbore and encompassed
Jerusalem took on a coat green as emerald and thick as civet-fur.
Above it the leaning cedars, newly-tipped with verdure, spread their
peculiar flat crowns like ancient hands extended in benediction over
the soil. Shoals of wild flowers, or rather flowers so long in
fellowship with the fields of Palestine as to become domesticated, were
scarlet and gold in shallows of green. Almond orchards snowed in the
valleys and every wrinkle and crevice in the hills trickled with clear
cold water. The winds whimpered and had the snows of Lebanon yet in
mind; the days were not long and the sun shone across vales filled with
undulating vapors, smoky and illusory.
The shade was not comfortable and within doors those apartments which
denied entrance to the sun had to be made tenantable by braziers.
Loiterers, wayfarers and outcasts betook themselves to protected angles
and sat blinking and comatose in the benevolent warmth of the sun.
It was late afternoon and without the cedar hedge of Gethsemane, where
the ancient green wall cut off the streaming wind, was a group sitting
close together on the earth.
One, much covered in garments barbarously striped, and who bestirred
long meager limbs now and then, was an Arab. Next to him a Jewish
husbandman from Bethesda squatted awkwardly, the length of his coarse
smock troubling him, while his hide sandals had been put off his hard
brown feet. His neighbor was a Damascene, and two or three others sat
about two who were employed in the center of this racial miscellany.
One of these was a Greek, the ruin of a Greek, not yet thirty and
bearing, in spite of the disfigurement of degradation, solitary
evidences of blood and grace. Opposite him sat a Roman, in a scarlet
tunic.
The two were playing dice, but the end of the game was in sight, for
the neat pile of sesterces beside the Roman was growing and the Greek
had staked his last on the next throw.
Presently the Greek took the tesserae and threw them. The Roman glanced
at the numbers up and smiled a little. The Greek scowled.
"The old defeat," he muttered. "Fortune perches on the standards of
Rome even in a game of dice. Oh, well, we have had our day!"
The Roman stowed away the sesterces in a wallet and hung it again
inside his tunic.
"Yes, you have had your day," he replied. "Marathon, Thermopylae and
Plataea--in my philosophy you can afford to lose a game of dice to a
wolf-suckled Roman!"
The Greek sat still with his chin upon his breast, and the Roman,
getting upon his feet, scrutinized the sluggish group of on-lookers.
His interest was not idle curiosity in the men. Such as they were to
be seen cumbering the markets and streets of Jerusalem by day or by
night throughout the year. They were types of that which the world
calls the rabble--at once a strength and a destruction, a creature or a
master, as the inclination of its manipulators is or as the call of the
situation may be. Individually, it has a mind; collectively, it has
not; at all times it is a thing of great potentialities overworked, and
of great needs habitually ignored. That the man in scarlet should scan
each one of these, as one appraises another's worth in drachmae, was a
natural proceeding, old as the impulse in the shrewd to prey upon the
unwary. Out of this or that one, perhaps he could turn an odd denarius
at another game of dice.
But when he looked reflectively at the west, where the broad brow of
the hills was outlined against a great radiance, he calculated on the
hour of remaining daylight and the distance from that point to another
in Bezetha far across Jerusalem, and felt of his wallet.
It was bulky enough for one day's winnings, and entirely too bulky to
be lost to some of the criminals or vagrants that would walk the night.
With a motion of his hand he saluted the defeated Greek and the gaping
group which sat in its place and watched him, and turned down the Mount
toward Jerusalem.
To a casual observer it would appear that he was a Roman. He wore the
short garments characteristic of the race, was smooth-shaven, and
displayed idolatrous images on his belt, and, in disregard of Judean
custom, uncovered his head. But his features under analysis were
Arabic, modified, not by the solidity of Rome but by the grace of the
classic Jew.
He was built on long, narrow lines, spare as a spear stuck in the sand
before a dowar, but Judean flesh rounded his angles and reduced the
Arabian brownness of complexion. He was strikingly handsome and tall;
not imposing but elegant, modeled for symmetry of his type, not for
ideality, for refinement, not for strength. His hands were delicate
almost to frailty, his feet slender and daintily shod. Never a Roman
walked so lightly, never a Jew so jauntily.
His presence was captivating. Naivete or impudence, carelessness or
recklessness, gravity or mockery were ever uncertain in their
delineation on his face, and one gazed trying to decide and gazing was
undone. Never did he reveal the perspective of a single avenue in his
intricate and indirect disposition. He forwent the human respect that
is given to the straight-forward man, for the excited interest which
the populace pays to the elusive nature.
It was hard to name his years. He was too well-knit to be young, too
supple to be old. The only undisputed evidence that he was past
middle-age was not in his person but behind the affected mood in his
soft black eyes. There was another nature, literally in ambush!
He had reached the gentler slopes of the Mount, when a young man
dressed wholly in white approached from the north. The wayfarer walked
hesitatingly, his eyes roving over the towered walls of the City of
David. There were other wayfarers on Olivet besides the man in white
and the man in scarlet. There were rustics and traveling Sadducees, in
chairs borne by liveried servants, Pharisees with staff and scrip,
marketers, shepherds, soldiers on leave and slaves on errands, men,
women and children of every class or calling which might have affairs
without the walls of Jerusalem. But each turned his steps in one
direction, for the night was not distant and Jerusalem would shelter
them all.
The hill was busy, but many took time to observe the one in white. The
men he met glanced critically at his fine figure and passed; the women
looked up at him from under their wimples, and down again, quickly;
some of the children lagged and gazed wistfully at his face as if they
wanted his notice. Even the man in scarlet, attracted by the wholesome
presence of the comely young man, studied him carelessly. He was a
little surprised when the youth stopped before him.
"Wilt thou tell me, brother, how I may reach the Gate of Hanaleel from
this spot?" he asked. His manner was anxious and hurried, his eyes
troubled.
"Thou, a son of Israel, and a stranger in the city of thy fathers?" the
other commented mildly.
"The Essenes are rare visitors to Jerusalem," was the reply.
"Ah!" the other said to himself, "the bleached craven of En-Gadi. Dost
thou come from the community on the Dead Sea?" he asked aloud.
"I journey thither," the Essene answered patiently. "I come from
Galilee."
The man in scarlet looked a little startled and put his slender hand up
to his cheek so that a finger lay along the lips. "Now, may thy haste
deaden thy powers of recognition, O white brother," he hoped in his
heart, "else thou seest a familiar face in me."
He lifted the other arm and pointed toward the wall of the city.
"Any of these gates will lead thee within," he said.
"Doubtless, but once within any but the one I seek, I am more lost than
I am here. Wilt thou direct me?"
The man in scarlet motioned toward a splendid mass of masonry rising
many cubits above the wall toward the north. "There," he said. "Go
hence over the Bridge of the Red Heifer and follow along the roadway on
the other side of Kedron."
As the man in white bowed his thanks, his elbow struck against an
obstruction which yielded hastily. The two looked, to see the Greek
who had been defeated at dice make off up the hill. The Essene caught
at his pilgrim wallet which hung at his side and found it open.
"Ha! a thief!" the man in scarlet cried. "Did he rob thee?"
His quick eyes dropped to the wallet. There were many small round
cylinders wrapped in linen within, evidently stacks of coin of various
sizes from the little denarius to the large drachma; a handful of loose
gold and several rolls of parchment which might have been bills of
exchange. The Essene frowned and closed the mouth of the purse.
"A trifle is gone," he said. "He was discovered in time."
"If thou carryest this to the Temple, friend," the older man urged,
"get it there to-night, else thou walkest in danger continually."
"I give thee thanks; I shall be watchful; peace to thee,"--and the
young man walked swiftly away.
"Wary as the eyes of Juno!" the man in scarlet said to himself.
"Essenes never make offering at the Temple; that treasure goes into the
common fund of the order. Now, what a shame that the unsated maw of
the Essenic treasury should swallow that and hold it uselessly when I
need gold so much! Would that I had been born a good thief!"
He sauntered after the young Essene and idly kept him in sight.
"He walks like a legionary and talks like a patrician, but doubtless he
hath the spirit of an ass, or he would not have let that knave of a
Greek make off with so much as a lepton. I wonder if I should not seek
out the thief and win his pilferings from him."
The Essene in the distance, just before he reached the Bridge of the
Red Heifer, unslung his wallet and resettled the strap over his
shoulder, but the purse did not reappear at his side. He had concealed
it within his gown.
"I wish he were not in such uncommon haste; I might persuade him to
loan it me. Money-lending is second nature to a Jew. There must be
several thousand drachmae in that wallet--enough to take me to
Alexandria. I wonder if he sped so all the way from--_Hercle!_ What
an aristocrat!"--noting the Essene draw aside his robes from contact
with the unclean mob at the opposite end of the causeway.
"What! do they resent it?" he exclaimed, lifting himself on tiptoe to
watch the young man, who seemed suddenly pressed upon and swallowed up
by rapidly assembling numbers.
Distant shouts arose, the Sheep Gate choked suddenly with a mass,
Kedron's banks, the tombs of Tophet and the rubbish heaps there yielded
up clambering, running people. The hurry was directed along the brook
outside the wall; stragglers closed up and the whole, numbering
hundreds, flung itself toward the north.
The man in scarlet, moved by amazement and a half-confessed interest in
the man he had seen disappear, ran down the Mount and after the crowd.
But a glance ahead now showed him that the Essene had not called forth
this demonstration. The gate next beyond the heavy shape of Hanaleel
was discharging a struggling mass that instantly expanded in the open
into a great party-colored ring, dozens deep. The flying body the man
in scarlet believed to encompass the young Essene swept up to the
circle and melted into it.
Meanwhile, around him came running eagerly the travelers, the
marketers, shepherds, soldiers and slaves, and behind, the loiterers,
who had watched him defeat the Greek. Focalizing at the Bridge of the
Red Heifer which spanned Kedron at a leap, the mob caught and
precipitated him into its heart. Rushed toward the road on the
opposite side, he seized a corner of the parapet, and, holding fast,
let the mass stream by him.
When the rush trailed out, thinned and ceased altogether, he leisurely
drew near the huge compact circle and stood on its outskirts. But he
could hear and see nothing but the crowd about him.
"What is it?" he asked, touching a man in front of him. The man shook
his head and stood fruitlessly on tiptoe.
Presently unseen authority in the hollow ring pressed the crowd back.
In the ferment and resistance, he caught, through a zigzag path of
daylight between many kerchiefed heads, a glimpse of a segment of the
center. A young man stood there. About his forehead was bound the
phylactery of a Pharisee. At his feet was a tumbled heap of white
outer garments. Then the breach closed up.
"A sacrifice?" the man in scarlet asked himself. But such a deduction
would not answer for the behavior of the crowd. Its temper was
ferocious. They howled, they spat, they shook arms and clenched hands
above their heads and forward over their neighbors' shoulders; they
cursed in Greek and Aramic; they twisted their faces into furious
grimaces; they pressed forward and were driven back and the foremost
rank which knew wherefore it raged was not more violent than the
rearmost which was perfectly in the dark.
It was typically the voice of the Beast in man. Some circumstance,
unknown to the greater body, had waived restraint. Therefore the
wolves of Perea could have come down from the bone-whited wadies of the
wilderness and said to them with truth: "We be of one blood, ye and we!"
Each felt the support of numbers, the momentum of unanimity, the
incentive of relaxed order, and the original cause, however heinous,
was forgotten in the joy of the reversion to primordial savagery.
Their quiet fellow stood on the outskirts and listened to the yelp of
the jackal in man. Before him was a wall of variously clad backs and
upstretched heads, beside him rows of raving men in profile, with
strained eyes, open mouths and working beards; and one of them was the
man who had shown, when asked, that he did not understand this
demonstration.
The man in scarlet finally shrugged his shoulders. He had suddenly
evolved an explanation--the blood of a fellow man. He turned away, not
because he had revolted--he had seen too many spectacles in the Circus
in Rome--but because he was disinclined to stand till he had learned
the particulars of the uproar. A gnarly hummock, white, harsh and dry,
as if it were a heap of disintegrated ashes, rose several rods away on
the brink of Kedron. He mounted it and sat. Yes; he would wait, also,
till he saw the Essene again, who, he was sure, had been buried in the
ring. It would be unkind to himself to permit a chance for a loan to
pass untried.
The tumult continued many minutes before he noticed abatement in the
forward ranks. Movement which had been general throughout the interval
increased at times, but the mob showed no signs of dispersing.
The western slope of Olivet was now in its own shadow, its ravines
already purpling with night. Only the glory on the summit of Moriah
blazed with undiminished fire, as the gold of the gates gave back the
gold of the sunset.
Presently a number of men, dressed alike in priestly robes, hurried
back through Hanaleel into the city. Hardly had they disappeared
before the gate gave up a number of radiant shapes in a column, which
broke suddenly and flung itself upon the great raving circle. The
flash of armor and the glitter of swords were suddenly interjected into
a demoralized eddy of stampeded hundreds. Another sort of clamor
arose, no less voluminous, no less fervid, but it was a howl of panic
and protest against the methods of Vitellius' legionaries sent to
disperse a crowd.
A solid core of fugitives drove through the gate beside Hanaleel and
the Sheep Gate; fragments, detachments and individuals rolled down the
banks into Kedron; screaming, tumbling, falling bodies fled north and
south by the roadway and wherever there was a gate or a niche or a
crevice it received fugitives who appeared no more. Dust arose and
obscured everything but the flash of arms and armor which rived through
it like lightning in a cloud. The uproar began to subside, and
presently the laughter and jests of the soldiers mounted above the
protest. Fainter and fainter the cries grew, fewer the sounds of
flying feet, and at last, strong, harsh and biting as the clang of a
sledge upon metal, the command of the centurion to fall in settled even
the shouts of the soldiers.
There was the even, musical ring of whetting armor as the column filed
back through Hanaleel, and silence. The man in scarlet, who had sat on
his ash-heap and smiled throughout the dispersing of the mob, a royal
creature enthroned and entertained by the discomfiture of the mass,
suddenly realized that the obscurity, which he had expected to lift,
was the shadow of night. He arose and, dusting off his scarlet skirt,
moved out into the road.
At that moment, a figure moving nearer the wall passed him, walking
swiftly. It was the Essene.
"Ho! a discreet youth! a cautious youth!" the man in scarlet said to
himself; "profiting by experience, he waited in safety somewhere until
this light-fingered rabble was dispersed. That must be a fat purse, a
fat purse! And I am looking for such!"
He quickened his pace to overtake the young man and in his interest
forgot the late riot. Suddenly the young Essene stopped as if he had
been commanded. The man in scarlet brought up and looked.
Before them was an immense trampled dusty ring. In the falling
twilight, he saw several huddled shapes, in attitudes of suffering and
sorrow, kneeling together in its center over something which was
stretched on the sand.
A strangling gasp attracted the older man's attention once more to the
Essene. His figure seemed to shrink, his cheeks fell in. Swiftly
about his lips crawled the gray pallor of one physically sick from
shock to the senses. His eyes flared wide and the next instant he flew
at the mourning cluster about the prostrate shape in the ring. One or
two fell back under his hand, and he leaned over and looked.
A cry, heartrending in its agony, broke from his lips. He dropped to
his knees and fell forward with his face in the dust. A murmur of
compassion arose from the little group around him, and the man in
scarlet lifted his shoulders and turned his back on the blighting
spectacle of the young man's anguish.
He walked hurriedly out of the falling night on the Mount, through
Hanaleel, into the lights and noise of the City of David. Soldiers on
the point of closing the great gate paused to let him through.
"Comrade," he said to one, "what did they out yonder?"
"They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen," was the reply.
[Illustration: "They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen"]