THE CHURCH MILITANT AND ORTHODOX.
It was at a newly-established colony of Scythian Jews in the
neighbourhood of Hebron that the travellers found Herschel Rubenssohn,
roughly clad and labouring with his own hands like one of the
_fellahin_. He had turned his back deliberately upon the days when
English hearts had thrilled in response to his rehearsal of the
tragedy of his race, and the Anti-Semites of the Continent had been
lashed to frenzy by his cutting sarcasm. The pen was laid aside, and
the poet was intent on the best methods of cultivating olives, and on
finding new species of vines unaffected by the diseases which attacked
those native to the country. Even these lowly tasks could not be
performed in peace, for he was called upon incessantly to quell the
disputes which arose among the pale-faced, gaberdined and ringleted
denizens of the Ghetto who were his fellow-colonists. It was his duty,
also, to act as interpreter for them with the Roumi authorities, and
to mediate in the many misunderstandings that broke out between them
and the peasants who worked for them. Cyril’s invitation to dinner he
accepted with unfeigned pleasure, confessing that when he left London
he had little expected ever to regard an opportunity of donning
evening dress as an occasion of rejoicing. The momentary return to the
old life, which he had so often contemned, after the manner of poets,
as false and hollow, was a keen delight to him, and Mansfield found it
hard to believe that the vague-eyed man of the world, who knew his
London so thoroughly, could be one and the same with the industrious
toiler of the morning. Presently, however, the curious effect produced
by the contrast of the sunburnt face with the whiteness of the
forehead where the hat had shaded it attracted his attention. Looking
more closely at the guest, he saw that his delicate hands were
roughened and blistered within, and he conceived a growing admiration
for the man who had voluntarily left a life of ease for one of toil,
purely in the hope of setting an example to his nation.
But this admiration was not fated to endure very long. As Rubenssohn
grew accustomed to the company in which he found himself, the
vagueness left his eyes. In Cyril he discovered one who appealed to a
different side of his nature, and a mocking spirit took possession of
him. Mansfield and the melancholy Paschics listened with bated breath
while the guest embarked upon a career of destruction, sparing neither
the beliefs common to mankind generally nor those of his own people.
He ridiculed with the utmost impartiality the ideas of love and
immortality, the tyranny of the Law, and the Messianic hopes of Rabbi
Schaul. The keen arrows of his wit played round each subject in turn,
disclosing with cruel certainty the weak spot or the flaw. He made no
attempt to deny the degradation of his people, and in Mansfield’s view
he proposed no remedy for it. He believed in the Jewish race, it
seemed, and he accorded a qualified toleration to Judaism on account
of its services in the preservation of the race, but his Judaism
possessed neither prophecies nor the hope of a Messiah, and existed
independently of any religious sanctions. Its ecclesiastical system
had been evolved naturally enough during the progress of the race, and
ascribed, as other nations ascribed their religions, to the guidance
of a higher power. Freedom, toleration, a more natural mode of life,
these things would in his view raise the Jews far above the level of
other nations, and then the old fetters which had held the race
together might safely be shaken off. Mansfield thought of the
prosperous Jews whom he had met at Alexandria, and who enjoyed all
these blessings already, and his heart rose in revolt against
Rubenssohn’s philosophy. If this was to be the end, if the Jews had
remained a separate people merely that in the end of the ages they
might be better fed, clothed, housed, than the nations, throwing aside
callously the prophecies which had cheered them and the faith that had
sustained them in their sorrows, if they were to be bereft at once of
hope and of religion, then the heaviest of their former woes would be
a lighter curse than their new prosperity.
“I had rather be in the wrong with Lady Phil and Princess Soudaroff
than in the right with Rubenssohn,” he decided, remembering how often
he had listened to the old lady as she expounded her views on the
Jewish question and her interpretation of prophecy, Philippa at her
side concurring enthusiastically in all that was said. This time,
however, he did not confide his feelings to Cyril.
Jerusalem was the next place of interest to be reached, and Mansfield
had mapped out for himself a very definite plan for occupying his
leisure hours here. He intended to visit all the missionary
establishments in and around the city in which Lady Caerleon was
interested, and to photograph them and their inmates. Any spare time
was to be devoted to views of Jerusalem itself, and by dint of these
labours Mansfield hoped to provide a peace-offering which would not be
unacceptable to Philippa’s mother, and might even tend to soften her
heart towards him. But his plans were interrupted, and his fair
project brought to a premature conclusion, owing to the greed of human
nature. No sooner was it known that Cyril had arrived in Jerusalem
than his lodgings were fairly besieged. Jews, Mohammedans and
Christians, Syrians, Levantines, Greeks, Albanians, European
adventurers of all nations, crowded to wait upon him. Since the famous
revelations of Dr Texelius, so promptly contradicted by the Pannonian
official papers, nothing had been said of Count Mortimer as a
candidate for the governorship of Palestine, but there appeared to be
a general feeling that the future of the country lay in the hands of
this unpretending traveller, and the time-servers would not lose their
opportunity. Some of them wanted concessions and some contracts, some
Government offices and some commissions in the Jewish army or police,
some wished merely to gain the general goodwill of the possible ruler,
and some were anxious to confer benefits on him, in the shape of
invitations to their houses, or gifts of horses, carpets, and works of
art, without, of course, the slightest ulterior design. Cyril
disappointed them grievously by refusing alike their favours and their
requests, assuring them that he was simply an agent of the Syndicate,
and Mansfield developed a prickly suspiciousness that made him
distrust any one who addressed him civilly. This was the result of an
adventure of his own. Pausing in a back street one day to photograph a
picturesque archway, he was accosted by a respectable citizen, who
invited him into his garden, where was to be seen a piece of ruined
wall on which no tourist’s eye had ever lighted. Mansfield accepted
the invitation, took two or three photographs, and submitted to be
regaled with coffee and sweetmeats, all before he discovered that his
host had recognised him, and was anxious to obtain the contract for
clothing the army of the Jewish State. Then he rose up and fled, with
his faith in humanity sorely shattered, and kept rigidly to the beaten
track until he was rejoiced by Cyril’s decision to leave the city for
a short time. Business was impossible while the envoy was so
persistently mobbed, and it was advisable to pay a flying visit to
Jericho, since a sheikh in the neighbourhood of that place had
threatened to make himself disagreeable with regard to the fords of
the Jordan.
It was clear that Cyril’s movements must be kept to some extent a
secret, if he was to conduct the negotiations with the Roumi
authorities, for which he had come, without being pursued into the
very audience-chamber by the greedy throng of privilege-hunters.
Accordingly, he put the matter into the hands of the Chevalier
Goldberg’s agent, who secured him quarters for the night at Jericho,
in the house of a wealthy Jew, and despatched beforehand all that was
necessary for comfort. In this way Mansfield and his employer were
able to leave Jerusalem as if for a morning ride, and meeting, when
out of sight of the city, the guide and escort provided for them, ride
on at once to Jericho. The sight of the huge Scythian hospice,
constructed of late years for the accommodation of pilgrims, suggested
to Mansfield that their visit might have excited less remark in the
place if they had sought a lodging there, but Cyril laughed at the
idea.
“I didn’t know you were so anxious to see the last of me,” he said.
“The monks would indeed think that their enemy was delivered into
their hand, and it would be sheer ingratitude not to prepare a special
cup of coffee for his benefit.”
The sheikh proved more easy to deal with than had been expected, and
Cyril and Mansfield spent the evening at his village, discussing in
the most friendly spirit the various matters in dispute. As the guests
rode back to their quarters, passing the great fountain called
Ain-es-Sultan, Mansfield directed Cyril’s attention to several lights
which dotted the side of a precipitous mountain about a mile away.
“What can those be?” he said. “I didn’t see any houses there by
daylight.”
“That must be Jebel Karantal, the Mount of Temptation,” said Cyril,
“and the lights come from the hermits’ caves. We might ride over there
in the morning, if you are anxious to see the holy men in their native
dirt.”
As Mansfield reflected that the picture of a real live hermit might
help to console Philippa for all the photographs he had not had time
to take at Jerusalem, he accepted the offer gratefully, and did not
fail to remind Cyril of it the next morning. They rode at an easy pace
across the plain, with its thickets of tamarisk and thorn, starting so
many partridges and other birds that the hunter’s instinct awoke in
Mansfield, and he lamented more than once that they were not spending
several days at Jericho, so as to get a little shooting. Arrived at
the foot of the path which led up the mountain, they found standing
there a horse with a European saddle, in the charge of a native
servant, who told their grooms that his master, a Frank gentleman, had
started about half an hour ago to make the ascent.
“We are a little late,” said Cyril. “Evidently this place is becoming
popular as a tourist resort. I see a whole horde of Scythian pilgrims
in the distance,” and he pointed to a dingy mass of people, bearing
banners and sacred pictures, and headed by two priests in shining
vestments, that was approaching from the direction of Jericho. “But
they are not likely to have brought cameras with them, and we must
only hope for your sake, Mansfield, that our fellow-countryman has
been equally forgetful.”
Leaving their horses with the grooms, they began to make the ascent of
the mountain, finding the only path that offered itself alarmingly
narrow and steep. It grew worse instead of better higher up, and when
they were between three and four hundred feet above the plain, Cyril
wiped his heated brow and sat down upon a large stone which lay
temptingly in the shadow of the rock, on a ledge into which the path
widened at this point.
“I draw the line here, Mansfield. I may be getting old, but my life is
valuable to me, and I don’t feel justified in endangering it by any
further breakneck feats. If you are conscious of a yearning to risk
your neck on that giddy ascent in front, by way of emulating a fly
walking up a wall, pray go on, and I will sit here and await
developments. It will be some consolation to your afflicted relatives
that I am at hand to give your scattered remains decent burial.”
Mansfield had been carrying his camera under his arm, but now he slung
it over his shoulder by its strap, so as to leave his hands free,
laughing as he did so, and applied himself to the further climb with
heroic determination, steadfastly avoiding the temptation to look
downwards. If his glance strayed for a moment from the almost
perpendicular path to the sheer precipice below, he felt sure that
nothing could save him from making personal acquaintance with its
depths. Presently he came to another ledge, which formed the approach
to the mouth of a cave, but glancing into the semi-darkness within the
dwelling, he caught sight of a pith helmet. It was clear that the
tourist whose horse they had seen below was talking to the hermit, and
Mansfield seized joyfully the opportunity of outstripping him and
reaching the summit first. Another terrific climb brought him to the
foot of an unsafe-looking flight of wooden steps, at the top of which
an elderly monk, very fat and very dirty, stood smiling hospitably.
Mansfield unstrapped his camera and photographed him in the act, then
accepted his beaming invitation to mount the steps to his cave. Here
he took one or two more photographs, making gallant attempts the while
to talk to his host in classical Greek pronounced in the modern
fashion, and smiling broadly, by way of making his goodwill evident.
His conversation or his smiles, or both, seemed to win the heart of
the hermit, for he found himself invited, partly by signs, to sling
the camera over his shoulder again, preparatory to climbing another
dizzy ascent, at the summit of which was situated the rock-hewn chapel
of which his host was the guardian. This was exactly what Mansfield
was most anxious to see, and he accepted the invitation with alacrity,
but stepped first to the edge of the little rock platform, in order to
estimate its distance from the plain.
To his surprise the greater part of the way he had traversed was
clearly visible, and he could see Cyril peacefully smoking a cigar
where he had left him. Receiving a wave of the hand in answer to his
shout, he was about to follow his guide up the face of the rock, which
at this point justified Cyril’s comparison by appearing quite
perpendicular, when his attention was attracted by the sight of a
crowd of people gathered round the horses and their grooms at the foot
of the hill. They were the Scythian pilgrims whom Cyril had pointed
out to him, and they were buzzing round the horses like a swarm of
angry bees. For a moment he thought they must be intending to steal
them, then he told himself that the presence of the grooms would
prevent that: the pilgrims were merely examining the novel English
saddles. He began the ascent, but, before passing round a projecting
rock which would cut off his view, he looked down again at the plain.
The pilgrims had quitted the horses, and were rushing up the path in a
confused mass, priests and people mixed together, one man only being a
little in advance. Mansfield’s heart misgave him, and he pointed out
the crowd to the hermit; but it did not need the old man’s raised
hands and look of shocked surprise to tell him that the pilgrims
should have mounted the hill in slow procession, singing solemn
litanies, and not with this indecorous haste. Cyril’s allusion of the
day before to the monks of the Scythian hospice recurred to him, and,
explaining hastily to the hermit that he must go back at once, he
turned to retrace his steps. He tried to shout a warning from the
platform in front of the cave; but it was evident that Cyril regarded
his frenzied gestures merely as the result of an ebullition of animal
spirits, for he waved his hand with the same placidity as before.
Giving up the attempt to make himself understood, Mansfield addressed
his energies afresh to the task of descending, which proved to be even
more difficult and dangerous than that of ascending had been. He was
out of sight of Cyril now; but before he had covered half the distance
that separated them, a sound mounted to his ear which made him hurl
away his camera and dash headlong down the path, regardless of his own
safety. It was the crack of a revolver, the sound of which travelled
far in the clear air.
In the meantime, Cyril, smoking quietly on his fragment of rock, and
all unconscious of danger, was disturbed by the noise of angry voices.
Almost as they reached his ear, a haggard man, in the flat cap and
long, dull-grey coat of the Scythian peasant, rushed round the corner
of the path, and recoiled precipitately on catching sight of him.
“Odd!” said Cyril to himself. “Mad, perhaps,” and mechanically his
hand sought his revolver in its accustomed pocket. His fingers had
scarcely closed upon it when the throng of pilgrims burst upon him
with furious shouts, and he had barely time to set his back against
the rocky wall before he found himself confronted by a semicircle of
angry faces, clenched fists, and menacing clubs.
“Kill him! kill the renegade!” was the cry. “Kill the traitor, and
save the Holy Places from the Jewish dogs!”
“You had better go on your way quietly,” shouted Cyril in his best
Scythian. “I am armed,” and he drew out the revolver.
“There are stones enough!” cried a voice, and a man who had found a
point of vantage flung a jagged piece of rock which struck Cyril on
the temple. The sight of the flowing blood appeared to stimulate the
ferocity of the mob, and deprive its members of such hesitation as
they may have felt in throwing themselves upon a solitary man, for
they sprang forward with a howl. Cyril had only time to fire one shot
into the air, in the hope partly of attracting Mansfield’s notice and
partly of frightening his assailants, before his right arm was broken
by a blow from a club as he raised the revolver, which dropped from
his hand. Hustled, beaten, and knocked about, the blood streaming from
his face, he had one thing, and only one, in his favour, and this was
that the pilgrims were so closely pressed together on the narrow ledge
as to be unable to get him down and trample upon him. Presently he
became aware that one of them, who must have caught it as it fell, was
holding the revolver to his head. Before the trigger could be pulled,
however, the voice of a priest, who had mounted upon the fragment of
rock upon which the victim had been sitting, rang like a trumpet
across the din.
“No shots! no shots! Will you give the heathen Roumis cause to accuse
us of murder? Throw the apostate over the precipice, so that it may
not be known whose hand executed judgment upon him.”
The man who held the revolver tossed it away reluctantly, and joined
with the rest in attempting to hustle Cyril to the edge of the path.
Crippled as he was, he fought savagely, contesting every inch of
ground, determined not to give his assailants the opportunity of
seizing him and hurling him down headlong. “If I go over, I won’t go
alone,” was the thought in his mind; and he fixed on a huge fellow,
whose efforts to catch him up bodily he had successfully foiled, as
the companion whom he would clutch with his last strength and drag to
destruction in his company. The unequal struggle was approaching its
only possible end as Cyril was driven farther and farther from the
rock. The pilgrims nearest the brink were beginning to edge away to
the right and left in order to secure their own safety, thereby
lessening the pressure on that side and adding to the force arrayed
against the doomed man, when a bullet whizzed past Cyril’s ear and
buried itself in the shoulder of the giant on whom he had decided as
his comrade in the fatal plunge.
“Bravo, Mansfield!” Cyril gathered breath to shout; but before the
words were out of his mouth there was another shot, and the club fell
from an uplifted hand which was brandishing it over his head. Crack!
crack! crack! came the sharp whip-like reports, and man after man
pushed his way, cursing, out of the mass, each effectually disabled
for the time, but not one mortally wounded so far as Cyril could see.
“Mansfield never fired those shots!” was his mental comment, as the
number of his assailants continued to diminish, until only a few
remained on the ledge, making no attempt to molest him, but looking
about in bewilderment to see where the shots came from.
“Git!” said a stentorian voice which seemed to resound from overhead,
and the crestfallen pilgrims, grasping the meaning of the
monosyllable, embraced with thankfulness the permission accorded them
to retire. Once safely round the corner of the rock, they collected
their wounded and made their way down the hill. The speaker--a lean,
elderly man in white clothes and a pith helmet--kept them covered with
his revolver until they were out of sight, then let himself lightly
down to the path, and approached Cyril, who had sunk on the ground in
perilous proximity to the edge of the precipice.
“Well, sir?” he asked slowly.
“I am infinitely indebted to you,” said Cyril, looking up with
difficulty as his rescuer reached him.
“Not you, sir,” was the prompt reply. “When I saw those Scythian
cusses preparing a new Holy Place for themselves by conducting a
Christian martyrdom on this spot, it struck me that Scythia had quite
as many Holy Places in this territory as was healthy for her, so I
just started in with my six-shooter right away. You bet it went to my
heart not to lay out two or three of the fellows, and specially the
reverend gentleman that took the rock for a pulpit; but I know the
ways of the Roumi authorities, and I didn’t want my business
interrupted by a judicial inquiry any more than you would. But I guess
there’s a dozen or so that will carry about with ’em for some time a
pleasing little souvenir of me, any way.”
While the stranger spoke, he had been helping Cyril gently back to his
former seat on the stone, and now began to bind up the wound in his
head with a handkerchief.
“Surely I know your voice?” said Cyril faintly. “It seems quite
familiar, and yet I can’t recall where I have heard it.”
The rescuer ceased his work, and stepped back for a moment. “The same
as ever!” he exclaimed in admiration. “Sir, I have many a time heard
you called the first gentleman in Europe, but I never expected you
would remember me, when the last deal we did together was over twenty
years ago.”
“Mr Hicks of the ‘Crier’?” asked Cyril, with an uncertain smile.
“Sir, you are correct. Elkanah B. Hicks, of the ‘Empire City Crier,’
who would be sitting in the head office of that paper as news editor
at this moment if he was not a fool. But he has got the wandering
strain in his blood, and threw up his berth to come out here, with the
excuse that it needed the best man the paper had got to fathom you,
Count.”
“I am flattered. Then it was not Turkish you spoke just now?”
“No, sir. I dispersed that crowd by means of the beautiful language
which is the common heritage of your nation and mine. Do you find
yourself comfortably fixed now, Count?”
He stepped back again to look critically at his work, just as
Mansfield, with blazing eyes and panting breath, charged down upon the
ledge, revolver in hand.
“Thank God you’re safe, sir!” he cried, with something like a sob.
“Where are the villains?”
“Hold him, Hicks!” cried Cyril feebly, as his secretary dashed past
him in the direction taken by the fugitives. “He is suffering from the
usual British malady, and yearns to go and kill something. He isn’t
safe.”
“Young man,” said Mr Hicks, flinging his sinewy arms round the
intending avenger, and holding him fast, “the bugle has sounded the
‘cease fire,’ and I guess you had better obey. Here’s your boss with a
broken arm and pretty near bleeding to death, and no doctor in this
forsaken locality but the one at the Scythian hospice. I reckon we
won’t requisition his services, but I shall want your help if I am to
fix things myself, old campaigner though I am. Give me that
shooting-iron for the present. Those things have a nasty trick of
going off of themselves when a young fellow is seeing red.”
Sobered by Mr Hicks’s speech, and very much ashamed of his temporary
madness, Mansfield surrendered his revolver, and returned to Cyril’s
side, feeling an irresistible inclination to choke.
“My dear youth, don’t be an idiot,” said Cyril, and the lump in
Mansfield’s throat vanished instantly. He even laughed, in a husky and
shame-faced manner.
“That’s better,” said Mr Hicks. “Take this chunk of wood, my young
friend, and split it in two, if you have a knife about you.” He handed
him one of the broken clubs with which the pilgrims had been armed
instead of the regulation staves, and Mansfield succeeded in obtaining
two fairly suitable pieces of wood, rounded on one side and flat on
the other. The surgeon continued to improve the occasion even while
the operation of setting the broken arm was proceeding, talking
meditatively as he worked, perhaps with the benevolent intention of
diverting the patient’s thoughts from what was going on.
“Yes, young man, I like your face, and I guess I don’t object to your
grit; but you’ll have to learn how to take things. A week as a special
in war time would teach you a thing or two. What’s happened to that
kodak of yours, now? I saw you figuring around with it while I was
interviewing the old nigger who calls himself a saint up there. You
hurled it away, did you, just as if it was a rock? and all the
pictures with it that you had concluded to take home to your best
girl? Now what a wicked waste! Pull, pull harder; that’s right. Keep
cool, young man; the frozen deep is not a circumstance to the coolness
you want before you’ll make a good man at a pinch.”
With such cheerful counsels as these Mr Hicks lightened the gloom of
the painful process he had in hand, but Mansfield scarcely heard them,
in his anxiety for Cyril. At last the patient opened his eyes and
said, “Don’t be too hard on him, Hicks. He’s a good chap all round.”
The busy surgeon nodded.
“I guess I’d turn him out a better if I had him on the ‘Crier’ staff,”
he said; but when the work was over, and Mansfield had gone to fetch
the servants, that they might lend their aid in carrying Cyril down
the path, Mr Hicks smiled confidentially at his patient.
“That young man has a heart of gold, sir, and worships your very
shadow. It’s not his fault that he hasn’t enjoyed my experience,
though it might have been awkward for you if I hadn’t chanced to be
wandering around in these parts. I guess, if you’ll allow me, that
I’ll fix my camp next to yours while you stay at Jericho. The wily
Scythian will find that it’s another story when he has to do business
with Elkanah B. Hicks.”