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The Brook Kerith: A Syrian story, a novel by George Augustus Moore |
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Chapter 5 |
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_ CHAPTER V Gone to the study of the law! Dan said, as he walked up and down the room, glancing often into Joseph's letter, for it figured to him the Temple with the Scribes meditating on the law, or discussing it with each other while their wives remained at home doing the work. So do their lives pass over, he said, in the study of the law. Nothing else is to them of any worth.... My poor boy hopes that I shall forgive him for not returning home after the Feast of the Passover! Does he suspect that I would prefer him indifferent to the law in Magdala, rather than immersed in it at Jerusalem? A little surprised and shocked at the licentiousness of his thoughts, he drew them into order with the admission that it is better in every way that a young man should go to Jerusalem early in his life and acquire reverence for the ritual and traditions of his race, else he will drift later on into heresy, or maybe go to live in cities like Tiberias, amongst statues. But why do I trouble myself like this? For there was a time before I had a son, and the time is getting very close now when I shall lose him. And Dan stood swallowed up in the thought of the great gulf into which precarious health would soon pitch him out of sight of Joseph for ever. It was Rachel coming into the room that awoke him. She too! he muttered. He began to fuss about, seeking for writing materials, for he was now intent to send Joseph a letter of recommendation to the High Priest, having already forgotten the gulf that awaited him, in the pleasurable recollection of the courtesy and consideration he received from the most distinguished men the last time he was in Jerusalem--from Hanan the son of Seth and father-in-law of Kaiaphas: Kaiaphas was now High Priest, the High Priest of that year; but in truth, Hanan, who had been High Priest before him, retained all the power and importance of the office and was even called the High Priest. Dan remembered that he had been received with all the homage due to a man of wealth. He liked his wealth to be acknowledged, for it was part of himself: he had created it; and it was with pride that he continued his letter to Hanan recommending his son to him, saying that anything that was done to further Joseph's interests would be a greater favour than any that could be conferred on himself. The letter was sent off by special messenger and Joseph was enjoined to carry it himself at once to Hanan, which he did, since it was his father's pleasure that he should do so. He would have preferred to be allowed to pick his friends from among the people he met casually, but since this was not to be he assumed the necessary reverence and came forward in the proper spirit to meet Hanan, who expressed himself as entirely gratified by Joseph's presence in Jerusalem and promised to support his election for the Sanhedrin. But if the councillors reject me? For you see I am still a young man. The innocency of Joseph's remark pleased Hanan, who smiled over it, expressing a muttered hope that the Sanhedrin would not take upon itself the task of discussing the merits and qualifications of those whom he should deem worthy to present for election. The great man purred out these sentences, Joseph's remark having reminded him of his exalted position. But thinking his remark had nettled Hanan, Joseph said: you see I have only just come to Jerusalem; and this remark continued the flattery, and with an impulsive movement Hanan took Joseph's hands and spoke to him about his father in terms that made Joseph feel very proud of Dan, and also of being in Jerusalem, which had already begun to seem to him more wonderful than he had imagined it to be: and he had imagined it very wonderful indeed. But there was a certain native shrewdness in Joseph; and after leaving the High Priest's place he had not taken many steps before he began to see through Hanan's plans: which no doubt are laid with the view to impress me with the magnificence of Jerusalem and its priesthood. He walked a few yards farther, and remembered that there are always dissensions among the Jews, and that the son of a rich man (one of first-rate importance in Galilee) would be a valuable acquisition to the priestly caste. But though he saw through Hanan's designs, he was still the dupe of Hanan, who was a clever man and a learned man; his importance loomed up very large, and Joseph could not be without a hero, true or false; so it could 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 for many months more, had it not been that he happened to be a genuinely religious man, concerned much more with an intimate sense of God than with the slaying of bullocks and rams. He had accepted the sacrifices as part of a ritual which should not be questioned and which he had never questioned: yet, without discussion, without argument, they fell in his estimation without pain, as naturally as a leaf falls. A friend quoted to him a certain well-known passage in Isaiah, and not the whole of it: only a few words; and from that moment the Temple, the priests and the sacrifices became every day more distasteful to him than they were the day before, setting him pondering on the mind of the man who lives upon religion while laughing in his beard at his dupe; he contrasted him with the fellow that drives in his beast for slaughter and pays his yearly dole; he remembered how he loved the prophets instinctively though the priests always seemed a little alien, even before he knew them. Yet he never imagined them to be as far from true religion (which is the love of God) as he found them; for they did not try to conceal their scepticism from him: knowing him to be a friend of the High Priest, it had seemed to them that they might indulge their wit as they pleased, and once he had even to reprove some priests, so blasphemous did their jests appear to him. An unusually fat bullock caused them to speak of the fine regalement he would be to Jahveh's nostrils. One sacristan, mentioning the sacred name, figured Jahveh as pressing forward with dilated nostrils. There is no belly in heaven, he said: its joys are entirely olfactory, and when this beast is smoking, Jahveh will call down the angels Michael and Gabriel. As if not satisfied with this blasphemy, as if it were not enough, he turned to the sacristans by him, to ask them if they could not hear the angels sniffing as they leaned forward out of their clouds. My priests are doing 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 forget the vile things they said, but they were unforgettable: he treasured them in his heart, for he could not do else, and when he did speak, it was at first cautiously, though there was little need for caution; for he found to his surprise that everybody knew that the Sadducees did not believe in a future life and very little in the dogma that the Jews were the sect chosen by God, Jahveh. He was their God and had upheld the Jewish race, but for all practical purposes it was better to put their faith henceforth in the Romans, who would defend Jerusalem against all barbarians. It was necessary to observe the Sabbath and to preach its observances and to punish those who violated it, for on the Sabbath rested the entire superstructure of the Temple itself, and all belief might topple if the Sabbath was not maintained, and rigorously. In the houses of the Sadducees Joseph heard these very words, and their crude scepticism revolted his tender soul: he was drawn back to his own sect, the Pharisees, for however narrow-minded and fanatical they might be he could not deny to them the virtue of sincerity. It was with a delightful sense of community of spirit that he returned to them, and in the conviction that it would be well to let pass without protest the observances which himself long ago in Galilee began to look upon with amusement. A sudden recollection of the discussion that had arisen in the yard behind the counting-house, whether an egg could be eaten if it had been laid the day after the Sabbath, brought a smile to his face, but a different smile from of yore, for he understood now better than he had understood then, that this (in itself a ridiculous) question was no more serious than a bramble that might for a moment entangle the garment of a wayfarer: of little account was the delay, if the feet were on the right road. Now the scruple of conscience that the question had awakened might be considered as a desire to live according to a law which, observed for generations, had become part of the national sense and spirit. On this he fell to thinking that it is only by laws and traditions that we may know ourselves--whence we have come and whither we are going. He attributed to these laws and traditions the love of the Jewish race for their God, and their desire to love God, and to form their lives in obedience to what they believed to be God's will. Without these rites and observances their love of God would not have survived. It was not by exaggeration of these laws but by the scepticism of the Sadducees that the Temple was polluted. If the priests degraded religion and made a vile thing of it, there were others that ennobled the Temple by their piety. And as these thoughts passed through Joseph's mind, his eyes went to the simple folk who never asked themselves whether they were Sadducees or Pharisees, but were content to pray around the Temple that the Lord would not take them away till they witnessed the triumph of Israel, never asking if the promised resurrection would be obtained in this world--if not in each individual case, by the race itself--or whether they would all be lifted by angels out of their graves and carried away by 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 the only spiritual value in this world, he was glad to turn away from both Sadducees and Pharisees and mix with them. Sometimes, and to his great regret, he brought about involuntarily the very religious disputations that it was his object to quit for ever when he withdrew himself from the society of the Pharisees. A chance word was enough to set some of them by the ears, asking each other whether the soul may or can descend again into the corruptible body; and it was one day when this question was being disputed that a disputant, pressing forward, announced his belief that the soul, being alone immortal, does not attempt to regain the temple of the body. A doctrine which astonished Joseph, so simple did it seem and so reasonable; and as he stood wondering why he had not thought of it himself, his eyes telling his perplexity, he was awakened from his dream, and his awakening was caused by the word "Essene." He asked for a meaning to be put upon it, to the great astonishment of the people, who were not aware that the fame of this third sect of the Jews was not yet spread into Galilee. There were many willing to instruct him, and almost the first thing he learnt about them was that they were not viewed with favour in Jerusalem, for they did not send animals to the Temple for sacrifice, deeming blood-letting a crime. A still more fundamental tenet of this sect was its denial of private property: all they had, belonged to one brother as much as to another, and they lived in various places, avoiding cities, and setting up villages of their own accord; notably one on the eastern bank of the Jordan, from whence recruiting missionaries sometimes came forth, for the Essenes disdained marriage, and relied on proselytism for the maintenance of the order. The rule of the Essenes, however, did not exclude marriage because they believed the end of the world was drawing nigh, but because they wished to exclude all pleasure from life. To do this, to conceive the duty of man to be a cheerful exclusion of all pleasure, seemed to Joseph wonderful, an exaltation of the spirit that he had not hitherto believed man to be capable of: and one night, while thinking of these things, he fell on a resolve that he would go to Jericho on the morrow to see for himself if all the tales he heard about the brethren were true. At the same time he looked forward to getting away from the seven windy hills where the sun had not been seen for days, only grey vapour coiling and uncoiling 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 winter resort, to be reached easily in a day by a path through the hills, so plainly traced by frequent usage that a guide was not needed. A servant he could not bring with him, for none was permitted in the cenoby, a different mode and colour of life prevailing there from any he ever heard of, but he hoped to range himself to it, and--thinking how this might be done--he rode round the hillside, coming soon into view of Bethany over against the desert. From thence he proceeded by long descents into a land tossed into numberless hills and torn up into such deep valleys that it seemed to him to be a symbol of God's anger in a moment of great provocation. Or maybe, he said to himself, these valleys are the ruts of the celestial chariot that passed this way to take Elijah up to heaven? Or maybe ... His mind was wandering, and--forgetful of the subject of his meditation--he looked round and could see little else but strange shapes of cliffs and boulders, rocks and lofty scarps enwrapped in mist so thick that he fell to thinking whence came the fume? For rocks are breathless, he said, and there are only rocks here, only rocks and patches of earth in which the peasants sow patches of barley. At that moment his mule slid in the slime of the path to within a few inches of a precipice, and Joseph uttered a cry before the gulf which startled a few rain-drenched crows that went away cawing, making the silence more melancholy than before. A few more inches, Joseph thought, and we should have been over, though a mule has never been known to walk or to slide over a precipice. A moment after, his mule was climbing up a heap of rubble; and when they were at the top Joseph looked over the misted gulf, thinking that if the animal had crossed his legs mule and rider would both be at the bottom of a ravine by now. And the crows that my cry startled, he said, would soon return, scenting blood. He rode on, thinking of the three crows, and when he returned to himself the mule was about to pass under a projecting rock, regardless, he thought, of the man on his back, but the sagacious animal had taken his rider's height into his consideration, so it seemed, for at least three inches were to spare between Joseph's head and the rock. Nor did the mule's sagacity end here; for finding no trace of the path on the other 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 mule gave no heed but continued the ascent with conviction and after a little circuit among intricate rocks turned down the hill again and slid into the path almost on his haunches. A wonderful animal truly! Joseph said, marvelling greatly; he guessed that the path lay under the mass of rubble 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, a perfect animal, if he could be persuaded not to walk within ten inches of the brink! and Joseph drew the mule away to the right, under the hillside, but a few minutes after, divining that his rider's thoughts were lost in those strange argumentations common to human beings, the mule returned to the brink, out of reach of any projecting rocks. He was happily content to follow the twisting road, giving no faintest attention to the humped hills always falling into steep valleys and always rising out of steep valleys, as round and humped as the hills that were left behind. Joseph noticed the hills, but the mule did not: he only knew the beginning and the end of his journey, whereas Joseph began very soon to be concerned to learn how far they were come, and as there was nobody about who could tell him he reined up his mule, which began to seek herbage--a dandelion, an anemone, a tuft of wild rosemary--while his rider meditated on the whereabouts of the inn. The road, he said, winds round the highest of these hills, reaching at last a tableland half-way between Jerusalem and Jericho, and on the top of it is the inn. We shall see it as soon as yon cloud lifts. _ |
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