THE CARPENTER’S WIFE: A CAPRICCIO
“Habent sua fata—feminæ.”
Although the Pilgrims’ Way is a shady arcade, yet the ascent from Vicenza was steep enough to be something of a penance that sultry spring evening, and I was weary of the unending pillars and the modern yet already fading New Testament frescoes between them. But I was interested to see which parish or family had paid for each successive section, and what new name for the Madonna would be left to inscribe upon it. For even the Litany of Loreto seemed exhausted, and still the epithets poured out—“Lumen Confessorum,” “Consolatrix Viduarum,” “Radix Jesse,” “Stella Matutina,” “Fons Lachrymarum,” “Clypeus Oppressorum”—a very torrent of love and longing.
At last as I neared the summit of the Way, a fresco flashed upon me the meaning of it all—an “Apparitio B.M.V. in Monte Berico, 1428,” representing the Virgin in all her radiant beauty appearing to an old peasant-woman. So this it was that had raised this long religious road to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain! I remembered the inscription in S. Rocco, telling how 30,000 men had pilgrimed here in 1875—“spectaculum mirum visu.”
But where was the church that had been built over the spot of the Madonna’s appearance? I looked up and sighed wearily. I was only half-way up, I saw, for the road turned sharply to the right, and a new set of names began, and a new set of frescoes—still cruder, for I caught sight of nails driven into the Cross through the writhing frame of the Christ. But even my curiosity in the cornucopia of epithets was worn out. The corner had a picturesque outlook, and on the hill-side a bench stood waiting. Vicenza stretched below me, I could see the Palladian palaces admired of Goethe, the Greek theatre, the Colonnades, the Palace of Reason with its long turtle-back roof; and, beyond the spires and campaniles, the gleam of the Venetian Alps. A church-bell from below sounded for “Ave Maria.” I sat down upon the bench and abandoned myself to reverie. Why should not the Madonna appear to me? I thought. Why this preference for the illiterate? And then I remembered that this very Pilgrims’ Way had served as a battle-ground for the Austrians and the poor Italians of ’48. How these Christians love one another! I mused. And so my mind’s eye flitted from point to point, seeing again things seen or read—in that inconsequent phantasmagoria of reverie—to the pleasant droning of the vesper bell. Presently, telling myself it was getting late, I arose and continued my ascent to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain.
But I looked in vain, as I came up the hill, for the inscriptions and the frescoes. The sun was lower in the west, but the sunshine had grown even sultrier, the sky even bluer, the road even steeper and rougher, and it was leading me on to a gay-flowering plain lying in a ring of green hills amid the singing of larks and the cooing of turtle-doves. And on this plain I saw arising, not the church of my quest, but a far-scattered village, whose small square, primitive houses would have seemed ugly had their roofs not been picturesque with storks and pigeons and their walls embowered in their own vines and fig-trees and absorbed into the pervasive suggestion of threshing-floors and wine-presses and rural felicity. By a central fountain I could perceive a group of barefoot maidens, each waiting her turn with her water-jar. They seemed gaily but lightly clad, in blue and red robes, with bracelets gleaming at their wrists and strings of coins shining from their faces.
Anxious to learn my whereabouts, yet shy of intruding upon this girlish group, I steered my footsteps towards one who, her urn on her shoulder, seemed making her way by a side-track towards a somewhat lonely house on the outskirts, overbrooded by the brow of a hill. She was brown-skinned, I saw as I came near, very young, but of no great beauty save for her girlish grace and the large lambent eyes under the arched black eyebrows.
“Di grazia?” I began inquiringly.
“Aleikhem shalôm,” tripped off her tongue in heedless answer. Then, as if grown conscious I had said something strange, she paused and looked at me, and I instinctively became aware she was a Hebrew maiden. Yet I had still the feeling that I must get back to Vicenza.
“How far is thy servant from the city?” I asked in my best Hebrew.
“From Yerushalaim?” she asked in surprise. “But it is many parasangs. Impossible that thou shouldst arrive at Yerushalaim before the Passover, even borne upon eagles’ wings. Behold the sun—the Sabbath-Passover is nigh upon us.”
Ere she ended I had divined by her mispronunciation of the gutturals and by the Aramaic flavour of her phrases that she was a provincial and that I was come into the land of Canaan.
“What is this place?” I inquired, no less astonished than she.
“This is Nazara.”
“Nazara? Then am I in Galila?”
“Assuredly. Doubtless thou comest from the great wedding at Cana. But thou shouldst have returned by way of Mount Tabor and the town of Endor. Didst thou perchance see my mother at Cana?”
“Nay; how should I know thy mother?” I replied evasively.
She smiled. “Am I not made in her image? But overlong, meseems, have ye all feasted, for it is two days since we expect my mother and brothers.”
“Shall thy servant not carry thine urn?” I answered uneasily.
“Nay, I thank thee. It is not a bowshot to my door. And,” she added with a gentle smile, “my brothers do not carry my burdens; why should a stranger?”
“And how many brothers hast thou?” I asked.
“Some are dead—peace be upon them. But there are four yet left alive—nay,” she hesitated, “five. But our eldest hath left us.”
“Ah, he hath married a wife.”
She flushed. “Nay, but we speak not of him.”
“There must ever be one black sheep in a flock,” I murmured consolingly.
She brightened up. “So my brother Yakob always says.”
“And Yakob should speak with authority on the colour of sheep, and not as the scribes.” I laughed with forced levity.
Her brow wrinkled thoughtfully. “Doubtless Yeshua is possessed of a demon,” she said. “One of our sisters, Deborah, was likewise a Sabbath-breaker, but now that she is old, having nineteen years and three strong sons, she is grown more pious than even our uncle Yehoshuah the Pharisee.”
“Lives she here?”
“Ay, yonder, near my mother’s sister, the wife of Halphaï.”
She pointed towards a battlemented roof, but my eyes were more concerned with her own house, at which we were just arriving. It was a one-storey house, square and ugly like the others, redeemed by its little garden with its hedge of prickly pear, though even this garden was littered with new-made wheels and stools and an olive-wood table.
“Halphaï is gone up for the Passover,” she added. She stopped abruptly. The tinkle of mule-bells was borne to us from a steep track that came to join our slower pathway.
“Lo, my mother!” she cried joyfully; and placing her urn upon the ground, she hastened down the narrow track. I moved delicately, yet not without curiosity, to the flank of the hedge, and presently a little caravan appeared, ambling gently, with the girl walking and chattering happily by the side of her mother, who rode upon an ass. I noticed that the woman, who was small and spare, listened but little to her daughter’s eager talk, and seemed deaf to the home-coming laughter of her four curly-headed sons, who rode their mules sideways, with their legs dangling down like the fringes of their garments. Her shoulders were sunk in bitter brooding, and when a sudden stumbling of her ass made her raise her head mechanically to pull him up, I saw the shimmer of tears in her large olive-tinted eyes. Certainly I should not have called her made in the image of her daughter, I thought at that moment, for the face was sorely lined, and under the cheap black head-shawl I saw the greying hair that was still raven on her arched eyebrows. But doubtless the burden of much child-bearing had worn her out, after the sad fashion of Eastern women.
These reflections were, however, dissipated as soon as born, for a little cry of dismay from the girl brought to my perception that it was the forgotten water-jar that had caused the ass’s stumble, and that the urn now lay overturned, if not shattered, amid a fast-vanishing pool.
The little mishap made her brothers smile. “Courage!” cried the eldest. “Yeshua will fill it with wine instead.” At this all the four rustics broke into a roar of merriment. The youngest, a mere beardless youth, added in his vulgar Aramaic, “What one ass hath destroyed another will make good.”
The little woman turned on him passionately. “Hold thy peace, Yehudah. Who knows but that he did change the water into wine?”
“Let him come and do it here,” retorted the eldest. “Thou hast not forgotten what befell when he essayed his marvels in Nazara. No mighty works could he do here, albeit Shimeon and Yosé, inclining their ears to Zebedee’s foolish wife, were ready to sit on his right and left hand in the Kingdom.”
The two young men who had not yet spoken looked somewhat foolish.
“He laid his hand upon sick folk and healed them,” one said in apology.
“How many?” queried young Yehudah scornfully. “And how many are alive to-day? Nay, Shimeon, if he be Messhiach let him heal us of these Roman tyrants—not go about with their tax-farmers!”
“Peace, Yehudah!” The little mother looked round nervously, and a fresh terror came into those tragic eyes. There was something to me deeply moving in the sight of that shrinking little peasant-woman surrounded by these strong, tall rustics whom she had borne and suckled.
“Let Yeshua hold his peace!” answered the lad angrily, “and not prate about rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. But, God be thanked, a greater Yeshua hath arisen—Ben Abbas—a true patriot, who one day——”
“Aha! Behold my flock at last!” Startled by this sudden new angry voice, I glanced over the hedge, and saw standing on the doorstep cut in the rock, with a hammer in his horny hand, a big red-bearded peasant with bushy eyebrows. “These two days, Miriam, have I awaited thee.”
The little woman slid meekly off her ass. “But, Yussef,” she said mildly, “thou saidst thou wouldst go up for the Paschal sacrifice!”
“And how could I go up to the Holy City with all this work to finish, and not one of my four sons to carry my work to Sepphoris before the Sabbath!” He glared at them as they began to lead their beasts behind the garden. “Halphaï was sorely vexed that I did not company him and join in his lamb-group. And the house is not even ready for Passover at home; I shall be liable to the penalty of stripes.”
“I baked the mazzoth ere I departed,” his wife protested, “and Sarah hath purged the house of leaven.” She patted her daughter’s head.
“Sarah?” he growled, reminded of a fresh grievance. “Sarah should have had a husband of her own. But with these idle sons of mine, feasting and merrymaking while I saw and plane, I cannot even save fifty zuzim for her dowry.”
Sarah blushed and hastened to pick up her urn and carry it back to the fountain.
“Nay, but we have tarried at Kephar Nahum,” said Yakob defensively, as he disappeared.
The carpenter turned on his wife, his eyes blazing almost like his beard. His hammer struck the table in the garden, denting it. “’Twas to see thy loveling thou leftest home!”
The little mother went red and white by turns. “As my soul liveth, Yussef, I knew not he would be at the wedding.”
“He was at the wedding?” he asked, softened by his surprise.
“Ay, he and his disciples.”
“Disciples!” The carpenter sniffed wrathfully. “A pack of fishers and women, and that yellow-veiled Miriam from Magdala.”
“The Magdala woman was not there!” she murmured, with lowered eyes.
“She knew thy kinsman would not suffer her pollution. Ah, Miriam, what a son thou hast brought into the world!”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Thou must not pay such heed to the Sanhedrim messengers. In their circuit to announce the time of the New Moon they gather up all the evil rumours of Galila. This Magdala woman is repentant; her seven devils are cast out.”
“Miriam defends Miriam,” he said sarcastically. “But thou canst not say I trained him not up in the way he should go. Learning could we not afford to give him, but did not thine own brother, Jehoshuah ben Perachyah, teach him Torah, and did I not teach him his trade? His ploughs and yokes were the best in all Galila.”
“And now his followers say his homilies are the best,” urged the poor mother.
“Homilies?” he roared. “Blasphemies! But were his Midraschim Holy Writ itself, I agree with Ben Sameos (his memory for a blessing!) greater is the merit of industry than of idle piety.”
“But why should he work?” cried Yakob, who with Yehudah now reappeared from the stable. “Would that the wife of Herod’s steward followed me!”
“Or even that Susannah ministered to us with her substance!” added Yehudah. “Then I too would teach, take no thought for the morrow!” And he laughed derisively.
“He never took thought for anything save himself,” said Yussef, shaking his head. “Dost thou not remember, Miriam, those three dreadful days when he was lost, as we were returning from his Bar-Mitzvah in Yerushalaim! God of Abraham, shall I ever forget thy heart-sickness! And what was it he answered when we at length found him in the Temple with the doctors? He was about his father’s business! He was assuredly not about my business.”
“The Sabbath and Passover are drawing nigh,” she murmured, and slipped past her sons into the house.
“And what did he answer thee at Kephar Nahum?” her husband called after her. “ ‘Who is my mother?’ The godless scoffer! The Jeroboam ben Nebat! I thank the Lord I did not try to bring him back home. He might have asked, ‘Who is my father?’ ”
There was no reply, but I heard the nervous bustling of a broom. The carpenter turned to Yakob.
“And what said he at Cana?”
“He demanded wine, he and his disciples!”
“Methought he was an Ebionite or an Essene!”
“Nay, as thou saidst, Yeshua was ever a law unto himself. But there was no wine.”
“No wine?” cried Yussef. “So great a wedding company and no wine? Methought the Chosan was rich enough to plant wine-booths all the way from Cana to Nazara, like the Parnass of Sepphoris, and had as many gold and silver vessels as the priests in the Temple.”
“True, my father, but Yeshua had brought with him that vile tax-farmer Levi, who grinds the faces both of rich and poor, and, seeing the spying publican, the bridegroom straightway bade the servants hide the precious flagons and goblets, lest more taxes be squeezed out for the Romans.”
Yussef grinned knowingly. “And so poor Yeshua must go athirst.”
“Nay, but hear. When he clamoured for wine the servants wist not what to do, and my mother said gently to him, ‘They have no wine.’ But Yeshua turned upon her like a lion of Mount Yehudah upon a lamb, and he roared, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee? My hour is not yet come to be a Nazarite.’ ”
The carpenter chuckled. “Now she will know to stay at home. ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ ” he repeated with unction.
“Howbeit, my mother feared that his demon again possessed him, and she besought the servants to do whatsoever he said unto them. But they still held back. Then Yeshua, understanding what it was they feared, said, ‘Bring the water-pots.’ So they went out and brought the earthen pots wherewith we had washed our hands for the meal—albeit Yeshua would not wash his—and lo! they were full of wine.”
The carpenter repeated his knowing grin. “And Levi the publican—what said he?”
“He was the first to cry ‘A miracle!’ ” laughed Yakob, “and Shimeon-bar-Yonah held up his hands and cried, ‘Master of the Universe! Now is Thy glory manifest!’ ”
Yussef joined in his son’s laugh. “Is not Shimeon the lake fisherman?”
“Yea, my father; him whom Yeshua calls the Rock.”
“The Rock, in sooth!” broke in fiery young Yehudah. “Say rather, the Shifting Sand. It was from Shimeon I learned to be a Zealot, and now this recreant Maccabæan is bosom friend of Roman tax-gatherers and babbles of the keys of Heaven.”
“Babble not thyself, little one,” the father rebuked him. He turned to Yakob. “And what said Yeshua after the wine?”
“When he beheld his disciples had drunk new faith in him, he too was flown, and prophesied darkly that he would appear on the right hand of power, with clouds of glory and twelve legions of angels, whereat my mother feared that his madness was come upon him as of yore, and she made us follow in his train as far as his lodging in Kephar Nahum. And we spake privily to Yudas that he should watch over him till his unclean spirit was exorcised.”
“Yudas!” cried Yussef. “What doth an honest Israelite like Yudas in such company? But did I not foretell what would come of all these baptizings of Rabbi Jochanan, all these new foolish sects with their white garments and paddles and ablutions? Canaan is full of wandering madmen. The Torah I had from my father, Eli—peace be upon him!—is holy enough for me, and may God forgive me that I have not gone up to kill the Paschal lamb.”
Yakob lowered his voice. “Thou wouldst have met the madman.”
“What! Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim?”
“Sh! My mother knoweth naught. We spake him secretly as though converted, saying, ‘Lo! we have seen this day how thou workest miracles. But if thou do these things, show thyself to the world. Depart hence and go into Yudæa, that men may see the works that thou doest.’ For there is no man that doeth anything in secret, and he himself seeketh to be known openly. So he is gone up to Yerushalaim!”
The malicious glee on Yakob’s face was reflected in his father’s. “Now shall the mocker be mocked! Even thy learned uncle, Ben Perachyah, they scoff at for his accent, nor will they let him read the prayers. How much less, then, will they listen to Yeshua!”
“And the Pharisees hate him,” said Yakob, “because he hath called them vipers, and the Shammaites for profaning the Sabbath; even the Essenes for not washing his hands before meals.”
“And all the Zealots hold him a traitor!” cried Yehudah with flashing eyes.
“Nor will the Sadducees or the Bœthusians listen to a carpenter’s son,” added Yakob laughingly.
“Shame on thee, Yakob, for fouling thine own well!” And Sarah, returning with her pitcher on her shoulder, went angrily within.
Yakob grew red. “And dost thou think the nobles of Yerushalaim who eat off gold and silver will follow him like fishers?” he called after her. “Say they not already, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazara?’ ”
“Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim?” The little mother had dashed to the door, her eyes wide with terror. The urn she had just taken from her daughter fell from her trembling hand and shattered itself on the rocky doorstep, splashing husband and son.
“Woman!” cried the carpenter angrily, “have more care of my substance!”
“Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim!” she repeated frenziedly.
“Ay, like a good son of Israel. He hath gone up for the Paschal sacrifice. Mayhap,” he added with his chuckle, “he will do wonders with the blood of the lamb. Come, Miriam, let us change our garments and anoint ourselves for the festival.”
He pushed the woman gently within the room, but she stood there as one turned into a pillar of salt, and with an Eastern shrug he went in.
Presently Sarah came and wiped the steps with a clout and gathered up the shards, and then, with a new pitcher on her shoulder, she bent her steps towards the fountain.
I skirted round to meet her on her return, not a little to her amazement; but this time she surrendered her burden to my entreaty, though the ungainly manner in which I poised the pitcher lightened her clouded brow with inner laughter.
“This wandering brother of thine,” I ventured to ask at length, “dost thou think harm will befall him in Yerushalaim?”
Her brow puckered thoughtfully. “Perchance these strangers will believe on him, not knowing as we do that he hath a demon. Yeshua was wroth with us when he came, crying out that a man’s foes are those of his own household, and a prophet is nowhere without honour save in his own country. But how should Yeshua be able to work miracles more than Yakob or Yehudah? When he stood up in our synagogue on the Shabbos to read and expound the prophet Yeshaiah, his lips were touched with the same burning coal—almost he persuaded me to be a heretic—but inasmuch as he could do no miracles, all they in the synagogue were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust him out of the city.” She pointed to the brow of the hill hanging over us. “Up there they led him, that they might cast him down headlong. But out of compassion for my mother, who had followed with the crowd, they let him go, and he returned to Kephar Nahum and continued to make yokes and wheels for his livelihood.”
“And he still works there?”
“Nay, he neglected his craft to preach in the great synagogue built by the centurion—indeed, it is a hot place for work down there by the lake, neither is it so healthy as here in Nazara. Also he had free lodging with the family of Shimeon-bar-Yonah whom they call Petros, while Shalome, the wife of Zebedee, and other women tended him and mended his garments. But his fever took him and he began to wander about all Galila, teaching in the synagogues and preaching his strange gospel?”
“What gospel?”
“How should a girl know? Some heresy anent the Kingdom. And there went out a fame of him through all the region round about, and some said he healed all manner of sickness, so that there followed him great multitudes of people. But many came to us and said, ‘Alas! he is beside himself.’ And the Messengers of the New Moon told us many strange tales, so that my mother was nigh distraught, and when it was bruited that he had said Kephar Nahum shall be thrust down to hell, she journeyed thither, she and my brothers, to bring him home and watch over his affliction. But lo! they could not lay hold of him, for he was surrounded by such a press of people that they could not even come nigh unto him. So she sent a message that his mother and brothers desired to have speech of him. And he answered, ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ and he stretched forth his hand towards his disciples and said, ‘Behold my mother and my brothers.’ So she returned home sorely stricken, and put on mourning garments, and even the birth of her grandchildren gave her no joy. But when came the marriage of her rich kinsman in Cana my father would have her go, being weary of her weeping and thinking to cheer her heart; but lo! her last state is worse than her first, inasmuch as——” She broke off abruptly as we reached the hedge of prickly pear. “But why have I told all this to a stranger?”
“Because I have none else with whom to eat the Passover,” I answered boldly.
She turned and looked at me. Then, taking her pitcher from me with a word of thanks, “I will tell my father,” she answered gravely.
I waited in the little garden, watching a patriarchal tortoise. Presently the carpenter reappeared on the doorstep, a new man in festal garment and mien, his head anointed with oil.
“Baruch Habaa!” he cried cordially. “Since I cannot go up to Yerushalaim, Yerushalaim comes up to me.”
I followed him into the house, duly kissing the mezuzah as I went through the door. The room was small and dark, with bare walls built of little liver-coloured blocks of cemented stone, and the matted floor seemed to hold less furniture than that which littered the garden. The carpenter’s bench had been covered with cushions, and I could see that the divan was used for a bed. Very humble was the house-gear, these earthenware dishes and metal drinking-cups and brass candlesticks on the Passover table, and I saw no ornaments save a few terra-cotta vases, a Hebrew scroll or two, and a rudely painted coffer. The housewife, busy at the hearth with the roasted egg and bone of the ritual, greeted me with wistful eyes and lips that vainly tried to murmur or smile a welcome, and I watched her deft mechanic movements as I sat lightly gossiping with the males over the exegesis of the seventh chapter of Yeshaiah. I told them that the Septuagint translator had darkened the fourteenth verse by loosely rendering עלמה as παρθένος, or “virgin,” instead of “maiden,” but this did not interest them, as they knew no Greek. The room took a more cheerful air when the mother lit the Sabbath candles with a blessing almost as inaudible as her welcome to me, and soon my host began the Haggadah service by holding his hands over the wine-goblet. But Yehudah asked the ritual question, “Why does this night differ from all other nights?” with a touch of sarcasm, and interrupted himself to cry passionately: “How can we celebrate our deliverance from Egypt when the Roman Eagle hangs at the very door of our Temple?” At this the little mother turned yet paler, and every eye glanced uneasily towards the stranger.
“Nay, I am no friend of the Romans,” I said reassuringly.
Yehudah continued the formula sullenly. It was as I had always heard it, save for the question, “Why is the meat all roasted and none sodden or boiled?” But the father had scarcely begun his ritual reply when we heard a loud knocking on the door, the latch was lifted, and in another instant we saw a burly man panting on the threshold, and behind him, more vaguely in the dusk, an agitated woman under a head-shawl.
“O Reb Yussef!” breathed the newcomer.
“Halphaï!” cried the carpenter in amaze. “Art not in Yerushalaim?”
The little mother had sprung to her feet.
“They have killed my Yeshua!” she shrieked.
“Sit down, woman!” said the carpenter sternly.
But she gestured to the figure in the rear: “Speak, my sister, speak.”
“Nay, I will speak,” grumbled her sister’s husband. “Why else did I take horse from the Holy City without hearing the Levites sing or the trumpets blow for the blood-sprinkling? Thy Yeshua came up through the Fountain Gate riding on an ass, and as one flown with new wine.”
“Yea, the wine of the water-pots!” laughed Yakob.
“And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried, ‘Hosanna to the son of David!’ ” He paused for breath, leaving this picture suspended, and I saw a new light leap into the mother’s tragic eyes, a strange exaltation as of a secret hope incredulously confirmed.
“In Yerushalaim?” she breathed. “They cry Hosanna in Yerushalaim?”
“Yea,” said her sister. “And Halphaï told me, even the little children cried, ‘Hosanna to the son of David!’ ”
The carpenter was crumbling a mazzo with nervous fingers; an angry vein swelled on his forehead. “And Pilatus permitted this?” he cried.
“Patience, Reb Yussef!” said Halphaï. “There is more to come. For, growing yet more swollen in his presumption, Yeshua went to the Holy Temple, and, entering the Court of the Gentiles, where sit those who sell the sheep and the oxen and doves, instead of purchasing a sacrifice for his sins, he drove them all out with a scourge of small cords and poured out the changers’ money!”
Horror held the household dumb. I saw Halphaï look round complacently, as though compensated for his hot ride to Nazara. “And ye know what profit Hanan makes out of his bazaars,” he added significantly.
The mother was wringing her hands. “Hanan will never forgive him,” she cried. “They will kill him as they killed Jochanan the Baptizer.”
“Peace, woman,” said Yussef impatiently. “The High Priest and the Elders will but drive him from the city.”
“Nay, nay,” said Halphaï. “They hold him captive. And his disciples are fled. All save Yudas, who led a multitude with swords and staves to find him. And Shimeon-bar-Yonah too is taken, merely because his speech betrayeth him as a Galilæan. How then should I dare stay, who have the ill-hap to be married to his mother’s sister!”
The little mother was moving towards the door. Her husband stopped her. “Whither goest thou?”
“To saddle the ass. I must to Yerushalaim!”
“Thou!”
“Who else? Shall that yellow-veiled woman of Magdala give him comfort?”
“And will he take comfort from thee? Doth he not teach his followers to hate their father and their mother? And doth he not scoff at the womb that bare him?”
“Not he, but his demon,” she answered obstinately, and pressed forward again.
His brow grew black. “But it is the Sabbath!”
“It is my first-born.”
“Thou speakest more foolishly than Job’s wife. Now we see whence Yeshua sucked his blasphemies.”
“It is my first-born!” she repeated more frenziedly.
“Thy first-born! But did he keep to-day the Fast of the First-born?”
“Let her go, Yussef,” pleaded Halphaï. “As Rabbi Hillel taught (his memory for a blessing), the Sabbath was handed to man, not man to the Sabbath!”
“And the wife to the husband,” retorted Yussef, “not the husband to the wife. I forbid thee, Miriam, to disturb the Passover peace. Go—and I put thee away publicly!”
She blenched and sank back on the divan. “Peace?” she moaned. “Thou callest this peace!”
“Obey thy lord, Miriam! I will go.” And Halphaï’s wife stooped and kissed her.
Miriam burst into loud sobs. She caught her sister to her breast, and the two women mingled their tears.
The carpenter shrugged his shoulders. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hast not made me a woman,” he said drily.
The walls of the little room seemed higher, the light stronger, the prayer devouter, the company more numerous. Instead of the two little Sabbath candles and the earthenware dishes, I saw a barbaric blaze of gold and rich stuffs and jewels, and my eyes blinked before the flames of tall candles shining in gold candlesticks on a magnificent altar, in the niche of which stood a black cedar-wood idol, crowned and holding a crowned doll, and wrapped in a marvellous ornate vestment widening out like a bell. Over my head around the rough, liver-coloured stone walls hung lamps and bronzes and candles held by Cupids, and gilded busts, and medallions and hearts and bronze reliefs and pictures, and even a cannon-ball, and at my feet surged the white head-shawls of prostrate worshippers, like a great wave breaking on the crimson steps of the altar.
And gradually I became aware that the room had now doors on the right and the left, and these of bronze and wondrously wrought after the fashion of the Renaissance, through which a stream of worshippers poured, kissing the bronze as they passed in and out. And following one stream and vaguely looking for Miriam and her husband and the Passover table, I was borne back into the room, through another door, and now found myself in a narrow and still more crowded space at the back of the altar, where the gorgeous jewelled black idol with her doll stood in her niche in the gleam of ever-burning silver lamps, and I saw a golden eagle in a yellow sun flying over her head, and over the eagle two gilded angels holding a glittering wreath, and still higher, through a hole in the roof, as riding on clouds, a blue-mantled Mother and Child among a soaring escort of angels, while near the floor I beheld a large metal box with a yawning slit, into which a kneeling, weeping press of people rained money.
“Il Santo Camino, signore!” said an ingratiating voice, and looking up I perceived at my side a beadle with a wand.
“The holy kitchen?” I repeated in amaze.
“Si, signore. Here is the hearth at which the Madonna cooked for the Holy Family.”
He pointed to the money-box, and I now indeed recognised the fireplace whence Miriam had taken the roasted bone and egg. But it had moved to another side of the living-room, unless I was confused by the altar planted in the place of the Passover table.
“Then this is the house of Nazara?” I said in a whisper, for, dazed as I was, I feared to disturb the worshippers.
“Sicuro!” He smiled reassuringly. “La Santa Casa! Here the Holy Family abode in the peace and love of the Holy Ghost. And here there is Plenary Indulgence every day in the year. Ecco! One of their pots!” And he produced a terra-cotta vessel, not unlike one I had seen the little olive-eyed woman wiping, save that it was lined with gold and adorned with bas-reliefs of the Manger and the Annunciation.
“That must have cost money,” I murmured feebly.
“Già,” he assented complacently. “And behold the Madonna Nera, carved by St. Luke. Her attire is worth 1,800,000 lire.”
“Come?” I gasped.
He spurned a sobbing peasant-woman with his foot and cleared a space with his staff that he might plant me at the centre of the money-box.
“Passi,” he said pleasantly, seeing I hesitated to displace these passionate souls. “Regard the jewels and precious stones of her robe, the diamonds, emeralds, and pearls in her crown, the collars of Oriental pearl, the rings, the crosses of topaz and diamonds, the Bambino’s diamond necklace, the ring on his finger, the medallion with the great diamonds given by the King of Saxony——” He trolled off the glittering catalogue, on and on, in a joyous, dominant voice, to which the sighs and groans of the worshippers made an undertone. Countesses and Cardinals, Popes and Marchese had vied in dressing the idol, and decorating the kitchen. “And you must see the Treasury,” he wound up. “Gifts from all the royal houses of Europe to Our Lady of Loreto!”
“Loreto?” I repeated dully.
He looked at me sharply, as at a scoffer.
“But how did the Holy House get to Loreto?” I added hastily.
“It was carried by angels,” he answered simply.
“But when?”
“On the night of the tenth of December in the year 1294 from the bearing of the Virgin.”
“Who saw it carried?”
“You are an Englishman,” he answered briefly. “You shall see it in English.”
He made a path through the praying crowd, and I followed him without, and my breath failed me as I became aware that the Holy House was inclosed in a precious outer casing of marble, carved with beautiful reliefs of the life and death of the Virgin, holding all round its four lofty walls niches with statues of prophets and sybils and other gleaming altars, each with its surf of worshippers, and that this marvellous screen, so rich in the work of the Masters, was itself engirdled by a vast high-domed church with rich-dyed windows, gilded like a Venetian palace and full of arches and pillars and altars and chapels and mosaics and statues and busts and thick-populated frescoes, while from the centre of the choir windows a haloed Lady in a blue mantle gazed down upon her white-hooded ghostly worshippers filling the nave. And all around her from the interlacing of the arches and from the painted walls haloes gleamed like a firmament of crescent moons.
“Behold there!” said the beadle, pointing with his staff, and I saw that round the projecting base of the marble walls ran two deep parallel furrows. “Worn in the stone by the knees of six centuries of pilgrims,” he said pleasantly. “Of course there are not many to-day, being an ordinary Sunday, but in the year there are a hundred thousand, and in the season of the pilgrimages, or on the Feast of the Assumption——” An expressive gesture wound up the sentence.
We passed along the aisles, just peeping into the copious chapels, all pervaded by the ubiquitous Maria in picture or mosaic, in statue or bas-relief—Maria Immaculate, Maria the Virgin, Maria the Mother of God, Maria the Compassionate, Maria the Mediatress, Maria Crowned; and the marriage of Maria, and her death, and the visit to Elizabeth, and the Annunciation, and her family tree, and the disputes of the Sorbonne over the dogmas concerning her. And as we walked the organ began pealing, and priests and choristers chanted.
“Ecco!” cried the beadle, as he stopped in the left aisle and pointed to a great black-framed slate between two altars. “In your own English!”
I looked and read the headline of white letters:
“The Wondrous Flitting of the Kirk of our Blest Ledy of Lavreto.”
Underneath ran in parallel columns these two sentences:
“By decree of the Meikle Werthy Monsignor Vincent Casal of Bolonia Ruler of This Helly Place Vnder the protection of the Mest Werthy Cardinal Moroni.”
“I Robert Corbington Priest of the Companie of Jesvs in the Zeir MDCXXXV Heve Trvlie translated the premisses of the Latin Storie Hangged vp in the seyd Kirk.”
And underneath these parallel statements were the words, “To the Praise and Glorie of the Mest Pvre and Immaculate Virgin.”
Then began the story proper:
“The Kirk of Lavreto was a caumber of the hovse of the blest Virgin near Jerusalem in the towne of Nazaret in which she was borne and treined vp and greeted of the angel and hairin also Conceaved and norisht har sonne Jesvs.”
My eye ran impatiently over these known details and lighted at a lower point of the great dimly lit slate.
“Pavl de Sylva an eremyt of micle godliness, wha woned in a cell near by this Kirk whair daily he went to mattins, seyd that for ten zeirs, one the eight of September, twelve hovrs before day, he saw a light descend frem heaven vpon it, whilk he said was by the bu weathair shawed har selfe [sic] one the feest of har birth. In proof of all whilk twa verteous men of the seyd towne of Recanah many times avowed to me Rvler of Terreman and Govenor of the forseyd Kirk as followeth. Ane of them, nemmed Pavle Renallvci, affirmed that his grandsyres grandsyre sawe when the angels broght it over sea setting it in the forseyd wood and hed oft frequented it thair, the other nemmed Francis Prior sicklik seyd that his Grandsyre, being a hunder and twaintie zeirs awd hed also meikle havnted it in the same place and for a mere svr testimony that it had beine thair he reported that his grandsyres grandsyre hed a hovse beside it wharin he dwelled and that in his dayes it was beared by the angels frae thence to the hill of they tweye brothers whar they set it as seyd. . . .”
“The angels seem to have carried it about more than once,” I interrupted.
“Già,” said the beadle. “At first they placed it on the hill of Picino, in a grove of laurels which bowed before it and remained in adoration. But so many thieves and assassins took cover under them to plunder the pious pilgrims of their offerings that the laurels raised their heads again, and after a stay of only eight months the Holy House moved.”
“And came here?”
“Not yet. It moved first to a pleasant hill belonging to the brothers Artici, ancestors of Leopardi.”
“Ah, the hill of they tweye brothers,” I murmured.
“But the treasure heaped upon it dazzled them. They might have fought over it like Cain and Abel. So the house moved on.”
“And yet even Leopardi chanted the Madonna,” I said.
“Lo credo,” said the beadle, unastonished. “And there is still an inscription on the hill, but it does not console the neighbourhood any more than the chapel at Ravinizza.”
“The chapel at Ravinizza?”
“Did I not say? That was where it stopped first—near Dalmatia.”
“Quite a wandering Jew-house,” I murmured.
“That was in 1291, when the Holy Land fell into the power of the Infidel”
“Ah, that was why it left Palestine!”
“Naturally. And you may imagine the agony of the Dalmatians when they returned from the Crusades to find the Holy House no longer in Ravinizza. Even to-day the pilgrims sail out in little boats singing, ‘Return to us, Maria, with thy house!’ But how could it return to Dalmatia, seeing that seventy-five years before it left Palestine the blessed St. Francis had foretold its coming here by his word Picenum, which is a region on our side of the Adriatic, and being, moreover, interpreted by Latin scholars is a prophetic acrostic?”
“It seems a pity the house did not come straight to Loreto,” I ventured.
“We are fortunate it did not go straight back to Nazareth after the battle of Lepanto,” he said simply. “It was after our Lady’s victory over the Turks that this marble screen was placed around it. Here is the Treasury.” And thrusting roughly through the press of congregants, he opened a door and ushered me into a palatial room where under the ceiling-frescoes of Pomerancio of Pesaro I saw what seemed a vast bazaar of every precious article known to humanity.
“The New Treasury,” he said apologetically. “The old treasure was seized by Napoleon. It was worth 96,000,000 lire.” He looked sad.
“And how much is this worth?”
“Only 4,000,000.” And the unctuous catalogue recommenced. “A Genoese family had given this case of jewellery; it was worth 100,000 lire. These were the copes and vestments of Pio Nono (150,000 lire). This was the diadem of Maria, Queen of Spain, wife of Carlo IV—behold the amethysts, the brilliants, the rubies. These Oriental pearls were from the Princess of Würtemberg. Each pearl cost 150,000 lire and there were forty-three pearls—the signore could calculate for himself. This diamond tiara with an Oriental pearl in the centre was given by Maria Louisa, Duchessa di Parma. It was worth 420,000 lire.”
“Restoring some of her first husband’s plunder,” I interrupted.
“Già. And the Madonna Nera was given back too. And this pearl and gold covering for her is from Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria. It is worth 12,000 lire. And Giuseppe Napoleon’s wife gave us this monstrance. And this cup is from Prince Maximilian of Austria, and these regalia——”
The list went on, and I studied a coral model of the Santa Casa with the Mother and Son riding on the roof, while from the church came a boy’s voice soaring heavenward.
“And do you refuse offerings from those who are not royal?” I broke in at last.
“Ah, no,” he said seriously. “See! In that glass case are a thousand rings from a thousand pilgrims, and this standard is from a pilgrim of Budapest, and this little wooden ship—the Maria—was given by a sailor, and this pearl showing the Madonna and her Son was found inside a fish by a fisherman, and these ornaments painted with the juice of grass are the work of priests, and this beautiful bronze candelabrum was given by the Guild of Blacksmiths of Bologna. A Capuchin father from South America brought us these great bouquets of flowers made of the wings of Brazilian birds, and a Roumanian noble this little Byzantine brass Madonna, and Prince Carraciolo of Naples——”
“Basta!” I cried hurriedly, for he was back in the “Almanach de Gotha,” and, slipping a large piece of silver with a royal portrait on it into his hand, I moved towards the door.
His face shone. “But you have not seen the cups in the Santa Casa from which the Holy Family drank. And their little bells, and——”
“I have seen enough,” I said.
“And the cannon-ball,” he went on in undiminished gratitude. “The cannon-ball which shattered the pavilion of Pope Julius II when he was besieging a city, but which by the grace of the Blessed Virgin left him un——”
I escaped into the crowd of snooded peasant women and worked my way along the aisle till I stood outside the portal under a gigantic Madonna and Child.
But the beadle was beside me.
“Go and look at the Fontana della Santa Casa.” And he pointed in parting gratitude to the centre of the piazza. “Bellissima!”
I did not go, but I looked at the great marble fountain with its grotesque beasts and Cupids and basins, and remembering the humble village fountain at which the carpenter’s daughter had filled her urn, I turned sharply to the right and found myself descending a long sordid street of shops and stalls, all doing a busy trade—despite the Sunday—in crosses, rosaries, crucifixes, chaplets, picture-postcards, medals, and all the knick-knacks of holiness. Sometimes through open windows of the ugly one-storey houses I caught sight of the landscape below—the path descending to the sea, bordered with buttercups and a-flutter with birds, the rolling olive-plains, the strip of blue sea, the wonderful headland. Never had I seen a lovelier view shut out by meaner buildings. With its patches of refuse and its dreary shops and booths it seemed the ugliest street in all Italy, bearing on its face the mark of its bastard origin—a city grown up not from natural healthy human life, but for the exploitation of a miracle.
And this it was that drew gold like water from the crowned heads of Europe. And this it was that had drawn hither even Descartes, the first Apostle of Philosophic Doubt. Surely “Non cogito, ergo sum,” is the motto of Faith, I thought.
I stood in a vast ancient market-place among canvas-covered stalls, by a lovely fountain with a smiling little Bacchus that faced an old cathedral, and I gazed like ten thousand others at a lovely open-air pulpit that rose in the shadow of a tall campanile. From a bronze capital it rose, girdled with beautiful marble reliefs of dancing children by Donatello and protected from the sun by a charming circular roof, and in this delectable coign of vantage stood a priest holding something that fevered the perspiring mob.
“La sacra cintola! La sacra cintola!”
I knew what the Virgin’s girdle would be like, for had I not seen her handing it to St. Thomas in Lippo Lippi’s picture in this same town of Prato, as she flew up to heaven in the radiance of her youth and beauty, standing on cherubs’ heads and escorted by angels? But now so far as I could see this tasselled belt, it seemed to correspond ill with the waist measurement of the little mother of Nazara.
Some white pigeons fluttered round the priest’s head and settled on the pulpit, and a great sigh of ecstasy went up from the people.
I looked round at the little Bacchus. But he was still smiling.
I stood before an altar in a little church, but this time a sweet-faced woman in a wimple stood beside me.
“The wall is behind the altar,” she said. “And once a year the miraculous image of the Madonna of the Bed is shown to the people of Pistoja and the pilgrims, exactly as Our Lady of the Graces impressed it on this piece of wall here when she appeared to the sick girl. Very beautiful is she in her crown and mantle, clasping to her arms the crowned Bambino as she flies upwards.”
“And where is the bed?”
“The bed was removed from this sanctuary, which it blocked up disproportionately. A separate little chapel was built for it.”
We passed to the bed-chapel by way of the old cloisters of the Ospedale, and saw in a small room a heavy brownish wooden bed with a red quilt, made as for an occupant. A Madonna and Child was painted on the headpiece, and a Madonna and Child at the foot, and a Madonna and Child hung on the wall.
“And when was the miracle wrought?” I asked.
“In 1336.”
The very year of the death of Cino, the poet of Pistoja and the friend of Dante, I remembered. And Dante and Cino had receded into the dim centuries while this bed with its prosaic quilt and pillows stood stolid, inscribed at head and foot with inscriptions dated 1336 and 1334, begging me to pray for the souls of Condoso Giovanni and Fra Ducchio.
“Here,” explained the sweet-faced sister, “the poor girl had lain many long years, incurable, when one day the Virgin appeared in dazzling beauty, holding the Child, and told two little boys who happened to be in the hospital to fetch brother Jacopo della Cappa. The venerable brother, being busy confessing, refused to be disturbed, whereupon the Virgin sent a second message bidding him come at once, for she desired him to predict a pestilence in Pistoja, of which he would die in a month. So he came forthwith, but he had scarcely entered the room when the dazzling apparition disappeared. But she left the invalid girl in perfect health, and her holy image on the wall.”
“And did Fra Jacopo duly die?”
“To the day. And so great was the plague that there was scarcely any one left to administer the last office.”
“As disproportionate as the bed to the church,” I thought, “to kill off all Pistoja and save one bedridden girl.” But how utter such a thought to this sweet-faced sister?
“Since then the bed and the image on the wall have wrought many miracles,” she said. “The blind have had their sight, the deaf their hearing, the paralysed their limbs. That was why the name was changed from Our Lady of the Bed to Our Lady of the Graces. And countless were the pilgrims that came. But in 1780 the wicked Scipione Ricci, who was a secret Jansenist, was made our bishop, and he tried to destroy the faith in our sanctuary and in the Girdle of Prato. But our neighbours of Prato rose against him, rushed into the cathedral, smashed his episcopal chair, and sacked his palace. He had to resign his bishopric, and so our faith was purged of the heretic, and Maria was avenged. Ah, that jubilee of her Immaculate Conception in 1904! It was a day of Paradise.”
Again a haze disturbs my vision. For a moment I see the little olive-eyed Jewess of Nazara, racked between husband and son, wringing her impotent hands; then my vision clears, and I am reading a printed Italian prayer before a chapel of the Madonna in a mighty fane.
“To the Holy Immaculate Virgin of Hope Venerated in the Basilica of S. Frediano
“Kneeling before you, Immaculate Virgin, Mother of God, consoler of the afflicted, refuge of sinners, we pray you to turn upon us your looks full of goodness, compassion, and love. You see all our spiritual and temporal needs. Obtain from your divine Son sincere contrition for sin, light to know the truth, force to conquer temptations, help to believe and act as true Christians, patience in tribulations, peace of heart, holy perseverance to the end. Obtain for us that there may remain far from us disease, pestilence, hunger, war, earthquakes, fires, drought, flood, sudden death. Take this City under your particular protection, preserve it, defend it, cause ever to reign therein the spirit of religion and of concord, and in private families mutual charity, domestic content, and good morals. . . . Whoever will devoutly recite this will acquire forty days’ Indulgence already conceded by His Most Reverend Excellence Monsignore the Archbishop Filippo Santi.
“Lucca, 1848.”
I seemed to be back in Asia on a burning June day fifteen hundred years before this prayer was written, much pushed about by the crowd that surged round a church.
“Is it the Whitsuntide service?” I asked a priest at last in the Greek I heard on all sides.
“Nay; art a barbarian or a worshipper of the Temple of Diana that thou knowest not the Church of the Theotokos, and the great Imperial Council of Bishops that is sitting there to avenge the insults of Nestorius to the Virgin?”
“What insults?” I murmured.
“Surely thou hast snored in the cave in the Pion Hill with our Seven Sleepers! This blasphemous Patriarch of Constantinople denies our Lady the title Theotokos, would argue that she is not Mother of God, but that the Christ born through her was only the human part of Him, not the Eternal Logos.” His voice trembled, his beady eyes flamed with passion. “And he dares come defend his thesis here—in Ephesus, where the Holy Virgin lies buried! But our saintly Cyril of Alexandria hath drawn up twelve anathemas and will stamp him out as he stamped out that minx Hypatia.”
“Is Cyril here too, then?”
“Ay, and what an ambrosial homily he preached! ‘Hail, Mary, Mother of God, spotless dove! Hail, Mary, perpetual lamp at which was kindled the Sun of Justice! Hail, Mary! Thanks to Thee, the archangels rejoice and sing; thanks to Thee, the Magi followed the star; thanks to Thee the college of Apostles was established. . . .’ ” His voice died away in reminiscent ecstasy.
“Then Cyril and Nestorius are now in debate?”
“Nay, the heretic shrinks from appearing—he pretexts that all the bishops are not arrived, and he induced the Emperor’s commissioner to protest against the sitting. But as thou seest, the Council is going on—hath been going on from early morn—there are two hundred bishops.”
“There are only a hundred and fifty,” put in a voice. “It is scandalous.”
“Ay,” assented another voice. “Where is the Patriarch of Antioch?”
The priest turned on the Nestorians. “It is beasts like you with whom Paul fought here,” he said.
“Beast thyself,” retorted a physician in a long robe, “to suggest that God could be contained in the womb.” It was the beginning of a scuffle that grew to a bloody battle between the Nestorian minority and the orthodox. Daggers and scimitars gleamed in the air. I saw a group of Nestorians take refuge in a church, but fly from it again, leaving a trail of bleeding corpses along the aisle. The survivors made for the harbour, hoping doubtless for safety in the multitude of boats and ships.
And ever thicker grew the crowd surging round the Council-chamber, till at last as the long summer day closed, a rumbling as of distant thunder was heard from within—“Anathema! Anathema!” And the cry passed to the crowd—“Anathema! Anathema!”—till the whole firmament seemed to crash and rock with it and men cheered and danced and tossed their weapons in air. And as the venerable figures began to troop out and the word came that Nestorius was deposed, a thousand torches leapt as by magic into flame, and men escorted the Bishops to their lodgings, leaping and singing, and lo! round the whole city blazed illuminations and bonfires.
And my eyes, piercing through the future, beheld Italian bottegas with immortal Masters and Pupils, turning out through the centuries portraits of the Madonna and Child, to be blazoned henceforward inseparable, a symbol of the true faith: delectable, innumerable, filling the whole earth with their glory.
The close smell of the studios gave way again to the odour of crowded humanity and I was in the arena of Seville. But never, not even at Easter, had I seen the populace so joyous, the ladies shrouded in such rich mantillas or flirting such precious fans, the picadors so gaily caparisoned, the toreadors so daring, the bulls maddened with so many banderillas or disembowelling so many horses. It was the mutual ecstasy of slaughter. And from all parts of the city penetrated the chiming of bells, while the thunder of festive cannon sometimes drowned even the roar of the ring. And at every thrilling stroke or perilous charge there came from parted lips, “Ave Maria purissima” or “Viva nuestra Señora,” and from all around rose the instinctive reply: “Sin peccado concebida.”
Gradually, as I listened to the conversation in the intervals of the bull fights, I became aware of the sense of the Fiesta. All this overflow of religious rapture sprang not from the bulls but the Bull—Regis Pacifici—which after centuries of passionate controversy had at last been launched by Paul V in this sixteen hundred and seventeenth year from the bearing of the Virgin, forbidding the opponents of Immaculate Conception to sustain their doctrine in public. Maria had been conceived without sin. The last flaw had been removed from her perfection.
“Heaven rewards us for expelling the last of the Moors,” cried a lovely Señora with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “And now that we have purged Spain and placed her and her mighty possessions under the protection of the Immaculate Conception, her future shall be even more glorious than her past.”
But my reply was drowned by the roar of the ring as the dead bull was trailed off at a gallop.
“Ave Maria purissima!”
“Sin peccado concebida!”
I am still in Spain, watching Señor Bartholomé Estéban Murillo polish off his Madonnas for country fairs or South American convents. Presently under the guidance of Señor Pacheco, Holy Inquisitor of pictures, he paints the popular dogma of the day, in the shape of little angels floating below a lovely lady in a blue mantle standing with clasped hands on the earth-ball, and the scene shifts to France where two centuries later the picture is purchased at a fabulous price by the Louvre, just before Pio Nono from his refuge at Gaeta publishes the Bull Ineffabilis, definitely declaring that the freedom of the Virgin from original sin is a divine revelation. Cheap coloured pictures of the “Immaculate Conception” multiply, and Bernadette, a pious young shepherdess in the French Pyrenees, beholds in a grotto by a spring a White Lady, veiled from head to foot, with a cerulean floating scarf, a chaplet with golden links, and two golden roses on her naked feet, who announces herself as “The Immaculate Conception” and demands a Procession to her shrine.
And before my eyes unrolls the long panorama, painted in immortal colours by the epical brush of Zola: the mushroom Lourdes of hotels and holy shops replacing the rude village, the Hospital of our Lady of Sorrows, the crowned statue of our Lady of Salvation, the Fathers of the Grotto, the Blue Sisters, the Church of the Rosary, the Basilica swathed in splendid banners, glittering with golden hearts innumerable, and jewels and marbles and marvellous lamps; the unending masses and litanies, the three hundred thousand pilgrims a year, the thaumaturgic bathing pools, unclean, abominable, the White Train rolling through the night with its hideous agglomeration of human agonies, amid ecstatic canticles to the Madonna, the thirty thousand tapers winding round in leagues of flame to the rhythm of interminable invocations, the perpetual thunder of supplication breaking frenziedly on the figure of the Madonna framed in the ever-blazing Grotto.
The thunder continued but it was again the roar of an arena, though by the towered old palaces round the great semi-circle of cobbled piazza and by the fountain with the bas-reliefs of Christian virtues I knew I was back in Italy, in my beloved Siena. But what was this smoky flame that shot skyward and what was this tree near the Christian fountain that they were breaking up to throw on the bonfire? What was this dreadful sport that had replaced the Palio?
In a vast pyre burnt a great huddle of writhing figures, whose shrieks were drowned by the fiendish roar of the drunken mob.
“Viva Maria! Viva Maria!”
And I remembered that Siena had peculiarly dedicated itself to the Holy Mother, was the civitas Virginis, and that the Madonna was its feudal suzerain, formally presented with the keys of its gates. Visions from the old chronicles floated before me—the dedication of 1260, the weeping Syndic in his shirt, a rope round his neck, prostrate with the Bishop before the altar of the Virgin, or walking behind her as she was carried in the great barefoot procession to the chanting of Ave Marias; and the victory over Florence that duly followed, when, throwing her white mantle of mist over her city, she enabled her faithful feudatories to slay ten thousand Florentines “as a butcher slays animals in a slaughter house,” so that the Malena ran bank-high with blood, and the region, polluted by the carcases of eighteen thousand horses, was abandoned to the wild beasts, and coins were struck in her honour; and the renewed dedications whenever the Commune was in peril, the gorgeous processions and “Te Deums,” the great silk standard showing the Madonna rising into heaven over the city, the Cardinal, the Prior, the Captain of the People, the Signoria in violet and cloaked as on Good Friday, the trumpeters trumpeting in the striped Duomo, the feudal keys in a silver basin, the fifty poor damsels in white, dowered annually so long as the Virgin did her duty as suzerain——
But the shrieks from the bonfire brought me back to the moment.
“Whom are they burning?” I cried in horror.
“Only Jews,” replied my neighbour reassuringly, and indeed, I could now distinguish the Hebrew death-cries of the victims.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.”
“We burn them and the Tree of Liberty together!” my neighbour chuckled. “No godless French Republic for us!” A fierce yell from the crowd underlined his remark. He craned forward, beaming, exalted.
“They have found another! O Blessed Virgin of Comfort, they have found another!”
And I perceived, dragged along towards the pyre by her greying hair, a little olive-eyed Jewish mother, whose worn face I seemed to recognise under her dishevelled head-shawl.
“Viva Maria! Viva Maria! Viva la Madre di Dio!”
The spectacle was too horrible. With a convulsive shudder I shook off these visions and rose, cramped, to my feet. The sun was dipping beyond the mountains of Vicenza, the peaceful bell from below was still tolling, the air was cool and delicious. Now I could continue my climb to the church of Our Lady of the Mountain. And the loving epithets recommenced—“Debellatrix Incredulorum,” “Janua Coeli,” “Turris Davidica,” without pause, without end. And as I walked, other of her countless names began crowding upon me, from “Our Lady of Snows” to “Our Lady of Sorrows,” from “Our Lady of the Porringer” to “The Queen of the Angels,” and all the symbols of her, from the Pomegranate to the Sealed Book, from the Dove to the Porta Clausa; and all the myriads of churches and altars that had been dedicated to her from Rome to Ecuador—from Milan Cathedral with its hundred spires to the humblest wayside shrine of Sicily or Mexico—and all the feasts, all the “Months of Maria,” all the Pilgrimages, with all the medals and missals, all the effigies in wood or wax or bronze, all the marbles and mosaics, from the crude little black sacrosanct Byzantine figures to the exquisitely tender marble Pietà of Michelangelo, and all the convents and orders she had created, all the Enfants de Marie, and Serviti di Maria, and Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and all the hymns, antiphons, litanies, lections, carols, canticles. The air was full of organ sounds and the melody of soaring voices. “Ave Maris Stella” they sang, and “Salve Regina” and “Stabat Mater,” and then in an infinite incantation, sounding and resounding from all the spaces of the world: “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis! Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!” And her figure floated before me, pure, radiant, loving, as it has floated before millions of households for hundreds of years, consoling, blessing, vitalising.
And I thought of her long adventure to reach this marvellous apotheosis: in what a strange little source this mighty river had begun; how that looseness of the Septuagint translator in rendering the Hebrew for “maiden” by “virgin” in an utterly irrelevant passage of Isaiah had led to Mary’s virginity; how she had remained a virgin through all the vicissitudes of her married life, Joseph turning into a man of eighty with children by his former wife, or even remaining virgin himself, the brothers of Jesus changing into his cousins; how her son had been born as a ray of light or even as an illusive appearance; how, with the growth of theology and Mariolatry and nunneries and monasteries, she had grown holier and holier, immaculate, impeccable, a model to men and maidens, the Queen of Heaven, mighty beyond all the saints, giving four feast-days to the Church, entering into the liturgy, redeeming souls from purgatory on Assumption Day, and even sustaining the saintly with her milk; how her final purification from the taint of original sin had been a stumbling block for the more rigid theologians, St. Bernard opposing the festival, Aquinas and the Dominicans denying the dogma against Duns Scotus and the Franciscans; but how the “intellectuals”—so serviceable to the mob when their logic found contorted reasons for the popular faith—were sooner or later swept aside, the harsh definers of heresy themselves left heretics, when they ran counter to the popular emotion, the popular festivals, the popular instinct for an ideal of purity and perfection. What a curious play and interplay of schoolman-logic and living emotion, working ceaselessly through the centuries, combining or competing to re-shape and sublimate the carpenter’s wife till she was wrought to the mould of the popular need, her very parents, unknown to the Gospels, becoming, as Joachim and Anna, the centre of a fresh cycle of legends, pictures, Church festivals. And what uncountable volumes of monumental learning and jejune controversy, from Augustus and Anselm and the venerable Bede to the two thousand and twelve pages of Carlo Passaglia of Lucca, the respondent to Renan!
And my thoughts turned from the theologians to the poets and painters, to the Vergine Bella e di sol vestita—the beautiful Apocalyptic Virgin, clothed with the sun—of Petrarch, and the weeping Virgin of Tasso, and the Vergine Madre Figlia del tuo Figlio of Dante, and the images in all these forms created by the artists, for whom the Madonna sufficed to open all the mansions of art; who could cluster all the poetry of the world round her glory or her grief, were it rural loveliness or the beauty of lilies, or lofty architecture, or space-rhythm, or begemmed and brocaded attire, or the sculptural nude; who set her rich-carved throne, adorned with arabesques or hued in strange green and gold, amid palatial pillars under diapered ceilings or within glamorous landscapes, or in the bowers of roses or under the shadow of lemon-trees; who even crowned her with the Papal tiara.
But none of these images would stay with me: for not even the triple crown, surmounted by the golden globe and cross, not even this symbol of temporal, spiritual, and purgatorial authority, could banish the worn face of the carpenter’s wife under the cheap head-shawl, the little olive-eyed mother in Israel, in whose ears sounded and resounded the terrible words: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”