Command

by William McFee

But that evening he was absorbed in his emotions, saturated with the rich and coloured shadows of the valley, the tremendous loom of the mountains and the vast obscurity of the sea. And as they crossed the road he put his hand on her shoulder while Esther moved on ahead in the dusk to prepare the evening meal. And they stood for a moment in the road, facing the huge lift of the earth towards the great golden stars, silent in the oncoming darkness. They heard the deep booming bark of a watch-dog far up the valley, a sound like the clang of metal plates on earthen floors. She looked at him with a characteristic quick turn of the head, her body poised as though for flight.

"Promise you will come," he said thickly, holding to her tightly as though she were the stronger. "Can't you understand? I must go, and I can't go without you, leave you here. Promise!"

She watched him steadily as he said this, her eyes bright in the dusk and charged with that enigmatic expression of waiting and of knowledge beyond his imagining. It almost took her breath away at times, this consciousness of events of which he knew nothing. He wanted her to go with him to that terrible distant land where already the multitudes, starved out by the victorious Germans, were devouring their own children, even carrying their dead back in ships.... And he did not know.

"Promise!" he muttered, straining her to him. She looked up the dim dusty road, along which weary hearts had wandered for so many centuries, and a sudden wave of pity for him swept over her. She saw him for a moment as a pathetic and solitary being trembling upon the brink of a tragic destiny, a being who had come up out of the sea to do her bidding and who would sail out again into the chaos of tempests and war, and vanish. And it was her sudden perception of this dramatic quality in their relations that brought about the brief passionate tenderness. It was her way, to give men at the very last a perfect memory of her, to carry away with them into the shadows.

"Yes," she said gently, and her strong and vigorous body relaxed against his as he held her close. "How could you leave me here, alone? Mon Dieu! We will go!"

And for a moment she meant it. She meant to go. She saw herself, not in England it is true, but as the central figure in a gorgeous pageant of fidelity, a tragic queen following a beggar man into captivity in a strange land of her own bizarre imagining. They stood in the road for a while, he staring at the stars rising over the dark summits and she looking up the road into the dusk at a mysterious drama playing away in the brightness of the future. And then the moment was past, and neither of them comprehended just then how far their thoughts had gone asunder.

And she was sincere in that exclamation, when she asked how he could leave her there alone? For she was alone. The young Jew trotted to and from the town bearing fragments of news, like a faithful dog carrying things in his mouth, but he had given her nothing as yet that constituted certainty. She trembled within the circle of the arm that held her as she suddenly saw herself—alone. She must keep him there yet a little longer. And as they climbed up the gully and reached the iron gate in the garden wall, the tears started to her eyes. He saw them in the light of the lamp in the kitchen and kissed her with a fresh access of emotion. He did not imagine the cause of them. She stared at him through their brightness and smiled, her bosom heaving. She knew he would never never realize they were tears of anger, and were evoked by the perception of the helplessness of women in a world of predatory men.

But above and beyond this terrible abstract indignation she found herself regarding him at intervals with smouldering eyes because of a certain subtle complacency in his manner. She could not know that this was the habit of years, or that men of his race are invariably complacent in the presence of their women. She could not conceive him in any rôle in which he had the right to be complacent. Yet he combined it with a tender humility that was very sweet to her in her situation out there on the hillside, playing for a hazardous stake. It was then she would look at him in stupefaction, wondering if she were going mad, and she afterwards would take the young Jew by the hair, dragging his head this way and that, and mutter between her clenched teeth: "Mon Dieu! Je déteste les hommes!" And he, poor youth, would assume an expression of pallid horror, for he had no idea what she was talking about, and imagined he had failed to carry out some of her imperious commands.

"Oh, Madama, what has thy servant done to deserve this?" he would whimper, less certain than ever of the solidity of his fortunes. And she would look at him, her hand dropping to her side as she gave a little laugh.

"Did I hurt you?" she would chuckle, and he would explain that she had not.