Great Lion of God (10 page)

But Saul had his secret and consuming joy. He waited for the Messias, and each day he prayed, “Though He tarries and has not come, still we shall wait for Him in faithfulness and hope and gladness.” Often he prayed, “Lord God of Hosts, if it be Your will, permit these worthless eyes to gaze upon Your Salvation, promised through the ages, before they are closed in death.” Sometimes, when this prayer was particularly fervent it seemed to him that his heart was seized in ecstasy and he would fall into a profound silence in which nothing lived but the Messias and himself, and he felt the awesome glory of that Presence within touch of his breath. Year by year, surety grew in him that he would not die before he beheld that Face, and had lain at the feet of the Holy One of Israel in total adoration. What joy, what pleasure, urged on him by his gentle father, and even sometimes by the disturbed Reb Isaac, could compare with that Vision? The world was nothing; it was a mere colored vessel awaiting the filling to the brim with the divine Essence. He could not speak of these things, no, not even to Reb Isaac. Once or twice he had attempted to speak but his throat closed and tears trembled under his lids, and he was forced to turn away. It was as if his very spirit would burst.

The Messias would not be born in Tarsus. It had been prophesied that He would be born in Bethlehem, as David had been born, and that He would be of the House of David also, and the rod of Jesse. Therefore, Saul ben Hillel lived for the day when he would first see Israel, and go, himself, to the little town of Bethlehem to await the Messias, Who would come in clouds of fire and with the thunder of seraphim wings and with crystal trumpets sounding from every corner of the world.

Saul left the dusky garden of his father’s house and put his feet on the straight and dusty road toward Tarsus, and the house of Reb Isaac. He would be very early this morning. They would sup together on cheese and bread and goat’s milk at the dawn. (Saul did not know that the old man supplemented this meager breakfast with the fine stuffs of his wife’s table, and Reb Isaac never enlightened him. The rabbi already knew how stringent was the soul of this young Pharisee, and he often searched his conscience in anxiety to discover where he, himself, had sinned, in being too rigid even in the Law. He could discover no sin. Saul was Saul ben Hillel, and God, blessed be His Name, undoubtedly knew what He was doing, and why He had created one who not only implicitly obeyed the Law but insisted on more elaborate rigors in the practicing of it.)

But Saul was not praying this morning, as, in the gray darkness he passed silent houses and curtained windows on the road. He could not, as yet, see the broad river which ran through the rich wide valley, nor even the mountains, but he heard, once or twice, the faint questioning cheep of a bird and saw an occasional dim shape—heard rather than actually seen—bursting from tree to tree. It would not be long before this road would be noisy and festive and loudly quarrelsome as the peasants brought in their milk and eggs and cheese and meat and fruit and wine and vegetables to Tarsus’ markets, their two-wheeled wagons creaking busily, their whips cracking, the patient asses trudging. Little half-naked boys would gambol about the animals, and be scolded by their bearded fathers, and would beg of those fathers for a copper or two to purchase some honeyed sweet or chopped spicy meat in a leaf carried in other carts. Then the dust would be bright yellow in the sun and it would be very warm, and the tamarisk trees would lift their wide green clouds to the sky and the river would be full of traffic, and the distant harbor would be crowded with sails and the sun would He hotly on roof and wall and the stones of the road would burn through the thickest sole. Then herds of goats and sheep and cattle would fill the road on the way to market, complaining and bleating, and there would be fresh carts and wagons joining those on the roads, heaped with terrified and squawking chickens and geese, all tied together. Sometimes a detachment of Roman soldiers on horseback would roar through the colorful throngs, who would move off the road, cursing, to escape those hoofs which struck fire from the stones. Sometimes several Roman chariots from the cool suburbs would race along the margin of the road, carrying centurions and taxgatherers and clerks and bureaucrats to their stations and their offices, and many was the bronzed and muscular fist raised in imprecation as they swept by. The Romans’ faces would be set impassively, no eye glancing at the dusty peasants in their rough robes of brown and black and red and blue and at their swart faces partly concealed by head cloths to protect teeth and lips from the drying heat and dust. No Roman deigned to look down into those wild black eyes with the curse implicit in them. But a pretty slave girl standing shyly near the gate of a villa would attract their attention and a light salute, or even a whistle, and she would wave her hand in pleased answer. Cypresses would stand in stiff immutable ranks near the highway, and there would be glimpses of greening spring meadows and blossoming palms, and an occasional Roman guard tower. And everywhere would be the acrid scent of sweat and offal and animals and men on the seething road, and deafening clamor.

Saul knew of these things. He encountered the same throngs returning from Tarsus in the evening. He tried to avoid the road, walking on the stiff grass, stinging his feet with nettles, warily watching for snakes and lizards, and trying not to hear the furious uproar near at hand, trying to recite prayers, trying to step around pigeons and geese. He did not care to encounter the hordes in the morning. He was a citizen of Rome, but he did not love the Romans, who had enslaved his country. He did not love the people of Cilicia, though he had been born in their city of Tarsus. All was remote to him. Later in his life he was to say, “Never did I feel this world was my home nor my joy nor my comfort. I was an alien in the land.” He would think: Truly, I always loved God alone, with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind, as I loved none other, nay, not even my parents nor my teachers. My hours were haunted by God, my years knew Him only.

Some time before he had discovered a lonely clay road branching away from the stony Roman highway, and on an impulse of curiosity he had wandered a way upon it. He never knew whose estate he then surveyed, with lush pastures and little brooks and deep trees and palms and grain and grapevines, nor did he care. But he came upon, without warning, a sudden rise of steep and jutting rock formations, tall and tawny in the early light, like a wall set in his path, or the great ruins of a temple. From an upper crevice like a mouth burst a narrow cataract of pure green water, which made a soft though thunderous sound. At the foot of the rocks, now turning to broken gold before the rising sun, was a vast pool into which the cataract poured down, and the pool was the color of lemons and curiously quiet below such turbulence. Trees of many kinds grew wild about the pool and masses of wild flowers of every imaginable color, and little poppies and daisies and ferns and yellow shrubs and emerald grasses and rosy vines. Then, as the sky awoke with morning the tumbled wall of rock stood against ardent blueness and scarlet streaks, and birds alighted on stones in the pool to drink and bathe themselves.

Aside from the sound of the falling water and the birdsong there was no other sound. It was an enchanted spot, and Saul, alone in all the world, knew of it. The young Saul forgot his first morning prayers to gaze upon such beauty with wonder and delight. He took off his sandals and stepped into the pool near the edge, and the citron-colored water was icy cold but refreshing to his dusty feet. He lifted the water in his hands to drink and bathe his face, and he saw small brilliant fish in the pond now, and saw that the pond wandered away into many little brooks and freshets on the earth, reviving the hot soil.

Many times that summer and throughout the year he came to that place, and never was it the same, but as changeful as a prism, and never did it fail to give him pleasure and peace. It was his own no matter who owned it. In the early evenings, walking home from school, he would come here also, and study his books against the background of rushing water and falling birds and murmurous trees, and then he would remove tunic and sandals and swim in the pond or stand under the argent spray of the cataract just before it plunged into ripples and small waves of light and tinted liquid.

In time, it became a hallowed place to him, where he could not only study but could pray with renewed ardor and understanding. The months passed, and he saw no other human being near, though sometimes at a distance he could hear the faint ringing of cowbells in the evening or the far songs of slaves working in the fields beyond. Occasionally a small wild animal or a fawn or a little lamb would come shyly here to drink, staring at him with innocent eyes, and then leaving as silently as they had come.

And so he arrived at his precious sanctuary this morning, earlier than customary, and the rocks were still gray from the night and the water had a more tumultuous sound in the absolute silence. It was very cool here, almost chill, and the cataract appeared to be speaking to itself and to the pond into which it fell. Nothing had color as yet. The earth exhaled a cold but vibrant life of spring, carnal and pure and demanding. Slowly, moment by moment, as Saul sat on a dry rock near the pond and waited to watch his wall of rock turn to fiery gold, the sky turned opaline and the trees and birds awoke. Now the flowers burst into tints and hues like emerging rainbows on the land, and there was a smell of fecund ferns and almond blossoms.

Saul, delighting afresh in all this wonder and beauty of the senses, sat very still, all ears and eyes. Then he heard a slight rustle and the sound of disturbed gravel. He looked across the pond, startled. A young girl had appeared at the edge of the pond, and she did not see him. She was, perhaps, one or two years older than himself, and she was very beautiful and slender, and Jew though he was Saul suddenly thought of a dryad, or a nymph emerging from a tree. Her chiton was of white linen, coarse and spare and bound with a ribbon below young breasts, and her feet were bare and pale and so was her throat and her arms, as pale as moonlight on the snow of mountains. Her hair was long and curling and dark as night, springing about a child’s face of soft amber and rose, and her eyes, he saw, in that clarified illumination of early morning, were huge and black, and her mouth resembled a new poppy.

He guessed at once, from her garment and her bare feet and her timid movements, that she was a slave girl from some house he had never seen nearby, for she cast furtive glances over her shoulder as she lifted her chiton and stepped into the still water. She lifted the cloth high and Saul caught a flash of round firm thighs, as pale and lustrous as her arms.

He had thought, in the past, that should he ever come upon another mortal in that spot it would be forever spoiled for him, and he would not come again. But he felt no outrage now at this charming vision, and he saw that the girl, too, thought she was entirely alone and unobserved. She bent as he often bent, to lift silver water in her hands, and she drank of it and then threw the rest over her face, and she laughed and shook her head and her long and heavy hair flew like a lifted mantle in the brightening air. She began to sing as she waded slowly and her voice was no more intrusive than a bird’s call, and was all as musical.

Then she returned to the edge of the pond and dropped her garment and she was gone as suddenly as she had appeared, vanishing behind the trees. Saul then became aware that he had been holding his breath and that his heart’s sound was louder than the song of the cataract and that his face and breast were as hot as if the sun had struck them. He was conscious of a fine trembling through his body, and he wet his lips. Now the scene seemed to him to be less beautiful for the absence of the girl, and lonely.

He was not a child. He would be fifteen years old before the deepest snows appeared on the Tarsus mountains. He was no innocent, no babe, no ignorant lad. He knew that the girl had set him afire, and he knew what he felt was the first lust he had ever known, as well as a strange tenderness never experienced before, and a mysterious urgency. He desired above all things to touch that slave girl, or that peasant’s daughter, to smooth her blowing hair into quiet with his loving hands, to kiss those red lips and that pale throat, to hold those little hands in his. He wanted to hear her heart beat against his and to feel her arm about his neck, and her breath against his cheek. His loins throbbed, and sweat ran from his brow. He had seen pretty girls before on the streets of Tarsus and working in the fields and even in his father’s garden, but he had looked upon them with indifference. In some astonishing way this girl was different from all others and he believed that she belonged to him as the rock and the cataract and the pond belonged to him, and no one else would ever know her but himself.

He did not think of the “strange woman” of whom Reb Isaac had told him, whose mouth was the gate to hell and all abomination. The lust he felt and the passionate tenderness, seemed to him as natural and as good and as wholesome as the morning, and not to be despised or rejected. Now he was alive as he had never been alive before, as tumultuous as a young Adam who had caught his first glimpse of his Eve, and as wild with joy. And his desire was no more evil than the desire of Adam for his newly created wife, and was as innocent.

“Of what are you dreaming, Saul ben Hillel?” asked Reb Isaac that morning. “You are absent and your eyes are far away.”

Morning after morning Saul arrived silently at the rock and the cataract and the pond, but he did not see the girl again for nearly a month, and she was there when he arrived, singing childishly to herself as she waded in the water and dashed it over her face and rubbed it on her arms. He had told himself that he had dreamt her appearance or that when he encountered her again her countenance would seem less lovely and that the vision would be vanished. But, as he watched her from behind a sheltering tree trunk, she was more beautiful than ever, more desirable, and the urgency was on him more savage than before to hold her against him and taste of those poppy lips. Some water had splashed on the bosom of her chiton and the cloth clung to her young breasts and he saw the swelling outline of them and the virgin nipples. He watched her, entranced, hardly breathing, and then she stepped from the water and was gone, as she had gone that first morning, and he heard no sound of her going.