The Jacket (The Star-Rover) Read online

  Pilate waxed eloquent over the diverse sects and the fanatic uprisings and riotings that were continually occurring.

  “Lodbrog,” he said, “one can never tell what little summer cloud of their hatching may turn into a thunderstorm roaring and rattling about one’s ears. I am here to keep order and quiet. Despite me they make the place a hornets’ nest. Far rather would I govern Scythians or savage Britons than these people who are never at peace about God. Right now there is a man up to the north, a fisherman turned preacher, and miracle-worker, who as well as not may soon have all the country by the ears and my recall on its way from Rome.”

  This was the first I had heard of the man called Jesus, and I little remarked it at the time. Not until afterward did I remember him, when the little summer cloud had become a full-fledged thunderstorm.

  “I have had report of him,” Pilate went on. “He is not political. There is no doubt of that. But trust Caiaphas, and Hanan behind Caiaphas, to make of this fisherman a political thorn with which to prick Rome and ruin me.”

  “This Caiaphas, I have heard of him as high priest, then who is this Hanan?” I asked.

  “The real high priest, a cunning fox,” Pilate explained. “Caiaphas was appointed by Gratus, but Caiaphas is the shadow and the mouthpiece of Hanan.”

  “They have never forgiven you that little matter of the votive shields,” Miriam teased.

  Whereupon, as a man will when his sore place is touched, Pilate launched upon the episode, which had been an episode, no more, at the beginning, but which had nearly destroyed him. In all innocence before his palace he had affixed two shields with votive inscriptions. Ere the consequent storm that burst on his head had passed the Jews had written their complaints to Tiberius, who approved them and reprimanded Pilate.

  I was glad, a little later, when I could have talk with Miriam. Pilate’s wife had found opportunity to tell me about her. She was of old royal stock. Her sister was wife of Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanжa. Now this Philip was brother to Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perжa, and both were sons of Herod, called by the Jews the “Great.” Miriam, as I understood, was at home in the courts of both tetrarchs, being herself of the blood. Also, when a girl, she had been betrothed to Archelaus at the time he was ethnarch of Jerusalem. She had a goodly fortune in her own right, so that marriage had not been compulsory. To boot, she had a will of her own, and was doubtless hard to please in so important a matter as husbands.

  It must have been in the very air we breathed, for in no time Miriam and I were at it on the subject of religion. Truly, the Jews of that day battened on religion as did we on fighting and feasting. For all my stay in that country there was never a moment when my wits were not buzzing with the endless discussions of life and death, law, and God. Now Pilate believed neither in gods, nor devils, nor anything. Death, to him, was the blackness of unbroken sleep; and yet, during his years in Jerusalem, he was ever vexed with the inescapable fuss and fury of things religious. Why, I had a horse-boy on my trip into Idumжa, a wretched creature that could never learn to saddle and who yet could talk, and most learnedly, without breath, from nightfall to sunrise, on the hair-splitting differences in the teachings of all the rabbis from Shemaiah to Gamaliel.

  But to return to Miriam.

  “You believe you are immortal,” she was soon challenging me. “Then why do you fear to talk about it?”

  “Why burden my mind with thoughts about certainties?” I countered.

  “But are you certain?” she insisted. “Tell me about it. What is it like—your immortality?”

  And when I had told her of Niflheim and Muspell, of the birth of the giant Ymir from the snowflakes, of the cow Andhumbla, and of Fenrir and Loki and the frozen Jцtuns—as I say, when I had told her of all this, and of Thor and Odin and our own Valhalla, she clapped her hands and cried out, with sparkling eyes:

  “Oh, you barbarian! You great child! You yellow giant-thing of the frost! You believer of old nurse tales and stomach satisfactions! But the spirit of you, that which cannot die, where will it go when your body is dead?”

  “As I have said, Valhalla,” I answered. “And my body shall be there, too.”

  “Eating?—drinking?—fighting?”

  “And loving,” I added. “We must have our women in heaven, else what is heaven for?”

  “I do not like your heaven,” she said. “It is a mad place, a beast place, a place of frost and storm and fury.”

  “And your heaven?” I questioned.

  “Is always unending summer, with the year at the ripe for the fruits and flowers and growing things.”

  I shook my head and growled:

  “I do not like your heaven. It is a sad place, a soft place, a place for weaklings and eunuchs and fat, sobbing shadows of men.”

  My remarks must have glamoured her mind, for her eyes continued to sparkle, and mine was half a guess that she was leading me on.

  “My heaven,” she said, “is the abode of the blest.”

  “Valhalla is the abode of the blest,” I asserted. “For look you, who cares for flowers where flowers always are? in my country, after the iron winter breaks and the sun drives away the long night, the first blossoms twinkling on the melting ice-edge are things of joy, and we look, and look again.

  “And fire!” I cried out. “Great glorious fire! A fine heaven yours where a man cannot properly esteem a roaring fire under a tight roof with wind and snow a-drive outside.”

  “A simple folk, you,” she was back at me. “You build a roof and a fire in a snowbank and call it heaven. In my heaven we do not have to escape the wind and snow.”

  “No,” I objected. “We build roof and fire to go forth from into the frost and storm and to return to from the frost and storm. Man’s life is fashioned for battle with frost and storm. His very fire and roof he makes by his battling. I know. For three years, once, I knew never roof nor fire. I was sixteen, and a man, ere ever I wore woven cloth on my body. I was birthed in storm, after battle, and my swaddling cloth was a wolfskin. Look at me and see what manner of man lives in Valhalla.”

  And look she did, all a-glamour, and cried out:

  “You great, yellow giant-thing of a man!” Then she added pensively, “Almost it saddens me that there may not be such men in my heaven.”

  “It is a good world,” I consoled her. “Good is the plan and wide. There is room for many heavens. It would seem that to each is given the heaven that is his heart’s desire. A good country, truly, there beyond the grave. I doubt not I shall leave our feast halls and raid your coasts of sun and flowers, and steal you away. My mother was so stolen.”

  And in the pause I looked at her, and she looked at me, and dared to look. And my blood ran fire. By Odin, this was a woman!

  What might have happened I know not, for Pilate, who had ceased from his talk with Ambivius and for some time had sat grinning, broke the pause.

  “A rabbi, a Teutoberg rabbi!” he gibed. “A new preacher and a new doctrine come to Jerusalem. Now will there be more dissensions, and riotings, and stonings of prophets. The gods save us, it is a mad-house. Lodbrog, I little thought it of you. Yet here you are, spouting and fuming as wildly as any madman from the desert about what shall happen to you when you are dead. One life at a time, Lodbrog. It saves trouble. It saves trouble.”

  “Go on, Miriam, go on,” his wife cried.

  She had sat entranced during the discussion, with hands tightly clasped, and the thought flickered up in my mind that she had already been corrupted by the religious folly of Jerusalem. At any rate, as I was to learn in the days that followed, she was unduly bent upon such matters. She was a thin woman, as if wasted by fever. Her skin was tight-stretched. Almost it seemed I could look through her hands did she hold them between me and the light. She was a good woman, but highly nervous, and, at times, fancy-flighted about shades and signs and omens. Nor was she above seeing visions and hearing voices. As for me, I had no patience with such weaknesses. Yet was she a g
ood woman with no heart of evil.

  * * * * *

  I was on a mission for Tiberius, and it was my ill luck to see little of Miriam. On my return from the court of Antipas she had gone into Batanжa to Philip’s court, where was her sister. Once again I was back in Jerusalem, and, though it was no necessity of my business to see Philip, who, though weak, was faithful to Roman will, I journeyed into Batanжa in the hope of meeting with Miriam.

  Then there was my trip into Idumжa. Also, I travelled into Syria in obedience to the command of Sulpicius Quirinius, who, as imperial legate, was curious of my first-hand report of affairs in Jerusalem. Thus, travelling wide and much, I had opportunity to observe the strangeness of the Jews who were so madly interested in God. It was their peculiarity. Not content with leaving such matters to their priests, they were themselves for ever turning priests and preaching wherever they could find a listener. And listeners they found a-plenty.

  They gave up their occupations to wander about the country like beggars, disputing and bickering with the rabbis and Talmudists in the synagogues and temple porches. It was in Galilee, a district of little repute, the inhabitants of which were looked upon as witless, that I crossed the track of the man Jesus. It seems that he had been a carpenter, and after that a fisherman, and that his fellow-fishermen had ceased dragging their nets and followed him in his wandering life. Some few looked upon him as a prophet, but the most contended that he was a madman. My wretched horse-boy, himself claiming Talmudic knowledge second to none, sneered at Jesus, calling him the king of the beggars, calling his doctrine Ebionism, which, as he explained to me, was to the effect that only the poor should win to heaven, while the rich and powerful were to burn for ever in some lake of fire.

  It was my observation that it was the custom of the country for every man to call every other man a madman. In truth, in my judgment, they were all mad. There was a plague of them. They cast out devils by magic charms, cured diseases by the laying on of hands, drank deadly poisons unharmed, and unharmed played with deadly snakes—or so they claimed. They ran away to starve in the deserts. They emerged howling new doctrine, gathering crowds about them, forming new sects that split on doctrine and formed more sects.

  “By Odin,” I told Pilate, “a trifle of our northern frost and snow would cool their wits. This climate is too soft. In place of building roofs and hunting meat, they are ever building doctrine.”

  “And altering the nature of God,” Pilate corroborated sourly. “A curse on doctrine.”

  “So say I,” I agreed. “If ever I get away with unaddled wits from this mad land, I’ll cleave through whatever man dares mention to me what may happen after I am dead.”

  Never were such trouble makers. Everything under the sun was pious or impious to them. They, who were so clever in hair-splitting argument, seemed incapable of grasping the Roman idea of the State. Everything political was religious; everything religious was political. Thus every procurator’s hands were full. The Roman eagles, the Roman statues, even the votive shields of Pilate, were deliberate insults to their religion.

  The Roman taking of the census was an abomination. Yet it had to be done, for it was the basis of taxation. But there it was again. Taxation by the State was a crime against their law and God. Oh, that Law! It was not the Roman law. It was their law, what they called God’s law. There were the zealots, who murdered anybody who broke this law. And for a procurator to punish a zealot caught red-handed was to raise a riot or an insurrection.

  Everything, with these strange people, was done in the name of God. There were what we Romans called the thaumaturgi . They worked miracles to prove doctrine. Ever has it seemed to me a witless thing to prove the multiplication table by turning a staff into a serpent, or even into two serpents. Yet these things the thaumaturgi did, and always to the excitement of the common people.

  Heavens, what sects and sects! Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees—a legion of them! No sooner did they start with a new quirk when it turned political. Coponius, procurator fourth before Pilate, had a pretty time crushing the Gaulonite sedition which arose in this fashion and spread down from Gamala.

  In Jerusalem, that last time I rode in, it was easy to note the increasing excitement of the Jews. They ran about in crowds, chattering and spouting. Some were proclaiming the end of the world. Others satisfied themselves with the imminent destruction of the Temple. And there were rank revolutionises who announced that Roman rule was over and the new Jewish kingdom about to begin.

  Pilate, too, I noted, showed heavy anxiety. That they were giving him a hard time of it was patent. But I will say, as you shall see, that he matched their subtlety with equal subtlety; and from what I saw of him I have little doubt but what he would have confounded many a disputant in the synagogues.

  “But half a legion of Romans,” he regretted to me, “and I would take Jerusalem by the throat . . . and then be recalled for my pains, I suppose.”

  Like me, he had not too much faith in the auxiliaries; and of Roman soldiers we had but a scant handful.

  Back again, I lodged in the palace, and to my great joy found Miriam there. But little satisfaction was mine, for the talk ran long on the situation. There was reason for this, for the city buzzed like the angry hornets’ nest it was. The fast called the Passover—a religious affair, of course—was near, and thousands were pouring in from the country, according to custom, to celebrate the feast in Jerusalem. These newcomers, naturally, were all excitable folk, else they would not be bent on such pilgrimage. The city was packed with them, so that many camped outside the walls. As for me, I could not distinguish how much of the ferment was due to the teachings of the wandering fisherman, and how much of it was due to Jewish hatred for Rome.

  “A tithe, no more, and maybe not so much, is due to this Jesus,” Pilate answered my query. “Look to Caiaphas and Hanan for the main cause of the excitement. They know what they are about. They are stirring it up, to what end who can tell, except to cause me trouble.”

  “Yes, it is certain that Caiaphas and Hanan are responsible,” Miriam said, “but you, Pontius Pilate, are only a Roman and do not understand. Were you a Jew, you would realize that there is a greater seriousness at the bottom of it than mere dissension of the sectaries or trouble-making for you and Rome. The high priests and Pharisees, every Jew of place or wealth, Philip, Antipas, myself—we are all fighting for very life.

  “This fisherman may be a madman. If so, there is a cunning in his madness. He preaches the doctrine of the poor. He threatens our law, and our law is our life, as you have learned ere this. We are jealous of our law, as you would be jealous of the air denied your body by a throttling hand on your throat. It is Caiaphas and Hanan and all they stand for, or it is the fisherman. They must destroy him, else he will destroy them.”

  “Is it not strange, so simple a man, a fisherman?” Pilate’s wife breathed forth. “What manner of man can he be to possess such power? I would that I could see him. I would that with my own eyes I could see so remarkable a man.”

  Pilate’s brows corrugated at her words, and it was clear that to the burden on his nerves was added the overwrought state of his wife’s nerves.

  “If you would see him, beat up the dens of the town,” Miriam laughed spitefully. “You will find him wine-bibbing or in the company of nameless women. Never so strange a prophet came up to Jerusalem.”

  “And what harm in that?” I demanded, driven against my will to take the part of the fisherman. “Have I not wine-guzzled a-plenty and passed strange nights in all the provinces? The man is a man, and his ways are men’s ways, else am I a madman, which I here deny.”

  Miriam shook her head as she spoke.

  “He is not mad. Worse, he is dangerous. All Ebionism is dangerous. He would destroy all things that are fixed. He is a revolutionist. He would destroy what little is left to us of the Jewish state and Temple.”

  Here Pilate shook his head.

  “He is not political. I have had report of him. He is a vis
ionary. There is no sedition in him. He affirms the Roman tax even.”

  “Still you do not understand,” Miriam persisted. “It is not what he plans; it is the effect, if his plans are achieved, that makes him a revolutionist. I doubt that he foresees the effect. Yet is the man a plague, and, like any plague, should be stamped out.”

  “From all that I have heard, he is a good-hearted, simple man with no evil in him,” I stated.

  And thereat I told of the healing of the ten lepers I had witnessed in Samaria on my way through Jericho.

  Pilate’s wife sat entranced at what I told. Came to our ears distant shoutings and cries of some street crowd, and we knew the soldiers were keeping the streets cleared.

  “And you believe this wonder, Lodbrog?” Pilate demanded. “You believe that in the flash of an eye the festering sores departed from the lepers?”

  “I saw them healed,” I replied. “I followed them to make certain. There was no leprosy in them.”

  “But did you see them sore?—before the healing?” Pilate insisted.

  I shook my head.

  “I was only told so,” I admitted. “When I saw them afterward, they had all the seeming of men who had once been lepers. They were in a daze. There was one who sat in the sun and ever searched his body and stared and stared at the smooth flesh as if unable to believe his eyes. He would not speak, nor look at aught else than his flesh, when I questioned him. He was in a maze. He sat there in the sun and stared and stated.”