“You, at least, are sure of a new dress, Mary. What will you choose ?”
In Rachel’s mind the word ‘sackcloth’ formed itself; but she did not say it, because the others might see, behind the jest, something of her own private little hell. Nor would it be apt. Mary’s parents, unlike her own, had allowed her to have some say in the matter, and the man she should marry in two months’ time was good and steady and looked kind. Ephraim, probably sensing Rachel’s aversion to him, had not been kind… .
Then Rachel and Susannah and Leah became aware that Mary had made no answer to this, surely most important and easily answered question. They looked at her and Susannah said, “She’s off again!”
They had grown up together and the three others knew that Mary had these curious lapses; times when she seemed not to hear or see or be with them in any but the physical sense. They’d learned from experience to leave her alone; for five minutes or so she’d behave like a sleep-walker, and then blink and smile and take up the chatter where it had broken off. But before they had learned this, when they were still very young, they’d tried to rouse her.
Once, abruptly, she’d been very sick; and once she had cried, so long and so violently that they had been frightened. Mary’s mother, Anne, was well known for her sharp tongue and hard hand, and although she herself was never overtly indulgent to her daughter, anybody who made Mary cry was in for trouble.
So they’d learned. Amongst themselves they’d talked about it naturally, and reached their own childish conclusion. Mary’s grandmother had been a woman of the desert who had fallen sick and been left for dead by her tribe. Mary’s grandfather, a merchant in a small way, had been coming home with his two camels, had found the woman, brought her to his home and in due time married her. Desert people were known to be different; when they were thirsty or hungry or exhausted or tired they could absent themselves from their suffering bodies and so survive, in some mysterious fashion, where other people would have died. There was something about the desert, the three little village girls had agreed, prophets and holy men often came out of the desert. And as they grew older, they noticed small differences in their well-loved friend, a peculiarly free-striding manner of walking, a way of holding the head, an outspokenness which was startling in one so modest, and these lapses.
Rachel, looking at Mary and seeing her state, wished with all her heart that she could similarly absent herself from the connubial bed. Leah said:
“Look the red rags are out. Spring has come!”
“No more donkeys,” Susannah said, shifting Joshua again.
“What a blessing. I hate walking through dung!”
“We’re lucky,” Leah said.
“We have wood. There are places where women have to gather it and use it for fuel. Imagine having to wait till a donkey passed before you could cook your dinner.”
“I don’t believe it,” Rachel said, and an argument began.
The girl named Mary had sighted the red rags and felt the now familiar feeling of sadness and foreboding and desolation. Spring had come; and with the short smooth path closed to them, the donkeys, with their heavy loads, must face the hill. Uphill they slowed down a little, downhill they stumbled, and their riders or their drivers were always
too ready to prod or strike. For her the bad season had begun.
She did not hear the question about her wedding dress. She was thinking, with something very near resentment, why nobody else cared. A donkey was a donkey, a thing, a beast of burden, provided by God to help men with the business of transporting himself or his. goods from place to place. If its pace slowed and a shout proved insufficient incentive to greater effort, a stick or a goad must be used. That was how all reasonable people looked at it; and to think differently was to invite scorn, wonder, amusement. Once, at the sight of a piece of quite gratuitous brutality, she had spoken out, and some of those who heard had laughed, some had been embarrassed for her; the man she had rebuked had been abusive, and, worst of all, had hit the poor donkey even harder.
And perhaps ordinary people were sensible; it seemed a pity, almost wrong to allow the sight of a red rag and all that it implied to mar such a lovely morning of sunshine and birdsong. Being miserable about donkeys did them no service. So stop it;
think about something else. Think about Spring.
It had always been her favourite season, not merely on account of its beauty but for its promise. Every year, for as long as she could remember, she had felt that before the first flowers faded and the young leaves darkened, something wonderful would happen to her. Many times she had stood by a hawthorn tree, the green and the white just breaking and been certain that some quite unique experience was about to be hers. The silken petals of the first anemones could affect her in the same way—as though they held some secret which if she stayed quite still, and waited, would be revealed to her. Nothing had ever happened, nothing had been revealed. On one Spring day, wishing to know whether this feeling were peculiar to herself or part of ordinary human experience, she had so far overcome her natural reserve as to speak of it to Susannah, the most wholly sympathetic of her friends. Susannah said:
“Yes, of course, I feel it too. Everybody does; even birds. It simply means that you’re looking forward to getting married.”
Mary had almost accepted that. Susannah was a sensible girl, and thoughtful, too, and the explanation was almost feasible, but not quite; the expected thing was less ordinary, less capable of being put into words. In fact it had been silly to try to talk about it at all, because there were no words.
And now it was Spring again, and she was not only looking forward to being married, she was properly betrothed; she was in love with Joseph and recognised her good fortune in that respect, was grateful to her parents for allowing her to exercise some choice; she was looking forward, with eager anticipation, to her wedding day, to having a husband and a house of her own, and presently, by God’s favour, a child. She pictured him, a sturdy little boy, rather like Rachel’s Joshua. Yet for all this, the feeling of immanence, of waiting for something wonderful, was with her still, and honesty compelled her to admit that it had nothing to do with Joseph, her feeling for him, or the little house adjoining the workshop.
At this point she returned to herself and her companions and reaching out her arms took Joshua from Susannah, saying:
“My turn now.” She settled him on her hip.
“By Abraham’s beard,” she said, ‘you’re heavier today than you were yesterday. If this goes on we shall have to hire you a litter!”
The girls exchanged satisfied glances; that was the way, leave her alone; she always came back, as sweet and good-natured as ever. Susannah repeated her question about the wedding dress.
“It’s blue,” she said.
“And I didn’t choose it. It was my mother’s. Mother could never wear it, it is too long for her and to cut it would have been a shame : it is such beautiful stuff. My grandfather bought it in Damascus.”
“Just blue?” Leah said.
“Isn’t that Mary all over? I never knew a girl who cared less about clothes. Her wedding dress; and it’s blue, and beautiful stuff! What kind of blue and what kind of stuff?”
“It’s about the colour of … of flax flowers, and I think it is silk.”
There were sounds of appreciation, not unmixed with envy. Leah said sardonically, “She things it is silk!” She and Susannah then began to
speculate as to when it would be their turn, and to describe the dresses in which they would like to be married. Rachel, looking back sourly to her own wedding, thought how much more suitable a mourning robe would have been than all the family finery in which she had been decked; and, unwilling to talk about marriage, fell into conversation with Mary about Joshua.
So, chirping like birds they came to the place just where the field path and the highroad were divided by the out-thrust buttress of bare reddish rock from which the water sprang. A very ordinary Spring morning in the twenty-fourth year of the reign of Augustus Caesar.
Years and years of wear from the pressure of the mouths of water-jars held against the rock to catch the spouting water had altered the formation of the spring which now gushed into a circle of eroded stone which looked as though it had been placed there for the convenience of the women. Each woman rested her jar against the rim, tilted it slightly and waited until it was full. Newcomers to Nazareth, or women who had had occasion to visit other villages, said that this was a quick and easier way of getting water than hauling a bucket up from a well by a rope.