“More than anything in the world.. ..” And then she realised. What a cruel, what a dreadful thing to have said. There were forms of brutality that had nothing to do with sticks or goads.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she said.
“I love you, as no woman has ever loved a man before—not having the reason for love that I have. But as we are … and if you are sure that in the masons’ lodge you will eat well, ..”
“Masons,” he said, ‘eat like kings, every day. So much building is going forward that when they contract they can stipulate two meat meals every day. Shall I write the letter?”
“If you would. If you are sure…. You see, you know, you believe, and you understand; but there are times when a woman needs another woman; and Elisabeth is the only one, the only one to whom I could talk.”
“I’ll write it now,” he said.
So now, here she was, within sight of Elisabeth’s garden which she had never seen, but recognised from descriptions given by various members of the family and, more modestly, by Elisabeth on the rare occasions when they had met and sat and talked together, quietly in the midst of hubbub. That a miracle should have happened to Elisabeth was not in the least surprising to Mary; Elisabeth was a rare person; she had borne that curse of a Jewish woman, childlessness, with great gallantry, without a complaint, without jealousy of. luckier women. She’d endured loneliness—his Temple duties often kept Zacharias away from home for two or three days together; and out of her frustration and solitude she had made beauty on a bare hillside.
As Mary walked, swiftly now, eager for their meeting, towards the place of colour and perfume that was Elisabeth’s garden, she saw her cousin emerge from the house door, empty a bowl at the foot of a tree and then stoop and straighten up with a bunch of yellow flowers, marigolds, in her hand. And it was true, Elisabeth, in the fifty-seventh year’of her age, was heavily pregnant.
She had never doubted it; Gabriel had told her and she had believed, just as she had believed what he had said about her own state; but there was a difference, a very great difference, between believing in your mind and seeing with your eyes.
She hurried forward, calling her cousin by name and Elisabeth, on her way back into the house, halted and turned and came to open the gate in the flowery fence.
“Mary!“she said; and Mary said:
“Oh, how I have longed to see you.” They were about to embrace and then Elisabeth took a step backwards and turned pale and sweat sprang out, like beads on her brow and upper lip.
“You!” she said.
“You, Mary! You are to be the mother of the Lord to whom my son is to be the forerunner. You, blessed above all women.”
Mary said, “You did not know?”
“Until this moment, no. But the child did. It leapt as I spoke your
name. So late and never a movement, I was worried. But he leapt, recognising you and the child you are to bear.”
“Gabriel did not tell you?”
“I never saw him. He appeared to Zacharias, in the Temple. He was dumb-struck, and dumb he has been ever since. Did you … did you see him, Mary?”
“Yes. He told me about you.”
“The chosen, the blessed one,” Elisabeth said. And because ordinary words were too ordinary, too worn to be used at this moment, there in the flowery garden they broke into one of those antiphonal chants of the kind which from time immemorial their race had used as a vehicle for praising God. Chanting and extempore song-making came easily to Jews in emotional moments. Deborah, in song, had celebrated the defeat of Sisera; David, in song, had lamented the death of Jonathan.
“Blessed is she that believed,” chanted Elisabeth; and Mary sang: “My soul doth magnify the Lord …”
The meeting set the tone for the whole visit. For two happy months Mary lived in an atmosphere of understanding and acceptance so complete that on one occasion she brought herself to mention to Zacharias some of those prophecies that caused her such foreboding.
Zacharias reached for his tablet and wrote, “He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied, it is written. You too.”
Elisabeth read the words aloud, and added, “John may have a hard life, also. The path of the forerunner is never easy.”
They agreed that all that they could do was to ensure the children a happy childhood, to rear them to be strong. They were oddly in accord in never doubting that to begin with, at least, these would be ordinary human babies. Without realising it they were thus rejecting the pagan ideas that had come to Israel with the Seleucid invaders, stories of gods and goddesses born in some supernatural way, springing to birth full-grown, armed, with winged feet and similar fantasies.
In Mary’s company Elisabeth’s reserve and fear of ridicule or pity disappeared completely; she moved about the village again and allowed Zacharias to write letters announcing her news.
Two female relatives offered to come and tend her in childbed.
“They are experienced; and it would be more seemly,” she said to Mary, almost apologetically, for it meant that Mary’s room would be needed.
“I must go home,” Mary said.
“Joseph will need me. The house at Cana should be near completion, now.”
Zacharias, inquiring round through another priest, found a group of pilgrims to Jerusalem, about to return to Galilee; and with them Mary walked home, knowing that the first thing she must do would be to tell her mother that she would have a child in midwinter.
Anne’s feelings—greatly to her own surprise—were divided. She was delighted with the news, delighted at the prospect of becoming a grandmother; to her delight she gave loud and repeated expression; but she also thought—Poor Mary, so soon! She’ll hardly be accustomed to being a wife before she’ll be a mother, hardly be used to managing a house before being called upon to manage a child as well. And all the natural fears that women have when told such news by their daughters rushed uppermost, exaggerated in her case by her protectiveness towards this child of hers who was so unlike her; not very robust, too sensitive. These feelings took expression in a great outpouring of advice, some sensible, some sheer superstition. She also said, again and again, how fortunate it was that they lived so close to one another; “I’ll look after you,” she said.
The visit to Elisabeth had bridged for Mary the gulf between the real and what seemed unreal. She knew now; and to her mother and her friends she no longer felt the impulse to say—If only you knew! She could think of the day when they would know; when what had been revealed to her would be revealed to them. And she turned upon them
the smile that was to embrace the world.FOUR JEXAL 700 miles Every time that Caspar rode into his city with its towers and its arches and its tinkling fountains something happened between his shoulder-blades, a prickling uneasiness, as though he were a dog whose hackles were rising. Always, somewhere between the Gate of the Rose and the Fountain of the Maidens, he would turn to Kalim, or whoever rode on his right, and make some remark.
“Jexal looks well today,” or “How it stinks, this place,” or “Still standing, I see.” Such words would bring him reassurance; it was his city, the heart-beat centre of the region he had won by his sword.
He never thought of it as his home; if he lived here and ruled for sixty years, and went out .and came in again every day of those sixty years, it would never be, he knew, with any sense of home-coming. In the desert three black huts, a few hobbled camels, a dung fire smoking into the evening air never failed to move him with the sense that he was rejoining his own; to a lesser degree he could feel it in the grasslands, where a huddle of clay huts stood by a patch of bean and rye, and there was the smell of sheep and dog barking. In the city he would always be a stranger. Its people had accepted him with despicable alacrity, had settled down, were smiling and placating; the city itself stayed inimical.
On this morning, at the usual place, he turned to Kalim and said, “Our city has put out the banners!” It was true; in the ten days of their absence the place had burst into bloom; trusses of flowers, pink and purple, blue and white and yellow, hung over every balcony, sprawled over every wall. In the open spaces around the fountains the trees had shaken out their green.