‘Forgive me,’ he answered quietly, ‘if I have presumed too much on a priest’s privilege and intruded into your private affairs. But I thought I recognized a look on your face that I seemed to remember on my own in 1917 . . .’ He paused. ‘It was then that I first realized that the war I was fighting was in me long before it was in the world without. I realized that I was fighting it in a – ach! was heisst es – a secondary dimension of reality.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ I said uncomfortably, not at all prepared to continue such a disturbing line of conversation with a stranger even though the stranger were a priest. So I went on instead to say: ‘Look, if you’ve been coming here every evening, don’t let us break the habit. I can easily arrange for my men to practise these explosions at a safer distance.’
At that a new expression came into his sombre eyes. He thanked me saying he would appreciate greatly such permission and begged me to allow him to explain why he so valued coming there in the evening. For twenty years, he told me, he had been coming here because this dip in the land where we practised our combats was, for him, the most hallowed ground in Palestine. It was there, he said, that Christ first revealed Himself to His disciples after the Resurrection. He waved his hands, now almost transparently white from the many years of concealment in his monk’s sleeves, at the land below us. The sun was just going down and the shadows were already running deep like flowing water in the waddies. He said that there exactly where the monastery stood the disciples, some as stunned by their private hesitations and evasions during those critical hours between Christ’s apprehension and His crucifixion as by the crucifixion itself, and all like sheep at nightfall in a world of wolves without a shepherd, were gathered fearfully together. Then suddenly He came out of a sunset sky and appeared before his anguished followers.
They did not recognize Him, but out of their own deep hurt, and in their fear welcoming any addition to their numbers, they made him welcome, saying, ‘Abide with us, for the day is far spent.’
Here there was a pause and then my companion went on to say that as for himself, he came there every night to relive that hour. He came to remind himself of his own evasions and failure to recognize the Resurrected One during the day and to wait until he was ready to fall on his own knees for pardon of his daily acts of unbelief.
‘But how do you know that this was the place?’ I asked abruptly.
The great bell had suddenly begun tolling the dark hour in the monastery and I rather shot the question at him because I felt that the emotion roused in me by his tale and the manner of his telling it would disturb me unless I clung to what were still to me the main facts of life.
‘The first pilgrims discovered it and marked the place,’ he replied. ‘The crusaders followed to build this their first church and monastery on the designated spot, exactly where you now do your work.’
His words again made me uncomfortable. His capacity for disconcerting me seemed unfailing yet I wanted him to say more. However, he excused himself gently, asking if I had not heard the bell? That was his call to duty as I had mine over there. He pointed to where my men huddled restless on the slope. If I liked, he concluded, we could meet again any evening I chose, in the same place, for now that I had been so good as to give him permission, he would keep up the custom. And with that he walked, still with a marked seaman’s roll under his monk’s habit, into the growing dark, the bell tolling all the time and shaking the brown air with wave upon wave of urgent sound.
But I did not see him again. I woke the next morning with one of my periodical recurrences of malaria, the worst I had experienced since I left the bush-veld. We had no doctor attached to my staff for we were only a small oddly select unit, an aristocracy, if you like, of killers, nor would I allow my adjutant to telephone to Jerusalem for one. I had had malaria so often in the past that I felt I knew better than any doctor what to do. I promptly dosed myself with quinine, got my batman to pile my bed high with rugs and greatcoats and settled down to wait confidently for my ague to stop and the sweat to burst out and break the fever. But as the day wore on it soon became evident that this was no ordinary attack. The ague got worse, my temperature rose and no sweat relieved the fever.
In the afternoon an age of ice seemed to have entered my blood and to be rattling my bones. When I am really ill, my instinct is for life, and not man, to nurse me. When I come to die I hope it may be in the open, face to face with sky and stars and so I may be able to commit my spirit without reserve to its keeper, the wind.
So now with the help of my batman I struggled out into the open to lie under the sky facing the lee of the slope where the monk and I had met the evening before. There at last I felt my fever had room to spread its wings. For that is what fever needs. Fever is Time grown strange wings, the mind feathered to range great distances between an anguished brittle moment in the present and one’s first drop into being. Hardly was I laid in the open than such consciousness as I had took flight. I forgot my aching and my shivering vanished and I just went with a single overwhelming thought swiftly backwards until I came to the moment where once a great darkness had gathered over the land on which I lay. I could feel the earth heave itself in agony beneath my ear, hear the temple rent with a lightning sound to be followed by a terrible silence wherein the only murmur was the blood hissing in my ear like an angry sea among the rocks. The silence became so frightening, so full of the nothingness of which I have spoken, that I could endure it no longer and flung myself up in my bed to look for something to fill it.
I saw the sun setting and realized my fever had brought me out at the moment where a little huddle of stricken followers were preparing for the night on the place where the monastery, my future workshop of war, was to be built. Then, in the focus of my fever, I saw first the huddle of men and then He Himself, coming down a footpath winding through figs and sparkling olives just as the monk had described it to me. The sunset was like a halo around His head. And yet now that He had come the occasion was so ordinary that I was not surprised that He was not recognized. How hard to learn that our own brief wonder is not worked in heaven but in the grains of sand at our feet; that miracle is not in the stars but in the fearful flesh and blood piled on the moon-bone beneath our own shrinking skin. The men now huddled about Him could not see the miracle for, in their fear, they were looking too far or too high.
Then I heard one of them, dark with bereavement like a crow at nightfall, say to Him: ‘Abide with us for the day is far spent, brother.’
But his tone implied no recognition.
As I watched it all, His presence crackling like a fire within my senses, I began to understand more fully their failure in recognition. He was the same: but He was translated. The perishable script of Himself was left in the archives somewhere around Gethsemane, and only the translation was now present. He had been rendered into a new idiom which could not yet be read. It was therefore no surprise to me that instead of answering the invitation directly, he asked instead with some suddeness. ‘But why are you not all here?’
‘Indeed, we are all here,’ one of them replied.
He shook His head decisively, answering, ‘Judas is not here.’
The amazement on their faces was great partly, perhaps, because of the implication in tone that He wished Judas to be there; and also, perhaps, because He evidently did not seem to know of Judas’s fate which was by now common knowledge throughout the land.
Then, in my fever, I saw one of them stand slowly to his feet and answer, ‘But surely . . . Master . . . you know Judas is dead. He hanged himself.’
Both by his action, words and tone I knew that at last revelation had come to that questioner.