As they assembled, one drew Simon aside and whispered importantly. Simon’s eyes dilated, astonishment lifted him, visibly, like a lash, and his hands trembled above his head.
“Have you heard,” he exclaimed to the others—“have you heard that the Nazarene whom I invited here, and who pretends to be a prophet, allowed his followers to pluck corn on the Sabbath, to thresh it even, and defended and approved their violation of the Law? Have you heard it? Is it true?”
Reulah quaked as one stricken by palsy. “On the Sabbath!” he moaned. “On the Sabbath! Why, I would not send a message on Wednesday, lest perchance it should be delivered on the Sabbath day. Surely it cannot be.”
But on that point the others were certain. They were all aware of the scandal; one had been an eyewitness, another had heard the Nazarene assert that he was “Lord of the Day.”
“This is monstrous!” Simon cried.
“He declared,” the eyewitness continued, “that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”
“It is monstrous!” Simon repeated. “The command to do no manner of work is absolute and emphatic. The killing of a flea on the Sabbath is as heinous as the butchering of a bullock. The preservation of life itself is inhibited. Moses had the son of Shelomith stoned to death for gathering sticks on it. Shammai occupied six days of the week in thinking how he could best observe it. It is unlawful to wear a false tooth on the Sabbath, and if a toothache it is unlawful to rinse the mouth with vinegar.”
“Yet,” objected Reulah, “it is lawful to hold the vinegar in the mouth provided you swallow it afterward.”
No one paid any attention to him. Simon’s indignation increased. Of the thirty-nine Abhôth he quoted twelve; he showed that the Nazarene had violated each one of these prohibitions against labor; he showed, too, that by his subsequent speech and bearing he had practically scoffed at the Toldôth, at the synagogue which had drawn it up as well.
“If the Sadducees were not in power, Jerusalem should hear of this. As it is—”
Whatever resolution he may have intended to express remained unuttered. A silence fell upon his lips; his guests drew back. At the step stood the Nazarene, behind him his treasurer, Judas of Kerioth. For a second only Jesus hesitated. He stooped, undid his shoes, and moved to where Simon stood. The latter bowed constrainedly.
“Master,” he said, “we awaited you.”
At this his friends retreated into the little room. Reulah reached the middle seat of the central mat first and held it, his nostrils quivering at the envy of the others.
Preceded by their host, Jesus and Judas found places near together, and, the usual ablutions performed, the customary prayers recited, lay, the upper part of the body supported by the left arm, the head raised, the limbs outstretched.
On the stools were dishes of stewed lentils, milk, and cakes of mashed locusts. Reulah ate with the tips of his lips, greedily, like a goat. Judas, too, ate with an air of hunger. The Master broke bread absently, his thoughts on other things. These thoughts Simon interrupted.
“Rabbi”—and to his wide mouth came the sneer of one propounding a riddle already solved—“it is not meet, is it, to thresh on the Sabbath day? Yet since you permit your followers to do so, how are we to distinguish between what is lawful and what is not?”
The Master raised his eyes. The dawn was in them, high noon as well.
“Show yourself a tried money-changer. Choose that which is good metal, reject that which is bad.”
Simon blinked as at a sudden light.
“But,” he persisted, “in seeking to observe the Law, there is not a jot or tittle in it that can be rejected.”
With an acquiescence that was both vague and melancholy, Jesus looked the Pharisee in the face.
“Seek those things that are great, and little things will be added unto you—”
He would have said more, perhaps, but a woman who had entered from the recess approached circuitously, and kneeling beside him let a tear, long as a pearl, fall upon his unsandalled feet.
Judas’ heart bounded; he glared at her, his eyes dilating like a leopard preparing to spring. At once he was back in the circus, gazing into the perils and the splendors of a woman’s face, telling himself with reiterated insistence that to hold her to him would be the birthday of his life; and here, within reach of his hand, was she whom in the din of the chariots he had recognized as the one woman in all the world, and who for one moment the day before had lain unconscious in his arms.
Reulah sat motionless, his mouth agape, a finger extended. “The paramour of Pandera,” he stammered at last; and lowering his eyes, he looked at her covetously from beneath the lids.
Simon, too, sat motionless. There was rage in his expression, hate even—that hatred which the beautiful excites in the base. Time and again he had seen her; she was a byword with him; from the height of her residence she looked down on his mean gray walls; her luxury had been an insult to his abstinence; and with that zest which a small nature takes in the humiliation of its superior, he determined, in spite of her manifest abjection, to humiliate her still more.
“If this man,” he confided to his neighbor,
