Changeling, and Other Stories
taught to curse her. And all she had done was to adore him, and love
him, and to care for and pity him when he had grown old and blind and
astray in the head.
Oh well, what did it matter what they said!
Three men there had been in her life: her childhood's sweetheart in her
native valley of Sorek, the slim lad who was to have married her and
settled down in the valley to lead the idyllic life of country lovers.
But he had gone to Egypt, and been infested with ambition, and they had
grown apart and never married. And now in Egypt he was a suave
administrator, very close to the Pharoah, a great man.
And there had been Samson.
And there was her present husband, small, hawk-eyed, taciturn, the
greatest of the Oriental sea-captains, who knew the Mediterranean as
other men knew the lake of Galilee, who had passed through the straits
known to the Greeks as the pillars of Hercules, and been north to
Ibernia, the land of forests and savage, hairy Celts, and bearded druid
priests with sinister eyes, and to other lands where the Phoenicians
had great tin mines. A quiet, efficient man, he!
To her husband she gave admiration and a fond devotion. To the boy of
her youth she had given her heart in a burst of virginal music. But to
the rough Hebrew rebel, a stranger to her race, in religion, in every
mode of life, she had given an immensity of love....
III
In her face now, that once had a proud, singing beauty, were dignity
and power and wisdom. Strands of gray in her hair and shadows near her
eyes. In all Gaza, in all Philistia, there was not one to refuse her
reverence, excepting, of course, the strange gipsy people who contended
she had ruined their champion and lord.
A queer people, they! A strange, inimical folk, who had come into
Canaan out of Egypt, headed by magicians who had cloven the Red Sea--so
they claimed--and their hand was against the dwellers in Canaan. For
centuries now they had been an irritating minor political problem, and
when the question of relations with Egypt sagged, or there was a lull
in the discussion of the great trade route to the East, the matter of
the Israelites always arose. Here they had harried a town; there
squatted on a public common. And war on a large scale was impossible
against them. Send armies to subdue them, and they became separate
desert units, like any other tribes. And before the armies had
returned to their garrisons, the Israelites were back. The
Philistines, with their suave Egyptian tolerance, could only smile.
What could one do against a people of that kind?
For centuries now, they had remained turbulent, cunning, breakers of
the peace, with Philistia rather contemptuous of them, rather proud,
not unaffectionate. No nation in the world had a problem quite like
them. And the more kindly, more tolerant Philistia became, the greater
the hatred of the Israelites. For years they would dwell at peace in
Philistine cities, then a strange national pique would come on them,
and they would march out into the desert chanting to their harsh God,
blaming themselves cruelly for having lived in comfort, and prophets
would arise among them who said bitter things, lashing them with a
white fury, and agitators would preach war, and it was then Philistia
had to be careful and send troops out, for one never knew the moment
that the young men would make a raid on a township or an estate of
vineyards. A sharp clash, a little guerilla warfare, and all would be
over. Wise old politicians claimed that every time the Israelites were
defeated, they gained a little more ground, but politicians were always
pessimists. And, also, what matter if they did?
Delilah remembered that as a child in her father's house in the valley
Sorek she had been brought up to the belief that all Israelites were
riotous, dissatisfied. They were splendid herdsmen, but beyond that
they had no virtues. And the little Hebrew children were looked down
upon, because they were so poor. Oh! the cruel snobbishness of little
children! A race apart, an inferior race, Delilah thought in her
youth, and had smiled at the thought of their crude, melodramatic god,
of whom they walked in fear. Their god was so limited, so concrete.
None of the symbolism of Daigon, half man and half fish, whom the
Mediterranean sailors thanked when the great silver draughts weighed
down their nets; none of Baal, god of the sun, the fecund divinity who
increased the herds of kine, and whose rays nurtured the soil and
brought forth the sweet blue grass; none of the grace of Ashtoreth, the
goddess of the dusky night, the terror and the delight and the mystery,
the goddess of the ripe breasts and great passionate eyes....
So Delilah viewed them with little interest and not a little contempt,
a turbulent, annoying, ignorant, clever people; their quaint folk-songs
and dances, their peculiar religious revivals, their passionate
hatreds... Undependable--that is what they were.
Came her youth and her growing into womanhood.... She wondered
sometimes if he of her young days, for all his closeness to the Pharaoh
of Egypt, his Egyptian palace, his Egyptian wife, ever remembered the
warm green days of Sorek, and how they had grown together from fifteen
to twenty-three.
Nothing had ever been said between them of marriage, but it was
accepted by them that they would marry, as it was accepted that the sun
shines, and with night come the stars. They might have been two girls
together, or they might have been two boys, so sweet was the friendship
between them.
The adventure of life unclosing itself came to them together--all the
beauty of the world, the wild smiling flowers, the sun dropping over
the hills, the clamor of birds in spring as they raided the seeded
fields, the little fish that jumped in the pools when the winds stilled
and evening came--all that was a tremendous bond. Even now when she
thought of places in the valley of her childhood she could picture them
only as background for his calm young face. They seemed natural, the
blossoming of apple-trees and her young lover's face.
And Delilah's dreams--five years of dreaming, of the governing of a
house, and the regiment of maid-servants, of little children. Five
years dreaming! And he had gone into Egypt and had never come back.
Only stories returned, of his success, of his offices, of his wife....
She had thought, being a young woman then, that what was killed with
such a tremendous shock was her love, but she knew now, now that she
was nine-and-forty years, that what had died was a dream. She had been
shocked, disoriented, and her life, which had been so carefully
planned, suddenly had no more meaning.
It had made a woman of her, though, and made her proud. She must have
something to do, to think about. Love and all thoughts of love she put
aside. In order to escape from herself she began to study people,
questions of the day, this, that. It was probably the woman loving the
underdog that turned her eyes on the question of the poor Hebrew,
rather than to the glory of Egypt, or the power of the merchant cities.
She became their friend, and they came to know her. Probably they
robbed her a little, but the cost was so small compared to the luxury
of escape.... All her friends smiled at her hobby and spoke of the
Israelites as "Delilah's Hebrews," and they wondered how a woman of her
looks and standing should bother with these things. Why did n't she
get married, they asked? Or was she becoming queer? One of these
strange women who took more interest in public affairs than a home. So
many of them were becoming that way.
But Delilah only smiled. They were her anodyne. She liked their
strange folk-dances; their wailing, nostalgic songs. And their
legends--there was about them a quaintness and simplicity she
loved--Adam and Eve in the garden; the story of Noah and his ark; the
naïve legend of Babel; and the newer history of the leader who had been
found by the Egyptian princess in the bulrushes--what was his name?
Moses! That was it.... How simple they were, how refreshingly simple,
the dear things!
IV
It had often seemed to her a strange thing, as she sat thinking, how
all one labors to learn passes easily away, and what one feels remains,
welcome or no. All the book-learning of her early years had gone, but
there would never go the memory of her first blushing kiss, and though
it was six-and-twenty years since he had gone from her life, yet the
thought of the Philistine boy who was now a grandee of Egypt--that
remained.
So, likewise, all she had learned of the Hebrews was gone; now a
legend, now a saying would come back to her, some proverb or a piece of
ritual, but like a bar from a tune one has forgotten. But everything
she felt, everything she had known of great Samson remained with her.
One learns things and one lives things. The things written in the head
fade out and die, but the words on the heart bite deeper and deeper....
She could remember every kiss he had given, the immense madness he had
evoked.... O God, was it possible that she, so calm now, so respected,
so wise, had once shaken like a leaf at his voice? Her knees had
trembled; her heart had fought in her breast like a caged bird; her
throat had gone dry....
Before she met him, she knew him by repute, a huge, turbulent man of
immense strength, who had often been in trouble with the Philistine
authorities.... In the tribal troubles, some years before, his name
had been very prominent. He had married a Philistine girl in Timnath,
and there had been a riot at the wedding, over a question of dowry, or
something of the kind, and some of the girl's Philistine relations had
been killed. A sort of vendetta had arisen and Samson had declared war
against the nation. He had proceeded to burn the corn stacked in the
fields; there was a strange rumor that he had captured an immensity of
foxes and, tying burning brands to their tails, had loosed them among
the harvest.
Then, of course, from a family quarrel it had become a national affair
and Samson was proscribed. Prodigious stories were told of his
strength and valor, of his defeating patrols single-handed, and
refuging on the rocks of Etom. The Hebrews were asked to give him up
to authority, and brought him to Lehi bound. But there he burst his
cords, such immense strength had he, and escaped after slaying twenty
men in a hand-to-hand fight. Then he had become a bandit of the hills
on whose head a price was set.
Around him a romance grew, as will about all mountain chiefs, to which
Samson lived up most gallantly. Careless of disguise, careless of
danger, he had come, with his great red beard and his hair floating to
his hips, into Gaza itself once, to see a woman. The watchmen were
told, and the city gates were locked while they searched for him, but
he crashed through the gates with his terrific shoulders and made his
way to Hebron. It was said he carried parts of the ironwork with him
to make weapons.
All this had happened years before, and all the border warfare was
over, and Samson was no longer a proscribed bandit but a great man of
the Hebrews, leaping suddenly into fame and holding fame and power as
such men will. He no longer raided harvests and kine, nor came to Gaza
secretly, but now he walked like a conqueror. It was said that it
irked him that everything was so peaceful and quiet, and he regretted
the old roaming days. To the Hebrews he was a great figure, a champion.
Delilah had never understood how they made a champion out of this
guerilla fighter, but when she saw him for the first time she
understood. He came to thank her for the interest she had taken in his
race.
"You have been good to my people," his voice thundered. "I thank you."