Helena

by Evelyn Waugh

  Countless times in his meditations Macarius had trodden the road to Golgotha pausing at each sad station. He had stood benighted beside the three crosses and lingered, when the rest had gone home, at the blocked tomb with Mary Magdalen and Mary the Mother of God. It was home ground, this acre of rock, a patrimony reclaimed. He was quite at ease rejoicing on his knees in the little cave.

  News of the operation flashed to Constantine from tower to tower of the chain of signal-posts that ran from Caesarea to Nicomedia. It came at the right moment. Constantine had newly arrived cross and dispirited and lonely from his Roman holiday. He needed something of just this kind, some new resounding conquest, another miracle. And here it was, a sure pledge that anything untoward which had happened on the Palatine was forgiven and forgotten and that he was back again in the full unshaded glare of Divine favor.

  He wrote at once, exuberantly, to Macarius:

  How God loves Us! Words fail. Victorious in war, free in conscience, We are now the recipients of a stupendous revelation, hidden for generations—the sepulcher itself, the original monument of the Passion and Resurrection. The mind boggles. This just shows how right We were to accept the Christian religion. See that they don’t put back that idolatrous temple. We will build a church there instead; the finest church in the world, better than every other in every detail. You and the Governor and Dracilianus must see to this. Just ask for whatever you need. How many columns will it take? How much other marble? Make it strong and gorgeous. Write and tell me what to send. This is a unique place and needs unique treatment. Would you prefer the roof domed or flat? If the former, it should be gilded. Get your estimates out as soon as you can. How about the rafters and wood paneling, if you decide on a flat roof? Let me know. God bless you, dear Brother.

  That was the letter, brimming with benevolence, which shook the Bishop from his mood of placid rejoicing. There was something disconcerting about the Emperor’s enthusiasm. Macarius knew that things would not be left as they stood. The place could not be kept for his own meditations or the edification of his local congregation. There would be pilgrims. Something must be done to protect the holy places, something, also, to accommodate visitors. But “the finest church in the world, better than every other in every detail”—these words from the man who had already staggered the Empire with his scale of church building, who in Rome alone had spent the pay-roll of an army, who was now planning prodigious erections at Byzantium—these words from such a man were exorbitant. What did Macarius, a provincial clergyman who had spent most of his life dodging the police, know of porphyry and gold leaf?

  Everyone was exceedingly civil to him. The Governor and the architect Dracilianus and all the contractors and clerks-of-the-works seemed to defer to him, and yet helplessly he felt that everything was being spoiled.

  If only the Imperial architects had not been consumed with this passion for symmetry! No sooner had Dracilianus surveyed the site, than he spoke of leveling and orientating it. He failed to hide his annoyance that the sepulcher did not lie dead west of Calvary and even hinted that perhaps this might be arranged; there at least Macarius was obdurate. What Dracilianus finally did, however, was nearly as bad. Macarius was shown the plans and the elevations, he was told a multitude of technical terms. He consented not knowing what was proposed. And at once the holy places swarmed with workmen. There were barrows and gang-planks and scaffolding everywhere; the whole area was screened from observation and though Macarius had the entrée he found himself lost among dust and industry.

  Months later Dracilianus’s plan was revealed. Everything was transformed. Where Hadrian had leveled up, he had leveled down. Taking the floor of the sepulcher as his mean Dracilianus had created a new, perfectly flat platform. The hill in which the sepulcher stood had been cut away, leaving only a thin, geometrically regular mass of stone round the sepulcher itself so that what had been a cave was now a tiny house. The hill of Calvary had been trimmed to a cube; it lay outside the future basilica, which was strictly orientated on the axis of the tomb. There were pegs and lines and trenches everywhere marking the proposed buildings. The basilica was to contain neither of the holy places, but to stand in a great, rectangular, colonnaded yard five hundred feet long. To the east of it a separate, semi-circular building was to enclose the tomb. It would require, in all, eighty columns, the architect explained, great quantities of marble and cedarwood. He rather fancied he had hit off just what the Emperor had in mind. He had quite outdone the Lateran basilica.

  But Macarius lacked vision of these future architectural glories. He had seen clearly enough the mourning women on the lonely hillside; he could not see the eighty columns. He saw only a parade ground cluttered with two incongruous protuberances, a sort of hut and an empty pedestal. He was lost, far from home, in this wilderness of mensuration. What Hadrian had carelessly preserved, Constantine had zealously destroyed, it seemed to Macarius.

  *

  And now came news that the Empress Dowager was on her way to visit them.

  “You see what you’ve done,” said the Prefect. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

  Eleven

  Epiphany

  Here, as elsewhere, little was known of the Empress Dowager. She was a golden legend. They expected someone very old and very luxurious; and they rather hoped, gentle. Instead they met a crank; and more than a crank, a saint. It was altogether too much. They were prepared to meet demands for delicacies of the table and elaborate furniture. They had secured quite a passable orchestra from Alexandria. What Helena wanted was something of quite another order. She wanted the True Cross.

  On the day of her arrival she made it clear that they had miscalculated. They went out to meet her, Bishop and Prefect and the whole city in a great cavalcade. They surrounded her litter with a massed choir and so led her to Government House. This was a nondescript huddle of buildings comprising the old Antonia Tower, part of Herod’s palace and more recent military offices. Nothing very much could be done with the exterior but the upper rooms had been lavishly upholstered. Helena, alighting, seemed to regard the place critically. The major-domo—imported with the band from Egypt—tried to put a good face on it by remarking that this was originally Pilate’s Praetorium. It might have been. No one was quite sure. On the whole most people thought that it was, though certainly much altered. Helena was plainly impressed. The major-domo went further. These marble steps, he explained, were the identical stairway which Our Lord had descended on his way to death. The effect was beyond his expectation. The aged Empress knelt down, there and then in her traveling cloak, and painfully and prayerfully climbed the twenty-eight steps on her knees. More than this, she made the whole of her suite follow her example. Next day she ordered her private cohort of sappers to take the whole staircase to pieces, number them, crate them and pack them on wagons. “I am sending it to Pope Sylvester,” she said. “A thing like this ought to be in the Lateran. You clearly do not attach proper importance to it here.”

  Then, having rendered Government House uninhabitable she bade her court find billets where they could, and herself settled in a single small room among the nuns of Mount Zion where she did her own housework and took her turn in waiting at table.

  The Holy Stairs left for the coast in a train of wagons. Macarius and his chapter watched them go aghast. Royal collectors had been known to strip whole provinces of their works of art. The Church of Jerusalem had unique treasures—the crown of thorns, the lance, the shroud and many others. Were they to lose now, in the hour of liberation, what they had guarded so devotedly through all the years of persecution? They conferred and decided to make one great present. They would thus at the same time express their loyalty to the throne and emphasize their right of possession in all they had. They gave Helena the Holy Coat, which a soldier won at dice and sold later to a disciple. The Empress was grateful but it was not what she really wanted. She wanted one thing only. Meanwhile she set a squad to work loading some tons of common earth. The fancy had taken her to bui
ld a church in Rome at the Sessorian Palace and to lay its foundations in the soil of the Holy Land. Macarius watched this operation without alarm.

  It was soon evident that the Empress’s change of address did not presage a regime of pious seclusion. The old lady was out and about everywhere, every day. She rode to Bethlehem. Here a small Christian community had charge of the cave of the Nativity. They used it for mass and had built a little meeting house over its entrance. Hither at Christmas all the Christians of Jerusalem came with their Bishop to keep the vigil. “Just the place for a basilica,” said Helena and, behold, in a few weeks the work began. She started, too, to build on Olivet. This, they told her, was a family estate of Saint Joachim and Saint Ann. Old trees grew here whose fruits they had enjoyed. Here was their family burial-place. Our Lady had played here as a child and here her body had briefly lain, shrouded and anointed. Here lay the gardens where Jesus had resorted and the cave where he had taken shelter often with the apostles; here he had passed the night in agony before his arrest, and hence he had ascended to Heaven. It was as holy a place as any in Jerusalem. “Just the place for a basilica.”

  Helena visited the sites often, saw the first trenches cut and picnicked among her foundations. And Macarius saw his little diocese growing vast in wealth and importance and fading from his recognition, as Dracilianus reduced everything to symmetry and covered the rough, the real, stone with panels of marble.

  It was like a masque of oriental magic, this utterance of a spell, this materialization from the clouds of domes and colonnades. Helena said the word, the complex machinery of imperial engineering was set into motion and she returned to help wash dishes in the convent scullery. It was, rather, a part of all that preternatural fecundity that surrounded her; of that Second Spring of unfailing clemency, when the seed germinated overnight, struck deep root and by noon threw up strong stems and a waving cumulus of flower and foliage. The multivarious harvest spiced the air and brought balm to her fretful hours. For she was fretful at times because she sought something quite different; not the budding sapling but old, seasoned wood.

  She went about her quest with a single mind, questioning everyone. There were timber merchants in the town who had come there with tenders for new work, many of them local firms who had been in the business for generations. None of them, however, claimed any experience in the matter of making gallows. They were quite willing to try, they said. What sort of wood was used for crosses three hundred years ago? It was a question they had not considered. The district was well wooded then, as now, they said. You could take your pick. All agreed, with professional assurance, that there was nothing like sound timber for endurance. All could quote instances of woodwork which had outlived concrete and masonry. “Only gets the harder with age, ma’am,” they declared. “No reason why it shouldn’t last forever provided it isn’t burned and the insects don’t get at it. There aren’t many insects in these parts but there’s been a power of burning.”

  She sent for historians and antiquaries. Some had already arrived in the town, hearing of the Empress’s foible. Others came at her invitation from Alexandria and Antioch, Christian, Jewish and heathen, all eager to help.

  The Christians were full of information. “It is generally believed,” a Coptic elder assured her, “that the cross was compounded of every species of wood so that all the vegetable world could participate in the act of redemption.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Helena.

  “Of course,” said the Copt, highly delighted. “So I have always maintained. That is to put a complexion altogether too naturalistic and quantitative on the matter.”

  “Why must the vegetable world participate in this act, please?” asked a young clergyman from Italy. “It was in no way redeemed or susceptible of redemption.”

  “Surely, the mere carpentry of such a cross,” said simple Macarius, whom Helena liked to have at hand on these occasions, “would have been so elaborate as to take many years? Some specimens of wood are known to come only from the forests far in the south of Africa and some from India.”

  “Exactly,” said the Copt. “I have proved that the truth is much more simple. One arm was of boxwood, one of cypress, one of cedar and one of pine. These four woods symbolize…”

  Another clergyman maintained the wood was aspen and that it was for this reason that the tree now continually shivered with shame. “Rot,” said Helena.

  A story still more elaborate was propounded by a swarthy scholar from the Upper Nile. When Adam was ill, he explained, his son Seth went to Paradise for some Oil of Mercy. The Archangel Michael gave him instead three seeds which arrived too late to save Adam from death. Seth put them in the corpse’s mouth and from them grew three rods which Moses later came to possess. He employed them for a variety of magical purposes, including the blanching of negroes, until in David’s day they turned into a single tree. (Here Helena began to show signs of impatience.) Solomon cut the tree down and tried to use it in the roof of the temple but it would not fit any purpose. A lady named Maximilla sat on it accidentally and her clothes burst into flame, so Solomon whipped Maximilla to death and used the wood as a footbridge which the Queen of Sheba, crossing, at once detected.

  “Oh, do stop,” said Helena. “It’s just this kind of story that I’ve come to disprove.”

  “There’s a great deal more,” said the darky, reproachfully. “At the end it floats up in the middle of the pool of Bethesda.”

  “Bosh,” said Helena.

  The Jews, Alexandrians of deep scholarship, showed more caution. Crucifixion, they remarked, was a Roman barbarity, quite alien to the best Jewish tradition. Their people, quite properly, stoned malefactors. The Gabonites, indeed, had crucified the seven descendants of Saul, but that was in most exceptional circumstances—to make the barley grow—and very long ago. At the period which interested the Empress such a thing could not have occurred. She must really consult the Roman military historians.

  One such was present. He said that pine was the cheapest wood and the easiest to work. No doubt that was what was used. Probably the upright was a more or less permanent fixture. The beam which the victim carried to his execution would be the cross-piece, which would be hoisted, with him hanging, to a socket and bolted into place. The same cross was no doubt used countless times.

  Here the Jews interposed. That was not possible, they said. The execution was a Roman action but it had taken place on Jewish soil at the time when Jewish law was still paramount. And the law was perfectly clear on the subject. Anything connected with a violent death was unclean and liable to contaminate the neighborhood. Instruments of execution, even if only the litter of a stoning or the bloodless cord of a strangulation, had to be cleared away, right out of sight, that very day.

  Well, whose business would that be?

  The temple guards, said the Roman. Romans did not concern themselves with ritual observances of that sort.

  The friends and family of the victim, said the Jews. In this case, apparently, they had been given charge of the body—a most unusual provision. No doubt all arrangements had been left to them.

  The soldiers, said the Christians. It had been no ordinary execution. The City was in turmoil. There had been alarming portents. Special precautions were taken to seal and guard the tomb. Special precautions would have been taken to dispose of all relics.

  Anyway, said the Roman, it was just one of those baffling little lacunae that occur in history, sacred or secular, and are never filled. There was no means now of learning precisely what happened then.

  But in spite of all expert discouragement, Helena held to her purpose.

  Macarius spoke little at these conferences. When they were over Helena sought his opinion. He gave it diffidently.

  It was certainly not the disciples who had hidden the cross, he said. Had they done so, the memory would have been preserved in the lore of his Church. Nothing had ever been known about the cross. That he could vouch for. Jew or Roman, who had hidden it, died with t
he secret.

  “Very well,” said Helena. “Let us argue from there. A party is detailed, temple guards or legionaries—we don’t know which—to get rid of two large baulks of timber, quickly and unobtrusively. What do they do? Clearly they don’t attract attention or waste time by carrying them far. The ground all round is rocky. They could not dig a trench big enough to hide them. What do they look for? A cave or the cellar of a ruined house—something like that. The place is full of them. Wherever I’ve been, I’ve seen them. All we have to do is to search all the hiding-places of that kind round Calvary and we are bound to find it.”

  “My dear lady,” said Macarius, “your Majesty, ma’am. Have you studied the ground round Calvary?”

  “Not very much. It’s always been so full of builders and people.”

  “Exactly. Come and look now.”

  They went together to the east end of the site where the rising ground afforded a general view of the workings. It was near sundown and the men were packing up for the day. At their feet lay the flat waste space with its two little lumps, fenced and covered in sacking. All over the site the first beginnings of walls and piers, and beyond it and round it for many times its area stretched the outworks. There was the rubble and rock which had been cleared away; there was the building stone and marble which had been assembled; there were brick kilns and lime kilns and concrete mixers; there were huge wooden cranes; wagons and handcarts; the stables of draft horses and the barracks of the laborers; field kitchens and latrines; drawing-office and book-keeper’s office; the guarded strong room where the pay was kept; there were the shells of houses evacuated and half-demolished and the shells of temporary houses under construction. There was a network of causeways and cuttings; there was a whole street of booths where hucksters had set up shop to catch the men on pay-days before they reached the market. All this had been brought into being by the words: “Let’s have a basilica.”