Chapter 22

The words were not spoken in the strident tone of a demagogue. Mencius had a feeling that the Galilean was talking to him personally. Perhaps Pilate felt the same way. The Romans who sat on either side of the Procurator were leaning forward. Nobody was smiling.

‘Truth,’ mused Pilate, half to himself. ‘What is truth?’

There was no reply to that. The Galilean faced the Procurator squarely for a moment and then averted his eyes, closed them, smiled briefly, and shook his head, as if to say that this was not the time or the place to explain truth.

The spell that had gripped the crowd suddenly lifted now, and impatient voices rose in angry demand for a decision. Pilate pounded for order and didn’t get it. He rose and shouted for silence in the court and there was a momentary cessation of the tumult.

The defendant, he said, was apparently innocent of any wrongdoing. There was no evidence that he had committed a crime. He had already been severely punished…But the crowd would have none of it. ‘Away with him!’ they yelled. ‘To death with him! Crucify him!’ The fanatic shouting rose to a concerted roar! ‘Crucify! Crucify!’

Pilate sat down heavily. His hand shook as he beckoned to one of the guards, and flung an order over his shoulder. Presently the guard returned with a silver basin of water. Pilate turned back his sleeves…That settles it, thought Mencius. The Procurator is helpless—and has given in. He will wash his hands of the whole affair. After all—Pilate wasn’t there to quarrel with Jewry, but to keep the peace or at least the semblance of it. He could save the Galilean only at the risk of his position, already precarious enough. Pilate dipped his hands in the water, and the crowd cheered…Mencius had seen enough now, and wanted to get out of the snarling pack. He turned about and worked his way to the street, intending to return at once to Levi’s Inn and deliver the Emperor’s message to the Legate from Minoa.

On the corner, across the street, stood a little group of forlorn and frightened men, garbed in simple country dress. Mencius guessed that these despairing people might be the helpless friends of the doomed man from Galilee. He crossed over and joined them. They were too preoccupied with their grief to notice his presence among them. One huge, middle-aged man, towering over the others, with streaming eyes and a contorted face, stood beating an open palm with a clenched fist, breathing in audible gasps like an exhausted runner.

There were a few weeping women in the company, two of them quite young and attractive in spite of their red and swollen eyes.

Now the crowd at the Insula was breaking up, coming apart, and a platoon of Roman legionaries marched through and down the terraced steps. The Commander, with the insignia of a Legate, was a handsome young fellow with an exaggerated military bearing which Mencius surmised was not quite natural for him. No—he was tipsy, that was the trouble; and doing his best to walk straight. A few paces in advance of him strutted a grizzled veteran bearing a banner. Mencius recognized it as a duplicate of the old rag that used to hang limp and listless over the big gate at the Fort at Minoa. So—it was young Gallio, then, who had been given this disgraceful job…Now came the prisoner, towed by a rope, and not gently, for the legionaries were marching with long strides. The rabble pressed closely. There was very little shouting now. They had got what the Sanhedrin wanted. Everybody would be satisfied now—the moneylenders, the landlords, the grafters; yes, and the Temple that couldn’t afford to offend anybody with property.