e colours.
It is rare to see a red that is merely like a pillar-box, or a blue
that is Reckitt's blue; the red is sure to have the enrichment
of tawny wine or blood oranges, and the blue of peacocks or the sea.
In short these people are artistic in the sense that used to be
called aesthetic; and it is a nameless instinct that preserves
these nameless tints. Like all such instincts, it can be
blunted by a bullying rationalism; like all such children,
these people do not know why they prefer the better, and can
therefore be persuaded by sophists that they prefer the worst.
But there are other elements emerging from the coloured crowd,
which are more significant, and therefore more stubborn.
A stranger entirely ignorant of that world would feel something
like a chill to the blood when he first saw the black figures
of the veiled Moslem women, sinister figures without faces.
It is as if in that world every woman were a widow. When he realised
that these were not the masked mutes at a very grisly funeral,
but merely ladies literally obeying a convention of wearing
veils in public, he would probably have a reaction of laughter.
He would be disposed to say flippantly that it must be, a dull life,
not only for the women but the men; and that a man might well want
five wives if he had to marry them before he could even look at them.
But he will be wise not to be satisfied with such flippancy,
for the complete veiling of the Moslem women of Jerusalem,
though not a finer thing than the freedom of the Christian woman
of Bethlehem, is almost certainly a finer thing than the more
coquettish compromise of the other Moslem women of Cairo.
It simply means that the Moslem religion is here more sincerely observed;
and this in turn is part of something that a sympathetic person will
soon feel in Jerusalem, if he has come from these more commercial
cities of the East; a spiritual tone decidedly more delicate
and dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city.
Whatever the human vices involved, it is not altogether for
nothing that this is the holy town of three great religions.
When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that could
not be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shops
that could not be opened, within a stone's throw of the Sepulchre.
This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticism
or formalism; but if these are vices they are not vulgarities.
There is no stronger example of