Chapter 2

In the capital a dull winter was being prophesied. Only one gleam was discoverable in the social twilight. The Progressives had shipped Cato off to Cyprus and society was rid for one season of a man with a tongue, who believed in economy when money was plentiful, in sobriety when pleasure was multiform and in domestic fidelities when escape was easy. But they had done irreparable mischief in disposing more summarily of Cicero. With the Conservative leader exiled to Greece and the Progressive leader himself taking the eagles into Gaul the winter's brilliance was threatened with eclipse. Pompey was left in Rome, but the waning of his political star, it could not be denied, had dimmed his social lustre. Clodius, of course, was in full swing, triumphant in Caesar's friendship and Cicero's defeat, but if society was able to stomach him, he himself had the audacious honesty to foregather in grosser companionship. Even Lucullus, whose food and wine had come to seem a permanent refuge amid political changes and social shifts, must now be counted out. His mind was failing, and the beautiful Apollo dining room and terraced gardens would probably never be opened again.

In view of the impending handicaps Clodia was especially anxious that a dinner she was to give immediately on her return from Baiae in mid-October should be a conspicuous success. During her husband's consulship two years ago she had won great repute for inducing men of all parties, officials, artists and writers, to meet in her house. Last year, owing to Metellus's sickness and death, she had not done anything on a large scale. This autumn she had come back determined to reassume her position. She was unaffected by the old-fashioned prejudice against widows entertaining and she had nothing to fear from the social skill of this year's consuls.

Her invitations had been hurried out, and now in her private sitting room, known as the Venus Room from its choicest ornament, a life-sized statue of Venus the Plunderer, she was looking over the answers which had been sorted for her by her secretary. The Greek, waiting for further orders, looked at her with admiring, if disillusioned, eyes. Large and robust, her magnificent figure could display no ungraceful lines as she sat on the low carved chair in front of a curtain of golden Chinese silk. Her dress was of a strange sea-green and emeralds shone in her ears and her heavy, black hair. An orange-coloured cat with gleaming, yellow eyes curved its tail across her feet. Above her right shoulder hung a silver cage containing a little bird which chirped and twittered in silly ignorance of its mistress's mood. Anger disfigured her beautiful mouth and eyes. The list of regrets stretched out to sinister length and included such pillars of society as Brutus and Sempronia, Bibulus and Portia. A cynical smile relieved Clodia's sullen lips. Did these braggarts imagine her blind to the fact that if lively Sempronia and stupid Bibulus could conveniently die, Brutus and Portia, who were wiping her off their visiting lists because her feet had strayed beyond the marriage paddock, would make short work of their mourning?

Aurelia's declination she had expected. Her inordinate pride in being Caesar's mother had not modified her arrogant, old-time severity toward the freedom of modern life. But that Calpurnia should plead her husband's absence as an excuse was ominous. Everyone knew that he dictated her social relations. Terentia had been implacable since that amusing winter when Clodia had spread a net for Cicero. For her own sex Clodia had the hawk's contempt for sparrows, but if Caesar as well as Cicero were to withdraw from her arena, she might as well prepare herself for the inverted thumbs of Rome.

On her list of acceptances, outside of her own sisters, who had won intellectual freedom in the divorce courts, she found the names of only two women--virtuous Hortensia, who was proud of her emancipated ideas, and Marcia, who was enjoying her husband's Cyprian business as much as the rest of the world. Men, on the other hand, bachelors and divorces, abounded. Catullus, luckily, was still in Verona, nursing his dull grief for that impossible brother. But she was glad to be assured that his friend, Rufus Caelius, would come. If Terentia and Tullia had tried to poison the mind of Cicero's protege against her, obviously they had not succeeded. He was worth cultivating. His years in Asia Minor had made a man of the world out of a charming Veronese boy and he was already becoming known for brilliant work at the bar. The house he had just bought faced the southern end of her own garden and gave evidence alike of his money and his taste.

And yet, in spite of Caelius's connections, he was still too young to wield social power, and it was with intense chagrin that Clodia realised that his was the most distinguished name upon her dinner list. Indifferent to the opinion of the world as long as she could keep her shapely foot upon its neck, she dreaded more than anything else a loss of the social prestige which enabled her to seek pleasure where she chose. Was this fear at last overtaking her swiftest pace? Her secretary, watching her, prepared himself for one of the violent storms with which all her servants were familiar. But at this moment a house slave came in to ask if she would see Lucretius. "Him and no one else," she answered curtly, and the Greekling slipped thankfully out as the curtains were drawn aside to admit a man, about thirty-five years old, whose face and bearing brought suddenly into the fretful room a consciousness of a larger world, a more difficult arena. Clodia smiled, and her beauty emerged like the argent moon from sullen clouds. An extraordinary friendship existed between this woman who was the bawd of every tongue in Rome, from Palatine to Subura, and this man whose very name was unknown to nine-tenths of his fellow-citizens and who could have passed unrecognised among most of the aristocrats who knew his family or of the literary men who had it from Cicero that he was at work on a _magnum opus_. Cicero was Lucretius's only close friend, and supposed he had also read every page of Clodia's life, but not even he guessed that a chance conversation had originated a friendship which Clodia found unique because it was sexless, and Lucretius because, within its barriers, he dared display some of his vacillations of purpose. The woman who was a prey of moods seemed to understand that when he chose science as his mistress he had strangled a passion for poetry; and that when he had determined to withdraw from the life of his day and generation and to pursue, for humanity's sake, that Truth which alone is immortal beyond the waxing and waning of nations, he had violated a craving to consecrate his time to the immediate service of Rome. And he, in his turn, who could penetrate beyond the flaming ramparts of the world in his search for causes, had somehow discovered beyond this woman's deadly fires a cold retreat of thought, where all things were stripped naked of pretence.

Their intercourse was fitful and unconventional. Clodia was accustomed to Lucretius's coming at unexpected hours with unexpected demands upon her understanding. He even came, now and then, in those strange moods which Cicero said made him wonder whether the gods had confused neighbouring brews and ladled out madness when they meant to dip from the vat of genius. At such times he might go as abruptly as he came, leaving some wild sentence reechoing behind him. But at all times they were amazingly frank with each other. So now Clodia's eyes met his calmly enough as he said without any preface: "I have come to answer your note. I prefer that my wife should keep out of your circle. You used to have doves about you, who could protect a wren, but they are fluttering away now and your own plumage is appalling." With the phrase his eyes became conscious of her emeralds and her shimmering Cean silks and then travelled to the nude grace of Venus the Plunderer. He faced her violently. "Clodia," he said, slaying a sentence on her lips, "Clodia, do you know that hell is here on this earth and that such as you help to people it? There is no Tityus, his heart eaten out by vultures, save the victim of passion. And what passion is more devouring than that frenzy of the lover which is never satisfied? Venus's garlanded hours are followed by misery. She plunders men of their money, of their liberty, of their character. Duties give way to cups and perfumes and garlands. And yet, amid the very flowers pain dwells. The lover fails to understand and sickness creeps upon him, as men sicken of hidden poison. Tell me," he added brutally, leaning toward her, "for who should know better than you? does not the sweetest hour of love hold a drop of bitter? Why do you not restore your lovers to their reason, to the service of the state, to a knowledge of nature?"

His eyes were hot with pity for the world's pain. Hers grew cold. "Jove," she sneered, "rules the world and kisses Juno between the thunderbolts. Men have been known to conquer the Helvetii with their right hands and bring roses to Venus with their left. Your 'poison' is but the spicy sauce for a strong man's meat, your 'plundering' but the stealing of a napkin from a loaded table. Look for your denizens of hell not among lovers of women, but among lovers of money and of power and of fame. Their dreams are the futile frenzies."

"Dreams!" Lucretius interrupted. Clodia shrank a little from the strange look in his eyes. "Do you, too, dream at night? I worked late last night, struggling to fit into Latin words ideas no Latin mind ever had. Toward morning I fell asleep and then I seemed to be borne over strange seas and rivers and mountains and to be crossing plains on foot and to hear strange noises. These waked me at last and I sprang up and walked out into the Campagna where the dawn was fresh and cool. But all day I have scarcely felt at home. And I may dream again to-night. This time my dead may appear to me. They often do." He walked toward her suddenly and his eyes seemed to bore into hers. "Do you ever dream of your dead?" A horrible fright took possession of her. She fell back against the Venus, her sea-green dress rippling upon the white marble, and covered her eyes with her hands. When she looked again, Lucretius was gone.

How terrible he had been to-day! Dream of the dead, he had said, the dead! And why had he talked of _a hidden poison of which men might sicken and die_? She felt a silly desire to shriek, to strike her head against the painted wall, to tear the jewels from her ears. The orange cat arched its back and rubbed its head against her. She kicked it fiercely, and its snarl of pain seemed to bring her to her senses. She picked the creature up and stroked it. The bird in the cage broke into a mad little melody. How morbid she was growing! She had been depressed by her ridiculous dinner and Lucretius had been most unpleasant. He was such a fool, too, in his idea of love. The brevity of the heated hours was the flame's best fuel. Venus the Plunderer seemed to smile, and there quickened within her the desire for excitement, for the exercise of power, for the obliterating ecstasies of a fresh amour. She had not had a lover since she accepted Catullus. How the thought of that boy sickened her! He had been so absurd that first day when she went to him at Allius's. After writing her that his heart was an AEtna of imprisoned fire, in the first moment he had reminded her of ice-cold Alps. He had knelt and kissed her foot and then had kissed her lips--_her lips!_--as coolly as a father might kiss a child. The unleashed passion, the lordly love-making which followed had won her. But that first caress and its fellow at later meetings was like crystal water in strong wine--she preferred hers unmixed. Of a poet she had had enough for one while; if she ever wanted him back she need only say so.

In the mean time it would be a relief to play the game with a man who understood it. Youth she enjoyed, if it were not too inexperienced. Caelius's smile, for instance, boyish and inviting, had seemed to her full of promise. He was worth the winning and was close at hand. Catullus had introduced him, which would add piquancy to her letting the din of the Forum succeed the babbling of Heliconian streams. Suddenly she laughed aloud, cruelly, as another thought struck her. How furious and how impotent Cicero would be! If she could play with this disciple of his, and then divest him of every shred of reputation, she might feel that at last she was avenged on the man whom she had meant to marry (after they had sloughed off Metellus and Terentia) and who had escaped her. Calling back her secretary she ordered writing materials and with her own hand wrote the following note:

"Does Caelius know that Clodia's roses are loveliest at dusk, when the first stars alone keep watch?"

III

About seven o'clock on a clear evening of early November Catullus arrived in Rome. With the passage of the weeks his jealous grief had learned to dwell with other emotions, and a longing to be with Lesbia, once more admitted, had reassumed its habitual sway. Coming first in guise of the need of comfort, it had impelled him to leave Verona, and on the journey it had grown into a lover's exclusive frenzy. To-morrow he might examine the structure of his familiar life which had been beaten upon by the storm of sorrow. To-night his ears rang and his eyes were misty with the desire to see Lesbia. He had written her that he would call the following morning, but he could not wait. Stopping only to dress after his journey, fitting himself, he shyly thought, to take her loveliness into his arms, he started for the Palatine. The full moon illumined the city, but he had no eyes for the marvel wrought upon temples and porticoes. Clodia's house stood at the farther end of the hill, her gardens stretching towards the Tiber and offering to her intimates a pleasanter approach than the usual thoroughfare. To-night he found the entrance gate still open and made his way through the long avenue of cypress trees, hearing his own heart beat in the shadowed silence. The avenue ended in a wide, open space, dominated by a huge fountain. The kindly moonlight lent an unwonted grace to the coarse workmanship of the marble Nymphs which sprawled in the waters of the central basin, their shoulders and breasts drenched in silvered spray. Upon the night air hung the faint scent of late roses. It had been among summer roses under a summer moon that Catullus had once drunk deepest of Lesbia's honeyed cup. This autumn night seemed freighted with the same warmth and sweetness. He was hurrying forward when he caught sight of two figures turning the corner of a tall box hedge. His heart leaped and then stood still. A woman and a man walked to the fountain and sat down upon the carved balustrade. The woman unfastened her white cloak. The man laughed low and bent and kissed her white throat where it rose above soft silken folds. Clodia loosened the folds. Caelius laughed again.

Catullus never remembered clearly what happened to him that night after he had plunged down the cypress avenue, his feet making no sound on the green turf. In the mad hours he found his first way into haunts of the Subura which later became familiar enough to him, and at dawn he came home spent. Standing at his window, he watched the pitiless, grey light break over Rome. The magic city of the moonlit night, the creation of fragile, reflected radiance, had evanished in bricks and mortar. The city of his heart, also, built of gossamer dreams and faiths, lay before him, reduced to the hideous realities of impure love and lying friendship. In the chaos substituted for his accustomed world he recognised only a grave in Troy.

His servant found him in a delirium and for a week his fever ran high. In it were consumed the illusions of which it had been born. As he gained strength again, he found that his anger against Caelius was more contemptuous than regretful; he discovered a sneering desire for Lesbia's beauty divorced from a regard for her purity. The ashes of his old love for her, the love that Valerius had understood, in the dusk, coming home from Mantua, were hidden away in their burial urn. Should he hold out his cold hands to this new fire? Should he go to her as a suppliant and pay in reiterated torture for Clytemnestra's embrace and for Juno's regilded favours? He was unaccustomed to weighing impulses, to resisting emotions. For the first time in his life slothful reason arose and fought with desire.

The issue of the conflict was still in the balance when, a few days later, a little gold box was brought to him without name or note. Opening it he found a round, white stone. Loosened flame could have leaped no more swiftly to its goal. Lesbia had said a white stone marked in her memory the day she had first given herself to him. She wanted him to come to her. She was holding out to him her white arms. He trembled with a passion which no longer filtered through shyness. The listlessness of his body was gone. His house was not a prison and the Palatine was near. Valerius would never come back from Asia, but Lesbia stood within his hand's sweet reach.

As he made his way through the Forum two drunken wretches shambled past him, and he caught a coarse laugh and the words, "Our Palatine Medea." Why did his ears ring, suddenly, strangely, with the laughter of bright, blue waves and the cadences of a voice telling a child Medea's story? Did he know that not the unawakening night but this brief, garish day separated him from one who had listened to that story with him in the covert of his mother's arms; that not the salt waves of trackless seas but the easy passage of a city street marked his distance from a soldier's grave? He had blamed death for his separation from Valerius. But what Death had been powerless to accomplish his own choice of evil had brought about. Between him and his brother there now walked the Estranger--Life.

A POET'S TOLL

I

The boy's mother let the book fall, and, walking restlessly to the doorway, flung aside the curtains that separated the library from the larger and open hall. The December afternoon was sharp and cold, and she had courted an hour's forgetfulness within a secluded room, bidding her maid bring a brazier and draw the curtains close, and deliberately selecting from her son's books a volume of Lucretius. But her oblivion had been penetrated by an unexpected line, shot like a poisoned arrow from the sober text:--

Breast of his mother should pierce with a wound sempiternal, unhealing.

That was her own breast, she said to herself, and there was no hope of escape from the fever of its wound. A curious physical fear took possession of her, parching her throat and robbing her of breath. It was a recoil from the conviction that she must continue to suffer because her son, so young even for his twenty-three years, had openly flouted her for one of the harpies of the city and delivered over his manhood to the gossip-mongers of Rome.

Seeking now the sting of the winter air which she had been avoiding, she pushed the heavy draperies aside and hurried into the atrium. Through an opening in the roof a breath from December blew refreshingly, seeming almost to ruffle the hair of the little marble Pan who played his pipes by the rim of the basin sunk in the centre of the hall to catch the rain-water from above. She had taken pains years ago to bring the quaint, goat-footed figure to Rome from Assisi, because the laughing face, set there within a bright-coloured garden, had seemed to her a happy omen on the day when she came as a bride to her husband's house, and in the sullen hours of her later sorrow had comforted her more than the words of her friends.

As she saw it now, exiled and restrained within a city house, a new longing came upon her for her Umbrian home. Even the imperious winds which sometimes in the winter swept up the wide valley, and leaped over the walls of Assisi and shrieked in the streets, were better than the Roman Aquilo which during these last days had been biting into the very corners of the house. And how often, under the winter sun, the northern valley used to lie quiet and serene, its brown vineyards and expectant olive orchards held close within the shelter of the blue hills which stretched protectingly below the snow-covered peaks of the Apennines. How charming, too, the spring used to be, when the vineyards grew green, and the slow, white oxen brought the produce of the plain up the steep slopes to the town.

She wondered now why, in leaving Assisi when Propertius was a child, she had not foreseen her own regretful loneliness. Her reason for leaving had been the necessity of educating her son, but the choice had been made easy by the bitterness in her own life. Her husband had died when the child was eight years old, and a year later her brother, who had bulwarked her against despair, had been killed in the terrible siege of Perugia.

Her own family and her husband's had never been friendly to Caesar's successor. Her husband's large estates had been confiscated when Octavius came back from Philippi, and her brother had eagerly joined Antony's brother in seizing the old Etruscan stronghold across the valley from Assisi and holding it against the national troops. The fierce assaults, the prolonged and cruel famine, the final destruction of a prosperous city by a fire which alone saved it from the looting of Octavius's soldiers, made a profound impression upon all Umbria. Her own home seemed to be physically darkened by evil memories. Her mind strayed morbidly in the shadows, forever picturing her brother's last hours in some fresh guise of horror. She recovered her self-control only through the shock of discovering that her trouble was eating into her boy's life also.

He was a sensitive, shrinking child, easily irritated, and given to brooding. One night she awoke from a fitful sleep to find him shivering by her bed, his little pale face and terrified eyes defined by the moonlight that streamed in from the opposite window. "It is my uncle," he whispered; "he came into my room all red with blood; he wants a grave; he is tired of wandering over the hills." As she caught the child in her arms her mind found a new mooring in the determination to seek freedom for him and for herself from the memories of Assisi, where night brought restless spectres and day revealed the blackened walls and ruins of Perugia.