What pure delight! Every letter sings! What does the meaning matter? All the beauty consists in the sound, in the assemblage of vowels and consonants. For that utterance I would give all the civic virtue of Juvenal and the philosophy of Lucretius! No! Just hear again! What sweetness there is in that murmur—
“‘Et Veneris dominæ volucres, mea turba columbæ!‘”
and he wagged that upper lip with a smack of delight.
Everybody repeated the lines of Propertius, unwearying of their charm, and embarking on a veritable orgy of quotation.
“Just listen,” murmured Mamertinus in his Æolian voice—
“‘Tingunt Gorgonio...‘”
“Tingunt Gorgonio,” repeated the master of chancery. “By Pallas!—why, it delights one’s very palate. It’s like swallowing a warm mouthful of wine mingled with Attic honey—
“‘Tingunt Gorgonio...‘”
Note how the ‘g’s’ follow each other, and then farther on—
“‘ ...punica rostra lacu.‘”
“Astounding! inimitable!” murmured Lampridius, shutting his eyes.
Julian was ashamed and amused at this verbal intoxication.
“Words should be, to a certain extent, devoid of meaning,” continued Lampridius gravely; “they should flow, roar, chant, without ever bringing up short either the ear or the emotion. Then only real enjoyment of their beauty is possible.”
On the threshold of the door, from which the gaze of Julian had seldom departed, there now appeared, quietly as a shadow, a white and haughty figure.
The open shutters allowed the moonlight to fall in, mingling with the ruddy shine of torches on the mosaic of the mirror-smooth floor, and on the wall frescoes, portraying Endymion asleep under the caresses of Selene. The apparition kept still as a statue. The antique Greek peplum of soft white wool fell in long folds, cinctured high under the breast. Moonlight illumined the robe, but the face remained in shadow. The new-comer looked at Julian and Julian looked at her. They smiled at each other, knowing that nobody observed them, and finger on lip she listened to the anecdotes of the guests.
Suddenly Mamertinus, who was discussing with Lampridius grammatical peculiarities of the first and second aorist, exclaimed—
“Arsinoë! At last! So you’ve made up your mind to abandon physics and modelling for our company?”
She came in and deigned a smile to everyone.
She was the same disk-thrower whom a month before Julian had seen in the abandoned wrestling-ground. The poet Publius, knowing everybody and everything in Athens, had sought the acquaintance of Hortensius and Arsinoë, and had introduced Julian to the house.
Arsinoë’s father, an old Roman senator, Helvidius Priscus, had died during the last years of Constantine the Great, bequeathing Arsinoë and Myrrha, his two daughters by a Goth woman-prisoner, to Hortensius, whom he respected on account of his love for antique Rome and hatred for Christianity. A distant relative of Arsinoë, owner of factories of purple at Sidon, had left his incalculable wealth to the young girl.
To Arsinoë, Christian virtues and the patriarchal customs of Rome seemed equally contemptible. The figures of independent women, Aspasia, Cleopatra, and Sappho, alone captivated her girlish imagination. Had she not declared naïvely one day, to the horror of Hortensius, that she would rather become a beautiful and free courtesan, than be transformed into the mother of a family, slave of a husband, “like everybody else”? Those three words, “like everybody else,” filled her with melancholy disgust. At one time Arsinoë was attracted by natural science, and had worked with illustrious men of science at the museum in Alexandria. Then the atomic theories of Epicurus, Democrates, and Lucretius had enthralled her. She loved a study which should deliver her soul from the “terror of the gods.”
With the same almost morbid intensity, she had afterwards applied herself to sculpture, and had come to Athens in order to study the best works, the masterpieces of Phidias, Scopas, and Praxiteles.
“You are still discussing grammar?” asked the daughter of Helvidius Priscus of the guests, as she came into the dining-hall. She continued ironically: “Don’t trouble yourselves; go on. I won’t argue or complain, because I’m too hungry after my day’s work. Slave, some wine!...”
“My friends,” continued Arsinoë when seated, “you’ll ruin your minds with quotations from Demosthenes and your rules from Quintilian!... Take care! Rhetoric will ruin you.... I want to see a man who doesn’t care a fig for Homer or for Cicero, who speaks without thinking of the aspirates, of syntax, or of the conjunction of letters. Julian, let us go down to the beach after supper; I am disinclined for discussions on dactyls and anapæsts.”
“Precisely my own mood, Arsinoë,” stammered Garguillus, who had eaten too much foie gras and who almost always, at the end of dinner, felt an aversion for literature proportionate to the weight upon his stomach.
“Litterarum intemperantia laboramus,” as Seneca used to say. “We are suffering from literary indigestion. We are simply poisoning ourselves!” and he thoughtfully took a tooth-pick from a pocket. His large face expressed weariness and disgust.
* * *
XIV
Together the pair went down the alley of cypresses leading to the sea. The moon-path of sensitive silver on the waters ran up to the horizon, and waves were breaking against a chalk cliff. At the end of the alley there was a semicircular seat. Above it the huntress Artemis, in short tunic, with crescented hair, quiver on shoulder, and two deer-hounds at her feet, looked down on the two young people.
They sat down together. Arsinoë pointed out the hill of the Acropolis, so distant that the columns of the Parthenon could hardly be distinguished; and took up the thread of conversations started at their former meetings—
“See how beautiful it is!... And you would destroy that, Julian?”
Making no reply, he stared on the ground.
“I have thought much over what you said to me the last time we met, concerning this humility of yours,” continued Arsinoë gently. “Was Alexander son of Philip of Macedon humble? And nevertheless is he not great and splendid?”
Julian said nothing.
“And Brutus, Brutus the stabber of Cæsar! Had Brutus turned the left cheek when struck on the right, do you think he would have been more sublime? Or, indeed, perhaps you consider him a criminal, you Galileans? Why can I not help thinking sometimes, Julian, that you are a hypocrite; and that these black habiliments are not your body’s true raiment?”
She turned brusquely towards his moon-lit face and regarded him steadfastly.
“Arsinoë, what do you want of me?” murmured Julian, whose cheek was very pale.
“I want you to be frankly my foe!” exclaimed the young girl. “You must not pass by like this, without telling me what you are. Sometimes I dream that it would be better if Rome and Athens were utterly ruined! Better burn a corpse than leave it unburied! And all our friends here—grammarians, rhetoricians—poets who write Imperial eulogies—all these are the rotting body of Greece and Rome. In their company one grows afraid, as among the shroudless dead.... Oh, you may triumph, Galileans! Soon corpses and ruins are all that will remain on earth!... And you, Julian.... But no!... It is impossible! I do not believe that you are with them and against Hellas—against me!...”
Julian sprang up before her, pale and mute, longing to burst away. She held him back.
“Tell me that you are my enemy,” she said with heart-broken challenge in her voice.
“Arsinoë!... Why——”
“Tell me all!... I must know. Do you not feel how near we are? Or are you indeed afraid to speak?”
“In two days I leave Athens,” murmured Julian.
“Why?—Where are you going?”
“The Emperor has recalled me to Court—to die perhaps. I may now be looking at you for the last time.”
“Julian, you do not believe in Him?” cried Arsinoë, seeking to read the eyes of the monk.
“Speak lower!”
He rose, a
nd striding round cautiously explored the dusty road silvered by the moon, the bushes, and even the sea, as if afraid to see sudden-rising spies from the Emperor. Reassured, he returned and sat down. Leaning one hand heavily on the marble he brought his lips close to the ear of Arsinoë—so near that she felt his warm breath—muttering rapidly—
“Believe in Him?... Listen, girl! I say to you now what I have never dared to say even to myself. I hate the Galilean!... But I have lied as long as I can remember. Lying has soaked into my soul, or clung to it, as this black vestment clings to my body. You remember the poisoned shirt of Nessus; Hercules snatched it off with pieces of his own flesh and it slew him, all the same. I—I too shall perish wearing this Galilean lie!”
He pronounced each word with painful effort. Arsinoë gazed at him. His face, changed by suffering and hatred, became the face of a stranger.
“Be calm, friend!” she murmured. “Tell me all. I shall understand you better than anyone else.”
“I should like to be able to speak, but speech is a power I have lost,” sneered Julian. “I have kept silence too long. Do you understand, Arsinoë? It is all over with him who has once fallen into their clutches! These good and humble men deform him to such a degree—teach him so thoroughly to lie and to dissimulate—that it becomes impossible ever to stand erect and manful again!”
The blood rushed to his forehead, swelling the veins, and through clenched teeth he muttered—
“Cowardice! Foul Galilean cowardice! this—to hate your enemy as I hate Constantius, and to pardon him, to crouch at his feet, cringe like a serpent, to supplicate him in the humble Christian manner: ‘A year, grant your weak-witted slave, Julian, another year; and then do with him as it may please you and your counsellors, O well-beloved of God!’ What baseness!”
“No, Julian,” protested Arsinoë, “you will conquer! Deception is your strength.... Julian, do you remember Æsop’s fable, The Ass in the Lion’s Skin? In this affair of yours the story is reversed; the lion is in the ass’s skin, and the hero in a monkish habit! And how they will shrink affrighted when you suddenly show your talons! What joy and what terror! Tell me, you long for power?”
“Power!” cried Julian, intoxicated at the sound of the word and inhaling with deep breaths the fresh air of night—"power!... oh, only for a year, a few months, a few days! And I would teach them, I would teach all these crawling and venomous creatures what means their Master’s word, ‘Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s’; I swear by the Sun-god they should render to Cæsar what is his!”
He raised his head, his eyes flashing with rage and pride and renewed youth. Arsinoë gazed on him with a smile. But his head soon fell. He sank back on the bench and crossing his arms on his breast in monkish fashion he faltered—
“No, no; why nurse empty dreams? That can never be. I shall perish. Anger will stifle me. Listen; every night after passing the day on my knees in churches, bowed over relics, I go home broken with fatigue; I fling myself on the bed and sob; yes, bite my own flesh, to avoid crying out with pain. Oh, you cannot know yet, Arsinoë, this Galilean horror and infection in which I have agonised for twenty years without escaping by death. We Christians take a deal of killing,—worms that live on even when cut in pieces! At first I used to seek consolation in the teachings of the diviners and philosophers. It was hopeless. I follow neither the one nor the other. I am wicked and I wish to be wickeder still. To be strong and terrible as the Demon, my only brother.... But why, why can I not forget that there is beauty in the world; why, O cruel one, did you dawn upon my life?”
With a quick spontaneous movement Arsinoë flung her bare arms round Julian’s neck, drew him to her so strongly, so closely, that he felt the whole freshness of her body, murmuring—
“And if I did come towards you, O young man, what if it were as a sibyl to prophesy you glory? You alone are alive among the dead! Splendour is yours! What matters it to me that your wings are no swan’s wings, but wings of the black and lost, your talons, talons of a bird of prey? My love is for all the revolted, the reprobate, the rejected—you understand me, Julian? I love the proud and solitary eagles better than any stainless swan. Only ... be prouder yet, be wickeder yet! Dare up to the height of your ambition! Lie without shame; better lie than be humiliated. Fear not hate; it is the impetus of your wings. Come, shall we make an alliance? You shall give me power, I will give you beauty. Are you willing, Julian?”
Again through the light folds of her antique peplum, as once in the palæstra, he saw the breathing image of the huntress Artemis; it seemed that divine body shone through, golden and tender.
His head reeled in the lunar shadow enveloping them. Those haughty lips laughingly approached his own.
For the last time he mused. “I must tear myself away. She does not love me. She will never love me. Her love is only for power.”
But immediately he added to himself, with a faint smile: “Well, let it be so! I consent to be duped!”
The chill of the strange and insatiate kiss of Arsinoë shot to his heart like the chill of death. It seemed as if Artemis herself, in the translucence of the moon, had descended towards him, embraced him, and mocked him, and like a beam of moonlight fled away.
* * *
On the following morning Basil of Cæsarea and Gregory of Nazianzen came across Julian in a basilica in Athens. He was kneeling in prayer. The two friends gazed at him, surprised. Never had they seen upon his features such an expression of rapt serenity.
“Brother,” murmured Basil to Gregory, “we have sinned; he whom we inwardly accused is a righteous man.”
Gregory shook his head.
“May the Lord pardon me if I am deceived,” he said slowly, his piercing eye still on Julian. “But remember, Basil, how often the Devil himself, the father of lying, has appeared to men in guise of an angel!”
* * *
XV
On the base of a dolphin-shaped lamp were ranged the curling irons of a barber. The lamp-light was growing pale, for rays of morning, falling through silken window-curtains, were gradually filling the sleeping chamber with deep violet hues. The curtains were dyed in the richest hyacinthine purple of Tyre.
“‘Hypostasis,’ ‘hypostasis’? What is the meaning of the divine hypostasis, or essence, or personality, of the Trinity? No human being can form any conception. I myself haven’t slept a wink in thinking over it the whole night. I arrived at no conclusion but an atrocious headache. Boy, give me towels and soap!”
So spoke a personage with a tall headdress like a mitre and the pontifical aspect of a high-priest or Asiatic tyrant. He was chief barber and wig-maker in attendance on the sacred person of Constantius. The razor in his skilful hands was flitting, with an incomparable grace and lightness, over the Imperial chin. He was engaged upon a sacred mystery. In attendance on each side were innumerable cubicularii, slaves holding vases, essences, oils, and napkins, and two youths bearing fans. Supervising all these, Eusebius, grand chamberlain of the private apartments, stood by. He was the most powerful man in the Empire.
During the ceremony of barbification, as an emperor’s shaving must be called, the two youths refreshed the illustrious patient by means of great fans, each six-winged like the seraphim, or theripides with which deacons fan away flies from a sacramental chalice, during the intoning of the liturgy. The barber had scarcely finished the Emperor’s right cheek and was beginning the left, which had been anointed with an Arabian essence named “the foam of Aphrodite.” Leaning to the ear of Constantius he whispered cautiously:
“Ah! Well-beloved of God, your universal intelligence alone can determine what this hypostasis, this mysterious personality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost may mean. Don’t listen to the bishops! Act as pleases yourself, and not as it may please them. But Athanasius, that patriarch of Alexandria, must be punished as a blasphemous rebel. Almighty God, the Creator Himself, will instruct your Holiness as to what, and in what manner, your subjects ought to believe. In my humble opinion
the Arians are perfectly right in asserting that there was a time when the ‘Son’ did not exist. And so consubstantiality....”
But at this moment Constantius was staring at himself in the great polished silver mirror, and rubbing his hand over the silky new shaven region on his right cheek. He interrupted—
“I don’t think that’s very smooth!—eh! I think you might go over it again. What were you saying to me about consubstantiality?”
The barber, who had received a talent of gold from the Court bishops Ursatius and Valentine to prepare the Emperor for the new profession of faith, was murmuring insinuatingly in the ear of Constantius and wielding his razor with the most persuasive delicacy, when at this moment the chief of the silentiarii, Paul, surnamed Catena, approached the Emperor.
He was so called because his infamous system of reports enwound any chosen victim in chains well-nigh indissoluble. His effeminate face was beardless and handsome, and judged by externals he seemed the angel of humility. His dark eyes were full of languor; his walk, a noiselessly graceful feline motion. He wore crosswise over the shoulder a wide dark blue ribbon—sign of special Imperial favour.
Paul Catena with a subtle and authoritative gesture waved the barber away, and whispered in the ear of Constantius—
“A letter from Julian! Intercepted to-night. Deign to read it.”
Constantius greedily snatched the letter from the hands of Paul, opened it, and read. Disappointed, he muttered—
“Mere trash—trifles; he sends a present of a hundred grapes to a sophist and writes the praises of the fruit and of the number ‘a hundred.’”
“Ah! a ruse!” said Catena.
“Really?” asked Constantius; “what proofs are there?”
“None.”
“Then he’s either exceedingly cunning or indeed——”
“What does your Eternity mean?”
“Or, in fact, he is innocent.”
“As your Majesty pleases,” stammered Paul.
“As I please? I desire to be just, simply just. Are you not aware of that? I must have proofs....”
The Death of the Gods Page 11
