Rome For Sale, page 20
A secretary entered, chewing at the end of a stylus. “This municipality in Africa you were speaking of—they’re two years behind in their interest. We have a right of seizure over several farms and buildings, and I find that the firm of Cælius in Puteoli would like to buy them.”
“Make them over,” said Atticus. “We have waited long enough.”
The secretary went out, scribbling notes. Atticus sat thinking again. People would be evicted; the municipality would suffer; there had been a drought there the last season. But he stiffened. Business was business; unless mankind accepted the disadvantages, they would lose the great benefits. It would be the firm of Cælius that attended to the matter. He would be merely selling what was his; many bankers would not have waited two years. Withdraw from evil. Cælius was a worthy friend, and he wanted the properties. Help your friend. Cælius was his friend, and he, Atticus, did not know the Africans. Cælius would take the responsibility; not an unreasonable man, he would do his best for everyone.
Atticus tried once more to meditate on the quatrain about Camillus. He was still meditating when the slave fetched him the bowl of salad which would be his whole meal. He thanked the slave with a gentle smile, and wondered if he would indulge in his only form of entertainment, a passage of verse or philosophy read aloud by one of the trained readers whom he kept for hiring out in the evening. But he called the secretary instead. As he ate, the secretary read off pages of figures and calculations. Atticus followed closely, he could remember almost endless lists of facts relating to his business-deals, and could turn up a fact for reference without effort.
He relaxed, listening. He was lost in a space of calculation whence all human existences were excluded. He had withdrawn from evil, for the figures were a world of their own. They were figures, not forces that were controlling hosts of men and their families.
He gave his instructions accordingly.
2
Cethegus did not find many chances to make overtures to Orestilla, but he was so constantly visiting the house that she could not entirely avoid him. He managed to press her hand twice, and once to come up close behind and lean against her. Worse, his eyes followed her all the while she was in the room, and she could not believe but that Catalina would notice. But Catalina was too enveloped in politics, and when her relief had passed she found that she could not stifle an annoyance. For the first time since their marriage she asked him questions about his former wife.
“I never knew her. What was she like?”
Catalina was surprised. “I’ve told you as well as I can.”
“Tell me again.”
“Fair. Smaller than you.”
“But that might be almost anyone. Can’t you tell me more about her than that?”
Catalina did not want to tell more. There wasn’t so very much more, and yet he would never be able to tell it. Not that it was even anything certain. Pollia had been always a little sickly, though she looked so healthy at first sight; she had been small-boned but plump, and with the fairest hair that he had seen at Rome—as if a golden glow was caught at the moment of extinction; you saw the gold, and when you looked again it was gone. That was Pollia. Gold, and then ashy white. She had looked so softly alive, and had died so easily. She had been delirious in her last illness, and cried incessantly that Catalina did not love her because he spent all his time drinking among the gladiators. It was foolish to say that she had died of a broken heart; she had died because her vitality was exhausted; the gold had burned out in its first marriage-flush and only the ashes were left. She had always been moping after she bore his son, and that had certainly made him spend more time than ever fencing in the schools, riding in the Field of Mars, swimming in the Tiber, hunting in the Sabine hills. He was proud of being able to beat all the professionals. And her son had taken after her. He had been handsome and looked so strong, and died of a chill as she had. In his early teens he had died, and Catalina’s life had been broken in half.
“How can I tell you about her?” he said. “She was a quiet person, rather without character. She only attracted me because I was inexperienced, and she looked fresh and virginal.”
“And was she?” asked Orestilla viciously. “Or did she fool you?”
Catalina did not answer. He gave a startled glance, and looked away. Orestilla was as startled herself, but could not withdraw. “You men are all such fools. No one is virginal nowadays. Only in the old days when girls lived in farmyards among rutting bulls and cocks and stallions were they virginal.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Catalina mildly, but his pulse raced. He was trying to think of Pollia as a drab. No, no such luck. That would ease his mind if he could believe it. “It really doesn’t interest me.”
Orestilla was infuriated. She could feel the lack of conviction in his voice, the careless effort to placate and silence her. “You know that isn’t true. You’re fighting not to believe it. You couldn’t bear to think she fooled you.”
“You didn’t know her—” Catalina burst out.
Orestilla waited, then as he didn’t proceed, she sneered. “I knew I’d only have to probe to bring out your delusions. You’ve given yourself away.”
Catalina felt the heat tugging at his scalp; he must put these thoughts away; Pollia and her boy were dead, and death was the end. He rose and took Orestilla’s hand in his. “What is worrying you?” he asked. “It can’t be Pollia. She meant nothing to me, and you are part of myself.”
Orestilla was ashamed. She looked into his slightly haggard face, and saw that all questions of jealousy had been eaten out of his mind. Why should she rebel because it was a loyalty outside their private life that had lifted him above all triviality? He had lifted up his love also. He carried it in his heart with the other images of piety. She softened. “O how can I worry you like this? Forgive me. I’ve been unwell the last two days. It’s that.”
He kissed her lips and looked sadly into her eyes, glad to accept her excuse; and then he returned to his work. She moved about the room, hoping that she would find something to do to aid him or that he would speak to her. Then she went quietly from the room. Catalina, roused by the noise, glanced up sightlessly for a moment towards the quivering curtains and then glanced back to the papers on the table.
In the bedroom Orestilla found the baby crying to herself while the nursemaid slumbered with her head in a corner of the wall. She tore the girl from the stool, banged her head, and, holding her tightly, beat at her with the disengaged hand. Then she realised that the girl was sobbing, and let her drop to the floor. “ Go,” she said.
The girl rose and slunk out. Orestilla picked up the baby and began to peel off the swaddling-clothes, swaying and chanting a lullaby.
Sleep pretty child
and nothing shall hurt you.
Sleep in my lap
where I bore you less gently.
3
The people were growing more restive, filled with dazzled hopes and rising angers. One day as Catalina with his men was walking through the northern slums, he encountered what was a usual enough spectacle: the ruins of a tenement-house. These huge four-faced buildings were run up with no concern except for cheapness and the number of rooms that could be partitioned off; sun-baked instead of kiln-baked bricks were used though floods or rains were liable to sap the walls and bring the whole mass crashing down on the heads of the huddled inhabitants. The house which Catalina now saw collapsed had been a medium-sized tenement, and the faulty foundations had given way after the spring rains. Last night the house had fallen, and scores of people had been buried in the ruins. Some of those who were not too deeply covered had been dug out by the survivors and neighbours, and as Catalina approached a woman was wailing over the dead bodies of her husband and three children.
“He kicked me out of bed and told me to go and earn some money,” she wailed, “and the roof fell in on him. It’s all my fault. Heaven broke the house down on him in revenge for the wrong he did me.”
The dead had been laid out on planks and doors pulled from the ruins, and a crowd had assembled along the street, waiting for the funeral to move off to the common burial-pits on the slopes outside the eastern walls. Generally the people accepted such misfortunes as part of the day’s burden, but the election-propaganda had roused them to a livelier sense of injustices, and there was a sullen air about the gathering.
“We ought to bring the owner along and dump him first into the pit under the bodies of his victims,” said one man.
“Murder I call it,” said another, and there was a murmur of angry agreement.
“There’s a few of your voters gone, master Catalina,” a man called from the crowd. “They’re killing us off as fast as they can, but there’s too many of us.”
The crowd burst into cheers, and the noise drew further reinforcements. Catalina decided to make the most of the chance. Conferring with the mourners, he set out at the head of the procession with his companions, while the funeral followed, the corpses upborne on the boards and shutters. In the rear came the populace, stamping and shouting and singing the insurrection songs.
O I’m a Roman citizen,
the earth is mine, they cry;
for I am given stones to eat
and the ground on which to lie.
Through the streets they wound, the numbers increasing at every step taken. Out of the taverns and lanes came the people clamorously, bright-eyed and hopeful that at last the day of revolution had come. Many swung weapons, others girt on a sword under their cloaks, women and girls came linked arm in arm with their men. The shopkeepers hastily closed their shops, and the few officials in the vicinity took refuge behind the nearest doors. Some pipers pushed to the front and struck up a tune. The procession defiled towards the Esquiline Gate, orderly despite its noise and the congestion caused by new groups struggling out of the side-streets.
Catalina felt the swing and roar of a host marching at his back, and he was filled with joy, though he tried to control his emotion. He must not play into the hands of his enemies. This was a rabble, when all was said and done; but it was also the material of a new world. These sufferers, for all their grime, longed for justice upon earth as none of the cultured and legalistic quibblers longed. What did it matter if hate was mingled with the longing? These people had suffered.
At last they passed the gate and entered into the burial-fields, making for the waste plot where the nameless dead were thrown. As in other spots along the walls and roads, some large stone-tombs stood outside the gate, inscribed with well-known names; but for the poor there were only some vast pits in which corpses rotted together until the stench made it necessary for lime and earth to be shovelled in by the public slaves under the caretaker’s control. The crowd deployed outwards round the pit to which the bearers were directed, covering the slopes and standing massed along the walls, climbing the rickety fences, trampling the few straggly bushes, good-humouredly quarrelling.
The caretaker, a small bearded man, was out of his wits. “What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, rushing from man to man, till at last he halted before Catalina. “A breach of the peace,” he panted. “Who are you?”
“Get out of the way,” said one of the mourners, “or we’ll chuck you in too.”
The caretaker subsided and retired up the hill. Catalina climbed on a rain-worn tombstone that dated from the days before the slopes were paupers’ ground. The crowd turned to hear, pressing closer; a hush fell; and Catalina felt all his anger at the waste of life flow back upon him as he looked down at the dusty blood-stained mangled corpses spread out at his feet and the great disordered crowd straining towards him below.
“There lie Roman citizens,” he said, pointing to the corpses “to whom belong provinces and kingdoms.” The mob groaned. “The conquered world reveres and envies the name of Roman as the noblest title a man can earn. Would they be so envious, do you think, if they could see Romans enslaved at the heart of the empire? Would they strive for the privilege of starving inside brick-prisons and of being foully crushed to death?”
The mob shouted, joyously groaning, lamenting, beating themselves into fury, as he went on to denounce the exploiters who used sweated labour and then filched the wages for rent, yet would not even make houses safe. In the homes of the rich meanwhile were heaped the spoils of a world; there was no question of dearth.
“Who with the feelings of a man can bear in this starving world to see these men with more wealth than they can use? They squander it in building houses piered on the sea or in levelling the mountain tops for sites, and yet we starve. They knock together several houses and yet feel cramped, and we have no hearth of our own. Yet the wealth of the earth is endless. These men buy pictures, statues, embossed plate; they pull down a house for a whim and build up another; they lavish and abuse their gains in every possible way, and yet with all their caprice they cannot exhaust their wealth.
“But for us there is poverty within the house, and debts without. There is no hope now, and yet the future is darker than the present. What have we left but the bare fact of misery?
“Will you then still shrink from action?”
He could not make himself heard after that. The mob roared, howling for him to lead them at once against the oppressors. They went mad with a delirium of enraptured rage. They pummelled one another for lack of enemies, leaped and roared; men and women clasped and kissed violently, only saved by the closely packed ranks from falling to the ground and rolling down the slopes. They could all bear things no longer. Catalina was their leader, he must lead them to tear down the walls of privation and destroy the enemy who feasted on the other side.
For a moment Catalina himself was carried away by the uproar. He made to leap down from the stone. Then his excitement died; his energy had flared up into words and burned itself out; the sense of uncompleted preparations, the barriers against action, reared up, blotting out the vista which had opened so alluringly. He must not give his foes the chance they wanted; already they’d have evidence against him for a breach of the peace, though they would not dare an impeachment as yet. To quiet the mob, he signed to the mourners to take up the dead on their shoulders again and cast them one by one into the pit.
The men obeyed, and slowly the mob ceased its outcry, hypnotised by the sight of the bodies lifted one by one and cast to the sound of mournful piping into the pit where they would rot together. When the last corpse had disappeared, Catalina raised his arm imperiously and spoke again:
“There is nothing more to say. You have seen. Remember.”
The roar broke out afresh, but he stepped down and moved with his bodyguard quickly round the edge of the gathering towards the gate, followed by cheers. The mob, deprived of his presence, began breaking into knots of arguers, shouting, laughing, embracing. Some crowded towards the gate; others, seeing that it would be some time before they could crush through, walked off along the foot-path under the walls to the further gates; others, who had kept their womenfolk with them or grasped unknown pleasing girls, were for making a day of it and wandering out into the fields beyond. Vendors had suddenly appeared crying hot cakes and portions of pease-puddings.
The caretaker, plucking at his beard in anguish, kicked his slaves and bade them fetch lime in barrows. “Some one will pay for this,” he muttered. “The world’s on its last legs when there’s such a funeral given to trash.”
He felt that he must throw the whole of his lime-store into the pit to ease his emotions; nothing less would keep such pampered dead from walking. He’d do it even though the clerk at the quæstor’s office should insinuate that he had been cheating the government by re-selling the lime. His feelings came before his reputation.
4
Clodius for once shrank from the excitements of an election. He had some interviews with Catalina, and the man’s dark exuberance chastened him. It was always so. Left to himself, he preached insurrection and ranted in the taverns and street-clubs; but when he was instructed to do so by Catalina, he found the impulse quenched. He saw only the hopelessness, the bad joke of trying to create a Utopia out of gutter-material; he resented Catalina’s faith, though it was his own when he let his emotions flow out.
In this sceptical reaction he almost felt like throwing in his lot with the conservative diehards. He wanted a state of iron-regulations and Spartan immolation of self, a communism of military hardships. Then this wavered into a pure lust of dominion. He longed to pull the whole of Rome down and re-build it as an incredibly complicated palace in which gorgeous fantasy would yet be subordinated to a scheme of beautiful proportions. All those who could not be fitted into their right jobs would then be slaughtered, all children beyond a certain quota strangled.
Now his reaction against Catalina’s faith was intensified by his doubts about Flaviola. He wanted to stop visiting Nacca’s hall, yet kept on turning up almost daily, and Flaviola was taking the regularity of his visits for granted. He must make a break. He therefore took advantage of an invitation from Hortensius and set off with Aulus Fulvius to stay at his country-villa.
Hortensius was resting from the courts for a few weeks. His throat was a trifle relaxed, and he was undergoing a treatment of gargles as prescribed by his Greek doctors. A portly fine-looking man, he carried into private life something of the largeness of gesture and luxuriance of diction to which he had trained himself as orator. Once when he was jostled on his way to the courts, he issued a writ against a man responsible for disturbing the elaborate folds of his toga, so closely did he consider every detail.
