by Jack Lindsay
The jovial Roman Senator and the pompous Exegetes looked out of place in the room; they shouldn’t have been asked. Olympos was different, he was perfectly in key with the house and its ways; and that made Daphne proud of him and proud of herself, for what was true about him must be true about her. So she argued to herself. Olympos was too discreetly a dear to be wrongly placed anywhere. He lay with his elbow on a cushion, chuckling quietly as the Senator told him stories of the trouble caused by unruly state slave-girls in the factories. One of the girls in the packing department of the glassA are section had actually given birth to a child, fed it and placed it in a large vase, wherein it had been delivered safely to Busiris. The Exegetes expressed astonishment. Did the Senator think there was anything behind the incident? In any case a report should at once be composed and submitted to the right department—that of Freights, probably.
Daphne looked at Sheftu-Teta to see how she took these crudities; but without appearing inattentive to the guests Sheftu-Teta entirely ignored the conversation. Daphne wondered how one gained such a manner, not in the least rude or superior, but merely self-contained, chaste without any effect of condemnation of the unchaste world. She was sorry that she didn’t have a brother; but she was sure somehow that if she had had a brother, he wouldn’t have been at all like Manetheis; he would have been a quarrelsome wretch that she would have disliked violently.
Everyone in the room was decorous, too decorous, except the Senator. Without exactly approving of the Senator, Daphne began to rebel against the spell cast on her by the Egyptian household. The daughters seemed unconstrained with their parents, neither subservient nor placatory, neither excited nor suppressed; and this attitude of theirs filled Daphne with revolt. She resolved to protest to her father as soon as she got home—about what she wasn’t sure; and the less sure she became, the more she wanted to make the Egyptian girls protest and revolt. The fact that they appeared to have nothing against which to revolt was the most exasperating thing of all.
Unnoticed by Olympos, Daphne drank all the wine that she could get. It was a rich sticky wine, dark red, too sweet, but very nice; it stuck to the tongue even after it was all swallowed. The only way that Daphne could feel patronising to the Egyptian girls was to drink more wine than they were allowed; for it would be no use for them to say that they drank all they wanted. Daphne had made up her mind that they weren’t allowed to drink as much as she was drinking, because only by thus making up her mind could she get the required satisfaction out of drinking so much.
She wondered if Sheftu-Teta saw the horrid way that the Roman Senator looked at the girls; and then she grew aware that he was looking horridly at her also. At the same time she felt how difficult it was to manage a skirt while sitting on a cushion on the floor, particularly a pleated skirt that it took hours to iron and press. Without getting up to look at oneself one couldn’t be sure of what one was showing to horrid-eyed Senators. She felt hate for her elaborately-pressed dress and coveted the graceful soft-linen dresses of the Egyptian girls. Then a thought pleased her. There wasn’t any brother in this family either. She smiled at the girls, who smiled pleasantly back.
Nobody except the Senator was taking any notice of Daphne, and even he took notice of her only when he couldn’t keep looking at the Egyptian girls any longer. The old man from Babylon sat still and gazed at each speaker in turn, his square head laid on one side, like a parrot; he had a curving beak-nose too, and his tongue looked fat and blunt as he ate. Daphne wished that he’d speak. She was certain he’d make a cackling noise and say: “Come in, everybody,” or “Sarapis bless the house.”
There came over her an irresistible wish to startle.
The Exegetes remarked that King Herodes had paid a hurried state-visit but had set off again at once for Ioppa.
“He wanted Marcus Antonius to kill the Queen,” announced Daphne loudly. “But he was told to get out, so he went.”
She had imagined that it would take hours to unfold all the thrilling story as it lived in her brain, communicated by Victor’s half-sentences and suggestions. But after she had uttered her two sentences, she couldn’t think of anything more to say. The story seemed woefully inadequate and pointless.
But everyone was staring at her.
“How do you know?” asked Olympos with sharp concern.
She brought out her explanation of slaves talking in the market-place, and didn’t expect for a moment to be believed. But no one saw anything unlikely in the explanation.
“Slaves will talk,” said Manethos gently, to ease the situation, “and I fear that they often say the first thing that comes into their head. Now I had a friend who owned a Galatian slave...”
Daphne didn’t listen. She hated him for trying to spoil her story, refusing to consider that he was also trying to save her from trouble and to stop the interested Exegetes from following the matter up. She seized the large goblet of wine that Olympos had left untouched, drank it all off, and then was sick into her lap, almost before she knew what was happening. She didn’t even have time to taste the wine. And even at this dreadful moment, she was unhappily aware, Sheftu-Teta and the two girls showed not the least signs of embarrassment or dismay. Sheftu-Teta merely lowered her lids slightly, and a slave-girl was instantly at Daphne’s side with unobtrusive napkins, and another slave-girl was leading Daphne out, and Daphne was feeling very dull and bilious, and sat somewhere with her head suddenly icily sweaty, and then saw that Sheftu-Teta, waiting till her departure did not seem meant to draw attention to a guest’s misfortunes, had followed after, to bathe the guest’s brow and to produce a medicine-phial and to do it all without bothering or being bothered.
*
Olympos was troubled. He tried to convince himself that there was nothing in Daphne’s remarks. No one else took them seriously after her collapse. The Senator made a joke about young girls wanting to be both seen and heard and about the necessity of Venus being able to stomach Bacchus; and though the joke was coolly received, everyone now thought that Daphne had been talking at random.
Olympos was upset both at Daphne’s words and at the state into which she had got. He blamed himself for not having watched her more closely, but was pleased that her retching had diverted the company from her disclosure. He felt that Daphne was not the girl to invent such a tale, and he wondered at the emotion stirred in his heart, he who had so long considered himself above all politics and their repercussions. Dynasties might change, but people would still get stone in their bladders.
He was troubled. He took Manethos aside, and said that he could stay no longer, that he had a professional call to make—but as he did not wish to disturb his niece in her recovery, would Manethos please send her home with some trustworthy attendants when she felt better?
Manethos answered that he could not possibly allow the niece of his esteemed friend to make a journey until she had had a night’s rest; that he would at once send a messenger to her father to say that she was detained and would return early in the morning; and that he would be delighted to have the niece of his friend sleeping under his roof for the night.
Olympos thanked him and went.
Straight to the Timonion in a hired carriage. He knocked at the door exhausted and trembling, asked for Antonius, ready to say that Cleopatra had sent him to inquire after the health of the Autocrator. He didn’t know what he feared, but felt that he must do something, whatever complications he involved himself in. Daphne’s words had thrust on him a responsibility which he could neither analyse nor evade.
The depressed but talkative door-keeper said that Antonius had gone off some while ago with his two pages, to the Palace it seemed, and there had been a great waste of wine, and the world was in a bad way...
Olympos agreed, and set out for the Palace. He had dismissed his cab and did not think of sending for another. His legs dragged, all his strength had left him. Never had he felt so weak. He chided himself; an old man who had put aside the toys of emotion.
Walk
calmly, for it is your own body that walks, no one else’s. For no one else’s can you care. In no one else’s can you walk, now that you have left your mother’s womb for sixty years.
When was his birthday? Not for six weeks, but he made no oblations to his daimon now, hadn’t for many years. Let the world go to wrack. Debauchery produced diseases, which were interesting; and the sins of the fathers were poison in the blood of the children, generation after generation. No one need be ill. Cleopatra could look after herself. And in the end it did not matter. In fact, before her corpse he would feel only the analytic impersonality of an inquest. One sigh, and then he’d turn her body over like a stone in the grass, to see what was underneath.
The stress of his seething thoughts enabled him to overcome his weakness, to flog himself along. Time doubled and twisted across his brain, and he looked up astonished to find himself arrived.
The sentries knew him well and let him through. He hastened for Cleopatra’s bedroom.
*
When Antonius entered the room, Cleopatra was already abed. Caesarion sat on a carved sandalwood stool at the bedside, reading aloud to her. Her eyes were shut and her long brown-golden hair spread down over her naked pillowed shoulders. At the noise of the entry she opened her eyes wide, but did not stir. Antonius stood swaying, and scowled at Caesarion, who rose timidly.
“Shall I go, mother?”
Cleopatra nodded, and the boy went, clutching the roll in his hand and brushing blindly past the pages who had halted in the shadow of the doorway.
Cleopatra’s half-covered bosom heaved once, and her blue eyes gleamed with a chilly incandescence. She was lying in a large four-poster bedstead hung with finely-woven mosquito-netting looped with golden tassels.
She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and then once more stared back at Antonius, who came gradually towards her.
“I’ve come,” he said roughly.
She nodded.
“You didn’t send for me.”
“What use would that have been?”
“No use.”
They stared at one another, the same questioning fear on both their faces. To their dulled, heavy eyes the room seemed clouding with dusty fumes of yellow light from the lamp of bronze shaped like a gladiator’s helmet. Antonius went on:
“I meant to kill myself, drinking.”
“I knew.”
A quiet fell between them, a chasm of strangeness. Yet they felt, wearily, that they knew utterly everything about one another. If they spoke on for a hundred years, each would still know what the other was about to say next, what to reply. And no understanding would be reached.
Then Cleopatra’s calm infuriated Antonius. He beat on the acanthus-figured end-post beside him, and the bed shook.
“But you don’t know why I stopped.”
She looked at him contemptuously. “I do. You’ve lost your nerve.”
He tore himself away from her and walked over to the window. The Pharos, on the other side of the harbour, was pouring out its flame, sending the rays over thirty miles for sailors lost in the darkness of the sea. The lamp by which Casarion had been reading spluttered and went out, and the room was lighted only by the dim glare sent sidelong from the lighthouse.
“But you don’t know why.”
“I don’t want to know.”
He swung round, “You’ve got to know.”
She said nothing. She was altogether tired-out, and the only thing that interested her was to watch her hair flowing down over her breasts. In the flickering light the tresses seemed to undulate, to move like snakes. She was warm in bed, with comforted spine, and tired out.
“Herodes called on me.”
“I know.”
“But what do you think he said?”
She answered in a long-drawn hiss, venomously, feeling the snake-life of her tresses flow into her, panging her breasts as if the thirsty gums of a babe settled on chafed nipples.
“I’m tired of all these questions. Of course I know what he said.”
“What?”
“He advised you to get rid of me.”
Antonius was disconcerted, he felt his strength flagging. He leaned his head against the window-post, and tried to reply mockingly, but his lips and throat were dry. His voice rasped.
“And what did I say?”
“You refused, and now he’s gone to make his peace with your master.”
Antonius turned, raising his hands hopefully, self-pitifully, but her next words crushed him:
“You refused...because you were afraid.”
He sank back, and pressed his head against the glass-panes. “Right. Always right.” He sneered. “What a woman.” Regaining power over his limbs, he returned to the bed, and stood looking down at her. “I loved you once.” He wanted to hurt. “You still look beautiful in a dim light.”
“Well?”
He beat himself into a rage again. “Don’t stare at me like that. You think I’m done for. You’re right about Herodes. I wouldn’t kill you to join with an eastern vagabond, a roaster of Jew-flesh. Do you think I’d give him that satisfaction when I know how he’s hated you all along?” He laughed bitterly. “Don’t you give me credit for a scrap of pride?”
“No,” she answered coldly.
He winced and shouted at her, “You’re wrong!” Then, as if deafened by his own voice, he put his hands to his ears. He leaned closer over her, and removed his hands. The right hand slid down to his waist. “Listen.” There was a threatening entreaty in his voice. “After he came I couldn’t go on as I was going. Yet I couldn’t kill you his way, and give him the satisfaction. Listen.” His voice grew suave, wooing, resonant. “But I can kill you my own way. Did you know that?”
He wrenched the dagger out from under his tunic, and lurched yet closer. She did not flinch or speak. She stared up at him, quietly, with a faint unsmiling disdain. Then with a slow gesture, still keeping her eyes fixed on his eyes, she threw the coverlet off.
“Kill me, if you can kill me.”
In his eyes his whole soul was concentrated, burning like a soul in pits of hell. He stared into her eyes, searching for the remotest show of fear. He was possessed. One glimpse of fear, and he would be able to kill. His hand would do its work, unbidden. The dagger would leap out, a live thing, and she would lie dead. Then, and then only, would he be able to kill himself. The dagger would turn back on him as compulsively as it would thrust at her heart if she weakened with one quiver of fear, one tremor of the eyelids.
With a wild cry he threw the dagger to the floor, where it stuck vibrating. He fell on his knees and buried his face in the mattress against her flanks.
“Poor Marcus,” she said, almost under her breath, and laid her hand on his head. He lifted his head with a moan and placed it on her uncovered breasts; and Victor, peering through the dimness of the room, saw in a momentary increase of light from the Pharos such an expression of abysmal despair on her face that he shrank back against the wall, praying that he had been deceived by the light-effect, but not daring to look a second time. It was too painful: to see someone with every defence broken down, every privacy mercilessly exposed, without hope or complaint, suffering as a child suffers, with a fatalistic submission of terror...and that one, Cleopatra Queen of Egypt, Queen of Kings.
He felt his own insecurity, the shifting webs of the spider-world, the slow-poisons of time, the rat in crannied flesh.
Every day the feeling grew worse. Only with Daphne did he find escape from it; and he was burned through with the fear that she would be snatched out of his life.
*
When Olympos reached the bedroom door, the pages told him to stand back; but Cleopatra heard and called him softly in.
“My husband is sleeping in the Palace tonight,” she said, indicating Antonius who slumbered at her side, one hand holding fast to a tress of her hair. “I have just given him the sleeping-draught you prepared for me.” She tried to speak lightly. “So I am glad that you have come. I need anot
her draught now.”
“I’ll prepare it,” said Olympos, and turned to go, but she raised a finger.
“What brought you here?” she asked with sudden interest, hesitatingly.
“A fancy...An old man’s fear...”
“You’re a good creature,” she answered, and her voice seemed happier. She lifted out her hand for him to kiss. He bent over it a moment, then saw that she was crying. “A strong draught,” she said. “ I feel that I’ll never be able to sleep again.” She smiled through wet lashes.
Olympos felt the words forced out of him. He bent closer and fluttered an eyelid towards Antonius.
“Any time Your Majesty...wants something stronger...”
“No, no,” she whispered passionately; and Antonius, stirred in his sleep by her voice, made some guttural noises. She waited and then went on, “I love him...I couldn’t harm him anyway. I’m sad for him. That’s all. He can’t fail easily. I can. I think I can.” Her voice hushed. “I’ll speak to you about a draught...stronger...some other time—but for myself.” Olympos again turned to leave, but she drew him back. “Tell me, Olympos. Why are men such cowards? Don’t answer. I’m as weak a coward myself. I can’t bear to see him weeping. He’s such a child. But that’s what every woman says of her man. I loathe weakness...I love babies...Now I don’t know what I’m saying. Go and get me that draught, Olympos. Strong, but not the stronger draught...” She seemed unable to let him go, though she was tormenting herself. She stretched out her arm, then withdrew it.
He hobbled from the room, glad to escape from human counsels to computations that did not err. So much of this, so much of that, and the result, sleep. Life was no different, but the ingredients were too many—too many for a fatigued old man to count. Why couldn’t people content themselves with getting stone in the bladder if something had to break their health and happiness?
The pages had fetched rugs from down the corridor and prepared to sleep against the threshold, ignoring the cluster of eunuch-chamberlains under the archway. Victor was haunted by Cleopatra’s face, its despair. If a Queen could feel like that at the moment of love restored, what hope was there for a slave who would never possess his beloved. No hope at all. The light from the great Pharos, which sent its beams of comfort and guidance to sailors far out at sea, flickered across the rich desolate room, the sleeping man, the woman crouching with bared breasts.