by Jack Lindsay
6 A CHILD IS BORN
The morning was taken up with the removal from the Timonion back to the Palace. Again Victor avoided sharing a room with Eros, and managed to have as his companion another page, Borios, who had been left behind during the retreat to the Timonion. Borios was a heavy good-natured fellow who suited Victor’s mood. Antonius appeared entirely subdued and tamed. He had little to say, agreed to all Cleopatra’s suggestions, and could not keep his eyes or hands away from her. His shattered nerves were tremulous with the sudden cutting — off of wine, and she made him drink a watered cup every now and then, though he insisted that he never wanted to see the stuff again. But he gratefully drank from the cup she held, looking up at her with wide eyes of devotion.
Eros and Victor stood at the end of the long mosaiced room with its tall rafters which had been lately re-gilded to remove the torch-smoke. Eros was discussing toilet problems with the girls, but Victor refused to join the conversation. He disliked both girls. Eiras was tall and dark, and had a way of looking at one for a long while as if she had an inner joke; and a slight dark down was visible on her upper lip when the light caught it. Charmion was lithe and fair, and always ready to laugh and shake her curls down over her face. They were intelligent girls in their way, Victor admitted, but didn’t like them; they were too shrewd and superior. He was irritated that Eros couldn’t see how they made fun of him; once they’d persuaded him to dress in some of their clothes while they painted his face, and the fool was pleased. Even so, they were better than the eunuchs, whose hands were always damp and flabby, and who went into hysterics of excitement so easily—unless they were the wizened-rat kind.
Cleopatra, seated in a chair of plaited palm-leaves, was telling Antonius about her plans. Victor knew, because he’d heard what she was saying when he’d taken the wine and cakes to the couch. She’d had the old canal from the Nile to the top of the Red Sea cleared of sand, and thirty of the best ships taken across. The ships had had to be hauled over the sand part of the way, where it would have taken too long to repair the canal.
Antonius was listening intently.
“I’m sure you know best,” was all he said.
Again the fear of a departure from Alexandria had come to break up all Victor’s plans, and he tried to piece together all that he’d heard. He couldn’t make out what was Cleopatra’s goal—India, or the Persian Gulf, or some tropical island where she could set up a tiny perfect-state. She’d gathered all her best portable property: gold and silver and gems and plate and rare woods. That was to ballast the ships. From one of her remarks it seemed also that she was meditating whether she would land in Ethiopia and make that the base for reconquering Egypt. A Holy War with Osiris as the rallying-cry. At the same time she had been strengthening all the coastal defences of Egypt, intriguing with the petty princes of Asia. If the fleet were powerful enough the Romans could yet be beaten off.
Victor waited anxiously for the next chance he would have to overhear a few more sentences of the long accounts that she was tumbling out. Contradictory hopes and divided efforts. Antonius was looking up again, and Victor knew what he was saying.
“You know best, my dear.”
The girls were teasing Eros.
“Would you marry me,” said Charmion, “if I asked you specially?”
“I wouldn’t marry any woman,” replied Eros loftily, “whether she asked me or not.”
Eiras regarded him with her malign smile. “You haven’t any idea what a desperate woman will do.”
“I’m a poor orphan,” moaned Charmion. “How can you be so hard-hearted?”
Eros raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t you girls anything else to talk about?”
“She’s madly in love with you,” insisted Eiras. “She embroidered a funny little man on the over-sheet and stitched Eros as his name.”
“Don’t,” said Charmion, wriggling. “You’ve made me drop a blush and now I don’t know where it is. Do find it for me, Eros.”
Eros scornfully shrugged his shoulders at such flippancies, and the girls went off, kissing the backs of their hands to him. Victor watched the pair. They were fine-looking girls, but not Daphne. What made Daphne different? The leap and tug of a wrestling flame, the sweeping poise of a wave, the curve of the wind in a sapling, the swaying balance of a blown fountain-jet, everything that has a mounting rhythm and yet belonged to the earth. Dimly he sensed the forms that he saw in Daphne, the memories of contact, the moon-reflections in the heron-guarded waters. But the other girls were only girls walking about, bright bits of flesh with mocking laughter behind their greedy teeth, hands to take and tear, legs to run away, eyes to burn, buttocks to crush. Daphne was different. Even when she was angry, she was kind; she was his.
And now he would never be able to claim her.
It was only the final obstacle. He could never claim her anyhow.
Yet she was his, reflected in the mirrors of memory, myriad-shaped and always herself, coming towards him or going, in the prison of the mirror.
*
She thought that she would never have the courage to face again the family of Manethos after she had been sent back home with the politest of thanks for spending the night in the house. No reference was made to the cause of her stay, but her dress appeared first thing in the morning, washed, pressed, and pleated, entirely dry and ready for wear. How it had been prepared, she couldn’t discover. Someone must have been up all night with it. She began protesting and asking questions; but Sheftu-Teta merely said, “The girl hung it before the kitchen-fire to air it,” and Daphne felt that her inquiries had been unmannerly. Certainly the family of Manethos were restful; they seemed incapable of making a fuss about anything.
She told her father that she’d had a slight fainting-fit and Olympos had advised her to stay for the night.
“A stuffy house, I suppose,” said Nicias irritably, yet pleased that his objections to the visit were now justified. “You know I don’t like foreigners. Incense-burning, no doubt.” All Eastern people were to him confounded with the Jews, whom he disliked because they had such a financial hold on Alexandria. Others of his colleagues were friendly with the Jewish scholars who preferred the liberal atmosphere of Alexandrian Jewry to the political and theological strife of Jerusalem; ever since the Jews had collaborated with the Museion in producing a Greek version of their Scriptures Alexandria had been the seat of a new school of Judaism, which sought to combine the growing syncretism of religious thought in the Mediterranean world with the specifically Judaic attitudes; but Nicias would have none of such things. His hatred was divided impartially between Jews and Romans.
Daphne in her new admiration for the Manethos family wanted to reply to his comments by pointing out that, after all, Alexandria was in Egypt and it was the Greeks who were foreigners; but she stopped in time, made a face behind her father’s back, and went to her room.
Nicias returned to the pamphlet that he was reading, enraged at the rash stupidity of the author, but relieved that there was still work to do on Aischulos. This fool tried to prove that the geographical names in the beacon-chain in Agamemnon were chosen by Aischulos symbolically. The only name that fitted into this scheme was Gorgopis Limne, the marsh of the Gorgon, the snake-flashing destroyer, the evil-eye; and perhaps Mount Aigiplanctos, the Crest of the Goat-wail, Tragedy meaning Goat-song; and perhaps Mount Arachnaios, the mountain of the spider’s web, since later in the play the cloak which wrapped Agamemnon as he was murdered was compared to a spider’s web; and perhaps Mount Hermaios, the mount of Hermes the herder of the dead...
Nicias was infuriated at having to make so many con-cessions, seeing that the theory was so entirely wrong-headed. The philology employed by the pamphleteer in the dissection of the other names was enough to make a true lover of words vomit. And Nicias yet couldn’t find out who had written the work, so that he could denounce him. He took a papyrus-sheet and wrote the title for a thesis, Place-Names in Aischulos.
But he got no further. For he
started to read Agamemnon, and read it right through, though he could have repeated every word with his eyes closed. Because he knew it so well, he felt that he knew hardly anything of it, the voice behind the voice, the knowledge behind the thinking. Ah, that was poetry, that was life. Modern existence was insultingly patternless, vague. Men and women ought to live amid gigantic crimes and atonements, curses and God-epiphanies. One knew all about life while one read Agamemnon, but when one looked at life itself one knew nothing. One saw only a pack of fools without even the intelligence to be significantly evil. Everything could be forgiven except lack of style, and there was no style without passion. Life should consist wholly of murders and harvest-revelries, women in childbirth and battles. Everything else was irrelevant. Nicias, who found existence intolerable if the slightest noise distracted his reading or if his meals were a second late or a fraction overcooked, indulged in dreams of tragic irony.
He himself was often late for his lectures at the Museion; but, early or late, he never lectured on anything but the derivation and usage of Greek words.
None of the students guessed that he was an admirer of great eaters, great drinkers, great wenchers—anything over-life-size. He had the wish to talk and act heartily, but never did more than overeat and overdrink at times at home, and the resulting indigestion merely made him more irritable. Even with old associates like Olympos he could make no more than a cumbrous attempt at heartiness followed by fretful glooms.
Only Callirhoe had understood. He was sure of that now, though tortured by the thought of so many things left unsaid and undone. He had desired her so greatly and yet had fallen into habits of possession. If only she would come back to him, he would show her, he would be able to express himself, to possess her mightily, in the daylight. She had died without knowing, and of what use was life thenceforth to him? She had wanted someone more easy-going, more earthy; and that was what he had wanted to be. But there was so much to read, words were such exacting masters...
In the next room his daughter, stripped, had hung a mirror on the wall opposite the mirror propped-up on her table, and had placed another on the floor, and was screwing her lips into an imitation of the small heavy mouths of the daughters of Manethos. She had also tied her hair back to give the effect of a close crop, and was trying to see herself from unusual angles. Losing her balance owing to the cramped position into which she had got herself, she fell forward and bumped her head on the wall.
*
Without telling Nicias, she called again on the Manethos household and achieved a kind of friendship with the girls. She was asked to come whenever she wished, and went as often as she could, wanting to find out what kind of life the girls led. They seemed to go nowhere, being contented to play music and sing, do needlework, and read poems, Egyptian or Greek. They conveyed to Daphne without condescension that they found Greek literature interesting as a youthful, indeed sometimes childish, offshoot of the Egyptian mind. They seemed on the best of terms with their parents, without being spoilt or asking much notice from them. They had never been beaten and were horrified to learn that Daphne had often been beaten as a child and once, so Daphne said, only a few years ago when she had tried in a storm of naughtiness to set the house on fire. In the first place, they could not imagine themselves setting any house on fire; and in the second place, if they made any such peculiar attempt, Manethos would merely give them some soothing medicine and read them poems written some 2,000 years ago on the decencies of family life.
These discoveries alternately charmed and angered Daphne, and she didn’t know if she was more sorry at having admitted such things in herself as the capacity to set houses on fire (though indeed she had no wish whatever to burn anything and couldn’t remember now why she had wanted to do such an act) or more wilfully tempted to go on inventing excesses of suffering and outbursts of temper in order to shake the enviable but unfair calm of the Manethos family. She was sure the girls were hiding something, and had the feeling that if she exposed herself she would end by making them confess; and every time she left the house, she thanked heaven for not having said the things she’d wanted to say.
There were many things that she didn’t comprehend about the family. Once a month, on a day fixed by the motions of the moon, Manethos, his wife and daughters, all used an enema, in a family-ritual of cleansing and dedication. They used a hollow gourd, smooth and pliant, and pure Nile-water in which flower-essences had been dropped. The treatment was necessary for good health, the girls assured Daphne, and produced a sensation of delightful well-being; but Daphne resisted the idea strongly, though very curious about it.
So the elder girl told her a story about the method and its divine origin. “One day the wise god Thoth took the shape of an ibis-bird and went to bathe in the Nile. He took that shape because of the long curved beak. You see, the beak enabled him to cleanse his intestines by bending down and using it as a water-squirt. Haven’t you ever seen an ibis with its head down between its legs? Well, some doctors were passing by, and they saw Thoth. Thus they were initiated into the process.”
The younger girl added gravely, “All knowledge is in nature. So with reason it might be argued that the ibis on that day became Thoth. For there is no reason to believe that a bird is less divine than a god. As a bird, I mean.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Daphne, not mentioning whether she disbelieved in the efficacy of the treatment, the metamorphosis of Thoth, or the divine reality of birds. She spoke emphatically, and was annoyed by the encouraging smiles of the girls. She looked at their boyishly slim figures, their frail self-possessed elegance, and was somehow outraged.
She longed for Victor, and felt that all his confused mistakes, crudities, and weaknesses were more akin to her than the inherited and admirable composure of the Egyptian sisters. As soon as she could, she left.
“She is unhappy,” said the younger girl.
“She is sick,” said the elder. “All these foreigners are sick. They think their body is a dress to be changed daily, and they fret because dresses become soiled.”
“How clever you are,” said the other, and kissed her slowly on the mouth.
*
Daphne called again, a week later, and asked if the girls would be in the Sarapeion on the night of the winter solstice. Knowing that Manethos was a priest, she expected that the whole family would visit the temple to attend the Nativity of the Sun. Yes, the girls said, they would be there, to hail the new-born child of the year; and Daphne asked if she might go with them. “Father won’t let me go unless it’s with someone he trusts,” she said, thinking that she was being very astute; and the girls agreed that their father and mother were eminently trustworthy.
But after Daphne had gone, they looked at one another. “Why does she want to go?”
The elder girl tossed her head slightly. “Something vulgar. Can’t you see it in the way she moves, in the way she crosses her legs, in the way she looks at one. It was rightly said: A girl should spend a year of her education looking at nothing but a lotus-lily, so that her eyes may learn restfulness.”
The other took up an Egyptian nine-stringed harp with rounded frame that was carved at the end with the head of Hathor, goddess of love. She sang:
My love has made me wise,
wise and gay.
When I run to meet him on the way,
the half of the forepart of my hair
falls down over my eyes.
Look at all the birds,
all the birds of Asia,
hovering in the air.
“It was written very long ago,” remarked her sister, as if in warning.
“Very long ago,” answered the singer, sadly.
*
Daphne went to Olympos and said that the Manethos girls had begged her to go and see the Birth of the Sun-baby and to stay the night with them, but of course Nicias wouldn’t agree, and as she didn’t want to hurt the feelings of the girls, would Olympos speak to Nicias on the subject, being such a dear old
fellow that nobody could deny him anything. Then she kissed him on the top of the head and waited expectantly.
Olympos replied that good young girls had other things to think about than sun-babies, who could very well come into the world without their help; and that the first rule of health was early to bed and early to rise; and that on considering the matter he didn’t think he’d speak to Nicias.
“You’re a bad old man.” She ruffled his scanty hair. “I’m sorry I kissed you.”
“But I meant what I said.”
“Then I’ll cry. Look at my lower lip.” She raised his head and made him look. “It’s shivering and shaking already, you old bully.”
She pointed at her lip. It was certainly quivering. She was proud of the trick which she’d practised before the mirror until she could do it perfectly; but she spoiled the effect by laughing.
“Say you’ll do it.”
“You oughtn’t to want to make me act against my convictions.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t care at all about your convictions. That’s only another word for nastiness. I simply want you to do a little, little thing for me, and you won’t.” She began to cry in earnest.
“You know I can’t resist your tears.” He patted her on the cheek. “Stop crying, and I’ll do it.”
She wiped her tears away and flung her arms round his neck. He disentwined them and placed her hands in her lap.
“I’d like your affection a trifle more disinterested, my dear.”
“I don’t know the meaning of big words, but how am I wrong for loving you because you show you love me?”