Now as Lucanus stood in this present twilight and looked at the darkening sea and the far glimmer of the orange-scarlet sunset, he felt his awful loneliness again, his abandonment, and his endless, unremitting grief, not only for Rubria, who was lost to him forever, but for all that suffered and cried aloud without solace. His soul stiffened in him with resistance. Never again would God speak to him, for he had shut his ears! The unanswerable had received no answer, or consolation.
A chill wind, salty and immense, swept over his flesh. He turned away, desolate as always, to return to his small house where he lived with Cusa and the latter’s wife, Calliope. He returned to a lighted lamp, a frugal dinner, and his studies. He was a soldier on bivouac, preparing for the near day when he would be armed adequately to meet the God of pain and vanquish Him.
“Bah!” said Cusa to his wife, Calliope, who stood before him with her plump infant girl resting on her hip. “You are only a woman, and it is notorious that women possess no intelligence.”
“I knew enough to get you as a husband, though veritably you are not the handsomest man alive,” replied Calliope, her pert and pretty face smiling impudently. “It was I who asked Aurelia for you, and it was I who suggested to that poor and noble lady that we wished to be free. She communicated my desires to Diodorus, and so, here we are, free if not freeborn.”
“You are wrong,” said Cusa, ill-naturedly, but smiling at his little girl, who cooed at him. “Did Aurelia free us, or the tribune, that ferocious descendant of the Quinites? No. When we were offered by him to Lucanus it was our blue-eyed Greek who said he would not accept us unless we were first freed, and as the Roman loves him as a son, and has adopted him as a son, the request was granted in order that Lucanus would not be alone in Alexandria. Did the tribune think that without our chaperonage Lucanus would become a sybarite? Or a haunter of brothels? Or a gamester? Hah! I only wish he had some appreciation of such things! He is a male Vestal Virgin. Has he no blood, no parts, no fires, no passions except for learning his accursed medicine?”
“You will observe,” said Calliope, sitting down and beginning to nurse her child, “that you are full of doubts yourself, in spite of your remarks about my intelligence. Why does Lucanus refrain from all the delights of young men? Why is he so abstemious? Less charitable people would consider him either a devotee of Narcissus or one engaged in unspeakable practices with other young men. But he is neither. Something eats at the vitals of his spirit, like the Spartan fox. He is short of patience with everyone; his words are cold or somber. He sits for hours in silence on the terrace, either with his books or with his hands fallen upon them. He is curt and hard of speech at times, if he is disturbed. Have you seen him smile often? Only our little Mara can amuse him. At times I find him tiresome. I think there is a spell upon him. Yesterday I visited the temple of Serapis to pray for him. It is not that I love him; it is impossible to love such a remote young man who resembles a statue more than flesh. But I was thinking of ourselves.”
“You forget that it was he who insisted upon our freedom.”
Calliope shrugged. “Freedom is good for the soul. So you often say, and who am I to disagree with you? Nevertheless, it was gay in the slaves’ quarters of the house of Diodorus. Doubtless, it is now gayer in Rome, or on the estates of the tribune. Who comes to this house but hectoring philosophers and tutors, and not even then at Lucanus’ invitation . Has Lucanus friends among the students? Is there laughter here, and spirited talk of girls and festivities? No! We are not old, but it is like the house of old men.”
Cusa frowned at her formidably, but she tossed her long, light brown tresses and said, “Humph.”
“When we return to Rome in another four weeks, Calliope, you will see your friends again, and you will have your gossips and your gaieties. Diodorus has already secured a position for Lucanus as a medical officer in Rome, with an excellent salary. He will also care for a number of rich private patients, and he will be busy in the sanitoria also. We can then have our own small banquets among our friends. It is not the fault of Lucanus that we see no one here; we are strangers.”
Calliope smirked at him. “With the generous stipend the tribune sends you, and your thrift, we can well buy our own small grove and farm near Rome. Is it necessary for you to become part of the household of Diodorus and tutor his children?”
“You have never heard of gratitude,” said Cusa, severely. He slapped his thigh. “No, if Diodorus does not want us, we must remain with Lucanus in Rome to conduct his household. I am certain he will take a wife there.”
“Hah,” said Calliope, with significance. “I tell you he will never marry. Has he accepted invitations from the families of the students here in Alexandria? No. He lives alone, in that terrible marble silence of his. He thinks only of Rubria; he has never forgotten her. She is a divinity to him. In her name he strips himself of money, and that is unnatural for a Greek, to give what he can to every beggar he sees. Does he not visit the prisons to cure and comfort criminals and slaves? He is a scandal. I am a woman of intuition. He has said nothing yet about that position as medical officer in Rome, and is silent when you mention it. I fear he will refuse — ”
“Do not be a fool!” roared Cusa in wrath. “Lucanus may not be natural or warm, but he is not an imbecile. For what has he been studying?”
“For some fearful reason of his own,” said Calliope.
Satisfied that she had now made Cusa anxious, she retired with her child for the afternoon’s sleep. But Cusa was too disturbed for rest. He walked out on the high terrace, mumbling to himself.
The house was neither large nor small, and was built of white stone, with a pleasant outdoor portico overlooking the sea through simple white columns. Behind the house lay the hot and vehement city of Alexandria, more polyglot even than Antioch, larger and more glaring, and much more corrupt. It seethed, rumbled, shouted, and screamed with innumerable tongues; it was a restless stream of black, dusky, and white faces, and outlandish garbs. The smothering and twisted streets boiled with caravans and camels and horses and chariots and donkeys. The jackals howled all night from the outskirts of the city. The prefect of the city could not be certain how many of his men would return at night to their stations; murder was very frequent. Even the Roman legions here could not always maintain order. Tax-gatherers disappeared when not accompanied by soldiers; their bodies were frequently found in the river or when the tides returned to the vast and brilliant-colored harbor. This was, to Cusa, the one agreeable aspect of the city, which burned as if with internal fires day and night, morning and evening. Prostitutes of all races and colors frequented the narrow and fiery streets at all hours. Every household of any consequence had its own armed guards at the gates, yet robbery was so common that few commented on it. Hot yellow dust surged over the city in such clouds that it made the smoldering skies red at night under the moon and above the torches set in sockets along the walls. Mobs assaulted each other at midnight; there were always bands of young Jews and Egyptians in conflict, cursing and beating each other with clubs, and using glittering knives. The alleys were full of corpses each dawn, evidence of other conflicts between other races also. Though the Romans had established a very adequate sanitary system of sewers emptying into the harbor, the people used the streets as latrines at night, contemptuous of the public booths within a few feet. As a consequence Alexandria stank, even during the brightest and driest of days. In comparison, Antioch was a clean sanitorium. Garlic seemed to be the popular perfume; the cobbled streets were strewn with the offal of both animals and men, despite the armies of slaves who were driven to the task of daily cleaning. It was a dangerous and flaming city, a sweltering and violent city, always clamoring with the sounds of pursuit and fleeing. Epidemics raged through the households; the prisons were always full. Chariots thundered without cessation; one was never far from the rattling and pounding of them.
But the house of Lucanus was in a more or less isolated spot, not far from the university. It was surround
ed by steep gardens and a comforting high wall surmounted by sharp iron pikes. Cusa had carefully established in the city the rumor that Lucanus possessed no money, and that the house was Spartan, containing no silver or gold or anything else worth stealing. In consequence, there had been only a dozen attempts at robbery in these past four years.
Cusa cursed the city and his uneasiness as he stood on the colonnade high above the harbor. The sea was the most royal of blues, almost an imperial purple as it simmered under the white-hot sky. Hundreds of ships, small and large, crowded the harbor. Sails, blue and red and white and scarlet and yellow, hung limp from the masts, for there was no wind in that brilliant stillness of noon. No ship moved; it was the hour for sleeping during the intolerable heat. The city was comparatively quiet, for Alexandria, and only the faintest of rumbles came to the ear of Cusa. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his bare arm and panted. That almost imperceptible breeze coming from the glittering sea was damp; Alexandria was tolerable only when a dry hot wind came from the deserts. The ships now swayed sluggishly on the slow and incandescent tide.
The palms in the garden were overlaid by sparkling yellow dusts, as were the parched grass and the languishing trees. It was impossible to combat the heat of Africa with any water, and the fountains were sluggish. Cusa could hear their feeble complaint between him and the sea. The flowers hurt the eye with their too intense colors, and the eye was further hurt by the light from the sky and the purple blaze of the harbor. Nevertheless, Cusa sat down and gave himself up to his troubled thoughts.
Lucanus had never been a merry soul, even when young, except when in the company of the little Rubria or riding madly on the small ass into Antioch with Keptah. He had always been too reserved, too quiet, too contemplative as a child, and his angers, infrequent though they were, had been as cold as ice, and as glacial. Any sunniness, warmth, and love which had been part of his character had been expended on the daughter of Diodorus. He had laughed rarely, and then almost always in her presence.
If Lucanus had been difficult enough in Antioch after Rubria’s death he was sometimes unbearable to Cusa in these past four years. He would fix Cusa with a sardonic eye when the tutor disagreed with him over the tasks brought home from the university. (Cusa felt that he was the equal of any of the teachers there, and it offended him when Lucanus preferred their interpretations to Cusa’s.) He would lead Cusa on, teasing him not with lightness, but with a sort of bitter goading. “You are no Socrates,” Cusa would say to him, secretly wounded, “and I resent these interminable dialogues which lead to nothing, except to make me appear foolish. Is that your intention?” Lucanus would apologize, with genuine regret, but his face would remain gloomy. He is like a man who constantly bites on an abscessed tooth, Cusa would think. When, in the name of all the gods, will he forget that maiden?
Cusa sat and thought about Lucanus, on the colonnade. He shook his head over and over. Despite Calliope’s complaints he had decided not to leave Lucanus unless the young Greek sent him away.
Chapter Seventeen
“It is unfortunate, my good Lucanus,” said the master of arts, Rustrumjee, “that you are firmly decided upon being a physician, for you are an artist of formidable merit.” Rustrumjee was a learned man from India; he was also curator of the art museum at the university of Alexandria, and his tastes were universal, exquisite, and perceptive. A small, graceful, and sinuous man, curiously giving an appearance of deformity, he had a dark face and strangely pale eyes and a subtle smile. To Rustrumjee a man who possessed no art, or no appreciation of art, was scarcely a man at all. Like most Indus, art to him was not apart from religion; he had also taught Lucanus Sanskrit. “As a Brahman, I belong to the exclusive caste of priests, and it is our vow to preserve our ancient language.” He looked at Lucanus with dignity for a moment, then picked up two small rectangles of wood on which Lucanus had painted portraits. He delicately frowned.
Lucanus had been asked by his teacher to remain after the other students had left. The young man said, “Master, I am a physician, from my birth. I can conceive of nothing else for me but medicine.”
Rustrumjee nodded, and sighed. “What has been ordained during Karma must be fulfilled. It is probable that this is another aspect of your Karma, the transmigration of your soul, needed to complete the needs of your spirit. I often like to speculate on what sins you committed against your fellow men, during a previous Karma, which now you must expiate in saving them from pain or death.”
Lucanus involuntarily smiled, the austere planes of his face breaking up from their usual rigidity into youthfulness. Then he was somber again. He never argued with Rustrumjee about religion, or engaged in discussion with him about it. He reserved that for Joseph ben Gamliel, who taught religion, who was compassionate, unlike the Indu, who had no real compassion because he believed that man’s earthly fate was ordained before endless rebirth and should not be protested. Yet Rustrumjee would never kill the most obnoxious fly or other insect, for fear of interfering with its own ordained Karma. Man, mosquito, or rat: they were one and the same to the Indu, moving up slowly through painful rebornings into being, and thence into Nirvana, and on the way demanding and receiving no human pity, for what they were they had so formed themselves, without the help or condemnation of the gods, through eons of time, through eons of existences. Lucanus found the vast interlockings of the Brahman’s religion in some way fascinating. It seemed to explain much of the agony of life, its mysterious calamities, its seeming anarchy. What if the diseased wretches in the prisons and in the medical infirmary, suffering from apparently undeserved tortures, were merely expiating former crimes and spiritual malformations? And, in expiating them, were rising to higher conditions of life?
He had discussed this with Joseph ben Gamliel. Then the Jew had said, “No. One has only to consider the illimitable harmony of nature, which is a reflection of God, its precise laws which never deviate, its exactness. God is the Law, and the Law is perfect and immutable. Consider the Ten Commandments, the Law. The fact that when a man breaks the Law he suffers intensely either physically or spiritually, and sometimes both ways, and that in obeying the Law he has peace and love and justice, and that if he has mortal pain he has spiritual sustenance proves without doubt that perfection is not beyond him and is within his reach. Why then continual rebirth? No. The expiation is in a spiritual form, a realm of abeyance where the soul can cleanse and purify itself.”
Lucanus believed Joseph ben Gamliel no more than he believed Rustrumjee, for the simple reason that though he could not reject God as existing he did not believe in the immortality of man. Convinced of both mortal and spiritual death, he was never without the deepest and most terrible anger against God.
Rustrumjee said now, “These portraits. They are the faces of men you have painted in the infirmary or in prison, dying faces. What extraordinarily passionate colors! Almost too vivid, almost too affrighting; they start from the wood. Some would say such coloring is not true reality, but only expressed emotion which comes from your own soul. There is a quality of distortion in the features, too, which does not arise from actuality, but again from your personal emotion. That agony! That huge distress! That phantasmagoria of torment! Those twisted lineaments that stand out so that one feels one can touch them and find them raised, like a boss! The sweat on the foreheads and on the cheeks seems livingly wet, and one expects the beads to roll. The dilated eyes of suffering pulse with blood; it would not surprise me if they should turn upon me in despair and pleading, begging for surcease. The other masters are horrified by your paintings, but I am not. Ah, Lucanus, you belong in Indi, and I feel that in several of your Karmas you have lived there, for only the Indus paint so, and so are an affront to the moderate Greeks, who prefer Olympian beauty and harmony to reality, and prefer to carve statues of their gods and to color them beyond the natural color of men. Yet Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so realistic, it is said, that a number of birds darted into the exhibition room to devour them!”
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br /> He looked at Lucanus wistfully. “You are certain you feel no urge to be an artist rather than a physician?”
“No, Master. I am a physician.”
Lucanus went to the infirmary, though, as he had spent two hours there that early morning, he was not compelled to go again today. There, too, was an Indu physician, but he was a Buddhist striving to alleviate torture so that the soul could attend to peaceful contemplation. There was also a Jewish physician, who had the gentlest of hands and the deepest of pity for all that suffered. There was also a Greek and an Egyptian, and even a Roman interested in epidemiology, which was his subject. Lucanus had long observed that in Alexandria the teachers possessed no arrogance about their individual races or creeds or family backgrounds. Not even the Roman ever declared proudly, “I am a Roman!” The humility, the fraternity, the eager exchange of knowledge among the teachers, the acceptance of each other, and their reverence for each other were at first a revelation to the young Greek. They were a brotherhood dedicated to truth and enlightenment. Truth was all, and the imparting of that truth.
They saw Lucanus entering, and greeted him with affectionate smiles, knowing that to him medicine was the divine art, above all other arts, and knowing him dedicated. But only the Jew could understand his fierce personal preoccupation with pain and death. To the others he seemed a student like themselves, academically interested in the aspects of disease and entranced with research for the sake of research alone. To them death was only one of their failures, the final failure, and they would become disinterestedly agog over it and discuss it endlessly. They experimented for the sake of experimentation.