Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1

  CHAPTER VII: A PAGAN END

  [111] FOR the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor MarcusAurelius, returning in triumph from the East, had brought in his train,among the enemies of Rome, one by no means a captive. People actuallysickened at a sudden touch of the unsuspected foe, as they watched indense crowds the pathetic or grotesque imagery of failure or success inthe triumphal procession. And, as usual, the plague brought with it apower to develop all pre-existent germs of superstition. It was bydishonour done to Apollo himself, said popular rumour--to Apollo, theold titular divinity of pestilence, that the poisonous thing had comeabroad. Pent up in a golden coffer consecrated to the god, it hadescaped in the sacrilegious plundering of his temple at Seleucia by thesoldiers of Lucius Verus, after a traitorous surprise of that town anda cruel massacre. Certainly there was something which baffled allimaginable precautions and all medical science, in the suddenness [112]with which the disease broke out simultaneously, here and there, amongboth soldiers and citizens, even in places far remote from the mainline of its march in the rear of the victorious army. It seemed tohave invaded the whole empire, and some have even thought that, in amitigated form, it permanently remained there. In Rome itself manythousands perished; and old authorities tell of farmsteads, wholetowns, and even entire neighbourhoods, which from that time continuedwithout inhabitants and lapsed into wildness or ruin.

  Flavian lay at the open window of his lodging, with a fiery pang in thebrain, fancying no covering thin or light enough to be applied to hisbody. His head being relieved after a while, there was distress at thechest. It was but the fatal course of the strange new sickness, undermany disguises; travelling from the brain to the feet, like a materialresident, weakening one after another of the organic centres; often,when it did not kill, depositing various degrees of lifelong infirmityin this member or that; and after such descent, returning upwardsagain, now as a mortal coldness, leaving the entrenchments of thefortress of life overturned, one by one, behind it.

  Flavian lay there, with the enemy at his breast now in a painful cough,but relieved from that burning fever in the head, amid the rich-scentedflowers--rare Paestum roses, and the like [113] --procured by Mariusfor his solace, in a fancied convalescence; and would, at intervals,return to labour at his verses, with a great eagerness to complete andtranscribe the work, while Marius sat and wrote at his dictation, oneof the latest but not the poorest specimens of genuine Latin poetry.

  It was in fact a kind of nuptial hymn, which, taking its start from thethought of nature as the universal mother, celebrated the preliminarypairing and mating together of all fresh things, in the hot and genialspring-time--the immemorial nuptials of the soul of spring itself andthe brown earth; and was full of a delighted, mystic sense of whatpassed between them in that fantastic marriage. That mystic burden wasrelieved, at intervals, by the familiar playfulness of the Latinverse-writer in dealing with mythology, which, though coming at so latea day, had still a wonderful freshness in its old age.--"Amor has puthis weapons by and will keep holiday. He was bidden go withoutapparel, that none might be wounded by his bow and arrows. But takecare! In truth he is none the less armed than usual, though he be allunclad."

  In the expression of all this Flavian seemed, while making it his chiefaim to retain the opulent, many-syllabled vocabulary of the Latingenius, at some points even to have advanced beyond it, in anticipationof wholly new laws of [114] taste as regards sound, a new range ofsound itself. The peculiar resultant note, associating itself withcertain other experiences of his, was to Marius like the foretaste ofan entirely novel world of poetic beauty to come. Flavian had caught,indeed, something of the rhyming cadence, the sonorous organ-music ofthe medieval Latin, and therewithal something of its unction andmysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along with the lastsplendour of the classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of thattransformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just aboutto dawn. The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself witha feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seemsto say, You have been just here, just thus, before!--a feeling, in hiscase, not reminiscent but prescient of the future, which passed overhim afterwards many times, as he came across certain places and people.It was as if he detected there the process of actual change to a whollyundreamed-of and renewed condition of human body and soul: as if he sawthe heavy yet decrepit old Roman architecture about him, rebuilding onan intrinsically better pattern. Could it have been actually on a newmusical instrument that Flavian had first heard the novel accents ofhis verse? And still Marius noticed there, amid all its richness ofexpression and imagery, that firmness of outline he had always relishedso much in the composition of [115] Flavian. Yes! a firmness like thatof some master of noble metal-work, manipulating tenacious bronze orgold. Even now that haunting refrain, with its impromptu variations,from the throats of those strong young men, came floating through thewindow.

  Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, Quique amavit cras amet!

  --repeated Flavian, tremulously, dictating yet one stanza more.

  What he was losing, his freehold of a soul and body so fortunatelyendowed, the mere liberty of life above-ground, "those sunny morningsin the cornfields by the sea," as he recollected them one day, when thewindow was thrown open upon the early freshness--his sense of all this,was from the first singularly near and distinct, yet rather as ofsomething he was but debarred the use of for a time than finallybidding farewell to. That was while he was still with no very gravemisgivings as to the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources oflife still springing essentially unadulterate within him. From time totime, indeed, Marius, labouring eagerly at the poem from his dictation,was haunted by a feeling of the triviality of such work just then. Therecurrent sense of some obscure danger beyond the mere danger of death,vaguer than that and by so much the more terrible, like the menace ofsome shadowy [116] adversary in the dark with whose mode of attack theyhad no acquaintance, disturbed him now and again through those hours ofexcited attention to his manuscript, and to the purely physical wantsof Flavian. Still, during these three days there was much hope andcheerfulness, and even jesting. Half-consciously Marius tried toprolong one or another relieving circumstance of the day, thepreparations for rest and morning refreshment, for instance; sadlymaking the most of the little luxury of this or that, with something ofthe feigned cheer of the mother who sets her last morsels before herfamished child as for a feast, but really that he "may eat it and die."

  On the afternoon of the seventh day he allowed Marius finally to putaside the unfinished manuscript. For the enemy, leaving the chestquiet at length though much exhausted, had made itself felt with fullpower again in a painful vomiting, which seemed to shake his bodyasunder, with great consequent prostration. From that time thedistress increased rapidly downwards. Omnia tum vero vitai claustralababant;+ and soon the cold was mounting with sure pace from the deadfeet to the head.

  And now Marius began more than to suspect what the issue must be, andhenceforward could but watch with a sort of agonised fascination therapid but systematic work of the destroyer, [117] faintly relieving alittle the mere accidents of the sharper forms of suffering. Flavianhimself appeared, in full consciousness at last--in clear-sighted,deliberate estimate of the actual crisis--to be doing battle with hisadversary. His mind surveyed, with great distinctness, the varioussuggested modes of relief. He must without fail get better, he wouldfancy, might he be removed to a certain place on the hills where as achild he had once recovered from sickness, but found that he couldscarcely raise his head from the pillow without giddiness. As if nowsurely foreseeing the end, he would set himself, with an eager effort,and with that eager and angry look, which is noted as one of thepremonitions of death in this disease, to fashion out, without formaldictation, still a few more broken verses of his unfinished work, inhard-set determination, defiant of pain, to arrest this or that littledrop at least from the river of sensuous imagery rushing so quickly
past him.

  But at length delirium--symptom that the work of the plague was done,and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy--broke the coherentorder of words and thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony,found his best hope in the increasing dimness of the patient's mind. Inintervals of clearer consciousness the visible signs of cold, of sorrowand desolation, were very painful. No longer battling with thedisease, he seemed as it were to place himself [118] at the disposal ofthe victorious foe, dying passively, like some dumb creature, inhopeless acquiescence at last. That old, half-pleading petulance,unamiable, yet, as it might seem, only needing conditions of life alittle happier than they had actually been, to become refinement ofaffection, a delicate grace in its demand on the sympathy of others,had changed in those moments of full intelligence to a clinging andtremulous gentleness, as he lay--"on the very threshold of death"--witha sharply contracted hand in the hand of Marius, to his almostsurprised joy, winning him now to an absolutely self-forgetfuldevotion. There was a new sort of pleading in the misty eyes, justbecause they took such unsteady note of him, which made Marius feel asif guilty; anticipating thus a form of self-reproach with which eventhe tenderest ministrant may be sometimes surprised, when, at death,affectionate labour suddenly ceasing leaves room for the suspicion ofsome failure of love perhaps, at one or another minute point in it.Marius almost longed to take his share in the suffering, that he mightunderstand so the better how to relieve it.

  It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the patient, and Mariusextinguished it. The thunder which had sounded all day among thehills, with a heat not unwelcome to Flavian, had given way at nightfallto steady rain; and [119] in the darkness Marius lay down beside him,faintly shivering now in the sudden cold, to lend him his own warmth,undeterred by the fear of contagion which had kept other people frompassing near the house. At length about day-break he perceived thatthe last effort had come with a revival of mental clearness, as Mariusunderstood by the contact, light as it was, in recognition of himthere. "Is it a comfort," he whispered then, "that I shall often comeand weep over you?"--"Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!"

  The sun shone out on the people going to work for a long hot day, andMarius was standing by the dead, watching, with deliberate purpose tofix in his memory every detail, that he might have this picture inreserve, should any hour of forgetfulness hereafter come to him withthe temptation to feel completely happy again. A feeling of outrage,of resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony of pity, ashe noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility, almostabject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of one,fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of amerciless adversary. From mere tenderness of soul he would not forgetone circumstance in all that; as a man might piously stamp on hismemory the death-scene of a brother wrongfully condemned to die,against a time that may come.

  [120] The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his effort towatch by it through the darkness, was a hint of his own failingstrength, just in time. The first night after the washing of the body,he bore stoutly enough the tax which affection seemed to demand,throwing the incense from time to time on the little altar placedbeside the bier. It was the recurrence of the thing--that unchangedoutline below the coverlet, amid a silence in which the faintest rustleseemed to speak--that finally overcame his determination. Surely,here, in this alienation, this sense of distance between them, whichhad come over him before though in minor degree when the mind ofFlavian had wandered in his sickness, was another of the pains ofdeath. Yet he was able to make all due preparations, and go throughthe ceremonies, shortened a little because of the infection, when, on acloudless evening, the funeral procession went forth; himself, theflames of the pyre having done their work, carrying away the urn of thedeceased, in the folds of his toga, to its last resting-place in thecemetery beside the highway, and so turning home to sleep in his owndesolate lodging.

  Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus Tam cari capitis?--+

  What thought of others' thoughts about one could there be with theregret for "so dear a head" fresh at one's heart?

  NOTES

  116. +Lucretius, Book VI.1153.

  120. +Horace, Odes I.xxiv.1-2.