The Song of the Sirens and Other Stories/The Fasces
THE FASCES
THE FASCES
I
Cneius Pompeius minantibus direpturos pecuniam militibus, quam in triumpho ferretur … adfirmavit … se potius et moriturum, quam licentiae militum succumberet, castigatisque oratione gravi laureatos fasces objecit, ut ab illorum inciperent direptione: eaque invidia redegit eos ad modestiam.
Julius Frontinus, STRATEGEMATICON, IV, V, 1.
FAINT and blurred, but unescapable, the vast hum from the roaring early-morning activity of Rome reached their ears above and through all nearer sounds. About them the bustle and hurry of the camp, its clatter and rattle, its buzz and drone, enveloped them with insistent noise. Yet the two women faced each other with a mute hostility so tensely silent that the spiritual hush inside the tent seemed an immense stillness pervading all the world. Except their own and each other's breathing they heard nothing.
Through the entrance of the tent, past the edges of its drawn-up flaps, they could see, on either side, an elbow of an immobile sentinel. But the two sentries might have been of bronze for all the two women noted them or thought of them. They felt alone and they were alone, for across the whole width of the big, gorgeous tent they were out of earshot of the guards.
They gazed at each other for some moments.
Pompeia spoke first:
"There is no need," she said, "to tell you how astonished I am to see you here. To say how much I disapprove would be waste of breath."
"Your assumption that I care nothing for your approbation," Mucia replied haughtily, "is as baseless as it is undeserved. I have always striven to win your approval. Your behavior and your utterances to-day are but one more instance of your determination to find fault with everything I do, to pick flaws in anything.
"Your surprise at my being here is natural, but your censure I do not deserve. I have broken no family law, and surely there is nothing very reprehensible in transgressing a clan-custom which never had any sense in it. Why should I be bound in these progressive times by a narrow-minded adherence to a mere whim of tradition just because all other women of my clan have observed it?"
"Your clan?" Pompeia exclaimed fiercely. "It is no longer your clan. When my brother married you he made you, worse luck, a member of our clan. You are not bound by the customs of any other clan or by the statutes of any other family, and if you were, nobody except your own blood kin would know or care. Nobody pays any attention to such things. No more do I. You know well that is not why I am incensed."
"If not, then why, in Castor's name?" Mucia queried amazedly.
"It should be unnecessary," said Pompeia coldly, "and it is probably useless, to point out to you the indelicacy of driving out here in a closed carriage with a man who is not your husband. You must have started long before daybreak."
"It seems to escape you," Mucia retorted indignantly, "that you have yourself done precisely the same thing."
"Not precisely nor nearly," Pompeia argued hotly. "I am a widow. I came with my cousin, who grew up with me and whom no one has ever suspected of being an admirer or gallant of mine. Your escort was a man wholly unrelated to you in any way, whose attentions to you have been the talk of Rome for a year."
"Clodius," Mucia disclaimed, "is my husband's friend."
"Clodius," Pompeia rejoined, "is nobody's friend. He is his own worst enemy; his country's worst enemy; your worst enemy, if you but knew it; and beyond peradventure, your husband's worst enemy."
"You are blinded," Mucia sneered, "by your own sour, vinegary spirit. Your bile and spleen miscolor all the world for you. Clodius has his faults, but he is far from being as bad as you make him out. He could appear such only to one blinded by mere gall."
"I may be blinded by anything you choose," said Pompeia fiercely, "by the worst quality your hatred can think up to accuse me of, but at the worst you can make me out, I would be far better than the bad wife of a good husband blinded by an unholy love for another man."
Mucia looked unaffectedly shocked.
"Can even your malice and venom imagine," she cried, "that I could be in love with Clodius?"
"Everybody thinks so," Pompeia told her, triumphantly, "all Rome is sure of it."
"I don't believe a word of it," Mucia exclaimed. "Because you hate me you want to think the worst of me, and because you credit anything, however improbable, you persuade yourself that all Rome believes what your malignity conjectures. The idea! Pompey is the handsomest, the kindest, the most fascinating, the most agreeable, the most popular, the most successful, the greatest man the world has ever seen. The idea of me, who am lucky enough to be his wife, so much as thinking of any other man, absurd! and you know it is absurd!"
The aversion all vanished from Pompeia's handsome, domineering countenance. She gazed at her beautiful sister-in-law with a sort of impersonal fascinated interest.
"Really Mucia," she asked, in a tone entirely inoffensive, wholly disarming, "do you truly care nothing for Clodius? Do you believe in your heart you care nothing for him and everything for Pompey?"
"Truthfully," said Mucia simply, "I do."
"And do you really believe that Clodius is Pompey's friend, showing you attentions for your husband's sake only?"
"I genuinely do," Mucia affirmed sincerely.
"I feel, somehow," Pompeia admitted, with an expression of wonderment, "that you are telling the truth."
"You could scarcely," Mucia proudly said, "feel anything else."
Pompeia's dark face suddenly flushed and her eyes blazed.
"You dolt," she exploded, "almost anyone would believe the exact reverse. And I believe you against my will and against my wish. I have never liked you, as you well know, and as I have never concealed. I began by seeing you frivolous and light-headed, I went on to think you flighty and capricious. Later I made sure you were vain and reckless. At last I judged you cynically shameless. I hated you all the while. But I wronged you, I deceived myself. You never deserved hatred; you are not worth hating, you are not a bad woman, you are worse. You are a fool. I hate you no longer, I despise you!"
The fury of the outburst dazed Mucia and her face showed it.
"O, I've no patience with you," Pompeia went on, "to be so shallow, so easy a dupe. Clodius has never been actuated by any motive but self-seeking. Out of that grew envy of Pompey. Pompey has never said or done anything that could give Clodius a chance to injure him, has never made any mistake in war or politics, Clodius has watched in vain for an opportunity, for a pretext against him. Once Pompey was off for the East and you left behind he naturally cast his eyes on you, and schemed to hurt or injure or discredit Pompey through you. When he found himself kept away from you by Caesar, he plotted to smirch you with innuendoes about Caesar's relations to you. You were silly enough to act so as to lay yourself open to his slanders and to come near disgrace from pure unthinking folly.
"Then, when Caesar avoided you in disgust, Clodius laid siege to you and you fell into his trap at once and more and more. Everybody but you sees through him. Everybody knows he cares nothing for you. Everybody sees what he is trying to do, what he has been doing. Day by day he has alienated you from your husband and ingratiated himself with you, till you echo his thoughts and words as an adoring bride does her bridegroom's utterances. Everybody in Rome can see it but you. And you lend yourself to his plans, let him lead you on to humiliate the family and help him compass Pompey's ruin, and never see what is going on. Oh, you incalculable fool!"
Pompeia stopped for mere lack of breath.
Mucia, pale and wrathful, spoke slowly and contemptuously.
"It is astonishing," she said, "how you very good women, who radiate virtue from every pore and make righteousness a profession and rectitude an art, can descry nothing but wickedness or folly wherever you look, can view nothing but evil anywhere. Your habit of censorious criticism becomes a bias of spiteful malignity and prevents your seeing clearly or thinking rationally. There is not an approach to truth in anything you say."
"Is there not?" Pompeia began again. "Do I not see clear? Do I not see that you are merely a simpleton? All Rome else believes that you are in the plot, that you have abetted Clodius to devise this threatened mutiny, that you have come out to your husband's camp to-day, as all Rome predicted days and days ago that you would come, to behold the outburst of the mutineers and gloat with your lover over your husband's discomfiture."
"Pompeia," Mucia said solemnly and with conviction, "you are surely insane. I know of no plot. What is this talk of mutiny? The daughter of Pompeius Strabo should not speak lightly of mutinies. Are your wits diseased? Is this a delusion of your own? Have you imagined mutiny impending? Or is there really anything behind what you say? If you are in your senses, let me hear you talk sensibly."
"I am talking sensibly," Pompeia protested. "From the day the army began to disembark at Brundisium, Clodius has had his agents among the men. They inflamed the soldiers' cupidity with exaggerated accounts of the value of the booty brought home, set them calculating the probable amount each one would receive and then, when they were busy with anticipations of how they would spend their prospective wealth, the rumor was spread about that Pompey would turn the entire spoil into the treasury and the men get nothing but their bare pay. They feel defrauded already. When Pompey announces how much is to go to the treasury and how little to the men, as he will to-day, they will feel robbed and are likely to break all restraints. That is Clodius' calculation."
"This is a tissue of absurdities," Mucia exclaimed.
"I knew you would not believe me," Pompeia breathed wearily. "I knew it would be useless to talk with you."
"I do not credit a syllable of what you say of Clodius," Mucia answered, "all the more since I know the falsity of your aspersions upon me. But you forget how much I love my husband. I have little faith in your wild talk of mutiny planned. But I am ready to oppose the most phantasmal shadow of any danger to Pompey as vehemently as if it were a tangible reality, a dreadful certainty."
"It is a certainty," Pompeia averred.
"I will not ask you," Mucia went on, "how you came to believe all this or where you heard it. But thinking you knew it you must have told Pompey. If warned he can easily provide against any danger."
"That is just what he will not do," Pompeia declared. "I might as well have been Cassandra of Troy pleading with Hector."
"What did he say?" Mucia asked.
"'Sister,' he said, Pompeia replied, 'our father's grave is a witness that any army, if misunderstood and mismanaged, may mutiny, however causelessly and unexpectedly, and that when they have once transgressed discipline the men may go to any length. But I never fail to understand and to manage my men.' That is what he said, then what could I say?"
"Obviously nothing," Mucia agreed, "and more than likely he is quite right and would foresee any such danger as you imagine long before you or any one else could hear of it."
At that moment they became aware of the sound of many feet approaching, not the footsteps of casual passers-by, not the tramp of soldiers in rank, but the noise of men walking together. The two women ceased to look at each other and faced the entrance of the pavilion.
II
The two sentinels wheeled stiffly to face each other, presented arms and stood at the salute. Between them a tall, well-knit man strode springily into the tent.
Mucia gave a little cry, ran to him and threw her arms about his neck. He started in surprise and then caught her to him. She fairly hung upon him, laying her face to his, kissing him again and again, and between tears and laughter repeating:
"Five years, Cneius, five years!"
He said nothing. When her transports slackened, he gently disengaged himself from her caresses. Holding her hands in his, he kissed her gravely, as an indulgent uncle might salute his niece, without warmth and as a sort of matter of routine.
"This is indeed a surprise," he said, "and the greatest pleasure of my homecoming. I feel greatly honored."
"And you do not disapprove?" she queried, half timidly.
His self-contained calmness, his total lack of any loverly ardor, his obvious preoccupation with other thoughts, piqued and displeased her.
"Certainly I approve of your coming," he told her, "but I am still astonished. Why did you come?"
"Chiefly because I wanted to see you," Mucia answered, adding with a sudden brilliant inspiration of solicitous mendacity, "and particularly to warn you that there are rumors of dexterous and well-laid plans to foment a mutiny which is expected to break out this very day."
Pompey laughed gently and softly, but he laughed. He still held Mucia's hands, holding her away from him and looking down at her.
Pompeia, withdrawn the width of the tent, gazing from under her raven-black hair, her brown eyes wide in her proud swarthy face, not only admired her brother, but confessed to herself that they were a well-matched, well-looking pair. He was very handsome; bareheaded, after the Roman fashion; his hair glossy brown, soft and wavy, his face healthily tanned, and ruddy; his eyes a very dark bluish-gray, transparent and bright; around big, black pupils. He was wearing the embossed body-armor of pure gold which the city of Antioch had had made for him, which he had declined, as he refused all gifts everywhere, but which he had so admired, that he bought it from the goldsmiths at its full value. His crimson cloak, fastened by a big emerald brooch on his left shoulder, hung behind him. His bare arms were round and muscular. From under his military kilt of broad leather straps, plated with scales of chased gold, his knees showed brown and sinewy. He wore the half boots of a Roman nobleman, made of crimson chamois leather, with tiny gold crescents dangling by short chains from their tops.
Before him Mucia gazed up at him adoring and rebuffed, her yellow curls rippling down past her flushed, sea-shell cheeks, her pale blue eyes ready to fill with tears, a lovely figure of a young matron still girlish, palpitating with anxiety, but already dashed by her husband's coolness.
"Why do you laugh?" she pouted.
"People tell me I am the greatest general the world ever knew," he said.
"Your wife knows well that they do," she chimed in, "and proud of it she is."
"You dear little girl!" he exclaimed. "Can you not feel why I laughed? I have lived in camps since I was fourteen. I grew up on incipient mutinies. I deserve as well as I can what men say of me. And you come of a family whose men have been priests and advocates and farmers, but which has never given a general or admiral to the republic, which has so avoided camps, that you are the first woman of your blood to set foot inside one. This is your first hour in a camp and you instruct me how to manage an army! You bring me warnings! Do you wonder that I laughed?"
"You might pay attention to your wife," she pouted.
"Not her warnings, certainly," he said, with an air of finality. "Attention to her I might pay if she had notified me of her coming."
"I wanted to surprise you," she protested.
"You have," he acknowledged, "and so much so that I must forego the pleasure of showing you over my camp. That would be a rare treat, to show my best-beloved, a woman so appreciative and enthusiastic, what she would see for the first time. I have shown many ladies many camps, but never any to a lady who had never seen one before. I should enjoy it of all things could I watch your pleasure. But all my time is taken up. I could hardly snatch these brief moments with you. I must turn you over to one of my aids."
He led her out of the tent and presented her to his staff. Gabinius, splendid in gilt armor. Labienus, thin-lipped, adequate, envious-eyed, conspicuous in his plain leather corselet; Cato, sour-faced and monosyllabic; Afranius, mild and mellow as a full moon; Petreius, emaciated with fever, but resolutely erect; and a dozen more.
"And you remember Mark Antony," he said presenting a curly-headed, blue-eyed dandy, a trifle too plump. "He shall have the pleasant duty of showing you the camp. You will find him an agreeable guide. And now I must go. Business presses."
In a moment he and all his staff save Antony were gone. III
Mucia found herself looking up into the very eyes Cleopatra of Egypt was to love so well twenty years later. All women admired Antony and liked him. Mucia liked him.
"You did not remember me really?" he began. "Am I not right?"
"No," she admitted, "I did not."
"No wonder," he agreed. "I went away scarcely more than a boy: I feel every inch a man now as I come home."
"You look it too," Mucia assured him, "and what is more you are."
She understood all the arts of coquetry and not least those by which women no longer young flatter youths. Antony responded to her words and tone. An atmosphere of intimacy enveloped them at once. From within the tent Pompeia glowered unnoticed, unheeded, forgotten.
"Do you really want to go over the camp?" Antony queried. "All camps are alike."
"But I have never seen a camp," Mucia exclaimed.
"Never seen a camp!" Antony echoed. "Do you mean that?"
"I truthfully do," Mucia confirmed.
"How on earth can that be possible," Antony wondered.
"I come of the Scaevolas, you know," Mucia reminded him.
"Oh yes," he drawled, ruminating. "Seems to me I remember that their women must never enter a camp. But I thought of course you'd left all that behind when you married."
"Not till to-day," she exclaimed.
"Showing you about will be a treat indeed," he laughed delightedly.
Mucia, in her interest, walked rapidly, scorning the suggestion of a litter and bearers for her comfort. Antony had never convoyed a lady who made the round of the camp so fast. When their tour was fairly complete she burst out.
"I don't care about so many square feet for so many horses nor anything like that. A camp is fascinating and you are a good showman, but you have shown me everything except what I want to see. I want to see the treasure, the ingots, the coins, the goblets, the vases, the bowls, the statuettes, the tables, the sofas, the rugs, the tapestries, the hangings, the awnings, the embroideries; all they will carry in the triumph. And especially the jewels; the jewels most of all."
"That is the only thing you could ask to see," Antony replied, chapfallen, "which I cannot show you. The treasure is under strict guard and the orders are unequivocal, to let no one see it"
"Not even the commander's wife?" Mucia pleaded.
"Pompey makes no exceptions and tolerates no transgressions," Antony declared. "No one dare break his rules."
"But even if no one else dare break one," Mucia insinuated, "you might know a way to get round this one quietly."
"Circumventing Pompey," Antony told her, "is likely to be as disastrous as disobeying him. Kind-hearted as he is, bland and deliberate as his habits are, he can be terrifyingly sudden and inflexibly stern on occasions."
"He wouldn't be savage on the eve of a triumph," Mucia wheedled.
"Technically," Antony agreed, "we disbanded at Brundisium and are here informally waiting to march in the celebration. Actually his authority is as autocratic as while we were still under oath and his discipline as exacting. He would not hesitate, I believe, to touch an offender with his baton if he thought the offense grave enough, and the offender would undoubtedly be stoned instantly."
"His hold on the men is good then?" Mucia queried.
"Perfect," Antony affirmed.
Mucia, inwardly self-congratulatory at this refutation of Pompeia's alarms, became altogether irresistible in her fascinations. Antony yielded after a little more talk.
"I'll take the risk," he agreed at last. "But I cannot arrange it at once, nor while you are with me. If you are willing to stay quiet a while in a tent by yourself, I'll find out if it is possible, arrange it if I can and in any case come back quickly to let you know."
"Where must I stay?" Mucia queried. "I am quite willing."
"Here," Antony indicated. "See the sentinels before those six tents, they are reserved for conferences of visiting politicians. If one is empty I'll leave you there safe under guard. No one can know you are there or can disturb you."
He spoke to a saluting sentry, they stepped past him and in a moment Mucia found herself alone in the glimmer of a closed leather tent.
She had barely settled and composed herself for her waiting when she heard talking, evidently in the tent adjoining hers. To begin with she was merely aware of the murmur of two men's voices. Then she made out that they were talking Greek. Then she recognized Clodius' voice. Very much to her own astonishment she felt herself thrill at the sound of it. She had been entirely sincere in talking with Pompeia. She herself was as far as possible from realizing how completely Clodius had ingratiated himself with her. He had been tactful, deft and unhurried, had never gone too far in word, tone, action or demeanor. She had accepted his attentions without concern because she was wholly absorbed in thinking of her husband. Convinced that she herself idolized Pompey she had thought of him as idolizing her, had pictured him from moment to moment as not only her husband, but as her ardent lover kept away from her by unwelcome duties. She had been wrapt up in her dreams of her ideal. Now that ideal had been displaced by the actuality of a cool, preoccupied and externally indifferent husband, who put her aside mechanically and continued absorbed in his duties, her recollections of the attentions of Clodius came over her, a pleasant throng of memories, of compliments, flatteries and kindnesses.
At first she could only recognize the voice, but could not hear the words, then he spoke louder.
"Crassus," he said. "Can you see a flaw in the arrangements?"
"Not a flaw," Crassus drawled, his fat, suety tones trailing glutinously into each other, "when we sit here and talk it over, it seems that everything has been considered, everything provided for and nothing forgotten."
"We are certain to succeed," Clodius exulted.
"I am not certain by any means," Crassus replied. "You forget the man we are dealing with. Pompey has been in ten thousand tight places. He has always come through safe. Time and time again his enemies have thought they had him. More than once, since I have been pitted against him, I have thought I had him. Just when it seems everything is adverse to him and no loophole of escape possible, he escapes or he turns the whole circle of menaces to his own advantage. He has a way of grasping the entirety of a situation in the twinkling of an eye, of comprehending all the factors better than any one else could and of doing just exactly the right thing, just exactly the one thing no other man alive, no other man that ever lived, could have been capable of conceiving and executing, and it is always the right thing to a hair and he always carries it out without an error. He's the factor which is likely to put all our calculations to naught."
"Whom the gods mean to destroy," Clodius quoted, "they first make mad. The man is insane with self-esteem, with self-confidence. His foolhardy recklessness is going to deliver him into our power tied hand and foot. His success against the fleets of the pirates and the hordes of a dozen sultans has so puffed him up that he thinks no harm can befall him, that he only has to will anything to have it go as he wishes. He is no longer his old wary self. I have not told you, but I know from reliable sources that he has been advised of our tampering and warned of our plans, has been warned by at least six different individuals. He laughed at them. He refuses to heed. He is deaf and blind. His folly will make us sure to succeed."
"It does look that way, I allow," Crassus admitted grudgingly. "But he may fool us yet. However it turns out you certainly have taken endless pains. You puzzle me, I can't see what you are in this for. I can see what I am to get, what the others are to get, but I can't see what you hope to get."
"I," said Clodius intensely, "hope to get Mucia."
Mucia hearing the passion in his voice, felt an answering tingle in her blood. She realized that the man loved her. All their hours together, all their words together suddenly appeared to her in a new light.
"Mucia," Clodius repeated, his voice dwelling on the name. "Mucia is what I hope to get."
Crassus snorted.
"Why man," he exclaimed. "You've had five years to get her in, with Pompey half a world away, and you've spent most of your time on her for three. If you haven't got her already, you'll never get her now. And if you could I don't see how a mutiny of his troops will help you."
"Of course you don't see," Clodius retorted. "Neither should I, if I had not been forced to see, and even now I cannot credit my senses. Mucia likes me, likes me so much that I should be sure that any other woman liking me as much loved me completely. Perhaps she does, if I could only make her realize her feelings. But she does not realize them. She delights to be with me, she enjoys my solicitude for her, she accepts all my attentions, but she accepts them as if I were her brother or her father. Off and on I believe she loves me, not for an instant have I believed that she feels that she does. She is walled, towered, bastioned and moated about with her love for Pompey. Not for Pompey as he is, but for what he seems to her. She worships that outward semblance of faultless, impeccable capacity and uprightness which he presents to her as to all the world. Once I show her the fellow as he really is, and she will see what a sham he has always been. He has succeeded all his life because he has succeeded, not from any real strength of character, not from any ability to command success. His life has been a series of dazzling windfalls of luck. He has never wrung success from adversity or risen superior to disaster. He never will. One failure will be the end of him, and his one failure is not two hours off. At this moment he is the hero who has swept the seas clear of all our enemies, abased our most dangerous foemen, avenged the massacre of our slaughtered countrymen, gathered the vastest treasure any Roman general ever captured and brought home the biggest army that ever claimed a triumph. By sunset he will be only the bungler who permitted the most dangerous mutiny a Roman army ever burst into. Whether they kill him or he survives he will be remembered only as a colossal failure. Either way Mucia will know him for the imitation he is. Either way I get her, for she will realize what it is to be loved by a real man."
"You are not a man," Crassus retorted. "You're a reptile."
"Mind your words, Crassus," Clodius warned him. "You don't want to quarrel with me. Our interests are identical."
"As far as Pompey goes, they are," Crassus admitted. "When I think of his cold scorn I rage."
"You hate him politically," Clodius added, "as much as I hate him personally. To-day is the end of Pompey. His sanctimonious assumption of perfection comes to an end to-day and we shall have"
His voice suddenly ceased.
Crassus gave an inarticulate grunt and then both were quiet.
IV
Mucia, listening intently, heard no footsteps nor any human movement, nor yet any stir of a tent-flap. Through the silence following the sudden hushing of the two voices she felt the presence of a third person in the next tent, rather than heard him enter it. She divined a mute interchange of keen glances.
Then Clodius spoke again.
"What brings you here, Caius," he said, in no tone of inquiry.
"Don't you dare to call me Caius," the new-comer rapped out, sharply. "Call me Caesar when you speak to me. You've no manner of pretension to any degree of intimacy that would justify your Caiusing me."
"All right Caesar," Clodius asserted easily. "No harm done."
"Harm enough," Caesar growled, "to be smirched with the stench of your effrontery, you nasty little tadpole. Keep your foul familiarities for those too low to resent them. Don't you dare to try them on me."
"All right Caesar," Clodius repeated. "No offense intended. You haven't told us why you came, though."
"Nor shall I unless I choose," Caesar replied. "Nor until I choose."
Thereupon Crassus interposed.
"If you won't treat Clodius decently for his own sake," he said, "treat him civilly because he's my friend. Do you hear?"
"I hear," Caesar answered, "and it's little I heed. You can hang all the hay in Italy on your horn, but you can't frighten me. You're like many another sham that's marked dangerous, you scare only the scary. I know you for what you are. You try to make believe you're the bull of the herd and you're nothing but a bogus bullfrog blown up with wind, you great scurfy toad!"
"Come, come Caesar," said Crassus. "You must be in a pretty humor with somebody, but that's no reason for insulting me. Remember that I've paid your debts, financed your election, and that you have me to thank for getting Spain as your province for next year. Be civil."
"I'll be civil or not as I choose," Caesar rejoined. "I'm in a bad humor with just precisely yourself. As for my election and my province, your cash would never have gotten either for me without my control of votes, and if you paid my debts it was in exchange for votes I swung as you wished, and you thought it a right good investment, too."
"Come, come Caesar," Crassus repeated, "out with what you have to say. I know you quite as well as you know me. You're not a man to waste breath on epithets. Tell us your business here. You never came merely to insult us two."
"Insult you two," Caesar sneered. "Impossible! You're beneath insult. It's a condescension to go through the motions of insulting you. You great pair of fools! I came in specifically to tell you that you can be heard outside. I heard you. I fancy the sentry may have heard you. You could be heard in either adjoining tent. You don't know that they are empty. If you must talk, talk lower."
"No need of that," Crassus replied, "we do know that the nearby tents are empty and the sentries don't understand Greek. If you came here to tell us we talk too loud you may go away again."
"I'll go away when I please," Caesar said sternly, "and you'll listen to me as long as I choose to talk. You babble of Pompey's self-conceit and over confidence. You two are a hundred times worse. You yoke of asses! You plume yourselves on the scheme you have fostered and are about to hatch out. You are boobies. I'm here to make you see your folly, to persuade you to give up your purposes."
"You are always doing unexpected things, Caesar, and in unexpected ways," Crassus spoke in his tallowy voice. "But this passes belief. Do you really expect to persuade us by misnaming and browbeating us?"
"I am bursting with arguments," Caesar replied.
"You may argue till the Greek Kalends," Crassus affirmed, "but you'll never persuade me to halt now. No conceivable argument could make me forego this chance of pulling down that smug, opinionated, insufferable paragon of a Pompey."
"I tell you," Caesar asserted, "you are a fool. Instead of working against him you ought to make him work with you. Think of the team you and he and I would make. I control the voters, you have more money than any ten men alive and he has the entire army and navy ready to do anything he asks."
(Mucia could almost feel the gesture by which Crassus kept Clodius mute.)
"Instead of plotting to abolish or weaken his hold on the military, you ought to use it. If you ruin him some other man will come up with whom you can make no arrangement. Through me you can make one with Pompey."
"I have tried over and over to make a dicker with him," Crassus growled. "I've got for my pains nothing but scorn and that cool, exasperating contempt of his. I hate him and I mean to get even with him at any cost. You can't change me."
"Nor me either," Clodius put in.
"Even if each of you," Caesar pursued, "is too blinded by hatred to see your own advantage as it is, you might be alive to considerations of prudence. Starting a mutiny is as easy as starting an avalanche, one rumor is like one rolling stone or sliding snow-wreath. Once under way an avalanche is no more unmanageable than a mutiny. A mutiny can no more be directed than a tempest or an earthquake."
"What's the use of your talking about mutinies to me," Crassus rumbled. "You know about slum-votes and election-trickery, you know nothing about soldiery."
"Just wait till I get to Spain," Caesar bragged. "I'll show you what I know about soldiery. When I come back you'll confess I know how to manage soldiers as well as any man alive."
"That's neither here nor there," Crassus objected. "That's all in your mind. It may prove true, but most likely it is mere dreaming. You don't know any more about mutinies than I do. Clodius knows all about mutinies, he's engineered three already. They turned out as he forejudged."
"A mutiny in Syria or on the banks of the Euphrates," Caesar argued, "was a very different proposition from a mutiny at the gates of Rome. Before Artaxata you risked one entire army, yourself included, in the face of the enemy. Your plans succeeded, you substituted a timid sluggard for a dashing martinet and a cowardly retreat for a glorious advance. If you had failed you had your chance with the rest of getting home. There was no danger of the mutineers killing more than a fraction of their officers, they were irritated only against Lucullus and his loyal subordinates. You only had to spread a panic against further advance and a demand for a retreat. Once turned homeward all discontent vanished.
"Here, to spite Pompey, you have turned the men against discipline itself, irritated them with all their officers, weakened the hold of their oath upon them, stopped the foundations of patriotism and embittered them against the nobility, against any wealthy family, against Rome itself. What you are risking is neither more nor less than the entire republic, the city and all in it, the whole present and future of Rome. Surely that is too much risk for mere private revenge."
"Revenge!" Clodius exclaimed. "Talk of revenge to Crassus. Hate drives him. What drives me is love. You can't move me by talking of risks, or of Rome. Not all Rome, not all the Empire, not all the world would be too much to risk to gain Mucia."
"Mucia!" Caesar sneered. "Love! You pose or you misuse words or both. You aren't capable of love and such as you are you do not so much as imagine you love Mucia. Why you are cruising on the offing of half the pretty women in Rome, and you'd tack inshore toward any port not well guarded. You'd be philandering round my wife if you dared and you'd dare if I were not careful and watchful. You love Mucia! You, ready to risk anything, let alone everything for her sake! Nonsense."
"No nonsense," cried Clodius with spirit, "but the plain truth."
Mucia, listening, heard no trace of insincerity in his tone. For her, for the moment, it seemed the plain truth indeed, and a pleasant thing to hear.
"Man, man," said Caesar, "granting that you are in love, have you spark of patriotism left? You've little enough. For your own mean spite and personal profit you ruined between Tigranocerta and Artaxata the most splendid campaign Romans ever fought. You thought little of patriotism then in your rage against Lucullus, and he your brother-in-law! But here and now cannot anything reach your better feelings? Did Rome escape Hannibal and all the power of Carthage, did Sulla save her from the Samnites twenty years agone, did she barely escape Catiline and his ruffians to be burnt in a mere mutiny and that not spontaneous but stirred up for the sake of a woman? Think of all the blood and tears that have gone to make Rome what she is. Must all be in vain because you are made reckless by a woman's indifference to you?"
"I mean to have Mucia," Clodius replied stubbornly. "To get her I must destroy that sham idol of a husband whom she worships. To do that I'll risk Rome, yes and ten Romes, or the world entire!"
"You two are a pair of lunatics," Caesar sighed.
"I should say," Crassus cut in, "that you, Caesar, are merely an alarmist. You seem to assume that the mutiny is bound to get wholly beyond our control. There is no likelihood of that. Clodius has all his plans well laid."
"What are they?" Caesar queried.
"Do you think it likely," Clodius retorted, "that we would tell you?"
Something in Clodius' tone struck Mucia unpleasantly as he spoke.
"I did not think so till you spoke those words," Caesar rounded on him, "I am certain by your intonation that you have no plan at all."
For a moment silence followed.
"You ninny!" Caesar began again. "You haven't any plan! Crassus, what sort of man are you to be led off by such a shallow fool? If you two cannot be moved by considerations of prudence or of patriotism, you might be alive to the thought of your own safety. Can't you realize that if the soldiers get out of hand you will be among the first men killed?"
"We knew we were risking our lives when we went into this scheme," Crassus affirmed.
"You risked your lives, of course," said Caesar. "But you never foresaw how or how much. I can see it on your faces. I've one more question to ask before I go. Can you stop this thing yet?"
No answer came to Mucia's ears. Again she heard Caesar's voice.
"You cannot! I can see that on your faces, too. You are a pair of fools indeed. You're a laughing stock for gods and men.
"You congratulate yourselves on your astuteness, you preen yourselves over your policy, you fancy you are paying off old scores, gratifying old grudges and getting even for old slights. You bat-blind idiots, you're worse off than the man in the fable, who dug a pit to snare his enemy, found himself trapped in it and starved to death there; you're worse off than the slave in the old joke who sat on a limb of a tree and sawed it off between himself and the tree trunk. You're in the position of the carpenter in the comedy who lay down drunk to sleep in his own shavings and drowsed off giggling while he set fire to them to spite the saddler next door. You've got up a beautiful plan to discredit Pompey and what does the plan amount to? To ruin him you have arranged to put the city at the mercy of the one thing worse than a plundering army of foreign savages, and that's a frenzied mob of indignant soldiers. You've got up a scheme for the massacre of all the notable families of Rome, men, women and children alike. Incidentally you two are certain to be butchered in the first outbreak, along with every other man of importance who happens to be in camp when the row starts. Yes and all the women visitors too. The soldiers will butcher every lady and gentleman in sight. You two and I will be among the first killed. Yes and Mucia besides."
"A nice mess you've led me into, Clodius," Crassus gloomed.
"You don't mean to say you believe all this?" Clodius exclaimed.
"I do," Crassus snarled, "and so do you, Caesar is right. You've led me by the nose into a trap. This can turn out but in two ways. One way we shall owe our lives to Pompey and shall have increased his prestige enormously, the other way we lose our lives. I see it clear now."
"And you've had enough of Clodius, I conjecture?" Caesar put in.
"More than enough," Crassus assured him. "If I come out of this alive I'll stand in with you on any dicker you arrange. Just now the point is, do you see any way of saving our lives? I can see Clodius is helpless."
"I see none," Caesar stated calmly. "Nor my own for that matter. As for myself I could find a horse and gallop for the horizon, say toward Capua. I might get into the city in time to have my dear ones out of the Porta Salaria before the soldiery burst in on this side. But that would do no good; once the news goes all Italy will rise; the Samnites and the Gauls and the rest will slaughter us Romans everywhere.
"No, I'll stay and see this thing out. It will be worth seeing. I could laugh with my last breath at the folly of you two, you weave a snare for Pompey and the result is that at this instant you two are dead men if Pompey does not save you. Pompey alone stands between us and death."
"Caesar," said Clodius, and Mucia could hear the shake in his voice—"you do not believe your own words. You never could be so cheerful in the face of death."
"You could not, you insect," Caesar sneered. "I am a man. When I really look on the face of death I shall not blench. I've seen death close a hundred times, as light-heartedly as to-day. Think of the excitement of it. Men get worked up over dice. But what a game this is, Rome the stake and our lives to boot and it all turns on Pompey. This beats chariot-racing for any wager."
Mucia heard a movement behind her and turned around.
"What are you listening to?" Antony asked.
"I was trying to hear what is being said in the next tent," Mucia coolly responded. "There are three men in there, talking excitedly in Greek. But they talk so low that I could not make out a word. At first I thought I knew the voices, but I could not even recognize them. However, listening has passed the time for me. Am I to see the treasure?" V
Her heart palpitating with conflicting emotions, her mind whirling with antagonistic ideas, Mucia went to her sight-seeing woodenly and numbly. Yet her instincts of coquetry and finesse made her counterfeit a delighted interest which completely deceived Antony.
Inwardly she was torn between loving admiration for Pompey, pique at his coolness, even resentment against him, leaning toward that furious rage for revengefulness which woke so easily in a Roman woman. She was divided between distrust of Clodius and the newly realized fascination he had long exercised upon her. Fearing for her own life alternately woke to frenzied panic and calmed under the spell of exultant confidence in her incomparable husband. Solicitude for his lofty reputation and for him struggled against indignation at his curt ignoring of her attempt of a warning. The black certainty of impending doom surged up and drowned her spirit in despair and then again she told herself she had heard merely the inventions of three politicians talking for effect.
With these and a thousand other contending sensations and thoughts seething within her she kept up her judiciously interested smile, shot her dazzling glances at the proper moments and gurgled expressions of pleasure which she herself could not hear and knew were successful only by watching Antony's face. She felt ready to faint more than once, yet congratulated herself that her companion perceived nothing wrong.
When he showed her the wagon-loads of jewels, she suddenly forgot all about Caesar and Crassus, Clodius and Pompey, mutinies and intrigues, forgot herself and spoke naturally. Antony was amazed. She swept away his attempt at reply in a second outburst, which he only half understood.
"You certainly seemed to enjoy the bulk of the treasure," he groped; "why are the jewels such a disappointment?"
"Naturally," Mucia replied, "these coffers of loose pearls and turquoises, of heaped sapphires and rubies, of unset opals and diamonds mean nothing to me. The romance, the glamor was all taken away from these stones when they were torn from their settings. No stories cling to them, no perfume of the past lingers about them. I am ready to burst into tears at the sacrilege. Mithridates had gathered the spoil of a hundred conquests into Amisus, his sixty sultanas had wonderful diadems, necklaces, bracelets and amulets. Every piece had its history. Archelaus had taken in Sparta all those rings and belts which the tyrant Nabis lavished on his women; and with them the ornaments of his chief wife Pheretime of Barca, the very trappings the first Pheretime wore when the Persians helped her punish the rebels and she tortured them and their wives. From Antioch Tigranes carried off the seven strand necklace the mother of Darius wore when Alexander captured her at Issus. He got the best of that share of Alexander's treasure which Seleucus kept.
"I expected to see all those glorious things and more, and you show me meaningless stones bereft of their souls.
"It was such a silly thing to do! The greater bulk of the wrought jewelry would have made only a trifling difference in transporting it and guarding it. And the authentic, original curios could have auctioned for ten times as much as you will ever sell these bleak pebbles for. Merely that is a pity. But the loss of their associations wrings my heart.
"I am so disappointed. I expected to thrill so at the sight and touch of them. They symbolized the power and majesty of the tyrants and kings and sultans who bestowed them, the glory of their conquests and kingdoms, the beauty of the women who wore them, the dangers and toil and triumph of the campaigns in which they were on. They would have preserved all that forever. Now it is all lost, gone from them irretrievably."
"Oh, the pity of it!"
"Don't talk to me. I am cheated with heaps of gems where I anticipated seeing the embodiment of the arrogance Rome has abased, of the courage and skill that accomplished so much for Rome, of the power and prestige and glory Rome has won."
Antony looked at her, bright-eyed, ten times handsomer than she had thought him.
"The embodiment!" he exclaimed. "You were never in a camp till to-day? Have you ever seen and touched fasces or standards or an eagle?"
"Fasces I have seen, of course, but never touched," she beamed, catching fire from his enthusiasm. "But I was a child when Pompey returned from Sicily and Africa and triumphed. I never saw an eagle or any standard."
"I should have thought," Antony wondered, "that you would have had Pompey take you to the treasury and show you his fasces and standards and eagles while they were deposited there."
"One never does the sight-seeing that is easiest," Mucia replied. "If I had thought of it I should have put it off, and in fact I never thought of it at all."
"Then," Antony exulted, "I can show you what you want to see, the embodiment of the soul of Rome."
The tent to which he led her was guarded by a detail of brawny self-important giants. Inside it they found a dozen centurions, grizzled veterans every one, scarred, seamed and weather-beaten. Their fierce old eyes glared kindly admiration at her from under their bushy brows, their mouths widened into smiles of a truculent good-nature which made her quake at the thought of fifty thousand such men suddenly frenzied with ferocious indignation. These old warriors were all awkward complaisance tremulously pleased at her presence, but their faces had that odd animality which results from sound teeth shortened by long grinding of gritty bread, an approach of nose and chin very different in its effect from the outcome of toothlessness, but productive of a sort of senile brutality which the grins only accentuated. They had been handling long narrow cases of red leather.
"We are just in time," Antony remarked, "they are taking out the standards for the parade. The soldiers are going to turn out to hear the general's speech."
Mucia shuddered. Everything hinged on that speech. Then the awestruck reverence with which the veterans opened the cases riveted her attention upon what they contained. From their swathings of fine crimson cloth and delicate white wool padding appeared the standards; each a ten-foot pole of carved wood gilded with gold-leaf all over; shod with a bronze spike below a chased silver rosette, bare for some feet above that; then to the top set close with thick corrugated silver disks, like cups trodden flat by an elephant; topped off by a cross-bar from whose ends hung streamers of crimson silk tipped with tinkling tassels of silver ivy-leaves. The names and numbers of the legions chiseled on the cross-bars, the dates and names of localities embossed on the saucer-shaped disks woke Mucia to palpitating delight in their crowding associations. She overwhelmed Antony with questions which he answered indulgently.
Yes, this was the first standard of the first legion. No, those disks did not recall Pompey's victories, the legion had won them under Lucullus. From the top down the disks commemorated the relief of Cyzicus, the capture of Heracleia, the storming of Sinope, the passage of the Halys, the taking of Amisus, the blockade and entry of Tigranocerta and the storm of Nisibis. Yes, the second standard commemorated Pompey's victories. No, there were no disks for any of the successes against the pirates, he had considered them too easy. They commemorated the night victory on the Lycos; the forcing of the Phasis, the storm of Artaxata, the taking of the castles in the Caucasus, and the entry into Jerusalem. So they went over them all, she bubbling delight, he pleased, enjoying her enjoyment, adding to it with brief sketches of battles or anecdotes of sieges and marches, but mostly watching her and talking tolerantly.
This was the eagle of the legion. No, eagles were not always of silver, in fact, they had always been of bronze until Aemilius Paullus had silver eagles made from the Macedonian booty; Scipio plated his silver eagles with gold after he defeated Antiochus of Syria; Pompey was the first commander to have his eagles of solid gold; actually this was the first eagle of cast gold ever made.
"And now," said Antony. "You shall see the fasces."
"The fasces!" Mucia exclaimed. "Has Pompey two sets of fasces?"
"No," Antony answered, "only this one set."
"But how can they be here?" Mucia queried staring at the fasces the centurions were lifting out of their cases, "Are they not being carried before him?"
"Did you see any lictors when you saw him?" Antony suggested.
"I shouldn't have seen or noticed lictors," Mucia retorted, "if there had been ten dozen instead of two. I was not looking for lictors. I saw only Pompey."
"There were no lictors preceding him," Antony said simply.
"But why?" she marveled. "How can that be?"
"You see," Antony exclaimed. "Technically we disbanded at Brundisium. Nominally we have not been an army since we came ashore, nor Pompey a general."
"You mean," Mucia panted, "that the men are no longer under oath?"
"Certainly," Antony answered easily. "Not since the day after they disembarked."
"But what holds them together?" Mucia asked wide-eyed and breathing fast, her heart thumping.
"Pompey," was Antony's sufficient reply. "They are gentle as lambs. He is paying the expense of rations and everything else out of the booty account, and the technical irregularity will be overlooked, for it forestalls all chance of the quarrels, fights, stabbings, brawls, affrays, riots, pillaging, robberies and burnings that would certainly occur here and there as the men got to drinking, if they straggled up to Rome afoot, in loose bands without officers. The saving is obvious and great. As it is they have been as orderly as on campaign, not a squabble or row anywhere. But they are held only by custom, convenience of tenting and messing, their ingrained habits of obedience, the after effects of their oath-bound years and their reverence for Pompey."
Mucia ruminated in silence, choking. Here was an opportunity indeed for plotting an outbreak. Nothing to hold the men but Pompey's personal magnetism, no legal power behind him, no authority lodged in him, no bond between him and the men, no consecration of duty, no curse upon malcontents.
"And that is why the fasces are not carried before him," she quavered, "why no lictors precede him?"
"Just so," Antony agreed, "he could hardly parade the sacred legal symbols of powers he has solemnly surrendered. But the fasces will be displayed, carried behind him on the platform with the standards and eagles when he makes his speech to-day. The men would miss the tokens of command to which they are accustomed, and the violation of the law will be winked at and ignored."
Mucia bent over the fasces, forcing herself to seem interested in these emblems so full of weighty import, the grim bundles of gilded wands bound together with crossed red-leather thongs, each including a broad-bladed keen-edged axe, silver-mounted and its handle silver-ringed. She bent over them and forced herself to her expected outward semblance and to ask questions. Antony expounded as before.
Yes, these were the very fasces Pompey had assumed in Sicily with Sulla's permission, when he was only twenty-two. The laurel-wreaths were pure gold, the same he had added with Sulla's consent when he returned from Africa and triumphed and his men saluted him as commander. After he returned from Spain the fasces had been in the treasury from the end of his year of office until he set out against the pirates. Yes, the rods were birch, you could see that through the gold leaf if you looked carefully. Corinnos of Rhodes had forged and inlaid and chased the axes and carved their handles. Yes, the tassels of the straps were silk, these were the first silk tassels ever put on fasces, before Pompey they had been of wool only. Could these very rods be used for flogging? Indeed they could and had; many a thief or skulker had been cut to ribbons with them; afterwards the blood was washed off and the rods regilded, And could these very axes behead a man? Actually one or another had been used more than once.
"We were just in time, as I told you," Antony concluded, "here are the bearers come for them."
The two dozen bare-headed, bare-necked lictors, jaunty in their short crimson cloaks, filed in silently, eyeing the lady curiously, nudging each other and whispering that she was the general's wife. As they softly fell in to go the standard bearers edged their way in, received their precious charges from the old centurions, and tramped off behind the lictors.
When they were gone Mucia, bright-eyed and quick-breathing, faced Antony.
"Do you know," she said, "it was not the fasces and standards themselves, not even the eagles, that impressed me most, it was the way the men handled them. No young mother ever hung over her first baby boy more solicitously than those hard-faced old warriors over these cases. No priest ever touched any amulet or Palladium more reverently than they dealt with those standards and fasces and eagles; their battered, gnarled hands grasped and lifted them as delicately as a lady's fingers would her fancy work. The tears came into my eyes to see it."
"You have the right kind of heart," Antony told her delightedly. "You have true sympathy. That is just what I wanted you to see. All the toil and sweat and determination of their marchings and trenchings and waitings, all the grim resolution that carried them through starvation and sickness, all the hopeless valor of their chums and cronies who died on forlorn hopes and fruitless assaults; all the heart-breaking doubts of night surprises, the furious uncertainties of the crisis of battle, the tumultuous exultation of the moment of victory; all the ecstatic enthusiasm of recognition of their commander's worth in strategy and tactics; all their adoration of his still composure, of his unexpected revelations of insight beyond their comprehension; all that and more, all their successes and hopes they see in their standards. All their army's reputation and prestige and glory is manifest and visible to them in their eagles. And all the majesty and might of Rome, all the accumulated power and authority of her conquests, all the magic of her sway is for them inherent in the fasces. For them the standards are the visible soul of the army, the eagle the living presence of Rome's glory, the fasces the personality of her puissance. They might ignore the holiness of consecrated ground, they might violate a tomb or a temple, they might lay violent hands on the statue of a divinity; before the fasces they are deferential, before the standards they are obsequious, to the eagle they bow in awe. A soldier has often little enough respect for a court or a judge, but the fasces are for him the concrete embodiment of right and justice, he would give his life rather than see them dishonored. He might be never so drunk and never so weary, but every fiber of him would wake to energy to protect the standards; he might be so lost and degraded as to kill his own father and mother, but he would hesitate to do wrong to an eagle. I see you comprehend all this. Few women do. It will make you enjoy the assembly all the more. You will realize what is behind Pompey's speech."
Did she not realize? She shook inwardly as she realized it, shook outwardly, almost tottered before she mastered herself into external decorum as she suffered Antony to escort her to the platform.
VI
From the platform of a Roman camp, orders of the day were read, news cried, notifications given, also addresses made to the soldiers by officers or the commander. This platform was in most cases a substantial structure of earth faced and topped with sod, in temporary camps; or in permanent camps with stone, which it was sometimes entirely constructed, as was the platform toward which Antony conducted Mucia. The rank and file of men were assembling before it; the centurions, nearly six hundred of them, on either side of it facing the soldiers; upon it stood Pompey, his chief officers on his right, on his left the visiting notabilities, behind him his lictors and the standard bearers. Farther back on the platform, upon its three raised tiers, were massed the officers, the staff and others above the rank of centurion. On Pompey's left, among the visitors, were a dozen or more ladies, Pompeia with them. Mucia noted her, and near by Crassus, Clodius and Caesar. For Antony did not conduct her up to join the rest until he had led her entirely around the platform, so that she might get the men's view of it from in front. Pompey, sweeping his outlook with keen eyes, stood at the edge of the platform, midway of its front. The crimson horsehair crest of his helmet rippled in the breeze, his blue eyes sparkled, his gallant bearing, his golden armor, his crimson cloak and big green shoulder-brooch set him off splendidly. Still more was he set off by the tiers of serried officers behind the standard bearers and lictors. Against the deep azure of the morning sky spread the golden wings of the ten eagles, gleaming in the sun. The masses of gorgeous coloring of the uniforms made a background which would have swallowed up and extinguished almost any other general, but against it Pompey stood out conspicuous, his ineffaceable distinction making his armor seem more golden, his cloak more crimson than any of those behind him, as his face seemed nobler and his eyes brighter. Mucia admired him unreservedly and her sense of pique at his coolness lessened. She comprehended why Sulla had accorded him his title of "the Great Man;" if at that moment his shoulders bore the whole weight of Rome's destinies he looked fully equal to the load, looked the visible incarnation of the majesty of Rome. Beside him Clodius seemed a poor creature.
Yet Mucia ruefully reflected that appearances were very little likely to avail in the approaching crisis. Clodius looked the shrewder, if the meaner man.
Before Antony went his way to take his place among the younger members of the staff he left Mucia next Pompeia. Looking about she found Caesar on her left between her and Clodius. Clodius did not meet her eye. Crassus behind him looked pasty and mottled.
Caesar had hitched his belt askew into that rakish position, the habit of which had made him so conspicuous as a lad. He seemed to Mucia masking a cynical bravado under an inscrutable air of rollicking jauntiness. Pompeia gloomed darkly, tense and over-wrought.
The centurions had flowed round in a crescent and stood facing the platform leaving a few yards of ground bare before it. Behind them was a jam of the rank and file, armed and helmeted as for review, but collected like any crowd without formation. They were ominously silent. Their one cheer was lifeless. Pompey began his speech as lifelessly. As she listened to his cold, formal periods Mucia wondered was he really the sham Clodius made him out. The men, she could see, listened without enthusiasm as he frigidly enumerated those names of victories which, if glowingly delivered, should have roused his auditors to a frenzy of ardor. Clearly he spoke and audible to the last man at the rear of the listening thousands, but his utterance, precise, almost mincing in its exactness, carried no warmth.
The senate had graciously acceded to their request for a triumph. They were to be accorded full measure of recognition for their valor and their success.
There were to be two separate processions on succeeding days. The first day would commemorate the annihilation of the pirates. The army would act as escort only. The second day would celebrate all the land victories. The spoil … (at the mention of the spoil Mucia felt the strained attention of the men, their readiness to take offense), the spoil would be displayed on sixteen hundred wagons. It would be deposited entire in the treasury. Each man would be paid his allotted stipend at once and in addition in place of any division of booty; would receive the amount of two years' wages, paid in silver.
At that word the storm burst. The roar of the angry men drowned Pompey's voice and swelled into a tide of sound that seemed capable of drowning all the noises in the world. It lasted on, roar following roar in pulsations, blent into one unbroken cataract of noise. All the men were gesticulating and here and there a naked sword flashed aloft above the mob. The tossing sea of waving arms and contorted faces made a terrible spectacle. Mucia realized instantly the fatuity of Clodius and Caesar's unerring prescience. She knew her last hour had come, unless Pompey was strong to save. She knew that upon him hung, not only her life but the lives of all those about her, that upon him depended the salvation of Rome and of all the Roman world. She realized how imbecile had been any pretensions of Clodius towards keeping in hand and guiding the tempest he had aroused. She had a staggering prophetic vision of what the platform she stood on might look like at sunset, her draggled corpse among others heaped pell-mell. Equally clear did she behold the impending horrors of Rome pillaged, burning, then obliterated forever.
In all this instantaneous realization of threatening doom she did not lose her composure. The Romans were an amazingly excitable race, quick to yield to any passion, and by no means controlled in the outward expression of their feelings. Their women screamed easily, their men, even in public, commonly burst into tears, even multitudes of them together, upon provocation that would move no Teutonic or Saxon crowd to any exhibition of emotion whatever. Contradictorily they were extremely capable of self control in respect to anything infringing their idea of dignity. The nobility especially valued a dignified exterior above all the other possessions of their souls. Mucia came of a family believed to be descended from an ancestor capable of thrusting his right hand into a fire and holding it there unflinchingly till it charred. She lived up to her family traditions in general. Now she did not shriek or faint. She was of that blood which bred those contained matrons whose poise and serenity we may still view mirrored forever on the faces of such portrait statues as have come down to us. She had not their height or majesty of form, she had the Roman soul of the tallest of them. Inwardly overwhelmed with dread, she coolly took in the situation. She had had her eyes on Pompey's face and she saw him for one heart-beat thunderstruck with astonishment, saw that he had anticipated no such situation, saw him wholly unprepared to deal with it.
The sea of faces before her heaved like a whirlpool. The next breath it might become an irresistible torrent of utter destruction. There would be one chance against it and only one.
The women about her she saw as unperturbed as herself, true to their ideals of demeanor. Yet their impassive countenances were deathly white every one.
On the faces of the more comprehending men she read dazed terror; Crassus was blotched and speckled with hues of fright, Clodius was gray with the fear of death; Caesar clothed in cynical patrician effrontery gazed unmoved at the riot, cast a glance of amused contempt at Clodius and fixed expectant eyes on Pompey.
Mucia's followed his. She had borne up in spirit against her inward shudders at the men's outburst, now she nearly fainted under the hot wave of reassurance that surged through her. Pompey's face was the face of the practised fencer who knows his own skill, knows just what he means to do and confidently waits his certain opportunity.
The roar for gold, gold, gold filled the air. The first syllable of "aurum" pulsated in a "wow," "wow," "wow" like the snarl of a horde of ravening wild beasts. Ravening wild beasts the men would be next instant unless Pompey saved the situation. Calmly and resolutely he faced them until they hushed from mere breathlessness.
Then his voice rang out, clear, magnetic, full of resonance and fire.
"You want gold?"
Again the roar, the harsh, hoarse, rasping roar of fifty thousand angry fighters, again he waited for it to die down.
"You want gold?" he repeated.
The roar redoubled and through its continuance Pompey's face was not that of a man baffled and defeated, not that of one in a quandary, it was the face of a capable man seeing his opportunity and rising to grasp it. It was not the face of one who doubts or fears. It wore the expression of the man who comprehends his countrymen to the recesses of their souls, knows all the modulations of their heart-strings, understands a situation in all its complexities and means to do the one thing sure to touch the right chord.
Silence fell again, not so much now that the men were breathless as that those in front felt the compulsion of Pompey's magnetic gaze, those not so far off yielded to the spell of his masterful attitude, and the thrill of their submission communicated itself to the entire throng. Transfigured and sublime, his presence thralling the whole vast concourse, he stepped back half a pace. With each hand he seized the fasces from the nearest lictor to right and left of him. To the earth before the platform he hurled them. Through the stunned silence his voice bugled:
"If you want gold, begin on that: … or that!"
The stillness became as if no breathing thing but himself existed. Stepping back again he seized the two standards of the fourth legion.
"Or on that!" he called as he hurled the first, "or on that!" as he hurled the second.
Across the dazed hush his clarion voice carried far.
"Think what you are doing. The gold I shall turn into the treasury is no more yours to covet than the bullion on the fasces, the metal of your standards, or the gold of the eagles."
He seized and hurled the great gold eagle of the seventh legion.
"If you must and will have gold," he called, "begin on that!"
The tension snapped. A tenfold roar effaced the brief silence. It was a roar of weeping men, abashed, abased, brought back to their senses, those behind trampling those before as they surged forward. From the dust they lifted their desecrated standards, their eagle, the dread fasces. Tenderly they brushed them. On their knees they begged for pardon, with streaming eyes and babbling tongues choked by sobs they proffered unalterable fealty.
When the tumult slackened Pompey held up one hand. Every man in whatever attitude he might be was frozen mute. Pompey gave a low-voiced order. The two lictors and the three standard-bearers went down into the crowd, retrieved their precious charges and returned to their places, no other man moving the while.
Mucia looked about her. Crassus she saw, but not Clodius. In fact she never saw him again that near, never at all again to speak to. Caesar's eyes met hers with an expression of relished amusement.
She looked again at Pompey, at the deity who had saved her, had saved Rome.
He surveyed the throng before him.
"Further details of the arrangements will be communicated to you by your centurions," he said. "After the spoil is in the treasury you will be paid your stipends and the amount of one year's wages apiece paid in silver."
He paused.
Not a sound did any man make.
"Magnificent," Caesar whispered to Mucia. "Almost too risky, but perfectly successful."
"You will now fall into ranks," Pompey continued to the men. "You will march past. From the march past the whole army will double-quick the six miles to Antium. There you will be allowed one draft of water each. You will then double-quick back to camp."
He paused, and stood imperiously dominating the ensuing silence, completely master.
In Roman civil life, in all state affairs, still more in all military matters women were not supposed to exist. If present they effaced themselves, tolerated maybe, but ignored. But now Mucia rushed to Pompey and threw her arms about his neck.
He caught her to him, not perfunctorily, but greedily. Before all his staff and army he kissed her lips.
Then did the men burst into vast, ringing cheers.
"No danger now," Pompey whispered to Mucia as he released her.
"After that cheer they are mine, heart and soul."