About seven o'clock on a clear evening of early November Catullus
arrived in Rome. With the passage of the weeks his jealous grief had
learned to dwell with other emotions, and a longing to be with Lesbia,
once more admitted, had reassumed its habitual sway. Coming first
in guise of the need of comfort, it had impelled him to leave Verona,
and on the journey it had grown into a lover's exclusive frenzy.
To-morrow he might examine the structure of his familiar life which
had been beaten upon by the storm of sorrow. To-night his ears rang
and his eyes were misty with the desire to see Lesbia. He had written
her that he would call the following morning, but he could not wait.
Stopping only to dress after his journey, fitting himself, he shyly
thought, to take her loveliness into his arms, he started for the
Palatine. The full moon illumined the city, but he had no eyes for
the marvel wrought upon temples and porticoes. Clodia's house stood
at the farther end of the hill, her gardens stretching towards the
Tiber and offering to her intimates a pleasanter approach than the
usual thoroughfare. To-night he found the entrance gate still open
and made his way through the long avenue of cypress trees, hearing
his own heart beat in the shadowed silence. The avenue ended in a
wide, open space, dominated by a huge fountain. The kindly moonlight
lent an unwonted grace to the coarse workmanship of the marble Nymphs
which sprawled in the waters of the central basin, their shoulders
and breasts drenched in silvered spray. Upon the night air hung the
faint scent of late roses. It had been among summer roses under a
summer moon that Catullus had once drunk deepest of Lesbia's honeyed
cup. This autumn night seemed freighted with the same warmth and
sweetness. He was hurrying forward when he caught sight of two
figures turning the corner of a tall box hedge. His heart leaped and
then stood still. A woman and a man walked to the fountain and sat
down upon the carved balustrade. The woman unfastened her white cloak.
The man laughed low and bent and kissed her white throat where it
rose above soft silken folds. Clodia loosened the folds. Caelius
laughed again.
Catullus never remembered clearly what happened to him that night
after he had plunged down the cypress avenue, his feet making no sound
on the green turf. In the mad hours he found his first way into haunts
of the Subura which later became familiar enough to him, and at dawn
he came home spent. Standing at his window, he watched the pitiless,
grey light break over Rome. The magic city of the moonlit night, the
creation of fragile, reflected radiance, had evanished in bricks and
mortar. The city of his heart, also, built of gossamer dreams and
faiths, lay before him, reduced to the hideous realities of impure
love and lying friendship. In the chaos substituted for his
accustomed world he recognised only a grave in Troy.
His servant found him in a delirium and for a week his fever ran high.
In it were consumed the illusions of which it had been born. As he
gained strength again, he found that his anger against Caelius was
more contemptuous than regretful; he discovered a sneering desire
for Lesbia's beauty divorced from a regard for her purity. The ashes
of his old love for her, the love that Valerius had understood, in
the dusk, coming home from Mantua, were hidden away in their burial
urn. Should he hold out his cold hands to this new fire? Should he
go to her as a suppliant and pay in reiterated torture for
Clytemnestra's embrace and for Juno's regilded favours? He was
unaccustomed to weighing impulses, to resisting emotions. For the
first time in his life slothful reason arose and fought with desire.
The issue of the conflict was still in the balance when, a few days
later, a little gold box was brought to him without name or note.
Opening it he found a round, white stone. Loosened flame could have
leaped no more swiftly to its goal. Lesbia had said a white stone
marked in her memory the day she had first given herself to him. She
wanted him to come to her. She was holding out to him her white arms.
He trembled with a passion which no longer filtered through shyness.
The listlessness of his body was gone. His house was not a prison
and the Palatine was near. Valerius would never come back from Asia,
but Lesbia stood within his hand's sweet reach.
As he made his way through the Forum two drunken wretches shambled
past him, and he caught a coarse laugh and the words, "Our Palatine
Medea." Why did his ears ring, suddenly, strangely, with the laughter
of bright, blue waves and the cadences of a voice telling a child
Medea's story? Did he know that not the unawakening night but this
brief, garish day separated him from one who had listened to that
story with him in the covert of his mother's arms; that not the salt
waves of trackless seas but the easy passage of a city street marked
his distance from a soldier's grave? He had blamed death for his
separation from Valerius. But what Death had been powerless to
accomplish his own choice of evil had brought about. Between him and
his brother there now walked the Estranger--Life.