I
"Look at him--a subject for his own verses--a grandfather
metamorphosed into an infant Bacchus! Will he be a Mercury in
swaddling clothes by next year? O, father, father, the gods certainly
laid their own youth in your cradle fifty-two years ago!"
The speaker, a young matron, smiled into her father's eyes, which
were as brilliant and tender as her own. Ovid and his daughter were
singularly alike in a certain blitheness of demeanour, and in Fabia's
eyes they made a charming picture now, both of them in festal white
against the March green of the slender poplars. Perilla's little boy
had climbed into his grandfather's lap and laid carefully upon his
hair, still thick and black, a wreath of grape leaves picked from
early vines in a sunny corner. Fabia and Perilla's husband, Fidus
Cornelius, smiled at each other in mutual appreciation of a youth
shared equally, it seemed to them, by the other three with the
new-born spring.
It was Ovid's birthday and they were celebrating it in their country
place at the juncture of the Flaminian and Clodian roads. The poet
had a special liking for his gardens here, and he had preferred to
hold his fete away from the city, in family seclusion, because Fidus
was about to take Perilla off to Africa, where he was to be proconsul.
The shadow of the parting had thrown into high relief the happiness
of the day. Perilla had always said that it was worth while to pay
attention to her father's birthday, because he could accept family
incense without strutting like a god and was never so charming as
when he was being spoiled. To-day they had spared no pains, and his
manner in return had fused with the tenderness kept for them alone
the gallantry, at once that of worldling and of poet, which made him
the most popular man in Roman society. Now, as the afternoon grew
older and his grandson curled comfortably into his arms, the
conversation turned naturally to personal things. Perilla's jest led
her father to talk of his years, and to wonder whether he was to have
as long a life as his father, who had died only two or three years
before at ninety.
"At least, having no sons," he went on, "I shall be spared some of
his disappointments. It was cruel that my brother, who could have
satisfied him by going into public life, should have died. Father
had no use for literature. He used to point out to me that not even
Homer made money, so what could I expect? But I believe that even
he saw that my student speeches sounded like metreless verse, and
later on he accepted the bad bargain with some grace. He had sniffed
at what I considered my youthful successes. I was immensely proud
over seeing Virgil once in the same room as myself, and when I came
to know Horace and Propertius fairly intimately I felt myself quite
a figure in Rome. But father had little or no respect for them--except
when Horace turned preacher--and no patience at all with what I wrote.
Before he died, however, when these greater men had passed off the
stage and he saw young men look up to me as I had looked up to them,
and found I could sell my wares, he began to grant that I had, after
all, done something with my time."
"I never can realise," Perilla exclaimed, "that you are old enough
to have seen Virgil! Why, I wasn't even born when he died! I suppose
those times, when Augustus was young, were very fiery and inspiring,
but I am so glad I live in this very year. I would rather have you
the chief poet of Rome than a hundred solemn Virgils, and surely life
can never have been as lovely as it is now. Isn't Rome much finer
and more finished?"
Fidus smiled. "You are your father's own child," he said. "We
certainly are getting the rustic accent out of our mouths and the
rustic scruples out of our morals. In the meantime"--he added
lightly--"some of us have to plod along with our old habits, or where
would the Empire be? I don't expect to improve much on the
proconsulship of my father."
Ovid's eyes rested whimsically on the young man, and after a pause
he said: "Art is one thing and conduct is another. I trust Perilla
to you but with no firmer assurance of her happiness than I have of
Fabia's entrusted to me. Soldiering and proconsuling have their
place, but so has the service of the Muses. While you are looking
after taxes in Africa, we will make Rome a place to come back to from
the ends of the earth. After all, to live is the object of life, and
where can you live more richly, more exquisitely than here? You will
find you cannot stay away long. Rome is the breath we breathe. I like
to believe that will prove true of you. I cannot give up Perilla long,
even with this young Roman as a hostage." The child had fallen asleep,
and with a light kiss on his tousled curls the grandfather turned
him over to his mother's arms. "Let us leave these connoisseurs to
discuss his dimples," he said to his son-in-law, "drag our other boy
out of his bee-hives and have one more game of ball before I get too
old."
Perilla watched the two men as they walked off toward the apiary,
and when she turned to her stepmother her eyes were wet with sudden
tears. "Fidus was almost impertinent to father, wasn't he? And father
was so perfect to him! That is what I tell Fidus, when he talks like
grandfather and says we are all going to the dogs--I tell him that
at least we are keeping our manners as we go, which is more than can
be said of the reformers. I am always nervous when he and father get
on to social questions, they feel so differently. Fidus was quite
angry with me the other day because I said I was thankful that we
had learned to have some appreciation of taste and good form and
elegance and that we should never go back to being boors and prudes.
He insisted that if by boors and prudes I meant men and women who
cared more for courage and virtue than for 'hypocrisy' and 'license,'
I should see them become the fashion again in Rome, before I knew
it. Augustus was not blindfolded, if he was old. But, although Fidus
doesn't understand father, he does love him. He said about coming
here that he would rather spend his last day with father than with
any other man in Rome. And what a happy day it has been!"
Perilla rose impulsively and, tucking her sleeping child in among
the cushions of a neighbouring bench, threw herself on the grass by
the older woman. Her forty-five years sat lightly upon Fabia, leaving
her still lovely in the sensitive eyes of her husband and
stepdaughter. A temperamental equableness and a disciplined
character gave to her finely modelled face an inward tranquillity
which was a refuge to their ardent natures. She only smiled now, as
Perilla's lively tongue began again: "How happy you make father all
the time! It keeps me from feeling too dreadfully about going off
to Africa. Do you know, when you first came to us, I had an idea you
wouldn't understand him! I was just old enough to realise that all
your traditions were very austere ones, that your family belonged
to the old order and had done wonderful things that weren't poetry
and the joy of living at all. But I was far too young to understand
that just because you did belong to people like that, when you married
a man you would sink your life in his. That seems to me now to be
the strongest thing about you. I have a feeling that inside you
somewhere your character stands like a rock upon which father's ideas
could beat forever without changing it. But you never let that
character make you into a force separate from him. You have made his
home perfect in every detail, but outside of it you are just his wife.
Tell me, does that really satisfy you?"
Fabia's smile grew into a laugh. "I seem very old-fashioned to you,
do I not, dear child? It is not because of my age, either, for plenty
of middle-aged women agree with you. It is quite in the air, isn't
it, the independence of women, their right to choose their own paths?
I was invited to a reading of the _Lysistrata_ the other day, and
actually one woman said afterwards that she believed Aristophanes
was only foreseeing a time when women would take part in the
government! She was laughed down for that, but most of the others
agreed that the whole progress of society since Aristophanes's time
lay in the emancipation of women from the confines of the home and
from intellectual servility. I, too, believe in mental freedom, but
you all insist a great deal upon the rights involved in being
individuals. I have never been able to see what you gain by that.
My husband is a citizen of Rome. To be called his wife is my proudest
title. It makes no difference to the state what I am or do of myself.
I live to the state only through him."
The younger woman had begun to speak almost before Fabia had finished,
but the conversation was interrupted by the nurse coming for the
child. Perilla went back to the house with them, confessing, with
a laugh, that an hour with her boy at bed-time was more important
than trying to change her perfect mother. It was not yet time to dress
for the birthday dinner, which was to crown the day, and Fabia
lingered on in the garden to watch the gathering rose in the late
afternoon sky above the tree-tops. An enchanted sense of happiness
came to her in the silence of the hour. She did not agree with her
husband that happiness was the main object of life, but she was very
grateful to the gods who had allowed her to be happy ever since she
was a little girl, left to the care of a devoted uncle by parents
she was too young to mourn. The latter half of her life these gods
had crowned with a love which made her youth immortal. She had been
married when she was a mere girl to a young soldier who had not lived
long enough to obtrude upon her life more than a gentle memory of
his bravery. The bearing of a child had been the vital part of that
marriage, and the child had come into her new home with her, leaving
it only for a happy one of her own. Her husband's child had been like
a second daughter to her, and throughout the twenty years of her life
with Ovid joy had consistently outweighed all difficulties. Insolent
tongues had been busy with his faithlessness to her. But after the
first fears she had come to understand that, although other women
often touched the poet and artist in him, none save herself knew the
essential fidelity and the chivalrous tenderness of the husband. She
had accepted with pride his shining place in public regard. It was
no wonder that he loved Rome, for Rome loved him.
A nightingale broke into song among the rose bushes. Her face was
like a girl's as she thought of Ovid, with the grape leaves above
his vivid face, young as the gods are young, seeking her eyes with
his. A faint smell, as of homely things, rose from the familiar earth.
Lights began to appear in the windows of the villa. She had come to
this home when she and Ovid were married, and this morning she had
again offered her tranquil prayers to the Penates so long her own.
The happy years broke in upon her. Ah, yes, she and her husband had
the divine essence of youth within them. But they had something finer
too, something that comes only to middle age--the sense of security
and peace, the assurance that, except for death, no violent changes
lay ahead of them. She had only to nurture, as they faced old age
together, a happiness already in full measure theirs.
As she turned toward the house she met her husband, come himself to
seek her. In the recurrent springs of her after life the faint smell
of the burgeoning earth filled her with an unappeasable desire.