The day at the villa had been the most trying one of a trying week
for Pliny and Calpurnia. A restful house-party of their dearest
friends had been spoiled by the arrival of Quadratilla, heralded by
one of her incredible letters dated at Baiae:
"I lost at the dice last night," she had written. "The dancers from
Cadiz had thick ankles. The oysters were not above suspicion and the
sows'-bellies were unseasoned. We have exhausted the love affairs
and debts of our neighbours, and made each other's wills. (I am to
leave my money--I rely on you to tell Quadratus--to a curled darling
here who hums Alexandrian dance tunes divinely). And we have
discussed _ad nauseam_ the rainfall in Upper Egypt, the number of
legions on the Rhine and the ships in from Africa. That clever Spanish
friend of yours--what was his name?--Martial--was quite right about
our conversations. It is a pity he had to pay out his obol for the
longer journey before he could get back to Rome.
"My digestion demands fresh eggs and lettuce to the rhythm of
hexameters. Or is it sapphics to which we eat this year? I must know
what the next crop of the stylus is to be. I cannot sleep at night
for wondering who is to teach in your new school. Will he be as merry
a guide as your Quintilian was? And will the Como boys become
sparkling little Plinies?
"I must see the grown-up Pliny's noble brow and my Calpurnia's
eyes--and the Tartarean frown of Tacitus, who, I hear, is with you.
Quadratus says you are at the smallest of your Como villas. The mood
suits me. At Tusculum or Tibur or Praeneste or Laurentum you might
have longed for me in vain. In your Arcadian retreat expect me on
the tenth day."
The hale old woman took a terrible advantage of her years and her
tongue to do as she chose among her acquaintances. And Pliny was more
or less at her mercy, because his mother and she had been friends
in their girlhood, and because her grandson, Quadratus, was among
the closest of his own younger friends. Unluckily, too, she had taken
a violent fancy to Calpurnia. She spared her none of her flings, but
evidently in some strange way the exquisite breeding and candid
goodness of the younger woman appealed to her antipodal nature. She
had lived riotously through seven imperial reigns, gambling, owning
and exhibiting pantomimes, nourishing all manner of luxurious whims,
whether the state lay gasping under a Nero or Domitian, or breathed
once more in the smile of Trajan. Her liking for Calpurnia was of
a piece, her acquaintances thought, with her bringing up of her
grandson. No boy in Rome had had an austerer training. He was never
allowed to mingle with her coarser companions, and when the dice were
brought in she always sent him out of the room--"back to his books."
No breath of scandal had ever touched his good name, and his tastes
could not have been more prudent, his grandmother used to say, with
uplifted eyebrows, had he had the "inestimable advantage of being
brought up by Pliny's uncle."
After a winter and spring of varied activities the friends gathered
at Pliny's villa had eagerly looked forward to a brief peace. Pliny's
law business had been unusually exacting. He had worked early and
late, and made a series of crucial speeches, and when spring came
on he had allowed neither work nor social demands to interfere with
his attendance at the almost numberless literary readings. His
"conscientious and undiscriminating concern for dead matter,"
Quadratilla once said, "rivalled Charon's." Calpurnia, never strong,
but always supplementing at every turn her husband's work, had felt
especially this year the strain of Roman life. Tacitus, already a
figure in the literary world through his _Agricola_ and _Germania_,
had made a beginning on his more elaborate _Histories_ and been
enslaved to his genius. Pompeius Saturninus and his clever wife,
Cornelia, were hoping for a little rustic idleness before beginning
the summer entertaining at their place in Tuscany. The group under
Pliny's roof was completed by Calpurnia's lovely aunt, Hispulla, and
Fannia, whose famous ancestry was accentuated in her own
distinguished character. Pliny's old schoolfellow, Caninus Rufus,
had come to his adjacent villa, bringing with him their common friend,
Voconius Romanus. These friends had entered upon one of the holiday
seasons rarely granted to people of importance. Their debts to the
worlds of business or society or literature held in abeyance, they
were lightly devoting their days to fishing and hunting, sailing and
riding, while the keenness of their intellectual interests--they
belonged to a very different set from Quadratilla's--was restfully
tempered and the sincerity of them deepened by a thorough-going
intimacy.
Upon the second fortnight of this life Quadratilla broke like a
thunder-squall. Whatever feelings had prompted her to leave her
fashionable resort, her mood after she arrived was characteristically
Bacchanal. She had a genius for making the tenderest feeling or the
deepest conviction seem absurd. Rufus did not know whether to be more
angry at her open hint to Pliny that his childlessness was like that
of so many millionaires of the day, a voluntary lure for the
attention of legacy hunters, or at her sardonic inquiries after
Tacitus's dyspepsia. His best friends knew that his gloom issued from
the travail of a mind which had sickened mortally under Domitian and
could not find in the present tranquillity more than a brief
interruption to the madness of men and the wrath of gods. It was not
that Quadratilla failed to perceive the massive intellectual force of
Tacitus. On the contrary, she enraged Rufus and the others still
further by a covert irony about Pliny's classing himself as a man of
letters with the historian, an innocent vanity which endeared him
only the more to those whose experience of his loyal and generous
heart left no room for critical appraisement of his mental calibre.
The day in question had been full of small annoyances. Calpurnia,
wishing, on the Feast of Fors Fortuna, to excuse the dining-room
servants from a noonday attendance, had had a luncheon served in the
grotto of the tidal spring. Unluckily, while they were testing the
ebb and flow by putting rings and other small objects on a dry spot
and watching the water cover them, Quadratilla lost out of one of
her rings a very valuable emerald. From that moment until the stone
was returned by Marcus everybody's patience had been strained to the
breaking point by the old lady's peevish temper. After dinner, when
they were sitting in the loggia overlooking the lake, which lay dark
and still beneath the June stars, they all united in a tacit effort
to divert her attention. Pliny told a story of some neighbours to
illustrate that the same kind of courage existed in the middle class
as in the aristocracy. A wife, finding that her husband was wasting
away with an incurable disease, not only urged him to end his life,
but joined him in the brave adventure, fastening his weakened body
to hers and then leaping with him from a window overlooking the lake.
Fannia agreed enthusiastically that the deed was as brave as the one
by which her famous grandmother had shown her husband the way to meet
an emperor's command to die; and she went on to say that she and Pliny
had decided once that some of the unknown hours of Arria's life were
as courageous as the final one of death. "Mother has told me all kinds
of things about her," she said. "Once her husband and son were both
desperately ill, and the son died. It wasn't safe to tell grandfather,
and grandmother went through it all, even the funeral, without his
knowing it. She would go into his room and answer questions about
the boy, saying he had slept well and eaten more. When she couldn't
bear it any longer she would go to her own room and give way, and
come back again, calm and serene, to nurse her husband."
"I wonder," said Cornelia, "if blood counted more in that apparently
simpler thing. Do you think a middle-class woman could have
controlled herself so finely?" Voconius broke in with a quick answer:
"It is nothing against Arria, whose memory we all reverence, if I
say I think she might. It seems to me that the kind of thing that
only an aristocrat could do was done by Corellius Rufus. It isn't
a matter of courage but of humour. Tell the story, Pliny. I haven't
heard it since the year he died--let me see, seven years ago, that
was. It's time we heard it again."
Tacitus leaned forward to listen as Pliny willingly complied:
"Corellius was, you know, a Stoic of the Stoics, believing in suicide.
When the doctors had assured him that he could never be cured of a
most dreadful disease, all his reasons for living, his wealth and
position and fame, his wife and daughter and grandchildren and
sisters and friends, became secondary to his reasons for dying. He
had held the disease in check, while he was younger, by the most
temperate living. But in old age it gained on him; he was bedridden
and had only weakening torments to face. I went to see him one day
while Domitian was still living. His wife went out of the room, for,
although she had his full confidence, she was tactful enough to leave
him alone with his friends. He turned his eyes to me and said: 'Why
do you think I have endured this pain so long? It is because I want
to survive our Hangman at least one day.' As soon as we were rid of
Domitian he began to starve himself to death. I agree with Voconius
that only an aristocrat could have thought of outwitting a tyrant
by outliving him."
"It is a pity, is it not," said Cornelia, "that Juvenal could not
have known men like Corellius and your uncle, Pliny, and all the rest
of you? He might be less savage in his attacks on our order." "And
equally a pity," Pliny gallantly responded, "that he could not modify
his views on your sex by knowing such ladies as are in this room."
Tacitus bowed gravely to Quadratilla as their host said this. A
retort trembled on the wicked old lips, but Calpurnia, seeing it,
made haste to ask if any of them had ever talked with Juvenal. "I
asked Martial once," she said, "to bring him to see us, but he never
came. I cannot help feeling that, if he could know us better, his
arraignment would be less harsh." "Dear Lady," said Tacitus, "you
forget that people like you are cut jewels, very different from the
rough rock of our order as well as from the shifting sands of the
populace." "Dear Cynic," laughed Calpurnia, "do we know any more
about the populace than Juvenal knows about us?"
But in Tacitus's unfortunate figure Quadratilla saw her chance to
annoy him by belittling the conversation. To everyone's despair, she
intruded maliciously: "To my thinking, the finding of my emerald
would show to advantage the cut of our aristocratic wits." Cornelia
had just whispered to Rufus, "I wish we could lose her as adequately
out of our setting," when Lucius came into the loggia with the sealed
package for Pliny. A question from his master gave him a chance to
tell Marcus's story, which lost nothing in the friendly, rustic
narration. A chorus of praise for the boy rose from the eager
listeners. Even Quadratilla remarked that he was a decent little
clod-hopper, as she demanded a lamp by which to examine her jewel.
Pliny and Calpurnia's eyes met in swift response to each other's
thoughts. They examined the farmer's seal and questioned Lucius more
closely. Calpurnia's eyes filled with tears at his account of the
old grandfather--"ruined," she exclaimed to the others, "in the very
month that Pliny's name, as we afterwards discovered, was put on the
prescription list. We were so anxious at the time--that must explain
our never following the family up. I will go early to-morrow," she
added, turning to her husband, "and see the mother. We must make up
for lost time." "Find out," said Pliny, "whether the boy wants to
go to school."
A cackle of laughter came from Quadratilla's chair back of the group
that had gathered around the servant. "How like my Pliny!" she
remarked genially. "A dirty little rascal restores my property in
the hope of picking up a reward. His heart's desire is doubtless a
strip of bacon for his stomach on a holiday. And Pliny offers him
an education!"