THE FEAST OF FLORA
Marsyas had assumed pagan dress, bound a scarlet ribbon for a fillet
about his head, and flung a scarlet cloak over his tunic, and so,
identified with the revelers, he safely entered the city.
Of the first he met on the brilliantly lighted wharves, he inquired, as
a stranger, where he should find the night's celebration. The citizens
he addressed, intoxicated with revel, smote him with palm-leaves or
thyrsi and haled him with them, as their fellow, seeking Flora.
They skirted the Regio Judaeorum toward the northwest and swept him
along toward the Serapeum. Ever the streets opened up, more
brilliantly lighted, more thickly crowded, more boisterously noisy;
ever the nucleus of the crowd that had encompassed him increased and
thickened and spread, until he was in the heart of a hurrying
multitude. Ever they shouted their indefinite anticipations, boasts of
their favor with Flora, hopes that the run would be diverting, threats
that were half-jocular, half in earnest. And some of them, drunk with
anarchy, made hysterical, inarticulate, yelping cries, like dogs on a
heated trail. And so, with their silent fellow among them, they went,
started into an easy trot, and unhindered, like waters turning over a
fall.
The strange, half-mad revelry did not make for reassurance in Marsyas.
His unexplained fears swept over him from time to time like a chill,
and an unspeakable hatred for the unwieldy host about him, as well as
the protest of his caution against the quick pace they had set, moved
him to separate himself from them as soon as he might.
Flora was to begin her flight from the Serapeum, but because the grove
was most beautiful and the Temple most rich, the aristocrats of the
city had repaired thither to separate themselves from _hoi polloi_, and
had builded for themselves the City of Love.
Marsyas knew that superior advantages were always for the rich man, and
he, who had to be in the forefront of Flora's van, had to gather unto
himself the most propitious opportunities. So while the riot of
plebeians into which he had been absorbed streamed contentedly on to
its own lowly place, Marsyas worked his way out of the crowd and
approached the City of Love.
The glow of its lights, breaking through low-hanging branches and
pillared avenues of tree-trunks, reached Marsyas with its music, its
shouts and its tumult, but its inhabitants were shut away behind
foliage, that their doings might be screened from the unqualified.
The young man looked here and there for a way to enter, but the
cunningly extended grove reached from street to street and blocked his
passage. Drawing closer he saw that a cordon of soldiers from the city
garrison had been thrown around the grove for protection during revels.
At that moment, some one whispered in his ear.
"Thou art in time, white brother. Continue and fail not!"
He looked to catch a glimpse of Vasti, the bayadere, at his side. She
was wrapped from head to heel in a murky red silk, like a
fire-illumined tissue of smoke. He exclaimed to himself that this was
no old woman, nor yet one young. There was too much lissome grace in
the sinuous figure, and too much unearthly wisdom in the dark
mysterious face.
An instant and she had disappeared like a spirit.
A little dazed he turned to follow his approved course, but stopped,
seeing that many humbler folk who had preceded him were halted and
driven away. The benefits of the grove were distinctly for those who
came with a following and in chariots. The cars of the rich were
constantly passing through the line of guards; the numbers were greatly
increasing, and presently became congested. The shouts of the
impatient waiting ones, the pawing of the horses and the calls of the
slaves running hither and thither, added uproar to the lines which
closed in around him, until finally he could go neither forward nor
backward.
While he turned this way and that for an avenue of escape, he found
that he stood beside a shell of a chariot, with Junia and Justin
Classicus seated within. Classicus was not given readily to seeing
people afoot, and Marsyas stepped hastily out of view. But the Roman
woman had already discovered him. He saw her speak to Classicus, and,
while he waited in resentment to be pointed out, Classicus leaped
lightly out of the car, and, forcing his way through a crush of slaves,
got up beside another, whom Marsyas saw to be Agrippa.
Then Junia leaned down to him.
"Come up; thou art safe," she said. "I will not betray thee. What was
it, reason or repentance that freed thee?" Her eyes sparkled and her
breath came and went quickly between her parted lips.
"An errand," he answered, "and the soldiers will not let me pass."
"An errand? Flora's errand? Nay, but thou art an Essene. Come up, I
say. The soldiers must pass thee if I bid them."
With thanks on his lips he stepped in beside her and was presently
driven without further interruption through the line of sentries, to
the circle of abandoned chariots within. There, alighting, the young
man found himself deftly thrust into the crowd by Junia to avoid
meeting the proconsul or Justin Classicus. She lost herself with him,
and entirely obscured from any he had ever seen before, they proceeded.
"I have delivered thee an evil charge," she said, and there was a note
of regret in her voice. "Yesterday and the day before they would have
been less objectionable, and seeing them hour by hour thou shouldst
have become gradually accustomed to their aberration. But suddenly
exposed to this night's work, thy soul will be covered with confusion."
Marsyas smiled awkwardly. The woman could not understand that nothing
short of the motive that had actuated him could have moved him to
follow Flora; neither did he wish her to rest under the self-blame that
she had urged him.
"I do not go of mine own will, nor even thine," he answered. "I was
summoned."
"What! has Flora summoned thee?" she cried, gazing at him in unfeigned
astonishment. "Fie on her boldness! Only the Floras of Rome do such a
thing!"
"A new evil in Rome?" he responded, smiling. "O lady, I can not go
thither unless thou promise me protection!"
She laughed and waved him a warning hand.
"Behold how thou acceptest my counsel here in Alexandria! What
obedience need I expect in Rome?"
Without waiting for his answer, she turned him out of the open into the
grove.
No extensive vista greeted him. No lamps, only their lights were
visible. No green-and-gold walled aisle led far in a straight line.
The woodland screening of leaf and branch prevailed everywhere. The
music, the shouts, the tumult seemed to be in another direction than
the one toward which they were tending. Marsyas went uncertainly; he
had been bidden to be in the forefront of Flora's van, and ahead of him
was falling silence. The splendid creature at his side held her peace,
and moved rapidly. Gradually, the people thinned out, and when Junia
turned him into another aisle they were alone. She seemed to be
conducting him away from the music and noise.
Only for a moment, he hesitated at a loss, and then with an apologetic
smile, he said to her:
"We will go this way,"--and, turning at right angles, led back toward
the tumult.
"Marsyas," she said, with more impatience than reproach, "and thou art
an Essene! How I reproach myself!"
But he smiled uncomfortably, and kept on.
The wail of instruments, wild and discordant, the blowing of horns, the
pulsation of drums, seemed suddenly to unite as they approached. Above
the clamor and squeal of cymbals and pipes, voices were lifted, loud
and strained as if striving to be heard above the uproar. Some of them
merely shouted, most of them were singing, not one but many songs;
shrieks and laughter shrilled through it all, and once in a while the
musical tone of a rich throat triumphant above the noise bespoke the
presence of gift with frenzy.
The tumult was not now distant, and Marsyas did not wish Junia's
further aid. His search after Flora was not a thing to be published
abroad. He glanced at the lights, looked about for a less circuitous
route, and, with a word to her, plunged through the brake toward the
revel.
Before she had thought to protest, the forefront of a procession
penetrated from the side of the aisle and, streaming across, broke
through the green on the other side.
The first were flamens, Greek, Roman and Egyptian, robed in the pallium
and carrying the lituus--first, if the order of procession had been
observed, but before them, and about them bounded a harlequinade of
baboons, centaurs, goats, swine--loose, ill-fashioned disguises that
only robbed their wearers of human form and did not achieve the animal
semblance. Among them were slighter figures of lizards, snails on
active pretty limbs, toads, beetles--glittering, sinuous things that
surpassed the heavier figures in agility and boldness. After them came
a great cornucopia of gold, banded with spiral garlands of roses,
studded with jewels and drawn on low ivory wheels by snow-white
mule-colts. Out of the shell-tinted mouth of the great horn, and
luxuriously bedded on a gauze of gold cast over the flowers and fruits,
was the rosy figure of a little boy, with pearly wings bound to his
shoulders.
Thus Eros proceeded to Flora.
Only thus far was any semblance of order distinguishable in the
procession. The wave of uproar suddenly assumed overwhelming
proportions; the aisle was inundated with frenzy.
Marsyas moved forward, Junia moving with him, and the tumult drawing
its bulky length across the aisle swept in now by multitudes. He was
caught; Junia clung to him determinedly for a moment, but was torn
away; he permitted himself to be swallowed up and pitched along by the
flood.
He attracted no consecutive attention. Maenads flung themselves upon
him because his cheeks were crimson and his figure notable, but other
youths with glowing cheeks drew the maenads away, now and again.
Satyrs, fauns and bacchantes saluted him, tumbled him, buffeted him:
one snatched off his scarlet fillet and crowned him with a wreath of
grape-leaves, while a second thrust a thyrsus into his hand. Some
clung about his shoulders and bawled into his ear; others reached him
flagons of wine and did not notice that others snatched the drink away.
These things were single events that stood up out of the daze of
astonishment and shock that confounded him.
The noise roared louder at every step: the thousands about him
augmented. The grove opened more; the lights became more scattering
and presently he found that he had been swept through another circle of
chariots and outpost of soldiery into the city again. Hurriedly
glancing at the buildings on each side of the street into which the
procession poured, he saw a sufficient number of familiar marks to
inform him that he had been borne out on the Rhacotis side of the city.
Then the blood within him chilled. This half-maddened, half-murderous
multitude was upon the trail of Flora, and was driving toward the
settlement of the Nazarenes!
An unshakable conviction possessed him, that Lydia stood between!
Meanwhile the army of rabble joined the procession of aristocrats.
From every avenue fresh multitudes poured in and added to the
thousands. Except for the bounding mimes about them the flamens kept
the front of the horde, following with downcast eyes the trail of
yellow roses which, Marsyas now knew, led the procession.
In the midst of the gigantic hurly-burly he saw with strained eyes and
a laboring heart that the light-footed goddess had made a long,
deviating flight: that over and over again she doubled on her tracks,
but that the detours led with deadly sureness toward the Nazarenes.
Impelled now by desperation, he began to work his way toward the front.
But he had not reckoned on the immense length of the procession, nor
how far he had been absorbed into the heart of it. Only when he was
rushed over a slight rise in the street did he know that ahead of him
for a great distance was a sea of tossing heads and moving shoulders,
and on either side a compact wave wholly filled the two hundred feet of
street and washed up against the walls of the houses.
The street opened up into an immense square, the last stadium which
marked the limit of the Roman influence in the Egyptian settlement.
Beyond that, on the water-front, were the streets of the Nazarenes!
Praying and struggling, Marsyas hardly noticed the increase of noise
beginning at the front and extending back to him and passing until the
wild clamor resolved itself into a stunning shout that shook Alexandria
and rippled the face of the bay.
"Flora! _Dea maxima_! _Solis filia_! Give us joy; give us joy!"
The trail of roses had been broken off. Flora had been found.
But another roar went up, here and there from the great body there were
cries of protest and disappointment: the voice of looters and brawlers
that had been deprived of sacrificial blood. There were hisses, shouts
of derision and cries to the populace to press on.
But the flamens stopped; the great concourse halted by rank and rank
until the slackening and final cessation of movement imprisoned the
dissenters that were resolved to go on. The main body continued its
greetings to the goddess, above the cry of the dissatisfied.
At the far side of the open was a tiny squat temple, hardly more than a
shrine, to Rannu, the Egyptian goddess of the harvests. On the top of
the cornice with the blush lights of the City of Love upon her, stood a
girl. Thus lifted into the night sky, her features could not be
distinguished, and Marsyas believed that she was mummied, face and
figure, in wrappings.
He continued to press forward. The small figure on the summit of the
Temple stirred, turned half about and slowly raised her arms with a
motion that seemed half-command, half-salute to the great expectant
crowd below.
Then wing-like mists, taking into themselves the sunset flush of the
fires of the City of Love, rose up and fluttered about her. Long,
flaming, melon-colored tongues licked in and out of the illusion:
distended convolutions of tissue tinged with rose floated and drifted
above her, beside her, before her; shivering streamers of silver
reached up and failed and dissolved; jagged streaks and reduplications
of fiery jets stood out and up and all about her. When the clouds of
pearly vapor lifted and eddied about her head, girdled her with circles
or framed her with rosy wheels, the center of all this motion was
distinguishable only as a snow-white spindle that whirled with dizzy
rapidity. And presently it was noted that the shape was losing the
mummy form, that more and more the outlines of a beautiful body were
blossoming out of the impearled mists: that petaline wings opened out,
fold on fold, as a rose-bud would blow, and each successive disclosure
gave the entranced vision a clearer image of the dancer at the heart.
Ever the motion seemed slow and stately as do all great and graceful
things maintaining splendid speed; ever the crimson light from the City
of Love lent its illimitable range of shade to the motion of the mists.
Below the great multitude, with its face lifted to the midnight sky,
passed from uproar into silence and from silence into thunders of
applause. The immense voice was the voice of admiration, for the
cooling hand of wonder pressed back the crowd's passion for a let to
its reason. They forgot their disappointment, their bloodthirst, their
hate of the Nazarenes, and stood to marvel that the goddess burned but
was not consumed.
But Marsyas, patiently working his way forward, pressed by a tall black
man who was saying over and over to himself in Hindu:
"It is the bayadere dance, for the glory of Brahma! A sacrilege!"
The rest of Flora's program meanwhile was proceeding. Slowly and
mightily, magnificent young athletes, for only such could drive their
way through so solid a pack of humanity, were working toward the
portico of the Temple. These were candidates for Flora's favor. Among
them were black-eyed Roman youths with laurel around their heads;
golden-haired Greeks, crowned with stephanes; lithe, bronze Egyptians
with ribboned locks at the temple which were the badge of princehood.
And after them came one, crowned with grape-leaves, with a thyrsus in
his hand, but he had shining black curls, the silken beard and the
crimson cheeks of a Jew. The eyes of this one glittered, not from
excitement of fancy, but from desperate resolution and astounded
recognition. The pagans were far in advance of him.
Now the crowd understood where they were bound and shouted to them; now
the youths forced themselves past the cornucopia, the mimes, the
flamens, and ran into the open space before the Temple. In poses
characteristic of their captivation and intent, they looked up at the
dancing fires and cried aloud to the goddess.
Meanwhile the morning-tinted mists whirled in a circular plane about
the girl; suddenly they began to tremble and rise,--up, up until the
ripple and shiver of the shaken silk took on the action and appearance
of an illuminated cataract. Through it, the beautiful outlines of the
dancer were distinguished, veiled as a Nereid beneath waters, leaping,
running. Thousands below instinctively raised their arms to catch the
figure which inevitably must leap through the inspirited cataract and
over the parapet of the Temple unless the rosy element pent her within
its bosom.
The flight gradually changed from a simple step into the entanglement
and intricacy of a dance. No gossamer adrift on the wind was more a
creature of the air, no tranced ephemera more the genius of motion.
The roar of the multitude failed in a vast suspiration of surprise and
bewildered delight. Flora had invented, not a new wantonness, but a
new grace.
But the young men shouted: each sprang to a column which upheld the
portico upon which Flora danced, and began to climb, helping themselves
by the incrusted garlands of stone which ran up the pillars from base
to capital. It was a contest in climbing, and the best of the
contestants was not long in proving himself. He was one of the
golden-haired Greeks and the multitude, for ever partizan to the
strongest man, roared and thundered its encouragement to him.
He went up with an ease and swiftness almost superhuman; now, he drew
himself across the outstanding corner of the architrave, and stood with
delicate foothold on its molding while he reached up past the frieze
and caught the cornice with his hands.
The dancer caught the flash of light on his golden stephane and wavered.
"_Habet_! _Habet_!" roared the multitude. "Evoe, Ionides!"
And Ionides, lazily lifting himself to the top of the portico, lingered
a moment on one hand and knee to contemplate his prize.
The cataract sank; the flying feet halted, the glory of fire and motion
was lost in lengths of silk which the dancer began hastily to wind
about her head and body. Sufficiently covered to hide her face, she
paused and looked to see his further move.
The Greek, with shining eyes and smiling lips, began slowly to raise
himself.
Then the one with the black curls and silken beard tore himself from
the foremost of the crowd and rushed toward the portico.
The dancer saw him come. She moved toward the edge of the cornice.
The Greek leaped: the other below flung up his arms, but the roar of
the multitude swept away the cry that came from his lips.
The dancer, eluding the triumphant Greek, rushed over the brink of the
portico and dropped like a plummet entangled in gossamer into the
upreached arms of Marsyas below.
Both fell like stones. But Marsyas sprang up with his prize in his
arms, and fled up the steps through the black porch and the stone
valves into the Temple of Rannu.
[Illustration: Marsyas sprang up with his prize in his arms (missing
from book)]
Outside, the multitude, having seen Flora flout her rightful possessor,
fell for a moment silent. Then, a part having but one desire to choose
for itself, fell to its own choosing; but the rest, already cheated of
blood and spoil, howled their disapproval, fought their way through
disinterested masses in order to reach the refuge of the capricious
Flora, met resistance and precipitated warfare, and in an incredibly
short time, bedlam reigned in the square before the Temple of Rannu.
The public celebration of the Feast of Flora was at an end. Meanwhile
there was a trail of yellow roses, beginning abruptly in the Nazarene
community and leading around every household and out and on toward the
west. The roses lay untouched and wilting through the night and were
shoveled up and carted away by the street-cleaners the next morning.
And on the summit of the Gate of the Necropolis, a painted beauty sat
in jewels and flowers and little raiment, and wondered why she was not
sought and found and why her followers stayed and roared before the
Temple of Rannu.