And at this time, alongside the road a crucifix was planted every few feet, and on every crucifix, a dead man hung.
IV
The morning turned out to be warmer than Caius had expected it to be, and after a while, the smell of the dead became quite unpleasant. The girls soaked their handkerchiefs with perfume and sniffed constantly, but that could not shut out the sudden waves of sweet and sickening smell which floated across the road, nor could it prevent a reaction to this smell. The girls were sick, and Caius finally had to drop behind and go to the side of the road and relieve himself. It almost spoiled the morning.
Fortunately, there were no crucifixes within half a mile of the public house where they stopped to lunch, and though they had little appetite left now, they were able to get over their sickness. This wayside inn was built in the Greek style, a rambling one story building with a pleasant veranda. The veranda, which was set out with tables, was built over a little gully through which ran a brook, and the grotto it faced upon was surrounded by banks of green and fragrant pine. There was no other smell here but the pine smell, the wet, sweet smell of the woods, and no sound except the polite hum of conversation from the diners and the music of the brook. “What an utterly delightful place,” Claudia said, and Caius, who had stopped here before, found a table for them and began to order lunch with great authority. The wine of the house, a sparkling amber drink, dry and refreshing, was set before them immediately, and as they sipped it, their appetite returned. They were at the back of the house, separated from the common room in front where soldiers and draymen and foreigners ate; here it was cool and shaded, and while the issue was rarely pressed, it was recognized that only knights and patricians were served here. That made it far from exclusive, for many knights were commercial travellers, business men and manufacturers and commission merchants and slave dealers; but it was a public house and not a private villa. Also, of late, the knights were aping the manners of the patricians and becoming less loud and obtrusive and unpleasant.
Caius ordered cold pressed smoked duck and glacéd oranges, and until the food came, he made conversation about the latest play to open in Rome, a rather contrived comedy in poor imitation of the Greek, as so many were.
The plot concerned an ugly and vulgar woman who made a pact with the gods to deliver them, in return for a day of grace and beauty, her husband’s heart. The husband had been sleeping with the mistress of one of the gods, and the intricate and shoddy plot was based on the thin motivation of revenge. At least, that was Helena’s feeling, but Caius protested that in spite of its superficiality, he thought it had many clever moments.
“I liked it,” Claudia said simply.
“I think we are too concerned with what a thing says instead of the way it says it,” Caius smiled. “For my part, I go to the theatre to be amused with what is clever. If one wants the drama of life and death, one can go to the arena and watch the gladiators cut each other up. I’ve noticed however that it isn’t the particularly brilliant or profound type who frequents the games.
“You’re excusing bad writing,” Helena protested.
“Not at all. I just don’t think the quality of writing in the theatre is of any great importance. It’s cheaper to hire a Greek writer than a litter-bearer, and I’m not one of those who make a cult of the Greeks.”
As he said this last, Caius became conscious of a man standing alongside the table. The other tables had filled up, and this particular man, a commercial traveller of some sort, wondered whether he might not join them.
“Just a bite and I’ll be going,” he said. “If you don’t mind the intrusion.”
He was a tall, well-fleshed, well set up man, obviously prosperous, his clothes expensive; and not deferential except to the obvious family and rank of these young people. In the old times, the knights had not had this attitude toward the landed nobility; it was only when they became very wealthy as a class that they discovered ancestry to be one of the most difficult commodities to purchase, and thereby its value increased. Caius, like so many of his friends, often remarked on the contradiction between the loud democratic sentiments of these people and their intense class aspirations.
“My name is Gaius Marcus Senvius,” said the knight. “Don’t hesitate to refuse me.”
“Please sit down,” Helena answered. Caius introduced himself and the girls, and he was pleased at the other’s reaction.
“I’ve had some dealings with some of your family,” the knight remarked.
“Dealings?”
“Dealings in cattle, that is. I’m a sausage maker. I’ve a plant in Rome and another in Tarracina, where I’m coming from now. If you’ve eaten sausage, you’ve eaten my sausage.”
“I’m sure,” Caius smiled—thinking, “He hates my guts, look at him. Now he hates my guts, but he’s still pleased to sit here. What swine they are!”
“Dealings in swine,” said Senvius, as if he had read the other’s mind.
“We are very pleased to meet you and we will carry back to our father your kindest wishes,” said Helena gently. She smiled sweetly at Senvius, and he looked at her newly. As if to say, “So you are a woman, my dear, patrician or no.” That was how Caius read it—“How would you like to go to bed with me, you little bitch?” They smiled at each other, and then Caius could have killed him, but hated his sister more.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation,” Senvius said. “Please go on with it.”
“We were talking tedious talk about a tedious play.”
The food came then, and they began to eat. Suddenly, Claudia halted a piece of duck halfway to her mouth and said what Caius afterwards considered a most astonishing thing,
“You must have been so disturbed by the tokens.”
“Tokens?”
“The crucifixion.”
“Disturbed?”
“By a waste of so much fresh meat,” said Claudia calmly, not cleverly at all, but just calmly, and then went on eating her duck. Caius had to fix his face to keep from bursting out with laughter, and Senvius went red and then white. But Claudia, not knowing at all what she had done, just went on eating. Only Helena sensed something harder than ordinary in the sausage maker, and her skin prickled in anticipation. She wanted him to hit back, and was pleased when he did.
“Disturbed isn’t the word,” Senvius said finally. “I don’t like waste.”
“Waste?” asked Claudia, breaking the glacéd orange into little pieces and placing each little piece so delicately between her lips. “Waste?” Claudia drew pity from some men and anger from a few; it took an extraordinary man to see beyond that.
“They were well set up, those men of Spartacus,” explained Marcus Senvius, “and well fed too. Suppose they averaged a a weight of one hundred and fifty pounds each. There are more than six thousand of them mounted out there like stuffed birds. That’s nine hundred thousand pounds of fresh meat—or it was fresh at any rate.”
“Oh, no, he can’t mean it,” thought Helena. Her whole body prickled with expectation now; but Claudia, who went on eating the glacéd orange, knew that he did mean it, and Caius asked,
“Why didn’t you make an offer?”
“I did.”
“But they wouldn’t sell?”
“I managed to buy a quarter of a million pounds.”
What is he up to, Caius wondered, and thought, “He’s trying to shock us. In his vulgar, filthy way, he’s going to pay us back for what Claudia said.” Helena, however, saw the substance of the truth, and Caius had the satisfaction of knowing that something had finally gotten under her skin.
“Of men?” whispered Claudia.
“Of tools,” said the sausage maker precisely, “to quote that admirable young philosopher, Cicero. Worthless tools. I smoked them, minced them, and mixed it with pork, spice and salt. Half goes to Gaul, half to Egypt. And the price is just right.”
“I think your humor is ill taken,” Caius muttered. He was very young, and he found it hard to stand up to the mature bitterness of the sausage maker. The knight would never in all his life forget Claudia’s insult, and he would always hold it against Caius because Caius had made the error of being present.
“I am not trying to be humorous,” Senvius said matter of factly. “The young lady asked a question, and I answered it. I bought a quarter of a million pounds of slave to be turned into sausage.”
“That’s the most frightful and disgusting thing I ever heard,” said Helena. “Your natural boorishness, sir, has taken an odd turn.”
The knight rose and looked from one to another. “Pardon me,” he said, and to Caius, “Ask your uncle, Sillius. He handled the transaction, and he made a nice little bit for himself in doing it.”
Then he moved away. Claudia went on eating the glacéd orange calmly, only stopping to remark, “What an impossible person he turned out to be!”
“Nevertheless, he was telling the truth,” Helena said.
“What?”
“Of course he was. Why should you be so shocked?”
“It was a stupid lie,” said Caius, “created solely for our benefit.”
“The difference between us, my dear,” said Helena, “is that I know when someone is telling the truth.”
Claudia became whiter than usual. She rose, excused herself, and then moved with stately dignity toward the rest room. Helena smiled a little, almost to herself, and Caius said,
“Nothing shocks you, really, does it, Helena?”
“Why should it?”
“At least, I will never eat sausage again.”
“I never ate it,” said Helena.
V
As they were moving along the road, early that afternoon, they fell in with a Syrian amber-trader whose name was Muzel Shabaal, whose carefully curled beard glistened with fragrant oil, and whose long embroidered gown swept down on either side of the fine white horse he rode, and whose fingers sparkled with expensive jewels. Behind him trotted a dozen slaves, Egyptians and Bedouins, each of them carrying a massive bundle on his head. Throughout the Roman domain, the road was a great leveler, and Caius found himself engaged in a rather one-sided conversation with the worldly merchant, even though the young man’s contribution was little more than an occasional nod. Shabaal was more than honored to meet any Roman, for he had the most profound admiration for Romans, all Romans, but particularly the well-bred and well-situated Roman, such as Caius most obviously was. There were some Easterners who did not understand certain things about the Romans, as for example, the freedom with which their women moved about; but Shabaal was not one of those. Scratch a Roman and you found a vein of iron, as witness these tokens alongside the road—and he was very pleased at the lesson his slaves learned simply by seeing these most instructive crucifixes.
“You would hardly believe it, young sir,” said Muzel Shabaal, in his fluent but curiously accented Latin, “but there were people in my land who fully expected Rome to fall to Spartacus, and there was even a small uprising among our own slaves, which we had to quell with harsh measures. How little you understand Rome, I said to them. You equate Rome with what you knew in the past or what you see around you. You forget that Rome is something new for this earth. How can I describe Rome to them? For example, I say
gravitas
. What does it mean to them? Indeed, what does it mean to anyone who has not seen Rome at first hand, and had the company of and discourse with the citizens of Rome?
Gravitas
—the earnest ones, those with a sense of responsibility, to be serious and to have serious intentions.
Levitas
we understand, it is our curse; we trifle with things, we are eager for pleasure. The Roman does not trifle; he is a student of virtue.
Industria, disciplina, frugalitas, clementia
—for me those splendid words are Rome. That is the secret of the peace of the Roman road and the Roman rule. But how does one explain that, young sir? For my part, I look with serious satisfaction at these tokens of punishment. Rome does not trifle. The punishment fits the crime, and thereby you have the justice of Rome. The effrontery of Spartacus was that he challenged all that was best. He offered rapine and murder and disorder; Rome is order—and thereby Rome rejected him . . .”
Caius listened and listened, and finally some of his boredom and distaste communicated itself. Whereupon the Syrian, with many bows and apologies, presented Helena and Claudia each with an amber necklace. He recommended himself to them and their families and all their possible business acquaintances, and then he took himself off.
“Thank the lord,” said Caius.
“My earnest one,” smiled Helena.
VI
Later that afternoon, shortly before they turned off the Appian Way onto the little side road which led to the country villa where they were to spend the night, an incident occurred which broke the monotony of the journey. A maniple of the 3rd Legion, on road patrol, was resting at a way station.
Scuta, pila,
and
cassis galeae
were stacked in rows of little three-sided tents, the long shields braced on the short spears, with three helmets nodding from each pile, for all the world like a close field of sheaved grain. The soldiers crowded the common court, pushing together under the shade of the awning, calling for beer and more beer, drinking it from the pint-sized wooden bowls called foot-baths. They were a tough, hard-faced, bronzed body of men, full of the strong smell of their sweat-soaked leather pants and jerkins, loud-voiced and foul-mouthed, and still conscious of the fact that the tokens of punishment along the highroad were the result of their recent work.
As Caius and the girls stopped to watch them, their captain came out of the pavilion, a goblet of wine in one hand, the other waving greeting to Caius—the more eagerly since Caius had two very good-looking young ladies with him.
He was an old friend of Caius’s, a young man, Sellus Quintius Brutas by name, making a career as a professional, and very dashing and good-looking too. Helena, he already knew, and Claudia he was only too pleased to meet, and he became very professional and offhand as he asked them what they thought of his boys.