Helena Read online

  The sun was in their faces now; with each step of the descent the air grew warmer and richer; half-way down Helena unbuttoned the short Dacian coat of bearskin she had worn during the journey, and joyfully tossed it to the wagoners. That evening they stopped at the fort which held the foot of the pass and the people flocked round to greet them with jars of sweet wine and baskets of figs, sugared and packed layer by layer with bayleaves. Next day they reached the sea.

  Government House stood on a little creek, sheltered from the open sea by a wooded islet dedicated to Poseidon. It was no new piece of official architecture but had been a summer palace of the old kings of Illyria and before that, tradition had it, the castle of Greek pirates; behind its new Vitruvian façade it climbed the hill in a series of irregular courts and arcaded gardens where the gardeners cutting back the clematis revealed marble capitals and plaques carved in the days of Praxiteles. Here Constantius justly and moderately governed his province. Uprooted from his homeland and estranged from his kin he assumed a manner that passed for dignity among his genial subjects. On all its frontiers the Empire was fiercely at war; Probus floundered round the periphery through sand and marsh slaughtering Sarmatians and Isaurians, Egyptians and Franks, Burgundians and Batavians; his grim Illyrian chiefs-of-staff, Carus, Diocletian, Maximian and Galerius, followed his eagles, watched him and counted their chances. Once or twice Constantius himself took the field in brief successful actions on the frontier. News of these victories came promptly to Dalmatia and was greeted with suitable official rejoicing. But there in that fertile and populous plain between the mountains and the sea, peace smiled; law was obeyed, the old gods were honored, exquisite carpets were woven, private houses were fondly adorned, sweet must fermented, the oil ran in the limestone vats; there Constantine learned his letters, rode his first pony, practiced the bow and sword; there Constantius took a mistress, a vicious woman from Drepanum ten years his senior, and seemed content.

  And there, shy and impulsive, in sudden starts and pauses, as if playing with her affections the nursery game of “grandmother’s steps,” Helena made a friend, a widow who had retired there from the disorders of Rome, the benevolent mistress of a household as large as Helena’s, a patron of local arts. To her, in time, Helena came to speak almost without reserve.

  “It’s odd,” she said one day, “that Chlorus should have taken up with this woman. She doesn’t look a bit kind. So much happens one never expected. I always knew that when I was old, he would want someone younger. Men always do. Papa did. I never expected him to give me up so soon, for someone nearly twice my age. I suppose that’s what he wanted all the time really, never me. If only people knew what they wanted…”

  “Helena, you’re hardly grown up and you sometimes talk as though your life were over.”

  “It is really, at least all I used to think was life… like Helen’s you know, at the fall of Troy.”

  “My dear, nowadays people marry again and again.”

  “Not me,” said Helena. “Just at present I’ve got Constantine, but he’ll grow up; then everything will be over; so much sooner than I ever thought.”

  “It’s twenty years since I left Rome,” said Helena’s friend; “I haven’t seen one of my old friends since; I have grandchildren whose names I can’t remember. I expect in Rome they all think of me as dead. Yet here I am well and cheerful, busy all day long, doing no one any harm and some people a little good, with the finest garden on the coast and a collection of bronzes. Don’t you call that a full life?”

  “No, Calpurnia, not really,” said Helena.

  *

  Then for the first time in anyone’s memory the Empire was at peace. Through the full length of its frontier the barbarians were stopped and shaken. Now for the first time there was the chance of restoration. Probus was the savior of the civilized world. He turned his energies to the tasks of peace. A great undertaking was begun in the marshes of Sirmium. They were to be drained and planted and settled by his victorious and devoted veterans. Probus directed the work in person. One warm day the men got bored, chased the Emperor up a tower and murdered him on the summit.

  When news of this incident reached Salona, Helena said: “That ought to make Chlorus a little happier about being on the shelf.”

  “Is he on the shelf?”

  “Oh, yes, everyone has forgotten him now.”

  But this was not quite true. The new emperor was Carus. He decided to attack the Persians, but before sailing he crossed the Adriatic and visited Constantius and talked to him at length, speaking the precise Latin of the Universities; a bald, leathery old soldier, but a gentleman.

  “I served under your great-uncle Claudius,” he said. “He gave me my first command. And I knew Aurelian well. He had great faith in you. They were great men, Claudius and Aurelian. We don’t seem to get that type in the army any more. Somehow or other the mold got broken sixty years back. The young men—Galerius, Diocletian, Numerian—well, you know what they are like as well as I do. I can’t abide the fellows. Do you know my boy, Carinus? I sometimes think he’s wrong in the head. And do you know what I’ve had to do? Put Carinus in charge in Rome, simply because I can’t find anyone better. That’s a pretty state of affairs. He’s doing no good there. I expect you’ve heard.”

  Constantius politely remarked that he had heard rumors, but disbelieved them.

  “Whatever they’re saying can’t be much worse than the truth. He’s made a pimp Consul and his hall porter Governor of the City. He even employs a professional forger to sign his letters. Not that the Romans mind. They find it all very amusing. But it can’t go on. As soon as I get back from Persia I shall put things straight. That’s why I’ve come to you now. I’m giving you the West. You’ve done well here. You’ve done well wherever you’ve been. You’re the man for the job. If things go too far in Rome or if anything happens to me, you’re to step in at once and act. I know I can trust you.”

  Constantius Chlorus had heard it before. He heard it now with less exultation. But he was content. His time, long deferred, had come at last. He told Helena about it and she heard it with less than her usual despondency. It seemed not to matter, now, and, anyway, might not be true.

  Next day Carus went back to his army.

  Months passed. News came from East and West, of the steady advance and repeated victories of Carus, of the appalling profligacy of Carinus. Seleucia and Ctesiphon fell; the eagles were on the Tigris, were across and marching straight for Persia. Carinus had staged a battle between ostriches and alligators.

  Then the familiar, paralyzing message. The Emperor was dead, burned in his tent, by an assassin, by a thunderbolt, none knew how. Carinus and Numerian were being proclaimed everywhere.

  And Constantius did nothing.

  At this, his star-given opportunity, lethargy mysteriously fell on him. He went down the coast alone to a little villa he had there, and week after week received no messengers. Neither his wife nor his mistress had any word from him or any clue to what was going on in his mind.

  When he came out of hiding it was all over. Numerian was dead; Apar, the Praetorian Prefect was dead, murdered in open court by Diocletian, and the army was on the march home with Diocletian commanding it. Soon Carinus too was dead, stabbed by a cuckold Tribune, and slave-born Diocletian ruled the world.

  *

  For seven more years Constantius remained Governor of Dalmatia. Constantine had a tutor and a fencing-master and the games of childhood became the stern exercises of boyhood; he was quick to learn, handsome and affectionate. He wept to read of the death of Hector. “I hate Achilles, don’t you, Mummy. I hate all the Greeks. I do so wish the Trojans would win.”

  “Yes, I did, too, although Paris wasn’t very nice, was he?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He got what he wanted, anyway.”

  “So did Menelaus in the end.”

  “I wonder, do you think he still wanted her, Mummy?”

  He had his own boat and an attendant fisherman; togeth
er they sailed far out beyond the islands, returning at morning, when he would lurch into the dining-room at breakfast, rough-haired and rosy, and lay his dripping creel before his mother, proud as a dog with a rat. There was little of his father in the boy, save for occasional sullen moods when his small plans went awry; he yielded swiftly to Helena’s teasing.

  “You’re a regular little Briton,” Helena once said to him.

  “You mustn’t let Father hear you say that.”

  “No, that wouldn’t do.”

  “Father says I’m Illyrian and that is the race of the Emperors. I’m to be Emperor some day.”

  “Pray God not,” said Helena.

  “Don’t you want me to be! Why not, Mummy? Tell me. I won’t say anything to Father.”

  “The Emperor has all the enemies in the world against him.”

  “Well, why not? I’d settle them. Father says it’s in my stars.”

  Helena reported the conversation later to her friend.

  “He hasn’t given up the idea, you see.”

  But Constantius no longer spoke what was in his mind. In that solitude, broken only by tidings of death, he had passed a climacteric; something had happened, an interior jolt and rearrangement, a twist of the kaleidoscope—such as he had experienced in Rome at Aurelian’s Triumph. (They were liable to sudden change, these “Flavians.” Thus Constantine came to glory.)

  Constantius lived alone now, save when he was with his troops. Helena passed days without hearing his voice. Quite alone; the Bithynian woman’s palanquin was never again seen in the courtyard. One day Constantine came in from fishing, agog.

  “Mummy, what d’you think we caught today? A body.”

  “Darling, how horrible.”

  “You can’t think how horrible. It was a woman. She’d been in the water weeks, Mark said; her face was quite black and she was all blown-out like a wine-skin. And, Mummy, she hadn’t been drowned; there was a cord, tight round her throat, sunk right in. I shouldn’t have noticed it only Mark showed me.”

  “Darling, it was beastly of Mark and it’s beastly of you to be so excited. You must try and forget it.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t ever forget it.”

  And that night, when she came to kiss him goodnight, she found him bright and sleepless. “Mummy, Mark and I know who that woman was. It’s Father’s lady. Mark could hardly see that either, the wrist was so swollen.”

  Constantius became faddy about his food; gave up beans and meat, and sometimes fasted all day. He rode often, sometimes twice a week, to his villa on the coast. But his work did not suffer. Whatever hours he kept, he was punctual in court, just and moderate; he never signed a paper unread; he amended the training reports of the army, he studied the accounts.

  “What does he do at that house down the coast?” asked Helena. “I suppose he’s got another nasty old woman.”

  “It sounds to me, my dear, as though he had got religion.”

  It was the truth, the simple explanation of Constantius’s new life, of his aversion from beans, of the inflated horror bobbing at the end of the fish-line.

  Many years before, as a subaltern, Constantius had been initiated to the cult of Mithras. There were a number of odd regimental ceremonies to which newly joined officers submitted; he accepted this as one of them. The occasion made no deep impression. He was led by the adjutant through the by-ways of the garrison town to an unobtrusive door. He was blindfolded, his hands bound in warm, wet gut; he was led down steps into a place that was hushed and warm. There he took an oath inviting extreme penalties if he ever disclosed what was now to be told him. He was then told a Secret. He repeated it, as he had done the oath, word by word after his director. It had no meaning for him—a string of uncouth Persian vocables, the names, he was told later, of seven lesser devils, henchmen of Ahriman; special names by whose use they could be placated. Then the bandage was removed and he saw a lamp-lit vault, the bas-relief of a bull-fight, and, in his immediate proximity, the familiar, friendly faces of half the mess. While he was with his regiment he attended off and on, saw other men initiated as he had been, heard talk of higher degrees of enlightenment and of deeper secrets. Then he had been taken up, moved about, isolated, and he had thought no more about these fraternal gatherings.

  He was not twenty then. His way seemed straight and plain as a trunk-road. He asked no guide or prop on the journey before him. Now, nearing middle-age, scant of hair, lonely, unregarded, with his passions turning sour within him, trapped and caught as though in a dream by the gladiator’s net, frost-bound in his own private, perpetual winter, he reverted to the occult aid offered him in his free youth.

  There was a cave near his villa, which was well known as a place of the Mysteries. The land for some acres round it was enclosed in a wall and left uncultivated save for a small vegetable plot behind the parsonage; a path, unpaved, led through stone-pine and boulder to a cave’s mouth at the edge of the sea. Here, on certain nights of the month, the hooded devotees resorted, drawn from barracks and warehouses, men of all degrees, unknown to one another elsewhere; and dispersed again silently after the rites to their various business.

  One day during the interregnum, while Constantius paced and sprawled in the agonies of indecision, the priest came to call at the villa, hoping for a subscription. Constantius received him with suitable condescension.

  “I was a Raven once at Nicomedia, Father.”

  “I know.” It was his business to know just that kind of thing. “How long is it since you came to the Mysteries?”

  “It must be seventeen years; more, eighteen.”

  “And now, I think, you are ready to return.”

  The priest had assumed authority; they were no longer Governor-General and subject but instead pupil and catechist, penitent and confessor. The priest spoke in abstruse, allegorical terms of matters Constantius had never considered; much of what he said was meaningless, but through it all ran a single intelligible thread. Light, Release, Purification; a Way Out.

  Day after day the priest came to the villa. Presently Constantius joined the congregation in the cave. He fasted and bathed; he accepted the veil of Cryphius and the Soldier’s brand. And there he stopped short. The priest urged him to prepare for the honey and ashes. “You are merely on the threshold. All you have done so far is mere preparation. You are still far out in the darkness. Beyond the Lion is the Persian, beyond him the Courtier of the Sun, beyond that the Father; so much I know; but beyond that is still another degree of which we do not speak, of which I know only the outer vestige, where there is no matter, no darkness, only Light and the ineffable One.”

  “These things are not for me, father.”

  “They are for all who seek.”

  “I am content.”

  Constantius had found what he wanted, the thing without which his talents availed him nothing; he did not ask more.

  He attended the cave regularly. He persisted in his single prayer, for release, for purification, for power through freedom and purity. There was a draper admitted as Soldier on the same night as himself who at the first rhythmic incantations invariably grew stiff, stood with pop eyes and grinding teeth, twisted spasmodically in fierce convulsions and uttered harsh, wordless cries. This man speedily rose to higher planes and no longer appeared at the same meetings as Constantius. Many outdistanced him in the race for enlightenment. Constantius was not competing; he drew strength month by month, year by year, from the Divine Toreador for the simple, earthly task he had set himself.

  When Constantine was fourteen years old his father took him to the Mithraum.

  “Did you enjoy it, darling?” Helena asked on his return.

  “We don’t speak of these things to women, do we, Father?” her son answered.

  “What do they do?” she asked Calpurnia later.

  “My dear, I think they dress up. Men love that. And they act sort of plays to each other and sing hymns and have the usual sacrifices, you know.”

  “Why do they make su
ch a secret of it?”

  “That’s half the attraction. There’s no harm in it.”

  “I hope not. It all sounds very odd to me. Constantine has come home saying he is a Raven.”

  She pressed her husband for information. “There’s no harm in your knowing the general story,” he said. “It’s very beautiful,” and he told her the tale of Mithras. He told it rather well and she listened intently.

  When it was finished she said, “Where?”

  “Where?”

  “Yes, where did it happen? You say the bull hid in a cave and then the world was created out of his blood. Well, where was the cave when there was no earth?”

  “That’s a very childish question.”

  “Is it? And when did this happen? How do you know, if no one was there? And if the bull was the first thought of Ormazd and he had to be killed in order to make the earth, why didn’t Ormazd just think of the earth straight away? And if the earth is evil, why did Mithras kill the bull at all?”

  “I’m sorry I told you, if you simply wish to be irreverent.”

  “I’m only asking. What I want to know is, do you really believe all this? Believe, I mean, that Mithras killed his bull in the same way you believe Uncle Claudius beat the Goths?”

  “I see it’s no good talking to you about it.”

  So Constantius went his pale way, seeking neither plain truth nor ecstasy, subduing the cloying powers of darkness by continence and a diet of eggs, and Constantine grew to gallant manhood and Helena by imperceptible stages and without regret lost her youth.

  *

  Diocletian had divided the Empire with Maximian, left him the embattled frontiers of the West, and spun himself intricate cocoons of court-etiquette at Nicomedia. At length Constantius was summoned there.