Helena Read online

  “Not me,” said Minervina.

  “No, my dear, but I daresay they will in time. It is no good moping, least of all about a thing like that. I was divorced, too, you know, precisely as you have been. It upset me at the time but I assure you I have had a far happier and safer life as the result. It’s only politics. I daresay Constantine regrets the change just as much as you do. I am told Fausta’s an odious girl, surrounded by Christians. And anyway, you have Crispus. They took my boy away, you know. You should interest yourself in the garden. I should very much like to know what’s happening to mine. With all these Emperors about, travel is quite out of the question. If they would only stop fighting, I should like to go back to Dalmatia. Not that I don’t find this place quite enchanting.”

  For the third summer they were at Igal, two hours’ drive from Trèves. Constantine had left them there on his road to power, not entirely forgotten, for Minervina had received her divorce papers and Helena the letters-patent proclaiming her Empress Dowager, at about the same time. Once, briefly and rather overwhelmingly, Constantine had dropped in to see them and had enlivened the occasion by slaughtering an entire army of unarmed Franks in the theater.

  The place was well chosen, better perhaps for a lady of Helena’s years than for Minervina. When you had seen the prodigious marble statue of Jupiter, the iron Mercury and the painted Cupid, you had seen everything that attracted the tourist. But these works were truly remarkable. The Cupid, crucified by women, drew tears. The Mercury was poised in full flight between two lodestones. The Jupiter held a golden thurible, two feet across, like a toy in his marble fingers, and grains of incense thrown into it filled the whole temple with sweetness while remaining unconsumed and undiminished. “Of course it’s all a trick,” said Helena. “But I can’t think how it’s done and I never get tired of seeing them do it.”

  And besides these fabulous treasures Trèves had many delicate charms; its gardens ran down to the Moselle, ran up into the hills; the water-gates were gold-starred and surmounted by five great crowns. It was an enchanting place, with all the opulence and chic of Milan sharpened by a Northern tang of its own which Helena recognized and loved.

  There was a Celtic air, too, which was still dearer to her. Poets abounded. “I don’t think they mean a great deal,” Helena said in answer to Minervina’s peevish questions, “but they are thoroughly nice young men and very badly off; they like coming here and when they read aloud they do so much remind me of my dear father in one of his poetic moods.”

  Minervina yawned in Helena’s salon. It was not what she was used to in the Middle East. Lactantius shunned it. This celebrated man was ostensibly Crispus’s tutor, but lessons had never prospered and soon lapsed. It was all of a piece with Constantine’s vague conception of splendor to search out from obscurity the greatest living prose stylist and set him to teach the obstreperous little prince his letters. Crispus now played all day long with boats and catapults and lorded it over his contemporaries, while Lactantius followed his own calling in his own quarters. He appeared on demand when Helena wished to make a show of him, and sometimes at his own fancy when he would pay a call on the ladies, as he was doing that afternoon, to remind them, if they seemed to forget it, of his continued existence at their court. He had outgrown ambition but he believed that it would not be convenient to be entirely forgotten.

  The post suited him well, for he was a Christian; he had got out of Nicomedia only just in time. Half his friends were caught in the latest wave of arrests and executions. Others of them turned up in Trèves from time to time with horrible stories. Refugees naturally headed there for it was one of the safest towns in the Empire, with a Bishop and countless priests going openly about their business. One was not starved of the sacraments in Trèves. What irked Lactantius was the lack of a theological library. The Bishop was an admirable man but his books were negligible. Lactantius had been able to bring nothing with him save his own manuscripts and was thus left, with all his unrivaled powers of expression, rather vague about what to express; with, more than that, the ever-present fear of falling into error. He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning. “If only I were a little braver,” Lactantius sometimes thought, “if I had dared stay nearer the center of things, across the Alps, I might have been a great writer.”

  The Christians were not the only cult that flourished in the mild air of Trèves; the City—Eastern in this respect, rather than Northern—teemed with mystagogues of one sort and another, and Minervina, who had formed a taste for such company in the Middle East, had a coterie of them, which Helena deplored. Almost everything about Minervina was objectionable but Helena bore with her for the sake of Crispus, now eleven years old, who in his grandmother’s fond eyes daily relived the brave childhood of Constantine.

  It was to Gnostic friends that Minervina now referred when she said: “I shall be glad when we move back to town. I miss my Souls.”

  “You have quite a little colony of your persuasion here in Igal, I think, Lactantius.”

  “Three families for whom your Majesty very kindly found cottages when they arrived from Thrace. A priest visits them; I, too, sometimes. They seem happy enough though it is a strange country for them; and they are simple people who speak no Latin.”

  “It’s funny, nowadays, how much talk there is everywhere about Christians. I don’t remember ever hearing of them when I was a girl in Britain.”

  “We have our martyrs there too—before your imperial husband’s day, of course. We are very proud of Alban.”

  Minervina fidgeted in disapproval and said: “I daresay the whole thing is very much exaggerated. I expect it will all blow over.”

  “It must be a sad time for your people,” said Helena.

  “Also a very glorious time.”

  “Really, Lactantius, what possible glory can there be in getting into the hands of the police?” said Minervina. “I never heard such affectation. If you feel like that I wonder you didn’t stay at home in Nicomedia. Plenty of glory there.”

  “It needs a special quality to be a martyr—just as it needs a special quality to be a writer. Mine is the humbler role, but one must not think it quite valueless. One might combine two proverbs and say: ‘Art is long and will prevail.’ You see it is equally possible to give the right form to the wrong thing, and the wrong form to the right thing. Suppose that in years to come, when the Church’s troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian, with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal,” and he nodded towards the gibbon who fretted his golden chain and chattered for fruit. “A man like that might make it his business to write down the martyrs and excuse the persecutors. He might be refuted again and again but what he wrote would remain in people’s minds when the refutations were quite forgotten. That is what style does—it has the Egyptian secret of the embalmers. It is not to be despised.”

  “Lactantius, dear, don’t be so serious. No one despises you. We were only joking. I should certainly never permit you to return East. You’re a great pet and everyone here is very fond of you.”

  “Your Majesty is too kind.”

  *

  With the first chill of autumn the household cumbrously removed to Trèves, advance party, main body, rear party, as in a military maneuver, ensuring the greatest possible delay in the brief journey. Minervina found the town, or rather her particular set there, agog with the prospect of a visit from a Gnostic of the highest distinction. He came from Marseilles with a great reputation bustling on in advance. He was quite the latest thing in Higher Thought. “I won’t have him here,” said Helena. “And that’s flat.”

  “I don’t suppose he would want to come,” said Minervina. “He doesn’t at all like grand life, I am sure. I expect he will have a li
ttle cell in the house of one of the Souls. They go for weeks without eating or sleeping, you know.”

  But when at last the savant arrived he did not eschew the hospitality of the second best house in Trèves. “You’ll come and hear him speak, won’t you?” said Minervina, and at length, because despite her placid habit of life and her decisive manner, she was troubled always with the suspicion that there was still something to be sought which she had not yet found, Helena consented.

  When the day came Helena, as her position demanded, was last to arrive. Her hostess met her on the steps and led her to the hall which was full of ladies—not only the mystical set but the entire high society of Trèves—and led her to a chair, placed by her direction, at one side. The lecturer was already in his place. He bowed to the Empress and his hostess in a manner that suggested familiarity with the best society, and began.

  Helena made some small business with her shawls which were not needed. The room was centrally heated and intensely hot. She discarded the lamb’s wool and took a light Asiatic silk, creating all the time a little disturbance of ladies-in-waiting and slaves about her chair; then she surveyed her immediate neighbors, nodded affably to some of them, then folded her hands and turned her attention towards the lecturer.

  He was an elderly, fleshy man, sagely bearded with the simple robes and practiced manner of a professional philosopher; his dark, questing eyes moved among the audience in search of sympathy, found Helena’s and briefly held them. He was at that moment employing her name and gave it, she thought, a slight inflection of recognition.

  … “Sophia,” he was saying, “who, as Astarte, abandoned her flesh in Tyre, and as Helena was the partner of Simon, the Standing One; she, of many forms, who is the last and darkest of the thirty Aeons of light and by her presumptuous love became mother of the seven material rulers…” The tones were fruity and curiously familiar. They carried Helena back to a windy tower long ago, almost forgotten.

  “It’s him all right,” thought Helena. “There’s no mistaking him; Marcias, still up to his old tricks.”

  All round her the idle ladies sat in their various ways absorbed. One or two had their tablets with them but they took few notes. Helena saw that her lady-in-waiting had twice scratched the single word “Demiurge,” and twice plowed it through. Those who still sought to follow Marcias’s meaning, looked anxious; happier those who surrendered without resistance to the flood of buoyant speech and floated supine and agape; they were getting what they had come for. Helena studied the row of blank profiles. She looked at Minervina who sat facing them at the lecturer’s side. At the close of each paragraph Minervina nodded, as though confirmed in an opinion she had long held.

  “All things are double one against another,” said Marcias and Minervina nodded. “So the things of error come; then the Gnosis intervenes. Dosithus knew himself not to be the Standing One, acknowledged his error, and in his knowledge was made one with the mensual twenty-nine, and with Helena, the thirtieth half-one” (“Not this Helena,” thought Helena)—“who is both mother and bride of Adam the primal.”

  Minervina nodded, deeply and gravely into the roll of firm flesh below her chin, and Helena felt something shockingly unsuitable to the occasion take shape deep within herself and irresistibly rise; something native to her, inalienable, long overlaid, foreign to her position, to marriage and motherhood, to the cares of her great household, the olive-presses and the almond picking; foreign to the schooling of thirty years, to the puzzled, matronly heads in the stuffy, steamy hall, something that smacked of the sea-mist and the stables and the salty tangles of a young red head. Helena fought it. She compressed herself in the chair, she bit her thumbs, she drew her scarf over her face, she ground her heel against her ankle bone, she tried furiously to cram her mind with all the sad things she knew—Minervina’s Bithynian accent and deserted Dido—but without avail. Overborne, all the more audible for her efforts at suppression, Helena began to giggle.

  The infection did not spread. The lady-in-waiting with the wax tablet recalled from aberration by the clucking at her side and observing Helena’s veiled face and trembling shoulders, supposed that something pathetic had been said, scented tears, and not to be outdone in delicacy of feeling, assumed her own particular expression of woe.

  The voice rippled on, and when Helena at length had hold of herself, was at the peroration. The hostess said her words of thanks: “… I am sure we are all a great deal clearer than we were on this important topic… the lecturer has kindly consented to answer any questions…”

  No one spoke immediately; then: “I was not quite sure whether you said that the Demiurge was an Aeon.”

  “No, madam. It was one of the aims of my poor discourse to demonstrate that he was not.”

  “Oh… thank you.”

  Minervina nodded as though to say: “I could have told you that, and I should have done so rather more sharply.”

  There was a further pause; then in clear, schoolroom tone, Helena said: “What I should like to know is: when and where did all this happen? And how do you know?”

  Minervina frowned. Marcias replied: “These things are beyond time and space. Their truth is integral to their proposition and by nature transcends material proof.”

  “Then, please, how do you know?”

  “By a lifetime of patient and humble study, your Majesty.”

  “But study of what?”

  “That, I fear, would take a lifetime to particularize.”

  A little murmur of admiration greeted this neat reply and on the crest of it the hostess rose to dismiss the meeting. The ladies rustled forward towards the lecturer but he, deprecating their flattery, came to greet Helena. “I was told your Majesty might do me the honor of coming.”

  “I scarcely hoped you had recognized me. I am afraid the lecture was far above my head. But I am delighted to see you have prospered. Are you… are you able to travel as you wish?”

  “Yes, I was given my freedom many years ago by a kind, foolish old woman who took a fancy for my verses.”

  “Did you get to Alexandria?”

  “Not yet, but I found what I wanted. Did you reach Troy, Highness?”

  “No, oh no.”

  “Or Rome?”

  “Not even there.”

  “But you found what you wanted?”

  “I have accepted what I found. Is that the same?”

  “For most people. I think you wanted more.”

  “Once. Now I am past my youth.”

  “But your question just now. ‘When? Where? How do you know?’—was a child’s question.”

  “That is why your religion would never do for me, Marcias. If I ever found a teacher it would have to be one who called little children to him.”

  “That, alas, is not the spirit of the time. We live in a very old world today. We know too much. We should have to forget everything and be born again to answer your questions.”

  Other ladies, eager to be presented to Marcias, stood around him, keeping their distance until the royal interview was ended. Helena surrendered him to them and was led to her litter. Minervina remained to wallow in the new revelation.

  That evening Helena sent for Lactantius and said: “I went to the lecture this afternoon. I found I knew the man quite well. He used to belong to my father in Britain. He’s put on a lot of weight since then. I couldn’t understand a word he said. It’s all bosh, isn’t it?”

  “All complete bosh, your Majesty.”

  “So I supposed. Just wanted to make sure. Tell me, Lactantius, this god of yours. If I asked you when and where he could be seen, what would you say?”

  “I should say that as a man he died two hundred and seventy-eight years ago in the town now called Aelia Capitolina in Palestine.”

  “Well, that’s a straight answer anyway. How do you know?”

  “We have the accounts written by witnesses. Besides that there is the living memory of the Church. We have knowledge handed down from father to son, invisible p
laces marked by memory—the cave where he was born, the tomb where his body was laid, the grave of Peter. One day all these things will be made public. Now they are kept a secret. If you want to visit the holy places you must find the right man. He can tell you, so many paces to the east from such and such a stone, where the shadow falls at sunrise on such and such a day. A few families know these things and they see to it that their children learn the instructions. One day when the Church is free and open there will be no need for such devices.”

  “Well, that’s all most interesting. Thank you, Lactantius. Good night.”

  “Good night, your Majesty.”

  “No one has seen him for nearly three hundred years?”

  “Some have seen him. The martyrs see him now.”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anyone who has?”

  “Your Majesty, I must beg you to excuse me. There are things that must not be spoken of to anyone outside the household.”

  “I should not have asked. All my life I have caused offense to religious people by asking questions. Good night, Lactantius.”

  “Good night, your Majesty.”

  Seven

  The Second Spring

  Four years passed. Crispus was called to his father’s headquarters and left jubilantly. Minervina married an ambitious, bald young Belgian and lost interest in the Higher Thought. The Indian ape aged prematurely, took sick in the chill river mist and died. In his own time, the ripe and right time, Constantine marched into Italy.

  Rumor and courier arrived simultaneously from Rome. Trèves was agog; all save the Empress Dowager. Her life had abounded in such tidings; one victory more, one emperor the less, another family pact between the victors, another loveless marriage; she had seen it all time and again; the division of spheres of influence; the start of another brief period of plotting and spying; these things came and went in their eccentric orbits.