4
For a year Komm lived in hiding in the forests of the Atrebates. There he was safe, because the Gauls hated the Romans, and having themselves submitted to the conquerors they had a great respect for those who refused them obedience. On the river-bank and in the green-wood, accompanied by his followers, he led a life not differing greatly from that he had lived as the chief of many tribes. He gave himself up to hunting and fishing, devised stratagems and drank fermented drinks, which, though depriving him of the knowledge of human affairs, enabled him to understand those that are divine. But his soul had suffered a change, and it pained him to be no longer free. All the chiefs of his people had been killed in battle, or had died beneath the lash, or, bound by the lictor, had been led away to a Roman prison. No longer did a bitter envy of them possess him; for now all his hatred was concentrated upon the Romans. He bound to his horse’s tail the golden circlet which he, as the friend of the Senate and the Roman people, had received from the Dictator. To his dogs he gave the names of Cæsar, Caius and Julius. When he saw a pig he stoned it, calling it Volusenus. And he composed songs like those which he had heard in his youth, eloquently expressing the love of liberty.
Now, it happened that one day, absorbed in the chase, having wandered away from his followers, he climbed the high, heather-clad table-land which commands Nemetacum, and, gazing thence, he saw with amazement that the huts and stockades of his town had vanished, and that in a wall-encircled enclosure rose temples and houses of an architecture so prodigious as to inspire him with the horror and fear caused by works of magic. For he could not believe that in so short a time such dwellings could have been constructed by natural means.
He forgot the birds on the moorland, and, prone on the red earth, he lay and gazed long upon the strange town. Curiosity, stronger than fear, kept his eyes wide open. Until evening he gazed upon the spectacle. Then there came to him an overpowering desire to enter the town. Beneath a stone on the heath he hid his golden torques, his bracelets, his jewelled belts and his weapons of chase. Retaining only his knife, hidden under his mantle, he descended the wooded hill-side. As he passed through the moist undergrowth, he gathered some mushrooms, so that he might appear as a poor man coming to sell his wares in the market. And in the third watch of the night he entered the town through the Golden Gate. It was kept by legionaries who allowed peasants bringing in food to pass. Thus the King of the Atrebates, disguised as a poor man, was readily enabled to penetrate as far as the Julian way. This was bordered by villas; it led to the Temple of Diana, the white façade of which was already adorned with interlacing arches of purple, azure and gold. In the grey morning light Komm saw figures painted on the walls of the houses. They were ethereal pictures of dancing girls and scenes drawn from a history of which he was ignorant: a young virgin whom heroes were offering up as a sacrifice, a mother in her fury plunging a dagger into her two children as yet unweaned, a man with the hoofs of a goat raising his pointed ears in surprise, when, unrobing a sleeping and reclining virgin, he discovers her to be at once a youth and a woman. And there were in the courtyard other pictures representing modes of love unknown to the peoples of Gaul. Though passionately addicted to wine and women, he had no idea of Ausonian voluptuousness, because he had no clear idea of the variety of human forms and because he was untroubled by the desire for beauty. Having come to this town, which had once been his, in order to satisfy his hatred and inflame his wrath, he filled his heart with fury and loathing. He detested Roman art and the mysterious devices of the Roman painters. And in all these census figures on the city portals he saw but little, because his eyes lacked discernment save in observing the foliage of trees or the clouds in a dark sky.
Bearing his mushrooms in a fold of his mantle, he passed along the broad-paved streets. Beneath a door over which was a phallus illuminated by a little lamp he saw women wearing transparent tunics, who were watching for the passers-by. He approached with the intention of offering them violence. An old woman appeared, who in a squeaky voice said sharply.
“Go thy way. This is not a house for peasants who reek of cheese. Return to thy cows, herdsman.” Komm replied that he had had fifty women, the most beautiful of the Atrebates, and possessed coffers full of gold. The courtesans began to laugh, and the old woman cried:
“Be off, drunkard!”
And it seemed to him that the duenna was a centurion armed with a vine-stock, with such splendour did the majesty of the Roman people shine throughout the Empire!
With one blow of his fist Komm broke her jaw and serenely pursued his way, while the narrow passage of the house was filled with shrieks, howls and lamentations. On the left he passed the temple of Diana of the Ardeni and crossed the forum between two rows of porches. When he recognized the goddess Roma standing on her marble pedestal, wearing a helmet, with her arm outstretched to command the peoples, in order to insult her, he performed before her the most ignoble of natural functions.
He was now coming to the end of the buildings of the town. Before him extended the stone circle of the amphitheatre as yet barely outlined, but already immense. He sighed:
“O race of monsters!”
And he advanced among the shattered and trampled vestiges of Gallic huts, the thatched roofs of which once extended like some motionless army and which were now degraded into less even than ruins—into little more than a heap of manure spread upon the ground. And he reflected:
“Behold what remains of so many ages of men! Behold what they have made of the dwellings wherein the chiefs of the Atrebates hung their arms!”
The sun had risen over the grades of the amphitheatre, and with insatiable and inquisitive hatred the Gaul wandered among the vast enclosures filled with bricks and stones. His large blue eyes gazed on these stony monuments of conquest, and he shook his long fair locks in the fresh breeze. Thinking himself alone, he muttered curses. But not far from the stone-masons’ yard he perceived, at the foot of an oak-crowned hillock, a man seated on a mossy stone in a crouching position, with his mantle thrown over his head. He wore no insignia; but on his finger was the knight’s ring, and the Atrebate knew enough of a Roman camp to recognize a military tribune. This soldier was writing on tablets of wax and appeared wrapt in thought. Having long remained motionless, he raised his head, pensive, with his style to his lips, looked about him vacantly, then gazed down again and resumed his writing. Komm saw his full face and perceived that he was young, and that he had a gentle, high-born air.
Then the Atrebate chief recalled his oath. He felt for his knife beneath his cloak, slipped behind the Roman with the agility of the savage and plunged the blade into the middle of his back. It was a Roman blade. The tribune uttered a deep groan and sank down. A trickle of blood flowed from one corner of his mouth. The waxen tablets remained on his tunic between his knees. Komm took them and looked eagerly at the signs traced thereon, thinking them to be magic signs the knowledge of which would give him great power. They were letters which he could not read and which were taken from the Greek alphabet then preferred to the Latin alphabet by the young littérateurs of Italy. Most of these letters were effaced by the flat end of the style; those which remained were Latin lines in Greek metre, and here and there they were intelligible:
TO PHŒBE, ON HER TOMTIT
O thou, whom Varius loved more than his eyes,
Thy Varius, wandering beneath the rainy sky of Galata...
And the couple sang in their golden cage of gold.
.........
O my white Phœbe, with prudent hand give
Millet and fresh water to thy frail captive.
She sits, she is a mother: a mother is timid.
.........
Oh! come not to the misty Ocean’s strand,
Phœbe, for fear...
... Thy white feet and thy limbs
So nimbly moving to the crotalum’s rhythm.
.........
And neither the gold of Crœsus nor the purple of Attala,
But thy fresh arms, thy breasts....
A faint sound ascended from the waking town. Past the remnants of the Gallic huts where a few barbarians, fierce though of humble rank, were still lurking in the trenches, the Atrebate fled, and through a breach in the wall he leapt into the open country.