Glory and the Lightning (6 page)

“Greed,” replied the physician. He glanced at the girl formidably and then was pleased to see her face devoid of mockery, and respectful. He said, “He was born in this house and was never deprived of plenteous food since his birth. He was given enough to satisfy the hunger of any man, and more.”

“Then why,” asked Aspasia, “is he not content, but must force food upon himself to his disaster?”

“Ask him yourself,” replied the physician with contempt.

Aspasia bent over the sick man whose oily and icteroid face swam with sweat and whose eyes and mouth were twisted with the pity of self. His expression implored Aspasia’s compassion, and he whimpered. She frowned.

“You are fat,” she said, “and you have heard the physician’s condemnation of your greed and your enormous appetite. You have known that such indulgence leads to suffering, and may cause your death, but you do not refrain. Why is this?”

The slave muttered, “I am hungry.”

“For what do you hunger?”

The man was silent. He looked up at Aspasia’s smooth and impassive face and thought he saw reflected there a tender and youthful pity. He licked his thick and greasy lips, dropped his eyes and murmured, “For freedom.”

Aspasia considered. Her wonderful hair fell about her cheeks as she bent over him. A great disgust filled her, but she revealed none of this. Then she said in a grave tone, “That is easily remedied. The Lady Thargelia is of a merciful and kindly character, and I am her favorite. I will persuade her to give you your freedom so that you may depart at once from this house and live and die as freemen do, working for what stipends you can gather and feeding and clothing yourself and finding your own shelter. As the stipends will be small and the labor arduous you will be forced to refrain from lusting for luxurious food, sleeping when you will in a soft bed, and amusing yourself with the slave girls. The wine of the country will be your portion. Then shall your fat disappear and your pain be abolished. That is freedom and I congratulate you that you should prefer poverty to richness of living, and a random shelter instead of a sound roof above you.”

The slave’s eyes widened with sudden fear and they lost their sly and injured expression. He suddenly sat up, moistening lips that appeared to have shrunk. “How shall I live?” he cried.

Aspasia smiled. “As other free men live—by your labor and your wits and your unending industry. What is it you do in this house? You assist in the kitchen and preside over the table of the Lady Thargelia and clean the copper and the silver. But you will have to find different employment, for such gentle duties are performed by pampered slaves in other houses. But rejoice! Hard labor will reduce your fat and your hunger, and a rigorous life will lengthen your days.”

She winked at the physician, who had become extremely interested. “Echion,” she said, “you will join me in my plea to the Lady Thargelia to release this injured and pining man who desires freedom above all things?”

“Of a certainty,” he replied at once. He looked at the slave who had paled excessively and he patted him upon his shoulder. “Tomorrow, you shall be free, for the Lady Thargelia will take you before the officer. Then you will gather up your possessions and will depart at once from this house.”

The slave glanced desperately about him, shrinking from the wide smiles of the girl and the physician. “Wine, in the name of the gods!” he cried in a trembling voice, and he extended a shaking hand as if he were dying of thirst in a desert.

The physician shook his head. “No. As you are now a free man there will be no more free wine in this house; and since you will receive many gifts from your generous mistress you will have money in your pouch. I will order wine for you—but only if you pay for it. Twenty drachmas for a small jug. You may request it at will from the attendant.”

He made as if to turn away but the slave suddenly grasped the physician’s green robe in a frantic grip. He almost fell from his bed as the weight of his belly pulled him to the edge. “Master!” he groaned. “That is cruelty!”

The physician raised his eyebrows as if in astonishment. “Cruelty, do you say? For granting you your heart’s desire for freedom so that you will no longer suffer and will walk in dignity as a free man? Is that not what you wish?”

The slave continued to grasp him. He began to pant. His yellowish flesh quivered in his extremity. His jaundiced eyes rolled in terror. Then he said in a bursting cry, “I do not wish to be free!”

The physician, who had assumed a benevolent expression during the conversation, let his features and his eyes show his revulsion and contempt, and the slave quailed. He said, “You do not wish to be free.

Your only wish is to continue a parasite’s existence and to indulge your loathsome appetites. I will tell you. I will not press the Lady Thargelia for your freedom, seeing that you truly despise and fear it as the majority of men do in this craven world. They prefer to be slaves, so long as they can escape responsibility!” He looked at Aspasia. “That is the history of mankind. Liberty is not desired if it entails hard labor and want and the risks of danger and hunger and if one fails by one’s own weakness.”

Aspasia inclined her head. “Mercy!” wailed the slave, intent only on his own dilemma. “I do not wish to be free.”

The physician let a long pause follow, as if considering, and his face was stern. He said at last, “I have said I will not press the Lady Thargelia for your freedom, but on one condition only, that you control your pig’s appetite. I am weary of seeing you in this infirmia. However, should you continue to indulge yourself and steal food beyond your needs, you shall have your freedom promptly and be sent away from this house. You understand me?”

The slave gave him a tremulous smile. Relief poured from him in sweat. He nodded like a chided child who has been forgiven. “I will obey your directions, Master,” he said, almost sobbing. “But opium, Master, for this pain which I vow to you will occur no more.”

The physician shook his head. “There will be no opium. You will endure this pain with thankfulness that it is the price of your past indulgence, which you will permit no more. That pain is nothing to the pangs of freedom, which upright men prefer to soft slavery. But you are not an upright man.”

He struck the slave’s grasping hand from his garments and left him. Aspasia followed, with a thoughtful expression. He said to her, “You will have observed that the man is his own malady, as I have insisted before. Are there sufferers who are born with painful defects? Of a surety. But their parents were feeble and should never have been permitted to beget and conceive.”

“But the sufferer is not responsible for his agony,” said Aspasia, following him.

He stopped and wagged his finger in her face. “All crimes against health must be paid for, either by parents or their offspring. That is the law of life, and who am I to dispute it?”

“Not in the name of mercy?”

“Mercy! Do the weak extend that to the strong they have exploited or ruined? No! They leave the body of the host as parasites leave it, when they have brought death to the host. It is the strong and the brave and the free which I admire, and which I will help.” He continued shaking his finger at her. “I am almost alone in this. We have philosophers who maintain that a man is entitled to be preserved for the simple reason that he was born—though none asked for his birth! Is that not a contemptible fallacy?”

“Truly, in many ways,” said Aspasia, as the bored maidens joined them. “Indiscriminate mercy, I have seen, is a destroyer on occasion. But are there not some to whom we should extend mercy?”

“I have not seen them, except for those who have been the victims of other men’s weakness,” said the physician with growing impatience.

“If they had been strong, would they have permitted themselves to become the victims of such weaklings?”

The physician stopped. Then he laughed loudly. “You have an argument!” he cried, and touched her fondly on her shoulder and then let his ringed hand slide down the length of her bare round arm. He felt its silken texture and its warmth, and his hand lingered. He looked into those clear brown eyes and smiled. “I congratulate you, my pupil. You should be in government, for all you are a woman.”

They visited the beds of others. Aspasia’s inner eye had sharpened. She saw what she had not seen before, though in many cases she was dubious. They came on the bed of a young female slave who was groaning, unable to deliver her child immediately. Aspasia said, “Has she sinned against health that she suffers so?”

The physician said, “If I had my will I should let this slave die. For inability to deliver normally is a physical defect, which can be passed on to daughters. Why should she be permitted to inflict such suffering on her offspring?”

“It is a hard decision,” said Aspasia.

“This is a world of hard reality,” said the physician, “as I have told you before. Ruthlessness in the name of health and sanity and justice is not to be despised. Many would die before their time? Ah. But think of the misery such deaths would curtail!”

Aspasia thought. It was, of a certainty, a law of nature that the weak and the defective must die. Human mercy often abrogated that law. Was that virtuous or evil? She must consider this when alone. Nevertheless, she did not believe that the physician was entirely correct. She said, “What of soldiers who are wounded, and those who have been afflicted, by no fault of their own, by other men?”

“Those I will help,” said the physician, and Aspasia smiled.

The physician laughed at her with affection. “My child,” he said, “you have maintained that nothing but the mind truly exists, and that all is subjective. Is pain subjective? Your argument would maintain this. If subjective, it can be controlled by an effort of will.”

Aspasia laughed aloud. “I am defeated by my own argument,” she answered. But still she was not entirely convinced that mercy was unrealistic and a weakness that must be detested. What of men who were imprisoned or done to death by the powerful Ecclesia, who endlessly sought for heresy and impiety? Were these men not deserving of mercy and justice? Were not mercy and justice sometimes one and the same? The world was full of riddles. Of one thing she was sure: There was no broad law which could be extended to cover the vast intricacy of human conduct and being. Nature had broad laws only, but men had intellect and should be discriminating. The defeat of nature had created civilizations and beauty and order and philosophy and art and had released the great imponderables of the human mind. Nature, herself, was chaotic and must be restrained if life were not to regress again to the jungle and savagery.

The maidens entered the classroom presided over by a severe female teacher, who looked at Aspasia with no affection. The girl’s beauty inspired her envy; her controversies annoyed her. The teacher, Maia, regarded the Apollonian art of mathematics as true law and order, inflexible and objective, and endlessly valid. Mathematics ruled the universes, and the teacher reverenced it as the manifestation of the wisdom of the gods. Without the rule of mathematics there would be no life at all, and no planets or stars guided in their passage by eternal and precise edict.

“But we have minds,” said Aspasia today, when the teacher again expounded on the subject. “Our minds are not precise, nor are they ruled by mathematics. If we were so ruled then every man’s conduct would be the same as every other man’s and every man would be reduced to a mere set of numbers and his thinking predicted. What of the mind, which is no slave to apparent validity and the rule of precision and mathematics?”

“If governments would insist that the rule of mathematics be applied to human affairs then we should have no disorders, no revolutions, no unprecise thinking, and no destructive emotions,” said the teacher.

“We should not, then, be men,” said Aspasia.

Goaded, the teacher exclaimed angrily, “What is a man?”

“Ah,” said Aspasia, “that is the question, which cannot be explained by mathematics.”

“Would you prefer chaos to law and order?” demanded the teacher, outraged.

“The majority of men prefer law and order, but deny that mathematics have aught to do with it,” said the girl. “They are the result of intelligence and reflection and an observance that men cannot exist in chaos and disorder.”

“It is an observance that is based on the truism that two and two make four,” said the teacher, more and more exasperated.

Aspasia shook her head gently. “It is true that in this world two and two equal four. But, how can it be proved that such a law prevails on other worlds which wheel about the suns? In those worlds it may be that two and two equal five. Could it be that mathematics itself is subjective and does not prevail everywhere at all times?”

“It is not subjective, Aspasia! There is but one law throughout the universes.”

“How can you prove that, Maia?”

“By induction and deduction, you young dissenter.”

“But these are also subjective, Maia. They originate in the mind.”

“There is a Mind greater than yours, my girl, Which has set the laws that govern the universes with precision and unshakable quantrums.”

“It, Itself, is subjective, Maia.”

The teacher looked at her cunningly. She mimicked, “How can you prove that, Aspasia?”

Aspasia laughed and the girls joined her. “It is all a tremendous mystery, which is very exciting. And conjecture is exciting in itself. A man without constant questions is only a beast.”

Nevertheless mathematics deeply interested her, even if, as she believed, or considered, the precise laws of it may pertain only to this world. She sharpened her mind on the minds of others and dialogue could reveal interesting vistas. But her teachers resented dialogues not in accord with their opinions. They did not know that it was their didactic convictions which vexed the maiden, for she did not believe in any absolute. The minds of men should be free to roam as they willed, and should be restrained only when they impinged on the minds of others and caused destruction and oppression. In short, liberty was the law of flourishing life and when it was abdicated by evil men it induced death.