CHAPTER VIII
AN ALEXANDRIAN CHARACTERISTIC
Nothing but prescience could have inspired Alexander, the young Macedonian conqueror, to decide to plant a city on the sandy peninsula which lay hot, flat, low and unproductive between the glassy waters of Lake Mareotis and the tumble of the Mediterranean.
For a century previous, a straggling Egyptian village, called Rhacotis, eked out a precarious existence by fisheries; the port was filled with shoals or clogged with water-growth, and the voluptuous fertility of the Nile margin followed the slow sweep of the great river into the sea twelve miles farther to the east. No other port along the coast presented a more unattractive appearance. But Alexander, having no more worlds to conquer, turned his opposition upon adverse conditions.
So he struck his spear into the sand, and there arose at the blow a city having the spirit of its founder—great, splendid, contentious, contradictory, impetuous and finally self-destructive through its excesses.
He enlarged and embellished Rhacotis, which lay to the west of the new city and left it to the tenantry of the Egyptians, poor remnants of that haughty race which had been aristocrats of the world before Troy. In its center arose that solemn triumph of Pharaonic architecture, the Serapeum.
But it was they who approached from the south, with the sand of the Libyan desert in their locks, who saw noble Alexandria. Between them and the city was first the strength of its fortifications, prodigious lengths of wall, beautiful with citadels and towers. Within was the Brucheum, with the splendor of the Library, for the Alexandrian spirit of contentiousness sharpened and forced the intellect of her disputants, till her learning was the most faultless of the time and its house a fit shape for its contents. After the Library the pillared façade of the Court of Justice; next the unparalleled Museum, and, interspersed between, were the glories of four hundred theaters, four thousand palaces, four thousand baths. Against the intense blue of the rainless Egyptian sky were imprinted the sun-white towers, pillars, arches and statues of the most comely city ever builded in Africa. Memphis, lost and buried in the sand, and Thebes, an echoing nave of roofless columns, were never so instinct with glory as Egypt's splendid recrudescence on the coast of the Middle Sea.
To the northeast, there was abatement of pagan grandeur. Here were quaint solid masses of Syriac architecture, with gowned and bearded dwellers and a general air of oriental decorum and religious rigor which did not mark the other quarters of the city. In this spot the Jews of the Diaspora had been planted, had multiplied and strengthened until there were forty thousand in the district.
Those turning the beaks of their galleys into the Alexandrian roadstead saw first the Pharos, a mist-embraced and phantom tower, rising out of the waves; after it, the Lochias, wading out into the sea that the palaces of the Ptolemies might hold in mortmain their double empire of land and water; on the other hand the trisected Heptistadium; between, the acreage of docking and out of the amphitheatrical sweep of the great city behind, standing huge, white and majestic, the grandest Jewish structure, next to Herod's Temple, that the world has ever known—the Synagogue.
The Jews of Alexandria; as a class of peculiar and emphatic characteristics, a class toward which consideration was due in deference to its numbers, its wealth and its sensitiveness, were necessarily the object of particular provision. Therefore, that they might be intelligently handled as to their prejudices, they were provided with a special governor from among their own—an alabarch; permitted to erect their own sanctuaries and to practise the customs of race and the rites of religion in so far as they did not interfere with the government's interests.
Thus much their privileges; their oppressions were another story.
Peopled by three of the most aggressive nations on the globe, the Greek, the Roman and the Jew, Alexandria seemed likewise to attract representatives of every country that had a son to fare beyond its borders. Drift from the dry lands of all the world was brought down and beached at the great seaport. It ranged in type from the fair-haired Norseman to the sinewy Mede on the east, from the Gaul on the west to the huge Ethiopian with sooty shining face who came from the mysterious and ancient land south of the First Cataract.
It followed that such a heterogeneous mass did not effect union and amity. That was a spiritual fusion which had to await a perfect conception of liberty and the brotherhood of man. The racial mixture in Alexandria was, therefore, a prematurity, subject to disorder.
So long as a Jew may have his life, his faith and his chance at bread-winning, he does not call himself abused. These things the Roman state yielded the Jew in Alexandria. But he was haughty, refined, rich, religious, exclusive, intelligent and otherwise obnoxious to the Alexandrians, and, being also a non-combatant, the Jew was the common victim of each and all of the mongrel races which peopled the city.
The common port of entry was an interesting spot. The prodigious stretches of wharf were fronted by packs of fleets, ranging in class from the visiting warrior trireme from Ravenna or Misenum, to the squat and blackened dhow from up the Nile or the lateen-sailed fishing-smack from Algeria to the papyrus punt of home waters. Its population was the waste of society, fishers, porters, vagabonds, criminals, ruffian sea-faring men, dockmen, laborers of all sorts, men, women and children—the pariahs even of the rabble and typically the Voice of Revilement.
Agrippa, landing with his party, attracted no more attention than any other new-comer would have done, until Silas gravely inquired the way into the Regio Judæorum.
"Jupiter strike you!" roared the man whom the sober Silas had addressed. "Do I look like a barbarian Jew that I should know anything about the Regio Judæorum!"
His words, purposely loud, did not fail to excite the interest he meant they should.
"Regio Judæorum!" cried a woman under foot, filling her basket with fish entrails. "What say you, Gesius? Who, these? Look, Alexandrians, what tinsel and airs are hunting the Regio Judæorum!"
"Purple, by my head!" the man exclaimed. "Roman citizens with the bent nose of Jerusalem!"
"Agrippa, or I am a landsman!" a sailor shouted. "Fugitive from debtors, or I am a pirate!"
"Jews!" another woman screamed; "coming to collect usury!"
A howl of rage, threatening and lawless, greeted this cry, out of which rose the sailor's voice with a shout of laughter.
"Usury! Ha, ha! He has not a denarius on him that is not borrowed!"
The Jewish prince had lived a life of diverse fortune, but never until then had he been the object of popular scorn. A surprise was aroused in him as great as his indignation; he stood transfixed with emotion. Cypros, thoroughly terrified, came out from among her servants and clung to his arm. On her the eyes of the fishwives alighted.
[Illustration: Cypros, thoroughly terrified, clung to his arm (missing from book)]
"Look! Look!" they cried. "Sparing us our husbands by hiding her beauty! The rag over her face! Bah! for a plaster of mud!"
"Fish-scales will serve as well," another cried, snatching up a handful and throwing it at the princess.
"Have mine, too, Bassia! Thou art a better thrower than I!" a third shouted, handing up her basket.
"Be sure of your aim, Bassia!"
The uproar became general.
"A handful for the simpering hand-maid, too!"
"Don't miss the she-Herod!"
"Fall to, wives; don't leave it all to Bassia!"
"'Way for the proconsul!"—a distant roar came up from the water's edge.
"Bilge-water in my jar, there, mate; it will mix their perfumes!"
"'Way for the proconsul!" the distant roar insisted.
"Don't soil the proconsul, women!"
"'Ware, Bassia! The proconsul is coming!"
"Perpol! he will not see! He is the best Jew-baiter in all Alexandria! Sure aim, O Phoebus of the bow!"
"'Way for the proconsul!"
"Pluto take the legionaries; here they come!"
"One more pitch at them, though Cæsar were coming!"
"No privileges exclusive for thyself, Bassia! Habet! More scales!"
"Scales; shells; water! Scales; sh—"
"Fish-heads! Habet!"
"Entrails—"
"'Way for the proconsul!"
"Directly, comrades! Shells, water!"
"Ow! You hit a soldier!"
"Bad aim, Bassia!"
"The legionaries! Scatter!"
The centurion at the head of a column now appeared, with his brasses dripping with dirty water, threw up his sword and shouted. The column flung itself out of line and went into the mob with pilum butt or point as the spirit urged.
Pell-mell, tumbling, screaming, scrambling, the wharf-litter fled, parting in two bodies as it passed Agrippa's demoralized group, one half plunging off the masonry on the sands or into the water, the other scattering out over the great expanse of dock. The soldiers pressed after, and, following in the space they had cleared, came a chariot, a legate in full armor driving, his charioteer crouching on his haunches in the rear of the car.
His apparitors brought up against Agrippa's party. They did not hesitate at the rank of the strangers; it was part of the blockade. Eutychus took to his heels and Silas went down under a blow from a reversed javelin. Agrippa, besmirched with the missiles of his late assailants and blazing with fury, breasted the soldiers and cursed them fervently. Two of them sprang upon him, and Cypros, screaming wildly, threw off her veil and seized the foremost legionary.
The legate pulled up his horses and looked at the struggle. Cypros' bared face was presented to him. With a cry of astonishment, he threw down the lines and leaped from the chariot.
"Back, comrades!" he shouted, running toward them. "Touch her not! Unhand the man! Ho! Domitius, call off your tigers!"
"How now, Flaccus!" Agrippa raged. "Is this how you receive Roman citizens in Alexandria?"
The legate stopped short and his face blackened.
"Agrippa, by the furies! I knew the lady, but—" with a motion of his hand he seemed to put off his temper and to recover himself. "Tut, tut! Herod, you will not waste good serviceable wrath on an Alexandrian uproar when you have lived among them a space. They are no more to be curbed than the Nile overflow, and are as natural to the place. But curse them, they shall answer for this! Welcome to Alexandria! Beshrew me, but the sight of your lady's face makes me young again! Come, come; bear me no ill will. Be our guest, Herod, and we shall make back to you for all this mob's inhospitality. Ah, my lady, what say you? Urge my pardon for old time's sake!"
He turned his face, which filled with more sincerity toward Cypros than was visible in his voluble cordiality to Agrippa. Cypros, supported by the trembling Drumah, put her hand to her forehead and tried to smile bravely.
"But thou hast saved us, noble Flaccus; why should we bear thee ill will? Blessed be thou for thy timely coming, else we had been killed!"
Agrippa, still smoldering, with Silas at his feet, alternately brushing the prince's dress and rubbing his bruises, took the word from Cypros.
"What do Roman citizens, arriving in Alexandria, and no proconsul to meet them? Perchance Rome's sundry long missing citizens have been lost here!" intimated Agrippa.
"Ho, no! They never kill except under provocation. Yet I shall have a word with the wharf-master and the prætor. But come, have my chariot, lady. Apparitor," addressing one of his guards, "send hither conveyance for my guests!"
"Thy pardon and thanks, Flaccus," Agrippa objected shortly, "we are expected by the alabarch."
"Then, by the Horæ, he should have been here to meet you. Forget him for his discourtesy and come with me. Beseech your husband, sweet lady; you were my confederate in the old days."
She smiled, in a pleased way. "But we did not inform the alabarch when we expected to arrive," she answered. "He hath not failed us."
"And perchance," Agrippa broke in, "it might disturb Alexandria again to know that the proconsul had entertained Jews!"
"Still furious!" Flaccus cried jocosely. "Oh, where is that elastic temper which made thee famous in youth, Herod? But here are our curricles; at least thou wilt permit me to conduct thy party to the alabarch's."
It was the bluff courtesy of a man who assumes polish for necessity's sake, and suddenly envelopes himself with it, momentarily for a purpose. Agrippa, looking up from under his brows, glanced critically at the proconsul's face for some light on his unwonted amiability, but, failing to discover it, submitted with better grace to the Roman's offers.
The proconsul was near Agrippa's age, and on his face and figure was the stamp of unalloyed Roman blood. He was of average height, but so solidly built as to appear short. His head was round and covered with close, black curls; his brows were straight thick lines which met over his nose, and his beardless face was molded with strong muscles on the purple cheek and chin. He was powerful in neck and arm and leg, and prominent in chest and under-jaw. Yet the brute force that published itself in all his atmosphere was dominated by intellect and giant capabilities.
He was Flaccus Avillus, Proconsul of Egypt, finishing now his fourth year as viceroy over the Nile valley. One of the few who stood in the wintry favor of Tiberius, the imperial misanthrope of Capri, his was the weightiest portfolio in all colonial affairs; his state little less than Cæsar's.
Wherever he walked, industry, pleasure and humankind, low or lofty, stood still to do him honor. So, when he headed a procession of curricles and chariots up from the wharves of Alexandria, he did not go unseen. Many of the late disturbers watched with strained eyes and gaping mouths and saw him turn his horses into the street which was the first in the Regio Judæorum, and not a few stared at one another and babbled, or pointed taut or shaking fingers at the prodigy. Flaccus, the most notorious persecutor of the Jews among the long list of Egyptian governors, was visiting the Regio Judæorum escorting Jews!
The sight created no less wonder and astonishment under the eaves of the Jewish houses, and throughout their narrow passages, but there was no demonstration. Each retired quietly to his family, or to his neighbor, and gravely asked what new trickery was this.
But Agrippa's party, following their conductor, proceeded through the less densely settled portion of the quarter into a district where the streets opened up into a stately avenue, lined by the palaces of the aristocratic Jews of Alexandria.
Before one, not in the least different from half a dozen surrounding it, their guide halted. The residence was square, with an unbroken front, except for a porch, the single attribute characteristic of Egypt, and the window arches and parapet relieved the somber masonry with checkered stone. The flight of steps leading up to the porch was of white marble.
One of the proconsul's apparitors knocked and stiffly announced his mission to the Jewish porter that answered. Immediately the master of the house came forth, followed by a number of servants to take charge of the prince's effects.
The master of the house, Alexander Lysimachus, alabarch of Alexandria, was a Jew by feature and by dress, but sufficiently Romanized in disposition to propitiate Rome. He wore a cloak, richly embroidered, over a long white under-robe; and the magisterial tarboosh, with a bandeau of gold braid, was set down over his fine white hair. His figure was lean and aged, a little bent, but every motion was as steady as that of a young man, and his air had that certain ease and grace which mark the courtier.
His first quick glance sought Flaccus, for the visit was without precedent and highly significant. But there was neither hauteur nor suspicion in his manner. The bluff countenance of the proconsul showed a little expectancy, but there was even less to be seen on the Jew's face that should betray his interpretation of the visit. The magistrates bowed, each after his own manner of salutation—the Jew with oriental grace, the Roman with an offhand upward jerk of his head and a gesture of his mailed hand.
"Behold your guests, Lysimachus," Flaccus said, "or what is left of them after an encounter with the rabble at the wharf. You should have been there to meet them."
"So I should, had I been forewarned," the alabarch explained, the peculiar music of the Jewish intonation showing in mellow contrast to the Roman's blunt voice. "What! Is this how the accursed vermin have used you!"
He put out his old waxen hands to the prince and searched his face.
"O thou son of Berenice!" he said softly. "Welcome to the worshiping hearts of Jews, once more."
"Thanks," replied Agrippa, embracing the old man. "My latest adventure with Gentiles has well-nigh persuaded me to remain there!"
"God grant it; God grant it! And thy princess?"
Cypros had uncovered her face and was reaching him her hands.
"Mariamne!" he exclaimed in a startled way. "Mariamne, as I live!"
Flaccus, who had fixed his eyes on Cypros the instant her veil was lifted, started.
"Mariamne! The murdered Mariamne!" he repeated.
"Ah, sir!" the alabarch protested, smiling. "Thou wast not born then. But I knew her: as a young man I knew her! But enter, enter! Pray favor us with thy presence at supper, noble Flaccus. It shall be an evening of festivity."
He led them through a hall so dimly lighted as to appear dark after the daylight without, and into one of the noble chambers characteristic of the opulent Orient. The whole interior was lined with yellow marble, and the polish of the pavement was mirror-like. The lattice of the windows, the lamps, the coffers of the alabarch's records, the layers for the palms and plantain, the clawed feet of the great divan were all of hammered brass. The drapery at arch and casement, the cushions and covering of the divan were white and yellow silk, and, besides a sprawling tiger skin on the floor, the alabarch's chair of authority, and a table of white wood, there was no other furniture.
The alabarch gave Flaccus his magistrate's chair, and, seating his two noble guests and their children, clapped his hands in summons.
A brown woman, with eyes like chrysolite and the lithe movements of a panther, was instantly at his elbow.
The alabarch spoke to her in a strange tongue, and the servant disappeared.
"I send for my daughter," he explained to his guests. "The waiting-woman does not understand our tongue. My daughter—the only one I have, and unmarried!"
"I remember her," Agrippa said with a smile.
At that moment in the archway leading into the interior of the house a girl appeared. She lifted her eyes to her father's face, and between them passed the mute evidence of dependence and vital attachment.
She wore the classic Greek chiton of white wool without relief of color or ornament, a garb which, by its simplicity, intensified the first impression that it was a child that stood in the archway. She was a little below average height, with almost infantile shortening of curves in her pretty, stanch outlines. But the suppleness of waist and the exquisite modeling of throat and wrist were signs that proved her to be of mature years.
Her hair was of that intermediate tint of yellow-brown which in adult years would be dark. It fell in girlish freedom, rough with curls, a little below her shoulders. There was a boyishness in the noble breadth of her forehead, full of front, serene almost to seriousness, and marked by delicate black brows too level to be ideally feminine. Her eyes were not prominent but finely set under the shading brow, large of iris, like a child's, and fair brown in color. In their scrutiny was not only the wisdom of years but the penetration of a sage. Though her tips were not full they were perfectly cut, and redder than the heart of any pomegranate that grew in the alabarch's garden.
But it was not these certain signs of strength which engaged Agrippa. Beyond the single glance to note how much the girl had developed in four years he gave his attention to certain physical characteristics which called upon his long experience with women to catalogue.
As she stood in the archway, the prince had let his glance slip down to her feet, shod in white sandals, and her ankles laced about with white ribbon. One small foot upbore her weight, the other unconsciously, but most daintily, poised on a toe. She swayed once with indescribable lightness, but afterward stood balanced with such preparedness of young sinew that at a motion she could have moved in any direction. Foremost in summing these things, Agrippa observed that she was wholly unconscious of how she stood.
"Terpsichore!" he said to himself, "or else the goddess hath withdrawn the gift of dancing from the earth!"
"Enter, Lydia, and know the proconsul, the noble Flaccus," the alabarch said. The girl raised her eyes to the proconsul's face and salaamed with enchanting grace. Flaccus checked a fatherly smile. He would wait before he patronized a girl-child of uncertain age.
"And this," the alabarch went on, "thou wilt remember as our prince, Herod Agrippa."
"Alas! sweet Lydia," Agrippa said, fixing soft eyes upon her. "Must I be introduced? Am I in four years forgotten?"
"No, good my lord," she answered in a voice that was mellow with the music of womanhood—a voice that almost startled with its abated strength and richness, since the illusion of her youth was hard to shake off, "thou art identified by thy sweet lady!"
Agrippa stroked his smooth chin and Flaccus shot an amused glance at him. Meanwhile the girl had opened her arms to Cypros. The children, one by one, greeted her. The alabarch went on.
"My sons are no longer with us," he said. "They are abroad in the world, preparing themselves to be greater men than their father. But go, be refreshed; it shall be an evening of rejoicing. Lydia, be my right hand and give my guests comfort."
He bowed the Herod and his family out of the chamber and they followed the girl to various apartments for rest and change of raiment.
The alabarch turned to the proconsul.
"If thou wilt follow me, sir—"
"No; I thank thee; I shall return to my house and prepare for thy hospitality. But tell me this: what does Agrippa here?"
"He comes to borrow money, I believe."
"Of you?"
"Doubtless."
"Put him off until you have consulted me. He is not a safe borrower."