Then Julia went with the sick girl to Arles. Meantime Marius on the battlefield had received the ovation of his officers and soldiers, and the salutations of the delegates from the senate proclaiming him consul. But at the same time there appeared—I doubt not, though Plutarch does not say so—a slave with a note from Julia:—
"I am sorry to tell you that Calpurnia is very unwell. That horrible mistral froze her, and she has done little else than cough night and day since. I have given her snail broth, but it has not relieved her much, and she is now spitting blood. Bother these Teutons, it is all their work. I always told you that you made a mistake in letting them come into Provence, and cross the Rhone. However, you were ever pigheaded, and now it serves you right. You will lose Calpurnia, who is the apple of your eye. Now if you had listened to me, etc., etc.
"Salve."
But there was something further to complicate matters, and superinduce sickness in a delicate girl. To escape to the hills the good people of Arles could not follow a road, for the whole district between them and the range of Les Alpines was covered with one vast lagoon. They could not travel in boats, for the lagoon was shallow, so they went on rafts supported on inflated skins, about which I shall have something to say presently. So Calpurnia, creeping close to her mother, wrapped in her pallium, was exposed for hours on a raft at the beginning of April to the cold winds, and to the water oozing up between the joints of the raft.
The whole story works out like an equation. I fancy—but am not sure—a quadratic equation, somehow thus:—
As I, in a 19th cent. hotel, and in Jäger underclothing:
Calpurnia, on a raft and in a pre-historic cave:: a cold in the head
I got: x
x X self in hotel and Jäger costume = Calpurnia on a raft and in a cave X cold in the head.
x = pthysis.
I think this is right. I cannot be sure; and I cannot be sure, though I was educated to be a mathematician by a senior wrangler.
The facts were these. My dear father thought, and thought perhaps justly, that a classical education was but a throwing back of the current of the mind into the past, whereas a mathematical education directed it to the future, and was the sole course which would prove Pactolean. So I was cut down in my classical studies, and drawn out in those which were mathematical. Likewise I was sent the year before entering the university to a senior wrangler to ripen me. I then learned that what as a boy I was wont to call the Rule of Three was more properly termed equations, and that equations might be complicated to the highest limits of muddledom, and when so complicated were termed quadratics. After a course of equations that flattened out my head like the Camargue, I was thrust into what are called surds, a sort of wood of errors, in which one spends hours in hewing one's way to get at nothing of the slightest profit to man or beast; finally, I believe my good tutor, now a bishop, got tired of me. I was stupefied by surds; and I entered the university. Now, after thirty-seven years, I find that every ode of Horace, every chapter of Cæsar, every line of Virgil I learned at school lies as a sprig of lavender in the folds of my memory—but I cannot even set and work out a common equation, or add up a sum in compound addition correctly.