Count Belisarius by Robert Graves Page A

who controlled the political side of the faction, while Indaro and Antonina laid successful siege to the Demarch, who controlled the military side. The usual ruling was that the husband of any actress who left the stage for the sake of marriage must pay a heavy contribution to the Fund. No other excuses were accepted except penitence, but no penitent might return to her old employment under a penalty of being shut in a house of correction for the rest of her days. Nevertheless, these four girls won permission to leave, on the understanding that they remained good Blues. With their savings, and money borrowed from their backers, they clubbed together to take a well-furnished suite of rooms in an elegant house close to the Statue of Venus, and opened it as a place of entertainment: being officially backed by the faction, it soon became the most fashionable resort of Constantinople. By this time my mistress Antonina’s mother was dead; Antonina had inherited me from her. The club catering was entrusted to my charge. As independent entertainers the ladies were no longer forced to pay a high proportion of their private earnings to the Dancing Master; instead, they became full members of the faction, paying their subscriptions regularly to the fund. Indaro and Chrysomallo were both highly trained, the first as an acrobatic dancer and juggler, the second as a singer and instrumentalist; and my mistress Antonina was equal to either of them in those accomplishments. Theodora was their manager and their clown. The four of them had some very happy, amusing, altogether shameless timestogether, and I am glad to record that they remained good friends both then and throughout their subsequent lives; and I, who have survived them all, regret them all.
    One day Theodora told us – for I was treated more as a friend than a slave, and they all confided in me – that she had been invited to accompany a patrician named Hecebolus to Pentapolis, of which he had been appointed Governor, and that this opportunity of seeing the world at her ease was too good to be missed. We all begged Theodora not to leave us, and Chrysomallo warned her that Hecebolus was not a man to be trusted – was he not a Tyrian by birth and so a born trickster? Theodora replied that she knew how to take care of herself and that her only anxiety was about leaving us to manage without her. Off she went; after a couple of amusing notes from cities on the route to Pentapolis, we heard nothing more either from her or about her for a very long time. Then a staff-officer came on leave from Pentapolis and told us that one evening Theodora had lost her temper with Hecebolus, who had tried to keep her in a sort of cage all to himself: she had emptied a pail of slops over him, brocaded tunic and all, as he was dressing for dinner. He had thrown her out of his residence immediately, and refused even to let her remove her few clothes and jewels. The staff-officer believed that she had then persuaded the captain of a vessel to take her to Alexandria in Egypt; but he could tell us nothing further.
    It was a very different Theodora who limped back to Constantinople many months later. The misfortunes prophesied for her by the Syro-Phoenician had been concentrated into a single year, and they had been very bitter ones. Our gay, self-reliant Theodora, who had never failed to tell us her most ludicrous and painful adventures, kept pretty silent on the subject of her experiences in Egypt and her humiliating return journey by way of Caesarea and Antioch and the interior of Asia Minor. We nursed her slowly back to health, but even when she was strong enough, to all physical appearances, she did not feel equal to resuming her work at the club-house. ‘I would rather spin wool all day than begin that life again,’ she cried. Much to our surprise, she actually borrowed a spinning-wheel and began learning to use this melancholy if serviceable instrument in the solitude of her