“Life’s a hard game is what us do think at our end of this rocky isle, and if a girl like our Eione gets through the hard part of being had by a man and the still harder part of having a baby-man, what us do feel, at our end of this funny-shaped island, is that she hasn’t done so badly for herself.”
Having thus spoken Tis looked at his island’s king, seated in the throne of Laertes, and wondered in his insular heart how it was that in so simple a matter as Arcadian Pan’s attraction to Eione and her rural predisposition to his thin goatish shanks compared with the more human limbs of other possible lovers it should have been necessary to have called him from the scullery to set the mind of this strange Theban lady at rest. Did the woman think that compared with the great fashionable courts of the main-land the royal palace-cave of Ithaca was a poor thing, and its girls poor things and its herdsmen uneducated clowns? By Hades! I’d larn her to think poorly of Ithaca if I were Odysseus the son of——
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a crashing fall in the Corridor of the Pillars, the door leading into which had been left ajar.
“See what that was!” commanded the king; while Zeuks, who was beginning to grow sleepy after the well-cooked food and good wine, jerked himself up, and fumbling under his coat for his dagger sat sideways against the back of his chair, watching Tis descend the couple of steps, push open the door, and pass into the corridor. The door swung back and there was silence. Tis wore, for his indoor work in kitchen and scullery his softest sandals; so that the silence round that dining table at this moment was profound.
Then Telemachos deliberately got up. Having risen from his chair he crossed the room as noiselessly as he could. All the while he had been so intensely struggling to get his philosophical ideas into focus so that he might explain them to Pontopereia his eyes had been fixed on an ancient sword suspended from an iron nail in the wall. It was a sword of a completely different make from the sort used by Odysseus. It had been part of a collection of foreign weapons made long ago by the father of Penelope, who, like Zenios of Thebes, was a great picker-up of antiques.
Engraved upon the handle, as Telemachos remembered well from his childhood, was the word “Sidon”; but there had once been a travelling merchant at their table when Telemachos was a little boy who assured Penelope from certain metal-marks he knew that this unusual weapon must have been made in Ecbatana. Of this sword Telemachos now possessed himself; nor did he fail to note with a thrill of more natural and simple pride than he had allowed himself to feel for years—well! anyway since the death of his mother—how firmly and strongly and yet how lightly and easily, he found himself able to wield it.
Without looking at Zeuks, for he kept his eyes on his father with a quaint deprecatory half-smile, he managed somehow to convey to the humorous kidnapper of the divine horses that with two such broad-shouldered men as they were to guard that throne-room neither of the old king’s lady-guests, however attractive, was in any danger of violence to her chastity.
Pontopereia, however, in place of catching such whimsical thoughts from her host’s son, fixed her beautiful eyes upon Zeuks who, although he had screwed his head round against the back of his chair in the hope of being able to follow the movements of Tis in the Corridor, was quite capable of giving her a wink.
Nor was the daughter of Teiresias unaware of all it meant just at that moment to get a wink from “Zeuks of Cuckoo-Hill”, as the king’s mother would certainly have called him, although in reality Cuckoo-Hill never came down as near to the actual harbour as was the man’s dwelling.
But Zeuks’ wink said all that was necessary between them at that particular beat of the pulse of time. It said quite unmistakably: “O no! I know you’ve not forgotten about the pirates strapping us to our chairs and chopping us to bits. And I know you’ve not forgotten the great word prokleesis.”
But Zeuks and Pontopereia were not the only man and woman whose difference of sex was a cause of vivid feeling at that moment. Into the wine-fragrant air about her Okyrhöe was projecting all the seduction she could. In fact she was playing the unmitigated harlot at the expense of the old king. She had not missed his attraction to her specially rounded breasts; and thus, as she kept asking him certain simple and direct questions, questions which she selected for the absence from them of what couldn’t be answered without an effort of thought—questions such as: “What was one of your earliest recollections, great King?”—she took care, in lifting her wine-glass to her lips, to reveal ever so little more of the rondure of one of these same breasts, whose perfect orb, culminating in a nipple as rosy as the wine at her lips, was never wholly revealed or wholly concealed, but was always, like the tip of a coral flagstaff in the heart of a milky isle, being partially glimpsed, to the most exquisite titillation of the old hero’s amorous proclivities.
Telemachos meanwhile, with that remarkable sword in his hand from the collection of his maternal ancestor, continued to lean all his weight upon this rare weapon’s gold-chased handle while he kept his attention absorbed in the effort to get its point firmly lodged in a convenient crack between two flag-stones. Pontopereia, having, so to say, settled her ethical account with Zeuks by a mental obeisance before the word prokleesis in exchange for a wink of recognition that if philosophy didn’t bring the sexes together it wasn’t of much use to mankind, had suddenly grown aware that by tilting herself a bit to one side and, though her chair was too heavy to be moved, by resting her weight on her left buttock, she could glimpse quite clearly at the end of the Corridor of Pillars the broad back of the spell-bound Tis.
“What on earth is the fellow staring at?” she asked herself. “Is someone lying dead at his feet? Has he killed some intruder—the first of Zeuks’ pirates to enter the palace?”
Tis was undoubtedly—she could divine that much from the general pose of his figure—a trifle scared as well as intensely interested and arrested; and Pontopereia, herself stiff with nervous excitement, breathed quickly as she watched him. While all this was going on, little old Eurycleia, who, under all her weight of years, moved as lightly as Atropos, the oldest, smallest, but most to be feared and most to be relied upon of all the Fates, was now leaning against the door-post of the interior entrance to the dining-hall. Her expression as she leant there was one of concern but it was not an expression of alarm. Nor was it an expression of tremulous or jumpy nerves.
What her face showed was pure and simple annoyance. The old nurse felt indignant. Indeed you might say she felt extremely angry. For two, if not for three generations she had been compelled to behold her own peculiar and special world crumble down. She did not see it fall with a crash. She saw it disintegrate and crumble down. And she saw this happen without being able to lift a finger to stop it. What she was doing now was typical of the whole situation. She was simply standing with her back against the cold stones of the passage wall just as if they, these inanimate fragments of flint and quartz and these bits of chilly marble were arrogantly and in a new kind of contemptuous aristocratic haughtiness cold-shouldering her into an oblivious grave.
All this waiting lasted for a far less space of time than it takes to describe the emotions of the persons who were waiting; and when the waiting ended, the general relief that everybody felt, though great enough, was not as heavenly as it would have been had the thoughts and feelings involved gone on for as long as any chronicler, using those unwieldy hieroglyphs we call “words” to inscribe them, was bound to go on.
Whether it was a real son of Hephaistos who had carved the letters “U” for uios, and “H” for the aspirated vowel at the beginning of the name of the great god of fire, nobody could ever be absolutely sure, but that the Pillar on which those letters were engraved had had breathed into it some sort of sub-human or super-human consciousness was undeniable.
And at this particular veering between serious apprehension and immense relief it was given to the consciousness of the Pillar to note the difference between the attitudes to life and death of the three men i
n that dining-hall; how Odysseus never gave to either life or death a single thought, pondering only and solely on how best to carry out his immediate purpose, how Telemachos, although temperamentally longing to be quit of the whole business, kept forcing himself to retain, with regard to the meaning of life, and with regard to the question whether there was any life for the individual soul after its body was dead, a position of rigid agnosticism; and finally how Zeuks with his motto of Prokleesis or “defiance” and his practice of Terpsis or “enjoyment” held strongly to the annihilation of the soul with the death of the body.
Shamelessly chuckling, as he had seldom dared to do in the presence of Odysseus, and never before had done in the presence of lady-visitors to the palace, Tis came back into the dining-hall from the Corridor, and at the sight of him the whole company except Odysseus and Okyrhöe moved forward to learn what had caused that resounding crash. There was now no physical barrier between the king on his throne with his wine-cup in his hand and the low arch at the end of the Corridor of Pillars that led out into the olive-garden, out into the grave-yard of the slaves, and out into the darkness of night.
“It were thee wone club what fell, my King,” explained Tis, as having mounted the two marble steps that led into the hall he advanced towards the foot of the throne; “and it did strike me silly old mind, as I did see the waves of darkness pouring in at far end, and these here lights of banquet pouring out at near end, that if us were all lying in the dirt, man-deep, under they olive-stumps outside thik arch, ’stead of meat-dazed and urine-dizzened inside these here luscious walls, that what made the old club fall was fear of summat happening to all on us when this night’s over and we get the people’s word at the ‘agora’!
“To say the truth I felt durned funny, my king, just now, when I seed thee’s girt club lying face-down on they stones near olive-branch what have come up bold and straight, as you might say, out of floor!”
The first thought of Odysseus, when he heard all this, was the entirely practical and personal one of making sure that his most useful weapon was in its usual place and ready to his hand when needed.
“You propped it up again exactly where it always used to be, I hope—I mean between those bits of white stone in the wall?”
“Sure I did, my King, sure I did! Club do now bide exactly where club always did bide; I reckon about five feet away from that there up-growing olive-shoot.”
And then, when Odysseus had nodded his obvious satisfaction at this statement, and when Telemachos had re-hung the antique sword picked up by his grand-dad upon its nail and resumed his seat, and when the combined voices of Tis and Eurycleia had died away in lively comment upon the club’s fall as the speakers withdrew into the kitchen, it was left to Zeuks to swing the conversation back to the extraordinary expedition which the dead Dryad had originated.
“I’ve heard from some quarter,” he told them all, “that the hundred-armed Monsters, Briareos, Kottos, and Gyes are now swimming about in the sunken cities of Atlantis, feeding upon the innumerable corpses of their drowned populations; and, do you know, the idea has crossed my mind that what the dead Dryad really hoped to bring about was that Typhon should join them down there. But how a fire-breathing creature like Typhon could live under water like those Monsters is as much beyond my comprehension as——”
“As many other things, Master Zeuks!” murmured Okyrhöe with her silvery laugh. And it was during the general amusement that followed this sally that the Fly, having rejoined the Moth in their usual retreat, which was now safely propped up again, implored his lovely friend to listen intently. “For,” said he, “the Pillar is now telling the club what is happening down there.”
“You mean down in Atlantis?” enquired the Moth.
“Certainly I do,” replied the Fly. “For you mustn’t be so absurdly man-loving as to think that because the human population of a continent is drowned with that continent, nothing interesting can go on down there any more. There are the fish, my pretty one, there are the fish. Do try to realize that life doesn’t end, Pyraust darling, when the human race ends. There are philosophers in the world—I won’t at this moment emphasize their names or their species—who hold the view that it will only be when the tribes of mortal men are sunk into complete oblivion that the real drama of the Cosmos will properly begin.”
“But,” whispered the Moth anxiously, “and forgive my stupidity if this is a silly question, what I cannot see is how this drama of the future will be recorded if there’s nobody to record it.”
“Unrecorded things are as important as recorded things,” said the Fly.
“But who hears of them?” commented the Moth sadly.
CHAPTER VIII
“How many are they?”
“How many of what, my beautiful one? Are you speaking of sea-gulls or crows?”
“People of course!” answered the Moth irritably. “Did you think I meant flies?”
“You’d have to count me out if you did,” replied her friend grimly. “For I don’t, and I believe it is a peculiarity shared by most of my species, at any rate those of the male sex, at all like being included in any plural category. Yes, indeed, my lovely one, I believe you’ll find, as your experience thickens and your years increase, that you’ll seldom meet a male who isn’t at heart, though under various circumstances he may not appear so, an ingrained individualist. When I was younger I used to flirt with the wanton notion that to be really ourselves we had to move about in circles. I also played with the spiritual thought, as I understand they call it, that only when there are two or three of us the wind can be cozened and coaxed and cajoled to carry us to particular places, to certain river-banks, for instance, and to certain ponds full of special sorts of rushes, where we can find those extra delicate morsels of refreshment which our exacting senses crave.
“But after all the horrors I’ve seen, and after all the dangers from which I’ve been saved only by my constant and obsequious flattery of the goddess of Chance, I have learnt the supreme lesson of my life, that there is only one thing upon which a Fly can depend, namely himself.”
“Do look what a lot of people there are! There must be more than a thousand! A thousand warriors who are skilled with the spear, not counting women and children!”
It was clear to the fly that his emotional friend was so hopelessly impressed by the number of the listeners that no appeal to reason was possible. So, giving it up, he confined himself to gazing out of the club’s “life-crack” at that awe-inspired mass of islanders and to endeavouring to follow the words of the orator. This shepherd of the people was none other than Nisos’ Father, Krateros Naubolides, who, mounted on an extremely old-fashioned and extremely shaky platform that had been erected by democratic settlers in Ithaca some sixty odd years ago, with the glittering marble Temple of Athene to its West and the deep blue water of the bay to its East, was explaining in a rough homely directness of speech, whose lack of intellectual subtlety and manifest honesty of feeling made his argument formidable, how bad for them it would be to use up all their precious sail-cloth, this divine “othonia” that took such expense to grow, such trouble to weave, and such art to prepare, for the ill-advised and indeed the absolutely crazy purpose of seeing off their aged and infirm king, in times when all experienced rulers were needed at home, on a wild fantastic voyage of his own eccentric fancy.
“It is our King’s actual presence,” Krateros bluntly and crudely shouted, “that we need at this juncture of our Island’s life, not some fabulous glory from a mad adventure undertaken in a demented old warrior’s last days!”
It was clear to the attentive fly that these rough and rude words uttered by a farmer, whose local breed was a good deal more purely local and insular than was that of Odysseus, was making a deep impression upon those among the islanders, both men and women, who were near enough to hear him; for they kept turning their heads to look at one another, and a considerable number of them actually clashed their brazen-pointed spears together in more than o
rdinary agreement.
Indeed the speaker himself, as the fly could catch in the tone of his voice, took it to be an indication that they were prepared, if this doting old hero went on insisting on his mad scheme, to rise in arms and dethrone both him and his philosophy-besotted son in favour of the more sensible if more insular stock of the House of Naubolides itself.
It was evident to Pontopereia that Odysseus was watching the assembly with inexhaustible attention, and was making, the girl decided, some special calculation with regard, not only to numbers and weapons, but to the quality and significance of the various farming families who were gathered here today, even if some were only represented by a male spearman whose relatives were all on the mainland. He had not dared to change the place of meeting and the girl could clearly see what were the chief impediments to this sort of democratic assembly in an “agora” that was at once old-fashioned in an unseemly, ramshackle, slovenly way, and modernistic in a cold, remote, indifferent way. For one thing, she noticed that however forcibly Odysseus had just now pressed his demand upon them for contributions of sail-cloth as if he were exacting the payment of tribute, it was only those quite near who could catch what he meant because of the purer language he used.
She noticed too that although Krateros Naubolides made himself heard, the agitation he created by the rough boldness of his rejection of the old king’s claim was so great that little groups of men from nearby positions kept hurrying to further-off vantage-grounds where they would ardently enlarge on what had been said.
No sooner had the Father of our young friend Nisos Naubolides swung himself down from the platform of his Ithacan “agora”, an erection that was really much too high to be a suitable speaking-place, than there ensued a rushing to and fro that made of the whole assembly a confusing if not a confounding hubbub of human bodies and human voices.
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