Atlantis (23 page)

“Her oak has fallen into dust and Erikepaia with it; but never once did the Nymph who had been loved by Pan or the farmer, my poor self, who loved the Nymph that had been loved by Pan, ever think of him save with true worship.”

It was only when Zeuks had finished speaking that the last thing anyone of them expected happened.

The goat-legged Being swung away from Pegasos and
approached
Odysseus. Then with a movement so swift and yet so gentle that Nisos imagined he was lifting the hero’s hand to his lips as a sign that he would himself be his guide to the house of the fugitives from Thebes he bit the king’s hand with such sudden and vicious force that the old man dropped his club to the ground.

In an instant the god was upon the back of Arion, who with mildly startled up-tossed head tore his bridle from Odysseus, and, while what was left of his beautiful black mane was tossed across his rider’s lean, goat-hairy shanks, set off at a gallop in the direction from which they had all just come; but as he rode away, the god of milk and butter and honey looked back over his shoulder at Nisos, as if deliberately wishing to include him also among the victims of his mischievous and shameless amorousness.

“Pegasos has told me,” he cried, “that you’ve left at the palace a sweet little shepherdess called Eione who is just made to delight my simple taste. She’ll suit me better, I fancy, than any
prophetic
daughter of Teiresias!”

Horse and rider, they were soon out of sight; but the shrewd
Zeuks had not missed a swift instinctive move towards Pegasos made by Nisos the moment the goat-horned one flung out that word: “Eione”.

“No, no, my dear boy!” he cried sharply. “’Twould be crazy to try to catch them! And what could you do if you did catch them? All the while I lodged—and in this very place—with Erikepaia, she never once told me of any occasion during the time she was loved by Pan when he made her jealous of a mortal maid.”

He turned to Odysseus with a look of whimsical appeal, which, though it had something at once gravely conspiring and gaily mischievous, contained also an immediate and extremely practical warning. And then, while he kept one hand in kindly restraint on the boy’s shoulder, he boldly laid the other on the Club of Herakles which the king, having picked it up from the ground, had carefully balanced, too absorbed to give it more than a secondary place in his mind, on the unwounded portion of the back of Pegasos.

“Our young friend here, O great king,” protested Zeuks; “is impatient for our return so that he can protect his girl from the advances of this amorous goat-foot; but I tell him that, though, we can wound these immortal creatures and even draw ichor from their veins till they are too weak to move, we cannot plunge them as they can plunge us into that vast company of spirits beyond counting, such as have lately, the rumour runs, broken loose from Hades—into the company of those who can only fly like the flight of birds where no birds are and can only cry like the echoes of voices where no voices are, until the end of time.”

“Let us, O great Master,” begged Nisos, who for all Zeuks’ words could not help vividly visualizing the white soft body of Eione helplessly yielded up to those lean hairy shanks and to those gross bristly lips of the immortal Goat-foot, “pray desperately to Atropos that fate may conquer both necessity and chance and bring us quick, quick, quick, to that House by the Sea whence without delay we can return home! O dear master,
O great king, this, I swear, is what Pegasos wants, for I can feel him trembling and quivering under our hands!”

All the while the boy was making this appeal he was working hard with both his hands to get the great sack of treasure nearer the horse’s tail and further away from its shoulders.

“But, my friends,” groaned Odysseus, raising his bowsprit beard and drawing in his breath towards the four quarters of the horizon one by one. “How, in the name of Pallas Athene, are we to know in what direction this accurst place lies? If only we could hear the sea;
that
would be a surer help than any praying to any goddess of fate.”

For a moment they were all three silent. Then the two men became aware of unrestrained sobs breaking from the throat of Nisos. And for another moment, however intently they listened, that was the only sound.

Suddenly Odysseus murmured, as if thinking aloud: “I have felt
this
happen before, once, twice, three times before! There may be nothing in it; but, on the other hand, it may be—We must doubt everything—
including
doubt.
Yes,
there
!
There it is again! So be it. I can only try.” He lifted the club an inch or two, held it very lightly, and waited again. He held it as if he were testing its weight. He held it so that in its whole length it was removed from contact with the back of Pegasos. Then, still holding it lightly with his right hand, but grasping the horse’s bridle with his left, he began walking rapidly straight past the rock and into what looked like the thickest part of the fir-forest that completely surrounded them. Nisos, lifting his head now, thought silently: “He is making the club lead us! O Atropos, let us get back in time to save her!” The path by which they had come had vanished; and now indeed there was no path at all. But Odysseus led them forward without the faintest hesitation, nor was there any hesitation in the manner in which Pegasos followed, the treasure-sack propt on his rump, and Nisos keeping it from falling, while Zeuks with a large fern in his hand followed close behind, driving the flies from the raw on the horse’s back whence Enorches had wrenched the wing.

Thus they steadily advanced, weaving their way in and out among the closely-growing fir-trees, and every now and then ascending and descending some small eminence usually of a circular shape and not unfrequently crowned with incredibly ancient stones of a kind totally different from any the island itself supplied, and in some cases, Nisos noticed as they passed, engraved with hieroglyphs not one letter of which he could recognize as Achaean or Hellenic.

And as they went on it was still the club of Herakles who led them; and Nisos often wondered whether he himself or Zeuks could have possibly caught, just through the palm of their hand, that subtle, illusive, delicate quiver, like the faint ripple of water seeking its level, by which the club conveyed its intimation of direction to the hand that had blinded Polyphemos.

Meanwhile within his “life-crack”, as to himself the club called their refuge, the silky wings of Pyraust, the brown moth, were fluttering with a desperate desire to fly homewards in the track of Arion and Pan.

“You shan’t! You shan’t! You shan’t!” shrilled the black fly in its highest-pitched voice. “I’d perish before I’d let you do anything so crazy! Don’t you see, you sweet, delectable, adorable, little fool, that the trees are already throwing long shadows, and didn’t you notice that on the crest of that last little hill we crossed the tree-trunks had a golden glow on their bark?”

The lovely little moth hurried to retort to this in an ironic assumption of pitiful weakness and naive innocence that not only made the fly feel a complete fool but removed from his proud heart every drop of that sweet metheglin of male superiority with which he had been intoxicating himself as he pictured their flight home together side by side in the “Wolf-Light” of the early dawn.

“Oh I know, I know,” cried the brown moth, “how lazy and luxurious it is of me to think of flying in the dark. But O it’s so nice, though I know it’s naughty of me to enjoy such a thing, to feel the great big strong black night holding me up on every side and whispering to me all the time: ‘Lean on me and you’ll
be absolutely safe! Spread out your beautiful wings under me and you’ll see how soon you’ll learn to swim with me, ride with me, float with me, yes! you darling little moth, till I fill every nerve beneath your skin, and every pore in your skin, and every cavity in your lovely and trembling form with my calm and cool support!’

“Thus whispers the black night; and nobody can ever know,” continued the subtle and teasing moth, “all that the darkness of night means to me!”

The fly gave such a jerk of metaphysical excitement at this speech that the club’s consciousness of a shock in the “life-crack” of his honeysuckle-twisted or ivy-twisted bosom very nearly
disturbed
the whole piloting of their cortège.

“Why then, O most lovely and bewitching of self-deceivers, do you always try so desperately to burn yourself to death in any flame of light?”

The beautiful moth’s answer to this piece of logic had, however, to be postponed; for it was at that very second that they arrived at the end of the wood. There, before them, lay the salt waves with their islands and ships and rocky reefs and wide-stretching curving bays. And there, beyond all these, in far-away,
vision-fulfilling
, story-ending, mystery-resolving, resting-places for the imagination, the eyes of those three human beings were led further and yet further, to the vast horizons of the encircling sea.

And the great Club of Herakles ceased its rudder-like
quiverings
as impelled by an irresistible impulse Odysseus lifted the great weapon high above his head and shook it in the air as if he, a man among men, were taking it on himself to challenge that golden sun-path which, originating behind him, was now flowing across the darkening waters!

Yes! and to challenge the divine ether itself he lifted it up, the ether under which the sea-spaces before him extended beyond the ships, beyond the islands, beyond the main-land, beyond those far-away Asiatic mountains, on the Eastern verge of the world, where from the image of Niobe, the mother of mankind, fell no longer that ceaseless torrent of tears, and finally to
challenge the very trident of Poseidon himself as he strove to dominate the multitudinous waves.

The two men, the now one-winged horse, the Heraklean club, the two insects, and our young friend Nisos, they were all silent; they were all gazing in front of them. What they saw as they gazed was the ruin of a building so colossal in its pre-historic enormity that the first impression Nisos had of it was that it ought to have sunk down by its own weight thousands of years ago to the very centre of the earth.

But what else did the boy see that made him even forget, as he looked, Eione’s danger from the shaggy lasciviousness of the Goat-foot from Arcadia? He distinctly saw, erect on a huge flat stone under a cyclopean arch, the figure of a young girl, a young girl of about the same age as Eione, though she may have been a little taller, and it seemed to him as if, with an outstretched arm, that figure was waving to him; not to the others, but to him—to him alone.

“But you don’t answer my question, Pontopereia. Why do you keep climbing the tower and looking inland like that? You’re not up to some game with any of these farm-boys round here, are you? I’ve always told you I wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing; so you’d better not begin it.

“I don’t mean that you’re not to climb the tower, child; so you needn’t put on that sulky look. I know you like looking out over the bay and counting the sails and watching for foreign ships. I like doing that myself. Yes I’m always ready to play our old game of pretending we’re waiting for the King of the Blameless Ethiopians; and that when his ship shows itself it will have a black sail, so that we shall know it.

“No, no! You’re not to slip off like that without a word! You’re much too fond of doing that; and I’ve noticed it’s grown on you as a regular habit these Spring days. Of course I know all young girls get Spring-Fever. I used to get it myself. In fact, old as I am, I do still. The wily old Earth-Mother herself must have had it, or something uncommonly like it, when she left her daughter alone with those daffodil-pickers, a proper temptation for the King of Hades. Daffodil-pickers! She had to swallow a few Pomegranate-seeds before she learnt how close lie the borders of Heaven and Hell!

“But you weren’t looking seaward, or counting ships, or
pretending
to be waiting for a black sail. You were staring at those fir-trees and at all those half-bare oaks and at that open clearing on the top of the ridge, where on fine days we can see the Rock of the Nymph of Dryops.

“Have you got into that crazy head of yours that just because I let Eione take you up there when this Moon was young you’ll see that same chit of a dairy-wench waiting for you in the same place now this Moon is old?

“O yes! and another thing, Pontopereia, while I’ve got you to myself; for I don’t know what Zenios would do if he heard of this little new game of yours. Don’t you ever again—yes, you may well steal into the shadow of that Bust of Kadmos!—but you
must
listen to me now, though I can see how white your cheeks have gone and how those clumsy great legs of yours are shivering and shaking!—Don’t you ever again, my girl, go into Zenios’ underground treasury! I expect you’ve so often heard me laugh at the old fool about his pride and his miserliness and about all that nonsense of his being the rightful heir to the throne of Thebes, that you’ve begun to fancy you can play any of your wild-girl games upon the old stick-in-the-mud.

“But I can assure you, my fine girl, that though you may be a prophet’s daughter, and though you may even have prophetic visions of your own, there’s one thing you
can’t
do, and that is meddle with Zenios’ treasure-shelves! Why, my dear crazy child, if he found me—yes,
me
,
my very, very self!—fumbling and
fidgetting, and flopping, and flouncing from shelf to shelf in that treasury of his there’d be a rumpus that would bring Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos up from the fields!

“And do you think he’d put up with a child like you
flibbertigibbetting
down there? I don’t like to try even to think of what he might do—yes! do to you and do to me too for not looking after you better!—for I’ve seen him in these furious moods, which is something you, my good child, have never seen, and I can assure you if you
had
seen him in one of them you’d never again take that silver key from its hook in his bedroom, never again go down those steps to that door.”

It was clear that Pontopereia would be obedient. But it was absolutely certain also that had the inscrutable Atropos met the eyes of this lovely guardian of a clumsy girl at this particular second the woman’s exultation over her victory would have sunk to the vanishing point.

“Where
is
Zenios? Is he coming home to supper?” enquired Pontopereia when she had recovered herself.

“O yes,” replied Okyrhöe, glancing at the reflection of them both in the big polished shield hanging on the wall over their heads, the shield which Zenios always swore had belonged to Kadmos himself, “he’ll be back all right for supper. In fact he’s got to meet that funny old man Moros, your friend Eione’s father or grandfather. I forget which it is! But he’s a quaint old fellow; and he certainly knows how to flatter. Zenios thinks highly of him since he’s ready to listen without end to endless talk about the great House of Kadmos, whence it came, and whither——”

“Whither it’ll go when you and I have escaped from it!” interrupted Pontopereia; and though the girl’s eyes were fixed on the arched entrance to the room where they were talking, an entrance which in some incredible antiquity, had been carved out of ten yards of solid rock, Okyrhöe’s eyes were still absorbed in the reflection of the two of them in that great polished shield. And so intense was the power of concentration with which Okyrhöe’s self-interest had endowed her vision that it seemed to her a quite natural yielding to a quite natural impulse when she
allowed the young girl to steal from her side and slip away in silence through that low deeply-cut arch into the open air, while she watched herself arrange her hair, arrange the veil that covered her hair, arrange what covered the veil that covered her hair, and, as she did so, permitted herself luxuriously and
voluptuously
to lie back in her chair and to tell herself, for the thousandth and one time, the thrilling story of her life up to date and all its drastic moves and dramatic crises.

It must have been her feminine suspicion that Pontopereia had taken advantage of Zenios’ troublesome mania for being flattered to start an amorous affair with some farmer’s son of the
neighbourhood
, or even to exalt this new friendship with Eione into a romantic attachment, that set her own mind running so recklessly upon her own youth.

Anyway she let herself recall the time when, being younger than Pontopereia was today, she had been a fellow-attendant along with Arsinöe among the crowd of spirited young girls from every part of the mainland at the court of King Priam in Ilium.

Her inspiration for these memories came from her own
beautiful
face; and as at this moment, with Zenios walking to meet his aged flatterer and Pontopereia remorsefully pretending to be looking for a black sail on water that was already too dark to reveal any sail, and with Nemertes, the stalwart mother of their three faithful servants, Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos, yes, with Nemertes, she told herself, now at work in the kitchen preparing a plentiful meal for the three lads and a no less plentiful, but rather more elegant one for Zenios and herself, there was no immediate necessity to leave this shield-mirror, she allowed the motions of her fingers, about her head, her hair, and her perfect throat, to follow the arbitrary motions of her memory.

And she remembered how her crafty mother from Crete, who had made her change her name from Genetyllis to Okyrhöe, had warned her against making friends with a wild strange girl at the same court whom everyone but the girl herself knew to be a bastard daughter of Hector.

But with Arsinöe she had insisted on making friends; and had proved her wisdom in this when the crash came and the city was taken, for she succeeded in making Andromache, Hector’s widow, believe that it was she, and not Arsinöe, who had the right to call Hector father, and she had betrayed Arsinöe into the hands of Phoenician merchants bound for Ithaca, and while clinging herself to the ill-starred Andromache, she had succeeded at last in becoming the wife of the miser Zenios, and in aiding him in his flight from Thebes in company with Pontopereia.

It had only been when Zenios in his craving for masculine society had begun to exercise his hospitable influence on the susceptible Moros that Okyrhöe learnt that Arsinöe like herself was a refugee in Ithaca; and although this piece of news had at first been a considerable shock to Okyrhöe, she was now, as she airily, though by no means absent-mindedly, practised various expressions in profile, in three-quarters-face, and in full face, telling herself a fine story as to what she would do if by any strange chance she found herself confronting once again her old acquaintance, Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector the son of Priam….

“Okyrhöe! what do you think? Who do you suppose——” The beautiful lady rose and swung round from her shield-mirror like an indignant sea-mew from the crest of a wave.

The shock of seeing Pontopereia so quickly again and in such an unaccountable whirl of excitement was as irritating as it was startling. The girl had left her at her shield-mirror. The girl now found her at her shield-mirror. There was something annoying in being thus caught practising seductive expressions and the effective manipulation of dramatic drapery.

“How often must I tell you, Pontopereia, that I won’t have you calling me Okyrhöe! You must call me Mother.”

“But you are not——” the girl began; but seeing real anger in the woman’s face she hurriedly broke off. “The King of Ithaca has come, mother! He’s come with a heap of golden treasure to buy me from you and take me away with him!”

The excitement of Pontopereia was so overwhelming that it
seemed to have loosened her hair, enlarged her breasts, increased her height, and transformed her whole being to such an extent that her figure seemed to fill the arched passage that led out into the air. As a growing girl the daughter of Teiresias was at the opposite pole of girlhood from the young Eione: for, while this latter’s face was plain and homely, her limbs were those of a perfect dancer; but while Pontopereia’s limbs were thick, heavy, awkward and unwieldy, her face was moulded with exquisite delicacy as if for the perfect expression of pure inspiration. It was a face that lent itself to be possessed by a power that, even as you watched it, seemed able to change human flesh and blood into some rarer essence, as though air, water, and fire had joined in revolt against the heavier and more substantial fourth element with which they are normally associated.

But though Okyrhöe had already recovered her composure and was now arranging her drapery round her shoulders with the absolute poise of a complete balance of personal being, as she begged the excited girl to tell her how large a bodyguard
Odysseus
had brought with him, and as she shifted her position from side to side in attempts to see if any of the royal attendants were visible between the outlet from this sequestered chamber and the curves of the sand-dunes descending to the edge of the sea, it was clear to Pontopereia that she had not yet decided upon her line of action.

“May I go and bring them in, Mother? And then may I run and tell Zenios who’s come, and bring him back before he’s gone too far? The only danger is that if I do catch up with him—you know what he is, Mother!—he very likely will just come back alone and send me on—miles and miles on very likely!—to tell old Moros that the king has suddenly come to supper and if
he
comes too there’ll be one too many!”

The daughter of Teiresias certainly revealed her insight into Okyrhöe’s nature by assuming that when the lovely lady finally decided in what direction her own chief private interests lay she wouldn’t waste a second in making up her mind what she wanted done.

But what a girl of her age, however great her prophetic
inspiration
, naturally couldn’t know, was the enormous though
imponderable
part played in the lives of all grown-up women by that curious sixth sense that can only be clumsily and crudely defined by the words
social
instinct.
Nor could she know that this same “social instinct” resembles pure animal instinct much closer than it resembles anything rational or logical, and, as such, depends to a large extent on sight, sound, taste, smell and touch.

“Can he possibly remember me?” Okyrhöe thought. Then, having dismissed that idea as out of the question—“Never mind,” she said to herself, “whether he does or not, I remember
him
perfectly well; and I remember that with him, where women are concerned, there are only two things, either simple lust, or simple affection.
That
being so——” And her train of thought concluded with obscene images.

Meanwhile Pontopereia was wondering about the
blood-stained
ichor dripping from the left side of the one-winged horse, wondering about the implacably-pointed beard of Odysseus, pondering on the deeply cracked bosom of the club of Herakles, pondering on the jests and jokes and jibes and jabbering
conjurations
of the jiggering-juggering Zeuks, and finally seeing again the ever-vigilant Nisos with the gods alone knew what sort of precious treasure done up in a sack that reeked of mysterious far-away harbours.

But Okyrhöe had already had time to make up her mind. Like the smoke of a burning arsenal her astounding decision filled the room and went eddying forth in spiral circles over the whole of Ornax and over the dark waters of the whole bay.

“What I’ve got to do is to leave Nemertes to look after Zenios, take Pontopereia with me—by the gods if they want
her
they shall have us both!—go with them to the palace of Odysseus; and, once there, having got rid of the old man’s old nurse, try my hand at being a combination of Kalypso and Penelope; and, as long as Athene leaves me in peace,
that
’ll
be pretty easy!”

“No, child,” she commanded in the strong firm tone of a born
feminine ruler, “No, child, I’ll come with you to welcome them. Oh no! I can’t possibly spare you to run after Zenios. Let him meet old Moros and bring him back. Nemertes must prepare a really royal meal and when Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos have washed and changed their clothes and had their own supper, they must wait at table! So come on, child, we must tell
Nemertes
what’s in store for her. It’s lucky we killed that old boar-pig last week; aye! What a piece of luck
that
is! Nemertes must have enough meat in the larder for three Odysseuses! Well, come along my dear!”

It is certain that the primeval dining-hall of Ornax had never seen such a satisfying feast as the one with which, only a few hours later, the three gratified guests along with their entertainers were delighting their souls.