Atlantis (32 page)

Having completed his discourse Telemachos gave Pontopereia a hurried smile and a friendly but rather stiff little bow and once again, as at the beginning of his words, turned his head and glanced hurriedly and a little apprehensively at his father. Pontopereia missed nothing of these two motions; and from the nature of his smile, and from the quality of that respectful little obeisance addressed to herself, she clearly took in, as it can be believed the sharp-witted Okyrhöe did also, more of the man’s own essential character than was revealed in the vague and obscure method of philosophizing he had been at such pains to advocate.

Telemachos had his father’s massive, clear-cut, majestic, and severe cast of features. Where the general outline of their faces differed, apart from the fact that the old hero had a beard while his son was clean-shaved, was that Odysseus’s features were rugged and rock-like while Telemachos’s were like smoothly polished marble. Of the two of them, the son was the handsomer, the father the more easy-going, humorous and informal.

As you looked at the two of them you could see the effect of the fact that the father’s life had been passed, and was still being passed, in a constant and lively stream of contact with friends and enemies, while the son’s was now being divided between solitary walks along the edge of the sea and meditations in a small chamber surrounded by deep recesses full of
parchment-rolls
, either inscribed by the careful fingers and the exquisitely prepared pigments of ancient Sumeria, or by the less careful and much more daring imagination of the artists of Crete.

Telemachos could have devoted the closing periods of his discourse to an eloquent analysis of the nature of the cosmos, and of the part played in that nature by the four elements, as well as by the souls of the living entities, who are, as he explained, urging and driving and steering forward the whole body of life, and he probably would have done so, had he not suddenly felt in the depths of his being an inexpressible longing to escape from the whole business; not only from the urging and driving and stirring, not only from the desperate willing and the heroic share, if only an infinitesimal share, in the creation of the future, but from the things in themselves; yes! from the ancient earth herself, mother of us all, from the sun and the moon and the stars and from the divine ether;—from it all, from it all, from it all!

Yes, at that moment with everything that was deepest in his nature he wanted to escape from the whole struggle of life. Life from the start had been to him more of an effort than a pleasure. The fact of his childhood and boyhood having been passed in the absence of his father and in the invasion of their rock-palace by those insolent suitors had inflicted a bruise, a discoloration, upon his whole nature from which it had never entirely recovered.

Something about the gesture with which he now put both his elbows on the table and rested his forehead on his hands was in no wise missed by Okyrhöe, who was not at all anxious that this meal, so luckily, dexterously, and crucially arranged, if only by pure chance, should break up without certain definite
advantages
for herself having been established.

“What,” she enquired suddenly of Telemachos, “is your feeling about this curious ride of Eione with Arcadian Pan on the backs of Pegasos and Arion, and carrying with them Echidna and Eurybia? The whole idea of it, they tell me, was of the old Dryad’s urging and it seems that she and her oak-tree have together paid the penalty. But why Zeus should have been angry if the object of the ride was to intercept Typhon I fail to see. Your father has explained—haven’t you, my King?—what an event in the history of Ithaca it is, this departure from Arima, well! from our whole island, of these two strange Beings.

“But what, I confess, puzzles me still, my Lord Telemachos, is this; and upon this I would like to hear your opinion. Are we to assume from the fact that Arcadian Pan and the girl Eione have gone off together that between this sweet-natured young creature and the goat-foot god there is, from now on, an
authentic
love-affair?

“Under ordinary conditions I am not inquisitive; and I know your father, our venerated King here, would not wish any of us to ask impertinent questions in these personal matters; but this is a most extraordinary and unusual expedition including not only Arcadian Pan but two powerful goddesses, one of them Eurybia, daughter of Gaia and Pontos and sister of Phorkys and of Nereus, and the other Echidna, who is said to have given birth to the Hydra of Lerna by this very same Typhon whom they are intending to waylay.

“In the first place, my Lord Telemachos, what puzzles me is that the ancient Dame of whom I caught a glimpse just now, and with whom I had the honour of a brief conversation when your revered Father took me into her presence, I am speaking of course of your old family-nurse, should have allowed a girl as young as Eione to go off on this wild adventure alone with Arcadian Pan and those two terrifying Goddesses who no doubt ruled over Ithaca and Achaea and Argos and Boeotia and Lakedaimon in the primeval far-away times before our mother the Earth gave birth to the Gods or the Titans or even to the mortal or immortal nymphs.

“In Thebes where my youth was spent a girl as young as Eione would still be in the care of her parents. Are your customs in this Island of Ithaca completely different from those on the mainland?”

There was a general silence. With what was quite clearly the faintest possible flickering of a smile at the left corner of his crafty mouth and with what was a definite movement of his beard in the direction of the Corridor of the Pillars, Odysseus saved his son, whom these significant questions had obviously embarrassed a good deal, from having to be the interpreter
of local custom, by making use of the most primitive and also the most royal of all forms of summons.

Loudly, vigorously, and several times, he clapped his hands. Had he been a King in Jerusalem, or a Pharaoh in Egypt, he could not have clapped his hands with quicker effect. All the four guests present at that table, Telemachos, Zeuks, Okyrhöe, Pontopereia; not to speak of the attendants, including Arsinöe, who were holding wine-jugs and water-bottles and bread-platters behind the backs of these four persons, became as alert as if they expected this startling and oriental summons to result in the appearance of a troop of Harpies.

But, after a deep silence, the husky, hoarse voice of the old Nurse Eurycleia was heard from the end of the long dark passage leading to the kitchen. “What do you want?” were the direct and downright words that reached their ears.

“Send up Tis,” was the king’s imperative answer; and when Tis arrived, clearly somewhat disturbed and uncomfortable, Odysseus told him with a rough, humorous, blunt emphasis upon the word
maid
,
to explain to the Lady Okyrhöe from Thebes how it was that he allowed a maid as young as Eione to go off on such an adventurous excursion alone with Arcadian Pan and two such formidable goddesses as Eurybia and Echidna.

Tis came forward to the left of the king’s chair upon the arm of which he boldly rested his hand as he spoke. It was as clear to Okyrhöe and Pontopereia as it was to Zeuks that he was accustomed to doing this, and although feeling awkward and uncomfortable was so thoroughly used to speaking his mind before Odysseus that he was by no means tonguetied in the king’s presence or in the presence of any guests.

“My little sister,” he said, “like the rest of us, has been brought up to take care of herself. We have never been people to be afraid of the gods and where there are a lot of sheep-folds there have always been occasional visits from the great god Pan who likes the company of mortal girls as much as he likes the company of mortal or immortal Nymphs. My little sister Eione has always looked after her maidenhead shrewdly enough as
well as briskly and boldly among the lads of the farms round us. So at our end of the island, if you understand, we would never be worried or scared if a sister of ours made friends with Arcadian Pan. Us all do know, ye must understand, that ’tis natural for Arcadian Pan to want a maid like she, and us all do know too that if Arcadian Pan did take she’s maidenhead, and she did bear a child to he, that child would be, whether it were a
he-child
or a she-child, half a god and half of an ordinary person; and what we do feel at our end of this dumb little island is that when once a girl has got through her labour-pains and has laid her baby, whether that baby be a man-child or a god-child, a mortal child or an immortal child, safe on the steps of the altar, she’s done pretty well for herself and has got a very nice start in life.

“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.