“By the Gods, this is what I will do!” For some reason he thought at this moment of his dead pet sea-hawk whom he would never behold again; and he also thought — it must have been the idea of his own death that brought such things into his mind — of the old dead Dryad about whom nobody any more seemed to give the least thought. Then he moved towards Akron. But what in heaven’s name was the man doing?
The captain of the “Teras” was indeed acting in a drastic manner. He was slowly and deliberately divesting himself of his clothes, and with the help of Proros and Pontos he was tying round his waist a long rope. Nisos paused for a moment as the East Wind and the Moonlight isolated their intrepid skipper and held him in their crystal embrace, and then to the young man’s spell-bound gaze seemed to plunge with him into the water from a bow-sprit now as bare of ornament as the beard of Odysseus.
On their naked captain now boldly swimming, with the rope behind him passing, as he swam, through the hands of both Proros and Pontos, Nisos saw Odysseus fix a well-pleased and proudly satisfied look, a look that said: “Well done, faithful one!” But the old man was evidently so certain now of the result that he soon turned his gaze back to Pegasos, and to his silent dialogue with Nausikaa, who was now resting as securely on the divine horse’s back as she would soon be doing on her expectant throne in the land of her fathers. Nisos however kept his eyes steadily on that moon-lit swimmer, kept them there indeed till the “Teras”, quickly enough when the man had once climbed out of the water, was strongly and firmly moored to that human-shaped rock on the island of Wone, about fifteen yards inland, and about the same distance from those primeval Beings, who in their “Arima” of a forgotten Past could remember the days before Zeus and his thunderbolts, or the Titans and their mountains piled on mountains, had begun to disturb the world.
“I think, my Lord the King,” Nisos now began, edging himself forward between Pontos and Proros, “that I’ll just run down, if I may, and tell Zeuks that our ship is now safely moored.”
Odysseus however was too absorbed in his final farewell to Nausikaa to hear his youthful adherent’s courteous mutterings; and indeed it was not till Akron was back on the ship and had begun to dress and even to swallow a glass of wine that the casual words: “Just as you like, my son,” came from the old man’s lips.
As he went off Nisos told himself rather crossly and maliciously that at that moment the man’s beard looked as if it were the horn of a sea-unicorn, an appendage which, in the case of this singular marine beast, protrudes not from the creature’s forehead but from beneath its jaws. The absent-minded permission to be, as children say, “excused”, was however, as can be surmised, enough to send our friend hurrying down two ladders and past four oarsmen. “Suppose,” he said to himself, “Zeuks has taken her into Nausikaa’s cabin and is even now enjoying her in that sumptuous bed.”
Nisos knew so little about the actual details of sex-adjustment between boys and girls that he was apt to wander off into completely fanciful paths when he thought of such a thing as the ravishing of Arsinöe by Zeuks. “I shall simply,” he told himself, “hit him with all the strength I have, and if I can’t crack his skull I ought to be able to stun him. But perhaps that might excite Arsinöe’s sympathy. God! I don’t know!”
It happened however, that at the moment when Arsinöe came flying towards him with anything but a desperate cry, with, in fact, a welcoming and laughing salute, he had just bent down to lift up the corner of one of those well-scrubbed planks leading down to the hold; for he had seen a wounded rat with the lower part of its body a mass of crushed flesh and blood feebly moving its front legs down there and making a faint and piteous appeal to an indifferent universe.
“Nisos! My dear, my dear! What is it? O the poor little thing!” And once having embraced the situation she not only allowed Zeuks to overtake her and with some trepidation to salute his rival but she gripped that rival’s arm, and, stooping down beside him, snatched up a piece of broken pottery that some sailor had dropped a minute ago, and in a few well-directed strokes sent the soul of the rat to the kingdom of Aidoneus.
Was it the royal blood of the House of Priam in her veins, pulsing through the cells of her brain, that gave Arsinöe on this occasion so much more spontaneous grace of gesture and so much more swiftness of mental apprehension than was possessed by either the Son of Arcadian Pan or the son of Odysseus, or was it a new feeling in her own heart? Anyway, the rat having been disposed of, there passed between Arsinöe and Nisos, almost as if the dead creature’s blood had brought it about, a strangely swift understanding. This understanding was so deep and complete that our friend Zeuks, while he grew aware of it, found himself, in a manner which if it had been less complete he could never have attained, able to disregard it.
“Excuse me, you two,” he ejaculated casually and carelessly, “if you don’t mind, I’ll rush up now and see what’s been happening. You can follow as leisurely as you like.”
The daughter of Hector smiled at the son of Odysseus; for since a couple of Libyan lads had just scrambled hurriedly past them on the way up, and three elderly sailors had shuffled uneasily past them on the way down, it was clear that however strong their instinct might be to snatch a moment of quiescence at this crisis in their lives, this particular cross-road corner, dominated by the mutilated rat and the piece of broken pottery that had ended its misery, was not a good place to stand aside in out of the mid-current of events.
Arsinöe felt a sensitive woman’s natural reluctance to confuse the background of one man’s love-making with the background of another man’s love-making, so she hesitated about letting Nisos lead her back into the cabin of Eione and Pontopereia, while the one where Nausikaa had recently given herself to the old king struck the Trojan imagination of Hector’s daughter as already dedicated to the heir of the Latin ruler whose New Troy was even then rising upon its Seven Hills.
Thus it was that driven by her own sensitivity to the particular background of any sexual emotion she automatically steered the ardent Nisos towards the ladder leading up to the seats of the oarsmen; and it was upon the oarsmen’s deck, as far as they could withdraw themselves from the great motionless oars of the four rowers, that they threw their arms round each other.
Never in his life had Nisos felt as he did now after they had unclasped their arms and had sunk back against the side of the vessel. He held her by her two hands and with their knees touching he stared at her with vibrant intensity but as if from a tremendous distance. What he was really beginning to approach at that moment was simply and solely the everlasting mystery of the feminine.
And what struck him above everything else in this connection was the fact of the unfathomable and impassable gulf between the whole being of a man and the whole being of a woman. Her bodily life and its particular quality, the physical, chemical, elemental nature of her flesh and blood, was as different from his as was the substance of a fallen star or a meteorite from the stalk of a burdock. “The extraordinary thing about it,” he told himself, “is that this femininity exists in exactly the same things, like hair, and finger-knuckles, and veins, where veins are apparent, and the bones of wrists, and the rounded bones of knee-caps and the curving bones of chin and of jaw, and the more remarkable curves of shoulders, yes! in exactly the same things that in a corresponding manner exist in our male bodies as when I look at Zeuks or Akron or at my own reflection! And yet there is this startling, upsetting, disturbing difference between us!