“And all this is quite apart from the fatal, everlasting, tragic difference in bodily shape, which has to do with a girl’s breasts and hips and all her softer and more undulating curves.” So Nisos thought; and the more he gazed at her in this curious, special way the more did this mystery of her femininity grow upon him and envelope him. “What is it? What is it? What is it?” The spirit within him called aloud. But as he gave himself up to her he ceased to look at her. What he was now looking at were not the round knee-caps against which his own hard bare knees were pressed, but what seemed in that dim light to be a small ivory box or bottle — he couldn’t be quite sure which it was, but he leaned to the view that it was an ivory box — out of which Euros kept shaking certain small, pearly shells upon a square wooden tray and examining them with extreme care as they lay side by side, before he gathered them up and shovelled them back into their glittering container.
Arsinöe herself was in the vague, dreamy, passive, resigned mood which had been her only happy mood for many a long year. She hadn’t made friends with Zeuks in the way Eione had done with Arcadian Pan. But to be the son of a god is a very different thing from being a god. Besides, the great love-affair of Arsinöe’s life had been her devotion to her father Hector, a devotion that couldn’t have been tenderer or more ardent if Hector had responded to it but all he did was to take her away from her nameless mother and place her under the care of his wife Andromache.
On this deck of the oarsmen they could only embrace with their eyes a very narrow space of sky; so that neither of them had the least idea whether Pegasos had or had not spread his wings. The Trojan girl had really come to like Nisos quite a good deal and to feel a solid trust in him; but if some woman-friend had asked her point-blank: “What do you feel for this kid?” she would have probably revealed the truth that she felt a strong protective instinct for him and a desire to look after him. She would in all probability have made her woman-friend laugh, if she had not started a regular giggling-fit between them, by confessing that there had been moments of late, since she had known him better, when she had got the same sort of pleasure from his company as she used to get when she played with a special boy-doll of hers she was accustomed to call Ottatos.
Whether characteristic or not of the difference between the sexes in every human tribe beneath the sun, this interlude, or siesta, or metaphysical sticking-place in the dramatic story of the “Teras” or “Ship of Marvels”, was a noteworthy experience for Nisos whatever it may have been for Arsinöe.
It struck him very forcibly that the extraordinary good luck — and he prayed it really was, from whatever far distance flung, the impact of the wisdom of that wisest of all old little maids his ancient patroness “Atropos” that had brought it about — of his having been thrown into contact with this Trojan captive was the greatest event in his whole life.
And it was so because, since his own entire intention was to be a prophet when he became a mature man, the last thing he wanted for his companion through life was an energetic, assiduous, industrious, conscientious, formidable, inexhaustibly active and indefatigably competent. What Nisos wanted or some would prefer to say needed, was someone whose whole nature had the unusual power of being able to devote itself to the one perfectly simple and mysteriously wise act of drifting. Such an one, whether a man or woman, is able to act in a heart-whole and independent way only once in their life; but this act is the infinitely complicated one of stripping themselves stark naked, diving into the deep salt sea and there drifting wherever the tide carries them.
Compared with the people who put purpose after purpose before them and continue struggling energetically until they attain each of these purposes, these once-acting, once-stripping themselves, once-diving into the deep-sea Drifters seem allowed by Atropos the privilege of being porous to more than one universe and being aware of more than one Space and of more than one Time.
Yes! The winds of a million systems of things blow across them and one infinity calls to another infinity through them. And the singular thing is that among male children only those who are lucky enough to be born under the special inspiration of that funny little goddess, the old maid Atropos, whose abysmal intelligence has not been killed either by child-bearing or by playing the bitch, know that for life to be life and for the universe to be the universe it is essential that there shall be two embodiments of womankind. Each of these embodiments must have that everlasting mystery in her skin, in her flesh, in her hair, in her bones, in her milk, in her milt, in her mensuration as well as in her mind. But the one must be actively competent and divinely creative, the other incompetent and divinely passive. Nisos felt no longing for a mate who was protective of offspring and eternally producing offspring and keeping the human race alive upon this earth. It was the second type of female, the type protective of dreams and fancies and wishes and longings and illusions and imaginations, and ideals, and rebellions, and destructions, and insurrections, and redemptions, and recoveries, and re-births, and by means of all these things eternally changing the movements and explorations of the energy of life from one generation to another, towards which he felt drawn.
“What is it,” he asked himself, at that crucial moment, “that this Trojan girl has got in her that neither Tis’s little sister nor the daughter of Teiresias possess, but which I must have if I’m to be happy in my choice?”
It was at that very pulse-beat of Time that the young man became suddenly aware that Arsinöe was watching him with concentrated attention. Previous to this moment she had preserved the same friendly passivity that had always been her mood with Zeuks and had lasted throughout his recent amorous handling of her. But something, whether a flicker of romantic seriousness passing across the face of Nisos, or some thought or feeling of her own that may very well have reached her from the psychic work-shop of Atropos had suddenly drawn the girl nearer to the young man.
Nor was he oblivious of this change in her. But the curious thing was that while each of her successive moods, favourable to him or unfavourable to him, were of startling and piercing importance to herself while they lasted, to him, as he watched them come and go, they seemed, each of them in its entirety and intensity, so much a part of her that they endeared her to him in absolute remoteness from their tone, whether for him or against him, in relation to himself.
What particularly struck him at that moment was an odd relief that she was neither as pretty as his friend Tis’s little sister, Eione, nor as beautiful as Teiresias’ daughter, Pontopereia. “Your preciousness to me, my dear,” he told her in his heart, “is that you are not particularly graceful like Eione or particularly intellectual like Pontopereia, but just simply a sweet-natured extremely feminine woman whom fate has handed over to me for my very own and who has come to entirely belong to me and to no other man in the whole world. It’s because you’re completely and entirely mine,” so his improper, indecent, and outrageous thoughts ran on, “that you’re so entrancingly lovely. What I worship, what I have always worshipped, ever since as a little boy I had a laurel stick called ‘Sacred’, which, though it hadn’t any vital crack dividing its breast and supplying moths and flies and gnats and midges with a refuge from wind and rain, had one end resembling an idol’s head and another end resembling a dragon’s tail, is some object, possessed of an individuality that separates it from everything else in the world, and yet which is absolutely and entirely my very own, not to be shared in any way at all with anyone else. You are mine, aren’t you, you tender, soft, mysterious subtle, enduring, unique creature? Gods in Heaven! if you weren’t, I’d be so alone in this mad, aching, bruising, biting, scratching, stinging cosmos that I wouldn’t care what happened to me! It’s having found you, and having got you as both my idol and as my secret private personal toy that makes you what from now on you’ll always—”