“Shut your eyes, darling!” murmured the fly to the moth, “for our ‘cosmos’, or whatever you call our old club, is going to hit this Science-Horror pretty heavily, furiously, bloodily, murderously on the head!”
Nisos was so close to the “life-crack” within the club’s bosom that in the dead silence following the voice from that terribly beautiful countenance he couldn’t help catching, as the adverb-loaded buzz of the fly ceased, the moth’s contribution to the crisis, which, as can be imagined, was contained in two monosyllabic sighs—“priest”—“death”. But such was his sympathy with the club’s emotion that the boy now deliberately removed his hand. “Like son, like father,” might have been a proverb among flies, for Odysseus also completely relaxed his hold upon the club. Whether the savour of “poisonous brass and metal sick” from the brazen club held by the kneeling Orion, who with his height thus reduced by half was still taller by a head than the father and son who were on their feet, had anything to do with the violence of its wooden rival neither Odysseus or Nisos ever knew; and the bronze and the wooden weapon never met again. But, after a desperate, whirling circle, the self-brandished pine-tree-stump from that Nemean wood crashed down head-foremost full into the forehead of the mysterious Being on that seaweed heap, breaking its skull to bits.
And, not content with this, the self-moved slayer of the Nemean Lion, just as if a ghost or “eidolon” of Herakles himself, wrenched forth from the dead past of that hero’s madness, had been wielding him, continued to strike at that indescribably beautiful and majestic face, till there was nothing left but a revolting mixture of blood, flesh, bones, seaweed and sand, streaked with filthily bedaubed tufts of hair.
The whole business was over and the gigantic Orion with his club of bronze was already striding off, without a word to Odysseus, in a south-westerly direction whence he must have caught, on some far-carried stir of the waters, a trailing cloud-wisp of Typhon’s breath, when a couple of Dolphins, a great deal larger than the one that had carried Atropos, but evidently, Nisos quickly told himself, sent to their aid by that timely-interfering Mistress of Particular Destinies, stopped with a slant-sliding pause of their triumphant witchery of movement close by their very side.
On the backs of these elegant sea-horses it was not long before it was possible for them to see, on rising to the ocean’s surface pretty well in the identical place where they dived down, the familiar single mast and complicated rigging of the “Teras”, not to speak of those tall, weird, eternally arguing goddesses “of an infant world”, Eurybia and Echidna, who still stood, disputing with each other as to what was happening on earth at this crucial time, disputing with each other in their new “Arima”, near to the Atlas-shaped rock to which the “Teras” was moored.
“Look! O my father! Look, for the sake of Aidoneus and Persephoneia, look! It is gone!” Gasping and spitting out the water from his throat and stomach, Nisos, keeping himself afloat with both legs and one arm, for their Dolphin-steeds were soon a mile away, shouted this news to Odysseus, to whom the watchful Akron had already thrown a rope.
Turning his steady gaze as well as his bowsprit-beard towards his son, the old adventurer, who with Akron’s help was only using his left hand to climb on deck while under his left arm the club of Herakles was squeezed against his ribs, signed to Nisos, who was treading water in an unruffled sunlit sea, to detach from his shoulder, as he himself with his right hand was now detaching from his head the Helmet of Proteus.
The sight that had made the youth utter that cry was nothing less than the complete disappearance of the figure-head of the “Teras” so long renowned in all the harbours of all the Islands. “There’s something here,” the boy told himself, as he watched the Helmet of Proteus with its elaborate apparatus of hollow cords, sink out of sight, “that deserves more thought than I can give it till I’m warm and dry.”
But as in his turn he was helped by Akron to reach the “Teras’” top deck he couldn’t help wondering why it had been necessary to sacrifice this elaborately worked-out method of remaining for an indefinite time beneath the ocean.
“That awful Being,” he said to himself, “had certainly no sympathy with anybody or anything. We were all the same to it! It would cut to bits, it would burn to cinders, a hero, a lion, a dolphin, a bird, a frog, a worm, a maggot, a flea. And all this to understand life!
“It didn’t enjoy anything, or like anything, or admire anything, or pity anything. And yet it wanted to explore everything and understand everything. What a perfectly appalling way of understanding things! All it could understand of anything was how that ‘anything’ reacted to torture and compulsion. Well, welclass="underline" I have learnt from the bottom of the ocean even more than from the ancient and adverbial language of flies. I now know what I shall be a prophet of when I am a man. I’ll be a prophet for the putting of Science in its place! And what is its place? Its place is the servant, not the master, of life, the friendly ‘doulos’, or obedient slave of living things, not their pitiless ‘basileus’, or ‘royal despot’.”
That day, with all the following days for several months, turned out to be one of the happiest epochs in the whole life of Nisos, the son of Odysseus. He grew more devoted to Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector, than he had ever imagined that it was possible for him to be to any girl. In a physical sense, in a romantic sense, in a psychic sense she appealed to him; and on her side all she had endured in her captivity had left her with so much subtle knowledge of the pathetic simplicity of masculine self-esteem that not the most teasing obstacles, the most stupid jealousies, the most ridiculous suspicions, the most childish egotisms, could spoil for her what she saw of honesty, loyalty, and simplicity in her boy-lover’s nature.
He also came to understand Odysseus as he had never dared to hope was possible; but it was not so much the mental enlightenment he got of the great Adventurer’s character as the simply boyish delight in the endless stories the old man would tell out of his inexhaustible memory, as they sat together under that single mast and outstretched sail in the most fortunate wind that ever wafted a vessel towards an unknown, but O! so passionately imagined, shore!
What was most fascinating of all perhaps to the boy was the way the old man would correct and qualify, and sometimes event indignantly contradict, the ballad ditties that had already been scattered abroad throughout Hellas about so many of his exploits. Of these ballad-tales Odysseus hesitated not to explain to his son that the ones about the Trojan War itself were far grander as poetry than the more modern and more domestic ones, full, though these latter were, of the realism of daily life, and more concerned with his own private and particular experiences.