“O my child, my child,” she murmured. “Say the words, only say the words, and I will help you to the limit of my power and — and—” Here the old lady broke off, under the strength of her emotion. “—and beyond the limit!” she added in a gasping whisper.
“You mean, my dear friend,” said Odysseus quietly, “that by the laws of decency and order that the world owes to Themis and to which Zeus himself bows, it would be improper for you, a mortal Nymph, to help me, a mortal man, before I had prayed and implored you to do so?”
The Dryad nodded furiously. “And we are further,” he went on, “since both of us are doomed to die, we are further obligated by the ineluctable courtesies of the cosmos to accept whatever comes of such an appeal for help made by a mortal man to a mortal Nymph? Isn’t that so, old friend?”
And once more the Dryad nodded; but this time resignedly rather than passionately.
“Well then, old sweetheart,” the crafty hero concluded, “I do most earnestly beg your help in this difficult situation, but unluckily”—and it would have been clear enough to Penelope, had it been she who was just then listening to the old king, that this heroic courtesy in face of the unregulated chaos of life was extremely unpalatable to the old creature to whom it was offered—“it looks to me as if, since I am a man who cannot escape death, by reason of my association with the body of my mother, and since you are not one of these immortal nymphs of fountain and grove and cave and river but like myself are doomed to old age, it seems that even working together we shall find it no easy task to get out of this appalling dilemma: but easy or hard, I will lay it before you, old friend, exactly as it is.”
He made a sign with his hand towards a large mossy stone a few paces to the North of her decayed and crumbling tree-trunk; and here they both sat down. “I understand from Eurycleia,” he went on, “and she of course gets all her knowledge of the tricks of our enemies from”—but catching a look on his companion’s face that he knew only too well, Odysseus interrupted his appeal for help and his tale of difficulties by reminding the Dryad that the aged Eurycleia was being assisted in the palace by the boy Nisos who was the younger son of Krateros Naubolides, the chief enemy of their House, as well as by the simple-minded maiden Leipephile who was betrothed to Krateros’ elder son.
“You see, old friend, we over-praised warriors of the last war before the last, are reduced, when our hoards of golden loot are exhausted, to living upon our native acres with very scanty attendants and upon pretty meagre fare, and if among these attendants there are some like the girl Arsinöe, who are captives of our bow and our spear, most of them are no different from the ordinary retainers of any well-do-do landowner.”
What he had seen in his old friend’s face that led him into reminding her of all this was a dark-scaled shadow of coiling jealousy that at the mention of Eurycleia’s name rose like the crest of a venomous tree-toad into the Dryad’s eyes.
But he hurried on now, speaking much faster, and clearly hoping by the mere rush of his words to drive back this moribund demon into its hiding-place amid the rotting roots of ancient hate.
“What I’ve decided to do now, my friend, is what I’ve been planning in the marrow of my bones for many and many a day; yes! you can guess what I mean. I’ve decided to call such an assembly of the men of Ithaca as there has not been for twenty years! To this assembly held in the agora, just as was the one about which they’ve so often told me when Telemachos made his great speech — and it’s ironical to think how absolutely impossible it is even to imagine his making a speech like that today — I’ve decided to appeal in person on behalf of my desire to hoist sail for the last time. I’ve decided to implore the people to help me finish the ship I’ve begun in the Cave of the Naiads. I’ve decided to implore them to furnish me with all the sail-cloth I need.
“And with this sail-cloth I shall hoist upon a mighty mast such a sail as has never been seen before upon any sea.”
They were seated so close to each other on that mossy stone that each of them was conscious of the smell of the other’s skin. The skin of Odysseus smelt in the nostrils of the old Dryad like a particular kind of sea-weed she was always especially anxious to keep from encroaching upon one of her favourite rock-pools where an uncultivated tract of land to the north of her dying oak-tree bordered on the sea.
The skin of the Dryad on the contrary smelt in the nostrils of the old king like an especially rare and fragrant fungus that grew out of the bark of the most ancient stumps of long dead trees.
Neither of the two old friends suffered the least distress from this vivid consciousness of the smell of the other’s skin. In fact a very curious phenomenon was the result of this mutual awareness, a sensuous result and a psychic result, and a result which gave each of them a peculiar pleasure. The fact is that from now on they would both enjoy summoning back at will, from, below their most sacred and secret shrines of intimately erotic “pot-pourri”, the separate smells of their separate skins fused together in one delicately united smell which was neither that of sea-weed nor of fungus but rather of those divine rock-roses of the land of the Graiai, the land that is called Kisthene, and that lies beyond Okeanos.
It was the Dryad and not the King who was the first to break the enchantment that had begun to wrap these two old friends round and about in its fatal folds as if with the invisible mantle of Urania, the heavenly Muse. “And now tell me, child of Laertes, what it is that in my crumbling corruption and my deciduous decomposition, I can do to help you fulfil your daring plan? Tell me, tell me, only tell me; and you’ll soon see what an old Nymph, even if she is destined unlike the Naiads and the Nereids, to perish utterly, can do to help you!”
“Well, it is like this, old friend,” and the cunning Wanderer gave her one swift sidelong glance out of his deep-sunken, glaucous-green, totally unreliable, wholly unconquerable eyes, and then, as he went on speaking, fixed his gaze on a small group of trees that was, as he well knew by this time, directly between the rock where they now sat and the little walled capitol-city of the island, “though it has been, of course, for years and even centuries, the custom with us for none but warriors, or at least none but grown-up males, to address the people’s assembly in the ‘agora’, this custom has of late grown less strict.
“Indeed in our life-time, as you, old friend, will remember, these assemblies of our traditional city-life have not only been open to all our people, but have been subjected to all manner of natural and even domestic interruptions. Now do you catch, my dear, what I am driving at? What I want to do is to get hold of this daughter of Teiresias and have her brought here under the good influence of young Eione and my faithful Tis, not to speak of young Nisos, who naturally enough, as happens in most Hellenic families, takes the opposite side to that of his elder brother in our civil strife; I mean of course, in this case, in the struggle between our House of Laertes and their House of Naubolides. Once have her safely here on the scene and I am confident she will exert such an influence on our side that my opponents will be completely vanquished. I’m perfectly well aware of the almost imbecile stupidity of Krateros’ eldest son, our young Nisos’ brother and of the equally helpless imbecility of the daughter of Nosodea who is betrothed to him. Our danger does not lie with them; though the House of Naubolides as represented by these simple old-fashioned Princes has actually, as all our islanders know, older and better claims to sovereignty than has our House of Laertes.