“We have accepted like babies all our mothers told us about the Twelve Olympians, about Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollon, Artemis, Hermes, Aphrodite, Hephaistos, Ares, Themis, and our own Athene.
“But, my friends, all this is sheer childishness, and what it leads to is exactly what has happened in the case of this worthless pirate, this low-born thief, this dung-heap rapscallion, this offscouring of the city’s brothels who calls himself Zeuks so that he may blaspheme the more, so that he may make a mock at our Father in Heaven, and, worse still, put to scorn our Father’s Sister and Mate, the great Queen of Heaven, Hera herself!
“What none of you are grown up enough to understand, though I’ve been explaining this very thing for the last ten years, is that by certain new, certain occult, certain mystical, certain sanctified, certain divinely inspired revelations, drawn at length and explained at last from the most sacred and precious oracle that we of pure Hellenic birth can boast, an oracle do I say? an inheritance, a birth-right, a talisman, an enchantment, a divine and celestial Word, by means of which our enemies are inevitably defeated and our intentions are inevitably fulfilled, we know that we’ve arrived at a point in our development where Eros and Dionysos appear in their true light. Does anyone here on this fair platform, looking down on the rich harbour of our island-home, realize the full significance, the concerted value, the abysmally-charged import of the birthright of which I speak?
“Has anyone here been so freed of late from our mothers’ lullabies and war-tales as to know what I mean when I say that our way of life in Hellas has been saved only just in time from its final extinction by recent interpretations of the prophecies of our unique poet and singer, Orpheus?”
At this point in the midst of the resounding oration of Enorches there suddenly occurred the sort of movement of relaxation in that well-to-do careless crowd which suggests an articulate admission that the subject of a speech is totally beyond the intelligence of its listeners but that the personality of the speaker, and the fervour of his arguments, not to mention the dramatic situation in which he is taking so dominant a part, are all conducive to the said listeners’ settling down to listen in self-satisfied pleasure as if they’d been suddenly transported to an agreeable theatre.
What pleased our young friend Nisos in all this, especially when he noticed that both the two portions of this unconventional hill-top assembly, the part of it that had been so fascinated by Zeuks and his unusual horses as to feel definitely hostile to Enorches, and the part of it that remained under his spell, had both relaxed, was the fact that Zeuks himself had suddenly taken the initiative with Odysseus, and had advanced close up to him, trailing the long thin leather straps by which he drew the two horses after him, and that the two were now engaged, under the very nose of the excited orator in what looked like a very harmonious and mutually satisfactory bargain.
Meanwhile the speaker was approaching the culminating points of his speech, which were entirely concerned with the Mysteries.
“What is revealed to us in the Orphic Mysteries,” he was saying, “is the inner truth, the ultimate quintessence, of our whole Hellenic life. This essence, this quintessence, my dear friends, floats like an exhalation through every moment of our existence. Whither and Whence does it float? That is no simple question; for it is fed by a thousand ineffable imponderables!
“Mystery it is, and mystery it pursues. From mystery it ascends and in mystery it is engulfed. As the heat of this thrice-sacred noon dissolves in those blue waves down there, so there is a sweetly-dissolving high noon in the life of all of us Achaians towards which we are moving even as I speak; and I swear to you, brothers and sisters of this Isle of Ithaca, that it is only in the celebration of the Orphic Mysteries that you, men and women of Hellas, can rise to your full spiritual stature and rejoice in your full divine inheritance!”
Enorches was clairvoyant enough to grow aware at this point that his large audience were enjoying his speech delivered from that jagged little rock in precisely the spirit he cared least of all for it to be enjoyed, that is to say, as a theatrical performance, and he allowed his arms to sink to his side and his voice to die away.
But he didn’t come down immediately from his little rock. He looked round him with a quite special expression, the expression of a creature with the beak of a bird of prey and the body of a serpent, a creature who has bitten its prey in half, and swallowed half of it, but still feels unsatisfied.
And it happened to be just at that very moment that Pyraust, the girl-moth, implored her boy-friend, Myos the House-Fly, to remove his powerful front legs from the particular one of her languidly trailing wings which it was always easiest for her to straighten out first when she had decided to spread both her wings in flight.
“I know he’s calling for me to go to him,” she explained, “and when he’s calling so strongly it hurts me, yes it hurts me very much, not to be able to go to him! So lift up your front legs, my beautiful one, I beseech you! They are so strong and so gloriously black; and O! how weak my poor trembling brown wings seem in comparison with them! But lift them up now, I beg you!”
But the fly remained obstinate. “In a second; all in good time, all in due course!” he buzzed. “But while we are together I do so want to settle once for all this one single point. Surely you do admit, my sweet one, you can’t help it, that in the smallest atom of dust, just as in the smallest grain of sand, there is a whole world of reality. Never mind all this noisy speaking and shouting! It’s about shams and shows; not about reality at all!”
Thus speaking Myos pressed his two front legs, so black, so shining, and so extremely strong, more firmly than ever upon the quivering wing of the girl-moth. “But look who’s here!” he added presently; and, again, after another pause: “Aren’t you glad, my Crumb of Crumbs, that I didn’t let you go when he first began bawling out his blathering bluster? Why! you’d have bumped into her! And I can tell you, my leaf of longing, my flying feather of dainty fancy, if you had bumped into her it would have been the end of you!”
The brown moth ceased struggling. The fly removed his leg from her wing. They both settled themselves down as comfortably as they were able in those narrow quarters where they were only about six inches below the powerful fingers of the king of Ithaca as he went on bargaining with Zeuks. Neither Zeuks nor he paid the faintest attention to the torrent of rhetoric from the lichen-covered rock, a torrent which, as soon as the speaker realized what newcomer it was who had now appeared among them, recommenced with redoubled vigour. For the personage who had burst in upon that extemporized “ecclesia” was in fact no other than Petraia, the old-maid midwife; and it was a Petraia worked up to a considerable degree of professional indignation, not to speak of virginal vituperation.
She advanced at a pace which could only be described by the vulgar expression “at a run”. She forced her way straight through the crowd till she reached a family group whose members were pushing against each other to get as close as they could to Pegasos and Arion.
Here she singled out a woman, obviously about as far advanced in pregnancy as it is possible to be and, clutching her by the only portion of her person which was not already pre-empted by three other children in addition to the small creature as yet undelivered, she dragged her away protesting loudly, a protest shared by so many of her brood that her carrying off by Petraia caused quite a little convulsion and a sort of counter-eddy in the stream of people who surrounded those two supernatural beasts.