“Oh, I’m so glad‚” cried this same eager girlish prophet, when she found Zeuks alone with Pegasos waiting for Okyrhöe and the old king, “to have a chance to ask you what you really meant by your terrifying story of those horrible pirates putting ropes round us all and deliberately chopping us to death one by one. I couldn’t bear to see it done to anybody, however much I hated them; and it’s certain I couldn’t bear it myself. I should just go shrieking-mad, and struggle wildly and bang about till I was killed or killed somebody else!”
The girl’s directness and simplicity had its effect. The expression upon the face of Zeuks would have suggested to anyone who had the particular kind of penetration that the great Theban prophet seems to have been not quite able to pass on to his progeny, that within the bloated mask of humorous relish for every conceivable aspect of human existence and of animal sensation that was Zeuks’ nature there had been suddenly roused from sleep a small active insect-like second nature that was a drastically honest commentator upon all the man’s impressions and was a pitiless exposure of all his own self-deceptions and all his own exaggerations and all his own boastings.
“I’ll tell you the whole thing, my dear Pontopereia,” Zeuks blurted out hurriedly. “I was glorying, you see, in my own mind over this idea of mine which I call Prokleesis or ‘defiance’. I’m proud of this idea, which has become very important to me and which is something I’m constantly trying to practise. But I’m a terrible one for seeing everything as comic and I suddenly saw my own life-method, my own life-philosophy, my own private and special defiance of life as a comic thing; and I thought: ‘How can I show up this prokleesis of mine as I love to show up all those other philosophic cure-alls that aim at dispending with Themis, treating old Auntie Atropos as a doting hag, discounting Necessity, and putting Chance to shame as a negligible wanton?’
“And I decided that the only way I could do this was by imagining a situation in which only a very few heroic human souls, and they probably already half-crazy, could possibly practise my philosophy of ‘prokleesis’, or defiance of the whole of existence, and so I conjured up the picture of those murderous pirates on the brink of chopping us all to death one after another, as much as to say: ‘Well! If you can defy life while watching your best friends chopped to bits and waiting your own turn, you have to be something more than a clowning antic like me, whose head’s been turned by a good idea!’”
The kidnapper of Pegasos with his hand on that Gorgonian Wonder’s solitary wing must have drained at that second the ambrosial dregs of true philosophic glory, for the awkward figure of the daughter of Teiresias hunched itself into a shapeless heap of girlish admiration before the knees that had bent so faithfully all those years serving the aged Nymph deserted by Pan.
When Okyrhöe in the Podandrikon’s incomparable skin, and with her bold hand on Odysseus’ shoulder, finally appeared, it was evident that neither her own loveliness nor the unique wonder wrapped round her had made the old hero forget his Heraklean club.
“We shall be off in a moment, pretty creature,” murmured the fly to the moth from the deep life-crack in that self-conscious weapon, “and then we’ll soon find out how far the great god Pan has been able to go with young Eione.”
“It’s all very well for you to say that,” replied the moth, “but I wish you hadn’t gone to sleep while the Sixth Pillar was talking to the club just now; for the Pillar had heard about our midwife’s sister having quarrelled with her Egeria, and being now with old Moros, at the home of Tis and Eione, and being on the point of having a child.”
“How you beautiful girls,” jeered the teasing fly, “do adore thinking of the results of love-making! What interests me is whether the great god Pan will be able to go to the limit with young Eione.”
The moth stared vaguely out of the belly of the club into the surrounding darkness. “Yes, I wonder,” she pondered, “whether Eione is old enough to have a child.”
CHAPTER VII
It was a riderless Arion who met the four of them, that is to say the two women, Okyrhöe and Pontopereia, mounted between the two men, Zeuks and Odysseus, when they arrived at the palace-porch and dismounted from the wounded back of Pegasos at the entrance to the Corridor of the Pillars. There was still a little more of that weird before-dawn light called Lykophos to be got through ere the sun rose, for neither Pegasos’ wounded shoulder nor his heavily-trailing solitary wing had interfered with the speed of his stride; and the darkness had only just broken when they got home.
The faithful Tis, however, was awaiting them, though since he had fastened Arion by a rope long enough to permit the animal to graze on the weeds in the Slaves’ Burial-ground it was clear he was ready to wait patiently for some time. But it was from Arion’s obvious restlessness and excited expectancy, to be seen in every turn of his finely-moulded head and every arching of his proud though mutilated neck, that Tis, who knew the instincts of animals as well as Odysseus knew the instincts of men, had guessed that some mysterious vibration existing between these two semi-godlike creatures had already begun to inform Arion of the near arrival of Pegasos.
When they actually did meet, their re-encounter would have delighted Nisos, and he would have observed with relief that each of them had now ceased to leave on the ground any trail of blood-stained ichor. The immediate witnesses of the scene however were too taken up with their own affairs to notice the condition of the pair of animals who were led off by Tis. He led them quite quietly and naturally to a shed adjoining the one devoted to Babba.
Babba herself, whose private affairs were less absorbing than those of any of the persons dismounting from the back of Pegasos, instantaneously thrust her horns through the wooden partition separating the two horses from herself, and then, hurriedly withdrawing these finely curved objects from the neat apertures they had made, proceeded to arrange her beautifully flapping ears so as to catch every faintest overtone and undertone of the thoughts and feelings that these unusual visitors exchanged between themselves.
But satisfactory as it was to an amiable and easy-going cow like Babba to have the distraction, though she could only understand half of what she heard, of listening to something that did at least make her forget the passing discomfort of waiting with full udders the time of her milking, it was a mild satisfaction compared with the pleasure Okyrhöe derived from talking to Arsinöe. The woman listened to every word Arsinöe uttered, to every sigh Arsinöe sighed. Nor was there any shade of seduction, whether frightening or reassuring, whether cajoling or propitiating, that she did not practise on her sister-handmaid from Priam’s court.
She had Arsinöe just now entirely to herself, for Odysseus had gone off with Zeuks to present that unusual cattle-dealer, as a queer specimen of an island farmer, to their old family-nurse, Eurycleia. Time and place and circumstance therefore all played into Okyrhöe’s hands and she threw such a thrilling intensity into what she was doing that she would have taken Arsinöe completely by storm if the latter had not possessed her own secret loyalties: but even these were troubled and shaken; for the girl accepted without question — being all the while herself the hero’s child — the grotesque lie that Okyrhöe was a daughter of Hector. “You have the very look of his eyes!” Arsinöe cried. As a matter of fact even while she was uttering this ridiculous cry, and very largely because of the honest vehemence with which she uttered it, this impassioned carver of the features she had idealized from childhood, in complete ignorance of her blood-relationship to their possessor, not only revealed their outlines in her own face but imagined she found them where in reality there wasn’t a trace of them.