To meet a sister-member of that girlish band of devoted hero-worshippers from Ilium was in itself an event that brought with it almost unbearable emotion, but to meet a woman who called Hector father loosened, as we say, Arsinöe’s knees and melted her reserved heart. It was therefore in the sobs of her compatriot upon her beautiful bosom, a bosom no longer entirely concealed under the skin of the Podandrikon, a creature whose name, owing to its association with some mysterious oriental court-fashion, must always, so its wearer had explained to Zeuks as on their ride the night-wind whistled through it, be pronounced with the stress on the syllable “dand”, that Okyrhöe won her first victory in the palace of the king of Ithaca.
It must, however, be allowed that in the bold invader’s second encounter with the defenders of this pillared rock-cave the victory was on the other side. The old Eurycleia, who had looked after the wounds, and recognized the scars, and protected the eccentricities, and cured the manias, of three generations, saw through the mask worn so becomingly by this beautiful adventuress at the first glance.
To every point Okyrhöe brought forward the old lady opposed a plain blunt doubt of its essential veracity.
“My rule has always been,” she declared at one point, “to obtain the word of a prophet or a teacher known through the whole of Hellas for proof of a family’s claim to be connected with this or that hero of the days of our grandparents; and I have never myself accepted the word of a ghost. Odysseus undoubtedly does believe that he met the ghost of Teiresias beyond the brink of Okeanos and made the ghost drink of the blood of the animal he was sacrificing. Moreover I know that Odysseus feels sure that he himself and none other went down into the Underworld ruled over by Aidoneus the brother of Zeus and Poseidon. Indeed everyone who lives near our dear Odysseus has heard him tell stories about the ghosts of the famous heroes and heroines that he encountered in that Kingdom of the Dead.
“But I have seen so much of life in my time, young lady, and if you’ll let me cry, ‘Go away!’ or ‘erre! erre!’ to the bad omen, so much of death too, that when I hear people tell me that they are connected with the family of Peleus or Theseus or Kadmos or Priam my feeling is simply this: if you have this noble blood in your veins your friends may be the better for it and your enemies the worse for it, but for you yourself life will be the same to you as it is to the rest of us, and death will be no longer in coming, nor kinder in the way in which it comes, than it is to the rest of us; for as my grandmother used to say, and she goes back further than your precious Kadmos, ‘the nearer to the First Man the stronger the hand; the nearer to the Last Man the shrewder the head!’
“Thus although it was with her sweetest and most cajoling smile that Okyrhöe bowed herself out of the presence of the king’s nurse, her thoughts, as she got the Trojan captive to introduce her to Leipephile, the betrothed of Nisos’ brother, and then persuaded that same Arsinöe to take her to a well-cushioned chamber in a low-roofed passage behind the royal throne in the dining-hall, where Pontopereia was talking eagerly to young Eione, were nothing less than murderous.
“O you wait, you wait, you wait, you wait! you croaking and creaking corpse! It won’t be you who’ll choose the death you’ll die. It’ll be your meek and obedient Okyrhöe; and it won’t be the prettiest death in the world either; I can tell you that.”
Meanwhile, hidden away in that chamber at the end of that low-roofed passage between the great dining-hall and the subterranean kitchens and sculleries, where the meals were prepared and washed up and where the floral wreaths and the symbols and all the ritualistic paraphernalia for festival days were kept, Tis’s little sister Eione was recounting to Pontopereia her escape from the amorous attentions of the god Pan.
“But didn’t you feel,” Pontopereia had just dared to suggest, “so spell-bound under his touch that you longed to yield to him?”
The two young girls were sitting cross-legged on opposite piles of Cyprian cushions. Eione was seated on cushions whose prevailing colour was pale green, and Pontopereia on cushions whose prevailing colour was purple. Eione looked gravely and intently into her friend’s eyes.
“No, my dear,” she replied, “you’ll probably laugh at me as absurdly ignorant, but to tell you the honest truth—”
“You mean you’ve never really been made love to?”
Eione neither reddened nor stammered. She just frowned and rubbed the sole of one of her sandals with two of her knuckles as if the unravelling of this difficult question required her whole mental concentration.
“I’m not sure whether I have or not,” she said simply. “A boy who lives near us pressed me once very tight against him, when neither of us had much on, and I felt something — the thing they all have, I suppose, that makes them men — pounding and throbbing and beating against me like a stick with the pulse of a heart. But it didn’t make me want him to do anything; and it didn’t frighten me or disturb me. I just noticed it; that’s all, and wondered what I’d feel if he did anything else, and whether I ought to help him to do anything else. And then somebody came — and that was all.”
Pontopereia gave the purple cushion beneath her a mighty tug with both her hands so that it rose up like a wave between her thighs. “No,” she said. “I can’t call that quite enough; and to tell you the truth, my sweet one, I’ve never myself got as far as that — I mean in real life, if you understand. What I’ve always done, since I was O! so little, is to tell myself stories of love-making when I’m alone in bed. Sometimes I wake up in the night — you know? — feeling very amorous and then I tell myself, O such weird and funny stories — not very nice stories always, I’m afraid! It depends on what I’m feeling that particular night. But do tell me, my Sweet, what you did when Arcadian Pan laid hands on you. And first, do tell me this. Did his thin hairy legs and goat’s feet give you the shivers?”
At this point, to Pontopereia’s complete astonishment, Eione burst out laughing. “Shivers?” she cried. “I should say not! I like goats very much. Goats are my favourite beasts, just as Crows are my favourite birds, and blue dragon-flies my favourite insects and eels my favourite fish! I begged Arcadian Pan to let me stroke his thin hairy legs and it wasn’t he who made me sit on his queer knees, it was I myself who made him take me on them. And I kept making him lift up his goat-feet so that I could see them quite close and touch them, like I like touching the feet of real goats! Then I made him let me clean his goat’s horns for him and polish them till they were lovely and smooth. Then I got him to teach me to make some real proper sounds with his pipe — yes! I played some real notes on Arcadian Pan’s own flute!
“Yes, as I’m telling you, Ponty darling, everything between us was just as I liked it to be, in fact as I made it be. The truth is I never knew that great gods — for he is a great god, isn’t he, Arcadian Pan? — ever let a person treat them, well! certainly not an ordinary farm-girl like me treat them, as he let me treat him!”
Pontopereia pulled out the uppermost one of her purple cushions from between her legs, and spreading it on her knees thumped it with her fists into smoothness.
“But what happened then, my dear? You aren’t suggesting, are you, that having made friends with this astonishing Being in such a simple way you were separated from him by a mistake?”
Eione looked at her with a vague careless, idle, good-natured, but entirely childish and innocent look.