“I wish indeed, Ponty dear,” she said, slowly, “that you could explain to me what happened for it’s all so totally beyond my comprehension that I’ve been living in a sort of trance of confusion ever since. It’s only your coming that’s brought me back into my own real self again. Yes, on my soul! I’ve never had such queer feelings. It’s just as if I’d been turned into somebody else; and somebody whose whole life goes by, without any move of her own, just as if she were a figure in another person’s dream! I know it sounds all vague and sleepy and funny; but I swear to you, Ponty darling, it’s true. Do you think I’ve fallen in love with Arcadian Pan? Ordinary girls like me can fall in love with an immortal god can’t they? There’s nothing impossible about it is there?
“Anyway, Ponty darling, I don’t quite know what has happened to me and that’s what’s made me decide that, come what may, I must stick close to Arcadian Pan for a few more spring days and see what comes of it! One important thing has already come of it and that is our curiously complete agreement over this great cosmic Revolution. Mind you, some of us Island people still talk of the ‘Minoan’ or ‘Cretan’ revolution and others still talk of the ‘Argive’ revolution; but the only revolution that Arcadian Pan and I talk of is what we have come to call the ‘Cosmic’ Revolution, by which we mean a rustic pastoral revolution against a cruel, despotic, wicked, undemocratic, hieratic, privileged tyrannical Order of the Citizens of great Cities, which we — rustic shepherds and shepherdesses from the country — have joined together to break up forever!”
“But what will you put in its place?” enquired Pontopereia, giving her purple cushion a final caress with both her hands; hands which it must be confessed were not, like those of Eione, the hands of a born dancer.
“Anarchy! Anarchy! Anarchy!” cried the younger girl. “Don’t you see, Ponty darling, this revolution of ours, which is really a revolution of the older gods against the newer gods, of the great old giant-gods, animal-gods, dragon-gods, serpent-gods, and, above all, women-gods, for the older times were matriarchal times, and women, not men, however heroic such men might be, ruled Heaven and Earth, since at the Beginning of things it was Gaia, our real old mother the earth, who gave birth to Ouranos, this holy heaven of hermeneutical humbug, that priests make so much of, and not the other way round! Isn’t that a spry word, ‘hermeneutical’? He taught me that!
“Yes! the thing that has thrown Arcadian Pan and me together has nothing really to do with his ‘taking me’, as he tells me they call it in the Arcadian sheep-folds, or his treating me as wives are treated, and it has nothing to do with my feelings, one way or the other.
“What Arcadian Pan feels drawn to do, as far as his treatment of a plain ignorant girl like me is concerned, is to keep his hands off me and the thing that male creatures carry about with them out of me, until what you might call ‘the ice’ is broken between us; but, to break this ‘ice’—which is of course my shyness and nervousness and pride and independence, and also, you needn’t smile, my dear! my ignorance — the great thing is for Arcadian Pan and me, and don’t ’ee ever think, Ponty my precious, that I don’t know what an honour it is for a stupid little kid like me to go about with a great immortal god, especially one with the beautifully-thin hairy legs and the firmly-planted goat-feet of my favourite of all animals! — the great thing, I say, is for Arcadian Pan and me to have the same idea of a proper ‘Cosmic Revolution’ and the same idea of the kind of Anarchy we must set up in place of this confounded hieratic ‘order’.
“What the old Dryad advised — and she told us that though her name ‘Kleta’ was given her by one of the Graces she was not displeased to bear a name that resembled Keto, the fair-cheeked sea-monster who became the wife of Phorkys, one of those honest ‘old Men of the Sea’ who cannot—and isn’t that a significant thing in itself? — tell a lie about anything.
“That’s what I said this morning to Arcadian Pan, and O! it pleased him so: and though he swore he couldn’t be as honest as all that, being a shepherd busy with ewes and nanny-goats and rams, and as a player on the flute for country-girls to follow and as the cause of those sudden, nameless, deep, strange, inexplicable, mysterious, obsessing, panic-terrors which take possession of mortal men and make them scurry and scamper away like rats out of a barn, he liked honesty, he said. And so I told him that the ‘old men of the sea,’ that is to say the old gods of the sea, were the only ‘honest’ gods in the world because they lived in water, and water I told him is the one element in the world that cannot, in its inherent nature, play dramatic tricks upon us.” “What about ships at sea?” thought Pontopereia; but she held her peace; and Eione went on. “Well! we shall want all the help we can get from the outspoken honesty of water if we are to make headway against Zeus, Poseidon, and Aidoneus, each of the three of them a superb master of lies! Yes, what Arcadian Pan and I feel is that these three Sons of Kronos are now trying to combine together, since one is the Ruler of the Sky, one of the Sea, and the other of whatever dark and dreadful world it is that lies beneath the Earth; and that what we revolutionists and rebels have to do is enlist against Zeus and Poseidon and Aidoneus all the subnormal and abnormal and supernormal creatures we can collect together!
“These three most powerful rulers among the Olympians have joined together to suppress with violence and magical force every rebel that is opposed to them and opposed to all the great Olympians who support them!
“Do you realize, Ponty dear, that fresh news has just reached this appalling priest Enorches from his fellow-priests of the Mysteries at Eleusis, informing him that Herakles, who has been guarding Mount Etna to keep that fire-breathing monster Typhon from breaking out, has been persuaded by Dionysos to yield himself up to an orgy of drink; and that while this has been going on, Eros, who had been chained with golden chains by Hephaistos or by some ‘Son of Hephaistos’, like the one who carved the letters ‘U. H.’ on the base of the pillar here, yes! chained to the arm of Aphrodite’s throne in Cyprus, has broken his bonds and joined Dionysos, and together they have succeeded in throwing Herakles into what amounts to a mad trance of ecstasy, in which condition he has become so completely irresponsible that the monster Typhon has got entirely loose, has left Italy and Sicily altogether, and has gone, fire-breathing, ravaging, rampaging, to where, above the Garden of Hesperides, the Titan Atlas, whose punishment from the Olympians it has been to hold up the sky, is threatening to leave his job? What do you think of all this, Ponty dear? Arcadian Pan and I think that his departure will neither mean the end of the sky nor the end of the earth, but the end of the superiority of the sky over the earth.
“You see, Ponty dear, the garden of the Hesperides lies at the western verge of the entire world where the divine streams of Okeanos encircle the earth, and where once used to be — malediction on those who submerged it! is what Arcadian Pan and I say now — the beautiful sheep-grazed meadows of Lost Atlantis. I took Arcadian Pan to the oak-tree of the King’s old Dryad who was such a friend of Laertes in his time, and the Dryad revealed to him certain secrets of the Future of which he, although an immortal, had heard nothing; ‘I am about to die’, the Dryad said to us, ‘or I shouldn’t know these things myself.’ And it was after our talk with the Dryad that we decided to intercept Typhon.”
Pontopereia’s blank amazement at these astonishing words made her whirl the purple cushion in the air before sitting down on it with a thud.