“You — and Arcadian Pan,” she gasped, “intercepting that fire-breathing monster!” As she stared dumbfounded at her young friend, she became aware that the childish innocence in Eione’s expression had suddenly changed to something else; and at this point she realized that between herself and this new Eione there was a blank space she couldn’t bridge. “How weird,” she said to herself, “are the ways by which two minds touch each other and dodge each other!”
And indeed it struck Pontopereia now as if they were the gestures of a complete stranger, when Eione suddenly stood up, opened her mouth as if to speak, but, in place of speaking, yawned, put the back of her left hand with careless indifference against her mouth, and, when her yawn was finished, with a half-smile, as if just waking from a pleasant dream in which she and Arcadian Pan might have been riding Typhon like an obedient horse, stretched both her shapely arms with clenched fists high above her straw-coloured head.
“You see, Ponty dear,” she said emphatically as she let her arms fall to her sides. “Not only has this Echidna of Arima borne children to Typhon but the dragon, Ladon, who guards the apples of the Hesperides, is her brother; and there is a good chance that when Poseidon and Aidoneus come on the scene we shall have got Prometheus himself to stand up to them.”
Pontopereia looked past her friend into far-receding space. She suddenly felt sad and lonely. Had this rash young girl, without in the least comprehending what was happening to her, fallen in love with Arcadian Pan? Was all that rather hurried and very startling and yet not completely satisfactory account of these great cosmic events an outward and visible sign of a much more personal feeling? Was it actually possible that a simple country girl like this should be subject to vibrations of emotion belonging to a superhuman conflict between Gods and Titans?
Pontopereia experienced just then a very perceptible sense of humiliation. When she had hastened their departure from Ornax she had felt without doubt the spirit of her father descend upon her and the inspiration of her father possess her soul, and she had exulted so much in this and felt so proud of it that it had seemed to her, as she bowed down in intellectual response before the gnomic humility of Zeuks, that her place in the struggle of life was with the great seers and the illumined soothsayers and not with ordinary women and girls.
But in this rough, earthy, primitive, uncomfortable rock-palace of the royal house of Ithaca she felt reduced in stature and importance. Her prophetic power seemed to have deserted her. While she had been listening to what Eione had told her of this news from the priests of Eleusis about the monster Typhon escaping from under Aetna and thundering over sea and land, till he reached the Garden of the Hesperides and the place where Atlas holds up the sky as his punishment, she felt as if without a definite inspiration from her father she had no place in these events and no power of her own to obtain such a place.
She even began to feel a doubt in her mind whether the beautiful and formidable Okyrhöe herself would be able to deal with this rock-hewn palace to which she had insisted on being brought.
With an intellectual candour that went further than the emotional simplicity of her friend she decided that the prophetic power within her must depend on the special atmosphere of particular places. “I don’t believe,” she told herself, “it will sweep me away at all here. Well, if I’m not destined, after all, to be a prophetess, I’m not, and that’s all there is to be said! But I wish Nisos was here.”
This frank admission, so nakedly expressed, was a great relief to her; she felt as if in the midst of putting on the ritualistic robes for the worship of one of the greater Olympians she had suddenly snatched the things off and thrown them on the floor and rushing out into the open air danced on the grass the first dancing-steps she had learnt as a child.
Meanwhile since Nisos’ brother had carried away the other virginal attendant it was natural that the two woman who had known Ilium and the Court of King Priam should drift off together. As may be imagined with one like Okyrhöe to deal with, it did not take Arsinöe very long to discover that this lovely creature who put on the skin of the fabulous “Podandrikon” to accompany her to the haunted area of Arima and who seemed to find that to talk about the importance of accentuating the syllable “dand” in this harsh word was the best way of keeping their Trojan emotion in its place, had the same will as herself to thwart, frustrate and bring to a disastrous and contemptible end, the one single aim of the old age of Odysseus, his desire to sail across the sunken towers of Atlantis into the Unknown West.
Over their bowed feminine heads as they moved through Arima, defying the dark influences of that sinister region, there moaned and wailed, just as over the drowned temples of Atlantis Odysseus might have heard his ship’s rigging respond to the wind, the eternally monotonous dialogue between Echidna the mother of the Hound of Hell, and Eurybia the grandmother of Hekate.
But when, in the golden afternoon light, Okyrhöe was led by her new ally into the very presence of what looked like the absolute reality of the fully-armed Hector himself, her nerves did for an instant, for all their superhuman control, break into a choking gasp. For not only were Hector’s lineaments represented in exact correspondence to the living truth but there was something about the curves of his broad low forehead that exactly resembled the shape of Arsinöe’s head. She recovered quickly however; and they were returning in a deliberately loitering fashion; for Arsinöe had begun to explain to the visitor that Odysseus grew irritable if he had to speak to guests or even to catch sight of guests while dinner was preparing though she admitted that the old hero had come by this time to look upon his unaristocratic companion, Zeuks, as an intimate; but the two women’s leisureliness at this moment received a shock that was as disturbing as it was startling.
By a grotesque piece of ill-luck they encountered the old Dryad Kleta; an encounter which brought them both down with a disagreeable jolt to the very things in Odysseus’ life that they would have preferred to ignore just then, that is to say to the human pathos of his present situation, as an extremely old man without a wife, or a daughter, or a grand-daughter, whose only son had become an austere, inhuman, unsympathetic recluse and a devotee of some contemplative cult, about which, save that it had nothing to do with Dionysos or Eros, and was in no favour with Enorches, it was very hard to get any information.
The old Dryad stood in front of them for a perceptible number of pulse-beats, staring at them as if they were trespassers and intruders of an extremely suspicious kind; not necessarily outsiders to be crushed as we crush black-beetles but entities to beware of and to be guarded against.
The old lady already knew Arsinöe by sight and was fully aware she was Trojan; and her first thought was that Okyrhöe must have just arrived by sea from the same part of the country. It may be believed she did not miss the royal eccentricity of the fabulous Podandrikon skin; and her mind began vaguely flapping like an aged phantom albatross from one to another of all the far-off harbours of which she had ever heard, leaving, as it flew, a feather caught in the sea-weed of one promontory and a splash of white dropping upon the rocks of another.
“Take notice, proud visitor,” she murmured, and then, with a quick glance at Arsinöe, “but you’ve been warned already, that we have to guard our renowned Odysseus from every agitating shock until the moment comes when he has got his ship ready to hoist sail and to sail away whither none of us will ever know! But sail he must and sail he will — away — away — away; and our duty now is to make everything as easy for him as we can until that heaven-appointed moment. Therefore, proud one, from far off, the best thing I can say to you is to bid you go — go quickly — go quietly — go at once! If you came by sea, find a ship and be off!