“See what that was!” commanded the king; while Zeuks, who was beginning to grow sleepy after the well-cooked food and good wine, jerked himself up, and fumbling under his coat for his dagger sat sideways against the back of his chair, watching Tis descend the couple of steps, push open the door, and pass into the corridor. The door swung back and there was silence. Tis wore, for his indoor work in kitchen and scullery his softest sandals; so that the silence round that dining table at this moment was profound.
Then Telemachos deliberately got up. Having risen from his chair he crossed the room as noiselessly as he could. All the while he had been so intensely struggling to get his philosophical ideas into focus so that he might explain them to Pontopereia his eyes had been fixed on an ancient sword suspended from an iron nail in the wall. It was a sword of a completely different make from the sort used by Odysseus. It had been part of a collection of foreign weapons made long ago by the father of Penelope, who, like Zenios of Thebes, was a great picker-up of antiques.
Engraved upon the handle, as Telemachos remembered well from his childhood, was the word “Sidon”; but there had once been a travelling merchant at their table when Telemachos was a little boy who assured Penelope from certain metal-marks he knew that this unusual weapon must have been made in Ecbatana. Of this sword Telemachos now possessed himself; nor did he fail to note with a thrill of more natural and simple pride than he had allowed himself to feel for years — well! anyway since the death of his mother — how firmly and strongly and yet how lightly and easily, he found himself able to wield it.
Without looking at Zeuks, for he kept his eyes on his father with a quaint deprecatory half-smile, he managed somehow to convey to the humorous kidnapper of the divine horses that with two such broad-shouldered men as they were to guard that throne-room neither of the old king’s lady-guests, however attractive, was in any danger of violence to her chastity.
Pontopereia, however, in place of catching such whimsical thoughts from her host’s son, fixed her beautiful eyes upon Zeuks who, although he had screwed his head round against the back of his chair in the hope of being able to follow the movements of Tis in the Corridor, was quite capable of giving her a wink.
Nor was the daughter of Teiresias unaware of all it meant just at that moment to get a wink from “Zeuks of Cuckoo-Hill”, as the king’s mother would certainly have called him, although in reality Cuckoo-Hill never came down as near to the actual harbour as was the man’s dwelling.
But Zeuks’ wink said all that was necessary between them at that particular beat of the pulse of time. It said quite unmistakably: “O no! I know you’ve not forgotten about the pirates strapping us to our chairs and chopping us to bits. And I know you’ve not forgotten the great word prokleesis.”
But Zeuks and Pontopereia were not the only man and woman whose difference of sex was a cause of vivid feeling at that moment. Into the wine-fragrant air about her Okyrhöe was projecting all the seduction she could. In fact she was playing the unmitigated harlot at the expense of the old king. She had not missed his attraction to her specially rounded breasts; and thus, as she kept asking him certain simple and direct questions, questions which she selected for the absence from them of what couldn’t be answered without an effort of thought — questions such as: “What was one of your earliest recollections, great King?”—she took care, in lifting her wine-glass to her lips, to reveal ever so little more of the rondure of one of these same breasts, whose perfect orb, culminating in a nipple as rosy as the wine at her lips, was never wholly revealed or wholly concealed, but was always, like the tip of a coral flagstaff in the heart of a milky isle, being partially glimpsed, to the most exquisite titillation of the old hero’s amorous proclivities.
Telemachos meanwhile, with that remarkable sword in his hand from the collection of his maternal ancestor, continued to lean all his weight upon this rare weapon’s gold-chased handle while he kept his attention absorbed in the effort to get its point firmly lodged in a convenient crack between two flag-stones. Pontopereia, having, so to say, settled her ethical account with Zeuks by a mental obeisance before the word prokleesis in exchange for a wink of recognition that if philosophy didn’t bring the sexes together it wasn’t of much use to mankind, had suddenly grown aware that by tilting herself a bit to one side and, though her chair was too heavy to be moved, by resting her weight on her left buttock, she could glimpse quite clearly at the end of the Corridor of Pillars the broad back of the spell-bound Tis.
“What on earth is the fellow staring at?” she asked herself. “Is someone lying dead at his feet? Has he killed some intruder — the first of Zeuks’ pirates to enter the palace?”
Tis was undoubtedly — she could divine that much from the general pose of his figure — a trifle scared as well as intensely interested and arrested; and Pontopereia, herself stiff with nervous excitement, breathed quickly as she watched him. While all this was going on, little old Eurycleia, who, under all her weight of years, moved as lightly as Atropos, the oldest, smallest, but most to be feared and most to be relied upon of all the Fates, was now leaning against the door-post of the interior entrance to the dining-hall. Her expression as she leant there was one of concern but it was not an expression of alarm. Nor was it an expression of tremulous or jumpy nerves.
What her face showed was pure and simple annoyance. The old nurse felt indignant. Indeed you might say she felt extremely angry. For two, if not for three generations she had been compelled to behold her own peculiar and special world crumble down. She did not see it fall with a crash. She saw it disintegrate and crumble down. And she saw this happen without being able to lift a finger to stop it. What she was doing now was typical of the whole situation. She was simply standing with her back against the cold stones of the passage wall just as if they, these inanimate fragments of flint and quartz and these bits of chilly marble were arrogantly and in a new kind of contemptuous aristocratic haughtiness cold-shouldering her into an oblivious grave.
All this waiting lasted for a far less space of time than it takes to describe the emotions of the persons who were waiting; and when the waiting ended, the general relief that everybody felt, though great enough, was not as heavenly as it would have been had the thoughts and feelings involved gone on for as long as any chronicler, using those unwieldy hieroglyphs we call “words” to inscribe them, was bound to go on.
Whether it was a real son of Hephaistos who had carved the letters “U” for uios, and “H” for the aspirated vowel at the beginning of the name of the great god of fire, nobody could ever be absolutely sure, but that the Pillar on which those letters were engraved had had breathed into it some sort of sub-human or super-human consciousness was undeniable.
And at this particular veering between serious apprehension and immense relief it was given to the consciousness of the Pillar to note the difference between the attitudes to life and death of the three men in that dining-hall; how Odysseus never gave to either life or death a single thought, pondering only and solely on how best to carry out his immediate purpose, how Telemachos, although temperamentally longing to be quit of the whole business, kept forcing himself to retain, with regard to the meaning of life, and with regard to the question whether there was any life for the individual soul after its body was dead, a position of rigid agnosticism; and finally how Zeuks with his motto of Prokleesis or “defiance” and his practice of Terpsis or “enjoyment” held strongly to the annihilation of the soul with the death of the body.