“Well, well, well! So we’ve got Ajax on our hands again! What twists and turns of fate! — ‘Turns’ do I say? What enormous, sweeping, astral curves this destiny of ours indulges in! Ajax! Well, well! We must all be as gentle and hospitable to him as we can — eh, ladies, my dears? — eh, Nisos, my lad? And to this purpose”—and at this point the old King swung directly round upon Euanthos, who had risen to his feet and with his hands clasped behind him and his shoulders squared was staring at some particular oblong of nothingness beyond which his preposterous politeness had erected its own private horizon—“to this purpose we are indeed — don’t you think so, Ladies? — incredibly lucky to have a real live Herald from the land of the Phaiakians actually here with us in our midst! He will explain to us, primitive islanders and settlers and farmers and fishermen as we are here in Ithaca, to what a stately tradition on the main-land of Hellas our ancestors look back.
“Yes, he will soon find, O my most gallant Hetairoi, that our old Achaian and Danaan ritual of life is as poetical as any he can discover in the most courtly cities of the orient. The first lesson he is destined to receive as to our power to show ourselves worthy of his respect will be the hospitality we shall now show to this noble princess, of whose coming he is the herald, and also the manner in which we shall entertain my ancient friend and once beloved rival, Ajax the son of Telamon!”
Odysseus leant forward as he spoke and as he did so he clasped with both hands the head of his club, pressing it against the pit of his stomach. It may be well believed how, as he did this, out of what the club itself always referred to as its “life-crack” and which was a slit in its gullet reaching as far down as its lungs and containing, as all its friends well knew, a sort of nomadic camp for two adventurous insect-friends of quite different species, there now issued a fine controversy.
Yes, out of the “life-crack” of the club there emerged and dissolved like recurrent waves of smoke into the hot afternoon air quite a bitter dialogue. It is curious how the voices of any living things as they strike air, or earth, or water, or fire, go through a change in their nature the perceiving of which, especially when such sounds happen to be solitary sounds, is a remarkable experience for the human person who perceives it.
Yes, it is when other sounds are absent and when the earth feels as if it were surrounded by an aura possessed of a singularly penetrating fragrance like nothing else in the world, that this change occurs. The sound may have been a cry of wild delight. It may have been a shriek of anger, it may have been a wail of sorrow, it may have been a whistle, a call, an appeal. It matters not what the sound was or what it conveyed. The sound has been changed.
And this change has come about by the thing having drawn out of the element into which it rose or fell, and into which it dispersed itself, something akin to its own nature and yet something that no creature alive could apprehend through its sense of hearing. Into what has it been changed? Into a presence. Yes, there is no doubt or question about that. It has become a presence. What the listener is aware of now is the inexplicable and unaccountable effect upon him of a presence; not a human presence nor a godlike presence nor a titanic presence, and totally different from any conceivable animal presence.
But the point is that the effect of this presence is the etherealizing in some mysterious way of the material element, whatever it may have been, into which the sound has plunged. If into the flames of a bonfire, those flames become the purged and dancing spirits of all the leaves they are devouring! If into the air above the peaks of a mountain, that air becomes a particular region of pure space made of a more rarefied substance than the ordinary air which surrounds the earth.
If into water, that water becomes a pool of such perfect translucence that a consecration of all the places on earth where water springs up seems indicated by its mere existence on this planet.
And finally if into earth, every grain of sand, or atom of rock or speck of mud, or dab of clay, or chip of quartz, or crumb of dung, or grit of granite, or mite of mould, which that sound reaches becomes suddenly possessed by something akin to the mystery of consciousness, though it is not the consciousness of a man or a beast or even of a vegetable.
It was when the voice of Odysseus died away with the sound of the name of the father of Ajax that the moth enquired of the fly: “Why does the King go on so long about Ajax? Isn’t the important person who has arrived not this half-drowned half-witted doting old hero from the Siege of Troy, but this great living Princess Nausikaa from the land of the Phaiakians?”
The philosophical contempt in the voice of the fly cannot be expressed in rational words. “Have you no idea, you funny little perfection of a darling, silly, little girl, as to the way we men take these things? Don’t you see that he’s making all this fuss about Ajax simply to cover up his feelings about Nausikaa? Have you forgotten, little stupid, all we were taught at school about men hiding up their strongest feelings, and about there having been a passionate romance between our King and some great Phaiakian princess? Why, you little ignorant silly, it’s one of the great love-stories of the entire world! Of course he has to make a lot of fuss about this old crazy Ajax! Why, you lovely, delicious, heavenly, little idiot, what on earth are you thinking about? Ajax defying the lightning is a simple proposition.
“There is Ajax. There is the lightning! There is an Ajax in every single living creature on earth and when that creature is in the mood of defying the Great Gods, it may be on behalf of the Little Gods, or it may be in anger on its own account. I tell you, you little silky-soft priest-worshipper, there isn’t a fisherman in all the coasts of Ithaca who hasn’t heard about Ajax and the Lightning. The toughest, roughest, homeliest, rudest fisherman you could find in this whole island has heard of Ajax defying the Lightning.
“I tell you, child, I know what I’m talking about. Being as fond of rotten fish as anybody in the world, I used to go out with certain special boats, whose owners used to start earlier in the morning than the others and weren’t as fussy as the others about cleaning out the bottom of their skiffs. Yes! I swear to you, you unscientific, irrational, unphilosophical, little lovely, I heard the most savage and most primitive of these sailors, yes! the very rudest of them, cry out to some companion: ‘Why, you’re as upset by a storm as Ajax defying the Lightning!’
“But when it comes to our king’s meetings with Princess Nausikaa of that land, it’s a very different story! Of course he keeps the essence of it to himself. Look at him now! He’s as ready to fall into a fit of reverie and fantasia as any youth in his beatified adolescence!”
The words of the wise fly had much truth in them just then; but the whole scene up there, from the place where Odysseus held his Heraklian weapon to the place where excitedly whispering groups were gathered on the furthest outskirts of that island-agora, was so confused and chaotic that it had become difficult to concentrate on any particular member of the heterogeneous crowd that was surging about in agitated waves of bewildered excitement.
As for the priest Enorches, he had become so invisible that he might have sunk into the earth after his tremendous oration.
“And now,” cried Odysseus, raising his voice above its accustomed pitch, “the thing for us to do is to go and greet this heroic rival of mine out of my ancient past, thus risen like a ghost to keep my pride in its proper place but also to make it clear to my enemies that it is essential that the people of Ithaca should provide their king with sail-cloth!”