“But country girls like me are quite different. We’ve lived so close to animals that we’ve sort of turned into animals. We’re fond of our own human flesh just as animals are. And we’re particularly fond of our own flesh when men are enjoying it, I mean feeling it with any part of their bodies. I know what I’m talking about, Ponty darling, for I’ve had an experience that doesn’t happen to every girl in the world I can assure you! I mean I’ve been, as they call it, ‘made love to’—not much ‘making’ and not much ‘love’ in it, but never mind that! — by no other than the most lecherous Being in the whole wide world, the great Arcadian god Pan, his own self!
“And do you know what happened? We just simply made friends. I begged him not to meddle with my virginity, for, as I told him frankly, I didn’t want to be bothered with the consequence of that sort of thing yet! I wanted to enjoy my life before starting to be a mother and all that sort of business. Arcadian Pan fully understood what I said to him; and he fully agreed with my point of view. I told him it wasn’t fair that our mother the Earth should just use us as procreating nest-eggs for her own purposes. And he agreed.
“He said that in the act of copulation a woman got more pleasure than a man the moment the pain was over and sometimes even while the pain was going on. But he said he’d make a bargain with me that he’d agree not to meddle with my virginity if in return I’d let him hold me on his knees and enjoy the feeling of my thighs pressed against his thighs and the pleasure of stroking my breasts. He said that the pleasure to male flesh of having female flesh pressed against it was greater than the most delicious taste to the tongue or the palate or the most exciting bathing in water, rushing through air, burrowing in earth-mould, or brandishing blazing fire.
“He said that to deny to masculine flesh its greatest possible thrill, namely the ecstasy of being pressed against feminine flesh, was the most cruel and wicked perversion in the whole universe, and that the whole idea of refusing our human flesh to each other, when the meeting of these two sorts of flesh, the male and the female, gave to each the greatest thrill of pleasure possible to all organic beings in the whole universe was a wicked and cruel denial to life of what life had come into existence to enjoy.
“‘Life,’ said Arcadian Pan to me, ‘life is lured and attracted out of the inert and inanimate elements into its earliest existence by the promise of the indescribable ecstasy of sexual pleasure! And so, when we have lured life out of the inanimate, to go and deny to it,’ thus spoke Arcadian Pan to me, ‘its prerogative and privilege and proprietary right, is an abominable treachery to the mysterious pressure, whatever it may be, that brought life into existence!’
“And I must tell you this also, Ponty, my true and only friend. When Arcadian Pan had taught me the ineffable, the unfathomable, the infinite pleasure that comes from male flesh pressing female flesh against itself — and, mind you, this has nothing at all to do with ‘taking maidenheads’, as they call it, or de-virginating virgins — he and I became excellent friends. I found his society extremely agreeable; and it seemed to me that he found mine the same! At any rate the result of our daily contact was that I got genuinely fond of him and sincerely attached to him as a friend; and I believe he felt exactly the same about me! That he was an immortal god and I a silly little mortal girl, doomed to perish in a few years, seemed to make no difference to him or to me! I can only tell you, Ponty dear, that if it weren’t for meeting you, and your being so sweet to me, I should miss his company so much that there’s no telling what silly things I might do. And what is more, I believe, though it seems conceited and vain to say so, that he misses me, though not of course as much as I miss him!”
At this point Pontopereia, as she lowered her not very shapely leg to the floor of that lowest deck of the “Teras” and endured with a little laugh the twitching pain she got from the contact of her sandal with her bunion, believed she beheld by the feeble flame of a flickering wick floating in oil, a real, actual, round pearl of a wet tear rolling down her friend’s plain, simple, and the extreme opposite of what could be called a clever face and sliding from her retreating chin to the white hollow between her girlish breasts.
A very different dialogue was proceeding meanwhile in the cabin of the two older women. There was no inclination between those two to make the relation between male and female flesh the subject of discourse. Their talk was actuated by, and revolved round, and obstinately and viciously returned to, the intense heart-gnawing jealousy they felt with regard to each other and the old wanderer with whom they were sailing.
“You have no idea then, is that what you want me to believe, as to what you will do with me, when you and this ugly, badly built ship of yours have lured Odysseus to his death?”
“Do with you? I don’t understand! I presume you’ll stay here on board with us until you’re tired of us? We shall, of course, when we’ve seen all we want to see of the ocean that swallowed up Atlantis, sail back to the land of my Fathers. If you think we’re going to visit Ithaca just for the sake of ending where we began you’re challenging the very mill-wheel of disappointment.
“And if you are playing with the crazy idea that you can persuade me to enter the harbour of the city of Thebes on your behalf you must be losing your head. What you ought to be asking yourself all this while is what you will do when we return to my country. I shall have no particular authority there; and if I had I doubt whether, from what I now am learning about you from personal contact, I should be particularly anxious to—What was that? The first call for dinner was it? Or was it a call for us to gather on the top deck again, before something—heaven knows what! — begins to happen?
“No, no! thanks all the same! You go on dressing; and be quick about it and stop talking! I can manage with this curst necklace if you leave me alone. Yes, you’re welcome to all the hot water in that pro-cho-os over there. I’ve got all I want.”
Meanwhile on the top deck the same sound of the same bell that had disturbed Nausikaa and Okyrhöe reached the ears of Odysseus. He had left his club propt against the bulwarks and had already begun to move, slowly and cautiously, as he always did when on board ship, from his seat of coiled ropes to the ladder leading to the oarsmen’s deck.
Over the face of the priest Enorches as he lay naked in a couple of blankets, for some kindly sailor had brought him a second one, now that the only light in the sky and on the water was moonlight, there floated an unquestionable smile of pure comfort and relief. Most onlookers would have supposed this look to have been purely due to a draught of rich Cyprian wine which another kindly sailor had brought him; but our old acquaintance the Fly who was now in a position to observe these things at close quarters knew well enough that it was his friend the brown-winged Moth, who by deliberately fanning with her wings the wine-moistened lips of the Priest of the Mysteries, had drawn from him this genial token of well-being.
As to the Moth herself, she had no sooner returned to her friend in their familiar refuge than she was compelled to listen to one of those cosmic conversations between the Sixth Pillar and the Club of Herakles which the Fly’s scientific mind always found so fascinating and illuminating.
“You must have noticed already, my dear old friend,” the Sixth Pillar was saying, “how strongly and emphatically the four elements are joining in this multiversial revolt against the authority of the Olympians? Of course there are voices abroad and I can hear them in this corridor who declare that what is now going on is a world-wide revolt of women against men rather than of men against gods or of Titans against Olympians; but with my own personal nearness to the Four Supreme Elements I cannot share these eccentric opinions.