He had just touched up the horses for the open road, when a woman rushed out of a hut with a screaming child in her arms, and stood in the way. Instead of shouting to her to look out, he brought the team to a dead stop, took an extra hitch of the reins around his waist, and held out his arms without a word. The mother gave him the child, black in the face and jerking all over. He held and stroked it; presently it got its breath and color back and quieted down, and he handed it back again, saying, “You know you could do that too, and better than I.” She seemed to understand this, blessed him, and said it seldom happened nowadays. As we drove on he said, “Do forgive me, sir. It looked half dead this time, or I’d not have made you wait.”
“Quite right,” I answered. “I am glad to see you care for all your children, even those who were lightly got.”
He turned his head, his gray eyes wide open; then he laughed. “Oh, it’s not mine, sir; it is the woodcutter’s.” He went on smiling to himself; then turned serious, and looked as if he would speak, but changed his mind and bent to his driving.
At the Palace my mother greeted me. While I was a lad in Crete she seemed to age five years in one; since then in this quiet place she had grown no older, and might have been the lad’s mother instead of mine. Some of her half-brothers were there to bid me welcome, men still in their prime, and I watched how they looked at him; he, after all, was a bastard as well as they. But they seemed to accept him, just as the people did. Perhaps it was this gift of healing. No one had sent me word of it; but then I had not sent for news.
Inside, my mother said to me, “I will see if Father is ready. I told him you were coming, Theseus, but he forgets again. Now at the last he calls the women to wash and comb him. Hippolytos, don’t stand dreaming; look after your father and see he has some wine.”
He served me himself, sending off the steward. When I bade him sit, he took a low stool, and sat with his arms folded lightly upon his knees. Looking at their long muscles and remembering them at the reins, I thought, “What arms for a woman!” It was time he thought about marriage; if Pittheus was too old to see to it, I had better take it in hand.
But when I asked him if he had a girl in mind, he looked amazed, and answered, “Oh, no, sir. It’s too late to think of that.”
“Too late?” I said staring. But to laugh would hurt him, and do no good. “Come, lad; whatever happened, everything passes. A girl, was it, or a boy?”
“I thought, sir, that you knew.” He had now got very serious; it made him look older, not younger as often with the young. “I have made an offering of all that. It’s settled and done.”
Since I had met him at the harbor, some unease had dogged me. Now it was as if a door creaked open, to show me the ancient enemy. But I would not look. “You are a man now,” I said, “heir to a kingdom. You must put your toys away.”
His brows, which were strong and darker than his hair, slanted and drew together. I saw his quiet did not come from meekness. “Well, sir, call it that if you wish; but how shall we talk then? It will be hard enough if both of us are trying; words don’t say much, in any case.”
In my heart, his patience angered me. It was like the patience of a great dog, that lets the small one snap. “What is this? Let me know it, then. You are your mother’s only son. Don’t you think her blood worth passing on; do you hold it so lightly?”
He did not speak for a while. His quiet stare seemed to say, “What will the man think of next? There is no knowing.” That too made me angry. At last he said, “She would not think so.”
“Well?” I said. “Come, get it over; have you taken some vow, or what?”
“Vow?” he said. “I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so; but it makes no odds.”
“You do not know?”
He said, trying hard with me (he was so young, he hardly expected anyone of my age to follow him), “Vows are to bind you if you change your mind. I shall take one if I am asked to; it makes no odds.”
“To what god?” I asked him. It was better to have it done.
“If I take a vow,” he answered, “that will be to Asklepios, when I am ready.”
This was something new. There were things behind, which he would not talk about, as there had always been. But this he had said quite briskly. He had been a riddle, I thought, since he was born.
I questioned him, expecting some high-flown words. But he said, “It started with the horses,” and then paused, thinking. “I used to doctor them. I always had a feel for it. Perhaps it comes from Poseidon.” He had a sweet smile. A woman would have melted. “Then at a push I had to give a hand with men, and that took hold of me. I started to wonder: what are men for?”
I had never heard such a question. It made me shrink back; if a man began asking such things, where would be the end of it? It was like peering into a dark whirlpool with a deep and spinning center, going down and down. I looked at the boy. He did not seem sick, nor frightened; only a little out of himself, as another boy might if a girl he was crazy for had just passed the window. “That,” I said, “is the business of the gods, who made us.”
“Yes, but for what? We ought to be good for it, whatever it is. How can we live, until we know?” I gazed at him; such desperate words, yet he looked all lit from within. He saw I was paying attention; that was enough to draw him on.
“I was driving my chariot once, going to Epidauros. Let me take you, sir, we can go tomorrow, then you will see … Well, never mind that; we were going well along the sea-road, there was a wind at our backs …”
“We?” I asked him, expecting to learn something of use.
“Oh, it seems like that with a team, when you are all going like one.” I had put him off; it took him a moment or two to get back again. “The road was good, and clear, nothing to hold back for. I let them go and they went like thunder. And I felt it then; I felt God going down into the horses, down through me. Like a steady lightning that does not burn. It lifted my hair upon my head. And I thought, ‘It is this, it is this, we are for this, to bring down the gods as the oak leads down the lightning, to lead down God into the, earth. For what?’ The chariot was racing beside the sea, everything blue and shining, our manes all streamed in the wind, they were running for joy as they do wild on the plains. And I knew what it was for; but one cannot tell it, the life goes out with words.” He jumped to his feet as if he had no weight in him, and strode across to the window, walking on air. There he stood looking out, with the sun upon him, blazing without heat in stillness. Then he came to himself again and said, quite shyly, “Well, but one can feel all that with a sick pup in one’s hands.”
As if she had heard, a nursing bitch came in heavy with milk, a wolfhound, and reared up with her paws against his chest. He stood rubbing her ears. Just so I had seen his mother stand, soon after I brought her home, eighteen years old. He was our living love, and through him we could live forever. Without him we died.
“If you have the healing from some god,” I said, “all the more need to get sons and pass it on. The Immortals won’t thank you to waste it, that is sure.”
He came down slowly from his lightness, finding he would need words after all. I could see him turning them over; like a racehorse hauling logs.
“But that is it,” he said. “Not to waste it, that is the thing. This power takes all of a man; go off after this or that, and it wastes away. Girls, now; if I once made a start, whether I married or just had one at the Dionysia, I daresay I couldn’t do without them after. They look so pretty and soft, like little foxes. Likely enough one could never have enough of them, once one had begun. Much better not to begin.”