“Go in, Mother,” I said. “I must speak with Father alone.” I think she had not guessed before what I had done. “Oh, Alexias!” she said. Then the blood warmed my heart, and its courage returned. “Go in, Mother,” I said; “alone is better.” She looked once more at me, and went.
When my father came in, he hung the outhouse key on the nail again. Then, without speaking, he turned towards me. I faced him and said, “Yes, sir, I am to blame. I went last night to bid Sostias goodbye, and I was careless, it seems.” The flesh of his face seemed to grow heavy and dull, and his eyes widened. “Careless! You impudent dog, you shall pay for this.” I said, “So I intend, sir,” and laid on the table the money I had ready. “For a man of his age, whom but for me you would have found hanged this morning, I think thirty is enough.” He stared at the silver, then shouted, “Do you dare to offer me my own? You have done now with playing the master here.”—“The City gave it to me,” I said, “for running at the Isthmus. Call it a gift to the gods.” He was still for a moment, then thrust at it with his hand, so that part of it fell, ringing and rolling on the floor-tiles. We stood unheeding it, looking in each other’s eyes.
He drew in his breath; I thought from his eyes he was going to lift his hand to me, or even to curse me, for he seemed beside himself. But a stillness fell on him instead. In this pause it was as if fear put out a hand, and pulled me by the hair; yet the face of fear was hidden.
He said, “Before you came of age, your uncle Strymon offered your stepmother the protection of his house. Why did you oppose it?” He had never called her my stepmother before. I felt a chill at it, beyond all reason, so that I must have grown pale; I saw his eyes fixed on my face. Then, remembering what a homecoming I had saved him from, I grew angry, and answered, “Because I thought it too soon to presume your death.” I was about to go on; but before I could open my mouth again, he thrust forth his head at me like a madman, and spat out, “Too soon! You had done that, both of you, soon enough!”
I stared at him, his meaning knocking at the doors of my mind, while my soul tried to close them. In the pause, there was a sound under the table. My father turned quickly and stooped down. There was a loud scream, as he dragged out little Charis. She must have been playing on the floor when he came in, and crept there out of the way. He shook her, and asked her what she meant by eavesdropping, as if she could have understood a word of what had passed. Terrified out of her senses, she struggled in his hands, and seeing me shrieked, “Lala! Lala!” straining towards me. “Don’t, Father,” I said. “You frighten her, let her go.”
Of a sudden he thrust her away, so that she fell at my feet. I picked her up, trying to quiet her while she sobbed and wailed. “Take her then,” he said, “since you claim her.” The child was crying in my ear; I could not believe I had heard him rightly. He strode forward, and seized each of us by the hair, holding our faces side by side; his lips showed his closed teeth as a dog’s do. “She is small,” he said, “for a child of three.”
I have seen evil in the world, and known horror, as any man must who has lived in times like these. But none of it has been to me what that moment was. Since then, the Gorgon’s head has never been a children’s tale to me. I felt the blood sink back upon my heart, and my limbs grow cold. It seemed that a voice of madness spoke in me, saying, “Destroy him, and this will cease to be.” I cannot tell what wickedness I might have done, but for the child. Prompted by a god, she did not let me forget her, but thrust her hot wet face into my neck, and clutched my hair. I moved my hand over her body to calm her, and came partly to myself. “Sir,” I said, “you have suffered much hardship; I think you are sick. You ought to rest, so I will leave you.”
I walked out into the courtyard with my sister in my arms. There I stood still, looking before me. It seemed that if I did not move, I could remain as stone, and know nothing. But this sleep was not permitted to me. The child broke it, speaking in my ear. She was saying that she wanted her mother.
I bent and set her on her feet. Calling the maid Kydilla, who was passing through, I told her to take the child in, and find her mother for her. For she had a right to what was hers. Then I walked out into the street.
At first, if I had any clear thought, it was only to find a place to be quiet in. But as I moved on through the City, seeking it in vain, the movement itself became needful to me; I walked faster and faster; I was like a man trying to leave his shadow behind. Presently passing through the Acharnian Gate I was out of the City. Then, the need pressing me more strongly, I girded my mantle up, and began to run.
I ran through the level plain between the City and Parnes. I did not go very fast; for I knew in myself I must run far, and my training worked in me though I did not regard it. The high wall of Parnes rose before me, pale with the summer drought; bleached grass and dark scrub and grey rock, standing against a hard dark sapphire sky. I reached the footslopes and ran between the olive fields, where poppies splashed the barley-stubble with blood. At last hearing a stream below me in a gulley, I felt thirst, and climbed down the rocks to drink. It was shady after the heat of the road, the water cool and fresh; I lingered there, when I should have hastened on. By this I learned that what I had been flying from was madness; for there it overtook me.
The form of my madness was this: that the sin I had been charged with, I was guilty of, at least in my soul. As in the terror of this thought I climbed up from the stream and began to run over the mountains, all sense fled from me, and it seemed I had committed it in my body also. Sometimes my mind would partly right itself, and I would throw off this last frenzy; yet I never really came into my wit. Who can doubt it was the judgment on my impiety, in destroying my father’s letter, and disobeying his command? For I could not see, what any man in his senses must have seen, that being beside himself he had been carried to an absurdity which he must perceive already; that a dozen of our acquaintance could bear witness to the time of Charis’s birth; that Strymon himself, who though mischievous was not a villain, would have testified for me in this at least. I only felt myself accursed by heaven and among men. So I hastened on, deeper into the hills and higher, into the wild country above the farms; climbing, and running where there was any place to run. My legs were torn by the heath and scrub, my feet bruised upon the stones. Once a troop of Spartans sighted me; but they took me for a runaway slave making for Megara, and rode past.
At last I came into the high places, where nothing is to be seen but dry stony tops and deep gorges, and far-off rock-shapes shuddering in the heat. I felt no hunger. Sometimes I felt thirst, but I was loth to stay and quench it, for I knew myself pursued; so that I began to look round for what hunted me, seeking to surprise it. The sunburnt mountain was the colour of a wolf’s pelt, and once I thought I saw one move. But it was the wind playing with a bush; it was not wolves that trailed me.
The sun shone brightly; but after the noontide, the wind blew small dark clouds across the sky, whose shadows hovered, and swooped like ravens down the slopes of the mountains. At first when I saw what followed me, I seemed to see only such a cloud as this, coming up behind. I had now run far in the summer heat, and climbed high; my breath came loudly, my legs began to fail, and my tongue was as dry as a dusty shoe. I saw water before me flowing down from a spring, and flinging myself on the earth drank as a beast does. As I lay there, I felt the cold that ran before the cloud; and looking up I saw them.
They were not in the cloud, but in the shadow of the cloud, running over the brush and the little stones towards me. Their faces and their feet were blue like the night; their garments were without substance, sometimes showing their dark limbs, sometimes the ground behind them. With a shout of horror I leaped to my feet, and fled; and now I knew that what I had taken only for the noise of my labouring breath, had been the hiss of the snakes that twined and darted in their hair. As I ran I prayed; but my prayer fell back like a spent arrow; I knew I was given to them for my sin, as Orestes was given, and no god would save me. Yet I ran, like the hunted wolf, who runs not in hope nor thought but because he is made so.