Atlantis (41 page)

“For the gods’ sake think, my wise one, think out a cunning scheme that’ll save our old man from this infernal witch!” Nisos
then became silent for a while, holding Arsinöe by the shoulders and pressing her gently against one of the walls of that long narrow down-descending passage, illuminated here and there by richly-oiled and richly-ensconced torches, and echoing at intervals, as the door at the bottom of it opened to let someone in or out, to the excited voices of the Phaiakian sailors, who, in Eurycleia’s subterranean kitchen, were enjoying her sagacious hospitality. Then, bending his head down gravely and seriously he touched Arsinöe’s forehead with his lips. And it was at this moment that the thought first flashed through his mind that he was the kind of boy who could only be really happy if he had as his wife a woman a lot older than himself.

“For don’t you see, Arsinöe, my darling friend,” he went on, “don’t you see, here there has suddenly come by the very will of Atropos herself, the grandest chance that the old man is ever likely to have to realize his desire to sail over the great Western ocean, under the waves of which Atlantis lies and to discover what unknown lands and continents and peoples and cities and fields of rich grain exist beyond those furthest horizons of water! For don’t you see, Arsinöe darling, if this Princess Nausikaa can only be brought to see our old man as she saw him once when she loved him at first sight, why then, my lovely Trojan, let the armour of Achilles be left on your Image of Hector! Odysseus will be the Captain of Nausikaa’s ship; and together they will sail into the fabulous memory of all the men who come after us—and, O my dear! may the old little goddess of Fate, Atropos herself, see to it that I am with him in this venture!”

Nisos was again silent, holding her by her shoulders against that wall. And then suddenly, freeing herself from him and throwing his hands back, she held herself erect and closed her eyes.

“I think,” she said, speaking clearly and very rapidly, “that it’s his beard that puts her off. What I would do if I were you is to make someone you happen to know, someone who wouldn’t suffer the punishment
you
would have to suffer for such a thing in case it turned out badly, cut off with a sharp sword, or a
polished knife, or a pair of shears, this teasing and intrusive and conceited and aggressive beard of the old man! Yes, Nisos
Naubolides
,
that
is what you must do! I see the doing of it clearly in the curious darkness into which at this moment the mental effort of trying to do exactly what is required has thrown around me. The thing to do is to cut off his beard!

“But one thing I know. The moment that beard of his has been cut off Nausikaa will see him as she saw him at the very first, when, while she was playing ball with her companions, he came straight to her out of the sea. Yes, Nisos Naubolides, that is the only way this witch-woman from Thebes who is already
succeeding
in enlarging the gulf between these former lovers, can be defeated. I swear to you I am right. I see it as if it were being done at this very moment. The love-light will come into
Nausikaa
’s eyes the second that beard is gone. No, it is not your king’s age that keeps them apart, now that they are together again.
It
is
the
beard.
And Okyrhöe knows it very well and plays upon it. I have been watching her. She doesn’t come between them herself if she can help it. She is too wise for that. She leaves it to the beard.”

It was at this point—and, whether she was one of Hector’s many illegitimate daughters or not, she certainly had a particular kind of intense and absorbed gravity, especially when there was a frown between her eyebrows, which anyone who had ever seen Hector would have recognized as his—that she opened her eyes and laid her fingers upon the young man’s sleeve.

“Have you anyone in your mind, Nisos Naubolides,” she asked him, “who would be the best person of all persons to do this bold and dangerous thing, whether a man or a woman, whether old or young? I mean,” she went on earnestly, after a pause to let a couple of Nausikaa’s ship’s officers pass down the passage, and Nisos couldn’t help admiring the way she
instinctively
let her fingers slip from his sleeve to his hand and let her head droop towards her shoulder—“I mean the actual cutting it off?” And when she saw he hadn’t missed her gesture as the men passed, “Lovers, not conspirators, eh?” she added.

“Well, my beautiful one,” he said, while his mind rushed off to the dining-hall and to the animal-shaped chair in which he had left Zeuks, “I think I
do
know the right one for the handling of this little job. But don’t you think we ought to have two strings to our bow in so ticklish a thing? Why don’t you go down to the kitchen and drop a few tentative hints in our old lady’s ear? She’s hand and glove with Odysseus, who treats her as if she were his Grandmother. She knows his mind, I should say, better than anyone else on this earth; and we may be sure she has as little love for Okyrhöe as we have: though I admit it’s possible she’s less friendly to Nausikaa than we are! However—the immediate business for us is to outwit this bitch from Thebes.

“Besides I think we’re agreed, my sweet Trojan, that it would be sheer madness in the old king not to snatch at the heavenly chance of a perfect ship and perfect sailors?”

Arsinöe smiled; and having exchanged a kiss that was at once so friendly and so free from passion that they might have been brother and sister, she went down to the kitchen, while he went up to the dining-hall. He found Odysseus still sipping his wine and still keeping up a curious kind of cerebral dalliance with both the women; while from one end of the table to the other end of the table the two oldest of the Phaiakian ship’s officers argued pedantically, technically and very loudly upon certain nice and difficult problems connected with the art of navigation.

Nisos slipped as noiselessly and as respectfully as he could to Zeuks’ grotesque chair, and kneeling down before it muttered what was really a sort of extempore prayer, graver than casual listeners might have supposed, to Zeuks and Zeuks’ chair, as if they were one creature or one sacred Image. To emphasize and enhance this anthropomorphic and fetish-worshipping gesture, which was one part humorous, two parts entirely serious, and only one part theatrical, he pressed his elbows against the arms of the chair and clasped his fingers in supplication; and then, afraid lest his queer friend should think he was making fun of him, he twisted his head round, as if to make sure that his performance was not missed by those at the table.

Meanwhile, having made sure that Zeuks was not in a trance of any sort, but sufficiently attentive, he whispered to him a realistic and rather grossly-worded summary of his talk with Arsinöe, feeling all the while that what he was kneeling before was neither a chair nor a man but a multiformed malleable monster ready to embrace whatever creature sank into its lap with such a transfiguring power of metamorphosis that it
and the creature received into it were transformed into a new and monstrous identity.

Zeuks made no comment upon his friend’s whispered
monologue
murmur save a constant murmur of the same words: “Go on. I understand. Go on. I follow you. Go on, Nisos
Naubolides
.”

This completely passive acceptance of our young friend’s startling revelation of what might have been described as “the Plot of the King’s Beard” reduced a little the enormity of the sacrilege involved. It was only after they had gone on like this for some time, Nisos explaining, predicting, conjecturing,
anticipating
, enlarging, revising, and Zeuks listening and indicating that he missed nothing of what he heard, that there was a quite unlooked-for if not especially momentous interruption to the wine-sipping at the high table.

No less a person than the midwife came up the steps from the corridor, holding by the hand her now pregnant sister.

“I have brought to you, O king,” she hurriedly announced, offering one of the empty table-chairs to her companion who sank into it with a groan of ineffable relief, “our well-known family prophetess, because they told me that there has come to you from Thebes the daughter of the great prophet Teiresias; and I wanted my sister
,
who is in the state you now
witness, to exchange a few thoughts with her.”

Round went the fine cranium and bowsprit beard of the old king as he looked for Pontopereia at the spot where she had recently been; but it was from quite a different quarter that her clear and unperturbed voice reached them. Tired of watching the deep and subtle struggle between the two ladies, the clumsy
little wide-eyed creature, whose intellectual grasp of the whole state of the world at that juncture reduced—and how little either of those clever ones knew it!—both Okyrhöe and Nausikaa to a pathetically ordinary level of active, lively, beautiful, ambitious, practical women whose response to life completely shut out all the more cosmic reactions of the human mind, had boldly climbed into the high recess of one of the windows.

Having persuaded, and not without rousing some rather pathetic erotic illusions in that official breast, the pompous Herald to help her with his powerful arms and shoulders, the girl had succeeded in scrambling up into what was one of the most elevated of all that spacious hall’s high window-ledges. From this vantage-ground she could not only amuse herself by watching the tricks of Okyrhöe and the shrewd hit-backs of Nausikaa, but she could see between the stalks of the creepers the blackened square of ground which was all that was left of the old Dryad and her oak-tree, after Zeus’ angry thunderbolt.

“Something decisive for good and something heavy with the opposite of good are both on the verge of happening.” Thus did Pontopereia murmur to herself the prophetic inspiration which came to her straight from that blackened spot in the forest where the old Dryad had perished.

“Something decisive for good, though it is also heavy with the opposite of good, is on the verge of happening,” and as
Pontopereia
tried in these crude words, which she repeated twice over to herself in silence, to express what a breath of wind was now uttering in her ears and uttering a good deal more often than twice, she was suddenly arrested and fascinated by something else. It was a peculiarity of hers to make much of all the
chance-shapes
and accidental formations that presented themselves whether out-of-doors or in-doors; and what she saw now struck her as a real omen. The Dryad’s blackened square of earth, which one general darkness of night had already made part of itself was scrawled over by a thin streak of light from the aperture at which she herself crouched, a streak of light with which chance or destiny was now inscribing, according to the lettering of a
language not wholly different from hers, the fitful outlines of a disturbing “N”! Did this “N”, the girl wondered, refer to Nisos or to Nausikaa, or possibly even to Nosodea the mother of Leipephile?

“It is in accordance with the ancient custom of our Grecian islands,” the Midwife was now saying—indeed she had been uttering sentence after sentence ever since she first appeared but in such a loud, pontifical, assured, self-confident voice, that it was as if she were addressing a crowd of people outside who had no connection with Odysseus or with these two women or with Zeuks or with Nisos.

Odysseus, who had not taken the faintest notice of what the midwife was saying, now suddenly addressed the pregnant woman herself. “Your pains have not begun yet, have they, my dear?” The question was a foolish one and an extremely masculine one; for it was obvious that the pregnant woman’s sister whose
profession
it was to deal with such cases would not have left her quite unassisted while she harangued the world; but there was clearly something about the exhausted creature that appealed to the old king.

Nausikaa rose from her seat. “Where’s that old nurse of yours,” she enquired; “the one you introduced me to a while ago? Hasn’t she got a room in the palace where a poor woman like this can rest in peace and wait her hour?”

Odysseus put down his wine-glass and looked round the room. “Nisos!” he cried. “Please go down to the kitchen and bring Eurycleia up here. I want to talk to her.”

Nisos leaned forward and whispered to the occupant of that grotesque chair, while the chair itself, as he did so, seemed to be perceptibly projecting its roots into the floor and its stag-like horns towards the roof.

“Shall I do what he says?” he whispered to Zeuks, “or shall I pretend not to hear him?”

It was Zeuks himself, however, who at that moment pretended not to hear Nisos; for in his own mind Zeuks was thinking, “Why is it that it gives me no great thrill to know I am the son of
Arcadian Pan? Is it because it doesn’t make me immortal and independent of death? In such great matters we men are like animals and do not understand what is going on. If it did make me independent of death it would still be impossible for me to
feel
independent of it. And what benefit do I get from being the son of a god, I should like to know, when I
feel
exactly like everybody else?”

These thoughts so dominated Zeuks that they gave him the sensation that he was lost in them and that his personality had disappeared and that it was the chair he sat in that thought these thoughts and that he was merely the name for the language the chair used. The chair, in fact, thought
in
Zeuks
instead of
in
Greek
!

It was indeed the fact that Nisos had actually knelt down with both his elbows propped on the arms of this singular chair where tree-root-legs and hooded covering of stag-horn seemed so much more alive than the man who was sitting in it, that rendered both himself and Zeuks so lost to all that was going on that it wasn’t until quite a crowd of Nisos’ relations were standing round them, nor until the Midwife herself had commenced a formal supplication imploring the goddess Athene to return to them in Ithaca that the spell was broken.

Roused at length from his trance Nisos was amazed to see quite close to him not only Nosodea, the mother of Leipephile, but Leipephile’s elder sister Spartika, the priestess of Athene, as well as the old man Damnos Geraios. His amazement indeed had hardly reached its peak when lo! standing alone behind the lot of them, but with the half-protective, half-mocking gaze he knew so fatally well fixed steadily upon himself he saw his own mother!