John Powys - Atlantis

This certainty reached his mind in close connection with those clutching knuckles of the lecherous son of Pan which he now could detect beneath that white linen and whiter breast; but it obtained its domination over him and over his destiny in connection with a secret resolve he now made that was totally different from any purpose or any vow or any dedication he had ever made before.

And with this new intention, with this new gathering together of the diverse forces of his soul into what he decided must be, from now on, one intense, strongly compressed will, a will most malleable, a will most adaptable, a will that lends itself, a will that adjusts itself, a will that conceals itself, a will that multiplies itself, a will that seeks its irrepressible level, a will like water, a will like air, our young friend made a convulsive clutch at the foot of the Heraklean club upon which Odysseus had begun to lean so heavily in his absorbed talk with Nausikaa that there was a real danger of its suddenly sliding along the floor and letting him down.

But no sooner had Nisos clutched it than the familiar tinkling voice of the scientific Fly was in his ears. “Oh how much easier it would be, this ancient language of yours,” he thought, “if only there weren’t all these accurst adverbs! It’s the adverbs that spoil it. Why can’t you sting without stinging violently or buzz without buzzing gently? Why can’t you kiss without kissing tenderly? Why can’t you even think without thinking stupidly or cleverly?”

Although he didn’t relinquish his hold upon the club of Herakles, Nisos worked himself up into such irritation over the mania for adverbs in the language of insects, that in a whisper that contained something of sheer unkindness he called the attention of the Fly to the emergence from the club’s “lifecrack”, which was just above his fingers, of the priest-enamoured Moth.

But those adoring brown wings had barely fluttered twice up and down the sweltering space between the wet hairs of the man’s blanket and the wet hairs of the man’s chest, before, in her shrinking desire to comfort the Interpreter of the Mysteries without driving her companion to any regrettably rash act she had not only darted back to their lodging but had implored the Fly to translate for her what the news was that the club was hearing from the omniscient Sixth Pillar.

“Haven’t you yet caught across that moon-lit ocean of yours, my adventurous friend,” were the startling words that were now communicated to the moth by the fly and over-heard by Nisos, “the heavy breathing of Pegasos upon the wind and the quick gasps of his long-maned companion? And I presume Odysseus is already aware that his friend Nausikaa is now the Virgin Queen of her native-land, and that not only her parents’ palace and garden await her return, but the whole country passionately wants her back?”

Nisos clutched the foot of the club of Herakles so fiercely that the force of his grip squeezed the club’s attention out of his ears and reduced his Nemean senses to the same sort of deaf, dumb, and numb condition with which they had expected, washed up upon the shore of Ithaca, the reviving right hand of a new possessor.

And it was then that, more vividly than ever aware of those knuckles of Zeuks concealing from him so much of the bosom of Arsinöe, our young friend decided that he must learn from this queer rival of his, this fantastic child of Arcadian Pan, whose whole personality resembled an unburst bubble of purposeless laughter, the trick the fellow had of repeating some logos, some slogan of conduct, some motto of behaviour, by which a person’s divided will-power could be unified and concentrated.

And Nisos then and there decided that the word he wanted was the word spoudazo. “Yes, yes,” he muttered in his secret heart— “that’s the word, that’s the incantation I want! I want the feeling of being able to pull myself together till I’m like an arrow-head of intense will-power! Yes! yes! Spoudazo is my word, but I must add to it the word terpsis, the sensation of enjoyment, and I must throw into-these words my whole self and with my whole self, I here and now must will intensely that Arsinöe the Trojan shall belong to me!”

Nisos had no sooner decided upon selecting spoudazo, “I absolutely will” as the logos that should henceforth represent the motive-power of his life, than Odysseus and Nausikaa having decided upon something that was clearly very important as the result of their prolonged and absorbed discussion, swung clear round and came out of the extempore dining-hall into that wretchedly littered ante-chamber where those carefully scrubbed planks led down to the ship’s lowest hold.

Our friend followed the aged King of Ithaca and the middle-aged Queen of the Phaiakians till they paused at the threshold of the cabin that Nausikaa shared with Okyrhöe. The ever-watchful old warrior was aware in a flash that they were being followed, and turned indignantly upon Nisos. But Nisos, knowing the wanderer’s almost supernatural self-control, flung himself on his mercy without a second’s hesitation.

“You ought O my King,” he cried, “to know at once what I’ve learnt by means of the weapon you now hold in your hand! For as you now are holding it, mighty one, this is news you will never share with the Sixth Pillar in the Corridor at Ithaca! If I don’t repeat every word of it, O great Master, may I pass at once to the kingdom of Aidoneus!”

It was with an unclouded forehead and even with the beginning of a friendly smile that the Wanderer bade him speak; and hurriedly and breathlessly the lad told the two of them the whole story.

To the young man’s astonishment it was Nausikaa who spoke first. “You had better tell him,” she said, addressing Odysseus, “what you have told me.”

“I have been telling the Queen,” said Odysseus at once, “what no one in the world knows except your mother; namely, my dear child, that I, and not Krateros Naubolides, am your father.”

Our friend stood for a moment just as if one of those golden antennae, for that is what those elongated tassels that hung from the Helmet of Proteus were really like, had got twisted round his neck. Then his whole face puckered up, in the manner of a small boy who has been slapped and told to go to bed and the biggest tears that Nausikaa had ever seen, though two even bigger ones formed, though they did not fall, in her own eyes, rolled down his cheeks.

Odysseus looked quietly from one to the other of them, while with the wrist of the hand that held the club, that club which sometimes was called Dokeesis, “Seeming”, and sometimes “Expectation” he touched Nisos gently on the head. Then he said, while his bow-sprit beard turned with a queer jerk into the direction of the bed in Nausikaa’s cabin: “Well, my son, what our new Queen and your old Dad have to do now is to plant between us the seed of a new brother for you since you’ve lost Agelaos! And he’ll have to look sharp,” Odysseus added, as he led the Queen towards her own bed, “if our friend Leipephile is to conceive a new King of Ithaca before you and I come home from Atlantis!”

The old man — and our young friend, for all his emotional agitation, had the wit to notice this, took good care to prop up “Expectation” against the edge of their bed, before returning to the threshold to draw the curtains of their chamber — said to Nisos with an extremely humorous expression on his face: “For the sake of Aphrodite’s son, and by him I do not mean the good Aeneas — stay on guard here, my boy, and make sure that that terrible woman from Thebes doesn’t break in upon us! O yes! and don’t fail to remind me, before those Immortal Horses do carry them off, to see to it that that poor devil of an Enorches has a couple more blankets to keep him warm! He hurt both those creatures, you must remember, and flying horses, like ordinary horses, have long memories.”