John Powys - Atlantis

“Whither it’ll go when you and I have escaped from it!” interrupted Pontopereia; and though the girl’s eyes were fixed on the arched entrance to the room where they were talking, an entrance which in some incredible antiquity, had been carved out of ten yards of solid rock, Okyrhöe’s eyes were still absorbed in the reflection of the two of them in that great polished shield. And so intense was the power of concentration with which Okyrhöe’s self-interest had endowed her vision that it seemed to her a quite natural yielding to a quite natural impulse when she allowed the young girl to steal from her side and slip away in silence through that low deeply-cut arch into the open air, while she watched herself arrange her hair, arrange the veil that covered her hair, arrange what covered the veil that covered her hair, and, as she did so, permitted herself luxuriously and voluptuously to lie back in her chair and to tell herself, for the thousandth and one time, the thrilling story of her life up to date and all its drastic moves and dramatic crises.

It must have been her feminine suspicion that Pontopereia had taken advantage of Zenios’ troublesome mania for being flattered to start an amorous affair with some farmer’s son of the neighbourhood, or even to exalt this new friendship with Eione into a romantic attachment, that set her own mind running so recklessly upon her own youth.

Anyway she let herself recall the time when, being younger than Pontopereia was today, she had been a fellow-attendant along with Arsinöe among the crowd of spirited young girls from every part of the mainland at the court of King Priam in Ilium.

Her inspiration for these memories came from her own beautiful face; and as at this moment, with Zenios walking to meet his aged flatterer and Pontopereia remorsefully pretending to be looking for a black sail on water that was already too dark to reveal any sail, and with Nemertes, the stalwart mother of their three faithful servants, Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos, yes, with Nemertes, she told herself, now at work in the kitchen preparing a plentiful meal for the three lads and a no less plentiful, but rather more elegant one for Zenios and herself, there was no immediate necessity to leave this shield-mirror, she allowed the motions of her fingers, about her head, her hair, and her perfect throat, to follow the arbitrary motions of her memory.

And she remembered how her crafty mother from Crete, who had made her change her name from Genetyllis to Okyrhöe, had warned her against making friends with a wild strange girl at the same court whom everyone but the girl herself knew to be a bastard daughter of Hector.

But with Arsinöe she had insisted on making friends; and had proved her wisdom in this when the crash came and the city was taken, for she succeeded in making Andromache, Hector’s widow, believe that it was she, and not Arsinöe, who had the right to call Hector father, and she had betrayed Arsinöe into the hands of Phoenician merchants bound for Ithaca, and while clinging herself to the ill-starred Andromache, she had succeeded at last in becoming the wife of the miser Zenios, and in aiding him in his flight from Thebes in company with Pontopereia.

It had only been when Zenios in his craving for masculine society had begun to exercise his hospitable influence on the susceptible Moros that Okyrhöe learnt that Arsinöe like herself was a refugee in Ithaca; and although this piece of news had at first been a considerable shock to Okyrhöe, she was now, as she airily, though by no means absent-mindedly, practised various expressions in profile, in three-quarters-face, and in full face, telling herself a fine story as to what she would do if by any strange chance she found herself confronting once again her old acquaintance, Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector the son of Priam….

“Okyrhöe! what do you think? Who do you suppose—” The beautiful lady rose and swung round from her shield-mirror like an indignant sea-mew from the crest of a wave.

The shock of seeing Pontopereia so quickly again and in such an unaccountable whirl of excitement was as irritating as it was startling. The girl had left her at her shield-mirror. The girl now found her at her shield-mirror. There was something annoying in being thus caught practising seductive expressions and the effective manipulation of dramatic drapery.

“How often must I tell you, Pontopereia, that I won’t have you calling me Okyrhöe! You must call me Mother.”

“But you are not—” the girl began; but seeing real anger in the woman’s face she hurriedly broke off. “The King of Ithaca has come, mother! He’s come with a heap of golden treasure to buy me from you and take me away with him!”

The excitement of Pontopereia was so overwhelming that it seemed to have loosened her hair, enlarged her breasts, increased her height, and transformed her whole being to such an extent that her figure seemed to fill the arched passage that led out into the air. As a growing girl the daughter of Teiresias was at the opposite pole of girlhood from the young Eione: for, while this latter’s face was plain and homely, her limbs were those of a perfect dancer; but while Pontopereia’s limbs were thick, heavy, awkward and unwieldy, her face was moulded with exquisite delicacy as if for the perfect expression of pure inspiration. It was a face that lent itself to be possessed by a power that, even as you watched it, seemed able to change human flesh and blood into some rarer essence, as though air, water, and fire had joined in revolt against the heavier and more substantial fourth element with which they are normally associated.

But though Okyrhöe had already recovered her composure and was now arranging her drapery round her shoulders with the absolute poise of a complete balance of personal being, as she begged the excited girl to tell her how large a bodyguard Odysseus had brought with him, and as she shifted her position from side to side in attempts to see if any of the royal attendants were visible between the outlet from this sequestered chamber and the curves of the sand-dunes descending to the edge of the sea, it was clear to Pontopereia that she had not yet decided upon her line of action.

“May I go and bring them in, Mother? And then may I run and tell Zenios who’s come, and bring him back before he’s gone too far? The only danger is that if I do catch up with him — you know what he is, Mother! — he very likely will just come back alone and send me on — miles and miles on very likely! — to tell old Moros that the king has suddenly come to supper and if he comes too there’ll be one too many!”

The daughter of Teiresias certainly revealed her insight into Okyrhöe’s nature by assuming that when the lovely lady finally decided in what direction her own chief private interests lay she wouldn’t waste a second in making up her mind what she wanted done.

But what a girl of her age, however great her prophetic inspiration, naturally couldn’t know, was the enormous though imponderable part played in the lives of all grown-up women by that curious sixth sense that can only be clumsily and crudely defined by the words social instinct. Nor could she know that this same “social instinct” resembles pure animal instinct much closer than it resembles anything rational or logical, and, as such, depends to a large extent on sight, sound, taste, smell and touch.

“Can he possibly remember me?” Okyrhöe thought. Then, having dismissed that idea as out of the question—“Never mind,” she said to herself, “whether he does or not, I remember him perfectly well; and I remember that with him, where women are concerned, there are only two things, either simple lust, or simple affection. That being so—” And her train of thought concluded with obscene images.