John Powys - Atlantis

“Thus although it was with her sweetest and most cajoling smile that Okyrhöe bowed herself out of the presence of the king’s nurse, her thoughts, as she got the Trojan captive to introduce her to Leipephile, the betrothed of Nisos’ brother, and then persuaded that same Arsinöe to take her to a well-cushioned chamber in a low-roofed passage behind the royal throne in the dining-hall, where Pontopereia was talking eagerly to young Eione, were nothing less than murderous.

“O you wait, you wait, you wait, you wait! you croaking and creaking corpse! It won’t be you who’ll choose the death you’ll die. It’ll be your meek and obedient Okyrhöe; and it won’t be the prettiest death in the world either; I can tell you that.”

Meanwhile, hidden away in that chamber at the end of that low-roofed passage between the great dining-hall and the subterranean kitchens and sculleries, where the meals were prepared and washed up and where the floral wreaths and the symbols and all the ritualistic paraphernalia for festival days were kept, Tis’s little sister Eione was recounting to Pontopereia her escape from the amorous attentions of the god Pan.

“But didn’t you feel,” Pontopereia had just dared to suggest, “so spell-bound under his touch that you longed to yield to him?”

The two young girls were sitting cross-legged on opposite piles of Cyprian cushions. Eione was seated on cushions whose prevailing colour was pale green, and Pontopereia on cushions whose prevailing colour was purple. Eione looked gravely and intently into her friend’s eyes.

“No, my dear,” she replied, “you’ll probably laugh at me as absurdly ignorant, but to tell you the honest truth—”

“You mean you’ve never really been made love to?”

Eione neither reddened nor stammered. She just frowned and rubbed the sole of one of her sandals with two of her knuckles as if the unravelling of this difficult question required her whole mental concentration.

“I’m not sure whether I have or not,” she said simply. “A boy who lives near us pressed me once very tight against him, when neither of us had much on, and I felt something — the thing they all have, I suppose, that makes them men — pounding and throbbing and beating against me like a stick with the pulse of a heart. But it didn’t make me want him to do anything; and it didn’t frighten me or disturb me. I just noticed it; that’s all, and wondered what I’d feel if he did anything else, and whether I ought to help him to do anything else. And then somebody came — and that was all.”

Pontopereia gave the purple cushion beneath her a mighty tug with both her hands so that it rose up like a wave between her thighs. “No,” she said. “I can’t call that quite enough; and to tell you the truth, my sweet one, I’ve never myself got as far as that — I mean in real life, if you understand. What I’ve always done, since I was O! so little, is to tell myself stories of love-making when I’m alone in bed. Sometimes I wake up in the night — you know? — feeling very amorous and then I tell myself, O such weird and funny stories — not very nice stories always, I’m afraid! It depends on what I’m feeling that particular night. But do tell me, my Sweet, what you did when Arcadian Pan laid hands on you. And first, do tell me this. Did his thin hairy legs and goat’s feet give you the shivers?”

At this point, to Pontopereia’s complete astonishment, Eione burst out laughing. “Shivers?” she cried. “I should say not! I like goats very much. Goats are my favourite beasts, just as Crows are my favourite birds, and blue dragon-flies my favourite insects and eels my favourite fish! I begged Arcadian Pan to let me stroke his thin hairy legs and it wasn’t he who made me sit on his queer knees, it was I myself who made him take me on them. And I kept making him lift up his goat-feet so that I could see them quite close and touch them, like I like touching the feet of real goats! Then I made him let me clean his goat’s horns for him and polish them till they were lovely and smooth. Then I got him to teach me to make some real proper sounds with his pipe — yes! I played some real notes on Arcadian Pan’s own flute!

“Yes, as I’m telling you, Ponty darling, everything between us was just as I liked it to be, in fact as I made it be. The truth is I never knew that great gods — for he is a great god, isn’t he, Arcadian Pan? — ever let a person treat them, well! certainly not an ordinary farm-girl like me treat them, as he let me treat him!”

Pontopereia pulled out the uppermost one of her purple cushions from between her legs, and spreading it on her knees thumped it with her fists into smoothness.

“But what happened then, my dear? You aren’t suggesting, are you, that having made friends with this astonishing Being in such a simple way you were separated from him by a mistake?”

Eione looked at her with a vague careless, idle, good-natured, but entirely childish and innocent look.

“I wish indeed, Ponty dear,” she said, slowly, “that you could explain to me what happened for it’s all so totally beyond my comprehension that I’ve been living in a sort of trance of confusion ever since. It’s only your coming that’s brought me back into my own real self again. Yes, on my soul! I’ve never had such queer feelings. It’s just as if I’d been turned into somebody else; and somebody whose whole life goes by, without any move of her own, just as if she were a figure in another person’s dream! I know it sounds all vague and sleepy and funny; but I swear to you, Ponty darling, it’s true. Do you think I’ve fallen in love with Arcadian Pan? Ordinary girls like me can fall in love with an immortal god can’t they? There’s nothing impossible about it is there?

“Anyway, Ponty darling, I don’t quite know what has happened to me and that’s what’s made me decide that, come what may, I must stick close to Arcadian Pan for a few more spring days and see what comes of it! One important thing has already come of it and that is our curiously complete agreement over this great cosmic Revolution. Mind you, some of us Island people still talk of the ‘Minoan’ or ‘Cretan’ revolution and others still talk of the ‘Argive’ revolution; but the only revolution that Arcadian Pan and I talk of is what we have come to call the ‘Cosmic’ Revolution, by which we mean a rustic pastoral revolution against a cruel, despotic, wicked, undemocratic, hieratic, privileged tyrannical Order of the Citizens of great Cities, which we — rustic shepherds and shepherdesses from the country — have joined together to break up forever!”

“But what will you put in its place?” enquired Pontopereia, giving her purple cushion a final caress with both her hands; hands which it must be confessed were not, like those of Eione, the hands of a born dancer.

“Anarchy! Anarchy! Anarchy!” cried the younger girl. “Don’t you see, Ponty darling, this revolution of ours, which is really a revolution of the older gods against the newer gods, of the great old giant-gods, animal-gods, dragon-gods, serpent-gods, and, above all, women- gods, for the older times were matriarchal times , and women, not men, however heroic such men might be, ruled Heaven and Earth, since at the Beginning of things it was Gaia, our real old mother the earth, who gave birth to Ouranos, this holy heaven of hermeneutical humbug, that priests make so much of, and not the other way round! Isn’t that a spry word, ‘hermeneutical’? He taught me that!

“Yes! the thing that has thrown Arcadian Pan and me together has nothing really to do with his ‘taking me’, as he tells me they call it in the Arcadian sheep-folds, or his treating me as wives are treated, and it has nothing to do with my feelings, one way or the other.