John Powys - Atlantis

“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?”