‘Now tell me about Hero and Leander.’
‘Leander was a handsome Trojan and he lived at Abydos on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles, or the Hellespont as the ancients called it. Hero was a priestess who served in Aphrodite’s temple at Sestos on the European side, and all Aphrodite’s mortal stand-ins had plenty of what it takes. These two fell for one another in a big way, but they were separated by about three or four miles of water.
‘As Leander was a strong-limbed chap, he didn’t let that deter him from get-togethers with his honey-bunch. Every night she came down to the shore with a lamp and he swam over to her. For them every night of the spring and summer was a night of gladness, and he swam back in time to get to the office, or whatever he did, every morning.
‘But autumn came, then winter, and the Hellespont got colder and rougher. Still drawn like a magnet by what was waiting for him on the other side, Leander continued to take the nightly plunge; then one night there was a terrible storm. The wind blew out the lamp Hero was holding. In the pitch darkness and swirled about by the strong current, Leander could no longer tell in which direction the shore lay. Lost, and with the icy water numbing his limbs, he swam round until he was exhausted, then he went under once, twice, thrice. By the time dawn came, Hero was right off her rocker, because by then she felt pretty sure he must have had it. Gazing desperately round, she suddenly caught sight of his body washed up on some rocks; so she rushed into the water and was drowned, too.’
Stephanie pulled a face. ‘What a gloomy ending.’
‘Never mind,’ Robbie smiled. ‘I’ll cheer you up with the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. He was a king of Cyprus and immensely rich. But he didn’t care about power or lolly or the things it could buy. He was interested only in his art, and he was the all-time-high sculptor of his day. Girls left him cold, because he said he had never seen one half as well made as the beauties he could carve himself, and at length he made a life-size ivory statue of one that was an absolute smasher.
‘He called the statue Galatea, and the more time he spent looking at it the more it got him under the fifth rib, until he was hopelessly in love with it. His statue was so life-like that he almost thought he could hear it breathing, and he fondled it and kissed it madly, hoping that it would come to life; but, of course, it didn’t. The only warmth it had was from his embraces, otherwise it remained just cold ivory.
‘Then the feast of Aphrodite came round. Being a pious type, Pygmalion took a whole lot of rich gifts to her temple, and although he knew that it was a silly thing to ask, because statues don’t come alive, he begged the goddess to take pity on him and give life to Galatea. The altar fire flared up three times, which was usually taken as a sign that the supplicant’s prayer was to be granted. He simply couldn’t believe it; but, all the same, he ran all the way home. When he entered the studio, Galatea smiled at him, stepped down from her throne and melted into his outstretched arms.’
‘That’s much nicer,’ Stephanie commented. ‘Now let’s have Cupid and Psyche.’
Robbie smiled at her. ‘All right. I think we’ll just have time for that before we have to get dressed and go up to lunch. Psyche was one of three Princesses. They were all good-lookers, but she was something out of this world. The other two hooked husbands, but she was so devastatingly lovely that no one could pluck up the courage to ask her to name the day, and so dumb that she hadn’t the know-how to bring any of the chaps up to scratch. But no one was interested in her mind, and people thought her such an eyeful that they even deserted the shrines of Aphrodite to come and strew flowers under Psyche’s feet when she went out shopping.
‘Aphrodite got to hear of this and became frightfully steamed up. She sent for her son Cupid, or Eros as the Greeks called him, and packed him off on a special mission. Her orders were that he was to shoot Psyche with one of his arrows, so that she should go absolutely goofy about the most horrid, mean, brutal man he could find, who would beat her and make her life a misery. Eros located Psyche, but he made a mess of things. The very sight of her beauty made him gasp, and he dropped the arrow on his own foot; so, of course, from that moment he was head-over-heels in love with her himself.
‘Just about this time, Psyche’s father got a bit tired of having an unmarried daughter on his hands; so he went and consulted the Oracle at Delphi on what to do about her. The answer was to fit her up with a first-class trousseau, then take her up to the top of a high mountain and leave her there. Her parents were very upset about this, but they were afraid that if they disobeyed the Oracle they would get it in the neck. Poor Psyche—who, you can bet, was jolly upset too—was decked out as a bride, accompanied by all and sundry up to the mountain top, kissed her good-bye and left, as she and everyone else supposed, to be devoured by some horrible monster.
‘But things didn’t pan out like that at all, and although the chronicles don’t say so, it’s pretty clear that Eros must have fixed with Apollo what his Oracle should decree. As dusk fell, Zephyr arrived and whisked Psyche, complete with trousseau, on a light breeze to what the estate agents would describe as a very desirable property. She was set down in a lovely garden outside the most enchanting small palace that ever you did see. Having smelt a few of the flowers, she took a peep inside the mansion then, as nobody was about, had a good look round. She found that it had all mod. cons., and that by comparison the furnishings made those in her old home palace look as if they had come out of a junk shop. She was just thinking that the curtains in the dining room must have cost about twenty times as much as her papa gave her as a dress allowance each year when a voice said in her ear: “I expect you must be pretty peckish. Please ask for anything you fancy and it will be here in a jiffy.”
‘That must have shaken her a bit, because there was still no one to be seen. But she plucked up her courage and opted for a boiled egg, to keep her figure down, to be followed by lashings of strawberries and cream and a stick of nougat to round it off with.’
‘Really, Robbie!’ Stephanie interjected. ‘I’m sure that’s not in the chronicles.’
‘Well, no,’ he admitted. ‘But I imagine that’s the sort of meal a sylph-like young girl without much brain might have asked for; and putting in little touches like that makes me see the characters in these stories better. Anyhow, in the flicker of an eyelid, there was her supper on the table, with gold spoons and forks to eat it with and a milk-shake to wash it down.
‘When she had finished licking her fingers after the nougat, she felt a bit drowsy; so she tripped lightly up the marble staircase to the best bedroom. A look in some of the cupboards showed her that, while she had been having supper, someone had unpacked for her. All her trousseau had been put neatly away, and to it had been added a full-length chinchilla coat. She put it on and was just preening herself a bit before the cheval glass when she got another shock. A voice said: “Not for now, dearie,” then invisible hands removed the coat and started to undress her.
‘As this voice had been a female one, she let herself be stripped, then led into the next room and popped into a silver bath full of scented asses’ milk. When the hands had helped her dry herself, she was taken back to the bedroom where she lay down on a bed of rose petals. That bit really is in the chronicle.’
Stephanie laughed. ‘What does it matter? You would have made up something just as suitable. But what happened then?’
‘All the lights went out, plunging the whole place into complete darkness.’
‘I think I really would have been scared by that.’
‘Psyche didn’t have time. There was a stir in the roseleaves beside her, and a charming male voice said: “You may never see me, but you can hear and touch me, and I’ve been absolutely crackers about you from the moment I set eyes on you. This palace and everything in it is yours. The servants will remain unseen, but they will obey your every wish. I am the husband that the gods chose for you, and I shall come to you like this every night. Now, in about ten seconds, I’m going to start kissing and caressing you
all over. I promise you there is nothing to be frightened of. You are going to enjoy this.”
‘The voice was that of Eros, of course, who had taken the form of an athletic young man. Before the first crack of dawn he left her; and he had been dead right. She had enjoyed it; in fact so much that she could hardly wait for night to fall so that he would come back and do whatever he had done to her all over again.
‘Well, for a month or two everything went splendidly. Psyche was perfectly content to stooge round her lovely palace and garden during the day, wondering what new kissing game her invisible husband would teach her that night. But, very understandably, the time came when, with not a soul to talk to day after day, she became lonely; so she begged him to stay on for lunch just now and again.
‘He said: “There’s nothing I’d like better, sweetie; but it’s just not on. If you ever set eyes on me our lovely romance would go right up the spout. I’ll send you some copies of Woman’s Own so that you can amuse yourself with some knitting.” But Psyche said she wasn’t a knitting sort of girl, and begged him to let her pay a short visit to her family, or to have them to stay for the week-end. He was dead against that, too; but she became so unhappy that at length he did agree that she should have her sisters up for the day.
‘When her two sisters arrived their eyes fairly popped on seeing the luxury in which Psyche was living. At first, when she told them that invisible hands brushed her hair and painted her toenails, they wouldn’t believe her; but when they asked for Lobster Newberg and Crepe Suzette for lunch and these items instantly appeared on golden platters on the dinner table they simply had to.
‘On their asking about her husband, she confessed that she had never seen him either. At that the sisters, having become green with jealousy, began to work on the poor girl. They told her that very soon she would be paying for that chinchilla coat in no uncertain manner. It was all very well for her to say that her chap felt like a beautiful young man, but demons could assume any form they liked. At any time he might turn into a terrible monster and tear her limb from limb. To escape such an awful fate, there was only one thing for her to do. As he was afraid of her seeing him, it was evident that when asleep he resumed his true, hideous form, and when looked on would lose much of his power. They advised her to put an oil lamp under her bed and, when her husband had dropped off to sleep, to get it out and light it. They added that she must also conceal one of the kitchen knives somewhere handy; so that when she set eyes on the horror that had been making love to her, she could plunge the knife into him before he could do her any harm.
‘As I have said, Psyche was no great brain; so she believed all her envious sisters said, and acted accordingly. As soon as her husband was sound asleep that night, she got out the carving knife and lit the lamp. The gullible little idiot got such a surprise that she dropped her knife. Instead of a three-headed baboon, or something of that kind, on the crushed rose petals, snoring slightly, lay the sort of boy friend that Helen of Troy, Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba, had they been around at that time, might have fought to get their hands on.
‘Eros’s bow and arrows lay on the floor beside the bed. Psyche was so knocked all of a heap by her luck that she hardly knew if it was Easter or Christmas. Still in a swoon, she picked up one of the arrows and tried it on her finger. The point drew a bead of blood, and instantly the yen she felt to cuddle up alongside the slightly snoring young man redoubled. But wounding herself with the arrow caused her to jerk the oil lamp and a drop of the hot oil fell on Eros’s shoulder.
‘He started awake, yelling: “Murder! Fire! Thieves! Rape!” Then he realised that his little nitwit had ignored the warnings that he had been at such great pains to instil into her. Sadly he told her that she had bitched the whole shooting match, and that now they must part for ever. His wings sprouted from his shoulders and he took off. At the same instant the enchanted palace vanished, lock, stock and barrel, and Psyche found herself back on the barren mountain top.
‘After a bit she began to scramble down. Coming to a river, and being by then cuckoo with despair, she chucked herself into it. But she was washed ashore further down, and I suppose someone took her in, gave her some clothes and sent her on her way. Her sisters handed her the frozen mitt. Instead of condoling with her, they both hurried up to the mountain top, hoping that Eros would take a good view of them; but a mist came down, so they walked over a precipice and broke their necks. That served them right, but it didn’t do Psyche any good; and for quite a time she wandered all over the place, distractedly seeking a way to make contact with Eros.
‘He had winged it like smoke back to Olympus, yelling blue murder about his tiny little burn; but perhaps he had a very delicate skin. At all events he tearfully begged his beautiful mama to nurse him well again, although he refused to tell her how he had come by his burn.
‘Aphrodite then put her Intelligence Service on the job, and a little bird brought her a report of her son’s affair with Psyche. The goddess was absolutely furious; largely, I suppose, because it was Psyche at whom people had deserted her temples to go and stare. All the same, I think she behaved very unreasonably in being beastly to her son just because he had had fun with a mortal, when she was practically on the Dilly herself.’
‘What does “on the Dilly” mean?’
Robbie smiled. ‘Oh, it’s an old-fashioned expression I happened to see in a book, for the girls who used to saunter up and down Piccadilly on the look-out for chaps they could persuade to come home with them for the night as paying guests; although, of course, Aphrodite never took money for that sort of thing. Generally, she was a very kind and easy-going goddess, but evidently in this case she felt that her supremacy as the Queen of Beauty was being challenged; so she pursued Psyche like a she-wolf after a ewe lamb.
‘She persuaded Zeus to send Hermes down to proclaim that anyone who took Psyche in would suffer the wrath of the gods, and offered seven kisses from her own lips to anyone who would give up her mortal rival. As you can imagine, down on earth poor Psyche was having a very thin time; so thin, in fact, that after a while she decided to hand in her checks.
‘That didn’t do her any good at all. No sooner had she given herself up at one of Aphrodite’s temples than she was hauled before the goddess by her golden hair, beaten, made into a slave and given all sorts of impossible tasks to perform.
‘First Aphrodite mixed up a great heap of wheat, barley, millet, peas and beans, told Psyche to sort them out by evening, then went off in her latest creation to a wedding feast. Of course, Psyche hadn’t a hope; but a kind little ant came on the scene, then brought all his pals to help; so when Aphrodite came back, trying to smother occasional burps from the amount of champagne she had drunk, she found that the job had been done.
‘Next morning the goddess took her hated daughter-in-law to the bottom of a rocky hill and pointed out to her a thicket at its top, in which was feeding a flock of sheep with golden fleeces. She told Psyche that they were as fierce as lions, but she must go and get her a good handful of their golden wool. Again Psyche knew that she just was not up to it, so she decided to make an end of herself by taking a header into a deep pool that lay close by. But the nymph who was the tenant of the pool popped up just in time and said:
‘“Hi, you! I don’t want your body going rotten and making a nasty smell in my water. Have some sense and the job you’ve been given will be easy. While those vicious rams are playing tag with the sheep among the bushes, you have a nap down here. By afternoon they will be tired out and want a nap, too. Then you can go up the hill without their seeing you, and pick off the golden wool they have left on the thorns.”
‘Naturally Psyche took this advice; but even the lapful of golden wool she brought Aphrodite did not appease the goddess. She gave the wretched girl other impossible tasks to do, but one way or another Psyche was always helped out with them.
‘Then at last Eros felt well enough to come downstairs, and he discovered that Psyche was sleeping under the sc
ullery sink or some place like that. When he heard of all she had suffered on his account he loved her more than ever, and rushed off to beg Zeus to make his mother stop being so beastly to his beloved.
‘Zeus, never having seen anything against a god uniting with a mortal, lent a sympathetic ear and summoned a Council of the Gods, ordering Aphrodite to bring Psyche with her. His Address from the Throne amounted to: “You all know that I’ve never been altogether sold on true love myself, but I admire it in others; so it is my intention to bless the banns of these two young people. What is more, since we can’t have outsiders as members of the Club, I’m going to make the bride an Immortal.” Then he beckoned to Psyche and, holding out a beaker of nectar to her, added: “Come here, my dear. Take a sup of this, and it will do the trick.”
‘When Psyche got her breath back everyone was queueing up to kiss her; and when Aphrodite saw how deliriously happy Eros looked, her mother’s heart softened and she promised to love Psyche, too. Then they held the biggest-ever wedding feast. Hephaestus cooked fabulous dishes, Dionysus got up the best bottles from the cellar, the Seasons produced wonderful flowers, the Muses sang their sweetest songs, Ganymede went round filling all their goblets with nectar—’
‘I thought Hebe was the Cupbearer of the Gods,’ Stephanie put in.
Robbie hesitated a second. ‘Well, she was at one time, but she lost her job. As I think I’ve told you, the Immortals were distinctly prudish when they were in company. I suppose the truth is that Hebe had been lifting the elbow herself too frequently. Anyhow, one night when they were feasting, she tripped up, and she can’t have been wearing much in the way of undies because, as she fell, everyone saw all there was to see. Apparently they were so shocked by this that Zeus gave her the sack and brought in handsome young Ganymede to do butler instead.’
‘I see. And did Eros and Psyche live happily ever after?’
Mayhem in Greece Page 35
