The oak-tree from which this disturbing appeal reached him through the thick darkness was not only large enough and hollow enough to hide three or four old Dryads as emaciated as Kleta; but it was disfigured and deformed under its lowest branch, as well as above its largest branch, by two deeply-cut indentations, now almost filled up with mosses and small ferns, one of which, the lower one, having been made by the childish axe of Laertes and the other upper one by a similar childish tool wielded by himself.
As he leaned now out of that wooden aperture and murmured his response to that quavering voice he couldn’t help thinking of the days when his mother had stopped him from interfering with Kleta’s so-called “garden”. What the old Nymph liked to do was to arrange every tree, every shrub, every flower, every clump of grass, every dead or living root, every wild fern, every spray of ivy, so as to make exquisite patterns and delicate arrangements, and even to design suggestions of god-like terraces, and the mystic purlieus or enchanted courts and secret vistas leading into divine sanctuaries where the smallest insects and the weakest worms could be safe at last from all those abominable injustices and cruel outrages, and all those stupid brutalities and careless mutilations that lack even the excuse of lust.
But it was not only of things like these that the aged Dryad Kleta constructed what she called her garden. What she really set herself to be was a protector and fulfiller of the intentions of her universal mother Gaia, the Earth. Kleta was in fact a sort of voluntary gardener of wild nature, planting and re-planting and trimming and cutting and watering and grafting and designing, as if she were a spirit-like impersonation of all the various maturing elements and an embodied shield-bearer against all the destructive ones.
Not an inch of Kleta’s garden in the slow long passing of the years was neglected. That spartan grace who visiting Ithaca once every five-hundred years had noticed this young oak-tree with its entwining “hetaira”, or devoted “companion”, and had given the Dryad her own name, was well-satisfied with her protégée. If that portion of the island called Arima was dedicated to mystery and prophecy, the portion of it tended by Kleta was dedicated to the unruffled preservation of what is usually obliterated.
Kleta would arrange with absorbed contemplation and deeply pondered purpose all those little separate twigs and straws and tiny pieces of wood and fungus and fir-cone that lend themselves to some subtle extension of the power of Themis even over such chaotic realms of pure chance as are offered by the man-trodden and creature-trodden trails and tracks and paths in a wild island like Ithaca.
Anyone, whether human or more than human, who turns nature into a garden is liable to find an unbelievable number of very small things that have once been parts of other things but are now entities on their own such as bits of wood, bits of stalk, bits of fungus, bits of small snail-shells, bits of empty birds’ eggs, bits of animals’ hair, bits of birds’ feathers, bits of broken sheaths of long-perished buds and shattered insect-shards, strewn remnants of withered lichen-clusters, and scattered fragments of acorns and berries and oak-apples that have survived in these lonely trails and tracks to be scurf upon the skin of one world and the chaos-stuff for the creation of another world.
It was especially the curious hieroglyphs and mysterious patterns which are the written messages from all the unnoticed things that die to make the dust out of which other things are born that fascinated the aged Dryad as she moved day by day about her wild garden.
It was because of her sensitiveness and touchiness with regard to her interpretations of Nature’s intentions, and the odd uses to which Nature’s smallest leavings and litterings can be put, that Kleta had often burst into fits of furious anger with the childish heroes of three generations of the Lords of Ithaca.
The first time he left his bed that February night he completely soothed the old Dryad. But by the fourth time he leaned on that great plank rather like a ship’s rail, that crossed the opening into his bedroom at the top of a short ladder of thick pine-wood boards, he felt as if it were he himself, quite as much as the Dryad, who needed soothing.
This time he held a torch in his hand and had sandals on his feet, while Kleta, who was watching that illuminated window with trembling limbs and a troubled mouth could only stare in amazement at the figure that confronted her across that black gulf. Odysseus was anything but uncomely, anything but deformed or badly built, but it must be confessed that in the flickering blaze of his torch he presented a somewhat eccentric appearance at that moment.
He was not a tall man; and this fact which the famous Helen hadn’t failed to notice made the massive breadth of his shoulders and the enormous span of his chest something that bordered on the fantastic and grotesque. Nobody’s vision of him, arrested at first by these peculiarities, would be able all the same to dwell on them for long.
The startling proportions and unique grandeur of his head would inevitably dominate any enduring impression. He was very nearly totally bald; so there were no attractive curls to distract an onlooker’s or even an interlocutor’s attention from the peculiar majesty of his skull and of the way his eyes were set in it. His forehead itself was neither particularly high nor particularly low. Its breadth was its chief characteristic and next to its breadth the unusual distance between his eye-sockets.
This distance made it impossible for him to stare at any person with that kind of concentrated intensity which suggested that the object of the gaze had the power of giving him something that it was essential he should have, or of taking something from him that it was essential he should not lose.
In fact this breadth between his eye-sockets produced an effect that was at once sub-human and super-human. It gave him that look which certain large animals have of being completely oblivious to everything save their own immediate purpose. But it also gave him the look of a Titan or a Giant or even of a God from whom other mortals, whether male or female, had no claim for more individual notice or respect than swarms of gnats or midges.
His nose was neither curved like an eagle’s beak nor protuberant as a boar’s snout. It carried forward the straight line of his forehead and its character lay in its massive and bony breadth; for its nostrils were not especially wide nor did they twitch or contract and open with the abnormal sensitivity of horses or deer. Curiously enough it was not his majestic skull nor this weird breadth between his eyes that gave to the countenance of Odysseus its most familiar attribute.
Every person, whether male or female, in any group of people who encounter one another day by day, possesses some particular physical characteristic more realistically charged with that person’s predominant effect upon others than any other attribute. In the case of the aged Odysseus this was his beard. If the wily old warrior had any special personal vanity or anything about his appearance upon which he himself especially concentrated it was his beard.
To get the effect that pleased him over this beard of his it had become necessary for him not only to trim it with the utmost care but to shave off or cut away all the hair on the portions of his face other than those that served him as a stage for this dramatic emphasis upon his beard.
As he now leaned out into that hollow sap-scented darkness holding his blazing torch, his beard was emphasized precisely in the way that satisfied this one queer streak of personal vanity in him. It was no wonder then that the old Dryad’s appeal to him to come down those wooden steps, for they were much more than a ladder, and listen closely to what she wanted him to hear became an appeal that he felt to be irresistible, for in certain deep and narrow mole-runs in their nature the personal vanity of god-like men surpasses by a hundred-fold the natural vanity of women. But there was more in this than that. There was a queer psychic obsession in it; for once when, in middle manhood, and under the influence of this rather eccentric vanity of his, and of the method he had deliberately adopted for trimming it, his beard showed signs of taking the shape he desired for it, his mother Antikleia cried out to him when she caught sight of him emerging clean and fresh fr
om a bath: “By the gods, boy, your beard is as pointed as the prow of a ship!” and, as it chanced, in flinging out this casual remark she proved she had read, as mothers sometimes, though not often, can read, what had hardly been known to himself, the hidden urge behind what he was doing to his face.
“O why is it,” he groaned to himself, this wily old sacker of cities, and enslaver of their defenders’ wives, “that we mortals have the power of re-creating our actual appearance with which we confront the sun and the moon? Animals and birds can’t do it though they can rejoice in the change or lament over the change when it’s done for them!”
If it had been some special competition of opposite odours during that February night, as they hovered round his home, some of them unspeakably exquisite, some of them revoltingly excremental, a few actually sepulchral, that swept his memory back at that moment to his mother’s words about the way he trimmed his beard, he was still descending that wooden flight of stairs, when a gust of wind from the sea whirled away from above both himself and Kleta’s oak a thick veil of mist, leaving in sight not only several zodiacal constellations, but among them, and yet not among them, such a shy, timid, lonely, brittle, shell-like crescent, that the idea of the Moon as she was before Artemis meddled with her, or Apollo meddled with the sun, whirled into his heavy skull.
This same gust of wind, not satisfied with making him aware that his disturbed sleep was connected with the fact that they were now in “noumenia” or the beginning of the month, brought from far-away, across rocks and deserts and forests and seas, in fact from the entrance to Hades itself a vision so strange that he paused in his descent, and holding his torch at arm’s length, so that its flame shouldn’t touch the protruding point of this same bowsprit-beard, shut both his deep-socketed, widely-separated eyes, and drew in his breath in such a gasping sigh that it was as if he were swallowing his own soul.
What that wind brought to him, as it revealed under those far-off stars that tiny crescent was nothing less than the glimpse he had in Hades of the ghost of Herakles himself, glaring round him like black night with his fingers on the string of his bow, while round about him whirled flocks upon flocks upon flocks of birds in feathered panic, their beaks and wings and claws indistinguishable as they circled.
But his vision of the former owner of the great club that nowadays was always so patiently waiting in the porch till its hour came round again, was gone with the gust that brought it. The old man leapt to the earth from the final rung of that wooden flight of steps and tightening his belt about his middle and holding his torch so that neither its flame nor its smoke should impede his movements he hurried across the uneven ground to the hollow oak.
It was certainly a pitiful old face that looked out at him from that mouldering recess; but he had known it now for all the years since Penelope died; and though in its lines and wrinkles, and in its scooped out hollows where soft feminine flesh should be, and in its bony protuberances where beguiling girlish dimples should be, it was a ghastly enough mask of the ravaging power of time, it had the same strangely preoccupied look it always had.
It was a beautiful face—no! not “beautiful” exactly—say rather haunting with its own special kind of poignant wistfulness—and it wore a permanent expression that betrayed the Dryad’s incurable inability to lose herself in any love or worship or devotion or absorbing affection that implied the sacrifice of the smallest fraction of that larger half of her conscious life that was given up to her struggle to be a tender nurse, not only to all the wild vegetation within her reach, but to the innumerable offscourings of animal, vegetable and even mineral life about her, that seemed to her queer mind to be in need of a friend.
Arrived at the hollow oak the old king thrust the torch he carried into the ground, where its quiet flame, now that the gust of wind had subsided, burned as steadily as a large candle. “There’s so much, Odysseus, to tell you‚” the Dryad began, “that I don’t know where to start. Kleta-Charis, my name-mother, has been here: that’s the chief thing I wanted to tell you. She was resting for the night in that cave of yours belonging to the Naiads where Athene helped you to hide your treasure when you returned to slay the suitors.”
“And where, now, old lady,” the king interrupted. “I am building my ship for my last voyage! But what did Kleta-Charis say? Don’t ’ee be afraid to tell me, old friend. I know of myself from what I’ve been feeling all night that there’s something new and strange on the wind; though whether from East or West the storm is coming, and whether Zeus or Poseidon is behind it I’ve not yet learnt.
“What I cannot understand is why my friend Athene hasn’t come to tell me what has been happening tonight. In all my life until now she has always come to me at a great crisis. Is it so serious, do you suppose, Kleta-Dryad, that she has been summoned by the gods of Olympos to a grand council? Or has she gone to the East, whither the great gods were always accustomed to go at this time of year, to receive worship and reward worshippers among the blameless Ethiopians?”
“Sit down on this, my child,” and the lady of the oak leaned forward from her hiding-place and using both of her long emaciated arms spread out on the dark mosses and small ferns between them the skin of a recently dead wolf.
“Kleta-Charis,” murmured the old Dryad in a low hoarse voice, and it was clear to her hearer that she spoke with an effort and with a grim determination to let him hear the worst at once, “Kleta-Charis told me that the great gods were at this hour in such extreme danger themselves that they had no time to think of the fate of their votaries and champions. She said that the whole of Tartaros has broken loose, and that in their first attempt to resist this upheaval, Zeus and Poseidon, blind with anger, raised up such a world-swallowing sea-wave that it swallowed the whole continent of Atlantis; and that the cities of Atlantis with all their populations had now sunk into Hades, where, if Aidoneus reigns still—but does he, Odysseus, does he reign in Hades still?—he ought to be marshalling them in their due order and bringing their leaders and chieftains, and especially those among them who were unjust and cruel, before the judgment-seats of Rhadamanthus and Minos.”
The old Dryad, having poured out all this in one breath save for a gasp at the word “Atlantis” and another at the word “Aidoneus”, sank down on her knees in the inside of the hollow tree-trunk and rested her chin and her hands against the rough, powdery, thousand-year-old jaggedness of disintegration which for nearly a century had constituted the window-sill of the slowly dying oak which was in a sense her house, and in a sense herself.
She breathed heavily, but freely enough now, as she watched the effect of her words upon the massive, upturned, almost bald head beneath her, as he squatted cross-legged upon the wolf-skin, while his torch from its muddy socket in the wet moss threw a wavering beam of light upon his outstretched bowsprit-beard which at noon-day was like the solid silver of a graven image in a temple.
But the most silvery beard in that darkness, in spite of the crescent-moon and the stars and the torch, would have been reduced to a colour-levelling monotone by the encompassing gloom. He remained silent for a long moment. Then he said slowly: “My friend Athene is bound to appear soon. She will touch me with her immortal hand. She will counsel me with her divine wisdom.”
After hearing this the dweller in the dying oak fell silent in her turn while far-away they both could catch the voice of some fortunate sea-bird that after losing itself inland fell to uttering repeated cries of relief when it caught once more the sound of waves breaking on the rocks.
“Athene will probably appear to me,” began Odysseus again, “in the form of a young fisherman or goatherd when I go tomorrow, today I mean, to the cave of the Naiads where I’m building my ship. It was clever of me—eh, Kleta, old friend?—to go to a place like that which all the island regards as so sacred to the sea-powers that they daren’t approach it? My difficulty, as I knew from the start, when I began working on the keel and the body of my ship, will be to collect enough sail-cloth to make a big
enough main-sail.
“You, of course, old friend, always busy as you are with tending your wild garden, have no idea of the things we men have to consider, especially in matters of war and of ships. I’ve made up my mind to hoist sail again before I die. I’m not going to rot here alive till I’m eaten by worms. You tell me Zeus and Poseidon and Aidoneus have between them drowned the whole of Atlantis. That doesn’t look to me as if the power of the gods were declining!
“Zeus, the Father of Athene, has often been influenced by her far-sighted wisdom; and when she visits me she will tell me how to propitiate the Father of men and gods. Even if Atlantis is at the bottom of the ocean, why should I be worried? Answer me that, name-child of the loveliest of the Graces! Couldn’t I steer my ship, when once I’ve got her mainsail, over the graves of a hundred Atlantises?
“I tell you’ old friend, I can’t see what there is in this news to make me miserable. I just can’t see! I feel at this moment as if I——”
But he suddenly stopped; confounded by what he saw in the old face staring at him out of that hollow tree.
“What’s the matter, Kleta-Dryad, old friend? For the sake of all the Olympians tell your child what’s the matter?”
The Dryad uttered a choking sound in her throat that was like the sob of a sea-wave caught and imprisoned behind cruel rocks when it longs to leap and curve and curl and toss and crest and fume and foam and race over the ocean’s surface. Then she said, speaking in a queer voice that seemed to come from the middle of her old bent spine and to force itself between her ribs and her withered breasts: “I can’t hide it from you, my child; I can’t hide it from you! But what Kleta-Charis really came to tell me was that Keto herself, the most terrible of all sea-monsters, has been seen in your cave!
Atlantis Page 5
