The wicked women saw that Psyche’s defences were down and her heart laid open to their attacks. They pressed their advantage: “Since we are so closely related,” one of them said, “the thought of your danger makes us forget our own. We two have talked the matter over countless times and will show you how to save yourself. This is what you must do. Get hold of a very sharp carving knife, make it sharper still by stropping it on your palm. Then hide it somewhere on your side of the bed. Also, get hold of a lamp. Have it filled full of oil, trim the wick carefully, light it and hide it behind the bedroom tapestry. Do all this with the greatest secrecy and, when he visits you as usual, wait until he is stretched out at full length, and you know by his deep breathing that he’s fast asleep. Then slip out of bed with the knife in your hand and tiptoe barefooted to the place where you have hidden the lamp. Finally, with its light to assist you, perform your noble deed, plunge the knife down with all your strength at the nape of the serpent’s poisonous neck and cut off its head. We promise to help you; the moment you have saved yourself by killing it, we shall come running in and help you to get away at once with all your treasure. After that, we’ll marry you to a human being like yourself.”
When they saw that Psyche was now determined to follow their suggestion, they went quietly off, terrified to be anywhere near her when the catastrophe came; they were helped up to the rock by the West Wind, ran back to their ships as fast as they could and sailed off at once.
Psyche was left alone, in so far as a woman haunted by hostile Furies can be called alone. Her mind was as restless as a stormy sea. When she first began making preparations for her crime, her resolve was firm; but presently she wavered and started worrying about all the different aspects of her calamity. She hurried, then she dawdled; at one moment she was bold and at another frightened; she felt nervous and then she got angry again. For, although she loathed the animal, she loved the husband it seemed to be. However, as evening drew on, she finally acted rapidly and prepared what was needed to do the dreadful deed.
Night fell, and her husband came to bed, and after preliminary amorous skirmishes he fell fast asleep. Psyche was not naturally either very strong or very brave, but the cruel power of fate made a man of her. Holding the knife in a murderous grip, she uncovered the lamp and let its light shine on the bed.
There lay the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures, Cupid himself, lying in all his beauty, and at the sight of him the flame of the lamp spurted joyfully up and the knife turned its edge for shame.
When Psyche saw this wonderful sight she was terrified. She lost all control of her senses and, pale as death, fell trembling to her knees, where she tried to hide the knife by plunging it in her own heart. She would have succeeded, too, had the knife not shrunk from the crime and twisted itself out of her foolhardy hands. Faint and unnerved though she was, she began to feel better as she stared at Cupid’s divine beauty: his golden hair, washed in ambrosia and still scented with it, curls straying over white neck and flushed cheeks and falling prettily entangled on either side of his head—hair so bright that it darkened the flame of the lamp. At his shoulders grew soft wings of the purest white and, though they were at rest, the tender down fringing the feathers quivered attractively all the time. The rest of his body was so smooth and beautiful that Venus could never have been ashamed to acknowledge him as her son. At the foot of the bed lay this great god’s gracious weapons, his bow, quiver and arrows.
Psyche’s curiosity could be satisfied only by a close examination of her husband’s weapons. She pulled an arrow out of the quiver and touched the point with the tip of her thumb to try its sharpness; but her hand was trembling and she pressed too hard. The skin was pierced and out came a drop or two of blood. So Psyche accidentally fell in love with Love. Burning with greater passion for Cupid even than before, she flung herself panting upon him, desperate with desire, and smothered him with sensual, open-mouthed kisses; her one fear now being that he would wake too soon.
While she clung to him, utterly bewildered with delight, the lamp which she was still holding, whether from horrid treachery or destructive envy, or because it too longed to touch and kiss such a body, spurted a drop of scalding oil on the god’s right shoulder. What a bold and impudent lamp, what a worthless servant of Love—for the first lamp was surely invented by some lover who wished to prolong the pleasures of the night—so to scorch the god of all fire! Cupid sprang up in pain and, seeing that the bonds of faith were shattered and in ruins, spread his wings and flew away from the kisses and embraces of his unhappy wife without a word; but not before Psyche had seized his right leg with both hands and clung to it. She looked very queer, carried up like that through the cloudy sky; but soon her strength failed her and she tumbled down to earth again.
Cupid did not desert her as she lay on the ground, but alighted on the top of a cypress nearby, where he stood reproaching her. “Oh, foolish Psyche, it was for your sake that I disobeyed the orders of my mother, Venus! She told me to inflame you with passion for some utterly worthless man, but I preferred to fly down from Heaven and become your lover myself. I know only too well that I acted thoughtlessly, and Cupid, the famous archer, wounds himself with one of his own arrows and marries a girl who mistakes him for a beast; she tries to chop off his head with a knife and darken the eyes that have loved her so greatly. This was the danger of which I warned you again and again, gently begging you to be on your guard. As for those fine sisters of yours who turned you against me and gave you such damnable advice, I’ll very soon be avenged on them. But your punishment will simply be that I’ll fly away from you.” And when he had uttered those words he soared up into the air and was gone.
Psyche lay motionless on the ground, following her husband with her eyes as far as she could and moaning bitterly. When the beat of his wings had carried him aloft clean out of her sight, she flung herself headlong into a river that flowed close by. But the kindly river, out of respect for the god and fearing for itself since even the waters do not escape his fiery intentions, washed her ashore and laid her on the bank, upon the flowery turf.
Pan, the goat-legged country god, happened to be sitting nearby, caressing the mountain nymph Echo and teaching her to repeat all sorts of pretty songs. A flock of she-goats roamed around, browsing greedily on the grass. The goat-footed god was already aware, somehow or other, of Psyche’s misfortune, so he gently beckoned to the desolate girl and did what he could to comfort her. “Pretty dear,” he said soothingly. “Though I’m only a shepherd and very much of a countryman, I have picked up a good deal of experience in my long life. So if I am right in my conjecture—or my divination, as sensible people would call it—your unsteady and faltering walk, your pallor, your constant sighs and your sad eyes show that you’re very much in love. Listen: make no further attempts at suicide by leaping from a precipice or performing any other fatal action. Stop crying and open your heart to Cupid, the greatest of us gods; he’s a thoroughly spoilt young fellow whom you must humour by praying to him only in the gentlest, sweetest language.”
It is very lucky to be addressed by Pan, but Psyche made no reply. She merely did a reverence to him as a god and went on. She trudged along the road for a while, until she happened to turn into a lane that led off it. Towards evening it brought her to a city of which she soon found out that the husband of one of her sisters was the king. She announced her arrival at the palace and was at once admitted.
After an exchange of greetings and embraces, the queen asked Psyche why she had come. Psyche answered: “You remember your advice about that knife and the beast who pretended to be my husband, and lay with me, and was going to swallow me up voraciously in my misery? Well, I took it, but no sooner had I shone my lamp on the bed than I saw a marvellous sight: Venus’s divine son, Cupid himself, lying there in tranquil sleep. The joy and relief were too great for me. I quite lost my head and didn’t know how to satisfy my longing for him; but then, by a dreadful accident, a drop of burning oil from the lamp spur
ted on to his shoulder. The pain woke him at once. When he saw me holding the lamp and the knife, he shouted: ‘How could you do me such a mischief? I divorce you; take your things away. I am going to marry your sister instead.’ And he named you. Then he called for the West Wind, who blew me out of the palace and landed me here.”
Psyche had hardly finished her story before her sister, madly jealous of her and burning with lust, went to her husband and deceived him with a cunning tale, declaring that she had heard her parents were dead. Off she went and when at last she reached the rock though another wind altogether was blowing, she shouted with misplaced confidence: “Here I come, Cupid, a woman worthy of your love. West Wind, convey your mistress!” Then she took a headlong leap; but she never reached the valley, either dead or alive, because the rocks cut her to pieces as she fell and scattered her flesh and guts all over the mountainside. So she got what she deserved and died, and the birds and beasts feasted on her remains.
And it was not long before a second vengeance followed. For Psyche wandered on and on until she came to another city, where the other sister lived and took her in by the same deceitful story as she had told to her sister. She, too, was anxious to supplant her sister by making a criminal marriage, hurried to the rock and died in exactly the same way.
III
PSYCHE CONTINUED on her travels through country after country, searching for Cupid; but he was lying in his mother’s own room and groaning for pain because of his wound from the lamp. Meanwhile a white gull, of the sort that skims the surface of the sea flapping the waves with its wings, dived down into the water; there it met Venus, who was having a bathe and a swim, and brought her the news that her son Cupid was suffering from a severe and painful burn, from which it was doubtful whether he would recover. It told her, too, that every sort of scandal about Venus’s family was going around.
People were saying that Venus’s son had flown down to the mountain to have an affair with a whore, while she herself had gone off to swim in the sea: “The result is, they declare, that Pleasure, Grace and Wit have disappeared from the earth and everything there has become ugly, dull and slovenly. Nobody bothers any longer about his wife, about his friends or his children; everything is in a state of disorder, and weddings are viewed with bitter distaste and regarded as disgusting.”
This talkative, meddlesome bird squawked into Venus’s ears and succeeded in setting her against her son. She grew very angry and cried: “So my promising lad has taken a mistress, has he? Here, gull—you seem to be the only creature left with any true affection for me—tell me, do you know the name of the creature who has seduced my poor simple boy? Is she one of the Nymphs, or one of the Seasons, or one of the Muses, or one of my own train of Graces?”
The garrulous bird was very ready to talk. “Lady, I cannot say; but if I remember rightly the story is that your son has fallen desperately in love with a human named Psyche.”
Venus was absolutely furious. “What! With her, of all women? With Psyche, the usurper of my beauty, the rival of my glory? This is worse and worse. It was through me that he got to know the girl. Does the brat take me for a procuress?”
Thus lamenting, she rose from the sea at once and hurried aloft to her golden room where she found Cupid lying ill, as the gull had told her. As she entered she bawled out at the top of her voice: “Now is this decent behaviour? A fine credit you are to our divine family and a fine reputation you’re building up for yourself. You trample your mother’s orders underfoot as though she had no authority over you whatsoever, and instead of tormenting her enemy with a dishonourable passion, as you were ordered to do, you have the impudence to sleep with the girl yourself, at your age! To have someone I hate as my daughter-in-law! And I suppose you also think, you worthless, debauched, revolting boy, that you’re the only child I’m going to have and that I’m past the age of child-bearing! Please understand that I’m quite capable of having another son, if I please, and a far better one than you. However, to make you feel the disgrace still more keenly, I think I’ll legally adopt one of my slaves and hand over to him your wings, torch, bow and arrows, which you have been using in ways for which I never intended them. And I have every right to do that, because not one of them was supplied by your father. The fact is that you have been mischievous from your earliest years and always delighted in hurting people. You have often had the bad manners to shoot at your elders, and as for me, your mother, you rob me day after day, you matricidal wretch, and have constantly stuck me full of your arrows. You sneer at me and call me ‘the widow’, and show not the slightest respect for your brave, invincible stepfather; in fact, you do your best to annoy me by setting him after other women and making me jealous. But you’ll soon be sorry that you played all those tricks; I warn you that this marriage of yours is going to leave a sour, bitter taste in your mouth.”
Then, to herself: “Everyone is laughing at me and I haven’t the faintest idea what to do or where to go. How in the world am I to catch and cage the little viper? I suppose I’d better go for help to old Sobriety to whom I’ve always been so dreadfully rude for the sake of this spoilt son of mine. Must I really have anything to do with that dowdy, countrified woman? Well, revenge is sweet from whatever quarter it comes. Yes, I fear that she’s the only person who can do anything for me. She’ll give the little beast a thrashing; confiscate his quiver, blunt his arrows, tear the string off his bow and quench his torch. Worse than that, she’ll shave off his hair, which I have often bound up with my own hands so that it glittered with gold, and clip those lovely wings of his which I once whitened with the dazzling milk of my own breast. When that’s been done, I’ll feel I’ve got my own back for the harm he’s done me.”
After this declaration she rushed out of doors in a furious rage truly worthy of Venus and at once ran into Ceres and Juno, who noticed how angry she looked and asked her why she was spoiling the beauty of her bright eyes with so sullen a frown. “Thank goodness I met you,” she answered, “I needed you to calm me down. There is something you can do for me, if you’ll be kind enough. Please make careful inquiries for the whereabouts of a runaway vagabond called Psyche—I’m sure you must have heard all about her and the family scandal she’s caused by her affair with … my unmentionable son.”
Of course they knew all about it, and tried to soothe her fury. “Lady,” they said, “what terrible sin has he committed? Why try to thwart his pleasures and kill the girl with whom he’s fallen in love? It is no crime, surely, to beam amiably at a pretty girl? You imagine that he’s still only a boy because he carries his years so gracefully, but you simply must realize that he’s a young man now. Have you forgotten his age? A mother and a woman of the world, ought you to persist in poking your nose into your son’s pleasures and blame the handsome boy for those very sensual talents and erotic inclinations that he inherits directly from yourself? What god or man will have any patience with you, when you go about all the time waking sexual desire in people but at the same time try to repress similar feelings in your own son? Is it really your intention to close down the factory of woman’s universal weakness?”
The goddesses, in thus fulsomely defending Cupid, showed their fear of his arrows, even when he was not about. Venus, seeing that they refused to take a serious view of her wrongs, indignantly turned her back on them and hurried off again to the sea.
Meanwhile, Psyche was restlessly wandering about day and night in search of her husband. However angry he might be, she hoped to make him relent either by coaxing him with wifely endearments or abasing herself in abject repentance. One day she noticed a temple on the top of a steep hill. She said to herself: “I wonder if my husband is there?” so she walked quickly towards the hill, her heart full of love and hope, and reached the temple with some difficulty, after climbing ridge after ridge. But when she arrived at the sacred couch she found it heaped with votive gifts of wheat-sheaves, wheat chaplets and ears of barley, also sickles and other harvest implements, but all scattered about untidily, as
though flung down on a hot summer day by careless reapers.
She began to sort all these things carefully, and arrange them in their proper places, feeling that she must behave respectfully towards every deity whose temple she happened to visit and implore the compassionate help of the whole heavenly family. The temple belonged to the generous Goddess Ceres, who found her busily and energetically at work and at once called out from afar: “Oh, you poor Psyche! Venus is furious and searching everywhere for you. She wants to be cruelly revenged and to punish you with all the strength of her divine power. I am surprised that you can spare the time to look after my affairs for me, or think of anything at all but your own safety.”
Psyche’s hair streamed across the temple floor as she prostrated herself at Ceres’s feet, which she wetted with her tears. She implored her protection: “I beseech you, Goddess—by your fruitful right hand, by the happy ceremony of harvest-home, by the secret contents of your baskets, by the winged dragons of your chariot, by the furrows of Sicily from which a cruel god once ravished your daughter Proserpine, by the wheels of his chariot, by the earth that closed upon her, by her dark descent and gloomy wedding, by her happy torch-lit return to earth, and by the other mysteries which Eleusis, your Attic sanctuary, silently conceals—help me: oh, please, help your unhappy suppliant Psyche. Allow me, just for a few days, to hide myself under that stack of wheatsheaves, until the great goddess’s rage has had time to cool down; or until I have somewhat recovered from my long and tiring troubles.”
Ceres answered: “Your tears and prayers go straight to my heart, and I would dearly love to help you; but I can’t afford to offend my relative. She has been one of my best friends for ages and ages and really has a very good heart. You’d better leave this temple at once and think yourself lucky that I don’t have you placed under arrest.”
Psyche Page 13
