Electra

by Henry Treece

  From then on, I was his mother rather than his wife; for I had to put the food into his mouth, and to clean him, since he could not help himself.

  Then we had a swarm of flies in the valley that drove the cattle crazy, and clustered round the ewes’ eyes till the poor beasts went blind. One day I spoke to Pylades as he sat at the door on his bench.

  ‘Look, husband,’ I said, ‘that cloud on the far hill is quite red in colour. What does that portend?’

  He waited a long while, then in a dull voice he said, ‘My wife, it is useless to pretend to you; I cannot see the cloud.’

  I gazed in amazement and answered, ‘But, Pylades, it is as big as a corn-field. It is immense, and all blood-red. Surely you can see it, now that I have described it?’

  Pylades said in the same heavy voice, ‘Electra, I cannot see the cloud. I cannot see my hand before my face. Now do you understand?’

  I ran to him then and looked at his staring eyes. They were blank and grey, like agate, and there was a milky ooze at their comers. I had seen the poor ewes in their trouble, and I knew that the flies had brought this misfortune on us.

  I began to wonder what had gone wrong. Why should my husband and my children have suffered so in recent years? I searched my heart for the answer, and suddenly, like a thunder-clap from a bright sky, I knew; I had denied the god. Then I remembered how, when our world was young, poor Iphigenia had denied the god in our secret garden, under the laurel boughs.

  That night, at dusk, I went to the rocks above the drinking-trough and put my mouth close to the hole where the little black snake lived. Never before had I dared come so close to his house, so close to his flickering tongue. But this night the fear of death was hard upon me. I kneeled and said, ‘Black snake, black snake, we are suffering, my husband and I. We gave you a home, and food, and kindness. Now, if you can hear me, speak to the god for me and tell him that I have wronged him and know my sin. Tell him that I believe in him again. If you are of the ancient world, black snake, do this for me, and beg him to send a sign so that we shall know what the end of it all will be.’

  I was ashamed of myself for saying these things; but, though I would willingly have suffered the god’s wrath myself, I hated it that poor Pylades should be crippled and blinded on my behalf.

  ‘Can you hear me, black snake?’ I called.

  For a while there was no sound, but the distant rumbling in the far hill, beyond Acetylene, as always happened in the summer. Then, below the sound of thunder, came the creature’s sharp hissing, as swift and quiet as milk into the pail. It came and went, and I knew that it had answered me. I went back into the house and brought Pylades to his bed, away from the draughty doorway.

  As the sun was setting, blood-red, behind Erymanthus, Pylades sat up in his bed and said, ‘Go to the door, wife, and see who is coming.’

  I answered, ‘Lie down, my love, no one will be coming here at this time. I should have heard them.’

  But he said once more, ‘Go to the doorway and look. It seems that my ears are still good, although my eyes have the night in them.’

  To pacify him, I went. A man and a woman were coming up the sandy hill towards our house, casting their long shadows on our doorstep, like travellers who have come through a desert and are far gone with thirst and weariness.

  I called to Pylades and told him. He lay back smiling and said, ‘I knew they were coming. I have heard them for the last hour. Now do not doubt me further. The god may have taken one thing from me, but he has given another in its place.’

  But I was not listening to Pylades. I was too concerned with the man and woman who approached our door. Though they were ragged and caked with dust, their clothes had once been of the finest weave; and though they staggered like drunken folk, there was in both of them a nobility of motion that is not born into common people. It was the way they held their heads high, and hardly deigned to answer when I greeted them, that impressed me,

  I thought: It must have been just so in the far-off ancient days when gods and goddesses visited simple cottagers.

  I said, ‘Enter, travellers. Here is a place of rest for you this night. My husband and I are poor old folk, but not so poor that we cannot share what we have; and not so old that we cannot tend a guest in our house.’

  The man looked down at me from his great height with eyes that glared so dully out of his brown and haggard face that at first I was afraid, and I wondered if I had spoken words which he thought out of place. But the woman with him flung back her hood, and let long masses of grey hair free to stream down her back, then she smiled at me and said, ‘We are beholden to you, my man and I.’

  There was some quality in her face that told me she always did the talking for him, protecting him, despite his great size, much as I did for poor Pylades. I gazed at her face as she led the tall man through our narrow doorway; it had once been a very beautiful face, oval, and curved softly, with broad cheeks rising like little hillocks below her great wide grey eyes. Once, too, her lips had been full and curved. And her hands had been long and narrow and hard-palmed, after the manner of the Achaeans.

  Now, of course, all this was ruining, all falling away, like life. One saw the woman not as she was, worn threadbare, but as she had been in her day of glory.

  Yet still she had comeliness and breeding, and stood silently in our rough room, beneath the oaken rafters, her robe about her, until I had announced her to my husband. Then she and the man sat unspeaking at our table, gazing before them, like gods.

  Pylades said from his bed, ‘You have come far, my lord and lady. I smell the sea in your garments still.’

  The woman said in her low voice,’ Not the sea, but the waters of Styx, old man. The grey river, not the wine-dark sea.’

  Pylades called to me, ‘Bring out the best wine, wife. They have a long thirst to slake, I know.’

  But once more the woman spoke and said, ‘If you have milk, that would be the better. We have little wit as it is, without diluting it with grape juice. Our stomachs call for food, not wine, woman.’

  This she said in a matter-of-fact manner, almost in a monotone, and with no feeling behind it, only simple truth.

  Yet when I put soft barley bread and goat cheese before them on a wooden platter, she and the man toyed at it with their fingers but hardly ate enough to feed a small child. Their hearts seemed elsewhere.

  I watched their fingers as they crumbled the bread; they wore no rings, but every finger bore the mark where once a ring had been. It was the same on their arms, and about their throats; there had been gold there once, but now there was only the mark it had left, from all the years of wearing.

  Trying to make conversation, I said, ‘The Dorian, have they molested you, my lord? Have they robbed you, my lady?’

  The man half-turned towards me, as though he was listening to other words than mine. In a distant voice, he said slowly, ‘The Dorian have gone, as though they had never been. We have driven them into the sea, for Poseidon’s fishes to feast on.’

  As he spoke, the tears ran down his hard face and dropped on his clenched hands. The woman dried them with the edge of her robe and crooned to him softly. Then suddenly she turned on me and said sharply, ‘We will have no more of that, no more of that! Do you understand?’

  I felt like a slave in the house of some nobleman in my father’s time. I, a great princess! But she was so masterful, this grey woman with the fine hands.

  Pylades said haltingly from his blind bed, ‘We are poor old folk, my lady. You must be gentle with us, we mean no harm.’

  The woman looked away from him, as though she despised him, and said to the man, ‘My lord, make do with this place for one night. I will find something better for you tomorrow, some palace, or some great house. But for one night, I beg you, tolerate these folk; they are rude, but they mean well.’

  The man bent his head as she spoke, as though he found it hard to hear her, to understand the words she uttered. He was like a god who speaks only with thund
er and great howling winds, and so finds words thin and difficult to grasp. His finger-nails were bitten down to the flesh; his feet were bound in stained bandages. If he was a god, then it was the god of beggars, I thought.

  All at once, he turned to me and said above my head, ‘I am no beggar, woman. You understand that?’

  I was so shocked that he should have heard my unspoken thought, that I bowed and said, ‘Yes, my lord, I understand. Forgive me,’

  The woman placed her hand on his, consoling, and whispered, ‘Do not disturb yourself, lord. No one thinks you are a beggar. All that is in your own head. Be still, and remember that you are a great king who walks through his own kingdom, visiting his folk.’

  The man nodded his shaggy head, and smiled like a simple boy. In that smile lay some memory which touched me to the quick of my understanding. My limbs began to tremble so much that I could not trust myself to go towards the table and tell the strangers who they were. I think I might have fallen to the floor and never risen again, so fierce was the tempest in my heart.

  Somehow I laid down straw and blankets for them both, at our room’s far corner, and then, when the clay lamps were blown out, I crawled in beside old Pylades. He said to me softy, ‘You are shaking, wife. What troubles you?’

  With the breath sobbing in my throat I answered, ‘Husband, the man who lies beneath our roof is my brother, Orestes—so altered by the years that I did not know him until he smiled. Then I saw his broken tooth that he got, jumping from an apple-tree, once when we were young.’

  Pylades waited long, as though considering his words, and at last he said, ‘I felt it all along. As I sat at the doorway in the sun, I felt deep in my belly that he was coming here, over the rocks and the hills, guided to our house for some reason which lies beyond understanding. It came on me like a chill wind that blew inside me, not on my outer skin. The hairs of my neck stood up and for a while I thought the use would come back to my hands, the feeling was so strong. I tried to clench my fingers, but the strength lay only in my head, not in my bones. But I knew that something was destined for us then, because since my sickness has been upon me I have sat like a stone, with no thought of moving. Yes, when I called to you that someone was coming, it was as though I already knew.’

  I put my arm about his thin shoulders and whispered in his ear, ‘What does it all mean, husband? Why should he seek us out? And that woman with him—can that be Hermione, my cousin, after all?’ Pylades answered, ‘God, what poor things we are, we men and women, when we do not know our own lovers, our own blood-kin! It is as though the god makes game with us, not only blinding our eyes, but blinding our understanding also. What can be the purpose? What, Electra?’

  Suddenly the woman called from the far corner of the darkened room. ‘You have given us a bed, now let us sleep. To give and then to take back is no true hospitality. We have come from far off; let us sleep.’

  Her voice was heavy with weariness and it seemed to cause her great effort to utter those words. It was like a voice speaking with difficulty from behind a thick curtain; like the voice of a priestess, drugged with laurel or mandrake, struggling to announce the message before she sank with the weight of her duty.

  Indeed, there was a curtain drawn between us, a curtain no eye could see, but one which kept me back from struggling out of bed and going to them, to say who they were. No use to tell me, doctor, that I should have known my own brother, my own cousin; for age plays tricks with the sight, with the memory. We recall our dear ones as they seemed to us when we knew them last, with all the freshness on them, the bright sunlight, the water glistening on them as they rose from the river, the droplets like precious stones. We do not remember them as gaunt and bearded ghosts, their limbs parched and thin, the dirt crusted on their bodies, their hair white. It was over thirty seasons since I last saw my brother or Hermione; and in thirty seasons, with the world falling about one, and a family to raise and mourn, the eye of memory grows weary and dull.

  I fell into an uneasy dream while I considered such things, such a sleep as I had once had, before they sailed to Troy, when the storm wrestled with the stones of the palace at Mycenae. In my sleep the old horror came on me again that I should see my sister in the cavern, with the cloaked figures bending over her and the squeaking bats going at the walls for what dripped there.

  And in the midst of this terror I seemed to feel a hand held over my mouth, hard and brutal, pinching my lips together. Whether it was in dream or waking, I do not know, but I seemed to open my eyes and find that our room was bright with a flickering glow, like summer lightning. And above me stood the stranger who had come to our house from over the hill. He was gaunt and immense, his shoulders now as broad as those of a god-image of the Egyptians. The left hand which clenched across my mouth to stop me screaming was a god’s hand, that can stay all escape. In the right hand was a knife that gleamed like a dark flame in the fluttering lightning. The stranger’s eyes gazed down on me without love or hatred. There was no depth in their glossy greyness, no understanding for good or ill.

  In my terror, I tried to say, ‘My brother! Orestes!’ But the great hand seemed to feel the words rising, and squeezed them back, like fingers crushing the life out of a snake.

  Then the man’s lips moved and said, ‘Do you remember Agamemnon? Do you remember the Lion King of Hellas?’

  I nodded in a frenzy, and tried to tell the man above me that I had loved Agamemnon once, but the hand stifled my utterance, and the slow voice said, ‘You killed him, killed the father. I am Agamemnon come again for vengeance, Agamemnon who has searched for you across the world for thirty harvests. At last I have found you, Electra. I have found the false woman who brought the Dorian down on Hellas by killing the god-king, brought darkness on the world by her treachery, brought plague on the great House by her wickedness. It is just, that the knife which took great Agamemnon away from men should put an end, at last, to his destroyer. Just, that Agamemnon should rise again to claim his vengeance!’

  As the muttering words came into my ears, I suddenly knew that this was not a dream, that the stranger who had come to our house indeed stood above me now, the madness in his head, the knife in his hand—the knife Aegisthus had once held in his hand, as I wrapped the towel about my father and waited for Clytemnestra to come through the bath-house steam.

  As I broke from my dream, I slid also from that terrible hand, and began to cry for help. Old Pylades wakened beside me and began to mumble, still half-asleep. Then I saw the woman who must be

  Hermione clasping the stranger about the arms, her hair wild from her bed and filled with straws, her shift fallen from her. She was saying, ‘Let her be, Orestes! Let her be! We are not sure that she is Electra! Come back to bed, my love!’

  My altered god-like brother laughed and shook her away as easily as a grown boar shakes off a young hound. ‘There shall be no more sleep,’ he cried, ‘only the sleep of death!’

  Then he soared above me like a dark cloud full of thunder, his body swelling in size, his head enormous and glaring. My scream mingled with his hoarse yelling as he brought the knife down at me.

  Almost fainting, I felt the bone-bruising blow of his forearm on my breast, but not the bitter edge of the knife. Pylades, close beside me, suddenly gave a great leap, as though the use had come back to all his limbs, then fell back shuddering.

  Once more the woman ran at Orestes and cried out, ‘Let be! Let be! You have done enough!’ And as she grappled with him, I saw that now his great hand held only the bone haft of the knife, the blade had broken off.

  Yet haft was hard enough as it struck my forehead in its second plunge. The summer lightning fell away from my eyes and the horrid shouting deadened in my ears.

  And when I knew the world again, the sun was coming from Acetylene, in through the window-hole and lying in a golden stream across our floor. The yellow straw in the far corner was scattered wide, and our oaken table lay overturned, one of its legs broken. There was no one in the cottage
but Pylades and myself. I shook my head, then almost howled with the pain of that shaking. I laid my fingers to my brow and they came away all glued and red.

  Pushing the nightmare from me, I turned towards my husband, and searching the stiffened body found the copper blade still in his breast, driven past the bone and broken off.

  ‘Pylades, my husband, speak to me!’ I said, still stupid with the terror of that night. But his face was an ivory mask, the smile on his pale lips frozen, as though he had welcomed this parting from a blind life that was worthless to him now.

  Somehow I got from the bed, my limbs shaking and my breath hard to come by. I have forgotten now what I intended to do; perhaps my memory had gone and I meant to run for aid from my sons, Medon or Strophius; perhaps I meant to ask the little black snake for help, hoping that he might intercede with the god and bring dead Pylades back to me; or perhaps I only wanted to go away from this dreadful house where the last of my world had ended in the night.

  I do not know what drove me out, into the sun-baked yard where our cattle were penned in the winter; but I staggered there. And there I saw how far our fateful visitors had got.

  They both lay with their heads in the water-trough, their white knuckles gleaming in the morning sunshine as they clutched the stone lip, as though kneeling to drink. But they were not drinking. Their lips were white and as stiff as those of my husband; and their hair floated in the clear water, like grey weed, swaying here and there with all the movements of the water in the hillside breeze.

  The knife’s bone haft that had killed great Agamemnon a lifetime ago lay between them on the sandy soil, and curled about it the little black snake that Phaestus had brought to the house from Delphi.