WHEN Circé returned, she took Amphion by the hand and spoke cheerily. He interested her much, and came at a moment very opportune; for the goddess was in a maidenly if not a motherly mood. She had just transformed a masculine friend into another four-footed denizen of the island, and her elementary emotions for the time being were sated. After these excitements the divine magician often inclined to serious thought, and, possessing infinite knowledge, would become didactic and instructive, if not actually prosy and tedious. Reaction is apt to take this shape.
Now Amphion entered the halls of Circé, and she summoned her servers — four pretty little maidens, bright as the rainbow on a springtime wood. Born of the wells and rivers were they, and they ministered to Amphion, anointed his limbs with sweet oil, clad him in delicious raiment of lambswool and silk, set a fragrant rose behind his ear, and so brought him to a repast of many delicate dishes and topaz-coloured wine, of which a child might drink and take no hurt.
While he revelled in the banquet, Circé with melodious voice discoursed.
He asked after his father, but upon this subject she had nothing to tell him at the present.
“Listen, Amphion, that you may take intelligent note of Aea and receive into your mind valuable ideas,” she began. “My island did not spring perfect from Poseidon’s bosom, as Aphrodite from the foam. Only gods and goddesses can be perfect without suffering, and not a human baby grows to boyhood lacking many pains. He forgets them; but he has endured them. Consciousness itself is great suffering — so great that there have been philosophers who doubted whether the game was worth the candle. Better and happier for many of your race, Amphion, had they been born to bear choice fruits, or entered the world as honeybees, who add to the earth’s sweetness without knowing it, and pass back again to nothing, unaware that they have lived.
“But Aea is beautiful after a myriad years and a myriad pangs. The world, you must know, is of no account without her artists, and as men take marble of Pentelicus and cut from the shapeless block miracles of beauty, so greater artists than men — the forces born of a world’s own progress — toil upon the mass that has created them. The burning ball presently grows cool, so that the genii of its own atmosphere may do their perfect work.
“Water descends from the burdened cloud — water, without which there can be no home for life. Rivers and springs twinkle upon the face of the new-born mother and blue seas lie in her lap. Day brings light, and Night opens and shuts her wings between evening and morning. Heat and cold sing their eternal antiphonies, and fire roars and frost tinkles. The giant forces smite with hurricane and torrent; the winds blow; the tides beat; the lightnings carve on the smooth and infant faces of the new world; the volcano models and remodels, casting up its clay into craters and precipices and pinnacles of splendour.
“These artists make a home for life, which comes timidly at first, then triumphantly, to play its part in glen and plain and alpine fastness; from the high hills to the valleys; from the blue face to the dark heart of the ocean; from the teeming and tropic zones to the solitudes of eternal snow.
Life also struggles with these great artists, and even as the mountains are carved into solemnities of loveliness that the plains know not, so are the broken pine and the dismantled oak lifted upon them, fairer to understanding eyes than their smug and prosperous neighbours of the valley.
“Aea is a little isle, but great enough to endure the sufferings that precede such wonders, and so win through pain to beauty with the rest of this wide-wayed world. Time and his ministers have made her what she is — a lesser jewel in the garniture of earth; not meet for Nature’s diadem or her signet, not worthy to be her sceptre or bosom-brooch; but a little opal — pure and perfect — to glimmer on her sandal, or the hem of her garment.
“And still Time toils and still Aea endures and is fairer and fairer for her pains. But Time will destroy her some day, for she is mortal; to Time even this round and steadfast-seeming globe itself is but a garden of Adonis — fair for a moment and then destined to burst like any other bubble. When that happens, I, Circé, who know not mortality, shall be driven out, to seek another home in some young star, and watch her also become the home of life.
“And now, little boy, who brings new beauty to Aea, you must sleep awhile, for I perceive that you grow bored.”
Indeed Amphion was exceedingly drowsy.
“What you tell me is very wonderful, dear goddess,” he said, “but I slept little last night, and can’t keep my eyes open any longer.”
“Fling yourself on yonder couch,” directed Circé; and when he had done so, the child instantly slumbered, and so remained for many hours.
He awoke, refreshed and alone, to find the sun’s slant beams playing among purple shadows on the pillars of marble that sprang around him. Then, rising, he walked out of the atrium and stood upon a wide terrace of black and white pavement tessellated, and watched the sun go down behind the hills.
That evening Circé was in one of her most youthful moods, looked not a day more than seventeen, and had garbed herself in white, with a coral necklace. They played at knuckle-bones and cat’s-cradles, and she asked Amphion riddles and told him funny stories and enchanted his heart, so that already he adored her for a playmate. They shared a pineapple for supper, and then a serving-girl conducted the boy to rest.
“Sleep well,” said Circé, giving Amphion her little finger to kiss; and he left her for a bed of swansdown, and did not awaken until he felt Simo’s cold coils upon his arm.
The lad roused instantly and related his adventures with enthusiasm.
“I have had a splendid time so far,” he said. “Circé is kind and good and full of fun. We played beautiful games together, and she told me many things well worth knowing. She is, indeed, a very great goddess, and the most interesting person I have ever met.”
“Yes,” answered the snake, “you are not the first who has found her interesting and fond of games; but we are here to discover Dolius. Had she anything to say about your father?”
“No,” confessed Amphion. “I am afraid she rather avoided the subject.”
“Divinity is ever evasive,” replied Simo; “but we must not forget our business; and if, as it seems, Circé finds herself in a good temper just now, and has enjoyed your society — a fact I hardly foresaw — it may be well to strike while the iron is hot. Assertion is the secret of success, and a shrill and obstinate repetition of the name of ‘Dolius’ will be your duty. Worry her with Dolius, and let her see that nothing and nobody else really concerns you. To make people interested, you must be interested yourself, so rub it in. Thus far I have myself neither seen nor heard of your father. He is naturally quite unknown, since he has been here only a week, and is probably hiding, for shame of his metamorphosis.”
“We need not be afraid of Circé,” declared Amphion. “She knows you are here, and wasn’t angry. She is much nicer than you thought, Simo.”
“You may have bewitched her mind as a novelty; though it is far more likely that she has tried to bewitch yours,” replied the other. “Be that as it will, I shall come before her to-morrow at the hour of the midday meal. I may have heard something by that time; and to-morrow be sure to return to the subject of Dolius. Let her know that I will arrive for lunch, and bid her be very careful of her jewellery at our meeting. A serpent must never look upon an emerald, otherwise he would become blind. This, doubtless, Circé knows, and if she should be wearing emeralds, beg her, civilly but firmly, to take them off.”
With that Simo left his friend, and Amphion slept again.
In the morning, after an excellent breakfast, he watched the enchantress, on a wide, marble piazza teaching ten marmoset monkeys to dance in harmony. She played an instrument resembling a little lute, but presently laid it aside and bade her pets go free.
“These were never anything else but what they are, you understand,” said she. “Intelligent and charming little companions, and often much distressed to hear that their prehistoric forefathers sometimes degenerated into men. And where is your serpent? Has he deserted you?”
“Simo came to me in the night. He much wishes to lunch with you, great goddess, at noon; and he hopes you will not wear emeralds, because they might hurt his eyes.”
“He will be welcome,” said Circé. “I take pleasure in the company of his race. They are far-seeing and intelligent, good talkers and good listeners. I wish I might meet with some on my islet.”
“Dolius dug him out of the sand before he was hatched, and he is quite as anxious to find my dear father as I am,” explained Amphion.
Circé nodded.
“You have come upon a difficult quest,” she said. “We will discuss the situation with Simo after luncheon. Now let us walk in the garden that I may pluck a herb or two and tend others.”
They strolled in the lady’s garth, among many green things whose mighty properties she alone understood. But Amphion perceived that she was familiar with the ways of serpents, for she directed him to pluck fennel and gather a plump, netted melon for Simo’s pleasure.
When lunch was served on plates of pure gold, the snake, in his black and amber, came winding over the outer terrace, rose on his tail, bowed to Circé with great dignity, and then ascended to the couch beside her. She was attired in a gown of russet-red worked in hieroglyphics of a pale green, and on her fair and shining hair there sat a single aquamarine of prodigious size.
“I am glad to see you at my table, Simo,” said the goddess, “and I have plucked for you a melon with red flesh, full of delicious juices.”
“I thank you, far-famed Circé,” he replied; “it was very considerate of you to do so.”
They ate an incomparable meal, and when all was ended, the lady bade her guests follow her to a place beneath a great tree, where they reclined among silken cushions to the sound of faint but exquisite music. She then addressed them.
“It is quite possible,” she began, “that you are both going to be annoyed with me, and, in order to clear the air, you must listen to a few practical considerations. Things are as they are, and to praise, or blame, what must be by the will of the high gods, is equally absurd. Praise or blame is founded on confusion of thought and forgetfulness of necessity. One brain may drive a man to murder; another must demand from the possessor a masterpiece of wisdom or beauty. One brain will launch a war; another create a Parthenon to celebrate victory. Neither praise nor censure is demanded in either event — only regret or gratification, as the case may be. Blame no man because he has the heart of a swine; praise no man who behaves with dignity, nobility and honour. Call no man, or god, a complete villain or a perfect hero, because, to be plain with you, there are not such things. Reality never held them.”
“There is a deity in the far-off Indies,” said Simo, “who is alien from your pantheon, great Circé, yet of all gods best understands man. He promises Nothing, yet Nothing is in itself so precious, that to attain it, and escape for ever those pains and penalties from which immortality itself is not immune, he indicates how annihilation must be worked for and only won through much thought and devotion. The ways thereto are eight, and a man who would reach the final bliss of Nothing must follow them all. They are right faith, right judgment, right speech, right purpose, right practice, right obedience, right memory and right meditation. And when you meet a man right in all these, you may indeed pay him right reverence and kneel before him. But we shall never meet such a wonder, for the good reason you have given: that there is no such perfect person. Thus Nothing is a bribe beyond faulty human attainment — a divine trick to lead men to wisdom by the promise of illusory reward. And we may also take the converse, and declare that a being so monstrously wicked as to attain and display the very spirit and essence of wickedness is not to be found.”
“We are just the same,” declared Circé. “We gods and goddesses are not absolute in goodness or evil, and you Greeks do wiseliest that make of us your big brothers and sisters, who share your emotions, your weaknesses and your virtues intensified to an Olympian degree. When you speak of Gautama, the divine Buddha, however, you are guilty of anachronism, since he is not yet.”
“I move in a fourth dimension independent of time,” explained Simo.
“Then I stand corrected,” replied Circé. “I beg your pardon.”
“Granted,” said Simo.
“This brings me to my own story,” continued the goddess; “and now you may be disappointed at what I shall tell you, but you have no right to be annoyed. Men imagine that I am an all-powerful enchantress to whose malevolent and ingenious necromancy there are no limits; but the truth is quite otherwise. I am a good-hearted, easy-going divinity, with abilities strictly circumscribed. My mother, Hecate, my sister, Medea, or Hebe — the giver of eternal youth — these, and my brother, Aetes, the arch-wizard, also, all do many far more wonderful things than I. To me is merely given a power that reduces man to his elementals and returns him to the likeness of the lower animal, vegetable, or mineral, from which his character and quality are most directly derived. Not only the ape and tiger had a hand in your originals, but all things desirable and undesirable are mingled within you, and mankind — the last comer on earth — inherits from the primal stock of life its innumerable complexities.
“The point is,” continued Circé, “that concerning these ancient human ancestries I myself know nothing whatever, and when I work the magic that I am set here to work by Zeus, for his unseen purposes, I have not the very smallest idea what form the operation will take. The potion is drunk; the victim goes to bed, and next morning his or her apartment is empty, and there is another tiger in the jungle, tree in the forest, or dragon-fly on the lake, as the case may be. But I never see that human being again. I merely do my duty; and you have no more right to blame me for its limitations than the unfortunate people in Aea have a right to protest against me for its results.”
“That I grant,” declared Simo. “It is a position which you and I find no difficulty in accepting. Merely an accidental weakness, common to the human race, makes men cry out at misfortune and hate those who bring it upon them. Reason should defy nature in this matter. I knew a wise man who laughed at himself when his hopes proved futile and his schemes miscarried. He was, of course, an exception. He possessed the rare intelligence to regard himself from the outside; and we all know what most people look like from the outside. Neither would he hate those who combined to do him ill. He strove rather to weigh their reasons and resolve them, so that he perceived some wrought against him in fair competition, while others stood in his way without any intention to do so, but simply by force of circumstances over which they had no control. One only worked for malice; and since malice is the mental activity of an idiot, the wise man forgave him also, and laughed over him as heartily as the others.”
Then Amphion, who had thought upon Circé’s last words, asked a question:
“You mean, great goddess, that you do not know in what shape my dear father moves upon the island?”
“That is exactly what I do mean, child,” she answered. “I have not the smallest idea, and you must not be annoyed with me because I confess it. That is the fact. I bore him no ill-will. I bear nobody any ill-will. He had a good supper, no doubt, including the necessary combination of nightshade and hellebore; and went off to congenial haunts when he woke up from his subsequent slumbers and found himself transformed into a brute. That is all I can tell you about the worthy fellow.”
“Then you have not the faintest idea in what shape Dolius now pursues his life?” asked Simo.
“Not the faintest. I took no note of him. There are, of course, general rough principles; but even these cannot be relied upon. There is no rule as to a metamorphosis, for the reason that you never know what is really hidden in the heart of any man. A tyrant, in the cruel and wicked sense, generally turns into a tiger or leopard; pirates may be fairly counted upon to reappear as wolves; a gentle, amiable person as a rule joins the herbivorous creatures — deer and kine. But, no doubt, if one really went into this subtle matter, my island would be full of great surprises. Sometimes you shall find a man has made his own soul, or essential part, into which he turns under my magic. There is a merchant beneath that gigantic mahogany-tree that overtops the forest. He was a pompous fellow with a big voice and three chins. His eyes glittered like diamonds set in a lump of putty, and his fingers were overladen with jewels. On the morning after his ordeal we took him and poured him out under the big tree. He had turned into a huge pile of gold pieces. That, however, was a unique experience.”
“Given a quiet, ignorant, inoffensive and well-meaning fisherman, of homely features and aged about forty, what should you judge we ought to look for?” asked Simo.
The goddess considered.
“He might be a buffalo, or a wart-hog, or a hippopotamus, or — a dozen things,” she said. “You must seek him industriously, and I will help you in one particular. You, Simo, have wisdom to understand all beasts, great and small; but Amphion lacks this gift. Let him, however, drink a little prescription I shall prepare, and he, too, will be able to question every living thing.”
“I thank you gratefully, kind Circé,” said Amphion, and the enchantress stroked his smooth face and kissed him.
“When we have found Dolius, may we take it that, out of your bounty and goodness and affection for this innocent boy, you will restore him into human shape?” asked Simo.
“I will,” she promised. “It is a thing I seldom do, save under compulsion of greater gods than myself. But I can, though the charm is elaborate and tedious. Once only for my own gratification I did so. Meeting a magnificent black puma on one occasion, with a coat like burnished ebony — a sleek, lithe and intensely attractive object — I transformed him to human shape, rather suspecting he was an Arabian prince in whom I had been interested two years before. Judge, however, of my disappointment when he reappeared as a gigantic Ethiopian of the most hateful proclivities, a wretch who had already been exceedingly insolent to me at his first forced landing because I liked him not. Handsome, in a coarse, equatorial way, no doubt, but far better as a puma. He was soon back on all-fours; and now he growls and shows his wonderful teeth and lashes his tail every time I meet him.”
They discussed the plan of campaign, and Simo perceived that Circé had wakened into great affection for Amphion and treated him as a new toy.
That night the boy drank the potion before going to bed, and when he and the serpent were alone, Simo indicated the situation. But his companion was too sleepy to listen, and both quickly slumbered.
Soon after dawn of the next day Amphion said “good morning” to a toucan, and rejoiced that the bird understood, while he found no difficulty in comprehending its reply. Greatly fortified by his new accomplishment, he set forth after breakfast with Simo, but was directed by his hostess to return at noon.
“I am going to teach you some new games to-day,” said Circé.