ABOUT the middle of the second week, Amphion, walking among the rocks when the tide was low, found a pelican eating a dead lobster; and something about the drab and homely bird put him in mind of his dear father. But the pelican proved to be a fishmonger from Athens, cast away here on an expedition of pleasure.
“The only time in my life that I permitted myself a holiday,” he chattered through his long bill; “and this was the appalling result. The glaring injustice bewilders me. Something ought certainly to be done about it.”
“You all say that,” replied Amphion sadly. “You all tell me something ought to be done about it — and I think so too; but what can be done?”
“There is no system, no coherence, no solidarity,” replied the pelican. “We talk our wretched heads off; but the moment anybody like myself attempts to organise, and centralise, and control public opinion, factious idiots argue and disagree. It is admitted that a union of sufferers, a combination, an amalgamation, or synthesis should be constructed; but everybody wants to take the lead: nobody is content to keep in the background and let the more powerful and intelligent guide their operations. This accursed jealousy keeps the whole pack of us impotent. My idea is simplicity itself. We select a leader — one who has been accustomed to the business — and we leave him to appoint conferences, consisting of committees, subcommittees, commissions, sub-commissions and so forth, thus applying the recognised resources of civilisation to the unparalleled situation in which we find ourselves. Then — ”
“Forgive me; but do you know a fisherman named Dolius?” asked Amphion.
“You’re not interested,” said the pelican. “I see you’re not interested.”
The boy left him talking to himself about coalescence and esprit de corps; and when he next met Simo, engaged in conversation with a striped zebra under a coconut-palm, Amphion mentioned his adventure.
“He used very long words, and was eating a lobster that had been dead many days,” explained the lad; “but there was something about him so like my father that I was wondering if Dolius may not after all be a shabby bird.”
“He may be,” admitted the snake. “We agreed that he was not a bird; but, after all, there is no certain reason against it.”
“You see,” continued Amphion, “many birds catch fish, whereas few beasts attempt to do so, except the otter and the jaguar.”
“True, true,” replied Simo; “but we must not press the analogy too hard. However, it enlarges the field of exploration, which begins to grow rather narrow. I have myself spoken to fourteen otters. They were river men in their better days, and, adventuring to sea beyond the domain of their experience, came to grief here many years ago. I have not as yet seen a jaguar, and, in any case, he has qualities one does not associate with Dolius. We can approach the kingfishers, the storks, the sea-hawks, the ospreys, cormorants and gulls. Yet I have a shrewd intuition that your father will not be found among them.”
“We must go on trying,” said Amphion. “Circé doesn’t want me this afternoon. I don’t think she is in a very good temper. She says I sing like a bird — without any soul.”
Simo considered this saying.
“She may be getting tired of you,” he said.
“Very likely indeed,” admitted Amphion; “I thought she was restless and rather bothered with me yesterday.”
“She was,” replied the serpent; “and after dark she lighted a fire in the forest and sat by it a long time all alone. I lay hidden in the grass watching her. Then, when the moon rose, she began gathering potent herbs. I heard the mandrakes shriek as she pulled them up by the roots. She is about to weave a very powerful spell, but whether it has anything to do with us I have yet to find out.”
“I hope not,” said Amphion.
“I think not,” replied the serpent. “I am inclined to believe that she may be after bigger game; but time will show.”
They climbed the mountains and met a panther, who talked with them, heard their story, and licked Amphion’s hands, saying that the boy reminded him of his own son. He had been a King of Crete in remote times; but the sense of his insulting injuries was still upon him.
“The most useful are taken, together with the worthless and unimportant,” he said. “I stood between my beloved people and many dire perils. Prosperity had made us enemies, as it is wont to do. We were threatened by powerful foes, who envied us our wealth and culture. I had actually started upon my way to seek an alliance when this unspeakable disaster fell upon me. Something definite and drastic ought most surely to be done about it. If you know Crete, tell me how it is with that corner-stone of human civilisation since my departure.”
“Better not ask,” said Simo.
The panther hung his majestic head.
“I can guess,” he answered.
He had not heard of Dolius, and they left him terribly cast down.
A golden eagle stood upon a crag, and, passing beneath the noble but mournful bird, they bade him “good evening,” for the sun had now turned into the west.
He was interested in the vision of a human boy, hopped down to them, and spoke with considerable bitterness.
“You see an artist,” he said, “a great sculptor, whose creations won the devotion of mankind and the applause of Olympus.”
“An archaic carver,” whispered Simo. “Crude, imitative, and of no historical importance; but quite well thought upon in his day.”
“My masterpieces were the pride and joy of the earth,” continued the lean eagle, and his eyes blazed into theirs. “I lifted the soul of man out of the dross; I inspired noble thoughts; I brought the high gods to our temples, and so into the hearts of mankind. I was attaining absolute mastery, and could make marble and bronze do everything but speak. I was proving to my fellow-creatures that through the sacred and purifying stream of master art alone, might the nations ever hope to live in harmony and peace. I had founded a school of enthusiastic followers, who would have carried on my light when I could no longer hold the torch; I was leavening the human mind with a sense of beauty, which must have borne fruit of justice, mercy, truth — all this I was doing. And then, on my way to execute an important commission in Africa, I am cast here by some jealous god and transformed into a raptorial fowl.”
“Did you ever carve a snake like me?” asked Simo.
“Like you? No; but many a finer serpent have I carved. I could think a better snake than you; consequently I produced far more wonderful ones — for temple tripods and so forth.”
“How can you produce anything more wonderful than reality, great artist?” inquired Amphion; but the eagle had no patience with a question so absurd.
“Tush!” he said. “The artist who concerns himself with reality is lost. A snake is a symbol, no more — a cipher in himself, only useful that we may avail ourselves of his significance, combined with certain physical attributes which we retain, but glorify and translate into a far nobler aspect than his own.”
“You are entirely wrong about art,” declared Simo, who was only interested in the eagle’s theory and not his practice. “You artists think yourselves far too important in the scale of things. You are merely magnified conjurers, and take the place of the necromancers who held the public eye in earlier time. To cut something like a man, or god, or serpent out of stone is no great matter; or to paint a picture; or tell a story; or produce an epic in poetry. These things will not bring the nations happily together, or banish war, or make evil men good. They may arrest passing attention and cause the intelligent to reflect a little. They may give pleasure, but, believe me, they butter no parsnips but the artist’s own. And not too often that much. They are the fringes of reality’s garment, not the covering itself. To be plain, you are all liars; you fake and dissemble and delude, but you don’t get any useful thing done.”
The eagle bristled his feathers and glared at Simo.
“Reptile!” he hissed. Then he stretched out his golden wings and lifted his eyes to the sinking orb of day.
“How long, Helios! How long!” he cried.
They left him looking like a brass lectern — one of those graven images that used to carry ancient writings upon their shoulders when we were young, and may, indeed, still do so, for all one knows to the contrary.
Simo spoke to Amphion when they had passed by.
“The eagle was perfectly right about art,” he said. “What he declared is indeed much to his credit. I only contradicted him because he said that he could ‘think’ a better snake than I am. That was rude; and though many noteworthy artists have been, and doubtless will continue to be, exceedingly rude, they gain nothing by it save the pity of lesser men, which they would much resent. Suavity is seldom amiss when dealing with barbarians, whether it is your life or your living that depends upon their good will. The man who has a child’s brain about art must, in that regard, be treated like a child. It is useless to slap him with your tongue, because in other respects he may be a better and usefuller man than yourself.”
Having passed the time of day with a mongoose, who pounced out upon Simo under a misapprehension, and questioned a marmot, they descended the mountain, made a circle of the isle, and returned somewhat weary after sundown.
On the beach they saw the pelican talking to a row of listening seals.
He was saying:
“Consolidate! For Olympus’ sake, let us consolidate! ”
That night their hostess proved in a serious mood. She, too, showed signs of fatigue, for she had, as she confessed, woven a powerful spell during Amphion’s absence.
“A tremendous and far-reaching affair of considerable interest to me,” she said, “but none to you. I had word of certain events from my sister, Medea, and have taken steps accordingly. Now, what of your adventures? Fortune has not smiled? You find my little menagerie unfriendly?”
“Not in the least,” replied Simo. “But it would be idle to pretend that any one of them likes you. They are full of their wrongs, and display a great sense of unjust suffering and a great hope of the ultimate reward they have deserved for such affliction.”
“Man builds his deities largely according to his view of his own deserving,” answered the enchantress. “If they are not acutely conscious that they have earned handsome treatment in the next world, for their sufferings in this one, then they trouble little about the gods or goddesses; but if, as mostly happens, they are convinced that Olympus lies much in their debt, then they cling to the conviction that those who dwell there are of the same mind and will act accordingly. All the creatures in my zoological garden, for example, consider that it will be difficult to recompense them for the disabilities and discomforts they have been called to endure; but the grim truth is that their affairs are of the utmost unimportance, and the celestial ones think no more of my little community than you think of the potential bird in an egg you scramble for breakfast.”
“The poor people all say something ought to be done about it,” murmured Amphion; and Circé laughed.
“What?” she asked.
“They do not know,” he answered.
“Nobody knows and nobody cares,” replied Circé. She was not in a kind mood.
“It is, of course, very difficult for, say, an ant-eater who has once been a man, to realise that he is doing just as much, or little, good as an ant-eater,” said Simo; “and even those who have the sense of proportion and humour to realise that ant-eater and man are much of a muchness, cannot carry the admission into their own personal experience. Once a man, then the ant-eater’s life must suffer by comparison. If you took from them their self-consciousness also, and obliterated memory, then it would be comfortable here, and nobody any the worse; but this you cannot do. You simply magic the human mind and spirit into an inhuman house; and though that house may be quite worthy of the particular mind that is called to make it a home, yet the fact remains: everybody best likes the house in which he was born and to which he is accustomed.”
“Except the sloth,” Amphion reminded Simo. “He loved being a sloth.”
“Might he be your father?” inquired the goddess.
But Simo asserted positively that he was not.
“Dolius had an active body, though tardy wits,” he said.
Circé was restless. She looked once or twice for signs of change in the weather; but the night remained slumbrous and starry. Fireflies danced among the myrtle bushes, and so still was it that the sound of a remote waterfall came to their ears.
“The waterfall,” she said, “was once a great chatterbox — a rhetorician from Athens. He had nothing whatever to say, as often happens with these people, but he could go on saying nothing for hours. He actually talked me to sleep! In due course he turned into a waterfall, and, as such, is an addition to our scenery and a source of æsthetic pleasure. Thus may even a rhetorician fulfil his destiny and justify himself under my enchantment.
“I claim for many of my reincarnations,” she continued, “that, far from casting a man into meaner shape than his own, I actually exalt him a stage on life’s pilgrimage. Many a useless, cunning and dangerous human being makes a very good tiger, or spider, or camel. It cannot be honestly denied that a busy and crafty spider is justifying existence far more handsomely than a lazy and lying Greek.”
“The spider catches flies, which is better than catching fools,” admitted Simo.
“There are indigenous monkeys on Aea,” continued Circé, “who, seeing the men that I have turned into monkeys, bitterly resent it, and have lost much of their own self-respect in consequence.”
“In fact, every innovation may be condoned,” declared Simo.
“Man learns from the animals the worst they can teach him rather than the best,” proceeded the enchantress, “and much of the very best in him, man has gleaned and received from them; for their ways are full of wisdom yet to be garnered. Morally, of course, the human being is far behind the brute, and physically they have also much to teach him. Take architecture. Know you who instructed man to build his home, little Amphion?”
“The beaver, perhaps?” asked the boy.
“They learned from birds, who, lacking reason, yet did more reasonably than the first men. The earliest human dwelling in Athens was made by a genius of the first order. He saw a swallow building her nest upon a rock, and he arrived at this marvellous conclusion: he said, ‘What the swallow can do, perchance I can do!’ — and leaving his damp and draughty cave beneath the swallow’s house, he, too, gathered mud and built a clay home, spread the floor with feathers, and covered the roof with straw. The palace in which we sit at present is merely an evolution of the swallow’s home. Go forth and tell me what of the night, my child.”
Amphion returned presently.
“All is yet still and lovely,” he reported; “but a very black cloud stretches over the sea and hides the rising stars.”
“Good!” said Circé.
The news cheered her, and she continued to discourse, but in a desultory fashion, to pass the time till they should go to bed.
“Foolish man,” declared the goddess, “invents all manner of infernal horrors to wound and slay his fellow-man; and now, not content with bow and spear, has thought upon Greek fire, which shall run before him and with its foul mouth poison his hapless foe. Thus, with the javelin, the catapult, the evil blast of flame, we wound and poison at a distance; yet who ever thinks of healing from a distance, as the hermetic powder was feigned to do? Who plans a sweet, cathartic vapour that, carried by the kindly winds, shall sweep over a city like shade on a cloudless day and flood a ferocious army with rare savour, warming every heart therein to good will? Why not strive to perfect a weapon that shall stroke the brain of man with joy, clear his bloody vision and lift his spirit to mercy? If I were free to do as I willed, and not bound by greater than I to the painful duties thrust upon me, I would seek some omnipotent amalgam to quicken reason and stir those starved germs of fellowship and sympathy that none wholly lacks among the many-peopled kingdoms of the earth. My poisons should only stifle superstition and greed, suspicion and envy, hatred and malice. The aromas of salvation should be so blown and dispersed upon mankind that, from the least to the greatest of them, selfishness must depart in the irradiant aura and only justice and love remain.
“I would pour them out on the four winds, as the rose her scent and the cloud her blessed rain, until hard hearts grew soft in their fragrance, and cold hearts warm. And if my enemy fell upon me, I should oppose to his steel the savour of my surer weapon, and approach him with hands open and unarmed.
“Such a panacea is beyond all human alchemy as yet; but the formula must surely be discovered by the unborn, though many generations of men yet to come will show neither love nor patience for them who seek it. Found it shall assuredly be, however, and one’s only fear, having regard for the spirit and conscience of mankind at large, is that it may be found too late. Civilisation will hang in the balance long after Greece is forgot and her wisdom in the dust. And civilisation may not prove victorious, but go down unfulfilled into the twilight days of this little world. We lesser celestials know not the issue. Only the highest gods hold that secret; and they hide the last act of the human drama very jealously; for the play would lose its salt if we knew the last act while yet the first unfolded. Moreover, if man could see the end, he might already set about to mould it differently, and so confound the divine dramatist.”
A growl of distant thunder silenced Circé, and a sudden puff of wind from the sea set the lamps flickering.
“Alas! One of those old-fashioned, furious typhoons,” said she. “Happily, they are very rare, for they generally bring no little tribulation to such as follow the ocean. Let us to our slumbers, and pray Poseidon to be gentle with the wooden ships.”
So they retired; and when Simo and Amphion were alone, and the snake curled in the boy’s breast, he spoke warning words, that showed how no illusions clouded his serpent mind.
“I like her least,” declared Simo, “when she is uttering noble sentiments and high precepts. Nothing is easier than for a god or goddess to set an exemplary rule of conduct for erring men. From their high places they look down upon the whole stage of the human comedy, and, as all beholders, see most of the game and mark where the players fail of skill. But anybody can preach; any god can get a congregation. What human beings need is an example — a good, working god, not only doing what he says should be done, but also showing man how to do it. Such an example would mean that the gods are in earnest; and when they tell earth to be perfect and never lift an almighty finger to help it attain perfection, nor even make the most half-hearted attempt in the same direction themselves — then their winged words may well leave the mortal heart a little cold.
“Regard Circé,” continued Simo. “She hatched this tempest that is making the palace shake, and the sea roar and tear its hair, and the trees fall and the earth groan under the arrows of hail and lightning. She was playing the very deuce with unknown, suffering men upon the sea all the time that she told us so beautifully how to behave. There will happen maritime disasters and wrecked sailors to-night, or broken-hearted warriors stranded high and dry to-morrow. In which case Circé will forget all about you, and Dolius also. She is, in fact, a humbug at heart, like every other eminent magician.”
He talked on for a considerable time, and revealed a highly sceptic attitude to principalities and powers; then, finding that Amphion was sound asleep, despite the riot of the tempest, he too slumbered.