NOW was young Amphion weary of Aea and its wonderful scenery and interesting but melancholy inhabitants. “If you see lovely things with a sick heart, your eyes talk to you in vain,” said he, “for the loveliness has departed out of them, and our naked earth and our little home and our one green fig-tree were dearer to me, with my father beside me, than all these woods and mountains and singing streams. For Aea is haunted with much sorrow, and I am sorrowful for myself and for the living creatures that once were men and women. I cannot bear the grief in their eyes, and there is no sadder thing in the world than to hear prayers that you have not power to answer.”
“True,” said Simo. “It is entirely right and agreeable that your young and sensitive heart should smart in this manner. But avoid sentimentality. There are two sides to every question, and while many just persons are getting a good deal more than they deserve on this island, many may be regarded as very fortunate to be here in a respectable shape and with nothing more to fear from the world of men. Not a few amongst them have merited far worse than this; not a few have left the scene of their unsocial activities just in time; not a few, did they return to their cities and the victims of their infernal wickedness, would be torn limb from limb, or given to the arenas.
“With respect to your father, Dolius,” continued the serpent, “I am of opinion that his patience and your own have now been put to a sufficient test; and it will much delight you to know that this very day, after noon, we shall find him.”
“Simo!” cried the boy, “oh, Simo, you have discovered my father!”
“I have known all about him for a long time,” replied his friend. “I have been at pains to avoid him. The search has proved of considerable interest to me and taught you much. But your father and yourself have now endured enough, and the psychological moment of liberation may be said to have arrived. To-night Circé will prepare the necessary materials that shall restore the company of inexpressible Odysseus to their manly shapes, and your father shall take advantage of the occasion.”
They were on their way to the palace when this glad news reached the son of Dolius; and now, as they proceeded, and Amphion knew not whether to bless or blame his companion — yet blessed him all the time — they beheld the hero and the enchantress upon a great terrace, where cypress-trees and marble statues alternately made light and darkness.
For the moment Circé had turned her back upon her lordly companion. She was plucking the petals from a red rose and her eyes brooded afar. The divine lady appeared by no means so voluptuous as usual; while for his part her visitor manifested uneasiness, and regarded her with doubt, if not dismay.
“Lion-hearted Odysseus looks worried,” whispered Amphion to Simo. “Can it be that Circé is already growing tired of him?”
And the snake made answer:
“Not at all. She’s only growing tired of Penelope. Nothing interests Circé less than the faithful wives of the majestic and distinguished explorers driven to enjoy her hospitality. Your great traveller invariably leaves a pattern of womankind waiting for him at home; and godlike Odysseus has doubtless chattered of Ithaca and Penelope till the goddess finds herself burdened with both. The ever-wise will practise greater reserve about his own affairs in a month or two. A man is one thing; his business and family ties quite another. Subtle Odysseus must stop here for a year, you see, before he departs on an itinerary that embraces Hades and elsewhere.”
Circé greeted Amphion with a measure of lavish affection which she had denied him of late. He sat beside her at their midday meal, and she chose dainties for him and declared herself delighted to learn that the faithful son had come in sight of his long journey’s end.
“I am brewing this afternoon,” she said, “and to-night the company of indomitable Odysseus will be restored to the shape in which he prefers them. Your father shall participate in the transformation if you can bring him in time.”
“He shall be here,” said Simo.
But the master of a thousand wiles was sulking within the tents of his heart. He ate and drank as became a great man, but for some time continued unusually taciturn. At length he thawed, however, and began to talk in a voice like the mellow thunder of a summer night.
“True wisdom,” he suddenly declared, “is not to be reached by most of us after the fashion of Epimenides, who fell asleep in Crete as a lad, and wakened, half-a-century later, to find himself a man endowed with rare knowledge of the world. Now my far-reaching dexterity and astounding general prescience were only reached — ”
“Come for a walk,” said Circé. “We will hear about your prescience another time. I have a great variety of herbs, simples, poisons and counter-poisons, correctives, balsamics, hypnotics, anodynes, emollients, traumatics, demulcents, abstersives, analeptics and prophylactics to gather and prepare before the night falls, and they are going to take some finding.”
Egotistical Odysseus was not used to be interrupted when he chose to speak winged words; but he arose obediently, hid his heart, and followed the goddess into her garth of charmed vegetables. She bade him bring a great basket, a trowel and a pair of gardening gloves. He obeyed, with inward annoyance, but outward calm.
Then Amphion, singing sweetly out of his happy heart, set forth with Simo to find Dolius.
The snake, who hung about his neck as usual, directed the lad to a part of the island that presented little attraction. It was a creek, or inlet, of the sea between oozy banks crowned with coarse sedge and grass. But into this dirt-coloured and stagnant estuary Simo, who was amphibious, now plunged, as soon as his young companion had brought him to the brink. He vanished beneath the weedy waters and had not been gone above three minutes when Amphion beheld a vast surge and confusion in that sluggish tide, and from its depths emerged, first Simo, and then a cumbrous and unlovely object of an oval contour with clumsy fins, or flappers, two above and two beneath.
The creature suddenly thrust forth a grotesque, beaked head from between its upper paws, rose on the hinder ones and waddled to Amphion. It was a mud-turtle of considerable size, and within its unlovely carapace concealed the simple heart and soul of Dolius, the fisherman.
“Your own dear father!” cried the serpent: and, regardless of his parent’s forbidding appearance, the boy leapt into the embrace of the mud-turtle and kissed its clammy beak with passionate rejoicings. As for Dolius, he passed a flipper over each of his little son’s shoulders and hugged him closely for many minutes.
It was long before the poor fellow could control his emotion sufficiently to tell a coherent tale and, indeed, he had but little to narrate. On discovering himself a mud-turtle, the bewildered angler, familiar with the habits of these reptiles, had found an oozy and slimy spot exactly suited to his new requirements; he had then sunk into the mud at the bottom and accepted his bleak lot with the stoical resignation of ignorance; but he had ceased not to pray from his noxious bed that it might please the Thunderer presently to make life better worth living and preserve his wife and child.
“I can honestly say that I never quite gave up hope,” declared the brave and pious fisherman. “In my darkest moments, when it seemed frankly impossible to support the new existence, I still felt that Zeus might find time to consider the necessities of my family. Have I been down there ten years or ten minutes? It is impossible for me to determine, because, from the purview of a mud-turtle, time is not.”
They told him all the glorious news, and how that after set of sun he would be restored to manly shape; whereon he expressed much gratification, but no great surprise. His mind was not large enough fully to appreciate either good or bad fortune.
He was interested to learn how his comrade, Archidamus, had returned home in safety, and that Chloris supported the disaster with fair fortitude. Only in one particular did he display any vivid feeling, and that concerned his opinion of the sea. Dolius had clearly contracted the most violent detestation of his familiar element, and when he learned that it was proposed to return home by air, he manifested great relief.
“It only needed that,” he said, “to crown my contentment and thanksgiving.”
Before they went up to the palace he insisted on offering a long prayer of gratitude to Zeus, and then he started upon Amphion’s arm. But the process of walking upright proved difficult and made their rate of going very slow. Therefore he sank again upon all-fours, and proceeded in that manner with the tardy, but not undignified, progression of his kind.
Elsewhere lordly Odysseus had made his broad back ache no little while he grubbed up henbane, hellebore, aconite, hemlock, dorcynium, nightshade, mandrakes, thorn-apple, and half a hundred other all-powerful herbs; and on an open space before the palace Circé herself had prepared a fire, in which burned certain gums and essences, and over which a handsome cauldron of bronze swung from a tripod.
She completed her preliminary labours as the sun sank behind the hills, and then observed Amphion, his father and the serpent approaching.
A smile at the boy’s innocent happiness lighted her mysterious eyes when he ran to her and announced the triumph. But she looked with absolute indifference at the mud-turtle.
“So you’ve found him?” she asked, not perhaps unkindly, but without a spark of feeling.
“Yes, Divine One, we have found him — my dear, dear, father. He has been at the bottom of a creek praying to Zeus day and night.”
“Fortunate fellow,” said Circé. “Let him join the pigs. All goes well, and he shall return to human shape with the rest of them.”
As night’s mantle descended upon the magic isle, an eerie scene unfolded about Circé’s bonfire. Bale fires indeed she knew too well — fires that had lured many a stout-ribbed ship to its doom; but a bonfire was much out of the common on Aea. She entered into the spirit of the thing, however, and played her part with divine dexterity. Odysseus himself had driven up his companions, and now the swine stood in a semicircle about the blaze. They grunted and squeaked, and the blue and green flames from the fire flashed upon their little eyes, blunt noses and white tusks. In the midst, patient and dignified, squatted the mud-turtle; while Circé, lightly clad in a diaphanous robe of black, with fireflies for a fringe, and a coronet of magnetic corundums, or emeries, upon her loosened hair, stirred the contents of the cauldron, throwing in one ingredient after another. The flames flashed their verdant and azure fires; a thick, aromatic smoke ascended, its bosom lit from below until the illumination floated into the dark sky; while a dozen maidens, clad in their white skins only, walked round and round the fire singing the incantation.
Behind the expectant swine a thousand less fortunate beasts, peering upon the spectacle, sat shoulder to shoulder and wing to wing. Unblinking they gazed, so that their eyes made a ring of living jewels, that glimmered with gold and ruby and emerald upon the darkness, and girdled with their lustre the principal performers in that unique ceremony.
At midnight the brew was on the boil; then, skimming thrice, adding an ounce of powdered gelsemium from the roots of yellow jasmine, and a handful of mixed myxomycetæ, the enchantress stirred slowly for another half-hour; then lifted the cauldron off its tripod and set it to cool.
The rite itself was accomplished in no time. Their incantation ended, the singing girls withdrew, and Circé, taking a soup-ladle of solid silver, began to bespatter the companions of Odysseus with the charmed liquid. Such was its potency that a single drop sufficed, and in rather less than five minutes each man of that heroic company had discarded his swinish shape and stood once again every inch a hero.
They crowded about devious Odysseus, embraced him with cries of joy and mingled their happy tears with his own; but while the better-mannered worshipped the goddess, and acknowledged both her astounding accomplishments and her mercy, other men of high stomach and long descent, who had suffered most, stormed against her with futile passion and, ignorant of the nature of things, would have attempted to burn her as a vile witch in her own bonfire. Them their leader restrained, and when Circé, gratified at the complete success of her entertainment, informed the company that a cold collation awaited them at the palace, the thankful companions gave her three fairly hearty cheers and proceeded to fare that should make them forget their recent meagre nourishment.
Meantime the mud-turtle had vanished for ever, and in his place there stood a weather-beaten, wrinkled fisherman of forty years old. He was as humble as usual, but his eyes shone with human light; he caught Amphion to his hairy bosom and pressed many kisses upon the happy boy’s cheek.
“I must pay my respects to the mistress,” said Dolius, and he went before Circé and touched his narrow forehead with fingers almost as horny as the turtle’s flipper, scraped his leg in seaman-fashion and heartily thanked her for her gracious goodness.
Then Amphion lifted a petition.
“Darling Circé!” he begged, “there’s a glorious, great, sad tiger sitting behind you, and he would be so thankful if you could — if you could change him; and there’s quite a lot of enchantment left in the kettle.”
But the goddess shook her head and overturned the cauldron, so that no unforeseen thing might happen. Whereupon, the tiger, who had been an amateur pirate — adopting that manner of life from pure wickedness rather than necessity — howled with disappointment and vanished into the darkness.
At her own supper-party Dolius sat on Circé’s right hand, much to his uneasiness; but he had fine instincts, though his intellect was small, and the goddess, discovering the divine Odysseus to be in the best of tempers, developed a fascinating attitude to them all. Her astounding achievement had not wearied her in the least, and she planned that the companions of her temporary lord should reclaim certain waste lands, and so keep themselves out of mischief, while enjoying healthy occupation.
During a moment when the hero and the fisherman conversed amicably together, Circé addressed Simo, who was curled up on the table-cloth beside her.
She regarded him with a respectful expression, as of one who looked upon an equal — a glance usually denied to the children of men.
“How do you propose to get this dear boy and his equally dear father home?” she asked. “Do you need my assistance?”
“One might have counted upon your generosity to offer it, all-powerful goddess,” replied the serpent, “but I can manage.”
“No doubt,” answered the enchantress dryly. “Are there any genuine, heaven-born serpents on this island? I don’t remember to have seen one.”
“There are not,” responded Simo.
“Had there been, I should like to have met with them,” declared his divine hostess. “If at any time you are at leisure and care to spend a fortnight with me in the discussion of our art, you will be welcome,” she continued more graciously.
“I should love to do so,” retorted Simo. “I shall not forget. Indeed an invitation from Circé is tantamount to a command.”
But in his heart he had determined to leave Aea for ever on the following day, and this the all-seeing goddess knew perfectly well.
“Of course you won’t come,” she said.