IT chanced that, when Typhon returned home, his father, Agathion, was not present to welcome him. The good man, being over-wearied by much running about at the sales where art treasures were changing hands, determined upon a complete mental and bodily rest, and now resided awhile at the villa of Epicurus.
There he had put himself into the hands of the Master, and enjoyed the sage’s simple and joyous method of dealing with sick and sorry disciples. The profane physic of Epicurus consisted in comfort and good cheer. Agathion had been laid on a bed of down to the music of fountains, while vistas of the garden opened before his eyes. His head was crowned with a garland of fragrant blossoms; delicate wine and delicious fruit stood at his elbow in vessels of severe grace; while maidens came and went, heartening him with their beauty and varied accomplishments. Some played the lute and sang Anacreon’s songs; others danced under a screen of summer leaves, where light and shadow danced with them.
“Agathion will be restored to health in a fortnight,” declared Epicurus.
Meantime, Typhon stood before his mother, received Elpenice’s embrace and smiled into her hungry eyes. He then brought Ægle and told how they proposed to wed as swiftly as the ceremony might be planned. Elpenice wept over the girl and only dried her tears when she learned that Ægle, owning the treasure of Plutus, would not only be the loveliest but the wealthiest bride in all Athens.
They made no delay; and having attired Ægle to her liking, Elpenice accompanied them to the garden of Epicurus and brought the pair before Agathion in the place of his rest-cure. And when they had saluted him, and he had risen from his couch and blessed them both, the lovers went out to seek Epicurus and Metrodorus, Leontion, the wife of Metrodorus, and Hermarchus, the philosopher’s first and wisest disciple. After they had departed, Elpenice spoke with Agathion.
“Alas! he is not our dear, hurricane boy any longer,” she sighed.
“That is so satisfactory,” answered Agathion.
“Yet,” said she, “one had forgotten that he could be a boy no more. He returns as a young man, very strong, and lovelier than ever, for his wondrous eyes scowl no more: they are placid and steadfast as the windless sea.”
“So satisfactory,” repeated Agathion.
“Yes, yes; but somehow I longed to embrace the delicious, round-limbed, sulky thing who went out to find Soter. He is as brown as a cattle drover and nearly as ragged. A stranger has returned to us. He stands several inches taller to begin with, and appears to be made of bronze. He proposes to let his beard grow as it will, unless you forbid it. His voice is deep, but melodious. I’m afraid of him. Moreover his ideas have developed in very startling and unexpected directions. He knows his own mind only too well. He speaks of the greatest good to the greatest number, declares that masterpieces should be shared by all and such-like nonsense. Pallas only knows where he picked up these desolate opinions.”
Agathion’s eyes rounded.
“That is not so satisfactory,” he replied. “And what of this girl?”
“She also is brown, but exceedingly beautiful,” declared Elpenice. “The stain of the sun will wear off; she is strong and healthy, and appears to echo Typhon’s views.”
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” answered the invalid. “She possesses a clear intellect, and if, as you tell me, she must be the wealthiest girl in Greece, then we may take it for granted that she will not long support this balderdash from our Typhon. I never heard of any successful philosopher who professed to banish private property, and the unsuccessful philosophers don’t matter. Would he ask me to share my toothbrush with a slave? Then why should I share my Praxiteles?”
“Ægle, I fear, can claim no long descent.”
“That does not vex me,” replied the father of Typhon. “I, too, entertain liberal opinions in some directions, and to have a daughter-in-law without relations will carry its own advantages. Only the poor hunger for relatives; you shall find the rich do remarkably well without them — when they get the chance. To marry a woman for her long descent is, philosophically speaking, futile. I heard Menander on this subject but recently, and he said we might as wisely inquire concerning its grandparents before we eat a capon. ‘Deucalion was the father of us all — gentle and simple alike’ — said Menander to Leontion. ‘The slut and the empress carry the same number of ancestors; but the working folk are too busy to preserve their pedigrees’ — that is all the difference. He added that a good man or woman is always nobly born. So, no doubt, is a good girl.”
“Ægle is quite good, and also rather clever for a woodland maid. There is a lack of cultured reticence in her speech, and she has a way of indicating her exact meaning only possible to the uncultured. But I think her failures in tact arise rather from ignorance than faulty taste. And with this astounding wealth much will be regarded as charming originality that might be viewed with less favour under different circumstances. She will tone down soon enough.”
“The treasure of Plutus already proves a source of infinite interest to me,” confessed Agathion. “As soon as my health is restored — and it cannot be long now — I must organise a party of trustworthy and understanding spirits to bring in these wonders. I may even accompany them, if it be possible to travel so far in comfort and security.”
“As for their marriage, since Typhon has spoken with Eros himself upon the mountains, their love has divine sanction — which is a comfortable thought,” added Elpenice. “Yet I could have wished he had waited a little.”
Meantime Typhon walked in the paths of the hanging garden, where it sloped to green waters flowing beneath. They were so crystal clear that the fishes might be seen swimming in the aquamarine depths of them; while in the ‘Grove of the Eucalypts,’ as it was called, the joys of high summer flourished. The fragrant gum-trees were in the enjoyment of their highest splendour. All shades of sea-green, glaucous green and blue, their sickle leaves shone in the sun, and murmured pleasantly together, while their starry blossoms, of crimson and ivory-white, feathered among the delicious foliage and sparkled under the sky. Palms also flourished amid them; the mighty wheels of cycads, with orange fruits in their hearts, spread upon the earth; the chamærops sprang aloft and aigrettes of honey-golden fruit flowed downward from the phoenix. Conifers darkled among the gayer foliage, and fir and pine and cypress limned their figures upon the cloudless sky. A mellow and perfected splendour marked the garden, where Nature worked to do the will of man, happy in his genial tyranny and patient wisdom.
Yet Typhon already sighed for the thin breezes of the scarps and crags, and Ægle whispered:
“It’s lovely; but isn’t it stuffy!”
Then came Epicurus to them alone, welcomed young Typhon with good greetings and smiled upon his companion also; while Ægle, gazing into his wondrous eyes, felt that for the first time in her life she stood before a great man.
“Typhon will also be great some day,” she thought; “but I shall have known him before he reached greatness, so it can never be quite the same.”
Content shone on the face of the philosopher and he took their hands; but Typhon felt sorrowful at heart, because he suspected that Epicurus would presently demand Soter and be shocked and sad to learn of the failure.
Therefore he delayed not and broke the evil news at once, that the worst might be over and the Master informed of his disappointment.
“I come empty-handed, great Epicurus,” said he. “I have done what I might, and sought through all the seasons, year after year, high and low, for Soter; but I have not found the herb and I have not met a man or tree that knew it. At first I cared not, only conscious that I was doing my best; but as time passed, and springs and summers rolled away, I grew more and more in longing to bring you what you bade me. I have greatly desired to lay it at your feet; I have felt the call to keener efforts and more strenuous adventure. And never more than now, when I stand before you and record failure. But command me to try again and I will forget my own purposes and return to my quest with added energy and fortified resolve on your behalf. For it is not well that I myself in these wanderings should have won a great treasure and failed of the small treasure that I went to find for you.”
And Epicurus smiled and said:
“Fear not, Typhon. You have brought me Soter, for it is looking out of your eyes. Soter is at once nothing and everything, my lad. There is no such plant on earth, and therefore you could not find it; but ‘Soter’ means ‘Salvation’: it is the saviour attitude — an addition to Zeus himself; and that you have surely found; for that, indeed, you may cry ‘Eureka!’ The salvation I sent you out to seek was for yourself, not for me; and the seeking was the finding. Each high impulse, each generous thought and single-hearted deed brought Soter nearer, until good will made your heart a home.
“Soter, the herb, existed in my own imagination alone; Soter, the saviour, awaited your rising up and lying down, from the day you departed until the day that you returned. With no endowment but courage, health and a well-developed but empty head, you set forth to seek it; and the search was all, the finding of no account whatever. The search alone possessed value. And where has the search left you? It has brought patience and self-possession, which set a man free; compassion and ruth, which open the road to duty; love, to bring the needful strength; imagination, which shows how great a thing life may be; and humour, to indicate how little a thing life is.
“From these you emerge upon the threshold of the larger wisdom — not the lesser wisdom of the spider, who spins, or the squirrel, who hoards, for self alone; but the wisdom of the honey bee, who works for others as soon as her little communal heart begins to beat, and ceases not until, with frayed wings and worn-out body, her few weeks are told, and she drops to earth again, where there is no more honey or sunshine or flowers. But she has brought more sweetness into the world than she took out of it; she has added to the cosmic store of good things; and be this your purpose — you and Ægle together — so that if you labour six weeks, six years, or sixty years, you shall bring more sweetness into the world than you take out of it. Were that a policy and ideal pursued through but three generations of mankind, there would appear enough on earth for all. That is the true way for men of honour and honesty to tread; but as yet they know it not.
“There remain faith and sincerity, without which no good thing can be done. We seek in faith and sincerity how to justify life; hence logic is less than physics; physics but second to ethics. We should respect rather than despise the help of the senses in our quest, and their evidences, through pleasure and pain, aid us to know whether we stand upon the right road; but I speak not of the body alone: it is the pleasure and pain of the soul also which you will now rise to consider. My aim is not, as with the Cyrenaics, the pleasure of the passing hour, but that enduring contentment and well-being of both body and mind that spell freedom from the greatest of all evils — pain. We may suffer much to’ escape from pain, and the way of real content and peace is thorny and often full of grief; but the wise man recognises that it must be so, and strives to reach, though he may never attain, that divine height where bodily sufferings torment no more a soul at peace. Few reach to that, for doubt, disappointment, weakness cling closely to the wisest and bravest of us; but we can only climb at all by generous recognition of our fellow-men, from whom we take our strength as well as our sorrow, and to whom we give both again.
“The world is not a menagerie, but a brotherhood, and when the shackles of creed and greed are smitten off for ever we shall, to our amazement, reach that primal discovery.
“Faith still takes as many shapes as love or hope, or beauty herself. Superstition has ever been a sort of glass house into which man willed to creep for comfort and support against the frosty weather of reality; and while obvious that ‘those who live in glass houses should not throw stones,’ and those who seek the security of faith’s iron bars must not make faces through them at the free men who walk beyond, it is equally certain that reason demands good manners from those outside. It is not enough to judge by results and say, with certain wise men, that by its fruit alone can we report on faith. Tolerance and the spirit of ‘aidos’ demand more than that. Respect every man’s faith, even though his own character and quality forbid him to show good works. Go in charity with your neighbour and, if you can neither teach him nor learn from him, still go in charity. The thing that matters is happiness, here and now, and the desire for that happiness is the earliest and latest and everlasting passion in the human heart; but happiness has more shapes than Proteus, and one may no more dispute about another’s happiness than he about our own. We cannot turn the world into an automaton, or self-mover; we cannot imagine that one machine will grind out happiness for all. The happiness of the hawk is the misery of the linnet; the happiness of the cultured world is the weariness of the ignorant; and men are so made that immense latitude must be allowed, and a great international liberty and generosity exist, before even approximate universal content could be created. Much, much has to be bred out of us before we see one social sunrise that can hearten and gladden all, as the living sun knows how to do.
“Lastly, of sincerity, which is the first child of true love and the test of love also. My children, if you find indifference shadowing and chilling your hearts in pursuit of any subject, then abandon that subject and waste no more time upon it. Only that is worth following which swallows up energy, arrides you sleeping and waking, dominates you, drives you, empties you, fills you again from its own fountains, absorbs you, demands all pure aspiration and endeavour — does everything but fatigue you. Of such high beacons are beauty and philosophy; and even to name their names without sincerity is to belittle ourselves. Sacrifice much to beauty, Typhon and Ægle. Much indeed must not be surrendered, but a thousand lesser challenges may well pass by unheard before this appeal. And remember that in the treasure houses of time, as truth is the criterion of enduring thought, so beauty and beauty alone embalms the work of art in everlasting youth.”
“That reminds me of a little Doric temple, where spake Apollo to me, Epicurus. It is now deserted and tumbling down. May I bring it hither and lift it again in your garden?”
“You shall do so,” answered the philosopher. And then he turned to Ægle.
“For you a special word, my lovely maiden. Endowed by Typhon with the riches of Plutus, a great charge and care is yours; yet simple are the rules that solve this tremendous responsibility. You have but to go forward, husband and wife, hand in hand, courageous, patient, proud of service, faithful to mankind, and your riches flow into their appointed channels.”
“Our needs are simple and we hate luxury and splendour,” replied Typhon. “Ægle will tell you so.”
“I never want to eat dandelions and chestnuts again,” admitted Ægle; “but there is a far cry from them to such fare as we have seen on the tables of the rich. Shall I, who have heard nightingales’ tongues, ever want to eat them? Shall I, who have seen the beauty of pard and ounce, fox and red squirrel, ever covet their skins to hide my own?”
“Add not to your possessions, but subtract from your desires,” said Epicurus. “Measured by Nature’s simple standards, all property is wealth; and measured by man’s unlimited greediness, all property is poverty. I do not fear for you in this matter.”
“Nor we for ourselves, after we have brought our many problems to you, noble Epicurus,” replied his disciple. “We stand upon a broad threshold and pray to the gods that we may step forth wisely.”
Then they came together where Typhon’s mother sat beside Agathion, and they were happy and content.
Soon the lovers found a small dwelling, wherein they might dwell until Typhon builded a better; but that, too, they intended should be no palace; for already their thoughts and shared longings soared to the mountains, where they planned often to go together.
And after they were wedded, Ægle spoke to Typhon and said:
“Our guardian shall be Hestia — kind deity of the hearth. For she shares in human festivities, and wills that her sacred brand should burn for the happiness of men.”
Therefore, upon their marriage day, they went to the town hall together, where the unsleeping flame of the goddess was ever burning; and they watched the colonists, and those about to depart for far countries, taking Hestia’s fire to comfort them in distant lands. Then they lighted a torch and brought it to their home.
FINIS