The Centaur Read Online Free Page A

self-abuse an answer even so delicately serious, he had presumed.
    Her brown eyes blazed with a force that struck from him all consciousness of her body; that shining form became the mere mounting of her angered divinity. “Yes,” she said, “and Philyra so loathed the monster she bore that rather than suckle you she prayed to be metamorphosed into a linden tree.”
    He stiffened; with her narrow woman’s mind she had cut through to the truth that would give most hurt. But in recalling to him the unforgivable woman, Venus fortified him against herself. In contemplating the legend wherein on an island so tiny it seemed glimpsed through many refracting layers of water there lay neglected a half-furred and half-membranous squid of fear that was his infant self, in contemplating this story, one among many stories save that an unrecognized image in it bore his name, Chiron had arrived as an adult at a compassionate view, framed in his experience of creatures and his knowledge of history, of Philyra as a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, more beautiful than bright, set upon by savage Kronos who, surprised by watchful Rhea, transformed himself into a stallion and galloped free to leave his interrupted seed work its garbled growth in the belly ofthe innocent daughter of the sea. Poor Philyra! His mother. Wise Chiron could almost reconstruct her face as, huge in tears, it begged a heaven whose very patterns had passed away to release her from the decree, antedating even the Hundred-handed and stretching backward to a time when consciousness was mere pollen drifting in darkness, that appointed the female copulation’s field of harvest, begged this cruel heaven to forgive her the ugly fruit of an assault but dimly comprehended and shamefully desired: it was here, on the very lip of her metamorphosis, that Chiron most clearly envisioned his mother; and when as a youth in many moods of sadness and wonder he had gone to examine linden trees, a lusty scholar newly maned, glossily fleshed yet already slightly stiffened by the prudent dignity that he had willed to protect his wound and by the pious resolve that was to make him the guardian of so many motherless, Chiron standing embraced by the tree’s wide soft shade had believed himself to discover in the tentative attitudes of the low branches and in the quiver of the heart-shaped leaves some protest, some hope of return to human form, even some delight at finding her son fully grown, which, together with his eager and exact researches into the chemistry of the lime-flower’s quiet honey, enabled him to augment his vision with the taste, odors, and touch of a pathetic, too-docile personality betrayed by a few hysterical moments into the arboreal benevolence that, had she remained human, would have been his mother’s and would have branched into words of nonsense, calm attentions, and gestures of love. Then touching his face to the bark he had spoken her name. Yet, for all his painstaking work of reconciliation, often when he contemplated the fable of his birth an infantile resentment welled up bitterly within his mature reconstruction; the undeserved thirst of his first days poisonedhis mouth; and the tiny island, not a hundred yards long, on which he, the first of a race by nature reared in caverns, had lain exposed seemed the image of all womankind: shallow, narrow, and selfish. Selfish. Too easily seduced, too easily repulsed, their wills wept self-indulgently in the web of their nerves and they left their dropped fruit to rot on the shore because of a few horsehairs. So, seen through one side of the prism he had made of the tale, the taunting small-faced goddess before him was to be pitied; and through the other, to be detested. In either case Venus was reduced. In a voice grave with composure he told her, “The linden has many healing properties”: a deferential rebuke if she chose to accept it; otherwise a harmless medical truth. His long survival had not been attained without