The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March Read Online Free Page B

hunting for a generalisation that would describe its diversity, its power of casting up from time to time on the waves of tedious circumstance such starlike persons. The generalisation did not arrive, but he walked on in a bright astonishment. How he would like to hear her read a play; he used to be interested in such things and when his journeys took him to an island that was large enough to have a theatre he never missed an opportunity to hear a good tragedy.
    As he entered the courtyard of his farm he saw Pamphilus standing alone, looking at the moon.
    ‘Good evening, Pamphilus,’ he said.
    ‘Good evening, father.’
    Simo went to bed, deeply moved with pride, but for form’s sake he repeated anxiously to himself: ‘I don’t know what I’ll do with him. I don’t know what I’ll do with him.’
    And Pamphilus stood looking at the moon and thinking about his father and mother. He was thinking about them in the light of a story that Chrysis had told. As the banquets drew to a close she liked to move the conversation away from local comment and to introduce some debate upon an abstract principle. (She cited often the saying of Plato that the true philosophers are the young men of their age. ‘Not,’ she would add, ‘because they do it very well; but because they rush upon ideas with their whole soul. Later one philosophises for praise, or for apology, or because it is a complicated intellectual game.’) Pamphilus remembered that on one evening the conversation had turned upon the wrong that poets do in pretending that life is heroic. And a boy from the other end of the island had said, half-mockingly and half-hopefully: ‘Well, you know, Chrysis . . . you know, life in a family is not in the same world as life in Euripides.’
    Chrysis sat a moment searching for her answer, then she lifted her hand and said: ‘Once upon a time –’
    The table burst out laughing, but with an affectionate laugh of mock-repudiation, because they knew that she liked to cast her remarks into the form of fables and to begin them with this childish formula. Pamphilus heard again her beautiful voice saying:
    ‘Once upon a time there was a hero who had done a great service to Zeus. When he came to die and was wandering in the gray marshes of Hell, he called to Zeus reminding him of that service and asking a service in return: he asked to return to earth for one day. Zeus was greatly troubled and said that it was not in his power to grant this, since even he could not bring above ground the dead who had descended to his brother’s kingdom. But Zeus was so moved by the memory of the past that he went to the palace of his brother and clasping his knees asked him to accord him this favour. And the King of the Dead was greatly troubled, saying that even he who was King of the Dead could not grant this thing without involving the return to life in some difficult and painful condition. But the hero gladly accepted whatever difficult or painful condition was involved, and the King of the Dead permitted him to return not only to the earth, but to the past, and to live over again that day in all the twenty-two thousand days of his lifetime that had been least eventful; but that it must be with a mind divided into two persons, – the participant and the onlooker: the participant who does the deeds and says the words of so many years before, and the onlooker who foresees the end. So the hero returned to the sunlight and to a certain day in his fifteenth year.
    ‘My friends,’ continued Chrysis, turning her eyes slowly from face to face, ‘as he awoke in his boyhood’s room, pain filled his heart, – not only because it had started beating again, but because he saw the walls of his home and knew that in a moment he would see his parents who lay long since in the earth of that country. He descended into the courtyard. His mother lifted her eyes from the loom and greeted him and went on with her work. His father passed through the court