CHAPTER X
A BOY CALLED SOPHOCLES
One hot summer morning Melantho and her daughter were sitting in the upper room spinning. Or rather it was Melantho who was sitting. Theria was pacing to and fro at her task, stretching out the thread with free gesture, her fingers twisting, twisting like fluttering wings. Melantho noted how tall the girl had grown. “Her awkwardness, too, is passing,” she mused as Theria turned, sweeping the thin folds of her chiton against her supple limbs. So might Iris have looked, the slender goddess messenger, running to the divine threshold with news for the blessed gods.
But Melantho had no thought of goddesses.
“She will soon be old enough for a husband,” was Melantho’s thought. “I must speak to Nikander about it.”
Theria sighed and paced again.
“Theria,” said her mother, “if you would sit down you would not be so tired.”
“Tired,” spoke the girl, frowning, “Great Hermes, why should I be tired except from this eternal sitting? There’s no breath in this room.”
“Theria, you grow more impatient every day. Do you suppose your father can ever get you a husband if you frown like that?”
At the word “husband,” the girl gave her mother a startled, puzzled look. She said nothing. Melantho’s thoughts ran in given channels. Her next was of vegetables and fish which Medon must purchase this morning.
“Daughter,” she said, “go down and fetch Medon to me.”
Quick as thought, Theria dropped her spindle into the basket of snowy wool and sped away.
The morning was full of sunshine. Theria carolled like a lark as she tripped down the stair. Housed though she was, Theria never seemed housed. Perhaps the effect upon generation after generation of her forefathers of living out of doors, the strengthening, sweetening effect upon mind and body, had entered into her and made her part of the open air.
Through the inner court she ran and burst open the door into the outer court of the men. Here pure amazement stopped her motion. In the outer court stood the most beautiful boy Theria had ever beheld.
He had laid aside his himation for the heat, and stood in his short chiton, slender, delicately erect, gazing about his new surroundings with shy yet interested eyes. His hair, honey coloured, was cut short and filleted as if for a holiday. He himself was bronzed by the sun as all high-born boys should be. At sight of Theria he smiled.
“Forgive me, lady,” he said. “My father left me here to wait for him.”
“Oh,” said Theria, “I thought perhaps a god had done that.” At which speech he blushed, and became a little lovelier.
She came toward him. She was not shy, for the boy was younger than she. Besides, she was too delighted with his beauty to be shy.
“Whence are you?” she queried.
“From Colonos.”
“The grove near Athens?”
“Yes, the shady, sacred grove. The most beautiful place in the world.”
“More beautiful than Delphi?” she smiled.
“I think so, lady.”
“It is your home,” said Theria gently. “Therefore you love it.”
“My father came to consult the Oracle,” explained the boy. “He questions about his ship which comes not back to us. He is now with your father in the Precinct. For you are Nikander’s daughter, are you not?”
“Yes—his only daughter,” she answered with pride.
How modestly the boy questioned. His respect toward her was something new in Theria’s experience. Both her brothers were brotherly contemptuous. But this stranger was talking with her! To Theria this experience was nothing short of an adventure. She felt it so. Mind and soul sprang up vivid and intense. She began to ask her usual eager questions.
“How did you come to Delphi? Was it a long journey? Oh, was it by sea?”
“No, lady, by land—through Bœotia and over the mountains.”
“How many days?”
“Three days—we did not hurry. Yesterday at sunset we came to the Triple Way.”
“Where Œdipus met his father.”
“Yes,” he answered, “where he killed his father. Of course you know the story. Oh, lady, such a lovely place it is. Up there where the mountains pierce the sky; the road runs among the clouds. Where the clouds broke I could catch glimpses far beneath of the blue valley and the sun setting. Far down I heard the tinkle of goat bells—the herds hidden below the clouds. I seemed to be in the home of the gods. And do you know what I did? I let the others walk onward and I stood there alone. The three roads went this way and that from the place of my feet. Then I seemed to see approaching along one road old Laius and his men, and by the other road Œdipus, young and proud, fulfilling his curse. But before they met I fled. Oh, I could not bear to think that he would kill his father all unknowing! What if it had been my own dear father and myself? The curse of Œdipus, that terrible curse, swept down over me with whirlwind wings.”
The boy put up his hand to his head with a whimsical yet solemn smile.
“It touched me,” he said, “and when I ran up to my dear father and clasped his hand I was weeping. I would not tell them why. Yet I am telling you.”
“I wish I had been there,” breathed Theria.
“I wish you had,” echoed the boy.
And suddenly the boy’s gentle reverence gave Theria a joy utterly new—a sense at once of humbleness and power.
“Come,” she said childishly, seizing his hand, “there’s a swing in the other aula. Let’s swing in it.” Busily she hied him thither. But the boy would not swing.
“It’s for girls; I’ll push you,” he said.
Soon the court rang with their voices and merry laughter. The boy “ran under” and Theria flew like a tall nymph in great dips and soarings. Now her black tresses streamed behind, new they flung over her face—a dusky veil. After a while the boy stopped, breathless, and the swing “died.”
“Guess who came with us all the way,” he said suddenly.
“I cannot guess.”
“Pindar!” he told her joyously. “That’s what made the journey so wonderful. All those three days I heard his divine talk with my father. Never shall I forget it—all about Hellas and the Persians and the war that is coming. I hope it won’t come too soon before I can fight.”
“Pindar is ours,” said Theria with Delphic pride. “There is a chair set in the temple just for him. He sits there and the god gives him song. Tell me: did you hear him sing?”
“Often and often,” boasted the boy. “When we would stop by the road to sup and pour wine to the blessed gods, then a slave would bring Pindar’s lyre. A fine old one it is, always fresh stringed. He would sweep it with his hand and the thing would tremble as if alive. Do you think my hand is like Pindar’s?” he asked, stretching out his right hand. Slender and brown it was, expressive as his face.
“No,” said the girl honestly, “but it is a player’s hand.”
“I’m going to be a poet some day,” ran on the boy.
“I wish I might be a poet,” said Theria.
“You! But you are a girl. For you will be the house and children and the loom.”
“I hate the house!” cried Theria.
“What! The home of your fathers? How can you?” The boy was shocked.
“Oh, I don’t mean the home. I mean the house walls that keep me in. Sometimes I want to scream and struggle as though I were tied down hand and foot.”
“But nothing ties you down.”
“Do you call it nothing to stay all day twisting a miserable thread like this?” Theria spun with her fingers. “When there is so much, oh, so much in the world.”
“But do women feel that way?” he asked. “They always seem contented in the house.”
“Would you be content?”
“By the gods, no.”
“But are we not like you, we girls? We are strong—we like to run and breathe the air. Look at my arm, how ugly white. It has never seen the sun.” She flashed out her fair arm—free of its drapery.
“That is not ugly,” said the boy gently.
“It is! It is! White as a Persian’s!”
“No, it is Greek,” maintained the boy. “By the gods, I’d like to see you running brown and free like Artemis in the wood.”
“You don’t think I am foolish to want to run and leap.”
“No—no—no!”
Theria’s eyes widened with delight.
“You don’t think me foolish to read my father’s books?”
“Books!” Here the boy was puzzled. “Why should you read books? Poems are to sing, not to read.”
“Oh, I sing them, too,” laughed Theria. “Far back in the storeroom, when nobody can hear, I sing them. I have to make up the tunes.”
“I wish I could hear you; oh, I wish I could hear you.”
That any one should care for what she did! No praise could be sweeter, no joy. So absorbed were they both that they did not hear the voices calling through the house, “Sophocles! Sophocles!” until the searchers had entered the open door—that door which should always be closed.
“Eleutheria,” came her father’s voice, sterner than she had ever heard it. “The meaning of this! By Hermes, I must know.”
The two turned in confusion.
“Whatever made you think you could bring a stranger here into the inner court? How long have you been together?”
Theria answered none of his questions. She faced him, her eyes black lakes of astonishment. So intense a mood could not break at once.
“I have done no wrong,” she asserted. “How can you think I have done wrong?”
“But you have. You are almost a woman. You cannot receive my guests.”
“My guest he is, this Sophocles,” she answered with frightened face but steady voice. “We have been talking together about Homer and Pindar. Surely that is no harm. Where is our wrong?”
A low exclamation came from the corner of the room. Pindar himself was there with Sophocles’s father.
The boy spoke, blushing, “I am the one to blame. I came in here to push the swing—not thinking.”
“There is no blame,” repeated the girl passionately. “Don’t call it blame.”
Had Nikander been an ordinary Greek father, Theria would undoubtedly have received her whipping at this time.
“Go to your room, Daughter,” said Nikander quietly. “I cannot talk with you here.”
And Theria fled in an agony of shame.
Pindar’s voice broke the silence.
“By the deep-vested Graces, Nikander, but I think we have broken into a pretty dialogue. Would I had heard some of it.”
The boy, redder still, hid behind his father.
Nikander shook his head in whimsical despair.
“What am I to do with a daughter like that? I never know what she will do next. She’s perfectly good, I assure you. She only breaks rules like a colt.”
“She’s your image,” laughed Pindar. “Your own face faced you when she spoke. Ay, and your spirit, too. By Artemis, did you mark how she fled up the stairs with head held high?”
“She’s a twin, you know,” said Nikander. “The boy is more beautiful.”
“Ay, I know your Dryas. The coming beauty they say, and perhaps the coming singer.”
Nikander’s face flushed with pleasure.
“The lyrists tell me so,” he assented.
Thus Eros brushed his wings across Theria’s fancy and flew away. No business of his was this. But youth was here—fearful impressibility: A breath, and youth is changed.
Who shall say that when in after years this boy sang of a woman and gave her a new type of nobleness the image of this proud sweet maid of Delphi did not float before him and make his creation real?
And as for Theria, the encounter was a peep outward into the world. From this time she became more aware of the hurry of development outside in the awakening land of Greece. From this time she felt it—the joyous advance into the light, new art, new politics, new thoughts.
The amassing knowledge of centuries was converging to a focus and the heart of the Greeks soared into a mental atmosphere never known before or since. This intense point came in Theria’s lifetime. No wonder the light of it penetrated all her walls and restrictions. No wonder she struggled to be free to meet it. Her own youth was of the youth-time of Hellas and longed to be merged with it as flame yearns toward flame.