CHAPTER XIII
IN PLEISTOS WOODS
She sped across the road and hid behind the Phokian offering. She could hear the priests’ pleasant voices talking of Delphi. From where she stood a little path set out here behind the shrines and treasuries. She followed it to the Precinct wall and went searching for a side gate. Found one at last. The keeper was almost asleep.
“Let me pass out,” she commanded. “Let me pass at once.”
The man spat. “Now, Missy, this here lock’s rusty. You go on down to the big gate. It won’t be far.”
“I will not go to the great gate. Be quick or I shall have you punished.” Theria’s voice had a ring of command. Besides, she did not speak the dialect of women, but the speech of men.
“I will, Missy; I will,” hastily said the man, fishing the key from his belt and fitting it. Noisily it creaked. Theria twisted her fingers in nervous fear. She could hear footsteps again. The Precinct was filling.
“It’s awful rusty, Missy: I can’t—— Ho, Hermes! there it goes.” The door swung open and Theria darted out.
Her Precinct hour was over. Where now to go? What to do? She was bitterly lonely. “Dryas can come to the Precinct whenever he will,” she thought heartbrokenly. “And Father brings him there and tells him all things. But I—I am hounded out as if I were a thief.”
She would not go home! No, she would not go home—not yet. She crossed the highway into the eastern end of Delphi town, and passed down through it to the glen.
The glen was deeper here, even wilder than where she had seen it below her home. It was so steep that no buildings could cling. It was given over to wild olives and laurel trees with gnarled roots, and to huge rocks, the gift of earthquakes from the cliffs above. Theria pushed doggedly down through it, tearing her hands, bruising her feet. At last, after a special tumble, she kirtled up her long chiton, pulling it up through her belt, took off her himation and formed it into a long roll which she tied about her waist. She was amazed at the ease this gave her. No wonder the Goddess Artemis could leap after the stag in this her special costume.
Now she was in the midst of stark, slender pine trees which soared from the vale into the height to feather out against the sun. She paused with upturned face.
“Are they always so solemn-thoughted, these dryads here?” she asked herself. For of course each tree had its dryad and the mood of the tree was the dryad’s own mood. “Do they always pray so seriously to their father Zeus?”
Theria would never willingly have come into the forest. No Greek would have exchanged the man-beautified sanctuary for this wild. But once here the forest mysteriously received her. She who had never before known the sweet ministration of trees began to be strangely quieted. The forest distances, infinite yet hidden, mobile, shifting with her every step, what a relief after the rigid walls of her house. How twilight-dim it was. Yet sunlight filtered through the dimness—pools of gold among the tree roots, shatterings of gold on boles and boughs. Beneath her feet, which had never trod aught save floor and pavement, was the deep pine-needle mass springy under her step. She looked down, wondering at it; a carpet no hands had ever woven, or perhaps a carpet woven by some delicate god.
So the forest silence entered her heart—the silence which is not silence at all, but the deep breathing of all living things. She seemed to have grown wings which would make her essentially free no matter in what house of stone or clay.
But no, it was not the forest itself which received Theria. She could never have conceived such a thought. It was rather the thousand delicate dwellers of the wood—dryads, fauns, satyrs, nymphs. These were touching her with unseen hands. These were they who dogged her footsteps with invisible service, who ceased from their gay dances, slipping into invisibility, that she might move across their place. Did she not see their lairs among the ferns, and the footprints perhaps of Artemis herself where she had crushed the starry mosses? Most of these beings were sinister. They could lay spells upon you. They could whisk you away into sleep. But to-day they had no mischief in their hearts. They were only kind.
Gradually came sweeping across the silence the voice of a rushing stream. Theria pushed forward eagerly to behold it—a lovely living thing, leaping, running, singing, between its banks. It was the same little stream she had seen falling down Castaly’s gorge, here set free on the hillside. Who has not been touched by the immortal force of moving water? Surely Theria was touched by it. She knelt by the stream, stooped her dark head low, her breast among the fern, and drank. The ineffable fragrance of the waterfall met her—a fragrance new to Theria.
Did not the gods breathe fragrance such as this? Ha, the nymph Castalia—her veritable presence!
Theria sprang to her feet, hiding her face. At any moment Castalia might be visible. No, no; Theria would not spy upon her.
Fearfully she said the accustomed stream-prayer, then took off her sandals and waded across. No Greek would cross a stream without first asking its pardon. Once on the farther bank she quickened her step, and began to breathe again. A narrow escape was that from a supernatural sight!
So noon came lordly into the sky, and afternoon. Theria found herself in the enclosure of Athena Forethought, the farthest shrine of Delphi; or its first, if you came from the east. The Forethought Fane, a little circular temple, was far above her on the road. She could scarce see it for crag and tree. Here, weary with wandering, Theria sat down to rest.