Читать книгу Demophon, a Traveller's Tale - Forrest Reid - Страница 5

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It would have been natural enough had the abrupt and dramatic departure of the nurse led to a great deal of discussion; but such was not the case. For one thing, except Keleos, Metanira, and the children, nobody knew in what manner she had gone; and Keleos and Metanira did not allude to the subject. Metanira, though she regretted nothing, had her own reasons for preserving silence; Keleos, whatever he may have thought, kept his thoughts to himself; Iole and Rhodea were strictly forbidden to mention the matter. And as they grew older it was assumed that the children had forgotten. It was particularly assumed that Demophon had forgotten, because this was desirable even if improbable, and since that unfortunate night he had never spoken Deo’s name. In fact, the one visible consequence that had accrued from this now closed episode was the careful watch thenceforward kept on all the little boy’s comings and goings.

Apart from this, his upbringing was normal. Once or twice he had tried to escape by himself, and on each of these occasions he had run in the direction of the wood, but had been captured before reaching it. And it was noticeable that he had allowed himself to be brought back without a struggle or a murmur. Such a good little boy! After that brief outburst, when he had so naughtily repulsed his mother, he had become a singularly docile child. Not quite such a bright little fellow as before, perhaps; indeed, sometimes dull and apathetic; but his bodily health remained perfect, and there was no more nonsense about woodboys or other questionable companions. Metanira, yielding to a nameless superstition, confiscated all the gifts he had brought home from that now distrusted wood. One morning, when she was alone, she made a bonfire of the lot—toys, Pan-pipes, and everything—after which she felt a good deal easier. She felt too, perhaps, just a tiny pang of compunction when she saw Demophon silently searching for his treasures, and then, also in silence, abandoning the search.

When he was ten years old he was sent to school at Eleusis. He was escorted thither by an old and trustworthy slave, who carried his lyre and his tablets, and never, either going or coming, let him out of sight for a moment. The school was kept by Pittakos, a poet. Here Demophon was taught to read and to write and to count. He was also taught music, and to speak or chant poetry—chiefly the poetry of Pittakos, who accompanied his pupils on a flute. But these lessons were not so romantic as they sound: the poetry was of a didactic and improving character, and Pittakos himself was getting old and crabbed. He would fly into a temper on the slightest provocation—if his pupils forgot to wipe their fingers on a piece of bread after eating, if they sat down on the sandy floor with their legs crossed, or if they omitted, when they got up, to rub out the marks they had made. When they were walking through the streets of Eleusis they must never raise their eyes from the ground; they must never address a stranger; they must never speak to a person older than themselves, even if they knew him, unless that person spoke to them first; they must not loiter before the shops, nor go near the public baths and gymnasiums; they must not laugh loudly, nor play tricks, nor do anything that could possibly attract attention. And Demophon obeyed most of these instructions, and was really in all respects a paragon as compared with several of his schoolmates; in spite of which he got many a scolding, while Pittakos rolled his eyes and waved his leather strap and threatened to use it on the first boy he heard uttering a whisper. He was the crossest old man imaginable.

But naturally a considerable part of the boy’s time was passed at home on the farm. It was a quite agreeable life, because such tasks as he performed were only the light and voluntary tasks that sprang out of his own interest in them. Here, and in all open-air lore, his father was his teacher. It was his father who taught him the names of the stars, who taught him the names of the trees, and to what God each belonged—the oak to Zeus, the fig and the vine to Dionysos, the myrtle to Aphrodite, the olive to Athena, the laurel to Zeus and Apollo, the pine to Poseidon. It was his father who taught him never to cross a stream without first saying a prayer and bathing his hands in the pure water; who taught him to bow himself to the shining car of Helios, when he went out of doors at sunrise.

But most of what he learned had to do with the farm. He learned that the time to reap the corn is at the morning rising of the Pleiades; that the time for breaking up the ground is when the cranes are flying southward in October, and the autumnal rains are near; that to get rid of the mice who may be injuring the crops, you must go out to the fields before dawn and write this inscription on an unhewn stone: “O King Mouse, dwelling in this field, neither injure me yourself nor allow another mouse to do so. I give you all the fields of the next farm, but I swear by the Mother of the Gods that if I catch you here again I will cut you in seven pieces.”

Keleos taught him the rules and prayers that ensure the fruitfulness of cattle and of the earth, taught him how to make the simple sacrifices of fruit and barley, of pulse and olive-oil and honeycombs—pastoral customs, pastoral wisdom, which he would one day, in turn, hand on to his own children.

And it was all pleasant enough to a dreamy and imaginative boy. Pleasant, too, were the scents of summer and of autumn, of the fallen apples and pears and ripe plums. Pleasant were the sights and sounds of the fields—the women with corn baskets on their heads, the reapers with their moon-shaped sickles, cutting and binding the corn, while the old man moved about superintending the work. The straw was not cut too close, but was left to be ploughed into the ground for manure. And the great white oxen, yoked to the plough, or threshing the grain under their feet, were to Demophon most beautiful of all.

But sometimes another mood would awaken in him, a mood in which he felt a restless desire to go out and explore the unknown world. In his mind there still floated memories of Deo and their early days together—memories, above all, of that beloved playmate, whom he now guessed to have been Hermes, the divine son of the nymph Maia. Then he would climb a hill and gaze along the road leading to Athens, twelve miles away; or along the road to Megara. Somewhere, beyond the reach of vision, beyond the rolling fields and plains and that blue distant line of mountains, were those two whom he longed to see again, and one of whom still visited and spoke to him in dreams that often seemed more than dreams. He had sought out the green cave in the wood, but the woodboy had not come to him, and the lonely beauty of the place, because it reminded him at every turn of his lost friend, had been intolerably sad. It had made him so sad, indeed, that after a second visit he had not gone back....

On his fourteenth birthday, on a morning of wintry sunshine, Demophon went down to the little temple by the sea, and kneeling at the altar stone, dedicated to the Goddess the newly shorn locks of his hair.