Atlantis by John Cowper Powys Read Free Book Online Page A

hated Nosodea she felt now, as she mentally caused the woman to be dragged before her judgment-seat, that she could not quite make clear even to herself. “She’s such a regular woman!” she found herself repeating; but she knew she was packing into the word “regular” several qualities that were by no means exclusively feminine.
    Nosodea’s husband, the father of the two girls, was a good deal older than his wife and was something of an enigma to the whole island. The adjective “geraios” meaning “old” was invariably added to his name by the whole neighbourhood; which in itself suggested, Arsinöe could not help thinking, that everybody felt the man to be different in some curious way from all his contemporaries .
    And the odd thing was, the Trojan girl now told herself, while Babba fidgetted more and more irritably and Tis watched her with the expression with which when slaughtering an animal he waited for it to fall stunned after giving it a blow between the eyes, the odd thing was that for some inscrutable reason which completely baffled her she felt there was something in common between herself and Damnos Geraios and that if she could only get hold of the man when Nosodea was well out of the way she could form an alliance with him not only against his wife and two daughters but against the whole world!
    “Well!” she sighed, almost as if she would have liked to spend the whole day thinking of all these people from the new background of her feelings, “I must be off, Master Tis! Thank you a thousand times for the milk!”
    But it was at that moment that the Trojan woman received a startling shock. The herdsman suddenly lifted his muscular body from the tree-root that had been serving him as a milking-stool. He did not raise it to its full height, which at its best was nothing beyond a man’s medium stature, but he raised it sufficiently to make it resemble a quadruped swaying about on its hind legs. He still held the silver ladle; and as if to assist himself in an agitating process of confused and difficult thought he grasped it tightly at both ends and drew it angrily up and down across his forehead like a glittering rod across a sullen and silent musical instrument.
    While absorbed in this process he kept repeating in a series of harsh cries the words: “Lady! lady, lady! The dream! The dream! The dream!”
    Arsinöe experienced a spasm of such nervous irritation at thisimpediment to her already over-delayed departure that it was with an effort she suppressed the impulse to leave the man to his fit, or whatever it was, that was now doubling him up, and just hurry off. But impulsive selfishness was as foreign to Arsinöe’s introspective nature as was impulsive geniality.
    “What dream are you talking about Master Tis? You really oughtn’t to give people such shocks. You quite scared me, jumping up so suddenly like that. Can’t you tell a person quietly, Master Tis, what’s come over you?”
    But Tis continued to totter like a quadruped on its hind-legs; while, though holding it with only one hand now, he scraped his forehead with the ladle.
    But it was at this moment that Babba, drawn into the situation by an obscure feeling that her friend and protector was being unfairly scolded, and also, by a less obscure desire to be led where she could find juicier and more sap-filled nourishment than the dry hay which at present bristled with so many sharp stalks over the edge of her wooden bin, shuffled back to Tis’s side and pressed her cold nose against the log from which he had just risen.
    This instinctive bovine movement combined with the tone of rebuke in Arsinöe’s voice brought Tis to himself and he began hurriedly to explain. “You see, lady,” he almost blubbered, “great-grand-dad’s, bit of land at the blasted end of this here rock of beggars and bastards was called, in them blessed days of old, after, if ye understand me, the home-stead of Aulion of the Naubolides and also after the