Chapter 23
Chuckling as she went, the old woman bustled upstairs to tell her mistress that her beloved husband was in the house. Her legs could hardly carry her fast enough, and her feet twinkled in their haste. As she reached the head of the bedstead, she cried: “Wake up, Penelope, dear child, and see a sight you’ve longed for all these many days. Odysseus has come home, and high time too! And he’s killed the rogues who turned his whole house inside out, ate up his wealth, and bullied his son.”
Penelope was not caught off her guard. “My dear nurse,” she said, “the gods have made you daft. It’s as easy for them to rob the wisest of their wits as to make stupid people wise. And now they’ve addled your brains, which used to be so sound. How dare you make sport of my distress by waking me when I had closed my eyes for a comfortable nap, only to tell me this nonsense? Never have I slept so soundly since Odysseus sailed away to that accursed place I cannot bring myself to mention. Off with you now downstairs and back into your quarters! If any of the other maids had come and awakened me to listen to such stuff, I’d soon have packed her off to her own place with a box on the ears. You can thank your age for saving you from that.”
But this did not silence the old nurse. “I am not making fun of you, dear child,” she said. “Odysseus really has come home, just as I told you. He’s the stranger whom they all scoffed at in the hall. Telemachus has known for some time that he was back, but had the sense to keep his father’s plans a secret till he’d made those upstarts pay for their villainy.”
Penelope’s heart leapt up. She sprang from the bed and clung to the old woman, with the tears streaming from her eyes and the eager words from her lips. “Dear nurse,” she cried, “I beg you for the truth! If he is really home, as you say, how on earth did he manage single-handed against that rascally crew who always hang about the house in a pack?”
“I never saw a thing,” said Eurycleia. “I know nothing about it. All I heard was the groans of dying men. We sat petrified in a corner of our quarters, with the doors shut tightly on us, till your son Telemachus shouted to me to come out. His father had sent him to fetch me. And then I found Odysseus standing among the bodies of the dead. They lay round him in heaps all over the hard floor. It would have done you good to see him, spattered with blood and filth like a lion. By now all the corpses have been gathered together at the courtyard gate, while he has had a big fire made and is fumigating the palace. He sent me to call you to him. So come with me now, so that you two may enter into your happiness together after all the sorrows you have had. The hope you cherished so long is fulfilled for you today. Odysseus has come back to his own hearth alive; he has found both you and his son in the home, and he has had his revenge in his own palace on every one of the Suitors who were doing him such wrong.”
“Don’t laugh too soon, dear nurse; don’t boast about them yet,” said Penelope in her prudence. “You know how everyone at home would welcome the sight of him, and nobody more than myself and the son we brought into the world. But this tale of yours does not ring true. It must be one of the immortal gods that has killed the young lords, provoked, no doubt, by their galling insolence and wicked ways. For they respected nobody they met – good men and bad were all the same to them. And now their iniquities have brought them to this pass. Meanwhile Odysseus in some distant land has lost his chance of ever getting home, and with it lost his life.”
“My child,” her old nurse exclaimed, “how can you say such things! Here is your husband at his own fireside, and you declare he never will get home. What little faith you have always had! But let me tell you something else – a fact, that proves the truth. You know the scar he had where he was wounded long ago by the white tusk of a boar? I saw that very scar when I was washing him, and would have told you of it, if Odysseus, for his own crafty purposes, hadn’t seized me by the throat and prevented me. Come with me now. I’ll stake my life upon it. If I’ve played you false, then kill me in the cruellest way you can.”
“Dear nurse,” Penelope replied, “you are a very wise old woman, but even you cannot probe into the minds of the everlasting gods. However, let us go to my son, so that I can see my suitors dead, together with the man who killed them.”
As she spoke she left her room and made her way downstairs, a prey to indecision. Should she remain aloof as she questioned her husband, or go straight up to him and kiss his head and hands? What she actually did, when she had crossed the stone threshold into the hall, was to take a chair in the fire-light by the wall, on the opposite side to Odysseus, who was sitting by one of the great columns with his eyes on the ground, waiting to see whether his good wife would say anything to him when she saw him. For a long while Penelope, overwhelmed by wonder, sat there without a word. But her eyes were busy, at one moment resting full on his face, and at the next falling on the ragged clothes that made him seem a stranger once again. It was Telemachus who broke the silence, but only to rebuke her.
“Mother,” he said, “you strange, hard-hearted mother of mine, why do you keep so far from my father? Why aren’t you sitting at his side, talking and asking questions all the while? No other woman would have had the perversity to hold out like this against a husband she had just got back after nineteen years of misadventure. But then your heart was always harder than flint.”
“My child, the shock has numbed it,” she admitted. “I cannot find a word to say to him; I cannot ask him anything at all; I cannot even look him in the face. But if it really is Odysseus home again, we two shall surely recognize each other, and in an even better way; for there are tokens between us which only we two know and no-one else has heard of.”
Patient Odysseus smiled, then turning briskly to his son he said: “Telemachus, leave your mother to put me to the proof here in our home. She will soon come to a better mind. At the moment, because I’m dirty and in rags, she gives me the cold shoulder and won’t admit that I’m Odysseus. But you and I must consider what is best to be done. When a plan has killed a fellow-citizen, just one, with hardly any friends to carry on the feud, he is outlawed, he leaves his kith and kin and flies the country. But we have killed the pick of the Ithacan nobility, the mainstay of our state. There is a problem for you.”
“One you must grapple with yourself, dear father,” Telemachus shrewdly rejoined. “For at getting out of a difficulty you are held to be the best man in the world, with no-one else to touch you. We will follow your lead with alacrity, and I may say with no lack of courage either, so far as in us lies.”
Odysseus was not at a loss. “As I see it, then,” he said, “our best plan will be this. Wash yourselves first, put on your tunics, and tell the maids in the house to get dressed. Then let our excellent minstrel strike up a merry dance-tune for us, loud as his lyre can play, so that if the music is heard outside by anyone passing in the road or by one of our neighbours, they may imagine there is a wedding-feast. That will prevent the news of the Suitors’ death from spreading through the town before we can beat a retreat to our farm among the orchards. Once there, we shall see. Providence may play into our hand.”
They promptly put his idea into practice. The men washed and donned their tunics, while the women decked themselves out. The admirable bard took up his hollow lyre and had them soon intent on nothing but the melodies of song and the niceties of the dance. They made the great hall echo round them to the feet of dancing men and women richly clad. “Ah!” said the passers-by as the sounds reached their ears. “Somebody has married our much-courted queen. The heartless creature! Too fickle to keep patient watch over the great house till her lawful husband should come back!” Which shows how little they knew what had really happened.
Meanwhile the great Odysseus, in his own home again, had himself bathed and rubbed with oil by the housekeeper Eurynome, and was fitted out by her in a beautiful cloak and tunic. Athene also played her part by enhancing his comeliness from head to foot. She made him look taller and sturdier than ever; she caused the bushy locks to hang from his head thick as the petals of the hyacinth in bloom; and just as a craftsman trained by Hephaestus and herself in the secrets of his art takes pains to put a graceful finish to his work by over-laying silver-ware with gold, she finished now by endowing his head and shoulders with an added beauty. He came out from the bath looking like one of the everlasting gods, then went and sat down once more in the chair opposite his wife.
“What a strange creature!” he exclaimed. “Heaven made you as you are, but for sheer obstinacy you put all the rest of your sex in the shade. No other wife could have steeled herself to keep so long out of the arms of a husband she had just got back after nineteen years of misadventure. Well, nurse, make a bed for me to sleep alone in. For my wife’s heart is just about as hard as iron.”
“You too are strange,” said the cautious Penelope. “I am not being haughty or indifferent. I am not even unduly surprised. But I have too clear a picture of you in my mind as you were when you sailed from Ithaca in your long-oared ship. Come, Eurycleia, make him a comfortable bed outside the bedroom that he built so well himself. Place the big bed out there, and make it up with rugs and blankets, and with laundered sheets.”
This was her way of putting her husband to the test. But Odysseus flared up at once and rounded on his loyal wife. “Penelope,” he cried, “you exasperate me! Who, if you please, has moved my bed elsewhere? Short of a miracle, it would be hard even for a skilled workman to shift it somewhere else, and the strongest young fellow alive would have a job to budge it. For a great secret went into the making of that complicated bed; and it was my work and mine alone. Inside the court there was a long-leaved olive-tree, which had grown to full height with a stem as thick as pillar. Round this I built my room of close-set stone-work, and when that was finished, I roofed it over thoroughly, and put in a solid, neatly fitted, double door. Next I lopped all the twigs off the olive, trimmed the stem from the root up, rounded it smoothly and carefully with my adze and trued it to the line, to make my bedpost. This I drilled through where necessary, and used as a basis for the bed itself, which I worked away at till that too was done, when I finished it off with an inlay of gold, silver, and ivory, and fixed a set of purple straps across the frame.”
“There is our secret, and I have shown you that I know it. What I don’t know, madam, is whether my bedstead stands where it did, or whether someone has cut the tree-trunk through and shifted it elsewhere.”
Her knees began to tremble as she realized the complete fidelity of his description. All at once her heart melted. Bursting into tears she ran up to Odysseus, threw her arms round his neck and kissed his head. “Odysseus,” she cried, “do not be cross with me, you who were always the most reasonable of men. All our unhappiness is due to the gods, who couldn’t bear to see us share the joys of youth and reach the threshold of old age together. But don’t be angry with me now, or hurt because the moment when I saw you first I did not kiss you as I kiss you now. For I had always had the cold fear in my heart that somebody might come here and bewitch me with his talk. There are plenty of rogues who would seize such a chance; and though Argive Helen would never have slept in her foreign lover’s arms had she known that her countrymen would go to war to fetch her back to Argos, even she, the daughter of Zeus, was tempted by the goddess and fell, though the idea of such madness had never entered her head till that moment, which was so fateful for the world and proved the starting-point of all our sorrows too. But now all’s well. You have faithfully described our token, the secret of our bed, which no-one ever saw but you and I and one maid, Actoris, who was my father’s gift when first I came to you, and sat as sentry at our bedroom door. You have convinced your unbelieving wife.”
Penelope’s surrender melted Odysseus’ heart, and he wept as he held his dear wife in his arms, so loyal and do true. Sweet moment too for her, sweet as the sight of land to sailors struggling in the sea, when the Sea-god by dint of wind and wave has wrecked their gallant ship. What happiness for the few swimmers that have fought their way through the white surf to the shore, when, caked with brine but safe and sound, they tread on solid earth! If that is bliss, what bliss it was for her to see her husband once again! She kept her white arms round his neck and never quite let go. Dawn with her roses would have caught them at their tears, had not Athene of the flashing eyes bestirred herself on their behalf. She held the long night lingering in the West, and in the East at Ocean’s Stream she kept Dawn waiting by her golden throne and would not let her yoke the nimble steeds who bring us light, Lampus and Phaethon, the colts that draw the chariot of Day.
But there was one thing which Odysseus had the wisdom soon to tell his wife. “My dear,” he said, “we have not yet come to the end of our trials. There lies before me still a great and hazardous adventure, which I must see through to the very end, however far that end may be. That was what Teiresias’ soul predicted for me when I went down to the House of Hades to find a way home for my followers and myself. So come to bed now, my dear wife, and let us comfort ourselves while we can with a sweet sleep in each other’s arms.”
Prudent Penelope answered: “Your bed shall be ready the moment you wish to use it, now that the gods have brought you back to your own country and your lovely home. But since it did occur to you to speak of this new ordeal, please tell me all about it; for I shall certainly find out later, and it could be no worse to hear at once.”
“Why drag it out of me?” he asked reproachfully. “Well, you shall hear the whole tale. I’ll make no secret of it. Not that you’ll find it to your liking! I am not pleased myself. For he told me to take a well-cut oar and wander on from city to city, till I came to a people who know nothing of the sea, and never use salt with their food, so that our crimson-painted ships and the long oars that serve those ships as wings are quite beyond their ken. Of this, he said that I should find conclusive proof, as you shall hear, when I met some other traveller who spoke of the ‘winnowing-fan’ I was carrying on my shoulder. Then, he said, the time would have come for me to plant my oar in the earth and offer the Lord Poseidon the rich sacrifice of a ram, a bull and a breeding boar. After that I was to go back home and make ceremonial sacrifices to the everlasting gods who live in the far-flung heavens, to all of them, this time, in due precedence. As for my end, he said that Death would come to me in his gentlest form out of the sea, and that when he took me I should be worn out after an easy old age and surrounded by a prosperous folk. He swore that I should find all this come true.”
“Well then,” Penelope sagely replied, “if Providence plans to make you happier in old age, you can always be confident of escaping from your troubles.”
While they were talking, Eurynome and the nurse, by the light of torches, were putting soft bedclothes for them on their bed. When the work was done and the bed lay comfortably spread, the old woman went back into her own quarters for the night, and the housekeeper Eurynome, with a torch in her hands, lit them on their way to bed, taking her leave when she had brought them to their room. And glad indeed they were to lie once more together in the bed that had known them long ago. Meanwhile Telemachus, the cowman, and the swineherd brought their dancing feet to rest, made the women finish too, and lay down for the night in the darkened hall.
But Odysseus and Penelope, after their love had taken its sweet course, turned to the fresh delights of talk, and inter-changed their news. He heard his noble wife tell of all she had put up with in his home, watching that gang of wreckers at their work, of all the cattle and fat sheep that they had slaughtered for her sake, of all the vessels they had emptied of their wine. And in his turn, royal Odysseus told her of all the discomfiture he had inflicted on his foes and all the miseries which he himself had undergone. She listened spellbound, and her eyelids never closed in sleep till the whole tale was finished.
He began with his first victory over the Cicones and his visit to the fertile land where the Lotus-eaters live. He spoke of what the Cyclops did, and the price he had made him pay for the gallant men he ruthlessly devoured. He told her of his stay with Aeolus, so friendly when he came and helpful when he left; and how the gale, since Providence would not let him reach his home so soon, had caught him up once more and driven him in misery down the highways of the fish. Next came his call at Telepylus on the Laestrygonian coast, where the savages destroyed his fleet and all his fighting men, the black ship that carried him being the only one to get away. He spoke of Circe and her magic arts; of how he sailed across the seas to the mouldering Halls of Hades to consult the soul of Theban Teiresias, and saw all his former comrades and the mother who had borne him and nursed him as a child. He told her how he had listened to the rich music of the Sirens’ song; how he had sailed by the Wandering Rocks, by the dreaded Charybdis, and by Scylla, whom no sailors pass unscathed; how his men had killed the cattle of the Sun; how Zeus the Thunderer had struck his good ship with a flaming bolt, and all his loyal band had been killed at one fell swoop, though he escaped their dreadful fate himself. He described his arrival at the Isle of Ogygia and his reception by the Nymph Calypso, who had so much desired to marry him that she kept him in her cavern home, a pampered guest, tempted by promises of immortality and ageless youth, but inwardly rebellious to the end. Finally he came to his disastrous voyage to Scherie, where the kind-hearted Phaeacians had treated him like a god and sent him home by ship with generous gifts of bronze ware and of gold, and woven stuffs. He had just finished this last tale, when sleep came suddenly upon him, relaxing all his limbs as it resolved his cares.
Once more Athene of the flashing eyes took thought on his behalf. Not till she was satisfied that he had had his fill of love and sleep in his wife’s arms, did she arouse the lazy Dawn to leave her golden throne by Ocean Stream and to bring daylight to the world. At last Odysseus rose from that soft bed of his and told Penelope his plans. “Dear wife,” he said, “the pair of us have had our share of trials, you here in tears because misfortune dogged each step I took to reach you, and I yearning to get back to Ithaca but kept in cheerless exile by Zeus and all the gods there are. Nevertheless we have had what we desired, a night spent in each other’s arms. So now I leave the house and my belongings in your care. As for the ravages that gang of profligates have made among my flocks, I shall repair the greater part by raiding on my own, and the people must contribute too, till they have filled up all my folds again. But at the moment I am going to our orchard farm, to see my good father, who has been so miserable on my account. And this, my dear, is what I wish you to do, though you are too wise to need my instructions. Since it will be common knowledge, as soon as, the sun is up, that I have killed the Suitors in the palace, go with your ladies-in-waiting to your room upstairs and stay quietly there, see nobody, and ask no questions.”
Odysseus donned his splendid body-armour, woke up Telemachus, the cowman, and the swineherd, and told them all to arm themselves with weapons. They carried out his orders and were soon equipped in bronze. Then they opened the doors and sallied out with Odysseus at their head. It was broad daylight already, but Athene hid them in darkness and soon had them clear of the town.
