Superwomen Part 8

So it was with Helen's suitors-emeritus. Long ago they had loved her.

She had married some one else. And, during the past twenty years, other interests in their lives had crowded out her memory. If they thought of her at all, it was, now and then, to court domestic tempests by mentally or verbally comparing her golden loveliness and eternal youth with their own wives' dumpy, or slatlike, matronly aspect.

For they had wives, most of them, by this time, wives and children.

Just stop for an instant, husbands all, and figure to yourselves what would happen if you should come home to-morrow night and break to your wives the tidings that you were about to go to war--for the sake of another woman! A woman, moreover, whom you had once adored, and whose memory had ever stood, wistful, winsome, wraithlike, between your wives and you.

So, when Agamemnon's fiat went forth that those long-dead promises were to be redeemed at once, there were home scenes throughout Greece whose bare recital would forever have crushed the spirit of Mormonism.

War must have seemed almost a relief to some of those luckless husbands after they had finished listening to their wives' remarks on the subject. For, of all overdue debts in this world of varied indebtedness, the hardest by a million-fold to pay are the sight drafts of defunct sentiment.

These olden heroes were not especially heroic in the crisis that threatened them, and none but a single man will be unduly harsh with them for their reluctance. One after another, they sought to dodge the fulfillment of their pledges.

Ulysses, for example, after an interview with his embarra.s.singly faithful wife, Penelope--she has always reminded me of Mrs.

Micawber--harnessed oxen to a plow and proceeded to give the impression that he had suddenly gone crazy, by plowing furrows in the salt sands of the seash.o.r.e. Those whose minds had fled were supposed to be directly under divine protection, and naturally such people were never called upon to fight or to meet any other obligation.

Truly, Ulysses was living up to his reputation as the craftiest of the Greeks. Yet his craft was put to naught by the wisdom of old Nestor--one of the few suitors who had not tried to crawl out of his agreement. Nestor placed Ulysses' baby son, Telemachus, on the seash.o.r.e, in the path of the advancing oxen. Ulysses turned the beasts aside to keep them from trampling the child to death. Whereat, it was decided that Ulysses was not insane--at least, not too insane to do his share of fighting--and he was enrolled as one of the chiefs of the Grecian host.

Having been caught, Ulysses set out, morbidly, to get even with Destiny by catching others. And he, as well as Nestor, began to strip away the subterfuges of the reluctant kings. Achilles, for instance, tried to escape military service by dressing as a girl and hiding among the women of his household. Ulysses, disguised as a peddler, visited these women, carrying a basket full of feminine gewgaws. At the bottom of the basket lay a magnificent sword. While the women were examining the jewelry and clothing in the peddler's stock, Achilles caught sight of the sword. For the first time, he showed interest in the intruder's visit. Paying no heed to the rest of the wares, he picked up the sword and fell to examining it with a professional interest. At once, Ulysses recognized him not only as a man, but as a warrior; and the sulky Achilles was forced to join the expedition.

Day and night, throughout Greece, the smiths' hammers clinked, and the smithy fires roared. Weapons were forged; armor was repaired; army equipments were set to rights. The woods and hilltops reechoed to ax blows, as great trees were felled for ship timber. At last, twelve hundred ships lay at anchor, waiting to bear the avenging host to Troy.

All this preparation was a matter of many months, and for a long time no hint of it reached Troy. Then--first in vague rumor, and soon in form not to be doubted--came news of the Greeks' preparation for war.

By this time, Helen had ceased to be a novelty in Troy. And now men cursed her, beneath their breath, as a sorceress who was to bring war and destruction upon them. Women hated her as the cause of their men's possible death in battle. But Priam, and the n.o.blest blest of his sons--Hector--were still her stanch champions. And, with such backing, her position in the city was at least outwardly a.s.sured.

Then came a minor tragedy, a foreshadowing of the wholesale misfortunes that were to follow. I have said that when Paris was still a herdsman on Mount Ida, he had met and loved a forest maid, OEnone, and, on learning that he was a prince, he had promptly deserted her, leaving her to grief and loneliness. OEnone had borne Paris a son--although this was unknown to him. In the years since she had last seen the fickle prince, this son had grown up. He was known as "Corythus."

When word reached OEnone of Helen's arrival in Troy, she sent her unfortunate rival a message. She wrote the message on birch bark and dispatched it, by Corythus, to the city.

Corythus arrived at the palace, and was led to Helen's bower, where he begged the princess to dismiss her maids, as he was the bearer of a word for her ears alone. Helen, obeying, received from him the folded birch bark and opened it. She read:

O thou that dost scan these lines, hast thou forgotten quite thine ancient sin, thy palace, thy husband and child--even as Paris hath forgotten me? Thou shalt not forget. For I send thee my curse, with which I shall scourge thee till I die. Soon Paris must look into the eyes of death. And little in that hour will he care for thy sweet lips, thy singing voice, thine arms of ivory, thy gold-red hair. Nay, remembering that thou hast cost his life, he will bid the folk that hate thee have their joy, and give thee to the mountain beasts to tear, or burn thy body on a tower of Troy!

My son--and his--beareth this word to thee.

As she finished reading, Helen fell, in a swoon, at Corythus' feet.

The youth was alarmed, and dropped on his knees beside her, lifting her head. And at that moment Paris entered the room.

Seeing a stranger kneeling beside Helen, he went wild with jealous rage. Whipping out his sword, he sprang upon Corythus, and buried the blade in the lad's neck. Then he turned, to plunge the weapon into Helen's breast. But, as he turned, he saw the birch-bark message on the floor and stooped to pick it up. Reading it, he realized what he had done, and whom, in his jealous frenzy, he had killed. He flung himself, wailing, forth from the palace and into the night.

Three days later, Corythus was laid on his funeral pyre in the market place of Troy. As Paris was advancing with the lighted torch, OEnone appeared. She leaped upon the pyre and shrieked down at her recreant lover:

"I hear the prayer that thou some day shall make in vain! Thou shalt die, and leave thy love behind thee, for another. And little shall she love thy memory! But"--turning upon the onlookers--"O ye foolish people--see! What death is coming on you from across the waters?"

At the shrieked words, all turned and looked seaward. Bearing down on the coast, in a driving rain, oar blades flashing, sails straining at their rigging, came the long-dreaded Greek fleet.

The Trojan war had begun.

For a highly sporting and poetical and altogether deathless account of that contest, I commend you to Homer's "Iliad." This is the story of Argive Helen, not an uncensored bulletin from the trenches.

For ten years the conflict waged, with varying fortunes. Again and again, as the tide of battle rolled up to the city's very walls, Helen stood on the ramparts and watched her former husband and the other men who had sworn eternal love for her, fighting and dying for her worthless sake.

Once, as she stood thus, she found at her side the group of aged men who were Priam's counselors. Gray-bearded they were, and feeble, and long past the time when love can set the pulse a-flutter, and they hated Helen with a mighty loathing for the disaster she had brought upon their dear fatherland. Even now, they had come forth upon the ramparts to berate her with her sin.

Helen turned and faced them. The afternoon sun poured down upon her white-clad form and upon her wonder face with its crown of ruddy hair.

And, at sight of her, these ancient moralists forgot why they had come hither. With one voice, cried they aloud that the love of so glorious a woman were well worth the loss of Troy--aye, of all the world.

A hundred commentators have said that this tribute of the graybeards is the most supreme compliment ever paid to mortal woman's charms.

Paris was at last challenged by Menelaus to mortal combat. He accepted the challenge, but later fled, in terror, from the man he had wronged.

Soon afterward, he led a sortie one night against the Greeks. A man on the outskirts of the Grecian camp gave the alarm and let fly an arrow at the advancing Trojans. The shaft struck Paris, inflicting a mortal wound.

The dying man was borne back into the city, and to the palace where the thoroughly disillusioned Helen awaited him. Since his cowardice in fleeing from Menelaus, she had taken no pains to hide her contempt for him. Now, as he lay dying, she looked down without emotion on the sharer of her crime. And Paris, seeing her bend over him, spoke the pitiful farewell that Andrew Lang's verse has made sublime, and that, even in mere prose, cannot lose all its beauty. His voice weak, his eyes glazing, he said:

"Long ago, dear, we were glad--we who never more shall be together.

Will you kiss me, once? It is ten weary years since you have smiled on me. But, Helen, say farewell with your old smile!"

Helen, something of her dead tenderness coming back to her, kissed him. And, with her kiss, his life went out.

The torch was set to the unlucky prince's pyre. From the crowd around it sprang OEnone. She mounted the blazing pile of wood, and her body was consumed with that of the man who was not worth dying for.

Helen, almost at once, married Paris' younger brother Deiphobus.

One morning the Trojans awoke to find that all the Greeks had sailed away. Their huts stood abandoned on the beach, their ships were nowhere visible on the horizon. Coming back, rejoicing, to the city, the scouting party that brought this joyous news found a monstrous wooden horse. They thought that the Greeks had built it and left it there, to propitiate Neptune for a speedy and safe voyage back to their native ch.o.r.es.

The Trojans bore the horse within the city's walls, to keep it as a memento of the great war.

Helen, pa.s.sing near the wooden beast that night, heard within it the clank of arms. She halted, and, in a low voice, spoke the names of some of her old suitors. Ulysses answered, bidding her open a concealed trapdoor in the horse's side. She obeyed. Out climbed a score of Greeks. Guided by Helen, they unbarred the city gates to the horde outside who had returned in their vessels. One of the greatest ma.s.sacres of the ages followed. Babies were butchered as they slept, women were cut down as they ran from their beds, half-wakened men were slaughtered like sheep. Then the torch was applied, and all Troy was burned to ashes.

Helen was saved from death by Ulysses, who took her to Menelaus and demanded kindly treatment for her, pleading in her behalf that she had at the last betrayed the Trojans by setting free the Greeks within the wooden horse.

There was no need for his mediation. No man could harbor wrath against the golden Helen. Menelaus, at the very first meeting of their eyes, forgave and forgot. He opened his arms and his heart to the woman who had wrecked his life and who had brought to death thousands of gallant men. Back to Greece he bore her; back to Sparta, where he installed her once more as his queen. He had first brought her hither in triumph as a mere slip of a girl, to people who had received her with pride.

Now she came to Sparta again, a woman of over fifty, to a populace who cursed and reviled her. Widowed wives and weeping mothers spat at her as she pa.s.sed them on the way to the palace.

But none of this was as hard to bear as had been Agamemnon's parting words--spoken in her presence--to the Greek army on the sh.o.r.es of Ilium. Though his brother was minded to forgive, Agamemnon was not.

And to the a.s.sembled host he had shouted:

"O ye who overlong have borne the yoke, behold this woman, the very fountain of your sorrows! For her ye left your dear homes long ago, but now the black ships rot from stern to prow, and who knows if ye shall see your own again? Aye, and if homes ye win, ye yet may find--ye that the winds waft and the waters bear--that you are quite gone out of mind. Your fathers, dear and old, died dishonored there; your children deem ye dead, and will not share their lands with you; on mainland or on isle, strange men are wooing now the women you wedded. For love doth lightly beguile a woman's heart.

"These sorrows hath Helen brought on you. So fall upon her straightway, that she die, and clothe her beauty in a cloak of stone!"

The crowd had armed itself with stones as Agamemnon began to speak.

But, as he denounced her, they were looking at her upturned face. And from their nerveless hands the stones fell to earth. They found her too beautiful for death.

Agamemnon, looking at her, cried:

"Hath no man, then, avenged his wrongs by slaying thee? Is there none to shed thy blood for all that thou hast slain? To wreak on thee the wrongs that thou hast wrought? Nay, as mine own soul liveth, there is one. Before a ship takes sail, I will slay thee with mine own hand!"

But, as he advanced toward her, sword in hand, her beauty seized him in its spell. He paused, irresolute, then turned away.

For many years thereafter, Helen and Menelaus dwelt together at Sparta. And because the years were happy, both history and fable are silent about them, save that Menelaus was once more as slavishly enamored of his wife as in their first months together. Helen, too, was well content with this safe haven after her tempest-tossed decade--"Peace after war; port after stormy seas; rest after toil."

The hatred of the people at large did not much distress her. Through the latticed windows of the palace filtered the growls of the populace, droning and futile as the roar of distant breakers. And even as breakers have no peril for landsmen, so, safe in her husband's home, Helen did not fear the grumbles of the folk he ruled.