Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face, Charles Kingsley [thriller novels to read TXT] 📗

a load; so he went down to the Esplanade in search of work. Of that, alas! there was none. So he sat down upon the parapet of the quay, and watched the shoals of sardines which played in and out over the marble steps below, and wondered at the strange crabs and sea-locusts which crawled up and down the face of the masonry, a few feet below the surface, scrambling for bits of offal, and making occasional fruitless dashes at the nimble little silver arrows which played round them. And at last his whole soul, too tired to think of anything else, became absorbed in a mighty struggle between two great crabs, who held on stoutly, each by a claw, to his respective bunch of seaweed, while with the others they tugged, one at the head and the other at the tail of a dead fish. Which would conquer?.... Ay, which? And for five minutes Philammon was alone in the world with the two struggling heroes.... Might not they be emblematic? Might not the upper one typify Cyril?—the lower one Hypatia?—and the dead fish between, himself?.... But at last the deadlock was suddenly ended—the fish parted in the middle; and the typical Hypatia and Cyril, losing hold of their respective seaweeds by the jerk, tumbled down, each with its half-fish, and vanished head over heels into the blue depths in so undignified a manner, that Philammon burst into a shout of laughter.

‘What’s the joke?’ asked a well-known voice behind him; and a hand patted him familiarly on the back. He looked round, and saw the little porter, his head crowned with a full basket of figs, grapes, and water-melons, on which the poor youth cast a longing eye. ‘Well, my young friend, and why are you not at church? Look at all the saints pouring into the Caesareum there, behind you.’

Philammon answered sulkily enough something inarticulate.

‘Ho, ho! Quarrelled with the successor of the Apostles already? Has my prophecy come true, and the strong meat of pious riot and plunder proved too highly spiced for your young palate? Eh?’

Poor Philammon! Angry with himself for feeling that the porter was right; shrinking from the notion of exposing the failings of his fellow-Christians; shrinking still more from making such a jackanapes his confidant: and yet yearning in his loneliness to open his heart to some one, he dropped out, hint by hint, word by word, the events of the past evening, and finished by a request to be put in the way of earning his breakfast.

‘Earning your breakfast! Shall the favourite of the gods—shall the guest of Hypatia—earn his breakfast, while I have an obol to share with him? Base thought! Youth! I have wronged you. Unphilosophically I allowed, yesterday morning, envy to ruffle the ocean of my intellect. We are now friends and brothers, in hatred to the monastic tribe.’

‘I do not hate them, I tell you,’ said Philammon. ‘But these Nitrian savages—’

‘Are the perfect examples of monkery, and you hate them; and therefore, all greaters containing the less, you hate all less monastic monks—I have not heard logic lectures in vain. Now, up! The sea woos our dusty limbs: Nereids and Tritons, charging no cruel coin, call us to Nature’s baths. At home a mighty sheat-fish smokes upon the festive board; beer crowns the horn, and onions deck the dish; come then, my guest and brother!’

Philammon swallowed certain scruples about becoming the guest of a heathen, seeing that otherwise there seemed no chance of having anything else to swallow; and after a refreshing plunge in the sea, followed the hospitable little fellow to Hypatia’s door, where he dropped his daily load of fruit, and then into a narrow by-street, to the ground-floor of a huge block of lodgings with a common staircase, swarming with children, cats, and chickens; and was ushered by his host into a little room, where the savoury smell of broiling fish revived Philammon’s heart.

‘Judith! Judith! where lingerest thou? Marble of Pentelicus! foam-flake of the wine dark main! lily of the Mareotic lake! You accursed black Andromeda, if you don’t bring the breakfast this moment, I’ll cut you in two!’

The inner door opened, and in bustled, trembling, her hands full of dishes, a tall lithe negress, dressed in true negro fashion, in a snow-white cotton shift, a scarlet cotton petticoat, and a bright yellow turban of the same, making a light in that dark place which would have served as a landmark a mile off. She put the dishes down, and the porter majestically waved Philammon to a stool; while she retreated, and stood humbly waiting on her lord and master, who did not deign to introduce to his guest the black beauty which composed his whole seraglio.... But, indeed, such an act of courtesy would have been needless; for the first morsel of fish was hardly safe in poor Philammon’s mouth, when the regress rushed upon him, caught him by the head, and covered him with rapturous kisses.

Up jumped the little man with a yell, brandishing a knife in one hand and a leek in the other; while Philammon, scarcely less scandalised, jumped up too, and shook himself free of the lady, who, finding it impossible to vent her feelings further on his head, instantly changed her tactics, and, wallowing on the floor, began frantically kissing his feet.

‘What is this? before my face! Up, shameless baggage, or thou diest the death!’ and the porter pulled her up upon her knees.

‘It is the monk! the young man I told you of, who saved me from the Jews the other night! What good angel sent him here that I might thank him?’ cried the poor creature, while the tears ran down her black shining face.

‘I am that good angel,’ said the porter, with a look of intense self-satisfaction. ‘Rise, daughter of Erebus; thou art pardoned, being but a female. What says the poet?—

‘“Woman is passion’s slave, while rightful lord O’er her and passion, rules the nobler male.”

Youth! to my arms! Truly say the philosophers, that the universe is magical in itself, and by mysterious sympathies links like to like. The prophetic instinct of thy future benefits towards me drew me to thee as by an invisible warp, hawser, or chain-cable, from the moment I beheld thee. Thou went a kindred spirit, my brother, though thou knewest it not. Therefore I do not praise thee—no, nor thank thee in the least, though thou hast preserved for me the one palm which shadows my weary steps—the single lotus-flower (in this case black, not white) which blooms for me above the mud-stained ocean wastes of the Hylic Borboros. That which thou hast done, thou hast done by instinct—by divine compulsion—thou couldst no more help it than thou canst help eating that fish, and art no more to be praised for it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Philammon.

‘Comprehend me. Our theory in the schools for such cases is this—has been so at least for the last six months; similar particles, from one original source, exist in you and me. Similar causes produce similar effects; our attractions, antipathies, impulses, are therefore, in similar circumstances, absolutely the same; and therefore you did the other night exactly what I should have done in your case.’

Philammon thought the latter part of the theory open to question, but he had by no means stopped eating when he rose, and his mouth was much too full of fish to argue.

‘And therefore,’ continued the little man, ‘we are to consider ourselves