The Revolt of Aphrodite Read Online Free PDF Page A

weeks. Small as a garden pea, and beautifully done in mother of pearl. Graphos now! But I will be coming to that.
    It was the recorders that brought me to the notice of Hippolyta. Vivid in a baroque hat like a watering can she dispensed tea and éclairs in the best hotel, coiling and uncoiling her slender legs as she questioned me about the mysteries of the black box, wondering if I could record a speech which was to be made by some visiting dignitary . My impression squared with all I heard afterwards of her public reputation. It was typical of back-biting Athens that she sounded so unsavoury a figure; the truth was that she was a mixture of naivety and wrong-headedness punctuated with strange generosities. The hard voice with its deeper tones and the fashionable boldness of the dark eyes were overcompensating for qualities like shyness which even her social practice had not enabled her entirely to throw off. The green scarf and the blood-red fingernails gave her a pleasantly old-fashioned vampire’s air. “O please could you do that for me?” She named a figure in drachmae so high that my heart leapt, it wouldkeep me for a month; and held my hand a trifle longer than formality permits. She was a warm, pleasantly troubling personage. Despite the impressive jewellery and the orchids she seemed more like a youth than a girl. Of course I accepted, and taking an advance made my way back to the Plaka delighted by such good fortune. She promised to let me know when the person in question—the speech-maker —arrived. “I can’t help liking slightly hysterical women” I confided to the Parthenon.
    At Spiro’s tavern, under the vine-trellis, I paused for a drink and caught sight of a familiar object at an empty table; the little yellow exercise book which Koepgen used for theology and musing alike. It lay there with his pen and a daily paper. He must have gone to the lavatory. At this time Koepgen was a theological student embarking on the grim path of monkhood. A typical product of white Russia, he spoke and wrote with equal ease in any of four languages. He taught me Greek, and was invaluable on out-of-the-way factors like the phonetics of this hirsute tongue; things like the Tsaconian dialect , still half anc. Doric. Well I sat and riffled while I waited.
    “The hubris, the overweening, is always there; but it is a matter of scale. The Greeks traced its path with withering accuracy, watching it lead on to ate —the point at which evil is mistakenly believed to be good. Here we are then at the end of the long road—races dehumanised by the sorceries of false politics.” Koepgen weeping for Russia again. I always want to shout “stop it!” At last he stood before me, full of a devout nonchalance. He was a small dapper man, contriving to look clean despite the threadbare soutane and grotesque smelly boots. His long hair, captured in a bun, was always clean. He seldom wore his stovepipe hat. He reproached me for my inquisitiveness and sat down smiling to hear my tale of good fortune. Of Hippolyta he said: “She is adorable, but she is connected with all sorts of other things. I came across her recently when I did some paid translation—O just business letters—for an organisation, a firm I suppose, in Salonika. She organised it. But something about it gave me an uncomfortable feeling. They offered me very large sums to keep on with the work, but I let it drop. I don’t know quite why. I wanted to keep myself free in a way. I need less and less money, more and more time.”
     

     
    T here are other data, floating about like motes in a sunbeam, waiting to find their place: the equipment in the abortioner’s leather bag. The needle-necked appurtenances which mock the spunk-scattering troubadours of a courtly love. The foetus of a love-song. (“One way” wrote Koepgen “might be to take up Plutarch’s idea of the Melis-ponda . This should be within the grasp of anyone.”) Mara the hag with a pair of tongs worked