Superwomen

by Albert Payson Terhune

Meantime, Greece was humming like a kicked hornet's nest. Menelaus learned of his wife's flight, and with whom she had fled. He went, heart-broken, to his brother Agamemnon for help in avenging his wrongs. Agamemnon not only reminded him of the other suitors' promise to defend the honor of the man whom Helen should marry, but volunteered, as overlord of Greece, to force them to keep their vows.

Now, this offer was none too easy to carry out. It is one thing to make the maddest pledge, under the drunkenness of love. It is quite another thing to fulfill that pledge when love is dead. The swain who at twenty declares to a girl: "If ever you want me, say the word, and I swear I will come to you, from the ends of the earth!" would be horribly embarrassed if, as a sedate husband and father at forty, that same half-forgotten sweetheart should hold him to his calf-love oath.

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 embarrassingly 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 seashore. 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 seashore, 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.