It is pleasant enough to lie here in the hot sun, to have a pipe that does its work properly, and to wonder what the time is, but not to be enough distressed about it to take the trouble to consult one’s watch. I am finishing the “Entertainments” of Kapnides now, and I am not quite clear about the last story but one in his book. I give it, in case you have not read it.
It was a most beautiful cloud. Two highly respectable Athenians looked at it for a long time, and they understood beauty in Athens.
“Now, if any one were to paint that,” said the first, “every one would say that it was not natural.” He felt there was depth in the remark.
“I am not so sure of that,” said the second, intending to be thought judicious but not disagreeable.
If the cloud had been painted, its chiefest beauty would have been omitted. For in the centre of the cloud sat the unborn soul of a girl-child. To all mortals it had no visible appearance. But the stars, as they crept slowly up for a night’s work, saw with smiling eyes a graceful figure seated in the vapour, leaning a little backward, white against the crimson pillows of mist, with slender hands clasped behind a shapely head, and long dark hair and closed eyes. For it lived, but did not think, after the manner of unborn souls, which have ways distinctly of their own.
And as the sun poised over the cool, lighted sea that sang to welcome it, a noise of little tinkling silver bells was heard all down the sky; and there was some hurry and confusion amid Powers which were usually calm with the unjust, irritating, excessive calmness of a natural law.
When it was all over, no one exactly knew whose fault it was. But the Manager was summoned before the great Zeus, and reprimanded severely. “It’s carelessness,” said Zeus, “and that’s what I can’t stand. You ought to have been ready, and there are no two ways about it. You sit there in the office, wondering how long it will be before you can sneak out to your beastly lunch, and you forget that you’re paid to be managing my business for me all that time.”
Whether it was the Manager’s fault or not, the fact remained. Down in the world, in the beautiful country just outside Athens, a boy-child had been born, and he had been born with the soul of a girl-child inside him.
“Such a piece of bungling!” grumbled Zeus, and went off to play at making orphans.