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It is a slow business, but the procession gradually nears home; and when the man at the helm succeeds in steering his sauntering charges safely between the Scylla of a hay-rick and the Charybdis of the burn, the old lady takes off her spectacles and relaxes her vigilance. When she looks again, though, she breaks into an exclamation of dismay.
This they man by man severally promised, imprecating the heaviest curses on whoever should break it; and mooring their bark within a creek, they went to supper, contenting themselves that night with such food as Circe had given them, not without many sad thoughts of their friends whom Scylla had devoured, the grief of which kept them great part of the night waking.
Even the shouts of the men which she had just heard were drowned in this dull, threatening rumble. For just an instant she thought it was thunder, and then her quick reasoning told her the truth. The herd had stampeded! That she and Scylla were directly in its path she was certain, for the camp-fire had, a moment before, been between them and the herd and was now invisible.
The night was suddenly lighted by lightning-flashes that followed one another so closely they seemed to make one long, lasting flare. The cow-boys had all passed, and Martha saw that the herd was scarcely two hundred yards away. She stepped directly in front of Scylla's prostrate form and raised the skirts. "Scream, Scylla, scream!" she cried.
In time, when passion shall have yielded to sober reason, the current may possibly turn; but, in the mean while, this government, in relation to France and England, may be compared to a ship between Scylla and Charybdis.
The following allusion to the stories we have just been relating is from Milton's Comus, line 252: "I have often heard My mother Circe and the Sirens three, Amidst the flowery-kirtled Naiades, Culling their potent herbs and baneful drugs, Who as they sung would take the prisoned soul And lap it in Elysium. Scylla wept, And chid her barking waves into attention.
This opposition of work and play is founded in our experience of a social state which is still at sixes and sevens; of a civilisation so imperfectly developed and organised that the majority does nothing save under compulsion, and the minority does nothing to any purpose; and where that little boy's Scylla and Charybdis all work and all play is effectually realised in a nightmare too terrible and too foolish, above all too wakingly true, to be looked at in the face without flinching.
Darwin, in his Botanic Garden, says, "So to the sacred Sun in Memnon's fane Spontaneous concords choired the matin strain; Touched by his orient beam responsive rings The living lyre and vibrates all its strings; Accordant aisles the tender tones prolong, And holy echoes swell the adoring song." Scylla was a fair virgin of Sicily, a favorite of the Sea-Nymphs.
The Straits of Rhegium and Messina are twelve miles in length, and, in the narrowest passage, about one mile and a half broad; and the fabulous monsters of the deep, the rocks of Scylla, and the whirlpool of Charybdis, could terrify none but the most timid and unskilful mariners.
Besides, the fellow might turn out to be one of your social superiors, and not care to know you; in which case, of course, you would only be letting yourself in for a needless snubbing. In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one's life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers.
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