CHAPTER XXIV
SELF-IMPOSED SLAVERY
‘I knew you would have to pass this way, and I have been waiting for you this half-hour,’ said Jacques. ‘Well, how went the encounter?’ That Madeleine was not in despair was clear from the fact that she was willing to talk about it.
‘Oh! Jacques, I cannot say. Mademoiselle de Scudéry was entertaining the whole company with discourse, but when she did address a word to me I was awkward and bashful—and—and—not over civil. Do you think she will hate me?’ She waited anxiously for his answer.
‘Awkward, bashful, and not over civil!’ laughed Jacques. ‘What did you do uncivil? Did you put out your tongue and hiccough in her face? Oh, that you had! Or did you deliberately undress and then dance about naked? I would that people were more inclined to such pleasant antics!’
‘In good earnest I did not,’ said Madeleine severely. ‘But I feigned not to be interested when she talked, and averted my eyes from her as if the sight of her worked on my stomach. Oh! what will she think of me?’
‘Well, I don’t know, Chop,’ Jacques said dubiously; ‘it seems you used arts to show yourself in such colours as ’twould be hard to like!’
‘Do people never take likings to bashful, surly people?’ she persisted.
‘I fear me they are apt to prefer smooth-spoken, courtly ones,’ he answered with a smile. ‘But, take heart, Chop, you will meet with her again, doubtless, when you must compel yourself to civility and to the uttering of such galanterie as the occasion furnishes, and then the issue cannot choose but be successful. Descartes holds admiration to be the mother of the other passions; an you arouse admiration the others will follow of their own accord.’
‘’Tis easy to talk!’ wailed Madeleine, ‘but her visible presence works so strangely upon me as to put me out of all my precepts, and I am driven to unseemly stammering or to uncivil silence.’
‘Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus Flamma demanat, etcetera. Have you been studying that most witty anatomy of the lover in the volume of Catullus that I lent you?’ asked Jacques, rather mockingly.
‘Yes,’ said Madeleine, blushing. Then, after a pause,—
‘It seems that ... er ... er ... my father ... that this Ariane ... that, in short, he has prospered in his suit of late?’
‘Has he? I am exceeding glad to hear it,’ said Jacques dryly. Then, looking at her with his little inscrutable smile, he added: ‘You show a most becoming filial interest in your father’s roman; ’tis as if you held its issue to be tied up in some strange knot with the issue of your own.’
How sinister he was looking! Madeleine stared at him with eyes of terror. She tried to speak but no sound would come from her lips.
Suddenly his expression became once more kind and human.
‘Why, Chop,’ he cried, ‘there are no bounds set to your credulity! I verily believe your understanding would be abhorrent of no fable or fiction, let them be as monstrous as they will. In good earnest you are in sore need of a dose of old Descartes!’
‘But, Jacques, I have of late been diligently studying him and yet it has availed me nothing. My will has lost naught of its obliquity.’
‘How did you endeavour to straighten it ... hein?’ Jacques asked very gently.
Madeleine hung her head and then confessed her theory about the Wax, and how she had tried upon reality the plastic force of her will.
Jacques threw out his hands in despair.
‘Oh, Chop!’ he cried, ‘it is a sin to turn to such maniac uses the cleanest, sweetest good sense that ever man has penned! That passage about the wax is but a figure! The only way to compass what we wish is to exercise our will first on our own passions until they will take what ply we choose, and then to exercise it on the passions of others. Success lies in you but is not to be compassed by vain, foolish rites after the manner of the heathen and the Christians. Why, you have made yourself a slave, bound with the fetters of affrighting fancies that do but confound the senses and scatter the understanding. The will is the only talisman. Exercise yourself in the right using of it against your next meeting with Mademoiselle de Scudéry, then when that meeting comes, at one word from you the bashful humours—docile now—will cower behind your spleen, and the mercurial ones will go dancing through your blood up to your brain, whence they will let fall a torrent of conceits like sugar-plums raining from the Palais Mazarin, and thus in Mademoiselle de Scudéry you will arouse the mother of the passions—Admiration.’
They both laughed, and arm in arm—Madeleine with a serene look in her eyes—made their way to the petite rue du Paon.