“That qualification, my dear Corinna, upsets the logic of your admirable tirade,” Fortinbras replied calmly, after drinking the remainder of his syrup and soda water. “I speak of love to Martin because his soul is starved, as I’ve already declared. I don’t speak of it to you, because your soul is suffering from indigestion.”
“I’ll have another kummel glacé,” said Corinna. “It’s a stomachic.” She reached for the bell-pull behind her chair—she had the corner seat. Auguste appeared. Orders were repeated. “How you can drink all that syrup without being sick I can’t understand,” she remarked.
“Omnicomprehension is not vouchsafed even to the very young and innocent, my dear,” said Fortinbras.
Martin glanced across the table apprehensively. If ever young woman had been set down that young woman was Corinna Hastings. He feared explosion, annihilation of the down-setter. Nothing of the sort happened. Corinna accepted the rebuff with the meekness of a school-girl and sniffed when Fortinbras was not looking. Again Martin was puzzled, unable to divest himself of his old conception of Corinna. She was Corinna, chartered libertine of the land of Rodolfe, Marcel, Schaunard—he had few impressions of the Quartier Latin later than Henri Murger—and her utterances no matter how illogical were derived from godlike inspiration. He hung on her lips for some inspired and vehement rejoinder to the rebuke of Fortinbras. When none came he realised that in the seedily dressed and now profusely perspiring Marchand de Bonheur she had met an acknowledged master. Who Fortinbras was, whence his origin, what his character and social status, how, save by the precarious methods to which he had alluded, he earned his livelihood, Martin had no idea; but he suddenly conceived an immense respect for Fortinbras. The man hovered over both of them on a higher plane of wisdom. From his kind eyes (to Martin’s simple fancy) beamed uncanny power. He assumed the semblance of an odd sort of god indigenous to this Paris wonderworld.
Fortinbras lit another of Martin’s Virginian cigarettes—the little tin box lay open on the table—and leaned back in his chair.
“My young friends,” said he, “you have each put before me the circumstances which have made you respectively despair of finding happiness both in the immediate and the distant future. Now as Montaigne says—an author whom I would recommend to you for the edification of your happily remote middle-age, having myself found infinite consolation in his sagacity—as Montaigne says: ‘Men are tormented by the ideas they have concerning things, and not by the things themselves.’ The wise man therefore—the general term, my dear Corinna, includes women—is he who has learned to face things themselves after having dispelled the bogies of his ideas concerning them. It is on this basis that I am about to deliver the judgment for which I have duly received my fee of ten francs.”
He moistened his lips with the pink syrup. For the picture you can imagine a grey old lion eating ice-cream.
“You, Corinna,” he continued, “belong to the new race of women whose claims on life far exceed their justification. You have as assets youth, a modicum of beauty, a bright intelligence and a stiff little character. But, as you rightly say, you are capable of nothing in the steep range of human effort from painting a picture to washing a baby. Were you not temperamentally puritanical and intellectually obsessed by the modern notion of woman’s right to an independent existence, you would find a means of realising the above-mentioned assets, as your sex has done through the centuries. But in spite of amazonian trifling with romantic-visaged and granite-headed medical students, you cling to the irresponsibilities of a celibate career.”
“If he asked me, I’d marry a Turk to-morrow,” said Corinna.
“Don’t interrupt,” said Fortinbras. “You disturb the flow of my ideas. I have no doubt that, in your desperate situation, you would promise to marry a Turk; but your essential pusillanimity would make you wriggle out of it at the last moment. You’re like ‘the poor cat in the adage.’ ”