PARTISAN REVIEW
They were seated at table. Before them a massive repast had been
spread (how, or by whom, I cannot say). They were busy gormandizing,
drinking heavily, making passes of love at one another, and braying
like to many madmen or idiots. When I made as
if
to take them away,
they replied that they were getting on very well and had no thought of
leaving. I insisted, saying that I had come to deliver them. "Deliver us
from what?" they shouted; and suddenly they all banded together and
covered me with insults. I was very inuch distressed, because of Piri–
thous. He could hardly recognize me, foreswore virtue, made mock of
his own good qualities and told me roundly that not for all the glory
in the world would he consent to give up his present enjoyments. All
the same I couldn't blame him for it, because I knew too well, that,
but for Daedalus' precautions, I should have foundered in the same way,
and joined in the chorus with him and with the others.
It
was only by
beating them hard on their behinds, that I got them to follow me;
of course there was also the fact that they were so clogged by drink as
to be incapable of resistance.
Once out of the labyrinth, how slowly and painfully they came
back to their senses and re-assumed their normal selves! This they did
with great sadness. It appeared to them (so they told me afterwards)
as if they were climbing down from some high peak of happiness into
a dark and narrow valley. Each rebuilt for himself the prison in which
every man is his own jailor, and from which he could never again
escape. Pirithos, however, soon showed himself aghast at his momentary
degradation, and he promised to redeem himself, in his own eyes and
in mine, by excess of zeal. An occasion was offered to him, not long
afterwards, to give me proof of his devotion.
X
I hid nothing from him; he knew my feelings for Ariadne, and
the abruptness of their decline. I did not even hide from him that,
child though she might still be, I was very taken with Phaedra. She
used often at that time to play on a swing strung up between the trunks
of two palm-trees; and when I saw her at the top of her flight, with
the wind lifting her short skirts, my heart would miss a beat. But when
Ariadne appeared I looked the other way and dissembled my feelings as
best I could, for fear of arousing in her the jealousy of an elder sister.
Still, thwarted desires are not healthy. But if I was to abduct her, and
thus bring off the audacious project which was beginning to simmer in
my head, I should need to employ a ruse of some sort. Then it was that
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