CHAPTER VI
RECORDING THE VIGIL OF A SCARLET HOMUNCULUS AND ARISTIDES THE JUST
The gray lemur sat before the fire in a baby's scarlet-painted cane chair. He kept his knees well apart, so that the comfortable warmth, given off by the burning logs and bed of glowing ashes, might reach his furry concave stomach and the inside of his furry thighs. His long, ringed tail, slipped neatly under the arm of the little scarlet chair, lay, like a thick gray note of interrogation, upon the surface of the black Aubusson carpet. Now and again he leaned his slender, small-waisted body forward, grasping the chair-arms with his two hands--which resembled a baby's leather gloves with fur backs to them--and advanced a sensitive, inquisitive, pointed muzzle toward the blaze, his nose being cold. His movements were attractive in their composure and restraint. For this quadrumanous exile from sub-tropic Madagascan forests was a dignified little personage, not in the least addicted, as the vulgar phrase has it, to giving himself away.
At first sight the lemur, sitting thus before the fire, appeared to be the sole inhabitant of the bare white-walled studio. Then, as the eye became accustomed to the dusky light, shed by hanging electric lamps with dark smoked-glass shades to them, other queer living creatures disclosed their presence.
At the end of the great room farthest from the door, where it narrowed in two oblique angles under high, shelving skylights, in a glass tank--some five feet by three and about two feet deep--set on a square of mosaic pavement, goldfish swam lazily to and fro. In the center of the tank, about the rockwork built up around the jet of a little tinkling fountain, small, dull-hued tortoises with skinny necks and slimy carapaces and black-blotched, orange-bellied, crested tritons crawled. While all round the room, forming a sort of dado to the height of above five feet, ran an arabesque of scenes and figures, some life-size, some even colossal, some minute and exquisitely finished, some blurred and half obliterated, in places superimposed, sketched one over the other to the production of madly nightmarish effects of heads, limbs, trunks, and features attached, divided, flung broadcast, heaped together in horrible promiscuosity. All were drawn boldly, showing an astonishing vivacity of line and mastery of attitude and expression, in charcoal or red and black chalk, or were washed in with the brush in Indian ink and light red. In the dusky lamplight and scintillating firelight this amazing decoration seemed endowed with life and movement, so that shamelessly, in unholy mirth, hideousness, and depravity it stalked and pranced, beckoned, squirmed, and flaunted upon those austerely snow-white walls.
For the rest, chairs, tables, easels, even the model's movable platform, were, like the carpet, dead black. Two low, wide divans upholstered in black brocade stood on either side of the deep outstanding chimney-breast; and upon the farther one, masked by a red-lacquer folding screen, amid a huddle of soft, black pillows, flat on its back, a human form reposed--but whether of living man or of cleverly disposed lay figure remained debatable, since it was shrouded from head to heel in a black silk _resai_, even the face being covered, and its immobility complete.
On taking leave of Anastasia Beauchamp, Adrian Savage had found himself in no humor either for work or for sleep. His search for the further reason had led him a longer journey than he anticipated. And in some of its stages that journey offered disquieting episodes. He admitted he was still puzzled, still anxious; more than ever determined as to the final result, yet hardly more clear as to how the result in question might be obtained. There were points which needed thinking out, but to think them out profitably he must regain his normal attitude of mind and self-possession. So, reckoning it useless to go home to his well-found bachelor apartments in the _rue de l'Université_, he decided to walk till such time as physical exercise had regulated both his bodily and mental circulation.
It happened to be the moment of the turn-out of theaters and other places of entertainment, and, as the young man made his way down toward the _Place de l'Opéra_, the aspect of the town struck him as conspicuously animated and brilliant. His eyes, still focused to the quiet English atmosphere and landscape, were quick to note the contrast to these presented by his existing surroundings. He invited impressions, looking at the scene sympathetically, yet idly, as at the pages of a picture-book. Strong effects of light and color held the ground plan, above which the tall, many-windowed houses rose as some pale striated cliff-face toward the strip of infinitely remote, star-pierced sky. It was sharply cold, and through the exciting tumult of the streets he could detect a shrill singing of wind in telegraph and telephone wires and amid the branches of the leafless trees. In like manner, passing from the material to the moral plane, through the accentuated vivacity of the amusement-seeking crowd, he seemed to detect, as so often in Paris--is not that, indeed, half the secret of her magic and her charm?--a certain instability and menace, a shrill singing of possible social upheaval, of Revolution always there close at hand awaiting her surely recurrent hour of opportunity.
To Adrian, after precedent-ridden, firmly planted, middle-class England and the English, that effect of instability, that shrill singing of social upheaval, proved stimulating. He breathed it in with conscious enjoyment while negotiating thickly peopled pavements or madly tram- and- motor-rushed crossings. For these dear Parisians, as he told himself, alike in mind and in appearance, are both individual and individualists with a positive vengeance, possessing not only the courage of their physical types--and making, for beauty or the reverse, the very most of them--and the courage of their convictions; but the courage of their emotions likewise. And how refreshingly many are those emotions, how variegated, how incalculable, how explosive! How articulate, too, ready at a moment's notice to justify their existence by the discharge of salvos of impassioned rhetoric! If the English might fairly be called a nation of pedants, these might, with at least equal fairness, be called a nation of comedians; not in the sense of pretending, of intentionally playing a part--to that affectation the English were far more addicted--but in the sense of regarding themselves and life from a permanently dramatic standpoint. Wasn't it worth while to have been away for a time, since absence had so heightened his appreciation of racial contrasts and power of recognizing them?
And there he paused in his pæan. For on second thoughts, were these psychologic determinations so well worth the practical cost of them? Is gain of the abstract ever worth loss in the concrete? His thought turned with impatience to Stourmouth, to the Tower House and its inhabitants, and to the loss of precious time which devotion to their affairs had, in point of fact, caused him. Resultant appreciation of psychologic phenomena seemed but a meager recompense for such expenditure. For this absence had made him lose ground in relation to Madame St. Leger. Miss Beauchamp intimated as much; intimated, too, that while he lost ground others had gained it, had done their best to jump his claim, so to speak, and had, in a measure at least, succeeded--take Mademoiselle Zélie de Gand, for example.
Whereupon Adrian ceased to take any interest, philosophic or otherwise, in the wonderful midnight streets and midnight people; becoming himself
## actively, even aggressively, individualist, as he brushed his way
through the throng, his expression the reverse of urbane and his pace almost headlong.
For who, in the devil's name, had dared give that much-discussed, plausible, very astute and clever, also very much discredited arrivist and novelist--Zélie de Gand--an introduction to Madame St. Leger? Miss Beauchamp owned to a suspicion. And then, yes, of course he remembered last year meeting the great Zélie at René Dax's studio! Remembered, too, how René had pressed a short story of hers upon him for publication in the Review; and had sulked for a week afterward when--not without laughter--he had pronounced the said story quite clearly unprintable. Did René, after all, represent the further reason, not as aspirant to _la belle Gabrielle's_ thrice-sacred hand indeed; but as her mental director, inciting her to throw in her lot with agitators and extremists, Feminists, Futurists, and such-like pestilent persons--enemies of marriage and of the family, of moral and spiritual authority, of all sane canons of art, music and literature, reckless anarchists in thought and purpose if not, through defective courage, in actual deed? Was this what Anastasia Beauchamp hinted at? Was it against risk of such abominable stabling of swine in his own
## particular Holy of Holies--for the young man's anger and alarm, now
thoroughly aroused, tended to express themselves in no measured language--she did her best to warn him?
Again, as earlier that day, a necessity for immediate and practical
## action laid hold on him. Delay became not only intolerable, but
unpardonable. He must know, and he must also prevent this campaign of defilement and outrage going further. Wherefore he bolted into the first empty cab, had himself whirled to the _Boulevard du Montparnasse_, and projected himself, bomb-like, bursting with protest and indignation, into René Dax's great, dusky, white-walled studio; to find, in the stillness, nothing more pertinent to the matter in hand than the gentle, gray lemur sitting in its scarlet-painted baby's chair before the fire, the orange-and-black blotched newts and small ancient tortoises crawling upon the rock-work of the little fountain, while in the glass tank the gleaming fishes swam lazily to and fro. Of the owner of this quaint menagerie no signs were visible.
But neither René's absence nor the presence of his queer associates held Adrian's attention more than a few seconds; for, upon an easel facing him as he entered, placed where the light of the hanging lamps fell strongest, was a drawing in red chalk, which at once fed his anger by its subject and commanded his unqualified admiration by its consummate beauty and art.
Nearly half life-size, the figure poised, the head slightly inclined, proudly yet lovingly, toward the delicious child she carried on her arm, Gabrielle St. Leger stepped toward him, as on air, from off the tall panel of ivory-tinted cartridge paper. The attitude was precisely that in which he had seen her this afternoon, when she told René Dax the "door should remain open since little Bette wished it." The two figures were rendered with a suavity, yet precision, of treatment, a noble assurance of line and faithfulness of detail, little short of miraculous considering the time in which the drawing must have been executed.--Yes, it was _la belle Gabrielle_ to the life; and alive--how wonderfully alive! The tears came into the young man's eyes, so deeply did this counterfeit presentment of her move him, and so very deeply did he love her. He noted, in growing amazement, little details, even little blemishes, dear to his heart as a lover, since these differentiated her beauty from that of other beautiful women, giving the original, the intimate and finely personal note.
And then anger shook him more sharply than ever, for how dare any man, save himself, note these infinitely precious, because exclusively personal, touches? How dare René observe, still more how dare he record them? His offense was rank; since to do so constituted an unpardonable liberty, a gross intrusion upon her individuality. René knew too much, quite too much, and, for the moment, Adrian was assailed by a very simple and comprehensive desire to kill him.
But now a wave of humiliation, salt and bitter, submerged this unhappy lover. For not only was that little devil of a Tadpole's drawing a masterpiece in its realization of the outward aspect of Gabrielle St. Leger, but of insight into the present workings of her mind and heart. Had not he apprehended and set forth here, with the clarity and force of undeniable genius, just all that which Anastasia Beauchamp had tried to tell him--Adrian Savage--about her? What he, Adrian, notwithstanding the greatness of his devotion, fumbled over and misinterpreted, René grasped unaided, and thus superbly chronicled! For, here indeed, to quote Anastasia, Gabrielle's eyes were turned toward the future and the strange unrestful wind--the wind of Modernity--which blows from out the future, was upon her face; with the result that her expression and bearing were exalted, a noble going forth to meet fate in them, she herself as one consecrated, at once the embodiment and exponent of some compelling idea, the leader of some momentous movement, the elect spokeswoman of a new and tremendous age.
Beholding all which, poor Adrian's spirits descended with most disintegrating velocity into his boots, and miserably camped at that abject level. For though he might declare, and very honestly believe, the idea in question, the movement in question, to be so much moonshine, and the Spirit of the Age a rank impostor, how did he propose to convince Madame St. Leger of that? The inquiry brought him up as against a brick wall. Yes, Miss Beauchamp had been rather cruelly right when she told him his work was cut out for him and would prove a mighty tough job. For what, calmly considered, had he, after all, to offer as against those alluring and immense perspectives?--Really, when he came to ask himself, it made him blush.--Only an agreeable, fairly talented and well-conditioned young man--that was all; and marriage--marriage, an old story to Gabrielle, a commonplace affair about which she already knew everything that there is to know. Of course she didn't know everything about it, he went on, plucking up a little spirit again. Hers had been a marriage of convenience; a marriage of reason. Poor Horace was by a whole generation her senior. Whereas, in the present case, it all would be so different--a great and exclusive passion, et cetera, et cetera. He would have liked to wax eloquent, descanting upon that difference and its resultant illuminating values. But his eloquence stuck in his throat somehow. Himself as a husband--humor compelled him to own, with a pretty sharp stab of mortification, this a rather stale and meager programme as alternative to cloudy splendors of self-consecration to the mighty purposes of Modernity and the Spirit of the Age.
"She is very beautiful, is she not, my Madonna of the Future?"
René Dax asked the question in soft, confidential accents. He stood at Adrian's elbow, clothed in a scarlet Japanese silk smoking-suit. Upon his neat bare feet he wore a pair of black Afghan sandals. Uttering little loving, crooning cries, the gray lemur balanced itself upon his shoulders, clasping his great domed head with thin furry arms and furry-backed, black-palmed hands, the finger-tips of which just met upon the center of his forehead.
"I have been watching, from behind the screen, the effect she produced on you. I have given up going to bed, you see. I wrap myself in blankets and quilts and sleep here--when I do sleep--upon one of the divans. It is more artistic. It is simpler. The bed, when you come to consider it, is, like the umbrella, the mark of the bourgeois, of the bourgeoise and of all their infected progeny. It represents, as you may say, the battle-cry of middle-class civilization. The domestic hearth? No, no. The domestic bed. How far more scientific and philosophic a definition! Therefore I abjure it.--So I was lying there on the divan in meditation. I am preparing illustrations for an _édition de luxe of Les Contes Drolatiques_. It is not designed for family reading. It will probably be printed in Belgium and sold at Port Said. I lie on my back. I cover my face, thus isolating myself from contemplation of surrounding objects, so that my imagination may play freely around those agreeable tales. In the midst of my meditation I heard you burst in. At first I felt annoyed. Then I arose silently and watched the effect this portrait produced on you. I was rewarded; for it knocked the bluster pretty effectually out of you, eh, _mon vieux_? I saw you droop, grow dejected, pull your beard, wipe your eyes, eh? And you deserved all that, for your manner was offensive this afternoon. You treated me disrespectfully. Have you now come to apologize? It would be only decent you should do so. But I do not press the point. I can afford to be magnanimous, since, in any case, I am even with you. My Madonna is my revenge."
"I did not come to apologize, but to demand explanation," Adrian began, hotly. Then his tone changed. Truly he was very unhappy, very heavy of heart. "You are right," he added. "This drawing is your revenge."
"You do not like my drawing."
"On the contrary, I find it glorious, wonderful."
"And it hurts you?"
"Yes, it hurts me," he answered hoarsely, backing away. "I hate it."
"I am so glad," René said, sweetly. He put his hand behind his scarlet back, and tweaked the tip of the lemur's long furry tail affectionately.
"You hear, you rejoice with me, oh, venerable Aristides!" he murmured.
To which the little creature replied by clasping his head more tightly and making strange, coaxing noises.
"But there,--for the moment my Madonna has done precisely what I asked of her, so now let us talk about something else, _mon vieux_, something less controversial. Why not? For here, after all, she is fixed, my Madonna. She can't run away, happily. We can always return and, though she is mine, I will permit you to take another look at her. So--well--do you remark how I have changed my decorative scheme since you last visited me? Is it original, startling, eh? That is what I intended. Again I felt the need to simplify. I called for plasterers, painters, upholsterers. When they will be paid I haven't a conception; but that is a contemptible detail. I rushed them. I harried them. I drove them before me like a flock of geese, a troop of asses. 'Work,' I screamed, 'work. Delay is suffocation to my imagination. This transformation must be effected instantly.' For suddenly color sickened me. I comprehended what a fraud, what a subterfuge and inanity it is. Form alone matters, alone is permanent and essential. Color bears to form the same relation which emotion bears to reason, which sensation bears to intellect. It represents an attitude rather than an entity. I recognized it as adventitious, accidental, unscientific, hysterical. So I had them all washed out, ripped off, obliterated, my tender, tearful blues and greens, my caressing pinks, my luscious mauves and purples, my rapturously bilious, sugar-sweet yellows, all my adorably morbid florescence of putrifaction in neutral-tinted semi-tones, and limited my scheme to this harshly symbolic triad. See everywhere, everywhere, black, white, red--these three always and only--beating upon my brain, feeding my eyes with thoughts of darkness, night, death, the bottomless pit, despair, iniquity; of light, day, snow, the colorless ether, virtue, the child's blank soul, immaculate sterility. And then red--red, the horrid whipper-in and huntsman of us all, meaning life, fire, lust, pain, carnage, sex, revolution and war, scarlet-lipped scorn and mockery--the raw, gaping, ever-bleeding, ever-breeding wound, in short, upon the body of the Cosmos which we call Humanity."
The young man's affectation of imperturbability for once deserted him. He was shaken by the force of his own speech. His voice rose, vibrating with passion, taking on, indeed, an almost maniacal quality, highly distressing to Adrian and altogether terrifying to the lemur, which moaned audibly and shivered as it clutched at his forehead.
"Get down, Aristides," he cried with sudden childish petulance. "Unclasp your hands. You scratch. You hurt me. Go back to your little chair. I am tired. I have worked too hard. The back of my head stabs with pain. I suffer, I suffer so badly."
He came close to Adrian, who, his nerves too very much on edge, still stood before the noble drawing of Gabrielle St. Leger.
"I am not well," he said, plaintively. "Certainly I have overworked, and it is all your fault. Yet listen, _mon vieux_. Your affection is necessary to me. Therefore do not let us quarrel. I own you enraged me this afternoon. I did not want you just then."
"Nor I you," Adrian returned, with some asperity.
"And your manner was at once insufferably brusque and insufferably possessive. I could not let it pass. I felt it incumbent upon me to administer correction. But I would not descend to anything commonplace in the way of chastisement. I would lay an ingenious trap for you. I came straight home. I seated myself here. I set up this panel, and I drew, and drew, and drew, without pause, without food, in a tense frenzy of concentration, of recollection, till I had completed this portrait. I was possessed, inspired. Never have I worked with such fury, such torment and ecstasy. For I had, at once, to assure myself of your sentiments toward the subject of that picture, and to read you a lesson. I had to prove to you that I, too, amount to something which has to be reckoned with; that I, too, have power."
"You have commanding power," Adrian answered, bitterly. "The power of genius."
"Then, then," René Dax cried, "since you acknowledge my power, will you consent to leave my Madonna alone? Will you consent not to make any further attempt to interfere between her and me, to pay court to and marry her?"
The attack in its directness proved, for the moment, staggering. Adrian stood, his eyes staring, his mouth half open, actually recovering his breath, which seemed fairly knocked out of him by the amazing impudence of this proposition. Yet wasn't it perfectly in the part? Wasn't it just exactly the egregious Tadpole all over? His mind swung back instinctively to scenes of years ago in play-ground, class-room, dormitory, when--while though himself exasperated--he had intervened to protect René, a boy brilliant as he was infuriating, from the consequences of some colossal impertinence in word or deed. And that swing back to recollection of their school-days produced in Adrian a salutary lessening of nervous excitement, restoring his self-confidence, focusing his outlook, both on events and persons to a normal perspective.
"So that I may leave the stage conveniently clear for you, _mon petit_?" he inquired, quite good-temperedly. "No, I am sorry, but I'm afraid I cannot consent to do anything of the kind."
And then he moved away across the studio, leaving the egregious Tadpole to digest his refusal. For he did not want to quarrel, either. Far from it. That instinctive throw-back into their school-boy friendship brought home to him how very much attached to this wayward being he actually was. So that, of all things, he wanted to avoid a quarrel, if such avoidance were consonant with restraint of René's influence in a certain dear direction and development of his own.
"Nothing will turn me from my purpose, _mon petit_," he said, gently, even gaily, over his shoulder. "Nothing--make sure of that--nothing, nobody, past, present, or to come."
He proceeded, with slightly ostentatious composure, to study the dado of pictured figures rioting along the surface of the white distempered walls. He had delivered his ultimatum. Very soon he meant to depart, for it was no use attempting to hold further intercourse with René to-night. Once you brought him up short, like this, for a greater or lesser period he was certain to sulk. It was wisest to let him have his sulk out. And--his eyes growing accustomed to the dusky light--good heavens, how superbly clever, how grossly humorous those pictured figures were! Was there any draftsman living who could compare with René Dax? No, decidedly he didn't want to quarrel with the creature. He only wanted to prevent his confusing certain issues and doing harm. Yet, as he passed from group to group, from one outrageous witticism to another, the difficulty of maintaining an equable attitude increased upon him. For it was hateful to remember that the same hand and brain which had projected that heroic portrait of Madame St. Leger was responsible for these indecencies as well. Looking at some of these, thinking of that, he could have found it in his heart, he feared, to take Master René by the throat and put an end to his drawing for ever, so atrocious a profanity did such coexistence, such, in a sense, correlation appear.
And then, moving on again, he started and drew back in absolute consternation. For there, right in front of him, covering the wall for a space of two yards or more, he came on a series of sketches--some dashed in in charcoal, some carefully finished in red and black chalk--of Joanna Smyrthwaite.--Joanna, arrayed in man's clothing, a slovenly, ragged jacket suit, sagging from her thin limbs and angular shoulders; she bareheaded, moreover, her hair cropped, her face telling of drink and dissipation, loose-lipped, repulsive to the point of disgust in its weakness and profligate misery, her attitudes degraded, almost bestial as she cringed on all fours or lay heaped together like so much shot rubbish.
Adrian put his hands over his eyes. Looked again. Turned indignantly to demand an answer to this hideous riddle. But his host had disappeared. Only the gray lemur sat in its scarlet-painted baby's chair before the fire; and from off the tall white panel Gabrielle St. Leger, carrying her child on her arm, stepped forth to meet the Future, while the unrestful wind which blows from out the Future--the fateful wind of Modernity--played upon her beloved face.
III
THE OTHER SIDE
##