"I am altogether on your side," she said. "But I cannot pretend it is plain sailing for you. There is a reserve of enthusiasm in her nature, an heroic strain pushing her toward great enterprises. It may be she will suffer before she arrives, will be led astray, will follow delusions. Her mind is critical rather than creative. She is disposed to distrust her instincts and to reason where she had ten thousand times better only feel. And, as I tell you, she looks toward the future; the restless wind of it is upon her face, alluring, exciting her. No—no—it is not plain sailing for you, my dear young man. But, for Heaven's sake, don't let true love be your undoing, seducing you from work, from personal achievement in your own admirable world of letters. For remember, the greater your own success the more you have to offer. And the modern woman asks that. She requires not merely Somebody to whom to give herself, but Something which shall so satisfy her brain and her ambitions as to make that supreme act of giving worth while."
Anastasia smiled wistfully, sadly.
"Yes, indeed, times have changed and the fashion of them! Man's supremacy is very quaintly threatened. For the first time in the history of the human race he finds sex at a discount.—But now good-night, my dear Savage. Whenever you think I can help you, come. You will always be welcome. And—this last word at parting—do your possible to keep that little horror away from her. In him Modernity finds a most malign embodiment. Farewell."
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.