"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."