The Golden Fleece (8 page)

The pale brown was sand: Egyptian sand, to judge by the ruins and statuary projecting through it at intervals. Some of the half-buried statues had faces, but they weren’t human faces; they were the faces of sphinxes. Inevitably, Shelley’s immortal line—”Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”—sprang to mind, but that wasn’t really the tenor of the picture. It wasn’t celebrating or regretting the decay that had all but erased the residue of a once-great civilization, but using its extreme subtlety of color to imply a near-identity between the stones and the sand, the shaped and the shapeless. It was an austere picture, but there was nothing sinister about it, and Adrian couldn’t get any implication of the supernatural from its peeping sphinxes, which seemed like mere human artifacts, fading into dust in the wake of their makers.

The dark brown, on the other hand, was a calculated exercise in the sinister and the supernatural, which seemed to be aiming to create a sense of unease by concealing its effects just out of the range of ordinary human sight. This one might not have seemed like a mere splodge even to Jason Jarndyke, although he would probably have been hard-pressed to identify anything in it other than trees-trunks and branches. It was another forest, but not leafy forest—there were only a few hints of dark green in the mix. This was a dense forest seen from within, all gnarled tree-trunks and decaying humus. This forest was inhabited, as the other had been, but not by conventional mythological creatures. There were strange squirrels and squatting toads, whose air of menace was not contained in anything as obvious as fangs and claws, but in a peculiar implication of
disease.

It was an ugly painting, and Adrian wondered whether Angelica had simply found it easier to paint the ugly than the beautiful, given her technical limitations, and had simply decided, in this instance, to play to her strengths. He was reluctant to conclude, now, that there might be any deep psychological significance in it, let alone any attempted magic. He was conscious of the fact that it was supposed to seem scary, but for that very reason, he found it slightly amusing, like a schlock-horror movie striving too hard for effect

The blacks were where the actual witches figured, though. In one, they were traditional witches in black conical hats, gathered around a cauldron. It was like a scene from Macbeth, and might well have been exactly that. It was redolent with tradition—tradition that did not seem to have been excessively tarnished by the travesties of Hallowe’en. The other was quite different; in that one there was a black tower, and black cats, and a black-clad witch standing tall and imperious, mistress of all she surveyed. The witches gathered around the cauldron in the other painting were hagwives, but the witch standing in front of the tower and behind the cat was more Morgan le Fay, a custodian of the kind of cold, implacable beauty that Medusa might have had before her hair became snaky and her gaze literally lethal. Her stare was not murderous, in any straightforward sense, but it was omnipotent.

Again, Adrian wondered if this had been intended as a kind of self-portrait, the dream of some dark
doppelgänger
—but it was not a calculated attempt to produce something frightening, as the second forest scene clearly was. It was an exercise in the deployment of the subtle shades that the common eye lumped together as “black,” its then almost incidental. For Adrian, it had all the subtleties of artificial photosynthesis and it was easy for him to imagine it soaking up the sun’s energy, in order to generate...what? Perhaps pure magic; raw power of a different sort. He liked it—but on balance, he thought that he liked the picture of the Golden Fleece, from which it was separated by the full length of the library, a little better.

Adrian studied each of the paintings for some considerable time, mentally placing them in a hypothetical chronological order. All in all, he felt relieved. They were experiments, attempts to do different and varied things within the limitation of different but equally slender margins of coloration. Experiments he understood; he was a scientist. Psychologically, he felt that his feet had touched bottom. He was no longer out of his depth.

Eventually, he turned to Angelica Jarndyke and said: “Thank you. I appreciate your letting me look at them.”

“Is that it?” she demanded.

Adrian gathered his courage. “Am I still on trial?” He asked. “Do you want me to tell you what I see, just to prove that I can?”

She thought about it for a moment, but then said: “No. I believe that you can see them. That’s not the point. What do you think of them?”

“I think they’re superb, in their way. Obviously, I’ve never see anything like them. I had no idea that anything like them could be done. They’re magnificent...if a little esoteric.”

“But you don’t like then?” she said, flatly.

He hesitated before saying. “They’re too varied for a collective judgment. I like some better than others. Less striking than the Hellfire, but that’s understandable given that the Hellfire had a thematic advantage as well as the shock of first impact. I
do
like the idea behind them, Mrs. Jarndyke—how could I not, given that they are, in a sense, especially designed for my eyes. If you want me to tell you that they’re great art, though, I can’t. They’re good, but they’re not works of genius. They’re not comparable with Monet or Rothko, or even the Vigeland brothers. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “I’d come to the same conclusion myself. Perhaps I’ve only been hiding them in subtle shades of color so that Jason wouldn’t see them, wouldn’t see my mediocrity.

“Your husband could never think that you’re mediocre, Mrs. Jarndyke, and neither do I.”

“But I can’t claim credit for nature’s work, can I?” she said, keeping her tone deliberately light. “I wanted to
do
something. You understand that, don’t you Mr. Stamford? You’re a genius, after all. You can do more than see.”

“That remains to be proven,” Adrian murmured—but he raised his voice to say: “But you
have
done something, Mrs. Jarndyce. Something nobody else has ever done before. Something unique. I’m just a scientist—you can’t trust my judgment, but you
can
trust my sight. This is amazing work.”

“In its way,” she added.

“In its way,” he agreed. “That’s not an insult, Mrs. Jarndyke. Nobody else in the world could have done this. Nobody else in the world could have shown me this, and I’m truly grateful. And we’re not alone, Mrs. Jarndyke. There must be others. We’re not as good as bees, because we don’t have the same selective pressures operating on us, but we’re in the age of genetic engineering now, and we’re beginning to understand the physiological bases of esthetics. In time, if they want to, our descendants will be able to see far better than we can—you and me included, Mrs. Jarndyke.”

“Bees?”
she repeated, incredulously.

“I assume so,” he said. “There’s a wider range of pigmentation in nature—a wider range of pigment-producing genes—-than the average human eye can discriminate. Natural selection produced them; ergo there must be organisms that can see them—the organisms to which the colors are, so to speak, addressed. Pollinators that the flowers are competing to attract: bees, among others. Hummingbirds too, probably.”

Angelica nodded, in a particular fashion, to confirm that she could follow the argument, and would think about it.

“Perhaps, one day,” Adrian went on, “when everyone is able to see as we see, your paintings will be hanging in every gallery on Earth, as the pioneering works of a whole new dimension of artistic endeavor. Maybe others will be better, in time, but you’ll always have been the first. No one can take that away from you.”

“No one we know of,” she said. “But somewhere, lying neglected in some dusty attic or the storerooms of some lunatic asylum....”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Jarndyke,” Adrian said, not interrupting because she had deliberately trailed off. “Your husband believed that you’d be happy to find someone who could see your work— and pleased with him for having found that someone. He wanted you to be pleased. I think I can understand why you’re not, but I’m not sure that he can.”

“You want me to pretend? For your sake?”

“It’s not for me to ask you to do anything—but if I did want you to pretend, it would be for his sake, not mine. He’s not at fault, Mr. Jarndyke. He might not give a damn about Rothko or Emanuel Vigeland, but he really would like to be able to appreciate your painting. It worries him that he can’t—but it isn’t his fault.”

Adrian almost continued, but decided that he might already have said too much. Jason Jarndyke was his employer, and he had to make every possible effort not to cause any difficulty. He took a step toward the door, hoping that they could simply go back to the dining room, where he could tell Jason Jarndyke once again what a magnificent artist his wife was, and how grateful he was to have seen her work.

Medea wouldn’t let him. She didn’t do anything as crude as blocking his way, but she stopped him in his tracks with a glance. Beautiful women could do that Adrian knew, but he couldn’t help a slight superstitious shudder.

“Why?” she said. “You think you understand—so why?”

“I thought the trial was over,” Adrian countered.

“I believe that you see it. You’ve yet to convince me that you understand it.”

Adrian thought about it, and then said: “I can’t, Mrs. Jarndyke. I know that there’s been a misunderstanding here—that your reaction to discovering that I can see your paintings wasn’t at all what your husband expected, and still isn’t. I know that, in a sense, I’ve let him down. He wanted to make you a gift of my eyes, of my special sight, because he thinks that you’ve been yearning for an audience for all the fifteen years that you’ve been married, and maybe longer. I think I do understand why you’re disappointed...but I couldn’t even attempt to convince you of it without stirring up trouble, and that’s the last thing I want to do. Please let me go, Mrs. Jarndyke. You have no use for me; it was very kind of you to let me see your paintings, and I’m truly grateful, but I’d like to return to my own work now.”

He had been trying to smooth things over, to worm his way out of his predicament, but he could see in Angelica Jarndyke’s marvelously beautiful face that he’d only made things worse. He cursed himself for having been a fool, for not having known what to say and not having the sense simply to keep quiet.

“What would
you
have done?” she asked, in a deadly whisper.

That, Adrian realized, was what she really wanted to know. She was only a Yorkshirewoman by marriage, he knew, but he didn’t think she’d have much patience for beating around the bush, so he stopped trying.

“I’ve asked myself that, once or twice, since I saw your
Inferno
,” he admitted. “What would I have done if, as well as being able to see the full color spectrum, and teach myself to identify and analyze a significant fraction of its psychological effects, I’d also been able to paint? For a little while, it seemed like a conundrum, but then I realized that I already had the answer. I’d have done what I
am
doing, with my own particular talent. Instead of studying genetics, in order to generate as many of the spectrum’s gradations of color in different organic pigments, I’d have done what you initially did, and gone to art school to learn technique. And when I’d learned the tricks of the trade, I’d have looked for an opportunity to apply them—but I’d have looked for a way to apply them in such a way that people could see what I was doing, perhaps not entirely consciously, but nevertheless visibly.

“I’d have done what other painters with our particular talent have done in the past, using all the colors of the palette in individual paintings. I’d have painted images that even people like Mr. Jarndyce could see without effort: portraits, flowers, foliage...maybe even sirens, fauns and witches. I’d have used my additional powers of discrimination to build in extra levels of suggestion, tantalizingly beyond the easy reach of commonplace consciousness, but I wouldn’t have tried to hide what I was representing; I wouldn’t have created an entire occult art that, so far as I knew,
nobody
else would ever be able to see...something for myself alone. Maybe that makes me less than a true artist. Maybe it makes me into a commercial hack, just looking for a way to market my talent. But that’s what I do—and that’s what I would have done, if I’d been able to paint but had no aptitude for science. I suppose I’d have gone into advertising.”

Adrian was afraid that Angelica Jarndyke might take offense at the implicit criticism, and that she might be fully entitled to do so—but if her sentiments inclined her in that direction, she controlled them. She didn’t go so far as to nod her head to concede the justice of his case, but she didn’t oppose it.