“Uncle, uncle, be patient!  Tell Mr. Shannon, and he, too, will become a believer.  I believe in you.  I believe in him, Mr. Shannon.  Don’t sneer!  Tell him, uncle.”  Mila’s words, almost imploring in their tone, calmed the infuriated inventor, who left the room.  He reentered in a moment, his head dripping, and he was grinning broadly.

“Whenever I encounter a refractory pattern in my fireworks—­as you call them—­I am compelled to throw a bucket of water over it to quench its too ardent spirits.  I have just done the same to my own head, dear Mr. Shannon, and I ask your pardon for my rudeness.  Get some fresh tea, Mila, strong tea, Mila.”  Pipes were relighted and the conversation resumed.

“I forgot in my obsession, in what Jacob Boehme calls ’the shudder of divine excitement,’ that I was talking to one of the uninitiated.  I suppose you think by pyrotechny I mean the old-fashioned methods of set pieces, ghastly portraits in fire, big, spouting wheels, rockets, war scenes from contemporary history, seaside stuff, badly done—­and flowery squibs.  My boy, all that, still admired by our country cousins, is the very infancy of my art.  In China, where nearly everything was invented ages ago, in China I learned the first principles, also the possibilities of the art of fireworks; yes, call it by its humble title.  In China I have seen surprising things at night.  Pagodas blown across the sky, an army of elephants in pursuit, and all bathed in the most divine hues imaginable.  But their art suffers from convention.  They accomplish miracles considering the medium they work in—­largely gunpowder.  And their art has no meaning, no message, no moral principle, no soul.  Years ago I discovered all the aids necessary to the pyrotechnist.  I am not a chemist for nothing.  If I can paint a fair imitation of a Claude Monet on canvas, I can also produce for you a colourless gas which, when handled by a virtuoso, produces astonishing illusions.  In the open air, against the dark background of the horizon, I can show you the luminous dots planewise of the Impressionists; or I can give you the broad, sabrelike brushwork of Velasquez, or the imperial tintings of Titian.  I can paint pictures on the sky.  I can produce blazing symphonies.  I will prove to you that colour is also music.  This sounds as if I were a victim to that lesion of the brain called ‘coloured-audition.’  Perhaps!  Not Helmholtz or Chevreul can tell me anything new in the science of optics.  I am the possessor of the rainbow secrets—­for somewhere in Iceland, a runic legend runs, there is a region vast as night, where all the rainbows—­worn out or to be used—­drift about in their vapoury limbo.  I have the key to this land of dreams.  Over the earth I shall float my rainbows of art like a flock of angels.  With them I propose to dazzle the eyes of mankind, to arouse sleeping souls.  From the chords of the combined arts I shall extort nobler cadences, nobler rhythms, for men to live by, for men to die for!”