IVREACTIONLOGANmade nearly two hundred pounds out of the exhibition and Mendel over a hundred. His family rejoiced in his triumph. A hundred pounds was a good year’s income to them. They rejoiced, but it was an oppression to him to go back to them and to talk in Yiddish, in which there were no words for all that he cared for most. Impossible to explain to them about art, for they had neither words nor mental conceptions. Art was to them only a wonderful way of making money, a kind of magic that went on in the West End, where, once a man was established, he had only to open his pockets for money to fall into them.Up to a point he could share their elation, for in his bitter moments he too was predatory. If the Christian world would not admit him on equal terms he had no compunction about despoiling it.The words “infant prodigy” stuck in his throat, and with his family it seemed indeed impossible that the Jews could produce art. How could they, when they had no care for it? And how had he managed to find his way to it? . . . Going back over his career step by step it seemed miraculous, and as though there were a special providence governing his life—Mr. Kuit, the Scotch traveller, Mitchell, Logan, all were as though they had been pushed forward at the critical moment. And for what? Merely to exploit an infant prodigy with a skilful trick? . . . He could not, he would not believe it. The pressure that had driven him along,the pressure within himself, had been too great for that, just to squeeze him out into the open and to fill his pockets with money. There was more meaning in it all than that, more shape, more design.Yet when he considered his work he was lacerated with doubt. It ended so palpably in the portrait of his father and mother, and he knew that he could never go back to that again. An art that was limited to Jewry was no art. Among the Jews no light could live. They would not have it. They would snuff it out, for it was their will to dwell in dark places and to wait upon the illumination that never came, as of course it never would until they looked within themselves.Within himself he knew there was a most vivid light glowing, a spark which only needed a breath of air upon it to burst into flame. He was increasingly conscious of it, and it made him feel transparent, as though nothing could be hidden from those who looked his way. What was there to hide? If there was evil, it lived but a little while and was soon spent, while that which was of worth endured and grew under recognition.Thence came his devotion to Logan, who simply ignored everything that apparently gave offence to others and saluted the rare, rich activity. It was nothing to Logan that he was a Jew and poor and uneducated: he was educated in art, and what more did he want? Logan was a friend indeed, and had proved it over and over again. He would take his doubts to Logan and they would be healed, but first he must go to the exhibition, the thought of which made him unhappy and uneasy.Cluny received him with open arms:—“A most successful exhibition. A great success. I hope you will let me have some of your work by me. A most charming exhibition. There was only one mistake, if I may say so: theRuth.”Mendel walked miserably through the rooms. All Logan’s pictures were in the best light: his own were half in shadow.“Mr. Logan has the making of a great reputation,” said Cluny, “a very great reputation.”“Oh, very clever!” said Mendel, suddenly exasperated more by Logan’s pictures than by the dealer.Indeed, “very clever” was the right description for Logan’s work. It attracted and charmed and tickled, but it did not satisfy. The pictures gave Mendel the same odd sense of familiarity as the picture in Camden Town had done, and turning suddenly, his eye fell on his own unhappyRuth. The figure was shockingly bad. He acknowledged the simpering sentimentality of the face. And he had been trying to paint love! But in spite of the figure, the picture held him. It was to him the matrix of the whole exhibition. Wiping out of consideration his own early drawings, it explained and accounted for every other piece of work. The least dexterous of them all, it had freshness and vitality and a certain thrust of simplification which everything else lacked. It was “solid,” and worth all Logan’s pictures put together.“Very good prices,” said the dealer. “Very good indeed.”Mendel paid no attention to him. He wanted to study hisRuth, to find out its precise meaning for him, and, if possible, in what mysterious part of his talent it had originated.It had made him feel happy again and had restored his confidence. He was serenely sure of himself, without arrogance. He was almost humble, yet tantalized because he could not think of a whole picture in the terms of that one piece of paint. He remembered the strange excitement in which he had conceived it, the almost nonchalance with which he had executed it. And to think that not a soul had seen it! The fools! The fools!He was ashamed to be seen looking so intently at his own work. The next day he was back again and told Cluny that it was not for sale.“I don’t think it’s a seller, Mr. Kühler,” said Cluny.“It’s not for sale,” repeated Mendel.He went every day and had no other thought. He wandered about in a dream, not seeing people in the streets, not hearing when he was spoken to.On the fifth day as he entered Cluny’s he began to tremble, and he fell against a man who was coming out. The blood rushed to his heart and beat at his temples. He knew why it was. The air seemed full of an enchantment that settled upon him and drew him towards the gallery. He knew he was going to see her, and she was there with Clowes, standing in front of hisRuth.Clowes was laughing at it, but Morrison, with brows knit, obviously angry, was trying to explain it.“I’m trying to explain the cornfield to Clowes,” she said. “Do come and help me.”“I can’t explain it myself,” he said, marvelling at the ease of the meeting. At once he and she were together and Clowes was out of it, like a dweller in another world.“I don’t think you ought to do things you can’t explain,” said Clowes.“Then you are wiping out Michael Angelo, and El Greco, and Blake, and Piero.”“Yes,” said Mendel. “You are wiping out inspiration altogether.”“Oh! if you think you are inspired I have nothing more to say,” replied Clowes rather tartly. She had felt instinctively that Mendel and Morrison would meet at the gallery, and was annoyed all the same that it had happened. She knew how they were regarded, and she herself did not approve. Morrison knew how impossible it was, and Clowes thought she ought not to allow it to go on.Clowes also recognized how completely she was out of it, and she made excuses and left them.“You are the only one who likes it,” he said.“I don’t like it, but I know that it isn’t bad. It isn’t good either, but it is real and it is you.”“I want no more than that,” he said, “from you.”In his mind he had prepared all sorts of reproaches for his meeting with her, but they fell away from his lips. He could only accept that it was good and sweet and natural to be with her.He told her quite simply how he had come to paint the picture, and how he had tried to paint his love for her. She smiled and shook away her smile.“I’m glad it isn’t anything like that really,” she said.“I tried to tell you what it was like when I wrote to you.”“Yes.”That was all she could say. She had been very unhappy, often desperately wretched, because her instinct fought so furiously against the idea of love with him whom she loved.“The picture has made me very happy,” she added. “It means that what I have been wanting to happen to you has happened. Youaredifferent, you know. I can talk to you so much more easily.”He suggested that they should walk in the Park and spend the day together, and she consented, glad that all the reproaches and storms she had dreaded should be so lightly brushed away.Happy, happy lovers, for whom nothing can defile the heavenly beauty of this earth; happy, from whom Time streams away, bearing with it all the foolish, restless activity of men; happy, for whom the pomps and vanities of the world are as though they had never been! Thrice happytwo, who in your united spirit bear so easily all the beauty, all the suffering, all the sorrow in the world, and bring it forth in joy, the flower of life that cometh up as a vision, fades, and sheds its seed upon the rich, warm soil of humanity. Emblem of immortality for ever shining in the union of spirits, in the enchantment of two who are together and in love.So happy were they that they wandered for the most part in silence through the avenues and over the grassy spaces of the Park.Of the two, she had the better brain, and, indeed, the stronger character. She had been toughened in the struggle to break out of the web of hypocrisy and meaningless tradition of gentility in which her family was enmeshed, and the freedom she had won was very precious to her. She kept it as a touchstone by which to measure her acquaintance and her experience, and, using it now, she realized that there were two distinct delights in being with Mendel on this tender autumn day; one tempted her with its promise of furious joys and wild, baffling emotions. It seduced her with its suggestion that this way lay kindness, the gift to him of his desire, peace, and satisfaction. But behind the suggestion of kindness lay a menace to her freedom, which, being so much more precious than herself, she longed for him to share, as in the keen happiness of that day he had done. That was the other delight, more serene and more rare, infinitely more powerful, and she would not have it sacrificed to the less. The gift of herself to which she was tempted must mean the blending of her freedom with his, for without that there would be no true gift, only a surrender.She could not think it out or make it clear to herself, but she knew that it was surrender he was asking, and she knew that if she surrendered shewould be no more to him in a little while than the other women of passage with whom his life was darkened.Ought she not then to tell him, to keep him from living in false hopes? She persuaded herself that she ought, but she did not wish to spoil this delicious day. It was such torture to her when he blazed out at her and he became ugly with egoism.“Of course,” he said, “theRuthmakes all the difference. I can’t let you go now, because you are the only one who has really understood my work. I am almost frightened of it myself, and it makes me feel desperately lonely when I think of all I shall have to go through to get at what it really means.”“No. If you want me like that I don’t want you to let me go,” she said, “for it is so important.”“Yes,” he said. “It may mean an entirely new kind of picture, for I don’t know anybody’s work that has quite what is hammering away in my head to get out. It must be because you love me that you can feel it when no one else can. Even to Logan it is only like a superior poster.”How adorable he was in this mood of simplicity and humility! She could relax her vigilance, and sway unreservedly to his mood and give him all that he required of her, her clearness, her sensitive purity.“You are like no other woman in the world to me,” he went on. “You fill me with the most wonderful joy, like a Cranach or a Dürer drawing. I can forget almost that you are a woman, so that it is a most wonderful surprise that you are one after all. You are the only person in the world whom I can place side by side with my mother.”“You don’t know what it is to me,” she said, “to have a friend so strong and frank as you are.”He put out his hand and laid it on her arm wonderingly, as if to satisfy himself that she was really there, much as on his first visit to Hampstead he had touched the grass.“I think I shall live to be very old,” he said, “and you will be just the same to me then as you are now.”“Oh, Mendel!”“Say that again!” he said, but she could not speak. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she hung her head. She longed to take him to her arms and to fondle him, to make him young, to charm away the pitiful old weary helplessness that he had. Reacting from this mood in her, which he did not understand and took for the first symptoms of surrender, he became wild and boastful, and clowned like a silly boy to attract her attention.Her will set against him. She could not endure the sudden swoop from the highest sympathy to the gallantry of the streets, and when he was weary of his tricks she tried to bring him to his senses by asking him suddenly:—“Is Logan a nice man?”“He is my best friend. He has wonderful ideas and energy like a steam-engine, and he has suffered too. He is not like the art students who expect painting pictures to be as easy as knitting. He could have been almost anything, but he believes that art is the most important thing of all. He has made a great difference to me, by teaching me to be independent. . . . I will take you to see him one day.”“I should like to meet him, because he has made a great difference in you.”“He steals.”That gave Morrison a shock, for Mendel seemed to be stating the fact as a recommendation.“Yes. When he has no money he steals. I went with him once and we stole some reproductions.”She was sorry she had mentioned Logan. Mendel was a different creature at once. Their glamourous happiness was gone. Logan seemed to have stalked in between them and the purity of their delight withered away.He felt it as strongly as she, but thought she was deliberately escaping from him, that she was fickle and could not stay out the day’s happiness. Women, he knew, were like that. They gave out just as the best was still to come.It was dusk and they were in a lonely glade. He pounced on her and drew her to him:—“I want you to kiss me.”“No—no!”“Yes—yes—yes! I say you shall. I will not have you let it all slip away.”“Don’t! Don’t!” she said, in a passion of resentment. He was spoiling it all. How could he be so crude and insensible after this matchless day?At last he was convinced of her anger.“I don’t understand you,” he said. “Don’t you want anything like that?”“It has spoiled the day for me,” she answered, “or almost, for nothing could really spoil it.”She walked on and he stood still for a moment. Then he ran after her.“Did you . . . did you hate me then?”“No, I didn’t hate you. I hated myself more because I can’t say what I feel.”“If you don’t love me like that,” he said, “I love you all the same. I must see you often—always. I can’t live, I can’t work, if you don’t let me see you. . . . No. That isn’t true. I shall work whatever happens.”How she loved his honesty! He was making no attempt to creep behind her defences. They had baffled him, and he counted his wounds cheerfully.“If you don’t love me like that,” he went onexcitedly, “it doesn’t make any difference. You are my love all the same. You are in all my thoughts, in every drop of my blood, and you can do with me as you will. If you don’t love me like that I will never touch you. I can understand your not wanting to touch me, because I am dirty. I am dirty in my soul. I will never touch you. I promise that I will never touch you, and what you do not like in me you shall never see. . . .”She broke down, and burst into an unrestrained fit of weeping. Why could she not make clear to him, to herself, what she felt so clearly? . . . Oh! She knew she ought to tell him to go, to spare him all the suffering that he must endure, but also she knew by the measure of her need for him how sorely he must need her. Their need of each other was too profound, too strong, too passionate, easily to find its way to surface life, nor could it be satisfied with sweets too easily attained. . . . She must wait. To leave him or to surrender to him would be a betrayal of that high mystery wherein they had their spiritual meeting.“I shall win,” she said to herself, “I shall win. I know I shall win.”And she amazed him with her sudden lightness of heart. She laughed and told him how solemnly Clowes was taking it all, and how the loose-tongued busybodies were talking. . . . As if it mattered what they said! He mattered more than all of them, because they took easily what was next to hand and grew fat on it, while he fought his way upward step by step and was never satisfied, and would fight his way always step by step with bloody pains and suffering.“Oh, Mendel!” she cried; “I’m so proud—so proud of you.”She was too swift for him. He came lumbering after her, puzzled, amazed, confounded at findingin this girl something that was so much more than woman, something that could actually live on the high level of his creative thought, something as necessary to his thought as dew to the grass and the ripening corn.
LOGANmade nearly two hundred pounds out of the exhibition and Mendel over a hundred. His family rejoiced in his triumph. A hundred pounds was a good year’s income to them. They rejoiced, but it was an oppression to him to go back to them and to talk in Yiddish, in which there were no words for all that he cared for most. Impossible to explain to them about art, for they had neither words nor mental conceptions. Art was to them only a wonderful way of making money, a kind of magic that went on in the West End, where, once a man was established, he had only to open his pockets for money to fall into them.
Up to a point he could share their elation, for in his bitter moments he too was predatory. If the Christian world would not admit him on equal terms he had no compunction about despoiling it.
The words “infant prodigy” stuck in his throat, and with his family it seemed indeed impossible that the Jews could produce art. How could they, when they had no care for it? And how had he managed to find his way to it? . . . Going back over his career step by step it seemed miraculous, and as though there were a special providence governing his life—Mr. Kuit, the Scotch traveller, Mitchell, Logan, all were as though they had been pushed forward at the critical moment. And for what? Merely to exploit an infant prodigy with a skilful trick? . . . He could not, he would not believe it. The pressure that had driven him along,the pressure within himself, had been too great for that, just to squeeze him out into the open and to fill his pockets with money. There was more meaning in it all than that, more shape, more design.
Yet when he considered his work he was lacerated with doubt. It ended so palpably in the portrait of his father and mother, and he knew that he could never go back to that again. An art that was limited to Jewry was no art. Among the Jews no light could live. They would not have it. They would snuff it out, for it was their will to dwell in dark places and to wait upon the illumination that never came, as of course it never would until they looked within themselves.
Within himself he knew there was a most vivid light glowing, a spark which only needed a breath of air upon it to burst into flame. He was increasingly conscious of it, and it made him feel transparent, as though nothing could be hidden from those who looked his way. What was there to hide? If there was evil, it lived but a little while and was soon spent, while that which was of worth endured and grew under recognition.
Thence came his devotion to Logan, who simply ignored everything that apparently gave offence to others and saluted the rare, rich activity. It was nothing to Logan that he was a Jew and poor and uneducated: he was educated in art, and what more did he want? Logan was a friend indeed, and had proved it over and over again. He would take his doubts to Logan and they would be healed, but first he must go to the exhibition, the thought of which made him unhappy and uneasy.
Cluny received him with open arms:—
“A most successful exhibition. A great success. I hope you will let me have some of your work by me. A most charming exhibition. There was only one mistake, if I may say so: theRuth.”
Mendel walked miserably through the rooms. All Logan’s pictures were in the best light: his own were half in shadow.
“Mr. Logan has the making of a great reputation,” said Cluny, “a very great reputation.”
“Oh, very clever!” said Mendel, suddenly exasperated more by Logan’s pictures than by the dealer.
Indeed, “very clever” was the right description for Logan’s work. It attracted and charmed and tickled, but it did not satisfy. The pictures gave Mendel the same odd sense of familiarity as the picture in Camden Town had done, and turning suddenly, his eye fell on his own unhappyRuth. The figure was shockingly bad. He acknowledged the simpering sentimentality of the face. And he had been trying to paint love! But in spite of the figure, the picture held him. It was to him the matrix of the whole exhibition. Wiping out of consideration his own early drawings, it explained and accounted for every other piece of work. The least dexterous of them all, it had freshness and vitality and a certain thrust of simplification which everything else lacked. It was “solid,” and worth all Logan’s pictures put together.
“Very good prices,” said the dealer. “Very good indeed.”
Mendel paid no attention to him. He wanted to study hisRuth, to find out its precise meaning for him, and, if possible, in what mysterious part of his talent it had originated.
It had made him feel happy again and had restored his confidence. He was serenely sure of himself, without arrogance. He was almost humble, yet tantalized because he could not think of a whole picture in the terms of that one piece of paint. He remembered the strange excitement in which he had conceived it, the almost nonchalance with which he had executed it. And to think that not a soul had seen it! The fools! The fools!
He was ashamed to be seen looking so intently at his own work. The next day he was back again and told Cluny that it was not for sale.
“I don’t think it’s a seller, Mr. Kühler,” said Cluny.
“It’s not for sale,” repeated Mendel.
He went every day and had no other thought. He wandered about in a dream, not seeing people in the streets, not hearing when he was spoken to.
On the fifth day as he entered Cluny’s he began to tremble, and he fell against a man who was coming out. The blood rushed to his heart and beat at his temples. He knew why it was. The air seemed full of an enchantment that settled upon him and drew him towards the gallery. He knew he was going to see her, and she was there with Clowes, standing in front of hisRuth.Clowes was laughing at it, but Morrison, with brows knit, obviously angry, was trying to explain it.
“I’m trying to explain the cornfield to Clowes,” she said. “Do come and help me.”
“I can’t explain it myself,” he said, marvelling at the ease of the meeting. At once he and she were together and Clowes was out of it, like a dweller in another world.
“I don’t think you ought to do things you can’t explain,” said Clowes.
“Then you are wiping out Michael Angelo, and El Greco, and Blake, and Piero.”
“Yes,” said Mendel. “You are wiping out inspiration altogether.”
“Oh! if you think you are inspired I have nothing more to say,” replied Clowes rather tartly. She had felt instinctively that Mendel and Morrison would meet at the gallery, and was annoyed all the same that it had happened. She knew how they were regarded, and she herself did not approve. Morrison knew how impossible it was, and Clowes thought she ought not to allow it to go on.
Clowes also recognized how completely she was out of it, and she made excuses and left them.
“You are the only one who likes it,” he said.
“I don’t like it, but I know that it isn’t bad. It isn’t good either, but it is real and it is you.”
“I want no more than that,” he said, “from you.”
In his mind he had prepared all sorts of reproaches for his meeting with her, but they fell away from his lips. He could only accept that it was good and sweet and natural to be with her.
He told her quite simply how he had come to paint the picture, and how he had tried to paint his love for her. She smiled and shook away her smile.
“I’m glad it isn’t anything like that really,” she said.
“I tried to tell you what it was like when I wrote to you.”
“Yes.”
That was all she could say. She had been very unhappy, often desperately wretched, because her instinct fought so furiously against the idea of love with him whom she loved.
“The picture has made me very happy,” she added. “It means that what I have been wanting to happen to you has happened. Youaredifferent, you know. I can talk to you so much more easily.”
He suggested that they should walk in the Park and spend the day together, and she consented, glad that all the reproaches and storms she had dreaded should be so lightly brushed away.
Happy, happy lovers, for whom nothing can defile the heavenly beauty of this earth; happy, from whom Time streams away, bearing with it all the foolish, restless activity of men; happy, for whom the pomps and vanities of the world are as though they had never been! Thrice happytwo, who in your united spirit bear so easily all the beauty, all the suffering, all the sorrow in the world, and bring it forth in joy, the flower of life that cometh up as a vision, fades, and sheds its seed upon the rich, warm soil of humanity. Emblem of immortality for ever shining in the union of spirits, in the enchantment of two who are together and in love.
So happy were they that they wandered for the most part in silence through the avenues and over the grassy spaces of the Park.
Of the two, she had the better brain, and, indeed, the stronger character. She had been toughened in the struggle to break out of the web of hypocrisy and meaningless tradition of gentility in which her family was enmeshed, and the freedom she had won was very precious to her. She kept it as a touchstone by which to measure her acquaintance and her experience, and, using it now, she realized that there were two distinct delights in being with Mendel on this tender autumn day; one tempted her with its promise of furious joys and wild, baffling emotions. It seduced her with its suggestion that this way lay kindness, the gift to him of his desire, peace, and satisfaction. But behind the suggestion of kindness lay a menace to her freedom, which, being so much more precious than herself, she longed for him to share, as in the keen happiness of that day he had done. That was the other delight, more serene and more rare, infinitely more powerful, and she would not have it sacrificed to the less. The gift of herself to which she was tempted must mean the blending of her freedom with his, for without that there would be no true gift, only a surrender.
She could not think it out or make it clear to herself, but she knew that it was surrender he was asking, and she knew that if she surrendered shewould be no more to him in a little while than the other women of passage with whom his life was darkened.
Ought she not then to tell him, to keep him from living in false hopes? She persuaded herself that she ought, but she did not wish to spoil this delicious day. It was such torture to her when he blazed out at her and he became ugly with egoism.
“Of course,” he said, “theRuthmakes all the difference. I can’t let you go now, because you are the only one who has really understood my work. I am almost frightened of it myself, and it makes me feel desperately lonely when I think of all I shall have to go through to get at what it really means.”
“No. If you want me like that I don’t want you to let me go,” she said, “for it is so important.”
“Yes,” he said. “It may mean an entirely new kind of picture, for I don’t know anybody’s work that has quite what is hammering away in my head to get out. It must be because you love me that you can feel it when no one else can. Even to Logan it is only like a superior poster.”
How adorable he was in this mood of simplicity and humility! She could relax her vigilance, and sway unreservedly to his mood and give him all that he required of her, her clearness, her sensitive purity.
“You are like no other woman in the world to me,” he went on. “You fill me with the most wonderful joy, like a Cranach or a Dürer drawing. I can forget almost that you are a woman, so that it is a most wonderful surprise that you are one after all. You are the only person in the world whom I can place side by side with my mother.”
“You don’t know what it is to me,” she said, “to have a friend so strong and frank as you are.”
He put out his hand and laid it on her arm wonderingly, as if to satisfy himself that she was really there, much as on his first visit to Hampstead he had touched the grass.
“I think I shall live to be very old,” he said, “and you will be just the same to me then as you are now.”
“Oh, Mendel!”
“Say that again!” he said, but she could not speak. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she hung her head. She longed to take him to her arms and to fondle him, to make him young, to charm away the pitiful old weary helplessness that he had. Reacting from this mood in her, which he did not understand and took for the first symptoms of surrender, he became wild and boastful, and clowned like a silly boy to attract her attention.
Her will set against him. She could not endure the sudden swoop from the highest sympathy to the gallantry of the streets, and when he was weary of his tricks she tried to bring him to his senses by asking him suddenly:—
“Is Logan a nice man?”
“He is my best friend. He has wonderful ideas and energy like a steam-engine, and he has suffered too. He is not like the art students who expect painting pictures to be as easy as knitting. He could have been almost anything, but he believes that art is the most important thing of all. He has made a great difference to me, by teaching me to be independent. . . . I will take you to see him one day.”
“I should like to meet him, because he has made a great difference in you.”
“He steals.”
That gave Morrison a shock, for Mendel seemed to be stating the fact as a recommendation.
“Yes. When he has no money he steals. I went with him once and we stole some reproductions.”
She was sorry she had mentioned Logan. Mendel was a different creature at once. Their glamourous happiness was gone. Logan seemed to have stalked in between them and the purity of their delight withered away.
He felt it as strongly as she, but thought she was deliberately escaping from him, that she was fickle and could not stay out the day’s happiness. Women, he knew, were like that. They gave out just as the best was still to come.
It was dusk and they were in a lonely glade. He pounced on her and drew her to him:—
“I want you to kiss me.”
“No—no!”
“Yes—yes—yes! I say you shall. I will not have you let it all slip away.”
“Don’t! Don’t!” she said, in a passion of resentment. He was spoiling it all. How could he be so crude and insensible after this matchless day?
At last he was convinced of her anger.
“I don’t understand you,” he said. “Don’t you want anything like that?”
“It has spoiled the day for me,” she answered, “or almost, for nothing could really spoil it.”
She walked on and he stood still for a moment. Then he ran after her.
“Did you . . . did you hate me then?”
“No, I didn’t hate you. I hated myself more because I can’t say what I feel.”
“If you don’t love me like that,” he said, “I love you all the same. I must see you often—always. I can’t live, I can’t work, if you don’t let me see you. . . . No. That isn’t true. I shall work whatever happens.”
How she loved his honesty! He was making no attempt to creep behind her defences. They had baffled him, and he counted his wounds cheerfully.
“If you don’t love me like that,” he went onexcitedly, “it doesn’t make any difference. You are my love all the same. You are in all my thoughts, in every drop of my blood, and you can do with me as you will. If you don’t love me like that I will never touch you. I can understand your not wanting to touch me, because I am dirty. I am dirty in my soul. I will never touch you. I promise that I will never touch you, and what you do not like in me you shall never see. . . .”
She broke down, and burst into an unrestrained fit of weeping. Why could she not make clear to him, to herself, what she felt so clearly? . . . Oh! She knew she ought to tell him to go, to spare him all the suffering that he must endure, but also she knew by the measure of her need for him how sorely he must need her. Their need of each other was too profound, too strong, too passionate, easily to find its way to surface life, nor could it be satisfied with sweets too easily attained. . . . She must wait. To leave him or to surrender to him would be a betrayal of that high mystery wherein they had their spiritual meeting.
“I shall win,” she said to herself, “I shall win. I know I shall win.”
And she amazed him with her sudden lightness of heart. She laughed and told him how solemnly Clowes was taking it all, and how the loose-tongued busybodies were talking. . . . As if it mattered what they said! He mattered more than all of them, because they took easily what was next to hand and grew fat on it, while he fought his way upward step by step and was never satisfied, and would fight his way always step by step with bloody pains and suffering.
“Oh, Mendel!” she cried; “I’m so proud—so proud of you.”
She was too swift for him. He came lumbering after her, puzzled, amazed, confounded at findingin this girl something that was so much more than woman, something that could actually live on the high level of his creative thought, something as necessary to his thought as dew to the grass and the ripening corn.