IXLOGAN MAKES AN ENDALLnight long he paced up and down his studio. His thoughts would not move, but went over and over the scene in the Cave, and probed vainly in the darkness for the next move. When he heard footsteps in the street he hung out of the window, making sure that it must be Logan come for him. But no one stopped at the door, and soon within himself and without was complete silence, save for his footsteps on the floor and the matches he struck to light cigarette after cigarette, though he could not keep one of them alight.His imagination rejected the facts and refused to work on them. The scene in the Cave had left an impression upon his retina, like that of the cinema—just a plain flat impression containing no material for his imagination. And yet he knew that he was deeply engaged in whatever was happening.With his chin in his hands he leaned out of his window and watched the dawn paint the eastern sky and the day wipe out the colours. Doors were opened in the street. Windows were lit with the glow of the fires, and the day’s activity had begun, but he had no share in it, for he knew that this day was like no other. For him it was a day lost in impenetrable shadow, and he could not tell what should take him out of it. And still he expected Logan would come.He heard Rosa get up and go downstairs and light the fire and bawl up to Issy to jump out ofhis bed, filthy snoring sluggard that he was. He heard the voices of the children and the baby yelling. . . . How indecent, how abominable it was to cram so many people into one small house!At the usual time he went over to his mother’s kitchen for breakfast, and gulped down his tea, but made no attempt to eat. Golda looked at him reproachfully, but said nothing, for she saw that he was in some deep trouble.After breakfast, as usual, he went for his walk down through Whitechapel almost as far as Bow Church and back.In his studio when he returned he found a policeman, who said:—“Mr. Mendel Kühler?”“Yes.”The policeman handed him a letter from Logan who had scrawled:—“I believe in you to the end.”To the end?“Is he dead?” asked Mendel.“Next door to it,” said the policeman. “The woman’s done in.”“Where?”“At the Pot-au-Feu, Soho.”“Where is he now?”“Workhouse infirmary. If you want to see him the police will raise no objection.”“Thank you,” said Mendel.He asked the direction and set out at once.The workhouse was a dull grey mass of buildings, rising out of a dull grey district like an inevitable creation of its dullness, and it seemed an inevitable contrast to the Merlin’s Cave, so that it was right that Logan should walk out of the glitter into it. This was the very contrast that Mendel’s imagination had been vainly seeking, and now, with the violence of a sudden release, his thoughts began to work again. . . . Oliver was dead. That was inevitable too. But why?Logan had surrendered to her. They would go home from the Merlin’s Cave to the Pot-au-Feu, to Hetty Finch’s room. He would surrender to her absolutely, because she had willed his destruction and could not see that his destruction meant her own. She wanted recognition, acknowledgment that her vitality was more important than anything else in the world, and she had brought Logan to it. There had been a cold, set purpose in his eyes last night—an intellectual purpose. The equation was worked out. She could have what she wanted, at a price. She could destroy the will and the desire of a man, but not his mind, not his spirit, which would still be obedient to a higher will, and that would break her as she had broken.Very bare and grim was the waiting-room in which Mendel had to bide until the nurse came for him. Its walls were of a faded green, dim and grimy, and when the door was opened as people went in or out, there was wafted in a smell of antiseptics. But as his thoughts gathered force the room seemed to be filled with a great light, which revealed beauty in the poor people waiting patiently to see their sick. They became detached and pictorial, but he could not think of them in terms of paint. His mind had begun to work in a new way, and he felt more solid, more human, more firmly planted on the ground, as though at last he was admitted to a place in life. It mattered to him no more that he was a Jew and strange and foreign to the Christian world. There were neither Jews nor Christians now. There were only people—tragic, wonderful people . . . He even forgot that he was in love. All his mind was concentrated upon Logan, who was now also tragic and wonderful, a source of tragedy and wonder, and his whole effort was to discover and to make plain to himself his share in the tragedy: not to weigh and measure and to wonder whether at one pointor another he could have stopped it. Nothing could have stopped it.There was no room for judgment in this tragic world.A nurse came to fetch him.She said:—“He is very weak, but he will be strong enough to know you. Don’t excite him.”She led him into the bare, white ward, across which the sun threw great shafts of light, to Logan’s bedside. At the head of the bed a policeman was sitting with his helmet on his knees, staring straight in front of him. He turned his eyes on Mendel, who thought he looked a very nice man, something amusingly imperturbable in this racking world of tragedy.He stood by the bedside and looked down at Logan, in whose face there was at last the noble, conquering expression at which, through all his foolish striving, he had always aimed. His brow was strong and massive, his mouth relentless as Beethoven’s, his nose sharp and stubborn, and there was something exquisite and sensitive in the drawn skin about his eyes. From his white brow his shock of black hair fell back on the pillow.His hand was outside the grey coverlet. Mendel took it in his. Logan opened his eyes, and into them came an expression of almost incredulous surprise, of ecstatic, intolerable happiness. He had wakened out of his dream into his dream, to be with Mendel, to have gone through the very depths to be with Mendel. His hand closed tight on his friend’s and his lids drooped over his eyes.He opened them again after a few moments and said:—“You!”The nurse placed a chair for Mendel, and he sat down and said:—“How are you feeling?”“Pretty weak. I dreamed of your coming, butI didn’t really believe it. . . . I’ve done it, you know.”“Yes.”“What are you doing?”“I’ve painted another portrait of my mother. A good one, this time. She is sitting in a wooden chair as she always sits, with her hands folded on her stomach. And I am planning a picture of a Jewish market, something bigger than I have attempted yet.”“I see. Good—good. . . . We must work together. We can do it now.”“Yes,” said Mendel, rather mystified. It was very strange to have Logan talking like that, as though he were going back to the first days of their friendship.“It is such peace,” said Logan; and indeed he looked as if he were at peace, lying there so still and white, with the hard strain gone from his eyes, in which there was none of the old roguish twinkle, but an expression of pain through which there shone a penetrating and most tender light.“Peace,” murmured Logan again. “Tell me more. There is only art.”“There is nothing else,” answered Mendel, carried away on the impulse of Logan’s spirit and understanding what he meant when he said “we.” Life, the turbulent life of every day, the life of desire, was broken and had fallen away from him, so that he was living without desire, only in his enduring will, which had lost patience with his desires and had destroyed them.Through Mendel trembled a new and strange elation. He recognized that his friendship with Logan was just beginning, and that he was absolved from all share in the catastrophe, if such there had been. And from him too the turbulent life of desire fell away, and he could be at one with his friend. There was no need to talk of the past—it was as though it had never been.He described the design he had made for his picture: two fat old women bargaining, and a strong man carrying a basket of fruit on his head.“A good beginning,” said Logan. “I . . . I could never get going. I was always overseen in my work.”“Overseen!” said Mendel, puzzled by the word.“Yes. I was always outside the picture, working at it. . . . Too . . . too much brains, too little force.”“I see,” said Mendel, for whom a cold finger had been put on one of his own outstanding offences against art. For a moment it brought him to an ashamed silence, but Logan’s words slipped so easily into his understanding and took up their habitation there, that he was powerless to resent or to attempt to dislodge them.“Overseen,” Logan repeated, with an obvious pleasure in plucking out the weeds from their friendship, in the fair promise of which he found peace and joy. “That was the trouble. It couldn’t go on. . . . City life, I think. Too much for us. Things too much our own way. . . . Egoism. . . .”“I know that I am feeling my way towards something and that it is no good forcing it,” said Mendel.An acute attack of pain seized Logan, and he closed his eyes and was silent for a long time, with his brows knit in a kind of impatient boredom at having to submit to such a thing as pain.“They’ve been very good to me,” he said. “Given me everything as if I were really ill.”He sank back into pain again.Mendel looked across at the policeman with a feeling of irritation that he should be there, a typical figure of the absurd chaotic life which had fallen away, a symbol of the factitious pretence of order which could only deceive a child.“Can’t you leave me alone with him?” he whispered.The policeman shook his head.“No, sir.”“You mustn’t worry about outside things,” said Logan, with an effort. “Wearealone. . . . Have you found a new friend?”“No.”“You will. Better men than I have been. . . . Do you see that girl still?”“Yes.”“She was the strongest of us.”“How?”Logan made no answer, and gave a slight shake of impatience at Mendel’s not understanding him.“Something,” he said, “that I never got anywhere near. . . . I . . . I was overseen in that too.”The blood drummed in Mendel’s temples. Logan’s cold finger went probing into his life too, and showed him always casting his own shadow over his passions. In love it was the same as in art. . . . It was very odd that, with every nerve at stretch to understand Logan and how he had been brought to smash the clotted passion of his life, it should only be important to understand himself, and that he should be able to understand so coldly, so clearly, so easily.And now the presence of the policeman became a relief. It was a guarantee that the whole visible world would not be swept away by the frozen will in Logan, which was like a floe of ice bearing everything with it, nipping at Mendel’s life, squeezing it up high and dry and bearing it along. He felt that if the policeman were to go away he would be drawn down into the doom that was upon Logan, into the valley of the shadow, even while the good sun came streaming in through the tall windows. . . . He had lost all the emotional interest which had kept him awake through the night. . . . It had been simple enough. There hadbeen himself, Logan and Oliver, three people, living in London the gay, reckless life of artists in London, a city so huge that men and women could do in it as they pleased. Oliver and he had hated each other, and Logan had had to choose between them. He had chosen wrongly and had put an end to his misery in the only possible way.Mendel fought back out of the shadow—back to the policeman, and the sick men lying in the rows of beds, and the dead man lying in the bed which had just been surrounded by a screen, and the simple, wonderful people in the waiting-room downstairs, and the sun streaming through the windows, and the teeming life outside in London—wonderful, splendid London, the very heart of the world. . . . It was well for Logan to lose sight of these things. He was a dying man. But Mendel was alive, never more alive than now, in face of the shadow of death, and he would not think the thoughts of a dying man unless they could be shaped in the likeness of life. He gathered together all his forces, summoned up everything that urged him towards life and towards art, and of his own strong living will plunged after Logan, no longer in obedience to Logan’s frozen purpose, but as a friend giving to his friend the meed that was due to him.He took Logan’s hand and pressed it, and chafed it gently to make it warm, and Logan smiled at him, and an expression of anguish came into his face as the warmth of his friend wrapped him round, penetrated him, thawed and melted his purpose, with which he had lived for so many empty, solitary days until it had driven him to make an end. The coldness in his friend touched Mendel’s heart and was like a stab through it, and he felt soon a marvellous release, as if his blood were flowing again, and it seemed that the weaknesses on which Logan had laid his finger were borne down with him into the shadow.Mendel remembered Cézanne’s portrait of his wife, and how he had intended to tell Logan that it had made him feel like a tree with the sap running through it to the budding leaves in spring.He told him now, and added:—“It doesn’t matter that I did not understand you in life.”“No,” said Logan. “Don’t go away!”“I’ll stay,” replied Mendel; “I’ll stay.”Then he was in a horrible agony again, as the marvellous clarity he had just won disappeared. Logan knew what he was doing, that he was taking with him all the weaknesses and vain follies which had so nearly brought them both to baseness, and Mendel knew that Logan must continue as a powerful force in his work; but he crushed the rising revolt in himself, the last despairing effort of his weakness, and gave himself up to feeding the extraordinary delight it was to the poor wretch, lying there with his force ebbing away, to give himself up to a pure artistic purpose such as had been denied him in his tangled life. Through this artistic purpose Logan could rise above the natural ebbing process of his vitality, which sucked away with it the baseness and the folly he had brought into his friend’s life. He could rejoice in the contact of their minds, the mingling of their souls, the proud salute of this meeting and farewell. It was nothing to him that he was dying, little enough that he had lived, for he knew that he had never lived until now.The nurse came and said the patient must rest.“Don’t go away!” pleaded Logan.“I’ll wait,” said Mendel, patting his hand to reassure him.“Half-past two,” said the nurse as she followed Mendel out. “What a remarkable man!” she added. “What a tragedy! I suppose the girl was to blame too.”“Blame?” said Mendel, rather dazed at being brought back to customary values. “Blame?”He went down to the dingy waiting-room and sat there subdued, cowering, exhausted. He felt very cold and miserable. It was so terrible waiting for a thing that had happened. The physical fact could make no difference. . . . Logan had made an end, a very complete and thorough end. . . . Oh! the relief of it, the relief of having Logan for his friend at last, of having seen him freely and fully tasting at last his heart’s desire, of being himself brought up to that level, that pure contact with another human being, for which he had always longed. . . . That desire in both of them had been violated and despoiled, God knows how. Lies? Lust? Profanation of the holy spirit of art? . . . What words could describe the evil that everywhere in life lay in wait for the adventurous, letting the foolish and the timid, the faint of heart and the blind of soul, go by, and waiting for strong men who walked with purpose and a single mind?At half-past two the nurse came to fetch him.“He is very weak now,” she said.Logan’s face wore a noble gathering serenity. He was too weak to talk much, and only wanted Mendel to hold his hand and to talk to him about art, about pictures “they” were going to paint, and about pictures they had both loved: Cranach, Dürer, Uccello, Giotto, Blake, Cézanne.“Good men, those,” said Logan. “Good company.”“Good, decent, quiet little men.”“We shall do good things.”His hand closed more tightly on Mendel’s, who surrendered himself to the force of the ebb in his friend, felt the cold, salt waves of death close about him and drag him out, out until Logan was lost, andwith a frightful wrench all that was dead in himself was torn away, and he was left prostrate upon the fringes of his life. . . . He became conscious to find himself leaning over Logan, gazing at his lips, with his own lips near them, waiting for the breath that would come no more.It was finished. Logan had made an end.Turning away, Mendel saw through the window the lovely grey-blue sky, fleecy with mauve-grey clouds heaped up by the driving wind—beautiful, beautiful. . . .
ALLnight long he paced up and down his studio. His thoughts would not move, but went over and over the scene in the Cave, and probed vainly in the darkness for the next move. When he heard footsteps in the street he hung out of the window, making sure that it must be Logan come for him. But no one stopped at the door, and soon within himself and without was complete silence, save for his footsteps on the floor and the matches he struck to light cigarette after cigarette, though he could not keep one of them alight.
His imagination rejected the facts and refused to work on them. The scene in the Cave had left an impression upon his retina, like that of the cinema—just a plain flat impression containing no material for his imagination. And yet he knew that he was deeply engaged in whatever was happening.
With his chin in his hands he leaned out of his window and watched the dawn paint the eastern sky and the day wipe out the colours. Doors were opened in the street. Windows were lit with the glow of the fires, and the day’s activity had begun, but he had no share in it, for he knew that this day was like no other. For him it was a day lost in impenetrable shadow, and he could not tell what should take him out of it. And still he expected Logan would come.
He heard Rosa get up and go downstairs and light the fire and bawl up to Issy to jump out ofhis bed, filthy snoring sluggard that he was. He heard the voices of the children and the baby yelling. . . . How indecent, how abominable it was to cram so many people into one small house!
At the usual time he went over to his mother’s kitchen for breakfast, and gulped down his tea, but made no attempt to eat. Golda looked at him reproachfully, but said nothing, for she saw that he was in some deep trouble.
After breakfast, as usual, he went for his walk down through Whitechapel almost as far as Bow Church and back.
In his studio when he returned he found a policeman, who said:—
“Mr. Mendel Kühler?”
“Yes.”
The policeman handed him a letter from Logan who had scrawled:—
“I believe in you to the end.”
To the end?
“Is he dead?” asked Mendel.
“Next door to it,” said the policeman. “The woman’s done in.”
“Where?”
“At the Pot-au-Feu, Soho.”
“Where is he now?”
“Workhouse infirmary. If you want to see him the police will raise no objection.”
“Thank you,” said Mendel.
He asked the direction and set out at once.
The workhouse was a dull grey mass of buildings, rising out of a dull grey district like an inevitable creation of its dullness, and it seemed an inevitable contrast to the Merlin’s Cave, so that it was right that Logan should walk out of the glitter into it. This was the very contrast that Mendel’s imagination had been vainly seeking, and now, with the violence of a sudden release, his thoughts began to work again. . . . Oliver was dead. That was inevitable too. But why?
Logan had surrendered to her. They would go home from the Merlin’s Cave to the Pot-au-Feu, to Hetty Finch’s room. He would surrender to her absolutely, because she had willed his destruction and could not see that his destruction meant her own. She wanted recognition, acknowledgment that her vitality was more important than anything else in the world, and she had brought Logan to it. There had been a cold, set purpose in his eyes last night—an intellectual purpose. The equation was worked out. She could have what she wanted, at a price. She could destroy the will and the desire of a man, but not his mind, not his spirit, which would still be obedient to a higher will, and that would break her as she had broken.
Very bare and grim was the waiting-room in which Mendel had to bide until the nurse came for him. Its walls were of a faded green, dim and grimy, and when the door was opened as people went in or out, there was wafted in a smell of antiseptics. But as his thoughts gathered force the room seemed to be filled with a great light, which revealed beauty in the poor people waiting patiently to see their sick. They became detached and pictorial, but he could not think of them in terms of paint. His mind had begun to work in a new way, and he felt more solid, more human, more firmly planted on the ground, as though at last he was admitted to a place in life. It mattered to him no more that he was a Jew and strange and foreign to the Christian world. There were neither Jews nor Christians now. There were only people—tragic, wonderful people . . . He even forgot that he was in love. All his mind was concentrated upon Logan, who was now also tragic and wonderful, a source of tragedy and wonder, and his whole effort was to discover and to make plain to himself his share in the tragedy: not to weigh and measure and to wonder whether at one pointor another he could have stopped it. Nothing could have stopped it.
There was no room for judgment in this tragic world.
A nurse came to fetch him.
She said:—
“He is very weak, but he will be strong enough to know you. Don’t excite him.”
She led him into the bare, white ward, across which the sun threw great shafts of light, to Logan’s bedside. At the head of the bed a policeman was sitting with his helmet on his knees, staring straight in front of him. He turned his eyes on Mendel, who thought he looked a very nice man, something amusingly imperturbable in this racking world of tragedy.
He stood by the bedside and looked down at Logan, in whose face there was at last the noble, conquering expression at which, through all his foolish striving, he had always aimed. His brow was strong and massive, his mouth relentless as Beethoven’s, his nose sharp and stubborn, and there was something exquisite and sensitive in the drawn skin about his eyes. From his white brow his shock of black hair fell back on the pillow.
His hand was outside the grey coverlet. Mendel took it in his. Logan opened his eyes, and into them came an expression of almost incredulous surprise, of ecstatic, intolerable happiness. He had wakened out of his dream into his dream, to be with Mendel, to have gone through the very depths to be with Mendel. His hand closed tight on his friend’s and his lids drooped over his eyes.
He opened them again after a few moments and said:—
“You!”
The nurse placed a chair for Mendel, and he sat down and said:—
“How are you feeling?”
“Pretty weak. I dreamed of your coming, butI didn’t really believe it. . . . I’ve done it, you know.”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve painted another portrait of my mother. A good one, this time. She is sitting in a wooden chair as she always sits, with her hands folded on her stomach. And I am planning a picture of a Jewish market, something bigger than I have attempted yet.”
“I see. Good—good. . . . We must work together. We can do it now.”
“Yes,” said Mendel, rather mystified. It was very strange to have Logan talking like that, as though he were going back to the first days of their friendship.
“It is such peace,” said Logan; and indeed he looked as if he were at peace, lying there so still and white, with the hard strain gone from his eyes, in which there was none of the old roguish twinkle, but an expression of pain through which there shone a penetrating and most tender light.
“Peace,” murmured Logan again. “Tell me more. There is only art.”
“There is nothing else,” answered Mendel, carried away on the impulse of Logan’s spirit and understanding what he meant when he said “we.” Life, the turbulent life of every day, the life of desire, was broken and had fallen away from him, so that he was living without desire, only in his enduring will, which had lost patience with his desires and had destroyed them.
Through Mendel trembled a new and strange elation. He recognized that his friendship with Logan was just beginning, and that he was absolved from all share in the catastrophe, if such there had been. And from him too the turbulent life of desire fell away, and he could be at one with his friend. There was no need to talk of the past—it was as though it had never been.
He described the design he had made for his picture: two fat old women bargaining, and a strong man carrying a basket of fruit on his head.
“A good beginning,” said Logan. “I . . . I could never get going. I was always overseen in my work.”
“Overseen!” said Mendel, puzzled by the word.
“Yes. I was always outside the picture, working at it. . . . Too . . . too much brains, too little force.”
“I see,” said Mendel, for whom a cold finger had been put on one of his own outstanding offences against art. For a moment it brought him to an ashamed silence, but Logan’s words slipped so easily into his understanding and took up their habitation there, that he was powerless to resent or to attempt to dislodge them.
“Overseen,” Logan repeated, with an obvious pleasure in plucking out the weeds from their friendship, in the fair promise of which he found peace and joy. “That was the trouble. It couldn’t go on. . . . City life, I think. Too much for us. Things too much our own way. . . . Egoism. . . .”
“I know that I am feeling my way towards something and that it is no good forcing it,” said Mendel.
An acute attack of pain seized Logan, and he closed his eyes and was silent for a long time, with his brows knit in a kind of impatient boredom at having to submit to such a thing as pain.
“They’ve been very good to me,” he said. “Given me everything as if I were really ill.”
He sank back into pain again.
Mendel looked across at the policeman with a feeling of irritation that he should be there, a typical figure of the absurd chaotic life which had fallen away, a symbol of the factitious pretence of order which could only deceive a child.
“Can’t you leave me alone with him?” he whispered.
The policeman shook his head.
“No, sir.”
“You mustn’t worry about outside things,” said Logan, with an effort. “Wearealone. . . . Have you found a new friend?”
“No.”
“You will. Better men than I have been. . . . Do you see that girl still?”
“Yes.”
“She was the strongest of us.”
“How?”
Logan made no answer, and gave a slight shake of impatience at Mendel’s not understanding him.
“Something,” he said, “that I never got anywhere near. . . . I . . . I was overseen in that too.”
The blood drummed in Mendel’s temples. Logan’s cold finger went probing into his life too, and showed him always casting his own shadow over his passions. In love it was the same as in art. . . . It was very odd that, with every nerve at stretch to understand Logan and how he had been brought to smash the clotted passion of his life, it should only be important to understand himself, and that he should be able to understand so coldly, so clearly, so easily.
And now the presence of the policeman became a relief. It was a guarantee that the whole visible world would not be swept away by the frozen will in Logan, which was like a floe of ice bearing everything with it, nipping at Mendel’s life, squeezing it up high and dry and bearing it along. He felt that if the policeman were to go away he would be drawn down into the doom that was upon Logan, into the valley of the shadow, even while the good sun came streaming in through the tall windows. . . . He had lost all the emotional interest which had kept him awake through the night. . . . It had been simple enough. There hadbeen himself, Logan and Oliver, three people, living in London the gay, reckless life of artists in London, a city so huge that men and women could do in it as they pleased. Oliver and he had hated each other, and Logan had had to choose between them. He had chosen wrongly and had put an end to his misery in the only possible way.
Mendel fought back out of the shadow—back to the policeman, and the sick men lying in the rows of beds, and the dead man lying in the bed which had just been surrounded by a screen, and the simple, wonderful people in the waiting-room downstairs, and the sun streaming through the windows, and the teeming life outside in London—wonderful, splendid London, the very heart of the world. . . . It was well for Logan to lose sight of these things. He was a dying man. But Mendel was alive, never more alive than now, in face of the shadow of death, and he would not think the thoughts of a dying man unless they could be shaped in the likeness of life. He gathered together all his forces, summoned up everything that urged him towards life and towards art, and of his own strong living will plunged after Logan, no longer in obedience to Logan’s frozen purpose, but as a friend giving to his friend the meed that was due to him.
He took Logan’s hand and pressed it, and chafed it gently to make it warm, and Logan smiled at him, and an expression of anguish came into his face as the warmth of his friend wrapped him round, penetrated him, thawed and melted his purpose, with which he had lived for so many empty, solitary days until it had driven him to make an end. The coldness in his friend touched Mendel’s heart and was like a stab through it, and he felt soon a marvellous release, as if his blood were flowing again, and it seemed that the weaknesses on which Logan had laid his finger were borne down with him into the shadow.
Mendel remembered Cézanne’s portrait of his wife, and how he had intended to tell Logan that it had made him feel like a tree with the sap running through it to the budding leaves in spring.
He told him now, and added:—
“It doesn’t matter that I did not understand you in life.”
“No,” said Logan. “Don’t go away!”
“I’ll stay,” replied Mendel; “I’ll stay.”
Then he was in a horrible agony again, as the marvellous clarity he had just won disappeared. Logan knew what he was doing, that he was taking with him all the weaknesses and vain follies which had so nearly brought them both to baseness, and Mendel knew that Logan must continue as a powerful force in his work; but he crushed the rising revolt in himself, the last despairing effort of his weakness, and gave himself up to feeding the extraordinary delight it was to the poor wretch, lying there with his force ebbing away, to give himself up to a pure artistic purpose such as had been denied him in his tangled life. Through this artistic purpose Logan could rise above the natural ebbing process of his vitality, which sucked away with it the baseness and the folly he had brought into his friend’s life. He could rejoice in the contact of their minds, the mingling of their souls, the proud salute of this meeting and farewell. It was nothing to him that he was dying, little enough that he had lived, for he knew that he had never lived until now.
The nurse came and said the patient must rest.
“Don’t go away!” pleaded Logan.
“I’ll wait,” said Mendel, patting his hand to reassure him.
“Half-past two,” said the nurse as she followed Mendel out. “What a remarkable man!” she added. “What a tragedy! I suppose the girl was to blame too.”
“Blame?” said Mendel, rather dazed at being brought back to customary values. “Blame?”
He went down to the dingy waiting-room and sat there subdued, cowering, exhausted. He felt very cold and miserable. It was so terrible waiting for a thing that had happened. The physical fact could make no difference. . . . Logan had made an end, a very complete and thorough end. . . . Oh! the relief of it, the relief of having Logan for his friend at last, of having seen him freely and fully tasting at last his heart’s desire, of being himself brought up to that level, that pure contact with another human being, for which he had always longed. . . . That desire in both of them had been violated and despoiled, God knows how. Lies? Lust? Profanation of the holy spirit of art? . . . What words could describe the evil that everywhere in life lay in wait for the adventurous, letting the foolish and the timid, the faint of heart and the blind of soul, go by, and waiting for strong men who walked with purpose and a single mind?
At half-past two the nurse came to fetch him.
“He is very weak now,” she said.
Logan’s face wore a noble gathering serenity. He was too weak to talk much, and only wanted Mendel to hold his hand and to talk to him about art, about pictures “they” were going to paint, and about pictures they had both loved: Cranach, Dürer, Uccello, Giotto, Blake, Cézanne.
“Good men, those,” said Logan. “Good company.”
“Good, decent, quiet little men.”
“We shall do good things.”
His hand closed more tightly on Mendel’s, who surrendered himself to the force of the ebb in his friend, felt the cold, salt waves of death close about him and drag him out, out until Logan was lost, andwith a frightful wrench all that was dead in himself was torn away, and he was left prostrate upon the fringes of his life. . . . He became conscious to find himself leaning over Logan, gazing at his lips, with his own lips near them, waiting for the breath that would come no more.
It was finished. Logan had made an end.
Turning away, Mendel saw through the window the lovely grey-blue sky, fleecy with mauve-grey clouds heaped up by the driving wind—beautiful, beautiful. . . .