Logan’s visit to Mendel in the East End had been one of the great events of his life. Through it he had found his feet where he had been floundering, though, of course, happily and excitedly enough.
He told himself that now he was going to settle down to work, to the great productive period of his life, such as was vouchsafed to every real artist who was tough enough to pay for it in suffering. He would rescue Mendel’s genius from the Detmold and the ossified advanced painters, and together they would smash the English habit of following French art a generation late, and they would lay the foundations of a genuine English art, a metropolitan art, an art that grew naturally out of the life of the central city of the world.
Logan always worked by programme, but hitherto he had changed his programme once a week. Now he was sure that this was the programme of his life. It would be amended, of course, by inspiration, but its groundwork was permanent. He was enthusiastic over it. . . . Of course, this was what he had always been seeking, and hitherto he had been fighting the London which absorbed the talents of the country, masticated them, digested them, and evacuated them in the shape of successful painters for whom neither life nor art had any meaning, or in the shape of vicious wrecks who crawled from public-house to public-house and died in hospitals.
It was time that was stopped. It was time for London to be made to recognize that it had a soul, and this generation must begin the task, for never before had a generation been so faced with the blank impossibility of accepting the work, thought, and faith of its predecessor. Never had it been so easy to slip out of the stream of tradition, for never had tradition so completely disappeared underground.
“‘He that hath eyes to see, let him see,’” quoth Logan, and he hurled himself into his work, dancing to and fro, squaring his shoulders at it as though the picture were an adversary in a boxing-match.
At half-past four he laid down his brushes and began to arrange the room, pinning photographs on the walls, and unpacking certain articles of furniture, as a rug, a great chair, and mattresses to make a divan, which he had bought that morning. Every now and then he ran to the window, threw up the sash, and looked up and down the street.
At last with a tremor of excitement he leaned out and waved his hand, shut the window, and ran downstairs. In a moment or two he returned with the girl of the Tube station. She was wearing the same clothes, with the addition of a cheap fur boa, and she panted a little from the run upstairs with him.
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
“Oh! It’s not far from where I live,” she said. “But you are in a mess.”
“I’ve only just got in. I would have asked you to my old place, but I had to leave.”