They went on to a music-hall, where Logan and she sat with their arms locked and their shoulders pressed together, whispering and babbling to each other.
Mendel sat bolt upright with his arms folded, staring at the stage but seeing nothing, so lost was he in the contemplation of the strange turn of affairs by which the adventure which had promised to lead him straight to art had deposited him in a muddy little pool of life. He would not submit to it. He would not surrender Logan and all the hopes he had aroused. Prepared as he had been to follow Logan through fire, he would not shrink when the way led through the morass. Friendship was to him no fair-weather luxury, and nothing but falsehood or faithlessness in his friend could make him relinquish it.
He told himself that Logan would soon tire of it, that Oliver would go the way of her kind. She was, after all, better than Hetty Finch, since she had a capacity for childish enjoyment.
She revelled in the sentimental ditties and the suggestive humours of the comedians, pressed closer and closer to Logan, and grew elated and strangely exalted as the evening wore on. And as they left the music-hall she gripped Mendel’s arm and brought her face close to his and whispered:—
“Do wish me luck, Kühler. Give me a kiss for luck.”
He kissed her and mumbled: “Good luck!”
“Come and see us to-morrow,” she said. “We shall be all right to-morrow.”
“Oh, come along!” cried Logan, dragging her away; and Mendel stood in the glaring light of the portico and watched them as, arm in arm, they were swallowed up in the crowd hurrying and jostling its way home to the dark outer regions of London.
He had an appalling sense of being left out of it. Everything passed and he remained. He lived in a circle of light into which, like moths, came timid, blinking, lovable figures, and he loved them; but they passed on and were lost in the tumultuous, heaving darkness of life, into which alone he could not enter. . . . Did he desire to enter it? He did not know, but he was hungry for something that lay in it, or, perhaps, beyond it.