“Is Oliver going?”
“Yes. Do you mind?”
“No. . . . No.”
It was an enormous relief to Mendel when Logan went. His enthusiasm was too exhausting, and it was maddening to have him talking of success and the triumph of art and the wars of the spirit when life had apparently reached up and extinguished the light of art altogether. For a brief moment, for a day or two, it had almost seemed to him that life and art were one, that everything was solved and simple, that he would henceforth only have to paint and pictures would flow from his brush as easily as song from a bird. This illusion had survived even the blow of Morrison’s departure. He believed that it was enough for him to have had that hour of illumination, and that, if go she must, he could do without her. The flash of light had been the same, magnified a thousand times, as the inspiration that set him at work on a picture and then left him to wrestle with the task of translating it into terms of paint. She had appeared to him exactly in the same visionary way, an image shining in truth and beauty, an emanation from that other world, and he had thought he would at worst be left with the terrible ordeal of translating the vision into paint. . . . But when he looked at his pictures they oppressed him with their lifelessness and dark dullness, and the idea of painting disgusted him. It was even an acute pain, almost like a wound upon his heart, to handle a brush. He could not finish the portrait of his father and mother, and, at best, he could only force himself to paint flower-pieces.
He was incapable of deceiving himself. He had never heard of devout lovers sighing in vain, and he had no sources of comfort within himself. Never had he shrunk from any torment, and this was so cruel as to be almost a glory, except that it meant such a deathly stillness and emptiness. He could not understand it, and he knew that it was past the comprehension of all whom he knew, even his mother. But he set his teeth and vowed that he would understand it if it took years. . . . A little girl, a little Christian girl! How was it possible?
There was some relief in the thought of her, but very little. She was still too visionary, and when he tried to think of her in life, by his side, it was impossibly painful.
Where was she? Why did she not write? Her silence was like ice upon his heart. . . . What kind of place did she live in? Among what people? How was he to imagine her? . . . To think of her among the trees or under the chestnut-tree was to be torn with impulses that could find no outlet; desires for creation that made painting seem a sham and a mockery.
So keen, and fierce, and deep was his suffering that death seemed a little thing in comparison. When he tried to think of death he knew that it was not worth thinking of, and he was ashamed that the thought should have been in his mind.
He knew that he must understand or perish. To say that he was in love was hopelessly inadequate. He knew how people were when they were in love. They were like Rosa, like animals, stupid and thick-sighted, with a thickening in their blood. But he was possessed with a clairvoyance that made everything round him seem transparent and flimsy, while thought crept stealthily, like a cat on a wall, and emotion was confounded.