“I’ll take you home in a cab,” he said. “But I won’t stay, if you don’t mind. I’m done up. If you and Oliver walk half way, Logan, we ought to be there about the same time.”
Jessie was appeased. A little kindness went a long way with her, and she hated to be a nuisance to a man.
When the cab stopped outside the door of her lodgings she flung her arms round Mendel’s neck and kissed him, saying:—
“You are a darling, and I would do anything in the world for you.”
“You shall come and sit for me,” he replied. “Good-night!”
“Good-night!”
Good-night! A night of tossing to and fro, of hearing terrifying noises in the darkness, of hearing Logan and Oliver in the next room, of shutting his ears to what he heard, of fancying he heard someone calling him . . . her voice! Surely she had called him, and the ache and the torment in his flesh was the measure of her need of him. . . . Strange, blurred thoughts; gusts of defiance and revolt; glimpses of pictures, subjects for pictures, colours and shapes. . . . His mother’s hands clutching a fish and bringing a knife down on to it. There was a blue light on the knife. It would be very hard to get that and to keep it subordinate to the blue in the fish’s scales. . . . His father and mother, eternally together, in an affection that never found any expression, harsh and bitter, but strongly savoured, like everything else in their lives. . . . Issy and Rosa, much the same as Logan and Oliver, and to them also he had to shut his ears. . . . The goggle-eyed man at the Pot-au-Feu. . . . London, London, the roaring fiery furnace of London in which he was burning alive, while flames of madness shot up above him. . . . Music. . . . There was a music in his soul, a music and mystery that could rise with an easy power above all the flames. . . . What did it matter that his body was burned, if his soul could rise like that up to the stars and beyond the stars to the point where art touched life and gave out its iridescent beneficent light? . . . Life, flames, body, stars, all might perish and fade away, but the soul had its knowledge of eternity and could not be quenched. . . . Eternal art, divine art, the world of form, shaped in the knowledge of eternity, wherein life and death are but a day and a night. . . . Sickening doubt of himself, sinking down, down into eternity to be a part of it, never to know it, never to see the light of art, lost to eternity in eternity. . . . He sat up in the middle of the night and imagined himself back in the one room in Gun Street, looking at the recumbent bodies of his family, lost in sleep, huddled together in degradation. . . . It would have been better to have gone home with Jessie. She would have given him rest and sleep. . . . No, no, no! . . . She was going away the day after to-morrow. He must see her before she went, with her big blue eyes and short chestnut hair. She had stopped in the middle of the dance. She had broken away from her partner, and on Hampstead Heath she had said “I love you.”
[IX
“GOOD-BYE”]
LOGAN came in early in the morning to make tea. He shut the door carefully and came and sat on Mendel’s sofa.