Therefore, when the picture was ended he found himself besottedly and uncontrollably in love and in a maddeningly sensitive condition, so that any sudden glimpse of beauty—the stars in the night sky, a girl’s face in the train, flowers in a window-box—could set him reeling. More than once he found himself clinging to the wall or a railing, emerging with happy laughter from a momentary lack of consciousness. In the street near his home he found a lovely little girl, of the same type as Sara, but more beautiful. Graceful and lively she was, fully aware of her vitality and charm, and she used to smile at him when he went to meet her as she came out of school, or stood and watched her playing in the street.
At last he asked her shyly if she would come to his studio that he might draw her. She consented and came often. She would chatter away, and, studying her, he was astonished at her womanishness, and he was overwhelmed when she said one day:—
“You don’t want to draw me. You only want to look at me.”
He was thrust back into the thoughts he had been avoiding. If this child knew already so frankly why he was attracted to her, why could not that other? Why did she seem to insist that he should regard her with the emotions with which he approached a work of art? A work of art could yield up its secret to the emotions, but she could only deliver hers to love dwelling not in any abstract region, but here on earth, in the life of the body. . . . He often thought of her with active dislike, because she seemed to him to be lacking in frankness. If she were going to cause so much suffering, as she must have known she would with her good-bye, then she must have her reasons for it. What did she mean with her neither yes nor no? With women there should be either yes or no. A refusal is unpleasant, but it could be swallowed down with other ills; and there were others. But this girl, this short-haired Christian, blocked his way, and there were no others except as there were cabs on the street and meals on the table.
For a time he avoided Logan and Oliver. He knew that Logan would despise him for his weakness in setting his heart on a girl who ran away from him, for he knew and admired the tremendous force with which his friend had hurled himself into his life with the girl of the station, constantly wooing and winning her afresh and urging her to share his own recklessness. He admired, too, Logan’s insistence on an absolute separation of his art and his life with Oliver, who was never for one moment admitted to his mind. Rather to his dismay, but at the same time with a wild rush of almost lyrical impulse, Mendel, finding himself with no other emotion than that of being in love, set himself to paint love. He worked with an amazing ease, painting one picture one day and covering it with another the next, feeling elatedly convinced that everything he did was beautiful, yet knowing within himself that he was in a bad way.
He avoided Logan, but Logan needed him, and came to tell him so.
“It is all very well for you to shut yourself up,” he said, “but I can’t live without you. You know what Oliver is to me, but it is not enough. The more satisfying she is on one plane, the more I need on the other the satisfaction that she cannot give me. Women can’t do it. They simply can’t, and it is no good trying. If you try, it means making a mess of both love and art. She is jealous? Very well. Let her be jealous. She enjoys it, and it helps her to understand a man’s passion.”
“I can’t stand it when you talk in that cold-blooded way about women.”
“I’m not cold-blooded,” said Logan, astonished at the adjective.
“I sometimes think you are, but I am apt to think that of all English people,” replied Mendel, wondering within himself if that did not explain Morrison. “Yes. I often wonder what you would be like if you were in an office, wearing a bowler hat, and going to and fro by the morning and evening train.”