Struggling for ideas with which to match Logan’s, he became instinctively aware that his friend’s enthusiasm was deliberate, not in itself faked, but artificially heated. Behind it lay a deeper passion, from which he was endeavouring to divert the energy it claimed.
Sitting between Logan and Oliver, Mendel could almost intercept the current of feeling that ran between them. It offended him as an indecency that they should have so little control over themselves as to reveal their condition of mutual obsession. . . . It reminded him of his impression of the police-court, where the secret sores of society were exposed nakedly, and queer, helpless, shameless, unrestrained creatures were dealt with almost like parcels in a shop. And again he had the sensation of being bound to them, of being confined with them in that little room, of a dead pressure being upon him, until he must scream or go mad.
He looked at them. Did they not feel it too? Logan was lying back with his hands beneath his head and his lips pressed together and a scowl on his face, looking as though his thoughts and his destiny were almost, but, of course, not quite too much for him. Oliver was looking out of the window with her hands on her hips, humming. She laughed and said:—
“I’d sooner live with an undertaker than an artist. He would be up to a bit of fun sometimes, and he’d do his work without making such a fuss about it.”
“There’s an undertaker at the corner of the next street. You’d better ask him to take you on.”
“As a corpse?” asked Mendel, exploding and spluttering at what seemed to him a very good joke. The others turned and looked at him solemnly, but neither of them laughed, and gradually his amusement subsided and he said lamely:—
“I thought it was very funny.”
“Oh! for goodness’ sake let’s go and have something to eat,” said Oliver. “You’re turning the place into a tomb with your silence. One’d think you were going to be crowned King of England instead of just holding a potty little exhibition.”
“He is going to be crowned King of Artists,” said Mendel, making another attempt at a joke.
“By God!” said Logan, “they’d kill me if they knew what I was like inside. Do you ever feel like that, Kühler, that all the birds in the cage would peck you to death for having got outside it? I do. I never see a policeman without feeling he is going to arrest me.”