“Yes, yes. I know, as a cow loves its calf. But I mean love, for you do not love the others the same as me.”
“You were not so very old when it came to me that you were different.”
“But it is more now that I am a man?”
“Of course.”
That settled his mind on the point that had been bothering him. Everywhere among the Christians love—the love that he knew and honoured—seemed to be lost in a soft, spongy worship of the mother’s love for her child. The woman seemed to be wiped out of account altogether except as a mother. It seemed that she was not expected to love, and she was left by herself with the child, with the man looking rather foolish all by himself, seeing his strong, beautiful masculine love absorbed and given to the senseless little lump of flesh in the woman’s arms. It was like discarding the flower for the seed, like denying the wonder of spring for the autumn fruit.
“If that is your Christian love,” he said to himself, “I will have none of it.”
He studied the Madonnas in the National Gallery, and they confirmed his impression of the weakness of Christian love, that left out the strong, vital love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man. He characterized it as womanish, and could not see that the ideal had served to save women from male tyranny. Moreover, most of the pictures struck him as shockingly bad, which confirmed his notion that the ideal that inspired them was rotten.
He could not test his ideas by his experience with Morrison, for he dared not think of her at all. When his mother spoke of her, it had been like a sharp knife through his heart. . . . Yes. That was love, and it could not be bothered with the idea of children. If they came, it would make room for them, but it was not going to be robbed by them. Its object was the woman, and it detested any idea that got between it and her. . . . Yet when this love for Morrison stood between himself and his love for art, he hated her almost as violently. Sometimes he thought that he would kill her, because she stood there smiling. She was always smiling. She could be happy; she could so easily be happy. . . .
Logan came to fetch him to go to the exhibition.
“I don’t want to go to the exhibition. I don’t want to see other people’s pictures. I want to paint my own.”