“It was over his woman.”
“Oh yes!”
“He has left her.”
“Has he been to see you?”
“No. It was a friend of his. I don’t know what will happen. They are bound to come together again. Perhaps they will go through life like that—parting and coming together again. I can’t get it out of my head. I shall never forget it. It is like my father knocking a drunken soldier down with a glass. I never forget that, though it was different. That was just something that I saw. This is in my own life. I feel as though it had somehow happened through me. I was with him when he met her, you know, and his whole life changed when he met me. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to take things seriously. . . . I didn’t write to you because I didn’t want to drag you into it. But I’m glad you’ve come. I’m glad you’ve come. . . . You know, it was beginning to be a horror with me that Logan would come in at that door, looking like a poor, battered, broken little Napoleon, and I should have to tell him that I was not his friend. . . . You know, he was something vital and living in my work, but Cézanne has kicked him out. He was only my friend really in my work, and if that goes everything goes. I couldn’t explain it to him, for he wouldn’t understand. He used to laugh at me for talking about my work to you. I’m afraid I told him more about you than I ought to have done, but, you see, he was my friend. He laughed at everything. He ought to have been a very happy man, the way he laughed at everything.”
He placed in her hands his reproduction of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife.
“That’s better than Cranach,” he said.
“But why is her mouth crooked?” asked Morrison, puzzled by the picture and by his setting it above Cranach.
“I don’t know,” replied Mendel, “but Cézanne knew when he did it.”
And he tried to explain the making of the picture, but she could not understand it. However, she could understand and love his enthusiasm, and they were both happy, talking rather aimlessly and often relapsing into silence.