“But I want to fly with you, hand in hand.”
She was elated, exalted. Her eyes shone and she glowed with excitement and hope. Surely he would understand now! Surely she had found words for it at last!
“That’s rubbish,” he said. “Men aren’t birds, and they are not angels. If you want to fly, go up in an airyoplane. That’s another machine like the cinema. It relieves human beings of another mania.”
She turned away to hide the tears that had gushed to her eyes. Why did he waste his strength? Why did he keep his force from entering into his imagination?
That evening was most miserable for her, and she was glad when it came to an end.
To add to her difficulties he was making himself ill over his work, which, as he said, had gone completely rotten, and he did not scruple to ascribe it to her. He would spend a delightful happy evening with her and feel that his difficulties were over, that in the morning he would be able to make a beginning upon all the ideas that were so jumbled and close-packed in his head. But in the morning he would be dull and nerveless, and though he might work himself up into a frenzy, yet he could produce nothing that was any good. His work was easier, and even a little better, after the evenings when they almost quarrelled.
Again and again he told himself that he could not go on, that life was as thick and heavy as the air before a thunderstorm. Often he thought that this density, this opaqueness, with which he was surrounded, meant that he must quarrel and break with her once and for all. It would nearly kill him to do it, but if it must be done, the sooner the better. Perhaps it was wrong for him to have anything to do with the Christian world at all. No single friendship or relationship that he had had in it had been successful or of any profit to him. Little by little his peace of mind had been taken from him. Everything had been taken from him, even, now, his work. . . . That he would not have. He set his teeth and stuck to it, every day and all day, but the few pictures he turned out did not sell. Cluny would not have them, and they were rejected by the exhibitions, even by the club of which he was a member.
Of all this he said not a word to a soul, not even to Morrison, not even to Golda. His money was dwindling. That put marriage out of the question. Fate, or the ominous pressure of life, or whatever it was, played into Morrison’s hands.