Logan had surrendered to her. They would go home from the Merlin’s Cave to the Pot-au-Feu, to Hetty Finch’s room. He would surrender to her absolutely, because she had willed his destruction and could not see that his destruction meant her own. She wanted recognition, acknowledgment that her vitality was more important than anything else in the world, and she had brought Logan to it. There had been a cold, set purpose in his eyes last night—an intellectual purpose. The equation was worked out. She could have what she wanted, at a price. She could destroy the will and the desire of a man, but not his mind, not his spirit, which would still be obedient to a higher will, and that would break her as she had broken.
Very bare and grim was the waiting-room in which Mendel had to bide until the nurse came for him. Its walls were of a faded green, dim and grimy, and when the door was opened as people went in or out, there was wafted in a smell of antiseptics. But as his thoughts gathered force the room seemed to be filled with a great light, which revealed beauty in the poor people waiting patiently to see their sick. They became detached and pictorial, but he could not think of them in terms of paint. His mind had begun to work in a new way, and he felt more solid, more human, more firmly planted on the ground, as though at last he was admitted to a place in life. It mattered to him no more that he was a Jew and strange and foreign to the Christian world. There were neither Jews nor Christians now. There were only people—tragic, wonderful people . . . He even forgot that he was in love. All his mind was concentrated upon Logan, who was now also tragic and wonderful, a source of tragedy and wonder, and his whole effort was to discover and to make plain to himself his share in the tragedy: not to weigh and measure and to wonder whether at one point or another he could have stopped it. Nothing could have stopped it.
There was no room for judgment in this tragic world.
A nurse came to fetch him.
She said:—
“He is very weak, but he will be strong enough to know you. Don’t excite him.”
She led him into the bare, white ward, across which the sun threw great shafts of light, to Logan’s bedside. At the head of the bed a policeman was sitting with his helmet on his knees, staring straight in front of him. He turned his eyes on Mendel, who thought he looked a very nice man, something amusingly imperturbable in this racking world of tragedy.
He stood by the bedside and looked down at Logan, in whose face there was at last the noble, conquering expression at which, through all his foolish striving, he had always aimed. His brow was strong and massive, his mouth relentless as Beethoven’s, his nose sharp and stubborn, and there was something exquisite and sensitive in the drawn skin about his eyes. From his white brow his shock of black hair fell back on the pillow.
His hand was outside the grey coverlet. Mendel took it in his. Logan opened his eyes, and into them came an expression of almost incredulous surprise, of ecstatic, intolerable happiness. He had wakened out of his dream into his dream, to be with Mendel, to have gone through the very depths to be with Mendel. His hand closed tight on his friend’s and his lids drooped over his eyes.