“It is such peace,” said Logan; and indeed he looked as if he were at peace, lying there so still and white, with the hard strain gone from his eyes, in which there was none of the old roguish twinkle, but an expression of pain through which there shone a penetrating and most tender light.
“Peace,” murmured Logan again. “Tell me more. There is only art.”
“There is nothing else,” answered Mendel, carried away on the impulse of Logan’s spirit and understanding what he meant when he said “we.” Life, the turbulent life of every day, the life of desire, was broken and had fallen away from him, so that he was living without desire, only in his enduring will, which had lost patience with his desires and had destroyed them.
Through Mendel trembled a new and strange elation. He recognized that his friendship with Logan was just beginning, and that he was absolved from all share in the catastrophe, if such there had been. And from him too the turbulent life of desire fell away, and he could be at one with his friend. There was no need to talk of the past—it was as though it had never been.
He described the design he had made for his picture: two fat old women bargaining, and a strong man carrying a basket of fruit on his head.
“A good beginning,” said Logan. “I . . . I could never get going. I was always overseen in my work.”
“Overseen!” said Mendel, puzzled by the word.
“Yes. I was always outside the picture, working at it. . . . Too . . . too much brains, too little force.”
“I see,” said Mendel, for whom a cold finger had been put on one of his own outstanding offences against art. For a moment it brought him to an ashamed silence, but Logan’s words slipped so easily into his understanding and took up their habitation there, that he was powerless to resent or to attempt to dislodge them.