“He is an Englishman,” said Logan sepulchrally, with the air of a Grand Inquisitor.
“Aren’t you an Englishman?”
“No, Scotch and French. These Englishmen have no passions, unless they are mad like Blake. . . . No, no. We’ll drop Mitchell overboard. We’ll make him walk the plank, and fishes in the caverns of the sea shall eat his eyes.”
Logan was beginning to assume enormous proportions in Mendel’s eyes. It seemed that there was nothing the tremendous fellow did not know. He began to talk of genius and the stirring of the creative impulse, and he gave so powerful an account of Blake that Mendel began to see visions of heaven and hell. Here was something which he could acknowledge as larger than himself without self-humiliation, and, indeed, the larger it loomed the more swiftly did he himself seem to grow. It was such a sensation as he had not known since the days before his rapture with Sara. All that had intervened fell away. That purity of passion returned to him and, choosing Logan for its object, rushed upon him and endowed him with its own power and beauty. Logan talking of Blake was to Mendel’s innocence as rare as Blake, and he adored him.
“I had almost given up art,” said Logan; “I had almost given it up as hopeless. How can there be art in a despiritualized country like this, that lets all its traditions rot away? I was just on the point of tossing up whether I should go on the stage or take to spouting at the street corners; for when a country is in such a condition that its artists are stifled, then it is ripe for revolution. I am instinctive, you know, like Napoleon. I feel that we are on the threshold of something big, and that I am to have my share in it. I used to think it would happen in art, but I despaired of that. It seemed to me that art in this country could go doddering on for generations, and then I thought it needed a political upheaval to push it into its grave. But when I saw your work, I said to myself: Here is the real thing, alive, personal, profound, skilled. I began to hope again. And now that I have met you I feel more hopeful still, and, let me tell you, like most painters, I don’t find it easy to like another man’s work.”
Mendel was fired. Trembling in every limb, he said:—
“It has been the dream of my life to find a friend who would work with me, think with me, go with me, share with me, not quarrelling with me because I am not this, that, and the other, but accepting me as I am—a man who has no country, no home, no love but art.”
“That,” said Logan, with a portentous scowl and a downward jab of his thumb, “is what I have been looking for—some one, like yourself, who was absolutely sincere, absolutely single-minded and resolute. The spirit of art has brought us together. We will serve it together.”
They shook hands like young men on the stage, and Logan fetched a deep sigh of relief.
Mitchell woke up, saying:—