It was a lie, too, to say that the Jews only cared about money. When they were overfed, like Maurice Birnbaum, they were like all the other overfed people, but when they were simple and normal they were better than the others, because they had always a sense of mystery and did not waste themselves in foolish laughter.
That was where Logan was true. He could laugh, because all the Christians laugh, but when it came to solemn things he could talk about them as though he were not half ashamed. Mitchell, for instance, always shied away from the truth. Why was he afraid of it? The truth, good or bad, was always somehow beautiful, invigorating, and releasing. All the pleasant things that Mitchell cared about Mendel found stifling. Nothing, he knew, could make life altogether pleasant, and all the falsehoods which were used in that attempt were contemptible. They strangled impulse and frankness, and without these how could there be art?
In his unhappy dreams Logan appeared like a figure of Blake, immense, looming prophetic, beckoning to achievement and away from the chatter and fuss of the world of artists.
Yet behind Logan there was still the figure of Mitchell, young and gay, and the idea of Mitchell led to the idea of Morrison.
There were some withered flowers on his painting-table, the last she had sent him. None had come since that evening in the Paris Café when she had nodded curtly to show him that he was not wanted.
He would not be thrust aside like that. He knew himself to be worth a thousand Mitchells. Logan had said that Mitchell was rubbish, and not even in the eyes of a slip of a girl would Mendel have Mitchell set above himself. Not for one moment was it tolerable. He would keep Morrison to her promises and make her come to have her portrait painted, and he would find out what there was in her that made him remember her so distinctly and so clearly separate her from all other girls. Somehow the thought of her cooled the intoxication in which he had been left by Logan. She offered, perhaps, another way out of his present state of congestion and dissatisfaction. Very clearly she brought back to his mind the thrilling delight with which he had worked as a boy, and that was true, truer than anything else he had ever known. . . . Ah! If he could only get back to that, with all the tricks and cunning he had learned.
He would get back to it some day, but he must fight for it; with Logan he would learn how to fight. Logan would lay his immense store of knowledge before him, and give him books to read, and teach him how to be so easy and familiar with ideas, which at present only frothed in his mind like waves thinning themselves out on the sea-shore.
He wrote an impassioned and insolent letter to Morrison commanding her presence at his studio and informing her that he was worth a thousand of her ordinary associates, and that she had hurt him, and that girls ought not to hurt men of acknowledged talent. This letter cost him a great deal of pain and time, because he was careful not to make any slip in spelling or grammar. It was more a manifesto than a letter, and he wished to do nothing to impair its dignity.
And all the time he was puzzled to know why he should care about her at all. He was prepared to throw everything—his success, the Detmold, his friends—to the winds to follow Logan, but Morrison he could not throw away.