There was a challenge in this, and René had the surprise of finding himself meeting it. Indeed it was bracing to feel the painter’s vigorous mind searching his own and throwing aside all that he disliked or condemned.
“Ever since,” said René, “ever since our first meeting under the archway, I have felt that there was something in you that I desired to understand, something that, without my understanding it, has made more difference than any other thing in my life.”
Kilner leaned forward.
“Now,” he said, “now we know where we are. Most men pretend with me that they keep the emotional side of their nature for women. They don’t give it them, God knows what they do with it. Most men also confuse their emotions with their imaginations. I think that is why they spend their lives in the uncomfortable search after comfort.”
“And women?” asked René.
“You and I are not concerned for the present with women. It seems to me that you and I are in this queer place for much the same reason, because we were incapable of letting our lives run along the lines laid down for them. I don’t know what you are after; perhaps you don’t know yourself, but I want to tell you what I am after. I’m not a great reader of books. Some of them may have said what I’m trying to say. . . . As long as I can remember I have had the intensest joy through my eyes. I think I’ve said that before. It doesn’t matter. I see things. At first it was just the crude pleasure of form. One thing after another, I let the whole world unroll before my eyes until I was drunk with delight in it and nearly mad. Then forms began to have a meaning and to melt into each other. I began to see relations between different forms. Beauty began to sing in color. With form and color the world was so rich that the strain upon my sight was an agony. My greed brought me to seek consolations which unfortunately did not console. If I accepted comfort, then I lost my delight in form and color and was not comfortable. I found that the way out of that was to select and concentrate. I could only select in a certain passionate mood. In an ecstasy I felt truly that I could recognize the object in the contemplation of which I could find the greatest joy, a joy equal to that of human love, and having this advantage over it that it need not be expressed in physical experience. But, once felt, it must be expressed. I do my best in paint, but it always seems impossible—except when I am actually working. When I look at what I have done, then I know that it is impossible. One can give a little singing hint of it and no more. And then again, turning from that to life, one is disgusted. Everywhere such coarseness, such greed, such meanness, such conceit. Yet to nurse that disgust is to feel the joy fade away, to hear the song of it die down. There is no justice then, no kindness, and the world is so horrible that the soul takes refuge in a sorry silence. Youth is then a heated torment from which there is no escape, but in a kind of death that brings decay and poisons love. . . . There, if you can understand that, you can understand me. I cannot surrender my vision either to comfort or to my own disgust.”
They were silent for some moments. Then René said:
“In here,” he touched his breast, “I know that you are right. I have been trying all this time to understand you with my brain, but now that seems only to be a sieve through which to pass what you have said. You see, I have never tried to express anything, but there have been times in my life when I have been moved enough to understand faintly what you mean. Disgust? I know that too. Almost everything I have ever done seems to me now to have been the result of disgust. I suppose that is why I am what I am. But I’m glad you came in to-night. I was going through another crisis of disgust; I go from one to another.”
“I know,” said Kilner. “A man does when he seeks to find love only in women.”