She looked at him suddenly and so fiercely that he laughed, and caught her in a passionate embrace.
“Look out! If I get to behaving too well, you’ll lose interest in me, Inga,” he said, laughing.
To this she made no reply.
He was astonished at the things she had shown him she had divined. He recognized their truth. He even felt that in her eyes was some strange intuition that made them see, beyond his view, down the long lanes of the future. But, above all, he understood that in their love the first phase had ended and another begun—a phase where the bitter and the sweet, sorrow and sadness, possession and denial would forevermore go hand in hand. She knew it, too, for that night they lay wakefully in each other’s arms and though they lay clasped in the oblivion of the night they spoke no word, for what lay in their minds they could not say to each other.
Yet this knowledge that life in all its aspects could not be avoided, that the thoughts which he cried out against could not be stilled, and that, even as he loved her, the woman of the present, he must suffer fiercely and weakly for what she had been, entered into that inner consciousness of the artist and illuminated it with a new, miraculous sense of power.
When he returned to his work, the test of sorrow brought him a deep comprehension. In the completeness of his dream he had forgotten what no artist should forget—that life is tragedy. He put before him a canvas which a week before had thrilled him with its mastery. He looked now and saw that it was only half truth, that he had done it in an ecstasy of sentimentalism. He threw it aside and began swiftly to paint in another. And as he looked upon the immemorial rocks with their head-dresses of sand-grasses turning with the first colorful touches of the autumn, he perceived beneath the surface pleasure to the eyes something grim and tragic in this spectacle of summer stifling in the arms of autumn, in these scarred and rocky sentinels, waiting the momentary flurry of the bitter time; the soul of those things which cannot die, inscrutable, contemplative and majestic, amid the poignant sadness of the green world which must die and die again, endlessly returning to its pain.
He painted breathlessly, seized by something poignant and illuminating that drove him on, and when he had ended, he covered the canvas hastily, afraid to look at it. For a week he worked in this frenzy, without pause for self-analysis, warned only by the fever of work which possessed him that what he had done was true, feeling in himself immense, clarifying changes, a detachment of vision he had never had—a new, stern independence of the intellect which he had purchased at the price of the intoxication of the senses.
At the end of this period, a certain heaviness of the spirit succeeded. He felt that he had worked beyond his capacity, aware of profound weariness and dejection. The next morning he postponed the morning’s sketching.
“No work to-day,” he said, “I feel like looking over what I’ve done. Let’s get out the canvases and sit in judgment.”