BOOK TWO BOHEMIA

BOOK TWO BOHEMIA

I THE POT-AU-FEU

AT the exhibition, the portrait of Golda created no small stir. The critics, who, since Whistler, had been chary of denouncing new-comers, had swung to the opposite extravagance and were excessively eager to discover new masters. The youth of this Kühler made him fair game, for it supplied them with a proviso. They could hail his talent as that of a prodigy without committing themselves.

“The portrait of the artist’s mother,” wrote one of them, “has all the essentials of great art, as the early compositions of Mozart had all the essentials of great music. Here is real achievement, a work of art instinct with racial feeling, and therefore of true originality. No trace here of Parisian experiments. This picture is in the direct line from Holbein and Dürer.”

Mendel took this to mean that he was as good as Holbein and Dürer, and accepted it not as praise but as a statement of fact. The picture was bought by a well-known connoisseur, who wrote that he was proud to have such a picture in his collection.

“Now,” thought the proud painter, “my career has really begun.”

For once in a way he regarded his success with his father’s eyes and much as Moscowitsch would have regarded the successful coup in business for which he was always vainly striving. The hectic gambling spirit introduced by Hetty Finch had disappeared, and though he still devoted his leisure to Mitchell, their adventurousness was tempered by the tantalization of the “top-knots,” Morrison and Clowes. To counteract the disturbing effect of their coolness, Mendel became very Jewish and hugged his success, gloating over it rather like a cat over a stolen piece of fish.

Morrison’s indifference to the buzz about his name was especially maddening, because he wished to prove to her that in painting dwelt a joy beside which her trumpery little ecstasy in woods and flowers was nothing, nothing at all. He wished to convince himself that he had not been really disturbed by her first visit to his studio. Only the shock of novelty he had felt, and by his success, by his triumphant work, he had obliterated it. . . . She was nothing, he told himself, only a raw girl, smooth and polished by her easy life, good for nothing except to be made love to by such as Mitchell.

Love? They called it love when a young man clasped a maiden’s hand, or when they kissed and rode together on the tops of buses! These Christians were rather disgusting with all their talk of love. He had heard more talk of it in three years of contact with them than in all his life before, and Weldon and others had talked of love in connection with Hetty Finch.

Disgusting!

And now here was Mitchell babbling of his love for Morrison. When Mendel wanted to talk of pictures and art and the old painters who had worked simply without reference to success, Mitchell kept dragging him back to Morrison, her simplicity, her extraordinary childlike innocence, her love of beauty, her generous trustfulness, her queer sudden impulses.

“What has such a girl as that to do with art or with artists?” said Mendel furiously. “An artist wants women as he wants his food, when he has time for them.”

“Gawd!” says Mitchell, trotting along by his side; “you don’t know what you are talking about. I tell you I never believed all that trash about a young man being redeemed by a virtuous girl until now.”

“It’s nonsense!” shouted Mendel; “nonsense, I tell you. It must be nonsense, because it didn’t matter to you whether it was Clowes or Morrison, and for all I know, it may be both.”

“Clowes is a jolly nice girl too,” replied Mitchell, “but she’s more ordinary. I never met anyone like Morrison before. I can’t make her out, but she does make me feel that I am an absolute rotter. It is her fresh enjoyment of simple things that disturbs me and makes me see what a mess I’ve made of my life. Once an artist loses that, he is finished.”

They had been reading Tolstoi on “What is Art?” and their young conceit had been put out by it. Must their extraordinary powers produce work accessible to the smallest intelligence? Mendel had been greatly influenced by that theory in his portrait of his mother, while Mitchell’s energy had been paralysed so that he could produce nothing at all.

“Yes,” Mitchell went on, “I know now what Tolstoi means. He means that love can speak direct to love, and, by Jove! it is absolutely true. Brains are only a nuisance to an artist. Look at Calthrop! He hasn’t got the brains of a louse. Of course, that is why painters are such an ignorant lot. I must tell my father that when he goes for me for not reading.”

“But Tolstoi liked bad artists!” grumbled Mendel. “And my mother does not like some of my best things. As for my father, he wants a painted bread to look as if he could eat it: never is he satisfied just to look at it. His love and my love are not the same and cannot speak to each other.”

“You should see more of Morrison, and then you would understand,” rejoined Mitchell.

Mendel felt that Mitchell was slipping away from him, and all this Christian talk of love was to him a corrosion upon his imagination and his nervous energy, blurring and distorting everything that he valued. There were many things that he hated, and yet because he hated them their interest for him was consuming. Issy’s wife, for instance, and her squalling children; his father’s bitter tongue; and Mitchell’s odd self-importance.

He repeated:—

“Tolstoi liked bad artists.”

“You can’t settle a big man like Tolstoi just by repeating phrases about him.”

“I can settle him by painting good pictures,” retorted Mendel. “I don’t paint pictures to please people.”

“Then why do you paint?”

“I don’t know. To be an artist. Because there is a thing called art which matters to me more than all the love and all the women and all the little girls in the world.”

“Ah!” sighed Mitchell. “You’ll soon think differently. I shall never do another stroke of work without thinking of Greta standing on Kew Bridge and looking up the river at the boats with their white sails.”

“Will you be quiet?” cried Mendel; “will you be quiet with your little girls and white sails?”

Mitchell seemed to be slipping away from him, and he dreaded the thought of being left alone with his success, which was blowing a bulb of glass round him, so that he felt imprisoned in it, and wherever he looked could see nothing but reflections of himself, Mendel Kühler, painting his mother, and his father, and old Jews and loaves and fishes for ever and ever. While he clung to Mitchell he knew that he could not be so encased, but Mitchell demanded that he should go out with him into a world all glowing with love, with rivers of milk and honey and meadows pied with buttercups and daisies; to stand on airy bridges and gaze at innocent little girls and white sails. The contemplation of this world revolted him, and he stiffened himself against it. Better the smells and the dirt than such fantastical stuff. His gorge rose against it.

To wean Mitchell from his amorous fancies he pretended that he was tired and wanted a holiday, and together they went down to a village on the South Coast near Brighton. There it was almost as it had been in the beginning. For a fortnight they were never out of each other’s company. They slept in one bed and shared each other’s clothes, paints, and money. They sketched the same subjects, took tremendous walks, and in the evening they talked as though there were no London, no Paris Café, no exhibitions, no dealers, no critics, nothing but themselves and their friendship and their artistic projects. Mendel was supremely happy. Never had he known such intimacy since the days of Artie Beech.

But Mitchell was often depressed and moody. He had letters every day, and every evening he wrote at great length.

One morning he had a letter which he crumpled up dramatically and thrust into his trousers pocket.

“Gawd!” he said. “That’s put the lid on it. I’m done for.”

“What is it?” asked Mendel, aghast.

“I’ll tell you when we get back to London. We must go back this afternoon. Eight o’clock in the Pot-au-Feu.”

The Pot-au-Feu was a little restaurant in Soho which Mitchell, Weldon, and some others had endeavoured to render immortal by decorating it with panels. In a room above it lived Hetty Finch.

Mendel’s thoughts flew to her, a figure of ill omen. He had not seen her for some time, and had imagined that she had so successfully got all she wanted and was so thoroughly established in her composite profession that she had no time for the younger artists. He had heard tales about her, and fancied she would succeed in hooking one of the older men for a husband.

He said:—

“Why do you want to go back to that beastly place? Here it is good. I could stay here for six months.”

“Gawd!” said Mitchell dismally. “’Tis life. There’s absolutely no getting away from it. Everything is swallowed up and nothing is left.”

He became very solemn and added:—

“If anything happens to me, Kühler, I want you to go to Greta Morrison and tell her that through everything I never forgot my happiness with her.”

“Happen!” cried Mendel. “What can happen?”

“I’ll tell you to-night,” replied Mitchell gloomily, “at the Pot-au-Feu.”

And not another word did he say, neither during their morning’s work, nor during lunch, nor in the train, nor in the taxi-cab that took them to Soho.

“You wait outside,” said Mitchell mysteriously.

Mendel waited outside and paced up and down, oppressed with the idea that his friendship with Mitchell was at an end. He was left helpless and exposed, for all that had been built on the friendship had come toppling down, and with it came the extra personality he had developed for dealing with the Detmold and the polite world—the Kühler who had assiduously learned manners and phrases, vices and enthusiasms, as a part to be played at the Paris Café and in the drawing-rooms of the languid ladies who were interested in art and artists. Hetty Finch went with it, for she had been an adjunct of that personality. . . . He was glad to be rid of her, and shook her off, plucked her out of his mind like a burr that was stuck upon it.

After a quarter of an hour or so Mitchell came out more mysterious than ever, took his arm and led him into the restaurant, which was hardly bigger than an ordinary room. Full of vigour and health as he was, Mendel felt an enormous size in it, as though he must knock over the tables and thrust his elbows through the painted panels. Madame Feydeau, the proprietress, greeted him with a wide smile and said she had missed him lately. At his table was the goggle-eyed man who dined there every night with his newspaper open in front of him. Weldon and a girl with short hair were sitting in uncomfortable silence, both with the air of doing a secret thing. Near the counter, with its dishes of fruit and coffee-glasses, was Hetty Finch, rather drawn and pinched in the face and very dark under the eyes.

Mendel was filled with impatience. She had no business to be sitting there, for he had disposed of her, and she made everything seem fantastic and unreal. He shook hands with her and sat at the table. Mitchell took the chair next to Hetty and talked to her in an undertone, while her eyes turned on Mendel with a frightened, inquiring expression.

“All right,” he said, as though he had understood her question. “I know when to hold my tongue.”

Mitchell went on whispering, and every now and then he bowed his head and clenched his fists, as though he were racked with inexpressible emotions. He too had become fantastic. Mendel knew that he was play-acting, and with a sickening dread he went back over all he knew of Mitchell, recognizing this same play-acting in much that he had accepted as genuine. Yet he would not believe it, for Mitchell was his friend, and therefore never to be criticized.

Would neither of them speak? Food was laid before him, and he ate it without tasting it. Mitchell led Hetty away to another table and talked to her impressively there. Then he brought her back and went on with his whispering.

Coffee was laid before Mendel, and he drank it without tasting it.

At last Hetty said, in a loud voice that rang through the room:—

“No. I will take nothing from you. I ask nothing from you, not a penny.”

“By God,” said Mitchell, hanging his head, “I deserve it.”

Hetty turned to Mendel and asked him sweetly to buy her a bottle of wine, as she needed something to pick her up.

“You are a devil,” she said, “sitting there as though nothing had happened. But I always said you were a devil and no good. I always said so, but I have my friends and can be independent.”

“Don’t be a fool,” said he roughly. “You’ll have a short run, and you’d better find something to fall back on while you can.”

“Get your hair cut!” she replied. “I know which side my bread’s buttered, and the old men aren’t so sharp as the young ones. You’ve got a fool’s tongue in your clever head, Kühler, and a fool’s tongue makes enemies.”

“Shut up!” he said. “And you leave Mitchell alone. He hasn’t done you any harm.”

“Ho! Hasn’t he?” she cried.

Mitchell groaned, and, giving a withering glance at the two of them, Hetty gathered up her vanity-bag and gloves and walked out of the restaurant.

“She’s a slut!” said Mendel. “She always was a slut and always will be.”

“Gawd!” cried Mitchell. “It was you let her loose on the town, and I shall never hold up my head again. I shall never be able to face my people. I shall just let myself be swallowed up in London. . . . But I shan’t trouble any of my friends. When I’m a pimp I shan’t mind if you look the other way. After all, it isn’t so far to fall. There’s not much difference between the ordinary artist and a pimp.”

“What has she done to you?” cried Mendel furiously. “Why do you let yourself be put down by a drab like that?”

“She’s not a drab,” said Mitchell, in a curious thin of protest. “She is the mother of my child.”

Mendel brought his fist down on the table with a thump, so that the cups jumped from their saucers.

“She is what?”

“The mother of my child,” said Mitchell, burying his face in his hands. “I have offered to marry her, to make an honest woman of her, but she refuses, and she will take nothing from me. Gawd! How can I ever face Morrison again? How can I face my mother?”

“Rubbish! Rubbish! Rubbish!” cried Mendel. “Why you? Why not Weldon—why not Calthrop?” He saw the goggle-eyed man listening eagerly and lowered his voice. “A drab like that deserves all she gets. She takes her risks, and I’ll say this for her, that she does not complain. She’s clever enough to know how to deal with it. . . .”

He wanted to say a great deal more, but realized that Mitchell, intent upon his own emotions, was not listening to him. Also, through the fantastic atmosphere, he began to be aware of a reality powerful and horrible. Against it Hetty seemed to be of no account, and Mitchell’s excitement was palpably false.

This reality had been called into being by no one’s will, and therefore it was horrible.

“I shall have to disappear,” said Mitchell.

Mendel did not hear him speak. His own will was aroused by the devastating reality. Because it was physical he exulted in it, and his will struggled to master it. He could not endure his friend’s helplessness and he wanted above all to help him, to make him see that this thing was at least powerful; evil and ugly, perhaps, but much too vital to be subdued or conquered by fantasy and theatrical emotions. He found Mitchell bewildering. Sentimentality always baffled him, for it seemed to him so superficial as to be not worth bothering about and so complicated as to defy unravelling. He knew that Mitchell was horrified and afraid, and that it was natural enough, but fear was not a thing to be encouraged.

He said:—

“Hetty knows perfectly well that she can manage it better without you.”

“I know,” replied Mitchell. “That’s what makes me feel such an awful worm.”

Mendel lost all patience. If a man was going to take pleasure in feeling a worm, there was nothing to be done with him. He called the waiter, paid the bill, and stumped out of the Pot-au-Feu leaving Mitchell staring blankly at the goggle-eyed man.

A few days later he met Edgar Froitzheim leaving the National Gallery as he entered it.

“Oh! Kühler,” said Froitzheim. “The very man I wanted to see. I am very proud about the picture—very proud. But I wanted to see you about young Mitchell. He is a friend of yours, isn’t he? He is behaving very badly to a young model. Such a pretty girl. Hetty Finch. You know her? She is in trouble through him, and he refuses to do anything for her. I’m told he has Nietzschean ideas. I sent for the girl. It is a very sad story and I have raised a subscription for her: fifty pounds to see her through. . . . Do try and bring Mitchell to reason.”

“I’ll do what I can,” replied Mendel, and he walked on to pay his daily homage to Van Eyck and Chardin, who were his heroes at the time.

That evening at the Paris Café he heard of another subscription having been raised for Hetty, and Calthrop growled and grumbled and said he had given her twenty pounds.

Mendel reckoned it up and he found that she was being paid for her delinquency more than he could hope to receive for many months of painful work.

As he finished his calculation he was amazed to see Mitchell come in with Morrison, whom he had declared he could never face again, and when Mendel rose to go over and join them she gave him only a curt little nod which told him plainly that he was not wanted.

II LOGAN

ONCE again Mendel decided that Mitchell, and with him London life, had fallen away from him. The Paris Café could never be the same again, and he plunged into despair, and thought seriously of accepting a Jewish girl with four hundred pounds whom a match-maker offered to him. Four hundred pounds was not to be sneezed at. It would keep him going for some years, so that he need not think of selling his pictures, which he always hated to part with. And the girl was just bearable.

The figure delighted his father and mother, for it showed them the high opinion of their wonder-son held among their own people.

It was terrible to him to find that he had very little pleasure in his work, which very often gave him excruciating pain. He took it to mean that he was coming to an end of his talent. Night after night he sat on his bed feeling that he must make an end of his life, but always there was some piece of painting that he must do in the morning, painful though it might be.

He had letters from Mitchell, but did not answer them, and at last “the schoolboy,” as Golda called him, turned up, gay and smiling and rather elated.

“I’ve discovered a great man,” he said with the awkward, jerky gesture he used in his more eloquent moments. “Absolutely a great man. Reminds me of Napoleon. Wonderful head, wonderful! His name is Logan—James Logan—and he wants to know you. He is a painter, and absolutely independent. He comes from the North—Liverpool or one of those places. I haven’t seen his work, but I met him at the Pot-au-Feu the other night. He asked me if I was not a friend of yours, as he thought he had seen me with you. He said: ‘Kühler is the only painter of genius we have.’ I spent the evening with him. I never heard such talk. It made the old Detmold seem like a girls’ school. . . . Hallo! Still-life again? What a rum old stick you are for never going outside your four walls!”

“What I paint is inside me, not outside,” said Mendel, trembling with rage at Mitchell looking at his work before he had offered to show it.

“Will you come and see Logan?”

“No. I am sick of painters. I want to know decent people.”

“But I promised I would bring you, and he admires your work. He is poor too, as poor as you are.”

“Can’t he sell?”

“It isn’t that so much as that he doesn’t try. He says he had almost despaired of English painting until he saw your work.”

“How old is he?”

“A good deal older than us. Twenty-six, I should think.”

“Why don’t you just stick to me?” asked Mendel. “What more do you want? Why must you always go off on a new track? First it’s Hetty Finch, then it’s Morrison, and now it’s this new man. We were happy enough by ourselves. Why do you want anything more? I don’t.”

“You’re used to living on dry bread. I’m not. I want butter with mine, and jam, if I can get it.”

“Then get it and don’t bother me to go chasing after it. I want to work.”

“Oh, rot! All that stuff about artists starving in garrets is out of date. It only happened because they couldn’t find patrons, but nowadays there are dealers and buyers. . . . Just look at the money you are making.”

“Then why is this Logan poor?”

“He isn’t known yet. He doesn’t know the artists because he never went to a London school. He was doing quite well in the North, but threw it all up because he couldn’t stand living in such a filthy town. He had a teaching job somewhere in Hammersmith, but he threw that up because he wanted his time to himself.”

“That sounds as if painting means something to him.”

“Do come and see him.”

“Oh! very well.”

“I’ll send him a wire and we’ll go to-night.”

They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and later made the expedition to Hammersmith, where they came to a block of studios surrounded by a scrubby garden. These studios were large and well-kept and did not tally with the description of Logan’s poverty. Still less did the inside give any sign of it. There was a huge red-brick fireplace, surmounted by old brass and blue china, with great arm-chairs on either side of it: there were Persian rugs on the floor; two little windows were filled in with good stained glass, which Mendel knew to be costly; there were two or three large easels; and the walls were hung with tapestry. The whole effect was deliberately and preciously rich.

Logan, who had admitted them to this vast apartment, rushed back at once to a very large easel on which he had a very small canvas, and fell to work on it with a furious energy, darting to and fro and stamping his right foot rather like the big trumpet man in a German band. He was a medium-sized, plumpish man, with a big, strongly featured face, big chin, and compressed lips, and long black hair brushed back from a round, well-shaped brow. He frowned and scowled at his work. A woman came out of a door and crossed the studio behind him. He hurled his palette into the air so that it sailed up and fell with a crash among the brass pots, and barked:—

“How can I work with these constant interruptions? Damn it all, an artist must have peace!”

He flung his arms behind his back and paced moodily to and fro, with his head down and his lips pursed up à la Beethoven. He extended the sphere of his pacing gradually so that he came nearer and nearer to Mendel, yet without noticing him. Mendel was tremendously excited and impressed with the man’s air of mystery and force. It was like Calthrop, but without his awkwardness. Mitchell in comparison looked puny and absurdly young.

Nearer and nearer came Logan, and at last he stopped and fixed Mendel with a baleful stare, and swung his head up and down three times.

“So you are Kühler?” he said.

Mendel opened his lips, but to his astonishment no sound came out of them. So desperately anxious was he not to cut a poor figure before this remarkable man, and not to seem, like Mitchell, pathetically young.

“Good!” said Logan. “Shake hands.” And he crushed Mendel’s thin fingers together. “What I like about you,” he went on, “is your sense of form. Design is all very well in its way, but quite worthless without form.”

Mendel, whose work was still three parts instinctive, could not attach any precise meaning to these expressions, but he was well up in the jargon of his craft and could make a good show.

“Art,” said Logan, “is an exacting mistress. Shall we go and have a drink?”

He put on his hat and led the two marvelling youngsters to a public-house, where he became a different man altogether. The compression of his lips relaxed, his eyes twinkled and his face shone with good humour, and he made them and the barmaid and the two or three men who were shyly taking their beer roar with laughter. He had an extraordinary gift of mimicry, and told story after story, many of them against himself, most of them without point, but in the telling exceedingly comic. Mendel sat up and bristled. It was to him half shocking, half enviable, that a man, and an artist, should be able to laugh at himself.

“If you’ll give me free drinks for a month,” said Logan to the elderly barmaid, “I’ll paint your portrait. Are you married? . . . No? I’ll paint you such a beautiful portrait that it will get you a husband inside a week.”

“I’m not on the marrying lay,” said the barmaid.

“Terrible thing, this revolt against marriage,” replied Logan, “and bad luck on us artists. I’m always getting babies left on my doorstep.”

“What do you do with them?” said Mendel, believing him, and astonished when the others roared with laughter.

“I keep the pretty ones and sell them to childless mothers. Ah! Many’s the time I’ve gone through the snow, like the heroine in a melodrama taking her child to the workhouse.”

“Oh! go on,” tittered the barmaid.

“Certainly,” said Logan. “Come along.”

As they left the public-house he took Mendel’s arm and said:—

“You have to talk to people in their own language, you know.”

“Yes,” replied Mendel, though this was precisely what he knew least of all.

“Why don’t you go on the stage?” asked Mitchell.

“I have thought of it. I think I might do well on the halls. There’s a life for you! On at eight in Bethnal Green:—

Off again in a motor-car to the Oxford:—

Off again to Hammersmith or Kensal Rise:—

My God! What a life! But I love the halls. They are all that is left of old England!”

His parody of the low comedian was so apt and his voice had such a delicious roll that Mendel could not help laughing, and he began to feel very happy with the man.

Logan swung back to his serious mood and gripped Mendel’s arm tighter as he said:—

“You have a big future before you. Only stick to it. Don’t listen to the fools who want you to paint the same picture over and over again with a different subject. There’s more stuff in that one little picture of yours than in all the rest of the exhibition put together.”

“Do you think so?” said Mendel, fluttering with excitement.

“I was amazed when I heard you had been to the Detmold with its Calthrop and all the little Calthrops.”

Both the youngsters were silent on that. They had often abused the Detmold, but with a profound respect in their hearts, and both had done their full share of imitating Calthrop.

When they reached the studio Mitchell suggested going, but Logan would not hear of it. He dragged them in and produced whisky and soda, and kept them talking far into the small hours. His bouncing energy kept Mendel awake and alert, but Mitchell was soon exhausted and fell asleep.

“Shall we put him out of the way?” said Logan suddenly. “No one would know, and the river is handy. He is too clean, too soft, and there are too many like him. They are in the way of real men like you and me.”

Mendel was appalled to find that he could not defend his friend. All the discontents of his waning friendship came rushing up in him and he began to babble violently.

“He is a liar and a coward, and he will never be an artist because he is too weak. He is not true. He is not good. I have trusted him with my secrets and he tells. He is always ashamed of me because of my clothes and because I have not been to Public School, and he is jealous because when we meet women they like me. He is soft and deceitful with them, but I am honest, and they like that. I wanted him to be my friend, but it is impossible.”

“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:—

“Gawd! I’ve been asleep. Have you two been talking? Gawd! It’s two o’clock.”

“I’ll walk home with you,” said Logan. “We can keep to the river nearly the whole way by going from side to side.”

So they walked while the tide came up, sucking and lapping, while the red dragons’ eyes of the barges came swinging up on it, moving up and down in a slow, irregular rhythm. It was very cold and the sky was thickly powdered with stars, whose pin-prick lights were reflected in the smooth water.

Upon the dome of the young artist’s vision that had before been black with infinite space, stars shone with a tender light. He was in ecstasy, and seemed to be skimming above the ground, hardly touching it with his feet. This long walk was like an exquisite dance, while Logan’s rollings were like a pipe. . . . Often he sank into a dream that he was upon a grassy hill in a mountainy place, he and his friend, who played upon a pipe so mournfully yet gaily while he danced, and from the trees fell silvery dewdrops and the songs of birds, which turned into pennies as they reached the ground and rolled away down the hill.

Both he and Logan were relieved when Mitchell, who had interrupted them with inappropriate remarks, turned aside at Vauxhall and vanished into London.

“So much for Mitchell,” said Logan. “You and I need sterner stuff. You and I are sprung from those among whom life is lived bravely and bitterly, and we have no use for its parasites. You and I will only emerge from the bitterness on condition that we can make of life a spiritual thing, for we are of those who seek authority. Life has none to offer us now, for all the forms of life are broken. Neither above us nor below is there authority, neither in heaven nor in hell. We must seek authority within ourselves, in the marriage of heaven and hell, in the consummation of good and evil, the two poles of our nature. It is for us, the artists, to bring them together, to liberate good and evil in ourselves, that they may rush to the consummation. We are the priests and the prophets, and we must in no wise be false to our vision.”

Mendel could not fit all this in with his mood and his delicious dreams, and when it brought him back to his sober senses, he could not see what it had to do with painting. However, Logan put things right by saying:—

“You are a poet. You are like Heine. I can see you with your little Josepha the pale, the executioner’s daughter. God rot my soul! It is years since I had such inspiration as you have given me. I think there must be Jewish blood in me, for I can certainly understand you through and through, and you have waked something in me that has always been asleep. Oh! we shall paint bonny pictures—bonny, bonny pictures.”

“You must come to see me every day,” said Mendel, “and every night we will go out together, and I must introduce you to my mother, for she too has good words.”

Logan smacked his lips as they entered the grimy streets near Spitalfields.

“Pah!” he said; “that’s life, that is, good dirty life. I was littered in a farm-yard myself and I like a good smell. . . . Can you put me up to-night? I don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”

“You can have my bed,” said Mendel, “and I will sleep downstairs on my brother’s sofa. Please—please. Do sleep in my bed.”

Logan accepted the offer and asked Mendel to stay with him while he undressed. He was unpleasantly fat, but strong and well-built.

He stayed for a long time in front of the mirror.

“See that bulge on the side of my head?” he said as he turned.

Mendel looked, and sure enough his head had a curious bulge on its right side.

“I had rickets when I was young,” said Logan, “and my skull must have got pushed over. I expect that’s what makes me what I am—lop-sided. I need you to balance me.”

He got into bed, and Mendel, reluctant to leave him, sat at his feet and devoured him with his eyes.

“Surely, surely, now,” he thought, “all is perfect now. No more disturbances, no more Mitchells, no more Hettys, and I shall do only what I really wish to do.”

He stole out into his studio, which was faintly lit from the street below, and it was as though it were filled with some vast spiritual presence, and he imagined how he would work, urged on by this new energy that came welling up through all that he could see, all that he could know, all that he could remember.

III LOGAN SETS TO WORK

IN the morning he was awakened by his sister-in-law, Rosa, shaking him and saying:—

“Mendel! Mendel! What are you doing on the sofa? Wake up! Wake up! There is some one in your studio.”

The house was ringing with Logan’s voice chanting the Magnificat. Mendel ran upstairs and found him in bed with a box of cigarettes and the New Testament, that fatal book, on his knees.

“Hello!” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you up. I have been awake for a couple of hours looking at your work. I hope you don’t mind. There’s a still-life there that’s a gem, as good as Chardin, and even better, for there’s always something sentimental about Chardin—always the suggestion of the old folks at home, the false dramatic touch, the idea of the hard-working French peasant coming in presently to eat the bread and drink the wine. I think it’s time you were written up in the papers. It’s absurd for a man like you to have to wait for success. There’s no artistic public in England, so you can’t be successful in your own way. The British public must have its touch of melodrama. To accept a man’s work it must first have him shrouded in legend. He must be a myth. His work must seem to come from some supernatural source.”

“I’ll just run over and tell my mother you are here,” said Mendel. “I always have breakfast there, and then go for a walk while the studio is dusted.”

“Right you are! I’ll be up in half a jiffy. Can I have a bath?”

“No. There’s no bath.”

“Very well; I can do without for once.”

Mendel ran round to Golda and told her of the wonderful man who was in his studio, and he described the adventure of the previous evening. Golda looked scared and said:—

“What next? What next? Good people sleep in their own beds.”

“But this man is an artist and he talks like a book.”

“Talk is easy,” said Golda. “But it takes years to make a friend.”

However, when Logan was brought to her she was polite to him and rather shy. He told her that fame was coming to her son faster than the wind.

“Too fast,” said she.

“It can never come too fast,” replied Logan. “The thirst for fame is a curse to an artist. Let it be satisfied and he is free for his work. I know, for I was very famous in my own town. I sickened of it and ran away. . . . I must congratulate you on letting your son follow his bent. I had to quarrel with my own people to get my way. I haven’t seen them since I was fourteen.”

“Not your mother?” said Golda, greatly upset.

Logan saw that he had made an awkward impression and hastened to put it right by saying lugubriously:—

“My mother is dead. She forgave me.”

He allowed that to sink in and was silent for a minute or two. Then he chattered on gaily and asked Golda to come and see him, and bragged about his studio and his work and his friends, and of a commission he had to decorate a large house in a West End square. He talked so fast that Golda understood very little of what he said, but she never took her eyes off him, and when he said good-bye, Mendel noticed that she did not bob to him as she did to Mitchell and Morrison and his other polite friends. He took that to mean that she accepted Logan as a person above these formalities.

For an hour they walked through the streets and squares of the East End, Mendel proud to display the vivid scenes he intended later on to make into pictures.

When they returned to the studio Logan insisted on seeing all the pictures and drawings again.

“Are you in touch with any dealer?” he asked.

“Cluny has a few pictures and a dozen drawings. He never does anything with them.”

“Hum!” said Logan. “Dealers are mysterious people. They can only sell things that sell themselves. By the way, I am giving up my studio in Hammersmith. It is too far away. I shall come nearer in. Hammersmith was all very well while I needed isolation, but that is all over now.”

“Where shall you go to?”

“Bloomsbury, I think. I like to be near the British Museum. Do you go to the British Museum? I must show you round. It is no good going there unless you know what to look for. By the way, I came out without any money last night. Can you lend me five pounds?”

Mendel wrote a cheque and handed it to him shamefacedly.

“I want to pay a bill on my way home,” said Logan. “I hate being in debt, especially for colours.”

“I get my colours from Cluny,” said Mendel, “and he sets them against anything he may sell.”

The irruption of money had depressed him, and he began to realize that he was very tired. The springs of Rosa’s sofa had bored into him and prevented his getting any real sleep.

He was not sorry when Logan went, after making him promise to meet him at the Pot-au-Feu for dinner.

He had a model coming at eleven, but when she arrived he sent her away. He was sore and dissatisfied. The studio seemed dark and dismal, and he could not get enough light on to his work. He took it right up to the window, but still there was not enough light, and his picture looked dull and dingy. His nerves throbbed and he was troubled in spirit, for now his old dreams of painting quietly among his own people while fame gathered about his name had suddenly become childish and pathetic. He was ignorant, futile, conceited, a pigmy by the side of the gigantic Logan, who would not wait upon the world, but would compel its attention and shape it to his will. What had he said artists were? Priests and prophets? . . . How could a man prophesy with a painting of a fish?

Downstairs he heard Issy come in for his dinner, and there was the usual snarling row because Rosa cooked so vilely. Mendel compared Issy’s life and his own: Issy working day in, day out, earning just enough to keep himself alive. Why did he go on with it? Why did he keep himself alive? Why did he not clear out, like Harry? There was no pleasure in his life, neither the time nor the money for it. . . . A wretched business.

But was it less wretched than this business of painting? There was more money in painting, and that was all anybody seemed to think of. People wanted the same picture over and over again, and if he consented to please them, his life would be just as poor a thing as Issy’s, except that he would have pleasure, and, through his friends, an occasional taste of luxury. At best he could be polite and gentlemanly, like Mitchell, bringing no more to art and getting no more out of it than a boyish excitement, as though art were a game and could give no more than a sensation of cleanliness, like a hot bath.

No, it would not do. It would not do.

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.

He decided at last not to send the letter but to go himself, and he went to the Detmold just as the light was fading and he knew she would be leaving.

She had gone already, but he met Clowes, who, he knew, lived with her. He pounced on her and said:—

“You must come to tea with me.”

“I’m afraid I . . .”

“You must! You must!”

She saw he was very excited and she had heard stories of his bursting into tears when he was thwarted. In some alarm she consented to go with him.

He led her to a teashop, a horrible place that smelt of dishwater and melted butter, made her sit at a table, and burst at once into a tirade:—

“You are Morrison’s friend. Will you tell me why she has avoided me? She came to my studio once and she said she would come again. She sent me flowers for three weeks, but she has sent no more.”

“She—she is very forgetful,” said Clowes, who was longing for tea but did not dare to tell him to turn to the waitress, who was hovering behind him.

“But she nodded to me as if she had hardly met me before,” said Mendel.

“She is very shy,” said Clowes, framing the word “Tea” with her lips and nodding brightly to the waitress. She added kindly:—

“I don’t think sending flowers means much with her. She gives flowers to heaps of people. She is a very odd girl.”

“Does she give flowers to Mitchell?” he asked furiously, coming at last with great relief to the consuming thought in his mind.

“Yes,” said Clowes. “She is very unhappy about Mitchell and that Hetty Finch affair.”

“Has he told her then?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he tell her?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you,” cried Mendel. “I’ll tell you. To make himself interesting to her, because he is not interesting. He is nothing. And I will tell you something more. He has been telling her things about me to excuse himself. Now, hasn’t he? . . . I can see by your face that he has.”

Clowes could not deny it, and she found it hard to conceal her distress. She was unused to intimate affairs being dragged out into the open like this, and her modesty was shocked. She had a pretty, intelligent face, and she looked for the moment like a startled hare, the more so when she put her handkerchief up to her nose with a gesture like that of a hare brushing its whiskers.

“Very well, then,” Mendel continued; “you can tell her you have seen me, and you can tell her that I shall come to explain myself. I hide nothing, for I am ashamed of nothing that I do. I have no need to excuse myself. I am not a gentleman one moment and a cad the next. And you can tell Morrison that if I see her with Mitchell again I shall knock him down.”

“Do please drink your tea,” said Clowes. “It is getting cold.”

Mendel gulped down his tea and hastened to add:—

“I am not boasting. He is bigger than I am, but I know something about boxing. My brother was nearly a prizefighter.”

Clowes began to recover from her alarm, and his immense seriousness struck her as very comic.

“Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?”

“Her hair?” cried Mendel. “Her beautiful hair?”

“Yes. She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets. All the girls are wild to do it.”

“Her hair? Her beautiful hair? Why?”

“Oh! she got sick of putting it up. She is like that. She suddenly does something you don’t expect.”

“But she must look terrible!”

“Oh no. She looks too sweet. And if all the boys at the Detmold wear their hair long, I don’t see why the girls shouldn’t wear theirs short.”

“My mother had her head shaved when she married,” said he, “and she wore a wig.”

“Why did she do that?”

“It is the custom. The woman shows that she belongs wholly to her husband and makes herself unattractive to all other men.”

“What a horrible idea!”

“It is a beautiful idea. It is the idea of love independent of everything else. That is why I thought Morrison must have some reason for cutting her hair.”

“When you know Greta, you will know that she doesn’t wait for reasons.”

“Why does she like Mitchell?”

“She likes nearly everybody.”

“But she writes to him.”

“Of course she does,” said Clowes, rather bored with his persistence.

“But she doesn’t write to me.”

“You don’t write to her. You can’t expect her to fall at your feet.”

As she said this Clowes realized his extraordinary Orientalism. She could see him holding up his finger and expecting a woman to come at his bidding, and for a moment she was repelled by him. But she was a kind-hearted creature and felt very sorry for him, for he seemed so utterly at sea and was obviously full of genuine and painful emotion.

He detected her repulsion at once and perceived the effort she made to conquer it, and was at once grateful to her, for, as a rule, when that happened, people let it swamp everything else.

She said:—

“I’ll tell Greta what you have said to me, and I am sure she will be very sorry to have hurt you.”

“I only want her to come and sit for her portrait. It is very important to me, because I want to try new subjects and there is some lovely drawing in her face.”

“But you mustn’t knock Mitchell down. He is quite a nice boy, really, only a little wild.”

“He is rotten,” said Mendel dogmatically.

He felt better, and until dinner-time he prowled about Tottenham Court Road and Soho, a region of London that he particularly loved—a vibrant, nondescript region where innumerable streams of vitality met and fused, or clashed together to make a froth and a spume. It was like himself, chaotic and rawly alive, compounded of elements that knew no tradition or had escaped from it. He felt at home in it, and elated because he was also conscious of being superior to it, yet without the dizzy sense of superiority that assailed him among his own people, while he was never shocked and humiliated, as he was sometimes in sedate and prosperous London, by being made suddenly to realize his external inferiority. He loved the shop-girls hurrying excitedly from their work to their pleasure, and he sometimes spoke to them in their own slang, sometimes went home with them. . . . They always liked him because he never wasted time over silly flirtatious jokes or pretended to be in love with them. His interest and curiosity, like theirs, were purely physical, and his passion gave them a delicious sense of danger.

Logan was waiting for him at the Pot-au-Feu. There was no one else in the restaurant but the goggle-eyed man in his corner. Logan was sitting Napoleonically with his arms on the table and his chin sunk on his chest, with his lips compressed.

He nodded, but did not get up.

“Sorry if I’m late,” said Mendel. “I went for a walk. I couldn’t work to-day. My sister-in-law’s sofa—I feel as if I had been beaten all over.”

“That’s the walk home,” said Logan. “I’m used to it. The hours I’ve spent walking about this infernal London! I’ve slept on the Embankment, you know.”

“No?”

“Yes. I’ve been as far down as that, though I’m not the sort of man who can be kept down. Did you know that Napoleon was out-at-elbows for a whole year?”

“No; I don’t know much about Napoleon.”

“Ah! You should. I read every book about him I can lay hands on. Gustave!”

The waiter came up and Logan ordered a very special dinner with the air of knowing the very inmost secrets of the establishment. He demanded orange bitters before the meal and a special brand of cigarette.

“My day hasn’t been wasted,” he said. “I’ve been to Cluny’s and I asked to see your stuff. The little man there looked astonished, but I told him people were talking of no one else but you, and quite rightly. I talked to him from the dealer’s point of view, and assured him that there was a big boom in pictures, coming, and that he had better be prepared for it with a handful of new men. I didn’t let him know that I was a painter, but I got him quite excited, and I did not leave him until he had hung a picture and two drawings.”

“Which picture?”

“The one of your mother’s kitchen. It is one of your best. To-morrow three men will walk into Cluny’s and they will admire your work. On the day after to-morrow a real buyer will walk in.”

Mendel’s eyes grew larger and larger. Was Logan a magician, that he could direct human beings into Cluny’s shop and conduct them straight to his work?

Logan laughed at his amazement.

“Lord love-a-duck!” he said, “you’re not going to sit still and wait for commercial fools to discover that you know your job. At my first exhibition in Liverpool I put on a false beard and went in and bought one of my own pictures, just to encourage the dealer and the timid idiots who were too shy to go and ask him the price of the drawings. It worked, and this is going to work too. When I’ve warmed Cluny up into selling you, then I’m going to make him sell me. If you don’t mind we’ll have our names bracketed,—Kühler and Logan. People will believe in two men when they won’t in one. As for three, you’ve only got to look at the Trinity to see what they’ll believe when they get three working together. . . . Oh! I forgot you were a Jew and brought up to believe in One is One and all alone.”

He laughed and gave a fat chuckle as he mimicked the little man in Cluny’s cocking his head on one side and pretending to take in the beauties of Mendel’s work as they were pointed out to him.

“I have enjoyed myself,” said Logan. “By God! I wish there were a revolution. I’d have my finger in the pie. Oh! what lovely legs there’d be to pull—all the world’s and his wife’s as well. But it won’t come in my time.”

Under Logan’s influence Mendel began to enjoy his food, which he had always treated as a tiresome necessity before. He sat back in his chair and sipped his wine and crumbled up his bread exactly as Logan did; and he had a delicious sense of leisure and well-being, as though nothing mattered very much. And, indeed, when he came to think of it, nothing did matter. He had years and years ahead of him, and here was good solid pleasure in front of him, so that he had only to dip his hands in it and take and take. . . .

After the dinner Logan ordered cigars, coffee, and liqueurs, and Mendel felt very lordly. The restaurant had filled up, and among the rest were Mitchell and Morrison.

Mendel turned, gave them a curt nod, and could not restrain a grin of satisfaction as he thought that score was settled. He leaned forward and gave himself up to the pleasure of Logan’s talk.

“What I contend,” said Logan, “is this—and mind you, I let off my youthful gas years ago. I’ve been earning my living since I was fourteen, so I know a little of what the world’s like. I’ve been in offices and shops, and on the land, in hotels, on the railway, on the road as a bagman, from house to house as a tallyman, and I know what I’m talking about. The artist is a free man, and therefore an outlaw, because the world is full of timid slaves who lie in the laps of women. If an artist is not a free man, then he is not an artist. And I say that if the artist is outlawed, then he must use any and every means to get out of the world what it denies him. One must live.”

“That’s true,” said Mendel.

“You may take it from me that there is less room in the world now for artists than ever there was. In the old days you chose your patron and he provided for you, as the Pope provided for Michael Angelo, and you devoted your art to whatever your patron stood for, spiritual power if he happened to be a pope, secular power if he happened to be a duke or a king. But, nowadays, suppose you had a patron—say, Sir Julius Fleischmann—and he kept you alive, what on earth could you devote your art to? You could paint his portrait, and his wife’s portrait, and all his daughters’ portraits, but they’d mean nothing; they’d just be vulgar men and women. No. Art is a bigger thing than any power left on the earth. Money has eaten up all the other powers, and only art is left uncorrupted by it. Art cannot be patronized. It cannot serve religion, because there is no religion vital enough to contain the spirit of art. There is nothing left in the world worthy of such noble service, and therefore art must be independent and artists must be free, because there is no honourable service open to them. They must have their own values, and they must have the courage of them. The world’s values are the values fit for the service of Sir Julius Fleischmann, but they are not fit for men whose blood is stirring with life, whose minds are eager and active, men who will accept any outward humiliation rather than the degradation of the loss of their freedom.”

“I met Sir Julius Fleischmann. Once,” Mendel said. “He subscribed for me when I went to my first School of Art. They wanted to send me to Italy, but I refused, because I knew my place was here in London. There’s more art for me in the Tottenham Court Road than in all the blue skies in the world.”

“Quite right, too!” cried Logan. “That shows how sound an artist’s instinct is. He knows what is good for him because he is a free man. The others have to be told what is good for them because they don’t know themselves and because, however unhappy they are, they don’t know the way out. When you and I are unhappy we know that it is because we have lost touch with life, or because we have lost touch with art; either the flesh or the spirit is choked with thorns, and we set about plucking them out. When it is a question of saving your soul, what do morals matter?”

Mendel had heard people talk about morals, and he knew that his own were supposed to be bad; but he was not certain what they were. Rather timidly he asked Logan, who gave his fat chuckle and replied:—

“Morals, my son? No one knows. They change about a hundred years after human practice. They are different in different times, places, and circumstances, and Sir Julius Fleischmann, like you and me, has none, because he can afford to do without them. . . . Well, I’ve done a good day’s work and we’ve had a good dinner, and I must get back to my beautiful bed—unless you’d like to go to a music-hall.”

Mendel was loath to let his friend go, and, weary though he was, he said he would like the music-hall. Logan bought more cigars and they walked round to the Oxford and spent the evening in uneasy and flat conversation with two ladies of the town, one of whom said she knew Logan, though he swore he had never seen her before. When they were shaken off, he told Mendel mysteriously that she was a friend of a woman of whom he went in terror, who had been pursuing him for a couple of years.

“Terrible! Terrible!” he said. “Like a wild beast. They’re awful, these prostitutes, when they fall in love. It eats them up, body and soul.”

And he went on talking of women, and from what he said it appeared that he was beset by them. He described them lurking in the street for him, forcing their way into his studio, clamouring for love, love, love.

“It makes me sick,” he said. “I never yet met a woman who knew how to love. If a man has an enthusiasm for anything outside themselves, they plot and scheme with their damnable cunning to kill it. They want the carcase of a man, not the lovely life in it. And if they’re decent they want babies, which is almost worse if you’re hard up. No, boy; for God’s sake don’t take women seriously. If you can’t do without them, hate ’em. They’ll lick your boots for it. They feed on hatred, and will take it out of your hand.”

He talked in this strain until they reached the Tube station in Piccadilly Circus. It was unusually empty, and by the booking-office was standing a very pretty girl, big and upstanding. She had a wide mouth and curious slanting eyes, plump cheeks and a roguish tilt to her chin. She was well and neatly dressed, and Mendel judged her to be a shop-girl.

“That’s a fine lass,” said Logan. “Good-night, boy. I’ll see you to-morrow and tell you about Cluny’s.”

“Good-night,” said Mendel, still loath to see his friend go, and he suffered a pang of jealousy as he saw Logan go up to the girl, raise his hat, and speak to her. She started, blushed, and smiled. They stopped and talked together for a few moments, and then moved over towards the lift.

Mendel waited and watched them, Logan talking gaily, the girl smiling and watching him intently through her smile. With her eyes she took possession of him, and Mendel was filled with misgiving when he heard Logan’s fat chuckle and the rustle and clatter of the gate as the lift descended. It reminded him oddly of the Demon King and the Fairy Queen in a pantomime he had once seen with Artie Beech, whose father used to get tickets for the gallery because he had play-bills in his shop window.

IV BURNHAM BEECHES

FOR Greta Morrison as for Mendel, London life had been opened up through Mitchell. He had been friendly and kind to her when everybody else had been harsh, fault-finding, and indifferent. Her first year and a half at the hostel had been a period of misery, for the girls and women there regarded her as odd, vague, and careless, and thought it their duty to impose on her the discipline she seemed to need, for they knew nothing of her suffering through her ambition and her work.

Like Mendel, she had been overwhelmed by her inability to adapt herself easily to the Detmold standard of drawing, for it was against her temperament and her habit of mind to be precise, and drawing had always been to her rather a trivial thing, though extremely pleasant for the purposes of the caricatures in which her teasing humour found an outlet. All her girlhood had been thrillingly happy in the execution of large allegorical designs, through which she sought to express her delight in the earth—the immense serene power of which she became profoundly aware as she lay in the bracken at home and gazed out over the rich valley or up into the marvellous, quivering blue sky, through which she felt that she was being borne without a sound, without a tremor, irresistibly. Nothing could shake that loving knowledge in her, and it hurt her that her mother’s cold, self-centred religion, which made her demand a fussy, sentimental attention from her children, forbade all expression of it in her daily life. Her brothers, revolting against the sentimentality exacted of them, treated all tenderness as ignoble rubbish, and in her rough-and-tumble with them Greta was hardened and forced into independence. She had to play their games with them and to suffer the same tortures of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw. But all their swagger seemed to her rather fraudulent; and because they laughed at her allegorical designs she decided that men were inferior beings. When they laughed at her designs it was to her as though they laughed at the beauty she had tried to express in them, and the sacrilege enraged her more than her mother’s petulance, for they were young and strong and full of life, and they should not have been blind. It was against them that she first found relief in caricature, and as they went through their Public Schools and were more and more compressed into type, she pilloried them, and, as a consequence, even when she was a young woman, big and fine, with the tender, delicate bloom of seventeen upon her, she had to submit to the indignity of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw.

She was filled with a horror of men, and especially Public School men, for they seemed to her entirely lacking in decency, humility, and honesty. They pretended to be so fine and ignored everything that was finer than themselves. Her brothers’ foolish love-affairs disgusted her and made her suppress in herself every emotion that tried to find its way to a good-looking boy or young man. She was not shy of them or afraid of them, but she would not encourage in them what she so detested in her brothers.

During her first year in London she devoted herself heart and soul to her work. There were two or three families who were kind to her as her mother’s daughter, but their ways were her mother’s, and she only visited them as a duty, and to break the monotony of the school and the hostel.

Her encounter with Mitchell took place at the time when Mendel’s influence on him had set him in revolt against his Public School training. On the other hand, the sight of the abyss of poverty into which Mendel descended so easily had set him reeling. He was shrewd enough to know that Hetty Finch was using him as a ladder to get out of it, and that there was a real danger of her kicking him down into it. In a state of horrible confusion he plunged at the most obvious outlet, the “pure girl” of the tradition of his upbringing.

He made no concealment of it, but turned to Morrison with a childlike confidence that touched her. She was feeling lonely, disappointed, and dissatisfied with herself and was glad of his company. It was a change from the woman-ridden atmosphere of the hostel.

By way of making their relationship seemly he introduced her to his family, where as the pure young girl who was to save their hope from wild courses she was a great success.

“First sensible thing you’ve done, my boy,” said Mr. Mitchell, that great man, a journalist who had been a correspondent in a dozen wars. “A pure friendship between a boy and a girl has a most ennobling influence—most ennobling.”

“She is truly spiritual,” sighed Mrs. Mitchell, “the type who justifies the independence of the modern girl, whatever the Prime Minister may say.”

“That scoundrel!” cried Mr. Mitchell. “That infamous buffoon who has not a grain of Liberalism left in his toadying mind!”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Mitchell, “we were talking about little Miss Morrison.”

“Well,” answered Mr. Mitchell, “we took our risk when we let the boy be an artist and we can be thankful it is no worse. Did I tell you, my love, that I am going off to the Cocos Islands to-morrow?”

“Indeed, my dear? Then you will not be able to come to my meeting.”

“No, I hear it is worse than the Congo.”

“Oh dear! oh dear! I don’t know what the world is coming to. The more civilized we get in one part of the world, the worse things are in another part. I declare such horrible things seem to me to make it quite unimportant whether we get the vote or not.”

“When you have a Tory Government calling itself Liberal,” said Mr. Mitchell very angrily, “it means that neither reform at home nor justice abroad can receive any attention. The country has gone to the dogs, and I thank God I spend most of my time out of it.”

“And poor Humphrey suffers. I’m sure I am a good mother to him, but I cannot be a father as well. I’m thankful to say he seems to be dropping that Jewish friend of his. He is a genius, of course, and quite remarkable, considering what he comes from; but with Jews it can never be the same, can it?”

“No, my love,” said Mr. Mitchell; “one would never dream of drinking out of the same glass, would one? Still, I must say, the Jews in England are much better than they are anywhere else, which seems to show that they can respond to decent treatment and thrive in the air of liberty.”

Both Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell had a platform manner of speaking, and as Morrison was not a subject that suited it, she was soon dropped; but in the end they came back to her, and agreed that she was a nice, shy little girl, and that she had no idea of marrying their only son, or anyone else, for that matter.

She was much impressed with them, for she had never met important people before, and she was given to understand that they were very important. They seemed to have their fingers on innumerable reforms which were only suppressed by the stupidity of the Government. Directly the Government was removed, as of course such idiots soon would be, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell would raise their fingers and, hey presto! women would have votes, the slums would be pulled down, maternity would be endowed, prostitutes would be saved, prisons would be reformed, capital punishment abolished, the working classes would be properly housed, every able-bodied man who wished it should have his small holding, the railways would be nationalized, site values would be taxed, divorce would be made easy and free from social taint, and education would be made scientific and thorough. In the meantime, as the Government did not budge, Mr. Mitchell went to the Cocos Islands and Constantinople to procure evidence of horrors abroad and Mrs. Mitchell addressed meetings on the subject of horrors at home.

Morrison was impressed. The contrast between these people who thought of everything and everybody but themselves and her own home, where nothing was thought of but the family, the Church, and the Empire, shocked her into thinking and gave her a sense of liberation. It made human beings more interesting than she had thought, and she began to see that they did not, as she had heedlessly accepted that they did, fit infallibly into their places, and that vast numbers had no places to fit into. She herself, she saw, did not fit into any place, and that she had been squeezed, like paint out of a tube, out of her home for no other reason than that she was a woman, and there was only just enough money to establish the boys. However, she could not quite swallow Mrs. Mitchell’s view that men had deliberately, coldly, and of set purpose ousted women from their rightful share in the sweets of life.

She had a period of despair as these revelations sank into her mind and she had to digest Mrs. Mitchell’s awful facts and statistics about the night-life of London. Life seemed too terrible for her powers, but, as she soon began to see how comic Mrs. Mitchell was, she pulled herself together and found that she was strengthened by the experience, and when Mitchell confessed the awful doings of his past, she felt immeasurably older than he, and was thankful she was a woman and did not expect such things of herself. For she could never quite take his word for all he said. She knew her brothers too well to accept his plea of passionate necessity.

“Gawd!” he used to say. “When I think of my past I feel that I must go on my knees and worship your purity.”

His absurdity made her blush, but she liked him. He was clever and had read much under his father’s guidance, poetry and modern English fiction mostly, and when she went to tea with him in his studio he used to read aloud to her, Keats and Shelley and Matthew Arnold.

“I think I only like poetry,” she said once, “when it makes pictures. When it doesn’t do that it seems to me just words, and it doesn’t seem to matter how nice they sound.”

“Gawd!” he said. “That’s like Kühler. He says nothing makes such pictures as the Bible, and he is always quoting that about: ‘At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: where he fell, there he lay down.’ And he says it must be the words, because his own Hebrew Bible never gave him anything like the same—er—vision of it.”

Once he had begun to talk of Mendel she would not let him leave the subject.

“Do you think he’s a genius?” she would ask.

“Gawd! I don’t know. He says he is a genius, and I suppose time will show whether it is true or not. But why do you want to talk of him?”

“I don’t know. I’m interested. Perhaps because he is different.”

“Well, you’ve had tea with him. That is about as much as is good for you. If you were my sister I wouldn’t let you know him.”

“Why not?”

“My dear girl, there are certain things in life that a young girl ought never to know.”

“What things? Is there anything worse than what your mother talks about at her meetings? Girls know all about that nowadays, and it is no good pretending we don’t.”

“Talking about them is one thing, coming in contact with them is another. Kühler is a Jew, and he comes from the East End, where they don’t have any decent pleasures. He’s infernally good-looking in a hurdy-gurdy sort of way. Gawd! Women look at him and off they go.”

“But he cares for poetry and the Bible and he loves pictures. . . .”

“It doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

During this talk he had begun to find Morrison extraordinarily pretty and lovable, and he said tenderly:—

“Won’t you take off your hat and let me see your beautiful hair?”

She refused, and asked him more about Mendel, and in exasperation at the unintended snub he told her the true story of Hetty Finch, not concealing his own share in it, but implying that Mendel’s terrible immorality had corrupted him and led to his downfall.

The story was received in silence.

At last she said:—

“And what is going to become of Hetty Finch?”

“That’s the extraordinary part of it,” said Mitchell. “She has found someone to marry her.”

He leaned against the mantelpiece and dropped his head in his hands and groaned.

“Gawd!” he said. “If it weren’t for you I don’t know what would become of me.” And he was so moved by his own thoughts that tears trickled down his nose and made dark spots on the whitened hearth.

“I can’t ask you to marry me,” he said mournfully. “I’m unworthy, but I want to be your friend.”

She made no reply, and he was forced to ask rather lamely:—

“Will you be my friend?”

“Of course.”

“Always?”

“How can I promise that?” she said.

It was then that he took her to the Paris Café, where, all in a turmoil through her new knowledge of men and women, she hardly knew what she was doing, and gave Mendel the curt nod which had so disgruntled him.

Every summer the Detmold students went for a picnic, either up the river, or to a Surrey common, or to one of the forests in the vicinity of London. This year Burnham Beeches was chosen. Two charabancs met the party at Slough, and though Mendel tried very hard to sit next to Morrison, he was outmanœuvred by Mitchell, and had to put up with Clowes.

“I wish you wouldn’t glare at Mitchell so. You make me quite uncomfortable,” said she.

“He is telling her lies about me,” growled Mendel.

“Don’t be absurd,” protested Clowes. “He is not talking about you at all.” She felt rather cross with him because he was spoiling her pleasure, and because she had wanted to sit next someone else, and she added: “People aren’t always talking about you, and if anybody does it’s the models, and that’s your own fault.”

“How beastly!” he said.

“I don’t blame them. They haven’t any other interest.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant this country. It is so flat and dull, regular railway scenery. What a place to choose for a picnic!”

“Wait until you get to the woods! We’re going to a place called Egypt. Don’t you think that’s romantic? Though it reminds me more of Oberon and Titania than of Anthony and Cleopatra.”

He looked blank, and she explained:—

“Shakespeare, you know.”

“I’ve never read Shakespeare.”

“Oh! you should.”

“I’ve tried, but I can’t understand him. I suppose it’s because I’m not English. It seems ridiculous to me, all those plots and murders.”

“But the fairies in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’!”

“I haven’t read it; but what do you want with fairies? A wood’s a wood, and there’s quite enough mystery in it for me without pretending to see things that aren’t there.”

“But it’s nice to pretend,” said Clowes rather lamely, almost hating him because he seemed so wrong in the country. She knew people like that, people she was quite fond of in London, but in the country they were awful.

The charabancs swung through Farnham Royal and they came in sight of the woods, brilliant under a vivid blue sky patched with huge, heavy white clouds. Birds hovered above the trees, and as they turned out of the street of seaside bungalows and along the sandy lane leading to Egypt, they put up rabbits and pheasants.

The art students looked bizarre and almost theatrical in the woods, with the long-haired young men and the short-haired girls, many of them wearing the brightest colours. Mendel hated the lot of them, giggling girls and bouncing boys, and he recognized how inappropriate they all were and how he himself was the most inappropriate of them all. He felt ashamed, and wanted to go away and hide, to crawl away to some hole and gaze with his eyes at the beauty he could not feel. There were too many trees, as there were too many people. . . . What a poor thing is a man in a crowd which makes it impossible to share his thoughts and emotions with anyone! And how bitter it is when he is full of thoughts and emotions! It is all so bitter that the crowd must do foolish, inappropriate things not to feel it, not to be broken up by it. . . . Yet the others seemed happy enough. The old Professors were beaming and pretending to be young. Perhaps they enjoyed it more than anyone because they did not want to be alone, or to steal away with a coveted maid, as some of the young men were doing even now. . . . Had Mitchell stolen away with Morrison? Horrible idea! No. There he was, putting up stumps for cricket.

Cricket! How Mendel loathed that fatuous game, the kind of inappropriate foolish thing the crowd always did! How he dreaded the swift hard ball that would hurt his hand or his shins! How humiliated he felt when he was out: and how he raged against the frantic excitement he could not help feeling when he hit the ball and made a run. One run seemed to him a larger score than anyone else could possibly make, and when he made a run and was on the winning side he always felt that he had won the match. In the field, no matter where he was placed, he went and stood by the umpire, because he had noticed that the ball rarely went that way.

He had to field now, and he went and stood by the umpire. Mitchell came swaggering in. He hit a lovely four, a three, a two. The fielders changed at the over, but Mendel stayed where he was. The ball came near him. He picked it up and threw it as hard as he could at Mitchell’s head. Fortunately he missed, and there was a roar of laughter.

“I say, I mean to say,” said one of the Professors, “we are not playing rounders or—or baseball.”

And there was more laughter.

Mitchell hit a three, a two, a lost ball (six), a four, and then he skied one. The ball went soaring up. With his keen sight Mendel could see it clearly shining red against the hot sky. With an awful sinking in his stomach he realized that it was coming down near him. It was coming straight to him. It would fall on him, hurt him, stun him. Then he thought that if he caught it Mitchell would be out. He never lost sight of the ball for a moment. If he caught it Mitchell would be out. He moved back two paces, opened his hands, and the ball fell into them.

“Oh! well caught, indeed! Well caught!”

Mitchell walked away from the wicket swinging his bat in a deprecating fashion. After all, one does not expect miracles even in cricket.

“Beautiful, beautiful ball!” thought Mendel, fondling it with his still tingling hands. “You came to me like a lark to its nest, and you shone so red against the sky, you shone so red, so red!”

His dissatisfaction vanished. The crowd was a nice beast after all. It was at his feet. At no one else had it shouted like that. . . . The woods were very beautiful, with the bracken nodding under the trees, and the branches swaying, and the soft winds murmuring through the leaves, through which the trees seemed to breathe and sigh and to envy the moving wind while they were condemned to stay and grow old in one spot. Very, very sweet were the green and yellow and blue lights hovering and swinging through the woods, dappling the trunks of the trees, weaving an ever-changing pattern on the carpet of moss and dead leaves, and the tufted bracken that sometimes almost looked like the sea, full of a life of its own. Surely, surely there were fish swimming in the bracken.

Starting out of his dreams, he saw Morrison at the wicket, very intent, with a stern expression on her face. He knew she was desperately anxious to score.

She was most palpably stumped with her second ball, but the umpire gave her “not out,” amid general applause, for she was a favourite.

She lashed out awkwardly at the next ball, which came on the leg side. It came towards Mendel at an incredible speed. He put his foot on it, picked it up, pretended it had passed him, and tore towards the trees in simulated pursuit; and he remained looking for it in the bracken while Morrison ran four, five, six, seven, eight, and just as some one cried “Lost ball!” he stooped, pretended to pick it up, and threw it back to the bowler.

He himself was bowled first ball, but, as it turned out, Morrison’s side won by three runs.

She was bubbling over with happiness, and after tea she came over to him and said:—

“I say, Kühler, that was a good catch.”

He folded his arms and cocked his chin and looked down his nose as he said:—

“Oh! yes. I can play cricket.”

“You made a blob,” she said with a grin.

“A catch like that,” he answered, “is enough for one day. I have seen many words written in the papers about a catch like that. Even Calthrop does not have so many words written about his pictures.”

“I shall hate to go back to London after this,” she said. “I didn’t know there was anything so beautiful near London.”

“There is Hampstead,” he said.

“I’ve never been there,” she replied.

“Will you let me take you to Hampstead? It has lilies and water.”

“Oh yes,” she said eagerly. “Do let us go into the woods now before we start. I’m sure there must be lovely places.”

He followed her, first looking round to see what had become of Mitchell, whom he saw standing with a scowl on his face, a foolish figure.

“Don’t talk!” said Morrison. “I’m sure it is lovely through here.”

She led the way through a grove of pines into a beech glade, at the end of which they found a dingle, where they stood and gazed back.

“Oh, look!” she cried. “Look at the pine stems through the sea-green of the beeches. Purple they are, and don’t they swing?”

“I like the wind in the trees,” said Mendel.

He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he caught some of her ecstasy. But he could not understand it at all and it hurt him horribly. She was wonderful and beautiful to him, the very heart of all that loveliness, the song of it, its music and its mystery.

“She is only a little girl,” he said to himself very clearly, stamping out the words in his mind, so that it was as though someone else had spoken to him.

The ecstasy grew in her, and with it the pain in him. She swayed towards him and fell against his breast and raised her lips to him. He stooped and almost in terror just touched them with his.

He was a sorry prince for a sleeping beauty, for he was afraid lest she should awake.

V HAPPY HAMPSTEAD

ON the morning of the day fixed for their expedition to Hampstead Heath she sent him roses—yellow roses. He took them across to his mother and gave them to her, saying:—

“I do not need flowers. I am happy.”

Golda laughed at him, and said:—

“You are a big little man since you made the catch at the cricket.”

“I don’t know what it is, but I am happy. It is no longer surprising to me that there are happy people in the world, and I think the Christians are not all such fools to wish to be happy. I am only astonished that they are happy with such little things.”

“It is nothing,” said Golda. “They are not truly happy; they are only hiding away from themselves.”

“But I am finding myself,” cried Mendel. “I shall no more paint fishes and onions. I shall paint only what I feel, and it will be beautiful. I am so clever I can paint anything I choose.”

“Go to your work now,” said Golda. “You can boast as much as you please when the King has sent for you and told you you are the greatest artist in England. Go to your work.”

He went back to his studio and there found a letter from Logan, giving his new address in Camden Town, and another from Mitchell, asking him why he was so unfriendly. This he answered at once:—

“You are no longer my friend. You have despised and injured me. Superior as I am to you, you have thought it your part as a gentleman to try to keep me in my place. You have treated me as a kind of animal. You cannot see that as an artist I am the equal of all men, the highest and the lowest. My own poor people I do not expect to know this, but of an educated man I do expect it. You cannot see this, and I count you lower than the lowest, and as such I am prepared to know you, and not otherwise. I have changed completely. I no longer believe in the Detmold or in Calthrop or in any of the things I reverenced as a student. I prefer the Academy, for it does not pretend to be advanced, and is honest though asleep. I am no longer a student. I am an artist. You will always be an art student, and so I say good-bye to you, as one says good-bye to friends on a station-platform. The train moves and all their affectionate memories and longings cannot stop it. The train moves and I am in it, and I say good-bye to you without even looking out of the window.”

This done, he sat down to work at a portrait of his father and mother, with which he was designing to eclipse his first exhibiting success. It seemed to him important that it should be finished. Hearing Issy come in, he shouted to him to come and sit instead of his father, who had given out that he was unwell and was indulging in a sleeping bout.

Issy came shambling in, pale, tired, and unhappy. He sat as he was told, and said:—

“I wish Harry would come back; the business is being too much for me.”

“Oh! I shall soon be rich and then I’ll help you.”