BOOK THREE THE PASSING OF YOUTH

BOOK THREE THE PASSING OF YOUTH

I EDWARD TUFNELL

A WRETCHED journey home, a miserable journey. There had been a high wind, leaving a heavy swell, and Mendel shared the feelings of his brother-in-law, Moscowitsch, concerning the sea. It made him ill, and he never wished to see it again.

Oliver sat with her eyes closed while Logan held her hand and whispered to her. The boat was crowded, for it was the first to make the crossing for two days. Detestable people, detestable sea, detestable evil-smelling boat! . . . How lightly they had undertaken the trip to Paris! Only seven hours! But what hours!

Mendel’s disgust endured until they reached London. This was home to him, and never, never again would he travel. The discomfort of it was too odious, the shock to his habits too great. In London he did at least know what to avoid, while in Paris there was no knowing when he might be plunged into a dreary, glittering place full of prostitutes and Americans.

He was glad to part with Logan and Oliver. They had so much to settle with each other that he felt he was an unnecessary third. Paris had done violence to their relationship. They had gone there light of heart; they had returned oppressed and entangled. . . . And in London it was raining; but that was good, because familiar. It was good to go out into the friendly streets and to see them shining like black rivers, and to see the people hurrying under their dripping umbrellas and the women with their skirts up to their knees.

He seemed to have been away a very long time, and yet Paris seemed very far off too, an unreal memory, like a place of which he had read or seen in photographs. He was glad when he mounted a bus and knew that it was bearing him towards his own people.

Golda was very excited. She had had a letter from Harry, who had seen his brother in Paris, but had been too shy to speak to him because of his friends.

“You should have gone to see your brother,” she said.

“How could I?” asked Mendel. “I did not know where he was.”

“You speak Yiddish. You could have found him. He has done very well, but he is coming home to us. He does not like to live away from his people, and he says England is best.”

And Mendel thought that England was indeed best. For him, then, England meant his mother’s kitchen, with its odd decorations from Tottenham Court Road, its dresser crammed with gilded china and fringed with cut green paper, its collection of his early pictures, almost all hanging crooked, and the hard wooden chair in which Golda sat all day long with her hands on her stomach, dreaming and brooding of her life, which through all her hardships had been sweet because of her beautiful child whom everybody loved and spoiled, as she herself loved and spoiled him because he was not like other children. England was best because it could contain that peace and that beauty, and there was nothing in England to harm it or in envy to destroy it.

Mendel could understand his brother wanting to come back to it; for he, too, from all his adventures, returned to its simplicity for strength and comfort.

Moscowitsch came in with a Jewish paper. He was in a terrible state of anger and hatred. His eyes flashed and his nostrils quivered as he read out how a Jew in Russia had been accused of killing a Christian boy for his blood, and how over a thousand Jews had been massacred on the instigation of the police.

“It grows worse and worse,” he said. “The Jews do not kill. It is the Christians who lust for blood. It is the Christians who are so wicked and dishonest that, when they must be found out, they say it is the Jews, or that the Jews are more wicked than they. It is impossible. But England is good to the Jews. England must send soldiers to Russia or the Jews will be all murdered.”

“Yes, it is bad in Russia,” said Golda, nodding her head. “But life is bad everywhere for good people. Only in England one is left alone.”

“Well, Mr. Artist!” said Moscowitsch genially. “Made your fortune yet?”

“No,” replied Mendel; “but I have been to Paris for my holidays and I stayed in a hotel. Three of us spent twenty pounds.”

“So?” said Moscowitsch, impressed. “Have you made it up with the Birnbaum, then?”

“No.”

“That is not the way to get on, to quarrel with money.”

“If he wants money,” said Golda, “he can always get it. What more do you want? There are some letters for you, Mendel.”

He opened his letters, and had the satisfaction of telling Moscowitsch that he was asked to paint a portrait for thirty pounds.

“Who is it?” asked Moscowitsch. “A lord?” He had an idea that only lords had their portraits painted by hand.

“That’s better,” he said. “That’s better than painting those pictures that nobody wants. You paint what they ask you and you’ll soon make your fortune, and be able to give your mother dresses covered with beads and tickets for the theatre and china ornaments. And you can be thankful you don’t live in Russia. They wouldn’t let you be an artist there. If you became a student they would send you off to Siberia and you would die in the snow.”

It was the first time Moscowitsch had spoken to him since the breach with Birnbaum, and Mendel was at his ease with him again, and glad to be with his people. He knew that Moscowitsch was greatly attached to Golda, and had more than once urged his being taken away from his painting and put to some useful trade.

“Oh! I shall very soon succeed,” he said boastfully. “This is only a beginning. You keep an eye on that paper of yours. You will find something else to read besides what Russia does to the Jews. You will see what England does for a Jew when he has talent and honesty.”

“They made Disraeli a lord,” said Moscowitsch.

“I shall be something much better than a lord.”

“They only make painters R.A.”

“I shall be much better than that,” said Mendel.

“It is like old times,” laughed Golda, “to hear him boasting.”

Mendel opened another letter. It was an invitation to become a member of an exhibiting club which considered itself exclusive.

“I have been invited to become a member of a club.”

That settled Moscowitsch. A club to him was proof of success and social distinction. He and his wife had made the acquaintance of a member of the music-hall profession who had two clubs, and they counted him a feather in their caps. To have a member of a club in the family was almost overwhelming, and he forgot the sorrows of the Jews in Russia.

The portrait commission was from Edward Tufnell, who had lately married and had been adopted as a candidate for Parliament for a northern constituency. Good earnest soul that he was, he regarded himself as responsible for launching Mendel upon the world, and once he had assumed a responsibility he never forgot it. Nothing made any difference to him. He had heard tales of the boy’s wildness, but he accepted responsibility for that too, read up the histories of men of genius for precedent, and acknowledged the inevitability of the flying of sparks from the collision of a strong individuality and the habits of the world.

He had always intended to give his protégé a lift, and had tried in vain to badger his father and his uncle, partners in a huge woollen manufactory, into having their portraits painted. They preferred to sink their money in men with reputations. He did not see how Mendel could acquire a reputation except by giving him work to do. On the other hand, he shrank from what he considered the vanity of having his own portrait painted, but his charmingly pretty wife gave him the opportunity he desired.

Therefore he invited Mendel to his house in the dales to stay until the picture was finished.

A day or two later and Mendel was in the train, being whirled North through the dull, rolling Midlands and the black, smirched valleys of the West Riding. The gloomy sky filled him with terror. At first he thought there was going to be a storm, but there seemed to be no life in the sky, and its strangeness oppressed him. The people in the train spoke a language which seemed almost as foreign as French, and when the train darted through forests of smoking chimney-stacks and he looked down into the grimy, trough-like streets, he was dismayed to think that here were depths of misery compared with which the East End was as a holiday ground. This, too, was England, and he had said that England was best. He remembered Jews in the East End who had fled from the North and said they would rather go back to Russia than return to the tailoring shops and the boot factories. So this vile, busy blackness was the North!

For some mysterious reason it made him think of Logan and Oliver, and the thought of them filled him with an added uneasiness. He had not thought of them once since the trip to Paris, and now he felt bound to them, and that they were a weight upon him. They stood out vividly against the murky, lifeless sky. He could see them standing hand in hand, smiling a little foolishly, and a physical tremor shot through him as he thought of the contact of their two hands, thrilling together, pressing together, to tell of their terrible need of each other. . . . This man and this woman. Mendel was haunted by the images of all the couples he knew, and they passed before him like a shadowy procession of the damned, all hand in hand, across the lifeless sky, all shadowy except Logan and Oliver, and then two others, his father and his mother; but they were not hand in hand. They were seated side by side, like two statues, and behind them the lifeless sky broke and opened to show the infinite blue space beyond the clouds.

He had changed at the darkest of the chimneyed towns, and the shabby local train went grinding and puffing through a tunnel into a vast green valley. At the first station he saw Edward Tufnell on the platform. He had changed a good deal, and was no longer the lanky, earnest youth of the Settlement, but his eyes still had their steady, serene expression and their sunny, beautiful smile.

He flung up his hand as he saw Mendel, smiled, and came fussily, as though he were meeting the Prime Minister himself. He insisted on carrying Mendel’s bag and canvases and made him feel small and young again, as he used to when he went trotting along by Edward’s side on his way to the French class.

“It’s a long journey,” said Edward. “You must be tired.”

“Oh no! I don’t mind any journey as long as I don’t have to cross the sea.”

“It is only two miles now.”

They climbed into a dogcart and drove, for the most part at a walk, up a long, winding road that crept like a worm along the flanks of a huge hill.

“Glorious country!” said Edward. “I love it. The South doesn’t seem to me to be country at all—just a huge park. One is afraid to walk on the grass. But here there is room and freedom. One understands why the North is Liberal.”

“It is too big for me,” replied Mendel. “But then I can’t get used to the country. I’m not myself in it. I feel in it as though I were on the edge of the world and in danger of falling off. Yes. The country seems dangerous to me, and I could never walk along a road at night.”

“How odd that is!” laughed Edward. “If I am ever afraid it is in the town. The vast masses of people do really terrify me sometimes, when I think of governing them all.”

“They can look after themselves,” said Mendel simply.

Over the shoulder of the hill they came on a grey stone house with a walled garden. Edward turned in at the gate, flicked his horse into a trot up the steep drive, and drew up by the front door, in which was standing a dainty little lady in a mauve cotton gown and a wide Leghorn straw hat.

“Here he is, my dear!” said Edward. “My wife, Kühler.”

“I’m so glad you could come,” said the little lady. “My husband has told me so much about you.”

“Not half what he could tell if he only knew,” thought Mendel.

“I’m afraid it is a very long way for you to come,” she said, leading him into the house while Edward drove round to the stables. “It is very good of you. We are very quiet here, but you can do just as you like, and I shall always be ready for you when you want me.”

She had a very charming voice that seemed to bubble with happiness, and she had the air of being surprised at herself for being so happy. The house was pervaded with her atmosphere, fragrant and good, and every corner seemed to be full of surprise, every piece of furniture looked astonished at finding itself in its place—so perfectly in its place. This fragrant perfection was the more amazing as the outside of the house was more than a little grim, and the hill behind it was dark and ominous, while several of the trees were blasted and chapped with the wind.

Mendel had never seen such a house, and when Edward took him up to his room he almost wept with delight at the comfort and sweetness of it all. There was a fire burning in the grate, by the side of which was a huge easy chair. Flowered chintz curtains were drawn across the windows, and the same gay chintz covered the bed. On the wash-hand-stand was a shining brass can of hot water. There were books by the bedside, the carpet was of a thick pile, and the furniture was old and exquisite. . . . He was filled with delight and gratitude.

“Yes,” he thought, “England is best! Comfortable England.”

And when Edward showed him the big tiled bathroom he had a shiver of dismay, and thought what a dirty, uncouth fellow he was to come among these exquisite people.

Mary Tufnell put him at his ease at once and encouraged him to talk about himself. He was frank and gay and amusing, and told her about his adventures and many of his troubles, and even ventured once or twice upon scabrous details.

“He is a darling,” she said to Edward. “But how he must have suffered. He is such a boy, but sometimes he seems to me the oldest person I have ever met.”

“You must remember that he is a Jew,” said Edward.

“He doesn’t let you forget it,” replied she.

The portrait was begun the next day. Mendel took a business-like view of his visit. He was there to paint and to make thirty pounds. Every moment that his hostess could spare he seized upon. He painted her in her mauve cotton and Leghorn hat and would not talk while he worked.

When the light was gone he was ready for any entertainment they might propose. He did not find either of them particularly interesting, and their unfailing kindness wearied him not a little. They were so invariably good in every thought, word, and deed. It seemed impossible for them to fail. There was no combination of circumstances which they could not surmount with their smiling patience. . . . He thought of them as two people walking along on either side of a road, smiling across it at each other. Nothing joined them. They had never met. There had been no collision. He had overtaken her on the road and had taken her step, her pace. . . . They had just that air. Dear Edward had fallen in with her by the wayside, and she had smiled at him and he was content and held for life. To their mutual grave astonishment she would have children, and her smile would become a little sad, and with the children she would be an ideal to Edward, like the little Italian Madonnas of whom he had so many photographs all over the house. And between them on the road would march the brave procession of life—kings and beggars, priests and prostitutes, artists and peasants, chariots, and strange engines of peace and war; but they would see nothing of it: they would see only each other, and they would smile and go smiling to the grave.

Mendel was at his ease with them and very happy, but suddenly out of nowhere there would arise, as it were, a great stench that pricked his nostrils and set him longing for London. And he would think of Logan and Oliver and ache to be with them, so that he knew that he was bound to them in the flesh. They were embarked upon a great adventure in which he must be with them to the end, for Logan was his friend, with whom he must share even the deepest bitterness. With Edward he could share nothing at all, for Edward was absurdly, incredibly innocent, content to smile by the wayside.

He wrote to Logan and Oliver and told them how he was longing to be with them, and how the country filled him with childish fears, and how Paris seemed a thousand miles away and its adventures a thousand years ago. And he was hurt because they did not at once reply.

He received two letters one morning. Logan wrote telling him he ought not to waste his time over portraits, and that he must come back to London soon, because the autumn was to see their triumph: nothing about himself, nothing about Oliver. Mendel was disappointed: nobody ever really answered his letters, into which he flung all his feeling.

His other letter was from Morrison. His first letter from her. He knew her hand, though he had never seen it before—round, big, simple. He kept her letter until his day’s work was done, and then he went into the garden to read it. There was an arbour at the end of a mossy walk which led to a crag above a little waterfall. Out of the crag grew a mountain ash, brilliant in berry. This was the most beautiful spot in the garden, and so he chose it for reading the letter.

“I want you to forgive me for being so foolish. I want to try again. I hate being beaten, and I think it was only my stupidity that beat me. I have been thinking of you all the time, and I have been troubled about you. What people said had nothing at all to do with it. I admire you more than I can say, and I have been very foolish.

“It has been a lovely summer. I have been working hard and feel hopeless about it. Please don’t ask to see my work. While I am at it I am wondering all the time what you are doing.

“I am to be allowed to come back to London in October. There is no reason why you should not write to me.”

She was there with him, by his side, under the glowing rowan-tree, gazing down at the little white waterfall dashing so merrily down into the pebbled beck. She was there with him, and his blood sang in his veins and his mind began to work, pounding along as it had not done these many weeks. . . . Weeks? Years—more than a lifetime.

He went back to his picture and thought it very, very bad. Edward and his wife came in and looked at it dubiously.

“Of course,” said Edward, “it is a very jolly picture, but I don’t think you have caught all her charm.”

“But the painting of the hat is wonderful,” said Mary.

“What do I care?” thought Mendel. “It is you—you as you are, smiling, eternally smiling over your little clean, comfortable happiness, three parts of which you have bought, with your servants and your flowers and your bathroom.”

In a day or two he was being whirled back to London, shouting every now and then from sheer exuberance—thirty pounds in his pocket, October to look forward to: October, when London shook off its summer listlessness; October, when She would return; and until October he would run with his eyes on the trail of the burning, creeping passion that bound him to Logan and Oliver.

II THE CAMPAIGN OPENS

HE reached London in the afternoon, and as soon as it was evening went to Camden Town to find Logan. Only Oliver was in. She was sitting in the window smoking. There had been a tea-party, and the floor was littered with cups, plates of bread and butter and cakes, fragments of biscuit, some of which had been trodden on.

Mendel surveyed this litter ruefully, and he said:—

“Why don’t you wash up?”

“Logan said he would. I washed up after breakfast. I’m not a servant, and he keeps on promising to have someone in to help.”

“Will you wash up if I help you?”

“No, thanks. Logan’s got to do it.”

“Who has been to tea?”

“Oh! A funny lot. Some of Logan’s fools who think he is a great man.”

“He is a great man,” said Mendel.

“Heuh! You try living with him. What’s the good of being a great man if you don’t make any money? It’s all very well for Calthrop to live like a pig. He makes money and can do what he likes.”

“If you don’t like it you can always clear out.”

“Where to? Eh? To go the round of the studios and oblige people like you? Not much! It isn’t as if I was married to him. I can’t make him keep me. Besides, he wouldn’t let me go. If I went he would run after me. I suppose you hadn’t thought of that, Mr. Kühler. You don’t know what it is to care for anybody. I’d like to see some one play you and play you, and then turn you down. That would teach you a lesson, that would.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m not going to stand it any longer,” she said. “I’m not going to be put on one side like dirt while you go on with your conceited talk. You’re both so conceited you don’t know how to hold yourselves. I’m a woman, and I stand for something in the world. A woman is more important than the biggest picture that was ever painted.”

“It depends upon the woman.”

“All right, then. I’m more important. You talk about Logan keeping me. He can consider himself damned lucky I stay with him.”

“Oh! you’re both in luck,” snapped Mendel, and he sat down and refused to say another word.

Oliver began to whistle and then to hum. She fidgeted in her chair. She thought she had come off rather well in the sparring match. She had been dreading Mendel’s return, for since the Paris adventure she had been asserting herself, as she called it, beating Logan down, bewildering him with her extraordinary sweetness and cajolery and sudden outbursts of fury. Both had agreed to bury the memory of the last night in Paris, but the thoughts of both were centred upon it. She rejoiced that she had served him out, but she had been stirred to a degree that alarmed her. Her former condition of lazy sensual security had been broken, and she dreaded Logan’s jealousy. She knew that she was not his equal in force, but she set herself to overcome him with cunning. His force would spend itself. She knew that. She must then bind him fast with tricks and lures, rouse the curiosity of his senses and keep it unsatisfied.

She had succeeded wonderfully. Logan crumbled and turned soft and sugary under her arts, and only one impulse in him resisted her—his love for Mendel; and through that love his passion for art. Therefore she dreaded and hated Mendel’s return.

Presently she ceased to hum. She thought suddenly that perhaps it had been a mistake to meet Mendel with hostility.

“I say, Kühler, do give us one of your cigarettes. These are awful muck.”

He threw his cigarette-case over to her.

“Did you have a good time up North?”

“Yes.”

“I come from there, you know. Logan was furious with you for going. He is really very fond of you, you know.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that.”

“He’s very excited just now. He keeps talking about the artistic revolution and the twentieth century, and all that, you know. He has been reading a book called ‘John Christopher,’ and keeps on reading it aloud until I’m sick of it. I believe he thinks he is like Christopher, though I’m sure he’s not, because Christopher could never see a joke. It is all about women, one after another, just left anyhow. It doesn’t sound like a story to me at all.”

“It sounds true,” said Mendel, not paying much attention to what she said.

To his intense relief Logan came in with a frame under his arm.

“Hullo!” he said. “Got back? How did you like the swells?”

“They were good people,” replied Mendel, “and wonderfully peaceful. I don’t think I appreciated it enough while I was there, but it seems very clear and beautiful to me now.”

“Portrait any good?”

“No.”

Logan put down his frame and without a word to Oliver proceeded to wash up the tea-things. She stayed in her chair in the window and hummed.

To Mendel his friend seemed altered. He had lost his good-humour and something of his happy recklessness, and he was more concentrated and full of a wary self-consciousness.

He came out of the bedroom when the washing up was done and flung himself on the divan, stretched himself out, and said:—

“I’m tired; done up. Lord! What fools there are in the world! No more portraits for you, my boy; at least, not this side of thirty. Ten years good solid work ahead of you.”

He laughed.

“I told Cluny he must hurry up or you would slide off into portrait-painting. Dealers hate the mere sound of the word. He is going to hurry up. I’ve played you for all I am worth, and Cluny is in my pocket. Oh! I’m a man of destiny, I am.”

A snort and a giggle came from Oliver. Logan sat up.

“Leave the room!” he said.

“Shan’t.”

“Leave the room. I want to talk to Kühler.”

“Talk away then. I shan’t listen.”

Logan walked over to her, seized her by the arms, and pushed her into the bedroom and locked the door. It was done very quickly and dexterously, as though it were a practised manœuvre.

“I’m finding out how to treat her,” he said. “Quiet firmness does the trick.”

He met Mendel’s eyes fixed on him in horrified inquiry and turned sharply away.

“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” he said. “The fact is, women aren’t fit for liberty and an artist ought to have nothing to do with them. But what can a man do? . . . What were we talking about?”

“Cluny.”

“Oh yes! He wants the exhibition to be the first fortnight in November. Can you be ready by then? It must be a turning-point in art, the beginning of big things. I know myself enough to realize that it is doubtful if I shall ever be a great creative artist, but I shall be the Napoleon of the new movement—the soldier and the organizer of the revolution in art. And it won’t be confined to art; it will spread through everything. Art will be the central international republic from which the commonwealths which will take the place of the present vulgar capitalistic nations will be inspired. What do you think of that for an idea?”

“Stick to art,” said Mendel. “I know nothing about the rest.”

“Do you remember my saying that the music-hall was all that was left of old England? I did not know how true it was. England has become one vast music-hall, with everybody with any talent or brains scrambling to top the bill. It runs through everything—art, politics, the press, literature, social reform, women’s suffrage, local government; and the people who top the bill can’t be dislodged, just like the poor old crocks on the halls, who come on and give the same show they were giving twenty years ago, and get applause instead of rotten eggs because the British public is so rotten with sentiment and so stupid that it can’t tell when a man has lost his talent. Please one generation in England and its grandchildren will applaud you, though everything about you is changed except your name. The result is, of course, that no talent is ever properly developed. A man reaches the point where he can please enough people to make a living, and he sticks there. Now, I ask you, is that a state of things which a self-respecting artist can accept?”

“No,” said Mendel. “No.”

“Well. It has to be altered. And who is to alter it if not the painters, who are less in contact with the general public than any other artists? Painters had a comfortable time last century, living on the North-country municipal councils, but that is all over and we are reduced to poops like Tysoe. There are any number of them, if one only took the trouble to dig them up, but they’re no good. I’ve lived on them for the last ten years, and they’re no good. You might as well squeeze your paints into the sink and turn on the tap for all the flicker of appreciation you get out of them. Then there are the snobs, the semi-demimondaines of the political set; but they are a seedy lot, with the minds and the interests of chorus-girls. You might whip up a little excitement at Oxford and Cambridge, but it would only vanish as soon as the young idiots came in contact with London and fell in love. . . . No. Behind the scenes of the music-hall is no good. We must make a direct onslaught on the general public. They must be taught that there is such a thing as art and that there are men devoted to the disinterested development of their talents—men who have no desire to top the bill or to make five hundred a week; men who recognize that art is European, universal, the invisible fabric in which human life is contained, and are content, like simple workmen, to keep it in repair.”

“I don’t know,” said Mendel, “if my brother-in-law Moscowitsch is typical, but he regards art which does not make money as a waste of time.”

“Oh! He is a Jew and uneducated. That’s where Tolstoi went so wrong. He confused the simplicity of art with the simplicity of the peasant, the dignity of the unsophisticated with the dignity that is achieved through sophistication. It may seem absurd to talk of bringing about anything so big through little Cluny, but it is not only possible, it is inevitable. The staleness of London cannot go on, and Paris seemed just the same to me. Stagnation is intolerable. There must come a movement towards freedom and a grander gesture, and the only free people are the painters. They are the only people whose work has not become servile and vulgarized. Through them lies the natural outlet. . . . Oh! I have been thinking and thinking, and I thank God we met before you had been spoiled by success or I had been ruined by my rotten swindling life—though that has had its advantages too, and I can meet the dealers on their own ground, and if necessary advertise as impudently as any of the music-hall artists.”

Oliver began to hammer on the door. He went and unlocked it and let her in.

“You can talk as much as you like now,” he said. “I’ve said my say.”

“I heard you,” she replied, “talking to Kühler as if he was a crowd in Hyde Park.”

Mendel was lost in thought. He was baffled by this association of art with things like politics and music-halls, which he had always accepted as part of the world’s constitution but essentially unimportant. He had no organized mental life. His ideas came direct from his instincts to his mind, and were either used for immediate purposes or dropped back again to return when wanted. However, he recognized the passionate nervous energy that made Logan’s words full and round, and he was glad to have him so accessible and so eager and purposeful. On the whole, it did not matter to him why Logan thought his work so important. No one else thought it so, and certainly no one else had taken so much trouble to help it to find recognition. Logan seemed to promise him public fame, and that would delight and reassure his father and mother more than anything else. They treasured every mention of his name in the newspapers, pasted the cuttings in a book, and produced it for every visitor to the house.

Struggling for ideas with which to match Logan’s, he became instinctively aware that his friend’s enthusiasm was deliberate, not in itself faked, but artificially heated. Behind it lay a deeper passion, from which he was endeavouring to divert the energy it claimed.

Sitting between Logan and Oliver, Mendel could almost intercept the current of feeling that ran between them. It offended him as an indecency that they should have so little control over themselves as to reveal their condition of mutual obsession. . . . It reminded him of his impression of the police-court, where the secret sores of society were exposed nakedly, and queer, helpless, shameless, unrestrained creatures were dealt with almost like parcels in a shop. And again he had the sensation of being bound to them, of being confined with them in that little room, of a dead pressure being upon him, until he must scream or go mad.

He looked at them. Did they not feel it too? Logan was lying back with his hands beneath his head and his lips pressed together and a scowl on his face, looking as though his thoughts and his destiny were almost, but, of course, not quite too much for him. Oliver was looking out of the window with her hands on her hips, humming. She laughed and said:—

“I’d sooner live with an undertaker than an artist. He would be up to a bit of fun sometimes, and he’d do his work without making such a fuss about it.”

“There’s an undertaker at the corner of the next street. You’d better ask him to take you on.”

“As a corpse?” asked Mendel, exploding and spluttering at what seemed to him a very good joke. The others turned and looked at him solemnly, but neither of them laughed, and gradually his amusement subsided and he said lamely:—

“I thought it was very funny.”

“Oh! for goodness’ sake let’s go and have something to eat,” said Oliver. “You’re turning the place into a tomb with your silence. One’d think you were going to be crowned King of England instead of just holding a potty little exhibition.”

“He is going to be crowned King of Artists,” said Mendel, making another attempt at a joke.

“By God!” said Logan, “they’d kill me if they knew what I was like inside. Do you ever feel like that, Kühler, that all the birds in the cage would peck you to death for having got outside it? I do. I never see a policeman without feeling he is going to arrest me.”

“I used to feel like that sometimes,” replied Mendel, “until I was arrested and realized that policemen are just people like anybody else. The man who arrested me was a very nice man.”

“Oh! I’m sick of your feelings,” cried Oliver, “and I want my dinner.”

“All right,” said Logan, reaching for his hat; “we’ll go to the Pot-au-Feu and afterwards to the Paris Café and fish for critics. I shall nobble one or two swells through Tysoe. We’ll pick up the more crapulous and lecherous at the café, and Oliver shall be the bait. So look your prettiest, my dear. . . . Let’s have a look at you.”

He lit the gas and made her stand beneath it.

“You’ll do,” he said, patting her cheek. “Come along.”

He put his arm through hers. She gave a wriggle of pleasure and pressed close to him.

Mendel followed them downstairs with an omen at his heart. He felt sure that something violent would happen.

But nothing violent did happen. The evening was extraordinarily light-hearted and pleasant. Logan was his old self again, cracking jokes, mimicking people almost to their faces, giving absurd descriptions of his interviews with dealers and buyers, and concocting a burlesque history of his life. Mendel had never laughed so much since he was at the Detmold. His sides ached, and he was hard put to it to keep his countenance when at the café Logan caught two critics and told them that they must make no mistake this time: their reputations were at stake, nay, the reputation of art criticism was at the cross-roads, and art was on the threshold of its greatest period, and criticism should be its herald, not its camp-follower.

“You fellows,” said Logan, “use your brains, you are articulate. We are apt to get lost in paint, in coloured dreams of to-morrow and the spaces of the night. We lose touch with the world, with life. We are dependent on you—even the greatest genius is dependent on you. You are the real patrons of art. The herd follows you. Criticism must not shirk its duty. The kind of thing that happened with Manet, with Whistler, ought not to happen again.”

The two critics were unused to such treatment from painters. Oliver used her eyes upon them, detached one of them into a flirtation and left the other to Logan’s mercies. Logan’s blood was up. Here was a game he dearly loved, talking, bullying, hypnotizing another man out of his individuality. He invented monstrously, outrageously—concocted a whole new technique of painting, the discovery of which he ascribed to Mendel’s genius, and ended up by saying that painting should be to England what music had been to Germany, a national and at the same time a universal art.

The critic had drunk enough to take it all seriously, and he promised to call and see the work of both painters. His colleague, on the other hand, made arrangements to take Oliver out to tea and won her promise to come and see him at his flat.

“That’s all right,” said Logan, as they left the café at closing time. “They will remember our names. They will forget how they came to know them and they will write about us.”

III SUCCESS

IT was all very well for Logan to talk about modern England being a music-hall, but his methods were almost identical with those of the publicists whom he decried. The greater part of his energy went to find a market for his wares, leaving very little for the production of the wares themselves. Because he was excited and busy and full of enthusiasm, he took it for granted that he was in a vigorous condition and that his vision of the future of art would be expressed in art. He talked volubly of what he was doing and what he intended to do, even while he worked, and his nerves were so overwrought that he contracted a horror of being alone. Though Oliver jeered at him as he worked he would not let her go out, and when once or twice she insisted, he could not work, and went round to see Mendel and prevented his working either.

Mendel knew nothing of markets and dealers and the relation of art to the world and its habits and institutions. He was carried off his feet by his friend’s torrential energy, believed what he said, wore his thoughts as he would have worn his hat, and lived entirely for the exhibition which was to do such wonders for him. Twelve exhibits were required of him. He would have had forty-eight ready if he had been asked for them. When he missed the delight and the pure joy he had had in working, he told himself that these emotions were childish and unworthy of a man, and a nuisance, because they would have prevented him from knowing clearly what he wanted to do. He dashed at his canvas with a fair imitation of Logan’s manner, slung the paint on to it with bold strokes, saying to himself: “There! That will astonish them! That will make them see what painting is!”

And every now and then he would remember that he was in love. He must paint love as it had never been painted before.

For his subject he chose Ruth in the cornfield, but very soon tired of painting ears of corn, so he left it looking like a square yellow block, and painted it up until it resembled a slice of Dutch cheese. Only when he came to Ruth’s face and tried to make it express all the love with which his heart was overflowing did he paint with the old fastidious care, but even that could not keep him for long, and he returned to his corn, the shape of which had begun to fascinate him, and he wanted somehow to get it into relation with the hill on which it was set. But he could do nothing with it, and had to go back to Ruth and love.

The effect was certainly startling and novel, and Logan was enthusiastic.

“That’s it,” he said. “The nearest approach to modern art is the poster, which is not art, of course, because it is not designed by artists. But it does convey something to the modern mind, it does jog it out of its routine and habitual rut. Now, your picture wouldn’t do for a poster. It is too good, but it has the same kind of effect. Stop! Look! Listen! Wake up, and see that there are beautiful women in the world and blue skies, and love radiant over all! This woman has nothing to do with what you felt for your wife when you proposed to her, or with what the parson said when the baby died: she is the woman the dream of whom lives always in your heart, although you have long forgotten it. She is the beauty you have passed by for the sake of peace and quiet and a balance at your bank.”

“Do you think it is a good picture?” asked Mendel.

“I think it is a good beginning. Two or three more like that and there will be a sensation. There will have to be policemen to regulate the crowd.”

Mendel caught his mood of driving excitement and really was convinced that he had broken through to a style of his own, and to the beginning of something that might be called modern art.

He was a little dashed when, after Logan had gone, he fetched his mother over to see it, and all she could find to say was:—

“You used not to paint like that.”

“No, of course not,” he said impatiently. “The old way was limited, too limited. It was all very well for painting the life down here, just what I saw in front of me. This picture is for an exhibition, all by myself with one other man.”

“Logan?” asked Golda dubiously.

“Yes. It is a great honour to give a private exhibition like that at my age. It is most unusual. This is the beginning of a new style. I’m beginning a new life.”

“You are not going away?” said Golda in a sudden panic that he was to be snatched away from her.

“I should never go away until you gave your permission,” he said. “I am not so very different from Harry that I want to go away and leave my people.”

“I never know what will come of that painting of yours.”

“Success!” he said jestingly. “And fame and money, and beautiful ladies in furs and diamonds, and carriages and motor-cars, and fine clothes and rings on everybody’s fingers.”

“I would rather have you seated quietly in my kitchen than all the gold of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,” said Golda.

“Then please like my picture.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Then say you like it.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I shall wipe it out then.”

“Your new friends will like it.”

“I like it,” he said. “I don’t think it is a very good picture, but it means something to me.”

And he longed for Morrison to come and see it, for it was the first picture that had directly to do with her. The portrait of her was hardly more than a drawing. What he called an “art student” might have done it, but this Ruth, he felt, was the beginning of his work as an artist, and he thought fantastically that when Morrison saw it she would see that he was to be treated with respect and would fall in by his side, and they would live happily, or at least solidly, ever after.

“Solid” was his great word, and he used it in many senses. It conveyed to his mind the quality of which he could most thoroughly approve. If a thing, or a person, or an action, or an emotion were what he called “solid,” then it was a matter of indifference to him whether it was in the ordinary sense good or bad. He was perfectly convinced that if Morrison could only be brought to reason, then his life would solidify and he would be able to go on working in peace.

Meanwhile he was anything but solid. His work, his life, his ideas, his ambition had all melted under Logan’s warm touch and were pouring towards the crucial exhibition. Mendel looked forward to it feverishly, because it was to put an end to his present condition, in which he was like a wax candle, luminous, but fast sinking into nothingness. If only he could reach the exhibition in time, the wind of fame would blow out the flame that was reducing him and he would be able to start afresh . . . But all the time as he worked words of Logan’s rolled in his mind, and had no meaning whatever, except that they made him think of music-halls and motor-buses and women’s legs in tights and newspapers and electric sky-signs spelling out words letter by letter. Out of this hotch-potch pictures, works of art, were to emerge. They were to take their place in it and, according to Logan, reduce it to order. But how was it possible? . . . In the quiet, ordered, patriarchal world of the Jews a rare nature might arise, but in that extraordinary confusion nothing rare could survive. Beauty could never compete on equal terms with women’s legs in tights and electric sky-signs; it could never produce an impression on minds obsessed and crammed to overflowing with the multitudinous excitements of the metropolis.

Mendel was convinced that Logan was right, that beauty must emerge to establish authority, and he thought of himself as engaged in a combat with a huge, terrible monster. Every stroke of his brush was a wound upon its flanks and an abomination the less. Yet he loved all the things against which he was fighting, because they made the world gay and stimulating and wonderful. He could see no reason why he should change the world. It was full enough of change already. Why, in his own time, the electric railways and the motor-buses had brought an amazing transformation in the life of the East End. No one now worked for such little wages as his father had done at the stick-making, and the life of the streets had lost its terrors and dangers. The young men had better things to do than to fight each other or to pelt old Jews with mud, and there was no reason to suppose that such changes would stop where they were.

However, he had Logan’s word for it, and Logan had given art a new importance in his eyes. He could not think it out himself without getting hopelessly confused, and there was nothing for it but to go on with his work.

Other relief he had none. He had written three ardent letters to Morrison, telling her, absolutely without restraint, of his love and his need for her, and she had not replied. He was too much hurt to write again, and as he worked he began to hate love, being in love, and the idea of it. He persuaded himself that it was a weakness, and he had ample reason for thinking so, when he compared his loose condition with his old clear singleness of purpose. What chiefly exasperated him in this indefinite unsuccessful love of his was that it exposed him to the passion, every day growing more furious, between Logan and Oliver. It made his own emotions seem fantastic, with the most vital current of his being pouring out in a direction far removed from the rest of his life, apparently ignoring the solid virtues of his Jewish surroundings and the elated vigour of his career among the artists.

“It will not do!” he told himself. “I will not have it! What is this love? Just nonsense invented by people who are afraid of their passions. A lady indeed? Is she? A lady is only a woman dressed up. She must learn that she is a woman, or I will have nothing to do with her.”

And sometimes he could persuade himself that he had driven Morrison from his thoughts. He finished the portrait of her from memory and was convinced that it was the end of her. It was a good picture and pretty enough to find a buyer, and there it ended. He had got what he wanted of her and could pluck her out of his thoughts.

Logan said it was a very fine picture, a real piece of creation.

“And if that doesn’t make them see how damned awful their Public School system is in its effect on women, I’ll eat my hat. You’ve had your revenge, my boy. You have shown her up. Why don’t you call it The Foolish Virgin? Of all the mischievous twaddle that is talked in this mischievous twaddling country the notion of love is the worst. You can’t love a woman unless you live with her, and a woman is incapable of loving a man unless he lives with her. By Jove! We’ll hang it and my portrait of Oliver side by side in the exhibition, and I’ll call mine The Woman who Did.”

“I won’t have them side by side,” said Mendel. “I want our pictures kept separate. I don’t want it said that we are working together.”

“But we are working together.”

“Yes. But along our own lines. We’re only together really in our independence. You said yourself that we didn’t want to found a school.”

“That’s true,” replied Logan, “but I don’t see why we shouldn’t have our little joke.”

“I don’t joke with art,” said Mendel grimly, and that settled the matter.

It was the first time he had set his will against his friend’s, and he was surprised to find how soft Logan was. Surely, then, it was he who was the leader, he who was blazing the new trail for art. . . . He had to bow to the fact that Logan had a programme while he had none. However, having once asserted his will, he became critical, and was not again the docile little disciple he had been.

Logan wanted to draw up a manifesto for the catalogue, to enunciate the first principles of modern art, namely, that a picture must have (a) not merely a subject, but a conception based on but not bounded by its subject; (b) form, meaning the form dictated by the logic of the conception, which must of necessity be different from the logic dictated by the subject, which would lead either to the preconceptions and prejudices of the schools or to irrelevant and non-pictorial considerations. All this was set out at some length, and appended were a number of maxims, such as:—

“In art the important thing is art.

“Abstraction precedes selection.

“Art exists to keep in circulation those spiritual forces, such as æsthetic emotion, which are denied in ordinary human communications.

“Photography has released art from its ancient burden of representation,” etc., etc.

With the spirit of this manifesto Mendel was in agreement, though he could make but little of its letter. He refused to agree to it because so much talk seemed to him unnecessary.

“If we can say what we mean to say in paint, then we need not talk. If we cannot say it in paint, then we have no right to talk.”

“You’d soon bring the world to a standstill,” said Logan, “if you limited talk to the people who have a right to it. It is just those people who never open their mouths. I think it is criminal of them, just out of shyness and disgust, to give the buffoons and knaves an open field.”

“All the same,” grunted Mendel, “I am not going to agree to the manifesto. People will read it and laugh at it, and never look at the pictures. You seem to think of everything but them. I wonder you don’t set up as a dealer.”

“You’re overworking,” said Logan, “that’s what you are doing. And directly the exhibition is open I shall pack you off to Brighton.”

Already a week before the opening they began to feel that the eyes of London were upon them. They crept about the streets half-shamefacedly like conspirators, relaxed and wary, waiting for the moment when their triumph should send their shoulders back and their heads up, and they would march together through a London which owed its salvation to them. Not since his portrait had appeared in the Yiddish paper had Mendel been so defiant and so morosely arrogant.

He was ill with excitement and could not do a stroke of work. Every minute of the day he spent with Logan and Oliver, to whom Tysoe was often added. He dined with them at the Pot-au-Feu, took them all out to lunch and tea at places like Richmond and Kew, had them to his house, and was squeezed by the approaching success to buy Logan’s two largest pictures before the public could have access to them.

“They are masterpieces!” he cried, swinging his long hands, “absolute masterpieces! You don’t know how much good it does me to be with you two. Absolutely sincere, you are! That’s what I like about you. Sincere! One looks for sincerity in vain everywhere else. Sincerity has vanished from the theatre, the novel, music, poetry. I suppose it is democracy—letting the public in behind the scenes, so that they see through all the tricks.”

“An artist isn’t a conjurer!” said Mendel.

“That is just what artists have been,” cried Logan, “and they can’t bluff it out any more.”

“Exactly!” gurgled Tysoe, who when he was roused from his habitual weak lethargy lost control of his voice, so that it wobbled between a shrill treble and a husky bass. “Exactly! That’s what I like about you two. No bluff, no tricks. You do what you want to do and damn the consequences. Ha! ha!”

So ill was Mendel just before the exhibition that Logan refused to allow him anywhere near it, and insisted that they should both go to Brighton, leaving Oliver to go to the private view and spy out the land.

Oliver protested. She wanted to go to Brighton.

“You shall have a new dress and a new hat,” said Logan. “You must go to the private view like a real lady. Cluny doesn’t know you, and you must go up to him every now and then and ask him in a loud voice what the prices are. You might even pretend to be a little deaf and make him speak clearly and distinctly.”

The idea tickled Mendel so that he began to laugh, could not stop himself, and was soon almost hysterical.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Oliver, shaking him.

He gasped:—

“I—I was laughing at the idea of your being a real lady. Ha! ha! ha!”

She gave him a clout over the head that sobered him. Logan pounced on her like a tiger.

“You devil!” he said. “You she-devil! Don’t you see the poor boy’s ill?”

“What’s that to me?” she screamed, with her head wobbling backwards and forwards horribly as he shook her. “It’s n-nothing t-to m-me!”

She caught Logan by the wrist and sent him spinning, for she was nearly as strong as he.

“Go to Brighton!” she shouted. “I don’t care. I’ll be glad to be rid of you both. You won’t find me here when you come back, that’s all, you and your little hurdy-gurdy boy! You only need a monkey and an organ to make you complete. Why don’t you try it? You’d do better at that than out of pictures.”

Logan could not contain himself. His rage burst out of him in a howl like that of a wind in a chimney, a dismal, empty moan. He stood up, and the veins on his neck swelled and his mouth opened and shut foolishly, for he could find nothing to say.

“You slut, you squeezed-out dishclout, you sponge!” he roared at last. “Clear out, you drab! Clear out into the streets, you trull! Draggle your skirts in the mud, you filth, you octopus! Sell the carcase that you don’t know how to give, you marble!”

She flung up her hands and sank on to her knees, and let down her hair and moaned:—

“O God! O God! O God!”

Logan’s fury snapped.

“For God’s sake! For God’s sake!” he said. “What has come over us? Oh, God help us! What are we doing? What are we coming to? Nell! Nell! I didn’t know what I was saying!”

He went down on his knees beside her, and Mendel, who had been numbed but inwardly elated by the storm, could not endure the craven surrender, the cowardly reconciliation, and he left them.

Out in the street he stood tottering on the curb, and spat into the gutter, with extreme precision, between the bars of a grating.

At Brighton, whither they went next day, Logan explained himself.

“It is extraordinary how near love is to hate, and how rotten love becomes if hate is suppressed—stale and tasteless and vapid.”

“Are you talking about yourself and Oliver?” asked Mendel.

“Yes.”

“Then please don’t. I don’t mind what happens between you and her so long as it doesn’t happen in front of me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Logan; “but it can’t always be prevented. I don’t see the use of pretence.”

“Neither do I. But some things are your own affair, and it is indecent to let other people see them.”

“Oh, a row’s a row!” said Logan cheerfully. “And one is all the better for it.”

“But if a woman treated me like that I should never speak to her again.”

“Love’s too deep for that. You can’t stand on your dignity in love.”

“I should make her understand once and for all that I would not have it.”

“Then she would deceive you. If you played the tyrant over a girl like Oliver she would deceive you.”

Mendel stared and his jaw dropped. Had Logan forgotten the night in Paris? Was he such a fool as to pretend he did not know, could not see that the whole liberation of frenzy in Oliver dated from that night? . . . Oh, well! It was no affair of his.

To change the subject he said:—

“We ought to get the press-cuttings to-morrow. I wonder if we shall sell the lot? It’s a good beginning, having tickets on your two.”

“I bet we sell the lot in a week. Oliver has two of the critics in her pocket. What do you say to giving a party in honour of the event? We can afford to forgive our enemies now, and there’s a social side to the movement which we ought not to neglect.”

Mendel made no reply. They were sitting on the front. The smooth, glassy sea, reflecting the stars and the lights of the pier, soothed and comforted him. Brighton was to him like a part of London, and he sank drowsily into the happy fantasy that he was being thrust out of the streets towards the stars and the vast power that lay beyond them. He was weary of the streets and the clamour, and he wanted peace and serenity, rest from his own turbulence, the peace which has no dwelling upon earth and lives only in eternity.

“How good it would be,” he said suddenly, “if one could just paint without a thought of what became of one’s pictures.”

“That’s no good,” replied Logan. “One must live.”

The first batch of cuttings arrived in the morning. They were brief, for the most part, quite respectful and appreciative. Mendel learned, to his astonishment, that he was influenced by Logan, and one critic lamented that a promising young painter, who could so simply render the life of his race, should have been infected with modern heresies. There was no uproar, neither of them was hailed as a master, and Logan in more than one instance was dismissed as an imitator of Calthrop.

“Calthrop!” said Logan, gulping down his disappointment and disgust. “Calthrop! Oh well, it is good enough for a beginning. It would have been very different if you had let me print the manifesto. The swine need to be told, you know. They want a lead. . . . We’ll wait for the Sunday papers.”

London was curiously unchanged when they returned. Mendel was half afraid he would be recognized as they came out of Charing Cross Station, but no one looked at him. The convulsion through which he had lived had left people going about their business, and he supposed that if an earthquake happened in Trafalgar Square people would still be going about their business in the Strand.

They were eager for Oliver’s account of the private view, and took a taxi-cab to Camden Town. She was wearing her new dress and was quite the lady: shook hands with Mendel and asked him haughtily in a mincing tone how he was. From all these signs he judged that the exhibition had been a success.

“Quite a lot of people came,” she said. “Real swells. There were two motor-cars outside.”

“Yes,” said Logan. “Tysoe agreed to leave his car outside for a couple of hours to encourage people to go in.”

“Kühler’s picture of the girl with short hair sold at once,” she said.

His pleasure in this news was swallowed up in his dislike of hearing Morrison spoken of by her.

“All your drawings but one are gone, Logan. I listened to what people said. They wanted to know who you were, and Cluny said you had a great reputation in the North. People laughed out loud at Kühler’s Ruth, and I heard one man say it was only to be expected. He said the Jews can never produce art. They can only produce infant prodigies.”

IV REACTION

LOGAN made nearly two hundred pounds out of the exhibition and Mendel over a hundred. His family rejoiced in his triumph. A hundred pounds was a good year’s income to them. They rejoiced, but it was an oppression to him to go back to them and to talk in Yiddish, in which there were no words for all that he cared for most. Impossible to explain to them about art, for they had neither words nor mental conceptions. Art was to them only a wonderful way of making money, a kind of magic that went on in the West End, where, once a man was established, he had only to open his pockets for money to fall into them.

Up to a point he could share their elation, for in his bitter moments he too was predatory. If the Christian world would not admit him on equal terms he had no compunction about despoiling it.

The words “infant prodigy” stuck in his throat, and with his family it seemed indeed impossible that the Jews could produce art. How could they, when they had no care for it? And how had he managed to find his way to it? . . . Going back over his career step by step it seemed miraculous, and as though there were a special providence governing his life—Mr. Kuit, the Scotch traveller, Mitchell, Logan, all were as though they had been pushed forward at the critical moment. And for what? Merely to exploit an infant prodigy with a skilful trick? . . . He could not, he would not believe it. The pressure that had driven him along, the pressure within himself, had been too great for that, just to squeeze him out into the open and to fill his pockets with money. There was more meaning in it all than that, more shape, more design.

Yet when he considered his work he was lacerated with doubt. It ended so palpably in the portrait of his father and mother, and he knew that he could never go back to that again. An art that was limited to Jewry was no art. Among the Jews no light could live. They would not have it. They would snuff it out, for it was their will to dwell in dark places and to wait upon the illumination that never came, as of course it never would until they looked within themselves.

Within himself he knew there was a most vivid light glowing, a spark which only needed a breath of air upon it to burst into flame. He was increasingly conscious of it, and it made him feel transparent, as though nothing could be hidden from those who looked his way. What was there to hide? If there was evil, it lived but a little while and was soon spent, while that which was of worth endured and grew under recognition.

Thence came his devotion to Logan, who simply ignored everything that apparently gave offence to others and saluted the rare, rich activity. It was nothing to Logan that he was a Jew and poor and uneducated: he was educated in art, and what more did he want? Logan was a friend indeed, and had proved it over and over again. He would take his doubts to Logan and they would be healed, but first he must go to the exhibition, the thought of which made him unhappy and uneasy.

Cluny received him with open arms:—

“A most successful exhibition. A great success. I hope you will let me have some of your work by me. A most charming exhibition. There was only one mistake, if I may say so: the Ruth.”

Mendel walked miserably through the rooms. All Logan’s pictures were in the best light: his own were half in shadow.

“Mr. Logan has the making of a great reputation,” said Cluny, “a very great reputation.”

“Oh, very clever!” said Mendel, suddenly exasperated more by Logan’s pictures than by the dealer.

Indeed, “very clever” was the right description for Logan’s work. It attracted and charmed and tickled, but it did not satisfy. The pictures gave Mendel the same odd sense of familiarity as the picture in Camden Town had done, and turning suddenly, his eye fell on his own unhappy Ruth. The figure was shockingly bad. He acknowledged the simpering sentimentality of the face. And he had been trying to paint love! But in spite of the figure, the picture held him. It was to him the matrix of the whole exhibition. Wiping out of consideration his own early drawings, it explained and accounted for every other piece of work. The least dexterous of them all, it had freshness and vitality and a certain thrust of simplification which everything else lacked. It was “solid,” and worth all Logan’s pictures put together.

“Very good prices,” said the dealer. “Very good indeed.”

Mendel paid no attention to him. He wanted to study his Ruth, to find out its precise meaning for him, and, if possible, in what mysterious part of his talent it had originated.

It had made him feel happy again and had restored his confidence. He was serenely sure of himself, without arrogance. He was almost humble, yet tantalized because he could not think of a whole picture in the terms of that one piece of paint. He remembered the strange excitement in which he had conceived it, the almost nonchalance with which he had executed it. And to think that not a soul had seen it! The fools! The fools!

He was ashamed to be seen looking so intently at his own work. The next day he was back again and told Cluny that it was not for sale.

“I don’t think it’s a seller, Mr. Kühler,” said Cluny.

“It’s not for sale,” repeated Mendel.

He went every day and had no other thought. He wandered about in a dream, not seeing people in the streets, not hearing when he was spoken to.

On the fifth day as he entered Cluny’s he began to tremble, and he fell against a man who was coming out. The blood rushed to his heart and beat at his temples. He knew why it was. The air seemed full of an enchantment that settled upon him and drew him towards the gallery. He knew he was going to see her, and she was there with Clowes, standing in front of his Ruth. Clowes was laughing at it, but Morrison, with brows knit, obviously angry, was trying to explain it.

“I’m trying to explain the cornfield to Clowes,” she said. “Do come and help me.”

“I can’t explain it myself,” he said, marvelling at the ease of the meeting. At once he and she were together and Clowes was out of it, like a dweller in another world.

“I don’t think you ought to do things you can’t explain,” said Clowes.

“Then you are wiping out Michael Angelo, and El Greco, and Blake, and Piero.”

“Yes,” said Mendel. “You are wiping out inspiration altogether.”

“Oh! if you think you are inspired I have nothing more to say,” replied Clowes rather tartly. She had felt instinctively that Mendel and Morrison would meet at the gallery, and was annoyed all the same that it had happened. She knew how they were regarded, and she herself did not approve. Morrison knew how impossible it was, and Clowes thought she ought not to allow it to go on.

Clowes also recognized how completely she was out of it, and she made excuses and left them.

“You are the only one who likes it,” he said.

“I don’t like it, but I know that it isn’t bad. It isn’t good either, but it is real and it is you.”

“I want no more than that,” he said, “from you.”

In his mind he had prepared all sorts of reproaches for his meeting with her, but they fell away from his lips. He could only accept that it was good and sweet and natural to be with her.

He told her quite simply how he had come to paint the picture, and how he had tried to paint his love for her. She smiled and shook away her smile.

“I’m glad it isn’t anything like that really,” she said.

“I tried to tell you what it was like when I wrote to you.”

“Yes.”

That was all she could say. She had been very unhappy, often desperately wretched, because her instinct fought so furiously against the idea of love with him whom she loved.

“The picture has made me very happy,” she added. “It means that what I have been wanting to happen to you has happened. You are different, you know. I can talk to you so much more easily.”

He suggested that they should walk in the Park and spend the day together, and she consented, glad that all the reproaches and storms she had dreaded should be so lightly brushed away.

Happy, happy lovers, for whom nothing can defile the heavenly beauty of this earth; happy, from whom Time streams away, bearing with it all the foolish, restless activity of men; happy, for whom the pomps and vanities of the world are as though they had never been! Thrice happy two, who in your united spirit bear so easily all the beauty, all the suffering, all the sorrow in the world, and bring it forth in joy, the flower of life that cometh up as a vision, fades, and sheds its seed upon the rich, warm soil of humanity. Emblem of immortality for ever shining in the union of spirits, in the enchantment of two who are together and in love.

So happy were they that they wandered for the most part in silence through the avenues and over the grassy spaces of the Park.

Of the two, she had the better brain, and, indeed, the stronger character. She had been toughened in the struggle to break out of the web of hypocrisy and meaningless tradition of gentility in which her family was enmeshed, and the freedom she had won was very precious to her. She kept it as a touchstone by which to measure her acquaintance and her experience, and, using it now, she realized that there were two distinct delights in being with Mendel on this tender autumn day; one tempted her with its promise of furious joys and wild, baffling emotions. It seduced her with its suggestion that this way lay kindness, the gift to him of his desire, peace, and satisfaction. But behind the suggestion of kindness lay a menace to her freedom, which, being so much more precious than herself, she longed for him to share, as in the keen happiness of that day he had done. That was the other delight, more serene and more rare, infinitely more powerful, and she would not have it sacrificed to the less. The gift of herself to which she was tempted must mean the blending of her freedom with his, for without that there would be no true gift, only a surrender.

She could not think it out or make it clear to herself, but she knew that it was surrender he was asking, and she knew that if she surrendered she would be no more to him in a little while than the other women of passage with whom his life was darkened.

Ought she not then to tell him, to keep him from living in false hopes? She persuaded herself that she ought, but she did not wish to spoil this delicious day. It was such torture to her when he blazed out at her and he became ugly with egoism.

“Of course,” he said, “the Ruth makes all the difference. I can’t let you go now, because you are the only one who has really understood my work. I am almost frightened of it myself, and it makes me feel desperately lonely when I think of all I shall have to go through to get at what it really means.”

“No. If you want me like that I don’t want you to let me go,” she said, “for it is so important.”

“Yes,” he said. “It may mean an entirely new kind of picture, for I don’t know anybody’s work that has quite what is hammering away in my head to get out. It must be because you love me that you can feel it when no one else can. Even to Logan it is only like a superior poster.”

How adorable he was in this mood of simplicity and humility! She could relax her vigilance, and sway unreservedly to his mood and give him all that he required of her, her clearness, her sensitive purity.

“You are like no other woman in the world to me,” he went on. “You fill me with the most wonderful joy, like a Cranach or a Dürer drawing. I can forget almost that you are a woman, so that it is a most wonderful surprise that you are one after all. You are the only person in the world whom I can place side by side with my mother.”

“You don’t know what it is to me,” she said, “to have a friend so strong and frank as you are.”

He put out his hand and laid it on her arm wonderingly, as if to satisfy himself that she was really there, much as on his first visit to Hampstead he had touched the grass.

“I think I shall live to be very old,” he said, “and you will be just the same to me then as you are now.”

“Oh, Mendel!”

“Say that again!” he said, but she could not speak. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she hung her head. She longed to take him to her arms and to fondle him, to make him young, to charm away the pitiful old weary helplessness that he had. Reacting from this mood in her, which he did not understand and took for the first symptoms of surrender, he became wild and boastful, and clowned like a silly boy to attract her attention.

Her will set against him. She could not endure the sudden swoop from the highest sympathy to the gallantry of the streets, and when he was weary of his tricks she tried to bring him to his senses by asking him suddenly:—

“Is Logan a nice man?”

“He is my best friend. He has wonderful ideas and energy like a steam-engine, and he has suffered too. He is not like the art students who expect painting pictures to be as easy as knitting. He could have been almost anything, but he believes that art is the most important thing of all. He has made a great difference to me, by teaching me to be independent. . . . I will take you to see him one day.”

“I should like to meet him, because he has made a great difference in you.”

“He steals.”

That gave Morrison a shock, for Mendel seemed to be stating the fact as a recommendation.

“Yes. When he has no money he steals. I went with him once and we stole some reproductions.”

She was sorry she had mentioned Logan. Mendel was a different creature at once. Their glamourous happiness was gone. Logan seemed to have stalked in between them and the purity of their delight withered away.

He felt it as strongly as she, but thought she was deliberately escaping from him, that she was fickle and could not stay out the day’s happiness. Women, he knew, were like that. They gave out just as the best was still to come.

It was dusk and they were in a lonely glade. He pounced on her and drew her to him:—

“I want you to kiss me.”

“No—no!”

“Yes—yes—yes! I say you shall. I will not have you let it all slip away.”

“Don’t! Don’t!” she said, in a passion of resentment. He was spoiling it all. How could he be so crude and insensible after this matchless day?

At last he was convinced of her anger.

“I don’t understand you,” he said. “Don’t you want anything like that?”

“It has spoiled the day for me,” she answered, “or almost, for nothing could really spoil it.”

She walked on and he stood still for a moment. Then he ran after her.

“Did you . . . did you hate me then?”

“No, I didn’t hate you. I hated myself more because I can’t say what I feel.”

“If you don’t love me like that,” he said, “I love you all the same. I must see you often—always. I can’t live, I can’t work, if you don’t let me see you. . . . No. That isn’t true. I shall work whatever happens.”

How she loved his honesty! He was making no attempt to creep behind her defences. They had baffled him, and he counted his wounds cheerfully.

“If you don’t love me like that,” he went on excitedly, “it doesn’t make any difference. You are my love all the same. You are in all my thoughts, in every drop of my blood, and you can do with me as you will. If you don’t love me like that I will never touch you. I can understand your not wanting to touch me, because I am dirty. I am dirty in my soul. I will never touch you. I promise that I will never touch you, and what you do not like in me you shall never see. . . .”

She broke down, and burst into an unrestrained fit of weeping. Why could she not make clear to him, to herself, what she felt so clearly? . . . Oh! She knew she ought to tell him to go, to spare him all the suffering that he must endure, but also she knew by the measure of her need for him how sorely he must need her. Their need of each other was too profound, too strong, too passionate, easily to find its way to surface life, nor could it be satisfied with sweets too easily attained. . . . She must wait. To leave him or to surrender to him would be a betrayal of that high mystery wherein they had their spiritual meeting.

“I shall win,” she said to herself, “I shall win. I know I shall win.”

And she amazed him with her sudden lightness of heart. She laughed and told him how solemnly Clowes was taking it all, and how the loose-tongued busybodies were talking. . . . As if it mattered what they said! He mattered more than all of them, because they took easily what was next to hand and grew fat on it, while he fought his way upward step by step and was never satisfied, and would fight his way always step by step with bloody pains and suffering.

“Oh, Mendel!” she cried; “I’m so proud—so proud of you.”

She was too swift for him. He came lumbering after her, puzzled, amazed, confounded at finding in this girl something that was so much more than woman, something that could actually live on the high level of his creative thought, something as necessary to his thought as dew to the grass and the ripening corn.

V LOGAN GIVES A PARTY

THE impulse to take his doubts to Logan endured, and was aggravated by the wretchedness into which Mendel was plunged by Morrison’s return and her powerful effect upon his life. He raged against himself as an idiot and a fool for taking her seriously and for believing that she could realize his work when as yet he understood it so little himself. If it was love, then have the love-making and get it over. If she refused, then let her go! What did she mean by slipping away just when the day’s happiness began to demand utterance, closeness, intimacy, the promise of the dearest and most comfortable joys?

He knew that he was deceiving himself, that she could do just as she liked and it would make no difference, but he also knew that he mistrusted her. In his heart he suspected her of being one of those who like to pretend that life can be all roses and honey, that there can be summer without winter, day without night. . . . Just a pretty English girl, he called her, and, in his most bitter moods, he regarded himself as caught; and in that there was a certain sardonic satisfaction. It seemed appropriate that, having known many women without a particle of love for them, he should be in love with a woman who did not wish to have anything to do with him.

When he told Logan about it, that experienced individual smoked three cigarettes and was silent for ten minutes by the clock.

“It won’t do,” he said; “give it up. You’re in love with her. Oh yes! You were bound to have your taste of it, being so young. But, for God’s sake, keep it clear of your work. I know it is very delightful and all that, and like the first blush of spring, and that she seems to understand everything. First love is always the same. She seems to understand, but so do the violets in the woods, and the apple-blossom in an orchard, and the singing birds on a spring morning. They all seem to understand everything. Life is solved: there are no more problems, and the rarest flower of all is the human heart. Yet the violets and the apple-blossoms fade and the birds sing no more: the spring passes and the summer is infernally hot and stale, and winter comes at last. So it is with love and women. Nothing endures but art, and that they are physically incapable of understanding. My God! Don’t I know it? A picture of mine means no more to Oliver than my boot does—rather less, because my boot is warmed with the warmth of my body. That’s all she understands.”

He looked down at the boots and fidgeted with his hands.

“Yes. That’s all she understands,” he repeated.

He was very haggard, and he looked up at Mendel as though he were trying to say something more than he could get into words; but Mendel was preoccupied with his own perplexities, and Logan’s appealing glance was lost upon him.

“I’m older than you,” Logan continued, “and of course it is difficult for me to say anything that will be of any use to you, but a man like you ought not to let life get in his way. It isn’t worth it. Life is only valuable to you as a condition of working. Nothing in it ought to be valuable for its own sake. Do you hear? You ought never to have anything in your life that you couldn’t sacrifice—couldn’t do without.”

He seemed to be rather thinking aloud than talking, and something indescribably solemn in his voice made Mendel shiver. He had hardly heard what Logan was saying and, thinking he must be in a draught, he looked towards the window.

Logan went on:—

“She’ll be back in a moment. We don’t often get the opportunity to talk like this. She has begun to read books, and thinks she knows about pictures now. She won’t leave us alone. That damned critic has been stuffing her up and she reads all his articles.”

He made a grimace of weary disgust.

“I care about you, Kühler, almost more than I do about myself, which is saying a good deal. Don’t let this love business get mixed up with your work, especially if, as you say, it is Platonic—that is the worst poison of all—almost, almost. . . . Still, I’d like to see the girl. Bring her to the party. We might join up and make a quartette—if she can stand Oliver. Women can’t, as a rule. They don’t like full-blooded people of their own sex.”

“She wants to know you,” replied Mendel half-heartedly. “I’m always talking to her about you.”

“All right,” said Logan. “Bring her to the party.”

Downstairs the front door slammed and Logan gave a nervous start. His whole aspect changed. He lost the drooping solemnity that had come come over him and was stiff, quick, and alert, and prepared to be droll, as he was when it was a question of humbugging Tysoe and Cluny.

Oliver came in with a bottle of wine under each arm. She was in very good spirits and looking remarkably handsome.

“Hello, Kühler!” she cried. “How do you like being a success? We’re full of beans. We’re going to take a house. Did Logan tell you?”

“No,” said Mendel. “I hadn’t heard of it.”

“Well, it’s true. We’ve done with the slums and being poor and all that. We’re going to have a house and I’m going to have a servant, and I shall have nothing to do all day but eat chocolates and read novels and have people to tea.”

“So you’re going to be a real lady.”

“Yes. I’m going to wear a wedding-ring, and we’re going to give out that we’re married, so that Mrs. Tysoe can call on me.”

“You’re not going to do anything of the kind,” snapped Logan.

“I am. I don’t see why I should have a beastly time just because you won’t marry me, setting yourself up against the world and saying you don’t believe in marriage.”

“I don’t want to be more tied to you than I am,” said Logan, endeavouring to adopt a reasonable tone.

He was curiously subdued, and never took his eyes off her. Mendel had the impression that they must recently have had a quarrel. Logan was endeavouring to placate her, but she was constantly aggressive. She seemed to have gained in personality and to be possessed of a definite will. She was no longer shrouded in the mists of sensuality, but stood out clearly, a figure of such vitality that Mendel could no longer keep his lazy contempt for her. Almost admirable she was, yet he found her detestable. He thought she should be thanking her lucky stars for having found such a man as Logan; she should be taking gratefully what he chose to give her, instead of setting herself up and putting forward her own vulgar needs. If a woman threw in her lot with an artist, she ought to revel in her freedom from the petty interests and insignificant courtesies that made the lives of ordinary women so humiliating.

What was she up to? He knew that there was a deeper purpose in her, something very definite, for which she had been able to summon up her raw vitality. He could understand Logan being fascinated. If he had been in love with the woman he would have been the same, and his mind would have been swamped by sensual curiosity.

Before, he had always been rather mystified to know what Logan saw in the woman, but now the infatuation was comprehensible to him. His mind played about it with a strange delight, and he was even envious of Logan to be consumed in the heart of that mystery upon whose fringes he himself was held. And he thought that if he brought Morrison to see them he would be able to understand her better, and might even be able to place his finger on the weak place in her armour.

“You two do give me the pip,” said Oliver. “You sit there as glum and silent as though you were in church. Taking yourselves too seriously, I call it.”

Still in his forbearing tone Logan said:—

“We talk of things which are very hard to understand.”

“Oh, give it up!” she said. “Leave all that to folk with brains and education. Why can’t you just paint without talking about it? You’d get twice as much work done.”

“Because, don’t you see, unless you’re a blasted amateur, you can’t paint without rousing all sorts of questions in your mind—questions that don’t seem to have anything to do with painting; but unless you attempt to answer them there’s no satisfaction in working.”

“Oh, cheese it!” she said; “I know what the critics look for, and it has nothing to do with brains. It is like being in love.”

“Who told you that?” asked Logan with sudden heat; but before she could answer him Mendel had exploded:—

“It is nothing at all like being in love. That is what all the beastly Christians think of—being in love. And they want art always, always to remind them of that—how they have been, are, or will be in love, as they call it. And what they call being in love is nothing but a filthy lecherous longing, which is a thousand miles beneath love, and twenty thousand miles beneath art, which is so rare, so noble, so beautiful a mystery that only those whom God has chosen can understand it at all; for while you are in this state of longing you can understand, you can feel nothing at all except a hungry delight in yourself and your own sticky sensations. What can women know of art? It needs strength and will, and women have neither; they have only obstinate fancies.”

When he had done he was so astonished at himself that he gasped for breath. Logan and Oliver, gaping at him, seemed ridiculous and little. Talking to them was a waste of breath, because when she was there Logan was not himself, but only a kind of excrescence upon her monstrous vitality. The room seemed to stink. It was airless and reeking with sex. He must get out and away, under the sky, among the trees, upon his beloved Hampstead. . . . Without another word he stalked away.

“Well! I never!” exclaimed Oliver. “Is Kühler in love?”

“Oh! shut up!” said Logan wearily.

For the party the room was cleared and a pianola was hired. The guests were invited to bring their own glasses and drink, and also any friends they liked. The result was that half the habitués of the Paris Café turned up, including Jessie Petrie, Mitchell, and Thompson, who was over for a short time from Paris, very important and mysterious because he had something to do with a forthcoming exhibition of Modern French Art which was to knock London silly. And there was a rumour that Calthrop himself was coming.

Oliver wore a new evening dress, which she had insisted on buying because she was very proud of her bust and arms. The dress was of emerald green silk and she looked very lovely in it—“Like a water nymph,” said Logan, and he went out and bought her a string of red corals to give the finishing touch.

“You won’t have much of this kind of thing when we move,” he said. “It is to be farewell to Bohemia. I’m going to settle down to work. I’ve taught Kühler a thing or two, but he has taught me how to work.”

“Damn Kühler! I hate him,” said Oliver.