Of the girls at the school he was afraid. He blushed and trembled when

any one of them spoke to him, and he never noticed them enough to

distinguish one from another, so that they existed only as a vague

nuisance and a menace to his happiness. Before Mitchell he was

prostrate. He bewildered and confounded that young man with his

outpourings, both by word of mouth and by letter. He had absolutely no

reserve, and poured out his thoughts and feelings, his experiences,

and Mitchell at last took up a protective attitude towards him and

defended him from the detestation which he aroused in the majority of

his fellow-students. At the same time Mitchell often felt that of the

two he was the greater child, and he would look back upon the years he

had spent at school in a rueful and puzzled state of mind, half

realizing that he had been shoved aside while the stream of life went

on, and that now he had to fight his way back into it. While Mendel

had been wrestling and struggling, he had been put away in

cotton-wool, every difficulty that had cropped up had been met, every

deep desire had found its outlet in convention. And now that he had

set out to be an artist, here was this Jew with years of hard work

behind him, and such a familiarity with his medium that he could do

more or less as he liked without being held up by shyness or

awkwardness. And it was the same in life. Mendel was abashed by

nothing, was ashamed of nothing. Life had many faces. He was prepared

to regard them all, and to fit his conduct to every one of them. He

was critical, not because he wished to reject anything, but because he

must know the nature of everything before he accepted it. He hated and

loved simply and passionately, and if he felt no emotion he never

disguised the fact. Whereas Mitchell and the others were so eager to

feel the emotions which their upbringing had denied that they leaped

before they looked and fabricated what they did not feel. Mendel

learned from them that life could be pleasant, and they became aware

that there were regions of life beyond the fringes of pleasantness.

They softened him and he hardened them. They were always together,

Mendel, Mitchell, Weldon and Kessler, working steadily enough, but out

of working hours kicking up their heels and stampeding through the

pleasures of London. . . . Calthrop was the divinity they served. He

was a man of genius and had made the Detmold famous. Those, therefore,

who came after him at the school must support him in everything. That

was Mitchell's contention, who was by now in full swing of revolt

against his Public School training, and in his adoration Mendel

followed him, and the others were dragged in their train. Calthrop

dressed extravagantly: so did the four. Calthrop smashed furniture: so

did the four. And as Calthrop drank, embraced women, and sometimes

painted outrageously, the four did all these things.

To Mendel it was Life--something new, rich, splendid, and thrilling.

He had lived so long cramped over his work that it was almost agony to

him to move in this swift stream of incessant excitement. There was no

spirit of revolt in him. He could shed some of the outward forms of

his religion, as to Golda's great distress he did, but against its

spirit he could not rebel. That he carried with him everywhere: the

bare stubborn faith in man, ground down by life and living in sorrow

all his days. Happy he was not, nor did he expect to be so. He might

be happy one day, but he would be miserable the next. Life in him was

not greatly concerned with either, but only to have both happiness and

misery in full measure. His deepest feelings arose out of his work,

the first condition of his existence; they arose out of it and sank

back into it again. His work was the visible and tangible form of his

being, which he hated and loved as it approached or receded from the

terrible power that was both beautiful and ugly, and yet something

transcending either. . . . And away there in London was the Christian

world of shows. What he was seeking lay beyond that, and not in the

dark Jewishness of his home. There lay the spirit, but the outward and

visible form was to be sought yonder, where the lights flared and the

women smiled at themselves in mirrors. He hurled himself into the

shows of the Christian world in a blind desire to break through them,

but always he was flung back, bruised, aching, and weary.

Day after day he would spend listlessly at home or at the school until

seven o'clock came and it was time to go to the Paris Café, to sit

among the painters and listen to violent talk, talk, talk--abuse of

successful men, derision of the great masters, mysterious and awful

whispers of what men were doing in Paris, terrible denunciations of

dealers, critics, and the public.

The café was a kind of temple and had its ritual. It was the aim of

the painters to "put some life into dear old London." Calthrop had

given a lead. He had determined that London should be awakened to art,

as the writing folk of a past generation had aroused the swollen

metropolis to literature and poetry. London should be made aware of

its painters as Paris was aware of the Quartier Latin. Bohemia should

no longer be the territory of actresses, horse-copers, and betting

touts. The Paris Café therefore became the shrine of Calthrop's

personality, and thither every night repaired the artists and their

parasites, who saw in the place an avenue to liberty and fame. In the

glitter and the excitement, the brilliance, the colour, the women with

their painted faces, the white marble-topped tables, the mirrors along

the walls, the blue wreathing tobacco-smoke, Calthrop's personality

was magnified and concentrated as in a theatre. The café without him

was Denmark without the Prince, and Mendel found the hours before he

came or the evenings when he did not come almost insupportable. Yet it

was not the man's success or his fame or his notoriety that fascinated

the boy, whose instinct went straight to the immense vitality which

was the cause of all. Calthrop was a huge man, dark and glowering. To

Mendel he was like a figure out of the Bible--like King Saul, in his

black moods and the inarticulate fury that possessed him sometimes;

and when he picked up and hurled a glass at some artist whose face or

whose work had offended him, he was very like King Saul hurling the

javelin.

There was always a thrill when he entered the café. The buzz would die

down. Where would he sit and whom would he speak to? . . . It was one

of the greatest moments in Mendel's life when one evening Calthrop

came sweeping in with his cloak flung round his shoulders and sat

opposite him and his three companions and raised a finger and

beckoned.

"He wants you," said Mitchell, pushing Mendel forward.

"Come here, boy," growled Calthrop, stabbing with his pipe-stem in the

direction of the seat by his side. "Come here and bring your friends.

Bought a drawing of yours this morning. Damn good."

Mitchell, Kessler, and Weldon came and sat at the table, all too

overawed to speak.

"What's your drink, heh?"

Drinks were ordered.

"Rotten trade, art," said Calthrop. "Dangerous trade. Drink, women,

flattery. Don't drink. Marry, settle down, and your wife'll hate you

because you're always about the place. . . . God! I wish I could be a

Catholic. I'd be a monk. . . . My boy, don't get into the habit of

doing drawings. They won't look at your pictures if you do, and we

want pictures--my God, we do! Everybody paints pictures as though they

were for a competition. You've got life to draw from--real, stinking

life. That's why I have hopes of you."

Mendel was so fluttered and flattered that he could only gulp down his

drink and blink round the café, feeling that all eyes were upon him;

and indeed he was attracting such attention as had never before been

bestowed on him. A girl at the next table ogled him and smiled. She

was with a young man whom the four detested and despised. This young

man reached over to take a bowl of sugar from their table. To take

anything from the great man's table without so much as "By your leave"

was sacrilege and was very properly resented. There was a scuffle, the

sugar was scattered on the floor, glasses fell crashing down, Mitchell

and Weldon hurled themselves on the young man, and the manager came

bustling up, crying: "If-a-you-pleess-a-gentlemen." But there was no

breaking the mêlée. A waiter was sent out for the police, and three

constables came filing in. One of them seized Mitchell, and Mendel,

half mad with drink and excitement, seeing his beloved friend, as he

thought, being taken off to prison, leaped on the policeman's back and

brought him down. In the confusion Calthrop and the others slipped

away and Mendel was arrested, still fighting like a wild cat, and led

off to the police-station, the constable whispering kindly in his ear:

"Steady, my boy, steady. A youngster like you should keep clear of the

drink."

The inspector smiled at the extreme youthfulness of the offender, but

decided that a taste of the cells would do no harm and that the boy

had better be sober before he was sent home. So Mendel had four hours

on a hard bench until a constable came in and asked him if he wanted

bail. He said "Yes," and, when asked for a name, gave Calthrop's, who

presently arrived and saw him liberated, after being told to appear in

court next morning at ten o'clock.

When he reached home he found his mother waiting up for him with wet

cloths in case his head should be bad.

"What now? What now?" she asked.

"I've been in prison."

"Prison!" Golda flung up her hands and sat down heavily. For her all

was lost. It was true then, that, outside in the world, at the other

end of it, was always prison, for the just and for the unjust, for the

old and for the young, for the innocent and for the guilty.

He tried to make light of it. For him, too, it was a serious matter.

He saw himself figuring in the Sunday papers: "Famous Artist in the

Police Court," with his portrait in profile as on a medallion.

Birnbaum and Sir Julius would read it. He would be taken away from the

Detmold and Edward Tufnell would never speak to him again. He

astonished, embarrassed, and delighted Golda by flinging himself in

her arms and sobbing out his grief.

VIII

HETTY FINCH

GOLDA was passing through a very difficult time. Rosa was hotter on

the pursuit of Issy than ever. Harry had had a violent quarrel

consequent on his reiterated demand for proof of the judicial

destruction of Christianity in America, and at last, like his father,

he went out and bought a clean collar and announced his departure for

Paris. He went away and not a word had been heard from him. Lotte

refused to look at any of the young men brought by the match-makers,

and Leah was the only comfortable member of the family, and she made

no attempt to conceal her unhappiness with Moscowitsch. She would come

on Saturday evenings and go up to her mother's room and fling herself

on the bed and cry her heart out, until late in the evening

Moscowitsch came to fetch her, when she would go meekly and apparently

happily enough. . . . And on the top of all these troubles, here was

Mendel going to the devil at a gallop.

Leah's trouble with Moscowitsch was that he would never let her go out

without him, and he could very rarely be persuaded to go out at all.

As for going away in the summer, he could see no sense in it. He gave

his wife a fine house. What more did she want? She had her children to

look after. What greater pleasure could she desire? His life was

entirely filled with his business and his home, and he would not look

beyond them. The neighbours went to the seaside? The neighbours were

fools who lived for ostentation and display. They did not know when

they were well off. . . . Moscowitsch had a great admiration for his

father-in-law as a man who knew what life was and refused to dilute

its savour with folly, and he regarded Golda as a perfect type of

woman, one who left the management of life to her husband and allowed

herself to be absorbed in her duties as a wife and mother.

But Leah longed to go to the seaside. It became an obsession with her,

and, because she could never talk of it, she thought of nothing else.

She was sick with envy when she saw the neighbours going off with the

children carrying buckets and spades. Secretly she bought her own

children buckets and spades, though they were much too small to use

them.

At last, when her worries began to tell on Golda, Leah declared that

what she needed was sea air, and offered to take her for a fortnight

to Margate, and Golda, anxious to escape from the horror of Mendel's

coming home night after night drawn and white with dissipation, and

from the dread of an explosion from Jacob, consented, and asked if

Issy might go, as that Rosa of his was making him quite ill.

For Golda, Leah knew that Moscowitsch would do anything in the world,

and so she procured his consent on condition that he was not expected

to accompany them, for he hated the sea, which had made him very ill

when he came to England, and he never wished to set eyes on it again.

Leah already had the address of some lodgings recommended to her by a

neighbour. She engaged them, and on a fine July day went down to

Margate by the express with her children, Golda, and Issy.

The lodgings were let by a handsome, florid woman with masses of

bleached golden hair, a ruddled complexion, fat hands covered with

cheap rings, plump wrists rattling with bracelets, and a full bosom on

which brooches gleamed. Leah thought her a very fine woman, and was so

fascinated by her that she stayed indoors day after day, helping with

the housework and gossiping, so that she never once saw the sea,

except from the train as she was leaving. Mrs. Finch was a lady, by

birth, but she had been unfortunate. She had an uncle in the Army and

a cousin in the War Office, and she had lived in London, in the best

part of the town, where, in her best days, she had had her flat. Also

she had travelled and had been to Paris and Vienna. But she had been

unfortunate in her friends. Leah commiserated her, and, open-mouthed,

gulped down all her tales of the gentlemen she had known, while Golda,

eager for more information of the glittering world which had swallowed

up her Mendel, listened too, fascinated and shuddering. And Leah, to

show that she also was a person of some consequence, began to talk of

her wonderful brother. She told of the motor-car which had come and

whirled him away, of his visit to the millionaire's house, of the fine

friends he was making, of the men and women he knew whose names were

in the papers.

"Every day," she said, "he is out to tea, and every evening he is out

at theatres and music-halls and parties and flats and hotels, and his

friends are so rich that they pour money into his pockets. He just

makes a few lines on a piece of paper and they give him twenty pounds,

or he makes up some paint to look like a face or a pineapple and his

pockets are full of money."

"Yes," said Golda uneasily. "He will be very rich."

"Then next time you come to Margate," said Mrs. Finch, "it will be the

Cliftonville, and you'll despise my poor lodgings."

"Oh no," cried Leah, "for it is like staying with a friend."

Every day Leah added something to the legend of Mendel, Mrs. Finch

urging her on with romances of her own splendid days. But the most

eager listener was Hetty, the girl who did the rough work of the house

and was never properly dressed until the evening, because, from the

moment when she woke up in the morning until after supper, she was

kept running hither and thither at Mrs. Finch's commands. She was

sufficiently like Mrs. Finch to justify Golda in her supposition that

she was that fine woman's daughter, but nothing was ever said in the

matter. Hetty did not have her meals with them, and, indeed, there was

no evidence that she had any meals. In the evenings she was allowed to

go out, and she would come back at half-past ten or so with her big

eyes shining and a flush fading from her cheeks and leaving them

whiter than ever. Very big were her eyes, very big and pathetic, and

her face was a perfect oval. She had rather full lips, always moist

and red. During the whole fortnight she never spoke a word except to

Issy. Indeed, she avoided Golda and Leah, and she alarmed Issy by what

he took to be her forwardness, when she asked him to take her to the

theatre. He complied with her request, but he was much too frightened

of her to speak, and he could think of nothing to say except to offer

to buy her chocolates and cigarettes, which she accepted as though it

was the natural thing for him to give her presents. She talked to him

about Mendel, and wanted to know if it was true that he knew lords and

had real gentlemen to tea with him in his studio.

"There's more goes on in his studio than I could tell you," said Issy

with a dry, uncomfortable laugh. "Artists, you know!"

"Oh yes! Artists!" said Hetty with a dreamy, wistful look in her eyes

as she drew in her lower lip with a slight sucking noise. "I wish I

lived in London, I do. Ma used to live in London, but she's too old

now to find any one to take her back there. It's dull here. Does your

brother ever come to Margate?"

"No," said Issy. "He'd go to Brighton if he went anywhere. I've got

another brother who's gone to Paris."

"O-oh! Paris! Is he rich too?"

"No."

Issy shut up like an oyster. He could feel the girl probing into him,

and he was sorry he had brought her. She was spoiling his fun, the

adventures he had promised himself during his holiday from Rosa's

indefatigable attentions. Hetty was too dangerous. He knew that if she

got hold of him she would not let go.

He took her home and never spoke another word to her during the

remainder of his visit, and he said to his mother once:--

"That's an awful girl."

"Worse than Rosa?" asked Golda.

"Rosa would stay. That girl would be off like a cat on the tiles."

Golda retorted with a description of Rosa of the same kind, but of a

more offensive degree.

Declaring that they were better for the sea air, and warmly enjoining

Mrs. Finch to visit then if ever she should come to London, the party

left Margate with shells and toffee and painted china for their

friends and relations, conspicuous among their luggage being the

buckets and spades which had never been used.

As Issy and his mother reached their front-door, he saw Rosa at the

corner of the street, and bolted after her, leaving Golda to enter the

house and give an account of her doings. Mendel, for once in a way,

was at home. He was at work on a picture for a prize competition at

the Detmold, as also were Mitchell and Weldon, so that they were

living quietly for the time being. Golda gave a glowing description of

the beauties of Margate and of Mrs. Finch and her jewellery. She began

to talk of Hetty, but for some reason unknown to herself, with a

glance at Mendel she stopped, and went off into a vague, dreamy

rhapsody concerning Margate streets.

"The streets are so clean, so nice, and the air is so strong, and the

sky is so clear, with the clouds tumbling across it, little clouds

like cotton-wool and grey clouds like blankets, almost as it was in

Austria, and I was so happy my heart was full of flowers, almost as it

was in Austria."

"What's the good of talking of Austria?" growled Jacob. "There you had

a corner. Here you have a whole house."

"But I was happy there."

Issy came in on that and announced that he was going to be married to

Rosa. There was half a house vacant in the next street, and he

proposed to take it.

"You shall not," said Jacob. "I will not have that slut in the house.

What sort of children will she give you? Squat-browed and bow-legged

they will be. How will she look after them? A woman that cannot

contain her love for her man will have none for the children. She is a

dirty girl, I tell you, and so is her mother and her father's mother,

and her father's father's mother."

"I don't know who we are, to hold up our heads so high. You are my

father, but in some things I cannot obey you. The business is mine

. . ."

"It is not. It is mine!" said Jacob. "It is in your name, but it is

mine. It is in your name, but your name is my name, and you shall not

give it to a woman like that, who goes smelling about street corners

like a dog. Her father has no money, and he never goes to the

synagogue."

"I am not marrying her father. I shall go out of the business, then,

and I shall start for myself. Rosa will kill herself if I do not marry

her, and I must do it."

"It is true," said Golda quietly. "I think she will kill herself."

Jacob stormed on and Issy blustered, until at last he confessed that

Rosa had caught him, and that he had to marry her. Jacob threw up his

hands and in a shrill voice of icy contempt told Issy exactly what he

thought of such marriages; they were nothing but dirt. . . . "Because

you have a little dirt on you, must you roll in the mud? You are like

dirty dogs, all of you. You, and Harry, and Mendel. I don't know what

has come to you in this London. God gave me one woman, and I have

asked for nothing else."

"You would not let me marry Rosa when I was young."

Words and feeling ran so high that Mendel, aghast, fled away to his

studio, where the sound of the storm reached him. It raged for hours,

and ended in Issy flinging himself out of the house and slamming the

door.

A week later Rosa was brought to see Golda, and she fawned on her like

a dog that has been whipped, sat gazing at her with her stupid brown

eyes, and whimpered: "I should have killed myself. Yes, I should have

killed myself."

"You would not have been so wicked," said Golda. "It is sinful to

throw good fish after bad. Can you cook?"

"Yes," said Rosa. "I can make cucumber soup. I could do anything for

Issy, he is so strong and handsome."

And Golda said to Mendel after the interview: "A woman like that is

like a steam bath for a man."

* * * * *

A few days later Issy and Rosa were married, without ceremony, without

carriages, or photographs, or guests, or feast. It was a wedding to be

ashamed of, but Jacob would not, and Rosa's father could not, lay out

a penny on it. The couple took half the house in the next street, and

Issy discovered at once that he hated his wife, and was at no pains to

conceal it either from her or from his family.

Mendel was profoundly depressed by this disturbance and plunge

downwards, for he still half expected his family to rise with him. He

was to make all their fortunes, but, with the rest of the family, he

detested the unhappy Rosa and regarded her as little short of a

criminal. He was depressed, too, because the summer holidays were

approaching and he would be bereft of his beloved Mitchell, who was

going away for three months to the country. He would be left with his

family, in whom there was no peace. Why could they not be like the

Mitchells and the Weldons, who could live together without quarrels,

and could take a happy, humorous interest in each other's doings

without these devastating passions and cursings and denunciations? And

yet when he thought of the Mitchells and the Weldons and the

Froitzheims, in their charming, comfortable houses, there was

something soft and foolish about them all--something savouring of

idolatry, for instance, in the homage Mitchell paid his father, in the

assumption that Mrs. Mitchell was a very remarkable woman, whose

children could not be expected to be ordinary. More and more did

Mendel value his mother, who was content to be just a woman and to

live without flattery of any kind, and to accept everyone whom she met

and to value them as human beings, without regard to their rank,

station, possessions, or achievements. Himself she esteemed no more

because he was an artist, though he had tried hard to make her give

her tribute to that side of his nature. She loved him simply, neither

more for his attainments nor less for his doings, that pained her

deeply. And that direct human contact he obtained nowhere else, and in

no one else could he find it existing so openly and frankly. Yet he

loved the follies and pretences of the outside world. He adored

theatricality, and among his polite friends there was always some

drama towards. It was never drowned in incoherent passions, and he

himself, among the nice cultured folk, was always a startling dramatic

figure. Sometimes they seemed to him all slyness and insincerity, and

then he loathed them; but that was generally when he had aimed at and

failed in some dramatic coup, or when they had encouraged him to talk

about himself until he bored them. On the whole, he was successful

with them, as he wished to be, easily and without calculation. It was

when they made calculation necessary, by feigning an interest that

they did not feel, that he was shocked and angry. If anywhere the

atmosphere was such that he could not be frank, then he avoided that

place and those people.

Now he was bored, bored to think of the hot stewing months with no

relief except such as he could find in vagrom adventures from the

harsh rigidity of life among his own people. And he was in a strange

condition of physical lassitude. Even his ambition was stagnant. In

his work he had only the pleasure of dexterity. It had no meaning, and

contained no delight. When he painted apples or a dead bird or a

woman, the result was just apples or a dead bird or a woman. The paint

made no difference and the subject was still better than his rendering

of it. He was only concerned with technical problems. Fascinated by a

gradated sky in a picture in the National Gallery, he practised

gradated skies until he could have done them in his sleep.

And he was tired, tired in body and in soul. Both in his life and in

his work he had had to conquer a convention in order to keep his

footing in the world of his desire. Just as he had only learned the

Detmold style of drawing by a supreme effort of will, so also by a

tremendous effort he had learned the rudiments of manners and polite

conversation. He had had to overcome his tendency to fall violently in

love with every charming person, male or female, he met, and to regard

with an aversion equally violent those in whom he found no charm. Such

charm must for him be genuine and not a matter of tricks, and for this

reason he had regarded every person whom he thought of as old with

dislike. For him anybody above twenty-five was "old." He still thought

he would be made or marred by the time he was twenty-three, but that

age seemed immeasurably far off. Long before then, like a thunderbolt,

his full genius would descend upon him and all the world would know

his name. He was almost innocent of conceit in this. Such, he

believed, was the history of genius, and so far nothing had happened

to deny his inward consciousness of his rarity. Relieve the pressure

of circumstance and he soared upwards. . . . There was a queer,

uncomfortable pleasure in such thoughts and dreams and in imagining a

fatality that should drag him down and down to Issy's level and lower.

There was a sickening fascination in picturing to himself a descent as

swift and irresistible as his upward flight. Yet dreary were the hours

of waiting for the impetus that had once or twice so freely and so

strongly moved in him. Sick with waiting, he would work in a fury to

master trick after trick and difficulty after difficulty in painting,

so as to be ready when the time came. All the cunning and wariness of

his race welled up in him as he prepared deliberately, slowly,

patiently for his opportunity.

* * * * *

One afternoon, as Golda was sleeping in her kitchen, she was awakened

by a knock at the door. Going to open it, she found Hetty Finch

waiting there, neatly clad in a brown tailor-made coat and skirt, very

smart, with a trim little feathered hat on her head. Golda's thoughts

flew to Mendel, and her first inclination was to slam the door in

Hetty's face, but, remembering that the boy was out, she admitted her.

Hetty followed Golda into the kitchen and stood looking round it with

obvious disappointment. She had not imagined the Kühlers to be so

poor.

"I promised Ma I would call," she said, taking the chair which Golda

dusted for her.

"And how is your Ma?" asked Golda.

"She's given up the house and gone into a hotel as manageress,"

replied Hetty, lying as usual, for her mother had been sold up and had

taken a place as barmaid in a tavern. "And I've come to London to earn

my living. Ma gave me fourteen shillings, and that was all she could

do for me. Still, I'm off her hands now."

Golda asked her what she was going to do, and she said she thought of

going into service until she had had a look round. Where was she

living? She had taken a room with some friends, lodgers of Ma's, off

Stepney Green.

Conversation was lifeless and desultory until Issy came into the room,

when she brightened up, but he was overcome with his old terror of the

girl and soon hurried away. Then she noticed the pictures on the wall

and asked if they were Mendel's. Golda refused flatly to talk about

them, but Hetty persisted and would talk of nothing else. Jacob came

in and she made him talk about Mendel, and she made herself so

charming to him and flattered his simple vanity so grossly that

presently Golda was staggered by the sight of him making tea with his

own hands and pouring it out for the visitor.

"Yes," said Jacob, "the boy did all those before he was fourteen. He

will get on, that boy. He is bound to get on, but I shall not live to

see him in his glory."

"I think they're lovely," said Hetty, sipping her tea. And she went on

chattering vivaciously until Jacob was called away to the workshop,

when once again conversation became lifeless and desultory. Golda made

one excuse after another to try to get rid of her, but Hetty would not

budge. At last there came the sound of Mendel's key in the door. Golda

bustled out of the room and whispered to him:--

"You must not come in. I have visitors and there are letters waiting

for you upstairs."

But Mendel had seen a girl sitting in the kitchen and he wanted to

know whether she was pretty or not. She turned and he saw that she was

charmingly pretty. He brushed by his mother. He felt at once that he

had made a good impression, and, indeed, all Hetty's dreams and

fancies were more than realized, though she was a little affronted and

disappointed by the poorness of his clothes.

"It is Hetty Finch," said Golda, "from Margate."

Mendel had had Issy's account of Hetty and he was on his guard at

once.

"Yes. I've come to live in London," said she.

"I've never lived out of it," he answered.

"I thought perhaps, as you know so many people, you could help me to

find some work. There must be room somewhere in London for poor little

me."

"I'll see about it," said Mendel, taking note of her features and

figure, and rather upset to find himself so little excited by her.

Issy had given him to imagine a dashing, overwhelming woman. He only

felt vaguely sorry for Hetty and a desire to stroke her, though he

knew her at once for what she was, and how she was drinking in the

strongly developed male in him. For the first time he felt cool and

detached in the presence of a woman: a deliciously grown-up sensation,

and he wanted more of it.

She soon said she must go, and in Golda's hearing he promised to write

to her, but when he took her to the door he asked her to come to his

studio, and she said she would come the next day.

IX

THE QUINTETTE

HE had more of the deliciously grown-up sensation the next day, when

Hetty came to see him. She was something new. The girls of the streets

he knew, and unattainably above them were the girls at the school and

his friends' sisters, whom he called "top-knots," because of the way

they did their hair. The "top-knots" were hardly female at all to him,

so remote were they, so entirely unapproachable; utterly different

from the girls of the streets, who were so accessible that he had but

to hold out his arms to find one of them, as if by magic, in his

grasp. And now Hetty was different again.

"You are cosy up here," she said, moving at once to the only

comfortable chair and curling up in it. "Your sister told me about

you."

"Leah? What lies did she tell you?"

"Well, I knew it wasn't _all_ true, about the money you were making,

because you wouldn't live here if it was true, would you? But I

suppose some of your friends make a lot of money."

"They're rich, some of them," replied Mendel, aghast to find himself

thinking coldly of his friends in terms of money, his mind rushing

swiftly between the two poles of his father and Sir Julius. "Yes.

There's plenty of money in London."

"That's what Ma said when she gave me the fourteen shillings. She said

a girl with eyes like mine had no need to go short in London." Hetty

raised her eyes and looked full at him, who met her stare boldly and

yet with some alarm, finding himself acting a part.

Hetty was flattering him by regarding him as the possessor of a key to

the wealth of London, and in spite of himself he could not help

accepting the rôle. She had touched an element of his character of

which till then he had been unconscious. The knave in him sprang into

being and thrust all his other qualities aside. He began to boast of

his success and to swagger about the luxury and immorality of London

life, though it was not all braggadocio, but also a kindly desire to

make Hetty happy by talking to her of the things that interested her.

He told her about Calthrop and the Paris Café, and Maurice Birnbaum

and his motor-car and richly furnished flat in Westminster, and a

Lord's son who was at the Detmold, and Mitchell, whose father was a

great man. And all the time, as he talked, he was astonished at the

sound of his own voice, so different did it sound.

Hetty wriggled with pleasure in her chair and pouted up her lips.

Presently she said her hat made her head ache, and she took it off and

stretched out her arms and said:--

"No more pots and pans for me! I do think you're lovely. It's just

like a story. I call that real fun. Not like Margate. . . . Do you

think I could get work as a model, or do you have to be slap-up?"

Mendel thought of the drabs who posed and he could not help smiling.

"I could only tell by your figure, though your face is all right."

"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked.

"Very."

"I'll show you my figure, if you like."

"All right, I'll light the gas-stove in the bedroom. It's a little

cold in here."

He showed her into the bedroom, and when she was ready she called to

him.

She was beautifully made, but she looked so foolish with her anxiety

to please him that he could take hardly any interest in her, and he

was distressed, too, because the only background he could give her

consisted of his new knavish thoughts of the wealth of London. Yet

nothing could disturb it, for the background was suitable. Her white

body was her offering.

"How much would I be paid?"

"A shilling an hour."

"Do you pay that?"

"Yes."

"If you could get me work I would sit to you for nothing."

"I'd pay you," he said. His generous qualities strove hard to reassert

themselves, but there was something about this girl that compelled

just what he was giving her--hardness for hardness, value for value.

Yet she was certainly beautiful, and it was strange to him to be

unable to give her the warm homage that within himself he could not

help feeling.

She sat on the bed, making no move to cover herself, and said:--

"Artists _are_ different. There was an artist once at Margate. It was

him put the idea into my head. But he was very poor and not a

gentleman."

And now to Mendel she was an object of sheer astonishment. He stood

and warmed his legs by the gas stove and gaped at her, sitting on his

bed and chattering in her clear, hard voice of her ambitions, her

dreams, the drudgery at home, while in everything she said was a

flattery which he could not resist. Worst of all, he felt that he was

one of a pair with her. His talent, her body, were shining offerings

with which they both emerged from the depths of the despised. Entering

into her spirit, he too was filled with a desire for revenge. Yet in

him this desire was charged with passion, which made their present

situation ridiculous. He thought of the poverty and the obscure

suffering downstairs, the dragging penury to which, but for his

talent, he would have been condemned. Then he imagined her as Issy had

described her at Margate, lurking in the kitchen, listening behind the

door as Leah spun her yarns. He could sympathize with her, and she

seemed to him almost gallant.

He got out a piece of mill-board and began to draw her, but to his

annoyance could not get interested in what he was doing. He wanted to

know more about her, could not rest content that a human being should

be so reduced to a cold purpose. Yet, though she talked freely enough,

nothing fell from her lips to meet his desire. She had no people, no

class, no tradition, but still she was a person. He could not dismiss

her as he dismissed so many, as "nonsensical."

"I can't make much of you now," he said, almost wailing. "I believe

I'm tired."

And suddenly he hurled away his drawing and rushed at her and kissed

her. She clung to him and he yielded to her will, seeing clearly that

this was her purpose, this her desire, this her ambition, her all.

He knew that she was using him, was making certain of being able to

use him. The newly discovered knave in him insisted on having his

existence, and through it he enjoyed a certain defiant happiness.

Happiness! To be happy! That had seemed impossible. His first year at

the Detmold had been miserable. He had been discouraged and almost

listless. Often he would go to his mother and say: "I shall never be

an artist."

"Not all at once," Golda would say. "Take a boy who is apprenticed to

a bootmaker. He cannot all at once make good boots. He must spoil a

deal of leather first. Or a tailor-boy: he must spoil cloth. A trade

must be learned, and you can learn this, for you work hard enough at

it."

For a moment or two he would see through her clear eyes and that was

enough to set him working again, half believing that he would soon

master his craft. But there had been the struggle to master what at

the Detmold, with such unquestionable authority, they called

"drawing."

This now, with Hetty, was in its way happiness, though he detested it

and her. It was an escape. It was easy. It made no demands on him,

save the small effort to achieve self-forgetfulness, and in that she

aided him, for she seemed superior to himself and enviable in the

clearness of her purpose. She offered herself and made no demands upon

him except of what could cost him nothing: just a few words to his

friends, a start in her chosen profession.

All the same, he was horrified at himself. Every other crisis and

sudden change in his life had been attended with violent suffering, an

eruption within himself, profound depression, almost a collapse. This

had been as easy as walking through a door, a slipping from one part

of his being to another. . . . Here suddenly was happiness, a queer

detached, almost indifferent condition, full of pleasure, and he

rejoiced in the novelty of it. He watched Hetty draw on her clothes

again and was sickened by the sensual languor of her movements. She

was drowsy, like a cat before a fire.

"No, I certainly shan't draw you to-day."

"What about to-morrow?"

"I shall be painting to-morrow."

"I do think you're a devil sometimes."

"I'll take you to the Paris Café, if you like."

"Will you?"

She perked up on that. She had not expected so soon to gain her

desire.

"Yes. If you've got to earn your living you should meet people, and

the sooner you get going the better."

Hetty sat with her chin in her hands, crouched in elation. Everything

had turned out as she had hoped and planned, as she had willed that it

should, and she regarded him with some contempt because he had been so

easy and because he was so young. She was the same age as he, but she

thought him a little vain boy. Yet when he looked at her she was

afraid of him, for he knew so much and guessed so much more. To defend

herself, her instinct drove through to his vanity and flattered it to

blind him. She feigned an animation she was incapable of feeling to

make herself more beautiful in his eyes, and he thought of his

friends, Mitchell and Weldon, and how they would be stirred with her.

He thought how she would please Calthrop, and he was lured into

believing that he would gain in importance through her.

"You've come at a very bad time," he said. "They'll all be going away

for the summer."

"Oh!" she looked dashed, hating to be caught out in a mistake. "Do

they go away for long?"

"Three months."

"Oh, well!" she drawled. "I can get a place if nothing turns up. But

something always does turn up. I'm one of the lucky ones, you know."

"I don't believe in luck," said he, with a sudden irruption of the old

self that seemed to have been left so far behind.

"I must go now," she said.

They groped their way down the dark stairs, and he went out with her,

feeling that he could not face his family, from whom he knew now that

his face was turned. In the street a mood of freedom and adventure

came over him, and for this mood she was a fitting mate. He took her

on the top of a bus to the West End, among the promenading crowds, and

she drank it all in with a kind of exaltation, her big eyes glowing,

her body trembling with excitement. Into one café after another he led

her, completely absorbed as he was in her purpose, and at last, when

they mounted the eastward bus, she leaned her head on his shoulder,

and he could hear her murmuring to herself: "London . . . London . . .

London."

He too was thrilled as he had never been before by London. He had

never so strongly realized it before. The great city had thrilled him

with its beauty and had stirred him with its business, but never

before had its spirit crept into his blood to send it whirling and

singing through his veins. He hardly slept at all that night, and the

next morning it was a long time before he could begin to work, which

then seemed far removed from the effort and almost anguish it used to

cost him. The still-life with which he had been wrestling became quite

easy to do, and very soothing was the handling of brushes and paint.

Every touch was like a caress upon his aching soul.

So began a period of real happiness. The pieces he painted with such

soothing ease were generally admired and readily bought. The dealer to

whom he took them was also a colourman and gave him apparently

unlimited credit; and he laid in an immense stock of colours and

amused himself with experiments. It seemed that his career was to be

successful without a struggle. His patrons were delighted to find him

so soon making money, and the Birnbaums and the Fleischmanns invited

him down into the country, but as he found that they put him up in a

servant's bedroom or a gardener's cottage he refused to go more than

once, or to any more of their kind who were not prepared to forget his

poverty.

He would rather stay in London with Hetty, whom he had begun to regard

as a mascot. With her coming everything had changed. She had made

everything easy and happy and delightful. He had no love for her, but

he could not help feeling grateful. She had turned work into a

pleasure, pleasure into a riot of ecstasy.

Alone with her in the evenings or with some chance acquaintance,

during the holidays he roamed through London, basking in the summer

evenings, discovering unimagined splendours, the Parks, the river, the

Zoo, boating on the Serpentine, the promenade on the romantic

Spaniard's Road at Hampstead. Nearly every night he wrote to Mitchell

in the country, describing his new easy happiness in his work and his

discovery of the charm of nights in London. And once a week Mitchell

would write to him and give him a delightful account of English

country life in a valley, shut in by rolling hills between which

wandered a slow, pleasant stream. Here Mitchell was painting, boating,

playing tennis, making love.

"There's a Detmold girl lives near here with her people--Greta

Morrison. You may remember her--glorious chestnut hair, big blue eyes,

but as shy as a little mouse. I couldn't get a word out of her until I

began to talk about you, and there's no end to her appetite for that.

I don't mince matters. I tell her exactly what you are, exactly what

you come from, and what a wild beast you are. She has seen you throw

things about at the Detmold, and she seems absolutely to like it. Yet

she is not a fool, and I like her enormously. She makes me feel what a

rotter I am, but I can't get on with her unless I talk about you. I

_have_ heard that her work is good, but she won't show me a thing."

Mendel was pleased that a "top-knot" should be interested in him, but

beyond the flicker of delight he gave no thought to the idea of Greta

Morrison. The "top-knots" belonged to the world which he was going to

despoil with Hetty Finch. That world must disgorge. It had condemned,

and still condemned, his father and mother to bitter poverty, and he

remembered how on their first coming to London the whole family had

slept in one room, and how he had sat up in the middle of the night

and looked at the recumbent bodies and suffered under the indignity of

it. And his brothers had grown from ruddy, bronzed boys into

pale-faced, worn young men. And behind Hetty was the dirty

lodging-house and her Ma, of whom he had a very clear idea. He used to

wax violent, and his imagination would run riot with the fantastic

visions of success he conjured up.

Who were the "top-knots" that they should have an easy, pleasant time

in the country while he was left to stew in London?

Hetty began genuinely to admire him, and her flattery was no longer

empty. There was some sustenance in it.

"O--oh!" she used to say. "You'll get on. There's no doubt about that.

You'll have a big stoodio and the nobs will come up in their

motor-cars, and you'll be able to paint what you like then."

"You're a liar," he would reply. "I shall always paint what I like. I

never do anything else, and never will. Once paint for the fools and

you have to do it always, because you become a fool yourself."

* * * * *

Golda once met Hetty coming down the stairs. She told her she was a

dirty slut and was not to show her face inside the house again. A few

days later she saw her open the front door and slip out. In her anger

she informed Jacob of the danger to Mendel, and Jacob went up to the

studio.

"I will not have that harlot in my house," he said.

"She is not a harlot," replied Mendel rather shakily, for, though his

father's power had dwindled, yet he was still a figure of authority.

"She is a harlot and a daughter of a harlot, and I will not have her

in my house."

"She is a model, and I must have models, as I have tried to explain to

you again and again. I am allowed money for models. I must have

models, just as you must have skins."

"Then there are other models. I know this girl, what she is after, and

she will ruin you."

"Neither she nor anyone else in the whole world could ruin me," said

Mendel, "for I am an artist, and while I have my art I ask nothing

outside it."

"Don't argue with me!" shouted Jacob. "I will not have that drab in my

house."

Mendel had a great respect and regard for his father. He was silent,

and Jacob went downstairs, satisfied that he had asserted himself.

He said to Golda:--

"They will blow the boy's head off his shoulder with the fuss they

make of him. I know how to take him down a peg or two."

"Don't go too far," said Golda. "It would be a black day for me if he

went away and was ashamed of us."

"If I saw that he was ashamed of you," replied Jacob, "I would thrash

him within an inch of his life. Ashamed of you, among all the dirt and

trumped-up people he goes among!"

However, Hetty still came to the studio and there were frequent

explosions, until at last Mendel, intent on the new independence he

had won, declared that he could bear it no longer, and he arranged

with Issy to take the top floor of his house and to turn that into a

studio. This compromise was successful, and pleased both parties:

Golda was happy to be relieved from further friction and Mendel was

glad to be away, for he knew that his doings must hurt her, and that

he hated. Yet he could see no way out of it. He was done for ever with

the old simplicity of his untutored painting in her kitchen. Art was

no longer a pure and hardly-won joy. It was a trade, like any other,

and, like any other, it had its sordid aspect, and, to compensate for

that, it was a career and could also be a triumph. These things he did

not expect his mother to understand. He had Mitchell to talk to now,

Mitchell to whom to impart the burden upon his soul, and Mitchell and

he were to work together and to give to the world such art as it had

never seen since the primitives.

Mitchell and he! That friendship was the source of his new confidence.

Golda had been and still was much to him, but when it came to painting

she knew nothing at all, and painting was the important thing. Through

painting lay not only satisfied ambitions and fame and riches, but

life itself, and of that what could Golda know?

It was a great thing, therefore, to be established away from home when

Mitchell returned from the country. And Mitchell approved. He had

suffered from being under his father's shadow, and with Weldon and

Kessler he had taken a studio near Fitzroy Square. He said:--

"A time will come when you will have to leave the East End."

"I shall never leave them," replied Mendel. "What I want to paint is

there. They are my people, and all that I have belongs to them."

"Rubbish. You'll soon be getting commissions, and you can't ask people

who can afford to pay for portraits to a hole like that."

"They will come to my studio," said Mendel, "or I will not take their

commissions."

Though Mitchell was rather shocked by his frank conceit, he could not

but admire and envy the way his impulses came rushing to the surface

and were never deterred by considerations as to the impression he

might be making. Mendel trusted Mitchell absolutely and hid nothing

from him, neither the most scabrous of his deeds nor the most childish

of his desires. He made no secret of the new manly feeling that had

come to him through Hetty, the conviction that he could meet the West

End on its own terms.

When he showed Mitchell the work he had done during the holidays, his

friend said:--

"Gawd! The difference is absolutely startling. There's charm in every

one of them, and they're not fakes either."

With Hetty he was enraptured.

"Gawd!" he said; "I'll give ten years to painting her, as Leonardo did

to Monna Lisa, and then it would not be finished. Came from a Margate

lodging-house, did she? Mark my words: she'll marry a successful

artist and queen it among the best."

With Mitchell, Hetty put forth all her cajolery when she found that he

knew what she thought good people. She could look very pathetic and

delicate, and middle-aged artists were sorry for her, and thought

being a model a perilous profession for her. One of them warned her of

the dangers she must run, and especially mentioned Mitchell and Kühler

as young men to be avoided. They roared with laughter when she told

them.

The Paris Café was Paradise to her, and she made friends with all its

habitués and attracted the attention of Calthrop, who became Mendel's

enemy for life when she told him that the youngster had said of him

that he had been a good artist once, but was now only repeating

himself.

With marvellous rapidity she picked up the jargon of the place, and

could quite easily have taken her career in her own hands, but she

would not surrender Mendel, who could no more do without her than he

could without Mitchell. She clung to him and kept him a happy slave to

his three friends, to whom she devoted herself as though her existence

depended on the solidarity of the group. From morning to night she was

with one or other of them, and every evening with the four of them at

the Paris, or making a row at a music-hall and getting themselves

kicked out.

She was learning her trade as they were learning theirs, and she was

delighted with the ease with which Mendel picked up what she called

"sense"; that is to say, he became much more like the others, affected

their speech, grew his hair long, wore corduroys, a black shirt, and a

red sash, and talked blatantly and with a slight contempt of great

painters. But even so, he was disturbing, for he did all these things

with passion, so that they tinged his soul, and were not as a mere

garment upon it. Even in falsehood he was sincere.

When Hetty found Calthrop painting a self-portrait, she set her four

boys painting self-portraits, and when she found the older men talking

about the beauty of roofs and chimneys, the four were soon ecstatic

about roofs and chimneys, and painting them without knowing how it had

come about. She could feel what was in the air, and had no difficulty

in making them conform to it, so that they were successful even while

they were students, and were talked of and discussed and approached by

dealers as though they were persons of consequence. Their life was one

long intoxication: money, praise, wine, and debauchery went to their

heads, and of all these excitants Mendel had the largest share, and

found himself the equal even of Kessler, whose father was a

millionaire soap-boiler. He attained an extraordinary skill at doing

what was expected of him, and developed an instinct as sharp as

Hetty's for the success of the moment after next.

He won scholarships at the Detmold and, carefully adapting his style,

an open prize at the Royal Academy. His patrons were excited and

delighted. He was interviewed by the Yiddish papers and photographed,

palette and brushes in hand, in a dashing attitude. He said many

foolish things to the reporters, but the printed version made him

blush. He was represented as saying that art had been reborn during

the last ten years, that the Royal Academy was exploded and would soon

close its doors, that there was no art criticism in England, that

there had never been a great Jewish artist, and that this deficiency

in the most vital and enduring race in the world would now be

repaired.

He thanked his stars that his friends could not read Yiddish. Two

well-known Jewish painters wrote to the paper to say that they existed

and to trounce his "bumptious and ignorant dismissal of respected and

respectable art." And he heartily agreed with them. He was shaken out

of the hectic dreams of months, yet could not feel or see clearly. His

way was with Mitchell, and Mitchell was generously rejoicing in it all

as though it had happened to himself, while Hetty was going from

studio to studio spreading the news and declaring the arrival of a

genius.

He wanted to go and hide his face in his mother's skirts, but she was

so happy and elated with the congratulations of the neighbours and

visits from the Rabbis of the synagogue that he could not but keep up

his part before her. For her and for all his family he bought

extravagant presents, and he went out and sought Artie Beech, whom he

had not seen for years, and gave him a box of cigars. He had a

melancholy idea that he was doing them all an injury and that he must

somehow repair it. The exact nature of the injury he did not know, but

his instinct was very sure that the whole business was false. Yet it

was so actual that he could not help believing in it. He was

hypnotized into accepting it. There seemed no reason why it should not

go on for ever. Here, apparently, was what he had always striven

for--art and homage--and the idea that they could go on for ever was

terrible and paralysing. But there was not a soul in the world with

whom he could share his feeling. If he showed the least hesitation

they would accuse him of ingratitude.

He was filled with a smouldering rage against them all which found no

vent until Maurice Birnbaum came in his motor-car and asked him to

bring some of his things to show Sir William Hunslet, R.A., who had

been much impressed with his prize picture. Once again Mendel climbed

into the motor-car, and once again he was told not to let his parcel

scratch the paint.

"Now," said Maurice, "you have the world at your feet, and I feel

proud to have had my share in bringing it about. You can have

everything you want, and if you don't grow into something really big

it won't be our fault. Everything that money can do it shall do."

The car rolled through the streets which had been the scene of

Mendel's happy rambles, but being carried through them in such

magnificence made him feel helpless, a victim to something stronger

than his own will and that he had always detested. He was being taken

away from his mother and from Mitchell, and he knew whither motor-cars

were driven. All roads ended in Sir Julius, who could sit and look at

pictures without a word. Everything went spinning past him. This was

going too fast, too fast, and he would be exhausted before he had

really known his purpose. Maurice Birnbaum's exciting, patronizing

tones, chattering on exasperatingly, infuriated him, until he felt

like stabbing him in his already dropping stomach. What could a fat

man like that have to do with art? How could so fat a man drive down

to the wretched poverty in Whitechapel and not feel ashamed?

But in spite of himself and his confused emotions Mendel enjoyed the

drive, which showed him more of London than the narrowed area he

frequented: more to conquer, more to know; shops, strange ugly

buildings, polite, mincing people, women like dolls, men like

marionettes, wide streets and plane-trees, the gardens and squares of

the polite Southwest. Often there were Georgian houses like that in

which his family lived, but so neat and trim and newly painted that

they looked like doll's-houses, proper places for the dolls and the

marionettes. . . . And it was exhilarating to be in the heart of the

roaring traffic, bearing down upon scarlet buses, and swift darting

taxi-cabs and motor-cars as rich as Maurice Birnbaum's. Out of the

traffic they turned suddenly into a quiet street of dead houses and

vast gloomy piles of flats. Outside a house more gloomy than the rest

they stopped. Maurice got out fussily, told Mendel to be careful how

he lifted his parcel out, fussed his way into the house through a

dark, luxuriously furnished hall, and into a vast studio where there

was a group of fashionably dressed women taking tea with Sir William

and exclaiming about the beauties of a portrait that stood on the

easel.

Maurice stood awkwardly outside the circle and muttered apologies,

while Mendel felt utterly and crushingly foreign to the atmosphere of

the place. He knew how these people would regard him. They would stare

at him with a cold interest not unmingled with horror, and he would be

conscious of bearing the marks of the place he came from, of smelling

of the gutter. Against that separation even art was powerless. And

what had his work to do with this huge, hard, brilliant portrait on

the easel? If they admired that they would never look at his dark

little pictures.

Sir William introduced Maurice to the ladies, but did not so much as

look at the boy, whom his mind had at once ticked off as a "student,"

and therefore to be kept in his place. Maurice explained spluttering:

words like "scholarship," "prize," "genius," "instinct," fell in a

shower from his lips, and one of the ladies put up her lorgnette and

stared at Mendel as though he were a picture or a wax model.

At last he was told to untie his parcel, and one by one he showed his

pictures. Sir William blew out his chest and his cheeks, and with a

wave of his hand blurted out one word:--

"Italy."

"That's what I say," said Maurice.

Mendel scented danger. They seemed to him to be conspiring together.

"Italy!" ejaculated Sir William. "Italy! Blue skies, the sun, the

light. Give him light and landscape with form in it."

"Am I ill?" thought Mendel with some alarm, for Sir William sounded to

him more like a doctor than a painter. And he decided that the

Academician was not a real artist because he showed no sign of the

fellow-feeling which had been so strong in Mr. Froitzheim.

Before the ladies he could say nothing. He put his pictures back in

the parcel and heard Maurice and Sir William still conspiring together

to send him to Italy. He was tired of being swung from one idea to

another. At the Polytechnic they had told him that the essential thing

in a picture was "tone," that he must remember the existence of the

atmosphere between himself and the object he was painting, and that

there were no bright colours in nature. At the Detmold little was said

about "tone," but he was told that the essence of a picture was

drawing, "the expression of form." . . . What next? He had a

foreboding that Italy was only another name for another essence of a

picture. Besides, he wanted to live. Though he adored art, yet it did

not contain all that was precious to him--liberty and gaiety,

friendship and affection. Always until the Detmold his life had been

weighed down with poverty and with terrible obsessions like that of

his dread of the fat, curly-headed boy who, during the six long years

of his schooling, had waited for him outside the school-gates every

day to give him a coward's blow and to challenge him to fight and to

jeer at him if he refused. There had been furious, passionate loves to

set him reeling, gusts of inexplicable desires and ambitions which had

often made him weep with pain. And now, just as the world was opening

out before him and he was warm with the friendship of an Englishman

(for he was proud of Mitchell's Public School training), they wished

to take him away and send him to a far country.

He had had enough of being a foreigner in England, and he loathed the

idea of travel. His father had told him that England was the best

country in the world, and, if he had suffered so much there, what

would it be in others? Italy? He wanted to paint what he had always

painted, fish and onions in a London kitchen. How could Italy help him

to do that?

He would not go. He would refuse to go. These Birnbaums and

Fleischmanns had had their way with him for long enough.

So lost was he in this growing revolt that he was already some

distance away from Sir William's studio before he was aware of having

left it.

"Our greatest painter," said Maurice. "The greatest since Whistler."

"Yes," said Mendel, aghast at the supersession of Calthrop and the

idols of the Detmold. If Maurice could be so ignorant there was

nothing to be said and argument was vain.

"He really appreciated your work," Maurice added.

"He never looked at it!" cried Mendel, enraged. "I put them in front

of him one by one, but he always looked at the fat lady in blue."

"He could tell with one glance," protested Maurice, who had been

mightily impressed.

Mendel saw that it was useless to talk, and shut his lips tight while

Maurice chattered to him of his extraordinary good fortune in being

able to go to Italy, to live among the orange groves and with the

greatest galleries of the world to roam in, the most beautiful scenery

and the most delightful food.

The mention of food made Mendel think of his mother's unsavoury dishes

and sluttish table, the most distasteful feature of his existence, but

he preferred even that to the Italy of Maurice Birnbaum and Sir

William. Through such people, he knew, lay nothing that he could ever

desire.

As soon as he reached home he told his mother that they wanted to send

him abroad to study. He strode about the kitchen and waved his arms,

growling:--

"Study? Study? I want to be an artist, not a student. I _am_ an

artist. I know art students when I see them--the Academy, South

Kensington, the Detmold--they are all the same. Let them go abroad and

never come back. No one will miss them, not even their fathers and

mothers, if they have anything so natural. I will not go--I will not

go!"

"But if the Maurice Birnbaum thinks you must go, then you must," said

Golda. "It is their money that has been spent on you."

"They've spent enough," cried Mendel, "without that. I don't want

their money any more. They know that. They want to keep me in their

hands and to say that they made me. They? People like that! God made

me, and they want to keep me all my life saying how grateful I am to

them. Grateful? I am not."

"But you could go for a little while."

"I will not go at all."

He sat down and wrote to Maurice Birnbaum saying that he would not go

to Italy, that he did not want any more of his commissions, and that

he would not be interfered with any more. He would shortly repay every

penny he had had, and he asked only to be allowed to know best what he

wanted to do.

"Everything that I love is here in London, and I can only learn from

what I love. I am one kind of artist and you want to turn me into

another kind. You will only waste your money, and I will not let you

do it."

Maurice never answered this letter and patronage and that of his

friends was withdrawn.

Mendel plunged more ardently than ever into his career with Mitchell

and the others, but found that they were not prepared to share or to

admit the new freedom which he had begun to enjoy. The Birnbaum

patronage had always to a certain extent restrained him, but now that

it was shaken off he plunged madly and wildly into every kind of

extravagance. He was no longer content to be the equal of the others.

He wanted to lead them. He was the most successful of them all, and he

wanted them all to join him in forcing art upon London. Calthrop had

shown them the way, but he had unaccountably stopped short. He had

many imitators, and there were even women who looked like his type,

but it all ended in his personality. . . . Art was something else:

something outside that, an impersonal thing, which London should be

made to recognize. The pictures of Kühler, Mitchell, Weldon, and

Kessler should be, as it were, only forerunners of the mighty pictures

that should be painted. . . .

He was just as extreme and violent in his vices as he was in his

idealism, and even Mitchell was rather upset by his pranks and

caprices. It was one thing to take a shy tame genius among your

acquaintance, quite another when the genius ran wild and dragged you

hither and thither and with breathless haste from the vilest human

company to the most dizzily soaring ideas. Weldon, who was uncommonly

shrewd, had begun to see the danger of allowing Hetty Finch to arrange

their affairs, and when on top of that Mendel, drunk with freedom and

success, began to take charge, he thought it time to secure himself

and began to withdraw from their undertakings and adventures.

At last Kessler struck, and told Mendel that he might be the greatest

genius that was ever born, but should sometimes try to remember that

his friends were gentlemen and could not always be making allowances

for his birth and upbringing. This happened in the Paris Café. Mendel

fell like a shot bird, like a stone. The eager words froze on his

lips, his face visibly contracted and became haggard, his eyes blinked

for a moment, then stared glassily. He sat so for some minutes, then

rose from the table and walked quickly out of the café.

He did not appear for a week, nor was anything heard of him. He sat at

home working furiously. Hetty Finch went to see him, but he turned her

out, telling her that she was a hateful, cold-hearted woman and that

he would never see her again.

At last he wrote to Mitchell, a letter of agony, for Mitchell, his

friend, seemed to him the worst offender, by not having warned him of

what was in the air:--

"You are my friend," he wrote, "my only friend. It is no more to you

what I am, where or how I was born, than it is to me what you are. The

soul of a man chooses his friend, and I trusted you even in my folly.

You could have defended me and our friendship. You have not done so

and I must live miserably without you. Good-bye. I shall not attempt

again to enter a life in which my work is not sufficient

recommendation. I was happy. I was not happy before. I am not happy

now. I have been foolish, but I was your friend."

Mitchell was irritated by this letter, but he was also moved. He

valued Mendel's sincerity, which had continually jolted him out of his

natural indolence. And, as he had a fine talent and a fairly strong

desire to use it to the full, the friendship had profited him. It had

also helped him to come to reasonable terms with that great man, his

father.

On the other hand he was in this difficulty, that he too had been

slipping out of the quintette through his new friendship with Miss

Greta Morrison and her friend, Miss Edith Clowes. Knowing Mendel's

contempt for the "top-knots," he had said nothing of this matter, and

had found it sometimes difficult to account for the afternoons and

evenings given to the dilemma of discovering whether Miss Morrison or

Miss Clowes were the love of his life. Mendel was an exacting friend,

and, as he concealed nothing, expected no concealment.

Mitchell, like the true Englishman he was, deplored the unpleasant

complication, but left it to time, impulse, or inspiration to unravel.

Impulse, in due course, came to his aid and he invented a plan. First

of all he wrote a manly note to Mendel, confessing his inability to

understand why he should suffer for Kessler's caddishness, and

declaring that friendship could not be so lightly broken. He received

no reply to this, and proceeded by taking Morrison and Clowes (as in

the fashion of the Detmold they were called) to see the docks at

Rotherhithe. While there he gazed from Morrison to Clowes and from

Clowes to Morrison, unable to decide which he loved, for both gave him

an equal contraction of the heart, and then he told them that ships

had never been properly painted, never _expressed_ in form and colour;

and then he added that it was clearly a man's job, and then he

informed them that only a short distance away lived Mendel Kühler.

"Would you like to go and see him?" he asked. "It is the queerest

thing to go and see him. A filthy street, a dark house, a ramshackle

staircase, and there you are--absolutely one of the finest painters

the Detmold has ever turned out."

"Do let us go and see him!" said Clowes, who had decided in her own

mind that she was the third of the party and in the way. Morrison said

nothing, and looked very solemn, as though she regarded the visit as

an event--something to be half dreaded. She had a very charming air of

diffidence, as though she were very happy and knew this to be an

unusual and peculiar condition. Often she smiled to herself, and then

seemed to shake the smile away, feeling perhaps that she, a slip of a

girl, had no right to be amused by a world so vast and so varied.

She had enjoyed herself. The ships had stirred her romantically, and

she could not at all agree with Mitchell about painting them, for were

they not works of art in themselves? They moved her in the same way,

arresting her eyes and delighting them, and touching her emotions so

that they began to creep and tickle their way through her whole being.

. . . O wonderful world to contain so much delight! And it pleased her

that the ships should start out of the squalor of the docks like

lilies out of a dark pond.

She smiled and shook the smile away when Mitchell spoke of Mendel

Kühler. She remembered once meeting Mendel on the stairs at the

Detmold. She had often noticed him--strange-looking, white-faced,

romantic, with a look of suffering in his eyes that marked him out

from all the other young men. . . . After she had passed him on the

stairs she turned to look at him, and at the same moment he turned and

she trembled and blushed, and her eyes shone as she hurried on her

way.

Mitchell had told her a great deal about him, and she had heard other

people say that he was detestable, an ill-mannered egoist. She

supposed he was so, for she rarely questioned what other people said,

but he remained a clear figure for her, the romantic-looking young man

who had looked back on the stairs.

"We'll take him by surprise," said Mitchell, with a sudden qualm lest

they should break in upon Mendel and Hetty Finch together. "If we told

him he would hide all his work away and put on a white shirt and have

flowers on the table, for he is terrified of ladies. He says they

don't look like women to him."

"I'm sure," said Clowes, "I don't want to look like a woman to any

man."

This was the most encouraging remark Mitchell had had from either

during the day, and he decided that he was in love with Clowes.

A brisk walk through narrow dingy streets brought them, with some help

from the police, to the door of Issy's house. Mitchell knocked and a

grimy little Jewess opened to them.

"Mr. Mendel Kühler?" said Mitchell.

"Upstairs to the top," replied the Jewess as she hurried away. They

climbed the shabbily carpeted stairs and knocked at the door of the

studio. Mendel opened it. He stood with a brush in his hand, blinking.

He stared at Mitchell and then beyond him at Morrison.

"Come in," he said. "I'd just finished. I've been working rather hard

and haven't spoken to a soul for three days. You must forgive me if I

don't seem very intelligent."

They went in and he made tea for them, hardly ever taking his eyes off

Morrison. He said pointedly to Mitchell:--

"So you came down to the East End to find me."

Clowes explained:--

"I'm a stranger to London and had never seen the docks, you know."

"I have never seen the docks either, though I live so near," said he.

Then, catching Morrison glancing in the direction of his easel, he

turned his work for her to see, almost ignoring the others. Afterwards

he produced drawings for her to see, and he seemed entirely bent on

pleasing her, which so embarrassed her that, when she could escape his

gaze, she looked imploringly over at the others. They could not help

her, and he went on until he had shown her every piece of work in the

studio. Whenever she spoke, shyly and diffidently, as though she knew

her opinion was of no value, he gave a queer little grunt of triumph,

and his eyes glittered as he looked over at Mitchell, as though to say

that he too knew how to treat the "top-knots" and to please them.

X

MORRISON

A FEW days later he wired to Morrison at the Detmold to ask her to sit

for him. She made no reply and did not come.

Very well then: he would not budge. He would only approach Mitchell

again through the "top-knots," who lived in a portion of Mitchell's

world that had hitherto been closed to him. It promised new adventure,

and he was so eager for it that he would not enter upon any other

outside his work.

The days went by and he began a portrait of his mother, with which he

intended to make his first appearance at an important exhibition.

Golda sat dressed in her best on the throne, and tried vainly to

soothe him as he cursed and stamped and wept over his difficulties:

"I can't do it! I can't do it!" he wailed. "I'm a fool, a blockhead, a

pig! If I could only do one little thing more to it I could make it a

great picture."

"You are always the same," said Golda. "In Austria, when you were a

little boy, the soldiers made you a uniform like their own. They used

to call you the Captain, and they saluted you in the street, only they

forgot to give you any boots, and when the soldiers marched by, you

stamped and roared because you were not allowed to go with them, and I

could not make you understand that you were not a real captain."

"But I am a real artist," he growled. "You'll never make me understand

that I am not a real artist."

"Nothing good was ever done in a hurry," said she. "If you run so fast

you will break your head against a wall."

"I shall paint many portraits of you, for I shall never be satisfied.

You may as well sit here with your hands folded as over there in the

kitchen. If I'm not careful your hands will grow all over the picture.

I have put such a lot of work into them."

Then for a long time he was silent, and both were lost in a dreamlike

happiness--to be together, alone with his work, bound together in his

delight as they used to be when he was a child before the invasion of

their peace.

He went to the door in answer to a knock and found Morrison standing

there with some flowers in her hands.

"Oh!" he said awkwardly, holding the door. "Won't you come in? Please.

I am painting my mother."

Golda's eyes lighted with pleasure on the fresh-looking girl and her

flowers.

"She is like a flower herself," she thought, and indeed the girl

looked as though she were fresh from the country.

She held out her hand to Golda, who stood up on the throne and bobbed

to her, then folded her hands on her stomach and waited patiently for

the lady to break the awkwardness that had sprung up between the three

of them. Mendel could do nothing. He looked from one to the other and

felt, with a little tremor of horror, the gulf that separated the two.

At last Morrison said to Golda:--

"I am very glad to see you, though I feel I know you quite well from

the drawings he has done of you."

Golda broke into inarticulate expressions of the delight it was to her

to see any of her son's friends, and saying that she would have a

special tea sent up, she edged towards the door and slipped out.

"Why didn't you come before?" asked Mendel, when he had heard the door

bang. "I sent you a telegram. I wanted to paint your portrait, and now

I have begun something else."

"I didn't want to come," replied she, "but something Mitchell said

made me want to come."

"What did he say?"

"He told me about Kessler, and I thought it was a shame. I thought it

was a horrible shame that you should be treated like that, as if

anything mattered but your work."

Her voice rather irritated him. Her accent was rather mincing and

precise, and between her sentences she gave a little gasp which he

took for an affectation.

"Why did Mitchell tell you that?"

"He tells me a great deal about you, and he was really upset by your

letter."

"Was he? Was he?"

Mendel had no thought but for Mitchell. He longed to go to him, to

embrace him, to tell him that all was different now. He blurted it all

out to the girl.

"We were so happy, the four of us together. Every evening we met and

we were like kings. Everything that we wanted to do we did. We had

money and success and all such foolish things, and we worked hard, all

of us. There were not in London four young men like us, and I was free

of the terrible people who wanted to turn me into an ordinary

successful painter--a portrait painter. I tell you, I have never had a

commission in my life that was not a failure. I only wanted to be

young and to work, for I had never been young before. And then

suddenly, out of nothing, my friends turned on me and told me I was a

Jew and uneducated, and ought to treat them with more respect. Why?

The Jews are good people, and what do I want with education? Can books

teach me how to paint? I tell you the Jews are good people."

Tea was brought up on a lacquer tray--bread, jam, and cake. They were

both hungry and fell to with a will, hardly speaking at all.

When they had finished they began to talk of pictures and of the lives

of the painters, and he told her stories of Michael Angelo and

Rembrandt: how Michael Angelo never took his boots off, and was never

in love in his life; and how Rembrandt was practically starved to

death. Then he showed her reproductions of Cranach and Dürer, whom at

the time he adored, and they bent over them, the chestnut head and the

curly black together. Gradually she led him on to tell of his own

life, and he began at the beginning in Austria, holding her

spell-bound with his vivid, picturesque talk.

"It makes me feel very quiet and dull," she said. "I don't think I

ever regarded places outside England as real, somehow. There was just

home and London, and London seemed to be the end of everything. All

the trains stop there, you know."

"Where is your home?" he asked.

"In Sussex. It is very beautiful country."

"How did you come to the Detmold?"

"A girl at home had been there, and at school they said I was no good

at anything but drawing. Indeed, I was sent away from two schools, and

at home I was such a trouble that mother decided I must do something

to earn my living. So I was sent up to the Detmold. I had my hair down

my back then."

"I remember," said he. "In a plait."

She smiled with pleasure at that.

"Yes," she said. "In a plait. I lived in a hostel, where they bullied

me because I was so untidy and was always being late for meals. At

home, you know, there were only my brothers, and my mother could never

keep them in order, and I was always treated as if I was a boy too.

. . . And I think that's all."

She ended so lamely that his irritation got the better of him, and he

jumped to his feet. It seemed to him that his view of the "top-knots"

was confirmed. They were simply negligible. He was baffled, and stood

staring down at her. Was she no more interested in herself than that?

Comparing the smooth monotony of her life with his, he waxed

impatient, and told himself he was a fool to have invited her to come

to him.

He began to study her face with a view to painting it, and he was

absorbed and fascinated by it. The lines of her cheek and of her neck

made him itch to draw them.

"Yes," he said, "I must paint you. I can do something good. I'm sure I

can."

"I wanted to ask if you would mind my painting you," she said.

He was aghast at her impudence. She, a slip of a girl, a "top-knot,"

paint the great Kühler!

She saw how horrified he was and added hastily:--

"Of course, I won't insist if you don't like sitting."

She rose to go and he begged her to stay.

"Don't go yet," he said with sudden emotion. "I don't want you to go.

Somehow I feel as if you had been sitting there always and I don't

want you to go. If you don't want to talk you needn't, but you must

stay. I could see that my mother liked you at once, and she always

knows good people. You made her happy about me. It was like sunshine

to her when you came in, and I shall be wretched if you go, for I

don't know what to think about you."

"I know what I think about you."

"What do you think?"

"You have made me feel that London isn't just a place where the trains

stop."

And she began to tell him about her home and the river where she

bathed with her brothers, the woods where in spring there were

primroses and daffodils, and in summer bluebells.

"Opposite the house," she said, "is a hill which is a common, all

covered with gorse in the summer, and the hot, nutty smell of it comes

up and seems to burn your face. There are snakes on the common--vipers

and adders and grass-snakes. From the top you can see the downs, and

beyond them, you know, is the sea. On moonlight nights it is glorious,

and I nearly go mad sometimes with running in and out of the shadows.

I believe I did go mad once, for I sat up on the top of the hill and

sang and shouted and cried, all by myself, and I felt that my heart

would break if I did not kiss something. The gorse was out, and I

buried my face in the dewy yellow flowers. . . . I often think the

woods are like churches on Easter Day. . . . And then when I get home

and it is just a house and I am just a girl living in it, you know, it

all seems wrong somehow."

Mendel sat on the floor trying to puzzle out this mysterious rapture

of hers. He had never heard of gorse or of downs, but he could

recognize her emotion. He had had something like it the first time he

saw a may-tree in blossom, and he had hardly been able to bear it. He

had rather resented it, for it had interfered with his work for a day

or two, and he could not help feeling that there was something

indecent about an emotion with which he could do nothing.

"Yes," he said heavily; "it must be very pretty."

She shivered at the grotesqueness of his words as she sank back into

her normal mood of happy diffidence. His face wore an expression of

black anger as he darted quick, furious glances at her. Here was

something that he did not understand, something that defied his

mastery, and when she smiled he thought it was at himself, and this

strange power that had been behind her appeared to him as a mocking,

teasing spirit. Let it mock, let it tease! He was strong enough to

defy it. Sweep through a green girl it might, but he was not to be

caught by it. He knew better. In him it had tough simplicity to deal

with and a will that had broken the confinement of Fate, the limits of

a meagre religion, to bend before no authority but that of art. . . .

He was rather contemptuous, too. Nothing as yet had resisted his

genius, and he felt it within him stronger than ever, a river with a

thousand sources. Block one channel and it would find another. Stop

that and it would find yet another.

Yet here he knew was no direct, no open menace, only the intolerable

suggestion that there were other streams, other sources, and the

suggestion had come from this foolish, empty girl.

"I will not have it," he said half aloud.

"What did you say?" she asked.

"Nothing. I was thinking--I was thinking that there is nothing so good

as London. They tried to send me to Italy, but I know that there is

nothing so good as London for life, and where life is, there is art. I

don't want your pretty places and your pretty feelings. I want to go

through the streets and to see the girls in the evening leaving the

shops, and the men in their bowler-hats looking at the girls and

wanting them, and the fat men in their motor-cars, and the bookstalls

on the railway stations, and the public-houses with their rows of

bottles and the white handles of the beer machines, and the plump

barmaids, and the long, straight streets going on for ever with the

flat houses on either side of them, and the markets and the

timber-yards and the tall chimneys. It all fills your mind and makes

patterns and whirling thoughts that take a spiral shape, going up and

up to mysterious heights. I want all that, and nothing shall take it

from me, do you hear?"

He turned on her ferociously, as though she were trying to rob him.

"And inside it all is something solid," he went on. "Do you know that

my father never loved but one woman in all his life? That's what Jews

are. They know what's solid. If they have to stay in the filth to keep

it, then they'll stay in the filth. And because I'm a Jew I'm not to

be caught with your pretty things and your little fancies. I shall

paint the things I understand, and I'll leave the clouds and the

rainbows and the roofs and chimneys to fools like Mitchell."

Morrison sat very meekly while he talked. She hung her head and

twitched her fingers nervously. She was elated by his passion, but she

too had her dreams and was not going to surrender them. His strength

had given her confidence in them and in herself, and she was filled

with a teasing spirit.

"Jews aren't the only people who are solid," she said. "You see men in

buses and trains whom an earthquake wouldn't move, and I'm sure, if an

earthquake happened, my mother would be left where she was, reading

the Bible."

Mendel replied:--

"In a thousand years my mother will be just as she is now."

Morrison stared at him and began to wonder if he was not a little mad.

He added simply:--

"I feel like that."

And she was relieved and thought he was the only sane person she had

ever met in her life.

"Will you let me come again?" she asked.

"I am going to paint you," he said; "I am going to paint you as you

are. You won't like it."

"I shall if you make me solid," she answered. "And you need flowers in

this dark room. You must let me send you some."

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:--

My old woman's got a wart on her nose;

How she got it I will now disclose.

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

My old woman's got a wart on her nose.

Off again to Hammersmith or Kensal Rise:--

My old woman's got a wart on her nose.

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:--