"Gawd! I've been asleep. Have you two been talking? Gawd! It's two

o'clock."

"I'll walk home with you," said Logan. "We can keep to the river

nearly the whole way by going from side to side."

So they walked while the tide came up, sucking and lapping, while the

red dragons' eyes of the barges came swinging up on it, moving up and

down in a slow, irregular rhythm. It was very cold and the sky was

thickly powdered with stars, whose pin-prick lights were reflected in

the smooth water.

Upon the dome of the young artist's vision that had before been black

with infinite space, stars shone with a tender light. He was in

ecstasy, and seemed to be skimming above the ground, hardly touching

it with his feet. This long walk was like an exquisite dance, while

Logan's rollings were like a pipe. . . . Often he sank into a dream

that he was upon a grassy hill in a mountainy place, he and his

friend, who played upon a pipe so mournfully yet gaily while he

danced, and from the trees fell silvery dewdrops and the songs of

birds, which turned into pennies as they reached the ground and rolled

away down the hill.

Both he and Logan were relieved when Mitchell, who had interrupted

them with inappropriate remarks, turned aside at Vauxhall and vanished

into London.

"So much for Mitchell," said Logan. "You and I need sterner stuff. You

and I are sprung from those among whom life is lived bravely and

bitterly, and we have no use for its parasites. You and I will only

emerge from the bitterness on condition that we can make of life a

spiritual thing, for we are of those who seek authority. Life has none

to offer us now, for all the forms of life are broken. Neither above

us nor below is there authority, neither in heaven nor in hell. We

must seek authority within ourselves, in the marriage of heaven and

hell, in the consummation of good and evil, the two poles of our

nature. It is for us, the artists, to bring them together, to liberate

good and evil in ourselves, that they may rush to the consummation. We

are the priests and the prophets, and we must in no wise be false to

our vision."

Mendel could not fit all this in with his mood and his delicious

dreams, and when it brought him back to his sober senses, he could not

see what it had to do with painting. However, Logan put things right

by saying:--

"You are a poet. You are like Heine. I can see you with your little

Josepha the pale, the executioner's daughter. God rot my soul! It is

years since I had such inspiration as you have given me. I think there

must be Jewish blood in me, for I can certainly understand you through

and through, and you have waked something in me that has always been

asleep. Oh! we shall paint bonny pictures--bonny, bonny pictures."

"You must come to see me every day," said Mendel, "and every night we

will go out together, and I must introduce you to my mother, for she

too has good words."

Logan smacked his lips as they entered the grimy streets near

Spitalfields.

"Pah!" he said; "that's life, that is, good dirty life. I was littered

in a farm-yard myself and I like a good smell. . . . Can you put me up

to-night? I don't mind sleeping on the floor."

"You can have my bed," said Mendel, "and I will sleep downstairs on my

brother's sofa. Please--please. Do sleep in my bed."

Logan accepted the offer and asked Mendel to stay with him while he

undressed. He was unpleasantly fat, but strong and well-built.

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

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

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

right side.

"I had rickets when I was young," said Logan, "and my skull must have

got pushed over. I expect that's what makes me what I am--lop-sided. I

need you to balance me."

He got into bed, and Mendel, reluctant to leave him, sat at his feet

and devoured him with his eyes.

"Surely, surely, now," he thought, "all is perfect now. No more

disturbances, no more Mitchells, no more Hettys, and I shall do only

what I really wish to do."

He stole out into his studio, which was faintly lit from the street

below, and it was as though it were filled with some vast spiritual

presence, and he imagined how he would work, urged on by this new

energy that came welling up through all that he could see, all that he

could know, all that he could remember.

III

LOGAN SETS TO WORK

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

and saying:--

"Mendel! Mendel! What are you doing on the sofa? Wake up! Wake up!

There is some one in your studio."

The house was ringing with Logan's voice chanting the _Magnificat._

Mendel ran upstairs and found him in bed with a box of cigarettes and

the New Testament, that fatal book, on his knees.

"Hello!" he said. "I hope I didn't wake you up. I have been awake for

a couple of hours looking at your work. I hope you don't mind. There's

a still-life there that's a gem, as good as Chardin, and even better,

for there's always something sentimental about Chardin--always the

suggestion of the old folks at home, the false dramatic touch, the

idea of the hard-working French peasant coming in presently to eat the

bread and drink the wine. I think it's time you were written up in the

papers. It's absurd for a man like you to have to wait for success.

There's no artistic public in England, so you can't be successful in

your own way. The British public must have its touch of melodrama. To

accept a man's work it must first have him shrouded in legend. He must

be a myth. His work must seem to come from some supernatural source."

"I'll just run over and tell my mother you are here," said Mendel. "I

always have breakfast there, and then go for a walk while the studio

is dusted."

"Right you are! I'll be up in half a jiffy. Can I have a bath?"

"No. There's no bath."

"Very well; I can do without for once."

Mendel ran round to Golda and told her of the wonderful man who was in

his studio, and he described the adventure of the previous evening.

Golda looked scared and said:--

"What next? What next? Good people sleep in their own beds."

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

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

However, when Logan was brought to her she was polite to him and

rather shy. He told her that fame was coming to her son faster than

the wind.

"Too fast," said she.

"It can never come too fast," replied Logan. "The thirst for fame is a

curse to an artist. Let it be satisfied and he is free for his work. I

know, for I was very famous in my own town. I sickened of it and ran

away. . . . I must congratulate you on letting your son follow his

bent. I had to quarrel with my own people to get my way. I haven't

seen them since I was fourteen."

"Not your mother?" said Golda, greatly upset.

Logan saw that he had made an awkward impression and hastened to put

it right by saying lugubriously:--

"My mother is dead. She forgave me."

He allowed that to sink in and was silent for a minute or two. Then he

chattered on gaily and asked Golda to come and see him, and bragged

about his studio and his work and his friends, and of a commission he

had to decorate a large house in a West End square. He talked so fast

that Golda understood very little of what he said, but she never took

her eyes off him, and when he said good-bye, Mendel noticed that she

did not bob to him as she did to Mitchell and Morrison and his other

polite friends. He took that to mean that she accepted Logan as a

person above these formalities.

For an hour they walked through the streets and squares of the East

End, Mendel proud to display the vivid scenes he intended later on to

make into pictures.

When they returned to the studio Logan insisted on seeing all the

pictures and drawings again.

"Are you in touch with any dealer?" he asked.

"Cluny has a few pictures and a dozen drawings. He never does anything

with them."

"Hum!" said Logan. "Dealers are mysterious people. They can only sell

things that sell themselves. By the way, I am giving up my studio in

Hammersmith. It is too far away. I shall come nearer in. Hammersmith

was all very well while I needed isolation, but that is all over now."

"Where shall you go to?"

"Bloomsbury, I think. I like to be near the British Museum. Do you go

to the British Museum? I must show you round. It is no good going

there unless you know what to look for. By the way, I came out without

any money last night. Can you lend me five pounds?"

Mendel wrote a cheque and handed it to him shamefacedly.

"I want to pay a bill on my way home," said Logan. "I hate being in

debt, especially for colours."

"I get my colours from Cluny," said Mendel, "and he sets them against

anything he may sell."

The irruption of money had depressed him, and he began to realize that

he was very tired. The springs of Rosa's sofa had bored into him and

prevented his getting any real sleep.

He was not sorry when Logan went, after making him promise to meet him

at the Pot-au-Feu for dinner.

* * * * *

He had a model coming at eleven, but when she arrived he sent her

away. He was sore and dissatisfied. The studio seemed dark and dismal,

and he could not get enough light on to his work. He took it right up

to the window, but still there was not enough light, and his picture

looked dull and dingy. His nerves throbbed and he was troubled in

spirit, for now his old dreams of painting quietly among his own

people while fame gathered about his name had suddenly become childish

and pathetic. He was ignorant, futile, conceited, a pigmy by the side

of the gigantic Logan, who would not wait upon the world, but would

compel its attention and shape it to his will. What had he said

artists were? Priests and prophets? . . . How could a man prophesy

with a painting of a fish?

Downstairs he heard Issy come in for his dinner, and there was the

usual snarling row because Rosa cooked so vilely. Mendel compared

Issy's life and his own: Issy working day in, day out, earning just

enough to keep himself alive. Why did he go on with it? Why did he

keep himself alive? Why did he not clear out, like Harry? There was no

pleasure in his life, neither the time nor the money for it. . . . A

wretched business.

But was it less wretched than this business of painting? There was

more money in painting, and that was all anybody seemed to think of.

People wanted the same picture over and over again, and if he

consented to please them, his life would be just as poor a thing as

Issy's, except that he would have pleasure, and, through his friends,

an occasional taste of luxury. At best he could be polite and

gentlemanly, like Mitchell, bringing no more to art and getting no

more out of it than a boyish excitement, as though art were a game and

could give no more than a sensation of cleanliness, like a hot bath.

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

It was a lie, too, to say that the Jews only cared about money. When

they were overfed, like Maurice Birnbaum, they were like all the other

overfed people, but when they were simple and normal they were better

than the others, because they had always a sense of mystery and did

not waste themselves in foolish laughter.

That was where Logan was true. He could laugh, because all the

Christians laugh, but when it came to solemn things he could talk

about them as though he were not half ashamed. Mitchell, for instance,

always shied away from the truth. Why was he afraid of it? The truth,

good or bad, was always somehow beautiful, invigorating, and

releasing. All the pleasant things that Mitchell cared about Mendel

found stifling. Nothing, he knew, could make life altogether pleasant,

and all the falsehoods which were used in that attempt were

contemptible. They strangled impulse and frankness, and without these

how could there be art?

In his unhappy dreams Logan appeared like a figure of Blake, immense,

looming prophetic, beckoning to achievement and away from the chatter

and fuss of the world of artists.

Yet behind Logan there was still the figure of Mitchell, young and

gay, and the idea of Mitchell led to the idea of Morrison.

There were some withered flowers on his painting-table, the last she

had sent him. None had come since that evening in the Paris Café when

she had nodded curtly to show him that he was not wanted.

He would not be thrust aside like that. He knew himself to be worth a

thousand Mitchells. Logan had said that Mitchell was rubbish, and not

even in the eyes of a slip of a girl would Mendel have Mitchell set

above himself. Not for one moment was it tolerable. He would keep

Morrison to her promises and make her come to have her portrait

painted, and he would find out what there was in her that made him

remember her so distinctly and so clearly separate her from all other

girls. Somehow the thought of her cooled the intoxication in which he

had been left by Logan. She offered, perhaps, another way out of his

present state of congestion and dissatisfaction. Very clearly she

brought back to his mind the thrilling delight with which he had

worked as a boy, and that was true, truer than anything else he had

ever known. . . . Ah! If he could only get back to that, with all the

tricks and cunning he had learned.

He would get back to it some day, but he must fight for it; with Logan

he would learn how to fight. Logan would lay his immense store of

knowledge before him, and give him books to read, and teach him how to

be so easy and familiar with ideas, which at present only frothed in

his mind like waves thinning themselves out on the sea-shore.

He wrote an impassioned and insolent letter to Morrison commanding her

presence at his studio and informing her that he was worth a thousand

of her ordinary associates, and that she had hurt him, and that girls

ought not to hurt men of acknowledged talent. This letter cost him a

great deal of pain and time, because he was careful not to make any

slip in spelling or grammar. It was more a manifesto than a letter,

and he wished to do nothing to impair its dignity.

And all the time he was puzzled to know why he should care about her

at all. He was prepared to throw everything--his success, the Detmold,

his friends--to the winds to follow Logan, but Morrison he could not

throw away.

He decided at last not to send the letter but to go himself, and he

went to the Detmold just as the light was fading and he knew she would

be leaving.

She had gone already, but he met Clowes, who, he knew, lived with her.

He pounced on her and said:--

"You must come to tea with me."

"I'm afraid I . . ."

"You must! You must!"

She saw he was very excited and she had heard stories of his bursting

into tears when he was thwarted. In some alarm she consented to go

with him.

He led her to a teashop, a horrible place that smelt of dishwater and

melted butter, made her sit at a table, and burst at once into a

tirade:--

"You are Morrison's friend. Will you tell me why she has avoided me?

She came to my studio once and she said she would come again. She sent

me flowers for three weeks, but she has sent no more."

"She--she is very forgetful," said Clowes, who was longing for tea but

did not dare to tell him to turn to the waitress, who was hovering

behind him.

"But she nodded to me as if she had hardly met me before," said

Mendel.

"She is very shy," said Clowes, framing the word "Tea" with her lips

and nodding brightly to the waitress. She added kindly:--

"I don't think sending flowers means much with her. She gives flowers

to heaps of people. She is a very odd girl."

"Does she give flowers to Mitchell?" he asked furiously, coming at

last with great relief to the consuming thought in his mind.

"Yes," said Clowes. "She is very unhappy about Mitchell and that Hetty

Finch affair."

"Has he told her then?"

"Yes."

"Why did he tell her?"

"I'm sure I don't know."

"I'll tell you," cried Mendel. "I'll tell you. To make himself

interesting to her, because he is not interesting. He is nothing. And

I will tell you something more. He has been telling her things about

me to excuse himself. Now, hasn't he? . . . I can see by your face

that he has."

Clowes could not deny it, and she found it hard to conceal her

distress. She was unused to intimate affairs being dragged out into

the open like this, and her modesty was shocked. She had a pretty,

intelligent face, and she looked for the moment like a startled hare,

the more so when she put her handkerchief up to her nose with a

gesture like that of a hare brushing its whiskers.

"Very well, then," Mendel continued; "you can tell her you have seen

me, and you can tell her that I shall come to explain myself. I hide

nothing, for I am ashamed of nothing that I do. I have no need to

excuse myself. I am not a gentleman one moment and a cad the next. And

you can tell Morrison that if I see her with Mitchell again I shall

knock him down."

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

Mendel gulped down his tea and hastened to add:--

"I am not boasting. He is bigger than I am, but I know something about

boxing. My brother was nearly a prizefighter."

Clowes began to recover from her alarm, and his immense seriousness

struck her as very comic.

"Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?"

"Her hair?" cried Mendel. "Her beautiful hair?"

"Yes. She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets.

All the girls are wild to do it."

"Her hair? Her beautiful hair? Why?"

"Oh! she got sick of putting it up. She is like that. She suddenly

does something you don't expect."

"But she must look terrible!"

"Oh no. She looks too sweet. And if all the boys at the Detmold wear

their hair long, I don't see why the girls shouldn't wear theirs

short."

"My mother had her head shaved when she married," said he, "and she

wore a wig."

"Why did she do that?"

"It is the custom. The woman shows that she belongs wholly to her

husband and makes herself unattractive to all other men."

"What a horrible idea!"

"It is a beautiful idea. It is the idea of love independent of

everything else. That is why I thought Morrison must have some reason

for cutting her hair."

"When you know Greta, you will know that she doesn't wait for

reasons."

"Why does she like Mitchell?"

"She likes nearly everybody."

"But she writes to him."

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

"But she doesn't write to me."

"You don't write to her. You can't expect her to fall at your feet."

As she said this Clowes realized his extraordinary Orientalism. She

could see him holding up his finger and expecting a woman to come at

his bidding, and for a moment she was repelled by him. But she was a

kind-hearted creature and felt very sorry for him, for he seemed so

utterly at sea and was obviously full of genuine and painful emotion.

He detected her repulsion at once and perceived the effort she made to

conquer it, and was at once grateful to her, for, as a rule, when that

happened, people let it swamp everything else.

She said:--

"I'll tell Greta what you have said to me, and I am sure she will be

very sorry to have hurt you."

"I only want her to come and sit for her portrait. It is very

important to me, because I want to try new subjects and there is some

lovely drawing in her face."

"But you mustn't knock Mitchell down. He is quite a nice boy, really,

only a little wild."

"He is rotten," said Mendel dogmatically.

* * * * *

He felt better, and until dinner-time he prowled about Tottenham Court

Road and Soho, a region of London that he particularly loved--a

vibrant, nondescript region where innumerable streams of vitality met

and fused, or clashed together to make a froth and a spume. It was

like himself, chaotic and rawly alive, compounded of elements that

knew no tradition or had escaped from it. He felt at home in it, and

elated because he was also conscious of being superior to it, yet

without the dizzy sense of superiority that assailed him among his own

people, while he was never shocked and humiliated, as he was sometimes

in sedate and prosperous London, by being made suddenly to realize his

external inferiority. He loved the shop-girls hurrying excitedly from

their work to their pleasure, and he sometimes spoke to them in their

own slang, sometimes went home with them. . . . They always liked him

because he never wasted time over silly flirtatious jokes or pretended

to be in love with them. His interest and curiosity, like theirs, were

purely physical, and his passion gave them a delicious sense of

danger.

* * * * *

Logan was waiting for him at the Pot-au-Feu. There was no one else in

the restaurant but the goggle-eyed man in his corner. Logan was

sitting Napoleonically with his arms on the table and his chin sunk on

his chest, with his lips compressed.

He nodded, but did not get up.

"Sorry if I'm late," said Mendel. "I went for a walk. I couldn't work

to-day. My sister-in-law's sofa--I feel as if I had been beaten all

over."

"That's the walk home," said Logan. "I'm used to it. The hours I've

spent walking about this infernal London! I've slept on the

Embankment, you know."

"No?"

"Yes. I've been as far down as that, though I'm not the sort of man

who can be kept down. Did you know that Napoleon was out-at-elbows for

a whole year?"

"No; I don't know much about Napoleon."

"Ah! You should. I read every book about him I can lay hands on.

Gustave!"

The waiter came up and Logan ordered a very special dinner with the

air of knowing the very inmost secrets of the establishment. He

demanded orange bitters before the meal and a special brand of

cigarette.

"My day hasn't been wasted," he said. "I've been to Cluny's and I

asked to see your stuff. The little man there looked astonished, but I

told him people were talking of no one else but you, and quite

rightly. I talked to him from the dealer's point of view, and assured

him that there was a big boom in pictures, coming, and that he had

better be prepared for it with a handful of new men. I didn't let him

know that I was a painter, but I got him quite excited, and I did not

leave him until he had hung a picture and two drawings."

"Which picture?"

"The one of your mother's kitchen. It is one of your best. To-morrow

three men will walk into Cluny's and they will admire your work. On

the day after to-morrow a real buyer will walk in."

Mendel's eyes grew larger and larger. Was Logan a magician, that he

could direct human beings into Cluny's shop and conduct them straight

to his work?

Logan laughed at his amazement.

"Lord love-a-duck!" he said, "you're not going to sit still and wait

for commercial fools to discover that you know your job. At my first

exhibition in Liverpool I put on a false beard and went in and bought

one of my own pictures, just to encourage the dealer and the timid

idiots who were too shy to go and ask him the price of the drawings.

It worked, and this is going to work too. When I've warmed Cluny up

into selling you, then I'm going to make him sell me. If you don't

mind we'll have our names bracketed,--Kühler and Logan. People will

believe in two men when they won't in one. As for three, you've only

got to look at the Trinity to see what they'll believe when they get

three working together. . . . Oh! I forgot you were a Jew and brought

up to believe in One is One and all alone."

He laughed and gave a fat chuckle as he mimicked the little man in

Cluny's cocking his head on one side and pretending to take in the

beauties of Mendel's work as they were pointed out to him.

"I have enjoyed myself," said Logan. "By God! I wish there were a

revolution. I'd have my finger in the pie. Oh! what lovely legs

there'd be to pull--all the world's and his wife's as well. But it

won't come in my time."

Under Logan's influence Mendel began to enjoy his food, which he had

always treated as a tiresome necessity before. He sat back in his

chair and sipped his wine and crumbled up his bread exactly as Logan

did; and he had a delicious sense of leisure and well-being, as though

nothing mattered very much. And, indeed, when he came to think of it,

nothing did matter. He had years and years ahead of him, and here was

good solid pleasure in front of him, so that he had only to dip his

hands in it and take and take. . . .

After the dinner Logan ordered cigars, coffee, and liqueurs, and

Mendel felt very lordly. The restaurant had filled up, and among the

rest were Mitchell and Morrison.

Mendel turned, gave them a curt nod, and could not restrain a grin of

satisfaction as he thought that score was settled. He leaned forward

and gave himself up to the pleasure of Logan's talk.

"What I contend," said Logan, "is this--and mind you, I let off my

youthful gas years ago. I've been earning my living since I was

fourteen, so I know a little of what the world's like. I've been in

offices and shops, and on the land, in hotels, on the railway, on the

road as a bagman, from house to house as a tallyman, and I know what

I'm talking about. The artist is a free man, and therefore an outlaw,

because the world is full of timid slaves who lie in the laps of

women. If an artist is not a free man, then he is not an artist. And I

say that if the artist is outlawed, then he must use any and every

means to get out of the world what it denies him. One must live."

"That's true," said Mendel.

"You may take it from me that there is less room in the world now for

artists than ever there was. In the old days you chose your patron and

he provided for you, as the Pope provided for Michael Angelo, and you

devoted your art to whatever your patron stood for, spiritual power if

he happened to be a pope, secular power if he happened to be a duke or

a king. But, nowadays, suppose you had a patron--say, Sir Julius

Fleischmann--and he kept you alive, what on earth could you devote

your art to? You could paint his portrait, and his wife's portrait,

and all his daughters' portraits, but they'd mean nothing; they'd just

be vulgar men and women. No. Art is a bigger thing than any power left

on the earth. Money has eaten up all the other powers, and only art is

left uncorrupted by it. Art cannot be patronized. It cannot serve

religion, because there is no religion vital enough to contain the

spirit of art. There is nothing left in the world worthy of such noble

service, and therefore art must be independent and artists must be

free, because there is no honourable service open to them. They must

have their own values, and they must have the courage of them. The

world's values are the values fit for the service of Sir Julius

Fleischmann, but they are not fit for men whose blood is stirring with

life, whose minds are eager and active, men who will accept any

outward humiliation rather than the degradation of the loss of their

freedom."

"I met Sir Julius Fleischmann. Once," Mendel said. "He subscribed for

me when I went to my first School of Art. They wanted to send me to

Italy, but I refused, because I knew my place was here in London.

There's more art for me in the Tottenham Court Road than in all the

blue skies in the world."

"Quite right, too!" cried Logan. "That shows how sound an artist's

instinct is. He knows what is good for him because he is a free man.

The others have to be told what is good for them because they don't

know themselves and because, however unhappy they are, they don't know

the way out. When you and I are unhappy we know that it is because we

have lost touch with life, or because we have lost touch with art;

either the flesh or the spirit is choked with thorns, and we set about

plucking them out. When it is a question of saving your soul, what do

morals matter?"

Mendel had heard people talk about morals, and he knew that his own

were supposed to be bad; but he was not certain what they were. Rather

timidly he asked Logan, who gave his fat chuckle and replied:--

"Morals, my son? No one knows. They change about a hundred years after

human practice. They are different in different times, places, and

circumstances, and Sir Julius Fleischmann, like you and me, has none,

because he can afford to do without them. . . . Well, I've done a good

day's work and we've had a good dinner, and I must get back to my

beautiful bed--unless you'd like to go to a music-hall."

Mendel was loath to let his friend go, and, weary though he was, he

said he would like the music-hall. Logan bought more cigars and they

walked round to the Oxford and spent the evening in uneasy and flat

conversation with two ladies of the town, one of whom said she knew

Logan, though he swore he had never seen her before. When they were

shaken off, he told Mendel mysteriously that she was a friend of a

woman of whom he went in terror, who had been pursuing him for a

couple of years.

"Terrible! Terrible!" he said. "Like a wild beast. They're awful,

these prostitutes, when they fall in love. It eats them up, body and

soul."

And he went on talking of women, and from what he said it appeared

that he was beset by them. He described them lurking in the street for

him, forcing their way into his studio, clamouring for love, love,

love.

"It makes me sick," he said. "I never yet met a woman who knew how to

love. If a man has an enthusiasm for anything outside themselves, they

plot and scheme with their damnable cunning to kill it. They want the

carcase of a man, not the lovely life in it. And if they're decent

they want babies, which is almost worse if you're hard up. No, boy;

for God's sake don't take women seriously. If you can't do without

them, hate 'em. They'll lick your boots for it. They feed on hatred,

and will take it out of your hand."

He talked in this strain until they reached the Tube station in

Piccadilly Circus. It was unusually empty, and by the booking-office

was standing a very pretty girl, big and upstanding. She had a wide

mouth and curious slanting eyes, plump cheeks and a roguish tilt to

her chin. She was well and neatly dressed, and Mendel judged her to be

a shop-girl.

"That's a fine lass," said Logan. "Good-night, boy. I'll see you

to-morrow and tell you about Cluny's."

"Good-night," said Mendel, still loath to see his friend go, and he

suffered a pang of jealousy as he saw Logan go up to the girl, raise

his hat, and speak to her. She started, blushed, and smiled. They

stopped and talked together for a few moments, and then moved over

towards the lift.

Mendel waited and watched them, Logan talking gaily, the girl smiling

and watching him intently through her smile. With her eyes she took

possession of him, and Mendel was filled with misgiving when he heard

Logan's fat chuckle and the rustle and clatter of the gate as the lift

descended. It reminded him oddly of the Demon King and the Fairy Queen

in a pantomime he had once seen with Artie Beech, whose father used to

get tickets for the gallery because he had play-bills in his shop

window.

IV

BURNHAM BEECHES

FOR Greta Morrison as for Mendel, London life had been opened up

through Mitchell. He had been friendly and kind to her when everybody

else had been harsh, fault-finding, and indifferent. Her first year

and a half at the hostel had been a period of misery, for the girls

and women there regarded her as odd, vague, and careless, and thought

it their duty to impose on her the discipline she seemed to need, for

they knew nothing of her suffering through her ambition and her work.

Like Mendel, she had been overwhelmed by her inability to adapt

herself easily to the Detmold standard of drawing, for it was against

her temperament and her habit of mind to be precise, and drawing had

always been to her rather a trivial thing, though extremely pleasant

for the purposes of the caricatures in which her teasing humour found

an outlet. All her girlhood had been thrillingly happy in the

execution of large allegorical designs, through which she sought to

express her delight in the earth--the immense serene power of which

she became profoundly aware as she lay in the bracken at home and

gazed out over the rich valley or up into the marvellous, quivering

blue sky, through which she felt that she was being borne without a

sound, without a tremor, irresistibly. Nothing could shake that loving

knowledge in her, and it hurt her that her mother's cold, self-centred

religion, which made her demand a fussy, sentimental attention from

her children, forbade all expression of it in her daily life. Her

brothers, revolting against the sentimentality exacted of them,

treated all tenderness as ignoble rubbish, and in her rough-and-tumble

with them Greta was hardened and forced into independence. She had to

play their games with them and to suffer the same tortures of

knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw. But all their

swagger seemed to her rather fraudulent; and because they laughed at

her allegorical designs she decided that men were inferior beings.

When they laughed at her designs it was to her as though they laughed

at the beauty she had tried to express in them, and the sacrilege

enraged her more than her mother's petulance, for they were young and

strong and full of life, and they should not have been blind. It was

against them that she first found relief in caricature, and as they

went through their Public Schools and were more and more compressed

into type, she pilloried them, and, as a consequence, even when she

was a young woman, big and fine, with the tender, delicate bloom of

seventeen upon her, she had to submit to the indignity of

knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw.

She was filled with a horror of men, and especially Public School men,

for they seemed to her entirely lacking in decency, humility, and

honesty. They pretended to be so fine and ignored everything that was

finer than themselves. Her brothers' foolish love-affairs disgusted

her and made her suppress in herself every emotion that tried to find

its way to a good-looking boy or young man. She was not shy of them or

afraid of them, but she would not encourage in them what she so

detested in her brothers.

During her first year in London she devoted herself heart and soul to

her work. There were two or three families who were kind to her as her

mother's daughter, but their ways were her mother's, and she only

visited them as a duty, and to break the monotony of the school and

the hostel.

Her encounter with Mitchell took place at the time when Mendel's

influence on him had set him in revolt against his Public School

training. On the other hand, the sight of the abyss of poverty into

which Mendel descended so easily had set him reeling. He was shrewd

enough to know that Hetty Finch was using him as a ladder to get out

of it, and that there was a real danger of her kicking him down into

it. In a state of horrible confusion he plunged at the most obvious

outlet, the "pure girl" of the tradition of his upbringing.

He made no concealment of it, but turned to Morrison with a childlike

confidence that touched her. She was feeling lonely, disappointed, and

dissatisfied with herself and was glad of his company. It was a change

from the woman-ridden atmosphere of the hostel.

By way of making their relationship seemly he introduced her to his

family, where as the pure young girl who was to save their hope from

wild courses she was a great success.

"First sensible thing you've done, my boy," said Mr. Mitchell, that

great man, a journalist who had been a correspondent in a dozen wars.

"A pure friendship between a boy and a girl has a most ennobling

influence--most ennobling."

"She is truly spiritual," sighed Mrs. Mitchell, "the type who

justifies the independence of the modern girl, whatever the Prime

Minister may say."

"That scoundrel!" cried Mr. Mitchell. "That infamous buffoon who has

not a grain of Liberalism left in his toadying mind!"

"My dear," said Mrs. Mitchell, "we were talking about little Miss

Morrison."

"Well," answered Mr. Mitchell, "we took our risk when we let the boy

be an artist and we can be thankful it is no worse. Did I tell you, my

love, that I am going off to the Cocos Islands to-morrow?"

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

"No, I hear it is worse than the Congo."

"Oh dear! oh dear! I don't know what the world is coming to. The more

civilized we get in one part of the world, the worse things are in

another part. I declare such horrible things seem to me to make it

quite unimportant whether we get the vote or not."

"When you have a Tory Government calling itself Liberal," said Mr.

Mitchell very angrily, "it means that neither reform at home nor

justice abroad can receive any attention. The country has gone to the

dogs, and I thank God I spend most of my time out of it."

"And poor Humphrey suffers. I'm sure I am a good mother to him, but I

cannot be a father as well. I'm thankful to say he seems to be

dropping that Jewish friend of his. He is a genius, of course, and

quite remarkable, considering what he comes from; but with Jews it can

never be the same, can it?"

"No, my love," said Mr. Mitchell; "one would never dream of drinking

out of the same glass, would one? Still, I must say, the Jews in

England are much better than they are anywhere else, which seems to

show that they can respond to decent treatment and thrive in the air

of liberty."

Both Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell had a platform manner of speaking, and as

Morrison was not a subject that suited it, she was soon dropped; but

in the end they came back to her, and agreed that she was a nice, shy

little girl, and that she had no idea of marrying their only son, or

anyone else, for that matter.

She was much impressed with them, for she had never met important

people before, and she was given to understand that they were very

important. They seemed to have their fingers on innumerable reforms

which were only suppressed by the stupidity of the Government.

Directly the Government was removed, as of course such idiots soon

would be, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell would raise their fingers and, hey

presto! women would have votes, the slums would be pulled down,

maternity would be endowed, prostitutes would be saved, prisons would

be reformed, capital punishment abolished, the working classes would

be properly housed, every able-bodied man who wished it should have

his small holding, the railways would be nationalized, site values

would be taxed, divorce would be made easy and free from social taint,

and education would be made scientific and thorough. In the meantime,

as the Government did not budge, Mr. Mitchell went to the Cocos

Islands and Constantinople to procure evidence of horrors abroad and

Mrs. Mitchell addressed meetings on the subject of horrors at home.

Morrison was impressed. The contrast between these people who thought

of everything and everybody but themselves and her own home, where

nothing was thought of but the family, the Church, and the Empire,

shocked her into thinking and gave her a sense of liberation. It made

human beings more interesting than she had thought, and she began to

see that they did not, as she had heedlessly accepted that they did,

fit infallibly into their places, and that vast numbers had no places

to fit into. She herself, she saw, did not fit into any place, and

that she had been squeezed, like paint out of a tube, out of her home

for no other reason than that she was a woman, and there was only just

enough money to establish the boys. However, she could not quite

swallow Mrs. Mitchell's view that men had deliberately, coldly, and of

set purpose ousted women from their rightful share in the sweets of

life.

She had a period of despair as these revelations sank into her mind

and she had to digest Mrs. Mitchell's awful facts and statistics about

the night-life of London. Life seemed too terrible for her powers,

but, as she soon began to see how comic Mrs. Mitchell was, she pulled

herself together and found that she was strengthened by the

experience, and when Mitchell confessed the awful doings of his past,

she felt immeasurably older than he, and was thankful she was a woman

and did not expect such things of herself. For she could never quite

take his word for all he said. She knew her brothers too well to

accept his plea of passionate necessity.

"Gawd!" he used to say. "When I think of my past I feel that I must go

on my knees and worship your purity."

His absurdity made her blush, but she liked him. He was clever and had

read much under his father's guidance, poetry and modern English

fiction mostly, and when she went to tea with him in his studio he

used to read aloud to her, Keats and Shelley and Matthew Arnold.

"I think I only like poetry," she said once, "when it makes pictures.

When it doesn't do that it seems to me just words, and it doesn't seem

to matter how nice they sound."

"Gawd!" he said. "That's like Kühler. He says nothing makes such

pictures as the Bible, and he is always quoting that about: 'At her

feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: where he fell, there he lay

down.' And he says it must be the words, because his own Hebrew Bible

never gave him anything like the same--er--vision of it."

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

subject.

"Do you think he's a genius?" she would ask.

"Gawd! I don't know. He says he is a genius, and I suppose time will

show whether it is true or not. But why do you want to talk of him?"

"I don't know. I'm interested. Perhaps because he is different."

"Well, you've had tea with him. That is about as much as is good for

you. If you were my sister I wouldn't let you know him."

"Why not?"

"My dear girl, there are certain things in life that a young girl

ought never to know."

"What things? Is there anything worse than what your mother talks

about at her meetings? Girls know all about that nowadays, and it is

no good pretending we don't."

"Talking about them is one thing, coming in contact with them is

another. Kühler is a Jew, and he comes from the East End, where they

don't have any decent pleasures. He's infernally good-looking in a

hurdy-gurdy sort of way. Gawd! Women look at him and off they go."

"But he cares for poetry and the Bible and he loves pictures. . . ."

"It doesn't seem to make any difference."

During this talk he had begun to find Morrison extraordinarily pretty

and lovable, and he said tenderly:--

"Won't you take off your hat and let me see your beautiful hair?"

She refused, and asked him more about Mendel, and in exasperation at

the unintended snub he told her the true story of Hetty Finch, not

concealing his own share in it, but implying that Mendel's terrible

immorality had corrupted him and led to his downfall.

The story was received in silence.

At last she said:--

"And what is going to become of Hetty Finch?"

"That's the extraordinary part of it," said Mitchell. "She has found

someone to marry her."

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

and groaned.

"Gawd!" he said. "If it weren't for you I don't know what would become

of me." And he was so moved by his own thoughts that tears trickled

down his nose and made dark spots on the whitened hearth.

"I can't ask you to marry me," he said mournfully. "I'm unworthy, but

I want to be your friend."

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

"Will you be my friend?"

"Of course."

"Always?"

"How can I promise that?" she said.

It was then that he took her to the Paris Café, where, all in a

turmoil through her new knowledge of men and women, she hardly knew

what she was doing, and gave Mendel the curt nod which had so

disgruntled him.

* * * * *

Every summer the Detmold students went for a picnic, either up the

river, or to a Surrey common, or to one of the forests in the vicinity

of London. This year Burnham Beeches was chosen. Two charabancs met

the party at Slough, and though Mendel tried very hard to sit next to

Morrison, he was outmanoeuvred by Mitchell, and had to put up with

Clowes.

"I wish you wouldn't glare at Mitchell so. You make me quite

uncomfortable," said she.

"He is telling her lies about me," growled Mendel.

"Don't be absurd," protested Clowes. "He is not talking about you at

all." She felt rather cross with him because he was spoiling her

pleasure, and because she had wanted to sit next someone else, and she

added: "People aren't always talking about you, and if anybody does

it's the models, and that's your own fault."

"How beastly!" he said.

"I don't blame them. They haven't any other interest."

"I didn't mean that. I meant this country. It is so flat and dull,

regular railway scenery. What a place to choose for a picnic!"

"Wait until you get to the woods! We're going to a place called Egypt.

Don't you think that's romantic? Though it reminds me more of Oberon

and Titania than of Anthony and Cleopatra."

He looked blank, and she explained:--

"Shakespeare, you know."

"I've never read Shakespeare."

"Oh! you should."

"I've tried, but I can't understand him. I suppose it's because I'm

not English. It seems ridiculous to me, all those plots and murders."

"But the fairies in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'!"

"I haven't read it; but what do you want with fairies? A wood's a

wood, and there's quite enough mystery in it for me without pretending

to see things that aren't there."

"But it's nice to pretend," said Clowes rather lamely, almost hating

him because he seemed so wrong in the country. She knew people like

that, people she was quite fond of in London, but in the country they

were awful.

The charabancs swung through Farnham Royal and they came in sight of

the woods, brilliant under a vivid blue sky patched with huge, heavy

white clouds. Birds hovered above the trees, and as they turned out of

the street of seaside bungalows and along the sandy lane leading to

Egypt, they put up rabbits and pheasants.

The art students looked bizarre and almost theatrical in the woods,

with the long-haired young men and the short-haired girls, many of

them wearing the brightest colours. Mendel hated the lot of them,

giggling girls and bouncing boys, and he recognized how inappropriate

they all were and how he himself was the most inappropriate of them

all. He felt ashamed, and wanted to go away and hide, to crawl away to

some hole and gaze with his eyes at the beauty he could not feel.

There were too many trees, as there were too many people. . . . What a

poor thing is a man in a crowd which makes it impossible to share his

thoughts and emotions with anyone! And how bitter it is when he is

full of thoughts and emotions! It is all so bitter that the crowd must

do foolish, inappropriate things not to feel it, not to be broken up

by it. . . . Yet the others seemed happy enough. The old Professors

were beaming and pretending to be young. Perhaps they enjoyed it more

than anyone because they did not want to be alone, or to steal away

with a coveted maid, as some of the young men were doing even now.

. . . Had Mitchell stolen away with Morrison? Horrible idea! No. There

he was, putting up stumps for cricket.

Cricket! How Mendel loathed that fatuous game, the kind of

inappropriate foolish thing the crowd always did! How he dreaded the

swift hard ball that would hurt his hand or his shins! How humiliated

he felt when he was out: and how he raged against the frantic

excitement he could not help feeling when he hit the ball and made a

run. One run seemed to him a larger score than anyone else could

possibly make, and when he made a run and was on the winning side he

always felt that he had won the match. In the field, no matter where

he was placed, he went and stood by the umpire, because he had noticed

that the ball rarely went that way.

He had to field now, and he went and stood by the umpire. Mitchell

came swaggering in. He hit a lovely four, a three, a two. The fielders

changed at the over, but Mendel stayed where he was. The ball came

near him. He picked it up and threw it as hard as he could at

Mitchell's head. Fortunately he missed, and there was a roar of

laughter.

"I say, I mean to say," said one of the Professors, "we are not

playing rounders or--or baseball."

And there was more laughter.

Mitchell hit a three, a two, a lost ball (six), a four, and then he

skied one. The ball went soaring up. With his keen sight Mendel could

see it clearly shining red against the hot sky. With an awful sinking

in his stomach he realized that it was coming down near him. It was

coming straight to him. It would fall on him, hurt him, stun him. Then

he thought that if he caught it Mitchell would be out. He never lost

sight of the ball for a moment. If he caught it Mitchell would be out.

He moved back two paces, opened his hands, and the ball fell into

them.

"Oh! well caught, indeed! Well caught!"

Mitchell walked away from the wicket swinging his bat in a deprecating

fashion. After all, one does not expect miracles even in cricket.

"Beautiful, beautiful ball!" thought Mendel, fondling it with his

still tingling hands. "You came to me like a lark to its nest, and you

shone so red against the sky, you shone so red, so red!"

His dissatisfaction vanished. The crowd was a nice beast after all. It

was at his feet. At no one else had it shouted like that. . . . The

woods were very beautiful, with the bracken nodding under the trees,

and the branches swaying, and the soft winds murmuring through the

leaves, through which the trees seemed to breathe and sigh and to envy

the moving wind while they were condemned to stay and grow old in one

spot. Very, very sweet were the green and yellow and blue lights

hovering and swinging through the woods, dappling the trunks of the

trees, weaving an ever-changing pattern on the carpet of moss and dead

leaves, and the tufted bracken that sometimes almost looked like the

sea, full of a life of its own. Surely, surely there were fish

swimming in the bracken.

Starting out of his dreams, he saw Morrison at the wicket, very

intent, with a stern expression on her face. He knew she was

desperately anxious to score.

She was most palpably stumped with her second ball, but the umpire

gave her "not out," amid general applause, for she was a favourite.

She lashed out awkwardly at the next ball, which came on the leg side.

It came towards Mendel at an incredible speed. He put his foot on it,

picked it up, pretended it had passed him, and tore towards the trees

in simulated pursuit; and he remained looking for it in the bracken

while Morrison ran four, five, six, seven, eight, and just as some one

cried "Lost ball!" he stooped, pretended to pick it up, and threw it

back to the bowler.

He himself was bowled first ball, but, as it turned out, Morrison's

side won by three runs.

She was bubbling over with happiness, and after tea she came over to

him and said:--

"I say, Kühler, that _was_ a good catch."

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

said:--

"Oh! yes. I can play cricket."

"You made a blob," she said with a grin.

"A catch like that," he answered, "is enough for one day. I have seen

many words written in the papers about a catch like that. Even

Calthrop does not have so many words written about his pictures."

"I shall hate to go back to London after this," she said. "I didn't

know there was anything so beautiful near London."

"There is Hampstead," he said.

"I've never been there," she replied.

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

"Oh yes," she said eagerly. "Do let us go into the woods now before we

start. I'm sure there must be lovely places."

He followed her, first looking round to see what had become of

Mitchell, whom he saw standing with a scowl on his face, a foolish

figure.

"Don't talk!" said Morrison. "I'm sure it is lovely through here."

She led the way through a grove of pines into a beech glade, at the

end of which they found a dingle, where they stood and gazed back.

"Oh, look!" she cried. "Look at the pine stems through the sea-green

of the beeches. Purple they are, and don't they swing?"

"I like the wind in the trees," said Mendel.

He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he caught some of her

ecstasy. But he could not understand it at all and it hurt him

horribly. She was wonderful and beautiful to him, the very heart of

all that loveliness, the song of it, its music and its mystery.

"She is only a little girl," he said to himself very clearly, stamping

out the words in his mind, so that it was as though someone else had

spoken to him.

The ecstasy grew in her, and with it the pain in him. She swayed

towards him and fell against his breast and raised her lips to him. He

stooped and almost in terror just touched them with his.

He was a sorry prince for a sleeping beauty, for he was afraid lest

she should awake.

V

HAPPY HAMPSTEAD

ON the morning of the day fixed for their expedition to Hampstead

Heath she sent him roses--yellow roses. He took them across to his

mother and gave them to her, saying:--

"I do not need flowers. I am happy."

Golda laughed at him, and said:--

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

"I don't know what it is, but I am happy. It is no longer surprising

to me that there are happy people in the world, and I think the

Christians are not all such fools to wish to be happy. I am only

astonished that they are happy with such little things."

"It is nothing," said Golda. "They are not truly happy; they are only

hiding away from themselves."

"But I am finding myself," cried Mendel. "I shall no more paint fishes

and onions. I shall paint only what I feel, and it will be beautiful.

I am so clever I can paint anything I choose."

"Go to your work now," said Golda. "You can boast as much as you

please when the King has sent for you and told you you are the

greatest artist in England. Go to your work."

He went back to his studio and there found a letter from Logan, giving

his new address in Camden Town, and another from Mitchell, asking him

why he was so unfriendly. This he answered at once:--

"You are no longer my friend. You have despised and injured me.

Superior as I am to you, you have thought it your part as a gentleman

to try to keep me in my place. You have treated me as a kind of

animal. You cannot see that as an artist I am the equal of all men,

the highest and the lowest. My own poor people I do not expect to know

this, but of an educated man I do expect it. You cannot see this, and

I count you lower than the lowest, and as such I am prepared to know

you, and not otherwise. I have changed completely. I no longer believe

in the Detmold or in Calthrop or in any of the things I reverenced as

a student. I prefer the Academy, for it does not pretend to be

advanced, and is honest though asleep. I am no longer a student. I am

an artist. You will always be an art student, and so I say good-bye to

you, as one says good-bye to friends on a station-platform. The train

moves and all their affectionate memories and longings cannot stop it.

The train moves and I am in it, and I say good-bye to you without even

looking out of the window."

This done, he sat down to work at a portrait of his father and mother,

with which he was designing to eclipse his first exhibiting success.

It seemed to him important that it should be finished. Hearing Issy

come in, he shouted to him to come and sit instead of his father, who

had given out that he was unwell and was indulging in a sleeping bout.

Issy came shambling in, pale, tired, and unhappy. He sat as he was

told, and said:--

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

"Oh! I shall soon be rich and then I'll help you."

"There's not much help for me," said Issy. "I'm like father. There's

always something against me to keep me down. It seems funny to me that

people will give you so much money for something they don't really

want."

"Come and look at it," said Mendel.

Issy obeyed.

"I don't think it's really like them. Why should anybody buy them who

doesn't know them?"

He spoke so heavily and dully that Mendel found it hard to conceal his

irritation. When Issy had gone back to his chair, he asked:--

"What do you live for, Issy?"

"Live?" said Issy, mystified.

"Yes. What do you like best in the world?"

"Playing cards. Playing cards. Every day there's work and every night

there's Rosa, and on Saturday I play cards. Yes. I play cards; and, of

course, you are always something to think about."

"What do you think about me?"

"Oh! You will be rich and famous, and you will be able to choose among

all the girls with money. It is like having a play always going on in

the family. But I would rather play cards, and Rosa is not so bad as

you all say she is. I am not a good husband to her, for I have moods

and I cannot talk to her, for I cannot talk to anyone. What is there

to say? She has her children, and she only wants more because she is a

fool. It is not her fault."

"That'll do, Issy. I've got all I want. I can't get any more from you.

Some day I'll teach you how to be happy."

"Oh!" said Issy, with a sly leer. "I know how to be happy. I can't see

why anyone should want to have father and mother hanging on their

walls."

He slunk away.

How depressing he was! Poor old Issy! as much a part of the street as

the doors and windows of the houses. He might move a hundred yards to

another exactly similar street, but he would always be the same. It

was not his fault. Mendel knew the depths of devotion of which his

brother was capable. It was devotion to his mother that kept him

living round the corner, devotion to his father that tied him to the

unprofitable business. The name of Kühler had attained the dignity of

a brass-plate on the front door, and he would die rather than see it

removed, at any rate in his father's lifetime.

For the first time Mendel faced his circumstances squarely. With

something of a shock he thought of the family arriving at Liverpool

Street and never in all these years moving more than half a mile away

from it, and that in this amazing London, with its trains and buses to

take you from end to end of it in a little over an hour. His mother

had never been west of the Bank. She did not even know where

Piccadilly Circus was, or the Detmold, or the National Gallery, or the

Paris Café, or Calthrop's studio, or any other important centre of

life. Liverpool Street she knew, and outside Liverpool Street were the

sea and Austria. . . . When there were no little happenings at home

she would always fall back on Austria and the troubled days at the

inn, and the soldiers who used to come in and ask to see the beautiful

baby before they thought of ordering drinks, and her rich uncle who

used to supply the barracks with potatoes and was so mean that he

refused to give her any when she had not a penny in the world, and the

neighbours who used to bring food so that the beautiful baby should

not starve. . . . They stayed where they were, stormily passionate,

yet with no sense of confinement, while he was drawn off into the

swiftly moving whirligig of London, going from house to house, studio

to studio, café to café, atmosphere to atmosphere, and all his

passionate storms were spent upon nothing, were absorbed in the

general movement, leaving him, tottering and dazed, in it, yet alien

to it, discovering no soul in it all and losing the clear knowledge of

his own.

Surely now that was ended. She had sent him the yellow roses, and he

had given them to his mother to join the two whom he loved. They must

have touched her face before they came to him, and Golda had buried

her face in them.

Impatiently he awaited the time for him to go to the Detmold. He put

on a clean collar and a black coat, but then he remembered how the old

Jews whom he asked to sit for him always put on clean clothes and

clipped their beards, under the impression that he wanted to

photograph them. In his clean collar and black coat he felt as though

he were going to the photographer's or to a wedding, and remembering

how he had been dressed when he saw her for the first time on the

stairs, he took out an old black shirt, a corduroy coat and trousers,

and a red sash.

He could not bring himself to wear the red sash. It reminded him of

Mitchell, who had been with him when he bought it.

* * * * *

It had been very hot. The walls and the pavements gave out a dry,

stifling heat. The smell of the street outside came up in waves--a

smell of women and babies, leather and kosher meat. He must wait for

the cool weather, he thought, before he asked her to the studio again.

"She is only a little girl," he said to himself. "She is pretty, but

she is only a little girl. I will tell her that she must not see

Mitchell again, because he is not true. I will paint her portrait, and

then I will not see her again, because she is only a little girl."

He sat in the window with the clock in front of him, and directly it

said half-past four he clapped his hat on his head, seized the

silver-knobbed stick which at that time was an indispensable part of

an artist's apparel, and bolted as though he were late for a train.

* * * * *

She was waiting for him. He took off his hat, but in his nervousness

he could not speak, and as he could not remember which side of a lady

he ought to walk, he bewildered her by dodging from one side to the

other with a quick, catlike tread, so that she did not hear him, and

whenever she turned to speak to him he was not there.

"Wasn't it a good picnic!" she said enthusiastically. "It's the best

picnic I've ever been to."

"They are usually pretty good," he said lamely. "I think we'd better

go by bus."

They mounted a bus and sat silently side by side.

When they stopped by the Cobden statue he said:--

"A friend of mine has just taken a studio in Camden Town. His name is

Logan."

"Was he at the Detmold?"

"No."

That settled Logan for her. She began to feel anxious. Was the

afternoon going to be a failure? Why could she never, never get the

better of her shyness? She wanted to make him happy because, on the

whole, people had been beastly to him and said such horrid things

about him. She wanted him to feel for himself, and not only through

her, that the world was a very wonderful place, a place in which to be

happy. He was so stiff and different, so taut and tightly strung up,

that lounging, loose-limbed Mitchell seemed graceful compared with

him. Yet there was something unforgettable about him, and he had

always had for her the vivid romantic reality of the beautiful young

men on the stage, who were creatures of a delicious, absurd world

which she would never enter and never wished to enter: a world where

young men opened their arms and young women sank into them and were

provided with happiness for ever and ever. Her vigour rejected this

world, for she knew and lived in a better, but all the same it had its

charm and its curious reality. . . .

She was not shy because she had kissed him. That had passed with the

shifting light through the trees and the clouds in the sky. It had

been vivid and true for that moment, but it had perished and fallen

away like a drop of water, like a rainbow.

He remembered it. As he sat by her side and could feel the warm life

in her, it became terribly actual to him, the cool contact of her

lips, and he was glad when the bus reached the yard with the painted

swing-boats and he need no longer sit by her side. He had begun to

feel subservient to her, and he would not have that. What Rosa was to

Issy, what Golda was to his father, that should a woman be to him, for

it was good and decent so. . . . He was almost sorry he had come. He

was painfully shy, and knew that she was suffering under it.

He walked so fast that she was hard put to keep up with him, but she

swung out and would not be beaten, and managed his pace without losing

her breath. Over to the wooded side of the Heath he took her, and

stopped under a chestnut-tree.

"Shall we sit down?" he said. "Or would you like to go on walking?"

"I'd like to sit down," she answered. "I love walking, but I can't

talk at the same time."

He sat down at once, without waiting for her to choose a spot.

"This grass is nice and cool," he said.

It was wet, but he had no thought for her thin cotton frock.

She sat a couple of yards away from him on the short turf and plunged

her arm into the long, cool grass. Then she lay on her stomach and

plucked a blade of grass and chewed it.

"Thank you for sending me the roses. I gave them to my mother."

"I liked your mother."

"She liked you. She said: 'That is a good girl.' She is very quick at

guessing what people are like."

"I'm glad she liked me."

Once again conversation died away, but she seemed content to lie there

with her arms in the cool grass. Their round slenderness fascinated

him. Her short hair hung over her face, so that he could only see the

tip of her chin.

Suddenly he asked her:--

"Do you send flowers to Mitchell?"

"Yes," she said, and her head was lowered so that the tip of her chin

was hidden by her hair.

He said nothing, but he too lay on the grass, flat on his stomach,

with his head on his arms. His heart began to thump, and, though he

tried to control it, it would not be still. Without raising his head

he said, in a choking voice that astonished him:--

"My father fainted for love of my mother. When he heard her name he

fainted away."

She said nothing, only in the long grass her fingers were still. Her

white hands in the grass fascinated him, held his eyes transfixed, the

green blades coming up through the white fingers that were so still.

He stared at them as though they were some strange flower, and for him

they had nothing to do with her at all. He drew himself near to them,

never taking his eyes off them--white and green, white and green and

pink at the finger-tips. He must touch them. They were cool, soft, and

firm, soft as the petals of a rose.

He grasped them like a child seizing a pretty toy, but when they were

in his grasp he was no longer like a child. A single impulse thrilled

through all his body and made it strong even as a giant. With one easy

swing of his arm he pulled her to him, held her with a vast

tenderness, and held her so, gazing into her face. Her lips parted,

and he kissed them. . . .

It was she who first found words:--

"Oh Mendel! I do love you."

He was amazed at his own strength, at his own tenderness. . . . So

that was a kiss! And this, this, this was love! It was incredible! How

sweet and easy were his emotions. He was as free and light as the wind

in the leaves.

She had slipped from his arms, but she was singing through all his

veins, she and no other, she and nothing else in the world. And he was

in her, perfectly, beautifully aware of her body and of the ecstasy in

it, of the tree above them, of the dove-coloured clouds, of the cool

green grass, of the yellow earth crumbling out of the mound yonder,

and of the ecstasy in them all.

So for many moments they lay in silence, until as suddenly as it had

come his strength left him, and he broke into a passionate babble of

words:--

"You must not send flowers to Mitchell, because he cannot love you and

I can. He knows nothing, and I know a great deal. I know women and the

ways of women, for many have loved me, but I have loved none but you.

No woman has been my friend except my mother. I did not look for any

woman to be like my mother. I am not an Englishman who can love with

pretty words. I love, and it is like that tree, growing silently until

it dies. It has stolen on me as softly as the night, and I sink into

it as I sink into the night, to sleep. It is as though the dark night

were suddenly filled with stars and all the stars had become flowers

and poured their honey into my thoughts. When your white hands were in

the grass they were like flowers and they seemed to belong to me, as

all beautiful things belong to me because I can love them."

She came nearer to him and laid her hand on his, and she said:--

"I am very, very happy."

And she laughed and added:--

"I _was_ glad when you made that catch."

He was beyond laughter. For him laughter was for trivial things. She

had stopped the flow of his thoughts, the rush of his emotions up into

his creative consciousness. Wave upon wave of passion surged through

him, racked him, tortured him, tossing his soul this way and that,

threatening to hurl it down and smash it on the hardness of his

nature. He set his teeth and would not wince. If she could laugh she

could know nothing of that. She was shallow, she was young. . . . Was

it because he was a Jew that he seemed so old compared with her? . . .

What was it she lacked that she could laugh and leave him to the

torment she had provoked?

But she was aware of the curious blankness that had come over his end

of their twilight silence, and she suffered from it, thinking: "Am I

an awful woman? Can I give nothing?" And she turned to him to give,

and give all the rare treasures of her soul, of her heart, to lay them

before him for his delight. But what she had already given had let

loose a storm in him that blotted out all the beauty of the scene, all

the loveliness of their love, the gift and the taking of it, and left

him with only the dim light of her purity.

Soon the storm passed and they had nothing but an easy delight in each

other's company, each turning to each as to a warm fire by which to

laugh and talk and make merry.

He told her stories of his childhood, of his brothers and his father,

and Mr. Kuit, the thief, who had bought him his first suit; of his

childish joy in painting, and there he stopped short. Of his misery he

was unable to speak.

"You do believe in yourself," she said.

"Why not?" he replied; "I am a man. When I hold my hands before my

eyes they are real. They are flesh and blood. I must believe in them.

And I am all flesh and blood. I must believe."

"And everything else is real to you."

"Everything that I love is real. And what I do not love I hate, so

that is real too."

They wandered about the Heath until night came and the stars shone,

and then they plunged into the glitter of London, where all people and

things were deliciously fantastic and comic, flat and kinematographic,

as though, if you walked round to the other side, you would discover

that they were painted on one side only. It gave them the glorious

illusion of being the only two living people in the world, for they

and only they had loved since the world began, and all the other

lovers were only people in a story, living happily ever after or

coming to an end of their love, neither of which could happen to them

because they were, always had been, and always would be in love.

They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, where they encountered Mitchell, who had

the effrontery to come and speak to them. He was very friendly and

spoke as though nothing had happened. They told him they had been to

Hampstead and recommended him to try it when he found London too

stuffy.

When he had gone away, Morrison said:--

"I am going away soon."

"Going away? But you mustn't go away."

"I have to go next week. My mother has fits of anxiety about my being

in London every now and then, and she drags me off home. She has got

one of them now. She can't see that if any harm were going to happen

to me it would have happened during my first year, when I didn't know

anything and was very lonely. I don't think I'm very real to her,

somehow."

She gave a little shiver of distaste at the thought of going home.

"But you mustn't go away," said Mendel. "I want you, always."

"And I want to be with you, but if I refused to go home now, I should

have to go for always, for I should have no money."

He was plunged into a dejected silence, and with hardly a word more he

took her home.

* * * * *

They had a whole week of this warm happiness. He abandoned every other

thought, every other pursuit, every other friend. He put aside his

work to paint her portrait, and she came every day to his studio. At

night he hardly slept at all for his longing for the next day to come

and bring her to his studio, that now seemed immense, airy, ample even

for such a giant as he felt. . . . He adored her even when she

laughed, even when she teased him. He even learned occasionally to

laugh at himself. It was worth it to see the amazing happiness he gave

her.

One morning as he was painting her, he said:--

"I can't believe you are going away."

"It is true, more's the pity."

"But you are not going, for I will marry you."

He said this in a matter-of-fact tone as he went on with his painting.

The picture was coming on well and he was pleased with it. He stepped

back and looked at it from different angles. It seemed a long time

before she made the expected matter-of-fact reply, and he looked up at

her. She was hanging her head and plucking at her skirt nervously. She

heard him stop in his work, and she replied:--

"I don't . . . think . . . I want to marry you, Mendel. I don't . . .

think . . . I want to marry anybody."

"I'm making plenty of money and I can get commissions for portraits. I

could make it up with Birnbaum. We could go to Italy together."

"Don't make it harder for both of us, Mendel. . . . I don't want . . .

to marry."

"You will go back home, then?"

"Please . . . please . . ." she implored him.

A fury began to rise in him. He stamped his foot on the ground and

struck his brush across the picture. He made a tremendous effort to

recover himself, but before he could say another word she had slipped

through the door and was gone. He darted after her, and reached the

front-door just in time to see her running as hard as she could down

the street and round the corner.

Just as he was, in his shirt-sleeves, hatless and collarless, he went

in to see his mother. He was white-hot with rage, and he walked up to

her and looked her up and down as though he were trying to persuade

himself that she was to blame.

"What do you think the news is now?"

Golda put her hand to her heart and looked at him fearfully as she

shook her head.

"I've been refused," he said, "refused by the Christian girl."

"Refused!" cried Golda, who had never heard of such a thing as a girl

refusing to marry a rich young man.

"Yes. I proposed to her and she refused."

"The Christians are all alike," said Golda. "They keep themselves to

themselves, and you must do the same."

She took a smoked herring from the cupboard and cut it into portions.

"And when your time for marrying comes you must look among the Jews,

for the Jews are good people. No Jewish girl would serve you a trick

like that. Jewish girls know that they must marry and they are good.

But she is young, and you are young, and you will both forget."

VI

CAMDEN TOWN

FROM the magnificent studio in Hammersmith to two rooms in Camden Town

Mr. James Logan removed his worldly goods, a paint-box, half-a-dozen

canvases, two pairs of trousers, three shirts, a "Life of Napoleon" in

two volumes, and a number of photographs of famous pictures. The

magnificent studio had been lent to him by the mistress of its owner,

who had returned unexpectedly from abroad, and Mr. James Logan's

departure from it was hurried, but unperturbed.

"In my time," he said, "I have kept Fortune busy, but her tricks leave

me unmoved. She will get tired of it some day and leave me alone."

All the same he did not relish the change. He was nearly thirty and

had tasted sufficient comfort to relish it and to prize it. Also he

could not forget the ambitions with which he had come to London five

years before. In the North he had won success by storm, and he could

not understand any other tactics. He was an extraordinary man and

expected immediate recognition of the fact. Upon his own mind his

personality had so powerful an effect that he was blind to the fact

that it did not have a similar effect upon the minds of others. Women

and young men he could always stir into admiration, but men older than

himself were only affronted. He knew it and used to curse them:--

"These clods, these hods, these glue-faced ticks have no more sap in

them than a withered tree. They hate me as a mule hates a stallion,

and for the same reason. May God and Mary have mercy on what little is

left of their souls by the time they come to judgment!"

He cursed them now as he laid his trousers on the vast new double-bed

he had bought and went into his front room to arrange his easel and

canvas for work. Whatever happened to him he would go on painting,

because he saw himself like that, standing as firm as a rock before

his easel, painting, while the world, for all he cared, went to rack

and ruin. What else could happen to a world that refused to recognize

its artists?

Painting was truly a joy to him. He loved the actual dabbling with the

colours, laying them out on his palette, mixing them, evolving rare

shades; he loved the fiery concentration and absorption in the making

of a picture; the renewed power of sight when he turned from a picture

to the world; the glorious nervous energy that came thrilling through

his fingers in moments of concentration; the feeling of the

superiority of this power to all others in the world. And so, whatever

happened, he turned to his easel and painted. Love, debt, passion,

quarrels, all the disturbances of life came and went, but painting

remained, inexhaustible. So he had been happy, free, unfettered, gay,

avoiding all responsibility because it was his formula that the

artist's only responsibility is to his art.

He was doubly happy now because he knew he had made an impression on a

young man whose sincerity and vigour of purpose he could not but

respect. He was himself singularly impressionable, and like a sponge

for sucking up the colour of any strong personality. And Mendel had

the further attraction for him that he was pure London, of the

shifting, motley London that Logan, as a provincial, adored. This

London he had touched at many points, but never through a strong

living soul that had, and most loyally acknowledged, London as its

home.

Logan's visit to Mendel in the East End had been one of the great

events of his life. Through it he had found his feet where he had been

floundering, though, of course, happily and excitedly enough.

He told himself that now he was going to settle down to work, to the

great productive period of his life, such as was vouchsafed to every

real artist who was tough enough to pay for it in suffering. He would

rescue Mendel's genius from the Detmold and the ossified advanced

painters, and together they would smash the English habit of following

French art a generation late, and they would lay the foundations of a

genuine English art, a metropolitan art, an art that grew naturally

out of the life of the central city of the world.

Logan always worked by programme, but hitherto he had changed his

programme once a week. Now he was sure that this was the programme of

his life. It would be amended, of course, by inspiration, but its

groundwork was permanent. He was enthusiastic over it. . . . Of

course, this was what he had always been seeking, and hitherto he had

been fighting the London which absorbed the talents of the country,

masticated them, digested them, and evacuated them in the shape of

successful painters for whom neither life nor art had any meaning, or

in the shape of vicious wrecks who crawled from public-house to

public-house and died in hospitals.

It was time that was stopped. It was time for London to be made to

recognize that it had a soul, and this generation must begin the task,

for never before had a generation been so faced with the blank

impossibility of accepting the work, thought, and faith of its

predecessor. Never had it been so easy to slip out of the stream of

tradition, for never had tradition so completely disappeared

underground.

"'He that hath eyes to see, let him see,'" quoth Logan, and he hurled

himself into his work, dancing to and fro, squaring his shoulders at

it as though the picture were an adversary in a boxing-match.

* * * * *

At half-past four he laid down his brushes and began to arrange the

room, pinning photographs on the walls, and unpacking certain articles

of furniture, as a rug, a great chair, and mattresses to make a divan,

which he had bought that morning. Every now and then he ran to the

window, threw up the sash, and looked up and down the street.

At last with a tremor of excitement he leaned out and waved his hand,

shut the window, and ran downstairs. In a moment or two he returned

with the girl of the Tube station. She was wearing the same clothes,

with the addition of a cheap fur boa, and she panted a little from the

run upstairs with him.

"I'm glad you came," he said. "I was afraid you wouldn't."

"Oh! It's not far from where I live," she said. "But you are in a

mess."

"I've only just got in. I would have asked you to my old place, but I

had to leave."

"So you're a nartist," she said. "I thought you were something funny."

"Funny!" snorted Logan. "I call a shop-walker funny; or a banker, for

that matter, or a millionaire. An artist is the most natural thing to

be in the world. . . . Take your hat and gloves off and give me a

hand, and then we'll have tea."

"Oh! I love my tea."

"I know all about tea. I get it from a friend of mine in the City. I

know how to make it, too."

They worked together, arranging, dusting, keeping deliberately apart

and eyeing each other surreptitiously. He liked her slow, heavy,

indolent movements, and she exaggerated them for him. She liked his

quick, firm, decisive actions, and he accentuated them for her; and

she liked his thick, black hair and his strong hands.

He picked up the great chair and held it at arm's-length.

"Oo! You are strong," she said.

"I could hold you up like that."

"I'd like to see you try," and she gave a little giggle of protest.

"I will if I don't like you," said he, "and I'll let you drop and

break your leg."

She went off into peals of laughter, and he laughed too.

"It's such a jolly day," he said. "It only needed you to come to make

everything perfect."

"What made you speak to me the other night?" she asked.

"I liked the look of you."

"But I'm not that sort, you know."

"It isn't a question of being that sort. I wanted to speak to you, and

that was enough for me. Sit down and have some tea."

The kettle was boiling, and he had already warmed the pot. He measured

out the tea carefully, poured the water onto it, and gave her a blue

china cup. He produced an old biscuit-tin containing some French

pastry, and then sat on the floor while she consumed the lot.

It gave him great pleasure to see her eat, and he liked her healthy,

childish greed. She had the face of a spoiled child, a very soft skin,

and plump, yielding flesh. He liked that. It soothed and comforted him

to look at her, while at the same time he was irritated by her inward

plumpness and easiness.

"You've always had a good time," he said.

"Oh yes! I've seen to that."

"You're not a London girl."

"No; Yorkshire."

"I'm from Lancashire."

"Eeh! lad," she said, her whole voice altering and deepening into an

astonishingly full note, "are ye fra' Lancashire? Eeh! a'm fair

clemmed wi' London. Eeh! I am glad ye coom fra' Lancashire."

"What are you doing in London?"

"I'm working in Oxford Street, though not one of the big shops."

"Like it?"

"M'm! Well enough."

"Of course you don't, handing out laces and ribbons----"

"'Tisn't laces and ribbons. It's corsets."

"Corsets, then, to women who haven't a tenth of your looks or your

vitality."

"It can't be helped if they have the money and I haven't, can it?"

"Money doesn't matter. What's money to you, with all the rich life in

you? Money cannot buy that, nor can it buy what will satisfy you."

"And what's that?"

"Love and freedom."

"Ooh! you are a talker."

"I'm not flirting with you. I haven't got time for that."

He laid his hand on her foot, which was covered with a thin cotton

stocking. She did not move it.

"You needn't stare at me like that," she said, with a curious

thickness in her voice.

"I can't help staring," he answered, "when I mean what I say." He

pressed his lips together and scowled, and shook her foot playfully.

There was an exhilarating pleasure in startling and mastering her by

directness. It was like peeling the bark off a stick. The thin layers

of affectation came off easily and cleanly, leaving bare the white

sappy smoothness of her innocent sensuality.

"I do mean what I say," he added. "Why should we beat about the bush?

I asked you to come to-day because I wanted you. You came because you

knew I wanted you."

"You asked me to tea."

"All right. And you'll stay to dinner. People have made love to you

before."

"Well, no . . . yes. . . . Not like . . ."

"Don't tell lies," he said. "You saw me at the station long before I

saw you, and you wanted me to see you. That was why you stayed at the

booking-office."

"You were with such a pretty boy," she said.

"Boy! You're not old enough to care for pretty boys."

"But he _was_ pretty."

"Be quiet!" he said, kneeling by her side. "You may want me to take

weeks over making all sorts of foolish advances to you, but I'm not

going to waste time. I've wasted too much time over that sort of

rubbish. We both know what we want and you are going to stay with me."

"No."

"I say yes."

"No." And she sprang to her feet and walked to the door. There she

turned. He had picked up her gloves.

"Will you give me my gloves, please?"

"No."

"Will you give me my gloves?"

"No."

"Then I shall go without them."

"Very well. Good-bye."

"If I stay, will you promise not to talk like that?"

"I don't want you to stay under those circumstances."

"You're an insulting beast."

"Not at all. I honour your womanhood by not pretending that it isn't

there."

"Will you give me my gloves?"

She ran across and tried to snatch them out of his hand. He gripped

and held her, and she gave a wild laugh as he kissed her.

She clung to him as he let her sink back into the great chair. She lay

with her eyes closed and her lips parted while he sat and poured

himself out another cup of tea. His hand was shaking so that he

spilled some tea on his new rug.

"That's all right," he said. "I'll give you a week to get used to me,

and if at the end of that time you don't like me, you can go."

"I haven't any friends," she said in a low voice, "and you get sick of

girls and the shop. You get sick of going out in the evening up and

down the streets and into the cinemas, and finding some damn fool to

take you to a music-hall. Such a lot of people and nobody to know."

"There's a lot of fun in living with an artist," he said. "You meet

queer people and amusing women, and you wouldn't find me dull to live

with."

"I felt queer as I came near the house," she said, "as though I knew

something was going to happen. I feel very queer now."

"That's love," said Logan grimly. "Love isn't what you thought it

was."

"You must let me go now."

"When will you come again?"

"Never."

"Oh yes, you will."

"Stop it!" she cried. "Stop it! I'm not going to be flummoxed by the

like of you."

"But you are," he said. "You poor darling!"

He took her hand and stroked it tenderly.

"Don't you see that you are flummoxed by something that is stronger

than both of us? I'm shaken by it, and I'm whipcord. We're poor

starving people, God help us! and we can save each other. We knew we

could do it at once, when we met. . . . If I said all the pretty

things in the world it wouldn't help. We're too far gone for that.

When you're starving you don't want chocolates. . . . I'm only saying

what I know. It is true of myself. If I have made a mistake about you,

I am sorry. You can go. . . . Have I made a mistake?"

For answer she turned towards him, gazed at him with glazing eyes,

raised her arms, and drew him into them.

* * * * *

A week later Nelly Oliver dined with Logan and Mendel at the

Pot-au-Feu. They had a special dinner and drank champagne, for it was

what Logan called the "nuptial feast."

Oliver, as they called her, was flushed with excitement, and kept on

telling Mendel that he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen. She

called Logan "Pip"--"Pip darling," "Pip dearest," "Pipkin" and

"Pipsy"--because she said he was like an orange-pip, bitter and hard

in the midst of sweetness.

"Pip says you're a genius," she said to Mendel. "What does he mean?"

Mendel disliked her, though he tried hard to persuade himself that she

was charming. He was baffled by the solemnity with which Logan was

taking her, for she seemed to him the type made for occasional solace

and not for companionship. Exploring her with his mind and instinct,

she seemed to him soft and pulpy, not unlike an orange, and if she and

Logan were to set up a common life, then he would be like a pip

indeed. . . . How could he explain to her the nature of genius? Can

you explain the night to an insect that lives but an hour in the

morning?

"I don't know," he said brusquely.

Logan was dimly aware that his friend and his girl were not pleasing

each other, and he set himself to keep them amused. He succeeded

fairly well, but his humour was forced, for he was under the spell of

the girl and the thought of the adventure to which she had consented.

She knew it, and was loud and shrill and triumphant, continually

setting Mendel's teeth on edge, for the purity of his instinct was

disgusted by the blurring and swamping of life by any emotion, and the

quality of hers was not such as to win indulgence.

"Logan will tell you what genius is," he said.

"She'll find that out soon enough if she lives with me," growled Logan

a little pompously.

Oliver put her head on one side and looked languishingly at Mendel as

she drawled:--

"It's a pity you haven't got a nice girl. Then there would be four of

us."

"Don't be a fool!" snapped Logan. "What does he want with girls at his

age?"

Oliver's lips trembled and she pouted in protest.

"I only thought it would be nice to round off the party. When you're

in love you can't help wanting everybody else to have some too."

Mendel was torn between dislike of her and admiration of Logan's

masterful handling of the problem of desire. . . . No nonsense about

getting married or falling in love. He saw the woman he wanted and

took her and made her his property, and the woman could not but

acquiesce, as Oliver had done. In a dozen different ways she

acknowledged Logan's lordship, even in her deliberate efforts to

exasperate him. Their relationship seemed to Mendel simple and

excellent, and he envied them. How easy his life would become if he

could do the same! What freedom there would be in having a woman to

throw in her lot with his! It would settle all his difficulties,

absolve him from his dependence on his family, and deliver him from

the attentions of unworthy women.

"How shall we dress her?" asked Logan.

Mendel took out his sketch-book and drew a rough portrait of Oliver in

a gown tight-fitting above the waist and full in the skirt.

"I should look a guy in that," she said. "It's nothing like the

fashion."

"You've done with fashion," said Logan. "You've done with the world of

shops and snobs and bored, idiotic women. You're above all that now.

In the first place there won't be any money for fashion, and in the

second place there's no room in our kind of life for rubbish. You're a

free woman now, and don't you forget it, or I'll knock your head off."

"But it's a horrible, ugly dress," said Oliver, almost in tears.

"It's what you're going to wear. I'll buy the stuff to-morrow and make

it myself. What colour would you like?"

"I won't wear it."

"Then you can go back to your shop."

"You know I can't. I've said good-bye to all the girls."

"Then you'll wear the dress."

"I shan't."

"For God's sake don't quarrel," said Mendel. "One would think you had

been married for ten years. Let her wear what she likes until she

wants some new clothes."

"Highty Tighty! Little boy!" sang Oliver. "You talk as though I were a

little girl."

"You behave like one," snapped Mendel, and her face was overcast with

a cloud of malignant sulkiness.

* * * * *

They went on to a music-hall, where Logan and she sat with their arms

locked and their shoulders pressed together, whispering and babbling

to each other.

Mendel sat bolt upright with his arms folded, staring at the stage but

seeing nothing, so lost was he in the contemplation of the strange

turn of affairs by which the adventure which had promised to lead him

straight to art had deposited him in a muddy little pool of life. He

would not submit to it. He would not surrender Logan and all the hopes

he had aroused. Prepared as he had been to follow Logan through fire,

he would not shrink when the way led through the morass. Friendship

was to him no fair-weather luxury, and nothing but falsehood or

faithlessness in his friend could make him relinquish it.

He told himself that Logan would soon tire of it, that Oliver would go

the way of her kind. She was, after all, better than Hetty Finch,

since she had a capacity for childish enjoyment.

She revelled in the sentimental ditties and the suggestive humours of

the comedians, pressed closer and closer to Logan, and grew elated and

strangely exalted as the evening wore on. And as they left the

music-hall she gripped Mendel's arm and brought her face close to his

and whispered:--

"Do wish me luck, Kühler. Give me a kiss for luck."

He kissed her and mumbled: "Good luck!"

"Come and see us to-morrow," she said. "We shall be all right

to-morrow."

"Oh, come along!" cried Logan, dragging her away; and Mendel stood in

the glaring light of the portico and watched them as, arm in arm, they

were swallowed up in the crowd hurrying and jostling its way home to

the dark outer regions of London.

He had an appalling sense of being left out of it. Everything passed

and he remained. He lived in a circle of light into which, like moths,

came timid, blinking, lovable figures, and he loved them; but they

passed on and were lost in the tumultuous, heaving darkness of life,

into which alone he could not enter. . . . Did he desire to enter it?

He did not know, but he was hungry for something that lay in it, or,

perhaps, beyond it.

VII

MR. TILNEY TYSOE

LOGAN with Oliver was more startling and exhilarating than before. He

was filled with a ferocious energy, and his programme was distended

with it.

He said to Mendel:--

"She's an inspiration. I have found what I was seeking. You have given

me the inspiration of art. Through you I shall reach the heights of

the spirit. She has given me the inspiration of life, and through her

I shall plumb the very depths of humanity. She is marvellous. All the

exasperation of modern life is in her, all the impatient brooding on

the threshold of new marvels. You think she is stupid, I know, but

that is only because she has in herself such an immense wealth of

instinctive knowledge of life that she does not need to judge it by

passing outward appearances. I am amazed at her, almost afraid of her.

Something tremendous will come out of her. . . . By God! It makes me

sick to think of all the dabbling in paint that goes on, not to speak

of all the dabbling in love. Love? The word has become foolish and

empty. I don't wish to hear it uttered ever again. . . . I swear that

if it doesn't come out in paint I shall write poetry. Oh! I can feel

the marrow in my bones again, and my veins are full of sap. . . . But

I want to talk business."

"Business?" said Mendel, who had been upset and bewildered by this

outburst.

"Yes. I want you to approve my programme, for you must have a

programme. It is all very well to work by the light of inspiration.

That can work quite well as far as you yourself are concerned, but

what about the public? what about the other artists?--damn them! We're

going to burst out of the groove, but we must have a good reason for

doing so."

"Surely it is reason enough that one can't work in it."

"Not enough for them. They must be mystified and impressed. They must

be unable to place us. They must feel that we are up to something, but

they must be unable to say what it is."

"I don't care what they say," said Mendel.

"But you must care. When we have carried out the programme, then you

can do as you like, but till then we must pull together. We must do it

for the sake of art. We must make a stand, not to found a school or to

say that this and no other style of drawing is right, but to assert

the sacred duty of the artist to paint according to his vision and his

creative instinct."

This was coming very near to Mendel's own feeling, and he remembered

the torture he had been through to learn the Detmold style of drawing,

and how some virtue had gone out of his work in the effort.

"It is the artist's business," said Logan, "to create out of the life

around him an expression of it in form."

"I agree," said Mendel.

"Accurate imitation is not necessarily an expression, is it? You know

it isn't. A picture must be a created thing. It must have a life of

its own, and to have that it must grow through the artist's passion

out of the life around him. It is all rubbish to look back, to talk of

going back to the Primitives or the Byzantines or Egypt. You can learn

a great deal from those old people about pictures, but you cannot

learn how to paint your own pictures from them, because you can only

live in your own life and your own time, and if you are a good artist

your work will transcend both. . . . Now, tell me, where is the work

that is expressing the glorious, many-coloured life of London, where

is the work that does not give you a shock as you come to it out of

the street, the thrilling, vibrant street, making you feel that you

are stepping back ten, twenty, fifty years? . . . Why has life

outstripped art?"

"I don't know," said Mendel, whose head had begun to ache.

"It has not only outstripped it," continued Logan. "It has begun to

despise it."

The postman knocked, and Mendel ran downstairs in feverish expectation

of a letter from Morrison, to whom he had written imploring her to

come again, or, if not, at least to let him have her address in the

country. There was no letter for him, and as soon as he returned with

a blank, disappointed face, Logan went on:--

"People collect pictures as they collect postage-stamps, to keep

themselves from being bored. Naturally they despise pictures, and they

despise us for accepting those conditions. They are intolerable, and

we must make an end of them. We are in a tight corner, and we should

leave no trick and twist and turn untried to get out of it. If we do

not do so then there will be no art, as there is no drama, no music,

and no literature, and there will be no authority among men, and

humanity will go to hell. It is on the road to it, and the artists

have got to stop it."

Mendel had not heard a word. He sat with his head in his hands

thinking of Morrison, and hating her for the blank misery in which she

had plunged him.

"Humanity," said Logan cheerfully, "is fast going to hell. It likes

it; and, as the democratic idea is that it should have what it likes,

not a finger, not a voice is raised to stop it. Everything that stands

in the way--ideals, decency, responsibility, passion, love--everything

is smashed. Nothing can stop it unless their eyes are opened and their

poor frozen hearts are thawed."

"What did you say?" asked Mendel, having half-caught that last phrase.

"We must try to stop it," said Logan. "We may be smashed and swept

aside, but we must try to stop it. . . . I've been to see Cluny

to-day. He has sold all your things except one drawing."

"I know," replied Mendel, who had received an amazing account which

showed about two-thirds of his earnings swallowed up in colours,

brushes, frames, and photographs. He knew, but he was not interested.

He was unhappy and restless and felt completely empty.

"We passionate natures," said Logan, striding up and down like

Napoleon on the quarter-deck of the _Bellerophon_--"we passionate

natures must take control. We must be the nucleus of true fiery stuff

to resist the universal corruption. We must be dedicated to the wars

of the spirit."

"I've got a splitting headache," said Mendel. "Do you mind not talking

so much? The important thing for a painter is painting. What happens

outside that doesn't matter."

"You think so now," said Logan, "but you wait. You'll find that

painting won't satisfy you. You will want to know what it is all for,

and one of these days you will be thankful to me for telling you.

. . . Cluny has taken on some of my things, and he has agreed to our

having an exhibition together. What do you say to that?"

"So long as I sell I don't care where I exhibit. Exhibitions are

always horrible. They always make pictures look mean and

insignificant."

"You are in a mood to-day."

"I tell you," cried Mendel in a fury--"I tell you I know what art is

better than anybody. It touches life at one point, and one point only,

and there it gives a great light. If life is too mean and beastly to

reach that point, so much the worse for life. It does not affect art,

which is another world, where everything is beautiful and true. I know

it; I have always known it. I have lived in that world. I live in it,

and I detest everything that drags me away from it and makes me live

in the world of filth and thieves and scoundrels. Yes, I detest even

love, even passion, for they make a fool and a beast of a man."

"Young!" said Logan. "Very young! You'll learn. . . . But do be

sensible and control your beast of a temper. Never mind my programme

if it doesn't interest you. Will you accept Cluny's offer? It is worth

it, for it will make you independent."

"How much does he want?"

"A dozen exhibits each."

"Oh! very well."

"And will you come and dine to-night with my fool of a patron, Mr.

Tilney Tysoe?"

"I don't want to know fools. I know quite enough already."

"But I've promised to take you. . . . He adores Bohemians, as he calls

us, and he buys pictures."

"Does he give you good food?"

"Some of the best in London."

"All right."

"Meet us at the Paris Café at seven-thirty. Don't dress. Tysoe would

be dreadfully disappointed if you didn't turn up reeking of paint. It

would be almost better not to wash."

"Is Oliver going?"

"Yes. Do you mind?"

"No. . . . No."

* * * * *

It was an enormous relief to Mendel when Logan went. His enthusiasm

was too exhausting, and it was maddening to have him talking of

success and the triumph of art and the wars of the spirit when life

had apparently reached up and extinguished the light of art

altogether. For a brief moment, for a day or two, it had almost seemed

to him that life and art were one, that everything was solved and

simple, that he would henceforth only have to paint and pictures would

flow from his brush as easily as song from a bird. This illusion had

survived even the blow of Morrison's departure. He believed that it

was enough for him to have had that hour of illumination, and that, if

go she must, he could do without her. The flash of light had been the

same, magnified a thousand times, as the inspiration that set him at

work on a picture and then left him to wrestle with the task of

translating it into terms of paint. She had appeared to him exactly in

the same visionary way, an image shining in truth and beauty, an

emanation from that other world, and he had thought he would at worst

be left with the terrible ordeal of translating the vision into paint.

. . . But when he looked at his pictures they oppressed him with their

lifelessness and dark dullness, and the idea of painting disgusted

him. It was even an acute pain, almost like a wound upon his heart, to

handle a brush. He could not finish the portrait of his father and

mother, and, at best, he could only force himself to paint

flower-pieces.

He was incapable of deceiving himself. He had never heard of devout

lovers sighing in vain, and he had no sources of comfort within

himself. Never had he shrunk from any torment, and this was so cruel

as to be almost a glory, except that it meant such a deathly stillness

and emptiness. He could not understand it, and he knew that it was

past the comprehension of all whom he knew, even his mother. But he

set his teeth and vowed that he would understand it if it took years.

. . . A little girl, a little Christian girl! How was it possible?

There was some relief in the thought of her, but very little. She was

still too visionary, and when he tried to think of her in life, by his

side, it was impossibly painful.

Where was she? Why did she not write? Her silence was like ice upon

his heart. . . . What kind of place did she live in? Among what

people? How was he to imagine her? . . . To think of her among the

trees or under the chestnut-tree was to be torn with impulses that

could find no outlet; desires for creation that made painting seem a

sham and a mockery.

So keen, and fierce, and deep was his suffering that death seemed a

little thing in comparison. When he tried to think of death he knew

that it was not worth thinking of, and he was ashamed that the thought

should have been in his mind.

He knew that he must understand or perish. To say that he was in love

was hopelessly inadequate. He knew how people were when they were in

love. They were like Rosa, like animals, stupid and thick-sighted,

with a thickening in their blood. But he was possessed with a

clairvoyance that made everything round him seem transparent and

flimsy, while thought crept stealthily, like a cat on a wall, and

emotion was confounded.

* * * * *

For days he had hardly left his studio, and it was only with the

greatest effort that he could bring himself to join Logan at the Paris

Café. He felt weak, and the streets looked very strange, clear and

bright, as they do to a convalescent. As he entered the café it seemed

years since he had been there, ages since he had sat there trembling

with excitement as he waited for the great Calthrop to come in. He

remembered that excitement so vividly that something like it came

rushing up in him, and he clutched at it for relief. . . . Calthrop

was there with his little court of models and students. Mendel found

himself laughing nervously as he stood and waited for the great man to

recognize him. Calthrop looked up and nodded to him. He was wildly,

absurdly delighted. He rushed over to Logan and Oliver and shook them

enthusiastically by the hand.

"Isn't it a splendid place?" he cried.

"Have something to drink," said Logan. "You've been overworking."

"You must say it's a splendid place," insisted Mendel, "or I shall go

home. Just by that table where Calthrop is sitting is where I was

arrested."

"Oh, which is Calthrop?" asked Oliver eagerly.

"The big man over there," said Mendel. "I was arrested just there, and

I had to go on my knees to the manager to make him allow me to come

here again. I had to apologize to him. At the time it was the greatest

tragedy of my life."