He had forgotten his dislike for Oliver in his elation at finding

himself gay again, and he chattered on of the days when the café had

seemed to him a heaven full of heroes. Oliver listened to him like a

child. She loved stories, and she leaned forward and drank in his

words, and she appeared to him as a very beautiful woman, desirable,

intoxicating. Yet because Logan was his friend he would not envy him,

but rejoiced in his possession of this rare treasure, a woman who

could deliver up to him all the warm secrets of life. And he could not

help saying so, and telling them how happy it made him to be with

them.

Logan and Oliver glanced at each other, and their hands met in a

fierce grip under the table. Mendel could not see more than their

glance, but the meeting of their eyes sent a flame like a white-hot

sword darting at his heart. The sharp pain released him, and sent him

shooting up into a wilder gaiety.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning with a start, he saw Mr.

Sivwright, his first master, standing above him. He rose and shook

hands.

"I am glad to see you," said Mr. Sivwright. "I've been meaning to

write to you, but I've been away, out of London."

Mendel introduced him to his friends and asked him to sit down.

"I can't stop a moment," said Mr. Sivwright. "I'm very busy. I have

just started a club for artists--opens at eleven. These absurd closing

hours, you know. I hope you'll join. It has been open a week. Great

fun, and I want some frescoes painted. . . . I'm very proud of your

success, Kühler. I feel I had my hand in it."

He produced a prospectus and laid it on the table, bowed awkwardly to

Oliver, and with a self-conscious swagger, as though he felt the eyes

of all in the café upon him, made his way out.

"Who's that broken-down tick?" asked Logan.

"Sivwright," answered Mendel. "He taught me when I was a boy. He's a

very bad artist, and he thinks art ended with Corot. I learned to

paint like Corot. Really! I used to go with him to the Park and weep

over the trees in the twilight: I never thought I should see him

again."

"Oh! people bob up," said Logan. "We go on getting longer in the

tooth, but people recur, like decimals."

"Would you like to go to his club?" asked Mendel. "It says 'Dancing.'

I feel like dancing."

"Oh! I love dancing," said she.

Logan assumed his air of mysterious importance and said it was time to

go to Tysoe's.

"We're twenty minutes late," he said; "Tysoe would be dreadfully put

out if we were punctual."

As Mendel had plenty of money they took a taxi-cab.

* * * * *

Mr. Tilney Tysoe was an idealist, and he had no other profession. He

was a very tall man with a long cadaverous face, great bulging, watery

eyes, and extraordinarily long hands, which hung limply from his

wrist, except when he was excited, when they shot up with extreme

violence, and carried his arms with them into a gesture so awkward

that he had to find relief from it in a shrug. He was devoted to the

arts, had a stall at the opera, a study full of books, and several

rooms full of pictures. An artist was to him a great artist, a book

that pleased him was a great book, and his constant lament was over

the dearth of great men in public life. It gave him the keenest

delight to see Logan, unkempt, wild-haired, shaggy, violent and

brusque, enter his daintily furnished drawing-room, and his eyes

passed eagerly to Oliver, looking just as she ought to have done, the

mistress of a Bohemian.

"Delighted! Delighted!" he said as he coiled his long white hand round

Mendel's workmanlike paw. "My wife, I regret to say, is away. She will

be so sorry to have missed you. Like me, she is tired of the shallow,

artificial people we live among. We both adore sincere, real people. I

adore sincerity. Sincerity is genius."

"That is true," said Logan in a sepulchral voice that made Mendel

jump. "At least, where you find sincerity, you may be sure that genius

is not far behind."

"I bought a picture of yours the other day, Mr. Kühler," said Tysoe.

"I am ashamed to think how little I gave for it, but works of art are

priceless, are they not?"

"Mine are," said Mendel, overcoming his disgust and beginning to enjoy

the game.

"You think so," rejoined Tysoe with an undulation of his long body.

"And why shouldn't you say so? You are sincere and strong. You must

force your talent upon an ungrateful world."

A man-servant announced dinner, and Tysoe gave his arm to Oliver and

led her downstairs, while Logan put his hand on Mendel's shoulder and

said with a chuckle:--

"Be sincere."

Mendel began at once with the soup, as though he had been wound up.

"I have won every possible prize for painting and drawing, and the

first picture I exhibited was the sensation of the year in art

circles."

"I remember it," said Tysoe.

"Like my friend Logan, I am profoundly dissatisfied with the state of

art in England, and though I am not an Englishman I have sufficient

love for the country to wish to do my share in redeeming it. The first

essential is a new technique, the second essential is a new spirit,

and the third essential is sincerity."

"Wonderfully true!" cried Tysoe. "Have some sherry. Wonderfully true!

Now, take the ordinary man. He might feel all that, but would he dare

to say it? No. That is why I, as an idealist, delight in the society

of artists. You know where you are with them. Facts are facts with

them."

"I do like this sherry wine," said Oliver, beginning to feel very

comfortable in the warm luxury of the dining-room.

Logan kicked her under the table.

Feeling that more was expected of him, Mendel wound himself up again

and went on:--

"Logan and I are going to hold an exhibition together. It will make a

great stir, that is, if London is not altogether dead to sincerity. We

think it is time that independence among artists was encouraged. Art

must not be allowed to stop short at Calthrop----"

He stopped dead as he realized that the wall opposite him held half a

dozen drawings by Calthrop. Logan rushed in:--

"Among real artists there is no rivalry. Art is not a competition. It

is a constellation, like the Milky Way."

"Ah! La Voie Lactée!" cried Tysoe, dropping into French, as he

sometimes did when he was moved. "Quite so! La Voie Lactée!"

"At home in Yorkshire," said Oliver, "there are sometimes two big

stars hanging just over the top of the moors, and they say it means

love or death if you see it at half-past nine."

Logan took charge of the conversation, frowning at Mendel and Oliver

as though they were naughty children. He described the masterpiece he

was painting, and Tysoe said:--

"I'm sure I shall like that. It sounds big and forceful, like

yourself. Do let me have a look at it before anyone else sees it."

Then he added:--

"I saw a charming still-life of yours once. A melon, I think it was.

What has become of it?"

"It was sold, I fancy," replied Mendel, who had never painted a melon

in his life.

"Ah! A pity. I wanted some little thing for a wedding-present. No one

I care about very much, so it must be a little thing."

"He has two or three little things just now," said Logan. "If you sent

a messenger-boy round to his studio he would let you see them."

And suddenly Mendel could keep the game up no longer. He began to feel

choked by the stuffy, empty luxury of the room, with its excess of

plate and glass and flowers and furniture and pictures. His head

seemed to be on the point of bursting. He must get out--out and away.

He wanted to laugh, to scream with laughter, to shout, to die of

laughter, anything to shake off the oppressive folly of his host. And

he began to laugh, to shake and heave with it. He suppressed it, but

at last he burst out with a roar and rushed from the room.

"Overworked," said Logan imperturbably. "That's what it is. The poor

devil hasn't learned sense yet. It's work, work, work with him, all

the time. He thinks of nothing but his art, you know. Never has, ever

since he was a boy. . . . He'll be a very great genius, and I shall be

left far behind."

"Not you," said Tysoe, "not you. I know no man in whom I have greater

faith than you."

"Do you think him as good as all that?" said Oliver eagerly. "I'm

always telling him Kühler's not a patch on him."

Meanwhile Mendel had taken refuge in the lavatory, where he shouted

and shook and cried with laughter. When he had recovered himself he

crawled back to the dining-room muttering inaudible apologies.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I've not been myself lately."

"You mustn't overdo it," said Tysoe kindly. "You have plenty of time.

You need be in no hurry to overtake Logan. He is entering upon

maturity. Your time will come."

Mendel felt disturbed. He had not thought of Logan seriously as a

painter, certainly not as a rival or a colleague. Logan was his

friend. That Logan painted was incidental. It irritated him to have to

sit and listen to him holding forth about painting. He had always

liked Logan's talk, but had never really connected it with his work.

It was just talk, like reading, or going to the cinema--a sop, a drug,

soothing and pleasant when he was in the mood for it, maddening when

he was not.

It was as though a spring had been touched, releasing his

intelligence, which had always been kept apart from his work. For the

first time he felt, though never so little, detached from it, while at

the same moment the awful inward pressure of his emotional crisis was

relaxed. He was happier, and less wildly gay, and he began to realize

that he had astonishingly good food in front of him, good wine in

plenty, delicious fruits to come, and fragrant coffee brewing there on

the sideboard among bright-hued liqueur bottles. . . . There was no

need to listen to Logan. There was pleasure enough in eating and

drinking and watching Oliver, and thinking how good it would be to

dance with her, and perhaps with others--little women whom he would

hold in his arms and feel them yield to every movement that he made.

. . .

He was left alone with Oliver after dinner, while Logan and Tysoe

retired to the study.

"You've made him very happy," he said rather unsteadily.

"Oh, yes!" said she. "It was like a Fate, wasn't it? I always had a

feeling that I wasn't like other girls. I always thought something out

of the way would happen to me, though I never thought of anything like

this."

"You mustn't tell me about him," said Mendel.

"I must tell someone or I shall die. He's so extraordinary. He says

it's something deeper than love, and I think it must be."

"You must not talk about it," he said.

"It makes all the stuff he talks about seem silly. I don't understand

it, do you?"

She lay back in her chair and swung her foot, with her eyes fixed on

the door waiting for Logan to return.

Mendel's dislike of her sprang up in him again, and he was a little

afraid of her: of her big, fleshy body, so full now of little

trickling streams of pleasure; of her eyes, watching, watching, with

the strange, glassy steadiness of the eyes of a bird of prey. . . . He

decided that he would not dance with her. He would dance with the

others--the little, harmless, pretty fools.

To reassure himself he told himself that Logan was happy, and strong

enough to resist the growing will in this woman.

VIII

THE MERLIN'S CAVE

LOGAN had cajoled twenty pounds out of Mr. Tysoe, who stood on his

doorstep, dangling his long hands, while his admired guests crept into

a taxi-cab. He swung from side to side:--

"I have had a most delightful evening--most charming, most inspiring."

Inside the cab Logan waved the cheque triumphantly and Oliver tried to

snatch it from him. They had an excited scuffle, which ended in a

kiss.

"What's the matter with the man?" asked Mendel.

"He's just a fool," replied Logan, "a padded fool. His only virtue is

that he does really think me a wonderful fellow, and he is kind. But

how I hate such kindness, the last virtue, the last refuge of the

decrepit! It is a perfume, a herb with which they are embalmed."

"I thought he was a very nice old gentleman," said Oliver.

"He seemed to me," said Mendel, "the kind of man who thinks of nothing

but women all day long."

"Hit it in once!" cried Logan. "A parrot will not do more for an

almond than he will for a commodious drab. He could take a nun and by

force of living with her and surrounding her with every luxury turn

her into a whore, because she would in time become only another

luxury. That is what men grow into if they lose the spirit of freedom.

. . . Where are we going to?"

"I told the man to go to Sivwright's club. It is called The Merlin's

Cave."

* * * * *

The club proved to be a cellar filled with little tables. There was a

commissionaire at the door and a book had to be signed. The rack of

the cloakroom contained several silk-lined overcoats and opera-hats.

"It's going to be damned expensive," said Logan.

"I'll pay," replied Mendel. "It's my fault."

Two tall young men in immaculate evening dress had entered just after

them. They gave out an air of wealth and cleanliness and made Logan

and Oliver look common and shabby. Mendel hated the two young men.

What had they done to look so well-fed and unruffled? Obviously they

had only to hold out their hands to have everything they wanted put

into them. . . . They looked slightly self-conscious and ashamed of

themselves, and wore a look of alarmed expectancy as they went

downstairs.

Why did they come there if they were ashamed? and why did they expect

an Asmodean lewdness of an artists' club, they for whom the

flesh-markets of the music-hall promenades existed?

"Real swells, aren't they?" said Oliver, overawed.

The strains of a small orchestra came floating up the stairs.

"Come on," said Mendel, "I want to dance." And he caught her by the

wrist and dragged her downstairs.

A girl was standing on a table singing an idiotic song with a

syncopated chorus which a few people took up in a half-hearted

fashion. The sound of it was thin and depressing.

"The same old game," said Logan. "Playing at being wicked. Why can't

they stick to their commercial beastliness? I should be ashamed to

bring any woman into this. I am ashamed." He half rose from his chair.

"Oh! don't go," pleaded Oliver, who was entranced with her first sight

of what she called a gay life. It was to her like a stage spectacle.

"Oh! there's that Calthrop; I suppose all those odd women with him are

models."

Calthrop was surrounded by admiring students, among them Morrison,

sitting prim and astonished and obviously amazed to find herself where

she was. Mendel began to tremble, and his heart beat violently, as he

stared at her--stared and stared.

She had lied to him then! She had not had to go home! She could strike

him down and then come to amuse herself at such a place as this!

Was she with Mitchell? No, Mitchell was not among the satellites.

How strange she looked! a wild violet in a hot-house. He waited for

her to glance in his direction, but she seemed to be absorbed in the

singer and in the song, and every now and then she smiled, though

obviously not at the song--at something that amused her or pleased her

in her thoughts. She could smile then and be happy, and all his wild

emotions had made no invasion into her life. . . . No; she would not

look in his direction. Perhaps she had seen him come in and refused to

see him.

Would the dancing never begin? The dancing took place on a slightly

raised floor. If he danced there she would have to see him.

He found a warm hand placed on his leg, and turning he saw Jessie

Petrie, a model, with whom he had danced at the studios and at the

Detmold.

"I thought I was never going to see you again," she said, "and

Mitchell said you had gone mad."

"Do I look it?" he asked.

"No. You look bonnier than ever. I'm on my own again now. Thompson has

gone to Paris. He says the only painters are there. I think he's going

mad, because he paints nothing but stripes and triangles. And he _was_

such a dear. . . . I'm feeling awfully lonely because Tilly has gone

to Canada. Samuelson gave her the chuck and she went out to her cousin

in Canada, who had always been wanting to marry her. . . . Are you

still down in Whitechapel? I do hate going to see you there. Why don't

you move up to the West End? I could come and live with you then, for

I do hate being at a loose end."

She was adorably pretty, dark, with eyes like damsons, lovely red

lips, touched up with carmine, and a soft white neck that trembled as

she spoke like the breast of a singing bird.

"Oh! who do you think I saw the other day? Hetty Finch! She has a flat

and a motor-car, but I don't believe she is married." She looked

suddenly solemn as she added: "The baby's dead." Then she rattled on:

"Isn't she lucky? But she's an awful snob. Would hardly speak to me!"

"She's a beast of a woman."

"What do you think of this place? I suppose if the swells come it'll

be a success, but they do spoil it."

"Yes," said Mendel. "They spoil everything. When do they begin to

dance?"

"They've nearly finished the programme. They have to have a programme

to make people eat and drink."

"Let's have some champagne."

He called the waiter and ordered a bottle.

"Been selling lately?"

"No," he said; "but I want to dance. Do you hear? I want to dance."

"Dancing," Logan threw in, "is the beginning of art. It is too

primitive for me, or I'm too old."

A thin-faced long-haired poet mounted the table and read some verses,

which the popping of corks and the clatter of knives and forks

rendered inaudible. The poet went on interminably, and at last someone

began drumming on the table and shouting "Dance! Dance! Dance!" The

poet stuck to it. Bread was thrown at him and the shouting became

general.

At last the orchestra struck up through the poet's reedy chanting,

couples made their way to the stage, and the dancing began. Morrison

still sat prim and preoccupied. Mendel put his arm round Jessie's

waist, his fingers sank into her young, supple body, and he lifted her

to her feet and rushed with her over to the stage. The whole place was

humming with life, beating to the chopped rhythm of the vacant

American tune.

"I do love dancing with you," said Jessie, as he swung her into the

moving throng of brilliantly dressed women and black-coated men, so

locked together that they were like one creature, a strange, grotesque

quadruped. And Jessie so melted into him, so became a part of him,

that he too became another creature, an organism in the whirling

circle supported and spun round by the music. It was glorious to feel

his will relaxing, to feel the lithe, soft woman in his arms yield to

every impulse, every movement. He danced with a terrific

concentration, with a wiry collected force that made Jessie feel as

light as a feather.

"Oo! That was lovely," she said when the music stopped. "You do dance

lovely."

"It was pretty good," said Mendel. "But wait until they play a waltz."

"I want to dance with you," cried Oliver. "You said I should dance

with you."

And she had the next dance with him; but there was no lightness in

her, only a greedy fumbling after sensation.

"This is awful!" thought Mendel, never for a moment losing himself,

and all the while conscious of Morrison sitting there unmoved: of

Morrison, whom he was trying to forget. Oliver seemed to envelop him,

to swallow him up. He was conscious of holding an enormous woman in

his arms and her contact was distasteful. The dance seemed endless.

Would the music never stop? . . . One, two, three. . . . One, two,

three. . . . It was like a dancing class with the fat Jewesses at

home. . . . And all the time he was conscious of Morrison's big blue

eyes staring at him. Would she never stop her damnable smiling?

He returned Oliver to Logan shamefacedly, as though he were paying a

long-standing debt.

Jessie returned from her other partner to him.

"Oh! It isn't anything like the same," she said; "and that is such a

lovely tune to dance to."

Now that the dancers were warmed up they refused to allow any

intervals. They had their partners and were unwilling to stop. The

orchestra was worked up into a kind of frenzy, and Mendel and Jessie

were whirled into an ecstasy. They abandoned the conventional steps

and improvised, gliding, whirling, swooping suddenly through the

dancers. Sometimes he picked her up and whirled her round, sometimes

his hands were locked on her waist and she bent backwards--back, back,

until he pulled her up and she fell upon his breast, happy, panting,

deliriously happy.

* * * * *

Morrison sat watching. She was trembling and felt very miserable. She

had been brought there by Clowes, who had been unable to resist the

flattery of Calthrop's invitation. All these people seemed to her to

be pretending to be happy, and she was oppressed with it all. She had

not seen Mendel until he mounted the stage, and then her heart ached.

She remembered the etched phrases of his letter to her. She had

written to him, but nothing she could express on paper conveyed her

feeling, her sense of being in the wrong, and her deep, instinctive

conviction of the injustice of that wrong. . . . He had placed her in

the wrong by talking of marriage so prematurely. As she looked round

the room she was oppressed by all the men: great, hulking creatures,

clumsy, cocksure, insensible, spinning their vain thoughts and vainer

emotions round the women as a spider spins its threads round a caught

fly. . . . She had often watched spiders dealing with the booty in

their webs, and Calthrop reminded her of a spider when he looked at

Clowes and laid his hand on her shoulder or fingered her arm. And

Clowes lay still like a caught fly and suffered it. . . . Morrison was

in revolt against it all. She was full of sweet life, and would not

have it so treated. Her prudery was not shocked, for she had no

prudery. The men might have their women so, if the women liked it, but

never, never would she be so treated.

It was because she had been able to sweep aside the sticky threads of

vanity with Mendel that the ecstasy of the woods and the Heath had

been possible.

As she watched him now, she knew that he was different from all the

others. He had brought an exaltation into the face of the common

little girl who was his partner. He was giving her life, not taking it

from her.

Yet to see him made her unhappy. The music was vulgar, the people were

vulgar, and he had no true place among them. But how he enjoyed it

all!

She shook with impatience at herself. It was hateful to be outside it,

looking on, looking on. A young student had pestered her to dance with

him. She turned to him and said:--

"I want to dance, please."

Delighted, he sprang to his feet, gave her his arm, and whirled her

into the dance.

* * * * *

Slowing down to take breath, Mendel looked in her direction. She was

gone! A black despair seized him, a groan escaped him; he hugged

Jessie tight against his body and plunged madly into the dance.

The musicians had been given champagne. The violinist began to

embroider upon the tune and the 'cellist followed with voluptuous

thrumming chords.

Jessie gave little cries of happiness to feel the growing strength in

Mendel's arms, the waxing power of his smooth movements. She gave

little cries like the call of a quail, and he laughed gleefully every

time she cried. He could feel the force rising in him. It would surely

burst out of him and break into molten streams of laughter, leaving

him deliciously light, as light and absurd as dear little Jessie, who

was swinging on the music like a dewdrop on a gossamer. . . . If only

the music would last long enough! He would be as tremulous and light

as she, and while that lightness lasted he could love her and taste

life at its highest point--for her. . . . She was aware of his desire,

and swung to it. It was like a wind swaying her, thistledown as she

was; like a wind blowing her through the air on a summer's day. O that

it might never end, that the sky might never be overcast, that the

rain might never come and the night might never fall. . . . Terrible

things had happened to Jessie in the night, and she was happy in the

sun.

Mendel was past all dizziness. The room had spun round until it could

spin no more, and then it had unwound itself, making him feel weak and

giddy. He was very nearly clear-headed, and every now and then he

caught a glimpse of Logan sketching and of Oliver, sitting with a

sulky pout on her lips and tears in her eyes because she wanted to

dance and knew she had made a failure of it.

"Lovely! lovely! lovely!" sighed Jessie.

"You are like the white kernel of a nut," said Mendel, "when the shell

is broken."

"Do let me come and sit for you," she said. "I won't want anything

except my dinner."

"Better keep to the dancing," he answered, as he spun her round to

stop her talking.

She began to stroke his neck and to press her face against his breast.

At the same moment he saw Morrison among the dancers. He slowed down

and then stopped dead. The music rose to an exultant riot of sound.

"Please, please!" cried Jessie, clinging to him; but he had forgotten

her.

Morrison and her partner swept past him, and he watched them go the

full circle. She saw him standing, and as she approached broke away

from her partner.

"Why aren't you dancing with me?" he said, shaking with eagerness to

hear her speak.

"I'm no good at dancing," she said. "I don't enjoy it."

"Who brought you here? Calthrop?"

"He brought Clowes and me. . . . You mustn't stop dancing. Your

partner. . . ."

"Please, please!" cried Jessie, stamping her foot; "the music is going

to stop."

"Wait a moment," he said, turning to Morrison. "Are you going home?"

"The day after to-morrow."

"I must see you."

Before she could reply her partner, who had lost his temper, seized

her and made her finish the dance, and when it was over he marched her

back to Calthrop's party, and he never left her side again.

Mendel returned to Logan and Oliver, to find them impatient to go. The

end of an evening always found them in this impatient mood.

"It all bears out what I say," said Logan. "All this night-club

business. People have to go mad in London before they can taste life

at all."

"Do you mind if I come home and sleep on your sofa?" asked Mendel. "I

can't face my studio to-night."

"Why don't you take Jessie home with you?" said Logan; "I'm sure she'd

like to."

Mendel winced, and Jessie's lips began to tremble. She was still

suffering from the sudden end to her happiness. She looked at him,

almost hoping that he was going to make reparation to her.

"You know I can't," he said; "I live in my brother's house and he is a

respectable married man."

He knew he was in for a terrible night of reaction and desperate blind

emotion; at the same time he did not wish to hurt Jessie more than he

had done.

"I'll take you home in a cab," he said. "But I won't stay, if you

don't mind. I'm done up. If you and Oliver walk half way, Logan, we

ought to be there about the same time."

Jessie was appeased. A little kindness went a long way with her, and

she hated to be a nuisance to a man.

When the cab stopped outside the door of her lodgings she flung her

arms round Mendel's neck and kissed him, saying:--

"You are a darling, and I would do anything in the world for you."

"You shall come and sit for me," he replied. "Good-night!"

"Good-night!"

* * * * *

Good-night! A night of tossing to and fro, of hearing terrifying

noises in the darkness, of hearing Logan and Oliver in the next room,

of shutting his ears to what he heard, of fancying he heard someone

calling him . . . her voice! Surely she had called him, and the ache

and the torment in his flesh was the measure of her need of him. . . .

Strange, blurred thoughts; gusts of defiance and revolt; glimpses of

pictures, subjects for pictures, colours and shapes. . . . His

mother's hands clutching a fish and bringing a knife down on to it.

There was a blue light on the knife. It would be very hard to get that

and to keep it subordinate to the blue in the fish's scales. . . . His

father and mother, eternally together, in an affection that never

found any expression, harsh and bitter, but strongly savoured, like

everything else in their lives. . . . Issy and Rosa, much the same as

Logan and Oliver, and to them also he had to shut his ears. . . . The

goggle-eyed man at the Pot-au-Feu. . . . London, London, the roaring

fiery furnace of London in which he was burning alive, while flames of

madness shot up above him. . . . Music. . . . There was a music in his

soul, a music and mystery that could rise with an easy power above all

the flames. . . . What did it matter that his body was burned, if his

soul could rise like that up to the stars and beyond the stars to the

point where art touched life and gave out its iridescent beneficent

light? . . . Life, flames, body, stars, all might perish and fade

away, but the soul had its knowledge of eternity and could not be

quenched. . . . Eternal art, divine art, the world of form, shaped in

the knowledge of eternity, wherein life and death are but a day and a

night. . . . Sickening doubt of himself, sinking down, down into

eternity to be a part of it, never to know it, never to see the light

of art, lost to eternity in eternity. . . . He sat up in the middle of

the night and imagined himself back in the one room in Gun Street,

looking at the recumbent bodies of his family, lost in sleep, huddled

together in degradation. . . . It would have been better to have gone

home with Jessie. She would have given him rest and sleep. . . . No,

no, no! . . . She was going away the day after to-morrow. He must see

her before she went, with her big blue eyes and short chestnut hair.

She had stopped in the middle of the dance. She had broken away from

her partner, and on Hampstead Heath she had said "I love you."

IX

"GOOD-BYE"

LOGAN came in early in the morning to make tea. He shut the door

carefully and came and sat on Mendel's sofa.

"She says you hate her," he said.

"I?" answered Mendel. "No. I. . . . What can make her say that?

Because I didn't dance with her? I had Jessie. You ought to have

danced with her."

"I'm glad she didn't dance. It might make her break out. Women are

very queer things. You never know where they will break out. . . . You

make love to them, touch a spring in them, and God knows where it may

lead you. . . . You're not in love with that mop-haired girl, are

you?"

"What if I am?"

"She's just a doll-faced miss. You're taken with the type because

you're unused to it. For God's sake don't take it seriously. You're

much too good to waste yourself on women. She'll drive you mad with

purity and chivalrous devotion and all the other schoolgirl twaddle.

Leave all that to the schoolboy English. It's all they're good for.

They've bred it on purpose to be the mother of more schoolboys. It is

the basis of the British Empire. But what is the British Empire to you

or any artist? Nothing."

"I don't want to talk about it," said Mendel.

"She won't marry you," said Logan. "She won't live with you. She'll

give you nothing. She'll madden you with her conceited stupidity and

wreck your work. . . . What you want is what every decent man

wants--to take a woman and keep her in her place, so that she can't

interfere with him. That's what I've done, and it's made a man of me,

but I'm not going to let her know it. She'd be crowing like an old hen

that has laid an egg. . . . No farmyard life for me, thanks."

Oliver bawled for her tea and Logan hastened to make it, and

disappeared into the bedroom.

Mendel got up and dressed, feeling eager for the day. The sun shone in

through the window and filled the room with a dusty glow, making even

the shabby bareness of the place seem charming.

"It is a good day," he said to himself. "I shall work to-day." And he

was annoyed at not having his canvas at hand.

On an easel stood the picture which Logan had described to Tysoe, a

London street scene with a group of people gazing into a shop window.

It was a clever piece of work, very adroit in the handling of the

paint and pleasing in colour, but Mendel had an odd uncomfortable

feeling of having seen it before, and yet he knew that the technique

was novel. Yet it was precisely the technique that seemed familiar.

Certain liberties had been taken with the perspective which, though

they were new to him, did not surprise him.

Logan came in dressed and said that Oliver would not be a minute. She

appeared in a dressing-gown.

"Well?" she said; "none the worse for last night?"

"No, thanks," said Mendel. "Why should I be? I enjoyed it."

"Did Logan tell you we were going to Paris?"

"No. He said nothing about it."

"I'm dying to go to Paris. He says they understand the kind of thing

we had last night in Paris."

"You're not going for good, are you?" asked Mendel.

"No. Just a trip. I want you to come too. We'll see some pictures and

have a good time. I can't speak a word of French, but they say English

is good enough anywhere."

"Yes, I'd like to go," said Mendel. "I want a change, before I settle

down to working for the exhibition. Is that picture going to be in

it?"

"Yes. Do you like it?"

"I like it. It seems to me new. Stronger than most things. All these

people going in for thin, flat colour and greens and mauves make me

long for something solid."

"I'm going to show that and a portrait of Oliver."

"I want my breakfast," said she.

"Oh! shut up. We're talking. . . . I've just begun the portrait. No

psychological nonsense about it. It's just the head of a woman in

paint. I don't want any damn fool writing about my picture: she is

wiser than the chair on which she sits and the secrets of the

antimacassar are hers. A picture's a picture and a book's a book."

"I do want my breakfast," sang Oliver.

Logan went livid with fury.

"Be silent, woman," he said.

"I shan't, so there. I want my breakfast."

"Why the hell don't you get the breakfast then?"

"Because you said you would."

Logan began to prepare the breakfast--rashers of bacon and eggs.

"You don't mind eating pork?" he asked Mendel.

"No. I like it, but I never get it at home."

"Fancy Jews being still as strict as that!" said Oliver. "Just like

they were in Shakespeare's time."

"Just as they were in the time of Moses and Aaron," said Mendel. "They

don't alter except that they haven't got a country to fight for."

"Thank God!" said Logan, "or there'd be a bloody mess every other

week. Fancy a Jewish Empire, with you sent out, like David, to hit the

Czar of Russia or Chaliapine in the eye with a stone from a sling.

Think of your sister-in-law luring the Kaiser into a tent and knocking

a nail through his head. I wish she could, upon my soul I do!"

"I think we should only be led into captivity again," said Mendel.

"Our fighting days are over, and someone told me the other day that

many of the most advanced artists in Paris are Jews."

"If they were all like you," said Logan, "I shouldn't mind. But I'm

afraid they're not. The Jews have got all the money and they keep the

other people fighting for it, and charge them a hell of a lot for guns

and uniforms to do it with. Oh! there are Christians in it too, but

they have to be nice to the Jews to be allowed to share the spoils. I

don't wonder the Jews left the Promised Land when they found the world

was inhabited by fools who would let them plunder it."

"There's not much plunder in my family," said Mendel.

* * * * *

After breakfast he declared that he must go, and Logan announced that

he would walk with him to enjoy the lovely sunny day. Oliver wanted to

come too, but he told her to stay where she was, and he left her in

tears.

"She's got a bad habit of crying," he said, "and she must be broken of

it. She cries if I don't speak to her for an hour. She cries if I go

out without telling her where I am going. She cries if I curse and

swear over my work, and if I am pleased with it she cries because I am

never so happy with her. . . . I feel like hitting her sometimes, but

it isn't her fault. She hasn't settled down to it yet. She says I

don't love her when she knows she never expected to be loved so much.

And she can't get used to it."

"Why don't you paint her crying?" asked Mendel maliciously.

"By Jove! I will," cried Logan. "Damned interesting drawing, with her

eyes all puckered up. . . . But it's a shame on a day like this to be

out of temper with anything. Lord! How women do spoil the universe, to

be sure! Do they give us anything to justify the mess they make of it?

. . . Women and shopkeepers. I don't see why one should have any mercy

on either of them. I have no compunction in stealing anything I want.

Shopkeepers steal from the public all the little halfpennies and

farthings of extra profit they exact."

He led Mendel into a picture shop and asked for a reproduction of a

picture by Van Tromp, and when the girl retired upstairs to ask about

that non-existent artist, he turned over the albums and helped himself

to half a dozen reproductions, rolled them up, and put them in his

pocket. When the girl came down and said they were out of Van Tromps,

he said:--

"I'm sorry. Very sorry to trouble you."

When they were out of the shop he chuckled, and was as elated over his

success as Mr. Kuit had been over his exploits.

"Oh! I should be an artist in anything I did," he said. "I don't

wonder thieves can't go straight once they get on the lay. If I

weren't a painter I should be a criminal."

He walked with Mendel as far as Gray's Inn, and there left him, saying

he had another picture-buying flat to go and see, and after that he

must pay a visit to Uncle Cluny and keep him up to the mark. He was in

fine fettle, and went off singing at the top of his voice.

Mendel bought some flowers on the way home because he wished always to

have flowers, even if she were to send no more.

He was sure of himself to-day. He was in love and glad to be in love.

Surely it could have no worse suffering than that through which he had

passed, and if it did, well, so much the worse for him. . . . He was

glad it had happened. His father would not be able to sneer at him any

more, as he was always sneering at Issy and Harry--Harry, who had

deserted his father and mother for the sweetbreads of Paris. (Jacob

always called sweetmeats sweetbreads.) He had a bitter, biting tongue,

had Jacob, and the habit of using it was growing on him. Mendel knew

that he had deserved many of his sneers, but now they could touch him

no longer. His life, like his art, now contained a passion as strong

as any Jacob had known in his life, and stronger, because it was

wedded to beauty, to which Jacob was a stranger.

He was able to work again at his picture of his father and mother. He

could make something of it now, he knew, because he could understand

his father and appreciate the strength in him which had kept his

passion alive through poverty and a life of constant storms and

upheavals. He remembered his father knocking down the schoolmaster,

and the soldier in the inn with the heavy glass. Oh yes! Jacob was a

strong man, and he had nearly died of love for Golda, the beautiful.

He worked away with an extraordinary zest, and he knew that it was

good. As he grew tired during the afternoon he was overcome with a

great longing for her to see it, just to see it and to say she liked

it. It would not matter much if she did not understand it, so long as

she saw it and liked it.

He turned to the roughly sketched portrait of her to ask her if she

liked it, and as he did so the door opened and she came in. Her arms

were full of flowers, so that her face was resting in them, her dear

face, the sweetest of all flowers.

"You said . . . you must see me, so I brought you these to say

good-bye."

"Do come in and see my picture. It is nearly finished."

"Oh! It is good," she said shyly.

"I thought you'd like it. I wanted you to like it. Do stay a little

and talk."

She sat down and looked about the studio, puckering up her eyebrows

nervously and making her eyes very round and large.

"You never told me how old you are," he said nervously.

"I'm nineteen."

"I'm twenty. Just twenty. How long are you going away for?"

"I don't know. Until the winter, I expect."

"What will you do there in the country? It is important that you

should tell me, because I must know how to think of you. What shall

you do? Is it a big house? Are you--are you rich?"

"No. It is not a very big house. My mother is fairly well off, but I

have four brothers, and they all have to go to Oxford and Cambridge.

. . . There's a good garden, and I shall spend a lot of time in that,

digging and looking after the flowers. And I shall try and do some

work. There's a big barn I can have for a studio."

"A big barn. Yes. Are your brothers nice men?"

"Two of them."

"And there's a river and a common. May I write to you?"

She was silent for a long time, and then she said:--

"No. Please don't."

His happiness vanished. It was as though a hole had opened in the

floor and swallowed it up.

"Why not?" he asked. "Why not?"

She shrank into herself for a moment, but shook off her cowardice and

answered:--

"I don't want to hurt you."

"You said you loved me. You can do what you like with me!"

"You're so different," she said. "Too different."

"From what? From whom? Go on, go on!"

She loved his violence and gained courage from it.

"You mustn't think it mean of me. I don't care a bit what people say,

but I don't want to hurt you--in your work, I mean. It isn't all that

I think and mean, but it is a part of it, a little part of it. People

are furious at our being seen together. It began at the picnic. We

were seen walking over the Heath. Clowes told me. She can't bear it.

She's a good friend. . . . It hurt me when she told me, and I knew

that I must tell you. It isn't only old women. It is all the important

people, who can hurt your work."

"Nobody can hurt my work."

"But they can. They are saying your work is bad, all the people who

said it was so good only last year, all the people who believed in

you. And it's all through me. It's my fault."

She began to weep silently. He was unmoved by the sight of it, so

appalled was he by the sudden devastation of his life. Suffering

within himself he knew, but hostility from without he had not had to

face. . . . Many little slights were explained--men who had given him

an indifferent nod, men who had apparently not seen him in the street.

In the surprise of it he was blind even to her. It was like a

sandstorm covering him up, filling with grit every little chink and

crevice of his being. He snorted with fury and contempt.

He shook himself free of the oppression of it. This was nothing to do

with her; it was not what he wanted from her--the gossip and

tittle-tattle, the sweepings of the studios. The models sickened him

of that. . . . So it was his turn now. Well, other men had survived

it.

"That isn't why you want to say good-bye."

"No. I'm not pleading to you to let me off, or anything like that. I

believe in you more than in anybody else, more than I do in myself.

. . . I don't believe in myself much."

It had all seemed clear to her before she had come. He would

understand how wrong and twisted the whole thing had become. They

would suffer together and they would see how useless such suffering

was in a world of beauty and charm and youth, and they would part

because they had to part. He would understand, even if she could not

rightly understand, for he was strong and simple and direct, and free

of the soft vanity of youth.

But he did not understand. He was angry and domineering.

"Why do you say all this?" he said heavily, floundering for words.

"What does it mean? Nothing at all. You belong to me. You gave up

Mitchell because I said you must. Have you given up Mitchell?"

"Yes."

"Very well then. Nothing else matters. If I want a thing I will break

through a Chinese wall to get it. Nothing can stop me, because when I

want a thing it is mine already. I want it because it is mine

already."

He was making it impossible for her--impossible to go, impossible to

stay, impossible to say anything.

Outside in the street the heavy drays went clattering by on the stone

setts. When they had passed there came up the shrill cries of children

playing in the street, the drone of a Rabbi taking a class of boys in

Hebrew. On the hot air came the smell of the street--a smell of women

and babies and leather and kosher meat.

"I know the way of women," he said. "My mother has been my friend

always. But I do not know your ways. I only know that I love you. You

are mine as that picture is mine, and you cannot take yourself from

me."

"I don't want to take myself from you," she said, half angry, half in

tears. "I want to make you understand me."

"What is there to understand? Do I understand my pictures?" he cried.

"Do you want no mystery? How can there be life without mystery? I

don't expect you to understand. I only want you to be honest and true

to me. . . . I conceal nothing. I am a Jew. I live in this horrible

place. My life is as horrible as this place. You know all that, all

there is to know, and you love me. You cannot alter me. You cannot

change my nature. . . ."

"Don't say any more," she said. "It only becomes worse with talking."

"What becomes worse?"

She could not answer him. She could not say what she felt. The woods,

the Heath, and--this; the rattle and smell of the street, the

dinginess of the studio, the dinginess of his soul--the dinginess and

yet the fire of it. On the Heath he had been like a faun, prick-eared

and shaggy, but wild and free as her spirit was wild and free. Here he

was rough, coarse, harsh, and tyrannical. She could feel him battering

at her with his mind, searching her out, probing into her, and she

resented it with all the passion of her modesty. She gathered up all

her forces to resist him.

"You are terrible! Terrible!" she cried. "Don't you see that it must

be good-bye?"

"I say it must not," he shouted. "I say it is nonsense to talk of

good-bye, when we have just met, when the kiss is yet warm on our

lips. For a kiss is a holy thing, and I do not kiss unless it is holy.

I say it is not good-bye."

"I say it is and must be," she said. "You are terrible. You hurt me

beyond endurance."

"And why should you not be hurt? Am I to have all the pain? I want to

share even that with you."

"It is impossible," she said dully, unable to share, or deal with, or

appreciate the violence of his passion, and falling back on the

mulishness which had been developed in her through her tussles with

her brothers. Through her mind shot the horrible thought:--

"We are quarrelling--already quarrelling."

To her he seemed to be dragging her down, defiling her. His eyes were

glaring at her with a passion that she took for sensuality, because it

came out of the dinginess of his soul. And he was stiffening into an

iron column of egoism, on which she knew she could make no impression.

She knew, too, that her presence was aggravating the stiffening

process. . . . She felt caught, trapped, and she wanted to get away.

Love must be free--free as the wind on the heath, as the blossom of

the wild cherry. Love must have its blossoming time, and he was

demanding the full heat of the summer. . . . She must get away.

"Good-bye," she said, holding out her hand.

He took her hand and pulled her to him.

"No! No! No!" she cried. "No! Good-bye! Good-bye!"

She turned away and was gone.

Unable to contain his agony, he flung himself on his bed and sobbed

out his grief.

"She is mine!" he moaned. "She is mine, and she cannot take herself

from me."

And when his tears were shed he began to think of the other women who

had come to him without love, so easily, so gratefully, some of them,

and this little girl who loved him could tear herself away--at a

fearful cost. He knew that. But if she could tear herself away, if she

could say good-bye, what could she know of love?

X

PARIS

MENDEL was able to finish his portrait of Jacob and Golda, but only at

the cost of painful and bitter labour. He was torn two ways: longing

to finish it, yet dreading the end of it, for he could not see beyond

it. Every picture he had painted had brought with it the certain

knowledge that it would lead to a better, that he was advancing

further on the road to art. But there was a finality about this

picture. It was an end in itself. It was not like most of his work,

one of a possible dozen or more. A certain stream of his feeling ended

in it and then disappeared, leaving him without guide or direction.

Therefore, when the picture was ended he found himself besottedly and

uncontrollably in love and in a maddeningly sensitive condition, so

that any sudden glimpse of beauty--the stars in the night sky, a

girl's face in the train, flowers in a window-box--could set him

reeling. More than once he found himself clinging to the wall or a

railing, emerging with happy laughter from a momentary lack of

consciousness. In the street near his home he found a lovely little

girl, of the same type as Sara, but more beautiful. Graceful and

lively she was, fully aware of her vitality and charm, and she used to

smile at him when he went to meet her as she came out of school, or

stood and watched her playing in the street.

At last he asked her shyly if she would come to his studio that he

might draw her. She consented and came often. She would chatter away,

and, studying her, he was astonished at her womanishness, and he was

overwhelmed when she said one day:--

"You don't want to draw me. You only want to look at me."

He was thrust back into the thoughts he had been avoiding. If this

child knew already so frankly why he was attracted to her, why could

not that other? Why did she seem to insist that he should regard her

with the emotions with which he approached a work of art? A work of

art could yield up its secret to the emotions, but she could only

deliver hers to love dwelling not in any abstract region, but here on

earth, in the life of the body. . . . He often thought of her with

active dislike, because she seemed to him to be lacking in frankness.

If she were going to cause so much suffering, as she must have known

she would with her good-bye, then she must have her reasons for it.

What did she mean with her neither yes nor no? With women there should

be either yes or no. A refusal is unpleasant, but it could be

swallowed down with other ills; and there were others. But this girl,

this short-haired Christian, blocked his way, and there were no others

except as there were cabs on the street and meals on the table.

For a time he avoided Logan and Oliver. He knew that Logan would

despise him for his weakness in setting his heart on a girl who ran

away from him, for he knew and admired the tremendous force with which

his friend had hurled himself into his life with the girl of the

station, constantly wooing and winning her afresh and urging her to

share his own recklessness. He admired, too, Logan's insistence on an

absolute separation of his art and his life with Oliver, who was never

for one moment admitted to his mind. Rather to his dismay, but at the

same time with a wild rush of almost lyrical impulse, Mendel, finding

himself with no other emotion than that of being in love, set himself

to paint love. He worked with an amazing ease, painting one picture

one day and covering it with another the next, feeling elatedly

convinced that everything he did was beautiful, yet knowing within

himself that he was in a bad way.

He avoided Logan, but Logan needed him, and came to tell him so.

"It is all very well for you to shut yourself up," he said, "but I

can't live without you. You know what Oliver is to me, but it is not

enough. The more satisfying she is on one plane, the more I need on

the other the satisfaction that she cannot give me. Women can't do it.

They simply can't, and it is no good trying. If you try, it means

making a mess of both love and art. She is jealous? Very well. Let her

be jealous. She enjoys it, and it helps her to understand a man's

passion."

"I can't stand it when you talk in that cold-blooded way about women."

"I'm not cold-blooded," said Logan, astonished at the adjective.

"I sometimes think you are, but I am apt to think that of all English

people," replied Mendel, wondering within himself if that did not

explain Morrison. "Yes. I often wonder what you would be like if you

were in an office, wearing a bowler hat, and going to and fro by the

morning and evening train."

"Why think about the impossible?" laughed Logan. "Anyhow, I'm not

going to let you shut yourself up. I want to go to Paris, and I can't

face three weeks alone with Oliver. Twenty-one days, sixty-three

meals. No. It can't be done."

"Yes, I'll go to Paris," thought Mendel. "I will go to Paris and I

will forget."

"You must come," urged Logan. "Madame at the Pot-au-Feu has given me

the name of a hotel kept by her sister-in-law. Very cheap. Bed and

breakfast, and, of course, you feed in restaurants. . . . You want

digging out of your hole. I don't know why, but you seem to have

insisted more on being Jewish lately. It is much more important for

you to be an artist and a man. I regard you as a sacred trust. I do

really. You are the only man in England for whom I have any respect,

and I need you to keep me decent." He added: "I need you to keep me

alive, for, without you, Oliver would gobble me up in a month."

He seemed to be joking, but Mendel could not help feeling that he was

at heart serious, and he had the unpleasant sinking of disgust which

sometimes seized him when he thought of Logan and Oliver together. He

could not account for it, and the sensation gave him a sickly pleasure

which made him weaker with Logan than with anybody else. Besides,

Logan often bewildered him, and he could not tolerate his inability to

grasp ideas except through a mad rush of feeling, and he hated the

fact that while Logan's mind seemed to move steadily on, his own

crumbled to pieces just at the moment when it was on the point of

absorbing an idea.

For these reasons he consented to go to Paris. The three weeks should

consolidate or destroy a friendship which had remained for him

distressingly inchoate. Deep in his heart he hoped that it would

become definite enough and strong enough to drive out his

indeterminate love. To be in love without enjoying love was in his

eyes a fatuous condition, undignified, vague, a kind of cuckoldry.

* * * * *

Oliver was aflame with excitement over the trip to Paris. She spoke of

it with an almost religious exaltation. As usual, her emotion was

entirely uncontrolled, became a physical tremulation, and she reminded

Mendel of a wobbling blanc-mange.

The plan was to have a fortnight in Paris and a week at Boulogne, for

bathing and gambling at the Casino.

No sooner had he left London than Mendel felt his cares and anxieties

fall away from him, and he began to wish he had brought Jessie Petrie.

He proposed to wire for her from Folkestone, but Logan pointed out

that Oliver could not stand women and was jealous of them.

"She'd say Jessie was making eyes at me," he said. "And if she made

eyes at you she'd be almost as bad."

In that Mendel could sympathize with Oliver. He was himself often

suddenly, unreasonably, and violently jealous of other men over women

for whom he did not care a fig.

He set himself to be nice to Oliver, and she in her holiday mood

responded, so that on the boat and in the Paris train Logan was sunk

in a gloomy silence, and in the hotel at night, in the next room,

Mendel could hear him storming at her, refusing to have anything to do

with her, threatening to go home next day unless she promised to keep

her claws, as he said, off Kühler. She promised, and they embarked

further upon their perilous voyage in search of an unattainable land

of satiety.

* * * * *

Their hotel was near the Montparnasse station, and they discovered a

café in the Boulevard Raspail which was frequented by artists and

models, one or two of whom Mendel recognized as former habitués of the

Paris Café. They were soon drawn into the artist world, and except

that he went to the Louvre instead of to the National Gallery for

peace and refreshment, Mendel often thought he might just as well be

in London. There was the same feverish talk, the same abuse of

successful artists, the same depreciation of old masters, but there

was more body to the talk, and sometimes a Frenchman, finding speech

useless with this shy, good-looking Jew, would make himself clear with

what English he could muster and a rapid, skilful drawing. For the

most part, however, he had to rely on Logan's paraphrase, until one

day in the Boulevard St. Germain he ran into that Thompson, lamented

by Jessie Petrie, the painter of stripes and triangles.

Thompson was a little senior to Mendel at the Detmold, had hardly

spoken to him in the old days, but was now delighted to meet a

familiar London face.

"I _am_ glad!" he said. "Come and see my place. How are they all in

London--poor old Calthrop and poor old Froitzheim? I should have

killed myself if I'd stayed in London; nothing but talk and women,

with work left to find its way in where it can. Here work comes first.

I suppose they haven't even heard of Van Gogh in London?"

Mendel had to confess that he had never heard of Van Gogh.

"A Dutchman," explained Thompson, "and he cut off his ear and sent it

to Gauguin. Ever heard of Gauguin?"

"No. But a man doesn't make himself a great artist by cutting off his

ear."

"Van Gogh was a great artist before that. He killed himself: shot

himself in his bed, and the doctor found him in bed smoking a pipe. He

was quite happy, for he had done all he could."

That sounded more like it to Mendel, more like the deed of a warrior

of the spirit.

"I'll show you," said Thompson, and they went round the galleries.

Mendel's head was nearly bursting when he came out. The riotous

colour, the apparent neglect of drawing and abuse of form, the entire

absence of tone and atmosphere, shocked him. He resented the wrench

given to all his training, and he took Thompson to the Louvre to go

back to Cranach and the early Italians. Thompson would not hear of

them, and insisted on his spending over an hour with Poussin.

"I can see nothing in them. Good painting, good drawing, but dull, so

dull! The flat, papery figures mean nothing."

"They mean everything to the picture," said Thompson, "and you have no

right to go outside the picture. Poussin kept to his picture, and so

must you if you are to understand him."

"I can see all that," said Mendel, "but he is dull. I can't help it,

he bores me."

"It is pure art."

"Then I like it impure."

"You don't really. But you are all like that when you first come from

London. You think that because a thing is different it must be wrong.

Have you come over alone?"

"No. I'm with a man called Logan and his girl. He is a great painter,

or he will be one. Anyhow, he is alive and has ideas."

"Does he know about Van Gogh?"

"No; but he says the next great painter must come from England."

"Pooh! Whistler!" said Thompson in a tone of vast superiority. "Nous

sommes bien loin de ça."

"Please don't talk French," said Mendel. "I don't understand a word."

"Whistler had good ideas," continued Thompson. "It is a pity he was

not a better artist."

Mendel was beginning to feel bored. He did not understand this new

painting for painting's sake, and did not want to understand it. To

change the subject he said:--

"I nearly brought Jessie Petrie with me."

"I wish you had. She is a dear little girl, and I nearly sent for her

the other day, but I've no use for the model now. It is perfectly

futile trying to cram a living figure into a modern picture."

"I don't see why, if you can paint it."

"Really," said Thompson, "I don't see what you have come to Paris for,

if you haven't come to learn something about painting. One wouldn't

expect you to understand Picasso straight off, but anyone who has

handled paint ought to be able to grasp Van Gogh."

"He is trying for the impossible," grunted Mendel. "The important

thing in art is art. I've come to Paris to have a good time."

"Oh! very well," said Thompson. "Why didn't you say so before? I'll

show you round."

* * * * *

Mendel took Thompson round to his hotel and up to Logan's room, where,

entering without knocking, they found Logan kneeling on the floor with

Oliver in a swoon in his arms. He had opened her blouse at the neck

and unlaced her corsage.

Mendel thought Oliver looked as though she was going to die, and his

first idea was to run for the doctor.

"She'll come round," said Logan. "It's my fault. I was brutal to her.

. . ." He nodded to Thompson. "How do you do?" and he covered up

Oliver's large bosom.

She came to in a few moments, opened her eyes slowly, rolled them

round, and came back to Logan, on whom she fixed a gaze of devouring

love. She put up her arms and drew his head down and kissed his lips.

Mendel drew Thompson out into the corridor.

"She was shamming," he said.

"I don't think so," replied Thompson. "What has happened? Does he

knock her about?"

"Not that I know of. They've not been together very long. They can't

settle down."

"She's a fine woman," said Thompson.

* * * * *

They were called in again and found Oliver sitting up on the bed

eating chocolates. She greeted Thompson with a queenly gesture, and

clapped her hands when Mendel told her they were going out to see the

sights.

"I'm sick of artists," she said. "I have quite enough of them in

London. I wish to God you weren't an artist, Logan. You'd be quite a

nice man if you worked for your living."

"Don't talk rubbish," mumbled Logan, who was subdued and curiously

ashamed of himself. "If I were like that I should have a little

dried-up wife and an enormous family, and you wouldn't have a look

in."

"And a good job too!" cried Oliver, in her most provoking tone. "A

good job too! I'd find someone who had a respect for me."

"D'you find Paris a good place to work in?" Logan turned to Thompson.

"I never knew the meaning of work till I came here. Ever heard of

Rousseau?"

"Oh, yes," said Logan.

"I don't mean the writer, I mean . . ."

"I know, I know," said Logan nonchalantly. He could never admit

ignorance of anything.

"A great painter," cried Thompson eagerly. "A very great painter. I

tell you he brought Impressionism up sharp. They had overshot the

mark, you know. Manet, Monet: they had overshot the mark."

Oliver began to scream at the top of her voice.

"Shut up!" said Logan. "You'll have us turned out."

"I don't care," she replied. "I don't care. I can't stand all this

talk about painting."

"What do you want us to talk about?" said Mendel, tingling with

exasperation. "Love? Three men and one woman can't talk about love."

"Well, I didn't come to Paris to sit in a dirty bedroom talking about

pictures. I want to go out to see the streets and the shops and the

funny people."

"For God's sake take us somewhere," said Logan.

* * * * *

Thompson, having ascertained that they had plenty of money, took them

to Enghien by the river. Oliver was happy at once. She wanted to be

amused and to be looked at, and as she was bouncing and rowdy she had

her desire.

She made Logan play for her at the little horses, but, as she did not

win, she was soon bored with it. Logan was bitten and could not tear

himself away. Mendel stayed with him and she disappeared with

Thompson.

"I'm bound to win if I go on," said Logan. "There's a law of chances,

you know, and I've always been lucky at these things. . . . It is so

exciting, too."

He changed note after note into five-franc pieces, lost them all, and

at last began to win a little; won, lost, won.

Mendel dragged him away from the table, protesting:--

"Come along. I have had enough. Do come along. We haven't had a chance

to talk for days, and I hate these rooms with all the flashy, noisy

people. . . . We can come back here and find the others. Let us go and

find some fun that we can share, for this is deadly dull for me.

Besides, we don't want to be stranded without money."

"But I'm winning. My luck is in."

He rushed back to the tables and lost--twice, upon which he allowed

himself to be persuaded, and they went out into the air and sat on a

terrace by the lake. Mendel produced cigarettes and they smoked in

silence for some time. Logan looked pale and worn and was obviously

smouldering with excitement.

"How amazingly different everything looks here," he said. "In London I

always feel as though I had a thumb pressing into my brain. Everybody

seems indifferent and hostile and everything I do is incongruous. I

feel almost happy here. I should like to stay here. I told her so and

she began to cry. I knocked her down. I couldn't stand her crying any

more. I knocked her down and she fainted."

"She was shamming," thought Mendel, seeing vividly the scene in the

bedroom. "He did not hurt her. She was shamming."

"I feel a brute," said Logan, "and yet I'm glad. I'm tremendously

glad. I want to sing. I want to get drunk. I'm tremendously glad. It

has settled something. I'm her master. She was getting on my nerves.

She won't do that any more. Ha! Ha!"

"Why don't you get rid of her?" asked Mendel. "Leave her here. Come

back with me to-morrow."

"Don't be a silly child," said Logan patronizingly. "I love her. I

couldn't live without her now, not for a single day. I could no more

do without her than I could do without the clothes on my back. I tell

you she's an inspiration. If she left me I should lay down my brush

for ever. She's a religion--all the religion I've got."

"I can't imagine stopping my work for any woman," said Mendel.

"Ah! that's because you don't know what a woman can mean. You can't

know while you are young."

Mendel's nerves had been throbbing in sympathy with his friend, but

suddenly all that place was filled with a soft, clear light and a

bright music, the colour and the scent of flowers, the soft murmur of

flowing water, the whisper of the wind in leafy trees, and his heart

ached and grew big and seemed to burst into a thousand, thousand

rivulets of love, searching out every corner of his senses, cleansing

his eyes, sharpening his hearing, refining every sense, so that the

scene before him--the white tables, the white-aproned waiters, the

green trees, the soft evening sky, the softer reflection of it in the

water--was exquisite and magical and full of a mysterious power that

permeated even Logan's brutal revelation and made it worthy of beauty.

. . . And this mysterious power he knew was love, and she, the girl

for whom it had arisen from the depths, was far away in England,

thinking of him, perhaps, regretting him, perhaps, but knowing nothing

of the beauty she had denied. . . .

Mendel was astonished to find tears in his eyes, trembling on his

lashes, trickling down his cheeks.

"What a baby you are!" said Logan. "You can't have me all to

yourself."

His divination was true. Lacking its true object, Mendel's love had

concentrated upon his friend, with whom he longed to walk freely in

the enchanted world of art, to be as David and Jonathan. Indeed,

Logan's state of torment was to him as a wound got in battle, over

which he gave himself up to lamentation, so single and deep and pure

that it obscured even the impulse of his love. He longed to rid his

friend of this devouring passion that was consuming him and thrusting

in upon his energy, but because his friend called it love, he

respected it and bore with it.

"How good it is, this life out of doors!" exclaimed Logan, lolling

back in his chair.

"I don't know," replied Mendel. "I think it is too deliberate, too

organized. I prefer London streets. There is nothing in the world to

me to compare with London streets. Nature is too beautiful. A tree in

blossom, a garden full of flowers, a round hill with the shadow of the

clouds over them, move me too much. Left alone with them I should go

mad. I must have human nature if I am to live and work. I only want

nature, just as I only want God, through human nature."

"By Jove! you hit the nail on the head sometimes, my boy. That is true

for all of us. It is what I meant when I said that Oliver was a

religion to me."

"I don't mean women or individuals," protested Mendel. "I mean human

nature in the lump. It may be very poor stuff, stupid and foolish and

vulgar, but it is all we've got, and one lives in it and through it."

"That is all very well while you are young," said Logan, "but you have

to individualize it when you are older. One person becomes a point of

contact. You can't just float through humanity like an apparition."

Mendel had lost the thread of his argument, though not his confidence

in its truth.

"That is not what I meant," he said, "and I don't see how a person

could be just a point of contact."

"All I know is that Oliver is such a point of contact to me, and I

know that unless art is inspired with some such feeling as you have

described, all the technical skill and all the deft trickery in the

world won't make it more than a sop for fools or an interesting

survival of mediævalism. That is why I think you are going to be so

valuable. You have so little to unlearn. You have only to shake off

the most antiquated religion in the world and you can look at life and

human nature without prejudice, while I have constantly to be

uprooting all sorts of prejudices in favour of certain ways of living,

morally and socially."

Mendel was beginning to feel comfortable and easy, for while his mind

worked furiously he could rarely express what he thought, and Logan in

his talk often came near enough to it to afford him some relief and to

urge him on to renewed digging in the recesses of his mind. It was a

vast comfort to him to find that there were other vital thoughts

besides that of Morrison, and that for ecstasy he was not entirely

dependent upon her. Warmed up by his confidence in Logan, he resolved

to tell him about the girl and the vast change she had wrought in his

life.

"I used to think," he said, "that if I stayed among my own people I

could work my way through the poverty and the dirt and the Jewishness

of it all to art. When she came I knew that it was impossible. She had

something that I needed, something that the Jews do not know, or never

have known. It is not my poverty that denies it to me, for if the poor

Jews do not know a good thing, the rich Jews certainly do not, for the

rich Jews are rubbish who stroke the Christians with one hand and rob

them with the other. It is something that she knows almost without

knowing it herself."

Logan smiled.

"I am not a fool about her," cried Mendel. "She is not particularly

beautiful to me. There is only one line in her face that I think

beautiful, from the cheek-bone to the jaw. I am not a fool about her,

but I had almost given the Christian world up in despair. It seemed to

me so bad, so inhuman, so hollow, so full of plump, respectable

thieves. The simple thieves and bullies of my boyhood seemed to me

infinitely preferable. And I had met some of the most important people

in the Christian world: all empty and callous and lascivious. And the

unimportant people were good enough, but dull, so dull. . . . Then

comes this little girl. She is like Cranach's Eve among monkeys. She

becomes at once to me what Cranach's wife must have been to him. He

painted her as child, girl, and woman. The chattering apes matter to

me no more. The Christian world is no longer empty. It is still

lascivious and greedy, soft and ill-conditioned, puffy and stale, but

it is suddenly full of meaning, of beauty, of a joy which, because I

am a Jew, I cannot understand."

"Give it up," growled Logan, "give it up. Paint her portrait and let

her go. You are a born painter. To a painter women are either

paintable or nothing. For God's sake don't go losing yourself in

philosophy."

"It is not philosophy!" cried Mendel indignantly. "It is what I feel."

"It will probably end in a damned good picture," retorted Logan. "Why

not be content with that?"

"Because it will not answer what I want to know, and because I feel

that there is something in the Jews, the real Jews, that she does not

understand either. And she is not a fool. She has a mind. She has a

deep character. She is strong, and she can get the better of me. She

is secret and she is cruel."

Logan gave his fat chuckle.

"She is just an English girl with all the raw feeling bred out of her.

She is true to type: impulsive without being sensual, kind without

being affectionate; and she would let you or any man go to hell rather

than give up anything she has been brought up to believe in or admit

to her life anything that was strange, unfamiliar, and not good form,

like yourself. . . . Give it up, give it up. You are only taking it

seriously because you have been irresistible so far and it is the

first setback you have received."

"I will not give it up," said Mendel, setting his teeth. Then he

laughed because the lights had gone up and the scene was gay and

amusing, and he wanted to plunge into the merry crowd of Parisians and

pleasure-seekers, to move among them and to come in contact with the

women, to watch the men strutting to please them, to delight in the

procession of excited faces, to taste the flavour of humanity which is

always and everywhere the same, rich, astonishing, comforting,

satisfying in its variety.

Oliver and Thompson returned with their hands full of trinkets, toys,

and pretty paper decorations which they had bought or won at games of

chance and skill. She sat on Logan's knee and insisted on wreathing

him with paper streamers, which he removed as fast as she placed them

on his head.

"Do! do!" she cried. "Do let go for once and let us all be gay. Oh! I

do love this place, with the band playing, and the lights in the

water, and the wonderful deep blue sky. Why don't we have a sky like

that in London? Do let us come here every year for the summer.

Thompson says painters have to come to Paris if they want to be any

good."

"I've been telling her about Van Gogh," said Thompson.

"So that's what's gone to your head!" growled Logan, patting her

cheek. "He's been talking to you about painting, has he?"

"Yes. He's is a nice man, and doesn't treat me as if I was a perfect

fool."

She darted a mischievous glance at Mendel, who started under it as

though he had been stung. He was horrified at the depth of his dislike

of her, and he remembered with disgust her full, coarse bosom exposed

as she lay in her calculated swoon. . . . How good it had been while

she was gone with that fool Thompson, who suited her so perfectly,

that chattering ape, with his talk of Van Gogh and Gauguin and

"abstract art," who stood now coveting her with shining eyes and

fatuously smiling lips.

"I'm not good enough for some people," she said. "When I come into the

room there is silence."

"Oh, shut up!" said Logan. "Let's go and have dinner and get back to

Paris. I'm sick of this cardboard place, where there is nothing but

pleasure."

They had an excellent dinner, during which Oliver never stopped

chattering and Mendel never once opened his lips. His thoughts were

away in England, in his studio with his work, and in the country with

Morrison, and he struggled to bring them together in his mind. How

could Logan love Oliver and keep her apart from his work? Two such

passions must infallibly seek each other out and come to grips. They

must come together or be flung violently apart. . . . Passions were to

him as real as persons; they had individualities, needs, desires; they

were entities insisting upon their right to existence; they must

express themselves, must make their impression upon the circumambient

world.

He became critical of Logan, though he hated to be so. Logan stood to

him for adventure and freedom, independence and courage. It was

incomprehensible to him that Logan should take Oliver seriously. She

was the woman for a holiday, for a wild outburst of lawlessness, not

for the morning and the evening and the day between.

"Oh, do cheer up, Kühler! You are like a death's-head at a feast."

He looked at her with a piercing glance which silenced her. No: she

was no holiday woman. She was the woman for a drab, drudging life,

with no other colour or joy in it than her own animal warmth. She was

like Rosa, made for just such a dreary, simple, devoted fool as Issy.

What could she do with a strong passion? She could only absorb it like

a sponge, and nothing could kindle her. Just a drab; just a sponge.

Thinking so, his dislike of her grew into a hatred so passionate that

he desired to know more of her, to watch her, to beget a clear idea of

her. He went and sat by her side and teased her, while she teased him

and told him he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen.

"That night in the Tube I thought you were the prettiest boy I ever

saw, and I was quite disappointed when Logan came to speak to me

instead of you."

"I would never have taken you from the shop," he said. "I would have

taken you to my studio, and perhaps I would have painted you, but I

would have sent you back to the shop."

"I wouldn't have gone, so there!" she said. "What would you have done

then?"

"I should have turned you out."

"Oh! Would you? Filthy brute! If I'm good enough for one thing I'm

good enough for another. Do you hear that, Logan? He would have turned

me out!"

"You leave Kühler alone," said Logan. "You'll never understand him, if

you try for a thousand years."

"Turned me out?" muttered Oliver. "Heuh! I like that. He'd turn me out

and get another girl in! I'll not have any of those tricks from you,

Logan."

"You can talk about them when I begin them," he replied.

She turned from Mendel to Thompson and soon had him soft in her

snares.

"She would like to do that with me," thought Mendel, "and she hates me

because she knows she cannot."

* * * * *

They returned to Paris by bus all sleepy and a little drunk. Oliver

leaned her head on Logan's shoulder and dozed, smiling to herself,

while Thompson, sitting by her side, fingered her sleeve.

They were carried far beyond the point where they should have

descended, and finding themselves on the boulevards, they woke up to

the liveliness of the Parisian night, and Oliver refused to go home.

Thompson suggested the cabarets, and they went from one dreary vicious

hole to another until they came on one where a party of Americans were

doing in Paris as the Parisians do. They had brought on a number of

_cocottes_ from the Bal Tabarin, and were drinking, shouting, dancing.

Thompson led Oliver into the mêlée, and soon she was drinking,

shouting, dancing with the rest.

Mendel was horrified and disgusted. There was no zest in the riot. It

was a piece of deliberate, cold-blooded bestialization. He trembled

with rage, and turned to Logan, who was sitting with a sickly smile on

his face:--

"You ought not to let her," he cried--almost moaned. "If she were my

woman I would not let her. I would kill any man who laid hands on her

like that. She is not a prostitute. I would not let my woman be a

prostitute."

But Logan did not move. He sat with his sickly smile on his face. He

was drunk and could not move.

Unable to bear the scene any longer, Mendel rushed away, jumped into a

taxi, and drove back to the hotel, swearing that he would go back to

London the next day. He would write and tell Logan that he must get

rid of Oliver or no longer be his friend. She was a poisonous drab.

She would be the ruin of his friend.

An hour or two later Logan came back. He was very white, and his hair

was dank, and there was a cold sweat on his face.

"My God!" he said, "Kühler! Are you awake? I don't know where she is.

I went to sleep. I was so tired, and there was such a row with those

blasted Americans. I went to sleep and awoke to find a nigger shaking

me and the place empty. . . . Where does Thompson live? Do you know?"

"Off the Boulevard Raspail. I went there to look at his rubbishy

pictures. I think I could find the way. Are you going to kill him?"

"I want to find her," said Logan. "I must find her. It is killing me

to think of her lost in Paris. I must find her. I can't sleep without

her. I must find her."

He hardly seemed to know what he was saying.

"Come along then," said Mendel. "I think I can find where Thompson

lives."

It was not far. They walked along the deserted boulevard under the new

white, florid buildings, and turned into an impasse.

"That's it," said Mendel. "Impasse. I remember that. A tall, thin

house with a big yellow door. Here it is."

They knocked until the yellow door swung mysteriously open and then

ran upstairs to the top floor.

Thompson came blinking into the passage.

"Where's Oliver? Where's Logan's girl?"

Mendel put up his fist to hit him in the eye.

"I put her into a taxi and sent her home. The Americans took us on to

another place. They were a jolly lot. A terrific place they took us

to. There were negresses dancing and a South Seas girl who said

Gauguin brought her back. . . . Oliver's all right. I put her in a

taxi and sent her back."

"You're a liar!" shouted Logan. "She's in there."

He rushed in, while Mendel put his arms round Thompson and laid him

neatly on the floor. In a moment Logan was out again.

"You're a shocking bad painter," he said to Thompson, "but she isn't

there."

They left the house and walked slowly back to the hotel. Logan clung

to Mendel's arm, saying:--

"It's my fault. She said if ever I knocked her about she'd clear out.

Do you mind walking about with me? I couldn't go to bed. I couldn't

sleep."

All night they walked about; going back to the hotel every half hour

to see if she was there, talking of anything and everything, even

politics, to keep Logan's mind from the fixed horrible idea that had

taken possession of it. They saw the sun come out, and the workers

hurrying along the streets, and the waiters in the cafés push up the

heavy iron shutters that had only been pulled down an hour or two

before, and the market women with their baskets, and the tramcars

glide and jolt along, the shops open and the girls go chattering to

their work through the long, leisurely Parisian day.

They returned at eight and had breakfast. At half-past nine Oliver

appeared, smiling and serene.

"We did have fun last night! You missed something, I tell you."

"Where have you been?" cried Logan. "I've been looking for you all

night."

"What a fool you are! I can look after myself."

"Where have you been?"

She faced him with a bold stare and said:--

"I got home about half-past two, and I took another room, partly

because I didn't want to disturb you, and partly--you know why."

"What number was your room?"

"Forty-four."

From where they sat Mendel could see the keyboard in the concierge's

lodge. There were only forty rooms in the hotel.

"Have you had breakfast?" asked Logan, forcing himself to believe her.

"Hours ago. In bed," she replied. "I paid for it and the bed."

"Why did you do that?" he snapped.

She caught Mendel's eyes fixed on her, eager to see her trapped, and

she smiled insolently as she replied:--

"I thought it would be a good joke if I let you think I had been out

all night. But you look such a wreck that I don't think you could see

a joke. . . . What are we going to do to-day?"

"We are going home," said Logan.

BOOK THREE

THE PASSING OF YOUTH

I

EDWARD TUFNELL

A WRETCHED journey home, a miserable journey. There had been a high

wind, leaving a heavy swell, and Mendel shared the feelings of his

brother-in-law, Moscowitsch, concerning the sea. It made him ill, and

he never wished to see it again.

Oliver sat with her eyes closed while Logan held her hand and

whispered to her. The boat was crowded, for it was the first to make

the crossing for two days. Detestable people, detestable sea,

detestable evil-smelling boat! . . . How lightly they had undertaken

the trip to Paris! Only seven hours! But what hours!

Mendel's disgust endured until they reached London. This was home to

him, and never, never again would he travel. The discomfort of it was

too odious, the shock to his habits too great. In London he did at

least know what to avoid, while in Paris there was no knowing when he

might be plunged into a dreary, glittering place full of prostitutes

and Americans.

He was glad to part with Logan and Oliver. They had so much to settle

with each other that he felt he was an unnecessary third. Paris had

done violence to their relationship. They had gone there light of

heart; they had returned oppressed and entangled. . . . And in London

it was raining; but that was good, because familiar. It was good to go

out into the friendly streets and to see them shining like black

rivers, and to see the people hurrying under their dripping umbrellas

and the women with their skirts up to their knees.

He seemed to have been away a very long time, and yet Paris seemed

very far off too, an unreal memory, like a place of which he had read

or seen in photographs. He was glad when he mounted a bus and knew

that it was bearing him towards his own people.

Golda was very excited. She had had a letter from Harry, who had seen

his brother in Paris, but had been too shy to speak to him because of

his friends.

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

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

"You speak Yiddish. You could have found him. He has done very well,

but he is coming home to us. He does not like to live away from his

people, and he says England is best."

And Mendel thought that England was indeed best. For him, then,

England meant his mother's kitchen, with its odd decorations from

Tottenham Court Road, its dresser crammed with gilded china and

fringed with cut green paper, its collection of his early pictures,

almost all hanging crooked, and the hard wooden chair in which Golda

sat all day long with her hands on her stomach, dreaming and brooding

of her life, which through all her hardships had been sweet because of

her beautiful child whom everybody loved and spoiled, as she herself

loved and spoiled him because he was not like other children. England

was best because it could contain that peace and that beauty, and

there was nothing in England to harm it or in envy to destroy it.

Mendel could understand his brother wanting to come back to it; for

he, too, from all his adventures, returned to its simplicity for

strength and comfort.

Moscowitsch came in with a Jewish paper. He was in a terrible state of

anger and hatred. His eyes flashed and his nostrils quivered as he

read out how a Jew in Russia had been accused of killing a Christian

boy for his blood, and how over a thousand Jews had been massacred on

the instigation of the police.

"It grows worse and worse," he said. "The Jews do not kill. It is the

Christians who lust for blood. It is the Christians who are so wicked

and dishonest that, when they must be found out, they say it is the

Jews, or that the Jews are more wicked than they. It is impossible.

But England is good to the Jews. England must send soldiers to Russia

or the Jews will be all murdered."

"Yes, it is bad in Russia," said Golda, nodding her head. "But life is

bad everywhere for good people. Only in England one is left alone."

"Well, Mr. Artist!" said Moscowitsch genially. "Made your fortune

yet?"

"No," replied Mendel; "but I have been to Paris for my holidays and I

stayed in a hotel. Three of us spent twenty pounds."

"So?" said Moscowitsch, impressed. "Have you made it up with the

Birnbaum, then?"

"No."

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

"If he wants money," said Golda, "he can always get it. What more do

you want? There are some letters for you, Mendel."

He opened his letters, and had the satisfaction of telling Moscowitsch

that he was asked to paint a portrait for thirty pounds.

"Who is it?" asked Moscowitsch. "A lord?" He had an idea that only

lords had their portraits painted by hand.

"That's better," he said. "That's better than painting those pictures

that nobody wants. You paint what they ask you and you'll soon make

your fortune, and be able to give your mother dresses covered with

beads and tickets for the theatre and china ornaments. And you can be

thankful you don't live in Russia. They wouldn't let you be an artist

there. If you became a student they would send you off to Siberia and

you would die in the snow."

It was the first time Moscowitsch had spoken to him since the breach

with Birnbaum, and Mendel was at his ease with him again, and glad to

be with his people. He knew that Moscowitsch was greatly attached to

Golda, and had more than once urged his being taken away from his

painting and put to some useful trade.

"Oh! I shall very soon succeed," he said boastfully. "This is only a

beginning. You keep an eye on that paper of yours. You will find

something else to read besides what Russia does to the Jews. You will

see what England does for a Jew when he has talent and honesty."

"They made Disraeli a lord," said Moscowitsch.

"I shall be something much better than a lord."

"They only make painters R.A."

"I shall be much better than that," said Mendel.

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

Mendel opened another letter. It was an invitation to become a member

of an exhibiting club which considered itself exclusive.

"I have been invited to become a member of a club."

That settled Moscowitsch. A club to him was proof of success and

social distinction. He and his wife had made the acquaintance of a

member of the music-hall profession who had two clubs, and they

counted him a feather in their caps. To have a member of a club in the

family was almost overwhelming, and he forgot the sorrows of the Jews

in Russia.

* * * * *

The portrait commission was from Edward Tufnell, who had lately

married and had been adopted as a candidate for Parliament for a

northern constituency. Good earnest soul that he was, he regarded

himself as responsible for launching Mendel upon the world, and once

he had assumed a responsibility he never forgot it. Nothing made any

difference to him. He had heard tales of the boy's wildness, but he

accepted responsibility for that too, read up the histories of men of

genius for precedent, and acknowledged the inevitability of the flying

of sparks from the collision of a strong individuality and the habits

of the world.

He had always intended to give his protégé a lift, and had tried in

vain to badger his father and his uncle, partners in a huge woollen

manufactory, into having their portraits painted. They preferred to

sink their money in men with reputations. He did not see how Mendel

could acquire a reputation except by giving him work to do. On the

other hand, he shrank from what he considered the vanity of having his

own portrait painted, but his charmingly pretty wife gave him the

opportunity he desired.

Therefore he invited Mendel to his house in the dales to stay until

the picture was finished.

A day or two later and Mendel was in the train, being whirled North

through the dull, rolling Midlands and the black, smirched valleys of

the West Riding. The gloomy sky filled him with terror. At first he

thought there was going to be a storm, but there seemed to be no life

in the sky, and its strangeness oppressed him. The people in the train

spoke a language which seemed almost as foreign as French, and when

the train darted through forests of smoking chimney-stacks and he

looked down into the grimy, trough-like streets, he was dismayed to

think that here were depths of misery compared with which the East End

was as a holiday ground. This, too, was England, and he had said that

England was best. He remembered Jews in the East End who had fled from

the North and said they would rather go back to Russia than return to

the tailoring shops and the boot factories. So this vile, busy

blackness was the North!

For some mysterious reason it made him think of Logan and Oliver, and

the thought of them filled him with an added uneasiness. He had not

thought of them once since the trip to Paris, and now he felt bound to

them, and that they were a weight upon him. They stood out vividly

against the murky, lifeless sky. He could see them standing hand in

hand, smiling a little foolishly, and a physical tremor shot through

him as he thought of the contact of their two hands, thrilling

together, pressing together, to tell of their terrible need of each

other. . . . This man and this woman. Mendel was haunted by the images

of all the couples he knew, and they passed before him like a shadowy

procession of the damned, all hand in hand, across the lifeless sky,

all shadowy except Logan and Oliver, and then two others, his father

and his mother; but they were not hand in hand. They were seated side

by side, like two statues, and behind them the lifeless sky broke and

opened to show the infinite blue space beyond the clouds.

He had changed at the darkest of the chimneyed towns, and the shabby

local train went grinding and puffing through a tunnel into a vast

green valley. At the first station he saw Edward Tufnell on the

platform. He had changed a good deal, and was no longer the lanky,

earnest youth of the Settlement, but his eyes still had their steady,

serene expression and their sunny, beautiful smile.

He flung up his hand as he saw Mendel, smiled, and came fussily, as

though he were meeting the Prime Minister himself. He insisted on

carrying Mendel's bag and canvases and made him feel small and young

again, as he used to when he went trotting along by Edward's side on

his way to the French class.

"It's a long journey," said Edward. "You must be tired."

"Oh no! I don't mind any journey as long as I don't have to cross the

sea."

"It is only two miles now."

They climbed into a dogcart and drove, for the most part at a walk, up

a long, winding road that crept like a worm along the flanks of a huge

hill.

"Glorious country!" said Edward. "I love it. The South doesn't seem to

me to be country at all--just a huge park. One is afraid to walk on

the grass. But here there is room and freedom. One understands why the

North is Liberal."

"It is too big for me," replied Mendel. "But then I can't get used to

the country. I'm not myself in it. I feel in it as though I were on

the edge of the world and in danger of falling off. Yes. The country

seems dangerous to me, and I could never walk along a road at night."

"How odd that is!" laughed Edward. "If I am ever afraid it is in the

town. The vast masses of people do really terrify me sometimes, when I

think of governing them all."

"They can look after themselves," said Mendel simply.

Over the shoulder of the hill they came on a grey stone house with a

walled garden. Edward turned in at the gate, flicked his horse into a

trot up the steep drive, and drew up by the front door, in which was

standing a dainty little lady in a mauve cotton gown and a wide

Leghorn straw hat.

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

"I'm so glad you could come," said the little lady. "My husband has

told me so much about you."

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

"I'm afraid it is a very long way for you to come," she said, leading

him into the house while Edward drove round to the stables. "It is

very good of you. We are very quiet here, but you can do just as you

like, and I shall always be ready for you when you want me."

She had a very charming voice that seemed to bubble with happiness,

and she had the air of being surprised at herself for being so happy.

The house was pervaded with her atmosphere, fragrant and good, and

every corner seemed to be full of surprise, every piece of furniture

looked astonished at finding itself in its place--so perfectly in its

place. This fragrant perfection was the more amazing as the outside of

the house was more than a little grim, and the hill behind it was dark

and ominous, while several of the trees were blasted and chapped with

the wind.

Mendel had never seen such a house, and when Edward took him up to his

room he almost wept with delight at the comfort and sweetness of it

all. There was a fire burning in the grate, by the side of which was a

huge easy chair. Flowered chintz curtains were drawn across the

windows, and the same gay chintz covered the bed. On the

wash-hand-stand was a shining brass can of hot water. There were books

by the bedside, the carpet was of a thick pile, and the furniture was

old and exquisite. . . . He was filled with delight and gratitude.

"Yes," he thought, "England is best! Comfortable England."

And when Edward showed him the big tiled bathroom he had a shiver of

dismay, and thought what a dirty, uncouth fellow he was to come among

these exquisite people.

* * * * *

Mary Tufnell put him at his ease at once and encouraged him to talk

about himself. He was frank and gay and amusing, and told her about

his adventures and many of his troubles, and even ventured once or

twice upon scabrous details.

"He is a darling," she said to Edward. "But how he must have suffered.

He is such a boy, but sometimes he seems to me the oldest person I

have ever met."

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

"He doesn't let you forget it," replied she.

* * * * *

The portrait was begun the next day. Mendel took a business-like view

of his visit. He was there to paint and to make thirty pounds. Every

moment that his hostess could spare he seized upon. He painted her in

her mauve cotton and Leghorn hat and would not talk while he worked.

When the light was gone he was ready for any entertainment they might

propose. He did not find either of them particularly interesting, and

their unfailing kindness wearied him not a little. They were so

invariably good in every thought, word, and deed. It seemed impossible

for them to fail. There was no combination of circumstances which they

could not surmount with their smiling patience. . . . He thought of

them as two people walking along on either side of a road, smiling

across it at each other. Nothing joined them. They had never met.

There had been no collision. He had overtaken her on the road and had

taken her step, her pace. . . . They had just that air. Dear Edward

had fallen in with her by the wayside, and she had smiled at him and

he was content and held for life. To their mutual grave astonishment

she would have children, and her smile would become a little sad, and

with the children she would be an ideal to Edward, like the little

Italian Madonnas of whom he had so many photographs all over the

house. And between them on the road would march the brave procession

of life--kings and beggars, priests and prostitutes, artists and

peasants, chariots, and strange engines of peace and war; but they

would see nothing of it: they would see only each other, and they

would smile and go smiling to the grave.

Mendel was at his ease with them and very happy, but suddenly out of

nowhere there would arise, as it were, a great stench that pricked his

nostrils and set him longing for London. And he would think of Logan

and Oliver and ache to be with them, so that he knew that he was bound

to them in the flesh. They were embarked upon a great adventure in

which he must be with them to the end, for Logan was his friend, with

whom he must share even the deepest bitterness. With Edward he could

share nothing at all, for Edward was absurdly, incredibly innocent,

content to smile by the wayside.

He wrote to Logan and Oliver and told them how he was longing to be

with them, and how the country filled him with childish fears, and how

Paris seemed a thousand miles away and its adventures a thousand years

ago. And he was hurt because they did not at once reply.

He received two letters one morning. Logan wrote telling him he ought

not to waste his time over portraits, and that he must come back to

London soon, because the autumn was to see their triumph: nothing

about himself, nothing about Oliver. Mendel was disappointed: nobody

ever really answered his letters, into which he flung all his feeling.

His other letter was from Morrison. His first letter from her. He knew

her hand, though he had never seen it before--round, big, simple. He

kept her letter until his day's work was done, and then he went into

the garden to read it. There was an arbour at the end of a mossy walk

which led to a crag above a little waterfall. Out of the crag grew a

mountain ash, brilliant in berry. This was the most beautiful spot in

the garden, and so he chose it for reading the letter.

"I want you to forgive me for being so foolish. I want to try again. I

hate being beaten, and I think it was only my stupidity that beat me.

I have been thinking of you all the time, and I have been troubled

about you. What people said had nothing at all to do with it. I admire

you more than I can say, and I have been very foolish.

"It has been a lovely summer. I have been working hard and feel

hopeless about it. Please don't ask to see my work. While I am at it I

am wondering all the time what you are doing.

"I am to be allowed to come back to London in October. There is no

reason why you should not write to me."

She was there with him, by his side, under the glowing rowan-tree,

gazing down at the little white waterfall dashing so merrily down into

the pebbled beck. She was there with him, and his blood sang in his

veins and his mind began to work, pounding along as it had not done

these many weeks. . . . Weeks? Years--more than a lifetime.

He went back to his picture and thought it very, very bad. Edward and

his wife came in and looked at it dubiously.

"Of course," said Edward, "it is a very jolly picture, but I don't

think you have caught all her charm."

"But the painting of the hat is wonderful," said Mary.

"What do I care?" thought Mendel. "It is you--you as you are, smiling,

eternally smiling over your little clean, comfortable happiness, three

parts of which you have bought, with your servants and your flowers

and your bathroom."

In a day or two he was being whirled back to London, shouting every

now and then from sheer exuberance--thirty pounds in his pocket,

October to look forward to: October, when London shook off its summer

listlessness; October, when She would return; and until October he

would run with his eyes on the trail of the burning, creeping passion

that bound him to Logan and Oliver.

II

THE CAMPAIGN OPENS

HE reached London in the afternoon, and as soon as it was evening went

to Camden Town to find Logan. Only Oliver was in. She was sitting in

the window smoking. There had been a tea-party, and the floor was

littered with cups, plates of bread and butter and cakes, fragments of

biscuit, some of which had been trodden on.

Mendel surveyed this litter ruefully, and he said:--

"Why don't you wash up?"

"Logan said he would. I washed up after breakfast. I'm not a servant,

and he keeps on promising to have someone in to help."

"Will you wash up if I help you?"

"No, thanks. Logan's got to do it."

"Who has been to tea?"

"Oh! A funny lot. Some of Logan's fools who think he is a great man."

"He is a great man," said Mendel.

"Heuh! You try living with him. What's the good of being a great man

if you don't make any money? It's all very well for Calthrop to live

like a pig. He makes money and can do what he likes."

"If you don't like it you can always clear out."

"Where to? Eh? To go the round of the studios and oblige people like

you? Not much! It isn't as if I was married to him. I can't make him

keep me. Besides, he wouldn't let me go. If I went he would run after

me. I suppose you hadn't thought of that, Mr. Kühler. You don't know

what it is to care for anybody. I'd like to see some one play you and

play you, and then turn you down. That would teach you a lesson, that

would."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I'm not going to stand it any longer," she said. "I'm not going to be

put on one side like dirt while you go on with your conceited talk.

You're both so conceited you don't know how to hold yourselves. I'm a

woman, and I stand for something in the world. A woman is more

important than the biggest picture that was ever painted."

"It depends upon the woman."

"All right, then. _I'm_ more important. You talk about Logan keeping

me. He can consider himself damned lucky I stay with him."

"Oh! you're both in luck," snapped Mendel, and he sat down and refused

to say another word.

Oliver began to whistle and then to hum. She fidgeted in her chair.

She thought she had come off rather well in the sparring match. She

had been dreading Mendel's return, for since the Paris adventure she

had been asserting herself, as she called it, beating Logan down,

bewildering him with her extraordinary sweetness and cajolery and

sudden outbursts of fury. Both had agreed to bury the memory of the

last night in Paris, but the thoughts of both were centred upon it.

She rejoiced that she had served him out, but she had been stirred to

a degree that alarmed her. Her former condition of lazy sensual

security had been broken, and she dreaded Logan's jealousy. She knew

that she was not his equal in force, but she set herself to overcome

him with cunning. His force would spend itself. She knew that. She

must then bind him fast with tricks and lures, rouse the curiosity of

his senses and keep it unsatisfied.

She had succeeded wonderfully. Logan crumbled and turned soft and

sugary under her arts, and only one impulse in him resisted her--his

love for Mendel; and through that love his passion for art. Therefore

she dreaded and hated Mendel's return.

Presently she ceased to hum. She thought suddenly that perhaps it had

been a mistake to meet Mendel with hostility.

"I say, Kühler, do give us one of your cigarettes. These are awful

muck."

He threw his cigarette-case over to her.

"Did you have a good time up North?"

"Yes."

"I come from there, you know. Logan was furious with you for going. He

is really very fond of you, you know."

"I don't need you to tell me that."

"He's very excited just now. He keeps talking about the artistic

revolution and the twentieth century, and all that, you know. He has

been reading a book called 'John Christopher,' and keeps on reading it

aloud until I'm sick of it. I believe he thinks he is like

Christopher, though I'm sure he's not, because Christopher could never

see a joke. It is all about women, one after another, just left

anyhow. It doesn't sound like a story to me at all."

"It sounds true," said Mendel, not paying much attention to what she

said.

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

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

"They were good people," replied Mendel, "and wonderfully peaceful. I

don't think I appreciated it enough while I was there, but it seems

very clear and beautiful to me now."

"Portrait any good?"

"No."

Logan put down his frame and without a word to Oliver proceeded to

wash up the tea-things. She stayed in her chair in the window and

hummed.

To Mendel his friend seemed altered. He had lost his good-humour and

something of his happy recklessness, and he was more concentrated and

full of a wary self-consciousness.

He came out of the bedroom when the washing up was done and flung

himself on the divan, stretched himself out, and said:--