"Well, if you like these wild people so much, why don't you take the

plunge and join them? You are wild enough yourself."

"I'm not wild in that way," replied Morrison. "And I know that if I

did do it it would be wrong."

And she returned to her task of labouring to understand Mendel. She

carried the idea of him wherever she went, and was sometimes able to

call up a clear image of him, and she was fearful for him because he

seemed to her so helpless, so much a stranger in a strange land, so

easily caught up in any strong current of feeling or enthusiasm. . . .

She, too, often felt outside things, but she so much enjoyed being a

looker-on. She loved to watch the race among the young artists, and

she longed for Mendel to win. It was right that he should win, because

he was so much the best of them all. He had taken the lead. It had

looked as though he must infallibly win, and then Logan had appeared

and he had stumbled in his stride.

Yet this had never been satisfying. She had no right to turn Mendel

into a figure on a frieze, to see him in the flat, as it were, and it

was in revolt against this conception that she had agreed to go with

him to Logan's party, which had been so disastrous. . . . Had she not

been cowardly to run away? But what could she do, what else could she

do, when confronted so suddenly with the appalling fact?

A week before the party Mendel had insisted on lending her "Jean

Christophe" volume by volume. She had read the first without great

interest. The friendship between the two boys struck her as silly and

sentimental and not worth writing about, and she had read no further.

However, when she found that Mendel was becoming a fixed idea, to

escape from it she took up the second volume, and was enthralled by

the tale of Christophe's love for Ada, thrilled by the sudden scene of

his assault on the peasant girl in the field, and with a growing sense

of illumination followed his life as it passed from woman to woman,

finding consolation with one, relief with another, comfort with

another, comradeship with yet another, and the physical relationship

slipped into its place and was never dominant. And Christophe, too,

had had women of passage because his vitality was so abundant that it

could not be contained in his being. It must be always flowing out

into art or into life, taking from life more and more power to give to

art. . . . With Gratia she was out of patience. Gratia was altogether

too complacent an Egeria. Morrison thought she could have given

Christophe more than that.

She made Clowes read the book, but Clowes found it no help. That was

in a story, this was actually happening in London; and besides, the

book had a rhapsodic, dreamlike quality that smoothed away all

ugliness, all difficulties. In life things were definitely ugly, and

it was no good pretending they were anything else.

"Anyhow," said Morrison, "I'm going on."

"You are going to see him again?"

"Yes, I will not be beaten. If I were married to him I should put up

with everything, and I don't see why not being married should make any

difference."

Clowes threw up her hands and said:--

"Well, if you come to grief, don't blame me."

"I'm not going to come to grief," said Morrison. "I'm going to

win--I'm going to win."

It was then that she went out and bought the flowers. Her courage

nearly failed her as she approached the door in the little slummy

street. Suppose he should be angry with her for running away, and

contemptuous of her cowardice! His anger and contempt were not easy

things to face.

She was relieved, therefore, when the dirty little Jewish servant

opened the door and told her Mendel was out. She handed in the flowers

shyly and went away without a word.

* * * * *

Mendel wrote to thank her for the flowers, but said nothing about

going to see her or about what he was doing. She thought he must be

contemptuous of her, though it was not like him to be so stupid as not

to respond to a direct impulse. On the other hand, he had always tried

to impose his authority on her, and she was not going to do his

bidding. Either he must take her on her own level or not at all. She

would make him understand that she too was driving at something, and

that love was to her not an end in itself, much though she might

desire love and its freedom. He had always made her feel that he

regarded love as sufficient for her. She must curl up in it and be

happy while he went on with his work. Against that all the free

instinct in her cried out. A woman was not a mere embryo to be

incubated in a man's passion, hatched out into a wife and a helpmate.

. . . When she tried to imagine what life with him would be like, she

shivered until she thought what life with him might be if she could

bring to it all her force and all her freedom.

At last she began to think that perhaps it was her own fault for not

having left a note or a message with the flowers, which might be

regarded only as a token of sentimental forgiveness. She knew how

easily he was sickened by any sign of Christian

sentimentality--"filthy gush" as he called it. . . . To safeguard

against that and to have done with it once and for all, she wrote to

him and told him that she had been reading "Jean Christophe," and that

it had helped her to understand both his sufferings and his need of

what in an ordinary foolish vain man would have to be condemned.

To this letter he did not reply, and she determined that she would go

and see him. She would take Clowes, in case things had become

impossible and their sympathy had somehow been undermined and

destroyed. Even if it were, she would not accept or believe it, and

she would fight to restore it. A vague intuition took possession of

her by which she surely knew that something strange, perhaps even

terrible, was happening to him, and she felt that he needed her but

did not know his need.

It required some persuasion to take Clowes down to Whitechapel. She

declared that she would stand by her friend whatever happened, but

that she did not wish to be personally mixed up in it. It would, she

said, make her in part responsible for whatever happened, and she did

not think she could bear it. However, Morrison explained that she only

wanted her there in case things were impossible, and that, if they

were not, she could make good her escape as soon as she liked. On that

Clowes consented and they journeyed to the East End.

The little Jewish servant said that Mr. Mendel was engaged. Would she

go up and see if he would soon be disengaged? She ran upstairs and

came down in a moment to ask if they would wait, and to their

surprise, darted past them, along the street, beckoned to them to

follow, and led them to Golda's kitchen. Golda bobbed to them, dusted

chairs for them to sit on, and, not knowing enough English to be able

to talk to them, went on with her ironing. When she had finished that,

she shyly produced an album and showed them all the photographs of

Mendel since he was a baby.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in his studio Mendel was in agitated conversation with Mr.

Tilney Tysoe, who had arrived half an hour before, wagging his hands,

rolling his enormous eyes, almost demented by the lamentable news he

had to tell. Logan had left Oliver!

"When?" asked Mendel.

"A few days ago," said Tysoe. "The poor fellow came round to me one

night after dinner. You know, he often drops in in the evening. Such a

splendid fellow, so sincere, such a force! And his admiration for you

is very touching. He came in and raved like a madman and said terrible

things--oh, terrible things! He told me that I was a fool and did not

know a picture from my foot, and he denounced himself as a scoundrel

and a thief and a liar. He wanted me to destroy all the pictures I had

bought from him, and said they were not worth the stretchers of the

canvas they were painted on. . . . Oh! it was terrible, terrible! He

said that for years he had been pulling my leg, and had got such a

taste for it that he had begun to pull his own leg, and he went on to

say that his soul was rotten with lies; and then he broke into a

torrent of wild, splendid stuff that made my spine tingle. I assure

you, I could not contain my enthusiasm. . . . Oh! he is a splendid

fellow. . . . I can't remember it all very well, but he said that love

is impossible in the world as it is, and that everybody is living in

hate. It sounded most true--most true--though you know I adore my

wife. . . . He said that humanity has tried aristocracy and failed,

and it has tried democracy and failed. It has swung from one extreme

to the other and found satisfaction in neither, and now it must bend

the two extremes together so as to get the electric spark which can

illumine life, and also to create a circle in which life can be

contained. Of course, I haven't got it at all clear, but it was most

inspiring--most inspiring. Certainly life is very unsatisfactory, and

it must be maddening for artists, maddening, though of course it

should drive them on to make a mighty effort. We are all looking to

the artists nowadays, especially since that wonderful exhibition."

"Yes, yes," said Mendel impatiently; "but what about Logan?"

"He told me you had quarrelled with him. Such a pity! Dear me! dear

me! You were such a splendid pair, so sincere. He said it was

irrevocable. But, you know, 'The falling out of faithful friends

renewing is of love.' Have you read the Oxford 'Book of Verse'? A

storehouse of poetry. . . . I came to see you for that reason.

Quarrels ought not to be irrevocable. . . . I have been to see Oliver

too. Poor girl! poor girl! I am keeping their little nest at Hampstead

for them. . . . I told Logan he ought to marry her. Of course, I know,

artists have their own view on that subject, but there is a great deal

to be said for marriage. Most people are married, you know, and a

woman who is not married must feel out of it. Nothing to do with

morality, of course, but you know what women are. They can't bear even

their clothes to be different, and, after all, marriage is only a

garment which we wear for decency's sake."

"But where is Logan?"

"That I don't know," said Tysoe. "Oliver said he would be here. She

said it was your fault that they had quarrelled. . . . Poor girl! So

pretty too! . . . I thought if you made it up with Logan, then he

could make it up with her and we should all be happy again. We might

have a nice little dinner of reconciliation at my house."

"It is no use, no use whatever," said Mendel. "Logan might go back to

her, but he will never come back to me. We have gone different ways,

not only in life, but in our work."

"You won't make it up?" asked Tysoe plaintively.

"No," answered Mendel. "I should like to, but it is impossible. It is

very good of you to try to intervene. Logan was my friend. He is no

longer the same man. He is altered, he is changed, he is done for."

"Nothing could ruin a man like that. It is disastrous, it is terrible

that he should lose his friend and the girl he loves at one stroke.

Kühler, I implore you, I entreat you, if he comes to see you, you will

not refuse him."

"If he comes I will see him, certainly," said Mendel.

"Ah! That is all I want," said Tysoe, beaming hopefully.

"But he will not come."

"We shall find a way. We shall find a way. . . . Ah! superb!" he

added, catching sight of Mendel's green-faced _Mother._ "Ah! The new

spirit at work in your art. Colour! What you have always wanted! . . .

How--how much?"

"Ten pounds," said Mendel.

"May I take it with me? I will send you my cheque."

Mendel wrapped the picture up in brown paper and gave it him, told him

he must go, thanked him for his kindness, and with unutterable relief

watched him go shambling down the stairs.

* * * * *

It was very certain that Logan would not come. There could be nothing

but futile suffering for both of them, and Logan would know that as

well as he. Logan knew himself better than most men, and he must have

felt the finality of that parting in the street. The breach was final

and irrevocable, for Oliver was definitely a part of Logan, as much a

part of him as his hand or his eyes, and Mendel hated Oliver with a

pure, simple, immovable passion. He saw in her embodied the natural

enemy of all that he loved: order, decency, honesty, art, and beauty.

He would have liked to blot out all trace of her everywhere, but she

lived most intensely in his mind. She existed for him hardly at all as

a person, but as an evil, fixed will set on the destruction of Logan,

of friendship, of art, of love, of beauty, of everything that lived

distinctly and clearly and with a flame-like energy. She existed to

drag all down into the glowing ashes of lust and lies. There were

times when she became symbolical of that Christian world that had made

him suffer so intensely. In her was the only discernible will of that

world in which everything was losing shape and form, every flame was

dying down, and everything, good and bad, was being reduced to ashes.

"Good and bad?" thought Mendel. "I don't know what they mean. I know

what is false and what is true. What is false I hate. What is true I

love. That woman is a lie and I hate her, and I wish she were dead."

Logan might hate her too, but he would always try, always hope to love

her, always waste himself in trying to kindle her lust into a passion.

The fool, the weak fool! Let her rot; let her drop down to her own

level, where she could be decently a beast of prey, marked out to be

shunned except by those who were her natural victims. Logan was too

good: but if there was so much good in him, might not something be

done? . . . No. Only Logan's own will could save him. Nothing could be

done for him except out of pity: and who wants pity? Leave that to men

like Tysoe, the kindly, emasculate fools of the world.

Yet Mendel knew that he was bound to Logan. At first he thought it

must be by pity, but it was deeper than that. There was not much

capacity for pity in Mendel. Ruthless with himself, he could see no

reason why others should be spared what he himself was ready to

endure. He had never thought that others might be weaker than he.

Logan, for instance, with ten years' more experience behind him, had

always seemed infinitely stronger.

And so Logan had left Oliver! There must have been a terrible row.

. . . Oh, well, he would go back to her. There would be no end to the

affair, there could be no end unless Logan were strong enough to stand

by himself. But when had he ever tried to do that? Even in his work he

borrowed here and there. Mendel was sure now that all Logan's work had

grown out of his own, and was often, by some amazing sleight of mind,

an anticipation of his own ideas. That explained a good deal: his

growing sense that Logan was really his enemy, and was cramping and

thwarting him, a sense that endured even after the quarrel. It was

strong upon him now. Tysoe had brought Logan vividly to his mind and

made him feel impotent, possessed by a vision of art but unable to

move a step towards it, rather dragged further and further away from

it. He was ashamed when he thought of how often he had excitedly

followed Logan's lead, only to come now to this discovery that he was

brought back to his own inchoate ideas. . . . He was reminded oddly of

the journalist who had interviewed him after his first success and had

produced so grotesque a parody of his innocently conceited remarks.

A tap at the door reminded him of the "two young ladies" who were

waiting to see him. He rushed eagerly to the door and flung it open,

thinking to find healing and refreshment in the sight of Morrison.

Only Clowes was standing there, and in his disappointment her face

seemed to him so foolish and flabby and idiotic that his impulse was

to shut the door. . . . He would bang the door in her face and it

would shut out the Christian world for ever. It did not want him, and

he did not want it, for it was full of lies. . . . Then he heard a

footstep on the stairs and Morrison appeared.

"Come in," he said. "Come in."

"I can't stay long," said Clowes nervously.

"All right," he replied.

Morrison reached the top of the stairs, and he stood looking at her.

"How are you?"

"I'm very well."

She was horrified at the change in him. He looked so tragic and drawn.

"Clowes can't stop long," she said. "But I'll stop, if I may. I should

like to."

"I'm afraid I haven't got anything to show you. I haven't been working

lately."

"It seems to be a pretty general complaint," said Clowes. "Everybody

is so upset by the French pictures. I should like to shake that

Thompson until his teeth rattled. He is so pleased with himself."

"He's an awful man," muttered Mendel. "He seems to think he told

Cézanne and Van Gogh how to do it. There seems to be a whole army of

men ready to take the credit of a thing when someone else has done it.

I suppose they are all talking like mad."

"What is so astonishing is that these things are actually selling, and

people who never sold a picture in their lives dab a few straight

lines on a picture and off it goes."

Mendel laughed.

"I've just sold one," he said. "I came straight back from the

exhibition and painted it. They sell just as if they were a new kind

of toy that is all the rage."

So they kept up a cheerful rattle of conversation until Clowes said

she really must go. No; she would not have tea, but she hoped Mendel

would come to tea with her one day.

He saw her to the front door and ran upstairs again, three steps at a

time.

"Now, then," he said, "what have you come for, and why did you bring

her?"

"In case there was nothing to be said and this visit was another

failure. I'm sick of failure; aren't you?"

"I didn't answer your letter. I thought it was all over."

"But I told you what had made me change."

"It was nothing to do with that. Everything seemed all over, and I'm

not sure even now that it isn't."

"I knew something was happening to you. What is it?"

"I've quarrelled with Logan."

She was silent for a moment or two, and then she said:--

"I'm so glad."

"You didn't like him. Why?"

"I thought him second-rate."

"He isn't that. He has a good mind, and he was a good friend."

"Are you so sure of that?"

"Of some things in him--of his affection, for instance--I am as sure

as I am of myself."

She smiled at him.

"Yes. That is saying a good deal. But why did you quarrel?"

"It was over his woman."

"Oh yes!"

"He has left her."

"Has he been to see you?"

"No. It was a friend of his. I don't know what will happen. They are

bound to come together again. Perhaps they will go through life like

that--parting and coming together again. I can't get it out of my

head. I shall never forget it. It is like my father knocking a drunken

soldier down with a glass. I never forget that, though it was

different. That was just something that I saw. This is in my own life.

I feel as though it had somehow happened through me. I was with him

when he met her, you know, and his whole life changed when he met me.

Perhaps he wasn't meant to take things seriously. . . . I didn't write

to you because I didn't want to drag you into it. But I'm glad you've

come. I'm glad you've come. . . . You know, it was beginning to be a

horror with me that Logan would come in at that door, looking like a

poor, battered, broken little Napoleon, and I should have to tell him

that I was not his friend. . . . You know, he was something vital and

living in my work, but Cézanne has kicked him out. He was only my

friend really in my work, and if that goes everything goes. I couldn't

explain it to him, for he wouldn't understand. He used to laugh at me

for talking about my work to you. I'm afraid I told him more about you

than I ought to have done, but, you see, he was my friend. He laughed

at everything. He ought to have been a very happy man, the way he

laughed at everything."

He placed in her hands his reproduction of Cézanne's portrait of his

wife.

"That's better than Cranach," he said.

"But why is her mouth crooked?" asked Morrison, puzzled by the picture

and by his setting it above Cranach.

"I don't know," replied Mendel, "but Cézanne knew when he did it."

And he tried to explain the making of the picture, but she could not

understand it. However, she could understand and love his enthusiasm,

and they were both happy, talking rather aimlessly and often relapsing

into silence.

"I never can make out," he said, "why you are more wonderful to me

than anybody else. Directly I am with you, I am not so much happy as

free. Even if I am miserable and you don't make me any happier, I want

you with me. . . . You mustn't go away again."

"No. I don't want to go away."

"Why need you actually go? Why shouldn't you stay here now? Stay with

me. Don't go. Don't think of going. I want you always with me. . . .

If you don't like the place we will find another studio and go there.

And if you want to be married we can get married at once. I have

nearly a hundred pounds in the bank."

He knelt by her side and held her knees in his two hands. She took his

face in her hands and said gently:--

"You mustn't talk like that, Mendel. Please don't think I don't love

you because I don't want you to talk like that. It is the first thing

to come into your mind, but with me it is almost the last thing. I

want love to be very, very beautiful before it comes to me. I want

love to be as beautiful to me as that picture of Cézanne's is to you.

Do you understand me?"

He sprang to his feet and turned away from her.

"No, I don't!" he shouted; "no, I don't!"

He was wildly angry. Her words had acted like salt upon his raw

feelings.

"No, I don't understand you. You want love to be like art. You want to

mix love up with art. Love belongs to life. Love is rich and ripe and

warm. You want it to be like the dew on the grass. It can't be!--it

can't be! Love bursts out of a man's body into his soul, and you want

it to live in his soul and to leave him with an impotent, cold body.

You want me to bend to your woman's will, for you know I cannot break

away from you. You are with your soul like Oliver with her body. You

are with your love like Oliver with her lust, and Logan and I are a

pair--a miserable, broken pair."

"Oh!" she cried, hiding her face in her hands. "You are wrong, wrong,

hideously wrong. You have understood nothing at all. Your mind has

rushed away with you. For God's sake be quiet for a little, to see if

we can't get it straight."

His desire was to batter down her opposition, yet he could not but

realize that she was too strong, and that he would only do grievous

and useless harm. He controlled himself, therefore, and was silent. At

last he grunted:--

"Can't you make me see what you mean?"

"It isn't a thing I could say in cold blood," she said.

He moved towards her, but she held up her hands to ward him off.

"No, no!'" she almost whispered. "That only makes my heart grow colder

and colder until it aches."

"Do you mean that you--don't--want me?"

"Foolish, foolish, foolish!" she said. "If you loved me one tenth part

as much as I love you, you would know what I mean."

"I don't," he said simply. "I don't, honestly I don't. Perhaps you are

so beautiful to me that I am blinded with it."

Of the truth of her feeling against him he had no doubt, but though he

laboured bitterly to understand it, he could make nothing of it. He

was driven back on his simple need for her.

"Very well," he said; "if it makes you feel like that for me to touch

you, I never will. Only don't talk of loving me more than I love you.

It isn't true."

"Yes. It was silly of me to say that," she agreed. "It isn't true."

"What do you want, then?"

"I want to share as much of your life as I can."

"It is a bleak, grimy business, a good deal of it."

"I want to share it."

"There is a good deal in it that will horrify you."

"I must get used to that. . . . When I am in London I want you to

promise that you will see me at least once a week."

"There are seven days in the week. Let it be seven times."

She laughed at that.

"And some day," she went on, "I want to take you down into the

country."

He began to suspect her of wanting to meddle with his work.

"I don't want the country," he rapped out. "I am a Londoner. All the

life I care about is in the streets and in the houses, in the

restaurants and the shops, and the costers' barrows and the cinemas

and the picture galleries. That is why I live here, because I love the

coarse, thrumming vitality all round me."

"But _I_ want the country," she said, "and you should know the life

_I_ love."

For a moment it seemed to him that the key to the mystery she talked

of was in his hands. He clutched at it and it evaded him, but his

idolatry of her was shaken, and he began dimly to see her as a

creature like himself, with feelings, thoughts, desires, and a will.

There was no doubt at all about the will, and he had to recognize it.

VIII

OLIVER

THEN began a period of quiet, happy friendship for them both. Mendel

was astonishingly amenable to many of her disciplinary suggestions and

allowed her to cut his hair (though not without thinking of Delilah),

and when she ordered him to get some new clothes he went off

obediently to a friend of Issy's and had a suit made--West End style

at East End prices.

"You will soon have me looking like a Public School gentleman," he

said.

"Never!" she replied. "You will never move like one--thank goodness."

"Why thank goodness?"

"Because they walk about as though they owned the earth and the

fatness thereof, as though the earth existed for them to walk about on

it without their needing even to look at it to see how beautiful it

is."

"That's like Logan," he said. "He used always to be railing against

the English. He said they had no eyes, only stomachs. But I think the

English must be the nicest people in the world, for there is no place

like London for living in."

Indeed, they both thought there could be no place like London. Once or

twice a week they dined together at the Pot-au-Feu and went on to a

party or to a music-hall or to the cinema, which he adored. He said it

gave him ideas for pictures and that there were often wonderful

momentary pictures thrown on the screen.

"The cinema does what the bad artists have been trying to do for

generations. It is a great relief to have it done by a machine. The

artist need not any more try to be a machine. There is no need for him

now to please the public. He can leave all that to the machine and go

straight for art. The few decent people will follow him, and what more

does he want? Art is not for the fools. . . . Logan was wrong. He

wanted art to go to the people. That is all wrong. The people must

come up to art. When they are sick of the machine, art is there, ready

for them." He added naïvely, "I shall be there, waiting for them."

He loved especially the dramas, when they were not clogged and

obscured with sentimentality. The simple values that governed them,

the triumph of virtue and the downfall of evil, appealed to him as

solid, as related to a process, a drama, that went on in himself, and,

he supposed, in everybody else. It worried and annoyed him when

Morrison made fun of these values and jeered at them.

"But things don't work like that," she protested.

"I think they do," he said.

"Good people are often crushed," she replied, "and bad people often

have things all their own way."

"But it is inside people that it happens like that. False people have

their souls eaten away with lies, and true people have free, happy

souls like yours. Being rich or poor, or what you call good or bad,

has nothing to do with it. Yes. It is inside people that it happens

like that, and I am more often the villain than the hero inside

myself."

"It seems absurd to me, and I can't think why you should take it

seriously."

"It is because you are so idiotically good. You have only one side to

your nature. You are like a heroine in your Dickens."

"I'm not. I'm sure I'm not. I'm bad-tempered and mean and unjust."

"You don't even know how bad I am. You have no more idea of what my

life is like than a rose has of an onion's."

"I don't like onions."

"That's the trouble. You don't like the smell of onions, and so you

don't eat them. Very poor people live on bread and onions and they

find them good. I have no patience with you. You want to be a rose

growing in a sheltered English garden."

"I don't. I don't want anything of the kind."

"A wild rose, then; and you have no right to want such a life. You are

not a flower. You are a human being, and you can't have a sheltered

life, or a summer hedgerow life, because you have truth and falsehood

in you, and if you will not live for the truth you will die for the

falsehood. That is why cinemas are good and theatres are rotten. All

the plays are false, because they have forgotten truth and falsehood

and are all about being rich or poor, or old or young, or married or

unmarried, and in the worst plays of all they are about people

pretending to be children so as to get out of the whole thing. I hate

you sometimes when you seem to be trying that game of refusing to be

grown up, denying your own feelings and letting men love you and

pretending you don't know what it is all about."

"I never do that," she cried indignantly.

"I'm not so sure," he said, unable to resist the temptation to press

home the advantage he had won in rousing her out of her placid

happiness. "I'm not so sure. There are too many girls do that."

"I don't. I may have done it. But I have never done it with you. It is

a wicked lie to say anything of the kind."

"You can't blame me if I catch at any idea that will help me to

understand you."

"You never will, if you go grubbing about with your mind."

"Oh! my mind is no good, is it? Then take your hands off my feelings.

They'll understand you right enough."

"No. They won't."

"Why not?"

"Because they're blind."

"Good God! What am I to do, then?"

"Wait."

"How long?"

"Till you can see."

"I never shall see more than I do now. If you love me, why don't you

love me as I am?"

"I do. But you don't know what you are--yet, and you don't know what I

am."

"I know what I want."

"It isn't what I want."

"If you knew at all what I wanted, you would want it too."

"What is it?"

"Love."

"You've got it."

"You don't call this love?"

"I do."

"Then I don't. It is just playing the fool--wasting time."

"It isn't wasting time. We are much better friends than we were."

"I don't want to be friends. I've had enough of friends. They have

never done me any good. It's a silly, thin kind of happiness at best."

"It is better than no happiness at all, which the other would be."

"How can you say that?" he cried, revolted. "How can you say that?

Every thought, every dream I have is centred on it. It is such

happiness that my imagination, is baffled by it."

"Please let us stop talking about it. We are only getting horribly at

cross-purposes."

He had learned when it was wise to stop, but he needed every now and

then the assurance that her serene confidence was shot with doubt.

Once or twice when he had tried to thrust her back on her doubts she

had flared up, and had fought tooth and nail, declaring that she would

never see him again. And, as he knew she meant it, he yielded, and

said that any sacrifice was better than that.

On her part, as she came more nearly to see his point of view, she was

often shaken and tempted to admit that he was right. There was no

looseness or formlessness about his ideas. He lived in a world that

apparently made room for everything, a world in which he stood solidly

on his feet while the waves of life broke upon him, and he only

absorbed into himself that which his passions needed. It was a plain,

simple world, where good and evil were equally true, and, apparently,

largely a matter of chance--a world in which he was gloriously

independent. But was he free? Sometimes she thought that he was

amazingly free. His only prejudice seemed to be against pink, fleshy

young men who had to do nothing for a living--young men like her

brothers, for instance, of whom she had drawn an amusing series of

caricatures showing the effect of introducing Mendel to them. . . .

Sometimes she wondered if her own longing for freedom was not just her

ignorance, just a craven desire to escape from knowing anything about

life, to remain an amused but fundamentally indifferent onlooker. And

when she had to face the suffering she inflicted on him, then she was

often moved to cry out within herself:--

"Oh! Take me, take me! Have your will. It will make an end of it all,

and you will pass on and forget me, but you will no longer suffer

through me."

But she could not bend her own will, which insisted that the treasure

she desired lay through him, and that he needed it even more than she.

It was because of his need that he clung to her through all his

suffering and exasperation. . . . Why, why was he so blind that he

could not see it? Why could he, who was so sure and so strong, not see

what was to her so clear through all her vacillation and all the

confusion of her idealism? . . . She tried to make him read English

poetry, but he could make little of it, and said none of it was worth

the Bible. He declared that Shelley wrote romantical nonsense, because

men could never be made perfect, and it was cruelly absurd to try

it--like dressing a monkey up in human clothes. And he countered by

making her read "Candide."

"When you have been through as much as Cunegonde," he said, "I'll

believe in your purity."

"It isn't purity that I'm fussing about."

"What is it, then?"

"Don't let us begin it all over again."

They found common ground in Blake, whom Mendel consented to read

because Blake was the only English painter who had had any idea of art

at all.

Blake brought them much closer together, and their tussles were

sharper, but less futile and exasperating.

"Why don't you take a lesson from Mrs. Blake?" he asked, after they

had read the Life.

"What? And sit and hold your hand? You'd turn round and hit me."

"I believe I would," he laughed. "By Jove! I believe I would."

* * * * *

He was not easy for her to handle. It was like playing with high

explosives, save that she was not playing.

She said to him once, when they had come very near the intimacy she

desired:--

"I believe you would understand me if only you could let go."

"How can I let go," he roared, "when I feel that you are weighing and

judging and criticizing every word I say, every thing I do?"

And she was silent for a long time. It was a new and dreadful idea,

that she was hemming him in by making him feel that she was judging

him. It was so far from her intention that she protested:--

"I am not judging you. I accept you just as you are."

"Accept!" he grumbled. "Accept! When you keep me at arm's-length!"

"I go as far as we can, then it breaks down."

"What breaks down?"

"I don't know what to call it. Sympathy, if you like."

"Oh! then if it breaks down it isn't any good, and we may as well give

it up for ever. I will learn to shuffle along without you."

"I won't shuffle. I refuse to hear of your shuffling."

"Then you want to know what to do?"

"What?"

"Take your place by my side, walk along with me like a sober, decent

woman."

"But I want to fly with you, hand in hand."

She was elated, exalted. Her eyes shone and she glowed with excitement

and hope. Surely he would understand now! Surely she had found words

for it at last!

"That's rubbish," he said. "Men aren't birds, and they are not angels.

If you want to fly, go up in an airyoplane. That's another machine

like the cinema. It relieves human beings of another mania."

She turned away to hide the tears that had gushed to her eyes. Why did

he waste his strength? Why did he keep his force from entering into

his imagination?

That evening was most miserable for her, and she was glad when it came

to an end.

* * * * *

To add to her difficulties he was making himself ill over his work,

which, as he said, had gone completely rotten, and he did not scruple

to ascribe it to her. He would spend a delightful happy evening with

her and feel that his difficulties were over, that in the morning he

would be able to make a beginning upon all the ideas that were so

jumbled and close-packed in his head. But in the morning he would be

dull and nerveless, and though he might work himself up into a frenzy,

yet he could produce nothing that was any good. His work was easier,

and even a little better, after the evenings when they almost

quarrelled.

Again and again he told himself that he could not go on, that life was

as thick and heavy as the air before a thunderstorm. Often he thought

that this density, this opaqueness, with which he was surrounded,

meant that he must quarrel and break with her once and for all. It

would nearly kill him to do it, but if it must be done, the sooner the

better. Perhaps it was wrong for him to have anything to do with the

Christian world at all. No single friendship or relationship that he

had had in it had been successful or of any profit to him. Little by

little his peace of mind had been taken from him. Everything had been

taken from him, even, now, his work. . . . That he would not have. He

set his teeth and stuck to it, every day and all day, but the few

pictures he turned out did not sell. Cluny would not have them, and

they were rejected by the exhibitions, even by the club of which he

was a member.

Of all this he said not a word to a soul, not even to Morrison, not

even to Golda. His money was dwindling. That put marriage out of the

question. Fate, or the ominous pressure of life, or whatever it was,

played into Morrison's hands.

Every now and then, unable to endure this pressure, he plunged into

excesses. There seemed to be no other way out. The Christian world

refused him. He no longer belonged to his own people. Their poverty

disgusted him. People had no right to be so poor as that, to have no

relief from the joyless daily grind for bread. . . . It was the fault

of the Christians who prayed to the Lord for their daily bread and

stole it from each other because they had forgotten that it was not

given them except in return for daily work.

That was the one strand of sympathy he had left with his

father--Jacob's absolute refusal to receive his daily bread from any

other hands than his own, and his almost crazy refusal to let Issy and

Harry go out and work for other masters. They could work for their

father because he had authority over them, but other masters had no

authority except what they bought or stole.

But a talk with Harry decided Mendel that his people's way, the Jewish

way, was no longer his.

Harry was bored. He had bouts of boredom when he could not endure the

workshop and refused to go near it, however great the pressure of

business might be. Like his father, he said:--

"I want nothing."

"Very well then," said Mendel; "you've got nothing. What are you

grumbling at?"

"But there _is_ nothing."

"Then it is easy to want nothing and you should be satisfied."

"That's it. It is too easy. Work, work, work. Play, play, play. How

disgusting it all is!"

"Why didn't you stay in Paris?"

"I could not bear to be away from the people."

"But if they give you nothing?"

"They have nothing to give. Nothing but old Jews who believe and young

Jews who cannot believe and are nothing."

"It is the same everywhere. The Christians do not believe either."

"But they are fools and can make themselves happy with their cinemas

and their newspapers and their forward women."

"I thought you liked women, Harry."

"I don't like women who like me. . . . I don't want to marry, I don't

want anything. I shall see the old people into their graves, and then

I don't know what I shall do. You are the only one I know who has

anything to live for or any life in him."

"I have little enough."

"Oh God! don't you start talking like me, or we shall all go to the

cemetery at once."

"All right, Harry. I'll keep you going. I'll keep you astonished."

His brother's despondency helped Mendel on a little, but what a mean

incentive to work, to astonish his poor ignorant family!

Very soon there came a terrible day when he had to tell them that he

had not a penny in the world and that he was a failure. It would have

gone hardly with him but for Harry, who espoused his cause, saying

dramatically that he believed in his young brother as he believed in

God, and that Mendel should not be stopped for want of money. And he

went upstairs and came down with his savings, nearly thirty pounds.

"Don't be a fool!" said Jacob. "He will only spend it on drink and

women."

"He is a genius," said Harry simply, and Issy, fired by his brother's

example, said he had saved ten pounds and he would add that. Together

they shouted Jacob down when he tried to raise his voice, until at

last he produced his cash-box and gave Mendel a ten-pound note,

saying:--

"If the Christians are liars when they say they believe in you, we are

not. You must learn that the Christians are all liars and you must

show them that you are the greatest artist in the world."

"I'll show them," mumbled Mendel. "Yes, I'll show them."

* * * * *

He returned to his work with a better determination to succeed, but he

felt more barren than ever, and had nothing to work with but his will.

Into that he gathered all his force and determined to go back and pick

up the thread of his work at the point where Logan had broken into the

weaving of it. He would paint yet another portrait of his mother, and

then he would choose a subject from among the life of the Jews. He

would start again. The Jews believed in him; he would glorify them,

although he no longer believed in but only admired them. When he came

to look at them clearly, they were squat and stunted, because he could

only look at them from a superior height. . . . He turned over his

early work, and studied it carefully, but he could not recover his

childish acceptance of that existence.

For some weeks he did not go near Morrison and frequented the Paris

Café, where he felt hopelessly out of it. No one spoke to him. Hardly

a soul nodded to him. Night after night he sat there despondently,

conjuring up the exciting evenings he had spent there. They were like

ashes in his mouth.

* * * * *

One night, to his amazement and almost fear, someone slipped into the

seat at his side. It was Oliver. She laid her hand on his knee and

said:--

"You look pretty bad, Kühler. Anything wrong?"

"Much as usual. How are you? What'll you drink?"

"Kümmel's mine," she said.

He ordered two Kümmels.

"I'm all right. How are you?"

"I've told you how I am," he said testily.

"All right, all right!" she said, "I haven't been here for a long

time. I wish you'd come and see me, Kühler. We never did get on, but

I'd like to have a talk about old times."

"Old times!" he said. "It seems only yesterday."

"It's nearly a year since I saw you. Logan came back, you know. Mr.

Tysoe was so good. He kept on the house for me. Wasn't it good of

him?"

The waiter brought the Kümmel. She drank hers off at a gulp, and

said:--

"It is like old times to see you, Kühler. I _am_ glad."

"Go on about Logan."

"He went back to that Camden Town place, you know, and we didn't see

each other for nearly two months. It was awful. I couldn't sleep at

nights, and I knew he wouldn't be able to sleep. He never slept, you

know, when we had had one of our hells and I wouldn't speak to him.

He! he!" she gasped and giggled nervously at the memory.

"Go on," said Mendel. He was icy cold. All the strange oppression that

was brooding in his life seemed to gather into a thick snowy cloud

about his head and to fit it like a cap of ice. "Go on."

"Mr. Tysoe gave me money. Wasn't it good of him? He used to see Logan.

Not very often--just occasionally. Logan was painting a wonderful

portrait of me, in my green dress and the corals he gave me. . . .

See: I always wear them, even now."

She thrust her hand into her bosom and produced the string of corals.

"I lived all alone and refused to see anyone. I got so thin, all my

skirts had to be taken in. I knew Logan was jealous, so I didn't see

anyone, and when I heard about the portrait I knew he would come back.

So I used to wear the green dress every evening and wait for him till

twelve, one, two, three in the morning, all alone, in that little

cottage on the Heath. . . . My, I _was_ tired, I can tell you. But I

never was one for getting up in the morning. . . . At last, one night,

he came. He walked in quite quietly, as though nothing had happened.

He had brought the picture with him. My word, it _is_ good. You'd love

it. He had offers for it, but he wouldn't sell it. He said a funny

thing about it. He said: 'It's literature. It isn't art.' So he

wouldn't sell it. . . . We had a glorious time--a glorious time! It

was better even than the beginning."

She stopped to linger over the memory, and she drew her hand

caressingly along her thigh.

"Go on," said Mendel, to break in upon her heavy silence.

"He had plenty of money. He sold everything he did. There were one or

two society ladies, the cats! Common property, I call them."

"So it broke down again," said Mendel.

"Yes. He got---- You know what he could be like. Sometimes I thought

he was going off his head, and I often wonder if he wasn't a bit

touched. . . . I haven't seen him since. I wondered if you had seen

him."

"No. I haven't seen him. He doesn't come back to me."

"Mr. Tysoe hasn't seen him. Cluny has some of his things, but won't

say a word. I think he must have left London."

"I should think so," said Mendel wearily, suddenly losing all

interest. "I should think so."

"I've left Hampstead. I'm living over the Pot-au-Feu, I'm working as a

model. Don't forget me, and if you hear of Logan, do let me know, and

come and have a talk over old times."

She had caught sight of an acquaintance smiling at her and went over

to him, for all the world, as Mendel thought, like a fly-by-night.

He half ran, half staggered out of the place, saying to himself:--

"I must see Morrison. I must see her at once."

* * * * *

He tried to see her next day, but Clowes told him she had gone to the

country.

"I insisted on her going, she was looking so pale. You know when she

feels lonely she won't eat. When she is miserable she gets so shy that

she can't even go into a shop. . . . I have taken a cottage in the

country, just outside London. Two rooms, two shillings a week. Isn't

it cheap? So I packed her off there two days ago."

"When will she be back?"

"I don't know. When she is tired of being alone. She said she wanted

to be alone."

"I want to see her. It is a very important for me to see her."

"I won't have you making her ill," said Clowes.

"I must see her. Will you give me her address, so that I can write to

her?"

Clowes gave him the address, and he wrote saying that life was

intolerable without her.

* * * * *

Morrison did not need his letter, and, indeed, it only reached the

cottage after she had left. She knew he needed her. Never for an

instant was his image absent from her mind, and at night, when she lay

awake, she could have sworn she heard a moaning cry from him. No wind

ever made a sound like that.

There was a pouring rain and a howling wind, but she walked the four

miles to the station and sent him a wire telling him to meet her at

the station in London. He received it just in time and was on the

platform.

He took her in his arms and kissed her.

"What is the matter?"

"Did you get my letter?"

"No. But I knew. What is it?"

"I don't know. My work, I think. I met Oliver last night. It upset me.

But I wanted you for my work. It is like a knife stuck through my

brain. I wanted to be with you, just to see you and to hear your

voice. Nothing else. That part of me feels dead. . . . Oliver is

living over the Pot-au-Feu, where Hetty Finch used to be. I wonder

what's become of her. I expect she has found a millionaire by now.

. . . We'll have the evening together. We'll dine at the Pot-au-Feu.

We might meet Oliver, but I can't think of any other place."

"We'll dine with Clowes, if you like."

"No; I want to go to the Pot-au-Feu."

"Very well. Are you very tired? Your voice sounds tired."

"I'll be all right now I am with you. Mr. Sivwright asked me to go to

the Merlin's Cave to-night. He has to shut it up. I thought I wouldn't

go, but I want to go, if you will come with me."

"It might cheer us up, and you love dancing."

They both thought of the night when he had danced with Jessie Petrie.

"I'm painting a picture of a Jewish market. I want you to see it."

"I'm glad you've gone back. I'm sure it is right."

"What are you doing?"

It was the first time he had asked after her work and a glow of

happiness overcame her.

"Oh! I . . . I'm doing a landscape--just a road running up a hill with

some houses on top."

"Like Rousseau. He was good at roads."

"Mine's just painting. It isn't abstract."

"You can't paint without being abstract," he said irritably. "Even

Academicians can't really imitate, but they abstract without using

their brains. You can't really copy nature, so what's the good of

trying?"

"You can suggest."

"Then it's a sketch and not a picture."

"Perhaps mine is only a sketch," she said rather forlornly, because

she had been rather hopeful of her work.

They went back to his studio, where he showed her his studies and

drawings for the new picture. She saw that he was working again with

his old love of his craft.

They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and had it all to themselves because the

weather was so bad. There were only the goggle-eyed man in the corner

with his green evening paper and Madame Feydeau and Gustave, the

waiter.

Over the dinner Mendel waxed very gay and gave her a very comic

description of the scene when he had gone to his family to confess his

failure. He had a wonderful power of making them comic without

laughing at them.

"They are wonderful people," he said. "They know what is sense and

what is nonsense. If you gave them the biggest problem in the world

they would know what was true in it and what was false. They are

always right about politics and public men. But when it comes to art,

they are hopeless."

"But they believe in you."

"Because I belong to them. They believe in themselves. . . . My mother

was quite sound about Logan. She said it could not go on. I thought it

was for ever. I've been thinking about Logan. He could never be

himself. He was always wanting to be something--something big. I

thought he was big for a long time. But he's just a man. I don't think

Cézanne was ever anything but just a man. It makes one think, doesn't

it? All these people who are written about as though they were

something terrific, all trying to be something more than they

are--just men. And then a quiet little man comes along and he is

bigger than the lot of them, because he has never tried to blow

himself out, but has given himself room to grow."

She had never known him so gentle and tender and wise, and if he had

wanted to love her she would not have denied him. She trusted him so

completely. And he looked so ill and tired. But he only wanted to be

with her, and to talk to her and to hear her voice.

After dinner they went to a cinema to fill in time, and he shouted

with laughter like a boy, threw himself about, and stamped his feet at

the comic film. And she laughed too, and took his hand in hers and

held it in her lap.

"That was good!" he said. "I think I should like to be a cinema actor.

If I get really hard up I shall try it. I might be a star, if I could

learn to wear my clothes properly and could get my hair to lie down in

a solid shiny block."

"I'll go with you. I'm sure I could roll my eyes properly."

"Come along," he said.

It was still raining hard, so they took a taxi to the Merlin's Cave,

though it was not half a mile away.

Everything was the same, even to the two rich young men who entered

just after them. They signed the book, and then, hearing the music,

Mendel seized Morrison by the wrist and dragged her down the stairs.

The place was astonishingly full. Nearly all the tables were occupied,

and they had to take one between the orchestra and the door. Calthrop,

Mitchell, Weldon, Jessie Petrie, everybody from the Paris Café was

there. Oliver was sitting with Thompson and the critic. In a far

corner Clowes was sitting with the young man from the Detmold. There

were models, male and female, all the strange people who for one

reason or another had lived in or on the Calthrop tradition. In the

middle of the room were two large tables which Sivwright had packed

with celebrities--authors, journalists, editors, actors, and

music-hall comedians. They were being fed royally, as became lions,

and there were champagne bottles gleaming on the tables. Tall young

soldiers in mufti began to arrive with chorus-girls who had not

troubled to remove their make-up.

"It's a gala!" said Mendel.

Oliver saw him, and beamed and raised her glass. He rose and bowed

with mock solemnity.

Dancing had not begun. Apparently the lions were to sing for their

supper.

An author read a short play, which he explained had been suppressed by

the censor. To Mendel it sounded very mild and foolish. It was a

tragedy, but no one was moved; the audience much preferred the

music-hall comedian, who followed with a song about a series of

mishaps to his trousers.

The same reedy-voiced poet recited the same poem as before, and the

same foolish girl sang the same foolish song, and it looked as though

the programme would never end.

Mendel was irritated and bored, and called for champagne.

"Waiter!"

But the waiter did not hear him.

"You don't want any champagne," said Morrison.

"Waiter!"

The door by them opened and Logan slipped in. He was almost a shadow

of his old self. The plump flesh had gone from his face, which was all

eyes and bones. He looked famished. His eyes swept round the room,

and, fastening on Oliver, lit up with a gleam of satisfaction. He was

like a starving man looking at a nice pink ham in a shop window. He

moved swiftly towards her, but stopped on seeing the men she was with

and swerved to a table a few yards behind her. From where Mendel was

sitting it looked as though he were peering over her shoulder, an

evil, menacing face.

Mendel shivered, and his eyes suddenly felt dry and hot, as though

they were being pushed out of his face. His throat went dry, and when

he tried to call the waiter he could make no sound. The waiter met his

eyes and came.

"Champagne!" said Mendel.

"Very good, sir. One bottle?"

"Half-a-bottle," said Morrison.

"One bottle," roared Mendel.

A young artist, who knew them both slightly, hearing the order, came

and sat with them.

The dancing began.

"Come and dance," said Morrison.

"No, I don't want to dance. That was Logan who came in. He hasn't seen

me yet."

"Which is Logan?" asked the young artist. "He's done some good things.

Someone told me the other day he had softening of the brain."

"Rubbish!" said Mendel. "They say that of every man who makes a

success, as though it needed something strange to account for it. It's

either softening of the brain, or consumption, or three wives, or he

is killing himself with drink. They talk as though art itself were

some kind of disease."

Logan had seen Mendel, and their eyes met. Mendel felt that Logan was

looking clean through him, looking at him as a ghost might look at a

man whom he had known in life, fondly, tenderly, icily through him,

without expecting him to be aware of the terrible scrutiny. But Mendel

was aware of it, and it chilled him to the marrow. Logan gave no sign,

but stared and stared, and presently turned his eyes away without a

sign, without a tremor. It was like turning away the light of a

lantern. He turned his eyes from Mendel to Oliver in one sweep. No one

else but those two seemed to exist for him, and Mendel felt that he no

longer existed. And more than ever Logan looked as if he were peering

over Oliver's shoulder with those staring, piercing eyes of his from

which the soul had gone out. Only the glowing spark of a fixed will

was left in them to keep them sane and human.

Mendel began to drink. The orchestra behind him sent the rhythm of a

waltz thumping through him. But it went heavily, without music or

tune. One--two--three. It was like having molten lead poured on the

nape of his neck, threatening to jerk his head off his spine. From

where he sat he could not see the dancing-floor, except reflected in a

mirror opposite him. . . . Oh! it was a gay sight and a silly It had

nothing to do with him. He could see nothing but Oliver with the grim,

haggard face looking over her shoulder. He gulped down a glass of

wine. That was better. It made things bearable. He poured out another

glass of wine.

"I think there is more in the Futurists than the Cubists," said the

young artist.

"In art," said Mendel, turning on him savagely, "there is neither past

nor present nor future; there is only eternity. You try to make a

group out of that, and see how you will get on. You can put that at

the head of your manifesto and your group would melt away under it

like the fat on a basted pigeon."

He put out his hand for his glass, but Morrison had taken it and was

drinking.

"You'll make yourself drunk," he said, taking it from her gently.

"I finished it all," she said, with an unhappy smile. "I didn't want

you to drink it, and you looked so tragic I knew it would be bad for

you."

The young artist crept away. Mendel took Morrison's hand and gripped

it.

"I'm glad you are with me," he said. "Look at Logan!"

Never taking his eyes off Oliver, Logan had begun to move towards her

with his hand in his breast pocket. He had nearly reached her, with

his eyes glowing almost yellow under the electric light, when he

changed his mind, swung round, and went to another table and sat with

his head down, biting his nails.

The dancing was fast and furious, and this time it was the flute which

played an obbligato, thin, fantastic, and comic, real silvery fun,

like a trickle of water down a crag into a pool in sunshine.

Thompson went to the dancing-floor with a girl in fancy dress--a

columbine's costume. That seemed to relieve Logan, who jumped to his

feet, walked quickly round to Oliver, bent over her, and spoke to her.

Her face wore an expression of amazed delight. Her eyes were drawn to

his, and though she shrank under them, she seemed to go soft and

flabby: she could not resist them. There was no menace in Logan now,

only an attitude of fixed mastery, an air of taking possession of her

once and for all, of knowing that at last he would get the longed-for

satisfaction.

They spoke together for a little longer, then she rose and put her

hand up and caressed his cheek and neck as though it hurt her to see

them so thin--as though, indeed, she refused to believe what her eyes

told her.

They walked past Mendel and Morrison without seeing them. Mendel

gripped Morrison's hand until she felt that the blood must gush out of

her nails. Logan opened the swing-door for Oliver, devouring her with

his burning eyes, in which there was a desperate set purpose of which

he seemed to be almost weary. So frail he looked, as if but a little

more and he would loose his hold even on that to which he clung. And

Oliver smiled at him with a malicious promise in her eyes that he

should have his will, that his hold should be loosened and his

weariness come to an end. Clearly she knew that he had no thought

outside herself.

And outside the two of them Mendel had no thought. His mind became as

a tunnel down which they were moving, and soon they were lost to his

sight and he was left to wait. There his thoughts stopped, while he

waited.

IX

LOGAN MAKES AN END

ALL night long he paced up and down his studio. His thoughts would not

move, but went over and over the scene in the Cave, and probed vainly

in the darkness for the next move. When he heard footsteps in the

street he hung out of the window, making sure that it must be Logan

come for him. But no one stopped at the door, and soon within himself

and without was complete silence, save for his footsteps on the floor

and the matches he struck to light cigarette after cigarette, though

he could not keep one of them alight.

His imagination rejected the facts and refused to work on them. The

scene in the Cave had left an impression upon his retina, like that of

the cinema--just a plain flat impression containing no material for

his imagination. And yet he knew that he was deeply engaged in

whatever was happening.

With his chin in his hands he leaned out of his window and watched the

dawn paint the eastern sky and the day wipe out the colours. Doors

were opened in the street. Windows were lit with the glow of the

fires, and the day's activity had begun, but he had no share in it,

for he knew that this day was like no other. For him it was a day lost

in impenetrable shadow, and he could not tell what should take him out

of it. And still he expected Logan would come.

He heard Rosa get up and go downstairs and light the fire and bawl up

to Issy to jump out of his bed, filthy snoring sluggard that he was.

He heard the voices of the children and the baby yelling. . . . How

indecent, how abominable it was to cram so many people into one small

house!

At the usual time he went over to his mother's kitchen for breakfast,

and gulped down his tea, but made no attempt to eat. Golda looked at

him reproachfully, but said nothing, for she saw that he was in some

deep trouble.

After breakfast, as usual, he went for his walk down through

Whitechapel almost as far as Bow Church and back.

In his studio when he returned he found a policeman, who said:--

"Mr. Mendel Kühler?"

"Yes."

The policeman handed him a letter from Logan who had scrawled:--

"I believe in you to the end."

To the end?

"Is he dead?" asked Mendel.

"Next door to it," said the policeman. "The woman's done in."

"Where?"

"At the Pot-au-Feu, Soho."

"Where is he now?"

"Workhouse infirmary. If you want to see him the police will raise no

objection."

"Thank you," said Mendel.

He asked the direction and set out at once.

The workhouse was a dull grey mass of buildings, rising out of a dull

grey district like an inevitable creation of its dullness, and it

seemed an inevitable contrast to the Merlin's Cave, so that it was

right that Logan should walk out of the glitter into it. This was the

very contrast that Mendel's imagination had been vainly seeking, and

now, with the violence of a sudden release, his thoughts began to work

again. . . . Oliver was dead. That was inevitable too. But why?

Logan had surrendered to her. They would go home from the Merlin's

Cave to the Pot-au-Feu, to Hetty Finch's room. He would surrender to

her absolutely, because she had willed his destruction and could not

see that his destruction meant her own. She wanted recognition,

acknowledgment that her vitality was more important than anything else

in the world, and she had brought Logan to it. There had been a cold,

set purpose in his eyes last night--an intellectual purpose. The

equation was worked out. She could have what she wanted, at a price.

She could destroy the will and the desire of a man, but not his mind,

not his spirit, which would still be obedient to a higher will, and

that would break her as she had broken.

Very bare and grim was the waiting-room in which Mendel had to bide

until the nurse came for him. Its walls were of a faded green, dim and

grimy, and when the door was opened as people went in or out, there

was wafted in a smell of antiseptics. But as his thoughts gathered

force the room seemed to be filled with a great light, which revealed

beauty in the poor people waiting patiently to see their sick. They

became detached and pictorial, but he could not think of them in terms

of paint. His mind had begun to work in a new way, and he felt more

solid, more human, more firmly planted on the ground, as though at

last he was admitted to a place in life. It mattered to him no more

that he was a Jew and strange and foreign to the Christian world.

There were neither Jews nor Christians now. There were only

people--tragic, wonderful people . . . He even forgot that he was in

love. All his mind was concentrated upon Logan, who was now also

tragic and wonderful, a source of tragedy and wonder, and his whole

effort was to discover and to make plain to himself his share in the

tragedy: not to weigh and measure and to wonder whether at one point

or another he could have stopped it. Nothing could have stopped it.

There was no room for judgment in this tragic world.

A nurse came to fetch him.

She said:--

"He is very weak, but he will be strong enough to know you. Don't

excite him."

She led him into the bare, white ward, across which the sun threw

great shafts of light, to Logan's bedside. At the head of the bed a

policeman was sitting with his helmet on his knees, staring straight

in front of him. He turned his eyes on Mendel, who thought he looked a

very nice man, something amusingly imperturbable in this racking world

of tragedy.

He stood by the bedside and looked down at Logan, in whose face there

was at last the noble, conquering expression at which, through all his

foolish striving, he had always aimed. His brow was strong and

massive, his mouth relentless as Beethoven's, his nose sharp and

stubborn, and there was something exquisite and sensitive in the drawn

skin about his eyes. From his white brow his shock of black hair fell

back on the pillow.

His hand was outside the grey coverlet. Mendel took it in his. Logan

opened his eyes, and into them came an expression of almost

incredulous surprise, of ecstatic, intolerable happiness. He had

wakened out of his dream into his dream, to be with Mendel, to have

gone through the very depths to be with Mendel. His hand closed tight

on his friend's and his lids drooped over his eyes.

He opened them again after a few moments and said:--

"You!"

The nurse placed a chair for Mendel, and he sat down and said:--

"How are you feeling?"

"Pretty weak. I dreamed of your coming, but I didn't really believe

it. . . . I've done it, you know."

"Yes."

"What are you doing?"

"I've painted another portrait of my mother. A good one, this time.

She is sitting in a wooden chair as she always sits, with her hands

folded on her stomach. And I am planning a picture of a Jewish market,

something bigger than I have attempted yet."

"I see. Good--good. . . . We must work together. We can do it now."

"Yes," said Mendel, rather mystified. It was very strange to have

Logan talking like that, as though he were going back to the first

days of their friendship.

"It is such peace," said Logan; and indeed he looked as if he were at

peace, lying there so still and white, with the hard strain gone from

his eyes, in which there was none of the old roguish twinkle, but an

expression of pain through which there shone a penetrating and most

tender light.

"Peace," murmured Logan again. "Tell me more. There is only art."

"There is nothing else," answered Mendel, carried away on the impulse

of Logan's spirit and understanding what he meant when he said "we."

Life, the turbulent life of every day, the life of desire, was broken

and had fallen away from him, so that he was living without desire,

only in his enduring will, which had lost patience with his desires

and had destroyed them.

Through Mendel trembled a new and strange elation. He recognized that

his friendship with Logan was just beginning, and that he was absolved

from all share in the catastrophe, if such there had been. And from

him too the turbulent life of desire fell away, and he could be at one

with his friend. There was no need to talk of the past--it was as

though it had never been.

He described the design he had made for his picture: two fat old women

bargaining, and a strong man carrying a basket of fruit on his head.

"A good beginning," said Logan. "I . . . I could never get going. I

was always overseen in my work."

"Overseen!" said Mendel, puzzled by the word.

"Yes. I was always outside the picture, working at it. . . . Too . . .

too much brains, too little force."

"I see," said Mendel, for whom a cold finger had been put on one of

his own outstanding offences against art. For a moment it brought him

to an ashamed silence, but Logan's words slipped so easily into his

understanding and took up their habitation there, that he was

powerless to resent or to attempt to dislodge them.

"Overseen," Logan repeated, with an obvious pleasure in plucking out

the weeds from their friendship, in the fair promise of which he found

peace and joy. "That was the trouble. It couldn't go on. . . . City

life, I think. Too much for us. Things too much our own way. . . .

Egoism. . . ."

"I know that I am feeling my way towards something and that it is no

good forcing it," said Mendel.

An acute attack of pain seized Logan, and he closed his eyes and was

silent for a long time, with his brows knit in a kind of impatient

boredom at having to submit to such a thing as pain.

"They've been very good to me," he said. "Given me everything as if I

were really ill."

He sank back into pain again.

Mendel looked across at the policeman with a feeling of irritation

that he should be there, a typical figure of the absurd chaotic life

which had fallen away, a symbol of the factitious pretence of order

which could only deceive a child.

"Can't you leave me alone with him?" he whispered.

The policeman shook his head.

"No, sir."

"You mustn't worry about outside things," said Logan, with an effort.

"We _are_ alone. . . . Have you found a new friend?"

"No."

"You will. Better men than I have been. . . . Do you see that girl

still?"

"Yes."

"She was the strongest of us."

"How?"

Logan made no answer, and gave a slight shake of impatience at

Mendel's not understanding him.

"Something," he said, "that I never got anywhere near. . . . I . . . I

was overseen in that too."

The blood drummed in Mendel's temples. Logan's cold finger went

probing into his life too, and showed him always casting his own

shadow over his passions. In love it was the same as in art. . . . It

was very odd that, with every nerve at stretch to understand Logan and

how he had been brought to smash the clotted passion of his life, it

should only be important to understand himself, and that he should be

able to understand so coldly, so clearly, so easily.

And now the presence of the policeman became a relief. It was a

guarantee that the whole visible world would not be swept away by the

frozen will in Logan, which was like a floe of ice bearing everything

with it, nipping at Mendel's life, squeezing it up high and dry and

bearing it along. He felt that if the policeman were to go away he

would be drawn down into the doom that was upon Logan, into the valley

of the shadow, even while the good sun came streaming in through the

tall windows. . . . He had lost all the emotional interest which had

kept him awake through the night. . . . It had been simple enough.

There had been himself, Logan and Oliver, three people, living in

London the gay, reckless life of artists in London, a city so huge

that men and women could do in it as they pleased. Oliver and he had

hated each other, and Logan had had to choose between them. He had

chosen wrongly and had put an end to his misery in the only possible

way.

Mendel fought back out of the shadow--back to the policeman, and the

sick men lying in the rows of beds, and the dead man lying in the bed

which had just been surrounded by a screen, and the simple, wonderful

people in the waiting-room downstairs, and the sun streaming through

the windows, and the teeming life outside in London--wonderful,

splendid London, the very heart of the world. . . . It was well for

Logan to lose sight of these things. He was a dying man. But Mendel

was alive, never more alive than now, in face of the shadow of death,

and he would not think the thoughts of a dying man unless they could

be shaped in the likeness of life. He gathered together all his

forces, summoned up everything that urged him towards life and towards

art, and of his own strong living will plunged after Logan, no longer

in obedience to Logan's frozen purpose, but as a friend giving to his

friend the meed that was due to him.

He took Logan's hand and pressed it, and chafed it gently to make it

warm, and Logan smiled at him, and an expression of anguish came into

his face as the warmth of his friend wrapped him round, penetrated

him, thawed and melted his purpose, with which he had lived for so

many empty, solitary days until it had driven him to make an end. The

coldness in his friend touched Mendel's heart and was like a stab

through it, and he felt soon a marvellous release, as if his blood

were flowing again, and it seemed that the weaknesses on which Logan

had laid his finger were borne down with him into the shadow.

Mendel remembered Cézanne's portrait of his wife, and how he had

intended to tell Logan that it had made him feel like a tree with the

sap running through it to the budding leaves in spring.

He told him now, and added:--

"It doesn't matter that I did not understand you in life."

"No," said Logan. "Don't go away!"

"I'll stay," replied Mendel; "I'll stay."

Then he was in a horrible agony again, as the marvellous clarity he

had just won disappeared. Logan knew what he was doing, that he was

taking with him all the weaknesses and vain follies which had so

nearly brought them both to baseness, and Mendel knew that Logan must

continue as a powerful force in his work; but he crushed the rising

revolt in himself, the last despairing effort of his weakness, and

gave himself up to feeding the extraordinary delight it was to the

poor wretch, lying there with his force ebbing away, to give himself

up to a pure artistic purpose such as had been denied him in his

tangled life. Through this artistic purpose Logan could rise above the

natural ebbing process of his vitality, which sucked away with it the

baseness and the folly he had brought into his friend's life. He could

rejoice in the contact of their minds, the mingling of their souls,

the proud salute of this meeting and farewell. It was nothing to him

that he was dying, little enough that he had lived, for he knew that

he had never lived until now.

The nurse came and said the patient must rest.

"Don't go away!" pleaded Logan.

"I'll wait," said Mendel, patting his hand to reassure him.

"Half-past two," said the nurse as she followed Mendel out. "What a

remarkable man!" she added. "What a tragedy! I suppose the girl was to

blame too."

"Blame?" said Mendel, rather dazed at being brought back to customary

values. "Blame?"

* * * * *

He went down to the dingy waiting-room and sat there subdued,

cowering, exhausted. He felt very cold and miserable. It was so

terrible waiting for a thing that had happened. The physical fact

could make no difference. . . . Logan had made an end, a very complete

and thorough end. . . . Oh! the relief of it, the relief of having

Logan for his friend at last, of having seen him freely and fully

tasting at last his heart's desire, of being himself brought up to

that level, that pure contact with another human being, for which he

had always longed. . . . That desire in both of them had been violated

and despoiled, God knows how. Lies? Lust? Profanation of the holy

spirit of art? . . . What words could describe the evil that

everywhere in life lay in wait for the adventurous, letting the

foolish and the timid, the faint of heart and the blind of soul, go

by, and waiting for strong men who walked with purpose and a single

mind?

* * * * *

At half-past two the nurse came to fetch him.

"He is very weak now," she said.

Logan's face wore a noble gathering serenity. He was too weak to talk

much, and only wanted Mendel to hold his hand and to talk to him about

art, about pictures "they" were going to paint, and about pictures

they had both loved: Cranach, Dürer, Uccello, Giotto, Blake, Cézanne.

"Good men, those," said Logan. "Good company."

"Good, decent, quiet little men."

"We shall do good things."

His hand closed more tightly on Mendel's, who surrendered himself to

the force of the ebb in his friend, felt the cold, salt waves of death

close about him and drag him out, out until Logan was lost, and with a

frightful wrench all that was dead in himself was torn away, and he

was left prostrate upon the fringes of his life. . . . He became

conscious to find himself leaning over Logan, gazing at his lips, with

his own lips near them, waiting for the breath that would come no

more.

It was finished. Logan had made an end.

Turning away, Mendel saw through the window the lovely grey-blue sky,

fleecy with mauve-grey clouds heaped up by the driving

wind--beautiful, beautiful. . . .

X

PASSOVER

IT was many days before Mendel could take up his work again. His mind

simply could not express itself in paint.

His first clear thought as he emerged from the numbness of the crisis

was for Morrison, and to her he wrote, telling her what had happened,

describing in minute detail his experience in the hospital, and adding

that he was without the least wish to see her, and would write to her

if his life ever became again what it had been before Logan's violent

end.

It seemed to him that Logan had claimed him, that he was destined to

go through life with Logan, a dead man, for sole companion, and always

behind Logan was the ominous and dreadful shadow of Oliver, from whom

he had thought to escape those many months ago.

His isolation was complete. It seemed that he had not a friend in the

world, and there was not a soul towards whom he could move or wished

to move. He could only rake over the ashes of the dead past and marvel

that there had ever been a flame stirring in them. And as he raked

them, he thrust into them much that only a short while ago had been

living and delightful.

What had happened? Youth could not be gone while he was yet so young,

but he felt immeasurably old, and, in his worst condition, outside

Time, which took shape as a stream flowing past him, bearing with it

all his dreams, loves, aspirations, hopes, thoughts. When he tried to

cast himself into it, to rescue these treasured possessions, he was

clutched back, thrown down, and left prostrate with his eyes darkened

and the smell of death in his nostrils.

Sometimes he thought with terror that he had plunged too far, had

given too much to Logan, had committed some obscure blasphemy, had

been perhaps "overseen" even in that moment when the weakness and all

that was dead in him had been wrenched away. And he said to himself:--

"No. This is much worse than death. It is foolish to seek any meaning

in death, for death is not the worst."

It was no good turning to his people, for he knew that he was cut off

from them. They were confined in their Judaism, from which he had

broken free. That was one of the dead things which had been taken from

him.

His mother could not help him, because she could not endure his

unhappiness. The pain of it was too great for her, and he had to

invent a spurious happiness, to pretend that he was working as usual,

though with great difficulty, and that, as usual, he was out and

about, seeing his friends. And in a way this pretence gave him relief,

though he suffered for it afterwards. He suffered so cruelly that he

was forced by it into making an effort to grope back into life.

He was able to take up his work again, and the exercise of his craft

soothed him, though it gave him no escape. The conception of his

market picture was dead. It was enclosed in Judaism, from which he was

free. Yet he had no other conception in his mind, and he knew that any

picture he might paint must spring from it. So he clung to the dead

conception and made studies and drawings for its execution.

Some of these drawings he was able to sell to Tysoe, who worried him

by coming to talk about Logan and was nearly always ashamed to leave

the studio without buying. Mendel was saved from borrowing of his

people, which had become repugnant to him now that he no longer

belonged to them.

It was through Tysoe's talk that he was able to push his way through

the tragedy of Logan and Oliver back to life. Tysoe insisted that the

cause of it was jealousy, but Mendel knew that Logan was beyond

jealousy, and, piecing the story together, he saw how Oliver had set

herself to smash their friendship because it fortified in her lover

what she detested, his intellect, which, because she could not satisfy

it, stood between him and his passion for her. If anyone was

responsible it was she, for she had tried to smash a spiritual thing

and had herself been smashed. . . . And Mendel saw that had he tried

to smash the relationship between Logan and Oliver he too would have

been broken, for that also was a spiritual thing, though an evil. And

he saw that, but for Morrison, he must have tried to smash it. His

obligation to her had given him the strength to resist, to make his

escape. Oliver had triumphed, evil had triumphed, and she and Logan

were dead and he had to grope his way back to life, and if he could

not succeed in doing that, then she and evil would have triumphed

indeed, and what was left of him would have to follow the dead that

had gone with Logan.

He sought the society of his father and of the old Jews, the friends

of the family, and was left marvelling at their indifference to good

and evil. They knew neither joy nor despair. They had yielded up their

will to God, upon Whom, through fair weather and foul, their thoughts

were centred. They lived in a complete stagnation which made him

shudder. Their lives were like stale water, like unmoved puddles, from

which every now and then their passions broke in bubbles, broke

vainly, in bubbles. Nothing brought them any nearer to the God upon

Whom their thoughts were centred, and only Time brought them any

nearer to the earth.

And yet Mendel loved them in their simple dignity. They had a quality

which he had found nowhere in the Christian world, where men and women

had their thoughts centred on the good, leaving evil to triumph as it

had triumphed in Oliver. . . . She had wanted good. With all the power

of her insensate passion, her blind sensuality, she had wanted love,

the highest good she could conceive. . . . But these old Jews were

wiser: they wanted God, Whom they knew not how to attain. Yet God was

ever present to them.

In Mendel, too, this desire for God became active and kindled his

creative will. He plunged into his work with a frenzy, but soon

recognized that he was committing the old offence and was "overseen."

. . . Yet how shall a man approach his God if not through art?

"Something is lacking!" cried Mendel desperately. "Something is

lacking!"

His imagination flew back to that last sublime moment of friendship

with Logan, but it lacked warmth. It seemed that he could not take it

back into life with him, or that until he had established contact with

life its force could not be kindled. . . . Oh! for sweet, comfortable

things--flowers, and rare music, a white, gleaming tablecloth, and

good meats!

He thought, with envy, of Edward Tufnell and his wife going along the

road on either side smiling at each other, so happily smiling. And

then he thought with more satisfaction of the old Jews. They were the

wiser and the more solid. They walked in the middle of the way, and

good and evil went on either side and neither could attain them. . . .

His thoughts swung between those two extremes like a pendulum, and out

of the momentum thus created grew a force in his mind which began to

find its way towards the God he was seeking. But it was only in his

mind. His force, his passion, were left slumbering in the hypnotic

sleep imposed on them by the tragedy.

Yet the mental impulse kept him working in a serene ecstasy. He could

make the design for his picture, and simplify his figures into a form

in which he knew there was some beauty, or at least that it could hold

beauty and let no drop of it escape.

He could return then to his normal life, and made Golda very happy by

joking with her and spending many evenings in her kitchen.

"You should take a holiday," she said. "You look tired out."

"I will," he said, "when the spring comes. I am going to be an artist,

but I am afraid it will not mean carriages and horses and the King

commanding his portrait to be painted."

* * * * *

He had the very great joy of beginning to understand Cézanne's delight

in the intellectual craft of painting and to see why he had neglected

the easier delights of handicraft and the mere pleasure of the eye.

But the more he understood, the harder it became to finish his

picture. He slaved at it, but there was still no beauty in it.

He would not surrender. It would have been so easy to slip back to

fake a pictorial quality. He had only to go to the National Gallery to

come out with his head buzzing with ideas and impressions. He had only

to go into the street to have a thousand mental notes from which to

give his work a human and dramatic quality.

He stuck to it and slaved away until he was forced to give in.

"You devil!" he said, as he shook his fist at the picture. "You empty

jug!"

But there was some satisfaction in it, unfinished failure as it was,

and he wanted Morrison to see it.

He wrote and asked her to come.

* * * * *

She and Clowes were in the country, painting, and they wired to him to

come and stay with them for a week. Clowes wrote to tell him that she

could put him up in the farm of which her cottage was a part.

With her letter he went racing over to see his mother.

"I'm going away," he said, "I'm going away to the country. The

Christian girl has a house in the country and I am going to stay in

it."

"You will have fresh air and new milk to make you well again," cried

Golda, scarcely able to contain her joy at seeing him once more his

happy, elated, robustious self. "You will be well again, but you

should have done with that nonsense about the Christian girl. A

sparrow does not mate with a robin, and a cock robin is what you are."

"Yes. I'm a robin," said Mendel, and he whistled blithely,

"Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! I shall go on the halls as a

whistler. Tit-a-weet! and I shall make three hundred pounds a week.

Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet!"

Golda laughed at him till the tears ran, so happy was she to have him

come back to her.

"It is not nonsense about the Christian girl," he said. "She is going

to turn me into a Public School gentleman, and I shall bring her to

see you, so that you can know for yourself that it is not nonsense."

"It is not the girl who is nonsensical, but you."

"Tit-a-weet!"

"I will bake her a Jewish bread and you shall take it to her. Yes.

Bring her to me and I will thank her for bearing with you."

"Tit-a-weet! Tit-a-weet!"

"Cock robin!"

* * * * *

His luggage consisted of a brown-paper parcel, a paint-box and two

canvases.

Morrison met him at the station. She was glowing with health and good

spirits and began to tease him at once about his luggage, of which she

insisted on taking charge.

"It's the loveliest little cottage!" she said; "only two rooms. . . .

I hope you don't mind walking along the road. There is another way

through the fields, but I daren't try to find it; besides, it goes

through the woods, and I don't want you to see any woods before you

have been to mine. I don't believe there'll be room for you in the

cottage. You'll have to sit in the garden and have your meals handed

out to you, among the chickens and the pigs."

"Pigs?" said Mendel, "I want to draw pigs. Marvellous animals!"

"These are the most marvellous pigs that ever were."

So they chattered in a growing glee as they walked along the winding

road up into the hills. They were unwilling to let their deep thoughts

emerge until they had been caught up in the beauty of the place, the

serene lines of the comfortable folding hills, the farmsteads tucked

in the hollows, the rich velvet plough-lands, the blue masses of

woods, the gorse-grown common, and the single sentinels the trees, and

the hedges where the birds sang and twittered, Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet!

. . . And over the hills hung the wide sky, vast and open, with great

clouds that seemed to be drawn from the edge of the earth and sent

floating up and up to show how limitless was the space above the

earth.

For the first time Mendel had no sting of anger at the exhilaration in

the English girl, no desire to pluck her out from the surroundings of

the lovely English country in which it seemed to be her desire to lose

herself. She was one with the rich fields and the mighty trees and the

singing birds in the hedges, and when his heart sang Tit-a-weet, he

knew it for a comic Cockney note. It was he who was at fault, not she,

and she was the very comfort he had come to seek.

The farmer's wife received him with a kindly pity--the poor, pale

London foreigner--and told him he must have plenty of good plain

country food, plenty of milk, plenty of fresh air.

"I do the cooking for Miss Clowes," she said, "and if you'll excuse my

saying so, the young ladies take a deal of tempting."

Mendel thought her a wonderful woman, his room a wonderful room, the

cottage a wonderful cottage, and the place the finest in the world.

The air was rare and buoyant and he had never felt so free and so

strong. His life in London looked to him like a bubble which he could

break with a touch or with a puff of his breath. But he was reluctant

to break it yet, for the time had not come.

The girls showed him their work and he praised it, and began to talk

of his own picture. Clowes led him on to explain what she called the

modern movement, which she could not pretend to understand.

Conversation that first evening was all between Clowes and Mendel,

while Morrison sat silent, curled up on the floor by the fire, gazing

into it, sometimes listening, sometimes dreaming, sometimes shaking

with a happy dread as she thought how near she was to her heart's

desire. It had been for so long her central thought that she would

take him down to the country and get him away from the terrible

pressure of London upon his spirit, so that she could see released in

him, perhaps slowly, perhaps painfully, what she loved--the vivid,

clear vitality. And now she had won. She had him sitting there within

reach, with good, faithful Clowes, and already she could feel the new

glow of health in him. Almost she could detect a new tone in his

lovely rich voice. . . . Sometimes, as she gazed into the fire, her

eyes were clouded with tears. It seemed so incredible that she could

have won against the innumerable enemies, invisible and intangible,

against whom action had been impossible, even if she had known what to

do.

She had been happy enough with Clowes in this place, but now she could

not help a wickedly ungrateful desire that Clowes should be spirited

away.

* * * * *

Clowes absented herself in the day-time, but Mendel had very little

energy, and for the most part of the day sat by the fire brooding over

the bubble of his London life, which he knew he must break with a

touch. Often Morrison sat with him, and neither spoke a word for hours

together.

On the fifth day, when the sun shone so that it was wicked to be

indoors, Morrison suggested lunch in the woods. Clowes excused

herself, but Mendel agreed to go with her, and the farmer's wife

packed them a basket of food. They set out gaily, over the common, up

the rolling field green with winter corn, down through the jolly

farm-yard full of gobbling turkeys and strutting guinea-fowl, under

the wild cherry-trees to the woods, where in a clearing they made a

fire, and Morrison, declaring that she was a gipsy, sang the only song

she could remember, "God Save the King," and told his fortune by his

hand. He was to meet a dark woman who would make a great change in his

life, and money would come his way, but he must beware of the Knave of

Clubs.

Entering into her mood, he insisted that they must act a Wild West

cinema drama, and he rescued her from Indians and a Dago ravisher, and

in the end claimed her hand from a grateful father; and so hilarious

did they become that the cinema drama turned into an opera, and he was

Caruso to her Melba. In the end they laughed until they were

exhausted, and decided that it was time for lunch.

* * * * *

After they had eaten they were silent for a long time, and at last,

rather to her surprise, she found herself beginning to explain to him

that this was love, this the heaven at which she had been aiming, the

full song whereof they had played the first few notes as boy and girl

at the picnic and again in the dewy grass on the Heath. And she told

him quite simply that she had loved him always, from the time when

they had met on the stairs at the Detmold, and even before that,

though she could not remember clearly. And she told him that love

dwelt in the woods and the hedgerows, in the sweet air and the song of

the birds, not only in the springtime but in the harsh winter weather

and in the summer heat of the sun. . . .

"Oh, Mendel," she said, "I have been wanting you to know, but it

seemed that you would never know while you looked for love in the heat

and the dust of London."

And he as simply believed her. It was lovely there in the woods, among

the tall grey-green pillars of the trees, with the pale yellow

sunlight falling on the emerald of the moss and the russet of the dead

bracken, and the brilliant enamel of the blackberry leaves. He was

overcome with his exquisite delight, and she, to comfort him, held him

in her arms, her weary shaggy faun, so bitterly conscious of his own

ugliness. She soothed him and caressed him, and won him over to her

own serene joy, which passed from her to him in wave upon wave of

flooding warmth, melting the last coldness in his soul, healing the

last wounds upon his spirit.

He roused himself, flung up his head, and began to whistle:--

"Tit-a-weet!"

And he looked so comical that she laughed.

"That isn't anything like a bird," she said.

"It is. It is very like cock robin."

To their mutual amazement it seemed entirely unnecessary to discuss

the future or the past, and the present demanded only happy silence.

Here in the enchantment of the woods was love, and it was enough.

While they stayed in the woods they hardly talked at all, but as they

walked home he became solemn and said, as though it pained and puzzled

him:--

"We are no longer young."

"We shall never be anything else," she protested, for she was pained

by the change in his mood.

"Youth passes," he said.

And her exhilaration died in her, for she knew she had touched his

obstinacy. He saw her droop and was sorry, and began to whistle and to

laugh, but she could not be revived. She had thought to have secured

him, to have made him safe with the charm of love for ever, but she

was sure now that the hardest of all was yet to come.

In the evening, as they sat by the fire in the little white room,

Mendel and Clowes talking and Morrison curled up on the floor gazing

into the coals, he suddenly ceased to hear Clowes' voice, and saw very

clearly the bubble of his life in London before him--Mr. Kuit, Issy,

Hetty Finch, Mitchell, Logan and Oliver--Logan and Oliver leaving the

Merlin's Cave and going out into the street and walking home to the

Pot-au-Feu, up the narrow, dark stairs to Hetty Finch's room. . . . He

put out his hand to touch the bubble and it broke, and with a

shuddering, gasping cry he heard Clowes saying:--

"On the whole I don't think all this modern stuff can be good for

anything but decoration."

And he began to think of his own picture, which was full of life.

Wherever he picked up the design he could follow it all round the

picture, and through and through it, beyond it into the mystery of

art, and out of it back into life. It was poised, a wonderful, lovely

created thing, with a complete, unaccountable, serene life of its own.

The harsh, gloomy background of London fell away, and in its place

shone green hills and a clear blue sky, fleecy with mauve-grey clouds.

. . .

Following the clouds, he came easily back to life again, to the two

girls sitting in this wonderful snug cottage, and he was overwhelmed

by a feeling that he was sharing their comfortable happiness on false

pretences. It was not to him the perfectly satisfying wonder they so

obviously wished it to be for him, and at last he could not contain

himself, and burst out:--

"You must not expect me to be happy. I cannot be happy. I will swing

up to it as high as ever you like, but I must swing back again.

Happiness is not life, love is not life, any more than misery is life.

If I stay in happiness I die as surely as if I stay in misery. I must

be like a pendulum. I must swing to and fro or the clock will stop.

. . . I can't make it clear to you, but it is so. What matters is that

the clock should go. Jews understand, but they forget that they are

the pendulum and they do not live at all. Jews are wonderful people.

They know that what matters is the impulse of the soul. It matters so

much to them that they have forgotten everything else. And those who

are not Jews think of everything else and forget the impulse of the

soul. But I know that when I swing from happiness to unhappiness, from

good to bad, from light to dark, then a force comes into my soul and

it can move up to art, and beyond art, into that place where it can be

free. . . . Don't, please, misunderstand me." He addressed himself

frankly to Morrison, who dropped her head a little lower. "In love I

can no more be free than I can in misery. I will swing as high on one

side as I will on the other, and then I can be free."

Morrison folded her hands in her lap and her hair fell over her face.

Mendel got up, said good-night, and went over to the farm.

"Well," said Clowes uneasily, "I really think he must be a genius."

Morrison made no reply, and presently Clowes went upstairs to bed,

leaving her with her hair drooping over her face, staring into the

glowing fire.

"I must learn my lesson," said Morrison to herself. "I must learn my

lesson."

She was so little trained for misery, but this was misery enough. But

she sat and brooded over it, and summoned up all her strength for the

supreme effort of her will, not to be broken and cast down in the

swing back from love. She had taught him to surrender himself to love;

she must learn to surrender herself to misery, to swing as high on one

side as on the other.

For many, many hours she wrestled with herself and broke down fear

after fear, weakness after weakness, until she was utterly exposed to

the enemies of love and knew that she could be with Mendel through

everything. She took out from her paint-box his letter describing the

scene in the hospital, which had shocked and horrified her before, and

now read and re-read it until she had lived through all the story and

could understand both Logan and Oliver.

At last, when she could endure no more, relief came, a new vision of

love, no longer lost in the woods or in any earthly beauty, but a

clear light illuminating men and women and the earth upon which they

dwell. And in her soul, too, the upward impulse began to thrill, and

with a sob of thankfulness she lay on her bed fully clothed and went

to sleep.

* * * * *

She was not at all disturbed when Mendel said in the morning that he

must go back to London to work on his picture. It was right. Their

happiness was too tremulous. There was plenty of time for them to take

up their ordinary jolly human lives, plenty of time now that they were

no longer young.

She walked with him to the station, and on the way they laughed and

sang, and he whistled and talked breathlessly about his picture.

"My mother says a cock robin can never mate with a sparrow," he said.

"I promised I would take you to see her."

"I should love to come, for I love your mother."

"I would like you to see the Jews as they are," he said, "so simply

serving God that their souls have gone to sleep."

As they stood on the platform she said:--

"Mendel, I did . . . begin to understand last night, and it has made

you and your work more important than anything else in my life."

He gripped her fiercely by the arm.

"Come to London, now," he said.

"Not now."

"Soon."

"Very soon."

He got into the train, and as it carried him off she could not bear

him to go, and, forgetting all the other people, she ran as hard as

she could along the platform, and stood at its extremity until the

train disappeared round the corner of the embankment, and even then

she called after him:--

"Mendel! Mendel!"

_Transcriber's Note_

This transcription is based on the British edition published by T.

Fisher Unwin in 1916. Scans of this edition are available through the

Hathi Trust Digital Library at:

http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100597585

As an additional resource, the American edition published by George H.

Doran in 1916 was also used. Scans of this edition are posted by the

Internet Archive at:

https://archive.org/details/mendelstoryofyou00canniala

The right margins of several page scans of the Unwin edition available

through the Hathi Trust were cut off, so the Doran edition was used to

correct for the missing text. No attempt was made to list all these

corrections.

The following changes to the text were noted:

-- Cover: The cover image is from the Doran edition.

-- p. 20: what you want, that you shall have. . .--Added an additional

period at the end of the sentence in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 20: "These children have only to go out into London and all will

be given to them,"--Changed the comma to a period.

-- p. 42: their voices seemed to him to come from very far away, The

unheaval had stunned him, had destroyed his volition and paralysed his

dreams.--Changed the comma after "away" to a period and "unheaval" to

"upheaval" in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 48: "That'll do. That'll do," said Moscowitch.--Changed

"Moscowitch" to "Moscowitsch" for consistency.

-- p. 84: "No," said the Professor." I don't know what that is. It

certainly isn't drawing."--Changed the closing quotation mark after

"Professor" to an opening quotation mark before "I".

-- p. 84: and he says: "I mean to say, that isn't drawing.--Changed

the opening double quotation mark to an opening single quotation mark.

-- p. 116: You may renember her--glorious chestnut hair, big blue

eyes, but as shy as a little mouse.--Changed "renember" to "remember".

-- p. 139: And then when I get home and it is just a house and I am

just a girl living it it--Changed the first "it" after "living" to

"in".

-- p. 158: hair brushed back from a round, well shaped brow.--Inserted

a hyphen between "well" and "shaped".

-- p. 184: as they went through their Public Schools and were more and

compressed into type--Inserted the word "more" between "and" and

"compressed" in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 189: "But he cares for poetry and the Bible and he loves

pictures. . ."--Added an additional period at the end of the sentence

in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 216: finding some dam fool to take you to a music-hall--For

consistency and in keeping with the Doran edition, changed "dam" to

"damn".

-- p. 217: When you're starving you don't want chocolates. . .--Added

an additional period at the end of the sentence in keeping with the

Doran edition.

-- p. 234: He says its something deeper--Changed "its" to "it's".

-- p. 245: No, no, no! . . . .--Deleted the fourth period in keeping

with the Doran edition.

-- p. 266: "What has happened?" Does he knock her about?"--Deleted the

closing quotation mark after "happened?"

-- p. 271: "That is all very well while you are young " said

Logan--Inserted a comma between "young" and the closing quotation

mark.

-- p. 290: the furniture was old and exquisite. . .--Added an

additional period at the end of the sentence in keeping with the Doran

edition.

-- p. 297: and through that love his passion for art--Added a period

at the end of the sentence.

-- p. 298: Cluny."--Inserted an opening double quotation mark at the

beginning of the sentence.

-- p. 316: "O God! O God! O God!'--Changed the closing single

quotation mark to a closing double quotation mark.

-- p. 341: You said you were'nt going to dance.--Changed "were'nt" to

"weren't".

-- p. 344: "Yes You are very honest--Added a period after "Yes".

-- p. 351: "You can't stop it," said Logan--Added a period at the end

of the sentence.

-- p. 358: "If it was my house, I would kick them out.'--Changed the

closing single quotation mark to a closing double quotation mark.

-- p. 380: "What do you want, then?--Added a closing double quotation

mark at the end of the sentence.

-- p. 397: "Then it's a sketch and not a picture.'--Changed the

closing single quotation mark to a closing double quotation mark.

-- p. 414: clouds heaped up by the driving wind--beautiful,

beautiful. . .--Added a fourth period at the end of the sentence.

In the original text, section breaks within a chapter are indicated

with space between paragraphs. This convention has been retained in

the html-based files. For clarity, section breaks in the text file are

indicated with a row of asterisks.