Chapter X: Book TWO: Bohemia (2)

"Oh no. She looks too sweet. And if all the boys at the Detmold wear their hair long, I don't see why the girls shouldn't wear theirs short."

"My mother had her head shaved when she married," said he, "and she wore a wig."

"Why did she do that?"

"It is the custom. The woman shows that she belongs wholly to her husband and makes herself unattractive to all other men."

"What a horrible idea!"

"It is a beautiful idea. It is the idea of love independent of everything else. That is why I thought Morrison must have some reason for cutting her hair."

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

"Why does she like Mitchell?"

"She likes nearly everybody."

"But she writes to him."

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

"But she doesn't write to me."

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

As she said this Clowes realized his extraordinary Orientalism. She could see him holding up his finger and expecting a woman to come at his bidding, and for a moment she was repelled by him. But she was a kind-hearted creature and felt very sorry for him, for he seemed so utterly at sea and was obviously full of genuine and painful emotion.

He detected her repulsion at once and perceived the effort she made to conquer it, and was at once grateful to her, for, as a rule, when that happened, people let it swamp everything else.

She said:--

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

"I only want her to come and sit for her portrait. It is very important to me, because I want to try new subjects and there is some lovely drawing in her face."

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

"He is rotten," said Mendel dogmatically.

* * * * *

He felt better, and until dinner-time he prowled about Tottenham Court Road and Soho, a region of London that he particularly loved--a vibrant, nondescript region where innumerable streams of vitality met and fused, or clashed together to make a froth and a spume. It was like himself, chaotic and rawly alive, compounded of elements that knew no tradition or had escaped from it. He felt at home in it, and elated because he was also conscious of being superior to it, yet without the dizzy sense of superiority that assailed him among his own people, while he was never shocked and humiliated, as he was sometimes in sedate and prosperous London, by being made suddenly to realize his external inferiority. He loved the shop-girls hurrying excitedly from their work to their pleasure, and he sometimes spoke to them in their own slang, sometimes went home with them. . . . They always liked him because he never wasted time over silly flirtatious jokes or pretended to be in love with them. His interest and curiosity, like theirs, were purely physical, and his passion gave them a delicious sense of danger.

* * * * *

Logan was waiting for him at the Pot-au-Feu. There was no one else in the restaurant but the goggle-eyed man in his corner. Logan was sitting Napoleonically with his arms on the table and his chin sunk on his chest, with his lips compressed.

He nodded, but did not get up.

"Sorry if I'm late," said Mendel. "I went for a walk. I couldn't work to-day. My sister-in-law's sofa--I feel as if I had been beaten all over."

"That's the walk home," said Logan. "I'm used to it. The hours I've spent walking about this infernal London! I've slept on the Embankment, you know."

"No?"

"Yes. I've been as far down as that, though I'm not the sort of man who can be kept down. Did you know that Napoleon was out-at-elbows for a whole year?"

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

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

The waiter came up and Logan ordered a very special dinner with the air of knowing the very inmost secrets of the establishment. He demanded orange bitters before the meal and a special brand of cigarette.

"My day hasn't been wasted," he said. "I've been to Cluny's and I asked to see your stuff. The little man there looked astonished, but I told him people were talking of no one else but you, and quite rightly. I talked to him from the dealer's point of view, and assured him that there was a big boom in pictures, coming, and that he had better be prepared for it with a handful of new men. I didn't let him know that I was a painter, but I got him quite excited, and I did not leave him until he had hung a picture and two drawings."

"Which picture?"

"The one of your mother's kitchen. It is one of your best. To-morrow three men will walk into Cluny's and they will admire your work. On the day after to-morrow a real buyer will walk in."

Mendel's eyes grew larger and larger. Was Logan a magician, that he could direct human beings into Cluny's shop and conduct them straight to his work?

Logan laughed at his amazement.

"Lord love-a-duck!" he said, "you're not going to sit still and wait for commercial fools to discover that you know your job. At my first exhibition in Liverpool I put on a false beard and went in and bought one of my own pictures, just to encourage the dealer and the timid idiots who were too shy to go and ask him the price of the drawings. It worked, and this is going to work too. When I've warmed Cluny up into selling you, then I'm going to make him sell me. If you don't mind we'll have our names bracketed,--Kühler and Logan. People will believe in two men when they won't in one. As for three, you've only got to look at the Trinity to see what they'll believe when they get three working together. . . . Oh! I forgot you were a Jew and brought up to believe in One is One and all alone."

He laughed and gave a fat chuckle as he mimicked the little man in Cluny's cocking his head on one side and pretending to take in the beauties of Mendel's work as they were pointed out to him.

"I have enjoyed myself," said Logan. "By God! I wish there were a revolution. I'd have my finger in the pie. Oh! what lovely legs there'd be to pull--all the world's and his wife's as well. But it won't come in my time."

Under Logan's influence Mendel began to enjoy his food, which he had always treated as a tiresome necessity before. He sat back in his chair and sipped his wine and crumbled up his bread exactly as Logan did; and he had a delicious sense of leisure and well-being, as though nothing mattered very much. And, indeed, when he came to think of it, nothing did matter. He had years and years ahead of him, and here was good solid pleasure in front of him, so that he had only to dip his hands in it and take and take. . . .

After the dinner Logan ordered cigars, coffee, and liqueurs, and Mendel felt very lordly. The restaurant had filled up, and among the rest were Mitchell and Morrison.

Mendel turned, gave them a curt nod, and could not restrain a grin of satisfaction as he thought that score was settled. He leaned forward and gave himself up to the pleasure of Logan's talk.

"What I contend," said Logan, "is this--and mind you, I let off my youthful gas years ago. I've been earning my living since I was fourteen, so I know a little of what the world's like. I've been in offices and shops, and on the land, in hotels, on the railway, on the road as a bagman, from house to house as a tallyman, and I know what I'm talking about. The artist is a free man, and therefore an outlaw, because the world is full of timid slaves who lie in the laps of women. If an artist is not a free man, then he is not an artist. And I say that if the artist is outlawed, then he must use any and every means to get out of the world what it denies him. One must live."

"That's true," said Mendel.

"You may take it from me that there is less room in the world now for artists than ever there was. In the old days you chose your patron and he provided for you, as the Pope provided for Michael Angelo, and you devoted your art to whatever your patron stood for, spiritual power if he happened to be a pope, secular power if he happened to be a duke or a king. But, nowadays, suppose you had a patron--say, Sir Julius Fleischmann--and he kept you alive, what on earth could you devote your art to? You could paint his portrait, and his wife's portrait, and all his daughters' portraits, but they'd mean nothing; they'd just be vulgar men and women. No. Art is a bigger thing than any power left on the earth. Money has eaten up all the other powers, and only art is left uncorrupted by it. Art cannot be patronized. It cannot serve religion, because there is no religion vital enough to contain the spirit of art. There is nothing left in the world worthy of such noble service, and therefore art must be independent and artists must be free, because there is no honourable service open to them. They must have their own values, and they must have the courage of them. The world's values are the values fit for the service of Sir Julius Fleischmann, but they are not fit for men whose blood is stirring with life, whose minds are eager and active, men who will accept any outward humiliation rather than the degradation of the loss of their freedom."

"I met Sir Julius Fleischmann. Once," Mendel said. "He subscribed for me when I went to my first School of Art. They wanted to send me to Italy, but I refused, because I knew my place was here in London. There's more art for me in the Tottenham Court Road than in all the blue skies in the world."

"Quite right, too!" cried Logan. "That shows how sound an artist's instinct is. He knows what is good for him because he is a free man. The others have to be told what is good for them because they don't know themselves and because, however unhappy they are, they don't know the way out. When you and I are unhappy we know that it is because we have lost touch with life, or because we have lost touch with art; either the flesh or the spirit is choked with thorns, and we set about plucking them out. When it is a question of saving your soul, what do morals matter?"

Mendel had heard people talk about morals, and he knew that his own were supposed to be bad; but he was not certain what they were. Rather timidly he asked Logan, who gave his fat chuckle and replied:--

"Morals, my son? No one knows. They change about a hundred years after human practice. They are different in different times, places, and circumstances, and Sir Julius Fleischmann, like you and me, has none, because he can afford to do without them. . . . Well, I've done a good day's work and we've had a good dinner, and I must get back to my beautiful bed--unless you'd like to go to a music-hall."

Mendel was loath to let his friend go, and, weary though he was, he said he would like the music-hall. Logan bought more cigars and they walked round to the Oxford and spent the evening in uneasy and flat conversation with two ladies of the town, one of whom said she knew Logan, though he swore he had never seen her before. When they were shaken off, he told Mendel mysteriously that she was a friend of a woman of whom he went in terror, who had been pursuing him for a couple of years.

"Terrible! Terrible!" he said. "Like a wild beast. They're awful, these prostitutes, when they fall in love. It eats them up, body and soul."

And he went on talking of women, and from what he said it appeared that he was beset by them. He described them lurking in the street for him, forcing their way into his studio, clamouring for love, love, love.

"It makes me sick," he said. "I never yet met a woman who knew how to love. If a man has an enthusiasm for anything outside themselves, they plot and scheme with their damnable cunning to kill it. They want the carcase of a man, not the lovely life in it. And if they're decent they want babies, which is almost worse if you're hard up. No, boy; for God's sake don't take women seriously. If you can't do without them, hate 'em. They'll lick your boots for it. They feed on hatred, and will take it out of your hand."

He talked in this strain until they reached the Tube station in Piccadilly Circus. It was unusually empty, and by the booking-office was standing a very pretty girl, big and upstanding. She had a wide mouth and curious slanting eyes, plump cheeks and a roguish tilt to her chin. She was well and neatly dressed, and Mendel judged her to be a shop-girl.

"That's a fine lass," said Logan. "Good-night, boy. I'll see you to-morrow and tell you about Cluny's."

"Good-night," said Mendel, still loath to see his friend go, and he suffered a pang of jealousy as he saw Logan go up to the girl, raise his hat, and speak to her. She started, blushed, and smiled. They stopped and talked together for a few moments, and then moved over towards the lift.

Mendel waited and watched them, Logan talking gaily, the girl smiling and watching him intently through her smile. With her eyes she took possession of him, and Mendel was filled with misgiving when he heard Logan's fat chuckle and the rustle and clatter of the gate as the lift descended. It reminded him oddly of the Demon King and the Fairy Queen in a pantomime he had once seen with Artie Beech, whose father used to get tickets for the gallery because he had play-bills in his shop window.

IV

BURNHAM BEECHES

FOR Greta Morrison as for Mendel, London life had been opened up through Mitchell. He had been friendly and kind to her when everybody else had been harsh, fault-finding, and indifferent. Her first year and a half at the hostel had been a period of misery, for the girls and women there regarded her as odd, vague, and careless, and thought it their duty to impose on her the discipline she seemed to need, for they knew nothing of her suffering through her ambition and her work.

Like Mendel, she had been overwhelmed by her inability to adapt herself easily to the Detmold standard of drawing, for it was against her temperament and her habit of mind to be precise, and drawing had always been to her rather a trivial thing, though extremely pleasant for the purposes of the caricatures in which her teasing humour found an outlet. All her girlhood had been thrillingly happy in the execution of large allegorical designs, through which she sought to express her delight in the earth--the immense serene power of which she became profoundly aware as she lay in the bracken at home and gazed out over the rich valley or up into the marvellous, quivering blue sky, through which she felt that she was being borne without a sound, without a tremor, irresistibly. Nothing could shake that loving knowledge in her, and it hurt her that her mother's cold, self-centred religion, which made her demand a fussy, sentimental attention from her children, forbade all expression of it in her daily life. Her brothers, revolting against the sentimentality exacted of them, treated all tenderness as ignoble rubbish, and in her rough-and-tumble with them Greta was hardened and forced into independence. She had to play their games with them and to suffer the same tortures of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw. But all their swagger seemed to her rather fraudulent; and because they laughed at her allegorical designs she decided that men were inferior beings. When they laughed at her designs it was to her as though they laughed at the beauty she had tried to express in them, and the sacrilege enraged her more than her mother's petulance, for they were young and strong and full of life, and they should not have been blind. It was against them that she first found relief in caricature, and as they went through their Public Schools and were more and more compressed into type, she pilloried them, and, as a consequence, even when she was a young woman, big and fine, with the tender, delicate bloom of seventeen upon her, she had to submit to the indignity of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw.

She was filled with a horror of men, and especially Public School men, for they seemed to her entirely lacking in decency, humility, and honesty. They pretended to be so fine and ignored everything that was finer than themselves. Her brothers' foolish love-affairs disgusted her and made her suppress in herself every emotion that tried to find its way to a good-looking boy or young man. She was not shy of them or afraid of them, but she would not encourage in them what she so detested in her brothers.

During her first year in London she devoted herself heart and soul to her work. There were two or three families who were kind to her as her mother's daughter, but their ways were her mother's, and she only visited them as a duty, and to break the monotony of the school and the hostel.

Her encounter with Mitchell took place at the time when Mendel's influence on him had set him in revolt against his Public School training. On the other hand, the sight of the abyss of poverty into which Mendel descended so easily had set him reeling. He was shrewd enough to know that Hetty Finch was using him as a ladder to get out of it, and that there was a real danger of her kicking him down into it. In a state of horrible confusion he plunged at the most obvious outlet, the "pure girl" of the tradition of his upbringing.

He made no concealment of it, but turned to Morrison with a childlike confidence that touched her. She was feeling lonely, disappointed, and dissatisfied with herself and was glad of his company. It was a change from the woman-ridden atmosphere of the hostel.

By way of making their relationship seemly he introduced her to his family, where as the pure young girl who was to save their hope from wild courses she was a great success.

"First sensible thing you've done, my boy," said Mr. Mitchell, that great man, a journalist who had been a correspondent in a dozen wars. "A pure friendship between a boy and a girl has a most ennobling influence--most ennobling."

"She is truly spiritual," sighed Mrs. Mitchell, "the type who justifies the independence of the modern girl, whatever the Prime Minister may say."

"That scoundrel!" cried Mr. Mitchell. "That infamous buffoon who has not a grain of Liberalism left in his toadying mind!"

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

"Well," answered Mr. Mitchell, "we took our risk when we let the boy be an artist and we can be thankful it is no worse. Did I tell you, my love, that I am going off to the Cocos Islands to-morrow?"

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

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

"Oh dear! oh dear! I don't know what the world is coming to. The more civilized we get in one part of the world, the worse things are in another part. I declare such horrible things seem to me to make it quite unimportant whether we get the vote or not."

"When you have a Tory Government calling itself Liberal," said Mr. Mitchell very angrily, "it means that neither reform at home nor justice abroad can receive any attention. The country has gone to the dogs, and I thank God I spend most of my time out of it."

"And poor Humphrey suffers. I'm sure I am a good mother to him, but I cannot be a father as well. I'm thankful to say he seems to be dropping that Jewish friend of his. He is a genius, of course, and quite remarkable, considering what he comes from; but with Jews it can never be the same, can it?"

"No, my love," said Mr. Mitchell; "one would never dream of drinking out of the same glass, would one? Still, I must say, the Jews in England are much better than they are anywhere else, which seems to show that they can respond to decent treatment and thrive in the air of liberty."

Both Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell had a platform manner of speaking, and as Morrison was not a subject that suited it, she was soon dropped; but in the end they came back to her, and agreed that she was a nice, shy little girl, and that she had no idea of marrying their only son, or anyone else, for that matter.

She was much impressed with them, for she had never met important people before, and she was given to understand that they were very important. They seemed to have their fingers on innumerable reforms which were only suppressed by the stupidity of the Government. Directly the Government was removed, as of course such idiots soon would be, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell would raise their fingers and, hey presto! women would have votes, the slums would be pulled down, maternity would be endowed, prostitutes would be saved, prisons would be reformed, capital punishment abolished, the working classes would be properly housed, every able-bodied man who wished it should have his small holding, the railways would be nationalized, site values would be taxed, divorce would be made easy and free from social taint, and education would be made scientific and thorough. In the meantime, as the Government did not budge, Mr. Mitchell went to the Cocos Islands and Constantinople to procure evidence of horrors abroad and Mrs. Mitchell addressed meetings on the subject of horrors at home.

Morrison was impressed. The contrast between these people who thought of everything and everybody but themselves and her own home, where nothing was thought of but the family, the Church, and the Empire, shocked her into thinking and gave her a sense of liberation. It made human beings more interesting than she had thought, and she began to see that they did not, as she had heedlessly accepted that they did, fit infallibly into their places, and that vast numbers had no places to fit into. She herself, she saw, did not fit into any place, and that she had been squeezed, like paint out of a tube, out of her home for no other reason than that she was a woman, and there was only just enough money to establish the boys. However, she could not quite swallow Mrs. Mitchell's view that men had deliberately, coldly, and of set purpose ousted women from their rightful share in the sweets of life.

She had a period of despair as these revelations sank into her mind and she had to digest Mrs. Mitchell's awful facts and statistics about the night-life of London. Life seemed too terrible for her powers, but, as she soon began to see how comic Mrs. Mitchell was, she pulled herself together and found that she was strengthened by the experience, and when Mitchell confessed the awful doings of his past, she felt immeasurably older than he, and was thankful she was a woman and did not expect such things of herself. For she could never quite take his word for all he said. She knew her brothers too well to accept his plea of passionate necessity.

"Gawd!" he used to say. "When I think of my past I feel that I must go on my knees and worship your purity."

His absurdity made her blush, but she liked him. He was clever and had read much under his father's guidance, poetry and modern English fiction mostly, and when she went to tea with him in his studio he used to read aloud to her, Keats and Shelley and Matthew Arnold.

"I think I only like poetry," she said once, "when it makes pictures. When it doesn't do that it seems to me just words, and it doesn't seem to matter how nice they sound."

"Gawd!" he said. "That's like Kühler. He says nothing makes such pictures as the Bible, and he is always quoting that about: 'At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: where he fell, there he lay down.' And he says it must be the words, because his own Hebrew Bible never gave him anything like the same--er--vision of it."

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

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

"Gawd! I don't know. He says he is a genius, and I suppose time will show whether it is true or not. But why do you want to talk of him?"

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

"Well, you've had tea with him. That is about as much as is good for you. If you were my sister I wouldn't let you know him."

"Why not?"

"My dear girl, there are certain things in life that a young girl ought never to know."

"What things? Is there anything worse than what your mother talks about at her meetings? Girls know all about that nowadays, and it is no good pretending we don't."

"Talking about them is one thing, coming in contact with them is another. Kühler is a Jew, and he comes from the East End, where they don't have any decent pleasures. He's infernally good-looking in a hurdy-gurdy sort of way. Gawd! Women look at him and off they go."

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

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

During this talk he had begun to find Morrison extraordinarily pretty and lovable, and he said tenderly:--

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

She refused, and asked him more about Mendel, and in exasperation at the unintended snub he told her the true story of Hetty Finch, not concealing his own share in it, but implying that Mendel's terrible immorality had corrupted him and led to his downfall.

The story was received in silence.

At last she said:--

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

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

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

"Gawd!" he said. "If it weren't for you I don't know what would become of me." And he was so moved by his own thoughts that tears trickled down his nose and made dark spots on the whitened hearth.

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

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

"Will you be my friend?"

"Of course."

"Always?"

"How can I promise that?" she said.

It was then that he took her to the Paris Café, where, all in a turmoil through her new knowledge of men and women, she hardly knew what she was doing, and gave Mendel the curt nod which had so disgruntled him.

* * * * *

Every summer the Detmold students went for a picnic, either up the river, or to a Surrey common, or to one of the forests in the vicinity of London. This year Burnham Beeches was chosen. Two charabancs met the party at Slough, and though Mendel tried very hard to sit next to Morrison, he was outmanoeuvred by Mitchell, and had to put up with Clowes.

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

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

"Don't be absurd," protested Clowes. "He is not talking about you at all." She felt rather cross with him because he was spoiling her pleasure, and because she had wanted to sit next someone else, and she added: "People aren't always talking about you, and if anybody does it's the models, and that's your own fault."

"How beastly!" he said.

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

"I didn't mean that. I meant this country. It is so flat and dull, regular railway scenery. What a place to choose for a picnic!"

"Wait until you get to the woods! We're going to a place called Egypt. Don't you think that's romantic? Though it reminds me more of Oberon and Titania than of Anthony and Cleopatra."

He looked blank, and she explained:--

"Shakespeare, you know."

"I've never read Shakespeare."

"Oh! you should."

"I've tried, but I can't understand him. I suppose it's because I'm not English. It seems ridiculous to me, all those plots and murders."

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

"I haven't read it; but what do you want with fairies? A wood's a wood, and there's quite enough mystery in it for me without pretending to see things that aren't there."

"But it's nice to pretend," said Clowes rather lamely, almost hating him because he seemed so wrong in the country. She knew people like that, people she was quite fond of in London, but in the country they were awful.

The charabancs swung through Farnham Royal and they came in sight of the woods, brilliant under a vivid blue sky patched with huge, heavy white clouds. Birds hovered above the trees, and as they turned out of the street of seaside bungalows and along the sandy lane leading to Egypt, they put up rabbits and pheasants.

The art students looked bizarre and almost theatrical in the woods, with the long-haired young men and the short-haired girls, many of them wearing the brightest colours. Mendel hated the lot of them, giggling girls and bouncing boys, and he recognized how inappropriate they all were and how he himself was the most inappropriate of them all. He felt ashamed, and wanted to go away and hide, to crawl away to some hole and gaze with his eyes at the beauty he could not feel. There were too many trees, as there were too many people. . . . What a poor thing is a man in a crowd which makes it impossible to share his thoughts and emotions with anyone! And how bitter it is when he is full of thoughts and emotions! It is all so bitter that the crowd must do foolish, inappropriate things not to feel it, not to be broken up by it. . . . Yet the others seemed happy enough. The old Professors were beaming and pretending to be young. Perhaps they enjoyed it more than anyone because they did not want to be alone, or to steal away with a coveted maid, as some of the young men were doing even now. . . . Had Mitchell stolen away with Morrison? Horrible idea! No. There he was, putting up stumps for cricket.

Cricket! How Mendel loathed that fatuous game, the kind of inappropriate foolish thing the crowd always did! How he dreaded the swift hard ball that would hurt his hand or his shins! How humiliated he felt when he was out: and how he raged against the frantic excitement he could not help feeling when he hit the ball and made a run. One run seemed to him a larger score than anyone else could possibly make, and when he made a run and was on the winning side he always felt that he had won the match. In the field, no matter where he was placed, he went and stood by the umpire, because he had noticed that the ball rarely went that way.

He had to field now, and he went and stood by the umpire. Mitchell came swaggering in. He hit a lovely four, a three, a two. The fielders changed at the over, but Mendel stayed where he was. The ball came near him. He picked it up and threw it as hard as he could at Mitchell's head. Fortunately he missed, and there was a roar of laughter.

"I say, I mean to say," said one of the Professors, "we are not playing rounders or--or baseball."

And there was more laughter.

Mitchell hit a three, a two, a lost ball (six), a four, and then he skied one. The ball went soaring up. With his keen sight Mendel could see it clearly shining red against the hot sky. With an awful sinking in his stomach he realized that it was coming down near him. It was coming straight to him. It would fall on him, hurt him, stun him. Then he thought that if he caught it Mitchell would be out. He never lost sight of the ball for a moment. If he caught it Mitchell would be out. He moved back two paces, opened his hands, and the ball fell into them.

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

Mitchell walked away from the wicket swinging his bat in a deprecating fashion. After all, one does not expect miracles even in cricket.

"Beautiful, beautiful ball!" thought Mendel, fondling it with his still tingling hands. "You came to me like a lark to its nest, and you shone so red against the sky, you shone so red, so red!"

His dissatisfaction vanished. The crowd was a nice beast after all. It was at his feet. At no one else had it shouted like that. . . . The woods were very beautiful, with the bracken nodding under the trees, and the branches swaying, and the soft winds murmuring through the leaves, through which the trees seemed to breathe and sigh and to envy the moving wind while they were condemned to stay and grow old in one spot. Very, very sweet were the green and yellow and blue lights hovering and swinging through the woods, dappling the trunks of the trees, weaving an ever-changing pattern on the carpet of moss and dead leaves, and the tufted bracken that sometimes almost looked like the sea, full of a life of its own. Surely, surely there were fish swimming in the bracken.

Starting out of his dreams, he saw Morrison at the wicket, very intent, with a stern expression on her face. He knew she was desperately anxious to score.

She was most palpably stumped with her second ball, but the umpire gave her "not out," amid general applause, for she was a favourite.

She lashed out awkwardly at the next ball, which came on the leg side. It came towards Mendel at an incredible speed. He put his foot on it, picked it up, pretended it had passed him, and tore towards the trees in simulated pursuit; and he remained looking for it in the bracken while Morrison ran four, five, six, seven, eight, and just as some one cried "Lost ball!" he stooped, pretended to pick it up, and threw it back to the bowler.

He himself was bowled first ball, but, as it turned out, Morrison's side won by three runs.

She was bubbling over with happiness, and after tea she came over to him and said:--

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

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

"Oh! yes. I can play cricket."

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

"A catch like that," he answered, "is enough for one day. I have seen many words written in the papers about a catch like that. Even Calthrop does not have so many words written about his pictures."

"I shall hate to go back to London after this," she said. "I didn't know there was anything so beautiful near London."

"There is Hampstead," he said.

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

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

"Oh yes," she said eagerly. "Do let us go into the woods now before we start. I'm sure there must be lovely places."

He followed her, first looking round to see what had become of Mitchell, whom he saw standing with a scowl on his face, a foolish figure.

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

She led the way through a grove of pines into a beech glade, at the end of which they found a dingle, where they stood and gazed back.

"Oh, look!" she cried. "Look at the pine stems through the sea-green of the beeches. Purple they are, and don't they swing?"

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

He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he caught some of her ecstasy. But he could not understand it at all and it hurt him horribly. She was wonderful and beautiful to him, the very heart of all that loveliness, the song of it, its music and its mystery.

"She is only a little girl," he said to himself very clearly, stamping out the words in his mind, so that it was as though someone else had spoken to him.

The ecstasy grew in her, and with it the pain in him. She swayed towards him and fell against his breast and raised her lips to him. He stooped and almost in terror just touched them with his.

He was a sorry prince for a sleeping beauty, for he was afraid lest she should awake.

V

HAPPY HAMPSTEAD

ON the morning of the day fixed for their expedition to Hampstead Heath she sent him roses--yellow roses. He took them across to his mother and gave them to her, saying:--

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

Golda laughed at him, and said:--

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

"I don't know what it is, but I am happy. It is no longer surprising to me that there are happy people in the world, and I think the Christians are not all such fools to wish to be happy. I am only astonished that they are happy with such little things."

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

"But I am finding myself," cried Mendel. "I shall no more paint fishes and onions. I shall paint only what I feel, and it will be beautiful. I am so clever I can paint anything I choose."

"Go to your work now," said Golda. "You can boast as much as you please when the King has sent for you and told you you are the greatest artist in England. Go to your work."

He went back to his studio and there found a letter from Logan, giving his new address in Camden Town, and another from Mitchell, asking him why he was so unfriendly. This he answered at once:--

"You are no longer my friend. You have despised and injured me. Superior as I am to you, you have thought it your part as a gentleman to try to keep me in my place. You have treated me as a kind of animal. You cannot see that as an artist I am the equal of all men, the highest and the lowest. My own poor people I do not expect to know this, but of an educated man I do expect it. You cannot see this, and I count you lower than the lowest, and as such I am prepared to know you, and not otherwise. I have changed completely. I no longer believe in the Detmold or in Calthrop or in any of the things I reverenced as a student. I prefer the Academy, for it does not pretend to be advanced, and is honest though asleep. I am no longer a student. I am an artist. You will always be an art student, and so I say good-bye to you, as one says good-bye to friends on a station-platform. The train moves and all their affectionate memories and longings cannot stop it. The train moves and I am in it, and I say good-bye to you without even looking out of the window."

This done, he sat down to work at a portrait of his father and mother, with which he was designing to eclipse his first exhibiting success. It seemed to him important that it should be finished. Hearing Issy come in, he shouted to him to come and sit instead of his father, who had given out that he was unwell and was indulging in a sleeping bout.

Issy came shambling in, pale, tired, and unhappy. He sat as he was told, and said:--

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

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

"There's not much help for me," said Issy. "I'm like father. There's always something against me to keep me down. It seems funny to me that people will give you so much money for something they don't really want."

"Come and look at it," said Mendel.

Issy obeyed.

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

He spoke so heavily and dully that Mendel found it hard to conceal his irritation. When Issy had gone back to his chair, he asked:--

"What do you live for, Issy?"

"Live?" said Issy, mystified.

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

"Playing cards. Playing cards. Every day there's work and every night there's Rosa, and on Saturday I play cards. Yes. I play cards; and, of course, you are always something to think about."

"What do you think about me?"

"Oh! You will be rich and famous, and you will be able to choose among all the girls with money. It is like having a play always going on in the family. But I would rather play cards, and Rosa is not so bad as you all say she is. I am not a good husband to her, for I have moods and I cannot talk to her, for I cannot talk to anyone. What is there to say? She has her children, and she only wants more because she is a fool. It is not her fault."

"That'll do, Issy. I've got all I want. I can't get any more from you. Some day I'll teach you how to be happy."

"Oh!" said Issy, with a sly leer. "I know how to be happy. I can't see why anyone should want to have father and mother hanging on their walls."

He slunk away.

How depressing he was! Poor old Issy! as much a part of the street as the doors and windows of the houses. He might move a hundred yards to another exactly similar street, but he would always be the same. It was not his fault. Mendel knew the depths of devotion of which his brother was capable. It was devotion to his mother that kept him living round the corner, devotion to his father that tied him to the unprofitable business. The name of Kühler had attained the dignity of a brass-plate on the front door, and he would die rather than see it removed, at any rate in his father's lifetime.

For the first time Mendel faced his circumstances squarely. With something of a shock he thought of the family arriving at Liverpool Street and never in all these years moving more than half a mile away from it, and that in this amazing London, with its trains and buses to take you from end to end of it in a little over an hour. His mother had never been west of the Bank. She did not even know where Piccadilly Circus was, or the Detmold, or the National Gallery, or the Paris Café, or Calthrop's studio, or any other important centre of life. Liverpool Street she knew, and outside Liverpool Street were the sea and Austria. . . . When there were no little happenings at home she would always fall back on Austria and the troubled days at the inn, and the soldiers who used to come in and ask to see the beautiful baby before they thought of ordering drinks, and her rich uncle who used to supply the barracks with potatoes and was so mean that he refused to give her any when she had not a penny in the world, and the neighbours who used to bring food so that the beautiful baby should not starve. . . . They stayed where they were, stormily passionate, yet with no sense of confinement, while he was drawn off into the swiftly moving whirligig of London, going from house to house, studio to studio, café to café, atmosphere to atmosphere, and all his passionate storms were spent upon nothing, were absorbed in the general movement, leaving him, tottering and dazed, in it, yet alien to it, discovering no soul in it all and losing the clear knowledge of his own.

Surely now that was ended. She had sent him the yellow roses, and he had given them to his mother to join the two whom he loved. They must have touched her face before they came to him, and Golda had buried her face in them.

Impatiently he awaited the time for him to go to the Detmold. He put on a clean collar and a black coat, but then he remembered how the old Jews whom he asked to sit for him always put on clean clothes and clipped their beards, under the impression that he wanted to photograph them. In his clean collar and black coat he felt as though he were going to the photographer's or to a wedding, and remembering how he had been dressed when he saw her for the first time on the stairs, he took out an old black shirt, a corduroy coat and trousers, and a red sash.

He could not bring himself to wear the red sash. It reminded him of Mitchell, who had been with him when he bought it.

* * * * *

It had been very hot. The walls and the pavements gave out a dry, stifling heat. The smell of the street outside came up in waves--a smell of women and babies, leather and kosher meat. He must wait for the cool weather, he thought, before he asked her to the studio again.

"She is only a little girl," he said to himself. "She is pretty, but she is only a little girl. I will tell her that she must not see Mitchell again, because he is not true. I will paint her portrait, and then I will not see her again, because she is only a little girl."

He sat in the window with the clock in front of him, and directly it said half-past four he clapped his hat on his head, seized the silver-knobbed stick which at that time was an indispensable part of an artist's apparel, and bolted as though he were late for a train.

* * * * *

She was waiting for him. He took off his hat, but in his nervousness he could not speak, and as he could not remember which side of a lady he ought to walk, he bewildered her by dodging from one side to the other with a quick, catlike tread, so that she did not hear him, and whenever she turned to speak to him he was not there.

"Wasn't it a good picnic!" she said enthusiastically. "It's the best picnic I've ever been to."

"They are usually pretty good," he said lamely. "I think we'd better go by bus."

They mounted a bus and sat silently side by side.

When they stopped by the Cobden statue he said:--

"A friend of mine has just taken a studio in Camden Town. His name is Logan."

"Was he at the Detmold?"

"No."

That settled Logan for her. She began to feel anxious. Was the afternoon going to be a failure? Why could she never, never get the better of her shyness? She wanted to make him happy because, on the whole, people had been beastly to him and said such horrid things about him. She wanted him to feel for himself, and not only through her, that the world was a very wonderful place, a place in which to be happy. He was so stiff and different, so taut and tightly strung up, that lounging, loose-limbed Mitchell seemed graceful compared with him. Yet there was something unforgettable about him, and he had always had for her the vivid romantic reality of the beautiful young men on the stage, who were creatures of a delicious, absurd world which she would never enter and never wished to enter: a world where young men opened their arms and young women sank into them and were provided with happiness for ever and ever. Her vigour rejected this world, for she knew and lived in a better, but all the same it had its charm and its curious reality. . . .

She was not shy because she had kissed him. That had passed with the shifting light through the trees and the clouds in the sky. It had been vivid and true for that moment, but it had perished and fallen away like a drop of water, like a rainbow.

He remembered it. As he sat by her side and could feel the warm life in her, it became terribly actual to him, the cool contact of her lips, and he was glad when the bus reached the yard with the painted swing-boats and he need no longer sit by her side. He had begun to feel subservient to her, and he would not have that. What Rosa was to Issy, what Golda was to his father, that should a woman be to him, for it was good and decent so. . . . He was almost sorry he had come. He was painfully shy, and knew that she was suffering under it.

He walked so fast that she was hard put to keep up with him, but she swung out and would not be beaten, and managed his pace without losing her breath. Over to the wooded side of the Heath he took her, and stopped under a chestnut-tree.

"Shall we sit down?" he said. "Or would you like to go on walking?"

"I'd like to sit down," she answered. "I love walking, but I can't talk at the same time."

He sat down at once, without waiting for her to choose a spot.

"This grass is nice and cool," he said.

It was wet, but he had no thought for her thin cotton frock.

She sat a couple of yards away from him on the short turf and plunged her arm into the long, cool grass. Then she lay on her stomach and plucked a blade of grass and chewed it.

"Thank you for sending me the roses. I gave them to my mother."

"I liked your mother."

"She liked you. She said: 'That is a good girl.' She is very quick at guessing what people are like."

"I'm glad she liked me."

Once again conversation died away, but she seemed content to lie there with her arms in the cool grass. Their round slenderness fascinated him. Her short hair hung over her face, so that he could only see the tip of her chin.

Suddenly he asked her:--

"Do you send flowers to Mitchell?"

"Yes," she said, and her head was lowered so that the tip of her chin was hidden by her hair.

He said nothing, but he too lay on the grass, flat on his stomach, with his head on his arms. His heart began to thump, and, though he tried to control it, it would not be still. Without raising his head he said, in a choking voice that astonished him:--

"My father fainted for love of my mother. When he heard her name he fainted away."