Chapter XI: Book TWO: Bohemia (3)

She said nothing, only in the long grass her fingers were still. Her white hands in the grass fascinated him, held his eyes transfixed, the green blades coming up through the white fingers that were so still. He stared at them as though they were some strange flower, and for him they had nothing to do with her at all. He drew himself near to them, never taking his eyes off them--white and green, white and green and pink at the finger-tips. He must touch them. They were cool, soft, and firm, soft as the petals of a rose.

He grasped them like a child seizing a pretty toy, but when they were in his grasp he was no longer like a child. A single impulse thrilled through all his body and made it strong even as a giant. With one easy swing of his arm he pulled her to him, held her with a vast tenderness, and held her so, gazing into her face. Her lips parted, and he kissed them. . . .

It was she who first found words:--

"Oh Mendel! I do love you."

He was amazed at his own strength, at his own tenderness. . . . So that was a kiss! And this, this, this was love! It was incredible! How sweet and easy were his emotions. He was as free and light as the wind in the leaves.

She had slipped from his arms, but she was singing through all his veins, she and no other, she and nothing else in the world. And he was in her, perfectly, beautifully aware of her body and of the ecstasy in it, of the tree above them, of the dove-coloured clouds, of the cool green grass, of the yellow earth crumbling out of the mound yonder, and of the ecstasy in them all.

So for many moments they lay in silence, until as suddenly as it had come his strength left him, and he broke into a passionate babble of words:--

"You must not send flowers to Mitchell, because he cannot love you and I can. He knows nothing, and I know a great deal. I know women and the ways of women, for many have loved me, but I have loved none but you. No woman has been my friend except my mother. I did not look for any woman to be like my mother. I am not an Englishman who can love with pretty words. I love, and it is like that tree, growing silently until it dies. It has stolen on me as softly as the night, and I sink into it as I sink into the night, to sleep. It is as though the dark night were suddenly filled with stars and all the stars had become flowers and poured their honey into my thoughts. When your white hands were in the grass they were like flowers and they seemed to belong to me, as all beautiful things belong to me because I can love them."

She came nearer to him and laid her hand on his, and she said:--

"I am very, very happy."

And she laughed and added:--

"I _was_ glad when you made that catch."

He was beyond laughter. For him laughter was for trivial things. She had stopped the flow of his thoughts, the rush of his emotions up into his creative consciousness. Wave upon wave of passion surged through him, racked him, tortured him, tossing his soul this way and that, threatening to hurl it down and smash it on the hardness of his nature. He set his teeth and would not wince. If she could laugh she could know nothing of that. She was shallow, she was young. . . . Was it because he was a Jew that he seemed so old compared with her? . . . What was it she lacked that she could laugh and leave him to the torment she had provoked?

But she was aware of the curious blankness that had come over his end of their twilight silence, and she suffered from it, thinking: "Am I an awful woman? Can I give nothing?" And she turned to him to give, and give all the rare treasures of her soul, of her heart, to lay them before him for his delight. But what she had already given had let loose a storm in him that blotted out all the beauty of the scene, all the loveliness of their love, the gift and the taking of it, and left him with only the dim light of her purity.

Soon the storm passed and they had nothing but an easy delight in each other's company, each turning to each as to a warm fire by which to laugh and talk and make merry.

He told her stories of his childhood, of his brothers and his father, and Mr. Kuit, the thief, who had bought him his first suit; of his childish joy in painting, and there he stopped short. Of his misery he was unable to speak.

"You do believe in yourself," she said.

"Why not?" he replied; "I am a man. When I hold my hands before my eyes they are real. They are flesh and blood. I must believe in them. And I am all flesh and blood. I must believe."

"And everything else is real to you."

"Everything that I love is real. And what I do not love I hate, so that is real too."

They wandered about the Heath until night came and the stars shone, and then they plunged into the glitter of London, where all people and things were deliciously fantastic and comic, flat and kinematographic, as though, if you walked round to the other side, you would discover that they were painted on one side only. It gave them the glorious illusion of being the only two living people in the world, for they and only they had loved since the world began, and all the other lovers were only people in a story, living happily ever after or coming to an end of their love, neither of which could happen to them because they were, always had been, and always would be in love.

They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, where they encountered Mitchell, who had the effrontery to come and speak to them. He was very friendly and spoke as though nothing had happened. They told him they had been to Hampstead and recommended him to try it when he found London too stuffy.

When he had gone away, Morrison said:--

"I am going away soon."

"Going away? But you mustn't go away."

"I have to go next week. My mother has fits of anxiety about my being in London every now and then, and she drags me off home. She has got one of them now. She can't see that if any harm were going to happen to me it would have happened during my first year, when I didn't know anything and was very lonely. I don't think I'm very real to her, somehow."

She gave a little shiver of distaste at the thought of going home.

"But you mustn't go away," said Mendel. "I want you, always."

"And I want to be with you, but if I refused to go home now, I should have to go for always, for I should have no money."

He was plunged into a dejected silence, and with hardly a word more he took her home.

* * * * *

They had a whole week of this warm happiness. He abandoned every other thought, every other pursuit, every other friend. He put aside his work to paint her portrait, and she came every day to his studio. At night he hardly slept at all for his longing for the next day to come and bring her to his studio, that now seemed immense, airy, ample even for such a giant as he felt. . . . He adored her even when she laughed, even when she teased him. He even learned occasionally to laugh at himself. It was worth it to see the amazing happiness he gave her.

One morning as he was painting her, he said:--

"I can't believe you are going away."

"It is true, more's the pity."

"But you are not going, for I will marry you."

He said this in a matter-of-fact tone as he went on with his painting. The picture was coming on well and he was pleased with it. He stepped back and looked at it from different angles. It seemed a long time before she made the expected matter-of-fact reply, and he looked up at her. She was hanging her head and plucking at her skirt nervously. She heard him stop in his work, and she replied:--

"I don't . . . think . . . I want to marry you, Mendel. I don't . . . think . . . I want to marry anybody."

"I'm making plenty of money and I can get commissions for portraits. I could make it up with Birnbaum. We could go to Italy together."

"Don't make it harder for both of us, Mendel. . . . I don't want . . . to marry."

"You will go back home, then?"

"Please . . . please . . ." she implored him.

A fury began to rise in him. He stamped his foot on the ground and struck his brush across the picture. He made a tremendous effort to recover himself, but before he could say another word she had slipped through the door and was gone. He darted after her, and reached the front-door just in time to see her running as hard as she could down the street and round the corner.

Just as he was, in his shirt-sleeves, hatless and collarless, he went in to see his mother. He was white-hot with rage, and he walked up to her and looked her up and down as though he were trying to persuade himself that she was to blame.

"What do you think the news is now?"

Golda put her hand to her heart and looked at him fearfully as she shook her head.

"I've been refused," he said, "refused by the Christian girl."

"Refused!" cried Golda, who had never heard of such a thing as a girl refusing to marry a rich young man.

"Yes. I proposed to her and she refused."

"The Christians are all alike," said Golda. "They keep themselves to themselves, and you must do the same."

She took a smoked herring from the cupboard and cut it into portions.

"And when your time for marrying comes you must look among the Jews, for the Jews are good people. No Jewish girl would serve you a trick like that. Jewish girls know that they must marry and they are good. But she is young, and you are young, and you will both forget."

VI

CAMDEN TOWN

FROM the magnificent studio in Hammersmith to two rooms in Camden Town Mr. James Logan removed his worldly goods, a paint-box, half-a-dozen canvases, two pairs of trousers, three shirts, a "Life of Napoleon" in two volumes, and a number of photographs of famous pictures. The magnificent studio had been lent to him by the mistress of its owner, who had returned unexpectedly from abroad, and Mr. James Logan's departure from it was hurried, but unperturbed.

"In my time," he said, "I have kept Fortune busy, but her tricks leave me unmoved. She will get tired of it some day and leave me alone."

All the same he did not relish the change. He was nearly thirty and had tasted sufficient comfort to relish it and to prize it. Also he could not forget the ambitions with which he had come to London five years before. In the North he had won success by storm, and he could not understand any other tactics. He was an extraordinary man and expected immediate recognition of the fact. Upon his own mind his personality had so powerful an effect that he was blind to the fact that it did not have a similar effect upon the minds of others. Women and young men he could always stir into admiration, but men older than himself were only affronted. He knew it and used to curse them:--

"These clods, these hods, these glue-faced ticks have no more sap in them than a withered tree. They hate me as a mule hates a stallion, and for the same reason. May God and Mary have mercy on what little is left of their souls by the time they come to judgment!"

He cursed them now as he laid his trousers on the vast new double-bed he had bought and went into his front room to arrange his easel and canvas for work. Whatever happened to him he would go on painting, because he saw himself like that, standing as firm as a rock before his easel, painting, while the world, for all he cared, went to rack and ruin. What else could happen to a world that refused to recognize its artists?

Painting was truly a joy to him. He loved the actual dabbling with the colours, laying them out on his palette, mixing them, evolving rare shades; he loved the fiery concentration and absorption in the making of a picture; the renewed power of sight when he turned from a picture to the world; the glorious nervous energy that came thrilling through his fingers in moments of concentration; the feeling of the superiority of this power to all others in the world. And so, whatever happened, he turned to his easel and painted. Love, debt, passion, quarrels, all the disturbances of life came and went, but painting remained, inexhaustible. So he had been happy, free, unfettered, gay, avoiding all responsibility because it was his formula that the artist's only responsibility is to his art.

He was doubly happy now because he knew he had made an impression on a young man whose sincerity and vigour of purpose he could not but respect. He was himself singularly impressionable, and like a sponge for sucking up the colour of any strong personality. And Mendel had the further attraction for him that he was pure London, of the shifting, motley London that Logan, as a provincial, adored. This London he had touched at many points, but never through a strong living soul that had, and most loyally acknowledged, London as its home.

Logan's visit to Mendel in the East End had been one of the great events of his life. Through it he had found his feet where he had been floundering, though, of course, happily and excitedly enough.

He told himself that now he was going to settle down to work, to the great productive period of his life, such as was vouchsafed to every real artist who was tough enough to pay for it in suffering. He would rescue Mendel's genius from the Detmold and the ossified advanced painters, and together they would smash the English habit of following French art a generation late, and they would lay the foundations of a genuine English art, a metropolitan art, an art that grew naturally out of the life of the central city of the world.

Logan always worked by programme, but hitherto he had changed his programme once a week. Now he was sure that this was the programme of his life. It would be amended, of course, by inspiration, but its groundwork was permanent. He was enthusiastic over it. . . . Of course, this was what he had always been seeking, and hitherto he had been fighting the London which absorbed the talents of the country, masticated them, digested them, and evacuated them in the shape of successful painters for whom neither life nor art had any meaning, or in the shape of vicious wrecks who crawled from public-house to public-house and died in hospitals.

It was time that was stopped. It was time for London to be made to recognize that it had a soul, and this generation must begin the task, for never before had a generation been so faced with the blank impossibility of accepting the work, thought, and faith of its predecessor. Never had it been so easy to slip out of the stream of tradition, for never had tradition so completely disappeared underground.

"'He that hath eyes to see, let him see,'" quoth Logan, and he hurled himself into his work, dancing to and fro, squaring his shoulders at it as though the picture were an adversary in a boxing-match.

* * * * *

At half-past four he laid down his brushes and began to arrange the room, pinning photographs on the walls, and unpacking certain articles of furniture, as a rug, a great chair, and mattresses to make a divan, which he had bought that morning. Every now and then he ran to the window, threw up the sash, and looked up and down the street.

At last with a tremor of excitement he leaned out and waved his hand, shut the window, and ran downstairs. In a moment or two he returned with the girl of the Tube station. She was wearing the same clothes, with the addition of a cheap fur boa, and she panted a little from the run upstairs with him.

"I'm glad you came," he said. "I was afraid you wouldn't."

"Oh! It's not far from where I live," she said. "But you are in a mess."

"I've only just got in. I would have asked you to my old place, but I had to leave."

"So you're a nartist," she said. "I thought you were something funny."

"Funny!" snorted Logan. "I call a shop-walker funny; or a banker, for that matter, or a millionaire. An artist is the most natural thing to be in the world. . . . Take your hat and gloves off and give me a hand, and then we'll have tea."

"Oh! I love my tea."

"I know all about tea. I get it from a friend of mine in the City. I know how to make it, too."

They worked together, arranging, dusting, keeping deliberately apart and eyeing each other surreptitiously. He liked her slow, heavy, indolent movements, and she exaggerated them for him. She liked his quick, firm, decisive actions, and he accentuated them for her; and she liked his thick, black hair and his strong hands.

He picked up the great chair and held it at arm's-length.

"Oo! You are strong," she said.

"I could hold you up like that."

"I'd like to see you try," and she gave a little giggle of protest.

"I will if I don't like you," said he, "and I'll let you drop and break your leg."

She went off into peals of laughter, and he laughed too.

"It's such a jolly day," he said. "It only needed you to come to make everything perfect."

"What made you speak to me the other night?" she asked.

"I liked the look of you."

"But I'm not that sort, you know."

"It isn't a question of being that sort. I wanted to speak to you, and that was enough for me. Sit down and have some tea."

The kettle was boiling, and he had already warmed the pot. He measured out the tea carefully, poured the water onto it, and gave her a blue china cup. He produced an old biscuit-tin containing some French pastry, and then sat on the floor while she consumed the lot.

It gave him great pleasure to see her eat, and he liked her healthy, childish greed. She had the face of a spoiled child, a very soft skin, and plump, yielding flesh. He liked that. It soothed and comforted him to look at her, while at the same time he was irritated by her inward plumpness and easiness.

"You've always had a good time," he said.

"Oh yes! I've seen to that."

"You're not a London girl."

"No; Yorkshire."

"I'm from Lancashire."

"Eeh! lad," she said, her whole voice altering and deepening into an astonishingly full note, "are ye fra' Lancashire? Eeh! a'm fair clemmed wi' London. Eeh! I am glad ye coom fra' Lancashire."

"What are you doing in London?"

"I'm working in Oxford Street, though not one of the big shops."

"Like it?"

"M'm! Well enough."

"Of course you don't, handing out laces and ribbons----"

"'Tisn't laces and ribbons. It's corsets."

"Corsets, then, to women who haven't a tenth of your looks or your vitality."

"It can't be helped if they have the money and I haven't, can it?"

"Money doesn't matter. What's money to you, with all the rich life in you? Money cannot buy that, nor can it buy what will satisfy you."

"And what's that?"

"Love and freedom."

"Ooh! you are a talker."

"I'm not flirting with you. I haven't got time for that."

He laid his hand on her foot, which was covered with a thin cotton stocking. She did not move it.

"You needn't stare at me like that," she said, with a curious thickness in her voice.

"I can't help staring," he answered, "when I mean what I say." He pressed his lips together and scowled, and shook her foot playfully. There was an exhilarating pleasure in startling and mastering her by directness. It was like peeling the bark off a stick. The thin layers of affectation came off easily and cleanly, leaving bare the white sappy smoothness of her innocent sensuality.

"I do mean what I say," he added. "Why should we beat about the bush? I asked you to come to-day because I wanted you. You came because you knew I wanted you."

"You asked me to tea."

"All right. And you'll stay to dinner. People have made love to you before."

"Well, no . . . yes. . . . Not like . . ."

"Don't tell lies," he said. "You saw me at the station long before I saw you, and you wanted me to see you. That was why you stayed at the booking-office."

"You were with such a pretty boy," she said.

"Boy! You're not old enough to care for pretty boys."

"But he _was_ pretty."

"Be quiet!" he said, kneeling by her side. "You may want me to take weeks over making all sorts of foolish advances to you, but I'm not going to waste time. I've wasted too much time over that sort of rubbish. We both know what we want and you are going to stay with me."

"No."

"I say yes."

"No." And she sprang to her feet and walked to the door. There she turned. He had picked up her gloves.

"Will you give me my gloves, please?"

"No."

"Will you give me my gloves?"

"No."

"Then I shall go without them."

"Very well. Good-bye."

"If I stay, will you promise not to talk like that?"

"I don't want you to stay under those circumstances."

"You're an insulting beast."

"Not at all. I honour your womanhood by not pretending that it isn't there."

"Will you give me my gloves?"

She ran across and tried to snatch them out of his hand. He gripped and held her, and she gave a wild laugh as he kissed her.

She clung to him as he let her sink back into the great chair. She lay with her eyes closed and her lips parted while he sat and poured himself out another cup of tea. His hand was shaking so that he spilled some tea on his new rug.

"That's all right," he said. "I'll give you a week to get used to me, and if at the end of that time you don't like me, you can go."

"I haven't any friends," she said in a low voice, "and you get sick of girls and the shop. You get sick of going out in the evening up and down the streets and into the cinemas, and finding some damn fool to take you to a music-hall. Such a lot of people and nobody to know."

"There's a lot of fun in living with an artist," he said. "You meet queer people and amusing women, and you wouldn't find me dull to live with."

"I felt queer as I came near the house," she said, "as though I knew something was going to happen. I feel very queer now."

"That's love," said Logan grimly. "Love isn't what you thought it was."

"You must let me go now."

"When will you come again?"

"Never."

"Oh yes, you will."

"Stop it!" she cried. "Stop it! I'm not going to be flummoxed by the like of you."

"But you are," he said. "You poor darling!"

He took her hand and stroked it tenderly.

"Don't you see that you are flummoxed by something that is stronger than both of us? I'm shaken by it, and I'm whipcord. We're poor starving people, God help us! and we can save each other. We knew we could do it at once, when we met. . . . If I said all the pretty things in the world it wouldn't help. We're too far gone for that. When you're starving you don't want chocolates. . . . I'm only saying what I know. It is true of myself. If I have made a mistake about you, I am sorry. You can go. . . . Have I made a mistake?"

For answer she turned towards him, gazed at him with glazing eyes, raised her arms, and drew him into them.

* * * * *

A week later Nelly Oliver dined with Logan and Mendel at the Pot-au-Feu. They had a special dinner and drank champagne, for it was what Logan called the "nuptial feast."

Oliver, as they called her, was flushed with excitement, and kept on telling Mendel that he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen. She called Logan "Pip"--"Pip darling," "Pip dearest," "Pipkin" and "Pipsy"--because she said he was like an orange-pip, bitter and hard in the midst of sweetness.

"Pip says you're a genius," she said to Mendel. "What does he mean?"

Mendel disliked her, though he tried hard to persuade himself that she was charming. He was baffled by the solemnity with which Logan was taking her, for she seemed to him the type made for occasional solace and not for companionship. Exploring her with his mind and instinct, she seemed to him soft and pulpy, not unlike an orange, and if she and Logan were to set up a common life, then he would be like a pip indeed. . . . How could he explain to her the nature of genius? Can you explain the night to an insect that lives but an hour in the morning?

"I don't know," he said brusquely.

Logan was dimly aware that his friend and his girl were not pleasing each other, and he set himself to keep them amused. He succeeded fairly well, but his humour was forced, for he was under the spell of the girl and the thought of the adventure to which she had consented. She knew it, and was loud and shrill and triumphant, continually setting Mendel's teeth on edge, for the purity of his instinct was disgusted by the blurring and swamping of life by any emotion, and the quality of hers was not such as to win indulgence.

"Logan will tell you what genius is," he said.

"She'll find that out soon enough if she lives with me," growled Logan a little pompously.

Oliver put her head on one side and looked languishingly at Mendel as she drawled:--

"It's a pity you haven't got a nice girl. Then there would be four of us."

"Don't be a fool!" snapped Logan. "What does he want with girls at his age?"

Oliver's lips trembled and she pouted in protest.

"I only thought it would be nice to round off the party. When you're in love you can't help wanting everybody else to have some too."

Mendel was torn between dislike of her and admiration of Logan's masterful handling of the problem of desire. . . . No nonsense about getting married or falling in love. He saw the woman he wanted and took her and made her his property, and the woman could not but acquiesce, as Oliver had done. In a dozen different ways she acknowledged Logan's lordship, even in her deliberate efforts to exasperate him. Their relationship seemed to Mendel simple and excellent, and he envied them. How easy his life would become if he could do the same! What freedom there would be in having a woman to throw in her lot with his! It would settle all his difficulties, absolve him from his dependence on his family, and deliver him from the attentions of unworthy women.

"How shall we dress her?" asked Logan.

Mendel took out his sketch-book and drew a rough portrait of Oliver in a gown tight-fitting above the waist and full in the skirt.

"I should look a guy in that," she said. "It's nothing like the fashion."

"You've done with fashion," said Logan. "You've done with the world of shops and snobs and bored, idiotic women. You're above all that now. In the first place there won't be any money for fashion, and in the second place there's no room in our kind of life for rubbish. You're a free woman now, and don't you forget it, or I'll knock your head off."

"But it's a horrible, ugly dress," said Oliver, almost in tears.

"It's what you're going to wear. I'll buy the stuff to-morrow and make it myself. What colour would you like?"

"I won't wear it."

"Then you can go back to your shop."

"You know I can't. I've said good-bye to all the girls."

"Then you'll wear the dress."

"I shan't."

"For God's sake don't quarrel," said Mendel. "One would think you had been married for ten years. Let her wear what she likes until she wants some new clothes."

"Highty Tighty! Little boy!" sang Oliver. "You talk as though I were a little girl."

"You behave like one," snapped Mendel, and her face was overcast with a cloud of malignant sulkiness.

* * * * *

They went on to a music-hall, where Logan and she sat with their arms locked and their shoulders pressed together, whispering and babbling to each other.

Mendel sat bolt upright with his arms folded, staring at the stage but seeing nothing, so lost was he in the contemplation of the strange turn of affairs by which the adventure which had promised to lead him straight to art had deposited him in a muddy little pool of life. He would not submit to it. He would not surrender Logan and all the hopes he had aroused. Prepared as he had been to follow Logan through fire, he would not shrink when the way led through the morass. Friendship was to him no fair-weather luxury, and nothing but falsehood or faithlessness in his friend could make him relinquish it.

He told himself that Logan would soon tire of it, that Oliver would go the way of her kind. She was, after all, better than Hetty Finch, since she had a capacity for childish enjoyment.

She revelled in the sentimental ditties and the suggestive humours of the comedians, pressed closer and closer to Logan, and grew elated and strangely exalted as the evening wore on. And as they left the music-hall she gripped Mendel's arm and brought her face close to his and whispered:--

"Do wish me luck, Kühler. Give me a kiss for luck."

He kissed her and mumbled: "Good luck!"

"Come and see us to-morrow," she said. "We shall be all right to-morrow."

"Oh, come along!" cried Logan, dragging her away; and Mendel stood in the glaring light of the portico and watched them as, arm in arm, they were swallowed up in the crowd hurrying and jostling its way home to the dark outer regions of London.

He had an appalling sense of being left out of it. Everything passed and he remained. He lived in a circle of light into which, like moths, came timid, blinking, lovable figures, and he loved them; but they passed on and were lost in the tumultuous, heaving darkness of life, into which alone he could not enter. . . . Did he desire to enter it? He did not know, but he was hungry for something that lay in it, or, perhaps, beyond it.

VII

MR. TILNEY TYSOE

LOGAN with Oliver was more startling and exhilarating than before. He was filled with a ferocious energy, and his programme was distended with it.

He said to Mendel:--

"She's an inspiration. I have found what I was seeking. You have given me the inspiration of art. Through you I shall reach the heights of the spirit. She has given me the inspiration of life, and through her I shall plumb the very depths of humanity. She is marvellous. All the exasperation of modern life is in her, all the impatient brooding on the threshold of new marvels. You think she is stupid, I know, but that is only because she has in herself such an immense wealth of instinctive knowledge of life that she does not need to judge it by passing outward appearances. I am amazed at her, almost afraid of her. Something tremendous will come out of her. . . . By God! It makes me sick to think of all the dabbling in paint that goes on, not to speak of all the dabbling in love. Love? The word has become foolish and empty. I don't wish to hear it uttered ever again. . . . I swear that if it doesn't come out in paint I shall write poetry. Oh! I can feel the marrow in my bones again, and my veins are full of sap. . . . But I want to talk business."

"Business?" said Mendel, who had been upset and bewildered by this outburst.

"Yes. I want you to approve my programme, for you must have a programme. It is all very well to work by the light of inspiration. That can work quite well as far as you yourself are concerned, but what about the public? what about the other artists?--damn them! We're going to burst out of the groove, but we must have a good reason for doing so."

"Surely it is reason enough that one can't work in it."

"Not enough for them. They must be mystified and impressed. They must be unable to place us. They must feel that we are up to something, but they must be unable to say what it is."

"I don't care what they say," said Mendel.

"But you must care. When we have carried out the programme, then you can do as you like, but till then we must pull together. We must do it for the sake of art. We must make a stand, not to found a school or to say that this and no other style of drawing is right, but to assert the sacred duty of the artist to paint according to his vision and his creative instinct."

This was coming very near to Mendel's own feeling, and he remembered the torture he had been through to learn the Detmold style of drawing, and how some virtue had gone out of his work in the effort.

"It is the artist's business," said Logan, "to create out of the life around him an expression of it in form."

"I agree," said Mendel.

"Accurate imitation is not necessarily an expression, is it? You know it isn't. A picture must be a created thing. It must have a life of its own, and to have that it must grow through the artist's passion out of the life around him. It is all rubbish to look back, to talk of going back to the Primitives or the Byzantines or Egypt. You can learn a great deal from those old people about pictures, but you cannot learn how to paint your own pictures from them, because you can only live in your own life and your own time, and if you are a good artist your work will transcend both. . . . Now, tell me, where is the work that is expressing the glorious, many-coloured life of London, where is the work that does not give you a shock as you come to it out of the street, the thrilling, vibrant street, making you feel that you are stepping back ten, twenty, fifty years? . . . Why has life outstripped art?"

"I don't know," said Mendel, whose head had begun to ache.

"It has not only outstripped it," continued Logan. "It has begun to despise it."

The postman knocked, and Mendel ran downstairs in feverish expectation of a letter from Morrison, to whom he had written imploring her to come again, or, if not, at least to let him have her address in the country. There was no letter for him, and as soon as he returned with a blank, disappointed face, Logan went on:--

"People collect pictures as they collect postage-stamps, to keep themselves from being bored. Naturally they despise pictures, and they despise us for accepting those conditions. They are intolerable, and we must make an end of them. We are in a tight corner, and we should leave no trick and twist and turn untried to get out of it. If we do not do so then there will be no art, as there is no drama, no music, and no literature, and there will be no authority among men, and humanity will go to hell. It is on the road to it, and the artists have got to stop it."

Mendel had not heard a word. He sat with his head in his hands thinking of Morrison, and hating her for the blank misery in which she had plunged him.

"Humanity," said Logan cheerfully, "is fast going to hell. It likes it; and, as the democratic idea is that it should have what it likes, not a finger, not a voice is raised to stop it. Everything that stands in the way--ideals, decency, responsibility, passion, love--everything is smashed. Nothing can stop it unless their eyes are opened and their poor frozen hearts are thawed."

"What did you say?" asked Mendel, having half-caught that last phrase.

"We must try to stop it," said Logan. "We may be smashed and swept aside, but we must try to stop it. . . . I've been to see Cluny to-day. He has sold all your things except one drawing."

"I know," replied Mendel, who had received an amazing account which showed about two-thirds of his earnings swallowed up in colours, brushes, frames, and photographs. He knew, but he was not interested. He was unhappy and restless and felt completely empty.

"We passionate natures," said Logan, striding up and down like Napoleon on the quarter-deck of the _Bellerophon_--"we passionate natures must take control. We must be the nucleus of true fiery stuff to resist the universal corruption. We must be dedicated to the wars of the spirit."

"I've got a splitting headache," said Mendel. "Do you mind not talking so much? The important thing for a painter is painting. What happens outside that doesn't matter."

"You think so now," said Logan, "but you wait. You'll find that painting won't satisfy you. You will want to know what it is all for, and one of these days you will be thankful to me for telling you. . . . Cluny has taken on some of my things, and he has agreed to our having an exhibition together. What do you say to that?"

"So long as I sell I don't care where I exhibit. Exhibitions are always horrible. They always make pictures look mean and insignificant."

"You are in a mood to-day."

"I tell you," cried Mendel in a fury--"I tell you I know what art is better than anybody. It touches life at one point, and one point only, and there it gives a great light. If life is too mean and beastly to reach that point, so much the worse for life. It does not affect art, which is another world, where everything is beautiful and true. I know it; I have always known it. I have lived in that world. I live in it, and I detest everything that drags me away from it and makes me live in the world of filth and thieves and scoundrels. Yes, I detest even love, even passion, for they make a fool and a beast of a man."

"Young!" said Logan. "Very young! You'll learn. . . . But do be sensible and control your beast of a temper. Never mind my programme if it doesn't interest you. Will you accept Cluny's offer? It is worth it, for it will make you independent."

"How much does he want?"

"A dozen exhibits each."

"Oh! very well."

"And will you come and dine to-night with my fool of a patron, Mr. Tilney Tysoe?"

"I don't want to know fools. I know quite enough already."

"But I've promised to take you. . . . He adores Bohemians, as he calls us, and he buys pictures."

"Does he give you good food?"

"Some of the best in London."

"All right."

"Meet us at the Paris Café at seven-thirty. Don't dress. Tysoe would be dreadfully disappointed if you didn't turn up reeking of paint. It would be almost better not to wash."

"Is Oliver going?"

"Yes. Do you mind?"

"No. . . . No."

* * * * *

It was an enormous relief to Mendel when Logan went. His enthusiasm was too exhausting, and it was maddening to have him talking of success and the triumph of art and the wars of the spirit when life had apparently reached up and extinguished the light of art altogether. For a brief moment, for a day or two, it had almost seemed to him that life and art were one, that everything was solved and simple, that he would henceforth only have to paint and pictures would flow from his brush as easily as song from a bird. This illusion had survived even the blow of Morrison's departure. He believed that it was enough for him to have had that hour of illumination, and that, if go she must, he could do without her. The flash of light had been the same, magnified a thousand times, as the inspiration that set him at work on a picture and then left him to wrestle with the task of translating it into terms of paint. She had appeared to him exactly in the same visionary way, an image shining in truth and beauty, an emanation from that other world, and he had thought he would at worst be left with the terrible ordeal of translating the vision into paint. . . . But when he looked at his pictures they oppressed him with their lifelessness and dark dullness, and the idea of painting disgusted him. It was even an acute pain, almost like a wound upon his heart, to handle a brush. He could not finish the portrait of his father and mother, and, at best, he could only force himself to paint flower-pieces.

He was incapable of deceiving himself. He had never heard of devout lovers sighing in vain, and he had no sources of comfort within himself. Never had he shrunk from any torment, and this was so cruel as to be almost a glory, except that it meant such a deathly stillness and emptiness. He could not understand it, and he knew that it was past the comprehension of all whom he knew, even his mother. But he set his teeth and vowed that he would understand it if it took years. . . . A little girl, a little Christian girl! How was it possible?

There was some relief in the thought of her, but very little. She was still too visionary, and when he tried to think of her in life, by his side, it was impossibly painful.

Where was she? Why did she not write? Her silence was like ice upon his heart. . . . What kind of place did she live in? Among what people? How was he to imagine her? . . . To think of her among the trees or under the chestnut-tree was to be torn with impulses that could find no outlet; desires for creation that made painting seem a sham and a mockery.

So keen, and fierce, and deep was his suffering that death seemed a little thing in comparison. When he tried to think of death he knew that it was not worth thinking of, and he was ashamed that the thought should have been in his mind.

He knew that he must understand or perish. To say that he was in love was hopelessly inadequate. He knew how people were when they were in love. They were like Rosa, like animals, stupid and thick-sighted, with a thickening in their blood. But he was possessed with a clairvoyance that made everything round him seem transparent and flimsy, while thought crept stealthily, like a cat on a wall, and emotion was confounded.

* * * * *

For days he had hardly left his studio, and it was only with the greatest effort that he could bring himself to join Logan at the Paris Café. He felt weak, and the streets looked very strange, clear and bright, as they do to a convalescent. As he entered the café it seemed years since he had been there, ages since he had sat there trembling with excitement as he waited for the great Calthrop to come in. He remembered that excitement so vividly that something like it came rushing up in him, and he clutched at it for relief. . . . Calthrop was there with his little court of models and students. Mendel found himself laughing nervously as he stood and waited for the great man to recognize him. Calthrop looked up and nodded to him. He was wildly, absurdly delighted. He rushed over to Logan and Oliver and shook them enthusiastically by the hand.

"Isn't it a splendid place?" he cried.

"Have something to drink," said Logan. "You've been overworking."

"You must say it's a splendid place," insisted Mendel, "or I shall go home. Just by that table where Calthrop is sitting is where I was arrested."

"Oh, which is Calthrop?" asked Oliver eagerly.

"The big man over there," said Mendel. "I was arrested just there, and I had to go on my knees to the manager to make him allow me to come here again. I had to apologize to him. At the time it was the greatest tragedy of my life."

He had forgotten his dislike for Oliver in his elation at finding himself gay again, and he chattered on of the days when the café had seemed to him a heaven full of heroes. Oliver listened to him like a child. She loved stories, and she leaned forward and drank in his words, and she appeared to him as a very beautiful woman, desirable, intoxicating. Yet because Logan was his friend he would not envy him, but rejoiced in his possession of this rare treasure, a woman who could deliver up to him all the warm secrets of life. And he could not help saying so, and telling them how happy it made him to be with them.

Logan and Oliver glanced at each other, and their hands met in a fierce grip under the table. Mendel could not see more than their glance, but the meeting of their eyes sent a flame like a white-hot sword darting at his heart. The sharp pain released him, and sent him shooting up into a wilder gaiety.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning with a start, he saw Mr. Sivwright, his first master, standing above him. He rose and shook hands.

"I am glad to see you," said Mr. Sivwright. "I've been meaning to write to you, but I've been away, out of London."

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

"I can't stop a moment," said Mr. Sivwright. "I'm very busy. I have just started a club for artists--opens at eleven. These absurd closing hours, you know. I hope you'll join. It has been open a week. Great fun, and I want some frescoes painted. . . . I'm very proud of your success, Kühler. I feel I had my hand in it."

He produced a prospectus and laid it on the table, bowed awkwardly to Oliver, and with a self-conscious swagger, as though he felt the eyes of all in the café upon him, made his way out.

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

"Sivwright," answered Mendel. "He taught me when I was a boy. He's a very bad artist, and he thinks art ended with Corot. I learned to paint like Corot. Really! I used to go with him to the Park and weep over the trees in the twilight: I never thought I should see him again."

"Oh! people bob up," said Logan. "We go on getting longer in the tooth, but people recur, like decimals."

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

"Oh! I love dancing," said she.

Logan assumed his air of mysterious importance and said it was time to go to Tysoe's.

"We're twenty minutes late," he said; "Tysoe would be dreadfully put out if we were punctual."

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

* * * * *

Mr. Tilney Tysoe was an idealist, and he had no other profession. He was a very tall man with a long cadaverous face, great bulging, watery eyes, and extraordinarily long hands, which hung limply from his wrist, except when he was excited, when they shot up with extreme violence, and carried his arms with them into a gesture so awkward that he had to find relief from it in a shrug. He was devoted to the arts, had a stall at the opera, a study full of books, and several rooms full of pictures. An artist was to him a great artist, a book that pleased him was a great book, and his constant lament was over the dearth of great men in public life. It gave him the keenest delight to see Logan, unkempt, wild-haired, shaggy, violent and brusque, enter his daintily furnished drawing-room, and his eyes passed eagerly to Oliver, looking just as she ought to have done, the mistress of a Bohemian.

"Delighted! Delighted!" he said as he coiled his long white hand round Mendel's workmanlike paw. "My wife, I regret to say, is away. She will be so sorry to have missed you. Like me, she is tired of the shallow, artificial people we live among. We both adore sincere, real people. I adore sincerity. Sincerity is genius."

"That is true," said Logan in a sepulchral voice that made Mendel jump. "At least, where you find sincerity, you may be sure that genius is not far behind."

"I bought a picture of yours the other day, Mr. Kühler," said Tysoe. "I am ashamed to think how little I gave for it, but works of art are priceless, are they not?"

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

"You think so," rejoined Tysoe with an undulation of his long body. "And why shouldn't you say so? You are sincere and strong. You must force your talent upon an ungrateful world."

A man-servant announced dinner, and Tysoe gave his arm to Oliver and led her downstairs, while Logan put his hand on Mendel's shoulder and said with a chuckle:--

"Be sincere."

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

"I have won every possible prize for painting and drawing, and the first picture I exhibited was the sensation of the year in art circles."

"I remember it," said Tysoe.

"Like my friend Logan, I am profoundly dissatisfied with the state of art in England, and though I am not an Englishman I have sufficient love for the country to wish to do my share in redeeming it. The first essential is a new technique, the second essential is a new spirit, and the third essential is sincerity."

"Wonderfully true!" cried Tysoe. "Have some sherry. Wonderfully true! Now, take the ordinary man. He might feel all that, but would he dare to say it? No. That is why I, as an idealist, delight in the society of artists. You know where you are with them. Facts are facts with them."

"I do like this sherry wine," said Oliver, beginning to feel very comfortable in the warm luxury of the dining-room.

Logan kicked her under the table.

Feeling that more was expected of him, Mendel wound himself up again and went on:--

"Logan and I are going to hold an exhibition together. It will make a great stir, that is, if London is not altogether dead to sincerity. We think it is time that independence among artists was encouraged. Art must not be allowed to stop short at Calthrop----"

He stopped dead as he realized that the wall opposite him held half a dozen drawings by Calthrop. Logan rushed in:--

"Among real artists there is no rivalry. Art is not a competition. It is a constellation, like the Milky Way."