Chapter XII: Book TWO: Bohemia (4)

"Ah! La Voie Lactée!" cried Tysoe, dropping into French, as he sometimes did when he was moved. "Quite so! La Voie Lactée!"

"At home in Yorkshire," said Oliver, "there are sometimes two big stars hanging just over the top of the moors, and they say it means love or death if you see it at half-past nine."

Logan took charge of the conversation, frowning at Mendel and Oliver as though they were naughty children. He described the masterpiece he was painting, and Tysoe said:--

"I'm sure I shall like that. It sounds big and forceful, like yourself. Do let me have a look at it before anyone else sees it."

Then he added:--

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

"It was sold, I fancy," replied Mendel, who had never painted a melon in his life.

"Ah! A pity. I wanted some little thing for a wedding-present. No one I care about very much, so it must be a little thing."

"He has two or three little things just now," said Logan. "If you sent a messenger-boy round to his studio he would let you see them."

And suddenly Mendel could keep the game up no longer. He began to feel choked by the stuffy, empty luxury of the room, with its excess of plate and glass and flowers and furniture and pictures. His head seemed to be on the point of bursting. He must get out--out and away. He wanted to laugh, to scream with laughter, to shout, to die of laughter, anything to shake off the oppressive folly of his host. And he began to laugh, to shake and heave with it. He suppressed it, but at last he burst out with a roar and rushed from the room.

"Overworked," said Logan imperturbably. "That's what it is. The poor devil hasn't learned sense yet. It's work, work, work with him, all the time. He thinks of nothing but his art, you know. Never has, ever since he was a boy. . . . He'll be a very great genius, and I shall be left far behind."

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

"Do you think him as good as all that?" said Oliver eagerly. "I'm always telling him Kühler's not a patch on him."

Meanwhile Mendel had taken refuge in the lavatory, where he shouted and shook and cried with laughter. When he had recovered himself he crawled back to the dining-room muttering inaudible apologies.

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

"You mustn't overdo it," said Tysoe kindly. "You have plenty of time. You need be in no hurry to overtake Logan. He is entering upon maturity. Your time will come."

Mendel felt disturbed. He had not thought of Logan seriously as a painter, certainly not as a rival or a colleague. Logan was his friend. That Logan painted was incidental. It irritated him to have to sit and listen to him holding forth about painting. He had always liked Logan's talk, but had never really connected it with his work. It was just talk, like reading, or going to the cinema--a sop, a drug, soothing and pleasant when he was in the mood for it, maddening when he was not.

It was as though a spring had been touched, releasing his intelligence, which had always been kept apart from his work. For the first time he felt, though never so little, detached from it, while at the same moment the awful inward pressure of his emotional crisis was relaxed. He was happier, and less wildly gay, and he began to realize that he had astonishingly good food in front of him, good wine in plenty, delicious fruits to come, and fragrant coffee brewing there on the sideboard among bright-hued liqueur bottles. . . . There was no need to listen to Logan. There was pleasure enough in eating and drinking and watching Oliver, and thinking how good it would be to dance with her, and perhaps with others--little women whom he would hold in his arms and feel them yield to every movement that he made. . . .

He was left alone with Oliver after dinner, while Logan and Tysoe retired to the study.

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

"Oh, yes!" said she. "It was like a Fate, wasn't it? I always had a feeling that I wasn't like other girls. I always thought something out of the way would happen to me, though I never thought of anything like this."

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

"I must tell someone or I shall die. He's so extraordinary. He says it's something deeper than love, and I think it must be."

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

"It makes all the stuff he talks about seem silly. I don't understand it, do you?"

She lay back in her chair and swung her foot, with her eyes fixed on the door waiting for Logan to return.

Mendel's dislike of her sprang up in him again, and he was a little afraid of her: of her big, fleshy body, so full now of little trickling streams of pleasure; of her eyes, watching, watching, with the strange, glassy steadiness of the eyes of a bird of prey. . . . He decided that he would not dance with her. He would dance with the others--the little, harmless, pretty fools.

To reassure himself he told himself that Logan was happy, and strong enough to resist the growing will in this woman.

VIII

THE MERLIN'S CAVE

LOGAN had cajoled twenty pounds out of Mr. Tysoe, who stood on his doorstep, dangling his long hands, while his admired guests crept into a taxi-cab. He swung from side to side:--

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

Inside the cab Logan waved the cheque triumphantly and Oliver tried to snatch it from him. They had an excited scuffle, which ended in a kiss.

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

"He's just a fool," replied Logan, "a padded fool. His only virtue is that he does really think me a wonderful fellow, and he is kind. But how I hate such kindness, the last virtue, the last refuge of the decrepit! It is a perfume, a herb with which they are embalmed."

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

"He seemed to me," said Mendel, "the kind of man who thinks of nothing but women all day long."

"Hit it in once!" cried Logan. "A parrot will not do more for an almond than he will for a commodious drab. He could take a nun and by force of living with her and surrounding her with every luxury turn her into a whore, because she would in time become only another luxury. That is what men grow into if they lose the spirit of freedom. . . . Where are we going to?"

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

* * * * *

The club proved to be a cellar filled with little tables. There was a commissionaire at the door and a book had to be signed. The rack of the cloakroom contained several silk-lined overcoats and opera-hats.

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

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

Two tall young men in immaculate evening dress had entered just after them. They gave out an air of wealth and cleanliness and made Logan and Oliver look common and shabby. Mendel hated the two young men. What had they done to look so well-fed and unruffled? Obviously they had only to hold out their hands to have everything they wanted put into them. . . . They looked slightly self-conscious and ashamed of themselves, and wore a look of alarmed expectancy as they went downstairs.

Why did they come there if they were ashamed? and why did they expect an Asmodean lewdness of an artists' club, they for whom the flesh-markets of the music-hall promenades existed?

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

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

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

A girl was standing on a table singing an idiotic song with a syncopated chorus which a few people took up in a half-hearted fashion. The sound of it was thin and depressing.

"The same old game," said Logan. "Playing at being wicked. Why can't they stick to their commercial beastliness? I should be ashamed to bring any woman into this. I am ashamed." He half rose from his chair.

"Oh! don't go," pleaded Oliver, who was entranced with her first sight of what she called a gay life. It was to her like a stage spectacle. "Oh! there's that Calthrop; I suppose all those odd women with him are models."

Calthrop was surrounded by admiring students, among them Morrison, sitting prim and astonished and obviously amazed to find herself where she was. Mendel began to tremble, and his heart beat violently, as he stared at her--stared and stared.

She had lied to him then! She had not had to go home! She could strike him down and then come to amuse herself at such a place as this!

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

How strange she looked! a wild violet in a hot-house. He waited for her to glance in his direction, but she seemed to be absorbed in the singer and in the song, and every now and then she smiled, though obviously not at the song--at something that amused her or pleased her in her thoughts. She could smile then and be happy, and all his wild emotions had made no invasion into her life. . . . No; she would not look in his direction. Perhaps she had seen him come in and refused to see him.

Would the dancing never begin? The dancing took place on a slightly raised floor. If he danced there she would have to see him.

He found a warm hand placed on his leg, and turning he saw Jessie Petrie, a model, with whom he had danced at the studios and at the Detmold.

"I thought I was never going to see you again," she said, "and Mitchell said you had gone mad."

"Do I look it?" he asked.

"No. You look bonnier than ever. I'm on my own again now. Thompson has gone to Paris. He says the only painters are there. I think he's going mad, because he paints nothing but stripes and triangles. And he _was_ such a dear. . . . I'm feeling awfully lonely because Tilly has gone to Canada. Samuelson gave her the chuck and she went out to her cousin in Canada, who had always been wanting to marry her. . . . Are you still down in Whitechapel? I do hate going to see you there. Why don't you move up to the West End? I could come and live with you then, for I do hate being at a loose end."

She was adorably pretty, dark, with eyes like damsons, lovely red lips, touched up with carmine, and a soft white neck that trembled as she spoke like the breast of a singing bird.

"Oh! who do you think I saw the other day? Hetty Finch! She has a flat and a motor-car, but I don't believe she is married." She looked suddenly solemn as she added: "The baby's dead." Then she rattled on: "Isn't she lucky? But she's an awful snob. Would hardly speak to me!"

"She's a beast of a woman."

"What do you think of this place? I suppose if the swells come it'll be a success, but they do spoil it."

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

"They've nearly finished the programme. They have to have a programme to make people eat and drink."

"Let's have some champagne."

He called the waiter and ordered a bottle.

"Been selling lately?"

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

"Dancing," Logan threw in, "is the beginning of art. It is too primitive for me, or I'm too old."

A thin-faced long-haired poet mounted the table and read some verses, which the popping of corks and the clatter of knives and forks rendered inaudible. The poet went on interminably, and at last someone began drumming on the table and shouting "Dance! Dance! Dance!" The poet stuck to it. Bread was thrown at him and the shouting became general.

At last the orchestra struck up through the poet's reedy chanting, couples made their way to the stage, and the dancing began. Morrison still sat prim and preoccupied. Mendel put his arm round Jessie's waist, his fingers sank into her young, supple body, and he lifted her to her feet and rushed with her over to the stage. The whole place was humming with life, beating to the chopped rhythm of the vacant American tune.

"I do love dancing with you," said Jessie, as he swung her into the moving throng of brilliantly dressed women and black-coated men, so locked together that they were like one creature, a strange, grotesque quadruped. And Jessie so melted into him, so became a part of him, that he too became another creature, an organism in the whirling circle supported and spun round by the music. It was glorious to feel his will relaxing, to feel the lithe, soft woman in his arms yield to every impulse, every movement. He danced with a terrific concentration, with a wiry collected force that made Jessie feel as light as a feather.

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

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

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

And she had the next dance with him; but there was no lightness in her, only a greedy fumbling after sensation.

"This is awful!" thought Mendel, never for a moment losing himself, and all the while conscious of Morrison sitting there unmoved: of Morrison, whom he was trying to forget. Oliver seemed to envelop him, to swallow him up. He was conscious of holding an enormous woman in his arms and her contact was distasteful. The dance seemed endless. Would the music never stop? . . . One, two, three. . . . One, two, three. . . . It was like a dancing class with the fat Jewesses at home. . . . And all the time he was conscious of Morrison's big blue eyes staring at him. Would she never stop her damnable smiling?

He returned Oliver to Logan shamefacedly, as though he were paying a long-standing debt.

Jessie returned from her other partner to him.

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

Now that the dancers were warmed up they refused to allow any intervals. They had their partners and were unwilling to stop. The orchestra was worked up into a kind of frenzy, and Mendel and Jessie were whirled into an ecstasy. They abandoned the conventional steps and improvised, gliding, whirling, swooping suddenly through the dancers. Sometimes he picked her up and whirled her round, sometimes his hands were locked on her waist and she bent backwards--back, back, until he pulled her up and she fell upon his breast, happy, panting, deliriously happy.

* * * * *

Morrison sat watching. She was trembling and felt very miserable. She had been brought there by Clowes, who had been unable to resist the flattery of Calthrop's invitation. All these people seemed to her to be pretending to be happy, and she was oppressed with it all. She had not seen Mendel until he mounted the stage, and then her heart ached. She remembered the etched phrases of his letter to her. She had written to him, but nothing she could express on paper conveyed her feeling, her sense of being in the wrong, and her deep, instinctive conviction of the injustice of that wrong. . . . He had placed her in the wrong by talking of marriage so prematurely. As she looked round the room she was oppressed by all the men: great, hulking creatures, clumsy, cocksure, insensible, spinning their vain thoughts and vainer emotions round the women as a spider spins its threads round a caught fly. . . . She had often watched spiders dealing with the booty in their webs, and Calthrop reminded her of a spider when he looked at Clowes and laid his hand on her shoulder or fingered her arm. And Clowes lay still like a caught fly and suffered it. . . . Morrison was in revolt against it all. She was full of sweet life, and would not have it so treated. Her prudery was not shocked, for she had no prudery. The men might have their women so, if the women liked it, but never, never would she be so treated.

It was because she had been able to sweep aside the sticky threads of vanity with Mendel that the ecstasy of the woods and the Heath had been possible.

As she watched him now, she knew that he was different from all the others. He had brought an exaltation into the face of the common little girl who was his partner. He was giving her life, not taking it from her.

Yet to see him made her unhappy. The music was vulgar, the people were vulgar, and he had no true place among them. But how he enjoyed it all!

She shook with impatience at herself. It was hateful to be outside it, looking on, looking on. A young student had pestered her to dance with him. She turned to him and said:--

"I want to dance, please."

Delighted, he sprang to his feet, gave her his arm, and whirled her into the dance.

* * * * *

Slowing down to take breath, Mendel looked in her direction. She was gone! A black despair seized him, a groan escaped him; he hugged Jessie tight against his body and plunged madly into the dance.

The musicians had been given champagne. The violinist began to embroider upon the tune and the 'cellist followed with voluptuous thrumming chords.

Jessie gave little cries of happiness to feel the growing strength in Mendel's arms, the waxing power of his smooth movements. She gave little cries like the call of a quail, and he laughed gleefully every time she cried. He could feel the force rising in him. It would surely burst out of him and break into molten streams of laughter, leaving him deliciously light, as light and absurd as dear little Jessie, who was swinging on the music like a dewdrop on a gossamer. . . . If only the music would last long enough! He would be as tremulous and light as she, and while that lightness lasted he could love her and taste life at its highest point--for her. . . . She was aware of his desire, and swung to it. It was like a wind swaying her, thistledown as she was; like a wind blowing her through the air on a summer's day. O that it might never end, that the sky might never be overcast, that the rain might never come and the night might never fall. . . . Terrible things had happened to Jessie in the night, and she was happy in the sun.

Mendel was past all dizziness. The room had spun round until it could spin no more, and then it had unwound itself, making him feel weak and giddy. He was very nearly clear-headed, and every now and then he caught a glimpse of Logan sketching and of Oliver, sitting with a sulky pout on her lips and tears in her eyes because she wanted to dance and knew she had made a failure of it.

"Lovely! lovely! lovely!" sighed Jessie.

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

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

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

She began to stroke his neck and to press her face against his breast. At the same moment he saw Morrison among the dancers. He slowed down and then stopped dead. The music rose to an exultant riot of sound.

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

Morrison and her partner swept past him, and he watched them go the full circle. She saw him standing, and as she approached broke away from her partner.

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

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

"Who brought you here? Calthrop?"

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

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

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

"The day after to-morrow."

"I must see you."

Before she could reply her partner, who had lost his temper, seized her and made her finish the dance, and when it was over he marched her back to Calthrop's party, and he never left her side again.

Mendel returned to Logan and Oliver, to find them impatient to go. The end of an evening always found them in this impatient mood.

"It all bears out what I say," said Logan. "All this night-club business. People have to go mad in London before they can taste life at all."

"Do you mind if I come home and sleep on your sofa?" asked Mendel. "I can't face my studio to-night."

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

Mendel winced, and Jessie's lips began to tremble. She was still suffering from the sudden end to her happiness. She looked at him, almost hoping that he was going to make reparation to her.

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

He knew he was in for a terrible night of reaction and desperate blind emotion; at the same time he did not wish to hurt Jessie more than he had done.

"I'll take you home in a cab," he said. "But I won't stay, if you don't mind. I'm done up. If you and Oliver walk half way, Logan, we ought to be there about the same time."

Jessie was appeased. A little kindness went a long way with her, and she hated to be a nuisance to a man.

When the cab stopped outside the door of her lodgings she flung her arms round Mendel's neck and kissed him, saying:--

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

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

"Good-night!"

* * * * *

Good-night! A night of tossing to and fro, of hearing terrifying noises in the darkness, of hearing Logan and Oliver in the next room, of shutting his ears to what he heard, of fancying he heard someone calling him . . . her voice! Surely she had called him, and the ache and the torment in his flesh was the measure of her need of him. . . . Strange, blurred thoughts; gusts of defiance and revolt; glimpses of pictures, subjects for pictures, colours and shapes. . . . His mother's hands clutching a fish and bringing a knife down on to it. There was a blue light on the knife. It would be very hard to get that and to keep it subordinate to the blue in the fish's scales. . . . His father and mother, eternally together, in an affection that never found any expression, harsh and bitter, but strongly savoured, like everything else in their lives. . . . Issy and Rosa, much the same as Logan and Oliver, and to them also he had to shut his ears. . . . The goggle-eyed man at the Pot-au-Feu. . . . London, London, the roaring fiery furnace of London in which he was burning alive, while flames of madness shot up above him. . . . Music. . . . There was a music in his soul, a music and mystery that could rise with an easy power above all the flames. . . . What did it matter that his body was burned, if his soul could rise like that up to the stars and beyond the stars to the point where art touched life and gave out its iridescent beneficent light? . . . Life, flames, body, stars, all might perish and fade away, but the soul had its knowledge of eternity and could not be quenched. . . . Eternal art, divine art, the world of form, shaped in the knowledge of eternity, wherein life and death are but a day and a night. . . . Sickening doubt of himself, sinking down, down into eternity to be a part of it, never to know it, never to see the light of art, lost to eternity in eternity. . . . He sat up in the middle of the night and imagined himself back in the one room in Gun Street, looking at the recumbent bodies of his family, lost in sleep, huddled together in degradation. . . . It would have been better to have gone home with Jessie. She would have given him rest and sleep. . . . No, no, no! . . . She was going away the day after to-morrow. He must see her before she went, with her big blue eyes and short chestnut hair. She had stopped in the middle of the dance. She had broken away from her partner, and on Hampstead Heath she had said "I love you."

IX

"GOOD-BYE"

LOGAN came in early in the morning to make tea. He shut the door carefully and came and sat on Mendel's sofa.

"She says you hate her," he said.

"I?" answered Mendel. "No. I. . . . What can make her say that? Because I didn't dance with her? I had Jessie. You ought to have danced with her."

"I'm glad she didn't dance. It might make her break out. Women are very queer things. You never know where they will break out. . . . You make love to them, touch a spring in them, and God knows where it may lead you. . . . You're not in love with that mop-haired girl, are you?"

"What if I am?"

"She's just a doll-faced miss. You're taken with the type because you're unused to it. For God's sake don't take it seriously. You're much too good to waste yourself on women. She'll drive you mad with purity and chivalrous devotion and all the other schoolgirl twaddle. Leave all that to the schoolboy English. It's all they're good for. They've bred it on purpose to be the mother of more schoolboys. It is the basis of the British Empire. But what is the British Empire to you or any artist? Nothing."

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

"She won't marry you," said Logan. "She won't live with you. She'll give you nothing. She'll madden you with her conceited stupidity and wreck your work. . . . What you want is what every decent man wants--to take a woman and keep her in her place, so that she can't interfere with him. That's what I've done, and it's made a man of me, but I'm not going to let her know it. She'd be crowing like an old hen that has laid an egg. . . . No farmyard life for me, thanks."

Oliver bawled for her tea and Logan hastened to make it, and disappeared into the bedroom.

Mendel got up and dressed, feeling eager for the day. The sun shone in through the window and filled the room with a dusty glow, making even the shabby bareness of the place seem charming.

"It is a good day," he said to himself. "I shall work to-day." And he was annoyed at not having his canvas at hand.

On an easel stood the picture which Logan had described to Tysoe, a London street scene with a group of people gazing into a shop window. It was a clever piece of work, very adroit in the handling of the paint and pleasing in colour, but Mendel had an odd uncomfortable feeling of having seen it before, and yet he knew that the technique was novel. Yet it was precisely the technique that seemed familiar. Certain liberties had been taken with the perspective which, though they were new to him, did not surprise him.

Logan came in dressed and said that Oliver would not be a minute. She appeared in a dressing-gown.

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

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

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

"No. He said nothing about it."

"I'm dying to go to Paris. He says they understand the kind of thing we had last night in Paris."

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

"No. Just a trip. I want you to come too. We'll see some pictures and have a good time. I can't speak a word of French, but they say English is good enough anywhere."

"Yes, I'd like to go," said Mendel. "I want a change, before I settle down to working for the exhibition. Is that picture going to be in it?"

"Yes. Do you like it?"

"I like it. It seems to me new. Stronger than most things. All these people going in for thin, flat colour and greens and mauves make me long for something solid."

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

"I want my breakfast," said she.

"Oh! shut up. We're talking. . . . I've just begun the portrait. No psychological nonsense about it. It's just the head of a woman in paint. I don't want any damn fool writing about my picture: she is wiser than the chair on which she sits and the secrets of the antimacassar are hers. A picture's a picture and a book's a book."

"I do want my breakfast," sang Oliver.

Logan went livid with fury.

"Be silent, woman," he said.

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

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

"Because you said you would."

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

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

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

"Fancy Jews being still as strict as that!" said Oliver. "Just like they were in Shakespeare's time."

"Just as they were in the time of Moses and Aaron," said Mendel. "They don't alter except that they haven't got a country to fight for."

"Thank God!" said Logan, "or there'd be a bloody mess every other week. Fancy a Jewish Empire, with you sent out, like David, to hit the Czar of Russia or Chaliapine in the eye with a stone from a sling. Think of your sister-in-law luring the Kaiser into a tent and knocking a nail through his head. I wish she could, upon my soul I do!"

"I think we should only be led into captivity again," said Mendel. "Our fighting days are over, and someone told me the other day that many of the most advanced artists in Paris are Jews."

"If they were all like you," said Logan, "I shouldn't mind. But I'm afraid they're not. The Jews have got all the money and they keep the other people fighting for it, and charge them a hell of a lot for guns and uniforms to do it with. Oh! there are Christians in it too, but they have to be nice to the Jews to be allowed to share the spoils. I don't wonder the Jews left the Promised Land when they found the world was inhabited by fools who would let them plunder it."

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

* * * * *

After breakfast he declared that he must go, and Logan announced that he would walk with him to enjoy the lovely sunny day. Oliver wanted to come too, but he told her to stay where she was, and he left her in tears.

"She's got a bad habit of crying," he said, "and she must be broken of it. She cries if I don't speak to her for an hour. She cries if I go out without telling her where I am going. She cries if I curse and swear over my work, and if I am pleased with it she cries because I am never so happy with her. . . . I feel like hitting her sometimes, but it isn't her fault. She hasn't settled down to it yet. She says I don't love her when she knows she never expected to be loved so much. And she can't get used to it."

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

"By Jove! I will," cried Logan. "Damned interesting drawing, with her eyes all puckered up. . . . But it's a shame on a day like this to be out of temper with anything. Lord! How women do spoil the universe, to be sure! Do they give us anything to justify the mess they make of it? . . . Women and shopkeepers. I don't see why one should have any mercy on either of them. I have no compunction in stealing anything I want. Shopkeepers steal from the public all the little halfpennies and farthings of extra profit they exact."

He led Mendel into a picture shop and asked for a reproduction of a picture by Van Tromp, and when the girl retired upstairs to ask about that non-existent artist, he turned over the albums and helped himself to half a dozen reproductions, rolled them up, and put them in his pocket. When the girl came down and said they were out of Van Tromps, he said:--

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

When they were out of the shop he chuckled, and was as elated over his success as Mr. Kuit had been over his exploits.

"Oh! I should be an artist in anything I did," he said. "I don't wonder thieves can't go straight once they get on the lay. If I weren't a painter I should be a criminal."

He walked with Mendel as far as Gray's Inn, and there left him, saying he had another picture-buying flat to go and see, and after that he must pay a visit to Uncle Cluny and keep him up to the mark. He was in fine fettle, and went off singing at the top of his voice.

Mendel bought some flowers on the way home because he wished always to have flowers, even if she were to send no more.

He was sure of himself to-day. He was in love and glad to be in love. Surely it could have no worse suffering than that through which he had passed, and if it did, well, so much the worse for him. . . . He was glad it had happened. His father would not be able to sneer at him any more, as he was always sneering at Issy and Harry--Harry, who had deserted his father and mother for the sweetbreads of Paris. (Jacob always called sweetmeats sweetbreads.) He had a bitter, biting tongue, had Jacob, and the habit of using it was growing on him. Mendel knew that he had deserved many of his sneers, but now they could touch him no longer. His life, like his art, now contained a passion as strong as any Jacob had known in his life, and stronger, because it was wedded to beauty, to which Jacob was a stranger.

He was able to work again at his picture of his father and mother. He could make something of it now, he knew, because he could understand his father and appreciate the strength in him which had kept his passion alive through poverty and a life of constant storms and upheavals. He remembered his father knocking down the schoolmaster, and the soldier in the inn with the heavy glass. Oh yes! Jacob was a strong man, and he had nearly died of love for Golda, the beautiful.

He worked away with an extraordinary zest, and he knew that it was good. As he grew tired during the afternoon he was overcome with a great longing for her to see it, just to see it and to say she liked it. It would not matter much if she did not understand it, so long as she saw it and liked it.

He turned to the roughly sketched portrait of her to ask her if she liked it, and as he did so the door opened and she came in. Her arms were full of flowers, so that her face was resting in them, her dear face, the sweetest of all flowers.

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

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

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

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

She sat down and looked about the studio, puckering up her eyebrows nervously and making her eyes very round and large.

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

"I'm nineteen."

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

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

"What will you do there in the country? It is important that you should tell me, because I must know how to think of you. What shall you do? Is it a big house? Are you--are you rich?"

"No. It is not a very big house. My mother is fairly well off, but I have four brothers, and they all have to go to Oxford and Cambridge. . . . There's a good garden, and I shall spend a lot of time in that, digging and looking after the flowers. And I shall try and do some work. There's a big barn I can have for a studio."

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

"Two of them."

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

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

"No. Please don't."

His happiness vanished. It was as though a hole had opened in the floor and swallowed it up.

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

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

"I don't want to hurt you."

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

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

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

She loved his violence and gained courage from it.

"You mustn't think it mean of me. I don't care a bit what people say, but I don't want to hurt you--in your work, I mean. It isn't all that I think and mean, but it is a part of it, a little part of it. People are furious at our being seen together. It began at the picnic. We were seen walking over the Heath. Clowes told me. She can't bear it. She's a good friend. . . . It hurt me when she told me, and I knew that I must tell you. It isn't only old women. It is all the important people, who can hurt your work."

"Nobody can hurt my work."

"But they can. They are saying your work is bad, all the people who said it was so good only last year, all the people who believed in you. And it's all through me. It's my fault."

She began to weep silently. He was unmoved by the sight of it, so appalled was he by the sudden devastation of his life. Suffering within himself he knew, but hostility from without he had not had to face. . . . Many little slights were explained--men who had given him an indifferent nod, men who had apparently not seen him in the street. In the surprise of it he was blind even to her. It was like a sandstorm covering him up, filling with grit every little chink and crevice of his being. He snorted with fury and contempt.

He shook himself free of the oppression of it. This was nothing to do with her; it was not what he wanted from her--the gossip and tittle-tattle, the sweepings of the studios. The models sickened him of that. . . . So it was his turn now. Well, other men had survived it.

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

"No. I'm not pleading to you to let me off, or anything like that. I believe in you more than in anybody else, more than I do in myself. . . . I don't believe in myself much."

It had all seemed clear to her before she had come. He would understand how wrong and twisted the whole thing had become. They would suffer together and they would see how useless such suffering was in a world of beauty and charm and youth, and they would part because they had to part. He would understand, even if she could not rightly understand, for he was strong and simple and direct, and free of the soft vanity of youth.

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

"Why do you say all this?" he said heavily, floundering for words. "What does it mean? Nothing at all. You belong to me. You gave up Mitchell because I said you must. Have you given up Mitchell?"

"Yes."

"Very well then. Nothing else matters. If I want a thing I will break through a Chinese wall to get it. Nothing can stop me, because when I want a thing it is mine already. I want it because it is mine already."

He was making it impossible for her--impossible to go, impossible to stay, impossible to say anything.

Outside in the street the heavy drays went clattering by on the stone setts. When they had passed there came up the shrill cries of children playing in the street, the drone of a Rabbi taking a class of boys in Hebrew. On the hot air came the smell of the street--a smell of women and babies and leather and kosher meat.

"I know the way of women," he said. "My mother has been my friend always. But I do not know your ways. I only know that I love you. You are mine as that picture is mine, and you cannot take yourself from me."

"I don't want to take myself from you," she said, half angry, half in tears. "I want to make you understand me."

"What is there to understand? Do I understand my pictures?" he cried. "Do you want no mystery? How can there be life without mystery? I don't expect you to understand. I only want you to be honest and true to me. . . . I conceal nothing. I am a Jew. I live in this horrible place. My life is as horrible as this place. You know all that, all there is to know, and you love me. You cannot alter me. You cannot change my nature. . . ."

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

"What becomes worse?"

She could not answer him. She could not say what she felt. The woods, the Heath, and--this; the rattle and smell of the street, the dinginess of the studio, the dinginess of his soul--the dinginess and yet the fire of it. On the Heath he had been like a faun, prick-eared and shaggy, but wild and free as her spirit was wild and free. Here he was rough, coarse, harsh, and tyrannical. She could feel him battering at her with his mind, searching her out, probing into her, and she resented it with all the passion of her modesty. She gathered up all her forces to resist him.

"You are terrible! Terrible!" she cried. "Don't you see that it must be good-bye?"

"I say it must not," he shouted. "I say it is nonsense to talk of good-bye, when we have just met, when the kiss is yet warm on our lips. For a kiss is a holy thing, and I do not kiss unless it is holy. I say it is not good-bye."

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

"And why should you not be hurt? Am I to have all the pain? I want to share even that with you."

"It is impossible," she said dully, unable to share, or deal with, or appreciate the violence of his passion, and falling back on the mulishness which had been developed in her through her tussles with her brothers. Through her mind shot the horrible thought:--

"We are quarrelling--already quarrelling."

To her he seemed to be dragging her down, defiling her. His eyes were glaring at her with a passion that she took for sensuality, because it came out of the dinginess of his soul. And he was stiffening into an iron column of egoism, on which she knew she could make no impression. She knew, too, that her presence was aggravating the stiffening process. . . . She felt caught, trapped, and she wanted to get away. Love must be free--free as the wind on the heath, as the blossom of the wild cherry. Love must have its blossoming time, and he was demanding the full heat of the summer. . . . She must get away.

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

He took her hand and pulled her to him.

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

She turned away and was gone.

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

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

And when his tears were shed he began to think of the other women who had come to him without love, so easily, so gratefully, some of them, and this little girl who loved him could tear herself away--at a fearful cost. He knew that. But if she could tear herself away, if she could say good-bye, what could she know of love?

X

PARIS

MENDEL was able to finish his portrait of Jacob and Golda, but only at the cost of painful and bitter labour. He was torn two ways: longing to finish it, yet dreading the end of it, for he could not see beyond it. Every picture he had painted had brought with it the certain knowledge that it would lead to a better, that he was advancing further on the road to art. But there was a finality about this picture. It was an end in itself. It was not like most of his work, one of a possible dozen or more. A certain stream of his feeling ended in it and then disappeared, leaving him without guide or direction.

Therefore, when the picture was ended he found himself besottedly and uncontrollably in love and in a maddeningly sensitive condition, so that any sudden glimpse of beauty--the stars in the night sky, a girl's face in the train, flowers in a window-box--could set him reeling. More than once he found himself clinging to the wall or a railing, emerging with happy laughter from a momentary lack of consciousness. In the street near his home he found a lovely little girl, of the same type as Sara, but more beautiful. Graceful and lively she was, fully aware of her vitality and charm, and she used to smile at him when he went to meet her as she came out of school, or stood and watched her playing in the street.

At last he asked her shyly if she would come to his studio that he might draw her. She consented and came often. She would chatter away, and, studying her, he was astonished at her womanishness, and he was overwhelmed when she said one day:--

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

He was thrust back into the thoughts he had been avoiding. If this child knew already so frankly why he was attracted to her, why could not that other? Why did she seem to insist that he should regard her with the emotions with which he approached a work of art? A work of art could yield up its secret to the emotions, but she could only deliver hers to love dwelling not in any abstract region, but here on earth, in the life of the body. . . . He often thought of her with active dislike, because she seemed to him to be lacking in frankness. If she were going to cause so much suffering, as she must have known she would with her good-bye, then she must have her reasons for it. What did she mean with her neither yes nor no? With women there should be either yes or no. A refusal is unpleasant, but it could be swallowed down with other ills; and there were others. But this girl, this short-haired Christian, blocked his way, and there were no others except as there were cabs on the street and meals on the table.

For a time he avoided Logan and Oliver. He knew that Logan would despise him for his weakness in setting his heart on a girl who ran away from him, for he knew and admired the tremendous force with which his friend had hurled himself into his life with the girl of the station, constantly wooing and winning her afresh and urging her to share his own recklessness. He admired, too, Logan's insistence on an absolute separation of his art and his life with Oliver, who was never for one moment admitted to his mind. Rather to his dismay, but at the same time with a wild rush of almost lyrical impulse, Mendel, finding himself with no other emotion than that of being in love, set himself to paint love. He worked with an amazing ease, painting one picture one day and covering it with another the next, feeling elatedly convinced that everything he did was beautiful, yet knowing within himself that he was in a bad way.

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

"It is all very well for you to shut yourself up," he said, "but I can't live without you. You know what Oliver is to me, but it is not enough. The more satisfying she is on one plane, the more I need on the other the satisfaction that she cannot give me. Women can't do it. They simply can't, and it is no good trying. If you try, it means making a mess of both love and art. She is jealous? Very well. Let her be jealous. She enjoys it, and it helps her to understand a man's passion."

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

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

"I sometimes think you are, but I am apt to think that of all English people," replied Mendel, wondering within himself if that did not explain Morrison. "Yes. I often wonder what you would be like if you were in an office, wearing a bowler hat, and going to and fro by the morning and evening train."

"Why think about the impossible?" laughed Logan. "Anyhow, I'm not going to let you shut yourself up. I want to go to Paris, and I can't face three weeks alone with Oliver. Twenty-one days, sixty-three meals. No. It can't be done."

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

"You must come," urged Logan. "Madame at the Pot-au-Feu has given me the name of a hotel kept by her sister-in-law. Very cheap. Bed and breakfast, and, of course, you feed in restaurants. . . . You want digging out of your hole. I don't know why, but you seem to have insisted more on being Jewish lately. It is much more important for you to be an artist and a man. I regard you as a sacred trust. I do really. You are the only man in England for whom I have any respect, and I need you to keep me decent." He added: "I need you to keep me alive, for, without you, Oliver would gobble me up in a month."