Chapter XVI: Book THREE: The Passing of Youth (3)

"Greta! Greta! I've just heard the most frightful thing. I couldn't help overhearing it and I ought not to tell anybody, but you ought to know. Kühler and Petrie! It must have been going on for months. He broke with her in the most cold-blooded way. It was heart-rending. I can't bear it. Oh! these men, these men!"

Morrison clenched her fists and her eyes blazed.

"Don't tell me any more!" she said. "Don't tell me any more!"

"I want to go home," whispered Clowes. "It is a dreadful party. That awful green woman spoils everything. It is like a nightmare to me now.

"It wouldn't be fair to go without telling him," said Morrison. "It wouldn't be fair."

"But you can't think of him after that," protested Clowes. "Oh! good gracious! There's Calthrop coming in. It is getting worse and worse."

Calthrop swung into the room with his magnificent stride. As usual, his entrance created a dramatic sensation. Logan, who had always decried his work, leaped to meet him and Mendel stood shyly waiting for his nod. . . . Whom would the great man speak to? That was the question. . . . He fixed his eyes on Oliver and strode up to her.

"You're the best-looking woman in the room," he said. "Do you like cinemas?"

"I adore them," said Oliver, with an excited giggle.

"Now, now's the chance!" whispered Clowes. "We can slip away now, before they begin drinking."

"I must tell him," replied Morrison, and, summoning up all her courage, she went up to Mendel and asked if she could speak to him. He went out with her, trembling in every limb.

"I am going," she said. "I have just heard something. Clowes overheard you and Jessie Petrie. She ought not to have told me. I don't know what I feel about it. Very wretched, chiefly. Please don't try to see me."

"I have told you what I am again and again," he said.

"Yes. You are very honest, but it is hard for a girl to imagine these things. Please, please see how hard it is and let me be."

"Very well," he answered, feeling that the whole world had come to an end. "Very well."

She called Clowes, who had stayed just inside the door, and together, like little frightened children, they crept downstairs.

"Good-bye love!" said Mendel. "My God, what rubbish, what folly, what nonsense! Love and a Christian girl! That's over. That's finished. I am outside it all--outside, outside, outside. Oh! Dark and vile and bitter, and no sweetness anywhere but in my own thoughts!"

Inside the room someone began to sing:--

I want to be, I want to be,
I want to be down home in Dixie. . . .

Oh! the mad folly of these Christians, with their childish songs, their idiotic pleasures, their preposterous belief in happiness. . . . Happiness! They ruin the world to satisfy their childish longing, and all their happiness lies in words and foolish songs. . . . The rhythm of the pianola tunes began to beat in his head, and another deeper rhythm came up from the depths of his soul and tried to break through them. It was the same rhythm that always came up when he had reached the lowest depths of misery. It came gushing forth like water from the rock of Moses, and crept through his being like ice, up, up into his thoughts, bringing him to an intolerable agony.

In the room glasses clinked. He turned towards the light and plunged into the carouse.

VI

REVELATION

THREE weeks later the exhibition of Modern French Art was opened in an important gallery in the West End. It roused indignation, laughter, scorn, and made such a stir in the papers that public interest was excited and the exhibition was an unparalleled success. People from the suburbs, people who had never been to a picture gallery in their lives, flocked to see the show, and most of them, when they left, said: "Well, at any rate we've had a good laugh."

Mendel never read the papers and knew nothing at all about it. These three weeks had been a time of blank misery for him. He could not work. His people set his teeth on edge. He could not bear to see a soul, for he could not talk. When he met friends and acquaintances, not a word could he find to say to them. There was nothing to say. They were living in a world from which he had been expelled. More than once he was on the point of going to his father and asking to be taken into the workshop, since the only possible, the only bearable life was one of hard manual labour, which left no room for spiritual activity, none for happiness, and very little for unhappiness.

He found some consolation in going to the synagogue. His mother was delighted, but the religion was no comfort to him. What pleased him was to see the old Jews in their shawls and the women in their beaded gowns, praying each in their separate parts of the building--praying until they wept, and abasing themselves before the Lord. What woe, what misery they expressed! All the year round was this dismal wailing, and there was only happiness on the day that Haman was hanged. . . . It seemed good and decent to him that the sexes should be separate before the Lord, as they should be separate before the holy spirit that was in them. They should meet in holiness, hover for a moment above life, then sink back into it again to gather new strength. So love would be in its place. It could be gathered up and distilled. It would not be allowed to spread like a flood of muddy water over life, which had other passions, other delights, other glorious flowerings.

It had been a great day for him when, in a little shop near his home, he had come on a pair of wooden figures rudely carved by savages--African, the shopman said they were. Rudely carved, they were not at all realistic, but admirably simplified, the man and the woman sitting side by side, naked. The man was wearing a little round bowler hat, while the woman was uncovered. They had the spirit and the idea that he most loved--the idea of man and woman sitting side by side, bound in love, unfathomably deep and unimaginably high, until one should follow the other to the grave.

He showed them to Golda, and told her they were she and his father.

"What next will you be up to?" she said. "Why, they are blackamoors."

"They are you and my father," he said, caressing the figures lovingly.

"I wish you would put the thought of that girl out of your head," she said tenderly. "It is making you so ill and so thin, and I dare not think what your father will say when he knows you are drinking again."

"Mother," he said, "when did you begin to love me?"

"When you were born," she said.

"Yes, yes. I know, as a cow loves its calf. But I mean _love_, for you do not love the others the same as me."

"You were not so very old when it came to me that you were different."

"But it is more now that I am a man?"

"Of course."

That settled his mind on the point that had been bothering him. Everywhere among the Christians love--the love that he knew and honoured--seemed to be lost in a soft, spongy worship of the mother's love for her child. The woman seemed to be wiped out of account altogether except as a mother. It seemed that she was not expected to love, and she was left by herself with the child, with the man looking rather foolish all by himself, seeing his strong, beautiful masculine love absorbed and given to the senseless little lump of flesh in the woman's arms. It was like discarding the flower for the seed, like denying the wonder of spring for the autumn fruit.

"If that is your Christian love," he said to himself, "I will have none of it."

He studied the Madonnas in the National Gallery, and they confirmed his impression of the weakness of Christian love, that left out the strong, vital love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man. He characterized it as womanish, and could not see that the ideal had served to save women from male tyranny. Moreover, most of the pictures struck him as shockingly bad, which confirmed his notion that the ideal that inspired them was rotten.

He could not test his ideas by his experience with Morrison, for he dared not think of her at all. When his mother spoke of her, it had been like a sharp knife through his heart. . . . Yes. _That_ was love, and it could not be bothered with the idea of children. If they came, it would make room for them, but it was not going to be robbed by them. Its object was the woman, and it detested any idea that got between it and her. . . . Yet when this love for Morrison stood between himself and his love for art, he hated her almost as violently. Sometimes he thought that he would kill her, because she stood there smiling. She was always smiling. She could be happy; she could so easily be happy. . . .

* * * * *

Logan came to fetch him to go to the exhibition.

"I don't want to go to the exhibition. I don't want to see other people's pictures. I want to paint my own."

"What are you working at?"

"Nothing."

"What's the matter?"

"Sex."

"Oh! That's always the matter with everybody."

"But I've thought of something."

"What?"

"Women don't love their children."

Logan roared with laughter, and he went on laughing because he enjoyed it. It was long since he had laughed so easily.

"Most of them do," he said. "Even if they've hated having them."

"They don't," said Mendel. "It's instinct just to gloat over them, just as one gloats over a picture one has just finished, however bad it may be. It has cost you something, and there is something to show for it. It is quite blind and stupid, like an animal. It is like lust. It is neither true nor false. It just _is_, chaotic and half-created. Love is a human thing. Love is the most human thing there is. When a clerk marries a girl because he wants a woman, I don't call that love. He is only making himself comfortable. There is a little more dirt in the world, that is all."

Logan laughed uncomfortably.

"Please listen," said Mendel. "I have been nearly mad this last fortnight, ever since the party. All my life seems to have broken its way into my mind, and I don't know when I shall be able to get it out again. It is very important that I should talk, and I have no one really to talk to except you. I am very lonely because I am a Jew and people do not understand me, or rather they think they understand me because I am a Jew. They think all Jews are the same. It is very rarely that I feel I am accepted as a man with thoughts, feelings, tears, laughter, tastes, bowels, senses like any other man."

"I know," said Logan sympathetically.

"How can you know? You have only to live in a world that is ready-made for you. I have to make mine as I go, step by step."

"That isn't because you are a Jew, but because you are an artist. It is the same for all of us."

"It can't be the same, for the ordinary world is not utterly foreign to you. You do not find that which you were brought up to believe, the wisdom you sucked in with your mother's milk, completely denied. . . . I tell you, love is all wrong, and because love is all wrong, art is all wrong, everything is wrong, and so is everybody. Everybody is living with only a part of himself, so that the cleverest people are the worst and most mischievous fools. I tell you, there are times in your West End when I can hardly breathe because people are such fools. If you are successful, they smile at you. If you are not successful, they look the other way. . . . Oh! I know it does not matter, but it makes success a paltry thing, and when you have lived for it and hungered for it, what then? What are you to do when it is like sand trickling through your fingers?"

"You can't stop it," said Logan. "You can't throw it away. You can only go on working, come what may."

"Yes," replied Mendel dubiously, and grievously disappointed. He had so hoped to squeeze out his twisted, tortured feelings into words, but at a certain point Logan failed him and seemed to shy at his thought. To a certain quality of passion in himself Logan was insensible. Where his own passion began to gain in clear force and momentum, swinging from the depths of life to the highest imagination, only gaining in strength as the ascent grew more arduous, Logan's remained in an exasperated intensity.

"I'm sorry," said Mendel. "Talking is no use. I've found my way out of as bad times as this, and shall again. It is no good talking. I will sit as silent as the little figures there, and in time I shall know what I must do."

"You want taking out of yourself," muttered Logan irritably. "Come and see Thompson's show."

* * * * *

As successful artists they entered the gallery self-consciously and rather contemptuously. That did not last long. There were many people sniggering at the Van Goghs and the Picassos, but Mendel's thoughts flew back to a still-life he had painted of a blue enamel teapot and a yellow matchbox years ago. He had painted them as he had seen them, in raw, crude colour, but the picture had been so derided, and he had been so scornfully reminded that there were no brilliant colours in nature, that he had painted the same subject over again with a very careful rendering of what was called "atmosphere."

Here were crude colours indeed--almost, in many cases, as they came from the tubes, and as for drawing, there was hardly a trace of it, yet in the majority of the pictures there was a riotous freedom which rushed like a cleansing wind through Mendel's mind, and it seemed to him that here was the answer to many of his doubts--not a clear vision of art, but a roughly indicated road to it. It was absurd to sit cramping over rules and difficult technicalities when the starting-point of art lay so far beyond them. There was much rubbish in the show, but the works of Cézanne and Picasso were undeniably pictures. They were not flooded with a clear loveliness, like the pictures of Botticelli or Uccello, but they had beauty, and lured the mind on to seek another more mysterious beauty beyond them.

The two friends went through the exhibition in silence. As they left, Mendel asked:--

"Well! what did you think of it?"

"We're snuffed out," replied Logan despondently.

"Not I!" cried Mendel. "I'm only just beginning."

"I don't understand it yet. It has made my eyes and my head ache. At first it seemed to me too cerebral to be art at all, but there's no denying it, and it has to be digested. In a way it is what I have always been talking about. It has to do with the life we are living, which may not be much of a life, but it is ours and we find it good. It has not been a plunge into another world, like a visit to the National Gallery, but into some reality a little beyond this extraordinary jumble and hotch-potch of metropolitan life."

"It is painting," said Mendel. "That is enough for me. And they are not afraid of colour. Why should they be? The colours are there: why not use them? I'm going to."

And he went home and dashed off a savage mother with a green face thrusting a straw-coloured breast into the gaping red lips of a child.

So much for maternity and the Madonnas! He knew how a man loved his mother, and it was not in that milky way, setting her above nature, she who was tied and bound to natural, instinctive, animal life. If a man loved his mother, it was because with her it was the easiest thing in the world to be intimate and frank and honest and without pretence of any kind.

His mother was marvellous to him because she was his dearest friend, not because she had given him suck. That was a fact like any other, and facts were not marvellous until more and more light was thrown on them from the mind, for in the murk and muddle of human life they were distorted.

For Mendel this was the wildest and rarest adventure yet. It was a flinging of his cap over the windmills, and with it he had the sense of losing all his troubles, all his perplexities. Nothing for the time being seemed to matter very much. He had always been denied colour, and here he had the right to use it because it had been used by other men rightly. In the world of art, or rather of artists, he had always been a sort of Ishmael, ever since he had outgrown being a prodigy, and here was a new world of art where he could be free. . . . True, he had seen the same things in Paris and had not thought much of them, but so much had happened since then, and he had passed through the greatest crisis of his life.

Always after his crises he expected to find himself, and now he thought he had surely done so. He would be entirely free, completely independent.

For three weeks he lived between his studio and the gallery, studying these strange new vibrant pictures and experimenting with their manners as now this, now that painter influenced him. Picasso baffled him altogether. These queer, violent, angular patterns actually hurt him, and he was repelled by their intellectual intensity. Gauguin he found too easy, Van Gogh too incoherent. It was when he came to Cézanne that he was bowled out and reduced to impotence and all the egoistic excitement oozed out of him.

He was not so free then. Here was an art before which he must be humbled and subdued if he was to understand it at all. He abandoned his experiments and made no attempt to work at all, but bought a reproduction of Cézanne's portrait of his wife and spent many days poring over it. It held him and fascinated him, and yet it looked almost like the unfinished work of an amateur who could not draw. Of psychological interest the picture was bare. It was just a portrait of a woman at peace, with her hands folded in her lap, bathed in a serenity beyond mortal understanding, though not beyond mortal perception, since a man had rendered it in paint. It released directly the swift, soaring emotion which, though it was roused in him by many pictures and by some poetry--passages in the Bible, for instance--was quickly entangled in sensual pleasure and never properly set free. Here, the more he gazed the more that emotion, pure, disinterested, unearthly, rushed through him, exploring all the caverns in his imagination and delivering from them new powers of perception. He felt, as he told Logan afterwards, like a tree putting out its leaves in the spring.

And yet he could not tell how this miracle was accomplished. No words could explain it--abstraction, composition, design, none of these words helped at all. It was not so much the doing of the thing, the art of the painter, as the setting out of the woman on the canvas without reference to anything in heaven or earth, or any idea, or any emotion or desire. It was enough that she was a woman, not especially beautiful, not particularly remarkable. So perfect a vision had no need to be tender or affectionate or sensual, or to call in aid any of the emotions of life. It needed no force but the rare religious ecstasy which has no need of ideas or common human feelings, and this vision of a woman gave Mendel a new appreciation of life and love and art. It gave human beings a new value. It was enough that they were alive and upon the earth with all that they contained of good and evil. They were in themselves wonderful, and there was no need to worry about whence they came or whither they were going, or what was their relation to God and the universe. In each man, each woman was enough of God and of the universe to keep them poised for their little hour.

What, then, was love? What but the sense of being poised, of being borne up by God, an intimation that could only be won through contact with life at its purest. And beyond that again lay a further degree of purity which could only find expression in art, since life, even at its rarest, was too gross.

Often Mendel kissed his reproduction reverently and hugged it to his bosom, thinking childishly that some of its spirit could enter into him by contact. He whispered to it:--

"I love you. You are my truth and my joy rising up through life, even from its very depths, and shaking free of it at last into pure, serene beauty. You weigh neither upon my senses nor upon my thoughts, but, following you, they are joined together to become a high sense which can know deliverance."

Followed days of a supreme delight. He wandered through the streets seeing all men and all women and all things as wonderful, since through them all flowed this lovely spirit which in the few men here and there could find its freedom and its expression in form.

Through Thompson he met a journalist who was writing a book about the new painting, and from him he learned the little that was known about Cézanne: how he worked away experimenting unsuccessfully until he was middle-aged, and then withdrew from the world of artists in Paris, to live the life of a simple country bourgeois and to paint the vision which he had begun to divine: and how he painted out in the fields, leaving his canvases in the hedges and by the wayside, because not the painting but the expression of his spirit and the solution of his problem mattered to him: and how he never sold a single picture, never attempted to sell them.

Such, thought Mendel, should the life of an artist be. But how was it possible if life would not let him alone, but was perpetually dragging him down into the mud? What mud, what filth he had had to flounder through to get even so far as he had!

And already he began to feel that he was slipping back. He could not accept that knowledge of the spirit vicariously, but must fight for his own knowledge of it in direct contact with life. To endeavour to escape from life was to isolate himself, to lose the driving force of life from darkness into the light, to dwell in the twilight of solitude armed only with his puny egoism and the paltry tricks of professional painting. He felt that at last he knew his desire, but in no wise how to attain it. Cézanne had had a wife: that had settled one of the torments of life. He had had ample means: that had absolved him from the ever-present difficulty of money.

These considerations relieved Mendel from another weighty puzzle. Perhaps if Cézanne had had to please other people and not only his own spirit, he would have cared more for his craft and for the quality of his paint. . . . All the same, it was good to have pictures reduced to their bare essentials, relieved of ornament and trickery, and yet retaining their full pictorial quality.

* * * * *

Shortly after the party Logan and Oliver had moved to a little cottage on Hampstead Heath, just below Jack Straw's Castle. Mendel went to see them there and met Logan on the Spaniard's Road. He was in a deplorable condition. His right eye was blackened, his nose was bloody and scratched, the lobe of his ear was torn and his forehead was purple with bruises.

"What on earth have you been doing to yourself!" asked Mendel.

"I've had a fight," said Logan glibly. "The other night on the Heath I came on a man beating a girl. I went for him. He was a huge lout of a man. We had a terrific tussle, and just as I was getting him down the girl went for me and scratched my face."

"If you lived where I do," said Mendel, "you would know better than to interfere."

"Oh! I enjoyed it," said Logan. "I couldn't stand by and see it done."

They ran down the grassy slope to the cottage, where they found Oliver entertaining Thompson and her critic. She had a slight bruise over her right eye, and Mendel thought:--

"Why does he lie? Why should he lie to me? I should think no worse of him for beating her. If I could not shake her off I should kill her."

He was filled with a sudden disgust at the household, which in his eyes had become an obscene profanation.

The talk was excited, and formerly he would have found it interesting. Thompson was full of the triumph of the exhibition and its success in forcing art upon the public. He spoke glibly of abstraction and cubing, and it was clear that they only delighted him as new tricks.

Oliver took part in the conversation. She had picked up the jargon of painters and made great play with the names of the new masters. To hear her talking glibly of Cézanne and saying how he had shown the object of pictorial art to be pattern filled Mendel's soul with loathing. He could not protest. What was the good of protesting to such people? . . . If only Logan had not been among them! He wanted to talk to Logan, to tell him what this new thing meant, to make him see that he must give up all thought of turning art back upon life, because life did not matter so very much. It could look after itself, while the integrity of art must at all costs be maintained.

However, when Thompson said that the artist was now free to make up a picture out of any shapes he liked, Mendel could not contain himself, and said:--

"The artist is no more free than ever he was. He does not become free by burking representation. He is not free merely to work by caprice and fantasy. He is rather more strictly bound than ever, because he is working through his imagination and cannot get out of it merely by using his eyes and imitating charming things. If he tries to get out of it by impudent invention, then pictures will be just as dull and degraded as before."

"'I am Sir Oracle,'" said the critic, "'and when I ope my lips let no dog bark.'"

"You can bark away," cried Mendel, "but you must not complain if a man loses patience with you and kicks you back into your kennel."

"Just listen to the boy!" cried Oliver. "Success has turned his pretty little head. Just listen to him teaching the critics their business!"

Mendel gave her a furious look of contempt and left the room and the house. Logan came running after him.

"I say, old man," he said, "you mustn't mind what she says. Those damn fools have stuffed her head up with their nonsense and she hasn't the brains of a louse."

"If it was my house, I would kick them out."

"They are good fellows enough."

"Good fellows! When they make her more idiotic and blatant than she is!"

"I can't think what made you so angry. There was nothing to flare up about. You are so touchy."

Mendel was walking at a furious pace. Logan was out of condition and had to beg him to go more slowly.

"I'm all to bits," said Logan. "That row----"

"Why do you tell lies? It was she who mauled you. Why do you tell lies to me? I have never told lies to you about anything. You have always jeered at women and said they can know nothing about art, and yet you let her talk. . . . Why don't you leave her?"

"We're very fond of each other," replied Logan. "It has gone too deep. We hate each other like poison sometimes, but that only makes it--the real thing--go deeper."

"I can't bear it," said Mendel; "I can't bear it. It was bad enough when she kept quiet, but now that she gives herself airs and talks, I can't stand it. I hate her so that I feel as if the top of my head would blow off. . . . Perhaps there was nothing much in what she said. Perhaps it was only a slow growing detestation coming to a head. But there it is. It is final. I have tried to like her, to be decent to her, to make allowances for her, but it is impossible."

"You don't mean you are not going to come to see us again?"

"Yes. That is what I do mean. She doesn't exist for me any longer. If I met her in a café or in the streets she would be all right. She would be in her place. There would be some truth in her. In connection with you she is a festering lie."

"She can't settle down to it," replied Logan lamely, ashamed of his inability to defend Oliver from this onslaught. Defence would be quite useless, for he knew that Mendel would detect his untruth. If only Mendel were a little older, if only he could have grown out of youth's dreadful inability to compromise.

"She can't settle down," Logan continued. "She is a creature of enormous vitality and she has no life outside herself, no imagination. Can't you see that her vitality has no outlet? I don't know, but it seems to me appalling to think of these modern women with their independence, and nothing at all to do with it. They won't admit the authority of the male, and they have broken out of the home. A lot of them refuse to have children. I feel sorry for them."

"Don't go on talking round and round the subject," cried Mendel wrathfully. He was really alarmed and pained as he saw himself being carried nearer and nearer to a breach with his friend. "I can't feel sorry for her and I don't. She is ruining you. You never laugh nowadays. You are always more dead than alive, and I cannot bear to see you with her. I cannot bear even to think of you with her."

"For God's sake, don't talk like that!" muttered Logan, quickening his pace to keep up, for Mendel was flying along.

"You must either give her up or me," said Mendel.

"Don't say that!" pleaded Logan; "don't say that! I can't get on without you. I don't see how I can get on without you. All the happiness I have ever had has come through you. Every hope I have is centred in you. If you go, life will become nothing but work, work, work, with nobody to understand. Nobody. . . . And I have been so full of hope. All this new business has made such a stir and has brought such life into painting that I had begun to feel that anything was possible. There might be even a stirring of the spirit to stem the tide of commercialism. You know what my life has been--one long struggle to find a way out of the pressure of vulgarity and sordid money-making, out of sentimentality and pretty lying fantasy, out of the corruption that from top to bottom is eating up the life of the country. You know that when I met you I had almost given up the struggle in despair. One man alone could not do it. But two men could--two men who trusted and believed in each other. . . . You were very young when I first met you, but you have come on wonderfully. It has been thrilling for me to watch the growth of your mind and the strengthening of your character. You are the only man I ever met who could really stand by himself. . . . It isn't easy for me to say all this, but I must tell you what your friendship has meant to me."

The more Logan talked, the more he divulged his feelings, his very real affection, the more Mendel's mind was concentrated on the one purpose, to get him away from Oliver.

"You must give her up," he said.

"I can't," gasped Logan.

They stood facing each other, Mendel staring into his friend's eyes that looked piteously, wearily, miserably out of his haggard, battered face. He could not endure it, and he could not yield to the entreaty in Logan's eyes.

He turned quickly and ran to a bus which had stopped a few yards in front. He rushed up the steps and was whirled away. Unable to resist turning round, he saw Logan standing where he had left him, with his head bowed, his shoulders hunched up, a figure of shameful misery.

After some minutes of numbness, of trying to gather up the threads snapped off by his astonishment at the quickness of the affair, Mendel began to tremble. His hands and his knees shook, and he could not control them. It was only gradually that he began to realize how strong his feelings had been, and how great the horror and the shock of knowing through and through, without blinking a single fact, the terrible relationship that bound Logan and Oliver--tied together in an insatiable sensuality, locked in a deadly embrace, like beasts of prey fighting over carrion: a furious, evil conflict over a dead lust. . . . At the same time he knew that he was bound with them, that in their life together he had his share, and that it was dragging him down, down from the ecstatic exaltation he had perceived in his new friend, Cézanne, a friend who could never fail, a friend upon whom no devastation could alight, a friend through whom he could never be clawed back into life.

By the time he reached home he was completely exhausted, and begged his mother to make him a cup of strong tea.

"What is it now?" Golda asked. "What is the trouble? There is always something new, and I think you will never be a man. For a man expects trouble and does not make himself ill over it."

"I have quarrelled with Logan," said Mendel, dropping with relief into Yiddish as a barrier against the outer world, in which terrible things were always happening.

"A good job too!" said Golda; "a good job too! He was no good to you. He only made you do the work that nobody likes. Now you can go back to the old way, and Mr. Froitzheim and Mr. Birnbaum will be pleased with you again. . . . You had better give up your friends. You are like a woman, the way you must always be in love with your friends. . . . But it is no good. Men will always fall in love, and then it is over with friendship. . . . Friends are only for moments. They come and disappear and come again. It is foolish to think you can keep them. . . . Is your head bad?"

"Pretty bad."

"You have not been drinking again?"

"No. I've been leading a decent life. I expect it doesn't suit me."

"Rubbish. . . . Rosa says the Christian girl has been to see you."

He leaped to his feet.

"Didn't she stay? Didn't you make her stay? What did she say? How did she look? Did she leave no message?"

Golda smiled at him.

"You had better go and see," she said.

He darted from the room and across to his studio panting with excitement, persuading himself at every step that she was there, waiting for him, perhaps hiding to tease him, for she was a terrible tease.

By the time he reached his studio he was so convinced that she was there that he hardly dared open the door. He pushed it open very gently and peered in. The room was empty, but he felt sure that she was there. He peeped round the corner into his bedroom. She was not there. He had to believe it, and came dejectedly back into the studio.

On his painting-table were autumn flowers daintily arranged in the old jug he used for a vase. He buried his face in them. She was there! She was there in the sweetness and fragrance of the flowers.

VII

CONFLICT

MORRISON had fought bravely through her storms and difficulties. She frightened Clowes with the violence of her efforts and the terrible strain she inflicted on her vitality. There were times when she thought the simplest way would be to cut adrift from all her old associations and to throw in her lot with Mendel, to give him his desire and so save him from the terrible life he was leading. But that was too drastic, too simple. She could only have done it on a great impulse, but always her deepest feelings shrank from it, and without her deepest feelings she could not go to him, for they were engaged most of all. . . . She felt cramped and confined, as though her love were a cord wound round and round her limbs, and she could not, she would not go to him bound. He must release her; she must compel him to release her. If it took half her lifetime she would so compel him. Her will was concentrated upon him. She would not have their love droop from the high sympathy it had known, nor should it be torn from it by his savage strength and the adorable violence of his passion. Neither, on the other hand, would she turn back from him. That would be to deny her freedom which she had bought so dearly. She had thought her freedom would give her the easy joy of flowers and clouds and birds, and she still believed in that easy joy, but it lay beyond the tangled web of this love for the strange, dark, faunlike creature whom she had found in the woods. If she turned back, if she denied the urgent emotions that drove her on, she had nothing to turn to but the old captivity, the life where all difficulties were arranged for, where all roads led to marriage, where men could only talk to women in a half-patronizing, half-flirtatious way that led to a ridiculous meeting of the senses, then to an engagement, and so to church. To that she would never, never return. She had fought her way out of it. She had learned to live by herself, within herself, to wrestle with her thoughts and emotions and to get them into shape. (It had been at a great cost to her external tidiness and orderliness, but that too she hoped to tackle in time.) She had won all this, and she had found a glorious outlet in work. So far as she had gone she had been successful, and she was ambitious, terribly ambitious, to show that a woman could do good work.

And then there was the dark side of Mendel's life--Logan, Oliver, Jessie Petrie. At the thought of it she shuddered, but her honesty made her confess that it made no difference to her central feeling. It had shocked her, outraged her, roused her to a fury of jealousy, but that she would not have. She fought it down inch by inch until she had it so well in control that, whenever it reared its head, she could crush it down.

Many a tear had it cost her, but she insisted that she must understand.

When she cut her hair short, she found, to her horror, that it was taken by many men as a sign that she was open to their advances, and all sorts and conditions of men had found to their astonishment that, although she was an artist and lived an independent life, she was immovable, and when it came to argument she was more than a match for them.

Again, she had had the confidence of more than one of the models, and she knew how they courted their own disasters. If there was to be any question of blame, the women must share it with the men.

She had no thought of blaming Mendel, but she hated to have that underworld in contact with the world which it was her whole desire to keep beautiful. It was no good pretending that the underworld was not there, but if she could have her way she would keep a tight control over it, and suppress it as she suppressed her jealousy, that other source of ugliness. If she could only, somehow, find an entrance to Mendel's life, not only to his rare moments, but to the life that went on from day to day, she would suppress it, she would cut it out and throw it away. She thought of it almost as a surgical operation, or as cutting a bruise out of an apple, for all her thoughts of life were as simple as herself, and life too was simple in her eyes. Anything that threatened to complicate it she expunged.

After a time she discovered that it was no good hoping to understand so long as she regarded the dark aspect of Mendel from outside his life. She must find her way inside it and see how it looked there. That was hard.

Clowes could not help her at all. To Clowes it was simply unintelligible that men could do these things. They bewildered her, and her only way out of it was to suppose that men were like that, and the less said about it the better. She was really very annoyed with Morrison for worrying over it, and she was disappointed. She had hoped that the unfortunate adventure would be over and that Morrison would wait tranquilly for her affections to be engaged by someone who was--presentable. . . . Still, there was no accounting for this strange, impulsive creature, though it was a pity she should throw away her growing popularity with people who were, after all, important, both in themselves and by their position; for Morrison's frank charm carried her to places where Clowes would have given her eyes to be seen. Clowes was baffled by her friend, but she would not abandon her. She was often bored with her, often exasperated, and more than once she said:--

"Well, if you like these wild people so much, why don't you take the plunge and join them? You are wild enough yourself."

"I'm not wild in that way," replied Morrison. "And I know that if I did do it it would be wrong."

And she returned to her task of labouring to understand Mendel. She carried the idea of him wherever she went, and was sometimes able to call up a clear image of him, and she was fearful for him because he seemed to her so helpless, so much a stranger in a strange land, so easily caught up in any strong current of feeling or enthusiasm. . . . She, too, often felt outside things, but she so much enjoyed being a looker-on. She loved to watch the race among the young artists, and she longed for Mendel to win. It was right that he should win, because he was so much the best of them all. He had taken the lead. It had looked as though he must infallibly win, and then Logan had appeared and he had stumbled in his stride.

Yet this had never been satisfying. She had no right to turn Mendel into a figure on a frieze, to see him in the flat, as it were, and it was in revolt against this conception that she had agreed to go with him to Logan's party, which had been so disastrous. . . . Had she not been cowardly to run away? But what could she do, what else could she do, when confronted so suddenly with the appalling fact?

A week before the party Mendel had insisted on lending her "Jean Christophe" volume by volume. She had read the first without great interest. The friendship between the two boys struck her as silly and sentimental and not worth writing about, and she had read no further. However, when she found that Mendel was becoming a fixed idea, to escape from it she took up the second volume, and was enthralled by the tale of Christophe's love for Ada, thrilled by the sudden scene of his assault on the peasant girl in the field, and with a growing sense of illumination followed his life as it passed from woman to woman, finding consolation with one, relief with another, comfort with another, comradeship with yet another, and the physical relationship slipped into its place and was never dominant. And Christophe, too, had had women of passage because his vitality was so abundant that it could not be contained in his being. It must be always flowing out into art or into life, taking from life more and more power to give to art. . . . With Gratia she was out of patience. Gratia was altogether too complacent an Egeria. Morrison thought she could have given Christophe more than that.

She made Clowes read the book, but Clowes found it no help. That was in a story, this was actually happening in London; and besides, the book had a rhapsodic, dreamlike quality that smoothed away all ugliness, all difficulties. In life things were definitely ugly, and it was no good pretending they were anything else.

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

"You are going to see him again?"

"Yes, I will not be beaten. If I were married to him I should put up with everything, and I don't see why not being married should make any difference."

Clowes threw up her hands and said:--

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

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

It was then that she went out and bought the flowers. Her courage nearly failed her as she approached the door in the little slummy street. Suppose he should be angry with her for running away, and contemptuous of her cowardice! His anger and contempt were not easy things to face.

She was relieved, therefore, when the dirty little Jewish servant opened the door and told her Mendel was out. She handed in the flowers shyly and went away without a word.

* * * * *

Mendel wrote to thank her for the flowers, but said nothing about going to see her or about what he was doing. She thought he must be contemptuous of her, though it was not like him to be so stupid as not to respond to a direct impulse. On the other hand, he had always tried to impose his authority on her, and she was not going to do his bidding. Either he must take her on her own level or not at all. She would make him understand that she too was driving at something, and that love was to her not an end in itself, much though she might desire love and its freedom. He had always made her feel that he regarded love as sufficient for her. She must curl up in it and be happy while he went on with his work. Against that all the free instinct in her cried out. A woman was not a mere embryo to be incubated in a man's passion, hatched out into a wife and a helpmate. . . . When she tried to imagine what life with him would be like, she shivered until she thought what life with him might be if she could bring to it all her force and all her freedom.

At last she began to think that perhaps it was her own fault for not having left a note or a message with the flowers, which might be regarded only as a token of sentimental forgiveness. She knew how easily he was sickened by any sign of Christian sentimentality--"filthy gush" as he called it. . . . To safeguard against that and to have done with it once and for all, she wrote to him and told him that she had been reading "Jean Christophe," and that it had helped her to understand both his sufferings and his need of what in an ordinary foolish vain man would have to be condemned.

To this letter he did not reply, and she determined that she would go and see him. She would take Clowes, in case things had become impossible and their sympathy had somehow been undermined and destroyed. Even if it were, she would not accept or believe it, and she would fight to restore it. A vague intuition took possession of her by which she surely knew that something strange, perhaps even terrible, was happening to him, and she felt that he needed her but did not know his need.

It required some persuasion to take Clowes down to Whitechapel. She declared that she would stand by her friend whatever happened, but that she did not wish to be personally mixed up in it. It would, she said, make her in part responsible for whatever happened, and she did not think she could bear it. However, Morrison explained that she only wanted her there in case things were impossible, and that, if they were not, she could make good her escape as soon as she liked. On that Clowes consented and they journeyed to the East End.

The little Jewish servant said that Mr. Mendel was engaged. Would she go up and see if he would soon be disengaged? She ran upstairs and came down in a moment to ask if they would wait, and to their surprise, darted past them, along the street, beckoned to them to follow, and led them to Golda's kitchen. Golda bobbed to them, dusted chairs for them to sit on, and, not knowing enough English to be able to talk to them, went on with her ironing. When she had finished that, she shyly produced an album and showed them all the photographs of Mendel since he was a baby.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in his studio Mendel was in agitated conversation with Mr. Tilney Tysoe, who had arrived half an hour before, wagging his hands, rolling his enormous eyes, almost demented by the lamentable news he had to tell. Logan had left Oliver!

"When?" asked Mendel.