Chapter XVII: Book THREE: The Passing of Youth (4)

"A few days ago," said Tysoe. "The poor fellow came round to me one night after dinner. You know, he often drops in in the evening. Such a splendid fellow, so sincere, such a force! And his admiration for you is very touching. He came in and raved like a madman and said terrible things--oh, terrible things! He told me that I was a fool and did not know a picture from my foot, and he denounced himself as a scoundrel and a thief and a liar. He wanted me to destroy all the pictures I had bought from him, and said they were not worth the stretchers of the canvas they were painted on. . . . Oh! it was terrible, terrible! He said that for years he had been pulling my leg, and had got such a taste for it that he had begun to pull his own leg, and he went on to say that his soul was rotten with lies; and then he broke into a torrent of wild, splendid stuff that made my spine tingle. I assure you, I could not contain my enthusiasm. . . . Oh! he is a splendid fellow. . . . I can't remember it all very well, but he said that love is impossible in the world as it is, and that everybody is living in hate. It sounded most true--most true--though you know I adore my wife. . . . He said that humanity has tried aristocracy and failed, and it has tried democracy and failed. It has swung from one extreme to the other and found satisfaction in neither, and now it must bend the two extremes together so as to get the electric spark which can illumine life, and also to create a circle in which life can be contained. Of course, I haven't got it at all clear, but it was most inspiring--most inspiring. Certainly life is very unsatisfactory, and it must be maddening for artists, maddening, though of course it should drive them on to make a mighty effort. We are all looking to the artists nowadays, especially since that wonderful exhibition."

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

"He told me you had quarrelled with him. Such a pity! Dear me! dear me! You were such a splendid pair, so sincere. He said it was irrevocable. But, you know, 'The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love.' Have you read the Oxford 'Book of Verse'? A storehouse of poetry. . . . I came to see you for that reason. Quarrels ought not to be irrevocable. . . . I have been to see Oliver too. Poor girl! poor girl! I am keeping their little nest at Hampstead for them. . . . I told Logan he ought to marry her. Of course, I know, artists have their own view on that subject, but there is a great deal to be said for marriage. Most people are married, you know, and a woman who is not married must feel out of it. Nothing to do with morality, of course, but you know what women are. They can't bear even their clothes to be different, and, after all, marriage is only a garment which we wear for decency's sake."

"But where is Logan?"

"That I don't know," said Tysoe. "Oliver said he would be here. She said it was your fault that they had quarrelled. . . . Poor girl! So pretty too! . . . I thought if you made it up with Logan, then he could make it up with her and we should all be happy again. We might have a nice little dinner of reconciliation at my house."

"It is no use, no use whatever," said Mendel. "Logan might go back to her, but he will never come back to me. We have gone different ways, not only in life, but in our work."

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

"No," answered Mendel. "I should like to, but it is impossible. It is very good of you to try to intervene. Logan was my friend. He is no longer the same man. He is altered, he is changed, he is done for."

"Nothing could ruin a man like that. It is disastrous, it is terrible that he should lose his friend and the girl he loves at one stroke. Kühler, I implore you, I entreat you, if he comes to see you, you will not refuse him."

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

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

"But he will not come."

"We shall find a way. We shall find a way. . . . Ah! superb!" he added, catching sight of Mendel's green-faced _Mother._ "Ah! The new spirit at work in your art. Colour! What you have always wanted! . . . How--how much?"

"Ten pounds," said Mendel.

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

Mendel wrapped the picture up in brown paper and gave it him, told him he must go, thanked him for his kindness, and with unutterable relief watched him go shambling down the stairs.

* * * * *

It was very certain that Logan would not come. There could be nothing but futile suffering for both of them, and Logan would know that as well as he. Logan knew himself better than most men, and he must have felt the finality of that parting in the street. The breach was final and irrevocable, for Oliver was definitely a part of Logan, as much a part of him as his hand or his eyes, and Mendel hated Oliver with a pure, simple, immovable passion. He saw in her embodied the natural enemy of all that he loved: order, decency, honesty, art, and beauty. He would have liked to blot out all trace of her everywhere, but she lived most intensely in his mind. She existed for him hardly at all as a person, but as an evil, fixed will set on the destruction of Logan, of friendship, of art, of love, of beauty, of everything that lived distinctly and clearly and with a flame-like energy. She existed to drag all down into the glowing ashes of lust and lies. There were times when she became symbolical of that Christian world that had made him suffer so intensely. In her was the only discernible will of that world in which everything was losing shape and form, every flame was dying down, and everything, good and bad, was being reduced to ashes.

"Good and bad?" thought Mendel. "I don't know what they mean. I know what is false and what is true. What is false I hate. What is true I love. That woman is a lie and I hate her, and I wish she were dead."

Logan might hate her too, but he would always try, always hope to love her, always waste himself in trying to kindle her lust into a passion. The fool, the weak fool! Let her rot; let her drop down to her own level, where she could be decently a beast of prey, marked out to be shunned except by those who were her natural victims. Logan was too good: but if there was so much good in him, might not something be done? . . . No. Only Logan's own will could save him. Nothing could be done for him except out of pity: and who wants pity? Leave that to men like Tysoe, the kindly, emasculate fools of the world.

Yet Mendel knew that he was bound to Logan. At first he thought it must be by pity, but it was deeper than that. There was not much capacity for pity in Mendel. Ruthless with himself, he could see no reason why others should be spared what he himself was ready to endure. He had never thought that others might be weaker than he. Logan, for instance, with ten years' more experience behind him, had always seemed infinitely stronger.

And so Logan had left Oliver! There must have been a terrible row. . . . Oh, well, he would go back to her. There would be no end to the affair, there could be no end unless Logan were strong enough to stand by himself. But when had he ever tried to do that? Even in his work he borrowed here and there. Mendel was sure now that all Logan's work had grown out of his own, and was often, by some amazing sleight of mind, an anticipation of his own ideas. That explained a good deal: his growing sense that Logan was really his enemy, and was cramping and thwarting him, a sense that endured even after the quarrel. It was strong upon him now. Tysoe had brought Logan vividly to his mind and made him feel impotent, possessed by a vision of art but unable to move a step towards it, rather dragged further and further away from it. He was ashamed when he thought of how often he had excitedly followed Logan's lead, only to come now to this discovery that he was brought back to his own inchoate ideas. . . . He was reminded oddly of the journalist who had interviewed him after his first success and had produced so grotesque a parody of his innocently conceited remarks.

A tap at the door reminded him of the "two young ladies" who were waiting to see him. He rushed eagerly to the door and flung it open, thinking to find healing and refreshment in the sight of Morrison. Only Clowes was standing there, and in his disappointment her face seemed to him so foolish and flabby and idiotic that his impulse was to shut the door. . . . He would bang the door in her face and it would shut out the Christian world for ever. It did not want him, and he did not want it, for it was full of lies. . . . Then he heard a footstep on the stairs and Morrison appeared.

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

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

"All right," he replied.

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

"How are you?"

"I'm very well."

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

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

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

"It seems to be a pretty general complaint," said Clowes. "Everybody is so upset by the French pictures. I should like to shake that Thompson until his teeth rattled. He is so pleased with himself."

"He's an awful man," muttered Mendel. "He seems to think he told Cézanne and Van Gogh how to do it. There seems to be a whole army of men ready to take the credit of a thing when someone else has done it. I suppose they are all talking like mad."

"What is so astonishing is that these things are actually selling, and people who never sold a picture in their lives dab a few straight lines on a picture and off it goes."

Mendel laughed.

"I've just sold one," he said. "I came straight back from the exhibition and painted it. They sell just as if they were a new kind of toy that is all the rage."

So they kept up a cheerful rattle of conversation until Clowes said she really must go. No; she would not have tea, but she hoped Mendel would come to tea with her one day.

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

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

"In case there was nothing to be said and this visit was another failure. I'm sick of failure; aren't you?"

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

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

"It was nothing to do with that. Everything seemed all over, and I'm not sure even now that it isn't."

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

"I've quarrelled with Logan."

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

"I'm so glad."

"You didn't like him. Why?"

"I thought him second-rate."

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

"Are you so sure of that?"

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

She smiled at him.

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

"It was over his woman."

"Oh yes!"

"He has left her."

"Has he been to see you?"

"No. It was a friend of his. I don't know what will happen. They are bound to come together again. Perhaps they will go through life like that--parting and coming together again. I can't get it out of my head. I shall never forget it. It is like my father knocking a drunken soldier down with a glass. I never forget that, though it was different. That was just something that I saw. This is in my own life. I feel as though it had somehow happened through me. I was with him when he met her, you know, and his whole life changed when he met me. Perhaps he wasn't meant to take things seriously. . . . I didn't write to you because I didn't want to drag you into it. But I'm glad you've come. I'm glad you've come. . . . You know, it was beginning to be a horror with me that Logan would come in at that door, looking like a poor, battered, broken little Napoleon, and I should have to tell him that I was not his friend. . . . You know, he was something vital and living in my work, but Cézanne has kicked him out. He was only my friend really in my work, and if that goes everything goes. I couldn't explain it to him, for he wouldn't understand. He used to laugh at me for talking about my work to you. I'm afraid I told him more about you than I ought to have done, but, you see, he was my friend. He laughed at everything. He ought to have been a very happy man, the way he laughed at everything."

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

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

"But why is her mouth crooked?" asked Morrison, puzzled by the picture and by his setting it above Cranach.

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

And he tried to explain the making of the picture, but she could not understand it. However, she could understand and love his enthusiasm, and they were both happy, talking rather aimlessly and often relapsing into silence.

"I never can make out," he said, "why you are more wonderful to me than anybody else. Directly I am with you, I am not so much happy as free. Even if I am miserable and you don't make me any happier, I want you with me. . . . You mustn't go away again."

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

"Why need you actually go? Why shouldn't you stay here now? Stay with me. Don't go. Don't think of going. I want you always with me. . . . If you don't like the place we will find another studio and go there. And if you want to be married we can get married at once. I have nearly a hundred pounds in the bank."

He knelt by her side and held her knees in his two hands. She took his face in her hands and said gently:--

"You mustn't talk like that, Mendel. Please don't think I don't love you because I don't want you to talk like that. It is the first thing to come into your mind, but with me it is almost the last thing. I want love to be very, very beautiful before it comes to me. I want love to be as beautiful to me as that picture of Cézanne's is to you. Do you understand me?"

He sprang to his feet and turned away from her.

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

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

"No, I don't understand you. You want love to be like art. You want to mix love up with art. Love belongs to life. Love is rich and ripe and warm. You want it to be like the dew on the grass. It can't be!--it can't be! Love bursts out of a man's body into his soul, and you want it to live in his soul and to leave him with an impotent, cold body. You want me to bend to your woman's will, for you know I cannot break away from you. You are with your soul like Oliver with her body. You are with your love like Oliver with her lust, and Logan and I are a pair--a miserable, broken pair."

"Oh!" she cried, hiding her face in her hands. "You are wrong, wrong, hideously wrong. You have understood nothing at all. Your mind has rushed away with you. For God's sake be quiet for a little, to see if we can't get it straight."

His desire was to batter down her opposition, yet he could not but realize that she was too strong, and that he would only do grievous and useless harm. He controlled himself, therefore, and was silent. At last he grunted:--

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

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

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

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

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

"Foolish, foolish, foolish!" she said. "If you loved me one tenth part as much as I love you, you would know what I mean."

"I don't," he said simply. "I don't, honestly I don't. Perhaps you are so beautiful to me that I am blinded with it."

Of the truth of her feeling against him he had no doubt, but though he laboured bitterly to understand it, he could make nothing of it. He was driven back on his simple need for her.

"Very well," he said; "if it makes you feel like that for me to touch you, I never will. Only don't talk of loving me more than I love you. It isn't true."

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

"What do you want, then?"

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

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

"I want to share it."

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

"I must get used to that. . . . When I am in London I want you to promise that you will see me at least once a week."

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

She laughed at that.

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

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

"I don't want the country," he rapped out. "I am a Londoner. All the life I care about is in the streets and in the houses, in the restaurants and the shops, and the costers' barrows and the cinemas and the picture galleries. That is why I live here, because I love the coarse, thrumming vitality all round me."

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

For a moment it seemed to him that the key to the mystery she talked of was in his hands. He clutched at it and it evaded him, but his idolatry of her was shaken, and he began dimly to see her as a creature like himself, with feelings, thoughts, desires, and a will. There was no doubt at all about the will, and he had to recognize it.

VIII

OLIVER

THEN began a period of quiet, happy friendship for them both. Mendel was astonishingly amenable to many of her disciplinary suggestions and allowed her to cut his hair (though not without thinking of Delilah), and when she ordered him to get some new clothes he went off obediently to a friend of Issy's and had a suit made--West End style at East End prices.

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

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

"Why thank goodness?"

"Because they walk about as though they owned the earth and the fatness thereof, as though the earth existed for them to walk about on it without their needing even to look at it to see how beautiful it is."

"That's like Logan," he said. "He used always to be railing against the English. He said they had no eyes, only stomachs. But I think the English must be the nicest people in the world, for there is no place like London for living in."

Indeed, they both thought there could be no place like London. Once or twice a week they dined together at the Pot-au-Feu and went on to a party or to a music-hall or to the cinema, which he adored. He said it gave him ideas for pictures and that there were often wonderful momentary pictures thrown on the screen.

"The cinema does what the bad artists have been trying to do for generations. It is a great relief to have it done by a machine. The artist need not any more try to be a machine. There is no need for him now to please the public. He can leave all that to the machine and go straight for art. The few decent people will follow him, and what more does he want? Art is not for the fools. . . . Logan was wrong. He wanted art to go to the people. That is all wrong. The people must come up to art. When they are sick of the machine, art is there, ready for them." He added naïvely, "I shall be there, waiting for them."

He loved especially the dramas, when they were not clogged and obscured with sentimentality. The simple values that governed them, the triumph of virtue and the downfall of evil, appealed to him as solid, as related to a process, a drama, that went on in himself, and, he supposed, in everybody else. It worried and annoyed him when Morrison made fun of these values and jeered at them.

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

"I think they do," he said.

"Good people are often crushed," she replied, "and bad people often have things all their own way."

"But it is inside people that it happens like that. False people have their souls eaten away with lies, and true people have free, happy souls like yours. Being rich or poor, or what you call good or bad, has nothing to do with it. Yes. It is inside people that it happens like that, and I am more often the villain than the hero inside myself."

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

"It is because you are so idiotically good. You have only one side to your nature. You are like a heroine in your Dickens."

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

"You don't even know how bad I am. You have no more idea of what my life is like than a rose has of an onion's."

"I don't like onions."

"That's the trouble. You don't like the smell of onions, and so you don't eat them. Very poor people live on bread and onions and they find them good. I have no patience with you. You want to be a rose growing in a sheltered English garden."

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

"A wild rose, then; and you have no right to want such a life. You are not a flower. You are a human being, and you can't have a sheltered life, or a summer hedgerow life, because you have truth and falsehood in you, and if you will not live for the truth you will die for the falsehood. That is why cinemas are good and theatres are rotten. All the plays are false, because they have forgotten truth and falsehood and are all about being rich or poor, or old or young, or married or unmarried, and in the worst plays of all they are about people pretending to be children so as to get out of the whole thing. I hate you sometimes when you seem to be trying that game of refusing to be grown up, denying your own feelings and letting men love you and pretending you don't know what it is all about."

"I never do that," she cried indignantly.

"I'm not so sure," he said, unable to resist the temptation to press home the advantage he had won in rousing her out of her placid happiness. "I'm not so sure. There are too many girls do that."

"I don't. I may have done it. But I have never done it with you. It is a wicked lie to say anything of the kind."

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

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

"Oh! my mind is no good, is it? Then take your hands off my feelings. They'll understand you right enough."

"No. They won't."

"Why not?"

"Because they're blind."

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

"Wait."

"How long?"

"Till you can see."

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

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

"I know what I want."

"It isn't what I want."

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

"What is it?"

"Love."

"You've got it."

"You don't call this love?"

"I do."

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

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

"I don't want to be friends. I've had enough of friends. They have never done me any good. It's a silly, thin kind of happiness at best."

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

"How can you say that?" he cried, revolted. "How can you say that? Every thought, every dream I have is centred on it. It is such happiness that my imagination, is baffled by it."

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

He had learned when it was wise to stop, but he needed every now and then the assurance that her serene confidence was shot with doubt. Once or twice when he had tried to thrust her back on her doubts she had flared up, and had fought tooth and nail, declaring that she would never see him again. And, as he knew she meant it, he yielded, and said that any sacrifice was better than that.

On her part, as she came more nearly to see his point of view, she was often shaken and tempted to admit that he was right. There was no looseness or formlessness about his ideas. He lived in a world that apparently made room for everything, a world in which he stood solidly on his feet while the waves of life broke upon him, and he only absorbed into himself that which his passions needed. It was a plain, simple world, where good and evil were equally true, and, apparently, largely a matter of chance--a world in which he was gloriously independent. But was he free? Sometimes she thought that he was amazingly free. His only prejudice seemed to be against pink, fleshy young men who had to do nothing for a living--young men like her brothers, for instance, of whom she had drawn an amusing series of caricatures showing the effect of introducing Mendel to them. . . . Sometimes she wondered if her own longing for freedom was not just her ignorance, just a craven desire to escape from knowing anything about life, to remain an amused but fundamentally indifferent onlooker. And when she had to face the suffering she inflicted on him, then she was often moved to cry out within herself:--

"Oh! Take me, take me! Have your will. It will make an end of it all, and you will pass on and forget me, but you will no longer suffer through me."

But she could not bend her own will, which insisted that the treasure she desired lay through him, and that he needed it even more than she. It was because of his need that he clung to her through all his suffering and exasperation. . . . Why, why was he so blind that he could not see it? Why could he, who was so sure and so strong, not see what was to her so clear through all her vacillation and all the confusion of her idealism? . . . She tried to make him read English poetry, but he could make little of it, and said none of it was worth the Bible. He declared that Shelley wrote romantical nonsense, because men could never be made perfect, and it was cruelly absurd to try it--like dressing a monkey up in human clothes. And he countered by making her read "Candide."

"When you have been through as much as Cunegonde," he said, "I'll believe in your purity."

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

"What is it, then?"

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

They found common ground in Blake, whom Mendel consented to read because Blake was the only English painter who had had any idea of art at all.

Blake brought them much closer together, and their tussles were sharper, but less futile and exasperating.

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

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

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

* * * * *

He was not easy for her to handle. It was like playing with high explosives, save that she was not playing.

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

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

"How can I let go," he roared, "when I feel that you are weighing and judging and criticizing every word I say, every thing I do?"

And she was silent for a long time. It was a new and dreadful idea, that she was hemming him in by making him feel that she was judging him. It was so far from her intention that she protested:--

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

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

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

"What breaks down?"

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

"Oh! then if it breaks down it isn't any good, and we may as well give it up for ever. I will learn to shuffle along without you."

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

"Then you want to know what to do?"

"What?"

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

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

She was elated, exalted. Her eyes shone and she glowed with excitement and hope. Surely he would understand now! Surely she had found words for it at last!

"That's rubbish," he said. "Men aren't birds, and they are not angels. If you want to fly, go up in an airyoplane. That's another machine like the cinema. It relieves human beings of another mania."

She turned away to hide the tears that had gushed to her eyes. Why did he waste his strength? Why did he keep his force from entering into his imagination?

That evening was most miserable for her, and she was glad when it came to an end.

* * * * *

To add to her difficulties he was making himself ill over his work, which, as he said, had gone completely rotten, and he did not scruple to ascribe it to her. He would spend a delightful happy evening with her and feel that his difficulties were over, that in the morning he would be able to make a beginning upon all the ideas that were so jumbled and close-packed in his head. But in the morning he would be dull and nerveless, and though he might work himself up into a frenzy, yet he could produce nothing that was any good. His work was easier, and even a little better, after the evenings when they almost quarrelled.

Again and again he told himself that he could not go on, that life was as thick and heavy as the air before a thunderstorm. Often he thought that this density, this opaqueness, with which he was surrounded, meant that he must quarrel and break with her once and for all. It would nearly kill him to do it, but if it must be done, the sooner the better. Perhaps it was wrong for him to have anything to do with the Christian world at all. No single friendship or relationship that he had had in it had been successful or of any profit to him. Little by little his peace of mind had been taken from him. Everything had been taken from him, even, now, his work. . . . That he would not have. He set his teeth and stuck to it, every day and all day, but the few pictures he turned out did not sell. Cluny would not have them, and they were rejected by the exhibitions, even by the club of which he was a member.

Of all this he said not a word to a soul, not even to Morrison, not even to Golda. His money was dwindling. That put marriage out of the question. Fate, or the ominous pressure of life, or whatever it was, played into Morrison's hands.

Every now and then, unable to endure this pressure, he plunged into excesses. There seemed to be no other way out. The Christian world refused him. He no longer belonged to his own people. Their poverty disgusted him. People had no right to be so poor as that, to have no relief from the joyless daily grind for bread. . . . It was the fault of the Christians who prayed to the Lord for their daily bread and stole it from each other because they had forgotten that it was not given them except in return for daily work.

That was the one strand of sympathy he had left with his father--Jacob's absolute refusal to receive his daily bread from any other hands than his own, and his almost crazy refusal to let Issy and Harry go out and work for other masters. They could work for their father because he had authority over them, but other masters had no authority except what they bought or stole.

But a talk with Harry decided Mendel that his people's way, the Jewish way, was no longer his.

Harry was bored. He had bouts of boredom when he could not endure the workshop and refused to go near it, however great the pressure of business might be. Like his father, he said:--

"I want nothing."

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

"But there _is_ nothing."

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

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

"Why didn't you stay in Paris?"

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

"But if they give you nothing?"

"They have nothing to give. Nothing but old Jews who believe and young Jews who cannot believe and are nothing."

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

"But they are fools and can make themselves happy with their cinemas and their newspapers and their forward women."

"I thought you liked women, Harry."

"I don't like women who like me. . . . I don't want to marry, I don't want anything. I shall see the old people into their graves, and then I don't know what I shall do. You are the only one I know who has anything to live for or any life in him."

"I have little enough."

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

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

His brother's despondency helped Mendel on a little, but what a mean incentive to work, to astonish his poor ignorant family!

Very soon there came a terrible day when he had to tell them that he had not a penny in the world and that he was a failure. It would have gone hardly with him but for Harry, who espoused his cause, saying dramatically that he believed in his young brother as he believed in God, and that Mendel should not be stopped for want of money. And he went upstairs and came down with his savings, nearly thirty pounds.

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

"He is a genius," said Harry simply, and Issy, fired by his brother's example, said he had saved ten pounds and he would add that. Together they shouted Jacob down when he tried to raise his voice, until at last he produced his cash-box and gave Mendel a ten-pound note, saying:--

"If the Christians are liars when they say they believe in you, we are not. You must learn that the Christians are all liars and you must show them that you are the greatest artist in the world."

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

* * * * *

He returned to his work with a better determination to succeed, but he felt more barren than ever, and had nothing to work with but his will. Into that he gathered all his force and determined to go back and pick up the thread of his work at the point where Logan had broken into the weaving of it. He would paint yet another portrait of his mother, and then he would choose a subject from among the life of the Jews. He would start again. The Jews believed in him; he would glorify them, although he no longer believed in but only admired them. When he came to look at them clearly, they were squat and stunted, because he could only look at them from a superior height. . . . He turned over his early work, and studied it carefully, but he could not recover his childish acceptance of that existence.

For some weeks he did not go near Morrison and frequented the Paris Café, where he felt hopelessly out of it. No one spoke to him. Hardly a soul nodded to him. Night after night he sat there despondently, conjuring up the exciting evenings he had spent there. They were like ashes in his mouth.

* * * * *

One night, to his amazement and almost fear, someone slipped into the seat at his side. It was Oliver. She laid her hand on his knee and said:--

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

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

"Kümmel's mine," she said.

He ordered two Kümmels.

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

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

"All right, all right!" she said, "I haven't been here for a long time. I wish you'd come and see me, Kühler. We never did get on, but I'd like to have a talk about old times."

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

"It's nearly a year since I saw you. Logan came back, you know. Mr. Tysoe was so good. He kept on the house for me. Wasn't it good of him?"

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

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

"Go on about Logan."

"He went back to that Camden Town place, you know, and we didn't see each other for nearly two months. It was awful. I couldn't sleep at nights, and I knew he wouldn't be able to sleep. He never slept, you know, when we had had one of our hells and I wouldn't speak to him. He! he!" she gasped and giggled nervously at the memory.

"Go on," said Mendel. He was icy cold. All the strange oppression that was brooding in his life seemed to gather into a thick snowy cloud about his head and to fit it like a cap of ice. "Go on."

"Mr. Tysoe gave me money. Wasn't it good of him? He used to see Logan. Not very often--just occasionally. Logan was painting a wonderful portrait of me, in my green dress and the corals he gave me. . . . See: I always wear them, even now."

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

"I lived all alone and refused to see anyone. I got so thin, all my skirts had to be taken in. I knew Logan was jealous, so I didn't see anyone, and when I heard about the portrait I knew he would come back. So I used to wear the green dress every evening and wait for him till twelve, one, two, three in the morning, all alone, in that little cottage on the Heath. . . . My, I _was_ tired, I can tell you. But I never was one for getting up in the morning. . . . At last, one night, he came. He walked in quite quietly, as though nothing had happened. He had brought the picture with him. My word, it _is_ good. You'd love it. He had offers for it, but he wouldn't sell it. He said a funny thing about it. He said: 'It's literature. It isn't art.' So he wouldn't sell it. . . . We had a glorious time--a glorious time! It was better even than the beginning."

She stopped to linger over the memory, and she drew her hand caressingly along her thigh.

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

"He had plenty of money. He sold everything he did. There were one or two society ladies, the cats! Common property, I call them."

"So it broke down again," said Mendel.

"Yes. He got---- You know what he could be like. Sometimes I thought he was going off his head, and I often wonder if he wasn't a bit touched. . . . I haven't seen him since. I wondered if you had seen him."

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

"Mr. Tysoe hasn't seen him. Cluny has some of his things, but won't say a word. I think he must have left London."

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

"I've left Hampstead. I'm living over the Pot-au-Feu, I'm working as a model. Don't forget me, and if you hear of Logan, do let me know, and come and have a talk over old times."

She had caught sight of an acquaintance smiling at her and went over to him, for all the world, as Mendel thought, like a fly-by-night.

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

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

* * * * *

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

"I insisted on her going, she was looking so pale. You know when she feels lonely she won't eat. When she is miserable she gets so shy that she can't even go into a shop. . . . I have taken a cottage in the country, just outside London. Two rooms, two shillings a week. Isn't it cheap? So I packed her off there two days ago."

"When will she be back?"

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

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

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

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

Clowes gave him the address, and he wrote saying that life was intolerable without her.

* * * * *

Morrison did not need his letter, and, indeed, it only reached the cottage after she had left. She knew he needed her. Never for an instant was his image absent from her mind, and at night, when she lay awake, she could have sworn she heard a moaning cry from him. No wind ever made a sound like that.

There was a pouring rain and a howling wind, but she walked the four miles to the station and sent him a wire telling him to meet her at the station in London. He received it just in time and was on the platform.

He took her in his arms and kissed her.

"What is the matter?"

"Did you get my letter?"

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

"I don't know. My work, I think. I met Oliver last night. It upset me. But I wanted you for my work. It is like a knife stuck through my brain. I wanted to be with you, just to see you and to hear your voice. Nothing else. That part of me feels dead. . . . Oliver is living over the Pot-au-Feu, where Hetty Finch used to be. I wonder what's become of her. I expect she has found a millionaire by now. . . . We'll have the evening together. We'll dine at the Pot-au-Feu. We might meet Oliver, but I can't think of any other place."

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

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

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

"I'll be all right now I am with you. Mr. Sivwright asked me to go to the Merlin's Cave to-night. He has to shut it up. I thought I wouldn't go, but I want to go, if you will come with me."

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

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

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

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

"What are you doing?"

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

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

"Like Rousseau. He was good at roads."

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

"You can't paint without being abstract," he said irritably. "Even Academicians can't really imitate, but they abstract without using their brains. You can't really copy nature, so what's the good of trying?"

"You can suggest."

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

"Perhaps mine is only a sketch," she said rather forlornly, because she had been rather hopeful of her work.

They went back to his studio, where he showed her his studies and drawings for the new picture. She saw that he was working again with his old love of his craft.

They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and had it all to themselves because the weather was so bad. There were only the goggle-eyed man in the corner with his green evening paper and Madame Feydeau and Gustave, the waiter.

Over the dinner Mendel waxed very gay and gave her a very comic description of the scene when he had gone to his family to confess his failure. He had a wonderful power of making them comic without laughing at them.

"They are wonderful people," he said. "They know what is sense and what is nonsense. If you gave them the biggest problem in the world they would know what was true in it and what was false. They are always right about politics and public men. But when it comes to art, they are hopeless."

"But they believe in you."

"Because I belong to them. They believe in themselves. . . . My mother was quite sound about Logan. She said it could not go on. I thought it was for ever. I've been thinking about Logan. He could never be himself. He was always wanting to be something--something big. I thought he was big for a long time. But he's just a man. I don't think Cézanne was ever anything but just a man. It makes one think, doesn't it? All these people who are written about as though they were something terrific, all trying to be something more than they are--just men. And then a quiet little man comes along and he is bigger than the lot of them, because he has never tried to blow himself out, but has given himself room to grow."

She had never known him so gentle and tender and wise, and if he had wanted to love her she would not have denied him. She trusted him so completely. And he looked so ill and tired. But he only wanted to be with her, and to talk to her and to hear her voice.

After dinner they went to a cinema to fill in time, and he shouted with laughter like a boy, threw himself about, and stamped his feet at the comic film. And she laughed too, and took his hand in hers and held it in her lap.

"That was good!" he said. "I think I should like to be a cinema actor. If I get really hard up I shall try it. I might be a star, if I could learn to wear my clothes properly and could get my hair to lie down in a solid shiny block."

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

"Come along," he said.

It was still raining hard, so they took a taxi to the Merlin's Cave, though it was not half a mile away.

Everything was the same, even to the two rich young men who entered just after them. They signed the book, and then, hearing the music, Mendel seized Morrison by the wrist and dragged her down the stairs.

The place was astonishingly full. Nearly all the tables were occupied, and they had to take one between the orchestra and the door. Calthrop, Mitchell, Weldon, Jessie Petrie, everybody from the Paris Café was there. Oliver was sitting with Thompson and the critic. In a far corner Clowes was sitting with the young man from the Detmold. There were models, male and female, all the strange people who for one reason or another had lived in or on the Calthrop tradition. In the middle of the room were two large tables which Sivwright had packed with celebrities--authors, journalists, editors, actors, and music-hall comedians. They were being fed royally, as became lions, and there were champagne bottles gleaming on the tables. Tall young soldiers in mufti began to arrive with chorus-girls who had not troubled to remove their make-up.

"It's a gala!" said Mendel.

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

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

An author read a short play, which he explained had been suppressed by the censor. To Mendel it sounded very mild and foolish. It was a tragedy, but no one was moved; the audience much preferred the music-hall comedian, who followed with a song about a series of mishaps to his trousers.

The same reedy-voiced poet recited the same poem as before, and the same foolish girl sang the same foolish song, and it looked as though the programme would never end.

Mendel was irritated and bored, and called for champagne.

"Waiter!"

But the waiter did not hear him.

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

"Waiter!"