Chapter XVIII: Book THREE: The Passing of Youth (5)

The door by them opened and Logan slipped in. He was almost a shadow of his old self. The plump flesh had gone from his face, which was all eyes and bones. He looked famished. His eyes swept round the room, and, fastening on Oliver, lit up with a gleam of satisfaction. He was like a starving man looking at a nice pink ham in a shop window. He moved swiftly towards her, but stopped on seeing the men she was with and swerved to a table a few yards behind her. From where Mendel was sitting it looked as though he were peering over her shoulder, an evil, menacing face.

Mendel shivered, and his eyes suddenly felt dry and hot, as though they were being pushed out of his face. His throat went dry, and when he tried to call the waiter he could make no sound. The waiter met his eyes and came.

"Champagne!" said Mendel.

"Very good, sir. One bottle?"

"Half-a-bottle," said Morrison.

"One bottle," roared Mendel.

A young artist, who knew them both slightly, hearing the order, came and sat with them.

The dancing began.

"Come and dance," said Morrison.

"No, I don't want to dance. That was Logan who came in. He hasn't seen me yet."

"Which is Logan?" asked the young artist. "He's done some good things. Someone told me the other day he had softening of the brain."

"Rubbish!" said Mendel. "They say that of every man who makes a success, as though it needed something strange to account for it. It's either softening of the brain, or consumption, or three wives, or he is killing himself with drink. They talk as though art itself were some kind of disease."

Logan had seen Mendel, and their eyes met. Mendel felt that Logan was looking clean through him, looking at him as a ghost might look at a man whom he had known in life, fondly, tenderly, icily through him, without expecting him to be aware of the terrible scrutiny. But Mendel was aware of it, and it chilled him to the marrow. Logan gave no sign, but stared and stared, and presently turned his eyes away without a sign, without a tremor. It was like turning away the light of a lantern. He turned his eyes from Mendel to Oliver in one sweep. No one else but those two seemed to exist for him, and Mendel felt that he no longer existed. And more than ever Logan looked as if he were peering over Oliver's shoulder with those staring, piercing eyes of his from which the soul had gone out. Only the glowing spark of a fixed will was left in them to keep them sane and human.

Mendel began to drink. The orchestra behind him sent the rhythm of a waltz thumping through him. But it went heavily, without music or tune. One--two--three. It was like having molten lead poured on the nape of his neck, threatening to jerk his head off his spine. From where he sat he could not see the dancing-floor, except reflected in a mirror opposite him. . . . Oh! it was a gay sight and a silly It had nothing to do with him. He could see nothing but Oliver with the grim, haggard face looking over her shoulder. He gulped down a glass of wine. That was better. It made things bearable. He poured out another glass of wine.

"I think there is more in the Futurists than the Cubists," said the young artist.

"In art," said Mendel, turning on him savagely, "there is neither past nor present nor future; there is only eternity. You try to make a group out of that, and see how you will get on. You can put that at the head of your manifesto and your group would melt away under it like the fat on a basted pigeon."

He put out his hand for his glass, but Morrison had taken it and was drinking.

"You'll make yourself drunk," he said, taking it from her gently.

"I finished it all," she said, with an unhappy smile. "I didn't want you to drink it, and you looked so tragic I knew it would be bad for you."

The young artist crept away. Mendel took Morrison's hand and gripped it.

"I'm glad you are with me," he said. "Look at Logan!"

Never taking his eyes off Oliver, Logan had begun to move towards her with his hand in his breast pocket. He had nearly reached her, with his eyes glowing almost yellow under the electric light, when he changed his mind, swung round, and went to another table and sat with his head down, biting his nails.

The dancing was fast and furious, and this time it was the flute which played an obbligato, thin, fantastic, and comic, real silvery fun, like a trickle of water down a crag into a pool in sunshine.

Thompson went to the dancing-floor with a girl in fancy dress--a columbine's costume. That seemed to relieve Logan, who jumped to his feet, walked quickly round to Oliver, bent over her, and spoke to her. Her face wore an expression of amazed delight. Her eyes were drawn to his, and though she shrank under them, she seemed to go soft and flabby: she could not resist them. There was no menace in Logan now, only an attitude of fixed mastery, an air of taking possession of her once and for all, of knowing that at last he would get the longed-for satisfaction.

They spoke together for a little longer, then she rose and put her hand up and caressed his cheek and neck as though it hurt her to see them so thin--as though, indeed, she refused to believe what her eyes told her.

They walked past Mendel and Morrison without seeing them. Mendel gripped Morrison's hand until she felt that the blood must gush out of her nails. Logan opened the swing-door for Oliver, devouring her with his burning eyes, in which there was a desperate set purpose of which he seemed to be almost weary. So frail he looked, as if but a little more and he would loose his hold even on that to which he clung. And Oliver smiled at him with a malicious promise in her eyes that he should have his will, that his hold should be loosened and his weariness come to an end. Clearly she knew that he had no thought outside herself.

And outside the two of them Mendel had no thought. His mind became as a tunnel down which they were moving, and soon they were lost to his sight and he was left to wait. There his thoughts stopped, while he waited.

IX

LOGAN MAKES AN END

ALL night long he paced up and down his studio. His thoughts would not move, but went over and over the scene in the Cave, and probed vainly in the darkness for the next move. When he heard footsteps in the street he hung out of the window, making sure that it must be Logan come for him. But no one stopped at the door, and soon within himself and without was complete silence, save for his footsteps on the floor and the matches he struck to light cigarette after cigarette, though he could not keep one of them alight.

His imagination rejected the facts and refused to work on them. The scene in the Cave had left an impression upon his retina, like that of the cinema--just a plain flat impression containing no material for his imagination. And yet he knew that he was deeply engaged in whatever was happening.

With his chin in his hands he leaned out of his window and watched the dawn paint the eastern sky and the day wipe out the colours. Doors were opened in the street. Windows were lit with the glow of the fires, and the day's activity had begun, but he had no share in it, for he knew that this day was like no other. For him it was a day lost in impenetrable shadow, and he could not tell what should take him out of it. And still he expected Logan would come.

He heard Rosa get up and go downstairs and light the fire and bawl up to Issy to jump out of his bed, filthy snoring sluggard that he was. He heard the voices of the children and the baby yelling. . . . How indecent, how abominable it was to cram so many people into one small house!

At the usual time he went over to his mother's kitchen for breakfast, and gulped down his tea, but made no attempt to eat. Golda looked at him reproachfully, but said nothing, for she saw that he was in some deep trouble.

After breakfast, as usual, he went for his walk down through Whitechapel almost as far as Bow Church and back.

In his studio when he returned he found a policeman, who said:--

"Mr. Mendel Kühler?"

"Yes."

The policeman handed him a letter from Logan who had scrawled:--

"I believe in you to the end."

To the end?

"Is he dead?" asked Mendel.

"Next door to it," said the policeman. "The woman's done in."

"Where?"

"At the Pot-au-Feu, Soho."

"Where is he now?"

"Workhouse infirmary. If you want to see him the police will raise no objection."

"Thank you," said Mendel.

He asked the direction and set out at once.

The workhouse was a dull grey mass of buildings, rising out of a dull grey district like an inevitable creation of its dullness, and it seemed an inevitable contrast to the Merlin's Cave, so that it was right that Logan should walk out of the glitter into it. This was the very contrast that Mendel's imagination had been vainly seeking, and now, with the violence of a sudden release, his thoughts began to work again. . . . Oliver was dead. That was inevitable too. But why?

Logan had surrendered to her. They would go home from the Merlin's Cave to the Pot-au-Feu, to Hetty Finch's room. He would surrender to her absolutely, because she had willed his destruction and could not see that his destruction meant her own. She wanted recognition, acknowledgment that her vitality was more important than anything else in the world, and she had brought Logan to it. There had been a cold, set purpose in his eyes last night--an intellectual purpose. The equation was worked out. She could have what she wanted, at a price. She could destroy the will and the desire of a man, but not his mind, not his spirit, which would still be obedient to a higher will, and that would break her as she had broken.

Very bare and grim was the waiting-room in which Mendel had to bide until the nurse came for him. Its walls were of a faded green, dim and grimy, and when the door was opened as people went in or out, there was wafted in a smell of antiseptics. But as his thoughts gathered force the room seemed to be filled with a great light, which revealed beauty in the poor people waiting patiently to see their sick. They became detached and pictorial, but he could not think of them in terms of paint. His mind had begun to work in a new way, and he felt more solid, more human, more firmly planted on the ground, as though at last he was admitted to a place in life. It mattered to him no more that he was a Jew and strange and foreign to the Christian world. There were neither Jews nor Christians now. There were only people--tragic, wonderful people . . . He even forgot that he was in love. All his mind was concentrated upon Logan, who was now also tragic and wonderful, a source of tragedy and wonder, and his whole effort was to discover and to make plain to himself his share in the tragedy: not to weigh and measure and to wonder whether at one point or another he could have stopped it. Nothing could have stopped it.

There was no room for judgment in this tragic world.

A nurse came to fetch him.

She said:--

"He is very weak, but he will be strong enough to know you. Don't excite him."

She led him into the bare, white ward, across which the sun threw great shafts of light, to Logan's bedside. At the head of the bed a policeman was sitting with his helmet on his knees, staring straight in front of him. He turned his eyes on Mendel, who thought he looked a very nice man, something amusingly imperturbable in this racking world of tragedy.

He stood by the bedside and looked down at Logan, in whose face there was at last the noble, conquering expression at which, through all his foolish striving, he had always aimed. His brow was strong and massive, his mouth relentless as Beethoven's, his nose sharp and stubborn, and there was something exquisite and sensitive in the drawn skin about his eyes. From his white brow his shock of black hair fell back on the pillow.

His hand was outside the grey coverlet. Mendel took it in his. Logan opened his eyes, and into them came an expression of almost incredulous surprise, of ecstatic, intolerable happiness. He had wakened out of his dream into his dream, to be with Mendel, to have gone through the very depths to be with Mendel. His hand closed tight on his friend's and his lids drooped over his eyes.

He opened them again after a few moments and said:--

"You!"

The nurse placed a chair for Mendel, and he sat down and said:--

"How are you feeling?"

"Pretty weak. I dreamed of your coming, but I didn't really believe it. . . . I've done it, you know."

"Yes."

"What are you doing?"

"I've painted another portrait of my mother. A good one, this time. She is sitting in a wooden chair as she always sits, with her hands folded on her stomach. And I am planning a picture of a Jewish market, something bigger than I have attempted yet."

"I see. Good--good. . . . We must work together. We can do it now."

"Yes," said Mendel, rather mystified. It was very strange to have Logan talking like that, as though he were going back to the first days of their friendship.

"It is such peace," said Logan; and indeed he looked as if he were at peace, lying there so still and white, with the hard strain gone from his eyes, in which there was none of the old roguish twinkle, but an expression of pain through which there shone a penetrating and most tender light.

"Peace," murmured Logan again. "Tell me more. There is only art."

"There is nothing else," answered Mendel, carried away on the impulse of Logan's spirit and understanding what he meant when he said "we." Life, the turbulent life of every day, the life of desire, was broken and had fallen away from him, so that he was living without desire, only in his enduring will, which had lost patience with his desires and had destroyed them.

Through Mendel trembled a new and strange elation. He recognized that his friendship with Logan was just beginning, and that he was absolved from all share in the catastrophe, if such there had been. And from him too the turbulent life of desire fell away, and he could be at one with his friend. There was no need to talk of the past--it was as though it had never been.

He described the design he had made for his picture: two fat old women bargaining, and a strong man carrying a basket of fruit on his head.

"A good beginning," said Logan. "I . . . I could never get going. I was always overseen in my work."

"Overseen!" said Mendel, puzzled by the word.

"Yes. I was always outside the picture, working at it. . . . Too . . . too much brains, too little force."

"I see," said Mendel, for whom a cold finger had been put on one of his own outstanding offences against art. For a moment it brought him to an ashamed silence, but Logan's words slipped so easily into his understanding and took up their habitation there, that he was powerless to resent or to attempt to dislodge them.

"Overseen," Logan repeated, with an obvious pleasure in plucking out the weeds from their friendship, in the fair promise of which he found peace and joy. "That was the trouble. It couldn't go on. . . . City life, I think. Too much for us. Things too much our own way. . . . Egoism. . . ."

"I know that I am feeling my way towards something and that it is no good forcing it," said Mendel.

An acute attack of pain seized Logan, and he closed his eyes and was silent for a long time, with his brows knit in a kind of impatient boredom at having to submit to such a thing as pain.

"They've been very good to me," he said. "Given me everything as if I were really ill."

He sank back into pain again.

Mendel looked across at the policeman with a feeling of irritation that he should be there, a typical figure of the absurd chaotic life which had fallen away, a symbol of the factitious pretence of order which could only deceive a child.

"Can't you leave me alone with him?" he whispered.

The policeman shook his head.

"No, sir."

"You mustn't worry about outside things," said Logan, with an effort. "We _are_ alone. . . . Have you found a new friend?"

"No."

"You will. Better men than I have been. . . . Do you see that girl still?"

"Yes."

"She was the strongest of us."

"How?"

Logan made no answer, and gave a slight shake of impatience at Mendel's not understanding him.

"Something," he said, "that I never got anywhere near. . . . I . . . I was overseen in that too."

The blood drummed in Mendel's temples. Logan's cold finger went probing into his life too, and showed him always casting his own shadow over his passions. In love it was the same as in art. . . . It was very odd that, with every nerve at stretch to understand Logan and how he had been brought to smash the clotted passion of his life, it should only be important to understand himself, and that he should be able to understand so coldly, so clearly, so easily.

And now the presence of the policeman became a relief. It was a guarantee that the whole visible world would not be swept away by the frozen will in Logan, which was like a floe of ice bearing everything with it, nipping at Mendel's life, squeezing it up high and dry and bearing it along. He felt that if the policeman were to go away he would be drawn down into the doom that was upon Logan, into the valley of the shadow, even while the good sun came streaming in through the tall windows. . . . He had lost all the emotional interest which had kept him awake through the night. . . . It had been simple enough. There had been himself, Logan and Oliver, three people, living in London the gay, reckless life of artists in London, a city so huge that men and women could do in it as they pleased. Oliver and he had hated each other, and Logan had had to choose between them. He had chosen wrongly and had put an end to his misery in the only possible way.

Mendel fought back out of the shadow--back to the policeman, and the sick men lying in the rows of beds, and the dead man lying in the bed which had just been surrounded by a screen, and the simple, wonderful people in the waiting-room downstairs, and the sun streaming through the windows, and the teeming life outside in London--wonderful, splendid London, the very heart of the world. . . . It was well for Logan to lose sight of these things. He was a dying man. But Mendel was alive, never more alive than now, in face of the shadow of death, and he would not think the thoughts of a dying man unless they could be shaped in the likeness of life. He gathered together all his forces, summoned up everything that urged him towards life and towards art, and of his own strong living will plunged after Logan, no longer in obedience to Logan's frozen purpose, but as a friend giving to his friend the meed that was due to him.

He took Logan's hand and pressed it, and chafed it gently to make it warm, and Logan smiled at him, and an expression of anguish came into his face as the warmth of his friend wrapped him round, penetrated him, thawed and melted his purpose, with which he had lived for so many empty, solitary days until it had driven him to make an end. The coldness in his friend touched Mendel's heart and was like a stab through it, and he felt soon a marvellous release, as if his blood were flowing again, and it seemed that the weaknesses on which Logan had laid his finger were borne down with him into the shadow.

Mendel remembered Cézanne's portrait of his wife, and how he had intended to tell Logan that it had made him feel like a tree with the sap running through it to the budding leaves in spring.

He told him now, and added:--

"It doesn't matter that I did not understand you in life."

"No," said Logan. "Don't go away!"

"I'll stay," replied Mendel; "I'll stay."

Then he was in a horrible agony again, as the marvellous clarity he had just won disappeared. Logan knew what he was doing, that he was taking with him all the weaknesses and vain follies which had so nearly brought them both to baseness, and Mendel knew that Logan must continue as a powerful force in his work; but he crushed the rising revolt in himself, the last despairing effort of his weakness, and gave himself up to feeding the extraordinary delight it was to the poor wretch, lying there with his force ebbing away, to give himself up to a pure artistic purpose such as had been denied him in his tangled life. Through this artistic purpose Logan could rise above the natural ebbing process of his vitality, which sucked away with it the baseness and the folly he had brought into his friend's life. He could rejoice in the contact of their minds, the mingling of their souls, the proud salute of this meeting and farewell. It was nothing to him that he was dying, little enough that he had lived, for he knew that he had never lived until now.

The nurse came and said the patient must rest.

"Don't go away!" pleaded Logan.

"I'll wait," said Mendel, patting his hand to reassure him.

"Half-past two," said the nurse as she followed Mendel out. "What a remarkable man!" she added. "What a tragedy! I suppose the girl was to blame too."

"Blame?" said Mendel, rather dazed at being brought back to customary values. "Blame?"

* * * * *

He went down to the dingy waiting-room and sat there subdued, cowering, exhausted. He felt very cold and miserable. It was so terrible waiting for a thing that had happened. The physical fact could make no difference. . . . Logan had made an end, a very complete and thorough end. . . . Oh! the relief of it, the relief of having Logan for his friend at last, of having seen him freely and fully tasting at last his heart's desire, of being himself brought up to that level, that pure contact with another human being, for which he had always longed. . . . That desire in both of them had been violated and despoiled, God knows how. Lies? Lust? Profanation of the holy spirit of art? . . . What words could describe the evil that everywhere in life lay in wait for the adventurous, letting the foolish and the timid, the faint of heart and the blind of soul, go by, and waiting for strong men who walked with purpose and a single mind?

* * * * *

At half-past two the nurse came to fetch him.

"He is very weak now," she said.

Logan's face wore a noble gathering serenity. He was too weak to talk much, and only wanted Mendel to hold his hand and to talk to him about art, about pictures "they" were going to paint, and about pictures they had both loved: Cranach, Dürer, Uccello, Giotto, Blake, Cézanne.

"Good men, those," said Logan. "Good company."

"Good, decent, quiet little men."

"We shall do good things."

His hand closed more tightly on Mendel's, who surrendered himself to the force of the ebb in his friend, felt the cold, salt waves of death close about him and drag him out, out until Logan was lost, and with a frightful wrench all that was dead in himself was torn away, and he was left prostrate upon the fringes of his life. . . . He became conscious to find himself leaning over Logan, gazing at his lips, with his own lips near them, waiting for the breath that would come no more.

It was finished. Logan had made an end.

Turning away, Mendel saw through the window the lovely grey-blue sky, fleecy with mauve-grey clouds heaped up by the driving wind--beautiful, beautiful. . . .

X

PASSOVER

IT was many days before Mendel could take up his work again. His mind simply could not express itself in paint.

His first clear thought as he emerged from the numbness of the crisis was for Morrison, and to her he wrote, telling her what had happened, describing in minute detail his experience in the hospital, and adding that he was without the least wish to see her, and would write to her if his life ever became again what it had been before Logan's violent end.

It seemed to him that Logan had claimed him, that he was destined to go through life with Logan, a dead man, for sole companion, and always behind Logan was the ominous and dreadful shadow of Oliver, from whom he had thought to escape those many months ago.

His isolation was complete. It seemed that he had not a friend in the world, and there was not a soul towards whom he could move or wished to move. He could only rake over the ashes of the dead past and marvel that there had ever been a flame stirring in them. And as he raked them, he thrust into them much that only a short while ago had been living and delightful.

What had happened? Youth could not be gone while he was yet so young, but he felt immeasurably old, and, in his worst condition, outside Time, which took shape as a stream flowing past him, bearing with it all his dreams, loves, aspirations, hopes, thoughts. When he tried to cast himself into it, to rescue these treasured possessions, he was clutched back, thrown down, and left prostrate with his eyes darkened and the smell of death in his nostrils.

Sometimes he thought with terror that he had plunged too far, had given too much to Logan, had committed some obscure blasphemy, had been perhaps "overseen" even in that moment when the weakness and all that was dead in him had been wrenched away. And he said to himself:--

"No. This is much worse than death. It is foolish to seek any meaning in death, for death is not the worst."

It was no good turning to his people, for he knew that he was cut off from them. They were confined in their Judaism, from which he had broken free. That was one of the dead things which had been taken from him.

His mother could not help him, because she could not endure his unhappiness. The pain of it was too great for her, and he had to invent a spurious happiness, to pretend that he was working as usual, though with great difficulty, and that, as usual, he was out and about, seeing his friends. And in a way this pretence gave him relief, though he suffered for it afterwards. He suffered so cruelly that he was forced by it into making an effort to grope back into life.

He was able to take up his work again, and the exercise of his craft soothed him, though it gave him no escape. The conception of his market picture was dead. It was enclosed in Judaism, from which he was free. Yet he had no other conception in his mind, and he knew that any picture he might paint must spring from it. So he clung to the dead conception and made studies and drawings for its execution.

Some of these drawings he was able to sell to Tysoe, who worried him by coming to talk about Logan and was nearly always ashamed to leave the studio without buying. Mendel was saved from borrowing of his people, which had become repugnant to him now that he no longer belonged to them.

It was through Tysoe's talk that he was able to push his way through the tragedy of Logan and Oliver back to life. Tysoe insisted that the cause of it was jealousy, but Mendel knew that Logan was beyond jealousy, and, piecing the story together, he saw how Oliver had set herself to smash their friendship because it fortified in her lover what she detested, his intellect, which, because she could not satisfy it, stood between him and his passion for her. If anyone was responsible it was she, for she had tried to smash a spiritual thing and had herself been smashed. . . . And Mendel saw that had he tried to smash the relationship between Logan and Oliver he too would have been broken, for that also was a spiritual thing, though an evil. And he saw that, but for Morrison, he must have tried to smash it. His obligation to her had given him the strength to resist, to make his escape. Oliver had triumphed, evil had triumphed, and she and Logan were dead and he had to grope his way back to life, and if he could not succeed in doing that, then she and evil would have triumphed indeed, and what was left of him would have to follow the dead that had gone with Logan.

He sought the society of his father and of the old Jews, the friends of the family, and was left marvelling at their indifference to good and evil. They knew neither joy nor despair. They had yielded up their will to God, upon Whom, through fair weather and foul, their thoughts were centred. They lived in a complete stagnation which made him shudder. Their lives were like stale water, like unmoved puddles, from which every now and then their passions broke in bubbles, broke vainly, in bubbles. Nothing brought them any nearer to the God upon Whom their thoughts were centred, and only Time brought them any nearer to the earth.

And yet Mendel loved them in their simple dignity. They had a quality which he had found nowhere in the Christian world, where men and women had their thoughts centred on the good, leaving evil to triumph as it had triumphed in Oliver. . . . She had wanted good. With all the power of her insensate passion, her blind sensuality, she had wanted love, the highest good she could conceive. . . . But these old Jews were wiser: they wanted God, Whom they knew not how to attain. Yet God was ever present to them.

In Mendel, too, this desire for God became active and kindled his creative will. He plunged into his work with a frenzy, but soon recognized that he was committing the old offence and was "overseen." . . . Yet how shall a man approach his God if not through art?

"Something is lacking!" cried Mendel desperately. "Something is lacking!"

His imagination flew back to that last sublime moment of friendship with Logan, but it lacked warmth. It seemed that he could not take it back into life with him, or that until he had established contact with life its force could not be kindled. . . . Oh! for sweet, comfortable things--flowers, and rare music, a white, gleaming tablecloth, and good meats!

He thought, with envy, of Edward Tufnell and his wife going along the road on either side smiling at each other, so happily smiling. And then he thought with more satisfaction of the old Jews. They were the wiser and the more solid. They walked in the middle of the way, and good and evil went on either side and neither could attain them. . . . His thoughts swung between those two extremes like a pendulum, and out of the momentum thus created grew a force in his mind which began to find its way towards the God he was seeking. But it was only in his mind. His force, his passion, were left slumbering in the hypnotic sleep imposed on them by the tragedy.

Yet the mental impulse kept him working in a serene ecstasy. He could make the design for his picture, and simplify his figures into a form in which he knew there was some beauty, or at least that it could hold beauty and let no drop of it escape.

He could return then to his normal life, and made Golda very happy by joking with her and spending many evenings in her kitchen.

"You should take a holiday," she said. "You look tired out."

"I will," he said, "when the spring comes. I am going to be an artist, but I am afraid it will not mean carriages and horses and the King commanding his portrait to be painted."

* * * * *

He had the very great joy of beginning to understand Cézanne's delight in the intellectual craft of painting and to see why he had neglected the easier delights of handicraft and the mere pleasure of the eye. But the more he understood, the harder it became to finish his picture. He slaved at it, but there was still no beauty in it.

He would not surrender. It would have been so easy to slip back to fake a pictorial quality. He had only to go to the National Gallery to come out with his head buzzing with ideas and impressions. He had only to go into the street to have a thousand mental notes from which to give his work a human and dramatic quality.

He stuck to it and slaved away until he was forced to give in.

"You devil!" he said, as he shook his fist at the picture. "You empty jug!"

But there was some satisfaction in it, unfinished failure as it was, and he wanted Morrison to see it.

He wrote and asked her to come.

* * * * *

She and Clowes were in the country, painting, and they wired to him to come and stay with them for a week. Clowes wrote to tell him that she could put him up in the farm of which her cottage was a part.

With her letter he went racing over to see his mother.

"I'm going away," he said, "I'm going away to the country. The Christian girl has a house in the country and I am going to stay in it."

"You will have fresh air and new milk to make you well again," cried Golda, scarcely able to contain her joy at seeing him once more his happy, elated, robustious self. "You will be well again, but you should have done with that nonsense about the Christian girl. A sparrow does not mate with a robin, and a cock robin is what you are."

"Yes. I'm a robin," said Mendel, and he whistled blithely, "Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! I shall go on the halls as a whistler. Tit-a-weet! and I shall make three hundred pounds a week. Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet!"

Golda laughed at him till the tears ran, so happy was she to have him come back to her.

"It is not nonsense about the Christian girl," he said. "She is going to turn me into a Public School gentleman, and I shall bring her to see you, so that you can know for yourself that it is not nonsense."

"It is not the girl who is nonsensical, but you."

"Tit-a-weet!"

"I will bake her a Jewish bread and you shall take it to her. Yes. Bring her to me and I will thank her for bearing with you."

"Tit-a-weet! Tit-a-weet!"

"Cock robin!"

* * * * *

His luggage consisted of a brown-paper parcel, a paint-box and two canvases.

Morrison met him at the station. She was glowing with health and good spirits and began to tease him at once about his luggage, of which she insisted on taking charge.

"It's the loveliest little cottage!" she said; "only two rooms. . . . I hope you don't mind walking along the road. There is another way through the fields, but I daren't try to find it; besides, it goes through the woods, and I don't want you to see any woods before you have been to mine. I don't believe there'll be room for you in the cottage. You'll have to sit in the garden and have your meals handed out to you, among the chickens and the pigs."

"Pigs?" said Mendel, "I want to draw pigs. Marvellous animals!"

"These are the most marvellous pigs that ever were."

So they chattered in a growing glee as they walked along the winding road up into the hills. They were unwilling to let their deep thoughts emerge until they had been caught up in the beauty of the place, the serene lines of the comfortable folding hills, the farmsteads tucked in the hollows, the rich velvet plough-lands, the blue masses of woods, the gorse-grown common, and the single sentinels the trees, and the hedges where the birds sang and twittered, Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! . . . And over the hills hung the wide sky, vast and open, with great clouds that seemed to be drawn from the edge of the earth and sent floating up and up to show how limitless was the space above the earth.

For the first time Mendel had no sting of anger at the exhilaration in the English girl, no desire to pluck her out from the surroundings of the lovely English country in which it seemed to be her desire to lose herself. She was one with the rich fields and the mighty trees and the singing birds in the hedges, and when his heart sang Tit-a-weet, he knew it for a comic Cockney note. It was he who was at fault, not she, and she was the very comfort he had come to seek.

The farmer's wife received him with a kindly pity--the poor, pale London foreigner--and told him he must have plenty of good plain country food, plenty of milk, plenty of fresh air.

"I do the cooking for Miss Clowes," she said, "and if you'll excuse my saying so, the young ladies take a deal of tempting."

Mendel thought her a wonderful woman, his room a wonderful room, the cottage a wonderful cottage, and the place the finest in the world. The air was rare and buoyant and he had never felt so free and so strong. His life in London looked to him like a bubble which he could break with a touch or with a puff of his breath. But he was reluctant to break it yet, for the time had not come.

The girls showed him their work and he praised it, and began to talk of his own picture. Clowes led him on to explain what she called the modern movement, which she could not pretend to understand.

Conversation that first evening was all between Clowes and Mendel, while Morrison sat silent, curled up on the floor by the fire, gazing into it, sometimes listening, sometimes dreaming, sometimes shaking with a happy dread as she thought how near she was to her heart's desire. It had been for so long her central thought that she would take him down to the country and get him away from the terrible pressure of London upon his spirit, so that she could see released in him, perhaps slowly, perhaps painfully, what she loved--the vivid, clear vitality. And now she had won. She had him sitting there within reach, with good, faithful Clowes, and already she could feel the new glow of health in him. Almost she could detect a new tone in his lovely rich voice. . . . Sometimes, as she gazed into the fire, her eyes were clouded with tears. It seemed so incredible that she could have won against the innumerable enemies, invisible and intangible, against whom action had been impossible, even if she had known what to do.

She had been happy enough with Clowes in this place, but now she could not help a wickedly ungrateful desire that Clowes should be spirited away.

* * * * *

Clowes absented herself in the day-time, but Mendel had very little energy, and for the most part of the day sat by the fire brooding over the bubble of his London life, which he knew he must break with a touch. Often Morrison sat with him, and neither spoke a word for hours together.

On the fifth day, when the sun shone so that it was wicked to be indoors, Morrison suggested lunch in the woods. Clowes excused herself, but Mendel agreed to go with her, and the farmer's wife packed them a basket of food. They set out gaily, over the common, up the rolling field green with winter corn, down through the jolly farm-yard full of gobbling turkeys and strutting guinea-fowl, under the wild cherry-trees to the woods, where in a clearing they made a fire, and Morrison, declaring that she was a gipsy, sang the only song she could remember, "God Save the King," and told his fortune by his hand. He was to meet a dark woman who would make a great change in his life, and money would come his way, but he must beware of the Knave of Clubs.

Entering into her mood, he insisted that they must act a Wild West cinema drama, and he rescued her from Indians and a Dago ravisher, and in the end claimed her hand from a grateful father; and so hilarious did they become that the cinema drama turned into an opera, and he was Caruso to her Melba. In the end they laughed until they were exhausted, and decided that it was time for lunch.

* * * * *

After they had eaten they were silent for a long time, and at last, rather to her surprise, she found herself beginning to explain to him that this was love, this the heaven at which she had been aiming, the full song whereof they had played the first few notes as boy and girl at the picnic and again in the dewy grass on the Heath. And she told him quite simply that she had loved him always, from the time when they had met on the stairs at the Detmold, and even before that, though she could not remember clearly. And she told him that love dwelt in the woods and the hedgerows, in the sweet air and the song of the birds, not only in the springtime but in the harsh winter weather and in the summer heat of the sun. . . .

"Oh, Mendel," she said, "I have been wanting you to know, but it seemed that you would never know while you looked for love in the heat and the dust of London."

And he as simply believed her. It was lovely there in the woods, among the tall grey-green pillars of the trees, with the pale yellow sunlight falling on the emerald of the moss and the russet of the dead bracken, and the brilliant enamel of the blackberry leaves. He was overcome with his exquisite delight, and she, to comfort him, held him in her arms, her weary shaggy faun, so bitterly conscious of his own ugliness. She soothed him and caressed him, and won him over to her own serene joy, which passed from her to him in wave upon wave of flooding warmth, melting the last coldness in his soul, healing the last wounds upon his spirit.

He roused himself, flung up his head, and began to whistle:--

"Tit-a-weet!"

And he looked so comical that she laughed.

"That isn't anything like a bird," she said.

"It is. It is very like cock robin."

To their mutual amazement it seemed entirely unnecessary to discuss the future or the past, and the present demanded only happy silence. Here in the enchantment of the woods was love, and it was enough.

While they stayed in the woods they hardly talked at all, but as they walked home he became solemn and said, as though it pained and puzzled him:--

"We are no longer young."

"We shall never be anything else," she protested, for she was pained by the change in his mood.

"Youth passes," he said.

And her exhilaration died in her, for she knew she had touched his obstinacy. He saw her droop and was sorry, and began to whistle and to laugh, but she could not be revived. She had thought to have secured him, to have made him safe with the charm of love for ever, but she was sure now that the hardest of all was yet to come.

In the evening, as they sat by the fire in the little white room, Mendel and Clowes talking and Morrison curled up on the floor gazing into the coals, he suddenly ceased to hear Clowes' voice, and saw very clearly the bubble of his life in London before him--Mr. Kuit, Issy, Hetty Finch, Mitchell, Logan and Oliver--Logan and Oliver leaving the Merlin's Cave and going out into the street and walking home to the Pot-au-Feu, up the narrow, dark stairs to Hetty Finch's room. . . . He put out his hand to touch the bubble and it broke, and with a shuddering, gasping cry he heard Clowes saying:--

"On the whole I don't think all this modern stuff can be good for anything but decoration."

And he began to think of his own picture, which was full of life. Wherever he picked up the design he could follow it all round the picture, and through and through it, beyond it into the mystery of art, and out of it back into life. It was poised, a wonderful, lovely created thing, with a complete, unaccountable, serene life of its own. The harsh, gloomy background of London fell away, and in its place shone green hills and a clear blue sky, fleecy with mauve-grey clouds. . . .

Following the clouds, he came easily back to life again, to the two girls sitting in this wonderful snug cottage, and he was overwhelmed by a feeling that he was sharing their comfortable happiness on false pretences. It was not to him the perfectly satisfying wonder they so obviously wished it to be for him, and at last he could not contain himself, and burst out:--

"You must not expect me to be happy. I cannot be happy. I will swing up to it as high as ever you like, but I must swing back again. Happiness is not life, love is not life, any more than misery is life. If I stay in happiness I die as surely as if I stay in misery. I must be like a pendulum. I must swing to and fro or the clock will stop. . . . I can't make it clear to you, but it is so. What matters is that the clock should go. Jews understand, but they forget that they are the pendulum and they do not live at all. Jews are wonderful people. They know that what matters is the impulse of the soul. It matters so much to them that they have forgotten everything else. And those who are not Jews think of everything else and forget the impulse of the soul. But I know that when I swing from happiness to unhappiness, from good to bad, from light to dark, then a force comes into my soul and it can move up to art, and beyond art, into that place where it can be free. . . . Don't, please, misunderstand me." He addressed himself frankly to Morrison, who dropped her head a little lower. "In love I can no more be free than I can in misery. I will swing as high on one side as I will on the other, and then I can be free."

Morrison folded her hands in her lap and her hair fell over her face. Mendel got up, said good-night, and went over to the farm.

"Well," said Clowes uneasily, "I really think he must be a genius."

Morrison made no reply, and presently Clowes went upstairs to bed, leaving her with her hair drooping over her face, staring into the glowing fire.

"I must learn my lesson," said Morrison to herself. "I must learn my lesson."

She was so little trained for misery, but this was misery enough. But she sat and brooded over it, and summoned up all her strength for the supreme effort of her will, not to be broken and cast down in the swing back from love. She had taught him to surrender himself to love; she must learn to surrender herself to misery, to swing as high on one side as on the other.

For many, many hours she wrestled with herself and broke down fear after fear, weakness after weakness, until she was utterly exposed to the enemies of love and knew that she could be with Mendel through everything. She took out from her paint-box his letter describing the scene in the hospital, which had shocked and horrified her before, and now read and re-read it until she had lived through all the story and could understand both Logan and Oliver.

At last, when she could endure no more, relief came, a new vision of love, no longer lost in the woods or in any earthly beauty, but a clear light illuminating men and women and the earth upon which they dwell. And in her soul, too, the upward impulse began to thrill, and with a sob of thankfulness she lay on her bed fully clothed and went to sleep.

* * * * *

She was not at all disturbed when Mendel said in the morning that he must go back to London to work on his picture. It was right. Their happiness was too tremulous. There was plenty of time for them to take up their ordinary jolly human lives, plenty of time now that they were no longer young.

She walked with him to the station, and on the way they laughed and sang, and he whistled and talked breathlessly about his picture.

"My mother says a cock robin can never mate with a sparrow," he said. "I promised I would take you to see her."

"I should love to come, for I love your mother."

"I would like you to see the Jews as they are," he said, "so simply serving God that their souls have gone to sleep."

As they stood on the platform she said:--

"Mendel, I did . . . begin to understand last night, and it has made you and your work more important than anything else in my life."

He gripped her fiercely by the arm.

"Come to London, now," he said.

"Not now."

"Soon."

"Very soon."

He got into the train, and as it carried him off she could not bear him to go, and, forgetting all the other people, she ran as hard as she could along the platform, and stood at its extremity until the train disappeared round the corner of the embankment, and even then she called after him:--

"Mendel! Mendel!"

_Transcriber's Note_

This transcription is based on the British edition published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1916. Scans of this edition are available through the Hathi Trust Digital Library at:

http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100597585

As an additional resource, the American edition published by George H. Doran in 1916 was also used. Scans of this edition are posted by the Internet Archive at:

https://archive.org/details/mendelstoryofyou00canniala

The right margins of several page scans of the Unwin edition available through the Hathi Trust were cut off, so the Doran edition was used to correct for the missing text. No attempt was made to list all these corrections.

The following changes to the text were noted:

-- Cover: The cover image is from the Doran edition.

-- p. 20: what you want, that you shall have. . .--Added an additional period at the end of the sentence in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 20: "These children have only to go out into London and all will be given to them,"--Changed the comma to a period.