BOOK TWO

BOHEMIA

I

THE POT-AU-FEU

AT the exhibition, the portrait of Golda created no small stir. The critics, who, since Whistler, had been chary of denouncing new-comers, had swung to the opposite extravagance and were excessively eager to discover new masters. The youth of this Kühler made him fair game, for it supplied them with a proviso. They could hail his talent as that of a prodigy without committing themselves.

"The portrait of the artist's mother," wrote one of them, "has all the essentials of great art, as the early compositions of Mozart had all the essentials of great music. Here is real achievement, a work of art instinct with racial feeling, and therefore of true originality. No trace here of Parisian experiments. This picture is in the direct line from Holbein and Dürer."

Mendel took this to mean that he was as good as Holbein and Dürer, and accepted it not as praise but as a statement of fact. The picture was bought by a well-known connoisseur, who wrote that he was proud to have such a picture in his collection.

"Now," thought the proud painter, "my career has really begun."

For once in a way he regarded his success with his father's eyes and much as Moscowitsch would have regarded the successful coup in business for which he was always vainly striving. The hectic gambling spirit introduced by Hetty Finch had disappeared, and though he still devoted his leisure to Mitchell, their adventurousness was tempered by the tantalization of the "top-knots," Morrison and Clowes. To counteract the disturbing effect of their coolness, Mendel became very Jewish and hugged his success, gloating over it rather like a cat over a stolen piece of fish.

Morrison's indifference to the buzz about his name was especially maddening, because he wished to prove to her that in painting dwelt a joy beside which her trumpery little ecstasy in woods and flowers was nothing, nothing at all. He wished to convince himself that he had not been really disturbed by her first visit to his studio. Only the shock of novelty he had felt, and by his success, by his triumphant work, he had obliterated it. . . . She was nothing, he told himself, only a raw girl, smooth and polished by her easy life, good for nothing except to be made love to by such as Mitchell.

Love? They called it love when a young man clasped a maiden's hand, or when they kissed and rode together on the tops of buses! These Christians were rather disgusting with all their talk of love. He had heard more talk of it in three years of contact with them than in all his life before, and Weldon and others had talked of love in connection with Hetty Finch.

Disgusting!

And now here was Mitchell babbling of his love for Morrison. When Mendel wanted to talk of pictures and art and the old painters who had worked simply without reference to success, Mitchell kept dragging him back to Morrison, her simplicity, her extraordinary childlike innocence, her love of beauty, her generous trustfulness, her queer sudden impulses.

"What has such a girl as that to do with art or with artists?" said Mendel furiously. "An artist wants women as he wants his food, when he has time for them."

"Gawd!" says Mitchell, trotting along by his side; "you don't know what you are talking about. I tell you I never believed all that trash about a young man being redeemed by a virtuous girl until now."

"It's nonsense!" shouted Mendel; "nonsense, I tell you. It must be nonsense, because it didn't matter to you whether it was Clowes or Morrison, and for all I know, it may be both."

"Clowes is a jolly nice girl too," replied Mitchell, "but she's more ordinary. I never met anyone like Morrison before. I can't make her out, but she does make me feel that I am an absolute rotter. It is her fresh enjoyment of simple things that disturbs me and makes me see what a mess I've made of my life. Once an artist loses that, he is finished."

They had been reading Tolstoi on "What is Art?" and their young conceit had been put out by it. Must their extraordinary powers produce work accessible to the smallest intelligence? Mendel had been greatly influenced by that theory in his portrait of his mother, while Mitchell's energy had been paralysed so that he could produce nothing at all.

"Yes," Mitchell went on, "I know now what Tolstoi means. He means that love can speak direct to love, and, by Jove! it is absolutely true. Brains are only a nuisance to an artist. Look at Calthrop! He hasn't got the brains of a louse. Of course, that is why painters are such an ignorant lot. I must tell my father that when he goes for me for not reading."

"But Tolstoi liked bad artists!" grumbled Mendel. "And my mother does not like some of my best things. As for my father, he wants a painted bread to look as if he could eat it: never is he satisfied just to look at it. His love and my love are not the same and cannot speak to each other."

"You should see more of Morrison, and then you would understand," rejoined Mitchell.

Mendel felt that Mitchell was slipping away from him, and all this Christian talk of love was to him a corrosion upon his imagination and his nervous energy, blurring and distorting everything that he valued. There were many things that he hated, and yet because he hated them their interest for him was consuming. Issy's wife, for instance, and her squalling children; his father's bitter tongue; and Mitchell's odd self-importance.

He repeated:--

"Tolstoi liked bad artists."

"You can't settle a big man like Tolstoi just by repeating phrases about him."

"I can settle him by painting good pictures," retorted Mendel. "I don't paint pictures to please people."

"Then why do you paint?"

"I don't know. To be an artist. Because there is a thing called art which matters to me more than all the love and all the women and all the little girls in the world."

"Ah!" sighed Mitchell. "You'll soon think differently. I shall never do another stroke of work without thinking of Greta standing on Kew Bridge and looking up the river at the boats with their white sails."

"Will you be quiet?" cried Mendel; "will you be quiet with your little girls and white sails?"

Mitchell seemed to be slipping away from him, and he dreaded the thought of being left alone with his success, which was blowing a bulb of glass round him, so that he felt imprisoned in it, and wherever he looked could see nothing but reflections of himself, Mendel Kühler, painting his mother, and his father, and old Jews and loaves and fishes for ever and ever. While he clung to Mitchell he knew that he could not be so encased, but Mitchell demanded that he should go out with him into a world all glowing with love, with rivers of milk and honey and meadows pied with buttercups and daisies; to stand on airy bridges and gaze at innocent little girls and white sails. The contemplation of this world revolted him, and he stiffened himself against it. Better the smells and the dirt than such fantastical stuff. His gorge rose against it.

To wean Mitchell from his amorous fancies he pretended that he was tired and wanted a holiday, and together they went down to a village on the South Coast near Brighton. There it was almost as it had been in the beginning. For a fortnight they were never out of each other's company. They slept in one bed and shared each other's clothes, paints, and money. They sketched the same subjects, took tremendous walks, and in the evening they talked as though there were no London, no Paris Café, no exhibitions, no dealers, no critics, nothing but themselves and their friendship and their artistic projects. Mendel was supremely happy. Never had he known such intimacy since the days of Artie Beech.

But Mitchell was often depressed and moody. He had letters every day, and every evening he wrote at great length.

One morning he had a letter which he crumpled up dramatically and thrust into his trousers pocket.

"Gawd!" he said. "That's put the lid on it. I'm done for."

"What is it?" asked Mendel, aghast.

"I'll tell you when we get back to London. We must go back this afternoon. Eight o'clock in the Pot-au-Feu."

The Pot-au-Feu was a little restaurant in Soho which Mitchell, Weldon, and some others had endeavoured to render immortal by decorating it with panels. In a room above it lived Hetty Finch.

Mendel's thoughts flew to her, a figure of ill omen. He had not seen her for some time, and had imagined that she had so successfully got all she wanted and was so thoroughly established in her composite profession that she had no time for the younger artists. He had heard tales about her, and fancied she would succeed in hooking one of the older men for a husband.

He said:--

"Why do you want to go back to that beastly place? Here it is good. I could stay here for six months."

"Gawd!" said Mitchell dismally. "'Tis life. There's absolutely no getting away from it. Everything is swallowed up and nothing is left."

He became very solemn and added:--

"If anything happens to me, Kühler, I want you to go to Greta Morrison and tell her that through everything I never forgot my happiness with her."

"Happen!" cried Mendel. "What can happen?"

"I'll tell you to-night," replied Mitchell gloomily, "at the Pot-au-Feu."

And not another word did he say, neither during their morning's work, nor during lunch, nor in the train, nor in the taxi-cab that took them to Soho.

"You wait outside," said Mitchell mysteriously.

Mendel waited outside and paced up and down, oppressed with the idea that his friendship with Mitchell was at an end. He was left helpless and exposed, for all that had been built on the friendship had come toppling down, and with it came the extra personality he had developed for dealing with the Detmold and the polite world--the Kühler who had assiduously learned manners and phrases, vices and enthusiasms, as a part to be played at the Paris Café and in the drawing-rooms of the languid ladies who were interested in art and artists. Hetty Finch went with it, for she had been an adjunct of that personality. . . . He was glad to be rid of her, and shook her off, plucked her out of his mind like a burr that was stuck upon it.

After a quarter of an hour or so Mitchell came out more mysterious than ever, took his arm and led him into the restaurant, which was hardly bigger than an ordinary room. Full of vigour and health as he was, Mendel felt an enormous size in it, as though he must knock over the tables and thrust his elbows through the painted panels. Madame Feydeau, the proprietress, greeted him with a wide smile and said she had missed him lately. At his table was the goggle-eyed man who dined there every night with his newspaper open in front of him. Weldon and a girl with short hair were sitting in uncomfortable silence, both with the air of doing a secret thing. Near the counter, with its dishes of fruit and coffee-glasses, was Hetty Finch, rather drawn and pinched in the face and very dark under the eyes.

Mendel was filled with impatience. She had no business to be sitting there, for he had disposed of her, and she made everything seem fantastic and unreal. He shook hands with her and sat at the table. Mitchell took the chair next to Hetty and talked to her in an undertone, while her eyes turned on Mendel with a frightened, inquiring expression.

"All right," he said, as though he had understood her question. "I know when to hold my tongue."

Mitchell went on whispering, and every now and then he bowed his head and clenched his fists, as though he were racked with inexpressible emotions. He too had become fantastic. Mendel knew that he was play-acting, and with a sickening dread he went back over all he knew of Mitchell, recognizing this same play-acting in much that he had accepted as genuine. Yet he would not believe it, for Mitchell was his friend, and therefore never to be criticized.

Would neither of them speak? Food was laid before him, and he ate it without tasting it. Mitchell led Hetty away to another table and talked to her impressively there. Then he brought her back and went on with his whispering.

Coffee was laid before Mendel, and he drank it without tasting it.

At last Hetty said, in a loud voice that rang through the room:--

"No. I will take nothing from you. I ask nothing from you, not a penny."

"By God," said Mitchell, hanging his head, "I deserve it."

Hetty turned to Mendel and asked him sweetly to buy her a bottle of wine, as she needed something to pick her up.

"You are a devil," she said, "sitting there as though nothing had happened. But I always said you were a devil and no good. I always said so, but I have my friends and can be independent."

"Don't be a fool," said he roughly. "You'll have a short run, and you'd better find something to fall back on while you can."

"Get your hair cut!" she replied. "I know which side my bread's buttered, and the old men aren't so sharp as the young ones. You've got a fool's tongue in your clever head, Kühler, and a fool's tongue makes enemies."

"Shut up!" he said. "And you leave Mitchell alone. He hasn't done you any harm."

"Ho! Hasn't he?" she cried.

Mitchell groaned, and, giving a withering glance at the two of them, Hetty gathered up her vanity-bag and gloves and walked out of the restaurant.

"She's a slut!" said Mendel. "She always was a slut and always will be."

"Gawd!" cried Mitchell. "It was you let her loose on the town, and I shall never hold up my head again. I shall never be able to face my people. I shall just let myself be swallowed up in London. . . . But I shan't trouble any of my friends. When I'm a pimp I shan't mind if you look the other way. After all, it isn't so far to fall. There's not much difference between the ordinary artist and a pimp."

"What has she done to you?" cried Mendel furiously. "Why do you let yourself be put down by a drab like that?"

"She's not a drab," said Mitchell, in a curious thin of protest. "She is the mother of my child."

Mendel brought his fist down on the table with a thump, so that the cups jumped from their saucers.

"She is what?"

"The mother of my child," said Mitchell, burying his face in his hands. "I have offered to marry her, to make an honest woman of her, but she refuses, and she will take nothing from me. Gawd! How can I ever face Morrison again? How can I face my mother?"

"Rubbish! Rubbish! Rubbish!" cried Mendel. "Why you? Why not Weldon--why not Calthrop?" He saw the goggle-eyed man listening eagerly and lowered his voice. "A drab like that deserves all she gets. She takes her risks, and I'll say this for her, that she does not complain. She's clever enough to know how to deal with it. . . ."

He wanted to say a great deal more, but realized that Mitchell, intent upon his own emotions, was not listening to him. Also, through the fantastic atmosphere, he began to be aware of a reality powerful and horrible. Against it Hetty seemed to be of no account, and Mitchell's excitement was palpably false.

This reality had been called into being by no one's will, and therefore it was horrible.

"I shall have to disappear," said Mitchell.

Mendel did not hear him speak. His own will was aroused by the devastating reality. Because it was physical he exulted in it, and his will struggled to master it. He could not endure his friend's helplessness and he wanted above all to help him, to make him see that this thing was at least powerful; evil and ugly, perhaps, but much too vital to be subdued or conquered by fantasy and theatrical emotions. He found Mitchell bewildering. Sentimentality always baffled him, for it seemed to him so superficial as to be not worth bothering about and so complicated as to defy unravelling. He knew that Mitchell was horrified and afraid, and that it was natural enough, but fear was not a thing to be encouraged.

He said:--

"Hetty knows perfectly well that she can manage it better without you."

"I know," replied Mitchell. "That's what makes me feel such an awful worm."

Mendel lost all patience. If a man was going to take pleasure in feeling a worm, there was nothing to be done with him. He called the waiter, paid the bill, and stumped out of the Pot-au-Feu leaving Mitchell staring blankly at the goggle-eyed man.

* * * * *

A few days later he met Edgar Froitzheim leaving the National Gallery as he entered it.

"Oh! Kühler," said Froitzheim. "The very man I wanted to see. I am very proud about the picture--very proud. But I wanted to see you about young Mitchell. He is a friend of yours, isn't he? He is behaving very badly to a young model. Such a pretty girl. Hetty Finch. You know her? She is in trouble through him, and he refuses to do anything for her. I'm told he has Nietzschean ideas. I sent for the girl. It is a very sad story and I have raised a subscription for her: fifty pounds to see her through. . . . Do try and bring Mitchell to reason."

"I'll do what I can," replied Mendel, and he walked on to pay his daily homage to Van Eyck and Chardin, who were his heroes at the time.

That evening at the Paris Café he heard of another subscription having been raised for Hetty, and Calthrop growled and grumbled and said he had given her twenty pounds.

Mendel reckoned it up and he found that she was being paid for her delinquency more than he could hope to receive for many months of painful work.

As he finished his calculation he was amazed to see Mitchell come in with Morrison, whom he had declared he could never face again, and when Mendel rose to go over and join them she gave him only a curt little nod which told him plainly that he was not wanted.

II

LOGAN

ONCE again Mendel decided that Mitchell, and with him London life, had fallen away from him. The Paris Café could never be the same again, and he plunged into despair, and thought seriously of accepting a Jewish girl with four hundred pounds whom a match-maker offered to him. Four hundred pounds was not to be sneezed at. It would keep him going for some years, so that he need not think of selling his pictures, which he always hated to part with. And the girl was just bearable.

The figure delighted his father and mother, for it showed them the high opinion of their wonder-son held among their own people.

It was terrible to him to find that he had very little pleasure in his work, which very often gave him excruciating pain. He took it to mean that he was coming to an end of his talent. Night after night he sat on his bed feeling that he must make an end of his life, but always there was some piece of painting that he must do in the morning, painful though it might be.

He had letters from Mitchell, but did not answer them, and at last "the schoolboy," as Golda called him, turned up, gay and smiling and rather elated.

"I've discovered a great man," he said with the awkward, jerky gesture he used in his more eloquent moments. "Absolutely a great man. Reminds me of Napoleon. Wonderful head, wonderful! His name is Logan--James Logan--and he wants to know you. He is a painter, and absolutely independent. He comes from the North--Liverpool or one of those places. I haven't seen his work, but I met him at the Pot-au-Feu the other night. He asked me if I was not a friend of yours, as he thought he had seen me with you. He said: 'Kühler is the only painter of genius we have.' I spent the evening with him. I never heard such talk. It made the old Detmold seem like a girls' school. . . . Hallo! Still-life again? What a rum old stick you are for never going outside your four walls!"

"What I paint is inside me, not outside," said Mendel, trembling with rage at Mitchell looking at his work before he had offered to show it.

"Will you come and see Logan?"

"No. I am sick of painters. I want to know decent people."

"But I promised I would bring you, and he admires your work. He is poor too, as poor as you are."

"Can't he sell?"

"It isn't that so much as that he doesn't try. He says he had almost despaired of English painting until he saw your work."

"How old is he?"

"A good deal older than us. Twenty-six, I should think."

"Why don't you just stick to me?" asked Mendel. "What more do you want? Why must you always go off on a new track? First it's Hetty Finch, then it's Morrison, and now it's this new man. We were happy enough by ourselves. Why do you want anything more? I don't."

"You're used to living on dry bread. I'm not. I want butter with mine, and jam, if I can get it."

"Then get it and don't bother me to go chasing after it. I want to work."

"Oh, rot! All that stuff about artists starving in garrets is out of date. It only happened because they couldn't find patrons, but nowadays there are dealers and buyers. . . . Just look at the money you are making."

"Then why is this Logan poor?"

"He isn't known yet. He doesn't know the artists because he never went to a London school. He was doing quite well in the North, but threw it all up because he couldn't stand living in such a filthy town. He had a teaching job somewhere in Hammersmith, but he threw that up because he wanted his time to himself."

"That sounds as if painting means something to him."

"Do come and see him."

"Oh! very well."

"I'll send him a wire and we'll go to-night."

They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and later made the expedition to Hammersmith, where they came to a block of studios surrounded by a scrubby garden. These studios were large and well-kept and did not tally with the description of Logan's poverty. Still less did the inside give any sign of it. There was a huge red-brick fireplace, surmounted by old brass and blue china, with great arm-chairs on either side of it: there were Persian rugs on the floor; two little windows were filled in with good stained glass, which Mendel knew to be costly; there were two or three large easels; and the walls were hung with tapestry. The whole effect was deliberately and preciously rich.

Logan, who had admitted them to this vast apartment, rushed back at once to a very large easel on which he had a very small canvas, and fell to work on it with a furious energy, darting to and fro and stamping his right foot rather like the big trumpet man in a German band. He was a medium-sized, plumpish man, with a big, strongly featured face, big chin, and compressed lips, and long black hair brushed back from a round, well-shaped brow. He frowned and scowled at his work. A woman came out of a door and crossed the studio behind him. He hurled his palette into the air so that it sailed up and fell with a crash among the brass pots, and barked:--

"How can I work with these constant interruptions? Damn it all, an artist must have peace!"

He flung his arms behind his back and paced moodily to and fro, with his head down and his lips pursed up _à la_ Beethoven. He extended the sphere of his pacing gradually so that he came nearer and nearer to Mendel, yet without noticing him. Mendel was tremendously excited and impressed with the man's air of mystery and force. It was like Calthrop, but without his awkwardness. Mitchell in comparison looked puny and absurdly young.

Nearer and nearer came Logan, and at last he stopped and fixed Mendel with a baleful stare, and swung his head up and down three times.

"So you are Kühler?" he said.

Mendel opened his lips, but to his astonishment no sound came out of them. So desperately anxious was he not to cut a poor figure before this remarkable man, and not to seem, like Mitchell, pathetically young.

"Good!" said Logan. "Shake hands." And he crushed Mendel's thin fingers together. "What I like about you," he went on, "is your sense of form. Design is all very well in its way, but quite worthless without form."

Mendel, whose work was still three parts instinctive, could not attach any precise meaning to these expressions, but he was well up in the jargon of his craft and could make a good show.

"Art," said Logan, "is an exacting mistress. Shall we go and have a drink?"

He put on his hat and led the two marvelling youngsters to a public-house, where he became a different man altogether. The compression of his lips relaxed, his eyes twinkled and his face shone with good humour, and he made them and the barmaid and the two or three men who were shyly taking their beer roar with laughter. He had an extraordinary gift of mimicry, and told story after story, many of them against himself, most of them without point, but in the telling exceedingly comic. Mendel sat up and bristled. It was to him half shocking, half enviable, that a man, and an artist, should be able to laugh at himself.

"If you'll give me free drinks for a month," said Logan to the elderly barmaid, "I'll paint your portrait. Are you married? . . . No? I'll paint you such a beautiful portrait that it will get you a husband inside a week."

"I'm not on the marrying lay," said the barmaid.

"Terrible thing, this revolt against marriage," replied Logan, "and bad luck on us artists. I'm always getting babies left on my doorstep."

"What do you do with them?" said Mendel, believing him, and astonished when the others roared with laughter.

"I keep the pretty ones and sell them to childless mothers. Ah! Many's the time I've gone through the snow, like the heroine in a melodrama taking her child to the workhouse."

"Oh! go on," tittered the barmaid.

"Certainly," said Logan. "Come along."

As they left the public-house he took Mendel's arm and said:--

"You have to talk to people in their own language, you know."

"Yes," replied Mendel, though this was precisely what he knew least of all.

"Why don't you go on the stage?" asked Mitchell.

"I have thought of it. I think I might do well on the halls. There's a life for you! On at eight in Bethnal Green:--

My old woman's got a wart on her nose; How she got it I will now disclose.

Off again in a motor-car to the Oxford:--

My old woman's got a wart on her nose.

Off again to Hammersmith or Kensal Rise:--

My old woman's got a wart on her nose.

My God! What a life! But I love the halls. They are all that is left of old England!"

His parody of the low comedian was so apt and his voice had such a delicious roll that Mendel could not help laughing, and he began to feel very happy with the man.

Logan swung back to his serious mood and gripped Mendel's arm tighter as he said:--

"You have a big future before you. Only stick to it. Don't listen to the fools who want you to paint the same picture over and over again with a different subject. There's more stuff in that one little picture of yours than in all the rest of the exhibition put together."

"Do you think so?" said Mendel, fluttering with excitement.

"I was amazed when I heard you had been to the Detmold with its Calthrop and all the little Calthrops."

Both the youngsters were silent on that. They had often abused the Detmold, but with a profound respect in their hearts, and both had done their full share of imitating Calthrop.

When they reached the studio Mitchell suggested going, but Logan would not hear of it. He dragged them in and produced whisky and soda, and kept them talking far into the small hours. His bouncing energy kept Mendel awake and alert, but Mitchell was soon exhausted and fell asleep.

"Shall we put him out of the way?" said Logan suddenly. "No one would know, and the river is handy. He is too clean, too soft, and there are too many like him. They are in the way of real men like you and me."

Mendel was appalled to find that he could not defend his friend. All the discontents of his waning friendship came rushing up in him and he began to babble violently.

"He is a liar and a coward, and he will never be an artist because he is too weak. He is not true. He is not good. I have trusted him with my secrets and he tells. He is always ashamed of me because of my clothes and because I have not been to Public School, and he is jealous because when we meet women they like me. He is soft and deceitful with them, but I am honest, and they like that. I wanted him to be my friend, but it is impossible."

"He is an Englishman," said Logan sepulchrally, with the air of a Grand Inquisitor.

"Aren't you an Englishman?"

"No, Scotch and French. These Englishmen have no passions, unless they are mad like Blake. . . . No, no. We'll drop Mitchell overboard. We'll make him walk the plank, and fishes in the caverns of the sea shall eat his eyes."

Logan was beginning to assume enormous proportions in Mendel's eyes. It seemed that there was nothing the tremendous fellow did not know. He began to talk of genius and the stirring of the creative impulse, and he gave so powerful an account of Blake that Mendel began to see visions of heaven and hell. Here was something which he could acknowledge as larger than himself without self-humiliation, and, indeed, the larger it loomed the more swiftly did he himself seem to grow. It was such a sensation as he had not known since the days before his rapture with Sara. All that had intervened fell away. That purity of passion returned to him and, choosing Logan for its object, rushed upon him and endowed him with its own power and beauty. Logan talking of Blake was to Mendel's innocence as rare as Blake, and he adored him.

"I had almost given up art," said Logan; "I had almost given it up as hopeless. How can there be art in a despiritualized country like this, that lets all its traditions rot away? I was just on the point of tossing up whether I should go on the stage or take to spouting at the street corners; for when a country is in such a condition that its artists are stifled, then it is ripe for revolution. I am instinctive, you know, like Napoleon. I feel that we are on the threshold of something big, and that I am to have my share in it. I used to think it would happen in art, but I despaired of that. It seemed to me that art in this country could go doddering on for generations, and then I thought it needed a political upheaval to push it into its grave. But when I saw your work, I said to myself: Here is the real thing, alive, personal, profound, skilled. I began to hope again. And now that I have met you I feel more hopeful still, and, let me tell you, like most painters, I don't find it easy to like another man's work."

Mendel was fired. Trembling in every limb, he said:--

"It has been the dream of my life to find a friend who would work with me, think with me, go with me, share with me, not quarrelling with me because I am not this, that, and the other, but accepting me as I am--a man who has no country, no home, no love but art."

"That," said Logan, with a portentous scowl and a downward jab of his thumb, "is what I have been looking for--some one, like yourself, who was absolutely sincere, absolutely single-minded and resolute. The spirit of art has brought us together. We will serve it together."

They shook hands like young men on the stage, and Logan fetched a deep sigh of relief.

Mitchell woke up, saying:--

"Gawd! I've been asleep. Have you two been talking? Gawd! It's two o'clock."

"I'll walk home with you," said Logan. "We can keep to the river nearly the whole way by going from side to side."

So they walked while the tide came up, sucking and lapping, while the red dragons' eyes of the barges came swinging up on it, moving up and down in a slow, irregular rhythm. It was very cold and the sky was thickly powdered with stars, whose pin-prick lights were reflected in the smooth water.

Upon the dome of the young artist's vision that had before been black with infinite space, stars shone with a tender light. He was in ecstasy, and seemed to be skimming above the ground, hardly touching it with his feet. This long walk was like an exquisite dance, while Logan's rollings were like a pipe. . . . Often he sank into a dream that he was upon a grassy hill in a mountainy place, he and his friend, who played upon a pipe so mournfully yet gaily while he danced, and from the trees fell silvery dewdrops and the songs of birds, which turned into pennies as they reached the ground and rolled away down the hill.

Both he and Logan were relieved when Mitchell, who had interrupted them with inappropriate remarks, turned aside at Vauxhall and vanished into London.

"So much for Mitchell," said Logan. "You and I need sterner stuff. You and I are sprung from those among whom life is lived bravely and bitterly, and we have no use for its parasites. You and I will only emerge from the bitterness on condition that we can make of life a spiritual thing, for we are of those who seek authority. Life has none to offer us now, for all the forms of life are broken. Neither above us nor below is there authority, neither in heaven nor in hell. We must seek authority within ourselves, in the marriage of heaven and hell, in the consummation of good and evil, the two poles of our nature. It is for us, the artists, to bring them together, to liberate good and evil in ourselves, that they may rush to the consummation. We are the priests and the prophets, and we must in no wise be false to our vision."

Mendel could not fit all this in with his mood and his delicious dreams, and when it brought him back to his sober senses, he could not see what it had to do with painting. However, Logan put things right by saying:--

"You are a poet. You are like Heine. I can see you with your little Josepha the pale, the executioner's daughter. God rot my soul! It is years since I had such inspiration as you have given me. I think there must be Jewish blood in me, for I can certainly understand you through and through, and you have waked something in me that has always been asleep. Oh! we shall paint bonny pictures--bonny, bonny pictures."

"You must come to see me every day," said Mendel, "and every night we will go out together, and I must introduce you to my mother, for she too has good words."

Logan smacked his lips as they entered the grimy streets near Spitalfields.

"Pah!" he said; "that's life, that is, good dirty life. I was littered in a farm-yard myself and I like a good smell. . . . Can you put me up to-night? I don't mind sleeping on the floor."

"You can have my bed," said Mendel, "and I will sleep downstairs on my brother's sofa. Please--please. Do sleep in my bed."

Logan accepted the offer and asked Mendel to stay with him while he undressed. He was unpleasantly fat, but strong and well-built.

He stayed for a long time in front of the mirror.

"See that bulge on the side of my head?" he said as he turned.

Mendel looked, and sure enough his head had a curious bulge on its right side.

"I had rickets when I was young," said Logan, "and my skull must have got pushed over. I expect that's what makes me what I am--lop-sided. I need you to balance me."

He got into bed, and Mendel, reluctant to leave him, sat at his feet and devoured him with his eyes.

"Surely, surely, now," he thought, "all is perfect now. No more disturbances, no more Mitchells, no more Hettys, and I shall do only what I really wish to do."

He stole out into his studio, which was faintly lit from the street below, and it was as though it were filled with some vast spiritual presence, and he imagined how he would work, urged on by this new energy that came welling up through all that he could see, all that he could know, all that he could remember.

III

LOGAN SETS TO WORK

IN the morning he was awakened by his sister-in-law, Rosa, shaking him and saying:--

"Mendel! Mendel! What are you doing on the sofa? Wake up! Wake up! There is some one in your studio."

The house was ringing with Logan's voice chanting the _Magnificat._ Mendel ran upstairs and found him in bed with a box of cigarettes and the New Testament, that fatal book, on his knees.

"Hello!" he said. "I hope I didn't wake you up. I have been awake for a couple of hours looking at your work. I hope you don't mind. There's a still-life there that's a gem, as good as Chardin, and even better, for there's always something sentimental about Chardin--always the suggestion of the old folks at home, the false dramatic touch, the idea of the hard-working French peasant coming in presently to eat the bread and drink the wine. I think it's time you were written up in the papers. It's absurd for a man like you to have to wait for success. There's no artistic public in England, so you can't be successful in your own way. The British public must have its touch of melodrama. To accept a man's work it must first have him shrouded in legend. He must be a myth. His work must seem to come from some supernatural source."

"I'll just run over and tell my mother you are here," said Mendel. "I always have breakfast there, and then go for a walk while the studio is dusted."

"Right you are! I'll be up in half a jiffy. Can I have a bath?"

"No. There's no bath."

"Very well; I can do without for once."

Mendel ran round to Golda and told her of the wonderful man who was in his studio, and he described the adventure of the previous evening. Golda looked scared and said:--

"What next? What next? Good people sleep in their own beds."

"But this man is an artist and he talks like a book."

"Talk is easy," said Golda. "But it takes years to make a friend."

However, when Logan was brought to her she was polite to him and rather shy. He told her that fame was coming to her son faster than the wind.

"Too fast," said she.

"It can never come too fast," replied Logan. "The thirst for fame is a curse to an artist. Let it be satisfied and he is free for his work. I know, for I was very famous in my own town. I sickened of it and ran away. . . . I must congratulate you on letting your son follow his bent. I had to quarrel with my own people to get my way. I haven't seen them since I was fourteen."

"Not your mother?" said Golda, greatly upset.

Logan saw that he had made an awkward impression and hastened to put it right by saying lugubriously:--

"My mother is dead. She forgave me."

He allowed that to sink in and was silent for a minute or two. Then he chattered on gaily and asked Golda to come and see him, and bragged about his studio and his work and his friends, and of a commission he had to decorate a large house in a West End square. He talked so fast that Golda understood very little of what he said, but she never took her eyes off him, and when he said good-bye, Mendel noticed that she did not bob to him as she did to Mitchell and Morrison and his other polite friends. He took that to mean that she accepted Logan as a person above these formalities.

For an hour they walked through the streets and squares of the East End, Mendel proud to display the vivid scenes he intended later on to make into pictures.

When they returned to the studio Logan insisted on seeing all the pictures and drawings again.

"Are you in touch with any dealer?" he asked.

"Cluny has a few pictures and a dozen drawings. He never does anything with them."

"Hum!" said Logan. "Dealers are mysterious people. They can only sell things that sell themselves. By the way, I am giving up my studio in Hammersmith. It is too far away. I shall come nearer in. Hammersmith was all very well while I needed isolation, but that is all over now."

"Where shall you go to?"

"Bloomsbury, I think. I like to be near the British Museum. Do you go to the British Museum? I must show you round. It is no good going there unless you know what to look for. By the way, I came out without any money last night. Can you lend me five pounds?"

Mendel wrote a cheque and handed it to him shamefacedly.

"I want to pay a bill on my way home," said Logan. "I hate being in debt, especially for colours."

"I get my colours from Cluny," said Mendel, "and he sets them against anything he may sell."

The irruption of money had depressed him, and he began to realize that he was very tired. The springs of Rosa's sofa had bored into him and prevented his getting any real sleep.

He was not sorry when Logan went, after making him promise to meet him at the Pot-au-Feu for dinner.

* * * * *

He had a model coming at eleven, but when she arrived he sent her away. He was sore and dissatisfied. The studio seemed dark and dismal, and he could not get enough light on to his work. He took it right up to the window, but still there was not enough light, and his picture looked dull and dingy. His nerves throbbed and he was troubled in spirit, for now his old dreams of painting quietly among his own people while fame gathered about his name had suddenly become childish and pathetic. He was ignorant, futile, conceited, a pigmy by the side of the gigantic Logan, who would not wait upon the world, but would compel its attention and shape it to his will. What had he said artists were? Priests and prophets? . . . How could a man prophesy with a painting of a fish?

Downstairs he heard Issy come in for his dinner, and there was the usual snarling row because Rosa cooked so vilely. Mendel compared Issy's life and his own: Issy working day in, day out, earning just enough to keep himself alive. Why did he go on with it? Why did he keep himself alive? Why did he not clear out, like Harry? There was no pleasure in his life, neither the time nor the money for it. . . . A wretched business.

But was it less wretched than this business of painting? There was more money in painting, and that was all anybody seemed to think of. People wanted the same picture over and over again, and if he consented to please them, his life would be just as poor a thing as Issy's, except that he would have pleasure, and, through his friends, an occasional taste of luxury. At best he could be polite and gentlemanly, like Mitchell, bringing no more to art and getting no more out of it than a boyish excitement, as though art were a game and could give no more than a sensation of cleanliness, like a hot bath.

No, it would not do. It would not do.

It was a lie, too, to say that the Jews only cared about money. When they were overfed, like Maurice Birnbaum, they were like all the other overfed people, but when they were simple and normal they were better than the others, because they had always a sense of mystery and did not waste themselves in foolish laughter.

That was where Logan was true. He could laugh, because all the Christians laugh, but when it came to solemn things he could talk about them as though he were not half ashamed. Mitchell, for instance, always shied away from the truth. Why was he afraid of it? The truth, good or bad, was always somehow beautiful, invigorating, and releasing. All the pleasant things that Mitchell cared about Mendel found stifling. Nothing, he knew, could make life altogether pleasant, and all the falsehoods which were used in that attempt were contemptible. They strangled impulse and frankness, and without these how could there be art?

In his unhappy dreams Logan appeared like a figure of Blake, immense, looming prophetic, beckoning to achievement and away from the chatter and fuss of the world of artists.

Yet behind Logan there was still the figure of Mitchell, young and gay, and the idea of Mitchell led to the idea of Morrison.

There were some withered flowers on his painting-table, the last she had sent him. None had come since that evening in the Paris Café when she had nodded curtly to show him that he was not wanted.

He would not be thrust aside like that. He knew himself to be worth a thousand Mitchells. Logan had said that Mitchell was rubbish, and not even in the eyes of a slip of a girl would Mendel have Mitchell set above himself. Not for one moment was it tolerable. He would keep Morrison to her promises and make her come to have her portrait painted, and he would find out what there was in her that made him remember her so distinctly and so clearly separate her from all other girls. Somehow the thought of her cooled the intoxication in which he had been left by Logan. She offered, perhaps, another way out of his present state of congestion and dissatisfaction. Very clearly she brought back to his mind the thrilling delight with which he had worked as a boy, and that was true, truer than anything else he had ever known. . . . Ah! If he could only get back to that, with all the tricks and cunning he had learned.

He would get back to it some day, but he must fight for it; with Logan he would learn how to fight. Logan would lay his immense store of knowledge before him, and give him books to read, and teach him how to be so easy and familiar with ideas, which at present only frothed in his mind like waves thinning themselves out on the sea-shore.

He wrote an impassioned and insolent letter to Morrison commanding her presence at his studio and informing her that he was worth a thousand of her ordinary associates, and that she had hurt him, and that girls ought not to hurt men of acknowledged talent. This letter cost him a great deal of pain and time, because he was careful not to make any slip in spelling or grammar. It was more a manifesto than a letter, and he wished to do nothing to impair its dignity.

And all the time he was puzzled to know why he should care about her at all. He was prepared to throw everything--his success, the Detmold, his friends--to the winds to follow Logan, but Morrison he could not throw away.

He decided at last not to send the letter but to go himself, and he went to the Detmold just as the light was fading and he knew she would be leaving.

She had gone already, but he met Clowes, who, he knew, lived with her. He pounced on her and said:--

"You must come to tea with me."

"I'm afraid I . . ."

"You must! You must!"

She saw he was very excited and she had heard stories of his bursting into tears when he was thwarted. In some alarm she consented to go with him.

He led her to a teashop, a horrible place that smelt of dishwater and melted butter, made her sit at a table, and burst at once into a tirade:--

"You are Morrison's friend. Will you tell me why she has avoided me? She came to my studio once and she said she would come again. She sent me flowers for three weeks, but she has sent no more."

"She--she is very forgetful," said Clowes, who was longing for tea but did not dare to tell him to turn to the waitress, who was hovering behind him.

"But she nodded to me as if she had hardly met me before," said Mendel.

"She is very shy," said Clowes, framing the word "Tea" with her lips and nodding brightly to the waitress. She added kindly:--

"I don't think sending flowers means much with her. She gives flowers to heaps of people. She is a very odd girl."

"Does she give flowers to Mitchell?" he asked furiously, coming at last with great relief to the consuming thought in his mind.

"Yes," said Clowes. "She is very unhappy about Mitchell and that Hetty Finch affair."

"Has he told her then?"

"Yes."

"Why did he tell her?"

"I'm sure I don't know."

"I'll tell you," cried Mendel. "I'll tell you. To make himself interesting to her, because he is not interesting. He is nothing. And I will tell you something more. He has been telling her things about me to excuse himself. Now, hasn't he? . . . I can see by your face that he has."

Clowes could not deny it, and she found it hard to conceal her distress. She was unused to intimate affairs being dragged out into the open like this, and her modesty was shocked. She had a pretty, intelligent face, and she looked for the moment like a startled hare, the more so when she put her handkerchief up to her nose with a gesture like that of a hare brushing its whiskers.

"Very well, then," Mendel continued; "you can tell her you have seen me, and you can tell her that I shall come to explain myself. I hide nothing, for I am ashamed of nothing that I do. I have no need to excuse myself. I am not a gentleman one moment and a cad the next. And you can tell Morrison that if I see her with Mitchell again I shall knock him down."

"Do please drink your tea," said Clowes. "It is getting cold."

Mendel gulped down his tea and hastened to add:--

"I am not boasting. He is bigger than I am, but I know something about boxing. My brother was nearly a prizefighter."

Clowes began to recover from her alarm, and his immense seriousness struck her as very comic.

"Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?"

"Her hair?" cried Mendel. "Her beautiful hair?"

"Yes. She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets. All the girls are wild to do it."

"Her hair? Her beautiful hair? Why?"

"Oh! she got sick of putting it up. She is like that. She suddenly does something you don't expect."

"But she must look terrible!"

"Oh no. She looks too sweet. And if all the boys at the Detmold wear their hair long, I don't see why the girls shouldn't wear theirs short."

"My mother had her head shaved when she married," said he, "and she wore a wig."

"Why did she do that?"

"It is the custom. The woman shows that she belongs wholly to her husband and makes herself unattractive to all other men."

"What a horrible idea!"

"It is a beautiful idea. It is the idea of love independent of everything else. That is why I thought Morrison must have some reason for cutting her hair."

"When you know Greta, you will know that she doesn't wait for reasons."

"Why does she like Mitchell?"

"She likes nearly everybody."

"But she writes to him."

"Of course she does," said Clowes, rather bored with his persistence.

"But she doesn't write to me."

"You don't write to her. You can't expect her to fall at your feet."

As she said this Clowes realized his extraordinary Orientalism. She could see him holding up his finger and expecting a woman to come at his bidding, and for a moment she was repelled by him. But she was a kind-hearted creature and felt very sorry for him, for he seemed so utterly at sea and was obviously full of genuine and painful emotion.

He detected her repulsion at once and perceived the effort she made to conquer it, and was at once grateful to her, for, as a rule, when that happened, people let it swamp everything else.

She said:--

"I'll tell Greta what you have said to me, and I am sure she will be very sorry to have hurt you."

"I only want her to come and sit for her portrait. It is very important to me, because I want to try new subjects and there is some lovely drawing in her face."

"But you mustn't knock Mitchell down. He is quite a nice boy, really, only a little wild."

"He is rotten," said Mendel dogmatically.

* * * * *

He felt better, and until dinner-time he prowled about Tottenham Court Road and Soho, a region of London that he particularly loved--a vibrant, nondescript region where innumerable streams of vitality met and fused, or clashed together to make a froth and a spume. It was like himself, chaotic and rawly alive, compounded of elements that knew no tradition or had escaped from it. He felt at home in it, and elated because he was also conscious of being superior to it, yet without the dizzy sense of superiority that assailed him among his own people, while he was never shocked and humiliated, as he was sometimes in sedate and prosperous London, by being made suddenly to realize his external inferiority. He loved the shop-girls hurrying excitedly from their work to their pleasure, and he sometimes spoke to them in their own slang, sometimes went home with them. . . . They always liked him because he never wasted time over silly flirtatious jokes or pretended to be in love with them. His interest and curiosity, like theirs, were purely physical, and his passion gave them a delicious sense of danger.

* * * * *

Logan was waiting for him at the Pot-au-Feu. There was no one else in the restaurant but the goggle-eyed man in his corner. Logan was sitting Napoleonically with his arms on the table and his chin sunk on his chest, with his lips compressed.

He nodded, but did not get up.

"Sorry if I'm late," said Mendel. "I went for a walk. I couldn't work to-day. My sister-in-law's sofa--I feel as if I had been beaten all over."

"That's the walk home," said Logan. "I'm used to it. The hours I've spent walking about this infernal London! I've slept on the Embankment, you know."

"No?"

"Yes. I've been as far down as that, though I'm not the sort of man who can be kept down. Did you know that Napoleon was out-at-elbows for a whole year?"

"No; I don't know much about Napoleon."

"Ah! You should. I read every book about him I can lay hands on. Gustave!"

The waiter came up and Logan ordered a very special dinner with the air of knowing the very inmost secrets of the establishment. He demanded orange bitters before the meal and a special brand of cigarette.

"My day hasn't been wasted," he said. "I've been to Cluny's and I asked to see your stuff. The little man there looked astonished, but I told him people were talking of no one else but you, and quite rightly. I talked to him from the dealer's point of view, and assured him that there was a big boom in pictures, coming, and that he had better be prepared for it with a handful of new men. I didn't let him know that I was a painter, but I got him quite excited, and I did not leave him until he had hung a picture and two drawings."

"Which picture?"

"The one of your mother's kitchen. It is one of your best. To-morrow three men will walk into Cluny's and they will admire your work. On the day after to-morrow a real buyer will walk in."

Mendel's eyes grew larger and larger. Was Logan a magician, that he could direct human beings into Cluny's shop and conduct them straight to his work?

Logan laughed at his amazement.

"Lord love-a-duck!" he said, "you're not going to sit still and wait for commercial fools to discover that you know your job. At my first exhibition in Liverpool I put on a false beard and went in and bought one of my own pictures, just to encourage the dealer and the timid idiots who were too shy to go and ask him the price of the drawings. It worked, and this is going to work too. When I've warmed Cluny up into selling you, then I'm going to make him sell me. If you don't mind we'll have our names bracketed,--Kühler and Logan. People will believe in two men when they won't in one. As for three, you've only got to look at the Trinity to see what they'll believe when they get three working together. . . . Oh! I forgot you were a Jew and brought up to believe in One is One and all alone."

He laughed and gave a fat chuckle as he mimicked the little man in Cluny's cocking his head on one side and pretending to take in the beauties of Mendel's work as they were pointed out to him.

"I have enjoyed myself," said Logan. "By God! I wish there were a revolution. I'd have my finger in the pie. Oh! what lovely legs there'd be to pull--all the world's and his wife's as well. But it won't come in my time."

Under Logan's influence Mendel began to enjoy his food, which he had always treated as a tiresome necessity before. He sat back in his chair and sipped his wine and crumbled up his bread exactly as Logan did; and he had a delicious sense of leisure and well-being, as though nothing mattered very much. And, indeed, when he came to think of it, nothing did matter. He had years and years ahead of him, and here was good solid pleasure in front of him, so that he had only to dip his hands in it and take and take. . . .

After the dinner Logan ordered cigars, coffee, and liqueurs, and Mendel felt very lordly. The restaurant had filled up, and among the rest were Mitchell and Morrison.

Mendel turned, gave them a curt nod, and could not restrain a grin of satisfaction as he thought that score was settled. He leaned forward and gave himself up to the pleasure of Logan's talk.

"What I contend," said Logan, "is this--and mind you, I let off my youthful gas years ago. I've been earning my living since I was fourteen, so I know a little of what the world's like. I've been in offices and shops, and on the land, in hotels, on the railway, on the road as a bagman, from house to house as a tallyman, and I know what I'm talking about. The artist is a free man, and therefore an outlaw, because the world is full of timid slaves who lie in the laps of women. If an artist is not a free man, then he is not an artist. And I say that if the artist is outlawed, then he must use any and every means to get out of the world what it denies him. One must live."

"That's true," said Mendel.

"You may take it from me that there is less room in the world now for artists than ever there was. In the old days you chose your patron and he provided for you, as the Pope provided for Michael Angelo, and you devoted your art to whatever your patron stood for, spiritual power if he happened to be a pope, secular power if he happened to be a duke or a king. But, nowadays, suppose you had a patron--say, Sir Julius Fleischmann--and he kept you alive, what on earth could you devote your art to? You could paint his portrait, and his wife's portrait, and all his daughters' portraits, but they'd mean nothing; they'd just be vulgar men and women. No. Art is a bigger thing than any power left on the earth. Money has eaten up all the other powers, and only art is left uncorrupted by it. Art cannot be patronized. It cannot serve religion, because there is no religion vital enough to contain the spirit of art. There is nothing left in the world worthy of such noble service, and therefore art must be independent and artists must be free, because there is no honourable service open to them. They must have their own values, and they must have the courage of them. The world's values are the values fit for the service of Sir Julius Fleischmann, but they are not fit for men whose blood is stirring with life, whose minds are eager and active, men who will accept any outward humiliation rather than the degradation of the loss of their freedom."

"I met Sir Julius Fleischmann. Once," Mendel said. "He subscribed for me when I went to my first School of Art. They wanted to send me to Italy, but I refused, because I knew my place was here in London. There's more art for me in the Tottenham Court Road than in all the blue skies in the world."

"Quite right, too!" cried Logan. "That shows how sound an artist's instinct is. He knows what is good for him because he is a free man. The others have to be told what is good for them because they don't know themselves and because, however unhappy they are, they don't know the way out. When you and I are unhappy we know that it is because we have lost touch with life, or because we have lost touch with art; either the flesh or the spirit is choked with thorns, and we set about plucking them out. When it is a question of saving your soul, what do morals matter?"

Mendel had heard people talk about morals, and he knew that his own were supposed to be bad; but he was not certain what they were. Rather timidly he asked Logan, who gave his fat chuckle and replied:--

"Morals, my son? No one knows. They change about a hundred years after human practice. They are different in different times, places, and circumstances, and Sir Julius Fleischmann, like you and me, has none, because he can afford to do without them. . . . Well, I've done a good day's work and we've had a good dinner, and I must get back to my beautiful bed--unless you'd like to go to a music-hall."

Mendel was loath to let his friend go, and, weary though he was, he said he would like the music-hall. Logan bought more cigars and they walked round to the Oxford and spent the evening in uneasy and flat conversation with two ladies of the town, one of whom said she knew Logan, though he swore he had never seen her before. When they were shaken off, he told Mendel mysteriously that she was a friend of a woman of whom he went in terror, who had been pursuing him for a couple of years.

"Terrible! Terrible!" he said. "Like a wild beast. They're awful, these prostitutes, when they fall in love. It eats them up, body and soul."

And he went on talking of women, and from what he said it appeared that he was beset by them. He described them lurking in the street for him, forcing their way into his studio, clamouring for love, love, love.

"It makes me sick," he said. "I never yet met a woman who knew how to love. If a man has an enthusiasm for anything outside themselves, they plot and scheme with their damnable cunning to kill it. They want the carcase of a man, not the lovely life in it. And if they're decent they want babies, which is almost worse if you're hard up. No, boy; for God's sake don't take women seriously. If you can't do without them, hate 'em. They'll lick your boots for it. They feed on hatred, and will take it out of your hand."

He talked in this strain until they reached the Tube station in Piccadilly Circus. It was unusually empty, and by the booking-office was standing a very pretty girl, big and upstanding. She had a wide mouth and curious slanting eyes, plump cheeks and a roguish tilt to her chin. She was well and neatly dressed, and Mendel judged her to be a shop-girl.

"That's a fine lass," said Logan. "Good-night, boy. I'll see you to-morrow and tell you about Cluny's."

"Good-night," said Mendel, still loath to see his friend go, and he suffered a pang of jealousy as he saw Logan go up to the girl, raise his hat, and speak to her. She started, blushed, and smiled. They stopped and talked together for a few moments, and then moved over towards the lift.

Mendel waited and watched them, Logan talking gaily, the girl smiling and watching him intently through her smile. With her eyes she took possession of him, and Mendel was filled with misgiving when he heard Logan's fat chuckle and the rustle and clatter of the gate as the lift descended. It reminded him oddly of the Demon King and the Fairy Queen in a pantomime he had once seen with Artie Beech, whose father used to get tickets for the gallery because he had play-bills in his shop window.

IV

BURNHAM BEECHES

FOR Greta Morrison as for Mendel, London life had been opened up through Mitchell. He had been friendly and kind to her when everybody else had been harsh, fault-finding, and indifferent. Her first year and a half at the hostel had been a period of misery, for the girls and women there regarded her as odd, vague, and careless, and thought it their duty to impose on her the discipline she seemed to need, for they knew nothing of her suffering through her ambition and her work.

Like Mendel, she had been overwhelmed by her inability to adapt herself easily to the Detmold standard of drawing, for it was against her temperament and her habit of mind to be precise, and drawing had always been to her rather a trivial thing, though extremely pleasant for the purposes of the caricatures in which her teasing humour found an outlet. All her girlhood had been thrillingly happy in the execution of large allegorical designs, through which she sought to express her delight in the earth--the immense serene power of which she became profoundly aware as she lay in the bracken at home and gazed out over the rich valley or up into the marvellous, quivering blue sky, through which she felt that she was being borne without a sound, without a tremor, irresistibly. Nothing could shake that loving knowledge in her, and it hurt her that her mother's cold, self-centred religion, which made her demand a fussy, sentimental attention from her children, forbade all expression of it in her daily life. Her brothers, revolting against the sentimentality exacted of them, treated all tenderness as ignoble rubbish, and in her rough-and-tumble with them Greta was hardened and forced into independence. She had to play their games with them and to suffer the same tortures of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw. But all their swagger seemed to her rather fraudulent; and because they laughed at her allegorical designs she decided that men were inferior beings. When they laughed at her designs it was to her as though they laughed at the beauty she had tried to express in them, and the sacrilege enraged her more than her mother's petulance, for they were young and strong and full of life, and they should not have been blind. It was against them that she first found relief in caricature, and as they went through their Public Schools and were more and more compressed into type, she pilloried them, and, as a consequence, even when she was a young woman, big and fine, with the tender, delicate bloom of seventeen upon her, she had to submit to the indignity of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw.

She was filled with a horror of men, and especially Public School men, for they seemed to her entirely lacking in decency, humility, and honesty. They pretended to be so fine and ignored everything that was finer than themselves. Her brothers' foolish love-affairs disgusted her and made her suppress in herself every emotion that tried to find its way to a good-looking boy or young man. She was not shy of them or afraid of them, but she would not encourage in them what she so detested in her brothers.

During her first year in London she devoted herself heart and soul to her work. There were two or three families who were kind to her as her mother's daughter, but their ways were her mother's, and she only visited them as a duty, and to break the monotony of the school and the hostel.

Her encounter with Mitchell took place at the time when Mendel's influence on him had set him in revolt against his Public School training. On the other hand, the sight of the abyss of poverty into which Mendel descended so easily had set him reeling. He was shrewd enough to know that Hetty Finch was using him as a ladder to get out of it, and that there was a real danger of her kicking him down into it. In a state of horrible confusion he plunged at the most obvious outlet, the "pure girl" of the tradition of his upbringing.

He made no concealment of it, but turned to Morrison with a childlike confidence that touched her. She was feeling lonely, disappointed, and dissatisfied with herself and was glad of his company. It was a change from the woman-ridden atmosphere of the hostel.

By way of making their relationship seemly he introduced her to his family, where as the pure young girl who was to save their hope from wild courses she was a great success.

"First sensible thing you've done, my boy," said Mr. Mitchell, that great man, a journalist who had been a correspondent in a dozen wars. "A pure friendship between a boy and a girl has a most ennobling influence--most ennobling."

"She is truly spiritual," sighed Mrs. Mitchell, "the type who justifies the independence of the modern girl, whatever the Prime Minister may say."

"That scoundrel!" cried Mr. Mitchell. "That infamous buffoon who has not a grain of Liberalism left in his toadying mind!"

"My dear," said Mrs. Mitchell, "we were talking about little Miss Morrison."

"Well," answered Mr. Mitchell, "we took our risk when we let the boy be an artist and we can be thankful it is no worse. Did I tell you, my love, that I am going off to the Cocos Islands to-morrow?"

"Indeed, my dear? Then you will not be able to come to my meeting."

"No, I hear it is worse than the Congo."

"Oh dear! oh dear! I don't know what the world is coming to. The more civilized we get in one part of the world, the worse things are in another part. I declare such horrible things seem to me to make it quite unimportant whether we get the vote or not."

"When you have a Tory Government calling itself Liberal," said Mr. Mitchell very angrily, "it means that neither reform at home nor justice abroad can receive any attention. The country has gone to the dogs, and I thank God I spend most of my time out of it."

"And poor Humphrey suffers. I'm sure I am a good mother to him, but I cannot be a father as well. I'm thankful to say he seems to be dropping that Jewish friend of his. He is a genius, of course, and quite remarkable, considering what he comes from; but with Jews it can never be the same, can it?"

"No, my love," said Mr. Mitchell; "one would never dream of drinking out of the same glass, would one? Still, I must say, the Jews in England are much better than they are anywhere else, which seems to show that they can respond to decent treatment and thrive in the air of liberty."

Both Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell had a platform manner of speaking, and as Morrison was not a subject that suited it, she was soon dropped; but in the end they came back to her, and agreed that she was a nice, shy little girl, and that she had no idea of marrying their only son, or anyone else, for that matter.

She was much impressed with them, for she had never met important people before, and she was given to understand that they were very important. They seemed to have their fingers on innumerable reforms which were only suppressed by the stupidity of the Government. Directly the Government was removed, as of course such idiots soon would be, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell would raise their fingers and, hey presto! women would have votes, the slums would be pulled down, maternity would be endowed, prostitutes would be saved, prisons would be reformed, capital punishment abolished, the working classes would be properly housed, every able-bodied man who wished it should have his small holding, the railways would be nationalized, site values would be taxed, divorce would be made easy and free from social taint, and education would be made scientific and thorough. In the meantime, as the Government did not budge, Mr. Mitchell went to the Cocos Islands and Constantinople to procure evidence of horrors abroad and Mrs. Mitchell addressed meetings on the subject of horrors at home.

Morrison was impressed. The contrast between these people who thought of everything and everybody but themselves and her own home, where nothing was thought of but the family, the Church, and the Empire, shocked her into thinking and gave her a sense of liberation. It made human beings more interesting than she had thought, and she began to see that they did not, as she had heedlessly accepted that they did, fit infallibly into their places, and that vast numbers had no places to fit into. She herself, she saw, did not fit into any place, and that she had been squeezed, like paint out of a tube, out of her home for no other reason than that she was a woman, and there was only just enough money to establish the boys. However, she could not quite swallow Mrs. Mitchell's view that men had deliberately, coldly, and of set purpose ousted women from their rightful share in the sweets of life.

She had a period of despair as these revelations sank into her mind and she had to digest Mrs. Mitchell's awful facts and statistics about the night-life of London. Life seemed too terrible for her powers, but, as she soon began to see how comic Mrs. Mitchell was, she pulled herself together and found that she was strengthened by the experience, and when Mitchell confessed the awful doings of his past, she felt immeasurably older than he, and was thankful she was a woman and did not expect such things of herself. For she could never quite take his word for all he said. She knew her brothers too well to accept his plea of passionate necessity.

"Gawd!" he used to say. "When I think of my past I feel that I must go on my knees and worship your purity."

His absurdity made her blush, but she liked him. He was clever and had read much under his father's guidance, poetry and modern English fiction mostly, and when she went to tea with him in his studio he used to read aloud to her, Keats and Shelley and Matthew Arnold.

"I think I only like poetry," she said once, "when it makes pictures. When it doesn't do that it seems to me just words, and it doesn't seem to matter how nice they sound."

"Gawd!" he said. "That's like Kühler. He says nothing makes such pictures as the Bible, and he is always quoting that about: 'At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: where he fell, there he lay down.' And he says it must be the words, because his own Hebrew Bible never gave him anything like the same--er--vision of it."

Once he had begun to talk of Mendel she would not let him leave the subject.

"Do you think he's a genius?" she would ask.

"Gawd! I don't know. He says he is a genius, and I suppose time will show whether it is true or not. But why do you want to talk of him?"

"I don't know. I'm interested. Perhaps because he is different."

"Well, you've had tea with him. That is about as much as is good for you. If you were my sister I wouldn't let you know him."

"Why not?"

"My dear girl, there are certain things in life that a young girl ought never to know."

"What things? Is there anything worse than what your mother talks about at her meetings? Girls know all about that nowadays, and it is no good pretending we don't."

"Talking about them is one thing, coming in contact with them is another. Kühler is a Jew, and he comes from the East End, where they don't have any decent pleasures. He's infernally good-looking in a hurdy-gurdy sort of way. Gawd! Women look at him and off they go."

"But he cares for poetry and the Bible and he loves pictures. . . ."

"It doesn't seem to make any difference."

During this talk he had begun to find Morrison extraordinarily pretty and lovable, and he said tenderly:--

"Won't you take off your hat and let me see your beautiful hair?"

She refused, and asked him more about Mendel, and in exasperation at the unintended snub he told her the true story of Hetty Finch, not concealing his own share in it, but implying that Mendel's terrible immorality had corrupted him and led to his downfall.

The story was received in silence.

At last she said:--

"And what is going to become of Hetty Finch?"

"That's the extraordinary part of it," said Mitchell. "She has found someone to marry her."

He leaned against the mantelpiece and dropped his head in his hands and groaned.

"Gawd!" he said. "If it weren't for you I don't know what would become of me." And he was so moved by his own thoughts that tears trickled down his nose and made dark spots on the whitened hearth.

"I can't ask you to marry me," he said mournfully. "I'm unworthy, but I want to be your friend."

She made no reply, and he was forced to ask rather lamely:--

"Will you be my friend?"

"Of course."

"Always?"

"How can I promise that?" she said.

It was then that he took her to the Paris Café, where, all in a turmoil through her new knowledge of men and women, she hardly knew what she was doing, and gave Mendel the curt nod which had so disgruntled him.

* * * * *

Every summer the Detmold students went for a picnic, either up the river, or to a Surrey common, or to one of the forests in the vicinity of London. This year Burnham Beeches was chosen. Two charabancs met the party at Slough, and though Mendel tried very hard to sit next to Morrison, he was outmanoeuvred by Mitchell, and had to put up with Clowes.

"I wish you wouldn't glare at Mitchell so. You make me quite uncomfortable," said she.

"He is telling her lies about me," growled Mendel.

"Don't be absurd," protested Clowes. "He is not talking about you at all." She felt rather cross with him because he was spoiling her pleasure, and because she had wanted to sit next someone else, and she added: "People aren't always talking about you, and if anybody does it's the models, and that's your own fault."

"How beastly!" he said.

"I don't blame them. They haven't any other interest."

"I didn't mean that. I meant this country. It is so flat and dull, regular railway scenery. What a place to choose for a picnic!"

"Wait until you get to the woods! We're going to a place called Egypt. Don't you think that's romantic? Though it reminds me more of Oberon and Titania than of Anthony and Cleopatra."

He looked blank, and she explained:--

"Shakespeare, you know."

"I've never read Shakespeare."

"Oh! you should."

"I've tried, but I can't understand him. I suppose it's because I'm not English. It seems ridiculous to me, all those plots and murders."

"But the fairies in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'!"

"I haven't read it; but what do you want with fairies? A wood's a wood, and there's quite enough mystery in it for me without pretending to see things that aren't there."

"But it's nice to pretend," said Clowes rather lamely, almost hating him because he seemed so wrong in the country. She knew people like that, people she was quite fond of in London, but in the country they were awful.

The charabancs swung through Farnham Royal and they came in sight of the woods, brilliant under a vivid blue sky patched with huge, heavy white clouds. Birds hovered above the trees, and as they turned out of the street of seaside bungalows and along the sandy lane leading to Egypt, they put up rabbits and pheasants.

The art students looked bizarre and almost theatrical in the woods, with the long-haired young men and the short-haired girls, many of them wearing the brightest colours. Mendel hated the lot of them, giggling girls and bouncing boys, and he recognized how inappropriate they all were and how he himself was the most inappropriate of them all. He felt ashamed, and wanted to go away and hide, to crawl away to some hole and gaze with his eyes at the beauty he could not feel. There were too many trees, as there were too many people. . . . What a poor thing is a man in a crowd which makes it impossible to share his thoughts and emotions with anyone! And how bitter it is when he is full of thoughts and emotions! It is all so bitter that the crowd must do foolish, inappropriate things not to feel it, not to be broken up by it. . . . Yet the others seemed happy enough. The old Professors were beaming and pretending to be young. Perhaps they enjoyed it more than anyone because they did not want to be alone, or to steal away with a coveted maid, as some of the young men were doing even now. . . . Had Mitchell stolen away with Morrison? Horrible idea! No. There he was, putting up stumps for cricket.

Cricket! How Mendel loathed that fatuous game, the kind of inappropriate foolish thing the crowd always did! How he dreaded the swift hard ball that would hurt his hand or his shins! How humiliated he felt when he was out: and how he raged against the frantic excitement he could not help feeling when he hit the ball and made a run. One run seemed to him a larger score than anyone else could possibly make, and when he made a run and was on the winning side he always felt that he had won the match. In the field, no matter where he was placed, he went and stood by the umpire, because he had noticed that the ball rarely went that way.

He had to field now, and he went and stood by the umpire. Mitchell came swaggering in. He hit a lovely four, a three, a two. The fielders changed at the over, but Mendel stayed where he was. The ball came near him. He picked it up and threw it as hard as he could at Mitchell's head. Fortunately he missed, and there was a roar of laughter.

"I say, I mean to say," said one of the Professors, "we are not playing rounders or--or baseball."

And there was more laughter.

Mitchell hit a three, a two, a lost ball (six), a four, and then he skied one. The ball went soaring up. With his keen sight Mendel could see it clearly shining red against the hot sky. With an awful sinking in his stomach he realized that it was coming down near him. It was coming straight to him. It would fall on him, hurt him, stun him. Then he thought that if he caught it Mitchell would be out. He never lost sight of the ball for a moment. If he caught it Mitchell would be out. He moved back two paces, opened his hands, and the ball fell into them.

"Oh! well caught, indeed! Well caught!"

Mitchell walked away from the wicket swinging his bat in a deprecating fashion. After all, one does not expect miracles even in cricket.

"Beautiful, beautiful ball!" thought Mendel, fondling it with his still tingling hands. "You came to me like a lark to its nest, and you shone so red against the sky, you shone so red, so red!"

His dissatisfaction vanished. The crowd was a nice beast after all. It was at his feet. At no one else had it shouted like that. . . . The woods were very beautiful, with the bracken nodding under the trees, and the branches swaying, and the soft winds murmuring through the leaves, through which the trees seemed to breathe and sigh and to envy the moving wind while they were condemned to stay and grow old in one spot. Very, very sweet were the green and yellow and blue lights hovering and swinging through the woods, dappling the trunks of the trees, weaving an ever-changing pattern on the carpet of moss and dead leaves, and the tufted bracken that sometimes almost looked like the sea, full of a life of its own. Surely, surely there were fish swimming in the bracken.

Starting out of his dreams, he saw Morrison at the wicket, very intent, with a stern expression on her face. He knew she was desperately anxious to score.

She was most palpably stumped with her second ball, but the umpire gave her "not out," amid general applause, for she was a favourite.

She lashed out awkwardly at the next ball, which came on the leg side. It came towards Mendel at an incredible speed. He put his foot on it, picked it up, pretended it had passed him, and tore towards the trees in simulated pursuit; and he remained looking for it in the bracken while Morrison ran four, five, six, seven, eight, and just as some one cried "Lost ball!" he stooped, pretended to pick it up, and threw it back to the bowler.

He himself was bowled first ball, but, as it turned out, Morrison's side won by three runs.

She was bubbling over with happiness, and after tea she came over to him and said:--

"I say, Kühler, that _was_ a good catch."

He folded his arms and cocked his chin and looked down his nose as he said:--

"Oh! yes. I can play cricket."

"You made a blob," she said with a grin.

"A catch like that," he answered, "is enough for one day. I have seen many words written in the papers about a catch like that. Even Calthrop does not have so many words written about his pictures."

"I shall hate to go back to London after this," she said. "I didn't know there was anything so beautiful near London."

"There is Hampstead," he said.

"I've never been there," she replied.

"Will you let me take you to Hampstead? It has lilies and water."

"Oh yes," she said eagerly. "Do let us go into the woods now before we start. I'm sure there must be lovely places."

He followed her, first looking round to see what had become of Mitchell, whom he saw standing with a scowl on his face, a foolish figure.

"Don't talk!" said Morrison. "I'm sure it is lovely through here."

She led the way through a grove of pines into a beech glade, at the end of which they found a dingle, where they stood and gazed back.

"Oh, look!" she cried. "Look at the pine stems through the sea-green of the beeches. Purple they are, and don't they swing?"

"I like the wind in the trees," said Mendel.

He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he caught some of her ecstasy. But he could not understand it at all and it hurt him horribly. She was wonderful and beautiful to him, the very heart of all that loveliness, the song of it, its music and its mystery.

"She is only a little girl," he said to himself very clearly, stamping out the words in his mind, so that it was as though someone else had spoken to him.

The ecstasy grew in her, and with it the pain in him. She swayed towards him and fell against his breast and raised her lips to him. He stooped and almost in terror just touched them with his.

He was a sorry prince for a sleeping beauty, for he was afraid lest she should awake.

V

HAPPY HAMPSTEAD

ON the morning of the day fixed for their expedition to Hampstead Heath she sent him roses--yellow roses. He took them across to his mother and gave them to her, saying:--

"I do not need flowers. I am happy."

Golda laughed at him, and said:--

"You are a big little man since you made the catch at the cricket."

"I don't know what it is, but I am happy. It is no longer surprising to me that there are happy people in the world, and I think the Christians are not all such fools to wish to be happy. I am only astonished that they are happy with such little things."

"It is nothing," said Golda. "They are not truly happy; they are only hiding away from themselves."

"But I am finding myself," cried Mendel. "I shall no more paint fishes and onions. I shall paint only what I feel, and it will be beautiful. I am so clever I can paint anything I choose."

"Go to your work now," said Golda. "You can boast as much as you please when the King has sent for you and told you you are the greatest artist in England. Go to your work."

He went back to his studio and there found a letter from Logan, giving his new address in Camden Town, and another from Mitchell, asking him why he was so unfriendly. This he answered at once:--

"You are no longer my friend. You have despised and injured me. Superior as I am to you, you have thought it your part as a gentleman to try to keep me in my place. You have treated me as a kind of animal. You cannot see that as an artist I am the equal of all men, the highest and the lowest. My own poor people I do not expect to know this, but of an educated man I do expect it. You cannot see this, and I count you lower than the lowest, and as such I am prepared to know you, and not otherwise. I have changed completely. I no longer believe in the Detmold or in Calthrop or in any of the things I reverenced as a student. I prefer the Academy, for it does not pretend to be advanced, and is honest though asleep. I am no longer a student. I am an artist. You will always be an art student, and so I say good-bye to you, as one says good-bye to friends on a station-platform. The train moves and all their affectionate memories and longings cannot stop it. The train moves and I am in it, and I say good-bye to you without even looking out of the window."

This done, he sat down to work at a portrait of his father and mother, with which he was designing to eclipse his first exhibiting success. It seemed to him important that it should be finished. Hearing Issy come in, he shouted to him to come and sit instead of his father, who had given out that he was unwell and was indulging in a sleeping bout.

Issy came shambling in, pale, tired, and unhappy. He sat as he was told, and said:--

"I wish Harry would come back; the business is being too much for me."

"Oh! I shall soon be rich and then I'll help you."

"There's not much help for me," said Issy. "I'm like father. There's always something against me to keep me down. It seems funny to me that people will give you so much money for something they don't really want."

"Come and look at it," said Mendel.

Issy obeyed.

"I don't think it's really like them. Why should anybody buy them who doesn't know them?"

He spoke so heavily and dully that Mendel found it hard to conceal his irritation. When Issy had gone back to his chair, he asked:--

"What do you live for, Issy?"

"Live?" said Issy, mystified.

"Yes. What do you like best in the world?"

"Playing cards. Playing cards. Every day there's work and every night there's Rosa, and on Saturday I play cards. Yes. I play cards; and, of course, you are always something to think about."

"What do you think about me?"

"Oh! You will be rich and famous, and you will be able to choose among all the girls with money. It is like having a play always going on in the family. But I would rather play cards, and Rosa is not so bad as you all say she is. I am not a good husband to her, for I have moods and I cannot talk to her, for I cannot talk to anyone. What is there to say? She has her children, and she only wants more because she is a fool. It is not her fault."

"That'll do, Issy. I've got all I want. I can't get any more from you. Some day I'll teach you how to be happy."

"Oh!" said Issy, with a sly leer. "I know how to be happy. I can't see why anyone should want to have father and mother hanging on their walls."

He slunk away.

How depressing he was! Poor old Issy! as much a part of the street as the doors and windows of the houses. He might move a hundred yards to another exactly similar street, but he would always be the same. It was not his fault. Mendel knew the depths of devotion of which his brother was capable. It was devotion to his mother that kept him living round the corner, devotion to his father that tied him to the unprofitable business. The name of Kühler had attained the dignity of a brass-plate on the front door, and he would die rather than see it removed, at any rate in his father's lifetime.

For the first time Mendel faced his circumstances squarely. With something of a shock he thought of the family arriving at Liverpool Street and never in all these years moving more than half a mile away from it, and that in this amazing London, with its trains and buses to take you from end to end of it in a little over an hour. His mother had never been west of the Bank. She did not even know where Piccadilly Circus was, or the Detmold, or the National Gallery, or the Paris Café, or Calthrop's studio, or any other important centre of life. Liverpool Street she knew, and outside Liverpool Street were the sea and Austria. . . . When there were no little happenings at home she would always fall back on Austria and the troubled days at the inn, and the soldiers who used to come in and ask to see the beautiful baby before they thought of ordering drinks, and her rich uncle who used to supply the barracks with potatoes and was so mean that he refused to give her any when she had not a penny in the world, and the neighbours who used to bring food so that the beautiful baby should not starve. . . . They stayed where they were, stormily passionate, yet with no sense of confinement, while he was drawn off into the swiftly moving whirligig of London, going from house to house, studio to studio, café to café, atmosphere to atmosphere, and all his passionate storms were spent upon nothing, were absorbed in the general movement, leaving him, tottering and dazed, in it, yet alien to it, discovering no soul in it all and losing the clear knowledge of his own.

Surely now that was ended. She had sent him the yellow roses, and he had given them to his mother to join the two whom he loved. They must have touched her face before they came to him, and Golda had buried her face in them.

Impatiently he awaited the time for him to go to the Detmold. He put on a clean collar and a black coat, but then he remembered how the old Jews whom he asked to sit for him always put on clean clothes and clipped their beards, under the impression that he wanted to photograph them. In his clean collar and black coat he felt as though he were going to the photographer's or to a wedding, and remembering how he had been dressed when he saw her for the first time on the stairs, he took out an old black shirt, a corduroy coat and trousers, and a red sash.

He could not bring himself to wear the red sash. It reminded him of Mitchell, who had been with him when he bought it.

* * * * *

It had been very hot. The walls and the pavements gave out a dry, stifling heat. The smell of the street outside came up in waves--a smell of women and babies, leather and kosher meat. He must wait for the cool weather, he thought, before he asked her to the studio again.

"She is only a little girl," he said to himself. "She is pretty, but she is only a little girl. I will tell her that she must not see Mitchell again, because he is not true. I will paint her portrait, and then I will not see her again, because she is only a little girl."

He sat in the window with the clock in front of him, and directly it said half-past four he clapped his hat on his head, seized the silver-knobbed stick which at that time was an indispensable part of an artist's apparel, and bolted as though he were late for a train.

* * * * *

She was waiting for him. He took off his hat, but in his nervousness he could not speak, and as he could not remember which side of a lady he ought to walk, he bewildered her by dodging from one side to the other with a quick, catlike tread, so that she did not hear him, and whenever she turned to speak to him he was not there.

"Wasn't it a good picnic!" she said enthusiastically. "It's the best picnic I've ever been to."

"They are usually pretty good," he said lamely. "I think we'd better go by bus."

They mounted a bus and sat silently side by side.

When they stopped by the Cobden statue he said:--

"A friend of mine has just taken a studio in Camden Town. His name is Logan."

"Was he at the Detmold?"

"No."

That settled Logan for her. She began to feel anxious. Was the afternoon going to be a failure? Why could she never, never get the better of her shyness? She wanted to make him happy because, on the whole, people had been beastly to him and said such horrid things about him. She wanted him to feel for himself, and not only through her, that the world was a very wonderful place, a place in which to be happy. He was so stiff and different, so taut and tightly strung up, that lounging, loose-limbed Mitchell seemed graceful compared with him. Yet there was something unforgettable about him, and he had always had for her the vivid romantic reality of the beautiful young men on the stage, who were creatures of a delicious, absurd world which she would never enter and never wished to enter: a world where young men opened their arms and young women sank into them and were provided with happiness for ever and ever. Her vigour rejected this world, for she knew and lived in a better, but all the same it had its charm and its curious reality. . . .

She was not shy because she had kissed him. That had passed with the shifting light through the trees and the clouds in the sky. It had been vivid and true for that moment, but it had perished and fallen away like a drop of water, like a rainbow.

He remembered it. As he sat by her side and could feel the warm life in her, it became terribly actual to him, the cool contact of her lips, and he was glad when the bus reached the yard with the painted swing-boats and he need no longer sit by her side. He had begun to feel subservient to her, and he would not have that. What Rosa was to Issy, what Golda was to his father, that should a woman be to him, for it was good and decent so. . . . He was almost sorry he had come. He was painfully shy, and knew that she was suffering under it.

He walked so fast that she was hard put to keep up with him, but she swung out and would not be beaten, and managed his pace without losing her breath. Over to the wooded side of the Heath he took her, and stopped under a chestnut-tree.

"Shall we sit down?" he said. "Or would you like to go on walking?"

"I'd like to sit down," she answered. "I love walking, but I can't talk at the same time."

He sat down at once, without waiting for her to choose a spot.

"This grass is nice and cool," he said.

It was wet, but he had no thought for her thin cotton frock.

She sat a couple of yards away from him on the short turf and plunged her arm into the long, cool grass. Then she lay on her stomach and plucked a blade of grass and chewed it.

"Thank you for sending me the roses. I gave them to my mother."

"I liked your mother."

"She liked you. She said: 'That is a good girl.' She is very quick at guessing what people are like."

"I'm glad she liked me."

Once again conversation died away, but she seemed content to lie there with her arms in the cool grass. Their round slenderness fascinated him. Her short hair hung over her face, so that he could only see the tip of her chin.

Suddenly he asked her:--

"Do you send flowers to Mitchell?"

"Yes," she said, and her head was lowered so that the tip of her chin was hidden by her hair.

He said nothing, but he too lay on the grass, flat on his stomach, with his head on his arms. His heart began to thump, and, though he tried to control it, it would not be still. Without raising his head he said, in a choking voice that astonished him:--

"My father fainted for love of my mother. When he heard her name he fainted away."

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

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

It was she who first found words:--

"Oh Mendel! I do love you."

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

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

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

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

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

"I am very, very happy."

And she laughed and added:--

"I _was_ glad when you made that catch."

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

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

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

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

"You do believe in yourself," she said.

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

"And everything else is real to you."

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

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

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

When he had gone away, Morrison said:--

"I am going away soon."

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You will go back home, then?"

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

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

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

"What do you think the news is now?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

CAMDEN TOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh! I love my tea."

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

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

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

"Oo! You are strong," she said.

"I could hold you up like that."

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

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

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

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

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

"I liked the look of you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You're not a London girl."

"No; Yorkshire."

"I'm from Lancashire."

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

"What are you doing in London?"

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

"Like it?"

"M'm! Well enough."

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

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

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

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

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

"And what's that?"

"Love and freedom."

"Ooh! you are a talker."

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

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

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

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

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

"You asked me to tea."

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

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

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

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

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

"But he _was_ pretty."

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

"No."

"I say yes."

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

"Will you give me my gloves, please?"

"No."

"Will you give me my gloves?"

"No."

"Then I shall go without them."

"Very well. Good-bye."

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

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

"You're an insulting beast."

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

"Will you give me my gloves?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You must let me go now."

"When will you come again?"

"Never."

"Oh yes, you will."

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

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

He took her hand and stroked it tenderly.

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oliver's lips trembled and she pouted in protest.

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

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

"How shall we dress her?" asked Logan.

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

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

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

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

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

"I won't wear it."

"Then you can go back to your shop."

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

"Then you'll wear the dress."

"I shan't."

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

He kissed her and mumbled: "Good luck!"

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

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

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

VII

MR. TILNEY TYSOE

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

He said to Mendel:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I agree," said Mendel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You are in a mood to-day."

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

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

"How much does he want?"

"A dozen exhibits each."

"Oh! very well."

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

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

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

"Does he give you good food?"

"Some of the best in London."

"All right."

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

"Is Oliver going?"

"Yes. Do you mind?"

"No. . . . No."

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh! I love dancing," said she.

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Be sincere."

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

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

"I remember it," said Tysoe.

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

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

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

Logan kicked her under the table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he added:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

THE MERLIN'S CAVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do I look it?" he asked.

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

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

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

"She's a beast of a woman."

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

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

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

"Let's have some champagne."

He called the waiter and ordered a bottle.

"Been selling lately?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jessie returned from her other partner to him.

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

"I want to dance, please."

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

"Lovely! lovely! lovely!" sighed Jessie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who brought you here? Calthrop?"

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

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

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

"The day after to-morrow."

"I must see you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good-night!"

* * * * *

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

IX

"GOOD-BYE"

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

"She says you hate her," he said.

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

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

"What if I am?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No. He said nothing about it."

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

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

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

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

"Yes. Do you like it?"

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

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

"I want my breakfast," said she.

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

"I do want my breakfast," sang Oliver.

Logan went livid with fury.

"Be silent, woman," he said.

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

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

"Because you said you would."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm nineteen."

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

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

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

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

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

"Two of them."

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

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

"No. Please don't."

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

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

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

"I don't want to hurt you."

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

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

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

She loved his violence and gained courage from it.

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

"Nobody can hurt my work."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What becomes worse?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We are quarrelling--already quarrelling."

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

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

He took her hand and pulled her to him.

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

She turned away and was gone.

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

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

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

X

PARIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He seemed to be joking, but Mendel could not help feeling that he was at heart serious, and he had the unpleasant sinking of disgust which sometimes seized him when he thought of Logan and Oliver together. He could not account for it, and the sensation gave him a sickly pleasure which made him weaker with Logan than with anybody else. Besides, Logan often bewildered him, and he could not tolerate his inability to grasp ideas except through a mad rush of feeling, and he hated the fact that while Logan's mind seemed to move steadily on, his own crumbled to pieces just at the moment when it was on the point of absorbing an idea.

For these reasons he consented to go to Paris. The three weeks should consolidate or destroy a friendship which had remained for him distressingly inchoate. Deep in his heart he hoped that it would become definite enough and strong enough to drive out his indeterminate love. To be in love without enjoying love was in his eyes a fatuous condition, undignified, vague, a kind of cuckoldry.

* * * * *

Oliver was aflame with excitement over the trip to Paris. She spoke of it with an almost religious exaltation. As usual, her emotion was entirely uncontrolled, became a physical tremulation, and she reminded Mendel of a wobbling blanc-mange.

The plan was to have a fortnight in Paris and a week at Boulogne, for bathing and gambling at the Casino.

No sooner had he left London than Mendel felt his cares and anxieties fall away from him, and he began to wish he had brought Jessie Petrie. He proposed to wire for her from Folkestone, but Logan pointed out that Oliver could not stand women and was jealous of them.

"She'd say Jessie was making eyes at me," he said. "And if she made eyes at you she'd be almost as bad."

In that Mendel could sympathize with Oliver. He was himself often suddenly, unreasonably, and violently jealous of other men over women for whom he did not care a fig.

He set himself to be nice to Oliver, and she in her holiday mood responded, so that on the boat and in the Paris train Logan was sunk in a gloomy silence, and in the hotel at night, in the next room, Mendel could hear him storming at her, refusing to have anything to do with her, threatening to go home next day unless she promised to keep her claws, as he said, off Kühler. She promised, and they embarked further upon their perilous voyage in search of an unattainable land of satiety.

* * * * *

Their hotel was near the Montparnasse station, and they discovered a café in the Boulevard Raspail which was frequented by artists and models, one or two of whom Mendel recognized as former habitués of the Paris Café. They were soon drawn into the artist world, and except that he went to the Louvre instead of to the National Gallery for peace and refreshment, Mendel often thought he might just as well be in London. There was the same feverish talk, the same abuse of successful artists, the same depreciation of old masters, but there was more body to the talk, and sometimes a Frenchman, finding speech useless with this shy, good-looking Jew, would make himself clear with what English he could muster and a rapid, skilful drawing. For the most part, however, he had to rely on Logan's paraphrase, until one day in the Boulevard St. Germain he ran into that Thompson, lamented by Jessie Petrie, the painter of stripes and triangles.

Thompson was a little senior to Mendel at the Detmold, had hardly spoken to him in the old days, but was now delighted to meet a familiar London face.

"I _am_ glad!" he said. "Come and see my place. How are they all in London--poor old Calthrop and poor old Froitzheim? I should have killed myself if I'd stayed in London; nothing but talk and women, with work left to find its way in where it can. Here work comes first. I suppose they haven't even heard of Van Gogh in London?"

Mendel had to confess that he had never heard of Van Gogh.

"A Dutchman," explained Thompson, "and he cut off his ear and sent it to Gauguin. Ever heard of Gauguin?"

"No. But a man doesn't make himself a great artist by cutting off his ear."

"Van Gogh was a great artist before that. He killed himself: shot himself in his bed, and the doctor found him in bed smoking a pipe. He was quite happy, for he had done all he could."

That sounded more like it to Mendel, more like the deed of a warrior of the spirit.

"I'll show you," said Thompson, and they went round the galleries.

Mendel's head was nearly bursting when he came out. The riotous colour, the apparent neglect of drawing and abuse of form, the entire absence of tone and atmosphere, shocked him. He resented the wrench given to all his training, and he took Thompson to the Louvre to go back to Cranach and the early Italians. Thompson would not hear of them, and insisted on his spending over an hour with Poussin.

"I can see nothing in them. Good painting, good drawing, but dull, so dull! The flat, papery figures mean nothing."

"They mean everything to the picture," said Thompson, "and you have no right to go outside the picture. Poussin kept to his picture, and so must you if you are to understand him."

"I can see all that," said Mendel, "but he is dull. I can't help it, he bores me."

"It is pure art."

"Then I like it impure."

"You don't really. But you are all like that when you first come from London. You think that because a thing is different it must be wrong. Have you come over alone?"

"No. I'm with a man called Logan and his girl. He is a great painter, or he will be one. Anyhow, he is alive and has ideas."

"Does he know about Van Gogh?"

"No; but he says the next great painter must come from England."

"Pooh! Whistler!" said Thompson in a tone of vast superiority. "Nous sommes bien loin de ça."

"Please don't talk French," said Mendel. "I don't understand a word."

"Whistler had good ideas," continued Thompson. "It is a pity he was not a better artist."

Mendel was beginning to feel bored. He did not understand this new painting for painting's sake, and did not want to understand it. To change the subject he said:--

"I nearly brought Jessie Petrie with me."

"I wish you had. She is a dear little girl, and I nearly sent for her the other day, but I've no use for the model now. It is perfectly futile trying to cram a living figure into a modern picture."

"I don't see why, if you can paint it."

"Really," said Thompson, "I don't see what you have come to Paris for, if you haven't come to learn something about painting. One wouldn't expect you to understand Picasso straight off, but anyone who has handled paint ought to be able to grasp Van Gogh."

"He is trying for the impossible," grunted Mendel. "The important thing in art is art. I've come to Paris to have a good time."

"Oh! very well," said Thompson. "Why didn't you say so before? I'll show you round."

* * * * *

Mendel took Thompson round to his hotel and up to Logan's room, where, entering without knocking, they found Logan kneeling on the floor with Oliver in a swoon in his arms. He had opened her blouse at the neck and unlaced her corsage.

Mendel thought Oliver looked as though she was going to die, and his first idea was to run for the doctor.

"She'll come round," said Logan. "It's my fault. I was brutal to her. . . ." He nodded to Thompson. "How do you do?" and he covered up Oliver's large bosom.

She came to in a few moments, opened her eyes slowly, rolled them round, and came back to Logan, on whom she fixed a gaze of devouring love. She put up her arms and drew his head down and kissed his lips.

Mendel drew Thompson out into the corridor.

"She was shamming," he said.

"I don't think so," replied Thompson. "What has happened? Does he knock her about?"

"Not that I know of. They've not been together very long. They can't settle down."

"She's a fine woman," said Thompson.

* * * * *

They were called in again and found Oliver sitting up on the bed eating chocolates. She greeted Thompson with a queenly gesture, and clapped her hands when Mendel told her they were going out to see the sights.

"I'm sick of artists," she said. "I have quite enough of them in London. I wish to God you weren't an artist, Logan. You'd be quite a nice man if you worked for your living."

"Don't talk rubbish," mumbled Logan, who was subdued and curiously ashamed of himself. "If I were like that I should have a little dried-up wife and an enormous family, and you wouldn't have a look in."

"And a good job too!" cried Oliver, in her most provoking tone. "A good job too! I'd find someone who had a respect for me."

"D'you find Paris a good place to work in?" Logan turned to Thompson.

"I never knew the meaning of work till I came here. Ever heard of Rousseau?"

"Oh, yes," said Logan.

"I don't mean the writer, I mean . . ."

"I know, I know," said Logan nonchalantly. He could never admit ignorance of anything.

"A great painter," cried Thompson eagerly. "A very great painter. I tell you he brought Impressionism up sharp. They had overshot the mark, you know. Manet, Monet: they had overshot the mark."

Oliver began to scream at the top of her voice.

"Shut up!" said Logan. "You'll have us turned out."

"I don't care," she replied. "I don't care. I can't stand all this talk about painting."

"What do you want us to talk about?" said Mendel, tingling with exasperation. "Love? Three men and one woman can't talk about love."

"Well, I didn't come to Paris to sit in a dirty bedroom talking about pictures. I want to go out to see the streets and the shops and the funny people."

"For God's sake take us somewhere," said Logan.

* * * * *

Thompson, having ascertained that they had plenty of money, took them to Enghien by the river. Oliver was happy at once. She wanted to be amused and to be looked at, and as she was bouncing and rowdy she had her desire.

She made Logan play for her at the little horses, but, as she did not win, she was soon bored with it. Logan was bitten and could not tear himself away. Mendel stayed with him and she disappeared with Thompson.

"I'm bound to win if I go on," said Logan. "There's a law of chances, you know, and I've always been lucky at these things. . . . It is so exciting, too."

He changed note after note into five-franc pieces, lost them all, and at last began to win a little; won, lost, won.

Mendel dragged him away from the table, protesting:--

"Come along. I have had enough. Do come along. We haven't had a chance to talk for days, and I hate these rooms with all the flashy, noisy people. . . . We can come back here and find the others. Let us go and find some fun that we can share, for this is deadly dull for me. Besides, we don't want to be stranded without money."

"But I'm winning. My luck is in."

He rushed back to the tables and lost--twice, upon which he allowed himself to be persuaded, and they went out into the air and sat on a terrace by the lake. Mendel produced cigarettes and they smoked in silence for some time. Logan looked pale and worn and was obviously smouldering with excitement.

"How amazingly different everything looks here," he said. "In London I always feel as though I had a thumb pressing into my brain. Everybody seems indifferent and hostile and everything I do is incongruous. I feel almost happy here. I should like to stay here. I told her so and she began to cry. I knocked her down. I couldn't stand her crying any more. I knocked her down and she fainted."

"She was shamming," thought Mendel, seeing vividly the scene in the bedroom. "He did not hurt her. She was shamming."

"I feel a brute," said Logan, "and yet I'm glad. I'm tremendously glad. I want to sing. I want to get drunk. I'm tremendously glad. It has settled something. I'm her master. She was getting on my nerves. She won't do that any more. Ha! Ha!"

"Why don't you get rid of her?" asked Mendel. "Leave her here. Come back with me to-morrow."

"Don't be a silly child," said Logan patronizingly. "I love her. I couldn't live without her now, not for a single day. I could no more do without her than I could do without the clothes on my back. I tell you she's an inspiration. If she left me I should lay down my brush for ever. She's a religion--all the religion I've got."

"I can't imagine stopping my work for any woman," said Mendel.

"Ah! that's because you don't know what a woman can mean. You can't know while you are young."

Mendel's nerves had been throbbing in sympathy with his friend, but suddenly all that place was filled with a soft, clear light and a bright music, the colour and the scent of flowers, the soft murmur of flowing water, the whisper of the wind in leafy trees, and his heart ached and grew big and seemed to burst into a thousand, thousand rivulets of love, searching out every corner of his senses, cleansing his eyes, sharpening his hearing, refining every sense, so that the scene before him--the white tables, the white-aproned waiters, the green trees, the soft evening sky, the softer reflection of it in the water--was exquisite and magical and full of a mysterious power that permeated even Logan's brutal revelation and made it worthy of beauty. . . . And this mysterious power he knew was love, and she, the girl for whom it had arisen from the depths, was far away in England, thinking of him, perhaps, regretting him, perhaps, but knowing nothing of the beauty she had denied. . . .

Mendel was astonished to find tears in his eyes, trembling on his lashes, trickling down his cheeks.

"What a baby you are!" said Logan. "You can't have me all to yourself."

His divination was true. Lacking its true object, Mendel's love had concentrated upon his friend, with whom he longed to walk freely in the enchanted world of art, to be as David and Jonathan. Indeed, Logan's state of torment was to him as a wound got in battle, over which he gave himself up to lamentation, so single and deep and pure that it obscured even the impulse of his love. He longed to rid his friend of this devouring passion that was consuming him and thrusting in upon his energy, but because his friend called it love, he respected it and bore with it.

"How good it is, this life out of doors!" exclaimed Logan, lolling back in his chair.

"I don't know," replied Mendel. "I think it is too deliberate, too organized. I prefer London streets. There is nothing in the world to me to compare with London streets. Nature is too beautiful. A tree in blossom, a garden full of flowers, a round hill with the shadow of the clouds over them, move me too much. Left alone with them I should go mad. I must have human nature if I am to live and work. I only want nature, just as I only want God, through human nature."

"By Jove! you hit the nail on the head sometimes, my boy. That is true for all of us. It is what I meant when I said that Oliver was a religion to me."

"I don't mean women or individuals," protested Mendel. "I mean human nature in the lump. It may be very poor stuff, stupid and foolish and vulgar, but it is all we've got, and one lives in it and through it."

"That is all very well while you are young," said Logan, "but you have to individualize it when you are older. One person becomes a point of contact. You can't just float through humanity like an apparition."

Mendel had lost the thread of his argument, though not his confidence in its truth.

"That is not what I meant," he said, "and I don't see how a person could be just a point of contact."

"All I know is that Oliver is such a point of contact to me, and I know that unless art is inspired with some such feeling as you have described, all the technical skill and all the deft trickery in the world won't make it more than a sop for fools or an interesting survival of mediævalism. That is why I think you are going to be so valuable. You have so little to unlearn. You have only to shake off the most antiquated religion in the world and you can look at life and human nature without prejudice, while I have constantly to be uprooting all sorts of prejudices in favour of certain ways of living, morally and socially."

Mendel was beginning to feel comfortable and easy, for while his mind worked furiously he could rarely express what he thought, and Logan in his talk often came near enough to it to afford him some relief and to urge him on to renewed digging in the recesses of his mind. It was a vast comfort to him to find that there were other vital thoughts besides that of Morrison, and that for ecstasy he was not entirely dependent upon her. Warmed up by his confidence in Logan, he resolved to tell him about the girl and the vast change she had wrought in his life.

"I used to think," he said, "that if I stayed among my own people I could work my way through the poverty and the dirt and the Jewishness of it all to art. When she came I knew that it was impossible. She had something that I needed, something that the Jews do not know, or never have known. It is not my poverty that denies it to me, for if the poor Jews do not know a good thing, the rich Jews certainly do not, for the rich Jews are rubbish who stroke the Christians with one hand and rob them with the other. It is something that she knows almost without knowing it herself."

Logan smiled.

"I am not a fool about her," cried Mendel. "She is not particularly beautiful to me. There is only one line in her face that I think beautiful, from the cheek-bone to the jaw. I am not a fool about her, but I had almost given the Christian world up in despair. It seemed to me so bad, so inhuman, so hollow, so full of plump, respectable thieves. The simple thieves and bullies of my boyhood seemed to me infinitely preferable. And I had met some of the most important people in the Christian world: all empty and callous and lascivious. And the unimportant people were good enough, but dull, so dull. . . . Then comes this little girl. She is like Cranach's Eve among monkeys. She becomes at once to me what Cranach's wife must have been to him. He painted her as child, girl, and woman. The chattering apes matter to me no more. The Christian world is no longer empty. It is still lascivious and greedy, soft and ill-conditioned, puffy and stale, but it is suddenly full of meaning, of beauty, of a joy which, because I am a Jew, I cannot understand."

"Give it up," growled Logan, "give it up. Paint her portrait and let her go. You are a born painter. To a painter women are either paintable or nothing. For God's sake don't go losing yourself in philosophy."

"It is not philosophy!" cried Mendel indignantly. "It is what I feel."

"It will probably end in a damned good picture," retorted Logan. "Why not be content with that?"

"Because it will not answer what I want to know, and because I feel that there is something in the Jews, the real Jews, that she does not understand either. And she is not a fool. She has a mind. She has a deep character. She is strong, and she can get the better of me. She is secret and she is cruel."

Logan gave his fat chuckle.

"She is just an English girl with all the raw feeling bred out of her. She is true to type: impulsive without being sensual, kind without being affectionate; and she would let you or any man go to hell rather than give up anything she has been brought up to believe in or admit to her life anything that was strange, unfamiliar, and not good form, like yourself. . . . Give it up, give it up. You are only taking it seriously because you have been irresistible so far and it is the first setback you have received."

"I will not give it up," said Mendel, setting his teeth. Then he laughed because the lights had gone up and the scene was gay and amusing, and he wanted to plunge into the merry crowd of Parisians and pleasure-seekers, to move among them and to come in contact with the women, to watch the men strutting to please them, to delight in the procession of excited faces, to taste the flavour of humanity which is always and everywhere the same, rich, astonishing, comforting, satisfying in its variety.

Oliver and Thompson returned with their hands full of trinkets, toys, and pretty paper decorations which they had bought or won at games of chance and skill. She sat on Logan's knee and insisted on wreathing him with paper streamers, which he removed as fast as she placed them on his head.

"Do! do!" she cried. "Do let go for once and let us all be gay. Oh! I do love this place, with the band playing, and the lights in the water, and the wonderful deep blue sky. Why don't we have a sky like that in London? Do let us come here every year for the summer. Thompson says painters have to come to Paris if they want to be any good."

"I've been telling her about Van Gogh," said Thompson.

"So that's what's gone to your head!" growled Logan, patting her cheek. "He's been talking to you about painting, has he?"

"Yes. He's is a nice man, and doesn't treat me as if I was a perfect fool."

She darted a mischievous glance at Mendel, who started under it as though he had been stung. He was horrified at the depth of his dislike of her, and he remembered with disgust her full, coarse bosom exposed as she lay in her calculated swoon. . . . How good it had been while she was gone with that fool Thompson, who suited her so perfectly, that chattering ape, with his talk of Van Gogh and Gauguin and "abstract art," who stood now coveting her with shining eyes and fatuously smiling lips.

"I'm not good enough for some people," she said. "When I come into the room there is silence."

"Oh, shut up!" said Logan. "Let's go and have dinner and get back to Paris. I'm sick of this cardboard place, where there is nothing but pleasure."

They had an excellent dinner, during which Oliver never stopped chattering and Mendel never once opened his lips. His thoughts were away in England, in his studio with his work, and in the country with Morrison, and he struggled to bring them together in his mind. How could Logan love Oliver and keep her apart from his work? Two such passions must infallibly seek each other out and come to grips. They must come together or be flung violently apart. . . . Passions were to him as real as persons; they had individualities, needs, desires; they were entities insisting upon their right to existence; they must express themselves, must make their impression upon the circumambient world.

He became critical of Logan, though he hated to be so. Logan stood to him for adventure and freedom, independence and courage. It was incomprehensible to him that Logan should take Oliver seriously. She was the woman for a holiday, for a wild outburst of lawlessness, not for the morning and the evening and the day between.

"Oh, do cheer up, Kühler! You are like a death's-head at a feast."

He looked at her with a piercing glance which silenced her. No: she was no holiday woman. She was the woman for a drab, drudging life, with no other colour or joy in it than her own animal warmth. She was like Rosa, made for just such a dreary, simple, devoted fool as Issy. What could she do with a strong passion? She could only absorb it like a sponge, and nothing could kindle her. Just a drab; just a sponge.

Thinking so, his dislike of her grew into a hatred so passionate that he desired to know more of her, to watch her, to beget a clear idea of her. He went and sat by her side and teased her, while she teased him and told him he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen.

"That night in the Tube I thought you were the prettiest boy I ever saw, and I was quite disappointed when Logan came to speak to me instead of you."

"I would never have taken you from the shop," he said. "I would have taken you to my studio, and perhaps I would have painted you, but I would have sent you back to the shop."

"I wouldn't have gone, so there!" she said. "What would you have done then?"

"I should have turned you out."

"Oh! Would you? Filthy brute! If I'm good enough for one thing I'm good enough for another. Do you hear that, Logan? He would have turned me out!"

"You leave Kühler alone," said Logan. "You'll never understand him, if you try for a thousand years."

"Turned me out?" muttered Oliver. "Heuh! I like that. He'd turn me out and get another girl in! I'll not have any of those tricks from you, Logan."

"You can talk about them when I begin them," he replied.

She turned from Mendel to Thompson and soon had him soft in her snares.

"She would like to do that with me," thought Mendel, "and she hates me because she knows she cannot."

* * * * *

They returned to Paris by bus all sleepy and a little drunk. Oliver leaned her head on Logan's shoulder and dozed, smiling to herself, while Thompson, sitting by her side, fingered her sleeve.

They were carried far beyond the point where they should have descended, and finding themselves on the boulevards, they woke up to the liveliness of the Parisian night, and Oliver refused to go home.

Thompson suggested the cabarets, and they went from one dreary vicious hole to another until they came on one where a party of Americans were doing in Paris as the Parisians do. They had brought on a number of _cocottes_ from the Bal Tabarin, and were drinking, shouting, dancing. Thompson led Oliver into the mêlée, and soon she was drinking, shouting, dancing with the rest.

Mendel was horrified and disgusted. There was no zest in the riot. It was a piece of deliberate, cold-blooded bestialization. He trembled with rage, and turned to Logan, who was sitting with a sickly smile on his face:--

"You ought not to let her," he cried--almost moaned. "If she were my woman I would not let her. I would kill any man who laid hands on her like that. She is not a prostitute. I would not let my woman be a prostitute."

But Logan did not move. He sat with his sickly smile on his face. He was drunk and could not move.

Unable to bear the scene any longer, Mendel rushed away, jumped into a taxi, and drove back to the hotel, swearing that he would go back to London the next day. He would write and tell Logan that he must get rid of Oliver or no longer be his friend. She was a poisonous drab. She would be the ruin of his friend.

An hour or two later Logan came back. He was very white, and his hair was dank, and there was a cold sweat on his face.

"My God!" he said, "Kühler! Are you awake? I don't know where she is. I went to sleep. I was so tired, and there was such a row with those blasted Americans. I went to sleep and awoke to find a nigger shaking me and the place empty. . . . Where does Thompson live? Do you know?"

"Off the Boulevard Raspail. I went there to look at his rubbishy pictures. I think I could find the way. Are you going to kill him?"

"I want to find her," said Logan. "I must find her. It is killing me to think of her lost in Paris. I must find her. I can't sleep without her. I must find her."

He hardly seemed to know what he was saying.

"Come along then," said Mendel. "I think I can find where Thompson lives."

It was not far. They walked along the deserted boulevard under the new white, florid buildings, and turned into an impasse.

"That's it," said Mendel. "Impasse. I remember that. A tall, thin house with a big yellow door. Here it is."

They knocked until the yellow door swung mysteriously open and then ran upstairs to the top floor.

Thompson came blinking into the passage.

"Where's Oliver? Where's Logan's girl?"

Mendel put up his fist to hit him in the eye.

"I put her into a taxi and sent her home. The Americans took us on to another place. They were a jolly lot. A terrific place they took us to. There were negresses dancing and a South Seas girl who said Gauguin brought her back. . . . Oliver's all right. I put her in a taxi and sent her back."

"You're a liar!" shouted Logan. "She's in there."

He rushed in, while Mendel put his arms round Thompson and laid him neatly on the floor. In a moment Logan was out again.

"You're a shocking bad painter," he said to Thompson, "but she isn't there."

They left the house and walked slowly back to the hotel. Logan clung to Mendel's arm, saying:--

"It's my fault. She said if ever I knocked her about she'd clear out. Do you mind walking about with me? I couldn't go to bed. I couldn't sleep."

All night they walked about; going back to the hotel every half hour to see if she was there, talking of anything and everything, even politics, to keep Logan's mind from the fixed horrible idea that had taken possession of it. They saw the sun come out, and the workers hurrying along the streets, and the waiters in the cafés push up the heavy iron shutters that had only been pulled down an hour or two before, and the market women with their baskets, and the tramcars glide and jolt along, the shops open and the girls go chattering to their work through the long, leisurely Parisian day.

They returned at eight and had breakfast. At half-past nine Oliver appeared, smiling and serene.

"We did have fun last night! You missed something, I tell you."

"Where have you been?" cried Logan. "I've been looking for you all night."

"What a fool you are! I can look after myself."

"Where have you been?"

She faced him with a bold stare and said:--

"I got home about half-past two, and I took another room, partly because I didn't want to disturb you, and partly--you know why."

"What number was your room?"

"Forty-four."

From where they sat Mendel could see the keyboard in the concierge's lodge. There were only forty rooms in the hotel.

"Have you had breakfast?" asked Logan, forcing himself to believe her.

"Hours ago. In bed," she replied. "I paid for it and the bed."

"Why did you do that?" he snapped.

She caught Mendel's eyes fixed on her, eager to see her trapped, and she smiled insolently as she replied:--

"I thought it would be a good joke if I let you think I had been out all night. But you look such a wreck that I don't think you could see a joke. . . . What are we going to do to-day?"

"We are going home," said Logan.