BOOK THREE

THE PASSING OF YOUTH

I

EDWARD TUFNELL

A WRETCHED journey home, a miserable journey. There had been a high wind, leaving a heavy swell, and Mendel shared the feelings of his brother-in-law, Moscowitsch, concerning the sea. It made him ill, and he never wished to see it again.

Oliver sat with her eyes closed while Logan held her hand and whispered to her. The boat was crowded, for it was the first to make the crossing for two days. Detestable people, detestable sea, detestable evil-smelling boat! . . . How lightly they had undertaken the trip to Paris! Only seven hours! But what hours!

Mendel's disgust endured until they reached London. This was home to him, and never, never again would he travel. The discomfort of it was too odious, the shock to his habits too great. In London he did at least know what to avoid, while in Paris there was no knowing when he might be plunged into a dreary, glittering place full of prostitutes and Americans.

He was glad to part with Logan and Oliver. They had so much to settle with each other that he felt he was an unnecessary third. Paris had done violence to their relationship. They had gone there light of heart; they had returned oppressed and entangled. . . . And in London it was raining; but that was good, because familiar. It was good to go out into the friendly streets and to see them shining like black rivers, and to see the people hurrying under their dripping umbrellas and the women with their skirts up to their knees.

He seemed to have been away a very long time, and yet Paris seemed very far off too, an unreal memory, like a place of which he had read or seen in photographs. He was glad when he mounted a bus and knew that it was bearing him towards his own people.

Golda was very excited. She had had a letter from Harry, who had seen his brother in Paris, but had been too shy to speak to him because of his friends.

"You should have gone to see your brother," she said.

"How could I?" asked Mendel. "I did not know where he was."

"You speak Yiddish. You could have found him. He has done very well, but he is coming home to us. He does not like to live away from his people, and he says England is best."

And Mendel thought that England was indeed best. For him, then, England meant his mother's kitchen, with its odd decorations from Tottenham Court Road, its dresser crammed with gilded china and fringed with cut green paper, its collection of his early pictures, almost all hanging crooked, and the hard wooden chair in which Golda sat all day long with her hands on her stomach, dreaming and brooding of her life, which through all her hardships had been sweet because of her beautiful child whom everybody loved and spoiled, as she herself loved and spoiled him because he was not like other children. England was best because it could contain that peace and that beauty, and there was nothing in England to harm it or in envy to destroy it.

Mendel could understand his brother wanting to come back to it; for he, too, from all his adventures, returned to its simplicity for strength and comfort.

Moscowitsch came in with a Jewish paper. He was in a terrible state of anger and hatred. His eyes flashed and his nostrils quivered as he read out how a Jew in Russia had been accused of killing a Christian boy for his blood, and how over a thousand Jews had been massacred on the instigation of the police.

"It grows worse and worse," he said. "The Jews do not kill. It is the Christians who lust for blood. It is the Christians who are so wicked and dishonest that, when they must be found out, they say it is the Jews, or that the Jews are more wicked than they. It is impossible. But England is good to the Jews. England must send soldiers to Russia or the Jews will be all murdered."

"Yes, it is bad in Russia," said Golda, nodding her head. "But life is bad everywhere for good people. Only in England one is left alone."

"Well, Mr. Artist!" said Moscowitsch genially. "Made your fortune yet?"

"No," replied Mendel; "but I have been to Paris for my holidays and I stayed in a hotel. Three of us spent twenty pounds."

"So?" said Moscowitsch, impressed. "Have you made it up with the Birnbaum, then?"

"No."

"That is not the way to get on, to quarrel with money."

"If he wants money," said Golda, "he can always get it. What more do you want? There are some letters for you, Mendel."

He opened his letters, and had the satisfaction of telling Moscowitsch that he was asked to paint a portrait for thirty pounds.

"Who is it?" asked Moscowitsch. "A lord?" He had an idea that only lords had their portraits painted by hand.

"That's better," he said. "That's better than painting those pictures that nobody wants. You paint what they ask you and you'll soon make your fortune, and be able to give your mother dresses covered with beads and tickets for the theatre and china ornaments. And you can be thankful you don't live in Russia. They wouldn't let you be an artist there. If you became a student they would send you off to Siberia and you would die in the snow."

It was the first time Moscowitsch had spoken to him since the breach with Birnbaum, and Mendel was at his ease with him again, and glad to be with his people. He knew that Moscowitsch was greatly attached to Golda, and had more than once urged his being taken away from his painting and put to some useful trade.

"Oh! I shall very soon succeed," he said boastfully. "This is only a beginning. You keep an eye on that paper of yours. You will find something else to read besides what Russia does to the Jews. You will see what England does for a Jew when he has talent and honesty."

"They made Disraeli a lord," said Moscowitsch.

"I shall be something much better than a lord."

"They only make painters R.A."

"I shall be much better than that," said Mendel.

"It is like old times," laughed Golda, "to hear him boasting."

Mendel opened another letter. It was an invitation to become a member of an exhibiting club which considered itself exclusive.

"I have been invited to become a member of a club."

That settled Moscowitsch. A club to him was proof of success and social distinction. He and his wife had made the acquaintance of a member of the music-hall profession who had two clubs, and they counted him a feather in their caps. To have a member of a club in the family was almost overwhelming, and he forgot the sorrows of the Jews in Russia.

* * * * *

The portrait commission was from Edward Tufnell, who had lately married and had been adopted as a candidate for Parliament for a northern constituency. Good earnest soul that he was, he regarded himself as responsible for launching Mendel upon the world, and once he had assumed a responsibility he never forgot it. Nothing made any difference to him. He had heard tales of the boy's wildness, but he accepted responsibility for that too, read up the histories of men of genius for precedent, and acknowledged the inevitability of the flying of sparks from the collision of a strong individuality and the habits of the world.

He had always intended to give his protégé a lift, and had tried in vain to badger his father and his uncle, partners in a huge woollen manufactory, into having their portraits painted. They preferred to sink their money in men with reputations. He did not see how Mendel could acquire a reputation except by giving him work to do. On the other hand, he shrank from what he considered the vanity of having his own portrait painted, but his charmingly pretty wife gave him the opportunity he desired.

Therefore he invited Mendel to his house in the dales to stay until the picture was finished.

A day or two later and Mendel was in the train, being whirled North through the dull, rolling Midlands and the black, smirched valleys of the West Riding. The gloomy sky filled him with terror. At first he thought there was going to be a storm, but there seemed to be no life in the sky, and its strangeness oppressed him. The people in the train spoke a language which seemed almost as foreign as French, and when the train darted through forests of smoking chimney-stacks and he looked down into the grimy, trough-like streets, he was dismayed to think that here were depths of misery compared with which the East End was as a holiday ground. This, too, was England, and he had said that England was best. He remembered Jews in the East End who had fled from the North and said they would rather go back to Russia than return to the tailoring shops and the boot factories. So this vile, busy blackness was the North!

For some mysterious reason it made him think of Logan and Oliver, and the thought of them filled him with an added uneasiness. He had not thought of them once since the trip to Paris, and now he felt bound to them, and that they were a weight upon him. They stood out vividly against the murky, lifeless sky. He could see them standing hand in hand, smiling a little foolishly, and a physical tremor shot through him as he thought of the contact of their two hands, thrilling together, pressing together, to tell of their terrible need of each other. . . . This man and this woman. Mendel was haunted by the images of all the couples he knew, and they passed before him like a shadowy procession of the damned, all hand in hand, across the lifeless sky, all shadowy except Logan and Oliver, and then two others, his father and his mother; but they were not hand in hand. They were seated side by side, like two statues, and behind them the lifeless sky broke and opened to show the infinite blue space beyond the clouds.

He had changed at the darkest of the chimneyed towns, and the shabby local train went grinding and puffing through a tunnel into a vast green valley. At the first station he saw Edward Tufnell on the platform. He had changed a good deal, and was no longer the lanky, earnest youth of the Settlement, but his eyes still had their steady, serene expression and their sunny, beautiful smile.

He flung up his hand as he saw Mendel, smiled, and came fussily, as though he were meeting the Prime Minister himself. He insisted on carrying Mendel's bag and canvases and made him feel small and young again, as he used to when he went trotting along by Edward's side on his way to the French class.

"It's a long journey," said Edward. "You must be tired."

"Oh no! I don't mind any journey as long as I don't have to cross the sea."

"It is only two miles now."

They climbed into a dogcart and drove, for the most part at a walk, up a long, winding road that crept like a worm along the flanks of a huge hill.

"Glorious country!" said Edward. "I love it. The South doesn't seem to me to be country at all--just a huge park. One is afraid to walk on the grass. But here there is room and freedom. One understands why the North is Liberal."

"It is too big for me," replied Mendel. "But then I can't get used to the country. I'm not myself in it. I feel in it as though I were on the edge of the world and in danger of falling off. Yes. The country seems dangerous to me, and I could never walk along a road at night."

"How odd that is!" laughed Edward. "If I am ever afraid it is in the town. The vast masses of people do really terrify me sometimes, when I think of governing them all."

"They can look after themselves," said Mendel simply.

Over the shoulder of the hill they came on a grey stone house with a walled garden. Edward turned in at the gate, flicked his horse into a trot up the steep drive, and drew up by the front door, in which was standing a dainty little lady in a mauve cotton gown and a wide Leghorn straw hat.

"Here he is, my dear!" said Edward. "My wife, Kühler."

"I'm so glad you could come," said the little lady. "My husband has told me so much about you."

"Not half what he could tell if he only knew," thought Mendel.

"I'm afraid it is a very long way for you to come," she said, leading him into the house while Edward drove round to the stables. "It is very good of you. We are very quiet here, but you can do just as you like, and I shall always be ready for you when you want me."

She had a very charming voice that seemed to bubble with happiness, and she had the air of being surprised at herself for being so happy. The house was pervaded with her atmosphere, fragrant and good, and every corner seemed to be full of surprise, every piece of furniture looked astonished at finding itself in its place--so perfectly in its place. This fragrant perfection was the more amazing as the outside of the house was more than a little grim, and the hill behind it was dark and ominous, while several of the trees were blasted and chapped with the wind.

Mendel had never seen such a house, and when Edward took him up to his room he almost wept with delight at the comfort and sweetness of it all. There was a fire burning in the grate, by the side of which was a huge easy chair. Flowered chintz curtains were drawn across the windows, and the same gay chintz covered the bed. On the wash-hand-stand was a shining brass can of hot water. There were books by the bedside, the carpet was of a thick pile, and the furniture was old and exquisite. . . . He was filled with delight and gratitude.

"Yes," he thought, "England is best! Comfortable England."

And when Edward showed him the big tiled bathroom he had a shiver of dismay, and thought what a dirty, uncouth fellow he was to come among these exquisite people.

* * * * *

Mary Tufnell put him at his ease at once and encouraged him to talk about himself. He was frank and gay and amusing, and told her about his adventures and many of his troubles, and even ventured once or twice upon scabrous details.

"He is a darling," she said to Edward. "But how he must have suffered. He is such a boy, but sometimes he seems to me the oldest person I have ever met."

"You must remember that he is a Jew," said Edward.

"He doesn't let you forget it," replied she.

* * * * *

The portrait was begun the next day. Mendel took a business-like view of his visit. He was there to paint and to make thirty pounds. Every moment that his hostess could spare he seized upon. He painted her in her mauve cotton and Leghorn hat and would not talk while he worked.

When the light was gone he was ready for any entertainment they might propose. He did not find either of them particularly interesting, and their unfailing kindness wearied him not a little. They were so invariably good in every thought, word, and deed. It seemed impossible for them to fail. There was no combination of circumstances which they could not surmount with their smiling patience. . . . He thought of them as two people walking along on either side of a road, smiling across it at each other. Nothing joined them. They had never met. There had been no collision. He had overtaken her on the road and had taken her step, her pace. . . . They had just that air. Dear Edward had fallen in with her by the wayside, and she had smiled at him and he was content and held for life. To their mutual grave astonishment she would have children, and her smile would become a little sad, and with the children she would be an ideal to Edward, like the little Italian Madonnas of whom he had so many photographs all over the house. And between them on the road would march the brave procession of life--kings and beggars, priests and prostitutes, artists and peasants, chariots, and strange engines of peace and war; but they would see nothing of it: they would see only each other, and they would smile and go smiling to the grave.

Mendel was at his ease with them and very happy, but suddenly out of nowhere there would arise, as it were, a great stench that pricked his nostrils and set him longing for London. And he would think of Logan and Oliver and ache to be with them, so that he knew that he was bound to them in the flesh. They were embarked upon a great adventure in which he must be with them to the end, for Logan was his friend, with whom he must share even the deepest bitterness. With Edward he could share nothing at all, for Edward was absurdly, incredibly innocent, content to smile by the wayside.

He wrote to Logan and Oliver and told them how he was longing to be with them, and how the country filled him with childish fears, and how Paris seemed a thousand miles away and its adventures a thousand years ago. And he was hurt because they did not at once reply.

He received two letters one morning. Logan wrote telling him he ought not to waste his time over portraits, and that he must come back to London soon, because the autumn was to see their triumph: nothing about himself, nothing about Oliver. Mendel was disappointed: nobody ever really answered his letters, into which he flung all his feeling.

His other letter was from Morrison. His first letter from her. He knew her hand, though he had never seen it before--round, big, simple. He kept her letter until his day's work was done, and then he went into the garden to read it. There was an arbour at the end of a mossy walk which led to a crag above a little waterfall. Out of the crag grew a mountain ash, brilliant in berry. This was the most beautiful spot in the garden, and so he chose it for reading the letter.

"I want you to forgive me for being so foolish. I want to try again. I hate being beaten, and I think it was only my stupidity that beat me. I have been thinking of you all the time, and I have been troubled about you. What people said had nothing at all to do with it. I admire you more than I can say, and I have been very foolish.

"It has been a lovely summer. I have been working hard and feel hopeless about it. Please don't ask to see my work. While I am at it I am wondering all the time what you are doing.

"I am to be allowed to come back to London in October. There is no reason why you should not write to me."

She was there with him, by his side, under the glowing rowan-tree, gazing down at the little white waterfall dashing so merrily down into the pebbled beck. She was there with him, and his blood sang in his veins and his mind began to work, pounding along as it had not done these many weeks. . . . Weeks? Years--more than a lifetime.

He went back to his picture and thought it very, very bad. Edward and his wife came in and looked at it dubiously.

"Of course," said Edward, "it is a very jolly picture, but I don't think you have caught all her charm."

"But the painting of the hat is wonderful," said Mary.

"What do I care?" thought Mendel. "It is you--you as you are, smiling, eternally smiling over your little clean, comfortable happiness, three parts of which you have bought, with your servants and your flowers and your bathroom."

In a day or two he was being whirled back to London, shouting every now and then from sheer exuberance--thirty pounds in his pocket, October to look forward to: October, when London shook off its summer listlessness; October, when She would return; and until October he would run with his eyes on the trail of the burning, creeping passion that bound him to Logan and Oliver.

II

THE CAMPAIGN OPENS

HE reached London in the afternoon, and as soon as it was evening went to Camden Town to find Logan. Only Oliver was in. She was sitting in the window smoking. There had been a tea-party, and the floor was littered with cups, plates of bread and butter and cakes, fragments of biscuit, some of which had been trodden on.

Mendel surveyed this litter ruefully, and he said:--

"Why don't you wash up?"

"Logan said he would. I washed up after breakfast. I'm not a servant, and he keeps on promising to have someone in to help."

"Will you wash up if I help you?"

"No, thanks. Logan's got to do it."

"Who has been to tea?"

"Oh! A funny lot. Some of Logan's fools who think he is a great man."

"He is a great man," said Mendel.

"Heuh! You try living with him. What's the good of being a great man if you don't make any money? It's all very well for Calthrop to live like a pig. He makes money and can do what he likes."

"If you don't like it you can always clear out."

"Where to? Eh? To go the round of the studios and oblige people like you? Not much! It isn't as if I was married to him. I can't make him keep me. Besides, he wouldn't let me go. If I went he would run after me. I suppose you hadn't thought of that, Mr. Kühler. You don't know what it is to care for anybody. I'd like to see some one play you and play you, and then turn you down. That would teach you a lesson, that would."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I'm not going to stand it any longer," she said. "I'm not going to be put on one side like dirt while you go on with your conceited talk. You're both so conceited you don't know how to hold yourselves. I'm a woman, and I stand for something in the world. A woman is more important than the biggest picture that was ever painted."

"It depends upon the woman."

"All right, then. _I'm_ more important. You talk about Logan keeping me. He can consider himself damned lucky I stay with him."

"Oh! you're both in luck," snapped Mendel, and he sat down and refused to say another word.

Oliver began to whistle and then to hum. She fidgeted in her chair. She thought she had come off rather well in the sparring match. She had been dreading Mendel's return, for since the Paris adventure she had been asserting herself, as she called it, beating Logan down, bewildering him with her extraordinary sweetness and cajolery and sudden outbursts of fury. Both had agreed to bury the memory of the last night in Paris, but the thoughts of both were centred upon it. She rejoiced that she had served him out, but she had been stirred to a degree that alarmed her. Her former condition of lazy sensual security had been broken, and she dreaded Logan's jealousy. She knew that she was not his equal in force, but she set herself to overcome him with cunning. His force would spend itself. She knew that. She must then bind him fast with tricks and lures, rouse the curiosity of his senses and keep it unsatisfied.

She had succeeded wonderfully. Logan crumbled and turned soft and sugary under her arts, and only one impulse in him resisted her--his love for Mendel; and through that love his passion for art. Therefore she dreaded and hated Mendel's return.

Presently she ceased to hum. She thought suddenly that perhaps it had been a mistake to meet Mendel with hostility.

"I say, Kühler, do give us one of your cigarettes. These are awful muck."

He threw his cigarette-case over to her.

"Did you have a good time up North?"

"Yes."

"I come from there, you know. Logan was furious with you for going. He is really very fond of you, you know."

"I don't need you to tell me that."

"He's very excited just now. He keeps talking about the artistic revolution and the twentieth century, and all that, you know. He has been reading a book called 'John Christopher,' and keeps on reading it aloud until I'm sick of it. I believe he thinks he is like Christopher, though I'm sure he's not, because Christopher could never see a joke. It is all about women, one after another, just left anyhow. It doesn't sound like a story to me at all."

"It sounds true," said Mendel, not paying much attention to what she said.

To his intense relief Logan came in with a frame under his arm.

"Hullo!" he said. "Got back? How did you like the swells?"

"They were good people," replied Mendel, "and wonderfully peaceful. I don't think I appreciated it enough while I was there, but it seems very clear and beautiful to me now."

"Portrait any good?"

"No."

Logan put down his frame and without a word to Oliver proceeded to wash up the tea-things. She stayed in her chair in the window and hummed.

To Mendel his friend seemed altered. He had lost his good-humour and something of his happy recklessness, and he was more concentrated and full of a wary self-consciousness.

He came out of the bedroom when the washing up was done and flung himself on the divan, stretched himself out, and said:--

"I'm tired; done up. Lord! What fools there are in the world! No more portraits for you, my boy; at least, not this side of thirty. Ten years good solid work ahead of you."

He laughed.

"I told Cluny he must hurry up or you would slide off into portrait-painting. Dealers hate the mere sound of the word. He is going to hurry up. I've played you for all I am worth, and Cluny is in my pocket. Oh! I'm a man of destiny, I am."

A snort and a giggle came from Oliver. Logan sat up.

"Leave the room!" he said.

"Shan't."

"Leave the room. I want to talk to Kühler."

"Talk away then. I shan't listen."

Logan walked over to her, seized her by the arms, and pushed her into the bedroom and locked the door. It was done very quickly and dexterously, as though it were a practised manoeuvre.

"I'm finding out how to treat her," he said. "Quiet firmness does the trick."

He met Mendel's eyes fixed on him in horrified inquiry and turned sharply away.

"It isn't as bad as it looks," he said. "The fact is, women aren't fit for liberty and an artist ought to have nothing to do with them. But what can a man do? . . . What were we talking about?"

"Cluny."

"Oh yes! He wants the exhibition to be the first fortnight in November. Can you be ready by then? It must be a turning-point in art, the beginning of big things. I know myself enough to realize that it is doubtful if I shall ever be a great creative artist, but I shall be the Napoleon of the new movement--the soldier and the organizer of the revolution in art. And it won't be confined to art; it will spread through everything. Art will be the central international republic from which the commonwealths which will take the place of the present vulgar capitalistic nations will be inspired. What do you think of that for an idea?"

"Stick to art," said Mendel. "I know nothing about the rest."

"Do you remember my saying that the music-hall was all that was left of old England? I did not know how true it was. England has become one vast music-hall, with everybody with any talent or brains scrambling to top the bill. It runs through everything--art, politics, the press, literature, social reform, women's suffrage, local government; and the people who top the bill can't be dislodged, just like the poor old crocks on the halls, who come on and give the same show they were giving twenty years ago, and get applause instead of rotten eggs because the British public is so rotten with sentiment and so stupid that it can't tell when a man has lost his talent. Please one generation in England and its grandchildren will applaud you, though everything about you is changed except your name. The result is, of course, that no talent is ever properly developed. A man reaches the point where he can please enough people to make a living, and he sticks there. Now, I ask you, is that a state of things which a self-respecting artist can accept?"

"No," said Mendel. "No."

"Well. It has to be altered. And who is to alter it if not the painters, who are less in contact with the general public than any other artists? Painters had a comfortable time last century, living on the North-country municipal councils, but that is all over and we are reduced to poops like Tysoe. There are any number of them, if one only took the trouble to dig them up, but they're no good. I've lived on them for the last ten years, and they're no good. You might as well squeeze your paints into the sink and turn on the tap for all the flicker of appreciation you get out of them. Then there are the snobs, the semi-demimondaines of the political set; but they are a seedy lot, with the minds and the interests of chorus-girls. You might whip up a little excitement at Oxford and Cambridge, but it would only vanish as soon as the young idiots came in contact with London and fell in love. . . . No. Behind the scenes of the music-hall is no good. We must make a direct onslaught on the general public. They must be taught that there is such a thing as art and that there are men devoted to the disinterested development of their talents--men who have no desire to top the bill or to make five hundred a week; men who recognize that art is European, universal, the invisible fabric in which human life is contained, and are content, like simple workmen, to keep it in repair."

"I don't know," said Mendel, "if my brother-in-law Moscowitsch is typical, but he regards art which does not make money as a waste of time."

"Oh! He is a Jew and uneducated. That's where Tolstoi went so wrong. He confused the simplicity of art with the simplicity of the peasant, the dignity of the unsophisticated with the dignity that is achieved through sophistication. It may seem absurd to talk of bringing about anything so big through little Cluny, but it is not only possible, it is inevitable. The staleness of London cannot go on, and Paris seemed just the same to me. Stagnation is intolerable. There must come a movement towards freedom and a grander gesture, and the only free people are the painters. They are the only people whose work has not become servile and vulgarized. Through them lies the natural outlet. . . . Oh! I have been thinking and thinking, and I thank God we met before you had been spoiled by success or I had been ruined by my rotten swindling life--though that has had its advantages too, and I can meet the dealers on their own ground, and if necessary advertise as impudently as any of the music-hall artists."

Oliver began to hammer on the door. He went and unlocked it and let her in.

"You can talk as much as you like now," he said. "I've said my say."

"I heard you," she replied, "talking to Kühler as if he was a crowd in Hyde Park."

Mendel was lost in thought. He was baffled by this association of art with things like politics and music-halls, which he had always accepted as part of the world's constitution but essentially unimportant. He had no organized mental life. His ideas came direct from his instincts to his mind, and were either used for immediate purposes or dropped back again to return when wanted. However, he recognized the passionate nervous energy that made Logan's words full and round, and he was glad to have him so accessible and so eager and purposeful. On the whole, it did not matter to him why Logan thought his work so important. No one else thought it so, and certainly no one else had taken so much trouble to help it to find recognition. Logan seemed to promise him public fame, and that would delight and reassure his father and mother more than anything else. They treasured every mention of his name in the newspapers, pasted the cuttings in a book, and produced it for every visitor to the house.

Struggling for ideas with which to match Logan's, he became instinctively aware that his friend's enthusiasm was deliberate, not in itself faked, but artificially heated. Behind it lay a deeper passion, from which he was endeavouring to divert the energy it claimed.

Sitting between Logan and Oliver, Mendel could almost intercept the current of feeling that ran between them. It offended him as an indecency that they should have so little control over themselves as to reveal their condition of mutual obsession. . . . It reminded him of his impression of the police-court, where the secret sores of society were exposed nakedly, and queer, helpless, shameless, unrestrained creatures were dealt with almost like parcels in a shop. And again he had the sensation of being bound to them, of being confined with them in that little room, of a dead pressure being upon him, until he must scream or go mad.

He looked at them. Did they not feel it too? Logan was lying back with his hands beneath his head and his lips pressed together and a scowl on his face, looking as though his thoughts and his destiny were almost, but, of course, not quite too much for him. Oliver was looking out of the window with her hands on her hips, humming. She laughed and said:--

"I'd sooner live with an undertaker than an artist. He would be up to a bit of fun sometimes, and he'd do his work without making such a fuss about it."

"There's an undertaker at the corner of the next street. You'd better ask him to take you on."

"As a corpse?" asked Mendel, exploding and spluttering at what seemed to him a very good joke. The others turned and looked at him solemnly, but neither of them laughed, and gradually his amusement subsided and he said lamely:--

"I thought it was very funny."

"Oh! for goodness' sake let's go and have something to eat," said Oliver. "You're turning the place into a tomb with your silence. One'd think you were going to be crowned King of England instead of just holding a potty little exhibition."

"He is going to be crowned King of Artists," said Mendel, making another attempt at a joke.

"By God!" said Logan, "they'd kill me if they knew what I was like inside. Do you ever feel like that, Kühler, that all the birds in the cage would peck you to death for having got outside it? I do. I never see a policeman without feeling he is going to arrest me."

"I used to feel like that sometimes," replied Mendel, "until I was arrested and realized that policemen are just people like anybody else. The man who arrested me was a very nice man."

"Oh! I'm sick of your feelings," cried Oliver, "and I want my dinner."

"All right," said Logan, reaching for his hat; "we'll go to the Pot-au-Feu and afterwards to the Paris Café and fish for critics. I shall nobble one or two swells through Tysoe. We'll pick up the more crapulous and lecherous at the café, and Oliver shall be the bait. So look your prettiest, my dear. . . . Let's have a look at you."

He lit the gas and made her stand beneath it.

"You'll do," he said, patting her cheek. "Come along."

He put his arm through hers. She gave a wriggle of pleasure and pressed close to him.

Mendel followed them downstairs with an omen at his heart. He felt sure that something violent would happen.

* * * * *

But nothing violent did happen. The evening was extraordinarily light-hearted and pleasant. Logan was his old self again, cracking jokes, mimicking people almost to their faces, giving absurd descriptions of his interviews with dealers and buyers, and concocting a burlesque history of his life. Mendel had never laughed so much since he was at the Detmold. His sides ached, and he was hard put to it to keep his countenance when at the café Logan caught two critics and told them that they must make no mistake this time: their reputations were at stake, nay, the reputation of art criticism was at the cross-roads, and art was on the threshold of its greatest period, and criticism should be its herald, not its camp-follower.

"You fellows," said Logan, "use your brains, you are articulate. We are apt to get lost in paint, in coloured dreams of to-morrow and the spaces of the night. We lose touch with the world, with life. We are dependent on you--even the greatest genius is dependent on you. You are the real patrons of art. The herd follows you. Criticism must not shirk its duty. The kind of thing that happened with Manet, with Whistler, ought not to happen again."

The two critics were unused to such treatment from painters. Oliver used her eyes upon them, detached one of them into a flirtation and left the other to Logan's mercies. Logan's blood was up. Here was a game he dearly loved, talking, bullying, hypnotizing another man out of his individuality. He invented monstrously, outrageously--concocted a whole new technique of painting, the discovery of which he ascribed to Mendel's genius, and ended up by saying that painting should be to England what music had been to Germany, a national and at the same time a universal art.

The critic had drunk enough to take it all seriously, and he promised to call and see the work of both painters. His colleague, on the other hand, made arrangements to take Oliver out to tea and won her promise to come and see him at his flat.

"That's all right," said Logan, as they left the café at closing time. "They will remember our names. They will forget how they came to know them and they will write about us."

III

SUCCESS

IT was all very well for Logan to talk about modern England being a music-hall, but his methods were almost identical with those of the publicists whom he decried. The greater part of his energy went to find a market for his wares, leaving very little for the production of the wares themselves. Because he was excited and busy and full of enthusiasm, he took it for granted that he was in a vigorous condition and that his vision of the future of art would be expressed in art. He talked volubly of what he was doing and what he intended to do, even while he worked, and his nerves were so overwrought that he contracted a horror of being alone. Though Oliver jeered at him as he worked he would not let her go out, and when once or twice she insisted, he could not work, and went round to see Mendel and prevented his working either.

Mendel knew nothing of markets and dealers and the relation of art to the world and its habits and institutions. He was carried off his feet by his friend's torrential energy, believed what he said, wore his thoughts as he would have worn his hat, and lived entirely for the exhibition which was to do such wonders for him. Twelve exhibits were required of him. He would have had forty-eight ready if he had been asked for them. When he missed the delight and the pure joy he had had in working, he told himself that these emotions were childish and unworthy of a man, and a nuisance, because they would have prevented him from knowing clearly what he wanted to do. He dashed at his canvas with a fair imitation of Logan's manner, slung the paint on to it with bold strokes, saying to himself: "There! That will astonish them! That will make them see what painting is!"

And every now and then he would remember that he was in love. He must paint love as it had never been painted before.

For his subject he chose Ruth in the cornfield, but very soon tired of painting ears of corn, so he left it looking like a square yellow block, and painted it up until it resembled a slice of Dutch cheese. Only when he came to Ruth's face and tried to make it express all the love with which his heart was overflowing did he paint with the old fastidious care, but even that could not keep him for long, and he returned to his corn, the shape of which had begun to fascinate him, and he wanted somehow to get it into relation with the hill on which it was set. But he could do nothing with it, and had to go back to Ruth and love.

The effect was certainly startling and novel, and Logan was enthusiastic.

"That's it," he said. "The nearest approach to modern art is the poster, which is not art, of course, because it is not designed by artists. But it does convey something to the modern mind, it does jog it out of its routine and habitual rut. Now, your picture wouldn't do for a poster. It is too good, but it has the same kind of effect. Stop! Look! Listen! Wake up, and see that there are beautiful women in the world and blue skies, and love radiant over all! This woman has nothing to do with what you felt for your wife when you proposed to her, or with what the parson said when the baby died: she is the woman the dream of whom lives always in your heart, although you have long forgotten it. She is the beauty you have passed by for the sake of peace and quiet and a balance at your bank."

"Do you think it is a good picture?" asked Mendel.

"I think it is a good beginning. Two or three more like that and there will be a sensation. There will have to be policemen to regulate the crowd."

Mendel caught his mood of driving excitement and really was convinced that he had broken through to a style of his own, and to the beginning of something that might be called modern art.

He was a little dashed when, after Logan had gone, he fetched his mother over to see it, and all she could find to say was:--

"You used not to paint like that."

"No, of course not," he said impatiently. "The old way was limited, too limited. It was all very well for painting the life down here, just what I saw in front of me. This picture is for an exhibition, all by myself with one other man."

"Logan?" asked Golda dubiously.

"Yes. It is a great honour to give a private exhibition like that at my age. It is most unusual. This is the beginning of a new style. I'm beginning a new life."

"You are not going away?" said Golda in a sudden panic that he was to be snatched away from her.

"I should never go away until you gave your permission," he said. "I am not so very different from Harry that I want to go away and leave my people."

"I never know what will come of that painting of yours."

"Success!" he said jestingly. "And fame and money, and beautiful ladies in furs and diamonds, and carriages and motor-cars, and fine clothes and rings on everybody's fingers."

"I would rather have you seated quietly in my kitchen than all the gold of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba," said Golda.

"Then please like my picture."

"I don't like it."

"Then _say_ you like it."

"I don't like it."

"I shall wipe it out then."

"Your new friends will like it."

"_I_ like it," he said. "I don't think it is a very good picture, but it means something to me."

And he longed for Morrison to come and see it, for it was the first picture that had directly to do with her. The portrait of her was hardly more than a drawing. What he called an "art student" might have done it, but this Ruth, he felt, was the beginning of his work as an artist, and he thought fantastically that when Morrison saw it she would see that he was to be treated with respect and would fall in by his side, and they would live happily, or at least solidly, ever after.

"Solid" was his great word, and he used it in many senses. It conveyed to his mind the quality of which he could most thoroughly approve. If a thing, or a person, or an action, or an emotion were what he called "solid," then it was a matter of indifference to him whether it was in the ordinary sense good or bad. He was perfectly convinced that if Morrison could only be brought to reason, then his life would solidify and he would be able to go on working in peace.

Meanwhile he was anything but solid. His work, his life, his ideas, his ambition had all melted under Logan's warm touch and were pouring towards the crucial exhibition. Mendel looked forward to it feverishly, because it was to put an end to his present condition, in which he was like a wax candle, luminous, but fast sinking into nothingness. If only he could reach the exhibition in time, the wind of fame would blow out the flame that was reducing him and he would be able to start afresh . . . But all the time as he worked words of Logan's rolled in his mind, and had no meaning whatever, except that they made him think of music-halls and motor-buses and women's legs in tights and newspapers and electric sky-signs spelling out words letter by letter. Out of this hotch-potch pictures, works of art, were to emerge. They were to take their place in it and, according to Logan, reduce it to order. But how was it possible? . . . In the quiet, ordered, patriarchal world of the Jews a rare nature might arise, but in that extraordinary confusion nothing rare could survive. Beauty could never compete on equal terms with women's legs in tights and electric sky-signs; it could never produce an impression on minds obsessed and crammed to overflowing with the multitudinous excitements of the metropolis.

Mendel was convinced that Logan was right, that beauty must emerge to establish authority, and he thought of himself as engaged in a combat with a huge, terrible monster. Every stroke of his brush was a wound upon its flanks and an abomination the less. Yet he loved all the things against which he was fighting, because they made the world gay and stimulating and wonderful. He could see no reason why he should change the world. It was full enough of change already. Why, in his own time, the electric railways and the motor-buses had brought an amazing transformation in the life of the East End. No one now worked for such little wages as his father had done at the stick-making, and the life of the streets had lost its terrors and dangers. The young men had better things to do than to fight each other or to pelt old Jews with mud, and there was no reason to suppose that such changes would stop where they were.

However, he had Logan's word for it, and Logan had given art a new importance in his eyes. He could not think it out himself without getting hopelessly confused, and there was nothing for it but to go on with his work.

Other relief he had none. He had written three ardent letters to Morrison, telling her, absolutely without restraint, of his love and his need for her, and she had not replied. He was too much hurt to write again, and as he worked he began to hate love, being in love, and the idea of it. He persuaded himself that it was a weakness, and he had ample reason for thinking so, when he compared his loose condition with his old clear singleness of purpose. What chiefly exasperated him in this indefinite unsuccessful love of his was that it exposed him to the passion, every day growing more furious, between Logan and Oliver. It made his own emotions seem fantastic, with the most vital current of his being pouring out in a direction far removed from the rest of his life, apparently ignoring the solid virtues of his Jewish surroundings and the elated vigour of his career among the artists.

"It will not do!" he told himself. "I will not have it! What is this love? Just nonsense invented by people who are afraid of their passions. A lady indeed? _Is_ she? A lady is only a woman dressed up. She must learn that she is a woman, or I will have nothing to do with her."

And sometimes he could persuade himself that he had driven Morrison from his thoughts. He finished the portrait of her from memory and was convinced that it was the end of her. It was a good picture and pretty enough to find a buyer, and there it ended. He had got what he wanted of her and could pluck her out of his thoughts.

Logan said it was a very fine picture, a real piece of creation.

"And if that doesn't make them see how damned awful their Public School system is in its effect on women, I'll eat my hat. You've had your revenge, my boy. You have shown her up. Why don't you call it _The Foolish Virgin_? Of all the mischievous twaddle that is talked in this mischievous twaddling country the notion of love is the worst. You can't love a woman unless you live with her, and a woman is incapable of loving a man unless he lives with her. By Jove! We'll hang it and my portrait of Oliver side by side in the exhibition, and I'll call mine _The Woman who Did._"

"I won't have them side by side," said Mendel. "I want our pictures kept separate. I don't want it said that we are working together."

"But we _are_ working together."

"Yes. But along our own lines. We're only together really in our independence. You said yourself that we didn't want to found a school."

"That's true," replied Logan, "but I don't see why we shouldn't have our little joke."

"I don't joke with art," said Mendel grimly, and that settled the matter.

It was the first time he had set his will against his friend's, and he was surprised to find how soft Logan was. Surely, then, it was he who was the leader, he who was blazing the new trail for art. . . . He had to bow to the fact that Logan had a programme while he had none. However, having once asserted his will, he became critical, and was not again the docile little disciple he had been.

Logan wanted to draw up a manifesto for the catalogue, to enunciate the first principles of modern art, namely, that a picture must have (_a_) not merely a subject, but a conception based on but not bounded by its subject; (_b_) form, meaning the form dictated by the logic of the conception, which must of necessity be different from the logic dictated by the subject, which would lead either to the preconceptions and prejudices of the schools or to irrelevant and non-pictorial considerations. All this was set out at some length, and appended were a number of maxims, such as:--

"In art the important thing is art.

"Abstraction precedes selection.

"Art exists to keep in circulation those spiritual forces, such as æsthetic emotion, which are denied in ordinary human communications.

"Photography has released art from its ancient burden of representation," etc., etc.

With the spirit of this manifesto Mendel was in agreement, though he could make but little of its letter. He refused to agree to it because so much talk seemed to him unnecessary.

"If we can say what we mean to say in paint, then we need not talk. If we cannot say it in paint, then we have no right to talk."

"You'd soon bring the world to a standstill," said Logan, "if you limited talk to the people who have a right to it. It is just those people who never open their mouths. I think it is criminal of them, just out of shyness and disgust, to give the buffoons and knaves an open field."

"All the same," grunted Mendel, "I am not going to agree to the manifesto. People will read it and laugh at it, and never look at the pictures. You seem to think of everything but them. I wonder you don't set up as a dealer."

"You're overworking," said Logan, "that's what you are doing. And directly the exhibition is open I shall pack you off to Brighton."

* * * * *

Already a week before the opening they began to feel that the eyes of London were upon them. They crept about the streets half-shamefacedly like conspirators, relaxed and wary, waiting for the moment when their triumph should send their shoulders back and their heads up, and they would march together through a London which owed its salvation to them. Not since his portrait had appeared in the Yiddish paper had Mendel been so defiant and so morosely arrogant.

He was ill with excitement and could not do a stroke of work. Every minute of the day he spent with Logan and Oliver, to whom Tysoe was often added. He dined with them at the Pot-au-Feu, took them all out to lunch and tea at places like Richmond and Kew, had them to his house, and was squeezed by the approaching success to buy Logan's two largest pictures before the public could have access to them.

"They are masterpieces!" he cried, swinging his long hands, "absolute masterpieces! You don't know how much good it does me to be with you two. Absolutely sincere, you are! That's what I like about you. Sincere! One looks for sincerity in vain everywhere else. Sincerity has vanished from the theatre, the novel, music, poetry. I suppose it is democracy--letting the public in behind the scenes, so that they see through all the tricks."

"An artist isn't a conjurer!" said Mendel.

"That is just what artists have been," cried Logan, "and they can't bluff it out any more."

"Exactly!" gurgled Tysoe, who when he was roused from his habitual weak lethargy lost control of his voice, so that it wobbled between a shrill treble and a husky bass. "Exactly! That's what I like about you two. No bluff, no tricks. You do what you want to do and damn the consequences. Ha! ha!"

So ill was Mendel just before the exhibition that Logan refused to allow him anywhere near it, and insisted that they should both go to Brighton, leaving Oliver to go to the private view and spy out the land.

Oliver protested. She wanted to go to Brighton.

"You shall have a new dress and a new hat," said Logan. "You must go to the private view like a real lady. Cluny doesn't know you, and you must go up to him every now and then and ask him in a loud voice what the prices are. You might even pretend to be a little deaf and make him speak clearly and distinctly."

The idea tickled Mendel so that he began to laugh, could not stop himself, and was soon almost hysterical.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Oliver, shaking him.

He gasped:--

"I--I was laughing at the idea of your being a real lady. Ha! ha! ha!"

She gave him a clout over the head that sobered him. Logan pounced on her like a tiger.

"You devil!" he said. "You she-devil! Don't you see the poor boy's ill?"

"What's that to me?" she screamed, with her head wobbling backwards and forwards horribly as he shook her. "It's n-nothing t-to m-me!"

She caught Logan by the wrist and sent him spinning, for she was nearly as strong as he.

"Go to Brighton!" she shouted. "I don't care. I'll be glad to be rid of you both. You won't find me here when you come back, that's all, you and your little hurdy-gurdy boy! You only need a monkey and an organ to make you complete. Why don't you try it? You'd do better at that than out of pictures."

Logan could not contain himself. His rage burst out of him in a howl like that of a wind in a chimney, a dismal, empty moan. He stood up, and the veins on his neck swelled and his mouth opened and shut foolishly, for he could find nothing to say.

"You slut, you squeezed-out dishclout, you sponge!" he roared at last. "Clear out, you drab! Clear out into the streets, you trull! Draggle your skirts in the mud, you filth, you octopus! Sell the carcase that you don't know how to give, you marble!"

She flung up her hands and sank on to her knees, and let down her hair and moaned:--

"O God! O God! O God!"

Logan's fury snapped.

"For God's sake! For God's sake!" he said. "What has come over us? Oh, God help us! What are we doing? What are we coming to? Nell! Nell! I didn't know what I was saying!"

He went down on his knees beside her, and Mendel, who had been numbed but inwardly elated by the storm, could not endure the craven surrender, the cowardly reconciliation, and he left them.

Out in the street he stood tottering on the curb, and spat into the gutter, with extreme precision, between the bars of a grating.

* * * * *

At Brighton, whither they went next day, Logan explained himself.

"It is extraordinary how near love is to hate, and how rotten love becomes if hate is suppressed--stale and tasteless and vapid."

"Are you talking about yourself and Oliver?" asked Mendel.

"Yes."

"Then please don't. I don't mind what happens between you and her so long as it doesn't happen in front of me."

"I'm sorry," said Logan; "but it can't always be prevented. I don't see the use of pretence."

"Neither do I. But some things are your own affair, and it is indecent to let other people see them."

"Oh, a row's a row!" said Logan cheerfully. "And one is all the better for it."

"But if a woman treated me like that I should never speak to her again."

"Love's too deep for that. You can't stand on your dignity in love."

"I should make her understand once and for all that I would not have it."

"Then she would deceive you. If you played the tyrant over a girl like Oliver she would deceive you."

Mendel stared and his jaw dropped. Had Logan forgotten the night in Paris? Was he such a fool as to pretend he did not know, could not see that the whole liberation of frenzy in Oliver dated from that night? . . . Oh, well! It was no affair of his.

To change the subject he said:--

"We ought to get the press-cuttings to-morrow. I wonder if we shall sell the lot? It's a good beginning, having tickets on your two."

"I bet we sell the lot in a week. Oliver has two of the critics in her pocket. What do you say to giving a party in honour of the event? We can afford to forgive our enemies now, and there's a social side to the movement which we ought not to neglect."

Mendel made no reply. They were sitting on the front. The smooth, glassy sea, reflecting the stars and the lights of the pier, soothed and comforted him. Brighton was to him like a part of London, and he sank drowsily into the happy fantasy that he was being thrust out of the streets towards the stars and the vast power that lay beyond them. He was weary of the streets and the clamour, and he wanted peace and serenity, rest from his own turbulence, the peace which has no dwelling upon earth and lives only in eternity.

"How good it would be," he said suddenly, "if one could just paint without a thought of what became of one's pictures."

"That's no good," replied Logan. "One must live."

* * * * *

The first batch of cuttings arrived in the morning. They were brief, for the most part, quite respectful and appreciative. Mendel learned, to his astonishment, that he was influenced by Logan, and one critic lamented that a promising young painter, who could so simply render the life of his race, should have been infected with modern heresies. There was no uproar, neither of them was hailed as a master, and Logan in more than one instance was dismissed as an imitator of Calthrop.

"Calthrop!" said Logan, gulping down his disappointment and disgust. "Calthrop! Oh well, it is good enough for a beginning. It would have been very different if you had let me print the manifesto. The swine need to be told, you know. They want a lead. . . . We'll wait for the Sunday papers."

* * * * *

London was curiously unchanged when they returned. Mendel was half afraid he would be recognized as they came out of Charing Cross Station, but no one looked at him. The convulsion through which he had lived had left people going about their business, and he supposed that if an earthquake happened in Trafalgar Square people would still be going about their business in the Strand.

They were eager for Oliver's account of the private view, and took a taxi-cab to Camden Town. She was wearing her new dress and was quite the lady: shook hands with Mendel and asked him haughtily in a mincing tone how he was. From all these signs he judged that the exhibition had been a success.

"Quite a lot of people came," she said. "Real swells. There were two motor-cars outside."

"Yes," said Logan. "Tysoe agreed to leave his car outside for a couple of hours to encourage people to go in."

"Kühler's picture of the girl with short hair sold at once," she said.

His pleasure in this news was swallowed up in his dislike of hearing Morrison spoken of by her.

"All your drawings but one are gone, Logan. I listened to what people said. They wanted to know who you were, and Cluny said you had a great reputation in the North. People laughed out loud at Kühler's _Ruth_, and I heard one man say it was only to be expected. He said the Jews can never produce art. They can only produce infant prodigies."

IV

REACTION

LOGAN made nearly two hundred pounds out of the exhibition and Mendel over a hundred. His family rejoiced in his triumph. A hundred pounds was a good year's income to them. They rejoiced, but it was an oppression to him to go back to them and to talk in Yiddish, in which there were no words for all that he cared for most. Impossible to explain to them about art, for they had neither words nor mental conceptions. Art was to them only a wonderful way of making money, a kind of magic that went on in the West End, where, once a man was established, he had only to open his pockets for money to fall into them.

Up to a point he could share their elation, for in his bitter moments he too was predatory. If the Christian world would not admit him on equal terms he had no compunction about despoiling it.

The words "infant prodigy" stuck in his throat, and with his family it seemed indeed impossible that the Jews could produce art. How could they, when they had no care for it? And how had he managed to find his way to it? . . . Going back over his career step by step it seemed miraculous, and as though there were a special providence governing his life--Mr. Kuit, the Scotch traveller, Mitchell, Logan, all were as though they had been pushed forward at the critical moment. And for what? Merely to exploit an infant prodigy with a skilful trick? . . . He could not, he would not believe it. The pressure that had driven him along, the pressure within himself, had been too great for that, just to squeeze him out into the open and to fill his pockets with money. There was more meaning in it all than that, more shape, more design.

Yet when he considered his work he was lacerated with doubt. It ended so palpably in the portrait of his father and mother, and he knew that he could never go back to that again. An art that was limited to Jewry was no art. Among the Jews no light could live. They would not have it. They would snuff it out, for it was their will to dwell in dark places and to wait upon the illumination that never came, as of course it never would until they looked within themselves.

Within himself he knew there was a most vivid light glowing, a spark which only needed a breath of air upon it to burst into flame. He was increasingly conscious of it, and it made him feel transparent, as though nothing could be hidden from those who looked his way. What was there to hide? If there was evil, it lived but a little while and was soon spent, while that which was of worth endured and grew under recognition.

Thence came his devotion to Logan, who simply ignored everything that apparently gave offence to others and saluted the rare, rich activity. It was nothing to Logan that he was a Jew and poor and uneducated: he was educated in art, and what more did he want? Logan was a friend indeed, and had proved it over and over again. He would take his doubts to Logan and they would be healed, but first he must go to the exhibition, the thought of which made him unhappy and uneasy.

Cluny received him with open arms:--

"A most successful exhibition. A great success. I hope you will let me have some of your work by me. A most charming exhibition. There was only one mistake, if I may say so: the _Ruth._"

Mendel walked miserably through the rooms. All Logan's pictures were in the best light: his own were half in shadow.

"Mr. Logan has the making of a great reputation," said Cluny, "a very great reputation."

"Oh, very clever!" said Mendel, suddenly exasperated more by Logan's pictures than by the dealer.

Indeed, "very clever" was the right description for Logan's work. It attracted and charmed and tickled, but it did not satisfy. The pictures gave Mendel the same odd sense of familiarity as the picture in Camden Town had done, and turning suddenly, his eye fell on his own unhappy _Ruth_. The figure was shockingly bad. He acknowledged the simpering sentimentality of the face. And he had been trying to paint love! But in spite of the figure, the picture held him. It was to him the matrix of the whole exhibition. Wiping out of consideration his own early drawings, it explained and accounted for every other piece of work. The least dexterous of them all, it had freshness and vitality and a certain thrust of simplification which everything else lacked. It was "solid," and worth all Logan's pictures put together.

"Very good prices," said the dealer. "Very good indeed."

Mendel paid no attention to him. He wanted to study his _Ruth_, to find out its precise meaning for him, and, if possible, in what mysterious part of his talent it had originated.

It had made him feel happy again and had restored his confidence. He was serenely sure of himself, without arrogance. He was almost humble, yet tantalized because he could not think of a whole picture in the terms of that one piece of paint. He remembered the strange excitement in which he had conceived it, the almost nonchalance with which he had executed it. And to think that not a soul had seen it! The fools! The fools!

He was ashamed to be seen looking so intently at his own work. The next day he was back again and told Cluny that it was not for sale.

"I don't think it's a seller, Mr. Kühler," said Cluny.

"It's not for sale," repeated Mendel.

He went every day and had no other thought. He wandered about in a dream, not seeing people in the streets, not hearing when he was spoken to.

On the fifth day as he entered Cluny's he began to tremble, and he fell against a man who was coming out. The blood rushed to his heart and beat at his temples. He knew why it was. The air seemed full of an enchantment that settled upon him and drew him towards the gallery. He knew he was going to see her, and she was there with Clowes, standing in front of his _Ruth._ Clowes was laughing at it, but Morrison, with brows knit, obviously angry, was trying to explain it.

"I'm trying to explain the cornfield to Clowes," she said. "Do come and help me."

"I can't explain it myself," he said, marvelling at the ease of the meeting. At once he and she were together and Clowes was out of it, like a dweller in another world.

"I don't think you ought to do things you can't explain," said Clowes.

"Then you are wiping out Michael Angelo, and El Greco, and Blake, and Piero."

"Yes," said Mendel. "You are wiping out inspiration altogether."

"Oh! if you think you are inspired I have nothing more to say," replied Clowes rather tartly. She had felt instinctively that Mendel and Morrison would meet at the gallery, and was annoyed all the same that it had happened. She knew how they were regarded, and she herself did not approve. Morrison knew how impossible it was, and Clowes thought she ought not to allow it to go on.

Clowes also recognized how completely she was out of it, and she made excuses and left them.

"You are the only one who likes it," he said.

"I don't like it, but I know that it isn't bad. It isn't good either, but it is real and it is you."

"I want no more than that," he said, "from you."

In his mind he had prepared all sorts of reproaches for his meeting with her, but they fell away from his lips. He could only accept that it was good and sweet and natural to be with her.

He told her quite simply how he had come to paint the picture, and how he had tried to paint his love for her. She smiled and shook away her smile.

"I'm glad it isn't anything like that really," she said.

"I tried to tell you what it was like when I wrote to you."

"Yes."

That was all she could say. She had been very unhappy, often desperately wretched, because her instinct fought so furiously against the idea of love with him whom she loved.

"The picture has made me very happy," she added. "It means that what I have been wanting to happen to you has happened. You _are_ different, you know. I can talk to you so much more easily."

He suggested that they should walk in the Park and spend the day together, and she consented, glad that all the reproaches and storms she had dreaded should be so lightly brushed away.

* * * * *

Happy, happy lovers, for whom nothing can defile the heavenly beauty of this earth; happy, from whom Time streams away, bearing with it all the foolish, restless activity of men; happy, for whom the pomps and vanities of the world are as though they had never been! Thrice happy two, who in your united spirit bear so easily all the beauty, all the suffering, all the sorrow in the world, and bring it forth in joy, the flower of life that cometh up as a vision, fades, and sheds its seed upon the rich, warm soil of humanity. Emblem of immortality for ever shining in the union of spirits, in the enchantment of two who are together and in love.

* * * * *

So happy were they that they wandered for the most part in silence through the avenues and over the grassy spaces of the Park.

Of the two, she had the better brain, and, indeed, the stronger character. She had been toughened in the struggle to break out of the web of hypocrisy and meaningless tradition of gentility in which her family was enmeshed, and the freedom she had won was very precious to her. She kept it as a touchstone by which to measure her acquaintance and her experience, and, using it now, she realized that there were two distinct delights in being with Mendel on this tender autumn day; one tempted her with its promise of furious joys and wild, baffling emotions. It seduced her with its suggestion that this way lay kindness, the gift to him of his desire, peace, and satisfaction. But behind the suggestion of kindness lay a menace to her freedom, which, being so much more precious than herself, she longed for him to share, as in the keen happiness of that day he had done. That was the other delight, more serene and more rare, infinitely more powerful, and she would not have it sacrificed to the less. The gift of herself to which she was tempted must mean the blending of her freedom with his, for without that there would be no true gift, only a surrender.

She could not think it out or make it clear to herself, but she knew that it was surrender he was asking, and she knew that if she surrendered she would be no more to him in a little while than the other women of passage with whom his life was darkened.

Ought she not then to tell him, to keep him from living in false hopes? She persuaded herself that she ought, but she did not wish to spoil this delicious day. It was such torture to her when he blazed out at her and he became ugly with egoism.

"Of course," he said, "the _Ruth_ makes all the difference. I can't let you go now, because you are the only one who has really understood my work. I am almost frightened of it myself, and it makes me feel desperately lonely when I think of all I shall have to go through to get at what it really means."

"No. If you want me like that I don't want you to let me go," she said, "for it is so important."

"Yes," he said. "It may mean an entirely new kind of picture, for I don't know anybody's work that has quite what is hammering away in my head to get out. It must be because you love me that you can feel it when no one else can. Even to Logan it is only like a superior poster."

How adorable he was in this mood of simplicity and humility! She could relax her vigilance, and sway unreservedly to his mood and give him all that he required of her, her clearness, her sensitive purity.

"You are like no other woman in the world to me," he went on. "You fill me with the most wonderful joy, like a Cranach or a Dürer drawing. I can forget almost that you are a woman, so that it is a most wonderful surprise that you are one after all. You are the only person in the world whom I can place side by side with my mother."

"You don't know what it is to me," she said, "to have a friend so strong and frank as you are."

He put out his hand and laid it on her arm wonderingly, as if to satisfy himself that she was really there, much as on his first visit to Hampstead he had touched the grass.

"I think I shall live to be very old," he said, "and you will be just the same to me then as you are now."

"Oh, Mendel!"

"Say that again!" he said, but she could not speak. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she hung her head. She longed to take him to her arms and to fondle him, to make him young, to charm away the pitiful old weary helplessness that he had. Reacting from this mood in her, which he did not understand and took for the first symptoms of surrender, he became wild and boastful, and clowned like a silly boy to attract her attention.

Her will set against him. She could not endure the sudden swoop from the highest sympathy to the gallantry of the streets, and when he was weary of his tricks she tried to bring him to his senses by asking him suddenly:--

"Is Logan a nice man?"

"He is my best friend. He has wonderful ideas and energy like a steam-engine, and he has suffered too. He is not like the art students who expect painting pictures to be as easy as knitting. He could have been almost anything, but he believes that art is the most important thing of all. He has made a great difference to me, by teaching me to be independent. . . . I will take you to see him one day."

"I should like to meet him, because he has made a great difference in you."

"He steals."

That gave Morrison a shock, for Mendel seemed to be stating the fact as a recommendation.

"Yes. When he has no money he steals. I went with him once and we stole some reproductions."

She was sorry she had mentioned Logan. Mendel was a different creature at once. Their glamourous happiness was gone. Logan seemed to have stalked in between them and the purity of their delight withered away.

He felt it as strongly as she, but thought she was deliberately escaping from him, that she was fickle and could not stay out the day's happiness. Women, he knew, were like that. They gave out just as the best was still to come.

It was dusk and they were in a lonely glade. He pounced on her and drew her to him:--

"I want you to kiss me."

"No--no!"

"Yes--yes--yes! I say you shall. I will not have you let it all slip away."

"Don't! Don't!" she said, in a passion of resentment. He was spoiling it all. How could he be so crude and insensible after this matchless day?

At last he was convinced of her anger.

"I don't understand you," he said. "Don't you want anything like that?"

"It has spoiled the day for me," she answered, "or almost, for nothing could really spoil it."

She walked on and he stood still for a moment. Then he ran after her.

"Did you . . . did you hate me then?"

"No, I didn't hate you. I hated myself more because I can't say what I feel."

"If you don't love me like that," he said, "I love you all the same. I must see you often--always. I can't live, I can't work, if you don't let me see you. . . . No. That isn't true. I shall work whatever happens."

How she loved his honesty! He was making no attempt to creep behind her defences. They had baffled him, and he counted his wounds cheerfully.

"If you don't love me like that," he went on excitedly, "it doesn't make any difference. You are my love all the same. You are in all my thoughts, in every drop of my blood, and you can do with me as you will. If you don't love me like that I will never touch you. I can understand your not wanting to touch me, because I am dirty. I am dirty in my soul. I will never touch you. I promise that I will never touch you, and what you do not like in me you shall never see. . . ."

She broke down, and burst into an unrestrained fit of weeping. Why could she not make clear to him, to herself, what she felt so clearly? . . . Oh! She knew she ought to tell him to go, to spare him all the suffering that he must endure, but also she knew by the measure of her need for him how sorely he must need her. Their need of each other was too profound, too strong, too passionate, easily to find its way to surface life, nor could it be satisfied with sweets too easily attained. . . . She must wait. To leave him or to surrender to him would be a betrayal of that high mystery wherein they had their spiritual meeting.

"I shall win," she said to herself, "I shall win. I know I shall win."

And she amazed him with her sudden lightness of heart. She laughed and told him how solemnly Clowes was taking it all, and how the loose-tongued busybodies were talking. . . . As if it mattered what they said! He mattered more than all of them, because they took easily what was next to hand and grew fat on it, while he fought his way upward step by step and was never satisfied, and would fight his way always step by step with bloody pains and suffering.

"Oh, Mendel!" she cried; "I'm so proud--so proud of you."

She was too swift for him. He came lumbering after her, puzzled, amazed, confounded at finding in this girl something that was so much more than woman, something that could actually live on the high level of his creative thought, something as necessary to his thought as dew to the grass and the ripening corn.

V

LOGAN GIVES A PARTY

THE impulse to take his doubts to Logan endured, and was aggravated by the wretchedness into which Mendel was plunged by Morrison's return and her powerful effect upon his life. He raged against himself as an idiot and a fool for taking her seriously and for believing that she could realize his work when as yet he understood it so little himself. If it was love, then have the love-making and get it over. If she refused, then let her go! What did she mean by slipping away just when the day's happiness began to demand utterance, closeness, intimacy, the promise of the dearest and most comfortable joys?

He knew that he was deceiving himself, that she could do just as she liked and it would make no difference, but he also knew that he mistrusted her. In his heart he suspected her of being one of those who like to pretend that life can be all roses and honey, that there can be summer without winter, day without night. . . . Just a pretty English girl, he called her, and, in his most bitter moods, he regarded himself as caught; and in that there was a certain sardonic satisfaction. It seemed appropriate that, having known many women without a particle of love for them, he should be in love with a woman who did not wish to have anything to do with him.

When he told Logan about it, that experienced individual smoked three cigarettes and was silent for ten minutes by the clock.

"It won't do," he said; "give it up. You're in love with her. Oh yes! You were bound to have your taste of it, being so young. But, for God's sake, keep it clear of your work. I know it is very delightful and all that, and like the first blush of spring, and that she seems to understand everything. First love is always the same. She seems to understand, but so do the violets in the woods, and the apple-blossom in an orchard, and the singing birds on a spring morning. They all seem to understand everything. Life is solved: there are no more problems, and the rarest flower of all is the human heart. Yet the violets and the apple-blossoms fade and the birds sing no more: the spring passes and the summer is infernally hot and stale, and winter comes at last. So it is with love and women. Nothing endures but art, and that they are physically incapable of understanding. My God! Don't I know it? A picture of mine means no more to Oliver than my boot does--rather less, because my boot is warmed with the warmth of my body. That's all _she_ understands."

He looked down at the boots and fidgeted with his hands.

"Yes. That's all _she_ understands," he repeated.

He was very haggard, and he looked up at Mendel as though he were trying to say something more than he could get into words; but Mendel was preoccupied with his own perplexities, and Logan's appealing glance was lost upon him.

"I'm older than you," Logan continued, "and of course it is difficult for me to say anything that will be of any use to you, but a man like you ought not to let life get in his way. It isn't worth it. Life is only valuable to you as a condition of working. Nothing in it ought to be valuable for its own sake. Do you hear? You ought never to have anything in your life that you couldn't sacrifice--couldn't do without."

He seemed to be rather thinking aloud than talking, and something indescribably solemn in his voice made Mendel shiver. He had hardly heard what Logan was saying and, thinking he must be in a draught, he looked towards the window.

Logan went on:--

"She'll be back in a moment. We don't often get the opportunity to talk like this. She has begun to read books, and thinks she knows about pictures now. She won't leave us alone. That damned critic has been stuffing her up and she reads all his articles."

He made a grimace of weary disgust.

"I care about you, Kühler, almost more than I do about myself, which is saying a good deal. Don't let this love business get mixed up with your work, especially if, as you say, it is Platonic--that is the worst poison of all--almost, almost. . . . Still, I'd like to see the girl. Bring her to the party. We might join up and make a quartette--if she can stand Oliver. Women can't, as a rule. They don't like full-blooded people of their own sex."

"She wants to know you," replied Mendel half-heartedly. "I'm always talking to her about you."

"All right," said Logan. "Bring her to the party."

Downstairs the front door slammed and Logan gave a nervous start. His whole aspect changed. He lost the drooping solemnity that had come come over him and was stiff, quick, and alert, and prepared to be droll, as he was when it was a question of humbugging Tysoe and Cluny.

Oliver came in with a bottle of wine under each arm. She was in very good spirits and looking remarkably handsome.

"Hello, Kühler!" she cried. "How do you like being a success? We're full of beans. We're going to take a house. Did Logan tell you?"

"No," said Mendel. "I hadn't heard of it."

"Well, it's true. We've done with the slums and being poor and all that. We're going to have a house and I'm going to have a servant, and I shall have nothing to do all day but eat chocolates and read novels and have people to tea."

"So you're going to be a real lady."

"Yes. I'm going to wear a wedding-ring, and we're going to give out that we're married, so that Mrs. Tysoe can call on me."

"You're not going to do anything of the kind," snapped Logan.

"I am. I don't see why I should have a beastly time just because you won't marry me, setting yourself up against the world and saying you don't believe in marriage."

"I don't want to be more tied to you than I am," said Logan, endeavouring to adopt a reasonable tone.

He was curiously subdued, and never took his eyes off her. Mendel had the impression that they must recently have had a quarrel. Logan was endeavouring to placate her, but she was constantly aggressive. She seemed to have gained in personality and to be possessed of a definite will. She was no longer shrouded in the mists of sensuality, but stood out clearly, a figure of such vitality that Mendel could no longer keep his lazy contempt for her. Almost admirable she was, yet he found her detestable. He thought she should be thanking her lucky stars for having found such a man as Logan; she should be taking gratefully what he chose to give her, instead of setting herself up and putting forward her own vulgar needs. If a woman threw in her lot with an artist, she ought to revel in her freedom from the petty interests and insignificant courtesies that made the lives of ordinary women so humiliating.

What was she up to? He knew that there was a deeper purpose in her, something very definite, for which she had been able to summon up her raw vitality. He could understand Logan being fascinated. If he had been in love with the woman he would have been the same, and his mind would have been swamped by sensual curiosity.

Before, he had always been rather mystified to know what Logan saw in the woman, but now the infatuation was comprehensible to him. His mind played about it with a strange delight, and he was even envious of Logan to be consumed in the heart of that mystery upon whose fringes he himself was held. And he thought that if he brought Morrison to see them he would be able to understand her better, and might even be able to place his finger on the weak place in her armour.

"You two do give me the pip," said Oliver. "You sit there as glum and silent as though you were in church. Taking yourselves too seriously, I call it."

Still in his forbearing tone Logan said:--

"We talk of things which are very hard to understand."

"Oh, give it up!" she said. "Leave all that to folk with brains and education. Why can't you just paint without talking about it? You'd get twice as much work done."

"Because, don't you see, unless you're a blasted amateur, you can't paint without rousing all sorts of questions in your mind--questions that don't seem to have anything to do with painting; but unless you attempt to answer them there's no satisfaction in working."

"Oh, cheese it!" she said; "I know what the critics look for, and it has nothing to do with brains. It is like being in love."

"Who told you that?" asked Logan with sudden heat; but before she could answer him Mendel had exploded:--

"It is nothing at all like being in love. That is what all the beastly Christians think of--being in love. And they want art always, always to remind them of that--how they have been, are, or will be in love, as they call it. And what they call being in love is nothing but a filthy lecherous longing, which is a thousand miles beneath love, and twenty thousand miles beneath art, which is so rare, so noble, so beautiful a mystery that only those whom God has chosen can understand it at all; for while you are in this state of longing you can understand, you can feel nothing at all except a hungry delight in yourself and your own sticky sensations. What can women know of art? It needs strength and will, and women have neither; they have only obstinate fancies."

When he had done he was so astonished at himself that he gasped for breath. Logan and Oliver, gaping at him, seemed ridiculous and little. Talking to them was a waste of breath, because when she was there Logan was not himself, but only a kind of excrescence upon her monstrous vitality. The room seemed to stink. It was airless and reeking with sex. He must get out and away, under the sky, among the trees, upon his beloved Hampstead. . . . Without another word he stalked away.

"Well! I never!" exclaimed Oliver. "Is Kühler in love?"

"Oh! shut up!" said Logan wearily.

* * * * *

For the party the room was cleared and a pianola was hired. The guests were invited to bring their own glasses and drink, and also any friends they liked. The result was that half the habitués of the Paris Café turned up, including Jessie Petrie, Mitchell, and Thompson, who was over for a short time from Paris, very important and mysterious because he had something to do with a forthcoming exhibition of Modern French Art which was to knock London silly. And there was a rumour that Calthrop himself was coming.

Oliver wore a new evening dress, which she had insisted on buying because she was very proud of her bust and arms. The dress was of emerald green silk and she looked very lovely in it--"Like a water nymph," said Logan, and he went out and bought her a string of red corals to give the finishing touch.

"You won't have much of this kind of thing when we move," he said. "It is to be farewell to Bohemia. I'm going to settle down to work. I've taught Kühler a thing or two, but he has taught me how to work."

"Damn Kühler! I hate him," said Oliver.

"You can hate him as much as you choose. It won't hurt him or me. I'm not a Hercules, and my work and you are about as much as I can manage."

"You're a nice one to be giving a party. You talk as though you would be in your grave next week."

"It is a farewell party."

"'Farewell to the Piano,'" laughed Oliver. "That was the last piece I learned when I had music lessons."

Mitchell was among the first to arrive. He had been ill, and looked washed-out and unwholesome. There was very little of the Public School boy left in him.

"Is Kühler coming?" he asked nervously.

"I expect so," answered Logan. "Do you know how to manage a pianola?"

"Yes. We've got one at home."

"You might play it then, to keep things going until they liven up."

Mitchell was placed at the pianola, and was still there when Mendel arrived with Morrison.

"I'm very glad to meet you," said Logan. "Kühler has talked about you so often."

"Yes," said Morrison.

"I hope you don't mind a Bohemian party. They are a mixed lot."

"No," said Morrison.

"Good God!" thought Logan. "Not a word to say for herself!"

Mendel introduced her to Oliver, who looked her up and down superciliously--this little schoolgirl in her brown tweed coat and skirt.

"I'm sorry I didn't dress," said Morrison. "I didn't know."

She shrank from the big, fleshy woman, who made her feel very unhappy. Yet she wanted to be fair. She had heard Mendel storm and rage against Oliver and she hated to be prejudiced. It distressed her not to like anybody, for she found most people likeable. She tried to be amiable:--

"I'm so glad the exhibition was such a success. Everybody is talking about it."

"Oh! yes, yes," said Oliver vacantly. Obviously she was not listening. She had eyes only for the men, and she bridled with pleasure when she attracted their attention.

Morrison was glad to escape to a corner, where she could watch the strange people and be amused by them, their attitudes and gestures and queer, conceited efforts deliberately to charm each other.

She blushed when she saw Mitchell at the pianola, and thought she had been rather foolish and weak to allow Mendel to bully her into dismissing him from her acquaintance, and she was relieved when she saw Mendel take in the situation and go up to Mitchell and tap him on the shoulder and enter into eager discussion of the pianola. She was less happy when she saw Mendel take Mitchell's place, and Mitchell make a bee-line for herself.

An astonishing change came over the music, which got into Mendel's blood. It was maddening, it was glorious to feel that he had all that wealth of sound in his hands. He knew nothing of music, and it was almost pure rhythm to him, and he wished to beat it out, to accentuate it as much as possible. The machine confounded him every now and then by running too fast or too slow, but he soon learned to pedal less violently, and then he was gloriously happy and drunk with excitement.

Astonishing, too, was the change in the company. Everybody began to talk and to laugh, and space was cleared in the middle of the room, and Clowes and a young man from the Detmold began to dance. Jessie Petrie and Weldon joined them, and soon the room was full of whirling, gliding couples.

Said Mitchell to Morrison:--

"I didn't expect to find you here. Are you going to dance?"

"No. I like watching."

He sat on the floor by her side, and, hanging his head, he said woefully:--

"So Kühler's won! Gawd! He always gets what he wants. There's no resisting him."

"Don't be absurd," said Morrison. "I hear you've been ill."

"Yes. I've been going to the dogs, absolutely to the dogs. I had to pull up. . . . I didn't know you knew Logan; but, of course, as he's so thick with Kühler----!"

"I met him for the first time to-night. What do you think of his work?"

"Flashy!" said Mitchell. "Very flashy. . . . Will you let me come and see you again?"

"I'd rather not, if you don't mind."

"Why do you dislike me so much?"

"I don't dislike you. I can't trust you not to be silly."

"Gawd! I bet I'm not half so silly as Kühler!"

"He is never silly!"

"Ah! Now you're offended!"

She turned away from him and refused to speak again. His half-flirtatious, half-patronizing manner offended her deeply, and was far more of an affront to her than Logan's almost open scorn of her as a little bread-and-butter miss. She wished Mendel would leave the pianola, but he was enthralled and could not tear himself away. He played the same tune over and over again, or went straight from one to another, swaying to and fro, beating time with his hands, swinging his head up and down.

Mitchell went very red in the face and slipped away. Presently she saw him dancing with Oliver.

After a few moments she found Logan by her side, and he said kindly:--

"I'm afraid you are not enjoying yourself much."

"Oh yes!" she gasped, in a frightened voice.

"I was thinking you were not used to this kind of thing."

"Oh yes! I often go to parties in people's studios."

"I remember, I saw you at the Merlin's Cave one night."

"Yes, I remember. I didn't enjoy that a bit. It all seemed such a sham."

"So it was," said Logan. "So is most of this. These people aren't really wicked, though they like to pretend they are. I don't dance myself. I'm too clumsy. Clog-dancing I can do, but not dancing with anybody else. . . . But perhaps I am keeping you----?"

"Oh no! I'm very happy looking on."

"Kühler's worth watching, isn't he?"

This was said with such insolent meaning that Morrison wilted like a sensitive plant. She managed to gasp out "Yes," and went on asking wild, pointless questions, with her thoughts whirling far removed from her words.

Why were all these people so impertinent, with their trick of plunging into intimate life without waiting for intimacy? She felt that in a moment Logan would be telling her all about himself and Oliver by way of luring her on to discuss Mendel. That she had no intention of doing, with him or with any one else.

"She's just a shy little fool," thought Logan, "and hopelessly, hopelessly young."

"I'm unhappy!" thought Morrison, and it seemed to her foolish and mean to be so. Her loyalty resented her weakness. She owed it to Mendel to enjoy herself and to share as far as she could his friends. But there was in the atmosphere of that gathering something that repelled her and roused the fighting quality in her, something indecent, something that hurt her as the picture of the flayed man in the anatomy book hurt her.

Mendel was playing a wild rag-time tune.

"I think I'd like to dance to this tune. You must dance with me. I don't think you ought to be out of your own party," she said to Logan, who caught her up in a great bear's hug, trod on her toes, knocked her knees, pressed his fingers so tight into her back that she could hardly bear it, and at last, as the music ceased, deposited her by Mendel's side.

"It is a marvellous thing, this machine," he said. "I should like to go on at it all night. Have you been dancing? You look hot. You said you weren't going to dance."

"I made Logan dance. He nearly killed me!"

"How did you get on?"

"Not--not very well."

"You don't like him?"

Jessie Petrie came running up: "Kühler, Kühler!" she cried. "Do, do dance with me!"

He was very angry with Morrison for daring not to like Logan, for making up her mind in two minutes that she did not like him. He gave her a furious glance as Weldon took his place and started a waltz, put his arms round Jessie's waist, and swung into the dance.

"Oh, Kühler!" said Jessie in her pretty birdlike voice, "I heard the most awful story about you the other day."

"Do be quiet!" he grunted. "Dance!"

But he was out of temper, out of tune, and the music he had been crashing out on the pianola was thudding in his head, so that he could not respond either to the music of the waltz or to Jessie's eagerness.

"Isn't it funny Thompson being back in London? I don't like him a bit now. You have spoiled me for everybody else. Do you want me to come on Friday as usual?"

"Do be quiet."

"What's the matter? You aren't dancing at all nicely and you haven't looked at me once this evening."

"No; don't come on Friday."

"Not----?"

Her voice was shrill with pain.

"No. That's all over."

She hung limp in his arms and her face was a ghastly yellow. She muttered:--

"Take me out. . . . I think I'm going to faint."

He half-carried her into the passage, where she sat on the stairs and began to cry. Neither of them noticed Clowes and the young man from the Detmold sitting above them.

"Don't cry!" he said roughly; "what have you got to cry about?"

"I never thought you only wanted me for that."

"You came to me. I didn't ask you to come."

"But I do love you so. I only want you to love me a little."

"I don't know how to love a little. When I love it is with the whole of me, and it is for always."

"But can't we be pals, just pals? We've been such pals."

"I'm sick to death of it all," he said violently, "sick to death. You're the best girl in London, Jessie, but it's no good--it's no good."

Clowes and the young man ostentatiously and with a great clatter went higher up the stairs, but neither Jessie nor Mendel heard them. The pain and the shame they were suffering absorbed them.

"I never thought," said Jessie, "it was near the end. I've always known when it was near the end before. It is like being struck by lightning."

Mendel was silent. He could do nothing. There was nothing to be said. Jessie had consoled him, comforted him, but she had only made his suffering worse. By the side of Morrison she simply did not exist, and it had been a lie to pretend that she did. That lie must be cut out.

"I never thought you only wanted me for that," she repeated, and began to move slowly down the stairs. At the bend she stopped and looked up at him, gave a little muffled cry, and moved slowly down into the dim lobby of the house.

Mendel gripped the banisters with both hands and shook them until they cracked.

"How horrible!" he muttered to himself; "how horrible!"

Upstairs, Clowes was boiling with rage. She lost all interest in her young man, and as soon as Mendel had returned to the room she raced downstairs, almost sobbing, and saying to herself:--

"That settles you, Master Kühler! That settles you!"

She darted across to Morrison, who had taken refuge in a corner, seized her by the hand and whispered:--

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

Morrison clenched her fists and her eyes blazed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the room someone began to sing:--

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

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

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

VI

REVELATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When you were born," she said.

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

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

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

"Of course."

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

Logan came to fetch him to go to the exhibition.

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

"What are you working at?"

"Nothing."

"What's the matter?"

"Sex."

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

"But I've thought of something."

"What?"

"Women don't love their children."

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

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

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

Logan laughed uncomfortably.

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

"I know," said Logan sympathetically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

"Well! what did you think of it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They are good fellows enough."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You must give her up," he said.

"I can't," gasped Logan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pretty bad."

"You have not been drinking again?"

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

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

He leaped to his feet.

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

Golda smiled at him.

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

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

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

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

VII

CONFLICT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You are going to see him again?"

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

Clowes threw up her hands and said:--

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

"When?" asked Mendel.

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

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

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

"But where is Logan?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But he will not come."

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

"Ten pounds," said Mendel.

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All right," he replied.

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

"How are you?"

"I'm very well."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mendel laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I've quarrelled with Logan."

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

"I'm so glad."

"You didn't like him. Why?"

"I thought him second-rate."

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

"Are you so sure of that?"

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

She smiled at him.

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

"It was over his woman."

"Oh yes!"

"He has left her."

"Has he been to see you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sprang to his feet and turned away from her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you want, then?"

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

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

"I want to share it."

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

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

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

She laughed at that.

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

OLIVER

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

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

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

"Why thank goodness?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think they do," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't like onions."

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

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

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

"I never do that," she cried indignantly.

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

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

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

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

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

"No. They won't."

"Why not?"

"Because they're blind."

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

"Wait."

"How long?"

"Till you can see."

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

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

"I know what I want."

"It isn't what I want."

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

"What is it?"

"Love."

"You've got it."

"You don't call this love?"

"I do."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it, then?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What breaks down?"

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

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

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

"Then you want to know what to do?"

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I want nothing."

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

"But there _is_ nothing."

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

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

"Why didn't you stay in Paris?"

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

"But if they give you nothing?"

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

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

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

"I thought you liked women, Harry."

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

"I have little enough."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

"Kümmel's mine," she said.

He ordered two Kümmels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Go on about Logan."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So it broke down again," said Mendel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

"When will she be back?"

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

He took her in his arms and kissed her.

"What is the matter?"

"Did you get my letter?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you doing?"

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

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

"Like Rousseau. He was good at roads."

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

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

"You can suggest."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But they believe in you."

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

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

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

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

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

"Come along," he said.

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

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

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

"It's a gala!" said Mendel.

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

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

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

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

Mendel was irritated and bored, and called for champagne.

"Waiter!"

But the waiter did not hear him.

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

"Waiter!"

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

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

"Champagne!" said Mendel.

"Very good, sir. One bottle?"

"Half-a-bottle," said Morrison.

"One bottle," roared Mendel.

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

The dancing began.

"Come and dance," said Morrison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

LOGAN MAKES AN END

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mr. Mendel Kühler?"

"Yes."

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

"I believe in you to the end."

To the end?

"Is he dead?" asked Mendel.

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

"Where?"

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

"Where is he now?"

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

"Thank you," said Mendel.

He asked the direction and set out at once.

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

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

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

There was no room for judgment in this tragic world.

A nurse came to fetch him.

She said:--

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

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

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

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

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

"You!"

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

"How are you feeling?"

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

"Yes."

"What are you doing?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sank back into pain again.

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

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

The policeman shook his head.

"No, sir."

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

"No."

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

"Yes."

"She was the strongest of us."

"How?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He told him now, and added:--

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

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

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

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

The nurse came and said the patient must rest.

"Don't go away!" pleaded Logan.

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

"He is very weak now," she said.

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

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

"Good, decent, quiet little men."

"We shall do good things."

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

It was finished. Logan had made an end.

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

X

PASSOVER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

He wrote and asked her to come.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Tit-a-weet!"

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

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

"Cock robin!"

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

"Tit-a-weet!"

And he looked so comical that she laughed.

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

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

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

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

"We are no longer young."

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

"Youth passes," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

As they stood on the platform she said:--

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

He gripped her fiercely by the arm.

"Come to London, now," he said.

"Not now."

"Soon."

"Very soon."

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

"Mendel! Mendel!"

_Transcriber's Note_

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

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

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

https://archive.org/details/mendelstoryofyou00canniala

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

The following changes to the text were noted:

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

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

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

-- p. 42: their voices seemed to him to come from very far away, The unheaval had stunned him, had destroyed his volition and paralysed his dreams.--Changed the comma after "away" to a period and "unheaval" to "upheaval" in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 48: "That'll do. That'll do," said Moscowitch.--Changed "Moscowitch" to "Moscowitsch" for consistency.

-- p. 84: "No," said the Professor." I don't know what that is. It certainly isn't drawing."--Changed the closing quotation mark after "Professor" to an opening quotation mark before "I".

-- p. 84: and he says: "I mean to say, that isn't drawing.--Changed the opening double quotation mark to an opening single quotation mark.

-- p. 116: You may renember her--glorious chestnut hair, big blue eyes, but as shy as a little mouse.--Changed "renember" to "remember".

-- p. 139: And then when I get home and it is just a house and I am just a girl living it it--Changed the first "it" after "living" to "in".

-- p. 158: hair brushed back from a round, well shaped brow.--Inserted a hyphen between "well" and "shaped".

-- p. 184: as they went through their Public Schools and were more and compressed into type--Inserted the word "more" between "and" and "compressed" in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 189: "But he cares for poetry and the Bible and he loves pictures. . ."--Added an additional period at the end of the sentence in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 216: finding some dam fool to take you to a music-hall--For consistency and in keeping with the Doran edition, changed "dam" to "damn".

-- p. 217: When you're starving you don't want chocolates. . .--Added an additional period at the end of the sentence in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 234: He says its something deeper--Changed "its" to "it's".

-- p. 245: No, no, no! . . . .--Deleted the fourth period in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 266: "What has happened?" Does he knock her about?"--Deleted the closing quotation mark after "happened?"

-- p. 271: "That is all very well while you are young " said Logan--Inserted a comma between "young" and the closing quotation mark.

-- p. 290: the furniture was old and exquisite. . .--Added an additional period at the end of the sentence in keeping with the Doran edition.

-- p. 297: and through that love his passion for art--Added a period at the end of the sentence.

-- p. 298: Cluny."--Inserted an opening double quotation mark at the beginning of the sentence.

-- p. 316: "O God! O God! O God!'--Changed the closing single quotation mark to a closing double quotation mark.

-- p. 341: You said you were'nt going to dance.--Changed "were'nt" to "weren't".

-- p. 344: "Yes You are very honest--Added a period after "Yes".

-- p. 351: "You can't stop it," said Logan--Added a period at the end of the sentence.

-- p. 358: "If it was my house, I would kick them out.'--Changed the closing single quotation mark to a closing double quotation mark.

-- p. 380: "What do you want, then?--Added a closing double quotation mark at the end of the sentence.

-- p. 397: "Then it's a sketch and not a picture.'--Changed the closing single quotation mark to a closing double quotation mark.

-- p. 414: clouds heaped up by the driving wind--beautiful, beautiful. . .--Added a fourth period at the end of the sentence.

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