Chapter XIV: Book THREE: The Passing of Youth (1)

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.