Chapter VI: Book ONE: East (3)

"Say another word," he shouted, "say another word and I turn you out of the house. Jeshua! I will tell you. In America it has been proved, absolutely proved in a court of law, that this Jeshua was nothing better than a pimp. It was proved by a very learned Rabbi before a Christian judge, and when the judge saw that it was proved he broke down and wept like a woman."

"I've only your word for it," said Harry, already rather dashed.

"I tell you I've seen it in print. If you like I will send for the book to America."

Harry held his peace. That settled it for him, and even Mendel was shaken by the storm his Christian inclinations had let loose.

"The Christians are liars," said Jacob. "Every one of them is a liar, and they eat filth."

There was a passion of belief in his father which Mendel could not but honour, and that other faith, so far as he knew, was held but mildly. It was charming in its results, but its spirit was unsatisfying to him who had been bred on stronger fare. All the same, his attitude towards his father's authority was changed. His simple acceptance was shaken, and he was in revolt against the repression of his dearest desires enjoined by it. His tongue was loosed and he began to talk enthusiastically to Edward Tufnell about his ambitions.

"I beat them all at the school," he used to say, "and I would never let anybody beat me. I can see more clearly than anybody. I can see colour where they can see none, and shadows where they can see none. And when I have painted them, then they can see them."

He was entirely unconscious in his egoism, and Edward was so generous a creature that he was not shocked or offended by it. He was a Quaker and as simple in his faith as a peasant, and he was young enough to know how difficult it was for the boy to expose his thoughts. After he had listened to his outpourings he would lead the boy on to talk of his experiences at the stained-glass factory. Mendel had a wonderful gift of vivid narration. Everything was so real to him, he had no reason to respect anything in the outside world unless it compelled the homage of his instinct, and in his broken Cockney English he could give the most dramatic descriptions of everything he saw and did. When he was engaged upon such tales, helping them out with wonderful mimicry, he had no shyness and laid bare his feelings as though they were also a part of the external scene.

Edward knew nothing at all about painting, but he could respond to quality in a human being, and he recognized that here was no ordinary boy. His first impulse was to rescue him from his surroundings, support him, send him to school. But what a Hell that would be for the sensitive foreigner brought face to face with the ruthless force of an ancient tradition! Edward himself had suffered enough from being such an oddity as a Quaker, but to send this Jew, who had learned nothing and had none but his natural manners, to a Public School would be an act of cruelty. Besides, the boy would not hear of being parted from his mother, whom he was never tired of praising. He told Edward quite solemnly that his mother had said things far more beautiful than anything in Keats or Milton and that no book could ever have held anything more moving than her descriptions of the life at home in Austria, with the Jews in their gaberdines with their long curls hanging by their ears, and the foolish peasants in their bright clothes, and the splendid officers who clapped children into prison if they splashed their great shining boots with mud. . . . As he listened Edward felt more and more convinced that it was his duty not to allow this rich nature to be swallowed up in the grey squalor of the slums. He had begun his philanthropic work believing that Oxford had much to give to the poor, and he had come in time to realize that the world of which Oxford was the romantic symbol stood sorely in need of much that the poor had to give. Mendel confirmed and strengthened an impression which had for some time been disturbing Edward's peace of mind. He felt that if he could help the boy he would be translating his perception into action.

He discussed the matter with his friends, who smiled at his solemnity. "Dear old Edward" was always a joke to them, so seriously did he take the problems with which he was faced. They said that, of course, if the boy was a genius he would find his way out and would be all the greater for the struggle. Edward protested that young talent was easily snuffed out, but again they laughed and said that if it were so then it was no great loss. Edward then said that the boy had a fine nature which might easily be crippled by evil circumstances. That they refused to believe either, and Edward made no progress until he told his tale to a rich young Jew who had lately come to the settlement. This young man, Maurice Birnbaum, was at once fired. His father was a member of a committee for aiding young Jews of talent. With Edward he swooped down on the Kühlers in his motor-car, and Golda showed him all her son's work, from the watch he drew at the age of three to a study of Sara's breasts. Birnbaum knew no Yiddish, and Golda scorned a Jew who could not speak the language of his race. He was also extremely gauche and talked to her rather in the manner of a parliamentary candidate canvassing for votes. He patronized her and told her that her son had talent, but that she must not expect Fortune to wait on him immediately. "A Christian Jew!" said Golda scornfully when he had gone. "He stinks of money and shell-fish. If you are going to eat pork, eat till the grease runs down your chin." And she had a sudden horror that Mendel might grow like that, all flesh and withered, uneasy spirit. She felt inclined to destroy all the pictures, and when Mendel came in she told him of her visitor and of her alarm, and he reassured her, saying: "What I am I will always be, for without you I am nothing. . . ." It was only from Mendel that Golda had such sayings. No one else ever acknowledged in words her quality or her power for sweetness in their lives, and she was terrified at the thought of his going. The big motor-car would come and take him and all his pictures away, she imagined, and he would be swept up into glittering circles of which alone he was worthy, though they were quite unworthy of him. And some rich woman would be enraptured with him, and she would take him to her arms and her bed, and he would be lost for ever. Mendel told her it meant nothing, that such people forgot those who were poor and never really helped them, because they could never know what it was like to need help: but he had a premonition that he had done with the stained-glass factory. He took up his brushes again and cleaned them, and chattered gaily of the things he would do when the motor-car fetched him and he was asked to paint the portraits of lords and millionaires.

Edward inquired further of Birnbaum, and he brought Mendel a paper to fill up, stating his age, circumstances, parentage, etc., etc. He was to send this, with a letter, to Sir Julius Fleischmann, who was a famous financier and connoisseur. Edward drafted a letter, but Mendel found it servile, and wrote as follows:--

DEAR SIR,-- I send you my paper filled up. My father is a poor man and I wish to be a painter. I have won prizes at a school, but I cannot make my living by my art. I am not asking for charity. I am only asking that my work shall be judged. If it is good painting, then let me paint. Give me my opportunity, please. If it is bad painting, then it is no great matter, and I will go on until I can paint well, and then I will show you my work again. If money is given me I will pay every penny of it back when I am as successful as I shall be. I am sending three drawings and two paintings. Yours faithfully, MENDEL KÜHLER.

This letter was sent enclosed in a parcel made up with trembling hands. He knew that the great moment had come, that at last he had attained the desired contact with the outside world. He was wildly elated, and had fantastic and absurd visions of Sir Julius himself driving down at once in his motor-car, knocking at the door and saying: "Does Mr. Mendel Kühler live here?" Then he would enter and embrace him and cry: "You are a great artist." And he would turn to Golda and say: "You are the mother of a great artist. You shall no longer live in poverty." And he would sit down and write a cheque for a hundred pounds. The story swelled and swelled like a balloon. It rose and soared aloft with Mendel clinging desperately to it. But every now and then it came swooping down to earth again, and then Mendel would imagine his drawings and pictures being sent back without a word. Elated or despondent, he passed through life in a dream, and was hardly conscious of his surroundings either at the factory or at home.

This went on for weeks, during which he composed letters of savage insult to Sir Julius, to Birnbaum, and even to Edward Tufnell, telling them that he needed no help, that he was a Jewish artist and would stay among the Jews, the real Jews, those who kept themselves to themselves and to the faith of their fathers, and had no truck with the light and frivolous world outside. But he tore all these letters up, for he knew that the answer he desired would come.

At last one morning there was a note for him. The secretary of the committee wrote asking him to take more specimens of his work to Mr. Edgar Froitzheim, the famous artist, at his studio in Hampstead. Mendel had never heard of Froitzheim, but it seemed to him an enormous step towards fame to be going to see a real artist in a real studio. He felt happier, too, at having this intermediary appointed, for he knew that artists always knew each other by instinct and helped each other for the sake of the work they loved.

Golda made him put on his best clothes, and washed him and brushed his hair. He packed up half a dozen drawings and his picture of the apples, which had been too precious to trust to the post or to Sir Julius, and he set out for Hampstead. To cool his excitement he walked across the Heath, remembering vividly the day when he had first seen it, and again it seemed to him a place of freedom and surpassing loveliness, the sweet, comfortable quality of the grass only accentuated by the bare patches of ground, which were here and there of an amazing colour, purple and brown. A rain-cloud came up on the gusty wind and shed its slanting shower, and its shadow fell on the rounding slopes. He became aware of the form of the Heath beneath its verdure and colour. Between himself and the scene he felt an intimacy, as though he had known it always and would always know it. It amused him and filled him with a pleasant glee, which, when it passed, left him shy for the encounter with the famous Froitzheim, the arbiter of his immediate fortunes.

VI

EDGAR FROITZHEIM AND OTHERS

VERY bright was the brass on Mr. Froitzheim's front door, very bright the face of the smiling maid who opened it. Mendel blushed and stammered inaudibly.

"Will you come in?" said the maid, "and I will ask Mr. Froitzheim."

She left Mendel in the hall and disappeared. This was a very large house, marvellously clean and light and airy. The wallpaper and the woodwork were white. On the stairs was a brilliant blue carpet. Through the window at the end of the passage were seen trees and a vast panorama of London--roofs, chimneys, steeples, domes--under a shifting pall of blue smoke.

The maid went into the studio and told Mr. Froitzheim that a boy was waiting for him--a boy who looked like an Italian. She thought he might be selling images, and he had a package under his arm. Mr. Froitzheim told her to bring the visitor in. He was arranging draperies, Persian and Indian coats, yellow and red and blue, and he did not look up when Mendel was shown in. He was a little dark Jew, neat and dapper in figure and very sprucely dressed, but so Oriental that he looked out of place in Western clothes. But that impression was soon lost in Mendel's awe of the studio. Here was a place where real pictures were painted. There were easels, a table full of paints, an etching plant, a model's throne, a lay figure, pictures on the walls, stacks of pictures behind the door, and the little man standing there, fingering the silks, was a real artist.

"Hullo, boy!" said Mr. Froitzheim.

"M-Mendel Kühler."

"Something to show me, eh?"

"Ye-yes. Pictures."

"What did you say your name was?"

"Kühler. Mendel Kühler."

"Oh yes. I remember. You know Maurice Birnbaum?"

"No."

"Eh? . . . What do you think of these? Lovely, eh? Bought them in India. You should go there. You don't know what sunlight is until you've been there--to the East. Ah, the East! Fills you with sunlight, opens your eyes to colour. . . . Persian prints! What do you think of these?"

He showed Mendel a whole series of exquisite things which moved him so profoundly that he forgot altogether why he had come and began to stammer out his rapture, a condition of delight to which Mr. Froitzheim was so unaccustomed that he stepped back and stared at his visitor. There was a glow in the boy's face which gave it a seraphic expression. Mr. Froitzheim tiptoed to the door and called, "Edith! Edith!" And his wife came rustling in. She was a thin little woman with a friendly smile and an air of being only too amiable for a world that needed sadly little of the kindness with which she was bursting. They stood by the door and talked in whispers, and Mendel was brought back to earth by hearing her say, "Poor child!" He knew she meant himself, and his inclination was to fly from the room, but they barred the door. She came undulating towards him, and she seemed to him terrifyingly beautiful, the most lovely lady he had ever seen. He thought Mr. Froitzheim must be a very wonderful artist to have such a studio, such a house, and such a woman to live with him.

Mrs. Froitzheim made him sit down and drew his attention to a bowl of flowers--tulips and daffodils. Mendel touched them with his fingers, lovingly caressed the fleshy petals of a tulip. Mrs. Froitzheim went over to her husband and whispered to him, who said:--

"Yes. Yes. It is true. He responds to beauty like a flower to the sun."

In the centre of the studio was a large picture nearly finished of three children and a rocking-horse, cleverly and realistically painted. Mendel looked at it enviously, with a sinking in the pit of his stomach, partly because he could not like it, and partly because he felt how impossible it would be for him to cover so vast a canvas.

"Like it?" said Mr. Froitzheim, wheeling it about to catch the best light.

"Yes," said Mendel, horrified at his own insincerity and unhappy at the vague notion possessing him that the picture was too large for him, whose notion of art was concentration upon an object until by some inexplicable process it had yielded up its beauty in paint. Composing and making pictures he could not understand.

"Well, well," said Mr. Froitzheim. "So you want to be an artist? Art, as Michael Angelo said, is a music and mystery that very few are privileged to understand. I have been asked by the committee to give my opinion, and I feel that it is a serious responsibility. It is no light thing to advise a young man to take up an artistic career."

"Yes, Edgar, that is very true," said his wife, with a wide reassuring smile at Mendel, whom she thought a very charming, very touching little figure, standing there drinking in the words as they fell from Edgar's lips.

Mr. Froitzheim produced a pair of spectacles and balanced them on his nose.

"It is a serious thing, not only for the sake of the young man but also for Art's sake. The sense of beauty is a dangerous possession. It is like a razor, safe enough when it is sharp, injurious when it is blunted. Your future, it seems, depends upon my word. I am to say whether I think your work promising enough to justify your being sent to a school. I asked you to bring more of your work to confirm the impression made by what I have already seen."

He spoke in an alert, sibilant voice so quickly that his words whirled through Mendel's mind and conveyed very little meaning. Only the words "a music and mystery" lingered and grew. They were such lovely words, and expressed for him something very living in his experience, something that lay, as he would have said, below his heart. He loosened the string of his untidy parcel and took out the picture of the apples. There were music and mystery in it, and he held it very lovingly as he offered it to Mrs. Froitzheim, much as she had just offered him the bowl of flowers.

"Very well painted indeed," said she, and Mendel winced. He turned to the artist as to an equal, expecting not so much praise as recognition. Mr. Froitzheim took the picture from him and went near the window. He became more solemn than ever.

"This is much better than the drawings. Have you always painted still-life?"

"I painted what there was at home."

"Have you studied the still-life in the galleries? Do you know Fantin-Latour's work?"

"No," said Mendel blankly.

"Of course, there is no doubt that you must go on."

Mendel had never had any doubt of it, and he began to feel more at his ease. That was settled then. There would be no more factory for him. He was to be an artist, a great artist. He knew that Mr. Froitzheim was more excited than he let himself appear. The apples could no more be denied than the sun outside or the flowers on the table. . . . He looked with more interest at Mr. Froitzheim's picture. It amused him, much as the drawings in the illustrated papers amused him, and he was pleased with the quality of the paint. He was still alarmed by the hugeness of it. His eyes could not focus it, nor could his mind grasp the conception.

Mrs. Froitzheim asked him to stay to tea and encouraged him to talk, and he told her in his vivid childish way about Golda and Issy and Harry and Leah and Lotte. She found him delightfully romantic and told him that he must not be afraid to come again, and that they would be only too glad to help him. Mr. Froitzheim said:--

"I will write to the committee. There is only one school in London, the Detmold. You should begin there next term, six weeks from now. Don't be afraid, work hard, and we will make an artist of you. In time to come we shall be proud of you. I will write to your mother, and one of these days I will give myself the pleasure of calling on her. . . . You must come and see me again, and I will take you to see pictures."

Mendel was in too much of a whirl to remember to say "Thank you." He had an enormous reverence for Mr. Froitzheim as a real artist, but as a man he instinctively distrusted him. It takes a Jew to catch a Jew, and Mendel scented in Mr. Froitzheim the Jew turned Englishman and prosperous gentleman. And in his childish confidence he was aware of uneasiness in his host, but of course Mr. Froitzheim could easily bear down that impression, though he could not obliterate it. He was an advanced artist and was just settling down after an audacious youth. He had been one of a band of pioneers who had defied the Royal Academy, and he had reached the awkward age in a pioneer's life when he is forced to realize that there are people younger than himself. He believed in his "movement," and wished it to continue on the lines laid down by himself and his friends. To achieve this he deemed it his business to be an influence among the young people and to see that they were properly shepherded into the Detmold, there to learn the gospel according to S. Ingres. He had suffered so much from being a Jew, had been tortured with doubts as to whether he were not a mere calculating fantastic, and here in this boy's work he had found a quality which took his mind back to his own early enthusiasm. That seemed so long ago that he was shocked and unhappy, and hid his feelings behind the solemnity which he had developed to overawe the easy, comfortable, and well-mannered Englishmen among whom he worked for the cause of art.

He was the first self-deceiver Mendel had met, and the encounter disturbed him greatly and depressed him not a little, so that he was rather overawed than elated by the prospect in front of him. He felt strangely flung back upon himself, and that this help given to him was not really help. He was still, as always, utterly alone with his obscure desperate purpose for sole companion. Nobody knew about that purpose, since he could never define it except in his work, and that to other people was simply something to be looked at with pleasure or indifference, as it happened. He used to try and explain it to his mother, and she used to nod her head and say: "Yes. Yes. I understand. That is God. He is behind everybody, though it is given to few to know it. It is given to you, and God has chosen you, as He chose Samuel. . . . Yes. Yes. God has chosen you." And he found it a relief sometimes to think that God had chosen him, though he was disturbed to find Golda much less moved by that idea than by the letter which Mr. Froitzheim wrote to her, in which he said that her son had a very rare talent, a very beautiful nature, and that a day would come when she would be proud of his fame.

Yet there were unhappy days of waiting. Jacob would not hear of his leaving the factory until everything was settled, and when Mendel told the foreman he was probably going to leave to be an artist, that worthy drew the most horrible picture of the artist's life as a mixture of debauchery and starvation, and told a story of a friend of his, a marvellous sculptor, who had come down to carving urns for graves--all through the drink and the models; much better, he said, to stick to a certain income and the saints.

At last Maurice Birnbaum came in his motor-car. Everything was settled. The fees at the Detmold would be paid as long as the reports were satisfactory, and Mendel would be allowed five shillings a week pocket-money, but he must be well-behaved and clean, and he must read good literature and learn to write good English. "I will see to that," said Maurice. "I am to take him now with some of his work to see Sir Julius. His fortune is made, Mrs. Kühler. Isn't it wonderful? He is a genius. He has the world at his feet. Everything is open to him. I have been to Oxford, Mrs. Kühler, but I shall never have anything like the opportunities that he will have. It is marvellous to think of his drawing like that in your kitchen." Maurice was really excited. His heart was as full of kindness as a honeycomb of honey, but he had no tact. His words fell on Golda and Mendel like hailstones. They nipped and stung and chilled. Golda looked at Mendel, he at her, and they stood ashamed. "We must hurry," said Maurice. "Sir Julius must not be kept waiting. He is a stickler for punctuality."

As a matter of fact, Maurice only knew Sir Julius officially. His family had never been admitted to the society in which Sir Julius was a power and a light. The entrance to the house of the millionaire was a far greater event to him than it was to Mendel.

The splendid motor-car rolled through the wonderful crowded streets, Maurice fussing and telling Mendel to take care his parcel did not scratch the paint, and swung up past the Polytechnic into the desolation of Portland Place. At a corner house they stopped. The double door was swung open by two powdered footmen, and by the inner door stood a bald, rubicund butler. Maurice gave his name, told Mendel to wait, and followed the butler up a magnificent marble staircase with an ormolu balustrade. Mendel was left standing with his parcel, while one of the footmen mounted guard over him. He stood there for a long time, still ashamed, bewildered, smelling money, money, money, until he reeled. It made him think of Mr. Kuit, who alone of his acquaintance could have been at his ease in such splendour. He felt beggarly, but he was stiffened in his pride.

The butler appeared presently and conducted him upstairs to a vast apartment all crystal and cloth of gold. In the far corner sat a group of people, among whom, in his confusion, Mendel could only distinguish Maurice Birnbaum and a small, wrinkled, bald old man with a beard, whose eyes were quick and black, peering out from under the yellow skull, peering out and taking nothing in. For the purposes of taking in his nose seemed more than sufficient. It was like a beak, like an inverted scoop. And yet his features were not so very different from those of the old men at home whom Mendel reverenced. There was a strange dignity in them, yet not a trace of the fine quality of the old faces he loved that looked so sorrowfully out on the world, and through their eyes and through every line seemed to absorb from the world all its suffering, all its vileness, and to transmute it into strong human beauty. There were some women present, but they made no impression whatever on Mendel, who was entirely occupied with Sir Julius and with resisting the feeling of helplessness with which he was inspired in his presence. He heard Maurice Birnbaum talking about him, describing his life, his mother's kitchen, the street where he lived, and then he was told to exhibit his pictures. A footman appeared and put out a chair for him, and on this, one after another, he placed his drawings and pictures. Not a word was said. Even the apples were received in silence. Sir Julius gave a grunt and began to talk to one of the women. Maurice gave Mendel to understand that the interview was over, and the poor boy was conducted downstairs by the butler. He had not a penny in his pocket and had to walk all the way home with his parcel, which his arms were hardly long enough to hold.

VII

THE DETMOLD

FLUNG into the art school, he was like a leggy colt in a new field, very shy of it at first, of the trees in the hedges, of the shadows cast by the trees. This place was very different from the Polytechnic. There were fewer old ladies, and more boys of his own age. The teachers were Professors, and the pupils held them in awe and respect. There were real models in the life-class, male and female, and the students, male and female, worked together. No ginger-beer bottles here, where art was a practical business. The school existed for the purpose of teaching the craft of making pictures, and its law was that the basis of the mystery was drawing.

Mendel's first attitude towards the other students was that he was there to beat them all. He would swell with eagerness and enthusiasm, and tell himself that he had something that they all lacked. He would watch their movements, their heads bending over their work, their hands scratching away at the paper, and he could see that they had none of them the vigour that was in himself. And by way of showing how much stronger he was he would use his pencil almost as though it were a chisel and his paper a block of stone out of which he was to carve the likeness of the model. He was rudely taken down when the Professor stood and stared with his melancholy eyes at his production and said:--

"Is that the best you can do?"

"Yes."

"Why do it?"

This was a stock phrase of the Professor's, but Mendel did not know that, and he was ashamed and outraged when the class tittered.

"No," said the Professor. "I don't know what that is. It certainly isn't drawing." And with his pencil he made a lovely easy sketch of the model, alongside Mendel's black, forbidding scrawl. It was a masterly thing and it baffled him, and humiliated him because the Professor moved on to the next pupil without another word. Not another line could Mendel draw that day. He sat staring at the Professor's sketch and at his own drawing, which, while he had been doing it, had meant so much to him, and he still preferred his own. The Professor's drawing had no meaning for him. He could not understand it, except that it was accurate. That he could see, but then his own was accurate too, and true to what he had seen. The light gave the model a distorted shoulder, and he had laboured to render that distortion, which the Professor had either ignored or had corrected.

Mendel cut out the Professor's drawing and took it home and copied it over and over again, but still he could not understand it. He was in despair and told Golda he would never learn.

"I shall never learn to draw, and the Christian kops will all beat me," he said.

"But they sent you to the school because you can draw. Didn't Mr. Froitzheim say that you could draw!"

"The Professor looks at me with his gloomy face, like an undertaker asking for the body, and he says: 'I mean to say, that isn't drawing. It isn't impressionism. I don't know what it is.'"

"It can't be a very good school," said Golda.

"But it is. It is the only school. All the best painters have been there, and Mr. Froitzheim sent his own brother to it. The Professor says I shall never paint a picture if I don't learn to draw, and I can't do it, I can't do it!"

To console himself he painted hard every evening and regarded the Detmold entirely as a place to which his duty condemned him--a place where he had to learn this strange wizardry called drawing, which he did not understand. He went there every day and never spoke to a soul, because he realized that his speech was different from that of the others, and he would not open his mouth until he could speak without betraying himself. He listened carefully to their pronunciation and intonation, and practised to himself in bed and as he walked through the streets.

So woeful were his attempts to emulate the Detmold style of drawing, that at last the Professor asked him if he was doing any work at home. To this Mendel replied eagerly that he was painting a portrait of his mother.

"Hum," said the Professor. "May I see it?"

So Mendel brought the picture, and the Professor said:--

"I mean to say, young man, that it wouldn't be a bad thing if you gave up work a little. I don't want to have to send in a bad report, but what can I do? There's something in you, plenty of grit and all that, but you're young, and, I mean to say, you're here to learn what we can teach you. When we've done with you, you can go your own way and be hanged to you. If you want to smudge about with paint and fake what you can't draw, there's the Academy."

At this awful suggestion Mendel shuddered. He was imbued enough with the Detmold tradition to regard the Academy as Limbo.

He gave up painting at home, and hurled himself desperately at the task of producing a drawing that should satisfy the Professor. Towards the end of his first term he succeeded, and had his reward in words of praise in front of the class.

The Professor had meanwhile taken one of the pupils aside and asked him not to leave the poor little devil so utterly alone. "After all," he said, "the school doesn't exist only for drawing. It has its social side as well, and I don't like to see any one cold-shouldered unless he deserves it. I mean to say, you other fellows have advantages which don't necessarily entitle you to mop up all the good things and leave none for your fellow-creatures."

Mitchell, the pupil, took his homily awkwardly enough, but promised that he would do what he could. He seized his opportunity one day when Mendel at lunch had horrified the company by picking up a chicken bone and tearing at it with his teeth. Mitchell took him aside and said:--

"I say, Kühler, old man, you'll excuse my mentioning it, you know, but it isn't done. I mean, we eat our food with forks."

Mendel knew what was meant, for at lunch he had been conscious of horrified eyes staring at him and had wished the floor would open and swallow him up. He muttered incoherent words of thanks and wanted to rush away, but Mitchell caught him by the arm and said:--

"I say, we artists must hang together. There aren't many of this crowd who will come to anything, and the Pro thinks no end of you. Won't you come along and have tea with me and some of the other fellows?"

Mendel went with him, delighting in the young man's easy, condescending Public School manner and pleasant, crisp voice, in which he spoke with an exaggerated emphasis.

"Gawd!" he said. "It makes me sick to see all the fools and the women wasting their time there, scratching away, while those of us who have any talent and could learn anything are left to flounder along as best we may. Do you smoke?"

Mendel had never smoked, but he did not like to refuse. He took a cigarette, which very soon made him feel sick and giddy. He lurched along with Mitchell until they came to a tea-shop, where they found two other young men whose faces were familiar.

"I've brought Kühler," said Mitchell. "He's a genius. This is Weldon, who is also a genius, and Kessler, who can't paint for nuts, and I'm a blame fool, though it's not my fault. My father's a great man. Gawd! what can you do when your own father takes the shine out of you at every turn?"

They began to talk of pictures and of one Calthrop, who was apparently the greatest painter the world had ever seen and a product of the Detmold.

"Sells everything he puts his name to," said Kessler.

"What a man!" said Weldon. "Goes his own way, absolutely believing in his art. If they like it, well and good. If they don't like it, let 'em lump it. He's as often drunk as not, and as for women . . . !"

Weldon and Kessler deserted pictures for women. Mitchell grew more and more glum, while Mendel was still feeling the effects of the cigarette too strongly to be able to take in a word.

"Gawd!" said Mitchell. "There they go, talking away, absolutely incapable of keeping anything clear of women. I can't stand it."

He dragged Mendel away, leaving his friends to pay the bill; and, as they walked, he explained that he was in love, and could not stand all that bawdy rubbish, and he elaborated a theory that an artist needed to be in love to keep himself alive to the sanctity of the human body, familiarity with which was apt to breed contempt or an excessive curiosity. Mendel said that he also had been in love, and he gave a vivid account of his raptures with Sara.

"My God!" cried Mitchell; "you don't mean to say that she came to you--a girl like that?"

"Yes," said Mendel; "I was never so happy."

"But, I say, weren't you afraid?"

"She was very beautiful."

Mitchell pondered this for a long time. He seemed to be profoundly shaken. At last he said:--

"But with a girl you _loved?_"

"I loved her when she was there."

"But when she wasn't there?"

"I was busy painting."

"I say, you are a corker! If it were Weldon or Kessler I should say you were lying."

"I do not lie," replied Mendel with some heat. "It may have been wrong, but it was good, and I was happier after it. I think I should have gone mad without it, for everything had disappeared--everything--everything; and without painting you do not understand how terrible and empty life is to me. I have nothing, you see. I am poor, and my father and mother will always be poor. Their life is hard and beastly, but they do not complain, and I should not complain if I did not have this other thing that I must do."

"Well, I'm jolly glad to know you," said Mitchell. "I'm not much of a fellow, but I'd like you to know my people. My father's a great man. He'll stir you up. And you must come along with me and Weldon and Kessler and see life while you're young. Good-bye."

He shook hands vigorously with Mendel and strode off with his long, raking stride, while Mendel stood glowing with the happiness of having found a friend, some one to whom he could talk almost as he talked to Golda: a fine young Englishman, pink and oozing robustious health, ease, refinement, and comfort. He thought with a devoted tenderness of Mitchell's rather absurd round face, with its tip-tilted nose and blinking eyes, its little rosebud of a mouth and plump round chin, on which there was hardly a trace of a beard. . . . "My friend!" thought Mendel, "my friend!" And he gave a leap of joy. It meant for him the end of his loneliness. No longer was he to be the poor, isolated Yiddisher, but he was to move and have his being with these fine young men who were the leading spirits of the school, the guardians of the tradition bequeathed to it by the great Calthrop. . . . Oh! he would learn their way of drawing, he would do it better than any of them. He would be gay with them and wild and merry and young. And all the while secretly he would be working and working, following up that inner purpose until one day he appeared with a picture so wonderful that the Professor would say, like Mr. Sivwright, that he had nothing more to learn. And because of his wonderful work, everybody would forget that he was a Jew, and he would move freely and easily in that wonderful England which he had begun to perceive behind the fresh young men like Mitchell and the cool, pretty girls at the school. That England was their inheritance and they seemed hardly aware of it. He would win it by work and by dint of the power that was in him.

Of the girls at the school he was afraid. He blushed and trembled when any one of them spoke to him, and he never noticed them enough to distinguish one from another, so that they existed only as a vague nuisance and a menace to his happiness. Before Mitchell he was prostrate. He bewildered and confounded that young man with his outpourings, both by word of mouth and by letter. He had absolutely no reserve, and poured out his thoughts and feelings, his experiences, and Mitchell at last took up a protective attitude towards him and defended him from the detestation which he aroused in the majority of his fellow-students. At the same time Mitchell often felt that of the two he was the greater child, and he would look back upon the years he had spent at school in a rueful and puzzled state of mind, half realizing that he had been shoved aside while the stream of life went on, and that now he had to fight his way back into it. While Mendel had been wrestling and struggling, he had been put away in cotton-wool, every difficulty that had cropped up had been met, every deep desire had found its outlet in convention. And now that he had set out to be an artist, here was this Jew with years of hard work behind him, and such a familiarity with his medium that he could do more or less as he liked without being held up by shyness or awkwardness. And it was the same in life. Mendel was abashed by nothing, was ashamed of nothing. Life had many faces. He was prepared to regard them all, and to fit his conduct to every one of them. He was critical, not because he wished to reject anything, but because he must know the nature of everything before he accepted it. He hated and loved simply and passionately, and if he felt no emotion he never disguised the fact. Whereas Mitchell and the others were so eager to feel the emotions which their upbringing had denied that they leaped before they looked and fabricated what they did not feel. Mendel learned from them that life could be pleasant, and they became aware that there were regions of life beyond the fringes of pleasantness. They softened him and he hardened them. They were always together, Mendel, Mitchell, Weldon and Kessler, working steadily enough, but out of working hours kicking up their heels and stampeding through the pleasures of London. . . . Calthrop was the divinity they served. He was a man of genius and had made the Detmold famous. Those, therefore, who came after him at the school must support him in everything. That was Mitchell's contention, who was by now in full swing of revolt against his Public School training, and in his adoration Mendel followed him, and the others were dragged in their train. Calthrop dressed extravagantly: so did the four. Calthrop smashed furniture: so did the four. And as Calthrop drank, embraced women, and sometimes painted outrageously, the four did all these things.

To Mendel it was Life--something new, rich, splendid, and thrilling. He had lived so long cramped over his work that it was almost agony to him to move in this swift stream of incessant excitement. There was no spirit of revolt in him. He could shed some of the outward forms of his religion, as to Golda's great distress he did, but against its spirit he could not rebel. That he carried with him everywhere: the bare stubborn faith in man, ground down by life and living in sorrow all his days. Happy he was not, nor did he expect to be so. He might be happy one day, but he would be miserable the next. Life in him was not greatly concerned with either, but only to have both happiness and misery in full measure. His deepest feelings arose out of his work, the first condition of his existence; they arose out of it and sank back into it again. His work was the visible and tangible form of his being, which he hated and loved as it approached or receded from the terrible power that was both beautiful and ugly, and yet something transcending either. . . . And away there in London was the Christian world of shows. What he was seeking lay beyond that, and not in the dark Jewishness of his home. There lay the spirit, but the outward and visible form was to be sought yonder, where the lights flared and the women smiled at themselves in mirrors. He hurled himself into the shows of the Christian world in a blind desire to break through them, but always he was flung back, bruised, aching, and weary.

Day after day he would spend listlessly at home or at the school until seven o'clock came and it was time to go to the Paris Café, to sit among the painters and listen to violent talk, talk, talk--abuse of successful men, derision of the great masters, mysterious and awful whispers of what men were doing in Paris, terrible denunciations of dealers, critics, and the public.

The café was a kind of temple and had its ritual. It was the aim of the painters to "put some life into dear old London." Calthrop had given a lead. He had determined that London should be awakened to art, as the writing folk of a past generation had aroused the swollen metropolis to literature and poetry. London should be made aware of its painters as Paris was aware of the Quartier Latin. Bohemia should no longer be the territory of actresses, horse-copers, and betting touts. The Paris Café therefore became the shrine of Calthrop's personality, and thither every night repaired the artists and their parasites, who saw in the place an avenue to liberty and fame. In the glitter and the excitement, the brilliance, the colour, the women with their painted faces, the white marble-topped tables, the mirrors along the walls, the blue wreathing tobacco-smoke, Calthrop's personality was magnified and concentrated as in a theatre. The café without him was Denmark without the Prince, and Mendel found the hours before he came or the evenings when he did not come almost insupportable. Yet it was not the man's success or his fame or his notoriety that fascinated the boy, whose instinct went straight to the immense vitality which was the cause of all. Calthrop was a huge man, dark and glowering. To Mendel he was like a figure out of the Bible--like King Saul, in his black moods and the inarticulate fury that possessed him sometimes; and when he picked up and hurled a glass at some artist whose face or whose work had offended him, he was very like King Saul hurling the javelin.

There was always a thrill when he entered the café. The buzz would die down. Where would he sit and whom would he speak to? . . . It was one of the greatest moments in Mendel's life when one evening Calthrop came sweeping in with his cloak flung round his shoulders and sat opposite him and his three companions and raised a finger and beckoned.

"He wants you," said Mitchell, pushing Mendel forward.

"Come here, boy," growled Calthrop, stabbing with his pipe-stem in the direction of the seat by his side. "Come here and bring your friends. Bought a drawing of yours this morning. Damn good."

Mitchell, Kessler, and Weldon came and sat at the table, all too overawed to speak.

"What's your drink, heh?"

Drinks were ordered.

"Rotten trade, art," said Calthrop. "Dangerous trade. Drink, women, flattery. Don't drink. Marry, settle down, and your wife'll hate you because you're always about the place. . . . God! I wish I could be a Catholic. I'd be a monk. . . . My boy, don't get into the habit of doing drawings. They won't look at your pictures if you do, and we want pictures--my God, we do! Everybody paints pictures as though they were for a competition. You've got life to draw from--real, stinking life. That's why I have hopes of you."

Mendel was so fluttered and flattered that he could only gulp down his drink and blink round the café, feeling that all eyes were upon him; and indeed he was attracting such attention as had never before been bestowed on him. A girl at the next table ogled him and smiled. She was with a young man whom the four detested and despised. This young man reached over to take a bowl of sugar from their table. To take anything from the great man's table without so much as "By your leave" was sacrilege and was very properly resented. There was a scuffle, the sugar was scattered on the floor, glasses fell crashing down, Mitchell and Weldon hurled themselves on the young man, and the manager came bustling up, crying: "If-a-you-pleess-a-gentlemen." But there was no breaking the mêlée. A waiter was sent out for the police, and three constables came filing in. One of them seized Mitchell, and Mendel, half mad with drink and excitement, seeing his beloved friend, as he thought, being taken off to prison, leaped on the policeman's back and brought him down. In the confusion Calthrop and the others slipped away and Mendel was arrested, still fighting like a wild cat, and led off to the police-station, the constable whispering kindly in his ear: "Steady, my boy, steady. A youngster like you should keep clear of the drink."

The inspector smiled at the extreme youthfulness of the offender, but decided that a taste of the cells would do no harm and that the boy had better be sober before he was sent home. So Mendel had four hours on a hard bench until a constable came in and asked him if he wanted bail. He said "Yes," and, when asked for a name, gave Calthrop's, who presently arrived and saw him liberated, after being told to appear in court next morning at ten o'clock.

When he reached home he found his mother waiting up for him with wet cloths in case his head should be bad.

"What now? What now?" she asked.

"I've been in prison."

"Prison!" Golda flung up her hands and sat down heavily. For her all was lost. It was true then, that, outside in the world, at the other end of it, was always prison, for the just and for the unjust, for the old and for the young, for the innocent and for the guilty.

He tried to make light of it. For him, too, it was a serious matter. He saw himself figuring in the Sunday papers: "Famous Artist in the Police Court," with his portrait in profile as on a medallion. Birnbaum and Sir Julius would read it. He would be taken away from the Detmold and Edward Tufnell would never speak to him again. He astonished, embarrassed, and delighted Golda by flinging himself in her arms and sobbing out his grief.

VIII

HETTY FINCH

GOLDA was passing through a very difficult time. Rosa was hotter on the pursuit of Issy than ever. Harry had had a violent quarrel consequent on his reiterated demand for proof of the judicial destruction of Christianity in America, and at last, like his father, he went out and bought a clean collar and announced his departure for Paris. He went away and not a word had been heard from him. Lotte refused to look at any of the young men brought by the match-makers, and Leah was the only comfortable member of the family, and she made no attempt to conceal her unhappiness with Moscowitsch. She would come on Saturday evenings and go up to her mother's room and fling herself on the bed and cry her heart out, until late in the evening Moscowitsch came to fetch her, when she would go meekly and apparently happily enough. . . . And on the top of all these troubles, here was Mendel going to the devil at a gallop.