Chapter VII: Book ONE: East (4)

Leah's trouble with Moscowitsch was that he would never let her go out without him, and he could very rarely be persuaded to go out at all. As for going away in the summer, he could see no sense in it. He gave his wife a fine house. What more did she want? She had her children to look after. What greater pleasure could she desire? His life was entirely filled with his business and his home, and he would not look beyond them. The neighbours went to the seaside? The neighbours were fools who lived for ostentation and display. They did not know when they were well off. . . . Moscowitsch had a great admiration for his father-in-law as a man who knew what life was and refused to dilute its savour with folly, and he regarded Golda as a perfect type of woman, one who left the management of life to her husband and allowed herself to be absorbed in her duties as a wife and mother.

But Leah longed to go to the seaside. It became an obsession with her, and, because she could never talk of it, she thought of nothing else. She was sick with envy when she saw the neighbours going off with the children carrying buckets and spades. Secretly she bought her own children buckets and spades, though they were much too small to use them.

At last, when her worries began to tell on Golda, Leah declared that what she needed was sea air, and offered to take her for a fortnight to Margate, and Golda, anxious to escape from the horror of Mendel's coming home night after night drawn and white with dissipation, and from the dread of an explosion from Jacob, consented, and asked if Issy might go, as that Rosa of his was making him quite ill.

For Golda, Leah knew that Moscowitsch would do anything in the world, and so she procured his consent on condition that he was not expected to accompany them, for he hated the sea, which had made him very ill when he came to England, and he never wished to set eyes on it again.

Leah already had the address of some lodgings recommended to her by a neighbour. She engaged them, and on a fine July day went down to Margate by the express with her children, Golda, and Issy.

The lodgings were let by a handsome, florid woman with masses of bleached golden hair, a ruddled complexion, fat hands covered with cheap rings, plump wrists rattling with bracelets, and a full bosom on which brooches gleamed. Leah thought her a very fine woman, and was so fascinated by her that she stayed indoors day after day, helping with the housework and gossiping, so that she never once saw the sea, except from the train as she was leaving. Mrs. Finch was a lady, by birth, but she had been unfortunate. She had an uncle in the Army and a cousin in the War Office, and she had lived in London, in the best part of the town, where, in her best days, she had had her flat. Also she had travelled and had been to Paris and Vienna. But she had been unfortunate in her friends. Leah commiserated her, and, open-mouthed, gulped down all her tales of the gentlemen she had known, while Golda, eager for more information of the glittering world which had swallowed up her Mendel, listened too, fascinated and shuddering. And Leah, to show that she also was a person of some consequence, began to talk of her wonderful brother. She told of the motor-car which had come and whirled him away, of his visit to the millionaire's house, of the fine friends he was making, of the men and women he knew whose names were in the papers.

"Every day," she said, "he is out to tea, and every evening he is out at theatres and music-halls and parties and flats and hotels, and his friends are so rich that they pour money into his pockets. He just makes a few lines on a piece of paper and they give him twenty pounds, or he makes up some paint to look like a face or a pineapple and his pockets are full of money."

"Yes," said Golda uneasily. "He will be very rich."

"Then next time you come to Margate," said Mrs. Finch, "it will be the Cliftonville, and you'll despise my poor lodgings."

"Oh no," cried Leah, "for it is like staying with a friend."

Every day Leah added something to the legend of Mendel, Mrs. Finch urging her on with romances of her own splendid days. But the most eager listener was Hetty, the girl who did the rough work of the house and was never properly dressed until the evening, because, from the moment when she woke up in the morning until after supper, she was kept running hither and thither at Mrs. Finch's commands. She was sufficiently like Mrs. Finch to justify Golda in her supposition that she was that fine woman's daughter, but nothing was ever said in the matter. Hetty did not have her meals with them, and, indeed, there was no evidence that she had any meals. In the evenings she was allowed to go out, and she would come back at half-past ten or so with her big eyes shining and a flush fading from her cheeks and leaving them whiter than ever. Very big were her eyes, very big and pathetic, and her face was a perfect oval. She had rather full lips, always moist and red. During the whole fortnight she never spoke a word except to Issy. Indeed, she avoided Golda and Leah, and she alarmed Issy by what he took to be her forwardness, when she asked him to take her to the theatre. He complied with her request, but he was much too frightened of her to speak, and he could think of nothing to say except to offer to buy her chocolates and cigarettes, which she accepted as though it was the natural thing for him to give her presents. She talked to him about Mendel, and wanted to know if it was true that he knew lords and had real gentlemen to tea with him in his studio.

"There's more goes on in his studio than I could tell you," said Issy with a dry, uncomfortable laugh. "Artists, you know!"

"Oh yes! Artists!" said Hetty with a dreamy, wistful look in her eyes as she drew in her lower lip with a slight sucking noise. "I wish I lived in London, I do. Ma used to live in London, but she's too old now to find any one to take her back there. It's dull here. Does your brother ever come to Margate?"

"No," said Issy. "He'd go to Brighton if he went anywhere. I've got another brother who's gone to Paris."

"O-oh! Paris! Is he rich too?"

"No."

Issy shut up like an oyster. He could feel the girl probing into him, and he was sorry he had brought her. She was spoiling his fun, the adventures he had promised himself during his holiday from Rosa's indefatigable attentions. Hetty was too dangerous. He knew that if she got hold of him she would not let go.

He took her home and never spoke another word to her during the remainder of his visit, and he said to his mother once:--

"That's an awful girl."

"Worse than Rosa?" asked Golda.

"Rosa would stay. That girl would be off like a cat on the tiles."

Golda retorted with a description of Rosa of the same kind, but of a more offensive degree.

Declaring that they were better for the sea air, and warmly enjoining Mrs. Finch to visit then if ever she should come to London, the party left Margate with shells and toffee and painted china for their friends and relations, conspicuous among their luggage being the buckets and spades which had never been used.

As Issy and his mother reached their front-door, he saw Rosa at the corner of the street, and bolted after her, leaving Golda to enter the house and give an account of her doings. Mendel, for once in a way, was at home. He was at work on a picture for a prize competition at the Detmold, as also were Mitchell and Weldon, so that they were living quietly for the time being. Golda gave a glowing description of the beauties of Margate and of Mrs. Finch and her jewellery. She began to talk of Hetty, but for some reason unknown to herself, with a glance at Mendel she stopped, and went off into a vague, dreamy rhapsody concerning Margate streets.

"The streets are so clean, so nice, and the air is so strong, and the sky is so clear, with the clouds tumbling across it, little clouds like cotton-wool and grey clouds like blankets, almost as it was in Austria, and I was so happy my heart was full of flowers, almost as it was in Austria."

"What's the good of talking of Austria?" growled Jacob. "There you had a corner. Here you have a whole house."

"But I was happy there."

Issy came in on that and announced that he was going to be married to Rosa. There was half a house vacant in the next street, and he proposed to take it.

"You shall not," said Jacob. "I will not have that slut in the house. What sort of children will she give you? Squat-browed and bow-legged they will be. How will she look after them? A woman that cannot contain her love for her man will have none for the children. She is a dirty girl, I tell you, and so is her mother and her father's mother, and her father's father's mother."

"I don't know who we are, to hold up our heads so high. You are my father, but in some things I cannot obey you. The business is mine . . ."

"It is not. It is mine!" said Jacob. "It is in your name, but it is mine. It is in your name, but your name is my name, and you shall not give it to a woman like that, who goes smelling about street corners like a dog. Her father has no money, and he never goes to the synagogue."

"I am not marrying her father. I shall go out of the business, then, and I shall start for myself. Rosa will kill herself if I do not marry her, and I must do it."

"It is true," said Golda quietly. "I think she will kill herself."

Jacob stormed on and Issy blustered, until at last he confessed that Rosa had caught him, and that he had to marry her. Jacob threw up his hands and in a shrill voice of icy contempt told Issy exactly what he thought of such marriages; they were nothing but dirt. . . . "Because you have a little dirt on you, must you roll in the mud? You are like dirty dogs, all of you. You, and Harry, and Mendel. I don't know what has come to you in this London. God gave me one woman, and I have asked for nothing else."

"You would not let me marry Rosa when I was young."

Words and feeling ran so high that Mendel, aghast, fled away to his studio, where the sound of the storm reached him. It raged for hours, and ended in Issy flinging himself out of the house and slamming the door.

A week later Rosa was brought to see Golda, and she fawned on her like a dog that has been whipped, sat gazing at her with her stupid brown eyes, and whimpered: "I should have killed myself. Yes, I should have killed myself."

"You would not have been so wicked," said Golda. "It is sinful to throw good fish after bad. Can you cook?"

"Yes," said Rosa. "I can make cucumber soup. I could do anything for Issy, he is so strong and handsome."

And Golda said to Mendel after the interview: "A woman like that is like a steam bath for a man."

* * * * *

A few days later Issy and Rosa were married, without ceremony, without carriages, or photographs, or guests, or feast. It was a wedding to be ashamed of, but Jacob would not, and Rosa's father could not, lay out a penny on it. The couple took half the house in the next street, and Issy discovered at once that he hated his wife, and was at no pains to conceal it either from her or from his family.

Mendel was profoundly depressed by this disturbance and plunge downwards, for he still half expected his family to rise with him. He was to make all their fortunes, but, with the rest of the family, he detested the unhappy Rosa and regarded her as little short of a criminal. He was depressed, too, because the summer holidays were approaching and he would be bereft of his beloved Mitchell, who was going away for three months to the country. He would be left with his family, in whom there was no peace. Why could they not be like the Mitchells and the Weldons, who could live together without quarrels, and could take a happy, humorous interest in each other's doings without these devastating passions and cursings and denunciations? And yet when he thought of the Mitchells and the Weldons and the Froitzheims, in their charming, comfortable houses, there was something soft and foolish about them all--something savouring of idolatry, for instance, in the homage Mitchell paid his father, in the assumption that Mrs. Mitchell was a very remarkable woman, whose children could not be expected to be ordinary. More and more did Mendel value his mother, who was content to be just a woman and to live without flattery of any kind, and to accept everyone whom she met and to value them as human beings, without regard to their rank, station, possessions, or achievements. Himself she esteemed no more because he was an artist, though he had tried hard to make her give her tribute to that side of his nature. She loved him simply, neither more for his attainments nor less for his doings, that pained her deeply. And that direct human contact he obtained nowhere else, and in no one else could he find it existing so openly and frankly. Yet he loved the follies and pretences of the outside world. He adored theatricality, and among his polite friends there was always some drama towards. It was never drowned in incoherent passions, and he himself, among the nice cultured folk, was always a startling dramatic figure. Sometimes they seemed to him all slyness and insincerity, and then he loathed them; but that was generally when he had aimed at and failed in some dramatic coup, or when they had encouraged him to talk about himself until he bored them. On the whole, he was successful with them, as he wished to be, easily and without calculation. It was when they made calculation necessary, by feigning an interest that they did not feel, that he was shocked and angry. If anywhere the atmosphere was such that he could not be frank, then he avoided that place and those people.

Now he was bored, bored to think of the hot stewing months with no relief except such as he could find in vagrom adventures from the harsh rigidity of life among his own people. And he was in a strange condition of physical lassitude. Even his ambition was stagnant. In his work he had only the pleasure of dexterity. It had no meaning, and contained no delight. When he painted apples or a dead bird or a woman, the result was just apples or a dead bird or a woman. The paint made no difference and the subject was still better than his rendering of it. He was only concerned with technical problems. Fascinated by a gradated sky in a picture in the National Gallery, he practised gradated skies until he could have done them in his sleep.

And he was tired, tired in body and in soul. Both in his life and in his work he had had to conquer a convention in order to keep his footing in the world of his desire. Just as he had only learned the Detmold style of drawing by a supreme effort of will, so also by a tremendous effort he had learned the rudiments of manners and polite conversation. He had had to overcome his tendency to fall violently in love with every charming person, male or female, he met, and to regard with an aversion equally violent those in whom he found no charm. Such charm must for him be genuine and not a matter of tricks, and for this reason he had regarded every person whom he thought of as old with dislike. For him anybody above twenty-five was "old." He still thought he would be made or marred by the time he was twenty-three, but that age seemed immeasurably far off. Long before then, like a thunderbolt, his full genius would descend upon him and all the world would know his name. He was almost innocent of conceit in this. Such, he believed, was the history of genius, and so far nothing had happened to deny his inward consciousness of his rarity. Relieve the pressure of circumstance and he soared upwards. . . . There was a queer, uncomfortable pleasure in such thoughts and dreams and in imagining a fatality that should drag him down and down to Issy's level and lower. There was a sickening fascination in picturing to himself a descent as swift and irresistible as his upward flight. Yet dreary were the hours of waiting for the impetus that had once or twice so freely and so strongly moved in him. Sick with waiting, he would work in a fury to master trick after trick and difficulty after difficulty in painting, so as to be ready when the time came. All the cunning and wariness of his race welled up in him as he prepared deliberately, slowly, patiently for his opportunity.

* * * * *

One afternoon, as Golda was sleeping in her kitchen, she was awakened by a knock at the door. Going to open it, she found Hetty Finch waiting there, neatly clad in a brown tailor-made coat and skirt, very smart, with a trim little feathered hat on her head. Golda's thoughts flew to Mendel, and her first inclination was to slam the door in Hetty's face, but, remembering that the boy was out, she admitted her.

Hetty followed Golda into the kitchen and stood looking round it with obvious disappointment. She had not imagined the Kühlers to be so poor.

"I promised Ma I would call," she said, taking the chair which Golda dusted for her.

"And how is your Ma?" asked Golda.

"She's given up the house and gone into a hotel as manageress," replied Hetty, lying as usual, for her mother had been sold up and had taken a place as barmaid in a tavern. "And I've come to London to earn my living. Ma gave me fourteen shillings, and that was all she could do for me. Still, I'm off her hands now."

Golda asked her what she was going to do, and she said she thought of going into service until she had had a look round. Where was she living? She had taken a room with some friends, lodgers of Ma's, off Stepney Green.

Conversation was lifeless and desultory until Issy came into the room, when she brightened up, but he was overcome with his old terror of the girl and soon hurried away. Then she noticed the pictures on the wall and asked if they were Mendel's. Golda refused flatly to talk about them, but Hetty persisted and would talk of nothing else. Jacob came in and she made him talk about Mendel, and she made herself so charming to him and flattered his simple vanity so grossly that presently Golda was staggered by the sight of him making tea with his own hands and pouring it out for the visitor.

"Yes," said Jacob, "the boy did all those before he was fourteen. He will get on, that boy. He is bound to get on, but I shall not live to see him in his glory."

"I think they're lovely," said Hetty, sipping her tea. And she went on chattering vivaciously until Jacob was called away to the workshop, when once again conversation became lifeless and desultory. Golda made one excuse after another to try to get rid of her, but Hetty would not budge. At last there came the sound of Mendel's key in the door. Golda bustled out of the room and whispered to him:--

"You must not come in. I have visitors and there are letters waiting for you upstairs."

But Mendel had seen a girl sitting in the kitchen and he wanted to know whether she was pretty or not. She turned and he saw that she was charmingly pretty. He brushed by his mother. He felt at once that he had made a good impression, and, indeed, all Hetty's dreams and fancies were more than realized, though she was a little affronted and disappointed by the poorness of his clothes.

"It is Hetty Finch," said Golda, "from Margate."

Mendel had had Issy's account of Hetty and he was on his guard at once.

"Yes. I've come to live in London," said she.

"I've never lived out of it," he answered.

"I thought perhaps, as you know so many people, you could help me to find some work. There must be room somewhere in London for poor little me."

"I'll see about it," said Mendel, taking note of her features and figure, and rather upset to find himself so little excited by her. Issy had given him to imagine a dashing, overwhelming woman. He only felt vaguely sorry for Hetty and a desire to stroke her, though he knew her at once for what she was, and how she was drinking in the strongly developed male in him. For the first time he felt cool and detached in the presence of a woman: a deliciously grown-up sensation, and he wanted more of it.

She soon said she must go, and in Golda's hearing he promised to write to her, but when he took her to the door he asked her to come to his studio, and she said she would come the next day.

IX

THE QUINTETTE

HE had more of the deliciously grown-up sensation the next day, when Hetty came to see him. She was something new. The girls of the streets he knew, and unattainably above them were the girls at the school and his friends' sisters, whom he called "top-knots," because of the way they did their hair. The "top-knots" were hardly female at all to him, so remote were they, so entirely unapproachable; utterly different from the girls of the streets, who were so accessible that he had but to hold out his arms to find one of them, as if by magic, in his grasp. And now Hetty was different again.

"You are cosy up here," she said, moving at once to the only comfortable chair and curling up in it. "Your sister told me about you."

"Leah? What lies did she tell you?"

"Well, I knew it wasn't _all_ true, about the money you were making, because you wouldn't live here if it was true, would you? But I suppose some of your friends make a lot of money."

"They're rich, some of them," replied Mendel, aghast to find himself thinking coldly of his friends in terms of money, his mind rushing swiftly between the two poles of his father and Sir Julius. "Yes. There's plenty of money in London."

"That's what Ma said when she gave me the fourteen shillings. She said a girl with eyes like mine had no need to go short in London." Hetty raised her eyes and looked full at him, who met her stare boldly and yet with some alarm, finding himself acting a part.

Hetty was flattering him by regarding him as the possessor of a key to the wealth of London, and in spite of himself he could not help accepting the rôle. She had touched an element of his character of which till then he had been unconscious. The knave in him sprang into being and thrust all his other qualities aside. He began to boast of his success and to swagger about the luxury and immorality of London life, though it was not all braggadocio, but also a kindly desire to make Hetty happy by talking to her of the things that interested her.

He told her about Calthrop and the Paris Café, and Maurice Birnbaum and his motor-car and richly furnished flat in Westminster, and a Lord's son who was at the Detmold, and Mitchell, whose father was a great man. And all the time, as he talked, he was astonished at the sound of his own voice, so different did it sound.

Hetty wriggled with pleasure in her chair and pouted up her lips. Presently she said her hat made her head ache, and she took it off and stretched out her arms and said:--

"No more pots and pans for me! I do think you're lovely. It's just like a story. I call that real fun. Not like Margate. . . . Do you think I could get work as a model, or do you have to be slap-up?"

Mendel thought of the drabs who posed and he could not help smiling.

"I could only tell by your figure, though your face is all right."

"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked.

"Very."

"I'll show you my figure, if you like."

"All right, I'll light the gas-stove in the bedroom. It's a little cold in here."

He showed her into the bedroom, and when she was ready she called to him.

She was beautifully made, but she looked so foolish with her anxiety to please him that he could take hardly any interest in her, and he was distressed, too, because the only background he could give her consisted of his new knavish thoughts of the wealth of London. Yet nothing could disturb it, for the background was suitable. Her white body was her offering.

"How much would I be paid?"

"A shilling an hour."

"Do you pay that?"

"Yes."

"If you could get me work I would sit to you for nothing."

"I'd pay you," he said. His generous qualities strove hard to reassert themselves, but there was something about this girl that compelled just what he was giving her--hardness for hardness, value for value. Yet she was certainly beautiful, and it was strange to him to be unable to give her the warm homage that within himself he could not help feeling.

She sat on the bed, making no move to cover herself, and said:--

"Artists _are_ different. There was an artist once at Margate. It was him put the idea into my head. But he was very poor and not a gentleman."

And now to Mendel she was an object of sheer astonishment. He stood and warmed his legs by the gas stove and gaped at her, sitting on his bed and chattering in her clear, hard voice of her ambitions, her dreams, the drudgery at home, while in everything she said was a flattery which he could not resist. Worst of all, he felt that he was one of a pair with her. His talent, her body, were shining offerings with which they both emerged from the depths of the despised. Entering into her spirit, he too was filled with a desire for revenge. Yet in him this desire was charged with passion, which made their present situation ridiculous. He thought of the poverty and the obscure suffering downstairs, the dragging penury to which, but for his talent, he would have been condemned. Then he imagined her as Issy had described her at Margate, lurking in the kitchen, listening behind the door as Leah spun her yarns. He could sympathize with her, and she seemed to him almost gallant.

He got out a piece of mill-board and began to draw her, but to his annoyance could not get interested in what he was doing. He wanted to know more about her, could not rest content that a human being should be so reduced to a cold purpose. Yet, though she talked freely enough, nothing fell from her lips to meet his desire. She had no people, no class, no tradition, but still she was a person. He could not dismiss her as he dismissed so many, as "nonsensical."

"I can't make much of you now," he said, almost wailing. "I believe I'm tired."

And suddenly he hurled away his drawing and rushed at her and kissed her. She clung to him and he yielded to her will, seeing clearly that this was her purpose, this her desire, this her ambition, her all.

He knew that she was using him, was making certain of being able to use him. The newly discovered knave in him insisted on having his existence, and through it he enjoyed a certain defiant happiness.

Happiness! To be happy! That had seemed impossible. His first year at the Detmold had been miserable. He had been discouraged and almost listless. Often he would go to his mother and say: "I shall never be an artist."

"Not all at once," Golda would say. "Take a boy who is apprenticed to a bootmaker. He cannot all at once make good boots. He must spoil a deal of leather first. Or a tailor-boy: he must spoil cloth. A trade must be learned, and you can learn this, for you work hard enough at it."

For a moment or two he would see through her clear eyes and that was enough to set him working again, half believing that he would soon master his craft. But there had been the struggle to master what at the Detmold, with such unquestionable authority, they called "drawing."

This now, with Hetty, was in its way happiness, though he detested it and her. It was an escape. It was easy. It made no demands on him, save the small effort to achieve self-forgetfulness, and in that she aided him, for she seemed superior to himself and enviable in the clearness of her purpose. She offered herself and made no demands upon him except of what could cost him nothing: just a few words to his friends, a start in her chosen profession.

All the same, he was horrified at himself. Every other crisis and sudden change in his life had been attended with violent suffering, an eruption within himself, profound depression, almost a collapse. This had been as easy as walking through a door, a slipping from one part of his being to another. . . . Here suddenly was happiness, a queer detached, almost indifferent condition, full of pleasure, and he rejoiced in the novelty of it. He watched Hetty draw on her clothes again and was sickened by the sensual languor of her movements. She was drowsy, like a cat before a fire.

"No, I certainly shan't draw you to-day."

"What about to-morrow?"

"I shall be painting to-morrow."

"I do think you're a devil sometimes."

"I'll take you to the Paris Café, if you like."

"Will you?"

She perked up on that. She had not expected so soon to gain her desire.

"Yes. If you've got to earn your living you should meet people, and the sooner you get going the better."

Hetty sat with her chin in her hands, crouched in elation. Everything had turned out as she had hoped and planned, as she had willed that it should, and she regarded him with some contempt because he had been so easy and because he was so young. She was the same age as he, but she thought him a little vain boy. Yet when he looked at her she was afraid of him, for he knew so much and guessed so much more. To defend herself, her instinct drove through to his vanity and flattered it to blind him. She feigned an animation she was incapable of feeling to make herself more beautiful in his eyes, and he thought of his friends, Mitchell and Weldon, and how they would be stirred with her. He thought how she would please Calthrop, and he was lured into believing that he would gain in importance through her.

"You've come at a very bad time," he said. "They'll all be going away for the summer."

"Oh!" she looked dashed, hating to be caught out in a mistake. "Do they go away for long?"

"Three months."

"Oh, well!" she drawled. "I can get a place if nothing turns up. But something always does turn up. I'm one of the lucky ones, you know."

"I don't believe in luck," said he, with a sudden irruption of the old self that seemed to have been left so far behind.

"I must go now," she said.

They groped their way down the dark stairs, and he went out with her, feeling that he could not face his family, from whom he knew now that his face was turned. In the street a mood of freedom and adventure came over him, and for this mood she was a fitting mate. He took her on the top of a bus to the West End, among the promenading crowds, and she drank it all in with a kind of exaltation, her big eyes glowing, her body trembling with excitement. Into one café after another he led her, completely absorbed as he was in her purpose, and at last, when they mounted the eastward bus, she leaned her head on his shoulder, and he could hear her murmuring to herself: "London . . . London . . . London."

He too was thrilled as he had never been before by London. He had never so strongly realized it before. The great city had thrilled him with its beauty and had stirred him with its business, but never before had its spirit crept into his blood to send it whirling and singing through his veins. He hardly slept at all that night, and the next morning it was a long time before he could begin to work, which then seemed far removed from the effort and almost anguish it used to cost him. The still-life with which he had been wrestling became quite easy to do, and very soothing was the handling of brushes and paint. Every touch was like a caress upon his aching soul.

So began a period of real happiness. The pieces he painted with such soothing ease were generally admired and readily bought. The dealer to whom he took them was also a colourman and gave him apparently unlimited credit; and he laid in an immense stock of colours and amused himself with experiments. It seemed that his career was to be successful without a struggle. His patrons were delighted to find him so soon making money, and the Birnbaums and the Fleischmanns invited him down into the country, but as he found that they put him up in a servant's bedroom or a gardener's cottage he refused to go more than once, or to any more of their kind who were not prepared to forget his poverty.

He would rather stay in London with Hetty, whom he had begun to regard as a mascot. With her coming everything had changed. She had made everything easy and happy and delightful. He had no love for her, but he could not help feeling grateful. She had turned work into a pleasure, pleasure into a riot of ecstasy.

Alone with her in the evenings or with some chance acquaintance, during the holidays he roamed through London, basking in the summer evenings, discovering unimagined splendours, the Parks, the river, the Zoo, boating on the Serpentine, the promenade on the romantic Spaniard's Road at Hampstead. Nearly every night he wrote to Mitchell in the country, describing his new easy happiness in his work and his discovery of the charm of nights in London. And once a week Mitchell would write to him and give him a delightful account of English country life in a valley, shut in by rolling hills between which wandered a slow, pleasant stream. Here Mitchell was painting, boating, playing tennis, making love.

"There's a Detmold girl lives near here with her people--Greta Morrison. You may remember her--glorious chestnut hair, big blue eyes, but as shy as a little mouse. I couldn't get a word out of her until I began to talk about you, and there's no end to her appetite for that. I don't mince matters. I tell her exactly what you are, exactly what you come from, and what a wild beast you are. She has seen you throw things about at the Detmold, and she seems absolutely to like it. Yet she is not a fool, and I like her enormously. She makes me feel what a rotter I am, but I can't get on with her unless I talk about you. I _have_ heard that her work is good, but she won't show me a thing."

Mendel was pleased that a "top-knot" should be interested in him, but beyond the flicker of delight he gave no thought to the idea of Greta Morrison. The "top-knots" belonged to the world which he was going to despoil with Hetty Finch. That world must disgorge. It had condemned, and still condemned, his father and mother to bitter poverty, and he remembered how on their first coming to London the whole family had slept in one room, and how he had sat up in the middle of the night and looked at the recumbent bodies and suffered under the indignity of it. And his brothers had grown from ruddy, bronzed boys into pale-faced, worn young men. And behind Hetty was the dirty lodging-house and her Ma, of whom he had a very clear idea. He used to wax violent, and his imagination would run riot with the fantastic visions of success he conjured up.

Who were the "top-knots" that they should have an easy, pleasant time in the country while he was left to stew in London?

Hetty began genuinely to admire him, and her flattery was no longer empty. There was some sustenance in it.

"O--oh!" she used to say. "You'll get on. There's no doubt about that. You'll have a big stoodio and the nobs will come up in their motor-cars, and you'll be able to paint what you like then."

"You're a liar," he would reply. "I shall always paint what I like. I never do anything else, and never will. Once paint for the fools and you have to do it always, because you become a fool yourself."

* * * * *

Golda once met Hetty coming down the stairs. She told her she was a dirty slut and was not to show her face inside the house again. A few days later she saw her open the front door and slip out. In her anger she informed Jacob of the danger to Mendel, and Jacob went up to the studio.

"I will not have that harlot in my house," he said.

"She is not a harlot," replied Mendel rather shakily, for, though his father's power had dwindled, yet he was still a figure of authority.

"She is a harlot and a daughter of a harlot, and I will not have her in my house."

"She is a model, and I must have models, as I have tried to explain to you again and again. I am allowed money for models. I must have models, just as you must have skins."

"Then there are other models. I know this girl, what she is after, and she will ruin you."

"Neither she nor anyone else in the whole world could ruin me," said Mendel, "for I am an artist, and while I have my art I ask nothing outside it."

"Don't argue with me!" shouted Jacob. "I will not have that drab in my house."

Mendel had a great respect and regard for his father. He was silent, and Jacob went downstairs, satisfied that he had asserted himself.

He said to Golda:--

"They will blow the boy's head off his shoulder with the fuss they make of him. I know how to take him down a peg or two."

"Don't go too far," said Golda. "It would be a black day for me if he went away and was ashamed of us."

"If I saw that he was ashamed of you," replied Jacob, "I would thrash him within an inch of his life. Ashamed of you, among all the dirt and trumped-up people he goes among!"

However, Hetty still came to the studio and there were frequent explosions, until at last Mendel, intent on the new independence he had won, declared that he could bear it no longer, and he arranged with Issy to take the top floor of his house and to turn that into a studio. This compromise was successful, and pleased both parties: Golda was happy to be relieved from further friction and Mendel was glad to be away, for he knew that his doings must hurt her, and that he hated. Yet he could see no way out of it. He was done for ever with the old simplicity of his untutored painting in her kitchen. Art was no longer a pure and hardly-won joy. It was a trade, like any other, and, like any other, it had its sordid aspect, and, to compensate for that, it was a career and could also be a triumph. These things he did not expect his mother to understand. He had Mitchell to talk to now, Mitchell to whom to impart the burden upon his soul, and Mitchell and he were to work together and to give to the world such art as it had never seen since the primitives.

Mitchell and he! That friendship was the source of his new confidence. Golda had been and still was much to him, but when it came to painting she knew nothing at all, and painting was the important thing. Through painting lay not only satisfied ambitions and fame and riches, but life itself, and of that what could Golda know?

It was a great thing, therefore, to be established away from home when Mitchell returned from the country. And Mitchell approved. He had suffered from being under his father's shadow, and with Weldon and Kessler he had taken a studio near Fitzroy Square. He said:--

"A time will come when you will have to leave the East End."

"I shall never leave them," replied Mendel. "What I want to paint is there. They are my people, and all that I have belongs to them."

"Rubbish. You'll soon be getting commissions, and you can't ask people who can afford to pay for portraits to a hole like that."

"They will come to my studio," said Mendel, "or I will not take their commissions."

Though Mitchell was rather shocked by his frank conceit, he could not but admire and envy the way his impulses came rushing to the surface and were never deterred by considerations as to the impression he might be making. Mendel trusted Mitchell absolutely and hid nothing from him, neither the most scabrous of his deeds nor the most childish of his desires. He made no secret of the new manly feeling that had come to him through Hetty, the conviction that he could meet the West End on its own terms.

When he showed Mitchell the work he had done during the holidays, his friend said:--

"Gawd! The difference is absolutely startling. There's charm in every one of them, and they're not fakes either."

With Hetty he was enraptured.

"Gawd!" he said; "I'll give ten years to painting her, as Leonardo did to Monna Lisa, and then it would not be finished. Came from a Margate lodging-house, did she? Mark my words: she'll marry a successful artist and queen it among the best."

With Mitchell, Hetty put forth all her cajolery when she found that he knew what she thought good people. She could look very pathetic and delicate, and middle-aged artists were sorry for her, and thought being a model a perilous profession for her. One of them warned her of the dangers she must run, and especially mentioned Mitchell and Kühler as young men to be avoided. They roared with laughter when she told them.

The Paris Café was Paradise to her, and she made friends with all its habitués and attracted the attention of Calthrop, who became Mendel's enemy for life when she told him that the youngster had said of him that he had been a good artist once, but was now only repeating himself.

With marvellous rapidity she picked up the jargon of the place, and could quite easily have taken her career in her own hands, but she would not surrender Mendel, who could no more do without her than he could without Mitchell. She clung to him and kept him a happy slave to his three friends, to whom she devoted herself as though her existence depended on the solidarity of the group. From morning to night she was with one or other of them, and every evening with the four of them at the Paris, or making a row at a music-hall and getting themselves kicked out.

She was learning her trade as they were learning theirs, and she was delighted with the ease with which Mendel picked up what she called "sense"; that is to say, he became much more like the others, affected their speech, grew his hair long, wore corduroys, a black shirt, and a red sash, and talked blatantly and with a slight contempt of great painters. But even so, he was disturbing, for he did all these things with passion, so that they tinged his soul, and were not as a mere garment upon it. Even in falsehood he was sincere.

When Hetty found Calthrop painting a self-portrait, she set her four boys painting self-portraits, and when she found the older men talking about the beauty of roofs and chimneys, the four were soon ecstatic about roofs and chimneys, and painting them without knowing how it had come about. She could feel what was in the air, and had no difficulty in making them conform to it, so that they were successful even while they were students, and were talked of and discussed and approached by dealers as though they were persons of consequence. Their life was one long intoxication: money, praise, wine, and debauchery went to their heads, and of all these excitants Mendel had the largest share, and found himself the equal even of Kessler, whose father was a millionaire soap-boiler. He attained an extraordinary skill at doing what was expected of him, and developed an instinct as sharp as Hetty's for the success of the moment after next.

He won scholarships at the Detmold and, carefully adapting his style, an open prize at the Royal Academy. His patrons were excited and delighted. He was interviewed by the Yiddish papers and photographed, palette and brushes in hand, in a dashing attitude. He said many foolish things to the reporters, but the printed version made him blush. He was represented as saying that art had been reborn during the last ten years, that the Royal Academy was exploded and would soon close its doors, that there was no art criticism in England, that there had never been a great Jewish artist, and that this deficiency in the most vital and enduring race in the world would now be repaired.

He thanked his stars that his friends could not read Yiddish. Two well-known Jewish painters wrote to the paper to say that they existed and to trounce his "bumptious and ignorant dismissal of respected and respectable art." And he heartily agreed with them. He was shaken out of the hectic dreams of months, yet could not feel or see clearly. His way was with Mitchell, and Mitchell was generously rejoicing in it all as though it had happened to himself, while Hetty was going from studio to studio spreading the news and declaring the arrival of a genius.

He wanted to go and hide his face in his mother's skirts, but she was so happy and elated with the congratulations of the neighbours and visits from the Rabbis of the synagogue that he could not but keep up his part before her. For her and for all his family he bought extravagant presents, and he went out and sought Artie Beech, whom he had not seen for years, and gave him a box of cigars. He had a melancholy idea that he was doing them all an injury and that he must somehow repair it. The exact nature of the injury he did not know, but his instinct was very sure that the whole business was false. Yet it was so actual that he could not help believing in it. He was hypnotized into accepting it. There seemed no reason why it should not go on for ever. Here, apparently, was what he had always striven for--art and homage--and the idea that they could go on for ever was terrible and paralysing. But there was not a soul in the world with whom he could share his feeling. If he showed the least hesitation they would accuse him of ingratitude.

He was filled with a smouldering rage against them all which found no vent until Maurice Birnbaum came in his motor-car and asked him to bring some of his things to show Sir William Hunslet, R.A., who had been much impressed with his prize picture. Once again Mendel climbed into the motor-car, and once again he was told not to let his parcel scratch the paint.

"Now," said Maurice, "you have the world at your feet, and I feel proud to have had my share in bringing it about. You can have everything you want, and if you don't grow into something really big it won't be our fault. Everything that money can do it shall do."

The car rolled through the streets which had been the scene of Mendel's happy rambles, but being carried through them in such magnificence made him feel helpless, a victim to something stronger than his own will and that he had always detested. He was being taken away from his mother and from Mitchell, and he knew whither motor-cars were driven. All roads ended in Sir Julius, who could sit and look at pictures without a word. Everything went spinning past him. This was going too fast, too fast, and he would be exhausted before he had really known his purpose. Maurice Birnbaum's exciting, patronizing tones, chattering on exasperatingly, infuriated him, until he felt like stabbing him in his already dropping stomach. What could a fat man like that have to do with art? How could so fat a man drive down to the wretched poverty in Whitechapel and not feel ashamed?

But in spite of himself and his confused emotions Mendel enjoyed the drive, which showed him more of London than the narrowed area he frequented: more to conquer, more to know; shops, strange ugly buildings, polite, mincing people, women like dolls, men like marionettes, wide streets and plane-trees, the gardens and squares of the polite Southwest. Often there were Georgian houses like that in which his family lived, but so neat and trim and newly painted that they looked like doll's-houses, proper places for the dolls and the marionettes. . . . And it was exhilarating to be in the heart of the roaring traffic, bearing down upon scarlet buses, and swift darting taxi-cabs and motor-cars as rich as Maurice Birnbaum's. Out of the traffic they turned suddenly into a quiet street of dead houses and vast gloomy piles of flats. Outside a house more gloomy than the rest they stopped. Maurice got out fussily, told Mendel to be careful how he lifted his parcel out, fussed his way into the house through a dark, luxuriously furnished hall, and into a vast studio where there was a group of fashionably dressed women taking tea with Sir William and exclaiming about the beauties of a portrait that stood on the easel.

Maurice stood awkwardly outside the circle and muttered apologies, while Mendel felt utterly and crushingly foreign to the atmosphere of the place. He knew how these people would regard him. They would stare at him with a cold interest not unmingled with horror, and he would be conscious of bearing the marks of the place he came from, of smelling of the gutter. Against that separation even art was powerless. And what had his work to do with this huge, hard, brilliant portrait on the easel? If they admired that they would never look at his dark little pictures.