Chapter VIII: Book ONE: East (5)

Sir William introduced Maurice to the ladies, but did not so much as look at the boy, whom his mind had at once ticked off as a "student," and therefore to be kept in his place. Maurice explained spluttering: words like "scholarship," "prize," "genius," "instinct," fell in a shower from his lips, and one of the ladies put up her lorgnette and stared at Mendel as though he were a picture or a wax model.

At last he was told to untie his parcel, and one by one he showed his pictures. Sir William blew out his chest and his cheeks, and with a wave of his hand blurted out one word:--

"Italy."

"That's what I say," said Maurice.

Mendel scented danger. They seemed to him to be conspiring together.

"Italy!" ejaculated Sir William. "Italy! Blue skies, the sun, the light. Give him light and landscape with form in it."

"Am I ill?" thought Mendel with some alarm, for Sir William sounded to him more like a doctor than a painter. And he decided that the Academician was not a real artist because he showed no sign of the fellow-feeling which had been so strong in Mr. Froitzheim.

Before the ladies he could say nothing. He put his pictures back in the parcel and heard Maurice and Sir William still conspiring together to send him to Italy. He was tired of being swung from one idea to another. At the Polytechnic they had told him that the essential thing in a picture was "tone," that he must remember the existence of the atmosphere between himself and the object he was painting, and that there were no bright colours in nature. At the Detmold little was said about "tone," but he was told that the essence of a picture was drawing, "the expression of form." . . . What next? He had a foreboding that Italy was only another name for another essence of a picture. Besides, he wanted to live. Though he adored art, yet it did not contain all that was precious to him--liberty and gaiety, friendship and affection. Always until the Detmold his life had been weighed down with poverty and with terrible obsessions like that of his dread of the fat, curly-headed boy who, during the six long years of his schooling, had waited for him outside the school-gates every day to give him a coward's blow and to challenge him to fight and to jeer at him if he refused. There had been furious, passionate loves to set him reeling, gusts of inexplicable desires and ambitions which had often made him weep with pain. And now, just as the world was opening out before him and he was warm with the friendship of an Englishman (for he was proud of Mitchell's Public School training), they wished to take him away and send him to a far country.

He had had enough of being a foreigner in England, and he loathed the idea of travel. His father had told him that England was the best country in the world, and, if he had suffered so much there, what would it be in others? Italy? He wanted to paint what he had always painted, fish and onions in a London kitchen. How could Italy help him to do that?

He would not go. He would refuse to go. These Birnbaums and Fleischmanns had had their way with him for long enough.

So lost was he in this growing revolt that he was already some distance away from Sir William's studio before he was aware of having left it.

"Our greatest painter," said Maurice. "The greatest since Whistler."

"Yes," said Mendel, aghast at the supersession of Calthrop and the idols of the Detmold. If Maurice could be so ignorant there was nothing to be said and argument was vain.

"He really appreciated your work," Maurice added.

"He never looked at it!" cried Mendel, enraged. "I put them in front of him one by one, but he always looked at the fat lady in blue."

"He could tell with one glance," protested Maurice, who had been mightily impressed.

Mendel saw that it was useless to talk, and shut his lips tight while Maurice chattered to him of his extraordinary good fortune in being able to go to Italy, to live among the orange groves and with the greatest galleries of the world to roam in, the most beautiful scenery and the most delightful food.

The mention of food made Mendel think of his mother's unsavoury dishes and sluttish table, the most distasteful feature of his existence, but he preferred even that to the Italy of Maurice Birnbaum and Sir William. Through such people, he knew, lay nothing that he could ever desire.

As soon as he reached home he told his mother that they wanted to send him abroad to study. He strode about the kitchen and waved his arms, growling:--

"Study? Study? I want to be an artist, not a student. I _am_ an artist. I know art students when I see them--the Academy, South Kensington, the Detmold--they are all the same. Let them go abroad and never come back. No one will miss them, not even their fathers and mothers, if they have anything so natural. I will not go--I will not go!"

"But if the Maurice Birnbaum thinks you must go, then you must," said Golda. "It is their money that has been spent on you."

"They've spent enough," cried Mendel, "without that. I don't want their money any more. They know that. They want to keep me in their hands and to say that they made me. They? People like that! God made me, and they want to keep me all my life saying how grateful I am to them. Grateful? I am not."

"But you could go for a little while."

"I will not go at all."

He sat down and wrote to Maurice Birnbaum saying that he would not go to Italy, that he did not want any more of his commissions, and that he would not be interfered with any more. He would shortly repay every penny he had had, and he asked only to be allowed to know best what he wanted to do.

"Everything that I love is here in London, and I can only learn from what I love. I am one kind of artist and you want to turn me into another kind. You will only waste your money, and I will not let you do it."

Maurice never answered this letter and patronage and that of his friends was withdrawn.

Mendel plunged more ardently than ever into his career with Mitchell and the others, but found that they were not prepared to share or to admit the new freedom which he had begun to enjoy. The Birnbaum patronage had always to a certain extent restrained him, but now that it was shaken off he plunged madly and wildly into every kind of extravagance. He was no longer content to be the equal of the others. He wanted to lead them. He was the most successful of them all, and he wanted them all to join him in forcing art upon London. Calthrop had shown them the way, but he had unaccountably stopped short. He had many imitators, and there were even women who looked like his type, but it all ended in his personality. . . . Art was something else: something outside that, an impersonal thing, which London should be made to recognize. The pictures of Kühler, Mitchell, Weldon, and Kessler should be, as it were, only forerunners of the mighty pictures that should be painted. . . .

He was just as extreme and violent in his vices as he was in his idealism, and even Mitchell was rather upset by his pranks and caprices. It was one thing to take a shy tame genius among your acquaintance, quite another when the genius ran wild and dragged you hither and thither and with breathless haste from the vilest human company to the most dizzily soaring ideas. Weldon, who was uncommonly shrewd, had begun to see the danger of allowing Hetty Finch to arrange their affairs, and when on top of that Mendel, drunk with freedom and success, began to take charge, he thought it time to secure himself and began to withdraw from their undertakings and adventures.

At last Kessler struck, and told Mendel that he might be the greatest genius that was ever born, but should sometimes try to remember that his friends were gentlemen and could not always be making allowances for his birth and upbringing. This happened in the Paris Café. Mendel fell like a shot bird, like a stone. The eager words froze on his lips, his face visibly contracted and became haggard, his eyes blinked for a moment, then stared glassily. He sat so for some minutes, then rose from the table and walked quickly out of the café.

He did not appear for a week, nor was anything heard of him. He sat at home working furiously. Hetty Finch went to see him, but he turned her out, telling her that she was a hateful, cold-hearted woman and that he would never see her again.

At last he wrote to Mitchell, a letter of agony, for Mitchell, his friend, seemed to him the worst offender, by not having warned him of what was in the air:--

"You are my friend," he wrote, "my only friend. It is no more to you what I am, where or how I was born, than it is to me what you are. The soul of a man chooses his friend, and I trusted you even in my folly. You could have defended me and our friendship. You have not done so and I must live miserably without you. Good-bye. I shall not attempt again to enter a life in which my work is not sufficient recommendation. I was happy. I was not happy before. I am not happy now. I have been foolish, but I was your friend."

Mitchell was irritated by this letter, but he was also moved. He valued Mendel's sincerity, which had continually jolted him out of his natural indolence. And, as he had a fine talent and a fairly strong desire to use it to the full, the friendship had profited him. It had also helped him to come to reasonable terms with that great man, his father.

On the other hand he was in this difficulty, that he too had been slipping out of the quintette through his new friendship with Miss Greta Morrison and her friend, Miss Edith Clowes. Knowing Mendel's contempt for the "top-knots," he had said nothing of this matter, and had found it sometimes difficult to account for the afternoons and evenings given to the dilemma of discovering whether Miss Morrison or Miss Clowes were the love of his life. Mendel was an exacting friend, and, as he concealed nothing, expected no concealment.

Mitchell, like the true Englishman he was, deplored the unpleasant complication, but left it to time, impulse, or inspiration to unravel. Impulse, in due course, came to his aid and he invented a plan. First of all he wrote a manly note to Mendel, confessing his inability to understand why he should suffer for Kessler's caddishness, and declaring that friendship could not be so lightly broken. He received no reply to this, and proceeded by taking Morrison and Clowes (as in the fashion of the Detmold they were called) to see the docks at Rotherhithe. While there he gazed from Morrison to Clowes and from Clowes to Morrison, unable to decide which he loved, for both gave him an equal contraction of the heart, and then he told them that ships had never been properly painted, never _expressed_ in form and colour; and then he added that it was clearly a man's job, and then he informed them that only a short distance away lived Mendel Kühler.

"Would you like to go and see him?" he asked. "It is the queerest thing to go and see him. A filthy street, a dark house, a ramshackle staircase, and there you are--absolutely one of the finest painters the Detmold has ever turned out."

"Do let us go and see him!" said Clowes, who had decided in her own mind that she was the third of the party and in the way. Morrison said nothing, and looked very solemn, as though she regarded the visit as an event--something to be half dreaded. She had a very charming air of diffidence, as though she were very happy and knew this to be an unusual and peculiar condition. Often she smiled to herself, and then seemed to shake the smile away, feeling perhaps that she, a slip of a girl, had no right to be amused by a world so vast and so varied.

She had enjoyed herself. The ships had stirred her romantically, and she could not at all agree with Mitchell about painting them, for were they not works of art in themselves? They moved her in the same way, arresting her eyes and delighting them, and touching her emotions so that they began to creep and tickle their way through her whole being. . . . O wonderful world to contain so much delight! And it pleased her that the ships should start out of the squalor of the docks like lilies out of a dark pond.

She smiled and shook the smile away when Mitchell spoke of Mendel Kühler. She remembered once meeting Mendel on the stairs at the Detmold. She had often noticed him--strange-looking, white-faced, romantic, with a look of suffering in his eyes that marked him out from all the other young men. . . . After she had passed him on the stairs she turned to look at him, and at the same moment he turned and she trembled and blushed, and her eyes shone as she hurried on her way.

Mitchell had told her a great deal about him, and she had heard other people say that he was detestable, an ill-mannered egoist. She supposed he was so, for she rarely questioned what other people said, but he remained a clear figure for her, the romantic-looking young man who had looked back on the stairs.

"We'll take him by surprise," said Mitchell, with a sudden qualm lest they should break in upon Mendel and Hetty Finch together. "If we told him he would hide all his work away and put on a white shirt and have flowers on the table, for he is terrified of ladies. He says they don't look like women to him."

"I'm sure," said Clowes, "I don't want to look like a woman to any man."

This was the most encouraging remark Mitchell had had from either during the day, and he decided that he was in love with Clowes.

A brisk walk through narrow dingy streets brought them, with some help from the police, to the door of Issy's house. Mitchell knocked and a grimy little Jewess opened to them.

"Mr. Mendel Kühler?" said Mitchell.

"Upstairs to the top," replied the Jewess as she hurried away. They climbed the shabbily carpeted stairs and knocked at the door of the studio. Mendel opened it. He stood with a brush in his hand, blinking. He stared at Mitchell and then beyond him at Morrison.

"Come in," he said. "I'd just finished. I've been working rather hard and haven't spoken to a soul for three days. You must forgive me if I don't seem very intelligent."

They went in and he made tea for them, hardly ever taking his eyes off Morrison. He said pointedly to Mitchell:--

"So you came down to the East End to find me."

Clowes explained:--

"I'm a stranger to London and had never seen the docks, you know."

"I have never seen the docks either, though I live so near," said he. Then, catching Morrison glancing in the direction of his easel, he turned his work for her to see, almost ignoring the others. Afterwards he produced drawings for her to see, and he seemed entirely bent on pleasing her, which so embarrassed her that, when she could escape his gaze, she looked imploringly over at the others. They could not help her, and he went on until he had shown her every piece of work in the studio. Whenever she spoke, shyly and diffidently, as though she knew her opinion was of no value, he gave a queer little grunt of triumph, and his eyes glittered as he looked over at Mitchell, as though to say that he too knew how to treat the "top-knots" and to please them.

X

MORRISON

A FEW days later he wired to Morrison at the Detmold to ask her to sit for him. She made no reply and did not come.

Very well then: he would not budge. He would only approach Mitchell again through the "top-knots," who lived in a portion of Mitchell's world that had hitherto been closed to him. It promised new adventure, and he was so eager for it that he would not enter upon any other outside his work.

The days went by and he began a portrait of his mother, with which he intended to make his first appearance at an important exhibition. Golda sat dressed in her best on the throne, and tried vainly to soothe him as he cursed and stamped and wept over his difficulties:

"I can't do it! I can't do it!" he wailed. "I'm a fool, a blockhead, a pig! If I could only do one little thing more to it I could make it a great picture."

"You are always the same," said Golda. "In Austria, when you were a little boy, the soldiers made you a uniform like their own. They used to call you the Captain, and they saluted you in the street, only they forgot to give you any boots, and when the soldiers marched by, you stamped and roared because you were not allowed to go with them, and I could not make you understand that you were not a real captain."

"But I am a real artist," he growled. "You'll never make me understand that I am not a real artist."

"Nothing good was ever done in a hurry," said she. "If you run so fast you will break your head against a wall."

"I shall paint many portraits of you, for I shall never be satisfied. You may as well sit here with your hands folded as over there in the kitchen. If I'm not careful your hands will grow all over the picture. I have put such a lot of work into them."

Then for a long time he was silent, and both were lost in a dreamlike happiness--to be together, alone with his work, bound together in his delight as they used to be when he was a child before the invasion of their peace.

He went to the door in answer to a knock and found Morrison standing there with some flowers in her hands.

"Oh!" he said awkwardly, holding the door. "Won't you come in? Please. I am painting my mother."

Golda's eyes lighted with pleasure on the fresh-looking girl and her flowers.

"She is like a flower herself," she thought, and indeed the girl looked as though she were fresh from the country.

She held out her hand to Golda, who stood up on the throne and bobbed to her, then folded her hands on her stomach and waited patiently for the lady to break the awkwardness that had sprung up between the three of them. Mendel could do nothing. He looked from one to the other and felt, with a little tremor of horror, the gulf that separated the two.

At last Morrison said to Golda:--

"I am very glad to see you, though I feel I know you quite well from the drawings he has done of you."

Golda broke into inarticulate expressions of the delight it was to her to see any of her son's friends, and saying that she would have a special tea sent up, she edged towards the door and slipped out.

"Why didn't you come before?" asked Mendel, when he had heard the door bang. "I sent you a telegram. I wanted to paint your portrait, and now I have begun something else."

"I didn't want to come," replied she, "but something Mitchell said made me want to come."

"What did he say?"

"He told me about Kessler, and I thought it was a shame. I thought it was a horrible shame that you should be treated like that, as if anything mattered but your work."

Her voice rather irritated him. Her accent was rather mincing and precise, and between her sentences she gave a little gasp which he took for an affectation.

"Why did Mitchell tell you that?"

"He tells me a great deal about you, and he was really upset by your letter."

"Was he? Was he?"

Mendel had no thought but for Mitchell. He longed to go to him, to embrace him, to tell him that all was different now. He blurted it all out to the girl.

"We were so happy, the four of us together. Every evening we met and we were like kings. Everything that we wanted to do we did. We had money and success and all such foolish things, and we worked hard, all of us. There were not in London four young men like us, and I was free of the terrible people who wanted to turn me into an ordinary successful painter--a portrait painter. I tell you, I have never had a commission in my life that was not a failure. I only wanted to be young and to work, for I had never been young before. And then suddenly, out of nothing, my friends turned on me and told me I was a Jew and uneducated, and ought to treat them with more respect. Why? The Jews are good people, and what do I want with education? Can books teach me how to paint? I tell you the Jews are good people."

Tea was brought up on a lacquer tray--bread, jam, and cake. They were both hungry and fell to with a will, hardly speaking at all.

When they had finished they began to talk of pictures and of the lives of the painters, and he told her stories of Michael Angelo and Rembrandt: how Michael Angelo never took his boots off, and was never in love in his life; and how Rembrandt was practically starved to death. Then he showed her reproductions of Cranach and Dürer, whom at the time he adored, and they bent over them, the chestnut head and the curly black together. Gradually she led him on to tell of his own life, and he began at the beginning in Austria, holding her spell-bound with his vivid, picturesque talk.

"It makes me feel very quiet and dull," she said. "I don't think I ever regarded places outside England as real, somehow. There was just home and London, and London seemed to be the end of everything. All the trains stop there, you know."

"Where is your home?" he asked.

"In Sussex. It is very beautiful country."

"How did you come to the Detmold?"

"A girl at home had been there, and at school they said I was no good at anything but drawing. Indeed, I was sent away from two schools, and at home I was such a trouble that mother decided I must do something to earn my living. So I was sent up to the Detmold. I had my hair down my back then."

"I remember," said he. "In a plait."

She smiled with pleasure at that.

"Yes," she said. "In a plait. I lived in a hostel, where they bullied me because I was so untidy and was always being late for meals. At home, you know, there were only my brothers, and my mother could never keep them in order, and I was always treated as if I was a boy too. . . . And I think that's all."

She ended so lamely that his irritation got the better of him, and he jumped to his feet. It seemed to him that his view of the "top-knots" was confirmed. They were simply negligible. He was baffled, and stood staring down at her. Was she no more interested in herself than that? Comparing the smooth monotony of her life with his, he waxed impatient, and told himself he was a fool to have invited her to come to him.

He began to study her face with a view to painting it, and he was absorbed and fascinated by it. The lines of her cheek and of her neck made him itch to draw them.

"Yes," he said, "I must paint you. I can do something good. I'm sure I can."

"I wanted to ask if you would mind my painting you," she said.

He was aghast at her impudence. She, a slip of a girl, a "top-knot," paint the great Kühler!

She saw how horrified he was and added hastily:--

"Of course, I won't insist if you don't like sitting."

She rose to go and he begged her to stay.

"Don't go yet," he said with sudden emotion. "I don't want you to go. Somehow I feel as if you had been sitting there always and I don't want you to go. If you don't want to talk you needn't, but you must stay. I could see that my mother liked you at once, and she always knows good people. You made her happy about me. It was like sunshine to her when you came in, and I shall be wretched if you go, for I don't know what to think about you."

"I know what I think about you."

"What do you think?"

"You have made me feel that London isn't just a place where the trains stop."

And she began to tell him about her home and the river where she bathed with her brothers, the woods where in spring there were primroses and daffodils, and in summer bluebells.

"Opposite the house," she said, "is a hill which is a common, all covered with gorse in the summer, and the hot, nutty smell of it comes up and seems to burn your face. There are snakes on the common--vipers and adders and grass-snakes. From the top you can see the downs, and beyond them, you know, is the sea. On moonlight nights it is glorious, and I nearly go mad sometimes with running in and out of the shadows. I believe I did go mad once, for I sat up on the top of the hill and sang and shouted and cried, all by myself, and I felt that my heart would break if I did not kiss something. The gorse was out, and I buried my face in the dewy yellow flowers. . . . I often think the woods are like churches on Easter Day. . . . And then when I get home and it is just a house and I am just a girl living in it, you know, it all seems wrong somehow."

Mendel sat on the floor trying to puzzle out this mysterious rapture of hers. He had never heard of gorse or of downs, but he could recognize her emotion. He had had something like it the first time he saw a may-tree in blossom, and he had hardly been able to bear it. He had rather resented it, for it had interfered with his work for a day or two, and he could not help feeling that there was something indecent about an emotion with which he could do nothing.

"Yes," he said heavily; "it must be very pretty."

She shivered at the grotesqueness of his words as she sank back into her normal mood of happy diffidence. His face wore an expression of black anger as he darted quick, furious glances at her. Here was something that he did not understand, something that defied his mastery, and when she smiled he thought it was at himself, and this strange power that had been behind her appeared to him as a mocking, teasing spirit. Let it mock, let it tease! He was strong enough to defy it. Sweep through a green girl it might, but he was not to be caught by it. He knew better. In him it had tough simplicity to deal with and a will that had broken the confinement of Fate, the limits of a meagre religion, to bend before no authority but that of art. . . . He was rather contemptuous, too. Nothing as yet had resisted his genius, and he felt it within him stronger than ever, a river with a thousand sources. Block one channel and it would find another. Stop that and it would find yet another.

Yet here he knew was no direct, no open menace, only the intolerable suggestion that there were other streams, other sources, and the suggestion had come from this foolish, empty girl.

"I will not have it," he said half aloud.

"What did you say?" she asked.

"Nothing. I was thinking--I was thinking that there is nothing so good as London. They tried to send me to Italy, but I know that there is nothing so good as London for life, and where life is, there is art. I don't want your pretty places and your pretty feelings. I want to go through the streets and to see the girls in the evening leaving the shops, and the men in their bowler-hats looking at the girls and wanting them, and the fat men in their motor-cars, and the bookstalls on the railway stations, and the public-houses with their rows of bottles and the white handles of the beer machines, and the plump barmaids, and the long, straight streets going on for ever with the flat houses on either side of them, and the markets and the timber-yards and the tall chimneys. It all fills your mind and makes patterns and whirling thoughts that take a spiral shape, going up and up to mysterious heights. I want all that, and nothing shall take it from me, do you hear?"

He turned on her ferociously, as though she were trying to rob him.

"And inside it all is something solid," he went on. "Do you know that my father never loved but one woman in all his life? That's what Jews are. They know what's solid. If they have to stay in the filth to keep it, then they'll stay in the filth. And because I'm a Jew I'm not to be caught with your pretty things and your little fancies. I shall paint the things I understand, and I'll leave the clouds and the rainbows and the roofs and chimneys to fools like Mitchell."

Morrison sat very meekly while he talked. She hung her head and twitched her fingers nervously. She was elated by his passion, but she too had her dreams and was not going to surrender them. His strength had given her confidence in them and in herself, and she was filled with a teasing spirit.

"Jews aren't the only people who are solid," she said. "You see men in buses and trains whom an earthquake wouldn't move, and I'm sure, if an earthquake happened, my mother would be left where she was, reading the Bible."

Mendel replied:--

"In a thousand years my mother will be just as she is now."

Morrison stared at him and began to wonder if he was not a little mad. He added simply:--

"I feel like that."

And she was relieved and thought he was the only sane person she had ever met in her life.

"Will you let me come again?" she asked.

"I am going to paint you," he said; "I am going to paint you as you are. You won't like it."

"I shall if you make me solid," she answered. "And you need flowers in this dark room. You must let me send you some."