Chapter IX: Book TWO: Bohemia (1)

I

THE POT-AU-FEU

AT the exhibition, the portrait of Golda created no small stir. The critics, who, since Whistler, had been chary of denouncing new-comers, had swung to the opposite extravagance and were excessively eager to discover new masters. The youth of this Kühler made him fair game, for it supplied them with a proviso. They could hail his talent as that of a prodigy without committing themselves.

"The portrait of the artist's mother," wrote one of them, "has all the essentials of great art, as the early compositions of Mozart had all the essentials of great music. Here is real achievement, a work of art instinct with racial feeling, and therefore of true originality. No trace here of Parisian experiments. This picture is in the direct line from Holbein and Dürer."

Mendel took this to mean that he was as good as Holbein and Dürer, and accepted it not as praise but as a statement of fact. The picture was bought by a well-known connoisseur, who wrote that he was proud to have such a picture in his collection.

"Now," thought the proud painter, "my career has really begun."

For once in a way he regarded his success with his father's eyes and much as Moscowitsch would have regarded the successful coup in business for which he was always vainly striving. The hectic gambling spirit introduced by Hetty Finch had disappeared, and though he still devoted his leisure to Mitchell, their adventurousness was tempered by the tantalization of the "top-knots," Morrison and Clowes. To counteract the disturbing effect of their coolness, Mendel became very Jewish and hugged his success, gloating over it rather like a cat over a stolen piece of fish.

Morrison's indifference to the buzz about his name was especially maddening, because he wished to prove to her that in painting dwelt a joy beside which her trumpery little ecstasy in woods and flowers was nothing, nothing at all. He wished to convince himself that he had not been really disturbed by her first visit to his studio. Only the shock of novelty he had felt, and by his success, by his triumphant work, he had obliterated it. . . . She was nothing, he told himself, only a raw girl, smooth and polished by her easy life, good for nothing except to be made love to by such as Mitchell.

Love? They called it love when a young man clasped a maiden's hand, or when they kissed and rode together on the tops of buses! These Christians were rather disgusting with all their talk of love. He had heard more talk of it in three years of contact with them than in all his life before, and Weldon and others had talked of love in connection with Hetty Finch.

Disgusting!

And now here was Mitchell babbling of his love for Morrison. When Mendel wanted to talk of pictures and art and the old painters who had worked simply without reference to success, Mitchell kept dragging him back to Morrison, her simplicity, her extraordinary childlike innocence, her love of beauty, her generous trustfulness, her queer sudden impulses.

"What has such a girl as that to do with art or with artists?" said Mendel furiously. "An artist wants women as he wants his food, when he has time for them."

"Gawd!" says Mitchell, trotting along by his side; "you don't know what you are talking about. I tell you I never believed all that trash about a young man being redeemed by a virtuous girl until now."

"It's nonsense!" shouted Mendel; "nonsense, I tell you. It must be nonsense, because it didn't matter to you whether it was Clowes or Morrison, and for all I know, it may be both."

"Clowes is a jolly nice girl too," replied Mitchell, "but she's more ordinary. I never met anyone like Morrison before. I can't make her out, but she does make me feel that I am an absolute rotter. It is her fresh enjoyment of simple things that disturbs me and makes me see what a mess I've made of my life. Once an artist loses that, he is finished."

They had been reading Tolstoi on "What is Art?" and their young conceit had been put out by it. Must their extraordinary powers produce work accessible to the smallest intelligence? Mendel had been greatly influenced by that theory in his portrait of his mother, while Mitchell's energy had been paralysed so that he could produce nothing at all.

"Yes," Mitchell went on, "I know now what Tolstoi means. He means that love can speak direct to love, and, by Jove! it is absolutely true. Brains are only a nuisance to an artist. Look at Calthrop! He hasn't got the brains of a louse. Of course, that is why painters are such an ignorant lot. I must tell my father that when he goes for me for not reading."

"But Tolstoi liked bad artists!" grumbled Mendel. "And my mother does not like some of my best things. As for my father, he wants a painted bread to look as if he could eat it: never is he satisfied just to look at it. His love and my love are not the same and cannot speak to each other."

"You should see more of Morrison, and then you would understand," rejoined Mitchell.

Mendel felt that Mitchell was slipping away from him, and all this Christian talk of love was to him a corrosion upon his imagination and his nervous energy, blurring and distorting everything that he valued. There were many things that he hated, and yet because he hated them their interest for him was consuming. Issy's wife, for instance, and her squalling children; his father's bitter tongue; and Mitchell's odd self-importance.

He repeated:--

"Tolstoi liked bad artists."

"You can't settle a big man like Tolstoi just by repeating phrases about him."

"I can settle him by painting good pictures," retorted Mendel. "I don't paint pictures to please people."

"Then why do you paint?"

"I don't know. To be an artist. Because there is a thing called art which matters to me more than all the love and all the women and all the little girls in the world."

"Ah!" sighed Mitchell. "You'll soon think differently. I shall never do another stroke of work without thinking of Greta standing on Kew Bridge and looking up the river at the boats with their white sails."

"Will you be quiet?" cried Mendel; "will you be quiet with your little girls and white sails?"

Mitchell seemed to be slipping away from him, and he dreaded the thought of being left alone with his success, which was blowing a bulb of glass round him, so that he felt imprisoned in it, and wherever he looked could see nothing but reflections of himself, Mendel Kühler, painting his mother, and his father, and old Jews and loaves and fishes for ever and ever. While he clung to Mitchell he knew that he could not be so encased, but Mitchell demanded that he should go out with him into a world all glowing with love, with rivers of milk and honey and meadows pied with buttercups and daisies; to stand on airy bridges and gaze at innocent little girls and white sails. The contemplation of this world revolted him, and he stiffened himself against it. Better the smells and the dirt than such fantastical stuff. His gorge rose against it.

To wean Mitchell from his amorous fancies he pretended that he was tired and wanted a holiday, and together they went down to a village on the South Coast near Brighton. There it was almost as it had been in the beginning. For a fortnight they were never out of each other's company. They slept in one bed and shared each other's clothes, paints, and money. They sketched the same subjects, took tremendous walks, and in the evening they talked as though there were no London, no Paris Café, no exhibitions, no dealers, no critics, nothing but themselves and their friendship and their artistic projects. Mendel was supremely happy. Never had he known such intimacy since the days of Artie Beech.

But Mitchell was often depressed and moody. He had letters every day, and every evening he wrote at great length.

One morning he had a letter which he crumpled up dramatically and thrust into his trousers pocket.

"Gawd!" he said. "That's put the lid on it. I'm done for."

"What is it?" asked Mendel, aghast.

"I'll tell you when we get back to London. We must go back this afternoon. Eight o'clock in the Pot-au-Feu."

The Pot-au-Feu was a little restaurant in Soho which Mitchell, Weldon, and some others had endeavoured to render immortal by decorating it with panels. In a room above it lived Hetty Finch.

Mendel's thoughts flew to her, a figure of ill omen. He had not seen her for some time, and had imagined that she had so successfully got all she wanted and was so thoroughly established in her composite profession that she had no time for the younger artists. He had heard tales about her, and fancied she would succeed in hooking one of the older men for a husband.

He said:--

"Why do you want to go back to that beastly place? Here it is good. I could stay here for six months."

"Gawd!" said Mitchell dismally. "'Tis life. There's absolutely no getting away from it. Everything is swallowed up and nothing is left."

He became very solemn and added:--

"If anything happens to me, Kühler, I want you to go to Greta Morrison and tell her that through everything I never forgot my happiness with her."

"Happen!" cried Mendel. "What can happen?"

"I'll tell you to-night," replied Mitchell gloomily, "at the Pot-au-Feu."

And not another word did he say, neither during their morning's work, nor during lunch, nor in the train, nor in the taxi-cab that took them to Soho.

"You wait outside," said Mitchell mysteriously.

Mendel waited outside and paced up and down, oppressed with the idea that his friendship with Mitchell was at an end. He was left helpless and exposed, for all that had been built on the friendship had come toppling down, and with it came the extra personality he had developed for dealing with the Detmold and the polite world--the Kühler who had assiduously learned manners and phrases, vices and enthusiasms, as a part to be played at the Paris Café and in the drawing-rooms of the languid ladies who were interested in art and artists. Hetty Finch went with it, for she had been an adjunct of that personality. . . . He was glad to be rid of her, and shook her off, plucked her out of his mind like a burr that was stuck upon it.

After a quarter of an hour or so Mitchell came out more mysterious than ever, took his arm and led him into the restaurant, which was hardly bigger than an ordinary room. Full of vigour and health as he was, Mendel felt an enormous size in it, as though he must knock over the tables and thrust his elbows through the painted panels. Madame Feydeau, the proprietress, greeted him with a wide smile and said she had missed him lately. At his table was the goggle-eyed man who dined there every night with his newspaper open in front of him. Weldon and a girl with short hair were sitting in uncomfortable silence, both with the air of doing a secret thing. Near the counter, with its dishes of fruit and coffee-glasses, was Hetty Finch, rather drawn and pinched in the face and very dark under the eyes.

Mendel was filled with impatience. She had no business to be sitting there, for he had disposed of her, and she made everything seem fantastic and unreal. He shook hands with her and sat at the table. Mitchell took the chair next to Hetty and talked to her in an undertone, while her eyes turned on Mendel with a frightened, inquiring expression.

"All right," he said, as though he had understood her question. "I know when to hold my tongue."

Mitchell went on whispering, and every now and then he bowed his head and clenched his fists, as though he were racked with inexpressible emotions. He too had become fantastic. Mendel knew that he was play-acting, and with a sickening dread he went back over all he knew of Mitchell, recognizing this same play-acting in much that he had accepted as genuine. Yet he would not believe it, for Mitchell was his friend, and therefore never to be criticized.

Would neither of them speak? Food was laid before him, and he ate it without tasting it. Mitchell led Hetty away to another table and talked to her impressively there. Then he brought her back and went on with his whispering.

Coffee was laid before Mendel, and he drank it without tasting it.

At last Hetty said, in a loud voice that rang through the room:--

"No. I will take nothing from you. I ask nothing from you, not a penny."

"By God," said Mitchell, hanging his head, "I deserve it."

Hetty turned to Mendel and asked him sweetly to buy her a bottle of wine, as she needed something to pick her up.

"You are a devil," she said, "sitting there as though nothing had happened. But I always said you were a devil and no good. I always said so, but I have my friends and can be independent."

"Don't be a fool," said he roughly. "You'll have a short run, and you'd better find something to fall back on while you can."

"Get your hair cut!" she replied. "I know which side my bread's buttered, and the old men aren't so sharp as the young ones. You've got a fool's tongue in your clever head, Kühler, and a fool's tongue makes enemies."

"Shut up!" he said. "And you leave Mitchell alone. He hasn't done you any harm."

"Ho! Hasn't he?" she cried.

Mitchell groaned, and, giving a withering glance at the two of them, Hetty gathered up her vanity-bag and gloves and walked out of the restaurant.

"She's a slut!" said Mendel. "She always was a slut and always will be."

"Gawd!" cried Mitchell. "It was you let her loose on the town, and I shall never hold up my head again. I shall never be able to face my people. I shall just let myself be swallowed up in London. . . . But I shan't trouble any of my friends. When I'm a pimp I shan't mind if you look the other way. After all, it isn't so far to fall. There's not much difference between the ordinary artist and a pimp."

"What has she done to you?" cried Mendel furiously. "Why do you let yourself be put down by a drab like that?"

"She's not a drab," said Mitchell, in a curious thin of protest. "She is the mother of my child."

Mendel brought his fist down on the table with a thump, so that the cups jumped from their saucers.

"She is what?"

"The mother of my child," said Mitchell, burying his face in his hands. "I have offered to marry her, to make an honest woman of her, but she refuses, and she will take nothing from me. Gawd! How can I ever face Morrison again? How can I face my mother?"

"Rubbish! Rubbish! Rubbish!" cried Mendel. "Why you? Why not Weldon--why not Calthrop?" He saw the goggle-eyed man listening eagerly and lowered his voice. "A drab like that deserves all she gets. She takes her risks, and I'll say this for her, that she does not complain. She's clever enough to know how to deal with it. . . ."

He wanted to say a great deal more, but realized that Mitchell, intent upon his own emotions, was not listening to him. Also, through the fantastic atmosphere, he began to be aware of a reality powerful and horrible. Against it Hetty seemed to be of no account, and Mitchell's excitement was palpably false.

This reality had been called into being by no one's will, and therefore it was horrible.

"I shall have to disappear," said Mitchell.

Mendel did not hear him speak. His own will was aroused by the devastating reality. Because it was physical he exulted in it, and his will struggled to master it. He could not endure his friend's helplessness and he wanted above all to help him, to make him see that this thing was at least powerful; evil and ugly, perhaps, but much too vital to be subdued or conquered by fantasy and theatrical emotions. He found Mitchell bewildering. Sentimentality always baffled him, for it seemed to him so superficial as to be not worth bothering about and so complicated as to defy unravelling. He knew that Mitchell was horrified and afraid, and that it was natural enough, but fear was not a thing to be encouraged.

He said:--

"Hetty knows perfectly well that she can manage it better without you."

"I know," replied Mitchell. "That's what makes me feel such an awful worm."

Mendel lost all patience. If a man was going to take pleasure in feeling a worm, there was nothing to be done with him. He called the waiter, paid the bill, and stumped out of the Pot-au-Feu leaving Mitchell staring blankly at the goggle-eyed man.

* * * * *

A few days later he met Edgar Froitzheim leaving the National Gallery as he entered it.

"Oh! Kühler," said Froitzheim. "The very man I wanted to see. I am very proud about the picture--very proud. But I wanted to see you about young Mitchell. He is a friend of yours, isn't he? He is behaving very badly to a young model. Such a pretty girl. Hetty Finch. You know her? She is in trouble through him, and he refuses to do anything for her. I'm told he has Nietzschean ideas. I sent for the girl. It is a very sad story and I have raised a subscription for her: fifty pounds to see her through. . . . Do try and bring Mitchell to reason."

"I'll do what I can," replied Mendel, and he walked on to pay his daily homage to Van Eyck and Chardin, who were his heroes at the time.

That evening at the Paris Café he heard of another subscription having been raised for Hetty, and Calthrop growled and grumbled and said he had given her twenty pounds.

Mendel reckoned it up and he found that she was being paid for her delinquency more than he could hope to receive for many months of painful work.

As he finished his calculation he was amazed to see Mitchell come in with Morrison, whom he had declared he could never face again, and when Mendel rose to go over and join them she gave him only a curt little nod which told him plainly that he was not wanted.

II

LOGAN

ONCE again Mendel decided that Mitchell, and with him London life, had fallen away from him. The Paris Café could never be the same again, and he plunged into despair, and thought seriously of accepting a Jewish girl with four hundred pounds whom a match-maker offered to him. Four hundred pounds was not to be sneezed at. It would keep him going for some years, so that he need not think of selling his pictures, which he always hated to part with. And the girl was just bearable.

The figure delighted his father and mother, for it showed them the high opinion of their wonder-son held among their own people.

It was terrible to him to find that he had very little pleasure in his work, which very often gave him excruciating pain. He took it to mean that he was coming to an end of his talent. Night after night he sat on his bed feeling that he must make an end of his life, but always there was some piece of painting that he must do in the morning, painful though it might be.

He had letters from Mitchell, but did not answer them, and at last "the schoolboy," as Golda called him, turned up, gay and smiling and rather elated.

"I've discovered a great man," he said with the awkward, jerky gesture he used in his more eloquent moments. "Absolutely a great man. Reminds me of Napoleon. Wonderful head, wonderful! His name is Logan--James Logan--and he wants to know you. He is a painter, and absolutely independent. He comes from the North--Liverpool or one of those places. I haven't seen his work, but I met him at the Pot-au-Feu the other night. He asked me if I was not a friend of yours, as he thought he had seen me with you. He said: 'Kühler is the only painter of genius we have.' I spent the evening with him. I never heard such talk. It made the old Detmold seem like a girls' school. . . . Hallo! Still-life again? What a rum old stick you are for never going outside your four walls!"

"What I paint is inside me, not outside," said Mendel, trembling with rage at Mitchell looking at his work before he had offered to show it.

"Will you come and see Logan?"

"No. I am sick of painters. I want to know decent people."

"But I promised I would bring you, and he admires your work. He is poor too, as poor as you are."

"Can't he sell?"

"It isn't that so much as that he doesn't try. He says he had almost despaired of English painting until he saw your work."

"How old is he?"

"A good deal older than us. Twenty-six, I should think."

"Why don't you just stick to me?" asked Mendel. "What more do you want? Why must you always go off on a new track? First it's Hetty Finch, then it's Morrison, and now it's this new man. We were happy enough by ourselves. Why do you want anything more? I don't."

"You're used to living on dry bread. I'm not. I want butter with mine, and jam, if I can get it."

"Then get it and don't bother me to go chasing after it. I want to work."

"Oh, rot! All that stuff about artists starving in garrets is out of date. It only happened because they couldn't find patrons, but nowadays there are dealers and buyers. . . . Just look at the money you are making."

"Then why is this Logan poor?"

"He isn't known yet. He doesn't know the artists because he never went to a London school. He was doing quite well in the North, but threw it all up because he couldn't stand living in such a filthy town. He had a teaching job somewhere in Hammersmith, but he threw that up because he wanted his time to himself."

"That sounds as if painting means something to him."

"Do come and see him."

"Oh! very well."

"I'll send him a wire and we'll go to-night."

They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and later made the expedition to Hammersmith, where they came to a block of studios surrounded by a scrubby garden. These studios were large and well-kept and did not tally with the description of Logan's poverty. Still less did the inside give any sign of it. There was a huge red-brick fireplace, surmounted by old brass and blue china, with great arm-chairs on either side of it: there were Persian rugs on the floor; two little windows were filled in with good stained glass, which Mendel knew to be costly; there were two or three large easels; and the walls were hung with tapestry. The whole effect was deliberately and preciously rich.

Logan, who had admitted them to this vast apartment, rushed back at once to a very large easel on which he had a very small canvas, and fell to work on it with a furious energy, darting to and fro and stamping his right foot rather like the big trumpet man in a German band. He was a medium-sized, plumpish man, with a big, strongly featured face, big chin, and compressed lips, and long black hair brushed back from a round, well-shaped brow. He frowned and scowled at his work. A woman came out of a door and crossed the studio behind him. He hurled his palette into the air so that it sailed up and fell with a crash among the brass pots, and barked:--

"How can I work with these constant interruptions? Damn it all, an artist must have peace!"

He flung his arms behind his back and paced moodily to and fro, with his head down and his lips pursed up _à la_ Beethoven. He extended the sphere of his pacing gradually so that he came nearer and nearer to Mendel, yet without noticing him. Mendel was tremendously excited and impressed with the man's air of mystery and force. It was like Calthrop, but without his awkwardness. Mitchell in comparison looked puny and absurdly young.

Nearer and nearer came Logan, and at last he stopped and fixed Mendel with a baleful stare, and swung his head up and down three times.

"So you are Kühler?" he said.

Mendel opened his lips, but to his astonishment no sound came out of them. So desperately anxious was he not to cut a poor figure before this remarkable man, and not to seem, like Mitchell, pathetically young.

"Good!" said Logan. "Shake hands." And he crushed Mendel's thin fingers together. "What I like about you," he went on, "is your sense of form. Design is all very well in its way, but quite worthless without form."

Mendel, whose work was still three parts instinctive, could not attach any precise meaning to these expressions, but he was well up in the jargon of his craft and could make a good show.

"Art," said Logan, "is an exacting mistress. Shall we go and have a drink?"

He put on his hat and led the two marvelling youngsters to a public-house, where he became a different man altogether. The compression of his lips relaxed, his eyes twinkled and his face shone with good humour, and he made them and the barmaid and the two or three men who were shyly taking their beer roar with laughter. He had an extraordinary gift of mimicry, and told story after story, many of them against himself, most of them without point, but in the telling exceedingly comic. Mendel sat up and bristled. It was to him half shocking, half enviable, that a man, and an artist, should be able to laugh at himself.

"If you'll give me free drinks for a month," said Logan to the elderly barmaid, "I'll paint your portrait. Are you married? . . . No? I'll paint you such a beautiful portrait that it will get you a husband inside a week."

"I'm not on the marrying lay," said the barmaid.

"Terrible thing, this revolt against marriage," replied Logan, "and bad luck on us artists. I'm always getting babies left on my doorstep."

"What do you do with them?" said Mendel, believing him, and astonished when the others roared with laughter.

"I keep the pretty ones and sell them to childless mothers. Ah! Many's the time I've gone through the snow, like the heroine in a melodrama taking her child to the workhouse."

"Oh! go on," tittered the barmaid.

"Certainly," said Logan. "Come along."

As they left the public-house he took Mendel's arm and said:--

"You have to talk to people in their own language, you know."

"Yes," replied Mendel, though this was precisely what he knew least of all.

"Why don't you go on the stage?" asked Mitchell.

"I have thought of it. I think I might do well on the halls. There's a life for you! On at eight in Bethnal Green:--

My old woman's got a wart on her nose;
How she got it I will now disclose.

Off again in a motor-car to the Oxford:--

My old woman's got a wart on her nose.

Off again to Hammersmith or Kensal Rise:--

My old woman's got a wart on her nose.

My God! What a life! But I love the halls. They are all that is left of old England!"

His parody of the low comedian was so apt and his voice had such a delicious roll that Mendel could not help laughing, and he began to feel very happy with the man.

Logan swung back to his serious mood and gripped Mendel's arm tighter as he said:--

"You have a big future before you. Only stick to it. Don't listen to the fools who want you to paint the same picture over and over again with a different subject. There's more stuff in that one little picture of yours than in all the rest of the exhibition put together."

"Do you think so?" said Mendel, fluttering with excitement.

"I was amazed when I heard you had been to the Detmold with its Calthrop and all the little Calthrops."

Both the youngsters were silent on that. They had often abused the Detmold, but with a profound respect in their hearts, and both had done their full share of imitating Calthrop.

When they reached the studio Mitchell suggested going, but Logan would not hear of it. He dragged them in and produced whisky and soda, and kept them talking far into the small hours. His bouncing energy kept Mendel awake and alert, but Mitchell was soon exhausted and fell asleep.

"Shall we put him out of the way?" said Logan suddenly. "No one would know, and the river is handy. He is too clean, too soft, and there are too many like him. They are in the way of real men like you and me."

Mendel was appalled to find that he could not defend his friend. All the discontents of his waning friendship came rushing up in him and he began to babble violently.

"He is a liar and a coward, and he will never be an artist because he is too weak. He is not true. He is not good. I have trusted him with my secrets and he tells. He is always ashamed of me because of my clothes and because I have not been to Public School, and he is jealous because when we meet women they like me. He is soft and deceitful with them, but I am honest, and they like that. I wanted him to be my friend, but it is impossible."

"He is an Englishman," said Logan sepulchrally, with the air of a Grand Inquisitor.

"Aren't you an Englishman?"

"No, Scotch and French. These Englishmen have no passions, unless they are mad like Blake. . . . No, no. We'll drop Mitchell overboard. We'll make him walk the plank, and fishes in the caverns of the sea shall eat his eyes."

Logan was beginning to assume enormous proportions in Mendel's eyes. It seemed that there was nothing the tremendous fellow did not know. He began to talk of genius and the stirring of the creative impulse, and he gave so powerful an account of Blake that Mendel began to see visions of heaven and hell. Here was something which he could acknowledge as larger than himself without self-humiliation, and, indeed, the larger it loomed the more swiftly did he himself seem to grow. It was such a sensation as he had not known since the days before his rapture with Sara. All that had intervened fell away. That purity of passion returned to him and, choosing Logan for its object, rushed upon him and endowed him with its own power and beauty. Logan talking of Blake was to Mendel's innocence as rare as Blake, and he adored him.

"I had almost given up art," said Logan; "I had almost given it up as hopeless. How can there be art in a despiritualized country like this, that lets all its traditions rot away? I was just on the point of tossing up whether I should go on the stage or take to spouting at the street corners; for when a country is in such a condition that its artists are stifled, then it is ripe for revolution. I am instinctive, you know, like Napoleon. I feel that we are on the threshold of something big, and that I am to have my share in it. I used to think it would happen in art, but I despaired of that. It seemed to me that art in this country could go doddering on for generations, and then I thought it needed a political upheaval to push it into its grave. But when I saw your work, I said to myself: Here is the real thing, alive, personal, profound, skilled. I began to hope again. And now that I have met you I feel more hopeful still, and, let me tell you, like most painters, I don't find it easy to like another man's work."

Mendel was fired. Trembling in every limb, he said:--

"It has been the dream of my life to find a friend who would work with me, think with me, go with me, share with me, not quarrelling with me because I am not this, that, and the other, but accepting me as I am--a man who has no country, no home, no love but art."

"That," said Logan, with a portentous scowl and a downward jab of his thumb, "is what I have been looking for--some one, like yourself, who was absolutely sincere, absolutely single-minded and resolute. The spirit of art has brought us together. We will serve it together."

They shook hands like young men on the stage, and Logan fetched a deep sigh of relief.

Mitchell woke up, saying:--

"Gawd! I've been asleep. Have you two been talking? Gawd! It's two o'clock."

"I'll walk home with you," said Logan. "We can keep to the river nearly the whole way by going from side to side."

So they walked while the tide came up, sucking and lapping, while the red dragons' eyes of the barges came swinging up on it, moving up and down in a slow, irregular rhythm. It was very cold and the sky was thickly powdered with stars, whose pin-prick lights were reflected in the smooth water.

Upon the dome of the young artist's vision that had before been black with infinite space, stars shone with a tender light. He was in ecstasy, and seemed to be skimming above the ground, hardly touching it with his feet. This long walk was like an exquisite dance, while Logan's rollings were like a pipe. . . . Often he sank into a dream that he was upon a grassy hill in a mountainy place, he and his friend, who played upon a pipe so mournfully yet gaily while he danced, and from the trees fell silvery dewdrops and the songs of birds, which turned into pennies as they reached the ground and rolled away down the hill.

Both he and Logan were relieved when Mitchell, who had interrupted them with inappropriate remarks, turned aside at Vauxhall and vanished into London.

"So much for Mitchell," said Logan. "You and I need sterner stuff. You and I are sprung from those among whom life is lived bravely and bitterly, and we have no use for its parasites. You and I will only emerge from the bitterness on condition that we can make of life a spiritual thing, for we are of those who seek authority. Life has none to offer us now, for all the forms of life are broken. Neither above us nor below is there authority, neither in heaven nor in hell. We must seek authority within ourselves, in the marriage of heaven and hell, in the consummation of good and evil, the two poles of our nature. It is for us, the artists, to bring them together, to liberate good and evil in ourselves, that they may rush to the consummation. We are the priests and the prophets, and we must in no wise be false to our vision."

Mendel could not fit all this in with his mood and his delicious dreams, and when it brought him back to his sober senses, he could not see what it had to do with painting. However, Logan put things right by saying:--

"You are a poet. You are like Heine. I can see you with your little Josepha the pale, the executioner's daughter. God rot my soul! It is years since I had such inspiration as you have given me. I think there must be Jewish blood in me, for I can certainly understand you through and through, and you have waked something in me that has always been asleep. Oh! we shall paint bonny pictures--bonny, bonny pictures."

"You must come to see me every day," said Mendel, "and every night we will go out together, and I must introduce you to my mother, for she too has good words."

Logan smacked his lips as they entered the grimy streets near Spitalfields.

"Pah!" he said; "that's life, that is, good dirty life. I was littered in a farm-yard myself and I like a good smell. . . . Can you put me up to-night? I don't mind sleeping on the floor."

"You can have my bed," said Mendel, "and I will sleep downstairs on my brother's sofa. Please--please. Do sleep in my bed."

Logan accepted the offer and asked Mendel to stay with him while he undressed. He was unpleasantly fat, but strong and well-built.

He stayed for a long time in front of the mirror.

"See that bulge on the side of my head?" he said as he turned.

Mendel looked, and sure enough his head had a curious bulge on its right side.

"I had rickets when I was young," said Logan, "and my skull must have got pushed over. I expect that's what makes me what I am--lop-sided. I need you to balance me."

He got into bed, and Mendel, reluctant to leave him, sat at his feet and devoured him with his eyes.

"Surely, surely, now," he thought, "all is perfect now. No more disturbances, no more Mitchells, no more Hettys, and I shall do only what I really wish to do."

He stole out into his studio, which was faintly lit from the street below, and it was as though it were filled with some vast spiritual presence, and he imagined how he would work, urged on by this new energy that came welling up through all that he could see, all that he could know, all that he could remember.

III

LOGAN SETS TO WORK

IN the morning he was awakened by his sister-in-law, Rosa, shaking him and saying:--

"Mendel! Mendel! What are you doing on the sofa? Wake up! Wake up! There is some one in your studio."

The house was ringing with Logan's voice chanting the _Magnificat._ Mendel ran upstairs and found him in bed with a box of cigarettes and the New Testament, that fatal book, on his knees.

"Hello!" he said. "I hope I didn't wake you up. I have been awake for a couple of hours looking at your work. I hope you don't mind. There's a still-life there that's a gem, as good as Chardin, and even better, for there's always something sentimental about Chardin--always the suggestion of the old folks at home, the false dramatic touch, the idea of the hard-working French peasant coming in presently to eat the bread and drink the wine. I think it's time you were written up in the papers. It's absurd for a man like you to have to wait for success. There's no artistic public in England, so you can't be successful in your own way. The British public must have its touch of melodrama. To accept a man's work it must first have him shrouded in legend. He must be a myth. His work must seem to come from some supernatural source."

"I'll just run over and tell my mother you are here," said Mendel. "I always have breakfast there, and then go for a walk while the studio is dusted."

"Right you are! I'll be up in half a jiffy. Can I have a bath?"

"No. There's no bath."

"Very well; I can do without for once."

Mendel ran round to Golda and told her of the wonderful man who was in his studio, and he described the adventure of the previous evening. Golda looked scared and said:--

"What next? What next? Good people sleep in their own beds."

"But this man is an artist and he talks like a book."

"Talk is easy," said Golda. "But it takes years to make a friend."

However, when Logan was brought to her she was polite to him and rather shy. He told her that fame was coming to her son faster than the wind.

"Too fast," said she.

"It can never come too fast," replied Logan. "The thirst for fame is a curse to an artist. Let it be satisfied and he is free for his work. I know, for I was very famous in my own town. I sickened of it and ran away. . . . I must congratulate you on letting your son follow his bent. I had to quarrel with my own people to get my way. I haven't seen them since I was fourteen."

"Not your mother?" said Golda, greatly upset.

Logan saw that he had made an awkward impression and hastened to put it right by saying lugubriously:--

"My mother is dead. She forgave me."

He allowed that to sink in and was silent for a minute or two. Then he chattered on gaily and asked Golda to come and see him, and bragged about his studio and his work and his friends, and of a commission he had to decorate a large house in a West End square. He talked so fast that Golda understood very little of what he said, but she never took her eyes off him, and when he said good-bye, Mendel noticed that she did not bob to him as she did to Mitchell and Morrison and his other polite friends. He took that to mean that she accepted Logan as a person above these formalities.

For an hour they walked through the streets and squares of the East End, Mendel proud to display the vivid scenes he intended later on to make into pictures.

When they returned to the studio Logan insisted on seeing all the pictures and drawings again.

"Are you in touch with any dealer?" he asked.

"Cluny has a few pictures and a dozen drawings. He never does anything with them."

"Hum!" said Logan. "Dealers are mysterious people. They can only sell things that sell themselves. By the way, I am giving up my studio in Hammersmith. It is too far away. I shall come nearer in. Hammersmith was all very well while I needed isolation, but that is all over now."

"Where shall you go to?"

"Bloomsbury, I think. I like to be near the British Museum. Do you go to the British Museum? I must show you round. It is no good going there unless you know what to look for. By the way, I came out without any money last night. Can you lend me five pounds?"

Mendel wrote a cheque and handed it to him shamefacedly.

"I want to pay a bill on my way home," said Logan. "I hate being in debt, especially for colours."

"I get my colours from Cluny," said Mendel, "and he sets them against anything he may sell."

The irruption of money had depressed him, and he began to realize that he was very tired. The springs of Rosa's sofa had bored into him and prevented his getting any real sleep.

He was not sorry when Logan went, after making him promise to meet him at the Pot-au-Feu for dinner.

* * * * *

He had a model coming at eleven, but when she arrived he sent her away. He was sore and dissatisfied. The studio seemed dark and dismal, and he could not get enough light on to his work. He took it right up to the window, but still there was not enough light, and his picture looked dull and dingy. His nerves throbbed and he was troubled in spirit, for now his old dreams of painting quietly among his own people while fame gathered about his name had suddenly become childish and pathetic. He was ignorant, futile, conceited, a pigmy by the side of the gigantic Logan, who would not wait upon the world, but would compel its attention and shape it to his will. What had he said artists were? Priests and prophets? . . . How could a man prophesy with a painting of a fish?

Downstairs he heard Issy come in for his dinner, and there was the usual snarling row because Rosa cooked so vilely. Mendel compared Issy's life and his own: Issy working day in, day out, earning just enough to keep himself alive. Why did he go on with it? Why did he keep himself alive? Why did he not clear out, like Harry? There was no pleasure in his life, neither the time nor the money for it. . . . A wretched business.

But was it less wretched than this business of painting? There was more money in painting, and that was all anybody seemed to think of. People wanted the same picture over and over again, and if he consented to please them, his life would be just as poor a thing as Issy's, except that he would have pleasure, and, through his friends, an occasional taste of luxury. At best he could be polite and gentlemanly, like Mitchell, bringing no more to art and getting no more out of it than a boyish excitement, as though art were a game and could give no more than a sensation of cleanliness, like a hot bath.

No, it would not do. It would not do.

It was a lie, too, to say that the Jews only cared about money. When they were overfed, like Maurice Birnbaum, they were like all the other overfed people, but when they were simple and normal they were better than the others, because they had always a sense of mystery and did not waste themselves in foolish laughter.

That was where Logan was true. He could laugh, because all the Christians laugh, but when it came to solemn things he could talk about them as though he were not half ashamed. Mitchell, for instance, always shied away from the truth. Why was he afraid of it? The truth, good or bad, was always somehow beautiful, invigorating, and releasing. All the pleasant things that Mitchell cared about Mendel found stifling. Nothing, he knew, could make life altogether pleasant, and all the falsehoods which were used in that attempt were contemptible. They strangled impulse and frankness, and without these how could there be art?

In his unhappy dreams Logan appeared like a figure of Blake, immense, looming prophetic, beckoning to achievement and away from the chatter and fuss of the world of artists.

Yet behind Logan there was still the figure of Mitchell, young and gay, and the idea of Mitchell led to the idea of Morrison.

There were some withered flowers on his painting-table, the last she had sent him. None had come since that evening in the Paris Café when she had nodded curtly to show him that he was not wanted.

He would not be thrust aside like that. He knew himself to be worth a thousand Mitchells. Logan had said that Mitchell was rubbish, and not even in the eyes of a slip of a girl would Mendel have Mitchell set above himself. Not for one moment was it tolerable. He would keep Morrison to her promises and make her come to have her portrait painted, and he would find out what there was in her that made him remember her so distinctly and so clearly separate her from all other girls. Somehow the thought of her cooled the intoxication in which he had been left by Logan. She offered, perhaps, another way out of his present state of congestion and dissatisfaction. Very clearly she brought back to his mind the thrilling delight with which he had worked as a boy, and that was true, truer than anything else he had ever known. . . . Ah! If he could only get back to that, with all the tricks and cunning he had learned.

He would get back to it some day, but he must fight for it; with Logan he would learn how to fight. Logan would lay his immense store of knowledge before him, and give him books to read, and teach him how to be so easy and familiar with ideas, which at present only frothed in his mind like waves thinning themselves out on the sea-shore.

He wrote an impassioned and insolent letter to Morrison commanding her presence at his studio and informing her that he was worth a thousand of her ordinary associates, and that she had hurt him, and that girls ought not to hurt men of acknowledged talent. This letter cost him a great deal of pain and time, because he was careful not to make any slip in spelling or grammar. It was more a manifesto than a letter, and he wished to do nothing to impair its dignity.

And all the time he was puzzled to know why he should care about her at all. He was prepared to throw everything--his success, the Detmold, his friends--to the winds to follow Logan, but Morrison he could not throw away.

He decided at last not to send the letter but to go himself, and he went to the Detmold just as the light was fading and he knew she would be leaving.

She had gone already, but he met Clowes, who, he knew, lived with her. He pounced on her and said:--

"You must come to tea with me."

"I'm afraid I . . ."

"You must! You must!"

She saw he was very excited and she had heard stories of his bursting into tears when he was thwarted. In some alarm she consented to go with him.

He led her to a teashop, a horrible place that smelt of dishwater and melted butter, made her sit at a table, and burst at once into a tirade:--

"You are Morrison's friend. Will you tell me why she has avoided me? She came to my studio once and she said she would come again. She sent me flowers for three weeks, but she has sent no more."

"She--she is very forgetful," said Clowes, who was longing for tea but did not dare to tell him to turn to the waitress, who was hovering behind him.

"But she nodded to me as if she had hardly met me before," said Mendel.

"She is very shy," said Clowes, framing the word "Tea" with her lips and nodding brightly to the waitress. She added kindly:--

"I don't think sending flowers means much with her. She gives flowers to heaps of people. She is a very odd girl."

"Does she give flowers to Mitchell?" he asked furiously, coming at last with great relief to the consuming thought in his mind.

"Yes," said Clowes. "She is very unhappy about Mitchell and that Hetty Finch affair."

"Has he told her then?"

"Yes."

"Why did he tell her?"

"I'm sure I don't know."

"I'll tell you," cried Mendel. "I'll tell you. To make himself interesting to her, because he is not interesting. He is nothing. And I will tell you something more. He has been telling her things about me to excuse himself. Now, hasn't he? . . . I can see by your face that he has."

Clowes could not deny it, and she found it hard to conceal her distress. She was unused to intimate affairs being dragged out into the open like this, and her modesty was shocked. She had a pretty, intelligent face, and she looked for the moment like a startled hare, the more so when she put her handkerchief up to her nose with a gesture like that of a hare brushing its whiskers.

"Very well, then," Mendel continued; "you can tell her you have seen me, and you can tell her that I shall come to explain myself. I hide nothing, for I am ashamed of nothing that I do. I have no need to excuse myself. I am not a gentleman one moment and a cad the next. And you can tell Morrison that if I see her with Mitchell again I shall knock him down."

"Do please drink your tea," said Clowes. "It is getting cold."

Mendel gulped down his tea and hastened to add:--

"I am not boasting. He is bigger than I am, but I know something about boxing. My brother was nearly a prizefighter."

Clowes began to recover from her alarm, and his immense seriousness struck her as very comic.

"Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?"

"Her hair?" cried Mendel. "Her beautiful hair?"

"Yes. She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets. All the girls are wild to do it."

"Her hair? Her beautiful hair? Why?"

"Oh! she got sick of putting it up. She is like that. She suddenly does something you don't expect."

"But she must look terrible!"