BOOK TWOBOHEMIAITHE POT-AU-FEUATthe 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 hisleisure 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 withhim 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 hadbeen 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 myhead 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 subscriptionfor 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.
ATthe 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 hisleisure 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 withhim 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 hadbeen 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 myhead 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 subscriptionfor 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.