VIIIHETTY FINCHGOLDAwas passing through a very difficult time. Rosa was hotter on the pursuit of Issy than ever. Harry had had a violent quarrel consequent on his reiterated demand for proof of the judicial destruction of Christianity in America, and at last, like his father, he went out and bought a clean collar and announced his departure for Paris. He went away and not a word had been heard from him. Lotte refused to look at any of the young men brought by the match-makers, and Leah was the only comfortable member of the family, and she made no attempt to conceal her unhappiness with Moscowitsch. She would come on Saturday evenings and go up to her mother’s room and fling herself on the bed and cry her heart out, until late in the evening Moscowitsch came to fetch her, when she would go meekly and apparently happily enough. . . . And on the top of all these troubles, here was Mendel going to the devil at a gallop.Leah’s trouble with Moscowitsch was that he would never let her go out without him, and he could very rarely be persuaded to go out at all. As for going away in the summer, he could see no sense in it. He gave his wife a fine house. What more did she want? She had her children to look after. What greater pleasure could she desire? His life was entirely filled with his business and his home, and he would not look beyond them. The neighbours went to the seaside? The neighbours werefools who lived for ostentation and display. They did not know when they were well off. . . . Moscowitsch had a great admiration for his father-in-law as a man who knew what life was and refused to dilute its savour with folly, and he regarded Golda as a perfect type of woman, one who left the management of life to her husband and allowed herself to be absorbed in her duties as a wife and mother.But Leah longed to go to the seaside. It became an obsession with her, and, because she could never talk of it, she thought of nothing else. She was sick with envy when she saw the neighbours going off with the children carrying buckets and spades. Secretly she bought her own children buckets and spades, though they were much too small to use them.At last, when her worries began to tell on Golda, Leah declared that what she needed was sea air, and offered to take her for a fortnight to Margate, and Golda, anxious to escape from the horror of Mendel’s coming home night after night drawn and white with dissipation, and from the dread of an explosion from Jacob, consented, and asked if Issy might go, as that Rosa of his was making him quite ill.For Golda, Leah knew that Moscowitsch would do anything in the world, and so she procured his consent on condition that he was not expected to accompany them, for he hated the sea, which had made him very ill when he came to England, and he never wished to set eyes on it again.Leah already had the address of some lodgings recommended to her by a neighbour. She engaged them, and on a fine July day went down to Margate by the express with her children, Golda, and Issy.The lodgings were let by a handsome, florid woman with masses of bleached golden hair, a ruddled complexion, fat hands covered with cheaprings, plump wrists rattling with bracelets, and a full bosom on which brooches gleamed. Leah thought her a very fine woman, and was so fascinated by her that she stayed indoors day after day, helping with the housework and gossiping, so that she never once saw the sea, except from the train as she was leaving. Mrs. Finch was a lady, by birth, but she had been unfortunate. She had an uncle in the Army and a cousin in the War Office, and she had lived in London, in the best part of the town, where, in her best days, she had had her flat. Also she had travelled and had been to Paris and Vienna. But she had been unfortunate in her friends. Leah commiserated her, and, open-mouthed, gulped down all her tales of the gentlemen she had known, while Golda, eager for more information of the glittering world which had swallowed up her Mendel, listened too, fascinated and shuddering. And Leah, to show that she also was a person of some consequence, began to talk of her wonderful brother. She told of the motor-car which had come and whirled him away, of his visit to the millionaire’s house, of the fine friends he was making, of the men and women he knew whose names were in the papers.“Every day,” she said, “he is out to tea, and every evening he is out at theatres and music-halls and parties and flats and hotels, and his friends are so rich that they pour money into his pockets. He just makes a few lines on a piece of paper and they give him twenty pounds, or he makes up some paint to look like a face or a pineapple and his pockets are full of money.”“Yes,” said Golda uneasily. “He will be very rich.”“Then next time you come to Margate,” said Mrs. Finch, “it will be the Cliftonville, and you’ll despise my poor lodgings.”“Oh no,” cried Leah, “for it is like staying with a friend.”Every day Leah added something to the legend of Mendel, Mrs. Finch urging her on with romances of her own splendid days. But the most eager listener was Hetty, the girl who did the rough work of the house and was never properly dressed until the evening, because, from the moment when she woke up in the morning until after supper, she was kept running hither and thither at Mrs. Finch’s commands. She was sufficiently like Mrs. Finch to justify Golda in her supposition that she was that fine woman’s daughter, but nothing was ever said in the matter. Hetty did not have her meals with them, and, indeed, there was no evidence that she had any meals. In the evenings she was allowed to go out, and she would come back at half-past ten or so with her big eyes shining and a flush fading from her cheeks and leaving them whiter than ever. Very big were her eyes, very big and pathetic, and her face was a perfect oval. She had rather full lips, always moist and red. During the whole fortnight she never spoke a word except to Issy. Indeed, she avoided Golda and Leah, and she alarmed Issy by what he took to be her forwardness, when she asked him to take her to the theatre. He complied with her request, but he was much too frightened of her to speak, and he could think of nothing to say except to offer to buy her chocolates and cigarettes, which she accepted as though it was the natural thing for him to give her presents. She talked to him about Mendel, and wanted to know if it was true that he knew lords and had real gentlemen to tea with him in his studio.“There’s more goes on in his studio than I could tell you,” said Issy with a dry, uncomfortable laugh. “Artists, you know!”“Oh yes! Artists!” said Hetty with a dreamy,wistful look in her eyes as she drew in her lower lip with a slight sucking noise. “I wish I lived in London, I do. Ma used to live in London, but she’s too old now to find any one to take her back there. It’s dull here. Does your brother ever come to Margate?”“No,” said Issy. “He’d go to Brighton if he went anywhere. I’ve got another brother who’s gone to Paris.”“O-oh! Paris! Is he rich too?”“No.”Issy shut up like an oyster. He could feel the girl probing into him, and he was sorry he had brought her. She was spoiling his fun, the adventures he had promised himself during his holiday from Rosa’s indefatigable attentions. Hetty was too dangerous. He knew that if she got hold of him she would not let go.He took her home and never spoke another word to her during the remainder of his visit, and he said to his mother once:—“That’s an awful girl.”“Worse than Rosa?” asked Golda.“Rosa would stay. That girl would be off like a cat on the tiles.”Golda retorted with a description of Rosa of the same kind, but of a more offensive degree.Declaring that they were better for the sea air, and warmly enjoining Mrs. Finch to visit then if ever she should come to London, the party left Margate with shells and toffee and painted china for their friends and relations, conspicuous among their luggage being the buckets and spades which had never been used.As Issy and his mother reached their front-door, he saw Rosa at the corner of the street, and bolted after her, leaving Golda to enter the house and give an account of her doings. Mendel, for once in a way, was at home. He was at work on a picture for a prize competition at the Detmold, asalso were Mitchell and Weldon, so that they were living quietly for the time being. Golda gave a glowing description of the beauties of Margate and of Mrs. Finch and her jewellery. She began to talk of Hetty, but for some reason unknown to herself, with a glance at Mendel she stopped, and went off into a vague, dreamy rhapsody concerning Margate streets.“The streets are so clean, so nice, and the air is so strong, and the sky is so clear, with the clouds tumbling across it, little clouds like cotton-wool and grey clouds like blankets, almost as it was in Austria, and I was so happy my heart was full of flowers, almost as it was in Austria.”“What’s the good of talking of Austria?” growled Jacob. “There you had a corner. Here you have a whole house.”“But I was happy there.”Issy came in on that and announced that he was going to be married to Rosa. There was half a house vacant in the next street, and he proposed to take it.“You shall not,” said Jacob. “I will not have that slut in the house. What sort of children will she give you? Squat-browed and bow-legged they will be. How will she look after them? A woman that cannot contain her love for her man will have none for the children. She is a dirty girl, I tell you, and so is her mother and her father’s mother, and her father’s father’s mother.”“I don’t know who we are, to hold up our heads so high. You are my father, but in some things I cannot obey you. The business is mine . . .”“It is not. It is mine!” said Jacob. “It is in your name, but it is mine. It is in your name, but your name is my name, and you shall not give it to a woman like that, who goes smelling about street corners like a dog. Her father has no money, and he never goes to the synagogue.”“I am not marrying her father. I shall go out of the business, then, and I shall start for myself.Rosa will kill herself if I do not marry her, and I must do it.”“It is true,” said Golda quietly. “I think she will kill herself.”Jacob stormed on and Issy blustered, until at last he confessed that Rosa had caught him, and that he had to marry her. Jacob threw up his hands and in a shrill voice of icy contempt told Issy exactly what he thought of such marriages; they were nothing but dirt. . . . “Because you have a little dirt on you, must you roll in the mud? You are like dirty dogs, all of you. You, and Harry, and Mendel. I don’t know what has come to you in this London. God gave me one woman, and I have asked for nothing else.”“You would not let me marry Rosa when I was young.”Words and feeling ran so high that Mendel, aghast, fled away to his studio, where the sound of the storm reached him. It raged for hours, and ended in Issy flinging himself out of the house and slamming the door.A week later Rosa was brought to see Golda, and she fawned on her like a dog that has been whipped, sat gazing at her with her stupid brown eyes, and whimpered: “I should have killed myself. Yes, I should have killed myself.”“You would not have been so wicked,” said Golda. “It is sinful to throw good fish after bad. Can you cook?”“Yes,” said Rosa. “I can make cucumber soup. I could do anything for Issy, he is so strong and handsome.”And Golda said to Mendel after the interview: “A woman like that is like a steam bath for a man.”A few days later Issy and Rosa were married, without ceremony, without carriages, or photographs, or guests, or feast. It was a wedding tobe ashamed of, but Jacob would not, and Rosa’s father could not, lay out a penny on it. The couple took half the house in the next street, and Issy discovered at once that he hated his wife, and was at no pains to conceal it either from her or from his family.Mendel was profoundly depressed by this disturbance and plunge downwards, for he still half expected his family to rise with him. He was to make all their fortunes, but, with the rest of the family, he detested the unhappy Rosa and regarded her as little short of a criminal. He was depressed, too, because the summer holidays were approaching and he would be bereft of his beloved Mitchell, who was going away for three months to the country. He would be left with his family, in whom there was no peace. Why could they not be like the Mitchells and the Weldons, who could live together without quarrels, and could take a happy, humorous interest in each other’s doings without these devastating passions and cursings and denunciations? And yet when he thought of the Mitchells and the Weldons and the Froitzheims, in their charming, comfortable houses, there was something soft and foolish about them all—something savouring of idolatry, for instance, in the homage Mitchell paid his father, in the assumption that Mrs. Mitchell was a very remarkable woman, whose children could not be expected to be ordinary. More and more did Mendel value his mother, who was content to be just a woman and to live without flattery of any kind, and to accept everyone whom she met and to value them as human beings, without regard to their rank, station, possessions, or achievements. Himself she esteemed no more because he was an artist, though he had tried hard to make her give her tribute to that side of his nature. She loved him simply, neither more for his attainments nor less for his doings, that pained her deeply. And thatdirect human contact he obtained nowhere else, and in no one else could he find it existing so openly and frankly. Yet he loved the follies and pretences of the outside world. He adored theatricality, and among his polite friends there was always some drama towards. It was never drowned in incoherent passions, and he himself, among the nice cultured folk, was always a startling dramatic figure. Sometimes they seemed to him all slyness and insincerity, and then he loathed them; but that was generally when he had aimed at and failed in some dramatic coup, or when they had encouraged him to talk about himself until he bored them. On the whole, he was successful with them, as he wished to be, easily and without calculation. It was when they made calculation necessary, by feigning an interest that they did not feel, that he was shocked and angry. If anywhere the atmosphere was such that he could not be frank, then he avoided that place and those people.Now he was bored, bored to think of the hot stewing months with no relief except such as he could find in vagrom adventures from the harsh rigidity of life among his own people. And he was in a strange condition of physical lassitude. Even his ambition was stagnant. In his work he had only the pleasure of dexterity. It had no meaning, and contained no delight. When he painted apples or a dead bird or a woman, the result was just apples or a dead bird or a woman. The paint made no difference and the subject was still better than his rendering of it. He was only concerned with technical problems. Fascinated by a gradated sky in a picture in the National Gallery, he practised gradated skies until he could have done them in his sleep.And he was tired, tired in body and in soul. Both in his life and in his work he had had to conquer a convention in order to keep his footingin the world of his desire. Just as he had only learned the Detmold style of drawing by a supreme effort of will, so also by a tremendous effort he had learned the rudiments of manners and polite conversation. He had had to overcome his tendency to fall violently in love with every charming person, male or female, he met, and to regard with an aversion equally violent those in whom he found no charm. Such charm must for him be genuine and not a matter of tricks, and for this reason he had regarded every person whom he thought of as old with dislike. For him anybody above twenty-five was “old.” He still thought he would be made or marred by the time he was twenty-three, but that age seemed immeasurably far off. Long before then, like a thunderbolt, his full genius would descend upon him and all the world would know his name. He was almost innocent of conceit in this. Such, he believed, was the history of genius, and so far nothing had happened to deny his inward consciousness of his rarity. Relieve the pressure of circumstance and he soared upwards. . . . There was a queer, uncomfortable pleasure in such thoughts and dreams and in imagining a fatality that should drag him down and down to Issy’s level and lower. There was a sickening fascination in picturing to himself a descent as swift and irresistible as his upward flight. Yet dreary were the hours of waiting for the impetus that had once or twice so freely and so strongly moved in him. Sick with waiting, he would work in a fury to master trick after trick and difficulty after difficulty in painting, so as to be ready when the time came. All the cunning and wariness of his race welled up in him as he prepared deliberately, slowly, patiently for his opportunity.One afternoon, as Golda was sleeping in her kitchen, she was awakened by a knock at thedoor. Going to open it, she found Hetty Finch waiting there, neatly clad in a brown tailor-made coat and skirt, very smart, with a trim little feathered hat on her head. Golda’s thoughts flew to Mendel, and her first inclination was to slam the door in Hetty’s face, but, remembering that the boy was out, she admitted her.Hetty followed Golda into the kitchen and stood looking round it with obvious disappointment. She had not imagined the Kühlers to be so poor.“I promised Ma I would call,” she said, taking the chair which Golda dusted for her.“And how is your Ma?” asked Golda.“She’s given up the house and gone into a hotel as manageress,” replied Hetty, lying as usual, for her mother had been sold up and had taken a place as barmaid in a tavern. “And I’ve come to London to earn my living. Ma gave me fourteen shillings, and that was all she could do for me. Still, I’m off her hands now.”Golda asked her what she was going to do, and she said she thought of going into service until she had had a look round. Where was she living? She had taken a room with some friends, lodgers of Ma’s, off Stepney Green.Conversation was lifeless and desultory until Issy came into the room, when she brightened up, but he was overcome with his old terror of the girl and soon hurried away. Then she noticed the pictures on the wall and asked if they were Mendel’s. Golda refused flatly to talk about them, but Hetty persisted and would talk of nothing else. Jacob came in and she made him talk about Mendel, and she made herself so charming to him and flattered his simple vanity so grossly that presently Golda was staggered by the sight of him making tea with his own hands and pouring it out for the visitor.“Yes,” said Jacob, “the boy did all those before he was fourteen. He will get on, that boy. He is bound to get on, but I shall not live to see him in his glory.”“I think they’re lovely,” said Hetty, sipping her tea. And she went on chattering vivaciously until Jacob was called away to the workshop, when once again conversation became lifeless and desultory. Golda made one excuse after another to try to get rid of her, but Hetty would not budge. At last there came the sound of Mendel’s key in the door. Golda bustled out of the room and whispered to him:—“You must not come in. I have visitors and there are letters waiting for you upstairs.”But Mendel had seen a girl sitting in the kitchen and he wanted to know whether she was pretty or not. She turned and he saw that she was charmingly pretty. He brushed by his mother. He felt at once that he had made a good impression, and, indeed, all Hetty’s dreams and fancies were more than realized, though she was a little affronted and disappointed by the poorness of his clothes.“It is Hetty Finch,” said Golda, “from Margate.”Mendel had had Issy’s account of Hetty and he was on his guard at once.“Yes. I’ve come to live in London,” said she.“I’ve never lived out of it,” he answered.“I thought perhaps, as you know so many people, you could help me to find some work. There must be room somewhere in London for poor little me.”“I’ll see about it,” said Mendel, taking note of her features and figure, and rather upset to find himself so little excited by her. Issy had given him to imagine a dashing, overwhelming woman. He only felt vaguely sorry for Hetty and a desire to stroke her, though he knew her at once for whatshe was, and how she was drinking in the strongly developed male in him. For the first time he felt cool and detached in the presence of a woman: a deliciously grown-up sensation, and he wanted more of it.She soon said she must go, and in Golda’s hearing he promised to write to her, but when he took her to the door he asked her to come to his studio, and she said she would come the next day.
GOLDAwas passing through a very difficult time. Rosa was hotter on the pursuit of Issy than ever. Harry had had a violent quarrel consequent on his reiterated demand for proof of the judicial destruction of Christianity in America, and at last, like his father, he went out and bought a clean collar and announced his departure for Paris. He went away and not a word had been heard from him. Lotte refused to look at any of the young men brought by the match-makers, and Leah was the only comfortable member of the family, and she made no attempt to conceal her unhappiness with Moscowitsch. She would come on Saturday evenings and go up to her mother’s room and fling herself on the bed and cry her heart out, until late in the evening Moscowitsch came to fetch her, when she would go meekly and apparently happily enough. . . . And on the top of all these troubles, here was Mendel going to the devil at a gallop.
Leah’s trouble with Moscowitsch was that he would never let her go out without him, and he could very rarely be persuaded to go out at all. As for going away in the summer, he could see no sense in it. He gave his wife a fine house. What more did she want? She had her children to look after. What greater pleasure could she desire? His life was entirely filled with his business and his home, and he would not look beyond them. The neighbours went to the seaside? The neighbours werefools who lived for ostentation and display. They did not know when they were well off. . . . Moscowitsch had a great admiration for his father-in-law as a man who knew what life was and refused to dilute its savour with folly, and he regarded Golda as a perfect type of woman, one who left the management of life to her husband and allowed herself to be absorbed in her duties as a wife and mother.
But Leah longed to go to the seaside. It became an obsession with her, and, because she could never talk of it, she thought of nothing else. She was sick with envy when she saw the neighbours going off with the children carrying buckets and spades. Secretly she bought her own children buckets and spades, though they were much too small to use them.
At last, when her worries began to tell on Golda, Leah declared that what she needed was sea air, and offered to take her for a fortnight to Margate, and Golda, anxious to escape from the horror of Mendel’s coming home night after night drawn and white with dissipation, and from the dread of an explosion from Jacob, consented, and asked if Issy might go, as that Rosa of his was making him quite ill.
For Golda, Leah knew that Moscowitsch would do anything in the world, and so she procured his consent on condition that he was not expected to accompany them, for he hated the sea, which had made him very ill when he came to England, and he never wished to set eyes on it again.
Leah already had the address of some lodgings recommended to her by a neighbour. She engaged them, and on a fine July day went down to Margate by the express with her children, Golda, and Issy.
The lodgings were let by a handsome, florid woman with masses of bleached golden hair, a ruddled complexion, fat hands covered with cheaprings, plump wrists rattling with bracelets, and a full bosom on which brooches gleamed. Leah thought her a very fine woman, and was so fascinated by her that she stayed indoors day after day, helping with the housework and gossiping, so that she never once saw the sea, except from the train as she was leaving. Mrs. Finch was a lady, by birth, but she had been unfortunate. She had an uncle in the Army and a cousin in the War Office, and she had lived in London, in the best part of the town, where, in her best days, she had had her flat. Also she had travelled and had been to Paris and Vienna. But she had been unfortunate in her friends. Leah commiserated her, and, open-mouthed, gulped down all her tales of the gentlemen she had known, while Golda, eager for more information of the glittering world which had swallowed up her Mendel, listened too, fascinated and shuddering. And Leah, to show that she also was a person of some consequence, began to talk of her wonderful brother. She told of the motor-car which had come and whirled him away, of his visit to the millionaire’s house, of the fine friends he was making, of the men and women he knew whose names were in the papers.
“Every day,” she said, “he is out to tea, and every evening he is out at theatres and music-halls and parties and flats and hotels, and his friends are so rich that they pour money into his pockets. He just makes a few lines on a piece of paper and they give him twenty pounds, or he makes up some paint to look like a face or a pineapple and his pockets are full of money.”
“Yes,” said Golda uneasily. “He will be very rich.”
“Then next time you come to Margate,” said Mrs. Finch, “it will be the Cliftonville, and you’ll despise my poor lodgings.”
“Oh no,” cried Leah, “for it is like staying with a friend.”
Every day Leah added something to the legend of Mendel, Mrs. Finch urging her on with romances of her own splendid days. But the most eager listener was Hetty, the girl who did the rough work of the house and was never properly dressed until the evening, because, from the moment when she woke up in the morning until after supper, she was kept running hither and thither at Mrs. Finch’s commands. She was sufficiently like Mrs. Finch to justify Golda in her supposition that she was that fine woman’s daughter, but nothing was ever said in the matter. Hetty did not have her meals with them, and, indeed, there was no evidence that she had any meals. In the evenings she was allowed to go out, and she would come back at half-past ten or so with her big eyes shining and a flush fading from her cheeks and leaving them whiter than ever. Very big were her eyes, very big and pathetic, and her face was a perfect oval. She had rather full lips, always moist and red. During the whole fortnight she never spoke a word except to Issy. Indeed, she avoided Golda and Leah, and she alarmed Issy by what he took to be her forwardness, when she asked him to take her to the theatre. He complied with her request, but he was much too frightened of her to speak, and he could think of nothing to say except to offer to buy her chocolates and cigarettes, which she accepted as though it was the natural thing for him to give her presents. She talked to him about Mendel, and wanted to know if it was true that he knew lords and had real gentlemen to tea with him in his studio.
“There’s more goes on in his studio than I could tell you,” said Issy with a dry, uncomfortable laugh. “Artists, you know!”
“Oh yes! Artists!” said Hetty with a dreamy,wistful look in her eyes as she drew in her lower lip with a slight sucking noise. “I wish I lived in London, I do. Ma used to live in London, but she’s too old now to find any one to take her back there. It’s dull here. Does your brother ever come to Margate?”
“No,” said Issy. “He’d go to Brighton if he went anywhere. I’ve got another brother who’s gone to Paris.”
“O-oh! Paris! Is he rich too?”
“No.”
Issy shut up like an oyster. He could feel the girl probing into him, and he was sorry he had brought her. She was spoiling his fun, the adventures he had promised himself during his holiday from Rosa’s indefatigable attentions. Hetty was too dangerous. He knew that if she got hold of him she would not let go.
He took her home and never spoke another word to her during the remainder of his visit, and he said to his mother once:—
“That’s an awful girl.”
“Worse than Rosa?” asked Golda.
“Rosa would stay. That girl would be off like a cat on the tiles.”
Golda retorted with a description of Rosa of the same kind, but of a more offensive degree.
Declaring that they were better for the sea air, and warmly enjoining Mrs. Finch to visit then if ever she should come to London, the party left Margate with shells and toffee and painted china for their friends and relations, conspicuous among their luggage being the buckets and spades which had never been used.
As Issy and his mother reached their front-door, he saw Rosa at the corner of the street, and bolted after her, leaving Golda to enter the house and give an account of her doings. Mendel, for once in a way, was at home. He was at work on a picture for a prize competition at the Detmold, asalso were Mitchell and Weldon, so that they were living quietly for the time being. Golda gave a glowing description of the beauties of Margate and of Mrs. Finch and her jewellery. She began to talk of Hetty, but for some reason unknown to herself, with a glance at Mendel she stopped, and went off into a vague, dreamy rhapsody concerning Margate streets.
“The streets are so clean, so nice, and the air is so strong, and the sky is so clear, with the clouds tumbling across it, little clouds like cotton-wool and grey clouds like blankets, almost as it was in Austria, and I was so happy my heart was full of flowers, almost as it was in Austria.”
“What’s the good of talking of Austria?” growled Jacob. “There you had a corner. Here you have a whole house.”
“But I was happy there.”
Issy came in on that and announced that he was going to be married to Rosa. There was half a house vacant in the next street, and he proposed to take it.
“You shall not,” said Jacob. “I will not have that slut in the house. What sort of children will she give you? Squat-browed and bow-legged they will be. How will she look after them? A woman that cannot contain her love for her man will have none for the children. She is a dirty girl, I tell you, and so is her mother and her father’s mother, and her father’s father’s mother.”
“I don’t know who we are, to hold up our heads so high. You are my father, but in some things I cannot obey you. The business is mine . . .”
“It is not. It is mine!” said Jacob. “It is in your name, but it is mine. It is in your name, but your name is my name, and you shall not give it to a woman like that, who goes smelling about street corners like a dog. Her father has no money, and he never goes to the synagogue.”
“I am not marrying her father. I shall go out of the business, then, and I shall start for myself.Rosa will kill herself if I do not marry her, and I must do it.”
“It is true,” said Golda quietly. “I think she will kill herself.”
Jacob stormed on and Issy blustered, until at last he confessed that Rosa had caught him, and that he had to marry her. Jacob threw up his hands and in a shrill voice of icy contempt told Issy exactly what he thought of such marriages; they were nothing but dirt. . . . “Because you have a little dirt on you, must you roll in the mud? You are like dirty dogs, all of you. You, and Harry, and Mendel. I don’t know what has come to you in this London. God gave me one woman, and I have asked for nothing else.”
“You would not let me marry Rosa when I was young.”
Words and feeling ran so high that Mendel, aghast, fled away to his studio, where the sound of the storm reached him. It raged for hours, and ended in Issy flinging himself out of the house and slamming the door.
A week later Rosa was brought to see Golda, and she fawned on her like a dog that has been whipped, sat gazing at her with her stupid brown eyes, and whimpered: “I should have killed myself. Yes, I should have killed myself.”
“You would not have been so wicked,” said Golda. “It is sinful to throw good fish after bad. Can you cook?”
“Yes,” said Rosa. “I can make cucumber soup. I could do anything for Issy, he is so strong and handsome.”
And Golda said to Mendel after the interview: “A woman like that is like a steam bath for a man.”
A few days later Issy and Rosa were married, without ceremony, without carriages, or photographs, or guests, or feast. It was a wedding tobe ashamed of, but Jacob would not, and Rosa’s father could not, lay out a penny on it. The couple took half the house in the next street, and Issy discovered at once that he hated his wife, and was at no pains to conceal it either from her or from his family.
Mendel was profoundly depressed by this disturbance and plunge downwards, for he still half expected his family to rise with him. He was to make all their fortunes, but, with the rest of the family, he detested the unhappy Rosa and regarded her as little short of a criminal. He was depressed, too, because the summer holidays were approaching and he would be bereft of his beloved Mitchell, who was going away for three months to the country. He would be left with his family, in whom there was no peace. Why could they not be like the Mitchells and the Weldons, who could live together without quarrels, and could take a happy, humorous interest in each other’s doings without these devastating passions and cursings and denunciations? And yet when he thought of the Mitchells and the Weldons and the Froitzheims, in their charming, comfortable houses, there was something soft and foolish about them all—something savouring of idolatry, for instance, in the homage Mitchell paid his father, in the assumption that Mrs. Mitchell was a very remarkable woman, whose children could not be expected to be ordinary. More and more did Mendel value his mother, who was content to be just a woman and to live without flattery of any kind, and to accept everyone whom she met and to value them as human beings, without regard to their rank, station, possessions, or achievements. Himself she esteemed no more because he was an artist, though he had tried hard to make her give her tribute to that side of his nature. She loved him simply, neither more for his attainments nor less for his doings, that pained her deeply. And thatdirect human contact he obtained nowhere else, and in no one else could he find it existing so openly and frankly. Yet he loved the follies and pretences of the outside world. He adored theatricality, and among his polite friends there was always some drama towards. It was never drowned in incoherent passions, and he himself, among the nice cultured folk, was always a startling dramatic figure. Sometimes they seemed to him all slyness and insincerity, and then he loathed them; but that was generally when he had aimed at and failed in some dramatic coup, or when they had encouraged him to talk about himself until he bored them. On the whole, he was successful with them, as he wished to be, easily and without calculation. It was when they made calculation necessary, by feigning an interest that they did not feel, that he was shocked and angry. If anywhere the atmosphere was such that he could not be frank, then he avoided that place and those people.
Now he was bored, bored to think of the hot stewing months with no relief except such as he could find in vagrom adventures from the harsh rigidity of life among his own people. And he was in a strange condition of physical lassitude. Even his ambition was stagnant. In his work he had only the pleasure of dexterity. It had no meaning, and contained no delight. When he painted apples or a dead bird or a woman, the result was just apples or a dead bird or a woman. The paint made no difference and the subject was still better than his rendering of it. He was only concerned with technical problems. Fascinated by a gradated sky in a picture in the National Gallery, he practised gradated skies until he could have done them in his sleep.
And he was tired, tired in body and in soul. Both in his life and in his work he had had to conquer a convention in order to keep his footingin the world of his desire. Just as he had only learned the Detmold style of drawing by a supreme effort of will, so also by a tremendous effort he had learned the rudiments of manners and polite conversation. He had had to overcome his tendency to fall violently in love with every charming person, male or female, he met, and to regard with an aversion equally violent those in whom he found no charm. Such charm must for him be genuine and not a matter of tricks, and for this reason he had regarded every person whom he thought of as old with dislike. For him anybody above twenty-five was “old.” He still thought he would be made or marred by the time he was twenty-three, but that age seemed immeasurably far off. Long before then, like a thunderbolt, his full genius would descend upon him and all the world would know his name. He was almost innocent of conceit in this. Such, he believed, was the history of genius, and so far nothing had happened to deny his inward consciousness of his rarity. Relieve the pressure of circumstance and he soared upwards. . . . There was a queer, uncomfortable pleasure in such thoughts and dreams and in imagining a fatality that should drag him down and down to Issy’s level and lower. There was a sickening fascination in picturing to himself a descent as swift and irresistible as his upward flight. Yet dreary were the hours of waiting for the impetus that had once or twice so freely and so strongly moved in him. Sick with waiting, he would work in a fury to master trick after trick and difficulty after difficulty in painting, so as to be ready when the time came. All the cunning and wariness of his race welled up in him as he prepared deliberately, slowly, patiently for his opportunity.
One afternoon, as Golda was sleeping in her kitchen, she was awakened by a knock at thedoor. Going to open it, she found Hetty Finch waiting there, neatly clad in a brown tailor-made coat and skirt, very smart, with a trim little feathered hat on her head. Golda’s thoughts flew to Mendel, and her first inclination was to slam the door in Hetty’s face, but, remembering that the boy was out, she admitted her.
Hetty followed Golda into the kitchen and stood looking round it with obvious disappointment. She had not imagined the Kühlers to be so poor.
“I promised Ma I would call,” she said, taking the chair which Golda dusted for her.
“And how is your Ma?” asked Golda.
“She’s given up the house and gone into a hotel as manageress,” replied Hetty, lying as usual, for her mother had been sold up and had taken a place as barmaid in a tavern. “And I’ve come to London to earn my living. Ma gave me fourteen shillings, and that was all she could do for me. Still, I’m off her hands now.”
Golda asked her what she was going to do, and she said she thought of going into service until she had had a look round. Where was she living? She had taken a room with some friends, lodgers of Ma’s, off Stepney Green.
Conversation was lifeless and desultory until Issy came into the room, when she brightened up, but he was overcome with his old terror of the girl and soon hurried away. Then she noticed the pictures on the wall and asked if they were Mendel’s. Golda refused flatly to talk about them, but Hetty persisted and would talk of nothing else. Jacob came in and she made him talk about Mendel, and she made herself so charming to him and flattered his simple vanity so grossly that presently Golda was staggered by the sight of him making tea with his own hands and pouring it out for the visitor.
“Yes,” said Jacob, “the boy did all those before he was fourteen. He will get on, that boy. He is bound to get on, but I shall not live to see him in his glory.”
“I think they’re lovely,” said Hetty, sipping her tea. And she went on chattering vivaciously until Jacob was called away to the workshop, when once again conversation became lifeless and desultory. Golda made one excuse after another to try to get rid of her, but Hetty would not budge. At last there came the sound of Mendel’s key in the door. Golda bustled out of the room and whispered to him:—
“You must not come in. I have visitors and there are letters waiting for you upstairs.”
But Mendel had seen a girl sitting in the kitchen and he wanted to know whether she was pretty or not. She turned and he saw that she was charmingly pretty. He brushed by his mother. He felt at once that he had made a good impression, and, indeed, all Hetty’s dreams and fancies were more than realized, though she was a little affronted and disappointed by the poorness of his clothes.
“It is Hetty Finch,” said Golda, “from Margate.”
Mendel had had Issy’s account of Hetty and he was on his guard at once.
“Yes. I’ve come to live in London,” said she.
“I’ve never lived out of it,” he answered.
“I thought perhaps, as you know so many people, you could help me to find some work. There must be room somewhere in London for poor little me.”
“I’ll see about it,” said Mendel, taking note of her features and figure, and rather upset to find himself so little excited by her. Issy had given him to imagine a dashing, overwhelming woman. He only felt vaguely sorry for Hetty and a desire to stroke her, though he knew her at once for whatshe was, and how she was drinking in the strongly developed male in him. For the first time he felt cool and detached in the presence of a woman: a deliciously grown-up sensation, and he wanted more of it.
She soon said she must go, and in Golda’s hearing he promised to write to her, but when he took her to the door he asked her to come to his studio, and she said she would come the next day.