IXTHE QUINTETTEHEhad more of the deliciously grown-up sensation the next day, when Hetty came to see him. She was something new. The girls of the streets he knew, and unattainably above them were the girls at the school and his friends’ sisters, whom he called “top-knots,” because of the way they did their hair. The “top-knots” were hardly female at all to him, so remote were they, so entirely unapproachable; utterly different from the girls of the streets, who were so accessible that he had but to hold out his arms to find one of them, as if by magic, in his grasp. And now Hetty was different again.“You are cosy up here,” she said, moving at once to the only comfortable chair and curling up in it. “Your sister told me about you.”“Leah? What lies did she tell you?”“Well, I knew it wasn’talltrue, about the money you were making, because you wouldn’t live here if it was true, would you? But I suppose some of your friends make a lot of money.”“They’re rich, some of them,” replied Mendel, aghast to find himself thinking coldly of his friends in terms of money, his mind rushing swiftly between the two poles of his father and Sir Julius. “Yes. There’s plenty of money in London.”“That’s what Ma said when she gave me the fourteen shillings. She said a girl with eyes like mine had no need to go short in London.” Hettyraised her eyes and looked full at him, who met her stare boldly and yet with some alarm, finding himself acting a part.Hetty was flattering him by regarding him as the possessor of a key to the wealth of London, and in spite of himself he could not help accepting the rôle. She had touched an element of his character of which till then he had been unconscious. The knave in him sprang into being and thrust all his other qualities aside. He began to boast of his success and to swagger about the luxury and immorality of London life, though it was not all braggadocio, but also a kindly desire to make Hetty happy by talking to her of the things that interested her.He told her about Calthrop and the Paris Café, and Maurice Birnbaum and his motor-car and richly furnished flat in Westminster, and a Lord’s son who was at the Detmold, and Mitchell, whose father was a great man. And all the time, as he talked, he was astonished at the sound of his own voice, so different did it sound.Hetty wriggled with pleasure in her chair and pouted up her lips. Presently she said her hat made her head ache, and she took it off and stretched out her arms and said:—“No more pots and pans for me! I do think you’re lovely. It’s just like a story. I call that real fun. Not like Margate. . . . Do you think I could get work as a model, or do you have to be slap-up?”Mendel thought of the drabs who posed and he could not help smiling.“I could only tell by your figure, though your face is all right.”“Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked.“Very.”“I’ll show you my figure, if you like.”“All right, I’ll light the gas-stove in the bedroom. It’s a little cold in here.”He showed her into the bedroom, and when she was ready she called to him.She was beautifully made, but she looked so foolish with her anxiety to please him that he could take hardly any interest in her, and he was distressed, too, because the only background he could give her consisted of his new knavish thoughts of the wealth of London. Yet nothing could disturb it, for the background was suitable. Her white body was her offering.“How much would I be paid?”“A shilling an hour.”“Do you pay that?”“Yes.”“If you could get me work I would sit to you for nothing.”“I’d pay you,” he said. His generous qualities strove hard to reassert themselves, but there was something about this girl that compelled just what he was giving her—hardness for hardness, value for value. Yet she was certainly beautiful, and it was strange to him to be unable to give her the warm homage that within himself he could not help feeling.She sat on the bed, making no move to cover herself, and said:—“Artistsaredifferent. There was an artist once at Margate. It was him put the idea into my head. But he was very poor and not a gentleman.”And now to Mendel she was an object of sheer astonishment. He stood and warmed his legs by the gas stove and gaped at her, sitting on his bed and chattering in her clear, hard voice of her ambitions, her dreams, the drudgery at home, while in everything she said was a flattery which he could not resist. Worst of all, he felt that he was one of a pair with her. His talent, her body, were shining offerings with which they both emerged from the depths of the despised. Enteringinto her spirit, he too was filled with a desire for revenge. Yet in him this desire was charged with passion, which made their present situation ridiculous. He thought of the poverty and the obscure suffering downstairs, the dragging penury to which, but for his talent, he would have been condemned. Then he imagined her as Issy had described her at Margate, lurking in the kitchen, listening behind the door as Leah spun her yarns. He could sympathize with her, and she seemed to him almost gallant.He got out a piece of mill-board and began to draw her, but to his annoyance could not get interested in what he was doing. He wanted to know more about her, could not rest content that a human being should be so reduced to a cold purpose. Yet, though she talked freely enough, nothing fell from her lips to meet his desire. She had no people, no class, no tradition, but still she was a person. He could not dismiss her as he dismissed so many, as “nonsensical.”“I can’t make much of you now,” he said, almost wailing. “I believe I’m tired.”And suddenly he hurled away his drawing and rushed at her and kissed her. She clung to him and he yielded to her will, seeing clearly that this was her purpose, this her desire, this her ambition, her all.He knew that she was using him, was making certain of being able to use him. The newly discovered knave in him insisted on having his existence, and through it he enjoyed a certain defiant happiness.Happiness! To be happy! That had seemed impossible. His first year at the Detmold had been miserable. He had been discouraged and almost listless. Often he would go to his mother and say: “I shall never be an artist.”“Not all at once,” Golda would say. “Take a boy who is apprenticed to a bootmaker. Hecannot all at once make good boots. He must spoil a deal of leather first. Or a tailor-boy: he must spoil cloth. A trade must be learned, and you can learn this, for you work hard enough at it.”For a moment or two he would see through her clear eyes and that was enough to set him working again, half believing that he would soon master his craft. But there had been the struggle to master what at the Detmold, with such unquestionable authority, they called “drawing.”This now, with Hetty, was in its way happiness, though he detested it and her. It was an escape. It was easy. It made no demands on him, save the small effort to achieve self-forgetfulness, and in that she aided him, for she seemed superior to himself and enviable in the clearness of her purpose. She offered herself and made no demands upon him except of what could cost him nothing: just a few words to his friends, a start in her chosen profession.All the same, he was horrified at himself. Every other crisis and sudden change in his life had been attended with violent suffering, an eruption within himself, profound depression, almost a collapse. This had been as easy as walking through a door, a slipping from one part of his being to another. . . . Here suddenly was happiness, a queer detached, almost indifferent condition, full of pleasure, and he rejoiced in the novelty of it. He watched Hetty draw on her clothes again and was sickened by the sensual languor of her movements. She was drowsy, like a cat before a fire.“No, I certainly shan’t draw you to-day.”“What about to-morrow?”“I shall be painting to-morrow.”“I do think you’re a devil sometimes.”“I’ll take you to the Paris Café, if you like.”“Will you?”She perked up on that. She had not expected so soon to gain her desire.“Yes. If you’ve got to earn your living you should meet people, and the sooner you get going the better.”Hetty sat with her chin in her hands, crouched in elation. Everything had turned out as she had hoped and planned, as she had willed that it should, and she regarded him with some contempt because he had been so easy and because he was so young. She was the same age as he, but she thought him a little vain boy. Yet when he looked at her she was afraid of him, for he knew so much and guessed so much more. To defend herself, her instinct drove through to his vanity and flattered it to blind him. She feigned an animation she was incapable of feeling to make herself more beautiful in his eyes, and he thought of his friends, Mitchell and Weldon, and how they would be stirred with her. He thought how she would please Calthrop, and he was lured into believing that he would gain in importance through her.“You’ve come at a very bad time,” he said. “They’ll all be going away for the summer.”“Oh!” she looked dashed, hating to be caught out in a mistake. “Do they go away for long?”“Three months.”“Oh, well!” she drawled. “I can get a place if nothing turns up. But something always does turn up. I’m one of the lucky ones, you know.”“I don’t believe in luck,” said he, with a sudden irruption of the old self that seemed to have been left so far behind.“I must go now,” she said.They groped their way down the dark stairs, and he went out with her, feeling that he could not face his family, from whom he knew now that his face was turned. In the street a mood of freedom and adventure came over him, and for this mood she was a fitting mate. He took her on the top of a bus tothe West End, among the promenading crowds, and she drank it all in with a kind of exaltation, her big eyes glowing, her body trembling with excitement. Into one café after another he led her, completely absorbed as he was in her purpose, and at last, when they mounted the eastward bus, she leaned her head on his shoulder, and he could hear her murmuring to herself: “London . . . London . . . London.”He too was thrilled as he had never been before by London. He had never so strongly realized it before. The great city had thrilled him with its beauty and had stirred him with its business, but never before had its spirit crept into his blood to send it whirling and singing through his veins. He hardly slept at all that night, and the next morning it was a long time before he could begin to work, which then seemed far removed from the effort and almost anguish it used to cost him. The still-life with which he had been wrestling became quite easy to do, and very soothing was the handling of brushes and paint. Every touch was like a caress upon his aching soul.So began a period of real happiness. The pieces he painted with such soothing ease were generally admired and readily bought. The dealer to whom he took them was also a colourman and gave him apparently unlimited credit; and he laid in an immense stock of colours and amused himself with experiments. It seemed that his career was to be successful without a struggle. His patrons were delighted to find him so soon making money, and the Birnbaums and the Fleischmanns invited him down into the country, but as he found that they put him up in a servant’s bedroom or a gardener’s cottage he refused to go more than once, or to any more of their kind who were not prepared to forget his poverty.He would rather stay in London with Hetty,whom he had begun to regard as a mascot. With her coming everything had changed. She had made everything easy and happy and delightful. He had no love for her, but he could not help feeling grateful. She had turned work into a pleasure, pleasure into a riot of ecstasy.Alone with her in the evenings or with some chance acquaintance, during the holidays he roamed through London, basking in the summer evenings, discovering unimagined splendours, the Parks, the river, the Zoo, boating on the Serpentine, the promenade on the romantic Spaniard’s Road at Hampstead. Nearly every night he wrote to Mitchell in the country, describing his new easy happiness in his work and his discovery of the charm of nights in London. And once a week Mitchell would write to him and give him a delightful account of English country life in a valley, shut in by rolling hills between which wandered a slow, pleasant stream. Here Mitchell was painting, boating, playing tennis, making love.“There’s a Detmold girl lives near here with her people—Greta Morrison. You may remember her—glorious chestnut hair, big blue eyes, but as shy as a little mouse. I couldn’t get a word out of her until I began to talk about you, and there’s no end to her appetite for that. I don’t mince matters. I tell her exactly what you are, exactly what you come from, and what a wild beast you are. She has seen you throw things about at the Detmold, and she seems absolutely to like it. Yet she is not a fool, and I like her enormously. She makes me feel what a rotter I am, but I can’t get on with her unless I talk about you. Ihaveheard that her work is good, but she won’t show me a thing.”Mendel was pleased that a “top-knot” should be interested in him, but beyond the flicker of delight he gave no thought to the idea of Greta Morrison. The “top-knots” belonged to the worldwhich he was going to despoil with Hetty Finch. That world must disgorge. It had condemned, and still condemned, his father and mother to bitter poverty, and he remembered how on their first coming to London the whole family had slept in one room, and how he had sat up in the middle of the night and looked at the recumbent bodies and suffered under the indignity of it. And his brothers had grown from ruddy, bronzed boys into pale-faced, worn young men. And behind Hetty was the dirty lodging-house and her Ma, of whom he had a very clear idea. He used to wax violent, and his imagination would run riot with the fantastic visions of success he conjured up.Who were the “top-knots” that they should have an easy, pleasant time in the country while he was left to stew in London?Hetty began genuinely to admire him, and her flattery was no longer empty. There was some sustenance in it.“O—oh!” she used to say. “You’ll get on. There’s no doubt about that. You’ll have a big stoodio and the nobs will come up in their motor-cars, and you’ll be able to paint what you like then.”“You’re a liar,” he would reply. “I shall always paint what I like. I never do anything else, and never will. Once paint for the fools and you have to do it always, because you become a fool yourself.”Golda once met Hetty coming down the stairs. She told her she was a dirty slut and was not to show her face inside the house again. A few days later she saw her open the front door and slip out. In her anger she informed Jacob of the danger to Mendel, and Jacob went up to the studio.“I will not have that harlot in my house,” he said.“She is not a harlot,” replied Mendel rather shakily, for, though his father’s power had dwindled, yet he was still a figure of authority.“She is a harlot and a daughter of a harlot, and I will not have her in my house.”“She is a model, and I must have models, as I have tried to explain to you again and again. I am allowed money for models. I must have models, just as you must have skins.”“Then there are other models. I know this girl, what she is after, and she will ruin you.”“Neither she nor anyone else in the whole world could ruin me,” said Mendel, “for I am an artist, and while I have my art I ask nothing outside it.”“Don’t argue with me!” shouted Jacob. “I will not have that drab in my house.”Mendel had a great respect and regard for his father. He was silent, and Jacob went downstairs, satisfied that he had asserted himself.He said to Golda:—“They will blow the boy’s head off his shoulder with the fuss they make of him. I know how to take him down a peg or two.”“Don’t go too far,” said Golda. “It would be a black day for me if he went away and was ashamed of us.”“If I saw that he was ashamed of you,” replied Jacob, “I would thrash him within an inch of his life. Ashamed of you, among all the dirt and trumped-up people he goes among!”However, Hetty still came to the studio and there were frequent explosions, until at last Mendel, intent on the new independence he had won, declared that he could bear it no longer, and he arranged with Issy to take the top floor of his house and to turn that into a studio. This compromise was successful, and pleased both parties: Golda was happy to be relieved from further friction and Mendel was glad to be away, for he knew that his doings must hurt her, and that hehated. Yet he could see no way out of it. He was done for ever with the old simplicity of his untutored painting in her kitchen. Art was no longer a pure and hardly-won joy. It was a trade, like any other, and, like any other, it had its sordid aspect, and, to compensate for that, it was a career and could also be a triumph. These things he did not expect his mother to understand. He had Mitchell to talk to now, Mitchell to whom to impart the burden upon his soul, and Mitchell and he were to work together and to give to the world such art as it had never seen since the primitives.Mitchell and he! That friendship was the source of his new confidence. Golda had been and still was much to him, but when it came to painting she knew nothing at all, and painting was the important thing. Through painting lay not only satisfied ambitions and fame and riches, but life itself, and of that what could Golda know?It was a great thing, therefore, to be established away from home when Mitchell returned from the country. And Mitchell approved. He had suffered from being under his father’s shadow, and with Weldon and Kessler he had taken a studio near Fitzroy Square. He said:—“A time will come when you will have to leave the East End.”“I shall never leave them,” replied Mendel. “What I want to paint is there. They are my people, and all that I have belongs to them.”“Rubbish. You’ll soon be getting commissions, and you can’t ask people who can afford to pay for portraits to a hole like that.”“They will come to my studio,” said Mendel, “or I will not take their commissions.”Though Mitchell was rather shocked by his frank conceit, he could not but admire and envy the way his impulses came rushing to the surface and were never deterred by considerations as tothe impression he might be making. Mendel trusted Mitchell absolutely and hid nothing from him, neither the most scabrous of his deeds nor the most childish of his desires. He made no secret of the new manly feeling that had come to him through Hetty, the conviction that he could meet the West End on its own terms.When he showed Mitchell the work he had done during the holidays, his friend said:—“Gawd! The difference is absolutely startling. There’s charm in every one of them, and they’re not fakes either.”With Hetty he was enraptured.“Gawd!” he said; “I’ll give ten years to painting her, as Leonardo did to Monna Lisa, and then it would not be finished. Came from a Margate lodging-house, did she? Mark my words: she’ll marry a successful artist and queen it among the best.”With Mitchell, Hetty put forth all her cajolery when she found that he knew what she thought good people. She could look very pathetic and delicate, and middle-aged artists were sorry for her, and thought being a model a perilous profession for her. One of them warned her of the dangers she must run, and especially mentioned Mitchell and Kühler as young men to be avoided. They roared with laughter when she told them.The Paris Café was Paradise to her, and she made friends with all its habitués and attracted the attention of Calthrop, who became Mendel’s enemy for life when she told him that the youngster had said of him that he had been a good artist once, but was now only repeating himself.With marvellous rapidity she picked up the jargon of the place, and could quite easily have taken her career in her own hands, but she would not surrender Mendel, who could no more do without her than he could without Mitchell. She clungto him and kept him a happy slave to his three friends, to whom she devoted herself as though her existence depended on the solidarity of the group. From morning to night she was with one or other of them, and every evening with the four of them at the Paris, or making a row at a music-hall and getting themselves kicked out.She was learning her trade as they were learning theirs, and she was delighted with the ease with which Mendel picked up what she called “sense”; that is to say, he became much more like the others, affected their speech, grew his hair long, wore corduroys, a black shirt, and a red sash, and talked blatantly and with a slight contempt of great painters. But even so, he was disturbing, for he did all these things with passion, so that they tinged his soul, and were not as a mere garment upon it. Even in falsehood he was sincere.When Hetty found Calthrop painting a self-portrait, she set her four boys painting self-portraits, and when she found the older men talking about the beauty of roofs and chimneys, the four were soon ecstatic about roofs and chimneys, and painting them without knowing how it had come about. She could feel what was in the air, and had no difficulty in making them conform to it, so that they were successful even while they were students, and were talked of and discussed and approached by dealers as though they were persons of consequence. Their life was one long intoxication: money, praise, wine, and debauchery went to their heads, and of all these excitants Mendel had the largest share, and found himself the equal even of Kessler, whose father was a millionaire soap-boiler. He attained an extraordinary skill at doing what was expected of him, and developed an instinct as sharp as Hetty’s for the success of the moment after next.He won scholarships at the Detmold and, carefully adapting his style, an open prize at the RoyalAcademy. His patrons were excited and delighted. He was interviewed by the Yiddish papers and photographed, palette and brushes in hand, in a dashing attitude. He said many foolish things to the reporters, but the printed version made him blush. He was represented as saying that art had been reborn during the last ten years, that the Royal Academy was exploded and would soon close its doors, that there was no art criticism in England, that there had never been a great Jewish artist, and that this deficiency in the most vital and enduring race in the world would now be repaired.He thanked his stars that his friends could not read Yiddish. Two well-known Jewish painters wrote to the paper to say that they existed and to trounce his “bumptious and ignorant dismissal of respected and respectable art.” And he heartily agreed with them. He was shaken out of the hectic dreams of months, yet could not feel or see clearly. His way was with Mitchell, and Mitchell was generously rejoicing in it all as though it had happened to himself, while Hetty was going from studio to studio spreading the news and declaring the arrival of a genius.He wanted to go and hide his face in his mother’s skirts, but she was so happy and elated with the congratulations of the neighbours and visits from the Rabbis of the synagogue that he could not but keep up his part before her. For her and for all his family he bought extravagant presents, and he went out and sought Artie Beech, whom he had not seen for years, and gave him a box of cigars. He had a melancholy idea that he was doing them all an injury and that he must somehow repair it. The exact nature of the injury he did not know, but his instinct was very sure that the whole business was false. Yet it was so actual that he could not help believing in it. He was hypnotized into accepting it. There seemed noreason why it should not go on for ever. Here, apparently, was what he had always striven for—art and homage—and the idea that they could go on for ever was terrible and paralysing. But there was not a soul in the world with whom he could share his feeling. If he showed the least hesitation they would accuse him of ingratitude.He was filled with a smouldering rage against them all which found no vent until Maurice Birnbaum came in his motor-car and asked him to bring some of his things to show Sir William Hunslet, R.A., who had been much impressed with his prize picture. Once again Mendel climbed into the motor-car, and once again he was told not to let his parcel scratch the paint.“Now,” said Maurice, “you have the world at your feet, and I feel proud to have had my share in bringing it about. You can have everything you want, and if you don’t grow into something really big it won’t be our fault. Everything that money can do it shall do.”The car rolled through the streets which had been the scene of Mendel’s happy rambles, but being carried through them in such magnificence made him feel helpless, a victim to something stronger than his own will and that he had always detested. He was being taken away from his mother and from Mitchell, and he knew whither motor-cars were driven. All roads ended in Sir Julius, who could sit and look at pictures without a word. Everything went spinning past him. This was going too fast, too fast, and he would be exhausted before he had really known his purpose. Maurice Birnbaum’s exciting, patronizing tones, chattering on exasperatingly, infuriated him, until he felt like stabbing him in his already dropping stomach. What could a fat man like that have to do with art? How could so fat a man drive down to the wretched poverty in Whitechapel and not feel ashamed?But in spite of himself and his confused emotions Mendel enjoyed the drive, which showed him more of London than the narrowed area he frequented: more to conquer, more to know; shops, strange ugly buildings, polite, mincing people, women like dolls, men like marionettes, wide streets and plane-trees, the gardens and squares of the polite Southwest. Often there were Georgian houses like that in which his family lived, but so neat and trim and newly painted that they looked like doll’s-houses, proper places for the dolls and the marionettes. . . . And it was exhilarating to be in the heart of the roaring traffic, bearing down upon scarlet buses, and swift darting taxi-cabs and motor-cars as rich as Maurice Birnbaum’s. Out of the traffic they turned suddenly into a quiet street of dead houses and vast gloomy piles of flats. Outside a house more gloomy than the rest they stopped. Maurice got out fussily, told Mendel to be careful how he lifted his parcel out, fussed his way into the house through a dark, luxuriously furnished hall, and into a vast studio where there was a group of fashionably dressed women taking tea with Sir William and exclaiming about the beauties of a portrait that stood on the easel.Maurice stood awkwardly outside the circle and muttered apologies, while Mendel felt utterly and crushingly foreign to the atmosphere of the place. He knew how these people would regard him. They would stare at him with a cold interest not unmingled with horror, and he would be conscious of bearing the marks of the place he came from, of smelling of the gutter. Against that separation even art was powerless. And what had his work to do with this huge, hard, brilliant portrait on the easel? If they admired that they would never look at his dark little pictures.Sir William introduced Maurice to the ladies, but did not so much as look at the boy, whom hismind had at once ticked off as a “student,” and therefore to be kept in his place. Maurice explained spluttering: words like “scholarship,” “prize,” “genius,” “instinct,” fell in a shower from his lips, and one of the ladies put up her lorgnette and stared at Mendel as though he were a picture or a wax model.At last he was told to untie his parcel, and one by one he showed his pictures. Sir William blew out his chest and his cheeks, and with a wave of his hand blurted out one word:—“Italy.”“That’s what I say,” said Maurice.Mendel scented danger. They seemed to him to be conspiring together.“Italy!” ejaculated Sir William. “Italy! Blue skies, the sun, the light. Give him light and landscape with form in it.”“Am I ill?” thought Mendel with some alarm, for Sir William sounded to him more like a doctor than a painter. And he decided that the Academician was not a real artist because he showed no sign of the fellow-feeling which had been so strong in Mr. Froitzheim.Before the ladies he could say nothing. He put his pictures back in the parcel and heard Maurice and Sir William still conspiring together to send him to Italy. He was tired of being swung from one idea to another. At the Polytechnic they had told him that the essential thing in a picture was “tone,” that he must remember the existence of the atmosphere between himself and the object he was painting, and that there were no bright colours in nature. At the Detmold little was said about “tone,” but he was told that the essence of a picture was drawing, “the expression of form.” . . . What next? He had a foreboding that Italy was only another name for another essence of a picture. Besides, he wanted to live. Though he adored art, yet it did notcontain all that was precious to him—liberty and gaiety, friendship and affection. Always until the Detmold his life had been weighed down with poverty and with terrible obsessions like that of his dread of the fat, curly-headed boy who, during the six long years of his schooling, had waited for him outside the school-gates every day to give him a coward’s blow and to challenge him to fight and to jeer at him if he refused. There had been furious, passionate loves to set him reeling, gusts of inexplicable desires and ambitions which had often made him weep with pain. And now, just as the world was opening out before him and he was warm with the friendship of an Englishman (for he was proud of Mitchell’s Public School training), they wished to take him away and send him to a far country.He had had enough of being a foreigner in England, and he loathed the idea of travel. His father had told him that England was the best country in the world, and, if he had suffered so much there, what would it be in others? Italy? He wanted to paint what he had always painted, fish and onions in a London kitchen. How could Italy help him to do that?He would not go. He would refuse to go. These Birnbaums and Fleischmanns had had their way with him for long enough.So lost was he in this growing revolt that he was already some distance away from Sir William’s studio before he was aware of having left it.“Our greatest painter,” said Maurice. “The greatest since Whistler.”“Yes,” said Mendel, aghast at the supersession of Calthrop and the idols of the Detmold. If Maurice could be so ignorant there was nothing to be said and argument was vain.“He really appreciated your work,” Maurice added.“He never looked at it!” cried Mendel, enraged.“I put them in front of him one by one, but he always looked at the fat lady in blue.”“He could tell with one glance,” protested Maurice, who had been mightily impressed.Mendel saw that it was useless to talk, and shut his lips tight while Maurice chattered to him of his extraordinary good fortune in being able to go to Italy, to live among the orange groves and with the greatest galleries of the world to roam in, the most beautiful scenery and the most delightful food.The mention of food made Mendel think of his mother’s unsavoury dishes and sluttish table, the most distasteful feature of his existence, but he preferred even that to the Italy of Maurice Birnbaum and Sir William. Through such people, he knew, lay nothing that he could ever desire.As soon as he reached home he told his mother that they wanted to send him abroad to study. He strode about the kitchen and waved his arms, growling:—“Study? Study? I want to be an artist, not a student. Iaman artist. I know art students when I see them—the Academy, South Kensington, the Detmold—they are all the same. Let them go abroad and never come back. No one will miss them, not even their fathers and mothers, if they have anything so natural. I will not go—I will not go!”“But if the Maurice Birnbaum thinks you must go, then you must,” said Golda. “It is their money that has been spent on you.”“They’ve spent enough,” cried Mendel, “without that. I don’t want their money any more. They know that. They want to keep me in their hands and to say that they made me. They? People like that! God made me, and they want to keep me all my life saying how grateful I am to them. Grateful? I am not.”“But you could go for a little while.”“I will not go at all.”He sat down and wrote to Maurice Birnbaum saying that he would not go to Italy, that he did not want any more of his commissions, and that he would not be interfered with any more. He would shortly repay every penny he had had, and he asked only to be allowed to know best what he wanted to do.“Everything that I love is here in London, and I can only learn from what I love. I am one kind of artist and you want to turn me into another kind. You will only waste your money, and I will not let you do it.”Maurice never answered this letter and patronage and that of his friends was withdrawn.Mendel plunged more ardently than ever into his career with Mitchell and the others, but found that they were not prepared to share or to admit the new freedom which he had begun to enjoy. The Birnbaum patronage had always to a certain extent restrained him, but now that it was shaken off he plunged madly and wildly into every kind of extravagance. He was no longer content to be the equal of the others. He wanted to lead them. He was the most successful of them all, and he wanted them all to join him in forcing art upon London. Calthrop had shown them the way, but he had unaccountably stopped short. He had many imitators, and there were even women who looked like his type, but it all ended in his personality. . . . Art was something else: something outside that, an impersonal thing, which London should be made to recognize. The pictures of Kühler, Mitchell, Weldon, and Kessler should be, as it were, only forerunners of the mighty pictures that should be painted. . . .He was just as extreme and violent in his vices as he was in his idealism, and even Mitchell was rather upset by his pranks and caprices. It was one thing to take a shy tame genius amongyour acquaintance, quite another when the genius ran wild and dragged you hither and thither and with breathless haste from the vilest human company to the most dizzily soaring ideas. Weldon, who was uncommonly shrewd, had begun to see the danger of allowing Hetty Finch to arrange their affairs, and when on top of that Mendel, drunk with freedom and success, began to take charge, he thought it time to secure himself and began to withdraw from their undertakings and adventures.At last Kessler struck, and told Mendel that he might be the greatest genius that was ever born, but should sometimes try to remember that his friends were gentlemen and could not always be making allowances for his birth and upbringing. This happened in the Paris Café. Mendel fell like a shot bird, like a stone. The eager words froze on his lips, his face visibly contracted and became haggard, his eyes blinked for a moment, then stared glassily. He sat so for some minutes, then rose from the table and walked quickly out of the café.He did not appear for a week, nor was anything heard of him. He sat at home working furiously. Hetty Finch went to see him, but he turned her out, telling her that she was a hateful, cold-hearted woman and that he would never see her again.At last he wrote to Mitchell, a letter of agony, for Mitchell, his friend, seemed to him the worst offender, by not having warned him of what was in the air:—“You are my friend,” he wrote, “my only friend. It is no more to you what I am, where or how I was born, than it is to me what you are. The soul of a man chooses his friend, and I trusted you even in my folly. You could have defended me and our friendship. You have not done so and I must live miserably without you.Good-bye. I shall not attempt again to enter a life in which my work is not sufficient recommendation. I was happy. I was not happy before. I am not happy now. I have been foolish, but I was your friend.”Mitchell was irritated by this letter, but he was also moved. He valued Mendel’s sincerity, which had continually jolted him out of his natural indolence. And, as he had a fine talent and a fairly strong desire to use it to the full, the friendship had profited him. It had also helped him to come to reasonable terms with that great man, his father.On the other hand he was in this difficulty, that he too had been slipping out of the quintette through his new friendship with Miss Greta Morrison and her friend, Miss Edith Clowes. Knowing Mendel’s contempt for the “top-knots,” he had said nothing of this matter, and had found it sometimes difficult to account for the afternoons and evenings given to the dilemma of discovering whether Miss Morrison or Miss Clowes were the love of his life. Mendel was an exacting friend, and, as he concealed nothing, expected no concealment.Mitchell, like the true Englishman he was, deplored the unpleasant complication, but left it to time, impulse, or inspiration to unravel. Impulse, in due course, came to his aid and he invented a plan. First of all he wrote a manly note to Mendel, confessing his inability to understand why he should suffer for Kessler’s caddishness, and declaring that friendship could not be so lightly broken. He received no reply to this, and proceeded by taking Morrison and Clowes (as in the fashion of the Detmold they were called) to see the docks at Rotherhithe. While there he gazed from Morrison to Clowes and from Clowes to Morrison, unable to decide which he loved, for both gave him an equal contractionof the heart, and then he told them that ships had never been properly painted, neverexpressedin form and colour; and then he added that it was clearly a man’s job, and then he informed them that only a short distance away lived Mendel Kühler.“Would you like to go and see him?” he asked. “It is the queerest thing to go and see him. A filthy street, a dark house, a ramshackle staircase, and there you are—absolutely one of the finest painters the Detmold has ever turned out.”“Do let us go and see him!” said Clowes, who had decided in her own mind that she was the third of the party and in the way. Morrison said nothing, and looked very solemn, as though she regarded the visit as an event—something to be half dreaded. She had a very charming air of diffidence, as though she were very happy and knew this to be an unusual and peculiar condition. Often she smiled to herself, and then seemed to shake the smile away, feeling perhaps that she, a slip of a girl, had no right to be amused by a world so vast and so varied.She had enjoyed herself. The ships had stirred her romantically, and she could not at all agree with Mitchell about painting them, for were they not works of art in themselves? They moved her in the same way, arresting her eyes and delighting them, and touching her emotions so that they began to creep and tickle their way through her whole being. . . . O wonderful world to contain so much delight! And it pleased her that the ships should start out of the squalor of the docks like lilies out of a dark pond.She smiled and shook the smile away when Mitchell spoke of Mendel Kühler. She remembered once meeting Mendel on the stairs at the Detmold. She had often noticed him—strange-looking, white-faced, romantic, with a look of suffering in his eyes that marked him out fromall the other young men. . . . After she had passed him on the stairs she turned to look at him, and at the same moment he turned and she trembled and blushed, and her eyes shone as she hurried on her way.Mitchell had told her a great deal about him, and she had heard other people say that he was detestable, an ill-mannered egoist. She supposed he was so, for she rarely questioned what other people said, but he remained a clear figure for her, the romantic-looking young man who had looked back on the stairs.“We’ll take him by surprise,” said Mitchell, with a sudden qualm lest they should break in upon Mendel and Hetty Finch together. “If we told him he would hide all his work away and put on a white shirt and have flowers on the table, for he is terrified of ladies. He says they don’t look like women to him.”“I’m sure,” said Clowes, “I don’t want to look like a woman to any man.”This was the most encouraging remark Mitchell had had from either during the day, and he decided that he was in love with Clowes.A brisk walk through narrow dingy streets brought them, with some help from the police, to the door of Issy’s house. Mitchell knocked and a grimy little Jewess opened to them.“Mr. Mendel Kühler?” said Mitchell.“Upstairs to the top,” replied the Jewess as she hurried away. They climbed the shabbily carpeted stairs and knocked at the door of the studio. Mendel opened it. He stood with a brush in his hand, blinking. He stared at Mitchell and then beyond him at Morrison.“Come in,” he said. “I’d just finished. I’ve been working rather hard and haven’t spoken to a soul for three days. You must forgive me if I don’t seem very intelligent.”They went in and he made tea for them, hardlyever taking his eyes off Morrison. He said pointedly to Mitchell:—“So you came down to the East End to find me.”Clowes explained:—“I’m a stranger to London and had never seen the docks, you know.”“I have never seen the docks either, though I live so near,” said he. Then, catching Morrison glancing in the direction of his easel, he turned his work for her to see, almost ignoring the others. Afterwards he produced drawings for her to see, and he seemed entirely bent on pleasing her, which so embarrassed her that, when she could escape his gaze, she looked imploringly over at the others. They could not help her, and he went on until he had shown her every piece of work in the studio. Whenever she spoke, shyly and diffidently, as though she knew her opinion was of no value, he gave a queer little grunt of triumph, and his eyes glittered as he looked over at Mitchell, as though to say that he too knew how to treat the “top-knots” and to please them.
HEhad more of the deliciously grown-up sensation the next day, when Hetty came to see him. She was something new. The girls of the streets he knew, and unattainably above them were the girls at the school and his friends’ sisters, whom he called “top-knots,” because of the way they did their hair. The “top-knots” were hardly female at all to him, so remote were they, so entirely unapproachable; utterly different from the girls of the streets, who were so accessible that he had but to hold out his arms to find one of them, as if by magic, in his grasp. And now Hetty was different again.
“You are cosy up here,” she said, moving at once to the only comfortable chair and curling up in it. “Your sister told me about you.”
“Leah? What lies did she tell you?”
“Well, I knew it wasn’talltrue, about the money you were making, because you wouldn’t live here if it was true, would you? But I suppose some of your friends make a lot of money.”
“They’re rich, some of them,” replied Mendel, aghast to find himself thinking coldly of his friends in terms of money, his mind rushing swiftly between the two poles of his father and Sir Julius. “Yes. There’s plenty of money in London.”
“That’s what Ma said when she gave me the fourteen shillings. She said a girl with eyes like mine had no need to go short in London.” Hettyraised her eyes and looked full at him, who met her stare boldly and yet with some alarm, finding himself acting a part.
Hetty was flattering him by regarding him as the possessor of a key to the wealth of London, and in spite of himself he could not help accepting the rôle. She had touched an element of his character of which till then he had been unconscious. The knave in him sprang into being and thrust all his other qualities aside. He began to boast of his success and to swagger about the luxury and immorality of London life, though it was not all braggadocio, but also a kindly desire to make Hetty happy by talking to her of the things that interested her.
He told her about Calthrop and the Paris Café, and Maurice Birnbaum and his motor-car and richly furnished flat in Westminster, and a Lord’s son who was at the Detmold, and Mitchell, whose father was a great man. And all the time, as he talked, he was astonished at the sound of his own voice, so different did it sound.
Hetty wriggled with pleasure in her chair and pouted up her lips. Presently she said her hat made her head ache, and she took it off and stretched out her arms and said:—
“No more pots and pans for me! I do think you’re lovely. It’s just like a story. I call that real fun. Not like Margate. . . . Do you think I could get work as a model, or do you have to be slap-up?”
Mendel thought of the drabs who posed and he could not help smiling.
“I could only tell by your figure, though your face is all right.”
“Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked.
“Very.”
“I’ll show you my figure, if you like.”
“All right, I’ll light the gas-stove in the bedroom. It’s a little cold in here.”
He showed her into the bedroom, and when she was ready she called to him.
She was beautifully made, but she looked so foolish with her anxiety to please him that he could take hardly any interest in her, and he was distressed, too, because the only background he could give her consisted of his new knavish thoughts of the wealth of London. Yet nothing could disturb it, for the background was suitable. Her white body was her offering.
“How much would I be paid?”
“A shilling an hour.”
“Do you pay that?”
“Yes.”
“If you could get me work I would sit to you for nothing.”
“I’d pay you,” he said. His generous qualities strove hard to reassert themselves, but there was something about this girl that compelled just what he was giving her—hardness for hardness, value for value. Yet she was certainly beautiful, and it was strange to him to be unable to give her the warm homage that within himself he could not help feeling.
She sat on the bed, making no move to cover herself, and said:—
“Artistsaredifferent. There was an artist once at Margate. It was him put the idea into my head. But he was very poor and not a gentleman.”
And now to Mendel she was an object of sheer astonishment. He stood and warmed his legs by the gas stove and gaped at her, sitting on his bed and chattering in her clear, hard voice of her ambitions, her dreams, the drudgery at home, while in everything she said was a flattery which he could not resist. Worst of all, he felt that he was one of a pair with her. His talent, her body, were shining offerings with which they both emerged from the depths of the despised. Enteringinto her spirit, he too was filled with a desire for revenge. Yet in him this desire was charged with passion, which made their present situation ridiculous. He thought of the poverty and the obscure suffering downstairs, the dragging penury to which, but for his talent, he would have been condemned. Then he imagined her as Issy had described her at Margate, lurking in the kitchen, listening behind the door as Leah spun her yarns. He could sympathize with her, and she seemed to him almost gallant.
He got out a piece of mill-board and began to draw her, but to his annoyance could not get interested in what he was doing. He wanted to know more about her, could not rest content that a human being should be so reduced to a cold purpose. Yet, though she talked freely enough, nothing fell from her lips to meet his desire. She had no people, no class, no tradition, but still she was a person. He could not dismiss her as he dismissed so many, as “nonsensical.”
“I can’t make much of you now,” he said, almost wailing. “I believe I’m tired.”
And suddenly he hurled away his drawing and rushed at her and kissed her. She clung to him and he yielded to her will, seeing clearly that this was her purpose, this her desire, this her ambition, her all.
He knew that she was using him, was making certain of being able to use him. The newly discovered knave in him insisted on having his existence, and through it he enjoyed a certain defiant happiness.
Happiness! To be happy! That had seemed impossible. His first year at the Detmold had been miserable. He had been discouraged and almost listless. Often he would go to his mother and say: “I shall never be an artist.”
“Not all at once,” Golda would say. “Take a boy who is apprenticed to a bootmaker. Hecannot all at once make good boots. He must spoil a deal of leather first. Or a tailor-boy: he must spoil cloth. A trade must be learned, and you can learn this, for you work hard enough at it.”
For a moment or two he would see through her clear eyes and that was enough to set him working again, half believing that he would soon master his craft. But there had been the struggle to master what at the Detmold, with such unquestionable authority, they called “drawing.”
This now, with Hetty, was in its way happiness, though he detested it and her. It was an escape. It was easy. It made no demands on him, save the small effort to achieve self-forgetfulness, and in that she aided him, for she seemed superior to himself and enviable in the clearness of her purpose. She offered herself and made no demands upon him except of what could cost him nothing: just a few words to his friends, a start in her chosen profession.
All the same, he was horrified at himself. Every other crisis and sudden change in his life had been attended with violent suffering, an eruption within himself, profound depression, almost a collapse. This had been as easy as walking through a door, a slipping from one part of his being to another. . . . Here suddenly was happiness, a queer detached, almost indifferent condition, full of pleasure, and he rejoiced in the novelty of it. He watched Hetty draw on her clothes again and was sickened by the sensual languor of her movements. She was drowsy, like a cat before a fire.
“No, I certainly shan’t draw you to-day.”
“What about to-morrow?”
“I shall be painting to-morrow.”
“I do think you’re a devil sometimes.”
“I’ll take you to the Paris Café, if you like.”
“Will you?”
She perked up on that. She had not expected so soon to gain her desire.
“Yes. If you’ve got to earn your living you should meet people, and the sooner you get going the better.”
Hetty sat with her chin in her hands, crouched in elation. Everything had turned out as she had hoped and planned, as she had willed that it should, and she regarded him with some contempt because he had been so easy and because he was so young. She was the same age as he, but she thought him a little vain boy. Yet when he looked at her she was afraid of him, for he knew so much and guessed so much more. To defend herself, her instinct drove through to his vanity and flattered it to blind him. She feigned an animation she was incapable of feeling to make herself more beautiful in his eyes, and he thought of his friends, Mitchell and Weldon, and how they would be stirred with her. He thought how she would please Calthrop, and he was lured into believing that he would gain in importance through her.
“You’ve come at a very bad time,” he said. “They’ll all be going away for the summer.”
“Oh!” she looked dashed, hating to be caught out in a mistake. “Do they go away for long?”
“Three months.”
“Oh, well!” she drawled. “I can get a place if nothing turns up. But something always does turn up. I’m one of the lucky ones, you know.”
“I don’t believe in luck,” said he, with a sudden irruption of the old self that seemed to have been left so far behind.
“I must go now,” she said.
They groped their way down the dark stairs, and he went out with her, feeling that he could not face his family, from whom he knew now that his face was turned. In the street a mood of freedom and adventure came over him, and for this mood she was a fitting mate. He took her on the top of a bus tothe West End, among the promenading crowds, and she drank it all in with a kind of exaltation, her big eyes glowing, her body trembling with excitement. Into one café after another he led her, completely absorbed as he was in her purpose, and at last, when they mounted the eastward bus, she leaned her head on his shoulder, and he could hear her murmuring to herself: “London . . . London . . . London.”
He too was thrilled as he had never been before by London. He had never so strongly realized it before. The great city had thrilled him with its beauty and had stirred him with its business, but never before had its spirit crept into his blood to send it whirling and singing through his veins. He hardly slept at all that night, and the next morning it was a long time before he could begin to work, which then seemed far removed from the effort and almost anguish it used to cost him. The still-life with which he had been wrestling became quite easy to do, and very soothing was the handling of brushes and paint. Every touch was like a caress upon his aching soul.
So began a period of real happiness. The pieces he painted with such soothing ease were generally admired and readily bought. The dealer to whom he took them was also a colourman and gave him apparently unlimited credit; and he laid in an immense stock of colours and amused himself with experiments. It seemed that his career was to be successful without a struggle. His patrons were delighted to find him so soon making money, and the Birnbaums and the Fleischmanns invited him down into the country, but as he found that they put him up in a servant’s bedroom or a gardener’s cottage he refused to go more than once, or to any more of their kind who were not prepared to forget his poverty.
He would rather stay in London with Hetty,whom he had begun to regard as a mascot. With her coming everything had changed. She had made everything easy and happy and delightful. He had no love for her, but he could not help feeling grateful. She had turned work into a pleasure, pleasure into a riot of ecstasy.
Alone with her in the evenings or with some chance acquaintance, during the holidays he roamed through London, basking in the summer evenings, discovering unimagined splendours, the Parks, the river, the Zoo, boating on the Serpentine, the promenade on the romantic Spaniard’s Road at Hampstead. Nearly every night he wrote to Mitchell in the country, describing his new easy happiness in his work and his discovery of the charm of nights in London. And once a week Mitchell would write to him and give him a delightful account of English country life in a valley, shut in by rolling hills between which wandered a slow, pleasant stream. Here Mitchell was painting, boating, playing tennis, making love.
“There’s a Detmold girl lives near here with her people—Greta Morrison. You may remember her—glorious chestnut hair, big blue eyes, but as shy as a little mouse. I couldn’t get a word out of her until I began to talk about you, and there’s no end to her appetite for that. I don’t mince matters. I tell her exactly what you are, exactly what you come from, and what a wild beast you are. She has seen you throw things about at the Detmold, and she seems absolutely to like it. Yet she is not a fool, and I like her enormously. She makes me feel what a rotter I am, but I can’t get on with her unless I talk about you. Ihaveheard that her work is good, but she won’t show me a thing.”
Mendel was pleased that a “top-knot” should be interested in him, but beyond the flicker of delight he gave no thought to the idea of Greta Morrison. The “top-knots” belonged to the worldwhich he was going to despoil with Hetty Finch. That world must disgorge. It had condemned, and still condemned, his father and mother to bitter poverty, and he remembered how on their first coming to London the whole family had slept in one room, and how he had sat up in the middle of the night and looked at the recumbent bodies and suffered under the indignity of it. And his brothers had grown from ruddy, bronzed boys into pale-faced, worn young men. And behind Hetty was the dirty lodging-house and her Ma, of whom he had a very clear idea. He used to wax violent, and his imagination would run riot with the fantastic visions of success he conjured up.
Who were the “top-knots” that they should have an easy, pleasant time in the country while he was left to stew in London?
Hetty began genuinely to admire him, and her flattery was no longer empty. There was some sustenance in it.
“O—oh!” she used to say. “You’ll get on. There’s no doubt about that. You’ll have a big stoodio and the nobs will come up in their motor-cars, and you’ll be able to paint what you like then.”
“You’re a liar,” he would reply. “I shall always paint what I like. I never do anything else, and never will. Once paint for the fools and you have to do it always, because you become a fool yourself.”
Golda once met Hetty coming down the stairs. She told her she was a dirty slut and was not to show her face inside the house again. A few days later she saw her open the front door and slip out. In her anger she informed Jacob of the danger to Mendel, and Jacob went up to the studio.
“I will not have that harlot in my house,” he said.
“She is not a harlot,” replied Mendel rather shakily, for, though his father’s power had dwindled, yet he was still a figure of authority.
“She is a harlot and a daughter of a harlot, and I will not have her in my house.”
“She is a model, and I must have models, as I have tried to explain to you again and again. I am allowed money for models. I must have models, just as you must have skins.”
“Then there are other models. I know this girl, what she is after, and she will ruin you.”
“Neither she nor anyone else in the whole world could ruin me,” said Mendel, “for I am an artist, and while I have my art I ask nothing outside it.”
“Don’t argue with me!” shouted Jacob. “I will not have that drab in my house.”
Mendel had a great respect and regard for his father. He was silent, and Jacob went downstairs, satisfied that he had asserted himself.
He said to Golda:—
“They will blow the boy’s head off his shoulder with the fuss they make of him. I know how to take him down a peg or two.”
“Don’t go too far,” said Golda. “It would be a black day for me if he went away and was ashamed of us.”
“If I saw that he was ashamed of you,” replied Jacob, “I would thrash him within an inch of his life. Ashamed of you, among all the dirt and trumped-up people he goes among!”
However, Hetty still came to the studio and there were frequent explosions, until at last Mendel, intent on the new independence he had won, declared that he could bear it no longer, and he arranged with Issy to take the top floor of his house and to turn that into a studio. This compromise was successful, and pleased both parties: Golda was happy to be relieved from further friction and Mendel was glad to be away, for he knew that his doings must hurt her, and that hehated. Yet he could see no way out of it. He was done for ever with the old simplicity of his untutored painting in her kitchen. Art was no longer a pure and hardly-won joy. It was a trade, like any other, and, like any other, it had its sordid aspect, and, to compensate for that, it was a career and could also be a triumph. These things he did not expect his mother to understand. He had Mitchell to talk to now, Mitchell to whom to impart the burden upon his soul, and Mitchell and he were to work together and to give to the world such art as it had never seen since the primitives.
Mitchell and he! That friendship was the source of his new confidence. Golda had been and still was much to him, but when it came to painting she knew nothing at all, and painting was the important thing. Through painting lay not only satisfied ambitions and fame and riches, but life itself, and of that what could Golda know?
It was a great thing, therefore, to be established away from home when Mitchell returned from the country. And Mitchell approved. He had suffered from being under his father’s shadow, and with Weldon and Kessler he had taken a studio near Fitzroy Square. He said:—
“A time will come when you will have to leave the East End.”
“I shall never leave them,” replied Mendel. “What I want to paint is there. They are my people, and all that I have belongs to them.”
“Rubbish. You’ll soon be getting commissions, and you can’t ask people who can afford to pay for portraits to a hole like that.”
“They will come to my studio,” said Mendel, “or I will not take their commissions.”
Though Mitchell was rather shocked by his frank conceit, he could not but admire and envy the way his impulses came rushing to the surface and were never deterred by considerations as tothe impression he might be making. Mendel trusted Mitchell absolutely and hid nothing from him, neither the most scabrous of his deeds nor the most childish of his desires. He made no secret of the new manly feeling that had come to him through Hetty, the conviction that he could meet the West End on its own terms.
When he showed Mitchell the work he had done during the holidays, his friend said:—
“Gawd! The difference is absolutely startling. There’s charm in every one of them, and they’re not fakes either.”
With Hetty he was enraptured.
“Gawd!” he said; “I’ll give ten years to painting her, as Leonardo did to Monna Lisa, and then it would not be finished. Came from a Margate lodging-house, did she? Mark my words: she’ll marry a successful artist and queen it among the best.”
With Mitchell, Hetty put forth all her cajolery when she found that he knew what she thought good people. She could look very pathetic and delicate, and middle-aged artists were sorry for her, and thought being a model a perilous profession for her. One of them warned her of the dangers she must run, and especially mentioned Mitchell and Kühler as young men to be avoided. They roared with laughter when she told them.
The Paris Café was Paradise to her, and she made friends with all its habitués and attracted the attention of Calthrop, who became Mendel’s enemy for life when she told him that the youngster had said of him that he had been a good artist once, but was now only repeating himself.
With marvellous rapidity she picked up the jargon of the place, and could quite easily have taken her career in her own hands, but she would not surrender Mendel, who could no more do without her than he could without Mitchell. She clungto him and kept him a happy slave to his three friends, to whom she devoted herself as though her existence depended on the solidarity of the group. From morning to night she was with one or other of them, and every evening with the four of them at the Paris, or making a row at a music-hall and getting themselves kicked out.
She was learning her trade as they were learning theirs, and she was delighted with the ease with which Mendel picked up what she called “sense”; that is to say, he became much more like the others, affected their speech, grew his hair long, wore corduroys, a black shirt, and a red sash, and talked blatantly and with a slight contempt of great painters. But even so, he was disturbing, for he did all these things with passion, so that they tinged his soul, and were not as a mere garment upon it. Even in falsehood he was sincere.
When Hetty found Calthrop painting a self-portrait, she set her four boys painting self-portraits, and when she found the older men talking about the beauty of roofs and chimneys, the four were soon ecstatic about roofs and chimneys, and painting them without knowing how it had come about. She could feel what was in the air, and had no difficulty in making them conform to it, so that they were successful even while they were students, and were talked of and discussed and approached by dealers as though they were persons of consequence. Their life was one long intoxication: money, praise, wine, and debauchery went to their heads, and of all these excitants Mendel had the largest share, and found himself the equal even of Kessler, whose father was a millionaire soap-boiler. He attained an extraordinary skill at doing what was expected of him, and developed an instinct as sharp as Hetty’s for the success of the moment after next.
He won scholarships at the Detmold and, carefully adapting his style, an open prize at the RoyalAcademy. His patrons were excited and delighted. He was interviewed by the Yiddish papers and photographed, palette and brushes in hand, in a dashing attitude. He said many foolish things to the reporters, but the printed version made him blush. He was represented as saying that art had been reborn during the last ten years, that the Royal Academy was exploded and would soon close its doors, that there was no art criticism in England, that there had never been a great Jewish artist, and that this deficiency in the most vital and enduring race in the world would now be repaired.
He thanked his stars that his friends could not read Yiddish. Two well-known Jewish painters wrote to the paper to say that they existed and to trounce his “bumptious and ignorant dismissal of respected and respectable art.” And he heartily agreed with them. He was shaken out of the hectic dreams of months, yet could not feel or see clearly. His way was with Mitchell, and Mitchell was generously rejoicing in it all as though it had happened to himself, while Hetty was going from studio to studio spreading the news and declaring the arrival of a genius.
He wanted to go and hide his face in his mother’s skirts, but she was so happy and elated with the congratulations of the neighbours and visits from the Rabbis of the synagogue that he could not but keep up his part before her. For her and for all his family he bought extravagant presents, and he went out and sought Artie Beech, whom he had not seen for years, and gave him a box of cigars. He had a melancholy idea that he was doing them all an injury and that he must somehow repair it. The exact nature of the injury he did not know, but his instinct was very sure that the whole business was false. Yet it was so actual that he could not help believing in it. He was hypnotized into accepting it. There seemed noreason why it should not go on for ever. Here, apparently, was what he had always striven for—art and homage—and the idea that they could go on for ever was terrible and paralysing. But there was not a soul in the world with whom he could share his feeling. If he showed the least hesitation they would accuse him of ingratitude.
He was filled with a smouldering rage against them all which found no vent until Maurice Birnbaum came in his motor-car and asked him to bring some of his things to show Sir William Hunslet, R.A., who had been much impressed with his prize picture. Once again Mendel climbed into the motor-car, and once again he was told not to let his parcel scratch the paint.
“Now,” said Maurice, “you have the world at your feet, and I feel proud to have had my share in bringing it about. You can have everything you want, and if you don’t grow into something really big it won’t be our fault. Everything that money can do it shall do.”
The car rolled through the streets which had been the scene of Mendel’s happy rambles, but being carried through them in such magnificence made him feel helpless, a victim to something stronger than his own will and that he had always detested. He was being taken away from his mother and from Mitchell, and he knew whither motor-cars were driven. All roads ended in Sir Julius, who could sit and look at pictures without a word. Everything went spinning past him. This was going too fast, too fast, and he would be exhausted before he had really known his purpose. Maurice Birnbaum’s exciting, patronizing tones, chattering on exasperatingly, infuriated him, until he felt like stabbing him in his already dropping stomach. What could a fat man like that have to do with art? How could so fat a man drive down to the wretched poverty in Whitechapel and not feel ashamed?
But in spite of himself and his confused emotions Mendel enjoyed the drive, which showed him more of London than the narrowed area he frequented: more to conquer, more to know; shops, strange ugly buildings, polite, mincing people, women like dolls, men like marionettes, wide streets and plane-trees, the gardens and squares of the polite Southwest. Often there were Georgian houses like that in which his family lived, but so neat and trim and newly painted that they looked like doll’s-houses, proper places for the dolls and the marionettes. . . . And it was exhilarating to be in the heart of the roaring traffic, bearing down upon scarlet buses, and swift darting taxi-cabs and motor-cars as rich as Maurice Birnbaum’s. Out of the traffic they turned suddenly into a quiet street of dead houses and vast gloomy piles of flats. Outside a house more gloomy than the rest they stopped. Maurice got out fussily, told Mendel to be careful how he lifted his parcel out, fussed his way into the house through a dark, luxuriously furnished hall, and into a vast studio where there was a group of fashionably dressed women taking tea with Sir William and exclaiming about the beauties of a portrait that stood on the easel.
Maurice stood awkwardly outside the circle and muttered apologies, while Mendel felt utterly and crushingly foreign to the atmosphere of the place. He knew how these people would regard him. They would stare at him with a cold interest not unmingled with horror, and he would be conscious of bearing the marks of the place he came from, of smelling of the gutter. Against that separation even art was powerless. And what had his work to do with this huge, hard, brilliant portrait on the easel? If they admired that they would never look at his dark little pictures.
Sir William introduced Maurice to the ladies, but did not so much as look at the boy, whom hismind had at once ticked off as a “student,” and therefore to be kept in his place. Maurice explained spluttering: words like “scholarship,” “prize,” “genius,” “instinct,” fell in a shower from his lips, and one of the ladies put up her lorgnette and stared at Mendel as though he were a picture or a wax model.
At last he was told to untie his parcel, and one by one he showed his pictures. Sir William blew out his chest and his cheeks, and with a wave of his hand blurted out one word:—
“Italy.”
“That’s what I say,” said Maurice.
Mendel scented danger. They seemed to him to be conspiring together.
“Italy!” ejaculated Sir William. “Italy! Blue skies, the sun, the light. Give him light and landscape with form in it.”
“Am I ill?” thought Mendel with some alarm, for Sir William sounded to him more like a doctor than a painter. And he decided that the Academician was not a real artist because he showed no sign of the fellow-feeling which had been so strong in Mr. Froitzheim.
Before the ladies he could say nothing. He put his pictures back in the parcel and heard Maurice and Sir William still conspiring together to send him to Italy. He was tired of being swung from one idea to another. At the Polytechnic they had told him that the essential thing in a picture was “tone,” that he must remember the existence of the atmosphere between himself and the object he was painting, and that there were no bright colours in nature. At the Detmold little was said about “tone,” but he was told that the essence of a picture was drawing, “the expression of form.” . . . What next? He had a foreboding that Italy was only another name for another essence of a picture. Besides, he wanted to live. Though he adored art, yet it did notcontain all that was precious to him—liberty and gaiety, friendship and affection. Always until the Detmold his life had been weighed down with poverty and with terrible obsessions like that of his dread of the fat, curly-headed boy who, during the six long years of his schooling, had waited for him outside the school-gates every day to give him a coward’s blow and to challenge him to fight and to jeer at him if he refused. There had been furious, passionate loves to set him reeling, gusts of inexplicable desires and ambitions which had often made him weep with pain. And now, just as the world was opening out before him and he was warm with the friendship of an Englishman (for he was proud of Mitchell’s Public School training), they wished to take him away and send him to a far country.
He had had enough of being a foreigner in England, and he loathed the idea of travel. His father had told him that England was the best country in the world, and, if he had suffered so much there, what would it be in others? Italy? He wanted to paint what he had always painted, fish and onions in a London kitchen. How could Italy help him to do that?
He would not go. He would refuse to go. These Birnbaums and Fleischmanns had had their way with him for long enough.
So lost was he in this growing revolt that he was already some distance away from Sir William’s studio before he was aware of having left it.
“Our greatest painter,” said Maurice. “The greatest since Whistler.”
“Yes,” said Mendel, aghast at the supersession of Calthrop and the idols of the Detmold. If Maurice could be so ignorant there was nothing to be said and argument was vain.
“He really appreciated your work,” Maurice added.
“He never looked at it!” cried Mendel, enraged.“I put them in front of him one by one, but he always looked at the fat lady in blue.”
“He could tell with one glance,” protested Maurice, who had been mightily impressed.
Mendel saw that it was useless to talk, and shut his lips tight while Maurice chattered to him of his extraordinary good fortune in being able to go to Italy, to live among the orange groves and with the greatest galleries of the world to roam in, the most beautiful scenery and the most delightful food.
The mention of food made Mendel think of his mother’s unsavoury dishes and sluttish table, the most distasteful feature of his existence, but he preferred even that to the Italy of Maurice Birnbaum and Sir William. Through such people, he knew, lay nothing that he could ever desire.
As soon as he reached home he told his mother that they wanted to send him abroad to study. He strode about the kitchen and waved his arms, growling:—
“Study? Study? I want to be an artist, not a student. Iaman artist. I know art students when I see them—the Academy, South Kensington, the Detmold—they are all the same. Let them go abroad and never come back. No one will miss them, not even their fathers and mothers, if they have anything so natural. I will not go—I will not go!”
“But if the Maurice Birnbaum thinks you must go, then you must,” said Golda. “It is their money that has been spent on you.”
“They’ve spent enough,” cried Mendel, “without that. I don’t want their money any more. They know that. They want to keep me in their hands and to say that they made me. They? People like that! God made me, and they want to keep me all my life saying how grateful I am to them. Grateful? I am not.”
“But you could go for a little while.”
“I will not go at all.”
He sat down and wrote to Maurice Birnbaum saying that he would not go to Italy, that he did not want any more of his commissions, and that he would not be interfered with any more. He would shortly repay every penny he had had, and he asked only to be allowed to know best what he wanted to do.
“Everything that I love is here in London, and I can only learn from what I love. I am one kind of artist and you want to turn me into another kind. You will only waste your money, and I will not let you do it.”
Maurice never answered this letter and patronage and that of his friends was withdrawn.
Mendel plunged more ardently than ever into his career with Mitchell and the others, but found that they were not prepared to share or to admit the new freedom which he had begun to enjoy. The Birnbaum patronage had always to a certain extent restrained him, but now that it was shaken off he plunged madly and wildly into every kind of extravagance. He was no longer content to be the equal of the others. He wanted to lead them. He was the most successful of them all, and he wanted them all to join him in forcing art upon London. Calthrop had shown them the way, but he had unaccountably stopped short. He had many imitators, and there were even women who looked like his type, but it all ended in his personality. . . . Art was something else: something outside that, an impersonal thing, which London should be made to recognize. The pictures of Kühler, Mitchell, Weldon, and Kessler should be, as it were, only forerunners of the mighty pictures that should be painted. . . .
He was just as extreme and violent in his vices as he was in his idealism, and even Mitchell was rather upset by his pranks and caprices. It was one thing to take a shy tame genius amongyour acquaintance, quite another when the genius ran wild and dragged you hither and thither and with breathless haste from the vilest human company to the most dizzily soaring ideas. Weldon, who was uncommonly shrewd, had begun to see the danger of allowing Hetty Finch to arrange their affairs, and when on top of that Mendel, drunk with freedom and success, began to take charge, he thought it time to secure himself and began to withdraw from their undertakings and adventures.
At last Kessler struck, and told Mendel that he might be the greatest genius that was ever born, but should sometimes try to remember that his friends were gentlemen and could not always be making allowances for his birth and upbringing. This happened in the Paris Café. Mendel fell like a shot bird, like a stone. The eager words froze on his lips, his face visibly contracted and became haggard, his eyes blinked for a moment, then stared glassily. He sat so for some minutes, then rose from the table and walked quickly out of the café.
He did not appear for a week, nor was anything heard of him. He sat at home working furiously. Hetty Finch went to see him, but he turned her out, telling her that she was a hateful, cold-hearted woman and that he would never see her again.
At last he wrote to Mitchell, a letter of agony, for Mitchell, his friend, seemed to him the worst offender, by not having warned him of what was in the air:—
“You are my friend,” he wrote, “my only friend. It is no more to you what I am, where or how I was born, than it is to me what you are. The soul of a man chooses his friend, and I trusted you even in my folly. You could have defended me and our friendship. You have not done so and I must live miserably without you.Good-bye. I shall not attempt again to enter a life in which my work is not sufficient recommendation. I was happy. I was not happy before. I am not happy now. I have been foolish, but I was your friend.”
Mitchell was irritated by this letter, but he was also moved. He valued Mendel’s sincerity, which had continually jolted him out of his natural indolence. And, as he had a fine talent and a fairly strong desire to use it to the full, the friendship had profited him. It had also helped him to come to reasonable terms with that great man, his father.
On the other hand he was in this difficulty, that he too had been slipping out of the quintette through his new friendship with Miss Greta Morrison and her friend, Miss Edith Clowes. Knowing Mendel’s contempt for the “top-knots,” he had said nothing of this matter, and had found it sometimes difficult to account for the afternoons and evenings given to the dilemma of discovering whether Miss Morrison or Miss Clowes were the love of his life. Mendel was an exacting friend, and, as he concealed nothing, expected no concealment.
Mitchell, like the true Englishman he was, deplored the unpleasant complication, but left it to time, impulse, or inspiration to unravel. Impulse, in due course, came to his aid and he invented a plan. First of all he wrote a manly note to Mendel, confessing his inability to understand why he should suffer for Kessler’s caddishness, and declaring that friendship could not be so lightly broken. He received no reply to this, and proceeded by taking Morrison and Clowes (as in the fashion of the Detmold they were called) to see the docks at Rotherhithe. While there he gazed from Morrison to Clowes and from Clowes to Morrison, unable to decide which he loved, for both gave him an equal contractionof the heart, and then he told them that ships had never been properly painted, neverexpressedin form and colour; and then he added that it was clearly a man’s job, and then he informed them that only a short distance away lived Mendel Kühler.
“Would you like to go and see him?” he asked. “It is the queerest thing to go and see him. A filthy street, a dark house, a ramshackle staircase, and there you are—absolutely one of the finest painters the Detmold has ever turned out.”
“Do let us go and see him!” said Clowes, who had decided in her own mind that she was the third of the party and in the way. Morrison said nothing, and looked very solemn, as though she regarded the visit as an event—something to be half dreaded. She had a very charming air of diffidence, as though she were very happy and knew this to be an unusual and peculiar condition. Often she smiled to herself, and then seemed to shake the smile away, feeling perhaps that she, a slip of a girl, had no right to be amused by a world so vast and so varied.
She had enjoyed herself. The ships had stirred her romantically, and she could not at all agree with Mitchell about painting them, for were they not works of art in themselves? They moved her in the same way, arresting her eyes and delighting them, and touching her emotions so that they began to creep and tickle their way through her whole being. . . . O wonderful world to contain so much delight! And it pleased her that the ships should start out of the squalor of the docks like lilies out of a dark pond.
She smiled and shook the smile away when Mitchell spoke of Mendel Kühler. She remembered once meeting Mendel on the stairs at the Detmold. She had often noticed him—strange-looking, white-faced, romantic, with a look of suffering in his eyes that marked him out fromall the other young men. . . . After she had passed him on the stairs she turned to look at him, and at the same moment he turned and she trembled and blushed, and her eyes shone as she hurried on her way.
Mitchell had told her a great deal about him, and she had heard other people say that he was detestable, an ill-mannered egoist. She supposed he was so, for she rarely questioned what other people said, but he remained a clear figure for her, the romantic-looking young man who had looked back on the stairs.
“We’ll take him by surprise,” said Mitchell, with a sudden qualm lest they should break in upon Mendel and Hetty Finch together. “If we told him he would hide all his work away and put on a white shirt and have flowers on the table, for he is terrified of ladies. He says they don’t look like women to him.”
“I’m sure,” said Clowes, “I don’t want to look like a woman to any man.”
This was the most encouraging remark Mitchell had had from either during the day, and he decided that he was in love with Clowes.
A brisk walk through narrow dingy streets brought them, with some help from the police, to the door of Issy’s house. Mitchell knocked and a grimy little Jewess opened to them.
“Mr. Mendel Kühler?” said Mitchell.
“Upstairs to the top,” replied the Jewess as she hurried away. They climbed the shabbily carpeted stairs and knocked at the door of the studio. Mendel opened it. He stood with a brush in his hand, blinking. He stared at Mitchell and then beyond him at Morrison.
“Come in,” he said. “I’d just finished. I’ve been working rather hard and haven’t spoken to a soul for three days. You must forgive me if I don’t seem very intelligent.”
They went in and he made tea for them, hardlyever taking his eyes off Morrison. He said pointedly to Mitchell:—
“So you came down to the East End to find me.”
Clowes explained:—
“I’m a stranger to London and had never seen the docks, you know.”
“I have never seen the docks either, though I live so near,” said he. Then, catching Morrison glancing in the direction of his easel, he turned his work for her to see, almost ignoring the others. Afterwards he produced drawings for her to see, and he seemed entirely bent on pleasing her, which so embarrassed her that, when she could escape his gaze, she looked imploringly over at the others. They could not help her, and he went on until he had shown her every piece of work in the studio. Whenever she spoke, shyly and diffidently, as though she knew her opinion was of no value, he gave a queer little grunt of triumph, and his eyes glittered as he looked over at Mitchell, as though to say that he too knew how to treat the “top-knots” and to please them.