XMORRISONAFEWdays later he wired to Morrison at the Detmold to ask her to sit for him. She made no reply and did not come.Very well then: he would not budge. He would only approach Mitchell again through the “top-knots,” who lived in a portion of Mitchell’s world that had hitherto been closed to him. It promised new adventure, and he was so eager for it that he would not enter upon any other outside his work.The days went by and he began a portrait of his mother, with which he intended to make his first appearance at an important exhibition. Golda sat dressed in her best on the throne, and tried vainly to soothe him as he cursed and stamped and wept over his difficulties:“I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” he wailed. “I’m a fool, a blockhead, a pig! If I could only do one little thing more to it I could make it a great picture.”“You are always the same,” said Golda. “In Austria, when you were a little boy, the soldiers made you a uniform like their own. They used to call you the Captain, and they saluted you in the street, only they forgot to give you any boots, and when the soldiers marched by, you stamped and roared because you were not allowed to go with them, and I could not make you understand that you were not a real captain.”“But I am a real artist,” he growled. “You’llnever make me understand that I am not a real artist.”“Nothing good was ever done in a hurry,” said she. “If you run so fast you will break your head against a wall.”“I shall paint many portraits of you, for I shall never be satisfied. You may as well sit here with your hands folded as over there in the kitchen. If I’m not careful your hands will grow all over the picture. I have put such a lot of work into them.”Then for a long time he was silent, and both were lost in a dreamlike happiness—to be together, alone with his work, bound together in his delight as they used to be when he was a child before the invasion of their peace.He went to the door in answer to a knock and found Morrison standing there with some flowers in her hands.“Oh!” he said awkwardly, holding the door. “Won’t you come in? Please. I am painting my mother.”Golda’s eyes lighted with pleasure on the fresh-looking girl and her flowers.“She is like a flower herself,” she thought, and indeed the girl looked as though she were fresh from the country.She held out her hand to Golda, who stood up on the throne and bobbed to her, then folded her hands on her stomach and waited patiently for the lady to break the awkwardness that had sprung up between the three of them. Mendel could do nothing. He looked from one to the other and felt, with a little tremor of horror, the gulf that separated the two.At last Morrison said to Golda:—“I am very glad to see you, though I feel I know you quite well from the drawings he has done of you.”Golda broke into inarticulate expressions of thedelight it was to her to see any of her son’s friends, and saying that she would have a special tea sent up, she edged towards the door and slipped out.“Why didn’t you come before?” asked Mendel, when he had heard the door bang. “I sent you a telegram. I wanted to paint your portrait, and now I have begun something else.”“I didn’t want to come,” replied she, “but something Mitchell said made me want to come.”“What did he say?”“He told me about Kessler, and I thought it was a shame. I thought it was a horrible shame that you should be treated like that, as if anything mattered but your work.”Her voice rather irritated him. Her accent was rather mincing and precise, and between her sentences she gave a little gasp which he took for an affectation.“Why did Mitchell tell you that?”“He tells me a great deal about you, and he was really upset by your letter.”“Was he? Was he?”Mendel had no thought but for Mitchell. He longed to go to him, to embrace him, to tell him that all was different now. He blurted it all out to the girl.“We were so happy, the four of us together. Every evening we met and we were like kings. Everything that we wanted to do we did. We had money and success and all such foolish things, and we worked hard, all of us. There were not in London four young men like us, and I was free of the terrible people who wanted to turn me into an ordinary successful painter—a portrait painter. I tell you, I have never had a commission in my life that was not a failure. I only wanted to be young and to work, for I had never been young before. And then suddenly, out of nothing, my friends turned on me and told me I was a Jew and uneducated, and ought to treat them with more respect.Why? The Jews are good people, and what do I want with education? Can books teach me how to paint? I tell you the Jews are good people.”Tea was brought up on a lacquer tray—bread, jam, and cake. They were both hungry and fell to with a will, hardly speaking at all.When they had finished they began to talk of pictures and of the lives of the painters, and he told her stories of Michael Angelo and Rembrandt: how Michael Angelo never took his boots off, and was never in love in his life; and how Rembrandt was practically starved to death. Then he showed her reproductions of Cranach and Dürer, whom at the time he adored, and they bent over them, the chestnut head and the curly black together. Gradually she led him on to tell of his own life, and he began at the beginning in Austria, holding her spell-bound with his vivid, picturesque talk.“It makes me feel very quiet and dull,” she said. “I don’t think I ever regarded places outside England as real, somehow. There was just home and London, and London seemed to be the end of everything. All the trains stop there, you know.”“Where is your home?” he asked.“In Sussex. It is very beautiful country.”“How did you come to the Detmold?”“A girl at home had been there, and at school they said I was no good at anything but drawing. Indeed, I was sent away from two schools, and at home I was such a trouble that mother decided I must do something to earn my living. So I was sent up to the Detmold. I had my hair down my back then.”“I remember,” said he. “In a plait.”She smiled with pleasure at that.“Yes,” she said. “In a plait. I lived in a hostel, where they bullied me because I was so untidy and was always being late for meals. At home,you know, there were only my brothers, and my mother could never keep them in order, and I was always treated as if I was a boy too. . . . And I think that’s all.”She ended so lamely that his irritation got the better of him, and he jumped to his feet. It seemed to him that his view of the “top-knots” was confirmed. They were simply negligible. He was baffled, and stood staring down at her. Was she no more interested in herself than that? Comparing the smooth monotony of her life with his, he waxed impatient, and told himself he was a fool to have invited her to come to him.He began to study her face with a view to painting it, and he was absorbed and fascinated by it. The lines of her cheek and of her neck made him itch to draw them.“Yes,” he said, “I must paint you. I can do something good. I’m sure I can.”“I wanted to ask if you would mind my painting you,” she said.He was aghast at her impudence. She, a slip of a girl, a “top-knot,” paint the great Kühler!She saw how horrified he was and added hastily:—“Of course, I won’t insist if you don’t like sitting.”She rose to go and he begged her to stay.“Don’t go yet,” he said with sudden emotion. “I don’t want you to go. Somehow I feel as if you had been sitting there always and I don’t want you to go. If you don’t want to talk you needn’t, but you must stay. I could see that my mother liked you at once, and she always knows good people. You made her happy about me. It was like sunshine to her when you came in, and I shall be wretched if you go, for I don’t know what to think about you.”“I know what I think about you.”“What do you think?”“You have made me feel that London isn’t just a place where the trains stop.”And she began to tell him about her home and the river where she bathed with her brothers, the woods where in spring there were primroses and daffodils, and in summer bluebells.“Opposite the house,” she said, “is a hill which is a common, all covered with gorse in the summer, and the hot, nutty smell of it comes up and seems to burn your face. There are snakes on the common—vipers and adders and grass-snakes. From the top you can see the downs, and beyond them, you know, is the sea. On moonlight nights it is glorious, and I nearly go mad sometimes with running in and out of the shadows. I believe I did go mad once, for I sat up on the top of the hill and sang and shouted and cried, all by myself, and I felt that my heart would break if I did not kiss something. The gorse was out, and I buried my face in the dewy yellow flowers. . . . I often think the woods are like churches on Easter Day. . . . And then when I get home and it is just a house and I am just a girl living in it, you know, it all seems wrong somehow.”Mendel sat on the floor trying to puzzle out this mysterious rapture of hers. He had never heard of gorse or of downs, but he could recognize her emotion. He had had something like it the first time he saw a may-tree in blossom, and he had hardly been able to bear it. He had rather resented it, for it had interfered with his work for a day or two, and he could not help feeling that there was something indecent about an emotion with which he could do nothing.“Yes,” he said heavily; “it must be very pretty.”She shivered at the grotesqueness of his words as she sank back into her normal mood of happy diffidence. His face wore an expression of black anger as he darted quick, furious glances at her. Here was something that he did not understand,something that defied his mastery, and when she smiled he thought it was at himself, and this strange power that had been behind her appeared to him as a mocking, teasing spirit. Let it mock, let it tease! He was strong enough to defy it. Sweep through a green girl it might, but he was not to be caught by it. He knew better. In him it had tough simplicity to deal with and a will that had broken the confinement of Fate, the limits of a meagre religion, to bend before no authority but that of art. . . . He was rather contemptuous, too. Nothing as yet had resisted his genius, and he felt it within him stronger than ever, a river with a thousand sources. Block one channel and it would find another. Stop that and it would find yet another.Yet here he knew was no direct, no open menace, only the intolerable suggestion that there were other streams, other sources, and the suggestion had come from this foolish, empty girl.“I will not have it,” he said half aloud.“What did you say?” she asked.“Nothing. I was thinking—I was thinking that there is nothing so good as London. They tried to send me to Italy, but I know that there is nothing so good as London for life, and where life is, there is art. I don’t want your pretty places and your pretty feelings. I want to go through the streets and to see the girls in the evening leaving the shops, and the men in their bowler-hats looking at the girls and wanting them, and the fat men in their motor-cars, and the bookstalls on the railway stations, and the public-houses with their rows of bottles and the white handles of the beer machines, and the plump barmaids, and the long, straight streets going on for ever with the flat houses on either side of them, and the markets and the timber-yards and the tall chimneys. It all fills your mind and makes patterns and whirling thoughts that takea spiral shape, going up and up to mysterious heights. I want all that, and nothing shall take it from me, do you hear?”He turned on her ferociously, as though she were trying to rob him.“And inside it all is something solid,” he went on. “Do you know that my father never loved but one woman in all his life? That’s what Jews are. They know what’s solid. If they have to stay in the filth to keep it, then they’ll stay in the filth. And because I’m a Jew I’m not to be caught with your pretty things and your little fancies. I shall paint the things I understand, and I’ll leave the clouds and the rainbows and the roofs and chimneys to fools like Mitchell.”Morrison sat very meekly while he talked. She hung her head and twitched her fingers nervously. She was elated by his passion, but she too had her dreams and was not going to surrender them. His strength had given her confidence in them and in herself, and she was filled with a teasing spirit.“Jews aren’t the only people who are solid,” she said. “You see men in buses and trains whom an earthquake wouldn’t move, and I’m sure, if an earthquake happened, my mother would be left where she was, reading the Bible.”Mendel replied:—“In a thousand years my mother will be just as she is now.”Morrison stared at him and began to wonder if he was not a little mad. He added simply:—“I feel like that.”And she was relieved and thought he was the only sane person she had ever met in her life.“Will you let me come again?” she asked.“I am going to paint you,” he said; “I am going to paint you as you are. You won’t like it.”“I shall if you make me solid,” she answered. “And you need flowers in this dark room. You must let me send you some.”
AFEWdays later he wired to Morrison at the Detmold to ask her to sit for him. She made no reply and did not come.
Very well then: he would not budge. He would only approach Mitchell again through the “top-knots,” who lived in a portion of Mitchell’s world that had hitherto been closed to him. It promised new adventure, and he was so eager for it that he would not enter upon any other outside his work.
The days went by and he began a portrait of his mother, with which he intended to make his first appearance at an important exhibition. Golda sat dressed in her best on the throne, and tried vainly to soothe him as he cursed and stamped and wept over his difficulties:
“I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” he wailed. “I’m a fool, a blockhead, a pig! If I could only do one little thing more to it I could make it a great picture.”
“You are always the same,” said Golda. “In Austria, when you were a little boy, the soldiers made you a uniform like their own. They used to call you the Captain, and they saluted you in the street, only they forgot to give you any boots, and when the soldiers marched by, you stamped and roared because you were not allowed to go with them, and I could not make you understand that you were not a real captain.”
“But I am a real artist,” he growled. “You’llnever make me understand that I am not a real artist.”
“Nothing good was ever done in a hurry,” said she. “If you run so fast you will break your head against a wall.”
“I shall paint many portraits of you, for I shall never be satisfied. You may as well sit here with your hands folded as over there in the kitchen. If I’m not careful your hands will grow all over the picture. I have put such a lot of work into them.”
Then for a long time he was silent, and both were lost in a dreamlike happiness—to be together, alone with his work, bound together in his delight as they used to be when he was a child before the invasion of their peace.
He went to the door in answer to a knock and found Morrison standing there with some flowers in her hands.
“Oh!” he said awkwardly, holding the door. “Won’t you come in? Please. I am painting my mother.”
Golda’s eyes lighted with pleasure on the fresh-looking girl and her flowers.
“She is like a flower herself,” she thought, and indeed the girl looked as though she were fresh from the country.
She held out her hand to Golda, who stood up on the throne and bobbed to her, then folded her hands on her stomach and waited patiently for the lady to break the awkwardness that had sprung up between the three of them. Mendel could do nothing. He looked from one to the other and felt, with a little tremor of horror, the gulf that separated the two.
At last Morrison said to Golda:—
“I am very glad to see you, though I feel I know you quite well from the drawings he has done of you.”
Golda broke into inarticulate expressions of thedelight it was to her to see any of her son’s friends, and saying that she would have a special tea sent up, she edged towards the door and slipped out.
“Why didn’t you come before?” asked Mendel, when he had heard the door bang. “I sent you a telegram. I wanted to paint your portrait, and now I have begun something else.”
“I didn’t want to come,” replied she, “but something Mitchell said made me want to come.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me about Kessler, and I thought it was a shame. I thought it was a horrible shame that you should be treated like that, as if anything mattered but your work.”
Her voice rather irritated him. Her accent was rather mincing and precise, and between her sentences she gave a little gasp which he took for an affectation.
“Why did Mitchell tell you that?”
“He tells me a great deal about you, and he was really upset by your letter.”
“Was he? Was he?”
Mendel had no thought but for Mitchell. He longed to go to him, to embrace him, to tell him that all was different now. He blurted it all out to the girl.
“We were so happy, the four of us together. Every evening we met and we were like kings. Everything that we wanted to do we did. We had money and success and all such foolish things, and we worked hard, all of us. There were not in London four young men like us, and I was free of the terrible people who wanted to turn me into an ordinary successful painter—a portrait painter. I tell you, I have never had a commission in my life that was not a failure. I only wanted to be young and to work, for I had never been young before. And then suddenly, out of nothing, my friends turned on me and told me I was a Jew and uneducated, and ought to treat them with more respect.Why? The Jews are good people, and what do I want with education? Can books teach me how to paint? I tell you the Jews are good people.”
Tea was brought up on a lacquer tray—bread, jam, and cake. They were both hungry and fell to with a will, hardly speaking at all.
When they had finished they began to talk of pictures and of the lives of the painters, and he told her stories of Michael Angelo and Rembrandt: how Michael Angelo never took his boots off, and was never in love in his life; and how Rembrandt was practically starved to death. Then he showed her reproductions of Cranach and Dürer, whom at the time he adored, and they bent over them, the chestnut head and the curly black together. Gradually she led him on to tell of his own life, and he began at the beginning in Austria, holding her spell-bound with his vivid, picturesque talk.
“It makes me feel very quiet and dull,” she said. “I don’t think I ever regarded places outside England as real, somehow. There was just home and London, and London seemed to be the end of everything. All the trains stop there, you know.”
“Where is your home?” he asked.
“In Sussex. It is very beautiful country.”
“How did you come to the Detmold?”
“A girl at home had been there, and at school they said I was no good at anything but drawing. Indeed, I was sent away from two schools, and at home I was such a trouble that mother decided I must do something to earn my living. So I was sent up to the Detmold. I had my hair down my back then.”
“I remember,” said he. “In a plait.”
She smiled with pleasure at that.
“Yes,” she said. “In a plait. I lived in a hostel, where they bullied me because I was so untidy and was always being late for meals. At home,you know, there were only my brothers, and my mother could never keep them in order, and I was always treated as if I was a boy too. . . . And I think that’s all.”
She ended so lamely that his irritation got the better of him, and he jumped to his feet. It seemed to him that his view of the “top-knots” was confirmed. They were simply negligible. He was baffled, and stood staring down at her. Was she no more interested in herself than that? Comparing the smooth monotony of her life with his, he waxed impatient, and told himself he was a fool to have invited her to come to him.
He began to study her face with a view to painting it, and he was absorbed and fascinated by it. The lines of her cheek and of her neck made him itch to draw them.
“Yes,” he said, “I must paint you. I can do something good. I’m sure I can.”
“I wanted to ask if you would mind my painting you,” she said.
He was aghast at her impudence. She, a slip of a girl, a “top-knot,” paint the great Kühler!
She saw how horrified he was and added hastily:—
“Of course, I won’t insist if you don’t like sitting.”
She rose to go and he begged her to stay.
“Don’t go yet,” he said with sudden emotion. “I don’t want you to go. Somehow I feel as if you had been sitting there always and I don’t want you to go. If you don’t want to talk you needn’t, but you must stay. I could see that my mother liked you at once, and she always knows good people. You made her happy about me. It was like sunshine to her when you came in, and I shall be wretched if you go, for I don’t know what to think about you.”
“I know what I think about you.”
“What do you think?”
“You have made me feel that London isn’t just a place where the trains stop.”
And she began to tell him about her home and the river where she bathed with her brothers, the woods where in spring there were primroses and daffodils, and in summer bluebells.
“Opposite the house,” she said, “is a hill which is a common, all covered with gorse in the summer, and the hot, nutty smell of it comes up and seems to burn your face. There are snakes on the common—vipers and adders and grass-snakes. From the top you can see the downs, and beyond them, you know, is the sea. On moonlight nights it is glorious, and I nearly go mad sometimes with running in and out of the shadows. I believe I did go mad once, for I sat up on the top of the hill and sang and shouted and cried, all by myself, and I felt that my heart would break if I did not kiss something. The gorse was out, and I buried my face in the dewy yellow flowers. . . . I often think the woods are like churches on Easter Day. . . . And then when I get home and it is just a house and I am just a girl living in it, you know, it all seems wrong somehow.”
Mendel sat on the floor trying to puzzle out this mysterious rapture of hers. He had never heard of gorse or of downs, but he could recognize her emotion. He had had something like it the first time he saw a may-tree in blossom, and he had hardly been able to bear it. He had rather resented it, for it had interfered with his work for a day or two, and he could not help feeling that there was something indecent about an emotion with which he could do nothing.
“Yes,” he said heavily; “it must be very pretty.”
She shivered at the grotesqueness of his words as she sank back into her normal mood of happy diffidence. His face wore an expression of black anger as he darted quick, furious glances at her. Here was something that he did not understand,something that defied his mastery, and when she smiled he thought it was at himself, and this strange power that had been behind her appeared to him as a mocking, teasing spirit. Let it mock, let it tease! He was strong enough to defy it. Sweep through a green girl it might, but he was not to be caught by it. He knew better. In him it had tough simplicity to deal with and a will that had broken the confinement of Fate, the limits of a meagre religion, to bend before no authority but that of art. . . . He was rather contemptuous, too. Nothing as yet had resisted his genius, and he felt it within him stronger than ever, a river with a thousand sources. Block one channel and it would find another. Stop that and it would find yet another.
Yet here he knew was no direct, no open menace, only the intolerable suggestion that there were other streams, other sources, and the suggestion had come from this foolish, empty girl.
“I will not have it,” he said half aloud.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“Nothing. I was thinking—I was thinking that there is nothing so good as London. They tried to send me to Italy, but I know that there is nothing so good as London for life, and where life is, there is art. I don’t want your pretty places and your pretty feelings. I want to go through the streets and to see the girls in the evening leaving the shops, and the men in their bowler-hats looking at the girls and wanting them, and the fat men in their motor-cars, and the bookstalls on the railway stations, and the public-houses with their rows of bottles and the white handles of the beer machines, and the plump barmaids, and the long, straight streets going on for ever with the flat houses on either side of them, and the markets and the timber-yards and the tall chimneys. It all fills your mind and makes patterns and whirling thoughts that takea spiral shape, going up and up to mysterious heights. I want all that, and nothing shall take it from me, do you hear?”
He turned on her ferociously, as though she were trying to rob him.
“And inside it all is something solid,” he went on. “Do you know that my father never loved but one woman in all his life? That’s what Jews are. They know what’s solid. If they have to stay in the filth to keep it, then they’ll stay in the filth. And because I’m a Jew I’m not to be caught with your pretty things and your little fancies. I shall paint the things I understand, and I’ll leave the clouds and the rainbows and the roofs and chimneys to fools like Mitchell.”
Morrison sat very meekly while he talked. She hung her head and twitched her fingers nervously. She was elated by his passion, but she too had her dreams and was not going to surrender them. His strength had given her confidence in them and in herself, and she was filled with a teasing spirit.
“Jews aren’t the only people who are solid,” she said. “You see men in buses and trains whom an earthquake wouldn’t move, and I’m sure, if an earthquake happened, my mother would be left where she was, reading the Bible.”
Mendel replied:—
“In a thousand years my mother will be just as she is now.”
Morrison stared at him and began to wonder if he was not a little mad. He added simply:—
“I feel like that.”
And she was relieved and thought he was the only sane person she had ever met in her life.
“Will you let me come again?” she asked.
“I am going to paint you,” he said; “I am going to paint you as you are. You won’t like it.”
“I shall if you make me solid,” she answered. “And you need flowers in this dark room. You must let me send you some.”