IILOGANONCEagain Mendel decided that Mitchell, and with him London life, had fallen away from him. The Paris Café could never be the same again, and he plunged into despair, and thought seriously of accepting a Jewish girl with four hundred pounds whom a match-maker offered to him. Four hundred pounds was not to be sneezed at. It would keep him going for some years, so that he need not think of selling his pictures, which he always hated to part with. And the girl was just bearable.The figure delighted his father and mother, for it showed them the high opinion of their wonder-son held among their own people.It was terrible to him to find that he had very little pleasure in his work, which very often gave him excruciating pain. He took it to mean that he was coming to an end of his talent. Night after night he sat on his bed feeling that he must make an end of his life, but always there was some piece of painting that he must do in the morning, painful though it might be.He had letters from Mitchell, but did not answer them, and at last “the schoolboy,” as Golda called him, turned up, gay and smiling and rather elated.“I’ve discovered a great man,” he said with the awkward, jerky gesture he used in his more eloquent moments. “Absolutely a great man. Reminds me of Napoleon. Wonderful head, wonderful! His name is Logan—James Logan—andhe wants to know you. He is a painter, and absolutely independent. He comes from the North—Liverpool or one of those places. I haven’t seen his work, but I met him at the Pot-au-Feu the other night. He asked me if I was not a friend of yours, as he thought he had seen me with you. He said: ‘Kühler is the only painter of genius we have.’ I spent the evening with him. I never heard such talk. It made the old Detmold seem like a girls’ school. . . . Hallo! Still-life again? What a rum old stick you are for never going outside your four walls!”“What I paint is inside me, not outside,” said Mendel, trembling with rage at Mitchell looking at his work before he had offered to show it.“Will you come and see Logan?”“No. I am sick of painters. I want to know decent people.”“But I promised I would bring you, and he admires your work. He is poor too, as poor as you are.”“Can’t he sell?”“It isn’t that so much as that he doesn’t try. He says he had almost despaired of English painting until he saw your work.”“How old is he?”“A good deal older than us. Twenty-six, I should think.”“Why don’t you just stick to me?” asked Mendel. “What more do you want? Why must you always go off on a new track? First it’s Hetty Finch, then it’s Morrison, and now it’s this new man. We were happy enough by ourselves. Why do you want anything more? I don’t.”“You’re used to living on dry bread. I’m not. I want butter with mine, and jam, if I can get it.”“Then get it and don’t bother me to go chasing after it. I want to work.”“Oh, rot! All that stuff about artists starving in garrets is out of date. It only happenedbecause they couldn’t find patrons, but nowadays there are dealers and buyers. . . . Just look at the money you are making.”“Then why is this Logan poor?”“He isn’t known yet. He doesn’t know the artists because he never went to a London school. He was doing quite well in the North, but threw it all up because he couldn’t stand living in such a filthy town. He had a teaching job somewhere in Hammersmith, but he threw that up because he wanted his time to himself.”“That sounds as if painting means something to him.”“Do come and see him.”“Oh! very well.”“I’ll send him a wire and we’ll go to-night.”They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and later made the expedition to Hammersmith, where they came to a block of studios surrounded by a scrubby garden. These studios were large and well-kept and did not tally with the description of Logan’s poverty. Still less did the inside give any sign of it. There was a huge red-brick fireplace, surmounted by old brass and blue china, with great arm-chairs on either side of it: there were Persian rugs on the floor; two little windows were filled in with good stained glass, which Mendel knew to be costly; there were two or three large easels; and the walls were hung with tapestry. The whole effect was deliberately and preciously rich.Logan, who had admitted them to this vast apartment, rushed back at once to a very large easel on which he had a very small canvas, and fell to work on it with a furious energy, darting to and fro and stamping his right foot rather like the big trumpet man in a German band. He was a medium-sized, plumpish man, with a big, strongly featured face, big chin, and compressed lips, and long black hair brushed back from a round, well-shaped brow. He frowned and scowled at hiswork. A woman came out of a door and crossed the studio behind him. He hurled his palette into the air so that it sailed up and fell with a crash among the brass pots, and barked:—“How can I work with these constant interruptions? Damn it all, an artist must have peace!”He flung his arms behind his back and paced moodily to and fro, with his head down and his lips pursed upà laBeethoven. He extended the sphere of his pacing gradually so that he came nearer and nearer to Mendel, yet without noticing him. Mendel was tremendously excited and impressed with the man’s air of mystery and force. It was like Calthrop, but without his awkwardness. Mitchell in comparison looked puny and absurdly young.Nearer and nearer came Logan, and at last he stopped and fixed Mendel with a baleful stare, and swung his head up and down three times.“So you are Kühler?” he said.Mendel opened his lips, but to his astonishment no sound came out of them. So desperately anxious was he not to cut a poor figure before this remarkable man, and not to seem, like Mitchell, pathetically young.“Good!” said Logan. “Shake hands.” And he crushed Mendel’s thin fingers together. “What I like about you,” he went on, “is your sense of form. Design is all very well in its way, but quite worthless without form.”Mendel, whose work was still three parts instinctive, could not attach any precise meaning to these expressions, but he was well up in the jargon of his craft and could make a good show.“Art,” said Logan, “is an exacting mistress. Shall we go and have a drink?”He put on his hat and led the two marvelling youngsters to a public-house, where he became a different man altogether. The compression of his lips relaxed, his eyes twinkled and his face shonewith good humour, and he made them and the barmaid and the two or three men who were shyly taking their beer roar with laughter. He had an extraordinary gift of mimicry, and told story after story, many of them against himself, most of them without point, but in the telling exceedingly comic. Mendel sat up and bristled. It was to him half shocking, half enviable, that a man, and an artist, should be able to laugh at himself.“If you’ll give me free drinks for a month,” said Logan to the elderly barmaid, “I’ll paint your portrait. Are you married? . . . No? I’ll paint you such a beautiful portrait that it will get you a husband inside a week.”“I’m not on the marrying lay,” said the barmaid.“Terrible thing, this revolt against marriage,” replied Logan, “and bad luck on us artists. I’m always getting babies left on my doorstep.”“What do you do with them?” said Mendel, believing him, and astonished when the others roared with laughter.“I keep the pretty ones and sell them to childless mothers. Ah! Many’s the time I’ve gone through the snow, like the heroine in a melodrama taking her child to the workhouse.”“Oh! go on,” tittered the barmaid.“Certainly,” said Logan. “Come along.”As they left the public-house he took Mendel’s arm and said:—“You have to talk to people in their own language, you know.”“Yes,” replied Mendel, though this was precisely what he knew least of all.“Why don’t you go on the stage?” asked Mitchell.“I have thought of it. I think I might do well on the halls. There’s a life for you! On at eight in Bethnal Green:—My old woman’s got a wart on her nose;How she got it I will now disclose.Off again in a motor-car to the Oxford:—My old woman’s got a wart on her nose.Off again to Hammersmith or Kensal Rise:—My old woman’s got a wart on her nose.My God! What a life! But I love the halls. They are all that is left of old England!”His parody of the low comedian was so apt and his voice had such a delicious roll that Mendel could not help laughing, and he began to feel very happy with the man.Logan swung back to his serious mood and gripped Mendel’s arm tighter as he said:—“You have a big future before you. Only stick to it. Don’t listen to the fools who want you to paint the same picture over and over again with a different subject. There’s more stuff in that one little picture of yours than in all the rest of the exhibition put together.”“Do you think so?” said Mendel, fluttering with excitement.“I was amazed when I heard you had been to the Detmold with its Calthrop and all the little Calthrops.”Both the youngsters were silent on that. They had often abused the Detmold, but with a profound respect in their hearts, and both had done their full share of imitating Calthrop.When they reached the studio Mitchell suggested going, but Logan would not hear of it. He dragged them in and produced whisky and soda, and kept them talking far into the small hours. His bouncing energy kept Mendel awake and alert, but Mitchell was soon exhausted and fell asleep.“Shall we put him out of the way?” said Logan suddenly. “No one would know, and the river is handy. He is too clean, too soft, and there aretoo many like him. They are in the way of real men like you and me.”Mendel was appalled to find that he could not defend his friend. All the discontents of his waning friendship came rushing up in him and he began to babble violently.“He is a liar and a coward, and he will never be an artist because he is too weak. He is not true. He is not good. I have trusted him with my secrets and he tells. He is always ashamed of me because of my clothes and because I have not been to Public School, and he is jealous because when we meet women they like me. He is soft and deceitful with them, but I am honest, and they like that. I wanted him to be my friend, but it is impossible.”“He is an Englishman,” said Logan sepulchrally, with the air of a Grand Inquisitor.“Aren’t you an Englishman?”“No, Scotch and French. These Englishmen have no passions, unless they are mad like Blake. . . . No, no. We’ll drop Mitchell overboard. We’ll make him walk the plank, and fishes in the caverns of the sea shall eat his eyes.”Logan was beginning to assume enormous proportions in Mendel’s eyes. It seemed that there was nothing the tremendous fellow did not know. He began to talk of genius and the stirring of the creative impulse, and he gave so powerful an account of Blake that Mendel began to see visions of heaven and hell. Here was something which he could acknowledge as larger than himself without self-humiliation, and, indeed, the larger it loomed the more swiftly did he himself seem to grow. It was such a sensation as he had not known since the days before his rapture with Sara. All that had intervened fell away. That purity of passion returned to him and, choosing Logan for its object, rushed upon him and endowed him with its own power and beauty. Logan talking ofBlake was to Mendel’s innocence as rare as Blake, and he adored him.“I had almost given up art,” said Logan; “I had almost given it up as hopeless. How can there be art in a despiritualized country like this, that lets all its traditions rot away? I was just on the point of tossing up whether I should go on the stage or take to spouting at the street corners; for when a country is in such a condition that its artists are stifled, then it is ripe for revolution. I am instinctive, you know, like Napoleon. I feel that we are on the threshold of something big, and that I am to have my share in it. I used to think it would happen in art, but I despaired of that. It seemed to me that art in this country could go doddering on for generations, and then I thought it needed a political upheaval to push it into its grave. But when I saw your work, I said to myself: Here is the real thing, alive, personal, profound, skilled. I began to hope again. And now that I have met you I feel more hopeful still, and, let me tell you, like most painters, I don’t find it easy to like another man’s work.”Mendel was fired. Trembling in every limb, he said:—“It has been the dream of my life to find a friend who would work with me, think with me, go with me, share with me, not quarrelling with me because I am not this, that, and the other, but accepting me as I am—a man who has no country, no home, no love but art.”“That,” said Logan, with a portentous scowl and a downward jab of his thumb, “is what I have been looking for—some one, like yourself, who was absolutely sincere, absolutely single-minded and resolute. The spirit of art has brought us together. We will serve it together.”They shook hands like young men on the stage, and Logan fetched a deep sigh of relief.Mitchell woke up, saying:—“Gawd! I’ve been asleep. Have you two been talking? Gawd! It’s two o’clock.”“I’ll walk home with you,” said Logan. “We can keep to the river nearly the whole way by going from side to side.”So they walked while the tide came up, sucking and lapping, while the red dragons’ eyes of the barges came swinging up on it, moving up and down in a slow, irregular rhythm. It was very cold and the sky was thickly powdered with stars, whose pin-prick lights were reflected in the smooth water.Upon the dome of the young artist’s vision that had before been black with infinite space, stars shone with a tender light. He was in ecstasy, and seemed to be skimming above the ground, hardly touching it with his feet. This long walk was like an exquisite dance, while Logan’s rollings were like a pipe. . . . Often he sank into a dream that he was upon a grassy hill in a mountainy place, he and his friend, who played upon a pipe so mournfully yet gaily while he danced, and from the trees fell silvery dewdrops and the songs of birds, which turned into pennies as they reached the ground and rolled away down the hill.Both he and Logan were relieved when Mitchell, who had interrupted them with inappropriate remarks, turned aside at Vauxhall and vanished into London.“So much for Mitchell,” said Logan. “You and I need sterner stuff. You and I are sprung from those among whom life is lived bravely and bitterly, and we have no use for its parasites. You and I will only emerge from the bitterness on condition that we can make of life a spiritual thing, for we are of those who seek authority. Life has none to offer us now, for all the forms of life are broken. Neither above us nor below is there authority, neither in heaven nor in hell. We must seek authority within ourselves, in themarriage of heaven and hell, in the consummation of good and evil, the two poles of our nature. It is for us, the artists, to bring them together, to liberate good and evil in ourselves, that they may rush to the consummation. We are the priests and the prophets, and we must in no wise be false to our vision.”Mendel could not fit all this in with his mood and his delicious dreams, and when it brought him back to his sober senses, he could not see what it had to do with painting. However, Logan put things right by saying:—“You are a poet. You are like Heine. I can see you with your little Josepha the pale, the executioner’s daughter. God rot my soul! It is years since I had such inspiration as you have given me. I think there must be Jewish blood in me, for I can certainly understand you through and through, and you have waked something in me that has always been asleep. Oh! we shall paint bonny pictures—bonny, bonny pictures.”“You must come to see me every day,” said Mendel, “and every night we will go out together, and I must introduce you to my mother, for she too has good words.”Logan smacked his lips as they entered the grimy streets near Spitalfields.“Pah!” he said; “that’s life, that is, good dirty life. I was littered in a farm-yard myself and I like a good smell. . . . Can you put me up to-night? I don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”“You can have my bed,” said Mendel, “and I will sleep downstairs on my brother’s sofa. Please—please. Do sleep in my bed.”Logan accepted the offer and asked Mendel to stay with him while he undressed. He was unpleasantly fat, but strong and well-built.He stayed for a long time in front of the mirror.“See that bulge on the side of my head?” he said as he turned.Mendel looked, and sure enough his head had a curious bulge on its right side.“I had rickets when I was young,” said Logan, “and my skull must have got pushed over. I expect that’s what makes me what I am—lop-sided. I need you to balance me.”He got into bed, and Mendel, reluctant to leave him, sat at his feet and devoured him with his eyes.“Surely, surely, now,” he thought, “all is perfect now. No more disturbances, no more Mitchells, no more Hettys, and I shall do only what I really wish to do.”He stole out into his studio, which was faintly lit from the street below, and it was as though it were filled with some vast spiritual presence, and he imagined how he would work, urged on by this new energy that came welling up through all that he could see, all that he could know, all that he could remember.
ONCEagain Mendel decided that Mitchell, and with him London life, had fallen away from him. The Paris Café could never be the same again, and he plunged into despair, and thought seriously of accepting a Jewish girl with four hundred pounds whom a match-maker offered to him. Four hundred pounds was not to be sneezed at. It would keep him going for some years, so that he need not think of selling his pictures, which he always hated to part with. And the girl was just bearable.
The figure delighted his father and mother, for it showed them the high opinion of their wonder-son held among their own people.
It was terrible to him to find that he had very little pleasure in his work, which very often gave him excruciating pain. He took it to mean that he was coming to an end of his talent. Night after night he sat on his bed feeling that he must make an end of his life, but always there was some piece of painting that he must do in the morning, painful though it might be.
He had letters from Mitchell, but did not answer them, and at last “the schoolboy,” as Golda called him, turned up, gay and smiling and rather elated.
“I’ve discovered a great man,” he said with the awkward, jerky gesture he used in his more eloquent moments. “Absolutely a great man. Reminds me of Napoleon. Wonderful head, wonderful! His name is Logan—James Logan—andhe wants to know you. He is a painter, and absolutely independent. He comes from the North—Liverpool or one of those places. I haven’t seen his work, but I met him at the Pot-au-Feu the other night. He asked me if I was not a friend of yours, as he thought he had seen me with you. He said: ‘Kühler is the only painter of genius we have.’ I spent the evening with him. I never heard such talk. It made the old Detmold seem like a girls’ school. . . . Hallo! Still-life again? What a rum old stick you are for never going outside your four walls!”
“What I paint is inside me, not outside,” said Mendel, trembling with rage at Mitchell looking at his work before he had offered to show it.
“Will you come and see Logan?”
“No. I am sick of painters. I want to know decent people.”
“But I promised I would bring you, and he admires your work. He is poor too, as poor as you are.”
“Can’t he sell?”
“It isn’t that so much as that he doesn’t try. He says he had almost despaired of English painting until he saw your work.”
“How old is he?”
“A good deal older than us. Twenty-six, I should think.”
“Why don’t you just stick to me?” asked Mendel. “What more do you want? Why must you always go off on a new track? First it’s Hetty Finch, then it’s Morrison, and now it’s this new man. We were happy enough by ourselves. Why do you want anything more? I don’t.”
“You’re used to living on dry bread. I’m not. I want butter with mine, and jam, if I can get it.”
“Then get it and don’t bother me to go chasing after it. I want to work.”
“Oh, rot! All that stuff about artists starving in garrets is out of date. It only happenedbecause they couldn’t find patrons, but nowadays there are dealers and buyers. . . . Just look at the money you are making.”
“Then why is this Logan poor?”
“He isn’t known yet. He doesn’t know the artists because he never went to a London school. He was doing quite well in the North, but threw it all up because he couldn’t stand living in such a filthy town. He had a teaching job somewhere in Hammersmith, but he threw that up because he wanted his time to himself.”
“That sounds as if painting means something to him.”
“Do come and see him.”
“Oh! very well.”
“I’ll send him a wire and we’ll go to-night.”
They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and later made the expedition to Hammersmith, where they came to a block of studios surrounded by a scrubby garden. These studios were large and well-kept and did not tally with the description of Logan’s poverty. Still less did the inside give any sign of it. There was a huge red-brick fireplace, surmounted by old brass and blue china, with great arm-chairs on either side of it: there were Persian rugs on the floor; two little windows were filled in with good stained glass, which Mendel knew to be costly; there were two or three large easels; and the walls were hung with tapestry. The whole effect was deliberately and preciously rich.
Logan, who had admitted them to this vast apartment, rushed back at once to a very large easel on which he had a very small canvas, and fell to work on it with a furious energy, darting to and fro and stamping his right foot rather like the big trumpet man in a German band. He was a medium-sized, plumpish man, with a big, strongly featured face, big chin, and compressed lips, and long black hair brushed back from a round, well-shaped brow. He frowned and scowled at hiswork. A woman came out of a door and crossed the studio behind him. He hurled his palette into the air so that it sailed up and fell with a crash among the brass pots, and barked:—
“How can I work with these constant interruptions? Damn it all, an artist must have peace!”
He flung his arms behind his back and paced moodily to and fro, with his head down and his lips pursed upà laBeethoven. He extended the sphere of his pacing gradually so that he came nearer and nearer to Mendel, yet without noticing him. Mendel was tremendously excited and impressed with the man’s air of mystery and force. It was like Calthrop, but without his awkwardness. Mitchell in comparison looked puny and absurdly young.
Nearer and nearer came Logan, and at last he stopped and fixed Mendel with a baleful stare, and swung his head up and down three times.
“So you are Kühler?” he said.
Mendel opened his lips, but to his astonishment no sound came out of them. So desperately anxious was he not to cut a poor figure before this remarkable man, and not to seem, like Mitchell, pathetically young.
“Good!” said Logan. “Shake hands.” And he crushed Mendel’s thin fingers together. “What I like about you,” he went on, “is your sense of form. Design is all very well in its way, but quite worthless without form.”
Mendel, whose work was still three parts instinctive, could not attach any precise meaning to these expressions, but he was well up in the jargon of his craft and could make a good show.
“Art,” said Logan, “is an exacting mistress. Shall we go and have a drink?”
He put on his hat and led the two marvelling youngsters to a public-house, where he became a different man altogether. The compression of his lips relaxed, his eyes twinkled and his face shonewith good humour, and he made them and the barmaid and the two or three men who were shyly taking their beer roar with laughter. He had an extraordinary gift of mimicry, and told story after story, many of them against himself, most of them without point, but in the telling exceedingly comic. Mendel sat up and bristled. It was to him half shocking, half enviable, that a man, and an artist, should be able to laugh at himself.
“If you’ll give me free drinks for a month,” said Logan to the elderly barmaid, “I’ll paint your portrait. Are you married? . . . No? I’ll paint you such a beautiful portrait that it will get you a husband inside a week.”
“I’m not on the marrying lay,” said the barmaid.
“Terrible thing, this revolt against marriage,” replied Logan, “and bad luck on us artists. I’m always getting babies left on my doorstep.”
“What do you do with them?” said Mendel, believing him, and astonished when the others roared with laughter.
“I keep the pretty ones and sell them to childless mothers. Ah! Many’s the time I’ve gone through the snow, like the heroine in a melodrama taking her child to the workhouse.”
“Oh! go on,” tittered the barmaid.
“Certainly,” said Logan. “Come along.”
As they left the public-house he took Mendel’s arm and said:—
“You have to talk to people in their own language, you know.”
“Yes,” replied Mendel, though this was precisely what he knew least of all.
“Why don’t you go on the stage?” asked Mitchell.
“I have thought of it. I think I might do well on the halls. There’s a life for you! On at eight in Bethnal Green:—
My old woman’s got a wart on her nose;How she got it I will now disclose.
My old woman’s got a wart on her nose;
How she got it I will now disclose.
Off again in a motor-car to the Oxford:—
My old woman’s got a wart on her nose.
My old woman’s got a wart on her nose.
Off again to Hammersmith or Kensal Rise:—
My old woman’s got a wart on her nose.
My old woman’s got a wart on her nose.
My God! What a life! But I love the halls. They are all that is left of old England!”
His parody of the low comedian was so apt and his voice had such a delicious roll that Mendel could not help laughing, and he began to feel very happy with the man.
Logan swung back to his serious mood and gripped Mendel’s arm tighter as he said:—
“You have a big future before you. Only stick to it. Don’t listen to the fools who want you to paint the same picture over and over again with a different subject. There’s more stuff in that one little picture of yours than in all the rest of the exhibition put together.”
“Do you think so?” said Mendel, fluttering with excitement.
“I was amazed when I heard you had been to the Detmold with its Calthrop and all the little Calthrops.”
Both the youngsters were silent on that. They had often abused the Detmold, but with a profound respect in their hearts, and both had done their full share of imitating Calthrop.
When they reached the studio Mitchell suggested going, but Logan would not hear of it. He dragged them in and produced whisky and soda, and kept them talking far into the small hours. His bouncing energy kept Mendel awake and alert, but Mitchell was soon exhausted and fell asleep.
“Shall we put him out of the way?” said Logan suddenly. “No one would know, and the river is handy. He is too clean, too soft, and there aretoo many like him. They are in the way of real men like you and me.”
Mendel was appalled to find that he could not defend his friend. All the discontents of his waning friendship came rushing up in him and he began to babble violently.
“He is a liar and a coward, and he will never be an artist because he is too weak. He is not true. He is not good. I have trusted him with my secrets and he tells. He is always ashamed of me because of my clothes and because I have not been to Public School, and he is jealous because when we meet women they like me. He is soft and deceitful with them, but I am honest, and they like that. I wanted him to be my friend, but it is impossible.”
“He is an Englishman,” said Logan sepulchrally, with the air of a Grand Inquisitor.
“Aren’t you an Englishman?”
“No, Scotch and French. These Englishmen have no passions, unless they are mad like Blake. . . . No, no. We’ll drop Mitchell overboard. We’ll make him walk the plank, and fishes in the caverns of the sea shall eat his eyes.”
Logan was beginning to assume enormous proportions in Mendel’s eyes. It seemed that there was nothing the tremendous fellow did not know. He began to talk of genius and the stirring of the creative impulse, and he gave so powerful an account of Blake that Mendel began to see visions of heaven and hell. Here was something which he could acknowledge as larger than himself without self-humiliation, and, indeed, the larger it loomed the more swiftly did he himself seem to grow. It was such a sensation as he had not known since the days before his rapture with Sara. All that had intervened fell away. That purity of passion returned to him and, choosing Logan for its object, rushed upon him and endowed him with its own power and beauty. Logan talking ofBlake was to Mendel’s innocence as rare as Blake, and he adored him.
“I had almost given up art,” said Logan; “I had almost given it up as hopeless. How can there be art in a despiritualized country like this, that lets all its traditions rot away? I was just on the point of tossing up whether I should go on the stage or take to spouting at the street corners; for when a country is in such a condition that its artists are stifled, then it is ripe for revolution. I am instinctive, you know, like Napoleon. I feel that we are on the threshold of something big, and that I am to have my share in it. I used to think it would happen in art, but I despaired of that. It seemed to me that art in this country could go doddering on for generations, and then I thought it needed a political upheaval to push it into its grave. But when I saw your work, I said to myself: Here is the real thing, alive, personal, profound, skilled. I began to hope again. And now that I have met you I feel more hopeful still, and, let me tell you, like most painters, I don’t find it easy to like another man’s work.”
Mendel was fired. Trembling in every limb, he said:—
“It has been the dream of my life to find a friend who would work with me, think with me, go with me, share with me, not quarrelling with me because I am not this, that, and the other, but accepting me as I am—a man who has no country, no home, no love but art.”
“That,” said Logan, with a portentous scowl and a downward jab of his thumb, “is what I have been looking for—some one, like yourself, who was absolutely sincere, absolutely single-minded and resolute. The spirit of art has brought us together. We will serve it together.”
They shook hands like young men on the stage, and Logan fetched a deep sigh of relief.
Mitchell woke up, saying:—
“Gawd! I’ve been asleep. Have you two been talking? Gawd! It’s two o’clock.”
“I’ll walk home with you,” said Logan. “We can keep to the river nearly the whole way by going from side to side.”
So they walked while the tide came up, sucking and lapping, while the red dragons’ eyes of the barges came swinging up on it, moving up and down in a slow, irregular rhythm. It was very cold and the sky was thickly powdered with stars, whose pin-prick lights were reflected in the smooth water.
Upon the dome of the young artist’s vision that had before been black with infinite space, stars shone with a tender light. He was in ecstasy, and seemed to be skimming above the ground, hardly touching it with his feet. This long walk was like an exquisite dance, while Logan’s rollings were like a pipe. . . . Often he sank into a dream that he was upon a grassy hill in a mountainy place, he and his friend, who played upon a pipe so mournfully yet gaily while he danced, and from the trees fell silvery dewdrops and the songs of birds, which turned into pennies as they reached the ground and rolled away down the hill.
Both he and Logan were relieved when Mitchell, who had interrupted them with inappropriate remarks, turned aside at Vauxhall and vanished into London.
“So much for Mitchell,” said Logan. “You and I need sterner stuff. You and I are sprung from those among whom life is lived bravely and bitterly, and we have no use for its parasites. You and I will only emerge from the bitterness on condition that we can make of life a spiritual thing, for we are of those who seek authority. Life has none to offer us now, for all the forms of life are broken. Neither above us nor below is there authority, neither in heaven nor in hell. We must seek authority within ourselves, in themarriage of heaven and hell, in the consummation of good and evil, the two poles of our nature. It is for us, the artists, to bring them together, to liberate good and evil in ourselves, that they may rush to the consummation. We are the priests and the prophets, and we must in no wise be false to our vision.”
Mendel could not fit all this in with his mood and his delicious dreams, and when it brought him back to his sober senses, he could not see what it had to do with painting. However, Logan put things right by saying:—
“You are a poet. You are like Heine. I can see you with your little Josepha the pale, the executioner’s daughter. God rot my soul! It is years since I had such inspiration as you have given me. I think there must be Jewish blood in me, for I can certainly understand you through and through, and you have waked something in me that has always been asleep. Oh! we shall paint bonny pictures—bonny, bonny pictures.”
“You must come to see me every day,” said Mendel, “and every night we will go out together, and I must introduce you to my mother, for she too has good words.”
Logan smacked his lips as they entered the grimy streets near Spitalfields.
“Pah!” he said; “that’s life, that is, good dirty life. I was littered in a farm-yard myself and I like a good smell. . . . Can you put me up to-night? I don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”
“You can have my bed,” said Mendel, “and I will sleep downstairs on my brother’s sofa. Please—please. Do sleep in my bed.”
Logan accepted the offer and asked Mendel to stay with him while he undressed. He was unpleasantly fat, but strong and well-built.
He stayed for a long time in front of the mirror.
“See that bulge on the side of my head?” he said as he turned.
Mendel looked, and sure enough his head had a curious bulge on its right side.
“I had rickets when I was young,” said Logan, “and my skull must have got pushed over. I expect that’s what makes me what I am—lop-sided. I need you to balance me.”
He got into bed, and Mendel, reluctant to leave him, sat at his feet and devoured him with his eyes.
“Surely, surely, now,” he thought, “all is perfect now. No more disturbances, no more Mitchells, no more Hettys, and I shall do only what I really wish to do.”
He stole out into his studio, which was faintly lit from the street below, and it was as though it were filled with some vast spiritual presence, and he imagined how he would work, urged on by this new energy that came welling up through all that he could see, all that he could know, all that he could remember.