IIILOGAN SETS TO WORKINthe morning he was awakened by his sister-in-law, Rosa, shaking him and saying:—“Mendel! Mendel! What are you doing on the sofa? Wake up! Wake up! There is some one in your studio.”The house was ringing with Logan’s voice chanting theMagnificat.Mendel ran upstairs and found him in bed with a box of cigarettes and the New Testament, that fatal book, on his knees.“Hello!” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you up. I have been awake for a couple of hours looking at your work. I hope you don’t mind. There’s a still-life there that’s a gem, as good as Chardin, and even better, for there’s always something sentimental about Chardin—always the suggestion of the old folks at home, the false dramatic touch, the idea of the hard-working French peasant coming in presently to eat the bread and drink the wine. I think it’s time you were written up in the papers. It’s absurd for a man like you to have to wait for success. There’s no artistic public in England, so you can’t be successful in your own way. The British public must have its touch of melodrama. To accept a man’s work it must first have him shrouded in legend. He must be a myth. His work must seem to come from some supernatural source.”“I’ll just run over and tell my mother you are here,” said Mendel. “I always have breakfastthere, and then go for a walk while the studio is dusted.”“Right you are! I’ll be up in half a jiffy. Can I have a bath?”“No. There’s no bath.”“Very well; I can do without for once.”Mendel ran round to Golda and told her of the wonderful man who was in his studio, and he described the adventure of the previous evening. Golda looked scared and said:—“What next? What next? Good people sleep in their own beds.”“But this man is an artist and he talks like a book.”“Talk is easy,” said Golda. “But it takes years to make a friend.”However, when Logan was brought to her she was polite to him and rather shy. He told her that fame was coming to her son faster than the wind.“Too fast,” said she.“It can never come too fast,” replied Logan. “The thirst for fame is a curse to an artist. Let it be satisfied and he is free for his work. I know, for I was very famous in my own town. I sickened of it and ran away. . . . I must congratulate you on letting your son follow his bent. I had to quarrel with my own people to get my way. I haven’t seen them since I was fourteen.”“Not your mother?” said Golda, greatly upset.Logan saw that he had made an awkward impression and hastened to put it right by saying lugubriously:—“My mother is dead. She forgave me.”He allowed that to sink in and was silent for a minute or two. Then he chattered on gaily and asked Golda to come and see him, and bragged about his studio and his work and his friends, and of a commission he had to decorate a large house in a West End square. He talked so fast thatGolda understood very little of what he said, but she never took her eyes off him, and when he said good-bye, Mendel noticed that she did not bob to him as she did to Mitchell and Morrison and his other polite friends. He took that to mean that she accepted Logan as a person above these formalities.For an hour they walked through the streets and squares of the East End, Mendel proud to display the vivid scenes he intended later on to make into pictures.When they returned to the studio Logan insisted on seeing all the pictures and drawings again.“Are you in touch with any dealer?” he asked.“Cluny has a few pictures and a dozen drawings. He never does anything with them.”“Hum!” said Logan. “Dealers are mysterious people. They can only sell things that sell themselves. By the way, I am giving up my studio in Hammersmith. It is too far away. I shall come nearer in. Hammersmith was all very well while I needed isolation, but that is all over now.”“Where shall you go to?”“Bloomsbury, I think. I like to be near the British Museum. Do you go to the British Museum? I must show you round. It is no good going there unless you know what to look for. By the way, I came out without any money last night. Can you lend me five pounds?”Mendel wrote a cheque and handed it to him shamefacedly.“I want to pay a bill on my way home,” said Logan. “I hate being in debt, especially for colours.”“I get my colours from Cluny,” said Mendel, “and he sets them against anything he may sell.”The irruption of money had depressed him, and he began to realize that he was very tired. The springs of Rosa’s sofa had bored into him and prevented his getting any real sleep.He was not sorry when Logan went, after making him promise to meet him at the Pot-au-Feu for dinner.He had a model coming at eleven, but when she arrived he sent her away. He was sore and dissatisfied. The studio seemed dark and dismal, and he could not get enough light on to his work. He took it right up to the window, but still there was not enough light, and his picture looked dull and dingy. His nerves throbbed and he was troubled in spirit, for now his old dreams of painting quietly among his own people while fame gathered about his name had suddenly become childish and pathetic. He was ignorant, futile, conceited, a pigmy by the side of the gigantic Logan, who would not wait upon the world, but would compel its attention and shape it to his will. What had he said artists were? Priests and prophets? . . . How could a man prophesy with a painting of a fish?Downstairs he heard Issy come in for his dinner, and there was the usual snarling row because Rosa cooked so vilely. Mendel compared Issy’s life and his own: Issy working day in, day out, earning just enough to keep himself alive. Why did he go on with it? Why did he keep himself alive? Why did he not clear out, like Harry? There was no pleasure in his life, neither the time nor the money for it. . . . A wretched business.But was it less wretched than this business of painting? There was more money in painting, and that was all anybody seemed to think of. People wanted the same picture over and over again, and if he consented to please them, his life would be just as poor a thing as Issy’s, except that he would have pleasure, and, through his friends, an occasional taste of luxury. At best he could be polite and gentlemanly, like Mitchell, bringing nomore to art and getting no more out of it than a boyish excitement, as though art were a game and could give no more than a sensation of cleanliness, like a hot bath.No, it would not do. It would not do.It was a lie, too, to say that the Jews only cared about money. When they were overfed, like Maurice Birnbaum, they were like all the other overfed people, but when they were simple and normal they were better than the others, because they had always a sense of mystery and did not waste themselves in foolish laughter.That was where Logan was true. He could laugh, because all the Christians laugh, but when it came to solemn things he could talk about them as though he were not half ashamed. Mitchell, for instance, always shied away from the truth. Why was he afraid of it? The truth, good or bad, was always somehow beautiful, invigorating, and releasing. All the pleasant things that Mitchell cared about Mendel found stifling. Nothing, he knew, could make life altogether pleasant, and all the falsehoods which were used in that attempt were contemptible. They strangled impulse and frankness, and without these how could there be art?In his unhappy dreams Logan appeared like a figure of Blake, immense, looming prophetic, beckoning to achievement and away from the chatter and fuss of the world of artists.Yet behind Logan there was still the figure of Mitchell, young and gay, and the idea of Mitchell led to the idea of Morrison.There were some withered flowers on his painting-table, the last she had sent him. None had come since that evening in the Paris Café when she had nodded curtly to show him that he was not wanted.He would not be thrust aside like that. He knew himself to be worth a thousand Mitchells.Logan had said that Mitchell was rubbish, and not even in the eyes of a slip of a girl would Mendel have Mitchell set above himself. Not for one moment was it tolerable. He would keep Morrison to her promises and make her come to have her portrait painted, and he would find out what there was in her that made him remember her so distinctly and so clearly separate her from all other girls. Somehow the thought of her cooled the intoxication in which he had been left by Logan. She offered, perhaps, another way out of his present state of congestion and dissatisfaction. Very clearly she brought back to his mind the thrilling delight with which he had worked as a boy, and that was true, truer than anything else he had ever known. . . . Ah! If he could only get back to that, with all the tricks and cunning he had learned.He would get back to it some day, but he must fight for it; with Logan he would learn how to fight. Logan would lay his immense store of knowledge before him, and give him books to read, and teach him how to be so easy and familiar with ideas, which at present only frothed in his mind like waves thinning themselves out on the sea-shore.He wrote an impassioned and insolent letter to Morrison commanding her presence at his studio and informing her that he was worth a thousand of her ordinary associates, and that she had hurt him, and that girls ought not to hurt men of acknowledged talent. This letter cost him a great deal of pain and time, because he was careful not to make any slip in spelling or grammar. It was more a manifesto than a letter, and he wished to do nothing to impair its dignity.And all the time he was puzzled to know why he should care about her at all. He was prepared to throw everything—his success, the Detmold, his friends—to the winds to follow Logan, but Morrison he could not throw away.He decided at last not to send the letter but to go himself, and he went to the Detmold just as the light was fading and he knew she would be leaving.She had gone already, but he met Clowes, who, he knew, lived with her. He pounced on her and said:—“You must come to tea with me.”“I’m afraid I . . .”“You must! You must!”She saw he was very excited and she had heard stories of his bursting into tears when he was thwarted. In some alarm she consented to go with him.He led her to a teashop, a horrible place that smelt of dishwater and melted butter, made her sit at a table, and burst at once into a tirade:—“You are Morrison’s friend. Will you tell me why she has avoided me? She came to my studio once and she said she would come again. She sent me flowers for three weeks, but she has sent no more.”“She—she is very forgetful,” said Clowes, who was longing for tea but did not dare to tell him to turn to the waitress, who was hovering behind him.“But she nodded to me as if she had hardly met me before,” said Mendel.“She is very shy,” said Clowes, framing the word “Tea” with her lips and nodding brightly to the waitress. She added kindly:—“I don’t think sending flowers means much with her. She gives flowers to heaps of people. She is a very odd girl.”“Does she give flowers to Mitchell?” he asked furiously, coming at last with great relief to the consuming thought in his mind.“Yes,” said Clowes. “She is very unhappy about Mitchell and that Hetty Finch affair.”“Has he told her then?”“Yes.”“Why did he tell her?”“I’m sure I don’t know.”“I’ll tell you,” cried Mendel. “I’ll tell you. To make himself interesting to her, because he is not interesting. He is nothing. And I will tell you something more. He has been telling her things about me to excuse himself. Now, hasn’t he? . . . I can see by your face that he has.”Clowes could not deny it, and she found it hard to conceal her distress. She was unused to intimate affairs being dragged out into the open like this, and her modesty was shocked. She had a pretty, intelligent face, and she looked for the moment like a startled hare, the more so when she put her handkerchief up to her nose with a gesture like that of a hare brushing its whiskers.“Very well, then,” Mendel continued; “you can tell her you have seen me, and you can tell her that I shall come to explain myself. I hide nothing, for I am ashamed of nothing that I do. I have no need to excuse myself. I am not a gentleman one moment and a cad the next. And you can tell Morrison that if I see her with Mitchell again I shall knock him down.”“Do please drink your tea,” said Clowes. “It is getting cold.”Mendel gulped down his tea and hastened to add:—“I am not boasting. He is bigger than I am, but I know something about boxing. My brother was nearly a prizefighter.”Clowes began to recover from her alarm, and his immense seriousness struck her as very comic.“Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?”“Her hair?” cried Mendel. “Her beautiful hair?”“Yes. She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets. All the girls are wild to do it.”“Her hair? Her beautiful hair? Why?”“Oh! she got sick of putting it up. She is like that. She suddenly does something you don’t expect.”“But she must look terrible!”“Oh no. She looks too sweet. And if all the boys at the Detmold wear their hair long, I don’t see why the girls shouldn’t wear theirs short.”“My mother had her head shaved when she married,” said he, “and she wore a wig.”“Why did she do that?”“It is the custom. The woman shows that she belongs wholly to her husband and makes herself unattractive to all other men.”“What a horrible idea!”“It is a beautiful idea. It is the idea of love independent of everything else. That is why I thought Morrison must have some reason for cutting her hair.”“When you know Greta, you will know that she doesn’t wait for reasons.”“Why does she like Mitchell?”“She likes nearly everybody.”“But she writes to him.”“Of course she does,” said Clowes, rather bored with his persistence.“But she doesn’t write to me.”“You don’t write to her. You can’t expect her to fall at your feet.”As she said this Clowes realized his extraordinary Orientalism. She could see him holding up his finger and expecting a woman to come at his bidding, and for a moment she was repelled by him. But she was a kind-hearted creature and felt very sorry for him, for he seemed so utterly at sea and was obviously full of genuine and painful emotion.He detected her repulsion at once and perceived the effort she made to conquer it, and was at oncegrateful to her, for, as a rule, when that happened, people let it swamp everything else.She said:—“I’ll tell Greta what you have said to me, and I am sure she will be very sorry to have hurt you.”“I only want her to come and sit for her portrait. It is very important to me, because I want to try new subjects and there is some lovely drawing in her face.”“But you mustn’t knock Mitchell down. He is quite a nice boy, really, only a little wild.”“He is rotten,” said Mendel dogmatically.He felt better, and until dinner-time he prowled about Tottenham Court Road and Soho, a region of London that he particularly loved—a vibrant, nondescript region where innumerable streams of vitality met and fused, or clashed together to make a froth and a spume. It was like himself, chaotic and rawly alive, compounded of elements that knew no tradition or had escaped from it. He felt at home in it, and elated because he was also conscious of being superior to it, yet without the dizzy sense of superiority that assailed him among his own people, while he was never shocked and humiliated, as he was sometimes in sedate and prosperous London, by being made suddenly to realize his external inferiority. He loved the shop-girls hurrying excitedly from their work to their pleasure, and he sometimes spoke to them in their own slang, sometimes went home with them. . . . They always liked him because he never wasted time over silly flirtatious jokes or pretended to be in love with them. His interest and curiosity, like theirs, were purely physical, and his passion gave them a delicious sense of danger.Logan was waiting for him at the Pot-au-Feu. There was no one else in the restaurant but thegoggle-eyed man in his corner. Logan was sitting Napoleonically with his arms on the table and his chin sunk on his chest, with his lips compressed.He nodded, but did not get up.“Sorry if I’m late,” said Mendel. “I went for a walk. I couldn’t work to-day. My sister-in-law’s sofa—I feel as if I had been beaten all over.”“That’s the walk home,” said Logan. “I’m used to it. The hours I’ve spent walking about this infernal London! I’ve slept on the Embankment, you know.”“No?”“Yes. I’ve been as far down as that, though I’m not the sort of man who can be kept down. Did you know that Napoleon was out-at-elbows for a whole year?”“No; I don’t know much about Napoleon.”“Ah! You should. I read every book about him I can lay hands on. Gustave!”The waiter came up and Logan ordered a very special dinner with the air of knowing the very inmost secrets of the establishment. He demanded orange bitters before the meal and a special brand of cigarette.“My day hasn’t been wasted,” he said. “I’ve been to Cluny’s and I asked to see your stuff. The little man there looked astonished, but I told him people were talking of no one else but you, and quite rightly. I talked to him from the dealer’s point of view, and assured him that there was a big boom in pictures, coming, and that he had better be prepared for it with a handful of new men. I didn’t let him know that I was a painter, but I got him quite excited, and I did not leave him until he had hung a picture and two drawings.”“Which picture?”“The one of your mother’s kitchen. It is one of your best. To-morrow three men will walkinto Cluny’s and they will admire your work. On the day after to-morrow a real buyer will walk in.”Mendel’s eyes grew larger and larger. Was Logan a magician, that he could direct human beings into Cluny’s shop and conduct them straight to his work?Logan laughed at his amazement.“Lord love-a-duck!” he said, “you’re not going to sit still and wait for commercial fools to discover that you know your job. At my first exhibition in Liverpool I put on a false beard and went in and bought one of my own pictures, just to encourage the dealer and the timid idiots who were too shy to go and ask him the price of the drawings. It worked, and this is going to work too. When I’ve warmed Cluny up into selling you, then I’m going to make him sell me. If you don’t mind we’ll have our names bracketed,—Kühler and Logan. People will believe in two men when they won’t in one. As for three, you’ve only got to look at the Trinity to see what they’ll believe when they get three working together. . . . Oh! I forgot you were a Jew and brought up to believe in One is One and all alone.”He laughed and gave a fat chuckle as he mimicked the little man in Cluny’s cocking his head on one side and pretending to take in the beauties of Mendel’s work as they were pointed out to him.“I have enjoyed myself,” said Logan. “By God! I wish there were a revolution. I’d have my finger in the pie. Oh! what lovely legs there’d be to pull—all the world’s and his wife’s as well. But it won’t come in my time.”Under Logan’s influence Mendel began to enjoy his food, which he had always treated as a tiresome necessity before. He sat back in his chair and sipped his wine and crumbled up his bread exactly as Logan did; and he had a delicious sense of leisure and well-being, as though nothingmattered very much. And, indeed, when he came to think of it, nothing did matter. He had years and years ahead of him, and here was good solid pleasure in front of him, so that he had only to dip his hands in it and take and take. . . .After the dinner Logan ordered cigars, coffee, and liqueurs, and Mendel felt very lordly. The restaurant had filled up, and among the rest were Mitchell and Morrison.Mendel turned, gave them a curt nod, and could not restrain a grin of satisfaction as he thought that score was settled. He leaned forward and gave himself up to the pleasure of Logan’s talk.“What I contend,” said Logan, “is this—and mind you, I let off my youthful gas years ago. I’ve been earning my living since I was fourteen, so I know a little of what the world’s like. I’ve been in offices and shops, and on the land, in hotels, on the railway, on the road as a bagman, from house to house as a tallyman, and I know what I’m talking about. The artist is a free man, and therefore an outlaw, because the world is full of timid slaves who lie in the laps of women. If an artist is not a free man, then he is not an artist. And I say that if the artist is outlawed, then he must use any and every means to get out of the world what it denies him. One must live.”“That’s true,” said Mendel.“You may take it from me that there is less room in the world now for artists than ever there was. In the old days you chose your patron and he provided for you, as the Pope provided for Michael Angelo, and you devoted your art to whatever your patron stood for, spiritual power if he happened to be a pope, secular power if he happened to be a duke or a king. But, nowadays, suppose you had a patron—say, Sir Julius Fleischmann—and he kept you alive, what on earth could you devote your art to? You could paint his portrait, and his wife’s portrait, and all hisdaughters’ portraits, but they’d mean nothing; they’d just be vulgar men and women. No. Art is a bigger thing than any power left on the earth. Money has eaten up all the other powers, and only art is left uncorrupted by it. Art cannot be patronized. It cannot serve religion, because there is no religion vital enough to contain the spirit of art. There is nothing left in the world worthy of such noble service, and therefore art must be independent and artists must be free, because there is no honourable service open to them. They must have their own values, and they must have the courage of them. The world’s values are the values fit for the service of Sir Julius Fleischmann, but they are not fit for men whose blood is stirring with life, whose minds are eager and active, men who will accept any outward humiliation rather than the degradation of the loss of their freedom.”“I met Sir Julius Fleischmann. Once,” Mendel said. “He subscribed for me when I went to my first School of Art. They wanted to send me to Italy, but I refused, because I knew my place was here in London. There’s more art for me in the Tottenham Court Road than in all the blue skies in the world.”“Quite right, too!” cried Logan. “That shows how sound an artist’s instinct is. He knows what is good for him because he is a free man. The others have to be told what is good for them because they don’t know themselves and because, however unhappy they are, they don’t know the way out. When you and I are unhappy we know that it is because we have lost touch with life, or because we have lost touch with art; either the flesh or the spirit is choked with thorns, and we set about plucking them out. When it is a question of saving your soul, what do morals matter?”Mendel had heard people talk about morals, and he knew that his own were supposed to be bad; but he was not certain what they were. Rathertimidly he asked Logan, who gave his fat chuckle and replied:—“Morals, my son? No one knows. They change about a hundred years after human practice. They are different in different times, places, and circumstances, and Sir Julius Fleischmann, like you and me, has none, because he can afford to do without them. . . . Well, I’ve done a good day’s work and we’ve had a good dinner, and I must get back to my beautiful bed—unless you’d like to go to a music-hall.”Mendel was loath to let his friend go, and, weary though he was, he said he would like the music-hall. Logan bought more cigars and they walked round to the Oxford and spent the evening in uneasy and flat conversation with two ladies of the town, one of whom said she knew Logan, though he swore he had never seen her before. When they were shaken off, he told Mendel mysteriously that she was a friend of a woman of whom he went in terror, who had been pursuing him for a couple of years.“Terrible! Terrible!” he said. “Like a wild beast. They’re awful, these prostitutes, when they fall in love. It eats them up, body and soul.”And he went on talking of women, and from what he said it appeared that he was beset by them. He described them lurking in the street for him, forcing their way into his studio, clamouring for love, love, love.“It makes me sick,” he said. “I never yet met a woman who knew how to love. If a man has an enthusiasm for anything outside themselves, they plot and scheme with their damnable cunning to kill it. They want the carcase of a man, not the lovely life in it. And if they’re decent they want babies, which is almost worse if you’re hard up. No, boy; for God’s sake don’t take women seriously. If you can’t do without them, hate ’em.They’ll lick your boots for it. They feed on hatred, and will take it out of your hand.”He talked in this strain until they reached the Tube station in Piccadilly Circus. It was unusually empty, and by the booking-office was standing a very pretty girl, big and upstanding. She had a wide mouth and curious slanting eyes, plump cheeks and a roguish tilt to her chin. She was well and neatly dressed, and Mendel judged her to be a shop-girl.“That’s a fine lass,” said Logan. “Good-night, boy. I’ll see you to-morrow and tell you about Cluny’s.”“Good-night,” said Mendel, still loath to see his friend go, and he suffered a pang of jealousy as he saw Logan go up to the girl, raise his hat, and speak to her. She started, blushed, and smiled. They stopped and talked together for a few moments, and then moved over towards the lift.Mendel waited and watched them, Logan talking gaily, the girl smiling and watching him intently through her smile. With her eyes she took possession of him, and Mendel was filled with misgiving when he heard Logan’s fat chuckle and the rustle and clatter of the gate as the lift descended. It reminded him oddly of the Demon King and the Fairy Queen in a pantomime he had once seen with Artie Beech, whose father used to get tickets for the gallery because he had play-bills in his shop window.
INthe morning he was awakened by his sister-in-law, Rosa, shaking him and saying:—
“Mendel! Mendel! What are you doing on the sofa? Wake up! Wake up! There is some one in your studio.”
The house was ringing with Logan’s voice chanting theMagnificat.Mendel ran upstairs and found him in bed with a box of cigarettes and the New Testament, that fatal book, on his knees.
“Hello!” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you up. I have been awake for a couple of hours looking at your work. I hope you don’t mind. There’s a still-life there that’s a gem, as good as Chardin, and even better, for there’s always something sentimental about Chardin—always the suggestion of the old folks at home, the false dramatic touch, the idea of the hard-working French peasant coming in presently to eat the bread and drink the wine. I think it’s time you were written up in the papers. It’s absurd for a man like you to have to wait for success. There’s no artistic public in England, so you can’t be successful in your own way. The British public must have its touch of melodrama. To accept a man’s work it must first have him shrouded in legend. He must be a myth. His work must seem to come from some supernatural source.”
“I’ll just run over and tell my mother you are here,” said Mendel. “I always have breakfastthere, and then go for a walk while the studio is dusted.”
“Right you are! I’ll be up in half a jiffy. Can I have a bath?”
“No. There’s no bath.”
“Very well; I can do without for once.”
Mendel ran round to Golda and told her of the wonderful man who was in his studio, and he described the adventure of the previous evening. Golda looked scared and said:—
“What next? What next? Good people sleep in their own beds.”
“But this man is an artist and he talks like a book.”
“Talk is easy,” said Golda. “But it takes years to make a friend.”
However, when Logan was brought to her she was polite to him and rather shy. He told her that fame was coming to her son faster than the wind.
“Too fast,” said she.
“It can never come too fast,” replied Logan. “The thirst for fame is a curse to an artist. Let it be satisfied and he is free for his work. I know, for I was very famous in my own town. I sickened of it and ran away. . . . I must congratulate you on letting your son follow his bent. I had to quarrel with my own people to get my way. I haven’t seen them since I was fourteen.”
“Not your mother?” said Golda, greatly upset.
Logan saw that he had made an awkward impression and hastened to put it right by saying lugubriously:—
“My mother is dead. She forgave me.”
He allowed that to sink in and was silent for a minute or two. Then he chattered on gaily and asked Golda to come and see him, and bragged about his studio and his work and his friends, and of a commission he had to decorate a large house in a West End square. He talked so fast thatGolda understood very little of what he said, but she never took her eyes off him, and when he said good-bye, Mendel noticed that she did not bob to him as she did to Mitchell and Morrison and his other polite friends. He took that to mean that she accepted Logan as a person above these formalities.
For an hour they walked through the streets and squares of the East End, Mendel proud to display the vivid scenes he intended later on to make into pictures.
When they returned to the studio Logan insisted on seeing all the pictures and drawings again.
“Are you in touch with any dealer?” he asked.
“Cluny has a few pictures and a dozen drawings. He never does anything with them.”
“Hum!” said Logan. “Dealers are mysterious people. They can only sell things that sell themselves. By the way, I am giving up my studio in Hammersmith. It is too far away. I shall come nearer in. Hammersmith was all very well while I needed isolation, but that is all over now.”
“Where shall you go to?”
“Bloomsbury, I think. I like to be near the British Museum. Do you go to the British Museum? I must show you round. It is no good going there unless you know what to look for. By the way, I came out without any money last night. Can you lend me five pounds?”
Mendel wrote a cheque and handed it to him shamefacedly.
“I want to pay a bill on my way home,” said Logan. “I hate being in debt, especially for colours.”
“I get my colours from Cluny,” said Mendel, “and he sets them against anything he may sell.”
The irruption of money had depressed him, and he began to realize that he was very tired. The springs of Rosa’s sofa had bored into him and prevented his getting any real sleep.
He was not sorry when Logan went, after making him promise to meet him at the Pot-au-Feu for dinner.
He had a model coming at eleven, but when she arrived he sent her away. He was sore and dissatisfied. The studio seemed dark and dismal, and he could not get enough light on to his work. He took it right up to the window, but still there was not enough light, and his picture looked dull and dingy. His nerves throbbed and he was troubled in spirit, for now his old dreams of painting quietly among his own people while fame gathered about his name had suddenly become childish and pathetic. He was ignorant, futile, conceited, a pigmy by the side of the gigantic Logan, who would not wait upon the world, but would compel its attention and shape it to his will. What had he said artists were? Priests and prophets? . . . How could a man prophesy with a painting of a fish?
Downstairs he heard Issy come in for his dinner, and there was the usual snarling row because Rosa cooked so vilely. Mendel compared Issy’s life and his own: Issy working day in, day out, earning just enough to keep himself alive. Why did he go on with it? Why did he keep himself alive? Why did he not clear out, like Harry? There was no pleasure in his life, neither the time nor the money for it. . . . A wretched business.
But was it less wretched than this business of painting? There was more money in painting, and that was all anybody seemed to think of. People wanted the same picture over and over again, and if he consented to please them, his life would be just as poor a thing as Issy’s, except that he would have pleasure, and, through his friends, an occasional taste of luxury. At best he could be polite and gentlemanly, like Mitchell, bringing nomore to art and getting no more out of it than a boyish excitement, as though art were a game and could give no more than a sensation of cleanliness, like a hot bath.
No, it would not do. It would not do.
It was a lie, too, to say that the Jews only cared about money. When they were overfed, like Maurice Birnbaum, they were like all the other overfed people, but when they were simple and normal they were better than the others, because they had always a sense of mystery and did not waste themselves in foolish laughter.
That was where Logan was true. He could laugh, because all the Christians laugh, but when it came to solemn things he could talk about them as though he were not half ashamed. Mitchell, for instance, always shied away from the truth. Why was he afraid of it? The truth, good or bad, was always somehow beautiful, invigorating, and releasing. All the pleasant things that Mitchell cared about Mendel found stifling. Nothing, he knew, could make life altogether pleasant, and all the falsehoods which were used in that attempt were contemptible. They strangled impulse and frankness, and without these how could there be art?
In his unhappy dreams Logan appeared like a figure of Blake, immense, looming prophetic, beckoning to achievement and away from the chatter and fuss of the world of artists.
Yet behind Logan there was still the figure of Mitchell, young and gay, and the idea of Mitchell led to the idea of Morrison.
There were some withered flowers on his painting-table, the last she had sent him. None had come since that evening in the Paris Café when she had nodded curtly to show him that he was not wanted.
He would not be thrust aside like that. He knew himself to be worth a thousand Mitchells.Logan had said that Mitchell was rubbish, and not even in the eyes of a slip of a girl would Mendel have Mitchell set above himself. Not for one moment was it tolerable. He would keep Morrison to her promises and make her come to have her portrait painted, and he would find out what there was in her that made him remember her so distinctly and so clearly separate her from all other girls. Somehow the thought of her cooled the intoxication in which he had been left by Logan. She offered, perhaps, another way out of his present state of congestion and dissatisfaction. Very clearly she brought back to his mind the thrilling delight with which he had worked as a boy, and that was true, truer than anything else he had ever known. . . . Ah! If he could only get back to that, with all the tricks and cunning he had learned.
He would get back to it some day, but he must fight for it; with Logan he would learn how to fight. Logan would lay his immense store of knowledge before him, and give him books to read, and teach him how to be so easy and familiar with ideas, which at present only frothed in his mind like waves thinning themselves out on the sea-shore.
He wrote an impassioned and insolent letter to Morrison commanding her presence at his studio and informing her that he was worth a thousand of her ordinary associates, and that she had hurt him, and that girls ought not to hurt men of acknowledged talent. This letter cost him a great deal of pain and time, because he was careful not to make any slip in spelling or grammar. It was more a manifesto than a letter, and he wished to do nothing to impair its dignity.
And all the time he was puzzled to know why he should care about her at all. He was prepared to throw everything—his success, the Detmold, his friends—to the winds to follow Logan, but Morrison he could not throw away.
He decided at last not to send the letter but to go himself, and he went to the Detmold just as the light was fading and he knew she would be leaving.
She had gone already, but he met Clowes, who, he knew, lived with her. He pounced on her and said:—
“You must come to tea with me.”
“I’m afraid I . . .”
“You must! You must!”
She saw he was very excited and she had heard stories of his bursting into tears when he was thwarted. In some alarm she consented to go with him.
He led her to a teashop, a horrible place that smelt of dishwater and melted butter, made her sit at a table, and burst at once into a tirade:—
“You are Morrison’s friend. Will you tell me why she has avoided me? She came to my studio once and she said she would come again. She sent me flowers for three weeks, but she has sent no more.”
“She—she is very forgetful,” said Clowes, who was longing for tea but did not dare to tell him to turn to the waitress, who was hovering behind him.
“But she nodded to me as if she had hardly met me before,” said Mendel.
“She is very shy,” said Clowes, framing the word “Tea” with her lips and nodding brightly to the waitress. She added kindly:—
“I don’t think sending flowers means much with her. She gives flowers to heaps of people. She is a very odd girl.”
“Does she give flowers to Mitchell?” he asked furiously, coming at last with great relief to the consuming thought in his mind.
“Yes,” said Clowes. “She is very unhappy about Mitchell and that Hetty Finch affair.”
“Has he told her then?”
“Yes.”
“Why did he tell her?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you,” cried Mendel. “I’ll tell you. To make himself interesting to her, because he is not interesting. He is nothing. And I will tell you something more. He has been telling her things about me to excuse himself. Now, hasn’t he? . . . I can see by your face that he has.”
Clowes could not deny it, and she found it hard to conceal her distress. She was unused to intimate affairs being dragged out into the open like this, and her modesty was shocked. She had a pretty, intelligent face, and she looked for the moment like a startled hare, the more so when she put her handkerchief up to her nose with a gesture like that of a hare brushing its whiskers.
“Very well, then,” Mendel continued; “you can tell her you have seen me, and you can tell her that I shall come to explain myself. I hide nothing, for I am ashamed of nothing that I do. I have no need to excuse myself. I am not a gentleman one moment and a cad the next. And you can tell Morrison that if I see her with Mitchell again I shall knock him down.”
“Do please drink your tea,” said Clowes. “It is getting cold.”
Mendel gulped down his tea and hastened to add:—
“I am not boasting. He is bigger than I am, but I know something about boxing. My brother was nearly a prizefighter.”
Clowes began to recover from her alarm, and his immense seriousness struck her as very comic.
“Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?”
“Her hair?” cried Mendel. “Her beautiful hair?”
“Yes. She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets. All the girls are wild to do it.”
“Her hair? Her beautiful hair? Why?”
“Oh! she got sick of putting it up. She is like that. She suddenly does something you don’t expect.”
“But she must look terrible!”
“Oh no. She looks too sweet. And if all the boys at the Detmold wear their hair long, I don’t see why the girls shouldn’t wear theirs short.”
“My mother had her head shaved when she married,” said he, “and she wore a wig.”
“Why did she do that?”
“It is the custom. The woman shows that she belongs wholly to her husband and makes herself unattractive to all other men.”
“What a horrible idea!”
“It is a beautiful idea. It is the idea of love independent of everything else. That is why I thought Morrison must have some reason for cutting her hair.”
“When you know Greta, you will know that she doesn’t wait for reasons.”
“Why does she like Mitchell?”
“She likes nearly everybody.”
“But she writes to him.”
“Of course she does,” said Clowes, rather bored with his persistence.
“But she doesn’t write to me.”
“You don’t write to her. You can’t expect her to fall at your feet.”
As she said this Clowes realized his extraordinary Orientalism. She could see him holding up his finger and expecting a woman to come at his bidding, and for a moment she was repelled by him. But she was a kind-hearted creature and felt very sorry for him, for he seemed so utterly at sea and was obviously full of genuine and painful emotion.
He detected her repulsion at once and perceived the effort she made to conquer it, and was at oncegrateful to her, for, as a rule, when that happened, people let it swamp everything else.
She said:—
“I’ll tell Greta what you have said to me, and I am sure she will be very sorry to have hurt you.”
“I only want her to come and sit for her portrait. It is very important to me, because I want to try new subjects and there is some lovely drawing in her face.”
“But you mustn’t knock Mitchell down. He is quite a nice boy, really, only a little wild.”
“He is rotten,” said Mendel dogmatically.
He felt better, and until dinner-time he prowled about Tottenham Court Road and Soho, a region of London that he particularly loved—a vibrant, nondescript region where innumerable streams of vitality met and fused, or clashed together to make a froth and a spume. It was like himself, chaotic and rawly alive, compounded of elements that knew no tradition or had escaped from it. He felt at home in it, and elated because he was also conscious of being superior to it, yet without the dizzy sense of superiority that assailed him among his own people, while he was never shocked and humiliated, as he was sometimes in sedate and prosperous London, by being made suddenly to realize his external inferiority. He loved the shop-girls hurrying excitedly from their work to their pleasure, and he sometimes spoke to them in their own slang, sometimes went home with them. . . . They always liked him because he never wasted time over silly flirtatious jokes or pretended to be in love with them. His interest and curiosity, like theirs, were purely physical, and his passion gave them a delicious sense of danger.
Logan was waiting for him at the Pot-au-Feu. There was no one else in the restaurant but thegoggle-eyed man in his corner. Logan was sitting Napoleonically with his arms on the table and his chin sunk on his chest, with his lips compressed.
He nodded, but did not get up.
“Sorry if I’m late,” said Mendel. “I went for a walk. I couldn’t work to-day. My sister-in-law’s sofa—I feel as if I had been beaten all over.”
“That’s the walk home,” said Logan. “I’m used to it. The hours I’ve spent walking about this infernal London! I’ve slept on the Embankment, you know.”
“No?”
“Yes. I’ve been as far down as that, though I’m not the sort of man who can be kept down. Did you know that Napoleon was out-at-elbows for a whole year?”
“No; I don’t know much about Napoleon.”
“Ah! You should. I read every book about him I can lay hands on. Gustave!”
The waiter came up and Logan ordered a very special dinner with the air of knowing the very inmost secrets of the establishment. He demanded orange bitters before the meal and a special brand of cigarette.
“My day hasn’t been wasted,” he said. “I’ve been to Cluny’s and I asked to see your stuff. The little man there looked astonished, but I told him people were talking of no one else but you, and quite rightly. I talked to him from the dealer’s point of view, and assured him that there was a big boom in pictures, coming, and that he had better be prepared for it with a handful of new men. I didn’t let him know that I was a painter, but I got him quite excited, and I did not leave him until he had hung a picture and two drawings.”
“Which picture?”
“The one of your mother’s kitchen. It is one of your best. To-morrow three men will walkinto Cluny’s and they will admire your work. On the day after to-morrow a real buyer will walk in.”
Mendel’s eyes grew larger and larger. Was Logan a magician, that he could direct human beings into Cluny’s shop and conduct them straight to his work?
Logan laughed at his amazement.
“Lord love-a-duck!” he said, “you’re not going to sit still and wait for commercial fools to discover that you know your job. At my first exhibition in Liverpool I put on a false beard and went in and bought one of my own pictures, just to encourage the dealer and the timid idiots who were too shy to go and ask him the price of the drawings. It worked, and this is going to work too. When I’ve warmed Cluny up into selling you, then I’m going to make him sell me. If you don’t mind we’ll have our names bracketed,—Kühler and Logan. People will believe in two men when they won’t in one. As for three, you’ve only got to look at the Trinity to see what they’ll believe when they get three working together. . . . Oh! I forgot you were a Jew and brought up to believe in One is One and all alone.”
He laughed and gave a fat chuckle as he mimicked the little man in Cluny’s cocking his head on one side and pretending to take in the beauties of Mendel’s work as they were pointed out to him.
“I have enjoyed myself,” said Logan. “By God! I wish there were a revolution. I’d have my finger in the pie. Oh! what lovely legs there’d be to pull—all the world’s and his wife’s as well. But it won’t come in my time.”
Under Logan’s influence Mendel began to enjoy his food, which he had always treated as a tiresome necessity before. He sat back in his chair and sipped his wine and crumbled up his bread exactly as Logan did; and he had a delicious sense of leisure and well-being, as though nothingmattered very much. And, indeed, when he came to think of it, nothing did matter. He had years and years ahead of him, and here was good solid pleasure in front of him, so that he had only to dip his hands in it and take and take. . . .
After the dinner Logan ordered cigars, coffee, and liqueurs, and Mendel felt very lordly. The restaurant had filled up, and among the rest were Mitchell and Morrison.
Mendel turned, gave them a curt nod, and could not restrain a grin of satisfaction as he thought that score was settled. He leaned forward and gave himself up to the pleasure of Logan’s talk.
“What I contend,” said Logan, “is this—and mind you, I let off my youthful gas years ago. I’ve been earning my living since I was fourteen, so I know a little of what the world’s like. I’ve been in offices and shops, and on the land, in hotels, on the railway, on the road as a bagman, from house to house as a tallyman, and I know what I’m talking about. The artist is a free man, and therefore an outlaw, because the world is full of timid slaves who lie in the laps of women. If an artist is not a free man, then he is not an artist. And I say that if the artist is outlawed, then he must use any and every means to get out of the world what it denies him. One must live.”
“That’s true,” said Mendel.
“You may take it from me that there is less room in the world now for artists than ever there was. In the old days you chose your patron and he provided for you, as the Pope provided for Michael Angelo, and you devoted your art to whatever your patron stood for, spiritual power if he happened to be a pope, secular power if he happened to be a duke or a king. But, nowadays, suppose you had a patron—say, Sir Julius Fleischmann—and he kept you alive, what on earth could you devote your art to? You could paint his portrait, and his wife’s portrait, and all hisdaughters’ portraits, but they’d mean nothing; they’d just be vulgar men and women. No. Art is a bigger thing than any power left on the earth. Money has eaten up all the other powers, and only art is left uncorrupted by it. Art cannot be patronized. It cannot serve religion, because there is no religion vital enough to contain the spirit of art. There is nothing left in the world worthy of such noble service, and therefore art must be independent and artists must be free, because there is no honourable service open to them. They must have their own values, and they must have the courage of them. The world’s values are the values fit for the service of Sir Julius Fleischmann, but they are not fit for men whose blood is stirring with life, whose minds are eager and active, men who will accept any outward humiliation rather than the degradation of the loss of their freedom.”
“I met Sir Julius Fleischmann. Once,” Mendel said. “He subscribed for me when I went to my first School of Art. They wanted to send me to Italy, but I refused, because I knew my place was here in London. There’s more art for me in the Tottenham Court Road than in all the blue skies in the world.”
“Quite right, too!” cried Logan. “That shows how sound an artist’s instinct is. He knows what is good for him because he is a free man. The others have to be told what is good for them because they don’t know themselves and because, however unhappy they are, they don’t know the way out. When you and I are unhappy we know that it is because we have lost touch with life, or because we have lost touch with art; either the flesh or the spirit is choked with thorns, and we set about plucking them out. When it is a question of saving your soul, what do morals matter?”
Mendel had heard people talk about morals, and he knew that his own were supposed to be bad; but he was not certain what they were. Rathertimidly he asked Logan, who gave his fat chuckle and replied:—
“Morals, my son? No one knows. They change about a hundred years after human practice. They are different in different times, places, and circumstances, and Sir Julius Fleischmann, like you and me, has none, because he can afford to do without them. . . . Well, I’ve done a good day’s work and we’ve had a good dinner, and I must get back to my beautiful bed—unless you’d like to go to a music-hall.”
Mendel was loath to let his friend go, and, weary though he was, he said he would like the music-hall. Logan bought more cigars and they walked round to the Oxford and spent the evening in uneasy and flat conversation with two ladies of the town, one of whom said she knew Logan, though he swore he had never seen her before. When they were shaken off, he told Mendel mysteriously that she was a friend of a woman of whom he went in terror, who had been pursuing him for a couple of years.
“Terrible! Terrible!” he said. “Like a wild beast. They’re awful, these prostitutes, when they fall in love. It eats them up, body and soul.”
And he went on talking of women, and from what he said it appeared that he was beset by them. He described them lurking in the street for him, forcing their way into his studio, clamouring for love, love, love.
“It makes me sick,” he said. “I never yet met a woman who knew how to love. If a man has an enthusiasm for anything outside themselves, they plot and scheme with their damnable cunning to kill it. They want the carcase of a man, not the lovely life in it. And if they’re decent they want babies, which is almost worse if you’re hard up. No, boy; for God’s sake don’t take women seriously. If you can’t do without them, hate ’em.They’ll lick your boots for it. They feed on hatred, and will take it out of your hand.”
He talked in this strain until they reached the Tube station in Piccadilly Circus. It was unusually empty, and by the booking-office was standing a very pretty girl, big and upstanding. She had a wide mouth and curious slanting eyes, plump cheeks and a roguish tilt to her chin. She was well and neatly dressed, and Mendel judged her to be a shop-girl.
“That’s a fine lass,” said Logan. “Good-night, boy. I’ll see you to-morrow and tell you about Cluny’s.”
“Good-night,” said Mendel, still loath to see his friend go, and he suffered a pang of jealousy as he saw Logan go up to the girl, raise his hat, and speak to her. She started, blushed, and smiled. They stopped and talked together for a few moments, and then moved over towards the lift.
Mendel waited and watched them, Logan talking gaily, the girl smiling and watching him intently through her smile. With her eyes she took possession of him, and Mendel was filled with misgiving when he heard Logan’s fat chuckle and the rustle and clatter of the gate as the lift descended. It reminded him oddly of the Demon King and the Fairy Queen in a pantomime he had once seen with Artie Beech, whose father used to get tickets for the gallery because he had play-bills in his shop window.