VHAPPY HAMPSTEADONthe morning of the day fixed for their expedition to Hampstead Heath she sent him roses—yellow roses. He took them across to his mother and gave them to her, saying:—“I do not need flowers. I am happy.”Golda laughed at him, and said:—“You are a big little man since you made the catch at the cricket.”“I don’t know what it is, but I am happy. It is no longer surprising to me that there are happy people in the world, and I think the Christians are not all such fools to wish to be happy. I am only astonished that they are happy with such little things.”“It is nothing,” said Golda. “They are not truly happy; they are only hiding away from themselves.”“But I am finding myself,” cried Mendel. “I shall no more paint fishes and onions. I shall paint only what I feel, and it will be beautiful. I am so clever I can paint anything I choose.”“Go to your work now,” said Golda. “You can boast as much as you please when the King has sent for you and told you you are the greatest artist in England. Go to your work.”He went back to his studio and there found a letter from Logan, giving his new address in Camden Town, and another from Mitchell, asking him why he was so unfriendly. This he answered at once:—“You are no longer my friend. You have despised and injured me. Superior as I am to you, you have thought it your part as a gentleman to try to keep me in my place. You have treated me as a kind of animal. You cannot see that as an artist I am the equal of all men, the highest and the lowest. My own poor people I do not expect to know this, but of an educated man I do expect it. You cannot see this, and I count you lower than the lowest, and as such I am prepared to know you, and not otherwise. I have changed completely. I no longer believe in the Detmold or in Calthrop or in any of the things I reverenced as a student. I prefer the Academy, for it does not pretend to be advanced, and is honest though asleep. I am no longer a student. I am an artist. You will always be an art student, and so I say good-bye to you, as one says good-bye to friends on a station-platform. The train moves and all their affectionate memories and longings cannot stop it. The train moves and I am in it, and I say good-bye to you without even looking out of the window.”This done, he sat down to work at a portrait of his father and mother, with which he was designing to eclipse his first exhibiting success. It seemed to him important that it should be finished. Hearing Issy come in, he shouted to him to come and sit instead of his father, who had given out that he was unwell and was indulging in a sleeping bout.Issy came shambling in, pale, tired, and unhappy. He sat as he was told, and said:—“I wish Harry would come back; the business is being too much for me.”“Oh! I shall soon be rich and then I’ll help you.”“There’s not much help for me,” said Issy. “I’m like father. There’s always something against me to keep me down. It seems funny to me thatpeople will give you so much money for something they don’t really want.”“Come and look at it,” said Mendel.Issy obeyed.“I don’t think it’s really like them. Why should anybody buy them who doesn’t know them?”He spoke so heavily and dully that Mendel found it hard to conceal his irritation. When Issy had gone back to his chair, he asked:—“What do you live for, Issy?”“Live?” said Issy, mystified.“Yes. What do you like best in the world?”“Playing cards. Playing cards. Every day there’s work and every night there’s Rosa, and on Saturday I play cards. Yes. I play cards; and, of course, you are always something to think about.”“What do you think about me?”“Oh! You will be rich and famous, and you will be able to choose among all the girls with money. It is like having a play always going on in the family. But I would rather play cards, and Rosa is not so bad as you all say she is. I am not a good husband to her, for I have moods and I cannot talk to her, for I cannot talk to anyone. What is there to say? She has her children, and she only wants more because she is a fool. It is not her fault.”“That’ll do, Issy. I’ve got all I want. I can’t get any more from you. Some day I’ll teach you how to be happy.”“Oh!” said Issy, with a sly leer. “I know how to be happy. I can’t see why anyone should want to have father and mother hanging on their walls.”He slunk away.How depressing he was! Poor old Issy! as much a part of the street as the doors and windows of the houses. He might move a hundred yards to another exactly similar street, but he wouldalways be the same. It was not his fault. Mendel knew the depths of devotion of which his brother was capable. It was devotion to his mother that kept him living round the corner, devotion to his father that tied him to the unprofitable business. The name of Kühler had attained the dignity of a brass-plate on the front door, and he would die rather than see it removed, at any rate in his father’s lifetime.For the first time Mendel faced his circumstances squarely. With something of a shock he thought of the family arriving at Liverpool Street and never in all these years moving more than half a mile away from it, and that in this amazing London, with its trains and buses to take you from end to end of it in a little over an hour. His mother had never been west of the Bank. She did not even know where Piccadilly Circus was, or the Detmold, or the National Gallery, or the Paris Café, or Calthrop’s studio, or any other important centre of life. Liverpool Street she knew, and outside Liverpool Street were the sea and Austria. . . . When there were no little happenings at home she would always fall back on Austria and the troubled days at the inn, and the soldiers who used to come in and ask to see the beautiful baby before they thought of ordering drinks, and her rich uncle who used to supply the barracks with potatoes and was so mean that he refused to give her any when she had not a penny in the world, and the neighbours who used to bring food so that the beautiful baby should not starve. . . . They stayed where they were, stormily passionate, yet with no sense of confinement, while he was drawn off into the swiftly moving whirligig of London, going from house to house, studio to studio, café to café, atmosphere to atmosphere, and all his passionate storms were spent upon nothing, were absorbed in the general movement, leaving him, tottering and dazed, in it, yet alien to it, discoveringno soul in it all and losing the clear knowledge of his own.Surely now that was ended. She had sent him the yellow roses, and he had given them to his mother to join the two whom he loved. They must have touched her face before they came to him, and Golda had buried her face in them.Impatiently he awaited the time for him to go to the Detmold. He put on a clean collar and a black coat, but then he remembered how the old Jews whom he asked to sit for him always put on clean clothes and clipped their beards, under the impression that he wanted to photograph them. In his clean collar and black coat he felt as though he were going to the photographer’s or to a wedding, and remembering how he had been dressed when he saw her for the first time on the stairs, he took out an old black shirt, a corduroy coat and trousers, and a red sash.He could not bring himself to wear the red sash. It reminded him of Mitchell, who had been with him when he bought it.It had been very hot. The walls and the pavements gave out a dry, stifling heat. The smell of the street outside came up in waves—a smell of women and babies, leather and kosher meat. He must wait for the cool weather, he thought, before he asked her to the studio again.“She is only a little girl,” he said to himself. “She is pretty, but she is only a little girl. I will tell her that she must not see Mitchell again, because he is not true. I will paint her portrait, and then I will not see her again, because she is only a little girl.”He sat in the window with the clock in front of him, and directly it said half-past four he clapped his hat on his head, seized the silver-knobbed stick which at that time was an indispensable part ofan artist’s apparel, and bolted as though he were late for a train.She was waiting for him. He took off his hat, but in his nervousness he could not speak, and as he could not remember which side of a lady he ought to walk, he bewildered her by dodging from one side to the other with a quick, catlike tread, so that she did not hear him, and whenever she turned to speak to him he was not there.“Wasn’t it a good picnic!” she said enthusiastically. “It’s the best picnic I’ve ever been to.”“They are usually pretty good,” he said lamely. “I think we’d better go by bus.”They mounted a bus and sat silently side by side.When they stopped by the Cobden statue he said:—“A friend of mine has just taken a studio in Camden Town. His name is Logan.”“Was he at the Detmold?”“No.”That settled Logan for her. She began to feel anxious. Was the afternoon going to be a failure? Why could she never, never get the better of her shyness? She wanted to make him happy because, on the whole, people had been beastly to him and said such horrid things about him. She wanted him to feel for himself, and not only through her, that the world was a very wonderful place, a place in which to be happy. He was so stiff and different, so taut and tightly strung up, that lounging, loose-limbed Mitchell seemed graceful compared with him. Yet there was something unforgettable about him, and he had always had for her the vivid romantic reality of the beautiful young men on the stage, who were creatures of a delicious, absurd world which she would never enter and never wished to enter: a world where young men opened their arms and young womensank into them and were provided with happiness for ever and ever. Her vigour rejected this world, for she knew and lived in a better, but all the same it had its charm and its curious reality. . . .She was not shy because she had kissed him. That had passed with the shifting light through the trees and the clouds in the sky. It had been vivid and true for that moment, but it had perished and fallen away like a drop of water, like a rainbow.He remembered it. As he sat by her side and could feel the warm life in her, it became terribly actual to him, the cool contact of her lips, and he was glad when the bus reached the yard with the painted swing-boats and he need no longer sit by her side. He had begun to feel subservient to her, and he would not have that. What Rosa was to Issy, what Golda was to his father, that should a woman be to him, for it was good and decent so. . . . He was almost sorry he had come. He was painfully shy, and knew that she was suffering under it.He walked so fast that she was hard put to keep up with him, but she swung out and would not be beaten, and managed his pace without losing her breath. Over to the wooded side of the Heath he took her, and stopped under a chestnut-tree.“Shall we sit down?” he said. “Or would you like to go on walking?”“I’d like to sit down,” she answered. “I love walking, but I can’t talk at the same time.”He sat down at once, without waiting for her to choose a spot.“This grass is nice and cool,” he said.It was wet, but he had no thought for her thin cotton frock.She sat a couple of yards away from him on the short turf and plunged her arm into the long, cool grass. Then she lay on her stomach and plucked a blade of grass and chewed it.“Thank you for sending me the roses. I gave them to my mother.”“I liked your mother.”“She liked you. She said: ‘That is a good girl.’ She is very quick at guessing what people are like.”“I’m glad she liked me.”Once again conversation died away, but she seemed content to lie there with her arms in the cool grass. Their round slenderness fascinated him. Her short hair hung over her face, so that he could only see the tip of her chin.Suddenly he asked her:—“Do you send flowers to Mitchell?”“Yes,” she said, and her head was lowered so that the tip of her chin was hidden by her hair.He said nothing, but he too lay on the grass, flat on his stomach, with his head on his arms. His heart began to thump, and, though he tried to control it, it would not be still. Without raising his head he said, in a choking voice that astonished him:—“My father fainted for love of my mother. When he heard her name he fainted away.”She said nothing, only in the long grass her fingers were still. Her white hands in the grass fascinated him, held his eyes transfixed, the green blades coming up through the white fingers that were so still. He stared at them as though they were some strange flower, and for him they had nothing to do with her at all. He drew himself near to them, never taking his eyes off them—white and green, white and green and pink at the finger-tips. He must touch them. They were cool, soft, and firm, soft as the petals of a rose.He grasped them like a child seizing a pretty toy, but when they were in his grasp he was no longer like a child. A single impulse thrilled through all his body and made it strong even as a giant. With one easy swing of his arm he pulled her to him, held her with a vast tenderness, and held her so,gazing into her face. Her lips parted, and he kissed them. . . .It was she who first found words:—“Oh Mendel! I do love you.”He was amazed at his own strength, at his own tenderness. . . . So that was a kiss! And this, this, this was love! It was incredible! How sweet and easy were his emotions. He was as free and light as the wind in the leaves.She had slipped from his arms, but she was singing through all his veins, she and no other, she and nothing else in the world. And he was in her, perfectly, beautifully aware of her body and of the ecstasy in it, of the tree above them, of the dove-coloured clouds, of the cool green grass, of the yellow earth crumbling out of the mound yonder, and of the ecstasy in them all.So for many moments they lay in silence, until as suddenly as it had come his strength left him, and he broke into a passionate babble of words:—“You must not send flowers to Mitchell, because he cannot love you and I can. He knows nothing, and I know a great deal. I know women and the ways of women, for many have loved me, but I have loved none but you. No woman has been my friend except my mother. I did not look for any woman to be like my mother. I am not an Englishman who can love with pretty words. I love, and it is like that tree, growing silently until it dies. It has stolen on me as softly as the night, and I sink into it as I sink into the night, to sleep. It is as though the dark night were suddenly filled with stars and all the stars had become flowers and poured their honey into my thoughts. When your white hands were in the grass they were like flowers and they seemed to belong to me, as all beautiful things belong to me because I can love them.”She came nearer to him and laid her hand on his, and she said:—“I am very, very happy.”And she laughed and added:—“Iwasglad when you made that catch.”He was beyond laughter. For him laughter was for trivial things. She had stopped the flow of his thoughts, the rush of his emotions up into his creative consciousness. Wave upon wave of passion surged through him, racked him, tortured him, tossing his soul this way and that, threatening to hurl it down and smash it on the hardness of his nature. He set his teeth and would not wince. If she could laugh she could know nothing of that. She was shallow, she was young. . . . Was it because he was a Jew that he seemed so old compared with her? . . . What was it she lacked that she could laugh and leave him to the torment she had provoked?But she was aware of the curious blankness that had come over his end of their twilight silence, and she suffered from it, thinking: “Am I an awful woman? Can I give nothing?” And she turned to him to give, and give all the rare treasures of her soul, of her heart, to lay them before him for his delight. But what she had already given had let loose a storm in him that blotted out all the beauty of the scene, all the loveliness of their love, the gift and the taking of it, and left him with only the dim light of her purity.Soon the storm passed and they had nothing but an easy delight in each other’s company, each turning to each as to a warm fire by which to laugh and talk and make merry.He told her stories of his childhood, of his brothers and his father, and Mr. Kuit, the thief, who had bought him his first suit; of his childish joy in painting, and there he stopped short. Of his misery he was unable to speak.“You do believe in yourself,” she said.“Why not?” he replied; “I am a man. When I hold my hands before my eyes they are real.They are flesh and blood. I must believe in them. And I am all flesh and blood. I must believe.”“And everything else is real to you.”“Everything that I love is real. And what I do not love I hate, so that is real too.”They wandered about the Heath until night came and the stars shone, and then they plunged into the glitter of London, where all people and things were deliciously fantastic and comic, flat and kinematographic, as though, if you walked round to the other side, you would discover that they were painted on one side only. It gave them the glorious illusion of being the only two living people in the world, for they and only they had loved since the world began, and all the other lovers were only people in a story, living happily ever after or coming to an end of their love, neither of which could happen to them because they were, always had been, and always would be in love.They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, where they encountered Mitchell, who had the effrontery to come and speak to them. He was very friendly and spoke as though nothing had happened. They told him they had been to Hampstead and recommended him to try it when he found London too stuffy.When he had gone away, Morrison said:—“I am going away soon.”“Going away? But you mustn’t go away.”“I have to go next week. My mother has fits of anxiety about my being in London every now and then, and she drags me off home. She has got one of them now. She can’t see that if any harm were going to happen to me it would have happened during my first year, when I didn’t know anything and was very lonely. I don’t think I’m very real to her, somehow.”She gave a little shiver of distaste at the thought of going home.“But you mustn’t go away,” said Mendel. “I want you, always.”“And I want to be with you, but if I refused to go home now, I should have to go for always, for I should have no money.”He was plunged into a dejected silence, and with hardly a word more he took her home.They had a whole week of this warm happiness. He abandoned every other thought, every other pursuit, every other friend. He put aside his work to paint her portrait, and she came every day to his studio. At night he hardly slept at all for his longing for the next day to come and bring her to his studio, that now seemed immense, airy, ample even for such a giant as he felt. . . . He adored her even when she laughed, even when she teased him. He even learned occasionally to laugh at himself. It was worth it to see the amazing happiness he gave her.One morning as he was painting her, he said:—“I can’t believe you are going away.”“It is true, more’s the pity.”“But you are not going, for I will marry you.”He said this in a matter-of-fact tone as he went on with his painting. The picture was coming on well and he was pleased with it. He stepped back and looked at it from different angles. It seemed a long time before she made the expected matter-of-fact reply, and he looked up at her. She was hanging her head and plucking at her skirt nervously. She heard him stop in his work, and she replied:—“I don’t . . . think . . . I want to marry you, Mendel. I don’t . . . think . . . I want to marry anybody.”“I’m making plenty of money and I can get commissions for portraits. I could make it up with Birnbaum. We could go to Italy together.”“Don’t make it harder for both of us, Mendel. . . . I don’t want . . . to marry.”“You will go back home, then?”“Please . . . please . . .” she implored him.A fury began to rise in him. He stamped his foot on the ground and struck his brush across the picture. He made a tremendous effort to recover himself, but before he could say another word she had slipped through the door and was gone. He darted after her, and reached the front-door just in time to see her running as hard as she could down the street and round the corner.Just as he was, in his shirt-sleeves, hatless and collarless, he went in to see his mother. He was white-hot with rage, and he walked up to her and looked her up and down as though he were trying to persuade himself that she was to blame.“What do you think the news is now?”Golda put her hand to her heart and looked at him fearfully as she shook her head.“I’ve been refused,” he said, “refused by the Christian girl.”“Refused!” cried Golda, who had never heard of such a thing as a girl refusing to marry a rich young man.“Yes. I proposed to her and she refused.”“The Christians are all alike,” said Golda. “They keep themselves to themselves, and you must do the same.”She took a smoked herring from the cupboard and cut it into portions.“And when your time for marrying comes you must look among the Jews, for the Jews are good people. No Jewish girl would serve you a trick like that. Jewish girls know that they must marry and they are good. But she is young, and you are young, and you will both forget.”
ONthe morning of the day fixed for their expedition to Hampstead Heath she sent him roses—yellow roses. He took them across to his mother and gave them to her, saying:—
“I do not need flowers. I am happy.”
Golda laughed at him, and said:—
“You are a big little man since you made the catch at the cricket.”
“I don’t know what it is, but I am happy. It is no longer surprising to me that there are happy people in the world, and I think the Christians are not all such fools to wish to be happy. I am only astonished that they are happy with such little things.”
“It is nothing,” said Golda. “They are not truly happy; they are only hiding away from themselves.”
“But I am finding myself,” cried Mendel. “I shall no more paint fishes and onions. I shall paint only what I feel, and it will be beautiful. I am so clever I can paint anything I choose.”
“Go to your work now,” said Golda. “You can boast as much as you please when the King has sent for you and told you you are the greatest artist in England. Go to your work.”
He went back to his studio and there found a letter from Logan, giving his new address in Camden Town, and another from Mitchell, asking him why he was so unfriendly. This he answered at once:—
“You are no longer my friend. You have despised and injured me. Superior as I am to you, you have thought it your part as a gentleman to try to keep me in my place. You have treated me as a kind of animal. You cannot see that as an artist I am the equal of all men, the highest and the lowest. My own poor people I do not expect to know this, but of an educated man I do expect it. You cannot see this, and I count you lower than the lowest, and as such I am prepared to know you, and not otherwise. I have changed completely. I no longer believe in the Detmold or in Calthrop or in any of the things I reverenced as a student. I prefer the Academy, for it does not pretend to be advanced, and is honest though asleep. I am no longer a student. I am an artist. You will always be an art student, and so I say good-bye to you, as one says good-bye to friends on a station-platform. The train moves and all their affectionate memories and longings cannot stop it. The train moves and I am in it, and I say good-bye to you without even looking out of the window.”
This done, he sat down to work at a portrait of his father and mother, with which he was designing to eclipse his first exhibiting success. It seemed to him important that it should be finished. Hearing Issy come in, he shouted to him to come and sit instead of his father, who had given out that he was unwell and was indulging in a sleeping bout.
Issy came shambling in, pale, tired, and unhappy. He sat as he was told, and said:—
“I wish Harry would come back; the business is being too much for me.”
“Oh! I shall soon be rich and then I’ll help you.”
“There’s not much help for me,” said Issy. “I’m like father. There’s always something against me to keep me down. It seems funny to me thatpeople will give you so much money for something they don’t really want.”
“Come and look at it,” said Mendel.
Issy obeyed.
“I don’t think it’s really like them. Why should anybody buy them who doesn’t know them?”
He spoke so heavily and dully that Mendel found it hard to conceal his irritation. When Issy had gone back to his chair, he asked:—
“What do you live for, Issy?”
“Live?” said Issy, mystified.
“Yes. What do you like best in the world?”
“Playing cards. Playing cards. Every day there’s work and every night there’s Rosa, and on Saturday I play cards. Yes. I play cards; and, of course, you are always something to think about.”
“What do you think about me?”
“Oh! You will be rich and famous, and you will be able to choose among all the girls with money. It is like having a play always going on in the family. But I would rather play cards, and Rosa is not so bad as you all say she is. I am not a good husband to her, for I have moods and I cannot talk to her, for I cannot talk to anyone. What is there to say? She has her children, and she only wants more because she is a fool. It is not her fault.”
“That’ll do, Issy. I’ve got all I want. I can’t get any more from you. Some day I’ll teach you how to be happy.”
“Oh!” said Issy, with a sly leer. “I know how to be happy. I can’t see why anyone should want to have father and mother hanging on their walls.”
He slunk away.
How depressing he was! Poor old Issy! as much a part of the street as the doors and windows of the houses. He might move a hundred yards to another exactly similar street, but he wouldalways be the same. It was not his fault. Mendel knew the depths of devotion of which his brother was capable. It was devotion to his mother that kept him living round the corner, devotion to his father that tied him to the unprofitable business. The name of Kühler had attained the dignity of a brass-plate on the front door, and he would die rather than see it removed, at any rate in his father’s lifetime.
For the first time Mendel faced his circumstances squarely. With something of a shock he thought of the family arriving at Liverpool Street and never in all these years moving more than half a mile away from it, and that in this amazing London, with its trains and buses to take you from end to end of it in a little over an hour. His mother had never been west of the Bank. She did not even know where Piccadilly Circus was, or the Detmold, or the National Gallery, or the Paris Café, or Calthrop’s studio, or any other important centre of life. Liverpool Street she knew, and outside Liverpool Street were the sea and Austria. . . . When there were no little happenings at home she would always fall back on Austria and the troubled days at the inn, and the soldiers who used to come in and ask to see the beautiful baby before they thought of ordering drinks, and her rich uncle who used to supply the barracks with potatoes and was so mean that he refused to give her any when she had not a penny in the world, and the neighbours who used to bring food so that the beautiful baby should not starve. . . . They stayed where they were, stormily passionate, yet with no sense of confinement, while he was drawn off into the swiftly moving whirligig of London, going from house to house, studio to studio, café to café, atmosphere to atmosphere, and all his passionate storms were spent upon nothing, were absorbed in the general movement, leaving him, tottering and dazed, in it, yet alien to it, discoveringno soul in it all and losing the clear knowledge of his own.
Surely now that was ended. She had sent him the yellow roses, and he had given them to his mother to join the two whom he loved. They must have touched her face before they came to him, and Golda had buried her face in them.
Impatiently he awaited the time for him to go to the Detmold. He put on a clean collar and a black coat, but then he remembered how the old Jews whom he asked to sit for him always put on clean clothes and clipped their beards, under the impression that he wanted to photograph them. In his clean collar and black coat he felt as though he were going to the photographer’s or to a wedding, and remembering how he had been dressed when he saw her for the first time on the stairs, he took out an old black shirt, a corduroy coat and trousers, and a red sash.
He could not bring himself to wear the red sash. It reminded him of Mitchell, who had been with him when he bought it.
It had been very hot. The walls and the pavements gave out a dry, stifling heat. The smell of the street outside came up in waves—a smell of women and babies, leather and kosher meat. He must wait for the cool weather, he thought, before he asked her to the studio again.
“She is only a little girl,” he said to himself. “She is pretty, but she is only a little girl. I will tell her that she must not see Mitchell again, because he is not true. I will paint her portrait, and then I will not see her again, because she is only a little girl.”
He sat in the window with the clock in front of him, and directly it said half-past four he clapped his hat on his head, seized the silver-knobbed stick which at that time was an indispensable part ofan artist’s apparel, and bolted as though he were late for a train.
She was waiting for him. He took off his hat, but in his nervousness he could not speak, and as he could not remember which side of a lady he ought to walk, he bewildered her by dodging from one side to the other with a quick, catlike tread, so that she did not hear him, and whenever she turned to speak to him he was not there.
“Wasn’t it a good picnic!” she said enthusiastically. “It’s the best picnic I’ve ever been to.”
“They are usually pretty good,” he said lamely. “I think we’d better go by bus.”
They mounted a bus and sat silently side by side.
When they stopped by the Cobden statue he said:—
“A friend of mine has just taken a studio in Camden Town. His name is Logan.”
“Was he at the Detmold?”
“No.”
That settled Logan for her. She began to feel anxious. Was the afternoon going to be a failure? Why could she never, never get the better of her shyness? She wanted to make him happy because, on the whole, people had been beastly to him and said such horrid things about him. She wanted him to feel for himself, and not only through her, that the world was a very wonderful place, a place in which to be happy. He was so stiff and different, so taut and tightly strung up, that lounging, loose-limbed Mitchell seemed graceful compared with him. Yet there was something unforgettable about him, and he had always had for her the vivid romantic reality of the beautiful young men on the stage, who were creatures of a delicious, absurd world which she would never enter and never wished to enter: a world where young men opened their arms and young womensank into them and were provided with happiness for ever and ever. Her vigour rejected this world, for she knew and lived in a better, but all the same it had its charm and its curious reality. . . .
She was not shy because she had kissed him. That had passed with the shifting light through the trees and the clouds in the sky. It had been vivid and true for that moment, but it had perished and fallen away like a drop of water, like a rainbow.
He remembered it. As he sat by her side and could feel the warm life in her, it became terribly actual to him, the cool contact of her lips, and he was glad when the bus reached the yard with the painted swing-boats and he need no longer sit by her side. He had begun to feel subservient to her, and he would not have that. What Rosa was to Issy, what Golda was to his father, that should a woman be to him, for it was good and decent so. . . . He was almost sorry he had come. He was painfully shy, and knew that she was suffering under it.
He walked so fast that she was hard put to keep up with him, but she swung out and would not be beaten, and managed his pace without losing her breath. Over to the wooded side of the Heath he took her, and stopped under a chestnut-tree.
“Shall we sit down?” he said. “Or would you like to go on walking?”
“I’d like to sit down,” she answered. “I love walking, but I can’t talk at the same time.”
He sat down at once, without waiting for her to choose a spot.
“This grass is nice and cool,” he said.
It was wet, but he had no thought for her thin cotton frock.
She sat a couple of yards away from him on the short turf and plunged her arm into the long, cool grass. Then she lay on her stomach and plucked a blade of grass and chewed it.
“Thank you for sending me the roses. I gave them to my mother.”
“I liked your mother.”
“She liked you. She said: ‘That is a good girl.’ She is very quick at guessing what people are like.”
“I’m glad she liked me.”
Once again conversation died away, but she seemed content to lie there with her arms in the cool grass. Their round slenderness fascinated him. Her short hair hung over her face, so that he could only see the tip of her chin.
Suddenly he asked her:—
“Do you send flowers to Mitchell?”
“Yes,” she said, and her head was lowered so that the tip of her chin was hidden by her hair.
He said nothing, but he too lay on the grass, flat on his stomach, with his head on his arms. His heart began to thump, and, though he tried to control it, it would not be still. Without raising his head he said, in a choking voice that astonished him:—
“My father fainted for love of my mother. When he heard her name he fainted away.”
She said nothing, only in the long grass her fingers were still. Her white hands in the grass fascinated him, held his eyes transfixed, the green blades coming up through the white fingers that were so still. He stared at them as though they were some strange flower, and for him they had nothing to do with her at all. He drew himself near to them, never taking his eyes off them—white and green, white and green and pink at the finger-tips. He must touch them. They were cool, soft, and firm, soft as the petals of a rose.
He grasped them like a child seizing a pretty toy, but when they were in his grasp he was no longer like a child. A single impulse thrilled through all his body and made it strong even as a giant. With one easy swing of his arm he pulled her to him, held her with a vast tenderness, and held her so,gazing into her face. Her lips parted, and he kissed them. . . .
It was she who first found words:—
“Oh Mendel! I do love you.”
He was amazed at his own strength, at his own tenderness. . . . So that was a kiss! And this, this, this was love! It was incredible! How sweet and easy were his emotions. He was as free and light as the wind in the leaves.
She had slipped from his arms, but she was singing through all his veins, she and no other, she and nothing else in the world. And he was in her, perfectly, beautifully aware of her body and of the ecstasy in it, of the tree above them, of the dove-coloured clouds, of the cool green grass, of the yellow earth crumbling out of the mound yonder, and of the ecstasy in them all.
So for many moments they lay in silence, until as suddenly as it had come his strength left him, and he broke into a passionate babble of words:—
“You must not send flowers to Mitchell, because he cannot love you and I can. He knows nothing, and I know a great deal. I know women and the ways of women, for many have loved me, but I have loved none but you. No woman has been my friend except my mother. I did not look for any woman to be like my mother. I am not an Englishman who can love with pretty words. I love, and it is like that tree, growing silently until it dies. It has stolen on me as softly as the night, and I sink into it as I sink into the night, to sleep. It is as though the dark night were suddenly filled with stars and all the stars had become flowers and poured their honey into my thoughts. When your white hands were in the grass they were like flowers and they seemed to belong to me, as all beautiful things belong to me because I can love them.”
She came nearer to him and laid her hand on his, and she said:—
“I am very, very happy.”
And she laughed and added:—
“Iwasglad when you made that catch.”
He was beyond laughter. For him laughter was for trivial things. She had stopped the flow of his thoughts, the rush of his emotions up into his creative consciousness. Wave upon wave of passion surged through him, racked him, tortured him, tossing his soul this way and that, threatening to hurl it down and smash it on the hardness of his nature. He set his teeth and would not wince. If she could laugh she could know nothing of that. She was shallow, she was young. . . . Was it because he was a Jew that he seemed so old compared with her? . . . What was it she lacked that she could laugh and leave him to the torment she had provoked?
But she was aware of the curious blankness that had come over his end of their twilight silence, and she suffered from it, thinking: “Am I an awful woman? Can I give nothing?” And she turned to him to give, and give all the rare treasures of her soul, of her heart, to lay them before him for his delight. But what she had already given had let loose a storm in him that blotted out all the beauty of the scene, all the loveliness of their love, the gift and the taking of it, and left him with only the dim light of her purity.
Soon the storm passed and they had nothing but an easy delight in each other’s company, each turning to each as to a warm fire by which to laugh and talk and make merry.
He told her stories of his childhood, of his brothers and his father, and Mr. Kuit, the thief, who had bought him his first suit; of his childish joy in painting, and there he stopped short. Of his misery he was unable to speak.
“You do believe in yourself,” she said.
“Why not?” he replied; “I am a man. When I hold my hands before my eyes they are real.They are flesh and blood. I must believe in them. And I am all flesh and blood. I must believe.”
“And everything else is real to you.”
“Everything that I love is real. And what I do not love I hate, so that is real too.”
They wandered about the Heath until night came and the stars shone, and then they plunged into the glitter of London, where all people and things were deliciously fantastic and comic, flat and kinematographic, as though, if you walked round to the other side, you would discover that they were painted on one side only. It gave them the glorious illusion of being the only two living people in the world, for they and only they had loved since the world began, and all the other lovers were only people in a story, living happily ever after or coming to an end of their love, neither of which could happen to them because they were, always had been, and always would be in love.
They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, where they encountered Mitchell, who had the effrontery to come and speak to them. He was very friendly and spoke as though nothing had happened. They told him they had been to Hampstead and recommended him to try it when he found London too stuffy.
When he had gone away, Morrison said:—
“I am going away soon.”
“Going away? But you mustn’t go away.”
“I have to go next week. My mother has fits of anxiety about my being in London every now and then, and she drags me off home. She has got one of them now. She can’t see that if any harm were going to happen to me it would have happened during my first year, when I didn’t know anything and was very lonely. I don’t think I’m very real to her, somehow.”
She gave a little shiver of distaste at the thought of going home.
“But you mustn’t go away,” said Mendel. “I want you, always.”
“And I want to be with you, but if I refused to go home now, I should have to go for always, for I should have no money.”
He was plunged into a dejected silence, and with hardly a word more he took her home.
They had a whole week of this warm happiness. He abandoned every other thought, every other pursuit, every other friend. He put aside his work to paint her portrait, and she came every day to his studio. At night he hardly slept at all for his longing for the next day to come and bring her to his studio, that now seemed immense, airy, ample even for such a giant as he felt. . . . He adored her even when she laughed, even when she teased him. He even learned occasionally to laugh at himself. It was worth it to see the amazing happiness he gave her.
One morning as he was painting her, he said:—
“I can’t believe you are going away.”
“It is true, more’s the pity.”
“But you are not going, for I will marry you.”
He said this in a matter-of-fact tone as he went on with his painting. The picture was coming on well and he was pleased with it. He stepped back and looked at it from different angles. It seemed a long time before she made the expected matter-of-fact reply, and he looked up at her. She was hanging her head and plucking at her skirt nervously. She heard him stop in his work, and she replied:—
“I don’t . . . think . . . I want to marry you, Mendel. I don’t . . . think . . . I want to marry anybody.”
“I’m making plenty of money and I can get commissions for portraits. I could make it up with Birnbaum. We could go to Italy together.”
“Don’t make it harder for both of us, Mendel. . . . I don’t want . . . to marry.”
“You will go back home, then?”
“Please . . . please . . .” she implored him.
A fury began to rise in him. He stamped his foot on the ground and struck his brush across the picture. He made a tremendous effort to recover himself, but before he could say another word she had slipped through the door and was gone. He darted after her, and reached the front-door just in time to see her running as hard as she could down the street and round the corner.
Just as he was, in his shirt-sleeves, hatless and collarless, he went in to see his mother. He was white-hot with rage, and he walked up to her and looked her up and down as though he were trying to persuade himself that she was to blame.
“What do you think the news is now?”
Golda put her hand to her heart and looked at him fearfully as she shook her head.
“I’ve been refused,” he said, “refused by the Christian girl.”
“Refused!” cried Golda, who had never heard of such a thing as a girl refusing to marry a rich young man.
“Yes. I proposed to her and she refused.”
“The Christians are all alike,” said Golda. “They keep themselves to themselves, and you must do the same.”
She took a smoked herring from the cupboard and cut it into portions.
“And when your time for marrying comes you must look among the Jews, for the Jews are good people. No Jewish girl would serve you a trick like that. Jewish girls know that they must marry and they are good. But she is young, and you are young, and you will both forget.”