VICAMDEN TOWNFROMthe magnificent studio in Hammersmith to two rooms in Camden Town Mr. James Logan removed his worldly goods, a paint-box, half-a-dozen canvases, two pairs of trousers, three shirts, a “Life of Napoleon” in two volumes, and a number of photographs of famous pictures. The magnificent studio had been lent to him by the mistress of its owner, who had returned unexpectedly from abroad, and Mr. James Logan’s departure from it was hurried, but unperturbed.“In my time,” he said, “I have kept Fortune busy, but her tricks leave me unmoved. She will get tired of it some day and leave me alone.”All the same he did not relish the change. He was nearly thirty and had tasted sufficient comfort to relish it and to prize it. Also he could not forget the ambitions with which he had come to London five years before. In the North he had won success by storm, and he could not understand any other tactics. He was an extraordinary man and expected immediate recognition of the fact. Upon his own mind his personality had so powerful an effect that he was blind to the fact that it did not have a similar effect upon the minds of others. Women and young men he could always stir into admiration, but men older than himself were only affronted. He knew it and used to curse them:—“These clods, these hods, these glue-faced ticks have no more sap in them than a withered tree.They hate me as a mule hates a stallion, and for the same reason. May God and Mary have mercy on what little is left of their souls by the time they come to judgment!”He cursed them now as he laid his trousers on the vast new double-bed he had bought and went into his front room to arrange his easel and canvas for work. Whatever happened to him he would go on painting, because he saw himself like that, standing as firm as a rock before his easel, painting, while the world, for all he cared, went to rack and ruin. What else could happen to a world that refused to recognize its artists?Painting was truly a joy to him. He loved the actual dabbling with the colours, laying them out on his palette, mixing them, evolving rare shades; he loved the fiery concentration and absorption in the making of a picture; the renewed power of sight when he turned from a picture to the world; the glorious nervous energy that came thrilling through his fingers in moments of concentration; the feeling of the superiority of this power to all others in the world. And so, whatever happened, he turned to his easel and painted. Love, debt, passion, quarrels, all the disturbances of life came and went, but painting remained, inexhaustible. So he had been happy, free, unfettered, gay, avoiding all responsibility because it was his formula that the artist’s only responsibility is to his art.He was doubly happy now because he knew he had made an impression on a young man whose sincerity and vigour of purpose he could not but respect. He was himself singularly impressionable, and like a sponge for sucking up the colour of any strong personality. And Mendel had the further attraction for him that he was pure London, of the shifting, motley London that Logan, as a provincial, adored. This London he had touched at many points, but never througha strong living soul that had, and most loyally acknowledged, London as its home.Logan’s visit to Mendel in the East End had been one of the great events of his life. Through it he had found his feet where he had been floundering, though, of course, happily and excitedly enough.He told himself that now he was going to settle down to work, to the great productive period of his life, such as was vouchsafed to every real artist who was tough enough to pay for it in suffering. He would rescue Mendel’s genius from the Detmold and the ossified advanced painters, and together they would smash the English habit of following French art a generation late, and they would lay the foundations of a genuine English art, a metropolitan art, an art that grew naturally out of the life of the central city of the world.Logan always worked by programme, but hitherto he had changed his programme once a week. Now he was sure that this was the programme of his life. It would be amended, of course, by inspiration, but its groundwork was permanent. He was enthusiastic over it. . . . Of course, this was what he had always been seeking, and hitherto he had been fighting the London which absorbed the talents of the country, masticated them, digested them, and evacuated them in the shape of successful painters for whom neither life nor art had any meaning, or in the shape of vicious wrecks who crawled from public-house to public-house and died in hospitals.It was time that was stopped. It was time for London to be made to recognize that it had a soul, and this generation must begin the task, for never before had a generation been so faced with the blank impossibility of accepting the work, thought, and faith of its predecessor. Never had it been so easy to slip out of the stream oftradition, for never had tradition so completely disappeared underground.“‘He that hath eyes to see, let him see,’” quoth Logan, and he hurled himself into his work, dancing to and fro, squaring his shoulders at it as though the picture were an adversary in a boxing-match.At half-past four he laid down his brushes and began to arrange the room, pinning photographs on the walls, and unpacking certain articles of furniture, as a rug, a great chair, and mattresses to make a divan, which he had bought that morning. Every now and then he ran to the window, threw up the sash, and looked up and down the street.At last with a tremor of excitement he leaned out and waved his hand, shut the window, and ran downstairs. In a moment or two he returned with the girl of the Tube station. She was wearing the same clothes, with the addition of a cheap fur boa, and she panted a little from the run upstairs with him.“I’m glad you came,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”“Oh! It’s not far from where I live,” she said. “But you are in a mess.”“I’ve only just got in. I would have asked you to my old place, but I had to leave.”“So you’re a nartist,” she said. “I thought you were something funny.”“Funny!” snorted Logan. “I call a shop-walker funny; or a banker, for that matter, or a millionaire. An artist is the most natural thing to be in the world. . . . Take your hat and gloves off and give me a hand, and then we’ll have tea.”“Oh! I love my tea.”“I know all about tea. I get it from a friend of mine in the City. I know how to make it, too.”They worked together, arranging, dusting,keeping deliberately apart and eyeing each other surreptitiously. He liked her slow, heavy, indolent movements, and she exaggerated them for him. She liked his quick, firm, decisive actions, and he accentuated them for her; and she liked his thick, black hair and his strong hands.He picked up the great chair and held it at arm’s-length.“Oo! You are strong,” she said.“I could hold you up like that.”“I’d like to see you try,” and she gave a little giggle of protest.“I will if I don’t like you,” said he, “and I’ll let you drop and break your leg.”She went off into peals of laughter, and he laughed too.“It’s such a jolly day,” he said. “It only needed you to come to make everything perfect.”“What made you speak to me the other night?” she asked.“I liked the look of you.”“But I’m not that sort, you know.”“It isn’t a question of being that sort. I wanted to speak to you, and that was enough for me. Sit down and have some tea.”The kettle was boiling, and he had already warmed the pot. He measured out the tea carefully, poured the water onto it, and gave her a blue china cup. He produced an old biscuit-tin containing some French pastry, and then sat on the floor while she consumed the lot.It gave him great pleasure to see her eat, and he liked her healthy, childish greed. She had the face of a spoiled child, a very soft skin, and plump, yielding flesh. He liked that. It soothed and comforted him to look at her, while at the same time he was irritated by her inward plumpness and easiness.“You’ve always had a good time,” he said.“Oh yes! I’ve seen to that.”“You’re not a London girl.”“No; Yorkshire.”“I’m from Lancashire.”“Eeh! lad,” she said, her whole voice altering and deepening into an astonishingly full note, “are ye fra’ Lancashire? Eeh! a’m fair clemmed wi’ London. Eeh! I am glad ye coom fra’ Lancashire.”“What are you doing in London?”“I’m working in Oxford Street, though not one of the big shops.”“Like it?”“M’m! Well enough.”“Of course you don’t, handing out laces and ribbons——”“’Tisn’t laces and ribbons. It’s corsets.”“Corsets, then, to women who haven’t a tenth of your looks or your vitality.”“It can’t be helped if they have the money and I haven’t, can it?”“Money doesn’t matter. What’s money to you, with all the rich life in you? Money cannot buy that, nor can it buy what will satisfy you.”“And what’s that?”“Love and freedom.”“Ooh! you are a talker.”“I’m not flirting with you. I haven’t got time for that.”He laid his hand on her foot, which was covered with a thin cotton stocking. She did not move it.“You needn’t stare at me like that,” she said, with a curious thickness in her voice.“I can’t help staring,” he answered, “when I mean what I say.” He pressed his lips together and scowled, and shook her foot playfully. There was an exhilarating pleasure in startling and mastering her by directness. It was like peeling the bark off a stick. The thin layers of affectation came off easily and cleanly, leaving bare the white sappy smoothness of her innocent sensuality.“I do mean what I say,” he added. “Why should we beat about the bush? I asked you to come to-day because I wanted you. You came because you knew I wanted you.”“You asked me to tea.”“All right. And you’ll stay to dinner. People have made love to you before.”“Well, no . . . yes. . . . Not like . . .”“Don’t tell lies,” he said. “You saw me at the station long before I saw you, and you wanted me to see you. That was why you stayed at the booking-office.”“You were with such a pretty boy,” she said.“Boy! You’re not old enough to care for pretty boys.”“But hewaspretty.”“Be quiet!” he said, kneeling by her side. “You may want me to take weeks over making all sorts of foolish advances to you, but I’m not going to waste time. I’ve wasted too much time over that sort of rubbish. We both know what we want and you are going to stay with me.”“No.”“I say yes.”“No.” And she sprang to her feet and walked to the door. There she turned. He had picked up her gloves.“Will you give me my gloves, please?”“No.”“Will you give me my gloves?”“No.”“Then I shall go without them.”“Very well. Good-bye.”“If I stay, will you promise not to talk like that?”“I don’t want you to stay under those circumstances.”“You’re an insulting beast.”“Not at all. I honour your womanhood by not pretending that it isn’t there.”“Will you give me my gloves?”She ran across and tried to snatch them out of his hand. He gripped and held her, and she gave a wild laugh as he kissed her.She clung to him as he let her sink back into the great chair. She lay with her eyes closed and her lips parted while he sat and poured himself out another cup of tea. His hand was shaking so that he spilled some tea on his new rug.“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll give you a week to get used to me, and if at the end of that time you don’t like me, you can go.”“I haven’t any friends,” she said in a low voice, “and you get sick of girls and the shop. You get sick of going out in the evening up and down the streets and into the cinemas, and finding some damn fool to take you to a music-hall. Such a lot of people and nobody to know.”“There’s a lot of fun in living with an artist,” he said. “You meet queer people and amusing women, and you wouldn’t find me dull to live with.”“I felt queer as I came near the house,” she said, “as though I knew something was going to happen. I feel very queer now.”“That’s love,” said Logan grimly. “Love isn’t what you thought it was.”“You must let me go now.”“When will you come again?”“Never.”“Oh yes, you will.”“Stop it!” she cried. “Stop it! I’m not going to be flummoxed by the like of you.”“But you are,” he said. “You poor darling!”He took her hand and stroked it tenderly.“Don’t you see that you are flummoxed by something that is stronger than both of us? I’m shaken by it, and I’m whipcord. We’re poor starving people, God help us! and we can save each other. We knew we could do it at once,when we met. . . . If I said all the pretty things in the world it wouldn’t help. We’re too far gone for that. When you’re starving you don’t want chocolates. . . . I’m only saying what I know. It is true of myself. If I have made a mistake about you, I am sorry. You can go. . . . Have I made a mistake?”For answer she turned towards him, gazed at him with glazing eyes, raised her arms, and drew him into them.A week later Nelly Oliver dined with Logan and Mendel at the Pot-au-Feu. They had a special dinner and drank champagne, for it was what Logan called the “nuptial feast.”Oliver, as they called her, was flushed with excitement, and kept on telling Mendel that he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen. She called Logan “Pip”—“Pip darling,” “Pip dearest,” “Pipkin” and “Pipsy”—because she said he was like an orange-pip, bitter and hard in the midst of sweetness.“Pip says you’re a genius,” she said to Mendel. “What does he mean?”Mendel disliked her, though he tried hard to persuade himself that she was charming. He was baffled by the solemnity with which Logan was taking her, for she seemed to him the type made for occasional solace and not for companionship. Exploring her with his mind and instinct, she seemed to him soft and pulpy, not unlike an orange, and if she and Logan were to set up a common life, then he would be like a pip indeed. . . . How could he explain to her the nature of genius? Can you explain the night to an insect that lives but an hour in the morning?“I don’t know,” he said brusquely.Logan was dimly aware that his friend and his girl were not pleasing each other, and he set himself to keep them amused. He succeededfairly well, but his humour was forced, for he was under the spell of the girl and the thought of the adventure to which she had consented. She knew it, and was loud and shrill and triumphant, continually setting Mendel’s teeth on edge, for the purity of his instinct was disgusted by the blurring and swamping of life by any emotion, and the quality of hers was not such as to win indulgence.“Logan will tell you what genius is,” he said.“She’ll find that out soon enough if she lives with me,” growled Logan a little pompously.Oliver put her head on one side and looked languishingly at Mendel as she drawled:—“It’s a pity you haven’t got a nice girl. Then there would be four of us.”“Don’t be a fool!” snapped Logan. “What does he want with girls at his age?”Oliver’s lips trembled and she pouted in protest.“I only thought it would be nice to round off the party. When you’re in love you can’t help wanting everybody else to have some too.”Mendel was torn between dislike of her and admiration of Logan’s masterful handling of the problem of desire. . . . No nonsense about getting married or falling in love. He saw the woman he wanted and took her and made her his property, and the woman could not but acquiesce, as Oliver had done. In a dozen different ways she acknowledged Logan’s lordship, even in her deliberate efforts to exasperate him. Their relationship seemed to Mendel simple and excellent, and he envied them. How easy his life would become if he could do the same! What freedom there would be in having a woman to throw in her lot with his! It would settle all his difficulties, absolve him from his dependence on his family, and deliver him from the attentions of unworthy women.“How shall we dress her?” asked Logan.Mendel took out his sketch-book and drew arough portrait of Oliver in a gown tight-fitting above the waist and full in the skirt.“I should look a guy in that,” she said. “It’s nothing like the fashion.”“You’ve done with fashion,” said Logan. “You’ve done with the world of shops and snobs and bored, idiotic women. You’re above all that now. In the first place there won’t be any money for fashion, and in the second place there’s no room in our kind of life for rubbish. You’re a free woman now, and don’t you forget it, or I’ll knock your head off.”“But it’s a horrible, ugly dress,” said Oliver, almost in tears.“It’s what you’re going to wear. I’ll buy the stuff to-morrow and make it myself. What colour would you like?”“I won’t wear it.”“Then you can go back to your shop.”“You know I can’t. I’ve said good-bye to all the girls.”“Then you’ll wear the dress.”“I shan’t.”“For God’s sake don’t quarrel,” said Mendel. “One would think you had been married for ten years. Let her wear what she likes until she wants some new clothes.”“Highty Tighty! Little boy!” sang Oliver. “You talk as though I were a little girl.”“You behave like one,” snapped Mendel, and her face was overcast with a cloud of malignant sulkiness.They went on to a music-hall, where Logan and she sat with their arms locked and their shoulders pressed together, whispering and babbling to each other.Mendel sat bolt upright with his arms folded, staring at the stage but seeing nothing, so lost was he in the contemplation of the strange turnof affairs by which the adventure which had promised to lead him straight to art had deposited him in a muddy little pool of life. He would not submit to it. He would not surrender Logan and all the hopes he had aroused. Prepared as he had been to follow Logan through fire, he would not shrink when the way led through the morass. Friendship was to him no fair-weather luxury, and nothing but falsehood or faithlessness in his friend could make him relinquish it.He told himself that Logan would soon tire of it, that Oliver would go the way of her kind. She was, after all, better than Hetty Finch, since she had a capacity for childish enjoyment.She revelled in the sentimental ditties and the suggestive humours of the comedians, pressed closer and closer to Logan, and grew elated and strangely exalted as the evening wore on. And as they left the music-hall she gripped Mendel’s arm and brought her face close to his and whispered:—“Do wish me luck, Kühler. Give me a kiss for luck.”He kissed her and mumbled: “Good luck!”“Come and see us to-morrow,” she said. “We shall be all right to-morrow.”“Oh, come along!” cried Logan, dragging her away; and Mendel stood in the glaring light of the portico and watched them as, arm in arm, they were swallowed up in the crowd hurrying and jostling its way home to the dark outer regions of London.He had an appalling sense of being left out of it. Everything passed and he remained. He lived in a circle of light into which, like moths, came timid, blinking, lovable figures, and he loved them; but they passed on and were lost in the tumultuous, heaving darkness of life, into which alone he could not enter. . . . Did he desire to enter it? He did not know, but he was hungry for something that lay in it, or, perhaps, beyond it.
FROMthe magnificent studio in Hammersmith to two rooms in Camden Town Mr. James Logan removed his worldly goods, a paint-box, half-a-dozen canvases, two pairs of trousers, three shirts, a “Life of Napoleon” in two volumes, and a number of photographs of famous pictures. The magnificent studio had been lent to him by the mistress of its owner, who had returned unexpectedly from abroad, and Mr. James Logan’s departure from it was hurried, but unperturbed.
“In my time,” he said, “I have kept Fortune busy, but her tricks leave me unmoved. She will get tired of it some day and leave me alone.”
All the same he did not relish the change. He was nearly thirty and had tasted sufficient comfort to relish it and to prize it. Also he could not forget the ambitions with which he had come to London five years before. In the North he had won success by storm, and he could not understand any other tactics. He was an extraordinary man and expected immediate recognition of the fact. Upon his own mind his personality had so powerful an effect that he was blind to the fact that it did not have a similar effect upon the minds of others. Women and young men he could always stir into admiration, but men older than himself were only affronted. He knew it and used to curse them:—
“These clods, these hods, these glue-faced ticks have no more sap in them than a withered tree.They hate me as a mule hates a stallion, and for the same reason. May God and Mary have mercy on what little is left of their souls by the time they come to judgment!”
He cursed them now as he laid his trousers on the vast new double-bed he had bought and went into his front room to arrange his easel and canvas for work. Whatever happened to him he would go on painting, because he saw himself like that, standing as firm as a rock before his easel, painting, while the world, for all he cared, went to rack and ruin. What else could happen to a world that refused to recognize its artists?
Painting was truly a joy to him. He loved the actual dabbling with the colours, laying them out on his palette, mixing them, evolving rare shades; he loved the fiery concentration and absorption in the making of a picture; the renewed power of sight when he turned from a picture to the world; the glorious nervous energy that came thrilling through his fingers in moments of concentration; the feeling of the superiority of this power to all others in the world. And so, whatever happened, he turned to his easel and painted. Love, debt, passion, quarrels, all the disturbances of life came and went, but painting remained, inexhaustible. So he had been happy, free, unfettered, gay, avoiding all responsibility because it was his formula that the artist’s only responsibility is to his art.
He was doubly happy now because he knew he had made an impression on a young man whose sincerity and vigour of purpose he could not but respect. He was himself singularly impressionable, and like a sponge for sucking up the colour of any strong personality. And Mendel had the further attraction for him that he was pure London, of the shifting, motley London that Logan, as a provincial, adored. This London he had touched at many points, but never througha strong living soul that had, and most loyally acknowledged, London as its home.
Logan’s visit to Mendel in the East End had been one of the great events of his life. Through it he had found his feet where he had been floundering, though, of course, happily and excitedly enough.
He told himself that now he was going to settle down to work, to the great productive period of his life, such as was vouchsafed to every real artist who was tough enough to pay for it in suffering. He would rescue Mendel’s genius from the Detmold and the ossified advanced painters, and together they would smash the English habit of following French art a generation late, and they would lay the foundations of a genuine English art, a metropolitan art, an art that grew naturally out of the life of the central city of the world.
Logan always worked by programme, but hitherto he had changed his programme once a week. Now he was sure that this was the programme of his life. It would be amended, of course, by inspiration, but its groundwork was permanent. He was enthusiastic over it. . . . Of course, this was what he had always been seeking, and hitherto he had been fighting the London which absorbed the talents of the country, masticated them, digested them, and evacuated them in the shape of successful painters for whom neither life nor art had any meaning, or in the shape of vicious wrecks who crawled from public-house to public-house and died in hospitals.
It was time that was stopped. It was time for London to be made to recognize that it had a soul, and this generation must begin the task, for never before had a generation been so faced with the blank impossibility of accepting the work, thought, and faith of its predecessor. Never had it been so easy to slip out of the stream oftradition, for never had tradition so completely disappeared underground.
“‘He that hath eyes to see, let him see,’” quoth Logan, and he hurled himself into his work, dancing to and fro, squaring his shoulders at it as though the picture were an adversary in a boxing-match.
At half-past four he laid down his brushes and began to arrange the room, pinning photographs on the walls, and unpacking certain articles of furniture, as a rug, a great chair, and mattresses to make a divan, which he had bought that morning. Every now and then he ran to the window, threw up the sash, and looked up and down the street.
At last with a tremor of excitement he leaned out and waved his hand, shut the window, and ran downstairs. In a moment or two he returned with the girl of the Tube station. She was wearing the same clothes, with the addition of a cheap fur boa, and she panted a little from the run upstairs with him.
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
“Oh! It’s not far from where I live,” she said. “But you are in a mess.”
“I’ve only just got in. I would have asked you to my old place, but I had to leave.”
“So you’re a nartist,” she said. “I thought you were something funny.”
“Funny!” snorted Logan. “I call a shop-walker funny; or a banker, for that matter, or a millionaire. An artist is the most natural thing to be in the world. . . . Take your hat and gloves off and give me a hand, and then we’ll have tea.”
“Oh! I love my tea.”
“I know all about tea. I get it from a friend of mine in the City. I know how to make it, too.”
They worked together, arranging, dusting,keeping deliberately apart and eyeing each other surreptitiously. He liked her slow, heavy, indolent movements, and she exaggerated them for him. She liked his quick, firm, decisive actions, and he accentuated them for her; and she liked his thick, black hair and his strong hands.
He picked up the great chair and held it at arm’s-length.
“Oo! You are strong,” she said.
“I could hold you up like that.”
“I’d like to see you try,” and she gave a little giggle of protest.
“I will if I don’t like you,” said he, “and I’ll let you drop and break your leg.”
She went off into peals of laughter, and he laughed too.
“It’s such a jolly day,” he said. “It only needed you to come to make everything perfect.”
“What made you speak to me the other night?” she asked.
“I liked the look of you.”
“But I’m not that sort, you know.”
“It isn’t a question of being that sort. I wanted to speak to you, and that was enough for me. Sit down and have some tea.”
The kettle was boiling, and he had already warmed the pot. He measured out the tea carefully, poured the water onto it, and gave her a blue china cup. He produced an old biscuit-tin containing some French pastry, and then sat on the floor while she consumed the lot.
It gave him great pleasure to see her eat, and he liked her healthy, childish greed. She had the face of a spoiled child, a very soft skin, and plump, yielding flesh. He liked that. It soothed and comforted him to look at her, while at the same time he was irritated by her inward plumpness and easiness.
“You’ve always had a good time,” he said.
“Oh yes! I’ve seen to that.”
“You’re not a London girl.”
“No; Yorkshire.”
“I’m from Lancashire.”
“Eeh! lad,” she said, her whole voice altering and deepening into an astonishingly full note, “are ye fra’ Lancashire? Eeh! a’m fair clemmed wi’ London. Eeh! I am glad ye coom fra’ Lancashire.”
“What are you doing in London?”
“I’m working in Oxford Street, though not one of the big shops.”
“Like it?”
“M’m! Well enough.”
“Of course you don’t, handing out laces and ribbons——”
“’Tisn’t laces and ribbons. It’s corsets.”
“Corsets, then, to women who haven’t a tenth of your looks or your vitality.”
“It can’t be helped if they have the money and I haven’t, can it?”
“Money doesn’t matter. What’s money to you, with all the rich life in you? Money cannot buy that, nor can it buy what will satisfy you.”
“And what’s that?”
“Love and freedom.”
“Ooh! you are a talker.”
“I’m not flirting with you. I haven’t got time for that.”
He laid his hand on her foot, which was covered with a thin cotton stocking. She did not move it.
“You needn’t stare at me like that,” she said, with a curious thickness in her voice.
“I can’t help staring,” he answered, “when I mean what I say.” He pressed his lips together and scowled, and shook her foot playfully. There was an exhilarating pleasure in startling and mastering her by directness. It was like peeling the bark off a stick. The thin layers of affectation came off easily and cleanly, leaving bare the white sappy smoothness of her innocent sensuality.
“I do mean what I say,” he added. “Why should we beat about the bush? I asked you to come to-day because I wanted you. You came because you knew I wanted you.”
“You asked me to tea.”
“All right. And you’ll stay to dinner. People have made love to you before.”
“Well, no . . . yes. . . . Not like . . .”
“Don’t tell lies,” he said. “You saw me at the station long before I saw you, and you wanted me to see you. That was why you stayed at the booking-office.”
“You were with such a pretty boy,” she said.
“Boy! You’re not old enough to care for pretty boys.”
“But hewaspretty.”
“Be quiet!” he said, kneeling by her side. “You may want me to take weeks over making all sorts of foolish advances to you, but I’m not going to waste time. I’ve wasted too much time over that sort of rubbish. We both know what we want and you are going to stay with me.”
“No.”
“I say yes.”
“No.” And she sprang to her feet and walked to the door. There she turned. He had picked up her gloves.
“Will you give me my gloves, please?”
“No.”
“Will you give me my gloves?”
“No.”
“Then I shall go without them.”
“Very well. Good-bye.”
“If I stay, will you promise not to talk like that?”
“I don’t want you to stay under those circumstances.”
“You’re an insulting beast.”
“Not at all. I honour your womanhood by not pretending that it isn’t there.”
“Will you give me my gloves?”
She ran across and tried to snatch them out of his hand. He gripped and held her, and she gave a wild laugh as he kissed her.
She clung to him as he let her sink back into the great chair. She lay with her eyes closed and her lips parted while he sat and poured himself out another cup of tea. His hand was shaking so that he spilled some tea on his new rug.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll give you a week to get used to me, and if at the end of that time you don’t like me, you can go.”
“I haven’t any friends,” she said in a low voice, “and you get sick of girls and the shop. You get sick of going out in the evening up and down the streets and into the cinemas, and finding some damn fool to take you to a music-hall. Such a lot of people and nobody to know.”
“There’s a lot of fun in living with an artist,” he said. “You meet queer people and amusing women, and you wouldn’t find me dull to live with.”
“I felt queer as I came near the house,” she said, “as though I knew something was going to happen. I feel very queer now.”
“That’s love,” said Logan grimly. “Love isn’t what you thought it was.”
“You must let me go now.”
“When will you come again?”
“Never.”
“Oh yes, you will.”
“Stop it!” she cried. “Stop it! I’m not going to be flummoxed by the like of you.”
“But you are,” he said. “You poor darling!”
He took her hand and stroked it tenderly.
“Don’t you see that you are flummoxed by something that is stronger than both of us? I’m shaken by it, and I’m whipcord. We’re poor starving people, God help us! and we can save each other. We knew we could do it at once,when we met. . . . If I said all the pretty things in the world it wouldn’t help. We’re too far gone for that. When you’re starving you don’t want chocolates. . . . I’m only saying what I know. It is true of myself. If I have made a mistake about you, I am sorry. You can go. . . . Have I made a mistake?”
For answer she turned towards him, gazed at him with glazing eyes, raised her arms, and drew him into them.
A week later Nelly Oliver dined with Logan and Mendel at the Pot-au-Feu. They had a special dinner and drank champagne, for it was what Logan called the “nuptial feast.”
Oliver, as they called her, was flushed with excitement, and kept on telling Mendel that he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen. She called Logan “Pip”—“Pip darling,” “Pip dearest,” “Pipkin” and “Pipsy”—because she said he was like an orange-pip, bitter and hard in the midst of sweetness.
“Pip says you’re a genius,” she said to Mendel. “What does he mean?”
Mendel disliked her, though he tried hard to persuade himself that she was charming. He was baffled by the solemnity with which Logan was taking her, for she seemed to him the type made for occasional solace and not for companionship. Exploring her with his mind and instinct, she seemed to him soft and pulpy, not unlike an orange, and if she and Logan were to set up a common life, then he would be like a pip indeed. . . . How could he explain to her the nature of genius? Can you explain the night to an insect that lives but an hour in the morning?
“I don’t know,” he said brusquely.
Logan was dimly aware that his friend and his girl were not pleasing each other, and he set himself to keep them amused. He succeededfairly well, but his humour was forced, for he was under the spell of the girl and the thought of the adventure to which she had consented. She knew it, and was loud and shrill and triumphant, continually setting Mendel’s teeth on edge, for the purity of his instinct was disgusted by the blurring and swamping of life by any emotion, and the quality of hers was not such as to win indulgence.
“Logan will tell you what genius is,” he said.
“She’ll find that out soon enough if she lives with me,” growled Logan a little pompously.
Oliver put her head on one side and looked languishingly at Mendel as she drawled:—
“It’s a pity you haven’t got a nice girl. Then there would be four of us.”
“Don’t be a fool!” snapped Logan. “What does he want with girls at his age?”
Oliver’s lips trembled and she pouted in protest.
“I only thought it would be nice to round off the party. When you’re in love you can’t help wanting everybody else to have some too.”
Mendel was torn between dislike of her and admiration of Logan’s masterful handling of the problem of desire. . . . No nonsense about getting married or falling in love. He saw the woman he wanted and took her and made her his property, and the woman could not but acquiesce, as Oliver had done. In a dozen different ways she acknowledged Logan’s lordship, even in her deliberate efforts to exasperate him. Their relationship seemed to Mendel simple and excellent, and he envied them. How easy his life would become if he could do the same! What freedom there would be in having a woman to throw in her lot with his! It would settle all his difficulties, absolve him from his dependence on his family, and deliver him from the attentions of unworthy women.
“How shall we dress her?” asked Logan.
Mendel took out his sketch-book and drew arough portrait of Oliver in a gown tight-fitting above the waist and full in the skirt.
“I should look a guy in that,” she said. “It’s nothing like the fashion.”
“You’ve done with fashion,” said Logan. “You’ve done with the world of shops and snobs and bored, idiotic women. You’re above all that now. In the first place there won’t be any money for fashion, and in the second place there’s no room in our kind of life for rubbish. You’re a free woman now, and don’t you forget it, or I’ll knock your head off.”
“But it’s a horrible, ugly dress,” said Oliver, almost in tears.
“It’s what you’re going to wear. I’ll buy the stuff to-morrow and make it myself. What colour would you like?”
“I won’t wear it.”
“Then you can go back to your shop.”
“You know I can’t. I’ve said good-bye to all the girls.”
“Then you’ll wear the dress.”
“I shan’t.”
“For God’s sake don’t quarrel,” said Mendel. “One would think you had been married for ten years. Let her wear what she likes until she wants some new clothes.”
“Highty Tighty! Little boy!” sang Oliver. “You talk as though I were a little girl.”
“You behave like one,” snapped Mendel, and her face was overcast with a cloud of malignant sulkiness.
They went on to a music-hall, where Logan and she sat with their arms locked and their shoulders pressed together, whispering and babbling to each other.
Mendel sat bolt upright with his arms folded, staring at the stage but seeing nothing, so lost was he in the contemplation of the strange turnof affairs by which the adventure which had promised to lead him straight to art had deposited him in a muddy little pool of life. He would not submit to it. He would not surrender Logan and all the hopes he had aroused. Prepared as he had been to follow Logan through fire, he would not shrink when the way led through the morass. Friendship was to him no fair-weather luxury, and nothing but falsehood or faithlessness in his friend could make him relinquish it.
He told himself that Logan would soon tire of it, that Oliver would go the way of her kind. She was, after all, better than Hetty Finch, since she had a capacity for childish enjoyment.
She revelled in the sentimental ditties and the suggestive humours of the comedians, pressed closer and closer to Logan, and grew elated and strangely exalted as the evening wore on. And as they left the music-hall she gripped Mendel’s arm and brought her face close to his and whispered:—
“Do wish me luck, Kühler. Give me a kiss for luck.”
He kissed her and mumbled: “Good luck!”
“Come and see us to-morrow,” she said. “We shall be all right to-morrow.”
“Oh, come along!” cried Logan, dragging her away; and Mendel stood in the glaring light of the portico and watched them as, arm in arm, they were swallowed up in the crowd hurrying and jostling its way home to the dark outer regions of London.
He had an appalling sense of being left out of it. Everything passed and he remained. He lived in a circle of light into which, like moths, came timid, blinking, lovable figures, and he loved them; but they passed on and were lost in the tumultuous, heaving darkness of life, into which alone he could not enter. . . . Did he desire to enter it? He did not know, but he was hungry for something that lay in it, or, perhaps, beyond it.