VIIMR. TILNEY TYSOELOGANwith Oliver was more startling and exhilarating than before. He was filled with a ferocious energy, and his programme was distended with it.He said to Mendel:—“She’s an inspiration. I have found what I was seeking. You have given me the inspiration of art. Through you I shall reach the heights of the spirit. She has given me the inspiration of life, and through her I shall plumb the very depths of humanity. She is marvellous. All the exasperation of modern life is in her, all the impatient brooding on the threshold of new marvels. You think she is stupid, I know, but that is only because she has in herself such an immense wealth of instinctive knowledge of life that she does not need to judge it by passing outward appearances. I am amazed at her, almost afraid of her. Something tremendous will come out of her. . . . By God! It makes me sick to think of all the dabbling in paint that goes on, not to speak of all the dabbling in love. Love? The word has become foolish and empty. I don’t wish to hear it uttered ever again. . . . I swear that if it doesn’t come out in paint I shall write poetry. Oh! I can feel the marrow in my bones again, and my veins are full of sap. . . . But I want to talk business.”“Business?” said Mendel, who had been upset and bewildered by this outburst.“Yes. I want you to approve my programme,for you must have a programme. It is all very well to work by the light of inspiration. That can work quite well as far as you yourself are concerned, but what about the public? what about the other artists?—damn them! We’re going to burst out of the groove, but we must have a good reason for doing so.”“Surely it is reason enough that one can’t work in it.”“Not enough for them. They must be mystified and impressed. They must be unable to place us. They must feel that we are up to something, but they must be unable to say what it is.”“I don’t care what they say,” said Mendel.“But you must care. When we have carried out the programme, then you can do as you like, but till then we must pull together. We must do it for the sake of art. We must make a stand, not to found a school or to say that this and no other style of drawing is right, but to assert the sacred duty of the artist to paint according to his vision and his creative instinct.”This was coming very near to Mendel’s own feeling, and he remembered the torture he had been through to learn the Detmold style of drawing, and how some virtue had gone out of his work in the effort.“It is the artist’s business,” said Logan, “to create out of the life around him an expression of it in form.”“I agree,” said Mendel.“Accurate imitation is not necessarily an expression, is it? You know it isn’t. A picture must be a created thing. It must have a life of its own, and to have that it must grow through the artist’s passion out of the life around him. It is all rubbish to look back, to talk of going back to the Primitives or the Byzantines or Egypt. You can learn a great deal from those old people about pictures, but you cannot learn how to paint yourown pictures from them, because you can only live in your own life and your own time, and if you are a good artist your work will transcend both. . . . Now, tell me, where is the work that is expressing the glorious, many-coloured life of London, where is the work that does not give you a shock as you come to it out of the street, the thrilling, vibrant street, making you feel that you are stepping back ten, twenty, fifty years? . . . Why has life outstripped art?”“I don’t know,” said Mendel, whose head had begun to ache.“It has not only outstripped it,” continued Logan. “It has begun to despise it.”The postman knocked, and Mendel ran downstairs in feverish expectation of a letter from Morrison, to whom he had written imploring her to come again, or, if not, at least to let him have her address in the country. There was no letter for him, and as soon as he returned with a blank, disappointed face, Logan went on:—“People collect pictures as they collect postage-stamps, to keep themselves from being bored. Naturally they despise pictures, and they despise us for accepting those conditions. They are intolerable, and we must make an end of them. We are in a tight corner, and we should leave no trick and twist and turn untried to get out of it. If we do not do so then there will be no art, as there is no drama, no music, and no literature, and there will be no authority among men, and humanity will go to hell. It is on the road to it, and the artists have got to stop it.”Mendel had not heard a word. He sat with his head in his hands thinking of Morrison, and hating her for the blank misery in which she had plunged him.“Humanity,” said Logan cheerfully, “is fast going to hell. It likes it; and, as the democratic idea is that it should have what it likes, not afinger, not a voice is raised to stop it. Everything that stands in the way—ideals, decency, responsibility, passion, love—everything is smashed. Nothing can stop it unless their eyes are opened and their poor frozen hearts are thawed.”“What did you say?” asked Mendel, having half-caught that last phrase.“We must try to stop it,” said Logan. “We may be smashed and swept aside, but we must try to stop it. . . . I’ve been to see Cluny to-day. He has sold all your things except one drawing.”“I know,” replied Mendel, who had received an amazing account which showed about two-thirds of his earnings swallowed up in colours, brushes, frames, and photographs. He knew, but he was not interested. He was unhappy and restless and felt completely empty.“We passionate natures,” said Logan, striding up and down like Napoleon on the quarter-deck of theBellerophon—“we passionate natures must take control. We must be the nucleus of true fiery stuff to resist the universal corruption. We must be dedicated to the wars of the spirit.”“I’ve got a splitting headache,” said Mendel. “Do you mind not talking so much? The important thing for a painter is painting. What happens outside that doesn’t matter.”“You think so now,” said Logan, “but you wait. You’ll find that painting won’t satisfy you. You will want to know what it is all for, and one of these days you will be thankful to me for telling you. . . . Cluny has taken on some of my things, and he has agreed to our having an exhibition together. What do you say to that?”“So long as I sell I don’t care where I exhibit. Exhibitions are always horrible. They always make pictures look mean and insignificant.”“You are in a mood to-day.”“I tell you,” cried Mendel in a fury—“I tell you I know what art is better than anybody. Ittouches life at one point, and one point only, and there it gives a great light. If life is too mean and beastly to reach that point, so much the worse for life. It does not affect art, which is another world, where everything is beautiful and true. I know it; I have always known it. I have lived in that world. I live in it, and I detest everything that drags me away from it and makes me live in the world of filth and thieves and scoundrels. Yes, I detest even love, even passion, for they make a fool and a beast of a man.”“Young!” said Logan. “Very young! You’ll learn. . . . But do be sensible and control your beast of a temper. Never mind my programme if it doesn’t interest you. Will you accept Cluny’s offer? It is worth it, for it will make you independent.”“How much does he want?”“A dozen exhibits each.”“Oh! very well.”“And will you come and dine to-night with my fool of a patron, Mr. Tilney Tysoe?”“I don’t want to know fools. I know quite enough already.”“But I’ve promised to take you. . . . He adores Bohemians, as he calls us, and he buys pictures.”“Does he give you good food?”“Some of the best in London.”“All right.”“Meet us at the Paris Café at seven-thirty. Don’t dress. Tysoe would be dreadfully disappointed if you didn’t turn up reeking of paint. It would be almost better not to wash.”“Is Oliver going?”“Yes. Do you mind?”“No. . . . No.”It was an enormous relief to Mendel when Logan went. His enthusiasm was too exhausting, and it was maddening to have him talking ofsuccess and the triumph of art and the wars of the spirit when life had apparently reached up and extinguished the light of art altogether. For a brief moment, for a day or two, it had almost seemed to him that life and art were one, that everything was solved and simple, that he would henceforth only have to paint and pictures would flow from his brush as easily as song from a bird. This illusion had survived even the blow of Morrison’s departure. He believed that it was enough for him to have had that hour of illumination, and that, if go she must, he could do without her. The flash of light had been the same, magnified a thousand times, as the inspiration that set him at work on a picture and then left him to wrestle with the task of translating it into terms of paint. She had appeared to him exactly in the same visionary way, an image shining in truth and beauty, an emanation from that other world, and he had thought he would at worst be left with the terrible ordeal of translating the vision into paint. . . . But when he looked at his pictures they oppressed him with their lifelessness and dark dullness, and the idea of painting disgusted him. It was even an acute pain, almost like a wound upon his heart, to handle a brush. He could not finish the portrait of his father and mother, and, at best, he could only force himself to paint flower-pieces.He was incapable of deceiving himself. He had never heard of devout lovers sighing in vain, and he had no sources of comfort within himself. Never had he shrunk from any torment, and this was so cruel as to be almost a glory, except that it meant such a deathly stillness and emptiness. He could not understand it, and he knew that it was past the comprehension of all whom he knew, even his mother. But he set his teeth and vowed that he would understand it if it took years. . . . A little girl, a little Christian girl! How was it possible?There was some relief in the thought of her, but very little. She was still too visionary, and when he tried to think of her in life, by his side, it was impossibly painful.Where was she? Why did she not write? Her silence was like ice upon his heart. . . . What kind of place did she live in? Among what people? How was he to imagine her? . . . To think of her among the trees or under the chestnut-tree was to be torn with impulses that could find no outlet; desires for creation that made painting seem a sham and a mockery.So keen, and fierce, and deep was his suffering that death seemed a little thing in comparison. When he tried to think of death he knew that it was not worth thinking of, and he was ashamed that the thought should have been in his mind.He knew that he must understand or perish. To say that he was in love was hopelessly inadequate. He knew how people were when they were in love. They were like Rosa, like animals, stupid and thick-sighted, with a thickening in their blood. But he was possessed with a clairvoyance that made everything round him seem transparent and flimsy, while thought crept stealthily, like a cat on a wall, and emotion was confounded.For days he had hardly left his studio, and it was only with the greatest effort that he could bring himself to join Logan at the Paris Café. He felt weak, and the streets looked very strange, clear and bright, as they do to a convalescent. As he entered the café it seemed years since he had been there, ages since he had sat there trembling with excitement as he waited for the great Calthrop to come in. He remembered that excitement so vividly that something like it came rushing up in him, and he clutched at it for relief. . . . Calthrop was there with his little court ofmodels and students. Mendel found himself laughing nervously as he stood and waited for the great man to recognize him. Calthrop looked up and nodded to him. He was wildly, absurdly delighted. He rushed over to Logan and Oliver and shook them enthusiastically by the hand.“Isn’t it a splendid place?” he cried.“Have something to drink,” said Logan. “You’ve been overworking.”“You must say it’s a splendid place,” insisted Mendel, “or I shall go home. Just by that table where Calthrop is sitting is where I was arrested.”“Oh, which is Calthrop?” asked Oliver eagerly.“The big man over there,” said Mendel. “I was arrested just there, and I had to go on my knees to the manager to make him allow me to come here again. I had to apologize to him. At the time it was the greatest tragedy of my life.”He had forgotten his dislike for Oliver in his elation at finding himself gay again, and he chattered on of the days when the café had seemed to him a heaven full of heroes. Oliver listened to him like a child. She loved stories, and she leaned forward and drank in his words, and she appeared to him as a very beautiful woman, desirable, intoxicating. Yet because Logan was his friend he would not envy him, but rejoiced in his possession of this rare treasure, a woman who could deliver up to him all the warm secrets of life. And he could not help saying so, and telling them how happy it made him to be with them.Logan and Oliver glanced at each other, and their hands met in a fierce grip under the table. Mendel could not see more than their glance, but the meeting of their eyes sent a flame like a white-hot sword darting at his heart. The sharp pain released him, and sent him shooting up into a wilder gaiety.He felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turningwith a start, he saw Mr. Sivwright, his first master, standing above him. He rose and shook hands.“I am glad to see you,” said Mr. Sivwright. “I’ve been meaning to write to you, but I’ve been away, out of London.”Mendel introduced him to his friends and asked him to sit down.“I can’t stop a moment,” said Mr. Sivwright. “I’m very busy. I have just started a club for artists—opens at eleven. These absurd closing hours, you know. I hope you’ll join. It has been open a week. Great fun, and I want some frescoes painted. . . . I’m very proud of your success, Kühler. I feel I had my hand in it.”He produced a prospectus and laid it on the table, bowed awkwardly to Oliver, and with a self-conscious swagger, as though he felt the eyes of all in the café upon him, made his way out.“Who’s that broken-down tick?” asked Logan.“Sivwright,” answered Mendel. “He taught me when I was a boy. He’s a very bad artist, and he thinks art ended with Corot. I learned to paint like Corot. Really! I used to go with him to the Park and weep over the trees in the twilight: I never thought I should see him again.”“Oh! people bob up,” said Logan. “We go on getting longer in the tooth, but people recur, like decimals.”“Would you like to go to his club?” asked Mendel. “It says ‘Dancing.’ I feel like dancing.”“Oh! I love dancing,” said she.Logan assumed his air of mysterious importance and said it was time to go to Tysoe’s.“We’re twenty minutes late,” he said; “Tysoe would be dreadfully put out if we were punctual.”As Mendel had plenty of money they took a taxi-cab.Mr. Tilney Tysoe was an idealist, and he had no other profession. He was a very tall man witha long cadaverous face, great bulging, watery eyes, and extraordinarily long hands, which hung limply from his wrist, except when he was excited, when they shot up with extreme violence, and carried his arms with them into a gesture so awkward that he had to find relief from it in a shrug. He was devoted to the arts, had a stall at the opera, a study full of books, and several rooms full of pictures. An artist was to him a great artist, a book that pleased him was a great book, and his constant lament was over the dearth of great men in public life. It gave him the keenest delight to see Logan, unkempt, wild-haired, shaggy, violent and brusque, enter his daintily furnished drawing-room, and his eyes passed eagerly to Oliver, looking just as she ought to have done, the mistress of a Bohemian.“Delighted! Delighted!” he said as he coiled his long white hand round Mendel’s workmanlike paw. “My wife, I regret to say, is away. She will be so sorry to have missed you. Like me, she is tired of the shallow, artificial people we live among. We both adore sincere, real people. I adore sincerity. Sincerity is genius.”“That is true,” said Logan in a sepulchral voice that made Mendel jump. “At least, where you find sincerity, you may be sure that genius is not far behind.”“I bought a picture of yours the other day, Mr. Kühler,” said Tysoe. “I am ashamed to think how little I gave for it, but works of art are priceless, are they not?”“Mine are,” said Mendel, overcoming his disgust and beginning to enjoy the game.“You think so,” rejoined Tysoe with an undulation of his long body. “And why shouldn’t you say so? You are sincere and strong. You must force your talent upon an ungrateful world.”A man-servant announced dinner, and Tysoe gave his arm to Oliver and led her downstairs,while Logan put his hand on Mendel’s shoulder and said with a chuckle:—“Be sincere.”Mendel began at once with the soup, as though he had been wound up.“I have won every possible prize for painting and drawing, and the first picture I exhibited was the sensation of the year in art circles.”“I remember it,” said Tysoe.“Like my friend Logan, I am profoundly dissatisfied with the state of art in England, and though I am not an Englishman I have sufficient love for the country to wish to do my share in redeeming it. The first essential is a new technique, the second essential is a new spirit, and the third essential is sincerity.”“Wonderfully true!” cried Tysoe. “Have some sherry. Wonderfully true! Now, take the ordinary man. He might feel all that, but would he dare to say it? No. That is why I, as an idealist, delight in the society of artists. You know where you are with them. Facts are facts with them.”“I do like this sherry wine,” said Oliver, beginning to feel very comfortable in the warm luxury of the dining-room.Logan kicked her under the table.Feeling that more was expected of him, Mendel wound himself up again and went on:—“Logan and I are going to hold an exhibition together. It will make a great stir, that is, if London is not altogether dead to sincerity. We think it is time that independence among artists was encouraged. Art must not be allowed to stop short at Calthrop——”He stopped dead as he realized that the wall opposite him held half a dozen drawings by Calthrop. Logan rushed in:—“Among real artists there is no rivalry. Art is not a competition. It is a constellation, like the Milky Way.”“Ah! La Voie Lactée!” cried Tysoe, dropping into French, as he sometimes did when he was moved. “Quite so! La Voie Lactée!”“At home in Yorkshire,” said Oliver, “there are sometimes two big stars hanging just over the top of the moors, and they say it means love or death if you see it at half-past nine.”Logan took charge of the conversation, frowning at Mendel and Oliver as though they were naughty children. He described the masterpiece he was painting, and Tysoe said:—“I’m sure I shall like that. It sounds big and forceful, like yourself. Do let me have a look at it before anyone else sees it.”Then he added:—“I saw a charming still-life of yours once. A melon, I think it was. What has become of it?”“It was sold, I fancy,” replied Mendel, who had never painted a melon in his life.“Ah! A pity. I wanted some little thing for a wedding-present. No one I care about very much, so it must be a little thing.”“He has two or three little things just now,” said Logan. “If you sent a messenger-boy round to his studio he would let you see them.”And suddenly Mendel could keep the game up no longer. He began to feel choked by the stuffy, empty luxury of the room, with its excess of plate and glass and flowers and furniture and pictures. His head seemed to be on the point of bursting. He must get out—out and away. He wanted to laugh, to scream with laughter, to shout, to die of laughter, anything to shake off the oppressive folly of his host. And he began to laugh, to shake and heave with it. He suppressed it, but at last he burst out with a roar and rushed from the room.“Overworked,” said Logan imperturbably. “That’s what it is. The poor devil hasn’t learned sense yet. It’s work, work, work with him, all the time. He thinks of nothing but his art, youknow. Never has, ever since he was a boy. . . . He’ll be a very great genius, and I shall be left far behind.”“Not you,” said Tysoe, “not you. I know no man in whom I have greater faith than you.”“Do you think him as good as all that?” said Oliver eagerly. “I’m always telling him Kühler’s not a patch on him.”Meanwhile Mendel had taken refuge in the lavatory, where he shouted and shook and cried with laughter. When he had recovered himself he crawled back to the dining-room muttering inaudible apologies.“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve not been myself lately.”“You mustn’t overdo it,” said Tysoe kindly. “You have plenty of time. You need be in no hurry to overtake Logan. He is entering upon maturity. Your time will come.”Mendel felt disturbed. He had not thought of Logan seriously as a painter, certainly not as a rival or a colleague. Logan was his friend. That Logan painted was incidental. It irritated him to have to sit and listen to him holding forth about painting. He had always liked Logan’s talk, but had never really connected it with his work. It was just talk, like reading, or going to the cinema—a sop, a drug, soothing and pleasant when he was in the mood for it, maddening when he was not.It was as though a spring had been touched, releasing his intelligence, which had always been kept apart from his work. For the first time he felt, though never so little, detached from it, while at the same moment the awful inward pressure of his emotional crisis was relaxed. He was happier, and less wildly gay, and he began to realize that he had astonishingly good food in front of him, good wine in plenty, delicious fruits to come, and fragrant coffee brewing there on thesideboard among bright-hued liqueur bottles. . . . There was no need to listen to Logan. There was pleasure enough in eating and drinking and watching Oliver, and thinking how good it would be to dance with her, and perhaps with others—little women whom he would hold in his arms and feel them yield to every movement that he made. . . .He was left alone with Oliver after dinner, while Logan and Tysoe retired to the study.“You’ve made him very happy,” he said rather unsteadily.“Oh, yes!” said she. “It was like a Fate, wasn’t it? I always had a feeling that I wasn’t like other girls. I always thought something out of the way would happen to me, though I never thought of anything like this.”“You mustn’t tell me about him,” said Mendel.“I must tell someone or I shall die. He’s so extraordinary. He says it’s something deeper than love, and I think it must be.”“You must not talk about it,” he said.“It makes all the stuff he talks about seem silly. I don’t understand it, do you?”She lay back in her chair and swung her foot, with her eyes fixed on the door waiting for Logan to return.Mendel’s dislike of her sprang up in him again, and he was a little afraid of her: of her big, fleshy body, so full now of little trickling streams of pleasure; of her eyes, watching, watching, with the strange, glassy steadiness of the eyes of a bird of prey. . . . He decided that he would not dance with her. He would dance with the others—the little, harmless, pretty fools.To reassure himself he told himself that Logan was happy, and strong enough to resist the growing will in this woman.
LOGANwith Oliver was more startling and exhilarating than before. He was filled with a ferocious energy, and his programme was distended with it.
He said to Mendel:—
“She’s an inspiration. I have found what I was seeking. You have given me the inspiration of art. Through you I shall reach the heights of the spirit. She has given me the inspiration of life, and through her I shall plumb the very depths of humanity. She is marvellous. All the exasperation of modern life is in her, all the impatient brooding on the threshold of new marvels. You think she is stupid, I know, but that is only because she has in herself such an immense wealth of instinctive knowledge of life that she does not need to judge it by passing outward appearances. I am amazed at her, almost afraid of her. Something tremendous will come out of her. . . . By God! It makes me sick to think of all the dabbling in paint that goes on, not to speak of all the dabbling in love. Love? The word has become foolish and empty. I don’t wish to hear it uttered ever again. . . . I swear that if it doesn’t come out in paint I shall write poetry. Oh! I can feel the marrow in my bones again, and my veins are full of sap. . . . But I want to talk business.”
“Business?” said Mendel, who had been upset and bewildered by this outburst.
“Yes. I want you to approve my programme,for you must have a programme. It is all very well to work by the light of inspiration. That can work quite well as far as you yourself are concerned, but what about the public? what about the other artists?—damn them! We’re going to burst out of the groove, but we must have a good reason for doing so.”
“Surely it is reason enough that one can’t work in it.”
“Not enough for them. They must be mystified and impressed. They must be unable to place us. They must feel that we are up to something, but they must be unable to say what it is.”
“I don’t care what they say,” said Mendel.
“But you must care. When we have carried out the programme, then you can do as you like, but till then we must pull together. We must do it for the sake of art. We must make a stand, not to found a school or to say that this and no other style of drawing is right, but to assert the sacred duty of the artist to paint according to his vision and his creative instinct.”
This was coming very near to Mendel’s own feeling, and he remembered the torture he had been through to learn the Detmold style of drawing, and how some virtue had gone out of his work in the effort.
“It is the artist’s business,” said Logan, “to create out of the life around him an expression of it in form.”
“I agree,” said Mendel.
“Accurate imitation is not necessarily an expression, is it? You know it isn’t. A picture must be a created thing. It must have a life of its own, and to have that it must grow through the artist’s passion out of the life around him. It is all rubbish to look back, to talk of going back to the Primitives or the Byzantines or Egypt. You can learn a great deal from those old people about pictures, but you cannot learn how to paint yourown pictures from them, because you can only live in your own life and your own time, and if you are a good artist your work will transcend both. . . . Now, tell me, where is the work that is expressing the glorious, many-coloured life of London, where is the work that does not give you a shock as you come to it out of the street, the thrilling, vibrant street, making you feel that you are stepping back ten, twenty, fifty years? . . . Why has life outstripped art?”
“I don’t know,” said Mendel, whose head had begun to ache.
“It has not only outstripped it,” continued Logan. “It has begun to despise it.”
The postman knocked, and Mendel ran downstairs in feverish expectation of a letter from Morrison, to whom he had written imploring her to come again, or, if not, at least to let him have her address in the country. There was no letter for him, and as soon as he returned with a blank, disappointed face, Logan went on:—
“People collect pictures as they collect postage-stamps, to keep themselves from being bored. Naturally they despise pictures, and they despise us for accepting those conditions. They are intolerable, and we must make an end of them. We are in a tight corner, and we should leave no trick and twist and turn untried to get out of it. If we do not do so then there will be no art, as there is no drama, no music, and no literature, and there will be no authority among men, and humanity will go to hell. It is on the road to it, and the artists have got to stop it.”
Mendel had not heard a word. He sat with his head in his hands thinking of Morrison, and hating her for the blank misery in which she had plunged him.
“Humanity,” said Logan cheerfully, “is fast going to hell. It likes it; and, as the democratic idea is that it should have what it likes, not afinger, not a voice is raised to stop it. Everything that stands in the way—ideals, decency, responsibility, passion, love—everything is smashed. Nothing can stop it unless their eyes are opened and their poor frozen hearts are thawed.”
“What did you say?” asked Mendel, having half-caught that last phrase.
“We must try to stop it,” said Logan. “We may be smashed and swept aside, but we must try to stop it. . . . I’ve been to see Cluny to-day. He has sold all your things except one drawing.”
“I know,” replied Mendel, who had received an amazing account which showed about two-thirds of his earnings swallowed up in colours, brushes, frames, and photographs. He knew, but he was not interested. He was unhappy and restless and felt completely empty.
“We passionate natures,” said Logan, striding up and down like Napoleon on the quarter-deck of theBellerophon—“we passionate natures must take control. We must be the nucleus of true fiery stuff to resist the universal corruption. We must be dedicated to the wars of the spirit.”
“I’ve got a splitting headache,” said Mendel. “Do you mind not talking so much? The important thing for a painter is painting. What happens outside that doesn’t matter.”
“You think so now,” said Logan, “but you wait. You’ll find that painting won’t satisfy you. You will want to know what it is all for, and one of these days you will be thankful to me for telling you. . . . Cluny has taken on some of my things, and he has agreed to our having an exhibition together. What do you say to that?”
“So long as I sell I don’t care where I exhibit. Exhibitions are always horrible. They always make pictures look mean and insignificant.”
“You are in a mood to-day.”
“I tell you,” cried Mendel in a fury—“I tell you I know what art is better than anybody. Ittouches life at one point, and one point only, and there it gives a great light. If life is too mean and beastly to reach that point, so much the worse for life. It does not affect art, which is another world, where everything is beautiful and true. I know it; I have always known it. I have lived in that world. I live in it, and I detest everything that drags me away from it and makes me live in the world of filth and thieves and scoundrels. Yes, I detest even love, even passion, for they make a fool and a beast of a man.”
“Young!” said Logan. “Very young! You’ll learn. . . . But do be sensible and control your beast of a temper. Never mind my programme if it doesn’t interest you. Will you accept Cluny’s offer? It is worth it, for it will make you independent.”
“How much does he want?”
“A dozen exhibits each.”
“Oh! very well.”
“And will you come and dine to-night with my fool of a patron, Mr. Tilney Tysoe?”
“I don’t want to know fools. I know quite enough already.”
“But I’ve promised to take you. . . . He adores Bohemians, as he calls us, and he buys pictures.”
“Does he give you good food?”
“Some of the best in London.”
“All right.”
“Meet us at the Paris Café at seven-thirty. Don’t dress. Tysoe would be dreadfully disappointed if you didn’t turn up reeking of paint. It would be almost better not to wash.”
“Is Oliver going?”
“Yes. Do you mind?”
“No. . . . No.”
It was an enormous relief to Mendel when Logan went. His enthusiasm was too exhausting, and it was maddening to have him talking ofsuccess and the triumph of art and the wars of the spirit when life had apparently reached up and extinguished the light of art altogether. For a brief moment, for a day or two, it had almost seemed to him that life and art were one, that everything was solved and simple, that he would henceforth only have to paint and pictures would flow from his brush as easily as song from a bird. This illusion had survived even the blow of Morrison’s departure. He believed that it was enough for him to have had that hour of illumination, and that, if go she must, he could do without her. The flash of light had been the same, magnified a thousand times, as the inspiration that set him at work on a picture and then left him to wrestle with the task of translating it into terms of paint. She had appeared to him exactly in the same visionary way, an image shining in truth and beauty, an emanation from that other world, and he had thought he would at worst be left with the terrible ordeal of translating the vision into paint. . . . But when he looked at his pictures they oppressed him with their lifelessness and dark dullness, and the idea of painting disgusted him. It was even an acute pain, almost like a wound upon his heart, to handle a brush. He could not finish the portrait of his father and mother, and, at best, he could only force himself to paint flower-pieces.
He was incapable of deceiving himself. He had never heard of devout lovers sighing in vain, and he had no sources of comfort within himself. Never had he shrunk from any torment, and this was so cruel as to be almost a glory, except that it meant such a deathly stillness and emptiness. He could not understand it, and he knew that it was past the comprehension of all whom he knew, even his mother. But he set his teeth and vowed that he would understand it if it took years. . . . A little girl, a little Christian girl! How was it possible?
There was some relief in the thought of her, but very little. She was still too visionary, and when he tried to think of her in life, by his side, it was impossibly painful.
Where was she? Why did she not write? Her silence was like ice upon his heart. . . . What kind of place did she live in? Among what people? How was he to imagine her? . . . To think of her among the trees or under the chestnut-tree was to be torn with impulses that could find no outlet; desires for creation that made painting seem a sham and a mockery.
So keen, and fierce, and deep was his suffering that death seemed a little thing in comparison. When he tried to think of death he knew that it was not worth thinking of, and he was ashamed that the thought should have been in his mind.
He knew that he must understand or perish. To say that he was in love was hopelessly inadequate. He knew how people were when they were in love. They were like Rosa, like animals, stupid and thick-sighted, with a thickening in their blood. But he was possessed with a clairvoyance that made everything round him seem transparent and flimsy, while thought crept stealthily, like a cat on a wall, and emotion was confounded.
For days he had hardly left his studio, and it was only with the greatest effort that he could bring himself to join Logan at the Paris Café. He felt weak, and the streets looked very strange, clear and bright, as they do to a convalescent. As he entered the café it seemed years since he had been there, ages since he had sat there trembling with excitement as he waited for the great Calthrop to come in. He remembered that excitement so vividly that something like it came rushing up in him, and he clutched at it for relief. . . . Calthrop was there with his little court ofmodels and students. Mendel found himself laughing nervously as he stood and waited for the great man to recognize him. Calthrop looked up and nodded to him. He was wildly, absurdly delighted. He rushed over to Logan and Oliver and shook them enthusiastically by the hand.
“Isn’t it a splendid place?” he cried.
“Have something to drink,” said Logan. “You’ve been overworking.”
“You must say it’s a splendid place,” insisted Mendel, “or I shall go home. Just by that table where Calthrop is sitting is where I was arrested.”
“Oh, which is Calthrop?” asked Oliver eagerly.
“The big man over there,” said Mendel. “I was arrested just there, and I had to go on my knees to the manager to make him allow me to come here again. I had to apologize to him. At the time it was the greatest tragedy of my life.”
He had forgotten his dislike for Oliver in his elation at finding himself gay again, and he chattered on of the days when the café had seemed to him a heaven full of heroes. Oliver listened to him like a child. She loved stories, and she leaned forward and drank in his words, and she appeared to him as a very beautiful woman, desirable, intoxicating. Yet because Logan was his friend he would not envy him, but rejoiced in his possession of this rare treasure, a woman who could deliver up to him all the warm secrets of life. And he could not help saying so, and telling them how happy it made him to be with them.
Logan and Oliver glanced at each other, and their hands met in a fierce grip under the table. Mendel could not see more than their glance, but the meeting of their eyes sent a flame like a white-hot sword darting at his heart. The sharp pain released him, and sent him shooting up into a wilder gaiety.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turningwith a start, he saw Mr. Sivwright, his first master, standing above him. He rose and shook hands.
“I am glad to see you,” said Mr. Sivwright. “I’ve been meaning to write to you, but I’ve been away, out of London.”
Mendel introduced him to his friends and asked him to sit down.
“I can’t stop a moment,” said Mr. Sivwright. “I’m very busy. I have just started a club for artists—opens at eleven. These absurd closing hours, you know. I hope you’ll join. It has been open a week. Great fun, and I want some frescoes painted. . . . I’m very proud of your success, Kühler. I feel I had my hand in it.”
He produced a prospectus and laid it on the table, bowed awkwardly to Oliver, and with a self-conscious swagger, as though he felt the eyes of all in the café upon him, made his way out.
“Who’s that broken-down tick?” asked Logan.
“Sivwright,” answered Mendel. “He taught me when I was a boy. He’s a very bad artist, and he thinks art ended with Corot. I learned to paint like Corot. Really! I used to go with him to the Park and weep over the trees in the twilight: I never thought I should see him again.”
“Oh! people bob up,” said Logan. “We go on getting longer in the tooth, but people recur, like decimals.”
“Would you like to go to his club?” asked Mendel. “It says ‘Dancing.’ I feel like dancing.”
“Oh! I love dancing,” said she.
Logan assumed his air of mysterious importance and said it was time to go to Tysoe’s.
“We’re twenty minutes late,” he said; “Tysoe would be dreadfully put out if we were punctual.”
As Mendel had plenty of money they took a taxi-cab.
Mr. Tilney Tysoe was an idealist, and he had no other profession. He was a very tall man witha long cadaverous face, great bulging, watery eyes, and extraordinarily long hands, which hung limply from his wrist, except when he was excited, when they shot up with extreme violence, and carried his arms with them into a gesture so awkward that he had to find relief from it in a shrug. He was devoted to the arts, had a stall at the opera, a study full of books, and several rooms full of pictures. An artist was to him a great artist, a book that pleased him was a great book, and his constant lament was over the dearth of great men in public life. It gave him the keenest delight to see Logan, unkempt, wild-haired, shaggy, violent and brusque, enter his daintily furnished drawing-room, and his eyes passed eagerly to Oliver, looking just as she ought to have done, the mistress of a Bohemian.
“Delighted! Delighted!” he said as he coiled his long white hand round Mendel’s workmanlike paw. “My wife, I regret to say, is away. She will be so sorry to have missed you. Like me, she is tired of the shallow, artificial people we live among. We both adore sincere, real people. I adore sincerity. Sincerity is genius.”
“That is true,” said Logan in a sepulchral voice that made Mendel jump. “At least, where you find sincerity, you may be sure that genius is not far behind.”
“I bought a picture of yours the other day, Mr. Kühler,” said Tysoe. “I am ashamed to think how little I gave for it, but works of art are priceless, are they not?”
“Mine are,” said Mendel, overcoming his disgust and beginning to enjoy the game.
“You think so,” rejoined Tysoe with an undulation of his long body. “And why shouldn’t you say so? You are sincere and strong. You must force your talent upon an ungrateful world.”
A man-servant announced dinner, and Tysoe gave his arm to Oliver and led her downstairs,while Logan put his hand on Mendel’s shoulder and said with a chuckle:—
“Be sincere.”
Mendel began at once with the soup, as though he had been wound up.
“I have won every possible prize for painting and drawing, and the first picture I exhibited was the sensation of the year in art circles.”
“I remember it,” said Tysoe.
“Like my friend Logan, I am profoundly dissatisfied with the state of art in England, and though I am not an Englishman I have sufficient love for the country to wish to do my share in redeeming it. The first essential is a new technique, the second essential is a new spirit, and the third essential is sincerity.”
“Wonderfully true!” cried Tysoe. “Have some sherry. Wonderfully true! Now, take the ordinary man. He might feel all that, but would he dare to say it? No. That is why I, as an idealist, delight in the society of artists. You know where you are with them. Facts are facts with them.”
“I do like this sherry wine,” said Oliver, beginning to feel very comfortable in the warm luxury of the dining-room.
Logan kicked her under the table.
Feeling that more was expected of him, Mendel wound himself up again and went on:—
“Logan and I are going to hold an exhibition together. It will make a great stir, that is, if London is not altogether dead to sincerity. We think it is time that independence among artists was encouraged. Art must not be allowed to stop short at Calthrop——”
He stopped dead as he realized that the wall opposite him held half a dozen drawings by Calthrop. Logan rushed in:—
“Among real artists there is no rivalry. Art is not a competition. It is a constellation, like the Milky Way.”
“Ah! La Voie Lactée!” cried Tysoe, dropping into French, as he sometimes did when he was moved. “Quite so! La Voie Lactée!”
“At home in Yorkshire,” said Oliver, “there are sometimes two big stars hanging just over the top of the moors, and they say it means love or death if you see it at half-past nine.”
Logan took charge of the conversation, frowning at Mendel and Oliver as though they were naughty children. He described the masterpiece he was painting, and Tysoe said:—
“I’m sure I shall like that. It sounds big and forceful, like yourself. Do let me have a look at it before anyone else sees it.”
Then he added:—
“I saw a charming still-life of yours once. A melon, I think it was. What has become of it?”
“It was sold, I fancy,” replied Mendel, who had never painted a melon in his life.
“Ah! A pity. I wanted some little thing for a wedding-present. No one I care about very much, so it must be a little thing.”
“He has two or three little things just now,” said Logan. “If you sent a messenger-boy round to his studio he would let you see them.”
And suddenly Mendel could keep the game up no longer. He began to feel choked by the stuffy, empty luxury of the room, with its excess of plate and glass and flowers and furniture and pictures. His head seemed to be on the point of bursting. He must get out—out and away. He wanted to laugh, to scream with laughter, to shout, to die of laughter, anything to shake off the oppressive folly of his host. And he began to laugh, to shake and heave with it. He suppressed it, but at last he burst out with a roar and rushed from the room.
“Overworked,” said Logan imperturbably. “That’s what it is. The poor devil hasn’t learned sense yet. It’s work, work, work with him, all the time. He thinks of nothing but his art, youknow. Never has, ever since he was a boy. . . . He’ll be a very great genius, and I shall be left far behind.”
“Not you,” said Tysoe, “not you. I know no man in whom I have greater faith than you.”
“Do you think him as good as all that?” said Oliver eagerly. “I’m always telling him Kühler’s not a patch on him.”
Meanwhile Mendel had taken refuge in the lavatory, where he shouted and shook and cried with laughter. When he had recovered himself he crawled back to the dining-room muttering inaudible apologies.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve not been myself lately.”
“You mustn’t overdo it,” said Tysoe kindly. “You have plenty of time. You need be in no hurry to overtake Logan. He is entering upon maturity. Your time will come.”
Mendel felt disturbed. He had not thought of Logan seriously as a painter, certainly not as a rival or a colleague. Logan was his friend. That Logan painted was incidental. It irritated him to have to sit and listen to him holding forth about painting. He had always liked Logan’s talk, but had never really connected it with his work. It was just talk, like reading, or going to the cinema—a sop, a drug, soothing and pleasant when he was in the mood for it, maddening when he was not.
It was as though a spring had been touched, releasing his intelligence, which had always been kept apart from his work. For the first time he felt, though never so little, detached from it, while at the same moment the awful inward pressure of his emotional crisis was relaxed. He was happier, and less wildly gay, and he began to realize that he had astonishingly good food in front of him, good wine in plenty, delicious fruits to come, and fragrant coffee brewing there on thesideboard among bright-hued liqueur bottles. . . . There was no need to listen to Logan. There was pleasure enough in eating and drinking and watching Oliver, and thinking how good it would be to dance with her, and perhaps with others—little women whom he would hold in his arms and feel them yield to every movement that he made. . . .
He was left alone with Oliver after dinner, while Logan and Tysoe retired to the study.
“You’ve made him very happy,” he said rather unsteadily.
“Oh, yes!” said she. “It was like a Fate, wasn’t it? I always had a feeling that I wasn’t like other girls. I always thought something out of the way would happen to me, though I never thought of anything like this.”
“You mustn’t tell me about him,” said Mendel.
“I must tell someone or I shall die. He’s so extraordinary. He says it’s something deeper than love, and I think it must be.”
“You must not talk about it,” he said.
“It makes all the stuff he talks about seem silly. I don’t understand it, do you?”
She lay back in her chair and swung her foot, with her eyes fixed on the door waiting for Logan to return.
Mendel’s dislike of her sprang up in him again, and he was a little afraid of her: of her big, fleshy body, so full now of little trickling streams of pleasure; of her eyes, watching, watching, with the strange, glassy steadiness of the eyes of a bird of prey. . . . He decided that he would not dance with her. He would dance with the others—the little, harmless, pretty fools.
To reassure himself he told himself that Logan was happy, and strong enough to resist the growing will in this woman.