Chapter 20

VIIITHE MERLIN’S CAVELOGANhad cajoled twenty pounds out of Mr. Tysoe, who stood on his doorstep, dangling his long hands, while his admired guests crept into a taxi-cab. He swung from side to side:—“I have had a most delightful evening—most charming, most inspiring.”Inside the cab Logan waved the cheque triumphantly and Oliver tried to snatch it from him. They had an excited scuffle, which ended in a kiss.“What’s the matter with the man?” asked Mendel.“He’s just a fool,” replied Logan, “a padded fool. His only virtue is that he does really think me a wonderful fellow, and he is kind. But how I hate such kindness, the last virtue, the last refuge of the decrepit! It is a perfume, a herb with which they are embalmed.”“I thought he was a very nice old gentleman,” said Oliver.“He seemed to me,” said Mendel, “the kind of man who thinks of nothing but women all day long.”“Hit it in once!” cried Logan. “A parrot will not do more for an almond than he will for a commodious drab. He could take a nun and by force of living with her and surrounding her with every luxury turn her into a whore, because she would in time become only another luxury. That is what men grow into if they lose the spirit of freedom. . . . Where are we going to?”“I told the man to go to Sivwright’s club. It is called The Merlin’s Cave.”The club proved to be a cellar filled with little tables. There was a commissionaire at the door and a book had to be signed. The rack of the cloakroom contained several silk-lined overcoats and opera-hats.“It’s going to be damned expensive,” said Logan.“I’ll pay,” replied Mendel. “It’s my fault.”Two tall young men in immaculate evening dress had entered just after them. They gave out an air of wealth and cleanliness and made Logan and Oliver look common and shabby. Mendel hated the two young men. What had they done to look so well-fed and unruffled? Obviously they had only to hold out their hands to have everything they wanted put into them. . . . They looked slightly self-conscious and ashamed of themselves, and wore a look of alarmed expectancy as they went downstairs.Why did they come there if they were ashamed? and why did they expect an Asmodean lewdness of an artists’ club, they for whom the flesh-markets of the music-hall promenades existed?“Real swells, aren’t they?” said Oliver, overawed.The strains of a small orchestra came floating up the stairs.“Come on,” said Mendel, “I want to dance.” And he caught her by the wrist and dragged her downstairs.A girl was standing on a table singing an idiotic song with a syncopated chorus which a few people took up in a half-hearted fashion. The sound of it was thin and depressing.“The same old game,” said Logan. “Playing at being wicked. Why can’t they stick to their commercial beastliness? I should be ashamed to bringany woman into this. I am ashamed.” He half rose from his chair.“Oh! don’t go,” pleaded Oliver, who was entranced with her first sight of what she called a gay life. It was to her like a stage spectacle. “Oh! there’s that Calthrop; I suppose all those odd women with him are models.”Calthrop was surrounded by admiring students, among them Morrison, sitting prim and astonished and obviously amazed to find herself where she was. Mendel began to tremble, and his heart beat violently, as he stared at her—stared and stared.She had lied to him then! She had not had to go home! She could strike him down and then come to amuse herself at such a place as this!Was she with Mitchell? No, Mitchell was not among the satellites.How strange she looked! a wild violet in a hot-house. He waited for her to glance in his direction, but she seemed to be absorbed in the singer and in the song, and every now and then she smiled, though obviously not at the song—at something that amused her or pleased her in her thoughts. She could smile then and be happy, and all his wild emotions had made no invasion into her life. . . . No; she would not look in his direction. Perhaps she had seen him come in and refused to see him.Would the dancing never begin? The dancing took place on a slightly raised floor. If he danced there she would have to see him.He found a warm hand placed on his leg, and turning he saw Jessie Petrie, a model, with whom he had danced at the studios and at the Detmold.“I thought I was never going to see you again,” she said, “and Mitchell said you had gone mad.”“Do I look it?” he asked.“No. You look bonnier than ever. I’m on my own again now. Thompson has gone to Paris. He says the only painters are there. I think he’sgoing mad, because he paints nothing but stripes and triangles. And hewassuch a dear. . . . I’m feeling awfully lonely because Tilly has gone to Canada. Samuelson gave her the chuck and she went out to her cousin in Canada, who had always been wanting to marry her. . . . Are you still down in Whitechapel? I do hate going to see you there. Why don’t you move up to the West End? I could come and live with you then, for I do hate being at a loose end.”She was adorably pretty, dark, with eyes like damsons, lovely red lips, touched up with carmine, and a soft white neck that trembled as she spoke like the breast of a singing bird.“Oh! who do you think I saw the other day? Hetty Finch! She has a flat and a motor-car, but I don’t believe she is married.” She looked suddenly solemn as she added: “The baby’s dead.” Then she rattled on: “Isn’t she lucky? But she’s an awful snob. Would hardly speak to me!”“She’s a beast of a woman.”“What do you think of this place? I suppose if the swells come it’ll be a success, but they do spoil it.”“Yes,” said Mendel. “They spoil everything. When do they begin to dance?”“They’ve nearly finished the programme. They have to have a programme to make people eat and drink.”“Let’s have some champagne.”He called the waiter and ordered a bottle.“Been selling lately?”“No,” he said; “but I want to dance. Do you hear? I want to dance.”“Dancing,” Logan threw in, “is the beginning of art. It is too primitive for me, or I’m too old.”A thin-faced long-haired poet mounted the table and read some verses, which the popping of corks and the clatter of knives and forks rendered inaudible. The poet went on interminably, and atlast someone began drumming on the table and shouting “Dance! Dance! Dance!” The poet stuck to it. Bread was thrown at him and the shouting became general.At last the orchestra struck up through the poet’s reedy chanting, couples made their way to the stage, and the dancing began. Morrison still sat prim and preoccupied. Mendel put his arm round Jessie’s waist, his fingers sank into her young, supple body, and he lifted her to her feet and rushed with her over to the stage. The whole place was humming with life, beating to the chopped rhythm of the vacant American tune.“I do love dancing with you,” said Jessie, as he swung her into the moving throng of brilliantly dressed women and black-coated men, so locked together that they were like one creature, a strange, grotesque quadruped. And Jessie so melted into him, so became a part of him, that he too became another creature, an organism in the whirling circle supported and spun round by the music. It was glorious to feel his will relaxing, to feel the lithe, soft woman in his arms yield to every impulse, every movement. He danced with a terrific concentration, with a wiry collected force that made Jessie feel as light as a feather.“Oo! That was lovely,” she said when the music stopped. “You do dance lovely.”“It was pretty good,” said Mendel. “But wait until they play a waltz.”“I want to dance with you,” cried Oliver. “You said I should dance with you.”And she had the next dance with him; but there was no lightness in her, only a greedy fumbling after sensation.“This is awful!” thought Mendel, never for a moment losing himself, and all the while conscious of Morrison sitting there unmoved: of Morrison, whom he was trying to forget. Oliver seemed to envelop him, to swallow him up. He wasconscious of holding an enormous woman in his arms and her contact was distasteful. The dance seemed endless. Would the music never stop? . . . One, two, three. . . . One, two, three. . . . It was like a dancing class with the fat Jewesses at home. . . . And all the time he was conscious of Morrison’s big blue eyes staring at him. Would she never stop her damnable smiling?He returned Oliver to Logan shamefacedly, as though he were paying a long-standing debt.Jessie returned from her other partner to him.“Oh! It isn’t anything like the same,” she said; “and that is such a lovely tune to dance to.”Now that the dancers were warmed up they refused to allow any intervals. They had their partners and were unwilling to stop. The orchestra was worked up into a kind of frenzy, and Mendel and Jessie were whirled into an ecstasy. They abandoned the conventional steps and improvised, gliding, whirling, swooping suddenly through the dancers. Sometimes he picked her up and whirled her round, sometimes his hands were locked on her waist and she bent backwards—back, back, until he pulled her up and she fell upon his breast, happy, panting, deliriously happy.Morrison sat watching. She was trembling and felt very miserable. She had been brought there by Clowes, who had been unable to resist the flattery of Calthrop’s invitation. All these people seemed to her to be pretending to be happy, and she was oppressed with it all. She had not seen Mendel until he mounted the stage, and then her heart ached. She remembered the etched phrases of his letter to her. She had written to him, but nothing she could express on paper conveyed her feeling, her sense of being in the wrong, and her deep, instinctive conviction of the injustice of that wrong. . . . He had placed her in the wrong by talking of marriage so prematurely. As shelooked round the room she was oppressed by all the men: great, hulking creatures, clumsy, cocksure, insensible, spinning their vain thoughts and vainer emotions round the women as a spider spins its threads round a caught fly. . . . She had often watched spiders dealing with the booty in their webs, and Calthrop reminded her of a spider when he looked at Clowes and laid his hand on her shoulder or fingered her arm. And Clowes lay still like a caught fly and suffered it. . . . Morrison was in revolt against it all. She was full of sweet life, and would not have it so treated. Her prudery was not shocked, for she had no prudery. The men might have their women so, if the women liked it, but never, never would she be so treated.It was because she had been able to sweep aside the sticky threads of vanity with Mendel that the ecstasy of the woods and the Heath had been possible.As she watched him now, she knew that he was different from all the others. He had brought an exaltation into the face of the common little girl who was his partner. He was giving her life, not taking it from her.Yet to see him made her unhappy. The music was vulgar, the people were vulgar, and he had no true place among them. But how he enjoyed it all!She shook with impatience at herself. It was hateful to be outside it, looking on, looking on. A young student had pestered her to dance with him. She turned to him and said:—“I want to dance, please.”Delighted, he sprang to his feet, gave her his arm, and whirled her into the dance.Slowing down to take breath, Mendel looked in her direction. She was gone! A black despair seized him, a groan escaped him; he hugged Jessietight against his body and plunged madly into the dance.The musicians had been given champagne. The violinist began to embroider upon the tune and the ’cellist followed with voluptuous thrumming chords.Jessie gave little cries of happiness to feel the growing strength in Mendel’s arms, the waxing power of his smooth movements. She gave little cries like the call of a quail, and he laughed gleefully every time she cried. He could feel the force rising in him. It would surely burst out of him and break into molten streams of laughter, leaving him deliciously light, as light and absurd as dear little Jessie, who was swinging on the music like a dewdrop on a gossamer. . . . If only the music would last long enough! He would be as tremulous and light as she, and while that lightness lasted he could love her and taste life at its highest point—for her. . . . She was aware of his desire, and swung to it. It was like a wind swaying her, thistledown as she was; like a wind blowing her through the air on a summer’s day. O that it might never end, that the sky might never be overcast, that the rain might never come and the night might never fall. . . . Terrible things had happened to Jessie in the night, and she was happy in the sun.Mendel was past all dizziness. The room had spun round until it could spin no more, and then it had unwound itself, making him feel weak and giddy. He was very nearly clear-headed, and every now and then he caught a glimpse of Logan sketching and of Oliver, sitting with a sulky pout on her lips and tears in her eyes because she wanted to dance and knew she had made a failure of it.“Lovely! lovely! lovely!” sighed Jessie.“You are like the white kernel of a nut,” said Mendel, “when the shell is broken.”“Do let me come and sit for you,” she said. “I won’t want anything except my dinner.”“Better keep to the dancing,” he answered, as he spun her round to stop her talking.She began to stroke his neck and to press her face against his breast. At the same moment he saw Morrison among the dancers. He slowed down and then stopped dead. The music rose to an exultant riot of sound.“Please, please!” cried Jessie, clinging to him; but he had forgotten her.Morrison and her partner swept past him, and he watched them go the full circle. She saw him standing, and as she approached broke away from her partner.“Why aren’t you dancing with me?” he said, shaking with eagerness to hear her speak.“I’m no good at dancing,” she said. “I don’t enjoy it.”“Who brought you here? Calthrop?”“He brought Clowes and me. . . . You mustn’t stop dancing. Your partner. . . .”“Please, please!” cried Jessie, stamping her foot; “the music is going to stop.”“Wait a moment,” he said, turning to Morrison. “Are you going home?”“The day after to-morrow.”“I must see you.”Before she could reply her partner, who had lost his temper, seized her and made her finish the dance, and when it was over he marched her back to Calthrop’s party, and he never left her side again.Mendel returned to Logan and Oliver, to find them impatient to go. The end of an evening always found them in this impatient mood.“It all bears out what I say,” said Logan. “All this night-club business. People have to go mad in London before they can taste life at all.”“Do you mind if I come home and sleep on your sofa?” asked Mendel. “I can’t face my studio to-night.”“Why don’t you take Jessie home with you?” said Logan; “I’m sure she’d like to.”Mendel winced, and Jessie’s lips began to tremble. She was still suffering from the sudden end to her happiness. She looked at him, almost hoping that he was going to make reparation to her.“You know I can’t,” he said; “I live in my brother’s house and he is a respectable married man.”He knew he was in for a terrible night of reaction and desperate blind emotion; at the same time he did not wish to hurt Jessie more than he had done.“I’ll take you home in a cab,” he said. “But I won’t stay, if you don’t mind. I’m done up. If you and Oliver walk half way, Logan, we ought to be there about the same time.”Jessie was appeased. A little kindness went a long way with her, and she hated to be a nuisance to a man.When the cab stopped outside the door of her lodgings she flung her arms round Mendel’s neck and kissed him, saying:—“You are a darling, and I would do anything in the world for you.”“You shall come and sit for me,” he replied. “Good-night!”“Good-night!”Good-night! A night of tossing to and fro, of hearing terrifying noises in the darkness, of hearing Logan and Oliver in the next room, of shutting his ears to what he heard, of fancying he heard someone calling him . . . her voice! Surely she had called him, and the ache and the torment in his flesh was the measure of herneed of him. . . . Strange, blurred thoughts; gusts of defiance and revolt; glimpses of pictures, subjects for pictures, colours and shapes. . . . His mother’s hands clutching a fish and bringing a knife down on to it. There was a blue light on the knife. It would be very hard to get that and to keep it subordinate to the blue in the fish’s scales. . . . His father and mother, eternally together, in an affection that never found any expression, harsh and bitter, but strongly savoured, like everything else in their lives. . . . Issy and Rosa, much the same as Logan and Oliver, and to them also he had to shut his ears. . . . The goggle-eyed man at the Pot-au-Feu. . . . London, London, the roaring fiery furnace of London in which he was burning alive, while flames of madness shot up above him. . . . Music. . . . There was a music in his soul, a music and mystery that could rise with an easy power above all the flames. . . . What did it matter that his body was burned, if his soul could rise like that up to the stars and beyond the stars to the point where art touched life and gave out its iridescent beneficent light? . . . Life, flames, body, stars, all might perish and fade away, but the soul had its knowledge of eternity and could not be quenched. . . . Eternal art, divine art, the world of form, shaped in the knowledge of eternity, wherein life and death are but a day and a night. . . . Sickening doubt of himself, sinking down, down into eternity to be a part of it, never to know it, never to see the light of art, lost to eternity in eternity. . . . He sat up in the middle of the night and imagined himself back in the one room in Gun Street, looking at the recumbent bodies of his family, lost in sleep, huddled together in degradation. . . . It would have been better to have gone home with Jessie. She would have given him rest and sleep. . . . No, no, no! . . . She was going away the day after to-morrow. He must see her beforeshe went, with her big blue eyes and short chestnut hair. She had stopped in the middle of the dance. She had broken away from her partner, and on Hampstead Heath she had said “I love you.”

LOGANhad cajoled twenty pounds out of Mr. Tysoe, who stood on his doorstep, dangling his long hands, while his admired guests crept into a taxi-cab. He swung from side to side:—

“I have had a most delightful evening—most charming, most inspiring.”

Inside the cab Logan waved the cheque triumphantly and Oliver tried to snatch it from him. They had an excited scuffle, which ended in a kiss.

“What’s the matter with the man?” asked Mendel.

“He’s just a fool,” replied Logan, “a padded fool. His only virtue is that he does really think me a wonderful fellow, and he is kind. But how I hate such kindness, the last virtue, the last refuge of the decrepit! It is a perfume, a herb with which they are embalmed.”

“I thought he was a very nice old gentleman,” said Oliver.

“He seemed to me,” said Mendel, “the kind of man who thinks of nothing but women all day long.”

“Hit it in once!” cried Logan. “A parrot will not do more for an almond than he will for a commodious drab. He could take a nun and by force of living with her and surrounding her with every luxury turn her into a whore, because she would in time become only another luxury. That is what men grow into if they lose the spirit of freedom. . . . Where are we going to?”

“I told the man to go to Sivwright’s club. It is called The Merlin’s Cave.”

The club proved to be a cellar filled with little tables. There was a commissionaire at the door and a book had to be signed. The rack of the cloakroom contained several silk-lined overcoats and opera-hats.

“It’s going to be damned expensive,” said Logan.

“I’ll pay,” replied Mendel. “It’s my fault.”

Two tall young men in immaculate evening dress had entered just after them. They gave out an air of wealth and cleanliness and made Logan and Oliver look common and shabby. Mendel hated the two young men. What had they done to look so well-fed and unruffled? Obviously they had only to hold out their hands to have everything they wanted put into them. . . . They looked slightly self-conscious and ashamed of themselves, and wore a look of alarmed expectancy as they went downstairs.

Why did they come there if they were ashamed? and why did they expect an Asmodean lewdness of an artists’ club, they for whom the flesh-markets of the music-hall promenades existed?

“Real swells, aren’t they?” said Oliver, overawed.

The strains of a small orchestra came floating up the stairs.

“Come on,” said Mendel, “I want to dance.” And he caught her by the wrist and dragged her downstairs.

A girl was standing on a table singing an idiotic song with a syncopated chorus which a few people took up in a half-hearted fashion. The sound of it was thin and depressing.

“The same old game,” said Logan. “Playing at being wicked. Why can’t they stick to their commercial beastliness? I should be ashamed to bringany woman into this. I am ashamed.” He half rose from his chair.

“Oh! don’t go,” pleaded Oliver, who was entranced with her first sight of what she called a gay life. It was to her like a stage spectacle. “Oh! there’s that Calthrop; I suppose all those odd women with him are models.”

Calthrop was surrounded by admiring students, among them Morrison, sitting prim and astonished and obviously amazed to find herself where she was. Mendel began to tremble, and his heart beat violently, as he stared at her—stared and stared.

She had lied to him then! She had not had to go home! She could strike him down and then come to amuse herself at such a place as this!

Was she with Mitchell? No, Mitchell was not among the satellites.

How strange she looked! a wild violet in a hot-house. He waited for her to glance in his direction, but she seemed to be absorbed in the singer and in the song, and every now and then she smiled, though obviously not at the song—at something that amused her or pleased her in her thoughts. She could smile then and be happy, and all his wild emotions had made no invasion into her life. . . . No; she would not look in his direction. Perhaps she had seen him come in and refused to see him.

Would the dancing never begin? The dancing took place on a slightly raised floor. If he danced there she would have to see him.

He found a warm hand placed on his leg, and turning he saw Jessie Petrie, a model, with whom he had danced at the studios and at the Detmold.

“I thought I was never going to see you again,” she said, “and Mitchell said you had gone mad.”

“Do I look it?” he asked.

“No. You look bonnier than ever. I’m on my own again now. Thompson has gone to Paris. He says the only painters are there. I think he’sgoing mad, because he paints nothing but stripes and triangles. And hewassuch a dear. . . . I’m feeling awfully lonely because Tilly has gone to Canada. Samuelson gave her the chuck and she went out to her cousin in Canada, who had always been wanting to marry her. . . . Are you still down in Whitechapel? I do hate going to see you there. Why don’t you move up to the West End? I could come and live with you then, for I do hate being at a loose end.”

She was adorably pretty, dark, with eyes like damsons, lovely red lips, touched up with carmine, and a soft white neck that trembled as she spoke like the breast of a singing bird.

“Oh! who do you think I saw the other day? Hetty Finch! She has a flat and a motor-car, but I don’t believe she is married.” She looked suddenly solemn as she added: “The baby’s dead.” Then she rattled on: “Isn’t she lucky? But she’s an awful snob. Would hardly speak to me!”

“She’s a beast of a woman.”

“What do you think of this place? I suppose if the swells come it’ll be a success, but they do spoil it.”

“Yes,” said Mendel. “They spoil everything. When do they begin to dance?”

“They’ve nearly finished the programme. They have to have a programme to make people eat and drink.”

“Let’s have some champagne.”

He called the waiter and ordered a bottle.

“Been selling lately?”

“No,” he said; “but I want to dance. Do you hear? I want to dance.”

“Dancing,” Logan threw in, “is the beginning of art. It is too primitive for me, or I’m too old.”

A thin-faced long-haired poet mounted the table and read some verses, which the popping of corks and the clatter of knives and forks rendered inaudible. The poet went on interminably, and atlast someone began drumming on the table and shouting “Dance! Dance! Dance!” The poet stuck to it. Bread was thrown at him and the shouting became general.

At last the orchestra struck up through the poet’s reedy chanting, couples made their way to the stage, and the dancing began. Morrison still sat prim and preoccupied. Mendel put his arm round Jessie’s waist, his fingers sank into her young, supple body, and he lifted her to her feet and rushed with her over to the stage. The whole place was humming with life, beating to the chopped rhythm of the vacant American tune.

“I do love dancing with you,” said Jessie, as he swung her into the moving throng of brilliantly dressed women and black-coated men, so locked together that they were like one creature, a strange, grotesque quadruped. And Jessie so melted into him, so became a part of him, that he too became another creature, an organism in the whirling circle supported and spun round by the music. It was glorious to feel his will relaxing, to feel the lithe, soft woman in his arms yield to every impulse, every movement. He danced with a terrific concentration, with a wiry collected force that made Jessie feel as light as a feather.

“Oo! That was lovely,” she said when the music stopped. “You do dance lovely.”

“It was pretty good,” said Mendel. “But wait until they play a waltz.”

“I want to dance with you,” cried Oliver. “You said I should dance with you.”

And she had the next dance with him; but there was no lightness in her, only a greedy fumbling after sensation.

“This is awful!” thought Mendel, never for a moment losing himself, and all the while conscious of Morrison sitting there unmoved: of Morrison, whom he was trying to forget. Oliver seemed to envelop him, to swallow him up. He wasconscious of holding an enormous woman in his arms and her contact was distasteful. The dance seemed endless. Would the music never stop? . . . One, two, three. . . . One, two, three. . . . It was like a dancing class with the fat Jewesses at home. . . . And all the time he was conscious of Morrison’s big blue eyes staring at him. Would she never stop her damnable smiling?

He returned Oliver to Logan shamefacedly, as though he were paying a long-standing debt.

Jessie returned from her other partner to him.

“Oh! It isn’t anything like the same,” she said; “and that is such a lovely tune to dance to.”

Now that the dancers were warmed up they refused to allow any intervals. They had their partners and were unwilling to stop. The orchestra was worked up into a kind of frenzy, and Mendel and Jessie were whirled into an ecstasy. They abandoned the conventional steps and improvised, gliding, whirling, swooping suddenly through the dancers. Sometimes he picked her up and whirled her round, sometimes his hands were locked on her waist and she bent backwards—back, back, until he pulled her up and she fell upon his breast, happy, panting, deliriously happy.

Morrison sat watching. She was trembling and felt very miserable. She had been brought there by Clowes, who had been unable to resist the flattery of Calthrop’s invitation. All these people seemed to her to be pretending to be happy, and she was oppressed with it all. She had not seen Mendel until he mounted the stage, and then her heart ached. She remembered the etched phrases of his letter to her. She had written to him, but nothing she could express on paper conveyed her feeling, her sense of being in the wrong, and her deep, instinctive conviction of the injustice of that wrong. . . . He had placed her in the wrong by talking of marriage so prematurely. As shelooked round the room she was oppressed by all the men: great, hulking creatures, clumsy, cocksure, insensible, spinning their vain thoughts and vainer emotions round the women as a spider spins its threads round a caught fly. . . . She had often watched spiders dealing with the booty in their webs, and Calthrop reminded her of a spider when he looked at Clowes and laid his hand on her shoulder or fingered her arm. And Clowes lay still like a caught fly and suffered it. . . . Morrison was in revolt against it all. She was full of sweet life, and would not have it so treated. Her prudery was not shocked, for she had no prudery. The men might have their women so, if the women liked it, but never, never would she be so treated.

It was because she had been able to sweep aside the sticky threads of vanity with Mendel that the ecstasy of the woods and the Heath had been possible.

As she watched him now, she knew that he was different from all the others. He had brought an exaltation into the face of the common little girl who was his partner. He was giving her life, not taking it from her.

Yet to see him made her unhappy. The music was vulgar, the people were vulgar, and he had no true place among them. But how he enjoyed it all!

She shook with impatience at herself. It was hateful to be outside it, looking on, looking on. A young student had pestered her to dance with him. She turned to him and said:—

“I want to dance, please.”

Delighted, he sprang to his feet, gave her his arm, and whirled her into the dance.

Slowing down to take breath, Mendel looked in her direction. She was gone! A black despair seized him, a groan escaped him; he hugged Jessietight against his body and plunged madly into the dance.

The musicians had been given champagne. The violinist began to embroider upon the tune and the ’cellist followed with voluptuous thrumming chords.

Jessie gave little cries of happiness to feel the growing strength in Mendel’s arms, the waxing power of his smooth movements. She gave little cries like the call of a quail, and he laughed gleefully every time she cried. He could feel the force rising in him. It would surely burst out of him and break into molten streams of laughter, leaving him deliciously light, as light and absurd as dear little Jessie, who was swinging on the music like a dewdrop on a gossamer. . . . If only the music would last long enough! He would be as tremulous and light as she, and while that lightness lasted he could love her and taste life at its highest point—for her. . . . She was aware of his desire, and swung to it. It was like a wind swaying her, thistledown as she was; like a wind blowing her through the air on a summer’s day. O that it might never end, that the sky might never be overcast, that the rain might never come and the night might never fall. . . . Terrible things had happened to Jessie in the night, and she was happy in the sun.

Mendel was past all dizziness. The room had spun round until it could spin no more, and then it had unwound itself, making him feel weak and giddy. He was very nearly clear-headed, and every now and then he caught a glimpse of Logan sketching and of Oliver, sitting with a sulky pout on her lips and tears in her eyes because she wanted to dance and knew she had made a failure of it.

“Lovely! lovely! lovely!” sighed Jessie.

“You are like the white kernel of a nut,” said Mendel, “when the shell is broken.”

“Do let me come and sit for you,” she said. “I won’t want anything except my dinner.”

“Better keep to the dancing,” he answered, as he spun her round to stop her talking.

She began to stroke his neck and to press her face against his breast. At the same moment he saw Morrison among the dancers. He slowed down and then stopped dead. The music rose to an exultant riot of sound.

“Please, please!” cried Jessie, clinging to him; but he had forgotten her.

Morrison and her partner swept past him, and he watched them go the full circle. She saw him standing, and as she approached broke away from her partner.

“Why aren’t you dancing with me?” he said, shaking with eagerness to hear her speak.

“I’m no good at dancing,” she said. “I don’t enjoy it.”

“Who brought you here? Calthrop?”

“He brought Clowes and me. . . . You mustn’t stop dancing. Your partner. . . .”

“Please, please!” cried Jessie, stamping her foot; “the music is going to stop.”

“Wait a moment,” he said, turning to Morrison. “Are you going home?”

“The day after to-morrow.”

“I must see you.”

Before she could reply her partner, who had lost his temper, seized her and made her finish the dance, and when it was over he marched her back to Calthrop’s party, and he never left her side again.

Mendel returned to Logan and Oliver, to find them impatient to go. The end of an evening always found them in this impatient mood.

“It all bears out what I say,” said Logan. “All this night-club business. People have to go mad in London before they can taste life at all.”

“Do you mind if I come home and sleep on your sofa?” asked Mendel. “I can’t face my studio to-night.”

“Why don’t you take Jessie home with you?” said Logan; “I’m sure she’d like to.”

Mendel winced, and Jessie’s lips began to tremble. She was still suffering from the sudden end to her happiness. She looked at him, almost hoping that he was going to make reparation to her.

“You know I can’t,” he said; “I live in my brother’s house and he is a respectable married man.”

He knew he was in for a terrible night of reaction and desperate blind emotion; at the same time he did not wish to hurt Jessie more than he had done.

“I’ll take you home in a cab,” he said. “But I won’t stay, if you don’t mind. I’m done up. If you and Oliver walk half way, Logan, we ought to be there about the same time.”

Jessie was appeased. A little kindness went a long way with her, and she hated to be a nuisance to a man.

When the cab stopped outside the door of her lodgings she flung her arms round Mendel’s neck and kissed him, saying:—

“You are a darling, and I would do anything in the world for you.”

“You shall come and sit for me,” he replied. “Good-night!”

“Good-night!”

Good-night! A night of tossing to and fro, of hearing terrifying noises in the darkness, of hearing Logan and Oliver in the next room, of shutting his ears to what he heard, of fancying he heard someone calling him . . . her voice! Surely she had called him, and the ache and the torment in his flesh was the measure of herneed of him. . . . Strange, blurred thoughts; gusts of defiance and revolt; glimpses of pictures, subjects for pictures, colours and shapes. . . . His mother’s hands clutching a fish and bringing a knife down on to it. There was a blue light on the knife. It would be very hard to get that and to keep it subordinate to the blue in the fish’s scales. . . . His father and mother, eternally together, in an affection that never found any expression, harsh and bitter, but strongly savoured, like everything else in their lives. . . . Issy and Rosa, much the same as Logan and Oliver, and to them also he had to shut his ears. . . . The goggle-eyed man at the Pot-au-Feu. . . . London, London, the roaring fiery furnace of London in which he was burning alive, while flames of madness shot up above him. . . . Music. . . . There was a music in his soul, a music and mystery that could rise with an easy power above all the flames. . . . What did it matter that his body was burned, if his soul could rise like that up to the stars and beyond the stars to the point where art touched life and gave out its iridescent beneficent light? . . . Life, flames, body, stars, all might perish and fade away, but the soul had its knowledge of eternity and could not be quenched. . . . Eternal art, divine art, the world of form, shaped in the knowledge of eternity, wherein life and death are but a day and a night. . . . Sickening doubt of himself, sinking down, down into eternity to be a part of it, never to know it, never to see the light of art, lost to eternity in eternity. . . . He sat up in the middle of the night and imagined himself back in the one room in Gun Street, looking at the recumbent bodies of his family, lost in sleep, huddled together in degradation. . . . It would have been better to have gone home with Jessie. She would have given him rest and sleep. . . . No, no, no! . . . She was going away the day after to-morrow. He must see her beforeshe went, with her big blue eyes and short chestnut hair. She had stopped in the middle of the dance. She had broken away from her partner, and on Hampstead Heath she had said “I love you.”

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