IX“GOOD-BYE”LOGANcame in early in the morning to make tea. He shut the door carefully and came and sat on Mendel’s sofa.“She says you hate her,” he said.“I?” answered Mendel. “No. I. . . . What can make her say that? Because I didn’t dance with her? I had Jessie. You ought to have danced with her.”“I’m glad she didn’t dance. It might make her break out. Women are very queer things. You never know where they will break out. . . . You make love to them, touch a spring in them, and God knows where it may lead you. . . . You’re not in love with that mop-haired girl, are you?”“What if I am?”“She’s just a doll-faced miss. You’re taken with the type because you’re unused to it. For God’s sake don’t take it seriously. You’re much too good to waste yourself on women. She’ll drive you mad with purity and chivalrous devotion and all the other schoolgirl twaddle. Leave all that to the schoolboy English. It’s all they’re good for. They’ve bred it on purpose to be the mother of more schoolboys. It is the basis of the British Empire. But what is the British Empire to you or any artist? Nothing.”“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Mendel.“She won’t marry you,” said Logan. “She won’t live with you. She’ll give you nothing. She’ll madden you with her conceited stupidityand wreck your work. . . . What you want is what every decent man wants—to take a woman and keep her in her place, so that she can’t interfere with him. That’s what I’ve done, and it’s made a man of me, but I’m not going to let her know it. She’d be crowing like an old hen that has laid an egg. . . . No farmyard life for me, thanks.”Oliver bawled for her tea and Logan hastened to make it, and disappeared into the bedroom.Mendel got up and dressed, feeling eager for the day. The sun shone in through the window and filled the room with a dusty glow, making even the shabby bareness of the place seem charming.“It is a good day,” he said to himself. “I shall work to-day.” And he was annoyed at not having his canvas at hand.On an easel stood the picture which Logan had described to Tysoe, a London street scene with a group of people gazing into a shop window. It was a clever piece of work, very adroit in the handling of the paint and pleasing in colour, but Mendel had an odd uncomfortable feeling of having seen it before, and yet he knew that the technique was novel. Yet it was precisely the technique that seemed familiar. Certain liberties had been taken with the perspective which, though they were new to him, did not surprise him.Logan came in dressed and said that Oliver would not be a minute. She appeared in a dressing-gown.“Well?” she said; “none the worse for last night?”“No, thanks,” said Mendel. “Why should I be? I enjoyed it.”“Did Logan tell you we were going to Paris?”“No. He said nothing about it.”“I’m dying to go to Paris. He says they understandthe kind of thing we had last night in Paris.”“You’re not going for good, are you?” asked Mendel.“No. Just a trip. I want you to come too. We’ll see some pictures and have a good time. I can’t speak a word of French, but they say English is good enough anywhere.”“Yes, I’d like to go,” said Mendel. “I want a change, before I settle down to working for the exhibition. Is that picture going to be in it?”“Yes. Do you like it?”“I like it. It seems to me new. Stronger than most things. All these people going in for thin, flat colour and greens and mauves make me long for something solid.”“I’m going to show that and a portrait of Oliver.”“I want my breakfast,” said she.“Oh! shut up. We’re talking. . . . I’ve just begun the portrait. No psychological nonsense about it. It’s just the head of a woman in paint. I don’t want any damn fool writing about my picture: she is wiser than the chair on which she sits and the secrets of the antimacassar are hers. A picture’s a picture and a book’s a book.”“I do want my breakfast,” sang Oliver.Logan went livid with fury.“Be silent, woman,” he said.“I shan’t, so there. I want my breakfast.”“Why the hell don’t you get the breakfast then?”“Because you said you would.”Logan began to prepare the breakfast—rashers of bacon and eggs.“You don’t mind eating pork?” he asked Mendel.“No. I like it, but I never get it at home.”“Fancy Jews being still as strict as that!” said Oliver. “Just like they were in Shakespeare’s time.”“Just as they were in the time of Moses and Aaron,” said Mendel. “They don’t alter except that they haven’t got a country to fight for.”“Thank God!” said Logan, “or there’d be a bloody mess every other week. Fancy a Jewish Empire, with you sent out, like David, to hit the Czar of Russia or Chaliapine in the eye with a stone from a sling. Think of your sister-in-law luring the Kaiser into a tent and knocking a nail through his head. I wish she could, upon my soul I do!”“I think we should only be led into captivity again,” said Mendel. “Our fighting days are over, and someone told me the other day that many of the most advanced artists in Paris are Jews.”“If they were all like you,” said Logan, “I shouldn’t mind. But I’m afraid they’re not. The Jews have got all the money and they keep the other people fighting for it, and charge them a hell of a lot for guns and uniforms to do it with. Oh! there are Christians in it too, but they have to be nice to the Jews to be allowed to share the spoils. I don’t wonder the Jews left the Promised Land when they found the world was inhabited by fools who would let them plunder it.”“There’s not much plunder in my family,” said Mendel.After breakfast he declared that he must go, and Logan announced that he would walk with him to enjoy the lovely sunny day. Oliver wanted to come too, but he told her to stay where she was, and he left her in tears.“She’s got a bad habit of crying,” he said, “and she must be broken of it. She cries if I don’t speak to her for an hour. She cries if I go out without telling her where I am going. She cries if I curse and swear over my work, and if I am pleased with it she cries because I am never so happy with her. . . . I feel like hitting her sometimes,but it isn’t her fault. She hasn’t settled down to it yet. She says I don’t love her when she knows she never expected to be loved so much. And she can’t get used to it.”“Why don’t you paint her crying?” asked Mendel maliciously.“By Jove! I will,” cried Logan. “Damned interesting drawing, with her eyes all puckered up. . . . But it’s a shame on a day like this to be out of temper with anything. Lord! How women do spoil the universe, to be sure! Do they give us anything to justify the mess they make of it? . . . Women and shopkeepers. I don’t see why one should have any mercy on either of them. I have no compunction in stealing anything I want. Shopkeepers steal from the public all the little halfpennies and farthings of extra profit they exact.”He led Mendel into a picture shop and asked for a reproduction of a picture by Van Tromp, and when the girl retired upstairs to ask about that non-existent artist, he turned over the albums and helped himself to half a dozen reproductions, rolled them up, and put them in his pocket. When the girl came down and said they were out of Van Tromps, he said:—“I’m sorry. Very sorry to trouble you.”When they were out of the shop he chuckled, and was as elated over his success as Mr. Kuit had been over his exploits.“Oh! I should be an artist in anything I did,” he said. “I don’t wonder thieves can’t go straight once they get on the lay. If I weren’t a painter I should be a criminal.”He walked with Mendel as far as Gray’s Inn, and there left him, saying he had another picture-buying flat to go and see, and after that he must pay a visit to Uncle Cluny and keep him up to the mark. He was in fine fettle, and went off singing at the top of his voice.Mendel bought some flowers on the way home because he wished always to have flowers, even if she were to send no more.He was sure of himself to-day. He was in love and glad to be in love. Surely it could have no worse suffering than that through which he had passed, and if it did, well, so much the worse for him. . . . He was glad it had happened. His father would not be able to sneer at him any more, as he was always sneering at Issy and Harry—Harry, who had deserted his father and mother for the sweetbreads of Paris. (Jacob always called sweetmeats sweetbreads.) He had a bitter, biting tongue, had Jacob, and the habit of using it was growing on him. Mendel knew that he had deserved many of his sneers, but now they could touch him no longer. His life, like his art, now contained a passion as strong as any Jacob had known in his life, and stronger, because it was wedded to beauty, to which Jacob was a stranger.He was able to work again at his picture of his father and mother. He could make something of it now, he knew, because he could understand his father and appreciate the strength in him which had kept his passion alive through poverty and a life of constant storms and upheavals. He remembered his father knocking down the schoolmaster, and the soldier in the inn with the heavy glass. Oh yes! Jacob was a strong man, and he had nearly died of love for Golda, the beautiful.He worked away with an extraordinary zest, and he knew that it was good. As he grew tired during the afternoon he was overcome with a great longing for her to see it, just to see it and to say she liked it. It would not matter much if she did not understand it, so long as she saw it and liked it.He turned to the roughly sketched portrait ofher to ask her if she liked it, and as he did so the door opened and she came in. Her arms were full of flowers, so that her face was resting in them, her dear face, the sweetest of all flowers.“You said . . . you must see me, so I brought you these to say good-bye.”“Do come in and see my picture. It is nearly finished.”“Oh! It is good,” she said shyly.“I thought you’d like it. I wanted you to like it. Do stay a little and talk.”She sat down and looked about the studio, puckering up her eyebrows nervously and making her eyes very round and large.“You never told me how old you are,” he said nervously.“I’m nineteen.”“I’m twenty. Just twenty. How long are you going away for?”“I don’t know. Until the winter, I expect.”“What will you do there in the country? It is important that you should tell me, because I must know how to think of you. What shall you do? Is it a big house? Are you—are you rich?”“No. It is not a very big house. My mother is fairly well off, but I have four brothers, and they all have to go to Oxford and Cambridge. . . . There’s a good garden, and I shall spend a lot of time in that, digging and looking after the flowers. And I shall try and do some work. There’s a big barn I can have for a studio.”“A big barn. Yes. Are your brothers nice men?”“Two of them.”“And there’s a river and a common. May I write to you?”She was silent for a long time, and then she said:—“No. Please don’t.”His happiness vanished. It was as though a hole had opened in the floor and swallowed it up.“Why not?” he asked. “Why not?”She shrank into herself for a moment, but shook off her cowardice and answered:—“I don’t want to hurt you.”“You said you loved me. You can do what you like with me!”“You’re so different,” she said. “Too different.”“From what? From whom? Go on, go on!”She loved his violence and gained courage from it.“You mustn’t think it mean of me. I don’t care a bit what people say, but I don’t want to hurt you—in your work, I mean. It isn’t all that I think and mean, but it is a part of it, a little part of it. People are furious at our being seen together. It began at the picnic. We were seen walking over the Heath. Clowes told me. She can’t bear it. She’s a good friend. . . . It hurt me when she told me, and I knew that I must tell you. It isn’t only old women. It is all the important people, who can hurt your work.”“Nobody can hurt my work.”“But they can. They are saying your work is bad, all the people who said it was so good only last year, all the people who believed in you. And it’s all through me. It’s my fault.”She began to weep silently. He was unmoved by the sight of it, so appalled was he by the sudden devastation of his life. Suffering within himself he knew, but hostility from without he had not had to face. . . . Many little slights were explained—men who had given him an indifferent nod, men who had apparently not seen him in the street. In the surprise of it he was blind even to her. It was like a sandstorm covering him up, filling with grit every little chink andcrevice of his being. He snorted with fury and contempt.He shook himself free of the oppression of it. This was nothing to do with her; it was not what he wanted from her—the gossip and tittle-tattle, the sweepings of the studios. The models sickened him of that. . . . So it was his turn now. Well, other men had survived it.“That isn’t why you want to say good-bye.”“No. I’m not pleading to you to let me off, or anything like that. I believe in you more than in anybody else, more than I do in myself. . . . I don’t believe in myself much.”It had all seemed clear to her before she had come. He would understand how wrong and twisted the whole thing had become. They would suffer together and they would see how useless such suffering was in a world of beauty and charm and youth, and they would part because they had to part. He would understand, even if she could not rightly understand, for he was strong and simple and direct, and free of the soft vanity of youth.But he did not understand. He was angry and domineering.“Why do you say all this?” he said heavily, floundering for words. “What does it mean? Nothing at all. You belong to me. You gave up Mitchell because I said you must. Have you given up Mitchell?”“Yes.”“Very well then. Nothing else matters. If I want a thing I will break through a Chinese wall to get it. Nothing can stop me, because when I want a thing it is mine already. I want it because it is mine already.”He was making it impossible for her—impossible to go, impossible to stay, impossible to say anything.Outside in the street the heavy drays wentclattering by on the stone setts. When they had passed there came up the shrill cries of children playing in the street, the drone of a Rabbi taking a class of boys in Hebrew. On the hot air came the smell of the street—a smell of women and babies and leather and kosher meat.“I know the way of women,” he said. “My mother has been my friend always. But I do not know your ways. I only know that I love you. You are mine as that picture is mine, and you cannot take yourself from me.”“I don’t want to take myself from you,” she said, half angry, half in tears. “I want to make you understand me.”“What is there to understand? Do I understand my pictures?” he cried. “Do you want no mystery? How can there be life without mystery? I don’t expect you to understand. I only want you to be honest and true to me. . . . I conceal nothing. I am a Jew. I live in this horrible place. My life is as horrible as this place. You know all that, all there is to know, and you love me. You cannot alter me. You cannot change my nature. . . .”“Don’t say any more,” she said. “It only becomes worse with talking.”“What becomes worse?”She could not answer him. She could not say what she felt. The woods, the Heath, and—this; the rattle and smell of the street, the dinginess of the studio, the dinginess of his soul—the dinginess and yet the fire of it. On the Heath he had been like a faun, prick-eared and shaggy, but wild and free as her spirit was wild and free. Here he was rough, coarse, harsh, and tyrannical. She could feel him battering at her with his mind, searching her out, probing into her, and she resented it with all the passion of her modesty. She gathered up all her forces to resist him.“You are terrible! Terrible!” she cried. “Don’t you see that it must be good-bye?”“I say it must not,” he shouted. “I say it is nonsense to talk of good-bye, when we have just met, when the kiss is yet warm on our lips. For a kiss is a holy thing, and I do not kiss unless it is holy. I say it is not good-bye.”“I say it is and must be,” she said. “You are terrible. You hurt me beyond endurance.”“And why should you not be hurt? Am I to have all the pain? I want to share even that with you.”“It is impossible,” she said dully, unable to share, or deal with, or appreciate the violence of his passion, and falling back on the mulishness which had been developed in her through her tussles with her brothers. Through her mind shot the horrible thought:—“We are quarrelling—already quarrelling.”To her he seemed to be dragging her down, defiling her. His eyes were glaring at her with a passion that she took for sensuality, because it came out of the dinginess of his soul. And he was stiffening into an iron column of egoism, on which she knew she could make no impression. She knew, too, that her presence was aggravating the stiffening process. . . . She felt caught, trapped, and she wanted to get away. Love must be free—free as the wind on the heath, as the blossom of the wild cherry. Love must have its blossoming time, and he was demanding the full heat of the summer. . . . She must get away.“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand.He took her hand and pulled her to him.“No! No! No!” she cried. “No! Good-bye! Good-bye!”She turned away and was gone.Unable to contain his agony, he flung himself on his bed and sobbed out his grief.“She is mine!” he moaned. “She is mine, and she cannot take herself from me.”And when his tears were shed he began to think of the other women who had come to him without love, so easily, so gratefully, some of them, and this little girl who loved him could tear herself away—at a fearful cost. He knew that. But if she could tear herself away, if she could say good-bye, what could she know of love?
LOGANcame in early in the morning to make tea. He shut the door carefully and came and sat on Mendel’s sofa.
“She says you hate her,” he said.
“I?” answered Mendel. “No. I. . . . What can make her say that? Because I didn’t dance with her? I had Jessie. You ought to have danced with her.”
“I’m glad she didn’t dance. It might make her break out. Women are very queer things. You never know where they will break out. . . . You make love to them, touch a spring in them, and God knows where it may lead you. . . . You’re not in love with that mop-haired girl, are you?”
“What if I am?”
“She’s just a doll-faced miss. You’re taken with the type because you’re unused to it. For God’s sake don’t take it seriously. You’re much too good to waste yourself on women. She’ll drive you mad with purity and chivalrous devotion and all the other schoolgirl twaddle. Leave all that to the schoolboy English. It’s all they’re good for. They’ve bred it on purpose to be the mother of more schoolboys. It is the basis of the British Empire. But what is the British Empire to you or any artist? Nothing.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Mendel.
“She won’t marry you,” said Logan. “She won’t live with you. She’ll give you nothing. She’ll madden you with her conceited stupidityand wreck your work. . . . What you want is what every decent man wants—to take a woman and keep her in her place, so that she can’t interfere with him. That’s what I’ve done, and it’s made a man of me, but I’m not going to let her know it. She’d be crowing like an old hen that has laid an egg. . . . No farmyard life for me, thanks.”
Oliver bawled for her tea and Logan hastened to make it, and disappeared into the bedroom.
Mendel got up and dressed, feeling eager for the day. The sun shone in through the window and filled the room with a dusty glow, making even the shabby bareness of the place seem charming.
“It is a good day,” he said to himself. “I shall work to-day.” And he was annoyed at not having his canvas at hand.
On an easel stood the picture which Logan had described to Tysoe, a London street scene with a group of people gazing into a shop window. It was a clever piece of work, very adroit in the handling of the paint and pleasing in colour, but Mendel had an odd uncomfortable feeling of having seen it before, and yet he knew that the technique was novel. Yet it was precisely the technique that seemed familiar. Certain liberties had been taken with the perspective which, though they were new to him, did not surprise him.
Logan came in dressed and said that Oliver would not be a minute. She appeared in a dressing-gown.
“Well?” she said; “none the worse for last night?”
“No, thanks,” said Mendel. “Why should I be? I enjoyed it.”
“Did Logan tell you we were going to Paris?”
“No. He said nothing about it.”
“I’m dying to go to Paris. He says they understandthe kind of thing we had last night in Paris.”
“You’re not going for good, are you?” asked Mendel.
“No. Just a trip. I want you to come too. We’ll see some pictures and have a good time. I can’t speak a word of French, but they say English is good enough anywhere.”
“Yes, I’d like to go,” said Mendel. “I want a change, before I settle down to working for the exhibition. Is that picture going to be in it?”
“Yes. Do you like it?”
“I like it. It seems to me new. Stronger than most things. All these people going in for thin, flat colour and greens and mauves make me long for something solid.”
“I’m going to show that and a portrait of Oliver.”
“I want my breakfast,” said she.
“Oh! shut up. We’re talking. . . . I’ve just begun the portrait. No psychological nonsense about it. It’s just the head of a woman in paint. I don’t want any damn fool writing about my picture: she is wiser than the chair on which she sits and the secrets of the antimacassar are hers. A picture’s a picture and a book’s a book.”
“I do want my breakfast,” sang Oliver.
Logan went livid with fury.
“Be silent, woman,” he said.
“I shan’t, so there. I want my breakfast.”
“Why the hell don’t you get the breakfast then?”
“Because you said you would.”
Logan began to prepare the breakfast—rashers of bacon and eggs.
“You don’t mind eating pork?” he asked Mendel.
“No. I like it, but I never get it at home.”
“Fancy Jews being still as strict as that!” said Oliver. “Just like they were in Shakespeare’s time.”
“Just as they were in the time of Moses and Aaron,” said Mendel. “They don’t alter except that they haven’t got a country to fight for.”
“Thank God!” said Logan, “or there’d be a bloody mess every other week. Fancy a Jewish Empire, with you sent out, like David, to hit the Czar of Russia or Chaliapine in the eye with a stone from a sling. Think of your sister-in-law luring the Kaiser into a tent and knocking a nail through his head. I wish she could, upon my soul I do!”
“I think we should only be led into captivity again,” said Mendel. “Our fighting days are over, and someone told me the other day that many of the most advanced artists in Paris are Jews.”
“If they were all like you,” said Logan, “I shouldn’t mind. But I’m afraid they’re not. The Jews have got all the money and they keep the other people fighting for it, and charge them a hell of a lot for guns and uniforms to do it with. Oh! there are Christians in it too, but they have to be nice to the Jews to be allowed to share the spoils. I don’t wonder the Jews left the Promised Land when they found the world was inhabited by fools who would let them plunder it.”
“There’s not much plunder in my family,” said Mendel.
After breakfast he declared that he must go, and Logan announced that he would walk with him to enjoy the lovely sunny day. Oliver wanted to come too, but he told her to stay where she was, and he left her in tears.
“She’s got a bad habit of crying,” he said, “and she must be broken of it. She cries if I don’t speak to her for an hour. She cries if I go out without telling her where I am going. She cries if I curse and swear over my work, and if I am pleased with it she cries because I am never so happy with her. . . . I feel like hitting her sometimes,but it isn’t her fault. She hasn’t settled down to it yet. She says I don’t love her when she knows she never expected to be loved so much. And she can’t get used to it.”
“Why don’t you paint her crying?” asked Mendel maliciously.
“By Jove! I will,” cried Logan. “Damned interesting drawing, with her eyes all puckered up. . . . But it’s a shame on a day like this to be out of temper with anything. Lord! How women do spoil the universe, to be sure! Do they give us anything to justify the mess they make of it? . . . Women and shopkeepers. I don’t see why one should have any mercy on either of them. I have no compunction in stealing anything I want. Shopkeepers steal from the public all the little halfpennies and farthings of extra profit they exact.”
He led Mendel into a picture shop and asked for a reproduction of a picture by Van Tromp, and when the girl retired upstairs to ask about that non-existent artist, he turned over the albums and helped himself to half a dozen reproductions, rolled them up, and put them in his pocket. When the girl came down and said they were out of Van Tromps, he said:—
“I’m sorry. Very sorry to trouble you.”
When they were out of the shop he chuckled, and was as elated over his success as Mr. Kuit had been over his exploits.
“Oh! I should be an artist in anything I did,” he said. “I don’t wonder thieves can’t go straight once they get on the lay. If I weren’t a painter I should be a criminal.”
He walked with Mendel as far as Gray’s Inn, and there left him, saying he had another picture-buying flat to go and see, and after that he must pay a visit to Uncle Cluny and keep him up to the mark. He was in fine fettle, and went off singing at the top of his voice.
Mendel bought some flowers on the way home because he wished always to have flowers, even if she were to send no more.
He was sure of himself to-day. He was in love and glad to be in love. Surely it could have no worse suffering than that through which he had passed, and if it did, well, so much the worse for him. . . . He was glad it had happened. His father would not be able to sneer at him any more, as he was always sneering at Issy and Harry—Harry, who had deserted his father and mother for the sweetbreads of Paris. (Jacob always called sweetmeats sweetbreads.) He had a bitter, biting tongue, had Jacob, and the habit of using it was growing on him. Mendel knew that he had deserved many of his sneers, but now they could touch him no longer. His life, like his art, now contained a passion as strong as any Jacob had known in his life, and stronger, because it was wedded to beauty, to which Jacob was a stranger.
He was able to work again at his picture of his father and mother. He could make something of it now, he knew, because he could understand his father and appreciate the strength in him which had kept his passion alive through poverty and a life of constant storms and upheavals. He remembered his father knocking down the schoolmaster, and the soldier in the inn with the heavy glass. Oh yes! Jacob was a strong man, and he had nearly died of love for Golda, the beautiful.
He worked away with an extraordinary zest, and he knew that it was good. As he grew tired during the afternoon he was overcome with a great longing for her to see it, just to see it and to say she liked it. It would not matter much if she did not understand it, so long as she saw it and liked it.
He turned to the roughly sketched portrait ofher to ask her if she liked it, and as he did so the door opened and she came in. Her arms were full of flowers, so that her face was resting in them, her dear face, the sweetest of all flowers.
“You said . . . you must see me, so I brought you these to say good-bye.”
“Do come in and see my picture. It is nearly finished.”
“Oh! It is good,” she said shyly.
“I thought you’d like it. I wanted you to like it. Do stay a little and talk.”
She sat down and looked about the studio, puckering up her eyebrows nervously and making her eyes very round and large.
“You never told me how old you are,” he said nervously.
“I’m nineteen.”
“I’m twenty. Just twenty. How long are you going away for?”
“I don’t know. Until the winter, I expect.”
“What will you do there in the country? It is important that you should tell me, because I must know how to think of you. What shall you do? Is it a big house? Are you—are you rich?”
“No. It is not a very big house. My mother is fairly well off, but I have four brothers, and they all have to go to Oxford and Cambridge. . . . There’s a good garden, and I shall spend a lot of time in that, digging and looking after the flowers. And I shall try and do some work. There’s a big barn I can have for a studio.”
“A big barn. Yes. Are your brothers nice men?”
“Two of them.”
“And there’s a river and a common. May I write to you?”
She was silent for a long time, and then she said:—
“No. Please don’t.”
His happiness vanished. It was as though a hole had opened in the floor and swallowed it up.
“Why not?” he asked. “Why not?”
She shrank into herself for a moment, but shook off her cowardice and answered:—
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You said you loved me. You can do what you like with me!”
“You’re so different,” she said. “Too different.”
“From what? From whom? Go on, go on!”
She loved his violence and gained courage from it.
“You mustn’t think it mean of me. I don’t care a bit what people say, but I don’t want to hurt you—in your work, I mean. It isn’t all that I think and mean, but it is a part of it, a little part of it. People are furious at our being seen together. It began at the picnic. We were seen walking over the Heath. Clowes told me. She can’t bear it. She’s a good friend. . . . It hurt me when she told me, and I knew that I must tell you. It isn’t only old women. It is all the important people, who can hurt your work.”
“Nobody can hurt my work.”
“But they can. They are saying your work is bad, all the people who said it was so good only last year, all the people who believed in you. And it’s all through me. It’s my fault.”
She began to weep silently. He was unmoved by the sight of it, so appalled was he by the sudden devastation of his life. Suffering within himself he knew, but hostility from without he had not had to face. . . . Many little slights were explained—men who had given him an indifferent nod, men who had apparently not seen him in the street. In the surprise of it he was blind even to her. It was like a sandstorm covering him up, filling with grit every little chink andcrevice of his being. He snorted with fury and contempt.
He shook himself free of the oppression of it. This was nothing to do with her; it was not what he wanted from her—the gossip and tittle-tattle, the sweepings of the studios. The models sickened him of that. . . . So it was his turn now. Well, other men had survived it.
“That isn’t why you want to say good-bye.”
“No. I’m not pleading to you to let me off, or anything like that. I believe in you more than in anybody else, more than I do in myself. . . . I don’t believe in myself much.”
It had all seemed clear to her before she had come. He would understand how wrong and twisted the whole thing had become. They would suffer together and they would see how useless such suffering was in a world of beauty and charm and youth, and they would part because they had to part. He would understand, even if she could not rightly understand, for he was strong and simple and direct, and free of the soft vanity of youth.
But he did not understand. He was angry and domineering.
“Why do you say all this?” he said heavily, floundering for words. “What does it mean? Nothing at all. You belong to me. You gave up Mitchell because I said you must. Have you given up Mitchell?”
“Yes.”
“Very well then. Nothing else matters. If I want a thing I will break through a Chinese wall to get it. Nothing can stop me, because when I want a thing it is mine already. I want it because it is mine already.”
He was making it impossible for her—impossible to go, impossible to stay, impossible to say anything.
Outside in the street the heavy drays wentclattering by on the stone setts. When they had passed there came up the shrill cries of children playing in the street, the drone of a Rabbi taking a class of boys in Hebrew. On the hot air came the smell of the street—a smell of women and babies and leather and kosher meat.
“I know the way of women,” he said. “My mother has been my friend always. But I do not know your ways. I only know that I love you. You are mine as that picture is mine, and you cannot take yourself from me.”
“I don’t want to take myself from you,” she said, half angry, half in tears. “I want to make you understand me.”
“What is there to understand? Do I understand my pictures?” he cried. “Do you want no mystery? How can there be life without mystery? I don’t expect you to understand. I only want you to be honest and true to me. . . . I conceal nothing. I am a Jew. I live in this horrible place. My life is as horrible as this place. You know all that, all there is to know, and you love me. You cannot alter me. You cannot change my nature. . . .”
“Don’t say any more,” she said. “It only becomes worse with talking.”
“What becomes worse?”
She could not answer him. She could not say what she felt. The woods, the Heath, and—this; the rattle and smell of the street, the dinginess of the studio, the dinginess of his soul—the dinginess and yet the fire of it. On the Heath he had been like a faun, prick-eared and shaggy, but wild and free as her spirit was wild and free. Here he was rough, coarse, harsh, and tyrannical. She could feel him battering at her with his mind, searching her out, probing into her, and she resented it with all the passion of her modesty. She gathered up all her forces to resist him.
“You are terrible! Terrible!” she cried. “Don’t you see that it must be good-bye?”
“I say it must not,” he shouted. “I say it is nonsense to talk of good-bye, when we have just met, when the kiss is yet warm on our lips. For a kiss is a holy thing, and I do not kiss unless it is holy. I say it is not good-bye.”
“I say it is and must be,” she said. “You are terrible. You hurt me beyond endurance.”
“And why should you not be hurt? Am I to have all the pain? I want to share even that with you.”
“It is impossible,” she said dully, unable to share, or deal with, or appreciate the violence of his passion, and falling back on the mulishness which had been developed in her through her tussles with her brothers. Through her mind shot the horrible thought:—
“We are quarrelling—already quarrelling.”
To her he seemed to be dragging her down, defiling her. His eyes were glaring at her with a passion that she took for sensuality, because it came out of the dinginess of his soul. And he was stiffening into an iron column of egoism, on which she knew she could make no impression. She knew, too, that her presence was aggravating the stiffening process. . . . She felt caught, trapped, and she wanted to get away. Love must be free—free as the wind on the heath, as the blossom of the wild cherry. Love must have its blossoming time, and he was demanding the full heat of the summer. . . . She must get away.
“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand.
He took her hand and pulled her to him.
“No! No! No!” she cried. “No! Good-bye! Good-bye!”
She turned away and was gone.
Unable to contain his agony, he flung himself on his bed and sobbed out his grief.
“She is mine!” he moaned. “She is mine, and she cannot take herself from me.”
And when his tears were shed he began to think of the other women who had come to him without love, so easily, so gratefully, some of them, and this little girl who loved him could tear herself away—at a fearful cost. He knew that. But if she could tear herself away, if she could say good-bye, what could she know of love?