XPARISMENDELwas able to finish his portrait of Jacob and Golda, but only at the cost of painful and bitter labour. He was torn two ways: longing to finish it, yet dreading the end of it, for he could not see beyond it. Every picture he had painted had brought with it the certain knowledge that it would lead to a better, that he was advancing further on the road to art. But there was a finality about this picture. It was an end in itself. It was not like most of his work, one of a possible dozen or more. A certain stream of his feeling ended in it and then disappeared, leaving him without guide or direction.Therefore, when the picture was ended he found himself besottedly and uncontrollably in love and in a maddeningly sensitive condition, so that any sudden glimpse of beauty—the stars in the night sky, a girl’s face in the train, flowers in a window-box—could set him reeling. More than once he found himself clinging to the wall or a railing, emerging with happy laughter from a momentary lack of consciousness. In the street near his home he found a lovely little girl, of the same type as Sara, but more beautiful. Graceful and lively she was, fully aware of her vitality and charm, and she used to smile at him when he went to meet her as she came out of school, or stood and watched her playing in the street.At last he asked her shyly if she would come to his studio that he might draw her. She consentedand came often. She would chatter away, and, studying her, he was astonished at her womanishness, and he was overwhelmed when she said one day:—“You don’t want to draw me. You only want to look at me.”He was thrust back into the thoughts he had been avoiding. If this child knew already so frankly why he was attracted to her, why could not that other? Why did she seem to insist that he should regard her with the emotions with which he approached a work of art? A work of art could yield up its secret to the emotions, but she could only deliver hers to love dwelling not in any abstract region, but here on earth, in the life of the body. . . . He often thought of her with active dislike, because she seemed to him to be lacking in frankness. If she were going to cause so much suffering, as she must have known she would with her good-bye, then she must have her reasons for it. What did she mean with her neither yes nor no? With women there should be either yes or no. A refusal is unpleasant, but it could be swallowed down with other ills; and there were others. But this girl, this short-haired Christian, blocked his way, and there were no others except as there were cabs on the street and meals on the table.For a time he avoided Logan and Oliver. He knew that Logan would despise him for his weakness in setting his heart on a girl who ran away from him, for he knew and admired the tremendous force with which his friend had hurled himself into his life with the girl of the station, constantly wooing and winning her afresh and urging her to share his own recklessness. He admired, too, Logan’s insistence on an absolute separation of his art and his life with Oliver, who was never for one moment admitted to his mind. Rather to his dismay, but at the same time with a wild rush ofalmost lyrical impulse, Mendel, finding himself with no other emotion than that of being in love, set himself to paint love. He worked with an amazing ease, painting one picture one day and covering it with another the next, feeling elatedly convinced that everything he did was beautiful, yet knowing within himself that he was in a bad way.He avoided Logan, but Logan needed him, and came to tell him so.“It is all very well for you to shut yourself up,” he said, “but I can’t live without you. You know what Oliver is to me, but it is not enough. The more satisfying she is on one plane, the more I need on the other the satisfaction that she cannot give me. Women can’t do it. They simply can’t, and it is no good trying. If you try, it means making a mess of both love and art. She is jealous? Very well. Let her be jealous. She enjoys it, and it helps her to understand a man’s passion.”“I can’t stand it when you talk in that cold-blooded way about women.”“I’m not cold-blooded,” said Logan, astonished at the adjective.“I sometimes think you are, but I am apt to think that of all English people,” replied Mendel, wondering within himself if that did not explain Morrison. “Yes. I often wonder what you would be like if you were in an office, wearing a bowler hat, and going to and fro by the morning and evening train.”“Why think about the impossible?” laughed Logan. “Anyhow, I’m not going to let you shut yourself up. I want to go to Paris, and I can’t face three weeks alone with Oliver. Twenty-one days, sixty-three meals. No. It can’t be done.”“Yes, I’ll go to Paris,” thought Mendel. “I will go to Paris and I will forget.”“You must come,” urged Logan. “Madame at thePot-au-Feu has given me the name of a hotel kept by her sister-in-law. Very cheap. Bed and breakfast, and, of course, you feed in restaurants. . . . You want digging out of your hole. I don’t know why, but you seem to have insisted more on being Jewish lately. It is much more important for you to be an artist and a man. I regard you as a sacred trust. I do really. You are the only man in England for whom I have any respect, and I need you to keep me decent.” He added: “I need you to keep me alive, for, without you, Oliver would gobble me up in a month.”He seemed to be joking, but Mendel could not help feeling that he was at heart serious, and he had the unpleasant sinking of disgust which sometimes seized him when he thought of Logan and Oliver together. He could not account for it, and the sensation gave him a sickly pleasure which made him weaker with Logan than with anybody else. Besides, Logan often bewildered him, and he could not tolerate his inability to grasp ideas except through a mad rush of feeling, and he hated the fact that while Logan’s mind seemed to move steadily on, his own crumbled to pieces just at the moment when it was on the point of absorbing an idea.For these reasons he consented to go to Paris. The three weeks should consolidate or destroy a friendship which had remained for him distressingly inchoate. Deep in his heart he hoped that it would become definite enough and strong enough to drive out his indeterminate love. To be in love without enjoying love was in his eyes a fatuous condition, undignified, vague, a kind of cuckoldry.Oliver was aflame with excitement over the trip to Paris. She spoke of it with an almost religious exaltation. As usual, her emotion was entirely uncontrolled, became a physical tremulation, and she reminded Mendel of a wobbling blanc-mange.The plan was to have a fortnight in Paris and a week at Boulogne, for bathing and gambling at the Casino.No sooner had he left London than Mendel felt his cares and anxieties fall away from him, and he began to wish he had brought Jessie Petrie. He proposed to wire for her from Folkestone, but Logan pointed out that Oliver could not stand women and was jealous of them.“She’d say Jessie was making eyes at me,” he said. “And if she made eyes at you she’d be almost as bad.”In that Mendel could sympathize with Oliver. He was himself often suddenly, unreasonably, and violently jealous of other men over women for whom he did not care a fig.He set himself to be nice to Oliver, and she in her holiday mood responded, so that on the boat and in the Paris train Logan was sunk in a gloomy silence, and in the hotel at night, in the next room, Mendel could hear him storming at her, refusing to have anything to do with her, threatening to go home next day unless she promised to keep her claws, as he said, off Kühler. She promised, and they embarked further upon their perilous voyage in search of an unattainable land of satiety.Their hotel was near the Montparnasse station, and they discovered a café in the Boulevard Raspail which was frequented by artists and models, one or two of whom Mendel recognized as former habitués of the Paris Café. They were soon drawn into the artist world, and except that he went to the Louvre instead of to the National Gallery for peace and refreshment, Mendel often thought he might just as well be in London. There was the same feverish talk, the same abuse of successful artists, the same depreciation of old masters, but there was more body to the talk, and sometimes a Frenchman, finding speechuseless with this shy, good-looking Jew, would make himself clear with what English he could muster and a rapid, skilful drawing. For the most part, however, he had to rely on Logan’s paraphrase, until one day in the Boulevard St. Germain he ran into that Thompson, lamented by Jessie Petrie, the painter of stripes and triangles.Thompson was a little senior to Mendel at the Detmold, had hardly spoken to him in the old days, but was now delighted to meet a familiar London face.“Iamglad!” he said. “Come and see my place. How are they all in London—poor old Calthrop and poor old Froitzheim? I should have killed myself if I’d stayed in London; nothing but talk and women, with work left to find its way in where it can. Here work comes first. I suppose they haven’t even heard of Van Gogh in London?”Mendel had to confess that he had never heard of Van Gogh.“A Dutchman,” explained Thompson, “and he cut off his ear and sent it to Gauguin. Ever heard of Gauguin?”“No. But a man doesn’t make himself a great artist by cutting off his ear.”“Van Gogh was a great artist before that. He killed himself: shot himself in his bed, and the doctor found him in bed smoking a pipe. He was quite happy, for he had done all he could.”That sounded more like it to Mendel, more like the deed of a warrior of the spirit.“I’ll show you,” said Thompson, and they went round the galleries.Mendel’s head was nearly bursting when he came out. The riotous colour, the apparent neglect of drawing and abuse of form, the entire absence of tone and atmosphere, shocked him. He resented the wrench given to all his training, and he took Thompson to the Louvre to go back to Cranach and the early Italians. Thompson wouldnot hear of them, and insisted on his spending over an hour with Poussin.“I can see nothing in them. Good painting, good drawing, but dull, so dull! The flat, papery figures mean nothing.”“They mean everything to the picture,” said Thompson, “and you have no right to go outside the picture. Poussin kept to his picture, and so must you if you are to understand him.”“I can see all that,” said Mendel, “but he is dull. I can’t help it, he bores me.”“It is pure art.”“Then I like it impure.”“You don’t really. But you are all like that when you first come from London. You think that because a thing is different it must be wrong. Have you come over alone?”“No. I’m with a man called Logan and his girl. He is a great painter, or he will be one. Anyhow, he is alive and has ideas.”“Does he know about Van Gogh?”“No; but he says the next great painter must come from England.”“Pooh! Whistler!” said Thompson in a tone of vast superiority. “Nous sommes bien loin de ça.”“Please don’t talk French,” said Mendel. “I don’t understand a word.”“Whistler had good ideas,” continued Thompson. “It is a pity he was not a better artist.”Mendel was beginning to feel bored. He did not understand this new painting for painting’s sake, and did not want to understand it. To change the subject he said:—“I nearly brought Jessie Petrie with me.”“I wish you had. She is a dear little girl, and I nearly sent for her the other day, but I’ve no use for the model now. It is perfectly futile trying to cram a living figure into a modern picture.”“I don’t see why, if you can paint it.”“Really,” said Thompson, “I don’t see whatyou have come to Paris for, if you haven’t come to learn something about painting. One wouldn’t expect you to understand Picasso straight off, but anyone who has handled paint ought to be able to grasp Van Gogh.”“He is trying for the impossible,” grunted Mendel. “The important thing in art is art. I’ve come to Paris to have a good time.”“Oh! very well,” said Thompson. “Why didn’t you say so before? I’ll show you round.”Mendel took Thompson round to his hotel and up to Logan’s room, where, entering without knocking, they found Logan kneeling on the floor with Oliver in a swoon in his arms. He had opened her blouse at the neck and unlaced her corsage.Mendel thought Oliver looked as though she was going to die, and his first idea was to run for the doctor.“She’ll come round,” said Logan. “It’s my fault. I was brutal to her. . . .” He nodded to Thompson. “How do you do?” and he covered up Oliver’s large bosom.She came to in a few moments, opened her eyes slowly, rolled them round, and came back to Logan, on whom she fixed a gaze of devouring love. She put up her arms and drew his head down and kissed his lips.Mendel drew Thompson out into the corridor.“She was shamming,” he said.“I don’t think so,” replied Thompson. “What has happened? Does he knock her about?”“Not that I know of. They’ve not been together very long. They can’t settle down.”“She’s a fine woman,” said Thompson.They were called in again and found Oliver sitting up on the bed eating chocolates. She greeted Thompson with a queenly gesture, andclapped her hands when Mendel told her they were going out to see the sights.“I’m sick of artists,” she said. “I have quite enough of them in London. I wish to God you weren’t an artist, Logan. You’d be quite a nice man if you worked for your living.”“Don’t talk rubbish,” mumbled Logan, who was subdued and curiously ashamed of himself. “If I were like that I should have a little dried-up wife and an enormous family, and you wouldn’t have a look in.”“And a good job too!” cried Oliver, in her most provoking tone. “A good job too! I’d find someone who had a respect for me.”“D’you find Paris a good place to work in?” Logan turned to Thompson.“I never knew the meaning of work till I came here. Ever heard of Rousseau?”“Oh, yes,” said Logan.“I don’t mean the writer, I mean . . .”“I know, I know,” said Logan nonchalantly. He could never admit ignorance of anything.“A great painter,” cried Thompson eagerly. “A very great painter. I tell you he brought Impressionism up sharp. They had overshot the mark, you know. Manet, Monet: they had overshot the mark.”Oliver began to scream at the top of her voice.“Shut up!” said Logan. “You’ll have us turned out.”“I don’t care,” she replied. “I don’t care. I can’t stand all this talk about painting.”“What do you want us to talk about?” said Mendel, tingling with exasperation. “Love? Three men and one woman can’t talk about love.”“Well, I didn’t come to Paris to sit in a dirty bedroom talking about pictures. I want to go out to see the streets and the shops and the funny people.”“For God’s sake take us somewhere,” said Logan.Thompson, having ascertained that they had plenty of money, took them to Enghien by the river. Oliver was happy at once. She wanted to be amused and to be looked at, and as she was bouncing and rowdy she had her desire.She made Logan play for her at the little horses, but, as she did not win, she was soon bored with it. Logan was bitten and could not tear himself away. Mendel stayed with him and she disappeared with Thompson.“I’m bound to win if I go on,” said Logan. “There’s a law of chances, you know, and I’ve always been lucky at these things. . . . It is so exciting, too.”He changed note after note into five-franc pieces, lost them all, and at last began to win a little; won, lost, won.Mendel dragged him away from the table, protesting:—“Come along. I have had enough. Do come along. We haven’t had a chance to talk for days, and I hate these rooms with all the flashy, noisy people. . . . We can come back here and find the others. Let us go and find some fun that we can share, for this is deadly dull for me. Besides, we don’t want to be stranded without money.”“But I’m winning. My luck is in.”He rushed back to the tables and lost—twice, upon which he allowed himself to be persuaded, and they went out into the air and sat on a terrace by the lake. Mendel produced cigarettes and they smoked in silence for some time. Logan looked pale and worn and was obviously smouldering with excitement.“How amazingly different everything looks here,” he said. “In London I always feel as though I had a thumb pressing into my brain.Everybody seems indifferent and hostile and everything I do is incongruous. I feel almost happy here. I should like to stay here. I told her so and she began to cry. I knocked her down. I couldn’t stand her crying any more. I knocked her down and she fainted.”“She was shamming,” thought Mendel, seeing vividly the scene in the bedroom. “He did not hurt her. She was shamming.”“I feel a brute,” said Logan, “and yet I’m glad. I’m tremendously glad. I want to sing. I want to get drunk. I’m tremendously glad. It has settled something. I’m her master. She was getting on my nerves. She won’t do that any more. Ha! Ha!”“Why don’t you get rid of her?” asked Mendel. “Leave her here. Come back with me to-morrow.”“Don’t be a silly child,” said Logan patronizingly. “I love her. I couldn’t live without her now, not for a single day. I could no more do without her than I could do without the clothes on my back. I tell you she’s an inspiration. If she left me I should lay down my brush for ever. She’s a religion—all the religion I’ve got.”“I can’t imagine stopping my work for any woman,” said Mendel.“Ah! that’s because you don’t know what a woman can mean. You can’t know while you are young.”Mendel’s nerves had been throbbing in sympathy with his friend, but suddenly all that place was filled with a soft, clear light and a bright music, the colour and the scent of flowers, the soft murmur of flowing water, the whisper of the wind in leafy trees, and his heart ached and grew big and seemed to burst into a thousand, thousand rivulets of love, searching out every corner of his senses, cleansing his eyes, sharpening his hearing, refining every sense, so that the scene before him—the white tables, the white-aproned waiters, thegreen trees, the soft evening sky, the softer reflection of it in the water—was exquisite and magical and full of a mysterious power that permeated even Logan’s brutal revelation and made it worthy of beauty. . . . And this mysterious power he knew was love, and she, the girl for whom it had arisen from the depths, was far away in England, thinking of him, perhaps, regretting him, perhaps, but knowing nothing of the beauty she had denied. . . .Mendel was astonished to find tears in his eyes, trembling on his lashes, trickling down his cheeks.“What a baby you are!” said Logan. “You can’t have me all to yourself.”His divination was true. Lacking its true object, Mendel’s love had concentrated upon his friend, with whom he longed to walk freely in the enchanted world of art, to be as David and Jonathan. Indeed, Logan’s state of torment was to him as a wound got in battle, over which he gave himself up to lamentation, so single and deep and pure that it obscured even the impulse of his love. He longed to rid his friend of this devouring passion that was consuming him and thrusting in upon his energy, but because his friend called it love, he respected it and bore with it.“How good it is, this life out of doors!” exclaimed Logan, lolling back in his chair.“I don’t know,” replied Mendel. “I think it is too deliberate, too organized. I prefer London streets. There is nothing in the world to me to compare with London streets. Nature is too beautiful. A tree in blossom, a garden full of flowers, a round hill with the shadow of the clouds over them, move me too much. Left alone with them I should go mad. I must have human nature if I am to live and work. I only want nature, just as I only want God, through human nature.”“By Jove! you hit the nail on the head sometimes, my boy.That is true for all of us. It is what I meant when I said that Oliver was a religion to me.”“I don’t mean women or individuals,” protested Mendel. “I mean human nature in the lump. It may be very poor stuff, stupid and foolish and vulgar, but it is all we’ve got, and one lives in it and through it.”“That is all very well while you are young,” said Logan, “but you have to individualize it when you are older. One person becomes a point of contact. You can’t just float through humanity like an apparition.”Mendel had lost the thread of his argument, though not his confidence in its truth.“That is not what I meant,” he said, “and I don’t see how a person could be just a point of contact.”“All I know is that Oliver is such a point of contact to me, and I know that unless art is inspired with some such feeling as you have described, all the technical skill and all the deft trickery in the world won’t make it more than a sop for fools or an interesting survival of mediævalism. That is why I think you are going to be so valuable. You have so little to unlearn. You have only to shake off the most antiquated religion in the world and you can look at life and human nature without prejudice, while I have constantly to be uprooting all sorts of prejudices in favour of certain ways of living, morally and socially.”Mendel was beginning to feel comfortable and easy, for while his mind worked furiously he could rarely express what he thought, and Logan in his talk often came near enough to it to afford him some relief and to urge him on to renewed digging in the recesses of his mind. It was a vast comfort to him to find that there were other vital thoughts besides that of Morrison, and that for ecstasy he was not entirely dependent upon her. Warmed upby his confidence in Logan, he resolved to tell him about the girl and the vast change she had wrought in his life.“I used to think,” he said, “that if I stayed among my own people I could work my way through the poverty and the dirt and the Jewishness of it all to art. When she came I knew that it was impossible. She had something that I needed, something that the Jews do not know, or never have known. It is not my poverty that denies it to me, for if the poor Jews do not know a good thing, the rich Jews certainly do not, for the rich Jews are rubbish who stroke the Christians with one hand and rob them with the other. It is something that she knows almost without knowing it herself.”Logan smiled.“I am not a fool about her,” cried Mendel. “She is not particularly beautiful to me. There is only one line in her face that I think beautiful, from the cheek-bone to the jaw. I am not a fool about her, but I had almost given the Christian world up in despair. It seemed to me so bad, so inhuman, so hollow, so full of plump, respectable thieves. The simple thieves and bullies of my boyhood seemed to me infinitely preferable. And I had met some of the most important people in the Christian world: all empty and callous and lascivious. And the unimportant people were good enough, but dull, so dull. . . . Then comes this little girl. She is like Cranach’s Eve among monkeys. She becomes at once to me what Cranach’s wife must have been to him. He painted her as child, girl, and woman. The chattering apes matter to me no more. The Christian world is no longer empty. It is still lascivious and greedy, soft and ill-conditioned, puffy and stale, but it is suddenly full of meaning, of beauty, of a joy which, because I am a Jew, I cannot understand.”“Give it up,” growled Logan, “give it up. Painther portrait and let her go. You are a born painter. To a painter women are either paintable or nothing. For God’s sake don’t go losing yourself in philosophy.”“It is not philosophy!” cried Mendel indignantly. “It is what I feel.”“It will probably end in a damned good picture,” retorted Logan. “Why not be content with that?”“Because it will not answer what I want to know, and because I feel that there is something in the Jews, the real Jews, that she does not understand either. And she is not a fool. She has a mind. She has a deep character. She is strong, and she can get the better of me. She is secret and she is cruel.”Logan gave his fat chuckle.“She is just an English girl with all the raw feeling bred out of her. She is true to type: impulsive without being sensual, kind without being affectionate; and she would let you or any man go to hell rather than give up anything she has been brought up to believe in or admit to her life anything that was strange, unfamiliar, and not good form, like yourself. . . . Give it up, give it up. You are only taking it seriously because you have been irresistible so far and it is the first setback you have received.”“I will not give it up,” said Mendel, setting his teeth. Then he laughed because the lights had gone up and the scene was gay and amusing, and he wanted to plunge into the merry crowd of Parisians and pleasure-seekers, to move among them and to come in contact with the women, to watch the men strutting to please them, to delight in the procession of excited faces, to taste the flavour of humanity which is always and everywhere the same, rich, astonishing, comforting, satisfying in its variety.Oliver and Thompson returned with their handsfull of trinkets, toys, and pretty paper decorations which they had bought or won at games of chance and skill. She sat on Logan’s knee and insisted on wreathing him with paper streamers, which he removed as fast as she placed them on his head.“Do! do!” she cried. “Do let go for once and let us all be gay. Oh! I do love this place, with the band playing, and the lights in the water, and the wonderful deep blue sky. Why don’t we have a sky like that in London? Do let us come here every year for the summer. Thompson says painters have to come to Paris if they want to be any good.”“I’ve been telling her about Van Gogh,” said Thompson.“So that’s what’s gone to your head!” growled Logan, patting her cheek. “He’s been talking to you about painting, has he?”“Yes. He’s is a nice man, and doesn’t treat me as if I was a perfect fool.”She darted a mischievous glance at Mendel, who started under it as though he had been stung. He was horrified at the depth of his dislike of her, and he remembered with disgust her full, coarse bosom exposed as she lay in her calculated swoon. . . . How good it had been while she was gone with that fool Thompson, who suited her so perfectly, that chattering ape, with his talk of Van Gogh and Gauguin and “abstract art,” who stood now coveting her with shining eyes and fatuously smiling lips.“I’m not good enough for some people,” she said. “When I come into the room there is silence.”“Oh, shut up!” said Logan. “Let’s go and have dinner and get back to Paris. I’m sick of this cardboard place, where there is nothing but pleasure.”They had an excellent dinner, during which Oliver never stopped chattering and Mendel neveronce opened his lips. His thoughts were away in England, in his studio with his work, and in the country with Morrison, and he struggled to bring them together in his mind. How could Logan love Oliver and keep her apart from his work? Two such passions must infallibly seek each other out and come to grips. They must come together or be flung violently apart. . . . Passions were to him as real as persons; they had individualities, needs, desires; they were entities insisting upon their right to existence; they must express themselves, must make their impression upon the circumambient world.He became critical of Logan, though he hated to be so. Logan stood to him for adventure and freedom, independence and courage. It was incomprehensible to him that Logan should take Oliver seriously. She was the woman for a holiday, for a wild outburst of lawlessness, not for the morning and the evening and the day between.“Oh, do cheer up, Kühler! You are like a death’s-head at a feast.”He looked at her with a piercing glance which silenced her. No: she was no holiday woman. She was the woman for a drab, drudging life, with no other colour or joy in it than her own animal warmth. She was like Rosa, made for just such a dreary, simple, devoted fool as Issy. What could she do with a strong passion? She could only absorb it like a sponge, and nothing could kindle her. Just a drab; just a sponge.Thinking so, his dislike of her grew into a hatred so passionate that he desired to know more of her, to watch her, to beget a clear idea of her. He went and sat by her side and teased her, while she teased him and told him he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen.“That night in the Tube I thought you were the prettiest boy I ever saw, and I was quite disappointedwhen Logan came to speak to me instead of you.”“I would never have taken you from the shop,” he said. “I would have taken you to my studio, and perhaps I would have painted you, but I would have sent you back to the shop.”“I wouldn’t have gone, so there!” she said. “What would you have done then?”“I should have turned you out.”“Oh! Would you? Filthy brute! If I’m good enough for one thing I’m good enough for another. Do you hear that, Logan? He would have turned me out!”“You leave Kühler alone,” said Logan. “You’ll never understand him, if you try for a thousand years.”“Turned me out?” muttered Oliver. “Heuh! I like that. He’d turn me out and get another girl in! I’ll not have any of those tricks from you, Logan.”“You can talk about them when I begin them,” he replied.She turned from Mendel to Thompson and soon had him soft in her snares.“She would like to do that with me,” thought Mendel, “and she hates me because she knows she cannot.”They returned to Paris by bus all sleepy and a little drunk. Oliver leaned her head on Logan’s shoulder and dozed, smiling to herself, while Thompson, sitting by her side, fingered her sleeve.They were carried far beyond the point where they should have descended, and finding themselves on the boulevards, they woke up to the liveliness of the Parisian night, and Oliver refused to go home.Thompson suggested the cabarets, and they went from one dreary vicious hole to anotheruntil they came on one where a party of Americans were doing in Paris as the Parisians do. They had brought on a number ofcocottesfrom the Bal Tabarin, and were drinking, shouting, dancing. Thompson led Oliver into the mêlée, and soon she was drinking, shouting, dancing with the rest.Mendel was horrified and disgusted. There was no zest in the riot. It was a piece of deliberate, cold-blooded bestialization. He trembled with rage, and turned to Logan, who was sitting with a sickly smile on his face:—“You ought not to let her,” he cried—almost moaned. “If she were my woman I would not let her. I would kill any man who laid hands on her like that. She is not a prostitute. I would not let my woman be a prostitute.”But Logan did not move. He sat with his sickly smile on his face. He was drunk and could not move.Unable to bear the scene any longer, Mendel rushed away, jumped into a taxi, and drove back to the hotel, swearing that he would go back to London the next day. He would write and tell Logan that he must get rid of Oliver or no longer be his friend. She was a poisonous drab. She would be the ruin of his friend.An hour or two later Logan came back. He was very white, and his hair was dank, and there was a cold sweat on his face.“My God!” he said, “Kühler! Are you awake? I don’t know where she is. I went to sleep. I was so tired, and there was such a row with those blasted Americans. I went to sleep and awoke to find a nigger shaking me and the place empty. . . . Where does Thompson live? Do you know?”“Off the Boulevard Raspail. I went there to look at his rubbishy pictures. I think I could find the way. Are you going to kill him?”“I want to find her,” said Logan. “I must find her. It is killing me to think of her lost in Paris. I must find her. I can’t sleep without her. I must find her.”He hardly seemed to know what he was saying.“Come along then,” said Mendel. “I think I can find where Thompson lives.”It was not far. They walked along the deserted boulevard under the new white, florid buildings, and turned into an impasse.“That’s it,” said Mendel. “Impasse. I remember that. A tall, thin house with a big yellow door. Here it is.”They knocked until the yellow door swung mysteriously open and then ran upstairs to the top floor.Thompson came blinking into the passage.“Where’s Oliver? Where’s Logan’s girl?”Mendel put up his fist to hit him in the eye.“I put her into a taxi and sent her home. The Americans took us on to another place. They were a jolly lot. A terrific place they took us to. There were negresses dancing and a South Seas girl who said Gauguin brought her back. . . . Oliver’s all right. I put her in a taxi and sent her back.”“You’re a liar!” shouted Logan. “She’s in there.”He rushed in, while Mendel put his arms round Thompson and laid him neatly on the floor. In a moment Logan was out again.“You’re a shocking bad painter,” he said to Thompson, “but she isn’t there.”They left the house and walked slowly back to the hotel. Logan clung to Mendel’s arm, saying:—“It’s my fault. She said if ever I knocked her about she’d clear out. Do you mind walking about with me? I couldn’t go to bed. I couldn’t sleep.”All night they walked about; going back to the hotel every half hour to see if she was there, talking of anything and everything, even politics, to keep Logan’s mind from the fixed horrible idea that had taken possession of it. They saw the sun come out, and the workers hurrying along the streets, and the waiters in the cafés push up the heavy iron shutters that had only been pulled down an hour or two before, and the market women with their baskets, and the tramcars glide and jolt along, the shops open and the girls go chattering to their work through the long, leisurely Parisian day.They returned at eight and had breakfast. At half-past nine Oliver appeared, smiling and serene.“We did have fun last night! You missed something, I tell you.”“Where have you been?” cried Logan. “I’ve been looking for you all night.”“What a fool you are! I can look after myself.”“Where have you been?”She faced him with a bold stare and said:—“I got home about half-past two, and I took another room, partly because I didn’t want to disturb you, and partly—you know why.”“What number was your room?”“Forty-four.”From where they sat Mendel could see the keyboard in the concierge’s lodge. There were only forty rooms in the hotel.“Have you had breakfast?” asked Logan, forcing himself to believe her.“Hours ago. In bed,” she replied. “I paid for it and the bed.”“Why did you do that?” he snapped.She caught Mendel’s eyes fixed on her, eager to see her trapped, and she smiled insolently as she replied:—“I thought it would be a good joke if I let you think I had been out all night. But you look such a wreck that I don’t think you could see a joke. . . . What are we going to do to-day?”“We are going home,” said Logan.
MENDELwas able to finish his portrait of Jacob and Golda, but only at the cost of painful and bitter labour. He was torn two ways: longing to finish it, yet dreading the end of it, for he could not see beyond it. Every picture he had painted had brought with it the certain knowledge that it would lead to a better, that he was advancing further on the road to art. But there was a finality about this picture. It was an end in itself. It was not like most of his work, one of a possible dozen or more. A certain stream of his feeling ended in it and then disappeared, leaving him without guide or direction.
Therefore, when the picture was ended he found himself besottedly and uncontrollably in love and in a maddeningly sensitive condition, so that any sudden glimpse of beauty—the stars in the night sky, a girl’s face in the train, flowers in a window-box—could set him reeling. More than once he found himself clinging to the wall or a railing, emerging with happy laughter from a momentary lack of consciousness. In the street near his home he found a lovely little girl, of the same type as Sara, but more beautiful. Graceful and lively she was, fully aware of her vitality and charm, and she used to smile at him when he went to meet her as she came out of school, or stood and watched her playing in the street.
At last he asked her shyly if she would come to his studio that he might draw her. She consentedand came often. She would chatter away, and, studying her, he was astonished at her womanishness, and he was overwhelmed when she said one day:—
“You don’t want to draw me. You only want to look at me.”
He was thrust back into the thoughts he had been avoiding. If this child knew already so frankly why he was attracted to her, why could not that other? Why did she seem to insist that he should regard her with the emotions with which he approached a work of art? A work of art could yield up its secret to the emotions, but she could only deliver hers to love dwelling not in any abstract region, but here on earth, in the life of the body. . . . He often thought of her with active dislike, because she seemed to him to be lacking in frankness. If she were going to cause so much suffering, as she must have known she would with her good-bye, then she must have her reasons for it. What did she mean with her neither yes nor no? With women there should be either yes or no. A refusal is unpleasant, but it could be swallowed down with other ills; and there were others. But this girl, this short-haired Christian, blocked his way, and there were no others except as there were cabs on the street and meals on the table.
For a time he avoided Logan and Oliver. He knew that Logan would despise him for his weakness in setting his heart on a girl who ran away from him, for he knew and admired the tremendous force with which his friend had hurled himself into his life with the girl of the station, constantly wooing and winning her afresh and urging her to share his own recklessness. He admired, too, Logan’s insistence on an absolute separation of his art and his life with Oliver, who was never for one moment admitted to his mind. Rather to his dismay, but at the same time with a wild rush ofalmost lyrical impulse, Mendel, finding himself with no other emotion than that of being in love, set himself to paint love. He worked with an amazing ease, painting one picture one day and covering it with another the next, feeling elatedly convinced that everything he did was beautiful, yet knowing within himself that he was in a bad way.
He avoided Logan, but Logan needed him, and came to tell him so.
“It is all very well for you to shut yourself up,” he said, “but I can’t live without you. You know what Oliver is to me, but it is not enough. The more satisfying she is on one plane, the more I need on the other the satisfaction that she cannot give me. Women can’t do it. They simply can’t, and it is no good trying. If you try, it means making a mess of both love and art. She is jealous? Very well. Let her be jealous. She enjoys it, and it helps her to understand a man’s passion.”
“I can’t stand it when you talk in that cold-blooded way about women.”
“I’m not cold-blooded,” said Logan, astonished at the adjective.
“I sometimes think you are, but I am apt to think that of all English people,” replied Mendel, wondering within himself if that did not explain Morrison. “Yes. I often wonder what you would be like if you were in an office, wearing a bowler hat, and going to and fro by the morning and evening train.”
“Why think about the impossible?” laughed Logan. “Anyhow, I’m not going to let you shut yourself up. I want to go to Paris, and I can’t face three weeks alone with Oliver. Twenty-one days, sixty-three meals. No. It can’t be done.”
“Yes, I’ll go to Paris,” thought Mendel. “I will go to Paris and I will forget.”
“You must come,” urged Logan. “Madame at thePot-au-Feu has given me the name of a hotel kept by her sister-in-law. Very cheap. Bed and breakfast, and, of course, you feed in restaurants. . . . You want digging out of your hole. I don’t know why, but you seem to have insisted more on being Jewish lately. It is much more important for you to be an artist and a man. I regard you as a sacred trust. I do really. You are the only man in England for whom I have any respect, and I need you to keep me decent.” He added: “I need you to keep me alive, for, without you, Oliver would gobble me up in a month.”
He seemed to be joking, but Mendel could not help feeling that he was at heart serious, and he had the unpleasant sinking of disgust which sometimes seized him when he thought of Logan and Oliver together. He could not account for it, and the sensation gave him a sickly pleasure which made him weaker with Logan than with anybody else. Besides, Logan often bewildered him, and he could not tolerate his inability to grasp ideas except through a mad rush of feeling, and he hated the fact that while Logan’s mind seemed to move steadily on, his own crumbled to pieces just at the moment when it was on the point of absorbing an idea.
For these reasons he consented to go to Paris. The three weeks should consolidate or destroy a friendship which had remained for him distressingly inchoate. Deep in his heart he hoped that it would become definite enough and strong enough to drive out his indeterminate love. To be in love without enjoying love was in his eyes a fatuous condition, undignified, vague, a kind of cuckoldry.
Oliver was aflame with excitement over the trip to Paris. She spoke of it with an almost religious exaltation. As usual, her emotion was entirely uncontrolled, became a physical tremulation, and she reminded Mendel of a wobbling blanc-mange.
The plan was to have a fortnight in Paris and a week at Boulogne, for bathing and gambling at the Casino.
No sooner had he left London than Mendel felt his cares and anxieties fall away from him, and he began to wish he had brought Jessie Petrie. He proposed to wire for her from Folkestone, but Logan pointed out that Oliver could not stand women and was jealous of them.
“She’d say Jessie was making eyes at me,” he said. “And if she made eyes at you she’d be almost as bad.”
In that Mendel could sympathize with Oliver. He was himself often suddenly, unreasonably, and violently jealous of other men over women for whom he did not care a fig.
He set himself to be nice to Oliver, and she in her holiday mood responded, so that on the boat and in the Paris train Logan was sunk in a gloomy silence, and in the hotel at night, in the next room, Mendel could hear him storming at her, refusing to have anything to do with her, threatening to go home next day unless she promised to keep her claws, as he said, off Kühler. She promised, and they embarked further upon their perilous voyage in search of an unattainable land of satiety.
Their hotel was near the Montparnasse station, and they discovered a café in the Boulevard Raspail which was frequented by artists and models, one or two of whom Mendel recognized as former habitués of the Paris Café. They were soon drawn into the artist world, and except that he went to the Louvre instead of to the National Gallery for peace and refreshment, Mendel often thought he might just as well be in London. There was the same feverish talk, the same abuse of successful artists, the same depreciation of old masters, but there was more body to the talk, and sometimes a Frenchman, finding speechuseless with this shy, good-looking Jew, would make himself clear with what English he could muster and a rapid, skilful drawing. For the most part, however, he had to rely on Logan’s paraphrase, until one day in the Boulevard St. Germain he ran into that Thompson, lamented by Jessie Petrie, the painter of stripes and triangles.
Thompson was a little senior to Mendel at the Detmold, had hardly spoken to him in the old days, but was now delighted to meet a familiar London face.
“Iamglad!” he said. “Come and see my place. How are they all in London—poor old Calthrop and poor old Froitzheim? I should have killed myself if I’d stayed in London; nothing but talk and women, with work left to find its way in where it can. Here work comes first. I suppose they haven’t even heard of Van Gogh in London?”
Mendel had to confess that he had never heard of Van Gogh.
“A Dutchman,” explained Thompson, “and he cut off his ear and sent it to Gauguin. Ever heard of Gauguin?”
“No. But a man doesn’t make himself a great artist by cutting off his ear.”
“Van Gogh was a great artist before that. He killed himself: shot himself in his bed, and the doctor found him in bed smoking a pipe. He was quite happy, for he had done all he could.”
That sounded more like it to Mendel, more like the deed of a warrior of the spirit.
“I’ll show you,” said Thompson, and they went round the galleries.
Mendel’s head was nearly bursting when he came out. The riotous colour, the apparent neglect of drawing and abuse of form, the entire absence of tone and atmosphere, shocked him. He resented the wrench given to all his training, and he took Thompson to the Louvre to go back to Cranach and the early Italians. Thompson wouldnot hear of them, and insisted on his spending over an hour with Poussin.
“I can see nothing in them. Good painting, good drawing, but dull, so dull! The flat, papery figures mean nothing.”
“They mean everything to the picture,” said Thompson, “and you have no right to go outside the picture. Poussin kept to his picture, and so must you if you are to understand him.”
“I can see all that,” said Mendel, “but he is dull. I can’t help it, he bores me.”
“It is pure art.”
“Then I like it impure.”
“You don’t really. But you are all like that when you first come from London. You think that because a thing is different it must be wrong. Have you come over alone?”
“No. I’m with a man called Logan and his girl. He is a great painter, or he will be one. Anyhow, he is alive and has ideas.”
“Does he know about Van Gogh?”
“No; but he says the next great painter must come from England.”
“Pooh! Whistler!” said Thompson in a tone of vast superiority. “Nous sommes bien loin de ça.”
“Please don’t talk French,” said Mendel. “I don’t understand a word.”
“Whistler had good ideas,” continued Thompson. “It is a pity he was not a better artist.”
Mendel was beginning to feel bored. He did not understand this new painting for painting’s sake, and did not want to understand it. To change the subject he said:—
“I nearly brought Jessie Petrie with me.”
“I wish you had. She is a dear little girl, and I nearly sent for her the other day, but I’ve no use for the model now. It is perfectly futile trying to cram a living figure into a modern picture.”
“I don’t see why, if you can paint it.”
“Really,” said Thompson, “I don’t see whatyou have come to Paris for, if you haven’t come to learn something about painting. One wouldn’t expect you to understand Picasso straight off, but anyone who has handled paint ought to be able to grasp Van Gogh.”
“He is trying for the impossible,” grunted Mendel. “The important thing in art is art. I’ve come to Paris to have a good time.”
“Oh! very well,” said Thompson. “Why didn’t you say so before? I’ll show you round.”
Mendel took Thompson round to his hotel and up to Logan’s room, where, entering without knocking, they found Logan kneeling on the floor with Oliver in a swoon in his arms. He had opened her blouse at the neck and unlaced her corsage.
Mendel thought Oliver looked as though she was going to die, and his first idea was to run for the doctor.
“She’ll come round,” said Logan. “It’s my fault. I was brutal to her. . . .” He nodded to Thompson. “How do you do?” and he covered up Oliver’s large bosom.
She came to in a few moments, opened her eyes slowly, rolled them round, and came back to Logan, on whom she fixed a gaze of devouring love. She put up her arms and drew his head down and kissed his lips.
Mendel drew Thompson out into the corridor.
“She was shamming,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” replied Thompson. “What has happened? Does he knock her about?”
“Not that I know of. They’ve not been together very long. They can’t settle down.”
“She’s a fine woman,” said Thompson.
They were called in again and found Oliver sitting up on the bed eating chocolates. She greeted Thompson with a queenly gesture, andclapped her hands when Mendel told her they were going out to see the sights.
“I’m sick of artists,” she said. “I have quite enough of them in London. I wish to God you weren’t an artist, Logan. You’d be quite a nice man if you worked for your living.”
“Don’t talk rubbish,” mumbled Logan, who was subdued and curiously ashamed of himself. “If I were like that I should have a little dried-up wife and an enormous family, and you wouldn’t have a look in.”
“And a good job too!” cried Oliver, in her most provoking tone. “A good job too! I’d find someone who had a respect for me.”
“D’you find Paris a good place to work in?” Logan turned to Thompson.
“I never knew the meaning of work till I came here. Ever heard of Rousseau?”
“Oh, yes,” said Logan.
“I don’t mean the writer, I mean . . .”
“I know, I know,” said Logan nonchalantly. He could never admit ignorance of anything.
“A great painter,” cried Thompson eagerly. “A very great painter. I tell you he brought Impressionism up sharp. They had overshot the mark, you know. Manet, Monet: they had overshot the mark.”
Oliver began to scream at the top of her voice.
“Shut up!” said Logan. “You’ll have us turned out.”
“I don’t care,” she replied. “I don’t care. I can’t stand all this talk about painting.”
“What do you want us to talk about?” said Mendel, tingling with exasperation. “Love? Three men and one woman can’t talk about love.”
“Well, I didn’t come to Paris to sit in a dirty bedroom talking about pictures. I want to go out to see the streets and the shops and the funny people.”
“For God’s sake take us somewhere,” said Logan.
Thompson, having ascertained that they had plenty of money, took them to Enghien by the river. Oliver was happy at once. She wanted to be amused and to be looked at, and as she was bouncing and rowdy she had her desire.
She made Logan play for her at the little horses, but, as she did not win, she was soon bored with it. Logan was bitten and could not tear himself away. Mendel stayed with him and she disappeared with Thompson.
“I’m bound to win if I go on,” said Logan. “There’s a law of chances, you know, and I’ve always been lucky at these things. . . . It is so exciting, too.”
He changed note after note into five-franc pieces, lost them all, and at last began to win a little; won, lost, won.
Mendel dragged him away from the table, protesting:—
“Come along. I have had enough. Do come along. We haven’t had a chance to talk for days, and I hate these rooms with all the flashy, noisy people. . . . We can come back here and find the others. Let us go and find some fun that we can share, for this is deadly dull for me. Besides, we don’t want to be stranded without money.”
“But I’m winning. My luck is in.”
He rushed back to the tables and lost—twice, upon which he allowed himself to be persuaded, and they went out into the air and sat on a terrace by the lake. Mendel produced cigarettes and they smoked in silence for some time. Logan looked pale and worn and was obviously smouldering with excitement.
“How amazingly different everything looks here,” he said. “In London I always feel as though I had a thumb pressing into my brain.Everybody seems indifferent and hostile and everything I do is incongruous. I feel almost happy here. I should like to stay here. I told her so and she began to cry. I knocked her down. I couldn’t stand her crying any more. I knocked her down and she fainted.”
“She was shamming,” thought Mendel, seeing vividly the scene in the bedroom. “He did not hurt her. She was shamming.”
“I feel a brute,” said Logan, “and yet I’m glad. I’m tremendously glad. I want to sing. I want to get drunk. I’m tremendously glad. It has settled something. I’m her master. She was getting on my nerves. She won’t do that any more. Ha! Ha!”
“Why don’t you get rid of her?” asked Mendel. “Leave her here. Come back with me to-morrow.”
“Don’t be a silly child,” said Logan patronizingly. “I love her. I couldn’t live without her now, not for a single day. I could no more do without her than I could do without the clothes on my back. I tell you she’s an inspiration. If she left me I should lay down my brush for ever. She’s a religion—all the religion I’ve got.”
“I can’t imagine stopping my work for any woman,” said Mendel.
“Ah! that’s because you don’t know what a woman can mean. You can’t know while you are young.”
Mendel’s nerves had been throbbing in sympathy with his friend, but suddenly all that place was filled with a soft, clear light and a bright music, the colour and the scent of flowers, the soft murmur of flowing water, the whisper of the wind in leafy trees, and his heart ached and grew big and seemed to burst into a thousand, thousand rivulets of love, searching out every corner of his senses, cleansing his eyes, sharpening his hearing, refining every sense, so that the scene before him—the white tables, the white-aproned waiters, thegreen trees, the soft evening sky, the softer reflection of it in the water—was exquisite and magical and full of a mysterious power that permeated even Logan’s brutal revelation and made it worthy of beauty. . . . And this mysterious power he knew was love, and she, the girl for whom it had arisen from the depths, was far away in England, thinking of him, perhaps, regretting him, perhaps, but knowing nothing of the beauty she had denied. . . .
Mendel was astonished to find tears in his eyes, trembling on his lashes, trickling down his cheeks.
“What a baby you are!” said Logan. “You can’t have me all to yourself.”
His divination was true. Lacking its true object, Mendel’s love had concentrated upon his friend, with whom he longed to walk freely in the enchanted world of art, to be as David and Jonathan. Indeed, Logan’s state of torment was to him as a wound got in battle, over which he gave himself up to lamentation, so single and deep and pure that it obscured even the impulse of his love. He longed to rid his friend of this devouring passion that was consuming him and thrusting in upon his energy, but because his friend called it love, he respected it and bore with it.
“How good it is, this life out of doors!” exclaimed Logan, lolling back in his chair.
“I don’t know,” replied Mendel. “I think it is too deliberate, too organized. I prefer London streets. There is nothing in the world to me to compare with London streets. Nature is too beautiful. A tree in blossom, a garden full of flowers, a round hill with the shadow of the clouds over them, move me too much. Left alone with them I should go mad. I must have human nature if I am to live and work. I only want nature, just as I only want God, through human nature.”
“By Jove! you hit the nail on the head sometimes, my boy.That is true for all of us. It is what I meant when I said that Oliver was a religion to me.”
“I don’t mean women or individuals,” protested Mendel. “I mean human nature in the lump. It may be very poor stuff, stupid and foolish and vulgar, but it is all we’ve got, and one lives in it and through it.”
“That is all very well while you are young,” said Logan, “but you have to individualize it when you are older. One person becomes a point of contact. You can’t just float through humanity like an apparition.”
Mendel had lost the thread of his argument, though not his confidence in its truth.
“That is not what I meant,” he said, “and I don’t see how a person could be just a point of contact.”
“All I know is that Oliver is such a point of contact to me, and I know that unless art is inspired with some such feeling as you have described, all the technical skill and all the deft trickery in the world won’t make it more than a sop for fools or an interesting survival of mediævalism. That is why I think you are going to be so valuable. You have so little to unlearn. You have only to shake off the most antiquated religion in the world and you can look at life and human nature without prejudice, while I have constantly to be uprooting all sorts of prejudices in favour of certain ways of living, morally and socially.”
Mendel was beginning to feel comfortable and easy, for while his mind worked furiously he could rarely express what he thought, and Logan in his talk often came near enough to it to afford him some relief and to urge him on to renewed digging in the recesses of his mind. It was a vast comfort to him to find that there were other vital thoughts besides that of Morrison, and that for ecstasy he was not entirely dependent upon her. Warmed upby his confidence in Logan, he resolved to tell him about the girl and the vast change she had wrought in his life.
“I used to think,” he said, “that if I stayed among my own people I could work my way through the poverty and the dirt and the Jewishness of it all to art. When she came I knew that it was impossible. She had something that I needed, something that the Jews do not know, or never have known. It is not my poverty that denies it to me, for if the poor Jews do not know a good thing, the rich Jews certainly do not, for the rich Jews are rubbish who stroke the Christians with one hand and rob them with the other. It is something that she knows almost without knowing it herself.”
Logan smiled.
“I am not a fool about her,” cried Mendel. “She is not particularly beautiful to me. There is only one line in her face that I think beautiful, from the cheek-bone to the jaw. I am not a fool about her, but I had almost given the Christian world up in despair. It seemed to me so bad, so inhuman, so hollow, so full of plump, respectable thieves. The simple thieves and bullies of my boyhood seemed to me infinitely preferable. And I had met some of the most important people in the Christian world: all empty and callous and lascivious. And the unimportant people were good enough, but dull, so dull. . . . Then comes this little girl. She is like Cranach’s Eve among monkeys. She becomes at once to me what Cranach’s wife must have been to him. He painted her as child, girl, and woman. The chattering apes matter to me no more. The Christian world is no longer empty. It is still lascivious and greedy, soft and ill-conditioned, puffy and stale, but it is suddenly full of meaning, of beauty, of a joy which, because I am a Jew, I cannot understand.”
“Give it up,” growled Logan, “give it up. Painther portrait and let her go. You are a born painter. To a painter women are either paintable or nothing. For God’s sake don’t go losing yourself in philosophy.”
“It is not philosophy!” cried Mendel indignantly. “It is what I feel.”
“It will probably end in a damned good picture,” retorted Logan. “Why not be content with that?”
“Because it will not answer what I want to know, and because I feel that there is something in the Jews, the real Jews, that she does not understand either. And she is not a fool. She has a mind. She has a deep character. She is strong, and she can get the better of me. She is secret and she is cruel.”
Logan gave his fat chuckle.
“She is just an English girl with all the raw feeling bred out of her. She is true to type: impulsive without being sensual, kind without being affectionate; and she would let you or any man go to hell rather than give up anything she has been brought up to believe in or admit to her life anything that was strange, unfamiliar, and not good form, like yourself. . . . Give it up, give it up. You are only taking it seriously because you have been irresistible so far and it is the first setback you have received.”
“I will not give it up,” said Mendel, setting his teeth. Then he laughed because the lights had gone up and the scene was gay and amusing, and he wanted to plunge into the merry crowd of Parisians and pleasure-seekers, to move among them and to come in contact with the women, to watch the men strutting to please them, to delight in the procession of excited faces, to taste the flavour of humanity which is always and everywhere the same, rich, astonishing, comforting, satisfying in its variety.
Oliver and Thompson returned with their handsfull of trinkets, toys, and pretty paper decorations which they had bought or won at games of chance and skill. She sat on Logan’s knee and insisted on wreathing him with paper streamers, which he removed as fast as she placed them on his head.
“Do! do!” she cried. “Do let go for once and let us all be gay. Oh! I do love this place, with the band playing, and the lights in the water, and the wonderful deep blue sky. Why don’t we have a sky like that in London? Do let us come here every year for the summer. Thompson says painters have to come to Paris if they want to be any good.”
“I’ve been telling her about Van Gogh,” said Thompson.
“So that’s what’s gone to your head!” growled Logan, patting her cheek. “He’s been talking to you about painting, has he?”
“Yes. He’s is a nice man, and doesn’t treat me as if I was a perfect fool.”
She darted a mischievous glance at Mendel, who started under it as though he had been stung. He was horrified at the depth of his dislike of her, and he remembered with disgust her full, coarse bosom exposed as she lay in her calculated swoon. . . . How good it had been while she was gone with that fool Thompson, who suited her so perfectly, that chattering ape, with his talk of Van Gogh and Gauguin and “abstract art,” who stood now coveting her with shining eyes and fatuously smiling lips.
“I’m not good enough for some people,” she said. “When I come into the room there is silence.”
“Oh, shut up!” said Logan. “Let’s go and have dinner and get back to Paris. I’m sick of this cardboard place, where there is nothing but pleasure.”
They had an excellent dinner, during which Oliver never stopped chattering and Mendel neveronce opened his lips. His thoughts were away in England, in his studio with his work, and in the country with Morrison, and he struggled to bring them together in his mind. How could Logan love Oliver and keep her apart from his work? Two such passions must infallibly seek each other out and come to grips. They must come together or be flung violently apart. . . . Passions were to him as real as persons; they had individualities, needs, desires; they were entities insisting upon their right to existence; they must express themselves, must make their impression upon the circumambient world.
He became critical of Logan, though he hated to be so. Logan stood to him for adventure and freedom, independence and courage. It was incomprehensible to him that Logan should take Oliver seriously. She was the woman for a holiday, for a wild outburst of lawlessness, not for the morning and the evening and the day between.
“Oh, do cheer up, Kühler! You are like a death’s-head at a feast.”
He looked at her with a piercing glance which silenced her. No: she was no holiday woman. She was the woman for a drab, drudging life, with no other colour or joy in it than her own animal warmth. She was like Rosa, made for just such a dreary, simple, devoted fool as Issy. What could she do with a strong passion? She could only absorb it like a sponge, and nothing could kindle her. Just a drab; just a sponge.
Thinking so, his dislike of her grew into a hatred so passionate that he desired to know more of her, to watch her, to beget a clear idea of her. He went and sat by her side and teased her, while she teased him and told him he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen.
“That night in the Tube I thought you were the prettiest boy I ever saw, and I was quite disappointedwhen Logan came to speak to me instead of you.”
“I would never have taken you from the shop,” he said. “I would have taken you to my studio, and perhaps I would have painted you, but I would have sent you back to the shop.”
“I wouldn’t have gone, so there!” she said. “What would you have done then?”
“I should have turned you out.”
“Oh! Would you? Filthy brute! If I’m good enough for one thing I’m good enough for another. Do you hear that, Logan? He would have turned me out!”
“You leave Kühler alone,” said Logan. “You’ll never understand him, if you try for a thousand years.”
“Turned me out?” muttered Oliver. “Heuh! I like that. He’d turn me out and get another girl in! I’ll not have any of those tricks from you, Logan.”
“You can talk about them when I begin them,” he replied.
She turned from Mendel to Thompson and soon had him soft in her snares.
“She would like to do that with me,” thought Mendel, “and she hates me because she knows she cannot.”
They returned to Paris by bus all sleepy and a little drunk. Oliver leaned her head on Logan’s shoulder and dozed, smiling to herself, while Thompson, sitting by her side, fingered her sleeve.
They were carried far beyond the point where they should have descended, and finding themselves on the boulevards, they woke up to the liveliness of the Parisian night, and Oliver refused to go home.
Thompson suggested the cabarets, and they went from one dreary vicious hole to anotheruntil they came on one where a party of Americans were doing in Paris as the Parisians do. They had brought on a number ofcocottesfrom the Bal Tabarin, and were drinking, shouting, dancing. Thompson led Oliver into the mêlée, and soon she was drinking, shouting, dancing with the rest.
Mendel was horrified and disgusted. There was no zest in the riot. It was a piece of deliberate, cold-blooded bestialization. He trembled with rage, and turned to Logan, who was sitting with a sickly smile on his face:—
“You ought not to let her,” he cried—almost moaned. “If she were my woman I would not let her. I would kill any man who laid hands on her like that. She is not a prostitute. I would not let my woman be a prostitute.”
But Logan did not move. He sat with his sickly smile on his face. He was drunk and could not move.
Unable to bear the scene any longer, Mendel rushed away, jumped into a taxi, and drove back to the hotel, swearing that he would go back to London the next day. He would write and tell Logan that he must get rid of Oliver or no longer be his friend. She was a poisonous drab. She would be the ruin of his friend.
An hour or two later Logan came back. He was very white, and his hair was dank, and there was a cold sweat on his face.
“My God!” he said, “Kühler! Are you awake? I don’t know where she is. I went to sleep. I was so tired, and there was such a row with those blasted Americans. I went to sleep and awoke to find a nigger shaking me and the place empty. . . . Where does Thompson live? Do you know?”
“Off the Boulevard Raspail. I went there to look at his rubbishy pictures. I think I could find the way. Are you going to kill him?”
“I want to find her,” said Logan. “I must find her. It is killing me to think of her lost in Paris. I must find her. I can’t sleep without her. I must find her.”
He hardly seemed to know what he was saying.
“Come along then,” said Mendel. “I think I can find where Thompson lives.”
It was not far. They walked along the deserted boulevard under the new white, florid buildings, and turned into an impasse.
“That’s it,” said Mendel. “Impasse. I remember that. A tall, thin house with a big yellow door. Here it is.”
They knocked until the yellow door swung mysteriously open and then ran upstairs to the top floor.
Thompson came blinking into the passage.
“Where’s Oliver? Where’s Logan’s girl?”
Mendel put up his fist to hit him in the eye.
“I put her into a taxi and sent her home. The Americans took us on to another place. They were a jolly lot. A terrific place they took us to. There were negresses dancing and a South Seas girl who said Gauguin brought her back. . . . Oliver’s all right. I put her in a taxi and sent her back.”
“You’re a liar!” shouted Logan. “She’s in there.”
He rushed in, while Mendel put his arms round Thompson and laid him neatly on the floor. In a moment Logan was out again.
“You’re a shocking bad painter,” he said to Thompson, “but she isn’t there.”
They left the house and walked slowly back to the hotel. Logan clung to Mendel’s arm, saying:—
“It’s my fault. She said if ever I knocked her about she’d clear out. Do you mind walking about with me? I couldn’t go to bed. I couldn’t sleep.”
All night they walked about; going back to the hotel every half hour to see if she was there, talking of anything and everything, even politics, to keep Logan’s mind from the fixed horrible idea that had taken possession of it. They saw the sun come out, and the workers hurrying along the streets, and the waiters in the cafés push up the heavy iron shutters that had only been pulled down an hour or two before, and the market women with their baskets, and the tramcars glide and jolt along, the shops open and the girls go chattering to their work through the long, leisurely Parisian day.
They returned at eight and had breakfast. At half-past nine Oliver appeared, smiling and serene.
“We did have fun last night! You missed something, I tell you.”
“Where have you been?” cried Logan. “I’ve been looking for you all night.”
“What a fool you are! I can look after myself.”
“Where have you been?”
She faced him with a bold stare and said:—
“I got home about half-past two, and I took another room, partly because I didn’t want to disturb you, and partly—you know why.”
“What number was your room?”
“Forty-four.”
From where they sat Mendel could see the keyboard in the concierge’s lodge. There were only forty rooms in the hotel.
“Have you had breakfast?” asked Logan, forcing himself to believe her.
“Hours ago. In bed,” she replied. “I paid for it and the bed.”
“Why did you do that?” he snapped.
She caught Mendel’s eyes fixed on her, eager to see her trapped, and she smiled insolently as she replied:—
“I thought it would be a good joke if I let you think I had been out all night. But you look such a wreck that I don’t think you could see a joke. . . . What are we going to do to-day?”
“We are going home,” said Logan.