IITHE CAMPAIGN OPENSHEreached London in the afternoon, and as soon as it was evening went to Camden Town to find Logan. Only Oliver was in. She was sitting in the window smoking. There had been a tea-party, and the floor was littered with cups, plates of bread and butter and cakes, fragments of biscuit, some of which had been trodden on.Mendel surveyed this litter ruefully, and he said:—“Why don’t you wash up?”“Logan said he would. I washed up after breakfast. I’m not a servant, and he keeps on promising to have someone in to help.”“Will you wash up if I help you?”“No, thanks. Logan’s got to do it.”“Who has been to tea?”“Oh! A funny lot. Some of Logan’s fools who think he is a great man.”“He is a great man,” said Mendel.“Heuh! You try living with him. What’s the good of being a great man if you don’t make any money? It’s all very well for Calthrop to live like a pig. He makes money and can do what he likes.”“If you don’t like it you can always clear out.”“Where to? Eh? To go the round of the studios and oblige people like you? Not much! It isn’t as if I was married to him. I can’t make him keep me. Besides, he wouldn’t let me go. If I went he would run after me. I supposeyou hadn’t thought of that, Mr. Kühler. You don’t know what it is to care for anybody. I’d like to see some one play you and play you, and then turn you down. That would teach you a lesson, that would.”“What’s the matter with you?”“I’m not going to stand it any longer,” she said. “I’m not going to be put on one side like dirt while you go on with your conceited talk. You’re both so conceited you don’t know how to hold yourselves. I’m a woman, and I stand for something in the world. A woman is more important than the biggest picture that was ever painted.”“It depends upon the woman.”“All right, then.I’mmore important. You talk about Logan keeping me. He can consider himself damned lucky I stay with him.”“Oh! you’re both in luck,” snapped Mendel, and he sat down and refused to say another word.Oliver began to whistle and then to hum. She fidgeted in her chair. She thought she had come off rather well in the sparring match. She had been dreading Mendel’s return, for since the Paris adventure she had been asserting herself, as she called it, beating Logan down, bewildering him with her extraordinary sweetness and cajolery and sudden outbursts of fury. Both had agreed to bury the memory of the last night in Paris, but the thoughts of both were centred upon it. She rejoiced that she had served him out, but she had been stirred to a degree that alarmed her. Her former condition of lazy sensual security had been broken, and she dreaded Logan’s jealousy. She knew that she was not his equal in force, but she set herself to overcome him with cunning. His force would spend itself. She knew that. She must then bind him fast with tricks and lures, rouse the curiosity of his senses and keep it unsatisfied.She had succeeded wonderfully. Logan crumbled and turned soft and sugary under her arts, and only one impulse in him resisted her—his love for Mendel; and through that love his passion for art. Therefore she dreaded and hated Mendel’s return.Presently she ceased to hum. She thought suddenly that perhaps it had been a mistake to meet Mendel with hostility.“I say, Kühler, do give us one of your cigarettes. These are awful muck.”He threw his cigarette-case over to her.“Did you have a good time up North?”“Yes.”“I come from there, you know. Logan was furious with you for going. He is really very fond of you, you know.”“I don’t need you to tell me that.”“He’s very excited just now. He keeps talking about the artistic revolution and the twentieth century, and all that, you know. He has been reading a book called ‘John Christopher,’ and keeps on reading it aloud until I’m sick of it. I believe he thinks he is like Christopher, though I’m sure he’s not, because Christopher could never see a joke. It is all about women, one after another, just left anyhow. It doesn’t sound like a story to me at all.”“It sounds true,” said Mendel, not paying much attention to what she said.To his intense relief Logan came in with a frame under his arm.“Hullo!” he said. “Got back? How did you like the swells?”“They were good people,” replied Mendel, “and wonderfully peaceful. I don’t think I appreciated it enough while I was there, but it seems very clear and beautiful to me now.”“Portrait any good?”“No.”Logan put down his frame and without a wordto Oliver proceeded to wash up the tea-things. She stayed in her chair in the window and hummed.To Mendel his friend seemed altered. He had lost his good-humour and something of his happy recklessness, and he was more concentrated and full of a wary self-consciousness.He came out of the bedroom when the washing up was done and flung himself on the divan, stretched himself out, and said:—“I’m tired; done up. Lord! What fools there are in the world! No more portraits for you, my boy; at least, not this side of thirty. Ten years good solid work ahead of you.”He laughed.“I told Cluny he must hurry up or you would slide off into portrait-painting. Dealers hate the mere sound of the word. He is going to hurry up. I’ve played you for all I am worth, and Cluny is in my pocket. Oh! I’m a man of destiny, I am.”A snort and a giggle came from Oliver. Logan sat up.“Leave the room!” he said.“Shan’t.”“Leave the room. I want to talk to Kühler.”“Talk away then. I shan’t listen.”Logan walked over to her, seized her by the arms, and pushed her into the bedroom and locked the door. It was done very quickly and dexterously, as though it were a practised manœuvre.“I’m finding out how to treat her,” he said. “Quiet firmness does the trick.”He met Mendel’s eyes fixed on him in horrified inquiry and turned sharply away.“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” he said. “The fact is, women aren’t fit for liberty and an artist ought to have nothing to do with them. But what can a man do? . . . What were we talking about?”“Cluny.”“Oh yes! He wants the exhibition to be the first fortnight in November. Can you be ready by then? It must be a turning-point in art, the beginning of big things. I know myself enough to realize that it is doubtful if I shall ever be a great creative artist, but I shall be the Napoleon of the new movement—the soldier and the organizer of the revolution in art. And it won’t be confined to art; it will spread through everything. Art will be the central international republic from which the commonwealths which will take the place of the present vulgar capitalistic nations will be inspired. What do you think of that for an idea?”“Stick to art,” said Mendel. “I know nothing about the rest.”“Do you remember my saying that the music-hall was all that was left of old England? I did not know how true it was. England has become one vast music-hall, with everybody with any talent or brains scrambling to top the bill. It runs through everything—art, politics, the press, literature, social reform, women’s suffrage, local government; and the people who top the bill can’t be dislodged, just like the poor old crocks on the halls, who come on and give the same show they were giving twenty years ago, and get applause instead of rotten eggs because the British public is so rotten with sentiment and so stupid that it can’t tell when a man has lost his talent. Please one generation in England and its grandchildren will applaud you, though everything about you is changed except your name. The result is, of course, that no talent is ever properly developed. A man reaches the point where he can please enough people to make a living, and he sticks there. Now, I ask you, is that a state of things which a self-respecting artist can accept?”“No,” said Mendel. “No.”“Well. It has to be altered. And who isto alter it if not the painters, who are less in contact with the general public than any other artists? Painters had a comfortable time last century, living on the North-country municipal councils, but that is all over and we are reduced to poops like Tysoe. There are any number of them, if one only took the trouble to dig them up, but they’re no good. I’ve lived on them for the last ten years, and they’re no good. You might as well squeeze your paints into the sink and turn on the tap for all the flicker of appreciation you get out of them. Then there are the snobs, the semi-demimondaines of the political set; but they are a seedy lot, with the minds and the interests of chorus-girls. You might whip up a little excitement at Oxford and Cambridge, but it would only vanish as soon as the young idiots came in contact with London and fell in love. . . . No. Behind the scenes of the music-hall is no good. We must make a direct onslaught on the general public. They must be taught that there is such a thing as art and that there are men devoted to the disinterested development of their talents—men who have no desire to top the bill or to make five hundred a week; men who recognize that art is European, universal, the invisible fabric in which human life is contained, and are content, like simple workmen, to keep it in repair.”“I don’t know,” said Mendel, “if my brother-in-law Moscowitsch is typical, but he regards art which does not make money as a waste of time.”“Oh! He is a Jew and uneducated. That’s where Tolstoi went so wrong. He confused the simplicity of art with the simplicity of the peasant, the dignity of the unsophisticated with the dignity that is achieved through sophistication. It may seem absurd to talk of bringing about anything so big through little Cluny, but it is not only possible, it is inevitable. The staleness ofLondon cannot go on, and Paris seemed just the same to me. Stagnation is intolerable. There must come a movement towards freedom and a grander gesture, and the only free people are the painters. They are the only people whose work has not become servile and vulgarized. Through them lies the natural outlet. . . . Oh! I have been thinking and thinking, and I thank God we met before you had been spoiled by success or I had been ruined by my rotten swindling life—though that has had its advantages too, and I can meet the dealers on their own ground, and if necessary advertise as impudently as any of the music-hall artists.”Oliver began to hammer on the door. He went and unlocked it and let her in.“You can talk as much as you like now,” he said. “I’ve said my say.”“I heard you,” she replied, “talking to Kühler as if he was a crowd in Hyde Park.”Mendel was lost in thought. He was baffled by this association of art with things like politics and music-halls, which he had always accepted as part of the world’s constitution but essentially unimportant. He had no organized mental life. His ideas came direct from his instincts to his mind, and were either used for immediate purposes or dropped back again to return when wanted. However, he recognized the passionate nervous energy that made Logan’s words full and round, and he was glad to have him so accessible and so eager and purposeful. On the whole, it did not matter to him why Logan thought his work so important. No one else thought it so, and certainly no one else had taken so much trouble to help it to find recognition. Logan seemed to promise him public fame, and that would delight and reassure his father and mother more than anything else. They treasured every mention of his name in the newspapers,pasted the cuttings in a book, and produced it for every visitor to the house.Struggling for ideas with which to match Logan’s, he became instinctively aware that his friend’s enthusiasm was deliberate, not in itself faked, but artificially heated. Behind it lay a deeper passion, from which he was endeavouring to divert the energy it claimed.Sitting between Logan and Oliver, Mendel could almost intercept the current of feeling that ran between them. It offended him as an indecency that they should have so little control over themselves as to reveal their condition of mutual obsession. . . . It reminded him of his impression of the police-court, where the secret sores of society were exposed nakedly, and queer, helpless, shameless, unrestrained creatures were dealt with almost like parcels in a shop. And again he had the sensation of being bound to them, of being confined with them in that little room, of a dead pressure being upon him, until he must scream or go mad.He looked at them. Did they not feel it too? Logan was lying back with his hands beneath his head and his lips pressed together and a scowl on his face, looking as though his thoughts and his destiny were almost, but, of course, not quite too much for him. Oliver was looking out of the window with her hands on her hips, humming. She laughed and said:—“I’d sooner live with an undertaker than an artist. He would be up to a bit of fun sometimes, and he’d do his work without making such a fuss about it.”“There’s an undertaker at the corner of the next street. You’d better ask him to take you on.”“As a corpse?” asked Mendel, exploding and spluttering at what seemed to him a very good joke. The others turned and looked at him solemnly, but neither of them laughed, andgradually his amusement subsided and he said lamely:—“I thought it was very funny.”“Oh! for goodness’ sake let’s go and have something to eat,” said Oliver. “You’re turning the place into a tomb with your silence. One’d think you were going to be crowned King of England instead of just holding a potty little exhibition.”“He is going to be crowned King of Artists,” said Mendel, making another attempt at a joke.“By God!” said Logan, “they’d kill me if they knew what I was like inside. Do you ever feel like that, Kühler, that all the birds in the cage would peck you to death for having got outside it? I do. I never see a policeman without feeling he is going to arrest me.”“I used to feel like that sometimes,” replied Mendel, “until I was arrested and realized that policemen are just people like anybody else. The man who arrested me was a very nice man.”“Oh! I’m sick of your feelings,” cried Oliver, “and I want my dinner.”“All right,” said Logan, reaching for his hat; “we’ll go to the Pot-au-Feu and afterwards to the Paris Café and fish for critics. I shall nobble one or two swells through Tysoe. We’ll pick up the more crapulous and lecherous at the café, and Oliver shall be the bait. So look your prettiest, my dear. . . . Let’s have a look at you.”He lit the gas and made her stand beneath it.“You’ll do,” he said, patting her cheek. “Come along.”He put his arm through hers. She gave a wriggle of pleasure and pressed close to him.Mendel followed them downstairs with an omen at his heart. He felt sure that something violent would happen.But nothing violent did happen. The evening was extraordinarily light-hearted and pleasant.Logan was his old self again, cracking jokes, mimicking people almost to their faces, giving absurd descriptions of his interviews with dealers and buyers, and concocting a burlesque history of his life. Mendel had never laughed so much since he was at the Detmold. His sides ached, and he was hard put to it to keep his countenance when at the café Logan caught two critics and told them that they must make no mistake this time: their reputations were at stake, nay, the reputation of art criticism was at the cross-roads, and art was on the threshold of its greatest period, and criticism should be its herald, not its camp-follower.“You fellows,” said Logan, “use your brains, you are articulate. We are apt to get lost in paint, in coloured dreams of to-morrow and the spaces of the night. We lose touch with the world, with life. We are dependent on you—even the greatest genius is dependent on you. You are the real patrons of art. The herd follows you. Criticism must not shirk its duty. The kind of thing that happened with Manet, with Whistler, ought not to happen again.”The two critics were unused to such treatment from painters. Oliver used her eyes upon them, detached one of them into a flirtation and left the other to Logan’s mercies. Logan’s blood was up. Here was a game he dearly loved, talking, bullying, hypnotizing another man out of his individuality. He invented monstrously, outrageously—concocted a whole new technique of painting, the discovery of which he ascribed to Mendel’s genius, and ended up by saying that painting should be to England what music had been to Germany, a national and at the same time a universal art.The critic had drunk enough to take it all seriously, and he promised to call and see the work of both painters. His colleague, on the otherhand, made arrangements to take Oliver out to tea and won her promise to come and see him at his flat.“That’s all right,” said Logan, as they left the café at closing time. “They will remember our names. They will forget how they came to know them and they will write about us.”
HEreached London in the afternoon, and as soon as it was evening went to Camden Town to find Logan. Only Oliver was in. She was sitting in the window smoking. There had been a tea-party, and the floor was littered with cups, plates of bread and butter and cakes, fragments of biscuit, some of which had been trodden on.
Mendel surveyed this litter ruefully, and he said:—
“Why don’t you wash up?”
“Logan said he would. I washed up after breakfast. I’m not a servant, and he keeps on promising to have someone in to help.”
“Will you wash up if I help you?”
“No, thanks. Logan’s got to do it.”
“Who has been to tea?”
“Oh! A funny lot. Some of Logan’s fools who think he is a great man.”
“He is a great man,” said Mendel.
“Heuh! You try living with him. What’s the good of being a great man if you don’t make any money? It’s all very well for Calthrop to live like a pig. He makes money and can do what he likes.”
“If you don’t like it you can always clear out.”
“Where to? Eh? To go the round of the studios and oblige people like you? Not much! It isn’t as if I was married to him. I can’t make him keep me. Besides, he wouldn’t let me go. If I went he would run after me. I supposeyou hadn’t thought of that, Mr. Kühler. You don’t know what it is to care for anybody. I’d like to see some one play you and play you, and then turn you down. That would teach you a lesson, that would.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m not going to stand it any longer,” she said. “I’m not going to be put on one side like dirt while you go on with your conceited talk. You’re both so conceited you don’t know how to hold yourselves. I’m a woman, and I stand for something in the world. A woman is more important than the biggest picture that was ever painted.”
“It depends upon the woman.”
“All right, then.I’mmore important. You talk about Logan keeping me. He can consider himself damned lucky I stay with him.”
“Oh! you’re both in luck,” snapped Mendel, and he sat down and refused to say another word.
Oliver began to whistle and then to hum. She fidgeted in her chair. She thought she had come off rather well in the sparring match. She had been dreading Mendel’s return, for since the Paris adventure she had been asserting herself, as she called it, beating Logan down, bewildering him with her extraordinary sweetness and cajolery and sudden outbursts of fury. Both had agreed to bury the memory of the last night in Paris, but the thoughts of both were centred upon it. She rejoiced that she had served him out, but she had been stirred to a degree that alarmed her. Her former condition of lazy sensual security had been broken, and she dreaded Logan’s jealousy. She knew that she was not his equal in force, but she set herself to overcome him with cunning. His force would spend itself. She knew that. She must then bind him fast with tricks and lures, rouse the curiosity of his senses and keep it unsatisfied.
She had succeeded wonderfully. Logan crumbled and turned soft and sugary under her arts, and only one impulse in him resisted her—his love for Mendel; and through that love his passion for art. Therefore she dreaded and hated Mendel’s return.
Presently she ceased to hum. She thought suddenly that perhaps it had been a mistake to meet Mendel with hostility.
“I say, Kühler, do give us one of your cigarettes. These are awful muck.”
He threw his cigarette-case over to her.
“Did you have a good time up North?”
“Yes.”
“I come from there, you know. Logan was furious with you for going. He is really very fond of you, you know.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“He’s very excited just now. He keeps talking about the artistic revolution and the twentieth century, and all that, you know. He has been reading a book called ‘John Christopher,’ and keeps on reading it aloud until I’m sick of it. I believe he thinks he is like Christopher, though I’m sure he’s not, because Christopher could never see a joke. It is all about women, one after another, just left anyhow. It doesn’t sound like a story to me at all.”
“It sounds true,” said Mendel, not paying much attention to what she said.
To his intense relief Logan came in with a frame under his arm.
“Hullo!” he said. “Got back? How did you like the swells?”
“They were good people,” replied Mendel, “and wonderfully peaceful. I don’t think I appreciated it enough while I was there, but it seems very clear and beautiful to me now.”
“Portrait any good?”
“No.”
Logan put down his frame and without a wordto Oliver proceeded to wash up the tea-things. She stayed in her chair in the window and hummed.
To Mendel his friend seemed altered. He had lost his good-humour and something of his happy recklessness, and he was more concentrated and full of a wary self-consciousness.
He came out of the bedroom when the washing up was done and flung himself on the divan, stretched himself out, and said:—
“I’m tired; done up. Lord! What fools there are in the world! No more portraits for you, my boy; at least, not this side of thirty. Ten years good solid work ahead of you.”
He laughed.
“I told Cluny he must hurry up or you would slide off into portrait-painting. Dealers hate the mere sound of the word. He is going to hurry up. I’ve played you for all I am worth, and Cluny is in my pocket. Oh! I’m a man of destiny, I am.”
A snort and a giggle came from Oliver. Logan sat up.
“Leave the room!” he said.
“Shan’t.”
“Leave the room. I want to talk to Kühler.”
“Talk away then. I shan’t listen.”
Logan walked over to her, seized her by the arms, and pushed her into the bedroom and locked the door. It was done very quickly and dexterously, as though it were a practised manœuvre.
“I’m finding out how to treat her,” he said. “Quiet firmness does the trick.”
He met Mendel’s eyes fixed on him in horrified inquiry and turned sharply away.
“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” he said. “The fact is, women aren’t fit for liberty and an artist ought to have nothing to do with them. But what can a man do? . . . What were we talking about?”
“Cluny.”
“Oh yes! He wants the exhibition to be the first fortnight in November. Can you be ready by then? It must be a turning-point in art, the beginning of big things. I know myself enough to realize that it is doubtful if I shall ever be a great creative artist, but I shall be the Napoleon of the new movement—the soldier and the organizer of the revolution in art. And it won’t be confined to art; it will spread through everything. Art will be the central international republic from which the commonwealths which will take the place of the present vulgar capitalistic nations will be inspired. What do you think of that for an idea?”
“Stick to art,” said Mendel. “I know nothing about the rest.”
“Do you remember my saying that the music-hall was all that was left of old England? I did not know how true it was. England has become one vast music-hall, with everybody with any talent or brains scrambling to top the bill. It runs through everything—art, politics, the press, literature, social reform, women’s suffrage, local government; and the people who top the bill can’t be dislodged, just like the poor old crocks on the halls, who come on and give the same show they were giving twenty years ago, and get applause instead of rotten eggs because the British public is so rotten with sentiment and so stupid that it can’t tell when a man has lost his talent. Please one generation in England and its grandchildren will applaud you, though everything about you is changed except your name. The result is, of course, that no talent is ever properly developed. A man reaches the point where he can please enough people to make a living, and he sticks there. Now, I ask you, is that a state of things which a self-respecting artist can accept?”
“No,” said Mendel. “No.”
“Well. It has to be altered. And who isto alter it if not the painters, who are less in contact with the general public than any other artists? Painters had a comfortable time last century, living on the North-country municipal councils, but that is all over and we are reduced to poops like Tysoe. There are any number of them, if one only took the trouble to dig them up, but they’re no good. I’ve lived on them for the last ten years, and they’re no good. You might as well squeeze your paints into the sink and turn on the tap for all the flicker of appreciation you get out of them. Then there are the snobs, the semi-demimondaines of the political set; but they are a seedy lot, with the minds and the interests of chorus-girls. You might whip up a little excitement at Oxford and Cambridge, but it would only vanish as soon as the young idiots came in contact with London and fell in love. . . . No. Behind the scenes of the music-hall is no good. We must make a direct onslaught on the general public. They must be taught that there is such a thing as art and that there are men devoted to the disinterested development of their talents—men who have no desire to top the bill or to make five hundred a week; men who recognize that art is European, universal, the invisible fabric in which human life is contained, and are content, like simple workmen, to keep it in repair.”
“I don’t know,” said Mendel, “if my brother-in-law Moscowitsch is typical, but he regards art which does not make money as a waste of time.”
“Oh! He is a Jew and uneducated. That’s where Tolstoi went so wrong. He confused the simplicity of art with the simplicity of the peasant, the dignity of the unsophisticated with the dignity that is achieved through sophistication. It may seem absurd to talk of bringing about anything so big through little Cluny, but it is not only possible, it is inevitable. The staleness ofLondon cannot go on, and Paris seemed just the same to me. Stagnation is intolerable. There must come a movement towards freedom and a grander gesture, and the only free people are the painters. They are the only people whose work has not become servile and vulgarized. Through them lies the natural outlet. . . . Oh! I have been thinking and thinking, and I thank God we met before you had been spoiled by success or I had been ruined by my rotten swindling life—though that has had its advantages too, and I can meet the dealers on their own ground, and if necessary advertise as impudently as any of the music-hall artists.”
Oliver began to hammer on the door. He went and unlocked it and let her in.
“You can talk as much as you like now,” he said. “I’ve said my say.”
“I heard you,” she replied, “talking to Kühler as if he was a crowd in Hyde Park.”
Mendel was lost in thought. He was baffled by this association of art with things like politics and music-halls, which he had always accepted as part of the world’s constitution but essentially unimportant. He had no organized mental life. His ideas came direct from his instincts to his mind, and were either used for immediate purposes or dropped back again to return when wanted. However, he recognized the passionate nervous energy that made Logan’s words full and round, and he was glad to have him so accessible and so eager and purposeful. On the whole, it did not matter to him why Logan thought his work so important. No one else thought it so, and certainly no one else had taken so much trouble to help it to find recognition. Logan seemed to promise him public fame, and that would delight and reassure his father and mother more than anything else. They treasured every mention of his name in the newspapers,pasted the cuttings in a book, and produced it for every visitor to the house.
Struggling for ideas with which to match Logan’s, he became instinctively aware that his friend’s enthusiasm was deliberate, not in itself faked, but artificially heated. Behind it lay a deeper passion, from which he was endeavouring to divert the energy it claimed.
Sitting between Logan and Oliver, Mendel could almost intercept the current of feeling that ran between them. It offended him as an indecency that they should have so little control over themselves as to reveal their condition of mutual obsession. . . . It reminded him of his impression of the police-court, where the secret sores of society were exposed nakedly, and queer, helpless, shameless, unrestrained creatures were dealt with almost like parcels in a shop. And again he had the sensation of being bound to them, of being confined with them in that little room, of a dead pressure being upon him, until he must scream or go mad.
He looked at them. Did they not feel it too? Logan was lying back with his hands beneath his head and his lips pressed together and a scowl on his face, looking as though his thoughts and his destiny were almost, but, of course, not quite too much for him. Oliver was looking out of the window with her hands on her hips, humming. She laughed and said:—
“I’d sooner live with an undertaker than an artist. He would be up to a bit of fun sometimes, and he’d do his work without making such a fuss about it.”
“There’s an undertaker at the corner of the next street. You’d better ask him to take you on.”
“As a corpse?” asked Mendel, exploding and spluttering at what seemed to him a very good joke. The others turned and looked at him solemnly, but neither of them laughed, andgradually his amusement subsided and he said lamely:—
“I thought it was very funny.”
“Oh! for goodness’ sake let’s go and have something to eat,” said Oliver. “You’re turning the place into a tomb with your silence. One’d think you were going to be crowned King of England instead of just holding a potty little exhibition.”
“He is going to be crowned King of Artists,” said Mendel, making another attempt at a joke.
“By God!” said Logan, “they’d kill me if they knew what I was like inside. Do you ever feel like that, Kühler, that all the birds in the cage would peck you to death for having got outside it? I do. I never see a policeman without feeling he is going to arrest me.”
“I used to feel like that sometimes,” replied Mendel, “until I was arrested and realized that policemen are just people like anybody else. The man who arrested me was a very nice man.”
“Oh! I’m sick of your feelings,” cried Oliver, “and I want my dinner.”
“All right,” said Logan, reaching for his hat; “we’ll go to the Pot-au-Feu and afterwards to the Paris Café and fish for critics. I shall nobble one or two swells through Tysoe. We’ll pick up the more crapulous and lecherous at the café, and Oliver shall be the bait. So look your prettiest, my dear. . . . Let’s have a look at you.”
He lit the gas and made her stand beneath it.
“You’ll do,” he said, patting her cheek. “Come along.”
He put his arm through hers. She gave a wriggle of pleasure and pressed close to him.
Mendel followed them downstairs with an omen at his heart. He felt sure that something violent would happen.
But nothing violent did happen. The evening was extraordinarily light-hearted and pleasant.Logan was his old self again, cracking jokes, mimicking people almost to their faces, giving absurd descriptions of his interviews with dealers and buyers, and concocting a burlesque history of his life. Mendel had never laughed so much since he was at the Detmold. His sides ached, and he was hard put to it to keep his countenance when at the café Logan caught two critics and told them that they must make no mistake this time: their reputations were at stake, nay, the reputation of art criticism was at the cross-roads, and art was on the threshold of its greatest period, and criticism should be its herald, not its camp-follower.
“You fellows,” said Logan, “use your brains, you are articulate. We are apt to get lost in paint, in coloured dreams of to-morrow and the spaces of the night. We lose touch with the world, with life. We are dependent on you—even the greatest genius is dependent on you. You are the real patrons of art. The herd follows you. Criticism must not shirk its duty. The kind of thing that happened with Manet, with Whistler, ought not to happen again.”
The two critics were unused to such treatment from painters. Oliver used her eyes upon them, detached one of them into a flirtation and left the other to Logan’s mercies. Logan’s blood was up. Here was a game he dearly loved, talking, bullying, hypnotizing another man out of his individuality. He invented monstrously, outrageously—concocted a whole new technique of painting, the discovery of which he ascribed to Mendel’s genius, and ended up by saying that painting should be to England what music had been to Germany, a national and at the same time a universal art.
The critic had drunk enough to take it all seriously, and he promised to call and see the work of both painters. His colleague, on the otherhand, made arrangements to take Oliver out to tea and won her promise to come and see him at his flat.
“That’s all right,” said Logan, as they left the café at closing time. “They will remember our names. They will forget how they came to know them and they will write about us.”