IIISUCCESSITwas all very well for Logan to talk about modern England being a music-hall, but his methods were almost identical with those of the publicists whom he decried. The greater part of his energy went to find a market for his wares, leaving very little for the production of the wares themselves. Because he was excited and busy and full of enthusiasm, he took it for granted that he was in a vigorous condition and that his vision of the future of art would be expressed in art. He talked volubly of what he was doing and what he intended to do, even while he worked, and his nerves were so overwrought that he contracted a horror of being alone. Though Oliver jeered at him as he worked he would not let her go out, and when once or twice she insisted, he could not work, and went round to see Mendel and prevented his working either.Mendel knew nothing of markets and dealers and the relation of art to the world and its habits and institutions. He was carried off his feet by his friend’s torrential energy, believed what he said, wore his thoughts as he would have worn his hat, and lived entirely for the exhibition which was to do such wonders for him. Twelve exhibits were required of him. He would have had forty-eight ready if he had been asked for them. When he missed the delight and the pure joy he had had in working, he told himself that these emotions were childish and unworthy of a man, and anuisance, because they would have prevented him from knowing clearly what he wanted to do. He dashed at his canvas with a fair imitation of Logan’s manner, slung the paint on to it with bold strokes, saying to himself: “There! That will astonish them! That will make them see what painting is!”And every now and then he would remember that he was in love. He must paint love as it had never been painted before.For his subject he chose Ruth in the cornfield, but very soon tired of painting ears of corn, so he left it looking like a square yellow block, and painted it up until it resembled a slice of Dutch cheese. Only when he came to Ruth’s face and tried to make it express all the love with which his heart was overflowing did he paint with the old fastidious care, but even that could not keep him for long, and he returned to his corn, the shape of which had begun to fascinate him, and he wanted somehow to get it into relation with the hill on which it was set. But he could do nothing with it, and had to go back to Ruth and love.The effect was certainly startling and novel, and Logan was enthusiastic.“That’s it,” he said. “The nearest approach to modern art is the poster, which is not art, of course, because it is not designed by artists. But it does convey something to the modern mind, it does jog it out of its routine and habitual rut. Now, your picture wouldn’t do for a poster. It is too good, but it has the same kind of effect. Stop! Look! Listen! Wake up, and see that there are beautiful women in the world and blue skies, and love radiant over all! This woman has nothing to do with what you felt for your wife when you proposed to her, or with what the parson said when the baby died: she is the woman the dream of whom lives always in your heart,although you have long forgotten it. She is the beauty you have passed by for the sake of peace and quiet and a balance at your bank.”“Do you think it is a good picture?” asked Mendel.“I think it is a good beginning. Two or three more like that and there will be a sensation. There will have to be policemen to regulate the crowd.”Mendel caught his mood of driving excitement and really was convinced that he had broken through to a style of his own, and to the beginning of something that might be called modern art.He was a little dashed when, after Logan had gone, he fetched his mother over to see it, and all she could find to say was:—“You used not to paint like that.”“No, of course not,” he said impatiently. “The old way was limited, too limited. It was all very well for painting the life down here, just what I saw in front of me. This picture is for an exhibition, all by myself with one other man.”“Logan?” asked Golda dubiously.“Yes. It is a great honour to give a private exhibition like that at my age. It is most unusual. This is the beginning of a new style. I’m beginning a new life.”“You are not going away?” said Golda in a sudden panic that he was to be snatched away from her.“I should never go away until you gave your permission,” he said. “I am not so very different from Harry that I want to go away and leave my people.”“I never know what will come of that painting of yours.”“Success!” he said jestingly. “And fame and money, and beautiful ladies in furs and diamonds, and carriages and motor-cars, and fine clothes and rings on everybody’s fingers.”“I would rather have you seated quietly in my kitchen than all the gold of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,” said Golda.“Then please like my picture.”“I don’t like it.”“Thensayyou like it.”“I don’t like it.”“I shall wipe it out then.”“Your new friends will like it.”“Ilike it,” he said. “I don’t think it is a very good picture, but it means something to me.”And he longed for Morrison to come and see it, for it was the first picture that had directly to do with her. The portrait of her was hardly more than a drawing. What he called an “art student” might have done it, but this Ruth, he felt, was the beginning of his work as an artist, and he thought fantastically that when Morrison saw it she would see that he was to be treated with respect and would fall in by his side, and they would live happily, or at least solidly, ever after.“Solid” was his great word, and he used it in many senses. It conveyed to his mind the quality of which he could most thoroughly approve. If a thing, or a person, or an action, or an emotion were what he called “solid,” then it was a matter of indifference to him whether it was in the ordinary sense good or bad. He was perfectly convinced that if Morrison could only be brought to reason, then his life would solidify and he would be able to go on working in peace.Meanwhile he was anything but solid. His work, his life, his ideas, his ambition had all melted under Logan’s warm touch and were pouring towards the crucial exhibition. Mendel looked forward to it feverishly, because it was to put an end to his present condition, in which he was like a wax candle, luminous, but fast sinking into nothingness. If only he could reach the exhibition in time, the wind of fame would blow out the flame that wasreducing him and he would be able to start afresh . . . But all the time as he worked words of Logan’s rolled in his mind, and had no meaning whatever, except that they made him think of music-halls and motor-buses and women’s legs in tights and newspapers and electric sky-signs spelling out words letter by letter. Out of this hotch-potch pictures, works of art, were to emerge. They were to take their place in it and, according to Logan, reduce it to order. But how was it possible? . . . In the quiet, ordered, patriarchal world of the Jews a rare nature might arise, but in that extraordinary confusion nothing rare could survive. Beauty could never compete on equal terms with women’s legs in tights and electric sky-signs; it could never produce an impression on minds obsessed and crammed to overflowing with the multitudinous excitements of the metropolis.Mendel was convinced that Logan was right, that beauty must emerge to establish authority, and he thought of himself as engaged in a combat with a huge, terrible monster. Every stroke of his brush was a wound upon its flanks and an abomination the less. Yet he loved all the things against which he was fighting, because they made the world gay and stimulating and wonderful. He could see no reason why he should change the world. It was full enough of change already. Why, in his own time, the electric railways and the motor-buses had brought an amazing transformation in the life of the East End. No one now worked for such little wages as his father had done at the stick-making, and the life of the streets had lost its terrors and dangers. The young men had better things to do than to fight each other or to pelt old Jews with mud, and there was no reason to suppose that such changes would stop where they were.However, he had Logan’s word for it, and Logan had given art a new importance in his eyes. Hecould not think it out himself without getting hopelessly confused, and there was nothing for it but to go on with his work.Other relief he had none. He had written three ardent letters to Morrison, telling her, absolutely without restraint, of his love and his need for her, and she had not replied. He was too much hurt to write again, and as he worked he began to hate love, being in love, and the idea of it. He persuaded himself that it was a weakness, and he had ample reason for thinking so, when he compared his loose condition with his old clear singleness of purpose. What chiefly exasperated him in this indefinite unsuccessful love of his was that it exposed him to the passion, every day growing more furious, between Logan and Oliver. It made his own emotions seem fantastic, with the most vital current of his being pouring out in a direction far removed from the rest of his life, apparently ignoring the solid virtues of his Jewish surroundings and the elated vigour of his career among the artists.“It will not do!” he told himself. “I will not have it! What is this love? Just nonsense invented by people who are afraid of their passions. A lady indeed?Isshe? A lady is only a woman dressed up. She must learn that she is a woman, or I will have nothing to do with her.”And sometimes he could persuade himself that he had driven Morrison from his thoughts. He finished the portrait of her from memory and was convinced that it was the end of her. It was a good picture and pretty enough to find a buyer, and there it ended. He had got what he wanted of her and could pluck her out of his thoughts.Logan said it was a very fine picture, a real piece of creation.“And if that doesn’t make them see how damned awful their Public School system is in its effect on women, I’ll eat my hat. You’ve had your revenge,my boy. You have shown her up. Why don’t you call itThe Foolish Virgin? Of all the mischievous twaddle that is talked in this mischievous twaddling country the notion of love is the worst. You can’t love a woman unless you live with her, and a woman is incapable of loving a man unless he lives with her. By Jove! We’ll hang it and my portrait of Oliver side by side in the exhibition, and I’ll call mineThe Woman who Did.”“I won’t have them side by side,” said Mendel. “I want our pictures kept separate. I don’t want it said that we are working together.”“But weareworking together.”“Yes. But along our own lines. We’re only together really in our independence. You said yourself that we didn’t want to found a school.”“That’s true,” replied Logan, “but I don’t see why we shouldn’t have our little joke.”“I don’t joke with art,” said Mendel grimly, and that settled the matter.It was the first time he had set his will against his friend’s, and he was surprised to find how soft Logan was. Surely, then, it was he who was the leader, he who was blazing the new trail for art. . . . He had to bow to the fact that Logan had a programme while he had none. However, having once asserted his will, he became critical, and was not again the docile little disciple he had been.Logan wanted to draw up a manifesto for the catalogue, to enunciate the first principles of modern art, namely, that a picture must have (a) not merely a subject, but a conception based on but not bounded by its subject; (b) form, meaning the form dictated by the logic of the conception, which must of necessity be different from the logic dictated by the subject, which would lead either to the preconceptions and prejudices of the schools or to irrelevant and non-pictorial considerations. All this was set out at somelength, and appended were a number of maxims, such as:—“In art the important thing is art.“Abstraction precedes selection.“Art exists to keep in circulation those spiritual forces, such as æsthetic emotion, which are denied in ordinary human communications.“Photography has released art from its ancient burden of representation,” etc., etc.With the spirit of this manifesto Mendel was in agreement, though he could make but little of its letter. He refused to agree to it because so much talk seemed to him unnecessary.“If we can say what we mean to say in paint, then we need not talk. If we cannot say it in paint, then we have no right to talk.”“You’d soon bring the world to a standstill,” said Logan, “if you limited talk to the people who have a right to it. It is just those people who never open their mouths. I think it is criminal of them, just out of shyness and disgust, to give the buffoons and knaves an open field.”“All the same,” grunted Mendel, “I am not going to agree to the manifesto. People will read it and laugh at it, and never look at the pictures. You seem to think of everything but them. I wonder you don’t set up as a dealer.”“You’re overworking,” said Logan, “that’s what you are doing. And directly the exhibition is open I shall pack you off to Brighton.”Already a week before the opening they began to feel that the eyes of London were upon them. They crept about the streets half-shamefacedly like conspirators, relaxed and wary, waiting for the moment when their triumph should send their shoulders back and their heads up, and they would march together through a London which owed its salvation to them. Not since his portrait hadappeared in the Yiddish paper had Mendel been so defiant and so morosely arrogant.He was ill with excitement and could not do a stroke of work. Every minute of the day he spent with Logan and Oliver, to whom Tysoe was often added. He dined with them at the Pot-au-Feu, took them all out to lunch and tea at places like Richmond and Kew, had them to his house, and was squeezed by the approaching success to buy Logan’s two largest pictures before the public could have access to them.“They are masterpieces!” he cried, swinging his long hands, “absolute masterpieces! You don’t know how much good it does me to be with you two. Absolutely sincere, you are! That’s what I like about you. Sincere! One looks for sincerity in vain everywhere else. Sincerity has vanished from the theatre, the novel, music, poetry. I suppose it is democracy—letting the public in behind the scenes, so that they see through all the tricks.”“An artist isn’t a conjurer!” said Mendel.“That is just what artists have been,” cried Logan, “and they can’t bluff it out any more.”“Exactly!” gurgled Tysoe, who when he was roused from his habitual weak lethargy lost control of his voice, so that it wobbled between a shrill treble and a husky bass. “Exactly! That’s what I like about you two. No bluff, no tricks. You do what you want to do and damn the consequences. Ha! ha!”So ill was Mendel just before the exhibition that Logan refused to allow him anywhere near it, and insisted that they should both go to Brighton, leaving Oliver to go to the private view and spy out the land.Oliver protested. She wanted to go to Brighton.“You shall have a new dress and a new hat,” said Logan. “You must go to the private view like a real lady. Cluny doesn’t know you, and youmust go up to him every now and then and ask him in a loud voice what the prices are. You might even pretend to be a little deaf and make him speak clearly and distinctly.”The idea tickled Mendel so that he began to laugh, could not stop himself, and was soon almost hysterical.“What’s the matter with you?” asked Oliver, shaking him.He gasped:—“I—I was laughing at the idea of your being a real lady. Ha! ha! ha!”She gave him a clout over the head that sobered him. Logan pounced on her like a tiger.“You devil!” he said. “You she-devil! Don’t you see the poor boy’s ill?”“What’s that to me?” she screamed, with her head wobbling backwards and forwards horribly as he shook her. “It’s n-nothing t-to m-me!”She caught Logan by the wrist and sent him spinning, for she was nearly as strong as he.“Go to Brighton!” she shouted. “I don’t care. I’ll be glad to be rid of you both. You won’t find me here when you come back, that’s all, you and your little hurdy-gurdy boy! You only need a monkey and an organ to make you complete. Why don’t you try it? You’d do better at that than out of pictures.”Logan could not contain himself. His rage burst out of him in a howl like that of a wind in a chimney, a dismal, empty moan. He stood up, and the veins on his neck swelled and his mouth opened and shut foolishly, for he could find nothing to say.“You slut, you squeezed-out dishclout, you sponge!” he roared at last. “Clear out, you drab! Clear out into the streets, you trull! Draggle your skirts in the mud, you filth, you octopus! Sell the carcase that you don’t know how to give, you marble!”She flung up her hands and sank on to her knees, and let down her hair and moaned:—“O God! O God! O God!”Logan’s fury snapped.“For God’s sake! For God’s sake!” he said. “What has come over us? Oh, God help us! What are we doing? What are we coming to? Nell! Nell! I didn’t know what I was saying!”He went down on his knees beside her, and Mendel, who had been numbed but inwardly elated by the storm, could not endure the craven surrender, the cowardly reconciliation, and he left them.Out in the street he stood tottering on the curb, and spat into the gutter, with extreme precision, between the bars of a grating.At Brighton, whither they went next day, Logan explained himself.“It is extraordinary how near love is to hate, and how rotten love becomes if hate is suppressed—stale and tasteless and vapid.”“Are you talking about yourself and Oliver?” asked Mendel.“Yes.”“Then please don’t. I don’t mind what happens between you and her so long as it doesn’t happen in front of me.”“I’m sorry,” said Logan; “but it can’t always be prevented. I don’t see the use of pretence.”“Neither do I. But some things are your own affair, and it is indecent to let other people see them.”“Oh, a row’s a row!” said Logan cheerfully. “And one is all the better for it.”“But if a woman treated me like that I should never speak to her again.”“Love’s too deep for that. You can’t stand on your dignity in love.”“I should make her understand once and for all that I would not have it.”“Then she would deceive you. If you played the tyrant over a girl like Oliver she would deceive you.”Mendel stared and his jaw dropped. Had Logan forgotten the night in Paris? Was he such a fool as to pretend he did not know, could not see that the whole liberation of frenzy in Oliver dated from that night? . . . Oh, well! It was no affair of his.To change the subject he said:—“We ought to get the press-cuttings to-morrow. I wonder if we shall sell the lot? It’s a good beginning, having tickets on your two.”“I bet we sell the lot in a week. Oliver has two of the critics in her pocket. What do you say to giving a party in honour of the event? We can afford to forgive our enemies now, and there’s a social side to the movement which we ought not to neglect.”Mendel made no reply. They were sitting on the front. The smooth, glassy sea, reflecting the stars and the lights of the pier, soothed and comforted him. Brighton was to him like a part of London, and he sank drowsily into the happy fantasy that he was being thrust out of the streets towards the stars and the vast power that lay beyond them. He was weary of the streets and the clamour, and he wanted peace and serenity, rest from his own turbulence, the peace which has no dwelling upon earth and lives only in eternity.“How good it would be,” he said suddenly, “if one could just paint without a thought of what became of one’s pictures.”“That’s no good,” replied Logan. “One must live.”The first batch of cuttings arrived in the morning. They were brief, for the most part, quiterespectful and appreciative. Mendel learned, to his astonishment, that he was influenced by Logan, and one critic lamented that a promising young painter, who could so simply render the life of his race, should have been infected with modern heresies. There was no uproar, neither of them was hailed as a master, and Logan in more than one instance was dismissed as an imitator of Calthrop.“Calthrop!” said Logan, gulping down his disappointment and disgust. “Calthrop! Oh well, it is good enough for a beginning. It would have been very different if you had let me print the manifesto. The swine need to be told, you know. They want a lead. . . . We’ll wait for the Sunday papers.”London was curiously unchanged when they returned. Mendel was half afraid he would be recognized as they came out of Charing Cross Station, but no one looked at him. The convulsion through which he had lived had left people going about their business, and he supposed that if an earthquake happened in Trafalgar Square people would still be going about their business in the Strand.They were eager for Oliver’s account of the private view, and took a taxi-cab to Camden Town. She was wearing her new dress and was quite the lady: shook hands with Mendel and asked him haughtily in a mincing tone how he was. From all these signs he judged that the exhibition had been a success.“Quite a lot of people came,” she said. “Real swells. There were two motor-cars outside.”“Yes,” said Logan. “Tysoe agreed to leave his car outside for a couple of hours to encourage people to go in.”“Kühler’s picture of the girl with short hair sold at once,” she said.His pleasure in this news was swallowed up in his dislike of hearing Morrison spoken of by her.“All your drawings but one are gone, Logan. I listened to what people said. They wanted to know who you were, and Cluny said you had a great reputation in the North. People laughed out loud at Kühler’sRuth, and I heard one man say it was only to be expected. He said the Jews can never produce art. They can only produce infant prodigies.”
ITwas all very well for Logan to talk about modern England being a music-hall, but his methods were almost identical with those of the publicists whom he decried. The greater part of his energy went to find a market for his wares, leaving very little for the production of the wares themselves. Because he was excited and busy and full of enthusiasm, he took it for granted that he was in a vigorous condition and that his vision of the future of art would be expressed in art. He talked volubly of what he was doing and what he intended to do, even while he worked, and his nerves were so overwrought that he contracted a horror of being alone. Though Oliver jeered at him as he worked he would not let her go out, and when once or twice she insisted, he could not work, and went round to see Mendel and prevented his working either.
Mendel knew nothing of markets and dealers and the relation of art to the world and its habits and institutions. He was carried off his feet by his friend’s torrential energy, believed what he said, wore his thoughts as he would have worn his hat, and lived entirely for the exhibition which was to do such wonders for him. Twelve exhibits were required of him. He would have had forty-eight ready if he had been asked for them. When he missed the delight and the pure joy he had had in working, he told himself that these emotions were childish and unworthy of a man, and anuisance, because they would have prevented him from knowing clearly what he wanted to do. He dashed at his canvas with a fair imitation of Logan’s manner, slung the paint on to it with bold strokes, saying to himself: “There! That will astonish them! That will make them see what painting is!”
And every now and then he would remember that he was in love. He must paint love as it had never been painted before.
For his subject he chose Ruth in the cornfield, but very soon tired of painting ears of corn, so he left it looking like a square yellow block, and painted it up until it resembled a slice of Dutch cheese. Only when he came to Ruth’s face and tried to make it express all the love with which his heart was overflowing did he paint with the old fastidious care, but even that could not keep him for long, and he returned to his corn, the shape of which had begun to fascinate him, and he wanted somehow to get it into relation with the hill on which it was set. But he could do nothing with it, and had to go back to Ruth and love.
The effect was certainly startling and novel, and Logan was enthusiastic.
“That’s it,” he said. “The nearest approach to modern art is the poster, which is not art, of course, because it is not designed by artists. But it does convey something to the modern mind, it does jog it out of its routine and habitual rut. Now, your picture wouldn’t do for a poster. It is too good, but it has the same kind of effect. Stop! Look! Listen! Wake up, and see that there are beautiful women in the world and blue skies, and love radiant over all! This woman has nothing to do with what you felt for your wife when you proposed to her, or with what the parson said when the baby died: she is the woman the dream of whom lives always in your heart,although you have long forgotten it. She is the beauty you have passed by for the sake of peace and quiet and a balance at your bank.”
“Do you think it is a good picture?” asked Mendel.
“I think it is a good beginning. Two or three more like that and there will be a sensation. There will have to be policemen to regulate the crowd.”
Mendel caught his mood of driving excitement and really was convinced that he had broken through to a style of his own, and to the beginning of something that might be called modern art.
He was a little dashed when, after Logan had gone, he fetched his mother over to see it, and all she could find to say was:—
“You used not to paint like that.”
“No, of course not,” he said impatiently. “The old way was limited, too limited. It was all very well for painting the life down here, just what I saw in front of me. This picture is for an exhibition, all by myself with one other man.”
“Logan?” asked Golda dubiously.
“Yes. It is a great honour to give a private exhibition like that at my age. It is most unusual. This is the beginning of a new style. I’m beginning a new life.”
“You are not going away?” said Golda in a sudden panic that he was to be snatched away from her.
“I should never go away until you gave your permission,” he said. “I am not so very different from Harry that I want to go away and leave my people.”
“I never know what will come of that painting of yours.”
“Success!” he said jestingly. “And fame and money, and beautiful ladies in furs and diamonds, and carriages and motor-cars, and fine clothes and rings on everybody’s fingers.”
“I would rather have you seated quietly in my kitchen than all the gold of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,” said Golda.
“Then please like my picture.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Thensayyou like it.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I shall wipe it out then.”
“Your new friends will like it.”
“Ilike it,” he said. “I don’t think it is a very good picture, but it means something to me.”
And he longed for Morrison to come and see it, for it was the first picture that had directly to do with her. The portrait of her was hardly more than a drawing. What he called an “art student” might have done it, but this Ruth, he felt, was the beginning of his work as an artist, and he thought fantastically that when Morrison saw it she would see that he was to be treated with respect and would fall in by his side, and they would live happily, or at least solidly, ever after.
“Solid” was his great word, and he used it in many senses. It conveyed to his mind the quality of which he could most thoroughly approve. If a thing, or a person, or an action, or an emotion were what he called “solid,” then it was a matter of indifference to him whether it was in the ordinary sense good or bad. He was perfectly convinced that if Morrison could only be brought to reason, then his life would solidify and he would be able to go on working in peace.
Meanwhile he was anything but solid. His work, his life, his ideas, his ambition had all melted under Logan’s warm touch and were pouring towards the crucial exhibition. Mendel looked forward to it feverishly, because it was to put an end to his present condition, in which he was like a wax candle, luminous, but fast sinking into nothingness. If only he could reach the exhibition in time, the wind of fame would blow out the flame that wasreducing him and he would be able to start afresh . . . But all the time as he worked words of Logan’s rolled in his mind, and had no meaning whatever, except that they made him think of music-halls and motor-buses and women’s legs in tights and newspapers and electric sky-signs spelling out words letter by letter. Out of this hotch-potch pictures, works of art, were to emerge. They were to take their place in it and, according to Logan, reduce it to order. But how was it possible? . . . In the quiet, ordered, patriarchal world of the Jews a rare nature might arise, but in that extraordinary confusion nothing rare could survive. Beauty could never compete on equal terms with women’s legs in tights and electric sky-signs; it could never produce an impression on minds obsessed and crammed to overflowing with the multitudinous excitements of the metropolis.
Mendel was convinced that Logan was right, that beauty must emerge to establish authority, and he thought of himself as engaged in a combat with a huge, terrible monster. Every stroke of his brush was a wound upon its flanks and an abomination the less. Yet he loved all the things against which he was fighting, because they made the world gay and stimulating and wonderful. He could see no reason why he should change the world. It was full enough of change already. Why, in his own time, the electric railways and the motor-buses had brought an amazing transformation in the life of the East End. No one now worked for such little wages as his father had done at the stick-making, and the life of the streets had lost its terrors and dangers. The young men had better things to do than to fight each other or to pelt old Jews with mud, and there was no reason to suppose that such changes would stop where they were.
However, he had Logan’s word for it, and Logan had given art a new importance in his eyes. Hecould not think it out himself without getting hopelessly confused, and there was nothing for it but to go on with his work.
Other relief he had none. He had written three ardent letters to Morrison, telling her, absolutely without restraint, of his love and his need for her, and she had not replied. He was too much hurt to write again, and as he worked he began to hate love, being in love, and the idea of it. He persuaded himself that it was a weakness, and he had ample reason for thinking so, when he compared his loose condition with his old clear singleness of purpose. What chiefly exasperated him in this indefinite unsuccessful love of his was that it exposed him to the passion, every day growing more furious, between Logan and Oliver. It made his own emotions seem fantastic, with the most vital current of his being pouring out in a direction far removed from the rest of his life, apparently ignoring the solid virtues of his Jewish surroundings and the elated vigour of his career among the artists.
“It will not do!” he told himself. “I will not have it! What is this love? Just nonsense invented by people who are afraid of their passions. A lady indeed?Isshe? A lady is only a woman dressed up. She must learn that she is a woman, or I will have nothing to do with her.”
And sometimes he could persuade himself that he had driven Morrison from his thoughts. He finished the portrait of her from memory and was convinced that it was the end of her. It was a good picture and pretty enough to find a buyer, and there it ended. He had got what he wanted of her and could pluck her out of his thoughts.
Logan said it was a very fine picture, a real piece of creation.
“And if that doesn’t make them see how damned awful their Public School system is in its effect on women, I’ll eat my hat. You’ve had your revenge,my boy. You have shown her up. Why don’t you call itThe Foolish Virgin? Of all the mischievous twaddle that is talked in this mischievous twaddling country the notion of love is the worst. You can’t love a woman unless you live with her, and a woman is incapable of loving a man unless he lives with her. By Jove! We’ll hang it and my portrait of Oliver side by side in the exhibition, and I’ll call mineThe Woman who Did.”
“I won’t have them side by side,” said Mendel. “I want our pictures kept separate. I don’t want it said that we are working together.”
“But weareworking together.”
“Yes. But along our own lines. We’re only together really in our independence. You said yourself that we didn’t want to found a school.”
“That’s true,” replied Logan, “but I don’t see why we shouldn’t have our little joke.”
“I don’t joke with art,” said Mendel grimly, and that settled the matter.
It was the first time he had set his will against his friend’s, and he was surprised to find how soft Logan was. Surely, then, it was he who was the leader, he who was blazing the new trail for art. . . . He had to bow to the fact that Logan had a programme while he had none. However, having once asserted his will, he became critical, and was not again the docile little disciple he had been.
Logan wanted to draw up a manifesto for the catalogue, to enunciate the first principles of modern art, namely, that a picture must have (a) not merely a subject, but a conception based on but not bounded by its subject; (b) form, meaning the form dictated by the logic of the conception, which must of necessity be different from the logic dictated by the subject, which would lead either to the preconceptions and prejudices of the schools or to irrelevant and non-pictorial considerations. All this was set out at somelength, and appended were a number of maxims, such as:—
“In art the important thing is art.
“Abstraction precedes selection.
“Art exists to keep in circulation those spiritual forces, such as æsthetic emotion, which are denied in ordinary human communications.
“Photography has released art from its ancient burden of representation,” etc., etc.
With the spirit of this manifesto Mendel was in agreement, though he could make but little of its letter. He refused to agree to it because so much talk seemed to him unnecessary.
“If we can say what we mean to say in paint, then we need not talk. If we cannot say it in paint, then we have no right to talk.”
“You’d soon bring the world to a standstill,” said Logan, “if you limited talk to the people who have a right to it. It is just those people who never open their mouths. I think it is criminal of them, just out of shyness and disgust, to give the buffoons and knaves an open field.”
“All the same,” grunted Mendel, “I am not going to agree to the manifesto. People will read it and laugh at it, and never look at the pictures. You seem to think of everything but them. I wonder you don’t set up as a dealer.”
“You’re overworking,” said Logan, “that’s what you are doing. And directly the exhibition is open I shall pack you off to Brighton.”
Already a week before the opening they began to feel that the eyes of London were upon them. They crept about the streets half-shamefacedly like conspirators, relaxed and wary, waiting for the moment when their triumph should send their shoulders back and their heads up, and they would march together through a London which owed its salvation to them. Not since his portrait hadappeared in the Yiddish paper had Mendel been so defiant and so morosely arrogant.
He was ill with excitement and could not do a stroke of work. Every minute of the day he spent with Logan and Oliver, to whom Tysoe was often added. He dined with them at the Pot-au-Feu, took them all out to lunch and tea at places like Richmond and Kew, had them to his house, and was squeezed by the approaching success to buy Logan’s two largest pictures before the public could have access to them.
“They are masterpieces!” he cried, swinging his long hands, “absolute masterpieces! You don’t know how much good it does me to be with you two. Absolutely sincere, you are! That’s what I like about you. Sincere! One looks for sincerity in vain everywhere else. Sincerity has vanished from the theatre, the novel, music, poetry. I suppose it is democracy—letting the public in behind the scenes, so that they see through all the tricks.”
“An artist isn’t a conjurer!” said Mendel.
“That is just what artists have been,” cried Logan, “and they can’t bluff it out any more.”
“Exactly!” gurgled Tysoe, who when he was roused from his habitual weak lethargy lost control of his voice, so that it wobbled between a shrill treble and a husky bass. “Exactly! That’s what I like about you two. No bluff, no tricks. You do what you want to do and damn the consequences. Ha! ha!”
So ill was Mendel just before the exhibition that Logan refused to allow him anywhere near it, and insisted that they should both go to Brighton, leaving Oliver to go to the private view and spy out the land.
Oliver protested. She wanted to go to Brighton.
“You shall have a new dress and a new hat,” said Logan. “You must go to the private view like a real lady. Cluny doesn’t know you, and youmust go up to him every now and then and ask him in a loud voice what the prices are. You might even pretend to be a little deaf and make him speak clearly and distinctly.”
The idea tickled Mendel so that he began to laugh, could not stop himself, and was soon almost hysterical.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Oliver, shaking him.
He gasped:—
“I—I was laughing at the idea of your being a real lady. Ha! ha! ha!”
She gave him a clout over the head that sobered him. Logan pounced on her like a tiger.
“You devil!” he said. “You she-devil! Don’t you see the poor boy’s ill?”
“What’s that to me?” she screamed, with her head wobbling backwards and forwards horribly as he shook her. “It’s n-nothing t-to m-me!”
She caught Logan by the wrist and sent him spinning, for she was nearly as strong as he.
“Go to Brighton!” she shouted. “I don’t care. I’ll be glad to be rid of you both. You won’t find me here when you come back, that’s all, you and your little hurdy-gurdy boy! You only need a monkey and an organ to make you complete. Why don’t you try it? You’d do better at that than out of pictures.”
Logan could not contain himself. His rage burst out of him in a howl like that of a wind in a chimney, a dismal, empty moan. He stood up, and the veins on his neck swelled and his mouth opened and shut foolishly, for he could find nothing to say.
“You slut, you squeezed-out dishclout, you sponge!” he roared at last. “Clear out, you drab! Clear out into the streets, you trull! Draggle your skirts in the mud, you filth, you octopus! Sell the carcase that you don’t know how to give, you marble!”
She flung up her hands and sank on to her knees, and let down her hair and moaned:—
“O God! O God! O God!”
Logan’s fury snapped.
“For God’s sake! For God’s sake!” he said. “What has come over us? Oh, God help us! What are we doing? What are we coming to? Nell! Nell! I didn’t know what I was saying!”
He went down on his knees beside her, and Mendel, who had been numbed but inwardly elated by the storm, could not endure the craven surrender, the cowardly reconciliation, and he left them.
Out in the street he stood tottering on the curb, and spat into the gutter, with extreme precision, between the bars of a grating.
At Brighton, whither they went next day, Logan explained himself.
“It is extraordinary how near love is to hate, and how rotten love becomes if hate is suppressed—stale and tasteless and vapid.”
“Are you talking about yourself and Oliver?” asked Mendel.
“Yes.”
“Then please don’t. I don’t mind what happens between you and her so long as it doesn’t happen in front of me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Logan; “but it can’t always be prevented. I don’t see the use of pretence.”
“Neither do I. But some things are your own affair, and it is indecent to let other people see them.”
“Oh, a row’s a row!” said Logan cheerfully. “And one is all the better for it.”
“But if a woman treated me like that I should never speak to her again.”
“Love’s too deep for that. You can’t stand on your dignity in love.”
“I should make her understand once and for all that I would not have it.”
“Then she would deceive you. If you played the tyrant over a girl like Oliver she would deceive you.”
Mendel stared and his jaw dropped. Had Logan forgotten the night in Paris? Was he such a fool as to pretend he did not know, could not see that the whole liberation of frenzy in Oliver dated from that night? . . . Oh, well! It was no affair of his.
To change the subject he said:—
“We ought to get the press-cuttings to-morrow. I wonder if we shall sell the lot? It’s a good beginning, having tickets on your two.”
“I bet we sell the lot in a week. Oliver has two of the critics in her pocket. What do you say to giving a party in honour of the event? We can afford to forgive our enemies now, and there’s a social side to the movement which we ought not to neglect.”
Mendel made no reply. They were sitting on the front. The smooth, glassy sea, reflecting the stars and the lights of the pier, soothed and comforted him. Brighton was to him like a part of London, and he sank drowsily into the happy fantasy that he was being thrust out of the streets towards the stars and the vast power that lay beyond them. He was weary of the streets and the clamour, and he wanted peace and serenity, rest from his own turbulence, the peace which has no dwelling upon earth and lives only in eternity.
“How good it would be,” he said suddenly, “if one could just paint without a thought of what became of one’s pictures.”
“That’s no good,” replied Logan. “One must live.”
The first batch of cuttings arrived in the morning. They were brief, for the most part, quiterespectful and appreciative. Mendel learned, to his astonishment, that he was influenced by Logan, and one critic lamented that a promising young painter, who could so simply render the life of his race, should have been infected with modern heresies. There was no uproar, neither of them was hailed as a master, and Logan in more than one instance was dismissed as an imitator of Calthrop.
“Calthrop!” said Logan, gulping down his disappointment and disgust. “Calthrop! Oh well, it is good enough for a beginning. It would have been very different if you had let me print the manifesto. The swine need to be told, you know. They want a lead. . . . We’ll wait for the Sunday papers.”
London was curiously unchanged when they returned. Mendel was half afraid he would be recognized as they came out of Charing Cross Station, but no one looked at him. The convulsion through which he had lived had left people going about their business, and he supposed that if an earthquake happened in Trafalgar Square people would still be going about their business in the Strand.
They were eager for Oliver’s account of the private view, and took a taxi-cab to Camden Town. She was wearing her new dress and was quite the lady: shook hands with Mendel and asked him haughtily in a mincing tone how he was. From all these signs he judged that the exhibition had been a success.
“Quite a lot of people came,” she said. “Real swells. There were two motor-cars outside.”
“Yes,” said Logan. “Tysoe agreed to leave his car outside for a couple of hours to encourage people to go in.”
“Kühler’s picture of the girl with short hair sold at once,” she said.
His pleasure in this news was swallowed up in his dislike of hearing Morrison spoken of by her.
“All your drawings but one are gone, Logan. I listened to what people said. They wanted to know who you were, and Cluny said you had a great reputation in the North. People laughed out loud at Kühler’sRuth, and I heard one man say it was only to be expected. He said the Jews can never produce art. They can only produce infant prodigies.”