VIREVELATIONTHREEweeks later the exhibition of Modern French Art was opened in an important gallery in the West End. It roused indignation, laughter, scorn, and made such a stir in the papers that public interest was excited and the exhibition was an unparalleled success. People from the suburbs, people who had never been to a picture gallery in their lives, flocked to see the show, and most of them, when they left, said: “Well, at any rate we’ve had a good laugh.”Mendel never read the papers and knew nothing at all about it. These three weeks had been a time of blank misery for him. He could not work. His people set his teeth on edge. He could not bear to see a soul, for he could not talk. When he met friends and acquaintances, not a word could he find to say to them. There was nothing to say. They were living in a world from which he had been expelled. More than once he was on the point of going to his father and asking to be taken into the workshop, since the only possible, the only bearable life was one of hard manual labour, which left no room for spiritual activity, none for happiness, and very little for unhappiness.He found some consolation in going to the synagogue. His mother was delighted, but the religion was no comfort to him. What pleased him was to see the old Jews in their shawls and the women in their beaded gowns, praying each in their separate parts of the building—praying until theywept, and abasing themselves before the Lord. What woe, what misery they expressed! All the year round was this dismal wailing, and there was only happiness on the day that Haman was hanged. . . . It seemed good and decent to him that the sexes should be separate before the Lord, as they should be separate before the holy spirit that was in them. They should meet in holiness, hover for a moment above life, then sink back into it again to gather new strength. So love would be in its place. It could be gathered up and distilled. It would not be allowed to spread like a flood of muddy water over life, which had other passions, other delights, other glorious flowerings.It had been a great day for him when, in a little shop near his home, he had come on a pair of wooden figures rudely carved by savages—African, the shopman said they were. Rudely carved, they were not at all realistic, but admirably simplified, the man and the woman sitting side by side, naked. The man was wearing a little round bowler hat, while the woman was uncovered. They had the spirit and the idea that he most loved—the idea of man and woman sitting side by side, bound in love, unfathomably deep and unimaginably high, until one should follow the other to the grave.He showed them to Golda, and told her they were she and his father.“What next will you be up to?” she said. “Why, they are blackamoors.”“They are you and my father,” he said, caressing the figures lovingly.“I wish you would put the thought of that girl out of your head,” she said tenderly. “It is making you so ill and so thin, and I dare not think what your father will say when he knows you are drinking again.”“Mother,” he said, “when did you begin to love me?”“When you were born,” she said.“Yes, yes. I know, as a cow loves its calf. But I meanlove, for you do not love the others the same as me.”“You were not so very old when it came to me that you were different.”“But it is more now that I am a man?”“Of course.”That settled his mind on the point that had been bothering him. Everywhere among the Christians love—the love that he knew and honoured—seemed to be lost in a soft, spongy worship of the mother’s love for her child. The woman seemed to be wiped out of account altogether except as a mother. It seemed that she was not expected to love, and she was left by herself with the child, with the man looking rather foolish all by himself, seeing his strong, beautiful masculine love absorbed and given to the senseless little lump of flesh in the woman’s arms. It was like discarding the flower for the seed, like denying the wonder of spring for the autumn fruit.“If that is your Christian love,” he said to himself, “I will have none of it.”He studied the Madonnas in the National Gallery, and they confirmed his impression of the weakness of Christian love, that left out the strong, vital love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man. He characterized it as womanish, and could not see that the ideal had served to save women from male tyranny. Moreover, most of the pictures struck him as shockingly bad, which confirmed his notion that the ideal that inspired them was rotten.He could not test his ideas by his experience with Morrison, for he dared not think of her at all. When his mother spoke of her, it had been like a sharp knife through his heart. . . . Yes.Thatwas love, and it could not be bothered withthe idea of children. If they came, it would make room for them, but it was not going to be robbed by them. Its object was the woman, and it detested any idea that got between it and her. . . . Yet when this love for Morrison stood between himself and his love for art, he hated her almost as violently. Sometimes he thought that he would kill her, because she stood there smiling. She was always smiling. She could be happy; she could so easily be happy. . . .Logan came to fetch him to go to the exhibition.“I don’t want to go to the exhibition. I don’t want to see other people’s pictures. I want to paint my own.”“What are you working at?”“Nothing.”“What’s the matter?”“Sex.”“Oh! That’s always the matter with everybody.”“But I’ve thought of something.”“What?”“Women don’t love their children.”Logan roared with laughter, and he went on laughing because he enjoyed it. It was long since he had laughed so easily.“Most of them do,” he said. “Even if they’ve hated having them.”“They don’t,” said Mendel. “It’s instinct just to gloat over them, just as one gloats over a picture one has just finished, however bad it may be. It has cost you something, and there is something to show for it. It is quite blind and stupid, like an animal. It is like lust. It is neither true nor false. It justis, chaotic and half-created. Love is a human thing. Love is the most human thing there is. When a clerk marries a girl because he wants a woman, I don’t call that love. He is only making himselfcomfortable. There is a little more dirt in the world, that is all.”Logan laughed uncomfortably.“Please listen,” said Mendel. “I have been nearly mad this last fortnight, ever since the party. All my life seems to have broken its way into my mind, and I don’t know when I shall be able to get it out again. It is very important that I should talk, and I have no one really to talk to except you. I am very lonely because I am a Jew and people do not understand me, or rather they think they understand me because I am a Jew. They think all Jews are the same. It is very rarely that I feel I am accepted as a man with thoughts, feelings, tears, laughter, tastes, bowels, senses like any other man.”“I know,” said Logan sympathetically.“How can you know? You have only to live in a world that is ready-made for you. I have to make mine as I go, step by step.”“That isn’t because you are a Jew, but because you are an artist. It is the same for all of us.”“It can’t be the same, for the ordinary world is not utterly foreign to you. You do not find that which you were brought up to believe, the wisdom you sucked in with your mother’s milk, completely denied. . . . I tell you, love is all wrong, and because love is all wrong, art is all wrong, everything is wrong, and so is everybody. Everybody is living with only a part of himself, so that the cleverest people are the worst and most mischievous fools. I tell you, there are times in your West End when I can hardly breathe because people are such fools. If you are successful, they smile at you. If you are not successful, they look the other way. . . . Oh! I know it does not matter, but it makes success a paltry thing, and when you have lived for it and hungered for it, what then? What are you to do when it is like sand trickling through your fingers?”“You can’t stop it,” said Logan. “You can’t throw it away. You can only go on working, come what may.”“Yes,” replied Mendel dubiously, and grievously disappointed. He had so hoped to squeeze out his twisted, tortured feelings into words, but at a certain point Logan failed him and seemed to shy at his thought. To a certain quality of passion in himself Logan was insensible. Where his own passion began to gain in clear force and momentum, swinging from the depths of life to the highest imagination, only gaining in strength as the ascent grew more arduous, Logan’s remained in an exasperated intensity.“I’m sorry,” said Mendel. “Talking is no use. I’ve found my way out of as bad times as this, and shall again. It is no good talking. I will sit as silent as the little figures there, and in time I shall know what I must do.”“You want taking out of yourself,” muttered Logan irritably. “Come and see Thompson’s show.”As successful artists they entered the gallery self-consciously and rather contemptuously. That did not last long. There were many people sniggering at the Van Goghs and the Picassos, but Mendel’s thoughts flew back to a still-life he had painted of a blue enamel teapot and a yellow matchbox years ago. He had painted them as he had seen them, in raw, crude colour, but the picture had been so derided, and he had been so scornfully reminded that there were no brilliant colours in nature, that he had painted the same subject over again with a very careful rendering of what was called “atmosphere.”Here were crude colours indeed—almost, in many cases, as they came from the tubes, and as for drawing, there was hardly a trace of it, yet in the majority of the pictures there was a riotous freedom which rushed like a cleansing windthrough Mendel’s mind, and it seemed to him that here was the answer to many of his doubts—not a clear vision of art, but a roughly indicated road to it. It was absurd to sit cramping over rules and difficult technicalities when the starting-point of art lay so far beyond them. There was much rubbish in the show, but the works of Cézanne and Picasso were undeniably pictures. They were not flooded with a clear loveliness, like the pictures of Botticelli or Uccello, but they had beauty, and lured the mind on to seek another more mysterious beauty beyond them.The two friends went through the exhibition in silence. As they left, Mendel asked:—“Well! what did you think of it?”“We’re snuffed out,” replied Logan despondently.“Not I!” cried Mendel. “I’m only just beginning.”“I don’t understand it yet. It has made my eyes and my head ache. At first it seemed to me too cerebral to be art at all, but there’s no denying it, and it has to be digested. In a way it is what I have always been talking about. It has to do with the life we are living, which may not be much of a life, but it is ours and we find it good. It has not been a plunge into another world, like a visit to the National Gallery, but into some reality a little beyond this extraordinary jumble and hotch-potch of metropolitan life.”“It is painting,” said Mendel. “That is enough for me. And they are not afraid of colour. Why should they be? The colours are there: why not use them? I’m going to.”And he went home and dashed off a savage mother with a green face thrusting a straw-coloured breast into the gaping red lips of a child.So much for maternity and the Madonnas! He knew how a man loved his mother, and it was not in that milky way, setting her above nature, she who was tied and bound to natural, instinctive,animal life. If a man loved his mother, it was because with her it was the easiest thing in the world to be intimate and frank and honest and without pretence of any kind.His mother was marvellous to him because she was his dearest friend, not because she had given him suck. That was a fact like any other, and facts were not marvellous until more and more light was thrown on them from the mind, for in the murk and muddle of human life they were distorted.For Mendel this was the wildest and rarest adventure yet. It was a flinging of his cap over the windmills, and with it he had the sense of losing all his troubles, all his perplexities. Nothing for the time being seemed to matter very much. He had always been denied colour, and here he had the right to use it because it had been used by other men rightly. In the world of art, or rather of artists, he had always been a sort of Ishmael, ever since he had outgrown being a prodigy, and here was a new world of art where he could be free. . . . True, he had seen the same things in Paris and had not thought much of them, but so much had happened since then, and he had passed through the greatest crisis of his life.Always after his crises he expected to find himself, and now he thought he had surely done so. He would be entirely free, completely independent.For three weeks he lived between his studio and the gallery, studying these strange new vibrant pictures and experimenting with their manners as now this, now that painter influenced him. Picasso baffled him altogether. These queer, violent, angular patterns actually hurt him, and he was repelled by their intellectual intensity. Gauguin he found too easy, Van Gogh too incoherent. It was when he came to Cézanne that he was bowled out and reduced to impotence and all the egoistic excitement oozed out of him.He was not so free then. Here was an art before which he must be humbled and subdued if he was to understand it at all. He abandoned his experiments and made no attempt to work at all, but bought a reproduction of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife and spent many days poring over it. It held him and fascinated him, and yet it looked almost like the unfinished work of an amateur who could not draw. Of psychological interest the picture was bare. It was just a portrait of a woman at peace, with her hands folded in her lap, bathed in a serenity beyond mortal understanding, though not beyond mortal perception, since a man had rendered it in paint. It released directly the swift, soaring emotion which, though it was roused in him by many pictures and by some poetry—passages in the Bible, for instance—was quickly entangled in sensual pleasure and never properly set free. Here, the more he gazed the more that emotion, pure, disinterested, unearthly, rushed through him, exploring all the caverns in his imagination and delivering from them new powers of perception. He felt, as he told Logan afterwards, like a tree putting out its leaves in the spring.And yet he could not tell how this miracle was accomplished. No words could explain it—abstraction, composition, design, none of these words helped at all. It was not so much the doing of the thing, the art of the painter, as the setting out of the woman on the canvas without reference to anything in heaven or earth, or any idea, or any emotion or desire. It was enough that she was a woman, not especially beautiful, not particularly remarkable. So perfect a vision had no need to be tender or affectionate or sensual, or to call in aid any of the emotions of life. It needed no force but the rare religious ecstasy which has no need of ideas or common human feelings, and this vision of a woman gave Mendela new appreciation of life and love and art. It gave human beings a new value. It was enough that they were alive and upon the earth with all that they contained of good and evil. They were in themselves wonderful, and there was no need to worry about whence they came or whither they were going, or what was their relation to God and the universe. In each man, each woman was enough of God and of the universe to keep them poised for their little hour.What, then, was love? What but the sense of being poised, of being borne up by God, an intimation that could only be won through contact with life at its purest. And beyond that again lay a further degree of purity which could only find expression in art, since life, even at its rarest, was too gross.Often Mendel kissed his reproduction reverently and hugged it to his bosom, thinking childishly that some of its spirit could enter into him by contact. He whispered to it:—“I love you. You are my truth and my joy rising up through life, even from its very depths, and shaking free of it at last into pure, serene beauty. You weigh neither upon my senses nor upon my thoughts, but, following you, they are joined together to become a high sense which can know deliverance.”Followed days of a supreme delight. He wandered through the streets seeing all men and all women and all things as wonderful, since through them all flowed this lovely spirit which in the few men here and there could find its freedom and its expression in form.Through Thompson he met a journalist who was writing a book about the new painting, and from him he learned the little that was known about Cézanne: how he worked away experimenting unsuccessfully until he was middle-aged, and then withdrew from the world of artists in Paris, tolive the life of a simple country bourgeois and to paint the vision which he had begun to divine: and how he painted out in the fields, leaving his canvases in the hedges and by the wayside, because not the painting but the expression of his spirit and the solution of his problem mattered to him: and how he never sold a single picture, never attempted to sell them.Such, thought Mendel, should the life of an artist be. But how was it possible if life would not let him alone, but was perpetually dragging him down into the mud? What mud, what filth he had had to flounder through to get even so far as he had!And already he began to feel that he was slipping back. He could not accept that knowledge of the spirit vicariously, but must fight for his own knowledge of it in direct contact with life. To endeavour to escape from life was to isolate himself, to lose the driving force of life from darkness into the light, to dwell in the twilight of solitude armed only with his puny egoism and the paltry tricks of professional painting. He felt that at last he knew his desire, but in no wise how to attain it. Cézanne had had a wife: that had settled one of the torments of life. He had had ample means: that had absolved him from the ever-present difficulty of money.These considerations relieved Mendel from another weighty puzzle. Perhaps if Cézanne had had to please other people and not only his own spirit, he would have cared more for his craft and for the quality of his paint. . . . All the same, it was good to have pictures reduced to their bare essentials, relieved of ornament and trickery, and yet retaining their full pictorial quality.Shortly after the party Logan and Oliver had moved to a little cottage on Hampstead Heath, just below Jack Straw’s Castle. Mendel went tosee them there and met Logan on the Spaniard’s Road. He was in a deplorable condition. His right eye was blackened, his nose was bloody and scratched, the lobe of his ear was torn and his forehead was purple with bruises.“What on earth have you been doing to yourself!” asked Mendel.“I’ve had a fight,” said Logan glibly. “The other night on the Heath I came on a man beating a girl. I went for him. He was a huge lout of a man. We had a terrific tussle, and just as I was getting him down the girl went for me and scratched my face.”“If you lived where I do,” said Mendel, “you would know better than to interfere.”“Oh! I enjoyed it,” said Logan. “I couldn’t stand by and see it done.”They ran down the grassy slope to the cottage, where they found Oliver entertaining Thompson and her critic. She had a slight bruise over her right eye, and Mendel thought:—“Why does he lie? Why should he lie to me? I should think no worse of him for beating her. If I could not shake her off I should kill her.”He was filled with a sudden disgust at the household, which in his eyes had become an obscene profanation.The talk was excited, and formerly he would have found it interesting. Thompson was full of the triumph of the exhibition and its success in forcing art upon the public. He spoke glibly of abstraction and cubing, and it was clear that they only delighted him as new tricks.Oliver took part in the conversation. She had picked up the jargon of painters and made great play with the names of the new masters. To hear her talking glibly of Cézanne and saying how he had shown the object of pictorial art to be pattern filled Mendel’s soul with loathing. He could not protest. What was the good of protestingto such people? . . . If only Logan had not been among them! He wanted to talk to Logan, to tell him what this new thing meant, to make him see that he must give up all thought of turning art back upon life, because life did not matter so very much. It could look after itself, while the integrity of art must at all costs be maintained.However, when Thompson said that the artist was now free to make up a picture out of any shapes he liked, Mendel could not contain himself, and said:—“The artist is no more free than ever he was. He does not become free by burking representation. He is not free merely to work by caprice and fantasy. He is rather more strictly bound than ever, because he is working through his imagination and cannot get out of it merely by using his eyes and imitating charming things. If he tries to get out of it by impudent invention, then pictures will be just as dull and degraded as before.”“‘I am Sir Oracle,’” said the critic, “‘and when I ope my lips let no dog bark.’”“You can bark away,” cried Mendel, “but you must not complain if a man loses patience with you and kicks you back into your kennel.”“Just listen to the boy!” cried Oliver. “Success has turned his pretty little head. Just listen to him teaching the critics their business!”Mendel gave her a furious look of contempt and left the room and the house. Logan came running after him.“I say, old man,” he said, “you mustn’t mind what she says. Those damn fools have stuffed her head up with their nonsense and she hasn’t the brains of a louse.”“If it was my house, I would kick them out.”“They are good fellows enough.”“Good fellows! When they make her more idiotic and blatant than she is!”“I can’t think what made you so angry. There was nothing to flare up about. You are so touchy.”Mendel was walking at a furious pace. Logan was out of condition and had to beg him to go more slowly.“I’m all to bits,” said Logan. “That row——”“Why do you tell lies? It was she who mauled you. Why do you tell lies to me? I have never told lies to you about anything. You have always jeered at women and said they can know nothing about art, and yet you let her talk. . . . Why don’t you leave her?”“We’re very fond of each other,” replied Logan. “It has gone too deep. We hate each other like poison sometimes, but that only makes it—the real thing—go deeper.”“I can’t bear it,” said Mendel; “I can’t bear it. It was bad enough when she kept quiet, but now that she gives herself airs and talks, I can’t stand it. I hate her so that I feel as if the top of my head would blow off. . . . Perhaps there was nothing much in what she said. Perhaps it was only a slow growing detestation coming to a head. But there it is. It is final. I have tried to like her, to be decent to her, to make allowances for her, but it is impossible.”“You don’t mean you are not going to come to see us again?”“Yes. That is what I do mean. She doesn’t exist for me any longer. If I met her in a café or in the streets she would be all right. She would be in her place. There would be some truth in her. In connection with you she is a festering lie.”“She can’t settle down to it,” replied Logan lamely, ashamed of his inability to defend Oliver from this onslaught. Defence would be quite useless, for he knew that Mendel would detect his untruth. If only Mendel were a little older, if only he could have grown out of youth’s dreadful inability to compromise.“She can’t settle down,” Logan continued. “She is a creature of enormous vitality and she has no life outside herself, no imagination. Can’t you see that her vitality has no outlet? I don’t know, but it seems to me appalling to think of these modern women with their independence, and nothing at all to do with it. They won’t admit the authority of the male, and they have broken out of the home. A lot of them refuse to have children. I feel sorry for them.”“Don’t go on talking round and round the subject,” cried Mendel wrathfully. He was really alarmed and pained as he saw himself being carried nearer and nearer to a breach with his friend. “I can’t feel sorry for her and I don’t. She is ruining you. You never laugh nowadays. You are always more dead than alive, and I cannot bear to see you with her. I cannot bear even to think of you with her.”“For God’s sake, don’t talk like that!” muttered Logan, quickening his pace to keep up, for Mendel was flying along.“You must either give her up or me,” said Mendel.“Don’t say that!” pleaded Logan; “don’t say that! I can’t get on without you. I don’t see how I can get on without you. All the happiness I have ever had has come through you. Every hope I have is centred in you. If you go, life will become nothing but work, work, work, with nobody to understand. Nobody. . . . And I have been so full of hope. All this new business has made such a stir and has brought such life into painting that I had begun to feel that anything was possible. There might be even a stirring of the spirit to stem the tide of commercialism. You know what my life has been—one long struggle to find a way out of the pressure of vulgarity and sordid money-making, out of sentimentality and pretty lying fantasy, out of the corruption thatfrom top to bottom is eating up the life of the country. You know that when I met you I had almost given up the struggle in despair. One man alone could not do it. But two men could—two men who trusted and believed in each other. . . . You were very young when I first met you, but you have come on wonderfully. It has been thrilling for me to watch the growth of your mind and the strengthening of your character. You are the only man I ever met who could really stand by himself. . . . It isn’t easy for me to say all this, but I must tell you what your friendship has meant to me.”The more Logan talked, the more he divulged his feelings, his very real affection, the more Mendel’s mind was concentrated on the one purpose, to get him away from Oliver.“You must give her up,” he said.“I can’t,” gasped Logan.They stood facing each other, Mendel staring into his friend’s eyes that looked piteously, wearily, miserably out of his haggard, battered face. He could not endure it, and he could not yield to the entreaty in Logan’s eyes.He turned quickly and ran to a bus which had stopped a few yards in front. He rushed up the steps and was whirled away. Unable to resist turning round, he saw Logan standing where he had left him, with his head bowed, his shoulders hunched up, a figure of shameful misery.After some minutes of numbness, of trying to gather up the threads snapped off by his astonishment at the quickness of the affair, Mendel began to tremble. His hands and his knees shook, and he could not control them. It was only gradually that he began to realize how strong his feelings had been, and how great the horror and the shock of knowing through and through, without blinking a single fact, the terrible relationship that bound Logan and Oliver—tied together in aninsatiable sensuality, locked in a deadly embrace, like beasts of prey fighting over carrion: a furious, evil conflict over a dead lust. . . . At the same time he knew that he was bound with them, that in their life together he had his share, and that it was dragging him down, down from the ecstatic exaltation he had perceived in his new friend, Cézanne, a friend who could never fail, a friend upon whom no devastation could alight, a friend through whom he could never be clawed back into life.By the time he reached home he was completely exhausted, and begged his mother to make him a cup of strong tea.“What is it now?” Golda asked. “What is the trouble? There is always something new, and I think you will never be a man. For a man expects trouble and does not make himself ill over it.”“I have quarrelled with Logan,” said Mendel, dropping with relief into Yiddish as a barrier against the outer world, in which terrible things were always happening.“A good job too!” said Golda; “a good job too! He was no good to you. He only made you do the work that nobody likes. Now you can go back to the old way, and Mr. Froitzheim and Mr. Birnbaum will be pleased with you again. . . . You had better give up your friends. You are like a woman, the way you must always be in love with your friends. . . . But it is no good. Men will always fall in love, and then it is over with friendship. . . . Friends are only for moments. They come and disappear and come again. It is foolish to think you can keep them. . . . Is your head bad?”“Pretty bad.”“You have not been drinking again?”“No. I’ve been leading a decent life. I expect it doesn’t suit me.”“Rubbish. . . . Rosa says the Christian girl has been to see you.”He leaped to his feet.“Didn’t she stay? Didn’t you make her stay? What did she say? How did she look? Did she leave no message?”Golda smiled at him.“You had better go and see,” she said.He darted from the room and across to his studio panting with excitement, persuading himself at every step that she was there, waiting for him, perhaps hiding to tease him, for she was a terrible tease.By the time he reached his studio he was so convinced that she was there that he hardly dared open the door. He pushed it open very gently and peered in. The room was empty, but he felt sure that she was there. He peeped round the corner into his bedroom. She was not there. He had to believe it, and came dejectedly back into the studio.On his painting-table were autumn flowers daintily arranged in the old jug he used for a vase. He buried his face in them. She was there! She was there in the sweetness and fragrance of the flowers.
THREEweeks later the exhibition of Modern French Art was opened in an important gallery in the West End. It roused indignation, laughter, scorn, and made such a stir in the papers that public interest was excited and the exhibition was an unparalleled success. People from the suburbs, people who had never been to a picture gallery in their lives, flocked to see the show, and most of them, when they left, said: “Well, at any rate we’ve had a good laugh.”
Mendel never read the papers and knew nothing at all about it. These three weeks had been a time of blank misery for him. He could not work. His people set his teeth on edge. He could not bear to see a soul, for he could not talk. When he met friends and acquaintances, not a word could he find to say to them. There was nothing to say. They were living in a world from which he had been expelled. More than once he was on the point of going to his father and asking to be taken into the workshop, since the only possible, the only bearable life was one of hard manual labour, which left no room for spiritual activity, none for happiness, and very little for unhappiness.
He found some consolation in going to the synagogue. His mother was delighted, but the religion was no comfort to him. What pleased him was to see the old Jews in their shawls and the women in their beaded gowns, praying each in their separate parts of the building—praying until theywept, and abasing themselves before the Lord. What woe, what misery they expressed! All the year round was this dismal wailing, and there was only happiness on the day that Haman was hanged. . . . It seemed good and decent to him that the sexes should be separate before the Lord, as they should be separate before the holy spirit that was in them. They should meet in holiness, hover for a moment above life, then sink back into it again to gather new strength. So love would be in its place. It could be gathered up and distilled. It would not be allowed to spread like a flood of muddy water over life, which had other passions, other delights, other glorious flowerings.
It had been a great day for him when, in a little shop near his home, he had come on a pair of wooden figures rudely carved by savages—African, the shopman said they were. Rudely carved, they were not at all realistic, but admirably simplified, the man and the woman sitting side by side, naked. The man was wearing a little round bowler hat, while the woman was uncovered. They had the spirit and the idea that he most loved—the idea of man and woman sitting side by side, bound in love, unfathomably deep and unimaginably high, until one should follow the other to the grave.
He showed them to Golda, and told her they were she and his father.
“What next will you be up to?” she said. “Why, they are blackamoors.”
“They are you and my father,” he said, caressing the figures lovingly.
“I wish you would put the thought of that girl out of your head,” she said tenderly. “It is making you so ill and so thin, and I dare not think what your father will say when he knows you are drinking again.”
“Mother,” he said, “when did you begin to love me?”
“When you were born,” she said.
“Yes, yes. I know, as a cow loves its calf. But I meanlove, for you do not love the others the same as me.”
“You were not so very old when it came to me that you were different.”
“But it is more now that I am a man?”
“Of course.”
That settled his mind on the point that had been bothering him. Everywhere among the Christians love—the love that he knew and honoured—seemed to be lost in a soft, spongy worship of the mother’s love for her child. The woman seemed to be wiped out of account altogether except as a mother. It seemed that she was not expected to love, and she was left by herself with the child, with the man looking rather foolish all by himself, seeing his strong, beautiful masculine love absorbed and given to the senseless little lump of flesh in the woman’s arms. It was like discarding the flower for the seed, like denying the wonder of spring for the autumn fruit.
“If that is your Christian love,” he said to himself, “I will have none of it.”
He studied the Madonnas in the National Gallery, and they confirmed his impression of the weakness of Christian love, that left out the strong, vital love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man. He characterized it as womanish, and could not see that the ideal had served to save women from male tyranny. Moreover, most of the pictures struck him as shockingly bad, which confirmed his notion that the ideal that inspired them was rotten.
He could not test his ideas by his experience with Morrison, for he dared not think of her at all. When his mother spoke of her, it had been like a sharp knife through his heart. . . . Yes.Thatwas love, and it could not be bothered withthe idea of children. If they came, it would make room for them, but it was not going to be robbed by them. Its object was the woman, and it detested any idea that got between it and her. . . . Yet when this love for Morrison stood between himself and his love for art, he hated her almost as violently. Sometimes he thought that he would kill her, because she stood there smiling. She was always smiling. She could be happy; she could so easily be happy. . . .
Logan came to fetch him to go to the exhibition.
“I don’t want to go to the exhibition. I don’t want to see other people’s pictures. I want to paint my own.”
“What are you working at?”
“Nothing.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Sex.”
“Oh! That’s always the matter with everybody.”
“But I’ve thought of something.”
“What?”
“Women don’t love their children.”
Logan roared with laughter, and he went on laughing because he enjoyed it. It was long since he had laughed so easily.
“Most of them do,” he said. “Even if they’ve hated having them.”
“They don’t,” said Mendel. “It’s instinct just to gloat over them, just as one gloats over a picture one has just finished, however bad it may be. It has cost you something, and there is something to show for it. It is quite blind and stupid, like an animal. It is like lust. It is neither true nor false. It justis, chaotic and half-created. Love is a human thing. Love is the most human thing there is. When a clerk marries a girl because he wants a woman, I don’t call that love. He is only making himselfcomfortable. There is a little more dirt in the world, that is all.”
Logan laughed uncomfortably.
“Please listen,” said Mendel. “I have been nearly mad this last fortnight, ever since the party. All my life seems to have broken its way into my mind, and I don’t know when I shall be able to get it out again. It is very important that I should talk, and I have no one really to talk to except you. I am very lonely because I am a Jew and people do not understand me, or rather they think they understand me because I am a Jew. They think all Jews are the same. It is very rarely that I feel I am accepted as a man with thoughts, feelings, tears, laughter, tastes, bowels, senses like any other man.”
“I know,” said Logan sympathetically.
“How can you know? You have only to live in a world that is ready-made for you. I have to make mine as I go, step by step.”
“That isn’t because you are a Jew, but because you are an artist. It is the same for all of us.”
“It can’t be the same, for the ordinary world is not utterly foreign to you. You do not find that which you were brought up to believe, the wisdom you sucked in with your mother’s milk, completely denied. . . . I tell you, love is all wrong, and because love is all wrong, art is all wrong, everything is wrong, and so is everybody. Everybody is living with only a part of himself, so that the cleverest people are the worst and most mischievous fools. I tell you, there are times in your West End when I can hardly breathe because people are such fools. If you are successful, they smile at you. If you are not successful, they look the other way. . . . Oh! I know it does not matter, but it makes success a paltry thing, and when you have lived for it and hungered for it, what then? What are you to do when it is like sand trickling through your fingers?”
“You can’t stop it,” said Logan. “You can’t throw it away. You can only go on working, come what may.”
“Yes,” replied Mendel dubiously, and grievously disappointed. He had so hoped to squeeze out his twisted, tortured feelings into words, but at a certain point Logan failed him and seemed to shy at his thought. To a certain quality of passion in himself Logan was insensible. Where his own passion began to gain in clear force and momentum, swinging from the depths of life to the highest imagination, only gaining in strength as the ascent grew more arduous, Logan’s remained in an exasperated intensity.
“I’m sorry,” said Mendel. “Talking is no use. I’ve found my way out of as bad times as this, and shall again. It is no good talking. I will sit as silent as the little figures there, and in time I shall know what I must do.”
“You want taking out of yourself,” muttered Logan irritably. “Come and see Thompson’s show.”
As successful artists they entered the gallery self-consciously and rather contemptuously. That did not last long. There were many people sniggering at the Van Goghs and the Picassos, but Mendel’s thoughts flew back to a still-life he had painted of a blue enamel teapot and a yellow matchbox years ago. He had painted them as he had seen them, in raw, crude colour, but the picture had been so derided, and he had been so scornfully reminded that there were no brilliant colours in nature, that he had painted the same subject over again with a very careful rendering of what was called “atmosphere.”
Here were crude colours indeed—almost, in many cases, as they came from the tubes, and as for drawing, there was hardly a trace of it, yet in the majority of the pictures there was a riotous freedom which rushed like a cleansing windthrough Mendel’s mind, and it seemed to him that here was the answer to many of his doubts—not a clear vision of art, but a roughly indicated road to it. It was absurd to sit cramping over rules and difficult technicalities when the starting-point of art lay so far beyond them. There was much rubbish in the show, but the works of Cézanne and Picasso were undeniably pictures. They were not flooded with a clear loveliness, like the pictures of Botticelli or Uccello, but they had beauty, and lured the mind on to seek another more mysterious beauty beyond them.
The two friends went through the exhibition in silence. As they left, Mendel asked:—
“Well! what did you think of it?”
“We’re snuffed out,” replied Logan despondently.
“Not I!” cried Mendel. “I’m only just beginning.”
“I don’t understand it yet. It has made my eyes and my head ache. At first it seemed to me too cerebral to be art at all, but there’s no denying it, and it has to be digested. In a way it is what I have always been talking about. It has to do with the life we are living, which may not be much of a life, but it is ours and we find it good. It has not been a plunge into another world, like a visit to the National Gallery, but into some reality a little beyond this extraordinary jumble and hotch-potch of metropolitan life.”
“It is painting,” said Mendel. “That is enough for me. And they are not afraid of colour. Why should they be? The colours are there: why not use them? I’m going to.”
And he went home and dashed off a savage mother with a green face thrusting a straw-coloured breast into the gaping red lips of a child.
So much for maternity and the Madonnas! He knew how a man loved his mother, and it was not in that milky way, setting her above nature, she who was tied and bound to natural, instinctive,animal life. If a man loved his mother, it was because with her it was the easiest thing in the world to be intimate and frank and honest and without pretence of any kind.
His mother was marvellous to him because she was his dearest friend, not because she had given him suck. That was a fact like any other, and facts were not marvellous until more and more light was thrown on them from the mind, for in the murk and muddle of human life they were distorted.
For Mendel this was the wildest and rarest adventure yet. It was a flinging of his cap over the windmills, and with it he had the sense of losing all his troubles, all his perplexities. Nothing for the time being seemed to matter very much. He had always been denied colour, and here he had the right to use it because it had been used by other men rightly. In the world of art, or rather of artists, he had always been a sort of Ishmael, ever since he had outgrown being a prodigy, and here was a new world of art where he could be free. . . . True, he had seen the same things in Paris and had not thought much of them, but so much had happened since then, and he had passed through the greatest crisis of his life.
Always after his crises he expected to find himself, and now he thought he had surely done so. He would be entirely free, completely independent.
For three weeks he lived between his studio and the gallery, studying these strange new vibrant pictures and experimenting with their manners as now this, now that painter influenced him. Picasso baffled him altogether. These queer, violent, angular patterns actually hurt him, and he was repelled by their intellectual intensity. Gauguin he found too easy, Van Gogh too incoherent. It was when he came to Cézanne that he was bowled out and reduced to impotence and all the egoistic excitement oozed out of him.
He was not so free then. Here was an art before which he must be humbled and subdued if he was to understand it at all. He abandoned his experiments and made no attempt to work at all, but bought a reproduction of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife and spent many days poring over it. It held him and fascinated him, and yet it looked almost like the unfinished work of an amateur who could not draw. Of psychological interest the picture was bare. It was just a portrait of a woman at peace, with her hands folded in her lap, bathed in a serenity beyond mortal understanding, though not beyond mortal perception, since a man had rendered it in paint. It released directly the swift, soaring emotion which, though it was roused in him by many pictures and by some poetry—passages in the Bible, for instance—was quickly entangled in sensual pleasure and never properly set free. Here, the more he gazed the more that emotion, pure, disinterested, unearthly, rushed through him, exploring all the caverns in his imagination and delivering from them new powers of perception. He felt, as he told Logan afterwards, like a tree putting out its leaves in the spring.
And yet he could not tell how this miracle was accomplished. No words could explain it—abstraction, composition, design, none of these words helped at all. It was not so much the doing of the thing, the art of the painter, as the setting out of the woman on the canvas without reference to anything in heaven or earth, or any idea, or any emotion or desire. It was enough that she was a woman, not especially beautiful, not particularly remarkable. So perfect a vision had no need to be tender or affectionate or sensual, or to call in aid any of the emotions of life. It needed no force but the rare religious ecstasy which has no need of ideas or common human feelings, and this vision of a woman gave Mendela new appreciation of life and love and art. It gave human beings a new value. It was enough that they were alive and upon the earth with all that they contained of good and evil. They were in themselves wonderful, and there was no need to worry about whence they came or whither they were going, or what was their relation to God and the universe. In each man, each woman was enough of God and of the universe to keep them poised for their little hour.
What, then, was love? What but the sense of being poised, of being borne up by God, an intimation that could only be won through contact with life at its purest. And beyond that again lay a further degree of purity which could only find expression in art, since life, even at its rarest, was too gross.
Often Mendel kissed his reproduction reverently and hugged it to his bosom, thinking childishly that some of its spirit could enter into him by contact. He whispered to it:—
“I love you. You are my truth and my joy rising up through life, even from its very depths, and shaking free of it at last into pure, serene beauty. You weigh neither upon my senses nor upon my thoughts, but, following you, they are joined together to become a high sense which can know deliverance.”
Followed days of a supreme delight. He wandered through the streets seeing all men and all women and all things as wonderful, since through them all flowed this lovely spirit which in the few men here and there could find its freedom and its expression in form.
Through Thompson he met a journalist who was writing a book about the new painting, and from him he learned the little that was known about Cézanne: how he worked away experimenting unsuccessfully until he was middle-aged, and then withdrew from the world of artists in Paris, tolive the life of a simple country bourgeois and to paint the vision which he had begun to divine: and how he painted out in the fields, leaving his canvases in the hedges and by the wayside, because not the painting but the expression of his spirit and the solution of his problem mattered to him: and how he never sold a single picture, never attempted to sell them.
Such, thought Mendel, should the life of an artist be. But how was it possible if life would not let him alone, but was perpetually dragging him down into the mud? What mud, what filth he had had to flounder through to get even so far as he had!
And already he began to feel that he was slipping back. He could not accept that knowledge of the spirit vicariously, but must fight for his own knowledge of it in direct contact with life. To endeavour to escape from life was to isolate himself, to lose the driving force of life from darkness into the light, to dwell in the twilight of solitude armed only with his puny egoism and the paltry tricks of professional painting. He felt that at last he knew his desire, but in no wise how to attain it. Cézanne had had a wife: that had settled one of the torments of life. He had had ample means: that had absolved him from the ever-present difficulty of money.
These considerations relieved Mendel from another weighty puzzle. Perhaps if Cézanne had had to please other people and not only his own spirit, he would have cared more for his craft and for the quality of his paint. . . . All the same, it was good to have pictures reduced to their bare essentials, relieved of ornament and trickery, and yet retaining their full pictorial quality.
Shortly after the party Logan and Oliver had moved to a little cottage on Hampstead Heath, just below Jack Straw’s Castle. Mendel went tosee them there and met Logan on the Spaniard’s Road. He was in a deplorable condition. His right eye was blackened, his nose was bloody and scratched, the lobe of his ear was torn and his forehead was purple with bruises.
“What on earth have you been doing to yourself!” asked Mendel.
“I’ve had a fight,” said Logan glibly. “The other night on the Heath I came on a man beating a girl. I went for him. He was a huge lout of a man. We had a terrific tussle, and just as I was getting him down the girl went for me and scratched my face.”
“If you lived where I do,” said Mendel, “you would know better than to interfere.”
“Oh! I enjoyed it,” said Logan. “I couldn’t stand by and see it done.”
They ran down the grassy slope to the cottage, where they found Oliver entertaining Thompson and her critic. She had a slight bruise over her right eye, and Mendel thought:—
“Why does he lie? Why should he lie to me? I should think no worse of him for beating her. If I could not shake her off I should kill her.”
He was filled with a sudden disgust at the household, which in his eyes had become an obscene profanation.
The talk was excited, and formerly he would have found it interesting. Thompson was full of the triumph of the exhibition and its success in forcing art upon the public. He spoke glibly of abstraction and cubing, and it was clear that they only delighted him as new tricks.
Oliver took part in the conversation. She had picked up the jargon of painters and made great play with the names of the new masters. To hear her talking glibly of Cézanne and saying how he had shown the object of pictorial art to be pattern filled Mendel’s soul with loathing. He could not protest. What was the good of protestingto such people? . . . If only Logan had not been among them! He wanted to talk to Logan, to tell him what this new thing meant, to make him see that he must give up all thought of turning art back upon life, because life did not matter so very much. It could look after itself, while the integrity of art must at all costs be maintained.
However, when Thompson said that the artist was now free to make up a picture out of any shapes he liked, Mendel could not contain himself, and said:—
“The artist is no more free than ever he was. He does not become free by burking representation. He is not free merely to work by caprice and fantasy. He is rather more strictly bound than ever, because he is working through his imagination and cannot get out of it merely by using his eyes and imitating charming things. If he tries to get out of it by impudent invention, then pictures will be just as dull and degraded as before.”
“‘I am Sir Oracle,’” said the critic, “‘and when I ope my lips let no dog bark.’”
“You can bark away,” cried Mendel, “but you must not complain if a man loses patience with you and kicks you back into your kennel.”
“Just listen to the boy!” cried Oliver. “Success has turned his pretty little head. Just listen to him teaching the critics their business!”
Mendel gave her a furious look of contempt and left the room and the house. Logan came running after him.
“I say, old man,” he said, “you mustn’t mind what she says. Those damn fools have stuffed her head up with their nonsense and she hasn’t the brains of a louse.”
“If it was my house, I would kick them out.”
“They are good fellows enough.”
“Good fellows! When they make her more idiotic and blatant than she is!”
“I can’t think what made you so angry. There was nothing to flare up about. You are so touchy.”
Mendel was walking at a furious pace. Logan was out of condition and had to beg him to go more slowly.
“I’m all to bits,” said Logan. “That row——”
“Why do you tell lies? It was she who mauled you. Why do you tell lies to me? I have never told lies to you about anything. You have always jeered at women and said they can know nothing about art, and yet you let her talk. . . . Why don’t you leave her?”
“We’re very fond of each other,” replied Logan. “It has gone too deep. We hate each other like poison sometimes, but that only makes it—the real thing—go deeper.”
“I can’t bear it,” said Mendel; “I can’t bear it. It was bad enough when she kept quiet, but now that she gives herself airs and talks, I can’t stand it. I hate her so that I feel as if the top of my head would blow off. . . . Perhaps there was nothing much in what she said. Perhaps it was only a slow growing detestation coming to a head. But there it is. It is final. I have tried to like her, to be decent to her, to make allowances for her, but it is impossible.”
“You don’t mean you are not going to come to see us again?”
“Yes. That is what I do mean. She doesn’t exist for me any longer. If I met her in a café or in the streets she would be all right. She would be in her place. There would be some truth in her. In connection with you she is a festering lie.”
“She can’t settle down to it,” replied Logan lamely, ashamed of his inability to defend Oliver from this onslaught. Defence would be quite useless, for he knew that Mendel would detect his untruth. If only Mendel were a little older, if only he could have grown out of youth’s dreadful inability to compromise.
“She can’t settle down,” Logan continued. “She is a creature of enormous vitality and she has no life outside herself, no imagination. Can’t you see that her vitality has no outlet? I don’t know, but it seems to me appalling to think of these modern women with their independence, and nothing at all to do with it. They won’t admit the authority of the male, and they have broken out of the home. A lot of them refuse to have children. I feel sorry for them.”
“Don’t go on talking round and round the subject,” cried Mendel wrathfully. He was really alarmed and pained as he saw himself being carried nearer and nearer to a breach with his friend. “I can’t feel sorry for her and I don’t. She is ruining you. You never laugh nowadays. You are always more dead than alive, and I cannot bear to see you with her. I cannot bear even to think of you with her.”
“For God’s sake, don’t talk like that!” muttered Logan, quickening his pace to keep up, for Mendel was flying along.
“You must either give her up or me,” said Mendel.
“Don’t say that!” pleaded Logan; “don’t say that! I can’t get on without you. I don’t see how I can get on without you. All the happiness I have ever had has come through you. Every hope I have is centred in you. If you go, life will become nothing but work, work, work, with nobody to understand. Nobody. . . . And I have been so full of hope. All this new business has made such a stir and has brought such life into painting that I had begun to feel that anything was possible. There might be even a stirring of the spirit to stem the tide of commercialism. You know what my life has been—one long struggle to find a way out of the pressure of vulgarity and sordid money-making, out of sentimentality and pretty lying fantasy, out of the corruption thatfrom top to bottom is eating up the life of the country. You know that when I met you I had almost given up the struggle in despair. One man alone could not do it. But two men could—two men who trusted and believed in each other. . . . You were very young when I first met you, but you have come on wonderfully. It has been thrilling for me to watch the growth of your mind and the strengthening of your character. You are the only man I ever met who could really stand by himself. . . . It isn’t easy for me to say all this, but I must tell you what your friendship has meant to me.”
The more Logan talked, the more he divulged his feelings, his very real affection, the more Mendel’s mind was concentrated on the one purpose, to get him away from Oliver.
“You must give her up,” he said.
“I can’t,” gasped Logan.
They stood facing each other, Mendel staring into his friend’s eyes that looked piteously, wearily, miserably out of his haggard, battered face. He could not endure it, and he could not yield to the entreaty in Logan’s eyes.
He turned quickly and ran to a bus which had stopped a few yards in front. He rushed up the steps and was whirled away. Unable to resist turning round, he saw Logan standing where he had left him, with his head bowed, his shoulders hunched up, a figure of shameful misery.
After some minutes of numbness, of trying to gather up the threads snapped off by his astonishment at the quickness of the affair, Mendel began to tremble. His hands and his knees shook, and he could not control them. It was only gradually that he began to realize how strong his feelings had been, and how great the horror and the shock of knowing through and through, without blinking a single fact, the terrible relationship that bound Logan and Oliver—tied together in aninsatiable sensuality, locked in a deadly embrace, like beasts of prey fighting over carrion: a furious, evil conflict over a dead lust. . . . At the same time he knew that he was bound with them, that in their life together he had his share, and that it was dragging him down, down from the ecstatic exaltation he had perceived in his new friend, Cézanne, a friend who could never fail, a friend upon whom no devastation could alight, a friend through whom he could never be clawed back into life.
By the time he reached home he was completely exhausted, and begged his mother to make him a cup of strong tea.
“What is it now?” Golda asked. “What is the trouble? There is always something new, and I think you will never be a man. For a man expects trouble and does not make himself ill over it.”
“I have quarrelled with Logan,” said Mendel, dropping with relief into Yiddish as a barrier against the outer world, in which terrible things were always happening.
“A good job too!” said Golda; “a good job too! He was no good to you. He only made you do the work that nobody likes. Now you can go back to the old way, and Mr. Froitzheim and Mr. Birnbaum will be pleased with you again. . . . You had better give up your friends. You are like a woman, the way you must always be in love with your friends. . . . But it is no good. Men will always fall in love, and then it is over with friendship. . . . Friends are only for moments. They come and disappear and come again. It is foolish to think you can keep them. . . . Is your head bad?”
“Pretty bad.”
“You have not been drinking again?”
“No. I’ve been leading a decent life. I expect it doesn’t suit me.”
“Rubbish. . . . Rosa says the Christian girl has been to see you.”
He leaped to his feet.
“Didn’t she stay? Didn’t you make her stay? What did she say? How did she look? Did she leave no message?”
Golda smiled at him.
“You had better go and see,” she said.
He darted from the room and across to his studio panting with excitement, persuading himself at every step that she was there, waiting for him, perhaps hiding to tease him, for she was a terrible tease.
By the time he reached his studio he was so convinced that she was there that he hardly dared open the door. He pushed it open very gently and peered in. The room was empty, but he felt sure that she was there. He peeped round the corner into his bedroom. She was not there. He had to believe it, and came dejectedly back into the studio.
On his painting-table were autumn flowers daintily arranged in the old jug he used for a vase. He buried his face in them. She was there! She was there in the sweetness and fragrance of the flowers.