VIICONFLICTMORRISONhad fought bravely through her storms and difficulties. She frightened Clowes with the violence of her efforts and the terrible strain she inflicted on her vitality. There were times when she thought the simplest way would be to cut adrift from all her old associations and to throw in her lot with Mendel, to give him his desire and so save him from the terrible life he was leading. But that was too drastic, too simple. She could only have done it on a great impulse, but always her deepest feelings shrank from it, and without her deepest feelings she could not go to him, for they were engaged most of all. . . . She felt cramped and confined, as though her love were a cord wound round and round her limbs, and she could not, she would not go to him bound. He must release her; she must compel him to release her. If it took half her lifetime she would so compel him. Her will was concentrated upon him. She would not have their love droop from the high sympathy it had known, nor should it be torn from it by his savage strength and the adorable violence of his passion. Neither, on the other hand, would she turn back from him. That would be to deny her freedom which she had bought so dearly. She had thought her freedom would give her the easy joy of flowers and clouds and birds, and she still believed in that easy joy, but it lay beyond the tangled web of this love for the strange, dark, faunlike creature whomshe had found in the woods. If she turned back, if she denied the urgent emotions that drove her on, she had nothing to turn to but the old captivity, the life where all difficulties were arranged for, where all roads led to marriage, where men could only talk to women in a half-patronizing, half-flirtatious way that led to a ridiculous meeting of the senses, then to an engagement, and so to church. To that she would never, never return. She had fought her way out of it. She had learned to live by herself, within herself, to wrestle with her thoughts and emotions and to get them into shape. (It had been at a great cost to her external tidiness and orderliness, but that too she hoped to tackle in time.) She had won all this, and she had found a glorious outlet in work. So far as she had gone she had been successful, and she was ambitious, terribly ambitious, to show that a woman could do good work.And then there was the dark side of Mendel’s life—Logan, Oliver, Jessie Petrie. At the thought of it she shuddered, but her honesty made her confess that it made no difference to her central feeling. It had shocked her, outraged her, roused her to a fury of jealousy, but that she would not have. She fought it down inch by inch until she had it so well in control that, whenever it reared its head, she could crush it down.Many a tear had it cost her, but she insisted that she must understand.When she cut her hair short, she found, to her horror, that it was taken by many men as a sign that she was open to their advances, and all sorts and conditions of men had found to their astonishment that, although she was an artist and lived an independent life, she was immovable, and when it came to argument she was more than a match for them.Again, she had had the confidence of more than one of the models, and she knew how they courtedtheir own disasters. If there was to be any question of blame, the women must share it with the men.She had no thought of blaming Mendel, but she hated to have that underworld in contact with the world which it was her whole desire to keep beautiful. It was no good pretending that the underworld was not there, but if she could have her way she would keep a tight control over it, and suppress it as she suppressed her jealousy, that other source of ugliness. If she could only, somehow, find an entrance to Mendel’s life, not only to his rare moments, but to the life that went on from day to day, she would suppress it, she would cut it out and throw it away. She thought of it almost as a surgical operation, or as cutting a bruise out of an apple, for all her thoughts of life were as simple as herself, and life too was simple in her eyes. Anything that threatened to complicate it she expunged.After a time she discovered that it was no good hoping to understand so long as she regarded the dark aspect of Mendel from outside his life. She must find her way inside it and see how it looked there. That was hard.Clowes could not help her at all. To Clowes it was simply unintelligible that men could do these things. They bewildered her, and her only way out of it was to suppose that men were like that, and the less said about it the better. She was really very annoyed with Morrison for worrying over it, and she was disappointed. She had hoped that the unfortunate adventure would be over and that Morrison would wait tranquilly for her affections to be engaged by someone who was—presentable. . . . Still, there was no accounting for this strange, impulsive creature, though it was a pity she should throw away her growing popularity with people who were, after all, important, both in themselves and by their position; forMorrison’s frank charm carried her to places where Clowes would have given her eyes to be seen. Clowes was baffled by her friend, but she would not abandon her. She was often bored with her, often exasperated, and more than once she said:—“Well, if you like these wild people so much, why don’t you take the plunge and join them? You are wild enough yourself.”“I’m not wild in that way,” replied Morrison. “And I know that if I did do it it would be wrong.”And she returned to her task of labouring to understand Mendel. She carried the idea of him wherever she went, and was sometimes able to call up a clear image of him, and she was fearful for him because he seemed to her so helpless, so much a stranger in a strange land, so easily caught up in any strong current of feeling or enthusiasm. . . . She, too, often felt outside things, but she so much enjoyed being a looker-on. She loved to watch the race among the young artists, and she longed for Mendel to win. It was right that he should win, because he was so much the best of them all. He had taken the lead. It had looked as though he must infallibly win, and then Logan had appeared and he had stumbled in his stride.Yet this had never been satisfying. She had no right to turn Mendel into a figure on a frieze, to see him in the flat, as it were, and it was in revolt against this conception that she had agreed to go with him to Logan’s party, which had been so disastrous. . . . Had she not been cowardly to run away? But what could she do, what else could she do, when confronted so suddenly with the appalling fact?A week before the party Mendel had insisted on lending her “Jean Christophe” volume by volume. She had read the first without great interest. The friendship between the two boys struck her assilly and sentimental and not worth writing about, and she had read no further. However, when she found that Mendel was becoming a fixed idea, to escape from it she took up the second volume, and was enthralled by the tale of Christophe’s love for Ada, thrilled by the sudden scene of his assault on the peasant girl in the field, and with a growing sense of illumination followed his life as it passed from woman to woman, finding consolation with one, relief with another, comfort with another, comradeship with yet another, and the physical relationship slipped into its place and was never dominant. And Christophe, too, had had women of passage because his vitality was so abundant that it could not be contained in his being. It must be always flowing out into art or into life, taking from life more and more power to give to art. . . . With Gratia she was out of patience. Gratia was altogether too complacent an Egeria. Morrison thought she could have given Christophe more than that.She made Clowes read the book, but Clowes found it no help. That was in a story, this was actually happening in London; and besides, the book had a rhapsodic, dreamlike quality that smoothed away all ugliness, all difficulties. In life things were definitely ugly, and it was no good pretending they were anything else.“Anyhow,” said Morrison, “I’m going on.”“You are going to see him again?”“Yes, I will not be beaten. If I were married to him I should put up with everything, and I don’t see why not being married should make any difference.”Clowes threw up her hands and said:—“Well, if you come to grief, don’t blame me.”“I’m not going to come to grief,” said Morrison. “I’m going to win—I’m going to win.”It was then that she went out and bought the flowers. Her courage nearly failed her as sheapproached the door in the little slummy street. Suppose he should be angry with her for running away, and contemptuous of her cowardice! His anger and contempt were not easy things to face.She was relieved, therefore, when the dirty little Jewish servant opened the door and told her Mendel was out. She handed in the flowers shyly and went away without a word.Mendel wrote to thank her for the flowers, but said nothing about going to see her or about what he was doing. She thought he must be contemptuous of her, though it was not like him to be so stupid as not to respond to a direct impulse. On the other hand, he had always tried to impose his authority on her, and she was not going to do his bidding. Either he must take her on her own level or not at all. She would make him understand that she too was driving at something, and that love was to her not an end in itself, much though she might desire love and its freedom. He had always made her feel that he regarded love as sufficient for her. She must curl up in it and be happy while he went on with his work. Against that all the free instinct in her cried out. A woman was not a mere embryo to be incubated in a man’s passion, hatched out into a wife and a helpmate. . . . When she tried to imagine what life with him would be like, she shivered until she thought what life with him might be if she could bring to it all her force and all her freedom.At last she began to think that perhaps it was her own fault for not having left a note or a message with the flowers, which might be regarded only as a token of sentimental forgiveness. She knew how easily he was sickened by any sign of Christian sentimentality—“filthy gush” as he called it. . . . To safeguard against that and tohave done with it once and for all, she wrote to him and told him that she had been reading “Jean Christophe,” and that it had helped her to understand both his sufferings and his need of what in an ordinary foolish vain man would have to be condemned.To this letter he did not reply, and she determined that she would go and see him. She would take Clowes, in case things had become impossible and their sympathy had somehow been undermined and destroyed. Even if it were, she would not accept or believe it, and she would fight to restore it. A vague intuition took possession of her by which she surely knew that something strange, perhaps even terrible, was happening to him, and she felt that he needed her but did not know his need.It required some persuasion to take Clowes down to Whitechapel. She declared that she would stand by her friend whatever happened, but that she did not wish to be personally mixed up in it. It would, she said, make her in part responsible for whatever happened, and she did not think she could bear it. However, Morrison explained that she only wanted her there in case things were impossible, and that, if they were not, she could make good her escape as soon as she liked. On that Clowes consented and they journeyed to the East End.The little Jewish servant said that Mr. Mendel was engaged. Would she go up and see if he would soon be disengaged? She ran upstairs and came down in a moment to ask if they would wait, and to their surprise, darted past them, along the street, beckoned to them to follow, and led them to Golda’s kitchen. Golda bobbed to them, dusted chairs for them to sit on, and, not knowing enough English to be able to talk to them, went on with her ironing. When she had finished that, she shyly produced an album and showed themall the photographs of Mendel since he was a baby.Meanwhile, in his studio Mendel was in agitated conversation with Mr. Tilney Tysoe, who had arrived half an hour before, wagging his hands, rolling his enormous eyes, almost demented by the lamentable news he had to tell. Logan had left Oliver!“When?” asked Mendel.“A few days ago,” said Tysoe. “The poor fellow came round to me one night after dinner. You know, he often drops in in the evening. Such a splendid fellow, so sincere, such a force! And his admiration for you is very touching. He came in and raved like a madman and said terrible things—oh, terrible things! He told me that I was a fool and did not know a picture from my foot, and he denounced himself as a scoundrel and a thief and a liar. He wanted me to destroy all the pictures I had bought from him, and said they were not worth the stretchers of the canvas they were painted on. . . . Oh! it was terrible, terrible! He said that for years he had been pulling my leg, and had got such a taste for it that he had begun to pull his own leg, and he went on to say that his soul was rotten with lies; and then he broke into a torrent of wild, splendid stuff that made my spine tingle. I assure you, I could not contain my enthusiasm. . . . Oh! he is a splendid fellow. . . . I can’t remember it all very well, but he said that love is impossible in the world as it is, and that everybody is living in hate. It sounded most true—most true—though you know I adore my wife. . . . He said that humanity has tried aristocracy and failed, and it has tried democracy and failed. It has swung from one extreme to the other and found satisfaction in neither, and now it must bend the two extremes together so as to get the electric spark which can illumine life, and alsoto create a circle in which life can be contained. Of course, I haven’t got it at all clear, but it was most inspiring—most inspiring. Certainly life is very unsatisfactory, and it must be maddening for artists, maddening, though of course it should drive them on to make a mighty effort. We are all looking to the artists nowadays, especially since that wonderful exhibition.”“Yes, yes,” said Mendel impatiently; “but what about Logan?”“He told me you had quarrelled with him. Such a pity! Dear me! dear me! You were such a splendid pair, so sincere. He said it was irrevocable. But, you know, ‘The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love.’ Have you read the Oxford ‘Book of Verse’? A storehouse of poetry. . . . I came to see you for that reason. Quarrels ought not to be irrevocable. . . . I have been to see Oliver too. Poor girl! poor girl! I am keeping their little nest at Hampstead for them. . . . I told Logan he ought to marry her. Of course, I know, artists have their own view on that subject, but there is a great deal to be said for marriage. Most people are married, you know, and a woman who is not married must feel out of it. Nothing to do with morality, of course, but you know what women are. They can’t bear even their clothes to be different, and, after all, marriage is only a garment which we wear for decency’s sake.”“But where is Logan?”“That I don’t know,” said Tysoe. “Oliver said he would be here. She said it was your fault that they had quarrelled. . . . Poor girl! So pretty too! . . . I thought if you made it up with Logan, then he could make it up with her and we should all be happy again. We might have a nice little dinner of reconciliation at my house.”“It is no use, no use whatever,” said Mendel.“Logan might go back to her, but he will never come back to me. We have gone different ways, not only in life, but in our work.”“You won’t make it up?” asked Tysoe plaintively.“No,” answered Mendel. “I should like to, but it is impossible. It is very good of you to try to intervene. Logan was my friend. He is no longer the same man. He is altered, he is changed, he is done for.”“Nothing could ruin a man like that. It is disastrous, it is terrible that he should lose his friend and the girl he loves at one stroke. Kühler, I implore you, I entreat you, if he comes to see you, you will not refuse him.”“If he comes I will see him, certainly,” said Mendel.“Ah! That is all I want,” said Tysoe, beaming hopefully.“But he will not come.”“We shall find a way. We shall find a way. . . . Ah! superb!” he added, catching sight of Mendel’s green-facedMother.“Ah! The new spirit at work in your art. Colour! What you have always wanted! . . . How—how much?”“Ten pounds,” said Mendel.“May I take it with me? I will send you my cheque.”Mendel wrapped the picture up in brown paper and gave it him, told him he must go, thanked him for his kindness, and with unutterable relief watched him go shambling down the stairs.It was very certain that Logan would not come. There could be nothing but futile suffering for both of them, and Logan would know that as well as he. Logan knew himself better than most men, and he must have felt the finality of that parting in the street. The breach was final and irrevocable, for Oliver was definitely a part of Logan, asmuch a part of him as his hand or his eyes, and Mendel hated Oliver with a pure, simple, immovable passion. He saw in her embodied the natural enemy of all that he loved: order, decency, honesty, art, and beauty. He would have liked to blot out all trace of her everywhere, but she lived most intensely in his mind. She existed for him hardly at all as a person, but as an evil, fixed will set on the destruction of Logan, of friendship, of art, of love, of beauty, of everything that lived distinctly and clearly and with a flame-like energy. She existed to drag all down into the glowing ashes of lust and lies. There were times when she became symbolical of that Christian world that had made him suffer so intensely. In her was the only discernible will of that world in which everything was losing shape and form, every flame was dying down, and everything, good and bad, was being reduced to ashes.“Good and bad?” thought Mendel. “I don’t know what they mean. I know what is false and what is true. What is false I hate. What is true I love. That woman is a lie and I hate her, and I wish she were dead.”Logan might hate her too, but he would always try, always hope to love her, always waste himself in trying to kindle her lust into a passion. The fool, the weak fool! Let her rot; let her drop down to her own level, where she could be decently a beast of prey, marked out to be shunned except by those who were her natural victims. Logan was too good: but if there was so much good in him, might not something be done? . . . No. Only Logan’s own will could save him. Nothing could be done for him except out of pity: and who wants pity? Leave that to men like Tysoe, the kindly, emasculate fools of the world.Yet Mendel knew that he was bound to Logan. At first he thought it must be by pity, but it was deeper than that. There was not much capacityfor pity in Mendel. Ruthless with himself, he could see no reason why others should be spared what he himself was ready to endure. He had never thought that others might be weaker than he. Logan, for instance, with ten years’ more experience behind him, had always seemed infinitely stronger.And so Logan had left Oliver! There must have been a terrible row. . . . Oh, well, he would go back to her. There would be no end to the affair, there could be no end unless Logan were strong enough to stand by himself. But when had he ever tried to do that? Even in his work he borrowed here and there. Mendel was sure now that all Logan’s work had grown out of his own, and was often, by some amazing sleight of mind, an anticipation of his own ideas. That explained a good deal: his growing sense that Logan was really his enemy, and was cramping and thwarting him, a sense that endured even after the quarrel. It was strong upon him now. Tysoe had brought Logan vividly to his mind and made him feel impotent, possessed by a vision of art but unable to move a step towards it, rather dragged further and further away from it. He was ashamed when he thought of how often he had excitedly followed Logan’s lead, only to come now to this discovery that he was brought back to his own inchoate ideas. . . . He was reminded oddly of the journalist who had interviewed him after his first success and had produced so grotesque a parody of his innocently conceited remarks.A tap at the door reminded him of the “two young ladies” who were waiting to see him. He rushed eagerly to the door and flung it open, thinking to find healing and refreshment in the sight of Morrison. Only Clowes was standing there, and in his disappointment her face seemed to him so foolish and flabby and idiotic that his impulse was to shut the door. . . . He would bangthe door in her face and it would shut out the Christian world for ever. It did not want him, and he did not want it, for it was full of lies. . . . Then he heard a footstep on the stairs and Morrison appeared.“Come in,” he said. “Come in.”“I can’t stay long,” said Clowes nervously.“All right,” he replied.Morrison reached the top of the stairs, and he stood looking at her.“How are you?”“I’m very well.”She was horrified at the change in him. He looked so tragic and drawn.“Clowes can’t stop long,” she said. “But I’ll stop, if I may. I should like to.”“I’m afraid I haven’t got anything to show you. I haven’t been working lately.”“It seems to be a pretty general complaint,” said Clowes. “Everybody is so upset by the French pictures. I should like to shake that Thompson until his teeth rattled. He is so pleased with himself.”“He’s an awful man,” muttered Mendel. “He seems to think he told Cézanne and Van Gogh how to do it. There seems to be a whole army of men ready to take the credit of a thing when someone else has done it. I suppose they are all talking like mad.”“What is so astonishing is that these things are actually selling, and people who never sold a picture in their lives dab a few straight lines on a picture and off it goes.”Mendel laughed.“I’ve just sold one,” he said. “I came straight back from the exhibition and painted it. They sell just as if they were a new kind of toy that is all the rage.”So they kept up a cheerful rattle of conversation until Clowes said she really must go. No;she would not have tea, but she hoped Mendel would come to tea with her one day.He saw her to the front door and ran upstairs again, three steps at a time.“Now, then,” he said, “what have you come for, and why did you bring her?”“In case there was nothing to be said and this visit was another failure. I’m sick of failure; aren’t you?”“I didn’t answer your letter. I thought it was all over.”“But I told you what had made me change.”“It was nothing to do with that. Everything seemed all over, and I’m not sure even now that it isn’t.”“I knew something was happening to you. What is it?”“I’ve quarrelled with Logan.”She was silent for a moment or two, and then she said:—“I’m so glad.”“You didn’t like him. Why?”“I thought him second-rate.”“He isn’t that. He has a good mind, and he was a good friend.”“Are you so sure of that?”“Of some things in him—of his affection, for instance—I am as sure as I am of myself.”She smiled at him.“Yes. That is saying a good deal. But why did you quarrel?”“It was over his woman.”“Oh yes!”“He has left her.”“Has he been to see you?”“No. It was a friend of his. I don’t know what will happen. They are bound to come together again. Perhaps they will go through life like that—parting and coming together again. I can’t get it out of my head. I shall neverforget it. It is like my father knocking a drunken soldier down with a glass. I never forget that, though it was different. That was just something that I saw. This is in my own life. I feel as though it had somehow happened through me. I was with him when he met her, you know, and his whole life changed when he met me. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to take things seriously. . . . I didn’t write to you because I didn’t want to drag you into it. But I’m glad you’ve come. I’m glad you’ve come. . . . You know, it was beginning to be a horror with me that Logan would come in at that door, looking like a poor, battered, broken little Napoleon, and I should have to tell him that I was not his friend. . . . You know, he was something vital and living in my work, but Cézanne has kicked him out. He was only my friend really in my work, and if that goes everything goes. I couldn’t explain it to him, for he wouldn’t understand. He used to laugh at me for talking about my work to you. I’m afraid I told him more about you than I ought to have done, but, you see, he was my friend. He laughed at everything. He ought to have been a very happy man, the way he laughed at everything.”He placed in her hands his reproduction of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife.“That’s better than Cranach,” he said.“But why is her mouth crooked?” asked Morrison, puzzled by the picture and by his setting it above Cranach.“I don’t know,” replied Mendel, “but Cézanne knew when he did it.”And he tried to explain the making of the picture, but she could not understand it. However, she could understand and love his enthusiasm, and they were both happy, talking rather aimlessly and often relapsing into silence.“I never can make out,” he said, “why you aremore wonderful to me than anybody else. Directly I am with you, I am not so much happy as free. Even if I am miserable and you don’t make me any happier, I want you with me. . . . You mustn’t go away again.”“No. I don’t want to go away.”“Why need you actually go? Why shouldn’t you stay here now? Stay with me. Don’t go. Don’t think of going. I want you always with me. . . . If you don’t like the place we will find another studio and go there. And if you want to be married we can get married at once. I have nearly a hundred pounds in the bank.”He knelt by her side and held her knees in his two hands. She took his face in her hands and said gently:—“You mustn’t talk like that, Mendel. Please don’t think I don’t love you because I don’t want you to talk like that. It is the first thing to come into your mind, but with me it is almost the last thing. I want love to be very, very beautiful before it comes to me. I want love to be as beautiful to me as that picture of Cézanne’s is to you. Do you understand me?”He sprang to his feet and turned away from her.“No, I don’t!” he shouted; “no, I don’t!”He was wildly angry. Her words had acted like salt upon his raw feelings.“No, I don’t understand you. You want love to be like art. You want to mix love up with art. Love belongs to life. Love is rich and ripe and warm. You want it to be like the dew on the grass. It can’t be!—it can’t be! Love bursts out of a man’s body into his soul, and you want it to live in his soul and to leave him with an impotent, cold body. You want me to bend to your woman’s will, for you know I cannot break away from you. You are with your soul like Oliver with her body. You are with your love like Oliver with her lust,and Logan and I are a pair—a miserable, broken pair.”“Oh!” she cried, hiding her face in her hands. “You are wrong, wrong, hideously wrong. You have understood nothing at all. Your mind has rushed away with you. For God’s sake be quiet for a little, to see if we can’t get it straight.”His desire was to batter down her opposition, yet he could not but realize that she was too strong, and that he would only do grievous and useless harm. He controlled himself, therefore, and was silent. At last he grunted:—“Can’t you make me see what you mean?”“It isn’t a thing I could say in cold blood,” she said.He moved towards her, but she held up her hands to ward him off.“No, no!’” she almost whispered. “That only makes my heart grow colder and colder until it aches.”“Do you mean that you—don’t—want me?”“Foolish, foolish, foolish!” she said. “If you loved me one tenth part as much as I love you, you would know what I mean.”“I don’t,” he said simply. “I don’t, honestly I don’t. Perhaps you are so beautiful to me that I am blinded with it.”Of the truth of her feeling against him he had no doubt, but though he laboured bitterly to understand it, he could make nothing of it. He was driven back on his simple need for her.“Very well,” he said; “if it makes you feel like that for me to touch you, I never will. Only don’t talk of loving me more than I love you. It isn’t true.”“Yes. It was silly of me to say that,” she agreed. “It isn’t true.”“What do you want, then?”“I want to share as much of your life as I can.”“It is a bleak, grimy business, a good deal of it.”“I want to share it.”“There is a good deal in it that will horrify you.”“I must get used to that. . . . When I am in London I want you to promise that you will see me at least once a week.”“There are seven days in the week. Let it be seven times.”She laughed at that.“And some day,” she went on, “I want to take you down into the country.”He began to suspect her of wanting to meddle with his work.“I don’t want the country,” he rapped out. “I am a Londoner. All the life I care about is in the streets and in the houses, in the restaurants and the shops, and the costers’ barrows and the cinemas and the picture galleries. That is why I live here, because I love the coarse, thrumming vitality all round me.”“ButIwant the country,” she said, “and you should know the lifeIlove.”For a moment it seemed to him that the key to the mystery she talked of was in his hands. He clutched at it and it evaded him, but his idolatry of her was shaken, and he began dimly to see her as a creature like himself, with feelings, thoughts, desires, and a will. There was no doubt at all about the will, and he had to recognize it.
MORRISONhad fought bravely through her storms and difficulties. She frightened Clowes with the violence of her efforts and the terrible strain she inflicted on her vitality. There were times when she thought the simplest way would be to cut adrift from all her old associations and to throw in her lot with Mendel, to give him his desire and so save him from the terrible life he was leading. But that was too drastic, too simple. She could only have done it on a great impulse, but always her deepest feelings shrank from it, and without her deepest feelings she could not go to him, for they were engaged most of all. . . . She felt cramped and confined, as though her love were a cord wound round and round her limbs, and she could not, she would not go to him bound. He must release her; she must compel him to release her. If it took half her lifetime she would so compel him. Her will was concentrated upon him. She would not have their love droop from the high sympathy it had known, nor should it be torn from it by his savage strength and the adorable violence of his passion. Neither, on the other hand, would she turn back from him. That would be to deny her freedom which she had bought so dearly. She had thought her freedom would give her the easy joy of flowers and clouds and birds, and she still believed in that easy joy, but it lay beyond the tangled web of this love for the strange, dark, faunlike creature whomshe had found in the woods. If she turned back, if she denied the urgent emotions that drove her on, she had nothing to turn to but the old captivity, the life where all difficulties were arranged for, where all roads led to marriage, where men could only talk to women in a half-patronizing, half-flirtatious way that led to a ridiculous meeting of the senses, then to an engagement, and so to church. To that she would never, never return. She had fought her way out of it. She had learned to live by herself, within herself, to wrestle with her thoughts and emotions and to get them into shape. (It had been at a great cost to her external tidiness and orderliness, but that too she hoped to tackle in time.) She had won all this, and she had found a glorious outlet in work. So far as she had gone she had been successful, and she was ambitious, terribly ambitious, to show that a woman could do good work.
And then there was the dark side of Mendel’s life—Logan, Oliver, Jessie Petrie. At the thought of it she shuddered, but her honesty made her confess that it made no difference to her central feeling. It had shocked her, outraged her, roused her to a fury of jealousy, but that she would not have. She fought it down inch by inch until she had it so well in control that, whenever it reared its head, she could crush it down.
Many a tear had it cost her, but she insisted that she must understand.
When she cut her hair short, she found, to her horror, that it was taken by many men as a sign that she was open to their advances, and all sorts and conditions of men had found to their astonishment that, although she was an artist and lived an independent life, she was immovable, and when it came to argument she was more than a match for them.
Again, she had had the confidence of more than one of the models, and she knew how they courtedtheir own disasters. If there was to be any question of blame, the women must share it with the men.
She had no thought of blaming Mendel, but she hated to have that underworld in contact with the world which it was her whole desire to keep beautiful. It was no good pretending that the underworld was not there, but if she could have her way she would keep a tight control over it, and suppress it as she suppressed her jealousy, that other source of ugliness. If she could only, somehow, find an entrance to Mendel’s life, not only to his rare moments, but to the life that went on from day to day, she would suppress it, she would cut it out and throw it away. She thought of it almost as a surgical operation, or as cutting a bruise out of an apple, for all her thoughts of life were as simple as herself, and life too was simple in her eyes. Anything that threatened to complicate it she expunged.
After a time she discovered that it was no good hoping to understand so long as she regarded the dark aspect of Mendel from outside his life. She must find her way inside it and see how it looked there. That was hard.
Clowes could not help her at all. To Clowes it was simply unintelligible that men could do these things. They bewildered her, and her only way out of it was to suppose that men were like that, and the less said about it the better. She was really very annoyed with Morrison for worrying over it, and she was disappointed. She had hoped that the unfortunate adventure would be over and that Morrison would wait tranquilly for her affections to be engaged by someone who was—presentable. . . . Still, there was no accounting for this strange, impulsive creature, though it was a pity she should throw away her growing popularity with people who were, after all, important, both in themselves and by their position; forMorrison’s frank charm carried her to places where Clowes would have given her eyes to be seen. Clowes was baffled by her friend, but she would not abandon her. She was often bored with her, often exasperated, and more than once she said:—
“Well, if you like these wild people so much, why don’t you take the plunge and join them? You are wild enough yourself.”
“I’m not wild in that way,” replied Morrison. “And I know that if I did do it it would be wrong.”
And she returned to her task of labouring to understand Mendel. She carried the idea of him wherever she went, and was sometimes able to call up a clear image of him, and she was fearful for him because he seemed to her so helpless, so much a stranger in a strange land, so easily caught up in any strong current of feeling or enthusiasm. . . . She, too, often felt outside things, but she so much enjoyed being a looker-on. She loved to watch the race among the young artists, and she longed for Mendel to win. It was right that he should win, because he was so much the best of them all. He had taken the lead. It had looked as though he must infallibly win, and then Logan had appeared and he had stumbled in his stride.
Yet this had never been satisfying. She had no right to turn Mendel into a figure on a frieze, to see him in the flat, as it were, and it was in revolt against this conception that she had agreed to go with him to Logan’s party, which had been so disastrous. . . . Had she not been cowardly to run away? But what could she do, what else could she do, when confronted so suddenly with the appalling fact?
A week before the party Mendel had insisted on lending her “Jean Christophe” volume by volume. She had read the first without great interest. The friendship between the two boys struck her assilly and sentimental and not worth writing about, and she had read no further. However, when she found that Mendel was becoming a fixed idea, to escape from it she took up the second volume, and was enthralled by the tale of Christophe’s love for Ada, thrilled by the sudden scene of his assault on the peasant girl in the field, and with a growing sense of illumination followed his life as it passed from woman to woman, finding consolation with one, relief with another, comfort with another, comradeship with yet another, and the physical relationship slipped into its place and was never dominant. And Christophe, too, had had women of passage because his vitality was so abundant that it could not be contained in his being. It must be always flowing out into art or into life, taking from life more and more power to give to art. . . . With Gratia she was out of patience. Gratia was altogether too complacent an Egeria. Morrison thought she could have given Christophe more than that.
She made Clowes read the book, but Clowes found it no help. That was in a story, this was actually happening in London; and besides, the book had a rhapsodic, dreamlike quality that smoothed away all ugliness, all difficulties. In life things were definitely ugly, and it was no good pretending they were anything else.
“Anyhow,” said Morrison, “I’m going on.”
“You are going to see him again?”
“Yes, I will not be beaten. If I were married to him I should put up with everything, and I don’t see why not being married should make any difference.”
Clowes threw up her hands and said:—
“Well, if you come to grief, don’t blame me.”
“I’m not going to come to grief,” said Morrison. “I’m going to win—I’m going to win.”
It was then that she went out and bought the flowers. Her courage nearly failed her as sheapproached the door in the little slummy street. Suppose he should be angry with her for running away, and contemptuous of her cowardice! His anger and contempt were not easy things to face.
She was relieved, therefore, when the dirty little Jewish servant opened the door and told her Mendel was out. She handed in the flowers shyly and went away without a word.
Mendel wrote to thank her for the flowers, but said nothing about going to see her or about what he was doing. She thought he must be contemptuous of her, though it was not like him to be so stupid as not to respond to a direct impulse. On the other hand, he had always tried to impose his authority on her, and she was not going to do his bidding. Either he must take her on her own level or not at all. She would make him understand that she too was driving at something, and that love was to her not an end in itself, much though she might desire love and its freedom. He had always made her feel that he regarded love as sufficient for her. She must curl up in it and be happy while he went on with his work. Against that all the free instinct in her cried out. A woman was not a mere embryo to be incubated in a man’s passion, hatched out into a wife and a helpmate. . . . When she tried to imagine what life with him would be like, she shivered until she thought what life with him might be if she could bring to it all her force and all her freedom.
At last she began to think that perhaps it was her own fault for not having left a note or a message with the flowers, which might be regarded only as a token of sentimental forgiveness. She knew how easily he was sickened by any sign of Christian sentimentality—“filthy gush” as he called it. . . . To safeguard against that and tohave done with it once and for all, she wrote to him and told him that she had been reading “Jean Christophe,” and that it had helped her to understand both his sufferings and his need of what in an ordinary foolish vain man would have to be condemned.
To this letter he did not reply, and she determined that she would go and see him. She would take Clowes, in case things had become impossible and their sympathy had somehow been undermined and destroyed. Even if it were, she would not accept or believe it, and she would fight to restore it. A vague intuition took possession of her by which she surely knew that something strange, perhaps even terrible, was happening to him, and she felt that he needed her but did not know his need.
It required some persuasion to take Clowes down to Whitechapel. She declared that she would stand by her friend whatever happened, but that she did not wish to be personally mixed up in it. It would, she said, make her in part responsible for whatever happened, and she did not think she could bear it. However, Morrison explained that she only wanted her there in case things were impossible, and that, if they were not, she could make good her escape as soon as she liked. On that Clowes consented and they journeyed to the East End.
The little Jewish servant said that Mr. Mendel was engaged. Would she go up and see if he would soon be disengaged? She ran upstairs and came down in a moment to ask if they would wait, and to their surprise, darted past them, along the street, beckoned to them to follow, and led them to Golda’s kitchen. Golda bobbed to them, dusted chairs for them to sit on, and, not knowing enough English to be able to talk to them, went on with her ironing. When she had finished that, she shyly produced an album and showed themall the photographs of Mendel since he was a baby.
Meanwhile, in his studio Mendel was in agitated conversation with Mr. Tilney Tysoe, who had arrived half an hour before, wagging his hands, rolling his enormous eyes, almost demented by the lamentable news he had to tell. Logan had left Oliver!
“When?” asked Mendel.
“A few days ago,” said Tysoe. “The poor fellow came round to me one night after dinner. You know, he often drops in in the evening. Such a splendid fellow, so sincere, such a force! And his admiration for you is very touching. He came in and raved like a madman and said terrible things—oh, terrible things! He told me that I was a fool and did not know a picture from my foot, and he denounced himself as a scoundrel and a thief and a liar. He wanted me to destroy all the pictures I had bought from him, and said they were not worth the stretchers of the canvas they were painted on. . . . Oh! it was terrible, terrible! He said that for years he had been pulling my leg, and had got such a taste for it that he had begun to pull his own leg, and he went on to say that his soul was rotten with lies; and then he broke into a torrent of wild, splendid stuff that made my spine tingle. I assure you, I could not contain my enthusiasm. . . . Oh! he is a splendid fellow. . . . I can’t remember it all very well, but he said that love is impossible in the world as it is, and that everybody is living in hate. It sounded most true—most true—though you know I adore my wife. . . . He said that humanity has tried aristocracy and failed, and it has tried democracy and failed. It has swung from one extreme to the other and found satisfaction in neither, and now it must bend the two extremes together so as to get the electric spark which can illumine life, and alsoto create a circle in which life can be contained. Of course, I haven’t got it at all clear, but it was most inspiring—most inspiring. Certainly life is very unsatisfactory, and it must be maddening for artists, maddening, though of course it should drive them on to make a mighty effort. We are all looking to the artists nowadays, especially since that wonderful exhibition.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mendel impatiently; “but what about Logan?”
“He told me you had quarrelled with him. Such a pity! Dear me! dear me! You were such a splendid pair, so sincere. He said it was irrevocable. But, you know, ‘The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love.’ Have you read the Oxford ‘Book of Verse’? A storehouse of poetry. . . . I came to see you for that reason. Quarrels ought not to be irrevocable. . . . I have been to see Oliver too. Poor girl! poor girl! I am keeping their little nest at Hampstead for them. . . . I told Logan he ought to marry her. Of course, I know, artists have their own view on that subject, but there is a great deal to be said for marriage. Most people are married, you know, and a woman who is not married must feel out of it. Nothing to do with morality, of course, but you know what women are. They can’t bear even their clothes to be different, and, after all, marriage is only a garment which we wear for decency’s sake.”
“But where is Logan?”
“That I don’t know,” said Tysoe. “Oliver said he would be here. She said it was your fault that they had quarrelled. . . . Poor girl! So pretty too! . . . I thought if you made it up with Logan, then he could make it up with her and we should all be happy again. We might have a nice little dinner of reconciliation at my house.”
“It is no use, no use whatever,” said Mendel.“Logan might go back to her, but he will never come back to me. We have gone different ways, not only in life, but in our work.”
“You won’t make it up?” asked Tysoe plaintively.
“No,” answered Mendel. “I should like to, but it is impossible. It is very good of you to try to intervene. Logan was my friend. He is no longer the same man. He is altered, he is changed, he is done for.”
“Nothing could ruin a man like that. It is disastrous, it is terrible that he should lose his friend and the girl he loves at one stroke. Kühler, I implore you, I entreat you, if he comes to see you, you will not refuse him.”
“If he comes I will see him, certainly,” said Mendel.
“Ah! That is all I want,” said Tysoe, beaming hopefully.
“But he will not come.”
“We shall find a way. We shall find a way. . . . Ah! superb!” he added, catching sight of Mendel’s green-facedMother.“Ah! The new spirit at work in your art. Colour! What you have always wanted! . . . How—how much?”
“Ten pounds,” said Mendel.
“May I take it with me? I will send you my cheque.”
Mendel wrapped the picture up in brown paper and gave it him, told him he must go, thanked him for his kindness, and with unutterable relief watched him go shambling down the stairs.
It was very certain that Logan would not come. There could be nothing but futile suffering for both of them, and Logan would know that as well as he. Logan knew himself better than most men, and he must have felt the finality of that parting in the street. The breach was final and irrevocable, for Oliver was definitely a part of Logan, asmuch a part of him as his hand or his eyes, and Mendel hated Oliver with a pure, simple, immovable passion. He saw in her embodied the natural enemy of all that he loved: order, decency, honesty, art, and beauty. He would have liked to blot out all trace of her everywhere, but she lived most intensely in his mind. She existed for him hardly at all as a person, but as an evil, fixed will set on the destruction of Logan, of friendship, of art, of love, of beauty, of everything that lived distinctly and clearly and with a flame-like energy. She existed to drag all down into the glowing ashes of lust and lies. There were times when she became symbolical of that Christian world that had made him suffer so intensely. In her was the only discernible will of that world in which everything was losing shape and form, every flame was dying down, and everything, good and bad, was being reduced to ashes.
“Good and bad?” thought Mendel. “I don’t know what they mean. I know what is false and what is true. What is false I hate. What is true I love. That woman is a lie and I hate her, and I wish she were dead.”
Logan might hate her too, but he would always try, always hope to love her, always waste himself in trying to kindle her lust into a passion. The fool, the weak fool! Let her rot; let her drop down to her own level, where she could be decently a beast of prey, marked out to be shunned except by those who were her natural victims. Logan was too good: but if there was so much good in him, might not something be done? . . . No. Only Logan’s own will could save him. Nothing could be done for him except out of pity: and who wants pity? Leave that to men like Tysoe, the kindly, emasculate fools of the world.
Yet Mendel knew that he was bound to Logan. At first he thought it must be by pity, but it was deeper than that. There was not much capacityfor pity in Mendel. Ruthless with himself, he could see no reason why others should be spared what he himself was ready to endure. He had never thought that others might be weaker than he. Logan, for instance, with ten years’ more experience behind him, had always seemed infinitely stronger.
And so Logan had left Oliver! There must have been a terrible row. . . . Oh, well, he would go back to her. There would be no end to the affair, there could be no end unless Logan were strong enough to stand by himself. But when had he ever tried to do that? Even in his work he borrowed here and there. Mendel was sure now that all Logan’s work had grown out of his own, and was often, by some amazing sleight of mind, an anticipation of his own ideas. That explained a good deal: his growing sense that Logan was really his enemy, and was cramping and thwarting him, a sense that endured even after the quarrel. It was strong upon him now. Tysoe had brought Logan vividly to his mind and made him feel impotent, possessed by a vision of art but unable to move a step towards it, rather dragged further and further away from it. He was ashamed when he thought of how often he had excitedly followed Logan’s lead, only to come now to this discovery that he was brought back to his own inchoate ideas. . . . He was reminded oddly of the journalist who had interviewed him after his first success and had produced so grotesque a parody of his innocently conceited remarks.
A tap at the door reminded him of the “two young ladies” who were waiting to see him. He rushed eagerly to the door and flung it open, thinking to find healing and refreshment in the sight of Morrison. Only Clowes was standing there, and in his disappointment her face seemed to him so foolish and flabby and idiotic that his impulse was to shut the door. . . . He would bangthe door in her face and it would shut out the Christian world for ever. It did not want him, and he did not want it, for it was full of lies. . . . Then he heard a footstep on the stairs and Morrison appeared.
“Come in,” he said. “Come in.”
“I can’t stay long,” said Clowes nervously.
“All right,” he replied.
Morrison reached the top of the stairs, and he stood looking at her.
“How are you?”
“I’m very well.”
She was horrified at the change in him. He looked so tragic and drawn.
“Clowes can’t stop long,” she said. “But I’ll stop, if I may. I should like to.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t got anything to show you. I haven’t been working lately.”
“It seems to be a pretty general complaint,” said Clowes. “Everybody is so upset by the French pictures. I should like to shake that Thompson until his teeth rattled. He is so pleased with himself.”
“He’s an awful man,” muttered Mendel. “He seems to think he told Cézanne and Van Gogh how to do it. There seems to be a whole army of men ready to take the credit of a thing when someone else has done it. I suppose they are all talking like mad.”
“What is so astonishing is that these things are actually selling, and people who never sold a picture in their lives dab a few straight lines on a picture and off it goes.”
Mendel laughed.
“I’ve just sold one,” he said. “I came straight back from the exhibition and painted it. They sell just as if they were a new kind of toy that is all the rage.”
So they kept up a cheerful rattle of conversation until Clowes said she really must go. No;she would not have tea, but she hoped Mendel would come to tea with her one day.
He saw her to the front door and ran upstairs again, three steps at a time.
“Now, then,” he said, “what have you come for, and why did you bring her?”
“In case there was nothing to be said and this visit was another failure. I’m sick of failure; aren’t you?”
“I didn’t answer your letter. I thought it was all over.”
“But I told you what had made me change.”
“It was nothing to do with that. Everything seemed all over, and I’m not sure even now that it isn’t.”
“I knew something was happening to you. What is it?”
“I’ve quarrelled with Logan.”
She was silent for a moment or two, and then she said:—
“I’m so glad.”
“You didn’t like him. Why?”
“I thought him second-rate.”
“He isn’t that. He has a good mind, and he was a good friend.”
“Are you so sure of that?”
“Of some things in him—of his affection, for instance—I am as sure as I am of myself.”
She smiled at him.
“Yes. That is saying a good deal. But why did you quarrel?”
“It was over his woman.”
“Oh yes!”
“He has left her.”
“Has he been to see you?”
“No. It was a friend of his. I don’t know what will happen. They are bound to come together again. Perhaps they will go through life like that—parting and coming together again. I can’t get it out of my head. I shall neverforget it. It is like my father knocking a drunken soldier down with a glass. I never forget that, though it was different. That was just something that I saw. This is in my own life. I feel as though it had somehow happened through me. I was with him when he met her, you know, and his whole life changed when he met me. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to take things seriously. . . . I didn’t write to you because I didn’t want to drag you into it. But I’m glad you’ve come. I’m glad you’ve come. . . . You know, it was beginning to be a horror with me that Logan would come in at that door, looking like a poor, battered, broken little Napoleon, and I should have to tell him that I was not his friend. . . . You know, he was something vital and living in my work, but Cézanne has kicked him out. He was only my friend really in my work, and if that goes everything goes. I couldn’t explain it to him, for he wouldn’t understand. He used to laugh at me for talking about my work to you. I’m afraid I told him more about you than I ought to have done, but, you see, he was my friend. He laughed at everything. He ought to have been a very happy man, the way he laughed at everything.”
He placed in her hands his reproduction of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife.
“That’s better than Cranach,” he said.
“But why is her mouth crooked?” asked Morrison, puzzled by the picture and by his setting it above Cranach.
“I don’t know,” replied Mendel, “but Cézanne knew when he did it.”
And he tried to explain the making of the picture, but she could not understand it. However, she could understand and love his enthusiasm, and they were both happy, talking rather aimlessly and often relapsing into silence.
“I never can make out,” he said, “why you aremore wonderful to me than anybody else. Directly I am with you, I am not so much happy as free. Even if I am miserable and you don’t make me any happier, I want you with me. . . . You mustn’t go away again.”
“No. I don’t want to go away.”
“Why need you actually go? Why shouldn’t you stay here now? Stay with me. Don’t go. Don’t think of going. I want you always with me. . . . If you don’t like the place we will find another studio and go there. And if you want to be married we can get married at once. I have nearly a hundred pounds in the bank.”
He knelt by her side and held her knees in his two hands. She took his face in her hands and said gently:—
“You mustn’t talk like that, Mendel. Please don’t think I don’t love you because I don’t want you to talk like that. It is the first thing to come into your mind, but with me it is almost the last thing. I want love to be very, very beautiful before it comes to me. I want love to be as beautiful to me as that picture of Cézanne’s is to you. Do you understand me?”
He sprang to his feet and turned away from her.
“No, I don’t!” he shouted; “no, I don’t!”
He was wildly angry. Her words had acted like salt upon his raw feelings.
“No, I don’t understand you. You want love to be like art. You want to mix love up with art. Love belongs to life. Love is rich and ripe and warm. You want it to be like the dew on the grass. It can’t be!—it can’t be! Love bursts out of a man’s body into his soul, and you want it to live in his soul and to leave him with an impotent, cold body. You want me to bend to your woman’s will, for you know I cannot break away from you. You are with your soul like Oliver with her body. You are with your love like Oliver with her lust,and Logan and I are a pair—a miserable, broken pair.”
“Oh!” she cried, hiding her face in her hands. “You are wrong, wrong, hideously wrong. You have understood nothing at all. Your mind has rushed away with you. For God’s sake be quiet for a little, to see if we can’t get it straight.”
His desire was to batter down her opposition, yet he could not but realize that she was too strong, and that he would only do grievous and useless harm. He controlled himself, therefore, and was silent. At last he grunted:—
“Can’t you make me see what you mean?”
“It isn’t a thing I could say in cold blood,” she said.
He moved towards her, but she held up her hands to ward him off.
“No, no!’” she almost whispered. “That only makes my heart grow colder and colder until it aches.”
“Do you mean that you—don’t—want me?”
“Foolish, foolish, foolish!” she said. “If you loved me one tenth part as much as I love you, you would know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” he said simply. “I don’t, honestly I don’t. Perhaps you are so beautiful to me that I am blinded with it.”
Of the truth of her feeling against him he had no doubt, but though he laboured bitterly to understand it, he could make nothing of it. He was driven back on his simple need for her.
“Very well,” he said; “if it makes you feel like that for me to touch you, I never will. Only don’t talk of loving me more than I love you. It isn’t true.”
“Yes. It was silly of me to say that,” she agreed. “It isn’t true.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want to share as much of your life as I can.”
“It is a bleak, grimy business, a good deal of it.”
“I want to share it.”
“There is a good deal in it that will horrify you.”
“I must get used to that. . . . When I am in London I want you to promise that you will see me at least once a week.”
“There are seven days in the week. Let it be seven times.”
She laughed at that.
“And some day,” she went on, “I want to take you down into the country.”
He began to suspect her of wanting to meddle with his work.
“I don’t want the country,” he rapped out. “I am a Londoner. All the life I care about is in the streets and in the houses, in the restaurants and the shops, and the costers’ barrows and the cinemas and the picture galleries. That is why I live here, because I love the coarse, thrumming vitality all round me.”
“ButIwant the country,” she said, “and you should know the lifeIlove.”
For a moment it seemed to him that the key to the mystery she talked of was in his hands. He clutched at it and it evaded him, but his idolatry of her was shaken, and he began dimly to see her as a creature like himself, with feelings, thoughts, desires, and a will. There was no doubt at all about the will, and he had to recognize it.