Chapter 30

VIIIOLIVERTHENbegan a period of quiet, happy friendship for them both. Mendel was astonishingly amenable to many of her disciplinary suggestions and allowed her to cut his hair (though not without thinking of Delilah), and when she ordered him to get some new clothes he went off obediently to a friend of Issy’s and had a suit made—West End style at East End prices.“You will soon have me looking like a Public School gentleman,” he said.“Never!” she replied. “You will never move like one—thank goodness.”“Why thank goodness?”“Because they walk about as though they owned the earth and the fatness thereof, as though the earth existed for them to walk about on it without their needing even to look at it to see how beautiful it is.”“That’s like Logan,” he said. “He used always to be railing against the English. He said they had no eyes, only stomachs. But I think the English must be the nicest people in the world, for there is no place like London for living in.”Indeed, they both thought there could be no place like London. Once or twice a week they dined together at the Pot-au-Feu and went on to a party or to a music-hall or to the cinema, which he adored. He said it gave him ideas for pictures and that there were often wonderful momentary pictures thrown on the screen.“The cinema does what the bad artists have been trying to do for generations. It is a great relief to have it done by a machine. The artist need not any more try to be a machine. There is no need for him now to please the public. He can leave all that to the machine and go straight for art. The few decent people will follow him, and what more does he want? Art is not for the fools. . . . Logan was wrong. He wanted art to go to the people. That is all wrong. The people must come up to art. When they are sick of the machine, art is there, ready for them.” He added naïvely, “I shall be there, waiting for them.”He loved especially the dramas, when they were not clogged and obscured with sentimentality. The simple values that governed them, the triumph of virtue and the downfall of evil, appealed to him as solid, as related to a process, a drama, that went on in himself, and, he supposed, in everybody else. It worried and annoyed him when Morrison made fun of these values and jeered at them.“But things don’t work like that,” she protested.“I think they do,” he said.“Good people are often crushed,” she replied, “and bad people often have things all their own way.”“But it is inside people that it happens like that. False people have their souls eaten away with lies, and true people have free, happy souls like yours. Being rich or poor, or what you call good or bad, has nothing to do with it. Yes. It is inside people that it happens like that, and I am more often the villain than the hero inside myself.”“It seems absurd to me, and I can’t think why you should take it seriously.”“It is because you are so idiotically good. You have only one side to your nature. You are like a heroine in your Dickens.”“I’m not. I’m sure I’m not. I’m bad-tempered and mean and unjust.”“You don’t even know how bad I am. You have no more idea of what my life is like than a rose has of an onion’s.”“I don’t like onions.”“That’s the trouble. You don’t like the smell of onions, and so you don’t eat them. Very poor people live on bread and onions and they find them good. I have no patience with you. You want to be a rose growing in a sheltered English garden.”“I don’t. I don’t want anything of the kind.”“A wild rose, then; and you have no right to want such a life. You are not a flower. You are a human being, and you can’t have a sheltered life, or a summer hedgerow life, because you have truth and falsehood in you, and if you will not live for the truth you will die for the falsehood. That is why cinemas are good and theatres are rotten. All the plays are false, because they have forgotten truth and falsehood and are all about being rich or poor, or old or young, or married or unmarried, and in the worst plays of all they are about people pretending to be children so as to get out of the whole thing. I hate you sometimes when you seem to be trying that game of refusing to be grown up, denying your own feelings and letting men love you and pretending you don’t know what it is all about.”“I never do that,” she cried indignantly.“I’m not so sure,” he said, unable to resist the temptation to press home the advantage he had won in rousing her out of her placid happiness. “I’m not so sure. There are too many girls do that.”“I don’t. I may have done it. But I have never done it with you. It is a wicked lie to say anything of the kind.”“You can’t blame me if I catch at any idea that will help me to understand you.”“You never will, if you go grubbing about with your mind.”“Oh! my mind is no good, is it? Then take your hands off my feelings. They’ll understand you right enough.”“No. They won’t.”“Why not?”“Because they’re blind.”“Good God! What am I to do, then?”“Wait.”“How long?”“Till you can see.”“I never shall see more than I do now. If you love me, why don’t you love me as I am?”“I do. But you don’t know what you are—yet, and you don’t know what I am.”“I know what I want.”“It isn’t what I want.”“If you knew at all what I wanted, you would want it too.”“What is it?”“Love.”“You’ve got it.”“You don’t call this love?”“I do.”“Then I don’t. It is just playing the fool—wasting time.”“It isn’t wasting time. We are much better friends than we were.”“I don’t want to be friends. I’ve had enough of friends. They have never done me any good. It’s a silly, thin kind of happiness at best.”“It is better than no happiness at all, which the other would be.”“How can you say that?” he cried, revolted. “How can you say that? Every thought, every dream I have is centred on it. It is such happiness that my imagination, is baffled by it.”“Please let us stop talking about it. We are only getting horribly at cross-purposes.”He had learned when it was wise to stop, but he needed every now and then the assurance that her serene confidence was shot with doubt. Once or twice when he had tried to thrust her back on her doubts she had flared up, and had fought tooth and nail, declaring that she would never see him again. And, as he knew she meant it, he yielded, and said that any sacrifice was better than that.On her part, as she came more nearly to see his point of view, she was often shaken and tempted to admit that he was right. There was no looseness or formlessness about his ideas. He lived in a world that apparently made room for everything, a world in which he stood solidly on his feet while the waves of life broke upon him, and he only absorbed into himself that which his passions needed. It was a plain, simple world, where good and evil were equally true, and, apparently, largely a matter of chance—a world in which he was gloriously independent. But was he free? Sometimes she thought that he was amazingly free. His only prejudice seemed to be against pink, fleshy young men who had to do nothing for a living—young men like her brothers, for instance, of whom she had drawn an amusing series of caricatures showing the effect of introducing Mendel to them. . . . Sometimes she wondered if her own longing for freedom was not just her ignorance, just a craven desire to escape from knowing anything about life, to remain an amused but fundamentally indifferent onlooker. And when she had to face the suffering she inflicted on him, then she was often moved to cry out within herself:—“Oh! Take me, take me! Have your will. It will make an end of it all, and you will pass on and forget me, but you will no longer suffer through me.”But she could not bend her own will, whichinsisted that the treasure she desired lay through him, and that he needed it even more than she. It was because of his need that he clung to her through all his suffering and exasperation. . . . Why, why was he so blind that he could not see it? Why could he, who was so sure and so strong, not see what was to her so clear through all her vacillation and all the confusion of her idealism? . . . She tried to make him read English poetry, but he could make little of it, and said none of it was worth the Bible. He declared that Shelley wrote romantical nonsense, because men could never be made perfect, and it was cruelly absurd to try it—like dressing a monkey up in human clothes. And he countered by making her read “Candide.”“When you have been through as much as Cunegonde,” he said, “I’ll believe in your purity.”“It isn’t purity that I’m fussing about.”“What is it, then?”“Don’t let us begin it all over again.”They found common ground in Blake, whom Mendel consented to read because Blake was the only English painter who had had any idea of art at all.Blake brought them much closer together, and their tussles were sharper, but less futile and exasperating.“Why don’t you take a lesson from Mrs. Blake?” he asked, after they had read the Life.“What? And sit and hold your hand? You’d turn round and hit me.”“I believe I would,” he laughed. “By Jove! I believe I would.”He was not easy for her to handle. It was like playing with high explosives, save that she was not playing.She said to him once, when they had come very near the intimacy she desired:—“I believe you would understand me if only you could let go.”“How can I let go,” he roared, “when I feel that you are weighing and judging and criticizing every word I say, every thing I do?”And she was silent for a long time. It was a new and dreadful idea, that she was hemming him in by making him feel that she was judging him. It was so far from her intention that she protested:—“I am not judging you. I accept you just as you are.”“Accept!” he grumbled. “Accept! When you keep me at arm’s-length!”“I go as far as we can, then it breaks down.”“What breaks down?”“I don’t know what to call it. Sympathy, if you like.”“Oh! then if it breaks down it isn’t any good, and we may as well give it up for ever. I will learn to shuffle along without you.”“I won’t shuffle. I refuse to hear of your shuffling.”“Then you want to know what to do?”“What?”“Take your place by my side, walk along with me like a sober, decent woman.”“But I want to fly with you, hand in hand.”She was elated, exalted. Her eyes shone and she glowed with excitement and hope. Surely he would understand now! Surely she had found words for it at last!“That’s rubbish,” he said. “Men aren’t birds, and they are not angels. If you want to fly, go up in an airyoplane. That’s another machine like the cinema. It relieves human beings of another mania.”She turned away to hide the tears that had gushed to her eyes. Why did he waste his strength? Why did he keep his force from entering into his imagination?That evening was most miserable for her, and she was glad when it came to an end.To add to her difficulties he was making himself ill over his work, which, as he said, had gone completely rotten, and he did not scruple to ascribe it to her. He would spend a delightful happy evening with her and feel that his difficulties were over, that in the morning he would be able to make a beginning upon all the ideas that were so jumbled and close-packed in his head. But in the morning he would be dull and nerveless, and though he might work himself up into a frenzy, yet he could produce nothing that was any good. His work was easier, and even a little better, after the evenings when they almost quarrelled.Again and again he told himself that he could not go on, that life was as thick and heavy as the air before a thunderstorm. Often he thought that this density, this opaqueness, with which he was surrounded, meant that he must quarrel and break with her once and for all. It would nearly kill him to do it, but if it must be done, the sooner the better. Perhaps it was wrong for him to have anything to do with the Christian world at all. No single friendship or relationship that he had had in it had been successful or of any profit to him. Little by little his peace of mind had been taken from him. Everything had been taken from him, even, now, his work. . . . That he would not have. He set his teeth and stuck to it, every day and all day, but the few pictures he turned out did not sell. Cluny would not have them, and they were rejected by the exhibitions, even by the club of which he was a member.Of all this he said not a word to a soul, not even to Morrison, not even to Golda. His money was dwindling. That put marriage out of the question. Fate, or the ominous pressure of life, or whatever it was, played into Morrison’s hands.Every now and then, unable to endure this pressure, he plunged into excesses. There seemed to be no other way out. The Christian world refused him. He no longer belonged to his own people. Their poverty disgusted him. People had no right to be so poor as that, to have no relief from the joyless daily grind for bread. . . . It was the fault of the Christians who prayed to the Lord for their daily bread and stole it from each other because they had forgotten that it was not given them except in return for daily work.That was the one strand of sympathy he had left with his father—Jacob’s absolute refusal to receive his daily bread from any other hands than his own, and his almost crazy refusal to let Issy and Harry go out and work for other masters. They could work for their father because he had authority over them, but other masters had no authority except what they bought or stole.But a talk with Harry decided Mendel that his people’s way, the Jewish way, was no longer his.Harry was bored. He had bouts of boredom when he could not endure the workshop and refused to go near it, however great the pressure of business might be. Like his father, he said:—“I want nothing.”“Very well then,” said Mendel; “you’ve got nothing. What are you grumbling at?”“But thereisnothing.”“Then it is easy to want nothing and you should be satisfied.”“That’s it. It is too easy. Work, work, work. Play, play, play. How disgusting it all is!”“Why didn’t you stay in Paris?”“I could not bear to be away from the people.”“But if they give you nothing?”“They have nothing to give. Nothing but old Jews who believe and young Jews who cannot believe and are nothing.”“It is the same everywhere. The Christians do not believe either.”“But they are fools and can make themselves happy with their cinemas and their newspapers and their forward women.”“I thought you liked women, Harry.”“I don’t like women who like me. . . . I don’t want to marry, I don’t want anything. I shall see the old people into their graves, and then I don’t know what I shall do. You are the only one I know who has anything to live for or any life in him.”“I have little enough.”“Oh God! don’t you start talking like me, or we shall all go to the cemetery at once.”“All right, Harry. I’ll keep you going. I’ll keep you astonished.”His brother’s despondency helped Mendel on a little, but what a mean incentive to work, to astonish his poor ignorant family!Very soon there came a terrible day when he had to tell them that he had not a penny in the world and that he was a failure. It would have gone hardly with him but for Harry, who espoused his cause, saying dramatically that he believed in his young brother as he believed in God, and that Mendel should not be stopped for want of money. And he went upstairs and came down with his savings, nearly thirty pounds.“Don’t be a fool!” said Jacob. “He will only spend it on drink and women.”“He is a genius,” said Harry simply, and Issy, fired by his brother’s example, said he had saved ten pounds and he would add that. Together they shouted Jacob down when he tried to raise his voice, until at last he produced his cash-box and gave Mendel a ten-pound note, saying:—“If the Christians are liars when they say they believe in you, we are not. You must learn that the Christians are all liars and you must showthem that you are the greatest artist in the world.”“I’ll show them,” mumbled Mendel. “Yes, I’ll show them.”He returned to his work with a better determination to succeed, but he felt more barren than ever, and had nothing to work with but his will. Into that he gathered all his force and determined to go back and pick up the thread of his work at the point where Logan had broken into the weaving of it. He would paint yet another portrait of his mother, and then he would choose a subject from among the life of the Jews. He would start again. The Jews believed in him; he would glorify them, although he no longer believed in but only admired them. When he came to look at them clearly, they were squat and stunted, because he could only look at them from a superior height. . . . He turned over his early work, and studied it carefully, but he could not recover his childish acceptance of that existence.For some weeks he did not go near Morrison and frequented the Paris Café, where he felt hopelessly out of it. No one spoke to him. Hardly a soul nodded to him. Night after night he sat there despondently, conjuring up the exciting evenings he had spent there. They were like ashes in his mouth.One night, to his amazement and almost fear, someone slipped into the seat at his side. It was Oliver. She laid her hand on his knee and said:—“You look pretty bad, Kühler. Anything wrong?”“Much as usual. How are you? What’ll you drink?”“Kümmel’s mine,” she said.He ordered two Kümmels.“I’m all right. How are you?”“I’ve told you how I am,” he said testily.“All right, all right!” she said, “I haven’t been here for a long time. I wish you’d come and see me, Kühler. We never did get on, but I’d like to have a talk about old times.”“Old times!” he said. “It seems only yesterday.”“It’s nearly a year since I saw you. Logan came back, you know. Mr. Tysoe was so good. He kept on the house for me. Wasn’t it good of him?”The waiter brought the Kümmel. She drank hers off at a gulp, and said:—“It is like old times to see you, Kühler. Iamglad.”“Go on about Logan.”“He went back to that Camden Town place, you know, and we didn’t see each other for nearly two months. It was awful. I couldn’t sleep at nights, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He never slept, you know, when we had had one of our hells and I wouldn’t speak to him. He! he!” she gasped and giggled nervously at the memory.“Go on,” said Mendel. He was icy cold. All the strange oppression that was brooding in his life seemed to gather into a thick snowy cloud about his head and to fit it like a cap of ice. “Go on.”“Mr. Tysoe gave me money. Wasn’t it good of him? He used to see Logan. Not very often—just occasionally. Logan was painting a wonderful portrait of me, in my green dress and the corals he gave me. . . . See: I always wear them, even now.”She thrust her hand into her bosom and produced the string of corals.“I lived all alone and refused to see anyone. I got so thin, all my skirts had to be taken in. I knew Logan was jealous, so I didn’t see anyone, and when I heard about the portrait I knew he would come back. So I used to wear the greendress every evening and wait for him till twelve, one, two, three in the morning, all alone, in that little cottage on the Heath. . . . My, Iwastired, I can tell you. But I never was one for getting up in the morning. . . . At last, one night, he came. He walked in quite quietly, as though nothing had happened. He had brought the picture with him. My word, itisgood. You’d love it. He had offers for it, but he wouldn’t sell it. He said a funny thing about it. He said: ‘It’s literature. It isn’t art.’ So he wouldn’t sell it. . . . We had a glorious time—a glorious time! It was better even than the beginning.”She stopped to linger over the memory, and she drew her hand caressingly along her thigh.“Go on,” said Mendel, to break in upon her heavy silence.“He had plenty of money. He sold everything he did. There were one or two society ladies, the cats! Common property, I call them.”“So it broke down again,” said Mendel.“Yes. He got—— You know what he could be like. Sometimes I thought he was going off his head, and I often wonder if he wasn’t a bit touched. . . . I haven’t seen him since. I wondered if you had seen him.”“No. I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t come back to me.”“Mr. Tysoe hasn’t seen him. Cluny has some of his things, but won’t say a word. I think he must have left London.”“I should think so,” said Mendel wearily, suddenly losing all interest. “I should think so.”“I’ve left Hampstead. I’m living over the Pot-au-Feu, I’m working as a model. Don’t forget me, and if you hear of Logan, do let me know, and come and have a talk over old times.”She had caught sight of an acquaintance smiling at her and went over to him, for all the world, as Mendel thought, like a fly-by-night.He half ran, half staggered out of the place, saying to himself:—“I must see Morrison. I must see her at once.”He tried to see her next day, but Clowes told him she had gone to the country.“I insisted on her going, she was looking so pale. You know when she feels lonely she won’t eat. When she is miserable she gets so shy that she can’t even go into a shop. . . . I have taken a cottage in the country, just outside London. Two rooms, two shillings a week. Isn’t it cheap? So I packed her off there two days ago.”“When will she be back?”“I don’t know. When she is tired of being alone. She said she wanted to be alone.”“I want to see her. It is a very important for me to see her.”“I won’t have you making her ill,” said Clowes.“I must see her. Will you give me her address, so that I can write to her?”Clowes gave him the address, and he wrote saying that life was intolerable without her.Morrison did not need his letter, and, indeed, it only reached the cottage after she had left. She knew he needed her. Never for an instant was his image absent from her mind, and at night, when she lay awake, she could have sworn she heard a moaning cry from him. No wind ever made a sound like that.There was a pouring rain and a howling wind, but she walked the four miles to the station and sent him a wire telling him to meet her at the station in London. He received it just in time and was on the platform.He took her in his arms and kissed her.“What is the matter?”“Did you get my letter?”“No. But I knew. What is it?”“I don’t know. My work, I think. I met Oliver last night. It upset me. But I wanted you for my work. It is like a knife stuck through my brain. I wanted to be with you, just to see you and to hear your voice. Nothing else. That part of me feels dead. . . . Oliver is living over the Pot-au-Feu, where Hetty Finch used to be. I wonder what’s become of her. I expect she has found a millionaire by now. . . . We’ll have the evening together. We’ll dine at the Pot-au-Feu. We might meet Oliver, but I can’t think of any other place.”“We’ll dine with Clowes, if you like.”“No; I want to go to the Pot-au-Feu.”“Very well. Are you very tired? Your voice sounds tired.”“I’ll be all right now I am with you. Mr. Sivwright asked me to go to the Merlin’s Cave to-night. He has to shut it up. I thought I wouldn’t go, but I want to go, if you will come with me.”“It might cheer us up, and you love dancing.”They both thought of the night when he had danced with Jessie Petrie.“I’m painting a picture of a Jewish market. I want you to see it.”“I’m glad you’ve gone back. I’m sure it is right.”“What are you doing?”It was the first time he had asked after her work and a glow of happiness overcame her.“Oh! I . . . I’m doing a landscape—just a road running up a hill with some houses on top.”“Like Rousseau. He was good at roads.”“Mine’s just painting. It isn’t abstract.”“You can’t paint without being abstract,” he said irritably. “Even Academicians can’t really imitate, but they abstract without using their brains. You can’t really copy nature, so what’s the good of trying?”“You can suggest.”“Then it’s a sketch and not a picture.”“Perhaps mine is only a sketch,” she said rather forlornly, because she had been rather hopeful of her work.They went back to his studio, where he showed her his studies and drawings for the new picture. She saw that he was working again with his old love of his craft.They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and had it all to themselves because the weather was so bad. There were only the goggle-eyed man in the corner with his green evening paper and Madame Feydeau and Gustave, the waiter.Over the dinner Mendel waxed very gay and gave her a very comic description of the scene when he had gone to his family to confess his failure. He had a wonderful power of making them comic without laughing at them.“They are wonderful people,” he said. “They know what is sense and what is nonsense. If you gave them the biggest problem in the world they would know what was true in it and what was false. They are always right about politics and public men. But when it comes to art, they are hopeless.”“But they believe in you.”“Because I belong to them. They believe in themselves. . . . My mother was quite sound about Logan. She said it could not go on. I thought it was for ever. I’ve been thinking about Logan. He could never be himself. He was always wanting to be something—something big. I thought he was big for a long time. But he’s just a man. I don’t think Cézanne was ever anything but just a man. It makes one think, doesn’t it? All these people who are written about as though they were something terrific, all trying to be something more than they are—just men. And then a quiet little man comes along and he is bigger than the lot of them, because he has nevertried to blow himself out, but has given himself room to grow.”She had never known him so gentle and tender and wise, and if he had wanted to love her she would not have denied him. She trusted him so completely. And he looked so ill and tired. But he only wanted to be with her, and to talk to her and to hear her voice.After dinner they went to a cinema to fill in time, and he shouted with laughter like a boy, threw himself about, and stamped his feet at the comic film. And she laughed too, and took his hand in hers and held it in her lap.“That was good!” he said. “I think I should like to be a cinema actor. If I get really hard up I shall try it. I might be a star, if I could learn to wear my clothes properly and could get my hair to lie down in a solid shiny block.”“I’ll go with you. I’m sure I could roll my eyes properly.”“Come along,” he said.It was still raining hard, so they took a taxi to the Merlin’s Cave, though it was not half a mile away.Everything was the same, even to the two rich young men who entered just after them. They signed the book, and then, hearing the music, Mendel seized Morrison by the wrist and dragged her down the stairs.The place was astonishingly full. Nearly all the tables were occupied, and they had to take one between the orchestra and the door. Calthrop, Mitchell, Weldon, Jessie Petrie, everybody from the Paris Café was there. Oliver was sitting with Thompson and the critic. In a far corner Clowes was sitting with the young man from the Detmold. There were models, male and female, all the strange people who for one reason or another had lived in or on the Calthrop tradition. In the middle of the room were two large tableswhich Sivwright had packed with celebrities—authors, journalists, editors, actors, and music-hall comedians. They were being fed royally, as became lions, and there were champagne bottles gleaming on the tables. Tall young soldiers in mufti began to arrive with chorus-girls who had not troubled to remove their make-up.“It’s a gala!” said Mendel.Oliver saw him, and beamed and raised her glass. He rose and bowed with mock solemnity.Dancing had not begun. Apparently the lions were to sing for their supper.An author read a short play, which he explained had been suppressed by the censor. To Mendel it sounded very mild and foolish. It was a tragedy, but no one was moved; the audience much preferred the music-hall comedian, who followed with a song about a series of mishaps to his trousers.The same reedy-voiced poet recited the same poem as before, and the same foolish girl sang the same foolish song, and it looked as though the programme would never end.Mendel was irritated and bored, and called for champagne.“Waiter!”But the waiter did not hear him.“You don’t want any champagne,” said Morrison.“Waiter!”The door by them opened and Logan slipped in. He was almost a shadow of his old self. The plump flesh had gone from his face, which was all eyes and bones. He looked famished. His eyes swept round the room, and, fastening on Oliver, lit up with a gleam of satisfaction. He was like a starving man looking at a nice pink ham in a shop window. He moved swiftly towards her, but stopped on seeing the men she was with and swerved to a table a few yards behind her. From where Mendel was sitting it looked as though hewere peering over her shoulder, an evil, menacing face.Mendel shivered, and his eyes suddenly felt dry and hot, as though they were being pushed out of his face. His throat went dry, and when he tried to call the waiter he could make no sound. The waiter met his eyes and came.“Champagne!” said Mendel.“Very good, sir. One bottle?”“Half-a-bottle,” said Morrison.“One bottle,” roared Mendel.A young artist, who knew them both slightly, hearing the order, came and sat with them.The dancing began.“Come and dance,” said Morrison.“No, I don’t want to dance. That was Logan who came in. He hasn’t seen me yet.”“Which is Logan?” asked the young artist. “He’s done some good things. Someone told me the other day he had softening of the brain.”“Rubbish!” said Mendel. “They say that of every man who makes a success, as though it needed something strange to account for it. It’s either softening of the brain, or consumption, or three wives, or he is killing himself with drink. They talk as though art itself were some kind of disease.”Logan had seen Mendel, and their eyes met. Mendel felt that Logan was looking clean through him, looking at him as a ghost might look at a man whom he had known in life, fondly, tenderly, icily through him, without expecting him to be aware of the terrible scrutiny. But Mendel was aware of it, and it chilled him to the marrow. Logan gave no sign, but stared and stared, and presently turned his eyes away without a sign, without a tremor. It was like turning away the light of a lantern. He turned his eyes from Mendel to Oliver in one sweep. No one else but those two seemed to exist for him, and Mendel felt that heno longer existed. And more than ever Logan looked as if he were peering over Oliver’s shoulder with those staring, piercing eyes of his from which the soul had gone out. Only the glowing spark of a fixed will was left in them to keep them sane and human.Mendel began to drink. The orchestra behind him sent the rhythm of a waltz thumping through him. But it went heavily, without music or tune. One—two—three. It was like having molten lead poured on the nape of his neck, threatening to jerk his head off his spine. From where he sat he could not see the dancing-floor, except reflected in a mirror opposite him. . . . Oh! it was a gay sight and a silly It had nothing to do with him. He could see nothing but Oliver with the grim, haggard face looking over her shoulder. He gulped down a glass of wine. That was better. It made things bearable. He poured out another glass of wine.“I think there is more in the Futurists than the Cubists,” said the young artist.“In art,” said Mendel, turning on him savagely, “there is neither past nor present nor future; there is only eternity. You try to make a group out of that, and see how you will get on. You can put that at the head of your manifesto and your group would melt away under it like the fat on a basted pigeon.”He put out his hand for his glass, but Morrison had taken it and was drinking.“You’ll make yourself drunk,” he said, taking it from her gently.“I finished it all,” she said, with an unhappy smile. “I didn’t want you to drink it, and you looked so tragic I knew it would be bad for you.”The young artist crept away. Mendel took Morrison’s hand and gripped it.“I’m glad you are with me,” he said. “Look at Logan!”Never taking his eyes off Oliver, Logan had begun to move towards her with his hand in his breast pocket. He had nearly reached her, with his eyes glowing almost yellow under the electric light, when he changed his mind, swung round, and went to another table and sat with his head down, biting his nails.The dancing was fast and furious, and this time it was the flute which played an obbligato, thin, fantastic, and comic, real silvery fun, like a trickle of water down a crag into a pool in sunshine.Thompson went to the dancing-floor with a girl in fancy dress—a columbine’s costume. That seemed to relieve Logan, who jumped to his feet, walked quickly round to Oliver, bent over her, and spoke to her. Her face wore an expression of amazed delight. Her eyes were drawn to his, and though she shrank under them, she seemed to go soft and flabby: she could not resist them. There was no menace in Logan now, only an attitude of fixed mastery, an air of taking possession of her once and for all, of knowing that at last he would get the longed-for satisfaction.They spoke together for a little longer, then she rose and put her hand up and caressed his cheek and neck as though it hurt her to see them so thin—as though, indeed, she refused to believe what her eyes told her.They walked past Mendel and Morrison without seeing them. Mendel gripped Morrison’s hand until she felt that the blood must gush out of her nails. Logan opened the swing-door for Oliver, devouring her with his burning eyes, in which there was a desperate set purpose of which he seemed to be almost weary. So frail he looked, as if but a little more and he would loose his hold even on that to which he clung. And Oliver smiled at him with a malicious promise in her eyes that he should have his will, that his hold should be loosened and his weariness come to an end.Clearly she knew that he had no thought outside herself.And outside the two of them Mendel had no thought. His mind became as a tunnel down which they were moving, and soon they were lost to his sight and he was left to wait. There his thoughts stopped, while he waited.

THENbegan a period of quiet, happy friendship for them both. Mendel was astonishingly amenable to many of her disciplinary suggestions and allowed her to cut his hair (though not without thinking of Delilah), and when she ordered him to get some new clothes he went off obediently to a friend of Issy’s and had a suit made—West End style at East End prices.

“You will soon have me looking like a Public School gentleman,” he said.

“Never!” she replied. “You will never move like one—thank goodness.”

“Why thank goodness?”

“Because they walk about as though they owned the earth and the fatness thereof, as though the earth existed for them to walk about on it without their needing even to look at it to see how beautiful it is.”

“That’s like Logan,” he said. “He used always to be railing against the English. He said they had no eyes, only stomachs. But I think the English must be the nicest people in the world, for there is no place like London for living in.”

Indeed, they both thought there could be no place like London. Once or twice a week they dined together at the Pot-au-Feu and went on to a party or to a music-hall or to the cinema, which he adored. He said it gave him ideas for pictures and that there were often wonderful momentary pictures thrown on the screen.

“The cinema does what the bad artists have been trying to do for generations. It is a great relief to have it done by a machine. The artist need not any more try to be a machine. There is no need for him now to please the public. He can leave all that to the machine and go straight for art. The few decent people will follow him, and what more does he want? Art is not for the fools. . . . Logan was wrong. He wanted art to go to the people. That is all wrong. The people must come up to art. When they are sick of the machine, art is there, ready for them.” He added naïvely, “I shall be there, waiting for them.”

He loved especially the dramas, when they were not clogged and obscured with sentimentality. The simple values that governed them, the triumph of virtue and the downfall of evil, appealed to him as solid, as related to a process, a drama, that went on in himself, and, he supposed, in everybody else. It worried and annoyed him when Morrison made fun of these values and jeered at them.

“But things don’t work like that,” she protested.

“I think they do,” he said.

“Good people are often crushed,” she replied, “and bad people often have things all their own way.”

“But it is inside people that it happens like that. False people have their souls eaten away with lies, and true people have free, happy souls like yours. Being rich or poor, or what you call good or bad, has nothing to do with it. Yes. It is inside people that it happens like that, and I am more often the villain than the hero inside myself.”

“It seems absurd to me, and I can’t think why you should take it seriously.”

“It is because you are so idiotically good. You have only one side to your nature. You are like a heroine in your Dickens.”

“I’m not. I’m sure I’m not. I’m bad-tempered and mean and unjust.”

“You don’t even know how bad I am. You have no more idea of what my life is like than a rose has of an onion’s.”

“I don’t like onions.”

“That’s the trouble. You don’t like the smell of onions, and so you don’t eat them. Very poor people live on bread and onions and they find them good. I have no patience with you. You want to be a rose growing in a sheltered English garden.”

“I don’t. I don’t want anything of the kind.”

“A wild rose, then; and you have no right to want such a life. You are not a flower. You are a human being, and you can’t have a sheltered life, or a summer hedgerow life, because you have truth and falsehood in you, and if you will not live for the truth you will die for the falsehood. That is why cinemas are good and theatres are rotten. All the plays are false, because they have forgotten truth and falsehood and are all about being rich or poor, or old or young, or married or unmarried, and in the worst plays of all they are about people pretending to be children so as to get out of the whole thing. I hate you sometimes when you seem to be trying that game of refusing to be grown up, denying your own feelings and letting men love you and pretending you don’t know what it is all about.”

“I never do that,” she cried indignantly.

“I’m not so sure,” he said, unable to resist the temptation to press home the advantage he had won in rousing her out of her placid happiness. “I’m not so sure. There are too many girls do that.”

“I don’t. I may have done it. But I have never done it with you. It is a wicked lie to say anything of the kind.”

“You can’t blame me if I catch at any idea that will help me to understand you.”

“You never will, if you go grubbing about with your mind.”

“Oh! my mind is no good, is it? Then take your hands off my feelings. They’ll understand you right enough.”

“No. They won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re blind.”

“Good God! What am I to do, then?”

“Wait.”

“How long?”

“Till you can see.”

“I never shall see more than I do now. If you love me, why don’t you love me as I am?”

“I do. But you don’t know what you are—yet, and you don’t know what I am.”

“I know what I want.”

“It isn’t what I want.”

“If you knew at all what I wanted, you would want it too.”

“What is it?”

“Love.”

“You’ve got it.”

“You don’t call this love?”

“I do.”

“Then I don’t. It is just playing the fool—wasting time.”

“It isn’t wasting time. We are much better friends than we were.”

“I don’t want to be friends. I’ve had enough of friends. They have never done me any good. It’s a silly, thin kind of happiness at best.”

“It is better than no happiness at all, which the other would be.”

“How can you say that?” he cried, revolted. “How can you say that? Every thought, every dream I have is centred on it. It is such happiness that my imagination, is baffled by it.”

“Please let us stop talking about it. We are only getting horribly at cross-purposes.”

He had learned when it was wise to stop, but he needed every now and then the assurance that her serene confidence was shot with doubt. Once or twice when he had tried to thrust her back on her doubts she had flared up, and had fought tooth and nail, declaring that she would never see him again. And, as he knew she meant it, he yielded, and said that any sacrifice was better than that.

On her part, as she came more nearly to see his point of view, she was often shaken and tempted to admit that he was right. There was no looseness or formlessness about his ideas. He lived in a world that apparently made room for everything, a world in which he stood solidly on his feet while the waves of life broke upon him, and he only absorbed into himself that which his passions needed. It was a plain, simple world, where good and evil were equally true, and, apparently, largely a matter of chance—a world in which he was gloriously independent. But was he free? Sometimes she thought that he was amazingly free. His only prejudice seemed to be against pink, fleshy young men who had to do nothing for a living—young men like her brothers, for instance, of whom she had drawn an amusing series of caricatures showing the effect of introducing Mendel to them. . . . Sometimes she wondered if her own longing for freedom was not just her ignorance, just a craven desire to escape from knowing anything about life, to remain an amused but fundamentally indifferent onlooker. And when she had to face the suffering she inflicted on him, then she was often moved to cry out within herself:—

“Oh! Take me, take me! Have your will. It will make an end of it all, and you will pass on and forget me, but you will no longer suffer through me.”

But she could not bend her own will, whichinsisted that the treasure she desired lay through him, and that he needed it even more than she. It was because of his need that he clung to her through all his suffering and exasperation. . . . Why, why was he so blind that he could not see it? Why could he, who was so sure and so strong, not see what was to her so clear through all her vacillation and all the confusion of her idealism? . . . She tried to make him read English poetry, but he could make little of it, and said none of it was worth the Bible. He declared that Shelley wrote romantical nonsense, because men could never be made perfect, and it was cruelly absurd to try it—like dressing a monkey up in human clothes. And he countered by making her read “Candide.”

“When you have been through as much as Cunegonde,” he said, “I’ll believe in your purity.”

“It isn’t purity that I’m fussing about.”

“What is it, then?”

“Don’t let us begin it all over again.”

They found common ground in Blake, whom Mendel consented to read because Blake was the only English painter who had had any idea of art at all.

Blake brought them much closer together, and their tussles were sharper, but less futile and exasperating.

“Why don’t you take a lesson from Mrs. Blake?” he asked, after they had read the Life.

“What? And sit and hold your hand? You’d turn round and hit me.”

“I believe I would,” he laughed. “By Jove! I believe I would.”

He was not easy for her to handle. It was like playing with high explosives, save that she was not playing.

She said to him once, when they had come very near the intimacy she desired:—

“I believe you would understand me if only you could let go.”

“How can I let go,” he roared, “when I feel that you are weighing and judging and criticizing every word I say, every thing I do?”

And she was silent for a long time. It was a new and dreadful idea, that she was hemming him in by making him feel that she was judging him. It was so far from her intention that she protested:—

“I am not judging you. I accept you just as you are.”

“Accept!” he grumbled. “Accept! When you keep me at arm’s-length!”

“I go as far as we can, then it breaks down.”

“What breaks down?”

“I don’t know what to call it. Sympathy, if you like.”

“Oh! then if it breaks down it isn’t any good, and we may as well give it up for ever. I will learn to shuffle along without you.”

“I won’t shuffle. I refuse to hear of your shuffling.”

“Then you want to know what to do?”

“What?”

“Take your place by my side, walk along with me like a sober, decent woman.”

“But I want to fly with you, hand in hand.”

She was elated, exalted. Her eyes shone and she glowed with excitement and hope. Surely he would understand now! Surely she had found words for it at last!

“That’s rubbish,” he said. “Men aren’t birds, and they are not angels. If you want to fly, go up in an airyoplane. That’s another machine like the cinema. It relieves human beings of another mania.”

She turned away to hide the tears that had gushed to her eyes. Why did he waste his strength? Why did he keep his force from entering into his imagination?

That evening was most miserable for her, and she was glad when it came to an end.

To add to her difficulties he was making himself ill over his work, which, as he said, had gone completely rotten, and he did not scruple to ascribe it to her. He would spend a delightful happy evening with her and feel that his difficulties were over, that in the morning he would be able to make a beginning upon all the ideas that were so jumbled and close-packed in his head. But in the morning he would be dull and nerveless, and though he might work himself up into a frenzy, yet he could produce nothing that was any good. His work was easier, and even a little better, after the evenings when they almost quarrelled.

Again and again he told himself that he could not go on, that life was as thick and heavy as the air before a thunderstorm. Often he thought that this density, this opaqueness, with which he was surrounded, meant that he must quarrel and break with her once and for all. It would nearly kill him to do it, but if it must be done, the sooner the better. Perhaps it was wrong for him to have anything to do with the Christian world at all. No single friendship or relationship that he had had in it had been successful or of any profit to him. Little by little his peace of mind had been taken from him. Everything had been taken from him, even, now, his work. . . . That he would not have. He set his teeth and stuck to it, every day and all day, but the few pictures he turned out did not sell. Cluny would not have them, and they were rejected by the exhibitions, even by the club of which he was a member.

Of all this he said not a word to a soul, not even to Morrison, not even to Golda. His money was dwindling. That put marriage out of the question. Fate, or the ominous pressure of life, or whatever it was, played into Morrison’s hands.

Every now and then, unable to endure this pressure, he plunged into excesses. There seemed to be no other way out. The Christian world refused him. He no longer belonged to his own people. Their poverty disgusted him. People had no right to be so poor as that, to have no relief from the joyless daily grind for bread. . . . It was the fault of the Christians who prayed to the Lord for their daily bread and stole it from each other because they had forgotten that it was not given them except in return for daily work.

That was the one strand of sympathy he had left with his father—Jacob’s absolute refusal to receive his daily bread from any other hands than his own, and his almost crazy refusal to let Issy and Harry go out and work for other masters. They could work for their father because he had authority over them, but other masters had no authority except what they bought or stole.

But a talk with Harry decided Mendel that his people’s way, the Jewish way, was no longer his.

Harry was bored. He had bouts of boredom when he could not endure the workshop and refused to go near it, however great the pressure of business might be. Like his father, he said:—

“I want nothing.”

“Very well then,” said Mendel; “you’ve got nothing. What are you grumbling at?”

“But thereisnothing.”

“Then it is easy to want nothing and you should be satisfied.”

“That’s it. It is too easy. Work, work, work. Play, play, play. How disgusting it all is!”

“Why didn’t you stay in Paris?”

“I could not bear to be away from the people.”

“But if they give you nothing?”

“They have nothing to give. Nothing but old Jews who believe and young Jews who cannot believe and are nothing.”

“It is the same everywhere. The Christians do not believe either.”

“But they are fools and can make themselves happy with their cinemas and their newspapers and their forward women.”

“I thought you liked women, Harry.”

“I don’t like women who like me. . . . I don’t want to marry, I don’t want anything. I shall see the old people into their graves, and then I don’t know what I shall do. You are the only one I know who has anything to live for or any life in him.”

“I have little enough.”

“Oh God! don’t you start talking like me, or we shall all go to the cemetery at once.”

“All right, Harry. I’ll keep you going. I’ll keep you astonished.”

His brother’s despondency helped Mendel on a little, but what a mean incentive to work, to astonish his poor ignorant family!

Very soon there came a terrible day when he had to tell them that he had not a penny in the world and that he was a failure. It would have gone hardly with him but for Harry, who espoused his cause, saying dramatically that he believed in his young brother as he believed in God, and that Mendel should not be stopped for want of money. And he went upstairs and came down with his savings, nearly thirty pounds.

“Don’t be a fool!” said Jacob. “He will only spend it on drink and women.”

“He is a genius,” said Harry simply, and Issy, fired by his brother’s example, said he had saved ten pounds and he would add that. Together they shouted Jacob down when he tried to raise his voice, until at last he produced his cash-box and gave Mendel a ten-pound note, saying:—

“If the Christians are liars when they say they believe in you, we are not. You must learn that the Christians are all liars and you must showthem that you are the greatest artist in the world.”

“I’ll show them,” mumbled Mendel. “Yes, I’ll show them.”

He returned to his work with a better determination to succeed, but he felt more barren than ever, and had nothing to work with but his will. Into that he gathered all his force and determined to go back and pick up the thread of his work at the point where Logan had broken into the weaving of it. He would paint yet another portrait of his mother, and then he would choose a subject from among the life of the Jews. He would start again. The Jews believed in him; he would glorify them, although he no longer believed in but only admired them. When he came to look at them clearly, they were squat and stunted, because he could only look at them from a superior height. . . . He turned over his early work, and studied it carefully, but he could not recover his childish acceptance of that existence.

For some weeks he did not go near Morrison and frequented the Paris Café, where he felt hopelessly out of it. No one spoke to him. Hardly a soul nodded to him. Night after night he sat there despondently, conjuring up the exciting evenings he had spent there. They were like ashes in his mouth.

One night, to his amazement and almost fear, someone slipped into the seat at his side. It was Oliver. She laid her hand on his knee and said:—

“You look pretty bad, Kühler. Anything wrong?”

“Much as usual. How are you? What’ll you drink?”

“Kümmel’s mine,” she said.

He ordered two Kümmels.

“I’m all right. How are you?”

“I’ve told you how I am,” he said testily.

“All right, all right!” she said, “I haven’t been here for a long time. I wish you’d come and see me, Kühler. We never did get on, but I’d like to have a talk about old times.”

“Old times!” he said. “It seems only yesterday.”

“It’s nearly a year since I saw you. Logan came back, you know. Mr. Tysoe was so good. He kept on the house for me. Wasn’t it good of him?”

The waiter brought the Kümmel. She drank hers off at a gulp, and said:—

“It is like old times to see you, Kühler. Iamglad.”

“Go on about Logan.”

“He went back to that Camden Town place, you know, and we didn’t see each other for nearly two months. It was awful. I couldn’t sleep at nights, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He never slept, you know, when we had had one of our hells and I wouldn’t speak to him. He! he!” she gasped and giggled nervously at the memory.

“Go on,” said Mendel. He was icy cold. All the strange oppression that was brooding in his life seemed to gather into a thick snowy cloud about his head and to fit it like a cap of ice. “Go on.”

“Mr. Tysoe gave me money. Wasn’t it good of him? He used to see Logan. Not very often—just occasionally. Logan was painting a wonderful portrait of me, in my green dress and the corals he gave me. . . . See: I always wear them, even now.”

She thrust her hand into her bosom and produced the string of corals.

“I lived all alone and refused to see anyone. I got so thin, all my skirts had to be taken in. I knew Logan was jealous, so I didn’t see anyone, and when I heard about the portrait I knew he would come back. So I used to wear the greendress every evening and wait for him till twelve, one, two, three in the morning, all alone, in that little cottage on the Heath. . . . My, Iwastired, I can tell you. But I never was one for getting up in the morning. . . . At last, one night, he came. He walked in quite quietly, as though nothing had happened. He had brought the picture with him. My word, itisgood. You’d love it. He had offers for it, but he wouldn’t sell it. He said a funny thing about it. He said: ‘It’s literature. It isn’t art.’ So he wouldn’t sell it. . . . We had a glorious time—a glorious time! It was better even than the beginning.”

She stopped to linger over the memory, and she drew her hand caressingly along her thigh.

“Go on,” said Mendel, to break in upon her heavy silence.

“He had plenty of money. He sold everything he did. There were one or two society ladies, the cats! Common property, I call them.”

“So it broke down again,” said Mendel.

“Yes. He got—— You know what he could be like. Sometimes I thought he was going off his head, and I often wonder if he wasn’t a bit touched. . . . I haven’t seen him since. I wondered if you had seen him.”

“No. I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t come back to me.”

“Mr. Tysoe hasn’t seen him. Cluny has some of his things, but won’t say a word. I think he must have left London.”

“I should think so,” said Mendel wearily, suddenly losing all interest. “I should think so.”

“I’ve left Hampstead. I’m living over the Pot-au-Feu, I’m working as a model. Don’t forget me, and if you hear of Logan, do let me know, and come and have a talk over old times.”

She had caught sight of an acquaintance smiling at her and went over to him, for all the world, as Mendel thought, like a fly-by-night.

He half ran, half staggered out of the place, saying to himself:—

“I must see Morrison. I must see her at once.”

He tried to see her next day, but Clowes told him she had gone to the country.

“I insisted on her going, she was looking so pale. You know when she feels lonely she won’t eat. When she is miserable she gets so shy that she can’t even go into a shop. . . . I have taken a cottage in the country, just outside London. Two rooms, two shillings a week. Isn’t it cheap? So I packed her off there two days ago.”

“When will she be back?”

“I don’t know. When she is tired of being alone. She said she wanted to be alone.”

“I want to see her. It is a very important for me to see her.”

“I won’t have you making her ill,” said Clowes.

“I must see her. Will you give me her address, so that I can write to her?”

Clowes gave him the address, and he wrote saying that life was intolerable without her.

Morrison did not need his letter, and, indeed, it only reached the cottage after she had left. She knew he needed her. Never for an instant was his image absent from her mind, and at night, when she lay awake, she could have sworn she heard a moaning cry from him. No wind ever made a sound like that.

There was a pouring rain and a howling wind, but she walked the four miles to the station and sent him a wire telling him to meet her at the station in London. He received it just in time and was on the platform.

He took her in his arms and kissed her.

“What is the matter?”

“Did you get my letter?”

“No. But I knew. What is it?”

“I don’t know. My work, I think. I met Oliver last night. It upset me. But I wanted you for my work. It is like a knife stuck through my brain. I wanted to be with you, just to see you and to hear your voice. Nothing else. That part of me feels dead. . . . Oliver is living over the Pot-au-Feu, where Hetty Finch used to be. I wonder what’s become of her. I expect she has found a millionaire by now. . . . We’ll have the evening together. We’ll dine at the Pot-au-Feu. We might meet Oliver, but I can’t think of any other place.”

“We’ll dine with Clowes, if you like.”

“No; I want to go to the Pot-au-Feu.”

“Very well. Are you very tired? Your voice sounds tired.”

“I’ll be all right now I am with you. Mr. Sivwright asked me to go to the Merlin’s Cave to-night. He has to shut it up. I thought I wouldn’t go, but I want to go, if you will come with me.”

“It might cheer us up, and you love dancing.”

They both thought of the night when he had danced with Jessie Petrie.

“I’m painting a picture of a Jewish market. I want you to see it.”

“I’m glad you’ve gone back. I’m sure it is right.”

“What are you doing?”

It was the first time he had asked after her work and a glow of happiness overcame her.

“Oh! I . . . I’m doing a landscape—just a road running up a hill with some houses on top.”

“Like Rousseau. He was good at roads.”

“Mine’s just painting. It isn’t abstract.”

“You can’t paint without being abstract,” he said irritably. “Even Academicians can’t really imitate, but they abstract without using their brains. You can’t really copy nature, so what’s the good of trying?”

“You can suggest.”

“Then it’s a sketch and not a picture.”

“Perhaps mine is only a sketch,” she said rather forlornly, because she had been rather hopeful of her work.

They went back to his studio, where he showed her his studies and drawings for the new picture. She saw that he was working again with his old love of his craft.

They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and had it all to themselves because the weather was so bad. There were only the goggle-eyed man in the corner with his green evening paper and Madame Feydeau and Gustave, the waiter.

Over the dinner Mendel waxed very gay and gave her a very comic description of the scene when he had gone to his family to confess his failure. He had a wonderful power of making them comic without laughing at them.

“They are wonderful people,” he said. “They know what is sense and what is nonsense. If you gave them the biggest problem in the world they would know what was true in it and what was false. They are always right about politics and public men. But when it comes to art, they are hopeless.”

“But they believe in you.”

“Because I belong to them. They believe in themselves. . . . My mother was quite sound about Logan. She said it could not go on. I thought it was for ever. I’ve been thinking about Logan. He could never be himself. He was always wanting to be something—something big. I thought he was big for a long time. But he’s just a man. I don’t think Cézanne was ever anything but just a man. It makes one think, doesn’t it? All these people who are written about as though they were something terrific, all trying to be something more than they are—just men. And then a quiet little man comes along and he is bigger than the lot of them, because he has nevertried to blow himself out, but has given himself room to grow.”

She had never known him so gentle and tender and wise, and if he had wanted to love her she would not have denied him. She trusted him so completely. And he looked so ill and tired. But he only wanted to be with her, and to talk to her and to hear her voice.

After dinner they went to a cinema to fill in time, and he shouted with laughter like a boy, threw himself about, and stamped his feet at the comic film. And she laughed too, and took his hand in hers and held it in her lap.

“That was good!” he said. “I think I should like to be a cinema actor. If I get really hard up I shall try it. I might be a star, if I could learn to wear my clothes properly and could get my hair to lie down in a solid shiny block.”

“I’ll go with you. I’m sure I could roll my eyes properly.”

“Come along,” he said.

It was still raining hard, so they took a taxi to the Merlin’s Cave, though it was not half a mile away.

Everything was the same, even to the two rich young men who entered just after them. They signed the book, and then, hearing the music, Mendel seized Morrison by the wrist and dragged her down the stairs.

The place was astonishingly full. Nearly all the tables were occupied, and they had to take one between the orchestra and the door. Calthrop, Mitchell, Weldon, Jessie Petrie, everybody from the Paris Café was there. Oliver was sitting with Thompson and the critic. In a far corner Clowes was sitting with the young man from the Detmold. There were models, male and female, all the strange people who for one reason or another had lived in or on the Calthrop tradition. In the middle of the room were two large tableswhich Sivwright had packed with celebrities—authors, journalists, editors, actors, and music-hall comedians. They were being fed royally, as became lions, and there were champagne bottles gleaming on the tables. Tall young soldiers in mufti began to arrive with chorus-girls who had not troubled to remove their make-up.

“It’s a gala!” said Mendel.

Oliver saw him, and beamed and raised her glass. He rose and bowed with mock solemnity.

Dancing had not begun. Apparently the lions were to sing for their supper.

An author read a short play, which he explained had been suppressed by the censor. To Mendel it sounded very mild and foolish. It was a tragedy, but no one was moved; the audience much preferred the music-hall comedian, who followed with a song about a series of mishaps to his trousers.

The same reedy-voiced poet recited the same poem as before, and the same foolish girl sang the same foolish song, and it looked as though the programme would never end.

Mendel was irritated and bored, and called for champagne.

“Waiter!”

But the waiter did not hear him.

“You don’t want any champagne,” said Morrison.

“Waiter!”

The door by them opened and Logan slipped in. He was almost a shadow of his old self. The plump flesh had gone from his face, which was all eyes and bones. He looked famished. His eyes swept round the room, and, fastening on Oliver, lit up with a gleam of satisfaction. He was like a starving man looking at a nice pink ham in a shop window. He moved swiftly towards her, but stopped on seeing the men she was with and swerved to a table a few yards behind her. From where Mendel was sitting it looked as though hewere peering over her shoulder, an evil, menacing face.

Mendel shivered, and his eyes suddenly felt dry and hot, as though they were being pushed out of his face. His throat went dry, and when he tried to call the waiter he could make no sound. The waiter met his eyes and came.

“Champagne!” said Mendel.

“Very good, sir. One bottle?”

“Half-a-bottle,” said Morrison.

“One bottle,” roared Mendel.

A young artist, who knew them both slightly, hearing the order, came and sat with them.

The dancing began.

“Come and dance,” said Morrison.

“No, I don’t want to dance. That was Logan who came in. He hasn’t seen me yet.”

“Which is Logan?” asked the young artist. “He’s done some good things. Someone told me the other day he had softening of the brain.”

“Rubbish!” said Mendel. “They say that of every man who makes a success, as though it needed something strange to account for it. It’s either softening of the brain, or consumption, or three wives, or he is killing himself with drink. They talk as though art itself were some kind of disease.”

Logan had seen Mendel, and their eyes met. Mendel felt that Logan was looking clean through him, looking at him as a ghost might look at a man whom he had known in life, fondly, tenderly, icily through him, without expecting him to be aware of the terrible scrutiny. But Mendel was aware of it, and it chilled him to the marrow. Logan gave no sign, but stared and stared, and presently turned his eyes away without a sign, without a tremor. It was like turning away the light of a lantern. He turned his eyes from Mendel to Oliver in one sweep. No one else but those two seemed to exist for him, and Mendel felt that heno longer existed. And more than ever Logan looked as if he were peering over Oliver’s shoulder with those staring, piercing eyes of his from which the soul had gone out. Only the glowing spark of a fixed will was left in them to keep them sane and human.

Mendel began to drink. The orchestra behind him sent the rhythm of a waltz thumping through him. But it went heavily, without music or tune. One—two—three. It was like having molten lead poured on the nape of his neck, threatening to jerk his head off his spine. From where he sat he could not see the dancing-floor, except reflected in a mirror opposite him. . . . Oh! it was a gay sight and a silly It had nothing to do with him. He could see nothing but Oliver with the grim, haggard face looking over her shoulder. He gulped down a glass of wine. That was better. It made things bearable. He poured out another glass of wine.

“I think there is more in the Futurists than the Cubists,” said the young artist.

“In art,” said Mendel, turning on him savagely, “there is neither past nor present nor future; there is only eternity. You try to make a group out of that, and see how you will get on. You can put that at the head of your manifesto and your group would melt away under it like the fat on a basted pigeon.”

He put out his hand for his glass, but Morrison had taken it and was drinking.

“You’ll make yourself drunk,” he said, taking it from her gently.

“I finished it all,” she said, with an unhappy smile. “I didn’t want you to drink it, and you looked so tragic I knew it would be bad for you.”

The young artist crept away. Mendel took Morrison’s hand and gripped it.

“I’m glad you are with me,” he said. “Look at Logan!”

Never taking his eyes off Oliver, Logan had begun to move towards her with his hand in his breast pocket. He had nearly reached her, with his eyes glowing almost yellow under the electric light, when he changed his mind, swung round, and went to another table and sat with his head down, biting his nails.

The dancing was fast and furious, and this time it was the flute which played an obbligato, thin, fantastic, and comic, real silvery fun, like a trickle of water down a crag into a pool in sunshine.

Thompson went to the dancing-floor with a girl in fancy dress—a columbine’s costume. That seemed to relieve Logan, who jumped to his feet, walked quickly round to Oliver, bent over her, and spoke to her. Her face wore an expression of amazed delight. Her eyes were drawn to his, and though she shrank under them, she seemed to go soft and flabby: she could not resist them. There was no menace in Logan now, only an attitude of fixed mastery, an air of taking possession of her once and for all, of knowing that at last he would get the longed-for satisfaction.

They spoke together for a little longer, then she rose and put her hand up and caressed his cheek and neck as though it hurt her to see them so thin—as though, indeed, she refused to believe what her eyes told her.

They walked past Mendel and Morrison without seeing them. Mendel gripped Morrison’s hand until she felt that the blood must gush out of her nails. Logan opened the swing-door for Oliver, devouring her with his burning eyes, in which there was a desperate set purpose of which he seemed to be almost weary. So frail he looked, as if but a little more and he would loose his hold even on that to which he clung. And Oliver smiled at him with a malicious promise in her eyes that he should have his will, that his hold should be loosened and his weariness come to an end.Clearly she knew that he had no thought outside herself.

And outside the two of them Mendel had no thought. His mind became as a tunnel down which they were moving, and soon they were lost to his sight and he was left to wait. There his thoughts stopped, while he waited.

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