XPASSOVERITwas many days before Mendel could take up his work again. His mind simply could not express itself in paint.His first clear thought as he emerged from the numbness of the crisis was for Morrison, and to her he wrote, telling her what had happened, describing in minute detail his experience in the hospital, and adding that he was without the least wish to see her, and would write to her if his life ever became again what it had been before Logan’s violent end.It seemed to him that Logan had claimed him, that he was destined to go through life with Logan, a dead man, for sole companion, and always behind Logan was the ominous and dreadful shadow of Oliver, from whom he had thought to escape those many months ago.His isolation was complete. It seemed that he had not a friend in the world, and there was not a soul towards whom he could move or wished to move. He could only rake over the ashes of the dead past and marvel that there had ever been a flame stirring in them. And as he raked them, he thrust into them much that only a short while ago had been living and delightful.What had happened? Youth could not be gone while he was yet so young, but he felt immeasurably old, and, in his worst condition, outside Time, which took shape as a stream flowing past him, bearing with it all his dreams, loves, aspirations,hopes, thoughts. When he tried to cast himself into it, to rescue these treasured possessions, he was clutched back, thrown down, and left prostrate with his eyes darkened and the smell of death in his nostrils.Sometimes he thought with terror that he had plunged too far, had given too much to Logan, had committed some obscure blasphemy, had been perhaps “overseen” even in that moment when the weakness and all that was dead in him had been wrenched away. And he said to himself:—“No. This is much worse than death. It is foolish to seek any meaning in death, for death is not the worst.”It was no good turning to his people, for he knew that he was cut off from them. They were confined in their Judaism, from which he had broken free. That was one of the dead things which had been taken from him.His mother could not help him, because she could not endure his unhappiness. The pain of it was too great for her, and he had to invent a spurious happiness, to pretend that he was working as usual, though with great difficulty, and that, as usual, he was out and about, seeing his friends. And in a way this pretence gave him relief, though he suffered for it afterwards. He suffered so cruelly that he was forced by it into making an effort to grope back into life.He was able to take up his work again, and the exercise of his craft soothed him, though it gave him no escape. The conception of his market picture was dead. It was enclosed in Judaism, from which he was free. Yet he had no other conception in his mind, and he knew that any picture he might paint must spring from it. So he clung to the dead conception and made studies and drawings for its execution.Some of these drawings he was able to sell to Tysoe, who worried him by coming to talk aboutLogan and was nearly always ashamed to leave the studio without buying. Mendel was saved from borrowing of his people, which had become repugnant to him now that he no longer belonged to them.It was through Tysoe’s talk that he was able to push his way through the tragedy of Logan and Oliver back to life. Tysoe insisted that the cause of it was jealousy, but Mendel knew that Logan was beyond jealousy, and, piecing the story together, he saw how Oliver had set herself to smash their friendship because it fortified in her lover what she detested, his intellect, which, because she could not satisfy it, stood between him and his passion for her. If anyone was responsible it was she, for she had tried to smash a spiritual thing and had herself been smashed. . . . And Mendel saw that had he tried to smash the relationship between Logan and Oliver he too would have been broken, for that also was a spiritual thing, though an evil. And he saw that, but for Morrison, he must have tried to smash it. His obligation to her had given him the strength to resist, to make his escape. Oliver had triumphed, evil had triumphed, and she and Logan were dead and he had to grope his way back to life, and if he could not succeed in doing that, then she and evil would have triumphed indeed, and what was left of him would have to follow the dead that had gone with Logan.He sought the society of his father and of the old Jews, the friends of the family, and was left marvelling at their indifference to good and evil. They knew neither joy nor despair. They had yielded up their will to God, upon Whom, through fair weather and foul, their thoughts were centred. They lived in a complete stagnation which made him shudder. Their lives were like stale water, like unmoved puddles, from which every now and then their passions broke in bubbles, broke vainly,in bubbles. Nothing brought them any nearer to the God upon Whom their thoughts were centred, and only Time brought them any nearer to the earth.And yet Mendel loved them in their simple dignity. They had a quality which he had found nowhere in the Christian world, where men and women had their thoughts centred on the good, leaving evil to triumph as it had triumphed in Oliver. . . . She had wanted good. With all the power of her insensate passion, her blind sensuality, she had wanted love, the highest good she could conceive. . . . But these old Jews were wiser: they wanted God, Whom they knew not how to attain. Yet God was ever present to them.In Mendel, too, this desire for God became active and kindled his creative will. He plunged into his work with a frenzy, but soon recognized that he was committing the old offence and was “overseen.” . . . Yet how shall a man approach his God if not through art?“Something is lacking!” cried Mendel desperately. “Something is lacking!”His imagination flew back to that last sublime moment of friendship with Logan, but it lacked warmth. It seemed that he could not take it back into life with him, or that until he had established contact with life its force could not be kindled. . . . Oh! for sweet, comfortable things—flowers, and rare music, a white, gleaming tablecloth, and good meats!He thought, with envy, of Edward Tufnell and his wife going along the road on either side smiling at each other, so happily smiling. And then he thought with more satisfaction of the old Jews. They were the wiser and the more solid. They walked in the middle of the way, and good and evil went on either side and neither could attain them. . . . His thoughts swung betweenthose two extremes like a pendulum, and out of the momentum thus created grew a force in his mind which began to find its way towards the God he was seeking. But it was only in his mind. His force, his passion, were left slumbering in the hypnotic sleep imposed on them by the tragedy.Yet the mental impulse kept him working in a serene ecstasy. He could make the design for his picture, and simplify his figures into a form in which he knew there was some beauty, or at least that it could hold beauty and let no drop of it escape.He could return then to his normal life, and made Golda very happy by joking with her and spending many evenings in her kitchen.“You should take a holiday,” she said. “You look tired out.”“I will,” he said, “when the spring comes. I am going to be an artist, but I am afraid it will not mean carriages and horses and the King commanding his portrait to be painted.”He had the very great joy of beginning to understand Cézanne’s delight in the intellectual craft of painting and to see why he had neglected the easier delights of handicraft and the mere pleasure of the eye. But the more he understood, the harder it became to finish his picture. He slaved at it, but there was still no beauty in it.He would not surrender. It would have been so easy to slip back to fake a pictorial quality. He had only to go to the National Gallery to come out with his head buzzing with ideas and impressions. He had only to go into the street to have a thousand mental notes from which to give his work a human and dramatic quality.He stuck to it and slaved away until he was forced to give in.“You devil!” he said, as he shook his fist at the picture. “You empty jug!”But there was some satisfaction in it, unfinished failure as it was, and he wanted Morrison to see it.He wrote and asked her to come.She and Clowes were in the country, painting, and they wired to him to come and stay with them for a week. Clowes wrote to tell him that she could put him up in the farm of which her cottage was a part.With her letter he went racing over to see his mother.“I’m going away,” he said, “I’m going away to the country. The Christian girl has a house in the country and I am going to stay in it.”“You will have fresh air and new milk to make you well again,” cried Golda, scarcely able to contain her joy at seeing him once more his happy, elated, robustious self. “You will be well again, but you should have done with that nonsense about the Christian girl. A sparrow does not mate with a robin, and a cock robin is what you are.”“Yes. I’m a robin,” said Mendel, and he whistled blithely, “Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! I shall go on the halls as a whistler. Tit-a-weet! and I shall make three hundred pounds a week. Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet!”Golda laughed at him till the tears ran, so happy was she to have him come back to her.“It is not nonsense about the Christian girl,” he said. “She is going to turn me into a Public School gentleman, and I shall bring her to see you, so that you can know for yourself that it is not nonsense.”“It is not the girl who is nonsensical, but you.”“Tit-a-weet!”“I will bake her a Jewish bread and you shall take it to her. Yes. Bring her to me and I will thank her for bearing with you.”“Tit-a-weet! Tit-a-weet!”“Cock robin!”His luggage consisted of a brown-paper parcel, a paint-box and two canvases.Morrison met him at the station. She was glowing with health and good spirits and began to tease him at once about his luggage, of which she insisted on taking charge.“It’s the loveliest little cottage!” she said; “only two rooms. . . . I hope you don’t mind walking along the road. There is another way through the fields, but I daren’t try to find it; besides, it goes through the woods, and I don’t want you to see any woods before you have been to mine. I don’t believe there’ll be room for you in the cottage. You’ll have to sit in the garden and have your meals handed out to you, among the chickens and the pigs.”“Pigs?” said Mendel, “I want to draw pigs. Marvellous animals!”“These are the most marvellous pigs that ever were.”So they chattered in a growing glee as they walked along the winding road up into the hills. They were unwilling to let their deep thoughts emerge until they had been caught up in the beauty of the place, the serene lines of the comfortable folding hills, the farmsteads tucked in the hollows, the rich velvet plough-lands, the blue masses of woods, the gorse-grown common, and the single sentinels the trees, and the hedges where the birds sang and twittered, Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! . . . And over the hills hung the wide sky, vast and open, with great clouds that seemed to be drawn from the edge of the earth and sent floating up and up to show how limitless was the space above the earth.For the first time Mendel had no sting of anger at the exhilaration in the English girl, no desireto pluck her out from the surroundings of the lovely English country in which it seemed to be her desire to lose herself. She was one with the rich fields and the mighty trees and the singing birds in the hedges, and when his heart sang Tit-a-weet, he knew it for a comic Cockney note. It was he who was at fault, not she, and she was the very comfort he had come to seek.The farmer’s wife received him with a kindly pity—the poor, pale London foreigner—and told him he must have plenty of good plain country food, plenty of milk, plenty of fresh air.“I do the cooking for Miss Clowes,” she said, “and if you’ll excuse my saying so, the young ladies take a deal of tempting.”Mendel thought her a wonderful woman, his room a wonderful room, the cottage a wonderful cottage, and the place the finest in the world. The air was rare and buoyant and he had never felt so free and so strong. His life in London looked to him like a bubble which he could break with a touch or with a puff of his breath. But he was reluctant to break it yet, for the time had not come.The girls showed him their work and he praised it, and began to talk of his own picture. Clowes led him on to explain what she called the modern movement, which she could not pretend to understand.Conversation that first evening was all between Clowes and Mendel, while Morrison sat silent, curled up on the floor by the fire, gazing into it, sometimes listening, sometimes dreaming, sometimes shaking with a happy dread as she thought how near she was to her heart’s desire. It had been for so long her central thought that she would take him down to the country and get him away from the terrible pressure of London upon his spirit, so that she could see released in him, perhaps slowly, perhaps painfully, what she loved—thevivid, clear vitality. And now she had won. She had him sitting there within reach, with good, faithful Clowes, and already she could feel the new glow of health in him. Almost she could detect a new tone in his lovely rich voice. . . . Sometimes, as she gazed into the fire, her eyes were clouded with tears. It seemed so incredible that she could have won against the innumerable enemies, invisible and intangible, against whom action had been impossible, even if she had known what to do.She had been happy enough with Clowes in this place, but now she could not help a wickedly ungrateful desire that Clowes should be spirited away.Clowes absented herself in the day-time, but Mendel had very little energy, and for the most part of the day sat by the fire brooding over the bubble of his London life, which he knew he must break with a touch. Often Morrison sat with him, and neither spoke a word for hours together.On the fifth day, when the sun shone so that it was wicked to be indoors, Morrison suggested lunch in the woods. Clowes excused herself, but Mendel agreed to go with her, and the farmer’s wife packed them a basket of food. They set out gaily, over the common, up the rolling field green with winter corn, down through the jolly farm-yard full of gobbling turkeys and strutting guinea-fowl, under the wild cherry-trees to the woods, where in a clearing they made a fire, and Morrison, declaring that she was a gipsy, sang the only song she could remember, “God Save the King,” and told his fortune by his hand. He was to meet a dark woman who would make a great change in his life, and money would come his way, but he must beware of the Knave of Clubs.Entering into her mood, he insisted that they must act a Wild West cinema drama, and herescued her from Indians and a Dago ravisher, and in the end claimed her hand from a grateful father; and so hilarious did they become that the cinema drama turned into an opera, and he was Caruso to her Melba. In the end they laughed until they were exhausted, and decided that it was time for lunch.After they had eaten they were silent for a long time, and at last, rather to her surprise, she found herself beginning to explain to him that this was love, this the heaven at which she had been aiming, the full song whereof they had played the first few notes as boy and girl at the picnic and again in the dewy grass on the Heath. And she told him quite simply that she had loved him always, from the time when they had met on the stairs at the Detmold, and even before that, though she could not remember clearly. And she told him that love dwelt in the woods and the hedgerows, in the sweet air and the song of the birds, not only in the springtime but in the harsh winter weather and in the summer heat of the sun. . . .“Oh, Mendel,” she said, “I have been wanting you to know, but it seemed that you would never know while you looked for love in the heat and the dust of London.”And he as simply believed her. It was lovely there in the woods, among the tall grey-green pillars of the trees, with the pale yellow sunlight falling on the emerald of the moss and the russet of the dead bracken, and the brilliant enamel of the blackberry leaves. He was overcome with his exquisite delight, and she, to comfort him, held him in her arms, her weary shaggy faun, so bitterly conscious of his own ugliness. She soothed him and caressed him, and won him over to her own serene joy, which passed from her to him in wave upon wave of flooding warmth,melting the last coldness in his soul, healing the last wounds upon his spirit.He roused himself, flung up his head, and began to whistle:—“Tit-a-weet!”And he looked so comical that she laughed.“That isn’t anything like a bird,” she said.“It is. It is very like cock robin.”To their mutual amazement it seemed entirely unnecessary to discuss the future or the past, and the present demanded only happy silence. Here in the enchantment of the woods was love, and it was enough.While they stayed in the woods they hardly talked at all, but as they walked home he became solemn and said, as though it pained and puzzled him:—“We are no longer young.”“We shall never be anything else,” she protested, for she was pained by the change in his mood.“Youth passes,” he said.And her exhilaration died in her, for she knew she had touched his obstinacy. He saw her droop and was sorry, and began to whistle and to laugh, but she could not be revived. She had thought to have secured him, to have made him safe with the charm of love for ever, but she was sure now that the hardest of all was yet to come.In the evening, as they sat by the fire in the little white room, Mendel and Clowes talking and Morrison curled up on the floor gazing into the coals, he suddenly ceased to hear Clowes’ voice, and saw very clearly the bubble of his life in London before him—Mr. Kuit, Issy, Hetty Finch, Mitchell, Logan and Oliver—Logan and Oliver leaving the Merlin’s Cave and going out into the street and walking home to the Pot-au-Feu, up the narrow, dark stairs to Hetty Finch’s room.. . . He put out his hand to touch the bubble and it broke, and with a shuddering, gasping cry he heard Clowes saying:—“On the whole I don’t think all this modern stuff can be good for anything but decoration.”And he began to think of his own picture, which was full of life. Wherever he picked up the design he could follow it all round the picture, and through and through it, beyond it into the mystery of art, and out of it back into life. It was poised, a wonderful, lovely created thing, with a complete, unaccountable, serene life of its own. The harsh, gloomy background of London fell away, and in its place shone green hills and a clear blue sky, fleecy with mauve-grey clouds. . . .Following the clouds, he came easily back to life again, to the two girls sitting in this wonderful snug cottage, and he was overwhelmed by a feeling that he was sharing their comfortable happiness on false pretences. It was not to him the perfectly satisfying wonder they so obviously wished it to be for him, and at last he could not contain himself, and burst out:—“You must not expect me to be happy. I cannot be happy. I will swing up to it as high as ever you like, but I must swing back again. Happiness is not life, love is not life, any more than misery is life. If I stay in happiness I die as surely as if I stay in misery. I must be like a pendulum. I must swing to and fro or the clock will stop. . . . I can’t make it clear to you, but it is so. What matters is that the clock should go. Jews understand, but they forget that they are the pendulum and they do not live at all. Jews are wonderful people. They know that what matters is the impulse of the soul. It matters so much to them that they have forgotten everything else. And those who are notJews think of everything else and forget the impulse of the soul. But I know that when I swing from happiness to unhappiness, from good to bad, from light to dark, then a force comes into my soul and it can move up to art, and beyond art, into that place where it can be free. . . . Don’t, please, misunderstand me.” He addressed himself frankly to Morrison, who dropped her head a little lower. “In love I can no more be free than I can in misery. I will swing as high on one side as I will on the other, and then I can be free.”Morrison folded her hands in her lap and her hair fell over her face. Mendel got up, said good-night, and went over to the farm.“Well,” said Clowes uneasily, “I really think he must be a genius.”Morrison made no reply, and presently Clowes went upstairs to bed, leaving her with her hair drooping over her face, staring into the glowing fire.“I must learn my lesson,” said Morrison to herself. “I must learn my lesson.”She was so little trained for misery, but this was misery enough. But she sat and brooded over it, and summoned up all her strength for the supreme effort of her will, not to be broken and cast down in the swing back from love. She had taught him to surrender himself to love; she must learn to surrender herself to misery, to swing as high on one side as on the other.For many, many hours she wrestled with herself and broke down fear after fear, weakness after weakness, until she was utterly exposed to the enemies of love and knew that she could be with Mendel through everything. She took out from her paint-box his letter describing the scene in the hospital, which had shocked and horrified her before, and now read and re-read it until shehad lived through all the story and could understand both Logan and Oliver.At last, when she could endure no more, relief came, a new vision of love, no longer lost in the woods or in any earthly beauty, but a clear light illuminating men and women and the earth upon which they dwell. And in her soul, too, the upward impulse began to thrill, and with a sob of thankfulness she lay on her bed fully clothed and went to sleep.She was not at all disturbed when Mendel said in the morning that he must go back to London to work on his picture. It was right. Their happiness was too tremulous. There was plenty of time for them to take up their ordinary jolly human lives, plenty of time now that they were no longer young.She walked with him to the station, and on the way they laughed and sang, and he whistled and talked breathlessly about his picture.“My mother says a cock robin can never mate with a sparrow,” he said. “I promised I would take you to see her.”“I should love to come, for I love your mother.”“I would like you to see the Jews as they are,” he said, “so simply serving God that their souls have gone to sleep.”As they stood on the platform she said:—“Mendel, I did . . . begin to understand last night, and it has made you and your work more important than anything else in my life.”He gripped her fiercely by the arm.“Come to London, now,” he said.“Not now.”“Soon.”“Very soon.”He got into the train, and as it carried him off she could not bear him to go, and, forgetting allthe other people, she ran as hard as she could along the platform, and stood at its extremity until the train disappeared round the corner of the embankment, and even then she called after him:—“Mendel! Mendel!”
ITwas many days before Mendel could take up his work again. His mind simply could not express itself in paint.
His first clear thought as he emerged from the numbness of the crisis was for Morrison, and to her he wrote, telling her what had happened, describing in minute detail his experience in the hospital, and adding that he was without the least wish to see her, and would write to her if his life ever became again what it had been before Logan’s violent end.
It seemed to him that Logan had claimed him, that he was destined to go through life with Logan, a dead man, for sole companion, and always behind Logan was the ominous and dreadful shadow of Oliver, from whom he had thought to escape those many months ago.
His isolation was complete. It seemed that he had not a friend in the world, and there was not a soul towards whom he could move or wished to move. He could only rake over the ashes of the dead past and marvel that there had ever been a flame stirring in them. And as he raked them, he thrust into them much that only a short while ago had been living and delightful.
What had happened? Youth could not be gone while he was yet so young, but he felt immeasurably old, and, in his worst condition, outside Time, which took shape as a stream flowing past him, bearing with it all his dreams, loves, aspirations,hopes, thoughts. When he tried to cast himself into it, to rescue these treasured possessions, he was clutched back, thrown down, and left prostrate with his eyes darkened and the smell of death in his nostrils.
Sometimes he thought with terror that he had plunged too far, had given too much to Logan, had committed some obscure blasphemy, had been perhaps “overseen” even in that moment when the weakness and all that was dead in him had been wrenched away. And he said to himself:—
“No. This is much worse than death. It is foolish to seek any meaning in death, for death is not the worst.”
It was no good turning to his people, for he knew that he was cut off from them. They were confined in their Judaism, from which he had broken free. That was one of the dead things which had been taken from him.
His mother could not help him, because she could not endure his unhappiness. The pain of it was too great for her, and he had to invent a spurious happiness, to pretend that he was working as usual, though with great difficulty, and that, as usual, he was out and about, seeing his friends. And in a way this pretence gave him relief, though he suffered for it afterwards. He suffered so cruelly that he was forced by it into making an effort to grope back into life.
He was able to take up his work again, and the exercise of his craft soothed him, though it gave him no escape. The conception of his market picture was dead. It was enclosed in Judaism, from which he was free. Yet he had no other conception in his mind, and he knew that any picture he might paint must spring from it. So he clung to the dead conception and made studies and drawings for its execution.
Some of these drawings he was able to sell to Tysoe, who worried him by coming to talk aboutLogan and was nearly always ashamed to leave the studio without buying. Mendel was saved from borrowing of his people, which had become repugnant to him now that he no longer belonged to them.
It was through Tysoe’s talk that he was able to push his way through the tragedy of Logan and Oliver back to life. Tysoe insisted that the cause of it was jealousy, but Mendel knew that Logan was beyond jealousy, and, piecing the story together, he saw how Oliver had set herself to smash their friendship because it fortified in her lover what she detested, his intellect, which, because she could not satisfy it, stood between him and his passion for her. If anyone was responsible it was she, for she had tried to smash a spiritual thing and had herself been smashed. . . . And Mendel saw that had he tried to smash the relationship between Logan and Oliver he too would have been broken, for that also was a spiritual thing, though an evil. And he saw that, but for Morrison, he must have tried to smash it. His obligation to her had given him the strength to resist, to make his escape. Oliver had triumphed, evil had triumphed, and she and Logan were dead and he had to grope his way back to life, and if he could not succeed in doing that, then she and evil would have triumphed indeed, and what was left of him would have to follow the dead that had gone with Logan.
He sought the society of his father and of the old Jews, the friends of the family, and was left marvelling at their indifference to good and evil. They knew neither joy nor despair. They had yielded up their will to God, upon Whom, through fair weather and foul, their thoughts were centred. They lived in a complete stagnation which made him shudder. Their lives were like stale water, like unmoved puddles, from which every now and then their passions broke in bubbles, broke vainly,in bubbles. Nothing brought them any nearer to the God upon Whom their thoughts were centred, and only Time brought them any nearer to the earth.
And yet Mendel loved them in their simple dignity. They had a quality which he had found nowhere in the Christian world, where men and women had their thoughts centred on the good, leaving evil to triumph as it had triumphed in Oliver. . . . She had wanted good. With all the power of her insensate passion, her blind sensuality, she had wanted love, the highest good she could conceive. . . . But these old Jews were wiser: they wanted God, Whom they knew not how to attain. Yet God was ever present to them.
In Mendel, too, this desire for God became active and kindled his creative will. He plunged into his work with a frenzy, but soon recognized that he was committing the old offence and was “overseen.” . . . Yet how shall a man approach his God if not through art?
“Something is lacking!” cried Mendel desperately. “Something is lacking!”
His imagination flew back to that last sublime moment of friendship with Logan, but it lacked warmth. It seemed that he could not take it back into life with him, or that until he had established contact with life its force could not be kindled. . . . Oh! for sweet, comfortable things—flowers, and rare music, a white, gleaming tablecloth, and good meats!
He thought, with envy, of Edward Tufnell and his wife going along the road on either side smiling at each other, so happily smiling. And then he thought with more satisfaction of the old Jews. They were the wiser and the more solid. They walked in the middle of the way, and good and evil went on either side and neither could attain them. . . . His thoughts swung betweenthose two extremes like a pendulum, and out of the momentum thus created grew a force in his mind which began to find its way towards the God he was seeking. But it was only in his mind. His force, his passion, were left slumbering in the hypnotic sleep imposed on them by the tragedy.
Yet the mental impulse kept him working in a serene ecstasy. He could make the design for his picture, and simplify his figures into a form in which he knew there was some beauty, or at least that it could hold beauty and let no drop of it escape.
He could return then to his normal life, and made Golda very happy by joking with her and spending many evenings in her kitchen.
“You should take a holiday,” she said. “You look tired out.”
“I will,” he said, “when the spring comes. I am going to be an artist, but I am afraid it will not mean carriages and horses and the King commanding his portrait to be painted.”
He had the very great joy of beginning to understand Cézanne’s delight in the intellectual craft of painting and to see why he had neglected the easier delights of handicraft and the mere pleasure of the eye. But the more he understood, the harder it became to finish his picture. He slaved at it, but there was still no beauty in it.
He would not surrender. It would have been so easy to slip back to fake a pictorial quality. He had only to go to the National Gallery to come out with his head buzzing with ideas and impressions. He had only to go into the street to have a thousand mental notes from which to give his work a human and dramatic quality.
He stuck to it and slaved away until he was forced to give in.
“You devil!” he said, as he shook his fist at the picture. “You empty jug!”
But there was some satisfaction in it, unfinished failure as it was, and he wanted Morrison to see it.
He wrote and asked her to come.
She and Clowes were in the country, painting, and they wired to him to come and stay with them for a week. Clowes wrote to tell him that she could put him up in the farm of which her cottage was a part.
With her letter he went racing over to see his mother.
“I’m going away,” he said, “I’m going away to the country. The Christian girl has a house in the country and I am going to stay in it.”
“You will have fresh air and new milk to make you well again,” cried Golda, scarcely able to contain her joy at seeing him once more his happy, elated, robustious self. “You will be well again, but you should have done with that nonsense about the Christian girl. A sparrow does not mate with a robin, and a cock robin is what you are.”
“Yes. I’m a robin,” said Mendel, and he whistled blithely, “Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! I shall go on the halls as a whistler. Tit-a-weet! and I shall make three hundred pounds a week. Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet!”
Golda laughed at him till the tears ran, so happy was she to have him come back to her.
“It is not nonsense about the Christian girl,” he said. “She is going to turn me into a Public School gentleman, and I shall bring her to see you, so that you can know for yourself that it is not nonsense.”
“It is not the girl who is nonsensical, but you.”
“Tit-a-weet!”
“I will bake her a Jewish bread and you shall take it to her. Yes. Bring her to me and I will thank her for bearing with you.”
“Tit-a-weet! Tit-a-weet!”
“Cock robin!”
His luggage consisted of a brown-paper parcel, a paint-box and two canvases.
Morrison met him at the station. She was glowing with health and good spirits and began to tease him at once about his luggage, of which she insisted on taking charge.
“It’s the loveliest little cottage!” she said; “only two rooms. . . . I hope you don’t mind walking along the road. There is another way through the fields, but I daren’t try to find it; besides, it goes through the woods, and I don’t want you to see any woods before you have been to mine. I don’t believe there’ll be room for you in the cottage. You’ll have to sit in the garden and have your meals handed out to you, among the chickens and the pigs.”
“Pigs?” said Mendel, “I want to draw pigs. Marvellous animals!”
“These are the most marvellous pigs that ever were.”
So they chattered in a growing glee as they walked along the winding road up into the hills. They were unwilling to let their deep thoughts emerge until they had been caught up in the beauty of the place, the serene lines of the comfortable folding hills, the farmsteads tucked in the hollows, the rich velvet plough-lands, the blue masses of woods, the gorse-grown common, and the single sentinels the trees, and the hedges where the birds sang and twittered, Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! . . . And over the hills hung the wide sky, vast and open, with great clouds that seemed to be drawn from the edge of the earth and sent floating up and up to show how limitless was the space above the earth.
For the first time Mendel had no sting of anger at the exhilaration in the English girl, no desireto pluck her out from the surroundings of the lovely English country in which it seemed to be her desire to lose herself. She was one with the rich fields and the mighty trees and the singing birds in the hedges, and when his heart sang Tit-a-weet, he knew it for a comic Cockney note. It was he who was at fault, not she, and she was the very comfort he had come to seek.
The farmer’s wife received him with a kindly pity—the poor, pale London foreigner—and told him he must have plenty of good plain country food, plenty of milk, plenty of fresh air.
“I do the cooking for Miss Clowes,” she said, “and if you’ll excuse my saying so, the young ladies take a deal of tempting.”
Mendel thought her a wonderful woman, his room a wonderful room, the cottage a wonderful cottage, and the place the finest in the world. The air was rare and buoyant and he had never felt so free and so strong. His life in London looked to him like a bubble which he could break with a touch or with a puff of his breath. But he was reluctant to break it yet, for the time had not come.
The girls showed him their work and he praised it, and began to talk of his own picture. Clowes led him on to explain what she called the modern movement, which she could not pretend to understand.
Conversation that first evening was all between Clowes and Mendel, while Morrison sat silent, curled up on the floor by the fire, gazing into it, sometimes listening, sometimes dreaming, sometimes shaking with a happy dread as she thought how near she was to her heart’s desire. It had been for so long her central thought that she would take him down to the country and get him away from the terrible pressure of London upon his spirit, so that she could see released in him, perhaps slowly, perhaps painfully, what she loved—thevivid, clear vitality. And now she had won. She had him sitting there within reach, with good, faithful Clowes, and already she could feel the new glow of health in him. Almost she could detect a new tone in his lovely rich voice. . . . Sometimes, as she gazed into the fire, her eyes were clouded with tears. It seemed so incredible that she could have won against the innumerable enemies, invisible and intangible, against whom action had been impossible, even if she had known what to do.
She had been happy enough with Clowes in this place, but now she could not help a wickedly ungrateful desire that Clowes should be spirited away.
Clowes absented herself in the day-time, but Mendel had very little energy, and for the most part of the day sat by the fire brooding over the bubble of his London life, which he knew he must break with a touch. Often Morrison sat with him, and neither spoke a word for hours together.
On the fifth day, when the sun shone so that it was wicked to be indoors, Morrison suggested lunch in the woods. Clowes excused herself, but Mendel agreed to go with her, and the farmer’s wife packed them a basket of food. They set out gaily, over the common, up the rolling field green with winter corn, down through the jolly farm-yard full of gobbling turkeys and strutting guinea-fowl, under the wild cherry-trees to the woods, where in a clearing they made a fire, and Morrison, declaring that she was a gipsy, sang the only song she could remember, “God Save the King,” and told his fortune by his hand. He was to meet a dark woman who would make a great change in his life, and money would come his way, but he must beware of the Knave of Clubs.
Entering into her mood, he insisted that they must act a Wild West cinema drama, and herescued her from Indians and a Dago ravisher, and in the end claimed her hand from a grateful father; and so hilarious did they become that the cinema drama turned into an opera, and he was Caruso to her Melba. In the end they laughed until they were exhausted, and decided that it was time for lunch.
After they had eaten they were silent for a long time, and at last, rather to her surprise, she found herself beginning to explain to him that this was love, this the heaven at which she had been aiming, the full song whereof they had played the first few notes as boy and girl at the picnic and again in the dewy grass on the Heath. And she told him quite simply that she had loved him always, from the time when they had met on the stairs at the Detmold, and even before that, though she could not remember clearly. And she told him that love dwelt in the woods and the hedgerows, in the sweet air and the song of the birds, not only in the springtime but in the harsh winter weather and in the summer heat of the sun. . . .
“Oh, Mendel,” she said, “I have been wanting you to know, but it seemed that you would never know while you looked for love in the heat and the dust of London.”
And he as simply believed her. It was lovely there in the woods, among the tall grey-green pillars of the trees, with the pale yellow sunlight falling on the emerald of the moss and the russet of the dead bracken, and the brilliant enamel of the blackberry leaves. He was overcome with his exquisite delight, and she, to comfort him, held him in her arms, her weary shaggy faun, so bitterly conscious of his own ugliness. She soothed him and caressed him, and won him over to her own serene joy, which passed from her to him in wave upon wave of flooding warmth,melting the last coldness in his soul, healing the last wounds upon his spirit.
He roused himself, flung up his head, and began to whistle:—
“Tit-a-weet!”
And he looked so comical that she laughed.
“That isn’t anything like a bird,” she said.
“It is. It is very like cock robin.”
To their mutual amazement it seemed entirely unnecessary to discuss the future or the past, and the present demanded only happy silence. Here in the enchantment of the woods was love, and it was enough.
While they stayed in the woods they hardly talked at all, but as they walked home he became solemn and said, as though it pained and puzzled him:—
“We are no longer young.”
“We shall never be anything else,” she protested, for she was pained by the change in his mood.
“Youth passes,” he said.
And her exhilaration died in her, for she knew she had touched his obstinacy. He saw her droop and was sorry, and began to whistle and to laugh, but she could not be revived. She had thought to have secured him, to have made him safe with the charm of love for ever, but she was sure now that the hardest of all was yet to come.
In the evening, as they sat by the fire in the little white room, Mendel and Clowes talking and Morrison curled up on the floor gazing into the coals, he suddenly ceased to hear Clowes’ voice, and saw very clearly the bubble of his life in London before him—Mr. Kuit, Issy, Hetty Finch, Mitchell, Logan and Oliver—Logan and Oliver leaving the Merlin’s Cave and going out into the street and walking home to the Pot-au-Feu, up the narrow, dark stairs to Hetty Finch’s room.. . . He put out his hand to touch the bubble and it broke, and with a shuddering, gasping cry he heard Clowes saying:—
“On the whole I don’t think all this modern stuff can be good for anything but decoration.”
And he began to think of his own picture, which was full of life. Wherever he picked up the design he could follow it all round the picture, and through and through it, beyond it into the mystery of art, and out of it back into life. It was poised, a wonderful, lovely created thing, with a complete, unaccountable, serene life of its own. The harsh, gloomy background of London fell away, and in its place shone green hills and a clear blue sky, fleecy with mauve-grey clouds. . . .
Following the clouds, he came easily back to life again, to the two girls sitting in this wonderful snug cottage, and he was overwhelmed by a feeling that he was sharing their comfortable happiness on false pretences. It was not to him the perfectly satisfying wonder they so obviously wished it to be for him, and at last he could not contain himself, and burst out:—
“You must not expect me to be happy. I cannot be happy. I will swing up to it as high as ever you like, but I must swing back again. Happiness is not life, love is not life, any more than misery is life. If I stay in happiness I die as surely as if I stay in misery. I must be like a pendulum. I must swing to and fro or the clock will stop. . . . I can’t make it clear to you, but it is so. What matters is that the clock should go. Jews understand, but they forget that they are the pendulum and they do not live at all. Jews are wonderful people. They know that what matters is the impulse of the soul. It matters so much to them that they have forgotten everything else. And those who are notJews think of everything else and forget the impulse of the soul. But I know that when I swing from happiness to unhappiness, from good to bad, from light to dark, then a force comes into my soul and it can move up to art, and beyond art, into that place where it can be free. . . . Don’t, please, misunderstand me.” He addressed himself frankly to Morrison, who dropped her head a little lower. “In love I can no more be free than I can in misery. I will swing as high on one side as I will on the other, and then I can be free.”
Morrison folded her hands in her lap and her hair fell over her face. Mendel got up, said good-night, and went over to the farm.
“Well,” said Clowes uneasily, “I really think he must be a genius.”
Morrison made no reply, and presently Clowes went upstairs to bed, leaving her with her hair drooping over her face, staring into the glowing fire.
“I must learn my lesson,” said Morrison to herself. “I must learn my lesson.”
She was so little trained for misery, but this was misery enough. But she sat and brooded over it, and summoned up all her strength for the supreme effort of her will, not to be broken and cast down in the swing back from love. She had taught him to surrender himself to love; she must learn to surrender herself to misery, to swing as high on one side as on the other.
For many, many hours she wrestled with herself and broke down fear after fear, weakness after weakness, until she was utterly exposed to the enemies of love and knew that she could be with Mendel through everything. She took out from her paint-box his letter describing the scene in the hospital, which had shocked and horrified her before, and now read and re-read it until shehad lived through all the story and could understand both Logan and Oliver.
At last, when she could endure no more, relief came, a new vision of love, no longer lost in the woods or in any earthly beauty, but a clear light illuminating men and women and the earth upon which they dwell. And in her soul, too, the upward impulse began to thrill, and with a sob of thankfulness she lay on her bed fully clothed and went to sleep.
She was not at all disturbed when Mendel said in the morning that he must go back to London to work on his picture. It was right. Their happiness was too tremulous. There was plenty of time for them to take up their ordinary jolly human lives, plenty of time now that they were no longer young.
She walked with him to the station, and on the way they laughed and sang, and he whistled and talked breathlessly about his picture.
“My mother says a cock robin can never mate with a sparrow,” he said. “I promised I would take you to see her.”
“I should love to come, for I love your mother.”
“I would like you to see the Jews as they are,” he said, “so simply serving God that their souls have gone to sleep.”
As they stood on the platform she said:—
“Mendel, I did . . . begin to understand last night, and it has made you and your work more important than anything else in my life.”
He gripped her fiercely by the arm.
“Come to London, now,” he said.
“Not now.”
“Soon.”
“Very soon.”
He got into the train, and as it carried him off she could not bear him to go, and, forgetting allthe other people, she ran as hard as she could along the platform, and stood at its extremity until the train disappeared round the corner of the embankment, and even then she called after him:—
“Mendel! Mendel!”