IIPOVERTYTHENfollowed, for Golda, the blackest years of her life. She removed once more to one room in Gun Street, and she and the two boys earned enough to keep body and soul together. She found work in other people’s houses, helped at parties, and when nothing else was available she went to a little restaurant to assist as scullery-maid, and stayed after closing-time to scrub the tables and sweep the floor. For this she was given crusts of bread and scraps from the plates. She never had a word from her husband, and she knew she would not hear unless he made money. If he failed again, as of course he would, he would live in silence, solitary, proud, avoiding his fellow-men, who would have nothing to do with him except he made the surrender of dignity which it was impossible for him to make. She would not hear from him, and he would return one day unannounced, without a word, as though he had come from the next street; and as likely as not he would have given the coat off his back to some one poorer than himself. . . . Jacob was like that. He would give away on an impulse things that it had cost him weeks of saving to acquire. Low as he stood in the world, he seemed always to be looking downwards, as though he could believe in what came up from the depths but not in anything that went beyond him. Golda could not understand him, but she believed in him absolutely. She knew that he suffered even more than she, and she had learnedfrom him not to complain. The Jews had always suffered. That was made clear in the synagogue, where, in wailing over the captivity in Babylon, Golda found a vent for her own sorrows. She would weep over the sufferings of her race as she wept for those who were dead, her father and her mother, and her father’s father and her little brother, on the anniversary of their death. However poor she might be she had money to buy candles for them, and whatever the cost she kept the observances of her religion.So she lived isolated and proud, untouched by the excitements her children found in the houses of their friends and in the streets.Very wild was the life in the neighbourhood of Gun Street. There were constant feuds between Jews and Christians, battles with fists and sticks and stones. Old Jews were insulted and pelted by Christian youths, and the young Jews would take up their cause. There were violent disputes between landlords and tenants, husbands and wives, prostitutes and their bullies. Any evening, walking along Gun Street, you might hear screaming and growling in one of the little houses. Louder and louder it would grow. Suddenly the male voice would be silent, the female would rise to a shriek, the door would open, and out into the street would be propelled a half-naked woman. She would wail and batter on the door, and, if that were of no avail, she would go to the house of a friend and silence would come again. . . . Or sometimes a door would open and a man would be shot out to lie limp and flabby in the gutter.Harry, the second boy, took to this wild life like a duck to water. He practised with dumb-bells and learned the art of boxing, and so excited Mendel with his feats of strength that he too practised exercises and learned to stand on his hands, and cheerfully allowed his brother to knock him down over and over again in his ambition tolearn the elements of defence and the use of the straight left. In vain: his brain was not quick enough, or was too quick. His hands would never obey him in time, but he dreamed of being a strong man, the strongest man in the world, who by sheer muscle should compel universal admiration and assume authority.In the family the child’s superiority was acknowledged tacitly. He had his way in everything. He wanted such strange things, and was adamant in his whims. If he were not allowed to do as he wished, he lay on the ground and roared until he was humoured; or he would refuse to eat; or he would go out of the house with the intention of losing himself. As he was known all through the neighbourhood for his beauty that was impossible. He was an object of pride to the neighbours, and whenever he was found far from home, there was always some one who knew him to take him back. But Golda could not realize this, and she suffered tortures.The boy loved the streets and the shops, the markets with their fruit-stalls and fish-barrows, the brilliant colours in Petticoat Lane. He would wander drinking in with his eyes colour and beauty, shaking with emotion at the sight of the pretty little girls with their little round faces, their ivory skins, and their brilliant black eyes. Ugliness hurt him not at all. It was the condition of things, the dark chaos out of which flashed beauty. But cruelty could drive him nearly mad, and he would tremble with rage and terror at the sight of a woman with a bloody face or a man kicking a horse.He had a friend, a Christian boy, named Artie Beech, who adored him even as Abramovich adored his father. Golda was alarmed by this friendship, thinking no good could come out of the Christians, and she tried to forbid it, but the boy had his way, and he loved Artie Beech as a child loves a dollor a king his favourite. Together the two boys used to creep home from school gazing into the shop windows. One day they saw a brightly coloured advertisement of a beef extract: a picture of a man rending a lion. “It will make you stronger than a lion,” said Mendel. “Yes,” said Artie, “one drop on the tip of your tongue.” “I would be stronger than Harry if I ate a whole bottle,” replied Mendel, and they decided to save up to buy the strength-giving elixir. It took them seven weeks to save the price of it. Then with immense excitement they bought the treasure, took it home, and, loathing the taste of it, gulped it down and tossed a button for the right to lick the cork. Feeling rather sick, they gazed at each other with frightened eyes, half expecting to swell so that they would burst their clothes. But nothing happened. Mendel took off his coat and felt his biceps and swore that they had grown. Artie took off his coat: yes, his biceps had grown too.They went through the streets with growing confidence, and at school they were not afraid. Mendel’s new arrogance led him into the only fight he ever had and he was laid low. Aching with humiliation, he shunned Artie Beech and went alone to gaze at the picture of the man rending the lion. It took him a week of hard concentrated thought to realize that the picture and its legend were not to be taken literally, and his close study led him to another and a strangely emotional interest in the picture. His eyes would travel up the line of the man’s body along his arms to the lion’s jaws, and then down its taut back to its paws clutching the ground. The two lines springing together, the two forms locked, gave an impression of strength, of tremendous impact, which, as the boy gazed, became so violent as to make his head ache. At the same time he began to develop an appetite for this shock, and unconsciously used his eyes soas to obtain it. It would sometimes spring up in him suddenly, without his knowing the cause of it, when he watched his mother sitting with her hands folded on her stomach, or cooking with her hand—her big, strong, working hand—on a fish or a loaf of bread.One day in Bishopsgate, that lordly and splendid thoroughfare which led from the dark streets to the glittering world, he came on a man kneeling on the pavement with coloured chalks. First of all the man dusted the stones with his cap, and then he laid another cap full of little pieces of chalk by his side, and then he drew and smudged and smudged and drew until a slice of salmon appeared. By the side of the salmon he drew a glass of beer with a curl of froth on it and a little bunch of flowers. On another stone he drew a ship at sea in a storm, a black and green sea, and a brown and black sky. Mendel watched him enthralled. What a life! What a career! To go out into the streets and make the dull stones lovely with colour! He saw the man look up and down and then lay a penny on the salmon. A fine gentleman passed by and threw down another penny. . . . Oh, certainly, a career! To make the streets lovely, and immediately to be rewarded!From school Mendel stole some chalk and decorated the stones in the yard at Gun Street. He drew a bottle and an onion and a fish, though this he rather despised, because it was so easy. Always he had amused himself with drawing. As a tiny child, the first time his father went to America, he drew a picture of a watch to ask for that to be sent him, and this picture had been kept by his mother. And after that he often drew, but chiefly because it made his father and mother proud of him, and they laughed happily at everything he did. The pavement artist filled him with pride and pleasure in the doing of it: and every minute out of school and away from the Rabbihe devoted to drawing. His brothers bought him a box of colours, and he painted imaginary landscapes of rivers and swans and cows and castles. Every picture he made was treasured by his mother. They seemed to her, as they did to himself, perfectly beautiful. He used his water-colours as though they were oils, and laid them on thick, to get as near the pavement artist’s colours as possible. At school there were drawing-lessons, but they seemed to have no relation to this keen private pleasure of his.In the evenings he would lie on the ground in the kitchen and paint until his eyes and his head ached. Sometimes his perpetual, silent absorption would so exasperate his brothers that they would kick his paints away and make him get up and talk to them. Then he would curse them with all the rich curses of the Yiddish language, and rush away and hide himself; for days he would live in a state of gloom and dark oppression, feeling dimly aware of a difference between him and them which it was beyond his power to explain. He would try to tell his mother what was the matter with him, but she could not understand. His happiness in painting, the keen delight that used to fill him, were to her compensation enough for her anxiety and the stress and strain of her poverty.His little local fame procured her some relief. At school he won a prize accorded by vote for the most popular boy. This had amazed him, for he had very little traffic with the others, and during playtime used to stand with his back to the wall and his arms folded, staring with unseeing eyes. When his sister asked one of the boys why Mendel had won the vote, the answer she received was: “Hecandraw.” As a result his brothers were helped and his mother was able to get work as a sempstress. They were relieved from the poverty that paralyses. They could go from day to dayand carry their deficit from week to week. They could afford friends, and the visits of friends on a ceremonious basis, and Abramovich was always trying to interest rich men in the wonderful family.It was Abramovich who bought Mendel his first box of oil-paints, not so much to give the boy pleasure as with the idea that he might learn to paint portraits from photographs. That, however, was not in the boy’s idea. He abandoned his imaginary landscapes and began to paint objects, still in the manner of the pavement artist, thrilled with the discovery that he could more and more exactly reproduce what he saw. He painted a loaf of bread and a cucumber so like the originals that Abramovich was wildly excited and rushed off to bring Mr. Jacobson, a Polish Jew, a timber-merchant and very rich, to see the marvel.Mendel was unprepared. He sat painting in the kitchen with his mother and Lotte, his younger sister. Abramovich and Mr. Jacobson came in. Jacobson was ruddy, red-haired, with a strange broad face and a flat nose, almost negroid about the nostrils. He wore a frock-coat, a white waistcoat with a cable-chain across it, and rings upon his fingers. Mendel had a horror of him, and was overcome with shyness. Mr. Jacobson put on his spectacles, stared at the picture. “Ye-es,” he said. “That bread could be eaten. That cucumber could be cut and put into the soup. The boy is all right. Eh? Ye-es, and a beautiful boy, too.” Mendel writhed. Golda was almost as overcome with shyness as he. In silence she produced all the boy’s drawings and pictures and laid them before the visitors. Abramovich was loud in his praises, but not too loud, for he knew that Mr. Jacobson loved to talk. And indeed it seemed that Mr. Jacobson would never stop. He stood in the middle of the room and wagged his fat, stumpy hands and held forth:—“In my country, Mrs. Kühler, there was once a poor boy. He was always drawing. Give him a piece of paper and a pencil and he would draw anything in the world. The teacher at school had to forbid him to draw, for he would learn nothing at all. So one day the teacher could not find that boy. And where do you think they find him? Under the table. The teacher pulled him out and found in his hand a piece of paper—a piece of paper. The teacher looked down at the piece of paper and fainted away. The boy had drawn a picture of the teacher so like that he fainted away. Well, when the teacher came to himself, he said: ‘Boy, did you do that?’ ‘Yes,’ said the boy, ‘I did that.’ ‘Then, said the teacher, ‘I will tell you what you must do. You must paint a portrait of the King and take it to the King, and he will give you money, and carriages, and houses, and rings, and watches, for you and your father, and your uncles and all your family. Ahin and aher. The boy did that. He painted a portrait of the King and he took it to the palace. He went to the front door and knock, knock, knock. A lady opened the door and she said: ‘What do you want, little boy?’ ‘I want to see the King. I have something to show him.’ ‘I am the Queen,’ said the lady. ‘You can show it to me.’ The boy showed the picture and the Queen fainted away. The servants and the King came running in to see what had happened, and they stood like stone. ‘Who did that?’ said the King. ‘I did,’ said the boy. ‘I don’t believe him,’ said the King. ‘Shut him up for a day and a night, give him paint and brushes, and we will see what he can do.’ Well, they shut the boy up for a day and a night, and in the morning the door was opened and the King and the Queen came in. The King took off his hat and put it on the table and it fell to the ground. That boy had painted a picture of a table so like that the King thought it was a real table and tried to put his hat on it. Itis true, and the boy painted the King’s portrait every Saturday until he died, and he had houses and money and footmen and statues in his garden, and his father and mother drove in their carriages and wore sables even in the summer. And some day, Mrs. Kühler, we shall see you in your carriage and this boy painting the portrait of the King.”The story was received in silence. The emotions it aroused in Golda and her son were so profound, so violent that they were dazed. The tension was relieved by a giggle from Lotte, who knew that kings do not wear hats. Mendel sat staring at his picture, which, try as he would, he could not connect with the story.Abramovich said: “I told you so, Mrs. Kühler. I told you something would come of it.” Already he was convinced that Mendel only had to go out into London to make the family’s fortune.But Golda replied: “There’s time enough for that, and don’t go putting ideas into the boy’s head.”There was no danger of that. Mendel’s was not the kind of head into which ideas are easily put. He was slow of comprehension, powerful in his instincts, and everything he perceived had to be referred to them. School was to him a perfectly extraneous experience. What he learned there was of so little use to any purpose of which he was conscious, and it could not be shared with his mother. To her schooling was the law of the land. A strange force took her boy from her every day and, as it were, imprisoned him. When he was fourteen he would be free. She must endure his captivity as she had learned to endure so much else.When Mr. Jacobson had gone she said: “There have been boys like that, and a good boy never forgets his father and mother.”Mendel looked puzzled and said: “WhenIdrew a picture of teacher he caned me.”“Caned you?” cried Golda, horrified.“He often does.”“Thrashed you!” cried Golda; “on the hands?”“No,” replied Mendel, “on the seat and the back.”Golda made him undress, and she gave a gasp of anger when she saw the weals and bruises on his back. “But what did you do?” she cried.“I don’t know,” answered Mendel. This was true. At school he would suddenly find the teacher towering over him in a fury; he would be told to stay behind, and then he would be flogged. He had suffered more from the humiliation than from the pain inflicted. He could never understand why this fury should descend upon him out of his happy dreams. And now as his mother wept over the marks upon his body the suffering in him was released. All the feeling suppressed in him by his inability to understand came tearing out of him and he shook with rage. He could find no words to express these new emotions, which were terrible and frightened him.Lotte came up and felt the weals on his back with her fingers, and she said: “They don’t do that to girls.”“Be quiet, Lotte,” said Golda. “Don’t touch him. You will hurt him.” And she stood staring in amazement at the boy’s back. “That’s an awful mess,” she said to herself, and her thoughts flew back to men who had been flogged by the soldiers in Austria. But this was England, where everybody was left alone. She could not understand it. She did not know what to do. The boy could not be kept from school, for they would come and drag him to it. There were often dreadful scenes in Gun Street when children were dragged off to school. She made Lotte sit at the table and write: “Please, teacher, you must not beat my son. His back is like a railway-line, and it is not good to beat children.” She could think of no threat which could intimidate the teacher, no power she could invoke to her aid. Her powerlessnessappalled her. She signed the letter and thought she would go to the Rabbi and ask him what she must do. “Yes,” she said, “the Rabbi will tell me, and perhaps the Rabbi will write to the teacher also.” She could feel the torture in the boy, and she knew that it must be stopped. It was all very well to knock Harry or Issy about. They could put up with any amount of violence. But Mendel was different. With him pain went so deep. That was what made it horrible. He was like a very little child. It was wicked to hurt him. His silence now was almost more than she could bear.There came a knock at the door. Lotte went to open it and gave a little scream. It was her father come back from America. He came into the room, not different by a hair from when he went away; thinner, perhaps, a little more haggard and hollow under the eyes, so that the slight squint in his right eye, injured to avoid conscription, was more pronounced. He came in as though he had returned from his day’s work, nodded to his wife, and looked at the boy’s back.“Who has done that?” he asked.“At school,” replied Golda. “The teacher.”Jacob took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, picked up a chair and smashed it on the floor. Mendel put on his shirt and coat again and said: “It is like when you knocked the soldier over with the glass.”Jacob gave a roar: “Ah, you remember that? Ah! yes. That was when I had the inn near the barracks. He was an officer. Two of them came in. They were drunk, the swine! The man made for your mother and the officer for your sister. The glasses were big, with a heavy base. I took one of them . . .”“And the man spun round three times and fell flat on the floor,” said Mendel.“Ah! you remember that? Yes. And I lifted him out into the street and left him there in the snow. I was a strong man then. I wanted nothing from them, but if they touch what is mine . . . !” He seized Mendel and lifted him high over his head. He was tremendously excited and could not be got to sit down or to talk of his doings in America or of his voyage. That was his way. He would talk in his own time. His doings would come out piecemeal, over years and years. Now he was entirely absorbed with his fury. He was nearly ill with it and could not eat. Up and down the room he walked, lashing up his rage. Mendel was sent to bed, and until he went to sleep he could hear his father pacing up and down and his mother talking, explaining, entreating.Next morning Mendel had almost forgotten the excitement and went to school as usual. In the middle of an arithmetic lesson in walked Jacob, very white, with his head down. He went quickly up to the teacher and spoke to him quietly. The class was stunned into silence. Jacob raised his fist and the teacher went down. Jacob picked him up, shook him, and threw him into a corner. Then he shouted: “You won’t touch my boy again!” shook himself like a dog, and walked out, closing the door very quietly. The teacher hurried out and did not return. The class slowly recovered from its astonishment, shrill voices grew out of the silence like a strong wind, and books and inkpots began to fly. Soon the walls were streaked and spattered with ink and when it became known that it was Kühler’s father who had done it, Mendel found himself a hero. But he took no pride in it. He was haunted by the teacher’s white, terrified face. He had always thought of the teacher as a nice man. The thrashings inflicted on him had always seemed to him impersonal and outside humanity altogether. Yet because it was his father who hadthrashed the teacher he accepted it as right. At home his father, even in his absence, was the law, and could do no wrong. The violent scene seemed to Mendel to have nothing to do with himself, and he resented having become the centre of attention.The head master hurried in, quelled the class, went on with the lesson where it had been interrupted. Mendel could not attend. He was bewildered by a sudden realization of life outside himself. It was no longer a procession of events, figures, scenes, colours, shapes, light and darkness passing before his eyes, always charming, sometimes terrifying, but something violent which met another something in himself with a fearful impact. It could hurt him, and he knew that it was merciless, for the thing in himself that answered to it and rushed out to meet it was wild and knew no mercy either. He had heard of a thing called the maelstrom in the sea, a kind of spout, with whirling sides, down which great ships were sucked. And he felt that he was being sucked down such a spout, in which he could see all that he had ever known, the mountain and the river in Austria, the train, the telegraph wires, towns, buses, faces, the street, the school, Artie Beech, Abramovich, his father. . . . Only his mother stood firm, and from her came a force to counteract that other force which was dragging him towards the whirlpool.He became conscious of the discomfort in which he lived and was acutely aware of the people by whom he was surrounded.
THENfollowed, for Golda, the blackest years of her life. She removed once more to one room in Gun Street, and she and the two boys earned enough to keep body and soul together. She found work in other people’s houses, helped at parties, and when nothing else was available she went to a little restaurant to assist as scullery-maid, and stayed after closing-time to scrub the tables and sweep the floor. For this she was given crusts of bread and scraps from the plates. She never had a word from her husband, and she knew she would not hear unless he made money. If he failed again, as of course he would, he would live in silence, solitary, proud, avoiding his fellow-men, who would have nothing to do with him except he made the surrender of dignity which it was impossible for him to make. She would not hear from him, and he would return one day unannounced, without a word, as though he had come from the next street; and as likely as not he would have given the coat off his back to some one poorer than himself. . . . Jacob was like that. He would give away on an impulse things that it had cost him weeks of saving to acquire. Low as he stood in the world, he seemed always to be looking downwards, as though he could believe in what came up from the depths but not in anything that went beyond him. Golda could not understand him, but she believed in him absolutely. She knew that he suffered even more than she, and she had learnedfrom him not to complain. The Jews had always suffered. That was made clear in the synagogue, where, in wailing over the captivity in Babylon, Golda found a vent for her own sorrows. She would weep over the sufferings of her race as she wept for those who were dead, her father and her mother, and her father’s father and her little brother, on the anniversary of their death. However poor she might be she had money to buy candles for them, and whatever the cost she kept the observances of her religion.
So she lived isolated and proud, untouched by the excitements her children found in the houses of their friends and in the streets.
Very wild was the life in the neighbourhood of Gun Street. There were constant feuds between Jews and Christians, battles with fists and sticks and stones. Old Jews were insulted and pelted by Christian youths, and the young Jews would take up their cause. There were violent disputes between landlords and tenants, husbands and wives, prostitutes and their bullies. Any evening, walking along Gun Street, you might hear screaming and growling in one of the little houses. Louder and louder it would grow. Suddenly the male voice would be silent, the female would rise to a shriek, the door would open, and out into the street would be propelled a half-naked woman. She would wail and batter on the door, and, if that were of no avail, she would go to the house of a friend and silence would come again. . . . Or sometimes a door would open and a man would be shot out to lie limp and flabby in the gutter.
Harry, the second boy, took to this wild life like a duck to water. He practised with dumb-bells and learned the art of boxing, and so excited Mendel with his feats of strength that he too practised exercises and learned to stand on his hands, and cheerfully allowed his brother to knock him down over and over again in his ambition tolearn the elements of defence and the use of the straight left. In vain: his brain was not quick enough, or was too quick. His hands would never obey him in time, but he dreamed of being a strong man, the strongest man in the world, who by sheer muscle should compel universal admiration and assume authority.
In the family the child’s superiority was acknowledged tacitly. He had his way in everything. He wanted such strange things, and was adamant in his whims. If he were not allowed to do as he wished, he lay on the ground and roared until he was humoured; or he would refuse to eat; or he would go out of the house with the intention of losing himself. As he was known all through the neighbourhood for his beauty that was impossible. He was an object of pride to the neighbours, and whenever he was found far from home, there was always some one who knew him to take him back. But Golda could not realize this, and she suffered tortures.
The boy loved the streets and the shops, the markets with their fruit-stalls and fish-barrows, the brilliant colours in Petticoat Lane. He would wander drinking in with his eyes colour and beauty, shaking with emotion at the sight of the pretty little girls with their little round faces, their ivory skins, and their brilliant black eyes. Ugliness hurt him not at all. It was the condition of things, the dark chaos out of which flashed beauty. But cruelty could drive him nearly mad, and he would tremble with rage and terror at the sight of a woman with a bloody face or a man kicking a horse.
He had a friend, a Christian boy, named Artie Beech, who adored him even as Abramovich adored his father. Golda was alarmed by this friendship, thinking no good could come out of the Christians, and she tried to forbid it, but the boy had his way, and he loved Artie Beech as a child loves a dollor a king his favourite. Together the two boys used to creep home from school gazing into the shop windows. One day they saw a brightly coloured advertisement of a beef extract: a picture of a man rending a lion. “It will make you stronger than a lion,” said Mendel. “Yes,” said Artie, “one drop on the tip of your tongue.” “I would be stronger than Harry if I ate a whole bottle,” replied Mendel, and they decided to save up to buy the strength-giving elixir. It took them seven weeks to save the price of it. Then with immense excitement they bought the treasure, took it home, and, loathing the taste of it, gulped it down and tossed a button for the right to lick the cork. Feeling rather sick, they gazed at each other with frightened eyes, half expecting to swell so that they would burst their clothes. But nothing happened. Mendel took off his coat and felt his biceps and swore that they had grown. Artie took off his coat: yes, his biceps had grown too.
They went through the streets with growing confidence, and at school they were not afraid. Mendel’s new arrogance led him into the only fight he ever had and he was laid low. Aching with humiliation, he shunned Artie Beech and went alone to gaze at the picture of the man rending the lion. It took him a week of hard concentrated thought to realize that the picture and its legend were not to be taken literally, and his close study led him to another and a strangely emotional interest in the picture. His eyes would travel up the line of the man’s body along his arms to the lion’s jaws, and then down its taut back to its paws clutching the ground. The two lines springing together, the two forms locked, gave an impression of strength, of tremendous impact, which, as the boy gazed, became so violent as to make his head ache. At the same time he began to develop an appetite for this shock, and unconsciously used his eyes soas to obtain it. It would sometimes spring up in him suddenly, without his knowing the cause of it, when he watched his mother sitting with her hands folded on her stomach, or cooking with her hand—her big, strong, working hand—on a fish or a loaf of bread.
One day in Bishopsgate, that lordly and splendid thoroughfare which led from the dark streets to the glittering world, he came on a man kneeling on the pavement with coloured chalks. First of all the man dusted the stones with his cap, and then he laid another cap full of little pieces of chalk by his side, and then he drew and smudged and smudged and drew until a slice of salmon appeared. By the side of the salmon he drew a glass of beer with a curl of froth on it and a little bunch of flowers. On another stone he drew a ship at sea in a storm, a black and green sea, and a brown and black sky. Mendel watched him enthralled. What a life! What a career! To go out into the streets and make the dull stones lovely with colour! He saw the man look up and down and then lay a penny on the salmon. A fine gentleman passed by and threw down another penny. . . . Oh, certainly, a career! To make the streets lovely, and immediately to be rewarded!
From school Mendel stole some chalk and decorated the stones in the yard at Gun Street. He drew a bottle and an onion and a fish, though this he rather despised, because it was so easy. Always he had amused himself with drawing. As a tiny child, the first time his father went to America, he drew a picture of a watch to ask for that to be sent him, and this picture had been kept by his mother. And after that he often drew, but chiefly because it made his father and mother proud of him, and they laughed happily at everything he did. The pavement artist filled him with pride and pleasure in the doing of it: and every minute out of school and away from the Rabbihe devoted to drawing. His brothers bought him a box of colours, and he painted imaginary landscapes of rivers and swans and cows and castles. Every picture he made was treasured by his mother. They seemed to her, as they did to himself, perfectly beautiful. He used his water-colours as though they were oils, and laid them on thick, to get as near the pavement artist’s colours as possible. At school there were drawing-lessons, but they seemed to have no relation to this keen private pleasure of his.
In the evenings he would lie on the ground in the kitchen and paint until his eyes and his head ached. Sometimes his perpetual, silent absorption would so exasperate his brothers that they would kick his paints away and make him get up and talk to them. Then he would curse them with all the rich curses of the Yiddish language, and rush away and hide himself; for days he would live in a state of gloom and dark oppression, feeling dimly aware of a difference between him and them which it was beyond his power to explain. He would try to tell his mother what was the matter with him, but she could not understand. His happiness in painting, the keen delight that used to fill him, were to her compensation enough for her anxiety and the stress and strain of her poverty.
His little local fame procured her some relief. At school he won a prize accorded by vote for the most popular boy. This had amazed him, for he had very little traffic with the others, and during playtime used to stand with his back to the wall and his arms folded, staring with unseeing eyes. When his sister asked one of the boys why Mendel had won the vote, the answer she received was: “Hecandraw.” As a result his brothers were helped and his mother was able to get work as a sempstress. They were relieved from the poverty that paralyses. They could go from day to dayand carry their deficit from week to week. They could afford friends, and the visits of friends on a ceremonious basis, and Abramovich was always trying to interest rich men in the wonderful family.
It was Abramovich who bought Mendel his first box of oil-paints, not so much to give the boy pleasure as with the idea that he might learn to paint portraits from photographs. That, however, was not in the boy’s idea. He abandoned his imaginary landscapes and began to paint objects, still in the manner of the pavement artist, thrilled with the discovery that he could more and more exactly reproduce what he saw. He painted a loaf of bread and a cucumber so like the originals that Abramovich was wildly excited and rushed off to bring Mr. Jacobson, a Polish Jew, a timber-merchant and very rich, to see the marvel.
Mendel was unprepared. He sat painting in the kitchen with his mother and Lotte, his younger sister. Abramovich and Mr. Jacobson came in. Jacobson was ruddy, red-haired, with a strange broad face and a flat nose, almost negroid about the nostrils. He wore a frock-coat, a white waistcoat with a cable-chain across it, and rings upon his fingers. Mendel had a horror of him, and was overcome with shyness. Mr. Jacobson put on his spectacles, stared at the picture. “Ye-es,” he said. “That bread could be eaten. That cucumber could be cut and put into the soup. The boy is all right. Eh? Ye-es, and a beautiful boy, too.” Mendel writhed. Golda was almost as overcome with shyness as he. In silence she produced all the boy’s drawings and pictures and laid them before the visitors. Abramovich was loud in his praises, but not too loud, for he knew that Mr. Jacobson loved to talk. And indeed it seemed that Mr. Jacobson would never stop. He stood in the middle of the room and wagged his fat, stumpy hands and held forth:—
“In my country, Mrs. Kühler, there was once a poor boy. He was always drawing. Give him a piece of paper and a pencil and he would draw anything in the world. The teacher at school had to forbid him to draw, for he would learn nothing at all. So one day the teacher could not find that boy. And where do you think they find him? Under the table. The teacher pulled him out and found in his hand a piece of paper—a piece of paper. The teacher looked down at the piece of paper and fainted away. The boy had drawn a picture of the teacher so like that he fainted away. Well, when the teacher came to himself, he said: ‘Boy, did you do that?’ ‘Yes,’ said the boy, ‘I did that.’ ‘Then, said the teacher, ‘I will tell you what you must do. You must paint a portrait of the King and take it to the King, and he will give you money, and carriages, and houses, and rings, and watches, for you and your father, and your uncles and all your family. Ahin and aher. The boy did that. He painted a portrait of the King and he took it to the palace. He went to the front door and knock, knock, knock. A lady opened the door and she said: ‘What do you want, little boy?’ ‘I want to see the King. I have something to show him.’ ‘I am the Queen,’ said the lady. ‘You can show it to me.’ The boy showed the picture and the Queen fainted away. The servants and the King came running in to see what had happened, and they stood like stone. ‘Who did that?’ said the King. ‘I did,’ said the boy. ‘I don’t believe him,’ said the King. ‘Shut him up for a day and a night, give him paint and brushes, and we will see what he can do.’ Well, they shut the boy up for a day and a night, and in the morning the door was opened and the King and the Queen came in. The King took off his hat and put it on the table and it fell to the ground. That boy had painted a picture of a table so like that the King thought it was a real table and tried to put his hat on it. Itis true, and the boy painted the King’s portrait every Saturday until he died, and he had houses and money and footmen and statues in his garden, and his father and mother drove in their carriages and wore sables even in the summer. And some day, Mrs. Kühler, we shall see you in your carriage and this boy painting the portrait of the King.”
The story was received in silence. The emotions it aroused in Golda and her son were so profound, so violent that they were dazed. The tension was relieved by a giggle from Lotte, who knew that kings do not wear hats. Mendel sat staring at his picture, which, try as he would, he could not connect with the story.
Abramovich said: “I told you so, Mrs. Kühler. I told you something would come of it.” Already he was convinced that Mendel only had to go out into London to make the family’s fortune.
But Golda replied: “There’s time enough for that, and don’t go putting ideas into the boy’s head.”
There was no danger of that. Mendel’s was not the kind of head into which ideas are easily put. He was slow of comprehension, powerful in his instincts, and everything he perceived had to be referred to them. School was to him a perfectly extraneous experience. What he learned there was of so little use to any purpose of which he was conscious, and it could not be shared with his mother. To her schooling was the law of the land. A strange force took her boy from her every day and, as it were, imprisoned him. When he was fourteen he would be free. She must endure his captivity as she had learned to endure so much else.
When Mr. Jacobson had gone she said: “There have been boys like that, and a good boy never forgets his father and mother.”
Mendel looked puzzled and said: “WhenIdrew a picture of teacher he caned me.”
“Caned you?” cried Golda, horrified.
“He often does.”
“Thrashed you!” cried Golda; “on the hands?”
“No,” replied Mendel, “on the seat and the back.”
Golda made him undress, and she gave a gasp of anger when she saw the weals and bruises on his back. “But what did you do?” she cried.
“I don’t know,” answered Mendel. This was true. At school he would suddenly find the teacher towering over him in a fury; he would be told to stay behind, and then he would be flogged. He had suffered more from the humiliation than from the pain inflicted. He could never understand why this fury should descend upon him out of his happy dreams. And now as his mother wept over the marks upon his body the suffering in him was released. All the feeling suppressed in him by his inability to understand came tearing out of him and he shook with rage. He could find no words to express these new emotions, which were terrible and frightened him.
Lotte came up and felt the weals on his back with her fingers, and she said: “They don’t do that to girls.”
“Be quiet, Lotte,” said Golda. “Don’t touch him. You will hurt him.” And she stood staring in amazement at the boy’s back. “That’s an awful mess,” she said to herself, and her thoughts flew back to men who had been flogged by the soldiers in Austria. But this was England, where everybody was left alone. She could not understand it. She did not know what to do. The boy could not be kept from school, for they would come and drag him to it. There were often dreadful scenes in Gun Street when children were dragged off to school. She made Lotte sit at the table and write: “Please, teacher, you must not beat my son. His back is like a railway-line, and it is not good to beat children.” She could think of no threat which could intimidate the teacher, no power she could invoke to her aid. Her powerlessnessappalled her. She signed the letter and thought she would go to the Rabbi and ask him what she must do. “Yes,” she said, “the Rabbi will tell me, and perhaps the Rabbi will write to the teacher also.” She could feel the torture in the boy, and she knew that it must be stopped. It was all very well to knock Harry or Issy about. They could put up with any amount of violence. But Mendel was different. With him pain went so deep. That was what made it horrible. He was like a very little child. It was wicked to hurt him. His silence now was almost more than she could bear.
There came a knock at the door. Lotte went to open it and gave a little scream. It was her father come back from America. He came into the room, not different by a hair from when he went away; thinner, perhaps, a little more haggard and hollow under the eyes, so that the slight squint in his right eye, injured to avoid conscription, was more pronounced. He came in as though he had returned from his day’s work, nodded to his wife, and looked at the boy’s back.
“Who has done that?” he asked.
“At school,” replied Golda. “The teacher.”
Jacob took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, picked up a chair and smashed it on the floor. Mendel put on his shirt and coat again and said: “It is like when you knocked the soldier over with the glass.”
Jacob gave a roar: “Ah, you remember that? Ah! yes. That was when I had the inn near the barracks. He was an officer. Two of them came in. They were drunk, the swine! The man made for your mother and the officer for your sister. The glasses were big, with a heavy base. I took one of them . . .”
“And the man spun round three times and fell flat on the floor,” said Mendel.
“Ah! you remember that? Yes. And I lifted him out into the street and left him there in the snow. I was a strong man then. I wanted nothing from them, but if they touch what is mine . . . !” He seized Mendel and lifted him high over his head. He was tremendously excited and could not be got to sit down or to talk of his doings in America or of his voyage. That was his way. He would talk in his own time. His doings would come out piecemeal, over years and years. Now he was entirely absorbed with his fury. He was nearly ill with it and could not eat. Up and down the room he walked, lashing up his rage. Mendel was sent to bed, and until he went to sleep he could hear his father pacing up and down and his mother talking, explaining, entreating.
Next morning Mendel had almost forgotten the excitement and went to school as usual. In the middle of an arithmetic lesson in walked Jacob, very white, with his head down. He went quickly up to the teacher and spoke to him quietly. The class was stunned into silence. Jacob raised his fist and the teacher went down. Jacob picked him up, shook him, and threw him into a corner. Then he shouted: “You won’t touch my boy again!” shook himself like a dog, and walked out, closing the door very quietly. The teacher hurried out and did not return. The class slowly recovered from its astonishment, shrill voices grew out of the silence like a strong wind, and books and inkpots began to fly. Soon the walls were streaked and spattered with ink and when it became known that it was Kühler’s father who had done it, Mendel found himself a hero. But he took no pride in it. He was haunted by the teacher’s white, terrified face. He had always thought of the teacher as a nice man. The thrashings inflicted on him had always seemed to him impersonal and outside humanity altogether. Yet because it was his father who hadthrashed the teacher he accepted it as right. At home his father, even in his absence, was the law, and could do no wrong. The violent scene seemed to Mendel to have nothing to do with himself, and he resented having become the centre of attention.
The head master hurried in, quelled the class, went on with the lesson where it had been interrupted. Mendel could not attend. He was bewildered by a sudden realization of life outside himself. It was no longer a procession of events, figures, scenes, colours, shapes, light and darkness passing before his eyes, always charming, sometimes terrifying, but something violent which met another something in himself with a fearful impact. It could hurt him, and he knew that it was merciless, for the thing in himself that answered to it and rushed out to meet it was wild and knew no mercy either. He had heard of a thing called the maelstrom in the sea, a kind of spout, with whirling sides, down which great ships were sucked. And he felt that he was being sucked down such a spout, in which he could see all that he had ever known, the mountain and the river in Austria, the train, the telegraph wires, towns, buses, faces, the street, the school, Artie Beech, Abramovich, his father. . . . Only his mother stood firm, and from her came a force to counteract that other force which was dragging him towards the whirlpool.
He became conscious of the discomfort in which he lived and was acutely aware of the people by whom he was surrounded.