IVFIRST LOVEFORMendel every day became romantic, though he suffered tortures of shyness and used to bolt like a rabbit through the doors of the Polytechnic, rush upstairs to his easel, and never raise his eyes from it except to gaze at the objects placed before him. He worked in a frenzy, convinced that it was his business to translate the object on to the canvas. When he had done that he felt that the object had no further existence. It ought to vanish as completely as his consuming interest in it. As a matter of fact, it never did vanish, but it was lost in the praises of Mr. Sivwright, and the young women and old ladies who attended the class. The first task set the class after he joined it was a ginger-beer bottle, of which his rendering was declared to be a marvel, even to the high light on the marble in the neck of the bottle.He was rather small for his age and was almost absurdly beautiful, with his curly hair, round Austrian head, and amusing pricked ears. His eyes were set very wide apart. They were blue. His nose was straight, and very slightly tip-tilted, and his lips were as delicately modelled as the petals of a rose. They were always tremulous as he shrank under the vivid impressions that poured in on him in bewildering profusion. He began to grow physically and spiritually, though not at all mentally, and he lived in a state of bewilderment, retaining shrewdness enough to cling to the necessary plain fact that he was at the school tobe a success, for if he failed he would sink back into the already detestable world inhabited by Issy and Harry.He created quite a stir at the school. Mr. Sivwright, a Lancashire Scotsman, whose youthful revolt against commerce and grime had carried him in the direction of art only so far as the municipal school, said he was an infant prodigy and made a show of him. To Mendel’s disgust Mr. Sivwright assured the other pupils that he was a Pole. This was his first intimation that there was, in the splendid free Christian world, a prejudice against Jews. He was rather shocked and disgusted, for never in his life had he found occasion to call anything by other than its right name. It took him weeks to conquer his shyness sufficiently to protest.“I am a Jew,” he said to Mr. Sivwright. “Why do you call me a Pole?”“Well,” said Mr. Sivwright, “there’s Chopin, you know, and Paderewski, don’t you know, and Kosciusko, and the Jews don’t stand for anything but money. And, after all, you do come from Poland.”“But I am a Jew.”“You don’t look it, and there’s some swing about being a Pole. There’s no swing about being a Jew. It stops dead, you know. I don’t know why it is, but it stops dead.”The words frightened Mendel. How awful it would be if he were to stop dead, to reach the Polytechnic and to go no further!He was soon taken beyond the Polytechnic, for Mr. Sivwright led him to the National Gallery and showed him the treasures there. The boy was at once prostrate before Greuze. Ah! there were softness, tenderness, charm: all that he had lacked and longed for. It was in vain that Mr. Sivwright took him to the Van Eycks and the Teniers and the Franz Hals, striking an attitude and saying:“Fine! Dramatic! That’s the real stuff!” The boy would return to his Greuze and pour out on the pretty maidens all the longings for emotion with which he was filled, and the yearning seemed to him to be the irresistible torrent of art which carried those who felt it to the pinnacles of fame. . . . Yet he knew that Mr. Sivwright was a shoddy failure of a man, and he knew that Mr. Sivwright’s ecstasies were forced and had small connection with the pictures before him. He also knew that he had not the least desire to paint like Greuze, but he could not resist the fascination of the pretty maidens and the gush of feeling he had in front of them. The Italians he did not understand and Velasquez and El Greco repelled him. Also, the pictures as a whole excited him so that they ran into each other and he could not extricate them, and Greuze became his stand-by. He felt safe with Greuze.Every day he used to go home and tell his mother of the day’s doings, from the moment when he mounted the bus in the morning to the time when he walked home in the evening. He gave her minute accounts of all the people in the class, of the cheap restaurant where he had lunch, of the marvels of the streets: the old women selling flowers at Oxford Circus; the gorgeous shop-windows; the illuminated signs and advertisements, green, red, and yellow; the theatres; the posters of the comic men outside the music-halls; the rich people in their motor-cars; the marvellous ladies in their silks and their furs; the poor men selling matches; the scarlet soldiers and blue sailors; the big policemen who stopped the traffic with their white hands; the awful, endless desolation of Portland Place, with trees—actually trees—at the end of it; the whirl, the glitter, the roar, the splendour of London. And he used to mimic for her the strange people he saw, the mincing ladies and the lordly shopwalkers, the tittering girlsand the men working in the streets. The more excited he was the more depressed was Golda. What was it all for? Why could not people live a decent quiet life? Why was all this whirligig revolving round the prison? . . . But she smiled and laughed and applauded him, and believed him when he said none of the Christians could draw as well as he.He began to win prizes. It became his whole object to beat the Christians. What they told him to paint he would paint better than any of them. And by sheer will and concentration he succeeded.Mr. Sivwright said there was no holding him, and very soon declared he had nothing more to learn.This was taken by Mendel and his family to mean that he was now an artist. In all good faith he established himself in a room below the workshop at home, called it his studio, and set to work. For a few months he painted apples, fish, oranges, portraits of his mother, brothers, and sisters, and for a time was able to sell them among his acquaintance. He had one or two commissions for portraits and could always make a few shillings by painting from photographs. But appreciation of art among his own people was limited; he soon came to an end of it, and there was that other world calling to him. Art lay beyond that other world. He felt sure of that. It lay beyond Mr. Sivwright. If he stayed among his own people he would stop dead; for he knew now that it was true that the Jews stopped dead.And then to his horror he stopped. For no reason at all his skill, his enthusiasm, his eagerness left him. He forced himself to paint, transferred innumerable idiotic faces from photographs to cigar-box lids, made his mother neglect her work to sit to him, bribed Lotte to be his model, but hated and loathed everything that he did.He was listless, sometimes feverish, sometimes leaden and cold. Often he thought he was going to die—to die before anything had happened, before anything had emerged from the chaos of his painful vivid impressions.To make things worse, his father came home and said that he would give him six months in which to make his living, and at the end of that time, if he had failed, he would have to go into the workshop.He felt hopeless. He went to see Mr. Sivwright and poured out his woes to him, who wrote a letter to Jacob saying that his son was a genius and would be one of the greatest of painters. Jacob said: “What is a genius? I do not know. I know what a man is, and a man works for his living. In six months, if you can make fifteen shillings a week I will believe in this painting. If not, what is there to believe? What will you do when you are to marry, heh? Tell me that. Will your little tubes of paint keep a wife, heh? Tell me that.”Mendel could say nothing. He could do nothing. He gave up even trying to paint, for he might as well have played with mud-pies. He borrowed money from his brothers and prowled about the streets, and went to the National Gallery. Greuze meant nothing to him now. He began to feel, very faintly, the force of Michael Angelo, but the rest only filled him with despair. He knew nothing—nothing at all. He could not even begin to see how the pictures were painted. They were miraculous and detestable. . . . He went home and comforted himself with a little picture of some apples on a plate. He had painted it two years before in an ecstasy—a thrilling love for the form, the colour, the texture of the fruit and the china. It was good. He knew it was good, but he knew he could do nothing like it now—never again, perhaps.And how disgusting the streets had become! Such a litter, such a noise, such aimless, ugly people! He could understand his mother’s horror of them. Ah! she never failed him. To her his words were always music, his presence was always light. Half-dead and miserable as he was, she could know and love the aching heart of him that lived so furiously behind all the death and the misery and the ashes of young hopes that crusted him. She was like the sky and the trees. She was like the young grass springing and waving so delicately in the wind. She was like the water and the rolling hills. . . . He had discovered these things at Hampstead, whither he had gone out of sheer aimlessness. He had never been in the Tube, and one day, with a shilling borrowed from Harry, it seemed appropriate to him to plunge into the bowels of the earth. The oppression of the air, the roar of the train, the flash of the stations as he moved through them, suited his mood, fantastic and futile. He got out at Hampstead.It was his first sight of the country. He could hardly move at first for emotion. He found himself laughing, and he stooped and touched the grass tenderly, almost timidly, as though he were afraid of hurting it. He was fearful at first of walking on it, but that seemed to him childish, and he strode along with his quick, light-footed stride and lost himself in the willow groves. He made a posy of wild-flowers and took them back to his mother, carrying them unashamedly in his hand, entirely oblivious of the smiles of the passers-by. He knew he could not tell his mother of the happiness of that day, and the flowers could say more than any words.Yet the happiness only made his misery more acute. He suffered terribly from the pious narrowness of his home, the restricted, cramped life of his brothers and sisters, who seemed to him to bestealing such life as they had from the religious observances to which they were bound by their father’s rigid will. Prayers at home, prayers in the synagogue: the dreadful monotony of the home, of the talk, of the squabbles: human life forced to be as dull as that of the God who no longer interfered in human life. . . . There was a tragedy in the street. There had been a scandal. A young Rabbi, a gloriously handsome creature, who sang in the synagogue, had fallen in love with a little girl of fourteen who lived opposite the Kühlers. Golda had watched the intrigue from her windows, and she said it was the girl’s fault. The Rabbi used to go every day when her father was out and she used to let him in. Jacob wrote to the girl’s father, and the Rabbi left his lodgings and took a room over a little restaurant round the corner. He had his dinner and went upstairs and sat up all night singing, in his lovely tenor voice, love songs and religious chants, so sweetly that the neighbours threw their windows open and there was a little crowd of people in the street listening. And in the morning they found him with his throat cut.“It was the girl’s fault,” said Golda, but Jacob said: “A man should know better than to melt when a little girl practises her eyes on him.”This tragedy relaxed the nervous strain which had been set up in Mendel by his troubles. New forces stirred in him which often made him hectic and light-headed. Women changed their character for him. They were no longer soothing ministrants, but creatures charged with a mysterious, a maddening charm. He trembled at the rustle of their skirts and his eyes were held riveted by their movements. He was suffocated by his new curiosity about them.Sometimes, in his despair over his painting and the apparently complete disappearance of his talent, he would fill in the day in his father’sworkshop, stretching rabbit-skins on a board. Girls and men worked together, busily, quietly, dexterously, for the most part in silence, for they were paid by the piece and were unwilling to waste time. There was a girl who had just been taken into the workshop to learn the trade. She was small and plump and swarthy, but her face was beautiful, the colour of rich old ivory. Her eyes were black and golden from a ruddy tinge in her eyelashes. Her lips were full and pouting, and she had long blue-black hair, which she was always tossing back over her shoulder. When Mendel was there she rarely took her eyes off him, and even when her head was bent he could feel that she was watching him.He waited for her one evening, and with his knees almost knocking together he asked if she would come to his studio and let him draw her. With a silly giggle she said she would come, and she ran away before he could get out another word.The next evening he waited in his studio for her, but she did not come. So again the next and the next, and it was a whole week before she knocked at the door. He pulled her in. Neither could speak a word. At last he stammered out:“I—I haven’t got my drawing things ready.”“I don’t mind,” she said, and she gave a little shiver.“Are you cold?” he asked, and he touched her neck.She threw up her head, seemed to fall towards him, and their lips met.Thrilling and sweet were the hours they spent, lost in the miracle of desire, finding themselves again, laughing happily, weeping happily, breaking through into the enchanted world, where the few words that either knew had lost their meaning. They were hardly conscious of eachother. They knew nothing of each other, and wished to know nothing except the lovely mystery they shared. It was some time before he even knew her name, or where she lived, or what her people were. She existed for him only in the enchantment she brought into his life, in the release from his burden, in the marvellous free life of the body. Royal he felt, like a king, like a master, and she was a willing slave. From home she would steal good things to eat, and she would sit with shining eyes watching him eat; and then she would wait until he had need of her. . . . Strange, silent, happy hours they spent, free together in the dark little room, free as birds in their nest, happy in warm contact, utterly quiescent, utterly oblivious. . . .Soon their silence became oppressive to them, but neither could break it, so far beyond their years and their childish minds was the experience in which they were joined. When the first ecstasy passed and they became conscious and deliberate in their delight, they had unhappy moments, to escape from which he began to draw her. Into this work poured a strong cool passion altogether new to him, a joy so magnificent that he would forget her altogether. He was tyrannical, and kept her so still that she would almost weep from fatigue and boredom. But he was not satisfied until he had drawn every line of her, and had translated her from the world of the body to the world of vision and the spirit. He knew nothing of that. He was only concerned to draw her as he had drawn the ginger-beer bottle at the Polytechnic. Certain parts of her body—her little budding breasts and her round arms—especially delighted him, and he drew them over and over again. Her head he drew twenty times, and he found a shop in the West End where he could sell every one. And each time he bought her a little present.She was not satisfied with that. She wanted to display him to her friends. She wanted him to take her to music-halls and to join the parade of boys and girls. He refused. That would be profanation. He and she had nothing to do with the world. He and she were the world. Outside it was only his drawing. He could not see that she was unable to share it. Did he not draw her? Did he dream of drawing anything but her? . . . . To go from that to restaurants, the lascivious pleasantries of the streets, the garish music-halls, was to him unthinkable.She said he cared more for his drawing than for her, and indeed he would sometimes draw for a couple of hours and then kiss her almost absent-mindedly, just as she was going. He was so happy and satisfied and could not imagine her being anything less, or that she might wish to express in music-halls and “fun” what he expressed in his work.He felt gloriously confident, and naïvely told his mother how happy he was. Everything had come back. He could draw better than ever. He would be a great artist.Once more he took to painting in the kitchen. The studio was dedicated to the girl, Sara, who came to him in spite of her disappointment. He had spoiled her for other boys.He painted all day long in the kitchen, and his life became ordered and regular. He went for a walk in the morning, then worked all day long until the workpeople began to clatter downstairs, when he would pack up his paint-box and run up to the studio to wait for Sara to come tapping softly at his door.Golda was overjoyed at his new happiness and the budding manhood in him, but she knew that this springtime of his youth could not be without a cause. She knew that he was in love and was fearful of consequences, and dreaded his beingfatally entangled. She kept watch and saw Sara stealthily leave the house hours after the other workpeople had gone. She told Jacob, and Sara was dismissed and forbidden ever to come near the house again.
FORMendel every day became romantic, though he suffered tortures of shyness and used to bolt like a rabbit through the doors of the Polytechnic, rush upstairs to his easel, and never raise his eyes from it except to gaze at the objects placed before him. He worked in a frenzy, convinced that it was his business to translate the object on to the canvas. When he had done that he felt that the object had no further existence. It ought to vanish as completely as his consuming interest in it. As a matter of fact, it never did vanish, but it was lost in the praises of Mr. Sivwright, and the young women and old ladies who attended the class. The first task set the class after he joined it was a ginger-beer bottle, of which his rendering was declared to be a marvel, even to the high light on the marble in the neck of the bottle.
He was rather small for his age and was almost absurdly beautiful, with his curly hair, round Austrian head, and amusing pricked ears. His eyes were set very wide apart. They were blue. His nose was straight, and very slightly tip-tilted, and his lips were as delicately modelled as the petals of a rose. They were always tremulous as he shrank under the vivid impressions that poured in on him in bewildering profusion. He began to grow physically and spiritually, though not at all mentally, and he lived in a state of bewilderment, retaining shrewdness enough to cling to the necessary plain fact that he was at the school tobe a success, for if he failed he would sink back into the already detestable world inhabited by Issy and Harry.
He created quite a stir at the school. Mr. Sivwright, a Lancashire Scotsman, whose youthful revolt against commerce and grime had carried him in the direction of art only so far as the municipal school, said he was an infant prodigy and made a show of him. To Mendel’s disgust Mr. Sivwright assured the other pupils that he was a Pole. This was his first intimation that there was, in the splendid free Christian world, a prejudice against Jews. He was rather shocked and disgusted, for never in his life had he found occasion to call anything by other than its right name. It took him weeks to conquer his shyness sufficiently to protest.
“I am a Jew,” he said to Mr. Sivwright. “Why do you call me a Pole?”
“Well,” said Mr. Sivwright, “there’s Chopin, you know, and Paderewski, don’t you know, and Kosciusko, and the Jews don’t stand for anything but money. And, after all, you do come from Poland.”
“But I am a Jew.”
“You don’t look it, and there’s some swing about being a Pole. There’s no swing about being a Jew. It stops dead, you know. I don’t know why it is, but it stops dead.”
The words frightened Mendel. How awful it would be if he were to stop dead, to reach the Polytechnic and to go no further!
He was soon taken beyond the Polytechnic, for Mr. Sivwright led him to the National Gallery and showed him the treasures there. The boy was at once prostrate before Greuze. Ah! there were softness, tenderness, charm: all that he had lacked and longed for. It was in vain that Mr. Sivwright took him to the Van Eycks and the Teniers and the Franz Hals, striking an attitude and saying:“Fine! Dramatic! That’s the real stuff!” The boy would return to his Greuze and pour out on the pretty maidens all the longings for emotion with which he was filled, and the yearning seemed to him to be the irresistible torrent of art which carried those who felt it to the pinnacles of fame. . . . Yet he knew that Mr. Sivwright was a shoddy failure of a man, and he knew that Mr. Sivwright’s ecstasies were forced and had small connection with the pictures before him. He also knew that he had not the least desire to paint like Greuze, but he could not resist the fascination of the pretty maidens and the gush of feeling he had in front of them. The Italians he did not understand and Velasquez and El Greco repelled him. Also, the pictures as a whole excited him so that they ran into each other and he could not extricate them, and Greuze became his stand-by. He felt safe with Greuze.
Every day he used to go home and tell his mother of the day’s doings, from the moment when he mounted the bus in the morning to the time when he walked home in the evening. He gave her minute accounts of all the people in the class, of the cheap restaurant where he had lunch, of the marvels of the streets: the old women selling flowers at Oxford Circus; the gorgeous shop-windows; the illuminated signs and advertisements, green, red, and yellow; the theatres; the posters of the comic men outside the music-halls; the rich people in their motor-cars; the marvellous ladies in their silks and their furs; the poor men selling matches; the scarlet soldiers and blue sailors; the big policemen who stopped the traffic with their white hands; the awful, endless desolation of Portland Place, with trees—actually trees—at the end of it; the whirl, the glitter, the roar, the splendour of London. And he used to mimic for her the strange people he saw, the mincing ladies and the lordly shopwalkers, the tittering girlsand the men working in the streets. The more excited he was the more depressed was Golda. What was it all for? Why could not people live a decent quiet life? Why was all this whirligig revolving round the prison? . . . But she smiled and laughed and applauded him, and believed him when he said none of the Christians could draw as well as he.
He began to win prizes. It became his whole object to beat the Christians. What they told him to paint he would paint better than any of them. And by sheer will and concentration he succeeded.
Mr. Sivwright said there was no holding him, and very soon declared he had nothing more to learn.
This was taken by Mendel and his family to mean that he was now an artist. In all good faith he established himself in a room below the workshop at home, called it his studio, and set to work. For a few months he painted apples, fish, oranges, portraits of his mother, brothers, and sisters, and for a time was able to sell them among his acquaintance. He had one or two commissions for portraits and could always make a few shillings by painting from photographs. But appreciation of art among his own people was limited; he soon came to an end of it, and there was that other world calling to him. Art lay beyond that other world. He felt sure of that. It lay beyond Mr. Sivwright. If he stayed among his own people he would stop dead; for he knew now that it was true that the Jews stopped dead.
And then to his horror he stopped. For no reason at all his skill, his enthusiasm, his eagerness left him. He forced himself to paint, transferred innumerable idiotic faces from photographs to cigar-box lids, made his mother neglect her work to sit to him, bribed Lotte to be his model, but hated and loathed everything that he did.He was listless, sometimes feverish, sometimes leaden and cold. Often he thought he was going to die—to die before anything had happened, before anything had emerged from the chaos of his painful vivid impressions.
To make things worse, his father came home and said that he would give him six months in which to make his living, and at the end of that time, if he had failed, he would have to go into the workshop.
He felt hopeless. He went to see Mr. Sivwright and poured out his woes to him, who wrote a letter to Jacob saying that his son was a genius and would be one of the greatest of painters. Jacob said: “What is a genius? I do not know. I know what a man is, and a man works for his living. In six months, if you can make fifteen shillings a week I will believe in this painting. If not, what is there to believe? What will you do when you are to marry, heh? Tell me that. Will your little tubes of paint keep a wife, heh? Tell me that.”
Mendel could say nothing. He could do nothing. He gave up even trying to paint, for he might as well have played with mud-pies. He borrowed money from his brothers and prowled about the streets, and went to the National Gallery. Greuze meant nothing to him now. He began to feel, very faintly, the force of Michael Angelo, but the rest only filled him with despair. He knew nothing—nothing at all. He could not even begin to see how the pictures were painted. They were miraculous and detestable. . . . He went home and comforted himself with a little picture of some apples on a plate. He had painted it two years before in an ecstasy—a thrilling love for the form, the colour, the texture of the fruit and the china. It was good. He knew it was good, but he knew he could do nothing like it now—never again, perhaps.
And how disgusting the streets had become! Such a litter, such a noise, such aimless, ugly people! He could understand his mother’s horror of them. Ah! she never failed him. To her his words were always music, his presence was always light. Half-dead and miserable as he was, she could know and love the aching heart of him that lived so furiously behind all the death and the misery and the ashes of young hopes that crusted him. She was like the sky and the trees. She was like the young grass springing and waving so delicately in the wind. She was like the water and the rolling hills. . . . He had discovered these things at Hampstead, whither he had gone out of sheer aimlessness. He had never been in the Tube, and one day, with a shilling borrowed from Harry, it seemed appropriate to him to plunge into the bowels of the earth. The oppression of the air, the roar of the train, the flash of the stations as he moved through them, suited his mood, fantastic and futile. He got out at Hampstead.
It was his first sight of the country. He could hardly move at first for emotion. He found himself laughing, and he stooped and touched the grass tenderly, almost timidly, as though he were afraid of hurting it. He was fearful at first of walking on it, but that seemed to him childish, and he strode along with his quick, light-footed stride and lost himself in the willow groves. He made a posy of wild-flowers and took them back to his mother, carrying them unashamedly in his hand, entirely oblivious of the smiles of the passers-by. He knew he could not tell his mother of the happiness of that day, and the flowers could say more than any words.
Yet the happiness only made his misery more acute. He suffered terribly from the pious narrowness of his home, the restricted, cramped life of his brothers and sisters, who seemed to him to bestealing such life as they had from the religious observances to which they were bound by their father’s rigid will. Prayers at home, prayers in the synagogue: the dreadful monotony of the home, of the talk, of the squabbles: human life forced to be as dull as that of the God who no longer interfered in human life. . . . There was a tragedy in the street. There had been a scandal. A young Rabbi, a gloriously handsome creature, who sang in the synagogue, had fallen in love with a little girl of fourteen who lived opposite the Kühlers. Golda had watched the intrigue from her windows, and she said it was the girl’s fault. The Rabbi used to go every day when her father was out and she used to let him in. Jacob wrote to the girl’s father, and the Rabbi left his lodgings and took a room over a little restaurant round the corner. He had his dinner and went upstairs and sat up all night singing, in his lovely tenor voice, love songs and religious chants, so sweetly that the neighbours threw their windows open and there was a little crowd of people in the street listening. And in the morning they found him with his throat cut.
“It was the girl’s fault,” said Golda, but Jacob said: “A man should know better than to melt when a little girl practises her eyes on him.”
This tragedy relaxed the nervous strain which had been set up in Mendel by his troubles. New forces stirred in him which often made him hectic and light-headed. Women changed their character for him. They were no longer soothing ministrants, but creatures charged with a mysterious, a maddening charm. He trembled at the rustle of their skirts and his eyes were held riveted by their movements. He was suffocated by his new curiosity about them.
Sometimes, in his despair over his painting and the apparently complete disappearance of his talent, he would fill in the day in his father’sworkshop, stretching rabbit-skins on a board. Girls and men worked together, busily, quietly, dexterously, for the most part in silence, for they were paid by the piece and were unwilling to waste time. There was a girl who had just been taken into the workshop to learn the trade. She was small and plump and swarthy, but her face was beautiful, the colour of rich old ivory. Her eyes were black and golden from a ruddy tinge in her eyelashes. Her lips were full and pouting, and she had long blue-black hair, which she was always tossing back over her shoulder. When Mendel was there she rarely took her eyes off him, and even when her head was bent he could feel that she was watching him.
He waited for her one evening, and with his knees almost knocking together he asked if she would come to his studio and let him draw her. With a silly giggle she said she would come, and she ran away before he could get out another word.
The next evening he waited in his studio for her, but she did not come. So again the next and the next, and it was a whole week before she knocked at the door. He pulled her in. Neither could speak a word. At last he stammered out:
“I—I haven’t got my drawing things ready.”
“I don’t mind,” she said, and she gave a little shiver.
“Are you cold?” he asked, and he touched her neck.
She threw up her head, seemed to fall towards him, and their lips met.
Thrilling and sweet were the hours they spent, lost in the miracle of desire, finding themselves again, laughing happily, weeping happily, breaking through into the enchanted world, where the few words that either knew had lost their meaning. They were hardly conscious of eachother. They knew nothing of each other, and wished to know nothing except the lovely mystery they shared. It was some time before he even knew her name, or where she lived, or what her people were. She existed for him only in the enchantment she brought into his life, in the release from his burden, in the marvellous free life of the body. Royal he felt, like a king, like a master, and she was a willing slave. From home she would steal good things to eat, and she would sit with shining eyes watching him eat; and then she would wait until he had need of her. . . . Strange, silent, happy hours they spent, free together in the dark little room, free as birds in their nest, happy in warm contact, utterly quiescent, utterly oblivious. . . .
Soon their silence became oppressive to them, but neither could break it, so far beyond their years and their childish minds was the experience in which they were joined. When the first ecstasy passed and they became conscious and deliberate in their delight, they had unhappy moments, to escape from which he began to draw her. Into this work poured a strong cool passion altogether new to him, a joy so magnificent that he would forget her altogether. He was tyrannical, and kept her so still that she would almost weep from fatigue and boredom. But he was not satisfied until he had drawn every line of her, and had translated her from the world of the body to the world of vision and the spirit. He knew nothing of that. He was only concerned to draw her as he had drawn the ginger-beer bottle at the Polytechnic. Certain parts of her body—her little budding breasts and her round arms—especially delighted him, and he drew them over and over again. Her head he drew twenty times, and he found a shop in the West End where he could sell every one. And each time he bought her a little present.
She was not satisfied with that. She wanted to display him to her friends. She wanted him to take her to music-halls and to join the parade of boys and girls. He refused. That would be profanation. He and she had nothing to do with the world. He and she were the world. Outside it was only his drawing. He could not see that she was unable to share it. Did he not draw her? Did he dream of drawing anything but her? . . . . To go from that to restaurants, the lascivious pleasantries of the streets, the garish music-halls, was to him unthinkable.
She said he cared more for his drawing than for her, and indeed he would sometimes draw for a couple of hours and then kiss her almost absent-mindedly, just as she was going. He was so happy and satisfied and could not imagine her being anything less, or that she might wish to express in music-halls and “fun” what he expressed in his work.
He felt gloriously confident, and naïvely told his mother how happy he was. Everything had come back. He could draw better than ever. He would be a great artist.
Once more he took to painting in the kitchen. The studio was dedicated to the girl, Sara, who came to him in spite of her disappointment. He had spoiled her for other boys.
He painted all day long in the kitchen, and his life became ordered and regular. He went for a walk in the morning, then worked all day long until the workpeople began to clatter downstairs, when he would pack up his paint-box and run up to the studio to wait for Sara to come tapping softly at his door.
Golda was overjoyed at his new happiness and the budding manhood in him, but she knew that this springtime of his youth could not be without a cause. She knew that he was in love and was fearful of consequences, and dreaded his beingfatally entangled. She kept watch and saw Sara stealthily leave the house hours after the other workpeople had gone. She told Jacob, and Sara was dismissed and forbidden ever to come near the house again.