VIEDGAR FROITZHEIM AND OTHERSVERYbright was the brass on Mr. Froitzheim’s front door, very bright the face of the smiling maid who opened it. Mendel blushed and stammered inaudibly.“Will you come in?” said the maid, “and I will ask Mr. Froitzheim.”She left Mendel in the hall and disappeared. This was a very large house, marvellously clean and light and airy. The wallpaper and the woodwork were white. On the stairs was a brilliant blue carpet. Through the window at the end of the passage were seen trees and a vast panorama of London—roofs, chimneys, steeples, domes—under a shifting pall of blue smoke.The maid went into the studio and told Mr. Froitzheim that a boy was waiting for him—a boy who looked like an Italian. She thought he might be selling images, and he had a package under his arm. Mr. Froitzheim told her to bring the visitor in. He was arranging draperies, Persian and Indian coats, yellow and red and blue, and he did not look up when Mendel was shown in. He was a little dark Jew, neat and dapper in figure and very sprucely dressed, but so Oriental that he looked out of place in Western clothes. But that impression was soon lost in Mendel’s awe of the studio. Here was a place where real pictures were painted. There were easels, a table full of paints, an etching plant, a model’s throne, a lay figure, pictures on the walls, stacks of pictures behind the door, andthe little man standing there, fingering the silks, was a real artist.“Hullo, boy!” said Mr. Froitzheim.“M-Mendel Kühler.”“Something to show me, eh?”“Ye-yes. Pictures.”“What did you say your name was?”“Kühler. Mendel Kühler.”“Oh yes. I remember. You know Maurice Birnbaum?”“No.”“Eh? . . . What do you think of these? Lovely, eh? Bought them in India. You should go there. You don’t know what sunlight is until you’ve been there—to the East. Ah, the East! Fills you with sunlight, opens your eyes to colour. . . . Persian prints! What do you think of these?”He showed Mendel a whole series of exquisite things which moved him so profoundly that he forgot altogether why he had come and began to stammer out his rapture, a condition of delight to which Mr. Froitzheim was so unaccustomed that he stepped back and stared at his visitor. There was a glow in the boy’s face which gave it a seraphic expression. Mr. Froitzheim tiptoed to the door and called, “Edith! Edith!” And his wife came rustling in. She was a thin little woman with a friendly smile and an air of being only too amiable for a world that needed sadly little of the kindness with which she was bursting. They stood by the door and talked in whispers, and Mendel was brought back to earth by hearing her say, “Poor child!” He knew she meant himself, and his inclination was to fly from the room, but they barred the door. She came undulating towards him, and she seemed to him terrifyingly beautiful, the most lovely lady he had ever seen. He thought Mr. Froitzheim must be a very wonderful artist to have such a studio, such a house, and such a woman to live with him.Mrs. Froitzheim made him sit down and drew his attention to a bowl of flowers—tulips and daffodils. Mendel touched them with his fingers, lovingly caressed the fleshy petals of a tulip. Mrs. Froitzheim went over to her husband and whispered to him, who said:—“Yes. Yes. It is true. He responds to beauty like a flower to the sun.”In the centre of the studio was a large picture nearly finished of three children and a rocking-horse, cleverly and realistically painted. Mendel looked at it enviously, with a sinking in the pit of his stomach, partly because he could not like it, and partly because he felt how impossible it would be for him to cover so vast a canvas.“Like it?” said Mr. Froitzheim, wheeling it about to catch the best light.“Yes,” said Mendel, horrified at his own insincerity and unhappy at the vague notion possessing him that the picture was too large for him, whose notion of art was concentration upon an object until by some inexplicable process it had yielded up its beauty in paint. Composing and making pictures he could not understand.“Well, well,” said Mr. Froitzheim. “So you want to be an artist? Art, as Michael Angelo said, is a music and mystery that very few are privileged to understand. I have been asked by the committee to give my opinion, and I feel that it is a serious responsibility. It is no light thing to advise a young man to take up an artistic career.”“Yes, Edgar, that is very true,” said his wife, with a wide reassuring smile at Mendel, whom she thought a very charming, very touching little figure, standing there drinking in the words as they fell from Edgar’s lips.Mr. Froitzheim produced a pair of spectacles and balanced them on his nose.“It is a serious thing, not only for the sake ofthe young man but also for Art’s sake. The sense of beauty is a dangerous possession. It is like a razor, safe enough when it is sharp, injurious when it is blunted. Your future, it seems, depends upon my word. I am to say whether I think your work promising enough to justify your being sent to a school. I asked you to bring more of your work to confirm the impression made by what I have already seen.”He spoke in an alert, sibilant voice so quickly that his words whirled through Mendel’s mind and conveyed very little meaning. Only the words “a music and mystery” lingered and grew. They were such lovely words, and expressed for him something very living in his experience, something that lay, as he would have said, below his heart. He loosened the string of his untidy parcel and took out the picture of the apples. There were music and mystery in it, and he held it very lovingly as he offered it to Mrs. Froitzheim, much as she had just offered him the bowl of flowers.“Very well painted indeed,” said she, and Mendel winced. He turned to the artist as to an equal, expecting not so much praise as recognition. Mr. Froitzheim took the picture from him and went near the window. He became more solemn than ever.“This is much better than the drawings. Have you always painted still-life?”“I painted what there was at home.”“Have you studied the still-life in the galleries? Do you know Fantin-Latour’s work?”“No,” said Mendel blankly.“Of course, there is no doubt that you must go on.”Mendel had never had any doubt of it, and he began to feel more at his ease. That was settled then. There would be no more factory for him. He was to be an artist, a great artist. He knew that Mr. Froitzheim was more excited than he lethimself appear. The apples could no more be denied than the sun outside or the flowers on the table. . . . He looked with more interest at Mr. Froitzheim’s picture. It amused him, much as the drawings in the illustrated papers amused him, and he was pleased with the quality of the paint. He was still alarmed by the hugeness of it. His eyes could not focus it, nor could his mind grasp the conception.Mrs. Froitzheim asked him to stay to tea and encouraged him to talk, and he told her in his vivid childish way about Golda and Issy and Harry and Leah and Lotte. She found him delightfully romantic and told him that he must not be afraid to come again, and that they would be only too glad to help him. Mr. Froitzheim said:—“I will write to the committee. There is only one school in London, the Detmold. You should begin there next term, six weeks from now. Don’t be afraid, work hard, and we will make an artist of you. In time to come we shall be proud of you. I will write to your mother, and one of these days I will give myself the pleasure of calling on her. . . . You must come and see me again, and I will take you to see pictures.”Mendel was in too much of a whirl to remember to say “Thank you.” He had an enormous reverence for Mr. Froitzheim as a real artist, but as a man he instinctively distrusted him. It takes a Jew to catch a Jew, and Mendel scented in Mr. Froitzheim the Jew turned Englishman and prosperous gentleman. And in his childish confidence he was aware of uneasiness in his host, but of course Mr. Froitzheim could easily bear down that impression, though he could not obliterate it. He was an advanced artist and was just settling down after an audacious youth. He had been one of a band of pioneers who had defied the Royal Academy, and he had reached the awkward age in a pioneer’s life when he is forced to realizethat there are people younger than himself. He believed in his “movement,” and wished it to continue on the lines laid down by himself and his friends. To achieve this he deemed it his business to be an influence among the young people and to see that they were properly shepherded into the Detmold, there to learn the gospel according to S. Ingres. He had suffered so much from being a Jew, had been tortured with doubts as to whether he were not a mere calculating fantastic, and here in this boy’s work he had found a quality which took his mind back to his own early enthusiasm. That seemed so long ago that he was shocked and unhappy, and hid his feelings behind the solemnity which he had developed to overawe the easy, comfortable, and well-mannered Englishmen among whom he worked for the cause of art.He was the first self-deceiver Mendel had met, and the encounter disturbed him greatly and depressed him not a little, so that he was rather overawed than elated by the prospect in front of him. He felt strangely flung back upon himself, and that this help given to him was not really help. He was still, as always, utterly alone with his obscure desperate purpose for sole companion. Nobody knew about that purpose, since he could never define it except in his work, and that to other people was simply something to be looked at with pleasure or indifference, as it happened. He used to try and explain it to his mother, and she used to nod her head and say: “Yes. Yes. I understand. That is God. He is behind everybody, though it is given to few to know it. It is given to you, and God has chosen you, as He chose Samuel. . . . Yes. Yes. God has chosen you.” And he found it a relief sometimes to think that God had chosen him, though he was disturbed to find Golda much less moved by that idea than by the letter which Mr. Froitzheimwrote to her, in which he said that her son had a very rare talent, a very beautiful nature, and that a day would come when she would be proud of his fame.Yet there were unhappy days of waiting. Jacob would not hear of his leaving the factory until everything was settled, and when Mendel told the foreman he was probably going to leave to be an artist, that worthy drew the most horrible picture of the artist’s life as a mixture of debauchery and starvation, and told a story of a friend of his, a marvellous sculptor, who had come down to carving urns for graves—all through the drink and the models; much better, he said, to stick to a certain income and the saints.At last Maurice Birnbaum came in his motor-car. Everything was settled. The fees at the Detmold would be paid as long as the reports were satisfactory, and Mendel would be allowed five shillings a week pocket-money, but he must be well-behaved and clean, and he must read good literature and learn to write good English. “I will see to that,” said Maurice. “I am to take him now with some of his work to see Sir Julius. His fortune is made, Mrs. Kühler. Isn’t it wonderful? He is a genius. He has the world at his feet. Everything is open to him. I have been to Oxford, Mrs. Kühler, but I shall never have anything like the opportunities that he will have. It is marvellous to think of his drawing like that in your kitchen.” Maurice was really excited. His heart was as full of kindness as a honeycomb of honey, but he had no tact. His words fell on Golda and Mendel like hailstones. They nipped and stung and chilled. Golda looked at Mendel, he at her, and they stood ashamed. “We must hurry,” said Maurice. “Sir Julius must not be kept waiting. He is a stickler for punctuality.”As a matter of fact, Maurice only knew Sir Julius officially. His family had never beenadmitted to the society in which Sir Julius was a power and a light. The entrance to the house of the millionaire was a far greater event to him than it was to Mendel.The splendid motor-car rolled through the wonderful crowded streets, Maurice fussing and telling Mendel to take care his parcel did not scratch the paint, and swung up past the Polytechnic into the desolation of Portland Place. At a corner house they stopped. The double door was swung open by two powdered footmen, and by the inner door stood a bald, rubicund butler. Maurice gave his name, told Mendel to wait, and followed the butler up a magnificent marble staircase with an ormolu balustrade. Mendel was left standing with his parcel, while one of the footmen mounted guard over him. He stood there for a long time, still ashamed, bewildered, smelling money, money, money, until he reeled. It made him think of Mr. Kuit, who alone of his acquaintance could have been at his ease in such splendour. He felt beggarly, but he was stiffened in his pride.The butler appeared presently and conducted him upstairs to a vast apartment all crystal and cloth of gold. In the far corner sat a group of people, among whom, in his confusion, Mendel could only distinguish Maurice Birnbaum and a small, wrinkled, bald old man with a beard, whose eyes were quick and black, peering out from under the yellow skull, peering out and taking nothing in. For the purposes of taking in his nose seemed more than sufficient. It was like a beak, like an inverted scoop. And yet his features were not so very different from those of the old men at home whom Mendel reverenced. There was a strange dignity in them, yet not a trace of the fine quality of the old faces he loved that looked so sorrowfully out on the world, and through their eyes and through every line seemed to absorb from the world all its suffering, all its vileness, and to transmuteit into strong human beauty. There were some women present, but they made no impression whatever on Mendel, who was entirely occupied with Sir Julius and with resisting the feeling of helplessness with which he was inspired in his presence. He heard Maurice Birnbaum talking about him, describing his life, his mother’s kitchen, the street where he lived, and then he was told to exhibit his pictures. A footman appeared and put out a chair for him, and on this, one after another, he placed his drawings and pictures. Not a word was said. Even the apples were received in silence. Sir Julius gave a grunt and began to talk to one of the women. Maurice gave Mendel to understand that the interview was over, and the poor boy was conducted downstairs by the butler. He had not a penny in his pocket and had to walk all the way home with his parcel, which his arms were hardly long enough to hold.
VERYbright was the brass on Mr. Froitzheim’s front door, very bright the face of the smiling maid who opened it. Mendel blushed and stammered inaudibly.
“Will you come in?” said the maid, “and I will ask Mr. Froitzheim.”
She left Mendel in the hall and disappeared. This was a very large house, marvellously clean and light and airy. The wallpaper and the woodwork were white. On the stairs was a brilliant blue carpet. Through the window at the end of the passage were seen trees and a vast panorama of London—roofs, chimneys, steeples, domes—under a shifting pall of blue smoke.
The maid went into the studio and told Mr. Froitzheim that a boy was waiting for him—a boy who looked like an Italian. She thought he might be selling images, and he had a package under his arm. Mr. Froitzheim told her to bring the visitor in. He was arranging draperies, Persian and Indian coats, yellow and red and blue, and he did not look up when Mendel was shown in. He was a little dark Jew, neat and dapper in figure and very sprucely dressed, but so Oriental that he looked out of place in Western clothes. But that impression was soon lost in Mendel’s awe of the studio. Here was a place where real pictures were painted. There were easels, a table full of paints, an etching plant, a model’s throne, a lay figure, pictures on the walls, stacks of pictures behind the door, andthe little man standing there, fingering the silks, was a real artist.
“Hullo, boy!” said Mr. Froitzheim.
“M-Mendel Kühler.”
“Something to show me, eh?”
“Ye-yes. Pictures.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Kühler. Mendel Kühler.”
“Oh yes. I remember. You know Maurice Birnbaum?”
“No.”
“Eh? . . . What do you think of these? Lovely, eh? Bought them in India. You should go there. You don’t know what sunlight is until you’ve been there—to the East. Ah, the East! Fills you with sunlight, opens your eyes to colour. . . . Persian prints! What do you think of these?”
He showed Mendel a whole series of exquisite things which moved him so profoundly that he forgot altogether why he had come and began to stammer out his rapture, a condition of delight to which Mr. Froitzheim was so unaccustomed that he stepped back and stared at his visitor. There was a glow in the boy’s face which gave it a seraphic expression. Mr. Froitzheim tiptoed to the door and called, “Edith! Edith!” And his wife came rustling in. She was a thin little woman with a friendly smile and an air of being only too amiable for a world that needed sadly little of the kindness with which she was bursting. They stood by the door and talked in whispers, and Mendel was brought back to earth by hearing her say, “Poor child!” He knew she meant himself, and his inclination was to fly from the room, but they barred the door. She came undulating towards him, and she seemed to him terrifyingly beautiful, the most lovely lady he had ever seen. He thought Mr. Froitzheim must be a very wonderful artist to have such a studio, such a house, and such a woman to live with him.
Mrs. Froitzheim made him sit down and drew his attention to a bowl of flowers—tulips and daffodils. Mendel touched them with his fingers, lovingly caressed the fleshy petals of a tulip. Mrs. Froitzheim went over to her husband and whispered to him, who said:—
“Yes. Yes. It is true. He responds to beauty like a flower to the sun.”
In the centre of the studio was a large picture nearly finished of three children and a rocking-horse, cleverly and realistically painted. Mendel looked at it enviously, with a sinking in the pit of his stomach, partly because he could not like it, and partly because he felt how impossible it would be for him to cover so vast a canvas.
“Like it?” said Mr. Froitzheim, wheeling it about to catch the best light.
“Yes,” said Mendel, horrified at his own insincerity and unhappy at the vague notion possessing him that the picture was too large for him, whose notion of art was concentration upon an object until by some inexplicable process it had yielded up its beauty in paint. Composing and making pictures he could not understand.
“Well, well,” said Mr. Froitzheim. “So you want to be an artist? Art, as Michael Angelo said, is a music and mystery that very few are privileged to understand. I have been asked by the committee to give my opinion, and I feel that it is a serious responsibility. It is no light thing to advise a young man to take up an artistic career.”
“Yes, Edgar, that is very true,” said his wife, with a wide reassuring smile at Mendel, whom she thought a very charming, very touching little figure, standing there drinking in the words as they fell from Edgar’s lips.
Mr. Froitzheim produced a pair of spectacles and balanced them on his nose.
“It is a serious thing, not only for the sake ofthe young man but also for Art’s sake. The sense of beauty is a dangerous possession. It is like a razor, safe enough when it is sharp, injurious when it is blunted. Your future, it seems, depends upon my word. I am to say whether I think your work promising enough to justify your being sent to a school. I asked you to bring more of your work to confirm the impression made by what I have already seen.”
He spoke in an alert, sibilant voice so quickly that his words whirled through Mendel’s mind and conveyed very little meaning. Only the words “a music and mystery” lingered and grew. They were such lovely words, and expressed for him something very living in his experience, something that lay, as he would have said, below his heart. He loosened the string of his untidy parcel and took out the picture of the apples. There were music and mystery in it, and he held it very lovingly as he offered it to Mrs. Froitzheim, much as she had just offered him the bowl of flowers.
“Very well painted indeed,” said she, and Mendel winced. He turned to the artist as to an equal, expecting not so much praise as recognition. Mr. Froitzheim took the picture from him and went near the window. He became more solemn than ever.
“This is much better than the drawings. Have you always painted still-life?”
“I painted what there was at home.”
“Have you studied the still-life in the galleries? Do you know Fantin-Latour’s work?”
“No,” said Mendel blankly.
“Of course, there is no doubt that you must go on.”
Mendel had never had any doubt of it, and he began to feel more at his ease. That was settled then. There would be no more factory for him. He was to be an artist, a great artist. He knew that Mr. Froitzheim was more excited than he lethimself appear. The apples could no more be denied than the sun outside or the flowers on the table. . . . He looked with more interest at Mr. Froitzheim’s picture. It amused him, much as the drawings in the illustrated papers amused him, and he was pleased with the quality of the paint. He was still alarmed by the hugeness of it. His eyes could not focus it, nor could his mind grasp the conception.
Mrs. Froitzheim asked him to stay to tea and encouraged him to talk, and he told her in his vivid childish way about Golda and Issy and Harry and Leah and Lotte. She found him delightfully romantic and told him that he must not be afraid to come again, and that they would be only too glad to help him. Mr. Froitzheim said:—
“I will write to the committee. There is only one school in London, the Detmold. You should begin there next term, six weeks from now. Don’t be afraid, work hard, and we will make an artist of you. In time to come we shall be proud of you. I will write to your mother, and one of these days I will give myself the pleasure of calling on her. . . . You must come and see me again, and I will take you to see pictures.”
Mendel was in too much of a whirl to remember to say “Thank you.” He had an enormous reverence for Mr. Froitzheim as a real artist, but as a man he instinctively distrusted him. It takes a Jew to catch a Jew, and Mendel scented in Mr. Froitzheim the Jew turned Englishman and prosperous gentleman. And in his childish confidence he was aware of uneasiness in his host, but of course Mr. Froitzheim could easily bear down that impression, though he could not obliterate it. He was an advanced artist and was just settling down after an audacious youth. He had been one of a band of pioneers who had defied the Royal Academy, and he had reached the awkward age in a pioneer’s life when he is forced to realizethat there are people younger than himself. He believed in his “movement,” and wished it to continue on the lines laid down by himself and his friends. To achieve this he deemed it his business to be an influence among the young people and to see that they were properly shepherded into the Detmold, there to learn the gospel according to S. Ingres. He had suffered so much from being a Jew, had been tortured with doubts as to whether he were not a mere calculating fantastic, and here in this boy’s work he had found a quality which took his mind back to his own early enthusiasm. That seemed so long ago that he was shocked and unhappy, and hid his feelings behind the solemnity which he had developed to overawe the easy, comfortable, and well-mannered Englishmen among whom he worked for the cause of art.
He was the first self-deceiver Mendel had met, and the encounter disturbed him greatly and depressed him not a little, so that he was rather overawed than elated by the prospect in front of him. He felt strangely flung back upon himself, and that this help given to him was not really help. He was still, as always, utterly alone with his obscure desperate purpose for sole companion. Nobody knew about that purpose, since he could never define it except in his work, and that to other people was simply something to be looked at with pleasure or indifference, as it happened. He used to try and explain it to his mother, and she used to nod her head and say: “Yes. Yes. I understand. That is God. He is behind everybody, though it is given to few to know it. It is given to you, and God has chosen you, as He chose Samuel. . . . Yes. Yes. God has chosen you.” And he found it a relief sometimes to think that God had chosen him, though he was disturbed to find Golda much less moved by that idea than by the letter which Mr. Froitzheimwrote to her, in which he said that her son had a very rare talent, a very beautiful nature, and that a day would come when she would be proud of his fame.
Yet there were unhappy days of waiting. Jacob would not hear of his leaving the factory until everything was settled, and when Mendel told the foreman he was probably going to leave to be an artist, that worthy drew the most horrible picture of the artist’s life as a mixture of debauchery and starvation, and told a story of a friend of his, a marvellous sculptor, who had come down to carving urns for graves—all through the drink and the models; much better, he said, to stick to a certain income and the saints.
At last Maurice Birnbaum came in his motor-car. Everything was settled. The fees at the Detmold would be paid as long as the reports were satisfactory, and Mendel would be allowed five shillings a week pocket-money, but he must be well-behaved and clean, and he must read good literature and learn to write good English. “I will see to that,” said Maurice. “I am to take him now with some of his work to see Sir Julius. His fortune is made, Mrs. Kühler. Isn’t it wonderful? He is a genius. He has the world at his feet. Everything is open to him. I have been to Oxford, Mrs. Kühler, but I shall never have anything like the opportunities that he will have. It is marvellous to think of his drawing like that in your kitchen.” Maurice was really excited. His heart was as full of kindness as a honeycomb of honey, but he had no tact. His words fell on Golda and Mendel like hailstones. They nipped and stung and chilled. Golda looked at Mendel, he at her, and they stood ashamed. “We must hurry,” said Maurice. “Sir Julius must not be kept waiting. He is a stickler for punctuality.”
As a matter of fact, Maurice only knew Sir Julius officially. His family had never beenadmitted to the society in which Sir Julius was a power and a light. The entrance to the house of the millionaire was a far greater event to him than it was to Mendel.
The splendid motor-car rolled through the wonderful crowded streets, Maurice fussing and telling Mendel to take care his parcel did not scratch the paint, and swung up past the Polytechnic into the desolation of Portland Place. At a corner house they stopped. The double door was swung open by two powdered footmen, and by the inner door stood a bald, rubicund butler. Maurice gave his name, told Mendel to wait, and followed the butler up a magnificent marble staircase with an ormolu balustrade. Mendel was left standing with his parcel, while one of the footmen mounted guard over him. He stood there for a long time, still ashamed, bewildered, smelling money, money, money, until he reeled. It made him think of Mr. Kuit, who alone of his acquaintance could have been at his ease in such splendour. He felt beggarly, but he was stiffened in his pride.
The butler appeared presently and conducted him upstairs to a vast apartment all crystal and cloth of gold. In the far corner sat a group of people, among whom, in his confusion, Mendel could only distinguish Maurice Birnbaum and a small, wrinkled, bald old man with a beard, whose eyes were quick and black, peering out from under the yellow skull, peering out and taking nothing in. For the purposes of taking in his nose seemed more than sufficient. It was like a beak, like an inverted scoop. And yet his features were not so very different from those of the old men at home whom Mendel reverenced. There was a strange dignity in them, yet not a trace of the fine quality of the old faces he loved that looked so sorrowfully out on the world, and through their eyes and through every line seemed to absorb from the world all its suffering, all its vileness, and to transmuteit into strong human beauty. There were some women present, but they made no impression whatever on Mendel, who was entirely occupied with Sir Julius and with resisting the feeling of helplessness with which he was inspired in his presence. He heard Maurice Birnbaum talking about him, describing his life, his mother’s kitchen, the street where he lived, and then he was told to exhibit his pictures. A footman appeared and put out a chair for him, and on this, one after another, he placed his drawings and pictures. Not a word was said. Even the apples were received in silence. Sir Julius gave a grunt and began to talk to one of the women. Maurice gave Mendel to understand that the interview was over, and the poor boy was conducted downstairs by the butler. He had not a penny in his pocket and had to walk all the way home with his parcel, which his arms were hardly long enough to hold.