VIITHE DETMOLDFLUNGinto the art school, he was like a leggy colt in a new field, very shy of it at first, of the trees in the hedges, of the shadows cast by the trees. This place was very different from the Polytechnic. There were fewer old ladies, and more boys of his own age. The teachers were Professors, and the pupils held them in awe and respect. There were real models in the life-class, male and female, and the students, male and female, worked together. No ginger-beer bottles here, where art was a practical business. The school existed for the purpose of teaching the craft of making pictures, and its law was that the basis of the mystery was drawing.Mendel’s first attitude towards the other students was that he was there to beat them all. He would swell with eagerness and enthusiasm, and tell himself that he had something that they all lacked. He would watch their movements, their heads bending over their work, their hands scratching away at the paper, and he could see that they had none of them the vigour that was in himself. And by way of showing how much stronger he was he would use his pencil almost as though it were a chisel and his paper a block of stone out of which he was to carve the likeness of the model. He was rudely taken down when the Professor stood and stared with his melancholy eyes at his production and said:—“Is that the best you can do?”“Yes.”“Why do it?”This was a stock phrase of the Professor’s, but Mendel did not know that, and he was ashamed and outraged when the class tittered.“No,” said the Professor. “I don’t know what that is. It certainly isn’t drawing.” And with his pencil he made a lovely easy sketch of the model, alongside Mendel’s black, forbidding scrawl. It was a masterly thing and it baffled him, and humiliated him because the Professor moved on to the next pupil without another word. Not another line could Mendel draw that day. He sat staring at the Professor’s sketch and at his own drawing, which, while he had been doing it, had meant so much to him, and he still preferred his own. The Professor’s drawing had no meaning for him. He could not understand it, except that it was accurate. That he could see, but then his own was accurate too, and true to what he had seen. The light gave the model a distorted shoulder, and he had laboured to render that distortion, which the Professor had either ignored or had corrected.Mendel cut out the Professor’s drawing and took it home and copied it over and over again, but still he could not understand it. He was in despair and told Golda he would never learn.“I shall never learn to draw, and the Christian kops will all beat me,” he said.“But they sent you to the school because you can draw. Didn’t Mr. Froitzheim say that you could draw!”“The Professor looks at me with his gloomy face, like an undertaker asking for the body, and he says: ‘I mean to say, that isn’t drawing. It isn’t impressionism. I don’t know what it is.’”“It can’t be a very good school,” said Golda.“But it is. It is the only school. All the best painters have been there, and Mr. Froitzheim senthis own brother to it. The Professor says I shall never paint a picture if I don’t learn to draw, and I can’t do it, I can’t do it!”To console himself he painted hard every evening and regarded the Detmold entirely as a place to which his duty condemned him—a place where he had to learn this strange wizardry called drawing, which he did not understand. He went there every day and never spoke to a soul, because he realized that his speech was different from that of the others, and he would not open his mouth until he could speak without betraying himself. He listened carefully to their pronunciation and intonation, and practised to himself in bed and as he walked through the streets.So woeful were his attempts to emulate the Detmold style of drawing, that at last the Professor asked him if he was doing any work at home. To this Mendel replied eagerly that he was painting a portrait of his mother.“Hum,” said the Professor. “May I see it?”So Mendel brought the picture, and the Professor said:—“I mean to say, young man, that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you gave up work a little. I don’t want to have to send in a bad report, but what can I do? There’s something in you, plenty of grit and all that, but you’re young, and, I mean to say, you’re here to learn what we can teach you. When we’ve done with you, you can go your own way and be hanged to you. If you want to smudge about with paint and fake what you can’t draw, there’s the Academy.”At this awful suggestion Mendel shuddered. He was imbued enough with the Detmold tradition to regard the Academy as Limbo.He gave up painting at home, and hurled himself desperately at the task of producing a drawing that should satisfy the Professor. Towards the end of his first term he succeeded, and hadhis reward in words of praise in front of the class.The Professor had meanwhile taken one of the pupils aside and asked him not to leave the poor little devil so utterly alone. “After all,” he said, “the school doesn’t exist only for drawing. It has its social side as well, and I don’t like to see any one cold-shouldered unless he deserves it. I mean to say, you other fellows have advantages which don’t necessarily entitle you to mop up all the good things and leave none for your fellow-creatures.”Mitchell, the pupil, took his homily awkwardly enough, but promised that he would do what he could. He seized his opportunity one day when Mendel at lunch had horrified the company by picking up a chicken bone and tearing at it with his teeth. Mitchell took him aside and said:—“I say, Kühler, old man, you’ll excuse my mentioning it, you know, but it isn’t done. I mean, we eat our food with forks.”Mendel knew what was meant, for at lunch he had been conscious of horrified eyes staring at him and had wished the floor would open and swallow him up. He muttered incoherent words of thanks and wanted to rush away, but Mitchell caught him by the arm and said:—“I say, we artists must hang together. There aren’t many of this crowd who will come to anything, and the Pro thinks no end of you. Won’t you come along and have tea with me and some of the other fellows?”Mendel went with him, delighting in the young man’s easy, condescending Public School manner and pleasant, crisp voice, in which he spoke with an exaggerated emphasis.“Gawd!” he said. “It makes me sick to see all the fools and the women wasting their time there, scratching away, while those of us who have any talent and could learn anything are left to flounder along as best we may. Do you smoke?”Mendel had never smoked, but he did not like to refuse. He took a cigarette, which very soon made him feel sick and giddy. He lurched along with Mitchell until they came to a tea-shop, where they found two other young men whose faces were familiar.“I’ve brought Kühler,” said Mitchell. “He’s a genius. This is Weldon, who is also a genius, and Kessler, who can’t paint for nuts, and I’m a blame fool, though it’s not my fault. My father’s a great man. Gawd! what can you do when your own father takes the shine out of you at every turn?”They began to talk of pictures and of one Calthrop, who was apparently the greatest painter the world had ever seen and a product of the Detmold.“Sells everything he puts his name to,” said Kessler.“What a man!” said Weldon. “Goes his own way, absolutely believing in his art. If they like it, well and good. If they don’t like it, let ’em lump it. He’s as often drunk as not, and as for women . . . !”Weldon and Kessler deserted pictures for women. Mitchell grew more and more glum, while Mendel was still feeling the effects of the cigarette too strongly to be able to take in a word.“Gawd!” said Mitchell. “There they go, talking away, absolutely incapable of keeping anything clear of women. I can’t stand it.”He dragged Mendel away, leaving his friends to pay the bill; and, as they walked, he explained that he was in love, and could not stand all that bawdy rubbish, and he elaborated a theory that an artist needed to be in love to keep himself alive to the sanctity of the human body, familiarity with which was apt to breed contempt or an excessive curiosity. Mendel said that he also had been in love, and he gave a vivid account of his raptures with Sara.“My God!” cried Mitchell; “you don’t mean to say that she came to you—a girl like that?”“Yes,” said Mendel; “I was never so happy.”“But, I say, weren’t you afraid?”“She was very beautiful.”Mitchell pondered this for a long time. He seemed to be profoundly shaken. At last he said:—“But with a girl youloved?”“I loved her when she was there.”“But when she wasn’t there?”“I was busy painting.”“I say, you are a corker! If it were Weldon or Kessler I should say you were lying.”“I do not lie,” replied Mendel with some heat. “It may have been wrong, but it was good, and I was happier after it. I think I should have gone mad without it, for everything had disappeared—everything—everything; and without painting you do not understand how terrible and empty life is to me. I have nothing, you see. I am poor, and my father and mother will always be poor. Their life is hard and beastly, but they do not complain, and I should not complain if I did not have this other thing that I must do.”“Well, I’m jolly glad to know you,” said Mitchell. “I’m not much of a fellow, but I’d like you to know my people. My father’s a great man. He’ll stir you up. And you must come along with me and Weldon and Kessler and see life while you’re young. Good-bye.”He shook hands vigorously with Mendel and strode off with his long, raking stride, while Mendel stood glowing with the happiness of having found a friend, some one to whom he could talk almost as he talked to Golda: a fine young Englishman, pink and oozing robustious health, ease, refinement, and comfort. He thought with a devoted tenderness of Mitchell’s rather absurd round face, with its tip-tilted nose and blinking eyes, itslittle rosebud of a mouth and plump round chin, on which there was hardly a trace of a beard. . . . “My friend!” thought Mendel, “my friend!” And he gave a leap of joy. It meant for him the end of his loneliness. No longer was he to be the poor, isolated Yiddisher, but he was to move and have his being with these fine young men who were the leading spirits of the school, the guardians of the tradition bequeathed to it by the great Calthrop. . . . Oh! he would learn their way of drawing, he would do it better than any of them. He would be gay with them and wild and merry and young. And all the while secretly he would be working and working, following up that inner purpose until one day he appeared with a picture so wonderful that the Professor would say, like Mr. Sivwright, that he had nothing more to learn. And because of his wonderful work, everybody would forget that he was a Jew, and he would move freely and easily in that wonderful England which he had begun to perceive behind the fresh young men like Mitchell and the cool, pretty girls at the school. That England was their inheritance and they seemed hardly aware of it. He would win it by work and by dint of the power that was in him.Of the girls at the school he was afraid. He blushed and trembled when any one of them spoke to him, and he never noticed them enough to distinguish one from another, so that they existed only as a vague nuisance and a menace to his happiness. Before Mitchell he was prostrate. He bewildered and confounded that young man with his outpourings, both by word of mouth and by letter. He had absolutely no reserve, and poured out his thoughts and feelings, his experiences, and Mitchell at last took up a protective attitude towards him and defended him from the detestation which he aroused in the majority of his fellow-students. At the same time Mitchelloften felt that of the two he was the greater child, and he would look back upon the years he had spent at school in a rueful and puzzled state of mind, half realizing that he had been shoved aside while the stream of life went on, and that now he had to fight his way back into it. While Mendel had been wrestling and struggling, he had been put away in cotton-wool, every difficulty that had cropped up had been met, every deep desire had found its outlet in convention. And now that he had set out to be an artist, here was this Jew with years of hard work behind him, and such a familiarity with his medium that he could do more or less as he liked without being held up by shyness or awkwardness. And it was the same in life. Mendel was abashed by nothing, was ashamed of nothing. Life had many faces. He was prepared to regard them all, and to fit his conduct to every one of them. He was critical, not because he wished to reject anything, but because he must know the nature of everything before he accepted it. He hated and loved simply and passionately, and if he felt no emotion he never disguised the fact. Whereas Mitchell and the others were so eager to feel the emotions which their upbringing had denied that they leaped before they looked and fabricated what they did not feel. Mendel learned from them that life could be pleasant, and they became aware that there were regions of life beyond the fringes of pleasantness. They softened him and he hardened them. They were always together, Mendel, Mitchell, Weldon and Kessler, working steadily enough, but out of working hours kicking up their heels and stampeding through the pleasures of London. . . . Calthrop was the divinity they served. He was a man of genius and had made the Detmold famous. Those, therefore, who came after him at the school must support him in everything. That was Mitchell’scontention, who was by now in full swing of revolt against his Public School training, and in his adoration Mendel followed him, and the others were dragged in their train. Calthrop dressed extravagantly: so did the four. Calthrop smashed furniture: so did the four. And as Calthrop drank, embraced women, and sometimes painted outrageously, the four did all these things.To Mendel it was Life—something new, rich, splendid, and thrilling. He had lived so long cramped over his work that it was almost agony to him to move in this swift stream of incessant excitement. There was no spirit of revolt in him. He could shed some of the outward forms of his religion, as to Golda’s great distress he did, but against its spirit he could not rebel. That he carried with him everywhere: the bare stubborn faith in man, ground down by life and living in sorrow all his days. Happy he was not, nor did he expect to be so. He might be happy one day, but he would be miserable the next. Life in him was not greatly concerned with either, but only to have both happiness and misery in full measure. His deepest feelings arose out of his work, the first condition of his existence; they arose out of it and sank back into it again. His work was the visible and tangible form of his being, which he hated and loved as it approached or receded from the terrible power that was both beautiful and ugly, and yet something transcending either. . . . And away there in London was the Christian world of shows. What he was seeking lay beyond that, and not in the dark Jewishness of his home. There lay the spirit, but the outward and visible form was to be sought yonder, where the lights flared and the women smiled at themselves in mirrors. He hurled himself into the shows of the Christian world in a blind desire to break through them, but always he was flung back, bruised, aching, and weary.Day after day he would spend listlessly at home or at the school until seven o’clock came and it was time to go to the Paris Café, to sit among the painters and listen to violent talk, talk, talk—abuse of successful men, derision of the great masters, mysterious and awful whispers of what men were doing in Paris, terrible denunciations of dealers, critics, and the public.The café was a kind of temple and had its ritual. It was the aim of the painters to “put some life into dear old London.” Calthrop had given a lead. He had determined that London should be awakened to art, as the writing folk of a past generation had aroused the swollen metropolis to literature and poetry. London should be made aware of its painters as Paris was aware of the Quartier Latin. Bohemia should no longer be the territory of actresses, horse-copers, and betting touts. The Paris Café therefore became the shrine of Calthrop’s personality, and thither every night repaired the artists and their parasites, who saw in the place an avenue to liberty and fame. In the glitter and the excitement, the brilliance, the colour, the women with their painted faces, the white marble-topped tables, the mirrors along the walls, the blue wreathing tobacco-smoke, Calthrop’s personality was magnified and concentrated as in a theatre. The café without him was Denmark without the Prince, and Mendel found the hours before he came or the evenings when he did not come almost insupportable. Yet it was not the man’s success or his fame or his notoriety that fascinated the boy, whose instinct went straight to the immense vitality which was the cause of all. Calthrop was a huge man, dark and glowering. To Mendel he was like a figure out of the Bible—like King Saul, in his black moods and the inarticulate fury that possessed him sometimes; and when he picked up and hurled a glass atsome artist whose face or whose work had offended him, he was very like King Saul hurling the javelin.There was always a thrill when he entered the café. The buzz would die down. Where would he sit and whom would he speak to? . . . It was one of the greatest moments in Mendel’s life when one evening Calthrop came sweeping in with his cloak flung round his shoulders and sat opposite him and his three companions and raised a finger and beckoned.“He wants you,” said Mitchell, pushing Mendel forward.“Come here, boy,” growled Calthrop, stabbing with his pipe-stem in the direction of the seat by his side. “Come here and bring your friends. Bought a drawing of yours this morning. Damn good.”Mitchell, Kessler, and Weldon came and sat at the table, all too overawed to speak.“What’s your drink, heh?”Drinks were ordered.“Rotten trade, art,” said Calthrop. “Dangerous trade. Drink, women, flattery. Don’t drink. Marry, settle down, and your wife’ll hate you because you’re always about the place. . . . God! I wish I could be a Catholic. I’d be a monk. . . . My boy, don’t get into the habit of doing drawings. They won’t look at your pictures if you do, and we want pictures—my God, we do! Everybody paints pictures as though they were for a competition. You’ve got life to draw from—real, stinking life. That’s why I have hopes of you.”Mendel was so fluttered and flattered that he could only gulp down his drink and blink round the café, feeling that all eyes were upon him; and indeed he was attracting such attention as had never before been bestowed on him. A girl at the next table ogled him and smiled. She was with a young man whom the four detestedand despised. This young man reached over to take a bowl of sugar from their table. To take anything from the great man’s table without so much as “By your leave” was sacrilege and was very properly resented. There was a scuffle, the sugar was scattered on the floor, glasses fell crashing down, Mitchell and Weldon hurled themselves on the young man, and the manager came bustling up, crying: “If-a-you-pleess-a-gentlemen.” But there was no breaking the mêlée. A waiter was sent out for the police, and three constables came filing in. One of them seized Mitchell, and Mendel, half mad with drink and excitement, seeing his beloved friend, as he thought, being taken off to prison, leaped on the policeman’s back and brought him down. In the confusion Calthrop and the others slipped away and Mendel was arrested, still fighting like a wild cat, and led off to the police-station, the constable whispering kindly in his ear: “Steady, my boy, steady. A youngster like you should keep clear of the drink.”The inspector smiled at the extreme youthfulness of the offender, but decided that a taste of the cells would do no harm and that the boy had better be sober before he was sent home. So Mendel had four hours on a hard bench until a constable came in and asked him if he wanted bail. He said “Yes,” and, when asked for a name, gave Calthrop’s, who presently arrived and saw him liberated, after being told to appear in court next morning at ten o’clock.When he reached home he found his mother waiting up for him with wet cloths in case his head should be bad.“What now? What now?” she asked.“I’ve been in prison.”“Prison!” Golda flung up her hands and sat down heavily. For her all was lost. It was true then, that, outside in the world, at the other endof it, was always prison, for the just and for the unjust, for the old and for the young, for the innocent and for the guilty.He tried to make light of it. For him, too, it was a serious matter. He saw himself figuring in the Sunday papers: “Famous Artist in the Police Court,” with his portrait in profile as on a medallion. Birnbaum and Sir Julius would read it. He would be taken away from the Detmold and Edward Tufnell would never speak to him again. He astonished, embarrassed, and delighted Golda by flinging himself in her arms and sobbing out his grief.
FLUNGinto the art school, he was like a leggy colt in a new field, very shy of it at first, of the trees in the hedges, of the shadows cast by the trees. This place was very different from the Polytechnic. There were fewer old ladies, and more boys of his own age. The teachers were Professors, and the pupils held them in awe and respect. There were real models in the life-class, male and female, and the students, male and female, worked together. No ginger-beer bottles here, where art was a practical business. The school existed for the purpose of teaching the craft of making pictures, and its law was that the basis of the mystery was drawing.
Mendel’s first attitude towards the other students was that he was there to beat them all. He would swell with eagerness and enthusiasm, and tell himself that he had something that they all lacked. He would watch their movements, their heads bending over their work, their hands scratching away at the paper, and he could see that they had none of them the vigour that was in himself. And by way of showing how much stronger he was he would use his pencil almost as though it were a chisel and his paper a block of stone out of which he was to carve the likeness of the model. He was rudely taken down when the Professor stood and stared with his melancholy eyes at his production and said:—
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Yes.”
“Why do it?”
This was a stock phrase of the Professor’s, but Mendel did not know that, and he was ashamed and outraged when the class tittered.
“No,” said the Professor. “I don’t know what that is. It certainly isn’t drawing.” And with his pencil he made a lovely easy sketch of the model, alongside Mendel’s black, forbidding scrawl. It was a masterly thing and it baffled him, and humiliated him because the Professor moved on to the next pupil without another word. Not another line could Mendel draw that day. He sat staring at the Professor’s sketch and at his own drawing, which, while he had been doing it, had meant so much to him, and he still preferred his own. The Professor’s drawing had no meaning for him. He could not understand it, except that it was accurate. That he could see, but then his own was accurate too, and true to what he had seen. The light gave the model a distorted shoulder, and he had laboured to render that distortion, which the Professor had either ignored or had corrected.
Mendel cut out the Professor’s drawing and took it home and copied it over and over again, but still he could not understand it. He was in despair and told Golda he would never learn.
“I shall never learn to draw, and the Christian kops will all beat me,” he said.
“But they sent you to the school because you can draw. Didn’t Mr. Froitzheim say that you could draw!”
“The Professor looks at me with his gloomy face, like an undertaker asking for the body, and he says: ‘I mean to say, that isn’t drawing. It isn’t impressionism. I don’t know what it is.’”
“It can’t be a very good school,” said Golda.
“But it is. It is the only school. All the best painters have been there, and Mr. Froitzheim senthis own brother to it. The Professor says I shall never paint a picture if I don’t learn to draw, and I can’t do it, I can’t do it!”
To console himself he painted hard every evening and regarded the Detmold entirely as a place to which his duty condemned him—a place where he had to learn this strange wizardry called drawing, which he did not understand. He went there every day and never spoke to a soul, because he realized that his speech was different from that of the others, and he would not open his mouth until he could speak without betraying himself. He listened carefully to their pronunciation and intonation, and practised to himself in bed and as he walked through the streets.
So woeful were his attempts to emulate the Detmold style of drawing, that at last the Professor asked him if he was doing any work at home. To this Mendel replied eagerly that he was painting a portrait of his mother.
“Hum,” said the Professor. “May I see it?”
So Mendel brought the picture, and the Professor said:—
“I mean to say, young man, that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you gave up work a little. I don’t want to have to send in a bad report, but what can I do? There’s something in you, plenty of grit and all that, but you’re young, and, I mean to say, you’re here to learn what we can teach you. When we’ve done with you, you can go your own way and be hanged to you. If you want to smudge about with paint and fake what you can’t draw, there’s the Academy.”
At this awful suggestion Mendel shuddered. He was imbued enough with the Detmold tradition to regard the Academy as Limbo.
He gave up painting at home, and hurled himself desperately at the task of producing a drawing that should satisfy the Professor. Towards the end of his first term he succeeded, and hadhis reward in words of praise in front of the class.
The Professor had meanwhile taken one of the pupils aside and asked him not to leave the poor little devil so utterly alone. “After all,” he said, “the school doesn’t exist only for drawing. It has its social side as well, and I don’t like to see any one cold-shouldered unless he deserves it. I mean to say, you other fellows have advantages which don’t necessarily entitle you to mop up all the good things and leave none for your fellow-creatures.”
Mitchell, the pupil, took his homily awkwardly enough, but promised that he would do what he could. He seized his opportunity one day when Mendel at lunch had horrified the company by picking up a chicken bone and tearing at it with his teeth. Mitchell took him aside and said:—
“I say, Kühler, old man, you’ll excuse my mentioning it, you know, but it isn’t done. I mean, we eat our food with forks.”
Mendel knew what was meant, for at lunch he had been conscious of horrified eyes staring at him and had wished the floor would open and swallow him up. He muttered incoherent words of thanks and wanted to rush away, but Mitchell caught him by the arm and said:—
“I say, we artists must hang together. There aren’t many of this crowd who will come to anything, and the Pro thinks no end of you. Won’t you come along and have tea with me and some of the other fellows?”
Mendel went with him, delighting in the young man’s easy, condescending Public School manner and pleasant, crisp voice, in which he spoke with an exaggerated emphasis.
“Gawd!” he said. “It makes me sick to see all the fools and the women wasting their time there, scratching away, while those of us who have any talent and could learn anything are left to flounder along as best we may. Do you smoke?”
Mendel had never smoked, but he did not like to refuse. He took a cigarette, which very soon made him feel sick and giddy. He lurched along with Mitchell until they came to a tea-shop, where they found two other young men whose faces were familiar.
“I’ve brought Kühler,” said Mitchell. “He’s a genius. This is Weldon, who is also a genius, and Kessler, who can’t paint for nuts, and I’m a blame fool, though it’s not my fault. My father’s a great man. Gawd! what can you do when your own father takes the shine out of you at every turn?”
They began to talk of pictures and of one Calthrop, who was apparently the greatest painter the world had ever seen and a product of the Detmold.
“Sells everything he puts his name to,” said Kessler.
“What a man!” said Weldon. “Goes his own way, absolutely believing in his art. If they like it, well and good. If they don’t like it, let ’em lump it. He’s as often drunk as not, and as for women . . . !”
Weldon and Kessler deserted pictures for women. Mitchell grew more and more glum, while Mendel was still feeling the effects of the cigarette too strongly to be able to take in a word.
“Gawd!” said Mitchell. “There they go, talking away, absolutely incapable of keeping anything clear of women. I can’t stand it.”
He dragged Mendel away, leaving his friends to pay the bill; and, as they walked, he explained that he was in love, and could not stand all that bawdy rubbish, and he elaborated a theory that an artist needed to be in love to keep himself alive to the sanctity of the human body, familiarity with which was apt to breed contempt or an excessive curiosity. Mendel said that he also had been in love, and he gave a vivid account of his raptures with Sara.
“My God!” cried Mitchell; “you don’t mean to say that she came to you—a girl like that?”
“Yes,” said Mendel; “I was never so happy.”
“But, I say, weren’t you afraid?”
“She was very beautiful.”
Mitchell pondered this for a long time. He seemed to be profoundly shaken. At last he said:—
“But with a girl youloved?”
“I loved her when she was there.”
“But when she wasn’t there?”
“I was busy painting.”
“I say, you are a corker! If it were Weldon or Kessler I should say you were lying.”
“I do not lie,” replied Mendel with some heat. “It may have been wrong, but it was good, and I was happier after it. I think I should have gone mad without it, for everything had disappeared—everything—everything; and without painting you do not understand how terrible and empty life is to me. I have nothing, you see. I am poor, and my father and mother will always be poor. Their life is hard and beastly, but they do not complain, and I should not complain if I did not have this other thing that I must do.”
“Well, I’m jolly glad to know you,” said Mitchell. “I’m not much of a fellow, but I’d like you to know my people. My father’s a great man. He’ll stir you up. And you must come along with me and Weldon and Kessler and see life while you’re young. Good-bye.”
He shook hands vigorously with Mendel and strode off with his long, raking stride, while Mendel stood glowing with the happiness of having found a friend, some one to whom he could talk almost as he talked to Golda: a fine young Englishman, pink and oozing robustious health, ease, refinement, and comfort. He thought with a devoted tenderness of Mitchell’s rather absurd round face, with its tip-tilted nose and blinking eyes, itslittle rosebud of a mouth and plump round chin, on which there was hardly a trace of a beard. . . . “My friend!” thought Mendel, “my friend!” And he gave a leap of joy. It meant for him the end of his loneliness. No longer was he to be the poor, isolated Yiddisher, but he was to move and have his being with these fine young men who were the leading spirits of the school, the guardians of the tradition bequeathed to it by the great Calthrop. . . . Oh! he would learn their way of drawing, he would do it better than any of them. He would be gay with them and wild and merry and young. And all the while secretly he would be working and working, following up that inner purpose until one day he appeared with a picture so wonderful that the Professor would say, like Mr. Sivwright, that he had nothing more to learn. And because of his wonderful work, everybody would forget that he was a Jew, and he would move freely and easily in that wonderful England which he had begun to perceive behind the fresh young men like Mitchell and the cool, pretty girls at the school. That England was their inheritance and they seemed hardly aware of it. He would win it by work and by dint of the power that was in him.
Of the girls at the school he was afraid. He blushed and trembled when any one of them spoke to him, and he never noticed them enough to distinguish one from another, so that they existed only as a vague nuisance and a menace to his happiness. Before Mitchell he was prostrate. He bewildered and confounded that young man with his outpourings, both by word of mouth and by letter. He had absolutely no reserve, and poured out his thoughts and feelings, his experiences, and Mitchell at last took up a protective attitude towards him and defended him from the detestation which he aroused in the majority of his fellow-students. At the same time Mitchelloften felt that of the two he was the greater child, and he would look back upon the years he had spent at school in a rueful and puzzled state of mind, half realizing that he had been shoved aside while the stream of life went on, and that now he had to fight his way back into it. While Mendel had been wrestling and struggling, he had been put away in cotton-wool, every difficulty that had cropped up had been met, every deep desire had found its outlet in convention. And now that he had set out to be an artist, here was this Jew with years of hard work behind him, and such a familiarity with his medium that he could do more or less as he liked without being held up by shyness or awkwardness. And it was the same in life. Mendel was abashed by nothing, was ashamed of nothing. Life had many faces. He was prepared to regard them all, and to fit his conduct to every one of them. He was critical, not because he wished to reject anything, but because he must know the nature of everything before he accepted it. He hated and loved simply and passionately, and if he felt no emotion he never disguised the fact. Whereas Mitchell and the others were so eager to feel the emotions which their upbringing had denied that they leaped before they looked and fabricated what they did not feel. Mendel learned from them that life could be pleasant, and they became aware that there were regions of life beyond the fringes of pleasantness. They softened him and he hardened them. They were always together, Mendel, Mitchell, Weldon and Kessler, working steadily enough, but out of working hours kicking up their heels and stampeding through the pleasures of London. . . . Calthrop was the divinity they served. He was a man of genius and had made the Detmold famous. Those, therefore, who came after him at the school must support him in everything. That was Mitchell’scontention, who was by now in full swing of revolt against his Public School training, and in his adoration Mendel followed him, and the others were dragged in their train. Calthrop dressed extravagantly: so did the four. Calthrop smashed furniture: so did the four. And as Calthrop drank, embraced women, and sometimes painted outrageously, the four did all these things.
To Mendel it was Life—something new, rich, splendid, and thrilling. He had lived so long cramped over his work that it was almost agony to him to move in this swift stream of incessant excitement. There was no spirit of revolt in him. He could shed some of the outward forms of his religion, as to Golda’s great distress he did, but against its spirit he could not rebel. That he carried with him everywhere: the bare stubborn faith in man, ground down by life and living in sorrow all his days. Happy he was not, nor did he expect to be so. He might be happy one day, but he would be miserable the next. Life in him was not greatly concerned with either, but only to have both happiness and misery in full measure. His deepest feelings arose out of his work, the first condition of his existence; they arose out of it and sank back into it again. His work was the visible and tangible form of his being, which he hated and loved as it approached or receded from the terrible power that was both beautiful and ugly, and yet something transcending either. . . . And away there in London was the Christian world of shows. What he was seeking lay beyond that, and not in the dark Jewishness of his home. There lay the spirit, but the outward and visible form was to be sought yonder, where the lights flared and the women smiled at themselves in mirrors. He hurled himself into the shows of the Christian world in a blind desire to break through them, but always he was flung back, bruised, aching, and weary.
Day after day he would spend listlessly at home or at the school until seven o’clock came and it was time to go to the Paris Café, to sit among the painters and listen to violent talk, talk, talk—abuse of successful men, derision of the great masters, mysterious and awful whispers of what men were doing in Paris, terrible denunciations of dealers, critics, and the public.
The café was a kind of temple and had its ritual. It was the aim of the painters to “put some life into dear old London.” Calthrop had given a lead. He had determined that London should be awakened to art, as the writing folk of a past generation had aroused the swollen metropolis to literature and poetry. London should be made aware of its painters as Paris was aware of the Quartier Latin. Bohemia should no longer be the territory of actresses, horse-copers, and betting touts. The Paris Café therefore became the shrine of Calthrop’s personality, and thither every night repaired the artists and their parasites, who saw in the place an avenue to liberty and fame. In the glitter and the excitement, the brilliance, the colour, the women with their painted faces, the white marble-topped tables, the mirrors along the walls, the blue wreathing tobacco-smoke, Calthrop’s personality was magnified and concentrated as in a theatre. The café without him was Denmark without the Prince, and Mendel found the hours before he came or the evenings when he did not come almost insupportable. Yet it was not the man’s success or his fame or his notoriety that fascinated the boy, whose instinct went straight to the immense vitality which was the cause of all. Calthrop was a huge man, dark and glowering. To Mendel he was like a figure out of the Bible—like King Saul, in his black moods and the inarticulate fury that possessed him sometimes; and when he picked up and hurled a glass atsome artist whose face or whose work had offended him, he was very like King Saul hurling the javelin.
There was always a thrill when he entered the café. The buzz would die down. Where would he sit and whom would he speak to? . . . It was one of the greatest moments in Mendel’s life when one evening Calthrop came sweeping in with his cloak flung round his shoulders and sat opposite him and his three companions and raised a finger and beckoned.
“He wants you,” said Mitchell, pushing Mendel forward.
“Come here, boy,” growled Calthrop, stabbing with his pipe-stem in the direction of the seat by his side. “Come here and bring your friends. Bought a drawing of yours this morning. Damn good.”
Mitchell, Kessler, and Weldon came and sat at the table, all too overawed to speak.
“What’s your drink, heh?”
Drinks were ordered.
“Rotten trade, art,” said Calthrop. “Dangerous trade. Drink, women, flattery. Don’t drink. Marry, settle down, and your wife’ll hate you because you’re always about the place. . . . God! I wish I could be a Catholic. I’d be a monk. . . . My boy, don’t get into the habit of doing drawings. They won’t look at your pictures if you do, and we want pictures—my God, we do! Everybody paints pictures as though they were for a competition. You’ve got life to draw from—real, stinking life. That’s why I have hopes of you.”
Mendel was so fluttered and flattered that he could only gulp down his drink and blink round the café, feeling that all eyes were upon him; and indeed he was attracting such attention as had never before been bestowed on him. A girl at the next table ogled him and smiled. She was with a young man whom the four detestedand despised. This young man reached over to take a bowl of sugar from their table. To take anything from the great man’s table without so much as “By your leave” was sacrilege and was very properly resented. There was a scuffle, the sugar was scattered on the floor, glasses fell crashing down, Mitchell and Weldon hurled themselves on the young man, and the manager came bustling up, crying: “If-a-you-pleess-a-gentlemen.” But there was no breaking the mêlée. A waiter was sent out for the police, and three constables came filing in. One of them seized Mitchell, and Mendel, half mad with drink and excitement, seeing his beloved friend, as he thought, being taken off to prison, leaped on the policeman’s back and brought him down. In the confusion Calthrop and the others slipped away and Mendel was arrested, still fighting like a wild cat, and led off to the police-station, the constable whispering kindly in his ear: “Steady, my boy, steady. A youngster like you should keep clear of the drink.”
The inspector smiled at the extreme youthfulness of the offender, but decided that a taste of the cells would do no harm and that the boy had better be sober before he was sent home. So Mendel had four hours on a hard bench until a constable came in and asked him if he wanted bail. He said “Yes,” and, when asked for a name, gave Calthrop’s, who presently arrived and saw him liberated, after being told to appear in court next morning at ten o’clock.
When he reached home he found his mother waiting up for him with wet cloths in case his head should be bad.
“What now? What now?” she asked.
“I’ve been in prison.”
“Prison!” Golda flung up her hands and sat down heavily. For her all was lost. It was true then, that, outside in the world, at the other endof it, was always prison, for the just and for the unjust, for the old and for the young, for the innocent and for the guilty.
He tried to make light of it. For him, too, it was a serious matter. He saw himself figuring in the Sunday papers: “Famous Artist in the Police Court,” with his portrait in profile as on a medallion. Birnbaum and Sir Julius would read it. He would be taken away from the Detmold and Edward Tufnell would never speak to him again. He astonished, embarrassed, and delighted Golda by flinging himself in her arms and sobbing out his grief.