How depressing he was! Poor old Issy! as much a part of the street as the doors and windows of the houses. He might move a hundred yards to another exactly similar street, but he would always be the same. It was not his fault. Mendel knew the depths of devotion of which his brother was capable. It was devotion to his mother that kept him living round the corner, devotion to his father that tied him to the unprofitable business. The name of Kühler had attained the dignity of a brass-plate on the front door, and he would die rather than see it removed, at any rate in his father’s lifetime.
For the first time Mendel faced his circumstances squarely. With something of a shock he thought of the family arriving at Liverpool Street and never in all these years moving more than half a mile away from it, and that in this amazing London, with its trains and buses to take you from end to end of it in a little over an hour. His mother had never been west of the Bank. She did not even know where Piccadilly Circus was, or the Detmold, or the National Gallery, or the Paris Café, or Calthrop’s studio, or any other important centre of life. Liverpool Street she knew, and outside Liverpool Street were the sea and Austria. . . . When there were no little happenings at home she would always fall back on Austria and the troubled days at the inn, and the soldiers who used to come in and ask to see the beautiful baby before they thought of ordering drinks, and her rich uncle who used to supply the barracks with potatoes and was so mean that he refused to give her any when she had not a penny in the world, and the neighbours who used to bring food so that the beautiful baby should not starve. . . . They stayed where they were, stormily passionate, yet with no sense of confinement, while he was drawn off into the swiftly moving whirligig of London, going from house to house, studio to studio, café to café, atmosphere to atmosphere, and all his passionate storms were spent upon nothing, were absorbed in the general movement, leaving him, tottering and dazed, in it, yet alien to it, discovering no soul in it all and losing the clear knowledge of his own.
Surely now that was ended. She had sent him the yellow roses, and he had given them to his mother to join the two whom he loved. They must have touched her face before they came to him, and Golda had buried her face in them.
Impatiently he awaited the time for him to go to the Detmold. He put on a clean collar and a black coat, but then he remembered how the old Jews whom he asked to sit for him always put on clean clothes and clipped their beards, under the impression that he wanted to photograph them. In his clean collar and black coat he felt as though he were going to the photographer’s or to a wedding, and remembering how he had been dressed when he saw her for the first time on the stairs, he took out an old black shirt, a corduroy coat and trousers, and a red sash.
He could not bring himself to wear the red sash. It reminded him of Mitchell, who had been with him when he bought it.
It had been very hot. The walls and the pavements gave out a dry, stifling heat. The smell of the street outside came up in waves—a smell of women and babies, leather and kosher meat. He must wait for the cool weather, he thought, before he asked her to the studio again.
“She is only a little girl,” he said to himself. “She is pretty, but she is only a little girl. I will tell her that she must not see Mitchell again, because he is not true. I will paint her portrait, and then I will not see her again, because she is only a little girl.”
He sat in the window with the clock in front of him, and directly it said half-past four he clapped his hat on his head, seized the silver-knobbed stick which at that time was an indispensable part of an artist’s apparel, and bolted as though he were late for a train.
She was waiting for him. He took off his hat, but in his nervousness he could not speak, and as he could not remember which side of a lady he ought to walk, he bewildered her by dodging from one side to the other with a quick, catlike tread, so that she did not hear him, and whenever she turned to speak to him he was not there.
“Wasn’t it a good picnic!” she said enthusiastically. “It’s the best picnic I’ve ever been to.”