“And when your time for marrying comes you must look among the Jews, for the Jews are good people. No Jewish girl would serve you a trick like that. Jewish girls know that they must marry and they are good. But she is young, and you are young, and you will both forget.”
[VI
CAMDEN TOWN]
FROM the magnificent studio in Hammersmith to two rooms in Camden Town Mr. James Logan removed his worldly goods, a paint-box, half-a-dozen canvases, two pairs of trousers, three shirts, a “Life of Napoleon” in two volumes, and a number of photographs of famous pictures. The magnificent studio had been lent to him by the mistress of its owner, who had returned unexpectedly from abroad, and Mr. James Logan’s departure from it was hurried, but unperturbed.
“In my time,” he said, “I have kept Fortune busy, but her tricks leave me unmoved. She will get tired of it some day and leave me alone.”
All the same he did not relish the change. He was nearly thirty and had tasted sufficient comfort to relish it and to prize it. Also he could not forget the ambitions with which he had come to London five years before. In the North he had won success by storm, and he could not understand any other tactics. He was an extraordinary man and expected immediate recognition of the fact. Upon his own mind his personality had so powerful an effect that he was blind to the fact that it did not have a similar effect upon the minds of others. Women and young men he could always stir into admiration, but men older than himself were only affronted. He knew it and used to curse them:—
“These clods, these hods, these glue-faced ticks have no more sap in them than a withered tree. They hate me as a mule hates a stallion, and for the same reason. May God and Mary have mercy on what little is left of their souls by the time they come to judgment!”
He cursed them now as he laid his trousers on the vast new double-bed he had bought and went into his front room to arrange his easel and canvas for work. Whatever happened to him he would go on painting, because he saw himself like that, standing as firm as a rock before his easel, painting, while the world, for all he cared, went to rack and ruin. What else could happen to a world that refused to recognize its artists?
Painting was truly a joy to him. He loved the actual dabbling with the colours, laying them out on his palette, mixing them, evolving rare shades; he loved the fiery concentration and absorption in the making of a picture; the renewed power of sight when he turned from a picture to the world; the glorious nervous energy that came thrilling through his fingers in moments of concentration; the feeling of the superiority of this power to all others in the world. And so, whatever happened, he turned to his easel and painted. Love, debt, passion, quarrels, all the disturbances of life came and went, but painting remained, inexhaustible. So he had been happy, free, unfettered, gay, avoiding all responsibility because it was his formula that the artist’s only responsibility is to his art.
He was doubly happy now because he knew he had made an impression on a young man whose sincerity and vigour of purpose he could not but respect. He was himself singularly impressionable, and like a sponge for sucking up the colour of any strong personality. And Mendel had the further attraction for him that he was pure London, of the shifting, motley London that Logan, as a provincial, adored. This London he had touched at many points, but never through a strong living soul that had, and most loyally acknowledged, London as its home.