“You dare talk like that! He is your husband. You are his wife. It is a misfortune. You should be with the lawyers to find out when you can see him. I am to lose everything because he is unfortunate! A dog will not turn from a man in his misery, and must a woman learn from a dog? You are a soft girl! Go, I say, and find out when you can see him. Was ever a man so crossed by Fate! Where I go, there luck takes wings.”
His violence shook Leah out of the dazed misery in which she had come home, having no other idea, no other place to which to go. Jacob was at first for making his daughter wait in her new home until her husband was returned to her. His simple imagination seized on the idea and visualized it. It seemed to him admirable, and Golda had hard work to shake it out of his head. As a piece of unnecessary cruelty he could not realize it, but when it was brought home to him that he would have to pay the rent of the house in Hackney, he yielded and allowed the girl to stay at home.
Moscowitsch was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, and a gloom, such as not the darkest days of poverty had been able to create, descended upon the house. Jacob was ashamed and irritable. He insisted upon the most scrupulous observance of all the rites of his religion, and he forbade Mendel to paint. Painting had nothing to do with religion and he would have none of it. He trampled on Mendel’s friendship with Artie Beech. The Christian world of police and judges and the law had destroyed his happiness, and not the faintest smell of Christendom should cross his door. Friction between the father and his two sons was exasperated, and it seemed to Mendel that Hell was let loose. He was nearly of an age to leave school, and he dreamed by the hour of the freedom he would have when he went to work. He would go out early in the morning and come home late in the evening. He would stay in the streets and look at the shops and watch the girls go by. He would go one day out beyond London to see what the world was like there. He would find a place where there were pictures, and he would feast on them: for when he went to work he would paint no more, since painting would be shed with the miserable childhood that was so fast slipping away from him.
Yet a worse calamity was to happen. Once again the Christian world of police, law, and judges was to invade the home of the Kühlers, and this time it was Jacob himself who was taken. He was charged with receiving stolen goods. A detective-inspector and two constables invaded the house and took possession of an ormolu clock, a number of silver knives, and a brooch which Mr. Kuit had given to Golda. Five of Mr. Kuit’s friends had been arrested, but Mr. Kuit himself was not implicated. He paid for the defence of the prisoners and took charge of the Kühler family, transferred the business into Issy’s name, and advanced money to keep it going. He spared neither time nor trouble to try to establish Jacob’s innocence, but it looked almost as though some one else was taking an equal amount of trouble to prove his guilt, for every move of Mr. Kuit’s was countered, and Jacob himself was so bewildered and enraged that he could not give a coherent answer to the questions put to him. He babbled and raved of an enemy who had done this thing, of a rival who had plotted his ruin, but as he could not give a satisfactory account of the articles found in his possession, his passionate protestations and his fanatical belief in his own honesty were of no avail. From the dock in which he was placed with Mr. Kuit’s other friends he delivered a vehement harangue in broken English, not more than ten words of which were intelligible to the judge and jury. The judge was kindly, the jury somnolent. Jacob was the only member of the party with a clean record, and he received the light sentence of eighteen months; the rest had double that term and more. In the Sunday papers they were described as a dangerous gang, and their portraits were drawn like profiles on a coin by an artist whose business it was to make villains look villainous for the delectation of the sober millions who tasted the joys of wickedness only in print. Golda was staggered by the blank indifference of the world to her husband’s honesty. His word to her was law, but the judge and the newspapers swept it aside, and he was regarded as one with the wicked men whose crooked dealings had involved the innocent. This was the worst disaster that had ever broken upon her: husband and son-in-law both swept away from her, as it seemed now, in one moment. The sympathy she received from the neighbours touched her profoundly, and she accepted their view that the sudden abstraction of male relatives was a natural calamity, like sickness or fire. Thanks to Mr. Kuit the business would be kept together, and thanks to Abramovich she never lacked company. That faithful friend would come in in the evenings and go over the trial, every moment of which he had heard, and recount every word of Jacob’s speech, which to him was a piece of magnificent oratory. “Not a tear was left in my eyes,” he said. “Not a throb was left in my heart, and the judge was moved, for his face sank into his hands and I could see that he knew how unjust he must be.” And he spent many days ferreting out a villain to be the cause of it all, some inveterate, implacable enemy who had plotted the downfall of the most honest man in London. He fixed on a certain Mr. Rosenthal, who years ago had tried to sell them machines for the business when they had already bought all that were necessary. He was quite sure it was Mr. Rosenthal who had bribed the thieves to hold their tongues, when any one of them could have cleared Jacob in a moment. And Golda believed that it was Mr. Rosenthal and dreamed of unattainable acts of revenge.
Mendel used to listen to them talking, and their voices seemed to him to come from very far away. The upheaval had stunned him, had destroyed his volition and paralysed his dreams. He felt as though a tight band were fixed round his head. He had neither desire nor will. The world could do as it liked with him. If the world could suddenly invade his home and brand its head and lawgiver as thief, then the world was empty and foolish and it did not matter what happened. It amazed him that his brothers and sisters could go about as usual: that Harry could come home and talk of prize-fighters and sit writing to girls, and that Issy could go out to meet his Rosa at the corner of the street. It was astonishing that his mother could still cook and they could still eat, and that every morning Harry could go down and open the door to let in the workpeople to clatter up the stairs. . . . And Harry disliked getting out of bed in the morning. In his father’s absence he ventured to apply his considerable ingenuity to the problem, and rigged up a wire from his bed to the knob of the front-door. Nor was this the only sign of the removal of the centre of authority from the family, for Issy actually brought his girl Rosa to the house and made his mother be pleasant to her. . . . Golda felt that her children were growing beyond her, and she thought it was time Issy was thinking of getting married, though not to Rosa, whose father was a poor cobbler and could give her no money.
At regular intervals. Golda swallowed down her dread of the busy streets and went to Pentonville, where through the bars of the visitors’-room Jacob received her report and gave his instructions. He decreed against Rosa, who accordingly was forbidden to enter the house again. He had orders for every one of his children except Mendel, as to whom Golda did not consult him. Deep in her inmost heart she was in revolt against her husband, for she had begun to see that he had carried pride to the point of folly, and all her hopes, all her dreams, all her ambitions were centred upon her darling boy. Her ambitions were not worldly. She knew nothing at all about the world, and did not believe three parts of what she heard of it. Only she longed for him to escape the bitterness and bareness that had been her portion. The boy was so beautiful and could be so gay and could dance so lightly, and would sometimes be so tempestuous and masterful. It would be a sin if he were to be cramped over a board or were sent to work in a tailoring shop. She herself had a love of flowers and of moonlight and the stars shining through the smoky sky, and she would sometimes find herself being urged to the use of strange words, which would make Mendel raise his head and cock his ears as though he were listening to the very beat of her heart. To that no one in the world had ever listened, and her life seemed very full and worthy when Mendel in his childish fashion was awake to it. . . . Pentonville seemed to suit Jacob. He looked almost fat and said the cocoa was very good.
The time came for Mendel to leave school and Issy said he had better be taken into the workshop. Harry wanted him in the timber-yard in which he loafed away his days. Abramovich was for getting Mr. Jacobson to take him into his office, for Mr. Jacobson never failed to ask after the boy who painted the pictures. Now it so happened that Mendel had found a bookshop, outside which he had discovered a life of W. P. Frith, R.A. In daily visits over a period of three weeks he had read it from cover to cover, the story of a poor boy who had become an artist, rising to such fame that he had painted the portrait of the Queen. There it was in print, and must be true. Mr. Jacobson’s boy was only in a story, but here it was set down in a book, with reproductions of the artist’s wonderful pictures—“The Railway Station,” “Derby Day.” The book said they were wonderful. The book spoke with reverence and enthusiasm of pictures and the men who painted them.
With tremulous excitement he secretly produced his box of paints again, and squeezed out the colours on to the plate he used for a palette. He adored the colours and amused himself with painting smooth strips of blue, yellow, green, red, orange, grey, for the sheer delight of handling the delicious stuff. It was a new pleasure, the joy of colours in themselves without reference to any object, or any feeling inside himself except this simple thrilling delight. He could forget everything in it, for it was his first taste of childish glee. Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing could ever again so oppress and overwhelm him as distasteful and even pleasant things had done in the past. He would be an artist, a wonderful artist, like W. P. Frith, R.A.
So when he was called into the kitchen one night and they told him he was to go into Mr. Jacobson’s office, he looked as though their words had no meaning for him, and he said:—
“I want to be an artist.”