“Well?” said Abramovich kindly. “So you want to be an artist? But how?”
“I don’t know. I shall paint pictures.”
“But who will feed you? Who will buy you paints, brushes?”
“I shall sell my pictures.”
“Where, then? How?”
“To the shops.”
“Where are the shops? Tell me of any shop near here, for I don’t know a single one.”
Again Mendel felt that they were too clever for him, and he was on the brink of another fit of despair when, fortunately for him, Mr. Macalister, a commercial traveller in furs, came in. When he was in London he made a point of calling on the Kühlers, whom he liked, much as he liked strong drink. He was a man of some attainments, a student of Edinburgh, who had found the ordinary walks and the ordinary people of life too tame for his chaotic and vigorous temper, and he went from place to place collecting just such strange people as these Polacks, as he used to call them. He looked for passion in men and women, and accepted it gratefully and even greedily wherever he found it. . . . He had red hair and a complexion like a white-heart cherry, with little twinkling eyes as blue as forget-me-nots.
He kindled at once to the passion with which Mendel was bursting, stooped over Golda’s hand and kissed it—for he knew that was how foreigners greeted a lady—and then he sat heavily waiting for the situation to be explained to him. Mendel instinctively appealed to him. . . . Oh yes! he knew what an artist was, and some painters had made tidy fortunes, though they were not the best of them. There were Reynolds, and Lawrence, and Raeburn, and Landseer, and some young fellows at Glasgow, and Michael Angelo—a tidy lot, indeed. Never a Jew, that he had heard of.
“I told you so!” said Abramovich.