There arose the difficulty that no one had ever heard of a School of Art. Mr. Macalister was deputed to look into the matter. He inquired, and was recommended to the Polytechnic as being cheap and good, and the Polytechnic was decided on.

Mr. Kuit came in at the tail of all this excitement, and added to it by saying that he was just off to America, first-class by the Cunard Line, for he was going to start in style, live in style, and come back in style. He was delighted to hear of the brilliant future opening up before Mendel, and told wonderful stories of famous pictures that had been stolen, cut out of their frames and taken away under the very noses of the owners. He was wonderfully overdressed, not loudly or vulgarly, but through his eagerness to be and to look first-class. He produced a pack of cards and showed how he could shuffle them to suit himself, and three times out of five, through the fineness of the touch, he could “spot” a card. He was a wonderful man. The Kühlers gaped at him, and Moscowitsch, in emulation, was led on to brag of his smartness in business, and how he had thrice burned down his timber-yard and made the insurance people pay up. Yet, though he warmed up as he boasted, he lacked the magic of Mr. Kuit and could not conceal the meanness of his deeds behind their glamour. He lumbered along like a great bear behind Mr. Kuit, and was vexed because he could not overtake him, and when the glittering little Jew, who seemed more magician than thief, said he would give Mendel a new suit of clothes for his entry into the world of art, Moscowitsch promised to provide a new pair of boots. Mr. Kuit countered with two new hats, Moscowitsch with underclothes. On they went in competition until Mendel was magnificently equipped, and at last Moscowitsch laid two new sovereigns on the table and said they were for the boy’s pocket-money. Not to be outdone, Mr. Kuit produced a five-pound note and gave it to Golda to be put into the Post Office Savings Bank.

In her inmost heart Golda was alarmed. For the first time she began to realize the vast powerful London with which she was surrounded. At home, in Austria, people stole because they were poor, because they were starving. She herself had often sent Harry and Issy out into the market with a sack and a spiked stick with which to pick up potatoes and cabbages and bread, but here the old simplicity was lacking. The swagger and the magnitude of Mr. Kuit’s operations and her son-in-law’s frauds alarmed her, and she felt that no good could come of it. They belonged to some power which moved too fast for her, and it was being invoked for Mendel, her youngest-born, her treasure. Truly it was a black day that took Jacob from her. Where he was, there was simplicity. Everything was kept in its place when he was in authority. Everything was kept down on the earth. There was the good smell of the earth in all his dealings, all his emotions. Never in him was the easy fantastic excitement of Kuit and Moscowitsch . . . They were mad. Surely they were mad. Their excitement infected everybody. Golda could feel it creeping in her veins like a poison. It came from the world to which these men belonged, the world of prison. That one word expressed it all for Golda. She had only been out into it to go to the prison, and to her that seemed to be the cold empty centre of it all. The bustle and glitter of the streets led to the prison, and she had always to fight to get back into her own life, where things were simple and definite—ugly, maybe—but clear and actual. . . . And now into that world of hectic excitement playing about the prison and about Mendel was to go, to be she knew not what, to learn to play with brushes and colours, to practise tricks which seemed to her not essentially different from Mr. Kuit’s sleight with the cards. She was sure no good could come of it; but for the present the boy had his happiness, and to that she yielded.

[IV
FIRST LOVE]

FOR Mendel every day became romantic, though he suffered tortures of shyness and used to bolt like a rabbit through the doors of the Polytechnic, rush upstairs to his easel, and never raise his eyes from it except to gaze at the objects placed before him. He worked in a frenzy, convinced that it was his business to translate the object on to the canvas. When he had done that he felt that the object had no further existence. It ought to vanish as completely as his consuming interest in it. As a matter of fact, it never did vanish, but it was lost in the praises of Mr. Sivwright, and the young women and old ladies who attended the class. The first task set the class after he joined it was a ginger-beer bottle, of which his rendering was declared to be a marvel, even to the high light on the marble in the neck of the bottle.

He was rather small for his age and was almost absurdly beautiful, with his curly hair, round Austrian head, and amusing pricked ears. His eyes were set very wide apart. They were blue. His nose was straight, and very slightly tip-tilted, and his lips were as delicately modelled as the petals of a rose. They were always tremulous as he shrank under the vivid impressions that poured in on him in bewildering profusion. He began to grow physically and spiritually, though not at all mentally, and he lived in a state of bewilderment, retaining shrewdness enough to cling to the necessary plain fact that he was at the school to be a success, for if he failed he would sink back into the already detestable world inhabited by Issy and Harry.

He created quite a stir at the school. Mr. Sivwright, a Lancashire Scotsman, whose youthful revolt against commerce and grime had carried him in the direction of art only so far as the municipal school, said he was an infant prodigy and made a show of him. To Mendel’s disgust Mr. Sivwright assured the other pupils that he was a Pole. This was his first intimation that there was, in the splendid free Christian world, a prejudice against Jews. He was rather shocked and disgusted, for never in his life had he found occasion to call anything by other than its right name. It took him weeks to conquer his shyness sufficiently to protest.

“I am a Jew,” he said to Mr. Sivwright. “Why do you call me a Pole?”

“Well,” said Mr. Sivwright, “there’s Chopin, you know, and Paderewski, don’t you know, and Kosciusko, and the Jews don’t stand for anything but money. And, after all, you do come from Poland.”