He felt hopeless. He went to see Mr. Sivwright and poured out his woes to him, who wrote a letter to Jacob saying that his son was a genius and would be one of the greatest of painters. Jacob said: “What is a genius? I do not know. I know what a man is, and a man works for his living. In six months, if you can make fifteen shillings a week I will believe in this painting. If not, what is there to believe? What will you do when you are to marry, heh? Tell me that. Will your little tubes of paint keep a wife, heh? Tell me that.”
Mendel could say nothing. He could do nothing. He gave up even trying to paint, for he might as well have played with mud-pies. He borrowed money from his brothers and prowled about the streets, and went to the National Gallery. Greuze meant nothing to him now. He began to feel, very faintly, the force of Michael Angelo, but the rest only filled him with despair. He knew nothing—nothing at all. He could not even begin to see how the pictures were painted. They were miraculous and detestable. . . . He went home and comforted himself with a little picture of some apples on a plate. He had painted it two years before in an ecstasy—a thrilling love for the form, the colour, the texture of the fruit and the china. It was good. He knew it was good, but he knew he could do nothing like it now—never again, perhaps.
And how disgusting the streets had become! Such a litter, such a noise, such aimless, ugly people! He could understand his mother’s horror of them. Ah! she never failed him. To her his words were always music, his presence was always light. Half-dead and miserable as he was, she could know and love the aching heart of him that lived so furiously behind all the death and the misery and the ashes of young hopes that crusted him. She was like the sky and the trees. She was like the young grass springing and waving so delicately in the wind. She was like the water and the rolling hills. . . . He had discovered these things at Hampstead, whither he had gone out of sheer aimlessness. He had never been in the Tube, and one day, with a shilling borrowed from Harry, it seemed appropriate to him to plunge into the bowels of the earth. The oppression of the air, the roar of the train, the flash of the stations as he moved through them, suited his mood, fantastic and futile. He got out at Hampstead.
It was his first sight of the country. He could hardly move at first for emotion. He found himself laughing, and he stooped and touched the grass tenderly, almost timidly, as though he were afraid of hurting it. He was fearful at first of walking on it, but that seemed to him childish, and he strode along with his quick, light-footed stride and lost himself in the willow groves. He made a posy of wild-flowers and took them back to his mother, carrying them unashamedly in his hand, entirely oblivious of the smiles of the passers-by. He knew he could not tell his mother of the happiness of that day, and the flowers could say more than any words.
Yet the happiness only made his misery more acute. He suffered terribly from the pious narrowness of his home, the restricted, cramped life of his brothers and sisters, who seemed to him to be stealing such life as they had from the religious observances to which they were bound by their father’s rigid will. Prayers at home, prayers in the synagogue: the dreadful monotony of the home, of the talk, of the squabbles: human life forced to be as dull as that of the God who no longer interfered in human life. . . . There was a tragedy in the street. There had been a scandal. A young Rabbi, a gloriously handsome creature, who sang in the synagogue, had fallen in love with a little girl of fourteen who lived opposite the Kühlers. Golda had watched the intrigue from her windows, and she said it was the girl’s fault. The Rabbi used to go every day when her father was out and she used to let him in. Jacob wrote to the girl’s father, and the Rabbi left his lodgings and took a room over a little restaurant round the corner. He had his dinner and went upstairs and sat up all night singing, in his lovely tenor voice, love songs and religious chants, so sweetly that the neighbours threw their windows open and there was a little crowd of people in the street listening. And in the morning they found him with his throat cut.
“It was the girl’s fault,” said Golda, but Jacob said: “A man should know better than to melt when a little girl practises her eyes on him.”
This tragedy relaxed the nervous strain which had been set up in Mendel by his troubles. New forces stirred in him which often made him hectic and light-headed. Women changed their character for him. They were no longer soothing ministrants, but creatures charged with a mysterious, a maddening charm. He trembled at the rustle of their skirts and his eyes were held riveted by their movements. He was suffocated by his new curiosity about them.
Sometimes, in his despair over his painting and the apparently complete disappearance of his talent, he would fill in the day in his father’s workshop, stretching rabbit-skins on a board. Girls and men worked together, busily, quietly, dexterously, for the most part in silence, for they were paid by the piece and were unwilling to waste time. There was a girl who had just been taken into the workshop to learn the trade. She was small and plump and swarthy, but her face was beautiful, the colour of rich old ivory. Her eyes were black and golden from a ruddy tinge in her eyelashes. Her lips were full and pouting, and she had long blue-black hair, which she was always tossing back over her shoulder. When Mendel was there she rarely took her eyes off him, and even when her head was bent he could feel that she was watching him.
He waited for her one evening, and with his knees almost knocking together he asked if she would come to his studio and let him draw her. With a silly giggle she said she would come, and she ran away before he could get out another word.