“I used to feel like that sometimes,” replied Mendel, “until I was arrested and realized that policemen are just people like anybody else. The man who arrested me was a very nice man.”
“Oh! I’m sick of your feelings,” cried Oliver, “and I want my dinner.”
“All right,” said Logan, reaching for his hat; “we’ll go to the Pot-au-Feu and afterwards to the Paris Café and fish for critics. I shall nobble one or two swells through Tysoe. We’ll pick up the more crapulous and lecherous at the café, and Oliver shall be the bait. So look your prettiest, my dear. . . . Let’s have a look at you.”
He lit the gas and made her stand beneath it.
“You’ll do,” he said, patting her cheek. “Come along.”
He put his arm through hers. She gave a wriggle of pleasure and pressed close to him.
Mendel followed them downstairs with an omen at his heart. He felt sure that something violent would happen.
But nothing violent did happen. The evening was extraordinarily light-hearted and pleasant. Logan was his old self again, cracking jokes, mimicking people almost to their faces, giving absurd descriptions of his interviews with dealers and buyers, and concocting a burlesque history of his life. Mendel had never laughed so much since he was at the Detmold. His sides ached, and he was hard put to it to keep his countenance when at the café Logan caught two critics and told them that they must make no mistake this time: their reputations were at stake, nay, the reputation of art criticism was at the cross-roads, and art was on the threshold of its greatest period, and criticism should be its herald, not its camp-follower.
“You fellows,” said Logan, “use your brains, you are articulate. We are apt to get lost in paint, in coloured dreams of to-morrow and the spaces of the night. We lose touch with the world, with life. We are dependent on you—even the greatest genius is dependent on you. You are the real patrons of art. The herd follows you. Criticism must not shirk its duty. The kind of thing that happened with Manet, with Whistler, ought not to happen again.”
The two critics were unused to such treatment from painters. Oliver used her eyes upon them, detached one of them into a flirtation and left the other to Logan’s mercies. Logan’s blood was up. Here was a game he dearly loved, talking, bullying, hypnotizing another man out of his individuality. He invented monstrously, outrageously—concocted a whole new technique of painting, the discovery of which he ascribed to Mendel’s genius, and ended up by saying that painting should be to England what music had been to Germany, a national and at the same time a universal art.