“I like it,” he said. “I don’t think it is a very good picture, but it means something to me.”
And he longed for Morrison to come and see it, for it was the first picture that had directly to do with her. The portrait of her was hardly more than a drawing. What he called an “art student” might have done it, but this Ruth, he felt, was the beginning of his work as an artist, and he thought fantastically that when Morrison saw it she would see that he was to be treated with respect and would fall in by his side, and they would live happily, or at least solidly, ever after.
“Solid” was his great word, and he used it in many senses. It conveyed to his mind the quality of which he could most thoroughly approve. If a thing, or a person, or an action, or an emotion were what he called “solid,” then it was a matter of indifference to him whether it was in the ordinary sense good or bad. He was perfectly convinced that if Morrison could only be brought to reason, then his life would solidify and he would be able to go on working in peace.
Meanwhile he was anything but solid. His work, his life, his ideas, his ambition had all melted under Logan’s warm touch and were pouring towards the crucial exhibition. Mendel looked forward to it feverishly, because it was to put an end to his present condition, in which he was like a wax candle, luminous, but fast sinking into nothingness. If only he could reach the exhibition in time, the wind of fame would blow out the flame that was reducing him and he would be able to start afresh . . . But all the time as he worked words of Logan’s rolled in his mind, and had no meaning whatever, except that they made him think of music-halls and motor-buses and women’s legs in tights and newspapers and electric sky-signs spelling out words letter by letter. Out of this hotch-potch pictures, works of art, were to emerge. They were to take their place in it and, according to Logan, reduce it to order. But how was it possible? . . . In the quiet, ordered, patriarchal world of the Jews a rare nature might arise, but in that extraordinary confusion nothing rare could survive. Beauty could never compete on equal terms with women’s legs in tights and electric sky-signs; it could never produce an impression on minds obsessed and crammed to overflowing with the multitudinous excitements of the metropolis.
Mendel was convinced that Logan was right, that beauty must emerge to establish authority, and he thought of himself as engaged in a combat with a huge, terrible monster. Every stroke of his brush was a wound upon its flanks and an abomination the less. Yet he loved all the things against which he was fighting, because they made the world gay and stimulating and wonderful. He could see no reason why he should change the world. It was full enough of change already. Why, in his own time, the electric railways and the motor-buses had brought an amazing transformation in the life of the East End. No one now worked for such little wages as his father had done at the stick-making, and the life of the streets had lost its terrors and dangers. The young men had better things to do than to fight each other or to pelt old Jews with mud, and there was no reason to suppose that such changes would stop where they were.
However, he had Logan’s word for it, and Logan had given art a new importance in his eyes. He could not think it out himself without getting hopelessly confused, and there was nothing for it but to go on with his work.
Other relief he had none. He had written three ardent letters to Morrison, telling her, absolutely without restraint, of his love and his need for her, and she had not replied. He was too much hurt to write again, and as he worked he began to hate love, being in love, and the idea of it. He persuaded himself that it was a weakness, and he had ample reason for thinking so, when he compared his loose condition with his old clear singleness of purpose. What chiefly exasperated him in this indefinite unsuccessful love of his was that it exposed him to the passion, every day growing more furious, between Logan and Oliver. It made his own emotions seem fantastic, with the most vital current of his being pouring out in a direction far removed from the rest of his life, apparently ignoring the solid virtues of his Jewish surroundings and the elated vigour of his career among the artists.
“It will not do!” he told himself. “I will not have it! What is this love? Just nonsense invented by people who are afraid of their passions. A lady indeed? Is she? A lady is only a woman dressed up. She must learn that she is a woman, or I will have nothing to do with her.”
And sometimes he could persuade himself that he had driven Morrison from his thoughts. He finished the portrait of her from memory and was convinced that it was the end of her. It was a good picture and pretty enough to find a buyer, and there it ended. He had got what he wanted of her and could pluck her out of his thoughts.
Logan said it was a very fine picture, a real piece of creation.