“Of course, there is no doubt that you must go on.”
Mendel had never had any doubt of it, and he began to feel more at his ease. That was settled then. There would be no more factory for him. He was to be an artist, a great artist. He knew that Mr. Froitzheim was more excited than he let himself appear. The apples could no more be denied than the sun outside or the flowers on the table. . . . He looked with more interest at Mr. Froitzheim’s picture. It amused him, much as the drawings in the illustrated papers amused him, and he was pleased with the quality of the paint. He was still alarmed by the hugeness of it. His eyes could not focus it, nor could his mind grasp the conception.
Mrs. Froitzheim asked him to stay to tea and encouraged him to talk, and he told her in his vivid childish way about Golda and Issy and Harry and Leah and Lotte. She found him delightfully romantic and told him that he must not be afraid to come again, and that they would be only too glad to help him. Mr. Froitzheim said:—
“I will write to the committee. There is only one school in London, the Detmold. You should begin there next term, six weeks from now. Don’t be afraid, work hard, and we will make an artist of you. In time to come we shall be proud of you. I will write to your mother, and one of these days I will give myself the pleasure of calling on her. . . . You must come and see me again, and I will take you to see pictures.”
Mendel was in too much of a whirl to remember to say “Thank you.” He had an enormous reverence for Mr. Froitzheim as a real artist, but as a man he instinctively distrusted him. It takes a Jew to catch a Jew, and Mendel scented in Mr. Froitzheim the Jew turned Englishman and prosperous gentleman. And in his childish confidence he was aware of uneasiness in his host, but of course Mr. Froitzheim could easily bear down that impression, though he could not obliterate it. He was an advanced artist and was just settling down after an audacious youth. He had been one of a band of pioneers who had defied the Royal Academy, and he had reached the awkward age in a pioneer’s life when he is forced to realize that there are people younger than himself. He believed in his “movement,” and wished it to continue on the lines laid down by himself and his friends. To achieve this he deemed it his business to be an influence among the young people and to see that they were properly shepherded into the Detmold, there to learn the gospel according to S. Ingres. He had suffered so much from being a Jew, had been tortured with doubts as to whether he were not a mere calculating fantastic, and here in this boy’s work he had found a quality which took his mind back to his own early enthusiasm. That seemed so long ago that he was shocked and unhappy, and hid his feelings behind the solemnity which he had developed to overawe the easy, comfortable, and well-mannered Englishmen among whom he worked for the cause of art.
He was the first self-deceiver Mendel had met, and the encounter disturbed him greatly and depressed him not a little, so that he was rather overawed than elated by the prospect in front of him. He felt strangely flung back upon himself, and that this help given to him was not really help. He was still, as always, utterly alone with his obscure desperate purpose for sole companion. Nobody knew about that purpose, since he could never define it except in his work, and that to other people was simply something to be looked at with pleasure or indifference, as it happened. He used to try and explain it to his mother, and she used to nod her head and say: “Yes. Yes. I understand. That is God. He is behind everybody, though it is given to few to know it. It is given to you, and God has chosen you, as He chose Samuel. . . . Yes. Yes. God has chosen you.” And he found it a relief sometimes to think that God had chosen him, though he was disturbed to find Golda much less moved by that idea than by the letter which Mr. Froitzheim wrote to her, in which he said that her son had a very rare talent, a very beautiful nature, and that a day would come when she would be proud of his fame.
Yet there were unhappy days of waiting. Jacob would not hear of his leaving the factory until everything was settled, and when Mendel told the foreman he was probably going to leave to be an artist, that worthy drew the most horrible picture of the artist’s life as a mixture of debauchery and starvation, and told a story of a friend of his, a marvellous sculptor, who had come down to carving urns for graves—all through the drink and the models; much better, he said, to stick to a certain income and the saints.
At last Maurice Birnbaum came in his motor-car. Everything was settled. The fees at the Detmold would be paid as long as the reports were satisfactory, and Mendel would be allowed five shillings a week pocket-money, but he must be well-behaved and clean, and he must read good literature and learn to write good English. “I will see to that,” said Maurice. “I am to take him now with some of his work to see Sir Julius. His fortune is made, Mrs. Kühler. Isn’t it wonderful? He is a genius. He has the world at his feet. Everything is open to him. I have been to Oxford, Mrs. Kühler, but I shall never have anything like the opportunities that he will have. It is marvellous to think of his drawing like that in your kitchen.” Maurice was really excited. His heart was as full of kindness as a honeycomb of honey, but he had no tact. His words fell on Golda and Mendel like hailstones. They nipped and stung and chilled. Golda looked at Mendel, he at her, and they stood ashamed. “We must hurry,” said Maurice. “Sir Julius must not be kept waiting. He is a stickler for punctuality.”
As a matter of fact, Maurice only knew Sir Julius officially. His family had never been admitted to the society in which Sir Julius was a power and a light. The entrance to the house of the millionaire was a far greater event to him than it was to Mendel.
The splendid motor-car rolled through the wonderful crowded streets, Maurice fussing and telling Mendel to take care his parcel did not scratch the paint, and swung up past the Polytechnic into the desolation of Portland Place. At a corner house they stopped. The double door was swung open by two powdered footmen, and by the inner door stood a bald, rubicund butler. Maurice gave his name, told Mendel to wait, and followed the butler up a magnificent marble staircase with an ormolu balustrade. Mendel was left standing with his parcel, while one of the footmen mounted guard over him. He stood there for a long time, still ashamed, bewildered, smelling money, money, money, until he reeled. It made him think of Mr. Kuit, who alone of his acquaintance could have been at his ease in such splendour. He felt beggarly, but he was stiffened in his pride.