Mendel: A Story of Youth

by Gilbert Cannan

His isolation was complete. It seemed that he had not a friend in the world, and there was not a soul towards whom he could move or wished to move. He could only rake over the ashes of the dead past and marvel that there had ever been a flame stirring in them. And as he raked them, he thrust into them much that only a short while ago had been living and delightful.

What had happened? Youth could not be gone while he was yet so young, but he felt immeasurably old, and, in his worst condition, outside Time, which took shape as a stream flowing past him, bearing with it all his dreams, loves, aspirations, hopes, thoughts. When he tried to cast himself into it, to rescue these treasured possessions, he was clutched back, thrown down, and left prostrate with his eyes darkened and the smell of death in his nostrils.

Sometimes he thought with terror that he had plunged too far, had given too much to Logan, had committed some obscure blasphemy, had been perhaps “overseen” even in that moment when the weakness and all that was dead in him had been wrenched away. And he said to himself:—

“No. This is much worse than death. It is foolish to seek any meaning in death, for death is not the worst.”

It was no good turning to his people, for he knew that he was cut off from them. They were confined in their Judaism, from which he had broken free. That was one of the dead things which had been taken from him.

His mother could not help him, because she could not endure his unhappiness. The pain of it was too great for her, and he had to invent a spurious happiness, to pretend that he was working as usual, though with great difficulty, and that, as usual, he was out and about, seeing his friends. And in a way this pretence gave him relief, though he suffered for it afterwards. He suffered so cruelly that he was forced by it into making an effort to grope back into life.

He was able to take up his work again, and the exercise of his craft soothed him, though it gave him no escape. The conception of his market picture was dead. It was enclosed in Judaism, from which he was free. Yet he had no other conception in his mind, and he knew that any picture he might paint must spring from it. So he clung to the dead conception and made studies and drawings for its execution.

Some of these drawings he was able to sell to Tysoe, who worried him by coming to talk about Logan and was nearly always ashamed to leave the studio without buying. Mendel was saved from borrowing of his people, which had become repugnant to him now that he no longer belonged to them.

It was through Tysoe’s talk that he was able to push his way through the tragedy of Logan and Oliver back to life. Tysoe insisted that the cause of it was jealousy, but Mendel knew that Logan was beyond jealousy, and, piecing the story together, he saw how Oliver had set herself to smash their friendship because it fortified in her lover what she detested, his intellect, which, because she could not satisfy it, stood between him and his passion for her. If anyone was responsible it was she, for she had tried to smash a spiritual thing and had herself been smashed. . . . And Mendel saw that had he tried to smash the relationship between Logan and Oliver he too would have been broken, for that also was a spiritual thing, though an evil. And he saw that, but for Morrison, he must have tried to smash it. His obligation to her had given him the strength to resist, to make his escape. Oliver had triumphed, evil had triumphed, and she and Logan were dead and he had to grope his way back to life, and if he could not succeed in doing that, then she and evil would have triumphed indeed, and what was left of him would have to follow the dead that had gone with Logan.

He sought the society of his father and of the old Jews, the friends of the family, and was left marvelling at their indifference to good and evil. They knew neither joy nor despair. They had yielded up their will to God, upon Whom, through fair weather and foul, their thoughts were centred. They lived in a complete stagnation which made him shudder. Their lives were like stale water, like unmoved puddles, from which every now and then their passions broke in bubbles, broke vainly, in bubbles. Nothing brought them any nearer to the God upon Whom their thoughts were centred, and only Time brought them any nearer to the earth.