“I say, you are a corker! If it were Weldon or Kessler I should say you were lying.”
“I do not lie,” replied Mendel with some heat. “It may have been wrong, but it was good, and I was happier after it. I think I should have gone mad without it, for everything had disappeared—everything—everything; and without painting you do not understand how terrible and empty life is to me. I have nothing, you see. I am poor, and my father and mother will always be poor. Their life is hard and beastly, but they do not complain, and I should not complain if I did not have this other thing that I must do.”
“Well, I’m jolly glad to know you,” said Mitchell. “I’m not much of a fellow, but I’d like you to know my people. My father’s a great man. He’ll stir you up. And you must come along with me and Weldon and Kessler and see life while you’re young. Good-bye.”
He shook hands vigorously with Mendel and strode off with his long, raking stride, while Mendel stood glowing with the happiness of having found a friend, some one to whom he could talk almost as he talked to Golda: a fine young Englishman, pink and oozing robustious health, ease, refinement, and comfort. He thought with a devoted tenderness of Mitchell’s rather absurd round face, with its tip-tilted nose and blinking eyes, its little rosebud of a mouth and plump round chin, on which there was hardly a trace of a beard. . . . “My friend!” thought Mendel, “my friend!” And he gave a leap of joy. It meant for him the end of his loneliness. No longer was he to be the poor, isolated Yiddisher, but he was to move and have his being with these fine young men who were the leading spirits of the school, the guardians of the tradition bequeathed to it by the great Calthrop. . . . Oh! he would learn their way of drawing, he would do it better than any of them. He would be gay with them and wild and merry and young. And all the while secretly he would be working and working, following up that inner purpose until one day he appeared with a picture so wonderful that the Professor would say, like Mr. Sivwright, that he had nothing more to learn. And because of his wonderful work, everybody would forget that he was a Jew, and he would move freely and easily in that wonderful England which he had begun to perceive behind the fresh young men like Mitchell and the cool, pretty girls at the school. That England was their inheritance and they seemed hardly aware of it. He would win it by work and by dint of the power that was in him.
Of the girls at the school he was afraid. He blushed and trembled when any one of them spoke to him, and he never noticed them enough to distinguish one from another, so that they existed only as a vague nuisance and a menace to his happiness. Before Mitchell he was prostrate. He bewildered and confounded that young man with his outpourings, both by word of mouth and by letter. He had absolutely no reserve, and poured out his thoughts and feelings, his experiences, and Mitchell at last took up a protective attitude towards him and defended him from the detestation which he aroused in the majority of his fellow-students. At the same time Mitchell often felt that of the two he was the greater child, and he would look back upon the years he had spent at school in a rueful and puzzled state of mind, half realizing that he had been shoved aside while the stream of life went on, and that now he had to fight his way back into it. While Mendel had been wrestling and struggling, he had been put away in cotton-wool, every difficulty that had cropped up had been met, every deep desire had found its outlet in convention. And now that he had set out to be an artist, here was this Jew with years of hard work behind him, and such a familiarity with his medium that he could do more or less as he liked without being held up by shyness or awkwardness. And it was the same in life. Mendel was abashed by nothing, was ashamed of nothing. Life had many faces. He was prepared to regard them all, and to fit his conduct to every one of them. He was critical, not because he wished to reject anything, but because he must know the nature of everything before he accepted it. He hated and loved simply and passionately, and if he felt no emotion he never disguised the fact. Whereas Mitchell and the others were so eager to feel the emotions which their upbringing had denied that they leaped before they looked and fabricated what they did not feel. Mendel learned from them that life could be pleasant, and they became aware that there were regions of life beyond the fringes of pleasantness. They softened him and he hardened them. They were always together, Mendel, Mitchell, Weldon and Kessler, working steadily enough, but out of working hours kicking up their heels and stampeding through the pleasures of London. . . . Calthrop was the divinity they served. He was a man of genius and had made the Detmold famous. Those, therefore, who came after him at the school must support him in everything. That was Mitchell’s contention, who was by now in full swing of revolt against his Public School training, and in his adoration Mendel followed him, and the others were dragged in their train. Calthrop dressed extravagantly: so did the four. Calthrop smashed furniture: so did the four. And as Calthrop drank, embraced women, and sometimes painted outrageously, the four did all these things.
To Mendel it was Life—something new, rich, splendid, and thrilling. He had lived so long cramped over his work that it was almost agony to him to move in this swift stream of incessant excitement. There was no spirit of revolt in him. He could shed some of the outward forms of his religion, as to Golda’s great distress he did, but against its spirit he could not rebel. That he carried with him everywhere: the bare stubborn faith in man, ground down by life and living in sorrow all his days. Happy he was not, nor did he expect to be so. He might be happy one day, but he would be miserable the next. Life in him was not greatly concerned with either, but only to have both happiness and misery in full measure. His deepest feelings arose out of his work, the first condition of his existence; they arose out of it and sank back into it again. His work was the visible and tangible form of his being, which he hated and loved as it approached or receded from the terrible power that was both beautiful and ugly, and yet something transcending either. . . . And away there in London was the Christian world of shows. What he was seeking lay beyond that, and not in the dark Jewishness of his home. There lay the spirit, but the outward and visible form was to be sought yonder, where the lights flared and the women smiled at themselves in mirrors. He hurled himself into the shows of the Christian world in a blind desire to break through them, but always he was flung back, bruised, aching, and weary.
Day after day he would spend listlessly at home or at the school until seven o’clock came and it was time to go to the Paris Café, to sit among the painters and listen to violent talk, talk, talk—abuse of successful men, derision of the great masters, mysterious and awful whispers of what men were doing in Paris, terrible denunciations of dealers, critics, and the public.
The café was a kind of temple and had its ritual. It was the aim of the painters to “put some life into dear old London.” Calthrop had given a lead. He had determined that London should be awakened to art, as the writing folk of a past generation had aroused the swollen metropolis to literature and poetry. London should be made aware of its painters as Paris was aware of the Quartier Latin. Bohemia should no longer be the territory of actresses, horse-copers, and betting touts. The Paris Café therefore became the shrine of Calthrop’s personality, and thither every night repaired the artists and their parasites, who saw in the place an avenue to liberty and fame. In the glitter and the excitement, the brilliance, the colour, the women with their painted faces, the white marble-topped tables, the mirrors along the walls, the blue wreathing tobacco-smoke, Calthrop’s personality was magnified and concentrated as in a theatre. The café without him was Denmark without the Prince, and Mendel found the hours before he came or the evenings when he did not come almost insupportable. Yet it was not the man’s success or his fame or his notoriety that fascinated the boy, whose instinct went straight to the immense vitality which was the cause of all. Calthrop was a huge man, dark and glowering. To Mendel he was like a figure out of the Bible—like King Saul, in his black moods and the inarticulate fury that possessed him sometimes; and when he picked up and hurled a glass at some artist whose face or whose work had offended him, he was very like King Saul hurling the javelin.
There was always a thrill when he entered the café. The buzz would die down. Where would he sit and whom would he speak to? . . . It was one of the greatest moments in Mendel’s life when one evening Calthrop came sweeping in with his cloak flung round his shoulders and sat opposite him and his three companions and raised a finger and beckoned.