Jacob stormed on and Issy blustered, until at last he confessed that Rosa had caught him, and that he had to marry her. Jacob threw up his hands and in a shrill voice of icy contempt told Issy exactly what he thought of such marriages; they were nothing but dirt. . . . “Because you have a little dirt on you, must you roll in the mud? You are like dirty dogs, all of you. You, and Harry, and Mendel. I don’t know what has come to you in this London. God gave me one woman, and I have asked for nothing else.”
“You would not let me marry Rosa when I was young.”
Words and feeling ran so high that Mendel, aghast, fled away to his studio, where the sound of the storm reached him. It raged for hours, and ended in Issy flinging himself out of the house and slamming the door.
A week later Rosa was brought to see Golda, and she fawned on her like a dog that has been whipped, sat gazing at her with her stupid brown eyes, and whimpered: “I should have killed myself. Yes, I should have killed myself.”
“You would not have been so wicked,” said Golda. “It is sinful to throw good fish after bad. Can you cook?”
“Yes,” said Rosa. “I can make cucumber soup. I could do anything for Issy, he is so strong and handsome.”
And Golda said to Mendel after the interview: “A woman like that is like a steam bath for a man.”
A few days later Issy and Rosa were married, without ceremony, without carriages, or photographs, or guests, or feast. It was a wedding to be ashamed of, but Jacob would not, and Rosa’s father could not, lay out a penny on it. The couple took half the house in the next street, and Issy discovered at once that he hated his wife, and was at no pains to conceal it either from her or from his family.
Mendel was profoundly depressed by this disturbance and plunge downwards, for he still half expected his family to rise with him. He was to make all their fortunes, but, with the rest of the family, he detested the unhappy Rosa and regarded her as little short of a criminal. He was depressed, too, because the summer holidays were approaching and he would be bereft of his beloved Mitchell, who was going away for three months to the country. He would be left with his family, in whom there was no peace. Why could they not be like the Mitchells and the Weldons, who could live together without quarrels, and could take a happy, humorous interest in each other’s doings without these devastating passions and cursings and denunciations? And yet when he thought of the Mitchells and the Weldons and the Froitzheims, in their charming, comfortable houses, there was something soft and foolish about them all—something savouring of idolatry, for instance, in the homage Mitchell paid his father, in the assumption that Mrs. Mitchell was a very remarkable woman, whose children could not be expected to be ordinary. More and more did Mendel value his mother, who was content to be just a woman and to live without flattery of any kind, and to accept everyone whom she met and to value them as human beings, without regard to their rank, station, possessions, or achievements. Himself she esteemed no more because he was an artist, though he had tried hard to make her give her tribute to that side of his nature. She loved him simply, neither more for his attainments nor less for his doings, that pained her deeply. And that direct human contact he obtained nowhere else, and in no one else could he find it existing so openly and frankly. Yet he loved the follies and pretences of the outside world. He adored theatricality, and among his polite friends there was always some drama towards. It was never drowned in incoherent passions, and he himself, among the nice cultured folk, was always a startling dramatic figure. Sometimes they seemed to him all slyness and insincerity, and then he loathed them; but that was generally when he had aimed at and failed in some dramatic coup, or when they had encouraged him to talk about himself until he bored them. On the whole, he was successful with them, as he wished to be, easily and without calculation. It was when they made calculation necessary, by feigning an interest that they did not feel, that he was shocked and angry. If anywhere the atmosphere was such that he could not be frank, then he avoided that place and those people.
Now he was bored, bored to think of the hot stewing months with no relief except such as he could find in vagrom adventures from the harsh rigidity of life among his own people. And he was in a strange condition of physical lassitude. Even his ambition was stagnant. In his work he had only the pleasure of dexterity. It had no meaning, and contained no delight. When he painted apples or a dead bird or a woman, the result was just apples or a dead bird or a woman. The paint made no difference and the subject was still better than his rendering of it. He was only concerned with technical problems. Fascinated by a gradated sky in a picture in the National Gallery, he practised gradated skies until he could have done them in his sleep.