Mendel: A Story of Youth

by Gilbert Cannan

With Hetty he was enraptured.

“Gawd!” he said; “I’ll give ten years to painting her, as Leonardo did to Monna Lisa, and then it would not be finished. Came from a Margate lodging-house, did she? Mark my words: she’ll marry a successful artist and queen it among the best.”

With Mitchell, Hetty put forth all her cajolery when she found that he knew what she thought good people. She could look very pathetic and delicate, and middle-aged artists were sorry for her, and thought being a model a perilous profession for her. One of them warned her of the dangers she must run, and especially mentioned Mitchell and Kühler as young men to be avoided. They roared with laughter when she told them.

The Paris Café was Paradise to her, and she made friends with all its habitués and attracted the attention of Calthrop, who became Mendel’s enemy for life when she told him that the youngster had said of him that he had been a good artist once, but was now only repeating himself.

With marvellous rapidity she picked up the jargon of the place, and could quite easily have taken her career in her own hands, but she would not surrender Mendel, who could no more do without her than he could without Mitchell. She clung to him and kept him a happy slave to his three friends, to whom she devoted herself as though her existence depended on the solidarity of the group. From morning to night she was with one or other of them, and every evening with the four of them at the Paris, or making a row at a music-hall and getting themselves kicked out.

She was learning her trade as they were learning theirs, and she was delighted with the ease with which Mendel picked up what she called “sense”; that is to say, he became much more like the others, affected their speech, grew his hair long, wore corduroys, a black shirt, and a red sash, and talked blatantly and with a slight contempt of great painters. But even so, he was disturbing, for he did all these things with passion, so that they tinged his soul, and were not as a mere garment upon it. Even in falsehood he was sincere.

When Hetty found Calthrop painting a self-portrait, she set her four boys painting self-portraits, and when she found the older men talking about the beauty of roofs and chimneys, the four were soon ecstatic about roofs and chimneys, and painting them without knowing how it had come about. She could feel what was in the air, and had no difficulty in making them conform to it, so that they were successful even while they were students, and were talked of and discussed and approached by dealers as though they were persons of consequence. Their life was one long intoxication: money, praise, wine, and debauchery went to their heads, and of all these excitants Mendel had the largest share, and found himself the equal even of Kessler, whose father was a millionaire soap-boiler. He attained an extraordinary skill at doing what was expected of him, and developed an instinct as sharp as Hetty’s for the success of the moment after next.

He won scholarships at the Detmold and, carefully adapting his style, an open prize at the Royal Academy. His patrons were excited and delighted. He was interviewed by the Yiddish papers and photographed, palette and brushes in hand, in a dashing attitude. He said many foolish things to the reporters, but the printed version made him blush. He was represented as saying that art had been reborn during the last ten years, that the Royal Academy was exploded and would soon close its doors, that there was no art criticism in England, that there had never been a great Jewish artist, and that this deficiency in the most vital and enduring race in the world would now be repaired.

He thanked his stars that his friends could not read Yiddish. Two well-known Jewish painters wrote to the paper to say that they existed and to trounce his “bumptious and ignorant dismissal of respected and respectable art.” And he heartily agreed with them. He was shaken out of the hectic dreams of months, yet could not feel or see clearly. His way was with Mitchell, and Mitchell was generously rejoicing in it all as though it had happened to himself, while Hetty was going from studio to studio spreading the news and declaring the arrival of a genius.

He wanted to go and hide his face in his mother’s skirts, but she was so happy and elated with the congratulations of the neighbours and visits from the Rabbis of the synagogue that he could not but keep up his part before her. For her and for all his family he bought extravagant presents, and he went out and sought Artie Beech, whom he had not seen for years, and gave him a box of cigars. He had a melancholy idea that he was doing them all an injury and that he must somehow repair it. The exact nature of the injury he did not know, but his instinct was very sure that the whole business was false. Yet it was so actual that he could not help believing in it. He was hypnotized into accepting it. There seemed no reason why it should not go on for ever. Here, apparently, was what he had always striven for—art and homage—and the idea that they could go on for ever was terrible and paralysing. But there was not a soul in the world with whom he could share his feeling. If he showed the least hesitation they would accuse him of ingratitude.