Mendel scented danger. They seemed to him to be conspiring together.
“Italy!” ejaculated Sir William. “Italy! Blue skies, the sun, the light. Give him light and landscape with form in it.”
“Am I ill?” thought Mendel with some alarm, for Sir William sounded to him more like a doctor than a painter. And he decided that the Academician was not a real artist because he showed no sign of the fellow-feeling which had been so strong in Mr. Froitzheim.
Before the ladies he could say nothing. He put his pictures back in the parcel and heard Maurice and Sir William still conspiring together to send him to Italy. He was tired of being swung from one idea to another. At the Polytechnic they had told him that the essential thing in a picture was “tone,” that he must remember the existence of the atmosphere between himself and the object he was painting, and that there were no bright colours in nature. At the Detmold little was said about “tone,” but he was told that the essence of a picture was drawing, “the expression of form.” . . . What next? He had a foreboding that Italy was only another name for another essence of a picture. Besides, he wanted to live. Though he adored art, yet it did not contain all that was precious to him—liberty and gaiety, friendship and affection. Always until the Detmold his life had been weighed down with poverty and with terrible obsessions like that of his dread of the fat, curly-headed boy who, during the six long years of his schooling, had waited for him outside the school-gates every day to give him a coward’s blow and to challenge him to fight and to jeer at him if he refused. There had been furious, passionate loves to set him reeling, gusts of inexplicable desires and ambitions which had often made him weep with pain. And now, just as the world was opening out before him and he was warm with the friendship of an Englishman (for he was proud of Mitchell’s Public School training), they wished to take him away and send him to a far country.
He had had enough of being a foreigner in England, and he loathed the idea of travel. His father had told him that England was the best country in the world, and, if he had suffered so much there, what would it be in others? Italy? He wanted to paint what he had always painted, fish and onions in a London kitchen. How could Italy help him to do that?
He would not go. He would refuse to go. These Birnbaums and Fleischmanns had had their way with him for long enough.
So lost was he in this growing revolt that he was already some distance away from Sir William’s studio before he was aware of having left it.
“Our greatest painter,” said Maurice. “The greatest since Whistler.”
“Yes,” said Mendel, aghast at the supersession of Calthrop and the idols of the Detmold. If Maurice could be so ignorant there was nothing to be said and argument was vain.
“He really appreciated your work,” Maurice added.