Mitchell was irritated by this letter, but he was also moved. He valued Mendel’s sincerity, which had continually jolted him out of his natural indolence. And, as he had a fine talent and a fairly strong desire to use it to the full, the friendship had profited him. It had also helped him to come to reasonable terms with that great man, his father.
On the other hand he was in this difficulty, that he too had been slipping out of the quintette through his new friendship with Miss Greta Morrison and her friend, Miss Edith Clowes. Knowing Mendel’s contempt for the “top-knots,” he had said nothing of this matter, and had found it sometimes difficult to account for the afternoons and evenings given to the dilemma of discovering whether Miss Morrison or Miss Clowes were the love of his life. Mendel was an exacting friend, and, as he concealed nothing, expected no concealment.
Mitchell, like the true Englishman he was, deplored the unpleasant complication, but left it to time, impulse, or inspiration to unravel. Impulse, in due course, came to his aid and he invented a plan. First of all he wrote a manly note to Mendel, confessing his inability to understand why he should suffer for Kessler’s caddishness, and declaring that friendship could not be so lightly broken. He received no reply to this, and proceeded by taking Morrison and Clowes (as in the fashion of the Detmold they were called) to see the docks at Rotherhithe. While there he gazed from Morrison to Clowes and from Clowes to Morrison, unable to decide which he loved, for both gave him an equal contraction of the heart, and then he told them that ships had never been properly painted, never expressed in form and colour; and then he added that it was clearly a man’s job, and then he informed them that only a short distance away lived Mendel Kühler.
“Would you like to go and see him?” he asked. “It is the queerest thing to go and see him. A filthy street, a dark house, a ramshackle staircase, and there you are—absolutely one of the finest painters the Detmold has ever turned out.”
“Do let us go and see him!” said Clowes, who had decided in her own mind that she was the third of the party and in the way. Morrison said nothing, and looked very solemn, as though she regarded the visit as an event—something to be half dreaded. She had a very charming air of diffidence, as though she were very happy and knew this to be an unusual and peculiar condition. Often she smiled to herself, and then seemed to shake the smile away, feeling perhaps that she, a slip of a girl, had no right to be amused by a world so vast and so varied.
She had enjoyed herself. The ships had stirred her romantically, and she could not at all agree with Mitchell about painting them, for were they not works of art in themselves? They moved her in the same way, arresting her eyes and delighting them, and touching her emotions so that they began to creep and tickle their way through her whole being. . . . O wonderful world to contain so much delight! And it pleased her that the ships should start out of the squalor of the docks like lilies out of a dark pond.
She smiled and shook the smile away when Mitchell spoke of Mendel Kühler. She remembered once meeting Mendel on the stairs at the Detmold. She had often noticed him—strange-looking, white-faced, romantic, with a look of suffering in his eyes that marked him out from all the other young men. . . . After she had passed him on the stairs she turned to look at him, and at the same moment he turned and she trembled and blushed, and her eyes shone as she hurried on her way.
Mitchell had told her a great deal about him, and she had heard other people say that he was detestable, an ill-mannered egoist. She supposed he was so, for she rarely questioned what other people said, but he remained a clear figure for her, the romantic-looking young man who had looked back on the stairs.
“We’ll take him by surprise,” said Mitchell, with a sudden qualm lest they should break in upon Mendel and Hetty Finch together. “If we told him he would hide all his work away and put on a white shirt and have flowers on the table, for he is terrified of ladies. He says they don’t look like women to him.”
“I’m sure,” said Clowes, “I don’t want to look like a woman to any man.”