“Nothing. I was thinking—I was thinking that there is nothing so good as London. They tried to send me to Italy, but I know that there is nothing so good as London for life, and where life is, there is art. I don’t want your pretty places and your pretty feelings. I want to go through the streets and to see the girls in the evening leaving the shops, and the men in their bowler-hats looking at the girls and wanting them, and the fat men in their motor-cars, and the bookstalls on the railway stations, and the public-houses with their rows of bottles and the white handles of the beer machines, and the plump barmaids, and the long, straight streets going on for ever with the flat houses on either side of them, and the markets and the timber-yards and the tall chimneys. It all fills your mind and makes patterns and whirling thoughts that take a spiral shape, going up and up to mysterious heights. I want all that, and nothing shall take it from me, do you hear?”
He turned on her ferociously, as though she were trying to rob him.
“And inside it all is something solid,” he went on. “Do you know that my father never loved but one woman in all his life? That’s what Jews are. They know what’s solid. If they have to stay in the filth to keep it, then they’ll stay in the filth. And because I’m a Jew I’m not to be caught with your pretty things and your little fancies. I shall paint the things I understand, and I’ll leave the clouds and the rainbows and the roofs and chimneys to fools like Mitchell.”
Morrison sat very meekly while he talked. She hung her head and twitched her fingers nervously. She was elated by his passion, but she too had her dreams and was not going to surrender them. His strength had given her confidence in them and in herself, and she was filled with a teasing spirit.
“Jews aren’t the only people who are solid,” she said. “You see men in buses and trains whom an earthquake wouldn’t move, and I’m sure, if an earthquake happened, my mother would be left where she was, reading the Bible.”
Mendel replied:—
“In a thousand years my mother will be just as she is now.”
Morrison stared at him and began to wonder if he was not a little mad. He added simply:—
“I feel like that.”
And she was relieved and thought he was the only sane person she had ever met in her life.