“I can settle him by painting good pictures,” retorted Mendel. “I don’t paint pictures to please people.”
“Then why do you paint?”
“I don’t know. To be an artist. Because there is a thing called art which matters to me more than all the love and all the women and all the little girls in the world.”
“Ah!” sighed Mitchell. “You’ll soon think differently. I shall never do another stroke of work without thinking of Greta standing on Kew Bridge and looking up the river at the boats with their white sails.”
“Will you be quiet?” cried Mendel; “will you be quiet with your little girls and white sails?”
Mitchell seemed to be slipping away from him, and he dreaded the thought of being left alone with his success, which was blowing a bulb of glass round him, so that he felt imprisoned in it, and wherever he looked could see nothing but reflections of himself, Mendel Kühler, painting his mother, and his father, and old Jews and loaves and fishes for ever and ever. While he clung to Mitchell he knew that he could not be so encased, but Mitchell demanded that he should go out with him into a world all glowing with love, with rivers of milk and honey and meadows pied with buttercups and daisies; to stand on airy bridges and gaze at innocent little girls and white sails. The contemplation of this world revolted him, and he stiffened himself against it. Better the smells and the dirt than such fantastical stuff. His gorge rose against it.
To wean Mitchell from his amorous fancies he pretended that he was tired and wanted a holiday, and together they went down to a village on the South Coast near Brighton. There it was almost as it had been in the beginning. For a fortnight they were never out of each other’s company. They slept in one bed and shared each other’s clothes, paints, and money. They sketched the same subjects, took tremendous walks, and in the evening they talked as though there were no London, no Paris Café, no exhibitions, no dealers, no critics, nothing but themselves and their friendship and their artistic projects. Mendel was supremely happy. Never had he known such intimacy since the days of Artie Beech.
But Mitchell was often depressed and moody. He had letters every day, and every evening he wrote at great length.
One morning he had a letter which he crumpled up dramatically and thrust into his trousers pocket.
“Gawd!” he said. “That’s put the lid on it. I’m done for.”