Mendel wrote a cheque and handed it to him shamefacedly.
“I want to pay a bill on my way home,” said Logan. “I hate being in debt, especially for colours.”
“I get my colours from Cluny,” said Mendel, “and he sets them against anything he may sell.”
The irruption of money had depressed him, and he began to realize that he was very tired. The springs of Rosa’s sofa had bored into him and prevented his getting any real sleep.
He was not sorry when Logan went, after making him promise to meet him at the Pot-au-Feu for dinner.
He had a model coming at eleven, but when she arrived he sent her away. He was sore and dissatisfied. The studio seemed dark and dismal, and he could not get enough light on to his work. He took it right up to the window, but still there was not enough light, and his picture looked dull and dingy. His nerves throbbed and he was troubled in spirit, for now his old dreams of painting quietly among his own people while fame gathered about his name had suddenly become childish and pathetic. He was ignorant, futile, conceited, a pigmy by the side of the gigantic Logan, who would not wait upon the world, but would compel its attention and shape it to his will. What had he said artists were? Priests and prophets? . . . How could a man prophesy with a painting of a fish?
Downstairs he heard Issy come in for his dinner, and there was the usual snarling row because Rosa cooked so vilely. Mendel compared Issy’s life and his own: Issy working day in, day out, earning just enough to keep himself alive. Why did he go on with it? Why did he keep himself alive? Why did he not clear out, like Harry? There was no pleasure in his life, neither the time nor the money for it. . . . A wretched business.
But was it less wretched than this business of painting? There was more money in painting, and that was all anybody seemed to think of. People wanted the same picture over and over again, and if he consented to please them, his life would be just as poor a thing as Issy’s, except that he would have pleasure, and, through his friends, an occasional taste of luxury. At best he could be polite and gentlemanly, like Mitchell, bringing no more to art and getting no more out of it than a boyish excitement, as though art were a game and could give no more than a sensation of cleanliness, like a hot bath.
No, it would not do. It would not do.