Gregor Mendel

“ She saw that he was working again with his old love of his craft.
They dined at the Pot-au-Feu, and had it all to themselves because the weather was so bad. There were only the goggle-eyed man in the corner with his green evening paper and Madame Feydeau and Gustave, the waiter.
Over the dinner Mendel waxed very gay and gave her a very comic description of the scene when he had gone to his family to confess his failure. He had a wonderful power of making them comic without laughing at them.
“They are wonderful people,” he said. “They know what is sense and what is nonsense. ”

“ MR. TILNEY TYSOE LOGAN with Oliver was more startling and exhilarating than before. He was filled with a ferocious energy, and his programme was distended with it.
He said to Mendel:—
“She’s an inspiration. I have found what I was seeking. You have given me the inspiration of art. Through you I shall reach the heights of the spirit. She has given me the inspiration of life, and through her I shall plumb the very depths of humanity. She is marvellous. All the exasperation of modern life is in her, all the impatient brooding on the threshold of new marvels. ”

“ Oliver has two of the critics in her pocket. What do you say to giving a party in honour of the event? We can afford to forgive our enemies now, and there’s a social side to the movement which we ought not to neglect.”
Mendel made no reply. They were sitting on the front. The smooth, glassy sea, reflecting the stars and the lights of the pier, soothed and comforted him. Brighton was to him like a part of London, and he sank drowsily into the happy fantasy that he was being thrust out of the streets towards the stars and the vast power that lay beyond them. ”

“ He made a grimace of weary disgust.
“I care about you, Kühler, almost more than I do about myself, which is saying a good deal. Don’t let this love business get mixed up with your work, especially if, as you say, it is Platonic—that is the worst poison of all—almost, almost. . . . Still, I’d like to see the girl. Bring her to the party. We might join up and make a quartette—if she can stand Oliver. Women can’t, as a rule. They don’t like full-blooded people of their own sex.”
“She wants to know you,” replied Mendel half-heartedly. “I’m always talking to her about you.”
“All right,” said Logan. ”

“ At home, in Austria, people stole because they were poor, because they were starving. She herself had often sent Harry and Issy out into the market with a sack and a spiked stick with which to pick up potatoes and cabbages and bread, but here the old simplicity was lacking. The swagger and the magnitude of Mr. Kuit’s operations and her son-in-law’s frauds alarmed her, and she felt that no good could come of it. They belonged to some power which moved too fast for her, and it was being invoked for Mendel, her youngest-born, her treasure. Truly it was a black day that took Jacob from her. ”

“ Oliver came in with a bottle of wine under each arm. She was in very good spirits and looking remarkably handsome.
“Hello, Kühler!” she cried. “How do you like being a success? We’re full of beans. We’re going to take a house. Did Logan tell you?”
“No,” said Mendel. “I hadn’t heard of it.”
[Pg 334]
“Well, it’s true. We’ve done with the slums and being poor and all that. We’re going to have a house and I’m going to have a servant, and I shall have nothing to do all day but eat chocolates and read novels and have people to tea.” ”

“ When they were out of the shop he chuckled, and was as elated over his success as Mr. Kuit had been over his exploits.
“Oh! I should be an artist in anything I did,” he said. “I don’t wonder thieves can’t go straight once they get on the lay. If I weren’t a painter I should be a criminal.”
He walked with Mendel as far as Gray’s Inn, and there left him, saying he had another picture-buying flat to go and see, and after that he must pay a visit to Uncle Cluny and keep him up to the mark. ”

“ If you don’t mind we’ll have our names bracketed,—Kühler and Logan. People will believe in two men when they won’t in one. As for three, you’ve only got to look at the Trinity to see what they’ll believe when they get three working together. . . . Oh! I forgot you were a Jew and brought up to believe in One is One and all alone.”
He laughed and gave a fat chuckle as he mimicked the little man in Cluny’s cocking his head on one side and pretending to take in the beauties of Mendel’s work as they were pointed out to him. ”

“ Unless some people love knowledge for its own sake, quite independently of its possible uses, the new discoveries will only concern the working out of ideas inherited from disinterested investigators. Mendelism is now studied by hosts of agriculturists and stock-breeders, but Mendel was a monk who spent his leisure enjoying his peas-blossoms. A million years of practical agriculturists would never have discovered Mendelism. ”

“ There was a strange dignity in them, yet not a trace of the fine quality of the old faces he loved that looked so sorrowfully out on the world, and through their eyes and through every line seemed to absorb from the world all its suffering, all its vileness, and to transmute [Pg 82] it into strong human beauty. There were some women present, but they made no impression whatever on Mendel, who was entirely occupied with Sir Julius and with resisting the feeling of helplessness with which he was inspired in his presence. ”

“ My father’s a great man. He’ll stir you up. And you must come along with me and Weldon and Kessler and see life while you’re young. Good-bye.”
He shook hands vigorously with Mendel and strode off with his long, raking stride, while Mendel stood glowing with the happiness of having found a friend, some one to whom he could talk almost as he talked to Golda: a fine young Englishman, pink and oozing robustious health, ease, refinement, and comfort. ”

“ He believed there must be mute, inglorious Miltons in the slums, and that they only needed fertilization. When, therefore, he heard of the poor boy who sat in his mother’s kitchen painting oranges and fish and onions, he was excited to bring the prodigy within reach of culture. He made him attend lectures on poetry and French classes. These duties gave Mendel a good excuse for escaping from home in the evenings, and he attended the classes, but hardly understood a word of what was said. ”

“ If I’m good enough for one thing I’m good enough for another. Do you hear that, Logan? He would have turned me out!”
“You leave Kühler alone,” said Logan. “You’ll never understand him, if you try for a thousand years.”
“Turned me out?” muttered Oliver. “Heuh! I like that. He’d turn me out and get another girl in! I’ll not have any of those tricks from you, Logan.”
“You can talk about them when I begin them,” he replied.
She turned from Mendel to Thompson and soon had him soft in her snares.
“She would like to do that with me,” thought Mendel, “and she hates me because she knows she cannot.” ”

“ She herself had a love of flowers and of moonlight and the stars shining through the smoky sky, and she would sometimes find herself being urged to the use of strange words, which would make Mendel raise his head and cock his ears as though he were listening to the very beat of her heart. ”

“ And you can be thankful you don’t live in Russia. They wouldn’t let you be an artist there. If you became a student they would send you off to Siberia and you would die in the snow.”
It was the first time Moscowitsch had spoken to him since the breach with Birnbaum, and Mendel was at his ease with him again, and glad to be with his people. He knew that Moscowitsch was greatly attached to Golda, and had more than once urged his being taken away from his painting and put to some useful trade. ”

“ He says he had almost despaired of English painting until he saw your work.”
“How old is he?”
“A good deal older than us. Twenty-six, I should think.”
“Why don’t you just stick to me?” asked Mendel. “What more do you want? Why must you always go off on a new track? First it’s Hetty Finch, then it’s Morrison, and now it’s this new man. We were happy enough by ourselves. Why do you want anything more? ”

“ Not lightly do men let their occupation go; small, then, would be our wonder, did we find the established prophet unconvinced. Yet, is it from misgiving that Mendel had the truth, or merely from indifference, that no naturalist of repute, save Professor Weldon, has risen against him? ”

“ They began to talk of pictures and of one Calthrop, who was apparently the greatest painter the world had ever seen and a product of the Detmold.
“Sells everything he puts his name to,” said Kessler.
“What a man!” said Weldon. “Goes his own way, absolutely believing in his art. If they like it, well and good. If they don’t like it, let ’em lump it. He’s as often drunk as not, and as for women . . . !”
Weldon and Kessler deserted pictures for women. Mitchell grew more and more glum, while Mendel was still feeling the effects of the cigarette too strongly to be able to take in a word. ”

“ The poor devil hasn’t learned sense yet. It’s work, work, work with him, all the time. He thinks of nothing but his art, you [Pg 233] know. Never has, ever since he was a boy. . . . He’ll be a very great genius, and I shall be left far behind.”
“Not you,” said Tysoe, “not you. I know no man in whom I have greater faith than you.”
“Do you think him as good as all that?” said Oliver eagerly. “I’m always telling him Kühler’s not a patch on him.”
Meanwhile Mendel had taken refuge in the lavatory, where he shouted and shook and cried with laughter. ”

“ The art students looked bizarre and almost theatrical in the woods, with the long-haired young men and the short-haired girls, many of them wearing the brightest colours. Mendel hated the lot of them, giggling girls and bouncing boys, [Pg 192] and he recognized how inappropriate they all were and how he himself was the most inappropriate of them all. He felt ashamed, and wanted to go away and hide, to crawl away to some hole and gaze with his eyes at the beauty he could not feel. There were too many trees, as there were too many people. ”

“ He said: ‘Kühler is the only painter of genius we have.’ I spent the evening with him. I never heard such talk. It made the old Detmold seem like a girls’ school. . . . Hallo! Still-life again? What a rum old stick you are for never going outside your four walls!”
“What I paint is inside me, not outside,” said Mendel, trembling with rage at Mitchell looking at his work before he had offered to show it.
“Will you come and see Logan?”
“No. I am sick of painters. I want to know decent people.” ”

“ Mendel waited outside and paced up and down, oppressed with the idea that his friendship with Mitchell was at an end. He was left helpless and exposed, for all that had been built on the friendship had come toppling down, and with it came the extra personality he had developed for dealing with the Detmold and the polite world—the Kühler who had assiduously learned manners and phrases, vices and enthusiasms, as a part to be played at the Paris Café and in the drawing-rooms of the languid ladies who were interested in art and artists. ”

“ In each man, each woman was enough of God and of the universe to keep them poised for their little hour.
What, then, was love? What but the sense of being poised, of being borne up by God, an intimation that could only be won through contact with life at its purest. And beyond that again lay a further degree of purity which could only find expression in art, since life, even at its rarest, was too gross.
Often Mendel kissed his reproduction reverently and hugged it to his bosom, thinking childishly that some of its spirit could enter into him by contact. ”

“ Outside a house more gloomy than the rest they stopped. Maurice got out fussily, told Mendel to be careful how he lifted his parcel out, fussed his way into the house through a dark, luxuriously furnished hall, and into a vast studio where there was a group of fashionably dressed women taking tea with Sir William and exclaiming about the beauties of a portrait that stood on the easel. ”

“ He knew that the great moment had come, that at last he had attained the desired contact with the outside world. He was wildly elated, and had fantastic and absurd visions of Sir Julius himself driving down at once in his motor-car, knocking at the door and saying: “Does Mr. Mendel Kühler live here?” Then he would enter and embrace him and cry: “You are a great artist.” And he would turn to Golda and say: “You are the mother of a great artist. You shall no longer live in poverty.” And he would sit down and write a cheque for a hundred pounds. ”

“ Oliver began to scream at the top of her voice.
“Shut up!” said Logan. “You’ll have us turned out.”
“I don’t care,” she replied. “I don’t care. I can’t stand all this talk about painting.”
“What do you want us to talk about?” said Mendel, tingling with exasperation. “Love? Three men and one woman can’t talk about love.”
“Well, I didn’t come to Paris to sit in a dirty bedroom talking about pictures. I want to go out to see the streets and the shops and the funny people.” ”

“ Mendel had never smoked, but he did not like to refuse. He took a cigarette, which very soon made him feel sick and giddy. He lurched along with Mitchell until they came to a tea-shop, where they found two other young men whose faces were familiar.
“I’ve brought Kühler,” said Mitchell. “He’s a genius. This is Weldon, who is also a genius, and Kessler, who can’t paint for nuts, and I’m a blame fool, though it’s not my fault. My father’s a great man. Gawd! what can you do when your own father takes the shine out of you at every turn?” ”