Mendel

“ 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. ”

“ If it were Weldon or Kessler I should say you were lying.”
“I do not lie,” replied Mendel with some heat. “It may have been wrong, but it was good, and I was happier after it. I think I should have gone mad without it, for everything had disappeared—everything—everything; and without painting you do not understand how terrible and empty life is to me. I have nothing, you see. I am poor, and my father and mother will always be poor. Their life is hard and beastly, but they do not complain, and I should not complain if I did not have this other thing that I must do.” ”

“ While Mendel had been wrestling and struggling, he had been put away in cotton-wool, every difficulty that had cropped up had been met, every deep desire had found its outlet in convention. And now that he had set out to be an artist, here was this Jew with years of hard work behind him, and such a familiarity with his medium that he could do more or less as he liked without being held up by shyness or awkwardness. And it was the same in life. Mendel was abashed by nothing, was ashamed of nothing. Life had many faces. ”

“ In Mendel, too, this desire for God became active and kindled his creative will. He plunged into his work with a frenzy, but soon recognized that he was committing the old offence and was “overseen.” . . . Yet how shall a man approach his God if not through art?
“Something is lacking!” cried Mendel desperately. “Something is lacking!”
His imagination flew back to that last sublime moment of friendship with Logan, but it lacked warmth. It seemed that he could not take it back into life with him, or that until he had established contact with life its force could not be kindled. ”

“ Never had Mendel seen anything so glorious, so rich, so dream-like, so clearly corresponding to that marvellous region where all his thoughts ended, passed out of his reach, and took on a brilliant and mighty life of their own, a glory greater than that of the Emperor at home. ”

“ FIRST LOVE FOR Mendel every day became romantic, though he suffered tortures of shyness and used to bolt like a rabbit through the doors of the Polytechnic, rush upstairs to his easel, and never raise his eyes from it except to gaze at the objects placed before him. He worked in a frenzy, convinced that it was his business to translate the object on to the canvas. ”

“ At last the orchestra struck up through the poet’s reedy chanting, couples made their way to the stage, and the dancing began. Morrison still sat prim and preoccupied. Mendel put his arm round Jessie’s waist, his fingers sank into her young, supple body, and he lifted her to her feet and rushed with her over to the stage. The whole place was humming with life, beating to the chopped rhythm of the vacant American tune. ”

“ So desperately anxious was he not to cut a poor figure before this remarkable man, and not to seem, like Mitchell, pathetically young.
“Good!” said Logan. “Shake hands.” And he crushed Mendel’s thin fingers together. “What I like about you,” he went on, “is your sense of form. Design is all very well in its way, but quite worthless without form.”
Mendel, whose work was still three parts instinctive, could not attach any precise meaning to these expressions, but he was well up in the jargon of his craft and could make a good show.
“Art,” said Logan, “is an exacting mistress. ”

“ Delighted!” he said as he coiled his long white hand round Mendel’s workmanlike paw. “My wife, I regret to say, is away. She will be so sorry to have missed you. Like me, she is tired of the shallow, artificial people we live among. We both adore sincere, real people. I adore sincerity. Sincerity is genius.”
“That is true,” said Logan in a sepulchral voice that made Mendel jump. “At least, where you find sincerity, you may be sure that genius is not far behind.”
“I bought a picture of yours the other day, Mr. Kühler,” said Tysoe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A waiter was sent out for the police, and three constables came filing in. One of them seized Mitchell, and Mendel, half mad with drink and excitement, seeing his beloved friend, as he thought, being taken off to prison, leaped on the policeman’s back and brought him down. In the confusion Calthrop and the others slipped away and Mendel was arrested, still fighting like a wild cat, and led off to the police-station, the constable whispering kindly in his ear: “Steady, my boy, steady. A youngster like you should keep clear of the drink.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her encounter with Mitchell took place at the time when Mendel’s influence on him had set him in revolt against his Public School training. On the other hand, the sight of the abyss of poverty into which Mendel descended so easily had set him reeling. He was shrewd enough to know that Hetty Finch was using him as a ladder to get out of it, and that there was a real danger of her kicking him down into it. In a state of horrible confusion he plunged at the most obvious outlet, the “pure girl” of the tradition of his upbringing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was an all-day trip to Kief. Over stone and stubble, through ditch [Pg 74] and mire moved the lumbering, springless vehicle, and Mendel, who quitted Poltava with an incipient fever, arrived at his destination in a state of utter exhaustion. The carrier set him down at the outskirts of the town. It was as much as his position was worth to have harbored a Jew—a fugitive from the military at that—and slowly and painfully Mendel found his way through the strange city, to the Jewish quarter. Every soldier that crossed his path inspired him with terror ”

“ She darted a mischievous glance at Mendel, who started under it as though he had been stung. He was horrified at the depth of his dislike of her, and he remembered with disgust her full, coarse bosom exposed as she lay in her calculated swoon. . . . How good it had been while she was gone with that fool Thompson, who suited her so perfectly, that chattering ape, with his talk of Van Gogh and Gauguin and “abstract art,” who stood now coveting her with shining eyes and fatuously smiling lips.
“I’m not good enough for some people,” she said. “When I come into the room there is silence.” ”

“ During the evening, a number of Bensef's intimate friends visited the house and were told Mendel's history. The news of his arrival soon spread through the community, awakening everywhere the liveliest sympathy. Many parents had been bereft of their children in the self-same way and still mourned the absence of their [Pg 79] first-born, whom the cruel decree of Nicholas had condemned to the rigors of some military outpost. Mendel became the hero of Kief, while he lay tossing in bed, a prey to high fever. ”

“ Recha felt the truth of her husband's words and dried her eyes.
"I look into the year just begun with great hopes," continued Mendel. "Among our own people the greatest harmony prevails. The sorrows we have suffered in common have served to knit our souls more closely together, and the little quarrels and petty jealousies that formerly agitated our community have ceased. ”

“ Harry held his peace. That settled it for him, and even Mendel was shaken by the storm his Christian inclinations had let loose.
“The Christians are liars,” said Jacob. “Every one of them is a liar, and they eat filth.”
There was a passion of belief in his father which Mendel could not but honour, and that other faith, so far as he knew, was held but mildly. ”

“ LOGAN came in early in the morning to make tea. He shut the door carefully and came and sat on Mendel’s sofa.
“She says you hate her,” he said.
“I?” answered Mendel. “No. I. . . . What can make her say that? Because I didn’t dance with her? I had Jessie. You ought to have danced with her.”
“I’m glad she didn’t dance. It might make her break out. Women are very queer things. You never know where they will break out. . . . You make love to them, touch a spring in them, and God knows where it may lead you. . . . You’re not in love with that mop-haired girl, are you?” ”

“ He could see nothing but Oliver with the grim, haggard face looking over her shoulder. He gulped down a glass of wine. That was better. It made things bearable. He poured out another glass of wine.
“I think there is more in the Futurists than the Cubists,” said the young artist.
“In art,” said Mendel, turning on him savagely, “there is neither past nor present nor future; there is only eternity. You try to make a group out of that, and see how you will get on. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Clowes absented herself in the day-time, but Mendel had very little energy, and for the most part of the day sat by the fire brooding over the bubble of his London life, which he knew he must break with a touch. Often Morrison sat with him, and neither spoke a word for hours together.
On the fifth day, when the sun shone so that it was wicked to be indoors, Morrison suggested lunch in the woods. Clowes excused herself, but Mendel agreed to go with her, and the farmer’s wife packed them a basket of food. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Love never flew out of the window for he was never in the house. They did not talk to each other much. Beenah did the housework unaided by the sprig of a servant who was engaged to satisfy the neighbors. In his enforced idleness Mendel fell back on his religion, almost a profession in itself. They were a silent couple.
At sixty there is not much chance of a forty year old silence being broken on this side of the grave. So far as his personal happiness was concerned, Mendel had only one hope left in the world—to die in Jerusalem. His feeling for Jerusalem was unique. ”