He was leaning back from the small table, on which the tea was set, eyeing my half finished portrait. I had had a long sitting and his beautiful china tea in his thin blue and white china came as a great relief.
He looked extremely handsome, I thought, in the golden afternoon light, in his picturesque studio overall; Jewish, of course, but with a distinguished air that made one overlook his stumpy hands and other signs of ill-breeding.
“Perhaps you’d like to hear something of my life,” he said, “it has not been without interest.”
He lit another cigarette, pushed the box, a beautiful piece of Moorish inlaid work, to within my easy reach, and then drawing a deep breath of smoke, began:
“I started life about as low as any new peer. My father was a Jew and we lived in the Jewish quarter off the Commercial Road. When he was sober he was very kind to me and my brothers. My mother never had any great significance for me, but I realize now that she must have been a very hard worked and hard treated woman as upon her fell the sole burden of supporting her husband and large family.
“From the time when my first memories start I have always been interested in drawing, and I used to use every scrap of paper and every stump of pencil I could find, but lines never satisfied me—I wanted colours and tones. And these I could not afford. Coloured chalks used to be my chief delight and I used to take them from the desk of the Rabbi who managed the local synagogue and to whom I used to go once a week for religious instruction. For my father, though quite indifferent himself, was always most particular that I should attend. The Rabbi used the chalks, I remember, to draw maps of the divisions of the tribes with.
“Well one day he caught me taking his chalks, but instead of beating me, as the red-haired master at the board school would have done, he asked me all about my drawing and finally persuaded me to let him take some of my work away to show to his rich friends. For he was the son of a very rich man himself and had been to the ’Varsity but had sacrificed it all to help his fellow countrymen in the slums. I tell you that there are just as fine acts of self-sacrifice done by the rabbis in the Yiddish quarter as by any of your parsons at Kennington, only they don’t brag about it.
“Well, he showed my work to his friends in the West, with the result that a few days later a man with a top hat and spats came to the door and asked to see me and my work. He gave half-crowns to all my brothers but he didn’t give me half a crown, and I remember, I was very offended until I heard that I was to be taken away and taught painting.
“That was the beginning of my ‘career.’ Those Jews ran me for the next five years, and I painted just as I was told to at the Academy school, to which I was sent. And everyone was very kind to me and I was introduced to lots of rich men, not only the moneyed Jews but men of your class who spend lots of money on being bored and are called ‘in society’ by lower middle class novelists. I began to acquire social polish and was being shaped into a pretty little gentleman; but all the time particularly when I could feel the grain of the canvas under my brush, I was dissatisfied.
“When I was nineteen they gave me a studio, nothing like this, of course, but a decent enough shed with a good north light—and set me up as a Society portrait painter. Well I painted and flattered the ugly old women, that came to me, for a time; but after a little I found I could stand it no longer. I was painting badly, insipidly, insincerely, and I knew I could do better. I saw that the whole Academic conception was false—yes, that sounds funny from me nowadays, doesn’t it? But we all see things more clearly when we’re young.
“That autumn the Italian futurists came to London and Marinetti delivered his epoch making series of broken-English lectures at the Dorée galleries. It was there, and particularly in Severini’s ball-room scenes, that I found what I and half Chelsea had been looking for.
“I always acted on impulses then, and when I came back and found in my room the luggage I had been packing for a tour through Italy with the Jews—they still ran me, though by that time I was making a fairly decent living—I was filled with revulsion. I wrote a brief, I am afraid rude, note to them, and slamming the door of my studio rushed out into the night.
“I have no clear idea of what happened that night. I went to the Café Royal and drank absinthe. And soon I joined a group at the next table and together, as the sham English Bohemians do, we drank a lot, & laughed a lot, and finally all reeled out into the cool air of Regent Street. There were girls with us too, who had their hair cut short though it was not fashionable then. The leader of the set was a beautiful youth with red-gold hair whom we all called Ronald. I never learned his sirname though I met him continually for the next year and shared his studio with him. He painted fierce warm-colored ‘abstractions’ in tremendous bouts of energy which left him lethargic and apathetic. He was a great friend of mine in the year I spent in our sham Quartier Latin. For after that night I left the Jews and spent my time with the young art students and futurists. We were a happy enough lot and I should always have looked back to that year as the best of my life if —
“Well, during that year I painted as I have never painted before or since. I painted as I knew I ought to without convention or restraint. I exhibited at the Mansard Gallery and in the Adelphi and reviews of my work appeared in ‘Blast’ and ‘The Gypsy.’ I was gloriously happy in my work & then it was all spoilt, and by a woman.
“I won’t say much about that, if you don’t mind. I was desperately in love and Ronald kept telling me not to be a fool. I wouldn’t listen to him and began to break with my friends. She was a model and her vision remains to me now as the most beautiful thing I need ever fear to see..... Well, the crash came, as Ronald said it would, and I tore up all my drawings and stuffed the stove in the studio full of them. And I scraped the paint off my canvases with my palette knife; and I had one tremendous night with the whole set ‘flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng, seeking to put thy pale lost lilies out of my mind.’ We were all very noisy and drunk and we told Rabellaisian jokes till far into the morning, and then in the grey of dawn I slunk back to the respectability and the Jews.”
He was speaking, up till now, very seriously and bitterly. Now he shook his great shoulders like a dog, tossed his head, & motioning me to resume my pose took up his palette.
“Oh yes, they received me with open arms. And Mayfair accepted me as its season’s attraction. The old life went on. They made me an R.A. and—Happy? why yes. Why not? I’ve made a good thing out of life. Ask any of your club friends, they’ll tell you so. But there are times when I see reviews of Ronald’s work and hear my academic colleagues’ sneers of him that I—Oh well; we must get on with the damned picture while the light lasts.”
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