Artists -- Fiction; English fiction -- 20th century; Jews -- England -- London -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
"And when your time for marrying comes you must look among the Jews,
for the Jews are good people. No Jewish girl would serve you a trick
like that. Jewish girls know that they must marry and they are good.
But she is young, and you are young, and you will both forget."
VI
CAMDEN TOWN
FROM the magnificent studio in Hammersmith to two rooms in Camden Town
Mr. James Logan removed his worldly goods, a paint-box, half-a-dozen
canvases, two pairs of trousers, three shirts, a "Life of Napoleon" in
two volumes, and a number of photographs of famous pictures. The
magnificent studio had been lent to him by the mistress of its owner,
who had returned unexpectedly from abroad, and Mr. James Logan's
departure from it was hurried, but unperturbed.
"In my time," he said, "I have kept Fortune busy, but her tricks leave
me unmoved. She will get tired of it some day and leave me alone."
All the same he did not relish the change. He was nearly thirty and
had tasted sufficient comfort to relish it and to prize it. Also he
could not forget the ambitions with which he had come to London five
years before. In the North he had won success by storm, and he could
not understand any other tactics. He was an extraordinary man and
expected immediate recognition of the fact. Upon his own mind his
personality had so powerful an effect that he was blind to the fact
that it did not have a similar effect upon the minds of others. Women
and young men he could always stir into admiration, but men older than
himself were only affronted. He knew it and used to curse them:--
"These clods, these hods, these glue-faced ticks have no more sap in
them than a withered tree. They hate me as a mule hates a stallion,
and for the same reason. May God and Mary have mercy on what little is
left of their souls by the time they come to judgment!"
He cursed them now as he laid his trousers on the vast new double-bed
he had bought and went into his front room to arrange his easel and
canvas for work. Whatever happened to him he would go on painting,
because he saw himself like that, standing as firm as a rock before
his easel, painting, while the world, for all he cared, went to rack
and ruin. What else could happen to a world that refused to recognize
its artists?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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