The boy loved the streets and the shops, the markets with their fruit-stalls and fish-barrows, the brilliant colours in Petticoat Lane. He would wander drinking in with his eyes colour and beauty, shaking with emotion at the sight of the pretty little girls with their little round faces, their ivory skins, and their brilliant black eyes. Ugliness hurt him not at all. It was the condition of things, the dark chaos out of which flashed beauty. But cruelty could drive him nearly mad, and he would tremble with rage and terror at the sight of a woman with a bloody face or a man kicking a horse.
He had a friend, a Christian boy, named Artie Beech, who adored him even as Abramovich adored his father. Golda was alarmed by this friendship, thinking no good could come out of the Christians, and she tried to forbid it, but the boy had his way, and he loved Artie Beech as a child loves a doll or a king his favourite. Together the two boys used to creep home from school gazing into the shop windows. One day they saw a brightly coloured advertisement of a beef extract: a picture of a man rending a lion. "It will make you stronger than a lion," said Mendel. "Yes," said Artie, "one drop on the tip of your tongue." "I would be stronger than Harry if I ate a whole bottle," replied Mendel, and they decided to save up to buy the strength-giving elixir. It took them seven weeks to save the price of it. Then with immense excitement they bought the treasure, took it home, and, loathing the taste of it, gulped it down and tossed a button for the right to lick the cork. Feeling rather sick, they gazed at each other with frightened eyes, half expecting to swell so that they would burst their clothes. But nothing happened. Mendel took off his coat and felt his biceps and swore that they had grown. Artie took off his coat: yes, his biceps had grown too.
They went through the streets with growing confidence, and at school they were not afraid. Mendel's new arrogance led him into the only fight he ever had and he was laid low. Aching with humiliation, he shunned Artie Beech and went alone to gaze at the picture of the man rending the lion. It took him a week of hard concentrated thought to realize that the picture and its legend were not to be taken literally, and his close study led him to another and a strangely emotional interest in the picture. His eyes would travel up the line of the man's body along his arms to the lion's jaws, and then down its taut back to its paws clutching the ground. The two lines springing together, the two forms locked, gave an impression of strength, of tremendous impact, which, as the boy gazed, became so violent as to make his head ache. At the same time he began to develop an appetite for this shock, and unconsciously used his eyes so as to obtain it. It would sometimes spring up in him suddenly, without his knowing the cause of it, when he watched his mother sitting with her hands folded on her stomach, or cooking with her hand--her big, strong, working hand--on a fish or a loaf of bread.