BOOK III

FORWARD FROM BABYLON

BY

LOUIS GOLDING

1921

MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY

NEW YORK

FOR MY FATHER

_A Glossary of some Yiddish words is given on p._ 308.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

FORWARD FROM DOOMINGTON WALLS

CHAPTER

I

II

III

IV

V

BOOK II

FORWARD FROM PHYLACTERIES

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

BOOK III

APHRODITE

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

FORWARD FROM BABYLON

BOOK I

FORWARD FROM DOOMINGTON WALLS

CHAPTER I

Russia--here was the first Babylon. Sitting on the metal stool, his

second-hand velvet suit fraying against the heat of the oven, Philip's

big eyes were round with horror of this immense, inscrutable place.

Everything they said was portentous, not wholly real. Many of their

words attained a meaning only after laborious thinking.

"_Kossacken_--big as trees!"

"Big spikes in front of the Gubernator's house! Babies stuck! Rachel,

the parchment-maker's daughter, caught up on a white horse! Never

heard of again!"

"Blood in the streets, thick!"

A fear and a helpless rage seized the faces there, always only half

seen in the gloom of the kitchen. By day, beyond the bars which

uselessly scowled against the small glass panes, the drab walls of the

house next door kept away everything but a dirty and dubious light. By

night, the flare of the coal-gas jet distorted his father, Reb Monash,

and his own feet on the fender, and the sofa into things of blurred,

awkward lines.

It must be confessed that Reb Monash Massel was not wholly unconscious

of his power to produce this atmosphere where terrible and impalpable

presences flowed from his lips in a shadowy rout. Sabres flashing!

Hilarious ponderous blasphemies tangled in the beards of _Kossacken_

storming onward and away!

"You've heard me talk of Mendel, the Red One? No, not the shoemaker,

the clerk! It was when a clerk he was, in the woods! They were

cutting the Posne firs. They knew he was a Jew, the wood-cutters, and

they put their heads together. Can one be a Jew without stabbing the

_goyishke_ eyes, eh? He was working very late one night; it was near

the end of the month and he had all his accounts to make up. Well, he

was bending over his papers very busy, and it was late, after midnight.

There were owls hooting and two or three mad dogs in the woods crying

now and again. It was very miserable, but he was bent over his

figures. Above his head the air sang suddenly. He lifted his head and

a knife he saw, quivering in the log wall beyond him, to his left. The

window on his right was wide open because it was a sultry night. He

got up quietly and closed the window, then took the knife out to give

back to its owner next day. He was settling down to his work again

when his eye was caught by something gleaming in the opposite wall.

They were very badly built log cottages, these, pulled down as soon as

the trees in that part of the forest were cleared. Badly built, big

chinks between the logs. It was the gleam of a gun pointing at him

through a chink...."

Somebody uttered a sharp cry. Philip on the fender-stool sat with the

points of his elbows striking into his thighs, his chin pressed down

into the palms of his hands. A burning coke exploded in the fire and a

fragment jumped out on the mat. Mrs. Massel stooped to it and swiftly,

with unprotected hands, threw it back into the fire.

"It's already a long time ago," said Reb Monash. "I wasn't fifteen

yet. I wasn't married. It's all over now, it's all over. Besides,"

he went on comfortably, at the risk of disturbing the atmosphere he had

created by his subtle modulations of tone, his pauses, his notes of

drawn tension, "besides, they'll all be frying in hell, the

wood-cutters, one and all! What will you?"

A slight murmur of satisfaction went round among the women. The

assurance coming from so authoritative a source as Reb Monash himself,

no one could doubt that the wood-cutters had long ago met their deserts

and were still adequately enduring them.

"_Nu tatte_, what about Mendel, the Red One?" This from Philip in an

anxious quaver.

Reb Monash looked round and down on Philip, a significant droop in his

eyelids, his lips tightening a little.

"_Schweig_," he said. "Silence! is thy _tatte_ running away?"

"Hush!" Mrs. Massel echoed, very quietly, from her corner of the sofa.

Reb Monash could not resist the temptation of taking out one of his

Silver Virginia cigarettes, deliberately setting it in his mouthpiece,

lighting it, and drawing smoke two or three times contemplatively.

Somebody's foot tapped in a corner. He resumed. "_Yah_, a gun

pointing at him through a chink. What was there to do, I ask you? If

they fired--well, they fired, and he was dead. If they didn't fire, he

was alive. And if a man's alive, a man must live. Not so? So he took

his quill in his hand again ... and he heard a little noise in the wall

behind him. He looked round. Another gun. There, held by unseen

hands in the night. Another gun. Pointing at him. Two guns pointing

at him. He turned round to his table again. A Jew's not a Jew for

nothing. He said a few blessings. Thou hearest, Feivel?" turning to

Philip.

Philip swallowed a lump in his throat fearfully. He was afraid to

answer. It was perhaps one of those rhetorical questions to which an

answer was somehow, mysteriously, an offence. He thrust his head

deeper into his hands and blinked.

"He said a few blessings," Reb Monash repeated, to press the moral home

upon his listeners. "Well, what will you? He was a good clerk, very

neat. And while the minutes in his clock were ticking as slowly as the

years during the Time of Bondage, his figures he brought over from

column to column. When came the first sign of morning so that the lamp

shone less strongly on the two guns in the walls there, pointed at his

heart," these last words with slow emphasis and repeated, "pointed at

his heart--he dipped his head and hands into his bowl of water, took

out his _tallus_ and his _tephilim_; and when he was passing the strap

round his arm, he heard very faintly the guns withdrawn through the

chinks in the walls. But he could hear no feet creeping away.

Besides, he was _davenning_; how could he listen to anything else?

It's only God you must think about when you're _davenning_, no?

"He finished when it was already day in his hut. His beard--it was a

small beard, only a young man's beard--was grey, like the snow in Angel

Street. He did his accounts so well, did Mendel, the Red One--they

always called him the Red One, even after that night, and strangers

wondered why Red One--so well, that the merchant he worked for

increased his wages by a rouble a month soon after. Oh, a Russia it

was! What say you?"

By this time Mrs. Levine, from Number Seven, was soaked in tears, her

face, her blouse, and even the flour on her apron was streaky and damp.

She had come in half-way through, but any anecdote, sad or merry, or

merely a parable to illustrate a point of law, invariably reduced her

to tears.

"_Nu, nu!_" said Reb Monash, "over a year in Jerusalem!" which was a

signal that no further ramification was to be expected from that

anecdote, and moreover, that it might not be unwise for Mrs. Massel to

drop her knitting and prepare for him a tumblerful of tea and lemon,

with a lump of sugar--not too much lemon, for these were hard times;

not like Russia, where people hung round your neck to beg the privilege

from you of staying with them as a guest for two months, three months,

as long as you liked. Well, that was Russia, but what could you expect

from England? Pah! _Yidishkeit_ going to the dogs! Young men he'd

seen with his own eyes shamelessly boarding those new-fangled electric

tramcars on a _Shabbos_! Which involved a double offence; not only

riding but also carrying money in their pockets to pay for this

dissipation--money on _Shabbos_!

So it seemed, Philip was fitfully made aware, that there were aspects

of this Russian Babylon which compared very favourably with the

situation in England, or, more precisely, in the drab Northern city of

Doomington, where Philip first saw the light, seven years before; or,

perhaps, to be accurate, in Angel Street, where the wire factory at one

end and the grocer's shop at the other were the limits of his confident

experience. Beyond Moishele's shop ("grocer's" shop only for

convenience, seeing that his stock-in-trade extended from

sewing-machines to fish and beetroot), Doomington Road extended its

sonorous length, where, sole oases in this desert of terror, Philip

recognized the Bridgeway Elementary School and the Polish Synagogue,

the _Polisher Shool_.

It was not wholly that the young scions of Judæa in Russia were so far

from committing definite sins against God and Man that their days were

a positive round of gratuitous holiness. Much as Philip tried

dutifully to rejoice with his father over this sanctity of young

Russian Jewry, even when Reb Monash significantly expatiated on the

talents of young gentlemen only seven years old who steered their own

vessels through the dark seas of Kaballah--it was not this piety which

set Philip brooding.

The landscape which his elders painted, unconsciously and incidentally,

as a background to their memories, filled his mind with inchoate

sequences of pictures. To the Jewish mind there is only one landscape

which purely for its own sake arrests the mind and the heart. Each

detail of Jordan or Lebanon is impressed centuries too deep for its

deletion under snow or dissolution under fire. Plateau of Spain, the

turbid flow of Volga, the squalid nightmare of Doomington Road, are

matters of indifference to the Judaic protagonists while the great

drama develops along its austere and shoddy ways towards some

_dénouement_ far beyond the invisible hills. To Reb Monash the

Orthodox Greek Church he had known at home and from which his eyes

turned bitterly away, whence the black-hearted pappas came forth and,

on seeing Reb Monash, grimaced and bit his lips, had imperceptibly

become the Baptist Missionary Chapel at the corner of Travers Row,

whence the Rev. Wilberforce Wilkinson emerged from time to time,

bestowing on every Reb Monash or Philip Massel who came that way a

smile beatific with missionary invitation.

But it was a matter of much concern to Philip that the Dniester which

flowed beyond the pear-orchards (pear-orchards! he tried wistfully to

recreate them spreading their splendid snows beyond the kitchen

wallpaper) was clean as--clean as the water in the scullery tap. Which

seemed mythological. Philip's acquaintance with rivers was limited to

the River Mitchen that flowed on the further side of the wire factory

and parallel with Doomington Road. The river stank--literally and

abundantly. When it rose after the spring floods of two years ago, the

cellars of Angel Street were a wash of noisome and greasy waters.

"It happened in the centre of a forest..." said one. "Trees--the sun

never got through their leaves in summer..." said another. "Yes, she

had her own vines and fig trees...." "... Corn, barley, all rotten in

the rains..." "... and after that, to finish them, they had five

haystacks burned to the ground;" "the orchard by the river, near the

Woman's Pool ..." they said to each other.

It was little more than words to Philip. It seemed illogical that

there should be a river, which, being a river, did not stink. Fruit

could hardly be dissociated from the baskets and trays at Moishele's

shop. True, there were unconvincing pictures of fruit trees in the

classroom at school, but they lent only a feeble corroboration.

And then inevitably the talk came round from orchards and clean rivers

to the old Babylonian horrors.

"It happened in winter. I stood in the trunk of a rotten tree till

nightfall. All day I could hear the women screaming and the horses of

the _Kossacken_ storming in from the country. They set fire to

Miriam's house, and when she came to the window holding her hands out

to the crowd ... they threw a broken wine bottle in her face...."

When Reb Monash fell into his best anecdotic form, Philip sometimes,

only a year or two ago, had been afraid to venture beyond the front

door, in fear of _Kossacken_ galloping in with drawn sabres from

Doomington Road. Indubitably the night was compact with their menace.

Only gradually he shook off these alarms. England, he realized, the

very filth of the Mitchen river impressing it upon him, and the grime

of these grassless, clangorous streets, England was not Russia--a

knowledge won only after thick agony and his brow soaked with midnight

terror. Russia--the first Babylon--the dread, the enmity, faded into

the murky Doomington skies.

One scene remained with him to consummate this nightmare. Reb Monash

told the story frequently. If he had played a part whereat women

lowered their respectful eyes with a fleeting gesture of disapproval or

impatience, his piety none the less was confirmed, if it needed

confirmation, in the eyes of the Lord Himself.

It was many years ago now, years before Philip was born. Reb Monash at

last was emigrating from Russia to the Western world. His family and

half a dozen other families had been packed into the uncovered

emigrants' cart which was to take them to the railway terminus many

leagues away, where they would entrain for Germany and Hamburg. It was

a matter of no interest to the authorities that at most a dozen people

could breathe comfortably and stretch their limbs in the vehicle they

provided. Family after family was bundled in, every half-foot of extra

space was crammed with bedding and the few household goods which, the

more cumbrous they were, they found the more indispensable.

Why, indeed, Reb Monash was emigrating he had not precisely satisfied

himself. Though fear of a _pogrom_ hovered ever on the horizon, a

cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but liable, any wind of prejudice

blowing, to streak the sky with more sanguine hues than sunset, this

had been beyond memory so much a normal feature of existence that it

could not have been the determining factor. If the traditional

_wanderlust_ animated him, he was too much in demand as an orator in

the synagogues hundreds of miles round Terkass to lack means to gratify

his instinct. It cannot have been the sentiment that young Jewry in

England and America (where he was intending to end his provisional

pilgrimage) had so far fallen from grace that it needed the example of

his physical presence before it could resume the narrow road; it can

hardly have been that--for such ungodliness as prevailed in England and

America needed to be seen before it could be imagined.

"But there we were," said Reb Monash, "Chayah," this being Mrs. Massel,

"with little Rochke, peace be upon her, at her breast, and myself and

Dorah and little Channah. Oh, what a wind was blowing! Knives!

Packed like dead men in coffins we were! Then the driver cracked his

whip and we were away. It was a desolate country, only we could see

the long road in front and overhead the cold clouds and the fir trees

running along the road by our side, patiently, like wolves! We could

only hear the wind and the bells of the horses and their hoofs,

click-click, click-click, hour after hour. But though the wind blew so

cold in our faces, there was no room to breathe, no room. To stretch

out the chest, an impossible thing. And then there was a station at

the roadside where we stopped and--imagine it! they put another five,

six people in the cart. Think of it! We started to grumble and some

of the women and girls began to cry. What do you expect? They were

half-dead for sleep. But how could they sleep, crushed like that,

standing, with no room to bend, let alone lie down, and the wind

driving through their chattering teeth. There was an official there.

'Curse you!' shouted he, when he heard us lift our voices, 'Curse you!'

"May he be cursed to his father's father!" every one in the kitchen

muttered bitterly.

"'Curse you for a lousy lot--you beggars, you rats! Ugh!' He spat

into the cart, in amongst us. _Nu_, we did what possible was to let

the new people come in. Can you picture for yourselves--Oh! you

can't--what it was like? Rochke, peace be upon her, was at the breast.

We could hear the poor baby crying for food, eh, Chayah?"

But Mrs. Massel could never bear the telling of this tale. She would

be in the scullery peeling potatoes. Not washing up. It was

indiscreet to make a noise when Reb Monash was talking. If Philip

dropped a book, Reb Monash had to pause a full minute until he

recovered the evenness of his flow.

"Poor little Rochke, peace be upon her, crying for food! And so

crushed were we that there wasn't even room to feed the child, though

everybody understood and tried to make room. Now, perhaps you'll

realize what it was like. As the child became more and more hungry she

became too weak even to cry. It was getting dark and I started my

night prayers. Then I heard Chayah shout to me, 'Monash! Monash!' It

was not the first time she'd cried 'Monash!' to me that day. What

could I do? What help was there? I just went on _davenning_. Ah, the

poor child, the poor child, God wanted thee!"

His eyes softened. There was a huskiness in his throat. The women in

the kitchen lifted their aprons to their eyes. If there were any men

there they cleared their throats staunchly. Philip sat on the fender

stool, his heart bursting with pity for his mother. "Poor mother! my

own poor mother!" he felt like whispering into her ear and throwing his

arms round her neck and assuring her that he was alive and _he_ would

love her and die for her at the last. But he remembered that he was

not encouraged to display vehemently his passion for his mother. Very

gently he slipped from the stool, turned round into the scullery and

took a knife to help her peel the potatoes. At all events, he would

not allow her to work so cruelly hard. Why, her fingers were dry and

thin! No! he would never let her work like this. Never mind, when he

grew up...

"Poor child, poor child!" Reb Monash continued, his voice a trifle

unsteady. "How can I tell you? She was suffocating there. No room

for her little lungs to open and draw breath! 'Monash, the child, the

child!' Chayah was saying. What could I do? How could I understand?

Besides, I was _davvenning_--how could I interrupt? And her little

face was growing grey. What? Do you understand? There was no room

for her heart to beat ... so her heart stopped beating!"

Again there was a pause. The suffocation which had gripped the child

in that monstrous cart years ago seemed to occupy the kitchen in Angel

Street. It was not only the shut window; the beneficence of the

architects of Angel Street had declared that kitchen-windows should be

close-sealed as a wall. It was not the shut doors; the doors were

always shut because a "draught" aggravated Reb Monash's cough and

rendered him speechless for minutes. That suffocation from the Russian

road had descended upon Angel Street. Some one opened his collar and

craned his neck for air.

"But, of course, Chayah would not believe that anything had happened to

the child. I could only see Rochke very indistinctly because we'd been

separated by the crowd. 'It's only a fit! Shake her, shake her, if

thou canst!' I said. 'Or perhaps a sickness of the stomach!' said

Chayah. 'It will be well with the child when we stop and get down!

She'll have some air and food, and she'll be all right, no? Oh yes,

she will, she will! Sleep then, sleep then, babynu, all in mammy's

arms!' she sang.

"God alone knows what the place was where we stopped to change horses.

And Rochke, peace be upon her? Well, what need to talk? She's happier

than you or me. Oh, but what an ornament to the race she would have

been! Such eyes, the little one, holy, like an old woman's! But wait,

the story's not finished yet. Can it be believed? The officials

there, they wanted us to continue the journey with the dead child! The

smirched of soul, the godless ones! Wanted us to go on with the dead

child! And when even they saw it was against God and Man, they wanted

to bury her there and then, in unconsecrated ground! Oi! Oi! has it

been heard of since Moses? But always put your trust in the Above One

and all will be well with you. Know that! Think of us, in the

wilderness, with a dead baby, and no holy ground to bury her and not a

friend anywhere. The cart had gone on to the next stage, with Dorah

and Channah. Think of us!

"It was then the Above One came to our help. A Jewish merchant was on

the road with a load of dried fruit. He stopped, God be thanked, at

the station, and we told him how things lay with us. And would you

believe it? Not a penny he would take--not much was there to give--but

he took the baby away and gave her holy burial in his own town! Be his

years long in the land! May his seed multiply to the fourth and fifth

generation! And so all is well with Rochke, peace be upon her!"

Reb Monash obviously drew much consolation for the whole episode from

the fact that the Above One had shown him this signal favour, and the

last offices had been performed unimpeachably over Rochke's body.

But perhaps Philip was too young to be comforted by the thoughts of the

propriety with which the incident had closed. He could only see very

clearly the figures of his mother, blank-eyed, her hands empty,

standing alone in Babylon, in that bleak Russian night.

CHAPTER II

Philip had not yet recovered from the dull dismay with which he had

found himself installed as a scholar in the Infants' Class of the

Bridgeway Elementary School. He had attained the age of five. Within

quite recent memory he had been breeched. He still remembered the

pocket in his skirt which was crammed with "stuffs"--the main

merchandise of his companions, snippets of prints, calicoes, alpacas

and linen rags picked up below the maternal needles and generally on

the doorsteps of Angel Street.

Reb Monash was by no means hostile to the idea that Philip should

acquire a Gentile education, on the broad understanding that it should

not outshadow Philip's accomplishment in Hebrew lore. It went without

saying that labour on the Saturday should be anathema under any

concatenation of the links of Fate. Moreover, the law of the land, in

the person of the "School Board," had been eyeing him significantly.

"It's time Philip should begin school!" said Reb Monash shatteringly

one evening. Philip lay dozing on the horse-hair sofa. His heart

shook before the joint assault of a great joy and a great fear.

"School"--that unfathomable place of red brick and towering windows,

where the "lads" went, the swaggering young men who jumped from

pavement to pavement of Angel Street in five jumps; where one was

brought into direct visual contact with "pleaseteacher," a thing beyond

all imagination lovely and terrible.

"So Channah, thou wilt not go to work to-morrow morning. He's an old

man, Philip, and he must make his start in life."

"All right, _tatte_!" Channah murmured. She thought ruefully of the

fourpence or eightpence less it would mean in her week's total as a

buttonhole hand. But she was devoted to Philip and his wise, elderly

ways, and the thought of setting his feet upon the paths of that

learning whence her own feet had been rudely torn on the morning of

Philip's birth was worth the sacrifice of many fourpences.

Philip's face shone soapily next morning. His black hair lay stretched

in rigidly parallel formations on both sides of his impeccable parting.

Channah had shined his button-boots with so much rubbing and spitting

into congealed blacking that his boots seemed to focus all the light in

the kitchen. His mother had adorned his blouse with a great bow of

vermilion sateen.

"Is pleaseteachers like policemans?" Philip asked, as Channah led him

by a hand clammy with apprehension along the Doomington Road to the

Bridgeway Elementary School.

"Oh no! Pleaseteachers are much more lovely!" was the reply.

"Policemen only lock little boys up, but pleaseteachers give 'em

toffee--and flowers!"

"And flowers?" echoed Philip incredulously.

When they arrived at the entrance to the school, a sudden nausea

overwhelmed Philip.

"I'se not going to school!" he said suddenly and firmly.

"Feivele, what do you mean?"

"I'se not going!"

"What's the matter with you? Why aren't you going?"

"_Dat's_ why!"

But Channah had not come unprepared for such an emergency. Mrs. Massel

had anticipated it with a stick-jaw of Moishele's best. She held it

towards the child and made provocative labial noises.

"Aren't you going now?"

"No!" he said a little more doubtfully.

She had another weapon in the armoury.

"_Tatte_ will give you such a _pitch-patch_!" she said

threateningly--_pitch-patch_ being a form of castigation among all

nations as constant in method as it is variable in name.

In the surge of new fears, Reb Monash had been temporarily obscured.

Philip's mind travelled back swiftly to the knees of Reb Monash where

at so sinless an age he had already lain transversely more than once.

He contemplated the possibility of _pitch-patch_ for some moments.

"Gib me de stickjaw, den!" he said.

"You can't eat it now!"

"One suck!" he wheedled.

They passed duly through the vestibule into the great "infants' hall."

At its geometrical centre the principal pleaseteacher sat, pavilioned

in terrors. A few words of high import passed between Miss

Featherstone and Channah. Before Philip's eyes the walls soared

endlessly into perpendicular space. There was no ceiling. He made the

hideous discovery that there was no floor to the room. His shining

boots hung suspended in space. Strange antiphonies propounded and

expounded the cosmic mysteries. He was lost. He was rolling headlong

among the winds, like a piece of cotton-fluff lifted high above the

roofs of Angel Street.

What was this? The pleaseteacher was looking at him; her mouth was

opening; there were big cracks on each side of her nose. Yes, she was

smiling into him. He resumed his ponderable qualities. He was a

little boy dismally sick in the infants' hall of the Bridgeway

Elementary School. He preferred to be a piece of cotton-fluff. It was

a more impersonal doom.

"What's your name, little boy?"

He wondered whether it was an impertinence to reply. It was funny and

dry at the back of his throat. He stared fixedly at the crack on the

left side of her nose.

"What's your name, little boy?" A certain acidulation had thinned her

voice.

"My name Feivele an' I live at ten Angel Street an' I'm five years old

an' my farver's Rebbie Massel!" he said, the words trembling out in a

bewildered spate.

"Will you ask your brother to speak a little more slowly and

distinctly, Miss Massel? Thank you. Now what's your name, little boy?"

"Philip Massel, pleaseteacher!"

"Now, Philip Massel. I'm your head mistress. You must call _me_ Miss

Featherstone. Miss Briggs!" she called, "Miss Briggs! Will you please

put Philip Massel into your class?" Then turning to Philip, "You will

kindly call Miss Briggs 'teacher.' You understand?"

"Yes, pleaseteacher!"

"Stupid! But he'll soon know better," she assured Channah.

"Yes, Miss Featherstone!" Channah corroborated. Philip's hand

feverishly held his sister's all this while.

"You'd better just see him to his place," said Miss Featherstone to

Channah, as Miss Briggs led the way to her class.

"Sit here, Philip," said Miss Briggs, "next to Hyman Marks!"

"Don't go 'way, don't go 'way!" Philip huskily implored Channah.

Hundreds of scornful eyes were stripping him bare of his blouse, his

shined boots, his bow of vermilion sateen, till they all lay at his

feet in a miserable heap and he shivered there in the cold, naked,

despised. "Don't go 'way!" he moaned.

Channah looked despairingly towards Miss Briggs.

Miss Briggs seized her chalk significantly. It was time the new-comer

had settled down.

"I'll tell you what," said Channah, "I'll go to Moishele's and buy you

a ha'pny tiger nuts and a box of crayons. And I'll come back straight

away."

"Promise!" he demanded in anguish.

"_Emmes!_" she said, invoking the Hebrew name of Truth.

"_Emmes what?_" He knew that Truth unsupported by an invocation to the

Lord was a weak buttress.

"_Emmes adoshem!_" she said, her heart sinking at the perjury. But,

she consoled herself, it was not as if she had sworn by the undiluted

form of the oath, "_Emmes adonoi!_" from the violation of which

solemnity there is no redemption.

Philip saw her disappear through the doors. A black cloud of

loneliness enveloped him until he could hardly breathe. The terrifying

sing-song of these young celebrants at their fathomless ceremony had

begun again.

_Twice one are two,

One and one are two!

Twice two are four,

Two and two are four!_

Fantastic hieroglyphs danced across the blackboard at the dictate of

Miss Briggs' chalk. The heavy minutes ticked and ticked in a

reiteration of monochrome and despair.

_Twice one are two,

One and one are two!_

What teeth she had, Miss Briggs! Not like his mother's! A little

yellow his mother's were, but small and neat, as he observed whenever

she smiled one of her tired and sweet smiles. What was the specific

purpose of Miss Briggs' teeth? Why should those two at the top in

front be so large and pointed? He had heard old Mo who sold newspapers

tell tales about canninbles. Wass Miss Briggs a canninble? Oh the

long, long Channahless minutes! When would she come? What? Some one

was whispering behind him.

"Say, kid!"

Philip was afraid to turn round. What would Miss Briggs do if he

turned round? And she had two such horrid teeth, at the top, in front!

"Say, kid! Got anyfing?"

Philip turned his head round fearfully. A villainously scowling face

was bent over from the bench behind towards his own.

"Aven't yer got nuffing?"

Philip looked helplessly into the forbidding face.

"I tell yer, kid!" the voice menaced, "if yer don't gib me anyfing,

I'll spifflicate yer!"

The process of spifflication sounded as terrible as it certainly was

vague. Philip put his hand into his trouser-pocket where the lump of

stickjaw lay warmly spreading its seductive bounties over the lining.

To part with a whole lump of stickjaw from which the one due he had

extracted was a single suck! But, on the other hand, spifflication!

And moreover, soon, oh surely very, very soon, Channah would come back

with the tiger nuts, not to mention the box of crayons. He drew the

lump of sticky languor from his pocket. A grubby fist from behind

closed round it.

_Twice two are four,

Two and two are four!_

Faithless Channah! How could the mere passing of time be such a

labour? He subsided into a daze of stupefaction; only the hope of

Channah's appearance buzzed and buzzed like a fly on the ear-drum. A

great tear rolled slowly down his face. Another followed and another.

They dropped into the bow of vermilion sateen. Suppose his mother

should die in his absence? Or there might be a big, big fire! And

just suppose....

A great clangour of bells! Miss Featherstone on her dais shut a book

with a loud snap. Miss Briggs definitively placed her chalk on her

desk. A pleaseteacher from another class walked with dignity over to

the piano at the far end of the hall. She lifted the lid and played a

slow march. The top class filed out from the desks, advanced in single

order to a red line which, starting a few feet from Miss Featherstone's

dais, led to the door; the class marched along the red line and passed

with decorum from the hall. When Philip walked the red line in his

turn he was wondering whether he ought to be placing each foot

centrally upon the line. Dizzily he staggered along. When at last he

rushed out into the road, wild with the relief from servitude, Mrs.

Massel was waiting for him outside the school entrance, and when she

lifted him from his feet, he howled with fearful delight.

His heart was full of resentment against Channah for her ignoble

desertion. "Channah de Pannah, de big fat fing!" he jeered, when he

saw her at dinner. Only the surface of his wound was healed when she

bestowed upon him not only the tiger nuts and the box of crayons but a

gratuitous tin trumpet gay with scarlet wools.

He refused vehemently to return to school that afternoon. But Reb

Monash, entering the kitchen from the sitting-room where his _chayder_,

his Hebrew school, was installed, speedily convinced him that the

morning's bitter destiny must again be pursued.

For days his tiny faculties were flattened beneath the weight of his

bewilderment. When, one morning, he went with the others into the

playground for the interval, he crept inconspicuously on the skirts of

the shrieking masses to the furthest corner in the wall, where he

crouched, huddled, wondering what it was like to be grown up. When a

lady came into the playground and vigorously rang a bell, he felt that

no bell had any meaning to him. He was apart, unwanted. When he saw

the children lining up in their classes and passing into the school

with their teachers at their head, he turned towards them a dull

abstracted eye. But when the appalling quiet of the playground

impressed itself upon him, and he heard the choruses droning through

the windows, "Twice One are Two," he realized with a sickening pang of

alarm that he too was a cog in that machine, that he ought to have been

minutes and minutes ago on the inner side of those walls.

His face was hot with shame as he dragged his feet through the door,

and along the red line which burned down the hall like a trail of fire.

When he slunk into his place like a cat with a stolen steak into a

cellar, he found the eyes of Miss Briggs turned towards him so round

with stony horror that he feared they must drop from their sockets.

Hyman Marks next door gazed virtuously at him and turned away with a

sniff.

Something of this early stupefaction remained with him, even though he

had passed from the infants' hall to the upstairs department.

"Pleaseteacher" had long been attenuated into "teacher," and Miss

Green, who was the genius president over Standard Two, had entertained

for him more than a teacherly regard ever since Philip had raised his

hand in the middle of a lesson and inquired from her, "Please, Miss

Green, can pupils marry teachers?" They frequently maintained long

conversations when school was over, until Philip suddenly would bethink

himself of the duties his racial tongue demanded and which awaited him

in _chayder_ under the unremitting vigilance of Reb Monash; whereon,

with a troubled "Please, good afternoon, teacher!" he would scamper

off. Miss Green liked the sonority with which he delivered the

recitations she taught in class. He had a premature sense of tragedy.

_On Linden when the sun was low,

All darkly lay the untrodden snow--_

he delivered with the long modulations of a funeral dirge. He seemed

to have discovered a new delight in the mere utterance of rhythmic

lines. "On Linden when the sun was low," he chanted on his way home

from school, bringing his right foot down heavily upon the iambic

stresses of the line. There was a Saturday morning when Reb Monash

tested his knowledge of the Bible portion to be read in the synagogue

that day with "Say then, Feivele, what is the chapter in _shool_

to-day?"

Philip was abstracted. His mind was recreating his latest conversation

with Miss Green.

"On Linden when the sun was low!" he replied. Reb Monash stared at

him. "Proselytized one!" he exclaimed. "What means this?" He led

Philip to a copy of the Pentateuch and summarily refreshed his mind.

They were great friends, Miss Green and Philip, a fact which did not

leave Philip's behaviour uninfluenced. The class was filing through

the open door, (in the upstairs department the classes had single rooms

instead of a common hall). He had not noticed that an unfamiliar

teacher was standing at the door in Miss Green's place, and just before

entering he turned round to exchange a few words with his successor in

the procession.

"You bad boy!" exclaimed the voice of the strange lady. "Do not sit

down in your place! You will stand in the corner till I ask for you!"

Philip's ears were rimmed with hot shame. The procession ended. "Come

here!" said the lady. "Hold your hand out! Now!" Five, ten, twenty

times, she brought a ruler down on his knuckles. It was not the pain

which mattered. It was the disgrace! He, Miss Green's young

friend--or, as his class-mates with characteristic envy and vulgarity

called it, her "sucker-up!" Acute as his humiliation was, he kept

strict count of the ruler's descent upon his knuckles. Twenty-four!

Wouldn't Miss Green have something to say about it!

When the class filed into the room next day, Miss Green was looking

down upon Philip with so affectionate a regard that the shame and anger

pent within him since yesterday burst their bounds and he broke into

tears.

Horror upon horror! Miss Green, touched to the heart by these sudden

tears, bent down from her Olympian five-foot-four and kissed him loudly

on the forehead! It was too much to bear! A platonic display of

mutual respect was an excellent arrangement. But this descent into the

murky ether of physical contact injured his sense of fitness. The

sudden drought of his tears, the bright red spot in the centre of each

cheek, instructed Miss Green that she had erred. "These inscrutable

little Jew-boys!" she mused, and turned to Alfred and the cakes.

Next day she asked him to stay a moment with her after school. They

both realized the impropriety of any reference to yesterday's incident.

There followed a little small talk, then--

"Tell me, Philip," she said quietly, "tell me which you'd rather be,

Jew or Christian?"

The wheels of the whole world for one instant ceased their revolutions.

Here in truth was the end of an epoch and the beginning of another.

Here was an issue which nothing had ever before presented to his mind,

and an issue stated so simply. "Tell me, Philip, which would you

rather be, Jew or Christian?" He caught his breath as he envisioned

the state of affairs when such things as being Jew or Christian

depended upon one's own volition. For one instant cool as snow and

loud with the volume of plunging waters a something beyond even this

came from far off and looked mournfully and intensely into his eyes: he

beheld a state of things where nothing bound him with chains, where

dispassionately he looked at Jew and Christian, and walked away,

onward, up the slopes of a hill, where words like these had lost all

meaning.

He staggered on the locker where Miss Green had placed him. His

forehead was damp with a slight dew of sweat. The blackboard caught

his eyes.

26

34

---

104

78

---

884

Yes, yes, that was more intelligent. He scratched his head and looked

down at his feet. Really when you come to think of it, Christians did

eat repulsive things. There was a Christian boy in the playground one

afternoon eating a _brawn_ sandwich--despicable food, spotted and pale

pink like the white cat at home after the kettle of boiling water had

fallen on its fur. True! it seemed that Christian boys occasionally

went for their holidays and saw cows and trees and things--a distinct

feather in the Christian hat. But on the other hand, Mr. Barkle was a

Christian, and only Christians could kill rabbits like Mr. Barkle. The

slaughtering of animals was a very peculiar and limited privilege among

his own folk--a rite performed, as Reb Monash had made clear to the

_chayder_, swiftly, painlessly and professionally. Mr. Barkle, on the

other hand, had brought a rabbit into Standard Two for "object lesson"

and murdered it, slowly, publicly. Mr. Barkle himself was not unlike a

rabbit. He was very fat and his grey waistcoat resembled the rabbit's

belly. But his eyes sparkled somewhat unpleasantly--very different

from the rabbit's big, brown frightened eyes. And Mr. Barkle had

pressed the rabbit's neck between his hands, till the eyes became

bigger and bigger, and the legs moved convulsively, and a long low

whistle came out mournfully from the rabbit's throat, and the legs

twitched only faintly and then hung quite limp.

After Mr. Barkle had cut up the animal to describe its parts, a little

Christian boy had said:

"Please, Mister Barkle, can I take the rabbit 'ome? Farver luvs

rabbits!"

No! Philip determined. _No!_ he would never be a Christian!

Yet Miss Green was a Christian. It would be impolite to be too decided

about it.

"Please, Miss Green," he said, looking up, "I'd rarver stay wot I was

born!"

"There's a wise boy!" said Miss Green, with the faintest touch of

chagrin. And the conversation pursued less transcendental roads.

CHAPTER III

At no time did Philip find the society of his coevals congenial; the

society at least of the young males of his age; which was an element in

his composition not, I venture, to be crudely dismissed as one form or

another of priggishness.

Whatever the defects were of Philip's education, and these were not

inconsiderable, he was never warned to have no truck with Barney of

next door because his father was a presser and rigidly banished collars

from his wardrobe, excepting on _Yom Kippur_, the Day of Atonement, on

which occasion a waterproof collar did annual service with much

_éclat_; nor were fogs of dubiety sedulously created around Mr. and

Mrs. Lavinsky, whose premarital relations were, it was rumoured, not

free from stain.

Yet inherently Philip held himself aloof from all the "lads" in Angel

Street. He felt, not consciously and certainly not in defined words,

that everything coarse and cruel in the architecture of Angel Street

had taken hold of their spirit. There was as much of the frankly and

repulsively animal in them as in the sharp-ribbed cats who chattered

obscenely on the walls. He felt at times when he saw the boys

slithering along the roofs that fragments of the very roofs, steeped in

grime and dirty rain as they were, had detached themselves and become

animate.

He turned with relief to the latest "poetry" he had been taught; in the

reverberant recessions of rhythm the boys were rolled over and sucked

down like pebbles in an ebbing tide. The fustian of "Horatius" gave

him unmeasured delight, and soaked in the yellow flood of Tiber he

would forget the malodorous imminence of Mitchen.

But in the girls of Angel Street he satisfied his need for human

companionship. They did not bandy the filth of gesture and word which

were the traffic of the boys and which turned him sick, made him

faintly but dismally aware of yawning abysses of uncleanness hidden

from his feet.

So he would sit with the girls at their doorsteps while the boys

shrieked in the entries. The girls were a willing audience for his

declamations of verse; they accepted Kaspar's reiteration of "But it

was a famous victory" with sympathy and evident pleasure. When they

realized the full implications of the question,

_Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floating hair,

A tress o' golden hair,

O' drowned maiden's hair?_

they took out their handkerchiefs and wept.

Philip was sitting among the girls cutting out from the advertisement

pages of magazines pictures of ladies with artificially perfected

busts. The pictures thus obtained were inserted among the leaves of

books and the custom of the possessors of pins was solicited. Three

pricks among the pages of the books were allowed, with whatsoever

bounty fell to the adventure.

Philip had never quite decided which was the happier state--the being

endowed with pictures of many well-busted ladies, or the possession of

many pins. The latter at least held the prospect of a service he might

render to his mother, to whom a stock of pins should, he presumed, be

an inestimable boon. But opulence in pins meant a dearth in busted

ladies--a barren state of affairs only to be remedied by a fresh outlay

of capital.

A "gang" came by whooping. "Gang" was a popular word in the vocabulary

of Angel Street. It was sinister with warnings of Red Indians crawling

on their bellies from the pampas beyond Doomington Road. It evoked

images of Red Signs found on the necks of the murdered daughters of

millionaires.

"Yah! look at Philip Massel!" a voice jeered from the "gang." Philip

shivered. He disliked the "gang," he had no point of contact with it.

"Stick-to-my-muvver-an-don't-touch-me!" the voice continued. The girls

were silent, for chivalry was not a predominant trait in the psychology

of the "gang." Jessie still bore a black eye inflicted by Barney in

unequal war. It was Barney took up the cry:

"Philip Massel, Queen-of-the-Girls!"

This was a slogan which appealed to his comrades. "Philip Massel,

Queen-of-the-Girls!" they reiterated shrilly. Philip's face was pale.

His hand trembled as he cut the pictures. The bust of the next lady he

delimitated sadly belied the merits claimed by the advertisement.

"Oo--oo! 'Oo kissed Jessie in the back entry?" Barney howled.

"Philip Massel, Queen-of-the-Girls!" the rest sang in choric delight.

Oh, the black cavernous lie! Was Jehovah silent? Philip's eyes

blazed. He flung his scissors down with a crash. The further side of

Angel Street rose and sank as he rushed towards Barney. The rules of

the ring had not yet been studied in Angel Street. Murderously he

buffeted his fists against Barney's abdomen. Barney turned green and

subsided. The rest of the "gang" jumped upon Philip and were

comfortably pummelling him when Reb Monash appeared on the scene. Mrs.

Levine had lost no time in informing him that a brawl was in progress.

Reb Monash had no doubt it involved those of his scholars who were

already scandalously late for _chayder_.

The "gang" wilted before him. At his feet lay Philip, gasping and

bleeding.

"Feivele at the bottom of it!" he thundered. "Oh, a credit thou art to

thy race! An eight-year old, and this is the sum of thy knowledge!

Come then, I will instruct thee!" and he led Philip sternly home by a

familiar grasp of the brachial muscle between finger and thumb. Jessie

picked up the scissors ruminatively and turned the pages of the _Strand

Magazine_.

The idea shortly after occurred to Philip that some compromise with his

sex ought to be possible. It occurred simultaneously with the

appearance in his library of a new type of American hero. He was now

able to read without difficulty the "bloods" which described with

impartial gusto sandbaggings in the Bowery and the slaughter of

travellers conducted by Poncho-clad desperadoes in the Argentine.

Lurid as the "gang" was in behaviour, their literature was still

extremely tepid. Intellectually, they had not outstepped Lady

Kathleen's tender limits as laid down in her _Books for the Bairns_,

whereas Philip's heart had for months hovered and exulted with the

hearts of fully-fledged errand boys, twelve and fourteen years old.

But a new hero had crossed the Atlantic. He was in soul much more

turbulent than the heroes of the conservative school. His morals,

purely, be it understood, in order to achieve a virtuous end, were even

more elastic. The terror of his name was even more astounding. But

all his villainous qualities were kept strictly below the surface,

though, of course, his assistants were as coarse-grained and

blasphemous as tradition demanded. His manners were so exquisite that

hotel-keepers did not presume to ask for the payment of their bills.

When he slipped from his chambers to undertake a midnight escapade, he

would insert into one pocket his revolver, into another a

silver-mounted bottle of hair-oil. Whilst his minions were grappling

with the objects of his displeasure and bullet shots ripped across the

shack, he would lift the wick of the lamp in order to manicure his

nails. His speech was so full of gracious evasions that--that, in

short, he completely captured Philip's heart.

Here was a mode of making artistic capital out of those very qualities

of the young men in Angel Street which so revolted him, whilst at the

same time he would himself accentuate those features of aloof

refinement for which they had dubbed him "bouncer," a word particularly

repugnant to him, accentuate them actually amid deference and applause.

How, then, was a reversal of the Angel Street relationships to be

effected? Philip hardly knew. His first discovery was the gratifying

fact that on a certain non-physical plane the "gang" regarded him with

a measure of positive awe. Not only was he the son of his father, but

he had the Kabbalistic faculty of uttering rhymes, a faculty which

influenced them precisely as a barbarian village might be influenced by

a medicine-man's incantations. His uprising against Barney had not

been barren of result, though the fierce splendour of it had been

mitigated somewhat by the parental sequel.

But most of the battle was won when, by a stroke of fortune, Philip,

for whom a new hat was long overdue, was supplied with a sample of the

head-gear associated with captaincy from time immemorial. His new hat

was dowered with a shiny peak and a ribbon splendid with the legend

"H.M.S. IMMACULATE," and when pressed slantwise over Philip's left eye

gave him an air of authority not generally associated with his small

face. A certain calm persuasive eloquence, assisted by a number of

"alleys," both "blood" and "conker," vastly advanced his cause. He

read, finally, certain convincing passages from the career of the Dandy

Dave by which not only was Philip Massel's claim to be his European

representative rendered incontrovertible, but it was proved also that

any actual immersion of his own person in the filth of affairs was as

unbecoming to Philip's new dignity as to the dignity of Dandy Dave.

The character Philip now assumed was undoubtedly a composite affair.

Dandy Dave was predominant, but it was not immune from the vocabulary

and behaviour of pirates, explorers, trappers and other species of

emancipated men. The trapper element did not persist, as shall be

rendered credible.

"Do you see that skunk?" Captain Philip exclaimed to Lieutenant Barney

one day.

"Aye, aye, sir!" replied Lieutenant Barney, "Aye, aye, sir!" being, in

fact, Lieutenant Barney's only and final achievement in the diction of

romance.

The "skunk" was a notorious piebald cat even at that moment slinking

with a torso of fried fish along the yard wall of an empty house where

the "gang" was foregathered.

"'E must be captured! We shall sell 'is 'ide to the next ship wot

calls at yonder port!"

An exciting chase, which extended over two days, followed. On the

evening of the second day the corpse of the piebald cat was laid at

Captain Philip's feet.

"Wot now, Captain?" said Lieutenant Barney, whose wavering loyalties

had been steadied only an hour ago by the gift of an india-rubber

sucker. Philip's heart fluttered a little unquietly. In the mere

abstract conception of chase there had been much of the poetical. In

the presence of the dead cat the fogs of illusion thinned. Shame

tugged at his heart-strings. But the faultless figure of Dandy Dave

stood before him. With little knowledge of the implication of his

words, "Flay 'im!" he said harshly. "The merchants call this morn!"

Lieutenant Barney inserted a broken blade below the fringe of the cat's

eye. He tugged. Philip looked down. The hideous mess which ensued

spattered Philip's brain like a pat of filth. He ran quickly from the

yard and was violently sick for many minutes.... The trapper aspect of

Captain Philip's authority did not again assert itself.

Behind the Bridgeway Elementary School extended a huge and desolate

brick-croft. Here the "gang" frequently undertook expeditions to the

Himalayas and the two Poles. Volcanoes were discovered and duly

charted. Wide lakes of clayey yellow water were navigated. It was a

point of honour with the "gang" that the lakes must be definitely

crossed from border to border, not merely circumvented. But while the

"gang" miserably splashed along and drew their clogged boots to the

further side, Captain Philip serenely walked the whole way round and

from his dry vantage encouraged his men to safety. It would never do

for the Doomington counterpart of Dandy Dave to smirch his own limbs

alongside of the vulgar herd.

The last episode in the captaincy of Philip was the Liberation of

Princess Lena, the immediate inspiration of which was the gallant

rescue by Dandy Dave of the daughter of the President of the American

Republic from a cellar below the very basement of the White House.

Lena Myer lived in Angel Street and kept irregular hours. The days of

her flirtations had already begun. When she returned one evening it

was arranged that the "gang" was to seize her, gag her, and carry her

away to the stable of the lemonade works adjacent to the wire

factory--whither Lieutenant Barney had discovered a secret entrance.

Here for the space of an hour she was to be bound to a support. The

clattering of horses was to be heard in the courtyard and Captain

Philip, sweeping in magnificently, was to cut her bonds, lay her

captors in the dust and deliver her with a flourish to her distracted

parents.

Of course, Lena herself was not to be informed of the somewhat negative

part reserved for her. She had already attained her "stuck-up" days,

but her beauty and her father's wealth, (he was a barber), evidently

cast her for the situation.

All fell out as arranged. As she entered the darkest patch of Angel

Street a black mass fell on her, choked her with rags, and bore her

kicking furiously to the stable, where she was fastened to a wooden

support. Many desolate minutes passed, during which her moans struck

so heavy a chill into the hearts of the desperadoes that at last they

removed the rags from her mouth. Immediately such a foul stream of

imprecation fell from her virginal lips, that the bloodthirsty gang

withdrew trembling towards the spider-webbed walls. She threatened

them venomously with the vengeance of her admirers. Some one made a

tentative advance in her direction. She uttered a piercing scream and

he recoiled with knocking knees. The "gang" had experienced fights

with "gangs" from other streets; the "gang" even had compassed the

discomfiture of a policeman. But a situation like this, where the

incalculable feminine threw all their generalizations into rout, left

them shorn of philosophy.

"Jem Cohen 'll 'ave your eyes out, yer rotten lot 'er lice!" said the

maiden delicately.

A clatter in the yard beyond the stable, cunningly caused by the play

of two slates on the cobbles, produced sudden silence. Captain Philip!

A tremendous wave of dislike for Captain Philip swept over his

supporters! Nobody but a "bouncer" like that Philip Massel could have

involved them in so unnatural a situation. By crikey! _They'd_ show

him, by jemmy, wouldn't they just!

Philip rushed into the stable's darkness.

Rigid with hate, Princess Lena lay taut against her support. With a

fine curve Philip drew the captainly knife. The braces-and-rope

fetters fell from the lady's limbs. With the hiss of an escaping

valve, Lena threw herself upon the astounded hero. Two great scratches

ripped redly down Philip's cheeks.

"Take that an' that an' that' an that!" she howled as she thumped him,

bit him, scratched him, tore his hair. Then her nerves gave way, and

she sank to the ground, all of a heap, sobbing.

Beyond a scowling, laughing, shaking of fists, the "gang" had remained

passive hitherto, but the moment Lena subsided, with convulsive

unanimity they fell upon their captain. When at length the sated gang

emerged from the stable, there was no superficial point of resemblance

between Dandy Dave and the quivering youth moaning lugubriously in the

darkness.

Philip had not yet found a key to the Happy Life. His experiment among

the young gentlemen of Angel Street had doubtless been foredoomed to

failure. He was not of them. He had been a "bouncer" and would, in

their eyes, remain a "bouncer" unto the world's end. They realized

cunningly how he winced when they shouted filthy words after him.

Their experience with Lena Myer had widened their vocabulary, and they

filled the air with enthusiastic impurity as he passed by. He was

approaching his ninth birthday, but still the little girls of Angel

Street gave him his one illusion of society.

School, too, filled him with leaden ennui. Miss Green's class was only

a memory of his later infancy. Miss Tibbet, his present teacher, was a

hopeless automaton. She wore masculine boots and impenetrable

tortoise-shell spectacles. When she opened her lips, sound issued;

when she closed her lips, sound did not issue. Her personality was

capable of no further differentiation. Nothing happened. A waking

sleep buzzed in her classroom like a bluebottle.

For his years he was early in Miss Tibbet's class. There was something

about him which much endeared Philip to the young ladies of ten and

eleven who sat in the same benches. The emotion at first was one of

somewhat elderly amusement and compassion. But when Jane Freedman

declared herself in love with him, it became a universal discovery that

Philip lay wedged between the split sections of every heart. They

brought offerings to him--cigarette cards, jujubes and raw carrots,

(Philip had an unholy appetite for raw carrots). One day Jane Freedman

waylaid him with a large lump of pine-apple rock.

"Kiss me, and it is yours!" she said. It was a very large and inviting

piece of pine-apple rock; it had only been slightly sucked, not more

than a taste. He kissed her.

The other girls promptly waylaid him with larger pieces of pine-apple

rock. The whole thing really was very unpleasant. On the other hand

pine-apple rock had its compensation. Yet Philip developed a great

distaste for humanity. Boys, at one extreme, were more unclean than

cats, (cats being the predominant fauna of Angel Street, they were a

useful starting point for all philosophy). Girls, at the other, were

more sentimental than fish. Pine-apple rock began speedily to pall

upon him.

School was wearying beyond words. Not a chance gleam of gold filtered

through the pall of cloud. Miss Tibbet's mouth opened; then it closed.

It would have been an incident, even if you could have seen her eyelids

blink beyond her spectacles. She taught poetry as she taught vulgar

fractions. A mad impulse began to seize upon Philip. He must separate

his own lips further, wider, more hilariously than ever Miss Tibbet was

capable. Then to deliver himself of one prolonged shout--no more. One

prolonged shout which would cleave a path through the clouds of

monotony wherethrough the dizzy horses of adventure might come tumbling

from the spacious blue winds beyond. Not a shout of pain or of

desperation. A shout merely from the whole capacity of his lungs, a

human shout, a challenge of the body in ennui.

His lips opened trembling. Miss Tibbet's spectacles swept blankly

towards his face. He bent down over his paper. The impulse waxed

within him and became a passion. He began to say to himself that the

whole future of his life depended upon his courage. If he did not open

his lips and yell he would be one thing. If he did open his lips and

yell, he would be another thing, and a bigger, freer thing. One day he

stretched his jaws to make the effort. The back of his mouth was

crammed with sand. He lifted his hand as if to hide a yawn.

A mystic conviction took possession of him. If he had any value, that

shout would be achieved. But its agent would be something greater than

himself. Prepared or unprepared for it, the shout would come, if he

was worthy.

It was a very hot afternoon. Miss Tibbet croaked at the blackboard

like a machine. A desultory dog was barking somewhere with insensate

yelps. The geranium before the closed windows drooped in the heat.

Flies were droning aimlessly.

A huge shout swept suddenly into every corner of the room, slapped Miss

Tibbet's face like the palm of a hand. There was an intense silence.

All eyes turned to Philip's face, which was flushed furiously red,

unhappy, exultant.

"Philip Massel, stand up!" He shuffled to his feet.

"Was it you who made that noise?"

"Yes, Miss Tibbet!"

"Why did you make that noise?"

"I don't know!"

"Did somebody stick a pin into you?"

"No!"

"Did anybody stick a pin into Philip Massel?"

No reply.

Here was something entirely beyond Miss Tibbet's experience.

"Will the monitors keep order, please, while I take this boy to the

head master!"

Philip knew that sooner or later he would burst into tears. But a

great load was off his mind. He was free, he was free! For one moment

of dizzy elation a pang of that emotion struck him which long ago made

him tremble on a locker in Miss Green's room before the fateful

question--"Tell me, Philip, which would you rather be, Jew or

Christian?" The sheer poignancy passed, but something of his elation

remained, even in the cadaverous sanctum of the head master.

Mr. Tomlinson sat ominous in his chair as he listened to Miss Tibbet's

recital.

"Why did you behave in that disgraceful way, Philip Massel?"

"I--I--don't know, sir!"

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"I don't know, sir!"

"Are you sure it wasn't a pin?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Are you in pain?"

"No, sir!"

"Am I to understand that..." But Philip's shoulders were shaking. Big

tears rolled down his face. He hid his face in a dirty, frayed

handkerchief. He heard Mr. Tomlinson and Miss Tibbet whispering

overhead.

"The heat..." said one.

"Yes, I should think ... the heat...."

"You may go home, Philip Massel!" said Mr. Tomlinson. "Tell your

mother to put you to bed at once. Say I told her she must keep you

quiet. Don't come to school to-morrow if your head is aching.... And

never let it happen again, young man! Understand that!"

Philip withdrew. A grin mingled maliciously with his tears.

A day or two later he was standing contemplatively against the

playground wall during the interval, when he observed Harry Sewelson

approaching. Sewelson, though he was about a year older, was in

Philip's class. He lived in a draper's shop some minutes along

Doomington Road. They had had no commerce hitherto. Philip made a new

friend with extreme difficulty, and though he realized that there was a

quality in Sewelson, a keenness in his grey eyes, which distinguished

him from the rest, there was a garlic vulgarity about him, a

strongly-flavoured bluster, which, he had learned from Reb Monash, was

inseparable from Roumanian Jewry.

"I say!" declared Sewelson, "I bet you I know what was the matter on

Tuesday! I bet I know why you gave that shout!"

"_Bet_ you don't!" Philip replied. He was vaguely proud of the complex

of motives which had induced him to behave in so baffling a manner.

"Nobody pricked you!" Sewelson asserted.

"Right for once!" Philip agreed.

"And you weren't ill! I bet I know!"

Philip looked up curiously.

"_You just wanted to!_" Sewelson whispered in a somewhat melodramatic

manner. "You felt you just had to. You couldn't get away. You were

sick and tired!"

Philip's brown eyes looked up shyly, with a certain pleasure, with a

certain distrust, into the grey eyes before him.

"You're right!" said Philip. "It wasn't my fault!"

"I say," Sewelson said, after a pause. "I say..." Then he paused

again.

"Yes?" asked Philip.

"I say, what about being pals?"

Philip blushed slightly. "Let's!" he said.

They walked down the playground with linked arms.

"Oh, yes!" accepted Philip innocently. "I _do_ think Miss Tibbet is a

narky bitch!"

"Carried _nem-con_!" exclaimed Sewelson, proud of his elegant

introduction of a foreign tongue.

CHAPTER IV

The vicissitudes of school and Angel Street represented only the

secular side of Philip's existence. The Jewish, the clerical side,

claimed his servitude as soon as he pushed open the door of the house.

The whole day, of course, was punctuated with greater or lesser

ceremonies; but a considerable portion of it, at least of that part not

taken up by school, was spent in his father's _chayder_. Beyond

_chayder_, to gather together and confirm the saintliness ardently

desired and pursued for him by his father, lay the synagogue in

Doomington Road, the _Polisher Shool_.

The room in which the _chayder_ was housed was distinctly dismal,

despite the fountain of spiritual light playing perpetually there, the

fountain whereof Reb Monash himself was the head. It lay between the

"parlour," a chilly room upholstered in yellow plush, which was on the

right as you passed into the "lobby," and the kitchen in the recesses

of the house, to enter which you descended two invisible steps. Beyond

the window of the _chayder_ and beyond the yard, hung a grim,

blank-windowed hat-and-cap factory.

Low forms, where the two dozen scholars were disposed, ran round the

four walls of the room. Before a table facing the window Reb Monash

sat, in the additional shadow cast by the large oblong of cardboard

which occupied a fourth of the window-space so as to hide the damage

caused by a malicious Gentile stone. More for minatory gesture than

for punishment, a bone-handled walking-stick lay to his hand, along the

table. Facing the door a large cupboard stood invariably open. Here

on the lowest shelf were the Prayer Books, from the first page of which

the youngest scholars learned their Hebrew capitals. Here also were

the penny exercise books where the scholars proficient in the cursive

script wrote letters of a totally imaginary politeness to their

parents. "My dear and most esteemed Father and Mother," they ran, "I

am full of concern for your health. Reb Monash joins me in respectful

greeting. The High Festivals are approaching, God be thanked, and I

trust the Above One will bless our ways with milk and honey and will

much increase our progeny, even as the sands on the shore. Believe I

am your to-death-devoted son."

Upon one wall hung a chart where an adventurous red line traced the

forty years' wandering of the Jewish race between the House of Bondage

and the Promised Land. A portrait of Dr. Theodor Herzl, every feature

cleverly pricked out in Hebrew letters, hung opposite. There were

enlargements from photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Massel, and portraits of

Heine and Disraeli, which had been hung not without compunction,

although each had made so generous a death-bed recantation of his

errors.

The payment to Reb Monash for a week's tuition ranged between one

shilling and eighteenpence. He sometimes accepted ninepence, but on

the condition that other parents should not be informed and the market

be thus demoralized. He even accepted no payment at all, in cases of

extreme indigence, where it meant that a scion of Israel would

otherwise run riot in pagan ignorance. The attendances of his pupils

were as follows:--In the week-days, a few frantic minutes between

morning and afternoon school for the recital of _minchah_, the midday

prayer, and more importantly, several long hours in the evening; on the

Saturday, once, after dinner.

During the evening session, while the maturer boys were biting their

pens over their letters home, and the boys less mature were

transcribing for page after page a sample line in Reb Monash's own

script, _rebbie_ himself dealt with the infants, five, four, three

years old. Patiently, gently, the meat skewer he used as a pointer

moved from capital to capital. (A safe way to win temporary harbourage

in _rebbie's_ good graces was to provide him with a new pointer.)

"_Aleph!_" said Reb Monash. "_Aleph!_" piped the little voice.

"_Baze!_" "_Baze!_" "_Gimmel, doled!_" "_Gimmel, doled!_"

With the young he had enormous patience. When at last they knew all

the letters in their consecutive order, his pointer would dart

bewilderingly from letter to letter.

"_Lange mem, tsadik, coff...._"

Ignorance, up to a certain age, Reb Monash could condone. It was

inattention against which he maintained a fiery crusade.

"What, thou canst not distinguish between _baze_ and _shloss mem_?

Playest thou then alleys already? Thou art a lump-Gentile, a

_shtik-goy_!" After the youngsters had been thus instructed, a snap of

his Prayer Book was the signal for a deathly calm. All the exercise

books were closed and put away upon their shelf. Everybody sat down

upon the benches round the wall and each face assumed a look of virtue

bordering upon imbecility. Reb Monash then produced a thin notebook

where in three columns down each page he had written a large number of

Hebrew words. These words had, excepting rarely, no connection with

each other. One leaped abruptly from "pepper" to "son-in-law" and

thence to "chair," "snake," "pomegranate" and "yesterday."

Starting with any boy indiscriminately he read out word after word,

receiving an English or Yiddish equivalent. Here again, to introduce a

complexity, he suddenly interrupted the written order of the words, or,

indeed, himself gave the profane equivalent of the vocabulary and

demanded the "Holy Speech" in return. With as little warning he

transferred his attention to another of his scholars, and woe upon him

if the black crime of inattention had sent his wits scattering, woe if

his lips could not repeat the word just translated! A silence intense

as the silence of the antechamber where the High Priest three times

demands from Radames his defence, occupied the breathless _chayder_

during the process of "Hebrew."

Yet for all his sallies and alarms the tragedy of Reb Monash was no

more apparent than in the heart-broken monotone in which he uttered his

list of inconsequent words. All the ghettoes of Russia had known the

silver of his voice. If there had been sorrows of Israel none had told

them more poignantly; if Zion still were to raise tall towers, none so

joyfully had prophesied her new splendours. Still in many synagogues

beyond the _Polisher Shool_ his oratory was in demand. But the glow of

his old dreams? Was it because no single reality had called him to

concrete endeavours, that no single dream had found fulfilment?

But all this lay deep down, deeper than himself dared to pursue.

"_Pilpelim?_" "Pepper!"

"_Lo mit a vov?_" "To him!"

"Philip, where holds one?"

"... er ... er..."

"What! thou knowest not?"

"Yes, _tatte_, yes ... _odom_, a man!"

Reb Monash's lips set tight. Philip's back curved under his father's

fist. He pressed his head down upon his neck. He knew that the nearer

he attained to immobility, the sooner would his punishment be over.

Reb Monash sat down again.

"_Roshoh?_" he asked significantly.

"Evil one!"

"_Boruch?_" to point the contrast.

"Blessed!" the voice translated.

And so till "Hebrew" was at an end. Then followed translation from the

week's portion of the Pentateuch; and perhaps if one or two scholars of

such holy state remained under his care, an excursion into the Talmud.

The combination of Miss Tibbet and _chayder_ left Philip limp with

fatigue and dejection. Life under Miss Tibbet was clockwork, barren of

adventure and hope. _Chayder_ was a cycle that each year returned to

the same spot through a round of indignities and petty tyrannies. All

its nightly incidents were the same as last week's and last year's and

seemed destined to reduplication world without end. Walls seemed to

rise frowning before him wherever he looked. It was hard to breathe.

Were these days the pattern of all the days he should ever know, till

he died at last and half-hearted funeral eulogies were uttered over his

coffin?

Yet now and again there were incidents which slightly relieved the

tedium of existence. As for instance when the notorious Jakey arrived

in _chayder_ about an hour late one stifling summer evening. Jakey was

in truth a desperate character. His stockings lay invariably over his

boots, and the boots themselves knew no other fastening than string.

Among the layers of dirt on his face his right eye or his left emerged

livid in purple and salmon hues. On numerous occasions he had "wagged"

school in order to play pitch and toss with coins, derived who knew

whence? in the company of stalwarts fifteen years old, three years his

senior.

It was in fact during the solemn stillness of "Hebrew" that he arrived.

Upon his appearance the hush was intensified into something acute as

shrill sound or pain. Slowly, with tight-browed condemnation, Reb

Monash turned his head to the truant. "So thou art come!" he said.

"Enter! we are incomplete without thee!" With withering courtesy he

motioned him to the end of a bench. Nonchalantly moving the tip of his

tongue from one cheek to the other Jakey sat down.

"_Nu_, Jakele, what hast thou for thyself to say?" he asked, still

couchant, as it were, upon his chair. Jakey for several seconds longer

kept his tongue in his left cheek. He lifted his brows in interested

contemplation.

"I had the stomach-ache!" he suggested, clasping his hands against his

liver as a piece of convincing by-play.

"_Ligner!_" thundered Reb Monash, "Thou art sound as a Hottentot!"

Jakey withdrew one hand from his stomach, and lifted a thumb to his

mouth.

"My muvver's dying!" he said after further meditation.

Reb Monash quivered with wrath.

"Such a year upon thee! Long live they mother, but thou, thou art a

proselytized one!"

He advanced to make Jakey more immediately aware of the jeopardy into

which his soul had fallen. Jakey looked up shiftily, his eyes

watchful. Reb Monash's fist came down upon empty air. Swift as a

lizard Jakey darted across to the table. He stood there, Reb Monash's

bone-handled stick uplifted. A murmur of horror went round the

_chayder_. Reb Monash with a shout of anger advanced raging. And then

it was that his own stick, the symbol of more absolute authority than

the Shah's, was brought down upon his own shoulder. There was a

silence. Then immediately a tremendous hubbub filled the room. Reb

Monash sank into his chair. A few of the youngest lads lifted up their

voices and wept. A boy in a corner was giggling nervously.

"Where is he? Where is he?" asked Reb Monash weakly. An enormity had

been perpetrated unknown in the annals of _chayders_. And in his, Reb

Monash's, where discipline and holiness were equal stars.

"'E's ran away! I seen 'im!" the cry rose.

Reb Monash grimly took up once more his book of Hebrew words. The long

monotone began again.

"_Ishoh?_" "A woman!"

"_Sachin?_" "A knife!"

The door was flung open. A storm of flying apron-strings filled the

threshold, and a cloud of loose hair. It was the mother of Jakey.

"Reb Monash, what is for such a thing?" she demanded indignantly. "One

might think a policeman, not a _rebbie_. My poor Jakele, gentle as a

dove, a credit in Israel! What for a new thing is this?"

Reb Monash lifted his hands deprecatingly. "What say you, Mrs. Gerber?

An hour later he comes...."

She gave him no time to continue. "And then to lay about him with a

walking-stick! A Tartar, not a Jew! Never a word of complaint from

God or man about my poor orphan and ... to come to _chayder_ ... and a

pogrom! _Oi, a shkandal_! A walking-stick like a tree! A moujik, God

should so help me, not a _rebbie_! Poor Jakele, crying his heart out

like a dove! I'll take him away from a so crooked _chayder_!"

"But that concerns me little!" broke in Reb Monash. "For each one that

goes, come four each time!" (This confident mathematic invariably

puzzled Philip. He knew how necessary to the Massel family was an

increased income. Why should not Reb Monash dismiss his whole

_chayder_ and then automatically increase his clientele fourfold?)

"Like a tree a walking-stick!" continued Mrs. Gerber. She flounced

through the door. "Such a year! Such a black year shall seize you!"

she spat. The door closed with a loud bang. It was impossible to sit

down under it. Not only to have been assaulted, but to be accused of

being the assailant was too much to bear. Reb Monash took his

skull-cap, his _yamelke_, from his head, placed it on the mantelshelf,

and assumed his silk hat.

"Learn over your passages!" he rapped out as he followed furiously to

the house of Jakey.

There was subdued whispering at first.

"Wot a lark!" said some one. "Oo--aye! Wot a lark!" some one else

repeated. Then every one laughed. Philip was hilarious. It really

was too funny--Jakey the dove!

"I've got the stomach-ache, _rebbie_!"

"No you've not, you mean your muvver's dying!"

Some one lifted the walking-stick. Barney did a _pas seul_ in the

corner. The gaiety of the situation intoxicated everybody. Philip was

swept off his feet by the general merriment. He reached up for his

father's skull-cap, put it on and looked round solemnly. Barney

imitated Mrs. Gerber with great distinction.

"A moujik, not a _rebbie_!"

At this moment the door opened. Reb Monash's face looked round

glowering below his silk hat. Quick as thought Philip covered the

borrowed skull-cap, knowing there was no time to replace it, with his

own cap. He felt the unfortunate load pressing guiltily against his

head.

Reb Monash took off the silk hat and looked round for the _yamelke_.

"Where's my _yamelke_?" he demanded fiercely.

"Dunno!" a murmur rose.

"Did I not place it on the mantelshelf?"

"Didn' see yer!"

"Dost thou know?"

"No, _rebbie_!"

"Dost thou, Philip?"

"No, _tatte_!"

"Dost thou, Barney?"

"No, _rebbie_!"

"Empty ye out all your pockets!"

The _yamelke_ was nowhere to be found. It was a very hot evening and

it produced on Philip an unholy delight to see his father sitting there

in the close heat, with bright red carpet slippers, thin black

trousers, a thin alpaca coat--and to crown all, the stately and stuffy

tall hat, malevolent and quite definitely absurd.

It was towards the end of the evening that Philip lifted his cap to

scratch his head over some knotty point in the _chumish_, the

Pentateuch, they were translating. He had wholly forgotten the

abstracted _yamelke_, so, whilst his own cap fell with a soft slur on

the table before him, the _yamelke_ sat revealed like a toad under a

lifted stone.

Reb Monash looked up. It was too late to hide the _yamelke_. Reb

Monash's eyes glinted unpleasantly. _Chayder_ drew to an immediate end.

The drizzle falling beyond the _chayder_ window next day was like a

curtain of liquid soot. The interview between Reb Monash and Philip on

the conclusion of last evening's episode had made them both, for

different, for opposite, reasons, very tired. Philip, though the hard

form where he sat left him at no time unconscious of his wounds, was

only a little more listless than his father. His mind was too numbed

even to appreciate the exquisite irony of his letter to his "esteemed

and beloved parents." When the ritual of "Hebrew" recommenced, it was

only with an effort that he suspended the mechanical scrawling of his

pen. The dirge of question and reply proceeded mournfully, broken only

by the occasional "where holds one?" like the surface of a pond on a

dull day when the fish seem to rise rather to assert their rights than

to satisfy their hunger. Oh, to get away from it all, mused Philip

dimly. To where there are trees and grass like Longton Park, but

freer, larger. To go there alone and to come back to mother, perhaps

with an offering of cowslips, whatever they were. There would be a

bird there who would sing. Not like a canary. He couldn't bear the

singing of canaries. They reminded him of a pale girl whom he saw

sometimes at a window of the hat-and-cap factory. She sang sometimes,

like a canary, ever so sweetly, but a captive. He had once seen a

canary cage hanging on an outside wall. A great rain-storm had burst,

but the people on the doorstep had gone in, forgetting all about the

bird. He had knocked at their door and told them, and though the man

had sworn at him, he took the bird in, a sickly sodden mass,

greyish-yellow. That bird had not sung again. It uttered only a

little broken cheep each morning when the sun came. Now out there ...

Oh, what was all this useless droning, droning about ... "_Pilpelim?_"

"Pepper!" ... out there, when the rain came, there would be thick

branches to shelter that singing bird. He would walk alone, clean,

free. "Alone I walked, I walked alone." There was music in that!

"Alone I walked, I walked alone." Yes of course! the sense was quite

different, but there was something about it identical with his "On

Linden when the sun was low." "Alone I walked, I walked alone," he

stressed. "I sat upon a mossy stone," he followed swiftly. What fun!

That was like real poetry. He repeated the words, trembling with

delight.

_Alone I walked, I walked alone.

I sat upon a mossy stone._

What about that bird? We must introduce that bird! "I heard a bird

singing up in the sky." No, that wouldn't do! Something was wrong!

Gosh! it was very easy! Just leave out that "singing," thus: "I heard

a bird up in the sky." But we can't end there! "I heard a bird up in

the sky," and ... and ... "He sang so sweet and so did I!" His thighs

trembled. His heart stormed. He had beaten down the walls of

_chayder_; he was away beyond somewhere; he was elected into the

fellowship of poetry; what did Miss Tibbet matter for ever and ever?

Again, again ... how did it go? ... lest he should lose it! Listen!

Ah, the surge the fullness of it!

Alone I walked, I walked alone,

I sat upon a mossy stone.

I heard a bird up in the sky.

He sang so sweet and so did I!

Green fields stretching away, trees, stones with soft moss, a bird, a

bird!

"Feivel, where holds one?"

Sickeningly, with the click of a trap, the walls of _chayder_ shut to

about him. An ecstasy was in his eyes. A mist of stupidity,

helplessness, obscured their light. Oh, no! oh, no! he would make no

pretence about it. He'd not been listening, he'd been away, singing!

... What did it matter? Let the fist come down on his aching back!

Let the muscles of his arm be pinched and wrenched again. Listen, oh

listen!

_I heard a bird up in the sky.

He sang so sweet and so did I._

He lifted his wide eyes to his father. In an even voice he said,

"_Tatte_, I've not been listening!"

A thrill of subdued expectance went round the _chayder_. His enemies

rubbed their grubby hands gleefully. One or two looked anxious.

But there was no explosion. In the same even tones Reb Monash said,

"_Nu_, and what hast thou been doing?"

Slowly Philip's sallow face flushed a deep crimson. Must he tell?

Must he stand there stripped of this new garment which had covered him,

fragrant with spices and touched with the colours of a new dawn? But

it was the voice not of his own free lips, the voice ordered by some

blind, strong dictate of the heart, that said, "I was writing a poetry!"

A slight sound came from Reb Monash's lips. It was only dimly anger;

it was also resignation, dismay. His lips closed. The fires of his

wrath last night had burned round his son, till at last Philip lay on

the sofa, spent, lightless, like a cinder. He had thereon turned to

Mrs. Massel who at one stage had ventured to intervene. Would she like

to see her son stuff his maws with pig; or perhaps grow up to take a

_shiksah_ to his arms? All that night low sobbing came from the room

where Philip slept. Even when Reb Monash thought his wife sleeping,

there came an answering moan from her bed as the sobbing of the boy

entered the room like a frail ghost. Reb Monash turned his eyes upon

his Hebrew notebook.

"Go thou! go thou! go!" he said heavily. "I'll deal with thee later!"

Philip passed from the room. The walls of _chayder_ were no more round

him; his head rang again with the poor music he had made.

"Mamma!" he said, bursting into the kitchen, "I've made a poetry!"

"Feivele!" she exclaimed with horror. "Why art thou not in _chayder_?"

"He sent me out!" he answered, his lips quivering. "I've been a bad

boy!"

"Then go out into the street!" she said. "He'll see thee here and say

I'm petting thee!"

He ran out into Angel Street. The lines were singing in his head. He

skipped along Angel Street, from the wire factory to Doomington Road

and back again, chanting his lines. Then Harry Sewelson, his pal, came

into his mind. He would make use of his unusual liberty to go and tell

him about the "poetry." He ran breathlessly along Doomington Road to

"Sewelson's High-Class Drapery and Hosiery Establishment." He passed

through the side non-professional door along a dark lobby to the

kitchen. Harry sat in a corner reading.

A sudden shame and reluctance overwhelmed Philip. What was he making

all this fuss about? Harry would only laugh at him, and why shouldn't

he?

"Hello!" said Harry, "come in!"

Philip came forward. "What are you reading?" he asked.

"Poetry!" Harry replied.

This put a different complexion on affairs.

"_I've_ just done a poetry!" Philip declared proudly, throwing his

scruples aside. He had established an affinity with a printed book.

"G-arn!" said Harry sceptically.

"_Emmes!_"

"Tell us then!"

"_Alone I walked, I walked alone.

I sat upon a mossy stone.

I heard a bird up in the sky.

He sang so sweet and so did I._

There, what d'you think of that?"

"It's not your own!"

"_Emmes adonoi!_"

Harry looked up with warm commendation in his eyes.

"You know," he said, "it's like this feller!"

"Who's that?"

"Oh, this feller's called Tennyson!" he said, turning the leaves.

Philip drew a chair close and together they examined the faded penny

reprint.

"Gosh!" exclaimed Philip excitedly. "Isn't that spiff!"

If the episode of the profane poem written during the sanctity of

"Hebrew" had rendered Reb Monash sadly and half-consciously aware that

in Philip he had nurtured a son who lay beyond the theoretic and

practical bounds of his knowledge; a son who was so bewilderingly

unlike and unworthy of himself as he had been like and worthy of his

father, and his father had been like and worthy of his grandfather, and

so backward to whichever of the Twelve Tribes had fathered his race--if

the episode of the poem produced in him only fears and doubts, it was

the appearance of Mottele which crystallized for him the difference

between the actual Philip and the Philip of his dreams.

The parents of Mottele had removed to Doomington from a smaller town in

an adjacent county for the specific reason that Mottele had demanded

more adequate instruction in Hebrew. They had moved even though the

father had achieved a fair clientele as a tailor in the town where he

had settled, whereas the market in tailors for Doomington was already

hopelessly glutted.

At the time when Mottele entered Reb Monash's _chayder_ Mottele had

passed his ninth, and Philip his tenth birthday. His mother, as she

floated in amply behind the compact figure of Mottele, seemed rather an

exhalation from Mottele than an important author of his existence. She

was vague and large and benignant as a moon, shining with pale piety

reflected from the central sun of Mottele. Mottele himself entered as

one doomed only for a short while to range the treacherous zone of the

fleshly. By an inverse law of gravity, his eyes were drawn upwards to

the ceiling and thence to the mudless floors of Heaven where his elder

brethren, the mediæval Rabbis and the early Prophets, awaited the

quietus to the mundane phase of Mottele's piety. His general

appearance betokened a rigid aloofness from the vulgar delights of the

body. Both stud-holes of his waterproof collar were in excellent

condition; the pockets which in most entrants to _chayder_ were

associated with the fecund bulges of boy-merchandise, displayed only a

_sidder_, a Prayer Book, emerging with propriety; his stainless boots

proved that the rapturous puddles of the roadway were unknown of his

fastidious feet. Upon his head sat a little round peakless cap from

which fell a demure fringe over his forehead. There was something

sweet and thin, a little sickly almost, in the tender flute of his

voice as it piped to Reb Monash's question a response as innocent as

honey.

Upon Reb Monash Mottele produced an immediate and visible effect. He

fell naturally into a manner towards him of affection, mingled with

respect. "Here," he declared, "here truly is a Judaic child! Just as

at home! No blackguarding in the streets, and his head never running

this way and that to nothingness and Gentilehood. A credit to God and

Man!"

Mottele seemed almost audibly to lap up the instruction tendered him,

almost audibly, as a cat audibly laps milk; you might almost see his

sharp little tongue wash round the corners of his mouth to make sure

that no drop of Jewish wisdom should be unabsorbed. During "Hebrew,"

he sat upon his corner of the form with a rapture of concentration

worthy of some infant mystic vouchsafed the Beatific Vision. It was

with no vulgar assertion of rights that his claim to one especial end

on one especial form was recognized. His claim existed merely, and one

might question as easily the claim of Reb Monash to thump the back for

inattention. There was something both ludicrous and infuriating in the

sight of some hulking fellow of twelve shuffling heavily away from the

sacrosanct seat, as the result of some slight pathetic quiver in

Mottele's eyelids.

Before long Mottele's bark was sailing the deep waters of the

post-Pentateuchal Bible, while Philip's keel was still grinding against

the elementary shingles of the "weekly portion." Mottele now became

Reb Monash's standard, before which all things else, at but a cursory

reference, were revealed as dross. The state of Philip's spiritual

health was shown to be perilous in the extreme. Now too Reb Monash

developed a new theory.

"It is not that Feivel cannot!" he declared bitterly. "He will not!

It suits him not to be a good Jew! Regard then Mottele! There is a

jewel for you, there is an ornament for England, one shakes with

delight of him in the _Polisher Shool_. One says in looking upon

Mottele that there is hope still for the Hebrew race! Mottele ...

Mottele ... Mottele! ..."

Day after day the word Mottele droned or thundered in Philip's ears.

All that was stifling in Angel Street and repressive in _chayder_ took

to itself for a name the three syllables of Mottele. The word began to

lose for him all its physical connotation. Increasingly it became for

him a symbol of injustice and despair.

Reb Monash had felt hitherto that the child of his dreams, such a child

as would have been a living glory in Terkass, was almost of too

exquisite a lineament for the reality of this godless England. But

Mottele had undeceived him, for here in the very flesh was a child

actually born in England and yet recalling irresistibly the piety of

his own boyhood in Russia; a child such as he had been himself, at ten

years an intimate of greybeards and an object of almost superstitious

affection and reverence among the old women of the Synagogue. He would

not confess it to himself, yet there seemed an element of injustice in

the fact that he, Reb Monash, to whom surely, on the grounds of his own

holiness and the uninterrupted holiness of his ancestry generation

behind generation, such a son as Mottele was due, that he should be the

father of so unsatisfactory a child as Philip. There was much he loved

in Philip. Because of the very strength of his love for Philip, he

assured himself, he grieved so much to find Philip so far from his

heart's desire. It was as much a matter of the happiness of Philip's

own soul as of the happiness and credit of himself. But, he realized,

to display to Philip or to Philip's mother, how deep was his love for

his son, would be tantamount to an offence against God. It would

sanction the delusion that he accepted Philip such as he was, whereas

the Philip he strove after was far less like Philip than like himself

or Mottele, after which image, with God's grace, he would yet convert

his son. For there was much, he repeated, he loved in Philip; as for

instance his poetry, his imagination, which, wedded to Jewishness, the

spiritual state called _Yidishkeit_, were a valuable possession, as he,

in his oratory, himself frequently realized. On the other hand, the

quality of poetry, unhealthily developed, might nourish errors

concerning the primal verity of _Yidishkeit_ which might land him into

the pits of the unclean. There was a certain quality of the _rational_

which up to a certain limit was likewise a decoration. It was a

quality which could excellently elucidate a parable or examine an

obscure text with the possible result of throwing upon it a naive and

modern light very entertaining to the elders at the Synagogue; but

again, like all Philip's positive qualities, it had a negative aspect

of the greatest spiritual danger. It was a God-sent bounty that had

sent Mottele in his way--Mottele, who had imagination, but not to

excess, who was rational, but not unhealthily. By placing the virtues

of Mottele in a clear light before Philip, by the spectacle of the

affection and esteem which Mottele commanded in the exercise of these

virtues, both in _chayder_ and in _shool_, the increasing contumacy he

had observed with alarm in Philip would be broken down, and a son

worthy of the traditions of Reb Monash adorn his home.

"I hate him!" Philip was saying to Harry, "I hate him!" His face was

still wet with tears of vexation. His fists were clenched and his jaws

were set viciously. He had only escaped that evening by slipping out

through the front door after opening it for a septuagenarian panegyrist

of Mottele.

"He's only a liar and a sucker-up!" he exclaimed. "He does it for just

what he can get out of it! Thinks I can't see! Yah!" he growled in

disgust.

"But listen!" said Harry, "Just listen to this!

_How could I look upon the day?

They should have stabb'd me where I lay,

Oriana--

They should have trod me into clay,

Oriana!_

What do you think of that? Isn't it fine? He seems to have had a

rottener time even than Mottele's giving you! But isn't it grand

stuff?"

"Yes, I know, I know! But tell me what I can do! I hate him! I want

to kill him!"

Harry looked up reflectively. "Kill him?" he asked. "Stab him where

he lies, Oriana! That's an idea, Philip! I can lend you a peashooter.

Or, why not try a gonfalon? Gonfalons are awfully tricky!"

"You're laughing!" said Philip indignantly. "I wish you came to our

_chayder_, you wouldn't laugh then, I can tell you!"

"But you talked about killing yourself, didn't you? Really, I don't

know what to say! Kill him or try to forget about him!"

"Oh God, God!" said Philip, banging his forehead in despair. "It's so

miserable! While I'm being half killed, he sits smiling and wiping his

rotten nose!"

Harry looked up sympathetically.

"Else you could run away and be Two Little Vagabonds!" he suggested.

"Don't want to run away! He'd swank like one o'clock, the pig!" Philip

said morosely. "Besides," he added in a slightly altered tone, "don't

want to run away from mother! She'd be lonely! Oh, Harry, you're no

help to a chap, you aren't!"

Yet the conversation was not wholly fruitless. It implanted in Philip

the germ of more than one idea.

"_Rebbie_," said Mottele at dinner one Saturday afternoon, "my uncle,

peace-be-upon-him, died on Thursday, no? I want to go and join the

_minyon_ at my auntie's house to-night."

"What good art thou at a minyon? Thou canst not make a tenth! Thou

art in years still far from thy thirteenth year."

"But all the same it's a _mitzvah_?"

"Ah, true, true!" said Reb Monash, his eye full of benignant

appreciation. "Go thou then. Thou art no big one and they will make

room for thee. Bring thou in the best bread thou hast forgotten,

Chayah," he said turning to his wife.

She rose and entered the parlour where Reb Monash kept the "best bread"

locked in the sideboard. She placed the bread dutifully before her

husband. It had latterly become the custom for Mottele to join the

Massel family for dinner on the Sabbath mid-day. Reb Monash felt that

his punctilious washing before meals, his prayers before food and his

evident appreciation of the long blessing after food, could have

nothing but the most exemplary effect upon Philip.

Philip writhed inwardly to find Reb Monash cut a couple of slices of

the "best bread" (so dignified because the flour was of a slightly

superior brand and was varnished and sprinkled with black grain), one

for Mottele and one for himself. The "second bread" lay at the other

end of the table for the consumption of his mother, of Channah and, of

course, of Philip. The treatment meted out respectively to Mottele and

himself in _chayder_ had inured him to indignity. This seemed,

however, an unnecessary slight upon his mother, even if she was only a

woman and therefore somewhat beyond the pale of masculine courtesies.

"As for thee, Feivel," said Reb Monash, "after dinner thou wilt stay

indoors to say over to thyself the week's portion, while I take my few

minutes' sleep. It was badly said by thee in _chayder_ on Thursday

evening. Thou didst halt three times, four times. When wilt thou

learn to say it like Mottele? It was like a stream running, Chayah,

the way Mottele said it, so clear, oh, a pleasure!"

Mottele's eyes were turned ceilingwards in a direction which had become

habitual with him during the chanting of his praises. Praise produced

in him no tremor of self-consciousness. It was his due. Being a good

Jew had, there was ample authority, its celestial reward, but that did

not render superfluous a certain meed of appreciation in this lesser

mundane state.

It might be remonstrated here that Mottele displayed in abundant

measure the qualities of "priggishness" already repudiated as an

essential element in Philip's character. To which allegation the only

reply must be that "priggishness" simply does not meet the Mottele

case. "Priggishness" is a word defining a totally different collection

of qualities; those persons to whom Mottele was a delight, and they

were many, might have admitted that he was distinguished by a sort of

precocity, but they felt this precocity definitely to demonstrate how

pleasant an odour was Mottele in the nostrils of the Lord, Whose

providence had caused Rebecca to conceive at the premature age of

three, the youthful Rabbi Achivah to develop the beard of senility in

the course of a single night, and Mottele to be the thing he was.

Those persons, on the other hand, to whom Mottele was more a stink than

an odour, and it is to be regretted that Philip was one of these, would

have laughed with pale scorn at the idea of disposing of Mottele as a

"prig," Mottele, whose sweet face was a cauldron of infamy and whose

voice was harsher than a Hell hag's lament over an escaped soul.

"But, _tatte_, can't I just go out to the corner of Angel Street?"

asked Philip mournfully. He knew instinctively that utterance of the

possibility put it effectively out of court.

"Thou wilt not go! Have I not spoken? Enough! _Nu_, Mottele, when

thou goest to study in the Yeshivah, thou wilt come to see me, yes?"

Mottele began ingeniously to pun upon the word Yeshivah. Reb Monash

beamed with delight.

"Well," said Reb Monash, when the carrot and potato dessert had been

cleared away, "I go to sleep. One will see thee in the afternoon

_shool_, Mottele, for _minchah_, eh?"

"God being so good, Reb Monash!"

"And forget thou not, Feivel! Not a foot into the street or thou wilt

see then!"

"But Monash," broke in Mrs. Massel, "see how it is a fine day! Can't

he just go out and get some air in the street?"

"So thou must take his part, Chayah, _nu_? It will not harm him to go

without air. The Torah if he will imbibe will do him more good!"

"_A guten Shabbos!_" said Mottele quietly as he slid through the door,

"A good Sabbath!" Philip looked towards him in a passion of dumb hate.

Mottele halted for the fraction of a moment with a trace of virtuous

aloofness and a slightly lifted head. There followed a quick flash of

vivid red thrust through his teeth, and the door closed softly behind

him.

"I'll show him! I'll show him! I'll show him!" the words pealed

through Philip's head. "The devil! I'll give it him! Oh, s'elp me if

I don't!"

"To thy _chumish_ then!" said Reb Monash as he climbed the stairs.

Philip sat down on a dusty form in the deserted _chayder_. He turned

to a chapter in Genesis and started mumbling aloud. He mumbled on to

the end. He repeated the portion again, having already ascertained

that his knowledge of it was as thorough as his knowledge of anything

could be. He repeated it stupidly a third and a fourth time. He knew

that his father would be sleeping for an hour--no more, no less. Was

he to go on mumbling and mumbling for a hot solid hour? Oh, what did

it all mean, this soupy stuff, what sense had it, what poetry?

He remembered with a qualm of longing a line or two Harry had found

somewhere:

_O Brignall banks are wild and fair

And Greta woods are green...._

But this! ... mumble, mumble, mumble, that's all it was ... rubb-ish!

as Miss Tibbet used to say. What! Rubbish? Oh, sinful thought! He

laid his fingers dismayfully against his sinning lips. After all,

Mottele had nothing to do with the inception of the Bible; neither had

father, for that matter. The Bible was something awful and unutterable

and it was... Oh, there weren't any words for it! And he'd said

rubbish! Yet God would understand he hadn't really meant it. Besides,

if God were a young boy kept in mumbling all a Saturday afternoon, He

might say unfortunate things about the Bible, even though He's written

it all Himself. But how close it was in here! What a headache he had!

He wasn't supposed to go into the kitchen and talk to his mother. But

it was stuffy, horribly stuffy ... and he knew every word in his

_chumish_ seven times over. Oh, not so well as Mottele, oh, no, oh,

no! That wasn't to be expected! Did anybody know anything so well as

Mottele? How he hated Mottele! He knew that poetry was beginning to

have a hold over his affections second only to his mother. But he

didn't love poetry half so passionately as he hated Mottele. That

reminded him. _He_ wasn't going to let Mottele stick his tongue out at

him, after Mottele had polluted the house with his presence at dinner.

No, he'd first cut his throat three times, that he would!

Where was it now, where was it? He hunted about in his pockets. One

possession, and not for intrinsic reasons, Philip prized above all

others. It was a smooth chip, several inches long. Some months ago

now he had determined to assure himself of some record of the

indignities heaped upon him, directly or indirectly caused by Mottele!

The idea of the notched stick was very popular with the heroes of

romance. Yes, that would be just the thing, a notched stick! His

stick was already notched all the way down one side and well down the

other. Oh, yes, it was in the left trouser pocket! Strictly he wasn't

supposed to transfer anything from his weekday to his Saturday pockets.

Nothing must be carried on a Saturday. But he could not afford to be

without his notched stick even on Saturdays. It was the only thing

which maintained in him a degree of sanity when some peculiarly

injurious comparison had been made between Mottele and himself. He

clutched t grimly inside his pocket and assured himself of some

ultimate and lurid vengeance. Torture perhaps, some form of slow

assassination during which Mottele was all the time precisely aware of

the assassin. "Kill him!" Harry had suggested. What was that phrase

of Channah's? ... "Many a true word's spoken in jest!"

He hardly dared to notch the stick while it was still Shabbos.

Besides, his knife was in his weekday trousers. He'd not forget ...

But this headache! Father would be safely sleeping for a time yet.

He'd just creep along the lobby tip-toe and see what his mother was

doing.

"Mamma, Mamma, hello!" She was sitting in the meagre light of the

window. The kitchen around her was scrupulously clean. A pair of

cheap steel-rimmed spectacles lay on her nose; she was reading the

Yiddish version of the Bible, intended especially for women.

"Fievele," she said, "thou shouldst be repeating thy _chumish_ now,

thou shouldst not be here!"

"I've got such a headache, Mamma," he murmured clasping his forehead

with a somewhat exaggerated gesture. "I want to go out for a minute or

two! I'm stuffed!"

"But he said 'no'!"

"I've finished now. I know it all. What more can I do?"

"Thou must not think of it!"

"Ah, let me," he said appealingly, "only a minute or two!"

"What will he say to me, Feivele? Better go not!"

"Oh, I'll be back straight away! Or I'll tell you what; you stand at

the front door, and when he starts getting up wave your hand and I'll

be back in a jiffy, long before he's down. Ah _do_, Mamma!"

"If thou hast a headache it is best for thee to be outside!" she said

uneasily. "Go then. But forget not the moment I wave to thee, thou

art back!"

Philip darted to the door.

"One second!" she said, "here's an apple for thee! I got just one--for

thee!"

"What a lovely Mamma! Thank you, thank you!"

It was a forlorn little figure stood at the Angel Street corner of

Doomington Road. He saw the crowded tram-cars go up the road towards

an urban simulation of moorland called "Baxter's Hill." But beyond it

green, real country began ... and there was a river ... He saw the boys

of Angel Street playing games with a positively weekday enthusiasm. He

had wanted particularly to go and talk about Tennyson and things with

Harry this afternoon! How much luckier a lot had been cast for Harry!

There was a genial, vaguely terrifying unorthodoxy about his parents

which sometimes verged upon the license of the sheerly Gentile. They

carried money on Saturdays! Mrs. Sewelson put the kettle on the fire

with her own hands on Saturdays. But he wouldn't change his own mother

for a hundred anybody-else's mothers, he vowed, his eyes softening, his

teeth biting into the apple she had given him.

Would it be congenial to bite Mottele! No! that was girlish--and he'd

have such a sweet, nasty taste. No! he'd just pommel him, the "dog's

body" (he had heard the phrase on the lips of Lena Myer in description

of a young gentleman who had transferred his attention from Miss Myer

to another lady). Ah, one minute! What was that Mottele had said

about going to attend a prayer-for-the-dead meeting at his auntie's

house? Gosh! Here was an idea! S'elp me if Mottele wouldn't have to

attend his own prayer-for-the-dead meeting! By heaven, Mottele had

gone far enough! It was about time he got some of his own back!

Surely, Mother was waving! Oh, yes, certainly she was! He doubled

back like a rabbit surprised on the edge of a thicket. When his father

entered the room he was safely mumbling away.

"Feivel, thou art panting!" said Reb Monash suspiciously.

"I've been crying!" replied Philip sullenly.

"So? Well, let me hear what thou dost with thy _chumish_ now! Mind

not one mistake, or thou wilt not stir from the house after _Shabbos_

one step!"

Philip recited the portion with flawless accuracy. The week was duly

ushered in with the night service of the Sabbath. It was dark when

Philip made his way along Doomington Road and turned to the right past

the Bridgeway Elementary School along the side of it skirted by

Blenheim Road. The road led to a slightly loftier stratum of

Doomington, past gloomy brick-crofts which rose into the muddy hills on

one side and sank into clayey pools on the other, and it was along this

road that Mottele was bound to pass after the service on his return

home. Force of habit would lead him along the right side, from which

the ground sloped downwards. Rain brought the yellow mud sluicing from

the hills on the opposite side, rendering it therefore unpalatable for

such delicate boots as Mottele's.

The red tongue of his enemy, a slight enough offence in itself, but by

accident a consummation of so much preceding injury, had gone more

venomously to Philip's heart than Mottele had intended. Disregarding

the unwisdom of soiling his Saturday suit, Philip lay down to begin his

vigil. Mottele was a long time in arriving. No doubt, Philip mused,

he was sucking in the praise due to him for gratuitously walking up to

Longton to take part in the service. Philip passed his fingernail down

the notches in his stick. Twenty-five, twenty-six ... a dull anger

stupefied him ... twenty-nine ... One after one in gibbering disorder,

the occasions immortalized on the notched stick recreated themselves in

his mind.

"Mottele, oh, an Israel glory is Mottele!"

"Mottele, Mottele, Mottele! ..."

Curse Mottele ... the "dog's body"! And here was Mottele turning round

the bend in the road, his detestable little figure caught in the rays

of a lamp. Good, good! He was bound to pass that way. He slid his

body a couple of yards cautiously. That brought him nearly to the deep

part of the pond ... Two feet deep, at most, but that would do! Ah,

glory to God, here he was!

It was over surprisingly quickly. He rushed out upon the unsuspecting

Mottele, fell upon him and dragged him irresistibly over the edge of

the pavement towards the pond. They swung there for a moment or two

against its edge. Philip felt Mottele's fingers tighten in his hair.

Mottele seemed to remove not only his cap but half his scalp. The next

moment Mottele lay squelching in the ooze.

"Yah, Israel's glory, how d'you like that? Yah, dog's body!"

There was a spluttering. Then in Yiddish, "The God of Abraham, Isaac

and Jacob will show thee!" In English followed, "Yer bloody bastard!"

But a sudden and ghastly fear had gripped Philip. A realization of the

enormity of his crime possessed him. He swept the grass blindly for a

cap, lifted it, and ran down the Blenheim Road, his heart thumping in a

tumult of dismay.

He had been in the house for about twenty minutes when Reb Monash

asked: "Feivel, whose cap art thou wearing?"

Philip took his cap off. With a grimace he discovered it was

Mottele's. He'd know sooner or later anyhow. It was quite useless to

lie about it.

"Mottele's!" he replied.

"Where didst thou get it?"

No answer.

Threateningly, in crescendo:

"Where didst thou get it?"

"Found it!"

"Where? Say thou where, at once!"

There was a loud knocking at the door. Reb Monash remained in

ignorance but a few seconds longer. A deputation poured into the

kitchen. It consisted of two or three women, an old man gabbling

indignantly, the father of Mottele, the mother of Mottele, and in her

arms, swathed in a shawl, the soaked, screaming Mottele himself.

"It is well!" said Reb Monash shortly. "It is well!" he said quietly

and grimly. "You may go! We shall be happy together, Feivel and I!"

he added with acid humour.

Philip was conscious of the strained white face of his mother staring

from the candle-lit gloom of the scullery. He didn't mind these things

himself so fearfully much ... but somehow she never seemed able to get

used to them ... ah well, he'd had his whack ... the sooner it was over!

CHAPTER V

Not the most enthusiastic observer could have foretold the growth of a

friendship between Philip and Mottele. On the other hand, Reb Monash

regarded with some alarm the growing relations between his son and

Harry Sewelson. He was not wholly satisfied that a sound Jewish

atmosphere ruled in the Sewelson household, but his own path and theirs

were too far apart for any accurate ascertainment. Though they did not

live far away the Sewelsons were neither relatives nor _landsleit_; and

it was a fact that _landsleit_, that is, folk who have emigrated from

the same region or township in Eastern Europe, knew more of each

other's affairs though they lived at opposite ends of Doomington, than

folk who had originated from different provinces of the Exile, even

though these lived in the same street. He remembered with a certain

dismay how upon the first occasion that Philip had invited his friend

to Angel Street, Sewelson had instinctively removed his cap upon

entering the kitchen--an act which, perversely enough to non-Jewish

minds, is not merely bad manners in an orthodox Jewish house, but

positively savours of sin.

Harry had sat there quietly, but his grey eyes keenly observant. He

had entered the conversation, however, with a certain fertility of

Yiddish vocabulary and idea which more nonplussed Reb Monash than won

him over. When he sat down to bread and butter and tea with Philip,

his prayer-before-food was so rapid and brief a mumble as to suggest

either ignorance or contempt.

"It likes me him not, this young man!" declared Reb Monash with some

anxiety. But there was not at this time any specific reason for

forbidding the friendship between the two lads; so that when _chayder_

and _shool_ left room for the dissipation, Philip was away up

Doomington Road and in the kitchen beyond the Drapery and Hosiery

Establishment.

"I don't know what it is," Philip was saying, "I don't know what it is

about poetry. Somehow, you can get away with it. It's like a ... it's

like a road, isn't it? You start in Angel Street and you start walking

and hey, hullo! where are you?"

"You're right and you're wrong!" declared Harry. He was now a mature

man of twelve, and in ways more or less subtle was fond of rendering

the disparity of a year between them apparent to Philip. "It's more'n

that, I think. It can take you away, but it can keep you there as

well. You understand better what it all means. You understand, that's

what poetry means!" he declared solemnly, his face assuming an aspect

of such inscrutable wisdom as Philip might or might not penetrate.

"I can't understand!" said Philip morosely. "It's too big to try.

Besides I _don't_ want to understand, so there! It's rotten, the whole

thing's rotten, _chayder_ and Angel Street and _shool_ and the lads and

everything. I hate it all and I don't want to understand it. I just

_feel_ that poetry's nice, a million times nicer than all this

everywhere...." He pointed comprehensively beyond and round the walls

of the kitchen to include the whole of life as it presented itself to

him.

"What a girly-girly word, nice!" scoffed Harry. "You ought to be

careful what words you say or you'll never get a scholarship. Poetry

is not nice--it's splendid, and magnificent and all that sort of thing.

_Nice_! Ugh!"

"Well, you know what I mean!" said Philip uncomfortably. The tendency

to jibe at him was a somewhat distracting trait that had manifested

itself in his relations with Harry. The wholly undefined idea stirred

vaguely within him that Harry treated him somewhat as he treated

poetry--as something out of which he could make intellectual capital,

something to make use of--like chewing gum which you kept on chewing

and chewing until there wasn't any more chew in it, and then you just

stuck it under a chair and forgot about it. But he speedily shook off

ideas of this disturbing kind. Life was already sufficiently

complicated without mixing it up with silly old bogeys which led

nowhere. Moreover, his friendship with Harry was worth it, if only for

the sake of discussing poetry.

"Poetry makes you _feel_ funny!" said Philip. "It's nicer'n singing or

pictures. It doesn't let you think at all ... I mean thinking like

thinking out sums about how many herrings in a barrel at twelve and

sixpence what's one and a half next week! See?"

"There's thinking and thinking!" Harry postulated. "There's thinking

about herrings and a half--and thinking about philoserphy!" he declared

pompously.

"Philwhaterphy?" asked Philip with a mixture of scepticism and

reverence.

"Philoserphy!"

"Whatever does that mean?"

"Oh, knowing all about things upside down!"

"What's that got to do with Tennyson?" Philip asked smartly, as if he

had rather scored a point.

"Tennyson never says anything at all about jography or mensuration. I

suppose he forgot all about 'em when he left school!" Philip continued.

"That shows all you know! Philoserphy is something bigger'n jography.

Got nothing to do with it!"

"What's Tennyson's philoserphy?"

"Oh, it's better to be an Englishman than a Chinee!" Harry decided,

expanding his bosom with vicarious patriotism.

"I like carrots more'n cabbage! Is that philoserphy?" asked Philip, in

some slight fear of his intellectual patron.

"There's a lot more in it, too!" replied Harry somewhat uneasily,

disregarding his friend's levity. "In the spring a young man comes out

all spots and goes and gets married! There!"

"Humph! I s'pose there's lots of philoserphies and things in

Tennyson!" agreed Philip, not wholly convinced. "But I like poetry

because it's ... because it's got ... Oh, I don't know what to say!

_You_ know!"

"Well anyhow, _I_ know why I like poetry!" Harry insisted.

"You know the song we're singing in school? It goes:

_Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands.

Curtsey'd when you have and kissed,

The wild waves whist!_

"Now when they're all singing it, I hate singing it. It all gets lost

in twiddly-bits. I just _say_ it, slowly, and not listening to the

class. See how it goes, like kids dancing at Mother-Ice-cream's organ,

_Come unto these yellow sands!_

and then you all sort of stop a minute and go slowly, like drilling,

only beautifuller.

_And then take hands!_

And have you ever seen what a lot of 'w's' there is in that line. Just

listen:--

_The wild waves whist!_

I wonder if that's done on purpose?"

"Of course it is!" Harry said with a note of superiority in his voice.

"That's what they call 'alliteration!' They have a dictionary and put

down all the nice words beginning with one letter and then they start

writing poetry. It's very clever!"

"Yes, it is _too_ clever!" agreed Philip, embarrassingly conscious of a

whole field of technical difficulty yet to be ploughed before attaining

the happy position of a Tennyson. "Now she didn't tell us who wrote

that poem? Who was it?"

"That _poetry_!" stressed Harry, with an ironic reminiscence of an

error not long thrown over by his friend, "was by William Shakespeare.

Better than Tennyson they _do_ say!"

"Better than Tennyson!" Philip repeated with something of horror at the

irreverence. "But Tennyson was a _Lord_!"

"Well, Lords are not everything! Some Lords' grandfathers were just

beer-house men!" exclaimed a democratic Harry.

"What was this Shakespeare, anyhow? I think we used to do a recitation

by him all about stiffening the sinews, didn't we?"

"He was in a stable, and pinched rabbits from a woman called 'Lowsy

Lucy'! That's _his_ life story!"

"And yet he wrote all that about coming to these yellow sands and then

holding hands! But he can't really be better than Tennyson. He never

wrote those lines about hollyhocks. Do you remember? Like this:

_Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily!_

Those are the beautifullest lines all over anywhere!"

"A bit of a tongue twister, eh? Makes you pronounce all your aitches

like "hammer hammer hammer on the hard high road!" Harry blasphemed,

twinkling.

"Oh don't, don't!" exclaimed Philip, a catch of pain in his voice.

"Anyhow there isn't any philoserphy in those lines! And you don't know

what hollyhocks are? How can you like the lines? It's swank!"

"I don't know! It might be because I don't know, I like the lines.

But I _do_ know it's a flower; and when I see the real flower I'll be

glad to see it. But it's got nothing to do with the poetry. That's

just by itself:

_Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily!"_

"Never mind, never mind!" said Harry sapiently, "you'll grow older some

day!"

"I wonder!" mused Philip. "But look here, what's the time? Crutches!

Half-past eight! Got to be in bed at nine! So-long, Mr. Philoserphy!"

"So long till next time!" returned the sage, settling himself down to

his book. "_O revower!_"

As Philip ran along Doomington Road he could not help halting at the

floral establishment half-way home which recently had initiated a

forlorn crusade against the artistic apathy of the neighbourhood.

Already, it was evident, the high ideals of Madame Smythe, Floriste,

were being tarnished by the rust of compromise. She had opened her

establishment with a blaze of purely floral splendour. There were rose

trees entering into bloom, lilies, bunches of garden flowers,

democratic pots of geranium and fuchsia, tall tulips, narcissi; and as

a subfusc groundwork, wooden boxes of bulbs, manures, weed killers,

syringes and packets of seed. It was not long before young vegetables

were introduced, ostensibly on the ground that vegetables such as

potatoes and peas had a floral as well as a dietetic significance. And

now hoary potatoes, full-grown carrots, unblushing turnips, made an

almost animal show among the fragility of creeper and flowers.

None the less Madame Smythe's shop was the nearest thing to poetry in

the concrete that Philip had yet encountered. Not a day passed but

that Philip on his return from school flattened his nose against the

floristic window-pane, his eyes dazzled with delight, albeit

calceolaria and hyacinth equally were mere words to him.

One day he observed that a new glory arose from Madame Smythe's tallest

and most expensive vase. It took the shape of three flowers which he

had not seen before (he had not seen them for the reason that Madame

Smythe opened the shop in spring, and the new-comers were autumn

flowers). They were fluffy masses of numberless soft yellow petals,

bending slightly on their stalks like a gracious and lovely woman. Oh,

the rapture of burying a nose in these fragrant sweet cushions, the

rapture of seeing one of them upon his mother's blouse till her own

brown eyes caught additional gold from the gold of these blooms!

_Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily,_

he murmured. Ah, the scrumptious hollyhocks! That's what they were of

course! Hollyhocks! "Heavily hangs the hollyhock!" That's just what

these flowers were doing! He had no sooner coupled the name with the

flower than by the easiest process in the world the flower and the name

became one. No wonder Tennyson wrote poetry about hollyhocks! Just

look how each little petal curled so exquisitely, each petal fresh as

morning, yet chiselled finely into perfect form!

"Wouldn't it be spiff to buy a hollyhock and give it to mother, saying

(as one always said in romance), 'For the Fairest!' then bowing

gallantly!" he mused. "What can I do? I get a ha'p'ny a week, when

I'm good, from father. I'll be good for three weeks. That'll be

three-ha'pence. Then I'll go in and buy a hollyhock. Oo, what fun!"

The second and third halfpennies were added to the first, not without

depressions in the barometer of virtue. He shyly entered the shop of

his ambitions.

"Can I have a hollyhock, please, ma'am!"

"_A hollyhock_? I'm sorry, young man, we don't keep no hollyhocks!"

A look of grievous disappointment came into Philip's face. His voice

trembled.

"But please, ma'am," he said, "you've had some hollyhocks in the window

and somebody's bought 'em and now you've got some more hollyhocks!"

"Gracious! what can the young man want! We ain't got no hollyhocks!

Just show me what you mean!"

Philip approached the lattice-work which separated the shop from the

shop window. He pointed to the vase where his hollyhocks bloomed rich

and desirable.

"One of those hollyhocks, please!" he said.

"Hollyhocks!" she snorted. "Hollyhocks! Haw, haw, haw! Lawks!

Them's chrysanthemums! Haw, haw, haw!"

Philip's disappointment deepened. It was the glamour of the word no

less than the actual flower that had drawn his feet to pilgrimage. But

Madame Smythe had lifted the vase of chrysanthemums from the window.

"One, did you say?" she inquired, resuming business.

"Yes, one, please!" he assented, with trepidation.

"Here you are, sir, thank you!"

He opened his hands where the halfpennies lay warm and wet. He placed

his three coins on the counter.

"What!" she snapped, somewhat dangerously. "Sixpence, if you please!"

"I--I--I'm sorry!" he said weakly and blushing violently, "I'm sorry!

I haven't got any more!"

"Go home!" said Madame Smythe more genially, melting as she perceived

the lad's embarrassment. "Go home and tickle your fat aunt! Tell her

I told you!"

Now even if they weren't hollyhocks, and he reflected bitterly that he

had had no warrant for calling them hollyhocks, he wasn't going to be

humiliated in this way. No! not even if they cost ninepence, let alone

sixpence. No, he was going to buy a hollyhock, that is to say a

chrysanthemum, for his mother, even if he died for it! How could he

get sixpence? An appalling sum, on the further side even of avarice,

but he was going to get it, and he already had three-ha'pence, anyhow!

Another three weeks of comparative virtue swelled his total to

threepence. Two separate ha'p'nies from his sister Dorah (who had been

married for years and lived up in Longton), and he was worth fourpence.

It was a point of honour not to receive the slightest subsidy from his

mother towards her own gift. A ha'p'ny borrowed from Harry and

three-ha'pence from the sale of an enormous number of Dandy Dave's

chronicled exploits brought him the desired total.

He marched boldly into Madame Smythe's establishment. "One

chrysanthemum, please!" he demanded.

"Come again, Johnny, eh? Got the money this time?"

"Of course I have!"

"Hoity-toity! All right, my lord!"

"Here you are, ma'am!" he said, as he received the flower wrapped in

tissue-paper and handed over his coins.

"I say! I say! Mr. Rich! You've given me too much!"

"But you said sixpence!"

"Oh, that was weeks ago! They're cheaper now; they're only threepence!"

He was sickened to think he had allowed the extra weeks to pass by thus

unchrysanthemumed. "Give me another!" he demanded haughtily to

convince Madame Smythe of his superiority to all consideration of money.

The kitchen was crowded when Philip entered with his flowers and he

slipped in unnoticed to join his mother in the scullery.

"Mamma," he said shyly, "I've brought you a present all for yourself!"

"Oh, Feivele, sweet child, how lovely! But the money, where didst thou

get the money from?"

"I've been saving up, Mamma. But never mind about that! You've got to

take these flowers and wear them on your blouse!"

"But I can't, Feivele! It's not right a married woman should wear

flowers. Knowest thou not a Jewish woman must not wear her own hair?

How then shall I wear flowers? And what will thy _tatte_ say? I

can't, my child!"

"Oh, Mamma I've been saving up for such a long time just to buy 'em for

you. And now you don't want 'em. It's rotten, it's real rotten of

you!"

"I do want them; see, look where I put them in this jar. They'll be

here a long time, while I'm standing in the scullery, washing up and

peeling potatoes. And when they're dead, Feivele, they'll still be

living inside me. Dost thou understand? Thou art a good child!" she

said, "God bless thee!" She bent down and kissed his forehead.

... It was memories such as these and such chance snatches of poetry

that kept Philip that evening against the window-pane of Madame Smythe,

Floriste, for many contemplative minutes. Nine o'clock had passed when

at last he entered the kitchen of Number Ten Angel Street.

"Regard the hour!" said Reb Monash. "Thou hast been squandering the

hours with Sewelson! It likes me not that Sewelson! What about thy

scholarship! Thou shouldst have been in to-night studying for thy

scholarship after _chayder_. Much success thou wilt win!"

"Oh, I forgot about the scholarship!" said Philip apologetically.

"_Emmes, tatte_, I'll be in all to-morrow night studying the history

book!"

"Well, we shall see then! Go to bed now, at once! Good night!"

"Good night all!"

Philip had recently been chosen as one of the candidates for the

Doomington School Scholarship Examination by the master of Standard

Seven, whither Philip's talents in "Grammar and Composition" had

brought him with unusual rapidity. Reb Monash was delighted that his

son was progressing at least along the road to Gentile scholarship.

His experience contained the records of several young men whose earlier

years had been devoted to the mastery of secular knowledge, which, in

due time, only turned them with the more zeal to Jewish wisdom, whereto

all other accomplishments were but footnotes and commentaries; these

young men had actually been enabled through their Gentile wisdom to

study the Bible and the Talmud from a new, and sometimes from a

broader, point of view. He himself could read English well and was no

mean scholar of the Russian and German literatures. In addition to

which, of course, was his profundity in Hebrew lore, which gave him an

honoured position among the very circle of the Rabbis.

"It will do him no harm!" said Reb Monash. "If he will be like Moishe

Nearford I will not be displeased. You know Moishe Nearford, the Long

One? Not only was he high in Doomington School but he went on to the

university where one respected him, God and Man. And yet a Jew is he,

a perfect one. Never goes out with any other girl, only his sister

you'll see on his arm, week after week. A real Jew, say I, and a real

brother! And what about Moses Montefiore? He would stand up in the

House of Parliament while one talked of taxes and India and face the

East and start shaking himself over his _davenning_! But let him be

like Moishe Nearford, let alone Moses Montefiore, and I am content!"

So it came about that a tacit understanding existed for the next few

months between Reb Monash and Philip that the old Spartan devotion to

_chayder_ and _shool_ was temporarily not expected from him. It was

not in the least that Reb Monash deviated one whit from the ideal by

whose pattern he had determined to shape Philip; nor that Philip found

one whit more congenial the ideal thus created, an ideal so near to

Mottele as by that reason alone to be repugnant. It was, to simplify

the issue, a state of truce.

During this period, while Philip was reading for his own examination,

Harry was elected to a scholarship, not indeed to the older foundation

of Doomington School, which was the goal of Philip's endeavours, but to

the modern Council institution called the Highfield Grade School, for

which Harry's more astute and vehement personality seemed to fit him

more readily than for the fourth-century romanticism of Doomington

School. Yet only partly to keep abreast with his friend did Philip

apply himself to hard reading of a less congenial kind than poetry. It

is at a very early stage in the fortunes of Angel Street youth that the

shadows of tailor shop and grocery stores begin to cloud the dawn.

Before the meaning of such liberty as Angel Street can afford has been

grasped, it is time to study the lines of slavery. So early then had

the grinding fear of a sweated agony in a factory over the Mitchen

turned Philip's mind towards his only escape, to further and further

schooling, beyond the boundaries of the Bridgeway Elementary School.

Perhaps more immediately he felt that Doomington School would leave him

free to tread the primrose path of poetry. He envisioned such

black-gowned masters as figured in the adventures of Master Tom Merry;

saw them walking along groves academe hidden somewhere behind the walls

of Doomington School; and at their heels, imbibing the poetry these

gentlemen read from gold-clasped poets illuminated upon parchment

richer than the Scrolls of the Law at the _Polisher Shool_, a crowd of

emotional youths, who only turned from poetry in order to practise at

the nets or consume at Ma Pott's tuck-shop illimitable pastry.

He applied himself with fervour to French verbs, the Gulf Stream, and

the vexed question of herrings in barrels. He discovered that at a

certain stage in his reading the letters on the page before him lost

their antique stability and began to pirouette across the page, bowing

their heads, and, in the case of the genus "f" and "g," swishing their

tails indecorously; soon everything would melt in a mist of grey until

only by shutting his eyes and relaxing every ocular nerve he could

resume his vision.

"Father!" he declared, "it gets all mixed up on the paper when I've

been reading a long time. I think I need spectacles!"

"Thou canst not study," asked Reb Monash, "without wanting to be like

thy elders? Go then, go! I did not want spectacles till I was

five-and-thirty and I read more by the time I was ten than thou shalt

have read when thou art thirty! Go then, go! Thine eyes are well

enough!"

It was in the paper on geometry that his bad sight brought swiftest

disaster. He had solved one or two propositions with infinite

difficulty. He stared so hard and long at the paper before him on an

indecipherable mass of angles and lines that the _danse funèbre_ began

sooner than usual. When his vision arrived at the stage of opacity he

laid his pen down in a mood of bitter resentment.... He felt himself

for the first time hating his father with a conscious hate.

The examination was being held in the Meeting Hall of Doomington

School. He looked over the backs of his bent industrious competitors

towards the tall arched windows. These, on their outer side, were cut

by a black parapet, leaving only the upper half of the windows on that

side of the hall open to the daylight. He saw dimly a dark mass moving

leisurely along the parapet, now appearing behind the windows, now

disappearing behind the intervening walls. It seemed almost like one

of the peccant letters on his paper, incarnate in bulk. The long tail

wagged playfully. Philip blinked and stared intently. It was a large

and amiable rat. The rat disappeared beyond the further windows and

left Philip staring blankly. The rat found the destination he had been

making for unworthy of his continuous esteem. He sauntered pleasantly

back and then, discovering that an incident of more than usual interest

was taking place in the hall, he sat down on his haunches and looked on

in friendly concern. Philip felt the rat's eyes looking interestedly

down upon his own. He could have sworn that the rat inclined his head

with the gesture of a commendatory uncle.

"Never mind, old lad!" said the rat. "You're making a howling mess of

your geometry, it's true! If Mister Blabberthwaite, the geometry man,

had the least say in the matter there'd be no chance for you, my

hearty. And you've by no means gratified my expectations regarding

your geography paper, I must say. It was, perhaps, coming it a bit

thick to ask the names of all the capes on the American sea-board, that

I admit; but that wasn't any excuse for chucking Flamborough Head at

the mouth of the Irrawaddy which, if I mistake not, is not in America

at all. It's in Queensland or something of the sort. However,

_that's_ no odds! Don't worry, I feel a strong suspicion that

Doomington School will make room for you yet ... although don't breathe

a word, or it's all u.p., to use a vulgarism. No, not a word! The

truth is," whispered the rat, lifting a silencing paw to his nose, "Mr.

Furness and I have got something up our sleeves for you, something you

can't guess; but it's there right enough. _Verb. sap._, as people

invariably say upon arriving at my own respectable age. But

Esmeralda's squeaking, old chap! Sorry I can't stay ... but these

wives, you know! ... Well, so long, so long, and keep going! So long!"

And the rat resumed his urbane path.

It was impossible to get down to his geometry again, his head was

swimming. He rose and deposited his papers before the dignified

grey-haired worthy at the door, who, if he wasn't Mr. Furness, the head

master, was at least, surely, the Principal Governor of the School.

When they placed the subjects for an English essay before him and he

read:

"A day in my favourite church."

or

"What is the meaning of Empire Day?"

or

"The Place of Poetry in Cities,"

with a shout of inner exultance which, he feared, would lift the roof

of his skull, he realized precisely the good fortune which Messrs.

Furness and Rat had been retaining for him up their joint sleeves. He

betook himself to "The Place of Poetry in Cities" with a secret fear

that the ink-pot could not possibly contain sufficient ink, a fear

counteracted by the dismal thought that only one hour was allowed him

to express his opinion upon the subject of which he was the prime

authority in all Britain.

"The Place of Poetry in Cities," he began with anticipatory panache,

"is so great that it abolishes cities and turns the mud rivers into

rivers of silver. There is," he continued with anti-climax, "nothing

like it." But he soon resumed the tenour of his flight. Philip was,

in fact, affirming his creed, affirming the philosophy he had attained

after eleven and a half years of brick and mud, of stupidity, error,

false ideals, of that living poetry spelled by the half-hidden love

between his mother and himself, of that poetry in words which, without

this living poetry, could not have unfolded her secrets to a child

immersed in an almost unbroken despair. His pen scratched furiously

along. Too swiftly, too swiftly, the minutes raced round the rim of

his borrowed watch. Frequently the green meadows of his writing were

patined with flowers from the poets he had discovered, Campbell, Moore,

Tennyson, Longfellow, and when these failed him, an impromptu verse

from Philip Massel bubbled from his simmering brain. He was vaguely

conscious of the approach towards him of a clean-shaven man, with a

strong, red face, firm of jaw; but clad in such inexpensive clothing as

obviously to denote him the caretaker or, perhaps, the drilling

instructor. He was aware with a slight annoyance that the man hung for

some minutes over his paper and then very lightly placed his hand on

Philip's head. There was something quiet and fine and firm in that

gesture. Perhaps he wasn't the drilling instructor? Perhaps he was a

real master with a large family and he couldn't afford to wear

brand-new clothing? What did it matter? ... "so that the chimneys all

seem to be made of gold and the poor men are like princes...."

The stage arrived when he could no longer see the lines on which he was

writing or the letters he was forming. Still his pen raced along. The

tip of his pen disappeared in a mist like the top of a telegraph pole

in a November fog. His forehead was clammy with sweat. His forefinger

and thumb hurt horribly. And what was that? Some fool was clanging

the bell! That meant he must stop! Oh, the fool! Faster still and

faster! He felt that his eyes must fall from his sockets. Tears of

effort were rolling down his face. At last! At last! "... for Poetry

takes us from the cities of bricks and mud to a land full of beauty

like the night is full of stars!"

The dignitary of the receiving-desk by the door stared curiously at

him. He staggered out, half-blind, but filled with a great calm. The

days that followed were days of a confident lassitude. The decision

lay on the knees of the Rat and Mr. Furness, and he was content to wait.

When the information arrived that Philip Massel had won his

scholarship, Reb Monash buried Philip's head in his moustache and

beard. "Now," he said, his voice quivering, "thou wilt be a Jew and a

Human, a credit to God and Man!"

Another matter of satisfaction was the fact that Mottele looked

enviously towards him and made deliberate advances. And when he went

to tell his sister Dorah, in Longton, it was surprising to find her

stiff angular figure bending down and the hard mouth with strange

vehemence kissing him. Sixpence and a new overcoat of a wonderful

fluffy grey followed from the same quarter. Channah cried and bought

him a little volume of selections from a poet called Shelley.

But he appreciated nothing as he appreciated the pan of onions his

mother fried for him, all in curly brown strips and steeped in butter;

and more onions, and more onions, until he had had enough. And his

mother looked at him, and he understood, for the voice that asked for

another plateful was choked not merely by fried onions.

BOOK II

FORWARD FROM PHYLACTERIES

CHAPTER VI

Philip realized at no earlier age than is customary that life, anyhow

externally, is a succession of illusions, and that, if reality actually

exists, it must be isolated from facts and days, this inner reality

being governed by one set of laws and the outer appearance by another.

So that while poetry still dominated the inner boy as with a rod of

changeless reality, he found it necessary to abandon, for instance, the

old fancy of Doomington School in favour of the present fact.

It was a matter of acute disappointment to him that one convention laid

down by all his reading was not observed; for he was not seized by a

group of young gentlemen clad principally in Eton suits and top hats to

be immersed in a stream which ought surely to have flowed somewhere

through the precincts of the school. The front of the building solidly

enough lined a narrow central street of Doomington. A further aspect,

and one which seemed to conclude its periphery, was seen beyond the

grassless ground adjoining an even older institution. From no vantage

were the leafy summits of trees to be seen and no stream issued from

any portcullised arch in the walls. It was the antique Mitchen alone

which thrust turbid ink in any visible proximity. But what secret

bowers and what green places were hidden beyond the walls, some

mysterious how contained in her unfathomed spaces, who could tell?

He was not ducked in some shy water. On the other hand it did not

approach his concept of an awesome initiation that a group of quite

grubby boys seized him and bore him, frightened but not wholly

unwilling, towards an underground lavatory where pallid basins gleamed

in the interrupted light. His head was thrust into one of these

prosaic basins and water sent unpleasantly down his neck. He was with

some solemnity declared then to be fully a member of Transition A, and

allowed to proceed to his lunch in the main section of this underground

world, where he sat on the water pipes that lined the walls, eating

bread and cheese timidly. The air tingled with the bloodthirsty shouts

of footballers, violently kicking balls of crushed paper and twine. A

lady with tawny hair in a corner of the basement dispensed Jersey

caramels to appeased footballers. Indubitably the triumph of the day

was the purchase of a cap, green, with blue circular stripes, crested

with an eagle invincibly--a cap which proclaimed to the whole abashed

world that here was one who was of the world's elect, here was one who

was no lesser a mortal than a scholar at Doomington School.

As he walked home that afternoon, he took slow and measured steps, so

that none should be denied the privilege of gazing upon his cap. It

seemed that less a thing of cloth texture sat on his head than a crest

of fire. As he walked along Doomington Road, he paused before each

mirrored window as if to tie a shoelace, and actually to compare his

eagle, to their enormous disfavour, with all fowls in the lists of

fable or biology. But a climax, which seemed on the whole rather to be

overdoing it, occurred as he passed below the windows of the factory

where his sister Channah was a button-hole hand. For the shrill bravas

of feminine throats attracted his gaze upwards and there he saw and

heard the clustered buttonhole hands cheering and waving

enthusiastically. And before Philip had time to lower his blushing

face a cloud of confetti descended upon this youthful bridegroom of our

fair Lady of Wisdom, accentuating his discomfort into an ordeal of

shame. At this moment a schoolmate, not much older than Philip, but

his faded cap displaying a far more advanced stage of sophistication,

passed by, bestowing a sour look upon the object of this public

debasement of the masculine values of Doomington School. When he

arrived home his mother laid before him a steaming plate of soup which

she almost upset in her proud concentration upon the eagle-crested cap.

"And do you know, Mother," Philip declared during his breathless

repetition of the day's events, "there was a man there who put us into

our classes and he was reading my composition at the scholarship and I

thought he was the drilling man but he isn't really, he's the head

master, Mr. Furness, and he's like Jupiter, only Jupiter's got a great

big black beard and Mr. Furness hasn't and he's not got much on the top

of his head either. There's a huge statue of Jupiter..."

"To thy soup, Feivel!" said Mrs. Massel, "It will get cold and Mr.

Foniss will not come and heat it for thee. Calm then, calm!" she

demanded, by no means less aquiver with excitement than the boy.

Yet it must be here said that for some considerable time to come,

Doomington School had no serious influence upon Philip's real life.

There was of course something _genteel_ about the atmosphere compared

with the crudities of the Bridgeway Elementary School, and this

demanded from Philip a much more rigid discipline in the matter of

boots and ties. His master, he was informed, hailed from an Olympian

institution called Oxford University, and for this reason wore a sombre

black gown which would have made of a less imposing figure than this

gentleman an object to be treated with remote awe. Mr. Mathers was

distinguished from Miss Tibbet, at least by the fact that he did not

wear tortoise-shell spectacles, and from Miss Briggs of the infants'

hall, by the fact that the two front teeth of his top jaw were not

disproportionate. Yet Philip felt in his presence a combination of the

Briggs terror and the Tibbet ennui. There was in him a monomaniac

insistence on the correct orders of Latin sentences which produced the

sensation half-way during the lesson that the orders of Latin sentences

and the orders of the stars in their courses were of like fundamental

gravity. Mr. Mathers presented an interesting contrast to little Mr.

Costar who taught French, and who sat in his high desk like a little

bird twittering on a bough. Twitter--twitter! the notes came, in a

sequence of trills not musical but shrill and frequent. Yet sometimes,

and without warning, the tree-top twitter would cease, the eyes of Mr.

Costar would become glacially severe, some delinquent would be lifted

in his beak like a pink quivering worm, the throat of Mr. Costar would

vibrate in the processes of swallowing, and immediately the twitter

would be resumed, twitter--twitter, shrill, without humour. The boys

seemed no less strange and unreal than Mr. Mathers and Mr. Costar.

They came mysteriously from townships scattered round the central and

gloomy sun of Doomington, and disappeared with their daily quotum of

Latin orders and French verbs into the same dim places, beyond the pale

of knowledge. There was a community of Jewish boys at Doomington, but

he seemed at once only too familiar with their characteristics. They

were a blend of Mottele and Barney, Mottele being the predominant

element. Doomington School lay outside him, poetry lay within.

Doomington School did not want him. He would wait. Perhaps he too

would some day attain the heavy-browed responsibilities of a form

monitor, might be even the monitor elected by the form itself and not

the monitor arbitrarily appointed by the master. But now all these

concerns were beyond him, unintelligible.

On the other hand, the rearrangement in his daily times produced by the

school day was a matter of considerable importance. It meant that he

arrived home nearly two hours before the nightly session of _chayder_;

with the consequence that Reb Monash was still wrapped in his afternoon

doze. Mrs. Massel had by this time cleared away every vestige of the

mid-day meal and the kitchen was smelling delightfully fresh and clean.

The brasses on the mantelshelf shone broad and lustrous--trays and

samovar brought over from Russia, and the array of candlesticks which

glorified the table every Sabbath eve. The floor had been

energetically scrubbed and the windows so polished as to seduce into

the kitchen whatever light lingered beyond the iron bars. On the sofa

sat Mrs. Massel herself, in a clean afternoon apron, her fingers busy

with knitting, allowing herself in Philip's honour the few minutes she

spent idly in a day which began at six in the morning and ended at

eleven. Mrs. Massel was a woman of middle age, slim, but her whole

body eloquent of hard work. When Reb Monash had gone to seek his

rhetorical fortunes in America, before Philip was born, she had tried

to combine the housework with some form of itinerant business; the

strain was still visible in the long lines across her forehead. Her

face was small and wrinkled and superficially older than her actual

years. When, however, she smiled, the clouds of her sorrow and

tiredness seemed to chase each other out of the skies of her face. She

was then wistful and childish as one to whom the world still had all

her tragedies to reveal. Her nose was a little too broad for the small

lines of her face, and this only added to her smile an element of the

elfin and unreal, as if she had been instructed in some wisdom of dim

mirth by little people far beyond the circle of her recurrent

drudgeries. This childlike sweetness lay in her eyes even in repose;

for they seemed large and luminous with some inner steady light, they

were brown like hill tarns when autumn is on the bracken slopes round

them. On her smiling this light seemed to be broken into little

ripples which coursed over the brown waters of her eyes; but a surprise

and a doubt at no time deserted them, as if beyond the horizon clouds

lay ever waiting to veil these brown lights with mist.

The love between Mrs. Massel and her son was a thing which never or

rarely found expression in the usual endearments. It was a love much

more of silences than of speech. Philip did not like kissing her, as

feeling somehow that the relation between them lay too deep for the

lips. It made him self-conscious, and of his love a duty and a

convention instead of the sacrament too deep for any deliberate

thought. Kissing in Christian families, he learned from books and his

meagre experience, was a routine, where every member of the family

kissed all others on recognized sections of the face at organized

hours. From his mother the endearments he received were a broken word

which unwittingly left her lips, a gentle wind-like caress on the head,

a goodly something pressed secretly into his hand, or merely a glance

from her brown and childish eyes which might rest on his own for two

moments, silent with sanctity.

This concealment of their affection had always come naturally to them,

though it was found also to be the most discreet policy. Reb Monash

had long discovered that the way to confirm impiety was to cherish the

impious. He therefore expected from his wife that at those periods

when he was displaying in no mild manner his objection to the latest

phase of Philip's heathenism, his wife should loyally and actively

second his displeasure. Any manifestation of affection towards Philip

at such times caused him with so little restraint to lift his voice

that (to the humiliation of his wife) it was obvious that their

neighbours on both sides of the house were no less participant of his

eloquence than himself.

It was because during a whole hour they could sit and talk without

fear, that Philip's return from school now became the brightest period

of the day for both. Quite quickly Philip would switch from the day's

events to the latest poetry that had fastened on his imagination.

"Mamma," he said, "Listen and be very quiet. I'm going to read you

something from Shelley. Oh, it's a lovely thing about a plant in a

garden where there was hyacinths and roses like nymphs and about a Lady

who came with osier bands and things to hold the flowers up. I say,

Mamma, I say!"

"_Nu_, what is it? Thy meat's not well cooked?"

"No, no! I'm talking about lilies, not meat! I wonder which you are!"

"What I am? I am thy mother! What more needest thou?"

"Which are you? Are you the Sensitive Plant or are you the Lady in the

garden? When _tatte_ starts shouting you look lonely, like the

Sensitive Plant, but when he's upstairs you're all lovely like the

Lady!"

"Foolishness! Foolishness!"

"But then the Lady died, so it can't be you, can it? And so did the

Sensitive Plant, so what are we to do about it?"

"Of course she died! What then? And thy mother also, over a hundred

years! She too! But why must thou talk about Death like this, thou

not thirteen yet? Wait till thou art older and thou hast a wife and

family and hast married a son and a daughter, then it will be time!

But for thy Lady, she's only a story, so of course she's dead! How

else?"

"Ah, that's where you're wrong, see! Shelley knows all about it. He

makes you feel awfully miserable and then he comes back right at the

very end:

_That garden sweet, that lady fair,

And all sweet shapes and odours there,

In truth have never past away!

'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they._

I suppose all that's what Harry means by 'philosophy.' Anyhow, that's

not the part I like so much. What d'you think of this?

_... Narcissi, the fairest among them all

Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess

Till they die of their own dear loveliness."_

"What does thy mother think of it? My head's aching; what can I

understand thereof?"

"Oh yes, you can understand it right enough! You understand it better

than I do, but you don't want to show off! But listen ... Oh, where's

that Shelley Channah bought me? Good, here it is! Listen to this

now!" And he ran through another poem recently discovered. This

reading and chanting would take place daily. Mrs. Massel sat on the

sofa bewildered by this spate of melody, but keenly happy in the

enthusiasm of her son. If she ever ventured a "Philip, but not one

word do I understand!" "Ah! what does that matter?" Philip replied.

"Do you remember when I asked _tatte_ what good I would do to God by

saying a lot of prayers I can't understand a bit about--you remember,

he was in a good temper?--he answered that it didn't matter if you

can't understand; it's so holy to say things in Hebrew that God likes

it just the same. Well, there you are, it's just poetry! It's like

singing, only much finer!"

Sometimes he would get her to repeat lines after him. She might make a

feeble attempt to remonstrate with him, but saw that her humorous

efforts made him so beam with delight, that awkwardly, with an entirely

false distribution of accents and meanings, she stammered out her

lines. It was "Arethusa" finally brought this diversion to an end.

"From her couch of snows," said Philip. She made an effort to imitate

him.

"In the Acroceraunian mountains."

"In de Ac--ac--ac ... It cannot be, Feivel. I can't!"

"In the Ac--ro--ce--rau--nian mountains."

"Ac--roc--Ac--roc--roc-- No, Feivel, my teeth! Tell me all the rest

thyself, I will listen; it will be better so! I cannot thy croc--croc!"

When at last the feet of Reb Monash were heard in the bedroom overhead,

the poetry séance came abruptly to an end. Mrs. Massel turned to the

fire to put on the kettle for his pre-_chayder_ tea. Philip

regretfully hid away his poet and turned to the intricacies of algebra.

Schoolboys have an unerring instinct for the presence or absence of

what at Doomington School was called "public spirit." It was in fact

so essential a part of the non-material composition of the school that

the lists of forms which were drawn up terminally, a little invidiously

distinguished with an asterisk those hearts where "public spirit" was a

constant flame.

Philip, though his first year was well advanced, still came to school

somewhat as a stranger. While he himself anticipated little the

vehement passion which would some day absorb him into the fabric of the

school, his form mates anticipated it far less. So that the cold

disregard for Philip general in the form was in certain boys

concentrated into active persecution, and in Jeremy Higson, into an

attitude mournfully reminiscent of the Babylonian _Kossacken_. The

spirit was similar but the methods differed vitally. Higson might be

standing loosely against a desk when Philip entered the room after the

luncheon interval. A nail-studded boot would sweep like Jove's bolt

from the void into Philip's rear. But turning towards Higson, Philip

would find only a heavy-faced youth talking sleepily with his friends.

Higson senior was a mild Episcopalian gentleman who had written sixteen

pamphlets to prove the identity of the Anglo-Saxons, including the

Higsons senior and junior, with the Lost Tribes. For some perverse

reason Higson junior was exceedingly antipathetic to the Found Tribes,

when, to be logical, it was for Higson junior to rush forward in

consanguineous ecstasy to kiss Philip on the forehead and to repudiate

his principal friend, Evan Evans, an indisputable Celt, as an

outlander, an unsanctified.

"Where was Moses when the light went out?" he jeered with criminal

disrespect. "Who killed Christ?" he insisted frequently, turning

towards Philip an eye so baleful that it was evident he considered

Philip an actual participant in the crucifixion.

"Out of my way, you _smog_!" he growled, realizing that smog was a more

acid irritant to Philip than _sheeny_. Yet he discovered and practised

a more exquisite infliction. He knew that pig was anathema in Judæa,

because Higson senior had once made a pathetic effort to veto this

commodity from his household in response to Pentateuchal inhibition, an

effort done to nought by the severe displeasure of Mrs. Higson and

Higson junior.

Higson junior therefore introduced into the classroom the most

succulent morsels from his midday ham sandwiches to devour them in

lengthy bliss before Philip's sickened eyes. Philip began to discover

little blobs of ham fat in his pockets and school bag. Upon one

calamitous day he found as he devoured the first mouthful of his lunch

a taste of unutterable impiety in his mouth. Looking with horror into

his paper bag he found that its contents had been skilfully tampered

with, (he kept his lunch stowed in the pockets of his coat hanging in

the basement cloakroom), and that his mouth was now tainted with the

abomination of desolation. He withdrew on the wings of disgust and

scoured his mouth with water for the remainder of that interval, a

process he repeated impetuously during the next few days as often as he

recalled the dishonour of his mouth.

"What do you mean by it?" Higson asked Philip one afternoon.

"By what?"

"Killing Christ!"

Philip winced and turned away.

"I say, lads!" Higson said winking. "Let's have a lark with _smoggie_!"

"What's on, Turnips?"

"Let's crucify him!"

A slight gasp of horror rose from the Higson clientele.

"It's quite easy! Let's first stretch him out on the wall...."

Philip ran to the foot of Mr. Mathers' desk. His desperate eye had

caught sight of a large earthenware bottle of ink. He lifted it and

with twitching lips he whispered, "Touch me, that's all!"

"You little squib!" said Higson, swaggering forward nonchalantly. He

looked round to his friends.

"Just give me a hand, you fellows!"

"This is your job, Turnips! You bring him to the wall! We'll do the

rest!"

"Just you touch me, that's all!" Philip said wildly, his whole body

tense against the desk.

"And what will you do?"

"I'll throw this in your face! You'll see!"

"Go it, Turnips!" the retinue encouraged. "He's littler than you!"

Higson looked round with a growing expression of despair. It was

impossible to withdraw. He moved towards Philip. Philip's arm shot

forward. "Oogh--oogh--oogh!" A great volume of muddy ink was

streaming down Higson's face and over his light green suit. "Oh, you

bloody little devil! Oh, by Christ, I'll show you!"

"No you don't!" a quiet voice said. It was Forrester, the football

captain for the form. "You've had your whack! You'd better go and

wash before Mathers comes in!"

"Yah!" howled the retinue with swift veer of sails. "Look at Turnips!"

Bullying was one thing, in fact, and dirty blasphemy another,

particularly when attended by public ignominy.

Philip, it is true, was not more beloved after this incident than

before, but Higson certainly receded into a background of smouldering

impotence.

It can readily be seen then that Transition A was not likely to render

Philip's old interests less attractive.

A new planet now was beginning to swim into Sewelson's ken. The planet

attained soon the fixity of a star. The star soon almost rivalled the

sun of poetry as the prime luminary of Philip's intellectual sky. The

name of the new focus was Socialism.

"Don't talk to me about poetry!" Harry declared impatiently one day.

"What's the good of poetry while children are starving in garrets? For

God's sake keep it in its place, like a lap-dog in a basket. I tell

you, Philip, I tell you, there's nothing else but Socialism. Liberals

are Conservatives with their hands in somebody else's pockets.

Conservatives are Liberals with their hands in their own pockets!

Chalk and cheese! We working men have got beyond 'em; we can see 'em

through and through. Dead Sea Fruit, that's what they are, all lies

and hypocrisy inside, and red smiles outside. What did Churchill

promise and how much has he done? No, Philip, a good time's coming!

Socialism for ever!"

"But listen, Harry, not so fast! What does it all mean? And why

should it knock poetry out like that? There can't be much good in it,

if it hasn't got any room for poetry, I don't care what you say!"

Harry glared for a moment. "I didn't say that!" he snapped. "I said

it's bigger than poetry! It is poetry! How do you like that? Real

poetry!"

The relation between the boys at this moment presented in a lively

manner their differences and similarities. When any fresh intellectual

concept was presented to Philip, he was constitutionally distrustful of

it until he had ascertained its position regarding his previous

intellectual experience. With an unease which expressed itself in a

sort of timid humour, he held back from the idea, fearful of any

separative influence upon the current of his emotions. Harry, on the

other hand, was borne away completely by any new proposition which

made, through material disharmony, towards intellectual harmony. But

he was as instinctively afraid of a new emotional enthusiasm as Philip

was hospitable to it, and here he adopted the protective coloration of

a humour somewhat lambent and mischievous, to disguise the essentially

sluggish setting of his sympathies towards an enlargement of his

non-rational existence.

"Well, define it!" challenged Philip. "I know that I don't know

anything about it excepting that all sorts of filthy people are called

Socialists. People who get full of poetry begin to live a more

beautiful life inside. I suppose it ought to be the same with

Socialists!"

"Oh, there you are, just as I thought!" exclaimed Harry rather shrilly.

"Talking about Socialists, Socialists! What about poets, poets, if it

comes to that? You know Shelley was an absolute pig with that girl

Harriet and Cowper was mad and Tennyson became a Lord! What on earth's

that got to do with poetry! I was talking about Socialism, and I say

there's nothing in the world but Socialism! That's what I say! ..."

"How long have you been like this, Harry? It sounds uncomfortable!"

"Oh, ages!" replied Harry loosely.

"You said nothing about it when I saw you two Saturdays ago. Not that

that's got anything to do with it, either! But still, lend a poor chap

a hand! Where does it all want to get to?"

"Oh, there's millions of books been written about it. You know you

couldn't put poetry into a word or two, but it means something like

'Government of the People for the People by the People'--that sort of

thing. No millionaires paddling about in fat motor-cars and boys

getting consumptive in mines! No plush and palaces for the lords and

sweat and a crust for the working people. No rotten old kings on

thrones and dying men scrubbing on their knees in workhouses! ... Oh,

don't you see how we want it in Doomington of all places in the world!

_There's_ something--what is it you're always gassing about?--which is

going to sweep away the muck and the chimneys quicker than mooning

about with hollyhocks!"

"Have you got a book about it?" asked Philip uneasily.

"A book? Yes, I _suppose_ you'd better have a book to help you along.

I've got a fine book all about it, by a chap called Blatchford.

_Britain for the British_, that's what it's called! It'll knock you

off your feet, first read. Oh damn, I've lent it to Segal! I don't

think you've met Segal! No? Oh, he's a clever devil! Yes, I'll get

it back from Segal and you can have it."

"Right! I'd like to see what it's all about."

"Look here! You've done your homework, haven't you? You haven't?

Well, _I_ haven't, it doesn't matter! There's a Socialist meeting

outside Ward's Engineering Works to-night! They're thinking of putting

up a Socialist candidate instead of the lousy Liberal. What do you say

to coming along just now?"

"I'll never get home in time. The old man's getting a bit radgy again."

"Well, of course, if you're always going to be tied to your father's

apron strings...."

"I didn't say I wasn't coming!" Philip broke in hotly.

"Right-ho! We'll go through the back. It's nearer!"

It is almost no exaggeration to say that when Philip came home that

night, his head was clamorous with a new gospel, his eyes shone with

revelation, his too inflammable nature was ablaze! He walked in

unsteadily as if he had been drinking a heady wine. He looked towards

his father with a certain pity in his glance. Was he not too a victim

of these iniquitous conditions which the fiery-bearded man had

described with such blood-freezing fury? Did Reb Monash know it? Of

course he did not know it! "Hapathy!" the man had thundered, "Hapathy!

'Ere is the henemy! Your fathers is strangling their children. What

for? Hapathy! Your children is drinking the blood of their fathers!

What for? What for, I ask? Hapathy! Deny it who can!"

Reb Monash was engaged in a conversation with a lady who had two sons

to dispose into a _chayder_. He thought it discreet for the moment to

remain outwardly unaware of the sinful hour Philip had chosen for his

return. Open disapproval would have displayed Philip as no

satisfactory sample, so to speak, of the paternal wares. He turned to

Philip and with a gentle significance the two-sonned lady could not

have fathomed, inquired, "Sewelson?"

"No!" replied Philip, "Socialism!"

Reb Monash's lips tightened imperceptibly. He resumed the conversation

with his client.

"Of course," declared Philip enthusiastically some time later, "there's

absolutely no doubt of it! Shelley was an out-and-out Socialist! As

much of a Socialist as that candidate fellow, Dan what's-his-name!"

"You're right! Shelley was all there!" affirmed Harry. He beamed

pleasantly upon his convert. "All the decent chaps have been

Socialists from the beginning. Christ too, he was no end of a

Socialist!"

"Don't know anything about Christ!" said Philip uneasily. There was

something disturbing in this treatment of Christ. Christ belonged in

the first place to Russia, where they impaled babies in His honour; and

then to the Baptist Missionary Chapel, where He was associated with

soup and magic lanterns; and to the Christian prayers at school

wherein, of course, Philip had no part.

"Christ was a Jew, after all," Harry put in tentatively, "like Karl

Marx."

"Karl Marx?"

"Yes, that's the chap who wrote the big book you were looking at, on

the chair near you. I can't say I quite understand it, but they all

say you've got to read it, so I got it out of the library."

"Oh that! I don't like that sort of Socialism, it's as bad as Mathers'

Latin! I prefer Shelley's. How does it go? Oh yes, don't you think

this is fine poetry and fine Socialism, both together in one?

_Arise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number.

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fatten upon you.

Ye are many. They are few!_

Isn't it fine?"

"Whist! Yes, that beats the song we sing at the Socialist

meetings--all about keeping the red flag flying, eh? It leaves old man

Tennyson a bit husky, what do you think?"

"Steady dog, isn't he, Tennyson? Wants to take his time about it.

Doesn't he say something like

_Freedom slowly broadens down

From precedent to precedent....?_

Doesn't that mean you've got to take things sort of quietly?"

"... While mothers haven't got any milk for their kids and Doomington

stinks with corpses! By God! It makes me sick! But there's no point

rubbing it into you, you dark horse. You've been a Socialist for the

last--how many--fourteen years? But listen, I've not told you? Dan

Jamieson wants me to get on my hind legs and say a few words at one of

his meetings. What do you say to that?"

"I'd be frightened out of my life. But how does he know you'll not

make a muck of it?"

"That's what I wanted to know. But he said he overhead me barging at a

lot of kids at a street corner, and he said to himself, 'that's the

goods for me,' he said."

"Gee! You'll start crying in the middle!"

"Don't be so sure! It matters too much for me to start howling like a

kid. I'm as good as that weedy fellow with no chin at the Liberal

meeting yesterday, any time of the year!"

"What are you going to talk about? Will you spit out this here Marx of

yours?"

"I saw Jamieson on Tuesday and asked him what he wanted. 'Never tha

mind, lad!' he said, 'it'll serve our purpose seeing a lad like thee

get oop on's feet. That'll fetch 'em. Doan't think in advance about

it. Just oppen tha lips and t'rest'll coom.' That's the way he went

on. It _does_ make me feel rather goosy sometimes," Harry admitted,

"but I've got hopes in that line, so all I can say is I ought to be

damn glad of the chance!"

"Well, you're a game 'un, anyhow. I shouldn't like to be in your

shoes."

"You never know, my lad, you never know!" Harry speculated with dubious

prophecy.

Again some time has passed. Reb Monash sits upright upon that corner

chair wherein none shall sit whether Reb Monash be asleep upstairs or

at the furthest limit of his peregrinations--because "Respect!

respect!" he declares, "What means it to be sitting on a father's

chair!" He is sitting upright and his left fist clenched angrily beats

the table before him in punctuation of his utterances.

"Has one ever heard of such a thing? A _yungatsch_ of fifteen, not

more, to stand up in the market-place with the enemies of Israel and

talk black things! That's what it means, your schools and your

teachers! His parent, what is he? An _isvostchik_! I never had any

trust in these Rumanians. The town rings with it. Imagine! standing

up on a cart among the Atheists and Free-Lovers and Socialists! It's a

_shkandal_. It will bring his mother's grey hairs in sorrow to the

grave. Sooner my son should in the grave himself be than behave like

that proselytized Sewelson. Understand, not a word, Feivel! Thou must

never put foot into the heathen's house! I forbid it! I have had my

doubts for long. Would that I had so commanded before this day. God

knows what poison thou canst have drunk from his lips. What, what

sayest thou, Philip?"

"_Tatte_, I can't, he's my only pal! I'll be alone without him. And

he doesn't do it every week, anyhow. It's only this once!"

"Never must he enter this house! And if thou art ever seen with him, I

will break for thee thy bones, all of them. No more now!" He brought

the palm of his hand down emphatically. "Chayah, bring me a glass of

tea! Tell thy son to go to bed! If not it will be the worse for him!"

Philip's heart shook with resentment and grief. "I won't give him up,"

he muttered fiercely behind his teeth. "He won't stop me! He can't!

I'll be damned if I give him up! He'll see!"

Heavy wings were brooding over the kitchen in Angel Street. The gas

jet drooped dejectedly as if reluctant to light up the scared faces of

Mrs. Massel and her daughter. They sat side by side on the sofa

nervously rubbing together the palms of their hands. The thin white

cat scratched his ribs against their ankles and howled into their faces

inquiringly.

"Never mind," said Channah, "perhaps he'll just give him a good hiding

and send him off without supper. It's happened before, mother. Don't

look so worried!"

"Thou dost not know, Channah, what he's been saying to me in bed the

last few nights. He said if he'll go again with Sewelson he'll

_shmeis_ him till he begs for mercy. He said he'll keep him in the

cellar all night, he'll _shmeis_ him till he can't even cry. Oh, what

a year has fallen upon us, Channah!"

"I hate Sewelson, it's all his fault! I wish he was at the bottom of

the sea!" Channah burst out bitterly.

"But it was wrong of Feivel. It was wrong to go out with Sewelson

again. I told him. He deserves it. But no, the poor dove, not ..."

"Not what he'll get. Do you know who it was told father he was talking

to Sewelson? Oh, the sneak--I could murder him!"

"I don't know! I don't know! It was one of the _chayder_ boys, I

think. But hush, here come they! Don't say a word to him, Channah, or

he'll turn round on me and keep on shouting in bed all night! Oi, look

at the child!"

Reb Monash entered the room, his face bloodless with anger and cold

determination. Philip followed behind, his hands sunk in his pockets,

his chin on his breast. Reb Monash took from the pocket of his alpaca

coat a long thin strip of black hide. He sat down on a chair, and

without looking towards Philip, commanded "Thy trousers down!" Philip

obeyed.

"Now I will teach thee whether thou wilt mix with all the filth in the

land. Over my knees!"

The venomous strap descended, twice, three times, four times. A swift

catch came from Philip's throat. Again and once again. Her whole body

shuddering dismally, Mrs. Massel stole from the room. From the

scullery came Channah's voice, moaning. Again the strap came down. A

thin cry of pain shrilled through Philip's teeth.

"And wilt thou again go with Sewelson?"

No answer.

"And wilt thou again go with Sewelson. Say no!"

"I will! I will!"

"Well, we will see who will prevail. Say no!"

"I will!"

"I am stronger than thou. Say no!"

For answer Philip's body rolled slackly from his father's knees.

"No, my son, no! It is not yet finished. Wilt thou say no? One word,

no!"

The strap whistled through the air. Remotely, brokenly, Philip's voice

came from far off.

"No!"

"That is as I thought! Thou wilt bless me some time with tears in

thine eyes for what has been done to-night. Thy mother can give thee

supper if she will, I do not forbid."

But the crushed figure of Philip had writhed from the room. Soon he

was lying on his bed, limp, not daring to stir because each movement

stabbed him acutely. He buried his face in the pillow. He could not

think. He could not remember. He knew only that he was a mass of

intolerable pain. Yet he knew that something hurt him even more than

his pain. He had forsworn himself. He had lost something. All life

was a fight, was a movement forward, away from the darkness into the

places of light. He had forsworn himself. He had fallen back into

Babylon. The dark was closing round him and the pitchy waters were

gurgling in his throat.

There was a whisper beside him.

"Philip, Philip, it's Channah!"

Who was Channah? A girl, a sister. She had a rolled gold brooch with

two holes where diamonds should have been. One of her boots was very

worn at the heel.

"Go away, go away! I don't want you!"

"Philip, poor old kid, I'm so sorry! Mother's crying her heart out!

Listen, Philip! Mother sent me up with a cup of milk and some cake!"

How the pain licked round him, like flames. Sewelson was a fine chap,

anyhow. God, what a wonderful speech he had made that night! When he

came down his face was pouring with sweat. Somebody threw a brick at

him....

"Philip, well?"

"Oh, go away, go away! I don't want anything! Leave me alone!"

"I'm leaving the milk and the cake on the chair by your bed, see? Good

night, kid! Drink up and try and go to sleep!"

Dimly he heard the sound of his father and mother entering their

bedroom. Then a long monologue followed. It was very loud, but his

ears were sealed against it. Pitch blackness was all round him, and

something had made a breach in the walls of his soul and the pitch

blackness was flooding through. Would they all be drowned, Sewelson

and Shelley and the big bluff face of Dan Jamieson? He had forsworn

Shelley. The image of Shelley's body tossing forlornly on the waters

of Spezzia reproached him. Why had Shelley died if Philip Massel were

to forget him, leave him tossing endlessly on the grey seas? A

melancholy cat gibbered beyond the window, down in the yard. Wearily,

wearily, the hours passed. He could not tolerate it. With his guilt

keeping his shoulders below the waters he would never breathe clean

airs again, he would never fall asleep, never awake.

What could he do? He must gainsay his disloyalty! There was nothing

for it. Thus only would the forward march from Babylon be resumed.

What? What? He started from his bed! Repudiate his treachery before

the man in whose pocket lay dreadfully coiled the black snake? There

was nothing, nothing but this! Else all liberty was vain, poetry was

vain. Poetry was a plaything, not the incense in the House of the

Lord. A clock in a church steeple tolled once, twice. The night was

passing; the dawn would come. He would find his soul lost with the

dawn. Nothing of glamour or struggle would be left for him.

Yet what could he do? Renounce his renunciation? Nothing less,

nothing else! Vividly each stroke of the strap was reiterated in his

memory. Was liberty worth it, was poetry? He remembered Harry's

bleeding forehead where the lout had thrown the brick. He imagined the

floating, sodden hair of Shelley adrift on the indifferent waters.

He rose from his bed. It felt as if he were tearing his body into

strips. Every bone ached, every muscle was raw. He opened his door

and crept down the stairs till he stood outside his father's bedroom.

He knocked. His father had at last fallen asleep. The monologue for

that night was ended at last. There was no reply. He knocked again.

A sudden and tremendous panic seized him. What a fool he was! What

was he doing it all for? Why shouldn't he settle down and be what his

father wanted him to be and what the masters at school wanted him to

be. It was the easier way. How easy it would be to gain the applause

of the Polish Synagogue, the applause of Doomington School! On the

other side, what? Poetry, Shelley! A swift agony of pain as he moved

recalled him to his determination. Forward, forward! He knocked a

third time, more loudly.

"Yah, yah!" came the startled, sleepy voice of Reb Monash. "Who is it?

What is it?"

Philip opened the door.

"It's me!"

"What hast thou come about?"

"I've come about Sewelson. I said I won't go out again with

Sewelson..." There was a pause. The boy heard his heart drumming

across the night. Then followed--"Well--I will!"

He heard a gasp from the bed.

"Gott!"

Silence, complete silence.

Philip closed the door and crept upstairs again. The pain of his

lacerated flesh was somehow easier to bear. A faint finger of

moonlight pointed ghostlily into the room as he entered. He made out

vaguely the milk and cake his mother had sent up for him. He

discovered he was ravenously hungry and devoured the food. He took his

clothes off and with great caution hunched himself between the

blankets. The moonlight washed over his face and showed him sound

asleep.

The truce was over. During Philip's first year at school it had

already worn a little thin. The emotion of pride with which Reb Monash

had seen his son enrolled among the scholars of Doomington School was

now considerably reduced. Philip's second year at school seemed by no

means likely to bear out his father's prognostications that the study

of Gentile lore would so work upon his stubborn brain as to turn him

with warmth towards the _Yidishkeit_ of home and synagogue. _Chayder_

was now out of the question. It was easy enough for Philip to plead

home-work when a tentative invitation in that direction was held out,

and he was now nearly fourteen years old, too fully fledged for the

compass of _chayder's_ wing.

Yet Reb Monash was certainly going to see that the boy's other duties

were not neglected--his washings before food, his three several bodies

of prayer at morning, noon and night, his rigid application to the

matutinal phylacteries, his countless other duties. In the degree that

Philip's enthusiasm for that whole aspect of his existence symbolized

by his phylacteries flagged, a process considerably accelerated by the

distintegrative tide of Socialism, Reb Monash himself determined that

his son's feet should be held forcefully upon the precise road. He

frequently threatened a visit to Mr. Furness, an issue to which Philip

could not help looking forward with both pleasure and apprehension.

Philip had come into contact with the Head Master on very few

occasions, during one of which he was soundly snubbed for an effort to

display to Mr. Furness how much more intimate was his knowledge of

Shelley's philosophy than Mr. Furness'. Yet he felt that there was a

faculty in Mr. Furness for seeing with those deep-set stone-blue eyes

so deeply into a proposition that the difficult nature of his case

would be manifest to him. He felt at the same time a little discomfort

at the thought that the distinctly mediocre position he occupied in the

fortnightly form lists might attain a prominence he did not desire.

But, he reassured himself, there was always time to pick up in that

line, when he felt like it; in the meanwhile his friendship with

Sewelson was far more absorbing, particularly when it now became an

occupation which involved a savour of the perils incident to big game

hunting. In short, whenever the opportunity presented itself, he was

in Sewelson's company, and whenever Reb Monash discovered the fact he

received the punishment he risked.

Dan Jamieson had received a paltry hundred and thirty-five votes at the

General Election. But he had brought a blush of intense pleasure and

pride to Harry's cheeks by assuring him that to Harry he owed the odd

thirty-five.

"The foäk canna stand oop agin a babe!" he declared. Philip was

standing by at the time, shyly enough, and Jamieson added kindly, "and

I expect another thirty-five voäts from thee, lad, next time we sets

ball rollin'!"

Harry refused to let his friend forget the thirty-five votes which were

due from him to the Socialist cause. "It's not enough for you," he

insisted, "to talk to the chaps at the dinner hour. That's an average

of a man a month. I know. I've been doing it. You'll have to get up

and spout!"

"Don't be a fool, Harry! You know it's not my line! I'm not old

enough, anyhow!"

"Fiddle! What about me?"

Philip's career as an orator began with a question he tried to ask at a

Conservative meeting, with a mouth which felt as if it were dilated

with an india-rubber ball. No one took the least notice. After many

minutes his blush of discomfort faded away, but he swore fervently that

he wasn't going to be such a blithering idiot next time. Some days

later, when the tide of a Liberal orator's eloquence seemed to be

momentarily checked, he burst in shrilly with a long premeditated

question, "But what's the good of trying to patch the roof when the

foundations are rotten?" The orator closed his mouth with a spasm of

fright. A number of heavy democrats in the crowd said genially, "Good

for you, sonny! That's stumped him! Yes, what d'you say to that?"

they shouted to the orator, "What's the good of trying to patch the

roof when the foundations are rotten?"

"My concern is not with children," said the orator unhappily, "I'm

after the vote, the men with the vote. I leave it to the other parties

to canvass the children!"

"Down with him, down with him!" a woman shrieked excitedly. "He wants

to starve the kids!"

"Where's the young 'un? Give him a chance!"

But Philip had withdrawn, having tasted blood. A sweet music was

jingling in his ears. He had heard his own voice lifted in the

presence of a crowd and the crowd had responded generously. He

abandoned momentarily his ambition to become Poet Laureate and

determined to shape his course towards the Premiership of the United

Kingdom.

Now and again during this period Philip went to have a few words with

an old Bridgeway School friend of his who worked in one of the coat and

mantle factories bordering the Mitchen. It was an experience which

lifted his Socialism from a theory and a somewhat sentimental

abstraction to a clamant and immediate need. "Sweated labour" became a

phrase which he could endow with the actual physical associations it

was intended to conjure. He saw the men in their filthy shirts

spitting upon their pressing-irons and the floor indiscriminately.

Their sweat fell unregarded on the material below them. The tailors

sitting about on the littered tables seemed to be more perversions of

men, grotesques, than men actually. The windows were fouled with an

opaque mist of dirt and sweat. Little boys shuffled uneasily about

like subterranean gnomes. Girls cackled hideously after him, and when

the men started an obscene catch which lifted his gorge, girl after

girl in the adjoining rooms accepted the sexual challenge and cackled

in return. He saw a thick-nosed foreman whose waistcoat glimmered

evilly with countless soup droppings fuddling his fingers in the bosom

of a girl. He saw another girl, a recent recruit, leaning,

ivory-yellow, through a window which looked down on the Mitchen slime.

There was no reason why her body should not follow where her eyes

looked down so stupidly. What else was there? Nothing but the reeking

room and the dirty songs and the swinish waistcoat of the foreman! The

picture of this sick girl remained abidingly with him. When Harry

turned suddenly to him one evening and announced that he had given

Philip's name to the Longton secretary as a speaker for next Sunday

evening, at the very moment of dismay and revolt her image came back to

him and filled him with a blind fury against the ordinances of men.

"All right, I'll come!" he said thickly. "You know I'll make a filthy

mess of it, but that's your fault. I've got nothing to say and I don't

know how to say it and I'll just get up and open my mouth and shut it

and fall off. Good God, Harry Sewelson, you're a pig!"

"And you're a good Socialist! There's two first-rate lies. It's on

the croft outside Longton Park. But don't worry, Philip, old man,

you've got the stuff, never fear! Sunday, May the something-or-other,

is the date. Anyhow, that doesn't matter, it's next Sunday, at

half-past six! So that's all right!"

Philip carefully prepared a little speech. He repeated it several

times before his mother, assuring her that it was one of Antony's many

orations over the corpse of Cæsar. So long as Philip did not declaim

loud enough to wake Reb Monash she was happy enough to listen

obediently to Antony's denunciation of the House of Lords.

Next Sunday Philip turned up and sat below the oratorial cart biting

his nails nervously and recapitulating his speech. He was called upon

immediately after an emancipated coal-heaver, whose jocosity had

tickled the crowd into unrest.

When Philip rose blinking and with a heart full of the most unmitigated

hatred for Harry, a gentleman adorned with a muffler and a slant Tweed

hat exclaimed ribaldly, "Crikey! Look what's come! Johnny, go back to

your mummy's titty-bottle!"

There was a prompt evanescence from Philip's brain of his carefully

prepared speech. He was at that stage of nervousness which endows its

victims with a degree of courage no ordinary frame of mind could

conceivably induce. He turned fiercely towards the humorous gentleman

and forgetting completely his brothers in the cause who were round him

on the cart, forgetting the upturned, sceptical faces of his audience,

he vented upon the humorous gentleman so turbid a stream of

denunciation, dazzled his head with such a storm of rapiers furnished

as much from his own shrill temper as from the prose of Blatchford and

the poetry of Shelley, convinced him so thoroughly that both the

continuance of the House of Lords along its bloody path of rapacity and

the putrefaction of the factories along the Mitchen River were due to

his criminal indifference and abysmal stupidity, that the humorous

gentleman straightened his Tweed hat, tied his muffler into a different

knot, buttoned all the buttons in his jacket, in the vain effort to

present as different an appearance as possible from the humorist who

had twitted the firebrand on his first appearance upon the platform.

Philip was sweating and shivering when he descended; he was, moreover,

consumed with a secret dread lest the object of his denunciations

should wait for him in a dark corner to conclude the episode in

Philip's disfavour. The Longton secretary shook Philip's hand

respectfully as if the limb were made of a clay slightly superior to

his own. He checked himself when he found he was addressing Philip as

"sir" and substituted "comrade." And Philip, when he descended the

Blenheim Road, found himself booked to speak at a meeting on the

Longton croft some time ahead.

Philip instinctively realized that whatever the future held in store

for him as a speaker (but, to be candid, the glories of the Premiership

seemed speedily to dissipate), his talent lay rather in the field of

inspiration than of discipline. He knew (and this confirmed his

orientation towards the Laureateship) that he would invariably be a

catspaw of circumstances either for success or failure, as soon as he

had laid aside the pen for the tongue. For this reason he deliberately

withheld from the _Book of Pros and Cons for Debating Societies_ out of

which, as his friend confessed, Harry made golden capital. As he sat

again below the cart on the evening of his second public appearance, he

made a strenuous effort to keep his mind as blank as possible.

Overhead his precedent orator was thundering. The sanguine hues of his

bellying and flamboyant tie had already won for him half his battle.

Who could impeach the politics of a man whose neckwear flung a defiance

in the teeth of sunset and whose eloquence paled both? With a

consistent massacre of aitches he triumphed across the turbulent field,

until at last, when he ended with "and your children will get down on

their knees and praise God that their parents took the right path!",

the crowd generally, and Philip in particular, were swept high and dry

upon the beach of enthusiasm by the wave of the man's argument.

It was impossible to be self-conscious at such a moment. Philip sprang

valiantly on to the cart and with tremendous effect his treble, like

woodwind ardently repeating the theme of brass, reiterated "and your

children will get down on their knees and praise God that their parents

took the right path!"

There was no holding him back. Repeatedly he brought his left fist

upon the palm of his right hand to clinch his indisputable conclusions.

The other speakers on the platform were shocked out of mere admiration

into submission to his cogency. Harry could hardly realize that this

was the hesitant young friend who followed his lead with such

blundering perseverance, and who was, when you came to think of it,

rather a muff on the whole. It was a stranger, small, ungainly,

irresistible. The crowd below stared, their mouths gaping, their heads

swaying slightly to the rhythm of his gestures.

It was an incoherent enough medley, and perhaps the precocity of the

youth was more exhibited in the uncanny earnestness of his manner than

in the intellectual quality of the stuff he uttered. The crowd he was

addressing consisted of serious artisans, night-school-educated clerks,

filmy half-existent women, whose mental development at fifty would in

all likehood not transcend Harry's at fifteen, to whom they listened

indeed, not because they were interested in his crystal arguments, but

because his wit, his adroitness, pleased them like the froth on their

evening pints. They were therefore an easier prey to Philip's uncouth

flood of undigested emotions. He attempted, as often as he remembered

this episode, to reconstruct his speech, to examine what potent

eloquence had carried himself away even more completely than the crowd.

He only remembered the moment when he returned to the concluding remark

of the last speaker. "Our fathers," he began, "our fathers have tried

... I say, our fathers ... our fathers ..."

The crowd breathed anxiously. What was happening to the young feller?

Had he seen a ghost, he was that pale? He'd been as red as a turkey

cock only just now, he had! There weren't no stopping him a minute

ago, and now the words were sticking in the back of his throat. It was

a shame, it was! It was too much to expect of a kid! Just like these

Socialist fellers to put it across a kid once they got hold of him!

Couldn't be more than fifteen, or sixteen at the most, he couldn't! It

wasn't good enough, don't care what you say! He'd faint if they wasn't

careful....

But look, he was starting again.

"Our fathers have tried for all they are worth. Your fathers and mine

have tried..." The lad's eyes were starting from his head. He gulped

and started again, "Have tried, I say..."

It was as if some spell of physical evocation resided in his words.

Whilst his lips were still shaping the first vowel of "fathers,"

something black and aloof and ominous had drifted from the vague

towards the limit of his audience. A tall shining silk hat, familiar

symbol of repressions and disaster, threw a deep gloom over against his

eyes.

"Our fathers have tried..."

But his own father was here, whose love for him was like hate, and

whose hate pierced at once his son's heart and his own. What should he

do? It was he, of course it was he! Whose else could those mournful

and hostile eyes be, their orbs large with a stricken indignation?

There passed across the fringe of his stupor a recollection like the

vague white wing of an owl at dayfall. Hadn't his father said

something about going to see Dorah up in Longton this evening? Why had

he not taken warning and kept away? His father must have noticed from

the road some hundred yards away the gathering on the croft against the

railings of Longton Park. He must then have determined to go home

through the croft instead of down the straight Blenheim Road, so to

discover whether the proselytized one, the forbidden Harry Sewelson,

was uttering his nefarious doctrine here, with Philip, perhaps, at his

feet. And here he stood, his brow contracted with pent fury, biting

his upper lip! With what dexterity of the sloping brush had he stroked

the silky fibre of his hat to-day! How white, deathly white, was the

white bow on his stiff white front! There were signs of white in his

black beard. He was getting old, old. His eyes blazed. Old? He was

young, proud, strong--younger than his son, young as his race, the

eternal child, the stubborn stripling that would not change nor grow

though God were visible, though the hills melted, though the stars

cried across the void "Lo! you must change or you shall die!"

In this moment with tense clarity an alternative presented itself

before Philip's swooning eyes. He might withdraw; he had carried them

with him so clearly that they would let him go with but a sympathetic

murmur if he stammered out that he was unwell. He could withdraw with

grace, and at the same time go to meet the inevitable trouble half-way.

There discretion pointed. He must decide at once.

Or else, or else he could set the seal on his victories. He would not

have uttered that dismal shout in school vainly, he would not have

recanted vainly upon that strange dim night. He would, seeking for

courage in the very depth of his spirit, in the very height of this sky

where his father and he stood face to face, while Doomington waited,

and his race waited, he would gather together once more the reins of

his daring. Who should withstand his horses? Who should gainsay the

thunder of their nostrils and the death in their feet! Was it his own

battle alone that awaited decision? Himself, he existed no more! The

unborn brothers of his race, the unborn children of his country, lifted

towards him their ghostly hands. Do not desert us, they said, for in a

boy's hand lies the issue, and God is silent, waiting that a boy should

speak. A boy was he? A boy? He was a man amongst the men of eld!

Isaiah was by his side! Dimly the exquisite voice of Shelley said to

him, "Do not despair!"

What if it should break him, what if it meant he could never lift his

voice again? Yet his voice though silent, his voice though a frail

boy's, should be voluminous on the winds of the world, and if his body

were cast aside, his heart's blood would be red energy in the hearts of

the cohorts of Joy.

His figure suddenly, with the automatic gesture of the marionette,

straightened itself. With something of defiance he flung his chest

forward and clenched both his fists. A wave of swift colour flushed

into his cheeks and as swiftly withdrew. He was speaking once more.

The passion that moved the lad now was too swift merely for swift

diction. He spoke evenly, his voice was almost a whisper. The

black-bearded man who had stood for some moments on the edge of the

crowd, disappeared. No one noticed him. At last Philip dropped

loosely into the chair behind him on the cart.

For an hour or two that evening hardly a man moved from the gathering

in front of the railings of the Longton Park.

"Come to our house and have some grub!" said Harry apprehensively to

Philip, who leaned against the railings, ashen-pale.

Philip turned away wearily. "Go away, Harry, I'm done!" He walked

home very slowly, carefully avoiding the lines between the pavement

slabs. He trod on the foot of a dignitary from the _Polisher Shool_,

who swore at him and spat into the street.

CHAPTER VII

When the storm had subsided, Philip felt like a sea-battered hulk,

shorn of spars, incompetent to face wind and tide. The muscle of his

left arm suffered peculiarly. Really, the way it had been wrenched and

bruised was almost comical. As if his arm had espoused Blatchford and

orated on the waste croft which his father had so persistently misnamed

the "Public ways and the market-places." Poor old muscle! He dropped

his forearm tenderly to see if the movement did not circle the upper

arm with bracelets of fire. He took his shirt off and licked the

coloured wound with his tongue, like an animal released from a trap.

He stared into a jagged fragment of mirror, and seeing his face so grey

and drawn burst unaccountably into a roar of laughter. He drowned the

noise at once by biting his lip fiercely. "The Romance of a Brachial

Muscle!" What a fine subject for a long narrative poem in countless

cantos! Oh, by God, he was miserable! What was wrong with Life? Why

were Life and he always at daggers drawn? He recapitulated the sum of

his conscious crimes. He had once stolen carrots from the cellar, it

was true! But equipoise had been asserted: he had been rewarded by an

ample stomach-ache. And finally, when physical calm had been

established, to round off his state with spiritual calm, he had bought

two penn'orth of carrots and replaced them in the cellar. Also, he was

bound to confess, he invariably kept his book open in school during the

reciting of prepared passages. But then the boy behind him used his

own collar as he himself used the collar of the boy in front. It

wasn't really cheating because Gibson was such an ass in so many ways!

Anyhow there was no doubt the world hated him. The world had always

hated him. He had never got on with anybody in Angel Street. He had a

filthy time at school, and then there was all this business, and oh,

hell! what a rotten arm he had!

He had determined against committing suicide. He remembered once

saying to his mother after a row, saying with a strange mordant humour,

"Mother, I think it'll be happier for the whole family if I commit

suicide!"

"If thou what? Speak plain!"

"Kill myself! Throw myself in the river!"

She had made no reply. She merely went to the sofa and sat trembling

for a few minutes. She said "Feivel!" once, less with reproach than

raw, ugly pain. All that day she did her housework unsteadily and said

not a word to Philip. He hadn't liked it. No, it was better not to

commit suicide. It savoured too imitatively, moreover, of the _Mighty

Atom_, whom he had disliked. Then, in addition, the wife of somebody

the watchmaker had recently tried it and succeeded. She obviously

could have reaped no satisfaction from the episode. If only he could

die accidentally! Would even that make his father sorry for his

abominable treatment? The youthful corpse would lie on the parlour

floor under a black cloth and everybody would sympathize frightfully

with his mother and be pointedly chilly towards Reb Monash. Wouldn't

he be sick about it! Wouldn't he ask God for another chance to behave

like a decent sort of father, but all to no use! There would be his

son's pale and romantic corpse lying stately beneath the cloth, with

candles and things about. "Easeful Death," one of the poets said

somewhere. That wasn't half strong enough. It was a triumph, a

pageant! But it meant being carted off, didn't it, to the cold ground

somewhere, and the weepers would go away and the candles be

extinguished, and the rain would come down, and the coffin be sodden

and fall away! That was where the worm-element came in, and with the

worm-element he could pretend no sympathy; "where the worm became

top-dog," as he had once brilliantly said in comment upon "And the play

is the Tragedy, Man--the hero, the Conqueror--Worm!"

It was at this moment that the idea of running away occurred to him.

He had lately been reading the triumphant career of a runner-away.

Harry had once recommended running away, sceptically enough, but it

would be tremendously interesting to take his casual advice seriously.

He was quite definitely conscious how melodramatic the idea was, and

just as conscious that he had already decided on its execution. The

fellow in the book had performed no end of valiant deeds in fires,

shipwrecks and revolutions. It was a thin book, duller even than Mr.

Henty, whom he had long ago discarded. Of course, he was not going to

be taken in by that sort of thing, but any proposal was more

satisfactory than the shoutings and the bruised arms of which his life

now was constituted.

It was settled! He was going to run away! When? Obviously now, at

once! There was no point in to-morrow. To-morrow would be like

yesterday. It was evening now. He'd set out and by the time night

came ... Oh, there wasn't any need to worry about it! Something would

happen. Something always happened, Yet everything was rather

frighteningly vague. Was there any need to carry anything off with

him? Doubtless it would be more independent and proud to go just as he

was, and he wouldn't need an overcoat for months. Oh yes, he might as

well stick that Shelley in his pocket. He would finish the "Revolt of

Islam," though he had tried three times already. He lifted his injured

arm to reach the book and dropped it again, wincing. He sat down

before his rickety table, and wrote a brief note to his mother, slipped

it into an envelope and descended into the kitchen. He looked

mournfully and significantly upon his mother, murmuring to himself

bitterly, "If she only knew!" He felt a disgraceful impulse to utter a

loud howl of remorse, but manfully repressed it and, realizing that

each moment in the kitchen endangered his resolution, went to the door.

As he closed the door behind him, he dropped the envelope through.

He carefully examined his feelings. He was running away, wasn't he?

It was the most dramatic moment in all his life. There had been

psychological crises before, but here was something palpable, dramatic.

He was putting himself into immediate communion with some of the

choicest spirits of history or legend. Not many other chaps dared do

this sort of thing. Then why on earth wasn't he more excited about it?

His heart ought to be storming valiantly, but its workings seemed to

respect their usual method and speed. He only felt a little dazed and

stupid. He was under the ridiculous impression he was only acting!

That was absurd, at such a crisis! The vague, the vast, into which he

was adventuring, were not merely uninviting, they were, in some

inexplicable fashion, not even there. Home and his father and his

mother and his arm, all these were realities enough, and the only

realities. But this running away, upon which at this very moment he

was actually embarked, was a thin dream. And here was another reality,

here was Channah coming down the street.

"Good-bye, Channah!" he said darkly.

"You're not off to a meeting?" she ventured confidently.

"Oh no! Oh no!" he replied gloomily. She walked on. It was necessary

to be moving. She would probably find the note and the finding would

lead to immediate results. He ran along into Doomington Road, and

almost mechanically turned up into Blenheim Road. They'd not know

which way he was going, he needn't fear that. He slowed down and

sauntered along. Where the devil should he go now? that question ought

to be decided. His mind was torpid. No sooner was the question

formulated than it passed from his mind. Somebody was gesticulating to

a crowd on the croft. Aimlessly he turned in that direction. They

were talking about Tariff Reform, statistics, Poor Laws, molasses and

things. He lacked the resolution to go further, so he stood, neither

listening nor thinking, just dull, dimly unhappy.

He felt an arm slip round his neck. An anguished voice said, "Philip,

don't be such a donkey! Mother's half-mad with worry, you

_meshugener_! Is this your idea of a joke, you little fool?"

Channah must have realized which way his steps would instinctively turn.

Philip threw the arm off and turned to a dishevelled Channah. "I'm not

a fool! I'm dead sick of him and I'm going to get out of it!"

"Where?" she asked.

"Anywhere!" he exclaimed desperately.

"Come on now, there's a good lad!" She got hold of his arm. "He'll

not know anything about it if you come at once!"

"I want him to know! Let go! Oh, you won't, won't you? There!" He

wrenched his arm free. He fled along the croft and found his sister

following in forlorn pursuit. When he had put a safe distance between

them he turned round. Channah was standing, wringing her hands, and

her hair, escaped from her combs and pins, flew about her head. It

made him feel an unutterable scoundrel. He knew that he was acting

like a fool and a blackguard! "Come home, Philip, oh, do come home!"

her voice shrilled.

But he couldn't. He had a little dignity after all. He was getting on

in life and it was about time he could think out and pursue his own

plan of campaign.

"I can't!" he said. "Give Mother my love! Good-bye! Tell her it's

not my fault!" he insisted anxiously. "Good-bye!"

He followed up the road and left Channah standing blankly. Definitely

he was running away. An almost complete numbness now gripped his

brain. He had a faint idea of getting out into the country but he

found himself penetrating deeper and deeper into the town. Night was

gathering thickly over Doomington. He felt too stupid even to be aware

of his hunger. For hours and hours, it seemed, he walked through the

dark streets. Indifferent people jostled him into the roadway. Every

now and again he found his journeying had brought him before the same

ugly squat little church. He must get out of this. He turned off in a

direction he was certain he had not pursued before. He found himself

in a murky hidden square, with feet heavy as blocks of stone. Blocks

of stone seemed to be tugging his eyelids down to close over his eyes.

He was suddenly aware of a tremendous need of sleep. There was a form

in the flagged path which led through the square. A man and a woman

were sitting very close together on it; but there was room for him. He

threw himself down and his head fell immediately upon his chest. He

plunged at once into a tired sleep. When he awoke, it was very dark

and quiet. He remembered that there had been a man and a woman beside

him, but they had moved away! What was it he was doing here? Of

course, he'd run away! What a thick heavy business it was, running

away! How many hours ago was it since he had started? Nothing had

happened yet. Nothing. He just felt foolish and extremely miserable.

Well, he must keep going till something did happen. As he rose, he

heard the bell in the steeple over him toll hollowly. One o'clock!

Oh, the desolate hour! Somewhere deep in Doomington, alone, hungry,

tired, at one o'clock! He shuffled wearily from the square and up

through one or two towering and narrow streets. He heard a man

prowling about in a doorway. His heart stood still with terror. Steps

came forward and a lantern surrounded him with ghostly light. A

policeman peered suspiciously into his face and lumbered on. Here was

a main road. How wide and lonely and terrible it was! He dared not

stand still, the policeman would come after him and ask questions which

he would not be able to answer. He must keep moving, moving, God knew

where, but moving. His feet made an alarming sound on the deserted

pavements. Oh, what was he doing here? Why hadn't he waited till he

got some money from somewhere, somehow, before he ran away? How

formidably the doorways were barred against him! The plate-glass

windows stared leering with baleful eyes. Some one had moved from a

side street into the main road and was coming towards him. A lady it

was. A real lady too, she seemed, as she came nearer and he saw the

opulent nature of her clothing. Her skirts swished richly. There was

a feather bobbing over the side of her hat. Channah had only one

feather which she kept securely from year to year, dyeing it

occasionally. There were three feathers in the lady's hat. What was

she doing out just now? She couldn't possibly be running away, like

himself. She was rather fat, she ought to be quite a decent sort. She

introduced a sense of companionship into the appalling void of night.

Joy! She had stopped and was talking to him!

"Well, cockie!" she said, "it's rather late for a little 'un!"

"Yes, ma'am!" he said respectfully.

"Haven't you got a home? You look all right, your clothes and that!"

"Yes, I have got a home!"

"'Xcuse my asking like, but why aren't you in it? It's gone two, you

know!"

"Well, because ... it's because ... I ... I mean, he ..."

"Oh, I understand, cockie!" she said kindly. "He's been and gone and

chucked you out like, eh?"

"He _hasn't_ chucked me out!" declared Philip hotly. "I've chucked

myself out. I've run away from home!"

"Phew!" she whistled. "That's the ticket, eh? You're a plucked 'un!

But what are you going to do now?"

"I don't know. Just walk, I suppose. I'll see!"

"I like you, sonnie, I like your voice. Let's keep on, it'll never do

to stand in one place, they don't like it. Just come to the lamp

there. I'd like to look at you!"

He found that a large, warm, somewhat flabby hand had taken his own.

They walked together to a lamp. His friend got hold of his forehead

with one hand and his chin with the other, and exposed his face to the

falling lamplight. He caught a glimpse of the lady's face above the

heavy chain of rolled gold that lay on her bosom. Her face was pallid

round the fringes of the cheeks and on the tip of her nose, and by

contrast, her cheeks were singularly red. Her lips too were red, quite

unlike the red of Channah's lips and his mother's. It was a sleepy,

fat face, rather kindly. There was something strange about her eyes,

something like--well, funny eyes, anyhow! Hungry eyes they were, a

little wild, yet they were sleepy and kind, too. Surely her breath

didn't smell the least bit of beer? No, not such a thoroughly

estimable lady! Perhaps it was beer ... the poor lady had to take for

her health?

"Sonnie!" she said. "You've been having a heavy time, eh? Poor kid!

You've got nice eyes, you know! Be careful what you do with 'em. It

was eyes like yours what did for Bertha. Poor Bertha! She was a slim

lass once, Prayer Book and all, and parasol on Sundays, all complete!"

"Who's Bertha, please?"

"Hush, sonnie, hush, I'm talking! Bertha? Don't tell Reginald--I'm

Bertha! He wasn't a big feller neither, what done her in! And it

wasn't for money, anyways, _I_ can tell you. Love it was, and it isn't

all the girls can say that! And he went with his lips this way and

with his eyes that way, and where was you? Yes, he had eyes just like

yours, Arthur! Your name is Arthur, isn't it?"

"No, my name's Philip!"

"Oh, we are a gentleman, aren't we? 'No, my name's Philip!' Haw! haw!

Your name's not Philip, see? Your name's Arthur! What's good enough

for him is good enough for _you_, Arthur. So there, Arthur! ... I'm

sorry, kid, I'm not laughing at you. You see, I'm feeling all funny

like...." She passed the back of her hand across her forehead. A big

bead of clammy sweat was thrust backward into the maze of her yellowish

hair. "To tell you the honest, Arthur," she whispered, leaning over

towards the boy, "he's been and pitched me out!" She lifted her voice.

"Pitched me out, he has, the dirty heathen, at two o'clock in the

morning! After all the times we've had together. Scarborough! Oh,

Scarborough! The waiters stand round you and says 'Lobster, ma'am,

_with_ hock?' polite as polite! And here am I! Not good enough for

the likes of him, ain't I? I'll show him up! Pitched me out...." She

took a fluffy handkerchief from the depths of her blouse and tapped

each eye.

"I beg your pardon," said Philip with uneasy politeness, "have you had

to leave home too?"

"Home, sonnie, home? I've got a _home_! Oh, it's all right about my

_home_! But now and again a night out, eh, is the goods for Bertha!

I'm one of the girls! I'm a bird! I'm not too particular about my

perch, though I _have_ got a little perch of my own! But I was ...

hello! Some one's coming! Can you see who it is?"

"Yes," said Philip. "It's a policeman, I think!"

She whispered into his ear anxiously. "Listen, I'm going to be your ma

when he comes up, if he asks things. Understand? You've got the sick

sudden, and I thought a walk would settle your stomach. Now...."

The policeman advanced and halted. "Hello, missus!" he said.

"Burglars or what?"

"No, constable," replied the lady with quiet dignity, "my poor Arthur's

got a touch of the colic so I thought it best to give him a breath of

air like." She was wiping Philip's forehead with the little

handkerchief. "Are you feeling better now, Arthur boy?"

"Best go and stow him between the sheets, lady. He'll catch his death

in the damp air," the policeman growled amiably, and walked away.

The situation was altogether so inexplicable that Philip clutched

feebly after the expression "I'm a bird!" as a clue which might perhaps

lead him through the maze.

"A bird?" he asked. "Do you mean you sell birds?"

"Now you _are_ a funny kid. No, I don't sell birds. Leastwise, I only

sell one bird. See? That's a joke like. Ec, Arthur, but I did feel

all goosy when that policeman came, didn't you? My heart's going like

a pendulick yet, up and down, down and up. Well, I hopes your kidneys

are better, anyhow. But you _do_ look pale, kid! Anything wrong! How

old did you say you was? Fourteen and a half? So am I, next birthday,

ha, ha! Fourteen and a half! What must it be like to have a kid

fourteen and a half? Sometimes I wishes ..."

"Have you got no children yourself, ma'am?"

"What do you mean by asking me questions, Arthur? An honest woman like

me! If it hadn't been for you, Arthur, and that time you kissed me

under the mulberry tree ... Remember? Oh kid, kid, I'm all sort of

melted inside! Is your mother still living? She is, is she? Does she

ever kiss you, Arthur? Here, like this, on your lips ... like this ...

like this ... Oh, my Arthur boy!"

She had seized him round the shoulders. Her great soft lips were

hungrily raining kisses on his own. And her breath smelt beerily.

"Let me go!" he shouted with sudden fright. "Who are you? What do you

want?" He broke away and rubbed his lips savagely with his sleeve.

She was mopping large tears from her eyes. "Oh, I'm lonely, I'm so

lonely!" she moaned. "He's gone and pitched me out and here's Arthur,

and he shakes me off like a dog. Why ever was I born, God help me!"

A swift intense pang gripped Philip's stomach. He staggered against

the wall. Globes of red fire juggled before his eyes.

"What's the matter? I didn't mean anything!" the woman exclaimed with

alarm. "Tell me what's wrong!"

"I'm ... I'm ... hungry! ..." moaned Philip.

"Hungry? When did you last have a bite?"

"Dinner-time!"

"And what have you been doing since?"

"I don't know! I'm only hungry!"

"Oh, poor dove, poor dove! Hungry are you? And here was me standing

and you hungry and standing I was and talking, talking. Come to his

own Bertha's. Come to my little perch, Arthur, sonnie, and I'll soon

set you right. What about a rasher, eh, and some new bread and butter

and a cup of strong hot tea? I'll put him on his little feet again!

This way, sonnie ... Lord God, what a life is Bertha's! It ain't far.

It's just beyond the church straight along and the second to the left

... unsteady on his legs, he's that hungry...! Come with Bertha!"

Again Philip's hand was enclosed in the hand of the lady. Nothing in

the world mattered except that strong hot cup of tea, that bread and

butter, that rasher, whatever a rasher was! As they walked through the

empty streets, the kettle boiled before him on a fire of mirage, the

slaver of his hunger rimmed his tongue, the "rasher" was frying

ghostlily like a tail of fish on his mother's pan.

He heard her moaning musically over his head, like the doves in the

immemorial elms. It was a strange farrago of Arthurs and Berthas and

mulberry trees. He made no effort to follow the wanderings of her

mind, which now and again would reach indignantly the brick wall of her

late dismissal. Street succeeded street blankly and he found her

shuffling at last for a key. They entered the dark lobby of a house.

"Go quiet, kid!" she murmured, "Rosie's got a pal in the parlour

to-night, I think!"

They entered a room and the lady lit the gas, revealing a large soft

bed that dominated the apartment. There was a table in a corner where

stood a few utensils and a portable cooking-jet on a small round of

oilcloth.

"I'll tell you what, Arthur!" she said, "You'd best undress yourself

and get into bed. I'll get your rasher ready in a jiffy."

Philip looked shyly up to her. He was not too faint to be unaffected

by the thought of undressing before a strange lady. "I don't like," he

muttered.

"It's all right," she assured him, "I'm used to it!"

"Perhaps you've got boys of your own?" Philip suggested helpfully.

"Oh yes, I've got lots of boys!"

He was tremendously tired. How invitingly that soft bed displayed its

fat pillows. "I say, please!" he said awkwardly. "Will you look the

other way?"

She tittered soundlessly. He saw she had a succession of chins and

that each vibrated to her mirth. "All right, kid, I'm getting on with

the food." As he undressed, she cut the white bread into healthy

slices and buttered them abundantly. Drowsily he saw her making the

tea and he was almost asleep when he heard a loud simmering in a pan.

He looked up, his mouth watering, and saw, impaled on her fork, a

semi-translucent wafer of striped meat. He shook off the mist of

sleep. "Tell me, if you don't mind. Is that a rasher?"

"Of course it is!"

"What is a rasher?"

"Bless my soul, bacon, _of_ course!"

"Please, please!" he exclaimed. "I daren't eat bacon. I can't eat

bacon!"

"That's how it is, is it?" She came closer curiously and examined his

face. "Hum, yes! You're a little Jew-boy, aren't you?"

"I am!" He wondered what it was going to mean. Would she send him

back into the night hungry, faint to death? Who could fathom the

attitude of a given Gentile, man or woman, towards any accidental

Jew-boy?

"Funny!" she pondered. "One Jew-boy pushes me out and I takes another

Jew-boy in! All right, Arthur! Nothing's going to happen. You're

still my own Arthur! Don't get frightened. But if you won't have

bacon, you can only have sardines. I wasn't expecting no visitors

to-night."

"Anything!" he murmured weakly.

He ate greedily. She took the food away when he had finished and sat

by the bedside, looking into his face. She held his hand between her

own soft hands. In two moments he was asleep.

When he awoke next morning amid the clank of trams and the calling of

boys, he found himself embraced by two great white arms. With a sudden

shudder of realization, the events of yesterday and last night came

back to him. The lady who had been so kind had gone into bed after

him. It was rather stifling in the bed, he didn't like it! He didn't

like lying in the arms of a strange lady. A qualm of dislike passed

over him. As gently as possible, so as not to waken her, he slipped

from her arms and from the bed and started to dress. Her face was

distinctly unpleasant in the cold morning light. It was heavy and

layers of fat swelled all round it. She had been crying, for the marks

of tears ran dirtily down the bleared crimson of her cheeks. Her hair

lay about lankly on the pillow. Yet there was something unutterably

pathetic about her expression. How could he show her his gratitude?

Where would he have been without her?

"It's all right, Arthur," he heard her say. "I know you're getting up.

It's all right, just keep on dressing!" She did not open her eyes.

"I want to thank you very much!" he said lamely.

"No, kid, I want to thank you. I've never had it before. I don't

suppose it'll ever come again. If ever you tells your mother about it,

just say as Bertha thanks her. She's a mother and she'll understand

maybe. So long, kiddie, so long!"

He was fully dressed. He made a movement in her direction. "No, kid.

Don't shake my hand. Don't touch me. Before you have anything to do

with Bertha again, just walk into the river without looking where

you're going. Go away, for God's sake, go away! You'll find the front

door open! Go back home! Your mother wants you!" Her unwieldy body

turned round on the bed and the great face was buried in the pillow.

He stole from the room, down the stairs, and through the front door.

The door closed behind him and he saw a milk cart drive by cheerily.

Suddenly the figure of the strange kind lady became terrible and sad

and very remote. He turned away from her house. Mechanically he set

his face in the direction of home.

CHAPTER VIII

If Philip's oration on the croft, despite its immediate consequences,

had been a triumph for Philip, the fatality which had irresistibly

drawn his feet homeward after his escapade with Bertha, without any

reference to his will, was a triumph, if that was not too vulgar a

word, for Reb Monash. It made clear to both the father and the son

that Philip could not yet exist on his own initiative; however

refractory a cog he was in the machinery of the house in Angel Street,

that machinery was still the condition of his existence at all. It was

the consciousness that this position had been made starkly clear by the

issue of this latest event, and that this latest event was itself so

tangible a grievance, that induced Reb Monash to interview Mr. Furness.

After school on that same day, summoned by a special note from the

Head, Philip stood apprehensively outside his door. He knocked

timidly. A tremendous bellow filled the room and came gustily out into

the corridor.

"COME in!" the first word reduplicate and reverberant like a shout in

the cleft of hills. Philip entered, his ears singing. But the next

moment the shout ebbed wholly from his ears when he saw Mr. Furness

rise and come towards him with a smile at once admonitory and

encouraging.

"Well, Philip, how are you?"

"I'm all right, sir, thank you, sir!"

"Who is the latest poet? Still Shelley? Keep to Shelley, Philip; he

knew more of the spirit of God than all the churches!"

"I've been reading Edgar Allan Poe, sir."

"Humph! I'm not so sure! Unhealthy, morbid! Hard time, poor fellow,

on the other hand! Don't overdo him!"

"No, sir!"

"But to the matter in hand. You know why I've sent for you?"

"Yes, sir. He told me he was coming, sir."

"Your father's a great man, Philip. If in twenty years you're half the

man he is, I'll be proud of you. You've been distressing him, he tells

me. He's very concerned about you. Come now, what's wrong?"

"I can't explain, sir. We're different."

"You ran away from home lately and were out all night?"

Philip bit his lip. "Yes, sir."

"You're too old for that mock-romantic sort of thing. There's a strain

of it in your essays. Mr. Gibson sent me up your essay on Julius

Cæsar--something about 'he shall endure while the luminaries of history

rot in oblivion!' Luminaries don't rot. Leave all that to the

journalists, my boy, you can do better stuff. It wasn't only

mock-romantic, it was cruel! Can you imagine how your mother slept

that night? I'm rather ashamed of you. It was selfish. It was a

pose."

"But you don't know, sir, what had happened the day before. I was

nearly dead."

"I can understand. Public speaking, Socialism! All in their time!

You're forcing things, you'll burn out and be cinders when you ought to

be a man. No, you've not got the foundation for it. You've been

slacking in form. What is it you go to poetry for, do you know?"

"I can't say, sir. Beauty, perhaps?"

"Yes, beauty! You don't know the beauty of labour, though. When

you've mastered your Cæsar and your Greek Grammar--dull work, my boy,

dull work!--you'll find poetry finer than Shelley, the poetry Shelley

thought made his own like a marsh-lamp, the poetry of the Greeks. You

started well, but your place in form has been going down steadily.

Listen, Philip," he drew the boy nearer to him, "there's the question

of your scholarship. Think what it'll mean to her if anything happened

to your scholarship. You're not going to allow it, are you? And if

you go down as steadily as you have been going down of late, I don't

see what else can happen. What do you feel?"

There was a lump in Philip's throat. "I don't want anything to happen

which will hurt her."

"Well, Philip, we understand each other. Put your hand to the plough

like a man. Make a clean furrow and a deep one. I don't think we need

say more, need we? Come and see me when you've made a fresh discovery

in poetry, we'll talk about him. So good-bye now, Philip!"

Philip took the big man's hand and withdrew, feeling at once tearful,

chastened, and absurdly exalted, and a solemn determination now

possessed him to do some serious work before the examination which

ended the year. Every evening he withdrew to his own back room which,

out of most unpromising materials, his mother had converted into the

semblance of a study. She had inserted ledges into soap boxes where

his textbooks and poets were ranged above frills of pinky-white paper.

She had covered the doddering table with a neat piece of parti-coloured

cloth. A few bright pictures from magazines were tacked upon the

walls. In recognition of the new spirit of industry earnestly avowed

before her she substituted for the deficiently-seated chair a

rocking-chair which gave Philip an especial delight and won him to

sympathy with aorist tenses and the optative mood. Not a word passed

between Reb Monash and Philip. No current of sympathy ran to connect

them. Philip displayed no readiness to compromise in the matter of a

more ardent ritual. He would gabble off his prayers as quickly as

possible, and then, with no attempt to hide his relief, turn to his

books. His prayers were still tolerable, if barely, during the period

when he lavished his enthusiasm on active Socialism. Now that he began

to forswear his Socialistic delights, they began to be dust in his

mouth. The half-hour long morning prayers of which he might understand

one word in twenty, so wrought upon his nerves, that he felt like

crying aloud sharply, particularly during that section of the devotion

when he stood towards the East, placing together the inner sides of his

feet, looking blankly through the wall into nothingness. One morning,

during the sheer meaningless drift of his utterance, he curiously found

himself repeating something of sweet and significant import. He was

reciting, not the torpid Hebrew, but the languorous chimes of

"Ulalume." Delightedly he continued the poem to its end and once more

repeated it, till he realized that the time expected from him in the

recapitulation of the "Nineteen Prayers" was at an end. He completed

his morning's devotion with "Alastor." He had made a valuable

discovery. The ennui of prayer was not now to gloom his faculties

thrice daily. He could now pass in pageant before him all the comely

shapes of poetry he had known.

He at no time made the definite discovery that Reb Monash had realized

his substitution of poetry for prayer. If Reb Monash had made the

discovery, it was not succeeded by such immediate castigation as Philip

knew well. It was as if Reb Monash had at last found out that at the

end of these episodes the cause of piety, if anything, was weaker in

his son's bosom than before. Darkness gathered over the house in Angel

Street. A dim premonition of failure had settled upon Reb Monash's

eyes, but sternly he fought against it. Mrs. Massel moved wanly and

fearfully about the house, fearful of satisfying her hunger for Philip

with a stroke of the hand or a word. Channah stayed out as long and

discreetly as possible with her friends. A silence hung over the

house, for Reb Monash's popularity as a raconteur was at an end. Not

for years had the gathering in the kitchen taken place, where,

centrally, Mrs. Levine sniffed, and the tale of Rochke's interment was

told 'mid indignation and tears. Only at night was the silence broken

when Philip had taken his books down to study in the kitchen and Mr.

and Mrs. Massel had gone to bed. Then for an hour, or for two hours,

Reb Monash would recount the iniquities of his son in a voice of loud,

persistent monotony, still persistent while the advance of sleep was

clogging its clarity.

Peculiarly Philip resented the incident of the rocking-chair. He had

betrayed his liking for the chair in a casual conversation, comparing

it with the inadequacy of the chair it had superseded. He found next

day that his father had removed the chair. It was not wanted nor used

by Reb Monash. It was, he reflected bitterly, pure dislike of the

thought that he should enjoy even so feeble a pleasure as this. The

action seemed almost automatic on the part of Reb Monash and was

significant of the whole relation between the father and son.

As Philip sat on the lame, cracking chair before his table, the

pointlessness of it worked him up to a white heat. It was not merely

pointless. It lacked dignity. Reb Monash was the symbol of the older

world, with iron and austere traditions, with a forehead lit by the far

lights of antiquity. But the incident of the rocking-chair stood

stupidly out of keeping with the conflict of which now Philip was

becoming intellectually conscious.

At this time, too, the domestic finances were more miserable than they

had ever been before. The threat began to take shape that, at the end

of the year, with the conclusion of his present scholarship, Philip

would be expected to bring in his contribution to the household. All

the more passionately, therefore, Philip applied himself to his books

in the hope of a continuance of his scholarship allowance. Each

evening, when the big kitchen table was cleared, he descended from the

room upstairs with its meagre table and spread his books over the whole

extent of the kitchen table. It was understood that in the

constriction of finances, Philip was on no account to work by gaslight,

a single candle being, Reb Monash affirmed, more than expensive enough.

In truth these nights were cheerless almost as a charnel-house. It was

not merely that the ghost of his mother seemed always hovering

ineffectually about the room, as if she lifted her hands for a peace

which came not, or that his own personality surged uneasily and

wretchedly in undecided war against the immanent personality of his

father. Presences more tangible and numerous filled the room with

detestable sounds. Black, heavy beetles came drowsily and innumerably

ambling from the wainscotting and from among the embers of the

extinguished fire. He could hear them crackling and rustling where the

wall-paper had swollen from the wall. They filled him with loathing.

They were the quintessence of the ugliness of Doomington; but much of

Doomington had been charmed away for him by poetry, the beetles no

charm could exorcise. Sometimes his hatred so swept him away that he

ran about the room, treading quashily on the hordes of beetles where

they lumbered along the floor. But the more their black bodies burst

into white paste below his boot, the more unconcernedly they emerged

from their hiding places. They seemed in their pompous progression to

wink and leer at him, where the dim light of the candle caught their

oily shells. Then a nausea gripped him, his feet were sticky and

unclean, the gall churned in his body. They crept on the table

sometimes, they dropped with a sucking thud from the bulging whitewash

of the ceiling. Once he lifted a glass of water from the table to his

lips and found his lips in contact with the body of a beetle on the

rim. That night he was so wild with terror that he lit the

gas--unconscionable extravagance, but as he sat feebly in the chair, he

could hear the foul battalions rustling, whispering, smirking towards

their chinks.

His eyes had always been weak. The working by candle-light gave him so

much pain that he now formed the habit of lighting the gas when the

last syllables of the monologue upstairs had died away. One night he

left the kitchen-door open and the light staggered out into the hall.

A dim beam thrown upward somehow attracted the attention of Reb Monash,

who had ceased intoning that night more from weariness than sleep. A

shout of anger filled the house. Tremblingly Philip extinguished the

gas and pored aching over his texts by dim candle-light. It was with

infinite caution, and when his eyes stood almost blindly in his skull,

that now he ventured to light the gas. More than an hour after

midnight on one occasion he stood on the table and applied the candle

to the gas-jet. It was a heavy and oppressive night, but he had much

work to do; the examinations were at hand. Again a long time passed.

The sweat stood clammily on Philip's head. His lungs gaped for air.

He placed a chair against the door and held it half-open, so that,

while a little light escaped, a little air came in. Once more he

buried himself deep in his work. Wearily his eyes went on from page to

page. He entered almost into a trance of dull pre-occupation with the

lifeless books. Nothing existed for him beyond the poor round of

grammar, dictionary, text, notebook. Life was neither a freedom nor a

slavery; it was a concentration upon unimportant importances, emptily

insistent upon themselves. The sense which informed him that Reb

Monash stood at the door was neither sight nor sound. He was _aware_

of his presence. His heart seemed to flicker hesitantly down the

depths of his being, until it left a blank behind his ribs, where a

mouth entered whose teeth were fear and pain and anger. Anger! Surely

it was not right for any man, in any relation, let alone a father, to

steal like a criminal from his bed, soundlessly, terribly, and stand

there with shut, pale lips! There were limits to the methods correct

in the most comprehensive fatherhood. And his crime? He was doing his

work, nothing more than his work! His tongue was chafed and sick.

Perhaps it was an illusion after all. Surely he was alone, he had

heard nothing. He lifted his eyes. The actual physical presence of

Reb Monash struck him sharply and heavily like a blow on the cheek. He

gasped with fright. He stood there forbidding and dark, but a strange

light round him and his dim nightclothes. He was supernatural. He

stood there taut with hate. He said not a word. Philip's jaw relaxed,

his eyes staring dazed into his father's eyes. They stared at each

other across a gulf of deafening noise and of ghastly silence. Whose

feet had brought him down silent as death from his bed, who invested

him with that cadaverous power? Illimitably beyond him stretched

ancestral influences into the bowels of time. There was one slipping

away, fruit of their loins, one for whom each had been a Christ

crucified, slipping from the fold of their pride into the pagan vast.

Behind the boy's head boyish presences groped towards him....

The spell was snapped by a hurried pattering of feet downstairs. The

scared face of Mrs. Massel appeared.

"What dost thou mean?" she wailed, "what dost thou mean? Go! Touch

him not! He might have died with fright! What art thou? What dost

thou mean by it?" She had at last asserted herself. With weak hands

she pushed him away from the door. "Come, leave the boy! He will go

to bed at once! See, his face is like a tablecloth! Come, oi, oi,

come!"

"Go thou in front!" said Reb Monash. He entered the kitchen, where

Philip cowered on his chair. He turned out the gas and without a word

went upstairs to his room. A dull idiocy numbed Philip's brain. He

put his head down between his hands, and it slipped before long on to

the table. Here Mrs. Massel found him after some hours when she came

down to light the fire. As he shook himself, a beetle fell sleepily

from his sleeve.

CHAPTER IX

Some time previously, in the spring of the same year, the walls of

Doomington had fallen to their last stone upon the blast of the

trumpets of spring. Philip and Harry had adventured one afternoon

beyond the moor called "Baxter's Hill" at the north of the town and

found themselves by the side of a Mitchen distinctly cleaner than the

river which flowed behind the wire factory at the bottom of Angel

Street. They had walked up-stream for several miles out to a place of

fresh fields and young lambs skipping. It was true that chimneys still

punctuated every horizon with smoky fingers. But here and there were

thickets of trees where the lads lay embowered in green peace,

conscious of thick grass only and the speech of leaves. They both

claimed the distinction of having first sighted the shimmering and

enchanted carpet of blue below a sun-pierced canopy of foliage. Here

they abandoned themselves to the first wild rapture of Spring--the

first rapture of Spring Philip had known--burying their faces among the

dewy bells. Further and further to the dusk they went, until a new

town, flinging its van to meet them and to meet the Spring in their

button-holes and hearts, said, "Advance no more!" Weary and sleepy and

very hungry they came home that night, but their arms were lush with

heaped bluebells and the knowledge of Spring was steady in them. They

knew a place where Doomington was a lie and earth was soft.

Into this place, in the attenuated figure of Alec Segal, the "clever

devil" whose acquaintance Philip had made several months ago, came

Atheism. The recent years of his history had not left Philip wholly

unprepared for the assault against Judaism. But when Segal said

casually that the Holy Bible's self was just a bundle of musty papyri,

and God a dispensable formula, he was painfully shocked.

"Look here, Segal!" he said, "How can you say such a thing? Anything

might happen to a chap!"

Segal took off his cap and made an awkward gesture towards the implicit

deity. "Right-ho!" he exclaimed, "Happen away!"

Philip held his breath for a moment. Nothing took place. Only a cow

mooed contentedly.

Segal was slightly taller than Harry and a little his senior. The

angle of his nose related him more directly than either of his two

friends to the root stock of his race. Yet he had neither the

Heinesque vehemence of the one nor the inveterate romance of the other.

He could, in fact, hardly be thought of in terms of character. He

seemed to be the sum of certain intellectual qualities. His sole

morbidity was a ruthless passion for logic. Poetry, which in various

ways had brought the three youths together, interested him, but neither

for ethical nor for æsthetic reasons. Each poem was an interesting

proposition in itself, like a mixture in a test tube at his school

laboratory. It had the mechanical attributes of rhythm and rhyme and

metaphor constructing a mechanical whole.

But on thinking the matter over, after frequent and painful discussion,

Philip realized that Segal's attitude so shocked him because it dared

to put into blunt words something he had long been timorously feeling.

By the Bible, of course, Segal meant religion generally. The Bible was

the foundation of Judaism and therefore of Christianity, which, he had

long ago decided, in any case hadn't much claim to serious

consideration. His own remark had been sound enough; he had declared

that the disappearance of religion would leave the world "jolly empty."

But empty of what things? Empty as a garden without weeds. What

stupidity, cruelty, ignorance, flourished below the damp boughs of

religion from border to border of the world! And what things would

still flourish if religion were cut down! Tall trees of liberty, fine

flowers of poetry!

What was it he had always felt wrong with Judaism? What did it lack?

It was a quality not entirely missing even from the garbled

Christianity that came his way. The Baptist Missionary Chapel was as

fervent an enemy of this quality as the most vigorous Judaism. But dim

intimations had come by him on the wind of another Christian spirit.

Here there were white lilies and blue gowns pointed with stars; there

was soft singing at evening and the burning of many candles; there were

superb altars, marble and kingly. Superb altars--the Baptist

Missionary Chapel! Christianity contained both. But this quality was

eternally triumphant in the grand false superstitions of Greece and

Rome. Here there were white pillars in a noon of hyacinth; baskets of

wrought gold held violets and primroses; there were processions of

chiselled gods before whom maidens scattered a long foam of petals;

there were lads running races and the wind was in their hair; the wind

was a god, there were gods in the thickets of olive and in the

translucent caves of the sea.

Beauty! Poetry! This was what he needed most. This was what that old

world gave. What delight did his fathers know, generation beyond

generation, in the comely things of the world? What statuary had come

down and what pictures of burnished gold and azure? What dances were

there to the rising sun and in procession with the slow stars? If any

of his fathers had made him a graven image, he was stoned and the

thunders of those hoary enemies of lovely things shook over the

cowering tribes. There had descended to him a tradition of tragedy and

pride. Of beauty, none. There was, for example, the _shool_. How the

air was foetid! How the walls were bare! How the hangings before the

ark were tawdry! How the prayers were raucous, how the air drooped for

lack of poetry!

Ah! the sense of relief which began to possess him when now, throwing

forward his chest, and breathing even in midmost Doomington the deep

air of liberty, he realized how vain were all his innumerable

ceremonies; that God did not require of him these things and these; He

did not sit there watchfully counting the syllables of prayer His

votaries uttered, sit there like a miser counting his pieces of gold;

that the subterfuges and evasions of ritual which had given him

frequent unease were not fraught with more than a merely local and

temporary danger. Forward from phylacteries! They had slipped from

his arms like manacles. They lay discarded like the slough of a

serpent, coiled round his feet. What there was now of poetry in the

Feast of Tabernacles, in the prophetic and vague beards of the old men,

in the synagogue-chanting on darkening Saturday evenings, in the

mingled array of the Passover Tables, in the puckered faces of the

antique women muttering their year-long prayers, in the blast of the

liberating horn upon the Fast of Atonement--what there was of poetry in

them, he was free to understand; for they were shorn of all that had

made them forbidding; they were not symbols of dark terror, they were

pathways into the heart of the world. And with these he was free to

understand what there was of poetry in the vague Christian lilies, in

the burning of candles before the shrines of picturesque saints,

brothers of those other and marble gods. All that these Greek gods had

of poetry and all their groves and their broad-browed morning lads and

the virginal worshippers before those altars of poetry--all, all these

things were his. He was winning to freedom after much slavery.

But the acceptance of a general diminution in the divine attributes,

through which the Godhead gradually became a vague half-credible

abstraction, was attended by a campaign much more injurious to Philip's

ease. His elders had approached God with as much terror as

understanding when they made any advances in the celestial direction.

It was reassuring to realize that if God was being divested of His

raiment of love, He was losing proportionately the lightning of His

jealousy and the bolt of His somewhat sectarian wrath. Yet

simultaneously, as Segal and Harry agreed with no apparent remorse, it

was imperative to abandon the immortality of the soul. To Philip there

was something homicidal, matricidal, in the facile way with which they

consigned to worms as their ultimate doom the folk whom they might be

expected to love most dearly. They admitted it was an unpleasant pill

to swallow, but in the wind of truth their personal predilections, they

avowed, were as chaff! Who were they to stand up against Logic,

against Law? "Truth the grand," a poet had said, "has blown my dreams

into grains of sand!"

Segal remained imperturbable amid the crash of boyish comfort and

illusion. His own extinction being the disintegration of a number of

acute faculties, there would be no wraith of frustrated passion and

insatiate hungers to move forlornly through the Godless void. There

was a keen, bright fascination in this self-sufficiency for both the

tempestuous utilitarianism of Harry and the inchoate poetry of Philip

for whom this friendship involved almost a pungent ecstasy of

self-extinction, like the repeated assault of the moth against the

poised, unreluctant flame. These conclusions plunged Harry into a more

fiery round of Socialistic activities than he had yet known. If the

oppressed classes of the world would in no future state achieve

equality, if the capitalists in no democracy of spirits would be set by

counter-balance to hew wood and draw water for wage slaves there

triumphant, all the more reason then to achieve an earthly Utopia, to

rouse young Doomington to a sense of its manifold wrongs and, in the

concrete, to stand as Socialist candidate for the coming parliamentary

election at the Highfield Grade School. Philip, on the other hand,

felt what happened in this miserable and abortive world hardly

mattered, when all its insignificant schemes were doomed, collectively

and individually, to sudden and absolute annihilation. The extinction

of souls was not an attractive philosophy, he reflected bitterly, but

there seemed no alternative but to accept it as a general truth. Not

wholly consciously and with a passionate stupidity he applied three

individual cases to the test of the general assertion; the survival of

Shelley's soul, his mother's and his own. What arguing could there be

about these three and, least of all, about Shelley's. His mother's

death and his own being so utterly incredible, so much _contra

naturam_, their souls existed in an ether beyond all jeopardy. Yet

Shelley was demonstrably dead. But was he dead indeed? He realized

now for the first time how Shelley was the _lar_ of all his years. He

might vaguely and unhappily acquiesce in the destruction of souls _en

masse_, but nothing could convince him that Shelley did not triumph,

personally, separately, in the clouds of morning and ride the horses of

the wind; that he was not still the conscious spirit of song wherever

birds and waters sang; that the pyre had dissipated for ever that

unconquerable spirit.

Such then was the dubious and difficult current of Philip's atheism.

And it was a strange fortune that these speculations should most have

waged war within him at that period of the Jewish year when the

festivals which culminate in the New Year and the Day of Atonement

demanded unusually frequent attendance within the walls of the

_Polisher Shool_, the inner temple of phylacteries, where Philip still

so long and so frequently was held captive.

The worshipper entered the synagogue through a narrow door to the left

of an establishment for fried fish and chips. The odour, therefore, of

these commodities rising through the building interpenetrated the

atmosphere of prayer, until prayer and chipped potatoes became

inextricably woven together, and at no period in his life could Philip

pass beyond a fried fish shop without feeling a far-off refluence from

the old call to worship. Indeed, Philip's earliest anthropomorphism

represented the Deity as some immense celestial figure in white cloth

and a white hat standing above the fume and splendour of a great

concave oven where He shovelled upon his tray the souls of human

beings, brown and crisp, and resembling mystically the strips of

potatoes shovelled by Mr. Marks upon a less divine tray in a chip-shop

less august.

The worshipper now climbed a narrow staircase, and passing by the

women's door entered the synagogue proper. If he had endured some

recent loss in his family, the beadle from within would declare

robustly, "Look ye towards the bereaved one!" who would enter with

drooped head, the object of the regulated curiosity of bearded and

beardless alike. Only a thin wooden partition divided the women's from

the men's section, so that on one side praise was lifted to the Lord by

the women because He had made them what they were, on the other, in

unabashed juxtaposition, heartier praise was lifted by the men because

He had made them men. Little boys could stand quite easily upon the

forms and look down upon the women swaying in their old black silks and

beneath their crazy cherry-garlanded bonnets. Here stood the

_rebitsin_, Serra Golda, the most pious and wrinkled of Hebrew woman,

who, because it is a _mitzvah_, an act of grace, to stand as long as

possible during the Day of Atonement, stood all that hot long day on

her ulcered feet, even though the mere creeping from her own dun

parlour not far away had been one hard agony. Here too stood Mrs.

Massel, very quiet and shy among the voluble women, wiping her eyes

sometimes and repeating the prayers quietly, or perhaps, becoming

conscious of the dark watchful scrutiny of her boy beyond the

partition, lifting to him her face for one sweet moment and dropping it

again towards her Prayer Book.

Against the centre of the Eastern wall, which was at right angles with

this partition, stood the Ark wherein the Scrolls of the Law reposed

among mothy velvet, themselves enveloped in a petticoat of plush whence

hung silver bells. The whole Ark was curtained by a pall of scarlet,

lettered with gold thread. At the centre of the masculine section

(whose dimensions were some fifty by forty feet) stood the pulpit, some

inches above the general level, where the whole service was incanted

and the occasional auxiliaries from the audience were summoned. Below

the pulpit and facing the Ark, a coffin-like desk drawn closely against

their amplitudes, sat the elected officers for the year, the _parnass_

and the two _gabboim_. Reb Monash, the power of whose oratory was so

signal an ornament to the _Polisher Shool_, sat upon the right-hand

side of the Ark itself, against the wall. The benches ran parallel

along the _shool_ on both sides of the pulpit. In the strict, if

uncongenial, interests of truth it is necessary to say that every

member of the synagogue above the age of thirty spat, and not a few

below that age, these last retaining the easier hygiene of Poland and

further Europe. The more honourable worthies had their own particular

joints in the boarding for their expectorations, although, if they were

more than usually afflicted, they would proceed to the doorway,

returning thence purged. Hence experience alone was an adequate pilot

for an unscathed journey between any point of the synagogue and the

door. There were times when such tender breasts as Philip's were so

nauseated by the persistent spitting that their hearts seemed to

suspend beating from sheer sickness. On two occasions Philip's head

fell back bloodlessly and with a bang on the hard wood behind him and

he was taken away to the lavatory, where several men and women filled

their mouths with water and cascaded his face for some minutes until he

opened his eyes. No season in the year was hot enough to justify the

opening of the windows. A current of the comparatively clean air from

Doomington Road was declared with horror to be "A draught! A draught!"

and with patriarchical fury the windows were closed to. Sometimes on a

particularly sultry day an enterprising youth might open a window for

several inches without drawing the attention of the elders. It would

be unobserved for perhaps half an hour as no slightest movement of air

was created. Then the alarm would be given. Immediately angry shouts

of "A draught! A draught!" would be heard, some would huddle their

arms in the cold, some would cough vehemently in the blizzard of

self-suggestion. Occasionally the younger generation might make the

effort to stand up shoulder to shoulder for the rights of ventilation,

but so furious a hubbub would be created, the unease spreading itself

into the women's department where a clucking would be heard as of an

apprehensive farmyard; but especially the thunders of Mr. Linsky would

be so olympically august, that the younger generation would subside and

once more the opaque odours coagulate.

The _Polisher Shool_ was, it may be deduced, a somewhat reactionary

institution. But occasionally Reb Monash was called upon to deliver an

oration in a synagogue of such Æsculapian sanity that the atmosphere

seemed positively to evoke the vacant silence of Gentile worship. The

definitely English congregations were assembled actually in superseded

chapels, and here the laws of ventilation were no less rigorous than in

the offices of the Doomington Board of Health. But these lacked the

element of personality with which the _Polisher Shool_ was perhaps too

copiously endowed. And if all his life Philip had not been made

unceasingly conscious of the dislike entertained for him in cordial

measure by the body politic of the synagogue, he would have derived

much consolation from the study of its personalities, of the rotund Reb

Yonah, of Reb Shimmon like an army with banners, and the wizened

_shammos_, the beadle, flapping about on loose soles like a

disreputable ghost.

Philip's attitude towards _shool_ was immediately prejudiced on his

mere going thither. For almost from earliest times, not appreciably

long, it seemed, after he had discarded the blue wool and tassels of

infancy, he had been expected to crown his small figure with a large

black bowler hat; and bowler hats, as could not be denied, were

_bloody_. He felt stupidly self-conscious as he walked along by his

father's side, as if all Doomington stared and jeered. If Reb Monash

met a friend and these pursued a common way to the synagogue, Philip

would hover behind, remove the bowler hat, and pretend it was somebody

else's--he was only "holding it like."

There was a brood of young gentlemen very popular among their elders at

the _Polisher Shool_. There was Hymie, whose eyes were large and

innocent and who helped himself daily from his father's till. His

voice was the voice of an exceptionally guileless thrush and he sang

Yiddish songs at _Shalla-shudos_, the Saturday afternoon gatherings.

There was Moishe, who asked such clever questions so sweetly concerning

the weekly portion, that they were answered with delight by the

expository old men, excepting when, as they somewhat frequently did,

they involved sexual references. Moishe's mind was prematurely a

cesspool. Others also there were to whom piety was a paying

proposition, and two were pious because they were thus made. Philip

could not throw in his lot with this company. And the whole _shool_

remembered how the synagogue-president, the _parnass_, had, some years

ago, pressed him to drink of the Sabbath night cup of wine; how Philip

had refused it both because he didn't like wine and because he didn't

like a public exhibition of a deed tinged with piety; how the pride of

the _parnass_ had been aroused and how he endeavoured to force the wine

between Philip's lips while the whole _shool_ awaited the issue; how

Philip had suddenly thrust aside the foot of the beaker so that the

wine fell stickily round the respective trousers of himself and the

_parnass_.

Philip felt instinctively how everybody stiffened with dislike when he

entered the synagogue, a dislike accentuated by the universal honour

with which his father was regarded. Had he but been the son of a

bootmaker, the Judaic virtues would not have been so prominently

expected from him; they would have said "a bootmaker remains a

bootmaker, even to his remote posterity!" But being the son of Reb

Monash, whose black hair and beard his son was even now dimming with

disastrous grey, Philip was a public scorn.

All which did not embarrass Philip so much as the interminable hours he

spent behind the shut windows in the stale air--while bluebells lilted

afar off and birds spoke their foreign exquisite languages. And now

above all a widening had thrust his horizon far away and far away from

the smoky limits of Doomington, far from the mythic circuit of green

waves wherein England lay, far from the last hills of the world, out to

the tingling spaces and the royal stars.

For Segal, who had brought the dissolution of atheism with him, had

brought also astronomy: with a singing for the quiet sun and a meaning

for the hollows of sky. It was, of course, a long time now that for

both Philip and Harry the flat layer of earth had dropped away, coiling

round themselves to produce the globe they had seen in effigy, so far

back as the days of Miss Green. But Segal introduced, as

preliminaries, Sir Robert Ball and Proctor and Camille Flammarion, and

a knowledge of constellations, the nature of nebulæ, star dust and the

Milky Way, which united the three boys with a bond of fervent interest.

For Segal it meant illimitable fresh spaces for the plummet of logic;

and because Space was infinite, no room was left for God, who, if He

existed at all, could thus only be attenuated into nothingness. Harry

dreamed of an undiscoverable planet where equity among its mortals

prevailed; for in the infinite types of star which space permitted

through infinite time, it was evident that one such star had been or

was or might be developed; it was to this ideal star that he hitched

the lumbering wagon of earth. To Philip, the Milky Way was a divine

bluebell bank dancing by the borders of a celestial river. The stars

fed him with innumerable new images, giving to his conception of poetry

a depth and height. And here once more, as if to consummate the

significance Shelley had involved through each succeeding phase of

Philip's adolescence, just as he had been found to crystallize a world

in which complete escape from Doomington mud and brick might be

realized; to hold the stormy banner of Socialism; to smite down the

hydra-heads of religion; so now Shelley was seen to be a poet to whom

the fields of stars were more naturally a place for wandering and

singing than deathly fields of sorrel and marguerite; he was the Starry

Poet.

"I say, you chaps!" Harry said excitedly one day, "there's a telescope

in the Curiosity Shop opposite the gaol! What about it?"

"The inference being," suggested Segal, "that as soon as we've pinched

the telescope the gaol's waiting on the other side of the road?"

"No, old Cartwright's too watchful and the gaol too uncomfortable.

Didn't you say so yourself when you came out after your last six

months' hard? What about clubbing together and buying it?"

"I've got fourpence!" said Philip.

"I've not got that!" said Segal. "But let's find out about it. It's

just the thing we want. Ye Gods, we might find a new comet! Beware,

Halley!"

They appeared at Mr. Cartwright's shop and asked the price nonchalantly

of a set of chessmen. "And what's the price of this telescope?" asked

Harry with such an exaggerated gesture of indifference that Mr.

Cartwright could not fail to perceive the yearning of his bowels.

"A quid!" said Mr. Cartwright.

It was so shattering a sum that, whereas they would have attempted

bargaining if he had said, "Three-and-sixpence," they now said

brokenly, "All right! We'll buy it."

Mr. Cartwright was so astonished at this acquiescence that, taken

similarly off his guard, "You can have it for twelve bob!" he gasped.

"O--er--I'm sorry! We've not got more than three just now! We'll save

up the rest!"

Quick change of tactics on the part of General Cartwright, who has time

to recover his breath. "All right!" he declared, mouth tight at the

corners, "Leave that as a deposit and I'll reduce the price to eighteen

and six!" he said munificently.

Hence the telescope, which, though its actual magnifying powers were

somewhat scanty, served both as an outward symbol of their devotion to

stars and moon and as the token of their friendship. A new experience

now entered their lives, a state, an exaltation, a mystic absorption of

themselves into the heart of night from which the logician was by no

means immune and which he anticipated with as much fearful joy as his

friends. It was called "going deep," and was a state which they could

not cajole or anticipate but came when it listed and departed as

mysteriously. It was the fine flower of their friendship, coming only

at night during their contemplation of skies.

They would find as they talked of Cassiopeia or the far-flung wing of

Aquila or Vega's blue swords or the misty Pleiad sisters, a thinning of

their own voices, a growing outward and aloft. It seemed that the hulk

of body lay supine on the grimy soil of Doomington while their souls

quietly adventured among the high places. It was an ether where

extremes met, the young logician carried along a steep straight line by

the inherent ecstasy of Law to a place where, by different curves of

passionate imagination, his friends had ascended mysteriously those

ladders of poetry between earth and heaven. It was perhaps a shadow of

that state of fleshly innocence towards which the mystics have yearned,

that state which Adam supremely knew when Eve had not yet been torn

from his side. It was a state doomed to last not long, to re-occur

less frequently as the mists began to cloud their eyes insistently and

to stifle in their ears the clarity of starry silence. They did not

know how long a time lasted their "goings deep"--some moments only,

perhaps, sometimes a dim trance of a fleshless hour. But when they

descended from those places, their chaffings and bickerings were

resumed with difficulty, as if their bickering gainsaid a stilled voice

they had heard.

One incident each of them remembered most clearly out of this time of

astronomy--the night of the moon's eclipse. With various degrees of

difficulty they obtained permission to stay out till morning, and at

midnight they met upon the highest point of Baxter's Hill. A moorland

air came wandering in from the adjacent country, and because the

chimneys had ceased for the night to thicken the atmosphere, this

strange sweet air came timidly towards them, as a stranger little

welcomed in these parts. They lay back upon the grass looking towards

those regions of the sky where the moon did not yet dim the stars to

extinction. The telescope passed from hand to hand and they spoke of

the ashen hollows in the moon, Segal naming her features, and

emphasizing placidly how, soon or late, this earth whereon they lay now

should have exhausted all her fires.

Very quietly they spoke in the still night air until a sound of terror

was heard from some hidden hollow and the words were stricken on their

lips. The sound was heard again and again, curdling their blood.

"A woman's being murdered somewhere!" exclaimed Philip.

"Baxter's Hill has got a dirty reputation. I wonder if a fellow's

trying to get the better of a girl?" Harry whispered.

"Listen! Isn't it a rotten sound!"

The truth occurred to Segal. "You prize fools! Oh, you ultra prize

fools!" he cackled. "It's a sheep! Ha, ha! A sheep! And you're two

more!"

They found the midnight full of curious noises in which man and his

works had no concern. An owl hooted. A nightjar skimmed an edge of

darkness silently, then turned his hoarse wheel. Insects crepitated

below grasses. The boys had little known how the watchful forces of

nature crept back to the place Doomington had usurped when, during the

night, the town's fumy power was relaxed.

When at last the dark band of eclipse sliced the rim of the moon,

Philip was drowsing. Harry seized him suddenly. Philip sprang to his

feet. "Look! Look! The moon! The eclipse!"

Slowly the transformation took place. The three lads stood there

tensely straining towards the moon. It seemed that the world had no

sound during this breathless miracle. No owl cried and no sheep lifted

a voice from the hollows. The moorland wind stopped, the scant grasses

did not move. A train in a far cutting uttered a startled cry and

subsided. Until out of the white purity was made a disk of lurid and

burnished splendour, like the bossed shield of a Titan who strode

across space while the issues were still dubious of celestial wars.

The lads waited on the moor till dawn came, so that the fringe of that

night should not be sullied by their return to Doomington dust. Dawn

came with a cool breath from the East and a line of pale green lying

like a blade on the far-seen Mitchen. A sword was swung above the

slopes, glancing with gold and crimson. The edge of the sun was at

last visible. The boys made their way homeward along the quiet streets.

As Reb Monash ascended the pulpit on the second morning of _Rosh

Hashonah_, the New Year festival, to deliver a _drosheh_, an oration,

in his capacity as professional orator or _maggid_, the incidents of

the eclipse were hazily passing through Philip's mind. For some time

Reb Monash's utterance was calm and measured, not interfering with the

flow of Philip's recollections. But a sudden note of passion rising

and again falling away flickered across Philip's brain, as a vein of

fire smoulders with the turning of an opal, and when the opal is turned

away is swallowed in pearl-mist and blue. He was occupying the seat

vacated by his father against the side of the Ark. He looked up

towards Reb Monash who again was speaking abstractly, evenly, as if he

were finding his way somewhither. There was still on his face a

certain air of preoccupation which Philip had noticed all that morning.

It had been a morning signalized also by a few low kind words he had

said to Philip which had touched the boy curiously; and, at one moment,

he had looked sombrely, gently, into his son's eyes, placing a hand on

his shoulder as if to hold him back from the darkness towards which his

steps were tending. Philip had looked back uneasily into his eyes,

wondering. A shadow of so much sadness in his father's face had

produced a sick yearning in the deeps of the boy's body. His own eyes

had filled strangely, but he had clenched his fists and set his teeth.

His father had turned away from him and walked back into the

_chayder_....

Reb Monash standing in the pulpit became mysteriously depersonalized.

He became a force capable at one moment of bringing tears to the eyes

of his harshest listeners and the next of convulsing them with

laughter. Philip realized from what deep well of oratory sprang that

runlet which had burst forth upon the Longton croft from his lips. In

the pulpit Reb Monash lost sight of his personal sorrow and became the

voice of the age-long sorrow of his race. At such a time he stood like

a bard, his _tallus_ hanging down in great folds, his voice of such

strength and sweetness that a weeping came from the women's section

upon its first syllables.

The first part of the morning's oration proceeded on traditional lines.

He subtly interwove the text he had chosen with the message of the

festival now celebrated. Upon single words he threw such diverse and

strange lights that they were opened up gallery beyond gallery, like a

mine of meanings. Each sentence was illuminated by his inexhaustible

fertility of quotation, each quotation prefaced by the "as it stands in

the passage." He elaborated each point by a swift "_zu moshel_," to

give a parallel. But all this skill was the routine of the _maggid's_

profession; he had graduated with these arts in many schools. He was

proceeding further than this; his voice still was subdued, patient, as

if realizing that beyond these thickets was a clearing of intense

light, if but steadily he made his way. Then suddenly he emerged from

the tortuous paths and the tangle of undergrowth, with a loud resonant

cry as he came upon the clear space at the centre of his heart.

"But is it truly the beginning of the year? Shall it be a rejoicing

for our fathers and for our sons if the birth of to-day is not a birth

but a death? _Hayom harras olom_! But think, my brothers and my

sisters, into what world the Year, the Law, came first! For the world

was void and dark, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters, and the

spirit of God was the Law. The godlings were of stone and of wood whom

you would kick and they were fallen down, and their number was the

sands of the sea. Then to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob the one

God vouchsafed Himself and in His book His breath is fire. How He was

gracious to our fathers beyond all their deserts when, recollecting the

impieties of Egypt, they made themselves a false God, a Calf of Gold.

But yet He did not abandon them, nor in after times. Always he held

out His right arm over them, yea He shattered the gathered enemies,

even with the jawbone of an ass He shattered them. Whole races of the

godless were destroyed in His love for the Law He had uttered and the

Chosen People to whom He had entrusted the Law. Then our parents fell

upon evil ways, they took to themselves the daughters of the Gentile,

they no more circumcised their sons into the company of the Chosen.

Too many, too many to tell were the sorrows that came down upon us.

Our vineyards were taken away, our crops were wasted, our daughters

stolen away from us. The gold and the ivory of Solomon's temple were

despoiled, the Holy City was a waste of weeds. Yet once more in His

goodness Jerusalem arose and once more in their hardness of heart the

people sought the false gods: until the accursed Titus came upon us and

the walls for ever fell. By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and

wept; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion; we hanged our harps on the

willows in the midst thereof. But lo, my brothers, do not weep; my

sisters, one thing was left to us, as a tabernacle in the wilderness, a

dove on the void of waters, a sword in our right hand, a burning bush;

that Law which each year begins and ends but has no ending. For upon

it once again when the years of the _gollus_ are numbered shall the

Temple be rebuilt. Yea, when the trumpet shall sound, the corpses of

the Chosen shall be awakened; they shall rise from their graves and

roll from the scattered lands, beyond seas and hills, once more to the

hills of Zion. How shall the gems on the breast of the High Priest

shine and his garments be of dazzling white! How a Miriam shall sing a

sweeter song on further shores of deeper waters and more divinely

cloven than the waters of the Red Sea! Then at last shall Moses arise

from his undiscovered grave to enter that land he had but seen afar

off. The land shall be flowing with milk and honey and the grapes on

the vines be fat. Our matrons shall be fruitful with blessed children

and our daughters be glad. The Law shall be as a sign upon the

forehead of our sons.

How it shall all be forgotten, the valley of the shadow, the centuries

of _gollus_! Did our fathers lie on the rack of the Spaniards and were

their thumbs torn from their hands? It shall be as a mist of ten years

gone by. There were they crouched in cellars, old _bobbies_ leaning

against the damp walls, an old _zadie_ reading by the little candle of

the goodness of the God of Israel. The boys looked up listening with

shining eyes. There was the sound of bursting doors, but the old voice

did not falter. There was the clatter of iron boots down the stone

stairway; but there was no ceasing in the praise of God. And though

the old men, the women, yea, the children sucking still quietly at

their mothers' breasts, were tied against stacks of wood, and the flame

withheld if they but forswore Israel, still was the Law to them like a

cool cavern full of the fragrance of God, even in the very centre of

fire.

_Pogrommen_ have there been in those lands whence we have come? Who

shall remember them? Though the babies were torn from the wombs of

mothers, and maidens violated in the streets at noon, all shall be,

because the Law has been given to us, as dust in the roadway!

But hold! What do I say? If once more the children of Israel shall

build them a Calf of Gold, if they shall turn to the heathen things,

who shall keep back the lightnings of God, our God strong in love but

terrible in jealousy? Shall not we be utterly swept away till there is

no memory of our defeats and no trace of our victories? Shall it all

be vain, the rack, the fire, the mother disembowelled in pregnancy?

I say to you, look at our children, for a bad spirit has come into

these lands. I say not to you, our brothers and sisters, but to you,

to you, our children, keep ye your goings within the fold of the Law!

Have you need then of pogroms and swords that you shall remain with

God? Because, in this place, He has withheld them, thank Him for that

He loves you more. Behold, age behind age our sufferings and our

triumph go. Bring it not all to naught. Make not the bloodshed to be

useless as water. For the air is thick with the voices of the dead,

saying: 'Hold, hold by the banner of Israel! Let it not fall from you!

Proudly we held it though the blood dripped from our fingers!'

Lo, our children, you make us to you as strangers, you harden our

hearts with anger. But we are ready with our love for you when you

follow upon our ways, which are the ways of the countless dead. Let

not for little things our heritage be squandered; let not the Maccabæan

banner be smirched, nor false gods enter into our tabernacles which we

build now upon a wandering thousandfold bitterer than the forty years.

We lift out our arms to you. Join us in singing the Lord's song! May

the next year see us in Zion!"

There were one or two looked with alarm upon the face of Philip staring

from the wall against the Holy Ark. His face was bloodless, his eyes

round as if in nightmare. Not a sound was heard when Reb Monash came

weakly down from the pulpit. No one knew where to turn his eyes. As

his father came nearer to resume his seat, Philip gave a sudden

convulsive start, then fell jerkily towards the form where he had sat

before the _drosheh_. A tiny whispering arose in the congregation, as

of leaves after a windless noon when a first breeze shakes, or of still

waters ruffled. The _parnass_ uttered a deep _oi! oi!_ absently

clapping his hands three or four times; the weeping of the women

decreased; the men bent towards each other and talked. Some one

ascended the pulpit to begin the second part of the service.

Reb Monash had chosen well; for that preoccupation which had held his

face all that morning now held his son's for the rest of that day.

After dinner he lay down on the sofa thinking heavily; he neither spoke

a word with his mother nor picked up a book. He had answered too

easily all the questions life had offered him. Was it too late to

begin thinking clearly now? Were his conclusions correct by accident

or were all his conclusions mere self-flattery? No formula to help him

through the mists of doubt which were swarming round him came his way.

Late that night, when _shool_ and the evening _meyeriv_ service were

over, he walked out towards Baxter's Hill, under the light of stars.

It was not long that he moved onward like a sluggish water. A wind

came from somewhere afar off and set into motion the mists in his head.

More and more quickly they whirled within him, and then, swiftly, they

were gone. He rose skywards from his feet. Without pain or pleasure,

all that issue which had racked him this day became thin, remote. He

moved on the shores of a sea where the sands were stars, and the sea

was the great womb of the undefined, where all things were not, but God

was. Trembling, aghast, he stood on the arch of the sweep of sands,

hearing incoherent murmurings. Towards a blackness cool and clear he

stood where foam and wind beat into his face. He turned from the

voices of sea and bent down dabbling his fingers among the star-sands.

He rose and walked stepping from rock to rock to the channel where the

Milky Way flowed inward from the sea. On the bank of the Milky Way, he

stopped once more and lifted in his hands a handful of grass. Beyond

the slope, the dim waters of Mitchen moved through the night. He

leaned for some minutes drowsing against a tree trunk, then turned

towards the vague hulk of Baxter's Hill. "It's over!" he whispered.

"I know!"

CHAPTER X

It was noon on the Day of Atonement which followed nine days after the

_Rosh Hashonah_ memorable to more than one by the oration of Reb

Monash, noon in Cambridge Street, a thoroughfare in Doomington far

removed from the region of the synagogues, which, for this day, were

crowded from dawn to dusk by the day-long worshippers. The most pious

did not move from within their precincts; the less pious withdrew

occasionally to the immediate environs. All who were sacrilegious on

all the other three hundred and sixty-four days, on this day rigidly

fasted, and, having no regular pew in a regular synagogue, were

devoutly glad to pay for the privilege of any pew in any synagogue. If

they gainsaid or were indifferent to the precepts of their faith on

other days, who could forswear the immemorial terror of this day? If

they had been building all the year a palisade between Heaven and

themselves, on this day, who knew, they might enter Heaven through a

breach in the palisade. On the night concluding _Yom Kippur_ many

looked forward to the impieties of the morrow as if these had been

annulled in anticipation. But most felt that if all else were

_démodé_, _Yom Kippur_ stood august beyond fashion. Even the great

jewellery and general emporia of Doomington shut their doors, though

they exhibited a note to the effect that cleaning operations were in

progress, so that their credit with their more Nonconformist customers

might remain unimpaired. Bob Cohen, who lived with a _goyah_, a

Gentile lady, all the year round, became entirely oblivious of her

existence for these twenty-four hours, in a synagogue several towns

away from the scene of his amour. In _shool_ his fervent contrition

was only drowned by the self-reproaches of the penitents whose

perpetual state was the strictest matrimonial chastity. Avowed

atheists put in an appearance despite all their logic. There were few

Jews in Doomington that day beyond the circumference of a circle whose

radius was half a mile in any direction from the _Polisher Shool_.

Hence it was surprising to see Alec Segal in a shop doorway far up

Cambridge Street on the afternoon of _Yom Kippur_. It added to the

surprise to find Harry Sewelson join him after some minutes, for the

four parents of these youths, emancipated to the pitch of transferring

a kettle to and from the fire on _shabbos_, were yet very far from the

transgression of this ultimate sanctity; a sanctity of such awe as

might overwhelm spirits even of the defiant aloofness of Segal and

Harry.

"You're late!" said Segal.

"Three minutes!"

"Six and a half to be precise!"

"You'll be taking notes of how long your neck's in the noose before

you're dead...."

"Yes, and make a graph of the parabola of my descent. But why are you

late? Called in at a public-house _en route_?"

"No fear! I've had a drink at the scullery-tap, it was a little less

ostentatious. I suppose you've had a drink?"

"Yes, I hid a bottle of lemonade in my mattress!" declared Segal

cunningly.

"I'm not thirsty but I'm jolly peckish. My elder sister fainted, so I

had to take her home. As for Esther--you know, my other sister--she's

only fifteen, but she's dead nuts on fasting. Queer thing, the less

she puts down the more she brings up! She's been sick all day!"

"But that young scoundrel's not turned up yet! I wonder if anything's

wrong?"

"He's all right. His father doesn't stir a foot out of the _Polisher

Shool_; he'll have had an opportunity to prig something to eat and

drink!"

"I don't think he can have backed out?" Segal suggested.

"I don't think it's likely. He may be walking backward to draw

attention away from his bowler hat. He doesn't like bowler hats!"

"Or he may be writing a poem in a dark corner, being only young and

somewhat foolish. He'll grow out of the first as time goes on."

"Yes, he's amusing enough. But isn't that the illustrious bowler hat?"

"Hello! Here we are! I say, bowler hat, have you seen Philip Massel?"

"He's just coming!" said Philip, appearing at last. "Well, he's come!

I'm starving, where's the shop?"

"You've been at a banquet with Sir Timothy and the City Fathers; else

why so late?" insisted Harry.

"My mother was fearfully faint," replied Philip awkwardly. "I didn't

like to leave her. It's a crime for her to fast, she's so weak

nowadays! It's not been so bad for me, with some packets of biscuits

at home and a copy of Milton for _shool_. But let's come along!"

The boys walked up Cambridge Street and turned to the right towards a

bridge over the Deadwater Canal. They passed through the door of an

eating-house and the fat smells of frying enveloped them unpleasantly;

they chose a table in a corner and sat before a lake of spilled gravy

and the tin utensils.

"It feels rather shifty, all this!" ventured Philip after a few moments.

"Look here, lad, don't be conscientious at this time of day!"

remonstrated Segal.

"I mean when you think of the old men and the sick women who're a sight

worse off than we are!"

"Now, Philip," interposed Harry, "You know quite well it's not the

beastly food. It's a symbol of freedom! We're not going to be

enslaved any longer under the heel of these daft old superstitions.

_Vive la liberté_ and all that sort of thing! I positively don't feel

like eating now, as a matter of fact; the stink's rather thick. You

know, Alec, you might have chosen something more encouraging than this

hole."

"Phew!" from Philip. "I prefer the smell of the _Polisher Shool_!"

"We can't afford anything better. I should have preferred the New

Carlton myself, I admit!"

"There'd be too many Jews there! It would be too public!" Harry

affirmed.

"Well, young fellers," said a dishevelled lady at this stage, "wot are

ye going to 'ave? Say it slick!"

"Ham and eggs all round!" said Segal lordlily.

"Righto!" The lady was bustling off.

"Hold on!" Philip shouted after her concernedly.

"What's the matter with you, cock?"

"What else have you got? I won't have ham!"

"What about fish and fried, saucy?"

"Thank you!" Philip muttered gratefully.

"What do you mean by it?" exclaimed Harry indignantly. "What do you

want to spoil the show for?"

"You can call me a blooming prig, if you like, and be blowed! I think

ham's overdoing it, that's all! It's not playing the game!"

"Don't be a kid! What's your objection to the miserable animal? I

thought you'd got over all that!"

"I thought so too, but I think a chap can choose another sort of day

for ham! What's the good of piling it on like this?"

"Do you mean," asked Harry, "that you've just shoved your head out of

the burrow of superstitions, like a rabbit, and are going to dive down

again, scared? I thought you were more consistent than that.

Personally I should prefer beef, but I'm sacrificing my inclinations

precisely because ham is a symbol."

"It's not a symbol! I call it cheek!"

"Cheek my fat aunt! You're funking it!"

"You can say what you like! You can stuff your own mouth with the

muck! I'm not going to choke for your sake!"

"But what of all your wonderful talk about freedom and advancing with

the new race," Segal asked quietly, "and all the good old moonshine?"

"I just think, if you want a symbol, fried fish on _Yom Kippur_ is as

useful as ham. It's what d'you call it? it's irreverent somehow,

insisting on ham! Yes, that's it! It's irreverent!"

"It's certainly expensive!" declared Segal with an air of finality.

When the food came at last, the three boys hardly touched either ham or

fish. They had, at least, stood up for the principle of emancipation!

And ham, moreover, is a difficult commodity between unaccustomed jaws.

"It's time I got back!" said Philip, at the point where Cambridge

Street merged into more familiar territory. "He'll be getting restive

about me!"

"There's a comet in the offing!" declared Segal. "To-morrow night?"

"To-morrow night, and let your ham rest quiet in your bellies!"

Philip, after entering the _Polisher Shool_, spent a little time with

his mother, not yet being of an age when a masculine presence raised

perturbation in the women's section. When he advanced towards his own

seat, his father frowned a question upon him. "_Nu_, and where so

long?"

"I've been feeling sick!" Philip replied truthfully.

"Sit thee down then and open thy _machzer_! It is at this place one

holds! Omit thou no word!"

"I hope you are feeling all right, _tatte_?"

"How should I feel? 'Tis well with me!"

Around his head the chanting and the weeping gathered volume. The

voice of Mr. Herman on the pulpit was choked with crying and his usual

ornamentations were now wholly absent from his delivery. The hands of

Mr. Linsky thundered contrition. The face of Reb Yonah was drenched in

tears. To Philip it seemed that the voices of all these moaning,

swaying men had been lifted for age beyond age. It was as if he stood

in a dark country where large boulders stood greyly from the uneven

ground; the air was full of lamentations; the sky was compact with

lightless cloud. If but the dome were rifted, if but through that blue

division there came among these boulders and this lamentation the sharp

shaft of wind--the boulders would subside into sand, there would be no

lamentation; there would be flowers in green hollows, and water in

willowy places; if but the dome were rifted, if but a wind blew....

Philip was tired of vain imaginings. As long prayer succeeded long

prayer, the tedium of the day gripped him. He remembered the _Milton_

in his pocket and, with a thrill of dangerous delight, drew it forth

carefully. Oh, it was important to take the utmost care! Good Lord,

if he were found out, what on earth would happen? Could anything

happen proportionate to the crime? His _machzer_, fortunately, was a

large, protective book! He leaned the _Milton_ against its yellow

pages and turned stealthily to "Comus." Was there any poetry like

"Comus" in the world? What savour it gained from contact with these

present sights and sounds! How fair was the lady, and how the rhymes

were like bells at morning!

Enraptured he turned page upon page of "Comus." "Comus" was ended.

Reb Monash was shaking in his corner there, by the Ark, his face pale

with the fast. All was safe. He turned to "Allegro" and "Penseroso."

Never had he known poetry to taste so fresh, like cheese and fine bread

among the hills. He turned to the "Ode on the morning of Christ's

Nativity."

_See how from far upon the eastern road

The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet...._

What lines were these, flawless in music, divinely simple!

_The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet...._

How much loveliness in how little space! "Star-led," the exquisite

phrase! ... "Star-led" ... Now to the "Hymn! ..."

But a law of gravitation greater than he might understand brought his

eyes from his book, bent backward his head, lifted his eyes into the

eyes of his father staring down from above upon his book.

Then Philip realized blindingly the significance of this moment:

_... The son of heaven's eternal King,

Of wedded Maid and Virgin Mother born...._

and once more,

_... The heaven-born Child

All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies...._

Into the inmost centre of the very heart of his father's faith, the

faith of those innumerable dead who for the many centuries had looked

upon this day as the climax of their childhood in Jehovah, upon this

_Yom Kippur_ whose mere utterance was a fear and a great light, into

the synagogue's self, at the very doors of the Holy Ark where lay the

Law pregnant with history, he had introduced ... the "wedded Maid," the

"heaven-born Child" ...!

Down from his father's eyes it seemed that two actual shafts of flame

descended into his own eyes, burning like an acid through the pupils

beyond the sockets, into the grey stuff of his brain. A sweat stood

upon Philip's forehead, and a chill then seemed to hold it there, like

a circle of ice. The fire in his father's eyes shrivelled; there came

a hollow shadow of unutterable pain; a sigh fell weakly from his lips.

He staggered towards the door for air.

He returned and said, "My son, throw it away, throw thyself away! Let

me not see thee again!"

Philip hid the book among the dilapidated Prayer Books at a corner of

the women's section and returned to his _machzer_. Not once did his

father's eye meet his own during the rest of the day. When Reb Monash

and his wife were proceeding homewards after the fast and Philip made a

movement as to accompany them, Reb Monash stared with cold eyes and

motioned him to stand away.

The end had come. Channah sitting with wet eyes on a corner of the

sofa knew it. Mrs. Massel in the scullery lifting her apron to her

eyes and sobbing ever so quietly knew it. Philip in the darkness of

the empty _chayder_ with his head between his hands knew it. Reb

Monash knew it, breaking his fast in the kitchen, saying not a word.

The next morning Reb Monash turned to Mrs. Massel. Philip was in the

room. "He must go somewhere! He cannot sleep here to-night! He has

broken me, let him not stay to laugh in my face!"

"What can he do? Where can he go?"

"I know not! He must go!" There was no doubting the finality of his

command.

Not a word passed between Philip and his father. Mrs. Massel dared not

trust herself to utter a sound until Reb Monash had gone upstairs for

his afternoon nap.

"_Nu_, Feivele," she ventured then, "seest thou what has befallen us?

God knows I have not too many years to see thee in ... and now this

black year! _Schweig den, schweig_, Feivel! What shall be with us?"

Channah realized that it lay with her to take the initiative.

"Mother," she urged, "all will be well! You mustn't upset yourself

like this! The thing we've to talk about now is what we're going to do

with Philip!"

"Yes, what?" Philip asked helplessly.

"We've understood for a long time it was going to end up like this,

there was nothing else for it. We were talking about it only last

week. She said..."

"Who said, Channah? Who do you mean?"

"I mean Dorah! She said you were wasting the old man to a shadow and

she was going to put a stop to it, for father's sake and everybody

else's!"

"Wasting to a shadow! What about mother?"

"I know! But I didn't say anything! You know what it's like to argue

with Dorah! But she was going to see father about it, sooner or later,

and now that this has happened ... well, we'd best go and see her at

once!"

"Not one word didst thou say to me!" complained Mrs. Massel.

"It's bad enough now we've got to; what dost thou want more, _mutter_?"

"Oh, but what are you driving at, Channah? What's the idea?"

"She's going to put up a bed for you in her back-room. Benjamin keeps

a lot of stock there now, but they can put a little under your bed and

the rest on the landing. You can pay her so much a week while your

scholarship lasts, and if you don't get another, well, she says you'll

just have to go in for tailoring or something; or Benjamin can take you

on his rounds."

"Oh, hell!" groaned Philip.

There had never been much sympathy between his elder sister Dorah and

himself. Although the fact was rarely referred to among the Massels,

Reb Monash and his wife were already a widower and a widow respectively

when they were married, Reb Monash bringing Dorah, and Mrs. Massel

Channah, to the union. Their only children were Rochke, who died so

tragically on the exodus of the family from Russia, and Philip, born

some time later in Doomington. The common parent between Dorah and

Philip, therefore, was Reb Monash, and the long conflict between the

father and son had rendered less and less substantial the affection

between the brother and sister. Dorah, a tall, squared-jawed angular

woman, was in some ways more masculine and more forbidding than Reb

Monash, and in all ways more evident to the eye in her Longton

household than her demure husband, Benjamin, whose main concerns in

life were his wife's temper and the state of his samples. From time to

time she had startled Philip with sudden spurts of generosity, but

these had become increasingly rarer during the last two years.

"There's no way out of it!" asserted Channah. "And, after all, mother,

it's only twenty minutes' walk away. Besides, there's the tram up

Blenheim Road!"

The three made their appearance before long at Dorah's. They found her

already in possession of the main facts, as she had sent Benjamin down

that morning to find out how the family was feeling after the fast and

Benjamin had met Reb Monash proceeding to Longton. They had both

accepted the hospitality and the lemon-tea of Mr. Levine, the

_parnass_, who had ushered them in from the door of his furniture shop.

Benjamin had rendered his report duly.

With Channah, Dorah was monosyllabic. Philip she ignored.

"From where he takes this godlessness, _mutter_," she said in Yiddish,

"I understand not! A _shkandal_ it is, over the whole neighbourhood!"

"He is growing older, he will understand more. _Folg mir_, Dorah, he

will be a good Jew yet!"

"Would that one saw the least sign! I have made his bed for him, with

a _perinny_ on top and a _perinny_ below. He will be comfortable!"

"Oh, mother, don't!" broke in Channah. "Don't! It's not far from

Angel Street! You'll be able to see her every day after school, won't

you, Philip?"

"Yes!" said Philip thickly, "Every day! He'll be sleeping!"

Dorah turned to Philip for the first time. "Well, you'd best go home

and get your things ready! Will you want to bring all those books?"

"I must have my books!"

"He can take away the bookcases I made for them!" declared Mrs. Massel.

"The books will not be in thy way!"

"_Loz shen zein_! Let it be, then! Well, he will need a handcart.

Our greengrocer has one. I'll send him down at eight o'clock!"

A miserable drizzle was falling as Philip gathered the collection of

books he so much prized and placed them on the dirty brown sacking of

the handcart. Angel Street was more dark and wretched than the Angel

Street of any of his memories. His mother stood on the doorstep

forlornly, coughing heavily now and again in the rain and wind. He had

laid the soap-box bookcases she had made for him over his books and the

man was securing the whole load under a final layer of sacking with

coils of coarse rope.

"I'm going now, mamma!" He kissed her drawn face.

"Go, my little one!"

As the cart splashed over the greasy setts of Angel Street through the

damp darkness, she still stood watching, rain in her hair and soaking

her blouse. Slightly she lifted her hands towards the receding boy.

He looked back and saw her still standing there. He came back swiftly

and covered her face with kisses. But as he again withdrew, again she

stood there emptily. Whither did her lorn figure bring back his mind?

Whither? Somewhere long ago, far off! Then he remembered. He

remembered his image of her alone in the Russian darkness, when the

dead child had been taken from her arms. She had stood there emptily

as now ... But the handcart was lurching round into Doomington Road....

BOOK III

APHRODITE