The tramcar stopped at a corner nearer the station by one block of
buildings than Angel Street. Rayman, the butcher, was hacking away
with indecent enthusiasm at a hulk of ribs. At Lansky, the draper's,
unconcerned girl assistants were measuring lengths of cloth by
outstretching one corner and lifting the other to the teeth. Philip
noticed with an acute realization of detail the stupid cat with a
closed eye and a foolish blue ribbon round its neck which was arching
its back lasciviously against a woman's leg. The distance he had
walked could scarcely have been more than fifty yards, yet when he came
to Moishele's shop at the corner it seemed to him for one moment that
he had been walking and walking since dawn broke. Above him and across
the intervening gap of the street, on the side wall of the "Crown Inn,"
and over the advertisement for Groves and Whitnall's Ale, he read on an
oblong plaque, "Angel Street."
Angel Street! He dared not put into words what he feared. Must he
turn into the street? Oh, turn swiftly, swiftly, never a moment to
lose! A small clump of figures down the street brought momentary
terror over his blurred eyes, until he made out the wheels and the
containing boards of a fruit-handcart.
Thank God, nothing! Nothing at the pavement's edge outside the steps
of his father's house! Quietly he knocked. He could hear his heart
knocking loudly as the hand knocked. Channah came to the door; pale
she was, with wide, dark eyes. A spurt of light came into her eyes
when she saw Philip standing there, then the light flickered away.
"How is she?"
"Bad! Go in and see!"
"Just take my bag away. Oh, Channah, I thought I'd never get here!"
"Give it me and go in! She's been asking for you!"
"But why didn't you send for me before? Why did you let me stay away
so long? How could you do it? If I hadn't come home in time, Channah,
oh, think..."
"But it's all been so sudden, so sudden! Only two or three days ago
she broke down suddenly. She just crumpled up. You never saw such a
difference in a day or two! Oh, it's been terrible! Let's come away,
we mustn't keep the door open! Why are you standing there like that,
Philip! Shake yourself, be sensible!"
"Nothing, Channah, nothing! Oh, tell me, why did you persuade me to go
away, both of you? If I ever forgive you, can I forgive myself?"
"Philip, let me close the front door! Come in, don't stand like a
stone! I can't understand you; why don't you go in at once, she's been
asking for you, I tell you!"
"Don't you see how I'm afraid? It's on my mind--what I just said! Why
did you let me go?"
"We hadn't the least idea of anything. You'd have upset her if you'd
missed the chance. You'd have brought it about sooner!"
"Do you think she really meant it--about the _kuggel_? Wasn't she just
joking?"
"No. She wanted to get up to make you some and send it to you! Emmes,
Philip, if it isn't true!"
He had been standing stiff in each joint, touched as with frost.
Suddenly all his body drooped. His voice fell to an almost
unintelligible whisper. "Let me go in to her....!"
He moved the few steps to the parlour door and turned the handle. He
was at her bedside. Only her eyes he first saw. They were larger,
warmer, deeper than they had been at any time before. Because of the
eyes, he was not immediately conscious with the whole of his mind of
the pallor in which they were set: not merely pallor, a bloodless
yellow.
But the consciousness of this pallor was soaking through each pore of
his body and mind, even as he bent to kiss her powerless lips; even as
he rose and was saying, "Look, mother, mother! I'm back from Wenton!"
The consciousness of her pallor so steeped each atom, each corpuscle in
him that he became yellow as she. Still, for her sake, he held his
lips firm against his teeth, subdued the impulse in his four limbs to
fling themselves wildly, wildly, upon the floor. She was too weak to
answer. He saw her mouth endeavour to frame words and abandon the
attempt. Only by a lifting of the eyelids she showed the joy at the
centre of that waning heart, and by the dim flush of colour which
spread across her cheeks.
He knew not for what length of time he stood motionless over a body so
thin it hardly seemed to break the line of the counterpane. At last he
became aware that the door had opened and Channah had come through.
"Let me just come near her, Philip, I'll see if she can take a drop of
milk! Dorah's in the kitchen! She wants you to go in and have some
food!"
"Not now!" he whispered.
There was a shuffling with utensils on the bedside table. The sound
seemed to relax a chain which had held the boy taut. He staggered a
few steps and, perceiving the moth-eaten yellow plush arm-chair near
him, he sank into it with convulsive abandonment. Now he became
consciously and fully aware of the shock he had endured. Sometimes in
his dreams he had seen her dead. One dream of them all had lifted his
eyelids at midnight from eyes glassy with horror. Now as it came back
to him, he winced and writhed. He had seen her head lying on that
copper tray where each Sabbath eve she had placed the uncut bread
before her husband. Beside her head lay a squat beaker of wine, the
beaker over which, before the meal began, Reb Monash incanted the
_kiddush_ with shut eyes. In a groping, childish way he had
endeavoured to exorcise the terror of this dream by rationalizing it,
by relating the hideous phantasm to the fabric of reality. He knew
that the copper tray gleaming always like smooth dark mahogany might
stand as symbol of the heavy labours which year by year reduced her to
a ghost. She had the Jewish housewife's intense pride in the
cleanliness and beauty of her home. Each Thursday evening the kitchen
table was littered with trays, brass candlesticks, beakers, tins of
polish, dusters. Though the reek of the polish was offensive to her
lungs and sent her into fits of coughing, no Thursday evening saw the
arduous ritual abated by one iota. But Philip knew that the
significance of the dream lay deeper than this. Obscurely he realized
that the beaker of wine represented all the sacerdotalism of his race;
in some way far too profound for his guessing the vision of the severed
head was complicated with that antique ritual, so magnificently alive
and yet so ineffably dead. The head was lying on that tray of her own
devoted polishing throughout the doomed years, lying as an offering to
the impendent bearded God of his race. The cavernous lips opened as
the beaker rose to their glooms. "I am that I am!" a voice moaned
among endless colonnades of hills toppling towards the verges of space.
How came it that the eyes of Jehovah aloof among the chasmed clouds
were the eyes of Reb Monash, sitting upon his peculiar and inalienable
chair in the corner of the kitchen? And the copper tray was a lake
profound with many distances and many generations where dim ancestral
shapes flickered from deep to deep. Twofold tyrannies along the
deliberate reaches of the Nile, wildernesses and weak lads straggling
and dying in the wake of the wanderers, smitten lands of exile,
_Kossacken_ galloping in with sabres and flung beards, a slight lad
crumpled in a moth-eaten yellow plush armchair, crumpled, broken, too
mournful for any tears.
He had seen her dead in dreams, but never so pale, so shrunken as now,
her mouth retaining little if any at all of the weak, warm milk Channah
was lifting on a spoon. An ague shivering visited his whole body.
Clearly he brought her to mind as she hovered round him with cherries
and tea on those immortal afternoons; he saw her struggling with the
Acroceraunian mountains, her lips humorously twisting to shape the
alien syllables. He remembered the quiet pride with which, long ago,
she had regarded Reb Monash as he sat oracular in his chair, his
admirers drinking with reverent avidity the wine of wisdom flowing from
his lips. The boy's throat shook with harsh, suppressed sobs.
Channah spoke. "Philip, she's calling to you!"
Not a tear had risen to his eyes. He bent over his mother with a wan
smile. Weakly, slowly, she spoke. He knew that she had been lying
there, waiting to summon up the strength with which to frame a few
words.
"_Nu_, Feivele, my own one. Art thou feeling stronger for being away?"
"Mother, loved one," he replied in her own Yiddish. "Yes, stronger.
But I had rather I had been with thee!"
"Speak not thus! I was happy to think of thee among the fields. Didst
thou have a special egg a day and milk?"
"I did! But no, mother, thou must not talk more! Thou art not strong
now, but wait, wait ... when thou art better...."
"Be thou not a child! Feivele, I am going ... going...."
The words were smothered in a tiny dry coughing. Channah came forward
to help her. He turned his head away from the forlorn struggle.
Reb Monash had been to the _Polisher Shool_ for minchak. He returned,
and stood at the door, large-eyed, haunted.
"Thou art back, Feivele?" he said. He seemed to be searching for
further words, but nothing came. The voice seemed to Philip to strike
against his skin, then to fall away dully to the floor.
"Yes, _tatte_, yes," he said mechanically, and the abstract sphere in
which his mother dying and his grief and himself seemed to be
encrystalled, closed round him again in separating completeness.
All day greedily he remained with her, knowing with a mournful
exultance that when she gathered strength she would say a few words to
him; yet when these moments came, saying "Hush, mamma, not now!
Sweetest, hush!" bending over her, faintly touching her forehead.
A long time had passed, and he was conscious not merely of hunger, but
of a concrete clawed weakness tearing at the pit of his stomach, before
he allowed Channah to take him into the kitchen and cut some slices of
bread and butter for him and fill a pint mug with tea. Dorah was there
putting washed plates on the shelves, and as Channah sat down at the
table, she moved away to the parlour to take her place. Channah was
sitting opposite to him, herself sipping tea, not with any interest,
but because she knew that nothing had crossed her lips since morning.
There had been long silence while Philip ate and drank, his attention
wandering frequently from the food till Channah with a watchful word
recalled his wits.
"Channah," he said suddenly, "when will she die?"
She was startled. Her cup clattered on the saucer.
"Philip!" she said, in remonstrance.
"Channah," he repeated, "tell me, when will she die? That's what I
want to know, how long is there?"
He was speaking in regular, subdued tones, with hardly an inflection in
his voice. It seemed the voice almost of one talking in his sleep. An
instinct commanded her to remonstrate no further, to fall in at once
with this strange mood, to adopt his tones, to reply with no
equivocation.
"Not long. Three days ago the doctor said she'd last a week.
Yesterday he said she couldn't last above two or three days. But only
think--if it had happened before you came back!"
The last consideration made no impression. "Not more than two or three
days more?" he repeated.
She nodded.
"That was yesterday?" he said. "So to-morrow is the latest."
"To-morrow is the latest."
"Mother will die to-morrow. The day after to-morrow she will be dead.
What is the day after to-morrow?"
"To-day's Friday. It'll be Sunday!"
His voice gathered urgency. "Boys must go to funerals!" he demanded.
"They must," she said, "they always do! We don't go," she added. "You
must go for us!"
"There will be no mother the day after to-morrow?"
"Philip," she wailed, "why must you go on like that? I can't bear it!
It's been bad enough, but this is worse. You're looking and talking so
funny I can't make you out. Go on with your tea, it's getting cold!
I'll put in some tea from the teapot, shall I?" She hastened to the
fire on unsteady feet.
"Cold," he was repeating, "the day after to-morrow!"
She left the fire and crossed over to him. "Philip, don't!" she
implored. She shook him by the shoulders as if he were relapsing into
dangerous sleep.
He blinked. There was a grinding in his head like a clock running
down. "Poor old Channah, I'm sorry! I was hungry and it's made me
dizzy. What a pig I've been! What have I been saying?"
"It's all right, I was only joking!" she assured him. "Be a good old
boy, now, Philip, and have some more tea! You can't make things any
better by not eating!" she insisted, "So let's try and be sensible!"
"Oh, it's all right, Channah! You just get on with your own, I've had
enough. I can't stay away any longer. You've been attending to her
all this time, while I've been--I've been--" he paused and grimaced,
"I've been enjoying myself. I must go in straight away. You keep on
with your tea."
But as soon as he closed the kitchen door behind him, she fumbled for
her handkerchief in her blouse and withdrew to the scullery, her
shoulders rocking.
He was only slightly conscious of the people that came in to see how
she was and of his father sitting speechless in the corner, and Dorah
busy with one thing and another. He resented the appearance of the
doctor and his cursory examination of her, the negative shaking of his
head towards Reb Monash. What was there still to be done! What need
was there to underline so black, so ineluctable a fact? Perhaps if he
had more frequently envisaged the possibility of her death formerly,
even in the face of her lying so wasted on the bed before him he might
have dared to entertain a wild flicker of hope. But having only in
dreams seen her dead hitherto, and then with such indignation and
terror even in the depths of his subconscious heart that he would awake
fighting the dark, now the pulse of his soul was smothered in an icy
certitude, and he would allow no forlorn gleam of hope to lead him away
from her, from this last intense communion of which the sands were
running out, moment by ashen moment.
There was a murmuring like wings about their heads and about them the
shuffling of clumsy feet attempting to achieve a vain silence.
Sometimes he would find Reb Monash hanging over them, or Channah and
Dorah whispering together. One of them might smooth a pillow or lift a
spoon to her lips. And though he knew that these things were happening
within the same four walls as contained his mother and himself, in the
limitless egotism of his grief it seemed to him that walls far other
than these held them in a remote world, together, inseparable,
undisturbed.
Imperceptibly day had thickened into dusk and dusk into night. The
incandescent mantle chuckled and flared unevenly. The last neighbour
had tearfully withdrawn. He knew that several times Dorah had spoken
to him and that he had answered, yet with no knowledge of the words his
lips were actually shaping. At last he realized that both his sisters
were urging him to go away, to go to bed. Channah was trying to draw
him from the chair where he sat leaning over the bed.
"No, no, I'm not going!" he said.
"But you must go! Channah and I..." started Dorah.
"Go!" said Channah, "only for a few hours!"
"I tell you I've been away all these days and I'm not going away for a
second now! Let me be quiet, both of you! You go to bed! Can't I see
you've been up every night, while I've been sleeping in comfort over
there, not knowing anything!" He dropped his voice to a tone of
appeal. "_Do_ let me stay! If she wants anything, I can manage it.
Dorah, you ought to go up to be near father!" He found himself dimly
conscious for the first time since his return of his father's pallor,
his ghost-like silence. The vague picture of his father faded away.
"I'll go for two or three hours!" said Dorah. "When I come down, you
must go up at once!" Her lanky figure bent awkwardly over Mrs. Massel.
Her thin lips touched the forehead fleetingly. Channah threw herself
down on her knees beside the bed and babbled incoherent words.
"Go thou, go, my own one!" murmured her mother. "Thou hast not
slept--how long! Go, darling, sleep, sleep!"
There followed silence after the women had withdrawn. Not a word
passed between his mother and Philip. Sometimes she would close her
eyes for some minutes, then open them once more full and deep upon her
son's. He remembered how Time had been so dilatory in the train; how
he had wanted hours to shrivel into minutes, the long minutes to be
brief as a spark. Now Time moved too swiftly, with deadly deliberate
speed.
Beyond the parlour window and high beyond the houses on the other side
of Angel Street, he heard the galloping of horses and the abateless
revolutions of wheels. Oh, that the moments could expand into hours,
and the hours once more into the years in which he had loved her so
little and she had loved him so well, so well despite the danger that
lay between and the cloud that had always enveloped them.
But now at least there was no danger, no cloud; nothing hindered their
unity. The whispering of Doomington, that ceased not even in a
snow-muffled winter midnight, now on all sides withdrew, leaving the
dim parlour in Angel Street aloof and calm. The incandescent light
choked and spat no more. A still light, steadier than the moon, less
garish than the tree-shaded twilight of glades, invested the room,
converting each object there into a significance beyond ugliness and
beauty. All accidentals of space and birth and time were stripped from
the woman on the bed, from the boy at her side. She was the mother, he
was the son, nothing more. There was a pulsation in the air, between
them and about them, linking them though they were far apart as
Aldebaran and the Earth, though she lay crumbling under her wooden lid
and he strode sun-engirdled over the morning hills.
How long this thing lasted the boy did not know at all, for he did not
even know that it came. He only knew that Channah was peering round
the door, fearful of waking them if they had fallen asleep. She
wondered how it came that his face was shining as with dawn, though
still the night was deep and the black incandescent gas flared and
gasped. She wondered also at the smile which lay curled at the edges
of her mother's lips. She saw, at one moment, how his eyes looked
calmly towards hers, and how the next moment his head had fallen limply
on his breast. She came forward swiftly to prevent him slipping to the
ground.
He awoke to find himself lying under a blanket in his own former
bedroom, whither, he learned later, Dorah and Reb Monash had lifted
him. He stared unseeing for some time into the blotched ceiling, then
the words came tolling against his ears, "The Last Morning! The Last
Morning!" He did not at once seize the meaning of the phrase. He knew
merely that this morning was to be an ending of things. But when the
phrase became particularized, _whose_ last morning had dawned, slowly
he rose from his bed as a doomed man for the gallows.
It was morning. The blind had been drawn, but they had left the gas
feebly talking in the incandescent burner. Shadowy people had already
gathered in the lobby and there were several neighbours in the parlour.
Reb Monash was standing over her bed listening to the faint words she
was endeavouring to shape. A flicker of jealousy touched the boy's
heart.
"Monash," she said, "it is _shabbos_, yes?"
"Yah, Chayah, the Holy Day!"
"Ah, _gutt, gutt_!"
She could say no more. He observed how the neighbours would make way
to give each other the privilege of being within the dying woman's room
for some minutes. Death seemed to be in the room with all the
actuality of physical presence. He seemed to be standing over Philip's
head leaning dark branches about him like a tree.... No, he would not
let the futile gas burn there while the sun, while even the warped sun
of Doomington, shone into the room! What were all these people doing
here, treading softly in and out? Did they hope that she would carry a
brief for their souls into that country whither she was shortly
adventuring?
The clock! the clock! How it ticked relentlessly on the mantelpiece, a
large, round alarm clock with a pale face!
Channah was whispering. "I think she wants you!" He brought his ear
close to his mother's lips.
"_Shabbos_," she said, "the Holy Day! Before _shabbos_ goes, I am no
more, son mine!"
Should he say--the words were almost on his lips--"Mother, mother! The
sun's shining! You will be strong yet! That dress of satin I always
wanted to buy you, I will buy you soon. You will sit in the parlour
like a queen, only making cakes sometimes, for _yom tov_! I will take
your arm and we will go out into the green fields. Birds, mother! And
blossom on the trees! Even yet, mother, even yet!" There was no time
for lovely, false hopes. He said not a word, but she knew how he was
closer than he had been since the days when he lay, a fluttering
lifeless life, under her heart.
The clock! The clock! There was a whispering, a treading. Some one
had arrived. They bent to his ear and said, "It's from the _shool_.
Some one has come to say the 'Hear, O Israel!' Let him be near!"
Channah took him by the arm. "Come to the door. Just while the man's
there! Come!"
A low wailing rose from the room. "Oh God, Channah," he cried, "Oh,
why do they make all this ceremony out of dying! Why can't they let
her lie quietly? Did you hear how her breathing went heavier? She
wants to die, she's so tired! And they won't let her! Oh, listen to
them, send them away! Let's be alone with her!"
The shadow in the room when they returned seemed palpable. He could
make out no sound, no appearance clearly, save her face, and the
laboured breathing. And the clock! always ticking, dispassionately,
relentlessly! Always the clock! A rattling in her throat complicated
her breathing.
"Channah," said the boy, "Channah, look at the clock!" His voice was
hard, mechanical. "It's a quarter to nine. At nine o'clock she'll be
dead!"
"Feivele!" his father whispered. "She's said thy name! Go!"
"Mother, lovely, I'm here! What wilt thou? Ah, see, I'm here!"
"Thou wilt be, Feivele, say it--thou wilt be always a good boy? And
think ... of thy mother? Thou sayest yes?"
"Yes, _mutter meine_, yes!"
"And love Channah? And all, all? So, I am happy! Remember, thou,
Feivele!"
The clock stealing, stealing forward! Not the banded powers of Heaven
shall hold the clock-finger from moving forward over that space black
with doom! Tick-tock! wild eyes of Channah, Dorah wringing her hands!
Tick-tock! bearded face of Reb Monash, wrapped like a forest in its
griefs! Tick-tock! a wailing in the air like trees when the wind goes
about mournfully! Tick-tock! the rattling in her throat! Oh, the
falling chin, the glazing eye, Oh, dead, dead...! Tick-tock...!
tock....!
Waters flowing over his head where he lay prostrate on the beach! Dark
green engulfing waters drowning him beyond grief or tears! Tricklings
through his nostrils and oozings along the channels of his brain,
runlets boring through the drums of his ears, surge after surge
gurgling over his lips and into the bursting throat! And how bitter
the taste of the foam, encrusting his palate with a scurf of salt,
bitter as ashes, as sand! A low desolate bell swinging ceaselessly in
this world of sunken waters, as if the doom of oceans and lands had
been pronounced, and all souls must bestir themselves, howsoever long
ago they were clad in flesh!
And always a whispering, and a secret sound of feet even so low under
the water's rim, whither no sun attained, where the bell swung to and
fro in the lapse of glooms. The fantastic denizens of these waters!
Things with large phosphorescent eyes shedding tears that flickered
down the watery darkness like worms of fire! Things with shuffling
feet and lolling heads, bearded things with wise and cavernous skulls,
and one, shaped like a small woman, appearing, disappearing, busy on
important offices beyond all scrutiny! They would stand over him,
staring with meaningless kindness through the weeds which swayed and
swung over his body. They would endeavour to lift his hands from their
laxity to receive the offerings they brought, would lift their
offerings to his lips, but too bitter was the savour of brine on his
tongue and his head too weary! He would turn away from them, burying
his face in the clammy sands. There had long been a filtered light in
the waters which engulfed the world; the light thickened into opaque
walls. He could see no more the lolling heads, that busy strange woman
who came and went. Only darkness, and for how long! Even the bell was
muffled almost to nothingness, the bell was more a sense than a sound,
the bell seemed to be tolling from the deeps of his own body where he
lay unstarred, tolling from below his bones and making the arm which
lay across his breast lift and fall away. Once more the light
returning and the sound of feet and the bell louder tolling, louder and
ever louder, until the metal against which the tongue beat and
clamoured, burst into a thousand fragments, and he knew that he shook
with sobs!
Over him stood the busy woman; Mrs. Finberg she was, the shroud maker,
officiator at deaths. She waited till the hollow sobbing subsided,
then pressed on him hot cup of tea. This time he did not refuse, did
not turn his head and bury it in the escaping stuffing of the sofa.
After some moments he rose and opened the kitchen door. He found
Channah proceeding towards the lobby.
"When will it be, Channah?" he asked, "Is it arranged?"
"When will what be?"
"You know, the funeral, I mean!"
"It won't be more than a few hours now!"
"But I don't understand! Not more than a few hours! What's the time
now?"
"It's just after nine!"
"Nine o'clock? But she died at nine o'clock!"
She drew back frightened. "But that was _yesterday_!"
"_Yesterday_? Oh, what's the matter with me? Is it Sunday just now
then?"
"Of course it is! It was _shabbos_ yesterday!"
"Of course, of course!" He began to apprehend how time had been
annihilated for him. "Of course it's Sunday! What was I talking
about? And you say it's in a few hours then?"
"The man from the burial society has just been in. He says the cabs'll
come about two, he thinks; somebody said that funerals are the only
things that Jews are in time about. Oh, Philip, Philip, they'll not be
late; what does it matter when they come?"
"Oh, so there'll be cabs?"
"Yes, there'll be cabs!"
"And there'll be--you know--a hearse?"
"What do you keep on asking these questions for? Of course there must
be!"
"What's all those heavy noises for, in the parlour? What is it they're
moving about?"
"Don't, Philip, don't! Come back into the kitchen!"
"It's the coffin! Isn't it the coffin?"
The parlour door was flung open suddenly. With her hair escaped from
the pins, her hands beating wildly, there stood Dorah, crying shrilly,
with broken catches! "Come here, Channah, Philip! Come, look at her
for the last time! Quick, quick, it'll be too late!"
Channah clung back against him.
"We must go!" Philip whispered. "Poor old girl, let's go!"
All but her face was covered where she lay, the lid revealing the calm
head. The room was full of unchecked sobbing. Grief was round her
like a whirlpool. How calm she lay at its centre, unperturbed, serene!
A woman was tearing her hair, Dorah beating her breast savagely! Reb
Monash stood heaped against a corner, his head drooped upon his breast.
Channah, her shoulders convulsively shaking, lay clasped in a woman's
arms. Philip looked tearless upon his mother's tearless face. _She_
knew how to take Death quietly, like a queen! The tinge of yellow had
gone from her cheeks. They were only white now, placidly white. Never
before had her face been so wise and sweet. Oh, the queenly lady ...
mother as never before!
"Go out now, you must go out!" a voice said.
"Never, never! You'll never take her away!" Dorah shrieked, but the
woman led Dorah out, and Channah after her. For one moment Reb Monash
and Philip remained in the room, the body between them. Then they too
went.
Little trickles faltered down the kitchen windows, dulling the light
already so meagre. Philip looked out into the yard and saw a slow
drizzle falling miserably. The ground would be sodden, out there. He
shivered. A chill rain faltered within him as he turned away, a
drizzle soaking his heart till it was sodden like the cemetery out
along the paved roads, somewhere at a corner of Doomington. As he sat
motionless, a man approached him and asked him to unfasten his coat.
With leaden fingers he obeyed. The man seized his waistcoat a little
distance above the first button-hole and held it taut with the left
thumb and first finger. A razor in the right hand made a two-inch
incision. The canvas threads sprawled from the gap like exposed nerves.
When the first cab came crunching along Angel Street, he observed with
abstract interest how the wheels, though superficially they seemed to
be arrested outside the front door, still went heavily revolving
towards his ribs and crunched them below their passing, till he could
hardly breathe for the sharp bits of bone sticking in his chest. Other
vehicles followed. Two cabs had been subscribed for and sent by the
_Polisher Shool_ to express the sympathy and respect of the
congregation. One or two other synagogues which had witnessed Reb
Monash's oratorical triumphs paid a like tribute, and there was, of
course, a quotum provided by the burial society out of the Sunday fund
to which Reb Monash had contributed from the first week of his arrival
in Doomington, as knowing that though his family's living might be a
doubtful affair, of death's coming, soon or late, there could be no
doubt.
Some one told him that his father, the _parnass_ and the _gabboim_ of
the _Polisher Shool_ were already installed in the leading cab. They
were waiting for him. A lethargy had been creeping about his brain.
"Wasn't there any way of getting out of it? Why must he go? Why must
any one go? Wasn't it finished, finished beyond recall?"
Dorah sat on the sofa swaying regularly from side to side. He heard
the crying of Channah, hidden somewhere.
"Go thou, go!" moaned Dorah.
He staggered through the front door. A swift wave of sympathy from the
red-eyed crowd in the street surged towards him. A horrible
self-consciousness afflicted him and he wilted like a leaf before a
flame.
"What a lovely funeral!" he heard somebody mutter....
He heard the clinking of coins in a tin box. He remembered. There was
no wedding, no funeral where the _shammos_ was not to be seen, clinking
his box for the poor.
But the clinking faded from his ears when he discovered with a swift
stare of recognition the tin can at the pavement's edge. "_Orummer
ingel!_" a woman cried, lifting her voice, "Poor lad!" The words
grated. He was glad to find himself in the dark shelter of the cab,
crushed in among the men.
As the procession moved away, he knew that Dorah stood on the steps of
the house, beating her hands together, shouting; that Channah seemed to
run after them like a ghost; she tottered, and the capable arms of
women had seized her, were bearing her away. The hearse turned the
corner of Angel Street. The cabs followed.
Still a passionless stupor held him as they moved along Doomington Road
and up Blenheim Road, through Longton, beyond the outskirts of the
Jewish quarter, and to Wheatley at last, where the Jewish cemetery
straggled over the low slope of a hill and the tombstones bore meekly
the inquisitions of the passing trams.
The entrance into the cemetery was a wooden, draughty shed where a few
Prayer Books were lying about on the forms. The shed was rapidly
filling. In addition to those whom the cabs had brought were a number
who had travelled by tram. Soon he found a service beginning and
himself mechanically joining in prayers. And shortly after he was
moving out into the open with the rest, into the damp air. They were
moving along the uphill winding path to the cemetery. The clay
underfoot was difficult for treading. The atmosphere was full of the
smell of turned earth. After one or two minutes the untidy procession
paused and the _chazan_ who was officiating at the funeral continued
the wailing chant. Again they moved forward and again they stopped;
the chant was resumed, until at last they were among the graves. There
were uprooted weeds, removed by the caretaker from privileged graves,
lying in dank heaps, tainting the tainted air and tangling the narrow
walks among the dead.
This was the place then, this black, deep hole? The rain was drizzling
into the grave. If they waited too long, there would be a floor of
clayey water. It was a deep hole; who had thought that graves were so
deep? It was true that no disturbance from the harsh world above would
penetrate so far; but if the grave were a little less deep, there would
be communion with the roots of flowers, almost the tiny pattering of
birds' feet.
So he mused, hardly conscious of the solemn chanting and the sobbing
about his ears, until some one whispered that he must throw a clod of
earth into the grave, on to the coffin lid.
Even this, then? No release, no hope! A lump of earth fell dully from
his father's hand. Light would the earth be which her son threw on his
mother's bed! He lifted a fragment of clay and released it over the
grave. But heavily the sound came, boomed on his ears. Others
followed. He became aware of a new refrain in the threnody round him.
"Beg for me, Chayah!" "Beg for me, beg the Above One!" they were
shouting into the grave as the coffin disappeared below the rising
earth. "Beg for me, Chayah!"
He turned away. No more sound was heard of clay on naked wood.
Terribly, silently, the level rose. The caretaker had seized the
shovel and was piling more earth on the broken surface. Behind a tall
white stone with black pillars a little distance away, hidden from the
rest, Philip lay for some time, his face on the damp gravel, at last
realizing how far from all reach they had placed her, beyond all
language, all vision, at the roots of darkness, far from his twitching
fingers. It was time for the mourners to descend to the shed for
_minchah_. The _chazan_ was getting restive.
But a few lingered among the stones, coming to read again the
inscriptions over the graves of parents, children, friends, all equally
dead in the Wheatley cemetery, all under the drizzle in uncomplaining
company, all stretched quiet under the levelled clods, which other
sons, fathers, friends had heaped on the coffin lids.
When the crowd had descended, he found Reb Monash sitting alone on a
form against the wall. The _shammos_ whispered to Philip that he must
be seated alongside his father. Head swimming, he obeyed. And now
came _minchah_, the afternoon service. Reb Monash turned up in a
Prayer Book the _kaddish_, the special prayer of the bereaved. The
isolation of their two voices frightened him, but he was conscious of a
tense determination that no hitch should take place in this concluding
ceremony, that she should be left, the tired woman, at rest as soon as
they would release her. He uttered the prayer with dead clarity.
Minchah was over. In dull wonder he realized that the shammos had
unfastened his father's shoe laces and was unfastening his own. Reb
Monash rose weakly and walked across the room and Philip followed. The
crowd desultorily made way for them as they moved, their loose laces
dragging in the dust. As they were fumbling once more with the tying
of their laces, the black figures were flickering through the door into
the road.
Who of the living shall stay in the place of the dead? Let the dead
hold such converse together as they can! Day speeds to night and night
will bring new day. An emptier day for empty eyes in this place and in
that, but a new day none the less. Will not fresh waters be flowing
from the mountain sources, and other waves hurtle against the shores?
It is only the caretaker's dog who prowls unhappily among the graves,
wondering dimly at all this to-do. The caretaker himself wipes the
clay from his weeding fork and sets to work again, whistling.
There was a self-satisfaction in the clatter of the horses' hoofs as
the cabs made their way from the cemetery, an indication that having
achieved their part of the day's burden satisfactorily, it was left to
the humans they were carrying away to dismiss them as soon as decorum
permitted. The drizzle persisted still. The tram-lines glistened
evilly mottled among the bricks. With fitful abstraction Philip looked
through the window into the drab day. The continuity of houses had not
yet begun. Here and there stood a public house at a corner, or two or
three houses thrown up in apologetic haste. The cabs overtook a man
and a woman walking citywards in the same direction; it seemed that
when the hearse came abreast of the man, a natural impulse made him
remove his hat. The man stood gaping as the first cab approached, the
woman staring curiously. Then suddenly she seized him by the shoulder
and pointed a correcting finger towards the procession. She shouted
something into his ears--the actual words were drowned in the rattle of
wheels. The man gaped more foolishly, and at once, deliberately,
replaced his hat. As the man and woman passed from Philip's sight,
they were grinning significantly into each other's faces. The lad
wondered what it meant. Quickly he was informed. The procession was
now riding abreast of a piece of waste ground, sloping greasily up from
the roadside level. Against the sky-line, faintly muffled by the
intervening rain, Philip saw three or four youths standing,
long-legged. He perceived that as soon as they became conscious of the
funeral procession their lank immobility had stiffened, and that at
once they proceeded to make derisive gestures with their arms and
hands. When at last he realized the significance of their gestures he
felt as though each had plunged a rusty knife into him. It was the
movement he remembered on the part of a band of youths who two or three
years ago had assembled outside the _Polisher Shool_ to mock the old
Jews entering on their _Yom Kippur_ supplications. It was the movement
which had sometimes greeted him in the meaner Gentile parts of
Doomington, to an accompaniment of "smoggy van Jew!" Once Higson
Junior had stood at the top of the stairs ...
The rain was not too opaque to obscure their lips shaping, nor so dense
that he could not hear the scornful implacable words--"Smogs! Look at
the smoggy van Jews!"
"God!" he shouted, suddenly starting to his feet. The others calmed
him, bade him sit down; to them it seemed a spasmodic outburst of his
grief. They had not noticed the gesticulating youths on the clay
slope. Or perhaps the youths had not escaped their notice, but having
passed this way before, the edge of the experience had been blunted for
them by familiarity.
Philip as suddenly subsided, but the blood surged through him, wave
after wave, in fierce anger. This, then, was the gentleness of Christ!
These the countrymen of Shelley! For these Socialism schemed and
poured its hot blood! Oh, God! The skunks! What would it matter if
himself they stripped and threw stones at him, sent him bleeding home?
Or if they filled with mud the mouths and nostrils of these old men
about him? But they had desecrated Death itself, the dolorous quiet
majesty of Death! They had desecrated her, the sleeping woman with the
folded hands, the lips that should utter no more her sweet calm words,
her eyes, sealed under disks of clay, that had been innocent as dawn!
He squirmed in his corner of the cab. They had desecrated her sleep,
these minions of Christ! It seemed at that moment that no life
henceforward lay before him excepting the shattering from His throne of
the thorn-crowned Hypocrite, in whose service those long-legged
blackguards jeered at Death. This mood passed quickly. A memory came
to him of a picture he had seen somewhere, the eyes of Christ lifted in
anguish, the heavy blood thickening about the wounds. But he felt that
a bitter brew had been forced down his throat. A taste of crude salt
lay in the hollow of his tongue.
The cab arrived at Angel Street. Dorah and Channah sat waiting in the
kitchen on low stools, and low stools (on which alone the bereaved of a
Jewish family may sit during the shiveh, the seven days' mourning) were
set for Reb Monash and Philip. The neighbours had prepared some food,
but Philip could not eat. Each mouthful became impregnated with the
evil liquid flowing round his tongue. He was conscious of nothing but
intense irritation and dared not trust himself to utter a word. He
winced when a door opened, squeaking, and brutally he kicked the cat as
it meowed into his face. When Channah put her hand on his forehead, he
threw it off with a suppressed scream. He was annoyed that the women
let the food lie about so long, and when they removed it, he was
annoyed that they removed it so clumsily. A ring of hot metal seemed
to lie behind each eye. He shut his eyes, but only set the rings
rolling on their axes and throwing off sparks.
A sing-song monologue was drumming into his ears. One or two of Reb
Monash's friends had come in and his father was narrating the virtues
of the dead woman.
"Oi, such a wife!" he was moaning, "A Yiddish soul and good as gold!
Nothing which it is right for a Yiddish woman to do, she did not do!
No _mitzvah_ was too hard for her! And on Friday night what a table it
was! Not a speck on the tablecloth and the candles shining like the
heavens! _Oi_, my buried Chayah! Where shall I find me such another
one? Where, where? And on _yom tovvim_....!"
The teeth of Philip's bitterness fastened close on this harangue. This
was the first moment since his return from Wenton that he had become
conscious of Reb Monash as a separate and complete entity. He had been
irrelevant hitherto. Only his mother, living or dead, had occupied the
full circle of his vision. There had been room for no one, nothing but
her. The incident on the return from the cemetery had made a hole in
the walls of his isolation, an acid had come trickling into him,
corroding him. What did the old man mean by this futility? What
interest was all this to the nodding old fools on the sofa? Indeed,
what interest were her virtues to the man himself, eulogizing her from
the low stool, in the same chant he had heard often in the bygone
years, rising fitfully from the room where the living woman lay
sleepless and frightened in her bed?
"And what think you she would do? She would borrow money on her
bracelets to lend to Yashka, the fisher's wife! And when a woman gave
birth she would forget she was ill herself: she'd go out through the
rain to make her some dainty and clean her floor! What a house she
kept for me....!"
It was intolerable! Would he never finish? Whither was he leading?
Faster and faster revolved the wheels behind his eyes. He dug his
nails into his hands and the voice proceeded evenly. He had stopped.
No, it was to draw breath! He was proceeding again. This man his
father? Oh, a stranger surely! They had lost sympathy enough, God
knows, these years. But the man incanting now so monotonously, who was
he, what was he doing here?
Philip found his own lips in motion. Reb Monash was silent and turned
his head towards his son.
"You've found it all out now, have you?" he said. The voice was raw
and dry, a voice he had never uttered nor heard before. Was it himself
had asked that question, and himself who asked again with words that
stabbed the tranced silence in which the room lay frozen--
"So you've found it out now that you've killed her?"
A blight seemed to fall on the lips of Reb Monash. They turned sick
and grey. The colour spread along his cheeks. His eyes grew wider and
dark and very sorrowful. Neither he nor his son seemed aware that
Dorah had advanced to the boy, her teeth showing large between her
lips, that she lifted her hand to strike him, but the hand had failed
suddenly, and she had sunk on a stool, sobbing. The eyes of Reb Monash
still rested full on his son's, but his chin drooped lower on his
breast. When he spoke, his voice echoed the raw dry tones that had
left Philip's mouth.
"God knows, Feivele!" he said. "Perhaps thou hast right!"
His head shook unsteadily for some moments, then fell forward and
downward like a lead weight.
"He's fainted!" shrieked Dorah.
"He's fainted!" Channah echoed. Dorah turned fiercely on Philip. Her
fingers clawed the air.
"What have I done?" Philip said. "What was I saying?"
They flung the door open. Some one fumbled at the window frantically
for a minute or two, then realized that the window could not open.
With quick sobs of alarm Channah threw water into Reb Monash's face,
while Dorah held his head to the air.
Reb Monash opened his eyes. "Where's Feivele?" he asked faintly.
"Here!" the boy whispered.
"Feivele!" said his father. "Feivele, let it be over! It has lasted
too long!"
"Father, what meanest thou? I knew not what I was saying...."
"No, that is finished; it is said! The fighting, let it be over! Go
thine own way! If thou wilt come mine, some day far off, God be
praised! But the fighting, let it be over! I am tired!"
The boy stared into his father's face. Memory after memory floated
like vapours darkly over the seas of the past, interposed themselves
between that sallow face and his eyes. Then he saw the eyelids fail
wearily. The memories drew away along the wide levels.
He knew what issue had been declared. They had suffered much and
waited long, his father and he. To Death had fallen the decision of
their conflict.
"Father, let it be over!"
The tension was only broken that night. Harry Sewelson came in and
after a speechless, eloquent handshake, informed Philip that he had
been away all yesterday and had learned of the death only a couple of
hours ago. He had heard women discussing it over the counter in his
father's shop. Alec and his family had left the town unexpectedly a
few days ago or Alec would have come in too....
People kept on crowding into the kitchen till the room was unbearably
stuffy. Harry had relapsed into reverent silence in a corner. Philip
was certain he would choke unless he went to the front door to breathe.
He passed along the lobby and opened the door. At that moment old
Serra Golda, who had just climbed the stairs, was about to knock, and
even as her hand rose to the knocker, the door swung noiselessly
inward. Her little puckered eighty-year-old face, caught faintly by
the gleam of a street lamp, was distraught with fright. She uttered a
slight screech of horror. Her beady eyes stared from her head in a
manner intolerably ridiculous. A demon of laughter seized Philip
overwhelmingly and a great raucous peal bellowed from his lips. He
swayed impotently, hands waving in the air, each mouthful of laughter
louder and more hideous than the last. The old lady bustled by him,
muttering indignantly, "Thou loafer! such a year upon thee!"
The words only emphasized the insanity of his mirth. He managed to
close the door and then stood in the darkness of the lobby, beating his
head on the wall in his transports. He felt his ribs cracking in the
onslaught of laughter, and clasped his hands tight round his body.
He found Harry standing beside him.
"Good God! Philip!" he exclaimed. "It isn't seemly! How can you do
it!"
For long Philip could shape no word. The tears streamed from his eyes.
At last, with infinite difficulty, he brought out:
"Oh, hell, Harry, don't you understand? Don't you see ... see how
I'm..."
But the words were drowned in a fresh and prolonged peal. Harry walked
away from him impatiently.
It was fortunate that _meyeriv_, the evening service, had been rendered
and the _kaddish_ intoned. Philip now realized clearly that the
laughter was entirely out of his control and that it would be fatal to
re-enter the kitchen. Although the main attack had subsided, bubbles
of laughter still boiled in his throat and issued from his lips in
ragged shrieks. Utterly prostrated, he determined that the only thing
he could do was to go to bed at once, and he fell asleep with his own
laughter ringing lamentably in his ears.