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'schayder. Beyondchayder, to gather together and confirm the saintliness ardently desired and pursued for him by his father, lay the synagogue in Doomington Road, thePolisher Shool.
The room in which thechayderwas 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 thechayderand 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 ofminchah, 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,rebbiehimself 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 inrebbie'sgood 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 betweenbazeandshloss mem? Playest thou then alleys already? Thou art a lump-Gentile, ashtik-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 breathlesschayderduring 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 thePolisher Shoolhis 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 andchayderleft Philip limp with fatigue and dejection. Life under Miss Tibbet was clockwork, barren of adventure and hope.Chayderwas 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 inchayderabout 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 thechayder. 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 ofchayders. 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 arebbie. 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 tochayder... and a pogrom!Oi, a shkandal! A walking-stick like a tree! A moujik, God should so help me, not arebbie! Poor Jakele, crying his heart out like a dove! I'll take him away from a so crookedchayder!"
"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 wholechayderand 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, hisyamelke, 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 apas seulin 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 arebbie!"
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 theyamelke.
"Where's myyamelke?" 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!"
Theyamelkewas 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 thechumish, the Pentateuch, they were translating. He had wholly forgotten the abstractedyamelke, so, whilst his own cap fell with a soft slur on the table before him, theyamelkesat revealed like a toad under a lifted stone.
Reb Monash looked up. It was too late to hide theyamelke. Reb Monash's eyes glinted unpleasantly.Chayderdrew to an immediate end.
The drizzle falling beyond thechayderwindow 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 ofchayder; 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 ofchaydershut 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 thechayder. 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 ashiksahto 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 ofchayderwere 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 inchayder?"
"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'vejust 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'schayderMottele 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 tochayderwere associated with the fecund bulges of boy-merchandise, displayed only asidder, 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 thePolisher 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 inchaydertook 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 calledYidishkeit, 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 ofYidishkeitwhich might land him into the pits of the unclean. There was a certain quality of therationalwhich 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 inchayderand inshool, 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 ourchayder, 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 theminyonat 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 amitzvah?"
"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 inchayderhad 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 inchayderon 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 afternoonshool, Mottele, forminchah, 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 thychumishthen!" said Reb Monash as he climbed the stairs.
Philip sat down on a dusty form in the desertedchayder. 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 fairAnd 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 hischumishseven 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.Hewasn'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 thychumishnow, 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. Ahdo, 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 thychumishnow! Mind not one mistake, or thou wilt not stir from the house afterShabbosone 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!
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 norlandsleit; and it was a fact thatlandsleit, 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 whenchayderandshoolleft 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 Idon'twant to understand, so there! It's rotten, the whole thing's rotten,chayderand Angel Street andshooland the lads and everything. I hate it all and I don't want to understand it. I justfeelthat 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 youfeelfunny!" 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!Youknow!"
"Well anyhow,Iknow 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 justsayit, 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 istooclever!" 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?"
"Thatpoetry!" stressed Harry, with an ironic reminiscence of an error not long thrown over by his friend, "was by William Shakespeare. Better than Tennyson theydosay!"
"Better than Tennyson!" Philip repeated with something of horror at the irreverence. "But Tennyson was aLord!"
"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'shislife 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 Idoknow 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 thytattesay? 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 afterchayder. 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 hisdavenning! 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 tochayderandshoolwas 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.