During this period, while Philip was reading for his own examination, Harry was elected to a scholarship, not indeed to the older foundation of Doomington School, which was the goal of Philip's endeavours, but to the modern Council institution called the Highfield Grade School, for which Harry's more astute and vehement personality seemed to fit him more readily than for the fourth-century romanticism of Doomington School. Yet only partly to keep abreast with his friend did Philip apply himself to hard reading of a less congenial kind than poetry. It is at a very early stage in the fortunes of Angel Street youth that the shadows of tailor shop and grocery stores begin to cloud the dawn. Before the meaning of such liberty as Angel Street can afford has been grasped, it is time to study the lines of slavery. So early then had the grinding fear of a sweated agony in a factory over the Mitchen turned Philip's mind towards his only escape, to further and further schooling, beyond the boundaries of the Bridgeway Elementary School. Perhaps more immediately he felt that Doomington School would leave him free to tread the primrose path of poetry. He envisioned such black-gowned masters as figured in the adventures of Master Tom Merry; saw them walking along groves academe hidden somewhere behind the walls of Doomington School; and at their heels, imbibing the poetry these gentlemen read from gold-clasped poets illuminated upon parchment richer than the Scrolls of the Law at thePolisher Shool, a crowd of emotional youths, who only turned from poetry in order to practise at the nets or consume at Ma Pott's tuck-shop illimitable pastry.
He applied himself with fervour to French verbs, the Gulf Stream, and the vexed question of herrings in barrels. He discovered that at a certain stage in his reading the letters on the page before him lost their antique stability and began to pirouette across the page, bowing their heads, and, in the case of the genus "f" and "g," swishing their tails indecorously; soon everything would melt in a mist of grey until only by shutting his eyes and relaxing every ocular nerve he could resume his vision.
"Father!" he declared, "it gets all mixed up on the paper when I've been reading a long time. I think I need spectacles!"
"Thou canst not study," asked Reb Monash, "without wanting to be like thy elders? Go then, go! I did not want spectacles till I was five-and-thirty and I read more by the time I was ten than thou shalt have read when thou art thirty! Go then, go! Thine eyes are well enough!"
It was in the paper on geometry that his bad sight brought swiftest disaster. He had solved one or two propositions with infinite difficulty. He stared so hard and long at the paper before him on an indecipherable mass of angles and lines that thedanse funèbrebegan sooner than usual. When his vision arrived at the stage of opacity he laid his pen down in a mood of bitter resentment.... He felt himself for the first time hating his father with a conscious hate.
The examination was being held in the Meeting Hall of Doomington School. He looked over the backs of his bent industrious competitors towards the tall arched windows. These, on their outer side, were cut by a black parapet, leaving only the upper half of the windows on that side of the hall open to the daylight. He saw dimly a dark mass moving leisurely along the parapet, now appearing behind the windows, now disappearing behind the intervening walls. It seemed almost like one of the peccant letters on his paper, incarnate in bulk. The long tail wagged playfully. Philip blinked and stared intently. It was a large and amiable rat. The rat disappeared beyond the further windows and left Philip staring blankly. The rat found the destination he had been making for unworthy of his continuous esteem. He sauntered pleasantly back and then, discovering that an incident of more than usual interest was taking place in the hall, he sat down on his haunches and looked on in friendly concern. Philip felt the rat's eyes looking interestedly down upon his own. He could have sworn that the rat inclined his head with the gesture of a commendatory uncle.
"Never mind, old lad!" said the rat. "You're making a howling mess of your geometry, it's true! If Mister Blabberthwaite, the geometry man, had the least say in the matter there'd be no chance for you, my hearty. And you've by no means gratified my expectations regarding your geography paper, I must say. It was, perhaps, coming it a bit thick to ask the names of all the capes on the American sea-board, that I admit; but that wasn't any excuse for chucking Flamborough Head at the mouth of the Irrawaddy which, if I mistake not, is not in America at all. It's in Queensland or something of the sort. However,that'sno odds! Don't worry, I feel a strong suspicion that Doomington School will make room for you yet ... although don't breathe a word, or it's all u.p., to use a vulgarism. No, not a word! The truth is," whispered the rat, lifting a silencing paw to his nose, "Mr. Furness and I have got something up our sleeves for you, something you can't guess; but it's there right enough.Verb. sap., as people invariably say upon arriving at my own respectable age. But Esmeralda's squeaking, old chap! Sorry I can't stay ... but these wives, you know! ... Well, so long, so long, and keep going! So long!" And the rat resumed his urbane path.
It was impossible to get down to his geometry again, his head was swimming. He rose and deposited his papers before the dignified grey-haired worthy at the door, who, if he wasn't Mr. Furness, the head master, was at least, surely, the Principal Governor of the School.
When they placed the subjects for an English essay before him and he read:
"A day in my favourite church."
or
"What is the meaning of Empire Day?"
or
"The Place of Poetry in Cities,"
with a shout of inner exultance which, he feared, would lift the roof of his skull, he realized precisely the good fortune which Messrs. Furness and Rat had been retaining for him up their joint sleeves. He betook himself to "The Place of Poetry in Cities" with a secret fear that the ink-pot could not possibly contain sufficient ink, a fear counteracted by the dismal thought that only one hour was allowed him to express his opinion upon the subject of which he was the prime authority in all Britain.
"The Place of Poetry in Cities," he began with anticipatory panache, "is so great that it abolishes cities and turns the mud rivers into rivers of silver. There is," he continued with anti-climax, "nothing like it." But he soon resumed the tenour of his flight. Philip was, in fact, affirming his creed, affirming the philosophy he had attained after eleven and a half years of brick and mud, of stupidity, error, false ideals, of that living poetry spelled by the half-hidden love between his mother and himself, of that poetry in words which, without this living poetry, could not have unfolded her secrets to a child immersed in an almost unbroken despair. His pen scratched furiously along. Too swiftly, too swiftly, the minutes raced round the rim of his borrowed watch. Frequently the green meadows of his writing were patined with flowers from the poets he had discovered, Campbell, Moore, Tennyson, Longfellow, and when these failed him, an impromptu verse from Philip Massel bubbled from his simmering brain. He was vaguely conscious of the approach towards him of a clean-shaven man, with a strong, red face, firm of jaw; but clad in such inexpensive clothing as obviously to denote him the caretaker or, perhaps, the drilling instructor. He was aware with a slight annoyance that the man hung for some minutes over his paper and then very lightly placed his hand on Philip's head. There was something quiet and fine and firm in that gesture. Perhaps he wasn't the drilling instructor? Perhaps he was a real master with a large family and he couldn't afford to wear brand-new clothing? What did it matter? ... "so that the chimneys all seem to be made of gold and the poor men are like princes...."
The stage arrived when he could no longer see the lines on which he was writing or the letters he was forming. Still his pen raced along. The tip of his pen disappeared in a mist like the top of a telegraph pole in a November fog. His forehead was clammy with sweat. His forefinger and thumb hurt horribly. And what was that? Some fool was clanging the bell! That meant he must stop! Oh, the fool! Faster still and faster! He felt that his eyes must fall from his sockets. Tears of effort were rolling down his face. At last! At last! "... for Poetry takes us from the cities of bricks and mud to a land full of beauty like the night is full of stars!"
The dignitary of the receiving-desk by the door stared curiously at him. He staggered out, half-blind, but filled with a great calm. The days that followed were days of a confident lassitude. The decision lay on the knees of the Rat and Mr. Furness, and he was content to wait.
When the information arrived that Philip Massel had won his scholarship, Reb Monash buried Philip's head in his moustache and beard. "Now," he said, his voice quivering, "thou wilt be a Jew and a Human, a credit to God and Man!"
Another matter of satisfaction was the fact that Mottele looked enviously towards him and made deliberate advances. And when he went to tell his sister Dorah, in Longton, it was surprising to find her stiff angular figure bending down and the hard mouth with strange vehemence kissing him. Sixpence and a new overcoat of a wonderful fluffy grey followed from the same quarter. Channah cried and bought him a little volume of selections from a poet called Shelley.
But he appreciated nothing as he appreciated the pan of onions his mother fried for him, all in curly brown strips and steeped in butter; and more onions, and more onions, until he had had enough. And his mother looked at him, and he understood, for the voice that asked for another plateful was choked not merely by fried onions.
BOOK II
FORWARD FROM PHYLACTERIES
Philip realized at no earlier age than is customary that life, anyhow externally, is a succession of illusions, and that, if reality actually exists, it must be isolated from facts and days, this inner reality being governed by one set of laws and the outer appearance by another. So that while poetry still dominated the inner boy as with a rod of changeless reality, he found it necessary to abandon, for instance, the old fancy of Doomington School in favour of the present fact.
It was a matter of acute disappointment to him that one convention laid down by all his reading was not observed; for he was not seized by a group of young gentlemen clad principally in Eton suits and top hats to be immersed in a stream which ought surely to have flowed somewhere through the precincts of the school. The front of the building solidly enough lined a narrow central street of Doomington. A further aspect, and one which seemed to conclude its periphery, was seen beyond the grassless ground adjoining an even older institution. From no vantage were the leafy summits of trees to be seen and no stream issued from any portcullised arch in the walls. It was the antique Mitchen alone which thrust turbid ink in any visible proximity. But what secret bowers and what green places were hidden beyond the walls, some mysterious how contained in her unfathomed spaces, who could tell?
He was not ducked in some shy water. On the other hand it did not approach his concept of an awesome initiation that a group of quite grubby boys seized him and bore him, frightened but not wholly unwilling, towards an underground lavatory where pallid basins gleamed in the interrupted light. His head was thrust into one of these prosaic basins and water sent unpleasantly down his neck. He was with some solemnity declared then to be fully a member of Transition A, and allowed to proceed to his lunch in the main section of this underground world, where he sat on the water pipes that lined the walls, eating bread and cheese timidly. The air tingled with the bloodthirsty shouts of footballers, violently kicking balls of crushed paper and twine. A lady with tawny hair in a corner of the basement dispensed Jersey caramels to appeased footballers. Indubitably the triumph of the day was the purchase of a cap, green, with blue circular stripes, crested with an eagle invincibly—a cap which proclaimed to the whole abashed world that here was one who was of the world's elect, here was one who was no lesser a mortal than a scholar at Doomington School.
As he walked home that afternoon, he took slow and measured steps, so that none should be denied the privilege of gazing upon his cap. It seemed that less a thing of cloth texture sat on his head than a crest of fire. As he walked along Doomington Road, he paused before each mirrored window as if to tie a shoelace, and actually to compare his eagle, to their enormous disfavour, with all fowls in the lists of fable or biology. But a climax, which seemed on the whole rather to be overdoing it, occurred as he passed below the windows of the factory where his sister Channah was a button-hole hand. For the shrill bravas of feminine throats attracted his gaze upwards and there he saw and heard the clustered buttonhole hands cheering and waving enthusiastically. And before Philip had time to lower his blushing face a cloud of confetti descended upon this youthful bridegroom of our fair Lady of Wisdom, accentuating his discomfort into an ordeal of shame. At this moment a schoolmate, not much older than Philip, but his faded cap displaying a far more advanced stage of sophistication, passed by, bestowing a sour look upon the object of this public debasement of the masculine values of Doomington School. When he arrived home his mother laid before him a steaming plate of soup which she almost upset in her proud concentration upon the eagle-crested cap.
"And do you know, Mother," Philip declared during his breathless repetition of the day's events, "there was a man there who put us into our classes and he was reading my composition at the scholarship and I thought he was the drilling man but he isn't really, he's the head master, Mr. Furness, and he's like Jupiter, only Jupiter's got a great big black beard and Mr. Furness hasn't and he's not got much on the top of his head either. There's a huge statue of Jupiter..."
"To thy soup, Feivel!" said Mrs. Massel, "It will get cold and Mr. Foniss will not come and heat it for thee. Calm then, calm!" she demanded, by no means less aquiver with excitement than the boy.
Yet it must be here said that for some considerable time to come, Doomington School had no serious influence upon Philip's real life. There was of course somethinggenteelabout the atmosphere compared with the crudities of the Bridgeway Elementary School, and this demanded from Philip a much more rigid discipline in the matter of boots and ties. His master, he was informed, hailed from an Olympian institution called Oxford University, and for this reason wore a sombre black gown which would have made of a less imposing figure than this gentleman an object to be treated with remote awe. Mr. Mathers was distinguished from Miss Tibbet, at least by the fact that he did not wear tortoise-shell spectacles, and from Miss Briggs of the infants' hall, by the fact that the two front teeth of his top jaw were not disproportionate. Yet Philip felt in his presence a combination of the Briggs terror and the Tibbet ennui. There was in him a monomaniac insistence on the correct orders of Latin sentences which produced the sensation half-way during the lesson that the orders of Latin sentences and the orders of the stars in their courses were of like fundamental gravity. Mr. Mathers presented an interesting contrast to little Mr. Costar who taught French, and who sat in his high desk like a little bird twittering on a bough. Twitter—twitter! the notes came, in a sequence of trills not musical but shrill and frequent. Yet sometimes, and without warning, the tree-top twitter would cease, the eyes of Mr. Costar would become glacially severe, some delinquent would be lifted in his beak like a pink quivering worm, the throat of Mr. Costar would vibrate in the processes of swallowing, and immediately the twitter would be resumed, twitter—twitter, shrill, without humour. The boys seemed no less strange and unreal than Mr. Mathers and Mr. Costar. They came mysteriously from townships scattered round the central and gloomy sun of Doomington, and disappeared with their daily quotum of Latin orders and French verbs into the same dim places, beyond the pale of knowledge. There was a community of Jewish boys at Doomington, but he seemed at once only too familiar with their characteristics. They were a blend of Mottele and Barney, Mottele being the predominant element. Doomington School lay outside him, poetry lay within. Doomington School did not want him. He would wait. Perhaps he too would some day attain the heavy-browed responsibilities of a form monitor, might be even the monitor elected by the form itself and not the monitor arbitrarily appointed by the master. But now all these concerns were beyond him, unintelligible.
On the other hand, the rearrangement in his daily times produced by the school day was a matter of considerable importance. It meant that he arrived home nearly two hours before the nightly session ofchayder; with the consequence that Reb Monash was still wrapped in his afternoon doze. Mrs. Massel had by this time cleared away every vestige of the mid-day meal and the kitchen was smelling delightfully fresh and clean. The brasses on the mantelshelf shone broad and lustrous—trays and samovar brought over from Russia, and the array of candlesticks which glorified the table every Sabbath eve. The floor had been energetically scrubbed and the windows so polished as to seduce into the kitchen whatever light lingered beyond the iron bars. On the sofa sat Mrs. Massel herself, in a clean afternoon apron, her fingers busy with knitting, allowing herself in Philip's honour the few minutes she spent idly in a day which began at six in the morning and ended at eleven. Mrs. Massel was a woman of middle age, slim, but her whole body eloquent of hard work. When Reb Monash had gone to seek his rhetorical fortunes in America, before Philip was born, she had tried to combine the housework with some form of itinerant business; the strain was still visible in the long lines across her forehead. Her face was small and wrinkled and superficially older than her actual years. When, however, she smiled, the clouds of her sorrow and tiredness seemed to chase each other out of the skies of her face. She was then wistful and childish as one to whom the world still had all her tragedies to reveal. Her nose was a little too broad for the small lines of her face, and this only added to her smile an element of the elfin and unreal, as if she had been instructed in some wisdom of dim mirth by little people far beyond the circle of her recurrent drudgeries. This childlike sweetness lay in her eyes even in repose; for they seemed large and luminous with some inner steady light, they were brown like hill tarns when autumn is on the bracken slopes round them. On her smiling this light seemed to be broken into little ripples which coursed over the brown waters of her eyes; but a surprise and a doubt at no time deserted them, as if beyond the horizon clouds lay ever waiting to veil these brown lights with mist.
The love between Mrs. Massel and her son was a thing which never or rarely found expression in the usual endearments. It was a love much more of silences than of speech. Philip did not like kissing her, as feeling somehow that the relation between them lay too deep for the lips. It made him self-conscious, and of his love a duty and a convention instead of the sacrament too deep for any deliberate thought. Kissing in Christian families, he learned from books and his meagre experience, was a routine, where every member of the family kissed all others on recognized sections of the face at organized hours. From his mother the endearments he received were a broken word which unwittingly left her lips, a gentle wind-like caress on the head, a goodly something pressed secretly into his hand, or merely a glance from her brown and childish eyes which might rest on his own for two moments, silent with sanctity.
This concealment of their affection had always come naturally to them, though it was found also to be the most discreet policy. Reb Monash had long discovered that the way to confirm impiety was to cherish the impious. He therefore expected from his wife that at those periods when he was displaying in no mild manner his objection to the latest phase of Philip's heathenism, his wife should loyally and actively second his displeasure. Any manifestation of affection towards Philip at such times caused him with so little restraint to lift his voice that (to the humiliation of his wife) it was obvious that their neighbours on both sides of the house were no less participant of his eloquence than himself.
It was because during a whole hour they could sit and talk without fear, that Philip's return from school now became the brightest period of the day for both. Quite quickly Philip would switch from the day's events to the latest poetry that had fastened on his imagination.
"Mamma," he said, "Listen and be very quiet. I'm going to read you something from Shelley. Oh, it's a lovely thing about a plant in a garden where there was hyacinths and roses like nymphs and about a Lady who came with osier bands and things to hold the flowers up. I say, Mamma, I say!"
"Nu, what is it? Thy meat's not well cooked?"
"No, no! I'm talking about lilies, not meat! I wonder which you are!"
"What I am? I am thy mother! What more needest thou?"
"Which are you? Are you the Sensitive Plant or are you the Lady in the garden? Whentattestarts shouting you look lonely, like the Sensitive Plant, but when he's upstairs you're all lovely like the Lady!"
"Foolishness! Foolishness!"
"But then the Lady died, so it can't be you, can it? And so did the Sensitive Plant, so what are we to do about it?"
"Of course she died! What then? And thy mother also, over a hundred years! She too! But why must thou talk about Death like this, thou not thirteen yet? Wait till thou art older and thou hast a wife and family and hast married a son and a daughter, then it will be time! But for thy Lady, she's only a story, so of course she's dead! How else?"
"Ah, that's where you're wrong, see! Shelley knows all about it. He makes you feel awfully miserable and then he comes back right at the very end:
That garden sweet, that lady fair,And all sweet shapes and odours there,In truth have never past away!'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.
I suppose all that's what Harry means by 'philosophy.' Anyhow, that's not the part I like so much. What d'you think of this?
... Narcissi, the fairest among them allWho gaze on their eyes in the stream's recessTill they die of their own dear loveliness."
"What does thy mother think of it? My head's aching; what can I understand thereof?"
"Oh yes, you can understand it right enough! You understand it better than I do, but you don't want to show off! But listen ... Oh, where's that Shelley Channah bought me? Good, here it is! Listen to this now!" And he ran through another poem recently discovered. This reading and chanting would take place daily. Mrs. Massel sat on the sofa bewildered by this spate of melody, but keenly happy in the enthusiasm of her son. If she ever ventured a "Philip, but not one word do I understand!" "Ah! what does that matter?" Philip replied. "Do you remember when I askedtattewhat good I would do to God by saying a lot of prayers I can't understand a bit about—you remember, he was in a good temper?—he answered that it didn't matter if you can't understand; it's so holy to say things in Hebrew that God likes it just the same. Well, there you are, it's just poetry! It's like singing, only much finer!"
Sometimes he would get her to repeat lines after him. She might make a feeble attempt to remonstrate with him, but saw that her humorous efforts made him so beam with delight, that awkwardly, with an entirely false distribution of accents and meanings, she stammered out her lines. It was "Arethusa" finally brought this diversion to an end.
"From her couch of snows," said Philip. She made an effort to imitate him.
"In the Acroceraunian mountains."
"In de Ac—ac—ac ... It cannot be, Feivel. I can't!"
"In the Ac—ro—ce—rau—nian mountains."
"Ac—roc—Ac—roc—roc— No, Feivel, my teeth! Tell me all the rest thyself, I will listen; it will be better so! I cannot thy croc—croc!"
When at last the feet of Reb Monash were heard in the bedroom overhead, the poetry séance came abruptly to an end. Mrs. Massel turned to the fire to put on the kettle for his pre-chaydertea. Philip regretfully hid away his poet and turned to the intricacies of algebra.
Schoolboys have an unerring instinct for the presence or absence of what at Doomington School was called "public spirit." It was in fact so essential a part of the non-material composition of the school that the lists of forms which were drawn up terminally, a little invidiously distinguished with an asterisk those hearts where "public spirit" was a constant flame.
Philip, though his first year was well advanced, still came to school somewhat as a stranger. While he himself anticipated little the vehement passion which would some day absorb him into the fabric of the school, his form mates anticipated it far less. So that the cold disregard for Philip general in the form was in certain boys concentrated into active persecution, and in Jeremy Higson, into an attitude mournfully reminiscent of the BabylonianKossacken. The spirit was similar but the methods differed vitally. Higson might be standing loosely against a desk when Philip entered the room after the luncheon interval. A nail-studded boot would sweep like Jove's bolt from the void into Philip's rear. But turning towards Higson, Philip would find only a heavy-faced youth talking sleepily with his friends. Higson senior was a mild Episcopalian gentleman who had written sixteen pamphlets to prove the identity of the Anglo-Saxons, including the Higsons senior and junior, with the Lost Tribes. For some perverse reason Higson junior was exceedingly antipathetic to the Found Tribes, when, to be logical, it was for Higson junior to rush forward in consanguineous ecstasy to kiss Philip on the forehead and to repudiate his principal friend, Evan Evans, an indisputable Celt, as an outlander, an unsanctified.
"Where was Moses when the light went out?" he jeered with criminal disrespect. "Who killed Christ?" he insisted frequently, turning towards Philip an eye so baleful that it was evident he considered Philip an actual participant in the crucifixion.
"Out of my way, yousmog!" he growled, realizing that smog was a more acid irritant to Philip thansheeny. Yet he discovered and practised a more exquisite infliction. He knew that pig was anathema in Judæa, because Higson senior had once made a pathetic effort to veto this commodity from his household in response to Pentateuchal inhibition, an effort done to nought by the severe displeasure of Mrs. Higson and Higson junior.
Higson junior therefore introduced into the classroom the most succulent morsels from his midday ham sandwiches to devour them in lengthy bliss before Philip's sickened eyes. Philip began to discover little blobs of ham fat in his pockets and school bag. Upon one calamitous day he found as he devoured the first mouthful of his lunch a taste of unutterable impiety in his mouth. Looking with horror into his paper bag he found that its contents had been skilfully tampered with, (he kept his lunch stowed in the pockets of his coat hanging in the basement cloakroom), and that his mouth was now tainted with the abomination of desolation. He withdrew on the wings of disgust and scoured his mouth with water for the remainder of that interval, a process he repeated impetuously during the next few days as often as he recalled the dishonour of his mouth.
"What do you mean by it?" Higson asked Philip one afternoon.
"By what?"
"Killing Christ!"
Philip winced and turned away.
"I say, lads!" Higson said winking. "Let's have a lark withsmoggie!"
"What's on, Turnips?"
"Let's crucify him!"
A slight gasp of horror rose from the Higson clientele.
"It's quite easy! Let's first stretch him out on the wall...."
Philip ran to the foot of Mr. Mathers' desk. His desperate eye had caught sight of a large earthenware bottle of ink. He lifted it and with twitching lips he whispered, "Touch me, that's all!"
"You little squib!" said Higson, swaggering forward nonchalantly. He looked round to his friends.
"Just give me a hand, you fellows!"
"This is your job, Turnips! You bring him to the wall! We'll do the rest!"
"Just you touch me, that's all!" Philip said wildly, his whole body tense against the desk.
"And what will you do?"
"I'll throw this in your face! You'll see!"
"Go it, Turnips!" the retinue encouraged. "He's littler than you!"
Higson looked round with a growing expression of despair. It was impossible to withdraw. He moved towards Philip. Philip's arm shot forward. "Oogh—oogh—oogh!" A great volume of muddy ink was streaming down Higson's face and over his light green suit. "Oh, you bloody little devil! Oh, by Christ, I'll show you!"
"No you don't!" a quiet voice said. It was Forrester, the football captain for the form. "You've had your whack! You'd better go and wash before Mathers comes in!"
"Yah!" howled the retinue with swift veer of sails. "Look at Turnips!"
Bullying was one thing, in fact, and dirty blasphemy another, particularly when attended by public ignominy.
Philip, it is true, was not more beloved after this incident than before, but Higson certainly receded into a background of smouldering impotence.
It can readily be seen then that Transition A was not likely to render Philip's old interests less attractive.
A new planet now was beginning to swim into Sewelson's ken. The planet attained soon the fixity of a star. The star soon almost rivalled the sun of poetry as the prime luminary of Philip's intellectual sky. The name of the new focus was Socialism.
"Don't talk to me about poetry!" Harry declared impatiently one day. "What's the good of poetry while children are starving in garrets? For God's sake keep it in its place, like a lap-dog in a basket. I tell you, Philip, I tell you, there's nothing else but Socialism. Liberals are Conservatives with their hands in somebody else's pockets. Conservatives are Liberals with their hands in their own pockets! Chalk and cheese! We working men have got beyond 'em; we can see 'em through and through. Dead Sea Fruit, that's what they are, all lies and hypocrisy inside, and red smiles outside. What did Churchill promise and how much has he done? No, Philip, a good time's coming! Socialism for ever!"
"But listen, Harry, not so fast! What does it all mean? And why should it knock poetry out like that? There can't be much good in it, if it hasn't got any room for poetry, I don't care what you say!"
Harry glared for a moment. "I didn't say that!" he snapped. "I said it's bigger than poetry! It is poetry! How do you like that? Real poetry!"
The relation between the boys at this moment presented in a lively manner their differences and similarities. When any fresh intellectual concept was presented to Philip, he was constitutionally distrustful of it until he had ascertained its position regarding his previous intellectual experience. With an unease which expressed itself in a sort of timid humour, he held back from the idea, fearful of any separative influence upon the current of his emotions. Harry, on the other hand, was borne away completely by any new proposition which made, through material disharmony, towards intellectual harmony. But he was as instinctively afraid of a new emotional enthusiasm as Philip was hospitable to it, and here he adopted the protective coloration of a humour somewhat lambent and mischievous, to disguise the essentially sluggish setting of his sympathies towards an enlargement of his non-rational existence.
"Well, define it!" challenged Philip. "I know that I don't know anything about it excepting that all sorts of filthy people are called Socialists. People who get full of poetry begin to live a more beautiful life inside. I suppose it ought to be the same with Socialists!"
"Oh, there you are, just as I thought!" exclaimed Harry rather shrilly. "Talking about Socialists, Socialists! What about poets, poets, if it comes to that? You know Shelley was an absolute pig with that girl Harriet and Cowper was mad and Tennyson became a Lord! What on earth's that got to do with poetry! I was talking about Socialism, and I say there's nothing in the world but Socialism! That's what I say! ..."
"How long have you been like this, Harry? It sounds uncomfortable!"
"Oh, ages!" replied Harry loosely.
"You said nothing about it when I saw you two Saturdays ago. Not that that's got anything to do with it, either! But still, lend a poor chap a hand! Where does it all want to get to?"
"Oh, there's millions of books been written about it. You know you couldn't put poetry into a word or two, but it means something like 'Government of the People for the People by the People'—that sort of thing. No millionaires paddling about in fat motor-cars and boys getting consumptive in mines! No plush and palaces for the lords and sweat and a crust for the working people. No rotten old kings on thrones and dying men scrubbing on their knees in workhouses! ... Oh, don't you see how we want it in Doomington of all places in the world!There'ssomething—what is it you're always gassing about?—which is going to sweep away the muck and the chimneys quicker than mooning about with hollyhocks!"
"Have you got a book about it?" asked Philip uneasily.
"A book? Yes, Isupposeyou'd better have a book to help you along. I've got a fine book all about it, by a chap called Blatchford.Britain for the British, that's what it's called! It'll knock you off your feet, first read. Oh damn, I've lent it to Segal! I don't think you've met Segal! No? Oh, he's a clever devil! Yes, I'll get it back from Segal and you can have it."
"Right! I'd like to see what it's all about."
"Look here! You've done your homework, haven't you? You haven't? Well,Ihaven't, it doesn't matter! There's a Socialist meeting outside Ward's Engineering Works to-night! They're thinking of putting up a Socialist candidate instead of the lousy Liberal. What do you say to coming along just now?"
"I'll never get home in time. The old man's getting a bit radgy again."
"Well, of course, if you're always going to be tied to your father's apron strings...."
"I didn't say I wasn't coming!" Philip broke in hotly.
"Right-ho! We'll go through the back. It's nearer!"
It is almost no exaggeration to say that when Philip came home that night, his head was clamorous with a new gospel, his eyes shone with revelation, his too inflammable nature was ablaze! He walked in unsteadily as if he had been drinking a heady wine. He looked towards his father with a certain pity in his glance. Was he not too a victim of these iniquitous conditions which the fiery-bearded man had described with such blood-freezing fury? Did Reb Monash know it? Of course he did not know it! "Hapathy!" the man had thundered, "Hapathy! 'Ere is the henemy! Your fathers is strangling their children. What for? Hapathy! Your children is drinking the blood of their fathers! What for? What for, I ask? Hapathy! Deny it who can!"
Reb Monash was engaged in a conversation with a lady who had two sons to dispose into achayder. He thought it discreet for the moment to remain outwardly unaware of the sinful hour Philip had chosen for his return. Open disapproval would have displayed Philip as no satisfactory sample, so to speak, of the paternal wares. He turned to Philip and with a gentle significance the two-sonned lady could not have fathomed, inquired, "Sewelson?"
"No!" replied Philip, "Socialism!"
Reb Monash's lips tightened imperceptibly. He resumed the conversation with his client.
"Of course," declared Philip enthusiastically some time later, "there's absolutely no doubt of it! Shelley was an out-and-out Socialist! As much of a Socialist as that candidate fellow, Dan what's-his-name!"
"You're right! Shelley was all there!" affirmed Harry. He beamed pleasantly upon his convert. "All the decent chaps have been Socialists from the beginning. Christ too, he was no end of a Socialist!"
"Don't know anything about Christ!" said Philip uneasily. There was something disturbing in this treatment of Christ. Christ belonged in the first place to Russia, where they impaled babies in His honour; and then to the Baptist Missionary Chapel, where He was associated with soup and magic lanterns; and to the Christian prayers at school wherein, of course, Philip had no part.
"Christ was a Jew, after all," Harry put in tentatively, "like Karl Marx."
"Karl Marx?"
"Yes, that's the chap who wrote the big book you were looking at, on the chair near you. I can't say I quite understand it, but they all say you've got to read it, so I got it out of the library."
"Oh that! I don't like that sort of Socialism, it's as bad as Mathers' Latin! I prefer Shelley's. How does it go? Oh yes, don't you think this is fine poetry and fine Socialism, both together in one?
Arise like lions after slumberIn unvanquishable number.Shake your chains to earth like dewWhich in sleep had fatten upon you.Ye are many. They are few!
Isn't it fine?"
"Whist! Yes, that beats the song we sing at the Socialist meetings—all about keeping the red flag flying, eh? It leaves old man Tennyson a bit husky, what do you think?"
"Steady dog, isn't he, Tennyson? Wants to take his time about it. Doesn't he say something like
Freedom slowly broadens downFrom precedent to precedent....?
Doesn't that mean you've got to take things sort of quietly?"
"... While mothers haven't got any milk for their kids and Doomington stinks with corpses! By God! It makes me sick! But there's no point rubbing it into you, you dark horse. You've been a Socialist for the last—how many—fourteen years? But listen, I've not told you? Dan Jamieson wants me to get on my hind legs and say a few words at one of his meetings. What do you say to that?"
"I'd be frightened out of my life. But how does he know you'll not make a muck of it?"
"That's what I wanted to know. But he said he overhead me barging at a lot of kids at a street corner, and he said to himself, 'that's the goods for me,' he said."
"Gee! You'll start crying in the middle!"
"Don't be so sure! It matters too much for me to start howling like a kid. I'm as good as that weedy fellow with no chin at the Liberal meeting yesterday, any time of the year!"
"What are you going to talk about? Will you spit out this here Marx of yours?"
"I saw Jamieson on Tuesday and asked him what he wanted. 'Never tha mind, lad!' he said, 'it'll serve our purpose seeing a lad like thee get oop on's feet. That'll fetch 'em. Doan't think in advance about it. Just oppen tha lips and t'rest'll coom.' That's the way he went on. Itdoesmake me feel rather goosy sometimes," Harry admitted, "but I've got hopes in that line, so all I can say is I ought to be damn glad of the chance!"
"Well, you're a game 'un, anyhow. I shouldn't like to be in your shoes."
"You never know, my lad, you never know!" Harry speculated with dubious prophecy.
Again some time has passed. Reb Monash sits upright upon that corner chair wherein none shall sit whether Reb Monash be asleep upstairs or at the furthest limit of his peregrinations—because "Respect! respect!" he declares, "What means it to be sitting on a father's chair!" He is sitting upright and his left fist clenched angrily beats the table before him in punctuation of his utterances.
"Has one ever heard of such a thing? Ayungatschof fifteen, not more, to stand up in the market-place with the enemies of Israel and talk black things! That's what it means, your schools and your teachers! His parent, what is he? Anisvostchik! I never had any trust in these Rumanians. The town rings with it. Imagine! standing up on a cart among the Atheists and Free-Lovers and Socialists! It's ashkandal. It will bring his mother's grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. Sooner my son should in the grave himself be than behave like that proselytized Sewelson. Understand, not a word, Feivel! Thou must never put foot into the heathen's house! I forbid it! I have had my doubts for long. Would that I had so commanded before this day. God knows what poison thou canst have drunk from his lips. What, what sayest thou, Philip?"
"Tatte, I can't, he's my only pal! I'll be alone without him. And he doesn't do it every week, anyhow. It's only this once!"
"Never must he enter this house! And if thou art ever seen with him, I will break for thee thy bones, all of them. No more now!" He brought the palm of his hand down emphatically. "Chayah, bring me a glass of tea! Tell thy son to go to bed! If not it will be the worse for him!"
Philip's heart shook with resentment and grief. "I won't give him up," he muttered fiercely behind his teeth. "He won't stop me! He can't! I'll be damned if I give him up! He'll see!"
Heavy wings were brooding over the kitchen in Angel Street. The gas jet drooped dejectedly as if reluctant to light up the scared faces of Mrs. Massel and her daughter. They sat side by side on the sofa nervously rubbing together the palms of their hands. The thin white cat scratched his ribs against their ankles and howled into their faces inquiringly.
"Never mind," said Channah, "perhaps he'll just give him a good hiding and send him off without supper. It's happened before, mother. Don't look so worried!"
"Thou dost not know, Channah, what he's been saying to me in bed the last few nights. He said if he'll go again with Sewelson he'llshmeishim till he begs for mercy. He said he'll keep him in the cellar all night, he'llshmeishim till he can't even cry. Oh, what a year has fallen upon us, Channah!"
"I hate Sewelson, it's all his fault! I wish he was at the bottom of the sea!" Channah burst out bitterly.
"But it was wrong of Feivel. It was wrong to go out with Sewelson again. I told him. He deserves it. But no, the poor dove, not ..."
"Not what he'll get. Do you know who it was told father he was talking to Sewelson? Oh, the sneak—I could murder him!"
"I don't know! I don't know! It was one of thechayderboys, I think. But hush, here come they! Don't say a word to him, Channah, or he'll turn round on me and keep on shouting in bed all night! Oi, look at the child!"
Reb Monash entered the room, his face bloodless with anger and cold determination. Philip followed behind, his hands sunk in his pockets, his chin on his breast. Reb Monash took from the pocket of his alpaca coat a long thin strip of black hide. He sat down on a chair, and without looking towards Philip, commanded "Thy trousers down!" Philip obeyed.
"Now I will teach thee whether thou wilt mix with all the filth in the land. Over my knees!"
The venomous strap descended, twice, three times, four times. A swift catch came from Philip's throat. Again and once again. Her whole body shuddering dismally, Mrs. Massel stole from the room. From the scullery came Channah's voice, moaning. Again the strap came down. A thin cry of pain shrilled through Philip's teeth.
"And wilt thou again go with Sewelson?"
No answer.
"And wilt thou again go with Sewelson. Say no!"
"I will! I will!"
"Well, we will see who will prevail. Say no!"
"I will!"
"I am stronger than thou. Say no!"
For answer Philip's body rolled slackly from his father's knees.
"No, my son, no! It is not yet finished. Wilt thou say no? One word, no!"
The strap whistled through the air. Remotely, brokenly, Philip's voice came from far off.
"No!"
"That is as I thought! Thou wilt bless me some time with tears in thine eyes for what has been done to-night. Thy mother can give thee supper if she will, I do not forbid."
But the crushed figure of Philip had writhed from the room. Soon he was lying on his bed, limp, not daring to stir because each movement stabbed him acutely. He buried his face in the pillow. He could not think. He could not remember. He knew only that he was a mass of intolerable pain. Yet he knew that something hurt him even more than his pain. He had forsworn himself. He had lost something. All life was a fight, was a movement forward, away from the darkness into the places of light. He had forsworn himself. He had fallen back into Babylon. The dark was closing round him and the pitchy waters were gurgling in his throat.
There was a whisper beside him.
"Philip, Philip, it's Channah!"
Who was Channah? A girl, a sister. She had a rolled gold brooch with two holes where diamonds should have been. One of her boots was very worn at the heel.
"Go away, go away! I don't want you!"
"Philip, poor old kid, I'm so sorry! Mother's crying her heart out! Listen, Philip! Mother sent me up with a cup of milk and some cake!"
How the pain licked round him, like flames. Sewelson was a fine chap, anyhow. God, what a wonderful speech he had made that night! When he came down his face was pouring with sweat. Somebody threw a brick at him....
"Philip, well?"
"Oh, go away, go away! I don't want anything! Leave me alone!"
"I'm leaving the milk and the cake on the chair by your bed, see? Good night, kid! Drink up and try and go to sleep!"
Dimly he heard the sound of his father and mother entering their bedroom. Then a long monologue followed. It was very loud, but his ears were sealed against it. Pitch blackness was all round him, and something had made a breach in the walls of his soul and the pitch blackness was flooding through. Would they all be drowned, Sewelson and Shelley and the big bluff face of Dan Jamieson? He had forsworn Shelley. The image of Shelley's body tossing forlornly on the waters of Spezzia reproached him. Why had Shelley died if Philip Massel were to forget him, leave him tossing endlessly on the grey seas? A melancholy cat gibbered beyond the window, down in the yard. Wearily, wearily, the hours passed. He could not tolerate it. With his guilt keeping his shoulders below the waters he would never breathe clean airs again, he would never fall asleep, never awake.
What could he do? He must gainsay his disloyalty! There was nothing for it. Thus only would the forward march from Babylon be resumed. What? What? He started from his bed! Repudiate his treachery before the man in whose pocket lay dreadfully coiled the black snake? There was nothing, nothing but this! Else all liberty was vain, poetry was vain. Poetry was a plaything, not the incense in the House of the Lord. A clock in a church steeple tolled once, twice. The night was passing; the dawn would come. He would find his soul lost with the dawn. Nothing of glamour or struggle would be left for him.
Yet what could he do? Renounce his renunciation? Nothing less, nothing else! Vividly each stroke of the strap was reiterated in his memory. Was liberty worth it, was poetry? He remembered Harry's bleeding forehead where the lout had thrown the brick. He imagined the floating, sodden hair of Shelley adrift on the indifferent waters.
He rose from his bed. It felt as if he were tearing his body into strips. Every bone ached, every muscle was raw. He opened his door and crept down the stairs till he stood outside his father's bedroom. He knocked. His father had at last fallen asleep. The monologue for that night was ended at last. There was no reply. He knocked again. A sudden and tremendous panic seized him. What a fool he was! What was he doing it all for? Why shouldn't he settle down and be what his father wanted him to be and what the masters at school wanted him to be. It was the easier way. How easy it would be to gain the applause of the Polish Synagogue, the applause of Doomington School! On the other side, what? Poetry, Shelley! A swift agony of pain as he moved recalled him to his determination. Forward, forward! He knocked a third time, more loudly.
"Yah, yah!" came the startled, sleepy voice of Reb Monash. "Who is it? What is it?"
Philip opened the door.
"It's me!"
"What hast thou come about?"
"I've come about Sewelson. I said I won't go out again with Sewelson..." There was a pause. The boy heard his heart drumming across the night. Then followed—"Well—I will!"
He heard a gasp from the bed.
"Gott!"
Silence, complete silence.
Philip closed the door and crept upstairs again. The pain of his lacerated flesh was somehow easier to bear. A faint finger of moonlight pointed ghostlily into the room as he entered. He made out vaguely the milk and cake his mother had sent up for him. He discovered he was ravenously hungry and devoured the food. He took his clothes off and with great caution hunched himself between the blankets. The moonlight washed over his face and showed him sound asleep.
The truce was over. During Philip's first year at school it had already worn a little thin. The emotion of pride with which Reb Monash had seen his son enrolled among the scholars of Doomington School was now considerably reduced. Philip's second year at school seemed by no means likely to bear out his father's prognostications that the study of Gentile lore would so work upon his stubborn brain as to turn him with warmth towards theYidishkeitof home and synagogue.Chayderwas now out of the question. It was easy enough for Philip to plead home-work when a tentative invitation in that direction was held out, and he was now nearly fourteen years old, too fully fledged for the compass ofchayder'swing.
Yet Reb Monash was certainly going to see that the boy's other duties were not neglected—his washings before food, his three several bodies of prayer at morning, noon and night, his rigid application to the matutinal phylacteries, his countless other duties. In the degree that Philip's enthusiasm for that whole aspect of his existence symbolized by his phylacteries flagged, a process considerably accelerated by the distintegrative tide of Socialism, Reb Monash himself determined that his son's feet should be held forcefully upon the precise road. He frequently threatened a visit to Mr. Furness, an issue to which Philip could not help looking forward with both pleasure and apprehension. Philip had come into contact with the Head Master on very few occasions, during one of which he was soundly snubbed for an effort to display to Mr. Furness how much more intimate was his knowledge of Shelley's philosophy than Mr. Furness'. Yet he felt that there was a faculty in Mr. Furness for seeing with those deep-set stone-blue eyes so deeply into a proposition that the difficult nature of his case would be manifest to him. He felt at the same time a little discomfort at the thought that the distinctly mediocre position he occupied in the fortnightly form lists might attain a prominence he did not desire. But, he reassured himself, there was always time to pick up in that line, when he felt like it; in the meanwhile his friendship with Sewelson was far more absorbing, particularly when it now became an occupation which involved a savour of the perils incident to big game hunting. In short, whenever the opportunity presented itself, he was in Sewelson's company, and whenever Reb Monash discovered the fact he received the punishment he risked.
Dan Jamieson had received a paltry hundred and thirty-five votes at the General Election. But he had brought a blush of intense pleasure and pride to Harry's cheeks by assuring him that to Harry he owed the odd thirty-five.
"The foäk canna stand oop agin a babe!" he declared. Philip was standing by at the time, shyly enough, and Jamieson added kindly, "and I expect another thirty-five voäts from thee, lad, next time we sets ball rollin'!"
Harry refused to let his friend forget the thirty-five votes which were due from him to the Socialist cause. "It's not enough for you," he insisted, "to talk to the chaps at the dinner hour. That's an average of a man a month. I know. I've been doing it. You'll have to get up and spout!"
"Don't be a fool, Harry! You know it's not my line! I'm not old enough, anyhow!"
"Fiddle! What about me?"
Philip's career as an orator began with a question he tried to ask at a Conservative meeting, with a mouth which felt as if it were dilated with an india-rubber ball. No one took the least notice. After many minutes his blush of discomfort faded away, but he swore fervently that he wasn't going to be such a blithering idiot next time. Some days later, when the tide of a Liberal orator's eloquence seemed to be momentarily checked, he burst in shrilly with a long premeditated question, "But what's the good of trying to patch the roof when the foundations are rotten?" The orator closed his mouth with a spasm of fright. A number of heavy democrats in the crowd said genially, "Good for you, sonny! That's stumped him! Yes, what d'you say to that?" they shouted to the orator, "What's the good of trying to patch the roof when the foundations are rotten?"
"My concern is not with children," said the orator unhappily, "I'm after the vote, the men with the vote. I leave it to the other parties to canvass the children!"
"Down with him, down with him!" a woman shrieked excitedly. "He wants to starve the kids!"
"Where's the young 'un? Give him a chance!"
But Philip had withdrawn, having tasted blood. A sweet music was jingling in his ears. He had heard his own voice lifted in the presence of a crowd and the crowd had responded generously. He abandoned momentarily his ambition to become Poet Laureate and determined to shape his course towards the Premiership of the United Kingdom.
Now and again during this period Philip went to have a few words with an old Bridgeway School friend of his who worked in one of the coat and mantle factories bordering the Mitchen. It was an experience which lifted his Socialism from a theory and a somewhat sentimental abstraction to a clamant and immediate need. "Sweated labour" became a phrase which he could endow with the actual physical associations it was intended to conjure. He saw the men in their filthy shirts spitting upon their pressing-irons and the floor indiscriminately. Their sweat fell unregarded on the material below them. The tailors sitting about on the littered tables seemed to be more perversions of men, grotesques, than men actually. The windows were fouled with an opaque mist of dirt and sweat. Little boys shuffled uneasily about like subterranean gnomes. Girls cackled hideously after him, and when the men started an obscene catch which lifted his gorge, girl after girl in the adjoining rooms accepted the sexual challenge and cackled in return. He saw a thick-nosed foreman whose waistcoat glimmered evilly with countless soup droppings fuddling his fingers in the bosom of a girl. He saw another girl, a recent recruit, leaning, ivory-yellow, through a window which looked down on the Mitchen slime. There was no reason why her body should not follow where her eyes looked down so stupidly. What else was there? Nothing but the reeking room and the dirty songs and the swinish waistcoat of the foreman! The picture of this sick girl remained abidingly with him. When Harry turned suddenly to him one evening and announced that he had given Philip's name to the Longton secretary as a speaker for next Sunday evening, at the very moment of dismay and revolt her image came back to him and filled him with a blind fury against the ordinances of men.
"All right, I'll come!" he said thickly. "You know I'll make a filthy mess of it, but that's your fault. I've got nothing to say and I don't know how to say it and I'll just get up and open my mouth and shut it and fall off. Good God, Harry Sewelson, you're a pig!"
"And you're a good Socialist! There's two first-rate lies. It's on the croft outside Longton Park. But don't worry, Philip, old man, you've got the stuff, never fear! Sunday, May the something-or-other, is the date. Anyhow, that doesn't matter, it's next Sunday, at half-past six! So that's all right!"
Philip carefully prepared a little speech. He repeated it several times before his mother, assuring her that it was one of Antony's many orations over the corpse of Cæsar. So long as Philip did not declaim loud enough to wake Reb Monash she was happy enough to listen obediently to Antony's denunciation of the House of Lords.
Next Sunday Philip turned up and sat below the oratorial cart biting his nails nervously and recapitulating his speech. He was called upon immediately after an emancipated coal-heaver, whose jocosity had tickled the crowd into unrest.
When Philip rose blinking and with a heart full of the most unmitigated hatred for Harry, a gentleman adorned with a muffler and a slant Tweed hat exclaimed ribaldly, "Crikey! Look what's come! Johnny, go back to your mummy's titty-bottle!"
There was a prompt evanescence from Philip's brain of his carefully prepared speech. He was at that stage of nervousness which endows its victims with a degree of courage no ordinary frame of mind could conceivably induce. He turned fiercely towards the humorous gentleman and forgetting completely his brothers in the cause who were round him on the cart, forgetting the upturned, sceptical faces of his audience, he vented upon the humorous gentleman so turbid a stream of denunciation, dazzled his head with such a storm of rapiers furnished as much from his own shrill temper as from the prose of Blatchford and the poetry of Shelley, convinced him so thoroughly that both the continuance of the House of Lords along its bloody path of rapacity and the putrefaction of the factories along the Mitchen River were due to his criminal indifference and abysmal stupidity, that the humorous gentleman straightened his Tweed hat, tied his muffler into a different knot, buttoned all the buttons in his jacket, in the vain effort to present as different an appearance as possible from the humorist who had twitted the firebrand on his first appearance upon the platform.
Philip was sweating and shivering when he descended; he was, moreover, consumed with a secret dread lest the object of his denunciations should wait for him in a dark corner to conclude the episode in Philip's disfavour. The Longton secretary shook Philip's hand respectfully as if the limb were made of a clay slightly superior to his own. He checked himself when he found he was addressing Philip as "sir" and substituted "comrade." And Philip, when he descended the Blenheim Road, found himself booked to speak at a meeting on the Longton croft some time ahead.
Philip instinctively realized that whatever the future held in store for him as a speaker (but, to be candid, the glories of the Premiership seemed speedily to dissipate), his talent lay rather in the field of inspiration than of discipline. He knew (and this confirmed his orientation towards the Laureateship) that he would invariably be a catspaw of circumstances either for success or failure, as soon as he had laid aside the pen for the tongue. For this reason he deliberately withheld from theBook of Pros and Cons for Debating Societiesout of which, as his friend confessed, Harry made golden capital. As he sat again below the cart on the evening of his second public appearance, he made a strenuous effort to keep his mind as blank as possible. Overhead his precedent orator was thundering. The sanguine hues of his bellying and flamboyant tie had already won for him half his battle. Who could impeach the politics of a man whose neckwear flung a defiance in the teeth of sunset and whose eloquence paled both? With a consistent massacre of aitches he triumphed across the turbulent field, until at last, when he ended with "and your children will get down on their knees and praise God that their parents took the right path!", the crowd generally, and Philip in particular, were swept high and dry upon the beach of enthusiasm by the wave of the man's argument.
It was impossible to be self-conscious at such a moment. Philip sprang valiantly on to the cart and with tremendous effect his treble, like woodwind ardently repeating the theme of brass, reiterated "and your children will get down on their knees and praise God that their parents took the right path!"
There was no holding him back. Repeatedly he brought his left fist upon the palm of his right hand to clinch his indisputable conclusions. The other speakers on the platform were shocked out of mere admiration into submission to his cogency. Harry could hardly realize that this was the hesitant young friend who followed his lead with such blundering perseverance, and who was, when you came to think of it, rather a muff on the whole. It was a stranger, small, ungainly, irresistible. The crowd below stared, their mouths gaping, their heads swaying slightly to the rhythm of his gestures.
It was an incoherent enough medley, and perhaps the precocity of the youth was more exhibited in the uncanny earnestness of his manner than in the intellectual quality of the stuff he uttered. The crowd he was addressing consisted of serious artisans, night-school-educated clerks, filmy half-existent women, whose mental development at fifty would in all likehood not transcend Harry's at fifteen, to whom they listened indeed, not because they were interested in his crystal arguments, but because his wit, his adroitness, pleased them like the froth on their evening pints. They were therefore an easier prey to Philip's uncouth flood of undigested emotions. He attempted, as often as he remembered this episode, to reconstruct his speech, to examine what potent eloquence had carried himself away even more completely than the crowd. He only remembered the moment when he returned to the concluding remark of the last speaker. "Our fathers," he began, "our fathers have tried ... I say, our fathers ... our fathers ..."
The crowd breathed anxiously. What was happening to the young feller? Had he seen a ghost, he was that pale? He'd been as red as a turkey cock only just now, he had! There weren't no stopping him a minute ago, and now the words were sticking in the back of his throat. It was a shame, it was! It was too much to expect of a kid! Just like these Socialist fellers to put it across a kid once they got hold of him! Couldn't be more than fifteen, or sixteen at the most, he couldn't! It wasn't good enough, don't care what you say! He'd faint if they wasn't careful....
But look, he was starting again.
"Our fathers have tried for all they are worth. Your fathers and mine have tried..." The lad's eyes were starting from his head. He gulped and started again, "Have tried, I say..."
It was as if some spell of physical evocation resided in his words. Whilst his lips were still shaping the first vowel of "fathers," something black and aloof and ominous had drifted from the vague towards the limit of his audience. A tall shining silk hat, familiar symbol of repressions and disaster, threw a deep gloom over against his eyes.
"Our fathers have tried..."
But his own father was here, whose love for him was like hate, and whose hate pierced at once his son's heart and his own. What should he do? It was he, of course it was he! Whose else could those mournful and hostile eyes be, their orbs large with a stricken indignation? There passed across the fringe of his stupor a recollection like the vague white wing of an owl at dayfall. Hadn't his father said something about going to see Dorah up in Longton this evening? Why had he not taken warning and kept away? His father must have noticed from the road some hundred yards away the gathering on the croft against the railings of Longton Park. He must then have determined to go home through the croft instead of down the straight Blenheim Road, so to discover whether the proselytized one, the forbidden Harry Sewelson, was uttering his nefarious doctrine here, with Philip, perhaps, at his feet. And here he stood, his brow contracted with pent fury, biting his upper lip! With what dexterity of the sloping brush had he stroked the silky fibre of his hat to-day! How white, deathly white, was the white bow on his stiff white front! There were signs of white in his black beard. He was getting old, old. His eyes blazed. Old? He was young, proud, strong—younger than his son, young as his race, the eternal child, the stubborn stripling that would not change nor grow though God were visible, though the hills melted, though the stars cried across the void "Lo! you must change or you shall die!"
In this moment with tense clarity an alternative presented itself before Philip's swooning eyes. He might withdraw; he had carried them with him so clearly that they would let him go with but a sympathetic murmur if he stammered out that he was unwell. He could withdraw with grace, and at the same time go to meet the inevitable trouble half-way. There discretion pointed. He must decide at once.
Or else, or else he could set the seal on his victories. He would not have uttered that dismal shout in school vainly, he would not have recanted vainly upon that strange dim night. He would, seeking for courage in the very depth of his spirit, in the very height of this sky where his father and he stood face to face, while Doomington waited, and his race waited, he would gather together once more the reins of his daring. Who should withstand his horses? Who should gainsay the thunder of their nostrils and the death in their feet! Was it his own battle alone that awaited decision? Himself, he existed no more! The unborn brothers of his race, the unborn children of his country, lifted towards him their ghostly hands. Do not desert us, they said, for in a boy's hand lies the issue, and God is silent, waiting that a boy should speak. A boy was he? A boy? He was a man amongst the men of eld! Isaiah was by his side! Dimly the exquisite voice of Shelley said to him, "Do not despair!"
What if it should break him, what if it meant he could never lift his voice again? Yet his voice though silent, his voice though a frail boy's, should be voluminous on the winds of the world, and if his body were cast aside, his heart's blood would be red energy in the hearts of the cohorts of Joy.
His figure suddenly, with the automatic gesture of the marionette, straightened itself. With something of defiance he flung his chest forward and clenched both his fists. A wave of swift colour flushed into his cheeks and as swiftly withdrew. He was speaking once more.
The passion that moved the lad now was too swift merely for swift diction. He spoke evenly, his voice was almost a whisper. The black-bearded man who had stood for some moments on the edge of the crowd, disappeared. No one noticed him. At last Philip dropped loosely into the chair behind him on the cart.
For an hour or two that evening hardly a man moved from the gathering in front of the railings of the Longton Park.
"Come to our house and have some grub!" said Harry apprehensively to Philip, who leaned against the railings, ashen-pale.
Philip turned away wearily. "Go away, Harry, I'm done!" He walked home very slowly, carefully avoiding the lines between the pavement slabs. He trod on the foot of a dignitary from thePolisher Shool, who swore at him and spat into the street.