When the storm had subsided, Philip felt like a sea-battered hulk, shorn of spars, incompetent to face wind and tide. The muscle of his left arm suffered peculiarly. Really, the way it had been wrenched and bruised was almost comical. As if his arm had espoused Blatchford and orated on the waste croft which his father had so persistently misnamed the "Public ways and the market-places." Poor old muscle! He dropped his forearm tenderly to see if the movement did not circle the upper arm with bracelets of fire. He took his shirt off and licked the coloured wound with his tongue, like an animal released from a trap. He stared into a jagged fragment of mirror, and seeing his face so grey and drawn burst unaccountably into a roar of laughter. He drowned the noise at once by biting his lip fiercely. "The Romance of a Brachial Muscle!" What a fine subject for a long narrative poem in countless cantos! Oh, by God, he was miserable! What was wrong with Life? Why were Life and he always at daggers drawn? He recapitulated the sum of his conscious crimes. He had once stolen carrots from the cellar, it was true! But equipoise had been asserted: he had been rewarded by an ample stomach-ache. And finally, when physical calm had been established, to round off his state with spiritual calm, he had bought two penn'orth of carrots and replaced them in the cellar. Also, he was bound to confess, he invariably kept his book open in school during the reciting of prepared passages. But then the boy behind him used his own collar as he himself used the collar of the boy in front. It wasn't really cheating because Gibson was such an ass in so many ways! Anyhow there was no doubt the world hated him. The world had always hated him. He had never got on with anybody in Angel Street. He had a filthy time at school, and then there was all this business, and oh, hell! what a rotten arm he had!
He had determined against committing suicide. He remembered once saying to his mother after a row, saying with a strange mordant humour, "Mother, I think it'll be happier for the whole family if I commit suicide!"
"If thou what? Speak plain!"
"Kill myself! Throw myself in the river!"
She had made no reply. She merely went to the sofa and sat trembling for a few minutes. She said "Feivel!" once, less with reproach than raw, ugly pain. All that day she did her housework unsteadily and said not a word to Philip. He hadn't liked it. No, it was better not to commit suicide. It savoured too imitatively, moreover, of theMighty Atom, whom he had disliked. Then, in addition, the wife of somebody the watchmaker had recently tried it and succeeded. She obviously could have reaped no satisfaction from the episode. If only he could die accidentally! Would even that make his father sorry for his abominable treatment? The youthful corpse would lie on the parlour floor under a black cloth and everybody would sympathize frightfully with his mother and be pointedly chilly towards Reb Monash. Wouldn't he be sick about it! Wouldn't he ask God for another chance to behave like a decent sort of father, but all to no use! There would be his son's pale and romantic corpse lying stately beneath the cloth, with candles and things about. "Easeful Death," one of the poets said somewhere. That wasn't half strong enough. It was a triumph, a pageant! But it meant being carted off, didn't it, to the cold ground somewhere, and the weepers would go away and the candles be extinguished, and the rain would come down, and the coffin be sodden and fall away! That was where the worm-element came in, and with the worm-element he could pretend no sympathy; "where the worm became top-dog," as he had once brilliantly said in comment upon "And the play is the Tragedy, Man—the hero, the Conqueror—Worm!"
It was at this moment that the idea of running away occurred to him. He had lately been reading the triumphant career of a runner-away. Harry had once recommended running away, sceptically enough, but it would be tremendously interesting to take his casual advice seriously. He was quite definitely conscious how melodramatic the idea was, and just as conscious that he had already decided on its execution. The fellow in the book had performed no end of valiant deeds in fires, shipwrecks and revolutions. It was a thin book, duller even than Mr. Henty, whom he had long ago discarded. Of course, he was not going to be taken in by that sort of thing, but any proposal was more satisfactory than the shoutings and the bruised arms of which his life now was constituted.
It was settled! He was going to run away! When? Obviously now, at once! There was no point in to-morrow. To-morrow would be like yesterday. It was evening now. He'd set out and by the time night came ... Oh, there wasn't any need to worry about it! Something would happen. Something always happened, Yet everything was rather frighteningly vague. Was there any need to carry anything off with him? Doubtless it would be more independent and proud to go just as he was, and he wouldn't need an overcoat for months. Oh yes, he might as well stick that Shelley in his pocket. He would finish the "Revolt of Islam," though he had tried three times already. He lifted his injured arm to reach the book and dropped it again, wincing. He sat down before his rickety table, and wrote a brief note to his mother, slipped it into an envelope and descended into the kitchen. He looked mournfully and significantly upon his mother, murmuring to himself bitterly, "If she only knew!" He felt a disgraceful impulse to utter a loud howl of remorse, but manfully repressed it and, realizing that each moment in the kitchen endangered his resolution, went to the door. As he closed the door behind him, he dropped the envelope through.
He carefully examined his feelings. He was running away, wasn't he? It was the most dramatic moment in all his life. There had been psychological crises before, but here was something palpable, dramatic. He was putting himself into immediate communion with some of the choicest spirits of history or legend. Not many other chaps dared do this sort of thing. Then why on earth wasn't he more excited about it? His heart ought to be storming valiantly, but its workings seemed to respect their usual method and speed. He only felt a little dazed and stupid. He was under the ridiculous impression he was only acting! That was absurd, at such a crisis! The vague, the vast, into which he was adventuring, were not merely uninviting, they were, in some inexplicable fashion, not even there. Home and his father and his mother and his arm, all these were realities enough, and the only realities. But this running away, upon which at this very moment he was actually embarked, was a thin dream. And here was another reality, here was Channah coming down the street.
"Good-bye, Channah!" he said darkly.
"You're not off to a meeting?" she ventured confidently.
"Oh no! Oh no!" he replied gloomily. She walked on. It was necessary to be moving. She would probably find the note and the finding would lead to immediate results. He ran along into Doomington Road, and almost mechanically turned up into Blenheim Road. They'd not know which way he was going, he needn't fear that. He slowed down and sauntered along. Where the devil should he go now? that question ought to be decided. His mind was torpid. No sooner was the question formulated than it passed from his mind. Somebody was gesticulating to a crowd on the croft. Aimlessly he turned in that direction. They were talking about Tariff Reform, statistics, Poor Laws, molasses and things. He lacked the resolution to go further, so he stood, neither listening nor thinking, just dull, dimly unhappy.
He felt an arm slip round his neck. An anguished voice said, "Philip, don't be such a donkey! Mother's half-mad with worry, youmeshugener! Is this your idea of a joke, you little fool?"
Channah must have realized which way his steps would instinctively turn.
Philip threw the arm off and turned to a dishevelled Channah. "I'm not a fool! I'm dead sick of him and I'm going to get out of it!"
"Where?" she asked.
"Anywhere!" he exclaimed desperately.
"Come on now, there's a good lad!" She got hold of his arm. "He'll not know anything about it if you come at once!"
"I want him to know! Let go! Oh, you won't, won't you? There!" He wrenched his arm free. He fled along the croft and found his sister following in forlorn pursuit. When he had put a safe distance between them he turned round. Channah was standing, wringing her hands, and her hair, escaped from her combs and pins, flew about her head. It made him feel an unutterable scoundrel. He knew that he was acting like a fool and a blackguard! "Come home, Philip, oh, do come home!" her voice shrilled.
But he couldn't. He had a little dignity after all. He was getting on in life and it was about time he could think out and pursue his own plan of campaign.
"I can't!" he said. "Give Mother my love! Good-bye! Tell her it's not my fault!" he insisted anxiously. "Good-bye!"
He followed up the road and left Channah standing blankly. Definitely he was running away. An almost complete numbness now gripped his brain. He had a faint idea of getting out into the country but he found himself penetrating deeper and deeper into the town. Night was gathering thickly over Doomington. He felt too stupid even to be aware of his hunger. For hours and hours, it seemed, he walked through the dark streets. Indifferent people jostled him into the roadway. Every now and again he found his journeying had brought him before the same ugly squat little church. He must get out of this. He turned off in a direction he was certain he had not pursued before. He found himself in a murky hidden square, with feet heavy as blocks of stone. Blocks of stone seemed to be tugging his eyelids down to close over his eyes. He was suddenly aware of a tremendous need of sleep. There was a form in the flagged path which led through the square. A man and a woman were sitting very close together on it; but there was room for him. He threw himself down and his head fell immediately upon his chest. He plunged at once into a tired sleep. When he awoke, it was very dark and quiet. He remembered that there had been a man and a woman beside him, but they had moved away! What was it he was doing here? Of course, he'd run away! What a thick heavy business it was, running away! How many hours ago was it since he had started? Nothing had happened yet. Nothing. He just felt foolish and extremely miserable. Well, he must keep going till something did happen. As he rose, he heard the bell in the steeple over him toll hollowly. One o'clock! Oh, the desolate hour! Somewhere deep in Doomington, alone, hungry, tired, at one o'clock! He shuffled wearily from the square and up through one or two towering and narrow streets. He heard a man prowling about in a doorway. His heart stood still with terror. Steps came forward and a lantern surrounded him with ghostly light. A policeman peered suspiciously into his face and lumbered on. Here was a main road. How wide and lonely and terrible it was! He dared not stand still, the policeman would come after him and ask questions which he would not be able to answer. He must keep moving, moving, God knew where, but moving. His feet made an alarming sound on the deserted pavements. Oh, what was he doing here? Why hadn't he waited till he got some money from somewhere, somehow, before he ran away? How formidably the doorways were barred against him! The plate-glass windows stared leering with baleful eyes. Some one had moved from a side street into the main road and was coming towards him. A lady it was. A real lady too, she seemed, as she came nearer and he saw the opulent nature of her clothing. Her skirts swished richly. There was a feather bobbing over the side of her hat. Channah had only one feather which she kept securely from year to year, dyeing it occasionally. There were three feathers in the lady's hat. What was she doing out just now? She couldn't possibly be running away, like himself. She was rather fat, she ought to be quite a decent sort. She introduced a sense of companionship into the appalling void of night. Joy! She had stopped and was talking to him!
"Well, cockie!" she said, "it's rather late for a little 'un!"
"Yes, ma'am!" he said respectfully.
"Haven't you got a home? You look all right, your clothes and that!"
"Yes, I have got a home!"
"'Xcuse my asking like, but why aren't you in it? It's gone two, you know!"
"Well, because ... it's because ... I ... I mean, he ..."
"Oh, I understand, cockie!" she said kindly. "He's been and gone and chucked you out like, eh?"
"Hehasn'tchucked me out!" declared Philip hotly. "I've chucked myself out. I've run away from home!"
"Phew!" she whistled. "That's the ticket, eh? You're a plucked 'un! But what are you going to do now?"
"I don't know. Just walk, I suppose. I'll see!"
"I like you, sonnie, I like your voice. Let's keep on, it'll never do to stand in one place, they don't like it. Just come to the lamp there. I'd like to look at you!"
He found that a large, warm, somewhat flabby hand had taken his own. They walked together to a lamp. His friend got hold of his forehead with one hand and his chin with the other, and exposed his face to the falling lamplight. He caught a glimpse of the lady's face above the heavy chain of rolled gold that lay on her bosom. Her face was pallid round the fringes of the cheeks and on the tip of her nose, and by contrast, her cheeks were singularly red. Her lips too were red, quite unlike the red of Channah's lips and his mother's. It was a sleepy, fat face, rather kindly. There was something strange about her eyes, something like—well, funny eyes, anyhow! Hungry eyes they were, a little wild, yet they were sleepy and kind, too. Surely her breath didn't smell the least bit of beer? No, not such a thoroughly estimable lady! Perhaps it was beer ... the poor lady had to take for her health?
"Sonnie!" she said. "You've been having a heavy time, eh? Poor kid! You've got nice eyes, you know! Be careful what you do with 'em. It was eyes like yours what did for Bertha. Poor Bertha! She was a slim lass once, Prayer Book and all, and parasol on Sundays, all complete!"
"Who's Bertha, please?"
"Hush, sonnie, hush, I'm talking! Bertha? Don't tell Reginald—I'm Bertha! He wasn't a big feller neither, what done her in! And it wasn't for money, anyways,Ican tell you. Love it was, and it isn't all the girls can say that! And he went with his lips this way and with his eyes that way, and where was you? Yes, he had eyes just like yours, Arthur! Your name is Arthur, isn't it?"
"No, my name's Philip!"
"Oh, we are a gentleman, aren't we? 'No, my name's Philip!' Haw! haw! Your name's not Philip, see? Your name's Arthur! What's good enough for him is good enough foryou, Arthur. So there, Arthur! ... I'm sorry, kid, I'm not laughing at you. You see, I'm feeling all funny like...." She passed the back of her hand across her forehead. A big bead of clammy sweat was thrust backward into the maze of her yellowish hair. "To tell you the honest, Arthur," she whispered, leaning over towards the boy, "he's been and pitched me out!" She lifted her voice. "Pitched me out, he has, the dirty heathen, at two o'clock in the morning! After all the times we've had together. Scarborough! Oh, Scarborough! The waiters stand round you and says 'Lobster, ma'am,withhock?' polite as polite! And here am I! Not good enough for the likes of him, ain't I? I'll show him up! Pitched me out...." She took a fluffy handkerchief from the depths of her blouse and tapped each eye.
"I beg your pardon," said Philip with uneasy politeness, "have you had to leave home too?"
"Home, sonnie, home? I've got ahome! Oh, it's all right about myhome! But now and again a night out, eh, is the goods for Bertha! I'm one of the girls! I'm a bird! I'm not too particular about my perch, though Ihavegot a little perch of my own! But I was ... hello! Some one's coming! Can you see who it is?"
"Yes," said Philip. "It's a policeman, I think!"
She whispered into his ear anxiously. "Listen, I'm going to be your ma when he comes up, if he asks things. Understand? You've got the sick sudden, and I thought a walk would settle your stomach. Now...."
The policeman advanced and halted. "Hello, missus!" he said. "Burglars or what?"
"No, constable," replied the lady with quiet dignity, "my poor Arthur's got a touch of the colic so I thought it best to give him a breath of air like." She was wiping Philip's forehead with the little handkerchief. "Are you feeling better now, Arthur boy?"
"Best go and stow him between the sheets, lady. He'll catch his death in the damp air," the policeman growled amiably, and walked away.
The situation was altogether so inexplicable that Philip clutched feebly after the expression "I'm a bird!" as a clue which might perhaps lead him through the maze.
"A bird?" he asked. "Do you mean you sell birds?"
"Now youarea funny kid. No, I don't sell birds. Leastwise, I only sell one bird. See? That's a joke like. Ec, Arthur, but I did feel all goosy when that policeman came, didn't you? My heart's going like a pendulick yet, up and down, down and up. Well, I hopes your kidneys are better, anyhow. But youdolook pale, kid! Anything wrong! How old did you say you was? Fourteen and a half? So am I, next birthday, ha, ha! Fourteen and a half! What must it be like to have a kid fourteen and a half? Sometimes I wishes ..."
"Have you got no children yourself, ma'am?"
"What do you mean by asking me questions, Arthur? An honest woman like me! If it hadn't been for you, Arthur, and that time you kissed me under the mulberry tree ... Remember? Oh kid, kid, I'm all sort of melted inside! Is your mother still living? She is, is she? Does she ever kiss you, Arthur? Here, like this, on your lips ... like this ... like this ... Oh, my Arthur boy!"
She had seized him round the shoulders. Her great soft lips were hungrily raining kisses on his own. And her breath smelt beerily.
"Let me go!" he shouted with sudden fright. "Who are you? What do you want?" He broke away and rubbed his lips savagely with his sleeve.
She was mopping large tears from her eyes. "Oh, I'm lonely, I'm so lonely!" she moaned. "He's gone and pitched me out and here's Arthur, and he shakes me off like a dog. Why ever was I born, God help me!"
A swift intense pang gripped Philip's stomach. He staggered against the wall. Globes of red fire juggled before his eyes.
"What's the matter? I didn't mean anything!" the woman exclaimed with alarm. "Tell me what's wrong!"
"I'm ... I'm ... hungry! ..." moaned Philip.
"Hungry? When did you last have a bite?"
"Dinner-time!"
"And what have you been doing since?"
"I don't know! I'm only hungry!"
"Oh, poor dove, poor dove! Hungry are you? And here was me standing and you hungry and standing I was and talking, talking. Come to his own Bertha's. Come to my little perch, Arthur, sonnie, and I'll soon set you right. What about a rasher, eh, and some new bread and butter and a cup of strong hot tea? I'll put him on his little feet again! This way, sonnie ... Lord God, what a life is Bertha's! It ain't far. It's just beyond the church straight along and the second to the left ... unsteady on his legs, he's that hungry...! Come with Bertha!"
Again Philip's hand was enclosed in the hand of the lady. Nothing in the world mattered except that strong hot cup of tea, that bread and butter, that rasher, whatever a rasher was! As they walked through the empty streets, the kettle boiled before him on a fire of mirage, the slaver of his hunger rimmed his tongue, the "rasher" was frying ghostlily like a tail of fish on his mother's pan.
He heard her moaning musically over his head, like the doves in the immemorial elms. It was a strange farrago of Arthurs and Berthas and mulberry trees. He made no effort to follow the wanderings of her mind, which now and again would reach indignantly the brick wall of her late dismissal. Street succeeded street blankly and he found her shuffling at last for a key. They entered the dark lobby of a house.
"Go quiet, kid!" she murmured, "Rosie's got a pal in the parlour to-night, I think!"
They entered a room and the lady lit the gas, revealing a large soft bed that dominated the apartment. There was a table in a corner where stood a few utensils and a portable cooking-jet on a small round of oilcloth.
"I'll tell you what, Arthur!" she said, "You'd best undress yourself and get into bed. I'll get your rasher ready in a jiffy."
Philip looked shyly up to her. He was not too faint to be unaffected by the thought of undressing before a strange lady. "I don't like," he muttered.
"It's all right," she assured him, "I'm used to it!"
"Perhaps you've got boys of your own?" Philip suggested helpfully.
"Oh yes, I've got lots of boys!"
He was tremendously tired. How invitingly that soft bed displayed its fat pillows. "I say, please!" he said awkwardly. "Will you look the other way?"
She tittered soundlessly. He saw she had a succession of chins and that each vibrated to her mirth. "All right, kid, I'm getting on with the food." As he undressed, she cut the white bread into healthy slices and buttered them abundantly. Drowsily he saw her making the tea and he was almost asleep when he heard a loud simmering in a pan. He looked up, his mouth watering, and saw, impaled on her fork, a semi-translucent wafer of striped meat. He shook off the mist of sleep. "Tell me, if you don't mind. Is that a rasher?"
"Of course it is!"
"What is a rasher?"
"Bless my soul, bacon,ofcourse!"
"Please, please!" he exclaimed. "I daren't eat bacon. I can't eat bacon!"
"That's how it is, is it?" She came closer curiously and examined his face. "Hum, yes! You're a little Jew-boy, aren't you?"
"I am!" He wondered what it was going to mean. Would she send him back into the night hungry, faint to death? Who could fathom the attitude of a given Gentile, man or woman, towards any accidental Jew-boy?
"Funny!" she pondered. "One Jew-boy pushes me out and I takes another Jew-boy in! All right, Arthur! Nothing's going to happen. You're still my own Arthur! Don't get frightened. But if you won't have bacon, you can only have sardines. I wasn't expecting no visitors to-night."
"Anything!" he murmured weakly.
He ate greedily. She took the food away when he had finished and sat by the bedside, looking into his face. She held his hand between her own soft hands. In two moments he was asleep.
When he awoke next morning amid the clank of trams and the calling of boys, he found himself embraced by two great white arms. With a sudden shudder of realization, the events of yesterday and last night came back to him. The lady who had been so kind had gone into bed after him. It was rather stifling in the bed, he didn't like it! He didn't like lying in the arms of a strange lady. A qualm of dislike passed over him. As gently as possible, so as not to waken her, he slipped from her arms and from the bed and started to dress. Her face was distinctly unpleasant in the cold morning light. It was heavy and layers of fat swelled all round it. She had been crying, for the marks of tears ran dirtily down the bleared crimson of her cheeks. Her hair lay about lankly on the pillow. Yet there was something unutterably pathetic about her expression. How could he show her his gratitude? Where would he have been without her?
"It's all right, Arthur," he heard her say. "I know you're getting up. It's all right, just keep on dressing!" She did not open her eyes.
"I want to thank you very much!" he said lamely.
"No, kid, I want to thank you. I've never had it before. I don't suppose it'll ever come again. If ever you tells your mother about it, just say as Bertha thanks her. She's a mother and she'll understand maybe. So long, kiddie, so long!"
He was fully dressed. He made a movement in her direction. "No, kid. Don't shake my hand. Don't touch me. Before you have anything to do with Bertha again, just walk into the river without looking where you're going. Go away, for God's sake, go away! You'll find the front door open! Go back home! Your mother wants you!" Her unwieldy body turned round on the bed and the great face was buried in the pillow. He stole from the room, down the stairs, and through the front door. The door closed behind him and he saw a milk cart drive by cheerily. Suddenly the figure of the strange kind lady became terrible and sad and very remote. He turned away from her house. Mechanically he set his face in the direction of home.
If Philip's oration on the croft, despite its immediate consequences, had been a triumph for Philip, the fatality which had irresistibly drawn his feet homeward after his escapade with Bertha, without any reference to his will, was a triumph, if that was not too vulgar a word, for Reb Monash. It made clear to both the father and the son that Philip could not yet exist on his own initiative; however refractory a cog he was in the machinery of the house in Angel Street, that machinery was still the condition of his existence at all. It was the consciousness that this position had been made starkly clear by the issue of this latest event, and that this latest event was itself so tangible a grievance, that induced Reb Monash to interview Mr. Furness. After school on that same day, summoned by a special note from the Head, Philip stood apprehensively outside his door. He knocked timidly. A tremendous bellow filled the room and came gustily out into the corridor.
"COME in!" the first word reduplicate and reverberant like a shout in the cleft of hills. Philip entered, his ears singing. But the next moment the shout ebbed wholly from his ears when he saw Mr. Furness rise and come towards him with a smile at once admonitory and encouraging.
"Well, Philip, how are you?"
"I'm all right, sir, thank you, sir!"
"Who is the latest poet? Still Shelley? Keep to Shelley, Philip; he knew more of the spirit of God than all the churches!"
"I've been reading Edgar Allan Poe, sir."
"Humph! I'm not so sure! Unhealthy, morbid! Hard time, poor fellow, on the other hand! Don't overdo him!"
"No, sir!"
"But to the matter in hand. You know why I've sent for you?"
"Yes, sir. He told me he was coming, sir."
"Your father's a great man, Philip. If in twenty years you're half the man he is, I'll be proud of you. You've been distressing him, he tells me. He's very concerned about you. Come now, what's wrong?"
"I can't explain, sir. We're different."
"You ran away from home lately and were out all night?"
Philip bit his lip. "Yes, sir."
"You're too old for that mock-romantic sort of thing. There's a strain of it in your essays. Mr. Gibson sent me up your essay on Julius Cæsar—something about 'he shall endure while the luminaries of history rot in oblivion!' Luminaries don't rot. Leave all that to the journalists, my boy, you can do better stuff. It wasn't only mock-romantic, it was cruel! Can you imagine how your mother slept that night? I'm rather ashamed of you. It was selfish. It was a pose."
"But you don't know, sir, what had happened the day before. I was nearly dead."
"I can understand. Public speaking, Socialism! All in their time! You're forcing things, you'll burn out and be cinders when you ought to be a man. No, you've not got the foundation for it. You've been slacking in form. What is it you go to poetry for, do you know?"
"I can't say, sir. Beauty, perhaps?"
"Yes, beauty! You don't know the beauty of labour, though. When you've mastered your Cæsar and your Greek Grammar—dull work, my boy, dull work!—you'll find poetry finer than Shelley, the poetry Shelley thought made his own like a marsh-lamp, the poetry of the Greeks. You started well, but your place in form has been going down steadily. Listen, Philip," he drew the boy nearer to him, "there's the question of your scholarship. Think what it'll mean to her if anything happened to your scholarship. You're not going to allow it, are you? And if you go down as steadily as you have been going down of late, I don't see what else can happen. What do you feel?"
There was a lump in Philip's throat. "I don't want anything to happen which will hurt her."
"Well, Philip, we understand each other. Put your hand to the plough like a man. Make a clean furrow and a deep one. I don't think we need say more, need we? Come and see me when you've made a fresh discovery in poetry, we'll talk about him. So good-bye now, Philip!"
Philip took the big man's hand and withdrew, feeling at once tearful, chastened, and absurdly exalted, and a solemn determination now possessed him to do some serious work before the examination which ended the year. Every evening he withdrew to his own back room which, out of most unpromising materials, his mother had converted into the semblance of a study. She had inserted ledges into soap boxes where his textbooks and poets were ranged above frills of pinky-white paper. She had covered the doddering table with a neat piece of parti-coloured cloth. A few bright pictures from magazines were tacked upon the walls. In recognition of the new spirit of industry earnestly avowed before her she substituted for the deficiently-seated chair a rocking-chair which gave Philip an especial delight and won him to sympathy with aorist tenses and the optative mood. Not a word passed between Reb Monash and Philip. No current of sympathy ran to connect them. Philip displayed no readiness to compromise in the matter of a more ardent ritual. He would gabble off his prayers as quickly as possible, and then, with no attempt to hide his relief, turn to his books. His prayers were still tolerable, if barely, during the period when he lavished his enthusiasm on active Socialism. Now that he began to forswear his Socialistic delights, they began to be dust in his mouth. The half-hour long morning prayers of which he might understand one word in twenty, so wrought upon his nerves, that he felt like crying aloud sharply, particularly during that section of the devotion when he stood towards the East, placing together the inner sides of his feet, looking blankly through the wall into nothingness. One morning, during the sheer meaningless drift of his utterance, he curiously found himself repeating something of sweet and significant import. He was reciting, not the torpid Hebrew, but the languorous chimes of "Ulalume." Delightedly he continued the poem to its end and once more repeated it, till he realized that the time expected from him in the recapitulation of the "Nineteen Prayers" was at an end. He completed his morning's devotion with "Alastor." He had made a valuable discovery. The ennui of prayer was not now to gloom his faculties thrice daily. He could now pass in pageant before him all the comely shapes of poetry he had known.
He at no time made the definite discovery that Reb Monash had realized his substitution of poetry for prayer. If Reb Monash had made the discovery, it was not succeeded by such immediate castigation as Philip knew well. It was as if Reb Monash had at last found out that at the end of these episodes the cause of piety, if anything, was weaker in his son's bosom than before. Darkness gathered over the house in Angel Street. A dim premonition of failure had settled upon Reb Monash's eyes, but sternly he fought against it. Mrs. Massel moved wanly and fearfully about the house, fearful of satisfying her hunger for Philip with a stroke of the hand or a word. Channah stayed out as long and discreetly as possible with her friends. A silence hung over the house, for Reb Monash's popularity as a raconteur was at an end. Not for years had the gathering in the kitchen taken place, where, centrally, Mrs. Levine sniffed, and the tale of Rochke's interment was told 'mid indignation and tears. Only at night was the silence broken when Philip had taken his books down to study in the kitchen and Mr. and Mrs. Massel had gone to bed. Then for an hour, or for two hours, Reb Monash would recount the iniquities of his son in a voice of loud, persistent monotony, still persistent while the advance of sleep was clogging its clarity.
Peculiarly Philip resented the incident of the rocking-chair. He had betrayed his liking for the chair in a casual conversation, comparing it with the inadequacy of the chair it had superseded. He found next day that his father had removed the chair. It was not wanted nor used by Reb Monash. It was, he reflected bitterly, pure dislike of the thought that he should enjoy even so feeble a pleasure as this. The action seemed almost automatic on the part of Reb Monash and was significant of the whole relation between the father and son.
As Philip sat on the lame, cracking chair before his table, the pointlessness of it worked him up to a white heat. It was not merely pointless. It lacked dignity. Reb Monash was the symbol of the older world, with iron and austere traditions, with a forehead lit by the far lights of antiquity. But the incident of the rocking-chair stood stupidly out of keeping with the conflict of which now Philip was becoming intellectually conscious.
At this time, too, the domestic finances were more miserable than they had ever been before. The threat began to take shape that, at the end of the year, with the conclusion of his present scholarship, Philip would be expected to bring in his contribution to the household. All the more passionately, therefore, Philip applied himself to his books in the hope of a continuance of his scholarship allowance. Each evening, when the big kitchen table was cleared, he descended from the room upstairs with its meagre table and spread his books over the whole extent of the kitchen table. It was understood that in the constriction of finances, Philip was on no account to work by gaslight, a single candle being, Reb Monash affirmed, more than expensive enough.
In truth these nights were cheerless almost as a charnel-house. It was not merely that the ghost of his mother seemed always hovering ineffectually about the room, as if she lifted her hands for a peace which came not, or that his own personality surged uneasily and wretchedly in undecided war against the immanent personality of his father. Presences more tangible and numerous filled the room with detestable sounds. Black, heavy beetles came drowsily and innumerably ambling from the wainscotting and from among the embers of the extinguished fire. He could hear them crackling and rustling where the wall-paper had swollen from the wall. They filled him with loathing. They were the quintessence of the ugliness of Doomington; but much of Doomington had been charmed away for him by poetry, the beetles no charm could exorcise. Sometimes his hatred so swept him away that he ran about the room, treading quashily on the hordes of beetles where they lumbered along the floor. But the more their black bodies burst into white paste below his boot, the more unconcernedly they emerged from their hiding places. They seemed in their pompous progression to wink and leer at him, where the dim light of the candle caught their oily shells. Then a nausea gripped him, his feet were sticky and unclean, the gall churned in his body. They crept on the table sometimes, they dropped with a sucking thud from the bulging whitewash of the ceiling. Once he lifted a glass of water from the table to his lips and found his lips in contact with the body of a beetle on the rim. That night he was so wild with terror that he lit the gas—unconscionable extravagance, but as he sat feebly in the chair, he could hear the foul battalions rustling, whispering, smirking towards their chinks.
His eyes had always been weak. The working by candle-light gave him so much pain that he now formed the habit of lighting the gas when the last syllables of the monologue upstairs had died away. One night he left the kitchen-door open and the light staggered out into the hall. A dim beam thrown upward somehow attracted the attention of Reb Monash, who had ceased intoning that night more from weariness than sleep. A shout of anger filled the house. Tremblingly Philip extinguished the gas and pored aching over his texts by dim candle-light. It was with infinite caution, and when his eyes stood almost blindly in his skull, that now he ventured to light the gas. More than an hour after midnight on one occasion he stood on the table and applied the candle to the gas-jet. It was a heavy and oppressive night, but he had much work to do; the examinations were at hand. Again a long time passed. The sweat stood clammily on Philip's head. His lungs gaped for air. He placed a chair against the door and held it half-open, so that, while a little light escaped, a little air came in. Once more he buried himself deep in his work. Wearily his eyes went on from page to page. He entered almost into a trance of dull pre-occupation with the lifeless books. Nothing existed for him beyond the poor round of grammar, dictionary, text, notebook. Life was neither a freedom nor a slavery; it was a concentration upon unimportant importances, emptily insistent upon themselves. The sense which informed him that Reb Monash stood at the door was neither sight nor sound. He wasawareof his presence. His heart seemed to flicker hesitantly down the depths of his being, until it left a blank behind his ribs, where a mouth entered whose teeth were fear and pain and anger. Anger! Surely it was not right for any man, in any relation, let alone a father, to steal like a criminal from his bed, soundlessly, terribly, and stand there with shut, pale lips! There were limits to the methods correct in the most comprehensive fatherhood. And his crime? He was doing his work, nothing more than his work! His tongue was chafed and sick. Perhaps it was an illusion after all. Surely he was alone, he had heard nothing. He lifted his eyes. The actual physical presence of Reb Monash struck him sharply and heavily like a blow on the cheek. He gasped with fright. He stood there forbidding and dark, but a strange light round him and his dim nightclothes. He was supernatural. He stood there taut with hate. He said not a word. Philip's jaw relaxed, his eyes staring dazed into his father's eyes. They stared at each other across a gulf of deafening noise and of ghastly silence. Whose feet had brought him down silent as death from his bed, who invested him with that cadaverous power? Illimitably beyond him stretched ancestral influences into the bowels of time. There was one slipping away, fruit of their loins, one for whom each had been a Christ crucified, slipping from the fold of their pride into the pagan vast. Behind the boy's head boyish presences groped towards him....
The spell was snapped by a hurried pattering of feet downstairs. The scared face of Mrs. Massel appeared.
"What dost thou mean?" she wailed, "what dost thou mean? Go! Touch him not! He might have died with fright! What art thou? What dost thou mean by it?" She had at last asserted herself. With weak hands she pushed him away from the door. "Come, leave the boy! He will go to bed at once! See, his face is like a tablecloth! Come, oi, oi, come!"
"Go thou in front!" said Reb Monash. He entered the kitchen, where Philip cowered on his chair. He turned out the gas and without a word went upstairs to his room. A dull idiocy numbed Philip's brain. He put his head down between his hands, and it slipped before long on to the table. Here Mrs. Massel found him after some hours when she came down to light the fire. As he shook himself, a beetle fell sleepily from his sleeve.
Some time previously, in the spring of the same year, the walls of Doomington had fallen to their last stone upon the blast of the trumpets of spring. Philip and Harry had adventured one afternoon beyond the moor called "Baxter's Hill" at the north of the town and found themselves by the side of a Mitchen distinctly cleaner than the river which flowed behind the wire factory at the bottom of Angel Street. They had walked up-stream for several miles out to a place of fresh fields and young lambs skipping. It was true that chimneys still punctuated every horizon with smoky fingers. But here and there were thickets of trees where the lads lay embowered in green peace, conscious of thick grass only and the speech of leaves. They both claimed the distinction of having first sighted the shimmering and enchanted carpet of blue below a sun-pierced canopy of foliage. Here they abandoned themselves to the first wild rapture of Spring—the first rapture of Spring Philip had known—burying their faces among the dewy bells. Further and further to the dusk they went, until a new town, flinging its van to meet them and to meet the Spring in their button-holes and hearts, said, "Advance no more!" Weary and sleepy and very hungry they came home that night, but their arms were lush with heaped bluebells and the knowledge of Spring was steady in them. They knew a place where Doomington was a lie and earth was soft.
Into this place, in the attenuated figure of Alec Segal, the "clever devil" whose acquaintance Philip had made several months ago, came Atheism. The recent years of his history had not left Philip wholly unprepared for the assault against Judaism. But when Segal said casually that the Holy Bible's self was just a bundle of musty papyri, and God a dispensable formula, he was painfully shocked.
"Look here, Segal!" he said, "How can you say such a thing? Anything might happen to a chap!"
Segal took off his cap and made an awkward gesture towards the implicit deity. "Right-ho!" he exclaimed, "Happen away!"
Philip held his breath for a moment. Nothing took place. Only a cow mooed contentedly.
Segal was slightly taller than Harry and a little his senior. The angle of his nose related him more directly than either of his two friends to the root stock of his race. Yet he had neither the Heinesque vehemence of the one nor the inveterate romance of the other. He could, in fact, hardly be thought of in terms of character. He seemed to be the sum of certain intellectual qualities. His sole morbidity was a ruthless passion for logic. Poetry, which in various ways had brought the three youths together, interested him, but neither for ethical nor for æsthetic reasons. Each poem was an interesting proposition in itself, like a mixture in a test tube at his school laboratory. It had the mechanical attributes of rhythm and rhyme and metaphor constructing a mechanical whole.
But on thinking the matter over, after frequent and painful discussion, Philip realized that Segal's attitude so shocked him because it dared to put into blunt words something he had long been timorously feeling. By the Bible, of course, Segal meant religion generally. The Bible was the foundation of Judaism and therefore of Christianity, which, he had long ago decided, in any case hadn't much claim to serious consideration. His own remark had been sound enough; he had declared that the disappearance of religion would leave the world "jolly empty." But empty of what things? Empty as a garden without weeds. What stupidity, cruelty, ignorance, flourished below the damp boughs of religion from border to border of the world! And what things would still flourish if religion were cut down! Tall trees of liberty, fine flowers of poetry!
What was it he had always felt wrong with Judaism? What did it lack? It was a quality not entirely missing even from the garbled Christianity that came his way. The Baptist Missionary Chapel was as fervent an enemy of this quality as the most vigorous Judaism. But dim intimations had come by him on the wind of another Christian spirit. Here there were white lilies and blue gowns pointed with stars; there was soft singing at evening and the burning of many candles; there were superb altars, marble and kingly. Superb altars—the Baptist Missionary Chapel! Christianity contained both. But this quality was eternally triumphant in the grand false superstitions of Greece and Rome. Here there were white pillars in a noon of hyacinth; baskets of wrought gold held violets and primroses; there were processions of chiselled gods before whom maidens scattered a long foam of petals; there were lads running races and the wind was in their hair; the wind was a god, there were gods in the thickets of olive and in the translucent caves of the sea.
Beauty! Poetry! This was what he needed most. This was what that old world gave. What delight did his fathers know, generation beyond generation, in the comely things of the world? What statuary had come down and what pictures of burnished gold and azure? What dances were there to the rising sun and in procession with the slow stars? If any of his fathers had made him a graven image, he was stoned and the thunders of those hoary enemies of lovely things shook over the cowering tribes. There had descended to him a tradition of tragedy and pride. Of beauty, none. There was, for example, theshool. How the air was foetid! How the walls were bare! How the hangings before the ark were tawdry! How the prayers were raucous, how the air drooped for lack of poetry!
Ah! the sense of relief which began to possess him when now, throwing forward his chest, and breathing even in midmost Doomington the deep air of liberty, he realized how vain were all his innumerable ceremonies; that God did not require of him these things and these; He did not sit there watchfully counting the syllables of prayer His votaries uttered, sit there like a miser counting his pieces of gold; that the subterfuges and evasions of ritual which had given him frequent unease were not fraught with more than a merely local and temporary danger. Forward from phylacteries! They had slipped from his arms like manacles. They lay discarded like the slough of a serpent, coiled round his feet. What there was now of poetry in the Feast of Tabernacles, in the prophetic and vague beards of the old men, in the synagogue-chanting on darkening Saturday evenings, in the mingled array of the Passover Tables, in the puckered faces of the antique women muttering their year-long prayers, in the blast of the liberating horn upon the Fast of Atonement—what there was of poetry in them, he was free to understand; for they were shorn of all that had made them forbidding; they were not symbols of dark terror, they were pathways into the heart of the world. And with these he was free to understand what there was of poetry in the vague Christian lilies, in the burning of candles before the shrines of picturesque saints, brothers of those other and marble gods. All that these Greek gods had of poetry and all their groves and their broad-browed morning lads and the virginal worshippers before those altars of poetry—all, all these things were his. He was winning to freedom after much slavery.
But the acceptance of a general diminution in the divine attributes, through which the Godhead gradually became a vague half-credible abstraction, was attended by a campaign much more injurious to Philip's ease. His elders had approached God with as much terror as understanding when they made any advances in the celestial direction. It was reassuring to realize that if God was being divested of His raiment of love, He was losing proportionately the lightning of His jealousy and the bolt of His somewhat sectarian wrath. Yet simultaneously, as Segal and Harry agreed with no apparent remorse, it was imperative to abandon the immortality of the soul. To Philip there was something homicidal, matricidal, in the facile way with which they consigned to worms as their ultimate doom the folk whom they might be expected to love most dearly. They admitted it was an unpleasant pill to swallow, but in the wind of truth their personal predilections, they avowed, were as chaff! Who were they to stand up against Logic, against Law? "Truth the grand," a poet had said, "has blown my dreams into grains of sand!"
Segal remained imperturbable amid the crash of boyish comfort and illusion. His own extinction being the disintegration of a number of acute faculties, there would be no wraith of frustrated passion and insatiate hungers to move forlornly through the Godless void. There was a keen, bright fascination in this self-sufficiency for both the tempestuous utilitarianism of Harry and the inchoate poetry of Philip for whom this friendship involved almost a pungent ecstasy of self-extinction, like the repeated assault of the moth against the poised, unreluctant flame. These conclusions plunged Harry into a more fiery round of Socialistic activities than he had yet known. If the oppressed classes of the world would in no future state achieve equality, if the capitalists in no democracy of spirits would be set by counter-balance to hew wood and draw water for wage slaves there triumphant, all the more reason then to achieve an earthly Utopia, to rouse young Doomington to a sense of its manifold wrongs and, in the concrete, to stand as Socialist candidate for the coming parliamentary election at the Highfield Grade School. Philip, on the other hand, felt what happened in this miserable and abortive world hardly mattered, when all its insignificant schemes were doomed, collectively and individually, to sudden and absolute annihilation. The extinction of souls was not an attractive philosophy, he reflected bitterly, but there seemed no alternative but to accept it as a general truth. Not wholly consciously and with a passionate stupidity he applied three individual cases to the test of the general assertion; the survival of Shelley's soul, his mother's and his own. What arguing could there be about these three and, least of all, about Shelley's. His mother's death and his own being so utterly incredible, so muchcontra naturam, their souls existed in an ether beyond all jeopardy. Yet Shelley was demonstrably dead. But was he dead indeed? He realized now for the first time how Shelley was thelarof all his years. He might vaguely and unhappily acquiesce in the destruction of soulsen masse, but nothing could convince him that Shelley did not triumph, personally, separately, in the clouds of morning and ride the horses of the wind; that he was not still the conscious spirit of song wherever birds and waters sang; that the pyre had dissipated for ever that unconquerable spirit.
Such then was the dubious and difficult current of Philip's atheism. And it was a strange fortune that these speculations should most have waged war within him at that period of the Jewish year when the festivals which culminate in the New Year and the Day of Atonement demanded unusually frequent attendance within the walls of thePolisher Shool, the inner temple of phylacteries, where Philip still so long and so frequently was held captive.
The worshipper entered the synagogue through a narrow door to the left of an establishment for fried fish and chips. The odour, therefore, of these commodities rising through the building interpenetrated the atmosphere of prayer, until prayer and chipped potatoes became inextricably woven together, and at no period in his life could Philip pass beyond a fried fish shop without feeling a far-off refluence from the old call to worship. Indeed, Philip's earliest anthropomorphism represented the Deity as some immense celestial figure in white cloth and a white hat standing above the fume and splendour of a great concave oven where He shovelled upon his tray the souls of human beings, brown and crisp, and resembling mystically the strips of potatoes shovelled by Mr. Marks upon a less divine tray in a chip-shop less august.
The worshipper now climbed a narrow staircase, and passing by the women's door entered the synagogue proper. If he had endured some recent loss in his family, the beadle from within would declare robustly, "Look ye towards the bereaved one!" who would enter with drooped head, the object of the regulated curiosity of bearded and beardless alike. Only a thin wooden partition divided the women's from the men's section, so that on one side praise was lifted to the Lord by the women because He had made them what they were, on the other, in unabashed juxtaposition, heartier praise was lifted by the men because He had made them men. Little boys could stand quite easily upon the forms and look down upon the women swaying in their old black silks and beneath their crazy cherry-garlanded bonnets. Here stood therebitsin, Serra Golda, the most pious and wrinkled of Hebrew woman, who, because it is amitzvah, an act of grace, to stand as long as possible during the Day of Atonement, stood all that hot long day on her ulcered feet, even though the mere creeping from her own dun parlour not far away had been one hard agony. Here too stood Mrs. Massel, very quiet and shy among the voluble women, wiping her eyes sometimes and repeating the prayers quietly, or perhaps, becoming conscious of the dark watchful scrutiny of her boy beyond the partition, lifting to him her face for one sweet moment and dropping it again towards her Prayer Book.
Against the centre of the Eastern wall, which was at right angles with this partition, stood the Ark wherein the Scrolls of the Law reposed among mothy velvet, themselves enveloped in a petticoat of plush whence hung silver bells. The whole Ark was curtained by a pall of scarlet, lettered with gold thread. At the centre of the masculine section (whose dimensions were some fifty by forty feet) stood the pulpit, some inches above the general level, where the whole service was incanted and the occasional auxiliaries from the audience were summoned. Below the pulpit and facing the Ark, a coffin-like desk drawn closely against their amplitudes, sat the elected officers for the year, theparnassand the twogabboim. Reb Monash, the power of whose oratory was so signal an ornament to thePolisher Shool, sat upon the right-hand side of the Ark itself, against the wall. The benches ran parallel along theshoolon both sides of the pulpit. In the strict, if uncongenial, interests of truth it is necessary to say that every member of the synagogue above the age of thirty spat, and not a few below that age, these last retaining the easier hygiene of Poland and further Europe. The more honourable worthies had their own particular joints in the boarding for their expectorations, although, if they were more than usually afflicted, they would proceed to the doorway, returning thence purged. Hence experience alone was an adequate pilot for an unscathed journey between any point of the synagogue and the door. There were times when such tender breasts as Philip's were so nauseated by the persistent spitting that their hearts seemed to suspend beating from sheer sickness. On two occasions Philip's head fell back bloodlessly and with a bang on the hard wood behind him and he was taken away to the lavatory, where several men and women filled their mouths with water and cascaded his face for some minutes until he opened his eyes. No season in the year was hot enough to justify the opening of the windows. A current of the comparatively clean air from Doomington Road was declared with horror to be "A draught! A draught!" and with patriarchical fury the windows were closed to. Sometimes on a particularly sultry day an enterprising youth might open a window for several inches without drawing the attention of the elders. It would be unobserved for perhaps half an hour as no slightest movement of air was created. Then the alarm would be given. Immediately angry shouts of "A draught! A draught!" would be heard, some would huddle their arms in the cold, some would cough vehemently in the blizzard of self-suggestion. Occasionally the younger generation might make the effort to stand up shoulder to shoulder for the rights of ventilation, but so furious a hubbub would be created, the unease spreading itself into the women's department where a clucking would be heard as of an apprehensive farmyard; but especially the thunders of Mr. Linsky would be so olympically august, that the younger generation would subside and once more the opaque odours coagulate.
ThePolisher Shoolwas, it may be deduced, a somewhat reactionary institution. But occasionally Reb Monash was called upon to deliver an oration in a synagogue of such Æsculapian sanity that the atmosphere seemed positively to evoke the vacant silence of Gentile worship. The definitely English congregations were assembled actually in superseded chapels, and here the laws of ventilation were no less rigorous than in the offices of the Doomington Board of Health. But these lacked the element of personality with which thePolisher Shoolwas perhaps too copiously endowed. And if all his life Philip had not been made unceasingly conscious of the dislike entertained for him in cordial measure by the body politic of the synagogue, he would have derived much consolation from the study of its personalities, of the rotund Reb Yonah, of Reb Shimmon like an army with banners, and the wizenedshammos, the beadle, flapping about on loose soles like a disreputable ghost.
Philip's attitude towardsshoolwas immediately prejudiced on his mere going thither. For almost from earliest times, not appreciably long, it seemed, after he had discarded the blue wool and tassels of infancy, he had been expected to crown his small figure with a large black bowler hat; and bowler hats, as could not be denied, werebloody. He felt stupidly self-conscious as he walked along by his father's side, as if all Doomington stared and jeered. If Reb Monash met a friend and these pursued a common way to the synagogue, Philip would hover behind, remove the bowler hat, and pretend it was somebody else's—he was only "holding it like."
There was a brood of young gentlemen very popular among their elders at thePolisher Shool. There was Hymie, whose eyes were large and innocent and who helped himself daily from his father's till. His voice was the voice of an exceptionally guileless thrush and he sang Yiddish songs atShalla-shudos, the Saturday afternoon gatherings. There was Moishe, who asked such clever questions so sweetly concerning the weekly portion, that they were answered with delight by the expository old men, excepting when, as they somewhat frequently did, they involved sexual references. Moishe's mind was prematurely a cesspool. Others also there were to whom piety was a paying proposition, and two were pious because they were thus made. Philip could not throw in his lot with this company. And the wholeshoolremembered how the synagogue-president, theparnass, had, some years ago, pressed him to drink of the Sabbath night cup of wine; how Philip had refused it both because he didn't like wine and because he didn't like a public exhibition of a deed tinged with piety; how the pride of theparnasshad been aroused and how he endeavoured to force the wine between Philip's lips while the wholeshoolawaited the issue; how Philip had suddenly thrust aside the foot of the beaker so that the wine fell stickily round the respective trousers of himself and theparnass.
Philip felt instinctively how everybody stiffened with dislike when he entered the synagogue, a dislike accentuated by the universal honour with which his father was regarded. Had he but been the son of a bootmaker, the Judaic virtues would not have been so prominently expected from him; they would have said "a bootmaker remains a bootmaker, even to his remote posterity!" But being the son of Reb Monash, whose black hair and beard his son was even now dimming with disastrous grey, Philip was a public scorn.
All which did not embarrass Philip so much as the interminable hours he spent behind the shut windows in the stale air—while bluebells lilted afar off and birds spoke their foreign exquisite languages. And now above all a widening had thrust his horizon far away and far away from the smoky limits of Doomington, far from the mythic circuit of green waves wherein England lay, far from the last hills of the world, out to the tingling spaces and the royal stars.
For Segal, who had brought the dissolution of atheism with him, had brought also astronomy: with a singing for the quiet sun and a meaning for the hollows of sky. It was, of course, a long time now that for both Philip and Harry the flat layer of earth had dropped away, coiling round themselves to produce the globe they had seen in effigy, so far back as the days of Miss Green. But Segal introduced, as preliminaries, Sir Robert Ball and Proctor and Camille Flammarion, and a knowledge of constellations, the nature of nebulæ, star dust and the Milky Way, which united the three boys with a bond of fervent interest. For Segal it meant illimitable fresh spaces for the plummet of logic; and because Space was infinite, no room was left for God, who, if He existed at all, could thus only be attenuated into nothingness. Harry dreamed of an undiscoverable planet where equity among its mortals prevailed; for in the infinite types of star which space permitted through infinite time, it was evident that one such star had been or was or might be developed; it was to this ideal star that he hitched the lumbering wagon of earth. To Philip, the Milky Way was a divine bluebell bank dancing by the borders of a celestial river. The stars fed him with innumerable new images, giving to his conception of poetry a depth and height. And here once more, as if to consummate the significance Shelley had involved through each succeeding phase of Philip's adolescence, just as he had been found to crystallize a world in which complete escape from Doomington mud and brick might be realized; to hold the stormy banner of Socialism; to smite down the hydra-heads of religion; so now Shelley was seen to be a poet to whom the fields of stars were more naturally a place for wandering and singing than deathly fields of sorrel and marguerite; he was the Starry Poet.
"I say, you chaps!" Harry said excitedly one day, "there's a telescope in the Curiosity Shop opposite the gaol! What about it?"
"The inference being," suggested Segal, "that as soon as we've pinched the telescope the gaol's waiting on the other side of the road?"
"No, old Cartwright's too watchful and the gaol too uncomfortable. Didn't you say so yourself when you came out after your last six months' hard? What about clubbing together and buying it?"
"I've got fourpence!" said Philip.
"I've not got that!" said Segal. "But let's find out about it. It's just the thing we want. Ye Gods, we might find a new comet! Beware, Halley!"
They appeared at Mr. Cartwright's shop and asked the price nonchalantly of a set of chessmen. "And what's the price of this telescope?" asked Harry with such an exaggerated gesture of indifference that Mr. Cartwright could not fail to perceive the yearning of his bowels.
"A quid!" said Mr. Cartwright.
It was so shattering a sum that, whereas they would have attempted bargaining if he had said, "Three-and-sixpence," they now said brokenly, "All right! We'll buy it."
Mr. Cartwright was so astonished at this acquiescence that, taken similarly off his guard, "You can have it for twelve bob!" he gasped.
"O—er—I'm sorry! We've not got more than three just now! We'll save up the rest!"
Quick change of tactics on the part of General Cartwright, who has time to recover his breath. "All right!" he declared, mouth tight at the corners, "Leave that as a deposit and I'll reduce the price to eighteen and six!" he said munificently.
Hence the telescope, which, though its actual magnifying powers were somewhat scanty, served both as an outward symbol of their devotion to stars and moon and as the token of their friendship. A new experience now entered their lives, a state, an exaltation, a mystic absorption of themselves into the heart of night from which the logician was by no means immune and which he anticipated with as much fearful joy as his friends. It was called "going deep," and was a state which they could not cajole or anticipate but came when it listed and departed as mysteriously. It was the fine flower of their friendship, coming only at night during their contemplation of skies.
They would find as they talked of Cassiopeia or the far-flung wing of Aquila or Vega's blue swords or the misty Pleiad sisters, a thinning of their own voices, a growing outward and aloft. It seemed that the hulk of body lay supine on the grimy soil of Doomington while their souls quietly adventured among the high places. It was an ether where extremes met, the young logician carried along a steep straight line by the inherent ecstasy of Law to a place where, by different curves of passionate imagination, his friends had ascended mysteriously those ladders of poetry between earth and heaven. It was perhaps a shadow of that state of fleshly innocence towards which the mystics have yearned, that state which Adam supremely knew when Eve had not yet been torn from his side. It was a state doomed to last not long, to re-occur less frequently as the mists began to cloud their eyes insistently and to stifle in their ears the clarity of starry silence. They did not know how long a time lasted their "goings deep"—some moments only, perhaps, sometimes a dim trance of a fleshless hour. But when they descended from those places, their chaffings and bickerings were resumed with difficulty, as if their bickering gainsaid a stilled voice they had heard.
One incident each of them remembered most clearly out of this time of astronomy—the night of the moon's eclipse. With various degrees of difficulty they obtained permission to stay out till morning, and at midnight they met upon the highest point of Baxter's Hill. A moorland air came wandering in from the adjacent country, and because the chimneys had ceased for the night to thicken the atmosphere, this strange sweet air came timidly towards them, as a stranger little welcomed in these parts. They lay back upon the grass looking towards those regions of the sky where the moon did not yet dim the stars to extinction. The telescope passed from hand to hand and they spoke of the ashen hollows in the moon, Segal naming her features, and emphasizing placidly how, soon or late, this earth whereon they lay now should have exhausted all her fires.
Very quietly they spoke in the still night air until a sound of terror was heard from some hidden hollow and the words were stricken on their lips. The sound was heard again and again, curdling their blood.
"A woman's being murdered somewhere!" exclaimed Philip.
"Baxter's Hill has got a dirty reputation. I wonder if a fellow's trying to get the better of a girl?" Harry whispered.
"Listen! Isn't it a rotten sound!"
The truth occurred to Segal. "You prize fools! Oh, you ultra prize fools!" he cackled. "It's a sheep! Ha, ha! A sheep! And you're two more!"
They found the midnight full of curious noises in which man and his works had no concern. An owl hooted. A nightjar skimmed an edge of darkness silently, then turned his hoarse wheel. Insects crepitated below grasses. The boys had little known how the watchful forces of nature crept back to the place Doomington had usurped when, during the night, the town's fumy power was relaxed.
When at last the dark band of eclipse sliced the rim of the moon, Philip was drowsing. Harry seized him suddenly. Philip sprang to his feet. "Look! Look! The moon! The eclipse!"
Slowly the transformation took place. The three lads stood there tensely straining towards the moon. It seemed that the world had no sound during this breathless miracle. No owl cried and no sheep lifted a voice from the hollows. The moorland wind stopped, the scant grasses did not move. A train in a far cutting uttered a startled cry and subsided. Until out of the white purity was made a disk of lurid and burnished splendour, like the bossed shield of a Titan who strode across space while the issues were still dubious of celestial wars.
The lads waited on the moor till dawn came, so that the fringe of that night should not be sullied by their return to Doomington dust. Dawn came with a cool breath from the East and a line of pale green lying like a blade on the far-seen Mitchen. A sword was swung above the slopes, glancing with gold and crimson. The edge of the sun was at last visible. The boys made their way homeward along the quiet streets.
As Reb Monash ascended the pulpit on the second morning ofRosh Hashonah, the New Year festival, to deliver adrosheh, an oration, in his capacity as professional orator ormaggid, the incidents of the eclipse were hazily passing through Philip's mind. For some time Reb Monash's utterance was calm and measured, not interfering with the flow of Philip's recollections. But a sudden note of passion rising and again falling away flickered across Philip's brain, as a vein of fire smoulders with the turning of an opal, and when the opal is turned away is swallowed in pearl-mist and blue. He was occupying the seat vacated by his father against the side of the Ark. He looked up towards Reb Monash who again was speaking abstractly, evenly, as if he were finding his way somewhither. There was still on his face a certain air of preoccupation which Philip had noticed all that morning. It had been a morning signalized also by a few low kind words he had said to Philip which had touched the boy curiously; and, at one moment, he had looked sombrely, gently, into his son's eyes, placing a hand on his shoulder as if to hold him back from the darkness towards which his steps were tending. Philip had looked back uneasily into his eyes, wondering. A shadow of so much sadness in his father's face had produced a sick yearning in the deeps of the boy's body. His own eyes had filled strangely, but he had clenched his fists and set his teeth. His father had turned away from him and walked back into thechayder....
Reb Monash standing in the pulpit became mysteriously depersonalized. He became a force capable at one moment of bringing tears to the eyes of his harshest listeners and the next of convulsing them with laughter. Philip realized from what deep well of oratory sprang that runlet which had burst forth upon the Longton croft from his lips. In the pulpit Reb Monash lost sight of his personal sorrow and became the voice of the age-long sorrow of his race. At such a time he stood like a bard, histallushanging down in great folds, his voice of such strength and sweetness that a weeping came from the women's section upon its first syllables.
The first part of the morning's oration proceeded on traditional lines. He subtly interwove the text he had chosen with the message of the festival now celebrated. Upon single words he threw such diverse and strange lights that they were opened up gallery beyond gallery, like a mine of meanings. Each sentence was illuminated by his inexhaustible fertility of quotation, each quotation prefaced by the "as it stands in the passage." He elaborated each point by a swift "zu moshel," to give a parallel. But all this skill was the routine of themaggid'sprofession; he had graduated with these arts in many schools. He was proceeding further than this; his voice still was subdued, patient, as if realizing that beyond these thickets was a clearing of intense light, if but steadily he made his way. Then suddenly he emerged from the tortuous paths and the tangle of undergrowth, with a loud resonant cry as he came upon the clear space at the centre of his heart.
"But is it truly the beginning of the year? Shall it be a rejoicing for our fathers and for our sons if the birth of to-day is not a birth but a death?Hayom harras olom! But think, my brothers and my sisters, into what world the Year, the Law, came first! For the world was void and dark, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters, and the spirit of God was the Law. The godlings were of stone and of wood whom you would kick and they were fallen down, and their number was the sands of the sea. Then to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob the one God vouchsafed Himself and in His book His breath is fire. How He was gracious to our fathers beyond all their deserts when, recollecting the impieties of Egypt, they made themselves a false God, a Calf of Gold. But yet He did not abandon them, nor in after times. Always he held out His right arm over them, yea He shattered the gathered enemies, even with the jawbone of an ass He shattered them. Whole races of the godless were destroyed in His love for the Law He had uttered and the Chosen People to whom He had entrusted the Law. Then our parents fell upon evil ways, they took to themselves the daughters of the Gentile, they no more circumcised their sons into the company of the Chosen. Too many, too many to tell were the sorrows that came down upon us. Our vineyards were taken away, our crops were wasted, our daughters stolen away from us. The gold and the ivory of Solomon's temple were despoiled, the Holy City was a waste of weeds. Yet once more in His goodness Jerusalem arose and once more in their hardness of heart the people sought the false gods: until the accursed Titus came upon us and the walls for ever fell. By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion; we hanged our harps on the willows in the midst thereof. But lo, my brothers, do not weep; my sisters, one thing was left to us, as a tabernacle in the wilderness, a dove on the void of waters, a sword in our right hand, a burning bush; that Law which each year begins and ends but has no ending. For upon it once again when the years of thegollusare numbered shall the Temple be rebuilt. Yea, when the trumpet shall sound, the corpses of the Chosen shall be awakened; they shall rise from their graves and roll from the scattered lands, beyond seas and hills, once more to the hills of Zion. How shall the gems on the breast of the High Priest shine and his garments be of dazzling white! How a Miriam shall sing a sweeter song on further shores of deeper waters and more divinely cloven than the waters of the Red Sea! Then at last shall Moses arise from his undiscovered grave to enter that land he had but seen afar off. The land shall be flowing with milk and honey and the grapes on the vines be fat. Our matrons shall be fruitful with blessed children and our daughters be glad. The Law shall be as a sign upon the forehead of our sons.