How it shall all be forgotten, the valley of the shadow, the centuries ofgollus! Did our fathers lie on the rack of the Spaniards and were their thumbs torn from their hands? It shall be as a mist of ten years gone by. There were they crouched in cellars, oldbobbiesleaning against the damp walls, an oldzadiereading by the little candle of the goodness of the God of Israel. The boys looked up listening with shining eyes. There was the sound of bursting doors, but the old voice did not falter. There was the clatter of iron boots down the stone stairway; but there was no ceasing in the praise of God. And though the old men, the women, yea, the children sucking still quietly at their mothers' breasts, were tied against stacks of wood, and the flame withheld if they but forswore Israel, still was the Law to them like a cool cavern full of the fragrance of God, even in the very centre of fire.
Pogrommenhave there been in those lands whence we have come? Who shall remember them? Though the babies were torn from the wombs of mothers, and maidens violated in the streets at noon, all shall be, because the Law has been given to us, as dust in the roadway!
But hold! What do I say? If once more the children of Israel shall build them a Calf of Gold, if they shall turn to the heathen things, who shall keep back the lightnings of God, our God strong in love but terrible in jealousy? Shall not we be utterly swept away till there is no memory of our defeats and no trace of our victories? Shall it all be vain, the rack, the fire, the mother disembowelled in pregnancy?
I say to you, look at our children, for a bad spirit has come into these lands. I say not to you, our brothers and sisters, but to you, to you, our children, keep ye your goings within the fold of the Law! Have you need then of pogroms and swords that you shall remain with God? Because, in this place, He has withheld them, thank Him for that He loves you more. Behold, age behind age our sufferings and our triumph go. Bring it not all to naught. Make not the bloodshed to be useless as water. For the air is thick with the voices of the dead, saying: 'Hold, hold by the banner of Israel! Let it not fall from you! Proudly we held it though the blood dripped from our fingers!'
Lo, our children, you make us to you as strangers, you harden our hearts with anger. But we are ready with our love for you when you follow upon our ways, which are the ways of the countless dead. Let not for little things our heritage be squandered; let not the Maccabæan banner be smirched, nor false gods enter into our tabernacles which we build now upon a wandering thousandfold bitterer than the forty years. We lift out our arms to you. Join us in singing the Lord's song! May the next year see us in Zion!"
There were one or two looked with alarm upon the face of Philip staring from the wall against the Holy Ark. His face was bloodless, his eyes round as if in nightmare. Not a sound was heard when Reb Monash came weakly down from the pulpit. No one knew where to turn his eyes. As his father came nearer to resume his seat, Philip gave a sudden convulsive start, then fell jerkily towards the form where he had sat before thedrosheh. A tiny whispering arose in the congregation, as of leaves after a windless noon when a first breeze shakes, or of still waters ruffled. Theparnassuttered a deepoi! oi!absently clapping his hands three or four times; the weeping of the women decreased; the men bent towards each other and talked. Some one ascended the pulpit to begin the second part of the service.
Reb Monash had chosen well; for that preoccupation which had held his face all that morning now held his son's for the rest of that day. After dinner he lay down on the sofa thinking heavily; he neither spoke a word with his mother nor picked up a book. He had answered too easily all the questions life had offered him. Was it too late to begin thinking clearly now? Were his conclusions correct by accident or were all his conclusions mere self-flattery? No formula to help him through the mists of doubt which were swarming round him came his way. Late that night, whenshooland the eveningmeyerivservice were over, he walked out towards Baxter's Hill, under the light of stars. It was not long that he moved onward like a sluggish water. A wind came from somewhere afar off and set into motion the mists in his head. More and more quickly they whirled within him, and then, swiftly, they were gone. He rose skywards from his feet. Without pain or pleasure, all that issue which had racked him this day became thin, remote. He moved on the shores of a sea where the sands were stars, and the sea was the great womb of the undefined, where all things were not, but God was. Trembling, aghast, he stood on the arch of the sweep of sands, hearing incoherent murmurings. Towards a blackness cool and clear he stood where foam and wind beat into his face. He turned from the voices of sea and bent down dabbling his fingers among the star-sands. He rose and walked stepping from rock to rock to the channel where the Milky Way flowed inward from the sea. On the bank of the Milky Way, he stopped once more and lifted in his hands a handful of grass. Beyond the slope, the dim waters of Mitchen moved through the night. He leaned for some minutes drowsing against a tree trunk, then turned towards the vague hulk of Baxter's Hill. "It's over!" he whispered. "I know!"
It was noon on the Day of Atonement which followed nine days after theRosh Hashonahmemorable to more than one by the oration of Reb Monash, noon in Cambridge Street, a thoroughfare in Doomington far removed from the region of the synagogues, which, for this day, were crowded from dawn to dusk by the day-long worshippers. The most pious did not move from within their precincts; the less pious withdrew occasionally to the immediate environs. All who were sacrilegious on all the other three hundred and sixty-four days, on this day rigidly fasted, and, having no regular pew in a regular synagogue, were devoutly glad to pay for the privilege of any pew in any synagogue. If they gainsaid or were indifferent to the precepts of their faith on other days, who could forswear the immemorial terror of this day? If they had been building all the year a palisade between Heaven and themselves, on this day, who knew, they might enter Heaven through a breach in the palisade. On the night concludingYom Kippurmany looked forward to the impieties of the morrow as if these had been annulled in anticipation. But most felt that if all else weredémodé,Yom Kippurstood august beyond fashion. Even the great jewellery and general emporia of Doomington shut their doors, though they exhibited a note to the effect that cleaning operations were in progress, so that their credit with their more Nonconformist customers might remain unimpaired. Bob Cohen, who lived with agoyah, a Gentile lady, all the year round, became entirely oblivious of her existence for these twenty-four hours, in a synagogue several towns away from the scene of his amour. Inshoolhis fervent contrition was only drowned by the self-reproaches of the penitents whose perpetual state was the strictest matrimonial chastity. Avowed atheists put in an appearance despite all their logic. There were few Jews in Doomington that day beyond the circumference of a circle whose radius was half a mile in any direction from thePolisher Shool.
Hence it was surprising to see Alec Segal in a shop doorway far up Cambridge Street on the afternoon ofYom Kippur. It added to the surprise to find Harry Sewelson join him after some minutes, for the four parents of these youths, emancipated to the pitch of transferring a kettle to and from the fire onshabbos, were yet very far from the transgression of this ultimate sanctity; a sanctity of such awe as might overwhelm spirits even of the defiant aloofness of Segal and Harry.
"You're late!" said Segal.
"Three minutes!"
"Six and a half to be precise!"
"You'll be taking notes of how long your neck's in the noose before you're dead...."
"Yes, and make a graph of the parabola of my descent. But why are you late? Called in at a public-houseen route?"
"No fear! I've had a drink at the scullery-tap, it was a little less ostentatious. I suppose you've had a drink?"
"Yes, I hid a bottle of lemonade in my mattress!" declared Segal cunningly.
"I'm not thirsty but I'm jolly peckish. My elder sister fainted, so I had to take her home. As for Esther—you know, my other sister—she's only fifteen, but she's dead nuts on fasting. Queer thing, the less she puts down the more she brings up! She's been sick all day!"
"But that young scoundrel's not turned up yet! I wonder if anything's wrong?"
"He's all right. His father doesn't stir a foot out of thePolisher Shool; he'll have had an opportunity to prig something to eat and drink!"
"I don't think he can have backed out?" Segal suggested.
"I don't think it's likely. He may be walking backward to draw attention away from his bowler hat. He doesn't like bowler hats!"
"Or he may be writing a poem in a dark corner, being only young and somewhat foolish. He'll grow out of the first as time goes on."
"Yes, he's amusing enough. But isn't that the illustrious bowler hat?"
"Hello! Here we are! I say, bowler hat, have you seen Philip Massel?"
"He's just coming!" said Philip, appearing at last. "Well, he's come! I'm starving, where's the shop?"
"You've been at a banquet with Sir Timothy and the City Fathers; else why so late?" insisted Harry.
"My mother was fearfully faint," replied Philip awkwardly. "I didn't like to leave her. It's a crime for her to fast, she's so weak nowadays! It's not been so bad for me, with some packets of biscuits at home and a copy of Milton forshool. But let's come along!"
The boys walked up Cambridge Street and turned to the right towards a bridge over the Deadwater Canal. They passed through the door of an eating-house and the fat smells of frying enveloped them unpleasantly; they chose a table in a corner and sat before a lake of spilled gravy and the tin utensils.
"It feels rather shifty, all this!" ventured Philip after a few moments.
"Look here, lad, don't be conscientious at this time of day!" remonstrated Segal.
"I mean when you think of the old men and the sick women who're a sight worse off than we are!"
"Now, Philip," interposed Harry, "You know quite well it's not the beastly food. It's a symbol of freedom! We're not going to be enslaved any longer under the heel of these daft old superstitions.Vive la libertéand all that sort of thing! I positively don't feel like eating now, as a matter of fact; the stink's rather thick. You know, Alec, you might have chosen something more encouraging than this hole."
"Phew!" from Philip. "I prefer the smell of thePolisher Shool!"
"We can't afford anything better. I should have preferred the New Carlton myself, I admit!"
"There'd be too many Jews there! It would be too public!" Harry affirmed.
"Well, young fellers," said a dishevelled lady at this stage, "wot are ye going to 'ave? Say it slick!"
"Ham and eggs all round!" said Segal lordlily.
"Righto!" The lady was bustling off.
"Hold on!" Philip shouted after her concernedly.
"What's the matter with you, cock?"
"What else have you got? I won't have ham!"
"What about fish and fried, saucy?"
"Thank you!" Philip muttered gratefully.
"What do you mean by it?" exclaimed Harry indignantly. "What do you want to spoil the show for?"
"You can call me a blooming prig, if you like, and be blowed! I think ham's overdoing it, that's all! It's not playing the game!"
"Don't be a kid! What's your objection to the miserable animal? I thought you'd got over all that!"
"I thought so too, but I think a chap can choose another sort of day for ham! What's the good of piling it on like this?"
"Do you mean," asked Harry, "that you've just shoved your head out of the burrow of superstitions, like a rabbit, and are going to dive down again, scared? I thought you were more consistent than that. Personally I should prefer beef, but I'm sacrificing my inclinations precisely because ham is a symbol."
"It's not a symbol! I call it cheek!"
"Cheek my fat aunt! You're funking it!"
"You can say what you like! You can stuff your own mouth with the muck! I'm not going to choke for your sake!"
"But what of all your wonderful talk about freedom and advancing with the new race," Segal asked quietly, "and all the good old moonshine?"
"I just think, if you want a symbol, fried fish onYom Kippuris as useful as ham. It's what d'you call it? it's irreverent somehow, insisting on ham! Yes, that's it! It's irreverent!"
"It's certainly expensive!" declared Segal with an air of finality. When the food came at last, the three boys hardly touched either ham or fish. They had, at least, stood up for the principle of emancipation! And ham, moreover, is a difficult commodity between unaccustomed jaws.
"It's time I got back!" said Philip, at the point where Cambridge Street merged into more familiar territory. "He'll be getting restive about me!"
"There's a comet in the offing!" declared Segal. "To-morrow night?"
"To-morrow night, and let your ham rest quiet in your bellies!"
Philip, after entering thePolisher Shool, spent a little time with his mother, not yet being of an age when a masculine presence raised perturbation in the women's section. When he advanced towards his own seat, his father frowned a question upon him. "Nu, and where so long?"
"I've been feeling sick!" Philip replied truthfully.
"Sit thee down then and open thymachzer! It is at this place one holds! Omit thou no word!"
"I hope you are feeling all right,tatte?"
"How should I feel? 'Tis well with me!"
Around his head the chanting and the weeping gathered volume. The voice of Mr. Herman on the pulpit was choked with crying and his usual ornamentations were now wholly absent from his delivery. The hands of Mr. Linsky thundered contrition. The face of Reb Yonah was drenched in tears. To Philip it seemed that the voices of all these moaning, swaying men had been lifted for age beyond age. It was as if he stood in a dark country where large boulders stood greyly from the uneven ground; the air was full of lamentations; the sky was compact with lightless cloud. If but the dome were rifted, if but through that blue division there came among these boulders and this lamentation the sharp shaft of wind—the boulders would subside into sand, there would be no lamentation; there would be flowers in green hollows, and water in willowy places; if but the dome were rifted, if but a wind blew....
Philip was tired of vain imaginings. As long prayer succeeded long prayer, the tedium of the day gripped him. He remembered theMiltonin his pocket and, with a thrill of dangerous delight, drew it forth carefully. Oh, it was important to take the utmost care! Good Lord, if he were found out, what on earth would happen? Could anything happen proportionate to the crime? Hismachzer, fortunately, was a large, protective book! He leaned theMiltonagainst its yellow pages and turned stealthily to "Comus." Was there any poetry like "Comus" in the world? What savour it gained from contact with these present sights and sounds! How fair was the lady, and how the rhymes were like bells at morning!
Enraptured he turned page upon page of "Comus." "Comus" was ended. Reb Monash was shaking in his corner there, by the Ark, his face pale with the fast. All was safe. He turned to "Allegro" and "Penseroso." Never had he known poetry to taste so fresh, like cheese and fine bread among the hills. He turned to the "Ode on the morning of Christ's Nativity."
See how from far upon the eastern roadThe star-led wizards haste with odours sweet....
What lines were these, flawless in music, divinely simple!
The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet....
How much loveliness in how little space! "Star-led," the exquisite phrase! ... "Star-led" ... Now to the "Hymn! ..."
But a law of gravitation greater than he might understand brought his eyes from his book, bent backward his head, lifted his eyes into the eyes of his father staring down from above upon his book.
Then Philip realized blindingly the significance of this moment:
... The son of heaven's eternal King,Of wedded Maid and Virgin Mother born....
and once more,
... The heaven-born ChildAll meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies....
Into the inmost centre of the very heart of his father's faith, the faith of those innumerable dead who for the many centuries had looked upon this day as the climax of their childhood in Jehovah, upon thisYom Kippurwhose mere utterance was a fear and a great light, into the synagogue's self, at the very doors of the Holy Ark where lay the Law pregnant with history, he had introduced ... the "wedded Maid," the "heaven-born Child" ...!
Down from his father's eyes it seemed that two actual shafts of flame descended into his own eyes, burning like an acid through the pupils beyond the sockets, into the grey stuff of his brain. A sweat stood upon Philip's forehead, and a chill then seemed to hold it there, like a circle of ice. The fire in his father's eyes shrivelled; there came a hollow shadow of unutterable pain; a sigh fell weakly from his lips. He staggered towards the door for air.
He returned and said, "My son, throw it away, throw thyself away! Let me not see thee again!"
Philip hid the book among the dilapidated Prayer Books at a corner of the women's section and returned to hismachzer. Not once did his father's eye meet his own during the rest of the day. When Reb Monash and his wife were proceeding homewards after the fast and Philip made a movement as to accompany them, Reb Monash stared with cold eyes and motioned him to stand away.
The end had come. Channah sitting with wet eyes on a corner of the sofa knew it. Mrs. Massel in the scullery lifting her apron to her eyes and sobbing ever so quietly knew it. Philip in the darkness of the emptychayderwith his head between his hands knew it. Reb Monash knew it, breaking his fast in the kitchen, saying not a word.
The next morning Reb Monash turned to Mrs. Massel. Philip was in the room. "He must go somewhere! He cannot sleep here to-night! He has broken me, let him not stay to laugh in my face!"
"What can he do? Where can he go?"
"I know not! He must go!" There was no doubting the finality of his command.
Not a word passed between Philip and his father. Mrs. Massel dared not trust herself to utter a sound until Reb Monash had gone upstairs for his afternoon nap.
"Nu, Feivele," she ventured then, "seest thou what has befallen us? God knows I have not too many years to see thee in ... and now this black year!Schweig den, schweig, Feivel! What shall be with us?"
Channah realized that it lay with her to take the initiative.
"Mother," she urged, "all will be well! You mustn't upset yourself like this! The thing we've to talk about now is what we're going to do with Philip!"
"Yes, what?" Philip asked helplessly.
"We've understood for a long time it was going to end up like this, there was nothing else for it. We were talking about it only last week. She said..."
"Who said, Channah? Who do you mean?"
"I mean Dorah! She said you were wasting the old man to a shadow and she was going to put a stop to it, for father's sake and everybody else's!"
"Wasting to a shadow! What about mother?"
"I know! But I didn't say anything! You know what it's like to argue with Dorah! But she was going to see father about it, sooner or later, and now that this has happened ... well, we'd best go and see her at once!"
"Not one word didst thou say to me!" complained Mrs. Massel.
"It's bad enough now we've got to; what dost thou want more,mutter?"
"Oh, but what are you driving at, Channah? What's the idea?"
"She's going to put up a bed for you in her back-room. Benjamin keeps a lot of stock there now, but they can put a little under your bed and the rest on the landing. You can pay her so much a week while your scholarship lasts, and if you don't get another, well, she says you'll just have to go in for tailoring or something; or Benjamin can take you on his rounds."
"Oh, hell!" groaned Philip.
There had never been much sympathy between his elder sister Dorah and himself. Although the fact was rarely referred to among the Massels, Reb Monash and his wife were already a widower and a widow respectively when they were married, Reb Monash bringing Dorah, and Mrs. Massel Channah, to the union. Their only children were Rochke, who died so tragically on the exodus of the family from Russia, and Philip, born some time later in Doomington. The common parent between Dorah and Philip, therefore, was Reb Monash, and the long conflict between the father and son had rendered less and less substantial the affection between the brother and sister. Dorah, a tall, squared-jawed angular woman, was in some ways more masculine and more forbidding than Reb Monash, and in all ways more evident to the eye in her Longton household than her demure husband, Benjamin, whose main concerns in life were his wife's temper and the state of his samples. From time to time she had startled Philip with sudden spurts of generosity, but these had become increasingly rarer during the last two years.
"There's no way out of it!" asserted Channah. "And, after all, mother, it's only twenty minutes' walk away. Besides, there's the tram up Blenheim Road!"
The three made their appearance before long at Dorah's. They found her already in possession of the main facts, as she had sent Benjamin down that morning to find out how the family was feeling after the fast and Benjamin had met Reb Monash proceeding to Longton. They had both accepted the hospitality and the lemon-tea of Mr. Levine, theparnass, who had ushered them in from the door of his furniture shop. Benjamin had rendered his report duly.
With Channah, Dorah was monosyllabic. Philip she ignored.
"From where he takes this godlessness,mutter," she said in Yiddish, "I understand not! Ashkandalit is, over the whole neighbourhood!"
"He is growing older, he will understand more.Folg mir, Dorah, he will be a good Jew yet!"
"Would that one saw the least sign! I have made his bed for him, with aperinnyon top and aperinnybelow. He will be comfortable!"
"Oh, mother, don't!" broke in Channah. "Don't! It's not far from Angel Street! You'll be able to see her every day after school, won't you, Philip?"
"Yes!" said Philip thickly, "Every day! He'll be sleeping!"
Dorah turned to Philip for the first time. "Well, you'd best go home and get your things ready! Will you want to bring all those books?"
"I must have my books!"
"He can take away the bookcases I made for them!" declared Mrs. Massel. "The books will not be in thy way!"
"Loz shen zein! Let it be, then! Well, he will need a handcart. Our greengrocer has one. I'll send him down at eight o'clock!"
A miserable drizzle was falling as Philip gathered the collection of books he so much prized and placed them on the dirty brown sacking of the handcart. Angel Street was more dark and wretched than the Angel Street of any of his memories. His mother stood on the doorstep forlornly, coughing heavily now and again in the rain and wind. He had laid the soap-box bookcases she had made for him over his books and the man was securing the whole load under a final layer of sacking with coils of coarse rope.
"I'm going now, mamma!" He kissed her drawn face.
"Go, my little one!"
As the cart splashed over the greasy setts of Angel Street through the damp darkness, she still stood watching, rain in her hair and soaking her blouse. Slightly she lifted her hands towards the receding boy. He looked back and saw her still standing there. He came back swiftly and covered her face with kisses. But as he again withdrew, again she stood there emptily. Whither did her lorn figure bring back his mind? Whither? Somewhere long ago, far off! Then he remembered. He remembered his image of her alone in the Russian darkness, when the dead child had been taken from her arms. She had stood there emptily as now ... But the handcart was lurching round into Doomington Road....
BOOK III
APHRODITE
Such then was the spiritual adolescence of Philip Massel, and such, as lately described, the situation which was its inevitable result—a result not wholly unforeseen by one or two minor characters in the drama of his boyhood. In some senses the intellectual was the more spectacular element of his development; but the budding of his physical faculties, the suffusion of all his blood with sex, proceeded pauselessly through this troubled time. The strands of growth are, of course, inextricably intertwined, and this account has followed too rigidly the threads of Philip's spiritual history. It must return, therefore, to a phase which only by a little space followed the emergence of Socialism above Philip's horizon, and by a little space preceded that episode with Bertha which demonstrated his curious simplicity.
We turn then to a budding in Doomington Road. A group straggle within and without the rays of a lamp which illuminates a corner formed by Walton Street and the road itself. There is much tittering, a little whispering, and a youth raucously is singing!
Press your lips on my lips,Your dear little, queer little, shy lips.
It was only ten minutes ago that Policeman Pig-nob (as he is derisively termed) passed this way, with basest intentions upon Aphrodite.
It is nought to him whether there be a gathering together for the mere barren breeding of money or for a far holier purpose—the ultimate propagation of an antique race. Any gathering together at any street corner suggests to him disrespect towards the corpulent Doomington abstraction who is the Chief Constable, and is liable to be misinterpreted as an incipient movement against the Monarchy and Balmoral, (which he inaccurately places in the Strand near the lofty pillar where Cleopatra stands with a blind eye and a cocked hat looking towards the City Temple; for Policeman Pig-nob is a Free Churchman and to him the City Temple is almost unsurpassed in sacredness by the Chief Constable's detached villa itself or His Britannic Majesty's Balmoral). It is, I have recorded, but ten minutes ago that Policeman Pig-nob passed this way and dispersed the Aphrodisiac gathering. The males folded their tents like the Arabs and as silently stole away. The females, having ascertained even so soon the Sanctuary which is their flesh, stood their ground. Imagine, therefore, their horror when Policeman Pig-nob, not merely with policiary rudeness, shone his bull's-eye into their faces, (decorated in two cases with pink face-powder and in one with mauve), but, forsooth, pulled the admired hair of one of their number; and not, finally, Janey's hair or Ethel's or Lily's somewhat skimpy hair, but, I adjure you, Edie's very hair! Edie's! The lovely thick brown hair of the Queen of Walton Street! Not that Janey, Ethel, Lily and their attendant virgins were not madly jealous of Edie and her positively cattish success with the boys, but really ... the rights of the sex.... Policeman Pig-nob ... Edie ... and, as the most recent immigrant from Russia betrayed herself into exclaiming ... "a chalery soll im nemen! a cholera should him take!"
As silently, as swiftly as they had faded, the boys re-entered the fiery joint circle of Love and the Walton Street lamp. Edie stood picturesquely sobbing in the shadowed doorway of a shop. Over her Harry Sewelson stood proud guard, awaiting the moment when a silk-handkerchief, requisitioned from the paternal establishment, might plead for him a devotion which her tears but cemented like glue. In this direction too the heart of Philip Massel yearned sickly, albeit Ethel was murmuring seductively to him "dear little, queer little, shy lips!"
For the time of the budding of Philip Massel had come; yet even in his budding Philip was fastidious. It was no use, he decided. He could not bud and burgeon towards Ethel. This very decision seemed to make Ethel ache the more intensely towards the stimulation by Philip of her own florescence. You could not avoid kissing Ethel amid the permutations and combinations of Shy Widow and Postman's Knock, particularly as she tenderly called for you to join her in the lobby's darkness much more frequently than you called for her. This was most particularly the case at her own birthday party, when out of sheer animal gratitude for the smoked salmon sandwiches you received from her hands—well, what else could you be expected to do? But, alas, when you kissed Ethel, you could not fail to notice how frequently the nose of Ethel assaulted either your left or your right cheek.
But as for Edie—ah, do not speak of Edie! For her nose, by some miraculous diaphaneity or impalpability of love, seemed dimly, if at all, existent when the felicity of kissing Edie came your way—too rare felicity, for who but Harry Sewelson hulked before you on that faint, fair road to Edie?
If the expression may be allowed, at first Philip did not bud enthusiastically. Once more his intellectual timidity asserted itself; particularly when Harry, whose interest in girls had declared itself somewhat suddenly, very completely and some months ago, had attempted to convince Philip by cogent intellectual argument that the time had arrived for the widening of Philip's sphere of interest. Philip had as yet been aware of little physical encouragement and less emotional. And it seemed an act of deliberate malice on the part of Providence, an act calculated to arrest abruptly for a period of time his "widening" (until such time as the gathered forces would break sharply through the crust of distaste), that, first of feminine contacts, brought Ethel's nose into collision with Philip's cheek. No act of quixotry towards a promptly smitten lady could impel Philip to turn the other. It was fortunate, therefore, that Edie's lips made their appearance to obscure this nasal disquietude. And with Edie's lips, suddenly there came to Philip a knowledge of something softer than flowers and more fragrant than any breath in a garden after rain. Her hair covered her with a warmth and her hands were at once soft and nimble. She said little, for she had little to say, but she disposed her innumerous wares with such naive artifice that she suggested calm deep wells into which her bucket rarely dipped. She was, in fact, a plump and pretty little girl, alluring, secret, a little conceited. She realized with pleasure the vague suggestion of unholiness contained in any relation with the atheistic Harry, but she observed, flattered, with what immediacy Harry usurped her for his own when he stormed the citadel of Walton Street and ousted her other lovers with the flick of a cynical tongue. With premature womanishness she was conscious of the piquant contrast the figure of Harry afforded beside her own: the hard acute angles—the curves; the eloquent tongue—the tongue more enchanting in its silences than in its speech; the grey, quick eyes—the indeterminate brown; the lips whose kisses were incisions of steel—the lips which were like night, sweet, odorous.
On the recommendation of Harry, an invitation to Janey's birthday party was sent to Philip. The problem of a birthday present troubled him less than on his previous and first visit to such a ceremony, the occasion upon which he had met and conquered Ethel; for then, even after he had included a bottle of Parma Violet Scent with a box where he had glued seven halfpenny coins in a quaint design on the inner side of the lid, he had been perturbed lest he had not used sufficient halfpennies for real generosity. At Janey's birthday party, however, all such considerations had been drowned in a fortuitous kiss he had bestowed on Edie. (It had been a game which had lasted till every possible combination had been exhausted and each pair of female lips knew every pair of male).
But it was rare that these successful and unsuccessful adolescent amours knew the shelter of four walls—birthday parties were as infrequent as they were splendid. Hence it was that the corner of Walton Street each evening saw the gathering of adolescents, in which behold Philip included, criminally weaned for a time, I grieve to say, from the Anabasis and even impaired in his adherence to Karl Marx. And if Reb Monash inquired "Why so late?" or "Whither going?" and Philip answered "The Library!" it had been true at least on two occasions upon which he had made that reply. The epoch of street-corner flirtation had set in, and among strange, misty places went the wits of Philip woolgathering.
Alec Segal looked on aloof, amused. He had much eloquence, introspective and extraspective, at his command. Yet there was none of the Walton Street ladies concerning whom he wove garlands of words. If the development of his adolescence was impressed upon his conscious mind, and it was unlikely that he had not been mentally tabulating all his states as they succeeded each other, he had made no verbal comments to his younger friends. When Harry was found embroiled in the passages-at-arms of which Walton Street was the witness, Alec was interested and looked wise. When Philip fought weakly and fell in these same encounters, Alec still remained silent, but a shade of the sardonic settled more fixedly on his lips.
The whole of this new development was chaotic, obscure, a blind impulsion towards new things somewhat alien from his other loyalties—if Edie's lips were not to be taken, as in his equivocal poetic mind he tended to take them, as the fruit of the tree of poesy. With a little discomfort he would observe from time to time Alec Segal standing thin and cryptic at the outskirts of the Walton Street mêlée; standing there for one moment or two as if he were biding his time, and then behold, Alec was no more there.
"Alec!" he would demand, "Why do you come tip-toeing in like that? It gives a chap the creeps! If you come, can't you stay a bit, and if you can't stay, why on earth do you come? You're like a family ghost creeping about corridors and grinning from the battlements. You're a grisly beast, Alec!"
Alec would rub his left forefinger along the curved line of his nose.
"Nothing, my son! I'm just waiting!"
"Waiting for what?"
"Oh, I don't know! Everything's waiting, so am I! What's the moon waiting for when she stops short at midnight? I'm just waiting! Some of us are made to keep on moving, like Harry, for instance, and some of us to wait! But don't question your grandfather! It's disrespectful!"
One evening Harry, Alec and Philip were walking down the lonely track called Chester Street which led beyond the police station, through dark fields barren of buildings, into Blenheim Road. They were proceeding from a party which had been undiluted misery to Philip and had given, therefore, at least so much food for interested analysis to Alec. Even Harry was subdued. The party had been a thorough failure. Edie had lost her forfeit and had been requested to kiss the boy she liked best in the room. There was a breathless quiet as with downcast eyes she halted a moment and then walked demurely towards the face of the nincompoop, George something-or-other. He was not even a scholar of a Doomington higher school. He was, it was rumoured, attached to the "job and fent" line. He had lank black hair greasily retreating in equal mass from an undeviating central line. His cheeks were, it was true, very silky. His mouth was endurable. But, indisputably, he was a boob. What if his fatherwasa master tailor? After all, there are higher social grades than master tailorhood; even if the mere fact of a scholarship does not put you secure above all considerations of social status. And Edie had kissed George.
It was, of course, a deadly snub for Harry; but how much more deadly for Philip, who immediately before had himself been obliged to kiss the girl he liked best in the room, and had proceeded with ardent shyness to his lady's throne and the uninterested lips of Edie.
"There's no idealism in them at all!" reflected Harry bitterly. "I don't think they know what love means! Here's a chap ready to sacrifice his shirt for them, a chap many girls would jump at! And then what happens? A dolt with sleek hair turns up, and a Cheshire grin, and they're round his neck and licking his feet! It isn't only that they've got no taste—you know. They've got no self-respect!"
"Be more explicit, Harry!" Alec interposed. "Don't shirk the issue—and Edie!"
"They're all the same—absolutely ungrateful and heartless! I'm going to be a monk, a Trappist, I think! Trappism's a profession invented specially for me!"
"What? Because a little minx..."
"Don't...."
"Don't be a fool, Harry; you said they were all the same! I agree. Why are you specially put out about Edie then? You didn't object to the beefy arm of Lily wandering round George's waist, did you?"
"Not a scrap of difference—Lily's beefy arm, Edie's beefy soul...!"
"Look here!" Philip broke in miserably. "It's no good slanging her. I suppose if she likes him better she's entitled to behisgirl instead of somebody else's."
"A little raw, Philip?" Alec asked.
"Of course I'm not! I don't care what she does! I didn't notice her all evening!"
"Oh, you liar!"
"You looked glum enough when she chose that fellow, didn't you?" taunted Harry.
"Headache, I suppose! And even if I did look glum, and I don't say I did—you needn't rub it into a chap. Besides, in any case, I didn't look glum!"
"Your logic's masterful as usual, Philip!"
"The point is not Philip's logic but the heartlessness of women!" Harry insisted. "What's to be done about it?"
"The only thing to be done about it," declared Alec, "is to look the fact in the face, that's all! You must have no illusions about them! You must stare them straight in the eyes and beyond! Let 'em know they're not deceiving you with their little tricks! Strip off the illusions, I say!"
"I suppose by 'illusions' you mean," said Philip, "all that's jolly about 'em and make 'em different from us! No, it won't work!"
"There isn't anything different about us! We're all alike! Strip them naked and it's just—Body, Sex!"
"What on earth are you driving at now?" Philip asked, frightened.
"Only this—that it's about time you ... Hello! Look here! What on earth ... what on earth's this?"
They had come to the darkest part of Chester Street. Alec's foot had stumbled against something large and soft. The boys stopped. Harry lit a match and they saw a bundle before them wrapped in a white sheet. It was large and bulky and tied at the top in loose knots.
"What is it?" Philip asked.
"Washing, perhaps?" Alec speculated.
"Open it!" Harry demanded peremptorily. "It might be anything!"
"What shall we do with it? Perhaps it's something dropped from a removal cart, eh?" wondered Alec. "But I hardly think so, it's lying so steadily on its bottom, as if it had been put there deliberately. I think we'd best take it along ... Hello! Listen! I say! It'scrying! Good God, can you hear?"
"Get out of the way, Alec!" Harry exclaimed, "Don't stand theorizing!" He bent down and untied the knots swiftly. "Light up!" he commanded, pushing his matches into Philip's hand.
Harry uttered a startled cry.
"A baby!"
"Ye gods, a baby!"
And in truth, wrapped in a blanket and lying in a soft heap in a clothes-basket, a minute baby lay, whining feebly and curling its infinitesimal fingers.
"The kid'll die of cold! We must get it out of the way at once!"
"Not a day old!" Alec mused.
"Get a move on, for God's sake! Where shall we take it?"
"The police-station just along!" Philip suggested.
"Yes, the very place!" Harry took off his greatcoat and placed it over the top of the basket. "Here, Alec, take hold of the other handle!"
The baby was delivered into the hands of an inspector, summoned by a policeman who refused to have anything to do with the case. The inspector scrutinized the three lads suspiciously, as if he were ready to believe that one or the other of them was the father of the child. They made their statement and at length, reluctantly, he allowed them to withdraw.
"By Heaven!" muttered Harry, "What a swine the man is!"
"Who do you mean?" asked Alec, who, now that the practical matter had been discharged and they were once more entering the immaterial world of thought, reassumed the elderliness of his voice and manner. "Who do you mean, vague youth, is a swine? The inspector!"
"No! The father!"
"Yes, I'm with you! But what about the mother?"
"Fancy a mother behaving like that!" Philip wondered.
"That's just what I mean! The woman behaved perfectly naturally. Parents only keep their children because other people do. They're not really interested in children. My parents are not interested in me and I'm not fearfully interested in them. It's only a sort of crust of habit, and the parents of this child wouldn't allow it to form. John Smith and Mary Brown, let's call them. I declare that John Smith and Mary Brown are just natural and sensible people—they had their fling—Body, Sex! That's to-night's party and John Smith and Edie and the baby in the cradle all reduced to their elements! Body, Sex! It's as simple as an equation in Algebra!" (Alec invariably ended his ratiocinations with a flick of the fingers—a 'so easy, you know'!)
The incident had filled Harry with nausea. The disillusionment at the party, the check to his pride it had involved, the callous abandonment of the child in the bare croft, had combined to produce in him an indignation of cynicism.
"You're right!" he declared. "It's Sex, pure and simple! It's all dirt!"
"And you, Philip?"
"What do I know about it? Go on!"
Philip listened, fascinated and repelled. At least the philosophy of Segal offered a coherent explanation of to-night and the other nights. The whole theme was virgin to him, but the method of attack was so deadly calm, so impersonal, that he was impelled to follow. He was conscious, moreover, that other people, not least Harry and Alec, did not exclude this branch of life from their horizon; why, then, should he? It was all so different from the filth of Angel Street; here, if soul played no part or little in this interpretation, mind at least was not absent. There was, he did not dare to confess to himself, a quaint furtive pleasure in it all....
"Go on!" he said, breathless to advance, and half-inclined to flee.
Alec Segal talked. For one hour, two hours, they paced from corner to dark corner of Chester Street. There were but few interruptions from Harry and none from Philip. Only, as Alec talked, Philip felt sometimes that he would like to lie down on the cold kerb to cry—simply, childishly, to cry. And he felt creeping round him like a mist, a deadlier loneliness than had ever beset his heart, a loneliness that now crept and eddied through his being in chill wisps. Oh for the brown eyes of his mother, so innocent and so wide with knowledge! For the bloom was fading from the world; the freshness was passing away. Friendship was passing away. Hitherto he had stood alone, self-sufficient. Now the new preoccupations must assail him, wean him from his old friends. Wean him, oh sorrowful, oh, surely false, from his mother! Lead him towards insubstantial things waiting somewhere to hold him! And these things reached towards his friends, were interposed between them and him. They had been complete and single once, these friends, despite all the flaws in their unity. They were but provisional and dependent now, as he was himself to be henceforward. Pain which had a core of delight, delight which was gilded dust!
The three youths parted. As they moved in different ways, night, it seemed to Philip, engulfed them separately bringing unbridgeable division. Night swallowed something of boyhood. Manhood came stalking towards Philip out of the vast. Manhood placed a finger on his young forehead. A sad boy slept that night in Angel Street, sad and wise.
Dorah was a tall, raw-boned woman, carrying all the implicit angles of Reb Monash to an explicit extreme. In the civil strife at Angel Street her sympathy had always been on the side of tradition and Reb Monash, as against licence and Philip. Channah likewise had, in a weak and somewhat hopeless way, taken sides. Not openly, not with unabashed self-declaration, and far less through philosophy than sentiment, she had been steadily at Philip's side—when, at least, she was not absorbed in her collection of Vesta Tilley post cards and her long waitings at gallery doors for the performances of Lewis Waller or Martin Harvey.
The veins of Dorah's temper were less easily tapped than Reb Monash's, but when tapped, they yielded richer ore. When her temper was at its most exuberant, her voice was of a dovey stillness which boded much woe. But the contradiction in her household which most concerned Philip was, in a word, weak tea. So well defined and dark and abrupt was Dorah, that one would have imagined that tea of her brewing would be raven as Acheron. Yet it was, in fact, as weak as a rickety child. It was tepid. It was served in a large pint mug, so that its quantity the more ruthlessly exposed the invariable defects of its quality. Much and cold milk annihilated its last semblance to the potent brews of Angel Street and copious sugar rendered it, at length, unpleasant as an inverse castor oil.
Compare with weak tea, tea almost leonine; also cherries in the skim of milk, and Mrs. Massel sitting hard by, humming happily like a kettle, or moving about the kitchen with happy bird-like noises, and producing finally a remnant of Saturday'skuggel(which is a thick brown soft pudding with many raisins and a celestial crisp crust)! ... Until the shuffling of Reb Monash's feet overhead might be heard, and there is the last gulping of tea and swallowing ofkuggel, and the lifting of a laden satchel of books, and from Philip's lips a fatuous "So long, old mother, toodle-oo!" which is a valediction juvenile indeed from the lips of a young man to whom at last the secrets of the universe have been laid bare, from the genesis of the baby to the real nature of God and the perfidy of Edie....
"So long, old mother!"
Since the exodus from Angel Street, relations between Philip and his father had not been clearly defined. Philip still descended from Longton each Saturday morning to accompany Reb Monash to thePolisher Shool. He had at first been extremely reluctant to go, but Dorah threatened unstated oppressions, and though tea could hardly have been more pallid, Philip felt it wise to fall in with her request. He still came down to join in festival meals, but no word of intimacy passed between them. Inshool, the watchful eye of Reb Monash no longer guarded Philip's Prayer Book lest two pages be turned over in place of one; which very remission compelled Philip to reiterate the cryptic prayers with a blank, dull fidelity.
Thus, therefore, though they were on conversational terms with each other, as a man might be with a youth he disliked or feared but in whom he was compelled to take an interest, out of loyalty towards a dead friend, invariably the awakening of Reb Monash brought about the dissolution of such a cherry-séance as I have spoken of. For Mrs. Massel and her son had now made a tacit pact by which Philip always came home from Doomington School via Angel Street instead of by the upper road to Longton called Brownel Gap. It meant an uninterrupted hour with his mother, and these months, howsoever disastrous and dark the day might be before and after this golden hour, were their halcyon days.
"And yet," apprehensively muttered Philip to himself, "how thin she is getting!"
"Mother!" he would say, "Aren't you well? Can't you take something? You don't look half so—you know—half so fat and jolly as ordinary mothers do. Look at Alec Segal's mother! She adds another chin every month and she keeps on getting further out in front! You don't! What'll we do about it, mother; it can't go on, you know!"
"Channah, God bless her!" she would reply, "out of her hard-earned wages—and you know how much he makes her bring into the house—and then her new dress she's bought for Betsy's wedding, it's all purple like wine, apar-shane, that's what the dear girl looks, a beauty straight out of the picture book! Vesta Tilley me thou no Vesta Tilleys! Going on the stage like a boy, smoking cigarettes! But she always wears wigs! Perhaps she wants to make herself out a daughter of Israel, with her wearing wigs! Well, if she ever dresses up like an honest woman, I say Channah's new back comb, even if it hasn't got real diamonds, is just as lovely as Vesta Tilley's! Don't forget the sugar in thy tea, Feivele!"
"Yes, right, mother! But what about Channah, her hard-earned wages?"
"Oh yes! My head, my head! Thou dost not get thy brains from my old silly head, Feivele!Nu, where were we!Yah! I was saying, out of her hard-earned wages, cod-liver oil she buys me, and sometimes two fresh eggs she buys me! The extravagant girl, two fresh eggs! Make me a poetry out of two fresh eggs! It's all right making poetry out of trees and rivers! Thou hast ever seen trees and rivers, yes? No! Ah, those weretakketrees by the Dneister, and that was a river in a thousand! Will I ever smell again the grass in the fields by the river, when they cut it and it lies in heaps, and the moon, it comes up like a feather! This is not for me, Feivele! But when I'm dead, Feivele...."
"No, no, no, mother! Look here, I don't think you ought to talk like that! It isn't sensible!"
"I mean over a hundred years—thou shalt see a lot of countries and hills and thou shalt smell the grass cut by the river, maybe thou shalt see even the Dneister! Perhaps my brother Benya's daughter—she is how many years old, eight, nine—perhaps she will be astudentkaand thou wilt teach her English and she will teach theeRussand you'll get married—and thy old mamma, she'll not be there to see!"
"Mother, it's not decent of you! You talk like that more and more, I don't know why, and if you'd only take more care of yourself, you could be the Fat Woman in a show!"
"I'm sorry, son, I'm sorry," covering up her traces wistfully, "I mean I'll be over the sea in Angel Street, and you'll not want to wait till you come to England, thou and Rivkah—yes, yes, Rivkah is her name, God bless her! before you get married!"
Some days later, after another sitting where conversation ranges over continents and stars, and there is no fatigue in their wings—"Say, mother! here's two more new-laid eggs! I think one's a duck's, does it matter?"
"Oh akatchky! A big bluekatchky'segg! Oh, Feivele, where didst thou—
"Now don't ask! And anyhow, I've been sick of Longfellow for ages!"
"See, I'll boil it now! There's time before he comes down! Thou wilt have half!"
Stoutly, "Nothing, nothing! It's yours!" The egg is boiled. Sacredly, as if duck-egg-eating were a holy rite, Mrs. Massel eats her duck's egg. Once or twice she throws in fervent appreciations of the race ofkatchkies. Philip half hopes her cheeks will here and now take on a shade more colour from the nourishment he has provided for her out of the disposal of Evangeline. Her face still is pale, and there are still drawn lines at the mouth. Ah well, only wait till she's taken a lot more cod-liver oil and a lot more new-laid eggs, including as manykatchkiesas discarded poets will provide....!
"Feivele, he comes!"
"Humph—ho! I'm going! Oh, look at your hands, how liny and seamy they are! Come,doleave those brasses alone, they're so much work! And you know, when you don't clean 'em the only difference is they look like copper instead of brass! Ototototoi! I must be off, I suppose! What fat cherries they were—like babies! Well, you huge bullying monster of a mother, till to-morrow, till to-morrow!"
So the months passed, with their half-surreptitious visits to Mrs. Massel, which gained something of their too short delight from their shallow secrecy. At the extremes of the day, there were, on the one hand, school, on the other hand, Walton Street. At school he generally maintained an unambitious head above the waters, still fitfully persecuted by his fellows, or ignored, or dimly tolerated as one who took no interest in societies, sports and camps, but from whom no positive evil was to be expected, saving sometimes an ugly spurt of temper which did not cringe even before the towering creatures who at all other times carried universal terror in their wake. At the other extreme of the day were the sporadic flirtations in Walton Street which began somewhat to lose their attractions as he moved towards his sixteenth year. There were subfusc rumours about the migration of Alec Segal's family to another town for reasons unspecified. Harry Sewelson became entangled with two barmaids and a German governess successively. The simpering graces of the Edie ménage, it is grievous to add, began to wear thinner and thinner, excepting for the grosser souls of a George or a Willy Levi the Barber. Moreover, Philip had received so feeble a move as a consequence of an Edie-deteriorated school year, that he determined violently to regain his academic self-esteem. Of the fact that he became a competitor for the five-pound prize to be awarded to the greatest authority on Chaucer in the middle school at Doomington, Philip had left Dorah unaware. She was ready to expend over him the vials of her maternal love (she had no children) only as soon as he consented to be what she termed "a Jew among Jews." The history of Angel Street had taught her the futility of positive compulsion in this direction. But she placed before her the definite policy of treating Philip in a manner neither hostile nor affectionate, until, maybe, the sheer force of frigidity brought him creeping to the warmth. Whilst Philip had spent all the evening in the pursuit of Edie's lips instead of in the pursuit of a high place in form, she had merely said nothing. When now till a late hour he began to concern himself with his school work and his tales of Chaucer, she said nothing still, and was told as little. But likewise Philip said nothing to his mother. Suppose, and after all many of his competitors were in senior forms, suppose he should fail badly! Only Channah was his confidante, and from her he obtained the gift of a certain most desirable complete Chaucer which Cartwright had displayed in his curiosity shop for fruitless months.
Philip still remembered the almost dizzy delight he had occasioned his mother by the winning of a mere form prize as second-in-class two years ago. She still treasured it alongside of her Yiddish translations of Holy Writ, in the most intimate recess of her cupboard. Not a word was intelligible to her, of course; she was capable even of holding the book upside down. Yet she would carefully wipe her spectacles and proceed to move her eyes in leisurely transports from page to hieroglyphic page. She was so much attached to the book that he had not had the heart to take it away with him on the melancholy handcart which had transported his goods to Longton.
The decision of the Chaucer prize was to be decided an hour after school on a certain day and the official announcement to be made at prayers the following day. In an agony of sick apprehension Philip slunk about the corridors of the school. He was in a state of comatose despair and was staring unseeingly into a case of stuffed beavers and stoats, when a hearty and heavy hand descended on his shoulder.
"Well, Philip!" exclaimed the robust voice of Mr. Furness, "and who do you think has won the Chaucer prize?"
"Albert Chapman, sir!" suggested Philip weakly.
"Try again!"
"Jack Lord, sir!"
"No, my lad! He lives nearer Angel Street than that! Oh, of course, you live in Longton now! How's your sister?"
"You ... you don't meanme, sir?"
"But I do! Come into my room, I've a poet I think you'll like. Henley! You've not met Henley?
It matters not how strait the gate,How charged with punishment the scroll!
Won't your mother be glad, eh? I'm pleased, Philip, very! You're making good again! Let me see, we were quoting Henley. Of course, you remember:
In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud.
No? Here's the book then! ..."
Philip ran to Angel Street breathlessly and burst into the kitchen. Reb Monash had already come down and was sipping his glass of lemon-tea. But Philip had no eyes for Reb Monash.
"Mother!" he shouted, "I've won! I've won the Chaucer! A five-pound prize! Isn't it grand! I'll be able to buy you a blouse foryom tov! And hordes of eggs! Isn't it grand!"
She looked towards Reb Monash. He had contracted his forehead.
"Hush!" she said in a thin, even voice. "Thy father has a head this afternoon. Make not so much noise!"
"Don't you understand? I've won an awfully big prize and I've worked so hard for it!" he said, crestfallen. He had expected she would flush with delight and seize his hands and lift them to her lips, as she did when she was tremendously pleased with him. Instead, here she was showing no sign of pleasure, hardly of interest.
"It is well!" she said. "But thou must be quiet! Thou wilt have a cup of tea, wilt thou?"
"No!" he muttered, suppressing in his throat a lump of acute disappointment. "I've got to go to Dorah's at once! I promised to do something for her!"
His eyes had a suspicion of dampness when he arrived at Longton. He ate a chilled dinner sullenly.
Next day he had not the heart to go and see his mother. He spent the hour in an alcove of the school library ostensibly reading De Quincey, actually playing a game at that time gathering momentum at Doomington School, the game called "push penny," where two pair of nibs stuck in a table served as goal posts, and two rival pocket knives impelling two rival pennies attempted to introduce a further coin into the respective pen-nib goals. But he turned up in Angel Street as usual the following day. He was sulky. "A nice mother you are..." he began. But he had not time to say more. She had seated him beside her on the sofa and was stroking his head. "Feivele, Feivele, didst thou not understand? When he is here, dare I show what I think, how glad I am...?" A fit of coughing interrupted her. The boy looked up anxiously. "Thou knowest," she began again, "thou knowest what he will think, that I encourage thee in theygoyishkeit. Ah, would that thouwerta holier Jew, my son! It does not matter how far thou wilt go in the world, once a Jew, remain a Jew! Thou wilt have high friends. They will say to thy face 'How thou art wonderful, Mr. Massel!' Is not that true? And behind thee they will murmur 'Jew! Jew!'Yah, yah, that is a long way ahead! Where I shall be, who knows? And now again, what hast thou won? What? No! Not five pounds! For just sitting down and writing for three hours? No, that cannot be! Mr. Furness likes thee, no? It is Mr. Furness, he knows thou art cleverer than all the other boys...."
"No it wasn't, mother! He hadn't anything to do with it!"
"Tell me not! No sane man will give away five pounds because one sits oneself down at a desk and writes words! Ah well, let it be, if thou wilt have it so! ... But thou must not work so hard, thine eyes ... Oh, this coughing! I went to the market to buy a hen forshabbos. It is cheaper there. And it was raining one of your English rains ... lakes, it rained!"
"You know, mother, it's rotten of you! You shouldn't do it!"
"It will pass, it will pass! But the kettle's boiling! Tea! And look what I have bought thee, to-day! Cakes with ice, eh? I know how thou art a sweet tooth! Dost thou remember swallowing a whole box of pills because thou thought they were sweets! And how I took thee in this shawl, the red one, to the chemist! And he made thee sick with his finger, and thou bit his hand, thouyungatsch! See! It boils over on my clean fender!Kum shen, kum!"
The summer examinations followed. For some weeks preceding them, Philip worked hard all day and long into the night. It was during this period that Mrs. Massel took to her bed. Her cough had become heavy and persistent. Philip would come in after school with frightened eyes.
"It will pass, it will pass!" she repeated. He tried to overwhelm in a frenzied absorption in his work the lurking fear which gnawed at his heart-strings. Soon it was found imperative to move her bed from the upstairs bedroom to the parlour below. The pale thinning face would intervene between him and the page. He would draw back in a sudden access of terror. "It will be all right!" he assured himself, "All the really hot days of summer are to come yet!" One thing at least he could do. He would get a first-rate place in the exams. He knew how that would delight her. He was sure it would help her no end. He thrust himself wholly into his books.
He did so well at the examination that a bursary was awarded him which put his position at school beyond all peril for another two years.
"Mother!" he burst in one day. "Such good news!"
She lifted her head tiredly. "Tell me, my son!"
"I've got a huge scholarship and school's absolutely right now, nothing to fear! Tell me, mother, aren't you horribly excited! Isn't it fine!"
But looking down on her face, he found it wet with tears. An ice-sharp dismay leapt to his heart.
"Mother, aren't you glad? You ought to be laughing! I never expected anything like it! Oh, mother, why on earth are you crying? What's it all about?"
"Thou wilt not understand, Philip! But it is nothing! I'm not really crying! Nothing, nothing! See, my face is dry! Kiss me, Feivele!"
He bent down to her. For an hour he talked to her of the new confidence his success had brought him and what he was going to do when he left school. He might even go to the University! No, he would not be a doctor! His ambitions hadn't taken shape yet, but he might be.... Oh, he didn't know what he mightn't be if he only tried! And he'd have such a house for her to live in...!
He fell to describing the house of his dreams ... until at length Channah came in. She was ending her button-hole labours earlier, nowadays, in order to have more time to attend to her mother.
The summer holidays had already begun when Mr. Furness wrote to Philip informing him that he had made arrangements for the boy to spend a fortnight in the country. It was characteristic of Mr. Furness. He realized that unless he himself engineered it there was no chance of Philip obtaining the holiday the boy seemed badly to need. It was better, he decided, not to broach the matter at all, but by definitely presenting Philip with thefait accompli, and by placing himself behind the vantage of the impersonal post, to simplify Philip's position as far as possible. The idea had occurred to him of inviting Philip to the annual Doomington camp among the Westmoreland hills, particularly as the camp regularly contained a fair proportion of the Jewish boys at the school. But the thought of Reb Monash seemed rigidly to disqualify the idea. It was obvious that with the most courteous intentions in the world the ceremonial minutiae of Angel Street could hardly be repeated to their last austerity in the divine welter of camp. He cast about in his mind, therefore, for a means of satisfying at once the scruples of Reb Monash and his own determination that Philip should breathe smokeless air. The Jewish "guest house" kept by Mrs. Kraft under the Wenton Hills seemed as amiable a solution as he could find.
It was run on "strictlykosher" lines for boys between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and ladies over the decorous age of thirty. The determination to avoid complicationsdu coeurseemed, he considered, perhaps a little ostentatious. The important point, however, was that Wenton House was at once "kosher" and in the country, and he was satisfied that Mrs. Kraft was a capable and excellent lady.
For one moment only Mr. Furness's letter brought to Philip a wild joy, then the joy flickered and was quenched.
"Absolutely impossible!" he determined. "How can I go and leave her lying ill in the parlour, coughing! I'm not going, that's final!"
But the matter was by no means so easily decided. "Not going!" cried Mrs. Massel. "Not going!" echoed Channah.
"Be thou not a fool, my son!" the mother urged. "How I have yearned it should come to pass for thee! What, a Yiddisher house in the country! Of course thou wilt go! Thou wilt come back alabe, a lion, with a big chest, a sight for God and Man! Perhaps there will be a real river there? No? Not like the Mitchen! A river they call it, such a year upon them! Yes, and the men in the fields will be cutting the grass, or is it too soon? The year is slower in this England of thine than in Terkass, but what knows one of the year, how it comes or goes, in thy lovely Dum—ing—tonn!"
"Don't be silly, mother! How on earth can I go when you're like this! I can't! I can't think of it!"
"A question! Thou must go, I say! Annotate for me no passages!Mirtsaschem, I'll be well again when thou returnest. I will make thee, all for thyself, akuggel...oi, oi, this coughing ...mishkosheh, it will pass ... a largekuggel, with large raisins, larger raisins are not!"
"Of course you must go!" broke in Channah, adding her pressure, "Look how hard you've been working with all your Chaucers and things! We'll be having you to look after as well, if you're not careful! And you know yourself how it'll cheer mother up to think you're in the open air with no worries and nothing to do but get fat! I'll tell you what, I'll give you an extra half-crown—if you promise not to spend it on your smelly old books—and you must go to a farm every morning——"
But as she went on talking, a shadow, the sensation of a picture rather than a picture itself, established itself in Philip's mind. A figure shrouded, very calm, very cold! Candles fluttering somewhere! Hunched shadows ... calm ... cold....!
"I can't go! I can't go!" he shouted suddenly.
"Feivele!" his mother begged. "What is with you? Speak to him, Channah, speak to him!"
"You're a beast, Philip! Look how you're upsetting her! Youmustgo!Emmes adonoi, the doctor said she's getting on nicely. It's only rest she wants and good food, he said, and no worry. No worry, mind you!"
He looked away from Channah and saw the appeal in his mother's eyes.
"All right, I'll go!" he said heavily.
"Good old lad! The first thing..."
"Look here, Channah!" he interrupted. An idea had suddenly occurred to him. "I'll go on one condition. You must write a note to me every day I'm away, it doesn't matter how small, a post-card if you like! And every day mother must write her name on it, without fail! Promise that!"
Channah looked at him strangely.
"Of course I'll promise! And I'll do it! Won't we, mother?"
"The foolish boy with his poetry-ideas! Of course we will!Nu, shen, nu, thou art happy now? He will say to me a poetry, Channah, and thou must go this moment to boil thyself an egg! Go thou, go,tochterel!"