Over him stood the busy woman; Mrs. Finberg she was, the shroud maker, officiator at deaths. She waited till the hollow sobbing subsided, then pressed on him hot cup of tea. This time he did not refuse, did not turn his head and bury it in the escaping stuffing of the sofa.
After some moments he rose and opened the kitchen door. He found Channah proceeding towards the lobby.
"When will it be, Channah?" he asked, "Is it arranged?"
"When will what be?"
"You know, the funeral, I mean!"
"It won't be more than a few hours now!"
"But I don't understand! Not more than a few hours! What's the time now?"
"It's just after nine!"
"Nine o'clock? But she died at nine o'clock!"
She drew back frightened. "But that wasyesterday!"
"Yesterday? Oh, what's the matter with me? Is it Sunday just now then?"
"Of course it is! It wasshabbosyesterday!"
"Of course, of course!" He began to apprehend how time had been annihilated for him. "Of course it's Sunday! What was I talking about? And you say it's in a few hours then?"
"The man from the burial society has just been in. He says the cabs'll come about two, he thinks; somebody said that funerals are the only things that Jews are in time about. Oh, Philip, Philip, they'll not be late; what does it matter when they come?"
"Oh, so there'll be cabs?"
"Yes, there'll be cabs!"
"And there'll be—you know—a hearse?"
"What do you keep on asking these questions for? Of course there must be!"
"What's all those heavy noises for, in the parlour? What is it they're moving about?"
"Don't, Philip, don't! Come back into the kitchen!"
"It's the coffin! Isn't it the coffin?"
The parlour door was flung open suddenly. With her hair escaped from the pins, her hands beating wildly, there stood Dorah, crying shrilly, with broken catches! "Come here, Channah, Philip! Come, look at her for the last time! Quick, quick, it'll be too late!"
Channah clung back against him.
"We must go!" Philip whispered. "Poor old girl, let's go!"
All but her face was covered where she lay, the lid revealing the calm head. The room was full of unchecked sobbing. Grief was round her like a whirlpool. How calm she lay at its centre, unperturbed, serene! A woman was tearing her hair, Dorah beating her breast savagely! Reb Monash stood heaped against a corner, his head drooped upon his breast. Channah, her shoulders convulsively shaking, lay clasped in a woman's arms. Philip looked tearless upon his mother's tearless face.Sheknew how to take Death quietly, like a queen! The tinge of yellow had gone from her cheeks. They were only white now, placidly white. Never before had her face been so wise and sweet. Oh, the queenly lady ... mother as never before!
"Go out now, you must go out!" a voice said.
"Never, never! You'll never take her away!" Dorah shrieked, but the woman led Dorah out, and Channah after her. For one moment Reb Monash and Philip remained in the room, the body between them. Then they too went.
Little trickles faltered down the kitchen windows, dulling the light already so meagre. Philip looked out into the yard and saw a slow drizzle falling miserably. The ground would be sodden, out there. He shivered. A chill rain faltered within him as he turned away, a drizzle soaking his heart till it was sodden like the cemetery out along the paved roads, somewhere at a corner of Doomington. As he sat motionless, a man approached him and asked him to unfasten his coat. With leaden fingers he obeyed. The man seized his waistcoat a little distance above the first button-hole and held it taut with the left thumb and first finger. A razor in the right hand made a two-inch incision. The canvas threads sprawled from the gap like exposed nerves.
When the first cab came crunching along Angel Street, he observed with abstract interest how the wheels, though superficially they seemed to be arrested outside the front door, still went heavily revolving towards his ribs and crunched them below their passing, till he could hardly breathe for the sharp bits of bone sticking in his chest. Other vehicles followed. Two cabs had been subscribed for and sent by thePolisher Shoolto express the sympathy and respect of the congregation. One or two other synagogues which had witnessed Reb Monash's oratorical triumphs paid a like tribute, and there was, of course, a quotum provided by the burial society out of the Sunday fund to which Reb Monash had contributed from the first week of his arrival in Doomington, as knowing that though his family's living might be a doubtful affair, of death's coming, soon or late, there could be no doubt.
Some one told him that his father, theparnassand thegabboimof thePolisher Shoolwere already installed in the leading cab. They were waiting for him. A lethargy had been creeping about his brain. "Wasn't there any way of getting out of it? Why must he go? Why must any one go? Wasn't it finished, finished beyond recall?"
Dorah sat on the sofa swaying regularly from side to side. He heard the crying of Channah, hidden somewhere.
"Go thou, go!" moaned Dorah.
He staggered through the front door. A swift wave of sympathy from the red-eyed crowd in the street surged towards him. A horrible self-consciousness afflicted him and he wilted like a leaf before a flame.
"What a lovely funeral!" he heard somebody mutter....
He heard the clinking of coins in a tin box. He remembered. There was no wedding, no funeral where theshammoswas not to be seen, clinking his box for the poor.
But the clinking faded from his ears when he discovered with a swift stare of recognition the tin can at the pavement's edge. "Orummer ingel!" a woman cried, lifting her voice, "Poor lad!" The words grated. He was glad to find himself in the dark shelter of the cab, crushed in among the men.
As the procession moved away, he knew that Dorah stood on the steps of the house, beating her hands together, shouting; that Channah seemed to run after them like a ghost; she tottered, and the capable arms of women had seized her, were bearing her away. The hearse turned the corner of Angel Street. The cabs followed.
Still a passionless stupor held him as they moved along Doomington Road and up Blenheim Road, through Longton, beyond the outskirts of the Jewish quarter, and to Wheatley at last, where the Jewish cemetery straggled over the low slope of a hill and the tombstones bore meekly the inquisitions of the passing trams.
The entrance into the cemetery was a wooden, draughty shed where a few Prayer Books were lying about on the forms. The shed was rapidly filling. In addition to those whom the cabs had brought were a number who had travelled by tram. Soon he found a service beginning and himself mechanically joining in prayers. And shortly after he was moving out into the open with the rest, into the damp air. They were moving along the uphill winding path to the cemetery. The clay underfoot was difficult for treading. The atmosphere was full of the smell of turned earth. After one or two minutes the untidy procession paused and thechazanwho was officiating at the funeral continued the wailing chant. Again they moved forward and again they stopped; the chant was resumed, until at last they were among the graves. There were uprooted weeds, removed by the caretaker from privileged graves, lying in dank heaps, tainting the tainted air and tangling the narrow walks among the dead.
This was the place then, this black, deep hole? The rain was drizzling into the grave. If they waited too long, there would be a floor of clayey water. It was a deep hole; who had thought that graves were so deep? It was true that no disturbance from the harsh world above would penetrate so far; but if the grave were a little less deep, there would be communion with the roots of flowers, almost the tiny pattering of birds' feet.
So he mused, hardly conscious of the solemn chanting and the sobbing about his ears, until some one whispered that he must throw a clod of earth into the grave, on to the coffin lid.
Even this, then? No release, no hope! A lump of earth fell dully from his father's hand. Light would the earth be which her son threw on his mother's bed! He lifted a fragment of clay and released it over the grave. But heavily the sound came, boomed on his ears. Others followed. He became aware of a new refrain in the threnody round him. "Beg for me, Chayah!" "Beg for me, beg the Above One!" they were shouting into the grave as the coffin disappeared below the rising earth. "Beg for me, Chayah!"
He turned away. No more sound was heard of clay on naked wood. Terribly, silently, the level rose. The caretaker had seized the shovel and was piling more earth on the broken surface. Behind a tall white stone with black pillars a little distance away, hidden from the rest, Philip lay for some time, his face on the damp gravel, at last realizing how far from all reach they had placed her, beyond all language, all vision, at the roots of darkness, far from his twitching fingers. It was time for the mourners to descend to the shed forminchah. Thechazanwas getting restive.
But a few lingered among the stones, coming to read again the inscriptions over the graves of parents, children, friends, all equally dead in the Wheatley cemetery, all under the drizzle in uncomplaining company, all stretched quiet under the levelled clods, which other sons, fathers, friends had heaped on the coffin lids.
When the crowd had descended, he found Reb Monash sitting alone on a form against the wall. Theshammoswhispered to Philip that he must be seated alongside his father. Head swimming, he obeyed. And now cameminchah, the afternoon service. Reb Monash turned up in a Prayer Book thekaddish, the special prayer of the bereaved. The isolation of their two voices frightened him, but he was conscious of a tense determination that no hitch should take place in this concluding ceremony, that she should be left, the tired woman, at rest as soon as they would release her. He uttered the prayer with dead clarity.
Minchah was over. In dull wonder he realized that the shammos had unfastened his father's shoe laces and was unfastening his own. Reb Monash rose weakly and walked across the room and Philip followed. The crowd desultorily made way for them as they moved, their loose laces dragging in the dust. As they were fumbling once more with the tying of their laces, the black figures were flickering through the door into the road.
Who of the living shall stay in the place of the dead? Let the dead hold such converse together as they can! Day speeds to night and night will bring new day. An emptier day for empty eyes in this place and in that, but a new day none the less. Will not fresh waters be flowing from the mountain sources, and other waves hurtle against the shores? It is only the caretaker's dog who prowls unhappily among the graves, wondering dimly at all this to-do. The caretaker himself wipes the clay from his weeding fork and sets to work again, whistling.
There was a self-satisfaction in the clatter of the horses' hoofs as the cabs made their way from the cemetery, an indication that having achieved their part of the day's burden satisfactorily, it was left to the humans they were carrying away to dismiss them as soon as decorum permitted. The drizzle persisted still. The tram-lines glistened evilly mottled among the bricks. With fitful abstraction Philip looked through the window into the drab day. The continuity of houses had not yet begun. Here and there stood a public house at a corner, or two or three houses thrown up in apologetic haste. The cabs overtook a man and a woman walking citywards in the same direction; it seemed that when the hearse came abreast of the man, a natural impulse made him remove his hat. The man stood gaping as the first cab approached, the woman staring curiously. Then suddenly she seized him by the shoulder and pointed a correcting finger towards the procession. She shouted something into his ears—the actual words were drowned in the rattle of wheels. The man gaped more foolishly, and at once, deliberately, replaced his hat. As the man and woman passed from Philip's sight, they were grinning significantly into each other's faces. The lad wondered what it meant. Quickly he was informed. The procession was now riding abreast of a piece of waste ground, sloping greasily up from the roadside level. Against the sky-line, faintly muffled by the intervening rain, Philip saw three or four youths standing, long-legged. He perceived that as soon as they became conscious of the funeral procession their lank immobility had stiffened, and that at once they proceeded to make derisive gestures with their arms and hands. When at last he realized the significance of their gestures he felt as though each had plunged a rusty knife into him. It was the movement he remembered on the part of a band of youths who two or three years ago had assembled outside thePolisher Shoolto mock the old Jews entering on theirYom Kippursupplications. It was the movement which had sometimes greeted him in the meaner Gentile parts of Doomington, to an accompaniment of "smoggy van Jew!" Once Higson Junior had stood at the top of the stairs ...
The rain was not too opaque to obscure their lips shaping, nor so dense that he could not hear the scornful implacable words—"Smogs! Look at the smoggy van Jews!"
"God!" he shouted, suddenly starting to his feet. The others calmed him, bade him sit down; to them it seemed a spasmodic outburst of his grief. They had not noticed the gesticulating youths on the clay slope. Or perhaps the youths had not escaped their notice, but having passed this way before, the edge of the experience had been blunted for them by familiarity.
Philip as suddenly subsided, but the blood surged through him, wave after wave, in fierce anger. This, then, was the gentleness of Christ! These the countrymen of Shelley! For these Socialism schemed and poured its hot blood! Oh, God! The skunks! What would it matter if himself they stripped and threw stones at him, sent him bleeding home? Or if they filled with mud the mouths and nostrils of these old men about him? But they had desecrated Death itself, the dolorous quiet majesty of Death! They had desecrated her, the sleeping woman with the folded hands, the lips that should utter no more her sweet calm words, her eyes, sealed under disks of clay, that had been innocent as dawn!
He squirmed in his corner of the cab. They had desecrated her sleep, these minions of Christ! It seemed at that moment that no life henceforward lay before him excepting the shattering from His throne of the thorn-crowned Hypocrite, in whose service those long-legged blackguards jeered at Death. This mood passed quickly. A memory came to him of a picture he had seen somewhere, the eyes of Christ lifted in anguish, the heavy blood thickening about the wounds. But he felt that a bitter brew had been forced down his throat. A taste of crude salt lay in the hollow of his tongue.
The cab arrived at Angel Street. Dorah and Channah sat waiting in the kitchen on low stools, and low stools (on which alone the bereaved of a Jewish family may sit during the shiveh, the seven days' mourning) were set for Reb Monash and Philip. The neighbours had prepared some food, but Philip could not eat. Each mouthful became impregnated with the evil liquid flowing round his tongue. He was conscious of nothing but intense irritation and dared not trust himself to utter a word. He winced when a door opened, squeaking, and brutally he kicked the cat as it meowed into his face. When Channah put her hand on his forehead, he threw it off with a suppressed scream. He was annoyed that the women let the food lie about so long, and when they removed it, he was annoyed that they removed it so clumsily. A ring of hot metal seemed to lie behind each eye. He shut his eyes, but only set the rings rolling on their axes and throwing off sparks.
A sing-song monologue was drumming into his ears. One or two of Reb Monash's friends had come in and his father was narrating the virtues of the dead woman.
"Oi, such a wife!" he was moaning, "A Yiddish soul and good as gold! Nothing which it is right for a Yiddish woman to do, she did not do! Nomitzvahwas too hard for her! And on Friday night what a table it was! Not a speck on the tablecloth and the candles shining like the heavens!Oi, my buried Chayah! Where shall I find me such another one? Where, where? And onyom tovvim....!"
The teeth of Philip's bitterness fastened close on this harangue. This was the first moment since his return from Wenton that he had become conscious of Reb Monash as a separate and complete entity. He had been irrelevant hitherto. Only his mother, living or dead, had occupied the full circle of his vision. There had been room for no one, nothing but her. The incident on the return from the cemetery had made a hole in the walls of his isolation, an acid had come trickling into him, corroding him. What did the old man mean by this futility? What interest was all this to the nodding old fools on the sofa? Indeed, what interest were her virtues to the man himself, eulogizing her from the low stool, in the same chant he had heard often in the bygone years, rising fitfully from the room where the living woman lay sleepless and frightened in her bed?
"And what think you she would do? She would borrow money on her bracelets to lend to Yashka, the fisher's wife! And when a woman gave birth she would forget she was ill herself: she'd go out through the rain to make her some dainty and clean her floor! What a house she kept for me....!"
It was intolerable! Would he never finish? Whither was he leading? Faster and faster revolved the wheels behind his eyes. He dug his nails into his hands and the voice proceeded evenly. He had stopped. No, it was to draw breath! He was proceeding again. This man his father? Oh, a stranger surely! They had lost sympathy enough, God knows, these years. But the man incanting now so monotonously, who was he, what was he doing here?
Philip found his own lips in motion. Reb Monash was silent and turned his head towards his son.
"You've found it all out now, have you?" he said. The voice was raw and dry, a voice he had never uttered nor heard before. Was it himself had asked that question, and himself who asked again with words that stabbed the tranced silence in which the room lay frozen—
"So you've found it out now that you've killed her?"
A blight seemed to fall on the lips of Reb Monash. They turned sick and grey. The colour spread along his cheeks. His eyes grew wider and dark and very sorrowful. Neither he nor his son seemed aware that Dorah had advanced to the boy, her teeth showing large between her lips, that she lifted her hand to strike him, but the hand had failed suddenly, and she had sunk on a stool, sobbing. The eyes of Reb Monash still rested full on his son's, but his chin drooped lower on his breast. When he spoke, his voice echoed the raw dry tones that had left Philip's mouth.
"God knows, Feivele!" he said. "Perhaps thou hast right!"
His head shook unsteadily for some moments, then fell forward and downward like a lead weight.
"He's fainted!" shrieked Dorah.
"He's fainted!" Channah echoed. Dorah turned fiercely on Philip. Her fingers clawed the air.
"What have I done?" Philip said. "What was I saying?"
They flung the door open. Some one fumbled at the window frantically for a minute or two, then realized that the window could not open. With quick sobs of alarm Channah threw water into Reb Monash's face, while Dorah held his head to the air.
Reb Monash opened his eyes. "Where's Feivele?" he asked faintly.
"Here!" the boy whispered.
"Feivele!" said his father. "Feivele, let it be over! It has lasted too long!"
"Father, what meanest thou? I knew not what I was saying...."
"No, that is finished; it is said! The fighting, let it be over! Go thine own way! If thou wilt come mine, some day far off, God be praised! But the fighting, let it be over! I am tired!"
The boy stared into his father's face. Memory after memory floated like vapours darkly over the seas of the past, interposed themselves between that sallow face and his eyes. Then he saw the eyelids fail wearily. The memories drew away along the wide levels.
He knew what issue had been declared. They had suffered much and waited long, his father and he. To Death had fallen the decision of their conflict.
"Father, let it be over!"
The tension was only broken that night. Harry Sewelson came in and after a speechless, eloquent handshake, informed Philip that he had been away all yesterday and had learned of the death only a couple of hours ago. He had heard women discussing it over the counter in his father's shop. Alec and his family had left the town unexpectedly a few days ago or Alec would have come in too....
People kept on crowding into the kitchen till the room was unbearably stuffy. Harry had relapsed into reverent silence in a corner. Philip was certain he would choke unless he went to the front door to breathe. He passed along the lobby and opened the door. At that moment old Serra Golda, who had just climbed the stairs, was about to knock, and even as her hand rose to the knocker, the door swung noiselessly inward. Her little puckered eighty-year-old face, caught faintly by the gleam of a street lamp, was distraught with fright. She uttered a slight screech of horror. Her beady eyes stared from her head in a manner intolerably ridiculous. A demon of laughter seized Philip overwhelmingly and a great raucous peal bellowed from his lips. He swayed impotently, hands waving in the air, each mouthful of laughter louder and more hideous than the last. The old lady bustled by him, muttering indignantly, "Thou loafer! such a year upon thee!"
The words only emphasized the insanity of his mirth. He managed to close the door and then stood in the darkness of the lobby, beating his head on the wall in his transports. He felt his ribs cracking in the onslaught of laughter, and clasped his hands tight round his body.
He found Harry standing beside him.
"Good God! Philip!" he exclaimed. "It isn't seemly! How can you do it!"
For long Philip could shape no word. The tears streamed from his eyes. At last, with infinite difficulty, he brought out:
"Oh, hell, Harry, don't you understand? Don't you see ... see how I'm..."
But the words were drowned in a fresh and prolonged peal. Harry walked away from him impatiently.
It was fortunate thatmeyeriv, the evening service, had been rendered and thekaddishintoned. Philip now realized clearly that the laughter was entirely out of his control and that it would be fatal to re-enter the kitchen. Although the main attack had subsided, bubbles of laughter still boiled in his throat and issued from his lips in ragged shrieks. Utterly prostrated, he determined that the only thing he could do was to go to bed at once, and he fell asleep with his own laughter ringing lamentably in his ears.
Three times daily for the following seven days, a little community, necessarily never less than ten adults, and frequently intersprinkled with a few of those more piouschayderboys who wished specially to commend themselves to theirrebbie, gathered fordavenningin the Angel Street kitchen; the visitors on sofa and chairs, Reb Monash and Philip on low stools; the mourners uttering theirkaddish, the visitors chiming amen with devout promptitude.
Davenning, perhaps by some deliberate charitable intention, seemed to take up most of the day, and effectively chequered Philip's moods of stagnant melancholy with the need for definite action and a brave show in the eyes of the world. Benjamin, Dorah's husband, a meek, pale-haired man, whose will had always been a useful and docile implement in the hands of his wife, attended theminyonwith complete regularity, a praiseworthy fact in virtue of the commercial travelling which took him into far outlying villages. Dorah herself returned to Longton, leaving Philip in Angel Street for the period of theshiveh.
After the first week the family was permitted to resume ordinary chairs, but for a whole month the unshaved cheeks of Philip Massel testified biblically to his loss. Yetkaddishwas not at end. Three times a day for the ensuing eleven months the prayer was to be uttered in one synagogue or another. And year after year thereafter candles were to be lit on the eve of the anniversary of the death andkaddishthree times uttered next day.
For the Jewish mind the prayer is invested with extreme sanctity. The birth of a son conveys to his father and mother immediately the glad tidings of "Thank God! akaddishfor our souls!" In a precisely similar manner to the purchase of a mass and for precisely similar reasons, akaddish, by a childless man and woman, will be bought for money. There are, indeed, old men who shuffle about the dark spaces of a synagogue, whose main livelihood is the recital, at a stated rate, of the prayer. But, it is needless to insist, the commercial commodity is held to possess by no means the same efficacy as the consanguineouskaddish. Dereliction of duty in this matter is held to be a flagrant betrayal of the dead. The image is held before the culprit's eye of the body attempting to shake free from its bondage of worms and mud, and for lack of intercession before the throne of God, enchained cruelly within the narrow territory of the coffin.
The state in which Philip had endured the climax of his mother's illness, her death and funeral, had involved, it has been evident, less a storm of suffering than a trance, a deadly level of hysteria. When he returned from Angel Street to Longton, he seemed to lose his faculty for quick reaction, for poignant contrition or grief. His mind reduplicated the sooty autumn which spread like a web about the city, entrapping the last evidences of summer and leaving them to hang bedraggled like sucked flies.
Whether or no, for one who had at least made such pretensions of affection towards his dead mother, he ought, from the point of view of an abstract decency, to have persisted with the prayer to which she herself had attached such importance, it is not easy to decide. It is possible that had he recited thekaddishin a language he understood, he would have persisted even to the end. On the other hand, it is possible that had he been faced with the task of reiterating for so long the same fixed number and sequence of words with their inelastic content of meaning, he would have defected even sooner: that, in fact, the mere unintelligibility of the prayer conferred upon it for a season the quality of the kabbalistic. But the essential fact is this, that the emotional part of him now flowed like a sluggish backwater, and in his emotion alone the ritual could have been steeped until it shone with beauty and urgency.
Only his mind moved with any clarity, and his mind had long ago decided that phylacteries belonged to Babylon, that all the terror of the Day of Atonement was an immense, an almost conquering hypnotism, from which with travail he had escaped.Kaddishwas but an issue of the same quality as these, though more painful in its solution; for those others were related merely to the general problem presented to him by his race, whilst this was bound up so immediately with the lovely thing he had lost.
His first absence from the morning service at the littleshoolin Longton (his absences from the afternoon and evening services were not ostentatious and were therefore not commented on) produced a series of violent outbursts from Dorah, culminating in a threat that she would no longer allow him to pass her doors. When he informed her that he had had other struggles to determine and others still faced him, that he was too tired arguing the matter ofkaddishwith himself for any argument with her, that, in short, he would go, as she threatened, and become an errand boy or a clerk, her anger relaxed. It was certain he was very worn out, and if he actually left the bosom of his family, his last tie with Judaism would be snapped, and—who knew? he might, God forbid, even marry a Gentile, agoyah! What a scandal it would be! Benjamin would lose his Jewish clientele, it would shake Reb Monash'schayderto its foundations, and what would be thought of amaggidwhose son ... No, the matter was too terrible to think of! They must be patient, perhaps God would be kind even yet! Yet it was hard, very hard to bear! Not for all her resolutions could she stifle periodic outbursts of wrath. Philip would rise from the table with shut lips and retire to his room and his books.
Poetry had begun to lose its savour for him. Poetry tinkled. He discovered a volume of thePoems and Ballads. It mystified and annoyed him. He was in no mood for the sheer unrelated beauty of Keats, and Tennyson seemed fit only to read on a bench among the tulip beds of Longton Park. His feet held him too heavily to the ground to allow, with Shelley, any excursion into the empyrean. As yet it was an atmosphere too rare for him to breathe again; there was too much of the graveyard damp in his lungs. The equilibristic clap-trap of "Ulalume" and "The Raven" filled him at first with indignation and then with mere mirth.
The routine of school made as yet hardly any break in the even tenour of his mind. Mr. Furness uttered a few words of sympathy, so quiet and unobtrusive that without scraping the wound they gave to Philip a sense of ease and understanding more than all the rhymed consolations of the poets. With Browning he had more success, and though the robust exuberance of the poet was out of harmony with Philip's prevailing mood, here at least was stuff of the earth earthy, sound stuff for his jaws to tackle with pertinacity. But the discovery he made which nearest met his mood was the discovery of prose. With fiction, of course, he had always been familiar. But this was no more prose in a strict sense than Pope was poetry. Each existed for a purpose beyond its medium, Dickens for his tale and Pope for his precept. But when he casually picked up at a handcart in the Swinford market a copy of theReligio Medici, chiefly for a melancholy delight in its mere odour of antique must, and thus casually stumbled on a music which had more than the subtlety of verse, and none of its arbitrary divisions, he was carried away upon an untravelled sea. The "Urn Burial" he chanted night after night. TheHistoryof Clarendon and theCompleat Anglerwere a similar experience, the mere narrative of the first and the piscatorial erudition of the other affecting him as not truly relevant to the prose in which they were written, being merely moulds to give their music one shape instead of another shape. He moved lazily towards the more troubled seas of Swift and was suddenly tossing helplessly in those furious waters; until release allowed him to seek amiable harbourage with Dick Steele and, disregarding lordlily an intervening century, in the pleasant coves of Lamb.
It was not that the agony of those summer days, the telegram at Wenton, the cemetery, the words he had uttered in Angel Street and their consequence, were submerged quickly or in the least. For long, periods of listless vacuity clogged Philip's feet and mind. He would sit musing for hours over an unfinished meal or stand in prolonged and joyless reverie before a hardware shop. The slow blood in his veins called for no action. No dream of sky or hills was potent enough to prick his limbs with desire to be moving beyond the bounds of the city and along the climbing roads. So for a time these voyages with the learned and dead doctors of prose were the only adventures of his soul.
Almost with the first quickening of spring, something of the old unease twitched his body. He realized that his friend Alec, from whom no word had come to him, had not once entered his mind; that even Harry, upon whom he had stumbled several times, had in no wise concerned him. He had seen him once or twice with a lady. Details of her had not impressed themselves upon him. He knew only that she seemed ten or twenty years older than his friend, and a plain woman; distinctly, a plain woman. He determined to call for Harry and suggest a tram ride into the country.
"I'm sorry," Harry had said awkwardly. "I'm afraid I can't! I'm quite fixed up. I never have time to go with any one else."
"I beg your pardon," said Philip huffily, "really I shouldn't like to intrude! It just occurred to me that we used to have something to do with one another not so very long ago. I think I'd best not keep you any longer now."
"Philip, try and be a sport, if you can!" Harry entreated. "My time's not my own. You're not old enough yet, so you can't possibly understand! No offence meant!"
"What's the good of crowing about—what's your haughty age—nearly eighteen? It's a privilege bought by mere waiting!"
"Of course I could trust you to misunderstand. The fact is there's every chance of my getting—for God's sake don't tell a word to any one—", he dropped his voice and looked carefully round, "of my getting married!"
"Good God, man, you're a baby! Don't be a fool!"
"Oh, don't try that game on me! I'm old enough for marrying, if I'm old enough to be a father. Don't look so startled! I don't mean to say that I am. That's the trouble! Yes, it was a pretty sound instinct that prevented me from going round to see you, even when they kept her in after hours! I see the sort of sympathy I could have expected!"
"But who on earth is it?"
"Didn't we see you somewhere or other about ten days ago when we were together?"
"Do you mean that——?"
"Yes, that's Miss Walpole!" he said austerely. "The trouble is that we can't really decide if I am the father actually or not!" he went on in a sudden burst of confidence. "But the baby's due before long and there's only one thing left for a decent chap to do. That's apart entirely from the fact that the girl means everything to me now!" he said with assumed airiness.
"Don't be so bloody, Harry!" Philip burst out. A clearer vision of the lady presented itself to him than when she passed before him in the flesh. "She's a hag of eighty!"
The face of the infatuated youth turned white with wrath. "I think the sooner you take your filthy face through that door the better! You and your blasted impertinence!"
Dignity demanded a frigid and immediate withdrawal.
"I'll be damned!" Philip murmured, "a chap with a mind like Harry's! Lord, it was as hard as a knife! Poor old devil, I suppose he'll wake up in a month and find himself up to the neck! Who's left? That's what I want to know! All the old landmarks are washed away. What the hell is a chap to do? Who's left?" The question drummed insistently into his ears. He found himself aching for friendship. For the last few months he had hardly uttered a word excepting a request for the sugar, perhaps, and a reply to a question at school. His general friendlessness filled him with humiliation. The Walton Street phase had drawn to its dull end long ago and not a figure remained who offered the least hope of companionship. Alec, like the callous swine he had always felt Alec fundamentally to be, had merely disappeared—bearing with him the telescope of high romance, as might have been expected. On Harry the gods had inflicted a terrible cerebral affliction. Philip remembered Harry's attendant lady and shuddered. And Harry had been sweet on Edie once! Oh, yes, Edie! What was it he had heard Dorah and Benjamin saying about Edie? He remembered. Her photograph had been seen by a "millionaire" in the house of a relative of Edie in Pittsburg, U.S.A. The "millionaire," promptly enamoured, had entered into negotiations with the authorities in Doomington, the negotiations were succeeded by a trunk of the most astounding dresses and a first-class ticket to Pittsburg. So much for Edie! In any case she had worn thin ages ago. Then it was that Mamie returned to his mind.
His first thought was "Damn that girl! I thought I'd forgotten her!" She filled him with a vivid sense of guilt. "I've had enough!" he vowed. His mind returned to the episode of the signature, and to escape his contrition, he fled from the house and walked swiftly down Blenheim Road. To his horror he discovered that every step he took was actually a step nearer the enchantress. To his horror he was forced to recognize that the thought of her made him tingle with pleasure. The recollection of her began to torture him. It was a double infliction, sensations of guilt and promptings of delight struggling for mastery. When his mind returned to his mother, his despair was more abandoned than it had been since the summer. Yet ever when his gloom was most profound, the girl re-entered his thoughts, whistling as she turned the corner of the barn, brushing his cheeks with her hair.
"By God!" he exclaimed. "I lent her that prose translation of Dante!" (He remembered that she had asked who had wrote Dante, and that she had thought it sodelincateof him to lend her so sweet a book. And when she'd just finished the Pansy Bright-eye Library she was reading, she'dloveto learn all about this here Dante. She was sure he'd bethatinteresting!)
Which lack of culture had then rather accentuated than diminished her charm, a quaint sort of sophisticated naïveté. "Of course, I've got to get my book back! I'll call for it to-morrow night!"
He knocked firmly at the door of the Mamie household. A miniature version of Mamie appeared. He asked if Philip Massel could see Miss Mamie.... The child disappeared into the sitting-room half-way along the passage. A whispering which seemed to last many minutes followed. Then the child reappeared and ushered him into the room. The glare of an admirable incandescent mantle blinded him for a moment. There were three or four people in the room but immediately he only recognized Mrs. Hannetstein. A familiar voice addressed him.
"Oh, good evening, Mr.—er—Massel, so glad you've called!"
He turned to the source of the voice. Good heavens, was that Mamie? Hell, she'd got her hair up! You couldn't quite compare her to Harry's discovery, but she was years older than she had seemed! He was aware she had called him Mr. Massel. He would have to follow suit. Perhaps it was mere intrigue. He held out his arm waveringly. "Good evening, Miss..." He found, to his despair, he had entirely forgotten her surname. "I mean, Miss..." He coughed unhappily. But Mamie, so far from assisting him in his embarrassment, was unaware of it.
"Mother, this is Mr. Massel! We met, where was it? Oh, of course, in Wenton. Do you remember this gentleman, auntie? He helped me to escape from some cows, didn't you?"
"Yes," he managed to stammer, "and they were ravenous as wolves! I was awfully brave!"
Everybody laughed politely.
"I was just going to practise my latest song, 'Red Hearts, Red Roses.'Dosit down, won't you?" Mamie pressed.
"Thank you!"
"So glad you've come, but you don't mind my practising this song before my accompanist comes, Mr. Mendel, you know, the famous violinist!"
"Ah, Mamie, ah!" exclaimed her aunt waggishly, shaking the first finger of her left hand in humorous admonition.
"Don't be silly, auntie!" Mamie cried with a skittishness almost elderly. She sat down at the piano, and struck a few chords. Then Red Hearts bled, Red Roses drooped for some minutes.
Philip sat stiffly on his chair, wondering at the precise reason that had brought him here. He wished she hadn't put her hair up. He wondered dimly if he was in love with her. If he was, he supposed he ought to keep his eyes glued on her face in a peculiarly tense way. But it was distracting to see her lips moving in that active manner—like red mice, twisting!
"Oh, by the way," said Mamie at the conclusion of her song. "I was sorry to hear of your loss. Mrs. Kraft told me. It must have been awfully unpleasant!"
"It was rather rotten!" Philip muttered with difficulty.
What a peculiarly unreal air the girl gave to sorrow and death. Inexplicable creature! Was this politely tittering oldish young lady the girl whose lips had sought his own like a bee? What was the matter with him now, or what had been wrong then? His own pose on the chair, the piano, everything was strained, a little false. But over in Wheatley, the cemetery, the grave, there was no unreality! Damp clay and the sprawling weeds! No, he must wrench his mind away from Wheatley, or he'd never be able to peel the apple that was lying in a plate on his knees.
"To be sure," said Mrs. Hannetstein comfortably, "Death comes to us all sooner or later! Don't you think so, Mr. Massel?"
There seemed no reason to repudiate the assertion.
Conversation trickled in a thin stream. Philip was conscious of a certain slight unease in the air. Wasn't it about time he was going? It certainly was time he set about doing what he came to do. Then what on earth was it he had come for?
There was a loud knock at the door. "That'll be Adolf!" declared Mamie, rising from the piano stool with a glad yelp. "Run to the door, Esther!"
A masterly tread was heard along the lobby.
"There you are, darling!" said Mamie, as a tall fair gentleman opened the door, and stared possessively into the room. "Won't you put your violin down first?"
He put his violin down in a corner with deliberation and as deliberately caught Mamie in his arms. That ceremony over, he sat down and blinked inquiringly towards Philip.
"Adolf, dear, this is a young gentleman who was staying in Wenton when I was there!" said Mamie, with vague discomfort.
"Very glad to meet him, to be sure!" said Adolf.
"Mr. Massel, this is Adolf Mendel, the violinist! My fiancé," she added with a note of deferential pride.
Her fiancé ... then she'd ... herfiancé...!
The blustering, big-boned lout, what the devil did he mean by taking everything for granted in this gruff cocksure way! Had he ever sat with her in the angle of a barn and a haystack, kissing like hell! Had her eyelashes ever ... and her lips...
And she there, the vampire, what did she mean by it! Oh, blast her and the whole empty-headed crowd of them with their Red Roses and squeaky violins!
Anyhow, thank God, it was over! She'd pricked the bubble of his insufferably stupid illusion! In her degree and kind she'd gone the way of all the rest—Edie, Alec, Harry! What an idiotic room it was, with its refined knick-knacks on the mantelpiece and that creature with her hair up and the red-plush-framed photograph of Blackpool on the piano! They were discussing music and songs with a wealth of ostentatious esoteric detail. That was obvious enough surely. They wanted him to clear. He rose to go. Mamie perceived it with alacrity from the corner of her eye.
"Oh, I'm so sorry you've got to go!" she said effusively. "And I'm awfully sorry about that too, you know! You will come round again? Shan't he, Adolf, you'd love to see Mr. Massel again! Not at all, not at all; oh, good night!"
On the other side of the door he remembered his translation of Dante.
"Blast Dante!" he exclaimed through his teeth.
It was the fit of profound misogyny which followed this entirely unsatisfactory incident that fitted him so completely for the effusiveness and glitter of Wilfrid Strauss, and for that interlude with Kate which, only too conventional in its mere detail, was nevertheless at once the end and the beginning of Philip Massel's boyhood.
A certain hesitancy checks me upon the appearance of Wilfrid Strauss in this narration; even though I am aware how easy and profitable it is to philosophize upon thedeus ex machina; how it is entertaining to demonstrate that from the flimsiest accidentals the most stalwart essentials depend. Yet the Wilfrid Strauss phase in Philip's development is not so much to be considered a stalwart essential as an exact statement of accounts, a period, a signpost whose backward arm pointed to obscure chaos, whose forward arm pointed at least to clearer issues, more breadth, more light. It is probable that one Strauss and another had from time to time come into some sort of contact with Philip, for in such communities as Whitechapel, Brownlow Hill and Doomington, from the turbid mass of Jewish tailordom a type perpetually emerges which is volatile, swift, scornful of the mere labour of hands, ostentatious of the agile intellectual qualities which make the type invaluable for undertakings rarely entirely scrupulous. If previously, then, Philip had encountered a Strauss in embryo or in maturity, there was no point at which their respective strengths and weaknesses had met. Yet, in point of fact, it is Eulalie et Cie., Paris, of undefined occupations, who have kept this particular and actual Mr. Wilfrid Strauss too busily engaged, on the Rue de Rivoli and in Leicester Square, for his appearance before this date in the lesser thoroughfares of Doomington. And it is not possible to declare that Strauss, as he swaggered gently down Transfer Street from the Inland Station, would have met Philip Massel on any other afternoon than the May afternoon in the year of Philip's history I have now attained.
Philip had hoped, earnestly enough, as his old associations faded more and more completely out of his life, to pass beyond the fog of strangeness which shrouded from him the heart and meaning of Doomington School. But he was forced to realize that volition was by no means adequate to achieve this purpose; for the paradoxical truth was borne in upon him, that, as he stood, he was somehow absurdly too young and inconceivably too old to take his place simply among the rest. The problem was to be resolved only by deliberate action, and action was wholly beyond his reach. He could drift sombrely with the tide of his own ineffectual melancholy, but the lassitude that softened his limbs prevented him from striking out against the current.
He fell into the habit, therefore, of following for long hours the similar roads of Doomington, the amorphous monster which had always stretched so vaguely, so inscrutably, beyond his own steely horizons. In one direction you reached the museum where the mummies were embalmed in such fatuous splendour; southward lay the University galleries where the skeleton of some immense, extinct beast swung terrifyingly from the roof. Northward the road led far and far away to a place where suddenly three chimneys sprang like giants against the throat of the sky. Or in the centre of the city, at the extremes of the bibliophilic world, were the handcarts whose books concerned themselves mainly with the salvation of your soul, and the plate-glass-windowed shops of Messrs. Dobrett and Lees and Messrs. Hornel, whose books were recommended as admirable companions for your motor tours under the Pyrenees and your yachting cruises in the Mediterranean.
It was a lifeless youth, sick at heart, prematurely flotsam, he mourned, on the indifferent waters of life, who passed one afternoon under the shadow of the Stock Exchange, along Transfer Street and in the direction of Consort Square, where his defunct Highness stood isolated and unhappy among the conflicting currents of tramcars. But Philip saw nothing, heard nothing clearly, and paused not even a moment before the innumerable display of the latest Rhodesian novel behind the windows of Messrs. Dobrett and Lees' shop. A book swung vacantly between finger and thumb as he walked vacantly along. And he was so startled when a distinguished young stranger stopped him to ask a question that the book slipped to the ground. Not so much the sudden vision of what Philip conceived to be the most immaculate of grey tweeds as the easy refinement of the young gentleman's voice took him aback. Philip flushed and bent down towards the book.
"Oh, allow me, allow me!" said the stranger. "It was entirely my fault!" He stooped gallantly, lifted the book, and with a mauve silk handkerchief flicked, off the Doomington dust.
"Thank you!" said Philip. "No, really, it was my fault! I forgot I was holding it!"
The other made a courtly gesture of remonstrance. "This is the way, isn't it," he repeated, "to Blenheim Road?"
Philip considered a moment. "It's rather complicated if you've not been there before. You see, you've first got to turn to the left. And then, let me see ... Or you might take the car ... But look here, I'm not doing anything special just now. If you'd like, I could..."
There was something attractively full-blooded about the stranger, though it was true that the gloss—there seemed hardly another word—the almost boot-polish perfection of his appearance, was a little overwhelming. It would be easy enough to put him on the Brownel Gap car which would lead him to the top end of Blenheim Road. Yet Philip felt somehow reluctant to disattach himself so promptly from the stranger, to allow him merely to merge into the tumult and mist.
"If I dared to encroach..." hesitated the polite young man. It was, of course, an unworthy sentiment, particularly in a Communistic bosom ... and yet one could not help feeling that to be seen talking to a stranger of this calibre was rather a distinction. All the people he had rubbed shoulders with to-day, what dull faces they had, threadbare suits, dry lips mouthing "Cotton, cotton, cotton!" even to themselves! This young man was wearing the most smartly tailored of grey tweed suits, shoes of metropolitan brilliance, a velours hat whose ample brims shadowed, expensively, quick green eyes, a slightly squat nose, and lips attuned, as one might judge from a slight thickness and their broad curves, to Bacchic riot and to kissing, even, it might well be, to the more recondite pleasures of the flesh. The last thought checked Philip. Yes, there was something full-blooded to the verge of coarseness in that mouth! Wasn't all this talk about taxis and one's own little two-seater, a hell of a scooter, you know, just a little too ostentatious? After all, a gentleman in the complete sense of the word could deduce from one's clothes, for instance...
The stranger interrupted himself suddenly, then stared at Philip with some intentness. Then he lifted his forefinger to his nose and asked "Zog mir, bist a Yid? Tell me, thou art a Jew?"
Not merely the intonation of the voice had changed, so that the cadence of Leicester Square had subtly become the chant of theYeshiveh, but its very timbre was different, thicker, more ingenuous, infinitely more homely.
"Ich bin!" replied Philip, perhaps a little stiffly.
"So you're one of us then, eh? well, all's well! I want you to help me, kid!"
A note ofbonhommiehad entered the voice. "You say you can come along this way, can you? Good! Do you mind? I'm going to take you into my confidence, if you'll let me!"
Philip blinked. He felt a momentary difficulty in his breathing, as if he had been running. A little sudden, one might think....
"What do you say to just getting in here for a moment till we see where we are?" They withdrew into the doorway of a block of offices. "The fact is, I've got a job which is going to keep me in and about Doomington for a few months and I don't know a soul in the place. To tell the truth, I've managed to avoid Doomington till now.... Now isn't that a tactful thing to say to a native! I suppose youdobelong to the place, don't you? But look here, you don't mind me buttonholing you like this, do you now? Perfect stranger and that sort of thing!"
There was no doubt he was a thoroughly engaging young fellow. And at this moment Allen of the Sixth passed by, a celebrated swell so far as school swells went. Allen looked merely dowdy now, with his somewhat down-at-heel brown brogues and the silver braid round his prefectorial cap coming loose at the peak. Philip was sure that Allen had glanced a little enviously towards himself and with real respect at the stranger. But who could resist the dapper waist cunningly conferred upon the young man by some prince of tailors?
"It's very decent of you indeed!" Philip muttered. "I appreciate it. You know if I can be of any help at all, I'll be only too pleased!"
A grin extended the corners of the stranger's mouth. He almost ogled Philip as he replaced finger to ever-so-slightly-aquiline nose.
"A charming little speech, charming! I'm developing my theories about you, so help me! A lady's man, that's what you are, a regular lady's man! One has met your type, you know, up and down the place!"
Philip was not over pleased by this invariable insistence on the part of strangers that he was a "lady's man," that he had a "way with him," that they had "met your type, you know, up and down the place!" He coughed a little awkwardly. "I hate women!" he declared with vivid retrospect and pained conviction.
The other laughed a little too loudly. "And a jolly good joke, ha, ha! Hate women—gee, what an idea! But more of the ladies anon! Let's just settle the matter in hand!" He made a motion towards the suit case at his feet.
"Let me take your bag!" demanded Philip, with tardy politeness.
"Not for a moment! It's quite light, anyhow. My real luggage is at the station and it's as much as I'm worth with Eulalie et Cie.—my employers, you know, Paris,"—he paused to give the information its exact importance,—"as much as I'm worth to let this little Johnny out of my hand, God bless it! But listen, I've got something to ask you. Would you first tell me your name? Pardon? Massel! Oh, yes; good name, solid! Here's mine!"
He tenderly replaced his bag between his feet and withdrew a card from an expensive leather case. "Wilfrid Strauss,néWolfie, but don't tell any one! You can't sell ladies' vanities and gentlemen's—er—gentlemen's comforts, don't you know, with a name like Wolfie, can you now?"
Philip slightly demurred.
Strauss lifted eyebrows of fleeting disapproval. "Wolfie, impossible patronymic! Tell me now, I want to get into a Jewish boarding house. You see the Doomington trade is absolutely in Jewish hands and they're threatening to undercut ... but don't let me talk shop! How about it? Blenheim Road is the sort of district, I understand? I don't generally associate myself with the Only Race, as you can perhaps appreciate, so to speak, but you're beginning to see the line of attack, eh?"
Philip pressed his shoulder blades against the wall to re-establish his sense of reality. "Quite so, quite so!" he replied weakly.
"You can be of help to me, old man, if you would? I mean, you know the local ropes and that's half the game!"
At least here was Strauss adumbrating interests definite, if not exalted, some sort ofterminus ad quem. How nauseatingly void and vain had life in Doomington become!
Strauss proceeded. "Another thing! I've developed a sudden consuming passion for, what d'you call 'em,creplach, absolutely soaked inshmaltz, you know the sort ... and potatoblintsies... and let me see, there'smameliggy, um, yes,mameliggy!"
Memories of the curiously-flavoured Roumanian dish as served on special occasions by Mrs. Sewelson vividly presented themselves.
"Oh, so you're a Roumanian, Mr. ... I mean, Strauss?" Philip juxtaposed.
"No, no, don't misunderstand! One of my great pals in the old Mincing Lane days, Rupert Kahn—poor devil, he's doing twelve months now, somebody told me—was engaged to aRoumanische nekavehfor a time, till he made off with the engagement rings and her silver combs, and you couldn't blame him either—calves like the hind legs of an elephant.—Oh, appalling! ... But I say, don't you think we'd better be moving on?" Strauss interrupted himself. They emerged from the doorway and Strauss slipped his arm through Philip's as though the dawn of their acquaintance was already ancient history.
"Where the hell am I wandering off to, Massel, old dear?" Strauss speculated. "I'm afraid I'm a trifle light-headed. It must be that champagne the Inland Company so beneficently provide, eh? Half a bottle of fizz always cuts more of a dash than a whole of Sauterne, although it's not strictly the thing for lunch, would you say? Still, it's worth the difference, every time! What's your preference?"
"I'm afraid I'm not much of a connoisseur myself! Palestine's wine's about as far as I've gone, with occasional whiskey andlekkach"—Strauss looked puzzled—"you know, those curly little cakes! It's not been quite my line, somehow!"
"Poor old thing!" mused Strauss. "You've not moved very far and that's a fact! At about your age—I think my calculations are right—I'd spent three or four week-ends with Marjorie in Brighton ... Oh, curse the man! Him and his dirty Doomington manners!" The youth scowled uglily. Somebody, evidently displeased by the expansive manner Strauss had adopted for his procession down Transfer Street, had thrust a vicious elbow into the grey tweed waist. For one horrible moment it seemed that Strauss was mobilizing his resources for a punitive expectoration, but the West End reassumed control in time and Strauss continued:—
"Oh, yes, Brighton, Marjorie, as I was saying! That girl was a sponge, nothing more or less! She'd just open her mouth and pour the stuff down like rainwater pouring down a spout. Gee, that's a while ago now! Still, I don't think—damn those motors!—a show like Transfer Street is the place for one's confessions, what do you say? One oughtn't to let oneself rip like this, but you've got the sort of face one can trust, Massel, if I may say so. Somehow I generally manage to land on my feet when I arrive in a strange town, though I take no credit to myself for it, mark you! I remember once, first time I landed in Bordeaux ... But for God's sake let's go somewhere and have some tea. Then we can discuss the boarding-house business and the way the wind blows in Doomington. How do you feel about it?"
They had arrived some time ago at the point where Transfer Street crosses the pride of the city, the thoroughfare called Labour Street. A stream of vehicles passing transversely had held them up, but when at last the policeman raised a hand in potent arrest, the two youths crossed and found themselves facing the Crystal Café.
"This looks rather the kind of place!" exclaimed Strauss. "What's it like?"
The inside of the gilded eating-houses that threw the glare of their lamps and the smells of their cooking into Labour Street had hitherto occupied Philip's attention for a curious moment at most. His ignorance seemed now to be a grave lacuna in his education. "Sorry, not the vaguest idea!" he protested ruefully.
"Hold, I hear music! Say, boy, I guess we'll try the dandy li'l place right now!" declared Strauss, with an artful introduction of the appropriate accent. They entered, and the host ordered a delicate meal with some grandeur. Philip found the marble-faced walls a little ugly, but distinctly rich and impressive. The gentlemen in the orchestra he found also ugly, also distinctly rich and impressive; particularly the florid gentleman at the piano, whose moustache wandered so persistently into his mouth that he gave up the attempt to blow it away and endeavoured to reconcile himself to the taste. He was so very inflated, would the sudden puncture of a pin dismiss him into thin air? Anyhow the marble seemed solid enough. Philip surreptitiously passed his hand along the marble behind him to assure himself. His head was in a whirl. His friendship with the garrulous, glittering youth (Strauss made dainty play with his fingers to display two quite admirable rings, and there was a gleam of gold cuff-links from shirt-sleeves which he seemed deliberately to have pulled down an excessive inch), his friendship with Strauss had developed at so kinematic a speed that he was half afraid he could hear himself panting over the chocolate éclairs.
At least he had breath enough to tender such information as he possessed concerning Jewish boarding-houses, the people who might be considered the "swells" of the community, which synagogues would provide the happiest hunting-grounds for chase not strictly specified, and a number of kindred affairs. He discovered that he was usefuller than he had anticipated. He said to himself humorously that he was blossoming into a man of the world. Much fascinating conversation, or more strictly, monologue, followed, on matters less professional. It was laid down as axiomatic that every young fellow under eighteen, worth the least grain of his salt, knew what's what—a phrase Philip had already encountered, but here, obviously, endowed with a more intimate meaning than hitherto. When Strauss requested him to choose between the Turkish and Russian compartments of his cigarette case, he felt it behoved him to patronize the Turkish, for a recondite technical reason which at once did high credit to his own imagination and satisfactorily impressed his friend. A number of entertaining adventures were narrated by Strauss, illustrative of the nature of what's what. There was Flo in the punt at Richmond. Oh, of course, a married woman, she was! But then her own husband had introduced her with a wink which meant merely, "Go ahead, Wilfrid, old duck, go ahead!" And there was silly old Bobby—insisted on wearing a wedding ring at Bournemouth, and Jimmy Gluckstein had spread the news that he'd settled down in decent matrimony. Did a chap no end of harm, that sort of thing! And, 'struth, yes, ha, ha, ha! that ducky little French bit, Flory! Her mother, moaning with toothache, had interrupted them at about two in the morning. There'd only just been time to slip under the bed. And it was March, too, March in Paris! From two till seven in the morning, mark you! Grr-grr! ... From Strauss's enjoyment of the tale one could not help deducing that he felt, at least after this lapse of time; that his part in the episode was indisputably the most enjoyable, even the most dignified.... And oh, yes, talking about four-posters ... there was Fanny ... you should have heard ... another cigarette? ... and when her real boy came ... camisole ... about time we went ... Oh no, no, don't mention it!..."
Yes, of course, Philip would be delighted to accompany Strauss to Mrs. Levinsky's, in Blenheim Road. But wait a moment, why not try Mrs. Lipson's, in Brownel Gap, next door to Halick, the dentist? It was quite near to both the Reformed and the Portuguese Synagogues, a useful base for operations.... And it was at Mrs. Lipson's that Philip saw Strauss duly installed—after a dalliance in a bar parlour where Strauss drank a cocktail to fortify himself against the shock of his resumption into his tribe's bosom, and where Philip, school cap stuffed mournfully into trousers pocket, could not but accept a port and lemon for "old time's sake."
"You'll be certain, Philip, to call round for me to-morrow about twelve!" exhorted Strauss, as Philip at last left him that evening. "What's that, school? Oh, bother it, I forgot! Good old Philip, sitting at a nice desk doing multiplication sums and putting his hand up with the answer!"
"Look here!" Philip objected rawly. Yet it was difficult to shake off the temptation to believe that from more than one point of view, this, after all, was a fair epitome of scholastic labour. "School's all right! There's a good deal in it beyond books and things!" he reflected with some wistfulness. But the basement playground-restaurant compared rather dingily, he was uncomfortably conscious, with the blare and marble of the Crystal Café.
"Well, you're outgrowing it pretty quickly, I can say that for you! What do you say to coming round to-morrow evening? You could take me the round of the district ... and what about a music hall to wind up with?"
"I can't let you do all this for me! It wouldn't be playing the game! I mean we've only met to-day and I don't know anything about the business side of things, and you see I don't get much money myself. I just give lessons to a master-tailor...."
"Don't be absurd, old boy! I'll expect you to do the same for me, with interest, when I'm down on my luck! Not a word more! Five o'clock, you think? Good! Well, so long, old dear! Take a Turkish to smoke on the way home!"
"Er—thanks! So long! Till to-morrow!"
At the appointed time next day, at the very door of Mrs. Lipson's boarding-house, Philip was seized with a sudden vehement impulse to turn his back upon his new friend, simmering enthusiastically somewhere beyond thosekosherportals. Where after all was it leading to? The most insensitive nostril could not fail to register the faint odour of corruption which hung about Wilfrid Strauss. Somehow that impeccable grey tweed suit was more shoddy than the corduroys of that poor old devil trundling a wheelbarrow beside the gutter. Yet whither did all the other roads lead? Whatever the landscape on the journey, whatever pitiful doctrine guided you, where else but to a Wheatley cemetery, damp clay, a towsled dog barking emptily? And how was Strauss less valiant a companion thither than Harry and Alec and the rest? If he preferred to chase, not the shadow, but the glittering substance, who could blame him? A fine specimen he himself had become! Hardly a person in Doomington to talk to; at home the unresponsive books—Swift and Lamb beginning to gesticulate as little intelligibly as his faded poets; at school, still the unsealed barriers! Nothing left but to moon about the streets, remembering, regretting—hoping never. What, indeed, was there to hope for? The old loyalties were annulled, the old dreams crumbled! Heigh-ho, thank God for Wilfrid Strauss and for noise, Life! It was a chap's duty to himself to know what Life meant before Life had done with him, thrown him aside into that long, narrow dustbin....
He knocked. The sound came sharp and clear like a challenge against the tedium which had been stupefying him for so weary a time.
Strauss was delighted, charmed. He had been troubled by spasmodic doubts as the afternoon wore on. Would Massel turn up after all? There was something in the lad he couldn't quite fathom, something which might turn Philip away from him in the mysterious manner so many people he had particularly wished to please had, from time to time, turned away. He hoped he'd turn up if only to save him the strenuous necessity of discovering somebody else likely to show him the ropes economically. Besides, there was something distinctly pleasing about the youth. If only he'd dress a little better.... Anyhow, he was going to be useful if merely as a guide—though one couldn't call him exactly a business man. He'd more than repay the price of a tea and a theatre now and again. And if he'd only allow himself to be initiated into the business, what confidence he would arouse in the most chary breast!
There was a value in Philip's friendship Strauss did not recognize so consciously. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to observe the deference that Philip naively paid to his exhibition of nis vanities; a satisfaction increased by the knowledge that Philip was a "college lad." It was amusing to gibe at "college lads," to be sure, and one didn't actually desire to be a "college lad," yet one could not help vulgarly and secretly envying them.... In any case, it's easy enough to get rid of a chap when he's outlived his use. Hadn't he already made that discovery often enough? Time enough for that ... "Come in, old man, come in! Risk a whiskey and soda?"
The tawdry gaieties Strauss had in his command followed in bewildering succession. Books seemed to become less and less important as the furtive weeks passed by. If a memory of his mother came palely before him, he would the more speedily betake himself to the company of Wilfrid Strauss. It was difficult to retain those old musics of Shelley when the brass bellowed windily across the Regent Roller-Skating Rink, and the girls cackled in your ear. No long time elapsed before Strauss had made the rounds of the less reputable cafés, the more shady music halls, and, finally, the Doomington Zoological Gardens, with their alfresco dancing at the borders of the lake. The delights of the gardens were only vitiated for Philip by the inexorable custom which demanded that each male should at rigid intervals kiss his paramour—"strag" was the recognized term—in the ludicrously inadequate shelter of a laurel shrub.
There followed more than these. There followed Kate and her lazy eyes and the yelp of her animal laughter.
"Deeper, deeper, deeper!" became the insistent burden in Philip's brain. Closer round his feet the mud was gathering. Yet against this one thing he long managed to stand out, though Strauss would return to him, rubbing his eyes sleepily, or smacking his lips with luxurious appreciation. Delicately Strauss would suggest how illogical his position was, how, seeing it was necessary to take the plunge sooner or later, why not now, old sport?
Why not? More and more cynical his solitary mind was becoming, ever the more solitary as Strauss and he were more closely entangled in the cult of their pleasures. What else did women mean? They would die, he would die, securely enough all of them, whatsoever happened in the interspace. Alec's old philosophy was gaining new confirmation. What inhibitions did Life hold by which a youth should not probe for the honey of experience, each flower, chaste or poisonous, that opened to the sun or moon?
"Feivele!" ventured Reb Monash to him oneshabbosmorning, "Tell me, what is this lord's son that takes thee about? I saw thee with him in Brownel Gap on Tuesday when I was going to Rabbi Shimmon. Thou didst not see me, no? Or maybe it suits thee not—when thou art with thy lord's son? The town talks! Tell me then, what wills he with thee? It likes me him not!"
"Oh, for God's sake,tatte...!"
For one moment the flame of the extinguished conflict seemed to glower and spit from Philip's eyes. Then he recovered himself. He stared into the pallor of his father's cheeks, avoiding the eyes, avoiding the deep lines of fatigue about the corners of his mouth. "Nothing,tatte, a friend! What will you?" Reb Monash was about to express his unease with another question when he too checked himself and the shadow of this new friendship lay between them, heavy, unexplained.
But when next Strauss seductively introduced the name of Kate into the conversation, Philip shouted suddenly, at the top of his voice—and in Cambridge Street, "Go to the devil, you're a swine!" He turned savagely on his heel and attempted for four evenings to attain emancipation in the Doomington Reference Library. He had not power enough, however, after the dull prostration of these months, to resist the suave note of apology and invitation which arrived for him on the fifth morning. A little public house near the skating rink the same evening found them closer friends than before.