CHAPTER IX
Some time previously, in the spring of the same year, the walls of Doomington had fallen to their last stone upon the blast of the trumpets of spring. Philip and Harry had adventured one afternoon beyond the moor called "Baxter's Hill" at the north of the town and found themselves by the side of a Mitchen distinctly cleaner than the river which flowed behind the wire factory at the bottom of Angel Street. They had walked up-stream for several miles out to a place of fresh fields and young lambs skipping. It was true that chimneys still punctuated every horizon with smoky fingers. But here and there were thickets of trees where the lads lay embowered in green peace, conscious of thick grass only and the speech of leaves. They both claimed the distinction of having first sighted the shimmering and enchanted carpet of blue below a sun-pierced canopy of foliage. Here they abandoned themselves to the first wild rapture of Spring—the first rapture of Spring Philip had known—burying their faces among the dewy bells. Further and further to the dusk they went, until a new town, flinging its van to meet them and to meet the Spring in their button-holes and hearts, said, "Advance no more!" Weary and sleepy and very hungry they came home that night, but their arms were lush with heaped bluebells and the knowledge of Spring was steady in them. They knew a place where Doomington was a lie and earth was soft.
Into this place, in the attenuated figure of Alec Segal, the "clever devil" whose acquaintance Philip had made several months ago, came Atheism. The recent years of his history had not left Philip wholly unprepared for the assault against Judaism. But when Segal said casually that the Holy Bible's self was just a bundle of musty papyri, and God a dispensable formula, he was painfully shocked.
"Look here, Segal!" he said, "How can you say such a thing? Anything might happen to a chap!"
Segal took off his cap and made an awkward gesture towards the implicit deity. "Right-ho!" he exclaimed, "Happen away!"
Philip held his breath for a moment. Nothing took place. Only a cow mooed contentedly.
Segal was slightly taller than Harry and a little his senior. The angle of his nose related him more directly than either of his two friends to the root stock of his race. Yet he had neither the Heinesque vehemence of the one nor the inveterate romance of the other. He could, in fact, hardly be thought of in terms of character. He seemed to be the sum of certain intellectual qualities. His sole morbidity was a ruthless passion for logic. Poetry, which in various ways had brought the three youths together, interested him, but neither for ethical nor for æsthetic reasons. Each poem was an interesting proposition in itself, like a mixture in a test tube at his school laboratory. It had the mechanical attributes of rhythm and rhyme and metaphor constructing a mechanical whole.
But on thinking the matter over, after frequent and painful discussion, Philip realized that Segal's attitude so shocked him because it dared to put into blunt words something he had long been timorously feeling. By the Bible, of course, Segal meant religion generally. The Bible was the foundation of Judaism and therefore of Christianity, which, he had long ago decided, in any case hadn't much claim to serious consideration. His own remark had been sound enough; he had declared that the disappearance of religion would leave the world "jolly empty." But empty of what things? Empty as a garden without weeds. What stupidity, cruelty, ignorance, flourished below the damp boughs of religion from border to border of the world! And what things would still flourish if religion were cut down! Tall trees of liberty, fine flowers of poetry!
What was it he had always felt wrong with Judaism? What did it lack? It was a quality not entirely missing even from the garbled Christianity that came his way. The Baptist Missionary Chapel was as fervent an enemy of this quality as the most vigorous Judaism. But dim intimations had come by him on the wind of another Christian spirit. Here there were white lilies and blue gowns pointed with stars; there was soft singing at evening and the burning of many candles; there were superb altars, marble and kingly. Superb altars—the Baptist Missionary Chapel! Christianity contained both. But this quality was eternally triumphant in the grand false superstitions of Greece and Rome. Here there were white pillars in a noon of hyacinth; baskets of wrought gold held violets and primroses; there were processions of chiselled gods before whom maidens scattered a long foam of petals; there were lads running races and the wind was in their hair; the wind was a god, there were gods in the thickets of olive and in the translucent caves of the sea.
Beauty! Poetry! This was what he needed most. This was what that old world gave. What delight did his fathers know, generation beyond generation, in the comely things of the world? What statuary had come down and what pictures of burnished gold and azure? What dances were there to the rising sun and in procession with the slow stars? If any of his fathers had made him a graven image, he was stoned and the thunders of those hoary enemies of lovely things shook over the cowering tribes. There had descended to him a tradition of tragedy and pride. Of beauty, none. There was, for example, the shool. How the air was foetid! How the walls were bare! How the hangings before the ark were tawdry! How the prayers were raucous, how the air drooped for lack of poetry!
Ah! the sense of relief which began to possess him when now, throwing forward his chest, and breathing even in midmost Doomington the deep air of liberty, he realized how vain were all his innumerable ceremonies; that God did not require of him these things and these; He did not sit there watchfully counting the syllables of prayer His votaries uttered, sit there like a miser counting his pieces of gold; that the subterfuges and evasions of ritual which had given him frequent unease were not fraught with more than a merely local and temporary danger. Forward from phylacteries! They had slipped from his arms like manacles. They lay discarded like the slough of a serpent, coiled round his feet. What there was now of poetry in the Feast of Tabernacles, in the prophetic and vague beards of the old men, in the synagogue-chanting on darkening Saturday evenings, in the mingled array of the Passover Tables, in the puckered faces of the antique women muttering their year-long prayers, in the blast of the liberating horn upon the Fast of Atonement—what there was of poetry in them, he was free to understand; for they were shorn of all that had made them forbidding; they were not symbols of dark terror, they were pathways into the heart of the world. And with these he was free to understand what there was of poetry in the vague Christian lilies, in the burning of candles before the shrines of picturesque saints, brothers of those other and marble gods. All that these Greek gods had of poetry and all their groves and their broad-browed morning lads and the virginal worshippers before those altars of poetry—all, all these things were his. He was winning to freedom after much slavery.
But the acceptance of a general diminution in the divine attributes, through which the Godhead gradually became a vague half-credible abstraction, was attended by a campaign much more injurious to Philip's ease. His elders had approached God with as much terror as understanding when they made any advances in the celestial direction. It was reassuring to realize that if God was being divested of His raiment of love, He was losing proportionately the lightning of His jealousy and the bolt of His somewhat sectarian wrath. Yet simultaneously, as Segal and Harry agreed with no apparent remorse, it was imperative to abandon the immortality of the soul. To Philip there was something homicidal, matricidal, in the facile way with which they consigned to worms as their ultimate doom the folk whom they might be expected to love most dearly. They admitted it was an unpleasant pill to swallow, but in the wind of truth their personal predilections, they avowed, were as chaff! Who were they to stand up against Logic, against Law? "Truth the grand," a poet had said, "has blown my dreams into grains of sand!"
Segal remained imperturbable amid the crash of boyish comfort and illusion. His own extinction being the disintegration of a number of acute faculties, there would be no wraith of frustrated passion and insatiate hungers to move forlornly through the Godless void. There was a keen, bright fascination in this self-sufficiency for both the tempestuous utilitarianism of Harry and the inchoate poetry of Philip for whom this friendship involved almost a pungent ecstasy of self-extinction, like the repeated assault of the moth against the poised, unreluctant flame. These conclusions plunged Harry into a more fiery round of Socialistic activities than he had yet known. If the oppressed classes of the world would in no future state achieve equality, if the capitalists in no democracy of spirits would be set by counter-balance to hew wood and draw water for wage slaves there triumphant, all the more reason then to achieve an earthly Utopia, to rouse young Doomington to a sense of its manifold wrongs and, in the concrete, to stand as Socialist candidate for the coming parliamentary election at the Highfield Grade School. Philip, on the other hand, felt what happened in this miserable and abortive world hardly mattered, when all its insignificant schemes were doomed, collectively and individually, to sudden and absolute annihilation. The extinction of souls was not an attractive philosophy, he reflected bitterly, but there seemed no alternative but to accept it as a general truth. Not wholly consciously and with a passionate stupidity he applied three individual cases to the test of the general assertion; the survival of Shelley's soul, his mother's and his own. What arguing could there be about these three and, least of all, about Shelley's. His mother's death and his own being so utterly incredible, so much contra naturam, their souls existed in an ether beyond all jeopardy. Yet Shelley was demonstrably dead. But was he dead indeed? He realized now for the first time how Shelley was the lar of all his years. He might vaguely and unhappily acquiesce in the destruction of souls en masse, but nothing could convince him that Shelley did not triumph, personally, separately, in the clouds of morning and ride the horses of the wind; that he was not still the conscious spirit of song wherever birds and waters sang; that the pyre had dissipated for ever that unconquerable spirit.
Such then was the dubious and difficult current of Philip's atheism. And it was a strange fortune that these speculations should most have waged war within him at that period of the Jewish year when the festivals which culminate in the New Year and the Day of Atonement demanded unusually frequent attendance within the walls of the Polisher Shool, the inner temple of phylacteries, where Philip still so long and so frequently was held captive.
The worshipper entered the synagogue through a narrow door to the left of an establishment for fried fish and chips. The odour, therefore, of these commodities rising through the building interpenetrated the atmosphere of prayer, until prayer and chipped potatoes became inextricably woven together, and at no period in his life could Philip pass beyond a fried fish shop without feeling a far-off refluence from the old call to worship. Indeed, Philip's earliest anthropomorphism represented the Deity as some immense celestial figure in white cloth and a white hat standing above the fume and splendour of a great concave oven where He shovelled upon his tray the souls of human beings, brown and crisp, and resembling mystically the strips of potatoes shovelled by Mr. Marks upon a less divine tray in a chip-shop less august.
The worshipper now climbed a narrow staircase, and passing by the women's door entered the synagogue proper. If he had endured some recent loss in his family, the beadle from within would declare robustly, "Look ye towards the bereaved one!" who would enter with drooped head, the object of the regulated curiosity of bearded and beardless alike. Only a thin wooden partition divided the women's from the men's section, so that on one side praise was lifted to the Lord by the women because He had made them what they were, on the other, in unabashed juxtaposition, heartier praise was lifted by the men because He had made them men. Little boys could stand quite easily upon the forms and look down upon the women swaying in their old black silks and beneath their crazy cherry-garlanded bonnets. Here stood the rebitsin, Serra Golda, the most pious and wrinkled of Hebrew woman, who, because it is a mitzvah, an act of grace, to stand as long as possible during the Day of Atonement, stood all that hot long day on her ulcered feet, even though the mere creeping from her own dun parlour not far away had been one hard agony. Here too stood Mrs. Massel, very quiet and shy among the voluble women, wiping her eyes sometimes and repeating the prayers quietly, or perhaps, becoming conscious of the dark watchful scrutiny of her boy beyond the partition, lifting to him her face for one sweet moment and dropping it again towards her Prayer Book.
Against the centre of the Eastern wall, which was at right angles with this partition, stood the Ark wherein the Scrolls of the Law reposed among mothy velvet, themselves enveloped in a petticoat of plush whence hung silver bells. The whole Ark was curtained by a pall of scarlet, lettered with gold thread. At the centre of the masculine section (whose dimensions were some fifty by forty feet) stood the pulpit, some inches above the general level, where the whole service was incanted and the occasional auxiliaries from the audience were summoned. Below the pulpit and facing the Ark, a coffin-like desk drawn closely against their amplitudes, sat the elected officers for the year, the parnass and the two gabboim. Reb Monash, the power of whose oratory was so signal an ornament to the Polisher Shool, sat upon the right-hand side of the Ark itself, against the wall. The benches ran parallel along the shool on both sides of the pulpit. In the strict, if uncongenial, interests of truth it is necessary to say that every member of the synagogue above the age of thirty spat, and not a few below that age, these last retaining the easier hygiene of Poland and further Europe. The more honourable worthies had their own particular joints in the boarding for their expectorations, although, if they were more than usually afflicted, they would proceed to the doorway, returning thence purged. Hence experience alone was an adequate pilot for an unscathed journey between any point of the synagogue and the door. There were times when such tender breasts as Philip's were so nauseated by the persistent spitting that their hearts seemed to suspend beating from sheer sickness. On two occasions Philip's head fell back bloodlessly and with a bang on the hard wood behind him and he was taken away to the lavatory, where several men and women filled their mouths with water and cascaded his face for some minutes until he opened his eyes. No season in the year was hot enough to justify the opening of the windows. A current of the comparatively clean air from Doomington Road was declared with horror to be "A draught! A draught!" and with patriarchical fury the windows were closed to. Sometimes on a particularly sultry day an enterprising youth might open a window for several inches without drawing the attention of the elders. It would be unobserved for perhaps half an hour as no slightest movement of air was created. Then the alarm would be given. Immediately angry shouts of "A draught! A draught!" would be heard, some would huddle their arms in the cold, some would cough vehemently in the blizzard of self-suggestion. Occasionally the younger generation might make the effort to stand up shoulder to shoulder for the rights of ventilation, but so furious a hubbub would be created, the unease spreading itself into the women's department where a clucking would be heard as of an apprehensive farmyard; but especially the thunders of Mr. Linsky would be so olympically august, that the younger generation would subside and once more the opaque odours coagulate.
The Polisher Shool was, it may be deduced, a somewhat reactionary institution. But occasionally Reb Monash was called upon to deliver an oration in a synagogue of such Æsculapian sanity that the atmosphere seemed positively to evoke the vacant silence of Gentile worship. The definitely English congregations were assembled actually in superseded chapels, and here the laws of ventilation were no less rigorous than in the offices of the Doomington Board of Health. But these lacked the element of personality with which the Polisher Shool was perhaps too copiously endowed. And if all his life Philip had not been made unceasingly conscious of the dislike entertained for him in cordial measure by the body politic of the synagogue, he would have derived much consolation from the study of its personalities, of the rotund Reb Yonah, of Reb Shimmon like an army with banners, and the wizened shammos, the beadle, flapping about on loose soles like a disreputable ghost.
Philip's attitude towards shool was immediately prejudiced on his mere going thither. For almost from earliest times, not appreciably long, it seemed, after he had discarded the blue wool and tassels of infancy, he had been expected to crown his small figure with a large black bowler hat; and bowler hats, as could not be denied, were bloody. He felt stupidly self-conscious as he walked along by his father's side, as if all Doomington stared and jeered. If Reb Monash met a friend and these pursued a common way to the synagogue, Philip would hover behind, remove the bowler hat, and pretend it was somebody else's—he was only "holding it like."
There was a brood of young gentlemen very popular among their elders at the Polisher Shool. There was Hymie, whose eyes were large and innocent and who helped himself daily from his father's till. His voice was the voice of an exceptionally guileless thrush and he sang Yiddish songs at Shalla-shudos, the Saturday afternoon gatherings. There was Moishe, who asked such clever questions so sweetly concerning the weekly portion, that they were answered with delight by the expository old men, excepting when, as they somewhat frequently did, they involved sexual references. Moishe's mind was prematurely a cesspool. Others also there were to whom piety was a paying proposition, and two were pious because they were thus made. Philip could not throw in his lot with this company. And the whole shool remembered how the synagogue-president, the parnass, had, some years ago, pressed him to drink of the Sabbath night cup of wine; how Philip had refused it both because he didn't like wine and because he didn't like a public exhibition of a deed tinged with piety; how the pride of the parnass had been aroused and how he endeavoured to force the wine between Philip's lips while the whole shool awaited the issue; how Philip had suddenly thrust aside the foot of the beaker so that the wine fell stickily round the respective trousers of himself and the parnass.
Philip felt instinctively how everybody stiffened with dislike when he entered the synagogue, a dislike accentuated by the universal honour with which his father was regarded. Had he but been the son of a bootmaker, the Judaic virtues would not have been so prominently expected from him; they would have said "a bootmaker remains a bootmaker, even to his remote posterity!" But being the son of Reb Monash, whose black hair and beard his son was even now dimming with disastrous grey, Philip was a public scorn.
All which did not embarrass Philip so much as the interminable hours he spent behind the shut windows in the stale air—while bluebells lilted afar off and birds spoke their foreign exquisite languages. And now above all a widening had thrust his horizon far away and far away from the smoky limits of Doomington, far from the mythic circuit of green waves wherein England lay, far from the last hills of the world, out to the tingling spaces and the royal stars.
For Segal, who had brought the dissolution of atheism with him, had brought also astronomy: with a singing for the quiet sun and a meaning for the hollows of sky. It was, of course, a long time now that for both Philip and Harry the flat layer of earth had dropped away, coiling round themselves to produce the globe they had seen in effigy, so far back as the days of Miss Green. But Segal introduced, as preliminaries, Sir Robert Ball and Proctor and Camille Flammarion, and a knowledge of constellations, the nature of nebulæ, star dust and the Milky Way, which united the three boys with a bond of fervent interest. For Segal it meant illimitable fresh spaces for the plummet of logic; and because Space was infinite, no room was left for God, who, if He existed at all, could thus only be attenuated into nothingness. Harry dreamed of an undiscoverable planet where equity among its mortals prevailed; for in the infinite types of star which space permitted through infinite time, it was evident that one such star had been or was or might be developed; it was to this ideal star that he hitched the lumbering wagon of earth. To Philip, the Milky Way was a divine bluebell bank dancing by the borders of a celestial river. The stars fed him with innumerable new images, giving to his conception of poetry a depth and height. And here once more, as if to consummate the significance Shelley had involved through each succeeding phase of Philip's adolescence, just as he had been found to crystallize a world in which complete escape from Doomington mud and brick might be realized; to hold the stormy banner of Socialism; to smite down the hydra-heads of religion; so now Shelley was seen to be a poet to whom the fields of stars were more naturally a place for wandering and singing than deathly fields of sorrel and marguerite; he was the Starry Poet.
"I say, you chaps!" Harry said excitedly one day, "there's a telescope in the Curiosity Shop opposite the gaol! What about it?"
"The inference being," suggested Segal, "that as soon as we've pinched the telescope the gaol's waiting on the other side of the road?"
"No, old Cartwright's too watchful and the gaol too uncomfortable. Didn't you say so yourself when you came out after your last six months' hard? What about clubbing together and buying it?"
"I've got fourpence!" said Philip.
"I've not got that!" said Segal. "But let's find out about it. It's just the thing we want. Ye Gods, we might find a new comet! Beware, Halley!"
They appeared at Mr. Cartwright's shop and asked the price nonchalantly of a set of chessmen. "And what's the price of this telescope?" asked Harry with such an exaggerated gesture of indifference that Mr. Cartwright could not fail to perceive the yearning of his bowels.
"A quid!" said Mr. Cartwright.
It was so shattering a sum that, whereas they would have attempted bargaining if he had said, "Three-and-sixpence," they now said brokenly, "All right! We'll buy it."
Mr. Cartwright was so astonished at this acquiescence that, taken similarly off his guard, "You can have it for twelve bob!" he gasped.
"O—er—I'm sorry! We've not got more than three just now! We'll save up the rest!"
Quick change of tactics on the part of General Cartwright, who has time to recover his breath. "All right!" he declared, mouth tight at the corners, "Leave that as a deposit and I'll reduce the price to eighteen and six!" he said munificently.
Hence the telescope, which, though its actual magnifying powers were somewhat scanty, served both as an outward symbol of their devotion to stars and moon and as the token of their friendship. A new experience now entered their lives, a state, an exaltation, a mystic absorption of themselves into the heart of night from which the logician was by no means immune and which he anticipated with as much fearful joy as his friends. It was called "going deep," and was a state which they could not cajole or anticipate but came when it listed and departed as mysteriously. It was the fine flower of their friendship, coming only at night during their contemplation of skies.
They would find as they talked of Cassiopeia or the far-flung wing of Aquila or Vega's blue swords or the misty Pleiad sisters, a thinning of their own voices, a growing outward and aloft. It seemed that the hulk of body lay supine on the grimy soil of Doomington while their souls quietly adventured among the high places. It was an ether where extremes met, the young logician carried along a steep straight line by the inherent ecstasy of Law to a place where, by different curves of passionate imagination, his friends had ascended mysteriously those ladders of poetry between earth and heaven. It was perhaps a shadow of that state of fleshly innocence towards which the mystics have yearned, that state which Adam supremely knew when Eve had not yet been torn from his side. It was a state doomed to last not long, to re-occur less frequently as the mists began to cloud their eyes insistently and to stifle in their ears the clarity of starry silence. They did not know how long a time lasted their "goings deep"—some moments only, perhaps, sometimes a dim trance of a fleshless hour. But when they descended from those places, their chaffings and bickerings were resumed with difficulty, as if their bickering gainsaid a stilled voice they had heard.
One incident each of them remembered most clearly out of this time of astronomy—the night of the moon's eclipse. With various degrees of difficulty they obtained permission to stay out till morning, and at midnight they met upon the highest point of Baxter's Hill. A moorland air came wandering in from the adjacent country, and because the chimneys had ceased for the night to thicken the atmosphere, this strange sweet air came timidly towards them, as a stranger little welcomed in these parts. They lay back upon the grass looking towards those regions of the sky where the moon did not yet dim the stars to extinction. The telescope passed from hand to hand and they spoke of the ashen hollows in the moon, Segal naming her features, and emphasizing placidly how, soon or late, this earth whereon they lay now should have exhausted all her fires.
Very quietly they spoke in the still night air until a sound of terror was heard from some hidden hollow and the words were stricken on their lips. The sound was heard again and again, curdling their blood.
"A woman's being murdered somewhere!" exclaimed Philip.
"Baxter's Hill has got a dirty reputation. I wonder if a fellow's trying to get the better of a girl?" Harry whispered.
"Listen! Isn't it a rotten sound!"
The truth occurred to Segal. "You prize fools! Oh, you ultra prize fools!" he cackled. "It's a sheep! Ha, ha! A sheep! And you're two more!"
They found the midnight full of curious noises in which man and his works had no concern. An owl hooted. A nightjar skimmed an edge of darkness silently, then turned his hoarse wheel. Insects crepitated below grasses. The boys had little known how the watchful forces of nature crept back to the place Doomington had usurped when, during the night, the town's fumy power was relaxed.
When at last the dark band of eclipse sliced the rim of the moon, Philip was drowsing. Harry seized him suddenly. Philip sprang to his feet. "Look! Look! The moon! The eclipse!"
Slowly the transformation took place. The three lads stood there tensely straining towards the moon. It seemed that the world had no sound during this breathless miracle. No owl cried and no sheep lifted a voice from the hollows. The moorland wind stopped, the scant grasses did not move. A train in a far cutting uttered a startled cry and subsided. Until out of the white purity was made a disk of lurid and burnished splendour, like the bossed shield of a Titan who strode across space while the issues were still dubious of celestial wars.
The lads waited on the moor till dawn came, so that the fringe of that night should not be sullied by their return to Doomington dust. Dawn came with a cool breath from the East and a line of pale green lying like a blade on the far-seen Mitchen. A sword was swung above the slopes, glancing with gold and crimson. The edge of the sun was at last visible. The boys made their way homeward along the quiet streets.
As Reb Monash ascended the pulpit on the second morning of Rosh Hashonah, the New Year festival, to deliver a drosheh, an oration, in his capacity as professional orator or maggid, the incidents of the eclipse were hazily passing through Philip's mind. For some time Reb Monash's utterance was calm and measured, not interfering with the flow of Philip's recollections. But a sudden note of passion rising and again falling away flickered across Philip's brain, as a vein of fire smoulders with the turning of an opal, and when the opal is turned away is swallowed in pearl-mist and blue. He was occupying the seat vacated by his father against the side of the Ark. He looked up towards Reb Monash who again was speaking abstractly, evenly, as if he were finding his way somewhither. There was still on his face a certain air of preoccupation which Philip had noticed all that morning. It had been a morning signalized also by a few low kind words he had said to Philip which had touched the boy curiously; and, at one moment, he had looked sombrely, gently, into his son's eyes, placing a hand on his shoulder as if to hold him back from the darkness towards which his steps were tending. Philip had looked back uneasily into his eyes, wondering. A shadow of so much sadness in his father's face had produced a sick yearning in the deeps of the boy's body. His own eyes had filled strangely, but he had clenched his fists and set his teeth. His father had turned away from him and walked back into the chayder....
Reb Monash standing in the pulpit became mysteriously depersonalized. He became a force capable at one moment of bringing tears to the eyes of his harshest listeners and the next of convulsing them with laughter. Philip realized from what deep well of oratory sprang that runlet which had burst forth upon the Longton croft from his lips. In the pulpit Reb Monash lost sight of his personal sorrow and became the voice of the age-long sorrow of his race. At such a time he stood like a bard, his tallus hanging down in great folds, his voice of such strength and sweetness that a weeping came from the women's section upon its first syllables.
The first part of the morning's oration proceeded on traditional lines. He subtly interwove the text he had chosen with the message of the festival now celebrated. Upon single words he threw such diverse and strange lights that they were opened up gallery beyond gallery, like a mine of meanings. Each sentence was illuminated by his inexhaustible fertility of quotation, each quotation prefaced by the "as it stands in the passage." He elaborated each point by a swift "zu moshel," to give a parallel. But all this skill was the routine of the maggid's profession; he had graduated with these arts in many schools. He was proceeding further than this; his voice still was subdued, patient, as if realizing that beyond these thickets was a clearing of intense light, if but steadily he made his way. Then suddenly he emerged from the tortuous paths and the tangle of undergrowth, with a loud resonant cry as he came upon the clear space at the centre of his heart.
"But is it truly the beginning of the year? Shall it be a rejoicing for our fathers and for our sons if the birth of to-day is not a birth but a death? Hayom harras olom! But think, my brothers and my sisters, into what world the Year, the Law, came first! For the world was void and dark, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters, and the spirit of God was the Law. The godlings were of stone and of wood whom you would kick and they were fallen down, and their number was the sands of the sea. Then to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob the one God vouchsafed Himself and in His book His breath is fire. How He was gracious to our fathers beyond all their deserts when, recollecting the impieties of Egypt, they made themselves a false God, a Calf of Gold. But yet He did not abandon them, nor in after times. Always he held out His right arm over them, yea He shattered the gathered enemies, even with the jawbone of an ass He shattered them. Whole races of the godless were destroyed in His love for the Law He had uttered and the Chosen People to whom He had entrusted the Law. Then our parents fell upon evil ways, they took to themselves the daughters of the Gentile, they no more circumcised their sons into the company of the Chosen. Too many, too many to tell were the sorrows that came down upon us. Our vineyards were taken away, our crops were wasted, our daughters stolen away from us. The gold and the ivory of Solomon's temple were despoiled, the Holy City was a waste of weeds. Yet once more in His goodness Jerusalem arose and once more in their hardness of heart the people sought the false gods: until the accursed Titus came upon us and the walls for ever fell. By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion; we hanged our harps on the willows in the midst thereof. But lo, my brothers, do not weep; my sisters, one thing was left to us, as a tabernacle in the wilderness, a dove on the void of waters, a sword in our right hand, a burning bush; that Law which each year begins and ends but has no ending. For upon it once again when the years of the gollus are numbered shall the Temple be rebuilt. Yea, when the trumpet shall sound, the corpses of the Chosen shall be awakened; they shall rise from their graves and roll from the scattered lands, beyond seas and hills, once more to the hills of Zion. How shall the gems on the breast of the High Priest shine and his garments be of dazzling white! How a Miriam shall sing a sweeter song on further shores of deeper waters and more divinely cloven than the waters of the Red Sea! Then at last shall Moses arise from his undiscovered grave to enter that land he had but seen afar off. The land shall be flowing with milk and honey and the grapes on the vines be fat. Our matrons shall be fruitful with blessed children and our daughters be glad. The Law shall be as a sign upon the forehead of our sons.
How it shall all be forgotten, the valley of the shadow, the centuries of gollus! 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, old bobbies leaning against the damp walls, an old zadie reading 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.
Pogrommen have 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 the drosheh. A tiny whispering arose in the congregation, as of leaves after a windless noon when a first breeze shakes, or of still waters ruffled. The parnass uttered a deep oi! 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, when shool and the evening meyeriv service 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!"