CHAPTER V
Not the most enthusiastic observer could have foretold the growth of a friendship between Philip and Mottele. On the other hand, Reb Monash regarded with some alarm the growing relations between his son and Harry Sewelson. He was not wholly satisfied that a sound Jewish atmosphere ruled in the Sewelson household, but his own path and theirs were too far apart for any accurate ascertainment. Though they did not live far away the Sewelsons were neither relatives nor landsleit; and it was a fact that landsleit, that is, folk who have emigrated from the same region or township in Eastern Europe, knew more of each other's affairs though they lived at opposite ends of Doomington, than folk who had originated from different provinces of the Exile, even though these lived in the same street. He remembered with a certain dismay how upon the first occasion that Philip had invited his friend to Angel Street, Sewelson had instinctively removed his cap upon entering the kitchen—an act which, perversely enough to non-Jewish minds, is not merely bad manners in an orthodox Jewish house, but positively savours of sin.
Harry had sat there quietly, but his grey eyes keenly observant. He had entered the conversation, however, with a certain fertility of Yiddish vocabulary and idea which more nonplussed Reb Monash than won him over. When he sat down to bread and butter and tea with Philip, his prayer-before-food was so rapid and brief a mumble as to suggest either ignorance or contempt.
"It likes me him not, this young man!" declared Reb Monash with some anxiety. But there was not at this time any specific reason for forbidding the friendship between the two lads; so that when chayder and shool left room for the dissipation, Philip was away up Doomington Road and in the kitchen beyond the Drapery and Hosiery Establishment.
"I don't know what it is," Philip was saying, "I don't know what it is about poetry. Somehow, you can get away with it. It's like a ... it's like a road, isn't it? You start in Angel Street and you start walking and hey, hullo! where are you?"
"You're right and you're wrong!" declared Harry. He was now a mature man of twelve, and in ways more or less subtle was fond of rendering the disparity of a year between them apparent to Philip. "It's more'n that, I think. It can take you away, but it can keep you there as well. You understand better what it all means. You understand, that's what poetry means!" he declared solemnly, his face assuming an aspect of such inscrutable wisdom as Philip might or might not penetrate.
"I can't understand!" said Philip morosely. "It's too big to try. Besides I don't want to understand, so there! It's rotten, the whole thing's rotten, chayder and Angel Street and shool and the lads and everything. I hate it all and I don't want to understand it. I just feel that poetry's nice, a million times nicer than all this everywhere...." He pointed comprehensively beyond and round the walls of the kitchen to include the whole of life as it presented itself to him.
"What a girly-girly word, nice!" scoffed Harry. "You ought to be careful what words you say or you'll never get a scholarship. Poetry is not nice—it's splendid, and magnificent and all that sort of thing. Nice! Ugh!"
"Well, you know what I mean!" said Philip uncomfortably. The tendency to jibe at him was a somewhat distracting trait that had manifested itself in his relations with Harry. The wholly undefined idea stirred vaguely within him that Harry treated him somewhat as he treated poetry—as something out of which he could make intellectual capital, something to make use of—like chewing gum which you kept on chewing and chewing until there wasn't any more chew in it, and then you just stuck it under a chair and forgot about it. But he speedily shook off ideas of this disturbing kind. Life was already sufficiently complicated without mixing it up with silly old bogeys which led nowhere. Moreover, his friendship with Harry was worth it, if only for the sake of discussing poetry.
"Poetry makes you feel funny!" said Philip. "It's nicer'n singing or pictures. It doesn't let you think at all ... I mean thinking like thinking out sums about how many herrings in a barrel at twelve and sixpence what's one and a half next week! See?"
"There's thinking and thinking!" Harry postulated. "There's thinking about herrings and a half—and thinking about philoserphy!" he declared pompously.
"Philwhaterphy?" asked Philip with a mixture of scepticism and reverence.
"Philoserphy!"
"Whatever does that mean?"
"Oh, knowing all about things upside down!"
"What's that got to do with Tennyson?" Philip asked smartly, as if he had rather scored a point.
"Tennyson never says anything at all about jography or mensuration. I suppose he forgot all about 'em when he left school!" Philip continued.
"That shows all you know! Philoserphy is something bigger'n jography. Got nothing to do with it!"
"What's Tennyson's philoserphy?"
"Oh, it's better to be an Englishman than a Chinee!" Harry decided, expanding his bosom with vicarious patriotism.
"I like carrots more'n cabbage! Is that philoserphy?" asked Philip, in some slight fear of his intellectual patron.
"There's a lot more in it, too!" replied Harry somewhat uneasily, disregarding his friend's levity. "In the spring a young man comes out all spots and goes and gets married! There!"
"Humph! I s'pose there's lots of philoserphies and things in Tennyson!" agreed Philip, not wholly convinced. "But I like poetry because it's ... because it's got ... Oh, I don't know what to say! You know!"
"Well anyhow, I know why I like poetry!" Harry insisted.
"You know the song we're singing in school? It goes:
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands.
Curtsey'd when you have and kissed,
The wild waves whist!
"Now when they're all singing it, I hate singing it. It all gets lost in twiddly-bits. I just say it, slowly, and not listening to the class. See how it goes, like kids dancing at Mother-Ice-cream's organ,
Come unto these yellow sands!
and then you all sort of stop a minute and go slowly, like drilling, only beautifuller.
And then take hands!
And have you ever seen what a lot of 'w's' there is in that line. Just listen:—
The wild waves whist!
I wonder if that's done on purpose?"
"Of course it is!" Harry said with a note of superiority in his voice. "That's what they call 'alliteration!' They have a dictionary and put down all the nice words beginning with one letter and then they start writing poetry. It's very clever!"
"Yes, it is too clever!" agreed Philip, embarrassingly conscious of a whole field of technical difficulty yet to be ploughed before attaining the happy position of a Tennyson. "Now she didn't tell us who wrote that poem? Who was it?"
"That poetry!" stressed Harry, with an ironic reminiscence of an error not long thrown over by his friend, "was by William Shakespeare. Better than Tennyson they do say!"
"Better than Tennyson!" Philip repeated with something of horror at the irreverence. "But Tennyson was a Lord!"
"Well, Lords are not everything! Some Lords' grandfathers were just beer-house men!" exclaimed a democratic Harry.
"What was this Shakespeare, anyhow? I think we used to do a recitation by him all about stiffening the sinews, didn't we?"
"He was in a stable, and pinched rabbits from a woman called 'Lowsy Lucy'! That's his life story!"
"And yet he wrote all that about coming to these yellow sands and then holding hands! But he can't really be better than Tennyson. He never wrote those lines about hollyhocks. Do you remember? Like this:
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily!
Those are the beautifullest lines all over anywhere!"
"A bit of a tongue twister, eh? Makes you pronounce all your aitches like "hammer hammer hammer on the hard high road!" Harry blasphemed, twinkling.
"Oh don't, don't!" exclaimed Philip, a catch of pain in his voice.
"Anyhow there isn't any philoserphy in those lines! And you don't know what hollyhocks are? How can you like the lines? It's swank!"
"I don't know! It might be because I don't know, I like the lines. But I do know it's a flower; and when I see the real flower I'll be glad to see it. But it's got nothing to do with the poetry. That's just by itself:
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily!"
"Never mind, never mind!" said Harry sapiently, "you'll grow older some day!"
"I wonder!" mused Philip. "But look here, what's the time? Crutches! Half-past eight! Got to be in bed at nine! So-long, Mr. Philoserphy!"
"So long till next time!" returned the sage, settling himself down to his book. "O revower!"
As Philip ran along Doomington Road he could not help halting at the floral establishment half-way home which recently had initiated a forlorn crusade against the artistic apathy of the neighbourhood. Already, it was evident, the high ideals of Madame Smythe, Floriste, were being tarnished by the rust of compromise. She had opened her establishment with a blaze of purely floral splendour. There were rose trees entering into bloom, lilies, bunches of garden flowers, democratic pots of geranium and fuchsia, tall tulips, narcissi; and as a subfusc groundwork, wooden boxes of bulbs, manures, weed killers, syringes and packets of seed. It was not long before young vegetables were introduced, ostensibly on the ground that vegetables such as potatoes and peas had a floral as well as a dietetic significance. And now hoary potatoes, full-grown carrots, unblushing turnips, made an almost animal show among the fragility of creeper and flowers.
None the less Madame Smythe's shop was the nearest thing to poetry in the concrete that Philip had yet encountered. Not a day passed but that Philip on his return from school flattened his nose against the floristic window-pane, his eyes dazzled with delight, albeit calceolaria and hyacinth equally were mere words to him.
One day he observed that a new glory arose from Madame Smythe's tallest and most expensive vase. It took the shape of three flowers which he had not seen before (he had not seen them for the reason that Madame Smythe opened the shop in spring, and the new-comers were autumn flowers). They were fluffy masses of numberless soft yellow petals, bending slightly on their stalks like a gracious and lovely woman. Oh, the rapture of burying a nose in these fragrant sweet cushions, the rapture of seeing one of them upon his mother's blouse till her own brown eyes caught additional gold from the gold of these blooms!
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily,
he murmured. Ah, the scrumptious hollyhocks! That's what they were of course! Hollyhocks! "Heavily hangs the hollyhock!" That's just what these flowers were doing! He had no sooner coupled the name with the flower than by the easiest process in the world the flower and the name became one. No wonder Tennyson wrote poetry about hollyhocks! Just look how each little petal curled so exquisitely, each petal fresh as morning, yet chiselled finely into perfect form!
"Wouldn't it be spiff to buy a hollyhock and give it to mother, saying (as one always said in romance), 'For the Fairest!' then bowing gallantly!" he mused. "What can I do? I get a ha'p'ny a week, when I'm good, from father. I'll be good for three weeks. That'll be three-ha'pence. Then I'll go in and buy a hollyhock. Oo, what fun!"
The second and third halfpennies were added to the first, not without depressions in the barometer of virtue. He shyly entered the shop of his ambitions.
"Can I have a hollyhock, please, ma'am!"
"A hollyhock? I'm sorry, young man, we don't keep no hollyhocks!"
A look of grievous disappointment came into Philip's face. His voice trembled.
"But please, ma'am," he said, "you've had some hollyhocks in the window and somebody's bought 'em and now you've got some more hollyhocks!"
"Gracious! what can the young man want! We ain't got no hollyhocks! Just show me what you mean!"
Philip approached the lattice-work which separated the shop from the shop window. He pointed to the vase where his hollyhocks bloomed rich and desirable.
"One of those hollyhocks, please!" he said.
"Hollyhocks!" she snorted. "Hollyhocks! Haw, haw, haw! Lawks! Them's chrysanthemums! Haw, haw, haw!"
Philip's disappointment deepened. It was the glamour of the word no less than the actual flower that had drawn his feet to pilgrimage. But Madame Smythe had lifted the vase of chrysanthemums from the window.
"One, did you say?" she inquired, resuming business.
"Yes, one, please!" he assented, with trepidation.
"Here you are, sir, thank you!"
He opened his hands where the halfpennies lay warm and wet. He placed his three coins on the counter.
"What!" she snapped, somewhat dangerously. "Sixpence, if you please!"
"I—I—I'm sorry!" he said weakly and blushing violently, "I'm sorry! I haven't got any more!"
"Go home!" said Madame Smythe more genially, melting as she perceived the lad's embarrassment. "Go home and tickle your fat aunt! Tell her I told you!"
Now even if they weren't hollyhocks, and he reflected bitterly that he had had no warrant for calling them hollyhocks, he wasn't going to be humiliated in this way. No! not even if they cost ninepence, let alone sixpence. No, he was going to buy a hollyhock, that is to say a chrysanthemum, for his mother, even if he died for it! How could he get sixpence? An appalling sum, on the further side even of avarice, but he was going to get it, and he already had three-ha'pence, anyhow!
Another three weeks of comparative virtue swelled his total to threepence. Two separate ha'p'nies from his sister Dorah (who had been married for years and lived up in Longton), and he was worth fourpence. It was a point of honour not to receive the slightest subsidy from his mother towards her own gift. A ha'p'ny borrowed from Harry and three-ha'pence from the sale of an enormous number of Dandy Dave's chronicled exploits brought him the desired total.
He marched boldly into Madame Smythe's establishment. "One chrysanthemum, please!" he demanded.
"Come again, Johnny, eh? Got the money this time?"
"Of course I have!"
"Hoity-toity! All right, my lord!"
"Here you are, ma'am!" he said, as he received the flower wrapped in tissue-paper and handed over his coins.
"I say! I say! Mr. Rich! You've given me too much!"
"But you said sixpence!"
"Oh, that was weeks ago! They're cheaper now; they're only threepence!"
He was sickened to think he had allowed the extra weeks to pass by thus unchrysanthemumed. "Give me another!" he demanded haughtily to convince Madame Smythe of his superiority to all consideration of money.
The kitchen was crowded when Philip entered with his flowers and he slipped in unnoticed to join his mother in the scullery.
"Mamma," he said shyly, "I've brought you a present all for yourself!"
"Oh, Feivele, sweet child, how lovely! But the money, where didst thou get the money from?"
"I've been saving up, Mamma. But never mind about that! You've got to take these flowers and wear them on your blouse!"
"But I can't, Feivele! It's not right a married woman should wear flowers. Knowest thou not a Jewish woman must not wear her own hair? How then shall I wear flowers? And what will thy tatte say? I can't, my child!"
"Oh, Mamma I've been saving up for such a long time just to buy 'em for you. And now you don't want 'em. It's rotten, it's real rotten of you!"
"I do want them; see, look where I put them in this jar. They'll be here a long time, while I'm standing in the scullery, washing up and peeling potatoes. And when they're dead, Feivele, they'll still be living inside me. Dost thou understand? Thou art a good child!" she said, "God bless thee!" She bent down and kissed his forehead.
... It was memories such as these and such chance snatches of poetry that kept Philip that evening against the window-pane of Madame Smythe, Floriste, for many contemplative minutes. Nine o'clock had passed when at last he entered the kitchen of Number Ten Angel Street.
"Regard the hour!" said Reb Monash. "Thou hast been squandering the hours with Sewelson! It likes me not that Sewelson! What about thy scholarship! Thou shouldst have been in to-night studying for thy scholarship after chayder. Much success thou wilt win!"
"Oh, I forgot about the scholarship!" said Philip apologetically. "Emmes, tatte, I'll be in all to-morrow night studying the history book!"
"Well, we shall see then! Go to bed now, at once! Good night!"
"Good night all!"
Philip had recently been chosen as one of the candidates for the Doomington School Scholarship Examination by the master of Standard Seven, whither Philip's talents in "Grammar and Composition" had brought him with unusual rapidity. Reb Monash was delighted that his son was progressing at least along the road to Gentile scholarship. His experience contained the records of several young men whose earlier years had been devoted to the mastery of secular knowledge, which, in due time, only turned them with the more zeal to Jewish wisdom, whereto all other accomplishments were but footnotes and commentaries; these young men had actually been enabled through their Gentile wisdom to study the Bible and the Talmud from a new, and sometimes from a broader, point of view. He himself could read English well and was no mean scholar of the Russian and German literatures. In addition to which, of course, was his profundity in Hebrew lore, which gave him an honoured position among the very circle of the Rabbis.
"It will do him no harm!" said Reb Monash. "If he will be like Moishe Nearford I will not be displeased. You know Moishe Nearford, the Long One? Not only was he high in Doomington School but he went on to the university where one respected him, God and Man. And yet a Jew is he, a perfect one. Never goes out with any other girl, only his sister you'll see on his arm, week after week. A real Jew, say I, and a real brother! And what about Moses Montefiore? He would stand up in the House of Parliament while one talked of taxes and India and face the East and start shaking himself over his davenning! But let him be like Moishe Nearford, let alone Moses Montefiore, and I am content!"
So it came about that a tacit understanding existed for the next few months between Reb Monash and Philip that the old Spartan devotion to chayder and shool was temporarily not expected from him. It was not in the least that Reb Monash deviated one whit from the ideal by whose pattern he had determined to shape Philip; nor that Philip found one whit more congenial the ideal thus created, an ideal so near to Mottele as by that reason alone to be repugnant. It was, to simplify the issue, a state of truce.
During this period, while Philip was reading for his own examination, Harry was elected to a scholarship, not indeed to the older foundation of Doomington School, which was the goal of Philip's endeavours, but to the modern Council institution called the Highfield Grade School, for which Harry's more astute and vehement personality seemed to fit him more readily than for the fourth-century romanticism of Doomington School. Yet only partly to keep abreast with his friend did Philip apply himself to hard reading of a less congenial kind than poetry. It is at a very early stage in the fortunes of Angel Street youth that the shadows of tailor shop and grocery stores begin to cloud the dawn. Before the meaning of such liberty as Angel Street can afford has been grasped, it is time to study the lines of slavery. So early then had the grinding fear of a sweated agony in a factory over the Mitchen turned Philip's mind towards his only escape, to further and further schooling, beyond the boundaries of the Bridgeway Elementary School. Perhaps more immediately he felt that Doomington School would leave him free to tread the primrose path of poetry. He envisioned such black-gowned masters as figured in the adventures of Master Tom Merry; saw them walking along groves academe hidden somewhere behind the walls of Doomington School; and at their heels, imbibing the poetry these gentlemen read from gold-clasped poets illuminated upon parchment richer than the Scrolls of the Law at the Polisher Shool, a crowd of emotional youths, who only turned from poetry in order to practise at the nets or consume at Ma Pott's tuck-shop illimitable pastry.
He applied himself with fervour to French verbs, the Gulf Stream, and the vexed question of herrings in barrels. He discovered that at a certain stage in his reading the letters on the page before him lost their antique stability and began to pirouette across the page, bowing their heads, and, in the case of the genus "f" and "g," swishing their tails indecorously; soon everything would melt in a mist of grey until only by shutting his eyes and relaxing every ocular nerve he could resume his vision.
"Father!" he declared, "it gets all mixed up on the paper when I've been reading a long time. I think I need spectacles!"
"Thou canst not study," asked Reb Monash, "without wanting to be like thy elders? Go then, go! I did not want spectacles till I was five-and-thirty and I read more by the time I was ten than thou shalt have read when thou art thirty! Go then, go! Thine eyes are well enough!"
It was in the paper on geometry that his bad sight brought swiftest disaster. He had solved one or two propositions with infinite difficulty. He stared so hard and long at the paper before him on an indecipherable mass of angles and lines that the danse funèbre began sooner than usual. When his vision arrived at the stage of opacity he laid his pen down in a mood of bitter resentment.... He felt himself for the first time hating his father with a conscious hate.
The examination was being held in the Meeting Hall of Doomington School. He looked over the backs of his bent industrious competitors towards the tall arched windows. These, on their outer side, were cut by a black parapet, leaving only the upper half of the windows on that side of the hall open to the daylight. He saw dimly a dark mass moving leisurely along the parapet, now appearing behind the windows, now disappearing behind the intervening walls. It seemed almost like one of the peccant letters on his paper, incarnate in bulk. The long tail wagged playfully. Philip blinked and stared intently. It was a large and amiable rat. The rat disappeared beyond the further windows and left Philip staring blankly. The rat found the destination he had been making for unworthy of his continuous esteem. He sauntered pleasantly back and then, discovering that an incident of more than usual interest was taking place in the hall, he sat down on his haunches and looked on in friendly concern. Philip felt the rat's eyes looking interestedly down upon his own. He could have sworn that the rat inclined his head with the gesture of a commendatory uncle.
"Never mind, old lad!" said the rat. "You're making a howling mess of your geometry, it's true! If Mister Blabberthwaite, the geometry man, had the least say in the matter there'd be no chance for you, my hearty. And you've by no means gratified my expectations regarding your geography paper, I must say. It was, perhaps, coming it a bit thick to ask the names of all the capes on the American sea-board, that I admit; but that wasn't any excuse for chucking Flamborough Head at the mouth of the Irrawaddy which, if I mistake not, is not in America at all. It's in Queensland or something of the sort. However, that's no odds! Don't worry, I feel a strong suspicion that Doomington School will make room for you yet ... although don't breathe a word, or it's all u.p., to use a vulgarism. No, not a word! The truth is," whispered the rat, lifting a silencing paw to his nose, "Mr. Furness and I have got something up our sleeves for you, something you can't guess; but it's there right enough. Verb. sap., as people invariably say upon arriving at my own respectable age. But Esmeralda's squeaking, old chap! Sorry I can't stay ... but these wives, you know! ... Well, so long, so long, and keep going! So long!" And the rat resumed his urbane path.
It was impossible to get down to his geometry again, his head was swimming. He rose and deposited his papers before the dignified grey-haired worthy at the door, who, if he wasn't Mr. Furness, the head master, was at least, surely, the Principal Governor of the School.
When they placed the subjects for an English essay before him and he read:
"A day in my favourite church."
or
"What is the meaning of Empire Day?"
or
"The Place of Poetry in Cities,"
with a shout of inner exultance which, he feared, would lift the roof of his skull, he realized precisely the good fortune which Messrs. Furness and Rat had been retaining for him up their joint sleeves. He betook himself to "The Place of Poetry in Cities" with a secret fear that the ink-pot could not possibly contain sufficient ink, a fear counteracted by the dismal thought that only one hour was allowed him to express his opinion upon the subject of which he was the prime authority in all Britain.
"The Place of Poetry in Cities," he began with anticipatory panache, "is so great that it abolishes cities and turns the mud rivers into rivers of silver. There is," he continued with anti-climax, "nothing like it." But he soon resumed the tenour of his flight. Philip was, in fact, affirming his creed, affirming the philosophy he had attained after eleven and a half years of brick and mud, of stupidity, error, false ideals, of that living poetry spelled by the half-hidden love between his mother and himself, of that poetry in words which, without this living poetry, could not have unfolded her secrets to a child immersed in an almost unbroken despair. His pen scratched furiously along. Too swiftly, too swiftly, the minutes raced round the rim of his borrowed watch. Frequently the green meadows of his writing were patined with flowers from the poets he had discovered, Campbell, Moore, Tennyson, Longfellow, and when these failed him, an impromptu verse from Philip Massel bubbled from his simmering brain. He was vaguely conscious of the approach towards him of a clean-shaven man, with a strong, red face, firm of jaw; but clad in such inexpensive clothing as obviously to denote him the caretaker or, perhaps, the drilling instructor. He was aware with a slight annoyance that the man hung for some minutes over his paper and then very lightly placed his hand on Philip's head. There was something quiet and fine and firm in that gesture. Perhaps he wasn't the drilling instructor? Perhaps he was a real master with a large family and he couldn't afford to wear brand-new clothing? What did it matter? ... "so that the chimneys all seem to be made of gold and the poor men are like princes...."
The stage arrived when he could no longer see the lines on which he was writing or the letters he was forming. Still his pen raced along. The tip of his pen disappeared in a mist like the top of a telegraph pole in a November fog. His forehead was clammy with sweat. His forefinger and thumb hurt horribly. And what was that? Some fool was clanging the bell! That meant he must stop! Oh, the fool! Faster still and faster! He felt that his eyes must fall from his sockets. Tears of effort were rolling down his face. At last! At last! "... for Poetry takes us from the cities of bricks and mud to a land full of beauty like the night is full of stars!"
The dignitary of the receiving-desk by the door stared curiously at him. He staggered out, half-blind, but filled with a great calm. The days that followed were days of a confident lassitude. The decision lay on the knees of the Rat and Mr. Furness, and he was content to wait.
When the information arrived that Philip Massel had won his scholarship, Reb Monash buried Philip's head in his moustache and beard. "Now," he said, his voice quivering, "thou wilt be a Jew and a Human, a credit to God and Man!"
Another matter of satisfaction was the fact that Mottele looked enviously towards him and made deliberate advances. And when he went to tell his sister Dorah, in Longton, it was surprising to find her stiff angular figure bending down and the hard mouth with strange vehemence kissing him. Sixpence and a new overcoat of a wonderful fluffy grey followed from the same quarter. Channah cried and bought him a little volume of selections from a poet called Shelley.
But he appreciated nothing as he appreciated the pan of onions his mother fried for him, all in curly brown strips and steeped in butter; and more onions, and more onions, until he had had enough. And his mother looked at him, and he understood, for the voice that asked for another plateful was choked not merely by fried onions.
BOOK II
FORWARD FROM PHYLACTERIES