CHAPTER XI
Such then was the spiritual adolescence of Philip Massel, and such, as lately described, the situation which was its inevitable result—a result not wholly unforeseen by one or two minor characters in the drama of his boyhood. In some senses the intellectual was the more spectacular element of his development; but the budding of his physical faculties, the suffusion of all his blood with sex, proceeded pauselessly through this troubled time. The strands of growth are, of course, inextricably intertwined, and this account has followed too rigidly the threads of Philip's spiritual history. It must return, therefore, to a phase which only by a little space followed the emergence of Socialism above Philip's horizon, and by a little space preceded that episode with Bertha which demonstrated his curious simplicity.
We turn then to a budding in Doomington Road. A group straggle within and without the rays of a lamp which illuminates a corner formed by Walton Street and the road itself. There is much tittering, a little whispering, and a youth raucously is singing!
Press your lips on my lips,
Your dear little, queer little, shy lips.
It was only ten minutes ago that Policeman Pig-nob (as he is derisively termed) passed this way, with basest intentions upon Aphrodite.
It is nought to him whether there be a gathering together for the mere barren breeding of money or for a far holier purpose—the ultimate propagation of an antique race. Any gathering together at any street corner suggests to him disrespect towards the corpulent Doomington abstraction who is the Chief Constable, and is liable to be misinterpreted as an incipient movement against the Monarchy and Balmoral, (which he inaccurately places in the Strand near the lofty pillar where Cleopatra stands with a blind eye and a cocked hat looking towards the City Temple; for Policeman Pig-nob is a Free Churchman and to him the City Temple is almost unsurpassed in sacredness by the Chief Constable's detached villa itself or His Britannic Majesty's Balmoral). It is, I have recorded, but ten minutes ago that Policeman Pig-nob passed this way and dispersed the Aphrodisiac gathering. The males folded their tents like the Arabs and as silently stole away. The females, having ascertained even so soon the Sanctuary which is their flesh, stood their ground. Imagine, therefore, their horror when Policeman Pig-nob, not merely with policiary rudeness, shone his bull's-eye into their faces, (decorated in two cases with pink face-powder and in one with mauve), but, forsooth, pulled the admired hair of one of their number; and not, finally, Janey's hair or Ethel's or Lily's somewhat skimpy hair, but, I adjure you, Edie's very hair! Edie's! The lovely thick brown hair of the Queen of Walton Street! Not that Janey, Ethel, Lily and their attendant virgins were not madly jealous of Edie and her positively cattish success with the boys, but really ... the rights of the sex.... Policeman Pig-nob ... Edie ... and, as the most recent immigrant from Russia betrayed herself into exclaiming ... "a chalery soll im nemen! a cholera should him take!"
As silently, as swiftly as they had faded, the boys re-entered the fiery joint circle of Love and the Walton Street lamp. Edie stood picturesquely sobbing in the shadowed doorway of a shop. Over her Harry Sewelson stood proud guard, awaiting the moment when a silk-handkerchief, requisitioned from the paternal establishment, might plead for him a devotion which her tears but cemented like glue. In this direction too the heart of Philip Massel yearned sickly, albeit Ethel was murmuring seductively to him "dear little, queer little, shy lips!"
For the time of the budding of Philip Massel had come; yet even in his budding Philip was fastidious. It was no use, he decided. He could not bud and burgeon towards Ethel. This very decision seemed to make Ethel ache the more intensely towards the stimulation by Philip of her own florescence. You could not avoid kissing Ethel amid the permutations and combinations of Shy Widow and Postman's Knock, particularly as she tenderly called for you to join her in the lobby's darkness much more frequently than you called for her. This was most particularly the case at her own birthday party, when out of sheer animal gratitude for the smoked salmon sandwiches you received from her hands—well, what else could you be expected to do? But, alas, when you kissed Ethel, you could not fail to notice how frequently the nose of Ethel assaulted either your left or your right cheek.
But as for Edie—ah, do not speak of Edie! For her nose, by some miraculous diaphaneity or impalpability of love, seemed dimly, if at all, existent when the felicity of kissing Edie came your way—too rare felicity, for who but Harry Sewelson hulked before you on that faint, fair road to Edie?
If the expression may be allowed, at first Philip did not bud enthusiastically. Once more his intellectual timidity asserted itself; particularly when Harry, whose interest in girls had declared itself somewhat suddenly, very completely and some months ago, had attempted to convince Philip by cogent intellectual argument that the time had arrived for the widening of Philip's sphere of interest. Philip had as yet been aware of little physical encouragement and less emotional. And it seemed an act of deliberate malice on the part of Providence, an act calculated to arrest abruptly for a period of time his "widening" (until such time as the gathered forces would break sharply through the crust of distaste), that, first of feminine contacts, brought Ethel's nose into collision with Philip's cheek. No act of quixotry towards a promptly smitten lady could impel Philip to turn the other. It was fortunate, therefore, that Edie's lips made their appearance to obscure this nasal disquietude. And with Edie's lips, suddenly there came to Philip a knowledge of something softer than flowers and more fragrant than any breath in a garden after rain. Her hair covered her with a warmth and her hands were at once soft and nimble. She said little, for she had little to say, but she disposed her innumerous wares with such naive artifice that she suggested calm deep wells into which her bucket rarely dipped. She was, in fact, a plump and pretty little girl, alluring, secret, a little conceited. She realized with pleasure the vague suggestion of unholiness contained in any relation with the atheistic Harry, but she observed, flattered, with what immediacy Harry usurped her for his own when he stormed the citadel of Walton Street and ousted her other lovers with the flick of a cynical tongue. With premature womanishness she was conscious of the piquant contrast the figure of Harry afforded beside her own: the hard acute angles—the curves; the eloquent tongue—the tongue more enchanting in its silences than in its speech; the grey, quick eyes—the indeterminate brown; the lips whose kisses were incisions of steel—the lips which were like night, sweet, odorous.
On the recommendation of Harry, an invitation to Janey's birthday party was sent to Philip. The problem of a birthday present troubled him less than on his previous and first visit to such a ceremony, the occasion upon which he had met and conquered Ethel; for then, even after he had included a bottle of Parma Violet Scent with a box where he had glued seven halfpenny coins in a quaint design on the inner side of the lid, he had been perturbed lest he had not used sufficient halfpennies for real generosity. At Janey's birthday party, however, all such considerations had been drowned in a fortuitous kiss he had bestowed on Edie. (It had been a game which had lasted till every possible combination had been exhausted and each pair of female lips knew every pair of male).
But it was rare that these successful and unsuccessful adolescent amours knew the shelter of four walls—birthday parties were as infrequent as they were splendid. Hence it was that the corner of Walton Street each evening saw the gathering of adolescents, in which behold Philip included, criminally weaned for a time, I grieve to say, from the Anabasis and even impaired in his adherence to Karl Marx. And if Reb Monash inquired "Why so late?" or "Whither going?" and Philip answered "The Library!" it had been true at least on two occasions upon which he had made that reply. The epoch of street-corner flirtation had set in, and among strange, misty places went the wits of Philip woolgathering.
Alec Segal looked on aloof, amused. He had much eloquence, introspective and extraspective, at his command. Yet there was none of the Walton Street ladies concerning whom he wove garlands of words. If the development of his adolescence was impressed upon his conscious mind, and it was unlikely that he had not been mentally tabulating all his states as they succeeded each other, he had made no verbal comments to his younger friends. When Harry was found embroiled in the passages-at-arms of which Walton Street was the witness, Alec was interested and looked wise. When Philip fought weakly and fell in these same encounters, Alec still remained silent, but a shade of the sardonic settled more fixedly on his lips.
The whole of this new development was chaotic, obscure, a blind impulsion towards new things somewhat alien from his other loyalties—if Edie's lips were not to be taken, as in his equivocal poetic mind he tended to take them, as the fruit of the tree of poesy. With a little discomfort he would observe from time to time Alec Segal standing thin and cryptic at the outskirts of the Walton Street mêlée; standing there for one moment or two as if he were biding his time, and then behold, Alec was no more there.
"Alec!" he would demand, "Why do you come tip-toeing in like that? It gives a chap the creeps! If you come, can't you stay a bit, and if you can't stay, why on earth do you come? You're like a family ghost creeping about corridors and grinning from the battlements. You're a grisly beast, Alec!"
Alec would rub his left forefinger along the curved line of his nose.
"Nothing, my son! I'm just waiting!"
"Waiting for what?"
"Oh, I don't know! Everything's waiting, so am I! What's the moon waiting for when she stops short at midnight? I'm just waiting! Some of us are made to keep on moving, like Harry, for instance, and some of us to wait! But don't question your grandfather! It's disrespectful!"
One evening Harry, Alec and Philip were walking down the lonely track called Chester Street which led beyond the police station, through dark fields barren of buildings, into Blenheim Road. They were proceeding from a party which had been undiluted misery to Philip and had given, therefore, at least so much food for interested analysis to Alec. Even Harry was subdued. The party had been a thorough failure. Edie had lost her forfeit and had been requested to kiss the boy she liked best in the room. There was a breathless quiet as with downcast eyes she halted a moment and then walked demurely towards the face of the nincompoop, George something-or-other. He was not even a scholar of a Doomington higher school. He was, it was rumoured, attached to the "job and fent" line. He had lank black hair greasily retreating in equal mass from an undeviating central line. His cheeks were, it was true, very silky. His mouth was endurable. But, indisputably, he was a boob. What if his father was a master tailor? After all, there are higher social grades than master tailorhood; even if the mere fact of a scholarship does not put you secure above all considerations of social status. And Edie had kissed George.
It was, of course, a deadly snub for Harry; but how much more deadly for Philip, who immediately before had himself been obliged to kiss the girl he liked best in the room, and had proceeded with ardent shyness to his lady's throne and the uninterested lips of Edie.
"There's no idealism in them at all!" reflected Harry bitterly. "I don't think they know what love means! Here's a chap ready to sacrifice his shirt for them, a chap many girls would jump at! And then what happens? A dolt with sleek hair turns up, and a Cheshire grin, and they're round his neck and licking his feet! It isn't only that they've got no taste—you know. They've got no self-respect!"
"Be more explicit, Harry!" Alec interposed. "Don't shirk the issue—and Edie!"
"They're all the same—absolutely ungrateful and heartless! I'm going to be a monk, a Trappist, I think! Trappism's a profession invented specially for me!"
"What? Because a little minx..."
"Don't...."
"Don't be a fool, Harry; you said they were all the same! I agree. Why are you specially put out about Edie then? You didn't object to the beefy arm of Lily wandering round George's waist, did you?"
"Not a scrap of difference—Lily's beefy arm, Edie's beefy soul...!"
"Look here!" Philip broke in miserably. "It's no good slanging her. I suppose if she likes him better she's entitled to be his girl instead of somebody else's."
"A little raw, Philip?" Alec asked.
"Of course I'm not! I don't care what she does! I didn't notice her all evening!"
"Oh, you liar!"
"You looked glum enough when she chose that fellow, didn't you?" taunted Harry.
"Headache, I suppose! And even if I did look glum, and I don't say I did—you needn't rub it into a chap. Besides, in any case, I didn't look glum!"
"Your logic's masterful as usual, Philip!"
"The point is not Philip's logic but the heartlessness of women!" Harry insisted. "What's to be done about it?"
"The only thing to be done about it," declared Alec, "is to look the fact in the face, that's all! You must have no illusions about them! You must stare them straight in the eyes and beyond! Let 'em know they're not deceiving you with their little tricks! Strip off the illusions, I say!"
"I suppose by 'illusions' you mean," said Philip, "all that's jolly about 'em and make 'em different from us! No, it won't work!"
"There isn't anything different about us! We're all alike! Strip them naked and it's just—Body, Sex!"
"What on earth are you driving at now?" Philip asked, frightened.
"Only this—that it's about time you ... Hello! Look here! What on earth ... what on earth's this?"
They had come to the darkest part of Chester Street. Alec's foot had stumbled against something large and soft. The boys stopped. Harry lit a match and they saw a bundle before them wrapped in a white sheet. It was large and bulky and tied at the top in loose knots.
"What is it?" Philip asked.
"Washing, perhaps?" Alec speculated.
"Open it!" Harry demanded peremptorily. "It might be anything!"
"What shall we do with it? Perhaps it's something dropped from a removal cart, eh?" wondered Alec. "But I hardly think so, it's lying so steadily on its bottom, as if it had been put there deliberately. I think we'd best take it along ... Hello! Listen! I say! It's crying! Good God, can you hear?"
"Get out of the way, Alec!" Harry exclaimed, "Don't stand theorizing!" He bent down and untied the knots swiftly. "Light up!" he commanded, pushing his matches into Philip's hand.
Harry uttered a startled cry.
"A baby!"
"Ye gods, a baby!"
And in truth, wrapped in a blanket and lying in a soft heap in a clothes-basket, a minute baby lay, whining feebly and curling its infinitesimal fingers.
"The kid'll die of cold! We must get it out of the way at once!"
"Not a day old!" Alec mused.
"Get a move on, for God's sake! Where shall we take it?"
"The police-station just along!" Philip suggested.
"Yes, the very place!" Harry took off his greatcoat and placed it over the top of the basket. "Here, Alec, take hold of the other handle!"
The baby was delivered into the hands of an inspector, summoned by a policeman who refused to have anything to do with the case. The inspector scrutinized the three lads suspiciously, as if he were ready to believe that one or the other of them was the father of the child. They made their statement and at length, reluctantly, he allowed them to withdraw.
"By Heaven!" muttered Harry, "What a swine the man is!"
"Who do you mean?" asked Alec, who, now that the practical matter had been discharged and they were once more entering the immaterial world of thought, reassumed the elderliness of his voice and manner. "Who do you mean, vague youth, is a swine? The inspector!"
"No! The father!"
"Yes, I'm with you! But what about the mother?"
"Fancy a mother behaving like that!" Philip wondered.
"That's just what I mean! The woman behaved perfectly naturally. Parents only keep their children because other people do. They're not really interested in children. My parents are not interested in me and I'm not fearfully interested in them. It's only a sort of crust of habit, and the parents of this child wouldn't allow it to form. John Smith and Mary Brown, let's call them. I declare that John Smith and Mary Brown are just natural and sensible people—they had their fling—Body, Sex! That's to-night's party and John Smith and Edie and the baby in the cradle all reduced to their elements! Body, Sex! It's as simple as an equation in Algebra!" (Alec invariably ended his ratiocinations with a flick of the fingers—a 'so easy, you know'!)
The incident had filled Harry with nausea. The disillusionment at the party, the check to his pride it had involved, the callous abandonment of the child in the bare croft, had combined to produce in him an indignation of cynicism.
"You're right!" he declared. "It's Sex, pure and simple! It's all dirt!"
"And you, Philip?"
"What do I know about it? Go on!"
Philip listened, fascinated and repelled. At least the philosophy of Segal offered a coherent explanation of to-night and the other nights. The whole theme was virgin to him, but the method of attack was so deadly calm, so impersonal, that he was impelled to follow. He was conscious, moreover, that other people, not least Harry and Alec, did not exclude this branch of life from their horizon; why, then, should he? It was all so different from the filth of Angel Street; here, if soul played no part or little in this interpretation, mind at least was not absent. There was, he did not dare to confess to himself, a quaint furtive pleasure in it all....
"Go on!" he said, breathless to advance, and half-inclined to flee.
Alec Segal talked. For one hour, two hours, they paced from corner to dark corner of Chester Street. There were but few interruptions from Harry and none from Philip. Only, as Alec talked, Philip felt sometimes that he would like to lie down on the cold kerb to cry—simply, childishly, to cry. And he felt creeping round him like a mist, a deadlier loneliness than had ever beset his heart, a loneliness that now crept and eddied through his being in chill wisps. Oh for the brown eyes of his mother, so innocent and so wide with knowledge! For the bloom was fading from the world; the freshness was passing away. Friendship was passing away. Hitherto he had stood alone, self-sufficient. Now the new preoccupations must assail him, wean him from his old friends. Wean him, oh sorrowful, oh, surely false, from his mother! Lead him towards insubstantial things waiting somewhere to hold him! And these things reached towards his friends, were interposed between them and him. They had been complete and single once, these friends, despite all the flaws in their unity. They were but provisional and dependent now, as he was himself to be henceforward. Pain which had a core of delight, delight which was gilded dust!
The three youths parted. As they moved in different ways, night, it seemed to Philip, engulfed them separately bringing unbridgeable division. Night swallowed something of boyhood. Manhood came stalking towards Philip out of the vast. Manhood placed a finger on his young forehead. A sad boy slept that night in Angel Street, sad and wise.