CHAPTER XII
Dorah was a tall, raw-boned woman, carrying all the implicit angles of Reb Monash to an explicit extreme. In the civil strife at Angel Street her sympathy had always been on the side of tradition and Reb Monash, as against licence and Philip. Channah likewise had, in a weak and somewhat hopeless way, taken sides. Not openly, not with unabashed self-declaration, and far less through philosophy than sentiment, she had been steadily at Philip's side—when, at least, she was not absorbed in her collection of Vesta Tilley post cards and her long waitings at gallery doors for the performances of Lewis Waller or Martin Harvey.
The veins of Dorah's temper were less easily tapped than Reb Monash's, but when tapped, they yielded richer ore. When her temper was at its most exuberant, her voice was of a dovey stillness which boded much woe. But the contradiction in her household which most concerned Philip was, in a word, weak tea. So well defined and dark and abrupt was Dorah, that one would have imagined that tea of her brewing would be raven as Acheron. Yet it was, in fact, as weak as a rickety child. It was tepid. It was served in a large pint mug, so that its quantity the more ruthlessly exposed the invariable defects of its quality. Much and cold milk annihilated its last semblance to the potent brews of Angel Street and copious sugar rendered it, at length, unpleasant as an inverse castor oil.
Compare with weak tea, tea almost leonine; also cherries in the skim of milk, and Mrs. Massel sitting hard by, humming happily like a kettle, or moving about the kitchen with happy bird-like noises, and producing finally a remnant of Saturday's kuggel (which is a thick brown soft pudding with many raisins and a celestial crisp crust)! ... Until the shuffling of Reb Monash's feet overhead might be heard, and there is the last gulping of tea and swallowing of kuggel, and the lifting of a laden satchel of books, and from Philip's lips a fatuous "So long, old mother, toodle-oo!" which is a valediction juvenile indeed from the lips of a young man to whom at last the secrets of the universe have been laid bare, from the genesis of the baby to the real nature of God and the perfidy of Edie....
"So long, old mother!"
Since the exodus from Angel Street, relations between Philip and his father had not been clearly defined. Philip still descended from Longton each Saturday morning to accompany Reb Monash to the Polisher Shool. He had at first been extremely reluctant to go, but Dorah threatened unstated oppressions, and though tea could hardly have been more pallid, Philip felt it wise to fall in with her request. He still came down to join in festival meals, but no word of intimacy passed between them. In shool, the watchful eye of Reb Monash no longer guarded Philip's Prayer Book lest two pages be turned over in place of one; which very remission compelled Philip to reiterate the cryptic prayers with a blank, dull fidelity.
Thus, therefore, though they were on conversational terms with each other, as a man might be with a youth he disliked or feared but in whom he was compelled to take an interest, out of loyalty towards a dead friend, invariably the awakening of Reb Monash brought about the dissolution of such a cherry-séance as I have spoken of. For Mrs. Massel and her son had now made a tacit pact by which Philip always came home from Doomington School via Angel Street instead of by the upper road to Longton called Brownel Gap. It meant an uninterrupted hour with his mother, and these months, howsoever disastrous and dark the day might be before and after this golden hour, were their halcyon days.
"And yet," apprehensively muttered Philip to himself, "how thin she is getting!"
"Mother!" he would say, "Aren't you well? Can't you take something? You don't look half so—you know—half so fat and jolly as ordinary mothers do. Look at Alec Segal's mother! She adds another chin every month and she keeps on getting further out in front! You don't! What'll we do about it, mother; it can't go on, you know!"