He bent down to her. For an hour he talked to her of the new confidence his success had brought him and what he was going to do when he left school. He might even go to the University! No, he would not be a doctor! His ambitions hadn't taken shape yet, but he might be.... Oh, he didn't know what he mightn't be if he only tried! And he'd have such a house for her to live in...!
He fell to describing the house of his dreams ... until at length Channah came in. She was ending her button-hole labours earlier, nowadays, in order to have more time to attend to her mother.
The summer holidays had already begun when Mr. Furness wrote to Philip informing him that he had made arrangements for the boy to spend a fortnight in the country. It was characteristic of Mr. Furness. He realized that unless he himself engineered it there was no chance of Philip obtaining the holiday the boy seemed badly to need. It was better, he decided, not to broach the matter at all, but by definitely presenting Philip with the fait accompli, and by placing himself behind the vantage of the impersonal post, to simplify Philip's position as far as possible. The idea had occurred to him of inviting Philip to the annual Doomington camp among the Westmoreland hills, particularly as the camp regularly contained a fair proportion of the Jewish boys at the school. But the thought of Reb Monash seemed rigidly to disqualify the idea. It was obvious that with the most courteous intentions in the world the ceremonial minutiae of Angel Street could hardly be repeated to their last austerity in the divine welter of camp. He cast about in his mind, therefore, for a means of satisfying at once the scruples of Reb Monash and his own determination that Philip should breathe smokeless air. The Jewish "guest house" kept by Mrs. Kraft under the Wenton Hills seemed as amiable a solution as he could find.
It was run on "strictly kosher" lines for boys between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and ladies over the decorous age of thirty. The determination to avoid complications du coeur seemed, he considered, perhaps a little ostentatious. The important point, however, was that Wenton House was at once "kosher" and in the country, and he was satisfied that Mrs. Kraft was a capable and excellent lady.
For one moment only Mr. Furness's letter brought to Philip a wild joy, then the joy flickered and was quenched.
"Absolutely impossible!" he determined. "How can I go and leave her lying ill in the parlour, coughing! I'm not going, that's final!"
But the matter was by no means so easily decided. "Not going!" cried Mrs. Massel. "Not going!" echoed Channah.
"Be thou not a fool, my son!" the mother urged. "How I have yearned it should come to pass for thee! What, a Yiddisher house in the country! Of course thou wilt go! Thou wilt come back a labe, a lion, with a big chest, a sight for God and Man! Perhaps there will be a real river there? No? Not like the Mitchen! A river they call it, such a year upon them! Yes, and the men in the fields will be cutting the grass, or is it too soon? The year is slower in this England of thine than in Terkass, but what knows one of the year, how it comes or goes, in thy lovely Dum—ing—tonn!"
"Don't be silly, mother! How on earth can I go when you're like this! I can't! I can't think of it!"
"A question! Thou must go, I say! Annotate for me no passages! Mirtsaschem, I'll be well again when thou returnest. I will make thee, all for thyself, a kuggel ... oi, oi, this coughing ... mishkosheh, it will pass ... a large kuggel, with large raisins, larger raisins are not!"