Faithless Channah! How could the mere passing of time be such a labour? He subsided into a daze of stupefaction; only the hope of Channah's appearance buzzed and buzzed like a fly on the ear-drum. A great tear rolled slowly down his face. Another followed and another. They dropped into the bow of vermilion sateen. Suppose his mother should die in his absence? Or there might be a big, big fire! And just suppose....
A great clangour of bells! Miss Featherstone on her dais shut a book with a loud snap. Miss Briggs definitively placed her chalk on her desk. A pleaseteacher from another class walked with dignity over to the piano at the far end of the hall. She lifted the lid and played a slow march. The top class filed out from the desks, advanced in single order to a red line which, starting a few feet from Miss Featherstone's dais, led to the door; the class marched along the red line and passed with decorum from the hall. When Philip walked the red line in his turn he was wondering whether he ought to be placing each foot centrally upon the line. Dizzily he staggered along. When at last he rushed out into the road, wild with the relief from servitude, Mrs. Massel was waiting for him outside the school entrance, and when she lifted him from his feet, he howled with fearful delight.
His heart was full of resentment against Channah for her ignoble desertion. "Channah de Pannah, de big fat fing!" he jeered, when he saw her at dinner. Only the surface of his wound was healed when she bestowed upon him not only the tiger nuts and the box of crayons but a gratuitous tin trumpet gay with scarlet wools.
He refused vehemently to return to school that afternoon. But Reb Monash, entering the kitchen from the sitting-room where his chayder, his Hebrew school, was installed, speedily convinced him that the morning's bitter destiny must again be pursued.
For days his tiny faculties were flattened beneath the weight of his bewilderment. When, one morning, he went with the others into the playground for the interval, he crept inconspicuously on the skirts of the shrieking masses to the furthest corner in the wall, where he crouched, huddled, wondering what it was like to be grown up. When a lady came into the playground and vigorously rang a bell, he felt that no bell had any meaning to him. He was apart, unwanted. When he saw the children lining up in their classes and passing into the school with their teachers at their head, he turned towards them a dull abstracted eye. But when the appalling quiet of the playground impressed itself upon him, and he heard the choruses droning through the windows, "Twice One are Two," he realized with a sickening pang of alarm that he too was a cog in that machine, that he ought to have been minutes and minutes ago on the inner side of those walls.
His face was hot with shame as he dragged his feet through the door, and along the red line which burned down the hall like a trail of fire. When he slunk into his place like a cat with a stolen steak into a cellar, he found the eyes of Miss Briggs turned towards him so round with stony horror that he feared they must drop from their sockets. Hyman Marks next door gazed virtuously at him and turned away with a sniff.
Something of this early stupefaction remained with him, even though he had passed from the infants' hall to the upstairs department. "Pleaseteacher" had long been attenuated into "teacher," and Miss Green, who was the genius president over Standard Two, had entertained for him more than a teacherly regard ever since Philip had raised his hand in the middle of a lesson and inquired from her, "Please, Miss Green, can pupils marry teachers?" They frequently maintained long conversations when school was over, until Philip suddenly would bethink himself of the duties his racial tongue demanded and which awaited him in chayder under the unremitting vigilance of Reb Monash; whereon, with a troubled "Please, good afternoon, teacher!" he would scamper off. Miss Green liked the sonority with which he delivered the recitations she taught in class. He had a premature sense of tragedy.
On Linden when the sun was low,
All darkly lay the untrodden snow—
he delivered with the long modulations of a funeral dirge. He seemed to have discovered a new delight in the mere utterance of rhythmic lines. "On Linden when the sun was low," he chanted on his way home from school, bringing his right foot down heavily upon the iambic stresses of the line. There was a Saturday morning when Reb Monash tested his knowledge of the Bible portion to be read in the synagogue that day with "Say then, Feivele, what is the chapter in shool to-day?"
Philip was abstracted. His mind was recreating his latest conversation with Miss Green.