The state in which Philip had endured the climax of his mother's illness, her death and funeral, had involved, it has been evident, less a storm of suffering than a trance, a deadly level of hysteria. When he returned from Angel Street to Longton, he seemed to lose his faculty for quick reaction, for poignant contrition or grief. His mind reduplicated the sooty autumn which spread like a web about the city, entrapping the last evidences of summer and leaving them to hang bedraggled like sucked flies.
Whether or no, for one who had at least made such pretensions of affection towards his dead mother, he ought, from the point of view of an abstract decency, to have persisted with the prayer to which she herself had attached such importance, it is not easy to decide. It is possible that had he recited the kaddish in a language he understood, he would have persisted even to the end. On the other hand, it is possible that had he been faced with the task of reiterating for so long the same fixed number and sequence of words with their inelastic content of meaning, he would have defected even sooner: that, in fact, the mere unintelligibility of the prayer conferred upon it for a season the quality of the kabbalistic. But the essential fact is this, that the emotional part of him now flowed like a sluggish backwater, and in his emotion alone the ritual could have been steeped until it shone with beauty and urgency.
Only his mind moved with any clarity, and his mind had long ago decided that phylacteries belonged to Babylon, that all the terror of the Day of Atonement was an immense, an almost conquering hypnotism, from which with travail he had escaped. Kaddish was but an issue of the same quality as these, though more painful in its solution; for those others were related merely to the general problem presented to him by his race, whilst this was bound up so immediately with the lovely thing he had lost.
His first absence from the morning service at the little shool in Longton (his absences from the afternoon and evening services were not ostentatious and were therefore not commented on) produced a series of violent outbursts from Dorah, culminating in a threat that she would no longer allow him to pass her doors. When he informed her that he had had other struggles to determine and others still faced him, that he was too tired arguing the matter of kaddish with himself for any argument with her, that, in short, he would go, as she threatened, and become an errand boy or a clerk, her anger relaxed. It was certain he was very worn out, and if he actually left the bosom of his family, his last tie with Judaism would be snapped, and—who knew? he might, God forbid, even marry a Gentile, a goyah! What a scandal it would be! Benjamin would lose his Jewish clientele, it would shake Reb Monash's chayder to its foundations, and what would be thought of a maggid whose son ... No, the matter was too terrible to think of! They must be patient, perhaps God would be kind even yet! Yet it was hard, very hard to bear! Not for all her resolutions could she stifle periodic outbursts of wrath. Philip would rise from the table with shut lips and retire to his room and his books.
Poetry had begun to lose its savour for him. Poetry tinkled. He discovered a volume of the Poems and Ballads. It mystified and annoyed him. He was in no mood for the sheer unrelated beauty of Keats, and Tennyson seemed fit only to read on a bench among the tulip beds of Longton Park. His feet held him too heavily to the ground to allow, with Shelley, any excursion into the empyrean. As yet it was an atmosphere too rare for him to breathe again; there was too much of the graveyard damp in his lungs. The equilibristic clap-trap of "Ulalume" and "The Raven" filled him at first with indignation and then with mere mirth.
The routine of school made as yet hardly any break in the even tenour of his mind. Mr. Furness uttered a few words of sympathy, so quiet and unobtrusive that without scraping the wound they gave to Philip a sense of ease and understanding more than all the rhymed consolations of the poets. With Browning he had more success, and though the robust exuberance of the poet was out of harmony with Philip's prevailing mood, here at least was stuff of the earth earthy, sound stuff for his jaws to tackle with pertinacity. But the discovery he made which nearest met his mood was the discovery of prose. With fiction, of course, he had always been familiar. But this was no more prose in a strict sense than Pope was poetry. Each existed for a purpose beyond its medium, Dickens for his tale and Pope for his precept. But when he casually picked up at a handcart in the Swinford market a copy of the Religio Medici, chiefly for a melancholy delight in its mere odour of antique must, and thus casually stumbled on a music which had more than the subtlety of verse, and none of its arbitrary divisions, he was carried away upon an untravelled sea. The "Urn Burial" he chanted night after night. The History of Clarendon and the Compleat Angler were a similar experience, the mere narrative of the first and the piscatorial erudition of the other affecting him as not truly relevant to the prose in which they were written, being merely moulds to give their music one shape instead of another shape. He moved lazily towards the more troubled seas of Swift and was suddenly tossing helplessly in those furious waters; until release allowed him to seek amiable harbourage with Dick Steele and, disregarding lordlily an intervening century, in the pleasant coves of Lamb.
It was not that the agony of those summer days, the telegram at Wenton, the cemetery, the words he had uttered in Angel Street and their consequence, were submerged quickly or in the least. For long, periods of listless vacuity clogged Philip's feet and mind. He would sit musing for hours over an unfinished meal or stand in prolonged and joyless reverie before a hardware shop. The slow blood in his veins called for no action. No dream of sky or hills was potent enough to prick his limbs with desire to be moving beyond the bounds of the city and along the climbing roads. So for a time these voyages with the learned and dead doctors of prose were the only adventures of his soul.
Almost with the first quickening of spring, something of the old unease twitched his body. He realized that his friend Alec, from whom no word had come to him, had not once entered his mind; that even Harry, upon whom he had stumbled several times, had in no wise concerned him. He had seen him once or twice with a lady. Details of her had not impressed themselves upon him. He knew only that she seemed ten or twenty years older than his friend, and a plain woman; distinctly, a plain woman. He determined to call for Harry and suggest a tram ride into the country.
"I'm sorry," Harry had said awkwardly. "I'm afraid I can't! I'm quite fixed up. I never have time to go with any one else."
"I beg your pardon," said Philip huffily, "really I shouldn't like to intrude! It just occurred to me that we used to have something to do with one another not so very long ago. I think I'd best not keep you any longer now."