Rigid with hate, Princess Lena lay taut against her support. With a fine curve Philip drew the captainly knife. The braces-and-rope fetters fell from the lady's limbs. With the hiss of an escaping valve, Lena threw herself upon the astounded hero. Two great scratches ripped redly down Philip's cheeks.
"Take that an' that an' that' an that!" she howled as she thumped him, bit him, scratched him, tore his hair. Then her nerves gave way, and she sank to the ground, all of a heap, sobbing.
Beyond a scowling, laughing, shaking of fists, the "gang" had remained passive hitherto, but the moment Lena subsided, with convulsive unanimity they fell upon their captain. When at length the sated gang emerged from the stable, there was no superficial point of resemblance between Dandy Dave and the quivering youth moaning lugubriously in the darkness.
Philip had not yet found a key to the Happy Life. His experiment among the young gentlemen of Angel Street had doubtless been foredoomed to failure. He was not of them. He had been a "bouncer" and would, in their eyes, remain a "bouncer" unto the world's end. They realized cunningly how he winced when they shouted filthy words after him. Their experience with Lena Myer had widened their vocabulary, and they filled the air with enthusiastic impurity as he passed by. He was approaching his ninth birthday, but still the little girls of Angel Street gave him his one illusion of society.
School, too, filled him with leaden ennui. Miss Green's class was only a memory of his later infancy. Miss Tibbet, his present teacher, was a hopeless automaton. She wore masculine boots and impenetrable tortoise-shell spectacles. When she opened her lips, sound issued; when she closed her lips, sound did not issue. Her personality was capable of no further differentiation. Nothing happened. A waking sleep buzzed in her classroom like a bluebottle.
For his years he was early in Miss Tibbet's class. There was something about him which much endeared Philip to the young ladies of ten and eleven who sat in the same benches. The emotion at first was one of somewhat elderly amusement and compassion. But when Jane Freedman declared herself in love with him, it became a universal discovery that Philip lay wedged between the split sections of every heart. They brought offerings to him—cigarette cards, jujubes and raw carrots, (Philip had an unholy appetite for raw carrots). One day Jane Freedman waylaid him with a large lump of pine-apple rock.
"Kiss me, and it is yours!" she said. It was a very large and inviting piece of pine-apple rock; it had only been slightly sucked, not more than a taste. He kissed her.
The other girls promptly waylaid him with larger pieces of pine-apple rock. The whole thing really was very unpleasant. On the other hand pine-apple rock had its compensation. Yet Philip developed a great distaste for humanity. Boys, at one extreme, were more unclean than cats, (cats being the predominant fauna of Angel Street, they were a useful starting point for all philosophy). Girls, at the other, were more sentimental than fish. Pine-apple rock began speedily to pall upon him.
School was wearying beyond words. Not a chance gleam of gold filtered through the pall of cloud. Miss Tibbet's mouth opened; then it closed. It would have been an incident, even if you could have seen her eyelids blink beyond her spectacles. She taught poetry as she taught vulgar fractions. A mad impulse began to seize upon Philip. He must separate his own lips further, wider, more hilariously than ever Miss Tibbet was capable. Then to deliver himself of one prolonged shout—no more. One prolonged shout which would cleave a path through the clouds of monotony wherethrough the dizzy horses of adventure might come tumbling from the spacious blue winds beyond. Not a shout of pain or of desperation. A shout merely from the whole capacity of his lungs, a human shout, a challenge of the body in ennui.
His lips opened trembling. Miss Tibbet's spectacles swept blankly towards his face. He bent down over his paper. The impulse waxed within him and became a passion. He began to say to himself that the whole future of his life depended upon his courage. If he did not open his lips and yell he would be one thing. If he did open his lips and yell, he would be another thing, and a bigger, freer thing. One day he stretched his jaws to make the effort. The back of his mouth was crammed with sand. He lifted his hand as if to hide a yawn.