If the episode of the profane poem written during the sanctity of "Hebrew" had rendered Reb Monash sadly and half-consciously aware that in Philip he had nurtured a son who lay beyond the theoretic and practical bounds of his knowledge; a son who was so bewilderingly unlike and unworthy of himself as he had been like and worthy of his father, and his father had been like and worthy of his grandfather, and so backward to whichever of the Twelve Tribes had fathered his race—if the episode of the poem produced in him only fears and doubts, it was the appearance of Mottele which crystallized for him the difference between the actual Philip and the Philip of his dreams.
The parents of Mottele had removed to Doomington from a smaller town in an adjacent county for the specific reason that Mottele had demanded more adequate instruction in Hebrew. They had moved even though the father had achieved a fair clientele as a tailor in the town where he had settled, whereas the market in tailors for Doomington was already hopelessly glutted.
At the time when Mottele entered Reb Monash's chayder Mottele had passed his ninth, and Philip his tenth birthday. His mother, as she floated in amply behind the compact figure of Mottele, seemed rather an exhalation from Mottele than an important author of his existence. She was vague and large and benignant as a moon, shining with pale piety reflected from the central sun of Mottele. Mottele himself entered as one doomed only for a short while to range the treacherous zone of the fleshly. By an inverse law of gravity, his eyes were drawn upwards to the ceiling and thence to the mudless floors of Heaven where his elder brethren, the mediæval Rabbis and the early Prophets, awaited the quietus to the mundane phase of Mottele's piety. His general appearance betokened a rigid aloofness from the vulgar delights of the body. Both stud-holes of his waterproof collar were in excellent condition; the pockets which in most entrants to chayder were associated with the fecund bulges of boy-merchandise, displayed only a sidder, a Prayer Book, emerging with propriety; his stainless boots proved that the rapturous puddles of the roadway were unknown of his fastidious feet. Upon his head sat a little round peakless cap from which fell a demure fringe over his forehead. There was something sweet and thin, a little sickly almost, in the tender flute of his voice as it piped to Reb Monash's question a response as innocent as honey.
Upon Reb Monash Mottele produced an immediate and visible effect. He fell naturally into a manner towards him of affection, mingled with respect. "Here," he declared, "here truly is a Judaic child! Just as at home! No blackguarding in the streets, and his head never running this way and that to nothingness and Gentilehood. A credit to God and Man!"
Mottele seemed almost audibly to lap up the instruction tendered him, almost audibly, as a cat audibly laps milk; you might almost see his sharp little tongue wash round the corners of his mouth to make sure that no drop of Jewish wisdom should be unabsorbed. During "Hebrew," he sat upon his corner of the form with a rapture of concentration worthy of some infant mystic vouchsafed the Beatific Vision. It was with no vulgar assertion of rights that his claim to one especial end on one especial form was recognized. His claim existed merely, and one might question as easily the claim of Reb Monash to thump the back for inattention. There was something both ludicrous and infuriating in the sight of some hulking fellow of twelve shuffling heavily away from the sacrosanct seat, as the result of some slight pathetic quiver in Mottele's eyelids.
Before long Mottele's bark was sailing the deep waters of the post-Pentateuchal Bible, while Philip's keel was still grinding against the elementary shingles of the "weekly portion." Mottele now became Reb Monash's standard, before which all things else, at but a cursory reference, were revealed as dross. The state of Philip's spiritual health was shown to be perilous in the extreme. Now too Reb Monash developed a new theory.
"It is not that Feivel cannot!" he declared bitterly. "He will not! It suits him not to be a good Jew! Regard then Mottele! There is a jewel for you, there is an ornament for England, one shakes with delight of him in the Polisher Shool. One says in looking upon Mottele that there is hope still for the Hebrew race! Mottele ... Mottele ... Mottele! ..."
Day after day the word Mottele droned or thundered in Philip's ears. All that was stifling in Angel Street and repressive in chayder took to itself for a name the three syllables of Mottele. The word began to lose for him all its physical connotation. Increasingly it became for him a symbol of injustice and despair.
Reb Monash had felt hitherto that the child of his dreams, such a child as would have been a living glory in Terkass, was almost of too exquisite a lineament for the reality of this godless England. But Mottele had undeceived him, for here in the very flesh was a child actually born in England and yet recalling irresistibly the piety of his own boyhood in Russia; a child such as he had been himself, at ten years an intimate of greybeards and an object of almost superstitious affection and reverence among the old women of the Synagogue. He would not confess it to himself, yet there seemed an element of injustice in the fact that he, Reb Monash, to whom surely, on the grounds of his own holiness and the uninterrupted holiness of his ancestry generation behind generation, such a son as Mottele was due, that he should be the father of so unsatisfactory a child as Philip. There was much he loved in Philip. Because of the very strength of his love for Philip, he assured himself, he grieved so much to find Philip so far from his heart's desire. It was as much a matter of the happiness of Philip's own soul as of the happiness and credit of himself. But, he realized, to display to Philip or to Philip's mother, how deep was his love for his son, would be tantamount to an offence against God. It would sanction the delusion that he accepted Philip such as he was, whereas the Philip he strove after was far less like Philip than like himself or Mottele, after which image, with God's grace, he would yet convert his son. For there was much, he repeated, he loved in Philip; as for instance his poetry, his imagination, which, wedded to Jewishness, the spiritual state called Yidishkeit, were a valuable possession, as he, in his oratory, himself frequently realized. On the other hand, the quality of poetry, unhealthily developed, might nourish errors concerning the primal verity of Yidishkeit which might land him into the pits of the unclean. There was a certain quality of the rational which up to a certain limit was likewise a decoration. It was a quality which could excellently elucidate a parable or examine an obscure text with the possible result of throwing upon it a naive and modern light very entertaining to the elders at the Synagogue; but again, like all Philip's positive qualities, it had a negative aspect of the greatest spiritual danger. It was a God-sent bounty that had sent Mottele in his way—Mottele, who had imagination, but not to excess, who was rational, but not unhealthily. By placing the virtues of Mottele in a clear light before Philip, by the spectacle of the affection and esteem which Mottele commanded in the exercise of these virtues, both in chayder and in shool, the increasing contumacy he had observed with alarm in Philip would be broken down, and a son worthy of the traditions of Reb Monash adorn his home.
"I hate him!" Philip was saying to Harry, "I hate him!" His face was still wet with tears of vexation. His fists were clenched and his jaws were set viciously. He had only escaped that evening by slipping out through the front door after opening it for a septuagenarian panegyrist of Mottele.