Philip had not yet recovered from the dull dismay with which he had found himself installed as a scholar in the Infants' Class of the Bridgeway Elementary School. He had attained the age of five. Within quite recent memory he had been breeched. He still remembered the pocket in his skirt which was crammed with "stuffs"—the main merchandise of his companions, snippets of prints, calicoes, alpacas and linen rags picked up below the maternal needles and generally on the doorsteps of Angel Street.
Reb Monash was by no means hostile to the idea that Philip should acquire a Gentile education, on the broad understanding that it should not outshadow Philip's accomplishment in Hebrew lore. It went without saying that labour on the Saturday should be anathema under any concatenation of the links of Fate. Moreover, the law of the land, in the person of the "School Board," had been eyeing him significantly.
"It's time Philip should begin school!" said Reb Monash shatteringly one evening. Philip lay dozing on the horse-hair sofa. His heart shook before the joint assault of a great joy and a great fear. "School"—that unfathomable place of red brick and towering windows, where the "lads" went, the swaggering young men who jumped from pavement to pavement of Angel Street in five jumps; where one was brought into direct visual contact with "pleaseteacher," a thing beyond all imagination lovely and terrible.
"So Channah, thou wilt not go to work to-morrow morning. He's an old man, Philip, and he must make his start in life."
"All right, tatte!" Channah murmured. She thought ruefully of the fourpence or eightpence less it would mean in her week's total as a buttonhole hand. But she was devoted to Philip and his wise, elderly ways, and the thought of setting his feet upon the paths of that learning whence her own feet had been rudely torn on the morning of Philip's birth was worth the sacrifice of many fourpences.
Philip's face shone soapily next morning. His black hair lay stretched in rigidly parallel formations on both sides of his impeccable parting. Channah had shined his button-boots with so much rubbing and spitting into congealed blacking that his boots seemed to focus all the light in the kitchen. His mother had adorned his blouse with a great bow of vermilion sateen.
"Is pleaseteachers like policemans?" Philip asked, as Channah led him by a hand clammy with apprehension along the Doomington Road to the Bridgeway Elementary School.
"Oh no! Pleaseteachers are much more lovely!" was the reply. "Policemen only lock little boys up, but pleaseteachers give 'em toffee—and flowers!"
"And flowers?" echoed Philip incredulously.
When they arrived at the entrance to the school, a sudden nausea overwhelmed Philip.