He at no time made the definite discovery that Reb Monash had realized his substitution of poetry for prayer. If Reb Monash had made the discovery, it was not succeeded by such immediate castigation as Philip knew well. It was as if Reb Monash had at last found out that at the end of these episodes the cause of piety, if anything, was weaker in his son's bosom than before. Darkness gathered over the house in Angel Street. A dim premonition of failure had settled upon Reb Monash's eyes, but sternly he fought against it. Mrs. Massel moved wanly and fearfully about the house, fearful of satisfying her hunger for Philip with a stroke of the hand or a word. Channah stayed out as long and discreetly as possible with her friends. A silence hung over the house, for Reb Monash's popularity as a raconteur was at an end. Not for years had the gathering in the kitchen taken place, where, centrally, Mrs. Levine sniffed, and the tale of Rochke's interment was told 'mid indignation and tears. Only at night was the silence broken when Philip had taken his books down to study in the kitchen and Mr. and Mrs. Massel had gone to bed. Then for an hour, or for two hours, Reb Monash would recount the iniquities of his son in a voice of loud, persistent monotony, still persistent while the advance of sleep was clogging its clarity.
Peculiarly Philip resented the incident of the rocking-chair. He had betrayed his liking for the chair in a casual conversation, comparing it with the inadequacy of the chair it had superseded. He found next day that his father had removed the chair. It was not wanted nor used by Reb Monash. It was, he reflected bitterly, pure dislike of the thought that he should enjoy even so feeble a pleasure as this. The action seemed almost automatic on the part of Reb Monash and was significant of the whole relation between the father and son.
As Philip sat on the lame, cracking chair before his table, the pointlessness of it worked him up to a white heat. It was not merely pointless. It lacked dignity. Reb Monash was the symbol of the older world, with iron and austere traditions, with a forehead lit by the far lights of antiquity. But the incident of the rocking-chair stood stupidly out of keeping with the conflict of which now Philip was becoming intellectually conscious.
At this time, too, the domestic finances were more miserable than they had ever been before. The threat began to take shape that, at the end of the year, with the conclusion of his present scholarship, Philip would be expected to bring in his contribution to the household. All the more passionately, therefore, Philip applied himself to his books in the hope of a continuance of his scholarship allowance. Each evening, when the big kitchen table was cleared, he descended from the room upstairs with its meagre table and spread his books over the whole extent of the kitchen table. It was understood that in the constriction of finances, Philip was on no account to work by gaslight, a single candle being, Reb Monash affirmed, more than expensive enough.
In truth these nights were cheerless almost as a charnel-house. It was not merely that the ghost of his mother seemed always hovering ineffectually about the room, as if she lifted her hands for a peace which came not, or that his own personality surged uneasily and wretchedly in undecided war against the immanent personality of his father. Presences more tangible and numerous filled the room with detestable sounds. Black, heavy beetles came drowsily and innumerably ambling from the wainscotting and from among the embers of the extinguished fire. He could hear them crackling and rustling where the wall-paper had swollen from the wall. They filled him with loathing. They were the quintessence of the ugliness of Doomington; but much of Doomington had been charmed away for him by poetry, the beetles no charm could exorcise. Sometimes his hatred so swept him away that he ran about the room, treading quashily on the hordes of beetles where they lumbered along the floor. But the more their black bodies burst into white paste below his boot, the more unconcernedly they emerged from their hiding places. They seemed in their pompous progression to wink and leer at him, where the dim light of the candle caught their oily shells. Then a nausea gripped him, his feet were sticky and unclean, the gall churned in his body. They crept on the table sometimes, they dropped with a sucking thud from the bulging whitewash of the ceiling. Once he lifted a glass of water from the table to his lips and found his lips in contact with the body of a beetle on the rim. That night he was so wild with terror that he lit the gas—unconscionable extravagance, but as he sat feebly in the chair, he could hear the foul battalions rustling, whispering, smirking towards their chinks.
His eyes had always been weak. The working by candle-light gave him so much pain that he now formed the habit of lighting the gas when the last syllables of the monologue upstairs had died away. One night he left the kitchen-door open and the light staggered out into the hall. A dim beam thrown upward somehow attracted the attention of Reb Monash, who had ceased intoning that night more from weariness than sleep. A shout of anger filled the house. Tremblingly Philip extinguished the gas and pored aching over his texts by dim candle-light. It was with infinite caution, and when his eyes stood almost blindly in his skull, that now he ventured to light the gas. More than an hour after midnight on one occasion he stood on the table and applied the candle to the gas-jet. It was a heavy and oppressive night, but he had much work to do; the examinations were at hand. Again a long time passed. The sweat stood clammily on Philip's head. His lungs gaped for air. He placed a chair against the door and held it half-open, so that, while a little light escaped, a little air came in. Once more he buried himself deep in his work. Wearily his eyes went on from page to page. He entered almost into a trance of dull pre-occupation with the lifeless books. Nothing existed for him beyond the poor round of grammar, dictionary, text, notebook. Life was neither a freedom nor a slavery; it was a concentration upon unimportant importances, emptily insistent upon themselves. The sense which informed him that Reb Monash stood at the door was neither sight nor sound. He was aware of his presence. His heart seemed to flicker hesitantly down the depths of his being, until it left a blank behind his ribs, where a mouth entered whose teeth were fear and pain and anger. Anger! Surely it was not right for any man, in any relation, let alone a father, to steal like a criminal from his bed, soundlessly, terribly, and stand there with shut, pale lips! There were limits to the methods correct in the most comprehensive fatherhood. And his crime? He was doing his work, nothing more than his work! His tongue was chafed and sick. Perhaps it was an illusion after all. Surely he was alone, he had heard nothing. He lifted his eyes. The actual physical presence of Reb Monash struck him sharply and heavily like a blow on the cheek. He gasped with fright. He stood there forbidding and dark, but a strange light round him and his dim nightclothes. He was supernatural. He stood there taut with hate. He said not a word. Philip's jaw relaxed, his eyes staring dazed into his father's eyes. They stared at each other across a gulf of deafening noise and of ghastly silence. Whose feet had brought him down silent as death from his bed, who invested him with that cadaverous power? Illimitably beyond him stretched ancestral influences into the bowels of time. There was one slipping away, fruit of their loins, one for whom each had been a Christ crucified, slipping from the fold of their pride into the pagan vast. Behind the boy's head boyish presences groped towards him....
The spell was snapped by a hurried pattering of feet downstairs. The scared face of Mrs. Massel appeared.
"What dost thou mean?" she wailed, "what dost thou mean? Go! Touch him not! He might have died with fright! What art thou? What dost thou mean by it?" She had at last asserted herself. With weak hands she pushed him away from the door. "Come, leave the boy! He will go to bed at once! See, his face is like a tablecloth! Come, oi, oi, come!"
"Go thou in front!" said Reb Monash. He entered the kitchen, where Philip cowered on his chair. He turned out the gas and without a word went upstairs to his room. A dull idiocy numbed Philip's brain. He put his head down between his hands, and it slipped before long on to the table. Here Mrs. Massel found him after some hours when she came down to light the fire. As he shook himself, a beetle fell sleepily from his sleeve.