Ah! the sense of relief which began to possess him when now, throwing forward his chest, and breathing even in midmost Doomington the deep air of liberty, he realized how vain were all his innumerable ceremonies; that God did not require of him these things and these; He did not sit there watchfully counting the syllables of prayer His votaries uttered, sit there like a miser counting his pieces of gold; that the subterfuges and evasions of ritual which had given him frequent unease were not fraught with more than a merely local and temporary danger. Forward from phylacteries! They had slipped from his arms like manacles. They lay discarded like the slough of a serpent, coiled round his feet. What there was now of poetry in the Feast of Tabernacles, in the prophetic and vague beards of the old men, in the synagogue-chanting on darkening Saturday evenings, in the mingled array of the Passover Tables, in the puckered faces of the antique women muttering their year-long prayers, in the blast of the liberating horn upon the Fast of Atonement—what there was of poetry in them, he was free to understand; for they were shorn of all that had made them forbidding; they were not symbols of dark terror, they were pathways into the heart of the world. And with these he was free to understand what there was of poetry in the vague Christian lilies, in the burning of candles before the shrines of picturesque saints, brothers of those other and marble gods. All that these Greek gods had of poetry and all their groves and their broad-browed morning lads and the virginal worshippers before those altars of poetry—all, all these things were his. He was winning to freedom after much slavery.
But the acceptance of a general diminution in the divine attributes, through which the Godhead gradually became a vague half-credible abstraction, was attended by a campaign much more injurious to Philip's ease. His elders had approached God with as much terror as understanding when they made any advances in the celestial direction. It was reassuring to realize that if God was being divested of His raiment of love, He was losing proportionately the lightning of His jealousy and the bolt of His somewhat sectarian wrath. Yet simultaneously, as Segal and Harry agreed with no apparent remorse, it was imperative to abandon the immortality of the soul. To Philip there was something homicidal, matricidal, in the facile way with which they consigned to worms as their ultimate doom the folk whom they might be expected to love most dearly. They admitted it was an unpleasant pill to swallow, but in the wind of truth their personal predilections, they avowed, were as chaff! Who were they to stand up against Logic, against Law? "Truth the grand," a poet had said, "has blown my dreams into grains of sand!"
Segal remained imperturbable amid the crash of boyish comfort and illusion. His own extinction being the disintegration of a number of acute faculties, there would be no wraith of frustrated passion and insatiate hungers to move forlornly through the Godless void. There was a keen, bright fascination in this self-sufficiency for both the tempestuous utilitarianism of Harry and the inchoate poetry of Philip for whom this friendship involved almost a pungent ecstasy of self-extinction, like the repeated assault of the moth against the poised, unreluctant flame. These conclusions plunged Harry into a more fiery round of Socialistic activities than he had yet known. If the oppressed classes of the world would in no future state achieve equality, if the capitalists in no democracy of spirits would be set by counter-balance to hew wood and draw water for wage slaves there triumphant, all the more reason then to achieve an earthly Utopia, to rouse young Doomington to a sense of its manifold wrongs and, in the concrete, to stand as Socialist candidate for the coming parliamentary election at the Highfield Grade School. Philip, on the other hand, felt what happened in this miserable and abortive world hardly mattered, when all its insignificant schemes were doomed, collectively and individually, to sudden and absolute annihilation. The extinction of souls was not an attractive philosophy, he reflected bitterly, but there seemed no alternative but to accept it as a general truth. Not wholly consciously and with a passionate stupidity he applied three individual cases to the test of the general assertion; the survival of Shelley's soul, his mother's and his own. What arguing could there be about these three and, least of all, about Shelley's. His mother's death and his own being so utterly incredible, so much contra naturam, their souls existed in an ether beyond all jeopardy. Yet Shelley was demonstrably dead. But was he dead indeed? He realized now for the first time how Shelley was the lar of all his years. He might vaguely and unhappily acquiesce in the destruction of souls en masse, but nothing could convince him that Shelley did not triumph, personally, separately, in the clouds of morning and ride the horses of the wind; that he was not still the conscious spirit of song wherever birds and waters sang; that the pyre had dissipated for ever that unconquerable spirit.
Such then was the dubious and difficult current of Philip's atheism. And it was a strange fortune that these speculations should most have waged war within him at that period of the Jewish year when the festivals which culminate in the New Year and the Day of Atonement demanded unusually frequent attendance within the walls of the Polisher Shool, the inner temple of phylacteries, where Philip still so long and so frequently was held captive.
The worshipper entered the synagogue through a narrow door to the left of an establishment for fried fish and chips. The odour, therefore, of these commodities rising through the building interpenetrated the atmosphere of prayer, until prayer and chipped potatoes became inextricably woven together, and at no period in his life could Philip pass beyond a fried fish shop without feeling a far-off refluence from the old call to worship. Indeed, Philip's earliest anthropomorphism represented the Deity as some immense celestial figure in white cloth and a white hat standing above the fume and splendour of a great concave oven where He shovelled upon his tray the souls of human beings, brown and crisp, and resembling mystically the strips of potatoes shovelled by Mr. Marks upon a less divine tray in a chip-shop less august.
The worshipper now climbed a narrow staircase, and passing by the women's door entered the synagogue proper. If he had endured some recent loss in his family, the beadle from within would declare robustly, "Look ye towards the bereaved one!" who would enter with drooped head, the object of the regulated curiosity of bearded and beardless alike. Only a thin wooden partition divided the women's from the men's section, so that on one side praise was lifted to the Lord by the women because He had made them what they were, on the other, in unabashed juxtaposition, heartier praise was lifted by the men because He had made them men. Little boys could stand quite easily upon the forms and look down upon the women swaying in their old black silks and beneath their crazy cherry-garlanded bonnets. Here stood the rebitsin, Serra Golda, the most pious and wrinkled of Hebrew woman, who, because it is a mitzvah, an act of grace, to stand as long as possible during the Day of Atonement, stood all that hot long day on her ulcered feet, even though the mere creeping from her own dun parlour not far away had been one hard agony. Here too stood Mrs. Massel, very quiet and shy among the voluble women, wiping her eyes sometimes and repeating the prayers quietly, or perhaps, becoming conscious of the dark watchful scrutiny of her boy beyond the partition, lifting to him her face for one sweet moment and dropping it again towards her Prayer Book.
Against the centre of the Eastern wall, which was at right angles with this partition, stood the Ark wherein the Scrolls of the Law reposed among mothy velvet, themselves enveloped in a petticoat of plush whence hung silver bells. The whole Ark was curtained by a pall of scarlet, lettered with gold thread. At the centre of the masculine section (whose dimensions were some fifty by forty feet) stood the pulpit, some inches above the general level, where the whole service was incanted and the occasional auxiliaries from the audience were summoned. Below the pulpit and facing the Ark, a coffin-like desk drawn closely against their amplitudes, sat the elected officers for the year, the parnass and the two gabboim. Reb Monash, the power of whose oratory was so signal an ornament to the Polisher Shool, sat upon the right-hand side of the Ark itself, against the wall. The benches ran parallel along the shool on both sides of the pulpit. In the strict, if uncongenial, interests of truth it is necessary to say that every member of the synagogue above the age of thirty spat, and not a few below that age, these last retaining the easier hygiene of Poland and further Europe. The more honourable worthies had their own particular joints in the boarding for their expectorations, although, if they were more than usually afflicted, they would proceed to the doorway, returning thence purged. Hence experience alone was an adequate pilot for an unscathed journey between any point of the synagogue and the door. There were times when such tender breasts as Philip's were so nauseated by the persistent spitting that their hearts seemed to suspend beating from sheer sickness. On two occasions Philip's head fell back bloodlessly and with a bang on the hard wood behind him and he was taken away to the lavatory, where several men and women filled their mouths with water and cascaded his face for some minutes until he opened his eyes. No season in the year was hot enough to justify the opening of the windows. A current of the comparatively clean air from Doomington Road was declared with horror to be "A draught! A draught!" and with patriarchical fury the windows were closed to. Sometimes on a particularly sultry day an enterprising youth might open a window for several inches without drawing the attention of the elders. It would be unobserved for perhaps half an hour as no slightest movement of air was created. Then the alarm would be given. Immediately angry shouts of "A draught! A draught!" would be heard, some would huddle their arms in the cold, some would cough vehemently in the blizzard of self-suggestion. Occasionally the younger generation might make the effort to stand up shoulder to shoulder for the rights of ventilation, but so furious a hubbub would be created, the unease spreading itself into the women's department where a clucking would be heard as of an apprehensive farmyard; but especially the thunders of Mr. Linsky would be so olympically august, that the younger generation would subside and once more the opaque odours coagulate.
The Polisher Shool was, it may be deduced, a somewhat reactionary institution. But occasionally Reb Monash was called upon to deliver an oration in a synagogue of such Æsculapian sanity that the atmosphere seemed positively to evoke the vacant silence of Gentile worship. The definitely English congregations were assembled actually in superseded chapels, and here the laws of ventilation were no less rigorous than in the offices of the Doomington Board of Health. But these lacked the element of personality with which the Polisher Shool was perhaps too copiously endowed. And if all his life Philip had not been made unceasingly conscious of the dislike entertained for him in cordial measure by the body politic of the synagogue, he would have derived much consolation from the study of its personalities, of the rotund Reb Yonah, of Reb Shimmon like an army with banners, and the wizened shammos, the beadle, flapping about on loose soles like a disreputable ghost.
Philip's attitude towards shool was immediately prejudiced on his mere going thither. For almost from earliest times, not appreciably long, it seemed, after he had discarded the blue wool and tassels of infancy, he had been expected to crown his small figure with a large black bowler hat; and bowler hats, as could not be denied, were bloody. He felt stupidly self-conscious as he walked along by his father's side, as if all Doomington stared and jeered. If Reb Monash met a friend and these pursued a common way to the synagogue, Philip would hover behind, remove the bowler hat, and pretend it was somebody else's—he was only "holding it like."
There was a brood of young gentlemen very popular among their elders at the Polisher Shool. There was Hymie, whose eyes were large and innocent and who helped himself daily from his father's till. His voice was the voice of an exceptionally guileless thrush and he sang Yiddish songs at Shalla-shudos, the Saturday afternoon gatherings. There was Moishe, who asked such clever questions so sweetly concerning the weekly portion, that they were answered with delight by the expository old men, excepting when, as they somewhat frequently did, they involved sexual references. Moishe's mind was prematurely a cesspool. Others also there were to whom piety was a paying proposition, and two were pious because they were thus made. Philip could not throw in his lot with this company. And the whole shool remembered how the synagogue-president, the parnass, had, some years ago, pressed him to drink of the Sabbath night cup of wine; how Philip had refused it both because he didn't like wine and because he didn't like a public exhibition of a deed tinged with piety; how the pride of the parnass had been aroused and how he endeavoured to force the wine between Philip's lips while the whole shool awaited the issue; how Philip had suddenly thrust aside the foot of the beaker so that the wine fell stickily round the respective trousers of himself and the parnass.