FORWARD FROM BABYLON
BY
LOUIS GOLDING
1921
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
NEW YORK
FOR MY FATHER
[A Glossary of some Yiddish words is given on p. 308.]
CONTENTS
BOOK I
FORWARD FROM DOOMINGTON WALLS
CHAPTER
BOOK II
FORWARD FROM PHYLACTERIES
BOOK III
APHRODITE
FORWARD FROM BABYLON
BOOK I
FORWARD FROM DOOMINGTON WALLS
CHAPTER I
Russia—here was the first Babylon. Sitting on the metal stool, his second-hand velvet suit fraying against the heat of the oven, Philip's big eyes were round with horror of this immense, inscrutable place. Everything they said was portentous, not wholly real. Many of their words attained a meaning only after laborious thinking.
"Kossacken—big as trees!"
"Big spikes in front of the Gubernator's house! Babies stuck! Rachel, the parchment-maker's daughter, caught up on a white horse! Never heard of again!"
"Blood in the streets, thick!"
A fear and a helpless rage seized the faces there, always only half seen in the gloom of the kitchen. By day, beyond the bars which uselessly scowled against the small glass panes, the drab walls of the house next door kept away everything but a dirty and dubious light. By night, the flare of the coal-gas jet distorted his father, Reb Monash, and his own feet on the fender, and the sofa into things of blurred, awkward lines.
It must be confessed that Reb Monash Massel was not wholly unconscious of his power to produce this atmosphere where terrible and impalpable presences flowed from his lips in a shadowy rout. Sabres flashing! Hilarious ponderous blasphemies tangled in the beards of Kossacken storming onward and away!
"You've heard me talk of Mendel, the Red One? No, not the shoemaker, the clerk! It was when a clerk he was, in the woods! They were cutting the Posne firs. They knew he was a Jew, the wood-cutters, and they put their heads together. Can one be a Jew without stabbing the goyishke eyes, eh? He was working very late one night; it was near the end of the month and he had all his accounts to make up. Well, he was bending over his papers very busy, and it was late, after midnight. There were owls hooting and two or three mad dogs in the woods crying now and again. It was very miserable, but he was bent over his figures. Above his head the air sang suddenly. He lifted his head and a knife he saw, quivering in the log wall beyond him, to his left. The window on his right was wide open because it was a sultry night. He got up quietly and closed the window, then took the knife out to give back to its owner next day. He was settling down to his work again when his eye was caught by something gleaming in the opposite wall. They were very badly built log cottages, these, pulled down as soon as the trees in that part of the forest were cleared. Badly built, big chinks between the logs. It was the gleam of a gun pointing at him through a chink...."
Somebody uttered a sharp cry. Philip on the fender-stool sat with the points of his elbows striking into his thighs, his chin pressed down into the palms of his hands. A burning coke exploded in the fire and a fragment jumped out on the mat. Mrs. Massel stooped to it and swiftly, with unprotected hands, threw it back into the fire.
"It's already a long time ago," said Reb Monash. "I wasn't fifteen yet. I wasn't married. It's all over now, it's all over. Besides," he went on comfortably, at the risk of disturbing the atmosphere he had created by his subtle modulations of tone, his pauses, his notes of drawn tension, "besides, they'll all be frying in hell, the wood-cutters, one and all! What will you?"
A slight murmur of satisfaction went round among the women. The assurance coming from so authoritative a source as Reb Monash himself, no one could doubt that the wood-cutters had long ago met their deserts and were still adequately enduring them.
"Nu tatte, what about Mendel, the Red One?" This from Philip in an anxious quaver.
Reb Monash looked round and down on Philip, a significant droop in his eyelids, his lips tightening a little.
"Schweig," he said. "Silence! is thy tatte running away?"
"Hush!" Mrs. Massel echoed, very quietly, from her corner of the sofa.
Reb Monash could not resist the temptation of taking out one of his Silver Virginia cigarettes, deliberately setting it in his mouthpiece, lighting it, and drawing smoke two or three times contemplatively.
Somebody's foot tapped in a corner. He resumed. "Yah, a gun pointing at him through a chink. What was there to do, I ask you? If they fired—well, they fired, and he was dead. If they didn't fire, he was alive. And if a man's alive, a man must live. Not so? So he took his quill in his hand again ... and he heard a little noise in the wall behind him. He looked round. Another gun. There, held by unseen hands in the night. Another gun. Pointing at him. Two guns pointing at him. He turned round to his table again. A Jew's not a Jew for nothing. He said a few blessings. Thou hearest, Feivel?" turning to Philip.
Philip swallowed a lump in his throat fearfully. He was afraid to answer. It was perhaps one of those rhetorical questions to which an answer was somehow, mysteriously, an offence. He thrust his head deeper into his hands and blinked.
"He said a few blessings," Reb Monash repeated, to press the moral home upon his listeners. "Well, what will you? He was a good clerk, very neat. And while the minutes in his clock were ticking as slowly as the years during the Time of Bondage, his figures he brought over from column to column. When came the first sign of morning so that the lamp shone less strongly on the two guns in the walls there, pointed at his heart," these last words with slow emphasis and repeated, "pointed at his heart—he dipped his head and hands into his bowl of water, took out his tallus and his tephilim; and when he was passing the strap round his arm, he heard very faintly the guns withdrawn through the chinks in the walls. But he could hear no feet creeping away. Besides, he was davenning; how could he listen to anything else? It's only God you must think about when you're davenning, no?
"He finished when it was already day in his hut. His beard—it was a small beard, only a young man's beard—was grey, like the snow in Angel Street. He did his accounts so well, did Mendel, the Red One—they always called him the Red One, even after that night, and strangers wondered why Red One—so well, that the merchant he worked for increased his wages by a rouble a month soon after. Oh, a Russia it was! What say you?"
By this time Mrs. Levine, from Number Seven, was soaked in tears, her face, her blouse, and even the flour on her apron was streaky and damp. She had come in half-way through, but any anecdote, sad or merry, or merely a parable to illustrate a point of law, invariably reduced her to tears.
"Nu, nu!" said Reb Monash, "over a year in Jerusalem!" which was a signal that no further ramification was to be expected from that anecdote, and moreover, that it might not be unwise for Mrs. Massel to drop her knitting and prepare for him a tumblerful of tea and lemon, with a lump of sugar—not too much lemon, for these were hard times; not like Russia, where people hung round your neck to beg the privilege from you of staying with them as a guest for two months, three months, as long as you liked. Well, that was Russia, but what could you expect from England? Pah! Yidishkeit going to the dogs! Young men he'd seen with his own eyes shamelessly boarding those new-fangled electric tramcars on a Shabbos! Which involved a double offence; not only riding but also carrying money in their pockets to pay for this dissipation—money on Shabbos!
So it seemed, Philip was fitfully made aware, that there were aspects of this Russian Babylon which compared very favourably with the situation in England, or, more precisely, in the drab Northern city of Doomington, where Philip first saw the light, seven years before; or, perhaps, to be accurate, in Angel Street, where the wire factory at one end and the grocer's shop at the other were the limits of his confident experience. Beyond Moishele's shop ("grocer's" shop only for convenience, seeing that his stock-in-trade extended from sewing-machines to fish and beetroot), Doomington Road extended its sonorous length, where, sole oases in this desert of terror, Philip recognized the Bridgeway Elementary School and the Polish Synagogue, the Polisher Shool.
It was not wholly that the young scions of Judæa in Russia were so far from committing definite sins against God and Man that their days were a positive round of gratuitous holiness. Much as Philip tried dutifully to rejoice with his father over this sanctity of young Russian Jewry, even when Reb Monash significantly expatiated on the talents of young gentlemen only seven years old who steered their own vessels through the dark seas of Kaballah—it was not this piety which set Philip brooding.
The landscape which his elders painted, unconsciously and incidentally, as a background to their memories, filled his mind with inchoate sequences of pictures. To the Jewish mind there is only one landscape which purely for its own sake arrests the mind and the heart. Each detail of Jordan or Lebanon is impressed centuries too deep for its deletion under snow or dissolution under fire. Plateau of Spain, the turbid flow of Volga, the squalid nightmare of Doomington Road, are matters of indifference to the Judaic protagonists while the great drama develops along its austere and shoddy ways towards some dénouement far beyond the invisible hills. To Reb Monash the Orthodox Greek Church he had known at home and from which his eyes turned bitterly away, whence the black-hearted pappas came forth and, on seeing Reb Monash, grimaced and bit his lips, had imperceptibly become the Baptist Missionary Chapel at the corner of Travers Row, whence the Rev. Wilberforce Wilkinson emerged from time to time, bestowing on every Reb Monash or Philip Massel who came that way a smile beatific with missionary invitation.
But it was a matter of much concern to Philip that the Dniester which flowed beyond the pear-orchards (pear-orchards! he tried wistfully to recreate them spreading their splendid snows beyond the kitchen wallpaper) was clean as—clean as the water in the scullery tap. Which seemed mythological. Philip's acquaintance with rivers was limited to the River Mitchen that flowed on the further side of the wire factory and parallel with Doomington Road. The river stank—literally and abundantly. When it rose after the spring floods of two years ago, the cellars of Angel Street were a wash of noisome and greasy waters.
"It happened in the centre of a forest..." said one. "Trees—the sun never got through their leaves in summer..." said another. "Yes, she had her own vines and fig trees...." "... Corn, barley, all rotten in the rains..." "... and after that, to finish them, they had five haystacks burned to the ground;" "the orchard by the river, near the Woman's Pool ..." they said to each other.
It was little more than words to Philip. It seemed illogical that there should be a river, which, being a river, did not stink. Fruit could hardly be dissociated from the baskets and trays at Moishele's shop. True, there were unconvincing pictures of fruit trees in the classroom at school, but they lent only a feeble corroboration.
And then inevitably the talk came round from orchards and clean rivers to the old Babylonian horrors.
"It happened in winter. I stood in the trunk of a rotten tree till nightfall. All day I could hear the women screaming and the horses of the Kossacken storming in from the country. They set fire to Miriam's house, and when she came to the window holding her hands out to the crowd ... they threw a broken wine bottle in her face...."
When Reb Monash fell into his best anecdotic form, Philip sometimes, only a year or two ago, had been afraid to venture beyond the front door, in fear of Kossacken galloping in with drawn sabres from Doomington Road. Indubitably the night was compact with their menace. Only gradually he shook off these alarms. England, he realized, the very filth of the Mitchen river impressing it upon him, and the grime of these grassless, clangorous streets, England was not Russia—a knowledge won only after thick agony and his brow soaked with midnight terror. Russia—the first Babylon—the dread, the enmity, faded into the murky Doomington skies.
One scene remained with him to consummate this nightmare. Reb Monash told the story frequently. If he had played a part whereat women lowered their respectful eyes with a fleeting gesture of disapproval or impatience, his piety none the less was confirmed, if it needed confirmation, in the eyes of the Lord Himself.
It was many years ago now, years before Philip was born. Reb Monash at last was emigrating from Russia to the Western world. His family and half a dozen other families had been packed into the uncovered emigrants' cart which was to take them to the railway terminus many leagues away, where they would entrain for Germany and Hamburg. It was a matter of no interest to the authorities that at most a dozen people could breathe comfortably and stretch their limbs in the vehicle they provided. Family after family was bundled in, every half-foot of extra space was crammed with bedding and the few household goods which, the more cumbrous they were, they found the more indispensable.
Why, indeed, Reb Monash was emigrating he had not precisely satisfied himself. Though fear of a pogrom hovered ever on the horizon, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but liable, any wind of prejudice blowing, to streak the sky with more sanguine hues than sunset, this had been beyond memory so much a normal feature of existence that it could not have been the determining factor. If the traditional wanderlust animated him, he was too much in demand as an orator in the synagogues hundreds of miles round Terkass to lack means to gratify his instinct. It cannot have been the sentiment that young Jewry in England and America (where he was intending to end his provisional pilgrimage) had so far fallen from grace that it needed the example of his physical presence before it could resume the narrow road; it can hardly have been that—for such ungodliness as prevailed in England and America needed to be seen before it could be imagined.
"But there we were," said Reb Monash, "Chayah," this being Mrs. Massel, "with little Rochke, peace be upon her, at her breast, and myself and Dorah and little Channah. Oh, what a wind was blowing! Knives! Packed like dead men in coffins we were! Then the driver cracked his whip and we were away. It was a desolate country, only we could see the long road in front and overhead the cold clouds and the fir trees running along the road by our side, patiently, like wolves! We could only hear the wind and the bells of the horses and their hoofs, click-click, click-click, hour after hour. But though the wind blew so cold in our faces, there was no room to breathe, no room. To stretch out the chest, an impossible thing. And then there was a station at the roadside where we stopped and—imagine it! they put another five, six people in the cart. Think of it! We started to grumble and some of the women and girls began to cry. What do you expect? They were half-dead for sleep. But how could they sleep, crushed like that, standing, with no room to bend, let alone lie down, and the wind driving through their chattering teeth. There was an official there. 'Curse you!' shouted he, when he heard us lift our voices, 'Curse you!'
"May he be cursed to his father's father!" every one in the kitchen muttered bitterly.
"'Curse you for a lousy lot—you beggars, you rats! Ugh!' He spat into the cart, in amongst us. Nu, we did what possible was to let the new people come in. Can you picture for yourselves—Oh! you can't—what it was like? Rochke, peace be upon her, was at the breast. We could hear the poor baby crying for food, eh, Chayah?"
But Mrs. Massel could never bear the telling of this tale. She would be in the scullery peeling potatoes. Not washing up. It was indiscreet to make a noise when Reb Monash was talking. If Philip dropped a book, Reb Monash had to pause a full minute until he recovered the evenness of his flow.
"Poor little Rochke, peace be upon her, crying for food! And so crushed were we that there wasn't even room to feed the child, though everybody understood and tried to make room. Now, perhaps you'll realize what it was like. As the child became more and more hungry she became too weak even to cry. It was getting dark and I started my night prayers. Then I heard Chayah shout to me, 'Monash! Monash!' It was not the first time she'd cried 'Monash!' to me that day. What could I do? What help was there? I just went on davenning. Ah, the poor child, the poor child, God wanted thee!"
His eyes softened. There was a huskiness in his throat. The women in the kitchen lifted their aprons to their eyes. If there were any men there they cleared their throats staunchly. Philip sat on the fender stool, his heart bursting with pity for his mother. "Poor mother! my own poor mother!" he felt like whispering into her ear and throwing his arms round her neck and assuring her that he was alive and he would love her and die for her at the last. But he remembered that he was not encouraged to display vehemently his passion for his mother. Very gently he slipped from the stool, turned round into the scullery and took a knife to help her peel the potatoes. At all events, he would not allow her to work so cruelly hard. Why, her fingers were dry and thin! No! he would never let her work like this. Never mind, when he grew up...
"Poor child, poor child!" Reb Monash continued, his voice a trifle unsteady. "How can I tell you? She was suffocating there. No room for her little lungs to open and draw breath! 'Monash, the child, the child!' Chayah was saying. What could I do? How could I understand? Besides, I was davvenning—how could I interrupt? And her little face was growing grey. What? Do you understand? There was no room for her heart to beat ... so her heart stopped beating!"
Again there was a pause. The suffocation which had gripped the child in that monstrous cart years ago seemed to occupy the kitchen in Angel Street. It was not only the shut window; the beneficence of the architects of Angel Street had declared that kitchen-windows should be close-sealed as a wall. It was not the shut doors; the doors were always shut because a "draught" aggravated Reb Monash's cough and rendered him speechless for minutes. That suffocation from the Russian road had descended upon Angel Street. Some one opened his collar and craned his neck for air.
"But, of course, Chayah would not believe that anything had happened to the child. I could only see Rochke very indistinctly because we'd been separated by the crowd. 'It's only a fit! Shake her, shake her, if thou canst!' I said. 'Or perhaps a sickness of the stomach!' said Chayah. 'It will be well with the child when we stop and get down! She'll have some air and food, and she'll be all right, no? Oh yes, she will, she will! Sleep then, sleep then, babynu, all in mammy's arms!' she sang.
"God alone knows what the place was where we stopped to change horses. And Rochke, peace be upon her? Well, what need to talk? She's happier than you or me. Oh, but what an ornament to the race she would have been! Such eyes, the little one, holy, like an old woman's! But wait, the story's not finished yet. Can it be believed? The officials there, they wanted us to continue the journey with the dead child! The smirched of soul, the godless ones! Wanted us to go on with the dead child! And when even they saw it was against God and Man, they wanted to bury her there and then, in unconsecrated ground! Oi! Oi! has it been heard of since Moses? But always put your trust in the Above One and all will be well with you. Know that! Think of us, in the wilderness, with a dead baby, and no holy ground to bury her and not a friend anywhere. The cart had gone on to the next stage, with Dorah and Channah. Think of us!
"It was then the Above One came to our help. A Jewish merchant was on the road with a load of dried fruit. He stopped, God be thanked, at the station, and we told him how things lay with us. And would you believe it? Not a penny he would take—not much was there to give—but he took the baby away and gave her holy burial in his own town! Be his years long in the land! May his seed multiply to the fourth and fifth generation! And so all is well with Rochke, peace be upon her!"
Reb Monash obviously drew much consolation for the whole episode from the fact that the Above One had shown him this signal favour, and the last offices had been performed unimpeachably over Rochke's body.
But perhaps Philip was too young to be comforted by the thoughts of the propriety with which the incident had closed. He could only see very clearly the figures of his mother, blank-eyed, her hands empty, standing alone in Babylon, in that bleak Russian night.
CHAPTER II
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.
"I'se not going to school!" he said suddenly and firmly.
"Feivele, what do you mean?"
"I'se not going!"
"What's the matter with you? Why aren't you going?"
"Dat's why!"
But Channah had not come unprepared for such an emergency. Mrs. Massel had anticipated it with a stick-jaw of Moishele's best. She held it towards the child and made provocative labial noises.
"Aren't you going now?"
"No!" he said a little more doubtfully.
She had another weapon in the armoury.
"Tatte will give you such a pitch-patch!" she said threateningly—pitch-patch being a form of castigation among all nations as constant in method as it is variable in name.
In the surge of new fears, Reb Monash had been temporarily obscured. Philip's mind travelled back swiftly to the knees of Reb Monash where at so sinless an age he had already lain transversely more than once. He contemplated the possibility of pitch-patch for some moments.
"Gib me de stickjaw, den!" he said.
"You can't eat it now!"
"One suck!" he wheedled.
They passed duly through the vestibule into the great "infants' hall." At its geometrical centre the principal pleaseteacher sat, pavilioned in terrors. A few words of high import passed between Miss Featherstone and Channah. Before Philip's eyes the walls soared endlessly into perpendicular space. There was no ceiling. He made the hideous discovery that there was no floor to the room. His shining boots hung suspended in space. Strange antiphonies propounded and expounded the cosmic mysteries. He was lost. He was rolling headlong among the winds, like a piece of cotton-fluff lifted high above the roofs of Angel Street.
What was this? The pleaseteacher was looking at him; her mouth was opening; there were big cracks on each side of her nose. Yes, she was smiling into him. He resumed his ponderable qualities. He was a little boy dismally sick in the infants' hall of the Bridgeway Elementary School. He preferred to be a piece of cotton-fluff. It was a more impersonal doom.
"What's your name, little boy?"
He wondered whether it was an impertinence to reply. It was funny and dry at the back of his throat. He stared fixedly at the crack on the left side of her nose.
"What's your name, little boy?" A certain acidulation had thinned her voice.
"My name Feivele an' I live at ten Angel Street an' I'm five years old an' my farver's Rebbie Massel!" he said, the words trembling out in a bewildered spate.
"Will you ask your brother to speak a little more slowly and distinctly, Miss Massel? Thank you. Now what's your name, little boy?"
"Philip Massel, pleaseteacher!"
"Now, Philip Massel. I'm your head mistress. You must call me Miss Featherstone. Miss Briggs!" she called, "Miss Briggs! Will you please put Philip Massel into your class?" Then turning to Philip, "You will kindly call Miss Briggs 'teacher.' You understand?"
"Yes, pleaseteacher!"
"Stupid! But he'll soon know better," she assured Channah.
"Yes, Miss Featherstone!" Channah corroborated. Philip's hand feverishly held his sister's all this while.
"You'd better just see him to his place," said Miss Featherstone to Channah, as Miss Briggs led the way to her class.
"Sit here, Philip," said Miss Briggs, "next to Hyman Marks!"
"Don't go 'way, don't go 'way!" Philip huskily implored Channah. Hundreds of scornful eyes were stripping him bare of his blouse, his shined boots, his bow of vermilion sateen, till they all lay at his feet in a miserable heap and he shivered there in the cold, naked, despised. "Don't go 'way!" he moaned.
Channah looked despairingly towards Miss Briggs.
Miss Briggs seized her chalk significantly. It was time the new-comer had settled down.
"I'll tell you what," said Channah, "I'll go to Moishele's and buy you a ha'pny tiger nuts and a box of crayons. And I'll come back straight away."
"Promise!" he demanded in anguish.
"Emmes!" she said, invoking the Hebrew name of Truth.
"Emmes what?" He knew that Truth unsupported by an invocation to the Lord was a weak buttress.
"Emmes adoshem!" she said, her heart sinking at the perjury. But, she consoled herself, it was not as if she had sworn by the undiluted form of the oath, "Emmes adonoi!" from the violation of which solemnity there is no redemption.
Philip saw her disappear through the doors. A black cloud of loneliness enveloped him until he could hardly breathe. The terrifying sing-song of these young celebrants at their fathomless ceremony had begun again.
Twice one are two,
One and one are two!
Twice two are four,
Two and two are four!
Fantastic hieroglyphs danced across the blackboard at the dictate of Miss Briggs' chalk. The heavy minutes ticked and ticked in a reiteration of monochrome and despair.
Twice one are two,
One and one are two!
What teeth she had, Miss Briggs! Not like his mother's! A little yellow his mother's were, but small and neat, as he observed whenever she smiled one of her tired and sweet smiles. What was the specific purpose of Miss Briggs' teeth? Why should those two at the top in front be so large and pointed? He had heard old Mo who sold newspapers tell tales about canninbles. Wass Miss Briggs a canninble? Oh the long, long Channahless minutes! When would she come? What? Some one was whispering behind him.
"Say, kid!"
Philip was afraid to turn round. What would Miss Briggs do if he turned round? And she had two such horrid teeth, at the top, in front!
"Say, kid! Got anyfing?"
Philip turned his head round fearfully. A villainously scowling face was bent over from the bench behind towards his own.
"Aven't yer got nuffing?"
Philip looked helplessly into the forbidding face.
"I tell yer, kid!" the voice menaced, "if yer don't gib me anyfing, I'll spifflicate yer!"
The process of spifflication sounded as terrible as it certainly was vague. Philip put his hand into his trouser-pocket where the lump of stickjaw lay warmly spreading its seductive bounties over the lining. To part with a whole lump of stickjaw from which the one due he had extracted was a single suck! But, on the other hand, spifflication! And moreover, soon, oh surely very, very soon, Channah would come back with the tiger nuts, not to mention the box of crayons. He drew the lump of sticky languor from his pocket. A grubby fist from behind closed round it.
Twice two are four,
Two and two are four!
Faithless Channah! How could the mere passing of time be such a labour? He subsided into a daze of stupefaction; only the hope of Channah's appearance buzzed and buzzed like a fly on the ear-drum. A great tear rolled slowly down his face. Another followed and another. They dropped into the bow of vermilion sateen. Suppose his mother should die in his absence? Or there might be a big, big fire! And just suppose....
A great clangour of bells! Miss Featherstone on her dais shut a book with a loud snap. Miss Briggs definitively placed her chalk on her desk. A pleaseteacher from another class walked with dignity over to the piano at the far end of the hall. She lifted the lid and played a slow march. The top class filed out from the desks, advanced in single order to a red line which, starting a few feet from Miss Featherstone's dais, led to the door; the class marched along the red line and passed with decorum from the hall. When Philip walked the red line in his turn he was wondering whether he ought to be placing each foot centrally upon the line. Dizzily he staggered along. When at last he rushed out into the road, wild with the relief from servitude, Mrs. Massel was waiting for him outside the school entrance, and when she lifted him from his feet, he howled with fearful delight.
His heart was full of resentment against Channah for her ignoble desertion. "Channah de Pannah, de big fat fing!" he jeered, when he saw her at dinner. Only the surface of his wound was healed when she bestowed upon him not only the tiger nuts and the box of crayons but a gratuitous tin trumpet gay with scarlet wools.
He refused vehemently to return to school that afternoon. But Reb Monash, entering the kitchen from the sitting-room where his chayder, his Hebrew school, was installed, speedily convinced him that the morning's bitter destiny must again be pursued.
For days his tiny faculties were flattened beneath the weight of his bewilderment. When, one morning, he went with the others into the playground for the interval, he crept inconspicuously on the skirts of the shrieking masses to the furthest corner in the wall, where he crouched, huddled, wondering what it was like to be grown up. When a lady came into the playground and vigorously rang a bell, he felt that no bell had any meaning to him. He was apart, unwanted. When he saw the children lining up in their classes and passing into the school with their teachers at their head, he turned towards them a dull abstracted eye. But when the appalling quiet of the playground impressed itself upon him, and he heard the choruses droning through the windows, "Twice One are Two," he realized with a sickening pang of alarm that he too was a cog in that machine, that he ought to have been minutes and minutes ago on the inner side of those walls.
His face was hot with shame as he dragged his feet through the door, and along the red line which burned down the hall like a trail of fire. When he slunk into his place like a cat with a stolen steak into a cellar, he found the eyes of Miss Briggs turned towards him so round with stony horror that he feared they must drop from their sockets. Hyman Marks next door gazed virtuously at him and turned away with a sniff.
Something of this early stupefaction remained with him, even though he had passed from the infants' hall to the upstairs department. "Pleaseteacher" had long been attenuated into "teacher," and Miss Green, who was the genius president over Standard Two, had entertained for him more than a teacherly regard ever since Philip had raised his hand in the middle of a lesson and inquired from her, "Please, Miss Green, can pupils marry teachers?" They frequently maintained long conversations when school was over, until Philip suddenly would bethink himself of the duties his racial tongue demanded and which awaited him in chayder under the unremitting vigilance of Reb Monash; whereon, with a troubled "Please, good afternoon, teacher!" he would scamper off. Miss Green liked the sonority with which he delivered the recitations she taught in class. He had a premature sense of tragedy.
On Linden when the sun was low,
All darkly lay the untrodden snow—
he delivered with the long modulations of a funeral dirge. He seemed to have discovered a new delight in the mere utterance of rhythmic lines. "On Linden when the sun was low," he chanted on his way home from school, bringing his right foot down heavily upon the iambic stresses of the line. There was a Saturday morning when Reb Monash tested his knowledge of the Bible portion to be read in the synagogue that day with "Say then, Feivele, what is the chapter in shool to-day?"
Philip was abstracted. His mind was recreating his latest conversation with Miss Green.
"On Linden when the sun was low!" he replied. Reb Monash stared at him. "Proselytized one!" he exclaimed. "What means this?" He led Philip to a copy of the Pentateuch and summarily refreshed his mind.
They were great friends, Miss Green and Philip, a fact which did not leave Philip's behaviour uninfluenced. The class was filing through the open door, (in the upstairs department the classes had single rooms instead of a common hall). He had not noticed that an unfamiliar teacher was standing at the door in Miss Green's place, and just before entering he turned round to exchange a few words with his successor in the procession.
"You bad boy!" exclaimed the voice of the strange lady. "Do not sit down in your place! You will stand in the corner till I ask for you!"
Philip's ears were rimmed with hot shame. The procession ended. "Come here!" said the lady. "Hold your hand out! Now!" Five, ten, twenty times, she brought a ruler down on his knuckles. It was not the pain which mattered. It was the disgrace! He, Miss Green's young friend—or, as his class-mates with characteristic envy and vulgarity called it, her "sucker-up!" Acute as his humiliation was, he kept strict count of the ruler's descent upon his knuckles. Twenty-four! Wouldn't Miss Green have something to say about it!
When the class filed into the room next day, Miss Green was looking down upon Philip with so affectionate a regard that the shame and anger pent within him since yesterday burst their bounds and he broke into tears.
Horror upon horror! Miss Green, touched to the heart by these sudden tears, bent down from her Olympian five-foot-four and kissed him loudly on the forehead! It was too much to bear! A platonic display of mutual respect was an excellent arrangement. But this descent into the murky ether of physical contact injured his sense of fitness. The sudden drought of his tears, the bright red spot in the centre of each cheek, instructed Miss Green that she had erred. "These inscrutable little Jew-boys!" she mused, and turned to Alfred and the cakes.
Next day she asked him to stay a moment with her after school. They both realized the impropriety of any reference to yesterday's incident. There followed a little small talk, then—
"Tell me, Philip," she said quietly, "tell me which you'd rather be, Jew or Christian?"
The wheels of the whole world for one instant ceased their revolutions. Here in truth was the end of an epoch and the beginning of another. Here was an issue which nothing had ever before presented to his mind, and an issue stated so simply. "Tell me, Philip, which would you rather be, Jew or Christian?" He caught his breath as he envisioned the state of affairs when such things as being Jew or Christian depended upon one's own volition. For one instant cool as snow and loud with the volume of plunging waters a something beyond even this came from far off and looked mournfully and intensely into his eyes: he beheld a state of things where nothing bound him with chains, where dispassionately he looked at Jew and Christian, and walked away, onward, up the slopes of a hill, where words like these had lost all meaning.
He staggered on the locker where Miss Green had placed him. His forehead was damp with a slight dew of sweat. The blackboard caught his eyes.
26 34 --- 104 78 --- 884
Yes, yes, that was more intelligent. He scratched his head and looked down at his feet. Really when you come to think of it, Christians did eat repulsive things. There was a Christian boy in the playground one afternoon eating a brawn sandwich—despicable food, spotted and pale pink like the white cat at home after the kettle of boiling water had fallen on its fur. True! it seemed that Christian boys occasionally went for their holidays and saw cows and trees and things—a distinct feather in the Christian hat. But on the other hand, Mr. Barkle was a Christian, and only Christians could kill rabbits like Mr. Barkle. The slaughtering of animals was a very peculiar and limited privilege among his own folk—a rite performed, as Reb Monash had made clear to the chayder, swiftly, painlessly and professionally. Mr. Barkle, on the other hand, had brought a rabbit into Standard Two for "object lesson" and murdered it, slowly, publicly. Mr. Barkle himself was not unlike a rabbit. He was very fat and his grey waistcoat resembled the rabbit's belly. But his eyes sparkled somewhat unpleasantly—very different from the rabbit's big, brown frightened eyes. And Mr. Barkle had pressed the rabbit's neck between his hands, till the eyes became bigger and bigger, and the legs moved convulsively, and a long low whistle came out mournfully from the rabbit's throat, and the legs twitched only faintly and then hung quite limp.
After Mr. Barkle had cut up the animal to describe its parts, a little Christian boy had said:
"Please, Mister Barkle, can I take the rabbit 'ome? Farver luvs rabbits!"
No! Philip determined. No! he would never be a Christian!
Yet Miss Green was a Christian. It would be impolite to be too decided about it.
"Please, Miss Green," he said, looking up, "I'd rarver stay wot I was born!"
"There's a wise boy!" said Miss Green, with the faintest touch of chagrin. And the conversation pursued less transcendental roads.
CHAPTER III
At no time did Philip find the society of his coevals congenial; the society at least of the young males of his age; which was an element in his composition not, I venture, to be crudely dismissed as one form or another of priggishness.
Whatever the defects were of Philip's education, and these were not inconsiderable, he was never warned to have no truck with Barney of next door because his father was a presser and rigidly banished collars from his wardrobe, excepting on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on which occasion a waterproof collar did annual service with much éclat; nor were fogs of dubiety sedulously created around Mr. and Mrs. Lavinsky, whose premarital relations were, it was rumoured, not free from stain.
Yet inherently Philip held himself aloof from all the "lads" in Angel Street. He felt, not consciously and certainly not in defined words, that everything coarse and cruel in the architecture of Angel Street had taken hold of their spirit. There was as much of the frankly and repulsively animal in them as in the sharp-ribbed cats who chattered obscenely on the walls. He felt at times when he saw the boys slithering along the roofs that fragments of the very roofs, steeped in grime and dirty rain as they were, had detached themselves and become animate.
He turned with relief to the latest "poetry" he had been taught; in the reverberant recessions of rhythm the boys were rolled over and sucked down like pebbles in an ebbing tide. The fustian of "Horatius" gave him unmeasured delight, and soaked in the yellow flood of Tiber he would forget the malodorous imminence of Mitchen.
But in the girls of Angel Street he satisfied his need for human companionship. They did not bandy the filth of gesture and word which were the traffic of the boys and which turned him sick, made him faintly but dismally aware of yawning abysses of uncleanness hidden from his feet.
So he would sit with the girls at their doorsteps while the boys shrieked in the entries. The girls were a willing audience for his declamations of verse; they accepted Kaspar's reiteration of "But it was a famous victory" with sympathy and evident pleasure. When they realized the full implications of the question,
Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floating hair,
A tress o' golden hair,
O' drowned maiden's hair?
they took out their handkerchiefs and wept.
Philip was sitting among the girls cutting out from the advertisement pages of magazines pictures of ladies with artificially perfected busts. The pictures thus obtained were inserted among the leaves of books and the custom of the possessors of pins was solicited. Three pricks among the pages of the books were allowed, with whatsoever bounty fell to the adventure.
Philip had never quite decided which was the happier state—the being endowed with pictures of many well-busted ladies, or the possession of many pins. The latter at least held the prospect of a service he might render to his mother, to whom a stock of pins should, he presumed, be an inestimable boon. But opulence in pins meant a dearth in busted ladies—a barren state of affairs only to be remedied by a fresh outlay of capital.
A "gang" came by whooping. "Gang" was a popular word in the vocabulary of Angel Street. It was sinister with warnings of Red Indians crawling on their bellies from the pampas beyond Doomington Road. It evoked images of Red Signs found on the necks of the murdered daughters of millionaires.
"Yah! look at Philip Massel!" a voice jeered from the "gang." Philip shivered. He disliked the "gang," he had no point of contact with it.
"Stick-to-my-muvver-an-don't-touch-me!" the voice continued. The girls were silent, for chivalry was not a predominant trait in the psychology of the "gang." Jessie still bore a black eye inflicted by Barney in unequal war. It was Barney took up the cry:
"Philip Massel, Queen-of-the-Girls!"
This was a slogan which appealed to his comrades. "Philip Massel, Queen-of-the-Girls!" they reiterated shrilly. Philip's face was pale. His hand trembled as he cut the pictures. The bust of the next lady he delimitated sadly belied the merits claimed by the advertisement.
"Oo—oo! 'Oo kissed Jessie in the back entry?" Barney howled.
"Philip Massel, Queen-of-the-Girls!" the rest sang in choric delight. Oh, the black cavernous lie! Was Jehovah silent? Philip's eyes blazed. He flung his scissors down with a crash. The further side of Angel Street rose and sank as he rushed towards Barney. The rules of the ring had not yet been studied in Angel Street. Murderously he buffeted his fists against Barney's abdomen. Barney turned green and subsided. The rest of the "gang" jumped upon Philip and were comfortably pummelling him when Reb Monash appeared on the scene. Mrs. Levine had lost no time in informing him that a brawl was in progress. Reb Monash had no doubt it involved those of his scholars who were already scandalously late for chayder.
The "gang" wilted before him. At his feet lay Philip, gasping and bleeding.
"Feivele at the bottom of it!" he thundered. "Oh, a credit thou art to thy race! An eight-year old, and this is the sum of thy knowledge! Come then, I will instruct thee!" and he led Philip sternly home by a familiar grasp of the brachial muscle between finger and thumb. Jessie picked up the scissors ruminatively and turned the pages of the Strand Magazine.
The idea shortly after occurred to Philip that some compromise with his sex ought to be possible. It occurred simultaneously with the appearance in his library of a new type of American hero. He was now able to read without difficulty the "bloods" which described with impartial gusto sandbaggings in the Bowery and the slaughter of travellers conducted by Poncho-clad desperadoes in the Argentine. Lurid as the "gang" was in behaviour, their literature was still extremely tepid. Intellectually, they had not outstepped Lady Kathleen's tender limits as laid down in her Books for the Bairns, whereas Philip's heart had for months hovered and exulted with the hearts of fully-fledged errand boys, twelve and fourteen years old.
But a new hero had crossed the Atlantic. He was in soul much more turbulent than the heroes of the conservative school. His morals, purely, be it understood, in order to achieve a virtuous end, were even more elastic. The terror of his name was even more astounding. But all his villainous qualities were kept strictly below the surface, though, of course, his assistants were as coarse-grained and blasphemous as tradition demanded. His manners were so exquisite that hotel-keepers did not presume to ask for the payment of their bills. When he slipped from his chambers to undertake a midnight escapade, he would insert into one pocket his revolver, into another a silver-mounted bottle of hair-oil. Whilst his minions were grappling with the objects of his displeasure and bullet shots ripped across the shack, he would lift the wick of the lamp in order to manicure his nails. His speech was so full of gracious evasions that—that, in short, he completely captured Philip's heart.
Here was a mode of making artistic capital out of those very qualities of the young men in Angel Street which so revolted him, whilst at the same time he would himself accentuate those features of aloof refinement for which they had dubbed him "bouncer," a word particularly repugnant to him, accentuate them actually amid deference and applause.
How, then, was a reversal of the Angel Street relationships to be effected? Philip hardly knew. His first discovery was the gratifying fact that on a certain non-physical plane the "gang" regarded him with a measure of positive awe. Not only was he the son of his father, but he had the Kabbalistic faculty of uttering rhymes, a faculty which influenced them precisely as a barbarian village might be influenced by a medicine-man's incantations. His uprising against Barney had not been barren of result, though the fierce splendour of it had been mitigated somewhat by the parental sequel.
But most of the battle was won when, by a stroke of fortune, Philip, for whom a new hat was long overdue, was supplied with a sample of the head-gear associated with captaincy from time immemorial. His new hat was dowered with a shiny peak and a ribbon splendid with the legend "H.M.S. IMMACULATE," and when pressed slantwise over Philip's left eye gave him an air of authority not generally associated with his small face. A certain calm persuasive eloquence, assisted by a number of "alleys," both "blood" and "conker," vastly advanced his cause. He read, finally, certain convincing passages from the career of the Dandy Dave by which not only was Philip Massel's claim to be his European representative rendered incontrovertible, but it was proved also that any actual immersion of his own person in the filth of affairs was as unbecoming to Philip's new dignity as to the dignity of Dandy Dave.
The character Philip now assumed was undoubtedly a composite affair. Dandy Dave was predominant, but it was not immune from the vocabulary and behaviour of pirates, explorers, trappers and other species of emancipated men. The trapper element did not persist, as shall be rendered credible.
"Do you see that skunk?" Captain Philip exclaimed to Lieutenant Barney one day.
"Aye, aye, sir!" replied Lieutenant Barney, "Aye, aye, sir!" being, in fact, Lieutenant Barney's only and final achievement in the diction of romance.
The "skunk" was a notorious piebald cat even at that moment slinking with a torso of fried fish along the yard wall of an empty house where the "gang" was foregathered.
"'E must be captured! We shall sell 'is 'ide to the next ship wot calls at yonder port!"
An exciting chase, which extended over two days, followed. On the evening of the second day the corpse of the piebald cat was laid at Captain Philip's feet.
"Wot now, Captain?" said Lieutenant Barney, whose wavering loyalties had been steadied only an hour ago by the gift of an india-rubber sucker. Philip's heart fluttered a little unquietly. In the mere abstract conception of chase there had been much of the poetical. In the presence of the dead cat the fogs of illusion thinned. Shame tugged at his heart-strings. But the faultless figure of Dandy Dave stood before him. With little knowledge of the implication of his words, "Flay 'im!" he said harshly. "The merchants call this morn!"
Lieutenant Barney inserted a broken blade below the fringe of the cat's eye. He tugged. Philip looked down. The hideous mess which ensued spattered Philip's brain like a pat of filth. He ran quickly from the yard and was violently sick for many minutes.... The trapper aspect of Captain Philip's authority did not again assert itself.
Behind the Bridgeway Elementary School extended a huge and desolate brick-croft. Here the "gang" frequently undertook expeditions to the Himalayas and the two Poles. Volcanoes were discovered and duly charted. Wide lakes of clayey yellow water were navigated. It was a point of honour with the "gang" that the lakes must be definitely crossed from border to border, not merely circumvented. But while the "gang" miserably splashed along and drew their clogged boots to the further side, Captain Philip serenely walked the whole way round and from his dry vantage encouraged his men to safety. It would never do for the Doomington counterpart of Dandy Dave to smirch his own limbs alongside of the vulgar herd.
The last episode in the captaincy of Philip was the Liberation of Princess Lena, the immediate inspiration of which was the gallant rescue by Dandy Dave of the daughter of the President of the American Republic from a cellar below the very basement of the White House.
Lena Myer lived in Angel Street and kept irregular hours. The days of her flirtations had already begun. When she returned one evening it was arranged that the "gang" was to seize her, gag her, and carry her away to the stable of the lemonade works adjacent to the wire factory—whither Lieutenant Barney had discovered a secret entrance. Here for the space of an hour she was to be bound to a support. The clattering of horses was to be heard in the courtyard and Captain Philip, sweeping in magnificently, was to cut her bonds, lay her captors in the dust and deliver her with a flourish to her distracted parents.
Of course, Lena herself was not to be informed of the somewhat negative part reserved for her. She had already attained her "stuck-up" days, but her beauty and her father's wealth, (he was a barber), evidently cast her for the situation.
All fell out as arranged. As she entered the darkest patch of Angel Street a black mass fell on her, choked her with rags, and bore her kicking furiously to the stable, where she was fastened to a wooden support. Many desolate minutes passed, during which her moans struck so heavy a chill into the hearts of the desperadoes that at last they removed the rags from her mouth. Immediately such a foul stream of imprecation fell from her virginal lips, that the bloodthirsty gang withdrew trembling towards the spider-webbed walls. She threatened them venomously with the vengeance of her admirers. Some one made a tentative advance in her direction. She uttered a piercing scream and he recoiled with knocking knees. The "gang" had experienced fights with "gangs" from other streets; the "gang" even had compassed the discomfiture of a policeman. But a situation like this, where the incalculable feminine threw all their generalizations into rout, left them shorn of philosophy.
"Jem Cohen 'll 'ave your eyes out, yer rotten lot 'er lice!" said the maiden delicately.
A clatter in the yard beyond the stable, cunningly caused by the play of two slates on the cobbles, produced sudden silence. Captain Philip! A tremendous wave of dislike for Captain Philip swept over his supporters! Nobody but a "bouncer" like that Philip Massel could have involved them in so unnatural a situation. By crikey! They'd show him, by jemmy, wouldn't they just!
Philip rushed into the stable's darkness.
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.
A mystic conviction took possession of him. If he had any value, that shout would be achieved. But its agent would be something greater than himself. Prepared or unprepared for it, the shout would come, if he was worthy.
It was a very hot afternoon. Miss Tibbet croaked at the blackboard like a machine. A desultory dog was barking somewhere with insensate yelps. The geranium before the closed windows drooped in the heat. Flies were droning aimlessly.
A huge shout swept suddenly into every corner of the room, slapped Miss Tibbet's face like the palm of a hand. There was an intense silence. All eyes turned to Philip's face, which was flushed furiously red, unhappy, exultant.
"Philip Massel, stand up!" He shuffled to his feet.
"Was it you who made that noise?"
"Yes, Miss Tibbet!"
"Why did you make that noise?"
"I don't know!"
"Did somebody stick a pin into you?"
"No!"
"Did anybody stick a pin into Philip Massel?"
No reply.
Here was something entirely beyond Miss Tibbet's experience.
"Will the monitors keep order, please, while I take this boy to the head master!"
Philip knew that sooner or later he would burst into tears. But a great load was off his mind. He was free, he was free! For one moment of dizzy elation a pang of that emotion struck him which long ago made him tremble on a locker in Miss Green's room before the fateful question—"Tell me, Philip, which would you rather be, Jew or Christian?" The sheer poignancy passed, but something of his elation remained, even in the cadaverous sanctum of the head master.
Mr. Tomlinson sat ominous in his chair as he listened to Miss Tibbet's recital.
"Why did you behave in that disgraceful way, Philip Massel?"
"I—I—don't know, sir!"
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"I don't know, sir!"
"Are you sure it wasn't a pin?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Are you in pain?"
"No, sir!"
"Am I to understand that..." But Philip's shoulders were shaking. Big tears rolled down his face. He hid his face in a dirty, frayed handkerchief. He heard Mr. Tomlinson and Miss Tibbet whispering overhead.
"The heat..." said one.
"Yes, I should think ... the heat...."
"You may go home, Philip Massel!" said Mr. Tomlinson. "Tell your mother to put you to bed at once. Say I told her she must keep you quiet. Don't come to school to-morrow if your head is aching.... And never let it happen again, young man! Understand that!"
Philip withdrew. A grin mingled maliciously with his tears.
A day or two later he was standing contemplatively against the playground wall during the interval, when he observed Harry Sewelson approaching. Sewelson, though he was about a year older, was in Philip's class. He lived in a draper's shop some minutes along Doomington Road. They had had no commerce hitherto. Philip made a new friend with extreme difficulty, and though he realized that there was a quality in Sewelson, a keenness in his grey eyes, which distinguished him from the rest, there was a garlic vulgarity about him, a strongly-flavoured bluster, which, he had learned from Reb Monash, was inseparable from Roumanian Jewry.
"I say!" declared Sewelson, "I bet you I know what was the matter on Tuesday! I bet I know why you gave that shout!"
"Bet you don't!" Philip replied. He was vaguely proud of the complex of motives which had induced him to behave in so baffling a manner.
"Nobody pricked you!" Sewelson asserted.
"Right for once!" Philip agreed.
"And you weren't ill! I bet I know!"
Philip looked up curiously.
"You just wanted to!" Sewelson whispered in a somewhat melodramatic manner. "You felt you just had to. You couldn't get away. You were sick and tired!"
Philip's brown eyes looked up shyly, with a certain pleasure, with a certain distrust, into the grey eyes before him.
"You're right!" said Philip. "It wasn't my fault!"
"I say," Sewelson said, after a pause. "I say..." Then he paused again.
"Yes?" asked Philip.
"I say, what about being pals?"
Philip blushed slightly. "Let's!" he said.
They walked down the playground with linked arms.
"Oh, yes!" accepted Philip innocently. "I do think Miss Tibbet is a narky bitch!"
"Carried nem-con!" exclaimed Sewelson, proud of his elegant introduction of a foreign tongue.
CHAPTER IV
The vicissitudes of school and Angel Street represented only the secular side of Philip's existence. The Jewish, the clerical side, claimed his servitude as soon as he pushed open the door of the house. The whole day, of course, was punctuated with greater or lesser ceremonies; but a considerable portion of it, at least of that part not taken up by school, was spent in his father's chayder. Beyond chayder, to gather together and confirm the saintliness ardently desired and pursued for him by his father, lay the synagogue in Doomington Road, the Polisher Shool.
The room in which the chayder was housed was distinctly dismal, despite the fountain of spiritual light playing perpetually there, the fountain whereof Reb Monash himself was the head. It lay between the "parlour," a chilly room upholstered in yellow plush, which was on the right as you passed into the "lobby," and the kitchen in the recesses of the house, to enter which you descended two invisible steps. Beyond the window of the chayder and beyond the yard, hung a grim, blank-windowed hat-and-cap factory.
Low forms, where the two dozen scholars were disposed, ran round the four walls of the room. Before a table facing the window Reb Monash sat, in the additional shadow cast by the large oblong of cardboard which occupied a fourth of the window-space so as to hide the damage caused by a malicious Gentile stone. More for minatory gesture than for punishment, a bone-handled walking-stick lay to his hand, along the table. Facing the door a large cupboard stood invariably open. Here on the lowest shelf were the Prayer Books, from the first page of which the youngest scholars learned their Hebrew capitals. Here also were the penny exercise books where the scholars proficient in the cursive script wrote letters of a totally imaginary politeness to their parents. "My dear and most esteemed Father and Mother," they ran, "I am full of concern for your health. Reb Monash joins me in respectful greeting. The High Festivals are approaching, God be thanked, and I trust the Above One will bless our ways with milk and honey and will much increase our progeny, even as the sands on the shore. Believe I am your to-death-devoted son."
Upon one wall hung a chart where an adventurous red line traced the forty years' wandering of the Jewish race between the House of Bondage and the Promised Land. A portrait of Dr. Theodor Herzl, every feature cleverly pricked out in Hebrew letters, hung opposite. There were enlargements from photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Massel, and portraits of Heine and Disraeli, which had been hung not without compunction, although each had made so generous a death-bed recantation of his errors.
The payment to Reb Monash for a week's tuition ranged between one shilling and eighteenpence. He sometimes accepted ninepence, but on the condition that other parents should not be informed and the market be thus demoralized. He even accepted no payment at all, in cases of extreme indigence, where it meant that a scion of Israel would otherwise run riot in pagan ignorance. The attendances of his pupils were as follows:—In the week-days, a few frantic minutes between morning and afternoon school for the recital of minchah, the midday prayer, and more importantly, several long hours in the evening; on the Saturday, once, after dinner.
During the evening session, while the maturer boys were biting their pens over their letters home, and the boys less mature were transcribing for page after page a sample line in Reb Monash's own script, rebbie himself dealt with the infants, five, four, three years old. Patiently, gently, the meat skewer he used as a pointer moved from capital to capital. (A safe way to win temporary harbourage in rebbie's good graces was to provide him with a new pointer.)
"Aleph!" said Reb Monash. "Aleph!" piped the little voice.
"Baze!" "Baze!" "Gimmel, doled!" "Gimmel, doled!"
With the young he had enormous patience. When at last they knew all the letters in their consecutive order, his pointer would dart bewilderingly from letter to letter.
"Lange mem, tsadik, coff...."
Ignorance, up to a certain age, Reb Monash could condone. It was inattention against which he maintained a fiery crusade.
"What, thou canst not distinguish between baze and shloss mem? Playest thou then alleys already? Thou art a lump-Gentile, a shtik-goy!" After the youngsters had been thus instructed, a snap of his Prayer Book was the signal for a deathly calm. All the exercise books were closed and put away upon their shelf. Everybody sat down upon the benches round the wall and each face assumed a look of virtue bordering upon imbecility. Reb Monash then produced a thin notebook where in three columns down each page he had written a large number of Hebrew words. These words had, excepting rarely, no connection with each other. One leaped abruptly from "pepper" to "son-in-law" and thence to "chair," "snake," "pomegranate" and "yesterday."
Starting with any boy indiscriminately he read out word after word, receiving an English or Yiddish equivalent. Here again, to introduce a complexity, he suddenly interrupted the written order of the words, or, indeed, himself gave the profane equivalent of the vocabulary and demanded the "Holy Speech" in return. With as little warning he transferred his attention to another of his scholars, and woe upon him if the black crime of inattention had sent his wits scattering, woe if his lips could not repeat the word just translated! A silence intense as the silence of the antechamber where the High Priest three times demands from Radames his defence, occupied the breathless chayder during the process of "Hebrew."
Yet for all his sallies and alarms the tragedy of Reb Monash was no more apparent than in the heart-broken monotone in which he uttered his list of inconsequent words. All the ghettoes of Russia had known the silver of his voice. If there had been sorrows of Israel none had told them more poignantly; if Zion still were to raise tall towers, none so joyfully had prophesied her new splendours. Still in many synagogues beyond the Polisher Shool his oratory was in demand. But the glow of his old dreams? Was it because no single reality had called him to concrete endeavours, that no single dream had found fulfilment?
But all this lay deep down, deeper than himself dared to pursue.
"Pilpelim?" "Pepper!"
"Lo mit a vov?" "To him!"
"Philip, where holds one?"
"... er ... er..."
"What! thou knowest not?"
"Yes, tatte, yes ... odom, a man!"
Reb Monash's lips set tight. Philip's back curved under his father's fist. He pressed his head down upon his neck. He knew that the nearer he attained to immobility, the sooner would his punishment be over.
Reb Monash sat down again.
"Roshoh?" he asked significantly.
"Evil one!"
"Boruch?" to point the contrast.
"Blessed!" the voice translated.
And so till "Hebrew" was at an end. Then followed translation from the week's portion of the Pentateuch; and perhaps if one or two scholars of such holy state remained under his care, an excursion into the Talmud.
The combination of Miss Tibbet and chayder left Philip limp with fatigue and dejection. Life under Miss Tibbet was clockwork, barren of adventure and hope. Chayder was a cycle that each year returned to the same spot through a round of indignities and petty tyrannies. All its nightly incidents were the same as last week's and last year's and seemed destined to reduplication world without end. Walls seemed to rise frowning before him wherever he looked. It was hard to breathe. Were these days the pattern of all the days he should ever know, till he died at last and half-hearted funeral eulogies were uttered over his coffin?
Yet now and again there were incidents which slightly relieved the tedium of existence. As for instance when the notorious Jakey arrived in chayder about an hour late one stifling summer evening. Jakey was in truth a desperate character. His stockings lay invariably over his boots, and the boots themselves knew no other fastening than string. Among the layers of dirt on his face his right eye or his left emerged livid in purple and salmon hues. On numerous occasions he had "wagged" school in order to play pitch and toss with coins, derived who knew whence? in the company of stalwarts fifteen years old, three years his senior.
It was in fact during the solemn stillness of "Hebrew" that he arrived. Upon his appearance the hush was intensified into something acute as shrill sound or pain. Slowly, with tight-browed condemnation, Reb Monash turned his head to the truant. "So thou art come!" he said. "Enter! we are incomplete without thee!" With withering courtesy he motioned him to the end of a bench. Nonchalantly moving the tip of his tongue from one cheek to the other Jakey sat down.
"Nu, Jakele, what hast thou for thyself to say?" he asked, still couchant, as it were, upon his chair. Jakey for several seconds longer kept his tongue in his left cheek. He lifted his brows in interested contemplation.
"I had the stomach-ache!" he suggested, clasping his hands against his liver as a piece of convincing by-play.
"Ligner!" thundered Reb Monash, "Thou art sound as a Hottentot!"
Jakey withdrew one hand from his stomach, and lifted a thumb to his mouth.
"My muvver's dying!" he said after further meditation.
Reb Monash quivered with wrath.
"Such a year upon thee! Long live they mother, but thou, thou art a proselytized one!"
He advanced to make Jakey more immediately aware of the jeopardy into which his soul had fallen. Jakey looked up shiftily, his eyes watchful. Reb Monash's fist came down upon empty air. Swift as a lizard Jakey darted across to the table. He stood there, Reb Monash's bone-handled stick uplifted. A murmur of horror went round the chayder. Reb Monash with a shout of anger advanced raging. And then it was that his own stick, the symbol of more absolute authority than the Shah's, was brought down upon his own shoulder. There was a silence. Then immediately a tremendous hubbub filled the room. Reb Monash sank into his chair. A few of the youngest lads lifted up their voices and wept. A boy in a corner was giggling nervously.
"Where is he? Where is he?" asked Reb Monash weakly. An enormity had been perpetrated unknown in the annals of chayders. And in his, Reb Monash's, where discipline and holiness were equal stars.
"'E's ran away! I seen 'im!" the cry rose.
Reb Monash grimly took up once more his book of Hebrew words. The long monotone began again.