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.