England, Northern -- Fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Jews -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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