Louis Golding

“ Let not for little things our heritage be squandered; let not the Maccabæan banner be smirched, nor false gods enter into our tabernacles which we build now upon a wandering thousandfold bitterer than the forty years. We lift out our arms to you. Join us in singing the Lord's song! May the next year see us in Zion!"
There were one or two looked with alarm upon the face of Philip staring from the wall against the Holy Ark. His face was bloodless, his eyes round as if in nightmare. Not a sound was heard when Reb Monash came weakly down from the pulpit. No one knew where to turn his eyes. ”

“ All shepherds this same song of gold
On all downs where winds blow.
This is the song that shepherds must
Sing till the green downlands be dust
And tide of sheep-drift no more flow;
The song two skylarks told again
To all the sheep and shepherd men
On green downs where winds blow.
SKYLARK NOON
Now the tall sky
Is pricked with stars of song as the sky at night
With stars of light.
I am loosened, I fly
Till never a lark is near to the sun as I.
Now through the steeps of air do my swift wings cut. ”

“ The curtain of bird-song and magic dawn
From the sullen red windows of Hell.
Rattle of rifle and shriek of gun,
Gas-cloud sickly and heavy and dun,
Death has taken his armies in hand,
And the bodies lie countless in No Man's Land.
Out of the shock of the storm
Where the foul winds meet and cry,
Something drops down at my feet,
A little brown body and sweet,
A little dead body and warm.
The tiny dead throat shall sing no more,
Nor the quick eyes flash nor the swift wings soar;
But the shells shall hurtle, the grim guns roar,
O skylark out of the sky! ”

“ Philip listened, fascinated and repelled. At least the philosophy of Segal offered a coherent explanation of to-night and the other nights. The whole theme was virgin to him, but the method of attack was so deadly calm, so impersonal, that he was impelled to follow. He was conscious, moreover, that other people, not least Harry and Alec, did not exclude this branch of life from their horizon; why, then, should he? It was all so different from the filth of Angel Street; here, if soul played no part or little in this interpretation, mind at least was not absent. ”

“ Massel sat on the sofa bewildered by this spate of melody, but keenly happy in the enthusiasm of her son. If she ever ventured a "Philip, but not one word do I understand!" "Ah! what does that matter?" Philip replied. "Do you remember when I asked tatte what good I would do to God by saying a lot of prayers I can't understand a bit about—you remember, he was in a good temper?—he answered that it didn't matter if you can't understand; it's so holy to say things in Hebrew that God likes it just the same. Well, there you are, it's just poetry! It's like singing, only much finer!" ”

“ Gas-wave and gun,
Are ye not happy
With the red work done?
Drown ye the planets,
Shatter the sun!
Not a twitching of bloodless lip or of glazing eye!
For the Silence is deeper than Noon and older than Time,
The Silence inert and intense of the far first sky
When never a wind breathed over the primal slime.
The Sun is stayed in his march, and even Death
With the flush of triumph mantling his cheeks of gloom,
He too stands still for an instant and holds his breath.
A million of years passes by in a moment of doom. ”

“ Of this last Song whence I shrink
Ah slowly now and slowly down the tall noon I sink.
So am I wrapped in quiet, still trancèd by their Word,
Until I reach the airs
Where a mortal skylark fares
But not in his first rapture shall match his song with theirs!
And now my feet are fallen, I am no more a bird,
Now for my little seeing the high gold noon is blurred;
For now where grey roads wind
I walk the low world mutely among my human kind. ”

“ It was not that the agony of those summer days, the telegram at Wenton, the cemetery, the words he had uttered in Angel Street and their consequence, were submerged quickly or in the least. For long, periods of listless vacuity clogged Philip's feet and mind. He would sit musing for hours over an unfinished meal or stand in prolonged and joyless reverie before a hardware shop. The slow blood in his veins called for no action. No dream of sky or hills was potent enough to prick his limbs with desire to be moving beyond the bounds of the city and along the climbing roads. ”

“ SKYLARK AND DAWN (To Maurice Samuel)
Stretched and silent they lie to the furious gold of the dawn,
And the earth like a leper's face is pitted and scarred.
Firm in the grip of the wire relentless and hard,
They lie with their dead young faces pallid and drawn.
Somewhere stupidly, thickly, a big gun booms!
A rifle cracks like the spit of a snake in the trees!
And ever the great sun rises, rolling the glooms
Of the sulphurous night to the fields and the cliffs and the seas.
The groan of a dying man crawls out from his teeth! ”

“ To Philip, the Milky Way was a divine bluebell bank dancing by the borders of a celestial river. The stars fed him with innumerable new images, giving to his conception of poetry a depth and height. And here once more, as if to consummate the significance Shelley had involved through each succeeding phase of Philip's adolescence, just as he had been found to crystallize a world in which complete escape from Doomington mud and brick might be realized; to hold the stormy banner of Socialism; to smite down the hydra-heads of religion ”

“ Terrible! Wild!
A skylark shatters the spell,
With a music more fiery than hell,
More frail than the laugh of a child!
His little brown wings soar high to assault the sun.
His little round throat sends a challenge audacious and far
To the pale-faced legions of Silence that waver and run,
To the uprisen dawn and every invisible star.
Ah God! the song cuts deeper than tempered steel!
The eyes overflow with the surge of a salt harsh tear,
Again to listen to Music, again to feel
The uttermost glory of living when Death is so near! ”

“ Oh, Feivele, where didst thou—
"Now don't ask! And anyhow, I've been sick of Longfellow for ages!"
"See, I'll boil it now! There's time before he comes down! Thou wilt have half!"
Stoutly, "Nothing, nothing! It's yours!" The egg is boiled. Sacredly, as if duck-egg-eating were a holy rite, Mrs. Massel eats her duck's egg. Once or twice she throws in fervent appreciations of the race of katchkies. Philip half hopes her cheeks will here and now take on a shade more colour from the nourishment he has provided for her out of the disposal of Evangeline. ”

“ And the trousers of half of the children of Pallas are
dirty with grease,
And the other half ardently brush them and keep them
in crease.
Then pray, O London, my city, when you are dead,
That none know the place where you reared your mad proud head;
That there be not a mound nor a stone nor even a tree,
But only the ignorant river or the desert sea!
DOWN TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD Down Tottenham Court Road they ululate,
The droning choruses of Fate.
They walk the length of every wind,
The women who sin, the women who have sinned. ”

“ And here was Mrs. Levine, sodden flour on her apron, and long, torn wools fluttering from her shawl. She was wringing her hands. She bent towards the can of water. "Look away!" said the girl fiercely. A rumbling of wheels...
A cock was crowing. The leaves of a full tree were swishing against the window. Philip opened to the dawn red and apprehensive eyes.
But his first remembrance as he stared towards the oblong of eight lights was not the girl, not all the grape-dark kissing; it was a sudden stab of contrition—"The letter! My mother's signature! By God, what a swine I was! I forgot!" ”

“ On her smiling this light seemed to be broken into little ripples which coursed over the brown waters of her eyes; but a surprise and a doubt at no time deserted them, as if beyond the horizon clouds lay ever waiting to veil these brown lights with mist.
The love between Mrs. Massel and her son was a thing which never or rarely found expression in the usual endearments. It was a love much more of silences than of speech. Philip did not like kissing her, as feeling somehow that the relation between them lay too deep for the lips. ”

“ He knew that the copper tray gleaming always like smooth dark mahogany might stand as symbol of the heavy labours which year by year reduced her to a ghost. She had the Jewish housewife's intense pride in the cleanliness and beauty of her home. Each Thursday evening the kitchen table was littered with trays, brass candlesticks, beakers, tins of polish, dusters. Though the reek of the polish was offensive to her lungs and sent her into fits of coughing, no Thursday evening saw the arduous ritual abated by one iota. But Philip knew that the significance of the dream lay deeper than this. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One will see thee in the afternoon shool, Mottele, for minchah, eh?"
"God being so good, Reb Monash!"
"And forget thou not, Feivel! Not a foot into the street or thou wilt see then!"
"But Monash," broke in Mrs. Massel, "see how it is a fine day! Can't he just go out and get some air in the street?"
"So thou must take his part, Chayah, nu? It will not harm him to go without air. The Torah if he will imbibe will do him more good!"
"A guten Shabbos!" said Mottele quietly as he slid through the door, "A good Sabbath!" Philip looked towards him in a passion of dumb hate. ”

“ A train in a far cutting uttered a startled cry and subsided. Until out of the white purity was made a disk of lurid and burnished splendour, like the bossed shield of a Titan who strode across space while the issues were still dubious of celestial wars.
The lads waited on the moor till dawn came, so that the fringe of that night should not be sullied by their return to Doomington dust. Dawn came with a cool breath from the East and a line of pale green lying like a blade on the far-seen Mitchen. A sword was swung above the slopes, glancing with gold and crimson. ”