usband had begun to emphasize, "the immense advantage it will give the boy if he decides on an academic career." His wife was looking closely at the sock. "Well?" he asked, and reasonably, but was immediately driven to support his argument, not exactly by ranting, but almost: "It is time we Jews recognized the world has changed!" Here Moshe actually trembled. "All the opportunities that are open to us now!" "Ah, Moshe! Moshe!" sighed the woman, in the way that had always irritated him most. "That is not an answer!" he protested. "However you and others may transform him," his wife replied, "I pray that God will recognize a good Jew." "It is of more importance today," said the father, "that the world should recognize a good man." All of which was heard, as it happened, by their son, who had come in, and was listening with that cynical, yet affectionate amusement with which he now received any idea that originated in his parents. "Ah, Moshe"-his mother sighed again-"you forget that when both kinds are divided up into good, bad, and indifferent, the Jews will remain distinct from men." "There you are!" fumed the father, realizing at last that his son was present. "I make the simple announcement that you will be going to Oxford, and your mother embarks on a philosophical, not to say racial argument. Of Jews and men! I hope I am a man! What are you?" "I would like to think I am both," the young fellow replied, "but sometimes wonder whether I am anything at all." Because this was nothing like what he had intended to say, Mordecai smiled. "Then it has come to that!" cried the mother. "There, Moshe! Where can it all end?" In her distress she kept on turning and stretching the meticulously darned sock. "That does not mean you may expect me to cut my throat!" the son continued, laughing, jerking up his chin, and baring his teeth in what had, this time, only the rudiments of a smile. "It is terrible to see one's best intentions completely misinterpreted!" The father felt himself justified in moaning. "Oh, but I do appreciate them!" the son answered with dutiful alacrity. "All you have ever done. All the kindnesses. You have been a good father. And you need not doubt I shall try to repay you." Moshe Himmelfarb began to cry. "And Mother," the son almost shouted, because of his father's emotion, and because the mere mention of his mother involved him more deeply than ever in the metaphysical thicket from which he was hoping to tear himself free. "Whose guidance," he babbled, his voice carrying him to a crescendo of melodrama of which he himself was most aware, "whose example and deeds, might well redeem the whole race. Excepting one who is beyond redemption!" "We must certainly pray for you," Malke Himmelfarb remarked gently, hanging her head above the now crumpled and rejected sock. "My poor son!" Long after he had rushed from the room, Mordecai continued to visualize the situation: the black hairs on his father's elegant, but frail and ineffectual wrist; the pulse, actual or imagined, in his mother's yellow temple; and the ornate, heartrending furniture, of which he had explored every grain, every crack and blemish, under cover of conversation, daydream, and prayer. Now he would have prayed, but could not. He was suffering, and indeed continued to suffer from a kind of spiritual amnesia. Remembering an incident in the examination room, in which, at the end of an agonizing hour, the Italian language had flooded back into his mind, he hoped that some such release would take place on the present occasion-or he could have waited, weeks, if necessary, or even months. But it did not. At most, an occasional onset of compassion would deflect the blade of his cynicism, as on the evening when he watched his own father leave a fairground on the outskirts of the town, accompanied by a brewer's clerk named Goltz, known to him by sight and repute, and two anonymous girls of unmistakable occupation. As the young man watched from the shelter of a clump of pollarded trees, the bluish-white glimmer from the flares sluiced the faces of the three unsteady gentiles and their Jewish clown. The action of the flickering light made the unnatural abandon of the elderly, respectable Jew appear quite maniacal. He, too, was flickering and fluctuating as he led the way through the hubbub of shouting and jerky music. His companions seemed to have reached the stage where only the conventions of revelry are obeyed. The clerk stopped for a moment, and stuck his head inside a bush, to vomit. The mouths of the others opened from habit in the dreadful dough of their faces to emit song or wind. Or an arm attempted to return the imagined pressure of an arm. Or lips sucked the air in imitation of a kiss. So the revellers advanced, and almost brushed against their judge in passing. Without moving, the latter continued to watch, and was able to distinguish the pores of their skins, the roots of their hair, the specks of gold flashing in their teeth. If he did not catch their words, it was because those were drowned in the tumult of his distress, which continued long after the ridiculous old satyr, who was also his father, had disappeared. That his own desires were similar, that he had breathed on similar smeary faces, of similar sweaty girls, and fumbled at the scenty dresses, made the incident too familiar, and more intolerable. Yet, the young man had lived long enough, if only by one day, to embrace his father on retiring the following night. For a moment he had stood behind the chair. There was the scraggy, reprehensible neck. Would he plunge his knife, which he had learnt to use with the skill of any _shohet__? Then the thought began to tremble in him: that reason is far too imperfect a weapon. So he had bent forward instead, and Moshe interpreted what he received as an expression of gratitude, not of pity. The old Jew was at once brimming over with pride, for the grateful son who appreciated all that was being done for him. Very soon after, Mordecai left for Oxford. Although in those days the talk was of war, the Kaiser's unpredictable temper, and the refusal of the French nation to respect German ideals, it seemed most unlikely to the young man that an international situation would ignore the crucial stage in his career. Dressed in a topcoat of excellent, sober cloth and cut, and a travelling cap in tartan tweed, the kind thought of one of his aunts, he presented a fine figure as they stamped about the railway platform. They were all there. Moshe had fallen in love with the new leather monogrammed luggage, with which he had provided his son. But the mother could have been dazed by the appearances of a material world, of which she had only been allowed glimpses hitherto, and her clothes, as always on occasions of importance and splendour, looked as though they had been brought down from an attic. As for the son, he was only too relieved at the thought of relinquishing the identity with which his parents were convinced they had endowed him. And at last the train did pull out. And later in the day, the boat sailed into the fog. At Oxford Himmelfarb continued to distinguish himself scholastically. Determined at the beginning to restrict himself to books, he soon discovered he was an influence on the lives of human beings. He was very prepossessing in his Semitic way. He developed an ease of manner. Men hoped for his respect, women competed for his heart, and he would always allow them to believe they had succeeded. There was perhaps one young woman who roused and sustained his passionate interest. The young people went so far as to discuss marriage during their attachment, though neither thought to ask a parent's advice on the desirability of the match. Catherine was the daughter of a reprobate earl. The father's pursuit of pleasure and the mother's early death had allowed the girl more freedom than was customary. Frail and pale, simple in almost all her tastes, and of exquisitely pure expression, Catherine could have passed for an angel if she had chosen discretion. But Catherine did not choose. And her behaviour was frequently discussed, in raffish circles with knowledge and appreciation, in polite ones with imagination and distaste. Fortified by birth and fortune, Catherine herself was able to ignore opinion up to a point, and seemed to rise from each debauch purer and whiter than before. Their refinements of sensuality persuaded the young Jew that he loved the girl. Each was perhaps a little dazzled by the incandescence they achieved together, and the lover naturally wounded when, at what might have been thought the height of the affair, his mistress was discovered in a hotel bedroom with an Indian prince. For the first time Catherine must have sensed the narrowness of the plank she was treading, for it became known almost at once that she had gone abroad, for an indefinite period, with an aunt. Her lover did receive a letter from Florence: My darling M., I wonder whether you will ever be able to forgive me the shattering mistake I caused you to make. I do not expect it. I expect very little of anyone, realizing how little may be expected of myself. But would like to act sentimental, on such a wet night, in this stuffy little town, full of English Ladies Living Abroad. I might feel desperate, if I had not learnt you off by heart, and were not still able to bring you close, in spite of the revulsion I know the actuality would produce in you…. The letter continued in somewhat literary strain, about the "little green hills of Tuscany, with their exciting undertones of sensuous brown," but he had no inclination to read any farther. He tossed the ball into the basket and loosened his tie. He did not see Catherine again, although from time to time he read about her. She continued to lead a life in accordance with the conventions of her temperament: in her maturity she was almost strangled by a boxer in a mews in Pimlico, and died old, during a bombing raid of the Second War, in a home for inebriates at Putney. As for Mordecai, he now returned to his studies, with a rage that belonged to youth, and an austerity that he had inherited from his mother, until, shortly after destroying the distasteful letter from his mistress, he received another, of a far more disturbing nature, from his father: My dear son, I can no longer postpone informing you of the momentous decision I have been forced to make. To come at once to the point: I had been receiving instruction for some time past from a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and was baptized, I am happy to be able to tell you, last Thursday afternoon. A weight is lifted off my mind. For the first time in my life, I feel myself truly to be free. _I am a Christian__! After a lifetime spent studying the Jewish problem, it seems to me that this is the only solution of it. I hardly like to write _practical__ solution, but that is the word which came into my mind. To give so little, and receive so much! Because it must be obvious to all but fools that the advantages of every kind are enormous. However, as one who has the fate of our people sincerely at heart, I do not wish to stress those advantages, only to pray that many more of us repent of our stubborn, fruitless ways. You, Martin, I have felt for some time, are undergoing a crisis in faith. All the more likely, then, that reason may lead you into the right and safe path, when you are ready to decide. It is your dear mother for whom I fear there is little hope. She will choose to remain caught forever in the thicket of Jewish self-righteousness, and the reasonable step I have taken will only continue to cause her pain. Still, I shall pray that some miracle will unite our two souls at last. I will not trouble you with details of our business house-it is, besides, the summer season-nor shall I introduce comments on the international situation into a communication which is probably, in itself, a source of surprise, and, possibly, dear boy, distress. I shall remain always Your affectionate father… Mordecai had never felt emptier than on finishing reading his father's letter. If he himself had dried up, there had always been the host of others, and particularly parents, who remained filled with the oil and spices of tradition. And now his father's phial was broken; all the goodness was run out. One corner of memory might never be revisited. All through this phase of private desolation, the young Jew forced himself to go about his business, although his associates frequently suspected him of watching somebody else, who stood unseen behind their backs. Of the letters he composed to his apostate father, he sent the one that least conveyed his feelings, and must have caused a pang of disappointment in the recipient. For the letter was indifferent, not to say feeble, in the reactions it expressed. Of his mother, Mordecai did not dare think, nor did he mention his father's act in the letter he immediately wrote to her. It did seem for the first time that his own brilliantly inviolable destiny was threatened, by an increased shrivelling of the spirit in himself, as well as by the actions of those whom he had considered almost as statues in a familiar park. Now the statues had begun to move. Great fissures were beginning to appear, besides, in what he had assumed to be the solid mass of history. Time was no longer congealed, but flowing. Some of the young man's acquaintances had already packed their bags. They reminded him that war must come, and that, as a German, it was his duty to return with them before it was too late, to serve the Fatherland. Scarcely Jew, and scarcely German, Himmelfarb was still debating when he received the letter from his mother: My dearest Mordecai, Your father will have written you some account of what I cannot bring myself to mention. You will see that I am at present with my sisters, where I shall remain until I have recovered from my loss. They are very kind, considerate, more than I deserve. Oh, Mordecai, I can only think I have failed him in some way, and dread that I may also fail my son. Mordecai averted his face. He could not bear to see his mother. It was as though she had not survived the rending of the garment. The letter did, at least, release her son from the doldrums of indecision. Very soon Mordecai found himself adrift on the North Sea. Ostensibly he was returning home. So far his will had supported him, but only so far. That which his pride had begun to represent as a steel cable, was, in fact, a thread, which other people cruelly jerked, tangled with their clumsy fingers, and even threatened to break. So the sea air wandered in and out of that insubstantial cabin formed by the young man's bones. His once handsome skin had lost its tone of ivory to a dirty yellow-grey. Those of his fellow passengers who addressed him soon moved away across the deck, sensing a situation with which their own mediocrity could not deal, of hallucination, or perhaps even madness. A few, however, plumped for a simpler explanation: the damned Jew was drunk. Drunk or sober, he arrived at Holunderthal with admirable punctuality. Inside the skeleton of the station, the faces of strangers appeared convinced of their timelessness. Only his father, in his dark, correct coat, admitted age. His moustache was fumbling with a welcome. Or some undue perplexity. The young man's Aunt Zipporah, his mother's sister, a woman he had always disliked, for a certain smell of poverty, and association with disaster, spoke to him out of a strained throat. The aunt and the father were making way for each other. "Yes," said Mordecai. "We had the kind of crossing one expects." And waited. "Tell me," he said finally. "It is my mother." And listened. The aunt began to cry, like a rat that has been caught at last. Trapped inside the girders of Holunderthal _Hauptbahnhof__, it sounded awful. Inquisitive passers-by slowed down, and waited for a revelation to dictate their proper attitude. "Yes!" cried his Aunt Zipporah. "Your mother. On Saturday night. But over quickly, Mordecai." His father had begun to nail him with his voice. "It appears there was some internal malady she had been hiding from us, Mordecai." The aunt's grief gushed afresh. " Oy-yoy-yoy! Moshe! There was no malignancy. I have it from Dr Ehrenzweig. Not the least trace of a malignancy." Such luxuriant grief made that of her brother-in-law sound mercilessly arid. But his desperation was of a different kind. "Dr Ehrenzweig assures me," he insisted, "that she did not suffer. No pain, Mordecai. Up to the end." "Did not suffer! Did not suffer!" The aunt's voice blew and flapped. "There are different ways of suffering! Dr Ehrenzweig was responsible only for his patient's body." The father had s